“If I had the power, I would add an 11th commandment to the already existing 10: “You should never be a bystander”.”
— Roman Kent, Holocaust survivor, in his speech on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. January 27, 2015.
Tag: this is important
empowerment does not and should not mean “what makes me feel good.” empowerment is what gives you power, i.e. knowledge, autonomy, liberation. gaining knowledge doesn’t always make you feel good, it can be the most exhausting, terrifying, distressing thing you’ll experience.
wern:
i think a large part of the problem with the body positivity movement is that for most thin white abled cis girls (which the body pos movement tends to be publicly targeted towards) the focus should not be on learning to love and respect your own body!
the focus should be on learning to love and respect the bodies of very fat girls, and girls of colour, and trans girls, and disabled girls… not as inspiration for your own self-love, but in their own right. for the sole purpose of loving them
it is our social responsibility to love and respect bodies that are less “acceptable” than ours as much as our own. through that, you will learn to love your own body, but more importantly, you will change the way you act towards others
if your love for your body is only available up to a certain distance from the patriarchy’s idea of ‘perfect’.. if you ever think “i love my body because at least i don’t look like /her/” then you haven’t learned to love your body. all you’ve done is squeeze yourself into your own still-too-narrow definition of beauty and value. and you will have to keep squeezing for the rest of your life
There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.
1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not. Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”
2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.”
Sometimes shipping something does mean that. Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.” Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B. Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.” And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes.
Listen to your parents, kids.
This really should be one of a handful of Public Service Announcements randomly and chronically inserted into one’s dash.
Hell man sometimes it means “these two are TERRIBLE and I want to watch them burn like a catastrophic forest fire as a proxy for all the shit I don’t actually want in real life (like to light my own apartment on fire and scream) and then laugh at the destruction at the end.”
Fandom as a whole is not “minor-friendly”
Nor should it be.
If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will. But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids. Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now. You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable. If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online. If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.
If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests). In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find. Sorry. Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.
Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement. You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer. Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom? Of course there are. Unfortunately, such people are everywhere. They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially. That’s evil for you. There are abusers in elementary school. There are abusers in scout troops. There are abusers in houses of worship. Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that. It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.
In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience. I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit. Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom. Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.
New comic! (link to good version)
This comic was originally published on Everyday Feminism.
Privacy and surveillance are pet topics of mine both personally and professionally and I keep trying to figure out ways to contextualize them in accessible ways. Privacy as consent is a framework that works really well to break down ideas that things Should or Can’t be ‘private’ and that different people will make different decisions about their own privacy!
This comic is spot on, and important. Should be in the Privacy 101. I agree wholeheartedly with the message here, yet it is also… ironic to limit the barriers against information leaks, seeing that Google and whatever other “free“ services one uses know everything about you ever put to words or internet, and that far too few know about browser extensions like
and for iPhones and iPads, apps like 1Blocker and AdBlock – all of them preventing companies like Twitter, Google and FaceBook from tracking you through their inserted buttons on all websites.
Preventing privacy breaches, whether it is the information you give freely without realising it might be a problem for you later in life, or information that is stolen from you, gathered by web companies, or handed out against your will by people you know, is a major problem. Privacy should not be a privilege to fight for, but a right.
pro tip: before getting serious w a man, just casually mention ur period. like, just say ‘my cramps are bad rn’ or ‘I have to go buy some pads’. his reaction is very telling of how mature and understanding he is. you don’t wanna be dating a grown ass man who gets grossed out by the word menstruation. u deserve someone who is comfortable w u and I do mean all of u. you’ll be thanking urself for doing it now and not later hun!
have you ever considered that female celebrities claim not to be feminists/push a watered down version of feminism because it’s fucking unsafe for them to admit to anything else? emma watson gave the most watered down, man friendly speech on feminism i’ve ever seen in my life and men threatened to leak nudes of her and attack her so
READ THIS AND LAY OFF.
I fucking hate humanity sometimes. I really do.
Something that really bothers me about people’s hatred towards Ron is that unless you grew up really poor you have no idea what it’s like and how much it affects you. Especially if you grow up poor surrounded by rich friends. The jealousy seriously eats you alive and the way Ron acted was perfectly understandable.
Over twenty years later, I’ll still never forget the day one of my classmates told me to just ask my parents for more money, as though I was literally too thick to work out the obvious solution. Because in her world, it was that simple. Or the day my teacher gave me an ‘are you even trying for a believable lie’? look when I had to tell him my parents couldn’t afford to send me on a low-cost excursion. Or how for an entire school year, I had to wear a school uniform skirt so small it left angry marks on my waist every day, because my mother begged me to make it last just one more year. The day everyone thought it was hilarious to ruin my pencil case, and even more hilarious that I was so upset and claimed that my parents would be furious with me – LOL, that silly girl! They’ll just buy her a new one, it’s not that difficult! (Spoiler, they couldn’t and it was). And yeah, I had my fair share of second-hand underwear too, like another character who grew up in poverty. The utter shock I felt when I realized other families not only had air conditioning, but also used it regularly… the jealousy I felt when everyone else had nice formal wear and I had whatever my parents could manage to get… the list goes on and on. And that’s on top of a bunch of other struggles and disadvantages I had.
But to hear Ron critics talk, he was the worst person alive if he ever even dared to want nice things for himself instead of just nobly being happy other people had them. ‘Why is everything I own rubbish?’ is not a permissible attitude, not even for a moment.
I see a lot of people making fun/disapproving of how Ron is always stuffing his face with food and it INFURIATES ME.
When you grow up fucking poor you learn to take advantage of free food when you have it.
Asshats.
Also does anyone realize the sheer fortitude Ron had to have to invite Harry over to his house!?
I could not invite my better off friends over to my house because things were literally falling apart inside of it and my family didn’t have the means to fix it and it ate me up inside to not be able to have my best friend over to my house when I spent the better half of my teenage life sleeping over at her house because my parents and I didn’t want her to see how rundown the inside of our home was.
Ron was so nervous about what Harry would say about his house and was embrassed by the state of it but he saw Harry needed somewhere to stay and he opened up his home to him. People who have always been well off wouldn’t understand the magnitude of that action.
Ron is a damn treasure and anyone who hates him because of his jealousy can’t understand the deeper meaning behind it.
And honestly, I find this extremely annoying. If books are supposed to help us cultivate experience, imagination, and compassion, then why are we using books as weapons to make ourselves feel superior? Again, I’m including myself in here, because I’ve definitely fallen into this trap time and time again.
The problem with this attitude is that it can be alienating to the people who just haven’t read as many books. Everyone knows it’s good to read a lot, but feeling like you’re already at a disadvantage compared to your seemingly well-educated friends is disheartening and can even act as a barrier to reading even a single piece of literature.
shealwaysreads 