On 'Dangerous' Places and Who Defines Them

Hello there, readers. I am writing this blog post from a new location today: Paris, that famous city of love, light, and disappointingly few berets. Those of you who know me in real life (or perhaps follow me on certain social media accounts) will probably be aware that I recently moved here from my old university town in Wales. It was quite a dramatic decision and so far it's working out semi-well, but that's not what I'm writing this post about. Having never been to Paris, or even France for that matter, I looked to other people for advice on the city before coming here. Specifically, which areas were good places to live and which ones I should avoid at all costs. As I was receiving this guidance, a friend said something that struck me as rather odd. When referring to a particular area in the north of the city (which shall remain nameless, because I'm not here to debate the merits of that neighborhood today), he stated that while it was a poor area, it wasn't dangerous. However, he then went on to add that it was not a safe place for a woman to be out alone at night. Do you see the contradiction here?

The word 'dangerous', according to the University of Oxford's Lexico dictionary, means:

• 'Able or likely to cause harm or injury', or
• 'Likely to cause problems or to have adverse consequences.'

Antonyms for the word include 'harmless' and, notably, 'safe'. This area in Paris was described as 'not safe' for lone women at night. Therefore we can assume that this place is the opposite of safe: dangerous. Right? Not exactly. 

The issue here is something of a doublethink problem. The place in question can be both dangerous and safe at the same time, because it is not dangerous and safe in the same situations for the same type of people. It is generally deemed safe, because the people for whom it is seen as dangerous are viewed as exceptions to the rule of safety. Yes, this place is safe - except for women, especially women on their own and particularly women who are out at night. There is an element of danger here that is being acknowledged, but that danger is seen as minor enough that it can be left out of the overall verdict of this place being 'safe'.

Some people, my friend most likely included, might not see a contradiction here. After all, no place is 100% safe for everyone all the time. Still, it got me thinking: how do we define a place or a situation as dangerous? Moreover, who gets to define them as such? Is a place safe if it's only dangerous at night? Is it safe if it's only dangerous for women? 

The answer probably depends on who you ask. In the past, I've been shocked at my male friends' ignorance of the dangers women experience. I once had a guy friend at uni tell me about a time he thought he was being followed home at night, which scared him so much he held his keys between his fingers in case he was attacked. When I told him that I did that every time I walked home in the dark, mysterious follower or not, he didn't believe me. The idea that our quiet little university town could appear dangerous even without the presence of an obvious threat (e.g. someone following you) was unimaginable for him. Likewise, when I've said that I find Saudi Arabia in some ways a safer place than the UK because I experience less street harassment in the former, women have understood while the men I spoke to were incredulous, insisting that there was no way anything like that happened more in the UK, a country they saw as not nearly as dangerous when compared with Saudi. 

This ignorance is not limited purely to men though. A little while ago, a report was making the rounds on social media that said the majority of same-sex couples were afraid to hold hands in public, for fear of harassment or worse. This was hardly a revelation for me or my then-girlfriend, who would always do a quick check of our surroundings before considering any public display of affection or would simply avoid it altogether in some situations, such as when walking past groups of drunk people at night. Although I appreciated that awareness was being raised, it did kind of surprise me that the report was news to anyone. I was even more surprised when I realised many of the straight people I knew were shocked to find out that people like me and my girlfriend were ever afraid to hold hands anywhere in the UK. Even though I knew straight people didn't experience it, I thought this threat of homophobic harassment was common knowledge. Once again, people failed to recognise danger when it didn't affect them directly.

This is not to say that I am in any way exempt from these sorts of blind spots. As a white person, I am often ignorant of dangers which primarily affect people of colour. Although I don't trust the police anymore, I was still able to last well into my teens before I began to stop viewing the British police as the benevolent authority figures I'd been taught they were as a child. For many people of colour, this distrust can be instilled in them since childhood. I was able to maintain that ignorance because for white people, the police do not present so much of a threat as they do for people of colour. My whiteness had allowed me to develop a kind of privileged naivety, just as maleness or straightness had done for my friends.

