I hate that so many places will automatically convert :P into
like what is that. That’s not what I wanted to convey at all.
:P means
.
LG is the only company that gets it at all
Thank you for your service, LG. You alone understand. My apologies to anyone using your service who tries to sent this to anyone using any of the other services.
Bro I’m so fucking sick of hearing about Will Smith and Chris Rock. Already celebrities can’t not give their opinion on everything, Actual Celebrity Drama is 2000x worse, I don’t need every D-list celebrity’s take to make headline news
You know what hasn’t made headline news? The wife of sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, texted Trump advisors on January 6th to bring a case to the Supreme Court (where her husband is a Justice) to overturn the election. And Clarence Thomas, hearing cases about Jan. 6, voted to block his wife’s text messages from being turned over in an investigation by House Democrats. Political corruption, in plain sight, by a sitting Justice, who should be impeached for not recusing himself, and it barely made a blip in the news
I really like fictional couples that actually enjoy spending time with each other. It seems like such a simple, mundane thing. But, often, I see fictional couples who are completely enamored and dramatic and willing to die for each other, which isfine.But like… do they enjoy hanging out? Do they have private jokes and would they be friends even if they weren’t in love? It feels like such a basic thing, but it’s something that I actually don’t see that often. And it feels so refreshing and honest compared to these over-dramatic romeo and juliet-esque romances. Just two people who become good friends and becausethey enjoy each other’s presence so much it grows into a strong attraction. It feels more real and tangible than two attractive people meeting and “falling in love at first sight” - like, of course, you fell in love at first sight! You’re both supermodels! Sorry, can’t relate.
in light of another artist being outed for their offensive way of drawing (dont ask who i dont want to start anything) if you ever see me draw or reblog anything that makes you uncomfortable or even “suspicious” of me please dont hesitate to tell me, especially with my art
i dont want to end up getting used to a art style that looks caricaturized or makes people feel bad about how they look
I am still young and want to avoid turning a blind eye to problematic content before I end up weirding someone out, thank you
It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.
Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.
Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.
Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.
“That’s SO gay”, “Oh my god, you’re not a LESBIAN, are you?”
Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?
I’m here, I’m queer, go fuck yourself.
queer is not a slur, stop drinking the TERF koolaid
every time one of you fools spout about ‘queer is a slur’ a terf laughs because their fucking plan to make that word ‘taboo’ is fucking working you dipshit.
I did not get my degree in queer literature for you all to keep pulling this bullshit.
baby gays,,,, i beg of you to learn your queer history and stop listening to terf bullshit
every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.
terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.
By far the most obnoxious shipping phrase has to be, “How could anyone see it as anything BUT romantic?”
…Pretty easily actually
I’m aromantic, everything is platonic to me, especially between two characters who haven’t kissed or expressed explicit romantic interest.
All those things that you insist are signs that they love each other? I’d do them for my friends and it kind of sucks that there’s this undercurrent of, “They care too much for the relationship to be platonic because platonic relationships are inferior to romantic ones” to the phrase too
You’re not cute as you think when you post sexual comments on your favs social media.
You’re not cute as you think when you call your favs daddy on their social media.
You’re not cute or as funny as you think you are tagging your favs in posts that are sexual, stalkerish, extremely personal or something you should probably talk to a professional about.
You’re not as cute as you think you are following your favs around or stalking them.
Your favs aren’t your SO. They don’t belong to you. They are allowed to date, see, fuck, style, how ever they want.
They aren’t your fucking doll and I don’t care how much of their shit you buy or see.
You’re not cute, funny, a dedicated fan.
You’re gross. Get out of your delusion box now.
This doesn’t have a lot of notes because this is how most of y’all fan girls act and y’all don’t like people to call y’all weird asses out
I think the reason why Rocketman is truly that powerful is that the message is “get help, let people in, and you will heal”. Like Elton goes from telling Bernie “why the FUCK would I want [to be myself]” to singing “I’m gonna love me again, check in on my very best friend” during the end credits and that’s something so many of us LGBTQ+ people struggle with, loving ourselves for who we are, but it also shows that everyone can get there. You can heal. You can learn to love yourself.
In the mood for romantic feedism… Like having my love handles grabbed gently and being pulled close, being fed small sweets delicately with lots of kisses in between, wearing too tight pastel lingerie while eating chocolate strawberries, being told how beautiful and sexy I look with all this extra weight,, etc etc tell me how perfect my tummy looks when it’s stuffed full !!
you’re still worthy and valid even if you didn’t finish that big stuffing.
You’re still worthy and valid if you lost weight this week, or last week, or the next one too.
You’re still worthy and valid if you have a hard time gaining in general.
You’re still worthy and valid if you’re not constantly setting and hitting new goals.
Please, listen to your body. I promise it’s okay to take breaks. Please remind yourself that fetish is supposed to be fun. Disordered eating isn’t just starving yourself. It’s also eating when you really do not want to, forcing yourself to eat bc “gains” even when you’re in pain and again, you don’t want to. Intuitive eating is the best for your body. If you feel yourself having to convince yourself super hard everytime you go to stuff, maybe you need a break. That’s okay. Please take care of yourself. I want you here and happy and fat for as long as we can have you.
Can I just say this really quick? I read the Percy Jackson series as a 12 year old blonde girl.
(A 12 year old blonde girl with dyslexia and ADHD, no less.)
Blonde Annabeth means nothing to me. I have never felt disrespected by some sort of dumb blonde stereotype… i have been blonde (with dyslexia and ADHD) my entire life and never called a dumb blonde. In fact, I think the struggles I’ve had with My learning disabilities have been softened because I was a little blonde girl and people were patient with me. The stereotype just doesn’t exist anymore if it ever did. I do not need Annabeth to be blonde, I do not want Annabeth to be blonde. No one needs Annabeth to be blonde.
Now Black Annabeth. Now that’s the good shit. That enriches her arc. That makes so much sense. What a good idea. I honestly can’t think of a single black character with learning disabilities. If they do it right? I can’t fucking wait.
So anyone saying that Annabeth was important to little blonde girls hurt by the dumb blonde stereotype? Do not believe them. I was the little girl they are trying to use as a scapegoat and I could have cared less, even back then. When I was 11 I did not need a blonde role model. You know what I needed? A black protagonist I could relate to. I needed to be exposed to the racism little black girls face. I was ignorant as fuck back then, probably still am. Black Annabeth would have helped me. And it will help black girls who are still looking for positive, smart representation.
So anyway anyone who’s against Black Annabeth can stay away from me please thank you goodnight.
I remember when we loved Peggy Carter, when she was great representation within the mcu for a strong but vulnerable woman, and I really hate how she’s become so loathed. I still love the character and refuse to do the dirty work of hating her for the folks who said she (and we) didn’t belong in fandom in the first place.
Time for another US politics post because I am continuing to see leftists being staggeringly ignorant of the actual political situation in the USA.
I am going to say this once again: If you look at the republican party and the democrat party and think “These are fundamentally the same”, if you look at Donald Trump and Joe Biden and think “these men are fundamentally the same” then you need to step back and reexamine your prejudices and why you think that because it is not the case, there are massive differences and those differences have been growing steadily for decades. If you look at both parties, their records over the past two decades, and what they are currently pushing for the difference is stark and critical. There is absolutely no morally justifiable reason to support republicans and I would argue it is a moral obligation to prevent them from achieving their agenda by voting for the other guy.
On the other hand moderate democrats continue to be disappointing in that they are not progressives, but they do generally slowly move in the right direction on most issues. Even in their worst issues they tend to counter act the truly monstrous positions of the republican party.
Most critically, if you care about climate change, queer rights, disability rights, and voter suppression/voting rights you should be countering republicans at ever opportunity. If moderate democrats had their way we would have significantly improved voter rights over the past decade, we would already be well into compliance with the Paris climate accords and moving towards role model territory, and a range of queer rights far exceeding our current level would be law. They also want to greatly improve the disability rights and financial situation.
These are all things moderate democrats are pushing right now. These are not campaign promises or theoretical goals. Legislation has been introduced and is stopped only by the actions of two centrist senators. If they had even two more senators literally all of these would have been accomplished by now.
And the reason why is very simple: Moderate democrats generally bend to the general population’s opinion. When the left wins culture wars, moderate democrats move in that direction. And the left is good at winning culture wars over time, but we suck at the practical element of getting the actual laws to move left so we never really manage to actually shift the overton window.
Highlighting climate change, if you care about climate change at all you should be voting democrat for that alone. The moderate democrat stance is sufficient for combating climate change. We did it, we won that culture war, people want action on climate change. Now we just have to actually get enough government officials into office that will act on the will of the people for this issue, and that’s democrat. We are past the theoretical and now its time for the practical.
I’m begging you to support practical efforts to combat climate change. That requires you vote for government officials that will do it, as democrats have demonstrated they will by introducing and pushing hard for such legislation.
The stubborn refusal to support moderate democrat efforts on climate change because “it is insufficient” is pure ignorance born of a despairing attitude. Actual climate scientists mapped out the necessary steps and moderate democrats are following them (and more). If progressives fail to support moderate democrats in their climate efforts WE are the problem now.
Yes it could always be better, but perfect is the opposite of done, especially in the short term.
On the other hand the republican approach is to do less than nothing, get rid of the critical regulations and laws that we do have, and oppose positive change at every opportunity.
if I had to synthesize it I think the thing that is driving me the craziest about the post-Roe conversations right now is the sheer inattention to the practical reality of building a movement, from everyone, all the time.in one corner you have the Biden/Pelosi/etc people who are (correctly) pointing out there’s very little that can be done right now at the national level, and then just REFUSING to consider politics in any sphere beyond that incredibly narrow cart-before-the-horse model, and on the other side of things you have people who very seriously seem to think that the real problem with the pro-choice movement is branding, that if we’d rallied behind bodily autonomy earlier rather than neoliberal (ugh) “choice” rhetoric then, by the magic of intersectionality, we’d have beaten back the forced birthers.
and if you contrast that to the history of successful movement building, both right- and left-wing, it is completely unhinged to pinpoint branding OR national elections as the most important component. I’ve seen serious-minded people posting in like, the NYT or the Atlantic or even the New goddamn Republic debating whether or not voting is a good idea. Not “should you invest your time and political capital in the DNC as an institution” but “should you spend an hour to a day (local fascism dependent) on casting some votes”. And that is nuts! It ignores most of how our political system functions in favor of reifying silver bullet politics. Everyone who’s not a Republican is doing this right now and it’s driving me out of my goddamn gourd.
It is also not a new problem, obviously, exemplified by how abortion rights have been losing ground for decades. I personally experienced a variation on this in local politics when Yes 4 MPLS failed. Knives came out almost immediately: ACTUALLY the amendment was astroturfed! ACTUALLY it was corporate! ACTUALLY it was an inherently winnable fight, right then, in 2021, for reasons, and it was lost because of [my pet issue]. I saw a guy whose understanding of organizing is entirely based on his work experience with the AFL-CIO deride SEIU for supporting the amendment and imply that was why it failed. This wasn’t even written for a lefty mag, this was a random Signal chat full of locals and it was 99% posturing by volume. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that “fuck the police” as policy is a massive fucking uphill generational goddamn battle. These are people calling themselves abolitionists who were fully ready to give up after a single failed election cycle.
