[“A distinctive and common feature of early twentieth-century marriage self-help texts is their concern with the problem of mutual physical repulsion by wives and husbands. Sexologists and physicians by their own accounts were very busy teaching women and men how to make their bodies, and heterosexual sex itself, less repellent. Stopes was worried about the “mental revolt and loathing” that wives may feel in reaction to their husbands’ sexual violence; Ellis warned of the “stage of apparent repulsion and passivity” that seemed to be a normal part of women’s experience of sex with their husbands (a stage he believed would eventually give way to “active participation”); William Robinson, another early twentieth-century sexologist and author whom I discuss in more detail shortly, hoped that his marriage-advice manuals would address the “disgust,” “deep hatred,” and “desire for injury and revenge” that heterosexual couples felt for each other.
If heterosexual, reproductive, married intercourse was a core organizing principle of American life in the twentieth century, how could it also be so disgusting and rage inducing? On women’s end, the most obvious answer comes from sexologists’ own accounts: marriage was a site of repeated rape and dehumanization of women by their husbands, a situation that women struggled to endure and survive. But even beyond the well-documented patriarchal violence of marriage were other contributing factors. Intercourse between white American men and women—even as it was the key to the eugenics project of passing on “superior blood” and the patriarchal project of securing women’s free reproductive labor—was also a sin of the flesh. Puritan beliefs about sex as degrading and bodies as unclean were in widespread circulation in the United States at the turn of the century, casting heterosexual intercourse as “a mere matter of duty: to be permitted by sufferance; joyless, disgusting in itself; a something to be avoided, even in thought, other than it is a necessity for the continuance of the race.”]
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
[“… the American construction of modern heterosexuality was inseparable from white-supremacist gender norms. White male social reformers, who possessed far greater power and authority than civil rights and feminist activists, defined healthy heterosexual marriage in their own image and according to their own interests. Marital rape may have been discouraged by white male marriage experts of the twentieth century, but their emphasis on men’s entitlement to women’s emotional and reproductive labor, and women’s ostensibly innate vulnerability, virtue, and tendency toward self-sacrifice, ensured that modern heterosexuality served the interests of white supremacy. As the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers illuminates, whites treated Black people with such dehumanizing, “ungendering” brutality during slavery and its aftermath that whites effectively barred Black men from the kind of patriarchal power that constituted masculinity and Black women from the kind of purity and fragility that constituted femininity. Slavery and anti-Black racism positioned Black people outside the boundaries of a white gender binary, as threats not only to white ideas about normative masculinity and femininity but also to white men and women’s unity with each other. Illustrating the inseparability of modern heterosexuality and white supremacy, many early white feminists based their arguments for nonviolent marriage and women’s rights on the claim that bringing white women closer to equality with their husbands would ensure that white people remained a united front against Black civil rights. If white men forged egalitarian, companionate bonds with white women, they argued, then white women would offer race loyalty in return.
In sum, eugenicists, sexologists, and social reformers of the early twentieth century ushered in three concepts that would become enduring features of the heterosexual-repair industry. First, they exposed the ubiquity of violence and mutual loathing in heterosexual relationships but also reassured their readers that these were natural impulses in need of simple management. Rape could be curtailed by sexual and anatomical education. Mutual disgust could be diminished by better hygiene and beautification of the body. Communication between the sexes could be improved if couples read and discussed, together, the right marital literature written by knowledgeable guides. Second, they secured their own role and the role of expert white professionals more generally—physicians, sexologists, and later, psychologists—in defining modern heterosexuality and repairing heterosexual problems. By naming men’s and women’s ignorance of the unique temperament and anatomy of the opposite sex as the source of straight couples’ problems—rather than, say, patriarchy and white supremacy—early promoters of modern heteroromance introduced self-help projects, guided by marriage experts, as the new normal. Heterosexual desire and mutual likability did not come naturally, they acknowledged, but could be cultivated with the proper tools. Last, they accepted the premise that women and men often found each other’s bodies undesirable and hence advocated for the consumption of beauty products that help stimulate opposite-sex desire. Laying the foundation for the midcentury explosion of beauty interventions targeted to women attempting to appear “fresh” and “lovely” for their husbands while laboring at home, eugenicist advocates for hygienic and modern marriage offered soaps, perfumes, makeup, douching, and other consumer goods as keys to happy heterosexuality. They made explicit that heterosexual marriage was no longer a labor contract in which both parties showed up “as is” but an ongoing affective project requiring access to precise tools and information that would build mutual affection.
Each of these interventions set the stage for straight culture’s emergence as the romantic arm of misogyny, wherein the delicate coexistence of hate and love, the slap and the kiss, would come to represent the heteroerotic. But this era also initiated straight culture as a gendered mode of consumption in which the purchase of beauty products and relationship advice were vital to maintaining this delicate balance.”]
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
[“How do we, today, make the poor in America poor? In at least three ways. First, we exploit them. We constrain their choice and power in the labor market, the housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Those of us who are not poor benefit from these arrangements. Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure, but so do consumers who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market. Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive. The banking and payday lending industries profit from the financial exploitation of the poor, but so do those of us with free checking accounts at Bank of America or Wells Fargo, as those accounts are subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees. If we burn coal, we get electricity, but we get sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide and other airborne toxins, too. We can’t have the electricity without producing the pollution. Opulence in America works the same way. Someone bears the cost.
Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty. The United States could effectively end poverty in America tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes, reallocating the newfound revenue to those most in need of it. Instead, we let the rich slide and give the most to those who have plenty already, creating a welfare state that heavily favors the upper class. And then our elected officials have the audacity—the shamelessness, really—to fabricate stories about poor people’s dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce poverty because they would cost too much. Glancing at the price tag of some program that would cut child poverty in half or give all Americans access to a doctor, they suck their teeth and ask, “But how can we afford it?” How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question, one asked as if the answer wasn’t staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job. We could afford it if the well-off among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.
Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair—the externality of stockpiled opportunity. Wealth traps breed poverty traps. The concentration of affluence breeds more affluence, and the concentration of poverty, more poverty. To be poor is miserable, but to be poor and surrounded by poverty on all sides is a much deeper cut.Likewise, to be rich and surrounded by riches on all sides is a level of privilege of another order.
We need not be debt collectors or private prison wardens to play a role in producing poverty in America. We need only to vote yes on policies that lead to private opulence and public squalor and, with that opulence, build a life behind a wall that we tend and maintain. We may plaster our wall with Gadsden flags or rainbow flags, All Lives Matter signs or Black Lives Matter signs. The wall remains the wall, indifferent to our decorations.”]
matthew desmond, from poverty: by america, 2023
constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids
The battles that rose out of the AIDs epidemic were access to marriage and military service. When once the Queer community was focused on creating the best art and living lives worth telling stories about, the 1990's brought on a new goal: How to best fit in. As the brilliant Fran Bebowitz has said many times, the first people who died of AIDS were the interesting ones. The artists. There's a reason that arts became Ghostbusters and Cats in the 1990s. Because all of the really talented artists were dying. The rule-breakers. The ones who weren't afraid to shake things up. And the audience died with them. "Now we don't have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died- and that audience died in five minutes. Literally people didn't die faster in war. And it allowed of course, like the second, third, fourth tier to rise up to the front. Because of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people who… I don't know how top put this… got laid a lot. OK. Now imagine who didn't get AIDS. That's who was then lauded as like - the great artists." - Fran Lebowitz So many of the gays left alive once the Clinton Administration came into being were, to be frank, the boring ones. Gays who knew nobody and who nobody knew, and they rose to the top of the community and therefore their priorities rose to the top of the community as well. And what did they want? Apparently, they wanted to join the army and have big gay weddings. General employment non-discrimination wasn't all that important to them. Making sexuality and gender identity a protected class, along with sex, race, and religion, wasn't that important to them. They wanted marriage and military. Because they were the good gays. Not the naughty gays who were sleeping around and dying of AIDS. Not the poor gays who couldn't make political contributions. They were the gays with families and commitment ceremonies and office jobs and houses. They were the good ones. The ones who would look fantastic and incredibily marketable when they were interviewed by CNN. They were the gays who straight people would look at and say to themselves: "Maybe they're not so bad after all. I still don't want my kid to be gay. But maybe it's okay if Bob and Henry got married." The gay rights movement shifted from 'Accept us for who we are' to 'We'll be whatever you want us to be if you accept us.' And it's kind of remained that way over the last thirty years. We've been trained to be offended by queers who step too far out of the mainstream. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of gays online were on edge when Billy Porter started showing up to awards shows in dresses. Lots, and I mean lots, of gays were unnerved and worried when trans people started coming out of their own closets. Some going so far as to disavow the T from LGBT because they were worried people who don't like trans people would lop in the gay men and women in with them. Who needs community when you've already got your house in the suburbs, right?
this is why i hate the ‘q slur’ ppl.
“clearly since u do not tolerate chronically online baby gays actively demonizing ur political identity and the liberation movement you align yourself with u have not experienced real world oppression” are u expecting me to give u an itemized list of the times i’ve been hate crimed and targeted? and even if i did, would y’all not just say i was lying? “hate crime” to y’all means “a qu**r person posted something abt themselves on tumblr dot com and didn’t tag ‘tw q slur’ >:(”
also i never said i was from the south, i said i was from a red state. northerners progress their “north vs south” mindset past the civil war challenge.
groundbreaking news for these people, but the first people who were the loudest about reclaiming queer, and saying shit like "queer power" "queer as in fuck you" were victims of queerphobic violence. That's why they called themselves queers.
I hate this idea that the only people who use "queer" are privileged babies, and any real victim of queerphobic violence must hate that word and never want to use it or see it.
THIS. Most of my family were in a similar situation or only slightly better off in the 80's, and it was mostly fine? We had to be careful with money, but it wasn't like now at all. You could get by with less, and still feel mostly pretty secure with the basics you could afford. That feeling of stability is completely gone. So many people now live with a sense of constant urgency -- a sense of fear that you could lose everything at any moment.
Just fyi for everyone the new strain DOES have the capability to do breakthrough infections (meaning if you’ve had your shots or COVID within the last two or three months you can get it again - only 2 confirmed cases in the US as of this morning though), no we don’t know if the new vaccine coming in September will be protective enough, and yes a lot of our overarching medical bodies are letting us doctors know that those who are elderly and/or are immunocompromised should be wearing a mask.
actually none of you should have ever stopped wearing masks in the first place, hope this helps 💖
👆👆👆 THANK YOU LAST COMMENT!!
Ran into another masked person at work yesterday. I told her it was nice to see someone else masking up, and she cheerfully told me that she hadn't gotten sick since she started wearing masks to work and she had absolutely no intention of getting a cold again this season. I think we would have high fived if we hadn't been politely staying 6 ft apart
This makes me so sad and also I'm trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism
Talk to construction workers and you will learn that the million-dollar mansions being made today are total garbage that will fall apart within a few decades.
Decades? Try years. Try immediately. I toured a high-end development demo house once and the place was already shit. Drawers didn't fit right on their runners, doors not hung right, all sorts of other small issues. The people I know who work in the trades say they're not allowed to spend the time to build these places right. Labour costs money and everyone from the owners to the developers to the contractors wants to save a few dollars. And that includes the private mansions they've worked on. It all adds up to small leaks and minor inconveniences that build into structural problems that will make these places uninhabitable in less time than it takes to pay the mortgage.
In the first clinical trial of its kind, a team led by scientists from James Cook University in Australia inoculated volunteers with human hookworm larvae (Necator americanus) to see if these parasites can improve their metabolic health. The two-year study included 24 participants, each of whom showed heightened insulin resistance at the start of the trial. By the end of the investigation, researchers found those who were infected with hookworms showed a significant reduction in their insulin resistance scores compared to those who were given a placebo. That's not enough to recommend the practice just yet, but the findings join those of another pioneering study published in 2021 that infected participants with hookworms and found it benefited their gut's microbiome.
get them worms
Source: sciencealert.com
prayer to whichever dead catholic person is most appropriate: may I not have to run a whole week of surprise camps on crutches. in a knee brace.
Im agnostic raised liberal protestant, but absolutely the catholics got saints right. Sometimes your problem is so fucking specific you need Some Guy. If you're listening, Guy of Workers Who Have Strain Injuries,
No fucking WAY, there's actually a knee injury Guy? Catholicism accidentally reinventing the medical specialty system......
I know you're wondering: are there slutty pictures of him revealing his knees?
Saint Roch, by Francesco Ribalta, c. 1625, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia
[image id: st. Roch staring soulfully and hiking up his robe to show that his thigh has a bubo on it, also sluttily revealing his knees]
what the dog doin
Favorite part of seeing a new doctor: when they ask about birth control
Doctor: Sexually active?
Me: I'm over 35 and have a toddler, so we'll say yes but it's really more of an aspirational thing.
D: Hormonal birth control?
M: No.
D: Are you trying to get pregnant?
M: Ha, no, once was more than enough.
D: Barrier method?
M: Just the aforementioned toddler, so no.
D: If you don't want to get pregnant, you really should be using some form of birth control.
M: Oh, I am. I find that the absence of fallopian tubes is extremely effective.
D: o___o checks my record Oh. Right.
M: >:-}
my favourite story is when my doctor was like she was in her third trimester, pregnant. I'd been seeing her for several years by that point. When i first started seeing her I was IDing as a guy.
