#i don’t really wanna tag this with warnings because. i don’t think scars should inherently need warnings just being talked about because

[beaniebabs]

anyway unrelated to everything but just because i remembered. i Hate the way people talk about scars. like they’re Dirty and Bad and Ugly and if you have a scar it’s Gross and you’re Gross. i have Many scars and! seeing people talk shit about even hypothetical scars they COULD have in the future isn’t fun.

i don’t really Think about it a lot because it’s been there as long as i can remember and it’s not in an open location but. i have a pretty big, kinda jagged scar on my stomach from when i had surgery as a baby. it’s not too long— maybe 3 inches?— but if i’m not wearing something to cover it it’s Very noticeable.

i also have a bunch of stretch marks! they’ve mostly faded to be basically my skin color because of how long i’ve had them, but they’re still clearly there. you can see them, you can feel them. plus all the other little scars i have that are from things i can’t even remember.

if i’m lucky, i’ll be able to get top surgery relatively soon. it won’t be one of the “small” procedures, like peri-areolar or keyhole. i’ll very likely have to get buttonhole, double incision, or inverted-t, depending on what would be best for me medically. the scars aren’t gonna be anywhere near unnoticeable. and that should be okay.

people shouldn’t be afraid of scars. people shouldn’t be disgusted by scars. they can happen to anyone anywhere at any time. they’re natural. they’re inherently neutral physical traits that a person can have. even a close relative of mine wanted a natural birth so she wouldn’t have c-section scars because she thinks they’re ugly.

you don’t have to love them, you don’t have to think they’re beautiful. just. stop spreading this. fear and hatred of scars. and stop spreading fear and hatred of people’s physical traits in general. i dunno. it’s tiring seeing everyone hate things that are inherently a part of you all the time.

[afewmarvelousthoughts]

Only For A Moment Ch. 24

Master List: @afewmarvelousthoughtsadmin

Pairing: Bucky X Reader

Summary: For most of your life you’d been able to keep your abilities a secret, that is until Hydra got wind of you. After years of being in their clutches, you break out when The Avengers expose SHIELD/Hydra. Since then, you’ve been on the run. Things are going as well as you could hope when you see a familiar face… Could the Winter Soldier really be in Bucharest too?

Warnings: Past physical violence(ish), FEELS.

A/N: You didn’t think a happy chapter was going to follow up the doozy of 23 did you? Because... yeaaaah that’s not what’s happening. Though, I have to say I really loved writing this chapter for reasons I’m not even 100% sure of. Maybe because the back and forth attempts at support are something I’m all too familiar with? Maybe I just really like circling back to things I implied earlier in he story? Both? Who knows. 

Also, if you’re tagged (and still want to be) can you just sound off? It’s showing me that your tags are working but then it seems folks aren’t getting notified and I want to be sure you’re getting the heads up. 

Tags are open!

@bluegirlusa1 @l0kisbitch @tazzi-baby @disagreetoagree @woodyandbuzz20-01 @mooniightbucky  @soulless-and-sarcastic @saundrasays @breezy1415 @creepshowzombae  @alyssaj23 @mywinterwolf @wonderlandmind4 @fairislesheets @anamcg317 @buckaroo-barness  @jazztherebel @peachthatdrinkslemonade @regulusirius  @auskitty @babyimp1967 

The chair was something you tried not to think of. Of everything they put you through that one was the easiest to push from your mind. Everything after a round in that was fuzzy, like looking at the world through a foggy window while being underwater.

The taste of the rubber, the pain, that you remembered clearly enough. Some sort of electroshock you assumed. You suspected it was in those times that you had learned things. Languages, programming, combat, espionage. Because you had no solid recollection of actually being taught these skills they were just… there. Plus, besides using it for punishment (usually a last resort) there seemed to be a schedule, a method to it, at the beginning of your time with Hydra that tapered off after a time.

“Bucky?” He seems so far away. The look of terror is still there but his gaze shifts from your face to your arm. He pulls it straight and runs a finger over the track marks tucked inside your elbow. Instinctively you try and pull back, your heart begins to pick up speed, he holds you examining them. You curl your other arm protectively against your chest. He releases you and you curl into yourself.

“Please?” He reaches for your other arm and you reluctantly comply. More track marks. So many needles, and tests, and monitors. Days, maybe weeks, spent physically ill body burning and freezing and aching. He chews on his bottom lip before releasing you and bolting off the bed. “Come here,” He walks toward the kitchen and stands by the counter. You don’t move and he waves you over.

“You’re scaring me.”

For a split second, he looks bereft before his brows set at a determined angle, “I’m sorry but really,” again he gestures. Tentatively you rise up, the familiar feeling of dread curling in your stomach.

“Stand here,” he points to the living room side of the counter and takes the opposite kitchen side. Leaning down he rests his right elbow on the counter hand up. “Come on.”

“You want me to… arm wrestle you?” To say you were confused would be an understatement.

“Yup,” a crooked smile rises. “Humor me.”

“I feel like you have an unfair advantage here.”

He snorts, “That’s what I wanna find out. Don’t use your power, just your strength.” You squint at him for a second before getting into position and clasping his hand. “Give me all you got.”

You’re certain he’s hardly trying, but once you actually apply yourself he begins to move. His eyes lock onto yours. You feel him advance on you and you exert more force, the counter creaking under your elbows, you manage to push him back. It hits you that he is trying… You’re distracted by this realization and he begins to regain ground. Before you know it your hand slams painfully into the counter. 

“Told you, unfair advantage,” you say in a light tone, rubbing the back of your hand. Any other humor leaves you when you look back to him. His right arm is across his chest, left covering his mouth, staring at you.  

“No… you should have lasted a fraction of that.” His tone is so somber. The dread in your stomach growing. You just stare at him, feeling frozen.  

You didn’t notice him next to you but you're in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, “for everything.” His hand gently rubs your back and you shudder against him, arms still curled against your chest. Suddenly you pull away staring down at your hands. You knew… had known they had done something to you but you didn’t want to face it…

“What did they do to me?” You say, barely a whisper body trembling, chills racing over your skin.

“They were making a weapon.” His hands slide over your own, holding them tight. “I’m sorry,” he says again, his voice sounding like it’s about to shatter.

“You didn’t do this,” your voice is shaky.

He shakes his head and paces away, hands running through his hair. The muscles in his back ripple with tension. “I did though…” Your heart stops, you’re certain it literally stops beating because everything around you goes unnaturally quiet until he says, “After they… made me… made him… After it worked… they always wanted more…” Air rushes back into your lungs and you feel the reassuring thundering of your heart.

“Look at me,” your voice is stronger than you feel as you approach him. He turns slowly, lifts his eyes reluctantly to your own. “You did not do this. This, none of this was your choice.”

“Still…” his fingers gently run up your arm to the marks left by countless needles. “If I hadn’t…”

“What?” taking his hands in your own. “If you hadn’t what, Buck?” Something flashes across his face at this shortened version of his name before vanishing. “If you hadn’t survived? If you hadn’t been strong enough?” He looks away and you cup the left side of his face, forcing him to look at you. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“It’s just… You didn’t deserve this…”

“And you did?!”

“I… I don’t know.” The mix of rage, confusion, and pain on his face feels like a knife being twisted in your chest. “I was a soldier, Y/N,” he gestures to his chest with his left hand. “Even before… I did things I wasn’t… but you… you were-“

“I was a thief, a con woman, a liar, a fraud-”

“And… after…” his eyes wander to that scar and your blood boils for a different reason.

“Do not pity me, Barnes,” his brows raise a bit. “Ever,” you pull your hands back and step away. It was something you couldn’t bear, even before Hydra. How many relationships had ended because they only saw you as a victim, someone to be handled with kid gloves lest you break.

“I don’t. I wouldn’t,” his tone is measured. “I only meant you deserve something good, not more… pain.”

