white straight ciswoman mid-20s-ish. surrounded by telly. likes words,
I have a hole punch, let's not get big-headed now.
keppps << shallitellyouastory
The point isn’t that differences exist. It’s not about who is different and why, whether these differences are socially constructed or biologically inherent, whether the difference falls within or fits into a forced dichotomy.
It’s the fact that we live in a society that privileges differences associated with a certain class and group over all else. We allow our systems and rules to take differences and declare them as a disadvantage on an institutional level. People get so upset when you point out difference, difference in culture, ideology, theory… As if its the acknowledgment of difference that breeds disadvantage. No, it’s ignoring the fact that we live in a society where the majority takes for granted that only their personhood is declared as legitimate while all these differences are marked as the “deviant other” by default.
“Societies with more income inequality have higher infant death rates than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of mental illness than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher incidence of drug use than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher high school drop out rate than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality imprison a larger proportion of their population than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher rate of obesity than other societies:
Individuals in societies with more income inequality are less likely to be in a different class of than their parents compared to other societies:
Individuals in societies trust others less than people in other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of homicide than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality give less in foreign aid than other societies:
Children in societies with more income inequality do less well than children in other societies:
The authors sum it up pretty simply: : “Th[e] dissatisfaction [measured in this data is] a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society.”
Fantastic info - this is why we should focus on income inequity.
I live the gay lifestyle, the gay lifestyle that is often mentioned by some Republican candidates for president. For those who are unfamiliar with the lifestyle, this is a typical day:
7:00 a.m. I wake up, and just as I have done every morning since puberty, I choose to be gay today. This will come as a great relief to my gay, homosexual, male lover who lies beside me. Because being gay is a choice, our relationship is a gamble day to day. Even though we have both chosen to remain gay and to be together every day for the past 16 years, we never take anything for granted. One of us just might throw in the towel one day and give up the lifestyle.
7:30 a.m. I take a gay shower and let the gay water rinse off my gay body.
8:00 a.m. I have a gay breakfast of cereal with milk, and a good, strong, gay cup of coffee. I am fortified for another day of ruining the fabric of American society.
9:00 a.m. I start my morning shift as a gay hospital volunteer. The hospital is not gay, just me. The patients are mostly normal people. But it is OK. The hospital has a rule that all volunteers must sanitize their hands before meeting with patients. This is to avoid spreading germs, but I think that hand sanitizer is also effective in stopping the transfer of my gayness to other people.
12:00 p.m. I return home, eat a gay lunch and take my gay dogs for a walk. Well, I am not sure if the dogs are actually gay. I have heard it said that homosexuality does not exist in the animal kingdom because it is not natural, so chances are that the dogs are not gay. But because they live with me and my gay, homosexual, male lover, they are perceived by others to be gay. I would feel bad about this, but the fact is that I need these dogs. They are the closest that I will ever come to having actual children, because, as everyone knows, gays should not (and cannot) have children. I push this out of my mind as I walk the dogs gaily through the neighborhood.
1:00 p.m. I teach classes at a small, prestigious, liberal arts college. I am a gay college professor. The college is not gay, just me. But some may view the college as way too liberal, because “sexual orientation” is listed within the college’s anti-discrimination policy. This basically means that the college turns a blind eye as I infect the impressionable students with my gayness on a daily basis. I do not teach anything particularly gay in my classes. I am a theater professor, which, for all intents and purposes, is gay to most people, anyway.
6:00 p.m. My gay, homosexual, male lover returns home from his job. Luckily, he has chosen to be gay today, too, so we can sit down and have a nice, relaxing gay dinner together. We are aware that our relationship is ripping at the seams of our heterosexual neighbors’ marriages, but we choose to ignore this. If we were normal people, the guilt might weigh on us heavily, but we are gay, after all, so we do not have consciences. We eat in peace.
8:00 p.m. We go gay bowling at our Suburban Gay Bowling League. There are quite a lot of us homosexuals who gather each week to bowl at our local bowling alley. This makes the normal suburban bowlers uncomfortable, but we do not care. Some of them are openly hostile to us. The more polite ones just stare at us. It makes us feel like we are caged, exotic animals in a zoo. But we count ourselves lucky because the alley owners have sold out. They allow us to bowl here because they are desirous of our ample, disposable gay income. Ah, the almighty dollar! The owners show mercy on the normal suburbanites, though, by putting a buffer zone of two vacant lanes between our gay league and them. We are respectful of this line, which we call the “edge of gayness,” and do not cross it. We try to tone down our gaiety and frivolity by focusing intently on our bowling. The normal suburbanites never venture past their side of the line, either, because it would be unimaginable to them to interact with us.
11:00 p.m. My gay, homosexual, male lover and I collapse from the weariness of the gay lifestyle we have been living today. All of this subversive loving, volunteering, working, eating, playing and socializing is exhausting. Some say the gay lifestyle is self-enslavement, but we just cannot think about that now. Before we fall asleep, we each take out our personal, leather-bound copies of The Gay Agenda. The Gay Agenda is our Bible. We do not look at the real Bible because we are gay and therefore have no religion or morality. We read and strategize how we can best destroy American society tomorrow. Sharing a good, hardy, gay laugh, we each fall into a sound, gay sleep.
Zach Wahls Speaks About Family (x)
Tell Discovery Channel: Air the climate change episode from the Frozen Planet nature series
“The Discovery Channel is refusing to show the shocking conclusions of its own documentary.
“Frozen Planet” is a seven-part series that serves as a gripping portrait of life at the ends of the Earth, featuring stunning shots of wildlife at the North and South Poles.
But when the series airs in the U.S. early next year, Discovery Channel is only showing six episodes: they’re refusing to air the full seventh episode, which deals exclusively with climate change and exposing its devastating effects on our planet.
