Fun night, but then some ableism

The joys of poly: When your boyfriend double books himself for your visit, you can hang out with his other girlfriend instead.

This is what happened to me anyway, on Saturday. Jennie and I had a great time: poured some wine, put on the telly to a cooking program that was showing some Yorkshire puddings just about to go into the oven, so of course we had to watch it to find out what they did wrong ("Lots" was the verdict). And they made white chocolate cheesecake with amaretto-infused raspberries, which made us want amaretto-infused raspberries... And then somebody made dauphinoise potatoes, so we wanted dauphinoise potatoes...

And so our dinner menu was set: some kind of protein (we ended up with Quorn kievs), dauphinoise potatoes, and...cranachan for dessert because we bought cream for the potatoes anyway and whisky was cheaper than amaretto.

We went shopping for ingredients, came back and drunkenly cooked it all and it was great.

I found out I have a kitchen skill that neither Jennie nor Mat had! I'm so used to them knowing things and having a kitchen full of cool gadgets...but neither of them ever peels vegetables so I peeled the potatoes. Jennie was impressed at how quickly I managed to peel the potatoes and frankly so was I, considering the combination of being a person using a very sharp knife who's used to lots of tactile feedback while I'm doing this with a peeler, and the fact that I'd already had one glass of wine and when I say "glass" I mean "size of a fingerbowl"...

We watched most of a Miss Marple with Jennie doing her usual commenting on the costumes which I love because it tells me all kinds of things that I won't see or if I do won't know why they work or don't (like the way the servant was wearing a badly-fitting dress to show she was lower-class, while the posh lesbian she was standing next to (we were on a lookout for the lesbians too, as you always get those in Agatha Christie) was wearing perfectly tailored clothes.

Apparently the friend that James was out with told him that Interstellar was a better movie than 2001 because it was more intellectual, or something. So I was convinced we'd had the better evening.

Oh but then there was this commercial. I was busy counting up change to see if I had enough money for more wine at the time, so I was paying even less attention than usual, but I heard someone say "I lost my sight when I was fourteen..." so I looked up in what you might call professional interest and I must say I wasn't expecting a soap commercial but that's what I got (I think it was this one? but I went from not paying attention to it to yelling at it pretty quickly, so I'm not sure...oh yeah, and I'd already had some wine by this point).

Because I have a little cadre of blind friends on Twitter these days -- it's great; all women, too -- when I mentioned this there some of them said they'd talked about the same thing. The consensus was that none of us liked it: it "played the 'super sense' card," this misconception that blind people's other senses somehow improve to compensate for the lost one (they don't...we might learn to pay attention to them more, but we don't do anything that others couldn't, and it's not magic; it is huge in spoon costs). One said "It's not inclusive if they're fetishising us," and that's what this felt like: the person with special super senses was being consulted to give the ultimate verdict on what the best body wash is and she has spoken!

Jennie and Alisdair even questioned whether the woman was blind, which she is but I don't blame them because it seemed so false, not at all like what I'd expect blind people to talk about. Maybe it's just the people I know but when the blind people that I know get together (either IRL or on twitter), we talk about uncommunicative sighted people, inaccessible transport...and normal stuff, like our kids or hobbies or other people we know. I'm not saying this means no blind person thinks

My hands give me all the feedback that a sighted person would rely on their eyes for, so I navigate the world by touch. When I’m walking around a store I pick up every garment – I’m feeling the fabrics, the textures and the shapes. And colours aren’t about what they look like anymore. Blue became more about how my fingers feel running through water, and the colour green is more about the smell of freshly cut grass, and the feeling of it under bare feet.

But that just seems...like a sighted person's idea of what being blind is like? (That's not from the ad, but it's from "Molly's Story" on the Dove website, which I found when googling for the commercial.) It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't sound right; it sounds like marketing-speak. And even an authentically blind person can be given a daft script to read out. I mean, the pull quote is "I might have lost my sight, but I have not lost my ability to experience beauty in the world," ffs.

I think the last word on it from my new Twitter chum bigpurpleduck was "I mean, fair play to her making some money out of it. But I don't like this at all. Dove are using us, and peddling misconceptions."

A Natural Flair for Justice

I know I talked at the time about helping miss_s_b with her podfic by being one of the voices for it, but I can't find the entry now.

Anyway, that's a thing I did and it was super-fun and now you can listen to it here!

The fandoms involved are Doctor Who, Miss Marple and Murder She Wrote, which I'd think would be irresistible as a combination... But even if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea you might like this because it's very accessible, doesn't depend on knowing more than the broadest brushes of the characters, and it remains very sweet while drawing attention to the aspects of a "cozy mystery" that shouldn't be cozy at all.

I know I'm biased because Jennie's great and it was really fun to record a voice for this (it has an American character, so she asked me as local American), but I really think it came out wonderfully. I listened to it on a bus on my way to a meeting I didn't want to go to and was much more cheerful by the time I got there.

The written version of the story is also at the link for people who don't want an audio version.