I owe disability theory a great deal when it comes to my understanding of the insidiousness of oppression, not to mention my lower level of self-loathing. However, I am 122% done with watching white people with disabilities use disability theory as a cudgel against people of color.
If you’re white your life is easier than that of a person of color sharing all of your characteristics, full stop. This honestly isn’t up for debate, it’s just reality. for example, let us take into account the period in which various states were openly sterilizing people with disabilities. While those horrific abuses of human rights were going on, they were also sterilizing people of color for being people of color. People of color with disabilities, of course, were caught up under the crushing oppression of racism and ableism, with myriad corners of society clamoring for their elimination.
Almost every argument used to justify the abuse and dehumanization of people with disabilities has also been used against people of color. It’s for our own good, we aren’t intelligent enough for it to matter, we don’t feel things the same way normal people do, we need a firm hand and guidance, pain doesn’t affect us the same way, we’re not fit for civilized society, etc.
If you’re white and disabled you still need to check yourself in discussions about racism and to always fucking remember that people of color with disabilities exist. POC are actually disproportionately disabled thanks to racism.
Being disabled doesn’t erase whiteness and folks need to stop acting like it does.
(via sexgenderbody)
So here’s the real reason that rape jokes are troubled territory -
Because rape victims say so.
They get to say that. They get to feel that way. On this, they get to set the cultural rules.
It’s not about right or wrong, or logic versus emotion, or arguments of over sensitivity or hypocrisy - you have the free speech to make whatever jokes you want or talk about rape in whatever way you feel is illuminating. But they get to be upset about it. And call you on it. And be hurt by it.
But consider this:
You get to not be a rape victim.
They, however, are not afforded that luxury. Ever again.
"(Source: vickiexz, via thenewwomensmovement)
(Source: wretchedoftheearth, via stfueverything)
Gay and transgender youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their heterosexual counterparts.
As with racial disparities in school discipline, these higher rates of punishment do not correlate to higher rates of misbehavior among gay and transgender youth.
LGBT youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile justice system, even though they make-up only 5–7 percent of the population overall, and 60 percent of these youth are black or Latino.
This high rate of contact with the system is due in part to harsh school sanctions often based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.
"Anti-abortion activists are fond of saying “The only difference between a fetus and a baby is a trip down the birth canal.” This flippant phrase may make for catchy rhetoric, but it doesn’t belie the fact that indeed “location” makes all the difference in the world.
It’s actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other - and thus they don’t have equal rights. In the case of a pregnant woman, giving a “right to life” to the potential person in the womb automatically cancels out the mother’s right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
After birth, on the other hand, the potential person no longer occupies the same body as the mother, and thus, giving it full human rights causes no interference with another’s right to control her body. […] After birth its independence begs that it be protected as if it were equal to a fully-conscience human being. But before birth its lack of personhood and its threat to the women in which it resides makes abortion a completely logical and moral choice.
"Why Abortion Is Moral, a good explanation of why common ethical arguments against abortion are horseshit
To summarize, if (1) you think zygotes/embryos/fetuses are people and that their rights to gestate trump the self-ownership rights of their mothers, then (2) you must concede that NO ONE has absolute rights to dispose of his/her own body as s/he wishes. That is, if you agree with the first point, then you’d also have to agree that someone without kidneys should be allowed to surgically attach themselves to someone with kidneys in order to live.
But if you refuse to make this second step, then you’re stating that only pregnant women should be denied full control over their own bodies. Which means you are basically suggesting that pregnant women have no more rights than incubators or brood mares—hardly an acceptable moral or ethical position.
(via white0wls)
(Source: downlo, via stfueverything)
Seriously, the person I chatted with was knowledgeable, patient, and even ended up helping me with several issues I didn’t even sign on to discuss. That could not have gone any better.
So thank you Jill from Planned Parenthood, you managed to make an incredibly paranoid person calm down and feel a little bit better about life.
So glad you got the answers you needed!
http://www.plannedparenthoodchat.org/
It is awesome!
