tyrantisterror:

muchymozzarella:

thecuckoohaslanded:

simon-newman:

theonewhocheeps:

sometimesihavequestions:

thecuckoohaslanded:

cn123017:

thecuckoohaslanded:

thecuckoohaslanded:

thecuckoohaslanded:

specsthespectraldragon:

thecuckoohaslanded:

I can’t stop thinking about crocodiles for some reason so here’s some cool pictures I found of probably the second largest one in captivity, his name is Utan:

isn’t he beautiful

listen to the SOUND when he bites

and that’s not even a real power bite, that’s mostly just heavy bone falling on heavy bone from his jaws and the air rushing out from between them

2000 pounds of Good Boy

you get me

I honestly expected like 5 notes, what HAPPENED here

More tags on this ridiculous post:

Wait, thats the 2nd biggest crocodile? Then what does the biggest one look like?

That would be Cassius, a very old Saltwater crocodile who is estimated to be around 114 years old and lives at Marineland Melanesia in Green Island, Australia.  His official measurement is 5.48 meters, which makes him the largest in captivity currently.  Because Utan is only slightly smaller and much younger, (only in his 50s), he will likely break Cassius’ record eventually.  But for now, Cassius holds the title:

He is NOT, however, either the largest crocodile ever captured in Australia OR the largest ever in captivity.

A slightly larger crocodile has been reported (though not yet comfirmed) to have been captured at 5.58 meters.

And while the famous Brutus of the Adelaide River was estimated to be just slightly larger than Cassius at 5.5m, he was driven out of his territory by a younger and even larger crocodile, who as a result has been given the name, The Dominator.  He is estimated to be just over 6m.

This is Brutus, with an appropriate caption:

It is believed that he lost that arm in a fight with a Bull Shark.  

The Bull Shark lost.

THIS is the crocodile who kicked him out.  The Dominator:

And that’s STILL not the biggest.  

The largest living crocodile ever reliably measured was Lolong, who for the 1.5 years between his capture and his death was the largest crocodile ever held in captivity, at a whopping 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches) and 1075 kg (2,370 lbs).  He had been feeding on both humans and very large livestock in the Bunawan creek in Agusan del Sur in the Philippines.  It took 100 people all night to drag him to shore during his capture.

And here’s why:

Also, to prevent credit from getting buried on a separate reblog, I have been informed that the above image of the crocodile with the cartoon eyes and halo was made by @rashkah!  (And it is wonderful and I would like to thank him for its existence, because it perfectly captures my feelings about terrifying giant primordial reptiles.)

@theonewhocheeps

Holy fuck

As far as Brutus is concerned I was led to believe that he lost that arm when relatively young.

Since then Brutus developed a habit of hunting and eating Bull Sharks.

image

Here’s him with a prey.

And if you thought that you’ll be safe if you just stay out of Australia then think again!

Meet Gustave the Nile Croc.

image

This crocodile became almost legendary for both it’s size and the habit of hunting both livestock AND humans.

So how big is Gustave?

No one is sure. Since he was NEVER captured.

His estimated size is of at least 5,5m  but some give him over 6m.

The terrifying parts are:

1) He is still growing having only about 60 years.

2) Adult crocodiles often perform a gesture of submission to him – something usually done by young crocodiles toward adults – Gustave is just THAT BIG.

3) His sheer size makes it difficult for him to catch agile prey Nile crocs tend to feed on – hence why he developed a habit of hunting either larger prey like Hippopotamus or creatures which are not good at spotting danger in the first place like livestock and humans.

And this is NOT ALL.

Gustave actually has a noticeable scars on his body – he was shot at east 3 times and stabbed with a spear or something similar at one occasion.

He lived to tell the tale – my question is:

What happened to that one dude who attacked Gustave with a spear?

image

*Crocodile Dundee voice*  Mate, that’s not Gustave:

THIS is Gustave:

And he is the PERFECT CROCODILE.  He is the perfect example of what I mean when I talk about (as I do) how the morphology of extremely large crocodiles adapts to the changing physics of their bite.

This is a typical adult Nile Crocodile:

And THIS is a god among his kind:

This is it, folks.  The Final Form.  THIS is what peak performance looks like.

Crocodiles and physics have an interesting relationship.  Crocodiles have, by a CONSIDERABLE MARGIN, the strongest bite of any animal on Earth.  EVER.  Scaled up estimates (based on Nile and Saltwater crocodiles) give the extinct Deinosuchus an estimated bite force MORE THAN DOUBLE the recently updated Tyrannosaurus bite estimates.  Living crocodiles have bite forces measured in the range of 5000 pounds per square inch, for an individual around 15-16 feet.  It is estimated that modern crocodiles in the range of 18-20 feet would have bit forces around 7-8000 psi or more.

