Babe, @oonajaeadira , I'm going to need you to explain this one to me. Because two things that have the same sound are I believe the definition of a rhyme.

fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

Oscar de la Renta

Actually turning things over in my brain and yeah, I'd say that's probably my feeling on a lot of these conversations. The wrong thing is getting blamed.

White people do experience racism. The problem is when people hear that they think "people of color have power over white people" and not "under white supremacy, there are white people who are regarded as Not White Enough".

Men are oppressed. The problem is that people tend to think the ending of that sentence is "by women" and not "under the patriarchy, men are forced into a very specific and often harmful role and are heavily punished for any deviance from that role".

And the well has been poisoned by bad actors, so it's hard to get any amount of conversation about this going without either attracting said bad actors to totally derail the whole thing or without having kneejerk suspicion from the getgo due to said bad actors' previous actions.

Which is also why literally any time anyone says "this is a thing that sucks" the reaction usually is "booooo you think women oppress men" or "boooooo you think reverse racism is real" even when the post literally says otherwise.

I say "trans men who are not yet/never able/don't want to pass as men are often treated like women and subjected to misogyny" and "trans men who fit a very specific cishet passing picture often have access to male privilege in the way that others may not" in the same post and I'm told "booooooooo you think trans women oppress trans men" when I not only didn't mention trans women at all but also am talking about the way cishet society treats trans men and how our relationship to misogyny and male privilege is incredibly complicated and often interwoven throughout the various phases of our individual journeys.

I say "I had a boyfriend who was a white guy with monolid eyes and he confided in me about how badly people treat him when they think he's Asian" and I get "booooo you think reverse racism is real" when I'm talking about how white racists beat him up when he was walking down the street.

I say "I've seen white feminists advocate for genocide by saying we should kill all the men in various war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Syria" and "white people do not understand the black experience and to understand the black experience you need to also study black feminism" and I get "booooo you think women oppress men" when I'm talking about how even white liberals and leftists are often still racist.

And yeah I know piss on the poor website and all that but like. Come on folks, it's not that hard to read.

Anyway. I'm not joking lol I say "the patriarchy creates problems for men and we should spend some effort fixing that in conjunction with everything else we've gotta fix about society" which is LITERAL ACTUAL FEMINIST LITERATURE and I'm told "boooooooo meninist mra incel gtow you think women oppress men and are identical to the people who want to blow up schools"

Woe, bell hooks be upon ye or something. Read some black feminism and maybe you'll feel better.

No that's it exactly!!! Folks I am occasionally *directly* quoting black feminist theory I was raised with IN THE NINTIES and y'all are out here going "hmmmmmmm sounds like MRA bullshit to me" if I dare suggest anyone besides women suffer under the current sexism system.

Well I'm telling you [general] black women have been talking about this since before I was born and y'all are at minimum 30 years late to the conversation if this is so groundshaking and earthshattering to you to consider that maybe the patriarchy is bad for everyone it touches.

bell hooks hasn't even been in the ground for a full 2 years yet and she'd been writing on this topic since the 80s. Come on guys.

Just saw a TikTok complaining about ‘kitten’ as a pet name in fanfiction and while I do agree with their discomfort on that one the comments were FULL of people mentioning all the other common pet names ?? Like honey babe baby sweetheart etc ?? Is your partner just supposed to call you by your name the whole time ????????

God SORRY to drag this out bc I’m not doing this to like screenshot and expose people for having opinions I don’t like BUT I rounded up the wildest ones I found and blurred the names so no one can be mean to them for it I hope that’s okay 😭

Yeah a very common and go-to pet name is actually just one big joke. Everyone was tricking you the whole time!! Pranked <3

I can’t imagine the horrors that this would entail… I don’t wanna hear my name unless you’re reading off a legal document

“TW: British People”

Lettuce gives me such a big ick in salad I swear 😭

WHAT DO U WANT TO BE CALLED 😭 PLEASE YOU HAVE TO GIVE US SOME OPTIONS 😭

the kids are not alright, petnames are fucking normal you little freaks

Someone warn these kids away from the Southern US, please. Especially our diners. They'd implode in five minutes.

I think pet name preferences are just really personal and you can get randomly squicked at them for no reason or associate them with certain relationships and find it weird to have them used outside of that

@habbadax This reminded me suddenly of when I was 4-5 years old and I called all adults "honey" because that's what I saw people around me doing. I was so perplexed at the time at why everyone thought it was so funny lol

YOU CAN PRY MY NICKNAMES OUT OF MY COLD DEAD TYPEY FINGIES

How does this keep happening to me

We've had strap ons since at least 400 BC, and people still have the nerve to go on gay hook up apps and ask "how can an FTM be a top?"

