The project is saying that street harassment is not okay. That feeling entitled to treat and speak to women any type of way, is not okay. That demanding a woman’s attention is not okay. That intruding on a woman’s space and thoughts is not okay. That women should be able to walk to the train, to the grocery store, to school - without having to cross the street to avoid the men that she sees already eyeing her as she approaches. That making women feel objectified, sexualized simply because they are women, is not okay. That grabbing a woman’s wrist to force her to speak to you is not okay. That requesting for a woman to “smile for you” is not okay - because women are not outside on the street for the purpose of entertaining and pleasing men. That it’s quite possible women are wonderful, happy, intelligent human beings that simply want to move through out the world comfortably and safely while wearing their face however the hell they want to.
A lot of people will not agree with this project. A lot of people, men AND women, will not understand it. And that’s okay. This project is not asking for there to be zero interaction between men and women in public spaces - it’s asking for the interaction to be respectful and safe. This project is not to persuade women to feel offended. Rather, this project is for those who do feel offended by unwelcome aggressive treatment from men.
It’s my hope that some women will walk pass these wheat pastes and feel empowered. That men will at least take notice and consider what the posters are saying. And that the conversation about street harassment will continue to be enlivened and hopefully produce some sort of solution.
The brain has been traditionally viewed as a deterministic machine where certain inputs give rise to certain outputs. However, there is a growing body of work that suggests this is not the case. The high importance of initial inputs suggests that the brain may be working in the realms of chaos, with small changes in initial inputs leading to the production of strange attractors. This may also be reflected in the physical structure of the brain which may also be fractal. EEG data is a good place to look for the underlying patterns of chaos in the brain since it samples many millions of neurons simultaneously. Several studies have arrived at a fractal dimension of between 5 and 8 for human EEG data. This suggests that the brain operates in a higher dimension than the 4 of traditional space-time. These extra dimensions suggest that quantum gravity may play a role in generating consciousness.
(Image courtesy: Kookmin University)
(via of-great-importance)
(Source: snorkus)
[video]
The notion of the beauty and the beast is of course central to horror stories, but, watching “The Silence of the Lambs” for the second time, I began to wonder if the author of the original novel, Thomas Harris, had started the project by jotting down a list of the great…
(via apiphile)
Five Ways to Spot Somebody Suffering from Transphobia
reblogging because my anons are fucking up.
Indian bullfrog.
YELLOW frog with awesome blue puffy cheeks! I have never seen one like this before.
(via deniselle)
For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I have made a diagram.
(via apiphile)
NOMS
(via lexiconcarne)
Me on my way to steal egg
(Source: brainwasherr, via lexiconcarne)
so I answered this question on my personal blog, but it absolutely belongs here.
(tw: discussion of ED, rape, rape culture, depression/mental illness, and hate speech)
well anon, I give a shit! and if you care about other -isms, you probably should too. fat people (or really, people of any body type outside the “norm” as determined by the media — intersectionality, yo) are stigmatized to the point where:
hate speech and flat-out nastiness toward fat people is normalized, which is dehumanizing. people feel entitled to tell fat people they shouldn’t eat something, or should eat less, or should exercise more, or that what they’re wearing isn’t flattering, and all manner of things that are actually pretty inexcusable! moreover, people feel entitled to say (and do say, all the time) that fat people are disgusting, lazy, gluttonous, stupid, and/or unhygienic, which is simply untrue. and these things are legitimized and standardized by our culture. this is all in the name of Being Concerned About Their Health but that’s actually a load of crap — someone else’s health isn’t your business, you can’t tell if someone is healthy if you’re looking at them, and unhealthy people deserve just as much respect and dignity as healthy people regardless.
fat people, especially fat people who are not cis men, who are sexual assault survivors are significantly less likely to report their assault, because they’re told they’re wildly undesirable pretty much every day. in a culture where rape is misrepresented as a crime of passion or misunderstanding, fat people are scoffed at for reporting. who’d want to fuck a fat girl, after all?
fat people are encouraged in eating disorders and eating disordered behavior. generally, most people see any effort fat people make to lose weight as a good thing, even if those behaviors would cause serious alarm if performed by a thin person. I can speak firsthand about this - my EDNOS went undiagnosed for years because most of my doctors thought that any effort for me to lose weight was a good effort, even if it meant I was hurting myself. the other night I was watching TV and a diet advertisement came on for a product that had the tagline “Eating less never looked so beautiful.” seriously, what the hell?
speaking of, fat people are routinely misdiagnosed and mistreated by the medical community. I once went in to my university’s gyno to get a yeast infection addressed, and was told that I’d developed it because my thighs touched.* Melissa McEwan of Shakesville says it better than I ever could:
No, there is not a documented epidemic of brutal murders of fat people for being fat, but there is a documented epidemic of failure to provide life-saving healthcare: Google will easily help you find stories of fat people who died while emergency crews laughed at their weight and appearance, of fat people who were told they should lose weight to fix problems actually caused by blood clots, cancer, internal injuries, infections, and myriad other problems that later killed them, because their doctors couldn’t see past their fat to properly treat them. Google will also easily help you find stories of medical equipment that cannot accommodate fat bodies, of anesthetists who accidentally kill fat people in surgery, of doctors who prescribe wrong doses for fat bodies, of drug trials that make no attempt to include fat patients. Google will also easily help you find stories of fat people who did not seek life-saving healthcare because they had been so viciously fat-shamed by doctors their whole lives that they had given up hope of finding sensitive and caring providers who would treat them.
