“[TW: rape culture, victim blaming]Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It’s nothing that’s going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.
If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.
If this frustrates you, try to remember that women are blamed for lapsed vigilance. If a woman does get raped, everyone rushes to see where she let her guard down. Was she drinking? Was she alone? Was she wearing a short skirt? Did she go to a strange man’s room for coffee at 4am?
A woman must be seen to be vigilant as well as be vigilant. If she is deemed insufficiently vigilant, she will be at least partly blamed for any sexual violence that befalls her. If she’s regarded as downright reckless, that “evidence” can be used to completely exonerate her rapist. If it comes down to a he said/she said dispute over whether sex was consensual, as so many rape cases do, the dispute becomes a referendum on whether the woman seems like the sort of reckless person who would have sex with a stranger.
If a woman does go back to a strange man’s hotel room at 4am, even if she only wants a coffee and conversation, she’s more or less given him the power to rape her. No jury is going to believe she went up there for anything but sex. So, don’t be surprised if a stranger reacts badly to that suggestion.
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Underwater sculpture, in Grenada, in honor of our African ancestors thrown overboard.
beautiful
(Source: elegantlytasteless)
“Make the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
(Source: stephhr)
Hades and Persephone. You’ll never understand how beautiful this sculpture is until you see it in person. Bernini was fucking brilliant.
the close-ups literally made me gasp. GUYS ART IS AMAZING.
(Source: mytapas)
(Source: for-redheads)
“Celebrities are hired… to come into the Chicago schools and organize a rally to sell children on the wisdom of not dropping out of school. [The celebrity] tells the kids, “You are somebody.” They are asked to chant it in response. But the fact that they are in this school, doomed to be here for no reason other than their race and class, gives them a different message: “In the eyes of society, you are not much at all.” This is the message they get every day when no celebrities are there and when their business partners have departed for their homes in the white suburbs.
Business leaders seem to have great faith in exhortation of this kind— a faith that comes perhaps from marketing traditions. Exhortation has its role. But hope cannot be marketed as easily as blue jeans. Human liberation doesn’t often come this way— from mass hypnosis. Certain realities— race and class and caste— are there, and remain.”
i need to remember this. write it down somewhere and never forget.
(Source: pictureperfectbodywerkit)
