People told me that when I got into counseling/social services work, I
would see just how many people “abused the system.” I would encounter
countless people feigning disability in order to receive a check (that
usually amounts to less than $700 a month, sometimes far less).
And yes, I have seen a little bit of that.
But something I’ve seen far more of is lack of accessibility. I’ve
spoken with so many people who say things like, “I want to go back to
work, but my disability prevents me from
doing so because many places won’t consider me for hire.” Or: “I want
to work, but I risk losing my disability benefits, which I need in order
to pay for critical treatment of my medical condition.” Or: “I tried
working again, but it didn’t work out because my employer wouldn’t make
reasonable accommodations.”
(These are all paraphrased from a plethora of situations/people and by no means direct quotes.)
I know we need changes in our system. I think people should be able
to receive benefits no matter what if needed (so they may pay for
necessary items and have a safety net) while working part-time if able
(for a multitude of reasons, including that a job can make one feel
fulfilled).
This should not be all-or-nothing. We can do better.
Also kinda funny how people are up in arms about the disabled manipulating their hours so they can work and get disability, or feigning to supplement their income so they can fucking SURVIVE…. but it’s not an issue when we’re talking about tax loopholes that allow multi-billion dollar companies to pay ZERO in federal taxes (or the government ends up owing THEM)
“Ridiculously easy buttermilk biscuits!” You click the link. It’s a novella about finding inner peace in suburbia. You never knew you were disturbed till now.
“Ridiculously easy green beans!” You click the link, there are twelve ingredients. None of them are green beans.
“Ridiculously easy salted pistachio caramel latte coffee cake in three easy steps!” You click the link. There are twelve steps.
“Ridiculously easy marshmallow fondant!“ You click the link. It’s another novella about suburbia, this time about the dangers of feeding chemicals to your children. You wonder when you acquired these children and worry about their eyes. They are too bright, too happy, too shining…
“Ridiculously easy evaporated milk custard!*” *Must own own cow.
“Ridiculously easy shortcake in 12 steps!” You click the link. There are no steps.
“Ridiculously easy, easy to make, easy in three minutes, easy!” It doesn’t tell you what you’re making but you’re pretty certain it shouldn’t be hissing.
“Ridiculously easy,” the article reads, “easy, it’s so easy, easy” you hear laughing. Your face hurts why does your face hurt?
“It’s so easy,” you tell you friends, your smile is not your own. You can feel your teeth growing, “so easy, you’ll hardly feel a thing!”
“A very old man came to my Starbucks. Halfway through struggling to understand his order through his thick accent, he noticed my necklace. He stopped and said “your star is beautiful,” and I thanked him. There was a long pause before he spoke again. When he did, he said “it is beautiful, but I am having a hard time looking at it. The last time I wore one, it was mandatory.”
We then spoke to each other in Hebrew for a bit. But soon enough he stopped again, and looked back to my star. With one hand he held mine, and used the other hand to shakily touch the sapphires on my necklace. His lip shook, and tears rolled down his cheeks. In a shaky, heavily German-accented whisper, he said “I am so happy you are here. Your generation is here. We won,” and kissed my hand.”
the other day i saw a tweet by some man that was like “so what if men just started remaking all the iconic female comedies with all male casts?” and legit my first thought was “uh, yeah, sure, go ahead”
and then i thought a little harder and like, there are a few, but – you couldn’t realistically do that? because here’s the thing: historically, comedies with majority-female casts have been about characters in specifically gendered situations, or have only worked plot-wise because of gender roles. like – 9 to 5. the first wives club. clueless. legally blonde. mean girls. bridesmaids. like, sure, you COULD make all-male versions of those, but they’re going to bear almost zero resemblance to the original story, because those stories are specifically GENDERED stories.
whereas the reason why you can make a movie like ghostbusters with an all female cast is because the conceit is universal, since there was no reason to justify them being all men in the first place. male stories are universal. female stories are “about women.”
so, like, men: if you want to steal all the iconic female comedies and remake them, have at it! good luck with that! you’re not going to get very far.
Hold up - you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
I mean, his doctrine of radical individualism is a sham that ultimately reduces his followers to faceless conformity. This isn’t deep metatextual wankery - it’s the literal text of the film.
How do you see the film and not get that?
My ex didn’t get this. He loves Tyler durden. I’ve never seen fight club so I DIDN’T KNOW.
Yeah, in the film he’s a total con-man. His grand speeches sound good if you don’t think about them too deeply, but they’re not meant to be insightful - they’re meant to be a snake-oil salesman’s patter, calculated to bamboozle dumb, angry young men into doing his bidding.
