#like the insane misogyny in saying it's just true crime brain

[autumnrory]

"women are crazy for thinking they could ever be attacked in their home" is certainly a Tumblr Take

[homosexualslug]

Sam Questions, made by @gaysuperhell and tagged by @blahdose(gaysuperhell this is the best tumblr questionnaire I have ever seen thank u for ur service) - Sibling status (younger, middle, older, only child)*

*TECHNICALLY oldest but was raised separately so I have only child energy - How long have you been stanning Sam for: Honestly since I started watching 2007/S3ish, I always vibed with Sam more than Dean. Nowadays I'm a SPN Ladies stan first and equal parts Cas and Sam stan second, Dean is just the most fun to psychoanalyze - Favorite SPN Season, but if the only criteria was Sam’s hair: SEASON EIGHT! It's so lush and beautiful and POWERFUL! Sometimes I just stare at it instead of paying attention to whatever's happening! - Favorite Sam-centric episode: Mystery Spot is still a fave because of him, boy really went through the spectrum of human emotion in those 50 minutes. Runner-ups: After School Special, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Just My Imagination (I have a soft spot for young Sam lore) -Favorite Sam era: Season 4! He is no longer baby, he want power! But only because he thinks he's saving the world! Also, can't call it a whole arc but the taste we got of Samwitch throughout S13-S15 makes yearn for more. -Favorite song you would/have put in a Sam playlist: Don't have a Sam playlist but do have a very Sam-esque OC so tie between "Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea" by Missio, "Dark Speed" by Failure, and "Undefeated" by Incubus with honorable mention to Marina's "Bubblegum Bitch"

-Any ships you may like to mention: Saileen since Day 1, SamRuby (yeah yeah I know but look), Samwena (enjoy them as platonic mentor/mentee too), Sastiel (also enjoy as chaotic besties but damn if they wouldn't have been healthier for each other), Sam and Max Banes had potential - If you could steal one thing from Sam’s wardrobe, it would be: Purple dog shirt or the Hoodie™️ from 15x06 - You must have some intense headcanons you need to talk about, tell me one Sam hc that drives you insane: Stealing from HBO SPN - that Sam's a health nut because fruits/veggies don't have salt and won't make his throat burn because demon blood! - Complete the sentence: If Sam cishet, then WHY....: queer allegory about being kicked out by his dad and having something wrong with him? HMMM - Favorite unhinged Sam moment: Outside of all of Season 4 I'd also say 1) exorcising a half-dozen demons at once in My Bloody Valentine 2) third act of Mystery Spot and 3) literally shooting GOD - Tell me something about the HBO Sam that lives in your brain: Salt allergy, reflex whispering "christo" to see if hurts, angel healing makes him sick, etc. - Biggest injustice Supernatural commited against Sam (be as brief or as ranty as you desire): Boy oh boy 1) Ignoring most of his post-S7 trauma (Gadreel, BMOL torture, Lucifer, losing the hunters, etc) because the writers relied on him bouncing back faster than Dean 2) Never letting him know THE Voicemail was fake! 3) Blurry Wife because the misogyny of it all is so 2005 4) Being blamed for the apocalypse, being soulless, stopping hunting, etc. 5) The fact that Lucifer came back so many times and he didn't get to kill him ONCE as a treat

Also this is more @ the fandom, but how much Sam get ignored when talking about parenting Jack! Sam, who nurtured him and showed him kindness from Day 1! Who taught him how to use his abilities! Who didn't become what Lucifer wanted him to be and only wanted the same for Jack! - Oh no, the writers forgot to give Jess a personality! Now it’s up to you. Tell me, what was Jess like: True crime fan, super competitive at board games, got into law to help the little man, bisexual

- And finally, just say something about him that makes you smile ♥ : That he believes no one is truly beyond saving! That you can always choose to be a better person! That you decide who you are, no one else! Also, the fact that I got my first Bisexual Haircut as an excuse to cosplay him (thank u sam for being part of my queer journey)

Tagging @leydhawk @justsayingit @fangurl and any other Sam fans who follow me!

[madamspeaker]

It’s not a “gate” - The hair/salon thing

I’ve addressed the salon thing in a couple of asks, but I wanted to take a moment to just go through the whole thing separate of those because what this saga has highlighted is a complete failure of journalists to do their work, and the undercurrent of misogyny that perpetuates both journalistic discourse, and how women must present themselves, especially if a public figure.

