hello

1. It will make him angry.

I should hope so. I’m not sending him a friend request. If I kick him hard enough, there’s a good chance I’ll render him unable to act upon his anger. That’s my goal. His feelings are his problem.

2. It will make him hurt you worse.

Statistics say otherwise. And anyway, he’s already demonstrated his desire to hurt me. Why should I give him carte blanche to decide how much he’s going to hurt me? I’d rather be an active participant in that decision-making process.

3. Groin kicks aren’t really that devastating; I’ve seen lots of guys get hit in the balls and it hardly fazed them.

This response (almost universally from men) is so common I’ve come to think of it as “groinsplaining”—you can see it many of the YouTube comments in the videos linked above. These people rarely volunteer to demonstrate their own iron balls in a real kicking situation, but they confidently assert that men in general can shrug off all kinds of damage to the groin. All I can say is, I’ve seen two-year-olds take down grown men via the groin, and toddlers don’t even have any training. I do. I like my odds.

4. We shouldn’t be teaching people how to kick men in the balls; we should be teaching men not to do anything that would make us have to kick them in the balls.

Hey, that’s a great idea! Do you have a detailed, research-based plan for teaching all men everywhere to behave themselves all the time? And do you have funding for your efforts, and buy-in from politicians and community leaders, and a network of trained, experienced instructors who can effect this change? If not, better get started on your grant proposal. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here teaching people how to kick guys in the balls. That’s what I do.

5. Telling people they should kick an assailant in the balls is the same as telling victims who didn’t kick their assailant in the balls that they did something wrong.

No, it isn’t. It’s a practical way to reduce the number of future victims by giving them more viable options to disrupt and survive an assault.

Fact: We have the power to damage the bodies of men who try to hurt us. You’re saying we shouldn’t let people use that power. I’m offering people more choices; you’re trying to take them away.

6. Kicking a guy in the balls just makes the world a more violent place.

Maybe, in the short term. But if it stops him from killing someone, or putting them in the hospital, isn’t that a net win for non-violence? The Dalai Lama thinks so.

okay, so!

There is a trick to it. You do NOT want to soccer kick the dude because that’s a little projectile aiming at a littler target.

It’ll do in a pinch, and it’ll hurt, but it won’t incapacitate, which is what you want. You don’t want “ouch!” Or even “FUCK!”

You want him puking on the floor, and this is how we do:

There’s two ranges where a groin kick works: close and mid-range.

Say someone grabs you face to face, or pins you to the wall, and your hands are blocked. Now you’re close-range. What do you do? You come in closer, as close as you can, and with every ounce of adrenaline and aggression in your body, you do a can-can kick.

You know the first step in the can-can, where you raise your knee up as high as it’ll go as strong as you can?

Do that, as hard as you can, repeatedly.

If that doesn’t work, here’s the alternative. You’re going to take your hand, grasp between the thighs underhand. Its going to feel like you’re “cradling” the testicles. Dig your fingertips into the fragile skin BEHIND the scrotum. Then, once you have a good grip, you turn your hand into a vise, with your fingers digging inwards to the material. If you do it right, you should feel the testes INSIDE the scrotum. You want, whenever possible, to hook your fingers under them.

Then, with your hands in a claw and your fingertips latched behind the testes, you turn your hand sharply, as though you were turning a doorknob. Simultaneously, haul your elbow back and up as hard as you can.

If done properly, this technique can tear the scrotal tissue, and done with enough force, can tear the testes out of your attacker’s body.

No matter HOW pissed he is, he’s gonna drop. I’ve tried this technique on guys wearing cups and even with protection, it is not a fun feeling.

If you’re mid-range and have enough room for a kick, the goal becomes to use your shin. The shin is actually called the tibia, which ounce for ounce is one of the strongest bones in your body. So, here’s what you do, my little bloodthirsty beaus:

You aim, you scream “DO NOT COME CLOSER I SAID NO!” (legal purposes, because now you’re officially exercising your right to self-defence). Maintain a 360 degree awareness, just in case he has friends, and then, when he’s close enough, connect your shin full on soccer kick with the delicate squish of his testicles.

What you want is as much upwards force as possible in combination with as much momentum as you can manage. When he collapses, which he will, then stomp on his groin again, and then run.

The latter has less of a trick to it. It’s primarily about momentum and force.

Remember, if you’re close enough to put your hands on him, use your knee. If he’s coming at you, use your shin.

If you can smell the nachos he had for dinner, rip his fucking balls off.

