There’s a weird kind of generational synechdoche that happens. Like things that are blamed on “boomers” or “millennials” almost always refer to a very specific subset of each generation. For boomers, it’s the ones who could consolidate industries, cause wage stagnation for labor, etc. For millennials, it’s the ones who can take extended backpacking trips, eat avocado toast daily, etc. So basically what I’m saying is: It’s the rich ones.
Pretty much. Even the stereotypes about Gen X “slackers” (which were bizarrely gender focused in addition to classist, Gen X women just didn’t even exist to the media) were mostly focused on young upper middle class men in the burbs.
Those last two posts are why I have a pretty different perspective on the concept of male entitlement than a lot of other women seem to.
[Epistemic status: tentative, but approaching something quantifiable.]
Most entitlements are invisible. They only really stand out as entitlements when we think the person in question is acting *unduly* entitled. For example, we don’t think of a person who wants to walk their dog without being hit by a drunk driver as “acting entitled”, because our social contract considers that something we *are* entitled to. When we decry someone as exhibiting entitlement, there’s an unspoken “unjustified” hovering there. This makes sense: calling someone “entitled” for, say, wanting to be able to vote is technically not inaccurate, but since the law and the broader culture consider it a *legitimate* entitlement, it becomes an example of Scott’s “worst argument in the world”.
When we say men are acting entitled, we’re saying they’re demanding access to things they aren’t *actually* entitled to. We lack a similar concept for women. I think this is because the things many women act entitled to are things most of society *actually does believe* they deserve. It’s not obvious to the world at large. To most people, these women are merely acting within conventional female scripts. To the people on the receiving end of that entitlement, though, it reads very differently.
Many women believe, or behave as though they believe, that they are entitled to a certain degree of intimacy from other women. Unlike entitlement to specifically *sexual* intimacy, this is mostly not coded as threatening. It is considered part of normal womanhood, to the point where we don’t actually recognize it as an entitlement. It’s just part and parcel of Sisterhood.
This phenomenon includes but is not limited to:
The normalization of trauma as a casual conversation topic
Physically fixing another person’s clothes or hair without asking (tucking in tags, etc.)
Commiserating over body issues, periods, etc.
Casual discussion of weight and calories
The near-ubiquity of hugs as greetings
All of these are things to which many women are socialized to feel entitled. Remember that I’m not calling entitlement an inherently bad thing. Food and shelter are entitlements! I do not want to belittle the importance of these particular feminine norms for those who find them enriching. What I am saying is that this constant white noise of emotional (and sometimes physical) intimacy that women are expected to share is more damaging to some women than the expectation of male sexual intimacy. This is very, very rarely acknowledged in a feminist context.
Predictably, the women for whom this is especially difficult tend to be neurodivergent. Autistic women who can’t be touched, eating disordered women who can’t handle calorie talk, women with PTSD who don’t feel safe in a space where assault is constantly discussed. Even women who are “just” private, or gender-nonconforming, or, hell, even just kind of weird can find these norms burdensome. But they are so integral not only to large groups of women but to the structure of feminist activism that it’s no wonder so many of us feel alienated.
And the thing about entitlement is that it’s invisible. Many men who act entitled to women’s sexual attention do not realize there is any other way. It’s simply the nature of things. If you call them entitled, they honestly won’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s the same for many of the women mentioned above. They don’t see how their expectations of entitlement might be burdensome or unfair, because that’s just what being a woman is all about. It’s a blind spot they don’t even seem to realize they have.
Reblogging this to elaborate on that last part: defensive responses to this sort of behavior (i.e. “come on, it’s all in fun” “it’s just us girls”) sound an awful lot like the male sexual harasser’s “what, a guy can’t flirt anymore?” Some of it is bad faith, sure, but some of it is legitimate confusion at realizing something you’ve been trained to think of as yours actually isn’t. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be rattled if you started getting hostile responses to something you’d grown up assuming was okay.
It’s not lost on me that it’s a very broad group of women who probably have an uncomfortable relationship with the intimacy and emotional labor expectations of other women. Autistic, PTSD, traumatized, gender non conforming? Add those all up.
We’re all expected to play this same game, some of us are better at it than others.
Stop teaching children that there is only one person out there meant for them. Let it be easier for people to let their toxic relationships go without fear of losing “The One”.
Its so fucked up and weird that we don’t tell people that there will be multiple important people in their lives
“Young teens cant be ace!!!!!!!! 13/14yos dont experience sexual attraction!!!!!!!!!”
13/14 is right at the start of puberty. Guess what comes along with puberty?
Sexual feelings! Sexual attraction! Wow! There is absolutely nothing predatory about acknowledging that teens have sexual feelings. Theres nothing abnormal about teens having sexual feelings. To say otherwise is adopting the same mentality as the prudes who insist teens dont need sex ed because they’re ~too young~
Young teens can be straight. Young teens can be gay. And YES, young teens can be ace. Should they just assume they’re ace immediately? Probably not, since late bloomers exist, but it is frankly asinine to say that young teens dont/cant experience sexual attraction despite the very plain and clear evidence that they can and do.
There are a lot of good arguments for ace exclusion. “Teens cant be ace!!1!1!!” is not one of them.
