The Annoying Possum @annoyingpossum - Tumblr Blog

PSA on Britney Spears and the #FreeBritney movement for anyone that needs or wants more information on what is going on with her. It’s a fucking rabbit hole, so buckle up.

A little backstory first. Britney was a child star starting at the age of 4 years old on Broadway, and then worked her way to the Mickey Mouse Club, and eventually the solo career we know today. Her career has been on autopilot her entire life. If you look back at her music, she’s been telling everyone for years she’s too controlled and treated as a product if you listen to the lyrics of most of her hits. Examples include: Lucky, Overprotected, My Perogative, Circus, Piece of Me and Gimme More. Her music videos, social media posts, tour props and photoshoots regularly show her in a cage or in chains. If anyone has ever seen videos of her when she was younger, you’d know her REAL singing voice is very similar to Christina Aguilera’s. Her record label didn’t like it, as they were both on the Mickey Mouse Club and about to release their debut albums at the same time. So they had her voice retrained to sing in the baby voice we all know today because they believed it to be more iconic and would create a brand and career for her instead of her real voice. It’s unhealthy, and it’s been destroying her voice over the years, thus why she is known for lip syncing. She wanted to make an acoustic type pop album in 2006 titled Original Doll and reinvent herself using her real voice. The album was shelved and cancelled once her label realized she would be singing in her real voice. She isn’t allowed to sing live because she will either fail terribly, or she’ll have to sing in her deep voice that she isn’t known for. Her entire career she has been treated like a product meant to sell.

Now, for the real tea.

Everyone remembers the 2007 meltdown. Everyone. Leading up the meltdown Britney was going thru a public divorce, had two children under the age of 2 at the time and was VERY much the focus of the public. We all saw her on every magazine cover. We all also saw the photo of her with one of her kids on her lap while driving. Go on YouTube once and look up ‘Britney Spears paparazzi’. You’ll watch her be chased and followed by hundreds of them, even trying to get into a public restroom to photograph her, videotaping her in tears asking them to leave her alone, and even filming her thru the windows of an ambulance while she was naked being taken away for her final mental health hold.

After the public meltdown, shaving her head, locking herself in her home with her children, speaking in a british accent on regular basis, wearing the imfamous pink wig everywhere, and shopping naked, she was hospitalized twice. After the hospitalization, her father petitioned the courts to be a TEMPORARY conservator to her until she was mentally stable and for only one years time. 2 months after her hospitalization she did a guest appearance on How I Met Your Mother. 6 months after her hospitalization, she drops the Womanizer video and starts to promote her new album Circus with its worldwide tour that grossed $131.8 million. If she’s so unwell, why did she start working right away?

Her father after one year petitioned the courts for the conservatorship to become permanent due to her ALLEGEDLY having EARLY ONSET DEMENTIA in her TWENTIES. It passed and has been that way ever since. For 12 years to be exact.

Now for everyone that doesn’t understand what that means let me break it down for you.

Britney Spears is a now 38 year old woman who is not allowed to do the following without her fathers permission or he can legally lock her up in a mental health facility:

• drive a car

• vote

• get married

• have children

• spend HER OWN MONEY

• see how her money is being spent

• see her children (she has 30% custody of both of her boys due to her dad assaulting one of her sons)

• leave her home

• hire her own lawyer

• have any control over her career

• speak about the conservatorship publicly

• do interviews that aren’t scripted and all final cuts are approved by her father as well

• use a cell phone without being monitored

• use social media unmonitored

• contact ANYONE without being monitored or having them extremely vetted. (Iggy Azalea allegedly had her house searched for drugs top to bottom when they collaborated on a song together)

• go shopping

• go for a walk

• get Starbucks

A conservatorship is meant for people with mental health issues or decaying health. Most likely grandparents or people with actual dementia etc. They are meant for people who literally cannot take care of themselves. If she is so unwell that she isn’t mentally capable of doing anything for herself, why is she still working? Since the conservatorship began 12 years ago she has:

