[thancbread]

main blog for @chryseas .

art -> @hoeshiro

[my-dailydreams]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

[the-apocrypha]

Attn: People With Cervixes!

When was your last Pap smear?

Because I am tired of seeing young people (think 40 year olds!) die horribly of an almost completely preventable disease, and I haven't seen the obligatory Tumblr PSA about it, so I'm making my own.

1. CERVICAL CANCER IS REALLY BAD

Cancers that have a good prognosis are usually cancers that can be caught early--like skin cancer, which is easily seen, and therefore usually treated very early. Cervical cancer does not give you symptoms until you have very advanced disease, which means unless someone is regularly testing your cervix, you will likely not be diagnosed early. More than half of people diagnosed with cervical cancer present with advanced disease. 75% of them will be dead within 5 years. For comparison, when caught in the earliest stage, there is a 90% 5 year survival rate. Treatment for those diagnosed is chemo and radiation, and believe me, those are not fun. If you do happen to be in the lucky 25% of survivors, if your cancer comes back, you have an 85% chance of dying within a year. Also! We think of cancer as something that happens to old people, but the average age of diagnosis for cervical cancer is 50.

2. WHO GETS CERVICAL CANCER?

Cervical cancer used to be the most common cause of cancer-related death in women in America, but at this point it's basically a disease of People Without Pap Smears--developing countries, immigrants, low socioeconomic status, BIPOC, rural communities, LGBTQ, etc.

3. HOW DO PAP SMEARS SAVE YOUR LIFE?

A Pap smear is a screening test for two things: HPV, and your cervical cells. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the world. Literally half of the people in America have some strain of HPV on their body. Most HPV infections go away on their own (in people with healthy immune systems), but some strains are Very Bad, and some people are just Very Unlucky, and the HPV starts causing your cervical cells to turn cancerous. 91% of all cervical cancers are caused by HPV. So a Pap smear looks to see if your have HPV, and if so, is it one of the bad ones? And also, do you have any cancerous cells hanging about in your cervix? And! It takes 10-30 years for HPV to turn those cells into cancer, which means you have a really really long time to catch it before it becomes cancer and cut those pre-cancer cells out!

4. WHAT ABOUT THAT VACCINE?

The thing my dad said I shouldn't get because it might make me a slut. Yes! There is an HPV vaccine! You should get it! It protects you against the nine most common cancer-causing types of HPV. It's recommended starting at age 11, and you can get it up to age 45 now! (It used to be 26, but as of 2020, it's now extended.)You can get it from most primary care doctors, or from Planned Parenthood, CVS, Walgreens, etc. If you get the vaccine you still need Pap smears.

5. I HEARD YOU CAN ONLY GET THE VACCINE IF YOU'RE A VIRGIN

Fake news. While the vaccine does not treat old infections of HPV, it does prevent new ones, so while the benefits are theoretically decreased in those who have already been sexually active, it does not mean you will not benefit from having it!

6. WHO GETS PAP SMEARS?

Everyone with a cervix starting at age 21, until you lose your cervix or until you're 65. You should get them every 3-5 years (depending on your exact age and what test your doctor does).

7. BUT I GOT THE VACCINE

Nice! You still need Pap smears.

8. I HAD ONE AND IT WAS HORRIBLE/I'M SCARED OF THE EXAM

Talk to your doctor about this in advance! Good gynecologists (and other providers) will work with you to minimize discomfort as much as possible. They can use a small speculum and lots of gel, prescribe anti-anxiety medications to take in advance, and some people will even use numbing creams and/or laughing gas.

9. BUT I DON'T HAVE/CAN'T SEE A GYN

Most primary care physicians can do them! So do a lot of urgent care centers!

10. BUT I'M A LESBIAN

HPV can be transmitted through oral/genital contact, hand/genital, and even hand-to-hand-then-genital, so you still need Pap smears.

11. BUT I'M A VIRGIN/ASEXUAL

You still need Pap smears. HPV can be transmitted not just through penetrative sex, but also through oral/genital, hand/genital, and hand-to-hand-then-genital, and also 9% of cervical cancers are not caused by HPV.

