Confessions of a Teenage Ginger @onmydesperateendeavor - Tumblr Blog

A candle for the victims of the Orlando shooting.

bashana-haba-ah-deactivated2017

Watch: This plus-size dance company is blowing away outdated stereotypes about what kind of body you should have to be a savage dancer

Dancer Akira Armstrong has been featured in two Beyoncé music videos, but when she flew to Los Angeles, she couldn’t find an agent to represent her — due to her size. So she decided to form her own dance company, and they are killing it.

Gifs: The Scene

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parskis

i swear to god, men raising their voice is the most terrifying thing in the whole world. they dont understand, like its an immediate panic response, game over

cl4yton-deactivated20180207

I actually had no idea women found this so scary

periwinklepromise

my downstairs neighbors fight on a regular basis, and every time he starts yelling i’m a little afraid he’s going to kill her. i have no reason to think this except that he is a man and he is angry

thewonderfulthingaboutfish

My math teacher has a loud voice and a temper and he scares the living shit out of me almost everyday. He’s made me and other kids cry more than once and he and his teacher buddies make a joke out of terrifying students.

diamondsamura1-deactivated20220

this was women in general? i knew my gf didn’t like it but I was unaware if this affected most women

survivor-surviving

Yes, it does

pandora-ness

As a woman, I had no idea it effected other women like this. I was too afraid to even talk about it. I thought I was weak. Thanks for bringing attention to this.

kaldraws8280

My dad thinks it’s funny that I used to cry when he raised his voice. I freak out whenever some one does. Once my director did, and I started crying I couldn’t stop. I’m glad to see I’m not alone…

suicunesrider

This is so important– seeing how common this is– and I also want you all to know that this is not normal. It isn’t something instinctively ingrained into women, to be afraid of men. There is no natural state of men being a threat that women constantly have to be afraid of. This is cultural. So many women and girls here have a mutual understanding of this feeling, and I think it really shows an unsettling truth about our society, particularly about how men are raised to act and how so many women have this defensive reaction gradually develop. It’s so important that these people have their voices heard, because it teaches us about problems that we just can’t deny the existence of any longer.

shidoninoure

I’m glad I’m not the only one

anexperimentallife

My fellow men, pay attention. I didn’t realize how scary this could be until one of my exes explained it to me, and it’s heartbreaking.

Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)

Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.

I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.

I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.

Don’t tell me it’s too hard, that you just can’t do it, or that you “shouldn’t have to.” I’m 53 years old and just now getting the hang of it, and if this old dog can learn something new, so can you.

zzzccm

petition for stars in the day time please???

nonbinarbee-blog

girls already exist

heathens-and-kings

Do you think people with LED headlights know that everyone hates them? Like…really hates them in an oddly personal way? Do you think they know?

kstearb

It’s not unreasonable to stand against a force that threatens our ecosystem, disrespects an already abused nation and ignores all present and long-term consequences of oil contamination in the name of profit.

#NoDAPL #SolidaritywithStandingRock Prints, shirts and posters that are sold of this will have any sales donated to the reservation! Click here!

the-real-eye-to-see

Is this even possible?

tobamory

When I tell you I would’ve been in the back of house just fucking crying.

excusemewhileikisstheskai-deact

I thought this was the mannequin challenge so I had to unmute @spicyl0lita

lea-amie

i had to find an inhaler after watching this and i dont even have asthma

antiandrogen

oh my god?????

refinery29

You’ve got to watch this speech from the Philadelphia Women’s March that implores white women to think about who they’re really marching for

“Intersectionality ensures that we listen to our each other’s experiences beyond our personal understanding,” said speaker Ericka Hart. “Intersectionality takes time and forces us to be intentional in our inclusion. Intersectionality centers those who are most marginalized, those who are always fighting for their lives regardless of who is president.”

Gifs: Zuri Pryor-Graves

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evilrashida

Ericka Hart @ the women’s march:

orgaynicchemistry

These are just sections, watch the whole thing!!!

matchingvnecks

teachingwithcoffee

It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol

bigbutterandeggman-deactivated2

Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.

So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem.

BUT! Let’s look closer!

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.

So it’s not actually a song about rape - in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.

livinginthequestion

Best explanation of where this song came from I’ve heard, and it illustrates how much things have changed since then.

tayloracleswift-deactivated2015

My kink is being a Texan and saying Happy Holidays to Christian white people and having them passive aggressively reply Merry Christmas to me, knowing that they will go home and write a lengthy Facebook dissertation about the war on Christianity that I’ve begun to wage in my humble Jamba Juice. That really gets me going

bidoof

movie idea: guy finds a stone tablet engraved with a mysterious alien language and gets caught up in a national treasure-esque adventure to decipher its meaning, only to learn that it’s just an alien “live, love, laugh” decoration