I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.

What’s the difference?

I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative.  And other things are so close as makes no difference.

Kindness is performative.  Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions.  You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.

Strength is so many things.  It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel.  And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything.  Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy.  Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights.  It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.

Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker.  It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) - that’s not how it’s measured.  At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made?  And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” - which is of course the way you cause things to Be.

Sociability is also performative.  Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it.  It’s making an effort towards something you value.  So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.  

Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them.  If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing.  It’s not “pretending” - it’s agency.

tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.”  A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one

* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains!  Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity.  So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers.  So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is.  The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).

I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go. 

Notes on Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"

“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” was originally written in 1995 (I think?), then revised and republished in 2003 as part of Sedgwick’s final essay collection. Sedgwick writes that paranoid reading (the “intellectual offspring” of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, those suspicious readers par excellence) has become the dominant mode of critical inquiry practiced in literary and cultural studies today—so dominant, in fact, that most people think of paranoid reading practices and “theory” as synonymous. To practice theory is to practice the hermeneutics of suspicion: as she puts it, “Paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription”) (125). This is a really rich essay, and my summary will only touch on a few aspects of it. Skipping around a bit, I want to start with her list of the characteristics of paranoid reading:

Given the longstanding historical associations between homosexuality, homophobia, and paranoia (as both a medical condition and an interpretive mode), Sedgwick sees queer studies as a particularly good site for exploring how paranoid reading operates and why it has become so firmly entrenched in our contemporary understandings of what theory does/should do. That paranoia should become queer theory’s preferred methodology, and not just its object, speaks to some deeply rooted issues within contemporary queer theory/identity politics. Queer studies, perhaps to an even greater extent that feminist or critical race theory, has always been deeply preoccupied with the relationship between visibility and recognition (legal, social, political) on the one hand, and between visibility and violence (hate crimes, bullying, etc.) on the other. Queer theory’s mantra has become a combination of “Expose before you’re exposed” (#1 and #5) and “Never forget that the system really is out to get you” (#3 and #4). Sedgwick insists that this was by no means inevitable, and that it is possible (though difficult) to break the stranglehold paranoia has on contemporary theory. The problem is that paranoid thinking is contagious, and very teachable—whether we are intentionally taught it (in the grad school classroom) or happen to come into contact with in other ways (other people’s paranoia make us paranoid, in part because it makes us afraid that they’re going to get there first, see things we missed, and use the knowledge to expose or humiliate us).

Sedgwick’s definitions of paranoid vs. reparative reading have three primary sources: Melanie Klein, Silvan Tomkins, and Foucault (whose mid-career work is mostly paranoid, and late work, mostly reparative). Sedgwick advocates thinking about critical practice in terms of Kleinian “positions.” Though I haven’t read Klein, I think positions are sort of similar to Foucault’s notion of tactics or strategies of resistance. They emphasize practices of engagement over fixed identity positions, and are non-prescriptive, flexible, and responsive to the needs of the moment (rather than aiming at ideological purity, consistency, etc.). The paranoid position, Sedgwick writes, is “understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety […] a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one” (128). She contrasts this with the depressive position, in a passage I think is beautiful enough to quote at length:

Sedgwick associates the depressive position with a reparative reading practice. I love this definition, for a whole host of reasons. I like the idea that the work of repairing is actually work (which makes me think of that famous Audre Lorde quote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”). I also like that a reparative practice doesn’t try to recreate a “preexisting whole” (whether remembered or imagined), but aims instead to produce “something like a whole” that is responsive to the needs of the moment and of the individual, and that makes use of the resources that are available to the individual. To me, that last part is important for thinking about how and where antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic work gets done, and what tools are available to us in the process. Insisting on ideological purity is one of the surest ways to get nothing done. A post I saw on Tumblr recently makes the point well:

The point is, we work with what we have, salvaging what we can. Or, as Sedgwick puts it in her discussion of camp: “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150).  

A few more thoughts and questions to come.

There’s a machine that does your nails

Source

every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’

You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same). Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion. (I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)

ding ding ding ding.

Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content.  Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it.   Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause. If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency,  then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.

