Observations

The full saga of Margie and the Nuns (so far). Realised I never compiled these in one place.! Also, bonus Margies!

this is just “boys will be boys” used to defend misogynistic behavior under the assumption it’s biological and not a choice resulting from misogyny never being socially punished, but with a coat of paint on it to sound woke

socialized behavior argument aside i just also do not think this is true beyond shitheads who are obviously not representative of the general population. some boys just had good parents idk what to tell you

Like, on top of what OP is saying, I feel like people take misogynists at their word about their desires way too much. I would say its not just that misogyny isn't socially punished, but that misogyny and toxic masculinity are the only conceptual tools many cis boys & men have to make sense of their internal and external experiences.

There are a lot of cis men who would insist they just want to get laid and engage in sexual objectification of people they see as women, who do have genuinely negatively feelings towards women, while also having genuine desires for connection and emotional fulfillment that they are processing through a deeply patriarchal worldview, which is constantly reaffirmed by their environment as the only real way to see the world and the only meaningful way to navigate their experiences.

Which is not to say that cis boys treating people they see as women as disposable sexual objects doesn't happen or doesn't matter. But the idea that if you have any more internal depth to how you view yourself and your relationship with sexuality in the privacy of your own mind, that makes you fundamentally different than all the cis boys who "just see women as fleshlights" obscures how this kind of behavior and perception of others actually arises.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Bumblebees look like passive, cuddly, and docile creatures; and they generally are- but they won’t hesitate to defend themselves if they feel their warnings aren’t being seen!

I.e. below, when a bumblebee feels threatened they will raise one or more of their legs into the air, signaling to whatever or whomever may be bothering them as a message essentiality saying: “hey, back off, too close!”

species: top, bombus pascuorum / bottom, bombus impatiens

If their defensive posture goes unnoticed or ignored, they may be pushed into defending themselves by stinging (which is an all around sucky experience for not only you, but also for the bee. (Note that bumblebees do not die after stinging, but it is still stressful for them.) If you ever find yourself getting close to a bumblebee while taking pictures, trying to move them, or just admiring them, remember this posture! If they do this, it is simply asking you to take a step back because it feels it is being threatened! You might get stung.