(This is long, so to spare your dashboards it’s under a cut)

Let’s start with the facts. Nancy’s usual stylist wasn’t available for Monday, so she/he recommended someone else. Nancy’s office contacted him last weekend (Nancy only returned to SF some time on Friday), and asked if it was possible to do her hair. The thing to note at this moment is that the rules governing salons in California started to change from last Friday. The governor had announced limited indoor openings, but to confuse matters some localities were still imposing tighter restrictions. Nancy’s office checked with the stylist, who told them that the rules permitted one person in at a time. He then asked the salon owner who he rented a chair from if he could go into the premises and do the appointment on Monday. The owner agreed to his request on the Saturday. Fast forward to Monday afternoon - Nancy gets her hair done before doing a television interview on MSNBC, and then on Tuesday the owner cries “outrage!!!” to Fox News, bringing along with her a seconds long bit of footage that shows Nancy with her mask around her neck. Naturally the whole thing explodes on Twitter and then across other media (several versions of the story made the top ten shared links on Facebook).

What followed was a failure of journalism to ask follow up questions about the clearly odd parts of the salon owner’s account as relayed by Fox News (a red flag in of itself). In her interview with Fox she admitted she had known about the appointment in advance, but no one thought to ask why she let the appointment go ahead if it so offended and outraged her - she did own the place afterall, it’s not like Nancy had keys or barged in. Likewise, no one thought to ask where the rest of the salon footage was. Why only release seconds worth which rather conveniently showed Nancy with her mask down, and partially hidden under her chin? Could it be that she had worn the mask the rest of the time. No one in the media thought to ask this. It seemed fairly clear to most sensible people on Tuesday night that something with off with the salon owner’s tale of outrage, but the media pretty much took the Fox News version of events at verbatim. Only USA Today raised the points I just did, but alas, they buried them in their write up.

Wednesday saw Nancy fight back, acknowledging that she took responsibilty for trusting the salon (when perhaps she should have had someone else verify what they had been told), but ask yourselves this, would you have verified it elsewhere? She had been to this salon before with a stylist, they were local, she trusted them, and in a situation in which the law was changing, it makes perfect and reasonable sense to ask the professionals in that industry what their status is. On this point there have been plenty of indignant people and bots on Twitter up in arms that Nancy didn’t apparently know the regulations in SF, but a) she didn’t make those regulations (as some seem to think), b) she spends just as much if not more time in D.C., and c) she has about 100 other things on her plate in any given hour, that salon regulations in SF are probably somewhere near 120 on her list after deal with Covid-19, Trump, win the election, save the USPS, try to get a stimulus bill, deal with the federal budget which will need a CR to prevent a shutdown (minutes after I hit publish on this it was announced she had reached a deal with Mnuchin to avoid a shutdown), restore in-person inteligence briefings, file an appeal in the McGahn case (again), Bill sodding Barr,, Russian bounties on US soldiers and so on. She has an insanely stressful job at the moment, her staff too, and it seems more than reasonable for staff/her to ask a professional in the industry about the regulations on salons, when such regulations were pretty confusing to most people last weekend anyway. Nancy’s only apparent “crime” in this instance was to trust the word of the industry pro.

Then of course we have the “she’s not wearing a mask” portion of this debacle. Not one journalist has asked where the rest of the footage is. We see Nancy walk from the bowl to another room, wet hair, phone in hand, and the mask around her neck (slightly hidden by her chin), but we never got the footage of her walking to the bowl, or any other footage from what was definitely more than a 4 second long appointment. Could it possibly be that she had indeed been wearing a mask the rest of the time - that she wasn’t just wearing it around her neck as some sort of foulard meets choker fashion statement. People have asked, “Why did she pull it down?”, and to that I will say, probably any one of three or four reasons. She uses a clip at the back of her neck to secure her masks rather than the ear loops. Maybe it was in the way and the stylist asked her to pull it down. Maybe she had trouble breathing with her face covered and head back. Maybe she didn’t want to get it wet. The point here is that it was around her neck, suggesting that she had been compliant until that fateful video captured moment. The media again though have run with the Fox News narrative that she had no mask. For one, it’s actually visible in the footage, and two, they are blatantly disregarding what they themselves know to be true - that Nancy has been wearing a mask for the last five months. We have the footage and photographs to prove it, not to mention the press also know that she takes down her mask to talk at her pressers etc. The press are playing stupid on this point to satisfy some both sides need in an election that so far has Joe Biden with a good lead. Their wilful obtusity is purely to inject some drama into things on the Dem side for clicks because nothing at present is sticking to Biden. All this leads to me to the misogyny.

