a TMI rant

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man y’know fuck all those ill-educated lawmakers and whatnot who seem to firmly believe that women use tampons as masturbatory aids because you know what I am a gross old lady who has been menstruating regularly for over 25 years and the other night I actually brought myself to tears trying to get a goddamn tampon to fucking goddamn go where it was supposed to and do its damn job and words cannot convey how thoroughly unpleasant the entire experience was

maybe I’ve never had a baby but I’ve had a lot of things go into and out of my vagina over the years, as one does, fewer than I ought to have actually because I’m horrible about going to the gyn, and thanks to menstrual products I think I can safely say that despite having been for the last 15 years exclusively in a sexual relationship that is by and large fantastic and does include putting some things into my vagina in ways I truly very much enjoy, I have not really enjoyed the majority of these incursions in my life, due to just how many things you have to shove in there just how often when menstruating if it happens that, like me, you have sensitive skin and the alternative is to get fucking diaper rash as a grown-ass human. hmmm what a delightful choice. (I go back and forth, it’s really like 50-50, diaper rash or shoving things places I don’t want them to go.) (If that’s confusing: I’m saying I have a lot of great sex that involves penetration but in sheer percentages, most of the times things have gone into or out of there have been things I have not enjoyed, and that’s a shitty ratio.)

the best part with this stupid tampon the other night is that I thought I had it securely enough in place and then I had to hustle out of the bathroom because my family was waiting so we could go somewhere, and then I sat down to put my shoes on and holy fuck that was painful, and I had to squeeze into an overcrowded car and not let on what my deal was because how do you explain it (hi it feels like there’s a really pointy football in my cooch because my tampon’s not inserted properly, how are you? can you move your seat up so I can uncurl a little as i am considerably less bendy than normal at the moment because of this football and the stabbing? no? bummer i live in Stab City now and the rent is too damn high) and then instantly run off to the bathroom once we reached our destination. (yes fine whatever order me a beer I don’t care just pick something, it feels like someone’s stabbing me in the cunt from the inside no this is not my idea of a fun time!)

Like. I’m not a rookie. I know where tampons are supposed to go. I had removed one from that very spot not all that long before. It’s not like I’m new at this. But I swear I could not fucking get it to go where it was supposed to. It’s like the geography had shifted. It was like my body had shut itself and was trying to convince me that no, there was no passageway there, I had imagined the entire preceding twenty-odd years of my life of putting things there. (Yes, I know that happens sometimes, it’s an opening that is controlled by muscles that can contract or expand, like I said I’m not new at this, but usually I don’t have quite so much trouble.)

Is there anyone in the history of the world who has ever enjoyed inserting a tampon. I would hazard a guess that the proportion would be vanishingly small. It is at best neutral, but I don’t think I’ve even ever had a neutral experience. It shades at least slightly to the “unpleasant” side of the spectrum every goddamn time.

I wish there was a way to just– transfer that to the ignorant fucks who get all smug and smarmy and pass stupid laws and are assholes. here, dude. enjoy this sensation as if someone were sandpapering your prostate. have a nice day. guess what it’s seven days long this time. cheers. bonus round: cramps! now Bruno here will punch you fifteen times in the lower abdomen, and then take his thumb and jam it straight into your gut until your abs spasm, then give you a charley horse. peace bro. Now about that luxury tax…

Surely menstruation must suck less for some people but I think that’s maybe a myth.

I will stand by my firm belief that basically nobody ever has used a tampon to masturbate, though. There’s no way. There’s just not! I’m sure someone’s found a way but statistically, basically nobody finds that fun. I am a person, I repeat, who very much likes things in there, when the time is right and the mood is right and all. Proper methods and whatnot. 

Some gross papery cotton and cramps and a toilet are not the proper methods. 

continuation of tmi rant

via http://ift.tt/2fFpuko:thesacredreznor replied to your post “a TMI rant”

i completely empathize with your tampon struggle. every time iv'e attempted using one (once every few years) it’s been an exercise in abject misery. i can’t do it. i understand how it should work but getting it in is painful and once it is in it’s not like it’s suddenly not there like they tell you in sex-ed? it feels unpleasant as hell? and then i think maybe it’s just me and if i try again i’ll get it right. wash rinse repeat. now i’m just grateful that i can use pads!

EXACTLY.

Like, don’t get me wrong, I often can forget it’s there, but you’d be amazed what discomfort you can ignore. If I think about it, oh, I know it’s there, mostly all the time. (I won’t say constantly, because I’m not very attuned to my body; there are times I forget I have feet, so it’d be misleading and dishonest to insist that I’m constantly aware of what my vaginal walls are doing, because surely I’m not.)

