in Serbian, we don’t say ‘middle of nowhere’ – we use ‘vukojebina/вукојебина’ which literally would translate to ‘where wolves fuck’ and i’m so proud of my countries language
Yours is a language of understated beauty. You have every reason to be proud.
In German we say “wo sich Fuchs und Hase Gute Nacht sagen” which translates to “where Fox and rabbit tell each other good night” and I think that’s really cute
[ image description is screenshot of West Virginia facebook post that says, “having problems with your landlord? are they refusing to fix your home, or threatening to raise the rent? most of us rent from the landlord to keep a roof over our family’s heads. even though it is our home, we are forever in debt to the ‘lord’.
Rent is extortion. eviction is violence. we have the right to safe, comfortable and affordable housing. there is strength in a tenants union!!! contact us for assistance: facebook – eclosion collective; email – eclosioncollective@protonmail.com” ]
As some may know, I recently quit my job at PoundHell and started looking for new employment. Unfortunately this means no income until I find somewhere willing to take me, and I still have to pay off some overdraft fees, buy meds, and contribute to household food costs.
I hate asking for help, but I could really do with some rn. Of course I’d be 100% willing to do drawings & writing in exchange for any donations given; just sling me a message telling me what you’d like! Thank you.
To be specific (about the art, at least): One coffee will get you a simple drawing, touched-up to look nicer. Two coffees gets that, but with colour added too. The more coffees, the more time & energy I’ll put into your drawing (or drawings)!
If you donate a coffee to my friend, I will throw in a lined bust sketch for you! Here are some samples:
If you donate over £12 (four coffees, in ko-fi terms) to them, I will throw some colours in as well!
I’m fine with drawing busts of animals, monsters, and humans.
Please, please donate to my friend – they’re in a pretty dire situation. The art is just a bonus, really! Just make sure to either message my blog here or tell @fiveinthezone what you’d like drawn, provide a ref (written or visual) and I will get down to it as soon as they confirm that you’ve donated to them via their ko-fi!
starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”
to expound on this (it’s okay to reblog the expanded version):
I like living in a female body. I like my sexed characteristics. I like presenting femininely. I like being referred to as “she”. I have always been uncomplicatedly cis by pretty much every measure, and I don’t think that has changed. What’s changed, I think, is what all those things *mean* to the world around me.
“It doesn’t feel good when people say ‘everyone’ and they don’t mean you.” I heard that the other day, and I haven’t been able to let it go. It crystallizes what I’ve been feeling over the past year: that autistic women, or at least high-systemizing-low-empathizing women, are being increasingly defined out of womanhood itself. I’m seeing a return to frankly disturbing essentialism among women of my generation. It’s of a piece with that “feminist astrology” post I wrote a while back, but it’s more than that. It’s a creeping woo-ishness in the gender discourse that’s beginning to make me nauseous.
It seems, to my admittedly untrained eye, that despite constant pretenses at breaking down the gender binary, millennial and Gen Z women are not just enforcing it – they’re widening the gulf. The general mood is that there are things women know that men just can’t understand or even truly empathize with. On the more overly woo-ish end of things, there’s astrology and “feminine energy” and literal goddess worship. But the essentialized dichotomy shows up in more mainstream media, too. It underlies every thinkpiece on “how women feel” about X, Y, or Z. It’s there when women of my cohort make fun of STEMlords and “well actually"s and hyperlogical white dudes and expect me to laugh along with it. It’s not even subtle in posts like “women’s atheism is fundamentally different from men’s” and “women don’t say what they mean and that’s okay”. It’s present in every piece of emotional manipulation disguised as activism that women, being The Nurturing Ones, are supposed to fall for.
Obviously the stereotype itself is nothing new – what’s new is the enthusiasm with which my generation has seemingly decided to lean into it. I fear that by the time we’re fully in control of the media and the public narrative, women like me might be defined out of womanhood altogether. And I fear that responses to this concern will run along the lines of “it’s okay, just admit you’re non-binary”. I’m *not* non-binary! You fucks just moved the goalposts! Narrowing what counts as “woman” isn’t okay just because claiming non-binary genders is becoming more of an option. It’s still defining people out against their will.
tl;dr my gender is “too femme to count as male but too high-systemizing for The Sisterhood”
This may be recency bias on my end, but goddamn, today’s gender essentialism makes everything surrounding the concept of gender so very confusing. The worst part is that it’s gender essentialism dressed up as ‘breaking down the gender binary’. It’s basically just a repackaging of traditional gender norms with the labels on what’s good and what’s bad switched around.
But not quite. A lot of the vitriol directed at what they think is typically male is just slagging on autistic people. When you tell them this, they’ll look at you funny and say that of course they don’t hate autistic people, they’re not ableist!
But that’s because they don’t know what autism is, they don’t know what it actually looks like in the nitty-gritty, beyond the idealised image they have in their heads.
There’s a lot said about how autism is severely underdiagnosed in women because the behaviours that indicate autism are generally expected of women in society, yet I see a lot of these people stereotyping all men as having these autistic traits, while not realising they are autistic traits, and then unilaterally (or at least, without any concern for the scrupulous, which is to say, many autistic people) declaring all these traits to be bad and in need of changing.