That’s a problem.

Because a crocodile’s skull is only designed to handle so much pressure.  Go beyond that limit and the force of impact when those jaws snap shut could literally shatter their own skulls.

But evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting crocodiles, so PHYSICS ISN’T GOING TO STOP THEM.  What ends up happening in the skulls of these extremely large crocodiles is they will increase dramatically in mass to compensate for the increased forces.  A crocodile’s skull is almost exclusively solid bone, with only minimal space for nasal passages, a surprisingly advanced brain, and some slightly porous looking framework that helps the bone distribute the force over a larger area.  The effect is by far the most pronounced in Nile crocodiles, which most regularly feed on larger prey and need to make use of all that power.

Compare, 26 inch skull:

vs 29 inch skull:

Both of those are Nile crocodile skulls (or rather, replicas thereof).

And just for fun, here are the skulls of completely different (and very extinct species), Deinosuchus:

and Purussaurus:

The bigger the crocodile (within a given species), the more massive the skull needs to be to compensate for that UNBELIEVABLE bit pressure.  This is one way to see from a distance whether you are looking at a normal sized crocodile:

and a truly extraordinary individual:

One of the things about Gustave that’s so impressive is how healthy his teeth look.  A lot of large crocodiles, in their old age, have very worn down and often missing teeth.  They do replace them many times over a lifetime, but when they get very old this slows down.  Gustave, at least in every picture taken of him, had teeth that were in very good condition.

Even crocodiles much smaller than Gustave’s reported size (probably similar in size to Dominator or Lolong) tend to have smaller or more worn teeth:

than the pinnacle of his kind:

Lolong! It means Gramps or Grandpa, because he’s a relic of an ancient world where crocs more massive than he was walked the earth. His body is on display somewhere right now though I forgot where.

Every time I see this post there’s more crocodiles.  It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s All A Fucking Joke, Right

autumndiesirae:

homoelitism:

lunarsolareclipse:

lavabendingthot:

hirasawaschoiceass:

lavabendingthot:

satansbra:

millenniumfae:

In the few months I’ve been modding at fuckyeahasexual and touring ace Tumblr, there’s been a very. Steady. Stream of info that detail horrifically abusive situations and overall poor mental unhealth. Two a week in the inbox if I’m lucky, usually around seven-ten.

And there’s been so many, I can officially categorize all 500+ of these kinds of asks and submissions into an extensive bulletlist of Why Asexual Exclusionary Radicalism Is Incredibly Toxic And Shitty;

Coming Out To Family, Friends, And Employers

  • “My parents keep telling me that I’m something else, and it’s making me doubt my sense of judgement, not just about my sexual identity, but also about everything in general.”
  • “My family, friends, and co-workers keep referring to me as an inanimate object in a manner that’s clearly meant to humiliate and devastate me. Nothing I say will get them to stop.”
  • “My parents vocally/bodily forced me to undergo medical examinations, some of them concerning my sexual organs, many of them concerning blood tests and other trauma-centric procedures.”
  • “My family is intervening with my private life by changing my schedule to include exercise, socialization, friend influences, and whatever they think can ‘change’ me.”
  • “My friends/co-workers no longer respect my bodily boundaries when I came out to them, because they no longer see me as someone who should be respected. They regularly touch, fondle, grope, and prod me without permission, and/or verbally harass me, and don’t take my objections seriously.”
  • “My family, friends, and co-workers no longer just harass me, but also anyone I’m currently dating because they view my significant other as pathetic, underserved, or even being abused.”

First Few Days Of Dating

  • “My date got irrationally angry and confrontational when I came out to them, in a manner that made me fearful.” (SO many of these.)
  • “My date immediately lost any respect they had for my boundaries, no longer asked for consent, and {tried to} force themselves upon me.” (A lot of these, too)
  • “My date tried to verbally circumvent any boundaries and issues I confessed to, and it made me feel like I was in danger.”
  • “I didn’t come out to my date at first, and when they found out, they radically changed their behavior in an attempt to control and manipulate our new relationship to their benefit.”

Long-Term Relationships

  • “My partner has forcefully and radically changed our long-term relationship after finding out about my asexuality, and I’m now trapped and controlled in a way that I wasn’t before.”
  • “My partner broke up with me/is fighting with me because of my asexuality, and trying to make it seem like I’m hurting them. It’s made me doubt myself and my ability to trust my own intentions.”
  • “My partner is slowly changing from what was once supportive of my asexuality, and I’m wondering when I have the right to be worried and when I’d be overreacting. I’m aware of the worst case scenario, but I also worry that I’m being selfish and childish – which are things I’ve been told all throughout my asexual experience.”