I caught part of a radio interview yesterday in which two male hosts had to have it explained to them as to why a woman in the public eye might need a hair stylist more than once a week. One of the men had been perplexed as to why if Nancy needed her hair done she hadn’t just got it taken care of in D.C. were salons are open. It never entered his brain that no amount of hair spray is going to keep a hairstyle in place for at least 3 days (when Nancy was last in D.C.), or that she might need to lie down to sleep, or that hair does actually need washed. Likewise, it never occured to either of them that Nancy turning up to an television interview with anything other than styled hair would be a news story in itself, because here’s the rub, women are damned for makeup and hairstyling and thought vain and shallow, and they’re damned if they don’t put makeup on and get their hair done, especially for television (we all remember the “omg” reactions when Hillary turned up to an event days after the election in 2016 with a bare face). The last couple of days have been full of this crap, with men (looking at you Don Lemon and the SF Chronicle editorial board) especially saying Nancy should apologise for the salon episode. Why should she? She did what any reasonable person would do and asked about the rules. Her error was to take the salon at their word, but by today’s logic the salon’s lie is Nancy’s fault. I have seen more than one man on Twitter admit the facts of the case and still say “she should take the hit”. Would they say this of a man who had been lied to, framed, and the footage sold to a hostile media company? I think not.

And then of course there is the salon owner herself. The stylist released a statement last night backing Nancy’s side of events up. He also revealed that the owner, so “outraged” by Nancy’s appointment, had in fact been opening up illegally since April, had been forgoing masks, and been forcing stylists to work. What also emerged is that the owner had let her licence lapse on the premises back in May (so Nancy had not ended her business as she claimed), and was in the middle of relocating to Fresno -- something the press have gilbly ignored as they report how she has been hounded out of town because of Nancy, and forced to move. Let me say this, not even the IRA at the peak of The Troubles could get people to move that quick, and they had guns. And then there’s the gofundme - which popped up less than 24hrs after she handed the tape to Fox. Naturally the blurb is a sorry tale of woe, of a supposedly single mother forced to move because of the evil Speaker of the House. No mention that she owns three salons, that she’d let the licence lapse on one anyway, is opening one in Fresno, loves her guns (and those ain’t cheap) and took a PPP loan of $12,000 wihilst operating illegally. By the way, at the time of writing this, the gofundme has raised over $80k for her -- which shows you how Trumpers will buy into any bullshit, and how Nancy is a fundraising powerhouse regardless of your party affliation lol.

I appreciate this has been a rather long read, and if you made it this far, thanks! Nancy didn’t do anything wrong other than take the word of a salon in good faith. Should she have known the regulations herself? Maybe, but she has the kind of crazy and stressful life most of us can’t even begin to imagine, and unlike the Presidency, the Office of Speaker doesn’t come with personal maid services thrown in, or a whole West Wing of staff. End of the day, once out of that office, Nancy has to do all that normal life stuff that the rest of us do - shop, go to the post office, buy clothes etc., and now in the Covid era get ready for tv interviews herself rather than a studio stylist do it. Her mistake was to trust someone who has it turns out saw a chance to have a moment of fame, stick one to the woman she ignorantly blamed for the lockdown, and make some money from gullible Trumpers. I don’t know how this story will play out in the coming days. Ice cream lasted a week, spurred on by the far-left and then the far-right. This may have more staying power as Trump desperately seeks some kind of mud to stick to Dems, and with nothing sticking to Biden at present, his 2016 playbook (and the even older GOP one) of blame a woman (in this case Nancy) has been deployed. The problem of course is that Trump isn’t running against Nancy -- but as the press have so depressingly showed, that fact hasn’t stopped them from elevating one trip to a salon above 180k+ dead, Melania using a prvate email server (!!!, I mean come the fuck onnnnnnn, this after 2016!!!?!?!?), or Trump telling people to committ a felony and vote twice.