#troofax

transeldritch:

transeldritch:

anyway jokes by straight / cis people that rely on expectations of violence towards gay / trans people are Bad Content. 

(example: cis person looks at a trans person, says “god that’s unacceptable”, and the punchline is them saying “THOSE shoes with THAT skirt?” or some shit like that)

like the entirety of the joke is “haha I’m homophobic / transphobic” & the entirety of the punchline is “oops! I can’t believe you thought I was actually homophobic/transphobic!” & it’s just like ??? the entire substance of the joke relies on the person telling the joke to have the power to act violently against the audience.

zecretary:

melaninmedicine:

disappear for a while and you’ll be surprised at who doesn’t come looking for you.

Imagine if everyone of your friends and yourself did this at the same time.

And that’s why this kind of attitude is destructive.

I get that it’s super hard to get over, especially when you’ve been socialised to think that you cannot ask for help, because to do so is weak, or ‘attention seeking’ (which you’ve also been socialised to think is intrinsically a Bad Thing), but reminding yourself that it’s not your friends’ -jobs- to be your keeper, to magically guess how you’re feeling or what you need from them is definitely part of Self Care. And at the same time, so is reminding yourself that you -can- ask them for help and shouldn’t sit there in silence because you don’t want to burden them is -also- part of Self Care.

palpablenotion:

candidlyautistic:

princesse-tchimpavita:

candidlyautistic:

butterflyinthewell:

deeyvthai:

butterflyinthewell:

deeyvthai:

lithiuml0ser:

deeyvthai:

I hate this website for suggesting stimming and flailing your arms about are inherently autistic traits, if you play with fidget spinners you’re autistic, if you like anime, play video games, want to learn Japanese, it’s not even said as joke, some y’all legitimately self-diagnose yourselves with Autism on these traits.

My parents didn’t get me diagnosed by three separate doctors and fight for my right to a public education (I was called a lost cause by the health service) just so you could fucking wake up one morning and literally CHOOSE to be autistic.

Fuck your self-diagnosis up whatever genitals you currently fucking have because with great identity politics comes severe autism apparently.

Can’t I just have Autism in peace? I really don’t need 2/3rds of the site pretending they have it. I fucking loathe self-diagnosis. So fuck right off.

The only time your self-diagnosis means fuck all is if you plan on later bringing your findings to a Doctor, an actual medical professional or psychological professional because literally the whole point of self-diagnosing is to identify stuff for the Doctor and do their homework for them, save them time, so they can assess you faster. It’s not so you can play pretend and think you know more.

When you identify ailments of the common cold, you’re gonna go see a Doctor about that right? That’s exactly what self-diagnosing is, but I know what actually happens, you see you start off saying you’re autistic, someone asks how do you know you have it and you say you’re self-diagnosed (which is bullshit because you can see early signs from the age of an infant so If it wasn’t seen then, you don’t have it, buddy.) then they say you should see a Doctor to validate it, then you go to the Doctor and they say you don’t have it, oh but you don’tlike that answer and I have literally been friends with people that have hated the Doctor’s confirmation. They go for multiples of the same tests, they always come out clean, they wanna have a mental illness so bad, theypretend they have it.

THEY’RE CALLED PATHOLOGICAL LIARS SEEKING ATTENTION.

THANK YOU.
It’s the same shit with schizophrenia like I didn’t wait 8 years to be correctly diagnosed just so some person on here can take an online quiz and have be diagnosed with schizophrenia without even seeing a professional

See everyone else got offended by my wording which could have been worded better in fairness, but you; you understood what I meant you got the point.

HAHAHAHA, no. That doesn’t excuse what you said OP. If people missed your point then you did not make it clear enough. You don’t get to be all “oh well THAT person gets it and everybody else who is offended missed it.”

There are conditions that can alter someone’s sense of reality and should be examined by a professional– but, again, the barriers people face can prevent that from happening for a very long time.

Self diagnosis should never be the endgame imho, but the period between self dx and pro dx may be years because of the issues I mentioned in the paragraph above.

Mental illness or neurodevelopmental conditions or disorders or disabilities should never be an excuse for crappy behavior.

And I must restate again that the opinion on self diagnosis seems to be based on this idea that somebody looks at a website for one minute and decides that’s what they have. The process can actually take as much time as a pro dx because the person has to cross check and take stock of themselves. Sometimes examining ourselves can be a scary and revealing process.

Even if some people are faking for attention, there might be dozens more who aren’t and don’t have access to any help outside of online communities. Telling a struggling person that their struggle is invalid because it doesn’t meet some criteria is just plain shitty.

You reek of desperation to be heard when I Ignored your other responses.

Oh, I totally expected you to ignore me. People like you always do, but people who see what I said to you might rethink their stances a bit. If I can’t get someone to listen, they become an example of what a harmful viewpoint looks like.

FWIW It’s still not fair to judge everyone as a faker unless you live their lives. Sometimes the professionals get it wrong. They got it wrong for me until I was a teenager, and pros who have stereotyped views of disorders or mental illnesses and the like can miss making a proper diagnosis because the person presents in an atypical manner. This can go for physical health and mental health issues.

But you don’t care to listen to any POV but your own, so the last word is yours. Take it and enjoy it, and maybe think about the issue a little more instead of being so judgmental.

If only there were Science! and studies and things that prove OP doesn’t know what they are talking about.

Oh hey, look, a DOI!

10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00438  

I didn’t suffer at the hands of the psychiatric industry just so people can shit on self diagnosis.

Nothing screams unrecognized privilege more than ranting about the “bad” undiagnosed autistics, who had to figure this shit out for themselves because they have other(s) marginalized identity(ies) and were therefore overlooked for an early diagnosis, or even dangerously misdiagnosed and medicated as a result of oppressive bias.

To anyone who cares about this stuff, here is what happens when you’re a minority seeking “professional” “help”:

‘Tolling for the Aching Ones Whose Wounds Cannot Be Nursed’: The Marginalization of Racial Minorities and Women in Institutional Mental Disability Law https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901144

TY btw for including a link to that paper. That is SO going in my research folder if my creds can break through the paywall.

I had a terrible experience where diagnosis is concerned and literally every psychology professional has, once they listened, told me the same thing. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Of course I couldn’t get diagnosed off that info. They did that wrong. Etc.

My sister, who after getting a degree in psychology from a very conservative Christian school (which is unfortunately known for very incorrect views on mental illness and disability), was resistant to believing I’m autistic. She initially thought I was but since spending time with “truly” disabled people (read: institutionalized women who almost exclusively had impairments due to medical abuse and/or prolonged drug abuse), she doesn’t think I am any more. And I told her about getting tested. She said, “Well, those tests reveal things you don’t even realize.” I told her how I never even met the man that did my evaluation. She said, “Well, they can interpret a lot from the tests and don’t always need to talk to the person.” I told her about how I didn’t actually have a proctor in the room with me for nearly 2/3rds of the test. She said, “While that’s weird, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the results.” I told her how they never took a history or interviewed me. Not even in the questionnaire. She paused. “No one spoke with you?” “I had a proctor ask me about the inkblots and had me tell her various stories to go with pictures, but no. No one asked me about me, my childhood, anything.” “…”

You know when people say you can hear silence, it’s so loud? That’s what that pause was. Because my sister had to admit that of course they couldn’t have diagnosed me, they didn’t do it right. It’d be like me expecting to get spaghetti by putting water in a pot, filling it with noodles, and then being surprised they didn’t soften in the tepid water. I missed a pretty significant step, boiling the water. You NEED to be interviewed to be diagnosed properly. A history NEEDS to be taken.

I literally walked out of the testing, two weeks before being called back for the results, and got on the phone with my therapist. “They didn’t get the info they needed to diagnose me,” I said. And I would know, I nearly have the diagnostic criteria memorized. Literally no information I gave them could tell them if I had difficultly with eye contact or understanding non verbal communications or experienced interests in a particular - obsessive, intense - way. All of these would have contributed to a diagnosis. I was separately diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder, which they claimed was completely unrelated to an autism diagnosis… it’s not. If you don’t believe me, check DSM 5 Autism Spectrum Disorder Criteria B.4. APD directly lends itself to an autism diagnosis.

Professionals aren’t perfect. It’s their job to deal with their area of “expertise” but there’s also a necessity for malpractice insurance (yes, psychiatrists too) which shows you one thing. They screw up. Those that mandate malpractice insurance are saying that they actively expect them to screw up, so guard themselves with this. 

Does my self diagnosis invalidate your professional one? No. And I guarantee I’ve spent more time than this psychiatrist that failed to diagnose me researching and learning about autism. The thing with most psychiatrists? They need to know a bit of everything. You can go to a “specialist” but from my experience that doesn’t mean a lot in the field of psychology. My dad’s therapist specializes in lgbt identities but doesn’t know a lot of very common things about them (because she’s not queer herself). My therapist, on the other hand, specializes in eating disorders and knows a hell of a lot about them because she’s had one. Having a thing makes you far more knowledgeable, in nearly every case, than not having it. Because you’ve actually lived it.

