spent MONTHS looking for this stupid tumblr post bcuz i constantly want to reference it and it wouldn't come up no matter what i searched despite it being (what i thought) was a popular well-known tumblr post only to find that the original blog turned off reblogs and deactivated and that it only got 12k notes total. but im posting it anyway to preserve its legacy

I think that media literacy step one for any video is "why is a camera pointed at this?" If there's no obvious reason for a camera to be pointing that way all the time, someone filmed the video on purpose. We aren't a fly on the wall, we're a deliberate audience.

Heads up, especially if you have trouble with unreality:

I've already started seeing Sora videos pop up on other platforms, so just know that if you see this watermark logo:

the video is AI generated. Some of them can be very convincing, so I just wanted to let people know if you haven't already heard of it.

[image id: a white watermark of a cloud with eyes next to the word Sora.]

i genuinely have no animosity towards ppl who get upset abt not being able to read academic texts + i do think we need to expand the pathways/methods of being exposed to critical concepts so that "sit + read for 2 hours" is not the only option.

however, as someone dx with adhd + incapable of sitting still for even a minute (actually right at this moment i am writing this instead of reading the book sitting open in front of me), i do feel like a lot of ppl do not realize that not all readings are designed to be read like a novel.

as in, it's ok + normal + good to need to reread a paragraph several times, to only read part of a book, to have to research or reference words or concepts in order to grasp the reading, to skip over large chunks of text which are not relevant to your expertise, to continue reading despite not understanding a concept. this is something 'neurotypical' academics do frequently + many of these texts, especially contemporary ones, were designed with this in mind.

there are many ppl with accessibility needs that are not being met by academic texts at this time! many texts (in my humble opinion) are unnecessarily complex in order to show off or hide the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about.

i still feel like many of the kneejerk reactions on this site are based on the assumption that their experience reading academic texts should be similar to their experiences reading a nyt bestseller, rather than a process of thinking, analyzing, researching, processing, returning. some of u are telling yourself that any challenges u face while reading are a result of some internal fault u have + not an expected + precious part of the experience.

REMINDER TO CHECK YOUR BALLS

[Image Description: Testicular Self Exam from the Testicular Cancer Awareness Foundation. Each point is accompanied by an image of the corresponding action.

1. cup one testicle at a time using both hands, best performed during or after a warm bath or shower

2. examine by rolling the testicle between thumb and fingers, use slight pressure

3. familiarize yourself with the spermatic cord and epididymis, tube like structures that connect on the back side of each testicle

4. feel for lumps, change in size or irregularities, it is normal for one testis to be slightly larger than the other

End image description. ]

Certified Sex Ed Post!

Also check Your Tiddies!

[ID: Breast Self Exam graphic. Each point is accompanied by an image of the corresponding action. The points read:

"Once A Month, 2-3 Days After Periods", "Examine Breast And Armpit With Raised Arm", "Use Fingerpads With Massage Oil Or Shower Gel", "Up And Down", "Wedges", "Circles", "Examine Breast In The Mirror For Lumps Or Skin Dimpling", "...Change In Skin Color Or Texture", "...Nipple Deformation, Color Change Or Leaks Of Any Fluids".]

Certified Sex Ed Post!

I want to preface this by saying this is not victim blaming. This not calling people online lazy or grifting or whatever.

But an underlooked proponent on why some people are nearing homeless and crowdfunding heavily rn is bc society has failed you by making it as inconvenient as possible to learn about social systems and programs that already exist to help your situation as well as not having enough programs and aid.

Lemme give some examples. I have been unemployed for 10 months. My mom told me about a paying job training program a month ago after I already decided to mive in with her to find work, because nothing was coming up in my own city. My best friend didn’t know about affordable housing assistance in my state until she talked to my dad about it on a chance encounter. Some people on here have to see posts about much cheaper alternatives to their current prescriptions or medical plans because its not in the interest of their doctors paychecks to tell them about it. I would have waited to get vaccinated and not have crowdfunded for Uber money if I had known they were going to give free vaccine rides the next month. But I wouldn’t have really known this until I opened the app once that program started, because it is in their interest to keep taking my money until its their desired time for me to reap their “generous” services.

What I’m trying to say is that this is an under discussed aspect of how capitalism fails people. When you are forced to make your life and work and finances so singular and self interested, you are cut off from community and equivalent social services to proper government assistance. You literally don’t know that there is help somewhere out there for you unless you’re told.

I believe a professor I had called this “cultural wisdom” but I haven’t been able to find the social science articles that expanded on this. It’s a practical knowledge of local systems that allows someone to function and thrive in that system. The example she used was having an understanding that banks can hold your money, but the practical aspect of accessing your money (in a convenient and easy manor) was knowing about ATMs and how to use them. But unless you have an account or someone ready to inform you, there’s no dedicated time or milestone where someone learns this.

And that’s just with a machine designed to give you YOUR money, let alone complex social service programs.

I want everyone who crowdfunds for hospital bills to know they probably don’t have to oay them at all. Just find the financial aid office of the hospital. It’s on the website BY LAW. Find the form. Fill it out. Get the bills canceled or lowered! You don’t need crowd money, you need the government’s money that’s already set aside for your medical care.

GO TO, MESSAGE, OR CALL YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY. Libraries are focusing more and more on community resources, support, and outreach. If you genuinely don’t know something or feel uncertain or are in a new situation, a reference librarian will not only help you sort your thoughts through their reference interview but then help you arm yourself with knowledge from reliable and often local sources. It doesn’t even have to be a question to Ask A Librarian. You can simply say “I’m in this situation now. I don’t know what to do next./I’m not confident I know everything I should or want to know.”

