As someone who has been “thin-shamed” I can say it does Not at all go hand in hand with fat shaming. People “thin-shaming” me was mostly verbal harassment- you’re too skinny, you look like a boy, eat a fucking cheeseburger, what’s wrong with you why don’t you like food?
But guess what, I don’t have a problem finding clothes that fit me. There aren’t companies that refuse to make clothes for my size. There is no shortage of messages telling me that despite the harassment of some, I am still beautiful and ideal even if I’m unhealthy. Despite being thin-shamed, I still PANICKED when I started a medicine that made me gain weight, and I had to really analyze that, because no matter what my culture will still say that “fat is unideal” “fat is bad” and “honestly its fine to starve yourself / but shameful and bad to overeat.”
So “thin-shaming” is shitty because it’s shitty to be judged and have people make assumptions about you. But Fat-shaming is institutional, it’s not just individuals harassment and judgement, it’s potential jobs, it’s clothing companies, it’s media and advertisement, all telling you you’re bad as you are. Like what a way shittier thing.
“paul rudd ages so well” yeah well chadwick boseman is gonna turn forty in november and he looks about twenty-five
For those of you who, like me, probably couldn’t remember an actor’s name if it was tattooed on their forehead, that’s the goddAMN BLACK PANTHER, HOLY SHIT.
“Same-sex marriage may be legal in the U.S., but there are plenty of places where Americans can still get fired for being gay or transgender. The fight for equality based on gender identity and sexual orientation has emerged as a new battleground for employment rights.
As that struggle plays out, many LGBT job seekers are hard-pressed to find work at employers that won’t just honor their rights but welcome and support them. Here’s a guide finding LGBT-friendly employers in that evolving landscape.”
OKAY, so, I have an overwhelming need for soulmate AU’s of every-damn-thing and a love for Elizabeth Swann that burns like fucking Greek fire, so of course we were going to end up here eventually.
There are three people in the world who could be Elizabeth Swann’s soulmate. Depending on your AU of choice, these are the three people who see color when they meet her or have her name or first words printed on their skin or what have you. All of them are in love with her.
Commodore James Norrington knew when he was a teenaged, freshly-minted Navy officer, meeting a nine-year-old girl with solemn eyes and a pretty, lilting voice, that he was going to love her. When she was seventeen he was in love with the coiffed, well-heeled mask she wore, completely gone on her. He was horror-stricken to find that he loved the steely, vicious creature of sea and storm underneath even more. If he has a mark, it rings his wrists like cuffs, because for all that he might love her, James isn’t a pirate at heart, and being chained to one kills him as sure as a sword.
Will Turner loves the flashes of gentleness through her fire-bright shell, the way she always sounds startled when she laughs, the way she holds his face in her hands–gentle, like he’s made of crystal, but hard and immovable as steel. Will’s mark, if this is a universe with marks, lies like a necklace at his throat, close to the curve of his neck. He thought of it as a necklace, before he met her, before he knew her well. Now he thinks of it as a collar, a mark of ownership–he is Elizabeth’s, full stop, hers to keep, and he has come to love being kept by her.
Captain Jack Sparrow loves the heart of her, as hungry and dangerous as a fire at sea, loves her for the glint of lust in her eye when she looks at a fine ship or a sharp sword or a gold ring, or Will or James or Jack–the glint of wanting, of greed, of that is mine and I shall have it. When he looks back on it, remembering, he thinks that he fell in love with her when she burned the rum, and the flame in her eyes was brighter than the flame on the sand. His mark, if such exists, stretches across his shoulders, like wings, like lash marks, like a weight that makes free.
Elizabeth cares for them all, loves them all in a way, but none of them can be everything to her, the way a soulmate is supposed to be. None of them is the world entire, none of them is the ocean from horizon to horizon, and nothing less will satisfy her.
Elizabeth has no mark, if this is a world with marks. Or perhaps she does–a skull and crossbones, a coiling ocean current, the brand of a pirate, the words ‘Gentlemen, hoist the colors’ in bold black letters across her fair skin.
If this is a world where your soulmate’s touch stains your skin with colors, the three men are splashed with cerulean, azure-emerald-silver, and Elizabeth’s skin is clear. Until she faints over the edge of a cliff and plunges into the ocean below, and she is drawn out with her skin swirled with ocean-blue, coiling down her limbs and over her heart, arching over her cheeks and around her eyes.
If this is a world where you see color when you meet your soulmate, she grows up with it, and the colors always flare brightest when she stands at the bow of a ship and looks toward the horizon, where the water and the sky kiss.
(There is a fourth soulmate for Elizabeth Swann, a fourth body stamped with a simple name, no matter the universe. This one, perhaps, is the truest soulmate. Tia Dalma, Calypso, Oceana, the queen bound in her bones, wears the name on her mortal form, and whenever Elizabeth steps onto the deck of a ship, the woman-goddess smiles, slow and secret.)
(Every queen must have a king, after all. And Dalma-Calypso-Oceana
is proud of her king, straight and proud and fierce as a sword of folded steel. She loves her king like a hurricane loves a ship, like her king loves her lovers, hungry and desirous. Her love is blessing and curse by turns–her king’s ship has sweet winds and raging storms, blazes into Navy flotillas and skates away by a finger’s length. Her king stands in the winds and laughs and laughs, fierce and wild and free, and so, so in love.)
I am watching Curse of the Black Pearl, and I am still super fucking committed to Elizabeth Swann, she of the wild eyes and voice like Damascus steel and hungry heart of a pirate.
Why do so many people assume that liking Eponine means you want her to end up with Marius? Like, no, I want Eponine to end up with supportive parents and a nice flower garden
“And how do I spell that?” if I’m using my full name, or “And what does that stand for?” if I’m using R. Also I have a lot of people ask me about college and my plans for the future, to which I have to say…look, folks, I’m a college student, I’m struggling to plan my next meal, what do you want from me.
w - worst habit
Procrastination. Right this moment, I’m procrastinating a report, a presentation, and a poster, all of which are due in about ten days. You’re enabling me, which I appreciate.
Men are so annoying with the whole girls fuck over nice guys like do you know how many guys fuck over nice girls? Girls that will do ANYTHING for them? Girls who want them exclusively and cherish them and try to put up with them while the man cheats and treats her like shit? Like bye with that I don’t feel sorry for y'all. Everyone is capable of being shitty but you don’t hear us girls crying about nice girls finishing last shut the fuck up.
• It’s annoying. • It gives an imperfect metric for how many followers you have. (I would estimate about 25% of my “followers” are porn blogs run by bots). • It makes pulling up your activity page iffy even if you use Tumblr strictly for SFW content. • It’s problematic for individuals who have struggled with sex and/or pornography addictions, especially since many of the blog names are not obviously porn names, causing you to preview the blog. • It exposes minors to illegal and harmful content.
And to many of us: • It’s disgusting. • it’s degrading to human beings, especially women. • It makes Tumblr a less classy, less reputable place.
Please share this if you agree this is a serious problem.
I already reblogged a thing about Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron and the contrast between how they deal with motherhood, infertility and what it means to be a woman.
It’s surreal to think that these two movies came out just two weeks apart from one another in the US. In a way I feel a little bit sorry for AoU, because it would have looked like a perfectly okay summer blockbuster if Fury Road hadn’t come barreling down right on its tail and smashed all our pathetic lowball expectations to flaming shards in the sand.
When AoU came out, I had a lot of discussions with people about Natasha’s plotline. Because my gut reaction was certainly a massive eyeroll that the one female Avenger’s deep, dark secret is that she can’t have babies. But also, it’s not like a story about a woman who underwent forced sterilization is something we shouldn’t care about. (And in the US, this is a particular form of restriction of reproductive rights that’s disproportionately affected poor women of color.) And if she internalized the line that was fed to her, that she couldn’t be both a killer and a mother, that certainly doesn’t make it her fault.
But it still frustrated me, and my frustrations were really, really well articulated by this article. You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s excellent. But this is the relevant quote:
There’s nothing wrong with stories about women who are housewives or stories about women who struggle because they were forcibly prevented from having kids as a condition of whatever mission they chose to undertake. The problem is that with so few women in superhero movies, each of these portrayals stands not only for the choices Whedon made, but for all the choices he and many others didn’t and don’t make. The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it’s another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don’t. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn’t she?
These, for me, are scarcity problems. They are problems because there are so few opportunities to show women in action blockbusters that I tend to crave something very much capable of moving discussions of what those portrayals can be like forward.
…Scarcity will always drive us back to these same conversations about how every woman carries the obligation to represent What This Director Thinks Women Are For, and absolutely no answer to that question will ever be a good answer.
I think this is an interesting discussion in the context of Fury Road, because, intentionally or not, the movie takes on the scarcity problem in a couple of different ways.
On the most basic level, it gives us lots of women. In a context where studies have found that even background crowds in movies are on average only 17% women, Fury Road is FULL of women. Young women. Old women. Women who are disabled. Women who are physically strong and as skilled with weapons and vehicles as any of the men in their world. Women who are not physically strong but fight anyway. 80-year-old women who ride motorbikes and talk about all the kill shots they’ve made.
Look at the shot at the top of this post. Twelve women on screen at once! That’s more women in a single frame that some movies have speaking parts for.
