bean

When I was in high school, a man who I’d thought was the parent of a school friend followed me out to the grocery store parking lot greenhouse where I worked. It was dark, and late, and it was me, alone, in a chain link enclosure with one exit and a register full of cash. He called me up to the fence and asked if I wanted to get dinner, or go dancing. I was scared and shaking and told him no several times, and he only left when I falsely said I had a boyfriend. I was very aware that if he were to come over the fence, or just wait at the exit until I eventually had to leave, I could do nothing about it.

When my hair was very short, a hairdresser sent me to the barber’s side of the store so they could get the back of my head with clippers. The barber followed me out to my car to ask me out afterwards. I was very aware that we were the only people in the parking lot when it happened, and that the lot itself was tucked behind the building with no clear visibility to the road.

Today, a man I’ve met once made it very clear he knows where I live, and used that knowledge to express a romantic interest. If he ever decides that he’s unhappy with how I responded, he knows where I live. He knows what my car looks like. It is impossibly easy for him to determine when I’m home alone, and now I have to live with that knowledge.

Every woman I know has at least one story like this. My roommate had to be escorted to her car every night when she was a waitress, in case some man was waiting for her or a coworker’s shift to end.

If the person you want to ask out cannot physically run away from you when you are asking, YOU CANNOT ASK THEM OUT. You cannot ask someone out if they are at work. You cannot ask someone out if you’ve followed them to a remote/unoccupied/enclosed area. You cannot GO TO SOMEONE’S HOME UNINVITED to ask them out. You are not being romantic. You are not “taking initiative”. You are terrifying the person you want to woo. If they say yes, it is not because they want to, it is because they are terrified of what might happen if they say no.

This Vote Is Legally Binding

by @tkingfisher

In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…

Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!” Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again. This vote is legally binding. Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a console– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument. Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message. So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking

Sometimes it’s not just the people who shunned me or told me I’m gonna be punished when I die. Sometimes it’s more subtle. It’s my stepmothers friend, who knew my family’s religious status, and still insisted we say grace at her house, and took us along to her church when we visited, making my sister and I go to Sunday school for the first and only time. Or it’s the fact that I put “agnostic” on my SAT form, and suddenly every Christian college was sending me pamphlets and emails, which I never saw the actual Christian students get. It’s the girl who kindly reassured me, saying I’m just a “sheep lost from the flock” and that I’ll find my way back to “my people” someday.

Whoo boy. This.

Like… there are actual websites that list all of the various “unreached” ethnic, social and religious groups that they “need” to convert.

There’s an entire denomination of Christianity that engages in “pious fraud” (i.e. “Lying for Jesus isn’t a Sin!”) specifically aimed at converting Jews under false pretenses. They’re funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year by Evangelicals to do this. Some of them go undercover in Jewish communities dressed as Jewish people so they can missionize.

Missionaries don’t care about the diseases they might bring to uncontacted people–they buy helicopters and flout laws protecting those people in order to “bring them the good word”.

And, of course, this is all when they’re feeling nice.

If they’re not…

Well, actual genocide is on the table, instead of “just” cultural genocide–and there’s so much denial about this. I had one Christian tell me that “Christianity, when practiced properly, should never destroy a culture”.

I’m a Black man carrying the stars and stripes. What don’t I understand? Every time I pick this thing up, I know there are millions of people who are gonna hate me for it. Even now, here… I feel it. The stares, the judgment. And there’s nothin’ I can do to change it. Yet, I’m still here. No super serum, no blond hair, or blue eyes. The only power I have is that I believe we can do better.

op is absolutely right. this is coming from someone who researches and teaches on age and society professionally. modern western society is age-segregated to an unprecedented degree and there is ample evidence that it is absolutely fucking us over. it’s linked to everything from economic hardship to mental health crises.

intergenerational friendships are important. adults who never interact with young people outside of a defined institutional relationship with a built-in power imbalance (like being a parent or teacher) don’t develop the capacity to treat young people as equals, which reinforces patterns of abuse, neglect, social disempowerment, and silencing. young people who lack meaningful connections with adults outside of those same institutions miss out on an incredible source of support and guidance. and everyone misses out on the basic human joy of friendships that could have been really meaningful if we didn’t have this weird, broken ideology that says young people have nothing interesting to say, and no value to adults who don’t either want to raise them or exploit them or both.

like, sure, with any relationship between a minor and an adult, the adult has a responsibility that the minor doesn’t. some shit only comes from life experience. but like… that teen who comes to dnd on fridays, the younger coworker, that person met through fandom? i’m not gonna pretend we’re not friends just because i’m older than they are.

Intergenerational friendships are like??? So varied?????

Like maybe you’re 16 and working your first job, and you have an old Chinese man as a regular who sits at a table and reads the Chinese newspaper his family mails him, and you start sitting down and talking to him when it’s slow. And he tells you all about the life he’s lived, of being a child in the aftermath of world war two. And he talks to you about the prejudice he’s seen, and the way he sees people treat each other, and how much things have changed. And you learn a lot.

Or you meet a 30-something mother of two that walks with a cane in a group therapy session, and when you speak to her she opens up about her struggles with drugs, and how she wishes to stay better so she can be there for her kids. And she teaches you about having a more open mind when it comes to religious beliefs when you’re an edgy atheist teen.

Or you’re very isolated in your hobbies, and you meet a group of college students that share your interests and are fine letting you join in on their card games and D&D, and you not only learn the games but you get used to a group that’s accepting and just wants to have fun and make everyone comfy, and you learn not every group of people has to be judgemental and scary.

You’re saying that instead of making teens aware of the signs of toxic relationships, and keeping an open line of communication so we can help them take notice of and avoid these things… You’d rather we lock teens in a box where they’re deprived of the positives?

Force so many teens to be around peers that bully and disregard them, when they have prospective friends in local clubs and support groups that just aren’t necessarily in their peer group?

Hardcore Tumblr users really are just puritans huh? Hell even historically, households were made of many generations, and kids helped out in the community and met the adults that kept it going.

Years later we still get updates on her life, and a bunch of those people went to see her perform on stage six years later when she got the lead role in her college(!!!) production of She Kills Monsters.

I got really close to an adult volunteer with a queer youth group in high school, and she took me in like an odd, overenthusiastic niece. I did have a crush on her a little, but it was the sort of thing that teaches you what you like in a person without meaning anything more than that. She and her wife loaned me a pile of lesbian books to read, taught me to cook, and helped me learn to drive. They were like family. 

My grandmother’s friends, who I’ve known all my life, are also my friends. One of them is in the last year of her life now, and as sad as I am to lose her, I’m so grateful to have known her, to have been friends with her as close as she and my grandmother were. I’m also grateful my grandmother and I can share this grief and joy.

And UCD reportedly payed $175,000 for this image to not appear when you search it on google: