Speaking as someone who has been mentally ill and lonely for most of my teenage and adult life, incels are not just mentally ill and lonely. Incels subscribe to a politics of sexual entitlement and resentment towards women specifically because they feel they have not received the patriarchal favors they believe they’re entitled to, and why they hurt and kill women who don’t provide it to them. It’s literally just “mass shooters are just mentally ill” bullshit done to another violent group of people ignoring the role fascist ideology and gender and sexual politics plays in producing them.
suzanne collins is such a genius… the cultural phenomena of her series leading to the hanging tree house remixes, mockingjay being milked for two (bad) movies, the capitol-inspired makeup palettes, the halloween costumes, the explosion of the market for dystopia, the butchering of her characters and removal of disabilities, disfiguration, and racial tension + representation to sell more tickets, the extra gale scenes to fuel discourse, and the audience showing up to cinemas to watch what was pretty honestly marketed to them (the jacob vs edwardification of the symbolic love story and also to watch children fight to the death) it’s just so ridiculously ironic i would say you can’t write this shit, but she did write about it… in The Hunger Games published 2008
worth noting that this is not the first instance of occupational trouser-wearing among European women (as a matter of course for a given profession)!
pit brow women, or “pit lasses,” worked in British coal mines, and wore similar Short Dress and Trousers arrangements at least as far back as the mid-19th century
(also important to consider that, as seen in the photo above, these outfits were purely work-related and didn’t necessarily have any bearing on how the women dressed on their own time. some may indeed have preferred trousers to more conventional feminine clothing of the day, but there’s no way of telling who did or didn’t based solely on photos of them at work)
A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
Specifically, because she couldn’t afford to buy the implant from the company. They basically took her implant back to recoup their losses. This is what happens when you privatize healthcare and health research. The group providing her with this implant should not have been able to go bankrupt in the first place, let alone repossess her implant to pay off their debts.
This is what disabled people mean when we say that cyberpunk horror is just a reality for us. This woman was literally forced to undergo a surgery because she couldn’t pay to keep the implant already inside her brain. How long till companies start repossessing pacemakers and transplants?
Durable medical equipment companies in the US already do this.
DMEs will repossess your medical devices if you rent it through them and lose your insurance or your living situation. This includes feeding tube pumps and higher value mobility devices like motorized wheelchairs. I specify living situation because even with insurance they see homelessness as a liability to the medical equipment.
They have no qualms with letting you die and in the case of feeding tubes, they have no issues with letting you starve a bit faster.
This is why we need humanities funding to enable ethics and law to keep up with technological developments
[image description: a screenshot of a tweet by Melanie Lynskey:
“Was informed by my daughter that her two stuffies, Meowy and Doublecat, are wives to each other and are raising 7 kittens together. Embarrassed to say that I thought they were just pals, but #HappyPrideMonth to Meowy and Doublecat”
