Laura Fieselmanâs story, âMan & Hog,â follows Ross Andrew Flynn as he preps a hog at the Eddy Pub in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Only at www.vanishingpointmag.com
Today's Document
đȘŒ
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Monterey Bay Aquarium

â
d e v o n
No title available
sheepfilms

No title available
i don't do bad sauce passes

oozey mess

@theartofmadeline

Origami Around
Claire Keane

Discoholic đȘ©
Mike Driver

ç„æ„ / Permanent Vacation
Sweet Seals For You, Always

Love Begins
One Nice Bug Per Day

seen from Romania

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@vanishingpointmag
Laura Fieselmanâs story, âMan & Hog,â follows Ross Andrew Flynn as he preps a hog at the Eddy Pub in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Only at www.vanishingpointmag.com
Because within the gay community itâs glamorized and then outside the LGBT community thereâs not much knowledge about it, other than itâs a man dressing up as a woman, but really itâs more than that. Youâre taking on a persona. Youâre not necessarily cross-dressing. Itâs like a form of entertainment, but also a form of expressing yourself, showing off fashion and a lot of deeper things.
- photographer Shayan Asadi, in an interview on her new photo series "Queens of the Triangle," only on www.vanishingpointmag.com
On Thursday last I drove around for what seemed like a while but was actually just my drive home from West Campus. Just a mile in the nighttime. It was the time between dinner-hours and midnight, the space between labyrinthine Gothic and rolling hills running parallel to a low-slung rock wall,...
"Every time the feeling is different. It doesnât make me particularly happy or joyful but it makes me feel things I donât feel from words."
 In Nusaibah Kofar-Naisaâs audio documentary âSo That You May Hear The Other Half,â Duke senior Nyuol Tong, a native of South Sudan, explains how singing has the power to exalt spoken language. Only at http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."
From the photo series "Walden Pond," only at http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/
Maren Sanchez and Male Entitlement to Violence
Weâre hearing a whole lot  all about the Confidence Gap. But,  letâs talk about gender gaps  no one seems to keen on delving into: self-control and safety,Â
Maren Sanchez, who was 16, was stabbed to death by a classmate in a stairwell at her Connecticut High School on Friday. This a the photo being used by media taken from her Facebook page. She was, by all accounts, a happy, kind, ambitious and able girl who woke up, went to school and didnât go home because she made a boy angry. The homicidal classmate, unnamed, is also 16. His alleged motive was that she said no to attending a prom with him. Many accounts about this story are using the phrase, âunprovoked attackâ which implies that a girl, standing in a hallway at school and declining an invitation to the prom, could be responsible for a âprovokedâ attack. Iâm cynically waiting for explanations to start being made for why her killer did what he did and how tragic that his life is now over. Which is true, and happens regularly in cases involving teenagers, like the Steubenville rape, but not the point. The point isnât that the lives of raping and killing teenage boys are not lost, but that in expressing sympathy for them in the standard way does nothing to make sure we prevent the same from happening in the future.Â
She died as much from our apathy and basic contempt for the lives of girls and women, as from the knife he used to kill her with. This contempt is expressed not only in the routine beatings and deaths of girls and women at the hands of boys and men they know, but by our refusal to acknowledge this violence as the product of pervasive, violently maintained, gender hierarchy. These assaults happen every day and regulate the lives of all girls, women and non-gender conforming people who often face heightened violence. Girls are also aggressive and abuse, but thatâs not what this post is about. The overwhelming preponderance of violence is a gender one-way street. It happens every day.Â
For example, last month, 17-year old JeâMichael Malloy confessed to killing his 15-year-old girlfriend, Danielle Locklear during a âspat.â
Or, two months ago Matthew Bolton, 15,stalked and shot Anastasia Greer, 16, whoâd broken up with him.
That was a murder suicide, of which there are 12 each week in the United States, 69% involving a male murderer.Â
In the United States, 25 percent of teenage girls report being physically assaulted. Â
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 9.4 percent of high school students surveyed reported that theyâd been hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by their boyfriend or girlfriend. Â
The one-in-five women and almost one-in-seven men who experience intimate partner violence are between the ages of 11 and 17 years of age when they have their first abusive encounter.
Google âwalking while transâ to see how institutionalized the policing of gender is, and how it is expressed in hostility to femininity and expressions of femininity
An Avon Foundation study conducted by the No More coalition earlier this year found that one in 10 people between the ages of 14-21 have already committed an act of sexual violence, most but not nearly all of them, boys. However, 80 percent those on the receiving end of violence were girls. (18 percent were boys and five percent were transgender youth.)
In the next 24 hours violent men will kill at least three women in the U.S. and thousands and thousands more around the world. We arenât even keeping track properly.Â
Hereâs the interesting and most important part: the likelihood that a teenager would engage in this violence was not the same across all socioeconomic groups, but the teenagers with the highest propensity to sexually assault a peer were white kids, mainly but not solely boys, from higher-income families. The ones with the highest likelihood also consumed more pornography, a medium we do nothing to educate children about and one whose mainstream products normalize dehumanization and violent male domination. But, hey, free speech, status hierarchy and money â itâs the American way.
IWe absolve boys of responsibility at these ages, and we should, theyâre children still. I canât blame young boys, but I wonât absolve the adults around them, the promoters of xy entitlements and the boys-will-be-boys mentality that infuses family dynamics, school interactions and the legal system. That sentiment and all it implies is a fundamental building block of the aggrieved entitlement that routinely results in tragedies like Sanchezâs death.Â
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Oregon found that âGirls in the United States had significantly higher individual behavioral regulation than boys.â Not only did they appear to have more self-control but teachers and parents expect them to, so they attribute greater self-regulation to girls. They found that this is not true in Asian societies (the study included children in South Korea, Taiwan and China). In other words, we have a national problem with not expecting or teaching boys to control themselves when they are quite clearly biologically capable of doing so.  Thatâs a gap no one is talking about on Sunday morning news programs.
When a boy, maybe out of embarrassment and anger, allegedly pushes a girl like Sanchez down the stairs and stabs her to death in their school, status, power and domination arenât the first thing that comes to mind. Just sadness for everyone. In the case of teenagers in particular there is such evident tragedy in the loss of the lives of two young people and the profound scarring of those around them. But, soon after, status, power â and the institutionalized tolerance for violent male domination â have to be part of any constructive conversation. Otherwise we ensure the institutional tolerance that enables these crimes and reproduces a violent and misogynistic status quo.
Speaking of which, multi-billionaire tech CEO Gurbaksh Chahal, once called Americaâs most eligible bachelor, was sentenced to three years probation for  battering his girlfriend and telling her at least four times as he did that he would kill her.  A video allegedly showing him hitting and kicking her, 117 times if youâre counting, was deemed inadmissible by a judge because police seized it with no warrant. Chahal says that protests against his being professionally engaged are a âpolitical witch hunt.â  Chahal will retain his board seat â heâll keep working, go to meetings, make lots of money and keep posting feel-good memes because, well, he couldnât be expected to control himself. It does seem to me, however, that believing âSuccess is how high you bounce when you hit bottom,â really depends on whether or not youâre the one doing the hitting.
The Self-Control and the Safety Gaps- both gendered - are serious and important ones.  I will never stop being outraged by these facts and disgusted by the people who chose, and itâs a choice, to deny them. If we decided to close it, fewer of our girls would âfind themselvesâ dead.  Arenât you sick of hearing about girls and women being raped by predators and bludgeoned and slaughtered by angry boys and men never taught â by families, neighbors, religions, schools â to value them as human beings in their own right?
Posted here originally.Â
Poetry in more than words â Prashanth Kamalakanthan illuminates the poetry of Ahmad Jitan in film, revealing the power of linguistic ritual as the author reads his poem âCide Hamete Benengeli.â
Sunlight pours into the dusty room from the only window, falling on top of Kadiatouâs bright red head wrap. She sits on the floor behind the solid concrete slab for birthing in the maternity. She looks calm. I try to contain my excitement. She doesnât look like a woman about to have a baby. I wonder how Binta is so sure. Binta places Kadiatouâs birthing materials on a small tray. On the tray sits the bulb-like object that was in my yard yesterday, only a different color. Seeing the bulb again gives me a resonating feeling of fate. I realize it is the suction device used for the babyâs nose and mouth immediately after birth. This baby is coming.
From "Thief," a story about the experiences of a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali: http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/thief/Â
Gaze at Walden Pond through the haze of a hand made camera lens and revel in the power of linguistic ritual in our newly released issue! http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/
"Where I grew up, in Elizabethtown, down East, it was a real small town. Real nice. Were you ever a fan of the Andy Griffith show? That was a good show, but I myself was never much of a fan. I guess if someone were to psychoanalyze me, theyâd say I wasnât a fan because I lived in it."
From RC Cain Sees the World, one of the pieces in "Volume II: Songs of Living and Dying", only on http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/
A sneak preview from our upcoming submission. This piece is entitled Cidi Hamete Benengeli, a video about a linguistic connection, a ritual, a poem, a lesson to the world that marks the edge of the universe.
Old habits die hard. Â "Happy Hour" by Christine Delp exposes the beautiful and tragic story of a man struggling to preserve the tattered remains of the life he led before losing everything.
http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/happy-hour/
The greatest battle a man has to fight is the battle within himself. Only when he comes to understand himself and his elements will he claim victory. John is a Hillsborough boy, born and raisedâtruly an American gem.
http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/american-gem-john-blackfeather-jeffries-is-hillsboroughs-occaneechi-hero/
A phoenix hair clasp. Ting Lu, Beijing, China.
http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/no-place-like-home/
Guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument. Xiating Chen, Guangdong Province, China.
In the photo album âHome,â Ge Jin shows how cake, clothes and keepsakes help students stay connected to their cultural identities.
http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/no-place-like-home/
Day - 95
He tells me that Dream Theaterâs drummer, Mike Portnoy, filled in for Avenged Sevenfoldâs James âThe Revâ Sullivan, after Sullivan died in 2009. Although The Revâs death was said to be the result of natural causes, his autopsy revealed that he had died of âan acute polydrug intoxication due to the combined effects of oxycodone, Valium, and alcohol.â In other words, he ODâd on painkillers and booze.
âThatâs pretty hardcore,â I say. âThatâs what itâs all about, right?â
âNo,â Ben says. âThe hardcore-ity is merely a side effect of the musicâs energy and complexity. Metal is really about the community.â
For one brief moment, Iâm convinced that Ben is conducting an elaborate hoax. Heâs merely pretending to like metal for the shock value, and soon the cameramen are going to come out from under the bed and through the windows with high-definition close-ups of my hanging jaw and his smug grin. But it canât be an act. He knows too much.
âThe community is something you donât really see unless you go to a live show,â he says. âThatâs the best part of the whole experience. Machine Head will be at the Fillmore in Charlotte on Tuesday. You want to come?â
Who am I to say no to a new experience?
http://www.vanishingpointmag.com/how-heavy-metal-rocked-my-world/