Me: maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer…idk what if I’m not good enough

BookTok romance writers: ‘what if you were just a normal school teacher…but the MINOTAUR wanted to get you PREGNANT’

im dying over this thread of algorithmically-generated/otherwise low-effort Kindle covers

don't forget

grossly inappropriate copy of animal farm that is on my nightstand at this very moment

...When you're getting ready to design a book cover and you're not sure what you do is going to be good enough.. it's always reassuring to see something like [all of the above].

The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas, warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “single women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.” In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”

At the same time that the state was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the U.S. saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of blackness. It could be argued that the state and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized penal state while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women)….However…Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society.” By insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.

jackie wang, carceral capitalism

this line from swales really hammers home the inherent existential horror of vampirism: it removes and perverts the one unifying constant of human existence. death may not often be welcome, but if you can’t count even on that then what can possibly be relied on? the horror of the vampire is not just about the threat posed to individual characters but about how destabilizing vampirism is to their understanding of how the world works (which, again, the thing i am always thinking about with this novel is that its core anxiety is the possibility that somehow the glories and advances and science and knowledge of the west have mapped the world only incompletely…). this obviously has a particular terrifying and unsettling resonance for our cast of 19th century protestants with a certain set of views about the afterlife, but i think there are many ways to tap into this aspect of the horror, as is probably evidenced by how the figure of the vampire in so many ways as popularized by stoker has endured.

I truly think life will be a little nicer once we fully degender skirts and dresses

Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.

More... https://imgur.com/gallery/100MhvX

insane what ovulation will do to a mf

huge thanks to this post for giving me the working title for my mpreg fic.

the thing that gets me about about barbie is that barbie land wasn’t even purposefully a matriarchy, barbie land came about because of the way little girls were playing with their barbies, it wasn’t created by mattel it was created by the people using the toys, so the fact that the barbies ignored the ken’s and had girls night every night wasn’t because they had some bias against him, it was just an accurate depiction of how kids play with barbies. I had some ken dolls as a child and they were essential to the plot in the sense that of course my barbie has a boyfriend because that represented the world i saw around me, but also he didn’t have any purpose in my dream world because i was only interested in what the girls were doing because they represented me and how i wanted to be, I wanted girls night every night I wanted the girls to be president and austronauts and not because of some inherent feminist idea but because I was a girl and I wasn’t thinking about boys, ken was an accessory. this movie wasn’t made to change the world but it showed a different perspective than what we usually see which I thought was fun. Men don’t have to be the centre of all our stories and its not even because we hate them, sometimes we’re just not thinking about them

i’ve started looking at weight and health the way i look at class and income and it really puts a lot of things into a new perspective.

let me explain: in america at least, the lower class have significantly worse health outcomes, even when accounting for other factors. just being poor is enough to make your overall health worse. we don’t know that being fat makes your health directly worse, like the data just isn’t there, but for a moment, pretend it does.

imagine going to the doctor with a health problem and the doctor looking at your chart and saying well, this problem will be less severe if you go up an income bracket. have you thought about becoming rich? it would really help. start by saving a little money every month.

ridiculous, right?? very few people successfully go from working class to rich, it just doesn’t happen on a large scale in society. maybe for a time you pick up some overtime hours, spend a little beyond your means, and appear rich. but eventually you burn out, your car needs to be repaired, and you return to being working class.

we do have this data: only some people can successfully lose large amounts of weight, and only a tiny fraction of people who lose that weight actually keep it off for more than a year. telling people to lose weight for their health is just absurd because they almost certainly can’t do it any more than they can double their income for their health.

and yet i see it everywhere. a little poster in my work breakroom tells me to improve my blood pressure by losing weight! a psa on the radio says you need to take care of your heart by losing weight! we can’t even conclusively prove that weight is the cause rather than just correlated with a lot of these problems but here it is offered anyway: have you tried being rich?

You hit the nail on the head. A lot of people tend to try and invalidate fatphobia as a form of oppression by saying its not an immutible quality like race or sexuality or gender. The old “you can lose weight, i can’t become white/straight/cis” argument.

That’s because fatphobia is a lot more like classism; i.e. it’s a form of bigotry that is only TECHNICALLY changeable. They’re both seen as a lot more changeable than they actually are, for all the reasons you’ve listed.