this is so 100% Lebanese. everything from the dumpster rolling down the street, to the old fashion mercedes, to the soft french music playing in the background, to the scenery, to the random dude stopping his car on the highway to get out, to the two dudes on the mo-ped beeping and driving up the street the wrong way. Modern Art.
Your wife changes her hair color every season and her personality adjusts slightly. You’re secretly only in love with Autumn wife. She just came home sporting her Winter color.
it’s my fault. it’s just that when we met it was autumn; her red-orange hair and crackling laughter. there’s a little spooky in her, a lot of play. and what a better time for falling?
i didn’t realize it for the first few years – something shifting, something so subtle. the winter makes us all cold, the summer makes us all a little out of our minds. i just loved her, because she was incredible, and i was the luckiest person alive.
it’s just that i realized that spring came with sudden bursts of cold. it’s just that summer frequently raged in with fire sprouting from her lips. it’s just that winter was the worst of all, her eyes dead. it’s just that autumn loves me different; throws herself into it without the clingy sweat of summer. i used to love that summer girl, you know? i loved how wild she was, the way in summer she took every risk she could. but i carried her home drunk one too many times, cleaned up one too many of the messes she made for no reason than to enjoy the sensation of burning. and winter was worse; the shutdown, the isolation. how she became distant, a blizzard, caught up in her own head, unable to tell me what was wrong and unable to think i actually wanted to listen.
she comes home, her hair bleached white. a dark smile on her lips. the shadowy parts of her are back. they loom like icicles overhead. she kisses me with her body held at a distance, a peck on my cheek that feels like an iceberg. she makes polite conversation and we go to bed early, our bodies untouching.
it is a lonely season, i think on the ninth day of this. winter is cold. winter is known for the death of things. when i look at her, i see the girl i fell for, inhabited by an alien. she was the first women i loved so much i felt it would kill me. i can’t leave. when i wake her up with my crying, she tells me to shush and go back to sleep. she’s different like this, quiet, doesn’t eat.
three days later i stare at myself in the mirror. i wonder if it’s me. if the fat on my body or something in my face or the wrinkles and she doesn’t love me. i try prettier lingerie, lean cuisine, i try different hair, more makeup, try harder. it doesn’t work. she looks at me the same; that empty gaze that neither loves nor condemns my actions.
somewhere in februrary i lose it. we’re fighting again, from car to restaurant to car to home again. we fight about stupid things, small things; i tell her i feel she doesn’t love me, she says i’m not listening. the circle goes around and around, old pain peeling back, new pain unhealing. i sleep on the couch.
i wake up when i hear her crying, white hair around her all messed up. the kind of sobbing that only comes at two in the morning, heavy and thick and hurting. my winter girl. my heart is breaking. she looks up at me like i’m her anchor. “i’m sorry i’m like this,” she says. and i start saying, it’s okay i’m here we’re married, but she just shakes her head and says, “I know this isn’t the real me.”
i hold her cold hand. she stares at the blankets. “i am different in winter,” she whispers, “i know i am and i’m sorry.” she looks at me. “why do you think i dye my hair? cut it off? get rid of the old me?”
i tell her it’s okay. we’re together and it’s okay, and then she whispers, “i’m sorry you married four of me.”
we lay there like that, her head on my chest. she falls asleep. i stare at the ceiling, thinking of the way she sounded when she was crying. how i helped put her in that pain. how i promised in sickness and in health and everything in between.
the next day i spend at the library. there aren’t enough books on how to love someone with seasonal affective disorder so i make my own, notes and pages and little ideas on post-its. and i take a deep breath and make myself a promise.
she comes home to her favorite dinner and we kiss and she’s uneasy but that’s okay. the next day i bring home flowers and the next day she finds little love notes in her pockets. i love her quiet, the way winter demands, understand her sex drive is faltering; spend more time just cuddling. we drink wine and we kiss and some part of her starts relaxing.
the truth is there is no loving someone out of their mental illness. the truth is that you can love someone in despite of it; love them loud enough to give them an excuse to believe they can make their way out of it.
