Lots of people think the opposite of patriarchal messaging is “actually, men are bad and women are good”
When in reality, the opposite of patriarchal messaging is “there is no immutable difference between a man and a woman and no trait belongs only to one group or the other. Goodness or badness is entirely individual and not tied to gender in any meaningful way”
OP this is the sweetest and most lovely thing I've seen in a while. You're just plowing forward past the "but I'm not--" arguments and right into just letting them to be full and happy. A+
Today the Washington Post tracked down my little brother’s personal cell phone number because my mom is the president of an organization that supports families of transgender kids.
Yesterday (Feb 9 2023) my home state, Missouri, announced a government investigation into organizations providing care and support for transgender kids.
This is after an administrator at Washington University’s Pediatric Transgender Center came out in a now-viral article about how the Transgender Center was “rushing” trans kids into care and “mutilating” us. She gave away the personal information of many of my trans loved ones who, like me, received care from the center, and she described our bodies as horrifying. Everything she said was a lie.
No goddamn trans person is “rushed” into medical care, especially not trans minors in states controlled by far-right politicians. No one gets medical care for funsies in the only industrialized country without free healthcare.
I received care through this transgender center as a minor and it took over a year and countless doctor’s notes and visits to begin any sort of medical treatment. You can hear this same story from any trans person, especially — AGAIN — minors in Republican-controlled states. I had to see fertility doctors at 16 years old who tried to convince me not to go on T.
My mom, because she’s amazing, joined a support group when I came out. She is now the president. She had to alert the police yesterday after journalists kept coming TO HER HOUSE.
I finally got a call from a Washington Post journalist today to interview me, an actual trans person who received care from the Pediatric Transgender Center. She spoke with me for only 20 minutes and didn’t know the most basic facts about being trans. No doubt my words will be published in a ridiculous thought piece that only adds to the oppression of trans minors.
My medical transition has brought me nothing but joy. I was simply lucky to begin it at 17.
I am so scared. Trans people will be eliminated in the US as this progresses. This is not just a “red state” issue, either. Please extend compassion to your trans siblings and keep up with the trans eliminationist legislation and actions throughout the US.
Transphobes do not touch this post.
i achieved my wildest little creature dreams this weekend and turned my regular bed into a mossbed and it’s everything i’ve ever wanted in a snooze spot
Not fully achieved my bed into a Viny forest how I wanted but it’s getting there bits by bits
Benoit Blanc, entering the tardis for the first time: now mr doctuh… when you said it were bigguh on the insahd.. i mistook that fowuh a jest… but it seems thayut said blue box is, if my own eyes do nawt decieve me, indeed bigguh on the insahd
pleaaaaaase y'all the process of having a manufacturing facility declared kosher has nothing to do with a rabbi blessing the food
pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase stop
This touches on something I feel like most Christians (cultural and/or practicing) reaaaaallllly don’t get which is that rabbis traditionally aren’t clergy/priests in the Christian sense.
A rabbi isn’t a divinely-ordained speaker-for-God whose primary role is leading worship. Traditionally, rabbis are experts in Jewish law, practice, culture, history, etc.
A rabbi doesn’t have any sacred/spiritual/magical powers to bless things that any other Jew doesn’t have. (And that’s not how blessing things works in Judaism anyway. It’s an expression of gratitude, not a transmutation or instillation of magic divine power.)
The reason a rabbi is involved is to *make sure everything’s being done correctly.* Because they’re an *expert*.
Not to “bless” anything to fill it with godpowers or whatever.
Yes yes this.
You call in a rabbi to supervise and make sure that a kosher food production facility is set up properly the same way that you call in a master electrician to check and make sure all the lines are set up correctly. The electrician isn't blessing your production line any more than the rabbi is - they're both there to make sure shit is being done right.
So what you’re saying. Is the rabbi is like kOSHA?
This made me laugh so hard I wheezed.
[image description: a tweet by user @indigenousAI saying
“fun fact: as a DV survivor i cannot register to vote because doing so makes my address public. anyone who is fleeing or hiding from an abuser is automatically disenfranchised from the political process and this is a feature, not a bug”]
I don’t know of the original poster might not be aware
but!
if you’ve been a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, you can enroll into the address confidentiality program (free of cost!) and be registered to vote as an absentee voter and your name and address will not be made available for the public
it is super easy to get enrolled - the application takes like 5 minutes, but it has to be with someone who is certified to do it (most likely an advocate! try going to a family justice center in your area or calling the Attorney Generals office in your area!!!!)
ALSO :
you don’t need to have any police reports or have a protection order to qualify!!! you just have to sign stating that you’ve been a victim of one of the aforementioned crimes.
