The Spark of Being Human

Shannon. Twenty-six. Amateur writer, unlicensed psychologist(but psych degree-haver), expert binge-watcher, professional dreamer.

[tri4l-and-t3rror]

“you‘re so quiet” baby i’m not even here. i’m fantasizing about a book i read weeks ago. move on.

[prideprejudce]

guys i am in TEARS

[devindevout]

holy shit

[shancats]

I knew it the moment I read the name "declyn"

[larkandkatydid]

Like, for a harmless example, I’m pretty confident all of the assertions in this post about the origin of the word “spinster” are bullshit.   I can find no evidence that wool  (hand) spinner was ever a profession that paid well or allowed anyone to own their own business.  Nor does it make any logical sense to me to refer to it as an “art” because it’s not like it’s hard or can be done multiple ways. 

But you can find plenty of references to spinning wool by hand as being the shitty, tedious job that hurts your hands, hurts your back,and damages your lungs.    It’s difficult, but it’s mostly tedious and awful and you can basically “master” it as a toddler.  There’s a new book that suggests, after actually speaking to women whose feet were bound as children, that foot-binding was done in no small part in order to cripple girl children to make them better able to sit still for hours on end spinning and carding wool.   

The image of “spinster” people were calling to mind in the 18th/19th centuries was of a “surplus” woman who had to rely on the charity of her nearest male relatives and therefore had to do the shittiest, most tedious job in the household because her only alternative is to starve on the street or get hanged as a witch.

I mean, I”m being weirdly nitpicky about an utterly harmless post that I’m not even some kind of confident expert in…but there’s something troubling to me about anachronistically finding examples of all these economically self-sufficient single ladies instead of the grim, horrifying reality of how fragile a woman’s life was and how terrible it was to be a woman without some man to give you social status.  I mean, if there were all these examples of free-wheeling spinsters (not window with sons) who made good money and (somehow) owned their own property  then what did we even need feminism for?  I mean, hell, a single woman in the US in 1971 would not be able to open her own textile business because a single woman in 1971 would have no access to credit! 

My justification for being a joyless pendant here is that I think it’s Not Helpful to create these myths that there were lots of happy alternatives for women or to downplay how brutal structural oppression was:   A very small amount of women in pre/semi Industrial Age Europe had any kind of genuine financial security and most of those women in a lot of places/times in Europe and America had to genuinely fear having someone call them a witch and take whatever resources they did have. 

[apparentlyeverything]

You’re right and that post is nothing but revisionist historical fantasy that totally obscures the fact that single women were in an incredibly precarious economic and social position throughout most of history. The idea that spinsters were *actually* empowered, independent single women earning big money in the comfort and privacy of their own homes is completely ahistorical. And it seems like they’re doing it just to reclaim a dumbass term for unmarried women that’s only persisted because of sexism. 

[salparadisewasright-deactivated]

There’s a bizarre trend in popular Tumblr history posts toward “everything was AWESOME until the evil nineteenth century, which was when bad stuff was first invented” – like, people have latched on to the idea that the Victorian age rewrote popular conceptions of history to suit its own narrative of itself, which, entirely true so far as it goes, but then they’ve exaggerated it to the point of the grotesque.

[toxicmp3]

if he has abs he doesnt care about you

[toxicmp3]

men with abs aren’t capable of love

[barbedwirebutterfly-deactivated]

This is BULLSHIT, Dwayne Johnson is jacked as fuck and I FULLY FUCKING BELIEVE he is one of the most LOVING MEN IN THE ENTIRE WORLD

[shit-villagers-say]

I was on board with the first part until I read that and honestly you’re right nobody has more love in their heart than The Rock

[dimedog]

“I wish I had the time to do that.”

- me, a person who definitely has the time to do that but also has terrible time management skills and most likely to just spend 4 hours getting absolutely nothing accomplished instead of the hundred other things I could and should be doing

[mossandrock]

I feel personally attacked by the accuracy of this post.

