You know, when I was in the Guides (you’re called Girl Scouts in America, right?) there were always people muttering about how it was regressive and anti-feminist and whatever, making us do girly things all the time, and I kind of internalised that. It wasn’t until I left for university that I realised exactly how damn much it had taught me.
I knew how to cook. I knew how to light a fire, do basic first aid, swim, iron, do the laundry, wash-up oil-soaked frying pans at lightning speed, make a bed, change a fuse, hell, even build a bridge in an emergency. I found out the other day that one of my friends didn’t know what you were supposed to do when you burn yourself. On my first day at university, I met somebody who didn’t know how to to do the washing up.
People had such a weird view on it when we were kids. They weren’t teaching us to be housewives. They weren’t teaching us how to look after other people, not really. They were teaching us how to take care of ourselves. I kind of wish I could go back and apologise for sulking so much about being made to learn the symbols on laundry labels.
And if they taught me to paint my nails stylishly and flower-arrange like a duchess too, well, you can bet I have the best looking dorm room on campus.
People are so quick to shit on traditionally feminine activities… without realizing that basically forever, women have been the backbone of society. Laundry, cooking, childcare, etc are important and are honorable and respectable jobs/tasks, so long as they aren’t imposed on anyone because of gender.
Everyone should know how to do laundry, cook for themselves, and do all the things listed above. If a man (or anyone for that matter_ felt he was above those things because they would make him less respectable, I’d actually lose respect for him.
To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.
“In the end, Bush was probably an average president, but that’s really more about most of our presidents having been between bad and Trump. There’s nothing particularly wrong with being an average president. But he’s also been more than a touch romanticized by liberals because a casual glance makes it seem he led a Republican Party far to the left to that today. That’s not wrong per se, but it also lacks context. Bush pushed the party to the right from his first engagement with politics. His nomination of Clarence Thomas, his pushing Dan Quayle on the national scene, his Lee Atwater ad, the War on Drugs, naming Dick Cheney Secretary of Defense, and leaving Iraqi rebels out to dry—these are very bad, no good things. And they need to be remembered more than an imagined moderate Republicanism of 1989.”
pictured: a response to someone posting suggestive anime girl drawings in the group chat for my college’s art club. such a simple statement, yet that specific hank hill icon elevates it beyond human comprehension
screaming into the void since '89 