if you were to label me as 

what would you label me

friendly reminder that in psychology school people are taught that anger is a secondary emotion, so next time you make someone mad, remember that it’s because they were originally hurt or upset

Why does it always lead to this

Hugh Mackay

(via reservingheartbeats)

This is quote could change someone’s life.

(via ashanti-notthesinger)

Wholeness. Yes.

(via missturman)

I really like this.

(via sonofafieldnegro)

White Privilege

where’s my place in a music that’s been taken by my race cultural appropriated by the white face and we don’t want to admit that this is existing so scared to acknowledge the benefits of our white privilege

Dean let go... and yet he didn't (a theory)

So based on a number of amazing observations made by dustydreamsanddirtyscars (see here), here’s my theory on what happened in Purgatory:

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 #okay while this line is hilarious and whatnot #i actually read it as something a little bit sadder #because in this episode Dean is pushing everyone away #trying to make them WANT him to say yes so he’ll be gone #he tells Bobby ‘you’re not my father’ #knowing that’s where it’ll hurt him the most #he tells Sam ‘I don’t believe in you’ #knowing that will cut the deepest #but what does he say to Cas? he makes a bunch of mocking sexual references #I think he knows that Cas is attracted to him #and this is him calling him out on it #to try and make Cas angry and hurt #this episode is Dean trying to convince his family that they don’t want him #so he goes for their weak spots #and Cas’s weak spot is the fact that he’s in love with Dean

YES! YEEEES! 

*gross sobbing*

I’ve been noodling over this post for the past few days, and I think it’s almost right, in that Dean throws out the sexual barb because he almost certainly knows that he’s Cas’s weak spot.

And yet… I think the person Dean’s really digging at here isn’t Cas, but himself. He’s the one sexually attracted to Cas: he’s the one who can’t stop looking at Cas’s lips, who always looks so uncomfortable when Cas crowds his personal space. And Dean hates himself for it, because he knows that this is an angel of the Lord, the holiest of the holy, and he—well, what is he? He’s the blood-stained fuck-up, the man-sized hole of Daddy issues and neediness, the demon who never deserved to be saved from the Pit. What business does he have feeling something so dark and needy and human about an entity as good and heavenly as Cas, someone who so profoundly believes in Dean’s non-existent righteousness, who talks about him in terms of “special” and “saved” and “profound bond”, who rebelled against the divine plan and the entire Host of Heaven, and sacrificed everything, just for him, all for him? Dean knows it’s disrespectful, this dark and small and petty human sexual attraction, he knows it’s wrong and unreciprocated and he wishes he could make himself stop but he can’t, he just can’t.

Remember what the Dean!Leviathan says about Dean? “He doesn’t have relationships; he has applications for sainthood”. For nobody is that more applicable than Cas (which is why Cas’s eventual betrayal hurts Dean so much). To S5!Dean, Cas is a concept, a creature so innocent and pure Dean didn’t even think it existed until it saved him from eternal damnation.

So when Cas revokes his faith in him in that second GIF; when Cas says, essentially, “you are no longer worth my faith in you”, that’s when Dean snaps, because that hurts so much, too much, and all he can think to do is lash out with the one thing he thinks will hurt the most — except he doesn’t stop to wonder who he’s really trying to hurt here. 

That’s why, when Dean says “Blow me”, Cas seems more confused than anything else — he can tell that Dean is angry, and he’s angry too, but more than that, Cas doesn’t understand why Dean chose to express himself with those specific words.

But to Dean, the innuendo makes perfect sense; it’s a form of self-harm, of self-torture. In the same way he bitterly tells Kevin (twice) that angels are “junkless”, it reminds him of what he wants but can never, ever have.

Because Dean trained under Alastair, he knows all the best ways to torture a man, to make him break, and deep down he knows that what he feels for Cas is what will break him; or, more specifically, what will break him is that Cas can never feel what he feels, that angels just don’t have the equipment to feel that way, that whenever they try, it just breaks them apart.

And I eagerly await the day Dean realizes he was wrong.

Supernatural 30 Day Challenge Day 1: Dean Winchester Is a Douchebag

Welcome to the inaugural “Meta Thursday”! I’m kicking things off by starting up a new 30-Day Challenge, this time for “Supernatural” (of course)—although “30-Day” is a bit of a misnomer, because I don’t plan to do more than one of these essays a week, given that the Dragon Age one nearly killed me. :) I know many of you don’t watch Supernatural, or have (very valid) objections to its often problematic representations of women/POC, but hopefully I can address a few of those concerns and maybe get a few of you to check it out, because despite its flaws, it really is one of the best shows on TV today.

