TheOneHalf

Carmen Goodyear, one of the founders of Country Women magazine, and her wife Laurie York.

“Carmen Goodyear and Laurie York, partners in farm and marriage, have for decades forged an existence removed from consumerism, rooted in communal living, and above all, situated close to nature. This farm and preserve is where they have raised goats, sheep, chickens, and bees; where they have grown a mammoth garden that supplies most of their food; where they have helped wage successful battles against offshore oil drilling, a nuclear power plant, and GMOs; where they have, after many years together, gotten legally married …” 

Threeleaves on Redbubble / Instagram

For a growing number of American kids, porn is their sex ed.  Now Pornhub is hoping to offer their audience some more formal lessons in how to be a healthy and happy sexual being.

On Wednesday, the massive adult entertainment destination took the somewhat surprising step of launching the “Pornhub Sexual Health Center.”  They’re hoping the free sub-site will become a go-to resource for some of their 70 million daily users on all manner of topics, including STIs, sexual safety and how to manage relationships.

They’ve chosen Dr. Laurie Betito, a renowned sex therapist, to direct the site and they’ll also be working with a number of doctors, therapists and other experts to offer advice and answer questions.  Corey Price, Pornhub’s Vice President, told Mashable, “Our goal is to provide our visitors with a site that has credible and insightful information, rather than have them scouring the internet.”

While it’s a database they’ll build up over time, a first look reveals they’ve started with the fundamentals — with answers to things like “Babies. Where do they come from?” and “Are there really three holes?”  These might seems almost laughably basic to adult consumers of hardcore porn, but there are a lot of young people for whom these are very real questions.

Price told Mashable they weren’t aiming the content specifically at beginners.  He said they simply want to appeal to “those who are looking for trustworthy sex tips and health advice provided by experts.”  But it seems like they realize this could prove to be an especially valuable resource for their younger audience, who most likely isn’t getting comprehensive (much less sex-positive) sex ed in schools.

There are, of course, plenty of online sexual health and education resources, but for many kids, landing on sites like Pornhub is already their way into learning about sex.  Porn can obviously teach you plenty about the basics and mechanics of intercourse, but there’s a whole range of other things — biology, health, consent, relating to intimate partners, just to name a few — that you won’t pick up from watching videos like “Big tits round asses” or “Sloppy throat games.”

So if they can slide their curious audience over to the PSHC while they’re already on the site, it could function as pretty useful one-stop shop for filling in the blanks left by spotty sex ed classes and the birds and bees talks given by often bewildered parents.

By attacking the language and treating it as a joke, you are actively delegitimizing those you claim you support - the people you’re apparently concerned for by attacking those who you feel use the word too lightly. When you reduce the word it to a punchline of people you don’t like, you are saying “its stupid, a bad thing, a wrong thing, why should anyone use that”.

How about you just tell them they’re misusing the word in your personal opinion? That’s not hard, right? 

But the reality is that most folks aren’t really defending those who have been abused. They’re using it so they don’t have to take seriously anyone who is distressed - by making them the subject of ridicule, they can shame them into not being their problem and bolster their own sense of belonging by sharing a ‘joke’ with their community. It reminded them of who were the in-group and who were outsiders. Whenever I see it used as a ‘joke’, its not because the person they’re attacking has used it. Someone has said something that they have a problem with - perhaps they’re unhappy with how something has been handled by someone else or they feel disrespected. Then people come out and say “you triggered?”. The person they’re turning it on has said nothing to change the definition of the term triggered because they haven’t even used the word. The person talking to them, meanwhile, is using it as a harder ‘u mad bro?’ as a means to dismiss everything they say and feel in a sentence with no thought to those who the word actually helps.

Consider the “hug box”. The hug box, hug machine or squeeze chair or whatever particular name is being used for it is a machine that provides the physical act of being hugged without some of the issues of actually being hugged. After all, the people it was primarily developed for are people who may suffer extreme anxiety, stress or being overwhelmed or overstimulated in the actual gesture and want to experience the reassurance without that distress. Over the last decade, that term was turned into a perjorative term, wielded against people who they believed were in an echo chamber. The targets of the term weren’t misusing a mental health term to refer to their communities or their needs - their attackers were.