It’s easy to do, they’re tiny little squishiness wrapped in a delicate flap of skin about as thin as a toenail.

“What would street fights between guys look like—or professional fights for that matter—if one could go below the belt? For one, there’d be a lot more collapsing. Two, a lot more writhing in pain. Three, a lot less getting up. All in all, it would add up to less time looking powerful and more time looking pitiful. And it would send a clear message that men’s bodies are vulnerable.“

…

“So, men generally agree to pretend that the balls just aren’t there. The effect is that we tend to forget just how vulnerable men are to the right attack and continue to think of women as naturally more fragile.”

And:

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2017/07/31/i-argue-that-men-avoid-ball-kicking-to-protect-the-myth-of-masculinity-men-respond-in-the-most-surprising-way/

In other words: it takes 50lb of force to essentially explode a testicle.

The average untrained person can exert anywhere from 60-80psi in a punch.

The average kick strength is considerably more.

Now, if you’re worried about aim — a follow up trick.

Let’s assume the dude is up in your business and you’d rather he be dead at your feet. Valid!

If he’s close enough to grab you, you’re close enough to return the favour. IF SO:

Thumbs to eyeballs, and dig in like they’re grapes. Aim your thumbnails into his tear ducts, and then scoop outwards, as hard as you can. Scratch the cornea if you’re able to do so.

If you cannot, and a kick is going to become necessary —

Reach up, as though you were going in for one of those movie kisses. Your hands should meet at the back of his neck. Link your fingers together, hard as you can.

Using his height and the leverage created by the linked hands, take your knee… and then introduce it to his nuts.

Now, you don’t want to knee him in the *nuts*. That’s nowhere near enough force. Instead, pretend as though you’re trying to knee him in the belly-button, or the solar plexus. Pretend you have to get your knee up into the abdominal cavity, and exert that much pressure.

Remember: you’re going to piss him off, and an angry man who’s already grabbed you is a dangerous foe. You will have one shot to fuck him up —

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

Women have better orgasms than men

We have no refractory period between orgasms

We have an entire organ dedicated to pleasure

Our orgasms have no other biological function - we orgasm for the pure joy of it rather than to impregnate/pass on DNA

Our arousal is hidden - I could be literally thinking of sex 24/7 and nobody would know. This is also why I think it should be men who are flaunting themselves sexually in public/all over media - women can experience arousal entirely privately and not be a public nuisance

Our arousal does not make us vulnerable. An erection steals bloodflow and sticks out awkwardly, making it vulnerable to being broken, as well as emotionally vulnerable - men should naturally feel self-conscious about their erections. I think this is part of the reason men are so obsessed with making their dicks out to be some sort of weapon and symbol of power - they are massively overcompensating for their inability to experience an incredibly powerful, intimate and vulnerable sensation privately and safely.

Men being ‘visual’ is a massive overcompensation for the fact that their orgasms just aren’t that good. They lack the sensation in the penis that women do in the clitoris, and so they ‘need’ visual stimulation to give them extra incentive to be sexual.

Examples of women desiring sex from their aging, disinterested husband are commonplace, but every time a woman loses interest in sex we can always point to a man who is uninterested in her pleasure. A lot of those disinterested aging husbands will suddenly find their libido again when they find a younger woman - which, once again, shows that their sex drive is fueled by external factors such as rape/exploitation and being ‘visual’

Considering that we live in a society, where pornography is highly normalised and a woman grows up learning about sex based on a very toxic concept that’s aimed at breaking her self esteem and taking away her feeling of security, bodily autonomy, and pleasure - considering all this, can we justify consent being a leeway for a lot of dehumanising and harmful things men do to women in bed? Feminists know, that just because women make some choices wilfully, these choices, ultimately, aren’t made in a vacuum. I wonder: when you learn from the very young age that it’s hot and desirable for women to be either visibly and audibly in pain during sex or simply being a joyless and emotionless object for male satisfaction, - can you say your sexual preference are free and healthy and are not formed by the culture that rewards male pleasure and punishes female’s? Knowing, that no man ever views your preferences and desires as his main priority in sex, can you really insist that engaging in an act of that nature is fully neutral and not harmful or self-sabotaging in any way?

Since almost all of us grew to view sex as something that begins and ends with a penis (ironically, even or especially in women-oriented media) - even when we talk about the most respectful and attentive sexual interaction between a man and a woman, - can we, looking at it through a feminist lens, view it as an act done by two completely equally empowered actors? This is just a question, of course.

