Going Coastal

misandry-mermaid:

♔ MYTHS - Mermaids
“Mermaids are legendary aquatic creatures with the head and torso of a human female and the tail of a fish. The male version of a mermaid is called a merman; gender-neutral plurals could be “merpeople” or “merfolk”. Various cultures throughout the world have similar figures.”

Also we like to drown men at sea

♔ MYTHS - Mermaids

“Mermaids are legendary aquatic creatures with the head and torso of a human female and the tail of a fish. The male version of a mermaid is called a merman; gender-neutral plurals could be “merpeople” or “merfolk”. Various cultures throughout the world have similar figures.”

Also we like to drown men at sea

jessicavalenti:

Came across this gem while researching a column. SEXUAL CHAOS, y’all.

Guuuh puke

gradientlair:

quixxotica:

Quvenzhané Wallis tells you how to say her name. Clearly I needed this. I will say nothing more. She is so adorable it hurts.

I love Quvenzhané Wallis! Adorable. Love this video. If people (especially the media) can pronounce names from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Zach Galifianakis, they can take the TIME and RESPECT and learn her name—it is a part of their DAMN job. Really.

handsome-jack-here:

I have to make a presentation for my Natural Sciences class tomorrow. Naturally, as I am going to an HBCU and tomorrow is the first day of black history month, we had to choose black scientists.

I chose Mae Jemison, because she’s an absolute badass.

This is my presentation.

(Except the ‘babe’ slide, I just wanted to let it be known on Tumblr that Mae Jemison is hot.)

Hopefully it doesn’t get me in trouble.

Enjoy.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. … But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.

“

—	Michael Pollan on how cooking civilized us. (via explore-blog) Almost word for word from Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and The Cooked. Still poignant after all this time.

I want every little girl who someone says ‘they’re bossy’ to be told instead, ‘you have leadership skills’ because I was told that and because every woman I know who’s in a leadership position was told that.

“

—	Sheryl Sandberg (via kindofamenace)

Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.

Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.

In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:

The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.

In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.

“

—

[x] (via neighborly)

As a teacher, I give girls what I hope is a lot of attention. I don’t know if I give girls their fair share, but I aspire to, especially after noticing that boys are willing to use their greater share of teachers’ attention to get girls who they feel aren’t being quiet and docile enough punished. I have therefore acquired a reputation for “caring more about the girls.” This has had two marked results: Some straight boys have gotten more hostile toward me, and most girls have gotten more confident around me. This makes me think I’m doing something right.

Longer thoughts on how this phenomenon relates to sexual harassment in classrooms, if you’re interested: The girls figured out I won’t report them if they hit boys who are sexually harassing them, I’ll only report the boys. This led to an increase in how often girls got the last word and boys got smacked in my classes, and, also, to a DECREASE IN HOW OFTEN GIRLS GOT SEXUALLY HARASSED. The sexual harassers seem to have been depending on the sort of “equal blame” and “retaliation is never warranted” and “don’t hurt others’ feelings” perspectives so many schools try to instill in kids; the sexual harassers were usually the ones bringing me into the situation by saying, “Miss, she hit me! You should write her up!” Once they figured out I was only ever going to respond, “If you don’t treat girls like that, they won’t hit you,” the girls got more confident and the sexual harassers largely shut the fuck up.

In schools, fighting against sexual harassment is often punished exactly the same as, or more severely than, sexual harassment — a lot of discipline codes make no distinction between violence and violence in self-defence, and violence is ALWAYS the highest level of disciplinary infraction, whereas verbal sexual harassment rarely is. Sexual harassers, at least in the schools I’ve been in, rely heavily on GETTING GIRLS IN TROUBLE WITH HIGHER AUTHORITIES as a strategy of harassment — creating an external punishment that penalises girls for and therefore discourages girls from fighting back. Sexual harassers are willing to use their greater share of floorspace to ask to get girls who won’t date them punished. By and large, teachers do punish those girls when they swear or hit. Schools condition girls to ignore sexual harassment by punishing them when they speak up or fight back instead.

Once the sexual harassers in my classes understood that girls wouldn’t be punished for rejecting them, they backed off around me. And there started to be a flip in what conversations I get called into — girls are telling me when boys are being nasty (too loud and dominant), instead of boys telling me when girls are being uncooperative (louder and more dominant than boys think they should be).

(via torrentofbabies)

reblogging again for the wonderful commentary.

(via partysoft)

Holy crud, so glad I read this. Reblogging for other educators.

(via eupheme-butterfly)

As a girl who would not be shut up and would not tolerate teasing or abuse from boys in my class and was several times sent to such higher authorities for it, reading this is extremely, extremely vindicating. I was lucky, though, because being a particularly bright, advanced student for those grades, they generally took my side and I never got into any severe or lasting trouble. Again ,this was luck, and shouldn’t be the rule.

(via eruditechick)

I was going to write that exact last paragraph; WOW.

(via supersandys-space)

home-of-amazons:

nymeses:

This is what feminists mean when we talk about rape culture: these cards are considered socially acceptable and men buy them. Women are socialized into believing they are nothing more than fucktoys and men are raised to believe that rape is a joke.

Stores sell merchandise encouraging men to beat and rape women, and men are complaining about misandry hats? Fucking hell.

thebirdandthebat:

fleurdulys:

Rapunzel - unknown

GPOY

Also, took two minutes to google this image so it could be credited to the artist instead of “unknown.” It’s called “Persinette” and it’s by Serwaa. The artist’s DeviantArt page and Tumblr.

Manifesto of the 343 was published in France in 1971, when abortion was still illegal. It was a confession of having had an abortion, something that made you liable for arrest, signed by 343 famous women. Among them were Catherine Deneuve and Marguerite Duras, Francoise Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jeanne Moreau. Nearly every cigarette-sucking French sex symbol admitted she had had the procedure. The newspapers called them “the 343 Sluts.” Leave it to the French to make abortion glamorous. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France. The 343 sluts changed everything.

“

—	About My Abortion \| VICE United States by Molly Crabapple. (via warrenellis)