Blessed Be

i said what i said. i wasn’t confused about saying it.

if i found out a woman had aborted a fetus because she found out that fetus had a disability that i have—disabilities that i have firsthand knowledge of being painful, difficult to live with, and often resource-intensive—i would not be angry with her. i would not feel like she doesn’t think people like me should not be alive (unless she actually said so).

fetuses are not little potential “you”s. projecting your own anxieties onto a woman’s abortion (”i wouldn’t have wanted to be aborted” is common reasoning in plenty of pro-life circles; it’s not better here) is invasive and nonsensical.

bodily autonomy isn’t conditional. you don’t know a woman’s exact reason for abortion and you don’t need to. women’s rights to abortion need to be protected, even if you feel icky about some potential reasoning behind an abortion, which you aren’t even fully privy to in the first place.

disabled people should always be in the care of people who have the resources and desire to take care of them. insisting that disabled children be born simply to ease your own moral qualms with abortion is frankly unethical in my opinion, resources are often very slim for disabled people. not to mention our quality of life is often just lower in general. you can argue all you want in the notes about “mild” disabilities but you aren’t the arbiter of what constitutes a mild enough disability to make an abortion terrible and immoral and shame-worthy. 

women aren’t vessels. regardless of how morally pure you feel your crusade is, they simply aren’t.

speaking as a disabled person, energy is literally always better spent on changing society—by increasing resources for caretakers and disabled people alike, speaking frankly about quality of life, correcting notions about what disabled people’s lives are like, punishing mistreatment of actual disabled people [not potential ones], and putting research into easing the pain/suffering of people as much as possible—than it is on getting mad about women getting abortions. and it isn’t just better spent that way, it’s just immoral to do the latter.

you people will just. say anything

Nobody is saying women in movies can’t talk about men in a romantic context. What is being said is that women in movies often talk about nothing other than men in a romantic context.

Do you want to know how low the bar is? Do you want to know?

Iron Man 3 passes the Bechdel test. Pepper and Maya have a brief talk about Maya’s work.

THAT’S IT. THAT’S HOW LOW THE BAR IS. Two named female characters have a conversation about something that isn’t a heterosexual romance. Fucking IRON MAN managed to pass.

Now, here’s the issue. Do you know why this (informal, often misapplied) test is a thing?

Over three-quarters of movies cannot pass it.

At least 75% of the time, a woman’s driving force in a movie is entirely and only romance. Either that, or she is isolated from other female characters to the point that she may have very interesting motivations….but no other women to talk to about them.

talk then

Even worse, according to their backstory Sumi and Taka became distrustful and paranoid due to being enslaved by a vampire, so they were acting out of fear of being hurt again and were victims of people like Lenore. Meanwhile Lenore was just taking advantage of someone she and her sisters were planning to exploit for their own gain and whom they already had complete power over.

Yet in S4 the show goes hard on portraying her as sympathetic, “kind” within understanble limits, gets granted a dignified death waving an emotional goodbye to her victim, all framed as “tragic”. But Sumi and Taka? They were just devious betrayers, get a gruesome death, their corpses desecrated and put on display, the only acknowledgment being Alucard shown pissing beside them.

I was so sad that Sumi and Taka had to receive the death and punishment Alucard bestowed on them, because we SAW how kind and good hearted they were during the show - it wasn’t until the end that we saw gow mentally unhinged they had become. I would like to argue that their actions were controlled by their mental illness that stemmed from a traumatic past, and the fact that Alucard did not even bury them made me sad.

Yes, they did something completely fucked up. Yes, Alucard deserved to feel rage. But it was very clear (atleast to me) that their behaviour did not come from being horrible people, but rather terrified humans that thought their lives depended on their actions. I truly thought their death would bring on a sort of lesson to Alucard - both a good one and also a bad one.

But putting them on fucking stakes and pissing by their bodies? While Lenore fucking sexually assaulted and was abusive and despicable - and STILL got one of histories worst s.k. redemptions?

The Castlevania series fucked up majorly in their treatment of POC.

i dont have an issue with that girl. she moved. shes enjoying it. big woop. and hawaii is the USA officially. yes they have their own cultures and traditions, but don't deny facts. and no need to sh*t on the girl on the left whos happy. being a tourist in hawaii is fine. moving to hawaii is fine. people do that in other states too. and other countries.

There is a lot of nuance and context you’re missing here and it goes beyond just “hating on a girl” for moving to another state. 

Other countries may invite tourism but it’s unkind to insinuate that it’s a positive outlook for everyone especially for Hawaii whose history is entrenched in colonialism. A lot of their culture and traditions have been sanitized as they are made to sell themselves for tourism. The infrastructure of their job market is often built on tourism.

In addition, the framing of Hawaii being a tourist destination wasn’t cultivated by the locals there. It was a perception made by white people who moved there for other white people -- it’s easy to sell a remote island as an ideal paradise where people can move and have no worries. 

The problem is that the vision the girl on the left is enjoying is an idyllic fantasy that is reaped and enjoyed only by the white tourists like her that move there, while the indigenous people who have been born there are only living the consequences of what their ancestors faced at the hands of their colonizers while facing racial disparity in their own home.

For white tourists, Hawaii is an “escape”, it’s a “paradise” for them to come and enjoy. But for the indigenous people who have lived there, it’s their home and a lot of their livelihood is constantly being challenged and stolen. 

You mention Hawaii is a part of the USA officially, and that is correct, but we should also acknowledge that Hawaii didn’t become a part of the US willingly. (And I think it can be argued that a lot of the states of the US were not acquired by “friendly” means.) 

There was coercion. The US overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani essentially to seize control over it as a “territory”. The US would only admit to this act being illegal over 100 years later.

And honestly, I’m also just barely scratching the surface of this.

I feel you approached this in what you thought was a very logical way of thinking and because you also don’t want to excuse unkind treatment of people for what you probably assume is unwarranted and for no reason.

But I think you need to think about your reasoning of why your gut instinct was to assume that a brown woman was attacking a white woman for “no reason” when this is clearly racially charged conversation. This sort of thing has subtext. It has more beyond what you are seeing on the surface.

Aaliyah as Akasha ↳   in Queen of the Damned (2002)