Links to the info for every state in the Wikipedia article:
Reposting as Primaries and General Voting are coming up.
*Showing my ID to a child safety lock so that it lets me in *
amid the celebrations about the queen probably dying soon, we need to remember how this will negatively affect the country. there will be millions spent on a funeral and charles’s coronation while we are in the middle of a severe economic crisis and working class families are having to choose between heating and food. it will take attention away from all the important politics and parliament may be suspended. all news and television will be about her death and her reign — it’s been said that comedy programmes will be cancelled for potentially up to a fortnight out of ‘respect’.
yes, celebrate this news. but her death does not erase the fact that the monarchy exists, and it will be a spit in the face for working people when the money we all so desperately need is spent on her and the rest of her family
hope is a skill
hope is a weapon you are trained to wield
favourite additions
you truly do not exist for other ppl’s consumption and your existence is not hinged on making others happy and comfortable by stifling and hiding and crushing and editing parts of yourself to be less than who you really are
How physically active were actually "medieval" noble women? I know is a long period but I usually see people complaning about noble women in fantasy doing stuff such as hunting or riding horses. I have seen a couple of illustrations of fencing manuals with women in them too.
We, as a culture, especially in the US, have a very bad habit of using the British Regency/Victorian era as the gold standard for how women all over the world were treated throughout history. And the truth is, it ain’t that way. It never was, because women in this exact era used to duel each other in other parts of Europe and often did it topless.
Yes, this is real. We have records of it.
Was it all women, all the time? No. Was it often enough to mention? Yes.
There’s a really good article by Kameron Hurley, “Women Have Always Fought” that goes over the history of women warriors and the laziness of specular fiction in detail. This is a particularly great few paragraphs from the article that covers where our popular conception that women don’t fight comes from.
“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”
I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.
Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Check out some of these real women below.
Empress Maude, the daughter of the English King, Henry I, was named her father’s heir after her brother died. While her cousin Stephen stole the throne after her father’s death, she raised an army and took the country into a civil war to take it back. They fought it out for the decade it took for her son to reach adulthood, and laid the groundwork for Henry II to become king. There’s a great novel by Sharon Kay Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept which chronicles the civil war. If you’re interested in medieval history, I recommend reading it. Her daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, also led an interesting life. (It should be said, real history got to the denied female heir fights for her throne before George R.R. Martin.)
There’s great videos from Xiran Jay Zhao discussing the Chinese warrior queen Fu Hao of the Shang Dynasty and Wu Zetian, who became China’s first female emperor. (Yes, you read that right. Emperor.)
There is Khutulun, the Wrestler Princess and the great-great granddaughter of Gengis Khan, who is one source of our “defeat her in battle to marry her” tropes. She issued this challenge, “defeat her in wrestling, she’ll marry.” She scammed would be suitors out of 10,000 horses. Western male authors are so threatened by Khutulun, they’ve kept trying to rewrite her history by making her fall victim to the power of love. (No, seriously.)
There’s also Hojo Masako, the Buddhist nun who deposed her own son when he proved incompetent and ruled Japan as Shogun. Here’s her wiki entry too.
The Amazons of Greek Myth were real in that they were actual Scythian women who went to war. (As Scythian women did, just like their men.) They terrified and terrorized the Greeks so much, they became immortalized in their mythology. Don’t believe me? Here’s an article from National Geographic and this one from Live Science.
There’s stories like this all throughout history from big events to small ones. (You can find more over at Rejected Princesses if you’re interested.) There are female warriors, female generals, noblewomen who took command of their husbands’ forces, widows who took to the sea to get revenge on those who wronged them, women who rode with their husbands to battle, female assassins, female leaders of rebellions, etc. The women of the Japanese samurai class were trained to fight, and fight they did. Women warriors, queens, and politicians are all over mythology too. You’ll often see these women come out of the upper echelons of society because money creates options, but they are there. Many of those stories are lost to history, in some cases purposefully, and there was a long trend among archeologists that assumed because a person was buried with male grave goods, the body had to be male. We’re now finding out that isn’t true. There’s a significant portion of warrior corpses that have turned out to be female. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla chose to post a notice about it in response to these exact criticisms you’re questioning.
Those people you see complaining online? They’re clinging to a version of history that doesn’t exist. More, we know it doesn’t, because popular culture is hungry to the point of desperate for aggressive, confident, and competent female characters. If they were truly a lie, they wouldn’t ring true for so many people.
