here is the deepest secret nobody knows.

Gabrielle. 23. I study writing and read a lot.

[teesadutta]

[sazquatch-blog]

Sexualising professions conventionally dominated by women through ‘sexy teacher,’ ‘sexy nurse’ etc. tropes, serves to diminish women’s labour by reducing it to a sexual fantasy that exists to titillate men. This removes any reference to how difficult these professions are, and reinforces their status as ‘lesser’ careers, thus contributing to women’s work remaining underpaid and disrespected.

[scaredpotter]

when women say “i hate men” they mean it in the “stop hurting me and my sisters” kind of way, not the “i want to rape, murder and oppress you” way. you know, the way men hate women.

[hsaley-blog]

sense8 meme- 2/5 relationships: lito x hernando

love, like art, must always be free

[awesomeskeletonhellcollege]

[doumekichikara]

We have gender constructs in our daily life, and I think what tends to happen is we draw a line in an arbitrary place and we say everything on this side of the line is masculine, and everything on this side of the line is feminine. The problem arises when what’s feminine is often portrayed as being the negative inverse of the masculine, so masculine qualities are all these positive qualities such as strength or determination, and feminine qualities are somehow weakness or other negative kinds of traits. When you’re writing romance, in many ways, no matter what type of romance you’re writing, you have to engage with those gender constructs. So you can either use them as an erotic trope—and I think that does happen in some romance, and there are probably a lot of readers who really enjoy that, and even find it comforting—or you can choose to break from it, or play with it, or subvert it.

C.S. Pacat on gender in romance (via doumekichikara)

[butt-berry]

British tv cooking competitions: held in a large tent in the middle of a field, the host is a lesbian comedian and the judge is an adorable 80 year old woman, everything is a terrible pun, all the contestants are friends and cry when someone is eliminated

US tv cooking competitions: the set is a barely-lit dungeon, no one smiles in the entire series, rock/screamo musical intro, every sentence is emphasised with a cymbal crash, everyone hates each other especially the judges, at least one contestant is introduced holding a gun

[alliterate-deactivated20120901]

Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said fuck that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(via bansheewhale)

Remember this, next time you’re hearing someone talk about how men just naturally excel more at math and science and are driven to excellence and blah blah blah.

Women are driven to achieve, and just as capable of great discoveries, inventions, and successes. 

Men are are just more driven to cover up and erase women’s achievements. 

(via jessicalprice)

[failgirls]

i’m already gone.

[geenozah]

That was…

[hayleyattwell]

i have all these voices in my head, but yours..    it’s the only one i can’t live without

[delevingned-deactivated20151023]

[kateordie]

This scene was perfect

[andythanfiction-deactivated2017]

That time James Bond replied to homoerotic taunting not with some macho no homo bullshit, but by calmly implying he was bisexual anyway and somehow did not suddenly cease to be awesome but instead roughly doubled in awesome points.

[comtessedebussy]

I love this scene so much. 

[peachcooler]

[teesadutta]

[jack-donaghy]

A 2014 study shows that despite the wealth of talented actresses in Hollywood, women still remain grossly underrepresented when it comes to major film roles. Here to give us her take, a one-dimensional female character from a male driven comedy.

[privatebarb]

Nicki Minaj’s Good Morning America Speech [x]

[whitleyisa-deactivated20181209]

Ghostbusters cast surprises patients at Boston children’s hospital

[doumekichikara]

Growing out of Tolkien, medieval fantasy is often a fantasy of nostalgia, in which the reader is invited to escape into an exciting or reassuring past. However, “nostalgia” itself can be exclusionary, as those from minorities for whom life in the past would have allowed fewer rights cannot imagine existence there without constraints. Thus, the reader may travel backwards in time only if they take on an imaginative self that conforms to certain conditions, which may include race, sexuality, or gender expression. Writing the Captive Prince trilogy, I wanted to create a heroic, escapist story in a landscape of diversified period fantasy, challenging the assumption that, “that’s just the way it was.” Alongside heroic archetypes and genre-specific tropes, I constructed a “homonormative” universe, where constructs of sexual identity are different to our own. I centered research for the book on ancient Greek cultures, drawing on myths and literature from that period to highlight that even in our own world constructs of sexual identity have not been transcultural or transhistoric.

C.S. Pacat on representation in a fantasy setting (via doumekichikara)