kuriquinn:

fierceawakening:

paininthecasbutt:

yootsart:

saladsaladnovski:

“let people enjoy things” is quickly becoming a very dangerous phrase

This is the best explanation I’ve seen.

If you know someone is hurting kids, report them. If you don’t like that someone wrote about kids, scroll down.

👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻

fiercepowers:

theformerissilent:

sparrowpharoh:

fiercepowers:

littlemisfit:

luciadeigelsomini:

littlemisfit:

The old gays didn’t throw fists for each other in the streets so you could harass random strangers about what words they use to describe their personal sexuality over the internet

With that being said “bisexual lesbian” isn’t a thing

Anyway the old gays didn’t throw fists for each other in the streets so you could harass random strangers about what words they use to describe their personal sexuality over the internet

(Caption: typewriter text on weathered newspaper, titled What is a Lesbian? Text reads- To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not hav to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going out to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other. End caption)

@fiercepowers where is that from?

lavender woman, 1973

geoledgy:

A family can be a cyberdog, a flying radio, a grandpa, a grandma, a gay scientist, a war criminal, an alcoholic, and a LARP-ing lesbian + a mailman (not pictured) 

mrhaliboot:

Abalone! A Bismuth and Pearl fusion inspired by the most recent episode. A funky and flashy roller rink girl, a little bit Dolly Parton and a little bit Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing.

Unakite ~ Rainbow Quartz 2.0 ~ Milky Quartz ~ Cherry Quartz ~ Spectrolite ~  Spirit Quartz ~  Covellite ~  Larimar & Rhodonite ~ Smoky Quartz 1.0 ~ Senegalite ~ Abalone ~ Bertrandite & Realgar

apricops:

I’ve seen workplace autonomy get reduced at several jobs I’ve worked at and it always follows the same pattern, where the initial change is “that sucks and I think it’s dumb but at least I can see some rationale behind it” and subsequent changes become arbitrary reminders that your employer controls you.

When I worked at a distribution center, we used to be able to wear headphones. Then one day, someone working at a different distribution center got their headphone cords tangled up in the conveyors and was seriously injured, and we weren’t allowed to wear headphones anymore.

I hated the change, of course, and thought it was stupid, and wondered if the incident they mentioned even happened, but I could at least see the logic to it: “wearing cords around miles of conveyor systems is dangerous.”

So people started bringing portable radios and stuff to work. No cords, no blocked ears, no problem. Until those got banned too. Why? Because they could, and they showed that they could when they banned headphones.

Then I worked at a testing center. After a while, cell phones were banned. And again, there was some logic to the decision: for starters, we were surrounded by confidential information, and also needed to maintain a quiet and discreet atmosphere. It was obviously an unnecessary overreach and showed that they saw their employees as children, but they at least had some security concerns they could justify it with.

So people brought in books and magazines to read during downtime. And then books and magazines were banned too. Why? Because they could, and they showed that they could when they banned cell phones.

It’s tied up with the culture of… I don’t know if there’s a term for it, but it’s something we’ve all seen. If there’s no tasks left to do at work, then stare at a wall. If you’re on the clock, then don’t sit down even if there’s no reason not to sit down. Smile. That whole thing.

elfwreck:

theactualcluegirl:

star-anise:

headspace-hotel:

When I was younger, I read a lot of Christian books. In high school, I wrote a paper on Christian literature, specifically, what it is about Christian literature that makes it often flatter and less compelling than other genres. I’m not saying it all sucks, but I am saying that somehow, I’ve noticed through my life that Christian books suck more than their secular counterparts on average. I found them to often be juvenile, one-dimensional and derivative, and I didn’t think it had to be that way. I didn’t think that being Christian made a book bad, but I observed that the genre was stuffed with a lot of bad books, and the bad books were far worse than bad books outside the category. 

I’m not intending to start a discussion about Christian literature; I’m not alone in feeling this way or noticing this phenomenon if you believe it’s a thing. Online, you can read a lot of articles discussing the same thing: that Christian lit tends to be lower quality. So I wanted to know why. 

To answer the question, I looked at interviews of Christian authors and submission guidelines for Christian publishers. I wished to understand the intent behind writings in the genre and what might lead to the difference in quality. And what I found was very illuminating. 

Essentially, many Christian authors and publishers feel that: 

1. their books have a responsibility to promote morality in their readers, and authors are somewhat responsible for the moral fiber of their readers  

2. there has to be a strong delineation between “moral” and “immoral” behavior in books 

3. many topics either can’t be addressed at all or must be very clearly pointed out as “bad” if they are 

4. certain topics and ideas ought to be brought up in a book and pointed out as good as part of the purpose or meaning of the book

The conclusion I came to was that these ideas were resulting in flat, one-dimensional characters and dull plots. The responsibility of promoting moral integrity, and having to make absolutely sure that nothing you write could condone or promote immoral behavior, was of paramount importance. 

