You know those artist mutuals (bonus points if you also know them in real life) who keep reblogging those “If you really appreciate your artist friends, you don’t just like but also reblog their art!” posts?

And even though it feels a bit passive aggressive and pushy, you think “Sure, I want to be a good friend, I’ll do it!” - even if it’s not really your taste, or fandom.

And yet, every single time you post art, they never even spare a second glance and after a while, it just gets frustrating and you stop reblogging their stuff as well.

And then, they start whining about how none of their friends ever supports them.

I love that.

Because no, I don’t think you should only do something if you get something back in return. But if you keep trying to guilt trip people into doing something that you won’t do yourself, that’s hypocritical at best.

toboldlylesbian:

history-freak1:

imsuchacapricorn:

toboldlylesbian:

marisatomay:

toboldlylesbian:

pick your fighter

the ‘$1000 to go to Hawaii’ bride, the ‘I bought a $99 polygraph on amazon’ lady, or the ‘why was $200 so huge’ birthday girl

a lot of people seem to be confused and think the hawaii bride and the polygraph lady are the same but they’re actually 2 separate people so here’s all 3 in one go

the “$1500 to go to hawaii” bride

Ms Polygraph Test

$200 birthday

bask in the unfiltered nonsense of it all

since someone mentioned this and I had forgotten, a last minute entry fighter: “Squire Sebastian” lady

New to the arena, Kristie and her surprise wedding

Y'all really gonna pass up childless millennial Disney Mom?

my FAVORITE angry facebook post of all time

A couple people have pointed out that anytime I skype them while I’m at my home, there is always at least one other person there too.  Unfortunately, this does not mean that I am ever-popular and constantly have friends around, but rather that there is always cleaners, movers, maintenance, hangers, delivery men, laundry boys, guards, etc.  This is because in the UAE, service is inexpensive, and so rather than hanging curtains or fixing lights on my own (and likely messing things up) I hire someone to do it and pay a minimal price.  This is nice in that things get done effectively and quickly- but I realize it is a bit different from the normal growing-up process my peers are going through.  As a consultant- always thinking of organizing things into groups- I came up with these three division of people:

Lazys: the people who are content with having nothing accomplished.  They see a problem and just let it be.  Even if it will lead to dire circumstances, they see it as a slow process of destruction that they do not have to take care of.

Do-ers:  the people who get their hands dirty, see something that needs to be fixed and then learn how to fix it and dive right in.  For them the process of making things right is just as important as the outcome of order.  The only fault of the do-er is that sometimes their actions are not as effective in both time spent and/or quality of the out-come

Get-it-doners: the people who see a problem and find someone else who will have the solution.  It will be accomplished, but not by their own hands, and likely at a cost.  The get-it-doners will have the highest quality solutions (as they will bring in experts) but their dependence on others, causes problems if a solution is needed quickly.

Most twentysomething new adults like myself are either lazys or do-ers, I am somewhat unique in that I live in a place where the means required to be a get-it-doner are low.  Though it will work for these next two years while I’m in the UAE, I’m nervous that being so strongly a get-it-doner will impede my life when I may need to be a do-er. It is also a bit demoralizing in a way to have to rely on others for simple things, and I think that the independence that comes with early adulthood really pushes one to be a do-er.  However, I notice myself often seeing that something needs to get done, feeling like I don’t have the time or understanding, and so just asking someone else.

The danger in this is not just reliance, but also entitlement, and one needs to be careful to not think that they are “too good” to be a do-er.  It is these balances that must constantly be considered as an ex-pat in the Gulf.

dagny-hashtaggart:

morlock-holmes:

the-grey-tribe:

invertedporcupine:

triviallytrue:

athingbynatureprodigal:

triviallytrue:

To the extent that incel/redpill types have a point about anything, it’s true that dating success is partially dependent on arbitrary standards of attractiveness over which most people have very limited control, and that this is unfair and it’s unfortunate that humans are wired this way.

The infuriating thing is that they fail to realize that this is symmetric - that this isn’t some cruel injustice aimed at men, and women have the exact same issues to deal with. I’m reminded of this one post of a guy saying women didn’t want to date him because he was poor and ugly, and he was asked if he ever considered dating poor and ugly women, and he responded with something like “why would I ever do that?”

