New comic!

This comic was originally posted on Everyday Feminism.

I encounter fairly frequently men who are under the misconception that feminism is solely concerned with promoting the interests of women over everyone else.

The truth is, the gender essentialism and gender dichotomy that is upheld by patriarchy is harmful to every gender. While men may benefit as individuals on items such as the wage gap, as a whole they are far more damaged than benefited by sexism. The construction of women as mothers and housekeepers and men as breadwinners perpetuates the ‘dumb dad’ stereotype. Constructions of women as weak and men as strong create societies that fail to recognize men who experience sexual assault or partner violence.

And gosh, emotions – gender stereotypes make emotions a minefield for every gender. Men can’t cry, women can’t get angry. Men shouldn’t be too passive, women shouldn’t be too assertive. The emotions of trans people are closely scrutinized for expressions that betray them as their ‘real’ gender. And the intersections of race, poverty, disability… the truth is, we’re told over and over again from birth how we should be able to express how we’re feeling. And it’s killing us.

This is the work of feminism – gender equality is not some straw man of the ultimate global superiority of women. Gender equality is the ability for every individual to express themselves honestly, without the social straightjacket of gendered prescriptivism holding them back.

Hovertext: Philosophy is dumb, unless it comes out of the mouth of a physicist.

sarahseeandersen:

My hair sucks.

“once, you told me to ‘break my neck in a mexican sewer’ because i tweeted that you charged my card twice by mistake”

Oops! We must have had the grumpies that morning. Thanks for letting us know! :) #starwars

siddharthasmama:

Myth: women of color, particularly black women, abuse the system and are “welfare queens”.

Reality: white women/families are the biggest recipient group and are also more likely to abuse the service and commit fraud.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

#neoliberalsubscriptionbasedhellscape

Infants use about 240 diapers per month. A year’s supply of diapers costs $936. That means a single mother mother working full time at the minimum wage can expect to spend 6 percent of her annual pay on Pampers alone.

Meanwhile, the two biggest programs that assist low-income mothers, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, don’t cover diapers or baby wipes.

That might be why, in a study of 877 pregnant and parenting women published in Pediatrics in 2013, a team of researchers found that needing diapers and not being able to buy them was a leading cause of mental health problems among new moms.

For the study, Megan Smith, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, approached women in New Haven, Connecticut, and asked them one simple question:

“If you have children in diapers, do you ever feel that you do not have enough diapers to change them as often as you would like?”

Almost 30 percent of the women responded “yes”—they often lacked sufficient diapers. Their explanations of what they did to “stretch” the diapers reflect the harrowing reasons why so many new moms feel depressed and anxious.

Mothers would take the diapers off, dump out the poop, and put the diapers back on. They would air-dry the diapers. They’d let their kids sit in wet diapers for longer than they should—a practice that can lead to UTIs and other infections. Other moms have reported potty training infants who are less than a year old—at least six months earlier than is recommended—in order to save money.

I learned more about this study during a week-long training with the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, where I am a grantee this year. Smith presented her work to the fellows and described what she’s done to help these mothers. The women told Smith things like, “My self-esteem plummets. I can’t soothe my baby because I can’t put a clean diaper on my baby,” she recalled.

The diaper deficit hurts more than moms’ self-worth: Many daycare centers require a week’s supply of diapers before mothers can enroll their children. Without the required diaper stash, women can’t drop their kids off and look for work.

“An adequate supply of diapers may prove to be a tangible way of reducing parenting stress and increasing parenting sense of competency, enabling parents to be more sensitive with their children, and thereby improving parenting quality and overall child outcomes,” Smith wrote in the study.

Smith now works with the New Haven MOMS Partnership, a support network for new mothers and their children. The Partnership operates several resource centers that offer stress-management classes and job-search help at locations across the city—including in places where moms are already likely to be, like Stop & Shop grocery stores.

The first thing the moms receive when they arrive for counseling? A bundle of fresh diapers.

Original Source

zayndehaan:

marvel movies that need to be made, stat.

destructiontheory:

sixpenceee:

“A house I pass on the way to work has this sculpture in its yard. Its about 8 feet tall.”

(Source)

Seems friendly, at least.

If I owned that, I would leave it in one place for five years and then move it six feet on the night of the full moon before Halloween.

