Adventures in Emmieland

While enjoying a contemporary romance novel this evening I read something that jarred me. The female main character pondered the prevalence of dominating alpha male in romances. She then ponders that her love interest while being great in bed and rather direct doesn't boss her around because he respects her. I've repeatedly come across this type of thinking and can't wrap my head around why it is so difficult to grasp the idea of a male led relation that includes respect for the female partner. I've wondered if in our attempt to equalize the sexes we have prioritized what is "proper" over what actually works. I've never seen a well functioning enterprise that had no leader. Everything simply cannot be completely equal all the time. Now I don't think this means that anyone should be disrespected but I don't equate leadership with disrespect. Maybe that is the issue, in western society people who label as leaders often show blatant disregard for th...

There is something extra disheartening about a black person denying racism and appointing all responsibility for black folk being treated with respect. This morning while catching up the random that is FB I came across something a screenshot of a tweet thread about the use of the way black people speak. After clicking to get the full post I quickly becam annoyed with one guy who proclaimed himself an intelligent black guy who knows how to speak proper English and dismissed the ascertain someone else had made about the inherent racism of the attracts on non standard speech particularly when speaking of black vernacular. The point was made, rightly I agree, that the speech patterns being held up for ridicule were in fact fairly common adaptations across several groups from multiple countries. The standard English speaking black guy "sesbg" kept trying to change the conversation from one where people were discussing the intricacies of speech to belittling anyone who spoke that...

Debates from anti abortionist and  pro choice factions seem to mostly stem from deciding when a person is a person. Yesterday I saw an article/video about a couple who "adopted" left over embryos from IVF. By adopted I mean they were given permission to implant these embryos and deliver a baby. The embryos had been frozen for 15 years prior. I saw that they took the fact that they gave birth to live babies as confirmation that life and peopleness began at conception. I didn't take it that way because well how many post birth people have we ever heard of who have been successfully frozen and reanimated after 15 years? The fact that it can be done with embryos and not anyone outside the womb indicates to me that embryos are something but not what I would call people. I tend to think of them as potential people. Of course this story had other elements that made me question the motives of the folks involved but that's another post for another day.

I know a fair amount of clever people who have the gift of  witty turns of phrase. I also scroll through FB looking at this weeks offerings from the sum it up committee. Sometimes, often in fact, I find interesting sayings and ideas, interesting to me mostly due to their sparking extensive thoughts on some subject or other. People intrigue me so much of what I look at has to do with people. Today I read a post that was redirecting the meme of " no one can make you feel bad without your permission"  pretty well. I've known people who espouse this idea who mean well and I've known people who use it to cover their own cuplibility in being an ass to someone. What irks me is not that idea per say but the attempts to summarize things that truly cannot be said in two lines. Some ideas are simply not tweet sized and the push to summerize is not the way to go. Of course most reasonably intelligent people take the time to delve more into these ideas, not taking the surface ...