Thursday roundup

Putin supports fascism abroad while crying fascism at home.

Another surprise: industry buys violence and intimidation, tries to deny it.

You can oppose the occupation and still think BDS is a bad idea.

There's not much wrong with Jeb Bush's foreign policy prescriptions, except that they're the status quo. But look here for more sound foreign policy principles.

Dementia is devastating.

Legalisation is defunding violence in Mexico.

Pills won't really help you sleep.

Communicating without jargon doesn't mean dumbing down the content; (smart) people in one field don't necessarily know the codes of another. And need we remind ourselves: even Nobelists say some pretty dumb shit.

Don't let all the (justified) fuss over Tim Hunt, detract from the amazing backlash to Narendra Modi's "despite being a woman" comment.

Readers react (not well) to the student-loan op-ed. See also Dr. Rubidium's advice, storified.

Sometimes learning environments (i.e., colleges) should be uncomfortable.

Another great response to Burkett:

Womanhood is not an exclusive club. So many people are in it, and we are all so very different from one another. We shouldn’t imagine any of us hold the keys to womanhood. Yes, trans women have some different lived experiences than cis women—though fewer than one might expect. The trans women I have gotten to know share my struggles to overcome internalized sexism, and constantly confront the kind of suspicion of the feminine that trans theorist Julia Serano describes in her book Whipping Girl (required reading, truly). They face employment discrimination at rates even higher than cis women. It’s hard to imagine a trans woman who doesn’t know what it feels like to walk down the street and be afraid for her safety because of her gender. I bet I have a lot more “womanhood” experiences in common with my trans women friends than I do with the Queen of England, who has certainly never worried about birth control, gotten her period on the subway, or scraped by on half a man’s salary. Surely her brain has also been shaped by her experiences, which are very different than mine. Are we going to revoke her womanhood, too?

and another. 

What Burkett got right was that there is no static, inherent way of being female; there is no "female brain" that is wildly different from the "male brain," and the many things we attach to being a woman are social, cultural, and external. There's nothing biologically female about being wrapped in a pink blanket as a baby, or wearing nail polish, or having long hair, or being sensitive or emotionally competent or good with children; there's nothing inherently or biologically male about being wrapped in a blue blanket as a baby or being good at math or behaving aggressively or wearing pants or refusing to cry.

and

From Burkett's vantage point, Caitlyn Jenner's adoption of some of those cultural extras that we tack onto womanhood — long hair, sex-object poses, cosmetics, kindness, people-pleasing — set back the work of feminists, who have fought so long and hard to expand the idea of what a woman is. After all, if becoming a woman takes little more than breast implants and high heels — if the desire for those things comes from a "female brain" — then maybe feminism was wrong all along... But the fact that Jenner also adopts the cultural extras doesn't make her a feminist failure; it makes her human...

...And she's trying to look like a woman in a world that has only known her as a man, in a family that took the standards for female beauty to insane levels with the Kardashian brand of giant fake eyelashes, enormous breasts and butts squeezed from either end of a corseted waist, contoured cheekbones painted on with Dali-level precision (not to mention surrealism). The requirements one must meet to be seen as a glamorous, beautiful women in 2015 are onerous, oppressive, and remarkably high. That is unfair. It harms women as a group.

But expecting one single woman, especially one in a period of public vulnerability, to change that? That's a big burden to place on Jenner's shoulders.

...

That a group of women suffer the kind of violence and discrimination heaped on trans women should of course make transgender rights a feminist issue... And yet those rights, and the language we use to normalize the trans experience, have to coexist with centuries of female oppression rooted at least partly in women's reproductive capacities and in the physical body that gets assigned female at birth. A woman can still be a woman without breasts, without ovaries, without a uterus, or without a vagina, but it so often is those very organs that have been used to justify subordinating us. That cannot be stripped out of the feminist conversation. When we talk about the politics of contraception and abortion rights, that's not gender-neutral — abortion remains politically contentious precisely because conservative traditionalists are uncomfortable with female freedom and shifting gender roles; they understand that giving women control over reproduction helps to elevate women as a class, and affords us a wider set of opportunities and greater social mobility (that's true even though not every woman avails herself of contraception or an abortion, and it's true even if a small number of people who avail themselves of contraception or abortions aren't women).

...
To take women out of that equation — to say that because some men get pregnant or have abortions it's insensitive and marginalizing to talk about abortion as a women's rights issue — does kneecap feminism as a political movement. But part of the feminist politicking is realizing that while women are oppressed as a class, there is no singular "female experience."

...Part of the work is to push ideological boundaries, to listen to each other with respect even if that doesn't translate into agreement, and to face injustice head-on while building the foundations of a kinder, more flexible, more expansive society.

That isn't what makes us women, but it should be what makes us feminists.

Also on the loaded topic of "extras" like make-up: I wear none on dates (unless I'm already wearing lipstick, as I do sometimes). But even with lipstick, I tend not to; I remember one guy thought it was about him.

Why we balk at the age gap in films.

Communication in a relationship is sooo important but it can be a challenge.

Well, you've made it through all that; here are some sweet animal pictures.