#working class culture

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Inside and Outside: Wolves and Punks

Early-twentieth-century observations of sex between prisoners were shaped by a burgeoning sexological literature whose conceptual categories proved useful in understanding and mapping prison sexual culture. But heightened attention to prison sex in the 1920s and 1930s, on the part of penologists, prison administrators, and prisoners themselves, is not explained simply by the availability of a new conceptual template. While sexologists puzzled over the etiology of same-sex practices performed by apparently "normal" people, those practices would have been more easily and readily comprehended in urban working-class communities of the period.

George Chauncey has documented the visibility of queer life in early-twentieth-century New York City and its integration in working-class and immigrant communities. In that world, Chauncey writes, "the fundamental division of male sexual actors... was not between "heterosexual' and 'homosexual' men, but between conventionally masculine males, who were regarded as men, and effeminate males, known as fairies or pansies, who were regarded as virtual women, or, more precisely, as members of a 'third sex' that combined elements of the male and female.

Prisons were enclosed communities that gave rise to and perpetuated their own distinctive cultures, but they were far from hermetically sealed. The attribution of sexual deviance or "queerness" to the gender transgression of "fairies" and the possibility of conventionally masculine men having sex with them without compromising their status as "normal" found an echo in men's prison populations. Prison vernacular, especially the terms used to denote participants in prison sex, overlapped closely with working-class vernacular and the roles and expectations it delineated, no doubt reflecting its importation into prisons by a disproportionately working-class inmate population and perhaps its exportation into working-class communities as well.

Prison sexual vernacular was part of a prison argot that attracted considerable attention more generally, from both prison insiders and outsiders. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer and prisoner Hi Simons was fascinated by prison language that seemed to him "full of swagger and laughter, because of the vivid if often violent and vile poetry that streaked through it.... To use it," Simons wrote, "made us feel bold and free." Simons acknowledged that "except for a few terms from the I.W.W. vocabulary," incarcerated labor organizers "added nothing" to the specialized vocabulary of prisoners, but he worked to compile a dictionary of "prison lingo" he learned while an inmate of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth and published it in 1933. Others in this period published glossaries of prison terms as well, testifying to the emergence of a collective consciousness and shared culture among prisoners.

Central to prison argot were the coded terms that delineated sexual types and declared expectations about sexual acts and roles, offering a vernacular analog to sexological taxonomies. Noel Ersine included eighteen terms referring to same-sex sex among the fifteen hundred entries in Underworld and Prison Slang, published in 1933. Simons imagined that "a complete prison dictionary" would constitute "an encyclopedia of all imaginable sexual deviations," rivaling the sexologists' ambitions in cata loging sexual variance."

Prison constituted a unique transfer point between expert and vernacular sexual discourses, the terms of one often inflecting the other. Those men typed by sexologists as "pseudo-homosexuals" or "semi-homosexuals" were known to male prisoners as "wolves" and "punks." Those were men whose participation in same-sex sex was presumed to spring not from their nature but from the exigencies of circumstance. Wolves, sometimes also referred to as "jockers," were typically represented as conventionally, often aggressively masculine men who preserved (and according to some accounts, enhanced) that status by assuming the "active," penetrative role in sex with other men. As Victor Nelson made clear, "The wolf (active sodomist)... is not considered by the average inmate to be 'queer' in the sense that the oral copulist... is so considered. " In contrast to many accounts by penologists and some prison officials who blamed fairies for prison seduction, those most familiar with prison life typically credited wolves with initiating sex behind bars.

That initiation was often aggressive. As their name suggested, wolves were understood to be sexual predators, wooing, bribing, and sometimes forcing other men to have sex with them. Wolves were "always on the lookout for a handsome boy with a weak mind, who had nobody to send them in some food and money," sociologist Clifford Shaw wrote in his 1931 case study of a young juvenile delinquent." Berg described the process by which the wolf secured a sexual partner as "a campaign in which all the luxuries of prison - candy tobacco, sweets, and choice foods - are pressed upon the newcomer." Once the object of the wolf's affection accepted the goods offered, "he is quickly given to understand that he must repay the favor in kind." Sometimes seduction by wolves was described as a deliberate and cold-hearted maneuver of engaging a younger inmate in a relationship of indebtedness, which could be repaid only by sex. Others offered examples of more heartfelt and romantic courtship. Nelson recalled "Dreegan," the "champion "wolf" at Auburn Prison," who

outrageously flattered the objects of his lust; he gave them cigarettes, candy, money, or whatever else he possessed which might serve to break down their powers of resistance; and otherwise courted' them exactly as a normal man 'courts a woman. Once the boy had been seduced, if he proved satisfactory, Dreegan would go the whole hog, like a Wall Street broker with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress, and squander all of his possessions on the boy of the moment.

