Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.

pervocracy:

someuphillbattle:

Consent is like….the absolute minimum. Sex can be unhealthy, damaging, and traumatic without being criminal, and you have an ethical, if not legal, responsibility to do everything possible to avoid hurting your partner.

I want to add some examples to this, because I think it’s important to emphasize that this mostly isn’t rocket science, nor is it some vague “just remember to doubt yourself in everything you do!”  It’s stuff like this:

  • Don’t cheat.
  • Don’t expose people to STIs without their knowledge.
  • Don’t take advantage of someone who’s going through a crisis by offering them “sexual healing.”
  • Don’t have sex with a student, employee, or someone who otherwise might not be free to say no to you.
  • Don’t ignore signs that consent is being given reluctantly.
  • Don’t rules-lawyer or look for loopholes in consent.
  • If you know someone is new to an activity that you’re experienced in, don’t throw them in the deep end for their first time
  • Don’t do any of the above to yourself, either.

This isn’t meant to be a complete list or anything, just a sense that this isn’t an abstract topic.  There are concrete examples of how consensual sex can still be unethical.

bigfatscience:

deadmomjokes:

Food is just food and doesn’t have a natural mealtime. This is especially important to remember when you’re dealing with mental illness that makes it hard to eat.

When I’m in a down swing with my depression, I forget to eat/don’t feel like eating. When I do get around to eating, often the only thing I want is something like pancakes, or milk, or apple sauce. And of course it’s 6pm and I feel lame for eating ‘breakfast’ foods. Or it’s 8am and I want fried chicken, and feel like a terrible person for eating dinner at 8 in the morning.

But food is just food. We assign certain foods to certain times of day culturally, but it’s not a biological thing. Your body can digest pizza at 9 in the morning and yogurt at 11pm. Are you eating food? Yes? Then great! It doesn’t matter what ‘kind’ of food you’re eating, as long as you’re nourishing that body of yours. It’s ok to have cheap ramen for breakfast if that’s all you can stand to eat. That’s ok–you ate food today!! That’s a major accomplishment when you’re dealing with an illness that tries to stop you from doing everyday person things. (Especially if you’re recovering from an eating disorder.)

Don’t feel bad if you eat rice for breakfast or muffins for dinner. Food is just food.

Food is just food.

terminalpolitics:

ice-cold-justice:

drtanner-sfw:

vorchagirl:

oh-wow-lovlies:

#GrowingUpUgly
When guys in middle school would get dared by their friends to ask you out and see if you say yes as a joke

How about growingupugly and then turning out sort of okay looking but you don’t know for sure because your self esteem is shot and you’re convinced you look awful?

#GrowingUpUgly
Being so wholly convinced of your hideousness that as an adult you now literally cannot even imagine that someone would pay you a compliment and mean it; the only conceivable thing that could be happening is that they’re either a) taking the piss like the boys in school used to or b) so repulsed by you that they feel sorry for you and are telling you you’re pretty because they think you need to hear it.

Hurts how true this is though

I don’t know if this helps, but I’d like to say it anyway just in case it does.

None of you were ugly.

The other day I found a class picture from fourth grade and I looked everyone in it, and then I saw the “ugly girl” – the one people constantly harassed, whose desk kids would pretend was contaminated, the one kids would invent complex songs about just to voice their disgust toward her.

And she looked like a normal little girl.

She looked no different than the rest of the class.

She was never ugly. And I know that you may be thinking to yourself “but I WAS ugly” – I just want you to consider for a moment that maybe you weren’t.

Maybe you were tormented by your peers for no reason except that they were experimenting with and learning the rules of callous human cruelty that would define the rest of their lives – and recognizing this, the adults who should have protected you, let it happen. Cruelty and social shaming – the foundations of how human beings police their society is learned and it is practiced.

Since I’ve become an adult, I don’t recall ever seeing an “ugly” kid. Kids are all just strange-looking works in progress that the artist seems to have abandoned intending to finish them later.

