I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.
That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.
Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.
The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.
Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.
Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.
This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.
So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.
My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt.
They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.
A prime example of how gender is socially enforced.
I remember a prolonged battle at primary school, with petitions and numerous near riotous PTA meetings before girls were allowed to wear trousers. In the late 1990s/early 2000s. In Scotland. A country which now (rightly, for the most part) prides itself on its progressiveness. Please don’t ever take these things for granted, and don’t assume that it’s only far flung places that you have nothing in common with that took so long to catch up. We’re all still fighting, little by little, for every apparently trivial victory that mounts up until we can reach the non-trivial ones. And we can’t afford to stop.
At my private Catholic high school, girls were only given the green light to wear pants the year before I began attending.
In 1992.
Yeah, 1991, forced to wear dresses in school. Got detention once because after school was over while waiting for my ride outside I took off the dress that was over my button down shirt and normal-kids-shorts-length shorts because it was Louisiana degrees outside and I was 7.
Teachers were forced to wear skirts for years. And heels. My mother’s feet are still high heel shaped when she takes off her shoes. She had to wear a skirt till I was well into junior high.
i think that… approximately 100% of the time, parents, teachers, etc… have this misconception that neurodivergent kids & teens don’t know anything about how to handle their neurodivergence.
for years, i suffered through people making suggestions of things that were things i had done, and either weren’t worth the effort or they actually made things worse. i told them this, and if i was still having any issues with the same problem they’d say something about “well if you’re not gonna listen to any suggestions…” when I did. they’re the one who didn’t listen when i told them that doesn’t work for me. They assume that because I didn’t try it in front of them (which is often impossible), I never tried it. I tried doing my homework as soon as I got home. I tried doing my homework at the table, I tried working where I was comfortable. I tried listening to music, I tried working in silence. I tried using a planner, I tried setting reminders on my phone, I tried. I tell people that I have executive functioning issues and they say that I have to work on it like I haven’t been doing that as long as I’ve had to do things and it’s so much better than it was before. I’m as able as I am now because I’ve spent 18 years working on it.
One of my friends has ADHD, and at one point when her grades dropped her parents took her phone, despite her telling them that the only way she can focus on her homework is to listen to music, for which she needs her phone.
I was in a study hall with another friend, who also has ADHD. Sometimes, they would be able to focus and do their work. Others, they would end up being entirely unable to and would do other stuff. The “instructional support” person would start bothering them about it, insist that they try. As if they hadn’t already done so.
I am tired of watching people assume that neurodivergent people aren’t trying, or we haven’t tried. We’re always trying.
I can agree with most people that the live-action Grinch is far from a great movie, but this scene always kills me.
FUNNY BIT OF TRIVIA ABOUT THIS SCENE.
When the Grinch yanks the tablecloth away, everything on the table was supposed to fall. But Jim Carrey did it so expertly, all of the objects stayed right where they were! So the Grinch running back and messing everything up was improvised by Jim =)
THAT’S AWESOME
Also I love the push of the table it’s so extra it’s great
my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this
look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit
motherfucking australia
if there was a post to describe australia, this is it
wait.
you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?
that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?
fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?
wake up australia
That’s what birds do
They fly around and fuck shit up
Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country
Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit
It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.
Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do
yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes
why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.
My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.
no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange
what the actual fuck australia
I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.
Nope.
Went there.
Parrots tried to take our car.
Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.
Interesting thing about magpies – they’re not great at identifying individual humans visually, but if you make yourself identifiable in some way they’re usually open to reason. We used to have some very aggressive swoopers in our back yard – as soon as they realised that the humans *inside* the fence never bothered them and were the source of the delicious compost heap, they turned into flying black and white guard dogs who would viciously assault any passing stranger but never bothered anyone inside the yard. Several times they swooped at us when we approached from outside, then when we walked into the yard they would pull up and act incredibly apologetic like sorry ma’am I had no idea it was you I would never please don’t stop stocking the food pile.
There was another little group of magpies in the park who would attack any solo pedestrian but never bothered anyone walking a dog or pushing a pram, because apparently those were identifiable traits indicating a non-threatening human. In the spirit of inquiry, I started going out of my way to be polite to the magpies – carefully walking a wide arc around them when they were on the ground, etc – and emitting an identifiable call of ‘hello birdie’ before swooping season started.
I spent the next ten years crossing that park at least once a day and as long as I turned at the first flutter of wings and said ‘hello birdie’ to the magpie waiting to attack as soon as my back was turned, I was fine. Every time, the magpie would stare at me for a minute and then fly off to harass some other pedestrian because apparently the magpies and I, we were cool.
Parrots are a lot less open to negotiation, and the little bastards travel in flocks. Beware the parrots.
Australia: the only country where it is necessary to sign a peace treaty with the birds in order to stay unmangled.
Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights.
[F]or both boys and girls, [prof. Elizabeth Gershoff] said, “We found [spanking] linked to more aggression, more delinquent behavior, more mental health problems, worse relationships with parents, and putting the children at higher risk for physical abuse from their parents.”
“People often ask: Why didn’t you look for positive aspects?” she continued. “My answer is: We did, and there were none. We see consistently that the more children are spanked, the more behavioral problems they have in the years ahead.”
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