When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.
When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.
When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.
When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.
When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”
When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.
When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.
When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.
When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.
When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.
When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”
When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.
When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.
When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”
When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.
When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.
I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore.
Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over.
Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.
I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.
Apparently you can’t get your rocks off on Tumblr anymore.
i am contractually obligated to congratulate you on this reply
miss depression: *releases me for a quarter of a second*
me: wow. i feel so goo–
depression: Time’s Up Bitch.
Oh yes, I was also thinking about this Tumblr purge and it occurred to me that I’ve seen this before. Well, rather, I’ve read it. In George Orwell’s 1984 and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and in a more covert way Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, sexual imagery and expression is disencouraged, disallowed, and sometimes even banned. This keeps a compliant and complacent population who believes sexual intercourse to only be a duty to be performed for the sake of The Party rather than it being a natural part of human life. As a result it encumbers those with sexual thoughts with shame and a need to hide- and considering the amount of queer people who use this site, we already know that that’s not going to end well. Not only is this an attack on sex workers and the people who feel free to be horny on main (and that should be fine and normalized, lust is an emotion and healthy expression of it, just like anger and happiness should be encouraged) it’s an attempt to control us. I love Tumblr, but I don’t think the workers are doing this of their own accord- I believe there’s an article floating about surrounding how they’re instigating this purge to remain on Apple stores, who are ridding their pages of anything sexual? It’s no conspiracy, only control and part of our descent into dystopia. We can fight it, and we should. Own your sexuality and your female presenting nipples, and your male, and every other nipple you can find. Find comfort in your sexuality and (pedophiles excluded) don’t be afraid to express it (when safe). If people are making it unsafe for you to do so, change that environment. If anyone wants further information on the literature and their link to sexual freedom and expression, I’m passionate about the subject and have notes from my English teacher and a good chunk of an essay on it. If I’ve not been sufficiently articulate, let me know or add on as you please. I just want others to realize this could be yet another form of control- there is no freedom of speech when our communication forms are more than just words.
Employers that throw around the phrase “going above and beyond” should be banned from running a business. It’s exploitative, because the actual translation for that is: “I want you to do work that isn’t your job and isn’t in your job description without paying you for it. Give me free labor.”
This is a lesson I learned over and over again. Mostly because I grew up abused and it took me time to get over my streak of “be excessively helpful even to your employers so that you won’t be abused”. Which says something about both of those situations really.
But every time I went “above and beyond” for an employer it was treated as if it was expected. As if it was just a part of the job. In fact sometimes it was even punished. More than once I’ve revamped a department and made it run better, more efficiently, and so on, and both ended up in a layoff for me, either as a scapegoat for problems that the company already had but that my work uncovered, or so that my immediate supervisors could take the credit.
べんきょうしなければならない 