Self-Care And Self Development

  • “I don’t trust my ability to say either yes or no in sexual situations, and this has extended to my life in general. I don’t feel comfortable in my ability to self-determinate.”
  • “The lack of authority, definition, and schooling of the concept of asexuality has made me very uncomfortable with what I think I am, and that uncertainty haunts me every waking moment.”
  • “I think it’s too late/too early to tell if I’m asexual, but the longer I hesitate, the worse my mental health and emotional wellbeing gets. I’m effectively stuck.”
  • “I see no benefit in coming out, or even identifying as asexual. There’s no positivity, role models, or supportive community for what I consider a big and scary part of my overall identity.”
  • “I think this was sexual abuse, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
  • “I think I was treated badly by my parents/friends/partner, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
  • “I want to believe that I’m deserving of equal freedom and human respect paid to other, not asexual people, but people tell me I’m being selfish and childish.”
  • “No one encourages this part of me. And that makes me feel forgotten and abandoned in general.”

Shut the fuck up about your petty beef with tumblr bloggers and youtubers and Archie comics or whatever. I literally do not care, I can’t care. I see these messages every goddamn day – this post was written and drafted a month ago, and I very easily compiled most of this bulletpoint list from scratch, just by eyeing what I see in the askbox and what comes across my dash. 

‘Ace discourse’ anger is empty and so meaningless. This is what I see by being part of this one 17k follow asexual ask blog for maybe half a year. I am so Done with all the faux rage posts and all the false positivity about how it’s ok to NOT be ace and all the acephobia that falls perfectly in line with the gaslighting typical of acephobia-101 while also having the audacity to claim it not so.

This is what’s real and I want to bleed it into your goddamn eyes.

Reblogging this again, for obvious reasons

Ace ppl are not INSTITUTIONALLY OR SYSTEMATICALLY OPPRESSED BECAUSE OF THE DEGREE THAT YOU FEEL SEXUAL ATTRACTION. If ur trans ur lgbtq. If ur aro but ur gay, bi, pan ur lgbtq. If ur ace but homo, biromantic etc ur lgbt. Being ace doesnt make u lgbt by default. Does the interpersonal lack of understanding suck and should change? Yeah. But society doesnt want u dead so cishet aces stay tf out our business.

Someone read this, all this stuff about struggles of people coming out as ace, people abusing them and telling them that their identity isn’t real or is a problem to be fixed, making people feel worthless and feeling that they’re in the wrong about their own goddamn identity, and said “nah they ain’t oppressed™ enough to be in a community of people who face the same issues”

U mad huh?

Anyway….aces can’t be systematically opressed. None of those things are examples of systematic oppression

Also nice how they called it “asexual exclusionary radicalism” as if it wasn’t a cheap tactic to compare ace exclusionist to twerfs

@lavabendingthot @lunarsolareclipse @homoelitism

Hey, instead of being a giant piles of garbage, try reading up:

Aces don’t face oppression

Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can ‘opt out’ if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but don’t know that it’s “a thing”. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told they’re sick, then been “treated” for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality “correctly”.

In short, our orientation has been and continues to be pathologized, and asexuals have been put through corrective therapy: x,x, x, x, x

Posts of people describing the hardship they’ve faced for their asexuality:x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to ‘fix’ them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.

There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like “aces don’t get kicked out” or “aces don’t _____” any more than I as a white person get to say that things I don’t experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you haven’t experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You haven’t walked in an ace’s shoes, you don’t know what they deal with. Period.

Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesn’t mean the lack of oppression is the default “truth”.

Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it “as bad” or worse than gay or trans people, but we don’t HAVE to “have it worse” to beincluded and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone else’s. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone else’s.

We just want to protect our safe spaces

Aphobes have:

Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.

Het aces/aroaces are straight

Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces don’t identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and it’s not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.

We accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans aces

Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand,a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of “same” and “opposite” gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only “same-gender attracted” if they’re attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument “well they’re included as trans” is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. I’m one of them.

The standard of “SGA and trans” as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed “gay enough”.

(SGA did NOT come from ‘SGL’, same-gender loving. That is a term created by black queer people and not to be appropriated by white people.)

Discussion of the history of the word ‘queer’ and why it’s better than ‘SGA’: x, x, x, x, x

There are also many “SGA and trans” aces who are against the gatekeeping and feel that they are hated by these aphobes.

Your “discourse” is harmful to all asexuals. And PS, your rhetoric is literally indistinguishable from TWERF rhetoric.

The LGBT community has always been about fighting homophobia and transphobia/we came together to fight homophobia and transphobia

Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but it’s so rampant that I don’t feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, here’s a collection of biphobia, and the blog@terf-calloutdocuments some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.