Wolves may not have been motivated by "true" homosexuality, in the understanding of contemporaries, but the relationships they forged in prison were often far from casual. Jealous rivalries and violent confrontations among inmates were credited to the passionate feelings of some wolves for their partners. Inmate-author Goat Laven described "brutal fights," some fatal, that arose from sexual jealousies: "It means a kick in the back to steal another man's kid." Louis Berg seconded Laven account. "The unwritten law of the prison forbids any 'wolf" to make approaches to another's 'boy friend' once he is wooed and won," Berg observed. "But it is not to be expected that men who break the laws for lesser urges will hesitate when they are driven by passions that rock them to the roots of their being. Fights occur between 'wolves' over some boy which are sanguinary and even end in murder."

Berg went on to recount the murder of "Mildred," an inmate at Welfare Island, by her jealous ex-lover. "From all accounts, Berg observed, "Mildred' was the victim of jealousy caused by 'her' unfaithfulness. That 'she' paid with 'her' life partner. shows the seriousness with which such prison marriages' are regarded." To some, the jealous violence that prison relationships could spark testified not only to depth of feeling but also to their similarity to heterosexual relationships. In a disturbing comparison, Berg concluded that Mildred's murder "proves how completely such relationships are identified with the normal ones between men and women." Charles Ford described jealousies among female inmates that resulted in fist fights, "hair pullings," and "every other conceivable type of trouble making activity" and that were even more real than husband-wife jealousies."

One theory explaining the existence of prison wolves, enshrined in inmate lore by the early twentieth century, proposed that "a 'wolf' is an ex-punk looking for revenge!" The object of wolves' and jocker attentions were known as "punks" and "kids," often identified as younger inmates, unfamiliar with life behind bars and unable or unwilling to defend themselves physically. A type recognized in prison argot at least the early twentieth century, punks were understood to be "normal" men, vulnerable to sexual coercion by other inmates because of the combination of small physical stature, youth, boyish attractiveness, and lack of institutional savvy. A few accounts suggested that punks were potential homosexuals whose latent desires were nurtured and realized the prison context, but most saw them simply as the unfortunate victims of wolves.

The punk's fate was often attributed to naïveté and, especially, his ignorance of the inmate code and the consequences of indebtedness. Charles Wharton wrote in his 1932 prison account of a fellow inmate, "a mere boy" who "seemed to have come direct from a farm" who had "all the bewilderment of a child thrust into strange, frightening surroundings." The youth soon became the object of "pretended interest and sympathy" from other convicts, who showered  him with presents, "silk hose, fancy underwear, food stolen from the kitchen, and best of all, cigarets [sic], the gold standard of prison barter." In the process, Wharton wrote, the boy "became a wretched victim of the most vicious circle in Leavenworth's convict population.

Punks also suffered as a result of their youthful good looks. Jim Tully, author of the many books on his experiences on the road as a hobo and time in prison, recalled Eddie, a young inmate "with yellow hair and wondering hazel eyes" who was "too beautiful to be a boy." Eddie's life in prison as a result "was made a constant hardship by sex-starved men." Berg wrote that prison populations always include "boys at that uncertain age where they have a good deal of the feminine in them." Such boys, Berg wrote, "are in most prized in jails and prisons as virgins." Berg also attributed the fate of punks to "biologic inadequacy (another name for lack of guts)."

Whether understood to be the victims of their own attractiveness, their youth and small stature, or their cowardice, punks were never depicted as wholly willing participants in sex with other men. Although there was little attention to overt sexual violence in early-twentieth-century prison writing, many acknowledged that some form of coercion was often involved in sex in prison, in men's prisons especially. Like wolves, punks were also understood under the rubric of "acquired" homosexuality - they participated in sex with other men not because of a constitutional condition but because of the unusual circumstances of prison life. "Had they never gone to prison," Berg wrote ruefully, "most of them would today be normal men."

