call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.

@ everyone in the notes talking about physical performance: if that were the case, then sports would be divided by physical performance. that’s a thing you can measure. that’s a thing that varies by individual. a weak man and a strong man would be an unfair fight in boxing/wrestling/MMA, which is why they divide those sports up into weight groups based on physical performance. but they also further segregate them based on gender. chess is segregated by gender for no reason but sexism. if it’s actually about skill and physical ability, then measure those and separate people by those metrics. don’t do some bullshit gender segregation and pretend like men and women are inherently on different levels no matter their individual abilities.

Remember that time a teenage girl struck out Babe Ruth? That’s fucking why. Men are afraid of being beaten by women.

Remember that time male swimmers were pulled out of training because Kate Ledecky was leaving them ‘broken’ by swimming better than them? Remember how she didn’t even notice, because she was busy actually training?

Shooting is a sport that has no reliance on strength and so any allowance for gender variation is irrelevant. The last time there was a mixed competition (1992) a chinese woman named Zhang Shan won it.

It’s often presented as for the benefit of women. After all, they’ll be heartbroken when they‘re hurt or bested by men.

Projection is a hell of a drug. 

this is why they drug test Serena like crazy. the believe no woman should be that good. let alone a black woman. and black women have always been considered “manly” and less feminine.

also can we talk about how surfing is segregated as well? like how the dude who won this years international surfing cup or whatever was given $30,000 worth of prize money, while the woman who won the women’s comp was only awarded like $16,000 of prize money???? or whatever it was. but I know it was either half or less than half of what the man won. like why can’t they get the same prize money and when they’re competing internationally in the same competition? they surely have the same level of skill and talent.

the pay gap in sports between men and women is fucking insane.

The pay gaps, not to mention lack of sponsorships for women athletes who don’t look like models is insane. If you weigh over 250 pounds, no one will sponsor you. It’s why most female Olympic-class weightlifters live in poverty/out of their cars.

Reminder that in international (and usually national too) womens athletics anybody with 5m/mol of natural testosterone or higher is disqualified. (See legal case of Dutee Chand vs IAAF.)

Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.

Folks disqualified for hyper-androgenism in womens athletics.

Francine Niyonsaba

Caster Semenya

Dutee Chand

Margaret Wambui

And more

-

Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.

Racism and intersexism(discrimination against intersex people) in sports is abject evil. Desegregate sports.

All of this.

Oh, this some good stuff. I share to others 

ABSOTUTAFUCKINGLUTELY. I AM SO INCREDIBLY SICK OF EVERYONE REGARDING WOMEN AS INHERENTLY LESS THAN MEN. “THERE IS NO SEXISM IN BA SING SE” MY ASS

Yup to all of this, especially the racism highlight

What the UK Supreme Court decision has proved is that a wide range of politicians across different political parties do not understand what they're doing at a fundamental level.

In this video, the former Tory Chief Secretary, Simon Clark, essentially blue screens when it's posed to him that there's a risk in forcing trans men to use women's toilets as it can easily be abused by predatory cis men.

He has absolutely no answer, and anyone with one fucking iota of intelligence should have considered the ramifications of the Supreme Court decision.

But for many politicians, it is right wing ideological culture war pish above all else - and any politician who has pushed this line but can't answer this question is utterly incompetent and should be banned from any position of power.

If this is their approach to policy on trans people, it's absolutely their approach in other policy areas. Completely fucking farcical.

Fully agree this man is a clown. But the Supreme Court decision (which I presume is what this discussion is based on) does specifically address trans men and mascs and states that they can be excluded from either single sex space for either being a) not being """""biologically male""""" or b) looking too masculine (not joking).*

The transphobes making these decisions have considered trans men and mascs. They have decided the best option is just to try erasing them from public life entirely, much the same as they are trying to do to trans women and femmes.

Predatory cis men do not have to pretend to be trans men in order to assault people. Quite a number of trans men and mascs use women's toilets due to safety and accessibility issues. Based on the statistics we have, all genders of trans people are considerably more likely to experience assault than cis women. Being used as a 'gotcha' in these arguments to try and logically destroy transphobic sentiments is not going to help; the logic of the sentiment does not matter to them, they just want to cause harm to all trans people by whatever means they can.

this is going to be a generalized take, so please forgive me, but women are an underrated enforcer of femininity.

I’ve noticed this with hairdressers. multiple times I’ve gone to lady hairdressers and said “cut it all off,” and they’ve gone “hmm alright,” and basically just trimmed the split ends. meanwhile I can go to a dude and say “hey, can you make my hair slightly shorter?” and he’ll go “on it boss,” and shave me bald.

twice now, I’ve also had lady tattoo artists add pink to femme up a tattoo, despite that not being on the initial design.

god, also thinking about this brought back a memory. my mom once threw a fit because my shoes were “too masculine” (they were black women’s flats), saying that I’d upset my dad and ruin the formal event we were going to. I wore the shoes, my dad didn’t give a shit.

I dunno. it just feels like the misogyny is coming from inside the house sometimes.

my partner and I had a discussion the other day, about and I'm heavily paraphrasing here, what men expect from women appearance wise in public.

Do this with your makeup, you have to dress like this. I believe also, men have an expectation of how women should look even without makeup.

I responded by asking "who is men? Who is saying these things to you?" because these are horrible things to say/expectations to have. While I'm sure there are some men (probably ones lacking a relationship with their mother) out there who think like this, I'd certainly never said anything like this to my partner and wanted to know who had.

It didn't take too long for us to figure out, it was their older sister who had said things such as, "boys like when you do makeup like this," "guys like when you dress like this"

I want to try so many little hobbies. Candle making, soap making, basket weaving, wood carving, book binding, baking, weaving, I want to try them all.

I almost made a post about this the other day (unless i actually did and totally forgot) but there’s so many

I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book

Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.

Book binding? In there.

Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.

Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.

Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.

If i ever need to do anything I’m not sure of, I double check this book to see if there’s anything in there. It’s one of the only books on diy I’ve ever needed.

You can download the entire book as a PDF in the link above.

"Femininity is rewarded!" "No, masculinity is rewarded!"

You're both wrong. It's perceived gender conformity that's actually rewarded.

One field that badly needs to be purged of "Great Man-ism" is architecture.

In my hometown there's a hospital that won awards for the brilliant architectural vision of the great man who designed it.

The fact that even before it opened they'd begun building the extension, because it was too small to accommodate the number of patients, and even then too small to accommodate visitors, apparently didn't matter.

Standard "visionary design"

I've worked in multiple award-winning buildings, and every one of them was a terrible work environment. Confusing internal layouts, bad HVAC, inaccessible spaces, lacking basic amenities, horrible acoustics, just bad places to work all around.

But hey, the lines of the buildings look great from the outside.

there was an award-winning building at my college that, due to its oddly-curved roof, every year, produced icicles that could kill people

I worked as an admin for 2 months at a multiple award-winning architectural firm. When I got to see a restaurant design in progress, I pointed out that the design of the bar in said restaurant would end up causing injuries to the workers. I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.

I had left bartending to go to that job and I left that job to go back to bartending.

The fact that everyone has a story like this and yet architects are still allowed to ply their trade as if they were visionary artistic geniuses rather than glorified contractors with ideas above their station will never cease to grate my gears. Why do we, collectively, tolerate this bullshit?

Never gonna forget that episode of Grand Designs where the architect no longer wanted his name assosciated with the build because the folks who were going to live in it (and are paying to have it built...) raised the garage roof line high enough to be able to fit their regular-sized car into the garage.

I have basically been radicalized into feeling like architecture as a field is full of a lot of people who want to make really big sculptures and make other people pay for it. (There is also livable architecture. But when I look at architecture magazines, all I see are malevolent staircases that will murder you.)

Well put. (Source: Writing About Writing Facebook page)

as a lawyer who’s been practicing for six years now I can say with certainty that this 100% applies to lawyers

You’re a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I’m very fond of you, but you’re only quite a little fellow in a wide world, after all.

The Hobbit (1977) dir. Arthur Rankin Jr. & Jules Bass

May he plow the Lord’s fields in heaven

Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

I know I've said it before, but--that first point, there, about the "A" profile of his soil? Every time I think of it, I am taken aback with genuine awe.

So this is a picture of the soil horizons. The O profile/O horizon is stuff like fallen leaves, sticks, and so on, which are biodegrading into the A profile. A fair amount of soils might have no O profile at all.

