Me: Then explain how I was turned down a job washing and doing minor repairs on tractors and his exact words were “I don’t think a woman can do this job.” How about when I worked at a body shop making really good money but was sexually harassed by the man paying me. Or what about when I was flipping houses and stopped getting paid so I had to track down the man paying me at his house.
Man: Why are you so interested in jobs that men do? Do you want to be a man?
Me, breathing heavily: I THOUGHT YOU SAID THIS WASN’T THE 1930’s ANYMORE DID I READ SOMETHING WRONG
Disclaimer 1: This will probably get a little NSFW.
Disclaimer 2: Symptoms of periods vary from period-haver to period-haver. It pretty much sucks for everyone, though.
Disclaimer 3: I have a high pain tolerance. Really high. If I say something is really painful, it is really fucking painful.
And now for the reasons why having periods suck and it’s worse for us to have it than for you to hear about it:
There is blood coming from our vaginas. This is a very unpleasant feeling. We cannot “hold it.” Some people get a light trickling. Some, like me, get a Goddamn crime scene.
The ways to keep from bleeding all over everything include a pad, which basically feels like a diaper, and a tampon, which is basically shoving a cotton pipe up there, is not as much fun as it sounds, and can be very uncomfortable if done wrong. And doing it right is fairly hard. Thanks to good old Catholic sex ed, it took me about five years to figure out.
Cramps. I am lucky in that my cramps tend not to be THAT bad (thank you, high pain tolerance), but some get cramps so bad that the pain is comparable to appendicitis.
Headaches. What I lack in cramps, I often make up for in headaches. And not just any headaches. Agonizing headaches. They can start up to a week before the bleeding starts, they last a few days into it, and they don’t go away. No matter how much aspirin you take. Seriously, when I get menstrual headaches, I could down an entire fucking bottle of Advil and I’d probably die but my ghost would still have the headache.
Acne. I’m talking looking like Deadpool under the mask.
Indigestion. It isn’t fun.
Bloating.
Sometimes my actual vaginal region hurts. A lot. Enough to have me doubled over on the floor.
For some reason my anxiety gets worse sometimes around my period. Which is extra fun. There’s nothing like nearly calling the morgue because your dad was late from a basketball game, only to find out he was at Applebee’s.
Fatigue. Because I’m doing everything I normally do while my body is staging a mutiny.
Backache.
Just generally feeling disgusting.
This goes on for a week.
This happens every Goddamn month.
This generally starts around age twelve or so and lasts until maybe age 45.
16. Pads will dry out your vaginal regions and make them itchy. Really REALLY itchy
17. Tampons come in three sizes, too small to do any good, not quite big enough and i think this is a sheep
18, menstrual cups are brilliant if you get them in right, this will happen maybe once a period. You will not know if it’s right until you discover it’s wrong when it leaks.
19. you will run at least two degrees hotter, and up to four degrees hotter at night. Sleep is clearly for other people as you do the too hot too cold quilt exercise all night
20. you will sleep on your side because you are paranoid that you’ve put you cup/tampon in wrong and your pad won’t catch the flow
21. crime scene periods get more frequent as you get older
22. your period will not conform to any cycle, it will range between 2-5 days every 28-32 days, this will change for reasons – what those reasons are your body will not inform you
23. Fatigue for no reason is common – it might be because you’ve worn yourself out trying to get to sleep.
24. Period panties are a must, these are generally black cotton monstrosities that cover you from waist to crotch area, they’re black because they will get stained.
25. Paranoia is normal. No, you probably aren’t leaking but you’re sure you are.
26. The smell. Periods have a smell and you will be paranoid everyone in a mile’s radius will be aware of it.
27. you will shed more hair than usual, this can be up to three times as much. You’re not going bald, it will just look like it.
28. You will randomly dislike foods you previously liked and will like them again when the period is over
29. Chocolate does help, it’s not a myth, the darker the chocolate the better, and any threats to people who have stolen your chocolate are totally justified. Ibuprofen and a hot water bottle are also wonderful.
30. You will almost certainly, especially with cramps, feel like you really need to use the bathroom, you don’t, your body just makes it feel like you really need to.
17. Tampons come in three sizes, too small to do any good, not quite big enough and i think this is a sheep
And sometimes even the sheep will be too small to get you through the night.
15. This generally starts around age twelve or so and lasts until maybe age 45.
Yeahno, periods/puberty now start around 10, and menopause hits most women much later than 45. I’m 48 with no menopause in sight. My mom didn’t hit menopause until she was 56.
The body needs a certain amount of fat stored to jumpstart puberty. Kids with more fat go through periods earlier. The average bmi of of the general population has gone up, so that’s the main reason kids have periods earlier now. Also there are some special cases where kids drank milk treated with growth hormone and got periods as early as 7 or 8 due to hormone wackiness.
Kids with very low body fat percentage get delayed puberty. Professional teen gymnasts, or teens doing any other really physically intense sport, or underweight/anorexic teens, may not get their period till age 15 or 16.
Pads won’t dry out your vaginal area provided you have a thick and luxurious forest of pubic hair as a buffer between your skin and the pad. You’ll have a different problem tho – period blood matting up your pubic hair to the point that you need detangling shampoo for your crotch.
If you’re really lucky (read:sarcasm) you’ll have a super sensitive cervix which 1) will hurt like hell whenever you birth a clot (if you pass clots), and/or 2) will trigger waves of nausea and dizziness if your tampon touches it even the slightest bit.
Not even ibuprofen or any painkiller helps even in the slightest (stupid body created a bar against it, and they not work anymore).
And not matter how big are your pads, the blood goes always through them like nothing in less than 2h.
Cramps are like kicks straight to your tummy, and you could rip the head of any person who even dares to see you.
And not just dark underwears is necessary, but also dark clothes (although tight clothes makes me grumpier) and long, really long clothes help out even when you’re at home just in case the pads aren’t enough.
The worst week of the whole month!! Without say what my already unstable swing moods jump to the moon those days
Just a little thing i remembered: once my period literally made me pass out from pain when i was supposed to be taking a test earlier this year
So yeah
That’s a cool thing women’s uteruses do
Okay, hello, just wanted to add a possible useful information to the people that suffer more than they should when on their periods.
This isn’t normal. We’ve normalized a lot about periods and how they can be unforgiving to the point of passing out because of the pain but more and more doctors are (FINALLY) looking a bit deeper into it and you might have what they call “Endometriosis”.
Now, I’m no expert, and I recommend you researching more of this on your free time, but basically it’s been said 1 out of 10 women/ppl with ovaries have this. I just heard that one of my companion’s friend used to skip school whenever she had her periods because of how bad it got, but no one really paid it any mind. The girl kept seeing one doctor after the other until FINALLY one doctor listened and found out she had endometriosis, which can lead to infertility, but is treatable.
So please, of you are suffering so much that you are immobilized or you faint, talk about it and try to find a doctor who will listen. You might find something that can help you!!
Periods are something that hasn’t been looked too closely at because of how exasperatingly taboo it is. The pain is normalized. Don’t let it be.
Please remember that this is when the amazon strike was scheduled. It is very likely that it was precisely the direct action of Amazon workers that made this impact on Amazon. Do not make their work invisible.
This is literally now my favorite post ever, because its become thousands of reblogs consisting of passing on good fortune. Meanwhile many of y’all added your own comments saying your thanks, and continuing the chain by adding your own little bit of wishful thinking. You are all wonderful.
so anyway I met a guy when I was walking out of the metro today
“I’m Polish, I just haven’t been here for thirty years,” he said, and even under the stubble and the fucking haggard look that had me make eye contact before he walked up to me because damn bitch, you okay bro? and I know what kind of desperation puts that kind of look on your face, I pegged him at some mid-thirties, so he’d be like, what, four fucking years old when he left the country, “I’ve just been deported from Chicago, I have no family here, I have no home, I have nowhere to go. So I’m trying to get on a train to Berlin, but all I have,” and he shows me a handful of silver and yellow pennies and a crumpled banknote that is very distinctly not Polish currency, “is these and one dollar, I haven’t slept in two days, I haven’t showered in a week, I haven’t had water,” and he really fucking looks the part too and his voice breaks when he says the train from Warsaw to Berlin is so-and-so fucking expensive, BUT it’s cheaper from Poznan even counting the Warsaw-Poznan course and I’m just glad this man had the sense to beg near an ATM and to ask if I speak English before he said all that
and he was dead certain I’m not serious when I handed him enough for that train ticket and as much over as I could spare so he can remind himself he’s a human being
and I guess why I’m making this post is
@America, kindly get your SHIT TOGETHER
STAT.
Please reblog this. Please keep reblogging this. Please make Americans see this and see it again and over again. Their government is doing this to their own people, and it doesn’t result in anything being made great.
Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.
See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.
Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.
What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride – yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.
Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table – taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”
(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)
In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.
I’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.
It’s nice being
Tumblr Old and having some recollection of the self-identifiers we
used before this website. The slogans alone should tell you the
motivators behind using “queer” as opposed to other terms. There
was “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” There was “queer
rage”. There was “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.”
That last one especially shows rejection of any neat essentialist
boxes – go away with your binaries, your easy categorization, and
last but not least your respectability politics.
I’ve never seen “q
slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two
years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a
trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost
uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer”
with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are
almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that
it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any
other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically
correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of
history. Which is just not true.
So anyway, here are
some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any
other term:
1) Wide relevance.
Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.
2) Opacity. It can
be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it
can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t
fully covered by any of those categories!
3) Queer could,
therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I
can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that).
Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only
sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all
the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention
straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in
casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style
language.
And you know what,
of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the
abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is
catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the
community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace
it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default
descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy
with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve
come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and
sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside
from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.
I could go on about
how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb
people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who
especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete
one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something
the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under
good old respectability politics.
TL;DR: You can’t
just take away a term that many, many people in the
community have been actively using for decades before your latest
iteration of SGA discourse and expect no meaning to be lost or
broken.
@outderon
I think, in part, the notion of “queer is a slur” comes from the comparative rarity of encountering it as far as younger people are concerned. Which, of course, makes it sound much more punchy on occasions when it is used. But you’re absolutely right about all of this.
queer is a slur. this isn’t up for debate. the whole point of queer nation and groups like it was that the word queer has a history of violence, and that’s why they chose it. it was meant to shock. it was meant to turn cishets’ weapons against them – but the word is still a weapon, and people who aren’t comfortable with it shouldn’t have it applied to them
yes, queer was central to anti-assimilationist groups like queer nation and act up, and yes, fighting against respectability politics is really important. but like, none of this negates queer’s history. its recent history was empowerment and reclamation in the late 80s/early 90s, but before that it was exclusively a slur, and it’s still used (particularly by and against older people) to dehumanise lgbt+ people.
there’s nothing wrong with using it as a self-identification (provided you’re not cishet), but using it as an umbrella term is shit because it forces a slur onto people who aren’t necessarily comfortable with it. for so many lgbt+ people the word is primarily associated with violence and hatred, and I shouldn’t need to say that referring to people by a slur without their permission is just downright terrible
Okay, I have several huge problems with this.
Who exactly made you the Grand Arbiter of our language? Why do you get to tell people who were in the community before you were born that they can no longer use their language?
Can you tell me another term that can be used in informal day-to-day speech that has never been a slur? Can you show me an “umbrella” term that hasn’t been used by people telling half the community they’re “not gay enough” or “too extreme” or otherwise not worthy of being One Of Us? (In informal speech, I hear a lot of reversion to “gay” or “gay and lesbian;” hopefully I don’t have to explain what’s wrong here?) Can you show me a term that I can use to include all of us, as a person whose disability includes memory issues that make it very difficult to keep track of the ever-increasing alphabet soup?
