myrddinemrysnz:

melody-sillermoon:

scribbleowl:

vaspider:

My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.

She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.

And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.

I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.

But he slept in his workshop.

Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.

She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.

My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.

So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.

They missed each other desperately from across the yard.

I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.

And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.

The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.

There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.

But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.

Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.

Thank you for sharing this. I had never considered that aspect of the birth control revolution.

My great-grandmother also had twelve children and I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently as I debate having a second. Because I have a choice. We have options. She didn’t.

We have the ability to stop this from ever becoming commonplace again… we must use that ability and make it readily and cheaply available to every person on the planet or we have wasted the last 100 years of social progress

sonickitty:

radialarch:

i’ve seen a lot of variations on this argument pass my dash ever since that cacw empire article came out, so i’m just gonna say it: it is not harder and better and somehow more purer to portray a platonic male friendship on screen than it is to make the relationship romantic. it’s not. the history of media is full of guys who love each other and would do anything for each other and then go home to their wives, because well obviously they’re not gay.

“romance is just an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust.”

please. please send these easy shorthand gay relationships my way. what universe do you live in that gay people can hook up easily on-screen and the audience reaction is “what a cop-out, they’re just doing it to avoid developing their friendship.”

listen. heterosexual romance is often an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust. this works because there’s an expectation – both on part of the filmmaker and the presumed audience – that heterosexual romance is normal and part of the background radiation of everyday life. and anyone makes a movie where the male and female leads hook up, without much build-up or development of their relationship, they then strengthen that expectation in a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

gay romance does not have the same cultural history. the default assumption is in fact that same-sex leads will not hook up unless they live in the gay/lesbian genre. platonic male friendship is, in fact, the easy way out. 

it’s absolutely homophobic to say a gay romantic relationship would somehow lessen a bond of friendship. and i mean this in the kindest of ways, because it’s not the same kind of homophobia that leads to gay people being physically attacked, or laws being written to actively restrict people’s rights for the fact of being gay. it’s a low-grade, pervasive homophobia that results when the speaker doesn’t conceptualize gay people as a part of a normal, everyday milieu. that a character being gay has to be narratively justified in some way (as if gay people around the world don’t have to justify their right to exist every single day!); that a gay relationship is somehow “pandering” and “inorganic”, because the normal, natural – straight – audience could never really relate to a gay relationship.

look. we are all shaped by cultural expectations. it doesn’t make someone a bad person if their mental conception of “an intense relationship between two guys” defaults to “friendship” instead of “romance”. but responding to any challenges to that paradigm by extolling the virtues of same-sex friendship and ignoring the long history of gay relationships in media being censored and sanitized and othered? yeah. that’s homophobic.

Agreed. If it were really so “easy” to say they were lovers, it would have been done already. 

The use of the word “brotherhood” as a counter to gay relationships has really started to bother me.  

“What’s fascinating about the Cap-Bucky story as well is it’s a love story,” says the co-director. Stop your sniggering at the back, he’s talking about the fraternal kind. “These are two guys who grew up together, and so they have that same emotional connection to each other as brothers would, and even more so because Bucky was all Steve had growing up.”

Brotherhood has become a more polished “no homo,” apparently to the point that two male characters can have a “love story” on screen and still be totally straight. They could say the characters are “just friends,” but they have to go all the way to “brothers” to make sure the relationship can be as emotional as they want with no gay repercussions. When I see this, I feel like it sets up a dichotomy of queer vs. familial, where “brotherly love” is held up as the safe, natural reading, and a queer reading becomes even more perverse by contrast. 

blue-author:

anukii:

janedoodles:

kelseyridge13:

jumpingjacktrash:

katrinageist:

When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  

It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.  

There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.

When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.

what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.

There’s an interesting level here in that Jack tried to understand Christmas town. He could see the magic while he was there, and he did try to explain it that way to citizens of Halloween town.  But they weren’t interested in the kind of life he was describing, so he started “rebranding” Christmas so that it was not like Christmas but was like Halloween. The people of Halloween town, never having actually encountered Christmas, have no way of knowing that what they’re being told about Christmas and “Sandy Claws” is inaccurate. Jack also tried to study Christmas and its culture, though he couldn’t quite get it; eventually, he literally decides to take it for himself, even as he knows it’s not really for him.  He started out feeling sad the others in Halloween town didn’t ‘get it,’ but he then decided it’s not important to fully ‘get it’ but instead to have it.

So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.

This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”

This is an EXCELLENT explanation through example!

I’ve seen this post go around before and reblogged it, but this time, the distinction between “get it” and “have it” really jumped out at me.