Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/maternal-child-health-cuts #Trumpadministration #Reproductiverights #Fertilityproblems #USpolitics #Pregnancy #Children #Society #USnews #Gender #Health #Family #Women #IVF
#PennedPossibilities 635 — Are there any specific cultural influences that shaped the world or characters in your story
Two major cultural influences, one not so good and one good. Contrast.
The main character comes from an end-stage religio-fascist oligarchy. She live's in Chicago. She's also an atheist and bristles under restrictions put on women. I work to give an impression of an Anglo-Saxon culture suffused with religion and hypocrisy, but I never describe the main character other than at least one of her children have dark hair like her. With a name like May Ri, you wonder about her heritage. Constricted by patriarchy, she chooses Mars hoping for opportunity.
On Mars, the first child born on the planet was borne by a Japanese refugee. She learns Japanese from her mother and teaches it to the other Nisei (first generation Martians in Japanese), and the cultural aesthetic plays a part in the plot, as do some specific Japanese words.
Beyond that, I drop hints all over that the colonists are culturally diverse and are from across the planet—and poor because who signs what's essentially a slave contract to work on Mars and bear children? The Nisei with absent fathers and overworked mothers (who build the colony) are raised communally and increasing develop their own society free of gender roles and constrained sexuality. A trans character plays a role, and skin color is seen a beautiful.
The people back on earth don't like this. Mars Needed Women is a story of cultural and planetary conflict.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen
ON SUNDAY, dozens of #migrant #workers in #Taipei gathered at the city’s central train station
to protest gender violence against migrant women
as well as raise awareness about the plight of Palestinian women and children through a flash mob performance.
This was in celebration of
“One Billion Rising”,
an annual campaign against rape and #gender #violence held in 60 countries worldwide.
The name comes from a statistic that within their lifetime,
at least one in three women across the world will have encountered gender violence, which totals to around one billion people.
https://newbloommag.net/2025/04/02/one-billion-rising-2025/
#PennedPossibilities 634 — MC POV: How much do you value companionship? Do you always keep people around, or do you prefer to be alone?
[Devil-girl] An odd question. I've never really thought about it. Companionship is good, and I enjoy it when people are around, like when I train at the gym or am at work. What I do is all about teamwork, so I'm good with people. Yet, I don't always keep people around. I really do like to throw open all the windows and study a good book. I live in a converted dance studio, so two walls open to the outside and the other two are mirrored. Laying on a mat, with the breezes, and the quiet you get living in a university town. Hmm. I guess I'm finding more use for what people call friends. I've certainly found a lot of use for men…
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSInklingsStory #RSReluctanceStory
#microfiction #flashfiction #tootfic #smallstory
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.03 — How do you navigate scenes with many characters?
Carefully. I don't want to step on anyone's toes or disrupt them saying their lines.
In the Saying the Quiet Part Aloud department, I will admit that most of the advice I give is actually analysis of what I've written. I don't necessarily plan these things out, or have check lists. Sorry. What I do is simply write what I think sounds right, then go back and study whether it worked. I have plenty of experience (close to 2M words written), so I often get the sense of it right.
"Intuition!" you scoff, adding, "That's not helpful."
Here's a speed bump I navigated. Kyv is the current POV. I'm handing off to May Ri (the so-called princess).
...The book plate lit up. Kyv recognized the woman on vid[,saying]. "The Princess of Mars and her Five Daughters!"
May Ri, in her alighter outside, watched the growing crowd of men, wiry, lightly muscled, androgynous for that, all moonborne, adapted to 1/6th gravity. No weapons. She sighed. "You saw the vid of the nuking of Hershel?"
Handing off a POV is one way of navigating, I did that between those two paragraphs by transferring succinctly from the book plate (think cellphone doing FaceTime) Kyv is looking at to who he is looking at on said book plate. This is a 3rd person technique.
Beyond that, dialogue attribution is another technique I use. He said, she said. And you get to add a bit of visual or noise at the same time, which I call character tags. Indeed, you can avoid the said-ism in back and forths if the characters have an accent or manner of speech, but you have to be careful about that. While this seems like 3rd person also, keep in mind 1st POV characters often describe what's going on around them, and they do that in 3rd person, more so if they are telling a story of what happened to others.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #fantasy #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSInklingsStory #RSReluctanceStory
#microfiction #flashfiction #tootfic #smallstory
https://www.europesays.com/1969967/ Wetenschappers bijeen om zorgen over academische vrijheid in Nederland en VS #gender #klimaat #Nederland #netherlands #Nieuws #vs #wetenschap
Rechte und Religion - Warum Kirchen und AfD auf Konfrontationskurs sind
Die Kirchen grenzen sich von der AfD ab. Die kritisiert deren Unvereinbarkeitsbeschlüsse. Die Kirchen setzen sich für Geflüchtete ein. Die AfD kritisiert dies.#KatholischeKirche #EvangelischeKirche #Geflüchtete #Gender #AfD
AfD und Kirchen: Warum Kirchen und AfD auf Konfrontation gehen
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.04 — What are some tips and tricks you use to convey strong emotions?