A large part of this post is a response to people telling others who are self-identifying as queer “um sweaty :)))) that’s a slur :)))” – the same people who made “LGBT” into a warning sign – coming to tell us that we can’t use that word either, in any capacity.
You say “was” like anti-assimilationism is a footnote in a dusty history volume – to someone who is pushing back against assimilationism and the very real harm it is doing to a lot of the community.
“queer as an umbrella term is ahistorical” Oh, my sweet summer child. The first use of “queer” by people in the community as a broad descriptor was a century ago. The first use of it in the sense that I’m using it here – as a deliberately radical (both “radical politics” and “radically inclusive”) umbrella term applied to the whole community – predates the last major battle of the “who’s queer enough to count?” war and the use of LGBT, let alone the rest of the alphabet soup. I can show you formal scholarly articles about as old as you are that uncontroversially use it. Has it ever been used by the entire community to refer to the entire community? No. But neither has anything else that even pretends to include us all, and it definitely does have a storied history.
I wrote that post in response to a movement I’ve seen a fair amount of lately – the use of “queer is a slur” against people who are using it in a sense it’s had for over a quarter of a century in a deliberate bid to silence those of us who are hurt by supercessionist, assimilationist policies and tactics.
You want ahistorical? There are a lot of people right now trying to redefine the boundaries of the “LGBT” community to exclude folks who have been there all along, and to silence the voices of anybody who isn’t gay enough for their liking.
You know what else is still used as a slur? Gay. Yet somehow, it’s completely uncontroversial. When people talk about how gay they are* or “gay rights” or “gay marriage,” nobody bats an eye. Nobody gives them the “um sweaty, that’s a slur” speech. Even if they’re straight.
Active slurs are apparently perfectly fine for straight people to use to discuss things that affect all of us. So you’ll pardon me for being extremely fucking skeptical of the singling out of this term, one that sees extremely strong usage by the segments of the community keep being marginalized within the community, as unacceptable or a step too far. I’ve heard “That’s a step too far” way too many times from “LGBT” people and organizations – usually when I, as a trans person, ask them to fight for my rights too, or when I, as a bi person, ask for a face and a voice and maybe some resources.
The only thing that makes “queer” unacceptable where “gay” is uncontroversial is who’s using it.
Am I going to call specific, individual people queer? Not unless I’ve seen them actively claim it. Am I going to talk about the queer community, queer issues, queer rights? Hell yes I am – because the community that wants me as a member, the community I want to be a member of, is queer.
“Queer is a slur” is doing damage to me. Queer community, queer politics, and being queer are liberating me.
I went looking for this post because no less than 4 posts about “the q slur” have come across my dash today.
@wetwareproblem says it much more articulately above than I could, but what I will say is this: I’m so over people telling me the word I choose to identify with is so offensive it should never even be typed.
I’m queer. I have been part of the queer community for almost twenty years. My identity is not a slur.
Kids.
Queers don’t let queers tell falsehoods about the word queer.
I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful and I even think it’s well-intentioned – and that’s the problem. Earnestly, with good intentions, kids half my age are railing about queer being a slur and claiming to know the gay history that I personally lived (not to mention the gay history that precedes me).
We had queer studies courses in our universities. There are books on queer art, cinema, and history. You know how I know queer isn’t a slur?
Because we never had fag studies.
Sorry, that was harsh, right? Well, that’s the nature of a slur. It retains a hard edge, even if you take ownership of it. You can’t use it in respectful institutions such as academia. A straight person cannot utter it – even in solidarity – without sounding as if they’ve crossed a boundary.
The attempts to change history here are not without purpose. Changing the language is an effort made by people with ill-will for the LGBT community (particularly against the T, but also the B – which doesn’t bode well for those letters in the extended acronym). Fewer umbrella terms means people getting pushed out from under the umbrella.
Please guys, ask yourselves who benefits from this division (hint: people that do not want us to unify). Don’t fight against queer, a word that by its nature includes more vulnerable members of the community, people whose identity is less easily defined.
