Show & Tell
One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane
Sweet Seals For You, Always
hello vonnie
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
h
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
izzy's playlists!
AnasAbdin
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tannertan36
ellievsbear
Love Begins
dirt enthusiast
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Kaledo Art
Not today Justin
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@catmgrant
“So I’m being held, and every person in this body is being held to a higher ethical standard than the President of the United States?”
“That’s right, ‘cause there are some ethics committee rules that apply to you.”
“And it’s already super legal, as we’ve seen, for me to be a pretty bad guy, so it’s even easier for the President of the United States to be one, I would assume.”
“That’s right.”
“Thank you very much.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Exposes the Problem of Dark Money in Politics
We got stuff... (at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council)
Wally Lamb at BookCourt, 11/22/16
Great panel about horror, writing and Bigfoot. With deminstrations! (at Brookline Booksmith)
This picture is floating around Facebook right now, with a fairly shitty caption on it, using it as a visual example of a cis woman standing up to a transgender woman trying to use “her” bathroom. The shitty caption is unauthorized by the artist and diverges from the original meaning of the art.
This panel is from artist Sanford Greene, in honor of a scene in Captain America: Civil War. The woman on the left is played by a cis woman, Florence Kasumba, who just happens to not fit heteronormative female beauty standards. She’s tall, with a shaved head and a muscular body. She is strong and beautiful and feminine.
The meme with the shitty added caption, which I will not dignify with a link in this article or a repost, just adds to my growing anxiety as a cis woman who also does not fit heteronormative beauty standards. I am very tall for a woman, 6'1". That is taller than the average man. I have short hair. I dress in jeans and men’s tee shirts sometimes. Other times I wear dresses. I usually do what I want in this regard without consequence.
I don’t question my gender. I feel very comfortable in my own skin. I have short hair because I like the way it looks on me. I dress the way I do because I like that particular fashion and how it looks on my body, limited of course by the fact that many women’s clothes don’t fit my long frame, and jeans and tee shirts are comfortable and convenient.
Never in my life have I questioned the safety of these choices until now. It seems that daily I hear stories of women being thrown out of restrooms because they “look like a man” or, more terrifying to me, women being followed into restrooms by men who perceive them as a threat and want to enforce their own misguided sense of morality.
My anxiety has been slowly building over the last couple months reading reports, watching videos of women who are wounded, physically and emotionally, by strangers who hate them out of fear and ignorance. I can only imagine how the trans community feels. It makes my heart hurt. My fear has made me so very conscious of my own choices and my own gender identity and how personal, raw and sensitive those concepts are.
The entire transgender bathroom debate began with the assertion that “men dressed as women will prey on children,” a argument that is as absurd as “gay marriage will make people want to marry their pets.” Social Conservatives really need to try and think more logically about their evidence, because both are fictional scenarios that just can’t be used, since they don’t ever happen.
Bathrooms aren’t safe for anyone but cis men these days. I don’t see anything being protected except the feelings and comfort of bigots. Maybe that offered protection from the dangers of public bathrooms doesn’t apply to me. I’m too tall and chubby. I don’t have long hair. I don’t dress feminine enough. My appearance is not acceptable, it is displeasing to their eye. My choices are an offense.
I have forfeit my right to exist in peace because I don’t have a small frame and long hair and I’m not wearing a dress. My happiness is irrelevant because I choose to not wear lipstick, and my eye makeup is too subtle, I don’t have enough cleavage and it is hidden behind a green army jacket that maybe makes me look gay, and that’s enough for them to hate me.
All of the choices I’ve made for myself are wrong. I’m obviously confused. I should go find the nearest dress shop. I should grow my hair out starting today.
Holy shit, how did we even get here?
I am not afraid of transgender women assaulting me while I wash my hands or sit in a locked stall. I wish that those trying their hardest to be the Bathroom Police, to create a kind of vigilante Justice League to keep toilets safe for widows and orphans, would stop pretending this was ever about protecting people in public spaces. In the past few months, I’ve been more afraid of men than ever.
I am terrified that a man, driven by some kind of misguided white knight syndrome polluted by bigotry, will be cruel and confrontational or possibly violent with me just for wanting to use the bathroom in the same room as his little girl or his mother or his wife.
When I go to pee at the mall, I have visions of a father following me, cornering me in a dead end of white tile and porcelain, and slamming me against the wall, telling me that I am disgusting and trying to prey on his wife or his child — simply because I look like his pre-manufactured vision of what transgender women look like.
