ascagnel

I mean, what’s a sex organ? It’s not like there is some deity that decides what an organ’s purpose is and is and thus which organ can be shared in public. Laws (and more importantly, norms) are made by culture, not by science. So when people get all yelly about how women shouldn’t breast feed because boobs are “sex organs” and dudes aren’t waving their penises around in public, it would make equal sense to say “Women shouldn’t breastfeed in public because Shakespeare and Mark Twain weren’t contemporaries.” 

The argument makes literally no sense, and is (in my lingo) a hypothetheory (an untested argument that affirms the position of the arguer, so they never think to apply even the most rudimentary scrutiny.)

The reason some people have a hard time with public breast feeding is literally and only because their culture identifies nude breasts as taboo no matter the reason they are exposed. That’s the whole thing. That’s it. Every other argument is just someone trying to defend their worldview. Taboos are legitimate and every culture has them even if they’re rarely rational. 

This is an area where our culture has an internal disagreement about what should and should not be taboo. The real problem is that the taboo is being mostly enforced and upheld by the people who are in no way affected by it (men) to the detriment of those who are affected by it (mothers.) 

Unindexed is an online community that anyone can contribute to; it runs a back-end process that continuously scours Google for signs that it has been indexed, and securely erases itself once it discovers evidence of same.

It’s a cute art project (as opposed to a cute engineering project, which would have just used a robots.txt file to stop Google from indexing it altogether), and apparently included some kind of artistic statement of purpose that was nuked, along with the rest of the site, when Google indexed it 22 days in.

Park West Diner in Little Falls, NJ

It’s early February, and the roads have transformed into tunnels through snow banks as tall as your car. You’re headed back to your hometown for the day, and your first stop has to be your favorite diner. You ask for the booth by the window, where you sit with a cup of coffee. You try to relax, but it feels like something is missing.

Later, an old friend texts you to ask if you want to meet for coffee. When you arrive back at the same diner, it’s completely different.

“Where the hell’ve you been?” you hear as you walk in. It’s the server, who you’ve known for years; he shakes your hand hello and brings you coffee.

You sit down in a booth again, but this time, your old friend sits across from you and orders a New Jersey classic—Taylor Ham and cheese on a roll. He tells you about his life, that he’s working on a big passion project, that he has plans for the future. You realize it wasn’t something, but someone who was missing from your earlier visit.

You’ve left your hometown, and that means the you’ve left the people in it. But when you revisit your old stomping grounds, this diner, it’s as if nothing has changed. Countless late nights in these booths have forged a bond that distance can’t easily break—a bond you can always find again over a plate of cheese fries.

Guys, I wanted to let you know about a personal decision I recently made. I don’t really feel like discussing it, but I want to put my position out there. Please be respectful. This is a really long post, but please read the whole thing.

Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being “The First” (via yahighway)

Men don’t appreciate the amount of self-control women have to exercise in order not to spend their entire lives facepalming.

(via vulvanity)

Stabbing, I think you mean stabbing not facepalming