I want you to think about our racist and unhealthy “standards of beauty”. Are any of the things that society fixates on as “ugly” truly ugly? No. We take things that are beautiful and we associate them with ugliness and badness and coarseness – to control them – to batter the will of the already oppressed down to the point where they think the abuse they receive is justified.

The children who demeaned you were learning to crush the human spirit to the point where the target internalizes all that hate and keeps hating themselves even when the bullies are no longer there. Those children were learning the sadism that defines our social hierarchy – we live in a culture where success is achieved through exploiting others.

No one deserves to be treated that way. LGBT children shouldn’t grow up ashamed of themselves. Black children shouldn’t grow up thinking white children are inherently prettier.

You were not ugly. You were told you were ugly so that people could have an “excuse” to target you, to ostracize you, to other you, and to abuse you.

An “ugly child” wouldn’t know they were ugly until someone TOLD them they were. They don’t grow up ugly, they grow up emotionally abused.

And still if you feel that you were the exception and you were objectively and unquestionably so ugly as a child that everyone noticed – even if you feel you are still that ugly now…

That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve love. It doesn’t mean you won’t find love, and trust and happiness.

You are worthy of respect. You have worth. You have value.

And if the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice your worth – look at the evil and vile things the world does value and count yourself lucky not to be among that number.

There are people who will see your worth. There are people who will look at you and not see “ugliness” – they will see a friend, a mentor, a hero and even, yes, a lover.

If no one else says it today, and even if you can’t say it yourself, I would like to tell you that you are not ugly. That you were not ugly. That you did nothing wrong. That you did not deserve to be treated the way that you have been and that you deserve happiness and love and respect. And you will find it.

perpetual-allegory:

I kind of wish that the idea that you can just be was a little more mainstream.

Like, having drive and ambition is great. But it gets drilled in kids’ heads that there is some pressure to constantly be looking for the next move up, to be bigger than life. It wears you down to never be satisfied.

Not everyone is destined for greatness. It just doesn’t suit some people.

There’s nothing wrong with having a quiet life, making enough to get by, having a small apartment where you’re comfortable, and just living. You don’t have to constantly be looking to go onward and upwards. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to just be.

In order to stop the culture of faking orgasms, we need to stop the culture of shaming others for their sexual experiences.

fayedaniels:

silkbox:

  • Can’t get your partner off on the first try? Cool. You can still be thoughtful and make them feel good.
  • Can get your partner off within 30 seconds? Awesome, good for you both, don’t let it get to your head.
  • Can make someone cum in less than 5, but for others, it’s a process that takes an hour? That’s alright, everyone’s different. 
  • Does it take you 30 minutes to cum? That’s okay, you’re not broken, you’re not a failure.
  • Does it take you 10 seconds to cum? That’s great, you’re not a slut, you’re not overly sensitive or dirty. 
  • Can’t cum without toys/vibrators? That’s awesome, that’s a valid part of sexual play!
  • Can only cum with loving, vanilla sex? That’s perfectly normal, and you will find lots of great partners to experience that with!
  • Can’t orgasm at all? THAT’S ALSO COOL. It’s not a bad thing, you can still enjoy sex TONNES just like others.

Orgasms are NOT the defining characteristic of your sexual prowess. They are great, they’re lovely when they happen, but for the love of science, stop bringing them up higher than they need to be. 

I wish I had this post when I was 18

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Anonymous: genuine question: why do you not like people refering to lucio specifically as "boy"? tumblr tends to call every character boy/boi especialy since the mcelroys became popular so what is it about lucio in particular that isnt good to call him boy
Avatar
raptorific:

The short answer: it’s because he’s black and the people doing it are largely white and there’s cultural baggage surrounding white people using the words “boy” and “son” to address black men. 

The long answer starts out with the idea of tonedeafness and a fandom phenomenon that crops up when predominately white fanbases are exposed to dimensional, compelling characters of color. The same thing happened with Star Wars and Pacific Rim and so many other diverse franchises lately. 

