La Lioness Priyanka
La Lioness Priyanka's JournalThis whole narrative of white people losing power and white people mourning makes me nervous
Firstly, it's an inaccurate portrayal especially of white men, since they are not really losing power at all. Look at upper management, prestigious careers in private industry and government, salaries etc and by all metrics white men still have substantial power.
The issue of losing power as a group is psychologically threatening to a lot of people and so this narrative makes me a bit uncomfortable. The rise in hate groups since Obama has taken power has been astronomical and in many ways, I fear for minorities, women and LGBT people because of this narrative of loss.
I don't mean to be a negative nelly or insinuate that most white men are particularly bothered by this narrative, I just fear for the ones that do find this very meaningful. I wish there was a less threatening way of celebrating increasing diversity, instead of framing this as a loss of power for white men.
Anyway, this is my two cents. I am off to finish my schoolwork now 
The Myth of Male Decline
A great article in the NYtimes arguing that men are not indeed becoming the new oppressed gender.
SCROLL through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.....
The 1970s and 1980s brought an impressive reduction in job segregation by gender, especially in middle-class occupations. But the sociologists David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman report that progress slowed in the 1990s and has all but stopped since 2000. For example, the percentage of female electrical engineers doubled in each decade in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But in the two decades since 1990 it has increased by only a single percentage point, leaving women at just 10 percent of the total......
Just as the feminine mystique discouraged women in the 1950s and 1960s from improving their education or job prospects, on the assumption that a man would always provide for them, the masculine mystique encourages men to neglect their own self-improvement on the assumption that sooner or later their “manliness” will be rewarded...
According to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans now believe that a college education is necessary for a woman to get ahead in life today, but only 68 percent think that is true for men."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-male-decline.html?pagewanted=1
Really interesting read and somewhat a balanced view in which the author does not ignore the progress that women have made
Picture Thread
So i used to post pictures in the Lounge all the time. hen i stopped for a while, but i did want to say hi to new loungers and old loungers, friends and assorted peeps. What better way to do it than with a picture thread.
Picture of me taken on saturday being really chill after weeks of finals!!!
Hope you guys are doing well. I am about to grade 80 papers. PLEASE feel bad for me
Loungers in Philly (esp LGBT loungers and their allies)
A friend of mine is performing a show about coming out as bisexual and then as transgendered to his family. I have seen the show before and it's AMAZING! I urge you guys to go see it if you can
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/20120327_InterAct_festival_focuses_on_identity_issues_-_racial__sexual___ethnic__political.html
Hearing their 19-year-old daughter come out as bisexual was bewildering enough for a Muslim couple from south India whose own marriage was arranged by elders.
"And I shaved my head," says Deen, a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose parents were stalwarts of their Muslim Indian community just outside Hartford, Conn.
and to buy tickets http://www.interacttheatre.org/2011-2012-feature-3-draw-the-circle.html
I really urge to see it if you can.
(cross posted in LGBT)
The thing about intersectionality and having an intersectional life
is that i hate it. i would much prefer to have a group where most of my identity could be vested in. i hate being frequently disappointed in groups that i otherwise feel affiliation towards.
When there is racism or xenophobia or sexism in LGBT spaces, i feel rejected.
When there is homophobia or sexism in south asian groups, i feel rejected.
when there is racism, homophobia or xenophobia in feminist spaces, i feel rejected.
Having multiple oppressors just makes it than much easier to feel alienated from so many spaces. Having your loyalty contested (am i more feminist or more queer activist or more committed to immigrant rights) is tiresome.
your defense of transphobia this week makes you VASTLY unqualified to be a host of this forum
having a person who hosts this place who is so tolerant of transphobia, makes this place hostile to LGBT people.
of course i dont expect the majority of this forum to take this issue seriously, still i do want to make it clear that i feel hosts of this forum should not be bigoted or defend bigotry.
A Year After (marking the death anniversary of my best friend)
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Joan Didion.
I knew I was going to lose Debjani long before I lost her but I was not prepared for what I felt when it actually did. I didn’t realize how profound death is, how permanent and how unrelenting.
There is no chance to say that one thing you really want to tell her today. No one to receive the text message saying, “Incidentally I think I see my first wrinkle”. There is not another chance to get a glass of wine together. No chance to ask her what color should my wedding dress be? Death is unrelenting.
You think you understand the permanency of death, but till you’ve lost someone so close to you, you don’t.
It turns out that grief can be bottomless, just when you think you’ve hit the nadir of grief, you realize you’ve just skimmed the surface. How much pain, how much anger, how much bitterness you can feel are things you don’t realize.
You don’t get that you will literally reel in shock for months. You don’t realize that you’ll program her phone number into your new phone, because you don’t expect to be the crazy person who feels that when her best friend returns, you’ll need the number again.
You don’t think about how you’ll walk around envisioning your own death and how it could impact those you love. How many things you’ll avoid doing to prevent your loved ones from the kind of pain you now feel. You’ll avoid getting on motorcycles even though you love bike rides. You know you’ll never go hand gliding or white water rafting.
These things may have been on your bucket list but your bucket list will change. Hand gliding will be replaced by “spend more time with the people you love, because you don’t how long they have left”. You’ll look at life through the lens of death. You’ll finally understand mortality.
I struggled with this post. Should I have written something that told you more about my best friend or should I write about how the year after her feels. I know it may sound self-pitying but how profoundly I felt the loss of Debooh and how much I changed from it, is a testament to our friendship. This is the best way I could convey what her death anniversary meant to me and what she meant to me.
My grandmother who is 84 years old, upon being told that i am marrying Lisa
said this " Priyanka has a fundamental right to live her life in the way that makes her happy".
My grandmother (well technically she is my grand-aunt but we address her as grandmother), was also the first woman judge on the Calcutta high courts and is a very accomplished woman. I have never someone so committed to a secular India and to the rights of women.
Anyhow, thought i should share this with my DU family
A reminder that we have an HIV/AIDS forum..and a request
So we barely use the hiv/aids forum that we requested a couple of year ago, but william created a thread there that i think we can all contribute to
http://www.democraticunderground.com/115035
its like the internet version of the quilt. I encourage you guys to contribute to it, if you have a picture, a story, a poem or a piece of artwork that you'd like to share, in the memory of those who we have lost and in honor of those who are living with HIV/AIDS.
Profile Information
Name: PriyankaGender: Female
Hometown: NYC
Home country: United States
Member since: Tue Jul 8, 2003, 01:35 PM
Number of posts: 53,866
