Tag: this is important

blame-my-muses:

goawfma:

this is an insult

I once applied and interviewed at a bookstore cafe for a barista position. It was way closer to my home, and I had almost a decade of experience working in a coffee shop at that point. 

Got to the interview, and it turned out they didn’t want a barista, they wanted someone to spearhead their new cafe, as the cafe that had been in the store before didn’t want to resign their lease with the bookshop. They wanted to put their own cafe in its place, all new menus etc. They needed someone experienced to train their new staff, to handle window displays, to communicate with the bookstore owners about changes and needs of the cafe, to be able to handle inventory and ordering.

Okay, I had basically done most of that stuff at my previous job. I asked if cafe positions would also be required/trained to work the bookstore.

They would. They would be required to run the book sale counter, stock and reshelf books, and help bookshop customers find things. They would also–despite having an outside cleaning company–have to help maintain bathroom cleanliness. They’d have to take out trash, and clean spills, and vacuum. 

Wow, that’s a lot, I said. Is this a manager’s position, then?

No, I was told, it wasn’t, but there was a chance that after a training period it might become one. And that made me pause, because I’d been working as the front-of-house manager at my cafe, and I knew how much work that entailed, and what kind of money I was making, and it was only the commute that had me looking for a new job.

So I asked what the job paid.

$8. E I G H T  D O L L A R S. Per hour. Barely above minimum. For all of that work. For someone they expected to get an entirely new cafe up and running, and then also do the work of the bookstore and the cleaning company as well. 

I thanked the woman for the interview, said I’d have to talk to my significant other about the impact a four dollar pay cut would have on our finances, and that I wasn’t sure it was the job for me. She asked me to sleep on it, and she’d call me the next day. 

This is a job I was way more than qualified for. I had years of experience doing exactly the things they wanted. It was a convenient location, close to my home–I could walk there if I absolutely had to. I did not go home and talk about that four dollar pay cut and what it would do to our finances. I knew as soon as she told me that not only was it not feasible for us, it was downright insulting. That little money? For a frankly ridiculous list of responsibilities and expectations?

She called back the next day. I thanked her again, and told her in no uncertain terms that my time was worth way more than what they were offering.

And whenever people bitch about Millennials being lazy, not spending money, not buying houses…whatever the complaint of the month is…I think about the very nice lady who conducted this interview, and how confused she was that I didn’t want the job. 

bemusedlybespectacled:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

idyll-ism:

sorryiwasasleepagain:

blkbruja:

y’all need therapy. not girlfriends

Or they need a girlfriend that doesn’t mind listening and trying to help them work through their shit and defeat their fucking demons without asking them to pour out their soul to a stranger who is only listening because it’s their job. That’s the kind of shit you do for the people you love.

your partner is not your therapist. listening to your partner is one thing, but it is not their responsibility to help you work through your shit. that is on you.

one more time.

your partner is not your therapist.

also if I may hop onto this, I REALLY hate when people try to spin “therapists only listen because it’s their job” as a BAD thing. can you imagine if we tried to apply that to literally any other profession?

“why take your phone into the store to get it fixed? they don’t care about you, they’re only doing their job.”

“I don’t want to order a pizza. they’re not making it for me out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re only doing it because it’s their job.”

“why didn’t you just have your girlfriend do that surgery instead of going to a stranger who only saved your life because it’s their job?”

it’s their job because they are better equipped to do it than the other people in your life. jesus christ. 

also, if I may add: it’s not the therapist’s job to love you.

a lot – A LOT – of people conflate emotional vulnerability with love. they think that being open about your problems is something you only do with friends and family. so paying someone to be open with sounds wrong because it’s like paying someone to be your girlfriend or your mom.

but that’s fundamentally misunderstanding the point of a therapist.

the therapist’s job is to identify issues and help you develop methods to cope with them. that’s it. being open is necessary, not because they need to love you, but because you need to be honest if you want them to be able to accurately figure out what’s wrong. 

you don’t need to be in love with your doctor to tell them that you are having heart problems or unexplained pain. your lawyer doesn’t need to be part of your family for you to tell them your legal issues. it’s the same with your therapist – their job is to help, not to love.

hi-def-doritos:

hi-def-doritos:

hi-def-doritos:

Ok look even though it’s been said a million times before,

Having

your first period

does NOT

make you

a woman.