Trouble is, they’re sufficiently well-written that apparently they work on the dumb, angry young men in the audience, too.
I’ve actually written about this academically! There’s a really specific genre I call bro cinema that includes fight club, all of kubricks work, some Scorsese, and Tarantino (all of which I love TBH.) These directors don’t explicitly condemn toxic masculinity and instead trust the audience to have COMMON SENSE and realize that Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Tyler Durden or Travis Bickle are horrific misogynists. But without the film telling the audience how to feel about these characters, men misinterpret the objectivity as glorification. Fight Club is about how shitty masculinity is, but it’s been warped by men grasping for justification for their misogyny
The real issue here, I think, is the passive consumption of media, and moreover, creators and critical viewers underestimating just how passive the average audience member is in their consumption of media.
In the book Nurture Shock, which is a child psychology book that identifies common parenting mistakes, the author spends a chapter on children’s television. The author specifically talks about how media designed to teach morals often backfires – children who watch morality lessons express *more* behavior problems and become *more* cruel.
Now the author says it’s because of how these programs are structured. First they depict bad behavior, and then they explain why the behavior is bad, showing consequences, and tying up the program with a moral.
Small children aren’t smart enough to understand the moral. Small children learn by emulating behavior they see. They see a bad behavior and they learn the bad behavior. Just exposing children to bad behavior is enough to make them internalize that the behavior is something lots of people do, and therefore something acceptable for people to do to do.
If you try to explain to them after the fact that the behavior is harmful and to be avoided, that message is too complicated and goes right over their heads. You can’t tell little kids “do as I say, not as I do.”
Now the author of this book says “small children aren’t old enough to understand the moral.”
But honestly? Adults have the exact same problem.
Tyler Durden loses in the end. That’s the moral of the movie. Unfortunately that moral is too complicated for the vast majority of the audience. The typical adult audience member does not think critically enough about film media to process this moral.
A critical viewer thinks – the point is that Tyler is wrong! The point is that Tyler is doomed by his own hubris! HOW CAN AUDIENCES HAVE MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT IF THE MOVIE?!?!?
Easily, considering the movie only really devotes 5% of its screen time to explicitly denouncing Tyler’s behavior, and that explicit denouncement only arrives at the very end of the film.
The other 95% of the screen time is spent watching Tyler Durden jerk off.
Look – you can’t film two hours of bareback sex followed by a five minute tutorial on how to correctly use a condom and a 30 second montage of miserable teen parents changing diapers, then call your film a safe sex PSA.
You did not make a safe sex PSA.
You made a porno.
You can try to argue that the bareback sex is an ironic subversive metaphor, and that the “real point” of your film is proper condom usage and an anti-teen pregnancy message, but the fact is, the majority of your audience is going to change the channel the moment the cumshot finishes.
Audiences, outside of our special little corner of fandom discourse, are by and large just straight up lazy. They can’t be bothered to think that hard about the media they consume.
This is why I loved Fury Road so much, and also what I felt was so profoundly revolutionary about the movie. Fury Road is a movie about women escaping violent misogynists. Yet editor Margaret Sixel had the SHEER BRILLIANCE and AUDACITY to cut all the footage of misogynist violence out of the movie.
Mad Max: Fury Road proved that it is possible to denounce misogynist violence without depicting it.
Mad Max: Fury Road showed that refusal to depict misogynist violence isin and of itself a denouncement of misogynist violence.
We don’t need to show what victims went through to make victims sympathetic. In fact, voyeuristically depicting acts of cruelty only further objectifies victims. George Miller and Margaret Sixel understand this.
Similarly, George Miller made a point of using telling his videographers to use camera angels that focused on the action of the scene, instead of voyeristically zooming in the female castmember’s breasts/asses/legs – because he understood that when the camera ogles the female characters in an objectifying manner, the audience, who views the movie through the camera’s lens, is forced to ogle and objectify. George understood that sexist camera work creates a sexist perspective, and a sexist perspective tells a sexist narrative.
The thing is that the narrator is always sympathetic. Intimacy and familiarity breed sympathy. The audience is primed to feel sympathy for the narrator simply because they are speaking more than any other individual character.
No matter how unreliable, or morally dubious you make the narrator, they are still the hero or the story. Every villain is the hero of their own story. And when the villain is the narrator, the audience is hearing the version of the story in which the villain is the hero, and the audience is moved by that perspective.
We can give Fight Club the benefit of hte doubt and look at Fight Club as an intellectual experiment to see whether or not it’s possible to tell a story from the villain’s perspective and still denounce the villain’s actions.
