CUNTEXT

When boys have periods? That’s brother nature.

Misty Copeland and her mentor, Raven Wilkinson, For AARP Magazine

So basically: I knew it might be impossible find vegetable shortening (aka Crisco) for my Thanksgiving pie crust here in Athens. Crisco is pretty uniquely American, and Greeks are more likely to use phyllo than shortcrust anyway. That said, there are a handful of specialty shops in central Athens that sell things like Heinz baked beans and custard powder and Worcestershire sauce and other Weird Foreign Foods™ so us Sad Homesick Expats don’t have to go hungry (I’m always reminded of A Passage to India and their corned beef and tinned peas). So I went on Skroutz (the search engine for buying stuff in Greece) and typed in “vegetable shortening” to see if any stores carried it.

A notification came up asking me to confirm that I was over 18 years old?

???

I clicked “yes”??

Turns out there is, in fact, one shop in Athens that carries vegetable shortening. It’s a sex shop. The shortening is listed under “sex essentials”, as lube. For fisting. It’s literally called “βούτυρο για fisting” – “butter for fisting”.

and i think that part of it is because tumblr managed to really remain as close to outside of “real life” as possible. your parents aren’t on here. the people you see in real life aren’t on here. it was truly a space that was able to exist for you.

the people you followed and who followed you did so not because they felt some personal obligation (in the way facebook and twitter can feel), but because they liked what was being posted. they liked you being you, or at least being your tumblr persona.

and, perhaps more importantly, we all existed as a username. what appears next to your posts was nothing more than an avatar and that. real names were not only not required, but also discouraged, because you wouldn’t see them.

tumblr was (and is, at least for now) very much a part of the Old Internet, the internet of the early 2000s, where you had a space to be weird and experiment and play around however you want. the internet that was really exemplified by geocities, a free-for-all smorgasbord of things that each publisher found interesting and felt like sharing.

i think it’s fair to compare the change of the internet to gentrification. we very much started with this wild west, no-mans-land that was inhabited by outcasts and artists who went by pseudonyms. as time went on that became less and less the case. now almost every site has a real name policy, and literally everyone is on the internet. 

tumblr managed to stay weird until recently. tumblr managed to keep the oddballs hidden, to let people inhabit whatever persona they wanted, and to create and discard them as they pleased. and that’s something very special. something that “normal” society doesn’t have.

if you go on twitter, you’re expected to go as yourself, and while you can create numerous profiles, changing between them is difficult, and twitter will do its damndest to make sure you find people you know in real life. same with instagram. facebook is even more “real life”. and there’s a consequence to that. all the baggage that exists in real life exists with those sites.

on twitter the most popular posts are by celebrities, by names you’ve heard of in passing. on tumblr the most popular post is literally some shitpost by a random user.

facebook, and all the other “real name” people, talk about how that keeps people authentic, how it makes people act better, how it’s a “meritocracy”. they all exist in an ignorant privileged white boy bubble. without a real identity attached to an idea you don’t know what the person behind it looks like, you don’t know the life they live, and because of that your unconscious biases can’t come in to play (okay yes they can because we have biases around word usage, but less so than around skin color). the real “meritocracy” is the one where everyone is at a level playing field. and that was, to an extent, the old web (ignoring access to resources and limited internet access for a second if you will).

kicking off nsfw content and “female presenting nipples” is just another step of that old web disappearing, and the gates of capitalist, oppressive society going up again. and that’s what’s sad.

Art By IG: @vskafandre

On top of that, mail carriers:  -have wages that top out at over $30 an hour (and their wages go up in predictable steps based on how long they’ve been with the USPS) -have excellent benefits, including a shit-ton of vacation time, plus a pension, and they can retire after thirty years

But they also have one of the oldest, biggest, strongest unions in the country. That must piss off Republicans so much. 

Also, side note: they take zero taxpayer dollars. They’re entirely funded by postage. 

TRC fandom, particularly white TRC fandom: when you reply to these screenshots of mine with STIEFVATER MAKE RONAN BLACK YOU COWARD, and none of you also say STIEFVATER MAKE NOAH BLACK YOU COWARD, STIEFVATER MAKE GANSEY BLACK YOU COWARD, etc, it’s time to ask yourself why you think the character you wouldn’t hand a baby to is black and the character you want to love and protect is white. It behooves all of us to ask ourselves if our gut feelings are our own or if we’re sliding into a trench built for us by hundreds of years of storytelling and media coverage and stereotypes.

I’m a different creator now than I was in 2011*, and I’m pumped to do what I can to make sure the TRC show is a more diverse place than the TRC book series, but I’m not here for underlining stereotypes that get people killed every week.

*and I hope that I‘ll be a different creator yet again in another 8 years

pocket stones, I sink every mouth              with a name I disowned. I eat              my body to become its home.

Coop and Patience - All American 

Ali and Deana - God Friended Me

Jada Shields - Charmed

Tess Pearson - This Is Us

This? In particular? Pisses me off. I hate it.

I hate the implication that all porn is interchangeable and devoid of cultural value, so it’s no big deal when a decade’s worth of creative endeavor produced by a vibrant subculture is destroyed, because, whatever, it’s just dirty pictures.

I hate the disingenuous inability to see a distinction between a website that is about porn only, and a website that allows people to blog about all of their interests and aspects of their lives including sex and porn because those are normal parts of the human experience.