hope is the thing with the feathers

22, female, lesbian, white australian. far-left politics, feminism and art

[best-of-inspirobot]

[gorejock]

I’ve seen more narratives in media overall in my life that involve a gay character fucking people of the opposite sex than I have ones where they don’t and I honest to god am starting to think its the most finely crafted propaganda there is out there rn. Like its so damn common. 

[fidnru]

“bitches be crazy”-d.b. weiss and david benioff

[meangirlnurse]

i’m serious ladies, like, at this point, any time you start to write or say “i’m so stupid and useless because i’m clueless when women are flirting with me/don’t know how to flirt with women” you should be taking those words out of your mouth and replacing them with “i live in a society that is actively hostile to women loving women, which has offered me no models for how to pursue these relationships and taught me that my feelings for women are predatory and disgusting” 

[meangirlnurse]

i’m tired of lesbian self-hate being treated as a Funney Meme 

[slatestarscratchpad]

What's the most surprising thing you've learned as a psychiatrist?

How innocently people are awful at communication. I know the word “innocent” sounds out of place here, so let me explain what I mean.

(I’m going to use the example of a male patient, but it happens with both sexes.)

He will say “My wife keeps getting mad at me for no reason, I don’t know what to do”. I ask him for details. He says something like “I ask her when dinner will be ready and she just flips out at me”.

I suggest that we roleplay the conversation; I’ll pretend to be his wife, and he’ll talk to me the way he usually talks to her. It will go something like this:

ME: (in falsetto voice) Hi honey, welcome home!

HIM: Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!

ME (no longer in falsetto voice, speaking normally): Wait, are you exaggerating this or is that how you normally talk to your wife?

HIM: That’s how I normally talk to my wife.

ME: And just to be clear, you’re confused why she gets angry when you talk to her that way, and you’re asking me to figure out this mystery, right?

HIM: Yes.

ME: And you didn’t exaggerate that at all, that’s definitely how you usually talk?

HIM: Yes.

ME: When I was pretending to be your wife, I felt attacked by the way you asked me if dinner was ready.

HIM: Why?

ME: Well, I wrote down what you said on my notepad here, and it was “Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!” Do you think you could have asked this more like “Hi honey, when will dinner be ready?”

HIM: I’m afraid she wouldn’t take me seriously if I did that. She might just say something like “It’ll be ready later”, and then she wouldn’t know that I’m really hungry and really upset that she didn’t make it already.

ME: It sounds like dinner being ready on time is very important to you. Is there any way you can talk to your wife at some other point, like when you’re out on a date, let her know how important that is to you, and ask her if the two of you can come up with some system? Like maybe on days when she has lots of time, she can make dinner for you, and on days when she’s busy, she can let you know she won’t be making dinner and then you can bring some food home?

HIM:

It’s really surprising to me not just how many people are terrible communicators, but how many people, when asked to simulate their communication style in front of a psychiatrist, will be so innocent about how bad a communicator they are that they won’t try to hide it, they won’t try to change their answers in order to look better, they’ll just say things that are totally awful and offensive and then in all honesty ask me why I think their partner gets angry.

I assume there’s some cultural difference here, and maybe I’m the person who’s in the wrong in some subtle hard-to-understand way, but usually they tell me their wife miraculously stopped being temperamental and incomprehensible around the time they worked out some alternative dinner-assurance system besides yelling at her.

I guess this is another thing that surprises me, is how un-systematic some people are. By the fiftieth time I yelled at my wife for not making dinner on time, I would be considering the hypothesis that there’s a better way to solve this than more yelling, but a lot of people can’t seem to figure that out.

Eliezer had a phrase I like, “technical solutions to human problems”, of which the classic example is that if you don’t like your partner making noise, instead of yelling at her, you get earplugs (I realize earplugs don’t always work well in real life, it’s just an example). I’ve heard some people debate whether this is really a good idea or not. But it seems like some of my patients are the total opposite end of the scale, so fixated on human solutions to human problems that they can’t imagine addressing any of their issues other than by yelling at the other person to change even louder than they were yelling before.