A lot of the time, white fans are genuinely not trying to be racist, but most of their faves up to this point have been white, and they haven’t considered that perhaps the way they write and talk about those faves would take on different implications when the characters’ race is considered. 

For instance, and I get in trouble a lot for bringing this up, but a few months ago there was a Disney AU fanart of Finn and Rey from Star Wars as Tarzan and Jane. Now, in the movie, Tarzan and Jane are both white, but in the art, the impact changes because Finn is a black man and the artist drew him as an animalistic ape-man who meets a delicate high-class British woman who “civilizes” him. Obviously the Tarzan/Jane dynamic has a very VERY different meaning if Tarzan is depicted as black and Jane is depicted as white, and it is in fact racist to depict Finn that way even if it wouldn’t even be the smallest problem to draw, say, Iron Man and Pepper Potts in the same exact situation. (Also if anyone is Tarzan in that pairing, it’s Rey, but I digress)

So you get these situations where people are trying to do the stuff they always do for all characters, only their faves have mostly been white up to this point so they’ve never really had to consider the racial implications of the stuff they say and write about those characters. That’s why they draw D.Va as an infant without realizing that the infantilization of East Asian women is actually a harmful racist practice, and then when informed of this fact, instead of saying “oh shit, I didn’t know I was contributing to that! Thanks for telling me, I’ll stop doing it,” they get defensive and claim that actually it doesn’t matter if the end product is 100% identical to racism, because they didn’t intend for it to be racist, that’s not what they were trying to do.

Also, generally speaking, they don’t do the same thing to white characters. While jokes at the expense of Soldier: 76 and Zarya are usually things like “he’s old and grumpy” or “she’s really strong,” jokes about Reaper are more like “he’s got a huge dick and he’s abusive and a rapist” and jokes about D.Va are usually “she’s a dirty and mischievous subhuman creature and the white guy is like her dad.” The fact that a lot of people make all these jokes and think they’re roughly equivalent speaks to how much unconscious racism they’ve got to purge from their system. 

Alright, so now that we understand that, let’s get into a little more of why “boy” and “son” in particular are not the sort of thing you should not call Lucio. 

The first and main reason is that he’s a grown man, aged 26, but more importantly, he is a black man. Historically, the words “boy” and “son” have been used on black men for two reasons: 

  1. Because even grown black men were to be treated as childlike under white supremacy, esp. under slavery, and even after the abolition of slavery, the words “boy” and “son” are still used in order to talk down to black men. You will still frequently catch younger white people address black men older than them as “boy” or “son,” especially in a service capacity (i.e. a black waiter or employee at a store). Under slavery, the dominant white supremacist narrative was that even the smartest black people were only on the level of white children, which is obviously a complete falsehood fabricated to justify their continued subjugation by saying “they’d be lost without us.” So, by referring to black men as “boy” or “son,” that’s the message that was being communicated, that even though any given black person is grown, they’re still viewed as roughly mentally equivalent to children. 
  2. A lot of slaveowners didn’t feel it was worth it to learn the individual names of their slaves, so they would simply address them as “boy” or “son” (or “girl” or a variety of other degrading names for women) and this practice continued even after the abolition of slavery. Again, calling back to the “black waiter” situation I referred to earlier, you still sometimes see white patrons referring to black employees as “boy” or “son” in this way. For older people, they would use the terms “Auntie” and “Uncle” as a way to deny them honorific titles such as “Mister” and “Miss,” which is where we get mascots like “Aunt Jemima” and “Uncle Ben,” both of whom were derived from this practice. A similar example is how a lot of white railroad passengers wouldn’t bother to learn the names of their car’s porter and would simply call them all “George,” which again sort of demonstrates my point: the name “George” isn’t inherently racist, lots of people have that name, but to call a black guy doing their job that carries different implications even if you “didn’t mean it that way.”

