I know a lot of lesbians that used to identify as bi who worried that coming out as a lesbian would contribute to invalidating bisexuality in some way, by making it seem like a “stepping stone” to coming out as gay. I’ve also known bi women who identified as lesbians and changed their labels later, and worried that they were contributing to some kind of idea about how men can ~turn lesbians. I just wanted to say that it’s no individual lesbian or bi women’s responsibility to fix straight people’s perception of us. Like, it’s not your duty to serve as a political symbol! It’s your duty to find happiness even if that means changing ur label at some points.
this problem isn’t that men “misread” signals (and even verbal statements), it’s that men are unwilling to accept what’s being communicated, because it’d mean they won’t get what they want–and they value getting what they want more than they value their partner’s comfort, safety, and desires. this is a matter of will and values masquerading as a matter of knowledge and communication. men’s “confusion” is their justification for continuing with what they want to do (and society will accept it too!), so there’s always a motivation to be “confused.” that’s the problem.
“Last Monday morning was a little colder than I expected, so I made sure that there was a warm change of clothes in my daughter’s backpack in case she wanted to change. She’d had her heart set on wearing her rainbow sun dress since the weather warmed up so I finally acquiesced and let her. Still it wasn’t too surprising to me to see her walk out of school that afternoon with her T-shirt on over the dress and her jeans on under it.
“Did you get cold, sweetheart?” I asked her.“No,” she said a little crestfallen. “I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.”
I’m not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, “It’s a girl.” I didn’t think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old.
Five. You get me? She’s five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.
Have you ever stopped to think how weird a school dress code really is? I went and checked out the one for my daughter’s school district and it’s amazing in how hard it tries not to say what it actually means. There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don’t. Not really. They don’t sell boys clothes that do that. There’s nothing that is marketed to boys that is in anyway comparable to a skirt or a sun dress. Essentially, a school dress code exists to prevent girls from displaying too much of their bodies because reasons.
I didn’t pick up my daughter’s dress at My First Stripperwear. It’s not repurposed fetish gear from a store for very short people. It’s a dress from a mall chain store in her size. It covers everything but her shoulders and a small section of her upper chest and back. She’s worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it’s light and comfortable.
You know what really grills my cheese about it? It’s not even the shirt they made her put on over her top, it’s the pants they made her wear underneath. It’s a full-length dress that she has to hold up to keep from getting wet in uncut grass. She even had a small set of shorts underneath because it was gym day. But because the top part of her dress apparently exposed the immoral sinfulness of her bare shoulders she also had to pull on jeans even though her legs remained completely covered as part of her punishment.”
“I swear to God and all his Alf pogs I really didn’t think that I would have to face that particular dragon before she even entered a numbered grade.
Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad. Wrong. Naughty. And most importantly that the answer is to cover up.
Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone.”
I’m not skimming through the reblogs to see what anyone else has to say, but ISTG that if I see or get ONE comment about “BUH BUH BUH IT TEH ROOLZ!” I will SLAP someone.
1. She’s five. 2. When I was in grade school, girls wore spaghetti-strap tank tops all the time and nobody made a fuss. 3. She’s FIVE. 4. Virtually NOTHING in the “dress code” applies to BOYS, it’s all about punishing GIRLS.
5. SHE’S FUCKING FIVE YEARS OLD. HER MALE CLASSMATES ARE FIVE YEARS OLD.
WHO IS “DISTRACTED” BY A FIVE-YEAR-OLD’S FUCKING SHOULDERS??? (THE
KIND OF ADULTS YOU DON’T. FUCKING. WANT AROUND FIVE-YEAR-OLDS, THAT’S
WHO.)
Also, it drives me crazy how society has basically decided on behalf of all boys that they are incapable of completing a task if a girl is exposing skin. Like, really???? come on! If you send that message to boys, it will get engrained in their heads that it’s normal to stare at girls in a sexual way. This mindset kind of tends to evolve into sexual entitlement and misogyny. Tell boys, hey, stop looking at her like that, it’s rude and shouldn’t distract you. punish the boys when they aren’t doing their classwork, don’t punish the girls for dressing in ways they are comfortable
Fast forward to late last year. I got a medical marijuana prescription for pain associated with my cerebral palsy. Suddenly the pain was gone. Not 100%, I knew it was there but it was mostly an irritation. I can ignore an irritation…
Suddenly, because I had figured out how to treat the pain, my doctor started taking it more seriously. I got a referral to a neurologist and three weeks ago tomorrow I was finally diagnosed with Atypical Facial Pain (sometimes referred to as Persistent Idiopathic Facial Pain).