[antosescape]

how Lil succulent Bulbasaurs are born <3

please do not repost on other sites

[orriculum]

can i get uh……..McDeath™

[fayzaundevon]

is that that one play by Shakespeare

[orriculum]

yeah

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I was a star spilled in your arms.”

— Julia de Burgos, from Song of the Simple Truth; “Harmony of Word and Instinct,”

[dykes-deactivated20200607]

#in this moment we are all terry

[2makeroom4thefire]

i want realistic modern fantasy like

someone finding a dragon egg and livetweeting the process of trying to hatch it (with no prior knowledge on how a dragon egg should be hatched)

a guy selling an enchanted sword on craigslist

a tattoo artist who does spell runes but for really mundane stuff like conjuring a bound demonic pen or for summoning your keys

summoning a demon for the vine

selfies with mermaids

prank calling wizards

[hollowedskin]

being covered completely in tattoos as the equivalent of having a 20kg handbag stuffed with every possible thing you could need.

[roseoilz]

[sarah-maclean-completist]

@sarahmaclean

[architags]

Ciszak Dalmas & Matteo Ferrari . Malababa Flagship Store. Madrid. Spain. photos: Asier Rua

[dakotaaaa]

some thoughts on self objectification 

[theresagooseinthemainframe]

Holy mother of hell

[closet-keys]

this is a huge reason why lesbians can go years just not figuring out that they aren’t attracted to men. when your whole understanding of attraction is “objectifying yourself to the point that you understand intimacy as a performance to be the perfect sexual object for a man” then the question of who and what you desire isn’t even being asked- let alone answered. 

[cookiedoughmeagain]

For a long time I didn’t really understand what objectification meant, not in terms of its effects. And then I was reading something (Naomi Klein, I think), which made this point about it being a state of experiencing your own body through how others see you. And something clicked for me and it made sense, particularly in the concept of sex.

I was basically talking to myself in this way (“How do I look to him right now?”) without even realising I was doing it, without even consciously hearing those messages. But they also meant that I wasn’t actually hearing the messages of my own body either; I wasn’t quite aware of what I really felt.

It’s so insidious because it’s so hard to explain.

[yardsards]

I hate it when people say technology is taking away kids’ childhoods If anything, it’s actually giving kids more of an opportunity to let their imagination out

A lot of times when I let kids play on my phone, they go for the drawing app. I watched a girl on the bus write a silly poem about her friends and then laugh as she made Siri read it I hear children say to their friends “hey, FaceTime me later” because they still want to talk face to face even when they’re far away. I see kids sitting, who would feel lonely and ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they’re texting their friends who are far away. Children still climb trees. They might just take a selfie from the top to show off how high they’ve gotten. They can immediately read the next book of their favorite series on their Kindles. Most kids would still be up for a game of cops and robbers. Or maybe they’d google rules to another game they haven’t played yet. When children wonder why the sky is blue, they don’t get an exasperated “I don’t know” from tired adults. They can go on Wikipedia and read about light waves and our atmosphere. They show off the elaborate buildings they created on Minecraft.

Technology isn’t ruining childhoods, it’s enhancing them.

[benignmilitancy-deactivated2021]

Love this post so much to counteract much of the pessimism surrounding technology and kids. It’s not stealing kids’ innocence, just another means of expressing it. And so often do I hear that all kids do these days is “play on their phones” instead of doing other things, it’s starting to sound like a broken record. >.>

Heck, it reminds me of the first time our family got a computer; sure, I was on it all the time, but it afforded me a chance to talk more often with my best friend at the time. It filled in that boredom that would have otherwise been filled with TV and made me curious about the world.

[a-space-opera]

[lucyaudley]

This answers and raises questions

[disparatemind]

This is actually incredibly helpful

[itabia]

I’m tired of you fake hoes acting like you’ve always been ride or die for Thor when I specifically remember him being The Underrated Avenger for the last 4 years. Where were y’all??? Faaake. Hoooes.

[itabiadraws]

[battleofnuremberg]

@kangarooneys I’m wheezing omg