i am just an animal why am i doing all this
poll time because something my mother said pissed me off lmao
do you remove or shave your body hair (on your legs, under your arms, etc)?
all the time
i don’t really care for shaving but i do it because of society
sometimes but not always
never
if i remember to
i don’t have any body hair that is worth shaving tbh
and in the tags tell me your gender and age?
Iridescent Grizzly Bear Stickers
(Image ID: Four bear stickers. A brown bear standing, a gold bear sitting, a gold bear standing, and a brown bear sitting.)
Every person on this planet is one accident away from becoming disabled. Every person on this planet will become disabled if they live long enough. You are not an exception. Neither are your loved ones.
If you feel like disability rights aren’t relevant to you, remember that the only thing standing between you and being disabled is time.
A comment from @politicsistheopiateofthemasses:
Who, precisely, is out there in the world acting as the champion opponent to rights for the disabled? How big is the anti-disabled movement?
This is actually a very good question, whether or not it’s being asked in good faith.
If, by that question, you mean “Who is actively lobbying against Disability Rights?”
The immediate answer, over the last 30-35 years, is “The Business Community,” (if such a thing can be said to even exist, beyond political rhetoric). Of course, they don’t call themselves “anti-Disabled.” But then again, Real Estate agents and Homeowners’ Associations don’t call themselves anti-Black, either. But if you look at the consequences of their actions….
For starters, Section 14[c] of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows for Disabled Employees to be paid far below our current minimum wage, as long as the person’s disability negatively impacts their level of productivity. This gives employers an incentive to hire disabled people for jobs they are actually unsuited for.*
Also, I was active in the lobbying to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, back between 1989-90. In order to get the law passed at all, a whole passel of concessions had to have been made to appease the “pro-business” lobby in the Senate, including loopholes and vague language like a business is exempt from making itself accessible or from hiring disabled workers if they think adaptations will be too costly.
And have you ever gone through the want ads for secretarial work, and see how many job listings say that one of the job requirements is to be able to lift 20 lbs? That kind of thing only started to happen after the ADA went into effect, so that employers wouldn’t even have to consider hiring physically disabled people.
And the only teeth the ADA has in terms of enforcement is giving the disabled individual person the right to sue in court … which, if you’re dealing with disability, and you’re trying to sue because of employment discrimination, is a real catch-22.
If, by that question, you mean: “Who benefits from suppression of Disability Rights?”
The answer is: “Anyone who wants to maintain the status quo to retain their privilege and power in a White Supremacist, Patriarchal, society.”
You see: the rhetoric used to justify and perpetuate exploitation of marginalized people is all rooted in ableist assumptions. The enslavement of Africans in the 18th Century could be justified alongside the Declaration of Independence because Black people were thought to be incapable of acting and thinking like adults (they were intellectually inferior/impaired, the reasoning went). Women were denied the vote because they were considered too frail and emotionally fragile for political life, etc..
If you check out the history of the Unsightly Beggar Ordinances, which made it illegal for people with certain disfiguring disabilities to go out in public, you’ll see that the first ones were put on the books in the United States in 1867 – right after the end of the Civil War, when former enslaved people were now entering the “general population” (and the last of those laws weren’t repealed until 1970).
And then, there’s Aktion T4 – which was Hitler’s program to exterminate the disabled ahead of World War 2 – as a way to experiment with efficient gas chamber technology, and also to test the public’s acceptance of eugenics and genocide.
And this rhetoric will continue to be effective as long as people think of the Disabled as “those people,” the rare exceptions, instead of thinking of the Disabled as “me, someday, if I’m lucky enough to survive long enough.”
*Which almost happened to me, right out of college, except I didn’t take the bait. I have spastic cerebral palsy (with bad balance, can’t keep regular time, and hands that randomly grip things too tightly), and the only job my Vocational Rehabilitation social worker had on offer for me was to work on an assembly line putting raw eggs into egg cartons, at a wage that wouldn’t even cover the special transportation I’d need to get to the factory. Meanwhile, I’d gotten my college degree in writing and communications.
I found this post while looking for a different one. I’m reblogging it, because it bears repeating.
I’ll keep looking for that other post. It’s got an infographc I want to make an updated version of, all about how disablism (that is, active discrimination against disabled people) is really useful if you want to perpetuate an authoritarian hierarchy while also discouraging solidarity among the people you’re trying to keep down (one way it’s useful is illustrated by the commenter I was originally replying to, here: people are less likely to believe disablism is even real, so people who point it out aren’t taken seriously).
While I work out what I want my updated infographic to look like, for a new post, please enjoy this old one.
i refused to stay buried because i love you why are you running
babe it’s me i’m just covered in dirt and blood because i had to claw my way up into the light and crawl on my hands and knees back home to you stop screaming
If you have bodily autonomy, then there is always a chance that you will do something to your body that you will regret. This is not an argument for taking that autonomy away.
There is a much, much higher chance that someone who is not you will do something to your body that you regret.
Also doing something to your body that you regret is a completely different feeling from having something done to your body that you do not want.
One is kind of a “well shit, guess I made a mistake that I now have to fix”, the other is a violation of the most personal thing you have in this world. The two are not remotely the same.
Recently I drew some bears from photos as a study
You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!
most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.
And then it rained. I went out to the deck to take the hammock down just as the first drops started, tremendous things, exotic, glittering, cold. I had a sense of them crashing into the dust on my skin. The breeze had an animal smell. The empty hammock rocked. There was jazz in the little race to get it untied, a happy feeling in getting there just in time. The feeling of a poetic moment, a mingling of California and nostalgia—on the air a forbidden, a religious scent, an intuition of the summers of other people’s lives,—airy summers, pleasant people, unfettered lives of the land from which I was exiled. A moment of tenderness, the smell of rain overpowering, as thick and unbreathable as smoke, and almost sentimental, not just the atmosphere’s pregnancy and ripeness, but the strains of grief rising up from somewhere—from within. The simplicity of certain pleasures bursts in my heart. Im weeping, and asking a ludicrous question: will my life ever be like this?
– Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic



