Lipstick Feminists

Parents too.

^ PARENTS TOO. I didn’t even realize why my father became like a next level narcissist until I realized I graduate college in May.

yall go watch coisa mais linda (most beautiful thing) on netflix

I hate that so many women have to go through this.

it’s really weird how all the touted historical examples of “women” who “pretended” to be men seem to fall into two extremes:

1. women who did it for maybe a couple years at most on an extremely limited basis and usually not full time, died as women.

2. people who were men 100% of the time their whole adult lives and made explicit instructions to a trusted person to ensure they were remembered as a man even after death.

gee it’s almost like these two groups were totally separate and have completely different motivations or something. almost like it’s super obvious the 2nd category were all trans men and the only reason they aren’t remembered as men is due to transphobia.

I think this is necessary to post. I see a lot of people “saving” bunnies.

Never knew this, keeping this for reference

As a student of Veterinary Medicine I can completely confirm this! Do NOT take them out of their nest unless you’re 100% sure that the mother did not come back for them after at least one day!

if you’re a trans girl thank you

“Lighten Up” by Ronald Wimberly

Beautifuly written- and drawn.

Lin Manuel Miranda; Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; Terry Crews; Fred Rogers

Taika Waititi: Powerfully creative, Knows himself, Good humored, Takes his work and his relationships with other people seriously, Intentional as a creator

John Mulaney: Publicly supportive of his wife and other women in his life, Crafts humor without taking cheap shots at people, Supportive friend, Willing to laugh at himself yet confident

Andy Samberg: Uses platform and humor to publicly call out toxic masculinity and white privilege, Self-aware, Willing to cede the floor to others, Good friend

Will Smith: Very intentional about what type of actions he takes as a husband and father (if you haven’t watched him on The Red Table, you should), Good humored and professional, Dedicated to his craft putting in the hours and energy, Generous with his emotions and vulnerability, Responsive to others emotions and vulnerability

I read somewhere that one aspect of Toxic Masculinity is believing that being part of a “We” will erase the “I”; that selfhood is threatened by relationships with other people. It reads then that Healthy Masculinity (indeed, healthy people in general) create a “We” that enhances the “I”; that we can become more powerfully ourselves through relationships with other people. 

All these men listed (and many more unlisted) live this type of energy, the one that builds connections without fear of losing the self - and in fact builds the self more with the building of connections. 

This version of this post is important

More then ever I think Millie Bobby Brown’s situation reflects we live in a culture that does not care about children. Mbb was forced to sign sexualized fanart of her character on stranger things made by a man who makes a living off drawing child rape porn. Her parents let these people around their daughter and now they’re letting a 31 year old man talk to her about “things that should stay in text” and who is already being disturbingly possessive saying “I miss you” everyday. And the entire entertainment industry and us the public are just standing by and watching it.

And then there’s the other stranger things kids like Finn Wolfhard who had a grown adult woman call him sexually attractive granted there was immediate backlash but still him and the cast of It had erotic FanFiction and fanart made of them even some where they were raped by pennywise which made the children extremely uncomfortable. Even with the “fiction =/= reality” it still made them uncomfortable.

We can already see how children especially young girls like mbb are being sexualized younger and younger. It doesn’t stop at famous children either. Look at any Instagram account of a young girl and you already see her sexualizing herself wearing styles and cuts of clothes meant for women much older and wearing full faced make up. With the excuse “I thought she was over 18” coming up more and more this is especially troubling. And I honestly doubt any child would really want to dress like a 21 year old if she wasn’t given attention by older men when she did. When I think of how I dressed at 14 I remember I wore anime and graphic tees. I wore sloppy mascara and bright purple eye shadow. I wore gaudy jewelry from Claire’s with cupcakes and cartoons on them. I dressed like a child because I was one.

Every child wants attention from adults it makes them feel special and mature. Now adults are taking advantage of that. We are watching children being groomed and abused right before our eyes. The parents do nothing, we do nothing, no one does anything. How many times do we watch the media hound a celebrity woman showing signs of obvious past sexual abuse? How many children in foster care get caught up in sex trafficking and we ignore them? How many abused and raped children never get help? We live in a culture that doesn’t give a fuck about children. We see them as objects, toys, and as investments Not as actual living human beings. And it is most obviously in them media we consume we just don’t care.

this is where fiction does fucking affect reality

So here’s the thing. white people don’t believe that Black people can create art without it having something to do with them. Our films must teach them lessons, our books and songs and outworks must inform them, in no uncertain terms, that slavery bad, drugs bad, racism bad, and if not then it’s a Bad Movie, and Not Effective and Disappointing. If our art doesn’t include a Sesame Street style lesson on the Horrors of Being Black, then it’s bad screen-writing and lazy and a bunch of other buzzwords. If we don’t gently coddle them and hold their hands and give them easy to swallow theory, or give some sort of strong message on violence, drugs, police brutality, etc., then it’s bad. 

I just think it’s so annoying that everything I do as an artist has to mean something to white people. I don’t write to teach white people lessons. I’m sure most Black filmmakers don’t make their movies to teach white people lessons. Black artists have the right to make art for the sake of making art. We’re allowed to tell stories that are entirely divorced from politics. We’re allowed to write horror and romance, to talk about what it’s like to be Black and gay, and to fall in love, and how it is to live in a haunted house, or how it is to have doppelgängers that want to kill us. 

I don’t even know how to put it into words, but I’m tired of white people thinking that Black people are put on this earth to entertain and teach them. It’s frustrating and tiring and I wish that Black creators were allowed to just be,

#;-; THAT IS SO CONFUSING (– @all-the-ships-all-of-them )

It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.

WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS

This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.

My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED

These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements. 

Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes).  There is plenty of room for variation, too - a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)

Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX. 

Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY - and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.

And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes - we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well - take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens - the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.

So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex - if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.

So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around - but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to - just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual - their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.

Pregnancy gets weirder, too - decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain - where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man. 

Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear - surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?

Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies. 

Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.” 

Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)

Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage - those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own - you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death. There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.

Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.

everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz

@poisonedapples you’ve defeated gender im so proud

This is what I’ve been trying to achieve

Exciting news.

y’all better hype this up because this is BIG and is evidence that the berlin patient wasn’t a fluke, and this could revolutionize medicine (there’s already cases of cancers where methods similar to these have worked), and while you’re at it, please join a bone marrow registry!! (especially poc bc these therapies usually only have been done on white patients due to genetic similarities, and the more poc we get in registries the more access poc patients can have to this for cancers, SSS, etc)

no offense I haven’t heard a girl talk at length about pumpkin spice anything in years and I can’t remember the last time I went six hours without hearing a grown man making fun of how obsessed girls are with pumpkin spice lattes

Grown men are obsessed with making fun of girls so they don’t have to think of their own numerous and pathetic flaws.

Walk up to a man and say you don’t like bacon and wait for the reaction

justin: [relentlessly torments every npc griffin comes up with]

griffin: ok you know what? i’m going to introduce an npc who is your character’s entire heart and you are going to do literally everything she wants because you love her so god damn much. then i’m going to make her fuckign vanish. how about that? huh? motherfuckeir? your move.

Watch: In another clip, Sanders explains the real reason he got into politics.