I like the like button

Her name is Laetitia Ky and she’s only 23! 😍😍 I’ve already seen a white girl steal her idea so let’s promote tf out of the OG.

Her IG

Mrs. Ky is not a fucking “TERF”.

Y’all are just so incredibly misogynistic and racist.

Y’all won’t even embrace a West African Black African expressing her incredible talents and experiences through her artwork.

Y’all would rather cancel a talented West African Black Woman based on how she resorts to using yalls own crackhead gender logic (after being harassed and condescended on her page about her works) to describe her experieces and womanhood, than to even take 2 milliseconds to understand why she wouldn’t care less about validating people she’s not even referring to (male people) in her artworks about FEMALE EXPERIENCES.

So many people like y’all have coerced, harassed, and condescended her on her page when she speaks about womanhood.

LITERALLY—and I can’t stress this fucking enough— even when Mrs. Ky resorts to using y’all’s own ridiculous identity politics logic about individualizing and abstracting a material class experience (specifically the material class experiece of being a female person under a patriarchal power structure), her defining her own womanhood by her biology still qualifies her and her lived experiences as “terf rhetoric” because y’all are so hellbent on dissolving womanhood down to either a commodified set of misgynistic stereotypes or absolutely nothing at all for the sake of male approval.

Thousands upon thousands of other female people directly and clearly understand and are being empowered by her wonderful messages.

Yet here people’s like y’all are, screeching about transphobia, “cissexism”, “terf”, “bioessentialism” (NONE of y’all know what words mean, I swear, especially this one LMAO) , etc, etc, etc just because a woman—a black woman from Ivory Coast speaking English as her second language—sometimes sculpts positively and beautifully about her body for herself and for other female people to relate to, learn about, and find inspiration/empowerment within and DARES to call those messages and pieces and body parts “WOMANHOOD”.

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Demanding censorship and silence from women—ESPECIALLY black women—about how we describe our experiences about our bodies under a system that hates us and treats us as inferior because of our bodies in order to cater to male people’s sense of womanhood is misogyny 101. Yet y’all don’t fucking care because y’all will do ANYTHING to continue please male people at all costs, even if they can’t possibly relate to or experience what female people do.

Y’all will literally harass, coerce, intimidate, and SILENCE female people for refusing to play pretend and stretch their language, their spaces, their experiences, their fucking art on THEIR PAGES to include the feelings and completely irrelevant perspectives and bodies of male people on things they will NEVER understand or be included in.

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Everything is not going to be about trans people.

Everything that comes out of a female person’s mouth is not going to be about transwomen/male people with “feminine-aligned” gender identities.

Everything CANNOT be about trans people/male people.

And that’s fucking okay.

That’s the fucking reality of the material world, the people within in a material world, and the reality of the myriad of individual, yet common and class based experiences those people have and are subjected to based upon having those material experiences under the social systems and hierarchies constructed for societies and spaces.

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Of fucking course y’all would assert a black woman from Ivory Coast is another boogeywoman to trans people. Of fucking course.

Fuck y’all.

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Anyway, here is Laetitia Ky’s IG page.

Give her a well deserved follow, likes. and positive comments on her page about her works because she’s an incredibly talented, young artist with so much potential (I’m sure her amazing hair sculptures are just the tip of the iceberg of her creative abilities). 🎨🌈

She writes beautifully relatable and eloquent messages about her works and her story, so be sure to read those as well and research more about her to support her to the fullest extent. 💜

Here are a few of my favorite pieces by Mrs. Laetitia Ky from her IG page with their captions:

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Listen to Black Women

Believe Black Women

Trust Black Women

Uplift Black Women

Just once I’d like the see an historical heroine be asked if it bothers her that she has to wear skirts and have say, “Not really. I couldn’t fit this in a waistcoat.” and just pull out a loaf of bread or something and start eating it right in front of the baffled male lead.

Long answer:

One way to look at the transfiguration of women’s tied-on, capacious pockets of the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century’s tiny, hand-held reticule is to consider that this transformation occurred as the French Revolution, a time that violently challenged established notions of property, privacy, and propriety. Women’s pockets were private spaces they carried into the public with increasing freedom, and during a revolutionary time, this freedom was very, very frightening. The less women could carry, the less freedom they had. Take away pockets happily hidden under garments, and you limit women’s ability to navigate public spaces, to carry seditious (or merely amorous) writing, or to travel unaccompanied.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

leaving an abusive relationship was a huge one.

forcing myself to do a lot of "healthy" stuff I didn't want to do. eating, exercising, going to bed when I started feeling the night sadness. I like to think I reconnected to my body. people with depression often talk about their bodies as being these cages and something separate from the self. I don't feel that way any more. I notice I'm hungry or have a head ache or am fidgeting and I understand how that ties to my moods.

rigorously cutting out emotionally triggering things. I stopped listening to sad music. I stopped watching TV shows that made me sad (real talk and this is embarrassing but I know like everything about Grey's Anatomy. I was like the #1 Grey's fangirl I've seen seasons 1-10 several times, but I haven't watched an episode in years bc I was using it to work myself up when I was sad.). I stopped following people on social media, and even quit being friend with a few people I knew irl, who shared a lot of "I wanna kill myself" memes and negative content.

note: I didn't really indulge in a lot of cutesy positivity to counter this cutting out of the negative. I don't think that's helpful either. but yeah, there's a lot of unnecessarily violently depressing content out there and I really think that shits as much of a form of self harm as cutting or doing drugs or whatever.

speaking of which, I'm not any more, obviously, but I went through long periods of sobriety. im not physically addicted to anything, but it was still good for me.

mostly I got back in touch with who I was before I sorta lost myself. it's honestly where a lot of this "outlaw" stuff comes from. I grew up on westerns and country music and after my ex had tainted pretty much everything else I liked, all I really had was my cowboy nonsense that I had been repressing since high school because people around me thought it was cheesy and low class.

tbh I also just sorta got older. which sounds kinda condescending but being upset all the time is exhausting and I don't know like I could cry for four hours or I could cry for ten minutes and then go watch TV until I fall asleep. like I really don't have the energy any more.

this is relatively recent and kinda ties into the getting older thing, but I also stopped caring what other people thought of me. I talk a lot. I'm loud. I'm a bit of an odd duck. but I gotta be me and if people give me rude face or don't like me then fuck em honestly what's that gotta do with what I'm doing? I wanna strive to be better but I don't compare myself to others when I ask who I wanna be and how I'm gonna do that.

on the flip side, I really started to appreciate the people who do love and care about me and stop listening to that stupid voice saying I was "manipulating or lying to them and one day they'd realize I was actually the worst." I stopped listening to it say they all secretly hated me. I learned how to accept love from others.

this is gonna be cheesy as all hell but this is my dog I've had her for two years and I love her more than anything. also she gave me the perfect excuse to leave when I wasn't having a good time somewhere: