Hmm

Dear god, I thought shitty modern art would stop at "banana taped to a wall" but now it's escalated to "keep three piglets caged in an art gallery and make them slowly starve to death in front of audiences".

they've been doing that sort of thing for a while, there was one maybe ten years ago where someone displayed a bunch of individual goldfish in powered blenders that the audience could choose to turn on or not

the thing about this sort of stuff though is that the audience response and the audience response TO the audience response is also part of the art, so "me beating your ass in an art gallery for liquifying a fish in front of me" is now a commentary on the the place of individual choice in a larger society.

also someone broke in and stole those piglets, which is an even funnier response, because now this art piece is a commentary on general human decency and there's nothing the artist can do about it

Oh shit they want to be a part of the ‘weird spiritual belief but go off king’ group?

That’s so cool, because no one’s legally required to recognize Therians as their chosen species or Kin people as their chosen fictional characters. It’d be considered kind of fucked up if a Witch came into Congress (lol) and a meeting was put to a stop because one member refused to acknowledge the existence of Nyx. If a Therian insisted on being in a dog pageant (because see, they legally changed their identity to dog. Because the government gave in to that belief because a small collection of them underwent surgery to more heavily resemble a dog to help their species dysphoria and the human government decided that it was more convenient to just say they’re dogs) and won because they can do dog tasks more easily, the reaction would be, ‘this is the dumbest thing imaginable.’

You guys don’t want spiritual weirdo comparisons, because the only thing spiritual weirdos get is vague acknowledgment and the ability to believe in whatever bullshit.

maladaptive daydreaming is more real than gender identity, and it’s a-okay to tell people to kill themselves

honestly - TERF arguments are entirely horseshit. they don’t care about science, they don’t really care about women’s safety. it’s a regressive alt right movement in the garb of a feminist

they’re not sending their best

not even lukewarm but cold take: if you're a childfree woman that experiences opposite sex attraction you should only be with men that are VEHEMENTLY child-free. Men who get a vasectomy or refuse to have any sort of sex without protection. Any man that's on the fence while you're strongly convinced about the fact that you do not want children, will eventually turn on you and want children.

See now I know you’re for sure scrolling through my blog lol.

I mostly think it’s fine to leave the conversation there because A. My information is very likely out of date and while I think anyone in a given industry (especially as a figurehead) is unlikely to talk shit about it because it puts their job security at risk, it’d be useful to hear the current concerns in the industry. And B. On the points that matter I don’t think we particularly disagree. I don’t think any industry should be treated as above scrutiny, especially from left-leaning people and groups. It’s gross seeing how supposed leftists reaction to fucking McDonald’s workers being overworked, underpayed and making a penny on the bosses billions their reaction is rage, they’re indignant and want to fight. But the same people when told about abuses in the sex industry respond with apathy. We should be working harder to stop all exploitation in society in every shape it takes in every industry.

I don’t like Pork, I like kale

”But have you tried my bacon? My bacon is to die for, everyone loves my bacon.”

That’s cool, that a lot of people enjoy your bacon that is. But I don’t like pork, so it probably won’t be nice for me.

“What if I snuck little pork bits inside your kale, you’d probably like it than right?”

No. I don’t like pork so it’d just kind of ruin what’d otherwise be a good meal for me.

“You like chicken with your kale and that’s practically the same as pork!”

… No. Chicken is chicken. They’re both meats I guess but chicken isn’t pork.

“I think everyone secretly likes pork, they just haven’t had it cooked the right way.”

Then your ideas about the world are wrong, because I don’t like pork.

“I totally get what you mean, I’m a Muslim and I’m 100 percent against eating pork! I do crave bacon and pork chops all the time though I mean who doesn’t? Don’t get how you’re into kale though I mostly live on chicken and lettuce.

I don’t crave pork. Because I don’t like it, I do like kale though- it honestly doesn’t seem like you get what I mean at all.

“Oh yeah, I ate pork and found it pretty okay, but than I had kale and it was the bomb! It was so good it made me realize I never liked pork!”

I don’t think kale is just… Better than pork, I straight up don’t like it.