I don’t need a doctor to tell me what I spent half my life learning. I’m autistic and a “professional” diagnosis won’t make me more or less autistic.

Some of the barriers to getting an official diagnosis:
- being anything other than a cishet white dude
- being poor/working class (both because of whether you will actually be able to afford tests for a dx and because of how ppl will view you)
- being of a different religion/no religion when that differs from the stance of the person diagnosing/the predominant religion/no religion in your area.

half-ace:

autismserenity:

apersnicketylemon:

apersnicketylemon:

stop calling aro/ace people ‘straight’ or ‘basically straight’ 2kever.

I’d appreciate if people could reblog this, because this is a thing that ace people constantly have to deal with. A huge number of people, especially the L and G (but I have seen it from bi and pan people too) love to claim asexuals are ‘secretly straight’ in order to exclude us in much the same way they try to exclude bi and pan people from the community.

Like I have literally received death threats and suicide provocation for saying that ace people belong in the community and nearly all of them called me ‘secretly straight’ or some variation there-of and I can’t be the only ace person who’s had to deal with this crap. We are not straight.

MOTHERFUCKING *WHAT*.

I hear, all the time, the gay and lesbian community in particular, saying “ace people aren’t oppressed, they don’t have to face the threat of death and violence” and “ace people can’t call themselves queer, they don’t face oppression for their sexuality” (which I already debunked here).

And now you’re telling me that the same communities are, at the same time, carrying out that same oppression?!

OH HELL NO.

Yup. I’m really not surprised anymore. I don’t even try to claim a space in the LGBTQIA+ community myself because why seek out acceptance in a space that will not be safe for me? What is there to be gained from entering into a “community” that actively seeks to subdue people like me? I know there is no one consistent “LGBT Community,” but it sure says something that straight “allies” are more accepted on average than aces are.

annekewrites:

madeofpatterns:

misandry-mermaid:

What “I’m Pro-Choice” doesn’t mean:

• I want an abortion for myself
  
• I think everyone should have abortions
• I’m against parenthood, childbirth, or families
• I hate babies/children
• I’m okay with abortions but only in circumstances like rape or it being unsafe for the pregnant person
• I guess you can have an abortion if you really need one but I’m gonna judge you for your accidental pregnancy
  

What “I’m Pro-Choice” does mean:

• Regardless of my own choices, I believe EVERYONE should have the right to make their own reproductive choices and receive safe medical treatment without stigma.
  

another thing pro-choice doesn’t mean:

• It doesn’t mean that I approve of incitement against people with genetic conditions
  
• It doesn’t mean that I think it’s wrong to give birth to a child with down’s syndrome
• It doesn’t mean that I think poor people shouldn’t have babies
• It doesn’t mean that I think it’s wrong for someone to choose to continue an accidental pregnancy
• It doesn’t mean that I think disability needs to be eliminated from the world
• It doesn’t mean I think some lives are more desirable than others
• It doesn’t mean I’m trying to solve a social problem with eugenics

it just means that I think people’s bodies belong to them and that no one has an obligation to grow a baby in their body if they don’t want to. Regardless of their reasons

^^^ THIS. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT.

Telling a pregnant person who wants to carry to term that carrying this specific baby to term under these specific circumstances will ruin that person’s life forever, unless the pregnancy is literally life-threatening to the person who is pregnant, is not a thing that “pro-choice” people should be doing.  Pro-choice means pro-CHOICE, y’all.

(And this happens, it happens a whole fucking lot to pregnant folks who are considered socially undesirable for whatever intersection of reasons, and IT NEEDS TO STOP NOW.)

That second post: I was having this exact conversation with a friend only a few days ago. If you want to be pro-choice, you also need to be not just a feminist, but also a supporter of disability rights, of racial equality, of living wages. Because someone who feels they have to abort a pregnancy they actually want to keep, just because they can’t afford to raise a child doesn’t really have a choice at all.

And whilst others do have choices, some of those choices are based in sexist, ableist, racist, and generally bigoted ideas.

I genuinely think you cannot be doing pro-choice right if you don’t think we should be spending time and energy on changing perceptions about disabled babies, and challenging ideas that parents are being “selfish” if they don’t terminate a pregnancy if they’re aware of a disability. We should be rejecting ideas about it just being “better this way” because what possible quality of life could a disabled person have?

I am pro-choice, and we need to work towards a world where those choices are not influenced by bigotry.

oodlenoodleroodle:

lysikan:

realsocialskills:

One issue with accommodations and modifications in school, is that it can often be hard to avoid stigma. Kids don’t usually like being singled out or doing things conspicuously differently. Also, nondisabled kids often resent it when disabled kids are allowed to do things that they are not allowed to do.

Further, one frequent objection to accommodations is “but if I let one kid do this, then all the other kids will want to.”

Sometimes that’s true — and, often, the best solution to that problem is to just let all the kids do whatever the thing is. Sometimes there’s no good reason to restrict access to something. Sometimes changing the rule works better than making exceptions to it.

One way that something works to correct this problem is to make some of their accommodations available to other kids who would like to try them. The kid who has a documented need for accommodations probably isn’t the only one who would benefit from them.

And even aside from that, it’s good for kids to explore the world and experiment with different ways of doing things. This is a good way to learn that difference is normal, and that doing things differently is a basic fact of life.

For instance, if one kid needs to use manipulatives for math, maybe try making manipulatives available to all the kids.

If one kid needs a large print worksheet, maybe make a few large print copies and let kids try doing it that way.

If one kid needs to chew stuff, maybe make things available for other kids to chew.

If one kid needs to use fidget toys, maybe make them available to all the kids who would like to try it.

If one kid needs to type, and you have the resources to make that available to other kids too, maybe let them try doing assignments that way. And let the kids that works better for continue to do it.

And, beyond that, it helps to get in the habit of providing different ways to do things even when there isn’t a kid who needs them as a specific accommodation.

Not in the sense of “take a walk in the disabled kid’s shoes”, this is not a disability simulation. The point shouldn’t be empathy building, and it should not be presented as being about the disabled kid. The message is “there are a lot of legitimate ways to do things, and it’s ok to experiment and figure out what works for you, even if most people don’t do it the same way as you”.

You can’t always do this, and you can’t always do this for everything. When you can, it helps, a lot.

It’s also a good opportunity to teach kids that “fair” doesn’t mean “all the same”. Teach them that all people are individuals and do not all get the same thing, they (should) get the aids they need to work at the same level as other people. Accommodations are not treats and ‘presents’ or ‘prizes’, they are things that help people work within society. John needs glasses doesn’t mean all kids should have glasses, Mary needs speech-to-text doesn’t mean all kids need it (although that would be handy since reading tends to be retained a lot longer than listening).

Pointing out how people are different is a good thing to teach kids - so they don’t grow up with the idea that we’re all interchangeable cogs in a machine.

A possible activity for starting a conversation about this (if you have time to actually address the thing itself) is to have everyone take off one shoe and then distribute them back to the students randomly so everyone ends up with an odd pair, some will have a shoe that’s too big, some will have too small, some will just look like an odd pair, etc… The idea being that there are things in the world (accommodations) that are the “right shoe” for every individual (some need glasses, some need hearing aid, some need mobility aids, etc etc) and it’s just a matter of matching up with the thing you need. Maybe some necessary aids aren’t invented yet, maybe one of the students will be the person to invent something that will help a specific disability. “See a need, fill a need” like Bigweld said (in Robots).

My mom used to be a teacher, and she had some dyslexic students who would have benefited from coloured lenses, but they were too embarrassed/shy to wear them, so instead they got coloured plastic wallets and had them available on every table and any kid who wanted to could put a work sheet in a coloured wallet if they wanted to read something that wasn’t black on white.

aristoteliancomplacency:

[img ID: tweet by Laurie Penny saying ‘a critic who reviewed my new book made a huge fuss about refusing to use my preferred pronouns in the review. My publishers made the mistake of politely informing the magazine. I would have warned them against it, knowing how vicious transphobes can be to LGBTQ authors.

Max Dashu has replied to this tweet saying ‘child of privilege: i’m oppressed, I’m oppressed.” Married woman: “by a lesbian, by a lesbian.” Anyway, last I looked you said they/them she/her? Tempest in a teapot, misdirection…

Second img is a screenshot of Max Dashu sharing a link to the review written by noted antisemitic conspiracy theorist andtransphobe, Julie Bindel, along with the comment: ‘sweeping half a century of feminist activism from the boards doesn’t do women’s’ liberation any favours. Neither does stanning for men’s rights to consumer sex at the expense of women.

Third image is a retweet by Max Dashu of a tweet by someone else about the GRA and the Scottish government’s impact assessment for it. Dashu has commented with two quotes (unsourced): the first is: “I am having treatment for breast cancer and I am boiling with rage. It’s incomprehensible how they can equate a woman who has had a mastectomy with a male bodied person.” The second quote is: “do not dare equate my lived experience as a woman with someone whose lived experience is as a man.” /End ID]

Anyway, if there was any doubt that Max Dashu, creator of the Suppressed Histories Archive is a terf, doubt no more.

