I’ve got several issues with the proposed Tumblr blackout, but chief among them is the fact that it lands on the first day of Disabled Pride Month and the fact that there are people calling for it to become indefinite when disabled folks already have limited access to their communities, and many of us are losing what little reliable access we have because of places like Reddit going dark.
Like… idk. Maybe I’m being uncharitable. But the prioritization of ensuring Pride is minimally interfered with while the first day of Disability Pride is just taken away is rubbing me the wrong way.
And just to be clear. I don’t think anyone is doing it intentionally. But I also think that’s the problem. No one thinks about disabled people except other disabled people. I wish they would.
I have a chronic illness and I didnt even know there was a Disabled Pride Month.
So welcome to your first Disability Pride. I know it’s technically tomorrow, but it’s never too early to find out you have a community and be welcomed by it :)
Who’s calling for it to become indefinite? That, I would be against. But in its current form it seems fine.
And as a disabled person, I didn’t know about this July disability month. It seems US American-centric tbh. Not that it’s totally useless, of course, it just doesn’t have the same significance. I think we have more to gain in a short, 1-2 day blackout than we have to lose. Because a demand of the blackout is to fix some of the accessibility issues caused by recent changes.
There were numerous iterations in the notes from some people calling for it to become indefinite.
And while Disability Pride Month was to originally commemorate ADA, it is celebrated globally, with many other countries aligning with the US celebration.
Many people just don’t know it exists because Disabled Rights and issues are universally overlooked or ignored.
That you don’t recognize it’s importance does not mean it is not monumentally important to many of us and has been since the 90s.
And the blackout will not achieve anything. Fuck, it’s barely achieved anything on Reddit except to displace already vulnerable communities with limited access to community.
If you want to protest Tumblr, leave negative reviews on the apps citing the issues. Withhold money. Not this… token whatever this is supposed to be.
when walking our dogs around the neighborhood (this being in oh, about 2005/6 when I was 11/12 or so) we’d pick up after the dogs and the neighborhood association helpfully provided these little trash bins you could drop the shit bags in. My dad always told me they were mailboxes (tbf they did kind of look like mailboxes) that delivered the dogshit straight to the white house. We continued to call them poop mailboxes for years after, though my dad told me in all earnestness that service was discontinued in 2008 lol
If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn’t sound so bad, until you’re waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it’s delayed. Then you’re waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that’s probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they’re expecting it, it’s baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.
The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking “I’m going to o have a couple drinks” or “I don’t want to worry about parking where I’m going.” So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you’re waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.
Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say “why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let’s be real that’s who’s taking all the money)?” If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don’t get with a bus every 30 minutes.
it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
It’s also super a capitalism thing.
With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.
The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.
Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.
this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity
Small Town Grocery Store Stories: LGBTQ+ friendly edition
Me: minding my own damn business in the grocery store
One of my students and a few of his teammates enter the dairy aisle.
My student is holding hands with one of his teammates.
My student: Oh hey, Professor X!
Me, who has both my student and his girlfriend in my class: …Hello
My student, looking at his hand-holding partner: Oh! Don’t worry. My girlfriend knows. Not that I’m cheating! I’m not cheating. I’m not gay.
Hand Holding boy: Not that being gay is a bad thing! It’s a good thing!
My student: Right! But no, listen. We aren’t together, we just hold hands in public sometimes.
Hand Holding Boy: Especially on Friday nights. And weekends. And at away games.
My student: Because sometimes people will say shit and then we can punch them! And if the fight started because someone was being homophobic, coach won’t get mad at us.
Hand Holding Boy: Always nice to punch a homophobe.And [gesturing to another boy in the group] maybe they’ll think twice about saying something to [other boy’s name] if he ever gets a boyfriend and wants to hold his hand for real.
The Gay One, resigned but smiling: I’ve decided it’s sweet and not really fucking weird.
