regala il suo profumo alla gente, cogli la mia rosa di niente [Icon ID: A picture of the italian singer-songwriter Rino Gaetano. / End ID] [Banner ID: A panel from the Sailor Moon manga where Rei Hino is saying "Actually, I think boys are pretty stupid". Minako Aino is also shown, with the back of her head having a sweat drop indicating confusion at the statement. / End ID]
>i sit on a throne and people come up to me one by one displaying different items
>with each item i yell out "yonic" or "phallic" and then wave them away to a door to the left or right of me (depending on whether its yonic or phallic)
>guy comes up with an item thats too difficult to label as yonic or phalic
>i pull a lever to the right of me that opens a trap door under his feet sending him to fall miles down to his death as we are in my floating cloud castle
I made a post about this last year and the year before, and thought if I did it this way it gives people and orgs something to work towards. Often people forget that disabled people aren't just wheelchair users, and even those who are, need more than just that ramp!
My first ever pride, not only as a wheelchair but my first ever EVER pride, I went in expecting to feel at home.
Obviously I wasn't, I'm disabled, so why should I?
Instead there was just a ridiculous amount of uneven flooring, a steep ramp to the disabled toilet, no sanitary towel bin in the disabled toilet (???) no allowances to be let out of the festival to fetch things from my car, no where quiet and organisers who seemed genuinely surprised to see a wheelchair user!
My next pride, three years later, I was a seller, and while they had sorted their toilet problem (still no sanitary towel bin???), the hill to get in wouod have been genuinely impossible for me to get to if I hadn't been driving to get my stall in anyway, even with someone pushing me, no quiet areas, plenty of kerbs for me to get stuck at and again, genuine surprise.
Why is it so surprising to consider disabled people might be at pride? Not only do queer disabled people exist, but parents and family of queer kids and people, vendors and even entertainers!
no one has ever described girlhood like elena ferrante. the expectations. the inherent dissatisfaction, with your body, with who you are, or rather who you’re becoming. the competition. being the centre of your universe, viewing everyone pretty much exclusively in relation to yourself. learning not to. beautiful and in sparkling prose and not overly romanticised. i am so emo abt my brilliant friend rn. Elena Ferrante the woman you are.
This is not mine but I had to bring this over from Twitter, it was too good not to share.
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[Image description: Capture from TikTok showing Lila and Elena's faces from My Brilliant Friend. It's one of the promo pictures of season 3: Lila is leaning towards Lenù as if to smell her hair or face (?), while Lenù is looking defiantly at the camera. User Jonathan Heart asks: "Are they lovers?". User secret brittany, the creator, answers: "Worse".]
it's incredibly transparent that mainstream reviewers of the neapolitan novels (my brilliant friend series by elena ferrante) explain the divide between lila and elena in terms of elena having discipline, yet lila was somehow just too unfocused, pessimistic, or chaotic to be able to achieve her goals. some of them cast lila as a villain that needs to be contained by elena in writing; both a cruel misreading of lila's character but also one that tries to make elena complicit in seeing her friend as the antagonist of their story, something I don't for a second believe.
liberal press seriously can't handle, is unable, to admit, that lila cerullo didn't go on to become a famous writer or else lift herself up by her bootstraps because her family didn't care and couldn't afford her education, so she was forced to stop after elementary school? her father throws her out of a window when she complains. the point wasn't that she wasn't crafty enough, it's that you can be crafty and brilliant and if the opportunities aren't available to you it doesn't matter. lila potentially could have become the big boss of her neighbourhood if she'd seriously wanted to, but she wasn't interested in gaining power by such illegitimate means, she wanted to be better.
elena was dedicated and worked incredibly hard, much harder than those who were more fortunate had to, certainly. but she was also lucky. various things converged for her in such a way that she was able to leave the poverty of her childhood and create a different life for herself, and this wasn't because she was somehow better or more capable than lila, or because lila had deficiencies of character. to seriously read it as though that was the case, as though this was what ferrante was trying to tell us, is a reading so obviously false and cynical that it's bizarre these people wouldn't feel shameful publishing it. fuck the working class, they're mostly just lazy and incapable, right? oh but elena's alright, she has nice manners.
[ID: An illustration based on the song "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan. There is a cartoon-style human figure in front of a lesbian flag backdrop. The person has short red hair, a green shirt and a purple skirt. They are on all fours and a tear is falling from their eye. Above them there is a winged heart with the words "Good luck, babe!" written in green small caps, and some downward arrows, implying the heart is falling on the person. Under them is written "You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling" also in small caps, but white. / End ID]
Being a “Fun Fact !” kind of autistic is all fun and games until you get halfway through sharing an interesting tidbit and realize that it probably wasn’t appropriate to share in polite company and now you have to deal with the consequences :(
A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.
Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.
Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.
And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.
this year while we all celebrate pride month and celebrate ourselves as well as those who came before us and paved the way for us to do so, we must also think of those in gaza, queer or not, who live every day under a brutal occupation and don’t have that same privilege. happy pride, and may we see a free palestine in this lifetime.