Here’s Max taking a petty shot at author Laurie Penny for daring to have changed their pronouns from she/her and they/them in 2019, to they/them today.

Context: noted antisemitic conspiracy theorist and terf, Julie Bindel, reviewed Laurie Penny’s new book. She insisted on misgendering Penny throughout the review. Penny’s publisher reached out to The Critic (which published the review written by noted antisemitic conspiracy theorist and terf, Bindel) to correct them. Now the TERFs are mad about it.

@nostalgia-is-a-bitch-ah

(Hope it’s okay to stick this here, it would have taken multiple replies, but I can delete if not, just lmk). It was personal experience. She posted on her suppressed history archive page a Photo of a very famous ancient vase depiction of Achilles mourning the death of Patroclus, claiming it was the most moving depiction of woman‘s grief in antiquity, and identifying it as (iirc) Briseis. When someone asked for a reference for the vase she replied she didn’t have one, and often came across Material this way - without any attribution. Literally one reverse image search would have revealed what it was. But it’s also highly troubling that she managed to miss literally all the actual academia literature on depictions of grief in antiquity, or depictions of scenes from the Iliad, etc. That would have allowed her to identify this piece.

Plus, her feminist research into the Iliad (the topic of the post) was based on decades old books all by men, and when I asked her if she’d read any of the modern books on the Iliad written by women classicists - because there is actually quite a lot of work being done by women classicists about exactly the topics she was looking into - she stopped replying to that thread too.

Seeing how sketchy her research was when it was a topic I knew about, and seeing her ignore people pointing out modern material by women who are actually experts in the field on women in antiquity… was like, oh, okay. I cannot trust you as a source on the topics I don’t know as much about bc your research methods themselves are A Problem Here.

I‘m p sure I still have screenshots of at least parts of it if you want.

transfalcon:

andreashettle:

slashmarks:

santorumsoakedpikachu:

florianesque:

poutine-existentielle:

skerples:

female-anti-feminist:

foxysmoulder:

but really guys

tampons/pads marketed to young kids who just started getting their periods

should be a thing

wrappers with dinosaurs and planets and glitter and cats and sea creatures 

make kids feel comfortable about something natural that happens to their bodies. 

and for goodness sake

don’t sexualize it

No. Actually. Why do you need this? You don’t. Getting your period means you are starting to mature, which means you need to drive them AWAY from needless things like that. Also, you all bitch enough as it is about paying for these things, imagine how much more money companies will charge for those things? Or, maybe EDUCATE them, so they will already feel comfortable about it. Jesus fucking christ. 

Tell that to ten-year-old me, who still hadn’t had the period talk yet in school. I was crying and freaking out because I thought I was dying. Then my mother comes up to me and says with a smile “You’re becoming a woman!” I didn’t want to grow up yet. I was ten. Fucking ten and was told to start to grow up. My mom wanted me to get away from silly little kids things because I’m fucking bleeding out my goddamn vagina.

Also some people are children at heart and like to be silly and having a dinosaur-patterned maxi-pad would be pretty fuckin’ hilarious and I’m sure there’d be a huge market for that.

Not all people with vaginas are stoic and serious and want the same frilly, swirly boring-ass pads and tampons.

vagina owners get their first period when they get to a certain % of body fat (among other things), it doesn’t have anything to do with their maturity

the average age of someone’s first period has been decreasing at an incredibly quick rate for almost a decade. i got mine at 10, and as a kid i wasn’t the first person in my classes to get it. by 12 almost everyone i knew had gotten their period. because of this, most parents don’t think to talk to their children about periods- my mom’s generation’s average age was 15 and she got hers at 17. she had absolutely no reason to think that i’d get mine a full seven years earlier than she did.

almost all of my friends had no idea what a period was before getting it and went through great distress because of that. i only knew because my mom was an early childhood educator and kept up with age appropriate sex education for my brother and i at home. sex ed in elementary school was minimal. they gave us pads that were probably made in 1985 and a tube of deodorant and told us where babies came from and literally nothing else because my state does abstinence only. when i hit seventh grade and FINALLY learned what a period was in school everyone in the class had already gotten their period and teaching us “what to expect” was totally useless!

yeah education is important, but schools are not going to change their policies. they’re just not, because our school system isn’t set up to educate children about practical, realistic things. and we already know from abstinence only sex ed that relying on parents to teach their kids just leads to more problems because they don’t start talking to their kids about things until the children bring it up out of fear of their kids maturing too fast. maybe if there was a hygiene company that directed marketing towards 6-10 year olds it would encourage dialog in both homes and schools.

i remember being young and occasionally seeing a girl come back from the bathroom in tears, and all of us just knew. we’d group together and tell her what was happening and if we had hygiene supplies giver her something and tell her what to do with it. i walked three or four people to the nurse to get new underwear after an unexpected period and each time i had to explain exactly why everything was okay. children are already trying to fill in these gaps in our education system by talking about it among themselves, it’d be really helpful if there was a jumping off point for that conversation to take place.

http://www.redwombatstudio.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=250

Blackbeard’s Rugged Tampons.

