serakit

So I read this report from siderea and then wandered off on my own tangent, which I'm putting here and not there because it is tangential.

Autoimmune disorders have been a severe problem for a long time, and are one of the areas of medicine that very little is known about. While there certainly are male sufferers, they primarily happen in women and they're primarily thought of by the medical establishment as a women's problem. Given the *extensive* gender biases in medicine that winds up translating to not much research being done on them and not very many medical providers being conversant in them, or even willing to give you tests to prove you have them. (Assuming there *is* a test; lupus gets diagnosed basically via "you have all the symptoms and we couldn't find anything else wrong with you." There are some tests that can be indicators, but you can turn up negative on all the tests and still have lupus, and turn up positive on them and still have other things be the culprit.)

These auto-antibodies seem disproportionately to come up in men. So the question I have is whether they had prior mystery symptoms. Men are less likely to get their mystery symptoms outright dismissed by doctors than women are, but they're also less likely to seek treatment for them in the first place, and doctors are unlikely to have many answers, especially if siderea's surmise is correct and they have indeed discovered two previously unknown autoimmune disorders.

If COVID severity *does* turn out to be dramatically affected by whether you've got an autoimmune condition or not, then I'd point to this as a way in which the scorn for women hurts medicine for men as well: imagine how much quicker this would have been discovered if people were paying proper attention to autoimmune conditions in the first place, and doing the research involved in diagnosing and treating them so that all these people knew they had autoimmune condition X-- if you could catch this just by looking at medical history, without having to test everyone because medicine already takes such conditions seriously enough to catch them. Imagine how much further along we might be in *using* this information if anyone other than a few specialist centers cared in any way about researching autoimmune conditions.

The cynical part of me wonders if this will provoke more research into autoimmune conditions, or if they'll find out that giving interferon helps and then find reasons not to keep researching anymore, because after all it's *only* autoimmune, in much the same way I am *certain* that when the acute crisis is over all the people with long-term problems will simply be abandoned and dismissed by the medical establishment.

Is badly-handled rape a *thing* in contemporary-set shojo manga (or at least, was it a thing in the late nineties and early 2000s), or is it that the ones with rape are most likely to get translated, or did I just coincidentally happen to pick up all the ones that were like this? (By "fully-contemporary" I mean "with no fantastic or science-fictional elements".)

I ask this because I've finally gotten my hands on some of the later volumes of Mars, and as it turns out right after the point where I stopped as a teenager it takes a sudden swerve from "quiet girl likes biker boy with some extra complications from biker boy's unresolved issues about his identical twin's suicide" into "we have an ACTUAL SOCIOPATH in our school targeting us and also it turns out girl's stepfather raped her and now her mother wants to get back together with the stepfather!" Which I'd just take as Mars having an unusually high HSQ-- this is the same manga that gives us a girl credibly threatening to break another girl's fingers to get her to stay away from the boy and then them becoming best friends a couple of chapters later in, like, the first two volumes-- except that the other two I've picked up along these lines are *also* like that and what I've read in other genres *isn't*.

No one liked contemporary high school anything when I was regularly buying manga-- I was 100% looked down on for reading it even though I was *also* reading the fantasy everyone else was--- so I was mostly buying these by what had the most attractive cover copy on the first volume. Both Mars and Kare Kano bill themselves as cute high school romances. Mars I described above; Kare Kano I still haven't finished but I have been given to understand the hero rapes the heroine later on and they still get married.

Life is slightly different in that its tagline is "Real teens. Real stories. Real Life," and it *was* billing itself as Dramatic and Controversial. But it still initially advertises itself as being about cutting because your best friend turns on you when you get into a high school and she doesn't, and it escalates *extremely* quickly to "heroine's new friend's boyfriend is blackmailing heroine into being his sex slave by threatening to make friend miserable if she doesn't comply." (And he's, like, incredibly mustache-twirly "I am a VILLAIN, watch me VILLAIN" about the whole thing when he's alone with the heroine, in a way I'm very skeptical of real abusers ever being.)