I think this is where my use of Grammar B helps me. Strong emotions, even things like anger, I think are associated with confusion and levels of self-doubt, which leads to cycles of justification or re-evaluation on the fly, quickly, immediately, erratically. or it just might conceivably—or very possibly since MURPHY in all things, right?—get worse, far worse; that type of thing.
The last sentence is a short example of a Grammar B run-on. It is non-grammatical; your high school English teacher would grade it a Fail. What it does is breathlessly fire off thought after thought in a continuing sequence, no sequence dependent on the sequence before. It flows. Like a speech. The reader never needs to backtrack to deduce meaning. Such a construct could be cut into individual sentences, standardized. But. Why? Rhythm of any sort drives the reader forward. It creates tension. All useful when writing emotion. A flood of description to overwhelm the senses, like the emotion itself.
Another construction I think works, usually mixed carefully with the run-on to break repeating rhythms, is telegraphy. I used that in the previous paragraph. Did you. Notice? Short, non-grammatical sentences. Missing a verb, a noun, or what not. It works like a drumbeat, focusing the reader on individual word or unsupported phrase meanings—and you get extra credit if you use a word with multiple meanings that could conceivably apply in context; emotion is confusion, innit?
In a sense, Grammar B is like finding poetry in prose. Used right, it uniquely depicts emotion. This is why I call myself a "prosaist."
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
##writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion #grammar #grammarb
Direct Action
A transgender college student declared “I am here to break the law” before entering a women’s restroom at the Florida State Capitol and being led out in handcuffs by police. Civil rights attorneys say the arrest of Marcy Rheintgen last month is the first they know of for violating transgender bathroom restrictions passed by numerous state legislatures across the country.
Update. "Data from the Nature Index reveal the slow erosion of the #gender gap in global research publishing over the past decade. But with just 27% of high-quality papers in the natural sciences having female co-authors in 2024, there is a lot of room for improvement. In the health sciences — where women have a stronger presence — that figure sits at 41%."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00553-x
I am looking for publications on the relation between home computers (marketing, technology...) and boyhood in the 1980s.
"The organization of sex and gender once had functions other than itself—it organized society. Now, it mainly organizes and reproduces itself. The kinds of relationships sexuality established in the dim human past still dominate our sexual lives, our ideas about men and women, and the ways we raise our children. But they lack the functional load they once carried. One of the most conspicuous features of kinship is that it has been systematically stripped of its functions—political, economic, educational, and organizational. It has been reduced to its barest bones—sex and gender...
we are not only oppressed as women; we are oppressed by having to be women—or men as the case may be. I personally feel that the feminist movement must dream of even more than the elimination of the oppression of women. It must dream of the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love."
(Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women")
Fighting together, following their seniors' footsteps
"[...]the third-year students served as the emotional backbone of the team. Until now, they had been focused on keeping up with their seniors, but standing on the national stage for the first time, they felt the weight of responsibility and determination to lead. Team captain Maho Taguchi (3rd year) said, “The feeling that we had to lead the team grew stronger.”
This is a very good description for people who are not yet that familiar with sex vs gender.
CrashCourse: *What is gender identity?*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evUZ0MGseJY (
https://id.420129.xyz/watch?v=evUZ0MGseJY)
'#KevinBAnderson presents his newly published book, #TheLateMarxsRevolutionaryRoads, based on systematic analysis of #KarlMarx’s “Ethnological Notebooks” and related #Marx texts from his final years, 1869-1883.
'In these writings, Marx traveled beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts, turning his attention to #colonialism, agrarian #Russia and #India, #Indigenous societies, and #gender.'
https://marxedproject.org/event/late-marx-revolutionary-roads/
#WritersCoffeClub 2504.02 International Children’s Book Day! What makes for a good book for children?
I've no expertise other than being a fan of a certain cartoon that was supposed to have a 5-11 year-old demographic but succeeded because it didn't talk down to its audience. I also wrote a fantasy story in a 7-year-old's voice.
I think almost any story would work with the exception of things like bloody horror, excessive violence, or sex. Love between friends, people who are different, ghosts of family, even living with war are fair albeit difficult worthy topics, as well as is slice-of-life and finding normalcy in a not-normal world. The use of simpler vocabulary is a must, but a word or two that requires a dictionary is the happy medium, making the reader feel like they're also growing by participating. Storylines must be simplified appropriately, but neither dumbed down nor made condescending, and for goodness sake, never sugarcoated. There's plenty of hacks out there that can write a treacle tart that you can read to put a young kid to bed. A story that gently teaches about the real world that parents and children can appreciate and discuss? That's a priceless thing.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
Via Austin Kocher:
#USCIS just sent out an email announcing that it only recognizes "two sexes - male & female" & generally only sex assigned at birth.
Passing on information from a friend:
Incoming En-Gender conference, focused on gender and resistance. Online on August 21-23, submissions by April 30.