Prison sexual vernacular and the culture it delineated overlapped particularly closely with that of itinerant laborers, tramps, and hoboes who traveled the country's highways, rural byways, and railroad arteries in the early decades of the twentieth century. The association between tramping and homosexuality was strong enough by 1939 for a textbook on prison psychiatry to warn of "the possibility of homosexuality in prisoners of the vagabond type," since "this tendency among them appears to be very widespread." In his 1923 study The Hobo, sociologist Nels Anderson characterized homosexual practices among homeless men as "widespread and described relationships between older men, known as wolves or jockers, with younger men, referred to as punks, kids, or "prushuns." In transient communities, young men partnered with older, more experienced men who promised to protect them and teach them how to survive life on the road in return for domestic and sometimes sexual favors.

Judging from many accounts, those relationships were often predatory and abusive. Jim Tully, whose experiences as a "road-kid," hobo, circus worker, prisoner, and professional prize-fighter provided the material exper for his twenty-six books, characterized the jocker as "a hobo who took a weak boy and made him a sort of slave to beg and run errands and steal for him." Punks, he reported, "were loaned, traded, and even sold to other tramps."  John Good recalled that the "criminal tramps or yeggs" who were his companions on the road in turn-of-the-century Denver "needed a boy to beg and steal for them, and to listen around for information." "These boys are degraded to unnatural uses," Good reported, "as well as trained in the arts of pickpocketing and sneak-thieving." Josiah Flynt, an early participant-observer of transient life, also described relationships between boys and their jockers, in which "abnormally masculine" men take "uncommonly feminine" boys as partners." Those attachments sometimes lasted for years, and boys remained with their jockers until they were "emancipated."

Men who lived on the road and on the economic margins were vulnerable to arrest, and incarceration in jails and prisons was a nearly inevitable experience for hobos, tramps, and transient workers. It is not surprising. then, that the vocabulary of prisoners would borrow closely from that of hobo culture, another nearly uniformly single-sex world populated by working-class men. Some prison terms revealed a direct etymology between hobo and prison terminology. When Jack London was arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls in 1894, he was locked up in the "Hobo." "The Hobo," he explained, "is that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principle division of the minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo." Hi Simons defined the term "Bo" as both a "hobo" and "boy, catamite" in his dictionary of prison argot. The direction of influence was probably two-way, and some prison terms were no doubt ported into hobo and working-class vernacular as well.

The importation of sexual vernacular, customs, and assumptions about same-sex practices from transient men as well as from a larger ur-working-class world meant that some prisoners were familiar with the sexual culture they found behind bars. Fiction writer Chester Himes, who was sentenced to the Ohio State Penitentiary in 1928, claimed "that nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life." Himes grew up in a middle-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland, but youthful desire for excitement drew him to the city's rougher side. In prison, he wrote, "all sex gratification derived sodomy, and I had encountered homosexuals galore around the Matic Hotel and the environs of Fifty-Fifth Street and Central Avenue Cleveland." The many incarcerated men with transient pasts would've been similarly familiar with wolf-punk relationships in prison, which mirrored man-kid relationships on the road.

But while prisons, then as now, were by disproportionately populated by working-class inmates, they drew prisoners from other demographic groups as well, some of whom were unfamiliar with prison sexual terminology and the roles and assumptions it described. The persecution of political radicals under the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during the First World War and in the wake of the Palmer raids of 1919 resulted in the incarceration of activists in the 1920s, many of whom became vocal and articulate critics of the American prison system while behind bars. These spokespeople for the working class often betrayed their own distance from and naïveté about working-class sexual life in their prison writing, and many were shocked by the sexual life they witnessed behind bars.

Alexander Berkman, for example, was candid in detailing his own prison sexual education in a chapter on an encounter with another prisoner, "Red," a hobo who worked alongside Berkman. When Red announced to Berkman, "you're my kid now, see?" Berkman claimed not to understand him and asked him to explain. Bewildered by Berkman's naiveté, Red exclaimed, "You're twenty-two and don't know what a kid is! Green? Well, sir, it would be hard to find an adequate analogy to your inconsistent maturity of mind." When Red explained to him the practice he termed "moonology," which he defined as "the truly Christian science of loving your neighbor, provided he be a nice little boy," Berkman professed not to "believe in this kid love," and was deeply shocked, protesting that "the panegyrics of boy-love are deeply offensive to my instincts. The very thought of the unnatural practice revolts and disgusts me." The pedagogical question-and-answer structure of this chapter allowed Berkman to tutor his readers in "moonology" while maintaining claims to his own sexual innocence. He may also have intended to contrast Red's perverse sexuality with his own presumably platonic love for another inmate that he described later in the memoir. But Berkman was far from alone among early-twentieth-century inmate narrators in professing innocence of same-sex sexuality before life behind bars.