But the fact is, the experiment didn’t work. It was a statistical failure. The vast majority of the audience did not recognize the film as a criticism of toxic masculinity, but rather, a romanticization of it.
Perhaps the author’s goal was for Tyler Durden’s death to be interpreted as a cautionary tale, but the author failed in that goal. He failed. Because by the time Tyler Durden dies in the movie, he has already been painted a hero in the eyes of the majority of the audience, and heroes don’t become cautionary tales when they die; they become martyrs.
When you’re overwhelmed and just need to zone out for a minute and stare into space and people start waving their hands in your face trying to get you to “snap out of it”
Don’t worry about a lack of representation for dudes in the new Ghostbusters movie guys! You have Chris Hemsworth’s character! He’s a man!
He’s a Strong Male Character, he doesn’t need a woman to make him feel complete! I mean, yeah, he seems to be wearing a lot of unnecessarily tight clothes, but that’s just because he Feels Comfortable In His Own Skin! He’s pretty bright for a dumb blonde to? That makes him super relatable! He’s not a Dude in Distress! He doesn’t need a woman to save him! He is Fiesty! He can Hold His Own against the Ladies! He’s not loud and over bearing, he’s a cool, empowering male character! There may even be some ROMANCE! You guys like romance right? He’s practically one of the girls! He’s just as strong as the women! He’s TECH SUPPORT! THAT’S ALMOST AS GOOD AS BEING A REAL GHOSTBUSTER RIGHT???
But Chris Hemsworth still doesn’t look like a convincing nerd.
You mean glasses and standing near a computer isn’t enough to make him a nerd? He must be a fake nerd guy!
He’s both nerdy tech-support and a model, duh… it just makes him unique. Not like all those avarage-looking nerd stereotypes that men are forced to watch in every other movie. Such a Strong Male Character.
Look at me. Look me in the eye. On November the 8th, 2016, one of two things will happen: Hillary Clinton will become president, or Donald Trump will become president. These are the only two possibilities. The superdelegates aren’t going to switch. An indictment isn’t coming. There is no third possibility. There is no space between the spaces where you can hide. Every vote for Donald Trump requires two Hilary Clinton votes to overcome. A Hillary Clinton vote can only be overcome by two Donald Trump votes. If you stay home, a Donald Trump vote doubles its power. This is the real, actual reality of the situation. There is not one other option.
And there’s no ctrl-alt-del for the election. Read up on 2000 if you doubt this.
And to those of us who supported Bernie, he WANTS you to vote for Hillary. If you believe in him and his mission you will follow his advice. He knows that writing his name in, or voting for anyone else besides Clinton, is effectively voting for Trump.
Refusing to vote for Hillary is a vote for Trump, no matter how much you scream and say how it’s not. And if you’re standing by to do nothing in regards to taking down Trump, then you ARE grouped along with the rest of the people in this country that ruin things for everybody else.
No, seriously, go read about the presidential election in 2000.
If you weren’t old enough to remember and/or understand the ramifications of the 2000 election, I WILL TELL YOU.
Do not let Trump win. Please. I beg you. I went to grad school with people who voted for Nader in 2000 and my FB feed is full of them begging others not to make the same mistake they did. Bernie has his priorities straight, and the priority is stopping Trump.
And if that doesn’t do it for you, this is the Republican platform 2016. It calls for:
Conversion therapy for queer kids.Let me repeat that. CONVERSION THERAPY FOR QUEER KIDS. Some members of the RNC even wanted to endorse it more explicitly than they did.
“Literally
every study done on it shows that fat-shaming DOESN’T WORK. Being a
dick to fat people DOES NOTHING. It is not helpful. No one loses weight
just for hating themselves. It is 100% useless and does nothing.”
“Yeah, but, like… we’re concerned for their HEALTH, you see, sooo…
we’re going to call them awful, lazy, pathetic losers and that’ll
TOTALLY get them to be healthy.” “And if they ARE healthy? If every single possible test a doctor could do shows they’re in better health than YOU?” “… Still gonna call them gross. For… our… concern.”
Shut the actual forever fuck up, fat-shaming assholes. The only thing
you “care” about is making sure everyone is aesthetically pleasing to
you. You don’t give two shits about anyone’s health, nor should you,
since you’re not them or their goddamn doctor so it’s none of your
business in the first fucking place.
SHUT UP.
ALL THE SHUTTING UP, RIGHT DAMN NOW, AND FOREVER.
People who are fat ALREADY KNOW THEY ARE FAT.