If you are a gardener, the A profile is what you're concerned with most of the time; it's what we also call "topsoil." Your seeds germinate into it, and shallower plants might root into it alone without ever reaching the B profile. Worms and other small delvers live in it. It's what you're amending, what you're testing, what you're tilling, what you're trying to fill up with good microorganisms to work with your plants and provide you with food or flowers or cover.

I see this quote around sometimes, attributed to radioman Paul Harvey: Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

Without the topsoil, bluntly, we starve. And there are other problems, in places with a lack of it; without the topsoil, when the rains come, the water strikes hard soil. Hard soil doesn't accept water easily, so instead it pools and runs downhill. That action makes flooding, makes flash floods, makes standing water that carries disease, it contaminates the water table. Cholera is a huge problem in places with a low A profile that receive too much water at once.

We are seeing topsoil depletion across the US. I can't speak for other countries, but the heavy-tilling agricultural habits we've adopted here have obliterated inch after inch of our topsoil; in the 1800s the average depth was fourteen inches! Today it is six. Many suburban lawns have even less. This has knock-on effects we don't even consider on the day-to-day (for instance, there's some suggestion that the lower amounts of various minerals in vegetables and fruits today in comparison with earlier decades might be because of the lower amount of minerals in the soil for the plants to take up into themselves).

And this gentleman took soil that had been that abused and not only returned it to what it had been before the aggressive, destructive European agricultural policy had its way, but trebled that earlier depth.

His land protects the land around it from flooding. His land grows plants less susceptible to disease, because of all the various stressors and pressures those plants aren't confronted with. His land almost certainly has a considerably higher concentration of microorganisms and it would follow that we'd also see greater diversity of macroorganisms thereby.

Honestly, it just takes my breath away.

Sleipnir doesn’t make sense

One thing I never really understood was Sleipnir (meaning “slippery one” fyi) in depictions of Norse mythology. Sleipnir is an eight-legged horse, the steed of Odin and the son of Loki, and he is commonly depicted like this:

(image not mine)

But why would you depict an eight-legged horse like this? Horses gallop the same way most other mammals run, with all feet leaving the ground at one point, so having extra feet here doesn’t seem like it could make the horse any faster. I’m also not sure it would give it any more stable footing, since it doesn’t have a wider base.

If you want a stable eight-legged form that can reach great speeds for its size, wouldn’t you want to start with what nature has already provided? Wouldn’t you want something more like… this?

(my drawing)

“But wait!” you might say, “Sleipnir was conceived when Loki, in horse-form, seduced another horse! That’s why it looks all horsey, just with extra bits!”

Well, that’s a good point, but consider that Loki as a deity was originally based off the spider, and his name even derives from the old Swedish word for spider (source). Therefore, it’s not too hard to believe Sleipnir inherited his horse half from his mother and the more spidery half from his father. In conclusion:

Spider-Horse, Spider-Horse, He does spider-things of course! Weaves a web, Makes you gawk, Riding round ‘til Ragnarok! Look out! Here comes the Spider-Horse.

I am all for creative interpretations of Sleipnir. And spiders, obviously. This is epic.

But just so you know, that journal is from the 60′s, and the current scholarly consensus no longer considers the spider etymology to be likely. We still aren’t sure where the name comes from, and probably won’t ever be, but I’ve seen quite a few more recent academics lean toward Old Norse luka, meaning “close”, “shut”, or “end.” (See Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology.)

^^^^ my research found much the same. (which is sad, i like spiders)

As far as Sleipnir having eight legs, it’s probably a reference to Icelandic horses. Icelandic horses are one of the few horse breeds with five gaits. They can do a walk, trot and canter/gallop, like most horses. But they have also evolved to have a tolt,

[ gif of a man riding a brown Icelandic horse doing a tolt. The back legs of the horse move rather stiffly back and forth, while the front legs are lifted up almost to the horse’s chest. While the horse bounces slightly, the man riding the horse could probably hold a glass of water without spilling. ] 

which is fast, smooth and noted for its explosive speed and ability to cover long distances.

The second unique gait is called flugskeið, or flying pace.