The history we’re taught today largely downplays women’s achievements, contributions, and successes while uplifting those of men. It’s a fact. Go look at famous female figures anywhere, you’ll find the same story at play over and over. Historically, fantasy as a genre largely portrays a world that is, in fact, fantasy, but that fantasy has nothing to do with women doing things they’re not “supposed” to. There’s no clubhouse. There’s nothing unrealistic in imagining your female character is a kickass queen who defeats overconfident men in wrestling competitions and robs them of all their horses. It’s not unrealistic to come up with an ending that doesn’t conclude in tragedy, violent deaths, them “learning their place,” or even locked within the bonds of an unhappy marriage. (Shocker!) Some did, but the truth isn’t universal. It’s not even unrealistic to imagine they might have supportive male family members, love interests, and followers who happily (gasp) assist them in these endeavors. Maude, for reference, had bastard half-brothers who helped her instead of trying to take the throne for themselves.
History got here before fantasy authors. There’s nothing unrealistic about reality. Popular conceptions and common knowledge fed to us by the majority male dominated culture isn’t always the truth. Reality is, it’s the stories we see normalized across the media spectrum that are wrong. The ones that insist women are objects, who commodify their pain, and reframe their stories to ensure the focus remains on men. While this is changing, women are still often treated as the NPCs of male driven stories.
The people you hear complaining? They want storytelling traditions to stay that way, for the Great Man values countless narratives have reinforced to remain unchallenged. Funny as it sounds, they’re threatened by the very existence of narratives that countermand that centralized focus on men being superior, that there is a stratified gender hierarchy, and men taking their place as the sole, worshipful focus of a woman’s existence, much less these female characters being important in their own narratives. If these people weren’t threatened by female characters being people, they wouldn’t say anything. They’d just move on in apathy.
Reality is people are complicated. There’s room for all stripes in all colors and contexts. It’s no secret that history has suppressed and erased countless stories that don’t support the ruling narrative of the dominant culture. These same people forget there’s plenty of storytelling traditions that include women taking their place as warriors in cultures outside America. For all the sexism and misogyny, women fighting is not an alien concept, it’s not even foreign to other Western European traditions.
Believe what your own research is showing you, not what a bunch of idiots who can’t tell their ass from their elbow are whining about. They can’t handle someone who isn’t straight, male, and (most often) white being the central focus. Really, they can’t handle these characters as even a side focus. That’s their loss, it doesn’t have to be yours.
-Michi
This is a really good point. I don’t think libraries have ever been more important to protect and support. As a very popular post out there somewhere once pointed out, can you imagine if libraries were proposed today? They’d be tossed away as “social garbage.”
So yeah, support them and actually USE your card too. Most library systems have apps for ebook borrowing so you don’t even have to go in.
I’m glad that this post got notes. A bunch of book loving nerds, all of us 😉
Also, check what weird, cool non-book stuff your library has. Not just DVDs either. My library has a damn 3D printer and a laser cutter machine that you can use.
also the libby and hoopla apps are genuinely the best. hoopla has a great comics selection if your library uses that, libby has audiobooks and ebooks (the ebooks you can even send to your kindle)
gUyS please click the link you won’t regret it
Its been so long since Build-a-Frog came across my dash. I needed them today :)
im sobbing omg
Please do build a frog its very nice
Maybe none of these peeked your interest-maybe you’ve been wanting to create an o.c, but never really knew how to start-or you just enjoy making O.C’s….
This masterlist is to help you in making your own OCs….it can also apply to developing RP characters i suppose! (´ヮ`)!
How to Write Better OCs:
Character Development:
Need an Appearance idea?
Diversity
Mary Sue/Gary Stu
Villains
Relationships
ARCHETYPES
NAMES
APPEARANCE
DETAILS
Need Item names?
Other stuffs!
This is a great list! I saw it and couldn’t help but re-blog. Hopefully it helps any of you that are experiencing writers block
GUYS I DESIGNED A PLANET IT’S SO FRIGGIN COOL
Reblogging for the oc&character creation stuff!
Dude this is a gold mine.
We’re in the middle of a global crisis where nearly the entirely population is confined. Damn right we’re going to create.
To my younger (American) followers:
Even if the polls are ridiculous you still have to vote Even if the experts say it’s over you still have to vote Even if the newscasters have called your state you still have to vote
Elections are decided by the people who show up on election day. All the polls in the world don’t mater if you don’t go into the booth and make a choice. All the experts can be (and frequently are) wrong if you don’t go into the booth and make a choice. News media tend to call stats at 5% of votes tallied. If your polls are still open, you can still change things.
Don’t let a strong summer showing in the media dissuade you. You still have to show up in November. It does matter. If people see their candidate winning and decide that they don’t have to show up and be heard, there is a chance the other side will rally. You have to participate. No matter what.
I wore this for years ago. I was right then and I’m right now.
You still have to vote.
