(Source: senyasenechka)

In a lot of the chick lit, depicting women slightly older than me, the sexual maturity is that of a nine-year-old, maybe. The sex is just this giggly and ridiculous activity one is subjected to in order to make a man stay in your house and marry you. There’s no honest expression of female sexual desire, the kind you find even in those old cheesy feminist manuals like Our Bodies, Ourselves. We’ve gone backwards.
think-progress:

The women in top grossing films hits a five-year low.
This is a bigger problem than you think.

think-progress:

The women in top grossing films hits a five-year low.

This is a bigger problem than you think.

GEORGE ORWELL’S THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, A PROPOSED PREFACE TO ANIMAL FARM, EXPURGATED AND FOOTNOTED (WITH A BIAS). — BY JOHN REED

believermag:

image

“Perhaps now, as in Orwell’s time, censorship is not a problem of compliance—people are not ordered, or not as a rule ordered, to comply. The ogre of Orwell’s age was complacency; alas, the ogre of our age is more formidable: complicity.”

Read the entire online exclusive at believermag.com

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon… And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”
Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.

theparisreview:

If you have twenty minutes free, watch this short film. The Last Bookshop, which was shot in bookstores around London and Kent, takes place in a dystopian future world without books, and makes an engaging case for the joys of print. By Richard Dadd and Dan Fryer.

nezua:


flower exposed to radiation from Fukushima nuclear facility Japan

that makes me a little sad

nezua:

flower exposed to radiation from Fukushima nuclear facility Japan

that makes me a little sad

(Source: hoaxtheory)

todayinhistory:

April 27th 1759: Mary Wollstonecraft born

On this day in 1759, the British women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London. She was also a writer and is best known for her 1792 work ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men and argues the importance of female education. She died aged 38 after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later became Mary Shelley), who went on to write ‘Frankenstein’. Wollstonecraft is remembered as a leading feminist philosopher.

explore-blog:

Vladimir Nabokov’s United States immigration ID, from the fascinating story of how he became an American. 

explore-blog:

Vladimir Nabokov’s United States immigration ID, from the fascinating story of how he became an American