catwingsthespatula reblogged
Very informative thread -source
Dr. Sarah Taber fucking SNAPPED
catwingsthespatula reblogged
One of my favourite parts of working with kids is like… Very Gently subverting their idea of gendered topics… Like if a girl goes ‘no, sharks are a boy thing’ and you go “UM ACTUALLY THATS STUPID AND INCORRECT” they get freaked out, but if instead u go “Are you sure? Cause I think sharks are awesome, here’s a scale picture of a Megalodon” it’ll blow their tiny mind and they’ll be shitting themselves over it for days. 100% effective, 10/10 recommend
kapukai
Good example of this happened in a class I taught recently. Kids were making predictions about a text we’d be studying based on an illustration of the character: boy with spiky blonde hair wearing a pink football kit.
The first kid to respond said, “I think this is a girl that likes to play football.” I said “what gave you the idea that the character is a girl?” Obviously they pointed out the pink, to which I replied how pink was one of my fave colours and they just looked at me wide-eyed. Then the next said, “No it’s got to be a boy. He’s got short spiky hair.” Of course, I then listed all the female people they might’ve heard of who also have short spiky hair and, honestly, the puzzled looks on their little faces were priceless.
Anyway, they continued to debate which gender the character was using phrases like: “but he … and look at his …” or “so why is she … and maybe her …” which was the point I decided to stop them and ask: “If we can’t be sure whether the character is a he or she, should we really be using those pronouns?” And I kid you not, without any persuasion from me and after only the briefest of discussions, these children unanimously agreed that the best pronoun to use would be “they” until they knew their gender for certain. They then continued their discussion using gender neutral terms throughout without any fuss whatsoever. And these are 6 and 7 year olds.
thoughtparadocs
Hey the message of this post is great and all but ‘a scale picture of a meglodon’ what the f u CK
my-analogical-romance
Honestly my seven year old neice screamed once I told her that girls can have short hair and now shes pestering her mum for short and also blue hair
By the way here’s a scale picture of a Megalodon
#kids#gender roles#here’s to boys who like pink. and girls who like sharks.#and especially to kids (and adults) who like pink AND sharks#sincerely: a woman who likes long hair and hair bows and long dresses and clunky black ankle boots and no makeup and unshaven legs#who loves singing and baking and frogs and snakes and bugs and dinosaurs and outer space#the blue/pink divide is drilled into kids so hard#let girls climb trees for heaven’s sakes#let boys pick flowers#let kids pursue their interests#gender#society
catwingsthespatula reblogged
if a teenager is at your door and they are wearing a costume!! please give them candy!! they are still in it for the halloween spirit and it honestly no different from a little kid in a costume. they are just as excited and happy as all the other lil tykes and dont you dare tell them they are “too old for trick-or-treating” because that will literally break their hearts and that’s not cool.
dewyntersisters
Its getting close to Halloween again so I just thought I’d reblog this again
archdemonblood
And if “don’t be rude to teenagers over a stupid jawbreaker” isn’t enough for you, consider
- You can’t tell how old a kid is just by looking. I’ve known multiple 5th graders who were taller than I am, and I’m 25 years old. With their faces hidden by masks, you won’t be able to tell they’re elementary schoolers, but they still are.
- Lots of older siblings are expected to take their younger siblings trick-or-treating, and they only get paid in candy.
- You don’t know if that teenager is developmentally disabled.
- You don’t know if that teenager spent most of their childhood in a hospital or sick and has never had the traditional trick-or-treat experience before.
- You don’t know if this is that teenager’s first Halloween in America, and they just want to experience a piece of American culture.
- You don’t know if that teenager ever gets candy any other day of the year.
- You don’t know if that teenager has eaten anything at all today.
And those are just things I can think of off the top of my head.
and even if it is just a bored 16/17 year old out trying to see what free shit they can get. is it really gonna kill you to give them a fun sized milky way from the multipack you bought at poundland? That thing didn’t even cost you 5p, just give the kid the sugar, say “nice costume”, and let it go.
fandomsandanythingelse
There are worse things a teenager could be doing on Halloween instead of trick-or-treating.
It’s been kind if an unspoken rule in my college town that if college students show up at your door in costume you give them candy because they’re also out to have fun and it’s way nicer for the students to trick or treat instead of going out and getting drunk. It’s also a way for the people who don’t want to party and don’t want to drink to have fun so like, we need to stop getting angry at people older than 6 wanting to dress up and get candy.
Heck, we even offer the parents a bit of candy too! It’s all good fun~!
Fr, I always hate the ‘you’re too old for trick or treating’ bullcrap.
