I'm Tired and Angry But Somebody Should Be

To the world 🥂

I saw a post going around that was like “Pride is NOT about having a big fun party. It commemorates a RIOT and it is SERIOUS,” and the particulars re: pride aren’t in my lane but, you know “a long time ago people we view ourselves in continuity with got involved in some kind of violent confrontation and while I’m hazy on the details they were probably justified, anyway let’s get wasted” is pretty standard holiday fare

I like this point. But also, I don’t think the tumblr children really realize that for queer people, being openly joyous about who we are IS an act of defiance. Getting decked out in your rainbow paraphernalia and having a big PARTY to celebrate the ways that we are different from cis straight people IS a fucking riot. Like, has Pride become corporatized and etc? Yes, but that’s a very long other post. The point is: people still hate us and want us dead. Being who we are and refusing to hide or cower or apologize for it is still an act of rebellion, whether it takes the form of a violent confrontation or a big gay party. 

We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re having a fucking party, die mad about it.  

Terfs: wombyn are their ovaries!!! Ovaries make a wombybybynnn. Accept that u are a womynbdgnn you have ovaries !!!!

Me, a trans man on the danger list for ovarian cancer and is going to get them removed in the distant or near future:

not for long

You’re still female whether you have ovaries or not lmao

You heard it here first folks!! Females are females regardless of whether or not they have ovaries, so trans women are women regardless of their lack them. Well said :)

You played yourself like a damn fiddle, fool

i love watching terfs run circles around their own logic:

i especially love to person in the notes who brought up needing to have “female muscle/fat distribution patterns” like I have some incredible news for you about exactly what Hormone Replacement Therapy does…

Reblogging to show that terfs dumb crazy

🌟Reblog to piss a terf off🌟

🌷reblog to support & uplift a trans person🌷

The biggest problem with every single bad review of Captain Marvel coming from a man is that none of them seem to comprehend a narrative that isn’t meant for them.

They see Carol finally breaking free from being gaslighted by the Kree as “emotionally underwhelming,” never realizing that a climactic, emotional showdown with her abuser would be giving him exactly what he wants. Being in control of her emotions? Choosing not to react to a provocation? That’s strength most male comic fans don’t understand. They see masculine-coded strength as the only valid kind. Carol not being angry and putting Yon-Rogg down in a shonen-esque battle doesn’t make sense to them because it’s not what they would have done.

They see a woman struggling to work through lies she’d been told as “bad narrative structure,” when in reality the movie was never about building Carol up from nothing, but about her realizing her true potential through seeing past those lies. Carol’s character arc parallels many women attaining social consciousness, throwing off patriarchal lies they’d been conditioned to accept about who they are and what they can do. Her story isn’t about attaining power, but about embracing her true potential that had been deliberately hidden from her.

They see Carol’s emotions not lining up with the lies her abusers told her about being too emotional as “bad writing” or “bad acting,” never realizing that that was exactly the point. They only understand defiance as impassioned, outward battles of will and pride, not understanding that quiet, steadfast refusal to bend to others’ designs of who you should be is strength too.

Brie Larson was absolutely right. Carol’s story is not for men. And nothing proves that more than all the fanboys who didn’t understand it throwing fits on the internet.

You know what, it wasn’t until I started reading posts like this one that I realized how very much Captain Marvel was a story made for me (i.e. women in general). I mean, I loved it, but I’ve also loved many, many of the MCU movies starring men and become more than a little emotionally invested in those characters. 

I can’t remember if it was a quote or just like, an idea that I’ve seen floating around, but I saw it somewhere, the idea that women can relate to men’s stories because we’ve been socialized to empathize with and understand men on a very deep level, essentially as a survival mechanism. And we’ve been fed media featuring men’s stories, and largely only men’s stories for so long, that it’s just second nature to understand and relate to those stories, even if they aren’t “our” stories exactly. 

