[owning-my-truth-deactivated2022]

Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called ‘cathexis.’ In his book [M. Scott] Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us 'confuse cathecting with loving.’ We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposities of nurturance and care.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (via owning-my-truth)

[medicinal-music-deactivated2021]

the term high-maintenance is definitely used to attempt to belittle people and guilt someone for expecting basic decency and affection in a relationship, but let’s not ignore all the times people say that they are just high-maintenance to defend their toxic and unrealistic expectations of what another individual should be doing for them. even the best relationships have some boundaries where it’s not healthy to demand an immense amount of your partner. love is a partnership where you should both be putting in equal work to grow and build, it’s not just an opportunity to feel affection without reciprocating.

[whisperthatruns]

“I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.”

— James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

[aloofshahbanou]

And you have to ask those two questions – who am I linked with in my oppression and have I myself become an oppressor inadvertently or deliberately, thinking that my historical victim status makes it definitionally impossible for me to oppress others?

Judith Butler paraphrasing Edward Said  (via aloofshahbanou)

[the-eternal-moonshine]

Van Gogh and Monet

(all my gifs are here)

[love]

Dans Paris (2006)

[aslaneylul]

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Most women will be raped by somebody they know. So why is it that we are brought up to believe that rape is committed by strangers when mostly it isn’t? In my view, rape is simply a matter of access. There is no qualitative distinction about men here. The group of men that we know are worse to us than the group of men that we don’t know because they have the most access to us. Rape is a question of access. Men will rape women to whom they have access.

- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone

[lesbianherstorian]

a photograph from the feminist periodical everywoman vol. 2 no. 10, july 1971

[freuds-cokedealer]

“Besides, trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of 19th-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors. And so with our kente cloth: the silk was always imported, traded by Europeans, produced in Asia. This tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Should we condemn the young men and women of the University of Science and Technology, a few miles outside Kumasi, who wear European-style gowns for graduation, lined with kente strips (as they do now at Howard and Morehouse, too)? Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Case for Contamination

[daviddubnitskiyphotos]

[wildestlovers]

[legendofpooja]

You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother. You desperately want to look like her. How to wear your mother’s lipstick. You must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face. Your mother is a woman and women like her cannot be contained.

Warsan Shire, for Lemonade, Beyonce (via legendofpooja)

[al-dihya]

the whole point of religion is being highly aware that there is a higher power which by default should humble your postition as a creation on this earth so I don’t even understand how people can produce so much arrogance and superiority once they have decided to indulge in religious practices 

[skoteina-fota]

[wetheurban]

Artist Harmonia Rosales Reimagines Classic Works With Black Femininity

[pinakotekams]

They had not been seen together in the museum galleries for quite a while. Monet’s “Women with Umbrellas” are once again side by side in the Impressionist gallery.

[peggaboo]

AND THEN THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END!!!!

[atenderofsycamoretrees]

ok every time this post comes by i resist geeking out on it but NO LONGER so these women are probably the same woman and that woman is monet’s wife camille doncieux. he painted her a LOT. but fun fact: monet had this asshole friend named ernest hochede, and ernest racked up some debts, and like an asshole he basically just fled the country, leaving his wife alice and their six kiddos behind. monet immediately got alice and kids to move in with him, camille, and their two kids. at this point, monet, alice, and camille became my favorite probably historic poly threesome. they lived together, taking care of the kids. they were so poor that alice and camille took turns wearing the nice dress so they could go out with monet. when camille got uterine cancer and began dying, alice helped monet cope and took care of things while he painted camille over and over. when camille died, alice is the reason monet was able to survive. when ernest finally died, monet and alice married, and remained married until alice died. at that point, blanche, the oldest daughter, took care of monet until he died. anyway, the point is, the umbrella ladies are probably the same ladies, but as far as i’m concerned, there WAS a historically queer poly family in that household and they were wonderful.

[possumberries]

this is a fucking joy