Not every overweight person “got that way on their own”, MANY
medications and medical issues CAUSE weight gain as a SYMPTOM or SIDE
EFFECT and when it’s due to meds then BOOM they got fat BY ACTIVELY
WORKING TO BE HEALTHIER. The thing you “supposedly” care so damn much
about.
So shut your fucking mouth and go worry about your own goddamn health and stop assuming shit about everyone else’s.
So here’s something new I’m bringing to San Diego Comic-Con! I call these The Small Gods.
So, this is the God of Small Comforts.
And this is the God of Small Victories.
The God of Small Wonders
And finally, the God of Small Mercies.
I’ve shot them each with a sample offering garland, but each garland is different. Well, so far. I’ve only got 30 done at this point, fingers crossed I can get the other 70 done in time, or I guess those will be a little optional add-on… Anyway, there they be.
Table N-08 in Small Press! See you there next week!
Concept: a small child whose imaginary friend is Superman. He talks to “Superman” all the time, completely unaware that Clark can in fact hear everything he’s saying. The child and associated adults are infinitely surprised when reply letters from Superman start appearing in their mailbox
When a handful of Westboro Baptist Church members showed up Saturday at the funeral of Orlando shooting victim Christopher Leinonen, counterprotesters donning large, white angel wings were there to shield mourners. Members of the Orlando Shakespeare Theater put together the wings as a symbolic but also literal screen between the WBC and funeral attendees. An Orlando Police tweet later proved the efforts to stop the WBC worked.
Okay, but I’m actually crying tears of frustration, because the article doesn’t even mention the history behind this act.
There’s a reason this was undertaken by a theatre company. It means they knew The Laramie Project. It means they knew that the idea for the angel wings came from their use to block the WBC at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was murdered in Wyoming in 1998.
The original “Angel Action” was a counterprotest organized by LGBTQ activist Romaine Patterson, who had been a friend of Shepard’s in high school. This is part of our history. We’ve been shielding our loved ones from hate groups while we bury our dead for decades – and that deserves acknowledgement.
At the risk of taking Gingrich’s nonsense seriously, just imagine for a moment what translating his proposal into action would mean. The government would round up 3.3 million American Muslims, then “test” them to see “if they believe in Sharia,” a notion about which Gingrich doesn’t have the remotest clue. Sharia is the Arabic word for “law”; there’s no guidebook of official Sharia, and Islamic scholars have a multitude of ideas about how Koranic ideas could or should be translated into civil rules. But even if there were, Gingrich is literally proposing to prosecute thought crimes, as well as jettisoning the First Amendment to throw people in jail for visiting certain web sites. And where is he going to “deport” the Americans whom he decides believe in Sharia to?
Frankly, I think we need to ask just how Newt Gingrich got radicalized, and what caused him to reject the values of the country that gave him so much. Was it some radical cleric who did this to him? Is there a church somewhere in Georgia we need to be monitoring?
Today on Social Anxiety Theatre: mentally rehearsing elaborate justifications for completely innocuous actions just in case some hypothetical interlocutor demands an explanation.
All white people do racist things without being aware they are
All straight people do homophobic things without being aware that they are.
All Cis people do transphobic things without being aware that they are.
All men do sexist things without being aware that they are.
Saying things like ‘some men’, ‘some cis people’ absolves the blame of individuals and only seeks to comfort those with privilege and power.
When a post says ‘some X’, the X will always assume that they are not because THEY ARE NOT AWARE.
And most importantly,
It’s calledmetonymy,when anyone who is oppressed makes an exasperated statement like ‘i hate straight people’, they are substituting straight people for the concept of a system and a culture that teaches, incentives, and legitimizes homophobic acts and normalizes homophobic acts so that straight people constantly do homophobic things without realizing it and that’s really fucking annoying.
And just as important,
The concept of skeletons dehumanizes marginalized people and categorizes them as an ‘angry and emotional’ stereotype and only adds to the oppression of marginalized people under the guise of being ‘fair’, while the only thing you are doing is cushioning privileged people from their own ignorance and privilege.
I’m not interested in rhetoric that asserts that all rapists are men and all victims of rape are women, but I’m also not interested in rhetoric that denies that rape is, after all, a gendered crime, and that the threat and actuality of rape (as well as other kinds of sexual violence, harassment, and intimidation) are commonly-used tools to keep women afraid, under control, and alienated in our own bodies
When you discover you are likely autistic and keep finding things you connect to your potential autism, but feel guilty because you worry you might be reaching, even though the evidence points to you actually having autism
being a straight ally is more than just sympathizing with the struggle. it’s about taking action with your privilege. here are a few simple things you can do to support the LGBT+ community in this election cycle.