And what that caused was preachiness, one-dimensionality, a lack of compelling moral conflict, flat characters, and intellectually numbing stories. 

Why am I talking about this? 

Because a lot of the ideas I’ve been seeing spread around in writeblr and in the online writing and reading communities as a whole are identical. 

A lot of the posts I see online now about writing are almost exact echoes of the ideas I wrote about in my paper. 

Nowadays, I see posts constantly urging people to think about why they want to write their stories, and whether they are good or helpful or edifying. I see authors being slammed for not condemning characters with disgusting beliefs hard enough. I see people being dragged for liking characters that are not morally and ideologically pure. I see posts telling people to approach any difficult topic with extreme caution and crisp, unmistakable condemnation. Media is widely vilified when its fandom becomes toxic or nasty, assumed to be at fault for the moral fiber of its fans.

I see authors and publishers advertising their books as “feminist”, as if that makes any sense at all (is the author feminist? Does it just handle female characters well? Are the characters feminist? Is it focused on women’s issues?). I open a book and see poorly-integrated lines of dialogue dropping ideas about prejudice or gender that seem like a Tumblr post or part from a nonfiction book on racism inserted directly into a character’s mouth. I don’t think feminism is bad. I think feminism is great. And I don’t think talking about prejudice or gender is bad. I think these things need to be talked about. I definitely don’t think these ideas can’t be expressed in fiction. On the contrary; I think fiction is one of the best ways of expressing important ideas. 

But, I see some kind of preoccupation with the ideas your writing promotes, prominently including the idea that you must promote and you must condemn certain ideas, and that everything you write makes a statement about morality, and you’re responsible for edifying your audience and making them better people. And it’s really, really familiar. 

The conclusion that my paper came to is that you can’t clean up the reality of humanity. You can’t make the messiness of existence crisp and clear so you can feed your readers the ideas you want them to absorb bite by bite. You can’t have light without darkness, and you can’t have either without shades of gray. 

In life, racist people will not always be obviously horrible. (Even though sometimes they are…) Sometimes they will be people who love their spouses and kids and are generally “nice” and adopt dogs and love kittens, and they will still be racist. Sometimes even “good” people will say or do racist things and have to realize their mistakes and then make mistakes again and have to realize THOSE mistakes. Sometimes getting out of ideas you grew up hearing is long and difficult and you have to catch your brain repeating them even years after you tried to change. Racism can be passive, subtle, it can exist in people who are “good” in some ways. Sometimes people make progress toward changing but still have problems. How do we show this in books? Is it an author’s responsibility to solve all this and sort out everything? 

Is it racist for a racist character who is seeking redemption  to not have entirely overcome their prejudices by the end of a book? Is it the author’s responsibility to make sure racist behavior in the book is clearly labeled? Is it a reflection of the author’s views if a character says something racist? 

Note that I’m asking these questions. I’m definitely open to and would like perspectives from other people on this, people of color foremost and especially. The idea I am exploring is, does giving an author the responsibility of making sure their book clearly and unequivocally promotes certain ideas and condemns others impair them? Could it make it more difficult to address the ideas they want to? 

When I analyzed Christian literature, the conclusion I had to reach was that it does. I found christian lit as a whole to be excessively black-and-white, simplistic, shy of tackling anything with complexity, and almost dishonest about human nature. Is there an analogy in this situation? 

In life, relationships aren’t always pure and unproblematic. People don’t fall neatly into “people who have never done anything to hurt their partner” and abusers. People can sometimes have problems in their relationships and have to change their behaviors to preserve their relationships. Relationships have difficulties and arguments. Sometimes a person needs to change or become better in order to have a healthy relationship. Sometimes a relationship can be unhealthy without being abusive, and sometimes relationships are abusive. Must the author draw lines about “toxicity” and “problematicness” in super clear neon spray paint so people know the difference? 

These arguments come up about all sorts of morality-related things in books. And on some level I agree, you shouldn’t promote racism, and you should be careful and sensitive about portraying some things, but I am also extremely apprehensive about certain aspects of this culture that has sprung up. 

It’s really almost totally identical to what I noticed about Christian literature, and imo there it has done a lot of damage. I don’t really believe that authors are totally past being responsible for damage their ideas do, quite the opposite. But there is this expectation of dictating what’s bad and what’s good on a very clear level. 

That was part of the problem i noticed in Christian literature, the teaching of ideas rather than forcing readers to consider them. 

