ykno the thing about poetry is that 99% of it is bullshit and the other 1% will cut you like a material knife, and for every person that 1% is a different section of the whole. this is probably true about all art.
“In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. ‘The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.’
As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture.”
“First season of LEVERAGE - so he’s 21 years old - he shows me his watch designs. I’m expecting, y’ know, celebrity strap branding or faces. No, it’s engineering schematics of GEARS and shit. Pages of them. Even then, there were none so cool.” - John Rogers
[Original post found here. All content following is authored by the maker of Big Liberty, the source blog.]
DISCLAIMER: This links list is always in the works, and is not comprehensive or complete. If evidence is not listed, it doesn’t mean it does not exist. If you have any links to add, please insert them in relevant comments and they will be reviewed.
For a general resource on debunking the junk science behind obesity, please see:
Study: Children are likely to become overweight by mimicking behaviors of obese parentsNOTE: The study did not in fact show that children become overweight by mimicking the behaviors of fat parents, despite that scare-headline. It just showed that fat parents are much more likely to have fat children — which makes sense, given body weight is 77% heritable (July 13, 2009, NYDailyNews, USA)
Global governments must get ‘tough on obesity,’ in which the commentariat helpfully suggests plus-size clothing be ‘prescription-only,’ amongst other astoundingly panicked and bigoted replies (August 25, 2011, BBC Health, UK)
Kim Kitsuragi should be the new LoFi girl but for exclusively the world’s worst grindcore. with your help i can make this happen
songs are, in order: Dick to Mouth Resuscitation by Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Caring About Anything Is Gay by Anal Cunt, Anal Party by Clitgore (off the very-well-named The Final Cuntdown), and Needles by System of a Down
Agnes Herczeg ; artist research ; inspiration for the weaving project.
Agnes was born in Kecskemét in Hungary. In 1997 she graduated from the Hungarian university of Fine Arts, majoring in textile conservation. She has extensively studied embroidery and lace making, using materials of only natural, vegetable origin, for eg. yarns, threads, tree branches, roots, fruits and seeds.
it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
It’s also super a capitalism thing.
With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.
The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.
Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.
this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity
In addition to the above factors scorning non-nuclear family households, there is a load of racism pointed at living arrangements including more than 2 adults.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and nearly every multi-gen/extended family (who were rarely ever white) in my quiet, uniformly lower-middle-class neighborhood was thought of as “dirty” and “taking advantage” of “the system”. The defacto impression was these households were drug dealing or otherwise out of control.
The amount of surveillance that white folks dedicated to the comings and goings of a BIPOC multi-adult household was disgusting, and this was *before* Next Door. And despite me being white, people often made clear to me that my own multi-gen household wasn’t How It Was Done because that’s what Those People did.
The “nuclear” family is part of the toxic waste of the latter half of the 20th century. I’d say “kill it with fire,” but nuclear waste is not destroyed by fire.
Not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, etc.
Capitalism loves the nuclear family because it prevents people from pooling resources. In a nuclear family, you need one washing machine for every two adults. You need a blender, a set of screwdrivers, a hammer, a plunger, a bunch of cooking pots of different sizes, a stove. You need scissors. If you sew, you need a machine, no matter how rarely you use it. You need a hairdryer. A refrigerator. Ice trays. A carving knife. A set of steak knives. Measuring cups. Bandages. Cough medicine. Ibuprofen for headaches. A hot water bottle. Ice packs. Skin lotion.
You need 1 netflix subscription per two adults. 1 internet service subscription. 1 automobile. (Maybe more than 1 automobile.) 1 rental payment or mortgage.
No splitting those things among 3 or 4 or 7 people, nope nope nope. No having a shared bottle of lotion that everyone uses until it’s gone - no, if 4 households each have their own, odds are, a third of the lotion is going to waste before it gets used. And even if not, we’re selling 4 smaller, pricier bottles instead of 1 big one.
No buying rice in 15-lb or 25-lb bags; please buy rice in 1-lb bag for just the two of you. Do not share tools; we want a lawnmower in every garage, not one that’s shared by the whole neighborhood. We want everyone to have a car, not 2 cars shared by 7 adults and 9 teenagers with different schedules. Please rent a truck from a stranger if you need to move; don’t borrow one from the guy down the block who runs a landscaping business.
Buy your kids new clothes every year or so as they outgrow them. Do not pool resources with neighbors and share clothes outgrown, clothes of styles or fabrics that one child doesn’t like but another does. Also we’re going to color-code the toys by gender so you need to buy a complete set for GIRL and another complete set for BOY; they must not share them, because then you’re not likely to buy two sets.
Absolutely do not arrange childcare among multiple adults with varied schedules. Do not arrange children of different ages spending time together, playing and learning from each other; we need the alienation that comes with children thinking they can never have a casual conversation with anyone more than a year older or younger than themselves.
Do not arrange for teens to help care for disabled elders who just need help getting out of a bed or chair. You need to hire a professional for that. Do not arrange for elders to watch over toddlers who just need someone to make sure they don’t climb out of the playpen for an hour while parents are shopping. You need to hire a professional for that.
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.