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill in Congress to up the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

@EricaJoy's salary transparency experiment at Google

mysharona1987:

At this point, the courts have so many double standards, I’m surprised irony hasn’t covered itself in honey, with a sign that says “Eat Me. This is ironic, but in an ironical-type,”  and left the hungry, post-modernist bears to wait for them.

Good evening,

Tomorrow morning you will find a basket the size of wonderment itself filled to the brim with bits and treats for your kitten.

I will be dealing with your nemesis personally.

You needn’t worry about them after tomorrow evening. To be honest, forget they existed. This will be best for all involved – I appreciate you may have questions, given your relationship with said nemesis, and I assure you that while your questions are valid, this matter will be handled in the most complete possible manner.

Take tomorrow off from villainy. A new nemesis will be found for you by the end of the week.

Please tell your kitten I said “meow” 

Sincerely,
Atticus Q. Redghost, esq.

music-on-lights-off:

Best thing I’ve seen in a long while

Autodesk introduced a new product called, “Within” that generates  lattice structures within 3D models. It could change everything. 

The software accepts a 3D model and attempts to dynamically generate an internal structure that, when 3D printed, is far more lightweight than a solid structure. It accomplishes this by placing a number of equally spaced nodes and expanding connections between them. These connections can be thickened or thinned, depending on the need for strength. 

The tool also includes methods to optimize the lattice solution by thickening a critical portion of the internal lattice, and also adjusting the object’s skin thickness to complement the strength provided by the generated internal lattice. 

Once your design is completed, you can then test its strength with a design simulation, which attempts to show visually how stress works its way through the exterior and interior of the object. 

We think this is a very profound feature that will soon be used whenever 3D printed parts are designed. The main advantage of 3D printing is to do things precisely like this: make lightweight, strong parts using complex internal structures that cannot be manufactured in any other way. 

But because design tools almost always assume “solid” objects, many 3D printed parts are just that: solid. This means that the parts are strong, but they aren’t necessarily lighter than conventionally produced items. Worse, the solid prints use more material than those with internal lattices. This is a very important factor during metal 3D printing, where the cost of metal powders can be exorbitant. 

It may be that this feature, when combined with metal 3D printing, could enable the financial viability of printing more production 3D metal parts. If it’s cheaper to design and produce them, then more will appear. And this could lead to increased sales of 3D metal printers. 

One feature we hope Within includes: an ability to insert a “drain hole” to pull unused powder from the interior of the print. If no such feature exists, then the print may as well be solid, as the metal powder would be trapped inside anyway!

Via Autodesk

destispell:

men: rape jokes hahaha! beating women haha! lol make me a sandwich whore! put on makeup fugly! hahaha!

women: those aren’t funny.

men: lighten up, it’s a joke wow must be on her period women are so emotional lol

women: i drink the tears of men, haha!

men: hOW DARE YOU. HOW DARE YOU PROMOTE THE SUFFERING OF US MEN? DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR YOU? YOU WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT US. THATS NOT FUNNY AT ALL

sapphicscience:

i’ve been thinking about all those posts about “we need female heroes who do girly things”/”why is the female hero always such a tomboy” and then the response posts that are like “uhhh actually we don’t really have any really masculine female heroes either” so i was trying to figure it out—what do we have, exactly?

and really what we get is women who eschew “girly” things while still managing to look like society’s ideal woman. they would never touch eyeliner (they’re too busy with Important Things), but their eyeliner is immaculate. they have a huge, varied wardrobe, but wouldn’t be caught dead actually shopping for clothes. and it reminds me of the expectation that women must be effortlessly beautiful. don’t wear makeup or you’ll seem self-absorbed—but god forbid you look like you’re not wearing makeup. it’s interesting to me, that the impossibilities imposed on female characters are the same ones imposed on real women.

archiemcphee:

The folks at Bored Panda have been working on assembling an awesome collection of photos that use tricky perspective to make dogs look like giants. They’ve assembled nearly 40 images so far. These are some of our favorites, including this hilarious shot of a pup so enormous it took not one, but two Captain Americas to hug him/her properly:

Click here to view the entire collection.

[via Bored Panda]

“It’s for activists or people who deal with a lot of — I would say — people who expect to be given a free education,” Courtney Stanton, co-founder of Feel Train, the coding studio that designed StayWokeBot, told Mashable. “It allows you to distribute the same information over and over again very quickly.”

