(Source: extremeliking, via laughterkey)
Communism Fights Itself
The Corporate class has taken all the profits while the average worker has seen little or no increase in pay. This phenomenon is called capitalism.
(via laughterkey)
TRIGGER WARNING: Rape, misogyny, general horribleness
I am asked all the time why I think Professional Internet Types tend to be male more often than female. Is it because women aren’t as aggressive about building an audience and so struggle amid the media saturation? Is it because women aren’t as funny, or aren’t as talented, or blah blah blah?Maybe we need to consider that one of the central reasons women artists/vloggers/musicians/etc. are less likely to rise to prominence online is that whenever women build an audience online, men threaten those women with rape and murder. And unlike traditional celebrities, most of these women do not have the resources to hire the kind of lawyers and bodyguards that one needs to stay safe.
Like all misogyny, and I want to emphasize this, this is bad not just for women but also for all human beings. We are better off as a species if everyone has a chance to be heard, and we are worse off if talented people like Kitty Pryde don’t have the basic safety and security that one needs in order to effectively make and share stuff.
But it’s not just these kinds of horrifying threats (which as pointed out above is “the most normal thing”).
I also want to say something to all those guys who are like I was as a teenager: You’re not a sick person trying to get someone’s attention by harming or threatening them, but you do have a weird relationship with the women who make work you like.* You think that if this person knew you, you could be friends…maybe more than friends. And so you want to get her attention, so you can get to know each other, because then you’ll definitely become friends or maybe—
Stop.
When you start falling down that rabbit hole, stop. I know it’s hard. But stop.
What we love—even if these people make highly personal and confessional vlogs or whatever—is the stuff they make, not the people themselves. And what we really want is for more of that stuff to exist in the world. So the only proper way to be a fan is to let them be, so that they can bring more good and useful stuff into the world for us to enjoy.
* EDIT: Many people are yelling at me for saying the person in the above ask is not a sick person harming or threatening people. That is not what I am saying here. I am speaking to the people out there who are NOT like this person, but whose excessive and sometimes romanticized attention can shut down discourse. I thought that was pretty obvious from the grammar, but I just want to underscore it.
The GOP hates students, loves their debt payments.
Obviously, going in to debt hasn’t stopped me from pursuing my education, but it’s a fact that costs have gone up 300% and the wages that all of us can expect haven’t actually gone up shit.
I appreciate, though, that the establishment is afraid of college students. They should be afraid. Cause we’re gonna shake shit up, y’all.
(via wilwheaton)
“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.”
Brian Eno (via jessiethatcher)
I could reblog/post this every day as a constant reminder.
(via notational)
(via fishingboatproceeds)
“
We [Fraction and his wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick] were pregnant at the time, and while I was out there I started to realize that if I had a daughter, there would come a day when I would have to apologize to her for my profession. I would have to apologize for the way it treats and speaks to women readers, and the way it treats its female characters.
I knew that if we had a daughter, because I know my wife and I know the kind of girl she wants to raise and I know the kind of girl I want to raise, she was going to look at what I did for a living and want to know how the fuck I could stomach it. How could I sell her out like that?” Fraction continued. “That conversation is still coming, and I’m bracing for it in the way that some dads brace for their daughter’s first date or boyfriend. I became acutely aware that I had sort of done that thing that lots of privileged hetero cisgendered white dudes do. ‘I’m cool with women, and that’s enough.’ It’s not enough. It’s embarrassing to say, because we somehow have attached shame to learning and evolving our opinions, culturally, but I became aware that there was a deficiency of and to women in my work, and all I could do at that moment was take care of my side of the street.
”Writer Matt Fraction on his role on expanding the profile of female characters in the Marvel Universe. (via goodmanw)
Damn, Matt. Got all sniffly up in here.
(via sigridellis)
(Source: comicbookresources.com, via laughterkey)
“Women read comics. Anyone at all engaged in social media knows this. Women read comics and are a driving force behind fandom. I think I could call them the driving force behind fandom and put up a convincing argument. Just think about it: what fandoms have driven America crazy in the last decade? Could anyone dissuade me from saying that they were Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games? “Avatar” may have put butts in theater seats, but you don’t hear about it… ever. No one is immersed in the world of “Avatar” except James Cameron and people who enjoy wearing Na’vi Zentai suits. “The Avengers” was pretty darn huge and, if Tumblr is any indication, a whopping portion of the people driving that fandom online do not possess a Y chromosome. Women engage in fandom to levels that men do not. When women get behind something, their sheer numbers and passion force it into the mainstream. That’s why you can name the actor who plays that werewolf kid in “Twilight” and probably sing at least the chorus to one Justin Bieber song. What do tween boys like? I have no clue. Sports? Probably sports.”
Brett White, Comic Book Resources (via wandrinparakeet)
and yet men remain the most marketed demographic for just about everything.
(via ohhoechno)
I’m pretty sure the only men who spend more time thinking about DC than women on Tumblr are the men who actually work there.
(via touchofgrey37)
people still act fucking surprised when women show up for genre shit
(via cumaeansibyl)
Holy shit—seeing a quote with over 14,000 notes from one of your oldest friends is… amazing. Tumblr! Women. Nerd stuff? Brett White!
(via khealywu)
I felt like I should add to the notes. Brett White speaking truth!
(via patbaer)
(via laughterkey)
“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.”
| Stevie Nicks (via laesquinalatina)
(via laughterkey)
“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.”
Bill Watterson (via mikekarnell)
(via wilwheaton)
“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service.”
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013 (via bitchwhoisyou)
(Source: blackgirlsupremacy, via wilwheaton)