Tears burn your eyes but you won’t allow them to fall, “I had something good, for just a little while…” And it’s true. The little family you carved out with Nix was incredible. You approach him and grasp his hands tight, “And I think this may be something good too.”

His hands squeeze yours but when he looks at you there’s no light in his eyes, “I wish I could tell you, you’re right.” He lifts his left hand and traces the scar on your right cheek, “The truth is I don’t know how much good is left in me…” Your eyes narrow and he tries to pull away. Your grip tightens, and for extra measure, you wind your power around your clasped hands.

“You have been nothing but good to me… For no reason.” He won’t look at you but you won’t let him go, can’t let him go. “You’re a good man James Barnes,” now his eyes shoot to you, filled with some emotion you can’t name, “with a good heart…” A wan smile flickers across his lips.

Slowly he leans down to kiss you. At first soft, so gentle it’s barely there. You wind your right hand into his hair, pulling his lips hard against your own, your kiss hungry. Every fiber of your being burns with desire, not only for him but to make him see himself the way you did. You were never convinced of your own inherent goodness. Even before Hydra, you had always viewed yourself as someone with a less than stellar moral compass… But some part of you knew that before the war, before being unmade, Bucky was a good man.

Suddenly you want him. All of him. You want to forget talk of trauma and torture, of good and bad. All you want is to feel him. Your body grinds against him, you nip at his lip, and feel him stir against you. Your hands wander to his hip bones and begin tracing a path southward.

He gently lays his hands over yours and pulls back shaking his head slightly. “No,” his eyes are cloudy, voice a soft rasp. Your hands stop their journey and you look up at him as he straightens.

Cupping your face in his large hands he just looks at you for a moment, the space between his brows creased. His thumbs softly stroke your cheeks, his voice is thick with emotion, “Could… Can I just hold you for a while… would that be ok?” You can only smile gently and nod, unable to trust your voice to hold steady for a simple, ‘yes.’

Without another word he scoops you up, his grip pressing you tight against his chest. A seemingly unnecessary gesture considering you’re steps from the bed but there’s a sweetness to it.

Tenderness had never been your way. Even how you loved had been hard-edged, more of an escape than anything else. This was something different. Because while seconds before you were ready to fuck him senseless, to use him to blot out the darker thoughts in the same way you had used others, as he settles down on the bed, his back against the wall, holding you like he had that first night, you were never so happy to have heard the word, ‘no.’

[gender-pages-blog]

CAMPAIGN:

1. 