We all have our blind spots, no matter which minorities you might belong to, and my point in writing this post is not to condemn people who were just trying to give me helpful advice about an area in Paris. In fact, just acknowledging that an area is dangerous for women at night is more than I get from some men, who neglect to consider that an area which is safe for them might not be nearly so safe for women. The flat I currently live in overlooks a street, and sometimes when I look out at night and see men walking alone while there is not a single woman in sight, I wonder if they know how lucky they are. That is what I am asking for in writing this post: a consideration of how you experience danger, an acknowledgement of how privileged you might be if a place seems safe to you, and a reminder that just because you deem an area harmless, that may not be the case for everyone else. 

Link About It #7: Transphobia, Scotch Snaps, and the Death of an Imaginary Clown

This is the seventh instalment in a series now known as Link About It, previously called My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting things I've seen on the internet this week.

State of the world

• Art Speigelman, the author of Maus, withdrew his introduction to a Marvel comics collection after he was asked to remove a critical reference to Donald Trump that described him as "Orange Skull" (akin to the Marvel villain Red Skull).
• Two trans employees have left the Guardian because of its recent transphobic reporting and an unwelcoming work environment. The fact that even the Guardian, a historically progressive newspaper, is giving a platform to such harmful views is concerning, to say the least.
• In America, it seems that protections against sex discrimination are being thrown under the bus in attempt to make sure it's completely legal to discriminate against trans people. Discrimination hurts us all, even if we think it doesn't affect us.

Things I didn't know (until now)

• The planet Venus may have once been habitable, and the fact that it isn't any more could be due to global warming. I feel like this gives us a glimpse of what Earth could become if we don't put a stop to climate change. This might be old news for some of you, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I only found out about this because of the song "Nobody" by Mitski.
• So-called "scotch snaps" are major musical trend right now, which you may or may not have noticed. What I found really fascinating about Adam Neely's video on this topic is that he gets into how differences in languages can impact the music created by their speakers.
• Robert Pattinson once lied on live TV about seeing a clown die at a circus. So that's... something. This article also reminded me of the many times Pattinson blatantly dragged the Twilight franchise while doing press interviews for the series, which never ceases to amuse me.
• On a lighter note, the creation of Viennettas is surprisingly hypnotic.

Miscellaneous

• At The Guardian (which I'm hesitant to link to now, given the second article in this post), Ammar Kalia has written a rather sweet article about men who choose to take their wife's surname after marriage. Although I'm stunned that any man would expect his wife to take his surname in this day and age, it's still fascinating to hear about what names mean to people and what their reasons are for changing them.
• Literature Wales are running a "Platforming Under-Represented Writers Funding Scheme" that is offering grants to BAME, disabled, or chronically ill writers in Wales. The deadline for applications is 21st August at 5pm GMT, so if you want to apply then do so quickly!

Book Review: Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto

My copy of Goodbye Tsugumi - the colour looks

a bit different in real life.

A few years ago, probably when I was around the age of 16 or 17, I became mildly obsessed with the novel Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Somehow this fixation managed to develop without my having actually read or even bought a copy of the book. Maybe I was afraid that the experience of reading it wouldn't live up to my expectations of Kitchen, but when I finally did I was relieved to find that it was everything I'd hoped for. It was beautiful, sensitive, and powerful, and it immediately made me want to go and read everything else Yoshimoto had ever written. And then I didn't.

Aside from one short story of hers (Newlywed), I didn't get around to reading anything else by Yoshimoto until just last month, when I finally bought a copy of another one of her novels: Goodbye Tsugumi. If anticipation of disappointment was what kept me from reading Kitchen originally, it was definitely still in the back of my mind when reading Goodbye Tsugumi. Nothing could change how much I'd loved Kitchen, but what if I hated this other novel so much that my opinion of the author was forever changed? Luckily, I'm glad that I took the risk and did read it.

Before I get into what I thought of the book, I'd like to give a little background. First of all, if you were not already aware, Banana Yoshimoto is a Japanese author. I don't read any more than a tiny amount of Japanese, so I have always read the English translations of her work rather than the originals - a habit that can come with its own issues, as I will address later. As far as I can tell, Goodbye Tsugumi (called simply Tsugumi or TUGUMI in Japanese, I think) is her fourth novel, having been published in 1989 but only translated into English in 2002. The edition I read was published by Faber and Faber with a translation by Michael Emmerich. 

