We all know what erectile dysfunction is but literally no one is ever taught what vaginismus is and it can cause people to feel extremely lost, broken, and cause people to take their own lives. Raise. Awareness.

For the uninformed, vaginismus is when the vagina painfully tightens and spasms when faced with pressure, usually from anything trying to insert into the vagina. It’s the reason I can’t wear tampons, and why many people can’t have vaginal sex without severe pain.

There’s not a lot of treatments, and there isn’t a single one that is for vaginismus exclusively - they’re all medications or treatments to treat symptoms, but not the causes. In fact, for a long time doctors waved off vaginismus as a purely psychological disorder in cis women.

Seriously, this is so unaddressed and uncared for in medical circles. Please spread awareness, even if all it’s for is to let those who have it but don’t have a name for it finally be able to understand what’s happening to their bodies.

Certified Sex Ed Post!

You Fucking Uncultured Swine. although I myself am a USAmerican (I know, ugh) I watch French movie and look at grass and something. Stop getting plastic surgery. You're not living a full, rich, cultured life Unlike me. "one of the good ones" some may say. I still live on indigenous land as an imperial citizen but im kinda special and better about it - because of my media consumption habits. unlike those preppy normals.

Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

Goes insanely hard

To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.

The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples

And it absolutely was not meant to be

The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I'm not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not

However

The English version promises them rights as Citizens

From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.

And the Crown was PISSED

Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.

But its still better than anyone else got, and it's better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can't just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government's of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith "sales" or straight up stolen land.

Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.

So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.

But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don't see "honouring" them as anything good.

Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against

Toitū te tiriti

Uphold the treaty

My abnormal gait caused a police dog to lunge and chase at me while I was simply walking in my neighborhood. That’s a bit terrifying.

Thankfully it was off duty and leashed (I know it’s a police dog cause the owners are my neighbors, who are cops. Their cop cruiser is parked out front. The dog has training.)

But it scared the shot out of me and made my already difficult mobility worse and I had to limp even worse the rest of the way home, while the owner (a cop) just watched.

The implications that cops and their dogs are trained to view suspicious activity as anything abnormal, aka, many things people cannot control (disability for example, like Jesus Christ a trained dog tried to attack me for being disabled) are ferrying. I’m scared.

As someone who plays Dog Bite Simulator in real life (does protection sports with my dobermans) I've been trying to think of a good way to sort of say this for years.

A lot of the things we teach dogs that are "suspicious behavior" are things that people do when drunk or otherwise intoxicated, or when they are disabled either mentally or physically. The man who appears from behind a car with a weird gait and grunting and grumbling to himself? Yeah that's, um, pretty much every homeless guy I've ever walked past at a Wal-Mart. He's carrying a stick which he swings in a weird pattern about dog height? That's a crutch or a cane. He has a big bulky sleeve over one arm which is held out in front of him? Yeah that's just a regular ass broken arm in a cast.

There is a current of ableism baked into a lot of this, but I feel like you have to either be disabled in the ways featured to see it or you have to be paying attention to pick up on it. As I prepare Fenris for his temperament test in a couple weeks, I'm very conscious of the fact that there's gunna be someone who pops out at him who acts very much like the people we walk past every day for exercise, and he's supposed to react aggressively towards them.

It is, ironically, one of the reasons why I like the sport we're currently doing, which teaches the dogs that a bite is unacceptable unless A: they have been explicitly sent to bite by verbal command or B: aggressive contact (hitting, shoving, grabbing) has been made. While the temperament test for the breed fills me with Thoughts, the specific sport we're involved in takes care to teach the dogs that these parameters are not ever going to change, and that "people acting strangely aka in a disabled manner" is not a good excuse to bite the fuck out of someone.

But this is also why I'm constantly on my bullshit about being sure this is a door you (general) want to open with your own dog, because all it takes is one instance of your dog incorrectly reading the room and charging at the limping person with a cane or the Deaf guy talking a little too loudly or the schizophrenic having an episode in the middle of the pet store, and now you have a serious situation on your hands.

