I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

this was one of the first lessons I had in psych too and we were never told about this either nor was it in any of the reading materials

I never knew this.

I also never knew this about Kitty Genovese, but I do know that, in fact, many of the dozen (not thirty-eight) people who witnessed some part of the attack (which took place after 3AM, on a chilly night in March when most people’s windows were closed) tried to help in some way.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

(Also, going by the content of the murderer’s confession, it was indeed a random attack.)

how on EARTH was this “scientifically” studied but the details gotten so wrong and the wrong as hell conclusion published and taught in schools?!?!?! where were those scientists observation skills?! on vacation?!

How to take facts and turn them into an urban legend that gets taught in schools: Make a bad made-for-t.v.-movie about it, watch it, believe everything the movie says, annnnnnnd go!  That’s how it gets taught as this supposed “scientific study.”  Someone got fucking lazy.

Spread the real deal, kids.

A book about this, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Nonfiction this year! if anyone wants to check it out try your local library!

I have heard her name so many times and had truly no idea how outrageously irresponsible the scientific community has been in misrepresenting her story. This is a travesty. Kitty Genovese and others liker her deserve better, deserve dignity and truth in their absences, and I hope we keep fighting for those truths.

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

This point is invalid unless you use an example in your sentence

I CAN SENTENCE HOW I WANT THANK

BEAUTIFUL

you see thats why i love english

I like to velociraptor around my house at 2 in the morning.

GOOD

I feel like the original post should be “Any noun can verb if you don’t care enough”?

Before February ends, a miracle is going to happen

I receive it.

I pray it happens for all of us

reblog if your blog is actually safe for bi people.

reblog if you believe bi people deserve to have a space and voice.

reblog if you recognize the specific struggles that no people go through.

reblog if you know bi people are more than “half gay, half straight”.

reblog if you believe bi rights and representation aren’t just “catering to straight people.”

reblog if you see us.

reblog if you know we are safe on your blog.

an old white dude in taco bell saw me wearing my wal-mart vest and gave me a speech about how i need to quit retail and get a REAL job so i could one day “get a car like that” and pointed at my own damn car

for everyone that asked, i just said “you’re right” and then got in my car and drove away

Remember when Tumblr just invented a Greek god

Oh @hyena-bro my sweet summer child, allow me to tell you the story of Mesperyian, the goddess who never was and never will be.

So it all started with this tumblr post, right?

And obviously people mentioned the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, and the benefits of answering such goddesses as the most beautiful. But then Tumblr user 28weekslaterhater mentioned to answer the goddess Mesperyian (most beloved daughter of Hades) as the most beautiful. According to them, “jealous ho” Aphrodite burnt half of Mesperyian’s face off in a blind rage for being more beautiful than her.

This post began to spread to the fact-check-less masses of Tumblr, and more mythology sprouted up about this so-called “Mesperyian”, how she was the goddess of torture and punishment (even though a goddess of punishment already existed) and had to wear a cool mask because of the aforementioned face burning.

Everyone took it as gospel for years until various Tumblr users pointed out “hey if you happen to just… look up this goddess, the only thing you’ll find is this Tumblr post”. After that, it had been exposed that Mesperyian never fucking existed and that Tumblr user just completely made them up on the fly.

And that’s how Tumblr invented a Greek goddess

That’s one of the most greek god mythology things I’ve ever heard and based on that she’s to be treated as new to the roster.

Hades: I’ve only had Mesperyian for a year and a half but if anything happened to her I’d kill everyone on Earth and then myself

@belikebumblebee

Apparently your post will never be flagged if you mark it with a sfw tag and that’s what the bots are doing.

nice algorithm, staff!

I just love how in English you say “great minds think alike”, which is a completely positive thing since you’re kinda praising yourself, but in German you go like “zwei Dumme, ein Gedanke” = “two fools, one thought” 

German is beautiful, isn’t it

Kind of reminds me when my french teacher explained us the french idiom “L’espoir fait vivre” (Hope makes us live) and he asked me how Germans say it and I was like “Hope dies last” and his legit answer was:

“See, that’s why no one likes you!”

controversial but in my many years as a minor on tumblr i’ve never seen a single sex worker. they always block minors, mark their blogs as nsfw, and don’t spam the popular sfw tags. even if you, as a minor, actually look for them, as long as you listed your age truthfully in the registration, you won’t be able to find them.

what i, instead, saw as a minor was:

porn bots (which could be stopped by: captcha, double confirmation for accounts, not allowing url shorteners, not allowing rebloggers to delete captions, i would even be ok with hyperlinks not being allowed in reblogs)

fetishes and kinksters (which could be stopped by: adding more tags to the nsfw filter, including fetishes/kinks that appear as sfw)

people who forget tag their shit (which could be stopped by: an auto-tagging system for sensitive tags that would work similarly to the current block for apparently nsfw posts, but can give the op the option to delete incorrect tags)

pro-ana, pro-mia, romanticization of self-harm (which could be stopped by: banning the whole tag, as it just happened)

nazi, terfs (just kick them out for hate speech like twitter does)

pro-map thankfully only appeared once i was already past 18 but of course you could just ban the whole community + tag as it just happened.