[kittyknowsthings]

what the actual fuck

[systlin]

I couldn’t be a therapist, because I’d be yelling at him like “WHAT THE FUCK MAN”

[emeritusprofessorofnothing]

If this guy hasn’t been fired from every job he’s ever had, I guarantee he knows how to communicate with people. The issue is that he doesn’t see his wife as people.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

He’s not a “bad communicator”. You don’t talk to people that way unless you think of them as worthless. He clearly thinks of his wife that way and thinks she doesn’t even deserve to be upset about it. This is a perfect example of what Lundy Bancroft was talking about when abusive men go to therapy. He’s an abuser. He is abusing his wife. And like emeritusprofessorofnothing said, he couldn’t possibly hold down a job if he actually thought that was an acceptable way to speak to anyone. He thinks he gets to speak to her that way because he thinks of her as dirt under his shoe.

[fall-and-shadows]

Stop acting like men dont know what they’re doing. This scenario is textbook abuse. It is literally in tons of books on abuse that one common thing that men demand of their wives is that they have dinner on the table when they come home (and that they perceive it as abuse towards themselves, because they are entitled, if their wives do not comply). As a psychiatrist, especially when you’re talking about men yelling at their wives *nightly* over this, you should know better tbh. Do not be yet another person, especially a professional, that glosses over abusive behavior.

[oatmealtrash]

This psychiatrist sounds…bad. This is just straight up misogyny. Not just innocent poor communication .___.

[cecaeliawitch]

Its not “innocent”, he simply expected this therapist to share his perception of his wife being an abuse sink, and to advise him on how to get her to stop ‘malfunctioning’

[luminifera-archive]

My psychiatry teacher says there’s a very distinctive difference between a patient who is aggressive and cruel and bums around all day, and one who has had a steady job for years. The former likely has a serious mental illness that keeps them from functioning well in society, while the latter…

[thisiseverydayracism]

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2019/04/17/demolition-800-year-old-sacred-trees-compared-notre-dame-fire

Demolition of 800-year-old sacred trees compared to Notre-Dame fire

Campaigners have been fighting plans to bulldoze trees sacred to the Djap Wurrung peoples.

[sailorbrazil]

i personally think its pretty crazy that karl marx actually knew what was gonna happen to us back in 1850 like this guy comes out of nowhere at what the fuck o'clock and goes, capitalism is going to creep into every single crevice of your lives there will be nothing left and all creativity and integrity will be taken away like. he just said that    and it was correct

[doortoanotherdoortoanotherdoor]

[leosuncancervenus]

Okay…….donate to The Rainbow Railroad to help LGBT+ people flee Brunei…please feel free to drop some other ideas on how to help

[starry-eyed-nb]

Spread this around as much as possible! Not all of us have money to donate but spreading awareness does something.

[chairpersonchair]

Not only can you donate money but you can also donate your aeroplan miles to help pay for flights!!! And if you live in Canada you can even join their settlement team to support newcomers (no financial commitments)!!!!!

[leosuncancervenus]

Thank you so much for this addition !

[seaymphea-deactivated20190709]

“I never was a child / I was pulled right out of the sea / And the salt, it never left my body…”

— Chelsea Wolfe, from They’ll Clap When You’re Gone

[decisivly]

honestly being a lesbian in contact with the modern lgbt community is traumatizing as hell and i don’t think anyone else can empathize with the exception of a few gay men but other than that it’s literally just lesbians telling other lesbians “this is so fucked up do you see how fucked up this is how is this happening and why is no one listening to us”

[lucilliasheyff]

Honestly Nell Brinkley is so underrated and forgotten it’s a crime like holy shit her art is just so chaotically beautiful and opulent, it’s a shame no one talks about her any more, especially when you consider how much of a certain old anime style took so much inspiration from her (you know who I’m talking about)

Plus similar j.c. leyendecker, her art just screams wlw and it’s been rumored she also had her share of affairs

[vladtheunfollower]

[catasters]

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[dogg]

dun dun dun dun

[oldtimejapan]

When Helen Keller visited Akita Prefecture in Japan in July 1937, she inquired about Hachikō, the famed Akita dog that had died in 1935. She told a Japanese that she would like to have an Akita dog; one was given to her within a month, with the name of Kamikaze-go. When he died of canine distemper, his older brother, Kenzan-go, was presented to her as an official gift from the Japanese government in July 1938. Keller is credited with having introduced the Akita to the United States.