"...if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights."
"...no matter how many people I’ve slept with, having sex with me is a privilege, and anyone who wants to be in bed with me but is going to make me feel uncomfortable can get the fuck out."
"We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television. This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas."
(via Street Etiquette)- Howard Zinn
Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts. (source)And though I try to be good about recognizing stupid things I have been socialized to do and not doing them just because it's more convenient in the moment, I do this all. the. fucking. time.
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
When you get naked with someone and sleep with them, you not only let them see your body. You’re also letting them see you at your most basic level. The part of you that you spend a lot of time trying to pretend isn’t there. We’ve been taught to separate our hedonistic sexual selves from our demure, proper, tax-paying selves, and to keep the sexy part under wraps. To borrow from the ineffable Lil John, we are all supposed to be “a lady in the street and a freak in the bed.”
So when you get intimate with someone, you’re letting that part of yourself off the leash. You’re introducing another person to a side of you that even you don’t even always see. And that’s a scary prospect. It becomes much easier if we embellish our sexual selves and mask those drives we have with a more theatrical approach. If we distance ourselves from our sex lives, then maybe we won’t be held responsible if we do something wrong...
We become the embodiment of who we think our partner wants to be with because it’s safer than being ourselves. We act out a script in our head that’s been successful in the past, or we embellish our moans and cries of pleasure because we think it’s what our partner wants to hear. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad strategy. Sex can be stressful and each new partner presents unique challenges, preferences, and learning experiences. Retreating behind a sexual persona can make it a bit easier to have confidence in yourself.
This only becomes negative, in my opinion, when our obsession with being “perfect” prohibits us from enjoying ourselves. Even though having sex with another person is a shared experience, it is still a way for us to express ourselves. Becoming a caricature can alienate us too much from what we want and need. I think this tends to fade naturally when we develop a long-term sexual relationship with a partner, and this facilitates the development of those lovely little layers of intimacy.
As I've mentioned before, I have streaked my eating club. Twice. I also regularly go around shirtless for varying lengths of time, usually on Thursday evenings but sometimes other days of the week too. No one is really sure how shirtlessness became a rule of Middle School Drinking Game night, but it is one we hold people steadfastly to (unless they're realllllly uncomfortable with it, because violating people isn't cool). Occasionally I will lose my bra too, for various lengths of time. This Thursday night my pants eventually came off too and I watched (really really terrible) porn with a bunch of my friends from my eating club while caressing and being caressed by a female friend (which was turning me on way more than the porn, which was legitimately horrible for reasons we don't need to get into). And I was entirely comfortable in this situation. I like these situations because they help me get comfortable with my sexual self, in the context of hanging out with a group of my closest friends whom I feel will accept all of my selves.
Hello again Joseph,Translation: see post title.
My opinion regarding Teach for America hasn't changed. I greatly respect the work you guys do, and I know that a great teacher can change a student's entire life, but while I will always support teachers, I could never be one. I have not the patience, the interest, or the ability to know that my actions will have, at best, a localized effect. I just had my final interview for a position that would allow me to help conduct survey and observational research for the US Department of Education; I am all for the cause, just through a radically different means. I am flattered by your additional outreach, but remain uninterested in joining my friends in TFA's corps.
Best,
Maya
A friend (and fellow blogger) said to me on Facebook chat, "...youve definitely been talking about ish that i think about but dont usually talk about with people"
To which I replied, "yeah that's kind of what i'm going for. like, why don't we talk about this stuff? it's IMPORTANT."
And she said, "haha so much agree!"So if you're wondering where the giant smile on my face came from...
"...the people of the African Diaspora are a biogenetically diverse category of people who have an identity derived from common experiences of exploitation and racism. It is far more accurate and more fruitful to scholarship, and possibly to the future of humankind, to define African American people by their sense of community, consciousness, and commitment than by some mystical 'racial' essence. It is the Community into which they were born and reared, a Consciousness of the historical realities and shared experiences of their ancestors, and a Commitment to the perspectives of their 'blackness' and to the diminishing of racism that is critical to the identities of the Thurgood Marshalls and Hazel O'Learys of our society."
seems to shift from “men need to take full responsibility for their actions” to “men need to take full responsibility for their actions…and women have carte blance to act as recklessly and stupidly around men as possible without any trace of accountability.” and I just can’t agree anymore.
