WE ARE HEROES

He said “Gifts are not obligations. You give things to people, and you hope they like them. And your name was a gift from us to you. If it doesn’t work for you anymore, you’re not obligated to keep it.”

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.

i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.

but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’

even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before

society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them. 

I will always remember that twice a week, around the kitchen table, my sister would sit down with my dad for hours, and they would try to work out her math homework. I should mention that my dad is an artist, and art teacher. Truth be told I think he struggled with math just as much if not more then she did. But twice a week you could hear them downstairs, going back and forth, trying to figure it out together. Some nights would be smooth and easy, some nights I could hear them arguing from one floor up about factors or equations, not in anger but in mutual frustration.

I remember the day that she passed. My sister couldn’t wait until my dad’s school day ended, so she called him at work. She gleefully announced to him “I got a D-!”. We could hear him through the phone as he exclaimed “She got a D!” excitedly to his class. Still through the phone we heard his students clapping, laughing and whooping in congratulations. Seldom has a grade in our household been so celebrated.

They tried a different approach after that. I wasn’t just being lazy. I really was having trouble and my shitty teachers didn’t do anything to help me. So they tried, but I was in highschool math at the time, and my required classes were higher level that what had been required for either of them, so they didn’t really know. We spent hours googling how to do these problems and trying to teach each other and get through my work. There were a LOT of tears.

But do you know how happy I was too not only pass, but sneak by most of them with a (very low but still) C? Overjoyed. They were too.

Sandy Hook. 

Sandy Hook was the Nightmare Scenario. It was the “that’s not realistic.” If I’d been arguing with someone who was anti gun control and I said “someone could take a gun and go into a school and kill thirty kindergartners in just a couple of minutes, how would you feel then,” they would have said I was exaggerating, that’s manipulative and unrealistic. 

but that’s what happened. 

and the thing is

if thirty dead, white, upper middle-class kindergartners in Connecticut aren’t going to motivate change on gun control

then they’re never going to change for queer people in Florida, and they’re not going to change for music fans in sin city, and they’re not going to change for college students in Washington and Oregon, and they’re not going to change and they’re not going to change. 

equally-confused shrugging

“about 20%”

return the question, acting intrigued and interested with their answer

take out your id card and squint at it for a couple minutes before admitting that you forgot your glasses

lean in and whisper “I wonder the same thing daily”

We have to protect and look out for those who will be targeted by these nationalist right-wing bastards.

Refugees, people with any other skin colour than white, people with names that “don’t sound German”, anybody who is not Christian (Muslims especially, also Jewish people of course!), and LGBT+ people.

Some of them are Germans (i.e. have German citizenship), others are not, but they all belong to Germany, they all are a part of it, they live among us and with us, and they belong to us.

We have to watch out for each other.

Without Muslims you wouldn’t have:

Coffee

Cameras

Experimental Physics

Chess

Soap

Shampoo

Perfume/spirits

Irrigation

Crank-shaft, internal combustion engine, valves, pistons

Combination locks

Architectural innovation (pointed arch -European Gothic cathedrals adopted this technique as it made the building much stronger, rose windows, dome buildings, round towers, etc.)

Surgical instruments

Anesthesia

Windmill

Treatment of Cowpox

Fountain pen

Numbering system

Algebra/Trigonometry

Modern Cryptology

3 course meal (soup, meat/fish, fruit/nuts)

Crystal glasses

Carpets

Checks

Gardens used for beauty and meditation instead of for herbs and kitchen.

University

Optics

Music

Toothbrush

Hospitals

Bathing

Quilting

Mariner’s Compass

Soft drinks

Pendulum

Braille

Cosmetics

Plastic surgery

Calligraphy

Manufacturing of paper and cloth

It was a Muslim who realized that light ENTERS our eyes, unlike the Greeks who thought we EMITTED rays, and so invented a camera from this discovery.

