"The Major grunted. He was in something of a quandary. His sentiments towards journalists remained unchanged, but a man who has just handed you a cheque for £5,000 is in a privileged position. You cannot very well tell him to go to the devil."
- from The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie, published in 1931. Online calculators tell me that £5000 would be worth over £400,000 - or $500,000 - now.
Someone said "Are you really so stupid to think that Africa has the same technological advances as us? If they did they would probably have clean water and not live in houses made of sticks and mud. Get over yourself and stop being so ignorant."..... Below is a tiny collection of images of the Africa they refuse to show you..
ches
I’m sorry you’ve been made to believe that the whole of Africa is poor, I really am..
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“
(via gothhabiba)
If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.
The thing about people talking about how much they hate children is that I've never seen any correlation between "openly expressed loathing of children" and "support for policies that actively harm children."
In contrast, when people go out of their way to tell you how much they love children and want to protect children, it's at least a 50/50 chance that you are about to hear support for the most actively evil assault on children's rights and dignity that you can possibly imagine.
So we all know that Tumblr is US-centric. But to what degree? (and can we skew the results of this poll by posting it at a time where they should be asleep?)
fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it'll say "eating a lot of food causes diabetes" and you're like oh dang what? I thought we didn't know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says "we still don't know what causes diabetes" bruh they're just making shit up to give people eating disorders
Working at the sex shop really did rewire my brain. There was basically no topic that was too taboo to talk about, and what little propriety I’d had evaporated. I’d be out walking and chatting with friends about erotica I’d had to read that day only to be shushed and realize people were staring at me.
It always struck me as a little bit silly but I learned to curb myself for others comfort levels. Mostly.
But I have one distinct memory of decorating holiday cookies with my parents and my grandmother. My mom had worked in a sex shop back in her day, and I never hid my line of work from my family, so I was telling a work story.
I was conscious that my dad was slightly more sensitive, so I was using pretty broad descriptions, but I happened to mention silicone lube and my nana asked, “What’s that?”
I went into full sales mode. Focused on the little reindeer cookie I was decorating I started info dumping, “Oh, it’s pretty great. Water based lubricants get absorbed through vaginal mucous membranes, but silicone is too dense and our body can’t absorb it the same way. So once you apply some silicone you never have to worry about chafing, and a little goes a long way. It’s especially popular with older women, because they start producing less natural lubricant and absorb water based lubes so quickly.”
There was a silent beat after this statement.
I looked up.
My mom and grandmother were looking at me with rapt attention, and I belatedly realized I was addressing two older women who probably would welcome extra lubrication.
And then there was my dad, blushing so pink with embarrassment that I thought he was about to faint.
“I can talk about something else,” I offered in apology to my dad.
“Like hell! He can go in the other room, tell me more!” My nana declared. My dad scampered off to busy himself in another room while I answered their questions and talked about brands and pricing.
I slipped them each a small bottle of silicone lube for the holidays.