Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

Before the Spanish showed up and WRECKED OUR SHIT, precolonial Filipinos all wore skirts, dresses, and/or loincloths. It is much easier to weave a single piece of fabric, or a single tube of fabric, than it is to weave the fabric, pattern the fabric, cut the fabric, and sew the fabric into breeches. Why would you do that unless you had a practical reason to?

There were occasional examples of what looks like breeches in the Boxer Codex, a late 16th century Spanish manuscript that contains illustrated examples of the attire of the various ethnic groups in and around the Philippines, (along with ethnic groups from other Asian countries), but irl most likely those were just malong/patadyong (a garment that is a tube of fabric) tucked and tied to create breeches.

Please enjoy the below illustrations.

(There is a critical lack of mention of hanfu, yukata, or hanbok on this post. I only have the expertise to cover hanfu, but I don’t have the strength, spoons, or enough expertise to feel comfortable handling that so I’m hoping a hanfu expert can weigh in!)

Link to the other post is broken 😢

Archive.org has it!

The point is that mutual aid, like charities or private action, is not a sustainable or effective substitute for government resources and programs. A whole lotta leftists really wanting to go the classical liberal Victorian route but with that progressive veneer.

I study (read: I have a PhD) the move from charity to government funding for various things and please believe me that you do not want your access to money to be based on how much people like you or think you're pathetic / deserving enough. Marching small children around to every county fair so they can perform lord's prayer in sign language is not a way to fund a school.

....much less any way to educate small children.

Normally I don't promote non-fandom stuff but a friend of mine down in Louisiana is starting up her own autistic participatory research lab, which means all of the people who run it are on the spectrum themselves. They are currently looking for participants for her study on visual art as a form of stimming and autistic self-expression. This lab part of the communications department at Louisiana State University and is a not-for-profit affiliated with the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN).

Here is a link to a post about their study, which runs until September 30th. It includes a survey and an optional Zoom interview with the study coordinators. One of the art pieces will be randomly chosen for a $100 prize draw. It's 100% voluntary and I had them show me that they could safely store or discard any personal information collected.

Even if you aren't on the spectrum or a visual artist (like me), you can still show your support by keeping tabs on their Instagram here, as they're doing both valuable disability advocacy alongside their research.

Please direct any questions to them. I'm just the messenger.

If you read this far, here's a headcanon as a reward:

Follow-up: my friends are also looking for guest writers on the spectrum for their blog to talk about their lived experiences. If that's more your speed, you can check that out here.

welcome to the Murdersex zine, a zine celebrating all things sex and murder. but um. we don't want to romanticize it or anything so don't make your submissions too murdersexy. we will do extensive background checks on all applicants and if we decide a past work of yours has too much sexy murder we'll have to remove you, sorry. we have limits, you know, we want a tasteful gory spread you could put on your coffee table, and having the Wrong people in it would kill the vibe (and we condemn all killing! wholeheartedly!)

i love how this post picks up whenever something like this happens again

Some long-overdue listings (at ½ off)

Three years ago I made these collar embroidery patterns. I was inspired by medieval designs from between the years 500-1200. Their popularity stretched across Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Vikings of the north.

(Fleur-de-Lis Collar - Strawberry Collar - 50% off during August)

And I've finally corrected a big oversight, which is a straight border pattern to harmonize with them! This helps you achieve matching cuffs and hem, if that's your vibe.

(Fleur-de-Lis Scroll - Strawberry Scroll - 50% off during August)

I also took user feedback on board and gave these freehand patterns, which don't have a grid, a dashed line to help you evenly space your stitches out.

If you want a cozy-ass wardrobe for fall, the best time to start is now

August 2025 is gonna be one big theme sale!

Do you want a cute and tiny acorn border for a shirt? A beautiful squirrel to mend the torn knee of your jeans? How about making the hem of your skirt look like a forest floor?

Hm? No? Don't worry, I've also got a whole spread of cozy and spooky autumnal patterns in the back!

