WV: Wake up.

[quiet-nymph]

clivenichols on Instagram

[catasters]

[blaekswan-deactivated20210428]

met gala 2014 // met gala 2019

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

Okay was anyone going to tell me they’re actually together or was that something I had to read today in the dyke group chat for myself

[santhomedusae-deactivated202006]

they’re WHAT

[fan-art-ic]

“ Actresses Lupita Nyong'o, left, and Janelle Monáe took their relationship public this week. The couple’s touchy feely display of affection raised eyebrows at a Met Gala after party on Monday…In a video posted [on] Instagram Live Janelle can be seen in the background standing close to Lupita gently caressing her face while Danai Gurira stands next to them oblivious…Lupita, 36, has long been rumored to go both ways. She reportedly dated 41-year-old Black Panther co-star Danai Gurira off and on. The two actresses were inseparable until Janelle stepped into the picture.” 

[catchymemes]

[blackwoolncrown]

Reading about the complications of gender expression and queerness and identity…it’s a mess and I’m glad I just am not nearly as much invested in that shit as I am my interior pursuits bc if one had to wait until the world just ~understood presented identity correctly~ according to contemporary and ever-shifting labels one would die waiting.

Like lmao let me just be me this hyperfaceted bullshit is for the birds. What’s the point of being queer in queer spaces when you still have to play political bingo to be recognized and respected?

[blackwoolncrown]

And in order to navigate or be seen you’re supposed to have basically this secondary academic-level education on terms and politics and what label means what with what issues… god fuck off tbh? the fact that even queer spaces adopt the same rabid pedantic label-focused performativity as non queer spaces (in fact, maybe even moreso) is why I just don’t bend over backwards to give a shit. Kudos to everyone who does because making identity safer and easier is a worthwhile effort, but I cannot be assed. I don’t see what the worth is. Either you’re defending yourself to straights or defending yourself to queers lmao. And I’m sure the fact that I’m black has a lot to do with the fact that the whole scene doesn’t seem to be worth the effort bc at the end of the dayyyyyy…I’m still black to y'all! Too much and not enough, eternally. Identity is a prisonnnn. It’s not worth keeping up with labels and memorizing a gazillion flags and making sure people know how I ‘ID’. The self is a construct, there’s nothing inside here, everything I’ve ever said or done is a reflection of something else. The human animal is the human animal, a creature which can present with many different bodily colorations, shapes, genital configurations and sexual preferences. 'Heterosexuality’ as well as gender are not actually 'things’, therefore any oppositions to them are subsequently just as conceptual. My being is the only truth there is. The end.

[nursery-deactivated20160926]

[nonbinarypeach]

“it’s just really hard to get it right! these new pronouns are hard for me to deal with, too!”

[transisteradio]

Kinda ironic coming from Tan “I’ve never met a trans person before” France tbh #sureTan

[hundondestiny]

Really, it was Tan and Antoni who hadn’t had a whole lot of experience with transgender individuals. I really wish this one line would have made it into the show, because it’s something I say to every person I interact with who says “you’re the first trans person I’ve met.” I always come back with, “that you know of.” And then I always explain that I may be the first openly trans person they’ve met, but we’re everywhere…I wish that had made it in there, because I know Tan has gotten a lot of flack. I felt like that entire week, I spent it with my community, with my brothers. I feel like I’m a part of this really beautiful thing.

I think it’s just how editing made it come out. That conversation Tan and I had was about two hours on the couch. We talked about pronouns, we talked about the different transitions that trans men and trans women can go through, we talked about non-binary and genderqueer individuals, and people of color in my community who are trans and nonbinary and the additional difficulties they face. We also talked about Russia and Jamaica and how trans people that live in those countries have refugee programs directed to them, because they could get murdered and dragged in the streets. We got really, really deep.

There’s a distinct cut in that conversation with Tan and I where he’s very composed — he’s really composed all the time — and then after I laid some really deep knowledge on him, he was crying. He did come from a very sheltered upbringing and his getting into the queer community basically started with this show. So I don’t blame him for his lack of knowledge. Instead, I very much thank him for his willingness to seek out that knowledge through me, from someone who is willing to teach.

(Source)

It’s almost like… he made an effort.

[the-clown-wars]

[vetmedirl]

The Courtesy Rules Of Blindness

from The Courtesy Rules Of Blindness

“When you meet me don’t be ill at ease. It will help both of us if you remember these simple points of courtesy:

I’m an ordinary person, just blind. You don’t need to raise your voice or address me as if I were a child. Don’t ask my spouse what I want–“Cream in the coffee?”–ask me.

I may use a long white cane or a guide dog to walk independently; or I may ask to take your arm. Let me decide, and please don’t grab my arm; let me take yours. I’ll keep a half-step behind to anticipate curbs and steps.

I want to know who’s in the room with me. Speak when you enter. Introduce me to the others including children, and tell me if there’s a cat or dog.

The door to a room or cabinet or to a car that is left partially open is a hazard to me.

At dinner I will not have trouble with ordinary table skills.

Don’t avoid words like “see.” I use them too. I’m always glad to see you.