I don’t think there’s any grand metaphysical difference between gay romance and straight romance but at least gay people don’t suffer from the bizarre disease where they interpret their potential romantic partners as having wholly different desires and experiences as themselves.

The intent on this is good, and I like Triv a lot, but … wow, it’s rare to see something that is so thoroughly an example of the error it’s critiquing, which is extra-amazing when what it’s critiquing is a failure to notice when you’re acting out an example of the thing you’re critiquing.

Layers!

It goes a little off the rails at the end, which might be more productive: Triv, why do gay male relationships progress so differently from straight relationships or lesbian ones? 
To be more specific: why are straight bathhouses never that much of a Thing? Like, do you really think that straight people are wrong in knowing that their potential partners have very very different desiresandexperiences? 
Like, no way do you not know that men and women have very different experiences. 

I think straight men and straight women have different desires in the same way that gay obligate-tops and gay obligate-bottoms do - that physically they are looking for different things. But there are a lot of commonalities in the experience of people looking for companionship - desire for a partner they find attractive and desire to be desired/considered attractive are both almost omnipresent.

In terms of experience, I don’t mean that in terms of “men and women have no different experiences” I mean it in terms of “I know many men and women who have been rejected, who feel insecure about their looks/body, who feel like they should want sex more or less than they do, and who are desperately frustrated by the entire experience of dating.” These are not gendered experiences.

Steel-manning a bit, I think that the claim from more self-aware lonely men (which may rule out redpill as specified above, but is a real category of people) is not that no women experience loneliness and rejection, but that – at least in the context of the contemporary West – when lonely women express unhappiness, they receive sympathy, but when lonely men express unhappiness, they receive scorn at best and a hate mob at worst.

There was a fat activist who talked about the desexualisation of fat women, and she was asked if she would date a fat man. She said no, it would only be good praxis for her to date attractivemen.

My steel man, and I said this already but it really bothers me, would be, look at the following plan:

1. Be of average to slightly above average attractiveness.

2. Go to places where strangers meet each other, and put up a profile on a dating site.

3. Wait for someone to ask you out.

Is that a good plan? Does it have a fair chance of working?

This appears to be a great plan that works for the majority of straight women but a terrible plan that only works for a tiny minority of straight men.

I really do think that most people don’t actually understand how radically different the experiences of men and women seem to be. I think men massively underestimate the amount of unwanted sexual attention women get, but women massively overestimate the amount of wanted sexual attention men get.

When the women I talk to bring it up, every single one of them has been sexually harassed more in a given six month period than I have been in any given, uh, three plus decades of life, and has also been asked out in a perfectly polite way more often then I have in my entire life.

There appears to, in fact, be an extremely different experience between genders here.

I think there is a difference, but people often misinterpret it, and it’s no surprise that it’s shy guys who are left the most frustrated.

Basically, a lot of guys miss the way that “men are expected to hit on women, women are expected to be hit on by men” excludes women from certain actions. Yes, wanting people to be attracted to you and having no one absolutely fucking sucks. It also sucks to want to take action as far as the people you’re attracted to and feel like you’re not supposed to. These two states are terrible in complementary ways.

Like yes, you notice that you’d fall head over heels for a (reasonably attractive and compatible) woman who bothered to make the first move. But you don’t notice the ways in which she’s been conditioned her whole life to not do that, even if she wanted to.

This isn’t meant to be an “of course women have it worse in all respects” post, and I’m genuinely frustrated with the way that e.g. Me Too erased male victims of sexual assault (oh hi, pleased to meet you), but I think there really are a lot of guys who fundamentally don’t get that women not hitting on them may be down to more than just laziness.

I really like most of the points being made in this discussion and might even be tempted to reblog it without comment, but this is one of my longer-time general pet topics so of course I’m going to add a few comments.

First of all, regarding the anecdote in the OP about the guy saying that women won’t date him because he’s poor and ugly, his level of unreasonableness/hypocrisy depends a lot on whether he’s merely complaining that women won’t date him or whether he’s blaming women (in general, or some particular women) for not wanting to date him. Because the former is a perfectly morally and rationally coherent (if unfortunate and less than ideal) attitude to have (and a mindset that I’ve found myself in at times): someone can have undesirable treats that they feel they have little control over and lament that those traits make them unattractive while also finding those same traits unattractive in other people. Or to put it another way, someone might have a particular level N of, let’s say, physical attractiveness (conventional or otherwise) such that they cannot muster up enough attraction to anyone whose level is below N, while this is completely independent of their own attractiveness (which may itself change over some period of time, even abruptly, without the Required Level of Attractiveness N changing). In practice, on average, I imagine that these two situations are not independent (someone dealing with a particular not-conventionally-attractive superficial trait in themselves might be more used to it and therefore less turned off by it in others), but for many individuals they may be independent. The individual may be frustrated by this and hope to self-modify so that their N is decreased, but I don’t believe this can exactly be done on command, and so it can lead to an unfortunate situation that I feel sympathetic to.

That is very different from the guy in the anecdote actually blamingorresenting women for not being attracted to him, which would certainly show hypocrisy and lack of empathy. I am very sensitive about the distinction between feeling frustrated and blaming, I think perhaps because it was so often ignored by the anti- Nice Guy™ rhetoric that was rampant some 8-9 years ago (wow was it really that long ago?!). And while I don’t think that the OP was particularly trying to imply the sameness of these two things, I felt I might as well bring up the distinction.

Second main point, in response to the post just above me: while I have no disagreement whatsoever with @dagny-hashtaggart’s points here – the fact that women are socialized to not make first moves in the dating/sex realm to the point that it may be very hard to get that type of initiative beyond the abstract for many individual women – I suspect also that growing up in a society that conditions everyone to expect men to initiate things with women leads to women not feeling as much need to bother even trying to obtain the skill of doing so. I continue to hold the impression that it’s not a role all that many women desire to have (while a lot of men don’t much enjoy having it either), and that it’s only natural for not many women to even be all that aware of the burden of it. And so one of the ultimate effects of all this conditioning and socialization is that a sizable number of (attracted-to-men) women wind up kind of taking for granted that they don’t have to initiate anything and feeling a bit entitled to have first moves made on them (preferably by men they find attractive!), and so I can empathize with some measure of frustration and/or resentment by lonely men who perceive that. (For an example I witnessed of this type of entitlement, see this discussion from a few years ago; I’m a little uncomfortable about people reblogging the post at this link because I forgot to black out the name of the person involved.)

thatonechiiick:

nocruisecontrol:

currentuser:

krushstress:

ibelieveyouitsnotyourfault:

By Anonymous

In first grade, a boy named John— a notorious troublemaker—systematically chased every girl in our class during recess trying to kiss her on the lips. Most gave in eventually. It was easier to give in than keep running. When it was my turn, I turned and faced him, grabbed his glasses off his weasel face, and stomped on them on the hard blacktop. He ran to the principal’s office and cried.

In fifth grade, I was asked to be a boy’s girlfriend over email. It was the first email I ever received. He actually told me he wanted to send me an email, so I went home and made an AOL account. We went to a carnival and he won me a Garfield stuffed animal, and then he gave me a 3 Doors Down CD. A few days later, he broke up with me, and asked for Garfield and the CD back. I said no.

In sixth grade, a girl in my year gave head to an eighth grader in the back of the school bus while playing Truth or Dare.

In the summer after sixth grade, I kissed a boy for the first time at sleep away camp. He was my summer love. During the end-of-the-summer dining hall announcements, where kids usually announced lost sweatshirts and Walkmen, an older girl stepped up to the microphone, tossed her hair behind her shoulders, and proudly stated, “I lost something very precious to me last night. My virginity. If anyone finds it, please let me know.” The dining hall erupted into laughter and cheers. She was barred from ever coming back to the camp again, and wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to anyone.

In seventh grade, I told my brother I decided when I was older wanted a Hummer. What I really meant was I wanted a Jeep, but I didn’t know a lot about cars. My mother overheard and screamed at me for “wanting a Hummer.”

In the summer after freshman year of high school, I went to sleepaway field hockey camp with many of my close friends. One of them, named Megan, I had been friends with since kindergarten. One night when I was showering, she ripped open the curtain and snapped a photo of me on her disposable camera. I screamed. She laughed. We both laughed when I got out of the shower a few minutes later. After camp was over, her father took the camera to the convenience store to get it developed. When he gave the finished photos back to her, he said, “Your friend [Anonymous] has grown up.”