[And] why can’t both genders be educated on how to act responsibility around each other? What’s stopping us from steadfastly instilling “No always means no!” in the minds of all men and boys and educating women how not to put themselves in certain situations? Of course men shouldn’t attempt to have sex with a woman who’s too drunk to say no, but what’s wrong with reminding women that if you’re 5’1 and 110 pounds, it’s probably not the best idea to take eight shots of Patron while on the first, second, or thirteenth date? Yes, sober women definitely get raped too, but being sober and aware does decrease the likelihood that harm may come your way, and that’s true for each gender. (emphasis added) (source)is decidedly insensitive, but as I understand it, he was never trying to say that women who get themselves into less-than-safe situations deserve to be taken advantage of. THAT is victim-blaming, and I didn’t see any of it in his post. All I saw was the same advice my momma gives me whenever I’m going out: be smart, and be careful. Know your limits. We obviously need to switch from being a culture that teaches “don’t get raped” to being a culture that teaches “don’t rape,” but I don’t think that promoting safety amongst women is necessarily antithetical to that endeavor, ESPECIALLY when we take non-forcible rape into consideration. (By that I mean, like, A and B meet at a bar, get drunk, go home together, and shit goes down without enthusiastic consent and neither A or B know what to think about the situation in the morning.) I think that suggesting that the entire onus of responsibility for that situation falls onto the responsibility of the man (if we assume this is a heterosexual encounter) is JUST as dangerous as the female-blaming society we’re trying to grow out of.
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| This is Tamia, of The Style Sample |
"I’m not writing to be included in the canon. I’m writing to save something precious. I’m writing to get my pencil dimensionally around my little idea and work it out. Waiting for somebody to invite me to belong to something or be included in something was never my idea of being a part of this thing amazing journey called life. I just want to continue being a creative thinker and doer. I want to keep saving things and making history more inclusive by way of my particular alphabets and word arrangements."
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| Reblogged from It's a Go on the Fro |
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| Reblogged from It's a Go on the Fro |
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| Reblogged from It's a Go on the Fro |
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| Reblogged from Pretty is something you're born with. |
"Black women don’t need to be taught how to love. Despite what the common narrative may tell you, we are loving beings–no more or less so than any other group." -- Tami Winfrey Harris, who is currently working on a project on Black women and marriage
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| source: xkcd (aka the greatest webcomic of all time) |
gives content creators the power to force ISPs, search engines or payment services to shut down access to a Web site that the owner believes violated its copyright. On its face, the bill is designed to stop access to foreign Web sites that are profiting off of stolen content. (U.S.-based business can simply be dragged into court.) In reality, it’s much more insidious than that.
Say a French company just started a social networking site in which users can upload videos of themselves singing. Now let’s say some kids upload a video of themselves singing their favorite Britney Spears song, not even playing back the original recording but simply singing along innocently to a song they like.
In the eyes of Spears’s record label or any number of parties associated with her continued cash flow, that might very well look like an instance of piracy — and indeed, major labels have had content pulled off YouTube for similar “violations.” All the label has to do is send a letter to someone such as your ISP and request that the service stop routing traffic to the offending site, and, boom, no more French-sharing site for U.S. Internet users. And what’s really scary is that U.S. Internet service providers have immunity when it comes to what they can pull from their networks, so that French site might not even have a clear path to resolving the issue.
Now take that concept and begin to apply it across all the places you could potentially find “infringing” material. Sites about art, sites about movies, sites that let users generate content of all types — some of that content containing pieces of other work that should be considered fair use by any modern standard. Suddenly, a lot of destinations on the Internet will begin to look like island vacation spots — that is, they’re really hard to get to. And the impact won’t just be cultural or legal; the technical workings of the Internet itself will be dramatically affected.
Net Neutrality is the cornerstone of innovation, free speech and democracy on the Internet.I contacted my representative via this site: http://www.savetheinternet.com/
More than 2 million Americans have expressed support for Net Neutrality at Congress and the FCC. They want control over the Internet to remain in the hands of the people who use it every day.
Please stand with the public by protecting Net Neutrality once and for all.
As a 20-something in today's society, I've grown up on the internet. I trust it as a source of free information and use it for many hours a day to meet many of my needs. I also publish lots of my own content, and my father runs an online business, and it would be truly unjust for either of our sites to be affected by the end of Net Neutrality. People of my generation and every generation depend on the internet; don't let it be fundamentally and irrevocably changed. Don't let the American values of free speech and free commerce be trampled on. Please support Net Neutrality. I recognize that very serious infringements are regularly being made possible by the internet, but there must be other, less potentially damaging, ways to protect corporations against such infringements and punish wrongdoers. Please vote against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act, which could very well do more to censor legitimate free speech than to control the illegitimate spread of intellectual property. Please protect American consumers and maintain the free, open, user-determined nature of the internet by supporting The Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion and Consumer Protection Act of 2011.
I'm begging you.
Maya Reid
Princeton University, Class of 2012
