another season

bluepueblo: Wisteria, Kitayama, Kyoto, Japan photo via mamiko

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:23:23 -0400

Wisteria, Kitayama, Kyoto, Japan

photo via mamiko

"Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat."

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:22:31 -0400

“Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat.”

-
When Strangers Click, a 2011 documentary about online dating.

It reminds me of that famous Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It also reminds me of something written by one of the mods of Sex Worker Problems: “Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”

I mean, it’s just true.

(via tealeafprincess)

sarahhartleyillustration: Hardcore!SailorMoon (I might not do...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:16:03 -0400

sarahhartleyillustration:

Hardcore!SailorMoon (I might not do Tuxedo Mask til later)

DYSAETHESIA AETHIOPICA: The Racist Origins of Modern Clown Makeup (or, just one more reason to hate clowns)

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:09:36 -0400

DYSAETHESIA AETHIOPICA: The Racist Origins of Modern Clown Makeup (or, just one more reason to hate clowns):

so-treu:

sourcedumal:

deliciouskaek:

ianthe:

kawaii-afro-fluff:

ianthe:

This post was asking about a potential link between the afro-style wigs and big, painted lips of the modern clown and racist caricatures, so I decided to do what any good theatre history student would do - I did some research.

SPOILER ALERT: YUP, IT’S RACIST AS FUCK

From Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top:

Some circus programs contained portraits of clowns in literal blackface, with huge red mouths and bulging eyes, strumming energetically on a banjo, but often the auguste clown’s blackface was metaphorical. He created his racial identity through the act of ‘‘whitening up’’ with thick pancake.

His greasy whiteness and exaggerated bodily zones—huge red mouth, lolling, paint-encircled eyes, big fake nose, ears, and feet—made his look strikingly similar to blackface. Showmen played upon this visual connection by arguing that African American men literally were clowns because of their supposed aﬃnity for clowning and the circus. The Ringling Bros.’ route book from 1895 and 1896 contained a section, ‘‘The Plantation Darkey at the Circus,’’ which imagined—in almost orgasmic language—black men as minstrel characters.

[…]

Proprietors further conﬂated the African American man and the clown by arguing that both were completely controlled by their emotions, not reason.

Superlative examples of white manhood—the big cat tamer, the wire walker, and so forth—demonstrated little emotion during life-threatening acts. The clown, by contrast, howled in mock fear when he saw a mouse, or shrieked in pain at a mosquito bite. Showmen characterized male African American spectators in a similar vein as giddy and superstitious.

[…]

Actual big-top acts made this rhetorical relationship between the clown and the African American complete. In 1888 Eph Thompson trained the elephant John L. Sullivan at the Adam Forepaugh circus. Wearing a boxing glove at the end of his trunk, the elephant sparred with Thompson in the ring and frequently ‘‘punched’’ him so hard that Thompson went ﬂying over the ring bank.

Unlike the white trainer who dominated powerful animals, Thompson played a clownish coward—constantly vanquished by the boxing pachyderm—and consequently remained unthreatening to Euroamerican audiences. Yet Thompson still had a diﬃcult time ﬁnding employment with American shows. As a result, he moved to Europe where his career ﬂourished.

In line with the tenets of nineteenth-century romantic racialism, show-men’s portrayals of black men and clowns reﬂected contemporary representations of white women: late-nineteenth-century scientists argued that ‘‘excessive’’ emotionalism deﬁned women, racial ‘‘savages,’’ and children of all races. The German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel and the Americans Edward Drinker Cope and G. Stanley Hall were all proponents of recapitulation theory, positing that every organism repeats the life history of its ‘‘race’’ within its own lifetime, evolving through the less developed forms of its ancestors on its path to maturity. They contended that Euroamerican women and ‘‘primitives’’ remained mentally and emotionally ﬁxed in lower ancestral stages of evolution. Accordingly, only white boys were physiologically and mentally capable of reaching the highest stages of racial and gender development as fully evolved men. This line of thought used pseudoempirical phrenological evidence to claim that African American men were perpetually emotional and juvenile, just like the clown.

The painted clown acted out childish behaviors and infantile pleasures. He reveled in dirt, cried freely, openly adored the serious ‘‘adult’’ acts, and played physical pranks on everybody, from ringmaster to the audience. If playing a hobo (popularized most fully by Emmett Kelly’s ‘‘Willie’’ tramp character during the Depression, when at times nearly one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed), the auguste clown’s persona was deﬁned by dirt. Laughing loudly at the clown’s antics perhaps transported audiences back to the unrestrained pleasures of their own collective infancy and childhood.

More than a ‘‘low Other’’ who simply represented a tantalizing version of what they were not, the unfettered clown symbolized what clock-bound, alienated adult Euroamerican men perhaps felt they had lost.

Even the red noses have their origins in racist stereotypes.

From Mikita Brottman, Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor:

While the Native American plains tribes had their own various manifestations of the Trickster figure, the main clown type of non-Native Americans was not the August, as it was in Europe, but the character clown… After the [Civil War] ended, however, one particular style of character clown came into prominence: the Hobo.

Eric Lott describes how the Hobo figure was originally based on the blackface minstrel clowns (hence the exaggerated white mouths) who portrayed the figures of African Americans made homeless by the ravages of the Civil War.

Lott explains that the Hobo character clown is a distinctly American invention, with his tattered hat, huge white mouth, three days’ growth of beard, torn clothes, and cartoon alcoholic’s big red nose. […] It seems ironic that such mawkishly appealing personalities had their roots in the miseries of poverty and oppression and the disfigurements of alcoholism and venereal disease.

