A tiny town with a smaller population than some high schools has contaminated water, so Michigan declares a state of emergency, supplies residents with bottled water, and is dumping all the contaminated water in preparation of hooking the town up with a clean water supply.
MEANWHILE nobody gives two shits about Flint, a MAJOR CITY with OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND RESIDENTS.
the fact women are viewed as being more sexy at 15 than 40 is the creepiest thing in the world
Horrifying really
Looking through the notes, and people seem to be justifying this as evolutionary biology. They believe that human females are most fertile at the age of 15. Considering your body isn’t even done growing at this age, I find this incredibly hard to believe. Really? The best time for you to push a baby out of your vagina is when your periods probably aren’t even regular yet? Like the younger you are, the more likely you are to DIE from child birth. Well anyway, most websites claim you’re most fertile in your 20s, peaking at 27… So congrats on trying to blatantly justify pedophilia by using bullshit science.
Not only is “15 year olds are more fertile” a creepy, pedophilic belief, it’s also an extremely dangerous one.
Also, don’t believe the whole “most girls got married at 13-15″ bullshit. Most medieval records (pre-1500s) and more recent records show that this is pretty rare in a lot of societies. Most women actually married around 17-21, and others could be “married” young but not actually considered a woman to leave for her husband until around this age. IE, a family might “marry” their infant to another, usually within a few years age of the infant, but they would not live together until they were adults. This was often to show kinship between families, usually for political purposes, and could later be ‘broken’ before anyone went to live in another’s house.
Now is your excuse really going to be “BUT PEOPLE IN 1450 … rarely… DID IT TOOOO!” when you’re talking about people who didn’t wipe their asses, believe in bathing for the most part, rarely got to wash their clothes, or have basic access to sewage systems of any kind? Are you really gonna uphold the tenets of a society that really thought it was okay to shit in a fancy jar and throw it out the window when the jar got full? because… dude, there’s a reason the Japanese wanted to kick out Euro foreigners, and it wasn’t just xenophobia. We were freaking gross. We spread disease because we didn’t WASH THINGS. To the point where anti-Semetic beliefs spread because Jewish people kept their kitchens clean and stuff, so they didn’t DIE as often from basic shit like food poisoning and hepatits A (common in shellfish then). Was the solution to learn something and wash stuff? NO. Instead it was “Jews must be magical and are killing off proper Christians!”
Anyways. the point here is. What you think history might have been like is probably nowhere near as fucked up as you think it was, and if you think that’s a cool attitude to bring back, you’re prob more fucked up than 1400s Europe. So.
There.
Those are things you now know. Whether you wanted to or not.
(In Italy, the average age for marriage was 17; in France it is 16yo; and in England and Germany 18yo was the average age – all for first marriages. Source: “Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985)
AND JUST SO YOU KNOW THOSE AVERAGE MARRIAGE AGES GOT HIGHER AS THE YEARS WENT ON. AND WOMEN MARRIED MEN THEIR OWN AGE.
“The World We Have Lost" by Peter Laslett details a thousand marriage certificates issued in Canterbury from 1619 to 1660. ~85% of English brides in this period were at least 19 years of age when they married. The average ages at marriage for women were ~22 years, for men ~24 years.
“Money can’t buy you happiness” is propaganda from rich people to convince the poor to be satisfied with less.
Delicious, finally some good fucking food.
they’ve actually studied this, and there is a measurable point up to which money basically does buy happiness, and then past that point it stops
a billionaire is not guaranteed to be any happier than a millionaire, but both those people are almost guaranteed to be happier than someone living in poverty
(the “point” turns out to be “the time at which you have enough money that all your needs can be met without anxiety and you have some amount of money left over to do things like pursue passions, give back to the community, and do other emotionally fulfilling things.” what a shocker!)
Money buys security, free time, disposable income for leisure products, service, foods, and events.
So yes…it does actually buy happiness. It incidentally also purchases health care, and fulfill the hierarchy of needs which tend to contribute to most people’s ill health due to stress levels…
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
Not sure how true the bit about the reasons behind Lolita are. I’ve never read it as it squicks me. However, someone else noticed the type of website op mentions exists and I wanted to make sure the link was included with the post:
I didn’t know Mr. T pityed fool’s that weren’t woke, but that’s awesome. #respect
“I think about my father being called ‘boy’, my uncle being called ‘boy’, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called ‘boy’. So I questioned myself:“What does a black man have to do before he’s given the respect as a man?” So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody’s mouth is “Mr.” That’s a sign of respect that my father didn’t get, that my brother didn’t get, that my mother didn’t get.“
Here’s the petition to make Aloha Poke Co. remove the Aloha from their name since they caused so much financial problems for small businesses by threatening legal action if they don’t rebrand “Aloha Poke”
on showing pictures of a black professor and a white serial killer Timothy McVeigh to the kids
“They’re too young to understand!”
This is the fault of their parents and any other sick fucks around them. The sad thing is that the “nice man” would kill them in a heartbeat.
This is about more than parenting and “sick fucks.” This is about an environment that constantly reinforces anti-blackness. Every time you turn on the news, a black person is committing a crime. Black guys are the bad guys in movies and on tv. It’s nearly impossible to find positive representation of black people in children’s books and shows unless you’re actively looking for them, which white parents obviously don’t. Our entire society has been conditioning these children to believe that black is bad and white is good. You can even see the black kid internalizing this message, in real time. Racism is an insidious disease that plagues us all.
that’s it that’s white privilege
In short there really is no hope for white people as a whole.
Did nobody else notice that there was only one black kid in the group and when asked which one was a criminal he didn’t point
wupacing 