I’m not trying to talk over anybody at all, esp with things about racism, I’m white after all. And I really urge and ask my white followers and people-who-see-this-post to listen to the opinions, ideas and feelings of people of color who reply on the topic of racism. What I really want is everybody to consider this: is it an author’s job to make sure all “bad” and “good” things in their book are clearly delineated? If not, what is the best practice for an author? If not, might this cause problems? The culture I am seeing in the writeblr community seems to hold that it is, and rejection of redemption for villains, morally ambiguous situations and characters, addressing of complicated topics, and portraying anything “bad” without making absolutely certain that it’s clearly wrong is growing. 

Personally, I have a bad feeling about it. 

Thoughts? 

When I analyzed Christian literature, the conclusion I had to reach was that it does. I found christian lit as a whole to be excessively black-and-white, simplistic, shy of tackling anything with complexity, and almost dishonest about human nature.

That’s what I find, although my primary lens isn’t race; I come from the domestic violence prevention world, and have been watching frothing about “unhealthy” and “abusive” ships with alternating bemusement and dismay. I do care, deeply, about preventing intimate partner violence; but I think the current mania for pure, unproblematic relationships is honestly getting in the way of honest conversations about abuse.

Part of this is because, if you can only show good things as good, you cannot talk about the appeal of an abusive relationship, about why people stay in it. You have to deny the power and magnetism of loving a flawed person, and can’t talk about the profound yearning to be loved despite our flaws. If you don’t understand why people repeatedly return to an abusive partner–if you can’t empathize with their feelings and reasoning, and acknowledge their motivations as often being deeply compassionate and altruistic–then you cannot help them ever decide to walk away for good.

The other part is that, if people decide they know what is Good and what is Bad and They Are Against Abuse, they will justify anything they like as Good and Pure, even if the thing they like is harassing and abusing other fans, or a contentious ship that argues all the time but hits their id buttons. Anything that threatens their fervently-held self-image as being Against Abuse, any acknowledgement of their own complicity in anything resembling the thing they profess to hate, is strictly guarded against–never admitted to or corrected.

Coming at this as both a survivor and a rape crisis counselor, many people turn to fiction to process what they went through – not to relive the trauma, but to remind themselves that what they survived was just that; survival. It was triumph against a horrible darkness that has destroyed others in the past, and might very well destroy others in the future. It’s a way to tell ourselves, and maybe others who are going through hell that hell can be got through, and this story we’re writing is maybe a roadmap for just one way. What, to critics, may seem like nasty, violent, abusive rape stories that we should be ashamed of is often to us a shining beacon of just how it can be to come through awful things, and not only survive them, but triumph over them. These dark stories are important because we see ourselves in them, in all our complicated, messy, fucked up, fucked over, resilient brilliance, and that gives us hope.

And hope gives us power. And that is why we aren’t willing to be vilified for writing the way we do. Or for reading the way we do. Or for surviving and triumphing the way we do either.

As someone who is not a Christian, I find the connections between the current “some fanfic is evil” discourse and Christian literature to be more than a matter of similar approaches. I see a whole lot of condemnation of any relationship that falls outside the evangelical Christian norm, other than “maybe the genders can match.” There’s a lot of pushing for “two people (and only two); at least one should be a virgin and if not, they must both declare that any previous partners were mistakes or maybe just practice - this new relationship is their One True Perfect Forever relationship. They will be perfectly balanced and equal in it, and it will heal any emotional harms either of them has ever endured.” 

It’s not a bad story. The thing is, I’ve read several hundred of that story already. Mainstream romance does it rather a lot; changing one of the genders doesn’t add anything to the emotional impact. It’s not bad - unless the story is also pushing the idea that this is the only kind of romance that’s possible for good people, and that good people would never want anything else. I don’t need Christian puritanism in my romance stories.

montygreen:

The Good Place: 2020 Edition [insp.]

liberalsarecool:

Billionaires don’t work billions of hours, they just have a system that gives them all the surplus labor our efficient, underpaid workers create.

findingfeather:

sheriffs-secret-policebox:

fidnru:

it was really heartening to learn that the purpose of creating such a thick uterine lining during the menstrual period was to prevent the implantation of embryos rather than encourage them, and that our uterus is basically flushing out anything it deems unworthy during the period itself rather than “punishing” us for not being pregnant (which is how it’s usually framed). it’s almost as if your female body is more concerned with the protection and continuation of itself rather than being used as a procreative vessel.

the fact that we’ve come to accept the idea that our reproductive organs are punishing us for not being continuously pregnant is proof of how deeply patriarchal brainwashing has convinced women that we are nothing but broodmares for ‘their’ children.

This is honestly a life changing outlook. Thanks for protecting me uterus

Yup. Uterus says: you must be THIS VIABLE to get totally unrestricted access to the rest of the body’s resources.