the patchwork grove

Psst, hey, Marilyn Monroe’s image as a freewheeling sexpot was a carefully constructed lie. The real Marilyn Monroe was a roiling tragedy and her life was an indictment of our society as a whole. She was orphaned after her mother had a schizophrenic breakdown, bounced around between foster homes where she was sexually abused, and married a 21-year-old at 16 to get out of being sent to an orphanage. Hugh Hefner published nude photos of her without her consent that were taken when she was 23 and desperate. She suffered severe anxiety and depression, which she coped with by drinking and using barbiturates, and was already a full-blown addict when she became famous in the mid-50s. Her career was one of exploitation, condescension and alienation, and she killed herself at 36. That Hugh Hefner, a man who was at best an unpleasant footnote in her life, felt entitled to be buried next to her is one more humiliation in a pop cultural landscape we should all be ashamed of.

She deserves better

Marilyn was a founding member of the Hollywood branch of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and had lifelong left-wing political views with a particular emphasis on racial equality. She formed her own independent production company that survived for several years and earned a credit as an executive producer on several films. Additionally, she was not only concerned for workers rights, she acted for them, using her own fame to stop staff being unfairly sacked from several of her films. She was a loyal, kind woman and her early death remains a great tragedy. Worse still, as OP notes, is the co-opting of her image by exactly the sort of people she would have loathed in life.

it's really frustrating how a lot of people can understand that someone turning 18 is not like, a magical switch that gives them all knowledge and understanding of the world, and that an 18 year old is not reasonably any different than a 17 year old, and instead of doing anything productive with this they take that as a reason to come up with their own arbitrary age at which you become sentient, or whatever. which is how you end up with people having "21+ only" in bio

i have a suggestion

no one with any amount of power brave or enlightened enough to call what the western world is doing to children segregation. children are segregated from public life. children are a legitimate oppressed class

what else do you call it when third spaces place curfews for when children are allowed in, when public squares hire cops and guards to boot out any kids they find for "loitering"; when arcades and theatres and entertainment spaces mandate ID checks regardless of if their content is age-inappropriate or not; when parks for kids are constantly sold off for more property development, when public transport is gutted and tickets are converted to card-only systems, when micromobility devices are progressively outlawed under the moral panic pretense of "youth hooliganism", when cash is phased out of retail such that children have no legal means of purchasing anything independently? what else do you call it when children are completely barred from sharing space with adults on the internet? if we earnestly believe that children are an oppressed class who require liberation then we must analyse these things using the same language that we analyse all other class dynamics

liberals will look you dead in the eye and tell you kids are rapists and you should give up on them because of youtubers

i have a suggestion

There are a lot of people who are convinced that their empathy for youth and support for their liberation makes them simply larger, older kids and on the same footing in terms of power! Unlike the evil Parents from planet Parent, who were never children themselves obvs

today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.

reblog this post to help a child break the law

every time i have to relearn that being disabled means not being able to do all of the stuff other people can i get so pissed. you mean its just like this forever? i want to do stuff...

welcome to my epic fantasy world. we have many developed fantasy kingdoms with 2000 years of rich lore and history. and to the south you can see the evil sand people and to the east theres japanchina.

dark scaled reptiles are quite a do ra ble