ilien

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

Having autism is like

Having ADHD is like

Having both Autism and ADHD is like

Elementary as textposts part 4/?

[transcription of a reddit comment]

ew72 • 19 hr. ago

I'm a type 1 diabetic. I require insulin to live, multiple times a day.

When I was in middle school, many years ago, we didn't have insulin pumps and had to use syringes and vials like everyone else.

The school refused to let me carry it with me, meaning I had to go to the nurses office several times a day to inject. It's not just before lunch but could be any number of times depending on the current blood sugar levels.

The district then cut nurse staff to just spending half a day at two schools, and the nurse left before I had lunch.

I asked the office staff to unlock the office so I could take my insulin and eat lunch. They refused.

By middle school, I'd been dealing with t1 for about 5 years, and didn't take shit on the topic. I went to the school lobby, picked up the payphone (I just dated myself) and called 911, telling them, "Hi, I'm at (school), am type 1 diabetic and the office won't unlock a door and let me take insulin."

They sent a fire truck, and a bunch of firemen met me outside and walked me to the office and asked, while ignoring the staff, which room was the nurses office. I pointed to the door and he was like, "Okay boys, chop it down, this kid need his insulin!"

Suddenly, the office secretary could unlock the door and I didn't need to put it in the nurses office everyday anymore.

End id.]

“ExcUSE me?!”

the thing i love about social animals is they necessarily have a concept of manners which means that you can be rude to them. not threatening, but rude. and they’ll be annoyed at you for it.

Why is this person being a dick to an innocent Beast

‘relationships are work’ means ‘you have to put effort into loving each other intentionally & learning how to love each other and communicating properly’ not ‘your relationship makes you feel stressed and sad most of the time & the other person disrespects you and treats you bad but you stay anyway’

I’m begging you to look at this.

occasional posts from users

reblog if you make occasional posts

Sometimes I still hear my voice

when people who want to be vaguely progressive say 'nature' all secular style but it's painfully obvious they mean 'god' while thinking they don't mean god

"natural behaviour" "the natural body" "nature intended" "nature created" no da fuck it didn't

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.” - Yuval Noah Harari

For me the funniest thing to come out of the goncharov meme was not any of the fake scenes or the nyt articles about it or whatever but the fact that due to the fact that he'd found it funny when I told him about it I got my dad several books by ivan goncharov for christmas that year as a joke fully expecting him to not even touch them BUT to everyone's surprise he read every single one cover to cover and liked them so much that he read dostoevsky and then read tolstoy and then pushkin and then gogol and now barely reads anything that isn't nineteenth century russian literature and also has started watching academic talks about crime and punishment and will randomly bring up shit like the politics present in bulgakov's writing in at LEAST half of our conversations. all because of goncharov

We'll be talking about something normal and he'll go "this reminds me, in tolstoy's essay what is art--" and I just have to quietly live with the knowledge that he only talks like this because of a fake martin scorsese movie that was a joke on tumblr.com

Yup, that's how fandom works.

I dream of the day when I won’t have to look at this fucking chart….

the fuck did they rescue, a persian panther

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

For the record, this is what the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” actually means.

That’s not me just saying that, that’s what the author of the book by that name meant by it:

one way this is so obvious is how people know medieval European farmers spent tons of energy making bread, but what women did is reduced to “idk childcare”?

No they made cloth. All the time.

"We call it vff," said the alien. "It's - it's hard to describe to a species without vffsense. Imagine trying to describe light to a species that never evolved eyes. But there are forms of life that are only perceptible with vffsense, and they've visited Earth and fed on life as long as it's existed here."

There was a pause.

Then the human said, "That's the worst thing you've ever said."

"Don't worry about it."

"I think I have to, now."

"No, because - well - you have a species of spider which pretends to be an ant, correct? It's not capable of understanding the fact that it's mimicking an ant, but it instinctually mimics an ant in order to deter predators."

"Sure?"

"Humans produce a vff to mimic varths, predators only perceptible through vffsense. The organisms that would like to feed on you are terrified of varths, and so they leave you alone. You aren't aware you do it, you don't have the capacity to understand you're doing it, but you evolved to instinctually do it to deter predators you can't see."

There was a pause.

Then the human said in a very soft and thoughtful voice, "And are there varths on Earth?"

"Yes," said the alien. "Everywhere. But don't worry about it."

"I think I have to, now."

"Well, varths can also sense vff, of course, but to a varth you putting off varth like vff isn't particularly frightening."

"Not frightening, ok. So do they feed on us?"

"No."

"So if not feeding then something... else?"

"Yes. Quite a lot of something else actually."

"What do you mean a lot of something else?"

"Well, you know ostriches?"

"Yeah?"

"When you humans keep ostriches, sometimes you accidentally exhibit features and behaviors that... appeal to an ostrich more than a member of their own species."

"So you're saying varth find us-"

"Incconsivably sexy, desirable to the point they abandon their own home planet and species with some regularity. It's actually quite fascinating, humans are to varth as cats are to catnip."

"Wow that's a lot to take in... you sure know a lot of animal metaphors. You could be a zoologist."

"I am a zoologist"

"Oh?"

"That's why I'm here, talking to you."

"Ah."