I am afraid of a boyfriend or husband, who saw the altered version of the cartoon above, feeling like he needs to intervene to keep his short, thin, long-haired and bigoted girlfriend safe from me. You see, she tried to block me from going into the bathroom and I took one arm, larger than her leg, and gently pushed her out of my way. I made the wrong choice to not turn around and find another place to pee. None of my choices are right. I am confused.
No, I’m not confused. I’m angry. Move or be moved.
My favorite part of GoT on Sunday. Tormund Giantsbane woos Brienne over a dinner table with a giant haunch of meat in his mouth and is like "How YOU doin'?"
Barry and I both died, but inside I was cheering. FINALLY an on-screen romance where a physically imposing, tall woman is seen as a love interest. If this entire season devolves into a Tormund/Brienne romcom, I’ll be okay with that.
Well...maybe that’s pushing it.
Giving to Give
One of the things I've always admired about Stephen King is that in early interviews, you can tell that he just has no clue what to do with all of his money. He seems uncomfortable with his wealth, out of his element and not sure what the heck he's supposed to say about his success without bragging. It had to be a surreal time for him to go from selling short stories just to get his kid some antibiotics for an ear infection, to being financial secure for the rest of his life.
I love the story of him getting the call about selling the paperback rights for CARRIE and his subsequent knee-jerk reaction of running to a drug store and buying his wife a hairdryer. If getting a hairdryer was a big deal, you can imagine how stretched they were at that point. I also love it because at 12, reading this story was the first time, I realized that people could actually write stories for a living, that it was a real career that might rescue me from my own poverty and isolation.
Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, give away a lot of their wealth to arts and education in the state of Maine, because what else would you do with a fortune that you and your kids and your grandkids couldn't spend in their lifetimes? If you’re just a good person who feels like you have everything you need, you give it away to those who don’t. In a world where the top 1% tend to hoard their money for their heirs in trust funds and investments, the Kings are giving back to their community in a huge way.
I wish more people were like Stephen and Tabitha King. The world would be a better place if when my cup runs over, I pour it into someone's glass who has little instead of running to get myself another cup. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but when someone is struggling, a little bit of money can change their life. It can give them that break they needed to move to the next level and improve their quality of life. It can save an organization or business that fell on hard times. It can make the community better.
Talk nerdy to me.
Whats a fuck boy? i've heard many meanings but I want the exact one.
A fuckboy is a weakass dude who ain’t shit.
A fuckboy is the guy who will go around calling women “thirsty hoes” but like 30 profile pictures in a row and comment “hot” under one of them because he thinks somehow it’ll get him laid.
A fuckboy is the guy who calls girls sluts but goes around begging chicks for nudes out of fucking nowhere.
A fuckboy is the guy who sends unrequested dick pics with no context to women he’s barely spoken to.
A fuckboy is a guy who regularly uses phrases like “bros before hoes”
A fuckboy is a guy whose idea of flirting is “what would u do if i was there right now lol”
A fuckboy can often be spotted by his asking if you want to play “the 21 questions game” which is a trap to ask if you’re a virgin or not
A fuckboy is a guy who will call you a prude if you don’t want to fuck anyone, but call you a slut if you want to fuck someone who isn’t him.
A fuckboy is a guy who will disrespect you and try and get with you in the same breath.
A fuckboy is a guy whose idea of foreplay is kind of touching your clit twice before he tries to move on to sex
A fuckboy is a guy who tries to text you even when he already has a girl
A fuckboy is a guy who continues to hit on you even when you’ve said no
A fuckboy is a guy who pretend to invite you over for “Netflix and pizza” which is a bummer because it’s totally ruined legitimately inviting people over for Netflix and pizza
A fuckboy is any guy who’s ever told you “smile, beautiful” while you’re just walking down the street minding your own fucking business
A fuckboy is the kind of guy you have to lie about having a boyfriend to in order to get him to leave you alone.
A fuckboy is a guy who will tell you “you’re not like the other girls” like that’s a compliment because he doesn’t have any respect for them.
A fuckboy is a guy who will tell you “my exes were all crazy” even though you know them to be totally fine, kind, measured people.
A fuckboy is a guy who will tell you “guys don’t like it when you -bullshit bullshit bullshit-” and try to shame you because of your weight, hair, style, use of makeup or anything else that you do in order to express yourself because in their tiny fuckboy minds you only exist to attract them.
Lesson--Don’t be a fuckboy. Be an actual human being.
Friendzone vs. The Invisible Woman
What makes me the most upset about the "friendzone" bullshit that guys perpetuate is that it occasionally puts me in one of two categories with a new male acquaintance, either "fuckable" or "non-existent." Which means that he doesn't see me as an actual person. If I’m in the “fuckable” category, I’m apparently expected to eventually fuck him. Well shit, I didn’t even realize this. Is that in some sort of handbook I forgot to read? Can I get a Cliffsnotes version?