Speaking of my edition of the book: I personally think that the Faber and Faber editions of Yoshimoto's novels are really lovely, which is especially notable given that it's become a sort of running joke that the international editions of her work are often given bizarre or unappealing covers, to the point that she actually has a gallery of some of these on her website. The Faber and Faber covers are simple but beautiful, done in blocks of colour with the original title of the book in Japanese characters on the front - thank you to Didier for translating the kanji on the front of Goodbye Tsugumi, by the way. My copy of Kitchen is also from this collection, and it's a vibrant pink colour that goes nicely with GT's dark purple. You can see a photo of the Faber and Faber edition of GT near the beginning of this post, although I suggest googling more photos if you want to get a better idea of the colour - I took that photo in artificial light and the shades came out a bit strange.

Moving on to the content of the book now. There's actually not that much I have to say about GT, because I genuinely loved it. When I respect and admire an author, I find it hard to write a review for their books, mostly because I feel I am somehow unworthy of passing judgement on their work. This obviously wasn't the case in my review of American Psycho, but it is true here. 

It has been a while since I last read Kitchen, but I can say that GT shares many similar themes with its predecessor, which I get the sense might recur throughout Yoshimoto's work: grief, nostalgia, ideas of home and family, and of course youth. There is a reason why Yoshimoto has been referred to as "the voice of young Japan", after all, and I think it's because she is so good at depicting that peculiar uncertainty which comes with early adulthood, which is important in both Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi.

There is another emotion that Yoshimoto is brilliant at depicting, and that is something which I believe is known in Japanese as mono no aware. This is apparently translated to English as "the pathos of things", and I've seen it compared to the concepts of memento mori and lacrimae rerum, similarly evocative but untranslatable phrases. I apologise if I'm butchering the meaning here, and I am very willing to be corrected by someone who knows more about Japanese culture and language, but my understanding is that mono no aware is a sense of sadness or melancholy felt when confronted with impermanence, be it in life or the material world around us. 

Goodbye Tsugumi is suffused with this type of feeling, of nostalgia and a bittersweet type of happiness, where joy is tinged with sadness by the knowledge that whatever happy experience is happening now must eventually come to an end. That this would be the most prominent emotion in GT makes sense, given that its plot follows a Tokyo university student named Maria who returns to her childhood home to spend one last summer with her cousin, the titular Tsugumi, whose family run a seaside inn. Tsugumi is chronically ill with an unnamed condition, and the threat of her death constantly hangs over her family and friends. They all live alongside Tsugumi with the knowledge that each day could possibly be her last. At the same time, Tsugumi's parents have decided to sell the family inn and retire away from the town in which Maria and Tsugumi have grown up. So when Maria returns to the town for one last summer, it is with a mix of nostalgia and a constant sense of impending loss. Although she has a seemingly bright future ahead of her, living in Tokyo with her parents, Maria is always aware that she is about to lose her childhood home and possibly to lose Tsugumi, her childhood best friend. 

The beauty of Yoshimoto's writing is that she succeeds again and again in making the personal, universal. While Maria's situation is unique - the family inn, growing up in a seaside town, having a terminally ill cousin - we can all relate to the emotions she feels. No doubt most of us have experienced that kind of half-melancholy, the pre-emptive nostalgia of being happy and yet knowing that it inevitably can't last. I've seen a few novels attempt to depict this feeling, and I know even fewer that have done it well. Some books fall into the trap of over-idealising the past or jumping straight to tragedy. Yoshimoto's skill lies in her ability to portray complex emotions in a way that is both delicate and moving, and in Goodbye Tsugumi she does that brilliantly. 

