leila's tumblr @riotiousangelicparticulars - Tumblr Blog

🐢 🐢 🐢 #turtlesallthewaydown #johngreen #jscribble (at Bookworks Albuquerque)

#johngreen #jscribble #turtlesallthewaydown

“He’s so sexy. And he taught me the importance of being silly.” “Being silly is so important. Silly is the opposite of grief. It’s throwing yourself into a moment without care. You can’t always maintain your status as a dignified person– it gives you blinders. When you always expect the world to fulfill your expectations, it wears you down. It closes you off.” “So sexy.”

positivedoodles

riotiousangelicparticulars

i can make...

#positivity

The Pros & Cons of Dating a Programmer

pretty much… especially the last one

#gamedev #notoutdoorsy

monologuish

My Week in GIF Form

powerarmor

me: humanity is awful i can’t believe this there is no goodness or love

me: life is ok actually and i have a reason to live

glitterweave

thaibrator

mariah carey and ariana grande getting in a fight

shopjeen

I JUST CRIED FOR LIKE 4 MINUTES

shes-beauty-shes-ace

I’m literally crying.

riotiousangelicparticulars

i don’t often LOL, but i literally LOL’ed.

wilwheaton

riotiousangelicparticulars

literally right behind you

wilwheaton

#font snob

quick-nip

(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao

words to remember

#don't apologize

learning to sk8

#good dads #cute kids #ciclovia #abqciqlovia #skaters

skunkbear

Hundreds of you sent in questions for my live conversation with three astronauts and NASA’s chief scientist on Tuesday. Thanks! The most common question was: “What happens when you get your period in space?”

I didn’t end up asking this question because

a) the question itself has a lot of historical baggage b) the answer is pretty boring

But because people seemed genuinely curious, I decided to answer it here.

First, a bit of history…

In the early days of space flight, menstruation was part of the argument that women shouldn’t become astronauts.

Some claimed (1) that menstruation would effect a woman’s ability, and blamed several plane crashes on menstruating women. Studies in the 1940s (2,3) showed this was not the case. Female pilots weren’t impaired by their periods. But the idea wouldn’t die. In 1964, researchers from the Women in Space Program (4) still suggested (without evidence) that putting “a temperamental psychophysiologic human” (i.e. a hormonal woman) together with a “complicated machine” was a bad idea.

Others raised concerns about hypothetical health risks. They feared that microgravity might increase the incidence of “retrograde menstruation.” Blood might flow up the fallopian tubes into the abdomen, causing pain and other health problems. No one actually did any experiments to see if this really would be a problem, so there wasn’t any data to support or refute these fears.

Advocates for women in space argued that there had been a lot of unknowns when humans first went to space, but they sent men up anyway. Rhea Seddon, one of the first six women astronauts at NASA, recalled during an interview:

We said, “How about we just consider it a non-problem until it becomes a problem? If anybody gets sick in space you can bring us home. Then we’ll deal with it as a problem, but let’s consider it a non-problem.”

Just to give you a sense of the culture surrounding female astronauts back then, here’s an excerpt of a 1971 NASA report about potential psychological problems in space. Researchers Nick Kanas and William Fedderson suggest there might be a place for women in space:

The question of direct sexual release on a long-duration space mission must be considered. Practical considerations (such as weight and expense) preclude men taking their wives on the first space flights. It is possible that a woman, qualified from a scientific viewpoint, might be persuaded to donate her time and energies for the sake of improving crew morale; however, such a situation might create interpersonal tensions far more dynamic than the sexual tensions it would release.

Kanas, now an emeritus professor of psychology at UCSF, told me this was tongue-in-cheek — part of a larger discussion about the problem of sexual desire in space (5). Still, it’s surprising this language was included in an official NASA memorandum. Even advocates for women in space were caught up in this kind of talk. In a 1975 report for the RAND corporation, Glenda Callanen argues that women have the strength and intelligence to become astronauts. But here’s how she begins the report’s conclusion:

It seems inevitable that women are to be essential participants in space flight. Even if they were only to take on the less scientific parts of the space mission, or if they wished only to help “colonize” distant planets, their basic skills must still prepare them to perform countless new tasks.

In a culture where these statements were unremarkable, it’s easy to imagine that questions about menstruation weren’t purely motivated by scientific curiosity.

In 1983, 22 years after Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space, Sally Ride left earth’s atmosphere. She told an interviewer:

I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?” “No. That would not be the right number.”

So what DOES happen when you get your period in space?

The same thing that happens on Earth! In the last three decades years of female space flight, periods in space have been normal — no menstrual problems in microgravity.

Notes:

RE Whitehead, MD. “Notes from the Department of Commerce: Women Pilots.” The Journal of Aviation Medicine 5 (Mar-Dec 1934):48.

RS Holtz, MD. “Should Women Fly During the Menstrual Period?” The Journal of Aviation Medicine 12 (Sept 1941):302.

J Cochrane. “Final Report on Women Pilot Program.” 38.

JR Betson and RR Secrest. “Prospective women astronauts selection program.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 88 (1964): 421–423.

