"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

lizjamesbitch:

femmeforeverybody:

“One of the organizers came up to me and said that there was someone who wants to meet you; and he says that he’s you’re best, biggest fan and I’m thinking it’s a Trekkie! [laughs] and so I said certainly and I got up and turned around and maybe 10 or 15 feet coming towards me I see Dr. Martin Luther King and I remember thinking whoever that little fan is, he’s going to have to wait, because here’s Dr. King, who walks straight up to me with this big, magnificent smile on his face and says, “I’m the fan!” because I’m sort of looking around for someone else, and he says, “I am your best fan, I am your biggest fan!” and I… I was at a loss for words, and if you know me, I am never at a loss for words.

I just couldn’t say a thing and he began to tell me how important my role was, what an inspiration it was. And you have to understand we were in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, people were regularly being attacked by dogs, and marchers were being hosed on the television every night, real life things, and here I am in this futuristic thing on TV and he was so complimentary, he told me “I was so important and the way you have created this role,” and I am just looking at him and looking at him and I remember I just kept hoping he’d never stop talking. Because his voice is just… you know the voice. And I finally just start saying, thank you so much Dr. King and I am shaking his hand and still shaking from nervousness and I said thank you so much and I am really going to miss my co-stars.

And at this his face totally changed, and he said “What are you talking about?!” and so I told him I would be leaving the show, because; and that was as far as he let me go, and he said, “STOP! You cannot! You cannot leave this show! Do you not understand what you are doing?! You are the first non-stereotypical role in television! Of intelligence, and of a woman and a woman of color?! That you are playing a role that is not about your color! That this role could be played by anyone? This is not a black role. This is  not a female role! A blue eyed blond or a pointed ear green person could take this role!” And I am looking at him and looking at him and buzzing, and he said, “Nichelle, for the first time, not only our little children and people can look on and see themselves, but people who don’t look like us, people who don’t look like us, from all over the world, for the first time, the first time on television, they can see us, as we should be!”

http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/daily-astrology/martin-luther-king-mlk-uhura-nichelle-nichols/

Wow.  I’d never heard this story before.

I am so sick and tired of people calling female characters ‘useless”. 

fatespectrum:

nijireiki:

actualcanadiansherlockholmes:

lennat:

Women.

Are.

Not.

There.

To.

Be.

USED!

Do you ever read something that changes the entire way you think?

Holy shit.

YOU DON’T OWE USEFULNESS TO ANYONE.

YOOO.

… I needed this.

katiewoodger:

DISNEY HAVE STOLEN MY ARTWORK

I don’t know what to do. I am so upset. Can anyone help me?

My painting was created back in 2010, (see it HERE) and since then so many people have expressed their love for it, not just on tumblr, but in many places. At least 9 people had it tattooed on their bodies. It’s one of my favourite images I created at University and I was proud of it in many ways.

Disney have used it on a cosmetics bag HERE (look at the back)
and they have produced a Tshirt HERE with a really similar design clearly modeled from my painting

I’m so mad because I have no chance at getting Disney to do anything about it. I had so much respect for the company and now I am just SO upset and disappointed.

Any help, advice or signal boosting would be amazing. And thank you so much to the kind person who messaged me about this.

The Promise by Sharon Olds 

tenfiretrucks:

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like a prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains,
bound at the waist - and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it - you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

A diver has a very personal moment of dejection at the bottom of the pool during the 2012 CCCA Swimming and Diving State Championships at East Los Angeles College Swim Stadium on Thursday, April 26, 2012 in Monterey Park, CA. (Photo by Suzanne Tylander © 2012) This particular photo represents an emotional moment rarely caught underwater. This particular diver was expected to win the entire event. The diver knew as soon as he hit the water his form was flawed and that he might have just lost it all. I was fortunate enough to witness this moment as it was unfolding underwater. I captured the sequence of emotion just a split second after he hit the water and began to sink to the bottom with a sense of defeat written in his body language This was the image I chose from the series. I have felt this emotion and disappointment before as many athletes do. My chance to capture it underwater was rare but beautiful. It is a moment no competitive athlete wants to relive but something important that many of us can relate to. It is raw and human and real.

nevver:

London, Rome, Paris

I used to think I was getting away with something.

“Girls don’t count,” I’d say, running my fingers up her arm at the bar. “Don’t you know that?”

We both had boyfriends. Long-term boyfriends. Mine had introduced me to the concept.

“I wouldn’t feel threatened,” he’d say. “I know they could never compete.”

He meant that a woman, no matter how attached I got, could never “steal” me away from him. He meant that he’d only care about male penetration, about “sex” in the most typical terms. I was young and I didn’t value myself and I hadn’t been taught a lot about feminism or how relationships should work. I said nothing, because I wanted it to be true.

_____

We went on a date, she and I. We saw a movie and then she came over and we drank wine and watched TV and hooked up on the couch and fell asleep. We were drunk and we laughed. I held her.

The next morning, he was angry.

“I thought girls didn’t count,” I said.

“Yeah, but you like, went on a date,” he said.

“We saw a movie,” I replied. “She has a boyfriend.”

“It was a date,” he said. He was irritated.

_____

“How many people have you been with?,” they all ask, adding: “Girls don’t count.”

_____

These girls. I remember them. They happened. They were there with me. They had red hair and bright red lipstick and they wore Boston Red Sox hoodies and they loved Russian literature and they had big, wily pet dogs and they spent the night.

I talked to them at parties or met them in the dorms freshman year or they were friends of friends who stroked my hair and said, “I just think everyone’s a little bit bisexual, don’t you?”