I only have one minor criticism of the book, and it is to do with the translation. Or at least, I think it is. The trouble with reading works in translation is that you are aware that you are not experiencing a text in the exact words of the author but rather through the eyes of a translator, and if you cannot read the original version as well as the translation, you are left wondering where the author's writing ends and the translator's interpretation begins. This is my problem with Goodbye Tsugumi, specifically with its dialogue, and particularly with the dialogue of the character of Tsugumi. I believe that in the original text Tsugumi must have spoken in a way that was very informal and borderline disrespectful to her elders, which was no doubt a challenge for Emmerich to translate. Unfortunately, Emmerich seems to have tried to solve the problem by making Tsugumi speak like a parody of an American teenager. She calls people "kid" and "babe" and uses phrases like "this is the pits" and "talk about dumb with a capital D". I understand that translating what was likely colloquial Japanese would have been hard, but the (to me) obvious Americanness of Tsugumi's dialogue is rather jarring. Funnily enough, I had this exact same problem with the novel Naoko by Keigo Higashino, which was translated by Kerim Yasar, so perhaps this a standard translation practice when going from Japanese to English? I wouldn't dismiss GT based on this one issue, especially as I believe it is a translation problem rather than the fault of the author, and to be honest I did become less aware of it as the novel went on. That said, I'm still very curious about why this happens in translations of Japanese novels and if it is widespread and/or intentional. I'm probably going to try to research this in the future, so if I find out anything enlightening I'll add a note to this post.

Verdict: Goodbye Tsugumi is another brilliant novel by Banana Yoshimoto, one which might well challenge Kitchen's place in my heart if I didn't believe I had enough room in there for the both of them. Although the English rendering of Tsugumi's dialogue is distracting at best, it wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying this otherwise wonderful depiction of nostalgia, love, and the passage of time. 

Link About It #6: Headphone Jacks, Capsule Wardrobes, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

This is the sixth instalment in a series now known as Link About It, previously called My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

So once again, I have skipped a week of these Link About It posts. I'll admit I'm kind of defeating their whole purpose by doing this, as the aim of creating a "weekly" blog series was that it would compel me to post something at least once a week - alas, it seems that not even this promise to myself was enough to overcome my own laziness when it comes to writing. Plus, at the moment all of my free time is being sucked up by this great book called The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (you may have heard of him). Anyway, before I digress further, let's get on to the links:

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
I'm currently ambivalent about giving any attention (even if it's only social media clicks) to Tarantino at the moment, since I learned about his history of mistreating women, but I have found the following analyses of his new film quite interesting:

• Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, was apparently not happy with the portrayal of her father in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, according to The Wrap. This article says that Lee feels the film downplayed the difficulties her father experienced as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and makes him into "an arrogant punching bag".
• At Jezebel, Rich Juzwiak writes about the poor representation of the film's female characters - many of whom, it's worth noting, are based on real life women. While some degree of misogyny being present in a Tarantino film would not surprise me, the level of what Juzwiak refers to as "shittiness towards women" in this latest movie is pretty damning.

Fashion and minimalism

• Justine Leconte is a French fashion designer and YouTuber who makes brilliant videos on all aspects of clothing and style, including this excellent series on how to create a capsule wardrobe. She's also funny, charming, and straight to the point, so there's really no reason not to love her. At the moment I am obsessed with her videos, so much so that I am considering starting a capsule wardrobe myself.
• On a related note, Molly Osberg at Jezebel details her experience of wearing variations on the same thing for a year and a half. It's even more extreme a method than a capsule wardrobe, but Osberg makes a pretty good case for only having one outfit.
• If you're thinking all of this sounds worryingly like a certain trend for spartan aesthetics and bare-essentials living, Chelsea Fagan is here to tell you why minimalism is terrible. I still like the idea of having slightly less stuff than I have at the moment, but I agree with Fagan that minimalism as a movement is awfully wealth-dependent and generally cringey.

Miscellaneous words and (moving) pictures

• The end of the headphone jack is nigh! At least according to this article from the New York Times, anyway. Apparently we as a society have been hurtling towards a headphone-jack-less world for some time now, but being the obvious Luddite that I am, this is the first I've heard of it.
• Naomi Campbell has an incredibly detailed travel routine that has somehow made me both excited for and terrified of the next time I have to get on a plane. Mostly terrified, to be honest.
• Finally, this Tom Scott video will introduce you to the concept of "phatic expressions", which you've most likely heard of before but just don't know the name. The video also includes a dig at Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, which I enjoyed (the dig, not the books/films).

Is Speaking Up Always Worth It?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation that I've been thinking about ever since. At the time, I was bemoaning what I saw as the hypocrisy of straight and cisgender allies who will happily accept awards for "supporting the LGBT+ community" in public but then will fail to call out friends and family who say bigoted things in front of them. My parents responded by saying that, to be fair to those supposed allies, speaking out in such situations isn't always worth it.

This statement has been playing on repeat in my mind for the last month or so, and for a while I couldn't figure out why it bothered me. While I understand the idea of picking your battles and know that it would be impossible to call out every slightly problematic statement we encounter in life, something about the idea of shrugging off a prejudiced comment with the defence that "it's just not worth it" troubled me. After giving it a lot of thought, I think I've figured out why.

First of all, let's consider how we decide what makes taking a stand in a situation "worth it". In any interpersonal situation, I would argue that most people (subconsciously or otherwise) weigh up the costs and benefits of a statement before we make it. Most people don't go around saying whatever is on their mind at any given moment, at least in part because to do so would be socially damaging. A cost-benefits calculation applies to any interaction, even apparently innocuous ones like deciding whether or not to tell everyone the terrible pun that just came into your head (benefits = they may think it's hilarious; cost = they may think it's awful and never wish to associate with you again), but in this case I want to consider specifically the situation wherein a person you are with makes an offensive comment and you have to decide whether or not to contest it. The potential costs of the situation will vary, but will likely take into account the possibility of the following: making a scene, losing standing among social group, being seen as a killjoy, angering the person who made the comment, and so on. In more extreme situations, you might have to consider the likelihood that your physical safety could be endangered or you could even be arrested, but those are less likely and not what I'm really addressing here. Either way, it seems that you have a lot to lose if you speak out in a public situation. What then are the possible benefits of it? What do you stand to gain here? There is your personal dignity, of course, the sense that you have stood up for your moral principles and done "the right thing". Then there is the chance that you could change the mind of the person who made the comment. Perhaps you could sow a seed of doubt in their intolerant mind that will one day blossom into acceptance and understanding - but is that really worth the risk?

Here's where I believe the problem lies. If you see the only tangible benefit of speaking out as possibly changing the mind of the bigot in question, of course it's not going to seem worth it. I feel that this, along with the feeling that you're abiding by your personal code of honour, are usually the only benefits taken into account when people weigh up whether or not to speak up in the face of ignorance. My issue, then, is that there are other benefits which are not being considered.

There's more to speaking out against intolerance than the possibility of changing the offending person's mind, and to reduce it to that is to disregard the other important effect of taking a stand: reducing harm. If you are in a group, it's always worth considering that even if nobody else contests whatever offensive thing is being said, that doesn't mean none of them were affected by it. I can't count the number of times I have been in a group situation when someone has said something homophobic that I found deeply hurtful, but which I found myself unable to respond to either because I was still in the closet or was afraid of being attacked further if I said anything. Every one of those times, if just one person had spoken out and said that whatever homophobic thing was mentioned wasn't on, I would have felt relieved and infinitely safer in that situation. Yet almost every time it happened, nobody said anything. Remember this: no matter how uncomfortable you feel contesting a bigoted comment, it is nothing compared to how people of the marginalised identity in question will feel. If you want to be a true ally, your job at times like that is to speak up for the people who can't speak for themselves.

So that's my defence of speaking up in group scenarios, but what about in one-to-one conversations? What if it's just you and one person, and you know that there's no chance of anybody overhearing? In that case, the benefit of questioning what they've said is that it might make them a bit slower to repeat similar statements in future. As a queer person, I don't care if most people are homophobic in their thoughts - what I do care about is that they keep them to themselves. Even if you think telling your friend to shut up won't change their mind, it will still indicate to them that their bigotry is not acceptable. Very often, it is this belief that their views are not socially acceptable that stops people from participating in obvious bigotry, rather than a true sense that it is wrong.

