Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
The 2nd Amendment is no longer the right to bear arms. The 2nd Amendment has become the right to take lives. The 2nd Amendment is no longer aiding citizens. The 2nd Amendment is now abetting murderers.
When the laws don’t work, the laws must change.
Well, clearly you failed 9th grade Social Studies.
You know… I honestly don’t remember how did in 9th grade Social Studies?
I did okay majoring in Political Science and American Government in undergrad though. I graduated summa cum laude so I figure I must have learned something?
Law school also went alright I guess? I did somehow manage to get an article about the constitutionality and modification of excessive force laws through out the 50 states placed in a national publication. And I also managed to pass the Bar Exam.
But yeah it’s totally possible I failed 9th grade social studies tbh. I was a little shit when I was 15 and gave no fucks.
Futhermore: “tumblr” as you experience it is defined entirely by whom you’re following. If you think tumblr doesn’t focus enough on recovery or female artists or Jason Momoa, follow some recovery/female artists/Jason Momoa blogs, and tumblr will change.
THIS. People are always going on about “tumblr is so toxic” like there’s a singular tumblr experience and we’re all helpless to escape it. UNFOLLOW PEOPLE. If someone’s putting bullshit on your dash, just unfollow them. Follow new people. It really is that simple. Tumblr is what you make it.
why is there such a stigma against wearing pads? like why is it that people who wear tampons are seen as ‘strong’ and ‘cool’? y’all know that someone people can’t wear them bc it hurts them or that they just don’t like them? stop making it seem like people who wear pads are childish and weak compared to those who wear tampons
Ok kids buckle up because I know the answer to this question because I am a bitter, vindictive person.
So my first semester of PhD work in a musicology program involved this horrible class with a professor that wanted to suck the life out of all of his students by constantly belittling them. We had to write a short paper each week and present them conference-style and then he would tear us to shreds and do it all over again next week. The purpose of the class was supposedly to have us write papers about materials that hadn’t really been looked at by musicologists yet, and my class had music in advertisements. I was also the only woman in the class and the prof was lowkey sexist so I kept trying to do feminist topics without losing my entire will to live.
So we get to the end of the semester and I am just completely out of fucks, I have one paper left to write and I say fuck it, let’s write about pads and tampons, there must be something there, right? It turns out there IS something to be said there (and this gets back to OP’s question). Early pad and tampon commercials were very similar to each other; basically here’s a product to help you stay clean during your period. But around 1980, suddenly there’s public outcry and panic over tampons due to TSS (Toxic Shock Syndrome). At that point no one really understood how TSS worked but they knew it had to do with tampons. So women freaked out and started switching to pads instead. Now the worst offender, Rely, was taken off the market and other tampon commercials got slapped with little warning signs like “This product could cause TSS” so women bought even fewer tampons. This is when the advertising strategies for the two products changed.
Pad advertisements were now about “cleanliness” and “purity” - they knew you couldn’t get TSS from pads and they were going to emphasize that fact. You’ve got women in white dresses with long hair slowly walking through fields of flowers with pastoral-y flutes in the background. And to fight back, tampon companies take it the complete opposite direction - they ignore TSS entirely and start showing businesswomen running to catch the subway, sporty women riding bikes, basically any sort either high-powered position or active woman showed up in these commercials with contemporary pop-song type music over the top. The clear intention was “yeah we know that these could cause TSS but they’re much better for your mobility, both physically and career-wise.”
I got done giving this paper and I look up to see my four male classmates and one male professor in varying shades of pale-ness and they just all sort of looked at me for a couple minutes without knowing how to respond. It’s one of the proudest moments of my PhD career so far.
Anyway the two products have been advertised basically the same ways ever since then. Now pads are much more comfortable and discreet, and we understand how TSS works and how to avoid it, but the commercial strategies are cemented. If you want to be a strong, on-the-go woman of COURSE you’ll wear a tampon because you don’t want to be one of those sissy ladies in the pastoral field of flowers over in pad-land, do you?
people are not being homophobic by identifying as queer.
people are not forcing the word queer on you or anyone else by identifying as queer.
people identifying as queer does not affect you, it does not hurt you, and it is in absolutely no way your place to tell them to stop identifying as queer because doing so is queerphobic and disgusting. a queer person’s identity is not dependent on your approval.