About Me:
Witch. LGBTQ+ advocate. Transwoman. Professional screenwriter. Madly in love.
WARNING: I post feminism, social justice, witchcraft, paganism, and writing advice primarily. Her/Hers pronouns. 18+ Only.
“two ghosts are making love
in the gender neutral bathroom of a gay bar
atop a throne lined with toilet paper
and grime. a cacophony of limbs
so beautiful, the concrete walls shudder
with envy. you’ve learned all the names
for this: a spectacle, a revolution,
a disgrace, but you never learned to be-
hold what you see before you. two ghosts
heaving their aliveness against
the fractured light, gasping all
the good air into their profane
lungs, sweat stippling
brown throats. breathtaking
as a forest fire. queer
as an unmarked grave.”
— Ally Ang, “More Americans Believe They’ve Seen a Ghost Than a Trans Person,” published in Five South
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
I see a lot of talk about how neurodivergence evolved and stayed in the gene pool because it was somehow ‘useful’ to our ancient ancestors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this theory, I would like to propose an alternative. A theory that we already have physical evidence for. Humans just love each other and care for each other. Don’t you think that a species that cared for it’s people while they recovered from broken bones, or nursed their elderly well beyond their ‘usefulness’ would leave a member out because they didn’t make eye contact, or couldn’t stay focused on a particular task, or whatever other trait you associate with neurodivergence? I really don’t.
Sure, maybe it was useful to have someone around who didn’t mind making arrowheads all day, or who knew absolutely everything about all of the local flora and fauna, or who keyed in on every little distraction. At the end of the day, though, these people weren’t kept around because they were useful, they were cared for because they were loved.
Women with big laughs, big smiles, big voices, big bodies, and even bigger personalities to match. Women that don’t care if they take up space with long strides and sit with their legs miles apart.
They give big hugs and big kisses, and they have big hearts. Big, proud women are amazing.
This posts includes trans women and excludes terfs, btw.
- Criticized the Jews for defending themselves against the Holocaust because he insisted that they should have committed public mass suicide in order to “shame” the Germans instead of fighting back. His exact words were, “But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
- Wrote an open letter to the British people in 1940 telling them to surrender to the Axis even if it mean accepting genocide.
- Was very anti-black. I hope you can stomach reading how he treated black people in South Africa. It’s fucking disgusting.
- Refused his wife life-saving medication (for religious reasons), but those religious reasons all of a sudden no longer applied to him when he was in a similar position.
- Refused to have sex with his wife for the last 38 years of their marriage. He felt that in order to test his commitment to celibacy, he would have beautiful young women (including his own great niece) lie next to him naked through the night. His wife, whom he described as looking like a “meek cow” was no longer desirable enough to be a solid test.
- Believed that Indian women who were raped lost their value as a human.
- During his time as a dissident in South Africa, he discovered that a young male was harassing two of his female followers. He responded by cutting the girls’ hair off to ensure the “sinner’s eye” was “sterilized.” He later boasted about the incident in his writings, pushing the message to all Indians that women should carry responsibility for sexual attacks upon them.
- Argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honor.
- Believed that menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality.
- Waged a war against contraceptives, labeling Indian women who used them as whores.
- Held the attitude that women were simply creatures that could bring either pride or shame to the men who own them.
Books: Sex and Power by Rita Banerji, On Pacifism by Derrick Jensen, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
Also literally went on hunger strike to prevent the new Indian constitution from outlawing the caste system, because he believed in the idea that people are born into the wealth/privilege or poverty/privation they find themselves in. Patronisingly referred to the so-called Untouchables as “children of god”. It took another half century to get caste outlawed, and of course its still deeply embedded in the culture and people are still getting murdered for transgressing its theoretically illegal rules.
Fucking disgusting that we still have a holiday for him anyways.
Wasn’t he also an actual pedo?
Fucking hell, every Indian citizen needs to read this.
REBLOG.
Yes I HATE Gandhi with a passion and I believe Godse did the nation a huge favour in killing him! No, I don’t care if you disagree with me.