Max may have his name on the title card, but he spends the movie surrounded by women. Team War Rig starts out as one man and six women; later it’s two men and five women; then it gets supplemented by a bunch more women in the third act. It’s almost an exact flip of the 20% rule of thumb, where one woman for every four men seems normal.
But Fury Road deals with the scarcity problem in another way, too, one that I think is particularly important given the film’s content. It gives us six women all reacting to the same circumstances of slavery and sexual violence, and allows them to have different, individualized, and sometimes contradictory reactions, all of which are presented as valid.
So we have Toast, who counts bullets and loads weapons, who hacks off her hair to spite Joe, who grabs his gun at a key moment and gets pistol-whipped for it, who spits on his corpse when he’s dead. Angharad, who self-injures, who uses her status as Joe’s favorite against him, who can be fearless, or reckless, with her own body, but also clings to nonviolence even when that tactic has limitations in a violent world, who stops Furiosa from killing Nux, but then pushes him out of a moving vehicle seconds later. Capable, who holds onto kindness, understanding and compassion, despite all the violence around her, who trusts Nux when Furiosa is pointing a gun at him and growling, “Get out,” and proves to be correct in her instincts. Dag, who retreats into her own head, but is often the first to sense danger, who hurls insults at her abuser, and also at Max while he’s pointing a gun at them. Cheedo, who gets scared and tries to run back to the person who hurt her, but then later uses her perceived fragility as a weapon. And Furiosa, who holds on to her rage even as she fights her way up the ranks to become Joe’s trusted lieutenant, and finally uses it to end him.
And none of these reactions are treated as better or worse or right or wrong or the correct way to be a survivor of violence. It’s okay to be angry; it’s okay to be kind; it’s okay to be scared. Because there are so many women in the movie, each one of them gets to be a unique character instead of an avatar of What This Director Thinks Women Are For.
Extend that to all of filmmaking, and to all the many kinds of identities that are underrepresented on screen today. That’s how you deal with the scarcity problem.
also guys i think it’s time to start spelling ‘small’ right again,, it’s been long enough
see the thing is, at this point, smol isn’t even a “mispelling” of small anymore; it has its own connotations. while small is a regular adjective, smol acts more like a diminutive marker, which English has been lacking
in essence, a smol dog will always be a small dog, but not all small dogs are smol.
Canon: Grantaire is a boxer, fencer, and dancer. I know these are common knowledge, but I feel like there are some really glorious opportunities afforded there. He’s also evidently well-studied, just…in really random stuff, which speaks to me.
Headcanon: Even supposing he’d lived through June 6th, Grantaire wouldn’t have survived long without his friends. He’d have faded away, been found dead in the street within a month.
Heartcanon: This is, what, what I think should have happened? I don’t know, might’ve been nice if someone lived?
Soulcanon: I might have liked a little more description of the death scene, Vic! Would’ve been nice! But my firm belief is that Enjolras probably died pretty much on impact, whereas Grantaire took a minute or two to bleed out. He didn’t mind, because he fell looking at Enjolras’ face, angled so that the other man looked alive and merely pensive, and he’d say there are worst last sights. He kept his grip on Enjolras’ hand until he was finally too weak to force his muscles to cooperate.
Crotchcanon: Sooooo the night before the barricades rose Enjolras probably decided…well, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. ‘Be merry’ here accompanied by an intense eyebrow wriggle. Fight me. Grantaire figured that at least this way he would know that Enjolras’ skin tasted like before they died. If I ever wrote fic for this ‘and then there was wildly improbable sex’ incident, it would be intense angst.
Rey, my own sunshine daughter
Canon: Rey is flawless. Rey built her speeder and taught herself quarterstaff fighting. I hear she refused to trade a droid even though she was offered sixty portions. I hear she managed to fly the Millennium Falcon through an old star destroyer on her first try. She met Han Solo and he offered her a job. One time she lightsabered Kylo Ren in the face. It was awesome.
Headcanon: Rey has definitely…done what needed to be done. By which I mean she’s definitely killed a dude, and possibly eaten them, depending on how strapped she was for sustenance at the time.
Heartcanon: I appreciate why Rey didn’t kill Kylo at the end of the movie. Nonetheless, that hunting-wolf prowl with her teeth bared and the light of a dying star on her skin really did it for me, and I might have liked to see them deal with the fact that even Jedi kill, sometimes. And Rey’s NOT a Jedi, is the thing, so–yeah. Basically the summary here is that I want to see Rey kill a dude with a lightsaber. Kylo would be ideal, but not at all mandatory. I also really want to see her talk to a Force ghost, and I really, really want that Force ghost to be Anakin Skywalker. I am only interested in the Rey Skywalker thing insofar as it makes her Anakin’s granddaughter, not Luke’s kid (I’d love it if she was Leia’s kid, Rey Organa is also a plot I’m into, but that seems a little less likely), although I feel like Rey as the savior of the Force Mark III is really excellent.