Like always, some men just make up the rules as they go. While guys are crying about being friendzone’d I'm over here like, "Please, put me in the friend zone! I thought you were really cool before realizing that you're a misogynistic twatwaffle. In fact, you know what, nevermind about that. I didn't really think that through." I think of men as people. People who I might want to be friends with above all else, because I don’t sexualize every man I meet who I find attractive.
The dangerous thing is that the discrimination is subtle. I could be somewhere and if just one guy disregards me and makes me invisible socially, it makes me feel like crawling under a rock because of my anxiety. I’ll often just step away and let them win. The slight is obvious probably only to me, so other men in the room don't necessarily notice it, and sometimes it's even contagious. Even with how this treatment makes me feel, I’ve never once considered it a reason for violence.
Easy solution here for men: Stop and think how you would treat me and other women if we were the exact same person, but just a dude. This benefits you in lots of ways, because as a married woman I'm not in your dating pool to begin with.
For some men though, my lack of availability doesn't seem to matter because, remember, I’m not a person to them. Or, my lack of attractiveness to them is like an insult that they can't get past. My height just magnifies that intolerance, because as a woman who is sometimes physically more imposing than men I meet, I can be intimidating.
All of it makes me sad, because who wants to be judged by fuckability? Not men, surely. Remember the whole point of this is the “friendzone” that men cannot tolerate to the point where they threaten violence. Women who dismiss men based on their looks and refuse to speak to them at all are labeled “bitches” and “stuck-up” or “frost queens.” Last time I looked, those were negative labels.
I don’t see those kinds of labels on men who act the same way. I’ll make up a new term for it! I call it “The Invisible Woman.” While dudes are outright threatening violence because a girl wants to having a friendship with them instead of just wanting to fuck them, guys are flaunting their privilege by doing the exact same thing, but worse. Instead of remaining friends, that girl they don’t think is attractive or already has a partner now doesn’t exist at all. She is a ghost.
So yeah, my only answer to the top line of this screen shot is “Fuck that guy.” And to the men of the world--please friendzone me. Treat me like a person, not a machine that you drop kindness coins into until sex falls out. Treat me like a human being, not a thing that you get to disregard just because there’s no shitty power dynamic between us where you find me fuckable and I’m supposed to be thankful for it.
The Good Men out there, the guys who already treat me like a human being and respect me, who already think of women as equals--hold the rest of your community accountable to treating women like people and ending the implied violence of “watch who you friendzone.” Because at this point, with how much violence against women I see in my culture, either be an ally or get the fuck out of my face.
Photographic evidence that The Orange One steals my spot no matter where it is. And puts his fuzzy butt cheeks on my pillow.
Chicken and waffles with strawberry habenero sauce. The sauce almost killed Barry...
I think the bottom line here is that trans people just can't win no matter what they do. If places create transgender specific bathrooms, there's criticism, too. I had a video on my Facebook feed this morning of a "pastor" who was bemoaning NY having transgender specific bathrooms, but at the same time saying "If a man is in the bathroom with my little girl, there's going to be a problem." Well, sir, that would be the reason for the transgender bathrooms that you're bitching about right now, so trans people can pee without having to worry about you "having a problem," which is just a veiled threat of violence, right? "Christian" bigots don't want LBGT people to exist, period. Let's just call it what it is: Ignorance and intolerance.
Fundamentalists can pat themselves on the back for being good little Christians and standing up to progressive culture, but they're also chasing away people like myself, who used to be real contributor to the church. I was a tithe-paying member and former missionary. I’ve seen the light, dear friends, which is that Christian doctrines and church discipline are soaked in fear and ignorance. They have no place in modern society. For years, I’ve refused to affiliate at all and gave up on trying to find a place of worship that wasn’t filled with bigotry and paranoia that any sidestep against church dogma was “letting the devil in.“ I will not be a member of any organization that blatantly encourages violence and discrimination in the name of God, so I therefore remain unchurched. Congrats, fundamentalists, you’re destroying your own future member base.
Happy Siblings Day!
The GOG and Steam store pages for Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear are littered with negative reviews, with gamers trashing the game largely as a result of an encounter that takes place between the player and a transgender character.
"It's odd that in a fantasy game featuring giant ogres and dragons, the appearance of a transgender character is where so many draw the line in terms of realism."
It will cure all that ails you... (at Bee's Thai Cuisine)