I’m saying this because I’ve heard a recent surge around me in people saying girls “become a woman” when that happens and just…no?

I was 11. Fortunately I knew vague stuff about it before it happened to me. But for the most part, all I really got was “I’m an adult now because this means I can have kids.”

I was not an adult. I was a child. I still played with Polly Pockets. I had a 52-piece Littlest Pet Shop collection, and the goat was named Goatita because that’s how my brain worked. I wrote about my seventeen different crushes in purple pen in the first diary I ever owned without a lock. I used text abbreviations while writing by hand. I held royal tournaments with my Playmobil knights and had jousts and battles and feasts like in the books I read.

I had no emotional maturity. I had very little mental maturity. I couldn’t have in any way handled having a relationship. All I had was extra unwanted chest material, and a body that bled every few weeks, and the misconception that I ought to now be an adult when I was the farthest thing from one.

I was not a woman. I was a child. And that’s why arguments about periods=adulthood just make me mad, because the two are not equal and should never be equated.

Honestly the whole concepts of periods being the defining factor of womanhood needs to stop, not only because of the b.s. above but because of the transphobia b.s. as well. All a period means is that your body is doing a thing. It has no say on your identity.

positivelyqueerace:

dare-to-dm:

“As the Bechdel Test began to creep into the sightline of mainstream movie criticism, it was notable to see the surprise of some male critics that their favorite movies—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, The Princess Bride, Clerks, the original Star Wars trilogy, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even Tootsie, when you get right down to it—so soundly flunked it. For many women, the reaction was more of a shrug, along with relief that, finally, there was a simple way to help writers and directors step over an embarrassingly low baseline. To be clear, applying the rule isn’t about snatching away the well-earned status of Raging Bull or The Godfather or even This Is Spinal Tap. As Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Web site Feminist Frequency, noted in a 2009 video about the rule, “It’s not even a sign of whether it’s a feminist movie, or whether it’s a good movie, just that there’s a female presence in it.” The latter point is something that many people fail to grasp when trying to explain away why their favorite movies don’t pass the test (“But Batman is the hero of the movie! Of course the women characters are going to talk about him!”): the Bechdel Test is not a judgment of quality or nuance. After all, the beautiful, moving Gravity fails the test, while a formulaic rom-com like 27 Dresses passes with no problem. But the test itself is a simple, bloodless assessment of whether female characters are deemed important to a story—and a way to conclude that, most of the time, they aren’t.”

— We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (Zeisler, Andi)

This makes me happy that it has an explanation, because too many people misunderstand the point of the test. “It sets the bar too low!” They say. That’s the point. It’s the lowest bar possible and many movies can’t pass it.

c-bassmeow:

sodomymcscurvylegs:

There’s nothing more ugly than the culture of having children for the sake of having them. Too many people ask “do you want kids?” but not enough ask “are you ready for the emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices you will have to make to raise children?” It’s so ugly to me that people treat kids like a commodity, like a dress or a pair of earrings they just throw on. How dare you? That’s not a new car you can get bored of or discard in a few years, that is a person, and particularly a person who will absolutely be dependent on you for emotional support, financial support, discipline, and leadership; someone who you will have power of virtually every portion of their lives until they’re ready to be adults, who you will impact in irreversible ways, who will look to you for the rest of YOUR life and theirs for explanations about life and how they turned out to be who they are, for better or for worse. If you say you “want kids” but you’re “not sure if you could handle” them needing time and attention, costing you money,  or you’re “not sure you can handle” if they turn out gay, or disabled, or transgender, or any other myriad of things that don’t really make your child any less of a person but which an ugly society can have ugly views on, etc. then you don’t deserve to have children. If you “want children” but haven’t thought about literally having to be there for them for virtually everything they will go through and ask of you, you’re not adult enough to have them.

And what’s so insidious about many of these same people is that they are the ones making their children feel guilty that they fed them, housed them, and basically didn’t let them die, as if this is some meritorious act, as if parents aren’t supposed to raise their children and not kill and starve them, as if they are some type of martyr that deserves praise for doing the bare minimum.