Of the other manga I've read, it's all in other genres, and none of it is like this. Fruits Basket is probably closest in that it's *explicitly* contemporary-set and the fantastic elements are limited to the curse on the Sohmas-- this is not an alternate world and not a world where "magic" is a thing for most people. Fruits Basket deals a lot with child abuse, but despite how awful some of the characters can be, there's never, ever any rape. Occasional physical abuse, and a lot of verbal abuse, but never rape. (The scary elements also build much more gradually and cohere well and do not give you a sense that you are racing from melodramatic moment to melodramatic moment with no room to breathe.)

Magic Knight Rayearth is a portal fantasy-- they start out in contemporary Tokyo, but they don't stay there long, we don't see them there, and once they're through the portal everything's focused on plot. Even in the sequel series, where romance starts to creep in a bit more, we don't get this kind of thing.

Library Wars and Chobits are both set in near-future and have no dark elements at all. High-energy plot, yes, especially in Library Wars, but the plot is, in both series, mostly concerned with standing up for the people you love and doing what's right.

(What I read of Naruto and Trigun also are not like this, but those are both shonen so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be.)

Now that I write this out, I wonder if *having* a plot is part of it-- the speculative ones have plots focused around the speculative elements, so that even once the couples have actually succeeded at getting together there's still a lot of plot to be had. Even after most of the couples in Fruits Basket are together, there's still the issue of the curse. Hideki figures out he likes Chi pretty quickly, but there's still the issue of where she came from and why she has weird powers. Kasahara and Dojo are still in the middle of fighting off the forces of censorship even once they start working out they have feelings for each other. If your entire plot *was* the romance and now you're stuck, maybe Rape As Drama is the go-to? (Though that only works for the romances. Life hadn't resolved any of its previous plot threads when it went to that well.)

Or did I just happen to get the bad luck to pick the only ones that do this and most contemporary high school drama doesn't do this?

So there's apparently SO MUCH MORE to the omegaverse lawsuit than was in the New York Times article. Lindsay Ellis does a video essay here.

There was apparently quite a lot of plotting that went into that lawsuit-- like, there are emails proving that the writer insisting that the DMCA takedowns were all the publisher's doing was actually a deliberate strategy which they planned on purpose, and she carries the ruse of "it was just the publisher and not me" despite actually *demanding* this of the publisher far enough that she actually *perjured* herself about it in court. (And then the author accused of plagiarism dissolves her company and disappears right as a counterclaim gets going and there's just so much about this whole thing that is *incredibly weird*.)

One thing about the new apartment is that I'm hoping to spend some time going through the cookbooks and using them, because I have more than a hundred at this point and I only actually *use* a few of them regularly-- my staples are How to Bake Everything and Wintersweet, with occasional appearances from The All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Cookbook, Williams-Sonoma Breads, and Ladle, Leaf, and Loaf for a couple of specific recipes. I have definitely used others in the past for special occasions-- I think I've made almost every brownie recipe in The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook at least once-- but those are the ones that make regular appearances. This is at least in part because I am drawn to interesting more than useful, and part because I was regularly going and spending a lot at library sales on random cookbooks. (And also in part because I will tend to modify any cookbook recipe all to hell and back during the cooking process, because food issues and also a constitutional inability to follow directions.)

To that end, I was reading through "For the Love of Pie" to see if it has anything that looks interesting-- and more to the point, that I can eat; I've yet to come up with a good substitute for heavy cream in this sort of recipe (though since I actually *don't* need it to be straight up vegan, I might try bulking up my almond milk with melted butter and tapioca starch and seeing what I get-- though at some point I do still want to pursue that holy grail of allergy cooking, the vegan choux pastry) and there are a *lot* of recipes involving fruit in any pie cookbook. Still, it does have some stuff that looks like I will be able to eat it, and it has a lot of very energetic description at the beginning of how to make the perfect pie crust, which will be useful, since under normal circumstances anything I bake involving actual pastry crust is a fun afternoon project with Mathfriend and he makes the pie crust while I do whatever's going *in* the pie. (The people writing this book are "Pie-oneers", and they're clearly *very* delighted with that pun.)

