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“My favorite pony is Fluttershy and I still taste the blood in my mouth from where a boy’s elbow met my cheek. He hit me hard enough that I hit the floor. His shirt had her shy face on it. I kissed the concrete and he kept walking.

I am five feet and two inches and I’ve been shoved to the side so many times that if you are going to look for me, always scan the edges of a crowd for a small girl with wide eyes and bruises on her knees. I like Fluttershy because she’s like me, she likes animals more than people and when things get too loud, she shuts down. I like her because I’m scared of most things even though I know I shouldn’t be.

I am filled to the brim of moments where My Little Pony started turning into ashes where once had been a harmless little girl’s show. Boys with Rainbow Dash on their hoodies have sexually harassed my underage sister. They have touched my hair and made comments to my brother about whether or not he and I were fucking. They have made me scared for the little girls in my second grade class who are old enough to search for pictures of their favorite show. A boy with a pony bag threatened to rape me because I said I was a feminist. I wasn’t even talking to him at the moment.

I have grown to fear the title “brony.” I use to love the idea that a show could teach everyone who watched it friendship and compassion. I loved the idea of an all-inclusive community.

My favorite video game is anything I can shoot things in. I have been playing since before the PS was a thing. Yet with more geek cred than my boyfriend, I have been stripped down by worse words than I care to repeat. I have been asked to do anything from make a sandwich to suck a dick to kill myself. The whole nerd culture rails against the idea that I can dress in flower print and still have played both Portal games more times than I can count. I’m not supposed to be a girl and be in their space. This is for boys, get away.

This is my petition for every girl who has been spat on for liking comics. This is my petition for every person who loved something hard and watched a group of angry men ruin it. This is for every man who flinches because they’ve taken his fandom from him and made it disgusting.

Step on them by giving them the exact shit they’ve been shoving down your throat since you were fifteen and admitted that you liked Bioshock. Ask them if they only like My Little Pony because their girlfriend does. Ask them if they know every word to every episode. Sneer at them when they dress up, ask them to get back behind the grill, catcall them. Let them know you’re done letting them walk all over what you love. Take it back. Take back everything they wrenched from your fingers. Make the spaces they poisoned become unsafe for them. Stop rolling your eyes and letting it happen. Stand up. Destroy them.

I am sick of privileged babies making every community cater to them. I am sick of their pickup lines and reddit threads and antifeminism. I’m sick of their memes and fedoras and resistance to women. I am sick of them.

Take it back. This is my petition. I’m calling it reappropriation.

”

—	I’M SWEET AND SHY BUT TAKE SOMETHING FROM A LITTLE GIRL AND I’LL TAKE OUT YOUR HEART./// r.i.d (via fandomsandfeminism)

Anti-Vaccination

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GIFs, Important Matters

Penn and Teller on Vaccinations – Video

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“When you are hurting, there will always be people who find a way to make it about themselves. If you break your wrist, they’ll complain about a sprained ankle. If you are sad, they’re sadder. If you’re asking for help, they’ll demand more attention.

Here is a fact: I was in a hospital and sobbing into my palms when a woman approached me and asked why I was making so much noise and I managed to stutter that my best friend shot himself in the head and now he was 100% certified dead and she made this little grunt and had the nerve to tell me, “Well now you made me sad.”

When you get angry, there are going to be people who ask you to shut up and sit down, and they’re not going to do it nicely. Theirs are the faces that turn bright red before you have a chance to finish your sentence. They won’t ask you to explain yourself. They’ll be mad that you’re mad and that will be their whole reason alone.

Here is a fact: I was in an alleyway a few weeks ago, stroking my friend’s back as she vomited fourteen tequila shots. “I hate men,” she wheezed as her sides heaved, “I hate all of them.”

I braided her hair so it wouldn’t get caught in the mess. I didn’t correct her and reply that she does in fact love her father and her little brother too, that there are strangers she has yet to meet that will be better for her than any of her shitty ex-boyfriends, that half of our group of friends identifies as male – I could hear each of her bruises in those words and I didn’t ask her to soften the blow when she was trying to buff them out of her skin. She doesn’t hate all men. She never did.

She had the misfortune to be overheard by a drunk guy in an ill-fitting suit, a boy trying to look like a man and leering down my dress as he stormed towards us. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “Fuck you. Not all men are evil, you know.”

“Thanks,” I told him dryly, pulling on her hand, trying to get her inside again, “See you.”

He followed us. Wouldn’t stop shouting. How dare she get mad. How dare she was hurting. “It’s hard for me too!” he yowled after us. “With fuckers like you, how’s a guy supposed to live?”

Here’s a fact: my father is Cuban and my genes repeat his. Once one of my teachers looked at my heritage and said, “Your skin doesn’t look dirty enough to be a Mexican.”

When my cheeks grew pink and my tongue dried up, someone else in the classroom stood up. “You can’t say that,” he said, “That’s fucking racist. We could report you for that.”

Our teacher turned vicious. “You wanna fail this class? Go ahead. Report me. I was joking. It’s my word against yours. I hate kids like you. You think you’ve got all the power – you don’t. I do.”

