applecath

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the knowing eye contact women make when men are talking is the purest human connection possible

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im still blown away by the fact that there are people who unironically use the word "terf" despite the fact that it's as serious and real a concept as "feminazi". it's not real lol

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Bessie MacNicol (1869-1904)

“In the greenwood”

Oil on canvas

Glasgow Girls

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Hot take. Of all the femininity things that are great to ditch, I think longer hair is the one thing that's a bit different. It's the only thing our body just does naturally, it grows that hair just like it does leg hair. Plastic fingernails, makeup, plastic surgery, shaving high heels, revealing feminine clothes, extensions, botox.. all of these things aren't natural and outright harmful. But just letting your hair grow? That CAN be impractical and our society calls for ways to style, maintain etc long hair. But just long hair in itself isn't anti-feminist, your body just grows it. It's quite neutral to me and it depends heavily on why a woman has longer hair if it's anti-feminist or not. If you agonize over how to style it or which conditioner to use or if you are scared of being less attractive with short hair.. well that's not good. But if you just let it grow because it grows.. I can't see anything unfeminist about it. I thought of this because I had short hair for over ten years and I really enjoyed it. The hair dries quicker, it's not in your face etc. But due to health related circumstances, I couldn't cut my hair myself or get it cut by someone else for months sometimes. So my hair was at a stupid length that annoyed me to no end but I didn't want to go bald either and honestly often times didnt have the means/mobility to shave my head or something. Just having shoulder length hair and throwing it into a braid is the easiest hairstyle for me. If it grows longer for two or four months, it doesnt get more annoying, its just a slightly longer braid. I honestly dont love how it looks on me, its fine. But its so practical in my current situation where I don't do much physical labor and my hair has all the time in the world to dry. It made me rethink my stance on hair in a feminist context. I always thought short hair was the way to go because it's so practical. Right now it would be a hassle for me.

🧆

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YOU'VE JUST BEEN ISEKAI'D!

You know how it is. You were hit by a truck or fell from a great height, and now you're trapped in a fantasy land! Quick, spin this wheel to find out what you've reincarnated as!

Remember to show this to all your friends :)

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the economist tweets this for the 31st time (i checked) since this article was published of december 19 last year. it uses the name of my city incorrectly and as more attentive people say was written by a certain russian who remained anonymous in the article. and it's also fucking nonsense. literally the only significant thing we did was toppling the statue of the empress catherine (so much culture, so much identity). fucking sorry for cancelling the russian empire's pissmarks. i just wonder what did he do, did he pay them, did he suck everyone's dick at the office? like wtf 31 times in barely two months?

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The Days’ Doings, London, April 13, 1872

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Fun fact: ginger curdles milk.

How do I know? Well, I’ve mixed ginger with milk. A lot, actually. It’s the main step of making ginger milk, which is…milk. With ginger. Curdled.

It’s delicious, by the way. Ginger has an enzyme called zingipain/zingibain/ginger protease, which is an enzyme that cuts proteins. It’s like rennet for cheese, allowing proteins in the milk to tangle together and form a solid. Unlike rennet, however, it does not come from young cows.

I like a firmer texture for my ginger milk, so I usually make a few bowls and add an egg or two, then steam them. Highly recommend.

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In case anyone is having a bad night

(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)

Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean 

Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe

Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay

Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden

Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)

Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)

Here and here are websites where you can play with sand

Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods

Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails

Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis

Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)

Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites

Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)

Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3

Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm

Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests

Here is a website of calm rain noise

Take a breath. It’s going to be okay, I promise.

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I don't think it's that complicated: men enforce rules on women, and then also mock women who adhere to these rules.

And they do mock women who don't adhere to the rules, because men mock women just for being women. It doesn't have to be logical or consistent. You can't behave a certain way and receive no criticism as a woman, this is a game you cannot win, and it is by design.

If makeup empowered women, men would have been against it.

Really radfems? Men aren't against makeup? They shame women for wearing makeup telling our faces are unrecognizable.

They shame women who are girly.

Well education empowers women so thus having power and being leaders but men are against them.

It's high time radfems stop seeing things according to men's opinion and respect women.

#rad

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Draw near, allies, for these are dark days for “kink-shaming”. At best, this is one of the whiniest, most pathetic and least helpful phrases to have entered the parlance of modern times – and at worst, it’s just another guy’s excuse for sexual abuse. It’s confusing. You try to be modern and post-conventional, and you end up enabling the most old-fashioned and conventional nastinesses of all.