The A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outed

No one is saying that we don’t care about closeted people, but a) even if you’re a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the ‘B’ in BLT stands for ‘bread’. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we don’t have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every “ally” as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.

Furthermore, this puts forth the argument “I’m willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted people” while at the same time stating “I’m not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I don’t think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and support”. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.

Bonus: The History of LGBT(QQIAAP+)

Aces have never been a part of the LGBTQ/queer community

Stop tokenizing bi and trans people/stop comparing bi/trans and ace experiences

We’re not the ones doing it. They are comparing them, themselves.

I have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible person

Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I don’t think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesn’t justify you trying to invalidate all of us.

’Allosexual’ is a bad word because ____

I actually have an ‘allosexual’ tag just for posts about why ‘allosexual’ is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x

The split-attraction model is homophobic

What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as “disjunctive uranodioning”. (source) (credit to this post)

The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbians

No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.

“We’ll Show You You’re a Woman” describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, “Negative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).” It goes on to say, “Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality.”

The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, “A study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that “the percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the study”.”

It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and gender non-conforming people in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.

Aces are valid, they’re just not queer/LGBTQ

You cannot in one breath say “Asexuals are valid” and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you can’t call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.

Bonus: This is a list of all the mainstream LGBTQ groups that include asexuals.

Form your own community!

a) We do have our own community, because every letter in the acronym has its own communityand yet is still part of the acronym, b) you fucking shits won’t stop sending us hate and bombarding us with shit meant to trigger and harass us.

Aces take resources from other LGBTQ who need them

I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals “steal” things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any “stealing” has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought “you’ll never get kicked out or fired for being ace”, “no one is suicidal because they’re asexual”, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we don’t need them or we don’t use them, you can’t have it both ways.

For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they can’t use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that you’re saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think they’re not “queer enough” so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and that’s the message aces receive when you tell them they are “stealing” suicide prevention.

LGBTQ resources offer them to asexuals, andbenefit from us using them.

Lastly, do you not realize we are alsoPROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you don’t WANT us here.

Nasty shit aphobes do

(Thanks to @livebloggingmydescentintomadness for these)

My own contribution:

Living in a world where the media is overflowing with sexual imagery and where society constantly puts value on sexual intercourse, virginity, and related topics – who can forget the phrase ‘sex sells’? – men and women who do not experience sexual attraction (the definition of asexuality) and who are sex-repulsed or masturbation-repulsed (as many asexuals, myself included, are) feel alienated and ‘broken’. We also face erasure in terms of representation, being either grossly underrepresented or represented as cold, harsh, and ‘synonymous with celibate’ people. Let’s not forget erasure from LGBT spaces – I have many times been told that asexuals do not belong in the acronym or in “our spaces”, even though asexuals have the capacity to be homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, etc, as well as transgender or nonbinary. And, if we don’t belong in LGBT spaces, and we clearly aren’t heterosexual, what do we belong? Nowhere, it seems. Of course, the argument also drifts to “asexuals don’t experience oppression”, which is false.

Examples of asexual oppression:

http://autumndiesirae.tumblr.com/post/118710018295/aces-dont-face-discrimination

Asexuals are the highest targets for corrective rape:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/asexual-discrimination_n_3380551.html

Go fuck yourselves. ❤

A Holiday Story

gallusrostromegalus:

smartgirlsaremean:

rosexknight:

tinuviel-undomiel:

aethersea:

gallusrostromegalus:

princesspotpourri:

simpleanddestructivechemistry:

gallusrostromegalus:

spooky-spaghetties:

gallusrostromegalus:

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.

“TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point. 
“THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”

“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.   
Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.

Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!

So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.

The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently.  in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG.  For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.

In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money.  This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy.  Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.

Yes, really.

Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England.  She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.

That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.

Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.

After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job.  The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death.  They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania.  Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.

Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-

To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.  

…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.

This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻
Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕

I just wanna know why GGG’s nude photos were just tossed in a family album along with all the other special pictures. Did they just stumble across them between a great-aunt’s baptism pic and another’s wedding photo?

They were in a plain brown envelope tucked in with the 1963 Christmas photos.

Right between the pictures of Grandma’s Dog Spooky wearing like seven christmas decorations (So named because she was totally black except for a white mark on her chest and a propensity for 4AM garbage disposal noises) and of Grandpa getting smashed on Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, to be precise.

@navigatorsnorth @executeness

This person needs to write a book about their family stories. It would sell like wild.

I want to hear more every time this post comes around XD

Art. Pure art is what this is.

Ok, because several people in the tags have pointed out that the Thames is nowhere near Liverpool:

I called mom, again, to ask why the hell i would write that, because I distinctly recall the phrase “GGG was certain he’d been thrown in the Thames” when Grandma repeated the tale for me, but I am also ADHD as fuck and my brain might have invented that sentence.