Sophomore year of high school, one of my best friends Hilary had a party in her basement while her mom was away. We invited some of the guys in our grade and someone’s older brother bought us a handle of vodka. One of the boys who came sat next to me in Spanish class. His name was Thomas. I remember playing a simple game, where we passed the bottle of vodka around in a circle and drank. I remember being happily tipsy and having fun, to suddenly being very drunk. Thomas and I started chanting numbers in Spanish, and he leaned towards me and kissed me. We kissed in the middle of the party, with all of our friends cheering. Then we went into Hilary’s bedroom.

Hilary’s bedroom was in the basement, on the ground floor, with a large window next to her bed. When someone went outside to smoke a cigarette, they realized it was a front row seat to what was happening in the bedroom. It was dark outside, and the light on was in the bedroom. They called everyone outside to watch. I don’t remember getting undressed, but apparently we were both completely naked in Hilary’s bed. A friend of mine told me later she tried to open the door and stop what was happening, but Thomas must have locked it. They said they pounded on the door. I don’t remember hearing them pounding. I don’t remember seeing everyone’s faces outside the window.  I remember Thomas holding my head down, and shoving his penis into my mouth. I remember trying to resist, pulling back, but he held his hands firmly on my head, pushing my face up and down. That’s all that I remember.

The next day, my friends and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants. I couldn’t eat anything, and it wasn’t because I was hung over. Every time I tried to put food in my mouth, I felt like I was choking. Anytime a flash of the night before appeared in my mind, I felt like vomiting. My friends sat with me in silence. Then they told me a girl named Lindsey, who had briefly dated Thomas freshman year, had stood outside and watched the entire time. Even after everyone else stopped watching. My friends said they didn’t watch.

On Monday, Thomas and I sat next to each other in Spanish. We didn’t speak. We didn’t make eye contact. I went to the girls bathroom and threw up. I hear Lindsey and Thomas live together, now, ten years later.

Junior year of high school, my teacher for Honors Spanish was named Señor Gonzales. Señor Gonzales had all of the girls sit in the front row. Señor Gonzales called on any girl who was wearing a skirt to write on the chalkboard. Señor Gonzales asked a friend of mine, who had broken her finger playing an after school sport, if she broke her finger because “she liked it rough.” Señor Gonzales was a tenured teacher.

Senior year of high school, I got my first real boyfriend. His name was Colin. He was on the lacrosse team with Thomas. He told me that sophomore year, Thomas told everyone on the team what happened that night at Hilary’s. Everyone cheered. Colin said that, even then, he had a crush on me. Even then, he wanted to punch Thomas.

Colin and I lost our virginities to each other. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have the baby. He didn’t believe in abortion. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have a C-section. Colin said that if I didn’t have a C-section, my vagina would be too loose for him to ever enjoy having sex with me again. Colin said that he wouldn’t let our child breastfeed. He said his mother gave him formula, and that he turned out just fine. I didn’t get pregnant.

Junior year of college, I lived in Denmark for the spring semester and studied at the University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen is one of the safest cities in the world. Guns are illegal there. Pepper spray is illegal there. One night, my friends and I went to a concert at a crowded club in a part of the city I didn’t know very well. I brought a tiny purse with money, my apartment key, and my international cell phone. For some reason it made sense at the time to put my purse inside my friend’s purse. Maybe I didn’t feel like carrying it. We were both drinking. My friend left the concert to go home with her boyfriend. One by one, everyone I was there with left the concert, until I was suddenly alone and I realized I didn’t have my purse, or any money for a cab ride home.

I started walking in the direction that felt right. I walked for a long time. I had no idea where I was, and didn’t recognize the area. It was almost 4 am. I was on a residential street when a cab pulled up next to me. I asked the driver if he could drive me to an intersection down the street from my apartment.

I don’t have any money, I said.

I really need your help, I said.

I will do it for free, he said.

Sit in the front, he said.

I sat in the front. We drove in silence for some time, until he pulled over on the side of a dark street.