The weird thing is that while I feel vindicated and deep down knew my pain was real. The doubt and gaslighting I experienced in over a decade of pain has had an impact. One of the unfortunate issues with the way Canada handles legal medical marijuana is that patients don’t always have consistent access to certain products. My supplier was out of CBD for months (yes for nonCanadians who might be used to CBD being considered legally separate from marijuana. In Canada, CBD is considered weed and you need a special kind of prescription to get it) and the came back. Yet some part of my brain had somehow convinced itself that maybe I had been making it all up. I’d been pain-free for weeks after all. So, I ended up experiencing a lot of denial when the pain came back even though I didn’t have access to the medication I was using to control it.
This is the price of people not believing your pain. You can’t even look at it objectively anymore. I will likely need to manage this pain for the rest of my life and I’ll probably have periods where I’m still convinced it’s all in my head for at least a long time to come despite the vast difference in quality of life that pain treatment gives me and the fact that I’ll also very likely have periodic reminders of just how real my pain is because I only have intermittent access to medication. CBD is out of stock at my supplier again, so I’m probably in for a reminder soon.
@ people who were not born in Ireland and particularly Americans
– It is not Patty’s Day, it is Paddy’s Day. Patty is short for Patricia, Paddy is short for Pádraig which has been anglicised to Patrick.
– It is not Gaelic, it is Irish. In Irish, the language is called Gaelige but that’s pronounced Gwayl-geh.
– Literally no one in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef and cabbage
– We have also never said top of the morning
– If you pinch an Irish person for not wearing green on Paddy’s Day they’re likely to slap you.
– Why do you dye your drinks green?
– It is not “North Ireland” it is “Northern Ireland”. It is not “South Ireland” it is “The Republic of Ireland” or just “Ireland”.
– No, I do not know the Dohertys of Mayo.
– Please, if you must, do things for the craic and not the crack. Cocaine is not a great habit lads.
– Drinks like the “Irish car bomb” and the “black & tan” are incredibly offensive (you wouldn’t drink a “9/11”)
However
– Wearing green is grand
– Having a few drinks is also grand, they don’t even need to be Irish (I drink a Swedish cider most of the time)
– Aye sure queue up some Irish music on youtube it’s great.
– If you want one Irish word to use throughout the day a good one is Sláinte (pronounced slawn-sha) – it’s the equivalent of saying “cheers” before you drink!
Please be respectful on Holidays like this! It’s great to join in and show your respect & appreciation for other cultures celebrations, but remember to actually do that! Have fun, but stay respectful to the culture and religion. 😊
Fun history of corned beef and cabbage.
Beef is cheap in America (lots of land, lots of cows, so there’s such a thing as cheap cuts). So a lot of immigrants who could never afford beef in their home country now had access to beef.
(Example spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian-American invention).
Now Americans hated immigrants (plenty stilldo sadly) and hated anyone who wasn’t Protestant so you had segregation. So in New York the Irish Catholic area was next to the Jewish area. There was solidarity between American Irish and American Jewish immigrants. So Irish-Immigrants bought corned-beef from Jewish butchers.
(In Ireland, you may eat bacon or lamb for St Patrick’s Day, but lamb was (and is) expensive in America, and Irish Immigrants got their meat from Kosher butchers – no bacon).
Brisket is a cut of meat from the front of the cow. It’s a very tough cut of meat. The salting process (it’s like soaked in salt for over a week) and cooking for hours and hours (it’s an all day stew) makes it tender.
So corned beef and cabbage is a dish that evolved out of affordable ingredients (tough cut of beef, cabbage and carrots and potatoes are dirt cheap) and proximity to Jewish immigrants.
St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations as we know them now (parades and the like) were started in America by Irish-American immigrants. Because WASP Americans (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestants) hated Catholics and hated the Irish.
And for all immigrants there was a big push to assimilate (give kids English sounding names, forget your language, become Protestant). But people don’t give up religion easily, names and language maybe, but not God.
So still today you have Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Mexican Catholics, etc and even Americans who aren’t practicing Catholic or aren’t religious may view being raised Catholic as part of a cultural identity linked to their heretage (the same way someone who doesn’t practice Judaism is still Jewish, some difference since Judaism is a hereditary religion, but for immigrants in a country that hates Catholics, being Catholic, having that tradition was and is part of being an outsider to American, part of an identity those in power hated and tried to erase).
So holding giant Irish pride parade celebrating the Catholic patron Saint of Ireland was sort of a “fuck you” to anti-Catholic anti-Irish sentiment. A “fuck you” to the idea that being an American meant erasing your traditions and history and pretending to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
Look at us being proudly Irish and still Catholic. Obnoxiously, visibly Catholic and acting ways that the puritanical Protestants hate.