When attorney and former Illinois state congressman Charles S. Wharton was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth penitentiary in 1928 for conspiracy in armed mail robbery, he acknowledged his own pre-prison innocence.  Prefacing his discussion of "the worst of all phases of prison life," which he attempted to describe "as delicately as possible," Wharton wrote that, "looking back, I felt that I had been everywhere, seen everything, done about all which the average man-about-town is expected to do, and I held that impression until Leavenworth made me feel like a country yokel staring slack-jawed at his first sight of urban sin."

Socialist and anti war activist Kate Richards O'Hare was similarly shocked and appalled by the homosexuality she witnessed as an inmate of the Missouri state penitentiary in Jefferson City in 1919-20. Scoffing at O'Hare's estimate that 75 percent of her fellow inmates were "abnormal" as "entirely too high," Fishman speculated that she was "naturally led into such an exaggeration because, having no previous personal knowledge of prisons, she was swept off her feet to find that such things existed. She was utterly amazed when I told her that homo-sexuality was a real problem in every prison."

Eugene Debs, who was convicted of violating the Espionage Law in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in prison, lamented that "every prison of which I have any knowledge... reeks with sodomy" and wrote with dismay about "this abominable vice to which many young men fall victims soon after they enter the prison." "I shrink from the loathesome [sic] and repellant task of bringing this hidden horror to light," Debs wrote. "It is a subject so incredibly shocking to me that, but for the charge of recreance that might be brought against me were I to omit it, I would prefer to make no reference to it at all."  Debs wrote in near-apocalyptic language about the fate of the boy "schooled in nameless forms of perversions of mind and soul" and prison sexual practices that "wreck the lives of countless thousands and send their wretched victims to premature and dishonored graves."

Whether shocked or inured, prisoners of all stripes acknowledged sex in both men's and women's prison as nearly ubiquitous and its roles and customs elaborated to the point that it constituted a culture unto itself. That culture occupied a curious status in early-twentieth-century prisons. Officially, sex between prisoners was unequivocally forbidden. Prisoners who were found engaging in sex were punished, often by placement in solitary confinement and extension of their sentences. Some prisons took harsh and sometimes draconian measures to distinguish homosexual prisoners from the general population in order to humiliate them and punish their behavior. In the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, inmates were reportedly forced to wear a large yellow letter D (designating them as "degenerate") if they were discovered having sex. 

The superintendent of the Ohio prison at Chillicothe boasted to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, in response to a question about how he handled the problem of "sex perversion" at the institution, that he had found a way to deter such practices through the use of humiliation. "By this I mean that all known perpetrators or anyone anyway connected with sexual perversions be been compelled to sit at a certain table at the mess hall."  A report from Kentucky noted that inmates convicted of sexual offenses had one side of their heads shaved to identify them. These practices of marking prisoners as homosexual were forms of punishment for sexual transgression; they also suggested the need for the production of a legible marker of homosexuality that ran counter to the notion that homosexuals, inside and out, were easily identifiable by their gender transgression.

Homosexual prisoners were also dealt physical punishments. A photograph from a Colorado prison depicted two African American prisoners wearing loose dresses, perhaps as another form of stigmatizing market of sexual deviance, and pushing wheelbarrows filled with heavy rocks as a form of punishment for same-sex sex. Kentucky physician F. E. Wylie proposed sterilization and "emasculation" that would "make it impossible for degenerates to commit sex crimes," adding that "surgery might even be used as a punishment" for homosexuality. The authors of an investigation of the Oregon state penitentiary in 1917 moved further to argue that "in cases of congenital homo-sexuality in the penitentiary," the more radical surgery of castration was necessary, to deprive offenders not only of the ability to procreate but of their libido as well. By the 1920s, more than half of the United States had adopted sterilization laws and some targeted "moral degenerates and perverts" specifically. Those laws were most easily and readily applied to people in prisons, mental asylums, and other carceral institutions.

Sex in prison was officially prohibited and sometimes harshly punished. But because of the difficulty of detection and the belief in its inevitability, prison officers often seemed to take it in stride. Joseph Wilson and Michael Pescor criticized prison officers who "regard homosexual practices as only another kind of dirty joke" and wrote that it was "essential that "this question shall always be considered gravely-never with smiles smirks, and a shrug of the shoulder" in their 1939 text on prison psychiatry, suggesting that this was often precisely how it was treated. Berg confirmed that to officials at Welfare Island, "the 'fairies' were, for the most part, simply the butt for lewd jokes. When they spoke of perverts it was with the kind of indulgence that one uses toward children whose peccadillos are amusing rather than serious." He added that "sex indiscretions" were "rarely detected and still less frequently punished." 

If prison guards could not be relied on to maintain a properly vigilant and condemnatory attitude regarding prison homosexuality, the some hoped, prisoners themselves would rise to this role. "Only the co-operation of the decent element will ultimately weed them out," Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes speculated in 1938. Wilson and Pescor went so far as to suggest that if homosexuals "received a reasonable dose of violence" at the hands of prisoners "known to be aggressively heterosexual," it would "help build up a correct prison community attitude towards this question."

But the community attitude in men's prisons, to the extent that it is possible to generalize, seemed often to be characterized by a rough tolerance, even by those who presumably did not participate in same-sex sex. Samuel Roth, who spent several years in prison for publishing what was considered obscene material, noted that "one thing happened immediately," on his incarceration; "I lost my horrors of [homosexuality] as a vice." He was far from alone. Recalling his experience on a Georgia chain gang in the 1930s, George Harsh had "too many other things to think about to care what two consenting adults do between them." "Under the conditions," Harsh wrote, "I think such a situation was inevitable, and I could understand it and condone it." Indeed, the institutional culture of some prisons recognized the established place of prison fairies. Though fairies were segregated in Welfare Island's South Annex, they were allowed to stage a bawdy Christmas show called the "Fag Follies." In later decades, prisons would sponsor football and baseball games that pitted queens against jockers.

- Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. p. 61-73

#prison slang #convict code #wolves and punks #history of homosexuality #history of heteronormativity #sex in prison #life inside #research quote #reading 2021 #hobos #tramps #working class culture #history of crime and punishment #american prison system #victor nelson #chester himes #samuel roth #hi simons #penology #prison administration #queer history

[athousandgateaux]

We do not pointedly prefer football to opera; we do not think it is better, more pure, more human to be poor than to be rich. We do not think it is inevitable that human kindness is more likely to be encountered in working class individuals than in middle class individuals. We do not think working class people are better than anybody else because they have been defined as belonging to one or other social category. We are not interested in working class culture...We do not celebrate the working class: working class life is rubbish, it is not a condition to be aspired to, and the past thirty 24 years of pro-revolutionary fetishisation of the proletariat as a thing in itself (the legend has it that the leftist group Militant used to force its activists to wear flat caps and donkey jackets on their paper sells so as to fit in) has mistaken and confused the actual power of the working class and reduced the proletariat to the status of just another oppressed minority.

Monsieur Dupont, Nihilist Communism, pg. 23-24

#monsieur dupont #nihilist communism #working class #working class culture #cult #low culture #rainbow high #fetishization

[popculturelib]

While the term "popular culture" is often associated with commercialism and mass media, popular culture is about class studies as much as it is anything else. Because of that, we bring to you a book that's a little different from our usual fare: Hands: Physical Labor, Class and Cultural Work (2004) by Janey Zandy. It is a scholarly book about working-class people and the way that their lives and bodies are impacted by physical labor--and what it means when that physical ability is lost.

From the summary:

What are two hands worth? In linking forms of cultural expression to labor, occupational injuries, and deaths, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work centers what is usually decentered--the complex culture of working-class people. Janet Zandy begins by examining the literal loss of lives to unsafe jobs and occupational hazards. She asks critical and timely questions about worker representation--who speaks for employees when the mills, mines, factories, and even white-collar cubicles shut down? She presents the voices of working-class writers and artists, and discusses their contribution to knowledge and culture. This innovative study reveals the flesh and bone beneath the abstractions of labor, class, and culture. It is an essential contribution to the emerging field of working-class studies, offering a hybrid model for bridging communities and non-academic workers to scholars and institutions of knowledge.

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.

