Japan, the country with some of the most fucked up pornography and the penis festival
Where the vagina is basically illegal to talk about
So she did a bunch of art featuring 3D sculptures of her vagina, including this kayak, and was put in jail for it
She was indicted again in December on obscenity charges for selling vagina art to crowdfund for the kayak and could spend two years in prison
In Japan, women’s vaginas are treated as though they are men’s property. The trains here usually display pornographic advertisements. As a woman, I find that blatant objectification to be humiliating. I’m disgusted by it. My body belongs to me. So, with this project I wanted to release the vagina from the standard Japanese paradigm. Japan is lenient towards expressions of male sexuality and arousal, but not so for women. When a woman uses her body in artistic expression, her work gets ignored, and people treat her as if she’s some sex-crazed idiot. It all comes back to misogyny. And the vagina is at the heart of it. The vagina is ridiculed. It’s lusted after. Men don’t see women as equals—to them, women are just vaginas. Then they call my vagina-themed work “obscene,” and judge me according to laws written by and for men. [x]
She plans to turn her trial in to a manga comic. She seems pretty sure she’s not going to do any jail time but if you’d like to help her pay for her inevitable fine and court fees, you can check out her online store. There are little glow in the dark vagina characters.
Wow I’ve seen this reblogged a ton of times without seeing the whole going to jail part.
Here’s a recent article about her from July of 2017. It looks like she did some brief time in jail, and is currently still working on this artistic effort, as well as trying to raise awareness about a new terrorism law and the jail/prison system in Japan.
leverage season 1: let’s help a hardworking, honest young patriotic veteran w/ a disability who just wants to get back to the workforce
leverage season 3: let’s steal a federal witness and set him up for murder, fuck the courts. let’s steal the department of defense it’s not treason as long as we give it back probably.
leverage finale: lets fucking find out every company who got a government bailout they didn’t earn after the crash and DESTROY THEM. destroy the us banking system destroy the companies let’s take on interpol to do it goddammit
leverage if they’d gotten another season, presumably: lets travel back in time and kidnap george washington and then steal the declaration of independence and erase all eagles from existence by stealing the first ever eagle
leverage the movie: Donald Trump is president. Let’s go steal America.
A couple of supergirls because I’ve been reading some good stuff lately. Abby from Not Your Sidekick and Loup from Santa Olivia
When I was about ten, Mum bought me the eight books in the first picture, a couple at a time, from Kmart, until I had them all. I’m pretty sure they were $5 a book, which might sound like a lot for a kid, but Mum and Grandma had been buying me things like Kipling and Bronte since I was about eight, and they knew I took care of my books. They’re nice editions, unabridged, with eight full colour plates of illustrations in each. Even after the better part of thirty years, the pages are still bright white, so for cheap hardbacks, they used REALLY low acid paper for circa 1990. They’re also a proper sewn binding, not just glue.
Fast foward twenty five years. I find a book, in a charity shop, that matches my books. But it is one I do not own. It is one I never knew existed. I had always had weird recurring dreams of finding more books to match my treasured set of eight. TURNS OUT THEY WERE TRUE. Cue an internet trawling, which yielded a final number of twenty four titles in the series.
Over the last year or so, I’ve found three in charity shops and bought five from the internet. I have a massive list of things I want to buy – most of them books – but I decided that what I really wanted for my birthday this year was to complete the set. So here it is.
They’re all imperfect in some way – scratches, dents, the odd ex-owner’s name, and two badly faded spines, but the whole collection is together, after twenty six years of being incomplete.
Alice in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
What Katy Did Next – Susan Coolidge
What Katy Did – Susan Coolidge
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol & Cricket on the Hearth – Charles Dickens
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
What Katy Did at School – Susan Coolidge
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
The Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
Moonfleet – John Meade Falkner
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne
Around The World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Heidi – Johanna Spyri
The Water Babies – Charles Kingsley
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde & The Beach of Falsea – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Some of them I’ve read lots of times over the years, some, not since I was a kid, and a small amount are completely new to me despite being classics. I can’t wait to dive in.
