Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
Dalai Lama XIV (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
Quotes
I used to walk into a room full of people and wonder if they like me. Now I look around and wonder if I like them.
Rikkie Gale (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
1. If you don’t like the way he kisses you, you won’t like the way he fucks you. Get up and leave.
2. If he won’t go down on you, but expects you to go down on him, laugh. Get up and leave.
3. If you don’t want to do something and he doesn’t respect that, slap him round the face. Get up and leave.
4. If he isn’t okay with the imperfections on your skin, if he says they turn him off, get up and leave.
5. If you don’t want to shave your legs and he thinks that’s disgusting and refuses to touch them, get up and leave.
6. If he doesn’t see your body as a masterpiece, as a complete work of art, get up and leave.
7. If he makes you feel uncomfortable about any part of your body, get up and leave.
Get up and leave // E.E (via happy-absturz)
No need to slap someone, but yeah, leave boo
(via kushandwizdom)
I hate small talk. I wanna talk about death, aliens, sex, what life means and why we are here.
Me (via fxckingsinner)
I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror―just look at it for fifteen minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I’d stare at my face purely as a physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me, becoming just some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself.
村上春樹 (via purplebuddhaproject)
Normally people are not radical, normally people are not moving against the system: normally people are just trying to live, to have a bit of romance and to feed their kids. And what people want is to be recognized, to be incorporated. And when we understand that recognition and incorporation are generically anti-Black, then we don’t typically pick up the gun and move against the system, we typically try to find ways to be recognized, to be incorporated, even though that’s impossible. And I think that our language is symptomatic of that when we say that ‘I don’t like police brutality’. Because, here we are saying to the world, to our so-called ‘people of color allies’ and to the white progressives, ‘we’re not going to bring all the Black problems down on you today. If you could just help us with this little thing, I won’t tell you about the whole deal that is going on with us.
Frank Wilderson III, “We’re Trying to Destroy the World” (via animeterrorist)
Of course, not all women of color are sexualized in the same way. For example, while black women are considered lascivious, always consenting and out of control, Latina women are considered exotic or overly sensual and Asian women are considered childish and prude. These particular stereotypes are reinforced through popular culture and pornography (just Google respectively “Asian women,” “black women,” or “Latina women” and then “women” and see what comes up). The common thread here is that nonwhite women’s sexuality is seen as outside the norm of white heterosexuality. It’s therefore something to be uniquely desired, manipulated, exploited, or controlled. Within this rather toxic climate, being a woman of color who’s in touch with her sexuality is an act of resistance. Pushing past the negative media depictions and still finding a healthy, healing, erotic, and functional sexuality is no small feat.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.
Chinua Achebe (via kathreenmarie)
[T]he stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.
William Black, “How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope” (via profkew)
Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.
Fashion is a Feminist Issue: Greta Christina (via vogueltalia)
I feel like this about lingerie and specifically the value people place on lingerie (which is very often women’s work). The devaluation of things associated with women and women’s labor is reified in garments that are almost exclusively seen on women’s bodies. There’s this overwhelming sense that the labor associated with sewing, say, a bra is valueless, and that the laborer should be willing to work for free…or at least for inhumanely cheap wages. Culturally, I think this devaluation also ties into a lot of other things (for example, in America, puritanical Protestantism and its suspicions of the body, and, globally, the taken-for-granted exploitation of people of color), but I’ve just been idly pondering the way lingerie links up with many other conversations. And that’s not even getting into all the other expectations surrounding lingerie and how women are penalized for not conforming. Lift your breasts, but don’t wear push-ups. Wear underwear, but make sure it’s invisible. And so forth and so on. (I’m on my phone, by the way. Please pardon any typos.)