do you think after Ron and Hermione got out of the trapdoor and raised the alarm and were being patched up in the hospital wing
do you think they were given the most royal proud mama smackdown by McGonagall like “ how DARE you infiltrate a death maze you are ELEVEN and miss granger how on earth did you solve my chessboard i”
and hermione interjected like “oh professor it wasn’t me. i’m useless at chess. it was ron.”
and McGonagall turned to look at Ron Weasley in total amazement at this 11 yr old kid who had been pretty ordinary in all her classes but had apparently beaten her in death chess and he just shrugged like “rookie mistakes, professor. you made some rookie mistakes.”
#AND THIS WAS THE DAY MCGONAGALL LEARNED NOT TO UNDERESTIMATE RON WEASLEY#AND HE NEVER GOT A BREAK FROM HER EVER AGAIN#‘you beat me in death chess i’m sure you can handle transfiguring an owl into a spoon mr weasley’#ron weasley#‘damnit i should have just let myself be killed in there she’s making me LEARN THINGS’ (via alchemistc)
Asking “what’s sexual about this” is almost insidous. Sure, she’s not naked and she’s not performing any sexual acts, but that’s not what sexualization necessarily means. The girl-child is looking longinly, languishingly into the camera. She has her legs in a short dress spread, her lips separated, and very much make-up making her look older. She is passive, for the camera/viewer, while the boy is active, joking, playing, relaxed and as a child, respected as a child. I’m sure someone might say, “but that’s you sexualizing her, with your gaze” but come on, who are we kidding here? We know the industry sexualizes young girls, we know this isn’t a coinscidence. We know this is the pattern, the model for woman according to the male gaze or woman performing for the male gaze, and we know she is 13 and that everyone knows she is. And we know this destroys girls.
it’s thursday today but it’s cold outside, so here’s an update on my attempt at a thursday meme. it’s thursday and it’s cold but i’m still here to help. thanks
it’s 2015 now and thursday still needs a meme, here’s another attempt to contribute. it’s thursday and it’s a new year and as always i’m here to help. thanks
spring has sprung but thursday still needs a meme, so here’s another attempt to contribute. it’s springtime this thursday, and even as the seasons change i’m here to help. thanks
it’s a summer thursday and thursday still needs a meme, so here’s one more attempt to contribute. it’s thursday and this summer i’m here to help. thanks
my fav thing about eurovision is how there are always rainbow flags in the audience, like, most people show support to their own country w their flags, and then there’s that person whos just like “i’m here because i’m gay”
I’m proud to identify as morosexual. I’m attracted to dumbasses and dumbasses exclusively. A guy asked me what the Spanish word for tortilla was once and now I dream of kissing him under the moonlight
I’m proud to identify as morosexual. I’m attracted to dumbasses and dumbasses exclusively. A guy asked me what the Spanish word for tortilla was once and now I dream of kissing him under the moonlight
Plus-Sized Woman Rocks Bikini on Hollywood Boulevard to Promote Body Acceptance
Los Angeles is known for many things: great weather, a laidback lifestyle, and Hollywood’s biggest stars. But for many who live in La La Land, the pressure to conform to a certain beauty standard can leave them feeling downright depressed.
Vatican provides first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See over past decade...
“The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.
The Vatican’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, released the figures during a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.
Tomasi insisted that the Holy See was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.
But significantly, he didn’t dispute the committee’s contention that sexual violence against children can be considered torture. Legal experts have said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a new wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the world don’t carry statutes of limitations.
Tomasi also provided statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for the past decade. The Vatican in 2001 required bishops and religious superiors to forward all credible cases of abuse to Rome for review after determining that they were shuffling pedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials. Only in 2010 did the Vatican explicitly tell bishops and superiors to also report credible cases to police where local reporting laws require them to.
The Vatican statistics are notable in that they show how the peaks in numbers over the years - both of cases reported and sanctions meted out - roughly parallels the years in which abuse scandals were in the news. And they showed that far from diminishing in recent years, the number of cases reported annually to the Vatican has remained a fairly constant 400 or so since 2010, the last year the scandal erupted in public around the globe. These cases, however, concern mostly abuse that occurred decades ago.
