is a whale a fish? sure thing why not

[victusinveritas]

More here. Really bummed about this, her work was brilliant, and what got me into graphic novels.

[gregtom]

[k-simplex-deactivated20241001]

Happy Pride

[bringbackthepornbots]

"my girlfriend taught me about feminism and then dumped me, and i wrote a song about how important it is to listen to women, and i'm going to perform it forever because i'm so glad she helped me out" WHOMST is doing it like him

[hirsuteandcute]

I'm just going to say it - body hair (and beauty standards in general) is truly one of the final frontiers of women's issues in the West. Too many women just love their gilded cage too much. It shocks me how virulently women will defend it. I barely open my mouth and the "well I like how it feels. it just makes me feel cleaner. sensory issues. I do it for me. feminism is about choosing (to conform)." brigade come rushing in by the dozens.

Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.

You genuinely can't even point out that hairlessness is a man-made standard without women losing their shit and acting like they are totally immune to propaganda they've been exposed to from birth. I'm so tired.

[noah-wyles]

it's pride month

everyone get more understanding of the asexual spectrum right nOW

[filmphotofranz]

From the vigil for Persia Amarra Conway, the transgender woman who was found dead in SW Houston near Brays Bayou on Memorial Day. This is some of what her mom said about her.

[filmphotofranz]

the strange transgender feeling of watching someone else's vigil and hoping that if you're killed, your mom will talk about you like this

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

you'll feel like a total dipshit train wreck and no matter what some girl is gonna see you and think "role model". you can't kill yourself you have to go be clocky in the gas station so a 14 year old can have the trajectory of her life altered forever

[duchessvongooseberg]

as annoying as it is to work fast food, at my previous job one time a kid recognized the theta delta pin on my hat and was so fucking excited because i was the first other therian they had ever encountered offline.

"hey....are you a therian?" "yeah!" "what kind of animal?" "eh, some kinda dog" "😲😀 im like a wolf coyote hybrid" "that's fuckin awesome"

to be weird is to cast lifelines all around you

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

tags from @k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl

what really drives me nuts is that like. this happens an average of x times per year as a visibly weird person, but we only get made aware of it a small fraction of the time. you can't kill yourself you have to be clocky in the gas station.

[analog-delight]

Being clocky when i was working as a barista was one of my big joys. Being clocky when i was teaching high schoolers how to play the marimba was my reason for being for half a decade. It sucks how scared I am to leave the house I live in now. But I still need to try and be clocky at the grocery store. I wish i had a job to be clocky at. Being visibly me is one of the most radical acts I'm capable of, and I hope that one day we live in a world where it isn't radical at all.

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

that's exactly what I was feeling when I wrote this. we all find ways to defy our fear, love is an excellent motivator.

[baraphalloplastyclinic]

I actually do think we should discourage women from becoming housewives. Do not become financially dependent on a man. That's how a lot of women ended up dead over the years. A man gets violent suddenly and you have to choose between homelessness or potentially dying at his hand because you have an enormous gap in your resume and no degrees or certifications or anything that will help you pursue a career that will allow you to be financially independent. He owns your bank account. His name is probably the one on the car. Try and leave and he can report it stolen. Where will you go then?

Don't become a housewife.

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

Yes AND…

If you really want women to feel working is a viable option, then we need way more societal supports for mothers and parents in general.

I am a woman who grew up with a working mother with a PhD and never dreamed of being a housewife. I don’t do well when I don’t have a structured schedule that includes time outside the house. I have had stretches of unemployment where I was in essence a stay at home mother and I was miserable.

AND

There have been times I have seriously considered quitting my job not because I don’t want to work, but because finding quality childcare within budget and with hours that facilitate two full time working parents is unbelievably stressful.

I know women who would like to work but can’t afford it because the jobs they’re qualified for don’t pay enough to be worth the cost of childcare. Or women who decide not to go back to work after a baby is born because American maternity leave - even in locations with “good” policies - is an absolute joke.

And I think that people believe all you need to do here is encourage girls to go to college and have a job and they will become self-sufficient career women. But that is not enough, especially for people who value having multiple children.

[psych-is-the-name]

[star-mom-selkie]

happy pride month

[bringbackthepornbots]

had to send a client to our vendor "Racist Grifter" and i'm so mad about it lol

[victusinveritas]

Meanwhile, in the worst state in the Union… (Indiana, I'm from here, I can say it).

Not only is this homophobic and erasing Pride Month, it also snubs blended families like the Brady Bunch (and other, real families of course).

[soup-shoes]

Isn't it just so ludicrous that these people claim to be the Big Majority and they go for desperate bullshit like this.

They have institutional power - and that's all they've got going for them. We've got love and community and solidarity. They can print text on paper and demand that people read it, that's cute. Lots of people have made zines. You can make zines. Make a zine that says June is Male Pattern Baldness Kinkster month, and everyone MUST say "Mike Braun can Comb My Over anytime" to a stranger at least twice daily or they are breaking the LAW.

These poor fucks feel like they have to pull horsepiss like this, just to feel normal. We can do shenanigans just cause its fun.

We get to explore who, what, and how we want to be - and none of us is obligated to feel any kind of way about that.

Go ahead and be EXTRA this Pride just to showboat about it. And remember to honor Male Pattern Baldness Kinkster Month. Mike Braun is feeling a little unappreciated right now.

[victusinveritas]

As a balding male kinkster, I'm proud to have my own month, thanks!