Claudia Abbott-Barish, an American now living in the UK, where “Frozen Planet” is currently airing, started a Change.org petition asking the Discovery Channel to air all seven episodes of “Frozen Planet” to make sure Americans can see the truth about climate change.
The striking footage of “Frozen Planet” is not to be missed — it features never-before-seen images of penguins, polar bears, glaciers, and the great grey owl. It’s an intimate look at the ice-covered portions of our planet, made by the same people who produced the incredible “Planet Earth” series from a few years ago. Throughout the series, viewers follow stories of animals trying to survive in extreme conditions.
But central to the story about life at the ends of the Earth is the reality of climate change.
Some of the show was shot by a cameraman named named Dave, a friend of Claudia’s. While filming in the Arctic and Antarctica, Dave said he was stunned by the experience. He saw shrinking glaciers and melting ice right before his eyes, all while working with scientists who talked about how the devastating effects of climate change are worse than they ever feared.
Discovery Channel prides itself on revealing the mysteries and unseen worlds of our planet. Claudia thinks that by shortchanging U.S. viewers of the reality of climate change, Discovery Channel is doing a disservice to its viewers and the planet.
Please sign Claudia’s petition asking Discovery Channel to air the seventh episode of “Frozen Planet” to tell the whole story about climate change and life at the ends of the Earth.”
It’s not a controversy, it’s a crisis.
I’ve been watching Frozen Planet, and it’s incredible…and this censorship is bullshit. We can’t keep sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending this stuff isn’t happening just so we don’t upset people. It’s our fault, and it’s coming back to bite us already. People ought to know about it. If they don’t, how are we going to get them to do anything before the worst comes?
The marginalisation of women, as with the marginalisation of any other group, means those who do put their head above the parapet are highly visible, and much more likely to be taken as representative of their entire sex. If a male comic performs badly on Have I Got News for You, he lets himself down. If one of the few women to appear performs badly, she’s proof that women just aren’t funny. (In series 40, 41 and the first four episodes of series 42 – all screened this year – 84.5% of the five people who appeared on the programme were men, while 15.5% were women. Eight out of 23 episodes featured no women. Twelve out of 23 episodes featured one woman. In series 10 of the panel comedy series Mock the Week – excluding the one compilation show, the same as Have I Got News for You – 92% of guests were male, 8% female. Out of 11 shows, five casts were entirely male, and the other six featured six men and one woman.)
Clearly there is an element of sexism – even if unconscious – on many TV shows. I spoke to one booker who said she still feels the key question that is often asked of women who will appear on air is “Are they fuckable?”, and she has been shouted down when trying to book women MPs for programmes, has heard them called yappy, “and yet the most slimebag male politicians wouldn’t get questioned or blocked at all”. Writer and broadcaster Bidisha says she was always struck by the “absolute unwillingness that would descend” when she suggested a female guest for shows she was presenting – she was once told a leading writer was only good for talking about “menstruating nuns”.
1. One in three women die or are seriously injured as a result of gender-based violence. Violence against women results in more deaths among women ages 15 to 44 than the total number of women who die because of war, malaria, and cancer.
2. An estimated four million women and girls are bought and sold worldwide each year, either into marriage, prostitution or slavery.
3. One out of every six American women have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. An estimated 60 percent of all rapes are not reported to the police.
4. Approximately 96 million young women in developing countries still cannot read or write. Globally, girls account for 55 percent of children not in school.
5. Nearly 75 percent of those displaced by violent conflict are women. Displacement leaves women without access to health care, proper nutrition or education. Displaced women face a higher threat of gender-based terrorism and violence.
6. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in hundreds of thousands of violent sexual assaults, resulting in an estimated 250,000 women falling victim to HIV/AIDS. While many women awaiting treatment died, their perpetrators receive antiretroviral therapies in prison.
7. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that actually denies women the right to vote by law. In other parts of the world, where women are legally allowed to vote, many women still struggle to exercise their rights. For example, in Afghanistan, some women were denied the right to vote in 2009 because the country lacked the necessary amount of female staff members to provide enough polls for women.
8. With its rate of violence, sexual assault and inadequate health care, Afghanistan remains the most dangerous place in the world for women to live.
9. In 1974, Isabel Peron became the world’s first woman president, when she was elected President of Argentina. Around the world, 68 women have served as head of state in their country (not including monarchies). Currently, 38 women serve as head of government around the world. In 1997, Ireland became the first country to succeed power from one female president to another.
10. African nations have more women in parliament than most western nations. Rwanda ranks number one in world rankings for the highest representation of women at 49 percent.
Eve Ensler: Over It. TW for rape and rape culture.
“I am over rape.
I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.
I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.
I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.
I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.
I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.
I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.
I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.
I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.
I am over rape happening in broad daylight.
I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.
I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called “comrades.”
I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.
I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
And I’m over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.
Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the alleged rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.
I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.
I am over starving Somalian women being raped at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.
I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.
I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.
No women, no future, duh.
I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.
I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters — film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes — while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.
I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?
You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?
I am over years and years of being over rape.
And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5-years-old.
And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.
And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.
I am over being polite about rape. It’s been too long now, we have been too understanding.
We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine — once and for all — what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.”
Signal fucking boost.
Fun fact: I’ve been caught by boys and sexually assaulted three times over the course of my adolescence. I didn’t conceive of any of those times as anything but my fault till a few months ago.
Rape culture fucks you right in the head, and then it fucks you in the heart, and then it takes boys and tells them that they can fuck the rest of you, and you can study feminism for years and years and years before you look at yourself one night and say holy shit, it wasn’t my fault at all, and that’s what you should have been told at the very start, when it first happened, but no one ever did.
AND I’M REALLY FUCKING MAD ABOUT IT.
