Sapphic-bottom - Loving Women

China opened the world’s coolest library with 1.2 million books, and its interior will take your breath away.

When I was 13 years old and curious about sex and love, I asked my mom if she had had sex before marrying my father (of whom she is still married to, and has been since before I was born). She said that that wasn’t really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. I said ‘sure it is, you’ve either had sex before him, or you haven’t’. She brought me onto the couch and sat me down and told me about the boy she liked when she was young and how one night she snuck into his house while his parents were gone and they were kissing and he said they should have sex and she said that she wanted to save sex for marriage and he laughed and basically took all her clothes off and he raped her and as my mom was telling the story she cried and this was the second time I had ever seen my mom cry. She was 12 when it happened.

In grade 8 I got a call from my friend in the middle of the night and she was drunk in the park crying and told me that she went out that night with some other friends and they drank a little and her guy “friend” starting flirting and yes she laughed at first but then he tried to pull her shirt over her head and she pulled away and he ripped her shirt and it was her favourite shirt and then he pushed her to her knees and HIS BEST FRIEND HELD HER JAW OPEN WHILE HE FACE FUCKED HER. And so I went to the park and picked her up and took her home and slept in her bed with her except we didn’t sleep because she just cried and her mouth bled and this was four years ago but I still have to be the one to bring her items to the till it the cashier is a man, and she still has anxiety attacks and she’ll get a rash all over her body and I just want to kill those boys but instead they are still walking around. And I’m in the bathroom with her, dabbing at her skin with a warm cloth until it returns to its regular colour.

And in grade 9 one of my closest friends was kinda seeing this boy and so they hung out one night and then she said that she really had to be getting back home and he said that she wasn’t going anywhere until she gave him what he wanted and he parked the car and took off her clothes and she said no and he ignored her and so she laid in the backseat totally limp and just cried and it wasn’t even sex, he just masterbated by using her body instead of his hand and she came to school the next day with vodka in her water bottle and she drank all day and I had to fight her to get the alcohol away from her and she just cried and threw up and I skipped class while I held her hair back and that same boy texted me a month later, asking if I ever wanted to hangout sometime.

And in that same year my very best friend who has never even kissed a boy, confessed to me that when she was 9 years old, her 12 year old cousin made her give him a hand job and he told her that was what cousins do and he gave her a chocolate bar afterwards and she told me that he probably doesn’t even remember it but that it’s something that she’ll never have the luxury of forgetting.

And in grade 10 I knew a girl who invited her best friend over to watch Disney movies and then he started to put his hands down her pants and she said no but she is 130lbs and he is 220lbs and he called her a tease while she tried to fight him but he used one hand to hold her down, and the other to put inside of her and i was the one to push her inside of a classroom and stand in front of her while calling the police when he showed up at our school looking for her and she was so damn scared.

And a few months later I skipped class and was in the car with a guy who i had had unprotected sex with in the past while under the influence of cocaine but this time I was sober and I insisted we use a condom but he told me he couldn’t feel anything while the condom was on so he ripped it off and I said I refused to have unprotected sex again and so he just grabbed me and forced himself into my mouth and I was crying and he pulled me onto him and I just came saying “stop” over and over like a broken record but he must’ve heard something different because he went until he came and I just sat naked in the backseat while he drove me back to the school and said “we should do this again sometime”. And I had five showers that night and I scratched at my skin so hard to try and rip his fingerprints off of me, I still have the scars.

And I found out soon afterwards that that same guy had raped a classmate of mine, 5 months earlier and she told me about how he brought her McDonald’s first, and how he said they could take things slow and she told me about how he didn’t listen to her either. And he goes to our school and so after she told me about her incident and I told her about mine, we decided to report it to the police and the trial is currently still going on and he told people about it, except in his version we are just “asking for attention” and all his friends talk about how bad they feel for him. As if HE is the one that still wakes up screaming. As if HE felt like his skin no longer was beautiful, no longer belonged to him. And I held her in my arms as she bawled after giving the police her statement. And she did the same for me.

And I met a woman a year ago in a paint store and she had a service dog and I asked what the dog was for and it turns out that she had been so brutally raped and abused in her life, that the dog is literally trained to keep men away from her.

And I’m so FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF THIS WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN. How many rape victims eyes have I already looked into? How many more will I? And how many more friends will I hold while they shake? Because I don’t know how many more I can take. And who the fuck still has the nerve to make rape jokes? And… Something just has to change. Please, someone just start being that change.

-16 year old girl

some character design that makes me go absolutely apeshit is the whole wide mouth almond face shape cutey reptile. like i see a fucking animated reptile with a big mouth and eyes like a quarter mile apart and i just lose my mind

u know it’s times like this where i thinking abt having a girlfriend and.. can u imagine… a girl pulling u closer by ur belt loops… a girl kissing ur forehead when she thinks ur asleep and won’t notice… falling asleep with ur head resting on a girls shoulder.. a girl hugging u from behind and resting her chin on ur shoulder… having a girl absentmindedly hold ur hand while on a casual stroll.. a girl kissing ur cheek and leaving a lipstick stain… g o d

I like the word gay. But I like “lesbian” better.

I like it because of Sappho of Lesbos, a lesbian and a Lesbian whose memory reminds us that women who loved women existed long before any time on earth that any living person can remember.

I like it because of Sappho’s poetry, the sweet prose she wrote for the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Aphrodite has her counterpart in the Roman goddess Venus, whose symbol has evolved to represent the woman, the female, the feminine.

I like it because of its culture and history. Butch, fem, stud, dyke. Bars where women drink and dance and laugh and kiss other women. Boston marriages. Women’s colleges. They wanted Ellen to get a puppy but she wanted to kiss a lady.

It hasn’t all been pretty. This word has been taken from us, made into a fetish, a porn category, fuel for men’s libidos. Hysterical. Asocial. Deviants. Lesbians.

But that makes me love it all the more—to spite them, to spite the men who salivate over us, to spite the churches that rally against us, to spite it all. But I wear this badge for more than just spite. I wear it for love. Love for women, love for our history, love for love for… lesbian.

It’s not a dirty word. It’s beautiful, and I am proud to call myself a lesbian.