Still, thank heavens for the parade of embattled famous men fighting kink-shaming’s corner. I have just one thing to say to all the lady authors, lady pop stars and lady actors out there. And that is: if you haven’t had an eye-wateringly expensive lawyer draft a statement about how consensual your sex with a tormented junior was, then are you really properly creative at all?

Fighting out of a Brooklyn detention centre, we have the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is on remand facing sex trafficking charges and about 120 lawsuits alleging drugging and sexual abuse, including of teenagers and minors. He denies the charges, some of which relate to his so-called freak-off parties. This week, Diddy’s lawyer’s take on the multiple federal charges was that the US government was trying “to police non-conforming sexual activity”. “The prosecution of Mr Combs is both sexist,” this lawyer hazarded, “and puritanical.” Righto.

Elsewhere, we have actor and oil scion Armie Hammer, #MeTooed back in the day over a number of sexual abuse and coercion allegations, plus a little light cannibalism talk – which he says was like being “left standing there naked in front of the world with all of your proclivities or kinks being judged by the world”. Despite police reports, no charges were brought, and Armie now observes of his downfall that “people were my bags of dope with skin on it”. Ah, ye olde sex addict, hoovering up his chosen substance – women – that just happens to have “skin on it”.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 is currently showing a documentary on the rock star Marilyn Manson, who has successfully ridden out years of grim abuse allegations, including by his much younger former partner, Evan Rachel Wood. The documentary contains some previously unaired interview footage, in which Manson declares: “I’m not into rape whatsoever … I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me. Rape is for cowards, for lazy people.” Certainly for other people.

But arguably the newsiest one this week concerns the author Neil Gaiman, subject of what might have been last summer’s dam-breaking Tortoise podcast, Master. Except, there are some dams that people – and fandoms – are hugely invested in keeping intact. It has taken till now for the follow-up, courtesy of New York Magazine, in the form of an investigation entitled There Is No Safe Word, which features eight young women alleging sexual assault, coercion and misconduct by Gaiman, six of them on the record.

Gaiman denies anything was non-consensual, and says that the claims contain “descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen”. He has remained largely hidden behind lawyers since the allegations surfaced last year, with one of these legal eagles telling Tortoise that “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful”. Was boundaried BDSM what was going on? The alleged victims say no, and they say it at complex length in the New York investigation.

Take the story told by Scarlett Pavlovich. Even unconventional people end up needing conventional things such as childcare, which Gaiman and his ex-wife Amanda Palmer seem to have decided was best obtained by asking women who were also fans. Aged 24, Pavlovich has arrived for her first day of work at Gaiman’s – he is 61 – to discover the child is in fact on a playdate. She has only known the author for a couple of hours when he suggests she takes a bath in his outdoor tub while he’s on a work call. Minutes after, he appears naked, and joins her, swiftly beginning to stroke her feet. According to the New York Magazine report, she tells him “she was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press.” Indeed, he does so to the point of anal penetration. “Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he did anyway. He said, ‘Call me “master”, and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl. You’re a good little girl.’” She goes home to Google #MeToo and Neil Gaiman. Yet in time, she also goes back to Gaiman and Palmer’s houses. And months later, a vulnerable young adult without a home and estranged from her own family, she is still stuck in this toxic cycle. And has still never been paid for all the childcare.

In our era, people have righteously debunked the myth of the perfect victim – but less so the myth of the perfect perpetrator. The perfect perpetrator is an evil stranger – yet sexual abuse is overwhelmingly likely to be carried out by someone you know, who you may be related to or in a relationship with, and who is pretty nice to you some of the time. These are complex and inconvenient truths, but they are truths.

Furthermore, there are perfect perpetrators in the public imagination. Harvey Weinstein, once he was exposed, was the perfect perpetrator. Physically repulsive – hey, it is what it is – and not actually famous in the world outside his professional community, he was the kind of 2D scumbag no civilian could possibly be invested in. People in the normal world will always be incalculably more relaxed about the exposure of a movie producer, a job they instinctively regard as commoditised, than they will be about losing any kind of artist, a job whose works have affected them over the course of many years. Perhaps this is why many fans of the master storyteller Neil Gaiman are refusing to listen to the less appealing, less magical accounts of those women who allege he took advantage of them.

As for Neil himself, I see Gaiman still can’t let go of the allyship argot, which frequently feels performative and knackered, but in the circumstances of this case comes off as actively ludicrous. Finally breaking the silence on Thursday, Gaiman said that he hadn’t commented thus far on the multiple, months-long stream of allegations, some of which he had allegedly sought to silence via NDAs, “out of respect for the people that were sharing their stories”.

Sharing their stories, if you please! Neil: some of them have “shared their stories” with Auckland and Devon and Cornwall police. Are you attempting to be an “ally” to your own alleged victims? Either way, great to find you holding space/checking your privilege for them. You’ll note that people like Neil even react to sexual abuse allegations in a superior way. Honestly, I’m feeling somewhat lesser, here. I’ve literally never given $60,000 or $275,000 to people I haven’t sexually assaulted so that I can – hang on, let me get my reading glasses on – help them get therapy/“make up some of the damage”. Having said that, I have always paid my nanny via PAYE, and have never attempted to have sex with her. I recommend it.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

This short article is sarcastic, serious, and at least low-triggering. It's the easiest and quickest to read about the basics so far, with brief info. on similar legal situations.

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New charms and mini sculpts plus a pair of gold lustre capped ceramic teeth on gold plated 21” and 22” necklaces now available at the Jonathon Bancroft-Snell Gallery! All work is under $100cad and starting at $25.

Domestic and International shipping available for all work seen after February 8th.

I also have many unsold pieces from my previous video post featuring other mini sculpts/charms available here!

Swing on by sometimes, they’re open every day of the week but Sunday! :-) 🏺🪴

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medieval peasant: I see... so, it is the case that there are many paintings within this magical book? it is not so strange after all.

me, trying to show him tumblr to scare him: I was kind of hoping this would be a bit more confusing to you

peasant, suddenly pointing at the screen: hark! cynocephali

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I finished listening to Tortoise's "Master" podcast about Gaiman tonight and i'm so… disgusted by him for real. Female socialisation is one hell of a thing because even though clinically i know he deserves nothing but contempt, i swear to god at some points i've felt almost bad for him. I mean, the sheer embarrassment of this situation and the fact that he had to lure women in with David Tennant or other famous people… It's so cringe worthy right? Pervy old man, can't accept he's unattractive, dresses all in black to give himself a genre and it doesn't even work that much. It's so ordinary. He's such a sad, pathetic dude.

But then, in that last episode you hear a recording of him as he tries to gaslight one of these women, a fan who he attempted to sleep with while being decades older than her. With his fake little emails where he attempts to pass himself off as a naive and shy schoolboy ("oOooH what's happening to me? you're so wonderful and strange and wonderful! oh i'm so bashful i'm repeating words! uwu"), and playing all sad and shocked over the phone and trying to make her believe she - a 20 something years old - was the one who tried to kiss him first and why would she do that if she didn't really want him? He would have never done a thing if she hadn't initiated! With the fake-trembling voice. It's so diabolical, but not even in a way that'd be impressive. He's SO unsubtle. He's not at all a particularly good manipulator. He just picked the easiest targets possible.

And that poor woman who had just divorced her husband, who had lost 20 pounds, was obviously emotionally fragile. I have to say that testimony really broke my heart. She was obviously still so upset and hurt as she was telling the journalists about his casual cruelty to her. Gaiman saw her fragility and pounced on it, and when the woman asked him what his wife would think about their romance, he basically told her she was just a fun fuck, after first comforting her with all these sweet romantic gestures. Even without the literal rape he pulled, i would want to spit on his face. What an absolute garbage human being. He deserves everyone to know who he is and hate him forever for it.

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It’s fascinating how JKR saying women/girls are oppressed based on our sex is enough to retroactively render everything she’s ever written irredeemably evil forever, but when Neil Gaiman is outed as a serial rapist, suddenly the discussion becomes “we should acknowledge that bad people can make really really really good art too!!!!” Being male must be a fucking trip.

Literally, and that post is still full of people tagging or commenting something like, "okAy bUt jK rOwLinG AckSHUlLy iS a BaD wRItEr!"

Like full disclosure my position on this subject is that the only reason you should not read a book is if you don't enjoy it; after that, if you want to add some criteria, like if you think the author's a "bad person" you don't wanna give money to or read what they have to say, it's between you and your god isn't it? And i don't think someone writing about dark issues or even disturbing things like Gaiman did is NECESSARY a sign that the writer is secretly a deranged sexual pervert who has hurt real people.

But the immediate respect and leniency accorded to Gaiman is so blatant, contrasted with the scorn JK Rowling has received for merely voicing an opinion. People hated her so much they bonded over it. They did not hesitate to play stupid with her books, on purpose, until they believed whole-heartedly in their own stupidity in order to convince others. And those who didn't buy the "goblins are actually just like Jews because they're BANKERS so JKR is ANTISEMITIC" piss poor takes kept it to themselves and just played along because they were too fucking scared of being ostracised. Misogyny is a plague.

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Some weird bird noises that I hope will brighten your day.