Soulcanon: Okay but as long as we’re playing defiance-of-all-reason, what I really want is for Rey to be a midichlorian pregnancy. The Force decides that the last go-round of a Chosen One went horribly awry (although I have some thoughts on whether that…is strictly speaking true, in the Force’s eyes), so this time, the Force is like “I’m gonna do it again, and it’s going to be another angry sand orphan, but instead of an ex-slave who immediately gets indoctrinated into a powerfully repressive and increasingly rickety ancient Order, it’s going to be a scavenger with a moral backbone like soldered titanium and a quarterstaff, and she’s just gonna fucking wreck people with both.” And the Force drags Rey kicking and screaming into her destiny and drops her in Luke’s lap like “Be nice to your auntie, bye-bye now” and Luke is like “Um…I don’t deserve this.” Luke, you fucked off into exile for fifteen years and left your sister to run another rebellion, this time against her son. You deserve to have your Force-auntie fucking wreck you with her stick and her moral backbone.
Crotchcanon: Um…the OT3 is a thing and y’all can fight me. The Damerons. Poe struggles for a little while with the fact that he seems to have two (young) heroes trying to actively seduce him, in their awkward ways. Rey’s version of ‘seduction’ is just to press various foodstuffs into his hands and watch with an eager smile as he eats them, Finn’s is a little more like actual flirting, but not a lot. Finally he just comes back to his quarters (he has a private room by virtue of being a squad leader) and finds Rey literally sitting naked on his bed, legs crossed and calm as when she’s polishing BB-8′s optical sensor. Finn apologizes, hovering anxiously near the wall, and says that they’ve been trying to convince him to date them but he doesn’t seem to get the message, so Rey got impatient. Poe gives in to the inevitable. And then there’s sex. Lots of sex. Poe gets the shock of the decade when ever-so-serious General Organa reaches up to clap him on the shoulder in approval, once the others let him out of his quarters again.
And I just??? Have a lot of feelings about Professor Bruttenholm as a father??? Like, Hellboy is difficult as shit, that’s evident, but even so, at the end of the day, the Professor still claims Hellboy–who is clearly a demon–as his son and has faith in him to…not end the world, I guess, and Hellboy loves him so much. I am always so upset about this movie.
A set of facts from this post, on request from @littlestartopaz. “Kid Death, Soul Eater. Also Harry, from The Blue Sword”
Death the Kid
Canon: Kid’s hair stripes apparently go all the way around his head once he’s a full-blown shinigami, and that’s adorable to me for some reason.
Headcanon: I tend to imagine that Kid had a rough time adjusting to ‘normal’ people. Like, the other meisters were reticent with him because of…who he is and who he’s related to, and he comes at everything with a very arrogant perspective, especially early on, so I tend to think that he has a horribly rough time learning to make friends. Like, Patty and Liz were probably his first close friends. I’m pretty committed to that.
Heartcanon: Oooohhh, I dunno, I was pretty pleased with stuff. I feel like Kid actually has a devious side under that wide-eyed anxious exterior, would’a liked to have that pan out more fully.
Soulcanon: Kid becomes a shinigami and replaces Death and has a few conversations with various people who protest that it’s just not traditional for the Grim Reaper to dual wield pistols. They make lengthy and detailed arguments against his actions, there are sources, there is, on one memorable occasion, a PowerPoint. And Kid nods and ‘hmm’s and he continues to dual wield pistols. I don’t fucking care how it happens, he makes Patty and Liz immortal somehow.
Crotchcanon: I actually have no idea. Because every time I sit down and try to think about Kid and sex, I inevitably end up wondering about the logistics of sex with a shinigami. Like. How does that shit even pan out? Do you need to worry about condoms, or are death gods naturally infertile? Or in control of that sort of thing? Does Death have a body under that robe? Do the weird black shadow-tentacle things come into play? HOW DOES THIS WORK. So, as you can see, I have never made enough headway on this train of thought to have an opinion.
Harry (Angharad, Harimad-sol)
Canon: Harry Crewe is canonically good with any and all (non-demon) animals. Giant ill-tempered warhorse? Sure. Loner hunting cat? No problem. Harry Crewe is also a stone-cold badass, and all of you should read The Blue Sword and appreciate her.
Headcanon: Harry definitely causes small-to-middling disasters as she learns to use her massively powerful kelar for things other than bringing down mountain ranges. And as handy as that ability to fucking wreck an opponent is, it’s a little hard on Corlath’s City, and they all look on with a sort of benignly exasperated affection. Kelar tends to cause problems, but even Corlath never 'fixed’ a stone door and accidentally melded it with the frame.
Heartcanon: Damarian weddings have some kind of family-of-the-bride aspect and Mathin gives Harry away, or whatever the equivalent is, as the Daughter of the Riders. He cries a little and she cries a little and no one ever says anything about it. Also, Corlath very very quietly slaps Mathin with some kind of title, whatever he can get away with, as the father of their new Queen. Mathin isn’t informed of this for almost an entire year.
Soulcanon: Aerin and Harry meet. In the flesh. At some point. I don’t give a fuck who argues with me on this. And Aerin visits Harry in her dreams and at first Harry’s very deferential and nervous, but she lightens up over time, and Aerin gives her advice on being a queen and being a legend and being a mother. (At some point, when Harry is just exhausted of everything and frustrated with everyone and ready to ride off into the desert just to get away, Aerin turns up and tells a story about a very vain girl named Galanna who got her eyelashes shaved off and could have been rolled out a window, she was sleeping so heavily. Harry laughs herself sick in the dream and wakes up smiling for the first time in weeks.)
Crotchcanon: Okay but we can all agree that there was definitely some desperate, maneuvered-around-wounds, I-can’t-believe-you’re-alive-and-here sex in Corlath’s tent after that reunion scene, right? And once everyone was recovered and back in the City, there was definitely a day where Harry was just like “Update: I moved all your meetings and acquired snacks” and they just literally spent an entire day having sex in the blue stone garden. I can’t be alone in that assessment.
…is that the word gay has been used so overwhelmingly as a pejorative, as a slur, that most children in the U.S. in the past several decades likely grew up learning “gay” as a word for bad, strange, or wrong before they fully understand that there are “gay” people, and that it’s not just a word with negative connotations.
Kids grow up hearing “That’s so gay!” said with such vehemence relating to topics that those same kids aren’t remotely educated about, and they just internalize that it’s bad. This is how you get elementary schoolers saying, “Mr. Hopkins gave us homework, he’s so gay,” and the same elementary schoolers grow up to be high schoolers and adults who say, “What? I don’t mean gay like gay people, I mean gay like stupid or bad.”
And some of them aren’t overt homophobes in any other way… but dang, you teach little kids that a word that describes a class of people means “bad” and “wrong” before they know those people exist, and that’s bound to shape the way they think about things, isn’t it?
And in contrast you get queer kids who start to put 2+2 together about what “gay” really means a little bit faster than the kids around them because they’re desperate for some information, some hints of meaning… but they’re also hearing the same lessons as everybody else, that gay=bad, gay=wrong, gay=undesirable, gay=something no one ones and no one should be, gay is the worst thing you can be.
In the small town I lived in and the school I went to, nobody ever hit me and called me queer. No one ever shouted “queer” from a moving car while I was walking home. No one ever threatened or inflicted violence on me with the word “queer” on their lips.
Gay, though? Yes. And variations on the f-slur, but gay itself was enough of an invective, enough of a pejorative, to the people flinging it.
“Gay” was the slur that cishet people threw at me as a form of violence, often in corollary with physical violence. “Queer” is a word that I learned online, from members of my community. My experience of the former word is as an attack, while the other was as a sanctuary and respite from that attack.
Now, I’m not a gay man, but a bisexual trans woman. I was still sorting that out at the time, but I doubt it would have made a difference to many of my tormenters if I’d been able to explain it properly.
So when “gay” is used as the happy-go-lucky umbrella for what I would personally call the queer community, gay with even its positive connotations strongly coded as male, I’m not just being misgendered/swept under a default label of male along with a lot of other women and non-binary folks, I’m being forced to accept a label that I never sought, one that is definitely used as a pejorative and a slur, and a slur that was specifically used as a weapon against me.
Both “gay” and “queer” have the same problematic histories and problematic presents. They have both been subject to reclamation efforts. To me, the difference is how those efforts are organized.
“Gay” is an attempt to normalize, to assimilate, to take the elements of our community that are most palatable to the heteronormative homogeneous hegemony and emphasize them, making those elements even more palatable and altering or hiding the other elements of the community.
“Gay” is like trying to get into an exclusive school that you fear is likely to reject you for prejudiced reasons, so you keep your nose clean, make sure you take all the right extracurriculars, polish your cover letter and personal essay, and try to make the right contacts with influential people on the inside… and if you have to hide some of your past activities, break ties with friends who are less presentable, and de-emphasize your family to make sure the admissions office doesn’t get the wrong idea about what you’d bring to their institution, well, it’ll be worth it, because that’s what you have to do get a, you know, fair shake.
