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honestly, especially in the current state of the world, you all have GOT to kill whatever puritanical voice inside your head keeps insisting that if something is erotic it has no social, artistic, or intellectual merit.

stop acting as if someone can’t enjoy both erotica and literary fiction or classics. it’s not some dichotomy.

stop acting as if erotic art can’t be poignant and meaningful. and that includes all erotic art - not just fine art.

stop insisting that sex scenes or erotic material ruin movies and shows just because you, personally, get icked out watching it.

no, not all erotic art is high art, and not all erotic art is meant to invoke deep intellectual discussion - but insisting that makes erotic art valueless, a disservice to intellectualism, or whatever else - does nothing but add fuel to a fire built on conservative ideology.

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What you can’t see is me with the controller panicking and yelling

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Uni's magical Mario Galaxy adventure..

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My favorite grease ball

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shining bright bc i am a lovely little star :) (print!!)

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Calling Chuck Schumer Palestinian is unironically hilarious

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no language should be mocked other than french

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reblog if you’re a sick fuck

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The U.S. seems only to understand pregnancy as a distinct and fragile state. For the expectant, we issue reams of proscriptions—more than can reasonably be followed. We tell them what to eat and what not to eat. We ask that they visit the doctor regularly and that they not do any strenuous activity. We give them our seats on the bus. Finally, once they’ve actually undergone the physical trauma of it, their bodies thoroughly depleted, we beckon them most immediately to rejoin the rest of us. One New York mother summed up her recent postpartum experience this way: “You’re not hemorrhaging? OK, peace, see you later.”

The Chinese traditionally adhere to 30 days of restful confinement—another week for a C-section—during which time moms are meant to consume lactation-inducing soups and herbal tonics and abstain from sex and cold water. In Mexico, the ritualized interlude, or the cuarentena, goes for 40 days, or long enough for the womb to return to its place. Balinese women are not allowed to enter the kitchen until the baby’s cord stump has fallen. Dutch maternity nurses make postpartum visits every day for the eight days after childbirth, and in France, as elsewhere, new moms spend nearly a week in hospital.

Always, the mothers are educated as they convalesce; they’re taught to breast-feed, to manage baby rashes and bath time and sore nipples. Rarely are they first to respond to the infant’s shrieking. In 2011 I visited a luxury postpartum center in Taipei, where women of means (and who would rather not call on their mothers-in-law, as is custom) spend a month in recovery. When I asked Tsai Ya-hui, who had given birth to her first child three weeks earlier, what she did all day in her high-end suite, she answered: “Internet and sleep. That’s about it.” She looked more refreshed than I did.

There are elements of these postpartum practices (the consumption of foods rich in iron) that are common-sensical, and there are others (tightly wrapping the belly with a postnatal girdle; consuming distilled rice wine in place of water; extremely limited exposure to the sun in the first month), the usefulness and safety of which are debated by the medical community. But the thing to focus on here is the idea of a culturally recognized and accepted postpartum rest period. With these rituals comes an acknowledgment, familial and federal, that the woman needs relief more at this time than at any other—especially if she has a career to return to—and that it takes weeks, sometimes months, to properly heal from childbirth. An acknowledgement that overexertion after labor could lead to depression, infection, increased uterine bleeding, or prolapse. An acknowledgment that the postpartum stretch shouldn’t feel, as it did for so many of the American women who took part in my informal survey, like one long sleepless night.

“A culturally accepted postpartum period sends a powerful message that’s not being sent in this country,” said Dr. Margaret Howard, the director of the Day Hospital for Postpartum Depression in Providence, Rhode Island. “American mothers internalize the prevailing attitude—‘I should be able to handle this myself; women have babies every day’—and if they’re not up and functioning, they feel like there’s something wrong with them.” A colleague of Howard’s, the daughter of a pediatrician, brought her prepregnancy jeans to the delivery room, expecting to slip into them once the baby was out.

I spent part of an afternoon with some new mothers in Park Slope, an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood that is frequently and teasingly associated with over-the-top urban parenting. As a group, they’d received probably the best postpartum care that this country has to offer, which they detailed over the squeals and sighs of their nursing infants. Sophia Sotto had hired a postpartum doula, but didn’t feel comfortable “asking her to do the dishes in the sink.” She remembered: “I still couldn’t manage when to shower, when to eat.” Sarah Hake had an episiotomy and still, like every woman in America, was asked to come in for a 15-minute checkup six weeks after leaving the delivery room. “Six weeks is too late,” she said. The rest murmured their agreement.

All had cooked; all had cleaned. Asked Emily Lillywhite, “If you don’t get up and do it, who will?” One woman had taken an especially long walk two days after delivering, because she wanted to “feel normal again.” Most had been afraid to survey the wreck between their legs, and those who did look hadn’t been able to tell if they were healing well or not. “Google became my very good friend,” said Ruth Margolis. “Yes,” Sotto broke in. “Your postpartum support is the Internet.”

I heard stories of women vacuuming upon arriving home after a day and a half in the hospital; of new moms waiting until the six-week checkup to make their postnatal complications known; of visitors turning up and instantly asking for coffee; of lactation consultants who were meant to, but did not, take insurance; of a postpartum doula who, when she was summoned by a mother one month postlabor, said, “You’re too far along to need me.”

A popular site that advises women on how to find and work with a baby nurse counsels: “Ask your baby nurse what she likes to eat and stock up at the supermarket.” It is true that hiring a postpartum helper is far less expensive in, say, Hong Kong than in the U.S. But the problem is not one of money. The problem is that no one recognizes the new mother as a recuperating person, and she does not see herself as one. For the mourning or the injured, we will activate a meal tree. For the woman who is torturously fatigued, who has lost one 10th of her body’s blood supply, who can scarcely pee for the stitches running up her perineum, we will not.

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Outer space is impossibly vast, but it’s really not that difficult to learn all the important types of objects that are out there (kinds of stars, kinds of planets, kinds of galaxies, whatever), which sort of weirds me out. There’s a lot of complexity within that, and a fair amount we still don’t know, but it’s eminently plausible to get the gist of it. A precocious preteen could handle it all. We aren’t there yet, but I find it very easy to imagine a future in which space is well understood and seen as nothing but a dull, endless repetition of the same few dozen building blocks. There should be more variety to it!

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I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

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wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

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