Talk Like A Sailor, Giggle Like A Fairy

Ariana grande is suing forever 21 for stealing her look when she literally stole her look from a smaller queer artist I have no words

here’s the full body pic

and a lil more context..

Don’t try to perform at pride if you’re gonna take advantage of the community you’re performing for.

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.

They really don’t assasinate presidents like the used to anymore 😪

Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.  One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.  So you don’t.  Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.  So you miss your court date.  Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear. 

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.  And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all. 

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into. 

So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.

Here’s the thing, the name is now Jeffrey. I run science shows for kids, and at the start I get them to name a prop character. 80% of the time, they name it Jeffery. I have no clue why. My co-workers have observed the same phenomenon. 

I now carry around a laminated sign that says Jeffrey, and pull it out when a kid says it. And thinking I’m some kind of psychic, they loose their shit.

If you’re a Non-Muslim and you see a Muslim praying in public, could you please not pass in front of them?

Go behind them, but not in front. 👍

Oh, signal boost! I didn’t know this.

Okay, but also: if you see a Muslim praying in public and they have something in front of them, like a purse or a bag or something like that, you can pass in front of them, but pass in front of that object.

it’s called a sutrah, and it’s meant to act as a physical barrier between the person praying and someone who might happen to pass in front.

Also, if you did this and didn’t know, please don’t beat yourself up over it. Now you know! Muslims aren’t supposed to pass in front of Muslims praying, either, because prayer is communication with God and you don’t want to break that connection.

Spread culture, respect customs, be good people. Simple as that.

Didn’t know this.

Reblogging again

THE AMOUNTS OF REBLOGS THIS HAS JUST MAKES ME SO HAPPY

S I G N A L B O O S T

Reblog forever ! 

Similarly, if a Jew is saying the Shemonah Esrei prayer (whispered, moving only the mouth, standing facing east with legs together) don’t go in front unless there’s a barrier.

^^^^

“Lady who has a Bible Verse for every situation.”

IM DYIJG I LOST IT AT APPLE

people always talk about the extreme no homo mentality in guys sports teams but don’t talk about the severe lesphobia in girls sports teams. growing up playing team sports really fucked me up as a kid. straight girls i’ve played with were always scared of being perceived as gay for being athletic and because of the stereotypes of lesbians in certain sports. this was universal in the 3 sports i played: volleyball, softball, and basketball. 

there were always strict unwritten rules about how you presented yourself while playing. for instance the ribbon in the hair for softball and a bow in your ponytail for volleyball. if you didn’t prove your femininity while playing you were a lesbian. there was so much effort in not being seen as a lesbian and proving that you /weren’t/ a lesbian was really important. 

girls would always talk shit about girls with short hair on opposing teams. “we’re playing the team with the d*ke” was something i heard often as a kid. something i still heard in high school. being a lesbian in girls sports teams is predominantly what made me feel trapped in the closet in high school. I only felt comfortable coming out after i quit sports altogether

so if we could stop acting like straight girls have less of a stake in homophobia that’d be great 

!!!!

Giant isopods are so cool but what’s with the sexy funk music

most sexual motherfucker in the ocean. 

It’s true though.

three hours into a road trip when you hit an infinite stretch of farmland is where you find real power and real insignificance simultaneously

Some of y'all have no concept of what living in the Midwest is like huh

yes and I am grateful for that everyday

pout

you, a doctor: *handing me my new born baby* I’m sorry but your wife didn’t make it

me, an intellectual: *handing baby back to him* bring me the one my wife made