sans carte

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

I’m gonna say this point blank— you’re a tar pit if you think this way

Your suffering does not make you special, you are not granted brand new permissions to be belligerent and cruel because you have been treated poorly, straight people aren’t an oppressed class, no, but they’re people who are entitled to the same amount of basic decency that you, yourself, are entitled to

You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.

Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.

Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.

If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.

[yellow cherry jam]

[blue turtle]

[oneul]

[lofi axol]

2. Tumblr tags reading "Years from now we're gonna be like, 'They put it in WHAT???' Like, this is it. This is our Radium."

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

People (even in relatively liberal intellectual communities) often traffic in this truism that our culture is 'oversexualized' and that sexually explicit content is EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. It's inescapable, allegedly.

When in reality, every major social media website in existence is engaged in an all out war against the stuff. Credit card companies have attempted to refuse to process transactions based on people trying to purchase things like OnlyFans subscriptions. And SPEAKING OF ONLYFANS, that site recently went through a bunch of drama when it was considering trying to tamp down on the selling of sexually explicit content, when that is like minimum 90% of its total business.

While the MCU is a bit passe these days, it was once THEE global cultural juggernaut to end all juggernauts. And it is FAMOUSLY so aggressively devoid of any actual eroticism you'd be forgiven if you thought people in this universe are all created in science labs. (Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny, as the famous essay asserts)

Exact same with the Star Wars franchise. To such an extent that one of the most iconic and important characters in the whole thing (Anakin Skywalker) LITERALLY, canonically is a product of immaculate conception.

Capitalism is actually TERRIFIED of trying to sell us sex, and it shies away from it at almost all opportunities. (Why do you think Hollywood was so fucking blindsided by Heated Rivalry's unexpected success?) ALL the ads on porn sites are ads for other porn sites. Social media can't stop trying to free itself from the stuff completely. ALL THE MAINSTREAM AI COMPANIES (who are currently trying anything else they can think of to get people to use their products) ARE STAUNCHLY TRAINING THEIR MODELS OUT OF PROVIDING SEXUALLY EXPLICIT OUTPUTS (whether written or image-based).

Granted, you can of course still find plenty of sexually explicit content in internet and entertainment spaces if you intentionally seek it out. Plenty of it is out there, of course. But the notion that it permeates every corner of cultural world doesn't hold up to even a cursory level of scrutiny. Its ubiquity is radically overstated. You often have to navigate significant barriers to access sexually explicit content; it is often heavily targeted for censorship and, at minimum, it is often kept behind heavy structural partitioning.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Posted by The Library of Congress on Facebook:

Once more, due to annual popular demand, we like to share Rosa Parks’ pancake recipe on National Pancake Day. Jotted down on an envelope, it came to the Library along with the rest of her papers, a gift made possible by the generosity of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation in 2016. Learn more about the Rosa Parks Collection: https://www.loc.gov/.../rosa.../about-this-collection/...

Here is the Library of Congress page for the recipe!

And the full transcription (text) of the envelope!

And the recipe itself:

Featherlite Pancakes Sift together:

1 C flour

2 T B. Powder [presumably baking powder]

1/2 t salt

2 T sugar

Mix:

1 egg

1 1/4 C Milk

1/3 C peanut butter melted

1 T shorting or oil

Combine with dry ingredients Cook at 275° on griddle

-----

egg

does Idgie Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) eat pussy?