And what did that do in the long run? It delegitimized the word in the eyes of many, hurt people who were already vulnerable and caused any sight of the term to be a cause for anxiety because it becomes so associated with abuse. The more it got wielded as a weapon to not take seriously, the more it normalized its use as a weapon and further isolated the people it was meant to help.

long story short: ‘triggered’ is not a joke, its a lever to get people to shut up and its use is only really to delegitimize the term and further alienate and isolate the abused so people of a certain mindset won’t have to deal with them.

Jien Carson is gonna be played by Jamie Clayton, a brilliant actress and trans woman. Jien Carson is the founder of the Andromeda Initiative and leads the expedition from the human ark “Nexus” in Mass Effect: Andromeda

•.¸¸.ஐ ▫ Created  By: || ☆Ｈｉｔｏｍｉ▫@hitomicchi_0☆  ☆ ◇ respective credits to the creator☆▫ ஐ..•♡

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By Amanda Jette on upworthy.com —

Society, pay attention. This is important.

My wife, Zoe, is transgender. She came out to us — the kids and me — last summer and then slowly spread her beautiful feminine wings with extended family, friends, and neighbors.

A little coming out here, a little coming out there — you know how it is.

It’s been a slow, often challenging process of telling people something so personal and scary, but pretty much everyone has been amazing.

However, she dreaded coming out at the office.

She works at a large technology company, managing a team of software developers in a predominantly male office environment. She’s known many of her co-workers and employees for 15 or so years. They have called her “he” and “him” and “Mr.” for a very long time. How would they handle the change?

While we have laws in place in Ontario, Canada, to protect the rights of transgender employees, it does not shield them from awkwardness, quiet judgment, or loss of workplace friendships. Your workplace may not become outright hostile, but it can sometimes become a difficult place to go to every day because people only tolerate you rather than fully accept you.

But this transition needed to happen, and so Zoe carefully crafted a coming out email and sent it to everyone she works with.

The support was immediately apparent; she received about 75 incredibly kind responses from coworkers, both local and international.

She then took one week off, followed by a week where she worked solely from home. It was only last Monday when she finally went back to the office.

Despite knowing how nice her colleagues are and having read so many positive responses to her email, she was understandably still nervous.

Hell, I was nervous. I made her promise to text me 80 billion times with updates and was more than prepared to go down there with my advocacy pants on if I needed to (I might be a tad overprotective).

And that’s when her office pals decided to show the rest of us how to do it right.

She got in and found that a couple of them had decorated her cubicle to surprise her:

And made sure her new name was prominently displayed in a few locations:

They got her a beautiful lily with a “Welcome, Zoe!” card:

And this tearjerker quote was waiting for her on her desk:

To top it all off, a 10 a.m. “meeting” she was scheduled to attend was actually a coming out party to welcome her back to work as her true self — complete with coffee and cupcakes and handshakes and hugs.

NO, I’M NOT CRYING. YOU’RE CRYING.

I did go to my wife’s office that day. But instead of having my advocacy pants on, I had my hugging arms ready and some mascara in my purse in case I cried it off while thanking everyone.

I wish we lived in a world where it was no big deal to come out.

Sadly, that is not the case for many LGBTQ people. We live in a world of bathroom bills and “religious freedom” laws that directly target the members of our community. We live in a world where my family gets threats for daring to speak out for trans rights. We live in a world where we can’t travel to certain locations for fear of discrimination — or worse.

So when I see good stuff happening — especially when it takes place right on our doorstep — I’m going to share it far and wide. Let’s normalize this stuff. Let’s make celebrating diversity our everyday thing rather than hating or fearing it.

Chill out, haters. Take a load off with us.

It’s a lot of energy to judge people, you know. It’s way more fun to celebrate and support them for who they are.

This was WAY too much time and effort for a weird crossover that likely only a handful of people will get, but holy shit it was fun and self indulgent