So generally, there’s nothing wrong with the words “boy” or “son” most of the time, but when you address a black man this way, it carries a whole different implication. I’m not trying to condemn anyone morally or say “you’re evil if you’ve ever used these words about Lucio” or anything, but back to the beginning of this:

I am assuming you all have positive intent, that you are all well-meaning and that you are definitely not trying to be racist. Because of this, I feel like it’s my responsibility to tell you when a thing you’re saying carries meanings that you maybe didn’t consider and definitely didn’t mean to imply. I know I would feel foolish and guilty if I found out something I’d been saying casually actually had a racist meaning that I wasn’t aware of, so I just want to say that if anyone reading this is (like me) a white person who’s really truly well-intentioned and doesn’t mean to be racist at all, your response here should be “oh wow, I didn’t know that Boy and Son are names you generally shouldn’t call black people, I’ll be more conscious of that in the future,” and if your response is to become defensive and try to prove that it isn’t bad because you didn’t mean it “that way,” it either means you aren’t well-intentioned and do mean to be racist OR it means you didn’t read the post. 

That being said, I’m happy to inform where I can, but I’m also not black, and a lot of black writers have explained this a lot more eloquently than me. I suggest you do some googling and research what they’ve said on the subject, because I’m sure they’ll give you a clearer picture than I possibly can. 

hobbitsaarebas:

The same problems are also true for shipping and the depiction of sexual dynamics. For example, let’s say your OTP is Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes and your headcanon is that Steve is 100% a bottom and Bucky 100% an aggressive top. That’s fine and dandy, they’re two white muscular cis dudes so it’s a matter of personal preference and interpretation. Now let’s say your OTP is Sam Wilson/Steve Rogers and you headcanon Steve as 100% a bottom and Sam as 100% an aggressive top. These two OTPs and headcanoned dynamics are not equivalent at all in terms of value and acceptability, because there are awful racist stereotypes about Black men as tops, and especially about Black men topping white people. Many sexual dynamics can get really ugly really fast when fans (white fans mostly do this) drop characters of color into a dynamic that’s fine between white characters. 

There is also a big difference between altering someone’s canonical straight sexual orientation to make them gay/bi, versus altering a character of color’s canonical preference for dating other people of color in order to ship them with white characters. T’Challa is an example of this - shipping T’Challa with Natasha Romanoff or Bucky Barnes is not the same as shipping him with Storm or Sam Wilson. The first set of pairings tends to show up from white fans and be about about white fantasies of having unlimited access to places and people we have no right to. The second set of pairings is about actual shipping. If you prefer T’Challa with Sam rather than Storm, that’s personal preference in terms of m/f versus m/m ships. But if you’re white and prefer T’Challa with Natasha rather than Storm, that’s when the racism tends to start showing up. 

kyuubified:

kyuubified:

Whenever I see breast cancer awareness campaigns that sexualize breasts/place the importance of breasts over the person suffering from breast cancer I remember this story I read on a cancer forum of a woman who had a double mastectomy and how a little after she got dropped off by her husband at the clinic for a checkup and he never came to pick her up, and how she eventually took a cab home and he had taken all his things and just LEFT

and multiple stories from other women who had mastectomies and how their husbands either left them, cheated on them, or were no longer attracted to them because they didn’t have a breast/breasts anymore. And that shit makes me so mad. You can argue all you want that they’re isolated cases but this is what happens when you put the importance on the sexualization of breasts over the well being of the survivor. The person suffering from cancer is ALWAYS, ALWAYS going to be more important. Treatment for cancer is so fucking difficult, it’s both physically and psychologically torturous and the fact that these people survived these ordeals only to deal with this misogynistic dehumanizing shit makes me want to fucking fight everyone. It makes me so goddamn mad. 

It’s breast cancer awareness month so I’m bringing this back. Fuck your “save the tata’s” shirt; save, support, and love the people fighting this awful disease. They are so beautiful and so, so important and deserving with or without breasts.  

kendralynora:

when will ppl realise that “enemies to lovers” is when two ppl on two separate sides of an issue eventually come together through a common understanding IT IS NOT a man with no respect for a woman relentlessly wearing her down after multiple rejections until she eventually caves in as a result of an unhealthy sexist social norm that was drilled into her head her whole life