(via becauseiamawoman)
April Flores tastes Justine Joli’s toes, while Ulorin Vex snaps some polaroids. Photo ©2012 Coop.
Leica M9, f2/35mm Summicron lens, 2nd version.
(via ambidextrously-erotic)
Men get to feel hornier because they’re socially supported in this. The whole of society is geared toward titillating men and discouraging female sexual desire. It’s inherent to the Nice Guy® complaint, where men are entitled to feel physical attraction, but a woman who wants more than “nice” is shallow. It’s evident in the way men and women dress, with women always mindful to wear stuff that makes them sexually attractive, whereas men have the opposite problem, and have to avoid being too sexualized lest they seem feminine. Naked women are draped over every inch of public space, and the internet is full of visually interesting porn for men, but our society barely can imagine what it would be like to try to attract a female eye. Men seem hornier in no small part because their sexuality is celebrated and codified. It’s easy for men to know right away how to be sexual, whereas women are still largely expected to figure it out for themselves—-and even that’s a recent invention, because pre-feminism, women were mostly just expected to do what men wanted.
But even with the small amount of freedom we have, it’s worth noting that a 30-year-old woman who admitted obliquely to having had non-procreative sex in Congress created a month long, nationwide scandal. Until that kind of pressure disappears completely, we can’t even begin to measure what the “natural”, unadulterated female sexuality would look like, and how it would compare to the celebrated and constantly titillated male sexuality.
Either way, stop blaming sex for misogyny. If all men wanted was women to fuck them more, the English language wouldn’t even have the word “slut” in it.
"(via yesmeansyes)
Promo’ project for photographer Pål Laukli. Thanks to Trude (stylist) and Lea (model). “Oro” was published in the Tinagent magazine
wow
(via oio)
The fundamental mistake that most thin people make regarding fat people is that they make the assumption that all bodies work the same way that their own does. The naturally thin among us look at a fat person and think, “I’d have to eat nothing but cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long to weigh that much. Therefore, that person must eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long.”
It doesn’t work that way. Most fat people eat the same basic three meals a day that thin people eat. Despite what you have seen on tv and in movies, fat people do not shove food in their faces all day every day. In most cases, they eat the same things that thin people eat, but their bodies simply process it differently. But fat people are labelled as “disgusting” and “pigs” because they are only ever shown from a thin person’s point of view, based on these false assumptions.
Fat people can be guilty of this mistake too. Sometimes we see someone very thin and, knowing that we would have to stop eating entirely and exercise obsessively in order to be that thin, we assume that the thin person must be anorexic, when they may just be naturally thin.
The difference is, in our culture, thin people are assumed to be morally superior. These wrong assumptions about how body size happens paint the thin as disciplined and the fat as lazy, when the reality is that there are as many lazy and undisciplined thin people as there disciplined ones, and there are as many disciplined and active fat people as there are lazy ones.
“But every time I’m out I see fat people shoving food in their faces.” Really? And you never see thin people eating in public? Are you sure you aren’t just noticing the fat people because you started with the assumption that fat people eat all the time, and every time you see a fat person eating, you take special notice of that as proof that you are correct?
Some people will always be naturally thin, no matter how much junk food they cram in their faces, and some people will always be naturally fat, no matter how little they eat or how much they exercise. The naturally thin may gain weight now and then, but their bodies will always eventually settle into being their own natural thin size. The naturally fat can lose weight, but eventually will gain it all back as their body regains its natural shape.
Attaching moral weight to a person’s body size will always be wrong. When you think that thin people are better than fat people, you may as well be saying that tall people are better than short people, or blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.
The truth is that people are people, and all of them should be treated equally.
(via thatfeministdyke)
(via fuckyeahsexeducation)
By Erwin Olaf.
I ran across this photo earlier this week on Pinterest, and I felt like I had to share. We don’t often see images of mature women in our culture, much less mature women in lingerie. It really is a disservice. After all, should women stop feeling good about themselves once they’re past the age of 30?