Turns out, the truth is another Hot Mess.

The WHOLE line is “GGG was certain he had been thrown in the Thames like his brother, Who ran afoul of several criminal organizations while running cons in London and we’re not sure WHO actually did him in but it was a big affair to travel to London when they fished his body out with the eels.”

So “Thrown in the Thames” was GGG’s colloquialism for “was murdered due to gambling debts”

“Why did GGG even MARRY first husband?”  I asked.

“He had a nice mustache, apparently.”

notanadult:

gettzi:

killerchickadee:

mswyrr:

monanotlisa:

river-b:

officialqueer:

uphillbothways:

officialqueer:

kgirlskillen74:

kgirlskillen74:

27teacups:

lanewilliam:

robotbisexual:

jormunganndr:

robotbisexual:

violet-lesbian:

robotbisexual:

violet-lesbian:

officialqueer:

Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).

yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.

Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?

Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.

Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.

“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.

Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.

Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.

Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.

So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.

I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.

That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.

It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.

The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”

There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.

The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.

Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves. 

Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.” 

This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet. 

Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities

“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”

Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it. 

Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases. 

Yeah I freaking love pancakes

Wait wrong post

By far the best addition to this post

This is one of those things where I feel like an old.

Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”

There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)

I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.

They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!

TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.

I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here. 

“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.

image
image

Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101

They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.

And it’ll be queer as fuck.

I fucking love the word queer ❤

The pushback against queer is RECENT.

Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL.
And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence.
You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).

We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.

And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.

So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.

YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.

Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.

You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.

WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.

mooglemisbehaving:

kyraneko:

mooglemisbehaving:

beka-tiddalik:

roachpatrol:

rockscanfly:

roachpatrol:

ok but has anyone considered… stormtrooper memes. stormtroopers with injokes. stormtroopers quietly passing along little nudges and references while they’re standing guard or patrolling endless hallways. hux pausing halfway through a speech, suspiciously— he just heard a very tiny, staticy giggle. like,

  • (standing in front of blank wall or empty box) nothing to see here, move along
  • let’s just put that in the back pocket for now mmkay
  • *eats ration bar* mm mmm tastes like [dead comrade]
  • you can’t be mean to me on my birthday
  • *force chokes a problem*
  • (between heavy darth vader wheezes) i’m not mad, i’m just disappointed. 
  • (when something falls over) rebel scum!
  • *points at large machine* mom
  • it’s party time (everyone stands perfectly still for at least a minute)
  • (when friend come into the room) you’re surplus to requirements
  • they put a worm in him
  • *picks up thing that is not a phaser* pew pew
  • i’m matt the radar technician
  • millennium falcon as a code for “mother fucker”
  • Sending troopers new to the unit on an ruffleluff hunt
  • spreading the rumor that Hoth is secretly the main base because that’s the only place their uniforms make sense as camo
  • tagging other trooper’s helmets with mysterious substances when they’re not looking
  • radioing sanitation to ‘come take out this trash’ when dragging another trooper
  • there’s coffee and doughnuts in the breakroom
  • *does something dangerous* eat me ass first
  • healthy habits start at home
  • well, as we all know, [lie]
  • *gives someone a pinecone*  (very difficult to pull off)
  • i can’t go out dressed like THIS!
  • my morale is so [genital adjective] right now.
  • does anyone need to stormpooper before we go
  • fun is illegal 
  • *puts foot in small box* i live here now
  • doubletime sleeping
  • *points at captain phasma* mom
  • *humming Vader’s theme tune when someone’s in trouble*
  • Jedi are a myth
  • Kylo Ren is a myth
  • *explaining damage* It got KRed. (Kylo Renned)
  • KRUBAR Kylo Renned Beyond All Recall/Recognition/Repair
  • Calling helmets faces (a relic from the clone days)
  • Backtalking superior officers “begging to be spaced”
  • Kylo Ren is having a moment as an acceptable excuse for deviating a patrol route
  • General Hux is in a good mood as an acceptable excuse for deviating a patrol route
  • And Captain Phasma is smiling at us under that helmet (synonymous with “bullshit”)

Finn accidentally slipping into stormtrooper memes while with the Resistance and getting some odd looks.

Finn trying to explain to them why their Force-using manchild deadly enemy destroying property in a rage is funny and getting some more odd looks.

Finn feeling a little knot in his gut when he realizes he’s never going to be able to tell these jokes again. How’s he even going to connect to these people enough to make them laugh when they’re all scared shitless? How’s he going to carry his entire squad around in his head when he can’t even speak their language anymore?

Meanwhile Rey’s standing there squinting suspiciously at a pinecone.

