People giving JKR shit for Cho Chang will never not be annoying to me as an actual Chinese person. The thing about Chinese is that there is no perfect way to transliterate it into English, as the two languages are just too different from each other. And while there are more common romanization systems than others, ultimately it's up to the discretion of the individual person for how they want to transliterate Chinese into English. In the Chinese editions of HP, Cho's name is 张秋, which would most commonly be romanized as Zhang Qiu (East Asian names are written surname first, given name second). However, it's completely reasonable to assume that Cho's parents simply decided to romanize her name differently because they personally felt that Cho gets the pronunciation across better than Qiu. I've known plenty of Chinese people, and also people whose languages do not use the Latin alphabet in general, who spell their names in English differently from how the more standard transliterations would spell it, just because of their personal preference. If anything it's no different than Catherine vs. Katherine, so trying to use Cho as a gotcha against JKR is not only annoying and nit-picky, it's also just ignorant. Which I suppose goes for a lot of the criticism against her.
wow this is a great insight, thanks anon
This post is not mine, but one radfem woman from our community. She works as a sexologist and shared her experience in her work. If you too are a sexologist, or even better, have some statistics on this topic, please share your experiences or links. ---------------------------------------------------------- "When I first started working, I discovered that many men had never experienced the need to refuse intimacy with a regular partner. That is, a man in counseling complains that his partner often refuses him, he attributes her refusals to personal dislike and faded feelings, and when he tries to turn the situation around and remember when he himself had to refuse her, he does not understand what we are talking about. Because he has never had to - he responds to the initiative of his partner every time and considers it a sign of love and attraction on his part.
I heard this very often, I couldn't catch the lie and at the same time I couldn't interpret it. They are not robots, after all, to be available 24/7 at all hours of the day and night?
One day a client in a session literally opened my eyes with one phrase.
She said: “I CAN SEE WHEN HE'S NOT UP TO IT.”
That's the secret. The notorious emotional service. Subsequently, and many other women have confirmed this in a targeted survey: when the desire for intimacy arises, a woman assesses her partner's condition BEFORE taking the initiative. If she sees that her partner is tired, sick, in a bad mood, or preoccupied with something, she does not consider it appropriate to offer sex. I have also heard from many women that in a situation when she can not clearly assess the state of the partner, she prefers to flirt, as if casually get naked, as if accidentally do something that usually arouses the partner. If there is no reaction to this, the woman usually refuses to take the initiative and solves her problems on her own, without forcing the partner to conflict and feel guilty.
Men don't want their partners all the time - it's just that no one gets in their underwear when it's inappropriate. No one forces them to think about sex when they don't want to think about it.
Men themselves don't usually check against anything but their own erections.
They don't care when to offer sex to a woman(the following is a real and far from complete list):
Who is asleep (well, seriously, I don't know any woman who would ever think of waking up a sleeping partner to satisfy her sexually);
who's back from her 24-hour shift;
who just finished cooking a holiday dinner for ten people;
who has a high fever;
who's been vomiting all day;
who is eight months pregnant with a complicated pregnancy;
who has undergone a termination of pregnancy that day;
who is in the terminal stages of cancer;
who's just had a pet die;
returning from the funeral of a beloved grandmother;
waiting for a call from the NICU where their (mutual!) child is (“Let's get a little loose while we wait”) - and so on and so forth.
It may seem like it's a matter of cognitive distortion, that they just don't get it….. But they do. I asked one of them once: does he really think that a person in such a state can want sex? Yes, it is clear that they don't want to, he replied, but I'm just in case - maybe it will work out. I asked him how he would react if it didn't work out, and he admitted that he would be hurt and angry. And that's another “secret” - why it does burn out. Because refusal will inevitably lead to conflict, and a woman often does not have the strength not only for sex, but also for an argument. When he offered sex, she basically can not get out of the situation without damage - either to be raped, or to deal with his tantrums and offenses. And unfortunately, sometimes the first one turns out to be the lesser harm."
sometimes i think about how like, a decade ago, it was a common feminist thing to point out that "female" is a dehumanising thing to call a woman, since misogynists would often use the term in a derogatory way and now terfs are like "aha well im an adult human feeeeeemale". you're failing feminism actually
“Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings. We do not need food: in many ways, we are food, trainable meat, lambs queueing up to buy mint sauce. We consume only what we are told to, from lipstick to life insurance, and only what will make us more consumable ourselves, the better to be chewed up and swallowed by a machine that wants our work, our money, our sexuality broken down into bite-sized chunks.”