I loved them. They were real and they shared themselves with me and we spent time together at thrift shops and in classes and at bars and at friends’ dinner parties. We held hands while other couples passed around a joint. We buried our faces in each other’s soft necks under the covers. These were relationships. These were people I was with.

“I want us to be monogamous,” men say. “But you know, obviously girls don’t count.”

_____

When did you first have sex?

It depends on what you mean. There was a girl in high school.

No, I mean your virginity. When did you lose it?

Oh.

_____

He is masturbating. I ask, “What do you want?” He says, “Tell me about when you were with your ex-girlfriend.”

Later, I say my ex-boyfriend’s name when telling a story about last year and he tells me, “You know, I could stand to hear less about him.”

_____

“I just think you’ll end up with a man in the end,” he says when we’re walking to a bar.

“That’s presumptuous,” I reply.

“I just feel like you will.”

“Because you’re threatened?”

“What?”

“Because it threatens you to know that I could one day not need a dick. That, god forbid, a woman who could end up with either actually chooses to disregard your precious penis.”

“Hey, take it easy. I was just giving you relationship advice.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

At the bar, our friends wonder why we aren’t speaking. Even he is confused by what happened. He doesn’t know what he did wrong.

_____

For a long time, I said nothing. Because if they thought it wasn’t cheating, who was I to argue? I had freedom. I was getting one over on them. I was winning.

They were real. They were real and they counted. They’re not shadows among the men I saw. But I wanted them to be. I wanted to avoid the consequences, to avoid thinking, to avoid wondering what it meant. These men, they told me what it meant: it meant nothing.

And I told other women this fallacy. I moved in to kiss their necks and ears and said, “Girls don’t count, don’t you know?”

And later, they counted. And later, I knew.

"In December, [Megan Phelps-Roper, formerly one of the Westboro Baptist Church’s most vocal members] went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. ‘The idea that only [[Westboro Baptist Church] had the right answer seemed crazy,’ she says. ‘It just seemed impossible.’"

trickybastard:

Daniel Radcliffe on the set of Kill Your Darlings.

lalondes:

hoh my god i just realized that in the very last scene they’re all waving random flag but

enjolras

is waving

this red flag

which is riddled with bullet holes

as you can see

look familiar

he took th efl ag with him to he aven

"

[According to early modern physicians,] since the primary symptom of lovesickness is unsatisfied desire, and its ‘immediate cause’ for men or women is sperm needing evacuation, the most efficacious cure is therapeutic intercourse, ‘the injoying of the thing beloved.’ This is ideally to take place within marriage. If not, sex with the loved object or with any available substitutes is traditionally recommended: with prostitutes, slaves, or widows— preferably more than once or with more than one partner so as to evacuate both sperm from the genitals and the beloved’s image from the brain.

But since this cure may be unobtainable or morally problematic, other methods of prevention or remedy are offered. Friends, doctors, or the beloved may try aversive therapy, or what I call the misogyny cure…The doctor or a friend is to expose the physical ugliness and moral flaws of the beloved, or, more graphically, an old crone is to wave a bloody menstrual rag in the face of the lovesick nobleman, or reveal her own diseased genitals and her cankered breasts to emblematize the repulsiveness of all women.

"

drinkingalonetopony:

Wait Watchers: A Woman Reverses the Gaze

youdontlooklikeafeminist:

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero’s self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing.

The project was born when Morris-Cafiero was working on a separate project titled Something to Weigh. For one of the photos in that project, she snapped a self-portrait while sitting on some steps in Times Square.

After processing the film, she noticed that there was a man behind her making a face at her while being photographed by a female friend:

She noticed something similar in a photograph captured just five minutes later at a different location.

Morris-Cafiero then began setting up her camera in heavily trafficked public areas, composing the shots, setting a self-timer, and then stepping into the frame. The camera snaps a photo while she’s doing everything things (e.g. chatting on her phone or grabbing a bite to eat), and her hope is that the image also captures an interesting expression from at least one passing stranger.

I now reverse the gaze and record their reactions to me while I perform mundane tasks in public spaces. I seek out spaces that are visually interesting and geographically diverse. I try to place myself in compositions that contain feminine icons or advertisements. Otherwise, I position myself and the camera in a pool of people…and wait [#]

The images capture the gazer in a microsecond moment where they, for unknowable reasons, have a look on their face that questions my presence. Whether they are questioning my position in front of the lens or questioning my body size, the gazer appears to be visually troubled that I am in front of them [#]

You can find more photos from this series over on Haley Morris-Cafiero’s personal website.

penrose-stairs:

MVSEVM
2006
David Beck

I like the notion of public and private spaces, and of the intimacy that evolves when a viewer is forced to look at an object one on one. When the doors are closed, you have one experience. But when you start opening it, you discover that there’s a whole other world happening on the inside.

zuky:

abagond:

Broomberg and Chanarin say their work, on show at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, examines “the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself”. They argue that early colour film was predicated on white skin: in 1977, when Jean-Luc Godard was invited on an assignment to Mozambique, he refused to use Kodak film on the grounds that the stock was inherently “racist”.

The light range was so narrow, Broomberg said, that “if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth”. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients – the confectionary and furniture industries – complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.

‘Racism’ of early colour photography | Guardian

Makes perfect sense to me. The human eye always adjusts to see people’s faces but the technology of photography developed around adjusting to white people only. You can probably dig deeper and look at the cultural institution that developed around photography for what came to be accepted as “what the camera likes” and the aesthetics of palettes and light conditions and such for more normalization of racist standards. Same can probably be said of a great deal of Eurocentric art, aesthetics, and technology in general.