I don’t want pity, but don’t talk about the “wonderful compensations” of blindness. My sense of smell, taste, touch or hearing did not improve when I became blind, I rely on them more and, therefore, may get more information through those senses than you do–that’s all.

If I’m your houseguest, show me the bathroom, closet, dresser, window–the light switch too. I like to know whether the lights are on or off.

I’ll discuss blindness with you if you’re curious, but it’s an old story to me. I have as many other interests as you do.

Don’t think of me as just a blind person. I’m just a person who happens to be blind.

You don’t need to remember some “politically correct” term, “visually impaired”, “sight challenged” etc. Keep it simple and honest, just say blind.

         In all 50 states the law requires drivers to yield the right of way when they see my extended white cane. Only the blind may carry white canes. You see more blind persons today walking alone, not because there are more of us, but because we have learned to make our own way.”

[blackwoolncrown]

Like I would almost love to write out in full what I think about what porn has done to society or rather what our social culture has created via porn (which really is way more apt, I say this as a sex worker) but I wouldn’t even know where to begin, it’s so far-reaching and in the meantime it’s sus and annoying as FUCK that the average person doesn’t care too much to treat this discussion as worth repeated attention- the conversation is dominated by zealous TERF/SWERF radfem trash.

[blackwoolncrown]

If I don’t get into this today I really want to just say this: We need to talk about porn but it’s all useless until you realize that a society creates its porn not the other way around- while porn obviously re-influences its watchers it’s by and large a RESULT of a culture’s personal and subconscious narratives– porn will always exist, pornography existing is NOT the issue and porn by default is NOT savage this way, when we say ‘we need to talk about what porn has done’ what really should be understood is actually ‘we need to talk about what the porn this society creates says about it and where its messages COME FROM’. Porn = sexually explicit/evocative media There’s nothing wrong with this. Plenty of porn through the ages was just regular degular people fornicating, sometimes as humans, sometimes as gods. But the fact that we have porn today which absolutely degrades the human spirit, hates women, instills a sense of hopeless addiction and on average is a loveless, heartless, near-subhuman display of mechanical violence either explicitly or psychologically has EVERYTHING to do with the detachment, bodily hate, woman hate, etc written between the lines of the very religious and social codes of our society.

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

humanity has always had media with intentions to incite sex and sexuality—what makes modern day porn harmful is the commodity of it. there is violence in porn because we live in a violent culture. there is misogyny in porn because we live in a misogynistic culture. there is racism in porn because we live in a racist culture—like to zero in on modern pornography is to just pathologize the symptom and not the actual problem.

it’s so tiresome because things are only discussed in dichotomies around here—either you’re a sick freak for using porn to get off and therefore what you have to say doesn’t count or you’re a sex negative prude who doesn’t know anything. there’s weird value judgements attached to sexual expression in american culture—and i think that’s a part of the problem too.

[blackwoolncrown]

God, yes exactly just like an hour ago I was thinking the issue with porn is because of the commodity of it, because it exists as a thing that must thrive in the capitalist ‘market’, it instantly takes sex down to ‘that which excites the larges/lowest common denominator’. ANd when that’s dictated by the lead buyers of a patriarchal capitalist market then it’s just entirely exploitative, shallow, garbage as un-wholesome as the food and entertainment it tries to sell us and again, you’re also so on it with that last part bc this is why I just keep having to suck y teeth over not just this issue but HOW it is talked about like it’s so much easier to just blame this on ‘porn’ as an entire idea than to actually get into the issues which is why the rage about it is like, performative?? Like it’s just a fancy way of perpetuating sexual shame by saying pornography in itself is harmful. So yeah the fact that in general ppl haven’t idk unpacked their own sexual issues enough to bravely enter a discussion on porn like fucking adults is a big issue which is why it’s being left to a) the people who know the most about it- sex workers and b) the people who can most exploit the issue- idiot radfems.

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

the porn industry is really no different than any other industry in the way it chews up people and spit them back out in the most exploitative way possible—and setting damaging cultural norms in it’s own interests. the sexual aspect is what makes it hypervisible. so i’mma need for some of these swerfs to turn up for walmart floor staff and prisoners the same way they think they do for sex workers.

i guess in a weird way it makes sense. a lot of the radfems i see on here are under 25. it’s a rebellious shift from the “sex positive” liberalism that seemed to be pretty infectious on here. we’re bombarded with a narrow, heavily affected sort of sexuality that caters to only one sort of audience (white men)—and i understand the want to just divorce oneself from that but because we’re swinging too hard and not critically thinking—we throw the baby out with the bath water. and also because social network activism IS heavily performative—we get these ass up cold takes that are so divorced from reality.

like andrea dworkin should not be at the center of any woman seeking to liberate fellow women’s praxis. like other than some cute one liners—her work didn’t benefit any woman other than the white middle class ones. these kids don’t know that though cuz they’re like born in 98’ ☹️☹️☹️

[blackwoolncrown]