Kanas and Fedderson’s 1971 report went on to conclude: “Information regarding women during periods of stress is scanty. This lack, plus previously mentioned problems, will make it difficult for a woman to be a member of the first long-duration space missions. However, it is just as unlikely to think that women cannot adapt to space. Initial exploration parties are historically composed of men, for various cultural and social reasons. Once space exploration by men has been successfully accomplished, then women will follow. In preparation for this, more information should be compiled regarding the physiology and psychology of women under stressful situations.”

npr

I am not ashamed to admit that I have *always* wondered about this…and now we have the definitive answer - PERIOD. -Ariel

teesadutta

#yo mama

thebestoftumbling

Adorable baby fakes crying when daddy tries to cut her fingernails. (x)

esmicorazon

This is so cute like when do babies start learning these things like she’s scaring the shit out of her dad but she thinks it’s a game

woodmeat

this is the cutest fucking shit ive ever seen

riotiousangelicparticulars

hehe this baby's nails are never going to be trimmed :)

marinashutup

Do “White Passing” People of Color Have White Privilege?

The age old problem of simultaneously being “too white” and “not white enough”.

thewanderingyrs

this chick tho 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 what a kickass feminist lady!

hermionejg-deactivated20200701

seconded! Adore Marina.

fishingboatproceeds

I really liked this video (and enjoy Marina’s content in general). I wonder what Rosianna’s experiences are on this topic, since she often passes for white until people see her name.

hermionejg-deactivated20200701

I had a conversation with John about this earlier today. First, let me say that my pale skin and general european appearance has allowed me great privilege in life and I don’t want to obscure that. Additionally, while on US forms I select my ethnicity as hispanic/latino and then race as white (sometimes the former with hesitation, which I may go into later on in this), in the UK I tick White Other. But there is a difference between white and White, I think, especially in the way we interact with Whiteness.

Marina’s video was really important to me because it verbalised a lot of things I am always hesitant to explore or comment on because of the fear that it would be taking attention away from voices that are more marginalised and need to be heard more than mine. I think a lot of that plays into the “not ___ enough” that Marina went into.

So I’m half mexican, half british, for those of you who don’t know. I have hundreds of cousins on my mexican side and it’s a really important part of my identity for more reasons than I can go into. Aside from that, though, even if I’d sworn off my mexican identity and strapped a british flag to my back, when I hear people saying really fucking shitty things about latinxs (which happens much less in the UK than here in the USA) because they don’t perceive me as “other” or likely to be mexican or whatever, it’s still my family they’re talking about. At no point can you really properly participate in this project of dehumanisation, which is a good thing, but is also fucking exhausting and sad and makes me really angry.

I don’t find immigration “humour” very funny at all (you may have seen my reaction to sean penn’s comment at the oscars or whatever it was) because it almost always punches down, but also because I have family members who have been put through hell even though they’ve done everything by the rulebook. There’s a weird camaraderie at best, supremacy at worst in certain circles around whiteness, and there’s a scary ease with which many white people make racially charged jokes around other white people or around people they assume won’t understand them.

Specifically White passing stuff, though, something I kept thinking about when watching Marina’s video is the culture of like, European beauty established as ideal, lightness, whiteness, and how it gives you such a weird relationship to yourself when people related to one part of your identity reject you in some ways because you’re “too white” but then also idealise you for having the “right” kind of hair or the “right” kind of skin.

Anyway, happy to follow up on any of this.

wasarahbi

I wrote an article about this at my school and got to talk to a lot of white-passing (I found them by asking if anyone knew people who would identify with the term, I did not just randomly walk up to white passing people and ask if they were poc lol) peers about this. It was interesting to me to see how often stories would overlap and how many of us didn’t know how to explain, even now, at age 18 19 20 whatever why they/we felt the way they did when they/we were younger and unable to even use the vocabulary that many of us have now. I didn’t know the word “passing” until I came to college, and until watching this video I didn’t quite know how to explain in simple terms why white passing is such a unique burden. For me personally, the fact that you can still internalize the racism against your background even if you don’t “look” like how you are “expected” to look resonates the most.

I also dislike being told that I look more/less white/Asian because I have yet to reconcile two things: 1) Who decides what traits “belong” to particular races when there are plenty of people who defy those categories? According to??? 2) But also yes, sometimes those traits are more common in certain races than others. I don’t know. It’s very messy to me.

riotiousangelicparticulars

i have very similar feelings to rosianna here. i am aware of the privilege my general white appearance has given me. i’m also hesitant to speak as a poc for those reasons.

finding oneself in that “in-between space” is challenging, but can also be enlightening-- like when people talk about me in front of me, assuming i don’t understand spanish or arabic. or when folks talk about arabs or muslims in a derogatory way, assuming i have no connection to those people groups.

like rosianna, i’ve got the european features, perfect accent, and the ethnic name. the name has subjected me to some enhanced airport security, and of course several extra hours of interrogation in tel aviv, but for the most part, just rounds of “oh!”

but i also get wasarahbi’s highlighting the part about internalizing the racism despite not being directly attacked. i felt this very strongly after 9/11 and up to and during the iraq war.

#racism #white privilege #passing