Gen X: [raises hand] Can... can we also maybe not get worked to death?
We remain latchkey kids.
Gen X: quit telling everyone we're dead
absolutely everyone: sometimes we can still hear their voices
No they know what they’re doing
Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"
Imagine paying Columbia-amounts of money to be taught by someone with kindergarten-level art literacy. Like, motherfucker, the wholeass point of 4’33” is to emphasize how every performance of live music is inextricably linked to the ambient sounds of the context in which it is performed!!!!!!! Paying attention to and thinking about the context of the performance is the point of the song!!!! If the point was to hear birds chirping and people walking, John Cage would have fucking recorded that instead. Insisting that art is only good when contains good things and makes you feel good things is baby-level art criticism. How the fuck is this dude a professor.
Actually I’m not done going off yet. This pisses me off so much. How can you teach the humanities and be so obstinately ignorant? Like bruh, if the chanting outside makes you feel uncomfortable and upset, maybe you should take about four and a half minutes to contemplate why you feel that way. During that time, you might consider things such as: why are there students chanting? What are they protesting? Why do they feel so strongly about this issue that they’re willing to disrupt their lives to bring attention to it? Should I also feel as strongly? Should I be protesting with them? Is my desire for silence more important than the students’ desire for justice? Why do I find the noise they’re making more upsetting than the genocide they’re protesting?
Being like “loud noise make me angy 😠” is so fundamentally incurious and baby-brained it’s honestly unbelievable
Yellow duck road
Miss Congeniality (2000) dir. Donald Petrie
Unmute !
That is one aggressive motorcycle
I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.
Salute to our troops (70s careerwomen who put their hard-earned dollars into homemade gay erotica)
It was women with secretarial jobs doing a lot of the heavy lifting, if memory serves correctly.
They had training in type setting, could churn things out quickly, knew how to organise mailing lists, and had easy access to Expensive High Tech like photocopiers.
Boss make a dollar, she makes a dime. That's why she's printing Kirk X Spock zines on company time.
the only video that matters right now
Andy Goldsworthy
ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a burden to the state
I have thoughts about the last part:
This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it's so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she's putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That's a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say "Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them" as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??
This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.
Something about the idea that voting for president only matters if you live in a swing state, and that all the people in blue states or red states can indulge themselves in principled nonparticipation because the outcomes are preordained, strikes me as akin to playing with fire.
Is it really coherent to say "both sides are awful, write in Mickey Mouse or burn your ballot or just stay home and get drunk, unless you live in Pennsylvania, in which case maybe consider taking one for the team and compromising yourself by voting for the lesser evil?" Is that really the message that will lead to a preferable outcome?
What it sounds like to me is a sign that 1) you take your local electorate for granted, and 2) you see avoiding the worst case scenario as somebody else's problem.
I remember when Florida was a swing state. I also remember when Pennsylvania wasn't.
literally the last election fucking Georgia became a swing state because people showed the fuck up and voted.
“Exceptions alone do not, however, disprove the validity of generalizations. If I make a generalization that people stop at red lights while driving, certainly it is true that occasionally, some people do not; however it is an accurate and useful statement that people stop at red lights. It describes, with reasonable accuracy, a social phenomenon. To say that the generalization is not true simply because a few people do not fit it, is ludicrous and leaves us unable to describe or name even the most obvious social norms. The overall effect of this turn away from “meta-narratives” is to stop people from being able to describe their social conditions, from being able to generalize about personal experiences in their lives, from being able to see the commonalities of experience that can mobilize them to see problems as political rather than personal. The net effect is a lot of women’s studies students saying, “You can’t really say that,” about even the most basic truths.”
— Let them eat text: The real politics of postmodernism by Karla Mantilla (via philo-sophi-a)
Peggy Orenstein out here doing God's work
Ms. Orenstein is the author of “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity” and “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.”
Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”
For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.
I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.
I really hate how the woman who wrote this article felt the need to write "I'm not here to kink shame," after discussing how 2/3 college age women have been STRANGLED during sex, that the act of strangling women during sex has become normalized in mainstream media, and men online even joke about women getting injured / killed from it.
This is a serious problem of male violence and YES by all means we SHOULD be shaming it! We should be talking about how bad and dangerous this is!
I also dislike how she keeps calling it "choking"- choking is when you can't breathe because something is stuck in your throat. These women are being strangled and I feel like calling it 'choking' obfuscates the reality of the situation. I know that it's probably because people call the act "choking," but in an article it's best to use the correct word.
I feel like this part of the article is really important:
"The physical, cognitive and psychological impacts of sexual choking are disturbing. So is the idea that at a time when women’s social, economic, educational and political power are in ascent (even if some of those rights may be in jeopardy), when #MeToo has made progress against harassment and assault, there has been the popularization of a sex act that can damage our brains, impair intellectual functioning, undermine mental health, even kill us. Nonfatal strangulation, one of the most significant indicators that a man will murder his female partner (strangulation is also one of the most common methods used for doing so), has somehow been eroticized and made consensual, at least consensual enough."
I really don't think it's mere coincidence that more and more men and boys are starting to strangle their girlfriends and call it "kinky sex" just when women are fighting for more political/social rights.
When I am skeptical of a woman/girl labeling herself as asexual, I'm doing it from a feminist perspective.
How many times have we read of women saying some brainwashed bullshit along the lines of "Orgasming during sex isn't important to me, the special part is feeling close to my partner!" Or the whole conservative woman thing about "wifely duties" where sex is seen as maintenance of the relationship instead of something you enjoy together.
Women are taught by society that our pleasure and autonomy isn't a part of the bigger picture. The increased usage of the asexual label is an attempt to cope with that flawed sentiment instead of fighting it, in addition to women just plain not being attracted to people who don't enhance their lives.
Many of the women who call themselves asexual actually mean celibate (or wish they could be celibate), but that word carries baggage that they understandably don't want. If we want the word "asexual" to have meaning, it's important to focus on telling women that their pleasure DOES matter and it's okay to have standards that no one is meeting.
Remember - asexuality is defined by a lack of sexual attraction towards any individual of any sex, with an absent desire for sexual activity.
If you like sex, want sex, and desire to have sex but are disappointed by your partner or otherwise have values that are antagonistic to the idea of women having pleasure during sex, you’re not asexual, you’re a victim of the patriarchy.
I also wish celibacy was more supported as a choice. It's okay to have sexual attraction and still not find it worth it, never want a long term partner, or never want to have sex, and honestly that seems normal for a het woman living under patriarchy.
