why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.
Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?
yes!! oh my god!!
so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!
but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.
But how do you know it was platonic
i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.
lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.
actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.
whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).
i mean yeah there’s also a lot of angst here too because after the expedition their lives went in very different directions.
clark comes home and immediately acclimates to a hero’s life. he gets married and has a son who he names meriwether lewis clark after his best friend. he has a respectable government position and lives a long and happy life.
meanwhile lewis struggles to get accustomed to civilized life again. he misses the freedom of the expedition. he still sleeps on buffalo skins spread out on his bedroom floor. he writes that he is determined to find himself a wife but no woman can seem to stand him; one even flees town in the middle of the night to avoid seeing him again the next day. with his lifelong history of depression (which comes in bursts which, to me, seem a lot like manic depression), lewis spirals downward. he’s hated and conspired against in his political career, he starts to drink heavily, he stops talking to all of the people who had been closest to him.
he finally works himself up to taking a trip to dc to deliver his journals to jefferson and on the boat trip up he attempts to kill himself multiple times. he’s described as appearing frantic and afraid, and tries to calm himself down by repeatedly telling himself that clark is on his way, that clark will be coming to save him. we know that at this time he wrote clark a letter, but clark burned it so we don’t know what it said. i’m ashamed of the things i’d do to get my hands on that letter.
lewis dies in an inn on the natchez trace of two bullet wounds, and it’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder; everyone close to him seemed to accept it was suicide, including clark, who wrote, “oh, i fear the weight of his mind has overcome him”.
But what happened to Sacagawea and her son?
ok, more on sacagawea, because she deserves any and all the credit she gets plus a whole lot more honestly:
when sacagawea was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped by the hidatsa tribe and sold alongside another shoshone woman to charbonneau as his “wives”. charbonneau was officially hired by lewis and clark not just because he was a french fur trader who knew the pacific northwest territory as well as the hidatsa language, but because sacagawea’s knowledge of the shoshone language and people would benefit them as they traveled through their lands. sacagawea was not just some inconvenient extra, she was a purposeful and valued addition to the corps.
sacagawea had her son, jean-baptiste, while l&c and co. ™ were still wintering at fort mandan, so she was literally carrying this child on her back for the entire journey. she was also the only woman travelling in the corps! and she was given duties! strong and capable and literally perfect i love her so much!
while travelling on a riverway, the boat sacagawea was travelling on capsized, and along with saving her son she also rescued valuable supplies and papers; both the captains were blown away with how well she acted under that sort of duress (and how badly her husband did lmao). travelling through native lands, tribes were more likely to think these men were not dangerous purely because sacagawea was with them, so she literally saved their white asses through association. she was a necessary and important figure in council meetings between the corps and tribal chiefs. clark called her “janey” and called her son “pompy”. (cute.) when they do get to the ocean, sacagawea literally demands clark (which she would have to do through like three layers of translators) to let her go to the shore with them, because damn it she worked just as hard as anyone else and she wants to see the fucking whales man.
perhaps most remarkably, when the corps finally did encounter the shoshone tribe, among the very first group of people they encountered was sacagawea’s brother, who she hadn’t seen for five years. that’s. so incredible. like, that’s one of the most amazing things to me. this survivor of child sexual abuse bravely treks across huge stretches of territory with a military expedition and is reunited with her family, however briefly, and. god. i’m crying.
sacagawea was not paid for her contributions to the expedition, because the contract was with her husband. she gave birth to a daughter, lisette, six years after the expedition. she died at 25 years old of a sickness she apparently had throughout her adulthood (which may have been further complicated from her early abuse and pregnancies). after her death, clark adopted both of her children.
i love this beautiful brave bird woman just as much if not more than i love my adventurous southern sons.
i’ve seen a lot of comments about the really sorry state of spelling and grammar in the expedition journals, and just wanted to let everyone know that, since no one had a dictionary with them on the expedition, they had to spell out words phonetically, and for the most part everyone wrote how they talked. by that logic, linguists have determined that by reading the journals of expedition members aloud you can actually start to mimic their accents! lewis was a virginian with some book learning, so his passages tend to have more eloquent language and less visible accent. however, clark was kentucky born and bred, and manages to misspell “mosquito”more than sixteen different ways.
