Living life to the max

Supreme Court failed to block the 6-week abortion ban. Many people don't even know they're pregnant by then. They will carry pregnancies against their will. People will die.

And that's not all. This law also allows people to sue anyone they believe is providing or assisting someone in getting an abortion, like Uber drivers. The law will also award the people who report with at least $10,000.

A bounty.

A fucking bounty on pregnant people.

Fuck the Supreme Court.

Fuck Susan Collins.

Fuck Republicans.

Fuck men.

Fuck Texas.

Fuck Trump.

Fuck Trump voters.

But the landscape of children’s TV was very different six years ago. Like, that moment when they looked into each other’s eyes in a beam of golden light was revolutionary. I was living in a house with other queer people and we ALL screamed and cried, just like this.

Not until 2016. Before that, the marriage was only recognized in a few states.

My canon queer couple?

WAS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH AS COUSINS.

Cloverway gave one of them an offscreen boyfriend and, any time an uncuttable kissy scene came up, they started calling each other “cuz.” Another queer couple from the same show suffered the fate of being heterocized by one of them literally being genderswapped.

(Guess who became the girl. Go on, guess. At least it’s not as bad as France, where they became … brothers.)

That was my mainstream queer rep.

Oh. Until this came out.

… . yeah.

I’m not even in Avatar fandom and when those first gifs popped up on my dash, I started crying. I was 24 years old and crying over a show I had never watched because a pair of women held hands.

You can’t possibly understand what it was like before that.

You don’t want to understand what it was like before that.

I don’t want you to understand what it was like before that.

But there’s a reason we reacted like this.

Can’t believe Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 2000s

And in 2015 Emily Brontë released literary clsssic Wuthering Heights

a woman was the first known author/poet in 2300BC - Enheduanna

the first novel in recorded history was written by a woman in 1010AD - Murasaki Shikibu

the earliest example of science fiction was written by a woman in 1666 - Margaret Cavendish

horror science fiction was popularised by a teenage girl in 1818 - Mary Shelley

a Scotswoman expanded childrens’ stories from moralising tales into anarchic adventures in the mid 1800s, well before it became popular in the early 20th century - Catherine Sinclair

the masked/costumed hero archetype that inspired Batman and Zorro was created by a woman in 1905 - Baroness Emma Orczy

Toby: ohmygodohmygod this is so cool yes

dont you think its weird. dont you think its weird that the space race last time was two of the biggest powers in the world. and now its a handful of rich men. dont you think its weird they can afford that. dont you think its bad that rich men can afford the same things as the government.

dont you think its weird that while the world is suffering and poverty is everywhere, where there's wars and climate change and human pain and homelessness. the same month I've watched people die on the news from unbearable heat and unprecedented flooding. that a rich handful of men are going to space, causing more carbon emissions. dont you think its weird that instead of putting their vast amount of money to use for good they're using it to find a way off the planet theyre destroying.

Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103) 

The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts: 

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)