Enough blather. On with the meta!

Day 1: Your Favorite Character

Dean Winchester is a douchebag.

He’s cocky. Sexist. Petty. Judgmental. In early seasons he’s a bully. In later seasons he’s a drunk. He’s not particularly smart, or clever, and he thinks his jokes are much funnier than they really are. Often he tries too hard to be sexy, or cool, or manly, and as a result, he comes off fake, even desperate. He’s incapable of relating to women as real people, or, for that matter, men. He’s a “C-“ in bed that thinks he’s an “A+”, and he probably smells bad from all the cheeseburgers and liquor and sitting around in cars. He’s codependent, emotionally constipated, terrified by real intimacy, and lonely, so intensely, painfully lonely, that he pushes everyone away, or marginalizes them by turning them into a victim or someone he has to protect, because then his feelings too can be marginalized and contained; because to Dean Winchester, nothing, nothing, nothing in heaven or earth is more frightening than the most basic human endeavors of trusting, loving, or meeting someone halfway.

Also he’s addicted to hentai—which, dude, seriously?

Dean is all of these things and more—he is “a great big bag of dicks” as a certain Trickster might say—and yet, somehow, surprisingly, I love him anyway.

Very early on, despite his many flaws, Dean became my emotional anchor in this show instead of Sam—who, as a Hero on a Hero’s Journey, embodies the very archetype of relatability. And it doesn’t matter that Dean’s collection of foibles is almost custom-tailored to piss me off, because while I can’t excuse his flaws, I still accept them. His flaws give my love something to stick to.

Why do I love him? Easy: Dean Winchester is one stubborn son of a bitch.

No matter what he’s up against, not Heaven, not Hell, not Sam, not even himself, he doesn’t give in or give up. He might flinch, he might get scared, he might flee Hell Hounds or demons or God when He takes a familiar face, but Dean Winchester never, ever cries uncle. He sasses off to the Reaper and insults the Host of Heaven and shoots the devil in the face, because as he says himself, “I never did know when to quit”.  

Sure, Dean Winchester has a few other admirable qualities – his loyalty to Sam and his adopted family, his taste in music and movies, his rational skepticism and cool under pressure, and of course, his talent for nurturing —  but it’s his stubbornness, I think, that precludes all others; it is his saving grace, the reason for which he always deserved to be saved.

— Spoilers for Season 3 and beyond after the break —

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If This Isn’t From a Book, It Should Be (via gaircyrch)

 i just think it’s weird that they all tweeted the #2yearsof1d but louis and harry tweeted something completely different, but the identical to each others. 

and it’s even weirder that zayn did it first… because i mean

zayn. 

Harry Styles Interview: i93 Dallas Meet and Greet

the coming out conundrum

this post is aimed aimed people who believe harry and louis are dating. you can still read it even if you’re unsure/think they have feelings but are not actually in a relationship, but it’s probably rather irrelevant unless you firmly believe they are together.

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Favourite 1D moment #98: Zayn and Harry hashing it out on Twitcam and Zayn calling Harry a ‘miserable twat’ — quickly followed by a distraught Liam trying to distract viewers. [x]

In addition to John Green's excellent point about "cause erasure":

Crimes against humanity, international war crimes, international civil rights, and social justice are not fads.  They should not be “trendy on the internet,” and should not be something treated as The New Hot Thing.

I love seeing so many posts on my dash today, from both sides of each argument, about contraceptives, insurance equality, medical equality, Sandra Fluke, KONY 2012, the LRA, and the Invisible Children charity.  Especially from within The Hunger Games fandom, which I generally think should spend more of its time and focus on issues of social justice considering the nature of the source material, I think it’s a welcome shift to a lot of Tumblr’s general content (not counting myself out of that, obviously, because I also post a lot of really random/miscellaneous/whatever things).

But.

This same fervor happened in January for SOPA/PIPA/the e-parasite act/ACTA.  Do you know the status of any of these bills now?  Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, believes that the outcry over the SOPA bill was a “one-time thing,” and he is most likely not wrong.

Five months ago, the Occupy movement consistently crossed my dash as a major base of activism, awareness, and debate.  Do you know where the movement is focused now?  Pfizer (which also is a point of contention in the contraceptives/insurance debate due to their production of Viagra) and Bank of America are currently, and rightly, being protested for corporate corruption, and no one seems to be commenting because Occupy is no longer the “cause of the week.”

The Egyptian Revolution that everyone gave copious, and much-needed, attention a year ago… is still happening.  And people are still being hurt, and still being killed, and there is still no resolution. 