Also, there’s a national memorial in Montana that Clark carved his name into, called Pompey’s Pillar. Clark named it after Sacajawea’s son.
In another of your regular “this is the kind of person you follow” updates, I would like to remind you all that, in my latest novel (the “earth is where the trouble comes from” one), I have created an entire race of super OP plant mages who are descended from dryads solely so that I am able to point to my MC’s right hand woman and say “She’s asexual, and before you ask, yes, she is a tree.”
pop culture intertextuality is just so damn *fascinating*
today a parody movie (50 shades of black) comes out, based on the 50 shades of grey movie, which was based on the 50 shades book, which was based on twilight, which was somewhat based on interview with the vampire (which anne rice based on an earlier short story she wrote), which was based on Dracula and other vampire stories, which originally came from Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (even though Vampires were a thing in folk tales before then, he was the one who made them all classy, etc.)
so really, like so many things, this is all Lord Byron’s fault.
My brain (and my impending deadline) says work on my thesis, but my heart says continue writing Cesare/Micheletto fic. Someone please motivate me to do the responsible thing here.
*pictures you eating fully-grown musketeers, screaming and stabbing ineffectively in your mouth*
I feed on the blood of heroes and the hearts of virgins. They flail and writhe to no avail, for I am a dark and eldritch thing from beyond the stars. It is vital that I believe in myself, for my worshipers are…gone, now. We shall say no more about their fate.
It is the best goddamned thing you’ve seen all day.
Say hello to the Infinite Jukebox, an experiment in looping songs. See those curves cutting through the circle? What this bad boy does is analyze the song for similar beats and sounds, then randomly skips between said beats forever.
Yes, you heard me. Forever. With this piece of musical genius, you can literally play the same song for as long as you want - It will create the song that never ends.
And if that’s not enough, you can upload your own MP3s to this bitch and it’ll loop those as well.
Have fun, kids.
heads up - you can’t put this in a tab in chrome, then switch to a different tab and forget about it, because it’ll stop. But if you open it in its own window it’ll happily go on indefinitely.
More “wtf are humans, please leave the rest of us be” stuff:
Human reactions to fear!
No, I’m not talking about screaming or freezing in one spot and pissing yourself. I’m talking about the weirder, more specific-to-only-humans fear reactions.
Like singing.
Idk how many of you have watched people play horror video games, but a surprising amount of people start narrating what’s going on in a sing-song voice.
Imagine being an alien, walking in a horrific, dark tunnel with these weird gangly creatures, you’re all scared out of your wits and then one of them starts fucking singing.
In a dark cave. While everyone’s terrified.
“ ♫ ~We are all gonna fucking die, this is terrible and I wanna go hooooome~ ♬ ”
Imagine being a human in an alien crew in space and leaving with bright blue or pink hair and the color fades and everybody on board wonders WHY you are losing your colors??? Is it the lack of greens? Are you sad? Angry? They just don’t know??
“HUMAN BIOLOGY IS BAFFLING”
These are the kinds of pure posts I come to this place for.
i swear to god, men raising their voice is the most terrifying thing in the whole world. they dont understand, like its an immediate panic response, game over
I actually had no idea women found this so scary
my downstairs neighbors fight on a regular basis, and every time he starts yelling i’m a little afraid he’s going to kill her. i have no reason to think this except that he is a man and he is angry
My math teacher has a loud voice and a temper and he scares the living shit out of me almost everyday. He’s made me and other kids cry more than once and he and his teacher buddies make a joke out of terrifying students.
this was women in general? i knew my gf didn’t like it but I was unaware if this affected most women
Yes, it does
As a woman, I had no idea it effected other women like this. I was too afraid to even talk about it. I thought I was weak. Thanks for bringing attention to this.
