What am I doing?

Please appreciate this pic of me loosing my mind over this fish I caught.

Office mayhem on every Friday

So, there's apparently research coming out now about microplastics being found in people's bloodstreams and the possible negative effects of that and I feel the need to get out ahead of the wave of corporate sponsored "be sure to recycle your bottles!" or "ban glitter!" campaigns and remind everyone: It's fishing nets. It's fishing nets. It is overwhelming fishing nets It always has been fishing nets. Unless regulations are changed, it will continue to be fishing nets. The plastic in the ocean in largely discarded nets from industrial fishing. The microplastics are the result of these nets breaking down. The "trash islands" are also, you guessed it. Mostly fishing nets and other discarded fishing industry equipment. Do not allow them to continue to twist the story. Do not come after disabled people who require single use plastics. Do not come after people using glitter in art projects and makeup. These things make up a negligible amount of the issue compared to corporate waste, specifically in the fishing industry. Do not let them shift the blame to the individual so they can continue to destroy the planet and our bodies without regulation.

Industries are incredibly resistant to taking responsibility for their own waste, to the point where “consumers are responsible for industrial waste” is somehow considered a sensible, ethical, worthy sentence.

It is actually perfectly reasonable to say that “industries are responsible for industrial waste” and “the effects of industry can, should and must be fixed by industry” and “Industry can, should and must be held responsible for its impacts on the commons, such as air, water, oceans and land.”

Do you know how much ocean plastic waste is straws?

Something like 0.0007%.

IT’S NOT EVEN ONE ONE-HUNDREDTH OF A PERCENT.

But they want you to hate the disabled people who need safe and bendable and sanitary plastic straws in order to be able to drink. So you won’t notice the 70+% that’s fishing nets.

Today’s Gender of the Day doesn’t matter, really

always worth it <3

SOMEONE FINALLY PUT IT INTO WORDS!!!

guYS THE FUCKING SIGNS

We need to bring back the term “benevolent sexism” into widespread use for real. It’s a major mechanism in how bioessentialist Girlboss Radfems can be turned into bioessentialist conservative Tradwives.

I’m not actually interested in the bad faith radfem readings of this post where I get called an incel pervert (????). But I will be donating a lot of money to trans organizations and blocking all the radfems in the notes, because I don’t think it’s worth speaking to people whose position is that their politics are incorruptible and anyone who critiques them is wrong (and having incel fantasies???? What???)

I do want to talk about how there’s a lot of radical feminists in the notes acting like men doing small nice things for women like opening doors is what benevolent sexism is. It’s not, and I don’t want anyone who’s new to the term getting confused.

“Benevolent sexism” refers to sexism that masks itself as complimentary and beneficial to women. That might include holding open doors, but that’s a tiny and useless example. The bigger part is putting women on a pedestal as kind, innocent, safe, pure, etc, often in contrast to the roughness and violence of men. That used to be a major argument against women voting and engaging in politics, that they needed to be protected from something so rough, dirty, and corrupt. That’s where the similarities to radical feminism comes in.

Let me expand on my original thought:

Gender/sex essentialist radical feminists/TERFs and traditional sexism conservatives share many of the same basic beliefs about the world. Men are inherently rough, violent, and sexually aggressive where women are kinder, gentler, and inherently safer to be around. That’s benevolent sexism. Traditional sexists turn this into a belief that women must be protected by men from the world, so women must have husbands to shelter them from the world (ie control them). There’s also strands of outright misogyny that come with traditional sexism, but this post is long enough. Radfems turn this into a belief of separatism from men, which is interesting because many sexist and misogynistic societies do practice many kinds of separation between men and women.

Any radfem who’s insecure or unsure in her beliefs, who’s attracted to men, or who thinks she knows a good man is vulnerable to traditional sexist beliefs because she’s already accepted the same base premise. She just needs to change her mind about rejecting men entirely (which can be a struggle when you’re attracted to men or have men close to you in your life) to the idea that she can pick a Good Man(tm) to protect her. A person who jumps out of one set of radical beliefs can easily overcorrect in the other direction, as well. This is what sets up radfems who do become tradfems.

It’s a lot easier for benevolent sexism to slip into queer and feminist spaces in general, which is part of why it’s important to talk about it. The traditional sexist role for women is posed as subservient to that of men, but it’s still often posed as good, honorable, necessary, etc. If you’re willing to accept anything that paints women in a positive light into your feminist spaces, then it becomes easy to let benevolent sexism slip in.

The fundamental belief of feminism about women should be the women are human beings, people, not that women are inherently good. Any type of feminism that rejects that (as transphobic and separatist strands tend to) becomes vulnerable to benevolent sexism.

Bringing back this post in the context of 52% of white women who voted doing so for Trump. Benevolent sexism, the promises and pedestals patriarchy offers as its bait, is definitely a part of some of that.

