My number one tip for straight men (I mean, it could conceivably work for other genders and sexualities, but you’d have to adjust it quite a bit) is: inagine they’re a man.
Imagine that you just randomly told some bloke in a pub that he has beautiful eyes.
That you walked up behind your coworker Jim and started caressing his neck and shoulders while talking to him about the budget.
That you just sent a large and unexplained bouquet of flowers to Darren in Accounting.
That instead of complimenting a coworker on her breasts, you complimented him on his dick.
Does the action now seem weird? Uncomfortable? Do you no longer want to do it now that it isn’t directed at somebody you are sexually attracted to?
That strongly suggests that your action has a sexual aspect to it and therefore probably counts as sexual harassment!
I have a large, colorful tattoo on one arm. I’ve had multiple strange men cross a room to tell me how awesome it is, frequently while I’m at work, and it has never made me uncomfortable.
A couple of weeks ago, someone yelled out a car at me ‘I FUCKING LOVE YOUR BOOTS’, which was awesome.
It’s just… it’s really not hard to compliment people in a way that isn’t creepy, if your goal is actually to compliment them and not to slide a ‘btw I’m thinking about fucking you’ under the radar.
And the fact that some guys have NO IDEA how to do this really shows what’s wrong with our society.
Way too many parents need to learn the difference between “a child being disrespectful” and “a human person expressing an opinion that differs from theirs”
my mom had a nice technique for this. when i’d give her sass, she’d say, “i don’t speak rude, what’s that in polite-person-ese?”
basically, she’d encourage me to rephrase my opinion without the attitude. so “UGH, you NEVER let me do ANYTHING!” would (often after quite a bit of bitching and grumbling) turn into “it feels like every time i have a fun idea, you say no, and i just end up sitting around the house.”
and at that point we could troubleshoot like civilized people. she could explain that she didn’t want me to go to jimmy’s sleepover because jimmy’s dad creeps her out, and i could suggest maybe i could have andy over instead, and she could say sure, why not call peter and stacy and brianna and have your own party, i’ll pop some popcorn and rent a movie, and i could add what if we put up tents in the back yard and have a bonfire and roast marshmallows, and she could laugh and say don’t push it.
I really like this technique because it addresses the OPs comment but recognizes that the two can coexist. The problem is often the child is expressing their opinion in a rude or disrespectful way. And as humans we automatically become adverse to opinions we feel are aggressive toward us.
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
Mongols were fighting Samurai in Japan and Knights in Europe at the same time.
Star Wars a New Hope came out the same year as the last execution in France by Guillotine.
Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe were friends in their early 20′s.
When the Great Pyramids were being built there were areas that still had Woolly Mammoths roaming.
Harvard University didn’t teach calculus in its first few years after being established because calculus wasn’t invented yet.
Nintendo was founded two years after the Eiffel Tower was constructed
This is the book you want: The Timetables of History – going year by year (or in the earlier sections, at least century by century) and showing you what was going on in various parts of the world in several categories (e.g. Politics, Literature, Science, etc.) Super useful for visualizing what events were happening at the same time.
And for the moments the boys on set, with their silly crushes, became tiresome, Brown could turn to Winona Ryder. “I would just go to her like, ‘Ugh, the boys are getting on my nerves today!’ And she’d be like, ‘Got it — come sit.’ And we’d eat cheese.“
– Millie Bobby Brown for W Magazine (quote)
Rb if you wanna complain about men and eat cheese with Winona Ryder
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
I hope this a shit post cause that’s not even close to being true.
by now, most of you have probably seen this post about how “Athena gifted Medusa with ugliness and the power to turn men to stone as a way of protecting her from further violations of her person…As the original myth tells it, she lived in solitude because she did not wish to be around men after what Poseidon had done. And Athena gave her the power to never be at the mercy of a male again”
In addition, it makes some claims about how the image of Medusa’s head was found on the lintel of women’s shelters, and it was patriarchal Rome that subverted this myth into the one of rape and victim-blaming and turned her ugliness into something shameful.
….EXCEPT REALLY NOT
first let me say, I am all for reinterpreting and retelling Greek myths! People have been doing it down the ages, and I love the Romantic fixation on Prometheus and Freud’s fetish for Oedipus and tumblr’s fascination with Persephone/Hades. And I am definitely all for reclaiming stories that have been used to shame and silence women.
But I am also allergic to those retellings being retroactively fitted back into their sexist framework. On top of this being just plain old revisionist history, it does a disservice to why we needed to retell it in the first place.
Medusa was (probably) not natively a feminist heroine and her head was not hung above doorways of women’s shelters (not sure if Classical Greece had anything recognizable women’s shelters, my research hasn’t turned up anything.) Ancient Rome is not automatically more patriarchal than Ancient Greece, because Greece was pretty damn gross in a lot of ways and their myths are not exempt from that.
rip tumblr 