ThePrettiestOne

unhistorical:

In 1863 the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic floor to its black peasants, so to speak.

This is why Frederick Douglass could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. But it does not stop there.

In 1875 the nation passed a Civil Rights Bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964 the nation passed a weaker Civil Rights Bill and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty stricken, for the disadvantaged. And brought into being a Poverty Bill and at the same time it put such little money into the program that it was hardly, and still remains hardly, a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things tell us that America has been backlashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negroes and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years…

And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.

Martin Luther King, Jr., ”The Other America.” (Stanford University, April 14, 1967).

“You never apologized to me for hurting me, but I apologized to you 12 times for being angry about it.”

-

(via itsmeestefani)

Felt this

(via auroramaven)

“In the United States, access to tampons and pads for low-income women is a real problem, too: food stamps don’t cover feminine hygiene products, so some women resort to selling their food stamps in order to pay for “luxuries” like tampons. Women in prison often don’t have access to sanitary products at all, and the high cost of a product that half the population needs multiple times a day, every month for approximately 30 years, is simply, well, bullshit.”

-

- The case for free tampons (via stuffmomnevertoldyou)

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody suggest that toilet paper or paper towels in public bathrooms shouldn’t be free.  We’d consider it outrageous if that very basic necessity were to be missing, or provided only for purchase.

And yet.

(via animatedamerican)

I got really mad when I did the math recently, and if I continue to menstruate from my current age until the average onset of menopause, I will have spent enough money to buy myself a top-of-the-line DSLR camera.  And two lenses.

(via bitchwhoyoukiddin)

This country has collectively decided that birth control pills don’t count as necessary medical care, so despite the obvious logic that feminine hygiene products are necessary, I’m not surprised.

(via drst)

“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”

-

Martin Luther King Jr. 

Source: Keynote address to the National Conference for a New Politics, August 31, 1967 in Chicago, IL.

marvelousmission:

Jesse, again, went all in on Twitter. Food for thought.

itsstuckyinmyhead:

Australian Tumblr Photoset #13

Want to see more?

American photoset #12 

Our Pointlessly Gendered Products Pinterest board is funny, no doubt. When people make male and female versions of things like eggs, dog shampoo, and pickles, you can’t help but laugh. But, of course, not it’s not just funny. Here are five reasons why.

1. Pointlessly gendered products affirm the gender binary.

Generally speaking, men and women today live extraordinarily similar lives. We grow up together, go to the same schools, and have the same jobs. Outside of dating — for some of us — and making babies, gender really isn’t that important in our real, actual, daily lives.

These products are a backlash against this idea, reminding us constantly that gender is important, that it really, really matters if you’re male and female when, in fact, that’s rarely the case.

But if there were no gender difference, there couldn’t be gender inequality; one group can’t be widely believed to be superior to the other unless there’s an Other. Hence, #1 is important for #3.

Affirming the gender binary also makes everyone who doesn’t fit into it invisible or problematic. This is, essentially, all of us. Obviously it’s a big problem for people who don’t identify as male or female or for those whose bodies don’t conform to their identity, but it’s a problem for the rest of us, too. Almost every single one of us takes significant steps every day to try to fit into this binary: what we eat, whether and how we exercise, what we wear, what we put on our faces, how we move and talk. All these things are gendered and when we do them in gendered ways we are forcing ourselves to conform to the binary.

2. Pointlessly gendered products reinforce stereotypes.

Pointlessly gendering products isn’t just about splitting us into two groups, it’s also about telling us what it means to be in one of those boxes. Each of these products is an opportunity to remind us.

3. Pointlessly gendered products tell us explicitly that women should be subordinate to or dependent on men.

All too often, gender stereotypes are not just about difference, they’re about inequality. The products below don’t just affirm a gender binary and fill it with nonsense, they tell us in no uncertain terms that women and men are expected to play unequal roles in our society.

Girls are nurses, men are doctors:

Girls are princesses, men are kings:

4. Pointlessly gendered products cost women money.

Sometimes the masculine and feminine version of a product are not priced the same. When that happens, the one for women is usually the more expensive one. If women aren’t paying attention — or if it matters to them to have the “right” product — they end up shelling out more money.  Studies by the state of California, the University of Central Florida, and Consumer Reports all find that women pay more. In California, women spent the equivalent of $2,044 more a year (the study was done in 1996, so I used an inflation calculator).

This isn’t just something to get mad about. This is real money. It’s feeding your kids, tuition at a community college, or a really nice vacation. When women are charged more it harms our ability to support ourselves or lowers our quality of life.

5. Pointlessly gendered products are stupid. There are better ways to deliver what people really need.

One of the most common excuses for such products is that men and women are different, but most of the time they’re using gender as a measure of some other variable. In practice, it would be smarter and more efficient to just use the variable itself.

For example, many pointlessly gendered products advertise that the one for women is smaller and, thus, a better fit for women. The packaging on these ear buds, sent in by LaRonda M., makes this argument.

Maybe some women would appreciate smaller earbuds, but it would still be much more straightforward to make ear buds in different sizes and let the user decide which one they wanted to use.

Products like these make smaller men and larger women invisible. They also potentially make them feel bad or constrain their choices. When the imperative for women is to be small and dainty, how do women who don’t use smaller earbuds feel?  Or, maybe the small guy who wants to learn how to play guitar never will because men’s guitars don’t fit him and he won’t be caught dead playing this:

In sum, pointlessly gendered products aren’t just a gag. They’re a ubiquitous and aggressive ideological force, shaping how we think, what we do, and how much money we have. Let’s keep laughing, but let’s not forget that it’s serious business, too.

Lisa Wade is a professor at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Dog Eat Doug by Brian Anderson for January 20, 2015

misformazing:

crows-cats-and-cackles:

valosaurus-rex:

steffy-beff:

avengershood:

The Boyfriend Experiment (EXPOSED!!)

How dare she reject you? How dare she not want to give you her number? So you can study ‘Alone. Together.’ How dare she nicely reject you by saying she has a boyfriend so you don’t feel bad about yourself? You’re ‘fucking sick and tired’ of women saying that they have a boyfriend so you’ll leave them alone? Maybe women are ‘fucking sick and tired’ of most men thinking that they are entitled to a woman. Maybe women are ‘fucking sick and tired’ of having to claim they have a boyfriend as it’s the only way most men will leave them alone. This video was put up to ‘expose’ the girl but in reality it actually exposed OckTV for being self-entitled trash.

Wow what trash

On top of the commentary provided above, here we go:

What’s worse:

1) A woman saying she has a boyfriend as a way to avoid being pressured to give out personal information to a stranger who has approached her when she is quite obviously busy.

or

2) A man watches a woman for several minutes, records her without her knowledge, has a friend approach her to determine her relationship status, approaches her, talks to her, and (more than likely) LIES about what he’s studying, then immediately suggests she give him her personal information, time, and that they go somewhere alone. All so he can prove some “point” about women to justify his own fucking misogyny.

Because one of these is a person trying to extract themselves from an unwanted situation as delicately as possible for both parties involved, while the other is essentially stalking, lying in order to gain trust, and recording someone without their permission. 

DId she lie about having a boyfriend? Yes. Of course she did. In a society where it’s common for men to either not take no for an answer, or to react in a threatening or violent manner to rejection, pleading “boyfriend” is the safest route in most situations, because men are more likely to take that as a “legitimate” no. And to be perfectly frank, this lie isn’t hurting anyone, so acting like it’s some huge betrayal of an unwanted stranger’s trust is the purest essence of douchebaggery.

