Examine your word well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even when about your own immediate feelings—-much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
— George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Chapter 17
Holy shit
The One.
She is fighting invisible agents.
I’m really disappointed that this is so over sexualized because pole dancing is really cool
It should be a fucking olympic sport like with unitards and shit
okay, so first of all: this example is not “over sexualised” - this is someone who very possibly has never done a day’s worth of stripping in her life performing some moves in a dance studio. She’s very likely to have had a lifetime of dance and gymnastics training behind her and decided to take poledancing classes when it became the new hit craze. She’s learned in a formal class environment.
But poledancing was developed by strippers in a stripclub environment. Many of those strippers also had a lot of dance and gymnastics and cheerleader training behind them and they developed pole moves partly as a way to kill time when the club was quiet. They taught each other in an informal setting and innovated and created for themselves. Without getting paid explicitly to do so.
Their talent at being able to do things like this has never been recognised. Even though the first pole schools were opened by strippers and taught by strippers, it has now been appropriated by hundreds of people who have never done sex work and who have no respect for sex work, who think it is “sad” that poledancing has a history inextricably entwined with sex work, who only view poledancing as a legitimate artform once it becomes detached from its sex work context despite the fact it was conceived and built in a sex work environment by sex workers.
Poledancing is not “overly sexualised”. It IS a sexualised dance/athletic art and rightly so - it belongs to strippers and it is strippers who made it. Its beauty and athleticism and skill doesn’t change because it was used in a sexualised environment to help its practioners make more money (although now it is seen as just for middle-upper class non-sex workers to pay big bucks in a formal class environment to learn to titillate boyfriends and husbands whilst staying appropriately fit!). That’s a part of its history. Sexualised things are not inherently worth less because of their sexual nature. To believe so is just to devalue the hard work of the sex workers who innovated it and that is done more than enough as is.
Poledancing is still cool and amazing and requires great skill and talent to execute even MORE SO when it is sexualised. Just being able to perform it impressively is one thing; being able to make it a fluid part of a character performance (which is what stripping entails) is another. If you can’t appreciate that, you don’t understand it, so STFU.
Oxford University students on why we need feminism
“I need feminism because some people still think they don’t.”
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
— Kazuo Ishiguro (via petrichour)
(Source: pavorst)
”Boys are told from a young age that whatever they do will be excused under the “boys will be boys” mantra, and that “boys will be boys” mentality leads to what I call the “BOILING FROG” problem of women’s sexual boundaries. I call it that because if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will acclimate as it heats and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are raped just freeze and fall silent, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do over and over since day one. You tell me what’s more infantilizing: repeatedly letting boys (and grown men) off the hook for their behavior because “boys will be boys” and we can’t ever expect any differently, or creating a consent standard in which all partners take active responsibility for their partner’s safety, and which acknowledges the truly diseased sexual culture we’re soaking in every day.
— The (nonexistent) terrible, horrible, no good, very bad consequences of enthusiastic consent - Jaclyn Friedman (via queerintersectional)
One of my favorite videos. One by La Dispute (From an excerpt of Still life with woodpecker)
Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (via so-i-ummm)
She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.
— Douglas Adams; ”Mostly Harmless” (via sc0rnflakes)
(Source: sc0rnflakess)
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
— Franz Wright; “Letter, January 1998” (via lifeinpoetry)
Her beauty cannot be measured with standards of a colonized mind.
— Michelle NdegeOcello (via grrrlstudies)
(Source: cornellwocc)
What if all women were bigger and stronger than you? And thought they were smarter? What if women were the ones who started wars? What if too many of your friends had been raped by women wielding giant dildos and no K-Y Jelly? What if the state trooper who pulled you over on the New Jersey Turnpike was a woman and carried a gun? What if the ability to menstruate was the prerequisite for most high-paying jobs? What if your attractiveness to women depended on the size of your penis? What if every time women saw you they’d hoot and make jerking motions with their hands? What if women were always making jokes about how ugly penises are and how bad sperm tastes? What if you had to explain what’s wrong with your car to big sweaty women with greasy hands who stared at your crotch in a garage where you are surrounded by posters of naked men with hard-ons? What if men’s magazines featured cover photos of 14-year-old boys with socks tucked into the front of their jeans and articles like: “How to tell if your wife is unfaithful” or “What your doctor won’t tell you about your prostate” or “The truth about impotence”? What if the doctor who examined your prostate was a woman and called you “Honey”? What if you had to inhale your boss’ stale cigar breath as she insisted that sleeping with her was part of the job? What if you couldn’t get away because the company dress code required you wear shoes designed to keep you from running? And what if after all that women still wanted you to love them?
—
For the Men Who Still Don’t Get It, Carol Diehl. (via theseasonofthewitch)
this is beautiful, please read this
(via imsostrungout)
(Source: ashemo)
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
— Franz Kafka (via illusies)
(Source: hrsvt)
[Hating America] would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (via blua)
(Source: slaughterhousefive)
they say you must fight for your
freedom.
I know that.
only I didn’t fight the Japanese, the Italians, the Germans
or the Russians
for my freedom.
I fought Americans: the parents, the school yards,
the bosses, the ladies of the street, the friends, the
system
itself.
— Charles Bukowski (via henrycharlesbukowski)