Men, on the other hand, have never had to learn to relate to and empathize with women’s experiences as a necessity of everyday living. And media on the whole has reflected that throughout their lives. And so when they come across a story centered on a woman, and it doesn’t immediately resonate with them, they just assume the fault is with the story, rather than a lack of understanding on their part. 

So I guess it just kind of surprised me to see this disconnect, because I came out of the theater feeling pretty pumped and happy, more or less the same way I feel about any of my fave Marvel movies. And I assumed that other people who liked those same movies would probably feel the same way, regardless of gender. 

And then I stepped back and realized that the nuances of Carol’s story are so deeply about the experience of being a woman. But not like the version of that experience we so often see portrayed in the media. But the real experience that is so central to our lives that we don’t even really think about it most of the time. I didn’t realize why Carol’s story resonated with me so much at first, because it’s just the water that I swim in every day. It’s how the world is to me. And I forget that for roughly half the people out there, the world is actually very different. 

At age 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA. At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.  At age 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer. 

At age 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.   At age 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.

At age 28, Wayne Coyne ( from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook. At age 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.  At age 30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.  At age 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs. Julia Child released her first cookbook at age 39, and got her own cooking show at age 51. Vera Wang failed to make the Olympic figure skating team, didn’t get the Editor-in-Chief position at Vogue, and designed her first dress at age 40. Stan Lee didn’t release his first big comic book until he was 40. Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting at age 42. Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get his first movie role until he was 46.

Morgan Freeman landed his first movie role at age 52. Kathryn Bigelow only reached international success when she made The Hurt Locker at age 57. Grandma Moses didn’t begin her painting career until age 76. Louise Bourgeois didn’t become a famous artist until she was 78. Whatever your dream is, it is not too late to achieve it. You aren’t a failure because you haven’t found fame and fortune by the age of 21. Hell, it’s okay if you don’t even know what your dream is yet. Even if you’re flipping burgers, waiting tables or answering phones today, you never know where you’ll end up tomorrow. Never tell yourself you’re too old to make it. 

Never tell yourself you missed your chance. 

Never tell yourself that you aren’t good enough. 

You can do it. Whatever it is. 

This is so worth reblogging!

Thank you!

*raises hand*

Our attending walked into the room wearing her white coat, name badge on, and introduced herself as the doctor. The patient continued to refer to her as nurse the entire time we were there, and when we left, asked when the “real doctor” was coming. This same attending had to stop wearing her (very conservative, knee-length) dresses/skirts because male patients would comment on her legs or try to touch them. An ophthalmologist friend was telling me that she won’t do slit-lamp exams with the door shut anymore because male patients have (more than once) groped her.

Racism is still a big problem, too. I have another friend who, just yesterday, was told by a patient something along the lines of “it’s a good thing you aren’t a doctor (he is) because your people are coming here and taking up all the doctor jobs.” And that was definitely one of the milder things I’ve heard patients say about race. They’re usually screaming slurs.

I’ve introduced myself as a doctor, discussed treatment options, and when I left, I heard the patient complain that she hadn’t seen a doctor at all.

*raises hand*

Also, my home hospital has scrub color coding (we even went so far as to put up posters reminding patients of who was who, with pictographs) and it didn’t do a single bit of good. Every male employee, down to the transporters (!), routinely got called “doctor,” while the female physicians got called “nurse” or even “aide”.

*head on fire*

THIS MAKES ME SO MAD UGH

there are honest-to-god male youtubers making 20-minute-long screed videos angry that people are starting to ship han and lando and i just……….dudes?????? where have you been?????????? han and lando have been a gays only event since the 1980s?????? do you live under a rock?????? do you seriously think a man with an entire wardrobe of capes is heterosexual??????? do you think gays were just invented in the past 10 years????????? han, lando, i’m so sorry an ugly ass bitch would say that sweetie, oh my god

unpopular opinion: steve rogers is not lawful good aligned because COME ON when has that man EVER respected rules or laws he jumped out of a plane without a parachute, went in alone to a nazi base to save bucky, and rebelled against the entirety of shield because he knew they were corrupt my boy is chaotic good and no one can convince me otherwise

Why do Tara Lapinski and Johnny Weir look like they’re the announcing the 76th Hunger Games?