“You know I experimented with kale when I was younger than realized-“

I’m going to blow up the world.

will never get over what happened to the women’s march. the largest single-day protest in the history of the WORLD. 82 countries and 7 million people. an incredible display of female solidarity, hope, strength, and resistance. reduced to “white women in pussy hats.” not by conservatives but by leftists!! who gleefully dismissed this enormous protest because “white women voted for trump.” never mind that the women who attended the march very obviously did not vote for trump. they were all vilified anyway, even though a huge percentage of the protestors and organizers weren’t even white. the whole protest somehow came to be seen as a cringey, frivolous display of white woman privilege. again, the women’s march was GLOBAL and unprecedented in WORLD history. yet it’s pretty much never talked about anymore, except to joke about pussy hats.

I struggle to throw myself into traditional black power spaces not just because they are either unrealistic or overly confident in the power of assimilation. But because in a lot of instances, one of the most core issues is not being properly addressed or solved: the safety and prosperity of black womyn.

Too many times, these groups want to reestablish conservative control of womyn (stay home, have babies, "the black family," stop "acting like a man",) but just hang a pan african flag on them. Never mind that in so many instances, the first man to hurt a black womyn is a black man. Be that in parental neglect, sexual abuse, public degradation, and the ever popular sport of comparing black womyn to other races of womyn. You want this "black family" to preserve the black culture in the U.S. and want to restructure the very framework of the U.S. (which, yes, good) but don't want to chide and punish the men in the movement who are able to commit violence of varying forms against black womyn without much more than a "be better, my brother" or telling his victims to forgive.

I'll get more into traditional black power groups when the black men start whoopin the asses of the other black men abusing their "black queens." But until then, the only black power movements I'm interested in are the ones led by and, at this point, entirely composed of black womyn.

Social Construct Masterpost

I was inspired to make this post because of the mass confusion on tumblr about what social constructs are and how they function. I will start with a simple example:

This is a one dollar bill. It is an excellent example of a social construct. This piece of paper represents a specific amount of spending power in the society that it exists in (the USA). An individual person could decide personally that it represents 1000$ worth of spending power, but it would not matter because like all social constructs, the collective agreement between individuals in society is what determines the meaning of the construct. There are laws on the books about currency but it doesn’t stop society from changing the meaning of a dollar; after all, in times of scarcity a dollar is a much more valuable asset than in times of plenty. The exact value of a dollar is something that fluctuates in tune with other factors, including things like consumer confidence- meaning, how consumers feel about the economy. Social constructs can change based on changes of opinion in the population. 

One way to test if something is a social construct is to remove it from its native society and see if it retains the same functionality. The US dollar is accepted in some foreign countries, but in other places, it is just a piece of paper. 

Another way to test if something is a social construct is to remove people from the picture entirely and see if it retains its functionality. Without people to give a dollar meaning it simply becomes paper. 

Contrast the attributes of a dollar with say, biological sex.

Male humans produce sperm and much higher levels of testosterone than females. Females produce ova and offspring if their eggs are fertilized and implanted. Individuals who are sterile still have either male or female anatomy which serves sexual functions for the individual. Virtually everyone on earth qualifies as one sex or the other, with or without malfunctioning or variations. Is this binary a social construct?

Does the collective agreement of society give male and female organs their functionality? Absolutely not. Humans did not always have an understanding of how pregnancy happened, and yet it happened anyway. Individuals who don’t know about or understand reproduction can and do get pregnant via sex. No matter how many people got together and decided that females inseminate males there would be no change in the function of testes or ovaries. 

The functionality of human reproductive organs is also impervious to cultural or geographical differences. All over the world people get pregnant and have babies by mixing sperm from males with ova from females. There is no exception. 

Removing humans from the equation also has no effect on the biological reality of mammalian reproduction. Male mammals are male, female mammals are female, and only one of the two can give birth. 

Biological sex is not and never has been a social construct.

Another example is gender. Femininity is the easiest example to discuss. Lets look at different examples of femininity from around the world:

As you can see, what it means to be feminine or girly is very different depending upon the society. None of these is the “correct” femininity, just different versions from different cultures. There is no objective way to determine what makes someone feminine in any given culture- you have to ask people. 

The nature of femininity is totally subjective and relies on the collective agreement of society. If you move one of these women into a different society their defining feminine characteristics instead become physical characteristics with no gender designation at all. In fact, what would make you gender conforming in one culture would make you gender non conforming in another. Gender also changes in individual societies over time, so the meaning of being feminine in America in the 1800s would differ markedly from what it means to be feminine in America right now. How people feel about the construct changes its meaning.Thus we can easily say that gender is a social construct.