"Is there any chance you could be pregnant?" ". . . No?" "When was your last period?" ". . . . . . Never?" She puts down her clipboard for a second and looks at me confused.
"Sarah, I'm trans, you knew me before I came out . . ."
"oh my god"
She held her head in her hands in embarrassment and disbelief that she'd forgotten and then blamed it on the memory issues that some people get when pregnant but I guess that also means that I was passing so that's nice lmao
That is amazing. I love your semi-himbo doctor.
My GYN office still asks me when my last period was every time I go in.
The same GYN office that did my hysterectomy a few years ago.
Truly incredible continuity of care.
Image description: Tumblr post tag "#guys cmon the doctors are asking these question like a hundred times a week"
Yes. Yes they are. And that's kind of the problem. They're on auto-pilot, talking and treating what they expect to see and not the patient actually in front of them. I put a humorous spin on it because I choose to laugh at the absurdity, but I'm honestly really annoyed that something as simple and routine as checking my medical record for recent surgeries is apparently beyond the capacity of the person who is supposed to be helping me figure out why my body is doing THAT.
If a doctor, especially a GYN, doesn't notice that my record says "C-section with bilateral salpingectomy," they're going to make some assumptions that could negatively impact quality and appropriateness of care. If I have abdominal pain, it is not going to be because of a twisted fallopian tube, for example. It may be from adhesions formed during the healing process from the C-section. That happened to my mother! That's also in my record! Because it could be relevant and important for my medical care team to know.
As an engineer, if I approach every problem with the same set of questions, that may work fine for 70% of the work in front of me. But I'd be a really bad engineer if I couldn't recognize that remaining 30% and respond appropriately.
Give me a map of the midwest how you imagine it, and don't just use state lines, show me how you think the cultural area of the midwest actually exists in the US
Blue dots: cities that come to mind if I'm trying to name a Midwestern city to explain the Midwest to someone
Green dots: other cities among the 120 most populous cities in the US which feel probably Midwestern to me
Orange shaded region: Midwest core
Purple shaded region: yeah sure probably Midwestern but it kind of depends on context (Food? Demographics? Religion? Politics? Music? Natural environment/climate?)
Black dotted line: approximate "upper Midwest" versus "lower Midwest" boundary
Red line: approximate "the South" boundary- yes I guess I believe the South and the Midwest aren't mutually exclusive
Pink circled region: the Great Plains- a unified region which should be included or excluded from the Midwest as a package deal. I typically include it but I don't feel strongly about whether it would be better to consider it a separate but related region. However, if someone thinks the only thing west of the Midwest is The West, then the Great Plains should be in the Midwest, because they are definitely NOT the West.
I thought about some of the qualities people might think about the Midwest and looked up maps for them. Here they are, with the Midwest indicated by that quality circled. Note I am not making claims about whether any of these qualities are good or bad, they're just things that get associated with midwesternness.
"the Midwest is flat"
"the Midwest is not diverse"
"the Midwest was a hub for the Great Migration"
"the Midwest is union states that were not the original colonies or the far west"
"the Midwest has a significant mainline protestant population" (pink ABCUSA, orange ELCA, and green UMC on this map)
"the Midwest is farmland"
"the Midwest has wet summers and dry winters"
"people in the Midwest are of primarily German, Scandinavian, and Native American ancestry"
There are lots of these kinds of things that aren't occurring to me at the moment. But just for fun let's combine these ones into a map! There's a transparent purple layer for each of the previous maps, and a black outline for places that fall into at least 5 of the 8 regions.
Maybe this is the Midwest? Probably better than my first reblog on instinct alone.
Where's the map of frequency of folks saying "I'm just gonna ope! right on past ya real quick" because I feel like that'll nail this down
Among the complex mix of particles that make up wildfire smoke, an abundant but thus far unknown kind has been shown to trap a surprising amount of heat, according to new research. These results indicate that wildfires, which are expected to become harsher and more frequent in the coming years due to human-induced climate change, are heating Earth to a greater extent than previously thought. Using NASA's Douglas DC-8 aircraft, which is a 54-year-old quadjet (a jet powered by four engines) that was turned into a flying science lab, scientists performed smoke analysis of three specific lightning-caused fires. All three had burnt large swaths of land in the western United States in 2019 — the Shady Creek in Idaho, Castle and Ikes in Arizona and the 204 Cow of Oregon. Their findings showed that a new kind of particle associated with these fires, dubbed organic "dark brown carbon," strongly absorbs heat — so much so that they account for more than half of the total heat absorbed by the collected wildfire smoke.
Terrific
Source: space.com
This is an "appreciation for historical accuracy" post.