My dad thinks it’s funny that I used to cry when he raised his voice. I freak out whenever some one does. Once my director did, and I started crying I couldn’t stop. I’m glad to see I’m not alone…
This is so important– seeing how common this is– and I also want you all to know that this is not normal. It isn’t something instinctively ingrained into women, to be afraid of men. There is no natural state of men being a threat that women constantly have to be afraid of. This is cultural. So many women and girls here have a mutual understanding of this feeling, and I think it really shows an unsettling truth about our society, particularly about how men are raised to act and how so many women have this defensive reaction gradually develop. It’s so important that these people have their voices heard, because it teaches us about problems that we just can’t deny the existence of any longer.
I’m glad I’m not the only one
My fellow men, pay attention. I didn’t realize how scary this could be until one of my exes explained it to me, and it’s heartbreaking.
Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)
Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.
I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.
I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.
Don’t tell me it’s too hard, that you just can’t do it, or that you “shouldn’t have to.” I’m 53 years old and just now getting the hang of it, and if this old dog can learn something new, so can you.
how free are we really, as human beings, to make our own decisions?
where should the line be drawn between heroism and cruelty?
ought the quest for individual honor to be prioritized over the lives of others?
questions i have:
what accounts for the bro code dissonance of agamemnon stealing achilles’s girl when he’s literally leading an army in a war that was started because paris stole his brother’s girl?
is diomedes single?
to the nearest thousand, how many heart emojis would achilles text to patroclus in an average day if the technology were available?
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”
“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.
As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.
* * *
From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”
She was talking about Rachel.
“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”
“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”
“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.
“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”
That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.
“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”
She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
This made me SOOOO FUCKING ANGRY
I’m angry and sad and so bloody relieved she’s even ALIVE. I was preparing myself for him to say they faffed around all day and killed my wife. Because they don’t take women seriously. Women endure the pain of childbirth. We know what real pain is. We know when something is WRONG!
The accuracy of this is so intense and so scary… I feel like I’m a weird position, as a transman with SO many medical issues my whole life, to have been able to see it from both perspectives and here’s something I realized reading this…
IT CHANGED.
I hadn’t thought about it until I read this and instantly found myself looking at all my ER experiences (and there have been more than I’d like to admit).
As a “woman” I spent a great deal of time in the waiting room, clutching my sides or writing in chairs. I was told for over a year (four emergency room visits and countless primary appointments) that I had kidney stones, only to later be rushed into emergency spinal surgery to prevent paralysis for something that could have been corrected with simple physical therapy. I was threatened with not receiving pain medication if I didn’t calm down and/or accept the (incorrect) diagnosis. My desperation in these places was so great, and so difficult, that my depressed mind, with this as a catalyst I sometimes thought death might be preferable than going to the ER and I had to physically forced to seek help.
After growing more firm in my visual representation of a man, I’ve been to the ER three times and my primary countless. I can tell you right now several things: the staff was nicer, more sympathetic, and actually listened to me. I went to the worst hospital in my current area just two months ago and people said they were astonished that I had decent help… No, correction, women told me they were astonished I got helped as “fast” as I did (two-three hours in the waiting room). Doctors at all of these ER visits talked to me about what I might have, what they thought, what I thought….
I’ve received better medical help in the three years I’ve visually stood as a man than in more than twenty-five years appearing as a woman.
Our medical system was already shit. It was back then. It is now. That is no excuse for women to be treated this way. There is absolutely no reason a doctor should ever, ever dismiss a patients concerns. The truth of it is that we are in our bodies, all people regardless of any visual traits, and we know when they’re acting up. This is not okay.
And I will end this rant here to keep from diving into more details about our ludicrous medical system.
I think you guys know I already feel strongly about this, and I’m really glad there’s an article up about this from a male perspective.
I cannot believe that Hermione did not take advantage of that Rita skeeter’ article that said she was dating harry. I would be like HELL YES BITCHES I FUCKED THE BOY WHO LIVED, THE BOY WHO LIVED IS MY FUCKING SEX TOY! GUESS WHAT? HE ALSO DID DRACO MALFOY, 70% OF THE GRYFFINDOR HOUSE, YOUR SISTER, AND YOU ARE THE NEXT!
she could ask their friends to spread they also fucked harry potter to different prophet’ reporters until gets so ridiculous that it lost all credibility.
“Yes, I did the potter” -Viktor Krum
“Of course, Harry is so lovely” - Fleur Delacour
“I showed to him some nice stuff in the bath” - Cedric Digory (does not like to lie)
“He and Malfoy are often at each other” -Severus Snape and the entire Slytherin house
“At the same time” - Fred and George Weasley
“Harry truly is amazing, he is always gentle with us.” - Luna Lovegood with Neville Longbottom hiding behind her, nodding, mortified.
“Let’s just say that he can ride more than just a broom”- Oliver wood “Let’s just say that he being able to catch the snitch with his mouth was not a coincidence” - Ginerva Weasley.
“He made us gay” - Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas.
Harry does not stop glaring at everyone for the entire school year, meanwhile Ron literally cannot stop laughing
At the end of the year Dumbeldore awards Gryffindor an additional five hundred house points for Harry’s achievements at bedding the entire student body, the other teachers all have their heads in their hands they are working in a ridiculous place of ridiculous people
Headcanon: Selina has heard Bruce vent about his kids many, many, MANY times. She can even tell who he’s talking about by the first sentence, as detailed below:
He’s just SO - Dick
WHY does he - Jason
He NEVER - Tim
She ALWAYS - Cassandra
I don’t UNDERSTAND why he - Damian
When his back is turned, she’ll mouth the rant and sometimes mimic his body language. One time he caught her dramatically shaking her fist and so she just fist-bumped him.
I just read a post that mentioned the entire Justice League being on Cutthroat Kitchen and I desperately needed to know what your headcanons are on this.
Batman is out in round one. Firstly, he thinks $25k is nothing. What can you buy with $25k. Is that even enough to make a meal. He spends all his money and gets no sabotages and loses anyway because he is honestly a terrible cook. It will be edible and it will keep you alive but it will be terrible. Now, if you give him a fully stocked kitchen with all kinds of equipment he can bake you some fancy, fancy shit. But that’s baking. That is a science. Cooking is bullshit. Medium heat? What the fuck is medium heat? Medium is not a temperature. If you mean 180C say 180C. He never adds enough salt or sugar or fat to anything and everything is too spicy.
Wonder Woman also doesn’t make it very far. She can cook but, like… with fresh ingredients, and specific dishes. Plus she’s a vegetarian? She doesn’t know what the fuck to do with meats. They’re supposed to make chili dogs and she just has no frame of reference at all for what that should even look like. And she got the sabotage to do everything in the microwave. How even??
Flash gets the sabotage that replaces his good shit with garbage but that works in his favor because garbage is his specialty. He will make a delicious meal out of cheese whiz and goldfish and cocktail weenies. Unfortunately trash is all he’s good at. The man loves trash food. The next round they have to make something fresh and he’s SOL.
Green Arrow can’t cook for shit. He can stir fry and maybe roast things. It’s just not enough. He just buys sabotages for everyone because he wants to do as much damage as possible before he’s gone. Trolliver. He makes the Flash walk everywhere on top of egg crates. He’s the one who gives Wonder Woman the microwave.
J’onn can’t play because he can’t convince anyone he isn’t reading Alton’s mind for ideas. Alton always knows what you should do. Being able to read Alton’s mind is the ultimate advantage. Plus he can tell which judge it is, so he knows whether he needs to go for good food generally or for the best representation of the dish. Different judges want different things!! Honestly it is for the best they wouldn’t let J’onn play because he’s an alien and he eats weird shit.