And then there's Fried Chicken Pie. Which is *exactly* what it sounds like. You create Fried Chicken-- real, full-bore, breading-and-fried chicken-- and then you take this fried chicken and some greens and bake it into a pie crust. Because *reasons*. I have *never* encountered anything like this, and while normally that would be a reason to try it, I find it absurd to go to all the effort of making perfectly good fried chicken and then baking it into a pie.

It does have other reasonable-looking recipes and I have no doubt I will try some of them this winter once it becomes pie-baking weather, but this was just so very "WHY?" that I had to share.

Let it be known that I have written an entire essay to submit to something and I have used only ONE ellipsis and ONE em-dash.

I think Stephanie Laurens is at her best when she breaks her own mold-- she's normally writing very domineering heroes who are certain of the world and their place in it and can't possibly admit they're in love because then the woman has CONTROL over them and that's terrible. This sort of mindset as her ideal hero choice may be why Stephanie Laurens is *really awful* at consent even for romance novels; one of the early books gives us Regency date rape drugs which the heroine uses on the hero to rape him. (And they still end up together!)

But sometimes, especially in her later books, she'll give us other types of heroes, and these books tend to be the best and most interesting. In the kidnapping trilogy, we get Jeremy Carling, scholar who we know from an early book is more interested in translating ancient languages than in anything around him, and while he's spent a lot of time around warriors and people who deal in intrigue, he is explicitly not himself a heroic type. And he happens to spot a kidnapped family friend and realize she's been kidnapped, except they're inconveniently deep in rural areas where no one knows him, so he can't just summon help. He's got to rescue her all by himself. Which he does, because he is very intelligent and he's spent some time helping out his extremely heroic brother-in-law so he's got a running thought of "What would Tristan do in this situation?" in the back of his head. He is believably not as good at it as one of the Bastion Club would be, in that he fails to account for "sometimes your plan goes wrong and you need to have backups," but he also does okay at adjusting on the fly. (This book is also made more interesting by the heroine breaking the usual mold, because while she's by no means a wilting flower she's also not the feisty spitfire her sisters and cousins are and she's acutely aware of the fact; a lot of her inner monologue is her telling herself "I can do this, I can do this" every time she's confronted with a new difficult thing and then shoving herself through it with gritted teeth while refusing to complain about it. Since Jeremy's not domineering, the combination comes across as much more "two people versus the situation" than "two people versus each other and also the situation is there" and that makes for a better romance.)

Similarly, I also like "The Ideal Bride", in which we get a Regency politician as romantic hero, who certainly can be domineering if he wants to be but that isn't his first reaction to everything and he knows the woman he's courting won't stand for it if he tries it on her-- and one of the things he most values about her is that she can hold her own in that way-- so he spends much more time than the other heroes usually do thinking "okay, she's a very sensible and competent person; she must have reasons for her behavior; I just need to figure out what those are" and he never tries to just ride roughshod over her.

Y'all.

Abusive parents are not Marvel villains. They don't torture their children for the hell of it. They have a reason that makes sense to them-- whether it's some form of "you embarrassed me in public" or drug use or difficulty controlling their own emotions. They're not going to go out of their way to play elaborate torture-games just for the sake of playing elaborate torture-games. (If nothing else they probably do not have the spoons to set up elaborate torture games and maintain them over a protracted period of time.) They will generally purport to love their victims at least some of the time. There will be periods of time where they *aren't* acting awful and seem like they're caring.

There is this trend in fanfic of depicting abusive parents as people who are just 24/7 looking to torture their children in dramatic, elaborate ways involving the sort of extreme physical abuse that schoolteachers would *notice*, and I find it intensely frustrating. Not only is it inaccurate, but it misses all the stuff that's actually *interesting* about writing abused characters, namely the complex feelings and interplay.

It's become a thing to laugh at the Harper's Letter. "Cancel culture doesn't exist!" you cry. "People who can get published in Harper's are the opposite of cancelled! Clearly nothing is happening!"