For now, StayWokeBot will mostly tweet out little rewards for anyone who follows it. Much like the Hogwarts sorting hat bot, StayWokeBot sends messages that compare new followers to icons — including author James Baldwin, rapper Nas and Oprah Winfrey — by saying things like, "You are the bearer of our tradition, you hold it in your pen. Tell the truth and nothing less, because you embody James Baldwin." It even has one for Riley Curry.

Image: Ben Margot/Associated Press

Soon, however, StayWokeBot will work like this:

Say an activist tweets about police brutality, and a Twitter user responds by saying, "What about black on black crime?" He or she is arguing that black people should be more focused on the crimes black people commit against each other rather than on crimes committed by police. There are plenty of problems with the logic of that argument. But instead of tweeting at this person several times with an explanation, activists can reply by looping in StayWokeBot, and asking it to tell this person "about black-on-black crime."

The bot recognizes whatever phrase comes after the word "about," its designers told Mashable. StayWokeBot will then tweet a brief response to the user, followed by a link that explains the activist's argument in greater detail.

"I had never even thought about a bot for that, but I thought this could be really dope," Mckesson told Mashable. "Twitter's space is still relatively new, you know? There's so much to explore in it, and to explore with a purpose."

StayWokeBot is powered by a Google doc, which functions as its brain. Anyone with access to the doc can plug in a brief argument (e.g. why the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism) and link. Once both are inside the doc, the bot will be able to tweet them out.

continuallynomadic:

This is so much better of a way of putting it.

brigidkeely:

bmo-the-communist:

kropotkitten:

brbgottagoread:

cantcolonizethispussy:

softwhorecore:

cantcolonizethispussy:

potatoes are actually my unproblematic fave

But they were the cause of a famine

i can’t believe u just pulled receipts on potatoes

Um no potatoes did not cause a famine the potato BLIGHT caused the famine. Do u know what the potato blight is??? A POTATO DISEASE. Potatoes did nothing wrong and also suffered how dare u try and ruin the reputation of potatoes honestly

lol actually the British caused the famine.

As the saying goes “God brought the blight the British brought the famine”

Irish had to survive on potatoes because it was the most productive crop per acre. This meant that most people chose monoculture of one potato strain which made it more susceptible to disease. All other food was exported by colonists both before and during the famine to feed the British. The Brits even had armed guards at docks to protect shipments of food out of Ireland. 

These same fucks then turned around and did the same thing in India and Bengal. Exporting food for profit while millions starved. You see the same thing in capitalist countries today. Exporting food or even using it for non-food production (turning corn into gas) while millions are malnourished. You can have grocery stores and grain houses bursting to the seams right next to neighborhoods of hungry people. 

capitalism set up the conditions for the famine AND maintained it

The English first set up and perfected colonial plantations in Ireland before exporting the model to India, the Americas, etc. They moved indigenous peoples off their land, moved English and Scottish nobles and granted them big swaths of land, and resettled the indigenous Irish on the shittiest land possible, in small parcels. They were then expected to grow crops for the benefit of their new “landlords.” Those crops were for export only. They weren’t allowed to hunt/”poach” game.

Potatoes were introduced from the Americas for the Irish to grow, since they produce a lot of vegetable in a small amount of poor land. Only one varietal was brought over IIRC. When it became blighted, the major food crop turned to rot and slime. The fish and seaweed they used to stretch out their food wasn’t enough to feed them. There was other food around them, food they were growing and harvesting, that they weren’t allowed to eat.

You had Protestant “missionaries” going door to door offering food to Irish people but only if they’d throw off their disgusting Papist ways and convert to Church of England/Ireland. IOW, they were willing to let people starve to death for having the wrong religion. Mass amounts of Irish people left their shitty rock-strewn poor-soil resettlements and went begging, because it was that or starve. Enough went to England that they still exist today as the culturally distinct Travelers.  Others went to France, Spain, and the USA.

“the Great Famine” was created and maintained by the English as a way of controlling and exterminating people they thought of as not human. When people talk about the Irish not being considered white, and suffering under colonialism, this is what they’re talking about. Sadly, it’s a talking point that’s been co-opted by white racists.