— Laurie Penny
"oh i wasn't socialized male, i was a closet trans girl" then i wasn't socialized female bc i saw myself as a whole human with complex thoughts and emotions 🙄 fuckin socialized brainless is what you were
Your rights and freedom end where another person's rights and freedom begins. This is why sex can never be a human right. Sex is an activity shared between people. You cannot give one person the legal right to demand sex without taking away another person's agency to say no.
Celibacy is so powerful. Liberal feminism doesn't want you to know this because it's men pulling the strings behind the curtain, but it's so powerful.
Having EXTREMELY high standards and being a perfectionist when it comes to partners is one of the most self empowering things you can do. Our bodily autonomy is threatened on a daily basis, you can take control back by not allowing anyone who is not up to your extreme standards to touch you.
"Tim Friede’s YouTube channel is home to a collection of videos depicting the Wisconsin-native truck mechanic subjecting himself to purposeful snake bites, blood slowly dripping down his arms.
For the past 20 years, Friede has been one of the most notorious “unconventional” medical researchers, undergoing over 200 bites from the world’s deadliest snakes — and more than four times as many — 850 — venomous injections.
He did it all in the name of science.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 100,000 people are killed by snake bites each year, with countless more being disabled by the venom of the deadly reptiles.
While life-saving anti-venom is available, very few countries actually have the capacity to produce it properly, given that most bites occur in remote and rural areas, and anti-venom requires arduous sourcing and accuracy.
But Friede’s blood is now full of antibodies, following decades of strategic exposure to the neurotoxins of mambas, cobras, and other lethal slithering critters.
His blood is now the source material researchers are using to develop an anti-venom capable of neutralizing a broad spectrum of snake bites...
Friede started this hobby — which he is indeed adamant no one else tries at home — out of sheer curiosity in childhood. After playing with harmless garter snakes in his youth, he began keeping more dangerous species of snakes as pets. At one point, he had 60 of them in his home basement.
In 1999, he began extracting venom from his snakes, drying it, diluting it, and injecting himself with tiny doses — keeping meticulous records as he went.
He had one major hospitalization in 2001, when he was paralyzed and in a coma for four days. But instead of giving up, he doubled down.
“In hindsight, I’m glad it happened,” Friede told The Times. “I never made another mistake.”
Jacob Glanville, an immunologist and founder of biotech company Centivax, stumbled on Friede’s videos.
Now, Friede is the director of herpetology at Centivax and serves as something of a “human lab” to Glanville.
“For a period of nearly 18 years, [Tim] had undertaken hundreds of bites and self-immunizations with escalating doses from 16 species of very lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse,” Glanville told The Guardian.
“It blew my mind. I contacted him because I thought if anyone in the world has these properly neutralizing antibodies, it’s him.”
To develop the new anti-venom, Glanville and his fellow researchers identified 19 of the world’s deadliest snakes — in the elapid family — which kill their prey by injecting neurotoxins into their bloodstream, paralyzing muscles (including the big, important ones, like the heart and lungs).
The trouble is, each species in the elapid family has a slightly different toxin, meaning they would each require their own anti-venom.
But Friede’s blood contains certain fragments of each of these toxins; protein molecules seen across the various species. Because of his decades of service to science, his blood also contains the antibodies required to neutralize these toxins, preventing them from sticking to human cells and causing harm.
Combining the antibodies LNX-D09, SNX-B03, and a small molecule called varespladib that inhibits venom toxins, Centivax has successfully created a treatment effective against the entire range of 19 species’ toxins.
Their work, which was recently published in the journal Cell, will soon be tested outside of the lab.
Trials will start with using the serum to treat dogs admitted to Australian veterinary clinics for snake bites. Assuming that goes well, the next step will be to administer human tests.
Researchers also believe that because the serum stems from a human, this should also lower the risk of allergic reactions when being administered to other people.
“The final product would be a single, pan-anti-venom cocktail,” Professor Peter Kwong of Columbia University, a senior author of the study, told The Times.
Or, he added, they could make two: “One that is for the elapids, and another that is for the viperids, because some areas of the world only have one or the other.”
As for Friede, he maintains his affinity for snakes, though his last bite was in November 2018, when he said “enough is enough,” according to The New York Times.
By then, he had certainly done enough. His pursuit of immunity could feasibly save countless lives.
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity,” Friede told The New York Times, “to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”
-via GoodGoodGood, May 2, 2025
Being resourceful isn't ghetto. Being resourceful isn't "redneck" shit. Being resourceful will always be more impressive than casual consumerism. Making something you need or want out of what you already have will always be more impressive than funneling money into Amazon.