The Journal Of The InnKeeper

https://qz.com/991030/your-single-coworkers-and-employees-arent-there-to-pick-up-the-slack-for-married-people/

Not poly but an example of couple privilege, which is so deeply embedded in our culture that we bring these kinds of values with us into poly relationships unless we are consciously fighting against it.

How many unicorn hunters argue that their mythical "third" should be the one to move in with them because they have the family so it would be more of a hardship for them to move? How often do we see excuses for ignoring or dismissing or mistreating secondaries because they're "single" but the couple has a "family" to protect. How often do solo polys bear the brunt of the emotional labor, the financial strain, and various "responsibilities" because the "family" is a priority and needs to remain as such?

#RhetoricalQuestions #CouplePrivilege #IHaveMyOwnResponsibilitiesThatNeedPriorityButNoOneToHelpMeLikeThat

"In fact, single people do more to maintain their relationships with their friends, neighbors, siblings, and parents than married people. They are better at staying in touch with them, and helping and encouraging them. It is different for couples who move in together or get married. They tend to become more insular, even if they don’t have children. When aging parents need help, they get it disproportionately from their grown children who are single."

"Single people are rooted in their communities and towns in significant ways. They participate in public events more often, and take more music and art classes. They volunteer more than married people do for a wide variety of organizations."

"Ideally, only in special circumstances should employees be asked to justify their requests to take time off. Otherwise, in a culture that still celebrates married people and their families... single people may be treated unfairly. For example, employers may be tempted to take more seriously a request to take time off to care for an ailing spouse than an ailing sibling or close friend."

"When single people are caring for their parents and others who need their help, they do so at greater economic risk than married people are. If they put in fewer hours at work, or step away from their jobs, they do not have a spouse to pick up the financial slack—or keep them on their employer-sponsored health insurance. Similarly, when single people get laid off or lose their jobs, they are particularly vulnerable for the same reasons."

"Even more significantly, single people are excluded from more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit and protect only people who are legally married. ... When lifelong single people die, they cannot leave their benefits to anyone else—they go back into the system—and no one else can leave their benefits to a single person either."

"Financial disadvantages in taxation, Social Security, health spending, and housing expenses add up. By one estimate, single women, relative to married women, lose out on somewhere between a half million and a million dollars over the course of their adult lives."

Found a couple of new identity words that I like, but I don't think they feel right on me. (All words written in the feminized form because the post is referencing a feminist movement regarding the labels).

I posted back on Cinco de Mayo the differences between certain labels for people of Mexican descent, and how I preferred "chicana" over "Latina", as a reclaimed, formerly derogatory word that emphasizes the dual nature of being of mixed ethnicity and living in the US as well as the association with activism.

A few years ago I learned about "chingona" and "maldita". As far as I can tell, "chingona" derives from the verb "chingar", which is "to fuck" and is considered vulgar - a swear word. But more than just "a fucker", a "chingona" is colloquial for basically "a fucking badass" and is also a derogatory slur that some are attempting to reclaim, particularly the feminine version that I'm referencing in this post.

A "maldita" is a step beyond "fucking badass", somehow. The literal translation is "damned" or "cursed" or "accursed", but the colloquial use as an identity label is like a chingona on steroids? They are kinda like Spanish words for "thug", with similar classist and racist undertones and a similar embracing of the term by some.

These are words that I would have vehemently rejected when I was a teen, back when I also rejected "chicana" because of the class implications of "gangbanger", "thug", "good for nothing", "low class", etc. I wasn't one of *those* Mexican-Americans. I spoke proper English and I had a proper education and I lived in the suburbs and I eschewed gang violence and tattoos (and used words like "eschewed").

I live very far from the gang violence I grew up on the peripheries of back in the '80s today. Now I live in poverty, often in a house that would have fit right in with the ghettos I turned my nose up at. I still eschew gang violence and I still speak with a "blank" American accent (slipping into a Southern drawl every now and then).

But many people have been blurring the lines between "thug" and "activist", and many of them have been reclaiming words that are normally used to condemn and dismiss them. Like "chicana". I feel that my temporal distance from the California gangs of the '80s and my observations of how civil unrest is sometimes deliberately masked by oppressors to resemble general "thuggery" has given me a new perspective and newfound respect for the title "chicana".

With my memories of the gangs and my distance from my Spanish-speaking culture, I don't feel that I can claim "maldita" and "chingona" for myself, nor that I fully understand all the subtle cultural nuances of the terms. But I like that I learned about them and I like that they exist. I think they'll be rolling around in the back of my mind for a while.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170417034346/https://soyxingona.com/about-me/what-is-a-xingona// - "A Xingona is a woman who is on her game. Basically she has skills that no one else has strived for only by first hand experience. Xingonas aren’t brought down by bias, machismo, prides, and over-rated ego. She gets shit done because she can and she will."

https://alvaradofrazier.com/2012/07/14/frida-kahlo-chingona-artist - "The term 'Chingona' is a Spanglish term, slang, for a bad ass, wise woman, powerful, individualist, self-activated, a woman who lives a life for their own approval, self-empowered, a strong woman..."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-i-define-my-chingona-fire_b_5887de69e4b0a53ed60c6a35 - "Chingona: noun. 1. a Spanish slang term meaning 'bad ass woman'. Although the word 'chingona' is a Spanish term, it is not limited to Latinas. A chingona is any woman who chooses to live life on her own terms. PERIOD. She is the scholar AND the hoe. At the same damn time. OR she is neither. The point is: she gets to choose. And whatever choice she makes, is the right one."

Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic.  The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks.  But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music.  I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded.  The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman".  It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too.  In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

Watch on YouTube

When Chuck Berry died in March of 2017, I wrote this post as a memorial both to him and to the ongoing struggle of cultural appropriation and erasure. It would be more fitting to turn it into a blog post in March of any year, on the anniversary of his death, but I know me - if I waited until next March, I would forget to post it.

So I'm sharing it now because I'd rather share this bit of history and pop culture deconstruction at a random time, than to forget it entirely:

Fun Fact: Chuck Berry got famous for his song Johnny B. Goode (among others). He originally wrote it as autobiographical and penned the lyrics to say "Oh my, but that little colored boy could play" as a reference to his own amazing skill as a youth but changed it to "Oh my, but that little country boy could play" so that the song would get air time on the radio.

Another Fun Fact: Berry also wrote it in the key of B-flat, because big band and jazz music that featured horns preferred music in B-flat and E-flat. But in the movie, Back To The Future, when Marty McFly plays the song at the Under The Sea dance, he says "this is a blues riff in B..." The song that we hear in the movie is not actually played in B even though the character says it is, it's played in B-flat. But that's a really unusual key for guitarists in the '80s and for pianists who were the big names and major competitors in the music biz at the time Berry exploded on the scene.

The character of Marty McFly was an '80s guitarist. At that point in time, Rock & Roll had moved away from its jazz and blues influences, and therefore away from songs played in B-flat. So the character wouldn't have been used to playing in that key and would have likely preferred the key of B.

The song Johnny B. Goode is a classic example of the microaggression erasure of the black contribution to the history of Rock & Roll. People like to point to black musicians and say "see? We let them entertain us! We like their music!" but then we have to erase little details.

We're happy to give artists like Chuck Berry credit now, but who among us knew about the original lyrics that had to be whitewashed before anyone would even distribute his music? Everyone knew he was a colored man singing the song, but he couldn't sing about his experience as a colored man, he had to sing about a "country boy" in order to get white audiences to listen, and he had to get white audiences to listen in order to get radio time and record contracts.

And we also conveniently forget that Rock & Roll literally started in the Negro communities with jazz and blues and African rhythms because we whitewashed that too with simple little things such as changing the generally accepted keys for music based on *white* musician's instruments. Even though Berry was a guitarist, he came from a jazz and blues background, so of course he wrote his music from that influence.

But white musicians who favored piano and guitar and who lacked the horns of the big band era wrote music that was more comfortable for their instruments. And so, gradually, songs in the key of B-flat and E-flat lost favor to the point that a white kid in the '80s playing classic Rock & Roll music would have played the songs in the key of B even though it wasn't originally written that way.

This was a deliberate choice that the writers of the screenplay made, and they made it *for these reasons*. The screenwriters weren't necessarily erasing any of this history - they were acknowledging that it had already been erased by making the line of dialog say "blues riff in B" even though it wasn't.

And they taught the actor, Michael J. Fox, how to play the song in the key of B. So, we are not hearing Michael J. Fox's music, we're hearing the studio musicians Mark Campbell singing and Tim May's guitar *in the key of B-flat* because that's what sounds better and more like the original, but when we watch the scene, Fox is really playing the guitar, and he's playing it in the '80s key of B. Because the screenwriters understood the history and evolution of music.

https://theestablishment.co/special-snowflake-my-ass-why-identity-labels-matter-3b976b1899a4/

I've been arguing against the "I don't need no stinking labels!" crowd since I first encountered them. Not "needing" a label is a form of privilege. That's wonderful that you, personally, can move through life without ever having your personhood challenged or needing to do work in order to find people who are similar to you or who accept you.

The rest of us use our biologically advanced tool of language to communicate abstract concepts with each other like who we are and how we work to be "seen" by others and to find each other because we're not as visible or as numerous as some people are and we live in worlds that are hostile to differences.

"Labels are crucial for anyone whose experience isn’t positioned as the default in our society."

"That’s what labels do — they empower marginalized people. Through our identities, we build communities, we learn about ourselves, we tell our own stories, we celebrate ourselves in a society that often tells us we shouldn’t, and we come together to stand up to oppressive systems.
Our identity labels hold power."

"Remember those Earth-like planets NASA recently discovered? Well, they’re currently in the process of naming them — because that’s what often happens when you discover something that you didn’t realize existed. Notice I said “you didn’t realize existed,” not “new.” Many of these identities aren’t new — it’s just that people are only now starting to learn about them and name them."