O sapo-de-chifres ou sapo-folha (Proceratophrys boiei) é uma espécie de anfíbio da família Odontophrynidae. Essa espécie é endêmica do Brasil e é encontrada em várias regiões do país. Sua distribuição inclui principalmente áreas de Mata Atlântica, que é um bioma caracterizado por florestas tropicais úmidas e diversidade biológica excepcional

That’s sure a boi. @moopsy-daisy

Something I think has to be considered here is that "hanging out with your friends" is, like most things kids do, a contingent activity. It requires parents to allow it.

And increasingly parents are absolutely unwilling to let their kids out of their sight. Everything must be managed or supervised.

I'm an older millennial. My niece and nephew are ten and seven respectively. They live in the same housing development my brother and I grew up in. Lots of kids their own age there, and woodland with town-maintained paths to wander in.

When I was seven I thought nothing of telling my mom "Mom, I'm going out" and getting on my bike and going wherever. Maybe my friend Steve was home. Maybe Priscilla was climbing up that one cool half-fallen tree in the forest. Maybe I'd just pile rocks in the creek.

Fast forward three and a half decades. My brother was complaining to me the other day that my niece wants to hang out with one of her friends all the time and he and said friends parents just don't have time to arrange it all. It turns out her friend lives in the same neighborhood, a quarter mile away.

And I'm like "Why are you arranging anything? Why aren't they capable of coming and going as they please? She can get on her bike and ride there."

He looked at me like I'd proposed throwing his precious angel into a shark tank. Let her wander alone? Unsupervised? Just... out there?

It also turns out, by the way, that my niece is a poor cyclist because she isn't allowed out on her bike without my brother or his wife with her.

My brother and his wife are not unique in this. I have never, ever had a conversation with parents in my age cohort who aren't raising their kids far more restrictively than we ourselves were raised. Everything is monitored. You call them out on it and the near-universal response is "It just isn't safe out there."

Now, my niece and nephew are a bit younger than teens... but with teens it gets even worse, because then their parents are still paranoid about what could happen to them, but also suspicious about what their kids will use their new teen bodies and brains to do to THEMSELVES or to others.

I wonder what percentage of the parents in that survey would be willing to, if their kids asked for the car keys to go hang out with their friends, would hand them over without a down-to-the-second itinerary, a precise list of who will be present, and a stern admonishment that they can track the car on GPS so watch out, mister. I wonder that very much.

Teens have limited agency. They have no money and their lives are controlled. You want to know why they're not doing something? Probably because their parents don't want it done.

And all this is without even getting into "maybe they're hanging out online. Why is being on a group video call in Discord talking about nothing in particular for three hours considered more problematic than hanging out at the mall talking about nothing in particular for three hours?"

(Both my local malls ban unescorted teens, by the way.)

I am an elder millennial who is also a parent and let me tell you: this is not how we want to raise our kids. This is a lifestyle that has been imposed from the top down by an extreme surveillance state. My kids have cell phones, in theory they should be able to wander wherever they want and call for a check in or a ride or whatever, but the truth is that if anyone saw a kid under ten roaming unaccompanied by an adult they would call CPS and if they were over ten they'd call the cops on the kids. There is no longer any community. Neighbors don't talk. Everyone is suspect. This is in spite of the fact that rates of violent crime, especially involving minors, are lower than they ever were back in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up (and a majority of those crimes it turns out we not committed by strangers, but but trusted people that knew the children).

When we lived in town we were literally across the street from a park with a play ground. I could stand on my front porch, see the playground, and call my kids in for dinner. But the one time I let them wander over on their own (with instructions to stay together and come home before dinnertime) another parent at the park called the cops to come knock on my door!!

The only way my kids have been able to have more freedom was moving out to the middle of no where so they can roam the woods behind our house. I can't even begin to unravel how to turn the culture around and allow kids to just be kids in the outside.

I know there's the funny ha ha of a capitalist's worst nightmare of a product being too durable you don't need to replace it, but the situation is actually quite interesting to look into

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/tupperware-brands-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-2024-09-18/

A lot of articles tend to point towards a lack of "relevance" but ultimately that's not what is happening.

