lalaithion

[lalaithion]

title of this is just ‘lesbian sex’

[lalaithion]

extremely awkward event when the tornado warning came through and i had to take my whole family down into the gimp basement for safety. not an easy conversation even at a normal volume

[lalaithion]

articles about the “wild new trend” of piercing from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s are fascinating to read. a selection of excerpts:

- one doctor cautioned that girls with pierced ears would be “required to constantly wear earrings to hide the holes in their heads” (or you could just not be weird about a tiny dot on someone else’s earlobe?)

- Genevieve Dariaux, then director of the Nina Ricci couture house, said in 1965 that “Pierced ears are unthinkable for an elegant woman, and even more dreadful for a young girl.” bear in mind that, as I’ve said, earrings that made your ears LOOK pierced were still common. what the difference was, nobody has yet made plain

- lots of evidence that going to a doctor was the preferred “safe” method for piercing at the time. but many doctors refused to do it, or said they would but that they strongly discouraged patients from having the procedure done. this checks out with my mother’s experience in 1965- her schoolmate’s anesthesiologist father did free piercing for all his daughter’s friends

- some teenagers around 1965 called clip and screwback earrings “chicken earrings” (implying that the wearers were too scared of pain to get their ears pierced, I think)

- one advice column, also from 1965, implied that pierced ears were just a passing fad. the previous several centuries of western history would like a word, Mx. Columnist…

- A GIRL WITH RESTRICTIVE PARENTS BRINGING UP THE ARGUMENT THAT HER GRANDMOTHER HAD PIERCED EARS. YES. FINALLY SOMEONE REALIZED THE LOGICAL FALLACIES HERE. the argument against that is, indeed, a sort of “that was the Bad Old Days and we know better now” deal as some other commenters have hypothesized

- one article mentions that the trend could be part of the Victorian revival that was just becoming popular in the mid-60s, which is a fascinating thought I’ve never considered before

- many doctors complaining that they were suddenly being called upon to pierce ears despite not really knowing how. this is interesting, because before the Great Ear-Piercing Taboo, jewelers offering piercing services were more like modern piercers than Claire’s employees (and doctors weren’t involved at all unless an infection set in). descriptions I’ve read of Victorian piercer-jewelers mention a lot of things we’re familiar with today- needles designed with a hollow for inserting the starter jewelry, for example, and even “freezing” solutions to numb the earlobe. so in those early resurgence days, going to a long-established jewelry store for your piercing might actually have been a better option than a doctor’s office

- two young women in a 1964 Canadian article (from Calgary) mention that they think screwback earrings look cheap and gaudy, and the pierced version is more conservative and tasteful, in an interesting reversal of mainstream thought

- a newspaper columnist saying pierced ears give him “the wim-wams,” so they are to be avoided. whatever the hell that means

- a LOT of people seem to think that ear piercing was popular in the Victorian era because wealthy women didn’t want to lose their expensive jewelry. sorry folks- my collection of Victorian costume earrings (all pierced) says otherwise

- much confusion as to why modern girls want to do something so old-fashioned

- one woman marvels at how comfortable it is to wear earrings in pierced ears, as opposed to clips and screwbacks. I feel infinitely blessed, as an earring-lover, to have been born when I could escape the scourge of ear-vises altogether

- apparently an eccentric elderly man on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, literally bribed all the women of the community to pierce their ears because he liked the way it looked. one of them mentioned that she held out for $25- $244 CAD or $188 USD in today’s money. all because some rich Victwardian codger had a very specific fetish

- this absolutely incredible response of an Indian diplomat’s wife when asked, in New York, why she wore a diamond nose stud: “Because I feel [diamonds] become me more than rubies or emeralds.” QUEEN

- “when the fad changes, as it indubitably will-” are you certain of that, ma’am

[lalaithion]

Kintsugi-inspired Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries.

[lalaithion]

fairy that whispers secrets of future discourse to me: the worst parts of third worldism mix with crypto-Protestantism to produce “disabled Americans who don’t want to work twelve hour days are imperialist bourgeois”

me: what about disabled people in other countries

fairy that whispers secrets of future discourse to me: the who in the what now

[lalaithion]

I made a collection of bird ornaments, each one representing a species we can spot from our home, at the public pond out front and the birds in our backyard. I created them to celebrate this place where I finally feel at home and to enjoy making something crafty just for me again. :D

The backyard birds. Once I varnished and find nice threads for them all I'll make a better photo of them all together :)

[lalaithion]

2026 booktok discourse: sad books are a cognitohazard (they make you sad)

[lalaithion]

complimented a cashier on her turtle pin this morning and she said "oh thanks, I am a little bit of a Turtle Person" with the carefully contained energy of Cookie Monster telling you he's mildly fond of chocolate chips

I hope she and the multiple tons of turtle merch she definitely has at home are having a wonderful day

[lalaithion]

be so real with me if I were on total drama island and I fucked up so bad would you vote me off. I'm talking like I fucked up really bad. like unforgivably

[lalaithion]

The UK government did an investigation into the porn sites that haven't yet implemented the age verification measures and they...I shit you not, they published a list. A LIST of all the porn sites. That you can still access without having to verify your age. They made a government employee make a list of all the porn sites and check if they have age verification and then they published a list of those that don't. For all the public to read.