And if you want other things that aren't that, I have... at least one or two other patterns that might work. ;-)

Check them all out on my Etsy!

Sufficiantley advanced mutual aid is indistinguishable from government.

communal resource management is not the same thing as mutual aid.

mutual aid exists as a force of nature between living beings. it is the idea that we help each other survive, regardless of species and other separation, and exists as a concept to contrast survival of the fittest.

mutual aid may result in systems being built but much of what we are able to do for one another does not require systems. the point of mutual aid is that people don't need the state telling them when or how to help each other, or when or how to receive help.

it's almost like people spent centuries building intricate communal systems of support which were usurped by some form of overarching power structure that restricts both the community and the individual to the point that we need to break those structures to provide/receive actual care once more.

Okay, that's an interesting and completely untenable perspective.

Human beings being able to exist in large groups in close proximity to each other takes an incredible amount of organization, which involves bureaucracy and central planning, and rules and regulations. Individuals providing aid to individuals is not going to build and manage things like sewer systems and the delivery of clean water, and if you don't have those, no amount of helping your neighbor is going to get you out of having half your children die before age five, which until the sanitary revolution in the late 1800s was the level of infant mortality expected in any society. And today, a reliable indicator of a failed state is a sharp rise in infant and childhood mortality because of thrle breakdown of infrustructure. And that's just one example.

Likewise, anyone who has ever had to deal with bullying or exclusion will tell you that if your ability to survive is entirely dependent on the goodwill of your neighbors, and your neighbors don't like you, you will probably die.

On both a large systems scale and small individual scale, this type of anarchy is infeasible and would be horrific. And the systems humans develop time and time again to deal with these problems are, inevitably, government. Every time humans have lived in groups of more than a hundred or so people, they have developed a government. That is what we naturally do. and the interesting thing is that when you start trying to get most anarchists to tell you how they would solve these problems, eventually, after you break through the buzzwords, and the bs, and get them to start making plans, what they come up with, whether they are willing to call it that or not, is a government.

And the rest of the anarchists? Well they are much worse. These are the anarchists who decide that if humans in large groups inevitably form governments, then the solution is that humans should only ever live in small groups, that we should go back to being hunter-gatherers. The population of the planet is order of magnitudes, too large to support as hunter-gatherers, and this group of anarchists, either implicitly or frequently explicitly, are willing to countenance the death of the overwhelming majority of humans alive today in order to bring about their anarchist utopia. This type of anarchism got real popular for some reason in the 2010s, and the line between these guys and eco-fascists, is fine, permeable, and ultimately meaningless.

I am willing to guess that you are in the first group of anarchists, which makes you willfully ignorant and profoundly naive. I feel for you, because utopian visions and a world that refuses to live up to them are a very hard thing to deal with. You are ultimately exactly the kind of anarchist who prompted me to make this post, because people like you are annoying and incredibly frustrating to work with, because you are so disconnected from how humans and human societies actually work.

my ancestors seeing me shrug off a diarrhea session

People in the notes confused because they're so accustomed to running water they don't know how close diarrhea might have otherwise come to killing them if they've had it even once lol it's killed more humans than just about anything in history

We’re the granddaughters of the bowels you couldn’t irritate

Mine would be baffled that I've gone 5+ years with bloody diarrhea. Inflammatory Bowel Disease has probably always existed, but they didn't have treatment.

I do want to specifically shout out Dr Thomas Latta, who is the person who gave us IV hydration, and pretty much magically cured cholera with it in his first attempt. From his diary:

Diarrhea can very easily be death by dehydration, especially when you can't consume oral fluids (Cholera causes extreme vomiting as well). Not only did we solve part of the problem with clean water, the other half was learning how to put clean water into our bodies (with salt).

Also fun fact, Thomas Latta was active in England at the same time as John Snow, the father of epidemiology, also in response to the Cholera epidemics at the time.

Throughout history, so many people have worked so hard to alleviate human suffering, misery, and death. You will never know the names of all the people who have spent their life’s passion to take care of you, someone divided from them by decades, even centuries, someone whose existence they’d never know, whose name they’d never hear. But they did it, all the same.

