I Hope We Will Be Dragons

Xitter ate the tweet this is from, but Tim Bender posted it

i have to do stuff to get results

Watching the process of this absolutely stunning painting makes it even more beautiful.

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.

Relationship status?

“At a clinic in Anand in northern India, women give birth to Western children. White women’s eggs are inseminated with white men’s sperm, and the embryo is implanted in the wombs of Indian women. The children will show no traces of the women who bore them. They will neither bear her name nor get to know her. After giving birth to the children, the Indian women surrender them. They sign a contract and receive between 2,500 and 6,500 USD the moment they give up their responsibility for the child they just gave birth to. For the women, most of whom are poor and from nearby villages, the payment can be up to the equivalent of ten years’ salary. The buyers are typically American, European, Australian, Japanese, or wealthy Indians; they are childless heterosexual couples, homosexual men, and single men… With traditional surrogacy, the industry had been limited to the Western world. An Indian mother would have meant a child with Indian features. But suddenly, through the miracle of modern technology, it became possible for an Indian woman to give birth to a white child. Thus, Americans could pay two-thirds less than for surrogacy in the USA and still come home with their “own” child, even though it had spent nine months in an Indian woman’s body. Embryo transplantation also impacted on American courts’ judgments in the child custody cases. In one case from 1993, almost identical to “Baby M”—the mother had second thoughts after the birth and wanted to keep the child—the judgment was that she was not the child’s mother. She “was not exercising procreative choice, but was providing a service.” Because the egg wasn’t hers, the pregnancy wasn’t motherhood but a “service”; therefore, she had no rights to the child she gave birth to. This has now become standard practice in the USA, and even when the egg belongs to a third woman—a so-called egg donor—custody is granted to those who paid for the child.”