Okay but Rebels who see Finn being upset and making a concerted effort to figure out meme culture. Rey and Jessika talking it out while Jessika is teaching Rey the cultural miscellany of Resistance and pilot culture.

Rey being the first one to get it, because she synergizes what Jessika’s telling her and what Finn’s explaining and realizes, this is all communication around communication, the key point is shared understanding, and then she starts making her own, with Jessika, and Finn picks it up, and soon the whole base is in on this bastardized mix of stormtrooper meme and purely Resistance meme and a ridiculous combination of the two.

And then they interact with stormtroopers and something goes on in the background on the First Order side and a Resistance soldier asks, “Is Kylo Ren having a moment?” and there’s muffled laughter and an absence of blasterfire from the stormtroopers.

Pretty soon there’s a whole code that stormtroopers and resistance soldiers can use to communicate. “Nothing to see here, move along” means “I’m ignoring you on purpose, don’t shoot me,” and “I’m KR’d” means “I want out, please capture me.”

From the Rebel side, “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” becomes “throw me a bone here” in either direction to ask for a favor; “That’s no moon” means “you’re walking into a trap here/we’ve got a secret weapon you won’t like.”

Okay, I was expecting someone to pick this up, but damn, this is even better than I hoped.

50 Book Challenge: Books I Read in 2016

  1. Graceling by Kristin Cashore
  2. Fire by Kristin Cashore
  3. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
  4. Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore
  5. Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis
  6. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
  7. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
  8. *The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
  9. *The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
  10. *The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
  11. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
  12. Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
  13. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
  14. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
  15. Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
  16. Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman
  17. Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo
  18. The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin
  19. Lyddie by Katherine Paterson
  20. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
  21. A Hero at the End of the World by Erin Claiborne
  22. Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts edited by William Irwin, David Baggett, and Shawn Klein
  23. Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison 
  24. *Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli
  25. *Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
  26. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
  27. The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater
  28. George by Alex Gino
  29. *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
  30. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne
  31. A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
  32. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  33. Annabel by Kathleen Winter
  34. Pantomime by Laura Lam
  35. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
  36. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
  37. Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories edited by Pam Keesey
  38. Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House by R.L. Stine
  39. Goosebumps: Stay Out of the Basement by R.L. Stine
  40. Goosebumps: Monster Blood by R.L. Stine
  41. Goosebumps: Say Cheese And Die! by R.L. Stine
  42. Hannibal by Thomas Harris
  43. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
  44. Supermutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki 
  45. The Giver by Lois Lowry
  46. Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
  47. Messenger by Lois Lowry
  48. The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson
  49. Legion by Brandon Sanderson 
  50. A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?! by Eliezer Yudkowsky 

*Those marked with asterisks were rereads this year. 

Aaah I finally succeeded at this!! I’m really glad I read so much this past year, but I think I’m going to ease off of the 50 book challenge in 2017… As 2016 went on, I got more and more stressed about completing the challenge, and reading isn’t as fun when you’re stressed about doing it. Now that the pressure is off (and now that I have a kindle!), I might end up reading just as much anyway in 2017. 🙂 

I would highly recommend most of these books! For reviews of most of them, check out my youtube channel. More reviews coming soon. 

“but what has Hillary ACCOMPLISHED?”

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

bicatperson:

Yeah, okay, I’m gonna do one more of these.

Because it’s an ugly sexist myth that Hillary Clinton has never gotten anything done, and Donald keeps saying it anyway, because he knows his supporters will never bother to look it up. (Also to distract from his own record of bankruptcies and lawsuits and not getting an Emmy.)

And even on the left, you get people saying “how can we trust Clinton, even if her positions sound good, how can we know if she’ll follow through?”

Gee, I dunno, maybe we can look at her forty-year track record and extrapolate from there.

(Buckle up, this one’s gonna get long.)

In fact, let’s go back farther, let’s look at Hillary Rodham the Wellesley undergrad, 1965-1969:

And then let’s talk about Hillary the law student, lawyer, and professor, with some First Lady of Arkansas thrown in:

Let’s talk about First Lady Clinton, 1993-2001:

HRC followed that by immediately getting elected Senator from New York, and then re-elected by an even wider margin, so she served from 2001-2009.

I’m just gonna focus on the 77 bills Senator Clinton sponsored or cosponsored that that became law (although she introduced more than 2000, so imagine what could’ve happened with a Democratic majority):

At this point she was also running for President, but in swept Barack Obama and charmed the hearts of America, so Clinton ended up serving as his Secretary of State from 2009-2013.

There’s no Big Flashy Showpiece you can point to from Secretary Clinton’s tenure. A lot of her diplomatic work was straight-up post-Bush-administration repair work and maintenance. A lot of it was, frankly, unsexy. No one writes breathless headlines about statistically-supported initiatives to distribute lifesaving low-pollution stoves.