I got my period the month after I turned eleven. I was at my father’s house. Not only did he not have pads, he didn’t have clean running water at the time. I stuffed toilet paper into my underwear and washed my hands with dirty water. I was too terrified to tell anyone and I didn’t want to admit it was my period because I knew that would be becoming an “adult” at eleven, so I just used toilet paper and pretended it would go away for the rest of the first one.

I was completely. Fucking. Devastated. 

It didn’t help that when I was nine I’d gotten my mother buying me bras and telling me I needed to start wearing them because I wasn’t a child anymore and with my body the way it was not wearing a bra was inappropriate. I was nine. I was a fucking child, and anyone staring at a nine year old’s breasts, even if they’re developed for their age, should be ashamed of themselves and probably arrested.

Children are children, whether they have their periods or not, whether they have secondary sexual characteristics or not, etc. They don’t become adults because of that shit.

Reblogging for all the important dialogue/comments, and also for that link up above to Blackbeard’s Rugged Tampons for menstruating people who can’t stand having to buy anything “girly”.  It isn’t dinosaurs and glitter, but it’s something.

when I got my period I was so scared. I knew what periods were, though my mother had never really talked about it with me. she basically just showed me where the pads and tampons were and left me to it. I have two younger sisters, a 20 year old and a 14 year old. when the 14 year old got her period last year, me and my sister walked her through everything. my sister and I had always been open about menstruation with her, and as a result our younger sister had a very different experience than we did. I also gave her a bunch of cloth pads, which I use and my other sister sometime uses. (see this post on why I think cloth pads are better, more economical, and just plain fun). Party In My Pants is my favorite brand, and they make pads in some really cool patterns that I know would have made me feel better about getting my period when I was in middle school. 1,2,3,4,5

I just can’t get over the idea that starting to mature needs you mean to “drive them away” from “needless things like that”. Like WHAT? Like making the world a slightly more fun and halp place? Jfc your idea of adulthood is everything that is wrong with the world. We don’t need to drive kids away from this stuff, we need them to help us pull us back into it.

DINOSAUR STICKERS FOR ALL.

dragonsupremacy:

So many people that attempt a gender-reversal in which to objectify men instead of women do it completely, totally wrong. Showing images of muscular men flexing their muscles is not sexual objectification. It doesn’t accomplish the objective of reversing the gender roles of men and women. And it fails to give men the slightest taste of what it’s like to be a woman surrounded by sexually objectified images of women.

The factors that make images of women sexually objectifying are the stripping away of human qualities and the removal of agency. Images of hyper-sexualised, objectified women affirm the sexual availability and violable status of women. In ads, they conflate the characteristics of the woman with the characteristics of the object being sold, thus relegating the woman to an object. Just a picture of a naked or partly naked attractive person does not an objectifying image make. Sweaty, hairy men fresh from the gym are subjects of their environments, not objects.

You don’t see fashion photographs of helpless, bruised men lying near garbage dumps that vividly suggest brutal victimisation. You don’t see used car ads depicting ~sexy~ men’s bodies with jokes about being able to enjoy the man even though you’re not the first to have him. You don’t see awareness campaigns about testicular cancer that focus on SAVE THE BALLS and lament the loss of manliness after orchiectomy.

If you want to do a proper gender swap to give men an idea of how sexual objectification affects women, you can’t just switch out feminine women and insert masculine men, as if femininity were not an inherent component of sexual objectification. What the fashion and advertising industries do to women, you have to do to men. Get rid of the fucking muscle men. Get a pretty face skinny boy and put him in makeup; impractical, feminine-coded clothing; and a pose that looks explicitly like he wants to get spanked. If men squirm in discomfort when they see it, you know you did it right.

babydraygen:

• they’re fucking women

12yearsaking:

merkkultra:

do men have resting bitch faces as well or do they not have negative characteristics ascribed to them for putting on a neutral rather than a deliriously happy facial expression

Yes, Black men in majority white spaces do. If I don’t smile every single second of the day my coworkers become in intimidated and start asking me what’s wrong, telling me to smile, make jokes about how I’m trying to be a thug/act hard, why am I angry, etc. And it’s not just white men at my job God FORBID I my large Black ass makes a white girl feel threaten because I’m sitting down with a neutral expression.