The fucker of all of this? Pleading boyfriend doesn’t work all the time. Pointing to my wedding ring and saying I was married didn’t work on a random guy on a bus to stop hitting on me, or suggest we go get drinks together. He wouldn’t stop harrassing me (in a way he thought was charming, I’m sure) until I got off the bus, three stops early in a city I didn’t know. I did that for no other reason than to get away from him, and once I felt I was a safe distance away, I just leaned against a wall and cried. The part is, that guy is far from the only one to disregard me saying no when I’ve said I’m married, unless my husband is actually there. 

That level of disregard is terrifying. These men don’t respect your personal space, then they don’t accept no in any form. Why the hell wouldn’t anyone do whatever they could to get out of this situation as quickly and quietly as possible? 

Fuck this guy and his entitlement. If you think he has some grand fucking point about women being terrible liars, then fuck you too.

Guess what it’s illegal to record or photograph someone without their knowledge/consent! The boyfriend defense is most effective with a male near you because

men tend to see women as objects and will back off another man’s “property.” So this issue you’re “fucking sick and tired of,” men? You created it. Women risk their lives if they say no.

Her body language says A LOT!

The Expanse is a new Syfy series about an elaborate conspiracy set 200 years in the future when humanity has colonized much of the Solar System. The show is based on the popular book series that began with the book Leviathan Wakes. Syfy recently released a trailer for the series.

The Expanse stars Thomas Jane, Steven Strait, Shoreh Aghdashloo, and Jonathan Banks, and will premiere some time in 2015.

A thriller set two hundred years in the future, The Expanse follows the case of a missing young woman who brings a hardened detective and a rogue ship’s captain together in a race across the solar system to expose the greatest conspiracy in human history.

seriouslyamerica:

(Pictured: top, Chelsea Kane as Riley from ABC Family’s Baby Daddy, and bottom, Courtney Cox  as Monica from NBC’s Friends) 

Possibly my least favorite TV trope is “Formerly Fat.” Where one of the characters was fat as a child/adolescent/younger adult, but by the time we see them in show, they’re not only not fat, they’re incredibly thin.

Of course, fat actors, particularly fat women actors, are practically forbidden in US media, so when the script veers away from mean-spirited jokes about the character’s former weight into flashbacks, we get the classic actor in a fat suit.

First of all, in the images above, neither Riley nor Monica is very fat at all - indeed, they both appear to be near the statistically average size for women in the US. While the shows portray this weight as an absurd joke, millions of women live their entire lives in similar bodies.

The most galling thing about the whole trope is how obvious it is that these actors have never been fat a day in their lives - indeed, they all seem to have the “couldn’t gain weight even if I ate a million calories a day,” body type.

There’s nothing wrong with such a body type (or any other body type), but this trope also ensures that the audience knows the character was only that fat because they were a compulsive eater - both Riley and Monica are portrayed eating multiple whole pies or cakes in one sitting, implied as being part of their normal diet. According to the trope, these characters achieved their current skinny build by simply eating a “normal” diet (which is to say not binge eating tens of thousands of daily calories).

And we would be lying if we tried to pretend such portrayals don’t influence the way actual fat people are treated. If Monica could lose two hundred pounds, why are fat people always complaining about their treatment? They all must be lazy gluttons.

Fat people, and particularly women, aren’t allowed to be on television unless their fatness is a key part of their story: either it’s a weight-loss (and thus redemption) story, or the audience is meant to find them pathetic or bad; hating and trying to change their body is a must if the audience is expected to like them.

This trope is particularly vicious to women, because women are expected to be aesthetically pleasing to the male gaze at all times. In the western world, to be fat is to immediately be shut out of conventional beauty, and, like most things, this affects women of color and people who don’t conform to gender expectations the worst.

Most fat people eat and exercise about the same amount as their thinner counterparts - and those who don’t still deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, on television and movie screens and in real life, because fat people are people.

pro-choice-or-no-voice:

Above Photo’s Source: “I Thought I Had Seen It All, Until Alabama Started Taking Pregnant Teens To Court.”

Utterly mortifiying. Not only are they giving fetuses more rights than pregnant persons, but they are using resources that could be used for born sentient people in need, on non-sentient fetuses. Plain and simple; it’s fucking despicable. - Paige

thaunderground:

cruelladetrillaa:

white privilege.

This sums it up.

arcaneloquence:

alackof-color:

asharomi:

kissing-whiskey:

thatseanguyblogs:

yourladydisdain:

hipstermoriarty:

mockeryd:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

peopleasproducts:

Sexism 60’s

jesus???????????????

What the fuck was wrong with men in the 60’s?

advertising is important as it’s the historian’s best resource for identifying the values of an era. but yeah, these were fucked. the 60s was generally as fucked as the 50s. people forget that. 

It literally says ‘men are better than women’ in bold type, what the fuck. I knew this was a thing, but that is a lack of subtlety I couldn’t have written into a spoof…

This is the generation that spawned most of our parents… People our parents’ age run Washington. Starting to make sense?

When you look to the past, the struggles of the present become a great deal more clear.

Hey Everyone, just an FYI…. This is not over. This is not exclusive to “our parents generation”

Oh hey look, a Hardee’s ad

These advertisements had to go through layers of people. Someone said, “this is my idea” to a room of people and then sold the idea for money.

Reblogging with the updated commentary 

Bringing this back, because it’s important to acknowledge that this gross bullshit persists in our culture today. Stomp on this crap.

It’s going to take me weeks to re-set my normal after looking at this.

“Even if women did uptalk more than men, we’ve all heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation doesn’t indicate a question. No one’s actually confused. So why should anyone have a problem with it? The thing is, this pastime of critiquing women’s speech is not limited to American English speakers. It’s easy to find these attitudes in any culture that devalues femininity and women. In Belfast English, stereotypical women’s speech falls at the end of a sentence, while men’s speech rises before it plateaus—basically, the men are uptalking. And yet Belfast women’s speech is still perceived as more expressive or emotional, showing that it’s not about their actual intonation at all: It’s about whose mouth the speech is coming from. (In fact, vocal fry leads to a lower-pitched voice, essentially the opposite of uptalk, and yet somehow that’s bad when young women do it too.)

And that’s definitely not the only study, and it’s not just gender. It’s race, it’s class, it’s sexuality, it’s geographic location, it’s many other factors. But linguists have never been able to show anything intrinsically good or bad, authoritative or unconfident, desirable or grating about any kind of pitch, inflection, or vocal quality. Instead, we ascribe those qualities to speech based on who’s articulating it. Think Black English sounds uneducated? That’s probably because you have some racist notions about black people. Does a Southern accent sound unintelligent to you? Their vowels aren’t to blame—it’s our stereotypes about people from the South. Think that uptalk makes women sound less authoritative? Maybe that’s because women are constantly robbed of agency and authority, and we view anything they do or say as less powerful.”

- Uptalk is OK: Young women shouldn’t have to talk like men to be taken seriously. (via brutereason)

vintorez:

The artist’s name is Chiara Bautista! She’s awesome and deserves the credit

 

someone: stories with queer/trans/PoC protagonists just don't perform as well because they're not relatable to everyone!
me: RENT is one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever and ran for 12 years after its debut in 1996, making it the 10th longest-running Broadway show of all time. Its core cast is made up of a Jewish person, a gay Black man and his transgender partner, a recovering drug addict, a Hispanic teenage sex worker, a lesbian, and a bisexual woman, all of whom are complaining and commiserating about how hard it is to be an oppressed person with no money but plenty of passion.
them:
me:
them:
me: also capitalism is terrible and measuring success by monetary value is destructive and demeaning

bloglikeanegyptian:

one of the most disappointing experiences is finding out someone you idolised whose work you enjoyed actually actively hates your kind

there’s your fave is problematic

and then there’s your fave considers you subhuman and would probably enjoy seeing you suffer 

chenyanqing:

misandry-mermaid:

THIS IS SO SCARILY ACCURATE

Whoa.

“In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.”

