CailynWrites (and Reads) @cailynwrites - Tumblr Blog

Going around asking random people to hit their shit is crazy actually this is the one time I’ll side with a Frenchman

just once I want to see a good post critiquing makeup culture that doesn’t turn out to be made by some janky radfem blog

oh hey!! I’m not a janky radfem I can do it myself!

makeup culture is wack and normalizes a ludicrously high bar as the bare minimum women can do. I saw a “lazy"makeup tutorial the other day that listed 22 separate goddamn products. you’re supposed to buy and know how to use 22 different things on your face just for the privilege of being considered lazy and that’s uuuuuuh what’s the word? bullshit.

Really, five products could work, even 3. Just frame the face, eyes, lips, and you’re done.

0 products also works great

because I’m gonna be real here, the idea that 22 products is a minimum sucks but it’s really upsetting that any amount of makeup is the bare minimum at all

I would really just suggest some powder foundation, concealer, mascara and lipgloss/lipstick, or tbh just mascara works too, but that’s up to you

I’m sorry if I didn’t express this clearly enough in the original post but I’m not really looking for more concise makeup regiments. my intention was to point out how it’s Bad that makeup is considered a bare minimum at all, regardless of individual feelings on the matter

no face should be “required” to have “a minimum” of makeup. makeup has no health benefits and does nothing but fill the pockets of companies that prey on women and our insecurities.

makeup should not be seen as hygiene because it isnt. get that shit out of your head.

this post: makeup culture is ridiculous and 22 products should not be considered a minimum requirement for someones face. no one should have to do that

the notes: so like……. what youre saying is……. we need to make the minimum about 5 or 6 instead… i gotcha

Really the only makeup you need is eyeliner but that’s just my personal opinion

okay

where did we lose you

why are people like this

batmanisagatewaydrug

#nobody survived this post

official-graveyard-posts

Official graveyard post

batmanisagatewaydrug

stop telling people I’m dead

spikespeaches

happy out for a walk bitch day to those who celebrate

volkroki

i had a vision

beaswellgirl

yep, pretty much

Horrible job everyone

waitingforthet

I only watched the first three seasons, there’s only so far this parody can go.

waitingforthet

wait, I remembered one more thing I know about Supernatural

enchantedbook

From "Peter and Wendy" by J. M. Barrie, illustrated by Francis D. Bedford, 1911.

youngadultread

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it.

(via iamayoungfeminist)

horreurscopes

starting a collection for my anthropology class can you guys send me more posts like these

horreurscopes

puppydog-pyrolosis

Here's a few I have

amaditalks

One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?

oldearthaccretionist

Please.

autumn-clover

ballsmooches

Fandom could learn a lot about community from podfic

First I want to acknowledge that a lot of what I’m about to say has been said better in other places by people more knowledgeable than I am. I’ll link to at least one here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

This is An Abridged History of VoiceTeam, pulled together by thelordoflamancha. It’s 3000% worth a listen (if an hour and twenty minute-long NPR-style fandom audio documentary sounds good to you. It’s SUPER well-produced).

Also: I’m writing this on my phone on my lunch break, so it’s going to be incomplete, messy, and poorly formatted! I’ll start here: structurally, podfic is different from fanfic and the incentives around it are different as well. There simply isn’t the audience for podfic that exists for fanfic, even in mega fandoms, so you’ll never get the same stats from a pod that you’d get from a similar fic, in terms of hits, kudos, and comments. Further, unless people are streaming short podfics directly from AO3 (which is one way to listen, but not the only way, and is not a very good way to listen to long podfics), people have to leave ao3 to listen, then come back and leave feedback. Engagement is much, much, much lower across the board, so the incentive is just not the same.

Additionally, there’s a respect for other fans pretty well baked into the culture of podfic: you don’t release podfics you haven’t gotten permission for. Some people don’t want other people interpreting their work in this way, and that’s so understandable. But this didn’t happen by accident! People have been pretty intentional about building this culture through:

a) almost always thanking the author for granting permission very obviously, both in the notes of the work and (much of the time) in the audio recording itself

b) always linking the fic back to the original work

Podficcing takes skill and knowledge. Beyond just “please tag for major character death, etc.” Most people aren’t taught how to record and edit audio in school, while we do, generally, reach the age of 16 with some experience writing a 500-word story. Beyond that, ao3 doesn’t support audio files—you have to upload them somewhere else and link to them.

so! When faced with a pastime where there is a barrier to entry, a built-in lower interaction threshold, AND a necessary interaction and respect for with other fans, you’ve basically got two options. Either podfics are the purview of a dedicated few who love audio editing for the love of the game, or you grow the community.

Luckily, this is set up for community-building. There are people who need to ask for expertise and people who can provide it, and there’s already a culture of talking to other fans.

in the case of podficcing, some really dedicated and talented people have taken on the mantle of creating events that highlight and support community-building. The biggest(?) of these is VoiceTeam, which is basically a creative scavenger hunt event. For a month, people join teams to complete a series of challenges set by a mod team, each one of which is worth points. Everyone who participated gets points, so working together is key. The challenges range from “encourage authors from to create a blanket permission statement [a statement on a profile that outlines the author’s preferences for podfic / other transformation of their work]” to “listen to podfic while drawing” to “create a closet cosplay of a character as you listen to podfic.” Of course, there are a bunch of challenges about recording and posting podfic, but crucially, you don’t have to be a podficcer to participate in VoiceTeam.