If you are in America - 211 is your friend. It’s the United Way’s database of social assistance resources. When I was doing resource development for my masters in social work 211 was my holy grail. And there’s things that only workers know about that just calling and asking can reach cuz it sets off the social service phone tree. I will say YOU have to be persistent of you want to access these resources. Most of the ngo agencies are most interested in helping the pro-active clients in my experience. But do use the resources. They’re golden.

what’s more absurd is that we see thousands of ads everyday and literally none of them advertise any of those useful things. we have a gigantic system for communicating things, often tailored to spicifically you, and it won’t be used for what you actually need.

The road to the childrens’ hospital

@swedishfalcon-actual

I hope this joke outlives the context that made it, leaving future generations baffled.

the real answer to almost every "does [identity A] belong in [identity B] spaces" question is actually just "these spaces are informal social groups and if you're cool you can hang, don't worry about it"

Disney really didn't need to give Dana more reasons to hate them but by god they gave her some anyway

HOW TO TURN OFF GOOGLE AI in GMAIL:

Artist By Tamaji

Angel by 糖糖Will

People are so much more sad, and desparate, and lonely than you think. I have had three incidents in the last four months were a technician I was working with was being either dangerously unfocused (we work with high voltage), or just flat out angry with their coworkers, and every time when I just pulled them aside to say hey, this isn't you, you're nice, and you're competent, so something must be up - what can I do to help - they have responded by bursting into tears. One guy was struggling to get his wife moved into a care home, one guy just got served divorce papers, and the other hadn't slept a wink the night before because his daughter had the pukes.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

(I'll step off my soapbox now. Enjoy your Sunday.)

In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

i feel like it bears clarifying it’s not that trans women were a convenient target, it’s from what you said before, that they believe biological sex is the number one reality underpinning everyone, and gender expression is fake, which immediately leads to the conclusion that transgender people are misogynistic for (supposedly) reinforcing the existence of gender, which is inherently oppressive to women. this then takes a variety of forms from there on, but i just think it’s important to stress that the transphobia and transmisogyny of terfs isn’t incidental, it’s intentional

Yeah, so I wrote this a few years back with the goal of trying to get folks to understand why radfem ideology isn't actually driven purely by transmisogyny, and in fact why it's very possible to have what's called a "trans-inclusive radical feminist" (TIRF) or radfems that focus on other targets altogether, like sex workers (SWERF), intersex and asexual people, transmasculine folks anywhere along the spectrum, and anyone who can be spun as "letting the side down" against the real enemy, which is men.

So if it sounds like I'm downplaying the centrality of transmisogyny to modern, post-intersectionality radical feminism in this post, it's very much because I am. I want to teach people what radical feminism looks like in terms of its ideological roots, not in terms of common targets, because radfem groups often switch their targets based on who can be attacked without incurring too much censure right off the bat. I want people to be able to recognize what has essentially become a fascist ideological understanding of gender before it targets a community that they personally recognize as an ally who needs defending. And that means divorcing your understanding of what a community is from its targets.

That being said, you are also right that transmisogyny has never been precisely accidental, and trans women have been a favorite target within feminist and queer feminist groups for going on fifty years now. They really love that whole secretly infiltrating narrative shit.

This is because as far as radical feminism is concerned, gender relations are an ongoing zero-sum, binaristic struggle between men and women in which one side must triumph, and that side better be women. People who complicate this narrative by embracing uncertainty about the dividing line between these two eternally struggling categories become targets because they question whether men and women are actually mutually exclusive and all encompassing categories, whether you can move from one category to another, whether conflicts have to be zero-sum, whether it's not all our responsibility to ally with and support men trying to build a better world for themselves along with women. That's why sex workers are such a common target: the Pornography Wars were driven by arguments about whether it was women's sexual interaction with men that was inherently degrading or whether the actual problem was the poor worker protections and pay scales within the porn industry.

I'm a butch ace woman, okay? Radfems spent at least a decade mobilizing hatred against my community as a radicalization pipeline for feminists, especially queer feminists, in this exact space on Tumblr. I have never been shy about defending trans women when I see them under fire, but I am also not shy about defending other targets, either. So I want (collective) you to be able to see what I'm talking about in terms of a shitty ideology that is tuned to capture people like us, and that means talking about how post-intersectionality radical feminism has a distinct shape of its own that isn't purely a function of transmisogyny.

You know, I want to reblog this today because one of my reading snippets has been making the rounds through radfem spaces, and I keep getting served the most atrociously bad takes. Here's the quote that kicked it off, from feminist historian of the family Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Were:

That's the sum total of the post I released: that quote, Coontz's name and the date her book was last revised (2016).

The thing I find really illustrative about those responses is the sheer level of defensiveness radfems levy at that quote.

I'll add: you get some similar trends with people who, for example, only experience class oppression and see everything through a class-based lens and are convinced that if we just fix income inequality, by golly, surely that'll fix all those other oppressions!

And certainly, class does intersect with other forms of oppression. But, just, it's good to be aware of this tendency in people because it's very easy for people - including you, including me - to think that our own personal experiences and perspective is the Key to Everything, and to thus treat the oppressions other people face as secondary.

Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

Another tip for DDG - if you want to permanently get rid of DDG's AI features (which you can turn off in settings, but only temporarily) - for now you can just use noai.duckduckgo.com as your search engine. Works as advertised in the name.

Holly fucking shit yess! Searching reference is so painfull nowadays so this will help

China was so real for blocking everything Google and only allowing Bing and Duck Duck Go