regular plea for people to stop using this as a reaction image
this is a real sentence that was said by a real snl guy (norm macdonald) in response to a real news story - specifically, the murder of brandon teena, a trans man, whose death macdonald is mocking here. this very sentence that has now been turned into a meme prompted a trans rights org to picket the nbc in absence of any apology from them (the statement here slightly misquotes the sentence, but you can find video demonstrating that the wording in the image is what he said). i’ve used this as a reaction image in the past when i didn’t know the history behind it but i think more people should know and we should stop using it like this
“When you’re a trans woman you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody and if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you’re accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideas of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement. We trans women are made to teeter on this tightrope, not because we are transsexuals, but because we are women. This is the same double bind that forces teenage girls to negotiate their way between virgin and whore, that forces female politicians and business women to be aggressive without being seen as a bitch, and to be feminine enough not to emasculate their alpha male colleagues, without being so girly as to undermine their own authority.”
— Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, p 28-9 (via lugardepiedras)
“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign
This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
“Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?”
Yeah, I remember. And I’m sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that’s a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don’t talk about acid rain because there isn’t any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don’t talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there’s nothing to notice. But don’t be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it’s time to do that thing again and make sure that we don’t kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