Also, she didn’t singlehandedly bring peace to the Middle East. So, y’know, missed opportunity there.

But she was obviously doing something right, because Hillary Clinton had a 69% approval rating when she left the State Department in 2013.

A quick roundup of some things Secretary Clinton pulled off just fine:

People keep talking about how Clinton is, historically, one of the most unpopular presidential candidates. Those people usually don’t mention how, three years ago, she was the most popular politician in the United States.

And, look: no one is saying she’s only done good things. You can’t work this long in politics and expect to make only the right choices – follow only the strongest intelligence – back only the best policies. Reasonable people can find plenty to disagree with in her record. Plenty to criticize.

But when people try to claim she’s done nothing?

Or that she doesn’t have any consistent beliefs or principles – that her record doesn’t have constant themes that she’s been reliably standing for since the 1970s?

Hillary Clinton has made real, substantial progress for women’s rights.

Real, substantial progress for people with disabilities.

Real, substantial progress for the rights and protections of children.

Anyone tries to tell you otherwise, you laugh in their faces and start listing things. I bet you anything they run out of patience before you run out of list.

❤ THIS ❤

THIS RIGHT HERE

nientedal:

the-wondersmith:

rattlecat:

shrineart:

2oulle22-lover:

ghostedarmy:

teenagefrankzhang:

thegodaesthetic:

a-kir-a:

ichristyg:

eviltessmacher:

As a parent, you don’t get privacy until you are on your own. My house, my rules, my money, my decision.

Don’t like it?

Too bad.

I am the parent here. I’m not your friend. I’m your father.

Literally kids are not your prisoner??? There’s a difference between being protective and being controlling.

“You don’t get privacy until you’re an adult” like what the fuck. You’re one of those piece of shit parents that thinks taking away bedroom doors and making their kids hold sandwich board signs on busy roads is appropriate punishment aren’t you?
Children and teens are still fucking people and still deserve respect. If you can’t even respect your child how do you expect to teach them to respect others?

The mindset parents have of “my house my rules / I bought you that phonecomputertabletetc so I can go through it” is a huge contributer to anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide in kids and teens and if anyone is defending, condoning, or practicing that behavior I hope to god they get their kids taken away from them. Nobody deserves to grow up under an iron fist of emotional abuse.

So my dad took away my laptop because I wouldn’t give him the password. I wasn’t even allowed to type it in, he demanded to know the password to my personal computer because he thinks I’m “ doing things I’m not supposed to do. ” My sister is not, and never has been, held to the same standard when it came to passwords on her own phone etc. But my parents always suspect me of being “up to something” and will randomly ask to use my computer/ know the password, and when I say no, they get mad at me. In the past, they have taken away my devices and looked through them, which cased me a lot of anxiety and is part of the reason I don’t like it when people use my computer or go through the camera roll on my phone. Even as I type this, I’m being asked what I’m doing. If you think parents demanding to know the passwords to their child’s personal devices is a breach of privacy please reblog

My dad threatens to take my door away from me for having it closed. I’m a seventeen year old female, and he has threatened to take away my door.

when i was a teenager, i wasn’t allowed to have a cellphone, so my father would hand me a little bag of change and force me to call home from a payphone every single time i left somewhere and again when i arrived at the next place. that means if i went to the mall, i called when i got there. then if i wanted to go across the street to the Walmart i had to call and tell him so. then i had to call again when i got to the Walmart! if i had a bunch of stuff to do, i could go through the entire bag of change in one weekend – if i could even find enough payphones to call him from. his explanation for this lunacy was that he wanted to be able to find me anytime, anywhere. he also liked to randomly show up at my job to make sure i was there, and the first time i spent the night at my best friend’s after i got a car, he drove past the house no less than eight times, and called no less than four times. one of those calls was to ask where i was because my car wasn’t visible from the road – and when i explained the turnaround i was parked in was behind the house, he told me we’d “better not go anywhere or have friends over”. like, what the hell were we going to do? have a drunken orgy while my friend’s grandma was sitting in the next room? we ended up playing chess in the front parlor all night with all the lights on and the curtains open so he could see us if he drove by.

and what, exactly, did i do to deserve this? not a fucking thing. i didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t sneak out, didn’t do drugs, didn’t skip school, nothing. in 13 years of public school, i had one detention – for being late too many times. that’s it. i never did a single thing to make him think i was untrustworthy and i got stalked for it.

when i graduated high school, my father told me if i was going to go to art college on his dime, he was going to have a say in the classes i took and what i did with my free time – he even went so far as to tell me if he ever dropped by the campus, i’d better be in my dorm doing homework or in class, and if i got a grade he didn’t like, he was going to pull me out of school, bring me home, and basically keep me a prisoner with no phone, no tv, no visits with friends until i graduated from the local community college. faced with another four years of stalking and abuse, i moved out and worked in a factory until i could be considered an independent student, then went to the art college i’d always wanted to – on my terms.

my father died last May and i hadn’t talked to him for a year, hadn’t seen him for two, and before that i hadn’t had any communication with him at all for four.

the moral of the story for you “my house, my rules, you don’t get any rights” parents is: stop treating your children like shit or you’re going to die alone, and you’ll deserve it.