"On a daily basis, people are discriminated against for being something other than white, thin, neurotypical, cisgender, heteroromantic, heterosexual, and whatever else is perceived as “normal” in our society. If you fit into any of these categories, then you experience privilege. Some of your identities are more accepted, or at least more widely known. You don’t have to explain yourself everywhere you go. You don’t have to worry about facing discrimination throughout your day.

That’s privilege."

https://qz.com/920561/conscious-consumerism-is-a-lie-heres-a-better-way-to-help-save-the-world

"Conscious consumerism is a lie. Small steps taken by thoughtful consumers—to recycle, to eat locally, to buy a blouse made of organic cotton instead of polyester—will not change the world."

"Making series of small, ethical purchasing decisions while ignoring the structural incentives for companies’ unsustainable business models won’t change the world as quickly as we want. It just makes us feel better about ourselves."

"There’s also the issue of privilege. The sustainability movement has been charged with being elitist—and it most certainly is. You need a fair amount of disposable income to afford ethical and sustainable consumption options, the leisure time to research the purchasing decisions you make, the luxury to turn up your nose at 95% of what you’re offered, and, arguably, a post-graduate degree in chemistry to understand the true meaning behind ingredient labels."

"Choosing fashion made from hemp, grilling the waiter about how your fish was caught, and researching whether your city can recycle bottle caps might make you feel good, reward a few social entrepreneurs, and perhaps protect you from charges of hypocrisy. But it’s no substitute for systematic change."

"But when it comes to combating climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction, what we need to do is take the money, time, and effort we spend making these ultimately inconsequential choices and put it toward something that really matters."

"So if you really care about the environment, climb on out of your upcycled wooden chair and get yourself to a town hall meeting." And I would add to support science education and bone up on some heavy science yourself so that when you do go to a town hall meeting, you'll know what you're talking about and can propose solutions that are based in reality and more likely to work, like supporting gmo food, vaccinations, geologically relevant climate change policies, and functional education.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-inappropriate-interaction-you-have-had-at-a-club/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most inappropriate interaction you have had at a club?

A. I've had 2 that I can come up with off the top of my head and they happened on the same night.

I was at a regular nightclub with some swing dancers, and towards the end of the night, everyone had left except for 2 guys I know.  They were off dancing with some non-dancers they had met.  I was approached by a guy who is not a dancer, but who was clearly drunk.  He asked me to dance.  He said that he saw me dancing earlier and knew that I was with a group of actual dancers, not your typical drunk club girl.

Now, partner dance etiquette is to accept dance requests, dance one song, thank your partner for the dance, and return to your place to dance with someone else.  You can dance with them again later, but you don't dance multiple songs in a row because you don't want to monopolize anyone's time.  I get that non-dancers are not aware of this, but I still do this even at nightclubs.

We danced one song and he was terrible.  He was sloppy drunk and unable to tell that his clumsy manhandling of me was wrenching my shoulder.  So I thanked him for the dance as soon as the song ended and I turned and went back to my spot.  He followed me, demanding to know why I had left him on the dance floor.  I told him about proper dance etiquette, and that he got his dance with me, now I was done.  He backed me into a corner to prevent me from leaving and started arguing with me about dancing more with him.

Right about when I was getting ready to pull out my knife to get him to back off, one of my 2 dancer friends left saw what was happening and rushed over to grab my hand and pull me on the floor.  The asshole shouted after me something about being a bitch for going to dance with someone else.

A couple of songs later, I got asked to dance by some other drunk guy.  I accepted, and he attempted to hold me like he had seen the real dancers holding me, but as usual, he had no clue how to do it right.  He held me way too close and his hands were way too low on my back.  I started leaning away from him and he started holding me tighter.  He tried to spin me in a clumsy spin, and when I came back from the spin, he grabbed me in a full-body embrace and kissed my neck.

I pushed him away and walked off the floor.  He grabbed my arm to pull me back, but the other dance guy who was still there saw me and dove between us, putting me into a proper dance hold and whisked me away.

This second asshole tried to cut in, but my dance friend yelled back at him that I was "his" and he wasn't letting me go again.  He quietly asked me how "friendly" he could be to make his point, and I gave him permission to be *very* friendly.  So he put his hands on my butt and kissed me.  Finally the asshole left.

I hate displays of possession, but the behaviour of these two jerks left us only 2 options - allow someone else to "claim" me so that they would respect my rejection, or escalate to violence.  I chose the non-violent response first, and fortunately I did not have to fall back on the violent one.

There have been a lot of rumblings in my various communities about the lack of accessibility for basically everyone other than straight white educated cismen. One popular option that a lot of people are choosing to take these days (and I wholeheartedly support them) is to look at the speaker lineup, and if they are the only POC or woman or disabled person or whatever on the lineup, then to decline the invitation to speak.

Another option is to do the same thing as a guest. A third / fourth option is to do the same thing *as* straight, white, cismen and to do it publicly as a way to give up your seat for someone who is not (especially if your "seat" is on a panel or podium discussing accessibility issues).

As I said, I support this choice completely. However, the consequence of all POC and women and disabled people et. al. refusing to participate is that these events *remain* white, straight, male, and able-bodied.

So, if we are a member of an underrepresented demographic, and we get invited (or accepted) to speak at an event where the speaker lineup has less diversity than we'd like, and we have the spoons or the matches or the hit points for it, and our lecture topics work this way, I'd like to propose doing more of this in addition to our boycotts.

Give our lectures and workshops and panels in ways that absolutely do not benefit the people who are not us but that do benefit the people we are trying to make these events more accessible for.

This will not be applicable to everyone who speaks. It's most easily demonstrated with something like hearing loss because accommodating people with hearing difficulties tends to be *inconvenient* for people who can hear, whereas many other forms of accommodation benefit everyone or most people even those who do not *need* the accommodation.

One of the things that I do is, in my Simple Steps workshop, where we take dancing exercises and learn how to apply them as actual communication tools, we deliberately arrange this hands-on workshop so that men have to touch other men.  Everyone other than straight cismen is socialized to allow some form of physical contact (often whether it's wanted or not), but straight cismen get to indulge in their homophobia because of the homophobic culture.

So we do not accommodate them.  They are forced out of their comfort zone in our workshop.

Obviously, this has limitations.  People who have mental health issues regarding physical contact will find our workshop difficult for them. We made a choice to focus on this one issue, and the nature of the workshop is to be hands-on and interactive.  But the same goes for the ASL speaker in the original meme here - people who have eyesight problems would have had difficulty in his lecture too.

Another thing that I do is I make many of the events I host to be either child-friendly or low-cost / free (or both) because poverty is one of my pet SJ issues.  I am not a fan of children.  But I make as many of my events child-friendly because I know how expensive child-care is and how difficult it can be to participate in a community when everything costs money and time and there are children at home.  Children running around an event is inconvenient to many adults.  But without childcare options, poor people (and mostly women) are left out. 

I will be considering some of my more popular lectures and workshops to see if I can adapt them to make them less convenient for various target audiences, to illustrate this point.  If there is a way to make your lectures more accommodating to the people you are representing while simultaneously making it less accommodating to the non-representative audience, please consider this act of civil rebellion in lieu of just not participating at all.

If we want separate spaces, that's one thing, but if we're asking for more inclusivity, some of us have to be the ones to barge through the door. Otherwise, the room will remain monochrome because we've all decided that forcing the door open is too much effort.



Event Organizer: We're sorry, there won't be interpreters at the event where you are presenting about Deaf things, sign language, and interpreting.

 

Me: No problem, I'll present in ASL without interpretation. Hearing people will have to get by.

EO: Ummm ...

I presented for 25 minutes, and opened with a couple of slides in written English that explained the situation. Told them to stay, so that they could "learn a lesson they didn't come here for." They all did.

www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-if-my-wife-teaches-my-daughter-piano-but-I-want-her-to-do-gymnastics/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What can I do if my wife teaches my daughter piano but I want her to do gymnastics?

A. What does your daughter want?

She’s a human being.  Her desires for her body, time, emotions, etc. are the only ones that matter here.  If you’re funding her activities, you can technically be allowed to place limitations on them based on what you're willing to pay for, but as for encouraging her what TO do (as opposed to what not to do)? That’s all her.

Your interest in your daughter pursuing gymnastics is completely irrelevant.  So is your wife’s interest in teaching her piano.

Find out what YOUR DAUGHTER wants to do and stop treating her like an extension of yourself that you get to force into doing whatever it is you’d rather be doing but, for whatever reason, aren’t doing yourself.

If she wants to learn piano, then that’s what she should learn.  If she wants to do gymnastics, then that’s what she should do.  If she wants to do both, then find a way to allow her to do both If she wants to do neither, then suck it up and treat her like the human person she is, and encourage her in her endeavors like a responsible, loving parent.

She is not your doll, to dress up in the profession and hobby you want her to do.  She is a person.  She gets to make the decisions about how she spends her time and what she puts her body through.

Honestly, these parents who think their children are extensions of themselves instead of human beings in their own right!  This is how you get adult children who stop talking to their parents.

Respect her autonomy.  She’ll be a much more loving daughter if you respect her.

www.theatreartlife.com/technical/performing-arts-overworked-staff

"We need to stop pretending we're okay. We're not. We're tired, and crying in the dimmer room. Let's come out of the shadows into the light and do something about it."

I am pretty sure I know how I will die. It will likely happen one of two ways - I will suffocate to death because of the fucking chronic respiratory problems I developed after getting whooping cough when vaccination rates dropped, or I will be killed in an accident or die from something related to my shitty eating / sleeping / overworking habits on job site.

We have a saying - there are no old stagehands. I mean, of course there are, but so many more of us die early than we should, and most of the time it's preventable. We eat crappy food, we don't sleep enough, we stay awake too long doing dangerous manual labor, we work physically harder than necessary (dude, we have a forklift to unstack those!), we drink too much and do way too many recreational drugs.

One year, I actually stopped keeping track of the number of conversations I got into that started out like "hey, did you hear who died last week?!"

Our employers want to treat us like real employees when it benefits *them*, with dress codes and long lists of behaviour rules, but then turn around and treat us like freelancers in the monopoly days when it doesn't, with "oh, you can just push through one more hour without a break, can't you?" and "the show starts in 2 days so we will stay as long as necessary to get it going rather than schedule an extra couple of days for a reasonable work day length" and "sorry, we don't compensate for the $25 parking fee" and "no you can't wear that piece of clothing for medical reasons because it doesn't match our aesthetic" and and "but we gave you 8 hours between shifts, that should be plenty of rest even though you have to drive 2 hours each way and have things to do when you get home!" and "what do you mean you need a different person for each job position? Can't you do 3 job roles by yourself?"

No, we need a break every 2-2.5 hours, with a meal break on the 4-5 hour mark. We need OT for ever hour worked past 8-10 hours, and we need days that don't go past 10 hours *regularly*. We need enough time between our shifts to GET 8 hours of sleep, which includes our commute time and eating dinner when we get home and doing laundry and showering, not exactly 8 hours from the time you stop paying us to the time you start paying us again.

We need enough guys on site to accomplish the job safely, not as few as is *possible* to set a Guinness record. We need equipment that works. We need heavy equipment to do the heavy labor, like forklifts and scissor lifts, not rickety A-frame ladders and 4 tall dudes just because you think "tall" = "strong enough to lift this case that you used a forklift to stack back in the shop".

WE NEED ACTUAL MEAL BREAKS. 30 minutes is barely sufficient if food is provided and sitting there, hot and ready, the moment we go on break. An hour is the minimum if we have to go off property to find our own food, because it's still a 10 minute walk to the parking lot and another 15 minute or more drive to find food. And no, the solution to a crew who is not doing a satisfactory job is NOT withholding meals, but sending them home. If the crew is truly doing a poor job, you don't get to keep working them 10 hours without food. Fucking send them home and hire another crew.

And the clothing! We're fucking backstage! As long as our clothing is protective and not hindering our abilities, IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER WHAT WE LOOK LIKE. I can lift the exact same amount of weight in a polo shirt as I do in a tank top. Except in a tank top, I won't overheat when I lift. I can run my camera to the exact same skill level in a jacket as in a dress shirt. Except I won't be shaking the camera with my shivering if I'm warm enough and I can focus slightly better when I cut the wind from the a/c blowing in my face and drying out my eyes. When we are not in a public-facing customer service position, our attire does not matter past the point of legality or job performance.

If you want to pretend like you're a &"regular corporation" with all the rules and shit, then I want a fucking annual job performance review where someone sits down with me in an adult fucking manner and goes over my accomplishments and my areas for improvement, training opportunities, and a goddamn annual raise every year I work for you. I want anonymous supervisor surveys. I want salary standardization. I want an HR department that holds the company accountable for not treating people well. And I want some structure.

If the company can't provide all that shit, then don't pretend you're like a regular job. We're freelancers, either we get the benefits of freelancing that go along with the shit, or we get the benefits of a regular corporation that goes along with that shit. We should not get the shit of a corporation with the shit of freelance.

So stop treating us like shit.

#backstage #AVTech #AVLife #roadies #stagehand #entertainment #IMayHaveSomeOpinionsAboutThis #SoTired #AndYetStillSoPoor

Q. What is a open marriage?

A. The term "open marriage" was coined by Nena and George O'Neill, and they intended it to mean a partnership between two equal individuals that fostered and encouraged personal growth through the development of a complex network of interpersonal relationships outside of the marriage. They felt (and the research supports) that interpersonal relationships were healthier when the individuality of each person in the relationship was maintained and celebrated and ties to other people were welcomed.

The context in which the concept was developed was post WWII when women had spent time in the work force, being independent and heads of their own households while the men were at war, and now the men were coming home and pushing the women back in the kitchen.

In order to convince women that their place was in the home, the US started a campaign to make marriage the cornerstone of the family, and to make one's marriage be one's everything - friend, lover, soulmate, confidante, the person who could satisfy your every single need, to supersede all other relationships with extended family and even with religion and community. This way, it was thought, women wouldn't be tempted to go outside of the home and take jobs away from men or congregate in public where men were used to going.

This turned out to lead to some extremely dysfunctional and deeply unsatisfying relationships. The O'Neills believed that spouses needed to retain their individuality and their independence by maintaining close relationships with other people in order to come together as partners, who could then bring their best selves to the partnership to build resilience into the partnership.

All subsequent research into romantic relationships supports this theory. People who have a strong emotional support network outside of their romantic partner report more satisfaction within their romantic relationships, better conflict resolution skills, stronger bonds during both good times and bad, and more resilience when it comes to breakups and the death of a loved one.

Gender studies that show women having better social support networks vs. men maintaining only superficial ties to other men (leaving their spouse to be their sole source of emotional support) reveal that these women who experience the death of their spouse are better able to live fulfilling lives after their widowhood and they live longer than their male counterparts, for instance. This is thought to be a contributing factor to the difference in mortality rate between the genders.

In the O'Neill's book, they mentioned in one little section deep in the middle that having a romantic relationship in which both partners are open and honest with each other about who they are, what they think, what they feel, and what they want, and in which the partners support and encourage each other's personal growth, just might possibly maybe potentially allow room for extramarital sexual relationships, perhaps.

Because sex sells, this is the one thing that everyone remembered about the book, and now "open marriage" is synonymous with "extramarital sexual relationships". The O'Neills hated this and Nena O'Neill wrote a follow-up book where she backtracked and tried to put that genie back in the bottle. But it was too late. Now everyone thinks it means a married couple that has sex with other people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Marriage_(book)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201101/open-marriage-healthy-marriage
https://people.com/archive/george-and-nena-oneill-helped-to-open-marriage-now-theyd-like-to-close-it-a-little-vol-8-no-25

www.quora.com/Why-has-it-become-common-for-married-people-not-to-wear-their-wedding-rings/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

There are an awful lot of assumptions buried in this question.

Q. Why has it become common for married people not to wear their wedding rings?

A. It was not common in the US for wedding rings to be worn by men until the 20th century, so it had kind of a similar effect as branding livestock - it said that the woman belonged to someone, but the man (because same-sex marriage did not exist at the time) had no such corresponding mark of connection or ownership.

So it was only “common” for some people to wear rings, and it was only common for other people to wear rings for a short span of time in our nation’s history.  Wedding rings being common is a relatively modern practice, however they continue to be common today.  While it may be more noticeable now that some people do not wear their rings, and there may indeed be an increase in that number from previous generations, it is still more common for married people to wear a wedding ring than not.

But reasons why someone would not wear a wedding ring can include:

1. Historically, the wedding ring was connected to the exchange of valuables at the moment of the wedding rather than a symbol of eternal love and devotion.   Wedding rings are an archaic tradition used to mark humans as being “taken” or “owned” by someone else through this exchange of wealth.  Some people choose not to be marked as such or to engage in archaic practices that are not relevant to their modern lives.
    
2. The modern version of wedding and engagement rings were a deliberate propaganda campaign by the jewelry industry to sell more products, said jewelry industry contributing to war and slavery in their goal to obtain more product to sell, and some people are conscientious objectors.
    
3. Jewelry is often inconvenient or even dangerous in certain lives.
    
4. Jewelry is a very personal expression of the self and a wedding ring may not match the aesthetic that a person is going for.
    
5. Some people just don’t like things on their hands.
    
6. Some religions discourage the display of wealth and jewelry.  Methodist teaching says that people should not be "adorned with gold, or pearls, or costly apparel" (John Wesley, “The General Rules of the Methodist Church”).  Mennonites do not wear jewelry, including wedding rings, as part of their practice of “plain dress”.  Certain branches of Quakers have a “testimony of simplicity” and therefore do not wear jewelry and keep to “plain dress”.

I don’t wear my wedding ring because jewelry is dangerous in my job (#3).  I work with heavy machinery and anything that can’t easily tear away, such as metal around fingers, necks, and through ears and noses, could get caught in something and rip said body parts off.  My cousin’s fiance lost his ring finger a week out from the wedding (no idea why he was wearing his ring early) and had to go through the ceremony with a bandage on his hand and she put the ring on his right hand instead of his left.  I play piano.  I’d prefer to keep all my fingers, thank you.

As such, I have not worn rings in many, many years, so when I do put on a ring for an aesthetic look for dressing up or for a costume, it feels uncomfortable and gets in my way, much like long fingernails feel on people who do not wear their nails long normally (#5).

I object to the diamond industry, which is wrapped up in the jewelry industry in general, so I do not participate in displays of wealth and jewelry with materials associated with the diamond slave trade, the various gold rushes, or with the De Beers corporation and their capitalistic campaign to artificially create a market for themselves through their manipulation of the market (#2) with deceptive advertising.  Diamonds and gold are symbolic of that campaign and the horrific atrocities committed to obtain precious stones and materials for jewelry for rich people.  This could technically leave other materials and stones available to me for use as wedding rings or other jewelry, but I have other reasons for eschewing them in general.

I do not like being treated like someone’s wife (#1).  I prefer to be treated like an individual human being.  I have noticed that the way that strangers treat me changes based what they think my jewelry says about me.  As a teenager and young woman, I used to wear a wedding ring deliberately to avoid getting hit on in public spaces.

As an older adult, even though I am still getting hit on, I find that not being hit on just because I have signaled that I belong to someone else is more offensive.  My “no” should be more impactful than “there is a man out there somewhere who owns me and would not approve of you making moves on his woman”, so I would rather reject advances on my own than let the implication of some other man’s disapproval do the rejecting for me.