And there’s just so much collateral damage in that approach! They’re hurting so many people that they don’t even mean to hurt and I just want to scream at them to stopdoing that.
But then I’d just be aggressive, I guess.
A part of the gender thing on here, in particular, seems to be the repackaging of any action or feeling or concept related to gender not stereotypically on one side of the male/female dichotomy as non-binary. I am aware that there are non-binary people, but no every woman who presents as/likes sterotypically masculine things is non-binary and the same with men and femininity. It seems like, out of an effort to broaden the gender spectum, some people have been reinforcing gender essentialism, instead.
THIS. It’s not that non-binary identities aren’t real. It’s that some people are using them as yet another box instead of a reason to complicate the idea of boxes in the first place.
“Childhood is a difficult time…. The realities of childhood put to shame the half – true notions in some children’s books. These offer a gilded world unshadowed by the least suggestion of conflict or pain, a world manufactured by those who cannot – or don’t care to – remember the truth of their own childhood. Their expurgated vision has no relation to the way real children live.”
— Maurice Sendak, Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speech 1963 (via blancheparish)
LOL NOPE
Europe is racist as fuck. Europe has armed gaurds and high fences on its borders. Europe makes it illegal to rescue refugees at sea. Europe locks up refugee children. Europe has killer cops that shoot teenagers of color. Europe is full of fascist politicians nostalgically fantasizing about ethnic cleansing. Not a day goes by without attacks on Muslims.
Fuck Europe.
Can confirm.
The problem with England (I can’t talk for the rest of Europe) is that our racism and our xenophobia and all our bigoted views manifest in a different way then America, and we use this to claim that it doesn’t exist, even when our country is built on it.
We are taught that the British empire was a good thing, and pretty much no one here knows anything about colionisation and our role in most current world problems.
But the amount of times that I’ve tried to talk about any issue within England and been shut down with the claim “well we’re not as bad as America”.
That’s why the trump protests were so important. We are constantly looking to America to justify our own bigotry. We’ll call America out on their unjust wars, and ignore the fact our own army and government was supporting them.
Listen, I like my country- I like that we have a rich history (not that I support it, but heck, everyone likes learning about the Roman Empire, doesn’t mean they think it’s a good thing), I like that we have countrysides and big diverse towns like London, I like that we love fish and chips and curry sauce, I love our old pubs and traditional pub food, I like that we have the NHS (though I dislike how it’s run), I like our sense of dry gallows humour, I like our film and tv industry, I love our history of theatre, I love our myths and legends.
But god damn are we historically an awful country, and have we ever tried to make reparations? Our actions are still affecting other countries and ruining life. I don’t like the empire, I don’t like what the monarchy stands for, I don’t like our politicians that spew bigotry and hate, I don’t like our press which are like vultures, I don’t like the power the BBC has to cover-up actual sexual abuse and rape, I hate Katie Hopkins and that she has any platform to spew her hate, I hate Brexit and that it was founded on hate, I hate how we think our lives are more valuable than that of refuges or immigrants, I hate that we don’t think that we are directly or indirectly responsible for a lot of the refugees and asylum seekers that exist today, I hate that we have a system that is actively leading to the deaths of disabled people and that even when investigated by the UN and told to change because we were violating human rights we refused, I hate how we support America’s bigotry and then use their country as a shield when accused of our own bigotry.
I hate that we, as a country, are incapable of accepting responsibility and making amends for our terrible actions.
Incredibly well put.
One of the tricky things is that every European country has their own fictional self image which it keeps repeating to convince itself it’s not a bigoted shithole.
In the UK it’s very much focused on being better than the US, being civilized and polite and stylish, while.. ya know… having a lot of blood on its hands and doing all the same racist and bigoted shit everyone else is doing.
In the Netherlands it’s focused on being ‘tolerant’ and gay-friendly and having semi-legal weed, while.. ya know…
having a lot of blood on its hands and doing all the same racist and bigoted shit everyone else is doing.
In Germany it’s focused on having ‘learned from the second world war’ and being ‘better now, while .
. ya know…
having a lot of blood on its hands and doing all the same racist and bigoted shit everyone else is doing.
And so on.. every European country considers itself either an underdog or a pioneer or a peak of civilization or small and quirky and of course they all consider themselves so much better than the US while
doing all the same racist and bigoted shit everyone else is doing.
I still remember exactly how it felt to read about this man being brutally asssulted, HIT ON THE FACE WITH A PLANK OF WOOD, in London, a city I lived next to and visited all the time, simple because he was speaking my native language in public.
I remember breaking down sobbing because of how many people in this country I love hate me so fucking much for being born somewhere else.
IIRC, there was another similar incident on the underground this past April.
So tell me more about the supposed lack of xenophobia and racism in Europe
Just throwing this out there, xenophobia is definitely a thing in the UK, I was discriminated against to the point I had to move flats, because I spoke Welsh outside of Wales. But you can also be discriminated against for speaking Welsh in Wales if the people around you only speak English. In the UK, white people will discriminate against other white people if they’re not exactly like them.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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