And granted: I don’t want the left to be like the GOP. I don’t want us to vote for a child molester because he’ll be one more reliable vote for full luxury gay anarchism. But I do think that there are some very good points to be made about the primacy of “self-care”, individual accountability, and individuation of oppression – often to the point of incoherence, MY FELLOW HOMOSEXUALS – entirely outside a framework of collectivism or meaningful, long-term solidarity. Why are you asking why Biden won’t magically preserve Roe instead of beating Dems into the fucking dirt for neglecting state & local races for so long? Why are you insisting Manchin could be bullied into abolishing the filibuster instead of asking how and why the Democratic Party has repeatedly demolished its own grassroots networks that could make Manchin irrelevant?
The above is a point many many people have made (hello, No Shortcuts, a book everyone should read), but I do think it bears repeating: for the most part, the left and center-left does not understand power. It cannot anticipate things like a massive thicket of undemocratic regulation that makes local control of police (or abolition) illegal because it ignores how the right has exercised power to prevent progress. And because the left doesn’t understand power, it constantly misdiagnoses its own losses. No, better goddamn branding would not have saved Roe. Meaningful long-term organization with gender-equal bodily autonomy as a non-negotiable plank might have.
But then, it might not have, because marital rape was legal in parts of the United States until 1992. We are not trying to stomp out a few ants that got in from an open door. We are trying to mitigate a roach infestation in a pre-war NYC midrise. It is inherently a long-term fight no matter how much we might wish it wasn’t.
We have to build movements where the self is as close to irrelevant as possible. We have to take this seriously. I don’t think we should all be buying guns and training in the desert like the white supremacists, but I do think that people need to be organized and prepared and trained for long-term resistance, and this work cannot be buried under an avalanche of bikeshedding and therapeutized “memorize these terms in lieu of having a brain and being genuinely committed to undoing empire” messaging.
Worst of all! Most people who agree with the above go “and that’s why you should donate to an abortion fund, give money to people doing the work on the ground”. Which is kind of true, but also not nearly enough. We cannot continue this anti-social form of leftism. It is killing us, literally.
And like, I get it, I don’t want politics to be my only hobby either, or a hobby at all. I hate talking to people and I do NOT like cooperating. But democracy is a verb. The president is not and can’t be a king. And that means we need to build strong, resilient networks of allies, who can hold power to account for more than five goddamn minutes. The creepy church ladies are beating the absolute pants off us at this very fundamental task.
Dudes really like “if only someone could do something about this!!!!”
Biden didn’t cause Roe to be overturned you fucking walnut, it’s literally because Trump appointed 3 Supreme Court Justices. Tromp. Trump. Cuz y'all didn’t want to vote for the email lady
the House passed a bill codifying Roe, but it’s not going to clear the Senate, because Joe Manchin is anti-choice and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski like to talk a good game and then not vote that way. If only there were elections coming up that could replace some Republican Senators so that it actually has a chance. Wouldn’t that be nice.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships:3 Possible F/M ships:27 Possible M/M ships:36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS:66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media;femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
would love to see people including cleaners + customer service workers + workers who have other such precarious jobs with very early/very late working hours in chat about restructuring the working day to avoid having to go to/from work in the dark. but alas it is all about the 9-5 mon-fri 30k+ a year to send emails crowd, as ever
it’s not that i think office workers with stable, salaried jobs shouldn’t be advocating for their labour rights, or that those sorts of jobs aren’t exploitative; it’s the fact that embedded within this discourse there is always a process of naturalising certain notions of ‘legitimate,’ visibilised labour vs invisibilised labour rendered automatised; and, invariably, these conversations fall down hard on this process of naturalisation.
