#quotes

sawasawako-archived

“Don’t get me wrong: you can learn a lot on the internet. You can learn more than at any previous time in history. But ingesting information is only half of learning. The other half, the more important half, is responding to that information, thinking critically about it, about what it implies. Does it fit with your worldview? If not, why not? This is the part of learning that turns knowledge into wisdom, into action. This is the part of learning through which you create yourself, and it demands mental free time, time when you’re not consuming media of any kind, when you’re doing nothing at all. By greedily claiming every appointment on your mind’s timeline, the internet erases these vital hours from your life.”

– ‘I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,’ Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions, Evan Puschak

weltenwellen

Jasmin Lee Cori, The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect

firstfullmoon

“I have still not gotten good at explaining this to anyone who has always wanted to be alive, or at least people who have rarely questioned their commitment to living, but there is a border between wanting to be alive and wanting to stay here, wherever here is to you, or whatever it means. It’s a border that I have found to be flimsy, a thin sheet overrun with holes. But it is a border, nonetheless. Similar to the border between, say, sadness and suffering. All these feelings can intersect, of course. But I have found it slightly more confusing when they don’t. When I maybe want to be alive, but don’t want to be in the world as it is. When I haven’t wanted to be alive, but want to cling to the varied bits of brightness that tumble into my sadness, or my suffering, which isn’t the same as a temporary haze of sadness, or a rush of anxiety. I mean suffering that requires a constant measuring of the scales between staying and leaving. Suffering that requires a consideration of how long the scale can tilt toward leaving before it becomes the only viable option. There are a lot of things in any life that aren’t left up to the people doing the living. If there is anything for a suffering person (or any person) to self-determine, it should be how they live, or if they choose to live at all.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, in “The Art of Disappearance”

bisexualshakespeare

“I have never been able to understand people with consistent lives – people who, for example, grow up in a liberal Catholic household and stay that way; or who in junior high school are already laying down a record on which to run for president one day. Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation. What kind of life is that?”

— Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (216)

bloodofcain

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.

gehinnom

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

leohtttbriar

I know we’ve all seen “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny” but I would like to propose the corollary “everything is pornographic and nothing is erotic”

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represent the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feeling. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

"Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde

gorejock

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin (via nightkitchentarot)

radiofreederry

Favorite Trotsky quote

florizels

Transgender women are portrayed as deceivers so that rabid heterosexuals can turn a blind eye to the transsexual porn ads that litter the back of men’s magazines like Hustler and Penthouse, so that mainstream moviegoers can watch The Crying Game and act surprised to find out that the woman who performs in the drag bar happens to have a penis. “Deception” is the scarlet letter that trans people are made to wear so that everybody else can claim innocence.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

vympr

Did you know vaginal masturbation works out your pelvic floor muscles, and that having a stronger pelvic floor supports your bladder control, and can help prevent vaginal prolapse?

There are five stages of orgasm: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. The plateau phase, the one right before orgasm, has been shown to help the Kegel muscles (the PCs or pubococcygeus muscles). This hammock-like set of muscles is responsible for holding in your internal organs and plays a role in sexual satisfaction. “Having toned PC muscles is a good way to prevent everything from vaginal prolapse to the dreaded sneeze-pee phenomenon,” D’Angelo explains. “As we age we naturally begin to lose muscle tone in the pelvic floor, so experiencing frequent orgasms is a great way to keep our largest muscle group active, toned and healthy.”

Why Masturbation is Good for Your Health

vympr

Also whenever the topic of toning PC muscles comes up, doctors almost always only tell you to do kegels. The issue is that it can be kind of hard to tell when you're doing them correctly, and it's also not really a practical exercise to integrate into your daily routine for a lot of people (cuz they always stress you can do kegels "any time"!)

When you think about it, the muscle contractions they encourage you to practice with kegels is basically simulating the way the vagina contracts with orgasm anyway. They're just taking away the "sexual" part of it I guess, which makes 0 sense because it is literally a sex organ lmfao. But if masturbation isn't your thing, either method should work :^)