Brinens and Things &#8211; Tumblr Mirror

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

I mean I call them male / female in the professional context, because those are the typical terms and I’m absolutely not tromping all the back to whatever closet the bits came out of because somebody failed to understand my nonstandard terminology.

and for all its crudeness, I’ve never dealt with anyone who misunderstood the analogy!

(see also)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #nsfw text

May 12, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

shieldfoss:

According to google, the correct terminology ( in Danish ) translates into “male connector” in English (and I’ve been using male/female connector when writing in English since forever)

So

I mean

Yeah I’d absolutely use the correct technical terminology in places where I wouldn’t use “penis” and “vagina” terminology, even though it’s clearly just a figleaf for the exact same meaning.

(see also)

—

…you seem upset that my dialect has different terminology for this, and that it is non-obvious to an outsider that male/female dialects (or languages) allow their terms in *every* context including contexts famously scrupulous about not discussing sexuality?

(From my perspective, it would not have surprised me in the least if male/female dialects had some painfully circumlocutious politically-correct euphemism *specifically* for use in offices: indeed, it seemed the most likely outcome. Since my native dialect is already so politically correct, I’d figured I could afford to wait until I actually *got* an office job to confirm this: I could just ask somebody for a double-outletted adapter and they’d teach me the local euphemisms then.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw #scrupulosity cw? #nsfw text

May 11, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

Yes, mostly because I don’t know how to refer to them otherwise

(gf has informed me that male = connector, female = port works but i think that’d be too confusing)

#plug and socket are even more ambiguous imo

(see also)

—

TBH, it was pretty unnerving to learn that the prong/outlet dichotomy is not a widespread norm. Like, what *else* do I think is just how things are, until someday somebody who isn’t culturally SJ has no idea what I’m talking about and I fall face-first into an inferential crevasse?

@eightyonekilograms, I’m intellectually aware now that a great many dialects consider this terminology unremarkable (though I’d thought offices might be unusually strict, at least enough to make it uncomfortable on the part of the *speaker* even if none of the listeners actually cared), and while I generally don’t use it myself I try not to let my “this is strange and distasteful” reaction show. (I don’t think I even said anything about it to the *first* person, and she was likely too distracted to see the look on my face.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #gender #nsfw text #scrupulosity cw?

May 11, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

Tags:

#nsfw text #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #gender #discourse cw?

The Gender Census 2020 is now open!

February 12, 2020May 16, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

gendercensus:

[ Link ]

The seventh annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 12th March 2020.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a blog post summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful – it’s what helped us get 11,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/gendercensus2020/

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

Tags:

#signal boost #survey #gender

November 10, 2019May 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

officialgeorgecostanza:

As a linguistics nerd, I’d like to formally suggest “Nespring” as a nonbinary equivalent to niece/nephew and “Avaun” as a nonbinary equivalent to aunt/uncle

Nespring: literally meaning “the offspring of my sibling” from the old English roots “offspring” which is just ‘of spring’ and the Latin root “nepos” that both niece and nephew are derived from

Avaun: derived from the roots of both “aunt” and “uncle,” the anglo-French “aunte” and the Latin “avunculus”

@nonbinary-culture

Tags:

#language #gender #interesting idea #(fun fact: I used the word ”prumngle” in my thoughts a couple weeks ago) #(and then I stopped and looked at myself and went) #(”huh. I actually found a use for that word. neat.”) #(whereas these words would be *much* easier to find uses for)

June 29, 2019April 6, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

transsexualite:

Is it just me or does 90% of gendering occur at restaurants and fast food places

transsexualite:

petition to force restaurants to replace “sir/maam” with “mortal”

transsexualite:

okay but like fucjing imagine rolling up to the drive thru and a brooding cashier says “your total is $11.60, mortal”

shacklesburst:

who’s spreading rumors i’m mortal?!

dagny-hashtaggart:

In which the big golden M stands for both “memento” and “mori”

serinemolecule:

Come to Asia! It’s really only Indo-European languages that have gendered honorifics. In Japan, service workers always use “Honored Guest”.

If you watch anime, notice how words like “senpai” and “-san” aren’t gendered at all.

Linguistic gender was invented in Proto-Indo-European as a neat party trick to make it clearer which pronoun referred to what. And then most languages in the world came to be descended from it. But the languages that aren’t don’t make random words gendered.

My native dialect of English technically *has* sir/ma’am but doesn’t use them much†, and it weirds me out when my co-workers call customers “sir” and “ma’am”. I just don’t call customers anything: there’s really no need to add *any* word to the end of, to use OP’s example, “your total is $11.60”.

(Boss, Meta-Boss, and Boss^3 have all witnessed me talking to customers a fair bit, and none of them have ever complained about this. Boss^3 specifically complimented my customer interaction!)

—

†I’m not sure I can articulate or whether I even consciously understand what the exceptions are, but I think it’s something about the power differential needing to be *vast*. People who are only a level or two above you in the social hierarchy don’t get honorifics; those are for, like, CEOs and political leaders. (or maybe it’s about them needing to be very highly ranked in absolute terms: I poked my intuition with some more hypotheticals and it seems to feel less weird to call a barely-above-you man “sir” if you yourself are already pretty high up)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #death mention #gender #in which Brin has a job

February 9, 2019June 20, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

h-sleepingirl:

sinesalvatorem:

Question for the mind control fetishist community that is inexplicably over-represented among my followers:

I’ve recently become curious about the theory I’ve heard that asexual people who have kinks often have an autophilic sexuality. That is, their primary sexual interest is tied to them achieving some specific state. They’d have the same range of sexual response as allosexuals, but in response to achieving their preferred state to varyingly precise degrees.

For example, some asexuals are into amputation, or depictions of amputees. They often are more interested in being amputees themselves than in other people who are amputees. Often they’ll enjoy fantasising about being amputees, and further prefer situations where they can pretend to be amputees, and sometimes even desire actual amputation.

And I just remembered that lots of people who follow this blog are part of the mind control kink community! Which always surprises me, because I don’t think I post any mind control related content, and am honestly really sexually boring. But, like, I’ll totally give you guys more shout outs if you can help me learn about this.

My question is: Are asexual mind control fetishists more interested in being mentally controlled/impaired or in controlling others / the mental impairments of other? The autosexuality theory implies that asexuals should overwhelmingly prefer to be controlled/impaired, or be most aroused by the thought of their own altered mental state.

Also, autosexualities are in general correlated with being transgender. Are asexuals in the mind control kink community more likely to be transgender or feel gender dysphoric?

Right now I’m just curious about whether there’s any anecdotal support for this random thought, in case it’s worth doing a survey of. Would anyone be willing to tell me if their personal impression of the community supports or debunks this hypothesis? @acemindbreaker, @brin-bellway, @bannableoffense, @enscenic and anyone else who might have an opinion on this.

Here you go, a sample size of one!

I consider myself asexual (I get squicked by sexual things despite sometimes being sexually active), mind control/hypnosis fetish from a very young age (like a paraphilia, I need to think stuff about it to get off), and somewhat gender wonky in some indeterminate way.

Before puberty and probably before age 18 of so, I was solely “autosexual” in the way you describe it: my sexuality was entirely about hypnosis or mind control and how “deep” I would go into it would theoretically correspond with level of arousal and sexual enjoyment.

I figured, since I had an interest in kink as well and was sexually active, that this meant that I was solely a submissive.

As I got older I started experimenting with switching roles (hypnotic and not) and for the most part it was a service top type thing for a long time, until cc and I really got going.

I discovered a love for dominance, especially ownership and most importantly for this, objectification.

When I hypnotize cc, I am objectifying her in that I’m using her as porn and that’s part of what turns me on. I’ve always liked looking at porn of hypnotized or mind controlled subjects (as we do) and for a long time I sort of thought it was because I was projecting myself into their place.

Not always, I think. Definitely used to be that way. But then I discovered enjoyment of just seeing it as third party porn and getting off to it in that way, separating it from myself.

I still consider myself a bottom-leaning switch, and there is nothing quite like being hypnotized, but there is a different intensity in hypnotizing someone else that I’ve grown to love as well.

In terms of gender, I’m still figuring it out. I questioned being trans as a teenager. I’m pretty comfy in my AFAB body nowadays but not always and I’ve never felt like a strong pull towards the concept of gender one way or another, or a tendency to fluctuate.

Gender of my partners doesn’t matter to me, it’s the D/s vibe I get. (I’ll admit I tend to prefer male dominants and female submissives, just as a matter of looking at numbers.)

Tags:

#(April 2018) #this one doesn’t really count as an aglet but it’s interesting #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #asexuality #gender

February 8, 2019June 11, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jadagul:

Growing up, I would often read people describe “the spot on your back that you can’t reach.” Generally in the context of, like, putting on sunscreen.

I was always super confused by this, in a classic case of generalizing from one example. I can still overlap my hands at the small of my back; there’s nowhere on my back I can’t reach pretty comfortably. It still surprises me every time someone can’t do that.

shedoesnotcomprehend:

….wait, that’s actually a thing?

I always assumed that when people said that, they meant, like, “the spot on your back that’s slightly awkward to reach so maybe if someone’s putting on sunscreen right next to you they’ll get it for you since you can’t see it anyway”

Me, reading a story with centaurs that has just mentioned them having a scratching post†: “Huh, yeah, centaurs *would* have large swaths of their bodies they can’t reach with their hands. It’s *weird*, trying to wrap my head around the idea of people who can’t reach every part of their skin with their manipulating appendages. What must that be like?”

Me: “…wait, hang on, there are some humans who are like that”

Me: “my *mom* is like that”

(When it first came up, Mom was likewise surprised to learn that I *could* reach every spot on my back. She brought up age and fatness as possible reasons for us to differ on this, but I remember there’s a Shel Silverstein poem about the one spot on your back you can’t reach that expected children to find this a relatable feel, so I expect it’s not that. Fatness could maybe still be involved.)

†Edit: I mean this in the sense of “a post you rub against to scratch yourself”, not the sense of “a post you scratch”.

justice-turtle:

I was always told this was a sexual dimorphism thing – that (cis) girls could reach the middle of their back while (cis) boys could not, and that it was due to some kind of evolutionary thing about girls having specialized baby-holding elbows while boys had specialized spear-throwing elbows. (hence “you throw like a girl” = you throw badly)

I take it this is all a load of bullcrap?