“Cultural familiarity with gay stereotypes (cis men, promiscuity, circuit parties, and HIV) are not because that’s what gayness is or what gay experience is, but because that’s how the category was constructed in order to uphold myths about straightness, purity, and monogamy. In other words (and this also from Foucault) homosexuality wasn’t invented in order to give gay people better healthcare or more respectful employers, it was invented (perhaps analogously to the way Columbus “discovered” the American continent) in order to increase the reach of power, to map out, identify, taxonomize, and regulate what exists, what is known, what can be.
This idea, that these categories are historically and culturally dependent, is important to me.
One reason it’s important to me is because we are in the century-long process of the categorical invention of the trans woman. Hannah Arendt wrote (I actually can’t remember where or I would cite it, maybe somewhere in Between Past and Future) that it was fundamentally different to be a Jewish person before the foundation of the state of Israel. She didn’t mean better or worse, more fucked up or more liberated, but just that there was a shift in consciousness for people with this identity around this historical event. And I wonder about this with transness, what was it like to be a transgirl in the 50s, or the 1850s, and how did girls then feel and act, how did they relate to their bodies, how did they think about ideas we have now like passing or dysphoria. Did they feel like girls, or like women, or like ghosts, or like some other thing I wouldn’t think of off the top of my head because I live in a particular historical time, such that my parents rented the Crying Game on VHS and watched it with me when I was 10, and so I already knew before I knew the word “trans” that if I fooled a man into thinking I was a girl and tried to have sex with him he would think I was disgusting. I bet 1950s or 1850s girls like me didn’t think of dysphoria as Cartesian, as a bad map drawn by a sick mind on a healthy body…but they might have.”
Hello! Thought I’d let people know that Original Plumbing, a quarterly magazine that ran in the 2000s and was about trans men’s culture and identities, has a website selling some of their issues and they’re currently having a sale! Some of their issues (like the ones pictured) are going from 9-10 dollars when they’re normally 15-30. So if you’re interested in getting one for yourself I reccommend doing that. You can buy the issues here - https://originalplumbing.bigcartel.com/products
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
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>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
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>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
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>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
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