prevent usernames with words that hate and pedophilic groups use to flag from being chosen at blog creation.

while i know that tumblr is a 13+ website, nsfw content was hidden from minors last year. most cp was deleted + outlawed (both irl and drawn) for good not even last month. and while those are recent changes they did make tumblr, overall, 13+ appropriate.

i do not care much for porn, i just feel like they are solving the problem the wrong way and punishing a group of people who did nothing to harm minors. there were smarter solutions to this problem that were ignored in the favor of a very sloppy solution that doesn’t even cover stuff like sfw kink blogs, porn bots who don’t post pictures (most of them), people who just won’t tag their nsfw, hate groups and other non-sex related communities who are extremely dangerous for minors.

Honestly I’ve been an adult the entire time I’ve been on tumblr and even I’ve never come across a sex worker blog. In fact, I wasn’t even really aware they were a big thing on the site until very recently. Obviously they’re running their blogs responsibly. 

Everything else you listed though? You can’t avoid them if you try. 

Honestly, there groups that don’t want to be found, won’t be found. Sex work blogs? They have no reason to want to be found by people outside of the community, they’ll just get hate. At best, people might see their occasional “stop hurting sex workers” post. The blogs you mentioned? Want to be seen. Want to be visible.

Ok I 100% support this and it’s my number one frustration with this, but the reason it’s happening is because sesta/fosta laws go into place in a month and if there’s ads for sex work on Tumblr, even if they didn’t know they existed, Tumblr could be sued. Tell your legislation that you want sesta/fosta repealed!

you can really tell who’s been on this site for 6+ years this week

most of tumblr: OH GOD TUMBLR’S DYING!!!!

old users:

Forest fires are so weird. On what other planet do you just suddenly have such a violent chemical reaction? Idk probably none cause on what other planet do you have a bunch of carbon-carbon bonds sitting immersed in a bunch of oxygen? It’s not a stable situation, and after the fire has to be restored with solar power

Venus!

Fun Venus fact: it has fewer craters on its surface than you’d expect, and they all look suspiciously young. As far as we can tell, the whole surface of Venus is not that much more than a half billion years old. So what makes this so?

It is Earth-sized, which is theoretically enough to sustain tectonic activity. But we don’t see traditional plates there. Remember that Earth’s tectonic plates come in two flavors: continental plates, which are long-lived and low density, floating high in the mantle, and oceanic plates, which are heavier, younger, and are continually refreshed, spreading out from the center of the oceans and being subducted back in to the mantle where they collide with the continents.

As an incidental consequence, this means that a lot of ocean water gets sucked up in to the mantle during the subduction process. Water is very much unstable at tectonic pressures and temperatures, so it usually finds its way back out to the surface as a volcanic gas or something, but in the meantime there’s enough of it down there to lubricate the movement of the plates. Basically on the same principle that makes wastewater injection cause small earthquakes during the fracking process.

Now, Venus is likely to have had liquid water oceans at some point, but the runaway greenhouse effect has long since boiled them off. This means that a)the weight of the oceans doesn’t land disproportionately on a subsets of the plates, and b)there’s no water being pulled down there to keep the plates well-greased. So nowadays on Venus, subduction just… doesn’t happen. The plates are too rigid and dry, too homogeneous. So they stay locked in place relative to one another.

That means Venus has volcanoes but not really earthquakes. The energy that would be released in the motion of plates just builds, and builds, and builds. Until it doesn’t any more. Every [n] hundred million years or so, Venus has its one earthquake, which carries all the accumulated energy of all the earthquakes that ever happened on Earth between now and the Cambrian era, all at once.

This is enough to melt the entire surface and then some. The whole crust, all the mountains and valley networks and continents and basins and everything that floats on the fluid mantle, is subducted all at once, falling back in the planet’s interior. Then, with the whole planet molten, the surface can cool enough to form a new crust.

Anyway, that’s why global warming is bad.

Holy fuck The whole crust Melts All at once???? #amazing

alarming for my Venusian real estate portfolio if true

Andrew Wakefield sharing his research (1998)

Being a millennial is getting buyer’s remorse over a $3.83 pack of oreos.

This is genuinely hilarious but fuckin terrible

people say dolphins are smart but there not smart enough to not be Shity grey rubber tubes flappin about in the gotdamn ocean

*they’re

congratulations! you are the piss lord of shit mountain. thank u for hefting turds down the mountainside so that we, the proles, may feast on your bounteous craps

can we talk about how this is the single greatest sentence ever said on this website? this post changed us as a community. not a day goes by i dont think about it

Unpopular opinion but gender is fucking fake and if someone doesn’t want to identify as a “man,” “woman,” or your pre-approved Non-binary™ terms then so fucking be it. If someone wants to be stargender then who cares it has zero bearing on your life, it doesn’t matter if you understand it you football loving bastards.

You go you funky little starbabies, the cosmos are in your eyes