Fearing for her life, Iowa Democrat abandons race to unseat GOP Rep. Steve King

runwithskizzers:

fattyatomicmutant:

saywhat-politics:

The Democratic candidate running against anti-immigrant Republican Congressman Steve King (IA) announced Saturday that she is dropping out of the race for her own safety.

Hey so

Part of Fascisms early roots was using violence to scare away potential candidates against their power.

yo also this apparently too: 

[x]

Fearing for her life, Iowa Democrat abandons race to unseat GOP Rep. Steve King

kerryrenaissance:

asmallmadhope:

asmallmadhope:

know what’s wild? that the trope of like “my father always wanted a son so he treated me, his daughter, like a boy” is so popular and like lowkey loved, but if you ever saw a mother who talked about how much she wanted a daughter instead of a son, or if she treated her son like a girl, like??? people would think she’s awful and that poor boy??

damn wonder why that is 😒

i was high af when i wrote this but it’s still true

The latter is literally the plot of some horror movies.

thurisazsalail:

lesbian-lizards:

muffininspiration:

candiikismet:

thespacegoat:

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.

Pregnancy/maternal issues is the LEADING killer of girls aged 15-19 globally.

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.

bairnsidhe:

owlsofstarlight:

paintmeahero:

symmetraismygf:

the athiesm of women/people of color/lgbt people is absolutely different than the athiesm of cishet white men and i feel like people forget that a lot

how?

Don’t have spoons for long explanation – also this is only speaking for christianity – but religion has been a force of oppression for women, people of color, and lgbt+ people and the rejection of the religion is often coupled with the rejection of how religion treats them.

I’ll also say that abuse survivors are included in this because it is a reaction to and an attempt to reconcile how (christian) god would allow abuse to happen.

For straight white men atheism is usually rooted in intellectual and rational superiority complexes. It’s a “i am more rational and intelligent than you, how can you believe in something so obviously fake” thing as opposed to a reaction to a societal institution that upholds their oppression and abuse.

Women, PoC, Queer people, immigrants, trauma survivors, etc:  How can I believe in something that teaches you to be cruel?  How can I trust the books that tell me of peace and love, when you use your faith to hurt me?  How can a loving god allow [insert injustice of the day]?

White Men: I, as an Intellectual, eschew silly superstitions that say I might, someday, after my death, face one (1) single consequence.

castlesbyrs:

gaygothur:

You know those movies about those little nerd boys who get with really hot girls, and those girls eventually learn to settle for a little nerd boy because he’s kinda nice sometimes? Propaganda.

You know those movies and shows where the little nerd girl has to change absolutely every aspect that makes her, her, starting by her appearance, so she can get the really hot boy, while when it’s the other way around the girl just settles with the nerd boy? Propaganda.

pervocracy:

note-a-bear:

taylormariegreen:

micdotcom:

This map shows every state where women are more likely to live in poverty than men

Wait… hold up. Every state is colored in. That can’t be right… right? 

Unfortunately, the map is accurate. And it’s especially problematic for millennial women, who are much more likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher than millennial men, but who are consistently earning less living and living in poverty more. 

SLAMS THE REBLOG BUTTON

“But women earn more degrees” and still get paid less, so eat my whole ass

Something I see a lot of people missing in the reblogs: KIDS KIDS KIDS THIS IS LIKE 92% ABOUT KIDS

Yeah, there’s other factors too, but “women don’t ask for raises” and “pink-collar jobs aren’t valued” are smaller factors than the simple fact that caring for your own children is mandatory for women and optional for men.

Here’s the life story of, I’m going to say, about half the women I’ve ever worked with:

– Had children.  Possibly voluntarily, possibly through lack of contraception education and/or funds.

– Broke off relations with the father.  Frequently this was for a reason that was not a choice on her part, like he abused her or went to prison or just plain disappeared.

– Kept the kids.  Even if it was an amicable split, she likely has weekday custody and is the one who takes charge of the vast majority of their needs.

– Dad may or may not pay child support, but even if he does, the average child support is $2550/year and the average cost of raising a child in a low-income family is $8610/year.

– The mother can’t afford paid childcare, but she has some friends/family members who watch her kids, but they can’t commit to a consistent schedule, which means she can only work limited hours and has to take a lot of unplanned time off.

– This drastically limits both which jobs she can take and how much she can earn from those jobs, and completely locks her into poverty until the youngest child is old enough to be home alone.  But by then she’ll have an unimpressive resume of assorted part-time gigs, plus likely health problems from 15 years of eating junk and barely sleeping, so it’s not a fabulous career launch point.

There’s lots of factors in why women get paid less than men, but lack of childcare is hugely, gigantically more important than stuff like “women don’t speak up enough in meetings,” or even stuff like “female neurosurgeons make less than male neurosurgeons.”

inkskinned:

some stuff isn’t just a trope, you know? in the movies, we’re introduced to women who are “experts” who have trained for years, who live and breathe and are willing to die for whatever the male main character has never even experienced before. and then he takes the reigns and upstages her, instantly, with a little bit of friendly bewilderment because, come on, it’s not antifeminist, he’s just good, he’s standing there having shown he’s actually more powerful than she’ll ever be – and we buy it. and then we go home and when we live and breathe something we still ask ourselves. “am i actually good at this? or is some fool going to walk into this presentation eighteen minutes in and offer a sarcastic and biting correction?” we wait for the man to show up and prove that, despite awards and training and an excellent job position, we’re actually just secretly incompetent.

the trope isn’t just setting up for us “this man is good at what he does” – the fact that the trope demands our male hero upstage the woman says: even an incompetent man will always be better than the best woman. he could have upstaged the sage boss or whatever other male in power exists in the movie. but he doesn’t. he upstages the woman to earn his pack order because she is, intrinsically, the weakest link. the real fight will be man against man. it always is.

and i wish, i wish it stopped outside of the theater. but the number of men who try (gently) to assure me that they’re actually better at what i have multiple degrees and years of experience in – it tells me it worked. men are always looking to be the hero, to interrupt, to upstage, to flip the woman on her back and expose her to all your fellow men – see! for someone who has been doing this forever, she’s just another woman. i am reminded by a man this is called mansplaining. i said “it’s a system of silencing women” and he said, “no, it’s just an accident.” in the movie, he sees himself pointing to my equation on the board, having just walked in. “here’s the flaw,” he says. in the real life, i’m too frustrated to speak. in the movie, he’s inevitably right.

elle woods flipping her hair and saying what, like it’s hard? was a funny line. it’s funny because in every other movie, it’s said by a guy.

toughlovemuse:

newwavenova:

non-practicingbisexual:

fuckyeahbodypositivity:

kingforaking:

I’m doing a social experiment called ‘agreeing with boys when they compliment you’. 

the results: 

image

image

perf example of how uncomfortable boys are with women owning their own awesomeness. for many men, beauty, coolness, desirability are gifts they alone can bestow upon women. they get baffled, even aggressive when you show you’ve known you possess those things all along. 

i love this experiment! 

image

image

I reblog stuff like this every time I see it, because I figure women who follow me need the reminder, and men who follow me also need the reminder.

If you pay someone a compliment and they accept it and that makes you angry? You weren’t really interested in paying them a compliment. 

blueannawriting:

wlwsharoncarter:

wlwsharoncarter:

my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.

CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW

Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons

most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs

one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no you didn’t go to med school and I did and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while

but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.

when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”

and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name