I Don’t Want To Go On Hrt, But What I Would Give For This Kind Of Direct Experience Of My Feelings.

sorry boss can't come in today i was on my way to work and then a gentle spring breeze kissed my cheek and reminded me it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

In order to stop the culture of faking orgasms, we need to stop the culture of shaming others for their sexual experiences.

Can’t get your partner off on the first try? Cool. You can still be thoughtful and make them feel good.

Can get your partner off within 30 seconds? Awesome, good for you both, don’t let it get to your head.

Can make someone cum in less than 5, but for others, it’s a process that takes an hour? That’s alright, everyone’s different. 

Does it take you 30 minutes to cum? That’s okay, you’re not broken, you’re not a failure.

Does it take you 10 seconds to cum? That’s great, you’re not a slut, you’re not overly sensitive or dirty. 

Can’t cum without toys/vibrators? That’s awesome, that’s a valid part of sexual play!

Can only cum with loving, vanilla sex? That’s perfectly normal, and you will find lots of great partners to experience that with!

Can’t orgasm at all? THAT’S ALSO COOL. It’s not a bad thing, you can still enjoy sex TONNES just like others.

Orgasms are NOT the defining characteristic of your sexual prowess. They are great, they’re lovely when they happen, but for the love of science, stop bringing them up higher than they need to be. 

from the Lavender and Red Union, a group of communists who wrote this in 1975.

"GAY LIBERATION IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. SOCIALISM IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT GAY LIBERATION."

the antidote to despair is action.

mayor of nipton: i cant believe the deal i just made with none other than the legion! we'll have a new ally and the underground business and services i run here will prosper

the nefarious vulpes inculta:

odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do u think the rat guy and mouse lady would try having their own kid? Or are the six she had is enough?

This doesnt answer your question but I think if they did want to try for another litter, going to the rodent OB-gyn would be an experience

so strange to me that some people aren't bisexual