“Your friendships shrink as you get older—unless you have a loose definition of friendship. I used to work with one of the richest guys in Philadelphia. He was seventy years old. He could have dinner with anybody in the city. But those aren’t the types of friends I’m talking about. I mean the people who really know you. I think it’s amplified for me because I’m still single. My friends have gotten married and had kids. They have less and less time to give. More and more people have come into their lives. But the amount of people in my life has stayed the same. I’ll text them to see if they want to go to a Phillies game. And I always get an immediate ‘yes.’ But something always comes up right before the game. They have to reschedule because ‘Ethan’s friend is having a birthday party,’ or ‘Sarah has a soccer game.’ It’s hard to not feel left out. I used to see these guys several times a week. Now it’s five or six times per year.”
If men stopped working…the world would continue on.
If women stopped working, then things would get ugly.
What?
there has been an instance where this happened. it was 1975 and icelandic women decided not to work for one day.
working as in cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, doing chores and so on, not only “not showing up to your workplace”. women did nothing that day, except showing up in reykjavik and protesting for gender equality, equal pay and equal representation in parliament, you know, cool stuff.
you know what happened? havoc. men were left with food to cook and children they never took care of to pick up from kindergarden and entertain for the day. they went en masse to the food shops buying sausages because they could cook nothing else, they had to bond with children they never spent more than a couple hours a day with. they struggled combining their work day and the domestic tasks they had to sort out. and this just for one day.
iceland in 1975 stopped working and things indeed got ugly. so ugly that women in the following decades became woke AF and soon it happened that women became president, took half of the seats in parliament and achieved one of the best living environments in the world.
is your astonishment solved now?
We already know what happens to countries when the majority of the male workforce is removed. It is called “war.”
If you want to read Highly Documented and Very Historical accounts of how countries function without internal male labor, you can start by diving in to World War 1 and World War 2! (I’m just gonna talk about the Allied forces because my English is best
and I know the most about them, but the Axis powers had similar
dynamics!)
See, when the warring civilizations threw every able-bodied man they could at war fronts all over the planet, this left enormous labor vacuums. Not only did the countries have to function without male labor, but they also had to funnel vast amounts of food, clothing, ammunition and weapons to the men in combat. By WW2, women were needed in every possible role that didn’t include active combat.
If you send millions of men to combat, then the resulting millions of empty, necessary, “male” jobs must be done by women. That’s just how it works.
This is an British WW1 poster from 1917. It says it succinctly – every woman who takes a “male” job in the military, frees up that man for active combat.
One thing that you can’t get enough of in war is bullets! With men spending bullets but not making them, the women need to do it. These WW1 posters from around 1918 are pretty cool – the woman “doing her bit” has shades of Art Nouveau, I think.
Here’s an American WW1 poster in which the women are dressed as mechanics, train drivers, military support, manufacturers, farmers and nurses. I like the cool Victorian shoes and the baggy trousers. Isn’t it funny to think that this happened between the Victorians and the flappers?
In WW1, you couldn’t even afford to spare able-bodied men to drive ambulances in warzones. Ambulance drivers on the Front were largely women. They picked up the wounded and dying men and took them to field hospitals staffed largely by women.
By WW2, the women of the Allied nations were SO ON TOP OF THIS.
Here is a Canadian lady from the 1940s. Women in Air Force support were vital – men were the fighter pilots, women were transport pilots – as well as doing the support roles like aircraft maintenance and preparation, parachute packing, communications and intelligence, managing the radar, plotting the weather, and, of course, doing the catering. The language on this poster shows that the woman does all of this necessary work to get the fighter pilots in the air. Every non-combat military job that a woman took meant one more fighter pilot and soldier in active combat.
Back at home, people functioned fairly well without men in WW2. Everyone’s seen this American WW2 poster, you know she’s encouraging women to get into the factories and make All The Stuff!
HEY WE STILL NEED LOTS OF FOOD TO EAT AND THERE ARE NO MEN TO MAKE THE FOOD, SHOULD WE STARVE?
NO WE SHOULD NOT
THIS AUSTRALIAN LADY IS GOING TO FARM ALL THE THINGS
Land Armies (staffed by Land Girls) were super necessary to feed everyone at home PLUS everyone at war. Land Girls were used in both WW1 and WW2. While farming was a “protected occupation” (male farmers wouldn’t be forcibly drafted into the military, because their jobs were too important to a functioning society) the majority male farmworkers decided to enlist voluntarily. This left elderly or disabled male farmworkers to do intensive work. By WW2 they had some tractors to help, but most farming was still done by hand or with draft animals, especially since the steel and fuel for the tractors was more needed on the Front.
This American lady found a cool old-timey tractor, which is just as good as an ambulance…
But this British lady has to do her plowing with a draft horse! The weathered old farmer, too old for combat, is very grateful.
FOOD COMES FIRST!
okay but LOOK at some of these other Plushy Man Jobs, Necessary To Prevent the Downfall of Society, that American women needed to do RIGHT NOW TO BEAT THE NAZIS:
AMERICAN WOMEN! THESE ELEVATORS AREN’T GOING TO OPERATE THEMSELVES
I CAN KEEP GOING FOREVER
TAKE THE JOBS FROM MEN!! TAKE THEM!! SEIZE THEM!! DRILL THE THING
Oddly, even without men at work, “women’s work” still got done.
Children were still mostly looked after. Large communal childcare programs were set up (they were quickly closed after WW2, though.) Food was prepared. Households
ran. Single women stayed single. The countries functioned. The world still turned. MILLIONS OF MEN
were WIPED OFF THE PLANET but the world still turned.
In fact, the Allies won both WW1 and WW2.
And the resulting power/gender/employment vacuums shaped the gender dynamics of most of Tumblr’s parents and grandparents.
What I’ve seen often and what really needs to be addressed is how people on the left react to accusations that their friends and/or allies are doing things that are antisemitic. They’re quick to assert “conspiracies from the right (or relative right in the case of the Labour antisemitism issue),” “crying wolf,” “privilege (white Jews don’t have Jewish privilege and white privilege and experiencing antisemitism are not mutually exclusive),” and, of course, “Zionism.”
The problem here is in suppositions. Because someone is on the left, they assume everyone there is anti-racist and, by extension, against all forms of racism including antisemitism. But the thing is, it’s not that simple. This is why it’s so galling for Jews to hear Jeremy Corbyn say that he’s against “antisemitism and other types of racism” when we’re not questioning him on his commitment to fight other forms of racism. All racisms function in different manners with different stereotypes and different forms of marginalization. You can’t be “antiracist” and not understand that. You can’t be against “antisemitism” in principle and not in action. It’s the inaction that’s become very frustrating from a Jewish perspective. It’s the routine acceptance and denial of antisemitism on the left that is the problem, not whether Cobyn himself believes in antisemitic conspiracy theories or hates Jews qua Jews.
Take the situation at Oberlin College where various members of the faculty and student body have lined up to defend a professor who spreads antisemitic conspiracy theories on public social media while also teaching “social justice writing” classes. I have no doubt that the professor is antiracist in many areas, but she is an antisemite. She has not apologized, claimed that she is not antisemitic despite piles of evidence that she is, and people have acted angrily to the notion that she should even apologize. The anger at this point isn’t so much at the professor in question but at those who are lining up to defend her for her unrepentant actions, as if antisemitism is to be tolerated because the antisemitic speaker in question is valuable in other parts of the social justice fight.
The problem here is ultimately that a lot of people on the left believe that the fight against antisemitism no longer holds value or that, by virtue of Jews being “privileged” or “white” or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians they have somehow come to the belief that antisemitism is either no longer a problem or is no longer worth fighting. Tacit acceptance of antisemitic allies is bad enough, but defending them at the risk of normalizing their views is quite simply aiding in the spread and growth of antisemitism.
But we have reached a point where accusations of antisemitism are treated as more offensive than actual antisemitism and that means that Jews on the left will either need to start swallowing their bile and put up with the antisemitism or leave. It’s difficult to put your whole self into a movement that tells you that it won’t watch your back when you’re threatened no matter how much you want to support it.
here’s a reminder, too, for some of my younger followers
BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN THE WORLD. it’s important that you learn about what’s going on. but it’s not a requirement that you post about them on your tumblr. it’s ok to blacklist things that upset you if you use tumblr as a safe haven.
you’re not bad, uninformed, or uncaring because you don’t blog about tragedy, politics, human rights, etc. it doesn’t mean that you aren’t moved by these things. it simply speaks to whatever your personal purpose is when you use tumblr.
generally you won’t see me talking about current events on tumblr. that’s because this is a visual and personal journal – not a current events blog. sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of pressure to include current events and your stance on them on your blog. that’s not necessary if you don’t want to include those things.
A few people have reblogged this with tags like “i thought this went without saying” – but for some people (especially young people) i have found that it is NOT so obvious. There is such enormous pressure in the tumblr callout culture to have specific content on your blog. I have been trying to look at the things I take for granted (like this concept) and making sure to talk about them.
Thanks to everyone who has reblogged this for sharing this idea with your followers!
they may not pick up on sexual or flirtatious cues
they don’t explicitly express strong sexual attraction to others
because you can
just
because you can
bad reasons to headcanon a character as asexual:
they’re “innocent”/“childlike”
they’re non-human
they lack genitals
they’re cold and emotionless
bad reasons to deny a character possibly being asexual:
they’ve dated someone
they’ve had sex at least once
seriously how hard is it to grasp that asexuality is a lack of sexual attraction, not a lack of sex drive or romantic attraction, is it really too fucking complicated to grasp this very simple definition
they’re “too emotional”
you personally find them too hot to want them to be asexual
eirenical17 