It was a Muslim who first tried to FLY in 852, even though it is the Wright Brothers who have taken the credit.

It was a Muslim by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan who was known as the founder of modern Chemistry. He transformed alchemy into chemistry. He invented: distillation, purification, oxidation, evaporation, and filtration. He also discovered sulfuric and nitric acid.

It is a Muslim, by the name of Al-Jazari who is known as the father of robotics.

It was a Muslim who was the architect for Henry V’s castle.

It was a Muslim who invented hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes, a technique still used today.

It was a Muslim who actually discovered inoculation, not Jenner and Pasteur to treat cowpox. The West just brought it over from Turkey

It was Muslims who contributed much to mathematics like Algebra and Trigonometry, which was imported over to Europe 300 years later to Fibonnaci and the rest.

It was Muslims who discovered that the Earth was round 500 years before Galileo did.

The list goes on………..

Just imagine a world without Muslims. Now I think you probably meant, JUST IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT TERRORISTS. And then I would agree, the world would definitely be a better place without those pieces of filth. But to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of a few is ignorant and racist. No one would ever expect Christians or White people to be held responsible for the acts of Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bombing) or Anders Breivik (Norway killing), or the gun man that shot Congresswoman Giffords in head, wounded 12 and killed 6 people, and rightly so because they had nothing to do with those incidents! Just like the rest of the 1.5 billion Muslims have nothing to do with this incident!

Sources:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-islamic-inventors-changed-the-world-469452.html

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-29/world/muslim.inventions_1_hassani-inventions-muslim?_s=PM:WORLD

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

I feel like this is a very important thread considering a lot of people cut Hollywood abusers a lot of slack just because “they’re work is very good and entertaining”. There are plenty of other Hollywood actresses/actors that don’t pull off gross shit like this, support them instead…. At the end of the day, we need to put the victims first and stop letting this shit slide.

“it’s just a parking lot”

Bloody amazing.

And you know what’s right next to it?

That’s right, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden, which translates to the Memorial for the murdered jews.

So if you wanna go have a look at the monument commemorating the victims of Hitler’s regime, you can park your car right on the spot he died and walk there.

Adults fuck kids up so hard by praising something that the kids a) have no control over, and b) won’t itself improve over time (i.e. the level of giftedness doesn’t go up as we age, and eventually we find ourselves coming up to its limits). And our (I’m assuming you’re American) education system is so broken that we can’t do right by our gifted students in entirely different ways than how we can’t do right by our struggling students, or our students with other needs. It’s a fucking miracle that students on either side of “average” learn anything useful at all, and if they do it is 100% guaranteed that it’s due to a spectacular teacher finding ways to get their students involved intellectually and creatively in spite of, not thanks to, the system.

If you have kids or work with kids, take a moment and think about whether you compliment them on their innate gifts–“You’re so smart/talented!” or on what they actually do–“That was good/hard work you did!” This applies to all kids who do anything that comes easily for them: playing the violin, learning a second language, throwing/hitting/fielding a ball, etc. Replace “Wow, you’re so talented!” with “Your practicing has really paid off! You should be proud of how hard you worked!”

Praise ALL kids for not giving up if something is hard, even if they don’t get an A (or a B or even a C for that matter). “I know this isn’t the grade you wanted, but I saw that you worked at it, and that’s what’s going to make the next assignment a little easier.”

For gifted and talented kids, praise them for stretching themselves. Help them find challenging things to do. START EARLY, because, as the original poster says (and so many more of us feel), if we can skate through our first 18 years of life without being intellectually challenged, the rest of our LIFE is going to be very, very anxiety-inducing, difficult, and intellectually and emotionally overwhelming.