12. BUT I'M A TRANSGENDER MAN

If your cervix was removed, then congrats! You do not need Pap smears. Otherwise, unfortunately, you are still at risk for cervical cancer and need to be screened.

13. BUT I'M A TRANSGENDER WOMAN

Neovaginas do not need Pap smears! Congrats! Consider getting the vaccine, though, to prevent spreading HPV to others.

14. BUT I'M A CIS-GENDERED MAN

Congrats! You do not need Pap smears! You should still consider the vaccine though, not only to prevent the spread of HPV to others, but also because HPV causes 50% of all penile cancers as well.

In summary: please please please go get your pap smear. Go get vaccinated. The spread of HPV can be prevented, and cervical cancer can be caught and treated before it even becomes cancer.

DON'T FEAR THE SMEAR

[the-apocrypha]

it's cervical cancer awareness month y'all

[thestereotypebuster]

Also, pap smears need to start at age 21 OR when you start being sexually active, whichever comes first.

[mostfuckableffvillain]

Thancred

This is Thancred.

[kim-jong-chill]

i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

[mattheuphonium-blog]

fabulous 

[tockthewatchdog-deactivated2020]

i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.

[counterpunches]

#HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY

[tboy-cock]

binder companies need to post ads for fat big busted trans guys and not just skinny androgynous twinks with body fat percentages in the single digits and yes im serious

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[the-haiku-bot]

post so nice had to

reblog it twice and force it

down everyone’s throats

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[starghouls]

do you ever see a character that’s worshipped by a fandom and go “you’re not that great”

[iratempestatis]

[doberbutts]

Can you vibe check this?

Sometimes i think about how mixed people are used specifically as a literary tool in media and how that bleeds into black pop culture. I wonder if it would bother me less if I saw more media that depicted the way black communities sometimes abandon mixed people. Or the experience of having black people say out of pocket shit about mixed people. Or the way mono racial people play hot potato with us. I hate how other people of color will talk about our light skin privilege, without also acknowledging the very specific history mixed people share. I hate how often I’m seen as not black enough. This is honestly something I’ve realized with sinners and it’s my only complaint about the film.

Hey I just watched an FD Signifier video about this last month!

Really he hits on most of the problems I have with the way the black community treats mixed people, with the exception of:

Almost all of the focus is on the parents and not the resulting children, and when it *is* on the resulting children it's always about the extremely white passing kids and never about the kids who... aren't, or who aren't even mixed with white outside of what happened during slavery, or who aren't just biracial but in fact are multiracial and often catch flak from all sides.

In Sinners, for example, Mary is extremely white-passing, as is her actress, despite being black by definition of the then-in-legal-use one drop rule. Because of this, she is afforded certain privileges so long as she stays quiet about any connection to blackness, even though she has fond childhood memories of running around with a bunch of black kids her age. She is both not allowed to connect to blackness with her white peers, and shut out of blackness by her black peers, because she is seen as one of the "lucky ones" who were able to escape the oppression blackness brings with it.

I mean, personally I think she looks vaguely Latina and kinda Asian, which is how I think a lot of mixed Filipinos read to me, and sure enough she is Filipino, Black, and Jewish. But also, as Mary?

Yeah, sure, that's just a tan white woman. I can see it, and I'm sure others can see it, but she's got juuuuust enough European features to make a lot of white people shrug and not question things.

But what we don't see a lot of is the handling of the Drakes and the Obamas of the world- both also mixed race but significantly less ambiguously black.

Whether or not I liked this dude... that's a black guy. While he is still light skinned, there is no amount of white passing that happens here.

Same with Obama. I'm a shade darker than these dudes and it's weird to me to see Drake's blackness be questioned by people who may also have legitimate complaints against him, while Obama's is front and center and unquestionable. Um. Do we all have eyes here? Both of these dudes have a black parent. How connected they are to the culture itself is not defined by skin color but by how they were raised and in what circles they run.

