A black mother faces many challenges while combing her daughter’s extremely tangled hair.

Film by: Renelle Williams

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/renellexart/ submitted by: http://renellexart.tumblr.com/

High Priestess, by Le Grèbe

Tumblr - deviantart - instagram

Old but gold

#lamepun

This is really intense. Is there a web/text version of these slides available? They’re unreadable on Tumblr other than the headlines, and I’d really like to read them. 

Applause, OP, applause. Maybe a LITTLE BIT LOUDER for the people in the back (or, well, a more legible version posted elsewhere so we can read it easier)!

Also, THANK YOU SO MUCH for the mention of kānaka maoli and the illegal “annexation,” I’d reblog just for that!!

thanks!

I def wanted to ensure that that was at least mentioned, bc it’s so often left out, even in Indigenous circles. Solidarity is so important.

If anyone would like to read through and caption it, I’d gladly reblog that version, but the content is heavily triggering for me, so I can’t read through and caption it myself rn, sorry.

For anyone having trouble reading the slides, I transcribed the text. I tried my best with the image descriptions, but some of them are so small it’s hard for me to see the details and I’m not great at image descriptions, so if someone better at writing image descriptions wants to add those, I’d be grateful. Transcription below the cut: 

Keep reading

wow

External image

Jolene (33 R.P.M) - click for .mp3

Unsure where this came from, if not the palsied hands of the good Lord himself.

Simple premise: Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” slipped from 45 to 33 rpm. Nothing more; no studio trickery, no trip hop drum breaks. The guitar lopes back in and around itself. The bass becomes elastic, hot rubber. The violin stabs become sustained cello lines. The backing choir’s split harmony rattles around, slinking ghostly into the corner.  And most importantly, Parton’s once-frantic vocal is transformed from bubblegum country scrawl into something approximating field holler reverence. 

An already perfect song made transcendental..

Who would win in a battle for my immortal soul: the devil on his fiddle or “Jolene” at 33 RPM

I can never get enough of this

The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero. 

Fake geek boys

George Barbier, Illustrations for Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos, 1934. During his life, George Barbier was one of France’s most acclaimed illustrators and designers, a forefather of the art deco movement. But after his death in 1932 he quickly sank into obscurity. It’s only in the modern era that his work has been reappraised.

George Barbier, Illustration for Les Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs, 1929.

Barbier is notable for his bold depictions of female sexuality, and an aesthetic in his design work that a modern critic called ‘a kind of lipstick lesbian chic’. Many of his illustrations have a sapphic subtext, featuring women together in intimate poses, or women embracing people of ambiguous gender. Some show women dancing or being affectionate with figures that appear to be male but on closer inspection are clearly women in drag.

George Barbier, Le Feu (The Fire), 1925. This illustration shows a woman reclining in the arms of a person of indeterminate gender.

In his illustrations for Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Les Chansons de Bilitis, this subtext became outright text, with women naked together, kissing or making love. For the time, these illustrations were extremely daring and verged on the pornographic (even if they seem quite tame by today’s standards).

George Barbier, Illustration for Les Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs, 1929. 

Little is known about Barbier’s personal life in his hometown of Nantes, but we do know that in Paris he moved almost exclusively in homosexual circles. He was an intimate friend of the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou, and mixed with gay intellectuals like Marcel Proust.

George Barbier, Les dames seules (the single ladies), 1910. This early work is particularly striking for its apparent depiction of a butch/femme subculture among gay women in Paris. His sexuality gave him access to the underground gay scene in Paris, and his knowledge of it filters through into his work. Although many of his illustrations are fictional, fantastical, or historical, here and there we see glimpses of the hidden lives of queer women in fin-de-siecle Paris. It also makes his work particularly notable, IMO, because unlike many of his straight male contemporaries, he did not depict sex and romance between women for the titillation of the straight male gaze. His women are complex, resisting bland stereotypes or didactic stories of innocence and fallen virtue. They are beautiful, sensual, dangerous and daring. Even idealised, they seem like real people. They have a self-possession that resists objectification. Their sexuality belongs to them, not to the viewer. Links: * The Forgotten Art of French Illustrator George Barbier, New York Times, 2008 (With thanks, much of the detail of Barbier’s life is drawn from this article). * George Barbier: Fashioning the Queer Identity, MA Fashion Blog, 2016. * Further illustrations from Les Liaisons Dangereuses. * Further illustrations from Les Chansons des Bilitis.

“Woo child, tired of the bullshit Go on dust your shoulders off, keep it moving”

-Lizzo 

Britain’s Biggest Secret - The Black Victorians

Pictured above is the Higdon family. This photograph was taken in the year 1898 in Britain. That is all we know about them.

Who were the Black Victorians? Mainstream history has virtually erased them from our minds and history books. We have been filled with images of slavery in America and across the world, but why is it that this chapter in black history was skipped? Why isn’t it equally common knowledge that in the midst of all of that darkness there was light, also.

Never before seen photos were uncovered, giving us over 200 images of glances into our past. Many of the photos did not include names or any details whatsoever, cloaking these people in mystery for all of time.

At one point in history, people of color were included in high society and walked the cobbled streets of Britain. The women wore intricate, voluminous gowns and wore their hair in curls and chignons. The men in suits and fair business. This may not have been the case for all black people in Britain, but for some it was. 

The Victorian Era was ruled under Queen Victoria, an era that is described as an opulent culture, although there were underlying bouts of poverty and child labor. History would like you to believe that black people didn’t arrive in Britain until 1948 during “The Empire Windrush”, when many Jamaican descendants entered the country, but that is not so. There has been proof to suggest otherwise. There is documentation that proves that it wasn’t uncommon to see black faces at a Shakespeare show. We’ve been there all along, humming softly in the background.

These images prove that you can’t take mainstream history at face value. Take the time to look behind the curtain and uncover OUR history. It’s as if our ancestors are just waiting for us to seek them out.

Who were the Black Victorians?

To see more of these images check out this video reel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwrYUzPqI

Happy Black History Month.

Omg that woman in the 2nd picture is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen

^^ditto

I love the photo of the kids, like, the one all professional and drawing attention to the camera, the other posing like a badass.

anyway this is on the wall of my favourite multi-story car park

Nanna nanna…

god dammit

Stop

Parents: This can’t be true about you, you didn’t show any signs when you were younger!

Also parents: *would have destroyed your life if you’d shown any signs when you were younger*

Also parents: *aggressively ignored all signs you’ve ever shown*

More good discussion on Indigenous twitter about taking down racist statues or renaming schools (i.e. Schools named after John A Macdonald’s who started the Residential School system and many other genocidal policies).

This thread is by Waubgeshig Rice‏.

i have an idea in my head where thor is just like. painfully incapable of being cissexist.

like some transphobic reporter asks him abt his sexuality and he’s “i have been attracted to many of your midgardian genders” and “what” and “my current paramor is genderqueer” “are they male or female” “they are neither of those two genders, that is what i have just said!” “oh well what were they born as“ “oh no, dear friend, u appear to be confusing genderqueer with genderfluid! the lady mystique assures me that these are two very different things, [extremely extended explanation]”

y/y

oh  my gosh yes

“but what are they biologically?”

“…they are human.”

oh my god

“But what is between their legs?!”

“That is not of your concern, but on a good  day, myself!”

IM SCREAMING

#thor’s the kind of guy who would hear that joke #you know #‘who wears the pants in your relationship?’ #‘well if we’re doing it the right way #neither of us’ #and he’d just BELLOW with laughter #because yes no pants for both of us #excellent (via tinpanali)

@northern-seidmadr

@blackkatmagic headcanon accepted

it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman

This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.

When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.

Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.

Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.

Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?

If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.

Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.

Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.

A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.

Needed to hear this today.

If you wanna have a clue what being a transgender person is all about, read this.

“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”

So many people have no idea how true this is.  Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.

One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.”  This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).

There can be benefits, here and there.  But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.

Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces.  That does not mean we belong in them.  Or feel comfortable anywhere near them.  Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying.  Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying.  You are in a constant state of panic around men.  And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family.  We NEVER feel safe.  And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men.  They’re horrifying.  What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk.  Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this.  I have never been an athlete.  My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable.  I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports.  The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING.  Men don’t see women as less than human.  They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.  

Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them.  Your LIFE depends on whether they notice.  That’s not safety.  That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place.  Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.

We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people.  Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe.  Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity.  We have to lie to get them.  We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are.  We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.

Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make.  If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:

Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.  

Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.

For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces.  But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women.  Everything else is social.  Everything else is acting.  Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die.  We can never really be anything other than female.

Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.

Cis folks, read this.

Seriously, y’all.  I still get angry messages from men for my absolute betrayal of masculinity.  Every moment in men’s spaces, every second on a special forces ODA, I was always intensely aware that I did NOT belong and everything about my outward appearance and overblown masculine presentation screamed “trying too hard”.  Now that I’ve transitioned, many men are enraged that I attained the highest masculine ideals and then threw it all away because they cannot fathom that my wants and needs and authentic self were not reflected in those things.

Explaining this to cis folks can be maddening because there’s a dominant assumption that I was some kind of Alpha Male™ and that my experiences at war irreparably damaged my psyche and somehow made me “want to be a woman” when nothing could be further from the truth.  I knew I was a girl long before I ever joined the military.  Enlisting was a self-destructive last-ditch effort to be a Real Man™ and in spite of the muscles, tattoos, beard, combat patrols, guns, knives, and all the other things that we code as explicitly masculine it was a massive failure.  During all of that time; having all of those experiences; I saw the absolute worst of what men think of women.  I saw all of the ways that toxic masculinity demands psychotic behavior from men and I was absolutely horrified.

the reason male comic book fans work themselves into a frenzied rage over “fake geek girls“ is because they think they can’t get a girlfriend because of their love for comic books (a.k.a nerdiness). if they accept that geek girls genuinely love comic books, then they’re left with the cold harsh reality that it’s not their nerdiness that makes them unattractive to women, but the fact that they are misogynistic condescending dickbags who need to be avoided AT ALL COSTS

It goes beyond just geek girls, too. There’s this recurring thing in male-dominated nerd circles where they reach a certain level of dependence on the concept that they are shunned rebels in an unjust world, and they just cannot fucking let go of it. They break their own communities into factions to ensure there’s always someone to judge and feel cheated by. Look at the gamer variety’s arguments over consoles, or how much they enjoy complaining about ‘casuals’ and ‘care bears’.

This is why the idea that women are invading male nerd’s happy places is at it’s core bullshit obfuscation that cannot be defended by the excuse that oh they just don’t have good social skills.  They don’t want to get away from their issues with pals they can trust. They want to feel wronged. They want to feel like someone has stolen their victories from them. They are kings dethroned by rabble, and the only thing left is to live in the wilderness with their objectively correct opinions while the cruel and stupid masses devour themselves. Clinging to that scornfully righteous feeling of being hampered by society’s foolishness and betrayal is their driving goal, no matter how small the group they’re defining as society has to be to get it. So long as they manage that, the world is simple and they have no reason to grow or learn anything.

Women undeniably catch the most shit from this. Basic american misogyny has done half the work for them, making women both easy targets and easily otherized. The vulnerability that comes from desiring anything that might reject you threatens their narrative of uncomplicated and unquestionable superiority, so women must be EVEN MORE out to get them than most people! The thought that someone so perfect to act as the face of the enemy might be in the same position as them is anathema.

Essentially, they are really fucked up.

As OP said, avoid at all costs.

this is the best and most insightful commentary anyone has ever added to this post, let this version get the next 100k reblogs 

As a nerdy gamer girl, you took all of my feeling that I couldn’t describe over the years and out them into words. Thank you.

Wash rinse and repeat for white male ‘alt-right’ assholes.

Not every day has to “count.” Some days, your purpose is to make it to the next one. That counts too.

Damn I needed this today.

Me too, thank you.

Mom told me once, “Always do your best. And always remember that some days your best is going to be just showing up. And that’s okay.”