Fucking controversial statement I guess but “vaginas and uteruses have historically been and still frequently are a site of patriarchal violence and oppression and therefore people reclaiming agency over their own bodies and genitalia is a vital step towards equality” and “trans women are women and feminism must be trans-inclusive” are not contradictory statements and the importance of one does not invalidate the importance of the other
Upchuck the black vulture (Chuck for short). Happy Halloween!
I’d never thought I’d say this, but that is a very cute vulture.
You might be surprised at how cute vultures can be! While Chuck is a little uncomfortable about large crowds, he is super cuddly with people he trusts and is a total ham for the camera. I’ve only gotten the chance to hang out with him a few times, but he’s very clever and a joy to work with!
(here’s the original post, plus another picture, so we can stop reblogging the repost)
the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
reblog if you want bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, to manifest in your kitchen and roast your terrible choices in wallpaper
this post caused [reads smudged writing on hand] bill watterson? to physically manifest in my house
As a skeptic, I find these kinds of scenarios just as irritating, because in my book, and those of the skeptics I associate with, the idea is that one doesn’t doubt there was an experience, its what that experience is that’s in question. “I don’t doubt you saw something, but saying what it is will require investigation” and all that.
If anything, the skeptic is the one who should be pushing for them to go to a hotel for the night, because carbon monoxide poisoning produces the effects of a haunting.
So if your spouse, who is spending more time at home than you are, is reporting scary inexplicable shit, then the first place a skeptic’s mind is going to go is something in the environment causing it. Probably carbon monoxide, but there’s all kinds of gases and molds that can cause hallucinations, not to mention infrasound if the acoustics are just right. Regardless, anything that can cause you to see Bill Watterson materialize in your kitchen is probably dangerous, and the solution to that problem, be it a legitimate ghost or an infestation of ergot in the wallpaper, is to leave the dangerous area until the problem is identified and dealt with.
None of the creepy stuff from hauntings is really stuff you’d want to ignore even with its mundane causes. Even if it does come down to a 100% ‘in your head’ kind of thing, that means the house is causing a sharply negative psychological reaction and you shouldn’t stay there.
I’d totally dig the reverse film, though. Believer spouse is too stubborn to be chased out by the ghost, while the skeptic spouse is pulling their hair out because they’ve bought this money pit that just develops one problem after the other.
I mean, seriously
Most of our early magic books? Tales of seeing ghosts, demons, feeling sudden temperature shifts, hallucinations, seeing aliens and angels and all sorts of stuff? Feeling like someone is watching you, feeling suddenly inexplicable paranoid? Feeling tired, forgetting things, things ‘moving themselves’ or disappearing even though you KNOW you put it down on the counter earlier?
These can, and often do, happen for two major reasons: undiagnosed forms of epilepsy that do NOT cause the kinds of seizures on TV (often misdiagnosed as migrained), and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Guess what a lot of people like Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, Gardener, and others were doing in the 1800s and early 1900s? Having secret rituals. Indoors. Burning charcoal and wood and other things. Depleting oxygen indoors. With poor ventilation. With chimney and furnance problems they would never have been able to know about, carbon monoxide flooding the room. OF COURSE those people claimed to have powerful spiritual experiences!
i’ll say again that the reason i have a veritable obsession w fatphobia is that people with eating disorders (the deadliest mental illnesses) cannot recover within a fatphobic framework. it doesn’t work. we must relinquish our attempts to control our weight entirely if we want to be free of the disorder.
the clinicians, researchers, and health officials who fear fat and attempt to keep eating disorder sufferers weight suppressed – recovered, but not too much! – are killing us. if i hear about another friend who’s relapsed bc her team told her she was heavy enough now, i’m gonna lose my mind.
the fear of body fat has no place in this world and especially not in the treatment of people who already have a deadly fear of food and weight gain. clinicians cannot fear the same things as the eating disorder they’re supposed to be treating. if they do, and they shape their “treatment” around that, they should lose their licenses for so egregiously violating their professional commitment to first do no harm.
if you would rather see a client anorexic than fat, get the hell out of the field.
Thoughtfulfangirling 