“I call upon Helios + Thoth + Christ + Jewish God + Hekate and Ten Thousand Angels + Ten Thousand Demons + Hermes + John + Paul + George + Ringo + L + Ratio to make the other team’s racehorse shit itself and die”
do NOT feel bad abt scarfing down a tub of raspberries. there is NO reason at all to ration them like other delicious treats bc they WILL mold as soon as theyre out of your line of sight
Image: A tweet from aïs (@glamgamine) reading, “one thing I will never understand about adulthood is how I’m supposed to make appointments if I work full time and every place closes at 6PM.”
End of description.
This is a cultural leftover from a time prior to the current capitalist collapse. There are three factors.
Understaffing.
Loss of downtime.
Shift to hourly pay.
First, understaffing.
As recently as 30 years ago (that is, within the working lifetime of people over 50), businesses had way more staff than they do now. If you ever feel like you’re expected to do the work of 5 people, that’s because you are.
A local-size grocery store, for example, would have dedicated cashiers for each register (probably between 3 and 5 registers depending on the size of the store) for as long as the store was open, which could be 2 full shifts. That’s 6-10 cashiers only. Then, fully staffed shifts for each of the meat service, deli service, and bakery areas, another 12 or so. Then, fully staffed shifts for inventory and cleaning, probably around 5. And, to handle that staff of almost 30, at least one floor manager per shift, and one additional store manager who probably only worked one shift per day.
Today, you can expect about ¼ of that staff on a daily basis, and all of them to be expected to perform all of those duties, from register to stock to cleaning to specialty foods.
Even a fairly small, local bank would have a teller for each window, another for the drive-up, between 1 and 5 loan officers, and a location manager, as well as a regional manager coming in probably 1-2 days a week, and their own in-house janitorial service.
Today, it’s “lucky” to see two separate tellers doing counter and car service.
When a business is fully staffed, one staff member leaving early int he afternoon to take a doctor’s appointment or go to the bank or whatever else doesn’t do any harm. When it’s understaffed like this, one person leaving can cause the whole business to stop entirely.
Second, loss of downtime.
One of the reasons worker productivity has gone up so much is universal, high speed communications. Only 20 years ago (within the working lifetime of the oldest millenials), if you needed to send papers to be signed, you mailed them and expected them back the next week. For urgent stuff like medical papers, you faxed them and expected them back the next day when the recipient did their morning mail check. At the very earliest, a morning fax might be responded to in an afternoon mail check.
Every single piece of communication being functionally instant means that a lot of “downtime” where you would be waiting on paperwork to arrive is gone. That downtime was also when you would generally be given leave time by your supervisor to go to appointments at other businesses, while still taking home that day’s pay.
It’s not like you can do anything in the office when you’re waiting. And you did all your work for the day, so why would you be docked?
That brings us to:
Third, Hourly pay schemes.
If you’re lucky, you might still see daily pay schemes in some factory assembly jobs (mostly ones with strong unions). You receive a quota in the morning, and once you’ve completed your quota to satisfaction, you just fucking leave because you’re done.
Otherwise, this only still exists in salaried positions, which are getting rarer by the day.
More and more work is being shifted to hourly pay. This means that you can never be “done early” unless you want to lose the rest of that day’s pay. It’s a way for employers to steal either your time or your money.
Even 10 years ago (within the working lifetime of every millennial and the very oldest zoomers) most of the positions we see as hourly work now, were weekly payinstead.
So, if you get time off to go to an appointment during business hours now, you can cause your entire workplace to fail, miss “important” work tasks, and lose money.
And all of this is brand fucking new, meaning society as a whole has not yet shifted away from the system that had been working for literally centuries.
And yes, this does mean that people who worked jobs which were already hourly/otherwise as heinous as the ones we have now (food service and child care, mostly) had consistent difficulties arranging and arriving to appointments.
This is why the trope of the overworked waitress with no time to take her children to the doctor is so old, and yet is now so much more widely relatable.
I do feel that men have it drilled into their heads that they must love sex. Otherwise, they’re wrong, they’re fags, they’re not real men.
This means many of them might be socially pressured into having sex when they don’t want to because, against popular belief, men aren’t always horny.
And this culture of “men-must-always-want-sex” is pervasive in both hetero and queer spaces.
If you’re a straight guy every other straight person in your family will develop a breeding kink and harass you so they can have more relatives.
Queer dating culture for men is heavily sex-based. Dating apps run the circus and it mostly relies on hook-ups, which are fine if you like them but make it difficult to enter the dating scene unless you’re interested in putting yourself out there likethat.
And I think we need to address it.
First and foremost for asexual men. I remember when one of my high school friends confessed to her crush, he told her he was asexual and she got mad and was convinced he’d only said it to avoid dating her. “If he really didn’t like me, he could have told me straight, not using an excuse!”
An excuse. Because clearly there’s no other reason a man might not want sex.
But also for every other man who might not want to have sex for whatever reason and at whatever moment.
And it’s not just about not wanting sex, it’s about not wanting to make sexual comments, not wanting to discuss sexual encounters, and much more.
Men, you don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to.
Men, you’re loved and respected even if you don’t have sex with someone who likes you.
Men, you’re more than what other people say about your sexual life. You’re not a lesser man if you don’t have sex often.
