yo guys if you live in the US and use regular absorbency U by kotex sleek tampons please throw them away. they’re currently under recall in america because they’re coming apart in people and leaving pieces which puts you at a huge risk for toxic shock syndrome.
im gonna go ahead and plug the diva cup right now which i live and breathe by. i’ve never had any issues with it and i’m totally open to talking about it!
ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.
i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.
i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more.
have a cookie.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
3. Two good quotes by Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve
got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of,
babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
And: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do
not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your
sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may
disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
#hopepunk
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark
I really needed this right now. Thank you
Indeed.
I think it’s important to clarify that radical kindness doesn’t mean you have to be kind to your abusers, or to asshole men in power (like the orange one or his horrible judge). It’s not biting your tongue, smiling, and allowing yourself to be mistreated in order to fulfill some sort of fucked up ideal of “the high road” or whatever. It’s refusing to allow anyone else to be mistreated without comment. It’s extending kindness to other survivors and other folks facing oppression, even when that oppression is different than the kind you face. The folks in charge want us broken down into easily-controlled bite-size chunks. Empathy, compassion, communication, cooperation, collaboration – these are kindness, and they are powerful, radical tools that we can use to help one another heal and to build our communities into something stronger and better.
So we know how two of the favorite superhero peril tropes are A) Threaten a Loved One and B) Villain unwittingly taking the in-civvies Hero as a hostage. Venom and Eddie’s situation presents an opportunity for a special hybrid of both.
Because honestly, both Venom and Eddie have all the subtlety of a firework stand in a bonfire and X Evil Organization is bound to tail the burly man-eating monster to Eddie’s home and
Goons, breaking down the door: Alright Brock, no more games
Eddie: What
Goons: Don’t play dumb here, Eddie. We know the truth and our employer is determined to have a long, violent chat with the bastard eating all of his men. So we’ll make this simple for you:
Goons: Where is your 10 ft tall cannibal boyfriend?
Eddie:
Venom, inside Eddie: Eddie. Eddie, tell them where he is
Eddie, going thru every stage of grief and inventing new ones: ………………..um
Venom, all up in Eddie’s everything, every slime cell of him laughing to tears: Tell them where your boyfriend is, Eddie
idk if this has been posted yet but i read this thread by @teamarimo and found it SUPER interesting and thorough and thought it’d be good to share it
This is good, just wish it wasn’t posted as a Twitter essay, they’re so hard to read.
[Caption: a series of tweets by twitter user @teamarimo. It reads:
the debate on who can use the terms “butch/femme” keeps coming up so i
did a ton of research & i’d like to weigh in on the issue. i’ll post
sources at the end
too many people credit anne lister (a historical lesbian) with coining
femme in her journals but she was speaking french and “femme” has been a
french word forever
going in chronological order of gay words in the english-speaking world,
“lesbian” began as a synonym for tribade. “tribadism” = scissoring;
both words meant women who slept with women & the sexual act itself.