[feignedremote]

I was listening to Fiona Apple's debut album Tidal, an album I find myself appreciating more and more in the decade or so that I've listened to it, and I thought to myself wow, if 2010s Lana Del Rey or 2020s Ethel Cain wrote some of these lyrics, many people would be posting about feminism being OVER. Perhaps with the Fiona Apple "there is no hope for women" quote! And then I remembered that people did that with Fiona Apple at the time! Pitchfork's contemporaneous review of When the Pawn is misogynistic to the point of absurdity, despite (or because of?) being accompanied by an 8.0 rating, and describes the "Criminal" music video as "pedophilic" (with no further examination of why the writer gets that impression from it and what the artistic intent might have been.) And then in 2012 the same publication gave The Idler Wheel a 9.0, and in 2020 Fetch the Bolt Cutters their first 10 in a decade.

Similar trajectory with Lana Del Rey—Pitchfork was instrumental to her initial rise and the subsequent backlash in the early 2010s (I was there! I remember!), then gave 2019's Norman Fucking Rockwell! a 9.4 and the same year, ranked "Video Games" #9 on its list of the best songs of the decade, completing its transformation from loved to hated to loved again. (I think it's particularly interesting that they chose "Video Games" for the top ten rather than a NFR track, although "The greatest" is also in the top 100.)

Anyway, I am aware that the reviews I'm mentioning have different writers and the staff has changed over time and certainly an individual is allowed (even encouraged!) to revise their opinion on art, but the larger trend of dismissing a woman's art as shallow or distasteful and then realizing a decade or two later that perhaps that was unfair, yet continuing to take the same approach towards a different artist is very apparent imo. And it's certainly not an issue confined to insirutional music criticism; stan twitter talks like this too (which is more forgivable since they aren't professionals and many are young people—but still indicative of broader cultural attitudes about how one should tackle sexual violence and trauma in their art.)

[feignedremote]

Wrote this post this morning, went onto Twitter and promptly saw a guy call fiona apple a "professional victim" this evening (because people are discussing Paul Thomas Anderson abusing her.) Just goes to show that if you are a woman making art about rape or abuse, you are a fake victim no matter what. It never happened, but if it did, you liked it 🙃 (edit: this also ties into the whole trauma plot discourse, which would like us to think that it is somehow improbable to the point of being unbelievable for Fiona Apple to have been raped as a child and abused by a different man as an adult.)

[feignedremote]

hi caden @transmutationisms I am promoting you from replybox bc my reply to ur comment got really long and unwieldy for the comment box lmao.

But YESSS absolutely and that is part of what I am trying to get but perhaps did not really make explicit. I think Fiona Apple is *sometimes* in *some contexts* (ex among young women who are self-described feminists talking about music online) afforded grace that she otherwise might not be because she has publically disclosed her Real Experiences, in contrast to someone like Lana Del Rey, who did not, at least early in her career, which perhaps made it easier for people to dismiss her work as fetishistic and exploitative. Which is infuriating in its own right because people shouldn't have to publicize that if they don't want to, and it's deeply strange to take the lack of explicit disclosure of Real Experiences as a sign that these Real (Traumatic) Experiences did not exist. I also think it perpetuates a very rigid dichotomy between Trauma Victim or Not Trauma Victim while in reality we live in a society (lol) where abuse and sexual violence are rampant and there's no way to not be affected by those things—which isn't to say that everyone is equally affected, but that I don't think people, especially young women, can really be sorted into neat categories of abused or not, traumatized or not.

And then in the end, even if you disclose these Real Experiences, they're never Real enough for some people (as seen in Fiona Apple example). The utility of disclosure is always so limited. Of course people choose to speak openly about these things for many reasons, I am not saying they should or shouldn't, but it's an absurd bind because many audiences encourage these disclosures to affirm one's right to talk about "sensitive" subjects in their work and then continue to criticize them (we saw this w Ethel Cain—she was raped but it wasn't incestuous, so it's "weird" for her to make art involving incest.) Only winning move is not to play!

[our-queer-experience]

you all deserve BETTER

[ryan-sometimes]

I think it's so funny how we bred JOBS into dogs. I have two shih tzus and they were bred to be lap dogs. All they care about is looking cute and cuddling with people. Meanwhile my grandma has a border collie and that dog needs to feel so useful all the time, he acts like he will pass away if he doesn't have a job to do constantly

[halomancer]

On one hand this is extremely fucking funny, but on the other hand, it really boggles my mind how many people punish their dogs for just… doing the thing they were bred to do.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Like Jesus Christ, if you can’t provide an environment where your dog can’t fulfill its literal life purpose, maybe?? Don’t get that dog??? And if you do, maybe know the breed characteristics so you can redirect those traits into more constructive outlets????

[lemonsharks]

Both your most common doodle's parts (labra and golden) want to hunt and retrieve water birds so the best suggestion I can give y'all is congratulations on your new duck hunting hobby.

[safetytank]

#people will overlook the perfect breeds to suit their needs based on just their looks#and get a work dog because it looks cool

[queerb]

tags from @gnarlystarships because YEAH

[maggiedeshiboux]

@gallusrostromegalus

[gallusrostromegalus]

Any time someone sees Herschel and says "AWWW I want a Corgi <3" (because he is Very Cute (TM)), I immediately reply: "Do not get a Corgi unless you have a job for it to do. They were bred to bully livestock across the hills of Wales. This is basically a Border Collie that knows he is cute enough to get away with murder. If you get one and it doesn't have a job, it will apply its livestock-bullying instincts to YOU. Herschel's job specifically is to help manage my crippling ADHD, because I don't have a bull for him to micromanage." This gets me odd looks at the home depot but it does get the point across.

[bringbackthepornbots]

come on, we all know Robert Schumann was neither funny nor clever

[bringbackthepornbots]

"i'm not fucking him we're not dating i don't blush when he looks at me" sir you are not a good enough actor to fake that shit