One of Tupperware's biggest hurdles is availability, not demand. They previously relied on independent sellers, down to individual independent sellers, like the Tupperware Parties of yore (people, usually women seeking financial independence from the 50s onward, would hold events to sell Tupperware to other suburban women -- similar to Avon). 2022 was the first year Tupperware could be found in places like Target. At All. Their exclusivity and middle(wo)men decreased their reach as the parties became less and less of a thing.

The next issue for Tupperware is in manufacturing. It only has a single US plant (which it now closed) and struggled post-(early)covid to pay for rising costs of plastic and transportation of materials.

THEN Tupperware got fucked by investors trying to make bank first on their success and then also on their failure as they got swept into "meme stock" betting, where inexperienced traders gamble on stock around jokes/irony.

So ultimately, Tupperware has failed to get with the times as it has always relied on suburban lady sales while countless imitation products hit shelves in places where working class people shop for cheaper and sometimes comparable products, the cost to make a good product went up and as Tupperware struggled, investors and gamblers who are addicted to Line Going Up cashed in on betting on their failure rather than success, and because Tupperware is so synonymous with plastic food storage, IP gremlins are more than delighted to crash and burn a company to get it on the cheap and turn it around to make the numbers go back up again.

Rather than a "oh the woe of durability" story, or lament that a product is not used anymore, this is an excellent microcosm of the vulturistic nature of capitalism.

How dare you read the article and add nuance to this headline upon which I may project my grossly uninformed postulations of Our Society and consumer behavior.

I'm so frustrated by the lack of response to the mass psychogenic illness of law enforcement officials claiming to suffer contact fentanyl poisoning. There were a few studies done that quietly concluded that it's not real, none of the cases were credible, and the symptoms most closely resemble a panic attack or somatic episode.

No one is connecting this to systemic issues in police training and culture and no one is treating this as the canary in the coal mine it is.

Modern police training is functionally cult indoctrination, and intentionally cultivates paranoia. Police learn that everyone is out to get them, danger lurks around every corner, and their only job is to make it home alive after their shift.

They then enter the body of police culture, where questioning the bad behavior of fellow officers is at best strictly socially punished and at worst can get them killed, where they are constantly vigilant to say the right things and portray the right beliefs.

Suddenly, after generations of mainstream culture being generally supportive of police, in the midst of an anxiety-riddled pandemic, there is a highly-publicized backlash against law enforcement. Regular people are saying ACAB, calling cops fascists and murderers and wife-beaters. They're posting officers' service records on social media. Police, unwilling to believe they are evil, experience a cognitive dissonance backlash effect and cling to beliefs that contradict reality.

No one should be shocked - and no one should be hesitant to say - that there is a mental health crisis in law enforcement. They are paranoid, hyper-vigilant, and mired in cognitive dissonance. They have guns and virtually unchecked power to enact violence in their communities. Making up delusional stories about fentanyl is a pretty mild outcome compared to what we should be expecting from these circumstances.

Police aren't just bastards. They're a danger to themselves and others.

BTW, for anyone thinking this is an old story, the reason I'm bringing it up now is that it is actively being used to justify denying books, mail, and other documents to people in prison. The entire state of Wisconsin just banned donated books.

Prison staff are having psychogenic episodes they blame on fentanyl, and the response from DOC administration has been to appease and legitimize this hysteria by restricting some of the few freedoms left to incarcerated people. Their reaction should be, "Holy shit, the most vulnerable population in our state is in the care of people who in the midst of a mental health crisis so sever it's causing mass delusions."

Fjord Horse mane styles.

Tradisjonell - Traditional. 

Sørgerand - Funeral band. 

Hjerter - Hearts. 

Hjerter variasjon - Variation of hearts. 

Borg - Castle. 

Enslig midtstol - Lonely black (not sure about english term.)

Drage takker - Dragon spikes. 

Variasjon av Drage takker - Dragon spikes variation.