^^^^^^ Again again again, if only critical thinking were more common, if only it had a stronger presence in social discussion, we wouldn’t have to keep doing this pendulum swing b.s. The sadness too, in seeing women gladly throw the ENTIRE concept of sexual expression and sexuality under the bus and not thinking twice about how that fits perfectly in with partiarchal/christian woman hate like…Like bitch you ddn’t think through this enough and that’s SO sad and I say this as someone who is generally ace as hell

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

and that’s exactly what happened in the 80’s with dworkin and the reagan admin—which needless to say is full of hypocrites and war criminals.

i think americans need to unpack the assumption that sexual expression is deviant or something that shouldn’t be publicly discussed—that’s partly to blame for the cultural shifts.

all of our young people are being informed by pornography and youtube and netflix, etc—instead of family or older folk talking about sex or the social side of sex—the things to look out for other than diseases and pregnancy—because we forget but sex is a social expression and should be treated as such and not like something shameful or just a way to mechanically make babies…..i just…….

i read an article about how pornhub started a stats side company to keep track of what’s searched or watched the most—and journalists will get ahold of that info and make articles declaring sexual norms—such as “x% of millennials are into breasts which is lower than generations prior”—it’s super interesting to see company so obviously control the info AND set the trend with the same info—whether it’s true or not.

[blackwoolncrown]

Okay but also add to the thought soup the fact that Colonialism and the cultural pressures of Europeans dominated other cultures and caused them to hide, admonish or even abolish their own cultural forms of pornography. Like Europeans literally went around with their sex-repressed asses and shamed everyone else for their sexual art and bodily comfort and the economic and violent oppression they had to back it up with caused basically the entire planet to experience a reinforcement of sexual shame which is why we get to the point where ‘all sexual expression is perversion’ and thus all of our main sexual expression BECOMES perverted because its seen as inherently shameful, which means it’s expressed (literally) elsewhere so our society is hypersexualized.

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

and so to get to the root of it—we gotta decolonize ourselves….i like that.

[blackwoolncrown]

*bangs gavel* and that’s that on that

[marbleplant-deactivated20140601]

[mlleclaudine]

Black Bodies Painted and Photographed Like the Cosmos by Mikael Owunna

Mikael Chukwuma Owunna, a queer Nigerian-Swedish artist raised in Pittsburgh, has spent the past two and a half years photographing Black men and women for a series titled Infinite Essence. Hand-painted using fluorescent paints and photographed in complete darkness, Owunna’s subjects are illuminated by a flash outfitted with a UV filter, which turns their nude bodies into glowing celestial figures.

Owunna tells Colossal that the series was his response to the frequent images and videos of Black people being killed by those sworn to protect them: the police. The photographer’s friends, family members, dancers, and one person he connected with on Instagram serve as models for the project, which is named after an idea from his Igbo heritage. “All of our individual spirits are just one ray of the infinite essence of the sun,” Owunna explains. “By transcending the visible spectrum, I work to illuminate a world beyond our visible structures of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia where the black body is free.”

[theunimpairedcondition]

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

[mcgovern-wallawalla]

[ohmygoshbabyanimals]

[tiramisuki-deactivated20220502]

@isei-silva

[isei-silva]

A handsome man

[mango-habanero-autism-deactivat]

A truly great experience is petting a random cat, then having another person see, go “kitty!” and then take over petting so you can go about your business without disappointing the cat

[great-tweets]

👀

[monkeysaysficus]

They have nine beverages between the two of them

[birlinterrupted]

can you elaborate on the multiple ways you are anti-intelligence?

here’s a short elaboration:

1) it’s basically a completely empty concept. the idea of ‘intelligence’ is basically like a collection of frequently unrelated skills roughly seen as relating to cognition (and sometimes really just means an educational class background!). But like, practically, it doesn’t really mean anything other than a value judgment. The set of skills associated w ‘intelligence’ are so wide and diverse that most people who have some lack others completely (the Richard Dawkins problem) but equating them all into one idea erases this.

2) measuring people along some sort of axis of ‘intelligence’ is not only like basically impossible in any good faith way because of reason 1, it’s also almost always done as a value judgment of someone’s worth. A good example of the ways this has been done to awful effect is the use of the IQ test, let alone standardized aptitude tests like the SAT/ACT. The valuing of people’s worth based upon the cognitive ability has numerous issues wrt disability, and also frequently intelligence (or perceived intelligence) is the way that other oppressive attitudes are communicated.

3) Even if ‘intelligence’ were an actual coherent thing, there are numerous other traits that are equally or more important to have in this world. What I mean here is that there is a wide scale cult of intelligence as perhaps the most important personal trait in America. The amount of social shame that comes from not performing intelligence at the right amounts is intense, much more intense than it should be compared to other traits that are seen as basically optional. small example: I feel like I became a much better person over the same time period that my cognitive abilities kinda decreased (unrelated reasons), but obviously one of those is going to have a much greater effect on like my “success” in society!

that’s like the basics of what I’m talking abt here. I’m tired of ‘intelligence’ as being like one of the Highest Personal Goods that people can have, it’s tiresome and leads to all sorts of fucked up shit! maybe calling myself ‘anti-intelligence’ is a bit combative but like I feel like that constitutes a p good name for what I’m talking abt here.