I LOVE CLASSIC LIT.
The rest of my birthday present was three queer YA titles, but I’ll take a picture of those later, when I’ve covered them. 🙂
I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.
Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.
I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?
THREE.
For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.
This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?
I have formed a few theories.
1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.
2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.
3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.
4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.
5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.
I dunno. It’s fascinating.
Is it possibly because the bromance is so tender and so very much requited?? There’s not a lot of read into there because they’re both very comfortable with it.
Excellent theory! Yes, I like this: the relationship as is is so fulfilling for Boyle that there is nothing left for him to desire. And although Jake isn’t as…full Boyle about it, he also is getting everything out of it that he wants in a friendship.
I propose a refinement of the above theory:
Because Jake and Boyle are both largely comfortable with the intensity of the relationship, they do not appear to be repressing anything. In other words there is no level of bromanticism that either of them would deny or disavow. Therefore, the viewer actually believes that what you see is what you get: nothing is hidden or latent. So nobody has to write the fic that brings it to the surface.
I thought about this, and about the other intense, unrepressed bromance I can think of on television: J.D. & Turk (Scrubs). Of the 314 Scrubs stories on AO3, only 12 are JD/Turk (by contrast, Perry Cox/JD has 142 stories, and Turk’s most common partner is his wife Carla) . Like Boyle & Jake, they are repressing nothing, completely open about the intensity of their friendship, and emotionally secure with each other. So, I think there may be something to this theory.
I feel like the JD & Turk example is not exactly comparable because their slash representation is probably suppressed below what it would otherwise be by the White Guy and Black Guy Are Best Friends effect (also why there’s more Shawn/Lassiter than Shawn/Gus in Psych, why there’s more Loki/Tony or Bucky/Tony than Tony/Rhodey in the MCU, etc.)
Jake/Boyle should be an unreasonably massive pairing relative to the size of the fandom, going by the dynamics of… every other fandom… because they are The Two White Guys Who Talk To Each Other, but it’s NOT! That’s actually possibly an even bigger accomplishment than just convincing people not to slash best friends!
My guess on this part of the phenomenon is that
1) The show offers an actually really interesting and healthy het relationship in Jake/Amy, and as a part of that,
2) The Two White Guys Who Talk To Each Other are not even CLOSE to being the most attractive or interesting people on the show! Their emotional development, individually and in relation to each other, is not emphasized to the detriment/exclusion of all other characters and relationships! NOT EVEN CLOSE. They are SO DRAMATICALLY not the most interesting or attractive or emotionally-developed characters on the show that PEOPLE WRITE HET AND FEMSLASH ABOUT A SHOW WHERE THERE ARE TWO WHITE DUDES WHO TALK TO EACH OTHER!
Emily Vancamp as Sharon Carter in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Here’s an example of what we call a “soft no”. Sharon turns down Steve’s offer in a way that’s meant not to insult him but never actually uses the word “no”.
Steve clearly gets the message, though, and importantly offers to leave her alone. Sharon’s comment afterwards gives him an opportunity to try again later, but he doesn’t press and respects her rejection of his company even though it’s probably hurt his feelings a bit.
Just in case you ever wonder “What would Captain America do?”; there you go.
never do something steve rogers wouldn’t do.
Unless it’s jumping out of a plane without a parachute, you probably shouldn’t do that
I just have to add – I’ve seen interviews with Marvel people where they say that this scene demonstrates that Cap’s awkward with women and doesn’t know how to ask women out on a date. And it drives me crazy, because – as the OP says – Steve behaved perfectly here. It was a very charming, nonthreatening offer, and he accepted her rejection with good grace. You can’t help but feel that to Hollywood, the fact that she said no means he asked badly – which is exactly how I’d expect Hollywood to think, namely, the idea that men should keep pressing and pushing women until they say yes
knitting in the dark 