Holy sht. I knew something was up when I compared the two photos! Something didn’t seem right… and i was right!

I never would have even thought to make that connection before I saw that post so thank you for giving me something to look into - I truly learn more from this website than I ever will in any class

huh. you really do learn something new every day.

Racism abound…

minstrelsy was the first form of American national popular/mass culture - it’s the foundation for everything that came after it, including vaudeville, the circus, cartoons, everything. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft lays this out really well.

inkeddolls: chopzz: Hattie Watson #InkedDoll

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:55:51 -0400

inkeddolls:

chopzz:

Hattie Watson

#InkedDoll

snckpck: DONT BE AFRAID TO MOVE ON IF THE PERSON YOU LIKE DOESNT LIKE YOU BACK. GRAB A BOTTLE OF...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:51:59 -0400

snckpck:

DONT BE AFRAID TO MOVE ON IF THE PERSON YOU LIKE DOESNT LIKE YOU BACK. GRAB A BOTTLE OF FRUIT PUNCH AND BAG OF DORITOS AND LIVE YOUR LIFE!!!

psyche-deli: me on my way to steal your girl

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:46:44 -0400

psyche-deli:

me on my way to steal your girl

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:45:04 -0400

"One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:45:59 -0400

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”

- bell hooks (via loveyourchaos)

electrictattoos: Shaun Topper

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:45:45 -0400

electrictattoos:

Shaun Topper

"Women read comics. Anyone at all engaged in social media knows this. Women read comics and are a..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:58:48 -0400

“Women read comics. Anyone at all engaged in social media knows this. Women read comics and are a driving force behind fandom. I think I could call them the driving force behind fandom and put up a convincing argument. Just think about it: what fandoms have driven America crazy in the last decade? Could anyone dissuade me from saying that they were Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games? “Avatar” may have put butts in theater seats, but you don’t hear about it… ever. No one is immersed in the world of “Avatar” except James Cameron and people who enjoy wearing Na’vi Zentai suits. “The Avengers” was pretty darn huge and, if Tumblr is any indication, a whopping portion of the people driving that fandom online do not possess a Y chromosome. Women engage in fandom to levels that men do not. When women get behind something, their sheer numbers and passion force it into the mainstream. That’s why you can name the actor who plays that werewolf kid in “Twilight” and probably sing at least the chorus to one Justin Bieber song. What do tween boys like? I have no clue. Sports? Probably sports.”

- Brett White, Comic Book Resources (via wandrinparakeet)

and yet men remain the most marketed demographic for just about everything.

(via ohhoechno)

I’m pretty sure the only men who spend more time thinking about DC than women on Tumblr are the men who actually work there.

(via touchofgrey37)

racismschool: Food Inequality While the national average for...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:48:59 -0400

racismschool:

Food Inequality

While the national average for those with food insecurity in their homes is 14.5 percent, Native people, Black people and Latino people are hit the hardest.

As of 2011, One in four Black households (25.1% up from 24.9% in 2009) and one in four Latin@ households (26.2% down from 26.9% in 2009) were food insecure.

Frustratingly enough, (but not at all surprising) I was able to find several pieces of information on white, Black, Latin@ and Asian food disparities. Missing from almost every article, chart and graph was Native people. This is particularly disheartening because no matter what year I compared, the numbers for Native people’s food insecurity wasn’t just double the national average, it is double that of Black and Latin@ people.

In every racial group, it is the children who are hit the hardest. The above graphic from 2010, shows the national food insecurity rates and then the national child food insecurity rates. What many fail to realize is that children are paying the price first and foremost. The problem is, so many see this as someone else’s issue. Realistically, hell-even selfishly, we should remember how much food insecurity affects the mental, emotional and physical health of children. How it affects childhood education. How it so closely correlates to what their futures hold. Which means, what our country’s future holds. Feeding a hungry child today could stop us from having to pay an even bigger price tomorrow.

Feeding America is a great place to go if you need food, if you want to volunteer or if you want to donate. Do what you can, start in your own back yard and then expand it to the world.

Do it for selfish reasons. The person you help feed today, might be the person who heals your pain tomorrow.

payinginmynaivety: Showing my love for Studio Ghibli and all...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:59:58 -0400

payinginmynaivety:

Showing my love for Studio Ghibli and all that they taught me. x

nevver: Sometimes

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:57:40 -0400

nevver:

Sometimes

"How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?"

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:51:09 -0400

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”

- Leonard Cohen (via dayxbreak)

niallhortonhearsawho: a girl walks into a classroom wearing a spaghetti strap shirt. immediately...

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:11:02 -0400

niallhortonhearsawho:

a girl walks into a classroom wearing a spaghetti strap shirt. immediately every boy within a 50 yard radius gets a raging erection. the teacher attempts to present a lesson but to no avail, no one can hear over the sound of every male student masturbating to this girl’s shoulders. why couldn’t she just wear a long sleeved shirt

"I’m not ‘pro-abortion,’ that’s the very one clear thing I want you to understand. Abortion is not..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:09:21 -0400

“I’m not ‘pro-abortion,’ that’s the very one clear thing I want you to understand. Abortion is not the right answer for every pregnancy. And it’s not the right answer for every flawed pregnancy, and it’s not the right answer for every rape and incest patient. But when the patient knows it’s the right answer for her, then I want to be here for her.”

- Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion provider based in Wichita, Kansas. Listen to the CNN profile of him here. (via rhrealitycheck)

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:08:54 -0400

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:41:33 -0400

OH SHIT YEA

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:31:35 -0400

OH SHIT YEA