Later that kid and I became close friends and we skipped class to do anything else and the two of us were lying on our backs staring up at the sky and as we talked about that moment, he sighed, “I hate white people.” His girlfriend is white and so is his mom. I reached out until my fingers were resting in the warmth of his palm.

He spoke up each time our teacher said something shitty. He failed the class. I stayed silent. I got the A but I wish that I didn’t.

Here is a fact: I think gender is a difficult and personal topic and people that want to tell others what defines it just haven’t done their homework. I personally happen to have the luck of the draw and identify as female in a female body, which basically just means society leaves me alone about this one particular thing.

Until I met Alex, who said he hated cis people. My throat closed up. I’m not good at confrontation. I avoided him because I didn’t want to bother him.

One day I was going on a walk and I found him behind our school, bleeding out of the side of his mouth. The only thing I really know is how to patch people up. He winced when the antibacterial cream went across his new wounds. “I hate cis people,” he said weakly.

I looked at him and pushed his hair back from his head. “I understand why you do.”

Here is a fact: anger is a secondary emotion. Anger is how people stop themselves from hurting. Anger is how people stop themselves by empathizing.

It is easy for the drunken man to be mad at my friend. If he says “Hey, fuck you, lady,” he doesn’t have to worry about what’s so wrong about men.

It’s easy for my teacher to fail the kids who speak up. If we’re just smart-ass students, it’s not his fault we fuck up.

It’s easy for me to hate Alex for labeling me as dangerous when I’ve never hurt someone a day in my life. But I’m safe in my skin and his life is at risk just by going to the bathroom. I understand why he says things like that. I finally do.

There’s a difference between the spread of hatred and the frustration of people who are hurting. The thing is, when you are broken, there will always be someone who says “I’m worse, stop talking.” There will always be people who are mad you’re trying to steal the attention. There will always be people who get mad at the same time as you do – they hate being challenged. It changes the rules.

I say I hate all Mondays but my sister was born on one and she’s the greatest joy I have ever known. I say I hate brown but it’s really just the word and how it turns your mouth down – the colour is my hair and my eyes and my favorite sweater. I say I hate pineapple but I still try it again every Easter, just to see if it stings less this year. It’s okay to be sad when you hear someone generalize a group you’re in. But instead of assuming they’re evil and filled with hatred, maybe ask them why they think that way – who knows, you might just end up with a new and kind friend.

”

—	By telling the oppressed that their anger is unjustified, you allow the oppression to continue. I know it’s hard to stay calm. I know it’s scary. But you’re coming from the safe place and they aren’t. Just please … Try to be more understanding. /// r.i.d (via inkskinned)

Rape Poem To End All Rape Poems

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(Via)

Generation of Change

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So, maybe we’re the
generation of the selfie,
but we’re also the generation
that grew up in a tainted,
Photoshopped world
with every impossible beauty standard
shoved down our throat
through a tube
because eating has become
a guilty pleasure
and condemning beauty ideals
won’t go straight to our thighs.

And if, by chance,
we are able to destroy the
demons that you’ve planted
inside of us with your
constant advertisements and rules
that play behind our eyelids and
take root in our brains,
then let us take our fucking pictures
and capture that moment when
we felt beautiful because all this world
has taught us is that
our beauty is the greatest
measure of our worth.

Scoff at our phones all you like,
these delicate extensions of
our fingers, but know that
through this technology
that you couldn’t even
begin to understand,
we have smudged the entire
world with our fingerprints.
We are the generation of knowledge,
and we are learning more than
any that came before us.
So, frown at my typing fingers;
I am using them to grasp power
by the throat.

Try to invalidate us,
but we’ve heard our
parents talking about
the world’s crashing and burning
since we had sprung from the womb.
We know you’ve fucked up,
and we’re angry about it-
the kind of anger that
fuels knowledge,
that I feel in my veins every time
I read the news from my phone
before school,
that sticks in my throat like honey
in a debate;
the kind of anger that simmers,
that sharpens teeth into daggers,
that makes this generation more dangerous
than you could have ever imagined.

We are the generation of change,
and goddammit, we’re coming.

Emily Palermo, An Open Letter to the Men Who Told Me to Stay Out of Adult Conversations

Second a Day

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17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women

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“

When [an abusive man] tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the clientcan always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:

“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”
“I realized one of the children was watching.”
“I was afraid someone would call the police.”
“I could kill her if I did that.”
“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid the neighbors would hear.”

And the most frequent response of all:

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”

The response that I almost never heard — I remember hearing it twice in the fifteen years — was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss of control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”

A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.

I sometimes ask my clients the following question: “How many of you have ever felt angry enough at youer mother to get the urge to call her a bitch?” Typically half or more of the group members raise their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have ever acted on that urge?” All the hands fly down, and the men cast appalled gazes on me, as if I had just asked whether they sell drugs outside elementary schools. So then I ask, “Well, why haven’t you?” The same answer shoots out from the men each time I do this exercise: “But you can’t treat your motherlike that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!”

The unspoken remainder of this statement, which we can fill in for my clients, is: “But you can treat your wife or girlfriend like that, as long as you have a good enough reason. That’s different.” In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable….

– Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

(via seebster)