Aside from advances, I am treated more respectfully and with more deference when people find out that I am married (or when they think I am, such as when I used to wear a ring and was not married).  Again, I would prefer to earn that respect just because I am a person and deserve respect, than because I have met the social obligation of tying my fate to someone else.

So a side effect of not wearing a ring due to danger, comfort, and personal aesthetic (the actual reasons why I do not wear a ring) is that I get to challenge people’s assumptions and demand respect based on who I am, not my connection to someone else.  Some days I don’t want to put forth the effort of dealing with that challenge, so I might wear the ring to avoid it.  But mostly I see this as an opportunity for change rather than a drawback.  I consider it a feature, not a bug.

As always, individual variations occur when talking about TRENDS.  This is a discussion of TRENDS, so of course individuals are going to have some variations.

I was raised middle class by people whose parents were poor but moved into middle class, so my parents fit very firmly in the middle class category here on all boxes.  My mother especially.  There's a particular sort of mindset in immigrant families who are trying to assimilate - they tend to aspire to middle class and they also tend to be the rule-keepers of the classes, whether they ever reach the class they're aspiring to or not.

So I see a lot of my upbringing in the middle class category and therefore a lot of my values come from that category as well.  But I also see that I have developed a handful of traits from the poverty category since becoming an adult and going into poverty myself.

It's ironic to me that I make more money per hour than my parents ever did, and I have to work fewer hours in a month to make the same salary that my parents (jointly) did, but because of the economy and everything (especially rent) costing a larger portion of income, I am poorer than my parents who had a mortgage on 2 homes, 3 cars, and 2 children.

I actually make very good money by 1980s and 1990s standards.  And I do have the luxury that I only have to work 5 days a month to pay the bare minimum of my bills.   But that's because I live at poverty standards, with cheap rent, cheap cars, and the lack of acquiring *things* (although, by "things", I mean valuable items - I have a LOT of "stuff", which are mostly my tools and hobby items, such as 3 whole boxes filled with fabric and 6 boxes filled with rhinestones, pipe cleaners, fake flowers, earring hooks, etc.)

If I could work the job that I have at a normal 40-hours a week, I would be quite squarely in the upper middle class.  But I don't get that many hours.  I might work 40 or 50 hours in a single week, but that will be the only week I work that month, and possibly the only week I work for the next two or three months.

In the '80s and '90s, even working only one week a month, I would have easily been able to afford the kind of life my parents provided for me - a large 4 bedroom home in the suburbs of the 3rd most expensive city in the world to live in, private school, music lessons, enough vehicles for the children to have their own when it came time to drive, having children at all, etc.

But today, my very good salary yet few hours gives me a literally mouse-infested, termite-ridden 2 bedroom apartment with no straight lines or right angles anywhere in it in a crime-filled neighborhood, an 18-year old car that I literally keep together with zip ties and tin foil, and the bulk of my "disposable" income is spent on immediate pleasures like nice restaurants and dance events and stylistic clothing because I know I will never have anything for the future, so might as well enjoy my money now.

Not that I never save for the future, of course.  But that's my middle class upbringing.  I saved enough to buy my RV in cash, for instance, and every car I've ever owned was paid for in cash.  And I'm putting money away for the Honeymoon / Moving Road Trip if Canada ever accepts our immigration application (and if not, I'm still going to take a road trip and I might just move out to Seattle whether I have a job out there or not because #GetMeOutOfHere).

But my parents would have forgone all personal pleasures to save for the future, as I frequently did as a teenager living in that middle class home.  Now, however, I impulse spend on immediate pleasures because that's what someone does who is suffering from depression that's caused by economic suffering and who genuinely does not believe one will ever have health insurance or a retirement fund and can't even imagine the circumstances in which either are possible.

I am able to save up large amounts of money, but then something serious happens like my engine throwing a rod and needing either a new car or a new engine, or my 2 root canals at once, or my cat becoming terminally ill.  So I don't have any *confidence* in savings.  I know that something big will happen to drain it all as soon as I build it up.  That's the poverty mindset talking.

So I save only for very specific goals, because I know it's futile to just "save", generically, to have some kind of "nest egg" to live on in the future.  Which means I have the impulse to dip into it every now and then for present-day spending, as in the poverty category.  Whereas for my parents, saving is, itself, its own goal.  My mom seeing her father lose all his money, she's also very aware that middle class is not secure.  But, even though they also save for specific goals, they mostly just save as a general rule. They *manage* their money, while I *use* my money.

So, in my own personal experience, this chart tracks true.   My parents are middle class and their values match every box in the category.  Many of my values are in the middle class category because that was my early exposure, but I have developed some poverty class values since becoming poor and living this way for nearly 20 years, and I can see when and where the changeover happened.

https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic

I have a couple of exes like this, and pretty much all of my online flame wars are with dudebros like this (with an exception being a small number of actually "emotional" people who are feeling feelz that are not necessarily connected to reality and expecting everyone around them to cater to those feelz).

And this is the reason why I consider myself a New Atheist but refuse to associate with the "movement" and I don't attend atheist events. I believe in anti-theism, which is what the New Atheists are more or less founded on, but their toxic pseudo-logic justifications for sexism and racism make the community a place that I just don't want to be around.

"Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. ...

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies"

"Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth,"

"But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs."

Had to explain to someone the other night that the fact that "what happened to my ancestors doesn't affect me today" is exactly an example of that white privilege he claims not to have.  I pointed out to him that black people today, in Orlando, are poor and have poor health, because of deliberate racist decisions made by the city in housing zoning, railroad building, and freeway construction.  Their outcomes today are directly affected by what happened to their grandparents.

The fact that his white ancestors probably kidnapped George Washington (a story he seriously told me as evidence of how hard his ancestors had it in the past) and were outcasts during the Civil War and yet he suffers no setbacks from that because he "works hard to get what he has" is EXACTLY that "privilege" that the coworker he shut down was talking about.

My parents were refused food service and housing because they were a mixed marriage.  They still managed to be lower-middle class in the '80s, but how much further could they have gone if racism wasn't a thing?  If my dad could have used his forestry degree instead of working in a machine shop to support his family?  If my mother wasn't relegated to "secretary" job positions?  Where would I be today if sexism and racism didn't exist and didn't hold back my parents?

Maybe I'd be in the same place, I dunno.  The economy was completely fucked by the Boomers, so maybe I still would have chosen this career and still been thrown into poverty because of a gig economy.  But maybe I wouldn't be.  And maybe I, personally, would have but statistically people with my heritage would have *on average* better outcomes because their own parents and grandparents were not denied housing, jobs, or subsidies.

When your grandparents are funneled into ghettos, and then your parents are given crap education because schools are funded by property taxes, who then have shit jobs so that you grow up malnourished and without the opportunity for skills or clothing to impress employers, what happened to your ancestors very much affects your present day.

When your great great grandparents were paid for the slaves they lost, and when they were hired right off the boat because they were white and already spoke English, and when they were given the opportunity for free or low-cost land that other people were not afforded, so that each generation after them started with a walk to first base, what happened to your ancestors also very much affects your present day.

And the fact that you can look at some individual hardships that some 3x-removed uncle once suffered and say "see? My family had some shit too, but I don't let it affect me, I just work hard and earn my stuff"! and not see how that's actually reinforcing my own point, that's exactly what privilege is.

https://jezebel.com/rewriting-the-fairy-tale-adoption-narrative-1831433433

Adoption is not the "abortion alternative".  It's an industry (yes, I use that term deliberately) fraught with corruption, racism, and capitalism.

I had a pretty good adoptive experience.  But growing up, everyone else I heard about did not.  My own sister spent her entire life feeling abandoned, grieving for her bio-parents, and turning to drugs and sex-too-young to fill the void.  My uncle met my aunt when she was pregnant.  She gave up that child and later was found by the child.  The adult-child's story was pretty bad - neglectful adoptive parents, drug use, abuse ... They've tried to maintain a friendly relationship over the years but it's always been rocky.

I say that I was better off for my bio-mom not parenting me.   It's one of my main arguments in favor of allowing people to opt-out of parenting.  But the adoption system is not conducive to stories like mine.  Far too many people are not "better off" for the parents they ended up with.  Or, possibly they still are, but they still didn't get a good deal out of the arrangement.

Adoption is its own reproductive rights fight.  The system is terribly flawed and desperately needs an overhaul.  It is not a safe "third option" to avoid the issue of abortion.

I am glad I had an abortion.  I am more relieved by it every passing year.  It was absolutely the right choice for me.  Adoption was not.  I didn't want to avoid parenting, I needed to avoid *pregnancy*.

And the bullshit "gotcha" thought-questions about "what if we had transporters that could take the fetus out of your body and put it into someone else's, would you support that over abortion?" DO NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.   Or, rather, they might possibly remove one objection, but they introduce a whole bunch of other problems.

Look, I had signed up to be an egg donor at one point.  So I *also* get it from the standpoint of "my genetic offspring will be out there, somewhere, being raised by someone else".  Clearly, I'm OK with that possibility.  But the irony of people, particularly white men, who insist that they want to have "a child of their own", posing this gotcha question and suggesting that women give up "their own" child for someone else to raise, is thick.

Adoption is not an "abortion alternative".  Adoption is its own issue and the adoption system is fucked up.   If you really want to reduce abortions, support preventative care and post-natal care.

Oh, but that would be "socialism"!

Yeah, well, you care so much about all those little "babies", then fucking pay for their parents to care for them or to better avoid having them in the first place.

I just hosted a Brat Pack drama marathon. It was 3 of the movies that literally define the Brat Pack. David Blum, a reporter for the New Yorker, started out writing an article about Emilio Estevez shortly after St. Elmo's Fire. One night, Estevez invited Blum out to hang out with most of the cast, as they often did. Blum changed the focus of the article to the whole group and called it Hollywood's Brat Pack.

