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My goodness!!!

it's good this is my only social media and that i've insulated myself from the worst of this place. i'm not watching that video. i understand the value in bearing witness. but for me, it's like this. i know what's been happening to the hostages already, i don't need to be convinced. i don't want to violate them further by watching the beginning of the worst part of their lives and i don't want to be even more secondhand traumatized either. it would make me less, not more, able to do what i can do to be of use to the hostages.

but even more than i'm not watching that video, i'm not watching the absolutely psychopathic response to it by the mobs who are indulging in an orgy of probably the two oldest forms of hatred in the world--misogyny and antisemitism.

when i heard this video would be released, i had that impulse to hope that maybe now my former friends and community would finally get it. but it's not the case. we've all known this whole time. there's been no mystery about what kind of violence the go-pro wearing terrorists are perpetrating. we've already seen enough to know, even without seeking it out. journalists have described it thoroughly as well. if someone says they need to see something more explicit for "proof," they're nothing but consumers of terrorist torture porn. it's pure רַע

i'm not even going to try writing any appeals about these womens' humanity because anyone who doesn't get it, that's because they don't want to get it and they probably never will. they're getting off on this dehumanizing violence and trying to join it as part of the virtual mob. they're empty people and they are not going to change.

we are looking directly at this hate, some of us for the first time, and it's a window through time, through which we can see what many generations of Jews, and particularly Jewish women, have seen before. the violence and hatred is unchanging. only the technology of the violence has changed. the violence itself has not. the hatred has not. we know more about every previous age now, more about how our ancestors' hearts felt when they were breaking, the fear and anger, the determination to survive and make something better.

it's unbearable to know how outnumbered we are, how much of the world is morally and ethically dead when it comes to us, and how many of them accept, deny, are indifferent to, or celebrate this violence against us. it always has been unbearable, untenable, and yet we're here: the latest in a long line of generations who move forward even when it feels impossible, and do what we can to make a better world for the next ones with the conviction that no one should be hurt like this. never again.

and now i'm going back to listening to Israeli music. because i try to experience some kind of peace and calm each day, whatever i can, so i will have some strength to send. through davening, i try to send strength to the hostages to help them survive. we're one family, and all deeply connected. i have to hope that it helps in some way.

if you want to say Mi Sheberach and Tehillim for these women and don't know how, please reach out. or just daven from the heart for them, dedicate it to their merit, say each of their names out loud. light an extra Shabbat candle for them. set an extra place at your table. put something about them in a public place to make their reality present there. you'll have to protect it from attack. but do it anyway.

and if you want to know what you can do to pressure your political representatives or organizations to do something to free these captives, and all of the captives, i'll be here to talk about that as well.

Hornet is very nice and friendly

Meeting the Vessel for the first time:

Meeting the Hollow Knight for the first time:

Meeting Quirrel for the first time:

It’s maddening to me the way you all write about trans women as though we are fantasizing about and sexualizing some hypothetical female sexual violence. There’s no consideration for the fact that we are just talking about our own experiences. Not everything is performative or a fetish - the pain of trans people is not a public performance, it is our fucking lives. We experience sexual violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, sexualization both because we are women and because we are trans. I am not fetishizing female tragedy when I talk about the man who raped me or the men who have abused me, I’m attempting to communicate my pain and the fact that you cannot interpret that in any way that is other than nefarious or disingenuous or some sort of perversion, I feel like that says much more about how much you have dehumanized trans people in your head more than it says anything about us.

Postwar: any particularly amusing situation where Katara becomes even more indignant than usual

okay i know it’s cartoon physics and the cartoon violence is very funny and it’s an iconic scene from an iconic episode and "a girl has her ways" is one of the funniest lines katara ever says, but sometimes i do think about katara somehow running into those two boys she froze to a wall in gaoling for the crime of being kind of rude to aang. when they approach her, based on countless past experiences, she’s expecting them to ask her for either help with a problem or an autograph, but instead they’re like “you’re that crazy girl who froze us to a wall!!! you know we had to wait all day for the ice to thaw, only for us to fall flat on our faces from a considerable height, unable to move or to protect our faces from getting damaged because our limbs were completely frozen?? we got frostbite, pneumonia, concussions, and permanent brain damage from you!! we shattered our teeth and some of our fingers nearly fell off!! you activated chronic autoimmune conditions and shortened both our lifespans considerably!! what do you have to say for yourself after causing us unimaginable pain and ruining both our lives??” and katara just scoffs and goes “well! you deserved it for saying ‘nunya business’ to aang.” and they’re like “okay, but did we???? did we really????” and she’s like “uhhhh….. i was being a #girlboss???” and eventually she offers them free healing sessions and financial compensation but she really digs her heels in at first, claiming that she was just having a hot girl summer and that she shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions as a fourteen year old and that she can’t be a bad person because she’s ontologically Good!!!! and when they’re like “are you sure you’re not pure evil??” it triggers a crisis of identity that lasts a full month. but eventually she just forgets about it and goes back to being the Goodest person who ever lived.

Angie/Maddie🦇❥🇺🇸

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Let your voices count!

Okay, this might be controversial, but …

We all know and see how feminism — mainstream feminism — began to more and more include and revolve around men, although feminism is supposed to be specifically for women‘s rights.

I could say a lot about how mainstream "feminism" has become just another men‘s rights movement in disguise, BUT that‘s not the point of this post.

What came to my mind long ago is that every other social justice movement centers men, too. Now I‘m not saying that men can‘t be oppressed based on ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality, disability etc., and they certainly are part of movements about these issues. (not comparable to FEMinism, of course, since men are NOT oppressed on the basis of their sex — even intersectional feminism is only for WOMEN as they face unique oppression for being female, and oppressive systems are the result of male supremacy)

However, the more I observe what‘s going on, the more I notice that men are the center of these movements although it affects women just as much, and even more because misogyny and racism, homophobia etc. intertwine.

So, we got an LGBTQIAwhatever+ movement which is more concerned with male sexuality and male feelings than women‘s voices and safety. Not only in terms of the gender debate and the fact that women get dehumanized (e.g. "menstruators", "birthing people", "bonus hole") and that their sex-based reality gets erased, but also when it comes to how LGBTQIAwhatever+ rights are framed. For example, "kink" has been heavily pushed forward by and centered around the men, even during the beginning of the movement, although lesbian and bisexual women have always been critical of it, yet it‘s now the public image we get associated with as well. Women are hoping for solidarity with the men, but the men somehow still don‘t bother to work on their misogyny. It‘s inarguable that while the women and men share the oppression through homophobia — and don’t get me wrong, I think that all LGB people should fight against homophobia together — the women are still oppressed by the men due to misogyny.

We also have a Black Lives Matter movement, which has thankfully raised a lot of awareness since it started and is an integral part of social justice. However, the phenomenon remains the same: Men are centered, whereas the women have to mostly fend for themselves. I‘m not comparing case X to case Z or something like that, but the outrage when a black woman gets violated and faces misogynoir is very little compared to cases of while man on black man violence. I‘m not saying "pay less attention to victims who are black men!", I‘m saying "pay more attention to victims who are black women!" (same goes for racism and hate crimes against other ethnicities). And I‘m not glossing over the fact that there are MANY amazing black women who raise their voices and do meaningful activism, I‘m just saying that they don’t receive the same platform as their male counterparts, face misogyny (including heavy sexualization) from both black and white men and often feel the need to give up some space for the men, as apparently women can‘t talk about the female experience exclusively in the society we live in without getting scrutinized.

Then we got the Disability Rights Movement, which is somehow less popular but still as important. While most of the rights and affirmations are for both men and women alike, the men are still seen as a priority, both compared to other disabled women and in some cases also non-disabled women. Many disabled women have spoken about how disabled men still sexualize them and subject them to their misogyny, and we even got to the point where disabled men are supposed to be given access to rape prostitutes (yes, prostitution is paid rape even when you‘re disabled) whilst disabled women barely have the right to same-sex intimate care and are also more likely to get medically mistreated.

I could go on about how poor/homeless women are belittled and forced into prostitution and therefore overlooked compared to poor/homeless men (the notion that there are more poor/homeless men than women and hence men have it worse is false as the poor/homeless women end up as sex trafficking victims, especially during war times, or at least get coerced into enduring paid rape), how the "body positivity" movement has become another men‘s sexual fantasy, how discussions about religious indoctrination and extremism usually revolve around the boys and men who get dragged into becoming violent fanatics whilst the girls and women are expected to have empathy for their abusers, how men assert their male privilege shamelessly and regardless of all these aspects above …

But in the end, what becomes clear, is that men enthusiastically use the tools of patriarchy even when fighting against other forms of social injustice, and we as women deserve so much better than this — and this is also why we need to unite ourselves and prioritize one another.

Can someone draw tsumugi as this...

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In memory of every Layan around the world.