Fat people die because of fat hatred ALL THE TIME.
fat people are subject to a myriad of microaggressions that, in aggregate, signal to them that they are not worthy of “normal” society. plus-sized clothing is harder to find and often costs more and is not as well-made. safety equipment doesn’t fit fat people. fat people are expected to constantly apologize for themselves and be actively looking to lose weight, and therefore are not allowed to be happy or to like themselves (and fat people who are happy, who like themselves, or who feel sexy are relentlessly ridiculed and cut down for it). articles about the “obesity epidemic” are accompanied by photos of fat people where their heads are cropped off, which is a standard way of objectifying and dehumanizing. “fat” has become shorthand for “lazy, gluttonous, stupid, unhygienic, disgusting.” I could go on, but the blog This Is Thin Privilege has many other examples.
overweight teenage girls are much more likely than their average-weight peers to be depressed, suicidal, or to commit self-harm. this is because they’re only offered images of happy thin people and one-dimensional, unhappy fat people. when all you see in the media are people who look like you that hate themselves, or people who used to look like you to whom the best thing in their lives was no longer looking like you, you don’t expect happiness.
and not for nothing, but people are making a LOT of money off of this “obesity epidemic” crap and keeping people from focusing on the actual problems behind said “epidemic.” the people who benefit from keeping everyone scared of being fat? the billion-dollar diet/weight-loss industry, plus the companies who get a LOT of money from government food subsidies for corn, in particular. they want people at large to avoid thinking critically about why people in America are steadily gaining weight, because the answers will lose them a lot of money. classism, wage gaps, and poverty play a huge role — if you’re a single parent working multiple jobs, you don’t have a lot of time or money to prepare fresh meals all the time, and there is a correlation between poverty and weight. ever heard of a food desert? google that sucker, anon. shit’s whack.
you should give a shit about fatphobia because fatphobia is mad intersectional (body politics apply to a lot, a lot, a lot of people, not just fat people) and because it’s mostly manufactured to keep you thinking about “actually important things.”
not for nothing, but if you’re worried about the quality of life of oppressed people, you should also worry about the fact that 1 out of 10 parents would abort a child if it was genetically likely to be fat** and 1 out of 3 people would rather walk away from their marriage than be fat ***
apparently, fat is the most terrifying thing you could possibly be in American culture. and how fucked up is that?
* yeast infections do not happen because your thighs touch.
** sauce
*** even more sauceDid the person asking this question forget that fat, queer POC exist?
(via fatgirlposing)
[video]
Landscape With Yellow Birds
by the mighty Paul Klee,
who painted it entirely in the nude,
though fully clothed.
He lived a long time ago,
so the television wasn’t on
in the background,
but I do sense cigar smoke
somewhere.
Perhaps he did this in an atelier,
smoking cigars,
not listening to the television
because it wasn’t really invented yet.
He possessed a phonograph,
I imagine,
on which he only played
the darker Haydn.
Klee’s head is small and severe,
and his hair doesn’t stick out.
There’s a scrunched quality to his face,
with a hint of constipation,
and it sports a very square jaw.
This jaw squareness goes along
with the rest of the squareness
in his face.
His eyes are direct and penetrating.
He was a warrior and fought
at the time when warriors had spikes
on the tops of their helmets.
He spoke German and was German,
despite the embarrassment
of being born in Bern.
(Not a real town).
Perhaps he killed a man in France,
near the trenches,
while Snoopy flew overhead on his doghouse.
Though a warrior
with a phallic spike jutting from his helmet,
he was not a fan of war
and would not get along swimmingly
with current American neo-cons,
no matter what the the tabloids say.
He wrote at war’s outset: “I have long had this war in me.
That is why,
inwardly,
it is none of my concern.”
His two best friends,
Marc and Macke,
died in battle,
so he was wrong.
Klee suffered from scleroderma
and it would eventually kill him.
A systemic autoimmune disease
affecting primarily the skin,
it gradually removes the supple softness
of humanity,
replacing it with the fibrous, scaly hardness
of the reptilian.
It is terribly painful
and many art writers have noted
with comic obviousness
that Klee’s pain
seeped into his work.
This is like saying the sky is blue
and the ground dirty.
One of his last paintings,
“Death and Fire”,
features a skull
with the German word for death,
which is “Tod”.
The next time you meet a person
named Todd,
remember to laugh inwardly.
He died in Switzerland,
the land of his birth,
in 1940.
Despite being born in Switzerland
and even dying there,
he was not a Swiss citizen.
His attempts at it were always refused,
the sole reason being his art.
The staid and narrow-minded authorities
felt his painting was too revolutionary,
even degenerate,
for him to be Swiss.
Six days after his death, however,
they had a change of heart
and granted him posthumous
citizenship.
Bzzz! Too late.
He is buried in the ground
at Schosshaldenfriedhof,
in Bern.
(Not a real town).
If you happen to stop by,
tell him Mike says
“Hi”.
(via luckyme--luckymud)
(Source: ubercuteness, via sminthos)