Less than a month ago, uproarious backlash against the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood for ostensibly religious/political reasons brought forward a huge surge in positive (and, okay, a lot of negative) discourse about the nature of women’s medical equality and medical rights.  When this cause instantly silenced itself — despite Komen still pinkwashing products like handguns (violence from which causes 29% of women’s deaths in the US) and donating only 24% of their money towards breast cancer research and screenings — the visible online dialogue about women’s medical rights reduced immediately to its original sources (here on tumblr, that means mainly feminism blogs).

Cue Sandra Fluke, and people are once again acting like they’ve never been so shocked and outraged at the lack of concern by the general mainstream media/public about inequalities in healthcare for women, contraceptive availability and ethos, and/or the US’ stilted and politically biased coverage of both sex and the human body as a political warzone.

WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS A MONTH AGO.

While Kony is an exceptionally horrific case, we were discussing the horror of tyrannical war criminals in third-world countries with the discussion and protest of Muammar G’addafi SIX MONTHS AGO.  Meanwhile, Libya is currently restructuring and the import of weapons into Libya is rising, and Tumblr Social Justice is fairly content not to remain aware or updated on its status.

Should something happen again in Libya, it will also bring about a week or so of uproarious shock and sudden interest in the region.  Just like the uterus, just like SOPA and PIPA and ACTA, just like everything else that Tumblr Social Justice briefly puts 110% of its energies into creating awareness for.

And of course, I do not think that anything that does raise social awareness, activism, and political curiosity, outrage, or understanding is a bad thing.

At all. 

I think that the massive pouring of actions and words and ideas about the manhunt for Joseph Kony and the eye-opening expression of his heinous crimes is hugely important and hugely positive.  If the KONY2012 campaign truly does bring people into Africa for rebuilding, or does bring about enough international awareness that wherever Kony has hidden himself, he is found, then that is an amazing thing and a true mark of the tremendous good that a free and open internet can do (see that, SOPA?).

But.

Posting gifsets of dancing children labeled “Kony! <3”?

Crimes against humanity, international war crimes, international civil rights, and social justice are not fads.  They should not be “trendy on the internet,” and should not be something treated as The New Hot Thing.

I’m personally guilty, too, of raising my reblogs of certain causes during their Week Of Fame, too — of course.  In part, that’s because that’s when information about these causes (SOPA/ACTA/PIPA/net neutrality, Egypt, Libya, Sandra Fluke, Susan G. Komen, on and on and on) is easier to find and, like the rest of Tumblr/the Western world: I live in a society of passive consumption and it really is easier to notice things when they’re being waved in front of my face than when I have to keep myself abreast.

But if, for only one week, or for only one month, people are concerned with helping child soldiers, and then they are abandoned? 

That helps no one.  That potentially makes their tragic life situations worse, because perhaps the only thing the Western mainstream considers worse than to be “invisible” is to be “passe,” an old story, one that most people consider solved.

Crimes against humanity are never “solved.”  When one treat is removed, others move into its place, and the capture of Kony will not bring about immediate peace or safety for the tens of thousands who have suffered (and continue to suffer) because of the LRA. 

Egypt has not been “solved.”

Libya has not been “solved.”

The campaign against a free and neutral internet has not been “solved.”

The integral quest for medical equality for all peoples of all incomes and all genders is not “solved.”

Treating social issues as fads or trends leads to an idea that, like trends, they are impermanent and easy to remedy.  That hurts far, far more people and ideas than it helps.

Find the causes that are permanent to you, that are immediate and integral and being handled in a responsible and sustainable manner in your eyes and to your scrutiny (ie, look into where charities’ money is really going; find out what else your spokespeople have said/done), and focus your energies into those causes for the long haul.

Don’t just reblog a few KONY2012 campaign posters and assume your role has been played and the fight against the LRA has moved a step forward.  Don’t reblog a post urging a boycott of Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and then another post captioned “lol ____ is such a slutty whore.”  Don’t assume that because Tumblr has gone silent about any given cause that it has been “solved.”

If KONY2012 has moved you to a place of permanent and life-changing impetus to aid the plight of child soldiers and human trafficking in Uganda, Sudan, the DRC, and the CAR, then that is amazing and a beautiful testament to the good works that open communication and social media can do and be.

If reblogging KONY2012 seems “popular on the Tumblr Radar,” then please… at least read up on why, and decide how much you care, and at least decide whether you will still care in a month, or six months, or a year, before you proclaim your FEEEEELINGS.

Tumblr, as a whole, has had FEEEEELINGS about a LOT of things in the last year.

And really, we probably still should.  And we don’t.