merskrat - Tumblr blog

[merskrat]

To everyone who is waiting on their zine,

Please bear with me as I have gone through a traumatic event and have found myself in crisis. Without getting too much into it, I no longer have access to my computer, and I’m out of town staying with family due to going through a traumatic event. The Etsy shop is on vacation mode, and my printer needs a part that should be delivered to my apartment, so it should be fixed eventually if it wasn’t stolen while I’ve been gone. Luckily I was able to access the zine and all previous zines through my new phone, so we will get back on track eventually. As of right now, I can work on getting PDF versions to those who contributed to the zine, so please message me if you would like a digital copy rather than waiting for me to recover and figure everything out. My life just became really complicated, and my priorities have shifted. Thank you to everyone who contributed, and I will get things up and running again as soon as I can. And thanks for your understanding. Please pray for me or send me good vibes or whatever it is you do, because I really need it right now. I’m basically having to start my life from scratch, and don’t know what the coming weeks or months will hold for me.

[merskrat]

Backbone 8 is live!

Please reach out to me with your address if you contributed and want your free copy. I can also send it to you as a pdf if you’d prefer. Readers can get their copies here, as well as back editions (highly recommend Backbone 4, it’s still my favorite). Big thank you to everyone who continues to make this project a reality! Please buy a zine and help us keep it going!

[merskrat]

Grateful that my sweet boy had a dignified death at home. I prayed every night for a month that he would die in his sleep and I wouldn’t have to make the call, but ultimately I had to. The vet gave us a vial of his hair and even a clay paw print, which was an add on that we didn’t pay for. She was a very sweet woman. He ate two big bowls of ice cream before being put into a deep sleep. After the second injection, he breathed 14 times. I counted really carefully with my hand on him—I don’t know why, but it felt important. Sometimes I turn the AC up high and cuddle under the blanket he died on. I had him my entire adult life, and turned 32 without him, and without a party. I cried that day. I still remember my first birthday with him, in the train yard in Tacoma, drinking beer and picking blackberries while waiting for my train. We rode back into Seattle with my arm around him while I read a book about pirates that Tommy traded me. I was the youngest of all my friends, and he was the baby out of all of our dogs. My new cat Xyla stood by him while he slept. She’s a demon, but decided to be sweet, and now she sleeps in his bed. It’s bittersweet to see her snoozing there but ultimately makes me happy.

Rest in peace Jason

[merskrat]

hello! is there a deadline to submit?

I know we already talked but for everyone else, deadline for Backbone 8 is in like five days, but I accept submissions year round!

[merskrat]

hi!! any general theme for the essay submissions? :)

No theme, you can write about whatever you want!

[merskrat]

Fort Belknap Taken Over by Sinaloa Cartel

In a small reservation called Fort Belknap Indian Community in northern Montana, the Sinaloa cartel came from Mexico and began moving drugs via Native owned land. According to the President of this community, Jeffrey Stiffarm, the cartel gets locals addicted to fentanyl, gets them into debt, and forces them to work pushing drugs.

President Stiffarm was in law enforcement for twenty years before becoming the President of his community, and his life has also been touched by tragedy, when his son was found dead under extremely suspicious circumstances, “in a tree.” It was labeled a suicide, as so many Native deaths are. We all saw the same thing happen with the death of Cole Brings Plenty, a Native actor who died under suspicious circumstances, and whose death was also labeled as a suicide.

President Stiffarm has done many TV interviews, as well as testified in DC, in an attempt to bring attention to the cartel taking over Fort Belknap During an interview talked about a double homicide against tribal members that was directly related to the cartel. He said that the hit was directed from a member of the cartel who was in prison. A woman who peddled drugs out of a small shop was involved, bringing the two men to the place where they would be murdered, and one of the men was her first cousin. The community is very small and tight knit, with many people being related. President Stiffarm even had to arrest his own sister during his career in law enforcement. He said, “Here in Fort Belknap it’s not quite as bad, like it is in Rocky Boy.” He sent his chief of police to testify again in his place, but still no help has been sent to rid this reservation of the cartel. The small community doesn’t have a big enough police department to get rid of Sinaloa on their own, and the government has done next to nothing to help, although President Stiffarm reports that he has had more luck with Republican lawmakers than he has with Democrats.