I don’t want to do it for free anymore, he said.

He locked the car doors and reached across the center console and slipped his hand up my skirt. He grabbed my vagina. Hard. I pushed his hand away and unlocked the door. I ran down the street and realized he had taken me a block away from the intersection I wanted. I walked to my apartment and threw rocks at my roommate’s window until she let me inside. She yelled at me for waking her up. I escaped. Nothing happened. I was fine.

The summer after I graduated college I helped Hilary find an internship. She was an art major and wanted something for her resume besides waitressing. We found a posting on Craigslist to be a studio assistant for a painter in the Bronx. It was listed as an unpaid internship. The toll for the George Washington Bridge was twelve dollars, plus gas, but she got the internship anyway. She wanted the experience.

The artist was a 38-year-old Canadian painter named Bradley. Hilary was 22.There was another intern there, an art student from Manhattan named Stella.  Bradley needed assistants to help him make bubble wrap paintings. Stella and Hilary would take a syringe and fill the tiny bubbles with different color paints until it formed a mosaic. Bradley always had Hilary stay after Stella left to clean the paintbrushes and syringes. He told Hilary she was beautiful. More beautiful than his wife, who he only married for citizenship. He told Hilary they had a loveless marriage. He told Hilary he wanted to have her beautiful children. They began an affair. He told Hilary has wife knew and didn’t care. He told Hilary he was going to leave his wife soon.

Everyday Hilary drove to the Bronx, cleaned Bradley’s paintbrushes, and had sex on the studio floor. Everyday she went home with no money, and everyday she paid the toll at the George Washington Bridge. She needed the internship for her resume, she said. It was too late to find a new job, she said.

I could go on. I could tell you a lot more. About the whistles on the sidewalk, the kids who sat at the bottom of the stairs in high school to look up our skirts, my friend who was a prostitute in South Carolina, the men who’ve cornered me in parking lots and bars calling me a tease, the unwanted grabbing on the subway, the many times my father has called me fat, the time I traveled to the Philippines and discovered Western men pay preteen locals to spend the week in their hotel, the messages on OKCupid asking to “fart in my mouth.” About how I wasn’t sure if I had been raped because I was drunk and kissed Thomas back. How he raped my mouth and not my vagina, so that must not be rape. How easy it was for me to escape the dark street in Copenhagen, and how that made it not matter since “it could’ve been worse.”

Men have no idea what it takes to be a woman. To grin and bear it and persevere. The constant state of war, navigating the relentless obstacle course of testosterone and misogyny, where they think we are property to be owned and plowed. But we’re not. We are people, just like them. Equals, in fact, or at least that’s the core of what feminism is still trying to achieve. The job is not over. We’ve made great progress. There are female CEOs, though not very many. There are females writing for the New York Times and winning Pulitzer prizes, though not very many.  There are female politicians, though not very many. But these advances are only on paper. The job won’t be over until equality permeates the air we breathe, the streets we walk and the homes we live in.

I think back to how easy it was for me, in first grade, to feel fearless and strong in my conviction to stomp on John’s glasses. I felt right in reacting how I did, because John’s behavior was wrong. But his was an elementary learning of the wide boundaries his gender would go on to afford him. For me, it would never again be so easy.

- Anonymous, age 25

Don’t scroll down, read this. All of it.

READ IT.

Too much of this resonated with me

^^^^

sirmaximilliussublime:

uglyfoxybaby:

artnmxlanin:

romanovva:

start holding your boyfriends to best friend standards pls

“my boyfriend was annoyed that I didn’t shave for days” vs “my best friend was annoyed that I didn’t shave for days”

“my boyfriend doesn’t like my haircut so I’m growing it out again” vs “my best friend doesn’t like my haircut so I’m growing it out again”

“my boyfriend hates when I wear makeup so I guess I have to stop” vs “my best friend hates when I wear makeup so I guess I have to stop”

if your boyfriend would leave you for something that your best friend wouldn’t care about, KILL THEM AND EAT THEM

Lmfao

true tho because people forget having a partner is literally just having another best friend with a slightly different intimacy thrown in, not all the rules should change and you should feel 100% as comfortable with your partner as you do with a friend. it took me a long time to realize that. 

This is fucking great. Needed this.