The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is - so who gets to decide?

You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?

Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?

The world is complex and there are no easy answers.

The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.

Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.

Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.

The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. 

Preach it loud and hard!

I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”

The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic - victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.

And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.

The mentality is one and the same - “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.  

And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.

This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.

Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.  The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.

Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.

Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced. 

This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.

At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.  But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.  LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.” Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it. And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there! FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS. Yeah, this system had no room for abuse. So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.  It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS. Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work. So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities. 

In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE. Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up. It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008. That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.

She Came Prepared The Daily Politics presenter was chatting to Charlotte and Henrietta about banning unhealthy food in schools.

She came for him

“well maybe when you were my age you were a dumb piece of shit”

I CANNOT

Heroines.

Iconic

that explains why his generation is working so hard to destroy the fucking planet

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

My petty ass when someone skinny buys something XXXL from a thrift store to ~transform~ it into a cute tailored cocktail dress: how about you leave the XXXL section alone so poor fat women out there can retain some sense of variety out of the 7 things that actually fit them in the god damn goodwill

Just to be clear I’m not talking about “I bought something a couple sizes larger than me and I’m taking it in” 

I’m very specifically talking about THIS SORT OF THING

ugh the top and bottom ones make me especially furious because she removed the interesting part of the dress! those would both look adorable on me as is. 

she could make an ugly black dress like that herself without chopping up a cool vintage dress in a rare larger size

@maryburgers would you have gone to that specific theft store to buy that specific vintage dress? If you would have never gotten it then why would you degrade her for doing cute and interesting to a dress that probably would have just sat at the thrift store forever.

Hey you know what’s actually degrading? Making a habit, and by that I mean an entire blog, where you buy all the plus size clothes in a thrift store and then take pictures of yourself contrasting your tiny body against the IMPLLLAAAUSIBLY OUTRAGEOUSLY HUUUUGE clothing. That is degrading.

Also like, fat people live everywhere SOMEONE would have gone to that specific store and fit into those dresses as is and loved them, there are so little options for fat people everywhere, none of the alterations they made are special or unique, like they could easily find something similar in a thrift store at the same price point.

plus size clothes DON’T sit at the thrift store forever. general size clothes do. our donated clothes last maybe a few weeks tops at a thrift store because there’s a larger demand for them than supply, that’s why the sections are so damn small despite the average us woman being a size 14, because they’re picked over constantly by people who need clothes. i was not expecting to do this but i’m gonna go into deep detail so you understand why exactly this is fucked up.

poor people are more likely to be plus size because of lack of access to healthy food, which is the target demographic of a damn thrift store in the first place. thrift shopping is trendy now, which is fine, except when you buy clothes for projects like this that are in high demand but low supply: maternity clothes, plus size clothes, pajamas, etc. if you need clothing, buy it. but you can make any of these projects from clothes without poaching from low supply areas and taking comical pictures that mock fat bodies.

now here’s why there’s a ridiculously low supply of plus size clothes: fat people don’t have as many places to buy clothes and all of them have poor selection so we don’t buy a lot of them to begin with. the shopping pattern of a plus size person is very different from that of a straight size person as well. i know this from working in plus size retail. overwhelmingly, we shop when we desperately need clothes. and i mean desperately like hole the size of a basketball in the thigh of your jeans desperately. wearing a bra from 1998 desperately. work blazer held together with scotch tape and safety pins desperately. we can’t donate our clothes because we wear them until the point where we physically cannot anymore.

we also don’t cycle through trends as much as smaller sizes because a) shopping is a huge ordeal for a plus size person and b) our clothes cost WAY MORE so we can’t afford to wear an article of clothing once and then give it to goodwill. then on top of that none of the places that give you money for clothes EVER want your fatass clothes. skinny people can pop over to any secondhand clothing store that pays for donations and get some of that investment back. we can’t do that EVEN THOUGH our clothes cost way more than straight sizes. oh, and we get paid less than thinner women btw :) that’s always great.

so if we can’t regain any of our investment, we’re just gonna put up with clothes we don’t like until we can’t wear them anymore or we give them away in the case of weight loss (when ur fat you know a lot of other fatties, and if ur a queer/trans fatty someone is always having a clothing swap you can give to).