I say all that to say this: keeping silent is just as much of a choice as speaking up, even if it is the easier option. I can't speak for other marginalised identities, but I will say that if you are a man or a straight person, one of the greatest things you can do for me as an ally is to question sexism and homophobia when you encounter it. The sad fact is that your objection will likely carry more weight than mine would, and you are less likely to be put in danger by speaking up. The next time you are confronted with the choice to speak up or remain silent, I hope that you will consider first and foremost the impact that your choice will have on the victims of intolerance, rather than the potential to convince people with intolerant views.

PS: Thank you to my parents for providing the inspiration for this post!

Link About It #5: Goat Portraits, Women's Work, and an Ode to Anne Shirley

This is the fifth instalment in a series now known as Link About It, previously called My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

Remember last week, when I threatened to come up with a terrible pun-based name for this series if nobody suggested anything better? Well, I've made good on my promise, and this series is now going to be known as "Link About It" from this point onwards. Personally I think this title works better, but if you disagree.... all I can say is that you had your chance.

Women's work

This week I've somehow ended up stumbling across several excellent articles on the topic of women and labour, particularly the kind of domestic labour that is often invisible and expected from us.

• At The Cut, Lisa Miller considers how women tend to carry more things with them than men do, and what that says about our society. Miller looks at a number of issues, from the lack of pockets in women's clothes to who cleans up messes in public spaces, and ties them all together in a brilliant thesis on women and the baggage (literal and metaphorical) we carry.
• A new study says that the idea that men in general are "dirt blind" is a myth - they just aren't judged for being untidy or unclean in the same way women are. This made me think about the shared memory so many of us have of our mothers panicking over the state of the house when guests are coming over. Perhaps this is because women subconsciously know the house's condition reflects on them, rather than their male partners or children?
•  A lack of time is a woman's greatest enemy, writes Brigid Schulte at The Guardian. Her essay makes a compelling argument that the thing holding so many women back from creative or career success is the fact that they just don't have as much time as their male counterparts, due to the unseen domestic labour expected of them.

Articles on wanting and asking too much

• It's from 2017, but this ode to Anne of Green Gables at Lit Hub is so beautiful that I'd still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who loves L. M. Montgomery's precocious heroine. I didn't read any of the Anne books until I was an adult, but once I did I related to Anne so strongly that I wish I'd read them many years before. 
• This personal essay at Autostraddle explores desire, being "thirsty", and the radical act of openly claiming what you want. It's excellent, but I will warn that it's a bit NSFW.

Stories and pictures

• "The Crane Wife", by CJ Hauser, also explores desire and emotional needs. It's a beautiful story of a woman recovering from the collapse of a relationship, and how studying cranes in the wild helps her survive the aftermath. I originally thought that it was a piece of short fiction, but now I think it might actually be autobiographical. 
• These portraits of goats, taken by photographer Kevin Horan, are surprisingly striking. I never would have thought of goats as being particularly pretty animals before, but their uniqueness and personality really shine through in this series. 

If you've finished reading this post and are surprised that I haven't shared anything to do with the UK's new PM, I would just like to say that the omission was deliberate. Between the recent heatwave and being ill, I don't have the energy to confront the horror of our current political situation right now. There is a time for action and a time for distraction, and right now I'm strongly in need of the latter.

What I've Learned About Twitter, by Someone Who Joined a Few Months Ago

I've been on Twitter for a couple of months now, and to say it's been an enlightening experience would be one way to put it. Another way to put it would be that I, along with Twitter's other 330 million or so users, have been exposed to a yawning great hellmouth of confusion and internet culture that I just can't seem to look away from. 

Still, entering said hellmouth has provided numerous learning opportunities for me, some of which I was more thankful for than others. So that you too can acquire this knowledge without having to suffer as I have, and in honour of Twitter's recent (controversial) layout change, I have compiled a list of seven of the most important things I've learned here:

When drama or discourse is about to break on the internet, it will surface on Twitter first. There are a lot of criticisms you can make of Twitter, but the website's claim that "it's what's happening" is generally pretty accurate. It only took a little while of me being on Twitter to realise that conversations might have been happening on there for several days (an eternity in internet time) before they reach the likes of Facebook or other social media websites. As a result:

If you don't understand something you've seen on Twitter, there's no guarantee that Google will be able to help you. I'm sure most of us have been through this experience before: you see something online, it doesn't make sense to you, you Google it, and (often with the help of Urban Dictionary or a Buzzfeed article) you eventually learn what it's all about. This process doesn't work with Twitter. I spent a day or so utterly confused by everyone's mention of "cliff wife" on my feed before the story broke in other areas of the internet, at which point I finally learned what everyone was talking about. Before that, Googling or even searching within Twitter was no help at all. 

