Emily Bazelon at the New York Times Magazine: The New Abortion Providers
This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.
gwen at Sociological Images: Power = Masculine, Weakness = Feminine
At least according to this thesaurus, masculinity is powerful, capable, competent; femininity is weak and incompetent. There’s a sexual component as well — notice that power is associated with being virile, while weakness = lustless. Of course, we also associate men and masculinity with the active pursuit of sex, while women are supposed to be the objects of pursuit, not actively sexual.
Kristen Cashore at This is My Secret (via jadelennox at access_fandom): A Voice Recognition Software Demonstration
I have this thing called thoracic outlet syndrome, which isn’t the point of this post, so I won’t get into it too much here. Basically, it’s a neck/shoulder/arm/wrist/hand/fingers pain thing, + hand/finger agility thing, that I can manage about 80% of the time with daily stretches; that 17% of the time causes me discomfort, but doesn’t limit what I’m able to do (you’ve seen the pictures); and 3% of the time makes simple motions like turning a doorknob or flipping through a pile of paper prohibitively painful and renders me incapable of typing. Copious typing is on the small list of things that causes it to flare up to that level.
Dorian at Dorianisms: (My) Disabilities and Sex
Conversations about physical disabilities and sexuality are incredibly important. I am glad they are being had, and that I have had the opportunity to be a part of several in the extremely recent past. However. I feel like my particular (almost entirely mental) issues definitely have an impact on my sexuality and sexual behaviour, and I haven’t been a part of as many conversations that centre mental issues (though I have no doubt such conversations do exist, especially Here On the Internet).
Oh my goodness! Thanks for the link.
On a wholly unrelated note, that thesaurus business in the Sociological Images link is both fascinating and keenly distressing.
What the sociological images link doesn’t mention is how many of the synonyms are profoundly ableist. “crazy” as a synonym for “weak”? o_O
That post on voice recognition (I prefer the acronym VR, since VRS collides in my head with Video Relay Service, but to each eir own) was wonderful. I just purchased Dragon in the hopes that I can coerce it to work on my netbook (running Linux, so via Wine), so it’s very encouraging to see a user-demo. (I’d post this over on Kristin’s blog, but she seems to have comments turned off, and no public email address.) My issues are more with sitting up than using my hands, but the end result is the same – the more alternatives I have to typing, the better.