and i learn. i remember the rebirth of spring, when she starts thawing. we kiss and have picnics in pretty dresses. i remember her joy at little birds and her rain dancing. i fall in love with the flowers in her cheeks and the little bursts of cleaning. i fall in love with summer’s slow walks and milkshakes and shouting to music playing too loud on the speakers. i fall in love with her dancing, with the sunfire energy. and when winter comes; i am ready. i remember that snow used to look pretty. i fall in love with the hearth of her, with the holiday, with the slow smile that spreads across her face so shyly. i fall in love with how she looks in boots and mittens and every day i find another reason to love her the way she deserves – they way i always should have.
she comes home with her white hair and dark smile and a package in her hands. i ask to see what it is and that small shy grin comes creeping out. it’s a sunlamp packed in with medication. she looks at me with those wide eyes and that beautiful winter blush. “i’m trying to get better,” she whispers, “i promise.”
recovery doesn’t look immediate. sometimes it isn’t neat. i can’t say we never fight or that we’re suddenly complete. but each day, that tiny girl’s strength gives me another reason. i love her. i love her while she tames the roller coaster of spring; i love her for reigning in the summer storms; i love her for taking her winter and trying to be warm. it is hard, because everything worth it is hard. she spreads out her autumn leaves; mixes the best parts of her into everything. learns to take winter’s silence for a moment before yelling in summer. learns to take autumn’s spice and give it to spring. we are both learning.
one day she comes home and her hair is different, but it’s a style i don’t know. i kiss it and tell her that she’s beautiful and the inside of me swells like a flood. i’m so glad that she’s mine. every part of her. the whole. i am the luckiest person on earth. and i always have been. but she’s hugging me and saying, “thank you for helping me,” and i can’t explain why i’m crying.
this is what love is; not always an emotion but rather your actions. the choices we make when we realize our lives would be empty if the other was absent. this is what love is: letting them grow, helping them find their way in out of the cold. this is what love is: sometimes it takes work to see how the thing you planted together actually grows.
this is what love looks like in an autumn girl: it is winter and she glows.
When people ask, “How can I tell if someone is disabled or just lazy?” I think about my parents.
My parents have known me my whole life. When they’re not actively contemptuous of me, they do seem to be somewhat aware of my general personality and character. In one of his nicer moments, my dad has called me “sweet-natured.” They can tell that when I make them a surprise breakfast or lunch that I enjoy being helpful and doing nice things for people.
They know from watching me grow up that I have always had trouble keeping my room clean, getting homework done, and keeping my desk tidy at school.
The longest I can push myself past my limits is about nine months. Then I collapse and end up less functional than I was before I pushed myself. This has been a pattern throughout my middle and high school years. I would go to public school for about a year, and then collapse and have to do the rest of my education at home. My work history follows this pattern, too.
I once sat in a therapy session with my dad to talk about the constant struggle we were having at home because he wanted me to help out more and do better in school. When he asked me why I didn’t do things, I broke down in tears, because I couldn’t explain it. “I just CAN’T. I want to, and I CAN’T.” Nobody listened.
My mom asked me why I don’t do things, and I said, “I just can’t. I sit there for hours trying to convince myself to do things, and I can’t. Move.”
And she said, “Don’t think about it, just do it,” completely missing the point.
When I got older I found words for the things I was dealing with. I got professionally diagnosed, and I’d look up information about my diagnosis and e-mail articles to my parents explaining what my disability is and why I can’t do things.
My parents have firsthand information about my character (helpful, likes doing things for others) and my history with disability (can’t consistently keep things clean, can’t manage a daily schedule). I’ve talked to them extensively about my diagnosis and given them information about it. They have known me my whole life, and I’ve always been this way. And they still, STILL choose to believe I’m just a bad person who doesn’t try and doesn’t care.
My disability isn’t invisible, people refuse to look at it.
People like problems they can yell at. They like having a target for their frustration. They don’t want to admit disability is real, because they want problems that they can either solve, or blame someone else for. And the disabled person themself is their scapegoat, someone who can’t ever opt out of their role because the disability is never going to go away.
“My disability isn’t invisible, people refuse to look at it.”
somethin’ i am a little bit sick of is that because i am a 6′2 trans woman, i often get people commenting on my selfies with things like “please step on me” and “i want you to beat me up”. what is it about me that makes you think i’d want to do either of those things? i am very gentle and also my body is chubby and weak and i get fatigued from walking up anything steeper than a 20 degree angle hill, i’m definitely not going to have the energy to defeat you in combat.
i think there’s a Bad Attitude online that it’s somehow okay to make unsolicited advances towards people if you’re submissive about it. i’m a very affectionate person but comments like that from strangers make me feel uncomfortable.
i see a similar thing to this too where trans men are constantly infantilized and refferred to by cutesy terms, and like, and obviously this isn’t something i personally experience, but i’m really suspicious of the ways people describe trans bodies without our consent. i love strong women and i love cute men, but i’m so tired of how the gender expression of trans people is so often dismissed in favour of someones personal preferences. i’m not a big muscle babe who can beat you up, i have about as good fighting abilities as a 3d character who’s motion capture was performed by a bionicle, and i am sure there are a lot of trans men out there who are very bothered by being called things like “cute soft boii” or whatever.
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury – because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education.
Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When
they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for
their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s
Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that
revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every
dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative
professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized
in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated
differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce
law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as
adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
Play college sports
Title IX of the Education
Amendments of protects people from discrimination based
on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal
financial assistance
It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs
The EEOC rules that
sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling
is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to
apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism – this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
The White Death Note thing on netflix has me so worried
I mean. You realize you’re literally making a movie about a white boy “cleansing” american prisons right. You realize what the american prison system is right. You do realize your country already has enough problems with “lonely” white boys who think they can get away with murder without punishment for being white right.
You can’t grab a story like that and completely change the context without it turning into a huge fucking mess
Its downright ugly. There are nuances within the story that simply CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be whitewashed. Then to have a white boy play judge, jury and executioner at his own whim is a dangerous image to see glorified, no matter how the story ends.
To all those rolling their eyes or throwing up their hands about people blowing things out of proportion, educate yourselves. Making an westernised, whitewashed version of Death Note doesn’t happen in some magical utopia, its not without reason that people are troubled. Some random white boy with the power to thin out the American prison population is disgusting.
There are no tropes being cleverly subverted here. This is saying 1) we think Japanese people are such non-entitites we’re going to erase them from their own narratives 2) Set it in america because to hell with Japan and its culture relevance to the overall story 3) Non-white characters arent relatable, everyone can relate to a “lone-wolf” white boy who kill indiscriminately 4) Everyone hates prisoners, we’ll just have random white dude excute who he see fit 5) fuck the moral ramifications of a white boy lording power over a American slave institution consisting mainly black/brown people who he can kill at will
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Creators don’t get to babble about staying close to source material while whitewashing. Ignoring how significant the origin culture is in the source material. Then ploping in into another country so rooted in racism without even looking at the how that impacts the story. Nope, its irresponsible. Look if i wanted to see white boys get away with murder, I’d just watch the news.
Personally i hope this dies a death like Iron Fist.
So for all you feminists out their who think that all men should die, remember, you are not a feminist.
reblogging for the last comment
Yes
Legit question, I’m not trying to hate on feminists or anything. Why is it called feminist if they’re for equality?
That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely.
The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb.
The point of the word feminist, and the feminist movement, has never been to say that women are better than men. The point is that women and things associated with women have been given a lesser place in society and we want to bring those things up to a place of equality. The focus is on the feminine because that’s what’s being pushed down. However, focusing on the feminine does not mean we’re focusing only women. Men are belittled and called “less of a man” anytime they portray a trait that is associated with femininity. If women and the feminine were equal to men and masculinity then that wouldn’t happen. Feminism is about raising up things associated with females to have an equal place in society as the things associated with males. It’s called feminism, not equalism, because the focus is on raising up not tearing down. Equalism would suggest that male things need to come down to a lower level so that female things can meet it in the middle. That’s not the point. The point is to raise up the feminine so that it’s on the same playing field that the masculine is already on. We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.
This needs to be spread far and wide to everyone on tumblr.
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