Also, I’m just as angry as @audreyimpossible is, for some reason it’s coming out of me way softer than it is inside of me. But this queer is very tired of infighting. I’ve been here for a while and I can tell when we’re being manipulated.
I either didn’t see or didn’t remember this addition until it popped up in my notes again, but thank you so much. This is an extremely solid, well-made point.
This shit is why I get straight people at work telling me I can’t describe myself as queer.
The problem with the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of recreation as a structure for a day is that it simply can’t work that way. If I’m expected to be at work at 9, then my work day must begin at 7. Allowing myself a rushed experience to wake up and get to work. And I live close to work. So either my recreation or my sleep needs to take a hit, but for some people it could be more. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week as a basis for full time work is honestly unreasonable at that point. Because it isn’t actually 40 hours a week, it’s 50 hours a week lost to a job, of which 10 is unpaid.
some of my coworkers have 2h of transit to get to work, which takes 4-5h off their free time. working full time is a bad idea and shouldve never been a thing
And let’s not forget that maintaining a clean home and providing food for yourself takes over 20 hours a week (appx 20 hours in-house, and varying hours spent running outside errands) if you are completely abled.
A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.
Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de’Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de’Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.
Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.
The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.
Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de’Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.
Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.
After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.
Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.
Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.
Christ men have been Photoshopping women to make us more “pleasing” since for-fucking-ever.
Also, Isabella de’Medici is nice looking, but also has that look in her eye of all Medicis: “I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to kick your ass, buy you and everything you own, or have sex with you. Perhaps all three.”
It’s interesting the way the repaint has photoshop!Isabella affecting a slightly dreamy, docile gaze into the middle distance; she’s dewy-faced and unthreateningly soft. But in the original, she’s looking you right in the eye. She takes the male gaze and throws it right back at you. That’s a face that says go on, tell me I’d be so pretty if only I had a little repaint, I dare you. I’ll fuck you up.
They also made her hand smaller and I can’t tell if that’s an urn or scepter in her hand but considering it was painted out I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a symbol of power.
Oh, it’s a symbol of power alright. She’s a Medici, daughter of Cosimo I de Medici, First Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medicis were the most powerful political family in Florence for almost forever. In Florence, the lines between politics, crime, warfare, and the Church were very blurry. They even managed, on four separate occasions, to get one of their own family members elected Pope, usually by very underhanded dealing with the cardinals. They had their fingers in every pie in Italy from 13th through 17th century.
In the case of Isabella, in order to secure an alliance with the Orsini family of Rome, she was married to Paolo Giordano I Orsini when she was 16. Contrary to popular belief, people in Renaissance Europe weren’t all that into child brides, this was just about the politics, so she stayed at her father’s household in Florence until she was of appropriate age. And then she just sort of… never left. Her new husband had zero concept of money, and her dad actually kinda hated him even though he was the one who arranged the marriage in the first place. So Isabella and her 50,000 scudi dowry (at a time when the average Italian earned somewhere between 10 and 40 scudi a year)stayed in Florence. Because she never went to Rome to live with her husband, she enjoyed enormous freedom and power back in Florence. After her mother died, she basically stepped into the role of First Lady of Florence, and was considered one of the keenest political minds in Europe. She ruled what she wanted, bought what she wanted, and fucked who she wanted, with no one really able to tell her no.
She was eventually assassinated by her husband while she was on holiday at one of her family’s country villas, probably because she was fucking her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Well, she had an “accident” while bathing, and Paolo Orsini said she must have drowned, but the coroner said she was strangled, and several servants swore they saw him do it. He might also have done it on the orders of Isabella’s brother, Francesco Medici, since he was trying to consolidate his power as the next Grand Duke, and by all accounts she was definitely in his way because of her political savvy.
So yeah. She was a boss, and that’s what makes it even more offensive that this Victorian sap tried to make her into this passive, skinny, doe-eyed wimp.
Frankenuff’s Castle 