Once they get Aquaman to understand the concept he gets really into it. He’s a great cook! How does he know how to cook these things? The man loves food. By all rights he shouldn’t be any better than Wonder Woman but holy shit he’s amazing. The things that man can do with a crab… he gets a sabotage to wear lobster claws but is weirdly highly functional. Ollie regrets buying it. Of COURSE he can handle having claws. He’s probably asked for advice. He should have bought the claws for Superman. In the end it’s Aquaman versus Superman which no one saw coming.
Superman wins. It’s bullshit. Everyone is mad about it. Not because he didn’t deserve it but because WHAT IS HE BAD AT. THERE MUST BE SOMETHING. Where did he even learn this stuff??? Little do they know HE GREW UP ON A FARM. THAT BOY CAN MAKE MAYONNAISE FROM SCRATCH, AND DOES. There’s a no-superpowers rule in place with a fine for offenders but he is actually great about it because Martha never let him use powers in the house. They get asked to make a lasagna and he’s so excited because he never gets to make time-intensive things usually. Murphy’s Law and supervillains get him every time he tries. He doesn’t have enough time to make his mozzarella and ricotta and tomato sauce from scratch like he usually does (YOU DO WHAT) but he does make his own pasta and it does not seem to occur to him not to do this. He lets Aquaman buy the sabotage to take his pasta because he didn’t even grab any. He does that thing where he sings pop songs in the voice of the original singer while he cooks and they have to ask him to stop so they won’t have to pay royalties. He’s very embarrassed because he didn’t realize he was doing it. He successfully stops himself from adding way too much garlic, even though he thinks it’s better with like… a whole head of garlic… all the garlic, in the world. Aquaman makes a really good eggplant lasagna but he just can’t compete with the meaty cheesy midwestern monstrosity that Superman has created.
The real reason Bruce Wayne keeps training kids is so that there’s eventually a gradually cascading order of vigilantes protecting Gotham. When you defeat one, there’s a slightly smaller one just behind, ready to pick up the slack.
i finished reading the captive prince books last night and here is a brief List of Things:
1) the fact that like every four seconds damen reminds us that he has a Type, and everyone else reminds us that he has a Type, bcs every single person in every single kingdom knows that damen has a Type. WE GET IT. U LIKE BLONDS. mess. (“i have SEEN HIM.”)
2) equally, the fact that every four seconds damen starts daydreaming about What If I Could Court Laurent For Real. my two fave varieties of this are (a) the fact that basically every time he sees anything, up to and including random buildings and like, trees, probably, he’s like IF ONLY I COULD SEE THIS THING WITH LAURENT, BUT PROPERLY, WHILE COURTING, and (b) the time he was all “what if we’d met when we were younger, hmm i’d have been like 19, so laurent would have been… 13? wait, no, that wouldn’t work, how about instead: AU where laurent is 16 when i meet him at 19, so that i could—wait for it—court him! NICE.”
3) basically, all aspects of damen’s Big Dumb Crush. damen: “laurent is kind of hot i guess, too bad he’s an asshole so i definitely don’t care or like him at all or appreciate that everyone is super convinced that we’re fucking.” also damen, a short while later: [literally drops a fucking pitcher and spills wine everywhere bcs he unexpectedly sees laurent’s legs]
4) “the soldiers in kastor’s army are trained in massage?” and then that entire scene; i read this bit as i was walking home from work bcs i’m an idiot who thinks she can read while walking, i almost walked into like three different trees and then when it ended i had to go over to the edge of the sidewalk so that i could stand still and scream quietly into my hands
5) “hello, lover” (this was another point at which i had to put the book down so that i could have both hands free, in order to physically drag them down my face)
6) damen said, “you asked for it, once.” damen said, “wear it for me.” laurent said, “put it on me.” (i said, approximately, “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHADhHhdh”)
7) “you’re very…. attractive.”
8) “i’m a little more experienced than that.” “yes, that is immediately apparent.” “is it?”
9) actually every piece of dialogue occurring during or shortly before or after any of the sex scenes honestly, like, sex scenes as character studies, re: which, murder me about it
10) murder me especially about how careful damen is, even before he has any idea, like he doesn’t know what laurent’s deal is, only that he definitely has one, and he’s so so so attentive to that even though he doesn’t get it—and then, when you are done murdering me about that, you should pls murder me at LEAST twice about like………. every single tiny carefully constructed agonizing detail of how laurent functions in intimate situations. god.
11) “it was charming because it was clear that laurent was unsure exactly what to do, yet, typically, had acted to take control of everything” have i mentioned that laurent is my CHILD
12) [scandalized] “that is SPORTS”
13) the time when laurent gets drunk and is more sociable than usual and then the next morning is EXTREMELY CONFUSED by the fact that he appears to have made friends by accident asdkhfgksdjk BLESS. my tiny disaster baby.
14) the fact that nikandros spends basically the entire time he appears in these books being like “look, i get that there’s literally no hope of you not fucking him, bcs: U Have A Type, but also, the thing is, have you considered—” [long-suffering wordless scream into the void]
15) HE IS CHARLS. I AM CHARLS. WE ARE COUSINS, NAMED FOR OUR GRANDFATHER. CHARLS.
16) laurent teaching a little girl a fucking magic trick afsdksadhjfkjkahfkhdgjk bye bye bYE
17) the fact that laurent BLUSHES CONSTANTLY, he spends so much time blushing, it’s incredible. here’s a thing i enjoy thinking about is how fucking delightful damen presumably finds this, and how much fun he prob has making laurent blush at inopportune moments.
18) “he won’t kill you but I WILL”
19) damen at the end like “WELL, this wound isn’t actually LIFE-THREATENING, and now my BOYFRIEND is gonna have to TAKE CARE OF ME ATTENTIVELY while i recover, so :D :D :D on the whole i am rather pleased with this stabbing!!” DAMEN ARE U LITERALLY EVER OK
20) it :) was :) one :) kingdom :) once :)))))) goodbye
21) that time laurent brought damen an apricot
this has been a non-comprehensive list of Some Things I’ve Been Screaming About, the end
I don’t even know how that post got so popular. I just like to sit around and be a smart-ass about Legolas and Gimli, guys. Also, since it’s not my post, I never know who reblogs it until someone tells me or it comes across my dash.
wait wait wait wait. when you say robin hood, do you mean the old disney animation with the fox robin hood? because if so, im calling closeted furry here
laUGHING
Oh buddy that would almost be better. Like, don’t get me wrong, that was 100% my favorite movie as a Smol, but no, I was that kid who literally intended to time travel and marry Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Like, I was going to figure out time travel so that I could be one of the Merry Men, that was The Plan. I was Very Serious about my weird poly crush.
I’d like to point out that I’ve since grown up and decided that I would struggle in most poly relationships, BUT I would still marry Robin and Marian. Especially from Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood, which is MY FAVE VERSION because Marian is a badass and Robin is perpetually heart eyes over her all the time. Scarlet is also good, which has Maid Marian as Will Scarlet (no, it’s not gay, she’s in disguise). I didn’t like BBC’s Robin Hood much–the first season was fun trash, but I honestly bailed on the spot when they killed Marian and tuned back in just in time to find out that they BURN DOWN NOTTINGHAM AND KILL ROBIN at which point I was just like *flips table* NO.
There was a theory going around a few years back that the Hogwarts Houses are influenced by which Element someone is - Fire, Earth, Air, or Water. If you’re up to it, reblog this with your House and Astrological Sign, to compare how often it ends up right. It’s incredibly interesting to me.