• released 4 albums

• done 3 worldwide tours

• did a FOUR-year Vegas residency

• was a full time judge on X-Factor

• released multiple perfumes and a lingerie line

• made $138 MILLION DOLLARS or so A YEAR

In January of last year, Britney was placed in a mental health facility for 3 months after being seen driving her car to In-N-Out with her boyfriend without permission and for refusing to take the sedating medications her father has doctors prescribing her to keep her under control. She testified to a judge in documents that she was held there against her will by her father. After it was leaked to the press that she was there against her will, the Free Britney movement picked up speed causing a judge to open an investigation into the impact and legality her conservatorship has on her life. Britney’s mother Lynn was also liking and commenting on Free Britney posts saying she agrees that Britney is trapped by her father. Britney’s team had Twitter disable the Free Britney hashtag, and regularly threatens any celebrity that speaks out using the hashtag with a lawsuit if they don’t remove their support for the movement. She was seen shortly after leaving a hotel thru the front door (99% of celebrities park underground to avoid paparazzi unless they WANT to be photographed) stumbling while carrying her shoes, and out of it. Her team used that moment to justify to the public that she needs this conservatorship. She is not allowed to have any say in the hiring or firing of anyone on her team. Every year she pays $1.1 million dollars in fees for the conservatorship to continue, including paying her father a solid $100k+ salary and paying a lawyer she isn’t allowed to choose. She is allowed an allowance of around $1,500 a week for bills, shopping and essentials. Her net worth is $250 million.

So, when everyone sees her on Instagram walking up and down her hallways like it’s a fashion show. That’s all she is allowed to do. She has NEVER had control over her life. I don’t care if you personally like her or her music, NO ONE DESERVES THIS. All this woman wants is to see her children, make the music she wants to make, and go get a frappuccino in her car. She is a light of sunshine in this world, and we must protect her at all costs. So please, do not make fun of her, support the Free Britney movement, and send good vibes her way. She has a court date this month to review the conservatorship and decide if it is abusive or will continue to be in place. There are so many details to this that i left out that would make this post entirely much longer than it is, but a simple search will show you what else is out there. Spread this far and wide. ❤️ Free Britney

theliteraryarchitect-deactivate

Holy shit I didn’t know about any of this. What the fuck.

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I found this online and I love it.

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READ. EVERY. WORD. OF. THIS. Account of a medical team out in St. Paul last night.

Link to original tweet thread.

nansheonearth

“Okay here we go. I have waded through one google alert after another the last two weeks about the controversy surrounding the film “Adam”, a story about a male who poses as a trans man to get with a lesbian. It comes up in my google alert because every article tags michfest as it discusses the character’s trip to Camp Trans in 2006.

Some version of the following is being said in the articles: “Rather, the film demonstrates an authentic desire for dialogue and exploration as it depicts the internal struggles of the LGBTQ community—in the various “closets” some of the characters inhabit and in their community trip to Camp Trans, where we get a quick (though not totally thorough) education in how trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) refused to allow transwomen to attend the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

“Let’s talk about that “authentic dialogue”. I guess it applies to everyone in the alphabet except womon-identified womyn. Particularly womon-identified womyn who were/are part of the michfest community. Because our truth is left out by the constant regurgitation of the reductive one-liner that the gay/queer/alphabet-obsessed community has used to dismiss us with for 25 years - “Refused to allow transwomen”.

So let me be clear. We did ask one trans woman to leave the festival in 1991. Period. No other trans women were asked to leave or not allowed to purchase tickets before or after that time in 1991. Prior to this, and after this transgression, we had a commitment to not question anyone’s gender…. long before hipsters were giving their preferred pronouns in every possible moment. You see, Michigan was actually populated by one of the most gender diverse communities on the planet, brimming with gender outlaws from around the world, breaking the binary for 40 years.

In 1994, the year of the first Camp Trans, a group from the camp came across to the festival, bought tickets, walked through the festival in protest, had a gathering, and returned to camp trans. Friends and workers I knew and loved were part of the walk through festival with camp trans, and attended the workshop with Leslie Fineberg and Minni Bruce Pratt. In Michigan we lived with the tension of differing opinions without shutting each other down or shaming each other to hell.

As we stated in our August 18, 2014 press release/email/fb post: “The truth is, trans womyn and trans men attend the Festival, blog about their experiences, and work on crew. Again, it is not the inclusion of trans womyn at Festival that we resist; it is the erasure of the specificity of female experience in the discussion about the space itself that stifles progress in this conversation.”