The latest spike began in 2010, when 464 cases were reported, more than twice the amount in 2009. Starting in that same year, the Vatican began resorting more and more to the lesser penalty of sentencing accused priests to a lifetime of penance and prayer rather than defrocking them. The Vatican often metes out such sentences for elderly or infirm priests, since defrocking them would essentially render them destitute in their final years.
The main U.S. victim’s group, SNAP, praised the Vatican for releasing the data, saying “Every step toward more transparency about clergy sex crimes and coverups is good.” But it called the numbers “meaningless” and urged the Vatican to release the names and whereabouts of molesters.
Nick Cafardi, a U.S. canon lawyer and former chairman of the U.S. bishops’ lay review board that monitored clerical abuse, said the statistics clearly showed a positive evolution in how the church dealt with the abuse problem.
“Given where the church came from - with the pendulum swung squarely to the side of the accused priest whose explanations were almost always believed - this is a move away from that and more toward giving credibility to victims, which is progress,” he said. “Maybe not perfect progress, but progress.”
Tomasi’s appearance marked the second time this year that the Vatican has been hauled before a U.N. committee to face uncomfortable questions about how it has handled the crisis of priests who raped and molested tens of thousands of children, and the bishops who covered up for them. The Vatican was required to appear as a signatory to U.N. treaties.
The vice-chair of the committee, Felice Gaer, pressed Tomasi to acknowledge whether the Holy See considered sexual abuse to be a form of torture. She cited decisions from many international bodies, including the U.N. tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which have held that sexual violence is indeed a form of torture.
The U.N. convention defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” to obtain information, to punish or coerce and is inflicted with the “consent or acquiescence” of a public official.
Gaer said afterward that she considered Tomasi’s response to be a clear admission by the Holy See that sexual violence can be a form of torture.
Victims’ advocates and legal groups have said the Catholic Church could be exposed to a new round of litigation if courts agree that abuse can constitute torture.
“The Vatican has long minimized these offenses and the resulting harm,” said Pam Spees, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided documentation to the U.N. committee detailing the scope of the clerical abuse problem. “But the committee’s recognition (of abuse as a form of torture) could help open additional channels for victims to seek justice and reparations, including, potentially, relief from restrictive statutes of limitations and civil remedies, all of which contributes to preventing more harm.”
Tomasi acknowledged that there were problems in the past, including when priests were transferred from diocese to diocese after psychiatrists gave them a clean bill of health, thinking that a pedophile could be cured with therapy.
“The culture at the time would allow this to happen,” he said. “Unfortunately, that was a mistake as experience has shown.“”
“ The Vatican often metes out such sentences for elderly or infirm priests, since defrocking them would essentially render them destitute in their final years. “
Report them to the police, when they go to jail, they get room and board.
“Tomasi acknowledged that there were problems in the past, including when priests were transferred from diocese to diocese after psychiatrists gave them a clean bill of health, thinking that a pedophile could be cured with therapy. “
The 1812 version of Snow White is even worse when you consider that the girl was only seven years old in the tale (plus her unconscious body ended up being carted around by the prince until one of his servants accidentally woke her up). Also, in The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s unable to speak because she had her tongue cut out >__<
But I’d love to see faithful adaptations of the original tales. Especially Bluebeard. We need a Bluebeard adaptation.
Actually, the original-original pre-Grimm Brothers’ stories that were passed around Europe via oral tradition are nowhere near as violent as the Grimm’s made them. Cinderella’s stepsisters were never ugly and kept their eyes, Snow White’s mother was not even a villain (instead a group of bandits were), and instead of spending the whole story napping Sleeping Beauty outwitted a dangerous bandit leader, wouldn’t let him sleep with her, and saved herself.