I’m not trying to take this post away from women and make it about Black men but I want to point out that wether it’s patriarchy or white supremacy; those who feel as if they have power over you HATE to see you not smile. They are so used to people like you smiling to gain their approval that when you don’t there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes them extremely uncomfortable.

That’s why “angry Black women” is a thing. They have to put on a smile for everyone (yes even feminist white women) or we all get uncomfortable.

bibliogato:

You might not be aware but a few weeks ago, a book called For Such a Time by Kate Breslin was up for a RITA from the Romance Writers of America. It’s an Emmy or an Oscar of romance writing. The book was published in 2014 and I had personally never heard of it prior to reading the Smart Bitches review of it. That is what I’ve linked to as I’d rather not link to its Amazon or Goodreads profiles.

In short, the book is a retelling of the Book of Esther (a Jewish story about a strong Jewish woman, who saves her people, and keeps her faith, and is not a romance) in which a Nazi camp commander saves a Jewish woman from Dachau and takes her to Theresienstadt in then-Czechoslovakia. There, they fall in love, and through a magically appearing Bible, find Jesus, and save Jews. At the end, the woman converts to Christianity because that’s her redemption arc.

There are multiple factors at play here. First, the author, Kate Breslin, co-opted the horrific, unimaginable tragedy that happened within living memory to other people to promote her own agenda (evangelical/inspirational Christianity). Second, her agent, her publisher, and multiple RWA judges, not to mention the HUNDREDS of reviews on retail sies and Goodreads, did not think this was problematic. Third, the way we, across religions, have begun to approach the Holocaust is problematic and dangerous.

I could tell you about the microaggressions I experience as a Jewish woman regarding the Holocaust. I can tell you that people told me so often that I was “lucky” to have blonde hair blue eyed (like the heroine of Breslin’s book) because I “would have probably survived the Holocaust.” I began to adopt it as my own line, a way of deflecting the comment before it came. I can tell you that people have told me to “stop playing the Holocaust card.” And I can tell you that while I wish the Jewish national identity did not have to cling so tightly to its tragedies, it is a privilege the rest of you experience that you do not.

Over at Smart Bitches, the review is absolutely on point. Here, Rose Lerner goes through the problematic five star reviews of the book. Here, Smart Bitches’ Sarah Wendell wrote a brave and important open letter.

And I, KK Hendin, India Valentin, Dahlia Adler and others have been on Twitter. I’m adding my long form response here in hopes that Breslin, her publisher, RWA, the judges, and the readers and reviewers consider Jewish voices that they co-opted, stole from, offended, undermined and erased through the publication and award of this book.

In the book, the commander is the head of Theresienstadt. For those who don’t know, Theresienstadt was the ‘model camp’ used to show the Red Cross that things weren’t “so bad”. In reality, 140,000 people were interned there and just over 17,000 people survived it and the deportations to Auschwitz. The commander of that camp made people stand out in freezing temperatures until they literally dropped dead. He killed thousands of children. He oversaw the deportations to Auschwitz where a small percentage survived. He watched tens of thousands of people die of disease and starvation in his ‘model camp’. And Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA judges found that person worthy of redemption. Not only worthy of, but exceptional. Romantic.

If that’s your definition of a romantic hero…I have no words for you. I didn’t realize that genocide turned so many people on, but there you go.

Part of this is the glorification of forgiveness and the idea that every person is redeemable. There was a good conversation I had on Twitter about this and I understand these are religious and fundamental differences between people. I don’t think mass genocide is a forgivable thing. Kate Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA does.

Part of this is evangelical Christianity’s relationship with Jewish people (not with Judaism, let’s be clear) and Israel. Let’s be clear: we are people. We are not anyone’s tickets into heaven. We are not your Chosen people.

Part of this is that anti-Semitism in America wears many masks, and one of them is silence. It is as violent as the others. Silence is not neutrality. Silence allows, if not fosters, oppression, aggression, and erasure. If you are silent on this book, please take a moment to examine why you are silent.

In Kate Breslin’s book, there is an unequal power dynamic. There is no consent. What you are celebrating is rape, and it happened to many women during the Holocaust. He has all the power. She has none of it. Her life is in danger. She cannot consent in this case. That is rape. What happened is rape and rape is not romantic. And it’s certainly not inspirational.

What happened here is that Kate Breslin stole a tragedy that wasn’t hers to promote her own personal agenda. And in doing so, she contributed to the erasure of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Her book is anti-Semitic, violent, and dangerous. It glorifies and redeems a Nazi, while removing all of the Jewish woman’s agency and forcing her to convert to Christianity in order for her arc to be considered redemption. It is, in fact, exactly what has been done to the Jewish people throughout history. For longer than Christianity has been a religion, Jews across the world have been forced to convert or to hide their Judaism to save their lives. That is violence. That is erasure. Kate Breslin’s book is violence and erasure.

And as a Jewish woman who writes romance, I feel betrayed. Betrayed by my fellow romance readers. Betrayed by the people who published this. Betrayed by the judges who allowed it to get past the first round much less onto the ballot. Betrayed by the organization whose silence was support. Betrayed by everyone who has remained silent on this, who hasn’t called it out.

It is not easy to be Jewish in America. Many think it is because of stereotypes, but when push comes to shove, especially online, we turn toward our own and huddle close. It’s a collective memory safety measure. We have only ever been safest in communities made entirely of Jews. There are places in America where I am safer to say I am queer than I am Jewish. I talk more about queerness than Jewishness because of the backlash I’ve received for my Judaism. When discussions of diversity and racism come up, we are excluded.

But, as Justina Ireland and I were saying on Twitter yesterday, the Venn Diagram of racists and anti-Semites is a circle.

The discussion last night on Twitter was draining and exhausting. It is hard to shout about this for weeks. I admire Sarah so much for that open letter and my fellow Jewish writers and readers who were speaking up. I’m grateful for our allies who signal boosted.

I asked during the discussion when non-Jewish people learned about the Holocaust as I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about it.

The responses were illuminating. Most people learned in late elementary school, some as late as high school and into college. Some learned in units during history or social science classes. But most learned because they read books like Devil’s Arithmetic, Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars in English/Language Arts classes. I worry that by teaching nonfiction right next to fiction, we’re subconsciously distancing the Holocaust from real life. From ‘truth’. That it’s being filed away in minds as fiction.

I know that the Holocaust is hard to wrap our heads around. 6 million Jews, and roughly 5-6 million other victims, including Roma, disabled people, gay people, political prisoners, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s more people than any of us have ever seen standing in one place. That’s more people than live in New York City. That’s an incomprehensible number of lives and stories that went up in smoke. And there are more victims than we will ever know: there are mass graves and bodies all over the forests of Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, France. Not everyone made it to camps. I know this is hard to comprehend and I know that books and movies are increasingly our only access point for information about the Holocaust as survivors pass away.

But it’s alarming to me the number of people who learned late in life. Or who considered late elementary school to be early. For Jews, the Holocaust is something we carry with us everywhere. It is always with us. It informs our identity, our way of moving through the world, our holidays, our grandparents’ experiences, how we interact with food and triggers. My father won’t buy German cars. I won’t drink Fanta. There are ways the Holocaust lingers because it fundamentally changed Jewish identity, even in the wake of previous genocides and ethnic cleansings.

I am the granddaughter of a camp liberator. I am the great-granddaughter of pogrom survivors. I have stood on the edge of Babi Yar and wondered if the dirt beneath my feet was made from the bones of my relatives who died there.

The Holocaust is more than a single story. It is more than a book read in a classroom or Schnidler’s List. It is millions and millions and millions of stories extinguished. That we will never know. That’s what the Holocaust is. Not was, but is. History is present tense for some things.

Writing about the Holocaust is not something to do lightly.

As a white American, I wouldn’t touch a romance involving an African-American slave because there is no way—none—that I could handle that properly. Because you can research so many things, but you can’t research collective memory and the way that affects you personally. You can’t. I can’t access that certain empathy, that certain feeling, that way of being and feeling in a world that isn’t your own that I would need to in order to tell that story.

Just because you have the idea of a story doesn’t mean that you should, or have the right to, write it.

And if you decide to write about the Holocaust, and you are not Jewish, I recommend going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Go slowly. Listen. Watch. Read. And when you get to the shoes, stand there until you realize that’s a fraction, maybe a 1/1000th, of the volume, from one camp. Just one camp.

When you write about another group’s tragedy, your goal should be First, do no harm. Kate Breslin, Bethany House publishers, her agent, the readers, the judges, and in allowing this to be nominated, Romance Writers of America, failed that critical first step.

Please, for the generations that come next who will have no survivors to speak to them, no survivors who saw evil walking around in leather boots and not in the pages of their books as romantic hero, do not do what Breslin and her people did. Do no harm.