Hey So "all Men Are Trash" Posts Help Terfs

I’m just saying that maybe it wouldn’t have turned out quite as bad.

this is important. And if you can sew, even badly, you can do surprising amounts of alteration yourself

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

also I noticed a lot of people (i.e. liberals) framing the discussion around love and violence as if fighting oppression or oppressors (including in immediate self-defense) was somehow antithetical to being a loving person, or to being committed to loving ourselves and other people in our communities, or to recognising love as a revitalising and necessary force in activism and in life in general, such that we need to utterly shun violence as something that’s always morally reprehensible (and thus, to shun people who commit violence in self-defense as morally reprehensible) in order to be capable of love

and I started thinking about how a lot of edgy radicals & leftists essentially agree with this but in the opposite direction–as if we need to utterly shun love as a necessary & revitalising force in order to be capable of revolutionary action or self-defense

in the same way that liberals will say “we must love and see the humanity in our oppressors, so that we cannot use violence against them even if we are ourselves the targets of violence” (or–more likely, since these kinds of people aren’t likely to be people who have ever been seriously targeted by violence–”more immediately & materially marginalised people shouldn’t use violence even if they are themselves the targets of violence”), edgy radicals will say “we must be prepared to use violence against our oppressors, and therefore we must hate and demonise them, as if they are somehow essentially, ontologically evil by virtue of their identities.” & I think that both of these approaches are fundamentally misguided

of course we must be prepared to use violence in self-defense against institutions that commit violence against us–but ultimately, the basis of revolution or whatever cannot be hatred and it cannot be the romanticisation of violence for the sake of violence (and again, a lot of these edgelord-y people have probably never been seriously targeted by violence, don’t have bodies that are marked out for violence–they just like the thrill of it all). it has to be love–love for ourselves & each other & for the future that we have to believe is possible–& that will include love for the people who used to be our oppressors. because otherwise what is the point?

to me “love your oppressor” doesn’t mean that you can’t fight back against violence and it doesn’t mean that you can’t hate the people who hate you or else you’re just as bad as they are and it doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry… what it does mean is that you have to have some kind of fundamental respect & empathy for people’s humanity

it means that, rather than just assuming that all white people are evil by some kind of mystical biological necessity and thus The Revolution requires killing them all or something (I’ve seen this suggested, which is… terrifying), you’ve got to try to understand the material and psychological factors that play into white people behaving in the way that they do (such as, applying class analysis to the racism of poor whites–see, the psychological wage of whiteness, etc.). that attempt at understanding is what I mean by “empathy”

and of course this has a necessary practical function in addition to a theoretical and psychological one–because how can you hope to fight a system that works to fragment and divide the people whom it oppresses without understanding & fighting against the reasons for that fragmentation?

so in all of these ways I see the willingness to empathise & love and the willingness to fight against oppression, not as antithetical, but absolutely necessary to, each other.

For his death. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was an OD. (please no one take this out of context, I’m not conceding the point) Cops see a LOT of people on every kind of drug. From putting people in jail overnight for public intoxication to people on PCP trying to fly off buildings. Dealing with this is part of their job, just as much as dealing with criminals is. I’m not saying they have to be able to recognise every single drug reaction, but it IS part of what they routinely deal with. And being on drugs does not carry the death penalty in the US of A. So if someone’s actively dying of an overdose, (or an epileptic seizure, or a heart attack), you do not continue to kneel on that person, you stabilise them and call the paramedics. Again, because being high does not mean that you forfeit your right to life. Sure, if, hypothetically, he did OD it would have been a complicating factor. They may have been confused to some extent. But this isn’t an out-of-left-field occurrence they couldn’t possibly have been aware of. It’s a large part of their job. It wouldn’t absolve them.

for what?

Dear tumblr, have we heard about the sweeping reforms announced by the new LA DA?? Because I read a thread by the guy this morning that actually made me weep.

I’m very very sad because as a kid I had learned that Thomas Pynchon was really good (I knew this from oral tales about books he had written, from fellow high school students knowing about him in hushed tones)

Then I discovered he was a crackpot and an eccentric and he thought that he was Jesus Christ’s replacement (I’m paraphrasing here)

And then I found out he was a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, reactionary zealot, he’s the guy who wrote V for Vendetta

And now I’m wondering if he’s ever going to stop being an interesting, unique and ultimately terrible human being

#if you’re a us citizen of course 

Do this now.

Do this now.

Take a pause from President Trump’s latest outrage (sending federal police to foment violence in U.S. cities in hopes that it will help his flagging campaign) or inanity (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) — and do the only thing guaranteed to end the nightmare.

Go to Vote.org, or, if you are reading this in the dead-tree edition, type vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote into your browser, spend 30 seconds entering your name, address and date of birth, and you’ll find out instantly if your voter registration is current. If not, follow the instructions to register.

Next, click this link or type vote.org/absentee-ballot into your browser, and sign yourself up to receive an absentee ballot for the November election. That takes about two minutes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/24/stop-fretting-about-trump-do-something-about-it-right-now/

I was just staring at my cat playing with a ball of yarn yesterday and just realized, just now, that two of my cat’s out of nine lives were devoted to playing with balls of yarn

hey what if we didn’t combine dozens of unrelated political positions into two color-coded options