“Queer” rejects that. Queer rejects homogeny, it does not demand that we sand down our rough edges or smooth out our contours. It does not seek to reshape ourselves or our community to fit ever-evolving standards designed to keep us out, but it challenges those standards.
If “gay” is trying to appeal to a bigoted admissions board by being smooth and shiny enough to slip in, “queer” is challenging the admissions board to accept or reject you on your own merits as you exist, and challenging the bigoted assumptions that underline the power structure as revealed by this. It’s bypassing the admissions board by creating your own infrastructure for sharing resources and information.
I have a suspicion that a certain percentage of the intra-community backlash against the word “queer” is not because the negative connotations of the word hurt us as listeners, but rather that the radical connotations of the word hurt the effort to make assimilate gayness into heteronormativity.
I.e., it is less, “Queer makes people think it’s okay to bash us.” and more “Queer makes people think we’re not like them.”
Most people end posts in defense of the label “queer” and the umbrella term “queer community” by saying “I won’t call queer if they’re not comfortable with it,” and most of them get told, “BUT THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE DOING WHEN YOU SAY ‘QUEER COMMUNITY!”
I’ve never yet seen anybody talking about the gay community have to disclaim that they’re not using the word to people who view it as unreclaimed slur or who just plain find it too hurtful to have even given that discourse any thought.
I won’t call someone queer if they don’t think of themselves a queer. I will use queer as an umbrella term. If that’s not you, you can cheerfully include yourself out of it.
And heck, I’m doing you a solid. If you didn’t have a queer community to point to, you wouldn’t have anyone you could point to when you want to clarify that you’re not like those people.
If you’re bi/pan/aro/ace, anything other than black-or-white, capital G gay, you don’t have a word that doesn’t throw “sexual” right into the mix. And once you say “I’m bisexual, I’m pansexual, I’m asexual,” people seize on “sex” and think your sexuality is now public property and they’re allowed to fetishize at will or ask intrusive questions. Obviously this happens to gay men and lesbians, but they have “gay” and “lesbian” as descriptors without the “-sexual” in them. For those of us who don’t, I feel like queer can be a bit of a shield. If I say, “I’m queer,” instead of, “I’m bisexual,” I don’t get the waggled eyebrows and request to consider a threesome. In my experience, queer is somehow odd and confrontational enough that it turns off the “let’s ask sexy details” switch in straight peoples’ minds.
@jennytrout that’s fucking brilliantly put, thank you <3
THIS about the “gay as an insult” for this generation. That’s what I grew up on, kids at school sneering “that’s so gay” over and over again. “Queer” was a word I found online, and in history books about “queer literature” and “queer film history” and such. I think the first time I heard someone say it out loud was in college, at the LGBTQ club.
If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.
Here’s some non-chart-form lists.
Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.
Chromosomes:
XX
XY
X/X0
Mosaic
XXY
XXXY
XXX
XYY
Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)
Hormones
Estrogenized
Androgenized
Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
Gonads
Testicle/es
Ovary/ies
Ovotestes
Gonads
Testicular agenesis
Gonadal dysgenesis
Probably more, I’m not a professional here
Genitals
Penis
Vagina
Pseudovaginal pouch
Clitoromegaly
Micropenis
Hypospadias
Diphallia
Definitely more but I am Tired™
There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.
(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)
It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.
WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS
This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.
My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED
These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements.
Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes). There is plenty of room for variation, too - a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)
Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX.
Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY - and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.
And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes - we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well - take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens - the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.
So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex - if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.
So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around - but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to - just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual - their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.
Pregnancy gets weirder, too - decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain - where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man.
Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear - surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?
Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies.
Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.”
Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)
Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage - those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own - you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death.
There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.
Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.
everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz
Let’s be honest: Jesus wouldn’t take the wheel. Jesus would let Peter drive, fall asleep in the back seat, wake up to the sound of the other eleven screaming in mortal terror (while Peter bellows expletives at the car in front), and get them out of a fatal car accident at the very last second by rebuking the speed limit.
if u were a gifted/talented child who grew into an anxious adult w fragile self worth and a perfectionist streak that makes u abandon things if ur not good at them immediately clap ur hands
heyyyyy, i would love an exr au where one of them has to teach the other how to dance and it's so frustrating because "he won't fucking cooperate" and there's the deal with sexual tension so one of them just snaps and. . . i'll let you decide their fate ;)))) (love your work btw)
Heeeeeeey,
sorry this took a little while, life…is happening to me. But!
Abuse of the fact that Grantaire is canonically a dancer! Sexual tension! Here we go!
“One-two-three,
one-two-three, that’s-my-foot, one-two-three, one-two—Enjolras!” Grantaire huffed,
doing an awkward sort of two-step to back up without releasing his grip on his
partner’s hand and waist. “There are actually nerve endings in my toes,
do you mind?”