#bgsu #disability pride month #hands #class studies #working class #working class culture

[niishi]

coal mining history is so intriguing bc you get to see all of America's social culture and political society truly forming and where the path diverged and how we ended up where we are now. society really only exists the way it does because of mineral/oil miners. that's how it's always been since the industrial revolution. our entire existence and culture is built around mining. I.... well I wanted to say more but it's an essays worth of information and I don't have time for that .. so

#its just ground zero when it comes to pretty much everything that makes a society #cultural diversity #working class culture #the way people in society socialize (due to phones and other stuff that only exists bc of mineral and oil mining) #it controls economics #i mean it not only is a representation of our society within the career #but it is the thing that creates our society as we know it #interesting interesting

[lochness-tess]

From ‘I Could Be So Good For You: A Portrait of the North London Working Class’ 📚

#class politics #uk politics #poetry #class war #british culture #not so Great Britain #writers and poets #working class #this poem #real London #working class culture #booksbooksbooks #literature #readersgonnaread #readers on tumblr #class awareness

[sylvies-kablooie]

i do unironically think the best artists of our generation are posting to get 20 notes and 3 reblogs btw. that fanfic with like 45 kudos is some of the best stuff ever written. those OCs you carry around have some of the richest backstories and worldbuilding someone has ever seen. please do not think that reaching only a few people when you post means your art isn't worth celebrating.

#i often wonder about how many things would be considered classic or high art had they only received the marketing #how many short films that were made for class could have been the most powerful thing you'd ever seen? if you'd seen them? #“you know the greatest films of all time were never made” etc etc #but like. these works of art ARE being made. it's just enjoyed by a smaller audience with equal impact though #i think about this one furry i used to follow on insta who had the coolest worldbuilding ever. it's been years. #thought prompted by that sketch of nimona from ten years ago that was just for a character design #posted to the creator's tumblr and now it's nominated for best animated feature film at the oscars #and by the genuine emotional reaction a fan comic made me feel. how much work had gone into it. how beautiful it was to me. #idk what to tag this but i hope whoever needs to hear it does #writing #writer #fandom #fandom culture #artist

[sparksinthenight]

If the economy NEEDS workers working in degrading, dehumanizing, dangerous jobs where they have very little power, then you need to get a different economy. Any world that relies upon the exploitation and abuse of the workers needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. We can make a society where no one has to work a job that’s physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, emotionally, or environmentally unhealthy or unsafe for them. We need to create that society.

#original post #left wing #leftism #left #anti consumerism #capitalism #anti capitalist #capitalist hell #capitalist dystopia #capitalist bullshit #consumerism #consumer culture #workers #working class #exploitation #class #class war #classism #class warfare #equality #liberation

[raggedyfink]

Tbh I think the fast fashion conversation should involve poor ppl but not in any way in the form of shaming but more like: “you are being taken advantage of by large corporations that have women and children enslaved to make crappy clothes in excessive amounts that have literal lead that will damage ur body in serious ways that ur pressured to buy via influencers that form a parasocial relationship with you and don’t care about you to overconsume them in large amounts that won’t last and have to be thrown away at some point and all that ends up fucking the environment. Plus, the cycle of consumerism is damaging to ur finances to keep u in poverty and mental health of always wanting more but never satisfied.”

I am saying right now you don’t need to throw out fast fashion items you currently own, if they fall apart, they can be repurposed. I am also saying I’ve been guilty of shopping fast fashion but am also making a commitment to eliminate fast fashion purchases and mindset in my life. The root cause of these fast fashion corpos to keep doing what they do is purely based on you buying from them and you, the consumer in this capitalist world, have the power to change that. Obviously there’s little you can do to avoid big oil or buying things made with prison labor without serious direct action but the fashion industry is one that is by design meant to be maintained by mindless consumerism and overconsumption.

If you are poor, please do whatever within ur means to avoid fast fashion, whether it’s buying from thrift stores other than goodwill and just buying less clothes and focusing on more important things in ur life. A better tomorrow is still possible if you allow it.

#mine #gothgoth #deathrock #punk fashion #sustainable fashion #sustainability #trad goth #goth fashion #slow fashion #fuck fast fashion #punk #goth #anarcho punk #anarchism #anarchy #anarchist art #anarchist #anarchopunk #anarchofeminism #leftist theory #punk culture #goth culture #punk rock #counterculture #boycott divest sanction #boycott #working class #diy or die #diy #diy culture

[kaeyx]

Ok this is completely out of left field but hear me out. A royal!au with Diluc where he's a little known lord in the capital, and you're a bachelor/ette being taken to every ball of the season and getting paraded around to secure a good match. Diluc is incredibly rich and known in his lands for his kindness, revered by his soldiers, but he never really cared for the theatrics of high society nearer the capital. He was too young before his dad died, and he ran off during what should have been his debutant year, so nobody really knows of him besides trading partners. He always supplies the nobles with fine wine and meat from his herds but declines every invitation to actually come and attend an event in the big cities.

