🕯️⚰️ G A B R I E L 🦇🍷

I quit my soul crushing suicidality inducing job in early June. I've been looking since (and actually from even before, I'd been wanting out for years), but it's tough now where I live even for entry level positions with Kast's and Quiroz's buffoonery (in summary, we were recently VERY fucked with a new reform and I'm trying hard not to think about it much 🤪).

I'd appreciate help just to stay on top of my bills, please.

I'm currently in debt for about 300 USD due to medical expenses + unemployment. I don't have as much. Yes, this is after the help I've already gotten, I'm so sorry.

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.

Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”

Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”

We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.

A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”

The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”

The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”

A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”

Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)

A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”

Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”

All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.

Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

I keep thinking about that REALLY popular post about the digital circus ladt about how the criticism white trans women get (for racism in their art and social circles) is disproportionate to more privileged people behaving similarly on a larger scale or level of malicious intent.

The idea that because Gooseworx operated on a level of ignorance when creating storylines black people might feel erased or othered by should not be discussed at the level of visibility of Asmongold's platform, for just a purely rhetorical example and not true paraphrase, is still a real sentiment that is an absolute farce.

I am using these two people as easy literary reference. I could more aptly compare Ezra Miller and Jared Leto. Ezra's career is finished, their harm condemned ruthlessly, their cult mocked, while Jared Leto's cult and abuse was exonerated. He is still booked and busy in every way.

But it's a fallacy that queer people should exonerate each other of raciam, of misogyny, of fundamental societal harms because "there's levels to this shit." It's a fallacy that these things should be more hushed in trans spaces.

Because we alone define who we are. We alone as shared minority define what is safe community, what is progressive and inclusive art and most importantly we alone define how best to hold each other accountable. That is an imperative aspect of mutual self protection.

To silence such criticism, to water down such discussions, to speak of them only in hushed tones, to admonish those of us speaking passionately against these kinds of typical harm is to allow it in your spaces. Plain and simple. When you could just condemn wholeheartedly.

Whenever I see this being discussed I think of this James Baldwin quote and how applicable it still is 22 years later.

This is not true for IGM (intersex genital mutilation) victims. When i say intersex infants and children are being mutilated, i am not disparaging bottom surgery- i mean that the intersex ""corrective"" surgeries performed against our will do not meet the same standards. They aren't something we choose, they're forced on us. Victims of IGM are often left with chronic pain, issues with genital function and sensation, poor aesthetic outcomes, and scarring (which affects both the visual appearance AND can cause functional issues). These surgeries are completely unnecessary and done largely at the doctor's discretion, often without the knowledge of parents (either because they were not told or they were fooled), and the victim is almost always deeply unhappy (and often dysphoric) as a result. Doctors get to decide to mutilate us, lie to our families, and then also mistreat and abuse us for the rest of our lives. Further, outside of the surgical procedures, growing up intersex means routinely going through violating and invasive "inspections" of your genitals by doctors. I can recall having doctors, nurses, and volunteers demand to see my genitals as a young child, touching and examining them without my consent- same for my breasts once i hit puberty. Just about every intersex person i know can say the same. It's routine and constant medical and sexual abuse from medical professionals.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

I say it is funny because years back, when that deranged bitch's whole thing was constantly shit talking fellow lesbians for... Being immediately suspect in her mind EVEN IF THEY WERE TRANSFEM (because she had this weird thing going on of "lesbians are the evil oppressors of bi and trans women" at the time)?

Even the Movilh (old and largest LGBT org in Chile lead by hyper misogynist lesbophobe and insufferable Cis Gay Man™ Rolando Jiménez) was downright telling us to shut up because they had much more urgent things to worry about, such as some comedian telling a mid and at most annoying gay joke on TV. The bastard (Jiménez) has been recorded to have the gall to call his lesbian critics "crybaby lesbians."

And this sort of shit wasn't happening JUST in Chile.

Sydney Loofe in Australia (covertly unicorn hunted by a woman and her boyfriend, who deployed the boyfriend onto Loofe without warning and then they KILLED HER), the fact that the term "corrective rape" was created by South African lesbians rather than the wider local LGBT community BECAUSE CORRECTIVE RAPE IS THE PREMIUM TOOL OF STRUCTURAL LESBOPHOBIA, even if it occasionally does happen to other LGBT people too. We're still its primary target! And the cases of lesbicides (attempted or completed) in the US, all across LatAm, in Australia as I just mentioned, in Europe, in Asia... Come on.