My father didn’t do it to this extreme but he listened in on my calls, he constantly accused me of having sex or doing pot.

Guess what parents?

Most kids that got constantly accused of bullshit that I KNEW? INCLUDING MYSELF? Ended up doing those things because “Fuck it, might as well if they’re not going to believe me!”

For me, I had sex way before I planned to (19. I was planning on waiting til marriage). Why? Because fuck it, he acted like I was trying to be a whore all the damn time, I was going to do whatever I damn well pleased.

I moved out at age 19. I have never moved back in. I barely talk to him. I talk almost exclusively to my mom.

When I moved out he said I’d be pregnant by the end of the year.

I’m 30. I have no kids. I don’t plan on having kids. Ever. Because I watched every other person in my family have kids when they couldn’t afford them and I’m not doing that to a child.

When I lived with my parents I had nearly all A’s, I had an 8pm curfew at the age of 19, I was never allowed to leave town, leave state, anything like that for school trips or what have you. When I was in college I wasn’t allowed to go to any colleges more than 30 minutes away. My parents didn’t trust others and they instilled that in me and it took me YEARS to fix it.

My therapist pinned down exactly what that does to it a kid too. It’s isolating. You’re isolating your kid. You’re telling them you don’t trust them. You’re telling them you inherently think they’re bad.

And that has huge ramifications on your bond with them.

Hope you’re ready for it.

Dear Parents who approve of the lack of privacy until a certain age: You are engaging in child abuse. Emotional child abuse.

Preventing a child from having privacy is a punishable offense in the United States (many countries actually) and you can be penalized for it.

What is that?

  • Rejecting or ignoring: telling a child he or she is unwanted or unloved, showing little interest in child, not initiating or returning affection, not listening to the child, not validating the child’s feelings, breaking promises, cutting child off in conversation
  • Shaming or humiliating: calling a child names, criticizing, belittling, demeaning, berating, mocking, using language or taking action that takes aim at child’s feelings of self-worth
  • Terrorizing: accusing, blaming, insulting, punishing with or threatening abandonment, harm or death, setting a child up for failure, manipulating, taking advantage of a child’s weakness or reliance on adults, slandering; screaming; yelling
  • Isolating: keeping child from peers and positive activities, confining child to small area, forbidding play or other stimulating experiences
  • Corrupting: engaging child in criminal acts, telling lies to justify actions or ideas, encouraging misbehavior

If you are an abusive parent, you probably have one of these (if not all) of these red flags:

  • Routinely ignores, criticizes, yells at or blames child
  • Plays favorites with one sibling over another
  • Poor anger management or emotional self-regulation
  • Stormy relationships with other adults, disrespect for authority
  • History of violence or abuse
  • Untreated mental illness, alcoholism or substance abuse

Children who suffer from your abuse, experience these emotional and behavioral issues:

  • Habits like sucking, biting, rocking
  • Learning disabilities and developmental delays
  • Overly compliant or defensive
  • Extreme emotions, aggression, withdrawal
  • Anxieties, phobias, sleep disorders
  • Destructive or anti-social behaviors (violence, cruelty, vandalism, stealing, cheating, lying)
  • Behavior that is inappropriate for age (too adult, too infantile)
  • Suicidal thoughts and behaviors

In summary, there is no “my house, my rules”. If you actively promote this type of behavior as parents, you are committing a crime, and you can be fined and imprisoned for it, as well as having your kids taken away, which, if they are experiencing this behavior from you, shouldn’t be your kids to begin with.

Children are not your property, regardless of relation.

If you want to guarantee your children never consider you a part of their life or interact with you ever again, continuing these behaviors will absolutely do that. 

As someone who has a support group of nearly 80 kids ranging from the ages of 14 to 27, I can tell you so many horror stories of parental abuse and the shit it fucks up the kids with as a result. My wife experienced and survived her own form of parental abuse, as have I. 

We do not tolerate it, and neither should your kids.

I am so very thankful I had reasonable, understanding parents.

Literally all you’re doing with this shit is making ABSOLUTELY DAMNED SURE that, when your child eventually has a problem they could use your help with, they will do everything in their power to keep you from finding out.  You’re destroying their trust in you.