middle class america is forever in fear of the seal team 6 of rapist drug dealers murderers breaking into their house to get them specifically. what makes you so special?

addiction to true crime podcasts

Obsessed with them showing all of their security measures that could never be used against them ever at all

I hope someone who sees this video gets through every single one of her security measures to do nothing but put an elf on the shelf somewhere and then never return

I have so many questions.

In all seriousness this is a symptom of one of the most toxic elements of American culture, which is the belief that isolation is more likely to protect you from the danger of other people, than other people are to protect you from the danger of isolation.

Realistically, a medical emergency or house fire is far more likely to occur than being randomly murdered in your own house by a stranger, but this woman "protects" herself from the safety of living in community, thereby exposing herself to the danger of living in isolation.

I'm like, morbidly fascinated to observe how normal American women think it is to fear the entire world. I am American but it's still weird to me how every other woman has a deeply ingrained fear of going for a walk alone and expects me to as well.

I'm also really caught off guard when people say things like "Oh, there might be someone on drugs" about a poor or dilapidated area, as a reason it's dangerous. In my experience, the average American seems to have no idea what "drugs" are or do, only a vague impression that they are somewhat like rabies and cause people to become indiscriminately violent and dangerous towards everyone around them.

At my first college there was a restaurant downtown that everyone said was "a front for human trafficking." Even professors would say this. Despite the widespread nature of this rumor, it never seemed to occur to anyone that this information could be actionable or that any authority could be informed about the presence of a human trafficking ring. It was just a fact; human trafficking networks were an assumed part of the everyday world, something that had to be avoided like potholes in the road.

I think about these things a lot.

It is extremely beneficial for a number of industries, as well as certain politicians, for white people — and this is specific to white people — to believe that they are in life threatening danger at any given minute and it matters. It is critical to understand that this issue is extraordinarily racialized, and that the industries and politicians benefiting from making white people afraid are relying upon existing and worsening racial stratification in the US to fill their coffers, or provide them with power or both, and enjoying the knock on harms this does to the BIPOC, immigrant, unhoused and SUD communities adjacent to these needlessly terrified white folks.

77% of Americans believe that crime is increasing. While we don’t have a race breakdown of the numbers, we do have a political breakdown of the numbers, which is just as good, honestly. 92% of Republicans believe that crime is going up but only 58% of Democrats do.

In reality, every kind of crime has been decreasing for the last several years except auto theft. The murder rate fell between 2022 and 2023 at the steepest rate ever in history, and property crime is at its lowest rate since 1961. 

The most dangerous thing in the world to that woman in the video is the husband she locks herself in with every night.



Closing all your blinds and turning your lights off 24/7 like this is going to increase your chance of break-ins because there are a thousand times more people out there who want to break into your empty house and steal your TV, than people who want to assault a random stranger in their house

But to be fair those same people would probably be deterred by the door locks so it all evens out to a very expensive nothing I guess

I love Matilda because it's a story about a child who sees injustice around her and gets mad about it and questions why things aren't fair, and instead of the ending being that she learns how the world works and that life isn't fair, she catapults one of the adults who abused her out of a building with her mind

anybody else in the club feeling this one

Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me? A quote from Little Weirds by Jenny Slate engraved in a wooden spoon, 2022. instagram

In Defense of Shitty Queer Art

Queer art has a long history of being censored and sidelined. In 1895, Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence in the author’s sodomy trials. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the American Hays Code prohibited depictions of queerness in film, defining it as “sex perversion.” In 2020, the book Steven Universe: End of an Era by Chris McDonnell confirmed that Rebecca Sugar’s insistence on including a sapphic wedding in the show is what triggered its cancellation by Cartoon Network. According to the American Library Association, of the top ten most challenged books in 2023, seven were targeted for their queer content. Across time, place, and medium, queer art has been ruthlessly targeted by censors and protesters, and at times it seems there might be no end in sight.

So why, then, are queer spaces so viciously critical of queer art?

Name any piece of moderately-well-known queer media, and you can find immense, vitriolic discourse surrounding it. Audiences debate whether queer media is good representation, bad representation, or whether it’s otherwise too problematic to engage with. Artists are picked apart under a microscope to make sure their morals are pure enough and their identities queer enough. Every minor fault—real or perceived—is compiled in discourse dossiers and spread around online. Lines are drawn, and callout posts are made against those who get too close to “problematic art.”

Modern examples abound, such as the TV show Steven Universe, the video game Dream Daddy, or the webcomic Boyfriends, but it’s far from a new phenomenon. In his book Hi Honey, I’m Homo!, queer pop culture analyst Matt Baume writes about an example from the 1970s, where the ABC sitcom titled Soap was protested by homophobes and queer audiences alike—before a single episode of the show ever aired. Audiences didn’t wait to actually watch the show before passing judgment and writing protest letters.

After so many years starved for positive representation, it’s understandable for queer audiences to crave depictions where we’re treated well. It’s exhausting to only ever see the same tired gay tropes and subtext, and queer audiences deserve more. Yet the way to more, better, varied representation is not to insist on perfection. The pursuit of perfection is poison in art, and it’s no different when that art happens to be queer.

When the pool of queer art is so limited, it feels horrible when a piece of queer art doesn’t live up to expectations. Even if the representation is technically good, it’s disappointing to get excited for a queer story only for that story to underwhelm and frustrate you.

But the world needs that disappointing art. It needs mediocre art. It even needs the bad art. The world needs to reach a point where queer artists can fearlessly make a mess, because if queer artists can only strive for perfection, the less art they can make. They may eventually produce a masterpiece, but a single masterpiece is still a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans of censorship. The only way to drown out bigotry and offensive stereotypes created by bigots is to allow queer artists the ability to experiment, learn through making mistakes, and represent their queer truth even if it clashes with someone else’s.

If queer artists aren’t allowed to make garbage, we can never make those masterpieces everyone craves. If queer artists are terrified at all times that their art will be targeted both by bigots and their own queer communities, queer art cannot thrive.

Let queer artists make shitty art. Let allies to queer people try their hand at representation, even if they miss the mark. Let queer art be messy, and let the artists screw up without fear of overblown retribution.

It’s the only way we’ll ever get more queer art.

_

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This post is so fucking old–the old anon icon? Non-rebloggable asks? The gray bar at the bottom? Truly a relic

people are still reblogging it. incredible. love u all

At the end of my rope and it keeps getting longer like some sort of clown handkerchief bit?

HAPPY HOMESTUCK DAY :::; ) no secrets for my fandom lore here

Like. If i wanted to watch any post apocalyptic SLOP thats just goofy slapstick and oooh its a twisted lawless world theres dozens of media i can choose from.

I got into Fallout because of the fo1 opening cutscene, because you get to make a eugenicist feel so ashamed of his actions that he kills himself, because the series presents really subversive ideas like "the people who have been preserved to 'save the future' will probably be extremely xenophobic upon being let loose into a wasteland that's already rebuilding itself" and "we need to stop clinging to an idealized past so we don't make those same mistakes in the new future we're building"

Like if y'all wanted slop there's a whole Marvel catalog to look through <3 Why am I being treated like a pretentious weirdo because I like the west coast content that fucking built the franchise!!

surprisingly, this still remains probably the best and most concise explanation as to why the harry potter franchise didn't work and never could work in a satisfying way because of the author's limited perception of life and politics

we haven't had a true tumblr sexyman in years. Sans was like the last one. I can still see his weird glowing goo ghost dick when I close my eyes. that kind of absolute derangement just doesn't happen anymore. some people just liking Astarion and Senshi a lot is not the same. a true tumblr sexyman makes this website absolutely unusable

oh my god it was the porn ban. the porn ban killed the tumblr sexyman. the horny can't fester and multiply like it used to. the sexymen are killed in their infancy

Feminism

Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson reading like that Edgar Allan Poe meme