But see, there's a contradiction with cancellation: the people who have a platform loud enough to tell you it's happening are the people who are affected by it the least. It is absolutely happening-- you're just never hearing again from the people it's happening to severely enough that they actually lost their platform. The recent example that springs to mind is Isabel Fall, who we haven't heard from again after she was harassed off the internet for writing a messy, complicated story about gender, and who was forced to come out as trans to try to defend herself from the onslaught, which didn't precisely work-- and a lot of the people who were doing the harassing, instead of recognizing they'd done something wrong, blamed Neil Clarke for not including that she's trans in the author bio, especially since her birth year includes a Nazi dogwhistle number. That's the problem with "internet mob as justice"-- sooner or later you're going to get it wrong.

(As an aside, I asked at the time "What message does this send to the trans people who *did* find something to identify with in it? 'Your stories are wrong''. Just recently I discovered that in the aftermath there was an Atlantic article which included the reporter's encounter with someone who wanted sensitivity-writing classes in writing her own gender, because she was concerned about getting it wrong if she just wrote from personal experiences-- after all, look what happened to Isabel Fall!)

Or look at what happened to Amelie Wen Zhao. She was writing a book heavily inspired by modern slavery as practiced in Asia and Eastern Europe and was accused of (and initially pulled her book over) writing an inaccurate portrayal of American chattel slavery, which wasn't even something she was *trying* to portray in the first place.

Over in fanfiction-land, this has progressively escalated over time-- it used to be that if you were writing fics about certain subjects you had to give some details of what happened to you to be "allowed" to write such things free of harassment, since the only reason it was valid to write such fics was processing trauma. Now they seem to have escalated to "people writing such things need to do it privately" and have started suggesting that writing romance about teenage characters makes one a pedophile, because writing about fictional teenagers in a romantic or sexual context, to them, means you must be thinking about real teenagers that way too. They also suggest that any story in which an amoral character is not immediately called out in the text is inappropriate because the author is then "glorifying" whatever the behavior is. And again, this is accompanied by quite a lot of harassment online and sometimes threats and "you should kill yourself" type messaging.

I guarantee you there are writers who are looking at all of that and saying "if this is what's going to happen to me for trying to write about my experiences which do not fit the established social justice orthodoxy, I'm not going to write." But you'll never hear about them, because they either were harassed off the internet while still too small for you to hear about it, or they never wrote at all.

(And if, after all this, you still want to argue about it? You might also consider that the signatories on that list were not just Rowling or people confined to the Ivory Tower. Also included were Margaret Atwood, who has had her books banned in several countries, and Salman Rushdie, who's survived actual assassination attempts for his speech. Are you really going to try to suggest the guy someone tried to kill over this stuff is out of touch with what it looks like?)

There are two ways to get someone to do something they don't want to do: forcing and convincing. Laws are forcing; protests are kind of a combination of the two.

Mask mandates would be forcing. But since we don't have mask mandates in the places with the worst outbreaks and no one's mass protesting the lack of mask mandates, that leaves us with convincing. Which, yes, *does* require people to go talk to a lot of insecure white men buried in toxic masculinity and find out what their motives are and try to soothe their feelings. You can think whatever you want about that insecurity, but the fact remains that if you can't force them-- and yelling at them on Twitter does not constitute forcing-- you *have* to convince them, or deal with an unfettered pandemic. Therefore the correct response when someone posts an article in which they went to talk to a bunch of anti-maskers and discuss what tactics worked to get them to agree to wear a mask at least in the most high-risk situations is not a whole bunch of yelling about how you shouldn't have to coddle the feelings of white men.

Because no, you shouldn't have to coddle the feelings of people who don't want to listen to science. But your choices here are coddle their feelings somewhat and get them to wear masks at least in the highest-risk situations, or have them not wear masks at all and feel good because you got to yell and be morally pure on Twitter. At some point you have to stop and think about "is this action going to achieve my desired result". No one's saying you have to go talk to the anti-science people-- but when someone *is* doing so, try to refrain from attacking them for it.

At some point I really want to sit down and dig deep into the many meanings of the phrase "respectability politics", because the original meaning was very assimilationist and people opposing it were opposing assimilation, but it seems to have mutated into something with which to attack anything that acknowledges that the majority group has power and will necessarily need to be involved in social change attempts, especially if it goes so far as to acknowledge that it is *necessary* to involve and get the support of people who are not 100% Ideologically Committed To The Cause.