Until one time his wait staff and close trading partners manage to convince him, and he agrees to go to just one ball because he's in the area for business and the networking is always useful. He's not up to date with the current trends but gets a suit tailored for him ahead of time. He hasn't read any of the famous writers of the moment but he's still a learned man who can talk philosophy with all the men twice his age, who are charmed and all too eager to throw their kids at him, hoping for a chance to bring their families together.

You're one of the debutants and have had to sit through a dozen introductions while your parents try to secure a good match. You're not rich or important enough to have your pick of husband, but you're not poor enough to be completely irrelevant. Of all the bachelors running around and trying to charm you with their knowledge of the latest plays and wars, only one catches your eye. It's hard to not notice him, honestly. Diluc is tall and broad but doesn't hold himself like a man of war, fiery hair tied back from a handsome, brooding face while he stands on the sidelines and talks to some older nobleman. You've never seen him before, and none of your friends seem to know him either. He's the lord of a smallish county near the border, and you recognise the name from their generous sponsorships and rich wines.

#diluc.genshin #diluc x reader #idk what would happen but it's something like diluc being awkward and having no idea how court life works #you're tiered of the peacocking and elaborate social rituals #diluc isn't considered a prime candidate bc he's not as learned as he could be plus he doesn't network at all #plus he mostly hangs around the bourgeoisie #and no one really knows about him beyond he's in charge of everything super young because of his dad's unexpected death #plus diluc never finished his military service in an age where lords were expected to be rlly good at war AND cultured #idk I'm coping with my baroque lit class rn

[bisexualseraphim]

USAmericans will literally live in a trailer working 3 jobs for $7 an hour surviving off gas station food and still call themselves ‘middle class.’

Here in the UK if you’re middle class you’re probably a neurosurgeon with a stable-barn and a mansion big enough to have its own name. US middle class is our working class.

Not got owt to say about it, just really fuckin weird innit. I’ve had a few USAmericans describe me as middle class and I’m like mate… I make half of what you do lol

EDIT: I have since been corrected on this!!! Please stop reblogging this without checking the notes first, I was quite wrong!!!

#class divide #class differences #classism #british culture #uk culture #american culture #uk politics #british politics #america politics #us politics #working class #poverty #middle class

[anglerflsh]

I haven't painted properly in a while, anyway, quick (one hour each) redraws of frames from the '78 film

#[.art] #it is not an attempt to redraw the actual actors because godbless I'm not attempting that without doing at least one portrait class #so it's the average try at learning how to work with backgrounds and new brushes and all that. And an excuse to watch the movie productivel #les mis #les miserables 1978 #Javert #Jean Valjean #huh. why doesn't tumblr capitalise names in the tags why do I have to go back and change it. Get on that website staff #as usual I'm very apologetic about being in the main tags cringe culture is real and in my head 24/7. It's the panopticon all over again

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

The terms “suburbs” and “suburbanization” often bring to mind the period after the Second World War, defined by rows of bungalows on tree-lined streets. Another image of the suburbs are the more recent stucco McMansions in far-flung areas of the city with garages standing guard over sidewalk-less streets.

In fact, the process of suburbanization emerged far earlier in Canadian cities and was deeply tied to the emergence of the streetcar as a revolutionary form of public transpiration.

Up until the late 19th century, there were no effective means of mass public transit and most people’s main form of transportation was walking. The lack of transit set real limitations in terms of where people could live. ...

The period saw Winnipeg as the main industrial and wholesale base for western Canada. With three railways crossing the city and the grain exchange being moved from Toronto to Winnipeg in 1890, Winnipeg was considered the “Chicago of the North.”

In 1910, Winnipeg accounted for 50 per cent of all manufacturing in western Canada. A massive industrial working class was created in Winnipeg, and those workers needed to get to work somehow.

Yearly streetcar paid fairs increased from 3.5 million passengers in 1900 to 60 million in 1913. The areas of the city that gained the most new residents in this time were west and south Winnipeg.

Streetcars were not only the most effective option for public transport but also used as a tool for land speculation that drove the creation of new developments and suburbs.

In many cases, streetcar lines were built into less-developed areas to spur on development and used as a promotional tool to attract homebuyers.

