Zero Expectations, Zero Dissapointments @flamingivories - Tumblr Blog

“nobody wants to work anymore” yeah because everyone wants to kill themselves

"Nobody wants to work anymore" yeah, because working used to be so you could save up and have a life. That's not being offered anymore. No shit people don't want to work for the sake of working. There's better and faster ways to kill myself

scorpionlafemme

catgirlforeskin

trying to make a creative project without men and uproot any masculine words will drive one insane. There's the obvious stuff, right, swordsman becomes swordsmaid, count becomes countess, gladiator to gladiatrix and so on.

But did you know that "-er" is a masculine suffix, for which "-ster" as in "sister" is the feminine equivalent? Baker means a man that bakes, the historical feminine equivalent is a bakster, a webster is a female weaver. Some words already have the feminine as default, youngster, teamster, mobster, but most? Trying to be a principled feminist has you saying shit like goonster

gwenadier

Wait for real? Fascinating.

catgirlforeskin

for real! Lots of other examples too, anything "patr" comes from father, "patriarch" is the obvious one, but patriot, patron, patronym all would need "matr" for mother is instead. Pope and Papacy derive from "Papa" and would be Mome/Mamacy if you want yuri catholicism (hellworld!!) it's EVERYWHERE

catgirlforeskin

My favorite example, beyond the obvious ones like lord/lady, waiter/waitress, steward/stewardess, is housekeeper, which is now the more acceptable term for a maid, when maid, of course, just means "woman" and keeper is masculine, would be keepster or keepess but (to my knowledge) neither were used historically because, well, keeping wasn't something women got to do!

Likewise, waitress has fallen out of favor for host or server, which are also both gendered terms. (hostess or serving girl, respectively. Servant is also gendered, maidservant and servantess were used)

There's been a concerted push with a lot of these to phase out the feminine variants of these words and just treat the masculine variants as neutral, or find neutral alternatives like fireman -> firefighter (even though fighter is also gendered) because the feminine variants are seen as inherently lesser, which, yeah that's how women are seen.

There is a line you have to draw somewhere of "okay let's just treat this and below as gender neutral because, frankly, most words that just mean "person" mean "man" historically because women weren't (and still largely aren't) considered people, and otherwise we're going to shred the whole English language" and I get that.

BUT. I think a lot of folks draw that line at the start and insist that man/guy/dude/bro can be gender-neutral which is obvious stupid. And I think it's always worth having this investigation and questioning how we speak, it shapes how we think about worlds and people real and fictional.

Okay one last silly aside about barista, which is supposed to be gender-neutral from Italian but men got weird about it and then invented baristo so now -ista is kinda feminine? Typically it's just borrowed into English to sound Foreign (Sandinistas leading to the exonym Corbynistas)

catgirlforeskin

Bucket, Captain Lieutenant are gendered masculine btw, it'd be buckette captaine and lieutenante. It's not just an issue of suffixes being "ignored"(masculinized) when borrowed from french because we write Debutante with the e. Multiple times a month I stumble into new examples, the battle never ends

gooned-out-tgirl

hey i'd just like you to know ever since i saw this post it's been the only thing i think about when at work. Because of it i've tried imagining a version of english that is more feminine or even 100% fem. 1. it's been such a wild ride just going "my god how we speak is weird." 2. I has been a pure joy coming up with an idea for a world for a bee species and a lesbian lizard species to speak in this language.

catgirlforeskin

we are now sisters in arms in an eternal war 🤝

malewifesband

its always helpful imo to remember theres a cis person with whatever problem you have as a trans person 9/10 times. theres a cis man as short as you, a cis woman as tall as you, with hands and feet as big or small as yours. theres a cis woman scared to go out without shaving twice a day, theres a cis man whos upset bc he will never grow a beard. theres a cis woman who worries her infertility makes her less of a woman, and theres a cis man feeling similarly about his lack of potency. theres cis women who dilate and cis men with phalloplasty. theres a cis man scared that painting his nails will make people think hes not really a man and a cis woman whos exhausted with spending hours grooming just so people treat her like she wants to be treated as a woman. they dont put it in the terms we do but theyre worried that these problems make them inadequate at the gender they want people to see them as. our patriarchal system has made the boxes were supposed to fit into so small and you arent alone in not fitting it--nobody really fits

anarchistmemedistro

sl8tersstuff

I live my life in a constant state of grief of what I did, what I didn’t do, and what I can never do.

toothsheeran

probuccalfat

one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?

probuccalfat

i’m this exact post. all this just to fuck women.

probuccalfat

“are you going to the lucy dacus concert?” no. i listen to gucci mane.

veil-of-exordia

fluffyartbl0g

we cant hug in person but weve hugged a million times in my head ; u ;!!!!!

hauntanelle

one must imagine the tumblr mutual happy

sergle

u good?

girl obviously not

ynka-deactivated20220613

my desire to be hidden from the world just keeps intensifying

cerceos-deactivated20160308

Hans Bellmer (1933-34)

casual-isms

Unlearning How White People Ask Personal Questions

http://www.samefacts.com/2014/05/culture-and-civil-society/unlearning-how-white-people-ask-personal-questions/

beautytruthandstrangeness

Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.

ziyalofhaiti

****new link****

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.

From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way – major or minor — we should do that too.

autumnsneedle

This is really useful stuff – as someone who’s on disability and knows a ton of people in the same boat, “What do you do for a living?” can be such a loaded question. “How do you spend your time?” is a much more compassionate thing to ask, because you can just enthuse about what you’re writing or how great your cats are or whatever.