I Want You To Fuck All The Women In Me The female heart carries courage in the chambers that pump blood into lifeless souls, for it has learnt to surreptitiously push itself through tsunamis that dismantled strategically established structures with a mere hair flip. It knows how to put make-up in crowded metros, when all the women wonder why she's so obsessed with the idea of putting up make-up, that she's doing it here in front of everyone, when she could have done it within the confines of her home. Or wait, eyebrows raised, with questions on their otherwise serene morning faces, "why do you need make-up when you're beautiful the way you're?" To the women going to office without wake-up, standing firm amidst unsettling remarks, "your eyes look patchy and droopy", "are you sick or didn't get enough sleep?"Her dark circles are easily ignored evidences,of all the nights she was up convincing her family, to let her go to another town for her undergraduate degree, and from the time she spent breastfeeding her hungry daughter in the middle of the night, or from ensuring that socks don't keep falling off the little feet of her son. To the women who spent 6 hours dressing up, fixing it, re-doing it, deciding it's all been done wrong, so staring over all again, imitating the women on the Internet, finding just a fraction of the perfection she was looking for. We know how years of societal ridicule telling you that you're shorter, darker, heavier, slimmer, taller, than other women or than what men would have liked, has reduced you to a zombie feeding off on other people's shallow validation, and how deprived you're of the goddess that sits in your chest singing victory songs to the gods in heaven, proclaiming how it learnt to fight, from the time when she was a ball of blood and flesh in her mother's womb, hearing carefully drawn strategies to strangle her before she can come into the world only to learn what the world will snatch from her, from the time when genital mutilation was the only way out to keep her from letting things in, from the time when marriage stumbled like an unprecedented warning call over her ears when the only thing she wanted to hear was, "well done, you're meant for great things!", but she forced herself to learn each word of the "Guide To A Happy Married Life", learning how to find happiness in her husband's happiness, and her so-called "conflict of duties" didn't permit her to utter a word to her parents, because daughters can be scarred and sacred and scared, but no matter what, they don't come back home once married because they were never yours to begin with, from the time when she could claim the streets and dance naked celebrating her glory, being unrestrained and beautiful and ugly and melodramatic without giving a fuck to any tag that tried to push itself down her throat slowly choking her and claiming everything she could have been, from the time when liking pink and hugs and romantic movies were blurred lines segregating the dumb whores from the intellectual bitches, from the time when Holi (the festival of colours) was an excuse of a festival for men to feed off her in socially approved ways, leaving marks of their convenient pride over the skin that she proudly wore, over the skin that just wanted to see the colours of life, they showed her the colours of their souls when she was just 7, from the time when they told her she would never be able to walk or dance because she is too fat to move like that and has flat feet that will stifle her aspirations to keep pace, from the time when being beautiful was a warning bell that would never stop ringing and being ugly was "desperation dressed subtle", from the time when standing up for yourself was being a feminazi-sick-hysterical-neurotic-abused-crazy woman, and being silent was ignorant-dumb-weak-powerless-submissive, from the time when glancing through books under bed covers were plans to destroy established civilisations and control systems meant to maintain exploitative structures, from the time when letting a man touch you wherever he wants however he wants defined how much you loved him by surrendering your body-mind-soul at his feet even though he refuses to let you stroke his hair when he "doesn't feel like it", from the time when biting my lip was sexual and uncovering my breasts could wreck havoc  over the most dead faces in the room, from the time when you divorced me and left me stranded in the middle of the road with your child in my womb and I still tried my best to ensure that our daughter could have a relationship with her father despite the abuse that became my everyday life, to the time when social media where I find the illusion of being able to say what I feel, is a careful traitor trading my messenger (a place to initiate communication) in the hands of men, who can't resist telling a woman they don't even know, how much they wanna be frandz with her, and fuck her under the streetlight in a car that stinks of their unfriendly odour, but they say that the hostile smell is of her unclean and hairy vagina, wait but try naming the patriarchal instruction manual that told you to equate a woman's genitals with roses and lemons and peach, so I can have that shit banned, from the time when travelling alone meant being a money bank deliberately putting itself on sale, to the time when a simple activity like travelling alone was enough to get me called "rebellious",when it was nothing more than a statement of my power, defying your suffocating nerve-cracking fear-installing soul-wrenching systems, from the time when leaving my hair open meant a rude declaration of my recklessness on an otherwise warm winter day, and how sitting with my legs spread wide grants you commodious certification to get right between them no matter how much I scream, from the time when sex meant your entire being reducing me to pieces with the blink of an eye, without taking the time to understand what my body wants and how it responds, when it meant letting hormones dictate the anxieties of my confused head and shivering soul, I think today is your day to fuck me, show me how you will fuck all the women in me, because I swear that though the women in me are tired, they will fuck the fuck out of your fragile ego rusting at their fingertips, if you take a close look at us,you will see how we are so tired our bones would've given up on us if we didn't have this perpetual sadness keeping them together,our wombs would have refused to nurture lives if we didn't push hard enough to expel out lives that could live by everything you wanted to kill,our blood would refuse to flow if you weren't following our unchaste moves with the vigilance of a midnight cop, look at us, my dear, we're about to change the world, the tables are turning, the lights are getting dim, keep your shoulders down, don't grin like that in front of me, stop your suggestive wink emojis, step down from that convenient biased system-granted CEO chair that your ass is so accustomed to, your time's up boy, your time's up my boy.