Podtogether is another unique podfic event that pairs authors and podficcers together to create a new work specifically for podficcing. There’s an element of community baked in.

most podfic events have listening parties associated with them, where people listen to the same podfics and chat about them on discord in a liveblog sort of situation.

Okay, so what can fandom as a whole learn from podficcing? Some things are maybe not transferable; some of this only works because the community is a few thousand fans and not millions. Some things are up to individual fans to choose as opposed to structural innovations in fan spaces (curating your own space vs curating fandom in general). But!

An intentional focus on community, collaboration, and creativity over statistics. I honestly don’t know how to create more of this, but I noticed that one of the things that made Wolfbird (a fic that has largely been revealed as prompted rather than written) so enticing and beloved was the “bookclub” nature of the comments. The prompter added bookclub-style questions to the end of every chapter that encouraged people to talk to each other and share ideas about the story. I also think that the allure of statistics are a major driver of AI-promoted fics (I am not immune to line-go-up).

Creating community norms around fanfiction, and having mature ways to discuss them. I realize that this won’t work across the board, but it’s no secret that one of the biggest success factors in VoiceTeam has been the leadership of klb, a fan who is a teacher of young children. Sometimes fans need to be told that the community norms are different than how they’ve been acting, but it doesn’t need to be a huge proclamation.

Events? I know fic exchanges exist, but those are also fairly solitary environments where you can’t discuss what you’re working on more broadly. Maybe there are other options.

Enjoying not!fic. This is something I DO see in fandom, through blog posts and comments and different things. In podfic spaces people will get on a discord call, record it, and just have a fun time building out ideas. It’s a paper dolls playtime! Have fun with it! It will never get you notoriety, but that’s not the point.

Working intentionally collaboratively. One of the great things about multivoices is the notion of working together on something, sometimes even at the same time! Maybe having writing sprints with friends and then discussing what you write could work? Maybe reading something together and talking about it?

ultimately, I think it comes down to not letting the worst actors define the fandom experience. I think this has two parts: being vocal about what community norms are, and not allowing yourself to get too caught up in the fandom drama.

Recognizing fan creativity in all its glory. I’ve seen knitting projects, songs,

Being willing to put something kind of silly and shitty out into the world. This is a hallmark of voice team. Maybe you don’t post your weird song about how much fun you’re having on ao3, but it’s fun to show it to friends or teammates!

okay, lunch break is over and I can’t figure out how to turn off the list formatting in this post. I also never put a read more break up at the top, whoops. I hope this is legible to people, and I invite discussion here, of course! I also want to recognize that podfic is so great BECAUSE a lot of really awesome people work to make sure it is (klb, silverandblue, all the VT mods, etc)

ballsmooches

And another thing! With podfic, the process is (mostly) the point! The end product is almost secondary to the process of making it. That’s what people comment about, that’s what you work with people on, that’s where the shine of podfic is. And that’s not different from fic, but the emphasis of fic is so often the product, not the process.

terpsikeraunos

ancient greek word of the day: κακοθερής (kakotherēs), unfitted to endure summer heat

aphilologicalbatman-deactivated

this literally means “bad at summer” pass it on

zipstick

Reblog if you, too, are bad at summer

sotrias-labyrinth-deactivated20

I feel like ODD being an official disorder in the DSM should be the thing that makes everyone go “hm” about how psychology is practiced

txttletale

[looking a child directly in the eye] i diagnose you with Shitty Bitch Syndrome. this makes it legal to do medieval german tortures to you by the way

cringepics

cmon man

starryeyed-stars

also you would be surprised at which group gets disproportionately diagnosed with this disorder. did you guess black people. because its black people

gabedemon

Sometimes I forget people aren't multishippers then I see someone talking about how they used to ship something then got a new ship and I'm like what do you mean you aren't just collecting ships like cool rocks you see on the ground

bespangeled

In the 1960′s Legally a woman couldn’t

Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.

Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.

Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.

Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.

Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.

Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.

Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.

Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.

Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.

Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.

Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports

Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works

galacticdrift

I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.

Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.

Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.

This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.

When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.

gehayi

I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like: When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders. People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all. In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.) Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above. A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974. The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure. (Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.) The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman. My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…” The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor. Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try? I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.” When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small. (He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.) When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!! …No, they WEREN’T kidding. On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch. I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable. I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”

drst

Know your history.

hedwig-dordt

So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.

shatterpath

REBLOG FOREVER.

toooldforthissh--stuff

I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.

When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.

Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).

I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.

casper-the-friendly-being-blog

The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..

rivergst-deactivated20191102

About 8: The State of New York only added No-Fault Divorce as an option in 2010 (!!!)

systlin

I want to repeat here.

This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”

When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.

whatbigotspost

At first I re-blogged this with no commentary added because it’s already so thorough and good.

But then I realized I actually do want to add something. This was written nine years ago. In the 9 years that have come to pass the white nationalist Christian fascism ultra right agenda of misogyny has had many victories.

In the United States just off the top of my head a very few examples: there’s no longer a legally protected right to abortion. Countless laws across our country police, how woman you must look or be to enter a public bathroom. We know with certainty the president and countless people around him are pedophiles and rapists. Women’s participation in the workforce has been rolled back to 1980s levels. The pressure to be thin is higher now than 10 years ago.

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