In the grown-up world, self-respect gets you further than self-esteem. “I can probably do a good job at this if I work at it” is the result of focusing solely on a kid’s self-respect. “Everything is so easy for me because I’m gifted/talented wait this is hard and so is this and I can’t do anything and I’m afraid to try because what if I fail I’ve never failed and my entire understanding of my own worth as a human being is that I don’t fail” is what comes from focusing solely on a kid’s self-esteem. Self-respect, learned over time, will bring self-esteem with it naturally. Self-esteem, learned over time, is separate from self-respect and, without the balance, just brings pain and misery and mental breakdowns when the adult hits the hard limit of the gift or the talent.

Really, like, the way that trans women are taught and expected to speak is incredibly tedious, unnatural, and obviously forced to the ear of any speech pathologist. So the “solution” is for us to go “full-time” and essentially ditch the voice that comes naturally.

It isn’t right, but there’s no winning in either case. People will misgender you if you speak naturally, and if you do try to use your “feminized” voice you’re honestly putting yourself at risk of violence, and how the fuck am I supposed to feel confident when knowing full well that the sounds coming out of me aren’t genuine or convincing to anyone?

This is a serious fucking problem that doesn’t get addressed. Trans women are expected to find services and often pay absurd sums of money to get training or “therapy” for the voice, but all you are really doing is practicing the art of speaking in a submissive and stereotyped voice. Enter radfems, who would then use this as a weapon against us, claiming that we are perpetuating *ppfffpffpfafbloobpblboooblbllblblpp* by using our voices in a way that makes us feel safe. 

But, unless you’re the lucky 5-10% of trans women who can pass even after speaking, that safety is not only unlikely, but more often than not people are going to look at you with disgust and of course you know what happens once you’re outed.

Why should I have to talk like a fucking cartoon character? Cis women do NOT sound the way that these voice experts insist they do, because trans women have to speak primarily with a head tone, completely forgoing the chest and therefore removing the part of the sound that makes it sound like speaking and not fucking squealing.

Charlie Howard moved to Bangor, Maine during the early 80s. he was proudly gay and discriminated against because of it.

he was kicked out of a club for dancing with a man and assaulted by a woman in a supermarket, who yelled slurs at him. his kitten was found strangled on his porch.

on July 7th, 1984, as Charlie left a potluck with a friend, a car full of teenagers–3 boys, 2 girls–pulled up beside them. Charlie was chased down by the boys, brutally beaten, and called slurs. he had severe asthma and began having an attack. the boys dangled him over a bridge and, when he begged for his life because he couldn’t swim, they pried his hands off of the railing and threw him over. his friend fled to pull a fire alarm, but, by the time authorities got there, it was too late: Charlie had drowned. he was 23.

the murderers left the crime scene to attend a party, where they bragged about what they had done. they were minors and all the boys served under two years. the girls faced no chargges for not reporting the crime and helping the murderers leave the scene. the memorial in honor of Charlie that now stands beside the bridge has been defaced with homophobic slurs on numerous occasions. he’s dead and people still want to spit on his ghost.

Stephen King says that this crime is what woke him up to the violence faced by LGBT+ people. as a straight man, he had had the privilege of not having to think about this issue and says that this complacency and ignorance is what led to Charlie’s murder.

King included a fictionalized version of the murder in IT. in the novel, a gay man named Adrian is brutally beaten and thrown off a bridge as his boyfriend watches. he barely survives the fall and Pennywise is waiting for him at the bottom, drawn by the fear, suffering, and hatred. It crushes the still living Adrian’s ribs and bites him while taunting Adrien’s boyfriend, before dragging Adrian into the sewers.

It revels in the event and uses an image that is explicitly linked to the hate crime to torment Adrian’s boyfriend. this moment is there to make a clear statement: the homophobic murder of an innocent gay men is an act of pure, depraved evil. the embodiment of evil literally kills Adrian to conclude the hate crime.

Pennywise/It is also fueled by acts of racism, antisemitism, sexual violence, domestic abuse, and child abuse. he is monstrous in every sense, and often meant to represent the real bigotry and violence faced by children and marginalized people.