i dont understand the need to hide tattoos if you work with children. i mean you’re literally working with people that color on their body with markers all day if they could. hell they color YOU with markers if you don’t watch them close enough.
the problem is the parents who need to get the fuck over themselves.
I have tattoos, visible piercings, and a cane. Guess which one little kids care about. Go on, guess.
(via redheadpowers)
And then I hung up on my mother for criticizing Michelle Obama’s hair.
The racial politics of the Boston situation are really personally resonant to me as an American person of Eastern European/Central Asian background whose family are fairly recent immigrants (I’m third generation).
I most definitely read white, as the bombers did/do. I have all those privileges. I am the gateway to Other, my foreign family invisible/unmentioned until racist points need to be made about other more visible Asians, other Others, brown and Black folks. Then my body, my features, my family, my culture come under inspection. I become Other only when it’s ‘useful’. Otherwise other white people are happy to regard me as white too.
So I see what is happening here - these bombers’ foreignness becomes a proxy map: they are understandable to racists only when they become a map to people darker than them, to Muslims everywhere. As white people they are not deemed ‘understandable’ as violent terrorists, even though we have a long history in this country of white (non-foreign) terrorist bombings.
Flexible whiteness. It’s where I live. It’s horrifying to watch operate, even as I myself even as Other am shielded by white privilege.
(via karnythia)
A guide to Flying Lessons, by Lintilla Flufferbutt.
But he feels it anyway, doesn’t he. Against rhyme or reason, against every instinct the Crows beat into him. Against every atom of his being, he falls for the Warden. Charismatic, dangerous, sexy as hell… The Warden is Zevran’s on thing he can’t avoid. LIke a singularity, the warden sucks the assassin into his orbit, and inevitably, the assassin succumbs.
Whether he wants to or not.
Massages notwithstanding, Zevran had no intention of falling for the Warden, just seducing the Commander of the Grey to remain within that protective orbit. But funny how these things work out, isn’t it? Sometimes, you just can’t help yourself. It’s more than a pair of boots, or pretty gloves, it’s more than gold bars and silver. It’s gravity, it’s a tornado. It’s inescapable.
He never thought he’d ever feel this way. The Crows had ripped it out of him and cauterized the wound, after all. But these things have a way of regrowing. No matter how you salt the ground. And here he was… praying to never be ejected from an orbit he never saw himself get sucked into.
Brasca!
(via commanderbishoujo)
I’ve read a lot of great essays about how fandom is female-majority and creates a female gaze and a safe space for women and etc. But spend five minutes in fandom and you’ll have an unsettling question.
Why does a female-majority, feminist culture hate female characters so much?
It’s not a question of if it happens. You know it does. You can go into any fandom and see it. Some fandoms are worse than others, but it’s always there. Scroll down the Tumblr tag for any show, movie, book, comic, whatever, and you’ll see nothing but love for the men, and a lot of unjustified hate for the women, maybe with a few defenders here and there insisting on their love for the women in the face of all that hate.
To be clear, we’re not talking about female villains. Male villains get just as much hate. It’s fine if you hate Bellatrix Lestrange or Dolores Umbridge, you’re supposed to. (I personally stan for Bella, but I realize that wasn’t the authorial intent.) This is about people hating Hermione, Ginny and Luna, but loving Harry, Ron and Neville. This is about how ambiguous male antiheroes, like Snape, Zuko, or pretty much any male vampire protagonist can get away with walking that fine line between good and evil and not only remain sympathetic, but be even more beloved for how ~tortured~ he is, but when a female character is morally gray that bitch has to die.
So you can’t tell me it’s okay that you hate Sansa because you also hate Joffrey and he’s a dude. They’re not comparable. It isn’t even comparable if you pick a female antihero. Let’s do this apples to apples, here.
We all know that fandom does this. We all know that it’s fucked up and symptomatic of internalized sexism. What’s really fucking weird about it, though, is that the women doing this hating often aren’t ignorant. These are feminists. These are women who can go on meta-analyses of the writing. Some will hide behind pseudo-feminist reasons for their hate—oh, it’s the writing, we just aren’t given strong female characters! (I saw this used for the women of AtLA: Katara, Toph, Azula, et al. This was about when I just backed away slowly because I know a lost cause when I see it.) I’ve seen women who denied being sexist, but couldn’t name a single female character they liked. And it’s always that the female characters aren’t good enough, even when they obviously have a double standard, and they’re measuring women on an impossible scale full of contradictions and no-win binds, while the men are just embraced and loved pretty much for existing.
The reaction nearly every time one of these women is called out is not to say, “Huh, you may have a point, I should examine the way I judge and process women’s actions more closely,” but an insistence of their feminism, followed by a more detailed description of why that particular woman is terrible and she hates her, as if the whole point were not that fandom is already oversaturated with that kind of hate, and as if the person doing the calling out were not already 110% done with that bullshit.
Particularly telling is that male-dominated corners of fandom do not have this problem. They fetishize, they objectify, they ignore. They don’t hate like this.
We know it happens. What I want to know is WHY.
Theories follow below the cut.
Can I just mention that I’m still a bit tickled whenever I see someone linking my little Jowan’s Intention Fix?
Breast pumps are for working mothers, babies in the NICU, for nights with the babysitter. They are for mothers who are separated from their children or are struggling to breastfeed a child who cannot latch. They are for donating milk to children who need it. They are for many reasons and not one of them has to do with protecting society from the sight of a nursing woman.
(via alexandraerin)