Image ID: Text "Fourteen inches and seventeen pounds of cast iron penis. My late husband found this in the walls of an early 1900s farmhouse that he helped a friend demolish. He wanted to throw it in with his scrap pile and I wouldn't let him. I mean seriously...who would scrap this?!?" Under this are three pics of a dildo plus balls made out of cast iron. The member is placed on a work table and 2 of the pics also show licence plats and things hung on the wall behind it. The penis it's self shows the signs aged cast iron does, slight rusting and tarnishing. It has a rounded end with a little ring at the tip end, and has a sligh curve to it making it look quite fallic indead. It looks as though, with the balls, it could have been used with a harness, or for personal use. End ID

I hope this helps whomever had a burning desire for a description, and that they now feel satisfied ;)

I remembers reading about how women in Nantucket and New Bedford and what not, would keep "he's-at-homes" (scrimshaw dildos) for use while their husbands were out whaling (which was like a multiple years at sea job)

I love that it's not just that they had dildos while their husbands were away, but that presumably their husbands gave them to them. And not just gave them to them – scrimshaw is the art of the whaler, carving sculptures from the bones and baleen on their catches. So the husbands probably carved them for their wives. The 'think of me' on the one above seems like confirmation. That's love, that is.

Here's an article about them: https://lithub.com/there-once-was-a-dildo-in-nantucket/

Ok but why was an iron dick IN THE WALLS of a house? How did it get there? Did they put it there when the house was built? Was someone hiding it? What blacksmith accepted a commission to make an iron dick? What was THAT conversation like? There is a rich history here.

SEVENTEEN POUNDS

It being seventeen pounds and hidden in a wall makes me think it was used as a murder weapon.

Reminder that, in The Before Times (before the internet was common), almost all of our memes (not that we knew that's what they were) came from commercials or funny TV shows

before TV, they came from radio and print

before that, word of mouth (or perhaps a lot of people witnessing the same memorable action)

and, while some of those memes are still recognizable as memes today, most of them are as opaque as the next generations' memes will be to the previous generations, when there's no context. (Or as, say, Tumblr memes seem to nonTumblr users.)

(I am of the opinion that it's fun to learn the context, instead of just dismissing any other generation--past or future--as inscrutable, or, worse, having no sense of humor.)

@masterkree replied: "Please make a post with examples of vintage memes? I love this kinda stuff. ex: my Dad's favorite meme of all time is still "Come with me if you want to live" "

Oh, this is one I'm going to have to open up to other Old People, because I'm better at identifying them when I see them than I am at thinking of examples XD

The big one I do think of is "Where's the beef?" from some early 1980s Wendy's commercials

"Where's the beef?" was everywhere for a while, even making its way into the 1984 presidential election. I think, when people hear "Where's the beef?" now, they do still have a vague idea where it comes from.

From the late 1960s is "Sock it to me," from the comedy variety show Laugh In. Laugh in didn't coin "Sock it to me," but they certainly used it a lot. A lot. There's a section on the Laugh In wiki listing all the "catchphrases" made popular by the show; I'm pretty sure we'd call any phrase started in one place and used in general pop culture a meme now?

That got a presidential candidate involved, too

An even older example (which, as far as I know, wasn't referenced by a potential president) is the ACME corporation from the 1940s Warner Brothers Wile E Coyote theatrical shorts.

Now, young people today see the ACME gags, and can tell they're supposed to be some sort of joke, to the point that I've seen posts claiming it's an acronym, standing for A Company [that] Makes Everything. This is incorrect.

When the jokes were written, people would have turned to the phone book to find things. With the phone book entries being listed alphabetically, a lot of companies tried to give themselves names that would not only put them near the top of the listings, but also denote quality...whether they were quality or not. This led to companies having names like A1 Supply, with A1 not only being associated with things that are high quality, but also being, y'know, right at the top of the listing in a phone book category.

Acme also fits this scheme, because the word "acme" means "the top, highest point, peak, or summit." You also can't find too many superlatives that will be closer to the beginning of the alphabet.

References to companies (of dubious quality) named acme predated the Wile E Coyote shorts

but the Warner Brothers writers really ramped up the irony, by not only showing that their Acme's products were very much not the summit of anything, but also heavily implying that Coyote was just ordering his stuff from the first listing in the phone book, with no research whatsoever. There's also room to interpret it as being not one single Acme company, but a series of shady companies that are just trying to get the early 20th century version of SEO.