[lalaithion]

15yo boy sitting next to me on the bus reading dostoevsky w his mother sitting in the seat in front of him intermittently interrupting to lean back and show him instagram reels

[lalaithion]

"is sabrina destroying feminism or is she empowering women" i think shes having sex

[lalaithion]

Anti public defender sentiment NOW of all times has GOT to be a psyop and I’m not being hyperbolic

[lalaithion]

Yesterday my sister was going to complain about how things could have been different with our parents but stopped herself and said "No use treading through the multiverse"

Sooo true bestie that's going straight into my lexicon

[lalaithion]

Exaggerated fawning over "trans women" in the abstract (in the places where, and to the extent that, it occurs) is very compatible with the transmisogynist culture on this site.

Breathlessly insisting that trans women are gorgeous ethereal perfect goddesses whom "we" must protect (besides being dehumanising in and of itself) is used as a sort of cleansing ritual whenever the latest de-personing sexual harassment campaign against a trans woman—in which "we" have all gleefully participated—is getting a little bit too vicious and obvious to ignore.

"Trans women" in the abstract are worthy of respect, admiration, consideration, love, and all around being treated as human beings. You can insist this very vociferously all the while treating each individual trans woman as if she is worthy of nothing of the sort.

Some of the most notorious trans-woman-pedojacketers on here have a tendency to go on "trans women positivity" reblogging sprees after their attacks. If they don't feel the need to spread "nonbinary positivity" or "trans men positivity" posts, consider that it's because they don't tend to try to sexually harass TME people off the site.

[lalaithion]

I have found that many people who have not had a trans female or trans feminine experience often have trouble wrapping their brains around the concept of trans-misogyny, so I will offer the following two anecdotes to help illustrate what I mean by the term. Once, about two years ago, I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and a trans woman happened to be walking just ahead of me. She was dressed femininely, but not any more feminine than a typical cis woman. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on a doorstep, and as the trans woman walked by, the man turned to the woman he was sitting next to and said, “Look at all the shit he’s wearing,” and the woman he was with nodded in agreement. Now presumably the word “shit” was a reference to femininity — specifically, the feminine clothing and cosmetics the trans woman wore. I found this particular comment to be quite telling. After all, while cis women often receive harassing comments from strange men on the street, it is rather rare for those men to address those remarks to a female acquaintance and for her to apparently approve of his remarks. Furthermore, if this same man were to have harassed a cis woman, it is unlikely that he would do so by referring to her feminine clothing and makeup as “shit.” Similarly, someone who is on the trans masculine spectrum could potentially be harassed, but it is unlikely that his masculine clothing would be referred to as “shit.” Thus, trans-misogyny is both informed by, yet distinct from, transphobia and misogyny, in that it specifically targets transgender expressions of femaleness and femininity.

The second example of trans-misogyny that I’d like to share occurred at an Association for Women in Psychology conference I attended in 2007 (for those unfamiliar with that organization, it is essentially a feminist psychology conference). One psychologist gave a presentation on the ways in which feminism has informed her approach to therapy. During the course of her talk, she discussed two transgender clients of hers, one on the trans male/masculine spectrum, the other on the trans female/feminine spectrum. Their stories were very similar in that both had begun the process of physically transitioning but were having second thoughts about it. First, the therapist discussed the trans masculine spectrum person, whose gender presentation she described simply as being “very butch.” She discussed this individual’s transgender expressions and issues in a respectful and serious manner, and the audience listened attentively. However, when she turned her attention to the trans feminine client, she went into a very graphic and animated description of the trans person’s appearance, detailing how the trans woman’s hair was styled, the type of outfit and shoes she was wearing, the way her makeup was done, and so on. This description elicited a significant amount of giggling from the audience, which I found to be particularly disturbing given the fact that this was an explicitly feminist conference. Clearly, if a male psychologist gave a talk at this meeting in which he went into such explicit detail regarding what one of his cis female clients was wearing, most of these same audience members, as well as the presenter, would surely (and rightfully) be appalled and would view such remarks to be blatantly objectifying. In fact, in both of these incidents I have described, comments that would typically be considered extraordinarily misogynistic if they were directed at cis women are not considered beyond the pale when directed at trans women.

—serano

[lalaithion]

I love stupid demarcation arguments, regardless of subject matter. I once saw the self-appointed tag wranglers on a porn forum having a civil war over a comic of a trans woman frotting with a cis dude because they could not for the life of them agree whether that was "male on female" or "female on male", and I'm just sitting there like