“I’m trying, you’re not telling me what to
do!” Enjolras scowled down at the floor,
brow furrowed as he tried to place his feet, and tugged his hand out of
Grantaire’s. Grantaire released him
without a fight, dropping his hand from Enjolras’ hip and immediately missing
the warmth.
“It’s a waltz, not brain surgery,” Grantaire
said. “I told you what to do when we
started. There are literally three steps
to this dance.” Enjolras stopped, his
frown deepening until it seemed etched into his face, and Grantaire sighed. “Come here, we can try again,” he said,
holding out his hand again. “Your hand
on my shoulder, the other like this,” he coached, pulling Enjolras in
again. “Come on, Apollo,” he said with
an attempt at an encouraging smile, “weren’t you valedictorian in high school? You can do a waltz.”
Headcanon: What you think happened, based on the characters, settings, storylines and all reasonable extrapolations thereof.
Heartcanon: What you feel ought to have happened, quite divorced from rationality or sense.
Soulcanon: What you know happened, deep down in your soul, regardless of what anyone says. Including the creators of canon, themselves.
Crotchcanon: What your gonads wish had happened, or, alternatively, what turns you on.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, this seems like a fun basis for a meme: “Send me a character, and I’ll give you one of each” - a canon fact, a headcanon fact, a heartcanon fact, a soulcanon fact and a crotchcanon fact.” :-)
honestly being high functioning mentally ill is the worst because i know that my thoughts are irrational! i know my reactions are unhelpful and immature! i know i’m being a little shit! i know!! and i can’t! stop! fucking! doing! it!!!
I am so acutely aware that my anxieties are irrational and my impulses are stupid and my fixations are unhelpful. SO AWARE.
And you just sit there and fucking stew in the fact that you know how stupid it is and therefore you should be able to stop it and you can’t, and it spawns this whole new flotilla of problems. Nothing will tank your self-esteem in quite the same way as sitting there and having a panic attack and the whole time thinking “I’m panicking over nothing, I know I’m panicking over nothing, I should be able to stop this and I’m too useless to manage it.”
Have you seen Michael Moore's post about how Trump is going to win, and if so, your thoughts?
It’s a useful call to arms that everyone who is #BernieOrBust needs to hear and think about.
I’ve made it really clear that Bernie Sanders is who I wanted for my president, and I did what I could to make that happen … but he didn’t get the nomination, and now my realistic choice is between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
I think Michael Moore is right about Hillary not exciting young people the way President Obama did and does. It’s now our job to help everyone who is upset and disappointed and thinking about staying home to realize that we’re going to need every single vote we can get to defeat and utterly demolish and humiliate Donald Trump and everything he stands for.
I don’t like that Clinton is a warmonger. I don’t like that she’s too close to Wall Street. I don’t like that she and her campaign were condescending and dismissive of Millennials during the primaries.
But none of that changes the reality we are facing: it’s Clinton or Trump. I understand that younger voters don’t remember the 2000 election when SCOTUS installed Bush, and I understand that younger voters who were in elementary school during his disastrous presidency were effectively insulated from it because they were kids. I was *exactly* that kid in 2000 when I voted for Nader, because Bush was an asshole and Gore was a terrible candidate.
But if I could get my vote back now, I’d build the time machine with my own hands. Think of the millions of people who have died because of Bush. Think of the destruction of our climate that is now a total crisis, because Bush and his administration did nothing to address it. Think of how much horrible debt college students have, because Bush put people who just wanted to take their money away from them into positions of power. Think about the militarization of our police, which began under Bush.
President Obama did everything he could to roll back the damage Bush and Cheney did to our country and the world, and we aren’t even halfway to where we need to be. I don’t know how much President Clinton will work to continue rolling it back, but even if she keeps it in the same place, that’s better for our country and the world than what will happen under a President Trump.
If you, like me, wanted Bernie Sanders to be our president, if you, like me, believe in his revolution, if you, like me, believe that we have to make America work for the 99%, then your choice in this election is Hillary Clinton.
She’s not perfect. She’s not my first choice, or even in my top five choices. But she is the choice I have if I want to protect my country and my children from Donald Trump.
So that’s why, even though I still Feel the Bern, I’m With Her.
