natalie's tumblr and stuff @fancycat - Tumblr Blog

i know folks are gonna call me a pedo for this one, but i grew up seeing my mom and grandma naked. they had health issues and at times needed care and help showering. and i truly think more kids need to be shown the nonsexual reality of naked women at a young age. there is nothing sexual about my grandmothers breasts, they were simply body parts. more women die of heart attacks because people are too afraid of breasts to do real chest compressions, because they are scared to touch their breasts. the sexualization of our bodies literally kills us. i need people to be more normal about naked bodies and i'm 100% serious.

scarsofmybliss

I grew up around naked old people who weren't even my family! Gasp! And it was a good thing. I grew up around old-school hippies at a place called Lothlorien (in Indiana) and one of my friends dads held a sauna day every Sunday in the middle of the woods (like you cannot drive to their house, you park about a quarter mile away and walk into the woods kind of woods). All day random old people came to get naked, high (pot), and sweaty. Just random old peen and boobs swaying with the leaves. No big deal. These are things that I believe made me more at home in my body, made me more excited about aging, made me more willing to fight for my security and safety.

dee-the-red-witch

Bodies are just bodies. Nothing sacred and nothing inherently shameful or sinful either. The fact that we still can't get that through everyone in however many years it's been is just fucking idiotic.

dogpuppy

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.

coyoteroadkill

ive said this before but it was on my old blog so I'm saying it again

dehumanizing abusers is not effective at doing anything other than make people think they're ontologically incapable of violence

ajunicetryagain

it's also creating a class of people who you can abuse while telling yourself that you're Good and Moral and Not an Abuser.

kyraneko

if you dehumanize the caught abusers then the uncaught abusers will use their humanity as proof of innocence

if you dehumanize the hypothetical abusers you create incentives for false accusations as a means of dehumanization whenever dehumanization is desired for other reasons

pluviofleur

stretches my legs out so far with all toes spread out wide

pluviofleur

anyboli

This page from one of my history books looks like a lesbian utopia.

Source: Reclaiming Lost Ground by Neale McGoldrick & Margaret Crocco

anyboli

Very similar vibes - this 1899 illustration from Puck of butchy (for the time) lesbians looking like the coolest, hottest women to ever walk the earth

homunculus-argument

Those who think that wisdom and whimsy are mutually exclusive have neither. It's vitally important to do the right thing when the consequences are dire, and to do a whole bunch of utterly frivolous silly dumb shit when it doesn't matter what you do.

soviet-union-deactivated19911226

u ever see someone with extremely fucked up views (or actions) and think wowww if a couple of things in my life went the tiniest bit differently that would have been me

max1461

I think most people would benefit from reflecting on how this might be true for them

vacuously-true

Sometimes people bitch about media, both fiction and nonfiction, that they think "humanizes" bad people, especially bigots fascists Nazis et cetera. And I'm just like. Hey. Hey. The problem is. They ARE human. HUMANS did that. Your next door neighbor could do that. Your grandma could do that. You could do that.

"No I'm a good person" why? Because you've gotten lucky and not seen propaganda yet that perfectly hit your buttons? Because you had people to correct you when you fucked up? Idk man I don't think we're all so different from the bad people. We're all just people.

Reminding ourselves of our shared humanity with terrible people does NOT serve to justify their actions. It serves to remind us that the seeds of what happened to them could get into us as well, or might already have. It reminds us to be vigilant and interrogate the hatred inside us.

If you convince yourself that you're just an Inherently Good Person who would never believe hateful things well. Now any little hateful thing that makes its way inside you undetected is never going to be interrogated. It will be left to grow undisturbed.

If you remember that those things can get into anyone, you know to look out for them, and weed them out when they appear, and take the criticism when others point them out in you. So remember, that could have been you. If you forget, maybe it will be.

footsteps-on-the-dance-floor

april fools day is actually the most sensible day of the year because it's the only day on which people will read something on the internet and stop for a second to consider whether or not it's actually true

philosopherking1887

They should start calling it April Media Literacy Day.

ouroborosorder

”there’s no glory in suffering” and “sometimes the effort is the point” are two ideas that co-exist but god damn if I can ever tell when’s the time for which