"We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives."

—

(On why he let Willow cut all of her hair off)

Read more: Will Smith On Allowing Willow To Cut Her Hair: ‘She Has Got To Have Command Of Her Body’ | Necole Bitchie.com

- He raises a really great point. What would it mean to believe very early that my body was mine. That it’s not for anyone or for any particular purpose other than to be mine until I decide otherwise.

(via larepublicadedet)

I was damned near 30 before I could believe my body belonged to me & me alone. Dear people who take an issue with this,

Let the Smiths do right by their babies & shut the fuck up about how you think they should parent.

(via karnythia)

(via brsis)

briawesome:

fixed it.

(via arcticfritillary)

"
Dear girls of the world today;

There is nothing wrong with you.

Everything I see, everything I read, everything I hear, is geared toward telling you that something is wrong with you. You’re too fat. You’re too thin. Your skin is terrible. You look too young. You look too old. You’re too smart, you’re too dumb, you talk too much, you don’t talk enough, you’re broken, you’re flawed, you’re bad. And all those things are lies. They are exaggerations. They are designed to pick on the things you feel insecure about, and convince you that you will never be happy unless you force yourself into their standards of perfection.

They will tell you that you are weak; that girls can’t deal with spiders or do math or love snakes or run nations or be scientists. They will tell you that you must be indecisive, flighty, more interested in the interests that are chosen for you than the ones that you choose for yourself. They will tell you that you have to change yourself to suit them, and then they will keep moving the goalposts, so that you’re never done changing, and you’re never allowed to be you. And they are wrong. They are so, so wrong, and you are better than the lies they tell you.

If you are a girl, you are a girl. Period, finish, end statement. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what you enjoy doing. It doesn’t matter what your assigned birth sex is or was. It doesn’t matter who or what or why you love. All that matters is that you love, and that you accept that you are you, and you are awesome.

It’s okay if you love pink. Some girls genuinely do. I genuinely do. Once, we would all have been viewed as cross-dressing and weird for liking pink, which was a male color. Times change. If you want to own your own pinkness, do, and don’t let anyone tell you that makes you less of a feminist.

It’s okay if you hate pink. You’re not denying your gender or letting down the side, or anything else like that. You’re a person, and there are a lot of colors out there to fall in love with. I recommend orange, green, and anything that sears your retinas.

Frills and lace and high heels and makeup are all fine. So are denim and combat boots and tattoos. So is everything between those extremes.

Collect dolls or knives or books or interesting rocks. Watch horror movies or romances or cartoons. Run races; go to spas. Eat cake or lettuce. Buy yourself a toy light saber and make your own wooooom noises while you wave it around; build a cardboard castle and chuck plush mushrooms at your would-be rescuers. Live your life, the way you want to live it, and understand that no one can kick you out of “the girl club” for doing it wrong, because you’re not.

You’re doing it exactly right, and I love you for that.

Corn maze love,
Me.
"

— Dear girls of the world today… by Seanan McGuire (via sihayadesigns)

(via aimmyarrowshigh)

jessiphia:

villianousstrawberry:

hereissomething:

itswalky:

dredsina:

blacknoise0410:

steamlord313:

ananagirl:

inthelightofthepast:

rabelde-sin-causa:

I love National Geographic so much.

(Click the picture for the article in question)

lol. like.

Brilliant.

PERFECT

LMFAO Nat Geo bein’ all FUCK YOU

NO.

PSYCHE NAW

Way t’go, N. Geo!

I remember this issue XD

GOD DAMN

(via arcticfritillary)

"All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn’t your pet — it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you."

— Joss Whedon (x)

(Source: doctorbee, via zorabet)

YOU BROKE LUKA. GOOD JOB TUMBLR.

vastderp:

I do not get this impulse to shriek in people’s faces and bring everyone down over an obviously benevolent and sweet picture that a person drew to thumb their nose at the “it’s not natural to be gay/trans/whatever, you don’t see gay/trans/whatever animals!” crowd.

In fact, I’m sick of net activists in general right now.

When did the default response to nuance become rage?

Does it have to be? Can we as a group of people sharing a common goal of total equality across the goddam board seriously afford the luxury of collapsing over minutia? These constant pissing contests are driving me insane, because I care when people scream at each other way more than when someone’s picture has a possible problematic interpretation.

Fuck this brand of fake-ass, metastatic ‘dialogue’. You can keep it.

My dash is so full of fury right now, people yelling about how this person I don’t even know is terrible and how dare I support their trans-oppressive otherizing bluh bluh. I don’t even know the artist. I don’t really care! I just liked this cool pretty thing that got reblogged and it made me smile because the world is so full of awesome shit and look at all these awesome different ways to be a parent. One tiny head was lopped off the hydra, but that’s not enough! It has possible negative interpretations!

TIME FOR A PUBLIC SHAMING!

It could have been an interesting conversation but instead I just want to log off for like a week til it all clears out and we move on to the next item of hamster wheel outrage that ultimately achieves nothing but the diffusing of our pent-up energies. How lucky we are to be able to jerk off to the sounds of our own voices like this. With our dinners hot on the table and our internet connections more or less steady.

Seriously, where’s the social justice if all it means is a public spectacle of philosophical self-mutilation as we attack each other, raise the stakes astronomically high for anyone daring to make a statement, and exclude timid, meek or just plain decent people from our in-group because they aren’t aggressive enough to defend themselves because what if they fuck up and say something dumb, or just plain ask a question with the wrong tone of voice?

I firmly believe that I shouldn’t have to be afraid to talk openly about human rights and analyze our culture WITH OTHER ACTIVISTS.

It’s not a black/white issue of “everyone stop fighting forever or die” but we sure as fuck cannot afford to chase our tail while assholes with actual power over our actual lives continue their actual literal planned campaign of discrimination against every single fucking one of us. This is not about a false dichotomy of “get along forever” versus “lose the war”. This is about my culture, the culture I helped build in my small way, puking on the sidewalk and calling it a cleansing spring rain.

I will not watch damaging, self-serving idealists ride around cloaked in terms of activism while meek people quietly bow out and take their energy and creativity with them because they don’t want to become a public example of what happens if you’re not 100% pure. I will not sit idly by while assholes take my flag of hardcore awesome rainbow revolution and use it to justify bullying. Having lofty ideals doesn’t mean you’re immune to the lure of douchebaggery! Crack a history text sometime. If you can’t even treat a guy on the internet with courtesy, how are you going to break that cycle?

People are learning that this is how activism works. That this is what “anger” means, and how “anger” should be used. They are being told that this is what people are talking about when they say I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

This is a small taste of how the powers that be maintain a status quo, by making revolution appear violent, unpleasant and unwinnable to all potential rebels. You’d think we would have learned that by now. You’d think we’d stop helping the bastards grind us down.

I am leaving the social justice fandom forever. Fuck this, fuck the constant risk of making honest mistakes and being piled on.

Fuck the notion that one racefail/transfail/whateverfail makes you permanently fair game for outraged claw-sharpening from all sides.

Fuck self-destructive call-outs.

Fuck turning every moment of potential education and enlightenment into your own personal chopping block.

Fuck letting the judge and jury be more important than the spirit of the law.

Fuck interacting with people who would in all likelihood hate me if they actually knew me.

Fuck dealing with people who might at any moment turn on me because I’m not a very good tranny/sperglord/cripple by their standards.

Fuck activism as a form of social bonding complete with ostracism for people who don’t fit in.

Fuck the police, they’re still scum. At least some things are exactly as they appear in this goofy-ass world.

There. I’ve said fuck a total of fourteen times, so now I’m going to take my toys and go home. Maybe I’ll go back to being a hermit who screams at people from the woods like I was before I got involved in net activism.

Forward my fucking mail.

/citizenkaneclap.gif

(Sometimes it takes a while to realize just how toxic online social justice culture can be — particularly on tumblr — but man, the endless cycle of rage-without-nuance is impossible to maintain without fucking your own head up something fierce. Or at least that’s how it was for me.)

(via deusvolt)

"The problem that needs to be fixed is not kick all the girls out of YA, it’s teach boys that stories featuring female protagonists or written by female authors also apply to them. Boys fall in love. Boys want to be important. Boys have hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions. What boys also have is a sexist society in which they are belittled for “liking girl stuff.” Male is neutral, female is specific.
I heard someone mention that Sarah Rees Brennan’s THE DEMON’S LEXICON would be great for boys, but they’d never read it with that cover. Friends, then the problem is NOT with the book. It’s with the society that’s raising that boy. It’s with the community who inculcated that boy with the idea that he can’t read a book with an attractive guy on the cover.
Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them.
Because if I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and want to grow up to be an archaeologist, there’s no reason at all that a boy shouldn’t be able to read THE DEMON’S LEXICON with its cover on. My friends, sexism doesn’t just hurt women, and our young men’s abysmal rate of attraction to literacy is the proof of it.
If you want to fix the male literary crisis, here’s your solution:
Become a feminist."

— The Problem is Not the Books by Saundra Mitchell (via colinfirth)

(via zorabet)

"I don’t know the origin of the “write what you know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.” If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. “Bill is smart to sit in the grass” becomes “Bill is a smart-ass.” A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material."

—

BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON

Don’t Write What You Know

Why fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth

(A wonderful article, particularly for beginning writers, filled with true things. Go and read it at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/don-rsquo-t-write-what-you-know/8576/)

(via neil-gaiman)

(via allonsyblue)

Adults Who Only Read Adult Books Should Shut Up About Young Adult Books

imitationeuropean:

I interrupt this blog for a moment of outrage.

Okay, maybe “outrage” is too strong a word, but when I saw the title of this New York Times opinion piece—“Adults Should Read Adult Books”—my first reaction was something like this. It’s no secret that I love young adult fiction and I fully intend to read it until the day I die. After reading the full article, though, it’s clear that this guy Joel Stein is just an idiot, more deserving of my pity than my anger. Still, I feel like I need to chew this thing up and spit it back out before moving past it, so here goes:

The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter.

Oh it’s on, Joel Stein. I’m sure you didn’t realize this, but people who proudly declare that they have never read Harry Potter and never will, like it’s somehow beneath them to even crack the cover, are among my very least favorite people in the world. My boyfriend was one of those when we first started dating, and upon learning this I proceeded to read the entire series aloud to him until he changed his mind. For the record, it only took about four chapters for that to happen, but by that point I was a train that would not be stopped until I reached the last sentence of book seven. It was very much a turning point in our relationship.

The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.

I’d like to believe this is a poorly executed reference to parents reading books to their kids, but I have a sneaking suspicion Stein is actually making fun of people who learn to read as adults. Gross.

I’m sure all those books are well written.

Even when he’s trying to throw the counterargument a bone, he’s still wrong. The Twilight books are probably the four most terribly written novels ever to be published.

Read More