Same. I’ll never get over it and nothing has been the same since.
sigh
Just want to point out that Christopher Reeve was considering suicide before Robin Williams showed up. He didn’t just make him laugh, he saved Reeve’s life.
Also, he paid for Reeve’s medical bills from the accident.
*stillgrosssobbingoverthis*
I will never get past his death.
crying
Yeah, I’m still not over this
The most beautiful, funny people are sometimes the ones hurting the most – and the best at hiding it.
It’s worth noting that Williams had a serious physical illness that affected his mental capacities, caused major paranoia, and drove him to suicidal thoughts and actions. He was more than just depressed.
But yes, we suffered great loss when he died. Memory Eternal☦️
No celebrity death ever affected me as much as Robin Williams’. (Carrie Fisher’s death is very close, as is Whitney Houston’s.) Years later, it still hurts. Just last night, I was watching clips of Williams’ hilarious acceptance speeches. He was a once in a lifetime genius. “Cry lip” indeed.
No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.
Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.
None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.
This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.
Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….
I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.
Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item.
People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”:
Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity.
Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.
The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.
Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.
This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.
Let’s examine a traditionally male-dominated role that is very well-respected, and well-paid, in many parts of the world — that of a doctor. In the UK, it is listed as one of the top ten lucrative careers, and the average annual income of a family doctor in the US is well into six figures. It also confers on you significant social status, and a common stereotype in Asian communities is of parents encouraging their children to become doctors.
One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?
The answer is crushingly, breathtakingly simple. In Russia, the majority of doctors are women. Here’s a quote from Carol Schmidt, a geriatric nurse practitioner who toured medical facilities in Moscow: “Their status and pay are more like our blue-collar workers, even though they require about the same amount of training as the American doctor… medical practice is stereotyped as a caring vocation ‘naturally suited‘ to women, [which puts it at] a second-class level in the Soviet psyche.”
What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.
This is not normal. Today, President Donald Trump has fired Rex
Tillerson, and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him
as America’s top diplomat.
Jaywalking shouldn’t be a crime. Everyone does it; it’s part of the
self-governing behavior of urbandwellers, and is so routine that I’ve
suspected it plays a crucial role in a city’s everyday mobility.
Countries that don’t criminalize jaywalking have lower rates of people
killed in traffic.
Even the police in many US cities would seem to agree that jaywalking laws are silly, because they ignore a ton of jaywalking.
The exception? Black Americans – they’re dramatically more
likely to be charged with jaywalking than white folks. What’s worse,
several jaywalking arrests of black residents in recent years have
spiraled into abuse, violence and even death – as with Trayvon Martin,
or the case that recently came to light of Johnnie Jermaine Rush: after Rush jogged away from two officers who stopped him for jaywalking, they strangled, punched and tasered him.
Trump fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson, replacing him with CIA
director Mike Pompeo. He nominated deputy director Gina Haspel to lead
the CIA. If the Senate confirms her, she’ll be the first woman to direct
the CIA. Quartz offers some background on her:
In 2002, she oversaw a secret prison in Thailand that
tortured two terrorism suspects. That torture took place within the
CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which suspected terrorists
are sent to US allies, and interrogated in “black sites” on their soil.
One of the men, known as Abu Zubayda, was waterboarded 83 times
in one month and was slammed into walls by the head. He was deprived of
sleep and kept in a coffin-like box. Interrogators later decided he
didn’t have any useful information.
ProPublica found that Haspel personally signed cables to CIA headquarters that detailed Zubayda’s interrogation.
CIA videos of the torture were destroyed in 2005, on the orders
of a cable drafted by Haspel. Her then-boss Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s
director of operations for counterterrorism, signed off on the order.
“The cable left nothing to chance. It even told them how to get rid of
the tapes,” he wrote in his memoir, according to ProPublica. “They were
to use an industrial-strength shredder to do the deed.”
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a
Berlin-based NGO, has been pushing Germany’s public prosecutor to arrest
Haspel for her role in the torture program.