2.

Thing I learnt after being in an all girls college:

1) It could be extremely uncomfortable to sit with your legs close to each other, as the touching/rubbing of thighs causes sweat and irritation. And contrary to popular belief, women feel absolutely comfortable keeping their legs apart and airy, when they aren't being monitored by sperm-possessors under the gender-conforming systematic apparatus that sexualises vaginas, hence reinforcing the idea that the vagina should be carefully hidden at all times, as sitting with your legs open grants legitimate authority to the privileged sex to get right between them or puts the sex in their eyes. DAYUM GIRL SPREAD THEM LEGS WHENEVER YOU WANT HOWEVER YOU WANT 2) Women tend to love each other without any inherent impulse to harbour hate or jealously over how the other woman looks/what the other woman possesses. In-fact, when they're allowed to express themselves in a free setting (without being headed by men in lines and classrooms), they recognise their power to RESIST/MANIPULATE systems that strategically reproduce similar societies while subtly accommodating the idea of a progressive flux. 3) In an environment where you don't have the  consistent fear of being groped/harassed/raped shoved down your throat with every breath you take, women LEARN TO UNLEARN pre-conceived ideas of living in bodies, that are pre-determined crime spots, with socially approved criminals, who are just doing what nature has conveniently assigned them to do, and since women are the ones defying the law by resisting the order of nature, anything happening or the mere lack of it is caused either by the inability/ability of women to have caused otherwise. Reading, discussing, sharing (without the fear of threatening traditionally empowered groups), often enables women to work their way through contexts and scenarios while reclaiming their power to bargain with patriarchy and challenge discourses. 4) Timely acceptance of your sexual impulses is the key to recognition of manufactured consent. Only you own your the body you inhabit, and if anyone tries to alter your state of consciousness, refusing to take the time to understand how your body functions and what it really needs, you can show them the unapologetic exit gate from your phenomenal life. I think what I'm trying to say is that I didn't know how the fear of being physically weaker, the fear of being groped/raped/beaten, altered my mind and body so much on an everyday basis, until I stepped into a world where I was allowed to run free without anyone discussing the weird shape of my ass when it moves too fast, or without anyone commenting on my nipples being visible because I didn't wear a bra, or my dark lipstick shade being a subtle invitation to invade everything familiar. I slowly learnt to voice my opinion without a louder (ignorant) voice suppressing mine. I learnt to wear crop-tops without the fear of my waist-line being a mid-day party for hungry hands. I learnt everything by unlearning what FEAR, had almost gradually, with the abruptness and the consistency of a moving fan, injected into my craving nerves. And for the first time, the grass was greener on my side. For the first time, the grass on my side wasn't short"er" or weak"er" or less"er". For the first time, the grass on my side was all that there was, and I was told to run on it freely for as long as I wanted to, without the other side calling the act of running, sexual or rebellious or inappropriate. Of-course, my hair flew and my boobs shook, but it was all okay. For the first time, I was complete. I was whole. I was enough. For the first time, sentences began with, "if she does this/does that, then..." You'll probably tell me I shouldn't have gone to an all girls' college because it alienates the viewpoint of the other gender, and I would look at you with puppy eyes amused at the spontaneity of the moment, where you never realised how the OTHER viewpoint is all that has existed since the beginning of time.  When male viewpoint is all you've known all your life, a certain distance is needed to give you the permission (as it's said) to have your own. To let you have your own as an independent entity, without existing in relation to a fear-installing, soul-wrenching, gender-reinforcing, system. And unless you have your OWN, can you fully accept the OTHER?

Artist: Avnika Gupta Sociology Honours; Lady Shri Ram College For Women, Columnist; Berlin ArtParasites & Thought Catalog

The Redesigned, Renovated and Refurbished project is running a campaign on social media where we invite all of you to transgress, embrace and showcase your true gender performance by wearing whatever you would have/ already do, had their been no regulation and the different spaces you would occupy in those clothes.