 And like, I know it’s in the right place. I get what they’re saying, when you can tell it’s in far enough. It definitely is. It’s definitely settled in a place it’s more or less supposed to be, insofar as anything can be said to actually belong in a place that’s not really designed to hold things. But that doesn’t mean my body has to like it.

And the same for menstrual cups. I can feel it a lot less when it’s where it’s supposed to be, but that doesn’t mean I cant’ feel it. (And bonus with the interior stabbing, like, that fucking sucks a lot.) I also feel like, in my case at least, the added pressure of something being there worsens my cramps like 5x or more. Sometimes I wasn’t even having cramps until I inserted something, and then boy howdy do I.

But my skin just gets so angry with pads. I’ve tried fabric ones, plastic ones, natural ones, artificial ones. All kinds of ‘em. 

I can deal with just about any of it for a day or two, but by day 3 I’m just like, you know, the sweet release of death could really take me anytime and that would be fine. Days 1 and 2 are Cramps of Death, days 3 through Whatever (four? ha almost never. Five? Lucky. Six? Seven?) are Oh Boy It’s Either Internal Or External Or Maybe Both Chafing Time. (This time was both, fyi, while I’m being gross and TMI-y. Because Day 2 is always Cramps Of Death Plus You Would Not Believe Actually How Much Blood There Is, so I have to belt-and-suspenders it every time. You would not believe how much blood there actually is!! It’s fantastic, if by “fantastic” I mean “horrifying”.)

My one sister assures me that I should get an IUD and it’d be all better, but #1 I dunno, she still bitches a lot, and every time she’s like “oh but this hardly ever happens” and I’m like that gif with the guy doing the math and I’m like ok, hardly ever, sure, and #2 I can’t get over my terror that somehow I’ll lose access to healthcare in the 5 years one of those things lasts, and when it comes time to remove it I won’t be able to have it removed and I’ll die of a perforated uterus. (Or like, have to have emergency surgery and then be in medical debt for the rest of my unnatural life.) This is a genuine and all-encompassing belief I have, and it’s not entirely contraindicated by my life experiences of basically never having had stable access to medical care in my entire adult life. It sounds exactly like something that’s going to happen to me. 

In conclusion, I hate everything.

thesacredreznor replied to your post

via http://ift.tt/2xc5W2n:thesacredreznor replied to your post “continuation of tmi rant”

boy howdy do i feel you. day 2 is A Horror. also i am way too scared of adding anything to my already kinda fucked-up body to try any kind of hormonal birth control. so my options are pretty damn limited.

Yeah ditto. I have used hormonal birth control in the past, and it has Not Gone Super Well. It’s mostly that I have never managed to get a doctor to understand me in my entire life, but I’ve realized that since I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, a doctor’s sure not going to, and I can’t stay on a prescription to save myself, so I’m not willing to invest like 1000% of my executive function on something that’s honestly not all that great. 

torrilin reblogged your post and added:

FWIW, I have an iud, love it, and would never in a…

Yeah see above. Plus I had a friend who went on depo and lost her fucking mind, gained like 100 pounds, and has never been the same. I’m not fucking with that. 

runawaymarbles replied to your post “continuation of tmi rant”

I’m so glad there are other people out there who can’t use tampons?? I hate admitting it because I feel like a 14 year old but here we are

I mean. I can. It took me years to get the hang of it. And i can use them, so I do. But they suck. They just, they suck.

Mostly I would use my diva cup but I can never find the fucking thing. I live a nomadic life and also am a human disaster, so when I need it, I can’t fucking find it, and then there I am at like the grocery store checkout and instead of my wallet I pull out my fucking diva cup like what the fuck is it doing in my purse why would I ever have it in my purse what the fuck. So.

I can’t have things. I can’t have temporary things, I can’t have permanent things. I can only have disposable things, and only even those because I never have them when I need them, steal them from my sister, and then buy replacements way later. 

klyaksa1 replied to your post “a TMI rant”

Am I missing something? Who in their right mind seriously considers tampons a sex toy?

oh, there was a post going around a while back, and I’ve seen various references to it, where dudes who’ve never had decent sex ed, including politicians and such, think the whole concept of tampons is distasteful. There’s this pervasive notion among people who don’t really know much about vaginas that putting anything in them is pleasurable. I’m sorry, I have 0 sources, because it’s always so gross to read them.

mckitterick: mckitterick: lierdumoa: mckitterick: flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy: lierdumoa: Where...

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mckitterick:

mckitterick:

lierdumoa:

mckitterick:

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lierdumoa:

Where do I begin?

To start, here are some quick and easy results from googling “firefly confederate”:

Firefly, Serenity and Confederate Politics

What Haunts Me About Firefly

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Direct quotes from the Firefly wiki [link]:

“The confederacy of planets and moons that formed the Independent Faction was doomed from the start.”

“While leaders among the scattered outer worlds expressed concern over the formation of the Union of Allied Planets, most folk didn’t much care, figuring it wouldn’t affect them.”

Note the use of the terms ‘confederacy’ and ‘union.’

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“A CIVIL WAR NOVEL INSPIRED THE FIREFLY UNIVERSE. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels from author Michael Shaara was Joss Whedon’s inspiration for creating Firefly. It follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon modeled the series and world on the Reconstruction Era, but set in the future.” 

~ Rudie Obias, “23 Fun Facts About Firefly” [source]

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Note similarities between Malcolm Reynolds’ character biography and the biography of actual confederate general Jubal Anderson Early.

From the Jubal Early entry on Wikipedia [link]:

When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas by horseback, where he hoped to find a Confederate force still holding out. He proceeded to Mexico, and from there, sailed to Cuba and Canada. Living in Toronto, he wrote his memoir, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America, which focused on his Valley Campaign. The book was published in 1867.

Early was pardoned in 1868 by President Andrew Johnson, but still remained an “unreconstructed rebel”. In 1869, he returned to Virginia and resumed the practice of law. He was among the most vocal of those who promoted the Lost Cause movement.

From the Malcolm Reynolds entry on the Firefly Wiki [link]:

His contempt for the Alliance never completely disappeared (although he once said that he “wouldn’t mind makin’ a buck off ‘em”, and was shown in multiple episodes willing to steal Alliance supplies for a job, as long as it doesn’t affect the people), and, although he was on the losing side of the Unification War, years later he still wasn’t convinced it was the wrong one. Mal expressed what seemed to be his manifesto—"[The Alliance] will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.“[1] His anti-government attitude was reflected in his choice to live on a spaceship, drifting from world to world, as far away from Alliance interference as possible.

See also: 

Firefly Wiki article on the  Battle of Serenity Valley 

vs 

Wikepedia article on the Battle of Shenandoah Valley.

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The name Jubal Early probably sounds familiar to you even if you know nothing about Civil War history.

“The bounty hunter in ‘Objects in Space’, the final episode of Joss Whedon’s series Firefly is named Jubal Early because Joss Whedon knew from Nathan Fillion, who played the main character Malcolm Reynolds, that he was his ancestor. For dramatic irony regarding his name, he is played by Richard Brooks, an African-American man.”

~ also from the Jubal Early wiki page

Yes, that’s right. Joss Whedon asked a black actor to play a lunatic rapist bounty hunter named after a real life confederate general.  Joss Whedon has even stated in an interview that he “loves that character.”

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Now I mentioned “cowboys vs injuns reavers” earlier:

In the unaired pilot Simon Tam explicity refers to the reavers as “savages”  – one of the more popular Native American slurs used by settlers in the North American “Old West.” In the same episode we see Mal and Zoe riding through an open plain on horseback wearing chaps and carrying shotguns. Right from the get go we have protagonists dressed like cowboys in a spaghetti western, shit-talking an entire culture of supposedly “mindless savages” (yet not so mindless they can’t still practice guerrilla warfare in a fairly organized fashion).

Recommended reading: The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality

The episode “Bushwhacked” features a character – the lone survivor of a reaver ambush – who’s “gone native” and become a reaver himself. He completes his transformation from sane pilgrim into savage reaver by “cuttin’ on himself’ to making himself “look like one of them” – which he accomplishes by giving himself facial piercings which I, for one, found oddly reminiscent of those warn by certain Native American and Pacific Islander cultures.

He proceeds to attack the Firefly crew using guerrilla style tactics.

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People want to believe that they can weed out the Orientalism, shovel off the bastardization of the Chinese language, and jackhammer their way through the thick crust of cultural appropriation to reveal a better, purer show buried underneath.

But they can’t.

Firefly’s bedrock is racist.

Firefly is racist all the way down to its molten core.

Just go watch Killjoys already.

Fuck’s sake.

None of this registered with me, maybe because I’m not from the US so my knowledge of Civil War stuff is limited (I only found out what ‘Manifest Destiny’ was after you know which movie brought up a discussion) I obviously thought the lack of Chinese characters in a future where everyone speaks Chinese was…fucked up? But this??

How the fuck.

I want a reboot of Firefly that has nothing to do with Whedon, and which corrects his bigotry, racism, and misogyny.

