I don't know who needs to hear this but:

-"it only hurts a little" is still pain

-"I can ignore it" is still pain

-"I can cope with/manage it" is still pain

-"it's bearable" is still pain

-"I can push through it" is still pain

-"it doesn't hurt that much" is still pain

-"it doesn't stop me from doing x" is still pain

You don't need to be in agonizing pain to be in pain.

Also, the "normal amount of pain" is ZERO.

honestly i think #YesAllMen was a massive mistake and part of the death rattle of third wave feminism in its subsumption by capitalist class interests, because now you have cis women arguing with their whole chest that a no-op no-hormone they/she/he trans guy is ontologically a participant in Male Violence because Yes All Men, and no matter how hard you point out that this doesn't make sense the best you're going to get in response is "oh, so you're saying we should just misgender trans guys?"

not even getting into the whole thing about how it is actually, yes, incredibly racist and ableist (and transphobic) to assume ontological attributes of violence and sexual malintent from people you read as men. no i do not care how sure you are that they're Actually Making You Uncomfortable. thin-slicing is the set of automatic emotional responses you have based on engrained messages that the society you live in presses upon you 24/7. you are genuinely, fundamentally incapable of separating your thin-slicing from ableism, racism, and transphobia.

your first reaction to seeing a man look at you funny is inextricable from 1) seeing a person with those particular secondary sex characteristics and assuming they are a man, 2) seeing someone engaging in body language or facial expressions or manners of conducting themselves that you find upsetting and assuming they are violent and a danger to society. those are, in order, transphobia and ableism. your first instinctual emotional response to seeing a black person in your social circles is literally inextricable from the messages society has engrained in you about black people. being frightened of All Men and defending this paranoia of Yes All Men is literally impossible to engage in materially as a state of existence without enacting racism, ableism, and transphobia.

Fine

I guess if we're doing "stances"...

Before I start, yes I know that this post was the beginning of the entire ordeal, and that those people were being actively shitty. But people were rightfully upset about the phrase "abled NDs" — not upset about "ablebodied NDs" as it's being portrayed, but "abled NDs" specifically (...abled NDs need to sit down...) being thrown around — and that's become twisted to all of those upset about that phrasing being made out to be siding with the people in that particular post, when I don't think most of the people in the past couple days had even seen that post.

With that out of the way...

Some stances I've seen that I haven't agreed with: - cripplepunk is for anyone who is disabled - only physically disabled people can be cripplepunk - only people with mobility issues can be cripplepunk - only people who have to be hospitalized regularly can be cripplepunk

The only stance I've seen that I've agreed with: - cripplepunk is for cripples

I think there's no way to tell, based solely on if someone's "physically disabled" or "mentally disabled", to know if they are crippled, because the distinction between those two things is hard to, if not impossible to make, considering what we continue to learn about how the brain and body connect.

I know "physically disabled" people who would be gatekept from cripplepunk based on 2/5 stances above.

I know "mentally disabled" people who have worse mobility issues than some of the "physically disabled" people I know, and they would only qualify under 3/5, in some cases 4/5, stances above.

The only person who can make the call on whether someone "meets the requirements" to call themselves cripplepunk is the person themselves, elsewise we put people's medical history on trial and, depending on which stance we were to work with, gatekeep people who I feel cripplepunk is very much also for.

And so, rather than put up some arbitrary boundary, we rely on good-faith identification. If someone acts in a way they shouldn't (in that they do harm, silence others in conversation, play oppression olympics or otherwise downplay others' struggles), that is the grounds for their removal. If we try to do anything else, we have to start interrogating history of diagnosis (which makes issues for those who are self-diagnosed), or have to rely on people being visibly disabled (which leaves behind those with invisible disabilities, and there are "physical disabilities", and even mobility impairments which can be invisible).

Essentially, what I'm trying to get at, is that if someone is in a cripplepunk space, there's no safe way to assume that they shouldn't be there. And if they aren't doing any harm by being there, there's no reason to assume they shouldn't be there.

Which is why I've only really stuck my head into this discourse in offshoot conversations that aren't really related to the whole "who can be cripplepunk" thing. Because I don't know. You don't know. No one knows. It's impossible to gatekeep without harming people who directly need the movement, just like every other movement people have tried to gatekeep.

— from I Don’t Feel Safe Around Cis Women by Devon Price

Btw 1 in 6 Black (cis) men have been raped by being forced to penetrate, 1 in 7 have been sexually coerced, 1 in 5 have experienced unwanted sexual contact, and 1 in 8 have been publicly sexually harassed.

Whenever you find yourself in a situation of difficulty that makes you feel foolish and stupid, like if you lose your phone charger or forget an important appointment, or entirely forget when the War of 1812 took place, or beat meringue a little too far past the point of forming stiff peaks, or spill a glass of water in your lap in the precise way so as to make it appear like you peed your pants right as your crush is about to walk past, just think to yourself:

"At least I have the presence of mind not to think that carrots have too much sugar."

"Unsure what went wrong"

Is it possible for carrots to legitimately contain too much sugar for a diabetic person to eat?

Carrots themselves are a low glycemic index vegetable at 15 and are unlikely to cause blood sugar spikes, the issue is that they are put in cake which is often high in carbohydrates. Changing the carrots to kale (GI 4) would likely not make much of a difference because of the other ingredients in the cake

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one

Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.

“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”

At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.

Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.

One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”

Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”

She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”

You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.

reblog this if your blog is a safe space on april fools and won’t have any jumpers, screamers, or anything scary or anxiety inducing

I already told you that I love thick and bold lineart. But hear me out? what if I drew completely in a “lineless” style? ha? ha? *sweating profusely* what do you think?

My first stained glass this year and I definitely overused the iridescent colours 😌✨

Halloween vibes back from 2019! (ˇ‿ˇ)

Got my copy of Calendar 2023!It comes in 3 sizes and different options (=｀ω´=) You can get one on my Zazzle store!

LINK! https://www.zazzle.co.uk/calendar_2023_all_about_cats-158864261143018305

November vibes!

Some of my artworks with a similar feel and atmosphere (=｀ω´=)

Sunset, lanterns and november vibes (=｀ω´=) Wallpaper size on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/apofiss

Sunset, lanterns and november vibes (=｀ω´=) Wallpaper size on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/apofiss

A little addition to the star cats theme! (=｀ω´=) Wallpaper size on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/apofiss

Toothless! <3 (=｀ω´=) https://munchimo97.gumroad.com/

Calendar 2023 (=｀ω´=) Available on my Zazzle and discounts are very nice c: https://www.zazzle.co.uk/calendar_2023_all_about_cats-158864261143018305