And then I've seen people call Tiger Woods not black or an oreo, and again, er, do we have... the ability to look and see things with our eyes or are we just guessing here? Because like. This dude's way darker than any of the above and also has way less European ancestry than any of the above but people just conveniently skip that he's also Chinese and Thai.

I wish black media would stop focusing so highly on the lightest skinned of our mixed race population and accept that there are mixed black people out there that either aren't recently having kids with white people or aren't so ambiguous in their racial traits.

When I hear "mixed race black people have the ability to hide in white society" - that is only true for some of us. It sure as shit isn't true for me, or for any of these dudes I posted. Colorism is still a thing and we may be seen as more acceptably black than our darker skinned peers, but make no mistake at the end of the day I'm still a nigger just like the rest.

There is no world in which someone who looks like me can assimilate the way Mary can. I am black, I'm far too blackity black for white people to see me as anything else, and I only get recognized as mixed Native by other Black people who are less mixed or by Natives themselves (or the odd white person more used to seeing and identifying Native traits). It's frustrating that a lot of black media tends to leave people like me behind, outside of certain discussions of colorism. But as FD says, it's something you see as part of a bigger problem of the way white supremacy and racial oppression has impacted the black community.

As said in a different post discussing interracial relatio ships, really people's problems with mixed people like me go back to antiblackness. If I want to stop being annoyed by this, then it's my job to join hands with my black peers and combat antiblackness at its core.

[doberbutts]

Another thing that's wild to me regarding the whole "mixed/biracial isn't black" and assumption of being mixed being synonymous with white-passing?

All these women are also mixed race, biracial or multiracial, and I do not see anyone questioning their blackness. I'm darker than Beyoncé and likely about Rihanna's color (obv I've never seen her in person to compare but the shade seems close in videos- I have a hard time trusting photos because of Hollywood whitewashing), but even Ciara and Alicia Keys are light skinned without ever being capable of being confused for white passing.

Their popularity is a whole different conversation about colorism and how light-skinned became the face of black female celebrities and singers, especially in r&b and hiphop, and how other, darker, less recently mixed black women suffered in these same fields as a result... but there is no question regarding if they count as black. As said- their blackness is determined by their connection to the culture more than the color of their skin.

BUT also it does grate on me when less recently mixed black people describe themselves as monoracial. Most of us are mixed! That's how slavery works! If you can trace your family line back to the trans-atlantic slave trade, you have at minimum 5-10% white in you by definition. Most of us are actually higher than that, with the average being estimated between 15-25% white. If you're part of the diaspora created by slavery, you are NOT monoracial. You are mixed, and in fact you have more similarities with me than you think. My racial mixing just happens to be much more recent, so it's evident in the expression of my pigment. That's why we can get weird ass shit like this:

With each of these pairs being twins born minutes apart. These kids are mixed, but only one of each pair could ever be considered white passing.

[crippled-peeper]

what in fresh hell is going on in these people’s brains

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[sinnegantheworm]

here's my super-quick, easy-to-digest summary that i use when i can't spend more than like 15 seconds on it but need someone to know the basic distinctions:

generative AI - bad evil AI. chatbots, LLMs, image generators, etc. this the one that steals shit.

analytical AI - helpful medical AI. this the one that helps detect cancer early.

game "AI" - fake AI. 100% human created and dictated. this the one that determines game mob behavior n stuff.

[kazamajun]

Lyse Hext

[thancbread]

You don’t go here but look how comically pale they made this motherfucker

I’m wheezing

HES THAT PALE????????

[ghostisredacted]

you know shit is getting dire in your mewtuals' fandom when they pull out the white pharaoh

[bigmanboyagain]

[mxchinewxlf]

can white ppl drop the clanker memes already. im going to start killing

[mxchinewxlf]

i got called a clanker in a vc not that long ago, and when i snarkily called her unoriginal she proceeded to call me "tinskin". im native american btw. put the pieces together

[mxchinewxlf]

anyway then i started screaming.