What I’m leading to is that as long as women are conditioned and pressured to like and enjoy bad or hurtful sex, consent to it is a cheap concept not worth a sou. It’s extremely important, don’t get me wrong, but as long as we as society treats it as some sort of magic pill that eliminates all kinds of issues women face in hetero sex it will never be enough in my eyes.

While mediocre, boring, uncomfortable, bad and painful sex remains the status quo in our society, we can’t afford to call hetero sex a neutral act that has no negative connotation and consequences for women. Because while men get to have their every wish and desire catered in bed, most women don’t even experience the pleasure of having their organ specifically designed for orgasms stimulated the right way!

As long as hetero sex is used by men to punish, hurt and rape women; as long as the language around hetero sex is built on the concept of male dominance, pleasure and pressure (“to break her”, “to screw her”); as long as all the sexual practices expected from women would rather be considered derogatory for men; as long as women in heterosexual relationships don’t have at least one orgasm per intercourse - we can never say that sex with men is a neutral act in itself.

В Заводской Гардеробной | In the Factory's Changing Room;

hey we are all really small do you want to sleep in a pile

Which is a shame, since spinning is really where the "resource provided by the earth" tangibly becomes "object with a use."

Aspects of spinning, such as the amount of twist and the length of the fibers, are impactful upon the thread or yarn created, but lots of fiber crafters don't get to directly play with those variables...

It is so strange how textile production is so utterly dominated by very few fibers, when so many are possible. Industry keeps coming up with new ways to transform bamboo or something into fibers, which is all well and good, but we have yet to run out of easily usable natural fibers that have worked for thousands of years.

For those especially I can't over-recommend the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook or the Field Guide to Fleece (Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.) An awful lot of excellent fiber breeds and species are now unknown, under-used, and in danger of going extinct; Shave 'Em to Save 'Em and the Livestock Conservancy in general are good resources for finding local people working with those. There's a chiengora (dog wool) group on Ravelry that's great, too, and lots of easily searchable info on raising silkworms at home and spinning from hankies.

Fibershed did a spotlight on dogbane, nettle, and milkweed in comparison to hemp and flax. They talk specifically about Native American techniques and current cultivation of all three, particularly dogbane, and ways to spin yarn and make rope. They aren't super in-depth about processing the fibers, but it seems like it's because they have more tutorials/guides on other pages. Bast fibers all have a similar retting->drying->scutching->hackling->spinning (you also have to ripple flax at the beginning) process, generally speaking.

Of course, flax is a really accessible plant fiber to spin yourself! You can plant it yourself, buy unprocessed flax (locally or online), or buy processed but unspun flax. If you're interested in the whole process, this book is the flax bible: Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich. There are a lot of youtubers who go through it all, too.

If you're interested in kudzu, then may I suggest Oigawa Kudzu-fu Studio! They're located in Japan, but they have helpfully created an English website, too, where they go over making kudzu-fu (Japanese name for the cloth from kudzu). And if you ever find yourself going to Japan, you can take a class from them.

On Oigawa Studio's info page, they also mention that they work with ramie (plant in the nettle family), linden tree (basswood), and wisteria, so do with that what you will. I assume a lot of those resources are in Japanese.

Respect the Spindle. Anyone looking for the how's & why's of hand spinning will find answers there. Interest in hand spinning has seen a steady growth in the past 15 yrs since this book's release.

if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope

if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion

A lot of prison abolition frameworks rely on what we know about how societies met their own and each others needs before currency. So, if someone needed milk, they'd take eggs from their chicken and trade it with the person who has a cow. This ensured that everyone's physical needs were usually met.

Prison abolitonists won't say it, but their idea of how rape should be handled is exactly how these early agricultural societies handled it. It was a "majority rules" system. Meaning, if the community liked the women more, the man would be ousted or punished. And if the community liked the man more, the woman would be ousted or punished.

The general goal of prison abolition is not a society in which everyone is safe and has their individual needs met. It's a society that's stable and can maintain itself, where most people have their physical needs met enough to reproduce and continue the society.

This is why they can never give you a straight answer. Because the prison abolition framework doesn't aim to abolish rape, it aims to keep it as quiet as possible. Their solution is to keep men only raping their own wives and daughters, and for those women and girls to have enough other needs met that they'll shut up about it for fear of not having those other needs met.

Most prison abolitionists do not actually understand their framework, because they don't read the academic sources and they don't know how their ideal society would function. But the academics know exactly what it would look like, and it's a regressive society where instead of a justice system making prisons to keep the violent men contained, each household has a woman to keep that household's men contained.