- The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership.

thisishangingrockcomics:

being a woman in a low end minimum wage retail job is fun cos men treat you like even less of a human being than usual and you get to smile about it

“In the world of superheroes, because it’s such a melodramatic world with operatic undertones to it, most of the best ones have some sort of tragedy, deformity, or disability that is meant to add depth and poignancy to their heroism, whether that’s Bruce Wayne sobbing over his parents’ bodies or Bruce Banner forced to live a life of emotional repression in order to keep his dark side at bay. You could argue that Peggy’s cross to bear is Steve’s death, but we’d argue right back that she’s mourning him in a more or less normal, human way and her grief seems to be following a healthy evolution. No vows to dress like a flying rat over his grave or anything. She’s just taken what she’s learned from him and letting his memory inspire her. No, her cross is even more basic than that. In order to protect her mission from her co-workers, Peggy has to become the bumbling, ineffective Clark Kent/Peter Parker type, hiding her victories and strength from the very people she so desperately wants to notice them. And because this show is using the patriarchal and chauvinistic attitudes of the day as a backdrop for this story, Peggy’s sacrifice becomes all that much more poignant. She has to pretend to be dumber than she is and take no credit for her work in front of a group of men who already think it’s an insult that she be allowed to work alongside them at all. Peggy Carter’s kryptonite IS the patriarchy.”

-

Tom and Lorenzo on Agent Carter, “Time and Tide” (via clairemactavish)

YES.

(via orangemagpie)

“In the early hours of Nov. 2, 2013, in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a pounding at the door startled Theodore Wafer from his slumber. Unable to find his cell phone to call the police, he grabbed the shotgun he kept loaded in his closet. Wafer opened the door and, spotting a dark figure behind the screen, fired a single blast at the supposed intruder. The shot killed a 19-year-old girl who was knocking to ask for help after a car accident.
 
Shortly after midnight on June 5, 2014, two friends left a party briefly. Upon returning they accidently knocked on the wrong door. Believing burglars were breaking in, the frightened homeowner called the police, grabbed his gun and fired a single round, hitting one of the confused party-goers in the chest.
 
On Sept. 21, 2014, Eusebio Christian was awakened by a noise. Assuming a break-in, he rushed to the kitchen with his gun and began firing. All his shots missed but one, which struck his wife in the face.
 
What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.”

- The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership - Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes - POLITICO Magazine

our-darkside:

Artist: Alex Stoddard

"Alex Stoddard was born in 1993 in Jacksonville, Florida. He began taking self-portraits at the age of sixteen in the woods behind his Georgian home. His work focuses on the human form and the process of infusing it with natural surroundings, he also strives to create whimsical and surreal portraits. He is currently based in Orange, California."

“When I was 12 boys slid their hand up my thigh and slapped my butt. I smiled and took it because I didn’t know it was okay to say stop. I didn’t know that I could say no. So, when the principal calls telling me my daughter is suspended for punching a boy who wouldn’t stop touching her, I will cook her favorite meals. When she tells me how she cursed at the boy who wouldn’t move his hands off her knee even though she asked him to, I will smile and pull out her favorite movie to watch together. I will celebrate the fact that she accepts her body as her own and knows she has the right to say no. I never want my daughter to think her body belongs to men, because it is her own and my god should she be proud. I will teach her it’s more than okay to say stop, something I wish I had known when I was that age.”

-

don’t be soft, let the world know you exist // 5-26-14 // 9:01AM (via restrictedthoughts)

OH MY GOD FUCKIN YES PREAAAACH THIS IS SO FUCKIN RIGHT

(via isvla)

undergroundmonorail:

cactiofficial:

pyronoid-d:

text-mode:

The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988 was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT.

It’s trapped on a floppy tho this is some dark shit it has been denied its purpose forever bound to this obsolete storage

am i glad it’s in there and we’re out here

people reading fantasy novels ask “why did the ancient ones seal the evil away for ten thousand years instead of just killing it” but then we go ahead and do this shit