So what was a family religious Holiday became a big, visible celebration of heretage and homeland (a shared identity). And since it’s a celebration immigrants splurged by buying a big cut of beef (beef is cheaper in America, but immigrants did not have a lot of money and meat is still more than vegetables, so any cut of beef was still a special occasion thing) and supported their Jewish neighbors who ran the butcher’s shop.
(also, since it’s a St’s Feast, Lent restrictions on meat and drinking alcohol didn’t count, so eat a lot of meat and drink).
St Patrick’s Day in the US has its own history, heretage and ties to religion (and persecution for that religion). Traditions are tied to that history. So Corned Beef and Cabbage may not be a thing in Ireland but it’s a part of Irish-American tradition, history and culture.
In later centuries, when the cattle raids were long done, the majority of Irish people still didn’t eat very much beef – because it was still much too expensive. Those who did eat beef, tended to eat it fresh: corned beef again surfaces in writings of the late 1600’s as a specialty, a costly delicacy (expensive because of the salt) made to be eaten at Easter, and sometimes at Hallowe’en. – Then other factors, tragic ones, made beef even rarer in the Irish diet. It often astounds people to discover that, during the worst years of the Great Famine, among much other food, Irish tenant farmers were still exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of salt beef (“corned” beef, it then came to be called, because of the grain or “corn”-sized chunks of salt used in the preserving process) to Britain and Canada. But that was beef that the farmers were raising on behalf of the landlords who owned the land on which they lived and worked: they couldn’t touch it themselves, and couldn’t possibly afford what little fresh beef came on the market in their areas.
Many Irish people, during that period, got their first taste of beef when they emigrated to America or Canada – where both salt and meat were cheaper. There, when they got beef, the emigrants tended to treat it the same way they would have treated a “bacon joint” at home in Ireland.
“Last Monday morning was a little colder than I expected, so I made sure that there was a warm change of clothes in my daughter’s backpack in case she wanted to change. She’d had her heart set on wearing her rainbow sun dress since the weather warmed up so I finally acquiesced and let her. Still it wasn’t too surprising to me to see her walk out of school that afternoon with her T-shirt on over the dress and her jeans on under it.
“Did you get cold, sweetheart?” I asked her.“No,” she said a little crestfallen. “I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.”
I’m not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, “It’s a girl.” I didn’t think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old.
Five. You get me? She’s five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.
Have you ever stopped to think how weird a school dress code really is? I went and checked out the one for my daughter’s school district and it’s amazing in how hard it tries not to say what it actually means. There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don’t. Not really. They don’t sell boys clothes that do that. There’s nothing that is marketed to boys that is in anyway comparable to a skirt or a sun dress. Essentially, a school dress code exists to prevent girls from displaying too much of their bodies because reasons.
I didn’t pick up my daughter’s dress at My First Stripperwear. It’s not repurposed fetish gear from a store for very short people. It’s a dress from a mall chain store in her size. It covers everything but her shoulders and a small section of her upper chest and back. She’s worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it’s light and comfortable.
You know what really grills my cheese about it? It’s not even the shirt they made her put on over her top, it’s the pants they made her wear underneath. It’s a full-length dress that she has to hold up to keep from getting wet in uncut grass. She even had a small set of shorts underneath because it was gym day. But because the top part of her dress apparently exposed the immoral sinfulness of her bare shoulders she also had to pull on jeans even though her legs remained completely covered as part of her punishment.”
“I swear to God and all his Alf pogs I really didn’t think that I would have to face that particular dragon before she even entered a numbered grade.
Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad. Wrong. Naughty. And most importantly that the answer is to cover up.
Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone.”
I’m not skimming through the reblogs to see what anyone else has to say, but ISTG that if I see or get ONE comment about “BUH BUH BUH IT TEH ROOLZ!” I will SLAP someone.
1. She’s five. 2. When I was in grade school, girls wore spaghetti-strap tank tops all the time and nobody made a fuss. 3. She’s FIVE. 4. Virtually NOTHING in the “dress code” applies to BOYS, it’s all about punishing GIRLS.
5. SHE’S FUCKING FIVE YEARS OLD. HER MALE CLASSMATES ARE FIVE YEARS OLD.
WHO IS “DISTRACTED” BY A FIVE-YEAR-OLD’S FUCKING SHOULDERS??? (THE
KIND OF ADULTS YOU DON’T. FUCKING. WANT AROUND FIVE-YEAR-OLDS, THAT’S
WHO.)
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage because none of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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