The memes, by and large, just aren't as good. Don't get me wrong: there are some good memes on Twitter. Nevertheless, the hard truth is that they're generally just not as good as the ones on Facebook. Maybe I'm following the wrong people, or maybe FB's algorithm is just better suited to showing its users the crème of the meme crop, but that's what I've found. There is also another problem with the memes/jokes on Twitter, and that is:

For every funny tweet you see, there is a 50% chance it was stolen. I'm not going to get deep into the issues with internet culture and the commodification of memes and how with the prevalence of screenshotting much of what you see on social media is "stolen" in some sense anyway, but I will say this: at least on Facebook, a screenshotted meme (or tweet or tumblr post) at least normally retains the creator's username and is obviously not being claimed as original. On Twitter, where people regularly copy-paste other people's tweets and then send them from their own account as though they were the creator of the joke all along, this is not the case. Thankfully, you can normally rely on Twitter's dedicated userbase to expose the fraud in the tweet's replies, normally with screenshots and (another) meme about stealing jokes.

Academics love Twitter. This is actually one of the main reasons why I first joined the site, after I was at a conference and realised the majority of the people there were either live-tweeting the talks, introducing themselves to people they'd previously only known via their Twitter accounts, or just discussing the apparently self-contained sphere of "academic Twitter". To be honest, I don't know exactly why academics love Twitter so much. Perhaps it's the focus on text-based posts rather than images or videos, something which appeals to people who work in a field based largely upon reading and writing. Maybe it's the way the website's format lends itself to discussion and debate. Or, possibly, people who work in an increasingly fragile industry are keen to use any opportunity for networking and self-promotion. Either way, academic Twitter is definitely one of the brighter spots of the website and one of the few aspects of it that I don't regret introducing myself to. That said, even if academics love it, it is still true that:

Everybody hates Twitter, including and especially everyone who uses it on a regular basis. If you go on any random Twitter account, I would bet there's a 95% chance that at some point they have tweeted about how terrible the website is, how they hate the new update, or how they absolutely have to take a break from tweeting for a month or so because this website is just not good for their mental health. Having been on Twitter myself now, I completely understand. I've heard it referred to as "the blue hell site" a few times, but I feel Twitter is more like the toxic f*ckboy that the entire internet shares a history with. We know he's no good for us, but we just can't stop going back. And speaking of toxic men:

Men will appear out of nowhere to offer their opinion, even if you didn't ask for it. I will say that I am writing this based on my own experience as a visible woman on the internet, so it's quite possible that people whose gender appears differently on Twitter would have a different experience, but this does seem to be a common occurrence for women on the website. More than once, I have had men jump into my mentions to tell me things that I certainly didn't ask for their views on, everything from the history of Welsh nationalism to my crush on Megan Rapinoe. Topic, context, and whether or not you follow each other - nothing so trivial as these will prevent a Twitter man from giving his two cents, whether you like it or not. The problem is so severe that even as I write this I am convinced that, should a Twitter man read this post, they will suddenly emerge on here or the hellsite to contest what I've written. Such is the life of a woman on the internet. 

In conclusion, Twitter is a strange and terrible place and also probably my favourite social media website at the moment. No doubt I will continue to learn much more in my time on there, unless of course I end up getting banned or leaving as so many have done before me. I'd like to know the thoughts of other people who are on Twitter - even if you are a man, who in this case I am giving permission to share their opinions with me, except on the subject of women's experience on social media. Other women tweeters (twitterers? Twitter users?): I'd love to hear what you think (either on here or elsewhere) and if you've had any similar encounters to the ones I've mentioned. Being a woman on the internet is always a trial, but as ever, Twitter remains uniquely challenging.