HIPPO IN A TUTU

Alex Blank Millard: The Blank is Silent.

[hippoinatutu]

Check out my latest in The Establishment.

[best-of-memes]

[hippoinatutu]

Me everyday.

[hippoinatutu]

To the sales woman who felt shame on my behalf because that dress didn't fit:

You can say it. This dress was made for someone thinner than I. Or, I am too fat for this dress. I am aware of my curves. I know my round belly much better than you, I promise. I know which fabrics will accentuate my full breasts and which will not cover the delightful roundness of my ass. I do not feel shame, for running my hands down my sides and onto my hips in a dress too tight reminds me only that I was my own lover first, and damn my curves feel good. I am not afraid to ask if this dress comes in a bigger size. I am not afraid of the words Large and and Extra and Fat. Because I am fat, and beautiful, and clever, and fucking hilarious. and if that dress doesn't fit... I'll wear another.

[hippoinatutu]

RECIPE: Freelancer Breakfast Burritos

1) Get in a super inane argument with your partner. Nothing is too silly. Try arguing about Macklemore’s Same Love. (GO FOR BROKE.)

2) Decide to make breakfast instead of storming out into the snow.

3) In a small oiled pan, cook half a cup of black beans with diced jalapeños, diced onions, salt, pepper to taste.

4) Chop up the tomato that has to be used in the next hour before it goes bad. 

5) Decide that you are also upset that partner bought this soft tomato, it was clearly to make you angry.

6) Oh crap, the beans! Spoon not-burnt beans onto two tortillas, clean pan for eggs while checking Neko Atsume. Feed kitties.

7) Slice up or grate desired amount of jack cheese over beans so it can melt. 8) Crack two eggs into a cup with a tblspoon of water, salt, tblspoon of verde salsa, or whatevs. Mix with a fork until frothy.

9) Heat and butter the pan.

10) Get several notifications that your boss’ facebook page is being spammed by some preacher who hates feminism.

11) Finish deleting his posts, realize the butter is burning, turn down fire, pour out burnt butter, start again. 

12) As you pour in the eggs, consider that MAYBE you don’t HAVE to get divorced, and MAYBE THOSE WERE ALL THE TOMATOES AVAILABLE. 

13) Get weird twitter notification about dude who didn’t READ your article on male sexual assault survivors and wants to remind you that feminists don’t care about men’s issues… 

14) Scramble those eggs! Think, if we get divorced, partner gets the dog. Kiss the dog then yell at him to get out of the kitchen. 

15) Get email from editor, answer email so you can get paid. 

16) Eggs! Oh good, you turned the fire off. Pour eggs on top of cheese. Sprinkle with chopped tomatoes. 

17) Roll the burritos and think maybe instead of a divorce you should just both eat breakfast. 

18) Serve warm! (With a hug for partner who is arguing with racists on the twitters and is super appreciative for breakfast.) 

19) Realize you forgot to make coffee. 

20) Eat it all before you remember to take a picture!

Serves Two.

[hippoinatutu]

Recipe: Freelancer Omelettes

FREELANCER OMELETTES: Serves two overworked humans.

Prep time: 1.5 hours, or about ten minutes. Cook time: 10-45 minutes.

Ingredients: Eggs (Do we have eggs? Can we afford them if we don't? Phew!) Mushrooms (These are still good, right?) Onions Jack Cheese (‪#‎Rich‬) Fajita Seasoning (How long have we had this? Like a decade?) Wheat Bread Butter

Instructions: 1) Take out eggs. 2) Respond to email from annoying client asking you for inane information AGAIN through her son because she doesn’t write her own emails. 3) What were you doing? Oh yeah. Put some bread in the toaster. 4) Realize latest article came out and needs to be retweeted, forget to turn on toaster. Put butter in a pan. Turn on pan. 5) Dice up 1/4 cup onion and two large mushrooms, pause to check email from boss, answer email. 6) Realize butter is about to burn, turn down fire, add fajita seasoning, onions, and mushrooms. Mix them around while you check twitter. 7) Check on toast. What the frak? Turn on toast. 8) Crack eggs into a cup because all bowls are in the dishwasher. Add a little salt and about a tblspoon of water. Use a fork to mix eggs until frothy. 9) Get OTHER email from annoying client's annoying son, who works in your field but somehow doesn’t understand the basics. 10) Realize mushrooms and onions are going to burn, remove from fire, mix 'em up. Pour eggs on top, return to lowered fire. 11) Check the toast. SERIOUSLY?! PLUG IN TOASTER OVEN. 12) Slice up some cheese and put in on one side of the omelette. Fold over other side, turn off the fire and when cheese melts, slice in half and serve. 13) OMG the toast happened. Put whatever you have on it. 14) Take a picture of foods without wiping crumbs off the plate, because digital age, and IT’S IMPORTANT. 15) Give food to your partner who is on a conference call and watch it get cold. 16) EAT IT, you are getting light headed.

[masculinityissofragile]

Male Survivors Of Sexual Assault Speak Out - The Establishment

Several men discuss sexual abuse, toxic masculinity, and the word “victim.”

“Toxic masculinity creates a culture where men commit suicide because there is nothing worse than being ‘weak.’” My heart goes out to these survivors.

[hippoinatutu]

<3

[alwaysbewoke]

White People Commit the Most Heinous Crimes, So Why Is America Terrified of Black Men?

Though the United States was founded as a slave nation, with the subjugation of African Americans written into our constitution, and though our history brims with centuries of repulsive acts of viciousness perpetrated by whites against millions of African Americans, no white-as-criminal trope ever took hold.  This can only be attributed to the triumph of propaganda  over reality.

What about more recently? Most of us see our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings as shameful and repellent, yet still believe the black-as-criminal attitude is justified based on current crime fears. Is it?

It depends on what we choose to fear. How about serial killers? What criminal is more terrifying than a madman killing again and again, escaping the law?  America’s most notorious serial killers, striking fear as their body counts mount, have almost always turned out to be white, and gruesome beyond imagining. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, terrorized his city in the 1960s, sexually assaulting and murdering thirteen women. David Berkowitz, New York City’s “son of Sam,” killed six and wounded seven in the late 1970s, terrifying the city until his apprehension.Ted Bundy, who called himself “the most coldhearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet,” confessed to thirty murders in the 1970s. He was on the loose, killing women in Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado for years before he was apprehended. Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a clown and performed at children’s hospitals, murdered thirty-three teenaged boys and young men in the 1970s, burying twenty-seven in the crawl space under his house.  He described his sexual release in committing murder as “the ultimate thrill.” Gary Ridgeway, Washington State’s Green River Killer, was convicted of killing forty-eight girls and young women but admitted to ninety murders during the 1980s and 1990s. He returned to the corpses he left along the river to have sexual intercourse with them. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, killed three and terrorized many others, sending mail bombs with his anti-technology screeds to universities and airports for seventeen years, until 1995. Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, raped, murdered, and dismembered seventeen men and boys over thirteen years, until 1991. Dennis Rader, known as BTK for his signature “bind, torture, and kill” modus operandi, killed ten in Wichita, Kansas and was on the loose for decades until his 2005 apprehension.

Though each of these men was white, striking again and again in towns and cities across the United States, garnering intense media coverage of their crimes and captures, no fear of white men emerged. Their murders were considered individual acts for which they alone were responsible.

Prominent American organized crime families have long been run by white men like John Gotti, widely reputed to be responsible for at least thirty murders, including executions he ordered of members of his own crime family who he suspected of being informants. James “Whitey” Bulger killed at least eleven of his organized crime associates and did not face justice until he was 84 years old. He was sentenced to life in prison in late 2013. The judge sentencing him pronounced “the scope, callousness, and depravity of [his] crimes are almost unfathomable.” Yet none of us looks at white men with concern that they are mob bosses.

Rampage killers are often in the news.  Nearly every one who has murdered a large number of people in one horrific event has been white.  American bomber Timothy McVeigh took 168 lives at the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, many of them preschoolers at day care, in the worst incident of domestic terrorism until 9/11. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine high school killers, shot thirteen of their fellow high school students, then took their own lives in 1999. Adam Lanza killed his mother, then a classroom full of six- and seven-year-olds and six school personnel before killing himself at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.  Earlier that year James Holmes shot 12 moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.  All these men are white, as is the case for virtually all shooters on the long and growing list of mass killings in America. (The major exception is not an African-American but Korean student Seung-Hui Cho, who committed the worst mass shooting in our history, killing thirty-three people at Virginia Tech University before turning his gun on himself in 2007.)  Yet even though these shocking events generate round-the-clock media attention for days or weeks afterwards, that level of attention does not scare anyone away from white men.

Shocking cases of white women killing their own children occur regularly. In 1995, Susan Smith murdered her two sons, then told police an African American man did it. (So prevalent is the black-as-criminal stereotype that racial hoaxes are common and often effective in distracting attention.) Andrea Yates drowned all five of her young children in 2001. In one of the highest profile cases of the last few years, Casey Anthony was tried (and acquitted) for the murder of her daughter Caylee. No one concludes white women are baby killers.    

Every American presidential assassin – the killers of presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy – has been white, as was the killer of JFK’s assassin, and the murderers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.  Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin was white, and so were all those who made attempts on the lives of presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gerald Ford (Ford’s two attempted killers diverged not on racial but on gender lines, as both were white women).

In our nation’s history, so many of the sickest, most appalling crimes have been committed by whites. Yet no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how young the victims, no matter how much fear is engendered in a community, no matter how much media attention and public discussion the crimes of whites engender, the race itself is never sullied. One does not look at a white man or woman and feel concern that pale skin enhances the likelihood that he or she is an assassin, a bomber, a murderer.

Let’s look at run-of-the-mill crimes today. Who’s committing them?  Who should be feared?  Again, it depends on what categories of offenses we choose to fear. Whites are disproportionately arrested for some crimes, such as arson, driving under the influence, and vandalism. That is, even with the focus of police resources on black communities, whites are convicted of these offenses at numbers greater than their percentage of the population. Drunk driving is a real menace, killing over 10,000 Americans per year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Yet no one eyes a white driver next to him on the road and says, “A-ha, light-skinned guy, he’s probably drunk, I’m calling the police.” 

The statistics don’t matter.  Our perceptions do.

[alwaysbewoke]

and let’s not forget that when it comes to aggravated assault, whites led blacks 2-1 in arrests; in forcible-rape cases, whites led all racial and ethnic groups by more than 2-1; larceny theft, whites led Blacks, again, more than 2-1. and according to the fbi, whites were more likely to kill children, the elderly, family members and their significant others. they commit more sex-related crimes, gang-related crimes and are more likely to kill at their places of employment. in other words, white people stay criming on a level unmatched by any and everyone else. 

there has been in history no greater threat to human safety than white people but when you own the media, you can suppress the news, spin the news, skew the news and more. throughout history nations have been populated by sheep who are quick to believe what they are told because it’s easier than actually thinking and  oftentimes what they are told makes them feel better by either telling what they want to hear or by confirming their delusions. no one is more deluded about their criminality than white people than white people. no one.

what i always tell white people is that no matter what the crime stat, i always add to the white crime stat column the millions of african lives, native american live and japanese lives (hiroshima bombing) lives american white people have taken across the years. that’s a just total and when you do that, no one is even close to the numbers they’ve racked up.

[alwaysbewoke]

and let’s not forget that no one kills COPS more than white people. they always lead in that category yet it’s black people who are getting shot unarmed and shit.

[hippoinatutu]

I spoke to several men about their exeriences with sexual assault and rape and wrote about it here: http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/01/20/male-survivors-of-sexual-assault-speak-out/

[hippoinatutu]

Ask a Raging Feminist: How do we end rape culture?

We briefly answer how to end rape culture: http://www.sheknows.com/living/articles/1106959/rape-culture

[hippoinatutu]

This is what it sounds like when white women forget that feminism must be intersectional and they knowingly or unknowingly practice #WhiteFeminism.

[yiug7]

So feminism is not for equality and “for everyone” after all. What a surprise.

[hippoinatutu]

^When someone doesn't know what satire means.

[hippoinatutu]

This is what it sounds like when white women forget that feminism must be intersectional and they knowingly or unknowingly practice #WhiteFeminism.

[spindletrees]

Defend indigenous languages.

Defend minority languages.

Defend “economically useless” languages.

Sigh loudly at anyone who says that things have to be productive to be worth fighting for.

[tiniwilson]

[hippoinatutu]

https://youtu.be/ByP2pQSbSmE GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

[absurdistwords]

How To Speak to Black People About Race Part 3: Advanced

Welcome back. I can see that you’ve been doing well. You’ve been through the First and Second FAQs and are feeling solid.

You understand what black people mean by Racism, you understand that having latent racism called out isn’t an indictment but an opportunity for personal growth and increased empathy.

At this point, you’ve realized that acknowledging your privilege doesn’t mean that you are evil, nor does it mean that you have not struggled, worked hard or experienced hardship. You feel less defensive and no longer feel the need to take it personally when black people speak about the pain they have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of White Supremacy in America.

You understand why appeals to black on black crime as a rebuttal to claims of police brutality are not reasonable and you are more aware of how police and media can control the narrative of conflict.

Now, with a certainty that you will not stumble into the novice’s pitfalls, you are really listening to what black people are saying. But still… you have some questions.

Q: What about these FBI reports that say that black people proportionally commit more crime than white people? I mean that’s data, right? Not racism.

A: No worries. That’s completely understandable. I mean when you look at those breakdowns by race it sure looks like black people commit a whole lot of crime per capita more than white people…

Until you look closer. What many people fail to recognize (willfully or ignorantly) is that these statistics do not represent the amount of crime committed by race. They merely indicate the race of people arrested for crimes.

So let’s think about this. There’s a clear indication that a black person is significantly more likely to be arrested than a white person due to the fact that black communities are more heavily policed than white communities. So if we recognize that this imbalance exists, we realize that a breakdown of ARRESTS will reflect this imbalance.

Next, the stats don’t count the number of people arrested, just the number of arrests. So 100 arrests can represent pattern of harrassment against 10 people or it could represent repeated legitimate arrests of 5 people.

Also, being arrested is not the same as being guilty. That’s purportedly the reason we have trials. So a count of arrests is not a count of crimes committed.

Finally, the FBI reports are incomplete. Police VOLUNTARILY contribute their reports to the FBI, and any data validity problems on the local scale bubble up to the aggregate counts.

All of this should be tempered with the understanding that many factors contribute to crime and subsequent arrest rates.

Tl:dr FBI data is incomplete, reflects racial arrest bias and says nothing about the criminality of black people.

Q: A lot of famous black people are saying that racism isn’t really a problem anymore. They succeeded, why shouldn’t we take their word for it over yours?

A: Yeah. That’s totally confusing. And i can understand why it would be really comforting to take them at their word. I mean if there are black people denying white supremacy, then maybe everyone else is just being melodramatic, and you can go to sleep confident that nothing is actually needed of you.

Here’s the thing. Not all black people experience racism in the same way. Not all black people experience racism to the same degree. Not all black people are conscious of much of the racism that exists in America because so much of it is normalized.

Think about this. A movie with no black characters in it is not considered a “white” movie. It is simply considered “a movie” it is presumed to be relatable to all audiences. A movie with all black characters in it is considered a “black movie” and is presumed to only appeal to black audiences. Generally, in order for a “black movie” to become a movie it must have a white protagonist to give white people a person to relate to.

This sort of Racism is deeply entrenched in American psyches, regardless of race. The pressure to assimilate to white culture is strong. Subsequently many black people do not recognize these elements of society as products of white supremacy. Just like Neo in the Matrix (see how I tied this to a white guy for you?), many black people experience a process of becoming “woke” and conscious to the way that Racism is deeply woven into the fabric of American society.

When a black person is upwardly mobile, this generally thrusts them into a world increasingly devoid of other black people. Because ones economic and professional peers are now more likely to be white, one’s perspectives are more likely to be influenced directly by white people. Because most white people are like you, harboring no active resentment against individual black people, the feeling of Racism may not be so intense.

White people often “compliment” middle class or educated black people as “One of the good ones”, the implication being that it’s not black people they don’t like, just the majority of undesirable blacks whose culture and language they look down upon with disdain. This acceptance can be internalized, giving an upwardly mobile black person the notion that they’re doing blackness correctly and if everyone else would just do the same, there’d be no race problem.

Furthermore, when one is particularly famous either through politics or entertainment media, their livelihood and appeal and ability to interact effectively with the white people who by and large control money and opportunity depends on not rocking the boat so much. It is in their best interest to support the narrative that we live in a post racial America.

Tl:dr Their success may shield them from it or their paychecks depend on a post-racial America. Either way. How many of them ARE there? Thought So.

Q: Why do black people get so touchy when I bring up Dr. Martin Luther King? He’s a great role model for peace. How’s THAT offensive? You LIKE him!

A: Ok, let’s start with the whole black people aren’t a monolith thing. Just hold that, we’ll get back to it. Dr. King rightfully holds a place of honor among the black community and is celebrated as a hero of civil rights. But white people often don’t understand the complexity of his legacy.

The common narrative is that white people were mean to black people until the Sixties when Martin Luther King led a bunch of people to jail, had a dream that black people should be peaceful with whites at all times and then everyone was so sad when he got shot that Racism ended.

In truth, Dr. King represents only a portion of the black voices in the civil rights movement. He was (and is) often considered the “good” civil rights leader because he refused any violence and as such was preferred by whites to more bombastic voices such as Malcolm X. Even this though is based on an oversimplification of both their messages.

White people, liberals and conservatives alike often fetishize Dr. King, reducing him to a Jesus-like figure whose dictates ask black people must obey. WWMLKD?

This is a silencing tactic. A dismissal of black anger. An abdication of responsibility for white supremacy. People can look at #BlackLivesMatter and say “We saw violence at your protest on the news. MLK said no violence. Therefore you’re illegitimate”. Those who think themselves allies often use Dr. King as an excuse to distance themselves from any part of the movement that is more aggressive than Kumbaya.

Tl:dr MLK isn’t our dad. You can’t run tell him on us.

[hippoinatutu]

By the amazing @absurdistwords

[hippoinatutu]

New on Medium: Found language from a bot?

Yes please !

[hippoinatutu]

Thankful Raging Feminists

What am I and other raging feminists thankful for? Check it out! via @SheKnows http://www.sheknows.com/living/articles/1103937/what-women-are-thankful-for

[slackmistress]

Want to support the Syrian refugees?

Want to support the Syrian refugees? The International Rescue Committee has you covered. Click on this link, fill in the blanks with your info and it will pull up your elected officials and provide you with an editable letter to send.

Here are the 47 Democrats who voted for nearly impossible vetting standards. Let ‘em know what you think. Even though my reps are for bringing refugees here, I still sent a letter so they know that I’ve got their back.

Again, here’s the link.