Read the whole article here. There will also be a version of this article in my soon to be released book, Strong Medicine: a Harm Reduction Anthology.

[merskrat]

Saving for future reference

clovenhooves.org registration process

There is some information on how to register here, and I am also explaining it in this post. The reason for this application system is to reduce the amount of trolls and people intending on using the forum in bad faith.

Please read the forum rules & guidelines. I'd like interested persons to feel like they can adhere to the rules. The guidelines are more suggestive.

Please read the cybersecurity guidelines to make sure you feel comfortable with making an account. I want to make sure people are aware of how to mitigate harm to themselves in the case of a database breach (which I have hopefully done enough security measures to avoid happening, but there is always some risk of hacking when it comes to websites).

Please check the membership application and see if you feel comfortable answering these questions. (Note: Your application will only be visible by yourself, trusted members, and admins. Once your application is accepted/rejected, only yourself and admins can look at it. This is in part to minimize copying of answers, we want people to answer honestly based on what they know, not based on what others have said.)

Create an account. Please read the "About Cloven Hooves" and "Registration Agreement" section and make sure you are good with it. Remember, you do not need to provide a real email address if you don't want to. But caution: a fake email address means I cannot help you recover your account if you lose your password.

Provide some info in the "Invite code/referral" section -- at least write "tumblr" since I assume you learned about it from here. :) If you are willing to share your tumblr username (assuming you have an active feminist blog), that would help speed along this step. (Note: this field and the "why are you interested in this forum?" are private and only visible to yourself and admins.)

Post your membership application in the "Pending Applications" forum.

Wait for your account to be accepted as a member, accepted as a learner, or rejected. If you are accepted as a member, you will be able to post anywhere on the forum. If you are accepted as a learner, you will be able to post questions and have discussions in "The Learning Channel". If you are rejected, you will not be able to post, so the same as a guest account. Learners and rejected people are welcome to reapply later on, probably within a few weeks/months. (Admins will not give detailed explanations on why an account has been marked as learner or rejected, as that could lead to gaming the system.)

Okay, that's all, yay!

(And when I refer to "people" throughout this post, I mean "women." Women are people. Female human beings. This is a feminist/woman-centered community.)

[merskrat]

Most people who follow me don’t know that I have a side blog for magic and witchcraft, and have come to me here for advice on that kind of thing. That’s totally fine, but I would love for this blog to get more traction and I’m going to pay more attention to it from now on. Please give me a follow if you’re a witchy radfem woman!

[merskrat]

Focus on who you want, but I can’t think of a single benefit to ending my ten year marriage to my husband. He’s done more for me than any woman ever has.

To the radfems who hold the "extreme view" that it makes absolutely no sense to talk about real female liberation while still dating, marrying, or otherwise centering males...

Who think its laughably absurd to get online and talk about all the ways men have been abusing and oppressing women worldwide since the dawn of time, how they're utterly incorrigible and incapable of not being misogynistic, and then log off and go serve one of them...

I'm right there with you. And I agree.

Hetero and bi radfems foam at the mouth every time this is brought up because they don't want to actually ever stop dating their oppressors even though they know they can't change them, and they'll employ any diversion tactic to get you to just drop the subject - from telling you you're victim-blaming, or demonizing heterosexuality, or shaming their decisions.

We already know all the reasons why it's infinitely dangerous to date males and infinitely beneficial to stop, and they know them too. But like libfems, they believe that if they're 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 their oppression then its a-okay. Nothing to see here...no elephant in the room in the form of a glaring hypocrisy.