ALSO NOT EVERY ACE USES SAM.
fucking good ass post op
Its also OKAY if they’re wrong. Its okay to ID as ace then realize you’re not actually ace a few years later. Plenty of people identify wrong at first. Some bi people first thought they were gay/lesbian, and inverse. Some nb people first identified as binary trans, and inverse. Its okay to be wrong.
More than 20 years ago, I volunteered at a local Intermediate School (Between “Elementary” and “Middle” grades – the kids’ ages ranged from 9 to 11 years old), and was assigned to help about 5 girls who were reading/writing at a level above their class average work on a group project.
In between brainstorming sessions, they’d talk about having crushes on boys, and who was in love with whom in their class. As someone who (I now realize) has always been aromantic/asexual, I found that mind-boggling. But I never told them what they were feeling was wrong
If kids can start expressing feelings of attraction at that age, and the culture at large accepts it as a normal part of just who they are growing to be, why should that level of self-awareness be seen as unnatural in kids that are 4, 5, 6 years older?
The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is. And wherever you live, the map has you covered. Download a choice of three versions centered on these regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia.
hello friends! let me take you on a journey. a journey about how i unknowingly, and very much unintentionally, released a fake terry pratchett quote into the wilderness of the internet, where it’s been roaming free for nearly 3 years.
the v. short version: in january 2016 i reblogged a post and commented in the tags that it reminded me of something terry pratchett said about the use of satire. terry pratchett said something to that effect somewhere that i can’t source because i didn’t stop to write it down, it’s just something that stayed with me. it could have been an interview, or a non-fiction piece, or even a scene in one of the discworld books. i honestly don’t know. but he never said those exact words. i made a throwaway comment in the tags of a tumblr post, which later got picked up and reblogged, eventually hit twitter and has been thrown around social media as a legit terry pratchett quote since.
before i move into the long version where i try to document how this happened, i want to clarify two things:
1. i’ve been aware that quote was on twitter for a while, but never realized the extent to which it had spread – for reasons i’m going to explain in a bit. it first came to my attention in october 2016 when i got an ask about the origin of the quote. the problem is by then i’d lost track of the original post, so i had no hard evidence that my tags were the source. you can see how going around all ‘yeah i accidentally made up a terry pratchett quote and now it got famous but i have no proof to back up my claim’ wouldn’t fly with most people. now that i found that post again, i can try to fix the situation.
2. i feel very guilty about this. i realize there’s no way for anyone to control how things spread on social media, but all the same, i want to make it clear: this was not intentional. i admire and love terry pratchett, and the discworld series was formative for me as a teenager and young adult. misattributing a quote to him – a quote that doesn’t even sound like it came from him – is just about the worst thing i could think of doing as a long-time reader and fan. so, while i realize that this wasn’t something i could have predicted or controlled, i would like to apologize all the same.
the timeline:
1. january 2016: i reblogged this post and commented in the tags about how it reminded me of terry pratchett’s idea about the object of satire – again, the one i can’t source because i never wrote it down or bookmarked it. all i can say clearly is that he did not say those exact words. they come from my tags:
my tags were later copy-pasted by someone into their own reblog of that post, and made their way into the reblog stream (note that the post has nearly 400k reblogs/likes). this is a pretty common practice on tumblr.
2. march 2016: here’s a tweet that picked up the tags as a direct quote and got some 2.7k retweets. there might be earlier ones too, i don’t know if this is the original post that carried the quote to twitter. at this point i was not yet aware of what was going on. there are some comments already questioning whether the quote came from terry pratchett himself because, well, it doesn’t sound like terry pratchett. at all.
3. october 2016: i got a message asking for the source of the quote. this is the first time it came to my attention that it had reached twitter and was seeing a bit of traffic, but again, since i’d lost the original post i had no evidence to show that it came from me. all i could do at that point was to admit that yes, i did make a comment about it, but it wasn’t a direct terry pratchett quote.
i kind of. left alone it after that. partly because i felt couldn’t explain it any better than i already had without solid evidence, and partly because i never realized it would later take off as much as it did.
4. january 2018: quote started circulating a lot more. as far as i can tell, this tweet may have started the upsurge in traffic, with 23k retweets (again, there might be others, this is just the first thing that shows up when you google the quote).
5. between january 2018 and now: it’s spread to facebook, reddit, pinterest, several tumblrs and wordpress/blogspot blogs (here’s one trying to source it) and even linkedin, for cryin’ out loud.
i found this out recently, after i decided on a whim to check if there was still something going on with the quote. then a friend here on tumblr helped me finally track down the original post/tags so i could put all of this together.
hey vrabia, what do you plan to do about it?
after posting this, i’m going to try and get in touch with shaula evans and ask if she’s willing to tweet about this explanation. unfortunately there’s nothing much i can do aside from that. i’m not on twitter and don’t have an especially large following on tumblr. i’m going to put this in the terry pratchett/disworld tags, in hopes that more people see it, and i would appreciate if you reblogged it.
finally, a small reminder:
what happened here was the internet equivalent of a post-it scribble that fell behind my desk being picked up without my knowledge and published on the front page of a newspaper. please understand that, while i do feel uncomfortable about the whole thing for personal reasons, i’m not responsible for what gets shared where.
i wanted to make this post out of respect for terry and what his work means to me. if you feel like commenting/messaging me about this at any point, please keep the ‘it wasn’t intentional’ bit in mind and be considerate.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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