when we talk about “the” workday as though we all have one shared collective understanding of what “the” workday entails, we relegate the sorts of jobs i listed above to the background – to the realm of automation where they are at once excluded from a discourse of so-called 'legitimate’ labour organising because the organising in question is so unbelievably myopic & they maintain the social infrastructure needed for the highly fetishised 'leisure time’ to be made possible in the first place. there’s already a case being made for the four-day work week on the basis that it would 'stimulate’ the economy of the leisure sector – ie. put more pressure on customer service staff. this is what these discourses miss – have you considered the ways in which more leisure time for you impacts the work of the people whose labour is at once necessary for this leisure time and reduced to systematic invisibilisation and dehumanisation? ofc not lol.
btw if you don’t believe me about the automation thing try and pay attention to how office workers talk to eg. coffee shop staff :)
and like – this discourse should be about us first, sorry. we’re the ones who often can’t afford the cars and public transport that make travelling to/from work in the dark safer. we’re the ones with jobs that often can’t be done in constant daylight hours. you may want to shorten “the” work day, sure, but what about the infrastructure that you want to be in place outside of your work hours? what about the people who have to work in your bars, pubs, nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, etc etc, until long after dark? what about people who work night shifts, what about people who work early mornings? all of this labour is invisibilised so the discourse elides it completely; and a shorter work day for office workers means harder conditions for non-office workers with no financial compensation for the fact.
to use an anecdotal example – i’m a cleaner, i work early mornings, sometimes i have to come in even earlier than usual because the building where i work might be hosting a late-morning event so they need me done and out of the way by, say, 9:00am. i work relatively short shifts (as do most cleaners) and i live a 40 minute walk away from my workplace, so i generally walk to work because public transport is expensive where i live and the ratio of money spent on bus to money earned on an individual shift is not sustainable. (the buses also don’t run early enough for me to even get them to work on weekends, and the days when i need to be in at pisstake o’ clock are always saturdays, lmao.) in the summer, this is fine – in the winter, i can expect to be walking through poorly lit residential areas in the pitch black at 5am, 6am, five or six days a week, which is not pleasant and not safe! a politics of labour organising that advocates for my transport to be paid for by the company that hires me, for example, could alleviate this. or, to get wildly imaginative, we might even put pressure on businesses to organise their little events around making sure their cleaners have access to public transport at the time they’re being asked to come in such that they can get to work safely. but when we create a discourse where there are “legitimate” working hours/working days and there is labour that happens invisibly in the background that scaffolds both these legitimate working hours and the leisure outside of them, people slip through the cracks. you can get to work at 10 instead of 9, but i can’t. what are you going to do for me?
what it boils down to for me, is – could you, right now, tell me the name of your office cleaner(s)? do you know their pay, when they work, if they have fixed or zero-hour contracts? does the company you work for arrange their cleaning staff such to make unionising impossible? does your company hire its cleaners directly or are they hired through an external cleaning company, and do you appreciate the difference that that makes in terms of workplace alienation? i go to cleaning as an example because it’s what i do, but the same is true of other labour forces – what are the labour practices of the cafés and pubs and bars and restaurants you frequent? how do you treat the staff when you go in? do you tip? do you know where your tips go? do you ask? if you’re not going to stick up for the people who clean your workspace when their hours are precarious and unsociable and their pay is unlivable and their work is invisibilised to the point where people forget they exist, then i’m not clear on why i should be sticking up for you.
anyway, i guess in closing i would just say to take all of this with a big grain of salt labelled 'i think the proletariat should own the means of production anyway’ should you so wish, i guess.
Nah Manscaped can’t start doing jokey joke reblogs. You guys gotta start getting meaner
If Manscaped interacts with you you gotta be ready to post Tubgirl
idk how many people have been on here long enough to remember the Denny’s tumblr, but they were arguably the first official brand-affiliated social media account to experiment with hiring 20-something interns to make actual contemporary memes and snappy reblogs, about a year before the Wendy’s started pioneering a similar idea on Twitter.
we didn’t fully realize what it represented at the time and tolerated it, which in retrospect was like not stomping the first fish to grow legs and crawl out of the ocean. we cannot make the same mistake again. no mercy for brand accounts