Land and subdivisions that had basic municipal services, paved sidewalks, sewers and piped water, were still the most desirable to homebuyers and developers – but by 1900, streetcar service was a requirement." - Scott Price, "The streetcar emerges," The Uniter. Volume 78, Number 06. October 19, 2023.

#winnipeg #streetcars #street railways #mass transit #public transportation #canadian history #land development #working class culture #suburbs

[un-pearable]

ninjago is everything. it’s anime. it’s a comic book. it’s star wars. it’s fantasy. it’s atla. it’s a superhero story. it’s a ghost story haunted by a morality system so deterministic it can’t be escaped even in death. it’s also got literal ghosts. it’s got enough worldbuilding to fill entire books but also a timeline so broken it’s retconned its own most important scenes out of existence. gravity is a manipulatable element. so is the concept of shape. sentient androids exist alongside sapient snakes and skeletons and genies and dragons and everything. it’s got a multiverse that carries the corpses of the shows it’s outlasted. it’s terrible. it’s beautiful. it’s been in continuous production for over a decade. it’s the most frustrating experience of my life. it’s so, so much fun.

#ninjago #it’s a 40 minute ad for a few pieces of plastic that the writers wrote while they were waiting for #the cinematic masterpiece of The LEGO Movie to finish production #it’s 200+ episodes of impeccable Nonsense and some of the most delightful characters i’ve ever seen #it’s a beautful. astounding mess that’s has every kids media trope under the sun. it’s a work of art #text✨ #ngl this post is an abbreviated version of the twelve pages of nonsense i wrote arguing it’s cultural value as a 2010s period piece #for my popular culture class so. yeah i don’t have a good reason

[skinnypaleangryperson]

the strange thing about American society is the default mentality is that no one expects you to be great and even assumes medicore or complancent headspaces, leading people to not even try to begin with, an those that have something to offer or try, the conversation doesn't even come up at all

#im losing my mind pretending to think like everyone else #im dead silent around my family coworkers pretty much anyone #i lost my last friend over it #people cant stajd it when you dont worship celebrities and mindlessly consume #i cant relate to anyone and i have no support in my life over it #i have to put on a thick mask in EVERY aspect of my life and feel dead #but i have more personality than a lot of people but you cant tell when 98% of my life is stifiled performance #america #art #pop culture #working class #mental health #expression

[01tsubomi]

cultural perspective being indispensible in media consumption but looking back i find it so funny that for years and years before teaching in japan i thought it was another suspension-of-disbelief surrealist kagepro thing that haruka and takane spent all their time in a homeroom class for just the two of them and now the maximum number of kids we've ever had in my special needs class is 3

#granted i work at a really small school but having separate classes and teachers for 1-4 special needs kids is really standard in japan #i know there are specialized high schools but i think most kids go through public school no matter what #i'm no expert on the subject but i think the approach is interesting #the fact that they're willing to dedicate that much personal attention - separate homeroom classes #and other teachers teaching individualized curriculum for all subjects - is nice #i also feel like i'd be planning really different content for english class with each of my two usual students than i am for the both o the #so that's just part of my job but again. that's just part of my job #yuukei yesterday was already one of the most grounded parts of kagepro #but knowing just how normal mr. tateyama's homeroom class is in cultural context it really is just an ordinary teen love story #i think i might've felt even stronger abt that when i was 16 #personal #kagepro

[rawliverandcigarettes]

I think one of the reasons why I latched onto asari characters but not super onto asari culture itself, is because I think there's something inherently... bi-cultural about being asari, in a way? Either you have to live with the heritage of another species weighing down on you regarding its expectations, history and shortcoming, knowing that by nature, you probably won't even get to spend that much time with your dad and will have to accomodate for the hole they'll leave behind; or you're pureblood, and you're also ostracized by default.

Every asari is kind of doomed to feel culturally incomplete in some way, and I think it's pretty wild that it's baked deep within the biology itself.

#mass effect #asari #mass effect meta #bicultural #hey look at me still thinking about mass effect wow #(I edited TEoP's first chapter yesterday so that's why) #(it slaps!!!!! I'm genuinely so happy whenever I reread it) #(rhanda truly being the working class bi disaster of the century) #(her daddy issues are so IMMEDIATELY apparent it's so funny to me) #(her daddy issues being extremely different from nagatha's because the cultural baggage is completely different) #(in spite of them being half sisters and having lived in each other's faces far longer than they did with their respective dads)