Hi. OP here. I wrote this post because I saw people on my dash saying exactly what you’re saying – “We want a non-racist, non-sexist Firefly reboot.” I wanted them, and you, to realize that racism and sexism is so intrinsic to every single aspect of Firefly’s composition that by the time you take out all the bigotry, racism and misogyny, there’s nothing left to reboot.

Look at the show’s core team dynamic, for example:

Mal is a reboot of Rhett Butler. 

Zoe is nouveau!Rhett’s loyal hand (notice she doesn’t call him by his name as one would a friend, but instead always refers to him as Sir – and then consider what it means for a black woman to be constantly referring to her white confederate superior by a title that signifies dominance). 

Wash, Zoe’s husband, is the nerdy self-insert though which Joss racially fetishizes Gina Torres and projects his sexual/romantic insecurities (remember how Firefly devoted an entire episode to Zoe reassuring Wash that her relationship with Mal wasn’t a threat to their marriage?) (remember how Wash spent a scene sexually objectifying his wife’s body parts to an audience of Alliance interrogators). 

River Tam is a whitewashed anime archetype. 

Inara is a whorephobic westernized caricature of a geisha. I’m not going to go into that here but there are plenty of essays that describe the problematic Asian elements of Firefly in greater depth

And that’s just the main protagonists. That doesn’t even take into account the minor characters, villain archetypes, politics, narrative tropes, worldbuilding, etc. of the Firefly universe, all of which are also racist and misogynist.

Also, consider that Joss Whedon thought “rebooting” colonialism as men vs. zombie freaks was less racist than honestly representing the exploitation and genocide of Natives by colonizers.

Racist history needs to be told. Erasing the racist truth of a historical situation doesn’t “take out the racism.” That’s whitewashing. Whitewashing is in and of itself a form of racism. Firefly is racist because it tries to whitewash a racist history. Any Firefly reboot that attempts to whitewash Firefly’s racist premise will only be perpetuating the cycle of whitewashing and erasure.

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I think what people really want is another show about a quirky band of leather wearing gun slinging rebel merchants with snappy dialogue going on adventures in outer space. You don’t need to reboot Firefly for that. Killjoys fits that description, and it’s not a Firefly reboot. Cowboy Bebop and Farscape both fit that description, and they both pre-date Firefly. 

Fandom doesn’t need a Firefly reboot.

Fandom needs to give Firefly the boot.

It makes me sad to realize everything you say, @lierdumoa, is true. You have a brilliant analytical mind for sniffing out this sort of thing. Sorry, @international-asian, it just got worse.

All the conversation lately about Confederate statues and Civil War history made me go back to find this series of posts.

It also led me to read this interesting piece that really gets one to re-examine the narrative of American history that even those who grew up in the North were fed.

Turns out that General Sherman’s often-criticized “total war” campaign in the final weeks of the war - which finally put down the rebellion and saved the nation - might not have been the atrocity it’s depicted as in movies, and was far from the brutality exhibited by the famous American generals of the 20th Century who waged campaigns of true total war.

Yet Sherman’s still considered a villain by many modern Southerners, while our much-worse recent generals are considered heroes.

And this Confederate propaganda has been so successful in shaping our view of the Civil War that douche-canoes like Joss Whedon can get away with creating much-loved shows based on glorifying the villains of US history, and few notice until later.

I feel ashamed now that I once adored this show so much. I blame my lack of knowledge of US history at the time, and I was far from alone among ignorant Northerners who loved it.

A positive conclusion: Gonna have to find Killjoys!

ensignrook: I just…you’re welcome, fam.

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ensignrook:

I just…you’re welcome, fam. You. Are. Welcome.

I GOT MAH BEBBEH CHICKENZ IN THE MAIL TODAYok my sister didhere...

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I GOT MAH BEBBEH CHICKENZ IN THE MAIL TODAY

ok my sister did

here is other sister (middle-little) doing a Boob Shelf Chicken Smooch Selfie with #Farmbaby looking on in great amusement

“I named them,” Middle-Little said. 

“there are like 30 of them what did u name them” I texted back.

“I named them all Baby Chicken,” Middle-Little admitted. “But [Farmbaby] thought it was hilarious.”

I looked up on backyardchickens dot forum what kind of fun treats I could give them and started making plans to spoil the fancy ones and incidentally the other 350 of them that are showing up tomorrow to cohabitate with them, but then I remembered that the entire point of this exercise is that they’re going to be certified organic, which means I can only feed them Approved Chicken Feeds From Organic Sources With Receipts (apparently organic certification is like 95% Showing Your Receipts To The Certifying Organization) so. I’ll be restricted, there. But I’m sure I can still manage.