I think this is an important thing to keep in mind.

I love how two of the greatest inventions in the field of medicine were soap and saline IV

anyway in the hopes that i can save just one person from living the horror of my 20s: if you have a friend that seems a little too invested in callouts i hope you can get out of there safely

it's so easy to think to yourself "i don't have anything to hide, what do i have to worry about?" but having morals and generally doing your best not to hurt anyone will not save you. you can never be good or pure enough for these people. the target is constantly shifting and if they cannot find dirt on you they will change gears and tighten the circle of acceptable behaviors until you fit their new description of a threat. you are fully disposable to them and they are waiting to take the shot. don't confront them, don't give them the opportunity to darvo you. just hit the bricks 👍 the peace will be worth it

Sorry about the rant I'm just SO sick of this "we have to be on all the time never look away if you aren't upset about politics and traumatizing yourself watching people die on Twitter you're wrong and complicit and evil" like I know things are fucked and we need to stay angry but we can do that while also taking a minute to crack open a cold one with the boys or have gay sex or get tipsy at the line dance, we HAVE to have joy to remember why the fuck we're refusing to give up in the first place. Fight like hell for your loved ones and then also go home with them to smoke weed and drink sweet tea and make biscuits covered in honey and butter please, please don't deprive yourself of joy, you're allowed to be happy BEFORE the work is done. You're allowed to be happy.

The lady I used to live with was adamant that there be a party at any opportunity. They weren't always big, but if there was an occasion in the slightest, there was something done to celebrate it. Sometimes she literally would just say, "this deserves a Diet Coke!" And she would pass me a can from her stash in the closet.

It's important context that she had a very hard life into adulthood. Very poor family. Abusive father. Mentally ill mother. She often had to miss school as a teenager because she had to go find her mother, who would wander off for days into the woods. She also made sure her other siblings were fed, clothed, and at school while she herself was missing out on them.

I once asked her why she did so much celebrating.

She told me that people can choose to celebrate the small stuff if they want to, or not, but life was hard enough and the celebrations, no matter how small, made the other hard things easier. "If two people lead hard lives, and one of them celebrates and the other doesn't, which do you think will survive longer? Get more done? Make it farther?"

Your despondence and self-flagellation doesn't help anyone. Your passion and drive do. So you need to do things that ignite your passions and keep them ignited. Recognize that there is pain and awful suffering in the world. Do what you can to change that. Then do what you need to do to make sure you can keep doing it.

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

read all this punks. I know that this all can be a lot, so taking inspo from this and other posts, I am going to be drafting up a Guide for The Practical Revolutionary that will cover topics like this

Ill actually explain what to do in between "peaceful protest is not the beginning or end of resistance and you shouldnt count on it at all" types of posts and the "don't just chuck molotovs willy-nilly". bc both posts exist and both have a point, but its been causing some confusion with people who want to do direct action anarchism that goes beyond volunteering or mutual aid, but have reached a "if a peaceful march isnt enough for change but a violent protest isnt a good idea what am i supposed to do" type of dilemma. if you are similarly confused, drop questions for me to answer

As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

Re: this post

AO3 writers, apparently spam bots are now reaching the new low by leaving negative comments on authors' works (that are most likely copied and pasted, mass posted on random fics), meant to discourage and make authors delete their works. Holy shit.

Writers, if you receive mean/rude/negative comments on your fics, please always know that — with the new wave of bots — there are high chances of these comments being spam meant to try to get you to delete your works (so far, the only reason I can think of as to why they want writers to delete their works off AO3 is because, once the works have been deleted, it's nearly impossible for authors to claim ownership of their works in case of the works being stolen, used or re-uploaded without authors' permission).

Know that these negative comments from spam bots do not mean your works are "bad" in any way! They leave the same copy and paste script on various fics, because they want authors to feel discouraged, they want you to delete your works so they can maybe steal your works later without you being able to strike them with copyright violation once the original fics have been deleted.

Report these comments and move on.

I know how much a rude comment can affect an author. But please always remember that they just copied and pasted the same comment, same script onto your fic like they did dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of other writers. They never even read your works. They're bots. They just want you to delete your fics so they can safely steal them.

Don't give them what they want.

I will always reblog this....it is so important to be able to give them access to help. As a writer I fully support this

Comic is by Pan Cooke (he/him). You can find him @thefakepan on Instagram. Here’s a link to the comic: https://www.instagram.com/p/DAOU7_5PVkH/?igsh=dHlzYWZhN3BsaDZ4

[Image Descriptions: Screenshots from Instagram of an eight-panel comic by Pan Cooke. All panels except the last have black text against a white background at the top. The top text will be inside braces {} to differentiate from the rest of the panel description.

ID1: {A 10-year-old in Delaware was visiting her local library with her mother.} Below is a drawing of a young girl and her mother in between two library shelves, with more bookshelves behind them. The girl is wearing a purple long-sleeve shirt, dark pants, and an orange backpack. She wears a light purple flower-shaped barrette in her brunette hair, and looks excited to be there. The mom stands behind her, arms crossed and smiling. She wears a grayish teal t-shirt and dark bottoms, and has black hair. Next to the mom’s head is black block letters reading BOOK BANS.

ID2: {While searching the shelves, she picked up the book, “It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberly.} The drawing shows the girl from the back, reaching towards a bookshelf, with her hand on one book. All the books on the bookshelf are gray except for the one the girl touches, which is French blue.

ID3: {The book is about sex education and is one of the most banned books of the past two decades. The little girl took it home.} Depicted is the interior of a car, as though through the front windshield. The mom is in the driver’s seat, looking in the rear view mirror at her daughter, who sits in the middle of the back seat. The mother is smiling while the daughter looks pensively down at the blue book she’s holding. Both are wearing their seatbelts.

ID4: {Later that day, the little girl showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said,} “This is me.” Written in a speech bubble in the middle of the panel. The POV is behind the girl’s shoulder as she shows the open book to her mother. The mother sits at a table on the left side of the panel; she looks shocked, confused, and distraught.

ID5: {Her father was abusing her, and this was the first time she’d talked about it.} A close-up of the mother’s face from the last panel. Her eyebrows are a bit more raised, and her mouth is open as though about to speak. Her face conveys worry and and distress.

ID6: {The father was convicted, and the judge said,} “There were heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.” This is written in a speech bubble pointing towards an older, balding Black man wearing glasses and a judicial robe. He is sitting at a judge’s bench in a courtroom; part of the USA flag is visible behind him.

ID7: {In an interview, the author, Robie H. Harris, said…} “I have been called a pornographer, a child abuser - every name in the book, as the saying goes. But whenever I am called one of those names, I think of that ten-year-old girl. I wish we never had to talk with kids about any of these aberrant behaviors.

But we have to do so because they already know about them to some extent and because kids have a right to have the accurate information that can keep them healthy and safe. They need to know how to get help to make any abusive behavior stop.” This text in a speech bubble takes up most of the panel, with the left third being a portrait of Robie H. Harris, an old white woman with short gray hair. She wears glasses, a black shirt, small earrings, and a dark beaded necklace.

ID8: A yellow text box at the top of the panel contains the text {When right-wing groups petition and protest to get sex education books off the shelves of schools and public libraries, it stops the most vulnerable people from accessing the tools and language that can help them. It helps to shield and hide abusers. It communicates to children suffering from abuse that they are shameful and that it’s not safe or polite to speak out about.}

The drawing below shows the ceiling and top shelf of a library bookshelf full of books. Above the shelf in block letters reads: SEX ED BOOKS DON'T "GROOM" KIDS AND TEENS. THEY PROTECT THEM. In the corner of the bookshelf is a link to the article which inspired this comic: Source: https://bookriot.com/sex-ed books-protect-kids/

/ End Image Descriptions]

Feel free to give constructive feedback on my image descriptions! I know I can be a bit wordy sometimes.