I grew up in the '80s with the Brat Pack as my role models. I watched a lot of movies in the '80s. If it hadn't been for my love of books and music, I very much could have been Xavier Cross from Scrooged with how much television I watched as a kid. Those Brat Pack movies, though ... Most of what I enjoyed in the '80s did not age well. I go back to watch the classics now as an adult and I'm really kind of horrified, if I'm being honest. I still love my old movies, though, because nostalgia is one helluva drug - forget about beer goggles, you oughta try on rosy nostalgia glasses sometime!

Anyway, the media I consumed as a kid was ... well ... rough. It was hard. It was deep. Frankly, it's no wonder that GenXers are pretty fucked up. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Old Yeller, Neverending Story ... I'm still not over Artax's death. We grappled with some shit back then.

I also read a lot, as I mentioned. One of my favorite authors back then was one of the most popular authors of the time - Judy Blum. She tackled some pretty hard stuff too. Her coming of age novels were grounding. I remember the controversy over her 1975 novel, Forever. That book examined both suicidal depression and teen sex. Talk about heavy topics. In the story, the main character has premarital sex at the end of high school, believing she will be with her partner "forever", but in the end [spoiler alert] discovers that one's first love rarely lasts forever and she will move on from him.

The fact that the characters have sex as teenagers and do not end up married, and the main character uses birth control, makes this book come in a whopping #7 out of the top 100 "most challenged books" in the US, for how often it gets censored and banned.

I bring all of this up to talk about Cuties.

I finally watched the movie Cuties. I've been defending it and haven't even watched it yet. So I decided that if I must watch something before I criticize it, then I must also watch something in order to defend it. So I did. To be totally honest, absolutely nothing I have read, both pro and con, accurately explained to me what Cuties was about.

[SPOILER ALERT - The entire plot of the film follows]

Amy is an 11 year old Muslim girl growing up in France. Her family is, by my standards, extremely repressive. She is required to cover her body and hair, and pray for piety and modesty. She is moved into a new apartment and, presumably, a new school, where she meets the Cuties - 4 girls who have formed a dance team of that name.

These girls show their skin and defy authority. They are rebellious and obnoxious, but really not any worse than all the kids I knew at that age. Their first act of rebellion is to convince the entire schoolyard to pose and freeze one day when the bell rings to summon them back to class. I mean, that's hardly dangerous or scandalous. Just irritating to the authority figures.

After some routine bullying, Amy eventually gets accepted by their group and starts hanging out with them. She starts wearing less modest clothing, but again, nothing worse than anything I did at her age. She shows her legs and her midriff. I probably still have some of my old crop tops from the '80s. I have always been proud of my stomach and I liked showing it off.

As for legs ... well, I grew up in an era of knee-length shorts and I am still uncomfortable in anything shorter (although I have no problem with *skirts* that short, but shorts have to be to my knees). So let me tell you sometime of the nearly impossible task of finding shorts for women or girls that don't have half my ass hanging out. I literally have to wear men's shorts in order to find any long enough to make me comfortable. Girls wear short shorts because that's what's readily available.

Anyway, so the girls are dressing less modestly than Amy's Muslim family would like. But not any less modestly than any tweens I have seen since ... oh, probably the '60s. In fact, the tight mini skirts we see the Cuties in when we are introduced to them look suspiciously like the skirts I had back in the '80s. In the '90s, one of those mini skirts literally got me my first mall job when I was 16 - my boss liked my ass in that skirt and wanted to watch me reach up and straighten the suit jackets in that skirt all shift.

So, the Cuties have heard of some dance competition and they want to enter. So they rehearse all the time. All of their routines that we see are pretty standard hip hop routines - nothing particularly special or controversial. No twerking or crotch-splits or anything.

Amy wants to join their dance troupe, but she has never danced before. So she steals her older cousin's mobile phone to watch the practice videos the Cuties have uploaded so far and searches the internet for music videos to learn by. Unfortunately, she finds videos of voluptuous women in thongs twerking. So, guess what kind of moves she learns?

Here's the thing ... the right-wing propaganda of this film is totally wrong of course. It has nothing to do with pedophilia or sex trafficking or child prostitution. It is, of course, a criticism of the oversexualization of young girls, just as the producers and directors say it is.

But the defenses of the film led me to believe that it was a criticism of *the dance industry* and how *it* oversexualizes girls. But that's not true either.

The Cuties are not part of any dance studio or dance industry. They're 4 tweens (and Amy) who want to be famous dancers who emulate what they see in pop media. With, as far as I can tell, absolutely no adult supervision or guidance. Certainly no *pressure* to dance this way.

Amy's mother has no idea what she is getting up to. She has 2 small children to care for and a husband who is off somewhere courting a second wife (without telling her about it until it's a done deal). I'll get back to this in a minute. The only time we see Angelica's family is when she and her brother get into a fight and her dad yells that he's trying to sleep ... in the afternoon. We see Yasmine's mom, who seems nice enough, but clearly has no clue what the girls are getting into. None of the other girls' parents ever enter the picture.

So Amy, desperately trying to fit in, learns these very adult dance moves on her own. Then, when Yasmine gets kicked out of the group, and the group freaks out because the preliminaries for the dance competition are too soon to teach another girl the routine, Amy jumps in, proves that she's been studying their home videos and already knows the routine, and also introduces the other girls to the very adult dance moves she has also been studying.

These moves get incorporated into their routine. This routine wins the girls a spot in the competition during the primaries. When they get caught sneaking into a laser tag facility, Amy gets the girls out of trouble by explaining that they are dancers and celebrating their acceptance to the competition. To prove that they are really dancers, she starts doing the adult dance moves, making the two male employees so uncomfortable that they just let the girls go. The girls don't realize that the men were uncomfortable and trying to get out of watching tweens twerking, they think Amy just convinced the guards that they are legitimate dancers which, for some reason, gave them a free pass.

As they practice for the competition, Amy becomes more and more self-confident. She starts wearing even more revealing clothing and moves through her school with the same arrogant attitude as the other Cuties. Later, she picks a fight with a rival dance team, who manage to pants her and take pictures of her in her underwear to post on social media, mocking her for her childish undergarments.

Amy, filled with lots of really big emotions at this stage in her development and with her oppressive home life and her humiliation on behalf of her mother for her father bringing home a new wife, starts making really bad choices. She steals lots of money from her mom's purse and takes her friends and her brother on a shopping spree for more adult underwear and clothing.

Amy's mom eventually learns of the theft and freaks out, yelling and hitting Amy for getting out of hand. She even calls in a priest to do an exorcism, but the priest says there are no demons there. So Amy's mom and grandmother strip her and splash her with water, having earlier established that water washes away sins. Amy goes into a kind of trance-like convulsion partially consisting of some of her booty-shaking new dance moves.

Later, when her cousin discovers that she still has his phone and tries to take it back - her one connection to this grown-up, outside world of music videos and social media - Amy locks herself in the bathroom and takes a picture of genitals. I am unclear on if the picture includes her new adult underwear or not. The film shows her taking the picture but does not show us the picture (thankfully). She then posts this picture on social media.

Now her new friends hate her because she went too far. They call her a whore and say that they are receiving harassing messages to show off their private parts like Amy. So they kick her out of the group and bring back Yasmin. As her father's wedding day approaches and her grandmother continues to push her into being a dutiful, subservient, Muslim Senegalese young woman, and her period begins, all of Amy's really big feelings take over.

Amy sabotages Yasmine and shows up to the dance competition. With no time to wait for Yasmin, they accept Amy and run on stage. This is the one scene where we see the routine in full. And it's ... discomforting. The girls look like strippers. And I don't mean they look like some of these hip hop dancers who have some sexualized moves in their routine. I mean that I don't recall any hip hop in their new routine at all. The entire routine consisted of them humping the floor and putting their finger in their mouths and grabbing their crotches.

And the audience is having none of it. Except one dude, apparently. He seemed to think the routine was fine. But everyone else in the audience was shaking their heads, one mother covering her young daughter's eyes, some booing, lots of mumbling. The judges, however, all seemed to think it was fantastic, if their smiles and nods were anything to go by. That's disturbing.

While dancing, Amy seems to have some kind of emotional breakdown. Everything that has happened up to this point seems to have all come crashing in on her mind as she realizes what she's doing. She starts crying and flees the stage in the middle of the performance.

She runs home, where her grandmother sees her competition costume and calls her a whore, and then attacks her mother for having raised a whore daughter. Amy's mom finally stands up to her mother and tells her to back the fuck off and takes Amy into her room to comfort her. They seem to reach an understanding. Her mom tells her that she doesn't have to attend her father's wedding if she doesn't want to, which is about to start. So Amy changes out of her dance costume into a reasonably modest pair of jeans and a sweater, skips the wedding, and goes outside to play jump rope with the neighborhood kids.

And that's where it ends.

There was no "dance industry" in this film. It was mostly just 4 girls with too much unsupervised, unguided exposure to grown-up media. Had they been a part of a studio, it's quite possible that they would have been discouraged from the dance routine they choreographed.

This movie was far more like a Judy Blume novel, or a John Hughes film. It showed young kids under immense pressure with either not enough parental guidance or the wrong kind of parental oversight. Then, left to their own devices, their very large, overwhelming feelings drown the hormonal tweens and leads them to make very poor choices while they try to figure themselves out.

In the end, Amy figures out that she made some poor choices. But she can make other choices, and life will go on.

A few days ago, I just spent several hours watching teenagers kill other teenagers, get into large-scale fist fights with each other, learn how to use machine guns and grenades and kill enemy soldiers, and then barely-out-of-teens having lots of sex and snorting lots of cocaine and drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. These movies were also about young people figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on (maybe not for the ones who died, but the rest will go on).