Michigan was focused on the experience and rejuvenation of females. And we believed that the biological and political oppression of womyn was real, through the times that saw so many radical peoples look the other way as females lost hard fought protections and rights - the right to choose what happens with our bodies, the right to name our bodies, the right to gather among our peers. This was our grave “error” in a time when it became essentially outlawed to be concentrated on womyn, on females - especially lesbian womyn who are focused on womyn. We had the audacity to say our gathering was intended for womyn who were born and lived their lives as females. We left the onus up to each individual to decide what they did with our intention, and moving forward, didn’t question anyone about how they handled that.

Back to the “authentic dialogue” that is heralded as the way the LGBTQI community talks about gender. Every damn reference to our gorgeous, inter-generational, radical and diverse community that pops up in the press is a monologue, an echo chamber, a party line that leaves out our truth. Furthermore, that “authentic dialogue” perpetuates the disappearance of lesbians and the diminishment of womyn. On this, the anniversary of festival week, I break silence on this issue to once again tell the truth of our story.

I call to you to tell your truth about Michigan whenever these reductive lies are the single line with which our culture is referenced in articles, text books or conversations. It’s not easy, I know. I have taken to writing my stories of the festival, a memoir of sorts, a herstory of a certain flavor. I love telling the fun and animated stories, the beautiful happenings and the craze-ass things we did, as well as the struggles that made us stronger together. Yet I am most driven to tell the painful and difficult stories of how the Festival was one of the first institutions attacked for loving females, and how for 25 years we were ground zero demonstrating to the rest of the community what kind of attack you will be under if you do not capitulate to your own disappearance. I am compelled to make sure that when our sisters of coming generations look for stories of what we created together for 40 years in those beautiful woods, they will find us, and our truth will be so clear. Time will wear the rock away.“

- Lisa Vogel, Michigan Women’s Music Festival

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“Unlike feminist conferences today, […] there were no speakers at feminist conferences in those days; we thought that was elitist - we never ever had speakers. What happened was that any woman could write a paper for the conference. So they would write a paper, usually about two sides of A4, […] and we would take these to the conference the next day and put them in the entrance, and women would pick up all the papers - which could be written by anybody - and then there would often be workshops about the papers. [The papers] were all very short so [the women] could read them quickly and think, “I’ll go to that workshop.” I say all of this simply because feminists today do not know how this took place; they have these conferences where there are speakers up at the front - it’s a totally different thing. So these women would read the short papers and in the workshops [engage in] equal discussion amongst ourselves. Also what happened was that the discussions got further; […] conference papers at one conference would answer conference papers of the previous conference, and then they’d go in a newsletter, and so on. So theory was built in a way that doesn’t really happen today.”

— Sheila Jeffreys x

feathered-friend

Am I Thinking Critically?

Most of us have deeply held beliefs and opinions about the world that we feel justified in defending without thinking critically about what conventions have led us to believe them. I drafted this quick list of questions to cause you to think critically about an issue (i.e ethics and morality in pornography, women’s reproductive rights, gay marriage). This is short and doesn’t even begin to cover a comprehensive method of analyzing belief systems….so feel free to add more!!!

1. Who taught me to believe this? 2. Is the person who encouraged me to believe this in a position of power over me or are they a peer? (i.e a parent, boss, or teacher versus a coworker, friend, sibling) 3. Who/what group of people is the most widely known supporter of this belief? 4. What would the proponents of this belief stand to gain from my enforcement/complacency in this belief? 5. What would they stand to lose? 6. Who is harmed from this belief? (Think VERY hard before answering ‘no one’- most contested issues throughout history put at least one group at a disadvantage/directly harms them socioeconomically/physically/emotionally) 7. Have I pursued both sides of this issue in a reasonable, open manner or have I been too upset or frustrated to consider new ideas? 8. Are people’s safety, bodily autonomy, basic human rights such as food, clean water, freedom to express their own opinions at stake in my enforcement or complacency of this belief? 9. Am I using logical fallacies/propaganda/stereotyping/“buzz words”/slurs/threats to enforce this belief? (In my own thoughts and out loud) 10. Do I believe most of the same things of my friends/family/colleagues/social media tell me or do I challenge the status quo and think for myself by doing my own research and seeking unbiased information?