“I swear to every heaven ever imagined,
if I hear one more dead-eyed hipster
tell me that art is dead, I will personally summon Shakespeare from the grave so he can tell them every reason
why he wishes he were born in a time where he could have a damn Gmail account. The day after I taught my mother how to send pictures over Iphone she texted me a blurry image of our cocker spaniel ten times in a row.
Don’t you dare try to tell me that that is not beautiful.
But whatever, go ahead and choose to stay in
your backwards-hoping-all-inclusive club
while the rest of us fall in love over Skype.
Send angry letters to state representatives, as we record the years first sunrise so we can remember what beginning feels like when we are inches away from the trigger. Lock yourself away in your Antoinette castle
while we eat cake and tweet to the whole universe that we did. Hashtag you’re a pretentious ass hole.
Van Gogh would have taken 20 selflies a day. Sylvia Plath would have texted her lovers nothing but heart eyed emojis when she ran out of words.
Andy Warhol would have had the worlds weirdest Vine account, and we all would have checked it every morning while we
Snap Chat our coffee orders to the people we wish were pressed against our lips instead of lattes. This life is spilling over with 85 year olds rewatching JFK’s assassination and 7 year olds teaching themselves guitar over Youtube videos. Never again do I have to be afraid of forgetting
what my fathers voice sounds like. No longer must we sneak into our families phonebook
to look up an eating disorder hotline for our best friend.
No more must I wonder what people in Australia sound like or how grasshoppers procreate. I will gleefully continue to take pictures of tulips
in public parks on my cellphone and you will continue to scoff and that is okay. But I hope, I pray, that one day you will realize how blessed you are to be alive in a moment where you can google search
how to say I love you in 164 different languages.”
The 2011 Korean film “Silenced” is based on actual events that took place at Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where deaf children were the victims of repeated physical and sexual assaults by faculty members over a period of five years in the early 2000s.
A newly appointed teacher at the school alerted human rights groups in 2005, and was subsequently fired from his job. This teacher was the first to come forward about the abuse he’d witnessed, as the school specifically sought out poorer teachers who would be completely dependent on the school for their financial security and therefore less likely to turn against the administration.
Nine children eventually came forward, but more victims were believed to have concealed additional crimes in fear of repercussions or because of trauma. Children who were orphans or who had disabled parents were targeted specifically, and children who tried to come forward were sent back to school and disciplined by the faculty.
During the trial, the perpetrators received support from the local community, especially from the police and churches in the community. Of the six perpetrators, four received prison sentences, while the other two were freed immediately because the statute of limitations for their crimes had expired. Among those jailed, two were released after less than a year in jail. Four of the six teachers were reinstated in the school.
The film sparked public outrage after its 2011 release, which eventually resulted in a reopening of investigations into the incidents. The school was shut down, and several of the teachers pleaded guilty to sexual molestation charges, including the former principal, who was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The demand for legislative reform eventually reached its way to the National Assembly of South Korea, where a bill (named after the film) was unanimously passed in October 2011 to abolish the statute of limitations for all sex crimes against minors and the disabled.
The film’s ending scene is a protest that occurred following the suicide of a thirteen-year-old victim after the trial in 2005. As the crowd of human rights advocates and deaf people face brutality from the riot police, the fired teacher who initially came forward (who, along with a human rights activist, helped the victims through the trial process) repeats the name of the victim who’d committed suicide, saying “he cannot hear or speak.”
Abusive men pave the way for lazy men to get wives and girlfirends.
Lemme clarify, how many times have you heard your overworked female friends and relatives say “Yeah, Jerry drinks beer every evening after work while I cook dinner and clean up after everyone and does the bare minimum to help me raise the kids but he’s such a nice guy. He’s never beat me in my life. I couldn’t ask for a better guy in my life.”
Like no, Sally, your husband is a common stone among turds and you know it.
I try to explain this conceptually to people as a thing that happens not saying that this is good but it’s a thing that happens.
This is what male privilege is and how all men benefit from it.
This is why you are not exempt from statements about “all men” even if you are overall good.
You benefit from the bar constantly being lowered by systemic issues within the gender.
The expectations on you are always lower than they should because “at least you’re not X”.
That…is the best response I’ve seen to the “not all men” thing. Thank you.
Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
@ all the angry dudes in the replies: the point is not to trick or manipulate men. The point is to see how a potential romantic partner reacts to a minor inconvenience. If they say, “oh, ok, would seven work instead?” or “well there’s this Armenian tea house I’ve been meaning to try out, want to go there?” then that’s a good sign that they’re safe to date. If they throw a fit and/or demand to know every little detail about your rationale over something as simple as rescheduling dinner plans, that’s a bad sign. A really bad sign.
It’s like this, dudes. Women in Western society are socialised to cooperate and compromise. Some men are socialised to get all their own way, all the time. These dudes are incredibly dangerous to women their partners,* and the only way to tell them apart from the OK guys is to pay close attention to how they react. If you’re one of the OK ones, this isn’t about you. Learn to take “no” for an answer, and you’ll be fine.
*Updated to reflect the fact that abusive men can target any gender, and the fact that I used this screening tactic to good effect during my Big Gay Slut phase.
The thing a lot of the men reblogging don’t get – they think this post is telling women to lie. They think this post is telling women to start a fake argument and to be manipulative.
Actually, this post is doing the opposite. This post is telling women to be straightforward, and forthright, and upfront about their values and opinions.
This post is telling women, “I know you’ve been socialized and conditioned to nod and smile at everything a man says your whole life, since you were 4 years old and your grandma told you that little girls should be seen and not heard. I know that by now it’s second nature to you, and you probably don’t even realize you’re doing it half the time. You don’t even realize that the laugh that just came out of your mouth is a laugh of appeasement, rather than a laugh of genuine humor. ”
It’s telling women, “Force yourself to resist your conditioning. Consciously make an effort to be open and honest in that initial conversation, when you’re making small talk, about small things. If he says something you don’t quite agree with (and he inevitably will, because nobody agrees on everything), don’t smile and concede the point like you’ve been trained to do. Consciously make a point of vocalizing your real opinion.”
It’s telling women “If a man doesn’t respect your real opinion about a small, insignificant issue when you first meet him, then he’s not going to respect your real boundaries later on when you’re in a serious relationship.”
Seriously, ladies, read this to men already in your lives. If they get outraged…maybe reconsider their place in your lives.
Also, if someone tells you that you providing a counteroffer that you’re being unreasonable or ‘difficult’, don’t buy it.
like if you make a cashier cry you’re evil! sorry! you don’t get a free pass! you don’t get to stand there and see someone visibly stressed and already doing everything they can to help people and move things along as swiftly as possible and act like a toddler and insult them bc you aren’t getting your way in the snap of your fingers! they’re trying their damnedest! they don’t want to be there but they’ve gotta and that involves dealing w/ ppl and when it comes to that kind of behavior! you’re ugly!
no buts! you’re just evil! sorry if that hurts your feelings but you don’t seem to care about doing that to others so! sucks huh
(and as for the concern that covering trans healthcare is too expensive for a “small” company like Dark Horse: Barry Deutsch offered a rebuttal with evidence here: https://twitter.com/barrydeutsch/status/1005941450264068096, but beyond that, what Jay is alleging is more than just coverage but that it is part of a systemic culture from management that is hostile to queer and trans people (& to criticism) )
So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)
I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.
It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century – that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so – in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.
Polio still thrives in a lot of countries, including India. I watched a documentary about it Netflix. The disease runs rampant in well-developed countries, and with more people traveling around the world there is more exposure to this and many other diseases. When polio survivors in India were interviewed and asked about the anti-vaccination movement in the USA they had this look of total disgust and shock. Idiot anti-vaxxers are placing a death sentence on their children, would rather they die or have permanent scars and disabilities, would rather listen to lies about vaccinations causing autism.
We had a big round of whooping cough tear through this tiny town I live in. Children DIED because they were too young for the vaccination. The people who caused this, the carriers, are anti-vaxxers. No idea what happened to them. One child died because the coughing broke a rib and damaged their lungs.
Some polio survivors have had to live in an iron lung their entire lives because the vaccination wasn’t readily available. Now the vaccine is and it’s fools and idiots sentencing the most vulnerable to a painful death because of ignorance.
Tangentally, if compulsory vaccination programs had continued to present day, measles would’ve been eradicated by now.
wupacing 