A whole bunch of years ago I read books with girls getting their periods, having sex, dealing with death, feeling lots of feelings, and also figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on.

This is what it means to have a "coming of age" drama.

There is a country song that says "I believe that youth is spent well on the young / 'Cause wisdom in your teens would be a lot less fun". I don't happen to agree that youth is spent well on the young, but I definitely agree that wisdom in your teens would be a lot less "fun", for some value of "fun". I am frankly amazed some days that I lived to see adulthood. Between racing my car and rolling it down a hill and running from and waiting out a mountain lion from atop a water tower and sneaking out at night to party with kids doing way to many fucking drugs, it's really only luck that allowed me to live to see "wisdom". I'm not sure that my middle aged wisdom would have resulted in less fun, so much as different fun.  I'm having lots of fun as an adult too, only with much less risk.

My point is that the teen years are a pretty fucking foolish age. It's when bodies change and emotions get really large but the brains are not yet developed enough to know what to do with with it all. Everything is confusing, everything is humongous, everything is immediate, everything is absolute.

And that's what we see in "coming of age" stories. These stories are uncomfortable. These stories are challenging. These stories are difficult. These stories are often a little bit ugly. Because that's what the teen and pre-teen years are - uncomfortable, challenging, difficult, and often a little bit ugly.

Which makes Cuties a pretty damn good representative of the "coming of age" genre.

The movie does not draw any hard conclusions, as a good "coming of age" drama ought not. But what lesson it does impart is that the oversexualization of these young girls was definitely not for their own good. Amy was caught between too repressive and far too unfettered at a time in her life when her emotions were also too big whilst her knowledge and reason was far too inexperienced.

This led her to ping-pong between extremes, both being wrong. She needs to stop bouncing back and forth off the opposite walls and find a path between them that she can walk at a more reasonable pace without banging herself up on both walls. Which is, I feel, a common dilemma for many young girls. It certainly was for me.

Telling an uncomfortable story about an uncomfortable situation does not necessarily condone or support that situation or that action. It depends on how the story is told. For instance, 50 Shades very clearly romanticizes abuse by not recognizing what the character does as abusive and perpetuating the trope that a man can be "saved" by a good woman.

Flowers In The Attic wasn't romanticizing parental abuse or incest, although both were the vehicles for the tension in that novel. It was telling a story intended to make the reader feel off-kilter because of the horrific things happening to the characters. It was definitely never defended as some sort of introduction to a world people were clamoring to get into. Not a single person read Flowers and said "sure, it's not totally accurate about incest, but at least it got people talking about it, and maybe we can guide them to the correct way to do it!" You were supposed to feel uncomfortable when you read Flowers, even if you could empathize with the characters.

Cuties told an uncomfortable story. It showed a girl chafing at her repressive upbringing, flinging the chains off and jumping head-first without the benefit of a parachute, and only then realizing that she actually just jumped out of a frying pan and into a fire. To mix my metafores, which I have a tendency to do.

The movie seemed to imply that it was the influence of the media (social media, pop media, etc.) that was responsible for Amy's decent into hypersexualization. And, yeah, there is a lot of it out there for children to stumble across. But I also think that this is the inevitable outcome when children aren't given any guidance for how to navigate that media and what it means. I saw little to no adult mentorship in this film, other than Amy's occasional lessons to pray for a life of subservience to a man and no respect for her agency in any form.

What I definitely saw absolutely none of was pedophilia, btw. Pedophilia is a mental health condition where adults are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Most pedophiles do not harm children. Most are aware that they have a dangerous condition. Sexual assault tends to be perpetrated by people who are not pedophiles. I know this is difficult to understand, but assault and abuse (in all their forms) are not about *attraction*, they're about *power*.

There was absolutely no pedophilia anywhere in this film. There was nothing about adults being attracted to pre-pubescent children. In fact, everyone (but one older teen in the audience of the competition) was repulsed by the sexualization of the girls.

There was also no *system* or *industry-wide* hypersexualization of children. This was not Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms, where the industry itself is so competitive that it keeps falling into more and more adult requirements of children for the sake of competition.

But there *was* children exhibiting sexualized dance moves that they learned from pop media. And the tone of the film clearly disapproved.

We can possibly have a conversation about the ethics of a director teaching children how to play these kinds of roles where their characters are doing adult dance moves, but if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to talk about children in horror movies for the last 50 years, and docudramas showing young guerrilla soldiers, and every movie from the '80s showing teen violence and bullying. There better not be a single person complaining about Cuties who also thinks Lolita or The Professional are good films.

Child actors are still actors. They are required to play roles to tell the story. Sometimes their characters are bad people and sometimes they do bad things and sometimes bad things happen to them. This is unavoidable if we are going to tell stories about the experience of children. It's challenging to protect a child from the experience of playing a role, and that's an ongoing conversation that needs to continue. But children in real life go through some shit, and if we're going to tell stories about the lives and experiences of children, we're going to have to see that shit they go through. We have to be able to share our stories as children.

And that's what this film is, by the way. It's the dramatized experience of the creator - a Black Muslim Senegalese-French woman. This is her story. She needs to be able to tell her story, and we need to be able to see it. And this story very clearly tells a tale of a young girl who lived through some shit and made some poor choices, as children do, and life went on.

Just like every good "coming of age" story ever.

Now, having watched the movie, I would not say this is a film critiquing the dance industry's use of children's bodies. I would say that this is a film telling the story of a young girl experiencing things that some young girls experience, many of which are harmful and cause hardship to the child. That makes it a "coming of age" film. And one that has an opinion of some of those experiences, and that opinion is pretty solidly against them.

What I find very ironic is that a lot of supposedly progressive types get up in arms over these clear and obvious abuses of power, and yet they themselves take up positions of authority in their companies or communities and also get involved with much younger women, but see it as somehow "different" because they're not *as* famous or they're not rich (because, honestly, who the fuck becomes rich as a community leader or speaker or writer or organizer?), and because she's technically of legal age already once they start.

It's not as simple as "him rich & legal, her illegal = morally wrong". The span of the age gap, which life stage each person is in, how much community standing the older person has, how the younger person views them ... these things all affect the impact that this power imbalance has.

When I was 15-17, I actively courted men who could legally vote. This is a fuzzy area. However:

1. I was not an up-and-comer in an industry and they were not people of power who could influence my career. They didn't hold any position of authority over me at all and had nothing to benefit me other than the fact that I wanted to sleep with them.


2. There is a huge difference between a 16 & 18 year old both still in high school and a 14 & 35 year old, and also a big difference between them and a 35 & 55 year old. The bigger the age gap and the more different the life stage (i.e. the younger the youngest one is), the bigger the impact is.


3. I had comprehensive sex ed and control over my reproductive choices, and I made my decisions knowingly and on my own because I wanted to have sex, not because some older man convinced me that he "loved" me.

That still doesn't make what the older men did *right*, I'm just acknowledging that there is some nuance in the discussion. I had control of my sexual agency when I was a teenager because of my specific life circumstances and my available options. But older men still should have known better.

And now, with men I know in their 30s, 40s, and 50s all vocally condemning these statutory rapes, yet some of them justifying getting involved with women not very long out of their teenage years because "she's an adult, if I don't have sex with her, I am robbing her of her sexual agency" ... while it's true that it's not the same thing as 40 year old rock stars marrying 13 year old children, it's also the same *excuse*, just moving the age of "agency".

I don't think all "crimes" ought to have the same penalties. The crime of copyright violation shouldn't carry the same sentence as mass murder. But as someone who has had my artwork stolen, I'm kinda sensitive to people justifying one "crime" while being opposed to others. Same thing with these kinds of things - yes, there is nuance in the discussion depending on the variables, but that doesn't make it *right* when something is less bad than something else.

I'm just saying that I have noticed a lot of people willing to hard-line condemn some people for obvious atrocities, but who then do things that are ... a little less clearly bad, using the same *excuses*.

And this is, IMO, why we should both a) switch away from the Scorched Earth Policy as a blanket policy in SJW circles and work on more nuanced forms of justice (where earth scorching and banning are still options but not the only tools, and in fact are the last resort), and b) be a little more introspective and careful with our own "minor" infractions so that we don't emulate these clear examples in our lesser offenses, which leave doors open for the big offenses.

As I've said in other contexts before - if you don't want other people thinking your relationship is abusive, perhaps you shouldn't be doing the same things that abusers do.

If you want to take a hard stance against rape cases like these, perhaps you shouldn't be having the kinds of relationships where your justifications for that relationship are the same ones that these rapists use for their relationships.

And while acknowledging the severity of the hard-edged cases, if you don't want to find yourself on the receiving end of the kind of "justice" you promote, perhaps also acknowledge that life is complex.  While striving to do better.

Speaking of working retail...

"Excuse me, where is..."
Right beside you.

"Can you tell me how much this costs?"
Sure, I'll just scan it with this publicly accessible price checker you're standing next to.

"How much is this?"
According to the price sticker on the package, it costs this much.

"Can you help me get something off the high shelf?"
Well, I can hand you the one just below it on the shelf at waist height.

"Where is the bathroom?"
Right here, under this 6-foot tall sign that says "restrooms".

"Do you have [some kind of completed artwork or home furnishing]?"
No, sorry, as a craft store, we tend to have the materials for making art and furnishings. If you'd like finished objects, you might want to try a home furnishing store.

"I have this list of items I need to buy. Can I just hand it to you and you find them for me?"
Well, personal shoppers charge about $200 an hour, but I'll do it for half that rate since I'm also making minimum wage here, and that's plenty for me!

"Do you have [this seasonal item]?"
Not at the moment. It becomes available during that season, and then we get rid of those things to make room for the next season's things.
"But I'm sure I bought it here before!"
I'm sure you did too, but that was probably last season. We don't have it now.
"Any idea when you'll get them in again?"
Probably next season.
"Can you check?"
No.

"Do you carry this item?"
No, that's not something we carry.
"Can you check another location to see if they have it?"
No, the entire company does not carry that item.
"Can you call a different company to see if they have it?"
No.

"Do you have this item?"
I'm not sure, let's check this public tablet device conveniently located right in front of you under the giant sign that says "shop here!" to see if we carry it.
"Can't you just look it up for me?"
No problem, I'll just come out from behind my counter to stand where you're standing and I'll surf the app for you instead of addressing all these other customer's needs who are waiting in line behind you.

"Excuse me, do you work here?"
[in plain clothes, with bag/purse, no nametag, drink in hand, and obviously in a hurry]

"Excuse me, do you work here?"
[in brightly colored store shirt with store logo emblazoned on front and back, large apron with store logo embroidered across the front, radio with earpiece on, giant RF gun hanging from my belt]

"Can I just come behind your counter where your cash register is and plug my cell phone into the outlet powering your sensitive store electronics?"
No.
"But my cell phone is dying!"
Sorry, but nobody is allowed behind the counter where the cash register is. It's a security risk.
"But I just want to charge my cell phone!"
That's what a robber might say too. Sorry. There's a Starbucks in this same shopping plaza.
"OMG YOU'RE SO RUDE I WANT TO TALK TO A MANAGER RIGHT NOW!!!"

#ActualConversationsIHave #AdventuresInRetail

This was a Facebook post of my commentary on a link that I shared to some other FB post that someone made.  That post is now unavailable so I have no idea what the original post says that sparked my commentary.   But, fortunately in this case, my own commentary tends to be long enough and complete enough to be its own post.

I had an ex who has some unexamined assumptions about gender and he shied away from the discussion every time it came up.  This was one example.

He wore a kilt in someone's wedding once, and I don't remember if this was this exact same day or some other time, or even if it was two separate conversations, but he did remark once that it wasn't fair that women could wear dresses because of the comfort and "built in air conditioning".

So I shrugged and suggested that he just wear a dress.  I'll even go shopping with him to help him pick something out.  He immediately switched sides and blustered incoherently about why he couldn't wear a dress - not things like "I would get bullied" or "but I don't actually want to wear dresses I'm just remarking on the social double standard" (that last one being my own excuse - I actually don't like dresses and don't feel comfortable in them but I think people should be able to wear them if they want to) - but something something men don't wear dresses something.

I said that he could wear one around the house.  He could go to any of the places that *I* go where men wearing dresses was acceptable.  But no, he himself supported the very system that makes it difficult for men to wear dresses.

Another time, in a totally unrelated conversation, he remarked about disliking when gay men "advertise their politics", meaning that they moved in a "feminine" manner so that you could "tell" they were gay.  Like, they couldn't just be blokes who happened to like dick, they had to be *flamboyant*.  Somehow that was displaying their politics?

We had a very long conversation about that one, where I thought I had gotten through to him about how a person's mannerisms don't necessarily indicate their orientation, how merely existing isn't "advertising politics", and how masculinity was not a blank default but similarly "advertising one's politics" to the exact same degree.

Like, wearing a wedding band tells me as much about your monogamous sexual behaviour in private as my infinity-heart necklace, or you having a picture of your hetero spouse on the desk is "displaying your sexuality in public" to the same degree that having a picture of one's same-sex spouse does.

I don't particularly want to think of my coworkers having sex with their spouses, but telling me that they *have* a spouse comes with a bunch of implications including that they have PIV sex (and if you try to say that I shouldn't apply those assumptions to the statement, try telling a hetero man that him having a wife doesn't imply to you that he has sex and see how defensive he gets at the thought that you think he's celibate).

It's not just a blank slate, it comes with a bunch of assumptions that society just happens to think are appropriate assumptions to have.  This is why they make the same assumptions about people in different relationships.  When they meet a hetero married couple, they assume they have sex together.  So when they meet a gay couple, they similarly assume they have sex together, and because they're freaked out by gay sex, this assumptions bothers them, so suddenly the gay couple is "rubbing my nose in their private gay sex life".

So his heteromasculinity - his way of moving his body through space - is not "blank".  It is not devoid of his "politics", making someone who is more "flamboyant" deliberately displaying his own pro-gay-rights politics, or whatever.

The idea that whatever white straight cismen do is "blank" and "default" and anything other than what they do must therefore be some kind of "statement" pisses me right the fuck off.

I would constantly think that I got through to him on things like this, only to have other conversations like the dress one, where he'd seem to be supportive of breaking down gender roles by wishing men could wear skirts only to then support those roles when I suggested that he just go ahead and do it.

Unexamined privilege and unexamined biases.  Your statements about what other people do usually reflect more about you than about the other people.

#ThingsIWantToToon

A large dam is broken and hemorrhaging water.  Entire villages along the banks are flooded, people and animals are being swept away by the flood and the river is full of the dead.

A person with an evil grin is placing bombs along the dam.  Another person is on the ground trying to organize the disaster relief.

There is a long line of people bringing sandbags to try and control and redirect the flood.

Some of the people who handed over a sandbag have also started organizing to go after the saboteur and stop them from blowing more holes in the dam.

There is yet a third group of people in the distance with blueprints and maps and are clearly a long-range rebuilding team who will get to see the fruits of their labor only after the immediate disaster is controlled.

Off to the side, two people stand talking.  One of them says "I'm not going to bring a sandbag. I just don't think it will help anything."

The other one says "the person in charge of all of this isn't perfect.  Look, they're getting paid for their work here, and I heard they even backed into someone's fence with their car once.  Clearly they are just as bad as that guy up there blowing up the dam, so I can't support their efforts to block up the dam or clean up the mess from the flood."

#IfYourVoteDidNotCountWhyAreTheRepublicansSoIntentOnTakingAwayYourVote? #LesserOfTwoEvilsMeansOneIsStillTheGreaterEvil #DamageControl #HarmReduction #MultiFacetedPlan #ShortTermTriageLongTermRecovery #StopTheBleedingFirstThenStabilizeThenHeal

So, in a capitalist, bootstrap worldview, the goal is to work really hard so that we produce enough to one day retire so that we can enjoy the fruits of our labor without working anymore and our children have things easier.  And yet, the idea of a *society* working really hard to produce things like automation so that the *society* can enjoy the fruits of its labor without working anymore and our children can have things easier us somehow wrong and evil.  Because then people wouldn't be *working* and that, alone, is bad.

If we as individuals can be proud of having amassed enough that we can retire (and the younger we retire, the more we are deserving of pride and congratulations), then we as a society should be proud of having amassed enough that our people can also "retire" from the drudgery of production and spend their lives in the pursuit of happiness.

Being able to care for a population that does not produce or "contribute" ought to be seen as a mark of our success and wealth as a nation, just as retirement is seen as a mark of success for the individual.  Being able to say that we are so wealthy that we have enough to just give away and so successful at efficiency and automation that we can produce without needing to lift a finger ought to be a huge source of pride to capitalists.

I had an abortion several years ago.  When I was a teenager, Plan B wasn't a thing, so even though I had heard of it before I got pregnant, it just wasn't in my memory and I somehow managed to forget all about it the one time I needed it.

I was dating someone who was planning on getting a vasectomy, but hadn't yet scheduled it (ironically, he did schedule it after I got pregnant but before we knew).  I had been very reliably using the Mucous Method up until that point.  One day, we started out having sex, and before there was penetration, I told him that I was too close to my ovulation cycle, so he would need to either wear a condom or pull out.

I guess he forgot.

So I got pregnant and I didn't remember that Plan B was a thing, and a month later I started having the worst morning sickness ever.  As I missed my period, I took a pregnancy test, and my fears were confirmed.

Neither of us wanted to ever have kids.  I had been thinking about this since I was a teenager.  I had decided when I was 14 that if I ever got pregnant when I was not in a position to raise a child, I would abort.  I revisited that decision many times over the years and always reached the same decision.

Now I had taken on the identity label "childfree-by-choice" and was dating a man who felt the same.  So I looked at that decision one more time and, yep, still no change.

So I had an abortion.  He helped pay for it and he took care of me while I recovered.  Some things that they don't always tell you about abortion is that it may have a very long recovery period.  I had to be put on light duty for weeks afterwards - no heavy lifting (and remember, I do manual labor, so that put a crimp in my income).

I told my employers that I had just had surgery, so please put me on operator gigs only.  2 days after my abortion, I could barely stand upright.  But I had a camera gig, which they swore up and down that I would only have to operate, and not do any labor.  After the hefty price tag for the "surgery", I needed the work.

When I got there, they put me on the hand-held camera.  After I reminded them of my light duty restriction and asked to be put on the long lens, they said that I was the only one qualified to run a hand-held, plus it was corporate hand-held, which means I should be able to run it on sticks (on a mobile tripod) for the whole show, and not actually do for-real-hand-held.  So I agreed to stay where I was.

And then the director insisted I go handheld.

I nearly passed out from the pain of lifting a 30 lb camera on my shoulder and physically running around the stage.  I definitely had to run to the bathroom at least once to vomit from the pain.  I was dizzy and light-headed and felt like my insides were trying to spill outside, and this went on for 3 days.

My abortion was not a decision that I made lightly.  I spent many years considering the question to reach my conclusion.  My abortion was also not something without consequences.  It was a miserable experience and one that I hope never to have to go through again.  But I don't regret it even a single bit and I am horrified (and I use that term deliberately, to the full extent of its definition and context) at the thought that I may not have the option in my future.

Of all the bad situations I've gotten myself into, of all the choices I've had to make where no option was really a "good" option and some of them were merely less-bad than the others, that's the one decision I have absolutely no regrets for, that I still, to this day, feel nothing but relief and gratitude for.

