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sevaria

society if we could kill people who misgender us

baeddel-meinhof

he was the blueprint

sevaria

King

roobz-deactivated20220823

likeadog

people NEED to look into what diagnoses can affect their legal rights please ableism isnt just individual it is in the system!!! do your research!!! lie to the government!!!

afrafemme-blog

A friend and I were out with our kids when another family’s two-year-old came up. She began hugging my friend’s 18-month-old, following her around and smiling at her. My friend’s little girl looked like she wasn’t so sure she liked this, and at that moment the other little girl’s mom came up and got down on her little girl’s level to talk to her.

“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”

Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.

My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.

“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”

Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.

“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.

What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.

And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?

luvlyhuman-deactivated20150629

I try to do this every day I go to nursery and gosh it makes me so happy to see it done elsewhere.

bebinn

Yes, consent is nonsexual, too!

Not only that, but one of the reasons many child victims of sexual abuse don’t reach out is that they don’t have the understanding or words for what is happening to them, and why it isn’t okay. Teaching kids about consent helps them build better relationships and gives them the tools to seek help if they or a friend need our protection.

geshertzarmeod

Teaching Consent to Small Children

lotesseflower

I wish this post featured the OP’s name more prominently; it’s by Libby Anne of love joy feminism, and she writes fantastic stuff. A survivor of Christian patriarchal fundamentalism, she writes about parenting from the perspective of someone working through her own traumatic experiences. I love reading her blog.

sylviasybil

I met my nephew (codename Totoro) in person for the first time when he was eight months old. Before this, I’d known him only through video calling. A few hours after getting home from the airport, my sister (codename Mystery) was holding him on her hip. I asked her, “Can I hold him?”

She smiled and said, “Ask him.”

“What?”

“Hold out your hands to him and see if he leans toward you or away from you.” So I did, and he leaned away, and I dropped the subject. Five or ten minutes later, he was leaning towards me, overbalancing and almost falling out of Mystery’s arms, and she said, “He’s asking you to hold him now.” So I did, and it was magical, getting to introduce myself to my nephew and the firstborn of the Sybil family.

I am all about respecting children’s agencies and teaching good boundaries. I didn’t ask at the airport, when Totoro was surrounded by new stimuli and needed the reassurance of his mother. I didn’t ask when we first got back either; I gave him time to settle down, get used to his surroundings, and get used to me in person instead of a moving picture on a cell phone screen. I thought I was respecting his boundaries. But it had never occurred to me that an eight month old, who couldn’t speak or even understand most speech, might be able to establish his own boundaries.

A year later they came to visit again, when he was 19 or 20 months old. The weather was what we Northwesterners call “a bit nippy” and what thin-blooded Midwesterners like my sister call “fucking freezing, are you kidding me?” As we were getting ready to leave the house, Totoro objected vehemently to the need for pants and a coat. Finally Mystery had me stand by and hand her things as she near-literally wrestled him into his clothes. He was screaming and kicking and saying, “No pants, no no, don’t wanna, no Mama.”

And as she worked, Mystery kept talking to him soothingly. “I can hear you saying no, and I understand that you don’t want to wear your clothes, but it’s my job to keep you safe and warm. I know you’re saying no, I can hear that, but it’s very cold outside and I have to keep you safe and warm.” Over and over, reassuring him that she understood what she wanted and that she had a good reason for ignoring his wishes.

And it hit me all over again, an aspect of respecting children’s agencies and boundaries that had never once occurred to me. Because sometimes it is necessary to override their wishes. Part of being a good guardian is keeping them safe even when they want to play in traffic or eat nothing but candy. But I’d never thought about it from Totoro’s point of view, how frightening and how helpless it would feel to scream “no” into an unhearing void. Mystery made sure he knew he was being heard, he wasn’t being ignored, he was important enough to have people react to his words.

It’s just, geez. Every time I watch Mystery interact with Totoro I learn something new about agency and boundaries and just plain humanness. It blows me away.

classic-jorts

Jeph Jacques decided to go out in a blaze of shitposts and in his honor I think it's only right to share these tweets with a wider audience

goodnight, sweet prince

probablyasocialecologist

Source: PacingPixie

gatheringbones

[“Child removal proved to be a profitable career path for many white women. The civilizing machine required humans to run it: white women teachers. The boarding school movement presented them with significant new career opportunities. Middle-class white women in the mid- to late nineteenth century were still largely confined to the private sphere. But civilizing the West was deemed an appropriate extension of women’s domestic duties. This “manifest domesticity,” in scholar Amy Kaplan’s memorable phrase, thrust white women’s work into the center of the settler colonial enterprise. White women could respectably extend their own realm of power and influence through adopting a maternal attitude that saw Natives as children in need of their guidance. According to historian Margaret Jacobs, “the majority of boarding school employees nationwide” were white women.”]

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

everythingfox

Sound on

i-said-im-a-fucking-star-deacti

puts my uncomfortably wet hand on your shoulder. see here, gay boy- can i call you gay boy?

oneheadtoanother

achillesinhighheels

bewbin

you were born in 2006? what are you? a Honda Civic?

2006-honda-civic

can i fucking help you?

captain-price-returns

As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new

Well just call me a violent anti-tech extremist then.

rednines

workingclasshistory

On this day, 27 June 1869, Emma Goldman, the legendary Jewish writer, feminist, birth control advocate and anarchist was born in what is now Lithuania. Emigrating to New York City, she worked in many different jobs, like in textile sweatshops, as a masseuse, and in an ice cream parlour. Goldman stressed the importance of the interconnectedness of different struggles, like women's rights, as well as the need to transform our everyday lives: "The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It is necessary that woman learn that lesson, that she realise that her freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches. It is, therefore, far more important for her to begin with her inner regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs. The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds." For her activism she was arrested many times, jailed repeatedly and eventually stripped of her citizenship and expelled and deported to Russia. We have some of her work, as well as items celebrating her life, available here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/emma-goldman