all of this adds up to make it so that thrift stores are in low supply of plus size clothes that more and more people need because us fatties? if we don’t look good we don’t get jobs. you cannot look even the slightest bit unkempt or you come off as lazy or bitchy, and if you have a family to support you can’t spend weeks looking for a job where they won’t judge your competence based upon whether your clothes are trendy or not. when you’re not plus size and you take away these clothes from needy women you are in small part enabling their suffering.

it shouldn’t be that way. women should have access to affordable, well fitting, professional clothing regardless of size. but that’s not the world we live in so you can’t just cover your ears and pretend that it is.

@a-lames-adventure please fucking read all the replies on this and get the fuck @ me

Perspective.

I understand both sides of this issue, but the majority of the replies are the ethically sound side.

Having gone from a size 4 to a size 14 due to weight gain from medication, I can tell you that there is absolutely NO NEED to destroy plus-size clothing in order to get cute cocktail dresses or whatever in a thrift store. There are TONS of adorable petite cocktail dresses, formal dresses, etc, for smaller women. And there is a huge lack of cute dresses for anyone larger than a 10. I’m not even considered ‘plus size’, and I still struggle to find dresses that don’t make me look like the Goodyear blimp, because I’m pretty sure designers give up once you get beyond a certain size and intentionally make the dresses as ugly as possible.

If you want to make your own dress, buy the fucking fabric and do it from a pattern. You can even make it from a ~*~vintage~*~ pattern if you want extra Twee Points. Don’t buy, cut up, and ruin a perfectly good plus-size dress, while taking mocking pictures of how OMGHUGE it is, in order to make a rather bland cocktail dress. There’s literally no need to do that other than that you’re unimaginative, selfish, and don’t care about plus-size women.

This time x1000 Do you know how infuriating it is to try and find maternity clothes at a thrift store, find nothing, have to rely on you mom to spend $200 for 5 fucking items, and then go on pintrest and see some girl who would fit 90% of the clothes at the thrift store cutting up a maternity dress to make a blouse that looks like one you can by at urban Forever 21?

Always hates this trend, bless the replies on this post

We go forward.

This is too deep to comprehend.

Stop it

I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE FUNNY

:(((((

Facts.

Thank you!

They found it buried, and as soon as they realized it existed, they went straight to “nope get that garbage out of here right now”

take notes america

So, your queer history lesson for the day:

Everyone’s heard that pirate’s call each other “matey”. What you probably haven’t heard is that the word matey comes from “matelote”.

In the Caribbean this word was used between buccaneers to signify a life partner. Matelotes could inherit from each other, shared space, fought together, could speak for each other when one was incapacitated or absent, and more often than not the relationship was romantic and sexual.

That’s right folks. Pirates had a term for their gay life partners.

In light of this, I present to you a new alternative for significant other and partner. Bring back matelote.

(You can learn more about the practice of matelotage in: The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies by James Niell)

Arrr! Matelotage was such a great idea!

In an age when the English Navy ran on “rum, sodomy and the lash,” (as noted in many writings of the time), homosexual relationships were punishable by death.

The result here was that in the English Navy, relationships went underground. Very often, they became forced, often between a superior and a subordinate. When English crews went on the account, becoming pirates, they looked for a way to legitimize relationships of honest affection. Matelotage [French; meaning ‘seamanship’] , now used as an English word, became a term for a legal marriage between two men. […] In pirate society (and only pirate society) two men could “marry.” They would exchange gold rings, and pledge eternal union. After this, they were expected to share everything.  Plunder and living spaces were obvious, but couples in matelotage were also known to share other property, and even women. If one of the partners was killed in action, pirate captains were careful to make sure that the surviving member received both shares of plunder, as well as any appropriate death benefits. Simply put, homosexual relationships had been kept under wraps by people in fear for their lives because of draconian laws. Among sailors who had practiced this form of release themselves, it lost its sense of being alien, and so became accepted and legitimized as soon as they (by turning pirate) gained the right to make their own laws. {X}

Another excellent addition!