That man and I broke up not too much longer afterwards.  Not because of the abortion, but because we were really just not compatible.  It was a breakup in my top 3 Worst Breakups Of All Time.  It is one of the few relationships I have actual regrets for getting into and I might actually choose to erase from history if I had a time machine and I could go back in time and stop myself from dating him.

Not only were we not compatible in the long run, but over the years I've kept a sort of passive eye on him, just to see how things have turned out for him, and boy have we diverged!  I got more and more liberal and progressive and feminist and he got more and more ... let's just say he went in the other direction.

Each time something comes up to remind me of his existence, I am more grateful than the last time that we did not have to become co-parents.  I am hard pressed to think of other exes who I would have hated having to make parenting decisions with as much as him.

Not to mention the fact that my income has remained the same over the years while my cost of living has increased.  So I am, if it's at all possible, even poorer now than I was when we were dating (although he has plenty of money, so I suppose at least the kid would have been cared for).

I can't even express the full extent of my relief at not having had children, at never having been pregnant, and at having had that abortion all those years ago.  I was at the time fully cognizant of just how privileged I was for the opportunity.

So that relief is in direct proportion to the amount of horror I feel now, contemplating the very likeliness of losing Roe vs. Wade.

All the terror and disgust and fear that I felt when I realized I was hosting a parasitic life that would tie me to that man for 2 decades is magnified and amplified by the number of souls from the future, crying out for their lost choice, the number of women dying in living rooms and hospital emergency rooms from illicit attempts to save themselves from the chains of their pregnancies.

For all the problems that are legitimate concerns of abortive procedures (not the least of which is lack of proper counseling to help people who are less resolute than I was), losing these procedures will only make things worse.

It's only by having affordable, accessible, and culturally acceptable medical treatment for people who do not want to conceive or who are unwilling or unable to carry to term that we can even hope to fix the problems with the system and create those processes that would solve the legitimate problems.

I had an abortion.  I do not regret it even a minuscule, subconscious bit.  My relief and gratitude for the option only increases as time passes.  It was a terrible experience that I hope to never experience again, but I am so happy that I had the option when I needed it.

I do not have "mixed feelings".  It was not a difficult decision for me to make (although I did put a lot of effort into making that decision and making sure it was the right one).  I do not mourn some lost baby that could have been.  I am not suffering from any long-term medical side-effects from the procedure.  I am not afraid of "missing my chance".  I am not saddened at never having had children and quickly approaching an age where I can't "fix" that decision.

While I would have preferred to have made better decisions that would have prevented me from needing an abortion in the first place (*hint hint* - better education and access to Plan B would have solved that problem), and the procedure itself was deeply uncomfortable, the choice that I made that day was probably the single best decision I have ever made in my life, given my circumstances.

And I can't even imagine the shitshow that my life would have turned into had that choice been taken from me.

#StockUpOnPlanBNow #SaveEnoughForYouAndForOthersWhoCouldNotAffordToStockUp

It's weird.  When I see arguments about sex work, and people shorten it to "sw", for some reason that makes it easy for my brain to just skip over the term entirely.

So then, if I don't have the word "sex work" being said in my head along with the rest of the words in the sentences, my brain just substitutes "retail job" automatically because all the anti-sex-work arguments apply to my retail job - customers being dangerous, forced into work I don't like just to survive, demeaning, customers who don't value my services, even the false equivalency to sex trafficking (which, again, is not the same thing as "sex work") works for the retail industry because of the sweatshop problems in the production side of retail.

But I have never had anyone tell me that I was immoral for spending literally hours standing on tile (because retail workers in the US are not allowed to sit, even when they're cashiers and don't move from their post), working my body for poverty-wages to make some CEO richer.

I have never had anyone tell me that I was "selling my body" when I perform a dance routine on stage, or climb a truss or load a truck, which is all manual labor using my body in exchange for money, or tell me that I was a bad person for doing so or that I should find some lower-paid job where I didn't have to "sell my body" because that would make me a higher value person / potential wife / mother.

I have never had anyone tell me that they support me but my customers are evil and should not spend money on my services (even though banning all my customers would then put me out of a job).

I've never had anyone shake their head in shame over my being exploited by capitalism (but I've had plenty of people shake their heads at me over requesting a living wage in a capitalistic society).

I've never had anyone tell me that by consenting to work for a retail employer, I am indirectly supporting those aforementioned sweatshops.

Not only have I never had anyone tell me that my job is demeaning, but I have had lots of people try and tell me that it's noble to "earn an honest day's pay for an honest day's work" and to take pride in a job well done no matter what kind of job it is.  The harder the job (and often the lower it pays), the more "noble" it is.  Unless it's making your fast food, I guess.

It's funny how these arguments only apply when the job in question is sex, but it doesn't apply to retail, to cleaning services, to farm workers, to call service employees, or any of the other hundreds of low-paid, high-labor, emotionally and physically draining work.  But Horus forbid a person likes sexyfuntimes enough to want to trade it for money, and someone else has the money to trade it for sexyfuntimes with someone who enjoys the trade.

Literally, replace "sw" in any anti-sex-work argument with "retail" or even with "freelance art / content producer" (such as people who make a living from their Etsy products, or classic artists, or photographers, or musicians) and it applies to my life.

I HATE retail work.  I loathe it with every fiber of my being.  Even though I like the creative process of designing and building custom frames, I hate showing up to my job, I hate my 4-hour shifts that costs me almost as much in gas to get there and back as I make that day, I hate hate HATE our customers, I hate the physical and emotional pain I suffer from walking and standing on that goddamn tile, and I hate my pittance of a wage that I earn in exchange.

I love my freelance work, but I hate the part where I don't work for several months in a row no matter how many clients I call and beg for work, and I hate that I can be fired from a gig for the completely functional clothing that I'm wearing and my employers can pretend that I'm not being "fired" because they can just not call me for more work, but I'm not technically "fired" because this fucking state has no union power for my industry because our union sucks.

Everything that's "bad" about sex work applies to my jobs.  So unless you have a solution to capitalism itself so that *nobody* has to trade *anything* for money, any objection to sex work (as opposed to sex trafficking) or to legalizing and supporting sex work and sex workers is just sex-negative condescending bullshit.

When I see you fighting just as hard to, not just abolish capitalism but replace it with something that doesn't result in me starving to death because I can no longer earn a living, as you do justifying why sex work is bad (or sex work is good but people who use sex services are bad), then maybe I won't block your ass for your deeply embedded misogyny and sex-negativity.

And I better not catch you patronizing a kink club or using sex toys (which were probably manufactured in one of those sweatshops in Asia that more closely resemble your sex trafficking ring that you're so concerned about), or taking pole exercising classes, or wearing lingerie (or regular undergarments, or any clothing that you didn't personally make with your own self-harvested fibers that you wove yourself and then cut into your clothing for that matter) either. You fucking hypocrite.

So, as someone who works in retail, this graphic actually really bothers me.  I've seen this posted at least a dozen times in the last couple of weeks, and I'm getting tired of repeating myself, so I'm just going to post this here.

Retail employers do not hire more people based on the amount of work that needs to be done, they hire people based on the amount of money they bring in.

When the store calls for more cashiers to help manage long lines, that means that people who were assigned floor duty have to put their own floor duties on hold to come and ring up.  When the lines go down, our floor duties (namely, "go-backs" - putting away all the shit that customers leave lying all over the store or return at the register) are still there waiting for us, only now we have less time to complete our tasks - tasks which have continued to build up in our absence (it's not like people *stop* leaving shit all over the store when we go up to the registers).

Meanwhile, as all the floor people leave the floor to manage the registers, all the shoppers in the store looking for an employee to help them find something or ask a question are left bereft.  So this also hurts the other customers.

Making more work for us does not help us.  We don't get more help, we get less time to do more work.

I, for example, am required to help customers who come to my custom framing counter, while also building the frames before their due date, putting away go-backs for the 3 sections of the store closest to my counter, helping customers find things no matter where in the store they are located even if they're all the way across the store in departments that I don't know very well, come up and help at the register when the line gets too long, take out the trash, sweep the floor at night, and now I get to handle "buy online, pick up in store" orders because management decided to get in on this whole internet thing where people don't have the time to actually shop so they order stuff on our website and *we* have to play Personal Shopper and go pull everything for them so that they can just run in and pick it up.

They just keep adding to my duties, but not hiring more people.

If you want retail stores to hire more people, you have to give them more money.  If they have already put in automated registers, we have already lost that company - they do not want to hire more people and making more money will not change their mind at this point, it'll just justify their decision to install self-checkout registers.  You have to give money to companies who have ethical hiring practices and reward them for socially conscious decisions.

Look, you can feel irritated or resentful of companies who are investing in automation at the expense of hiring employees - thanks Capitalism!  You can also feel irritated or resentful at the idea of doing the "work" of an employee "for free".

But this all sounds a lot like the complaints of Oregonians freaking out about having to pump their own gas - the rest of the country pumps our own gas and have for years.  Some drivers have never even known a world where someone else pumps gas for us.  Most of the rest of us thought that the reaction in Oregon to losing their full service at gas stations was ridiculous, pampered, entitled, and elitist.

Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe we should be expecting companies to continue to provide people to do things for us.

Or maybe the entire system is fucked up, and we should be encouraging more automation alongside of better social safety nets so that we develop a culture where automation is sign of wealth and prosperity of the nation, not a complete abandonment of its people.

In the meantime, while we await this magical society that takes care of its people because we can afford to once we have all the robots to do all the jobs for us, giving low-paid, over-worked, menial employees more work to do is not the best form of support for us.  Our employers will not respond to the more work with more help.  They respond by insisting we meet the rising work demands with the staff we have with not even an increase in pay.

So you're not sending any message that anyone who can do anything about it will hear.  You're just making my day that much harder.