Be The Change You Want To See In The World👩🏽‍💻🌻⚖

What sound would a predatory tunicate make? Resembling a piranha plant from Super Mario Bros., these transparent invertebrates live anchored along the deep sea canyon walls and seafloor, patiently waiting for unsuspecting prey to wander by or swim into their cavernous hoods.

This #WomensHistoryMonth, let's not forget how many of our rights were only won in recent decades, and weren’t acquired by asking nicely and waiting. We need to fight for our rights. Here's are a few examples:

📍 Before 1974's Fair Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for financial institutions to discriminate against applicants' gender, banks could refuse women a credit card. Women won the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, but many banks still refused without a husband’s signature. This allowed men to continue to have control over women’s bank accounts. Unmarried women were often refused service by financial institutions entirely.

📍 Before 1977, sexual harassment was not considered a legal offense. That changed when a woman brought her boss to court after she refused his sexual advances and was fired. The court stated that her termination violated the 1974 Civil Rights Act, which made employment discrimination illegal.⚖️

📍 In 1969, California became the first state to pass legislation to allow no-fault divorce. Before then, divorce could only be obtained if a woman could prove that her husband had committed serious faults such as adultery. 💍By 1977, nine states had adopted no-fault divorce laws, and by late 1983, every state had but two. The last, New York, adopted a law in 2010.

📍In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, entered the Boston Marathon under the name "K.V. Switzer." At the time, the Amateur Athletics Union didn't allow women. Once discovered, staff tried to remove Switzer from the race, but she finished. AAU did not formally accept women until fall 1971.

📍 In 1972, Lillian Garland, a receptionist at a California bank, went on unpaid leave to have a baby and when she returned, her position was filled. Her lawsuit led to 1978's Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which found that discriminating against pregnant people is unlawful

📍 It wasn’t until 2016 that gay marriage was legal in all 50 states. Previously, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard. In 2008, California was the first state to achieve marriage equality, only to reverse that right following a ballot initiative later that year. 

📍In 2018, Utah and Idaho were the last two states that lacked clear legislation protecting chest or breast feeding parents from obscenity laws. At the time, an Idaho congressman complained women would, "whip it out and do it anywhere,"

📍 In 1973, the Supreme Court affirmed the right to safe legal abortion in Roe v. Wade. At the time of the decision, nearly all states outlawed abortion with few exceptions. In 1965, illegal abortions made up one-sixth of all pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths. Unfortunately after years of abortion restrictions and bans, the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Since then, 14 states have fully banned care, and another 7 severely restrict it – leaving most of the south and midwest without access. 

📍 Before 1973, women were not able to serve on a jury in all 50 states. However, this varied by state: Utah was the first state to allow women to serve jury duty in 1898. Though, by 1927, only 19 states allowed women to serve jury duty. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 gave women the right to serve on federal juries, though it wasn't until 1973 that all 50 states passed similar legislation

📍 Before 1988, women were unable to get a business loan on their own. The Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 allowed women to get loans without a male co-signer and removed other barriers to women in business. The number of women-owned businesses increased by 31 times in the last four decades. 

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Curious Georgiana (via grrrlstudies)

I know I’ve reblogged this before, but it bears re-reblogging (?).  This is how you respond to abuse, this is how you give people control over their bodies/uteruses, this is how you act as a generally non-judgmental and compassionate person.  I love this story so fucking much.

Yeah you're cute when you sleep but you didn't let me sleep either so I'm going to annoy you now because I'm bored. Hahah get poked, sleepy idiot.

How do you not comprehend this when I am literally staring at you. Like I understand that your brain can't understand things this nuanced but come on, how do you not get this.

I don't know if you know that what I am currently doing is an expression of affection, but that won't stop me. Knowing that I showed you that I love you is enough.

I heard a crinkly material and the sound of you chewing so I have to know what's in your mouth RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

I can't communicate with you and you can't communicate with me, so I'm just copying the tone of the sound you're making in hopes that you understand that I try.

You are doing activities beyond my comprehension, and I find this fascinating. I will never understand what the fuck you are trying to achieve here, but I am intrigued nonetheless.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

catches fire: a moment

of indecision.

For instance, Japan has spent a great deal of money on anti-suicide infrastructure, doing genuinely cartoonishly things like putting rollers on bridge railings so you can’t climb over them and slide right off, putting blue lights in the subway so it’s harder to see to throw yourself in front of a train. It’s not working. Japan’s suicide rate rose again in 2022. They are not addressing the root causes and stressors in their citizen’s lives and social barriers to mental health care and psychiatric medication.

It is not my job to fix others.

It is okay if others get angry.

It is okay to say no.

It is not my job to take responsibility for others.

I do not have to anticipate the needs of others.

It is my job to make me happy.

No one has to agree with me.

I have a right to my own feelings.

The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair. The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch. The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE. My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been, and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire, but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight, those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams, so I must communicate by other avenues. A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” —a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”— and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could. You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes, in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son. Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS. I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands. Of course I would. Each finger, even. To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of. If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape. Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor. “Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind’s new refrain in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame. The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert “where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.” It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference: The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire. We see double. You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash. Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red, only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget you’re gone. But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere. And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead. How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever? I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.