Paraxdisepink

THE FRENCH????????????????????

From the official French Embassy twitter account:

#consider using ‘people who suffer from french heritage’#this wording is the most inclusive and acknowledges the struggles that french people face

@shaythoven tags made me loose it

this obliterated me

Antigonick, Anne Carson

^this

whoever created 5+1 things fanfics can have my firstborn child

so, i have some good (?) news for you

this means I also have some good (?) news for @basinke, depending on how they feel about kids.

Five Things That Aren’t True by Basingstoke

People are scornful when a guy appears to not realize Women Are People until he gets married or has a daughter, but I think this is worth examining a little more closely.

when I read A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, I was really struck by his observations about gender. i wish I could remember the quote but he says something like, "do you really have a good relationship with your wife if you aren't almost inclined to call her Brother?" a lot of the things he said seemed like a contrast with the more "gender essentialist" ideas he espouses in for example Mere Christianity

And that's the thing, Mere Christianity and most of his well known fictional works were written before he was married, and the thing about a lot of writers we view today as sexist is that they hardly ever interacted with women as peers.

and like, of course someone would have these ideas about the Nature of Women in contrast to men when in their experience, women inhabit different and in many ways mutually unintelligible social worlds than men.

and of course even today many people make friends and acquaintances primarily among their own gender, and are in environments dominated by one gender or the other, and people insist that this is natural or better or more proper, and this allows people to make observations about the "opposite" gender as an outsider that hasn't had many equal-standing "peer" interactions with that gender

It's really hard to notice when this is happening. Like you're seldom ever in an environment where the "opposite" gender is literally not present, and you can think to yourself "yes I interact with women every day, I see women all the time, I am friends with women the normal amount" but still not have a trusting and intimate relationship with a woman where she's willing to disclose stuff to you, experiences with genuinely free, unstructured socializing with women, or experiences in an environment that is female-dominated or where the culture and behavior norms are influenced more strongly by women.

I've just been thinking about how some of the most disgustingly sexist guys I knew in high school did not have the opportunity to socialize normally with girls because of their strict background

I knew a guy that had been taught it was inappropriate for him just to be alone in a room with a girl, ever.

This was a very conservative Evangelical homeschool group. Almost all the kids weren't allowed to date until they were legal adults, and interactions with the "opposite" sex were often assumed to have sexual or romantic interest involved.

I mean, hell, a ton of people with "conservative" backgrounds were taught that there were "male" and "female" interests and activities, and that boys were supposed to like [X] whereas girls couldn't participate, so boys and girls were seldom in the same place doing the same things. I remember my best friend talking about how her dad exclusively took her brothers out to do (traditionally 'masculine') activities and basically ignored his daughters.

I've never quite thought before about how that might feed into sexist ideas by eliminating people's opportunities to neutrally spend time with the "opposite" gender.

I do want to mention that this goes both ways.

I've had a lot of close male friends as a kid, a teenager, and an adult and I've spent a lot of time in "male-dominated" spaces socializing and interacting with guys, and I REALLY notice when someone makes a statement about men that comes from the "yeah I interact with guys a normal amount" effect

other women will confidently state that men don't have "serious" body image issues, that fatphobia doesn't affect men, that sexual assault of men is rare enough to be not worth discussing, that it's rare for men to have eating disorders, and I'm like what fucking planet do you live on

Y'know it somehow never occurred to me till I read this post how much the gendering of everything in society (activities, colors, clothes, careers, etc) is so linked to heteronormativity and amatonormativity and also the refusal to provide adequate sex education. Like, if you refuse to give kids adequate sex education about how to safely prevent pregnancy and STIs, then you must instead separate the "sexes" in order to prevent pregnancy/STIs. And in order to separate the "sexes" and keep them separate from one another to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexual infections, you have to gender every single activity and thing they ever do and make it unacceptable for there to be any mixing of the "sexes" except under proscribed circumstances. It blows my mind to realize that assigning a binary gender to every possible thing in the world can be so directly linked to a refusal/inability to provide sex education and birth control, but here we are.

This post discussing how separate/incomprehensible men and women often find each other also illuminates exactly why and how so many "normative" relationships between men and women involve fetishization rather than real attraction. We're trained to see relationships between men and women as "normal," and to view the fetishization of societal "others" as the exception to the rule rather than the norm. But fetishization is what you do to someone who is "other" to you and about whose feelings you don't really care; fetishization is what you do to someone you don't really understand or want to understand but do want to fuck/date; it's what you do to someone you're using to fulfill a fantasy rather than seeing them as a real person; it's what you do someone you want to use to fulfill your sexual/emotional needs rather than treating them as a whole person who is different from you. Once you understand what fetishization is, you start seeing how frequently it occurs in "normative" attraction between men and women who are otherwise of the same race/class/ability status/etc simply because men and women are so trained to see one another as an incomprehensible "other" who is so different from them.

Anyway, no-fault divorce, easy access to birth control, and abortion on demand all serve to make families stronger, healthier, happier, and more robust, because they allow family to be a matter of choice rather than a means of social control and violence.

Wow, this got notes.

Since we're here, support your local Planned Parenthood and donate to the PP Action Fund here.

is there any humiliation greater than going out to the mailbox & there's nothing inside so now you've got to make the hero's journey back with no spoils

I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no

congrats to these people on being funnier than me on my own fucking post

I’m losing my mind at the implications that this show was so gay that two men kissing wasn’t going to add to it’s gayness 

[id: a red graphic with white text reading:

In small text at the bottom, it says “Millenial Memes for Existential Extremes”

/end id]

Also I did not give up ANY rights when I got my hysterectomy. Don’t be creepy.

unpopular opinion maybe but waking up to rain on a quiet weekend is quite literally the most magical thing in the world

literally why are we still making men shave their chests for movies and tv shows. grow up

king arthur, if you’re out there, there will never be a funnier time to wake up