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Shawn Braley Illustration

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men love to tell you unprompted how much they dislike chihuahuas

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Thank you, Snoop Logg...

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the thing about "age gap" discourse is that it's all framed in this way that carefully fails to account anywhere for the structure of patriarchy, instead cleverly hiding it in the background like furniture.

"i think wide age gaps are problematic" is framed as if it's a general concern. but if you ask for an example they will ALWAYS reach first for the case of an older man and a younger woman. this is meant to read as being self-evidently in favor of their point of view, but it only works that way if you fail to ask why it is self-evident that an older man would hold such disproportionate power.

why? is it perhaps the case that men tend in general to accrue more power & wealth & influence & position as they age? does that phenomenon arise naturally or are we perhaps talking around some other set of explicable social phenomena? is there some reason why, as is heavily implied by your argument, women do not accrue the aforementioned advantages as they age in the same way? without arguing that the relationship you describe either is or is not "problematic," can we examine whether we are framing correctly what exactly might be problematic about it? in this example, age is used as a convenient synecdoche that stands in for all the privilege that typically accrues to men as time goes on and as they advance within the patriarchal hierarchies woven into their personal and professional lives: a youth becomes a family patriarch, a bachelor becomes head of a household, a junior clerk becomes a C-suite suit. a woman, in the equivalent time, does not accrue patriarchal privilege as she ages -- in fact, absent other factors, her power (& value, since her only power under patriarchy is her value) decline the older she gets. lumping all this under "age gap" is not just simplistic, it's wrong.

this is illustrated in counterexample by the fact that when people who are fixated on "age gaps" give an example with an older woman and a younger man, they never fail to get more specific and make her his teacher, or his babysitter (current or ex-), or to specify this time that she is wealthy and he is destitute. it becomes obvious that once again, age is a stand-in in each case for some other differential of power -- structural power within the institution of the school for the teacher, the dyadic mentor/mentee carer/cared-for dynamic for the babysitter, and the simple familiar gulf between wealth and poverty for the rich woman.

the people fixated on "age gaps" either won't mention queer relationships at all because they raise inconvenient questions, or they'll actually come out and say "well it's kinda different for queer people and i can't weigh in uwu," or they'll go mask-off reactionary and invoke the specter of queer grooming to drive their point home. it makes little difference.

every statistic shows that people who own horses have excellent health outcomes. thinking about this for even two seconds should make clear that this is because only rich people own horses and rich people get excellent healthcare; the horses have nothing to do with it. the people who are worried about "age gaps" aren't even always wrong that there's a problematic power difference in a relationship, but their analysis of why that is makes about as much sense as "a horse every day keeps the doctor away" makes as medical advice.

say what you fucking mean.

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i think, if you're gonna open a restaurant, you should be legally required to have a fat person come in, move through the restaurant, and sit in at least one of the chairs. I think that person should be able to veto anything from how close together the tables are to how fucking skinny the chairs are. few things tick me off more then being unable to get to half the resteraunt because all the tables are like, 10 inches apart, or sitting down in a chair that has pointless side rails only to realize that they are gonna be digging into my butt for the next hour unless i sit on the very edge of the seat and never lean back.

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Just saw a post asking how tall people are and now I want to make it a poll. Apologies to people in the fringe height categories, you do not get specifics.

I had to consult a chart for this

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hate when that happens

06/24/2025

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African wild dog pups

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i used to tolerate heat better but either i aged or working in the freezers changed me.

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overstimulated and anxious at the zoo until I looked up and saw an angel dancing in a beam of light

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Having fun making bug magnets.

Baltimore: I'll be selling these and a bunch more stuff at Magical Market on July 6th if you wanna come say hi.

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As public schools across the country increasingly face budget shortfalls, educators like Patricia Harper, a fifth-grade teacher in Baltimore, have reportedly found it more necessary than ever to provide their own salaries. “I’m committed to coming into this classroom every day and helping my students learn, but in order to do this, I’m now required to dip into my own pocket to cover my annual income,” said the 10-year veteran of Baltimore City Public Schools, a district with more than 5,000 teachers who together would need to come up with an estimated $340 million to meet their annual salary requirements.

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