“An Open Letter to Non-Vaxxers: Tonight, while enjoying a nice dinner, I got a call from the director of my son’s preschool. She was calling to tell me that they had made the decision to put my son in a different class because two children in the class he was supposed to be in have “opted out” of their vaccines. This may not sound like a big thing. He is still in the Tuesday-Thursday class, and since he doesn’t start school until next Tuesday, it’s not like he has to get readjusted to a whole new class. No harm, no foul. Actually, this is a big deal–a very big deal. You see, my son is immunocompromised. He has cancer. He was fully vaccinated and supporting the whole “herd immunity” thing before his cancer diagnosis, but that darn chemo wiped out his immunity to the communicable diseases against which he had already been vaccinated. So, parents who choose to not vaccinate because you feel it’s the “right choice for your family”, I would like to thank you. Thank you for adding yet another worry to my plate and my husband’s plate. You see, we already worry about a lot–it’s an unfortunate part of your child having cancer–you worry every night. On top of worrying about things like relapse, organ toxicity brought on by chemo, debilitating late effects of chemo, secondary cancers brought on by chemo, the mental effects of having more than three years of painful treatment, we now get to worry about, of all things, measles. And mumps. And whooping cough. And chicken pox. Let me explain something about having a child with cancer to you: everything is robbed from your child in some form or another. Friends, Halloween, Christmas, play dates, school. It’s all taken away at some point or another and in some form or another because we have to protect our children from germs, because if they catch the wrong germs during the worst part of treatment, they can die. My son was isolated from everyone except immediate family for an entire year. For parents whose children are going through chemo, the decision to send them to school is a momentous one. It requires a leap of faith and trust in the surrounding community, in your child’s teachers and administrators, and in the families sending their children to school. It requires herd immunity. Now, even though my son is now in a different class than your unvaccinated children, I get to worry about him using the communal bathroom, the playground, and even walking around the halls with them. If there is an outbreak of measles in, say, Austin this winter, I won’t know if you have relatives in Austin and went to go see those relatives for Uncle Bobby’s birthday. I won’t know if your child was exposed to measles at the Austin Chuck-E-Cheese and then showed up at school on Tuesday. Oh, I’m sure you’ll do your due diligence and call the school to inform everyone that your child has come down with a case of the measles once it appears, but, the damage is done–the exposure to my immunocompromised child has already happened. It’s too late. Your choice just earned him a ticket to the hospital. Your choice just earned him a lot of shots and more toxic drugs in the desperate effort to stave off whatever disease your unvaccinated child passed to him. If, God forbid, he does come down with that disease, your choice just earned him a trip to the Pediatric ICU for a while–days, maybe weeks. Your choice may cost us our son. Who knows–it depends on how his already stressed body handles everything. People like to say that in choosing to not vaccinate, they are making the “best choice for their family”, and that, after all, their children are the ones at risk, not other people’s children. No, sorry, you’re wrong. Choosing to home school is a choice that is made in the best interest of a family–it impacts nobody but your family. Choosing to eat all organic and locally grown food is a choice that impacts nobody but your family. For that matter, choosing to eat nothing but fast food and frozen meals is a choice that impacts nobody but your family. Choosing to not vaccinate impacts my family and my immunocompromised son. It impacts the teacher who is pregnant and teaching your non-vaccinated child. It impacts the man going through chemo who happened to be behind you in the grocery store when your unvaccinated child sneezed. It impacts the mom next to you at the pick up line at school who is on immunosuppressive drugs for her rheumatoid arthritis and who is bending down to hug her child just as your unvaccinated child coughs. Your “choice” has repercussions for your community. Part of the cost of living in a first world country is that you have to do things that support the community in which you live. You pay taxes to pay for the police that respond to your 911 calls, to pay for the teachers who teach your children, and to pay for roads to be plowed and paved. You obey traffic laws to ensure an orderly flow of traffic. You don’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater because to do so would cause pandemonium and chaos. Sometimes, to live in a place with the privileges we enjoy here in America, you suck it up and do things you don’t want to do because it’s for the communal good. If everyone chose otherwise, we would not be a first world country. We would be a country without laws, roads, and schools. We would be a country overrun with disease. Your responsibility to your community is to vaccinate your child. The number of people who actually, literally, physically can’t have vaccines is extraordinarily small. The number of people who choose to not vaccinate is not–it’s growing. These people cite a vague unease about the number of vaccines a child gets or statistics they learned from Internet memes on autism. They confess conspiracy theories about Big Pharma and how it’s all a ploy to get doctors and pharmacists rich. They share anecdotes of a college friend’s neighbor’s son who got so sick from his vaccine he was hospitalized. They say their child got incredibly sick from the one round of vaccines he or she got at his 2 month visit, and they said they’re not vaccinating anymore. Guess what–if your child is sitting here today, talking, walking, eating, laughing, playing, and learning, he or she wasn’t that ill from the vaccine. He or she got a fever and reacted to the vaccine–it doesn’t mean they had an “adverse” reaction. I am horrified, non-vaxxers, that you are so quick to forget the lessons of history. You’re spoiled and selfish because you have never seen the horrors of a society in which vaccines are not available. Perhaps you should talk to my mother about her neighbor growing up–the one who contracted German measles while pregnant with her third child. That third child was born deaf and with brain damage, thanks to his mother catching that communicable–and now preventable–disease while pregnant. Perhaps you should talk to anyone over the age of 60 about what it was like when polio was around–how nobody was allowed to go swimming or use public drinking fountains for fear of catching that dreaded–and now preventable–disease. Perhaps you should talk to the parents of a child with cancer whose daughter spent a month in the Pediatric ICU during treatment because she caught chicken pox–a preventable disease–from an unvaccinated classmate. Perhaps you should take a trip to a third world country and explain to them why they should not be lining up in droves to get their children vaccinated by the Red Cross or other relief organizations. Perhaps, better yet, you should keep your children out of school.”

— Alex Pomadoni via Imgur (via whatthesimonsays)

I don't know who needs to hear this today but there's nothing wrong with liking someone the same gender as you. You're not predatory for having emotions and I'm so proud of you. You're wonderful.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is this line from hamlet: "there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy." It's a reminder that there is so much we don't know about this world and this universe and there is even more that we don't know that we don't know. With this said, something I wish I didn't know is that a whale pisses about 974 liters in one go.

Guys I can't keep defending this website

A Star Trek idea: A comedy sitcom where instead of a Vulcan on a mostly human ship it is a human on a mostly Vulcan ship