GRYFFINDOR: The Fire Signs - Leo, Aries, & Sagittarius
HUFFLEPUF: The Earth Signs - Taurus, Virgo, & Capricorn
RAVENCLAW: The Air Signs - Gemini, Libra, & Aquarius
SLYTHERIN: The Water Signs - Scorpio, Cancer, & Pisces
People who are complaining about Superman’s glasses disguising his identity have obviously never worn glasses. You take them off around your friends, people who see you every single day, and they’re like ,,WHAT THE FUCK, YOU LOOK SO DIFFERENT! IS THAT HOW YOUR EYES LOOK LIKE?! NO WAY! WHO ARE YOU???“
a girl i went to school with for over a decade came into my work once, we had a full blown conversation while i checked her out and she had no idea who i was bc i have glasses now, the clark kent glasses effect is real.
also i will eventually write a post about this but are we really going to pretend y'all would recognize A Random Reporter ™ say from your local newspaper if he dressed in lycra and flew around punching stuff. do you even know what any of the reporters from your local newspaper look like. would you even recognize them in reporter clothes. would you. would you sharon
This is 100% real. I went to a very small middle school and high school and I had a REPUTATION, okay, everyone knew me really well. And then I came into class one day with glasses on and my hair down and someone walked up and warned me… about myself. The look on their face when I took my glasses off and went “Are you fucking serious right now” was one of abject horror. I am confident that Clark Kent would be absolutely fine.
My best friend and I are creating an app to help closeted LGBTQIA+ kids in abusive situations.
The app is finished, and we plan on submitting it to the Technovation competition in April.
But there’s one problem.
We can’t get the app to help people if we don’t have the data.
The competition states we must source our own data through a survey, and if we don’t get enough participants, we can’t submit or release the app until we prove that there’s a need for it.
We already polled our school’s relatively small GSA, but that gave us biased answers that weren’t enough to successfully draw a conclusion.
Please,take this survey. No matter your sexuality, gender, preference, race, or anything of that matter. We need data to make this work.
More importantly, we need you to make this work.
The difference between this app helping people, and sitting in a trash folder on my computer is the amount of data this survey collects.
I’m rewatching the first season of Borgias because my brain is a staticky mess from churning out 5K of original stuff in 6 hours today, but like.
Listen.
Am I gonna be the one to write a plotless thing about Cesare’s thoughts on the scars on Micheletto’s back and Claiming and Micheletto as a cherished weapon and about how scars are the heraldic symbol of Cesare’s own house.
basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body.
that’s basically fine.
if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out.
unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.
These words scan with a fantastic degree of confidence considering that together they make no sense at all
so in my greek class we were talking about oral composition and how something like the iliad must have been composed, and my prof asked us to consider how we would rapidly compose something like poetry on the spot. and i think it was a really important exercise not just for understanding the construction of an oral epic but also for reminding us of how great works can come from supposedly “humble” origins. so if anyone is ever snobby about their homer, just remind them that, as my professor put it, the iliad is basically ancient freestyle rap, and homer is much closer to jay z than to f. scott fitzgerald
basically what i’m saying is please imagine homer asking someone to give him a beat on the lyre and then dropping the sickest fucking meter ever. the ill-iad, by lil homie
I’m going to the airport wearing an expensive black dress with a diamond necklace and glasses of champagne in both hands, waltzing through, casually reminding my chauffeur to haul my bags in for me. I need 4-5 attractive people (race+gender doesn’t matter) wearing clothes that are not better than mine, and cool sunglasses begging me not to leave, on their knees, barely grasping my dress because they want me to stay but at the same time they know the dress is worth more than anything they can ever afford. Turning around every so slightly and almost spilling, but not quite all the way there, my champagne, I’ll laugh and say quite loudly, “darlings I have to visit my ACTUAL husband!”
how do i get in on this
I’ve only seen this is screenshots before, can’t believe it’s finally blessed me
…………………reblog this and say something nice about the person u reblogged it from because there’s too much hate on my dashboard right now and its making me upset so lets start a chain of love
