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I feel like this should be obvious. But every time I see someone say “yes means yes; no means no” I cringe a little. Consent isn’t always that simple.
exactly
“ You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism. ”
Allen Ginsberg, cited in Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) 2001, p.21. (via fetishofsilence)
“The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” (via Brainpicker)
The Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation is unique in that it offers scholarships to single mothers, children who attend alternative schools, students who have earned a GED, students with grade point averages of 2.0 and students who have previously been incarcerated, etc., but desire a higher educational opportunity.
(Source: wizardryloves)
At Harvey Mudd College in California, about 40 percent of the computer science majors are women. That’s far more than at any other co-ed school. And it’s thanks in large part to the school’s president, Maria Klawe. She has worked hard to keep women interested in computer science and empower them to succeed in the field.
(Source: penguingirl)
While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.
When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.
Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:
“The life of my heart is crimson.”
[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]
“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”
“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”
[Writing about a terminal illness:]
“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”[Writing about life as a movie:]
“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.
Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.
Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]
So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:
Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”“Now I feel secure with my head held high.
Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.
While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.
(source)
SUFFICIENTLY MINDBLOWN
“ If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists. ”
Wicked Clothes presents: the Tri-Blend ’A Woman’s Place’ Shirt!
A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate.
Despite being half of the population, women only make up 18.3% of the United States Congress. That’s a number that certainly needs to increase. Sport this shirt to show your support for current and aspiring women in politics.
On top of being on sale for a limited time, use coupon code ‘1000NOTES’ for an EXTRA 10% off your ENTIRE order! Hurry and order now!
(Source: wickedclothes)
SeaWorld became a publicly-traded company today, so these penguins showed up at the New York Stock Exchange to make sure everything went smoothly.
Dove hired a forensic artist to draw how women see themselves versus how others see them - the results are moving.
Trans* activists in Mexico City, protesting violence against the LGBTQ community.
damn
(Source: tzintzuntzan)
“Abortion seems to be the only medical procedure that people want to deny you based on how you got in that situation.
Drove drunk, got in an accident and need an organ transplant? No problem.
Messing around with a gun, accidentally shoot yourself in the leg and need surgery? Of course.
Smoke tobacco for most of your life and need treatment for lung cancer? Yep.
Climb a tree, fall out and break your leg? We’ll fix that right up.
Have sex and get pregnant when you don’t want to be? YOU GOT YOURSELF INTO THIS SITUATION AND YOU DESERVE NO MEDICAL HELP OR COMPASSION! THIS IS YOUR FAULT AND YOU WILL DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES!
”
Worry About Your Own Uterus: (via veruca-assault)
“Worry about your own uterus” wise wise words.
(via triplash)
(Source: dakotawhatever)
“ What men can do to “protect” us is to check out the ways in which they put down and intimidate women in the streets and at home, to stop being verbally and physically abusive to us and to tell men they know who mistreat women to stop it and stop it quick. Men who are committed to stopping violence against women should start seriously discussing this issue with other men and organizing in supportive ways. ”
The Combahee River Collective. 1979. ‘8 Black Women, Why Did They Die?’ Radical America 13.5: 46. (via james-bliss)
“They gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.” - Leonard Matlovich
(Source: annieloveswinchester)