I don't see this quite so much as making a meme that went on to be used by others as I see it as using an existing meme, a cultural reference that viewers would ~get~

Those are the only examples I can think of offhand. I know there are more--and older--example out there!

If I may add, as someone probably from a gen a bit later than yours

France had a lot of quotes from adverts on tv and one liners from movies that I hear people still quote, but the younger generation is baffled about.

My parents know about these quotes. I am in between where i grew up on both tv memes and internet memes so most of the memes I reference, they don't get. Most of the memes they reference, my nephew (who grew up with a tablet in his hands, not on tv) does not get.

I'll give a few examples of stuff from ads we used to say if people are interested

Tu peux te brosser, martine. (Sometimes shortened to tu peux te brosser) means "dream on". From a biscuit advert

Tu pousses le bouchon un peu trop loin, maurice. (Same, name is often omitted) meaning you're taking the piss. From a dessert advert.

Et la marmotte, elle met le chocolat dans le papier alu. (Followed with "mais bien sûr") meaning someone is talking utter shite (mais bien sûr is sarcastic) from a chocolate advert

C'est cela, oui. (Meaning you're not interested in what someone is saying and they're potentially talking shit) from the movie le pere noel est une ordure

Anyway you get the idea. Some of these older movie references had a revival on msn messenger back in the days with the ability to send sound clips as reaction (same way you'd do with a gif nowadays) so people would uploads clips from movies to use in reply. Honestly we should maybe bring reaction sounds back.

Most of these make you sound like an old fart now btw, they're "old refs" as in old references (shortened). People sometimes say "J'ai pas la ref" when they identify something is a meme but they don't have the reference.

Common TV ones I can think of from mid to late 20th century:

What I like about these examples is I think they're true memes in the sense that they are customizable to the situation.

For example you could say "What you talking about Johnson?" - if you say it in the right tone everybody understood what you were referencing. Same for Marsha, you can put any name there it's about the tone and repetition.

genuinely inconsolable I can't have one of these pompeii bread plushies fr.

Blorbo from my mosaics.....

The site is '12ft Ladder' found here:

Reblogging this on ALL my blogs because holy shit is it useful

YEP. Working on a thesis and my university doesn’t have a lot of access to articles. It’s maddening!

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

I did a report on book banning once.

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.

People have called The Diary of Anne Frank child porn (which is now more properly called CSAM - child sexual assault material) because in the book Anne discusses her own sexuality and masturbation habits in a very direct and relatively detailed way. And since she was 14 and thus a child (except 14 year olds are not children, they're adolescents) this constituted disgusting vile child porn.

Which is ridiculous any way you look at it, but that's the justification many people have used to get that book banned. We can't let people know that minors have any kind of sexual awareness or feelings, now, can we?

What the fuck is Severance even about?

Until about a week ago I didn't realize Severance and Succession were two different shows.

Here’s the thing that some people don’t seem to understand about sex & kink. You have to respect boundaries before you get to push them. You have to show people they’re safe before you get to make them feel scared. You have to respect people before you get to degrade them. You have to be normal with people before you get to be dirty with them. You can’t be skipping steps. Treating them like a person always comes before treating them like a toy.

Once upon a time ago a friend of mine was the person who sits in the nuclear silo waiting for the red phone to ring. We were chatting and she told me one of the most wild things I've ever heard.

So the bunker itself is basically an egg sitting inside of another egg deep underground. It's got these shock absorbers in case there is some sort of bomb strike or natural disaster (mostly I think bomb strike) so that the systems and people inside aren't affected.

In the event that something happens and they need to make an emergency escape, there was a hatch that the two people in the bunker had to crawl out of to get onto the top of this egg and into the like 3 ft of space between the egg and the actual Earth.

Once there there's another hatch at the very top that opens to a shaft with a ladder. To keep that space from collapsing it is filled with sand. The hatch opens with two wing nuts (maybe bolts?) and is an inch thick. Once you have gotten the second wingnut mostly unscrewed it's a matter of timing to avoid being knocked unconscious. When you open the hatch (and as she was the senior officer she told me that this was something she would obviously allow her junior colleague to do) the sand also immediately falls down and fills up the space around the egg.

There was some debate on if there was enough room around the egg for the amount of sand, so it was generally seen as good practice to go ahead and start climbing while the sand was still falling. Basically swimming upstream.

Once you got to the top there was another hatch that required quite the series of things to open and of course only opens from the inside.

That hatch had been paved over to put up a basketball court.