this was long before IDpolitics
so lesbian/tribade was something you did, not something you IDd as, bc
they were labeled by their sexual activity since IDpol hadn’t come
around yet. there was no concept of who was or wasn’t exclusively
attracted to women. that’s why bi women are closer to lesbians than bi
men
tribade dominated the 17th-mid 19th centuries until sapphic & lesbian took prominence. it wasn’t until 1892 that a neurologist used bisexual to describe sexuality. from then until the 1960s, bi was used only in academic contexts. it still wasn’t an identity yet
bi women have always been here but shared community with & organized
under “lesbian” until (and even into) the 60s. before then, any text or
study that said “lesbian” meant gay & bi women unless it (on the
rare occasion) specifies otherwise, so context matters
butch/femme began in gay bars in the 40s-60s. women-only gay bars were
frequented by lesbian & bi women. so for the first decades of
butch/femme history, “lesbian” includes bi women bc there was no bi or
“women-exclusive” yet & they were at the bars, participating in the
culture
in the 70s, lesbian separatism begins with 12 white cis lesbians, the
furies. They suggest that women engage “only (with) women who cut their
ties to male privilege… as long as women still benefit from
heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will…
at some point have to betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters
who do not receive those benefits.” demon TERF sheila jeffreys says “our
definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does
not fuck men.” this marks the split between bi & lesbian women
lesbian separatism others bi women who shared space, identity &
oppression with lesbians centuries prior. it deems trans women as
inextricable from male privilege they (don’t) have. it others lgbt woc
who share oppression with men & therefore can’t exclude men from
their politics
tldr it’s bad lol. with events like stonewall (1969) & increasing
anti-gay violence in the 70s, anyone with proximity to heterosexuality
in gay spaces was viewed as a threat & shunned. so bi groups begin
to pop up, since they had no place in straight or gay communities
anymore
in the 80s, 2nd-wave bi organizing was feminist bi orgs forming bc
lesbians posited bisexuality as anti-feminist. by 1988, LGB officially
separates lesbian & bi. now lesbians are invested in specific
lesbian history & everything before the 60s says “lesbian.” see the
problem here
texts with the word “lesbian” before the 60s are also referring to bi
women but modern meanings of old words are applied to them, &
consequently, bi women are denied a massive chunk of our history,
including butch/femme culture
in the 60s, ball culture emerges in houses created as safe spaces for
black & latinx queer youth. the genders are butch queen, femme
queen, butch & women. here, butch & femme embody: the
intersections of race, gender & sexuality; the freedom of it; and
the resulting persecution
in the 70s, lesbian separatists say any form of masculinity harms women,
materializing against butch & trans women. femmes are framed as
wanting to reap benefits of heterosexuality while still toying with
women (this is heavily wrapped in biphobic rhetoric too, if you can’t
tell)
butch/femme is framed as heteronormative, anti-lesbian &
anti-feminist. so androgyny is proposed as the lesbian ideal. now
lesbian feminism is centered on white, middle class, androgynous
lesbians at the expense of working class + nonwhite lesbians, bi women,
and butches & femmes
butch/femme fall out of popular use, only kept alive by the same working
class & nonwhite women who are ousted by white lesbians.
butch/femme usage among queer youth of color includes lesbians &
nonlesbians as it had since 60s ball culture & since 40s gay bars
with gay & bi women
it’s interesting that people say butch/femme is for lesbians only when
the beginning of lesbian as an exclusively-woman attracted identity
& the downfall of butch/femme go hand-in-hand. it was queer youth of
color who kept that culture alive, lesbian or not
white lesbian TERFs who demonized the culture embraced it again when
genderfluidity became trendy in the late 80s. they claimed it as theirs,
and stripped it of its history with bi women, trans women & queer
youth of color that they wanted no association with
so that history was lost among many, and now well-meaning lesbians who
definitely are not TERFs don’t even know butch/femme’s roots in race,
trans/gnc identity, & class struggle, or its origins among gay &
bi women as one group
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and
bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed.
historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an
identity later
hi here’s a trans lesbian (homojabi@tumblr) saying exactly what I just
said from a trans perspective for the “everyone’s trying to steal from
lesbians” crowd. I’m going back to sleep
@queerly-tony I think you were discussing this a short while ago? Might be of interest 🙂
OMG I was!! Awesome! Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me it was TERFS trying to exclude trans women who started that shit.
Well cool. I’m… probably definitely some kind of butch. ❤
Entirely unsurprising that hard division between queer women has at its root extreme prejudice, hard division always does.
@asynca, might be interesting to you? I assume you probably know this, but possible you don’t.
Thanks! I knew some of this, some of it (like ‘tribadism’) is new.
this is my favourite summary:
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed. historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an identity later
Essentially – block anyone who tries to force a wedge between lesbians and bisexual women, between cis women and trans women, etc, etc. Exclusionary politics and separatism is ALWAYS founded in genuinely untrue bullshit, dodgy politics and discrimination.
Important history, darlings. Don’t let anyone rewrite it.
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