#ALL OF THIS#i was that developmentally disabled 17-year-old out trick-or-treating by the way#my sister was 14 and it was the first year we’d gone just us instead of with a parent to make sure we didn’t get lost#it was also the last#the year after that i was in college#(and had a lot of fun with my also autistic best friend/roommate)#(but still)#no one gave me a hard time but i hear about people judging teenagers for trick-or-treating and it breaks my heart#literally what are they doing wrong#even if they don’t have any specific reason beyond loving halloween and wanting to participate in a beloved holiday tradition#for a little longer than someone else thinks they should#what’s the harm?#obviously if they’re not respecting the little kids around them that’s an issue but otherwise?#let it go. they’ll stop when they’re ready.#halloween#trick or treating#kids#teenagers#society
catwingsthespatula reblogged
helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!
I think I found the article!
Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.
Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.
It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:
Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.
The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.
Anthropologists also look at damage on our ancestors' skeletons for clues to their behavior. Neandertals are the best-studied extinct members of the human family because we have a rich fossil record of their remains. Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same things, from ambush-hunting large game animals to processing hides for leather. Yes, Neandertal women were spearing woolly rhinoceroses, and Neandertal men were making clothing.
I also thought this part was cool :)
PLEASE read this article, this information is incredible for everyone looking to unlearn bioessentialism
catwingsthespatula reblogged
i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.
21 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 that 18 year old is literally your college classmate. you are the same age. You Are The Same Age
like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.
it's very easy to not be a creepy adult when talking to a minor. step one: don't act creepy. that's it. that's all you need to do.
When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.
Those years at Steve's table were incredibly important to my development as a person. And we had something in common: the game.
When I was a young teenager, I was in an online fandom group that DID in fact at one point pick up a creepy predator who targeted the young girls in the group.
Do you know what the single biggest protective factor was? The reason none of us were able to be singled out and abused?
There were other adults in the group.
I had spent lots of time on various forums and in this group of loose friends of varying ages, from high school to grad school. I knew what a healthy, safe, respectful friendship with unrelated adults looked like; I had lots of examples of adults behaving appropriately and protectively toward the kids in the group/forums while still treating us as equals.
Thus, it was immediately obvious that this guy was Off. He made us uncomfortable, we didn't like him, and we talked to one another and to the other adults in the group, who gave us good advice on keeping ourselves safe and asserting boundaries (he had not, at that point, done anything outright predatory, this was early on when it was just questionable boundaries) and, when he did cross a line, banned him instantly and checked in on all of us.
But the thing is: If we HADN'T had those safe, normal adults in the group, we could very easily have just assumed this was a normal way for adults to interact in a mixed space, and never said anything! We were all little nerds; assuming that this was just what the world was like outside of a strictly familial or school-based setting would have made sense. But we didn't think that--because we had PLENTY of examples of how the adults we DID feel comfortable around talked to and about us.
If the only adults in a space are predators, kids just start to assume that predatory behaviors are How Real Adults Act. If they interact with lots of adults, predatory behaviors stand out sharply as abnormal--and kids who may not be able to rely on their parents still have plenty of support in protecting themselves.
#it is vitally important that people learn how to interact with people from different social categories than themselves#that includes age#humans are social creatures. we live in multigenerational groups. there are important reasons for that.#(including that teaching children that the only adults they can ever trust are their parents can 100% be an abuse tactic)#child abuse cw#society
catwingsthespatula reblogged
Now, I’m not saying romantic relationships are inferior, or that they’re useless, or that you being in one or that you shipping some characters romantically is Bad or something off the walls like that. What I’m saying is that two people (or characters, since we’re talking shipping here) can be just as devoted to each other, love each other just as deeply, mean just as much to each other while being in a platonic relationship. The end point of caring about someone doesn’t have to be romance.
Friendship isn’t a stepping stone between strangers and romantic partners, it’s a different path. And you can follow that path as deep into the wood as a romantic one if you want, and neither is inferior to the other, they just have different views.
reblog my aro posts you cowards
ABSOLUTELY TRUE
There’s even some characters whose relationship seem so much more interesting as friends. Like “oh, they’ll tear the goddamn world apart for their friend, this is great” turns into “Oh, okay, they’re a couple. Never seem that one before, I guess”
herdingthoughts
That last addition is such a mood. Making or keeping a relationship platonic isn’t making it “less” so much as giving it a different “flavor” altogether. A story about sacrificing oneself to save one’s friend is just as powerful as doing so to save a lover, but the two situations aren’t interchangeable; the implications would be very different and would pretty much tell a different story. While labels can be useful sometimes, they can also be restrictive if we rely on them too much. Reducing relationships, fictional or otherwise, to one of a few boxes that follows well-defined formulas (mostly US or euro-centric, at that) is bland/uncreative at best and gross/reductive at worst, and portrayals of relationships would be so much richer if the nature and characteristics of each relationship was defined by and unique to the people in the relationship itself.
Given the context of romance being oversaturated and dumbed down so much in pop culture (which is also a big issue in and of itself, to reduce even romance to generic tropes for mindless public consumption), a story about someone tearing the world apart for a friend is ten times more powerful and original than “of course it was romantic all along!” As the previous commenter said… Totally never seen that before! /s