So who else does that thing where you’re too tired to get stuff done and you know you should sleep, but you’re so desperate to avoid tomorrow that you stay up way past when you should?
its fucked up to me how, like, we as a humanity can forget how to make shit. like how the west forgot how to make glass or some shit for a while.
nobody knows the exact way of creating lots of ancient stuff; greek fire and damascus steel are really well known examples, and material scientists are still studying roman cement because it’s better than modern cement
i use my tags as like….a secret whisper space….like…..idk how many of u actually read them but i know not all of u do obviously so it’s like the BONUS FACTS part of the book or something. the special fan club secrets. U Know Me A Little Better If U Read My Tags.
phillip hamilton:
gotta be my own man, like my father but bolder
me:
bolder than your father,,, alexander "non-stop" hamilton
phillip:
*successfully schedules a threesome with two arbitrary ladies he meets on the street, challenges some guy to a duel, and is fatally shot all in one musical number*
Imagine Palpatine giving Anakin a clone of Padme. On the surface Palpatine claims he is rewarding Vader for exemplary service, but really he's rubbing Vader's face in it over Padme's death.
Holy shit, that clone better be the goddamn FASTEST TALKER in the galaxy, man, because I cannot imagine her surviving five minutes alone with Vader otherwise, “reward” from Palpatine or NOT. Unless, like, sheer spite spared her, maybe, maybe just sheer spite. Of course she is not a reward, of COURSE not, Vader KNOWS she’s not, he–he–
Force, she looks just LIKE her. She doesn’t have the memories, obviously, but the Force signature and the lilt of her accent and the particular tilt to her head and the spark in the back of her eyes are all so, so similar, so very nearly PERFECT, so very nearly … so very nearly …
Ok. Going off the Padme could have been Boba Fett joke. There could have been a great story. Like Padme's death was faked which is why Boba never takes their mask off and through necessity of trying to find her children she becomes a bounty hunter.
OH MY GOD FRIEND WHAT I WOULD DO FOR ALL THE WEIRD VADER/NOT-FETT UST AND TENSION ALL LEADING UP TO THE INEVITABLE MOMENT WHERE PADME SHOOTS HIM IN THE RESPIRATOR AND RUNS OFF WITH THE REBELS ALL “I AM YOUR MOTHER”
(Side note: I had to sit through almost 20 minutes of
trailers, none of which were new and almost all of which were terrible or dull;
still saying the Nerd Prayer for Suicide
Squad)
When you take the reins of Star Trek away from J.J. Abrams, Robert Orci, and Alex Kurtzman and give it to Justin Lin, Simon Pegg, and Doug Jung you get:
Every character having a plot-purpose and a
highlighted moment where they shine
Prominent casting of non-white actors
Women who kick ass, fix spaceships, and don’t
have a camera leer at them
No sexist jokes
A deeply touching send off to Leonard Nimoy
Hikaru Sulu taking charge of the bridge
Hikaru Sulu having a husband
Nobody making a big deal of Sulu having a
husband
James T. Kirk, infamous lady’s man, looking at
Sulu with his husband and daughter and clearly wishing he had that kind of
close family to come home to because heteronormativity is dead in the future
Cast being listed in alphabetic order in the end
credits so that John Cho goes first
I guess what I’m saying is that with both the director and one of the writers being Asian-American, there was clearly a push for Sulu to get
the honor he deserves in this
So many possible couple pairings from all the
scenes together, and I ship them, all of them, just a big free love
multishipping orgy onboard the Enterprise
Creative fight scenes that incorporate futuristic
sci-fi tech and zero gravity
New plot instead of recycling the end of Wrath of Khan
Kirk riding a motorcycle, but in a completely
plot-justified and clever diversionary tactic
Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” being used in one of
the best scenes in the movie, I kid you not, it actually makes sense in context
Lots of humor and witty banter
Trek’s
traditional shining optimism about unity in diversity and human potential for
good
Continuity references
The best Rihanna song in a long time for the end
credits
So yeah, I really liked it. In fact, I think I liked it
better than the first in the reboot.
So I got this ask from my darling @twistedangelsays and I wrote this entire thing, and then realized that I’d written five thousand words for a headcanons ask. Soooo now it’s getting posted separately. I might crosspost it to AO3 if Adler hassles me into it and/or there’s interest in that. Once again: Tarsus IV warnings, and even thought this is…pretty calm comparatively speaking, it’s still under a cut.
Okay, so I just saw Star Trek tonight and spent an hour talking to you about it. I literally cannot believe I am doing this. I am already suffering because of your other Star Trek headcannons but I guess I'm just a fucking masochist. So, my dear Bones, give me (at least) five headcannons on how Tarsus IV happens in the alternate new Star Trek trilogy universe. <3 Your Kirk
HA, and people say I’m the twisted one.
Fortunately for you, I am a wee bit of a sadist, and I love talking about
Tarsus IV, so heeeere we go. I WAS going to do five people finding out about Tarsus, but that turned into a five thousand word monster so instead here are just some headcanons. For those of you who aren’t aware, Tarsus was
a famine and genocide, which Jim Kirk survived as a kid—basically, if you can
think of a content warning, it applies, thus: everything is under the cut.