The original oral stories were radically changed by the Brothers Grimm to fit their personal and political beliefs. Most notably, they often added in female characters solely for the purpose of making them evil villains and took away most of the heroines’ agency and intelligence. Both brothers belonged to a small fanatical sect of Catholicism that vilified women because of the idea of Original Sin and Wilhelm in particular had a particularly deep hatred of women. The Grimms were actually pretty horrible people. Those cannibalistic queens and ugly stepsisters and the mass amount of violence against women didn’t exist until the Grimms wanted them to. Their ideas stuck so soundly though that we now assume they were in the original tales and that these terrible characters and ideas come out of some perceived barbaric Old World culture. But in truth they’re really the Grimms’ weird obsession with hating women showing through. The original oral folklore focused on the heroes’ and heroines’ good deeds and used them as ways to teach cultural norms and a society’s rules and encouraged girls to be quick-witted and street-savvy instead of passive princesses, and the Grimms promptly stripped that all away.
So this guy Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth collected all these fairytales and in the 2000′s they were discovered in an attic and published. Unlike the Grimm brothers, he did not edit anything. The Grimms deliberately edited the stories to fit middle class tastes - they also were trying to create a national identity with these tales as a touchstone. Meanwhile Von Schonwerth’s goal was documenting the Bavarian oral traditions - which is why he didn’t edit the stories in his notes.
And the stories are weird and intense. Some have the classic “beginning middle end + moral” - some are just “here’s stuff that happened….”
And some of the endings…you know that story about a weary soldier who performs three tasks and gets to marry the princess? In this book, the soldier is continually rejected by both the king and the princess, so he brings an army to burn down the entire castle with everyone inside. The end, lol.
The other interesting thing is that while the Grimms tales had mostly female protagonists, Von Schonwerth’s have as many boys trying to escape nasty situations as girls. There are boys who cuddle up with frogs to discover that the frogs are princesses, there are boys called “King Goldenhair,” there are brothers fighting, and fathers sending sons out to stop being a burden on the family. In the introduction, Maria Tatar posits that the Grimms, having suffered from being orphans, may have avoided these types of stories.
Anyway, if you like fairytales, The Turnip Princess book is worth the read.
cant believe a bunch of english kids go through a fuckin cupboard and find a magical kingdom full of wonder and they go “yeah we’re the royal family now”
I think what’s more creepily imperialistic is the reaction of everyone in Narnia to the Pevensies.
Like, the Pevensies end up the royal family in large part because everyone’s like ‘it has been prophesied that you will come and rule us and everything will be great!’ and, well, in-universe I can’t really fault them on that; if I were a young teen or pre-teen in a completely foreign country, I too would probably just go along with whatever seem to make people friendly to me.
But the reaction of the Narnians, in almost ubiquitously welcoming these foreigners as obviously destined to rule them even though they know nothing of the country and the culture… now that is some creepily imperialist writing.
if four foreign kids popped out of a magic box and deposed trump by the express wishes of god’s fursona, i’d crown ‘em. this winter already fuckin feels like it’s lasted 100 years.
Pro tip: if an evangelical stranger approaches you asking to pray for you, there’s inevitably something about you that they see and want to change. [Ex: I attend a very conservative, very religious uni and am clearly tomboyish/lesbiany, and thus am constantly attracting evangelical strangers] If you can’t shake them (usually very difficult), then turn the tactic upon them by asking if they mind you leading the prayer bc “I have a few things on my mind.”
Then talk about whatever it is that’s making them uncomfortable. I ask god to protect all the lgbt+ kids that are lost, isolated or homeless. I mention my non-Christian brothers, sisters, and siblings that have to fight for recognition and respect in a monoreligious nation. I pray for the protection of immigrants and refugees, reminding my evangelical friends that their savoir was once one of that number. You can pray for pregnant mothers to find the resources and abortive care that they need, if they need it, if you’re feeling particularly brave.
This achieves two things: 1) there is no response to this, esp if you wrap it up with “amen, thank you guys so much for doing that with me. I hope y'all have a blessed day” and leave them no room to continue the prayer. But more importantly 2) that group will NEVER bother you again and you will show them, using their own method against them, that their prayer isn’t an act of faith, but of power.
Just thought I’d share bc I know that I used to be accosted by evangelical strangers once a week on my uni campus and never had a good response or ‘out’. This is by far the most effective method of shutting that sort of behavior down real quick.