In my area, I only heard "benevolent sexism" as "if you are a special kind of woman, you'll be able to to join the lower ranks of men, who are required to trample upon other men and women. E.g. upper-middle class women trampling on the poor men and women and the minorities.", so your part is absolutely going to be my new usage of the term! Thank you.

Good to know! I first ran into it while learning about the suffrage movement and the paternalistic framing of keeping women from voting as protecting their “goodness” by keeping them away from dirty politics, so it’s interesting to hear about other contexts.

I do think that benevolent sexism tends to come into the Madonna-Whore complex where there are good, wonderful, perfect, pure women and then tainted, fallen women, so it certainly can enable certain women to become enforcers of sexism and other -isms from their pedestal of being seen as Pure, Angelic creatures. But to get pedestal treatment, they still do have to be middle class, white, cishet, etc, and perform feminine gender roles that put them as subservient to men.

This also goes for things like 'divine femininity' and 'women are mystical creatures that need herbs based on their menstruation and not western medicine' etc etc.

Yes medicine has large gaps regarding qualitative treatment of bodily systems generally associated with women. No that doesn't make women ~mystical aliens~ that need completely different things than regular humans (men).

once i was presenting research at a conference where everyone who received money from a specific grant had to go to basically be like “and here’s what we’re doing with your money.”

and there was a team there presenting on astrophysics and I truly barely understood a thing they said. my team was there to talk about salamander eDNA, and the juxtaposition between Space Math and swabbing salamanders with cotton-tips just struck me as deeply funny.

Later some of the Space people came by and asked us all about the salamanders and one of them said, “I can’t imagine working with animals and water. It’s all so messy. I don’t know how you stay sane with those variables?”

And I was like, “dude I didn’t even know the math you talked about today even existed.”

And we were both just like 🤝 “love your work. huge fan. I’d rather die than do it though.”

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

Female Power Romantasy novels can be indulgent as they like with giving the MC all the powers and hottest love interests and overcomplicated backstories, and I will cheer that on. Yes, there is a place for this! I see your vision, girl!

But the moment it starts talking about blood purity, her divine right to rule, and how ubermensch her babies will be with the man with the equally super special bloodline? You're doing girlboss eugenics at that point.

This blew up, so let me explain.

"Specialina has rare squirrel blood passed down from the time a secret ancestor married a squirrel god. This gives her super powers to climb trees and find nuts!" 👍👍👍 Inheritable traits are a thing after all.

"Because Specialina has rare squirrel blood, she is entitled to rule over the rodent kingdom, and if she is kept from her rightful throne bestowed by her ancestry, the vile rat people will continue to corrupt the land." ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Oops, no one is entitled to rule over others, especially through genetics. And think about why a certain group of people is your designated "evil" race.

"Specialina's love interest is McBroody, a man with rare rabbit powers. With both squirrel blood who have domain over the skies and rabbit blood who have domain over the land, their children will have domain over everything and become the most powerful beings on earth who will bring the kingdom eternal balance, thus the evil rat people do everything to keep these two apart." 🛑🛑🛑 STOP. DO NOT PASS GO. THINK ABOUT WHY THE HAPPY ENDING OF YOUR FEMALE POWER FANTASY IS HAVING GENETICALLY SUPERIOR BABIES.

Wizard Ritual to Appease The Bone Snake

If you have not supplicated yourself to The Bone Snake today, do so now

If you do not bow to The Bone Snake now, The Bone Snake will force to you to be bowed forever

I had a good home life growing up and looooved to read. My parents encouraged it and would take me to the library, let me spend hours at book stores (at my request, they were very bemused by it) and gift me book money every birthday. If anything my adult anxiety is what took away that joy and makes it way harder to read like I did when I was young. Reading Rainbow didn’t work so hard to teach us that books take any person of any background of any culture to fun wonderlands and teach creativity so people can turn around and say that the only people who are reading are those that need an escape, though even if some kids did use it that way, it’s the healthiest way they could do so. Every child deserves the joy of reading, whether they are struggling or doing good. Protect libraries with your life.

Talking to my mom last night about the wedding we’re all going to in 2 weeks and she says “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a non Catholic wedding!”

And I’m like “well Rachel and Becca’s wedding wasn’t a Catholic wedding”

And she says “I guess that didn’t really register as a wedding to me”

And I’m here, ready to have a real hard conversation with my mom about homophobia and Recognizing others and as I’m having this spiral this bitch goes “cause it was outside”

So good news, my mom doesn’t give two fucks if you’re gay, straight, bi, pan, etc but get yo ass married in A HOUSE with a ROOF or it will not register with her

I guess you could say... you could say she is... erm... Home-ophobic

STOP 😂