a magpie collection

feminist. radical. witch. mystic. this is my internet commonplace journal so enjoy the scrapbook I guess.

[tubularfem]

Also while I’m at it there’s no such thing as a genital preference for gay men and lesbians. It’s a REQUIREMENT that a partner be the same sex! The END.

A preference would be “oh man I’m out of my favorite fruit, apples. That’s okay though, while I like it the best, I’ll eat oranges too since I have them.”

A preference implies that it can be changed, that it’s only a choice of which you prefer at the time. What has been called “genital preference” is actually so fucking homophobic it’s unreal. We don’t choose this! It’s innate. And it’s sexual orientation, and cannot be changed.

[drarry]

Imagine being the gays at a pride event in 2004 living their lives when someone grabs the microphone and announces to the room that Ronald Reagan was pronounced dead. Can you even imagine the hype, the celebration, the pure elation

[drarry]

This is the Pride Month that It will happen. I feel it in my gay bones

[broken-horn-of-equius]

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

Like to charge

Reblog to cast

[gnomebutch]

listen to sexworkers but only the ones filming anonymously from the comfort of their bedrooms and never the ones who are trafficked or groomed and are forced to do scenes that they don’t want to with people they don’t want to at the risk of their livelihood or even life because those stories bum me outttt and therefore don’t count despite making up the majority of cases.

[avobrav]

People I've seen referred to as sex workers:

Twitter artists who draw porn

Women who take pictures of themselves in their own room

Men who "assist" women (cameramen and disguised accounts for sex chats with johns on the behalf of those women)

Men who "manage" models and prostitutes (pimps)

Men who "transport" models and prostitutes (traffickers)

It's very convenient, to those who refuse to masturbate without pictures and videos of potential rape victims, that we listen to the people above far more than impoverished women who are begging for a way out.

[arctic-hands]

When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

[evilsoup]

[gilliagandy]

Truly thrilled to finally find this post on my dash.

[ingridverse]

I think it's less like Solomon and more like Hegel

[lesbiampire]

some of you have ‘identities’ that deserve to be invalidated. some of them are unhealthy, actively hurt disenfranchised groups, or have no basis in material reality. the overbearing identity politics that exists on the internet, this whole postmodernist idea of ‘I say it so I am!’ is completely irrelevant when we’re considering actual oppressions within societies/cultures. it is meaningless.

I saw a post once on here saying ‘some of you deserve to feel less valid’ and I have never seen anything truer. some of you need to get your self-indulgent heads out of your asses too and consider that the entire world doesn’t need to alter itself due to ~your feelings~ and if you think it does, maybe your feelings/identity/whatever are the problem here.

[curiousrecluse]

[courtesycalling]

Happy mušḫuššu monday everybody

(Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

[redarmyscreaming]

Gilbert Baker and the first pride flag in 1978. I met him at the San Francisco Flag Store, back in the day.

[nostalgic-teddyy]

Imagine the level of whimsy I could reach if I just had $5M in my bank account rn

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[kronkk]

Me: I want to see a cultural third gender that isn’t a way of othering effeminate males out of ‘correct’ manhood.

Progressives on Tumblr: I have the gender.

Me: You’re sure? You have the third gender and it isn’t exclusivily for males?

Progressives on Tumblr: This is correct. I have a socially functional third gender that is completely different from masculinity and femininity and isn’t sex-exclusive. I do not have a fringe identity for male crossdressers.

Me: Excellent! Please show me the gender.

Progressives on Tumblr: Here you go! *Effeminate male in a patriarchal society*

Me: 

[unrespectability]

it's kind of amazing how well men have managed to team up and fuck shit up and like, develop genuine strategies to protect their shared class interest and mutual loyalties at any cost, given how little they seem to genuinely like each other. i'll give them that. if there is one thing we can learn from them it is not like, toxicity and domination strategies and violence and cruelty and superiority complexes imo, it's not liking each other (as we inevitably will) but doing our best to be a united front regardless

[stariteart]

happy pride! 🌈☀️

[shewolfbite]

“Sex work” isn’t work. It’s the oldest lie men tell to justify treating women’s bodies as public commodities.

[kittyit]

link / archive

[marbleguard]

I’m going to say something that might sound crazy. Suicide and suicide attempts are sort of a societal alarm bell that says “something is very wrong with the environment this individual was in.” A living being choosing to take themselves out of existence is the most extreme act of distress there is. The state stepping in to silence this alarm bell by funneling suicidal people into a state sanctioned euthanasia program, normalizing this act through a socially accepted bureaucratic system, is not a good thing. It goes hand in hand with the state’s interest in maintaining the status quo at the expense of the population and the psychiatric industry’s interest in individualizing societal problems to extract profit and aid the existing system. It’s saying “there are no complaints here, just people with sick brains, carry on.”

[kittyit]

it does not sound crazy

[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.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid