mary shelley was the daughter of one of the first feminists as we know it, she met & ran away with percy shelley when she was 18, she wrote BOTH the first sci fi AND post apocalyptic novels, she was at the forefront of romanticism AND gothicism, two of the most influential literary and artistic movements in present day, she suffered from depression and only one out of her four children lived, her husband, who had several affairs, died when they were in their twenties, a majority of her friends and romantic poets also all died in their twenties, and yet she still continued writing poetry and novels and creating art throughout the rest of her life and lived til she was nearly 60. mary shelley is incredibly underappreciated she went through so much and has contributed & influenced so much to the english lit. canon as we know it she is one of the most remarkable writers & women of this era & i love her
so hey mary wollstonecraft is now widely thought of as the origin of the feminist movement but GOD every time i think about her i’m filled with the righteous fury of a thousand feminists bc my dudes. my guys. the unadulterated shite this woman had to go through.
not only did she have an illegitimate child in 18th century england, she lived in JACOBIN-ERA FRANCE as a SINGLE PARENT for THREE FUCKING YEARS. and bear in mind that by this point she already had a foot in the door with some pretty radical writerly types back in britain so rlly she might as well have been walking around with a sign that said ‘guillotine me’.
AND THEN after a journey across mainland europe (alone except for a maid and her infant daughter) and two suicide attempts this hard-ass motherfucker goes on to write THE foundational modern feminist text and bone down on william godwin who – by the way -was maybe one of the most iconic pro-anarchic authors of the period.
BUT DO YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT MAKES ME MAD AS ALL FUCK. days after giving birth to the baby who would go on to become mary shelley this incredible, difficult, fearsome woman died of septicemia and do you know what happened. her conservative critics g l o a t e d bc of course the vocal advocate for women’s rights dies of the female-exclusive affliction that is childbirth. and (and) after memoirs detailing her then-controversial lifestyle were published posthumously (thanks for nothing william) her work was virtually excluded from academic circles for the next hundred years.
SO IN CONCLUSION if i ever get hold of a time machine you bet your entire ass i’m zapping myself straight into mary wollstonecraft’s living room and i’m taking my bachelors degree certificate and my polling card and my birth control pills with me because if anyone deserves to know that at least some of us are luckier than the very luckiest 18th-century woman, it’s my gal mary.
While I’m at it, I’m really not happy with the way Tumblr is restoring “the innocence of youth” culture to 1990s-purity-ring levels.
It’s somehow transmuted a few good principles–adults shouldn’t have sex with underage people, underage people shouldn’t take part in porn, very young children shouldn’t be exposed to explicit sexuality–into bullshit like:
– All fiction involving underage sexuality, even non-sensationalized written descriptions of the kind of sexual relationships teenagers often have with each other, is child porn
– Sex education that talks about dealing with STIs and pregnancy and rape is okay, but teaching teenagers about sexual pleasure is gross and anyone who does it is probably a pedophile
– People under 18 all find sexuality frightening or offputting and don’t want to be exposed to it (I’m sure some feel that way, but if you think this is a universal or majority thing, wow, you must’ve gone to a very different high school than I did)
– Having adult content somewhere that minors could stumble across it is as bad as going to the playground and pushing it in kindergarteners’ faces
– Even acknowledging the existence of underage sexuality is suspicious, why would you be talking about this if you weren’t some kind of pedophile
It’s tough to talk about this because it immediately puts you in the company of people who really are being creepy about it, but I think it’s important to push back against these things. Young people have sexualities, they aren’t “innocent” and many of them don’t want to be, and it is possible to acknowledge these facts without exploiting them.
if you make a distinction between 6-year-olds and 16-year-olds with regard to sexuality, there’s a whole posse of antis who will actively go out and crusade in random folks’ inboxes trying to convince the world you’re a pedophile.
because of the ‘believe all accusations and spread them like wildfire’ element of this culture, there’s a whole lot of high-strung scrupulosity victims being manipulated by a handful of bigots, who aim them at women, jews, and queer people pretty much exclusively. you never see a cis straight man being accused this way. you never reblog from a cis straight man and get an anon going “you know he’s a pedophile right???” – if you get a message like that it’s always going to be about someone the right wing hates.
i don’t think it’s at all an irony that the core message of anti culture is the same as 1980′s fundamentalism. i think it’s very deliberate.
I think there are two different problems autistic people have with identifying and responding to other people’s boundaries.
Problem 1: Not picking up on social cues saying “boundary here”. We’re bad at reading tone/body language, so we miss the more subtle cues. Or we’re concentrating on interpreting speech or forcing thoughts into sentences so we miss them.
Problem 2: We get given the exact same social cues all the time for things that amount to being autistic in public. The social responses to “person being weird” and “person crossing a boundary” can be identical. That makes it really, really hard to pick out the ones that we’re supposed to pay attention to.
The fact he’s named kinda brushes over the fact this is a wild elephant. Born in the wild, raised in the wild, the only human interaction is watching the safaris. And after mean humans shot him, he decided the best course of action was to go visit the nice humans who just take pictures in hopes they’d help him. And then, even though they didn’t help him right away, he trusted that because they continued to be nice, he was safe, and they would help him.
also the people saw an elephant and were like “that’s a ben”
“Mirroring” is a big thing with cats. It’s why they will lay in similar positions several feet apart, or will come and try to do things when you do them. It’s a sign that they love you and want to show.
This cat wants to be close to its owner, and also wants to do what its owner is doing, to be involved in some way.
Giving them their own thing to use is a really great way to redirect them and allow them to mirror the behavior in a non-disruptive way that frustrates neither party.
This TERF page run by Janice Williams- one of the TERFs who sabotaged
London Pride this year- is now promoting fascist antisemitic conspiracy
theories.
TERFs really are openly showing their true colours now as they go all out in stoking up anti-trans prejudice ahead of the government consultation closing.
I see they got a cartoon by an artist trained at the Watto from SW School of Antisemitic Caricatures
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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