I’ve had a thing for brevity. Saying little, smiling more, only letting go occasionally.
Our trips to wherever, thats not what stays with me.
Its just what levels me as he brings me to a simmer & takes me by the heart strings,
makes me see better with eyes telling me what love means,
makes me hear better by making sure I’m listening.
Advice to be all me,
shooting words like arrows & nobody sees.
Pitfalls never saw me coming.
I’d rather not always see what’s in store for me
In depth or close up or inside of me
These feelings scare the shit out of me
And I keep putting myself in places of dread for this
This inconsistency, this lack of control that blazes in me
I’d rather go on than go on sitting still from repeating blemishes
Repeating injuries
Repeating steps to solve
I’ve come through it all
Repeating memories fall
What happened to those resolutions
They’re in my diary, that’s what.
Sometimes all it takes is grace.
I had to look up the word. It means promising success. Opportune. The coming week will be auspicious, my horoscope said. It’s funny believing in the stars, thinking on inevitability & the effect of planets’ pull on our minds. It’s a form of fortune telling. Can you follow your fate or will your lazy efforts be enough? Will personality keep you up high or will u barely tread water? What are words if you dont believe?
(via anthologyz)
That’s right, ladies! Real women support real women.
(Source: tsunderebabe, via anthologyz)
World Press Freedom Day
Today is World Press Freedom Day, a time to reflect not just on what are traditionally thought of as press freedoms, but also on ordinary citizen’s ability to share and access information via our digital networks.
Via UNESCO
[S]ecuring the safety of journalists continues to be a challenge due to an upward trend in the killings of journalists, media workers, and social media producers. In 2012 alone, UNESCO’s Director-General condemned the killings of 121 journalists, almost double the annual figures of 2011 and 2010. In addition, there continues to be widespread harassment, intimidation, arbitrary arrest and online attacks on journalists in many parts of the world. To compound the problem, the rate of impunity for crimes against journalists, media workers and social media producers remains extremely high.
Responding to this overall context of press freedom, WPFD 2013 focuses on the theme of “Safe to Speak: Securing Freedom of Expression in All Media” and puts the spotlight in particular on the issues of safety of journalists, combating impunity for crimes against freedom of expression, and securing a free and open Internet as the precondition for safety online.
Reporters Without Borders’ annual World Press Freedom Index is a good place to explore how press freedoms work — or don’t work — globally. At the top of the list are Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. Down at the bottom are the same three that that were there a year ago: Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea.
Freedom House reports that the percentage of the world’s population “living in societies with a fully free press has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade”:
At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive that media freedom is on the decline. After all, in a world in which news is being produced by a broader range of professionals – as well as citizen journalists and bloggers – information is flowing at faster rates than ever before. And with news being transmitted through a greater variety of mediums – including newspapers, radio, television, the internet, mobile phones, flash drives, and social media – one might expect the level of media freedom worldwide to be improving, not worsening.
As noted, press freedom doesn’t just affect professional journalists, but ordinary citizens committing acts of journalism, activists documenting abuses and members of civil society. Take, for instance, four men in Saudi Arabia interrogated over their attempts to launch a human rights organization. The charge against them, according to Amnesty International: ”founding and publicizing an unlicensed organization as well as launching websites without authorization.”
Related, Part 01: Al Arabiya, Iran, Syria ranked among world’s worst countries for press freedom.
Related, Part 02: UNESCO, Pressing for Freedom: 20 years of World Press Freedom Day (PDF).
Images: World Press Freedom Map (top), via Reporters Without Borders. Crime and Unpunishment: Why Journalists Fear for Their Safety (bottom), via UNESCO. Select to embiggen.
Remember the last time you tried hard to get your way? Curious never slinking moving forward on & on. Giving all and all the time forever seeking never halting even for a second cus the pause could be too long to sustain you?
Acts are rarely accomplished this way so if you’re going on, please keep going cus for the life of us, that’s how we keep growing, keep flight and keep giving in to this beautiful view.
You firestar. Pool of moonburst.
You turned my skin to dust. Rawblade glasstooth girl.
With your hot rage and bus ticket anywhere.
Never saw a woman run so many directions at once.
One night, you shined so bright the police came to watch.
Your bruises and shirt-shreds. How we all just stood there,
(Source: motherground, via mmmllamas)
Waking up in the morning, gota thank God
I don’t know but this day seems kind of odd.
This day of learning up ahead is another crawl
crawling up sprawling down into the pit falls
and still I go steady into the midday hour.
Challenges uphold me and I uphold my biggest trials,
a declaration of what I see as mine
& a truth be told twice over last night
that this time is a treasure.
Never mind the line by line
or connecting the dots in futile signs.
I’m gona do what feels right by me
& today’s gona be just fine.
Someone once told me cuddling cures sickness…
1. Sex is a beauty treatment. Scientific tests find that when women make love they produce amounts of the hormone estrogen, which makes hair shine and skin smooth.
2. Gentle, relaxed lovemaking reduces your chances of suffering dermatitis, skin rashes and blemishes. The sweat produced cleanses…
(via kimlundgren)
Things fall apart so easily. Omens all the way home told me that. I can’t fucking think in here. This isn’t as bad as it seems. It’s just bad if you watch the accident slowly undergo the transformation into rubbish. It’s time to get going & don’t let nobody stop you, even yourself, even your family, even your tendencies to not do shit about it.
There’s a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work.
Lance Crouther
(via missgreyday)
Shiiiiiit.
(via cramanda143)
WELP!
(via thecocochronicles)
OOP!
(via il-tenore-regina)
(via jezebeling)
A woman’s worst nightmare? That’s pretty easy. Novelist Margaret Atwood writes that when she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, “They are afraid women will laugh at them.” When she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, “We’re afraid of being killed.
[CW: discussion of rape culture and violence]
This reminds me of an article about online (heterosexual) dating that I read a while ago. It listed men’s and women’s worst fears about meeting someone from online. The highest ranked fear that men had was that their date would be fat, whereas the highest ranked fear that women had was that their date would turn out to be violent and kill them.
I think that says a lot.
(via kaitg)
Its interesting also that these fears sit subconsciously until woman are asked to exams their responses to men. We women will operate with this fear in mind, the way we protect ourselves, make sure our friends know where we are when we go on a date, words that we use while interacting with men, all in hopes they will not kill us, but simultaneously love us.
I think bell hooks made a point about this in her series on love. Something along the lines of how can women hope to love and receive love from men when at the foundation of our relationships there is this strong fear of men. You can’t build true trust when your foundation is crumbling under you.
The scariest part is, once you recognize this fear, and face it, how do you address it when there is evidence of “good” men abusing, hurting, and killing women everyday?
(via becomingchichi)
I was in my early 20’s when one of my homegirls broke this down for me.
I was in a broken relationship, and one of the things was that bugged me at the time was that the girlfriend at the time would freak out whenever I got angry - I never yelled, never throw or hit things, mostly, I just needed some time to cool out.
“Why does she get scared when I’m angry? I’d never hit her!”
“But she doesn’t KNOW that. She can’t assume that. Look at how many dudes are out there pulling shit.”
And that stuck with me for a hot minute. The relationship was broken on so many levels anyway, but that fact still remains, as a man, I can’t fault women for assuming the worst in order to protect themselves, especially how the world’s patriarchy and misogyny rolls.
(via bankuei)
I’ve had continual discussions with Tchy about this, and I don’t expect to stop. It’s fair to say that there’s no one in the world that I trust more, and he has been extremely careful with me, but… the fact remains that he leans quite a bit towards the masculine, and this means that that fear is always there. The news of transmasculine folks abusing/raping people doesn’t help that fear any. :(
I’m learning not to apologize for it. It’s not my fault (nor, really, is it his) that I’m scared of dude-type people. But it’s always there. Which is another reason why I get so pissed off when trans men try to make transmisogyny about them.
(via kiriamaya)
This is an incredible thread of responses. I’ve seen this quote before, but not the dialogue that built up around it. The part about loud=violent hits home particularly hard for me. I am terrified of getting into irl arguments with men, especially when they get loud. It’s always going to sit in the pit of my stomach.
(via mizbingley)
That part resonates for me too, although from a completely different angle. Despite being more terrified of sexual violence than I am of anything other than my own brain, I do not hesitate to yell, confront, get up in the face of, threaten, even hit men twice my size and many times my strength. Faced with a threat of violence from men, I will either imply or state “I dare you to.”
I also, as previously established on this blog, have a death wish.
To me, that encapsulates everything about the violence, especially sexual violence, coded into relationships between men and women in our society: for a woman to assert herself in the face of maleness may require the woman in question (such as me) to be perpetually suicidal.
(via 14kgoldnyc)
Reblogging for commentary. I have been frightened and scared by men being loud with me, even if I don’t think they’ll be violent. Like people have said above, it’s just a latent response in your brain to fear violence from men.
I went out to dinner with someone a couple of weeks ago (LONG story, was supposed to be a group dinner but it ended up just being me & a strange man) and I told him I blogged about feminism and politics, and he went off on me. He told me feelings were bullshit and women just wanted special privileges, and then he said, “Women don’t give men enough credit for not being violent psychopaths. That’s what we are, deep down. We want to rape and pillage, and we don’t, and women don’t give us enough credit for that.” I burst into tears. That shit was terrifying.
(via stfuconservatives)
I too am reblogging this for the amazing commentary.
When supposed feminist ally men deny this very basic, simple truth - that’s how you know they are an ally to no one.
This all gets taught to women at a very young age, how dangerous the world is when you’re in it being a woman. I’ve been struggling to write about something that happened with my daughter a few weeks ago, how to form the words, but this is possibly the best context.
We were in the wine shop, in line to pay, and she was so excited to get her lollipop (in the time honored tradition of wine stores everywhere). A man two people ahead of us started fighting with the woman behind the counter about how much money he’d given her. As I was moving her behind my body, my daughter froze, and when I say froze, I mean wasn’t moving a muscle except to shake.
It sorted itself out pretty quickly. We paid and left.
Once we got back into the car, she started crying. I asked her what was the matter, and she said, “Mama, I was so scared. When men get angry they shoot people.”
That’s a direct quote. When men get angry, they shoot people.
I asked her, “Baby, why do you think that?” She replied, “on NPR, that’s what happens. When men get really mad they kill people. That guy was really mad, what if he had a gun? What would you do?”
The talk we had afterwards was difficult; no one said parenting was easy. But this is the life we live as women. If my 9 year old understands it, then men of the world, alleged feminist allies, Nice Guys, random douches on the street, and even actual non-dangerous men: so can you.
(via someauthorgirl)
I’ve reblogged this quote before, I think. But reblogging now for the amazing commentary.
I was having a discussion with my father and brother the other day. We were talking about receiving threats of rape or violence via the internet. Their whole argument was “just ignore it and walk away from your computer”. Amazing solution. Can’t believe I never thought of that. It’s so clever because we all know that when you leave your keyboard the threat of violence disappears.
Urgh.
(via lavenderlabia)
“You can’t build true trust when your foundation is crumbling under you.”
This dialogue is indescribably important.
(via fascinasians)
(Source: alullaby, via fascinasians)
