“I hear some of you complaining “women always say they want a nice guy.” I know lots of women — I’m even related to a few — and I can’t say I’ve ever heard any of them say that. I can’t prove it, but this sounds like one of those things stand-up comedians say about women and everyone else just repeats. I’ve also never known a woman who cries when she breaks a nail — although I’ve known a few who swear like a 15-year-old sailor in jail — and I’ve never had a woman ask me if her outfit made her look fat unless she actually wanted and subsequently appreciated my opinion. So either I’ve stumbled upon a secret trove of women who aren’t passive-aggressive sob machines, or you need to stop mistaking Dane Cook routines for peer-reviewed sociological studies.”—Lore Sjöberg, Alt Text: Taking Another Look at the Myth of the ‘Nice Guy’ (via babyspooks)
I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’
and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?
Is anyone else just instantly endeared by people chillin’ on surfaces that aren’t made for sitting? Like hopped up on a counter with a cup of coffee, cross-legged on the floor eating cereal, drinking wine fully clothed in a bathtub, sprawled out on the hood of a car with snacks for a meteor shower, etc? I don’t know why I love it so much, but I do.
Ok so we all know that the answer to “Where did Captain America learn to
steal a car?” is “Nazi Germany” but I think the more pressing question
here is when the fuck did this complete maniac get a driver’s license
Because ok, Mighty Mouse 1.0 is too poor to own a car, too short to
reach the pedals, has vision problems, and is a goddamn New Yorker in the motherfucking 1930s, why on earth would he ever have learned to drive?
So this little bastard can’t even tell the gas from the brakes, he gets
all beefified, he goes on tour with the USO. Unless one of the showgirls
coached him through stalling out a car all over some Hollywood back
lot, he still can’t drive. He goes to Europe. At some point, some genius
looks at him and thinks “this strapping specimen of American hunkhood
obviously knows his way around a vehicle, let’s give him a motorcycle,”
and Steve “no parachute” Rogers is like “how hard could this be?” and
promptly wraps himself around approximately eight trees at the same time.
So then he’s kickin’ ass, fightin’ Hydra, and it’s just months of Bucky being like
“give me the goddamn keys, Steven,” and Dum Dum and Morita endlessly
encouraging his fucking insane Fury Road bullshit, like the Howling Commandos just use “grenade” as code for “Rogers” when they’re reporting
why yet another truck has been destroyed beyond recognition. Yes, sir, another grenade, I agree, sir, it’s very odd that we keep losing vehicles in the same way, that’s the third this month alone
So then he’s in the future and SHIELD is sorting his shit out, and
they’re not going to force Captain goddamn America to wait in line at
the DMV, they’re all in complete awe in him and they’ve seen the old
reels of him on his bike, so when they issue him his driver’s license without any type of road test
they go ahead and give him a motorcycle license too
and steve is like …neat.
Ok so then Bucky is back, shit is settled down, everyone’s heading
somewhere and Steve gets in the driver’s seat and Buck’s like WHOA WHOA
WHOA are you people out of your goddamn minds?! Why is Steve driving, is
this some kind of mission, are we heading into a combat zone, is the
plan for the vehicle to get blown up?? GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEYS STEVEN
And Sam is all “what are you talking about, Steve’s a great driver, I saw him jump his bike over a car once”
And Buck is all “yes but have you seen him use a turn signal?”
And Steve’s like, “Listen, we never needed to ‘signal’ our ‘turns’ in Nazi Germany.”
And after that Bucky always drives.
Fin.
okay but
this is basically how just about everyone in the us army in ww2 learned to drive
most infantrymen didn’t receive any instruction in vehicle use, but during ww2 they shipped about half a million jeeps overseas. most of them got used by logistics units and a lot got shipped to russia, but there were still so dang many of them that they would hand them to just about anyone who could have an excuse to use one.
gotta run a message? here’s a jeep. running gear up the line? take a jeep. got a 24 hour pass? just bring this jeep back safe, will you? you’re a cartoonist? here’s your own jeep. they handed them out like candy to everyone.
it wasn’t unreasonable on the face of it because the us was a car culture basically from the minute the car was invented, so most rural kids knew how to drive already. but tons of them didn’t, and at some point they’d almost certainly end up behind the wheel of a jeep.
as a result, accidents were hilariously common.
they pretty much assumed everyone knew how to drive based on the exact same logic used in this post. it was only after the war that somebody sat down and was like, yo, maybe we should make sure these kids know what a car is before we let them drive them.
my favorite compliment i’ve gotten at college was from a drunk frat boy who said i had “the body of the girl of his dreams” then paused and held up a hand to stop me from saying anything and continued “…..but the haircut of the boy of my dreams”
Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University
I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:
HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD
Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.
Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.
If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.
From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.
Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.
What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.
This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)
There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.
How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.
The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.
What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.
From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.
That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.
Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.
But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.
The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.
We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.
“At 23, JK Rowling was broke. Tina Fey was working at the Y.M.C.A. Oprah had just gotten fired from her first job as a TV reporter and Walt Disney had declared bankruptcy.”—Read This If You’re 23 And Lost by Heidi Priebe (via twentysomethingstate)
It’s fine to want things, but don’t act like you’re a victim because you want high quality stuff without having to pay higher prices for it lol.
it cant just be me who finds it rather jarring and unnerving that a 34 year old man and self-described “libertarian” wrote this post and yet it still gained some kind of traction
what bras aren’t overpriced though like by all means let me know
bras that you entitled “feminists” want: shiny, $50, money that could go to third world kids who need water bra made of papier-mâché and elmer’s school glue: does the job just fine, basically $0.00, checkermate feminists
ok but why do cis dudes always do this lmao… why do cis dudes constantly feel the need to argue with women about how much it costs to be a woman. has it occurred to a single one of them that how the fuck would they know? jfc
I have NEVER found a bra in my size for less than 50$ so bye
on the VERY RARE occasions i have found a bra for less than $50 in my size, they’ve fallen apart quickly and they hurt like hell. have you ever worn a bra, dude? apparently not. the cheap ones HURT. also, the cheap ones invariably come in small cup sizes. i do not have small boobs. bigger boobs = more expensive bras. you try bra shopping sometime.
whenever someone talks shit about the cost of bras, it almost ALWAYS turns out to be a cis dude who’s never had to purchase one or experience the shopping hell that is bra shopping in his life
i just bought 5 bras, plain and boring as hell,
ON SALE, and they still came to $170 before shipping and cross country/border duties. Once you added that in (because they don’t have that store here, and the sizes here cut off at 44), each bra came to $45
WHILE. PLAIN. AS FUCK. AND. ON. SALE.
shut your ignorant fucking mouth
As a plus size woman, let me educate you on the price of my favorite bras that are in my size, cover all my boob, and keep them in place. Mind you, I require all these things since I am a teacher and I work with seventh graders therefore not wearing a bra is not an option, and the only kinds of bras I fit in are plus size bras. I’m a fucking DDD, only certain stores carry my size and I fucking need bras.
So, the bras I like:
Soma’s Balconet Bra (comfiest, best coverage for my chest fat sacks)
MAN LOOKS LIKE THAT BRA IS $60 FUCKING DOLLARS.
What if I want to minimize these fuckers?
GEE. TWO BRAS FOR $120. MAN, I MUST BE A PICKY BITCH. LET’S SEE IF I CAN FIND A DDD BRA ANYWHERE ELSE. OH WAIT, I CAN’T. BECAUSE I HAVE BIG TITS AND I GET PUNISHED FOR THEM.
So, after much hassling from my parents and my dear roommate, I went in to talk to my physics teacher and I went “So, it’s come to my attention that I’m way too ADHD to be getting as much out of this class as you seem to think I should be, do you have any tips.” Because, you know, sitting in a classroom watching a teacher derive equations on the board for an hour doesn’t play great with attention issues and a total inability to sit still. It also causes problems on exams with a strict time limit for obvious reasons. And like it’s not that uncommon an issue so, foolishly, I assumed that he would have literally any help at all to offer me.
He suggested that I make sure I’ve done the reading before every class, in detail, so that I won’t have to pay as much attention in class since I’ll ‘already know the material.’ Because clearly reading between twenty and fifty pages of extremely dense physics textbook is going to go so much better. CLEARLY the best solution to attention deficit problems. OBVIOUSLY. The more fool ME for not thinking of it, right? Who wouldn’t think of that as the obvious solution to ADHD? God, Moran, what are you even doing with your life if you’re not meticulously doing the reading for everything? Because God forbid I realize that doing the reading is literally useless to me, even in classes I give even a single iota of a fractional fuck about as anything except a mandatory requirement.
Since I’m probably abusing sarcasm at this point: I just want to punch him in his smug asshole face. Really hard. A lot. Also the next time he laughs at me for not getting something I might actually flip a table.
I love seeing people heal on here. I saw you talking about suicide in June and now you can’t stop smiling. I saw you swear off relationships in March and now you’re planning a wedding. Man, the storm don’t last forever. I’m proud of y'all.
I swear, so often this site is like a weird little window into peoples’ lives and personal journeys because we put our saddest most awful thoughts on our blogs we’d never share anywhere else and so nobody in our ‘real lives’ even KNOWS the struggles and therefore, the amazing triumphs we’ve had, how hard we’re fighting, but I see this and I see people I follow overcome horrible shit nobody should ever have to even have nightmares about feeling, not once in their lives
but then I see them come out of it - or don’t, but live with it, and stick around for just one more day, and keep trying and living and just, every single fucking day, no matter how painful, my most common emotion here when I look at my friends is I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, PLEASE KEEP GOING.
I’m very glad that movies like Pacific Rim and Fury Road and The Force Awakens are as colorful as they are, because I am really, really tired of desaturated movies.
GOD ME TOO.
My buddy, my guy. Come close and listen to me.
You can have an apocalyptic, gritty, brutal movie with color. Really. You can. I promise.
ok but did every kid have a certain historical time period that they were REALLY into?? like I was super into the california gold rush when I was 9 for no reason
Fuck I’m walking downtown and I pass a group of guys staring at me and I think “great catcall time” but then one guy goes “you look like you could kill a man a million different ways with just your bare hands”. This. This is an acceptable comment to give a girl on the street.
Slytherin:
Family crests and ballet lessons, a perfume your grandmother picks for you. Black coffee in Paris at 7 in the morning, champagne in New York in the evening. Cashmere sweaters, turtlenecks and high waisted skirts. Heavy diamonds and chins held high. Upper east side, Monaco, shopping in Brussels. Lying through clenched teeth. Northern lights. Hiding pain and using people. Contradictions. Daisychains. Richard Siken. Glitter socks. Learning French. Louboutins. Traditions and secrets. Green and Silver.
Gryffindor:
Hands on fire, bandaids and ginger ale. Treehouses and make believe. The kissing of wounds to soothe the pain. Stardust, bruised knees, pinky swears. Sunflowers and David Bowie. Lightning, thunderstorms, tornadoes. Too much energy; too much caffeine. The smell of a bonfire, the crunch of first snow, laughter resonating through crisp winter air. Fingers intertwining and whispered gossip followed by giggles. Supernovae. The roar of a sportscar's engine. Truth or dare. Courage and morals. The knight in rusty armor who forgot his horse at home. Red and gold.
Ravenclaw:
Kneesocks, Sylvia Plath and the dusty smell of books. Paint drying on fingertips and hair in every colour of the rainbow. Oxford dictionary, the louvre, shadowpuppets. Dancing in the rain, overthinking, posters and empty canvases filling dorm rooms and adorning bedroom walls. The first touch of a paintbrush, forget-me-nots, hunger for knowledge. Metaphors. Fanfiction. Black boots and leather jackets. John Lennon sunglasses. Tartan. Poetry. Blue hair and black lipstick. Creativity and curiosity. Blue and silver.
Hufflepuff:
Promises and shooting stars. Giggles, goosebumps. Stolen kisses behind the quidditch field. Bumblebees and libraries, fiery hair and squad goals. Shared breakfast, tutoring. Growing. Security. Those friends you can tell everything, and they will never judge. Libraries and open fields. Golden retrievers, the smell of sawdust and hay, horse riding. Roadtrips. Study groups. Ivy League. Scholarships. Humble, soft, friendly. Loyal and smart. Stubborn and accepting. Yellow and black.
does anyone else ever unintentionally read a negative review of something you rly like and you have to consciously make an effort not to internalize it and trick yourself into hating the thing you loved 2 seconds ago