I mean

The guy next to them is even looking on in horror as if they’re describing a grisly child murder instead of figure skating.

I’m so here for this.

One of the weirdest parts of getting into your 30’s is thinking back to childhood memories, and realizing that your parents were younger than you are now in most of them.

me to a waitress when she tells me of a minor inconvenience: no problem! that’s okay!

waitress: ??! you’re so kind! thank you! i’m so sorry!!

me: are you Ok

me, gently touching the waitress’ arm: who hurt you

why is there such a stigma against wearing pads? like why is it that people who wear tampons are seen as ‘strong’ and ‘cool’? y’all know that someone people can’t wear them bc it hurts them or that they just don’t like them? stop making it seem like people who wear pads are childish and weak compared to those who wear tampons 

Ok kids buckle up because I know the answer to this question because I am a bitter, vindictive person.

So my first semester of PhD work in a musicology program involved this horrible class with a professor that wanted to suck the life out of all of his students by constantly belittling them. We had to write a short paper each week and present them conference-style and then he would tear us to shreds and do it all over again next week. The purpose of the class was supposedly to have us write papers about materials that hadn’t really been looked at by musicologists yet, and my class had music in advertisements. I was also the only woman in the class and the prof was lowkey sexist so I kept trying to do feminist topics without losing my entire will to live.

So we get to the end of the semester and I am just completely out of fucks, I have one paper left to write and I say fuck it, let’s write about pads and tampons, there must be something there, right? It turns out there IS something to be said there (and this gets back to OP’s question). Early pad and tampon commercials were very similar to each other; basically here’s a product to help you stay clean during your period. But around 1980, suddenly there’s public outcry and panic over tampons due to TSS (Toxic Shock Syndrome). At that point no one really understood how TSS worked but they knew it had to do with tampons. So women freaked out and started switching to pads instead. Now the worst offender, Rely, was taken off the market and other tampon commercials got slapped with little warning signs like “This product could cause TSS” so women bought even fewer tampons. This is when the advertising strategies for the two products changed.

Pad advertisements were now about “cleanliness” and “purity” - they knew you couldn’t get TSS from pads and they were going to emphasize that fact. You’ve got women in white dresses with long hair slowly walking through fields of flowers with pastoral-y flutes in the background. And to fight back, tampon companies take it the complete opposite direction - they ignore TSS entirely and start showing businesswomen running to catch the subway, sporty women riding bikes, basically any sort either high-powered position or active woman showed up in these commercials with contemporary pop-song type music over the top. The clear intention was “yeah we know that these could cause TSS but they’re much better for your mobility, both physically and career-wise.”

I got done giving this paper and I look up to see my four male classmates and one male professor in varying shades of pale-ness and they just all sort of looked at me for a couple minutes without knowing how to respond. It’s one of the proudest moments of my PhD career so far.

Anyway the two products have been advertised basically the same ways ever since then. Now pads are much more comfortable and discreet, and we understand how TSS works and how to avoid it, but the commercial strategies are cemented. If you want to be a strong, on-the-go woman of COURSE you’ll wear a tampon because you don’t want to be one of those sissy ladies in the pastoral field of flowers over in pad-land, do you?

Here Are Some People Who Are Very Confused About What “No Makeup” Looks Like

Woman: wearing foundation, powder, blush, bronzer, highlight, false lashes, mascara, nude lipstick, brow powder eyeshadow

Man: she doesn’t have red lipstick on so that means no makeup

like 3 of them are wearing very visible winged eyeliner i’m screaming

This is actually a really good idea –