Let them feel this way. They can do whatever they want, and they will anyway. They'll go from one bleak, unfulfilling relationship to another, fully knowing why each one is awful (because men don't see us as equals) and will just stubbornly press on with the same old patterns, while using other women as free therapists on whom to vent their frustrations over men. This is what partnered hetero/bi women tend to do with their single female friends in real life, as well.

I'm not focused anymore on women who will fight tooth and nail to defend their own oppression. This post isn't for them. They'll never change, and they'll continue to lash out at anyone who even has the audacity to suggest it. So let them enjoy the deja vu of going through the same sh*t year after year.

Instead, I'm focused on women who realize that men are a problem and are actually taking steps and making choices that separate themselves as much as possible from this problem, rather than willingly inviting it into their lives.

So to those women who have had enough and have stopped dating men (or never have) and who have decentered them due to a genuine wish to improve their lives...you're awesome to me for at least 𝘵𝘳𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 to take control of your own destiny by making tough decisions which will better your life in all ways. I commend you for it.

[merskrat]

Rest in peace Jason

[merskrat]

Comic I made out of a tumblr post of mine that went viral. (Christians keep your grubby little hands off if it. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.) this will go into Backbone 8 and I’m trying to get into making more comics with the help of a book that teaches you how to draw clothes.

[merskrat]

Working on Backbone 8 and still looking for more submissions!

I started editing today, and am still waiting on the cover art, but I believe the zine will be out by this fall! Please message me if you have any submissions and I will give you my email. Everyone who contributes gets a hard copy of the zine. This project is very important to me and I love and appreciate all of the women who have contributed in the past to keep it going. We started this in 2019 with a short educational zine about radical feminism, and have now branched out to a ton of different topics. We will print anything and everything, as long as it was created by a radical feminist. Poetry, art, essays, women’s history, prose, literally anything! Keep in mind that we print in black and white.

[merskrat]

Idk I think Job's wife really went off when she told him to curse God and die. It's interesting how there's no oxygen for her suffering in the narrative. She lost her children too. She lost her home too. Her health was taken from her too. Everything she had was stripped away by God. And yet there's no compassion for her. Not in the narrative nor in the commentaries or the sermons. She isn't even named.

[merskrat]

No you sound like a completely normal feminist, just the way you called women “cumsluts” and “cock worshippers” threw me off.

[merskrat]

The fact that a two party system is our only option means that democracy already *is* dead, and it has been for decades. I’m not backing any of these clowns. The fact that anyone thinks that Joe Biden, a conservative politician who can’t even form a coherent thought, is going to be the savior of democracy, is laughable. What has he done for us as a people? Did he codify Roe when he had the chance? No? Then he can get all the way fucked. When will people realize that we are voting between two right wing parties and push for *actual* change?

Trump won in 2016 by a super slim margin. Are you prepared to play a part in that happening again?

[merskrat]

Hi, are you still accepting submissions for your zine? If so, I was thinking of submitting an artwork! I'd be happy to send it if you're still accepting :)

Yes, I absolutely am! I’ll shoot you a message!

[merskrat]

God this is so relatable. I just had my yearly tea party and after an hour in the sun came down with a terrible migraine. I knew that might happen but I couldn’t *not* have the tea party because I *always* have the tea party. Sometimes I have to push myself beyond what I can handle in order to have fun and make memories, that’s just reality, but it’s often worth it. I want to go on dates with my husband, walks with my dog, browse the flea market for treasures, etc., and I just have to deal with the consequences after.

Sometimes us chronically ill/disabled folk will make the choice to have a day out when we know what the end result will be. We'll go out and have fun knowing we'll be stuck in bed for the next several days.

Even if we take it slow

Even if we only do low-impact activities

Even if we're mindful of our bodies and super duper extra careful

We'll still be recovering for a while.

That doesn't mean it wasn't worth it. It means we weighed the risks and rewards and made a choice. Most of the time I'm at home. But sometimes I'll go out and return with a flare up and some good memories. And that's okay too.