[ a light brown Icelandic horse demonstrating the flugskeið. With the exception of the wind in the horses’ mane, the upper part of the horse and the rider seem to almost be still, with the background simply zipping by them. The horse’s legs, however, move fast enough to blur. Unlike with a full gallop, the horse does not fully extend its legs away from its body. This is particularly obvious in the front legs of the horse, which lift up to the chest of the horse and land under its chin the same way as in the tolt]

It is both smooth and fast, some horses being able to reach speeds of 30 mph. Not all Icelandic horses can do a flugskeið, but you’ll notice that when done properly the legs move in unison and so fast they can blur, giving the illusion of the horse having eight legs.

Anyways, here is a video to further emphasize how cool the flugskeið is;

I’d never heard this theory! That’s so neat.

The one I’ve read attributed the eight legs thing to a metaphor of a coffin + 4 pallbearers.

This is FASCINATING, and I adore Sleipnir! 😍 @tinaferraldo

You’ve brought my horse geek out now. You have been warned!

The thing is, until the late 1800s we didn’t know how horses moved. 

In old paintings you typically see horses with their legs stretched wide as they thought that gave the appearance of great speed. 

But it really just looks like Timmy’s big brother was being an evil bastard and bent the legs of his tin horses out . 

It’s completely unnatural looking, but horses moved too fast for us to be able to see how they moved, until Edward MAuybridge captured their motion in a series of consecutive photographs in 1878.

And for the first time we could see that all four legs did leave the ground. (and are never stretched uncomfortably wide!). 

He also created the first motion picture as the individual photographs could be put together as a series of film frames (below).  

So, all this is to say that back when Sleipnir was being dreamed up, they didn’t understand how animals moved and probably thought more legs = faster, and to a degree they were right, things on four legs run faster than bipeds so they continued that principle to its logical, if incorrect, conclusion. 

THIS IS THE BEST HORSE MOVEMENT DISCOURSE EVER

Wow, the flugseiť is amazing - so fast and smooth! I wonder how it feels riding

sorry to do a completely meaningless poll to you all but

no nuance/I'm bald/I don't know these candy bars option, if you don't know them then this isn't for you

as a reminder:

one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.

DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE.

One of my college professors used to say “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”  I didn’t understand that for years because I didn’t do anything poorly, I couldn’t do anything poorly, I had to Do Everything Perfectly.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly… because doing it poorly is better than not doing it.

someone please hit me over the head with this post every day for like the next week thanks. a mention, a reblog with text, a message, something.

Truly hate the way "did this person do something that actually harmed someone" and "do they deserve to be unpersoned for it" are considered the same question

"Do you support [person]?" is the kind of binary question that comes out of an atomized social landscape where people do not get to practice thinking about how many kinds of support there are

you can support someone being treated like a human being and not have their human rights violated while also not supporting giving them any power over others because they’ve been shown to abuse it. you can also support people living their lives and doing what makes them happy while also not supporting the idea of their lives overlapping with your own personal one because you’re just not compatible and that’s best for everyone. the world isn’t made up of two doorways that say “Perfect Moral Person” and “Person Who Needs To Be Fed To Piranhas”. that’s not rlly how it works. there are lots of doors.

"but you don't understand, only BAD people get fed to piranhas. ME and everyone i love are GOOD people so we will NEVER be fed to piranhas!"

[video by tommcgovern27. original caption: this one’s going out to anyone living in a studio apartment rn]

haha pretty cool song shame it doesn’t have a keyboard solo that fucks super har-

There has NEVER been a more appropriate time to post this tweet

Like man, I know I've been here for a long time, through the ups and downs of Tumblr, but it's a big number!! And it's nice to celebrate! This runs for the next two weeks, between the 16th of April to the 30th of April 2025, and the prizes are: - One of my warm up style comics in which you get to choose the subject and - one of my full figure commissions I'll be choosing the winners on the 1st of May on a spin the wheel Gen, which I'll record! I'll message the winners too and make sure you know you won! (If I don't hear back from you in a week though, I'll re roll the wheel!) So, the rules: - Got to be following me here on tumblr! - You get two submissions, liking This Post and reblogging it! - For the figure piece, my commission rules apply (See my pinned post for more info!) and it can take up to two weeks for a final piece. Okay, I think that's it! Thanks again guys, for sticking with my art and supporting me! Lots of love and Good luck!

collecting posts of this type