snarltoothed

[snarltoothed]

art by Jordan Noel Davis.

[snarltoothed]

i really only saw the one poll about UBI specifically for mothers and i was really kind of hoping to see more discussion because i truly do see the points made in support of and in opposition of…

like, i do feel like being pro-mother (in a general societal sense) and working to provide social safety nets for mothers (be they stay-at-home, single, or otherwise) is very much a feminist issue. while i think UBI for all would be better, certainly there’s a benefit in at least fighting for it to make a large number of womens’ lives easier and safer.

however, i also understand that the only reason the government would pay mothers is to incentivise (and therefore coerce) women into a reproductive role.

however… i truly don’t know which way the impact will matter more. like… is it shitty of the government to use money to bribe women into having kids? undoubtedly. but will the impact of that be large enough to outweigh the immense benefit of making the lives of a vulnerable population of women safer and easier? i really don’t know. i don’t even know how to predict and materially weigh the pros and cons

#radfems interact #radfems do touch #radfem safe #radfems do interact #like. idk maybe it seems obvious for certain reasons im not privvy to #but i genuinely dont know im not even sure if that’s a thing the government has been fr discussing #or if the poll was a hypothetical

[snarltoothed]

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

#lmfao

[snarltoothed]

More hairy women everywhere now

[snarltoothed]

!!!

[snarltoothed]

"you're a feminist but are you normal about transgender women?" yeah I'm normal about gender. I don't believe in that shit

[snarltoothed]

Men can nuke humanity to extinction but women who choose not to have children are the ones men fear the most to kill their bloodlines. Men develop weapons that can kill tens of millions of humans at once but it's women who need to be controlled so we don't bring nations to their knees. Humanity can be destroyed by men committing mass murder on an apocalyptic scale or humanity can be destroyed by women refusing to give birth.

[snarltoothed]

Not to be That Guy but I do kind of think that the way postmodernist style thinking functions in academia is a psyop intended to undermine the left. In the 60s and 70s, all kinds of radicalism and action came from universities. Some universities built in that era were designed for police shutdowns during riots. But now it’s like… the way that people in humanities, social sciences etc, everyone who’s been encouraged into postmodernism, queer theory etc, ESPECIALLY those from pristigous schools, structure their thought is so… impossible to apply in any material way. Forget about radical meaning at the root, it’s more like radical meaning totally off the ground. Everything is like, a thought experiment, spoken about as if it’s reality. And they dominate leftist spaces– often having the class background or even just academic confidence to back up their strongly held beliefs, or even just the time to implement them. The closer you are to a liberal arts university, the more likely it is that the political groups around it are incredibly bogged down in identity and language that most people don’t understand, and an environment hostile to basic questioning and learning outside of adopting the lingo. It really effectively isolates the people in it AND isolates them from organizing effectively. Not to mention their conceptual frameworks are really removed from reality in the first place

If it wasn’t an actual psy op it worked just as well by itself lol

#the absolute impatience i have with postmodernist bullshit these days #like shuuuuuut the fuck up you guys are worse than the greek philosophers

[snarltoothed]

The Blair Witch wouldn't kill me. We'd actually have nasty lesbian sex. RIP those hikers but I'm different.

[snarltoothed]

the only grind I respect is girls grinding against each other or something. like whatever the mortar and pestle get up to

[snarltoothed]

i've seen posts talk about psychs restricting or withholding medication and want to add the opposite, there are psychs who push or require patients to take unneeded medication and overmedication is also a problem of autonomy not often brought up because it's done to patients where people consider it "necessary", like psychotic patients. we are then excluded from treatment programs or treatment itself for questioning this or refusing the medication. schizophrenic long-term patients have loss of brain tissue as a result.personally I have diagnosed neurological conditions now.

so both restriction of meds and overmedication should be considered same issue with lack of autonomy of the patient and there is not enough awareness of the effects of the medication, mostly because it's *assumed* the psych "knows best"

[snarltoothed]

The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex

Peggy Orenstein out here doing God's work

NY Times 4/12/24

By Peggy Orenstein

Ms. Orenstein is the author of “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity” and “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.”

Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”

For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.

I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.

Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites, those default sources of sex ed for teens. As with anything else, repeat exposure can render the once appalling appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, then, in what may become a feedback loop, be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room.

Choking, Dr. Herbenick said, seems to have made that first leap in a 2008 episode of Showtime’s “Californication,” where it was still depicted as outré, then accelerated after the success of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” By 2019, when a high school girl was choked in the pilot of HBO’s “Euphoria,” it was standard fare. A young woman was choked in the opener of “The Idol” (again on HBO and also, like “Euphoria,” created by Sam Levinson; what’s with him?). Ali Wong plays the proclivity for laughs in a Netflix special, and it’s a punchline in Tina Fey’s new “Mean Girls.” The chorus of Jack Harlow’s “Lovin On Me,” which topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for six nonconsecutive weeks this winter and has been viewed over 99 million times on YouTube, starts with, “I’m vanilla, baby, I’ll choke you, but I ain’t no killer, baby.” How-to articles abound on the internet, and social media algorithms feed young people (but typically not their unsuspecting parents) hundreds of #chokemedaddy memes along with memes that mock — even celebrate — the potential for hurting or killing female partners.

I’m not here to kink-shame (or anything-shame). And, anyway, many experienced BDSM practitioners discourage choking, believing it to be too dangerous. There are still relatively few studies on the subject, and most have been done by Dr. Herbenick and her colleagues. Reports among adolescents are now trickling out from the United Kingdom, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand and Italy.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

Twenty years ago, sexual asphyxiation appears to have been unusual among any demographic, let alone young people who were new to sex and iffy at communication. That’s changed radically in a short time, with health consequences that parents, educators, medical professionals, sexual consent advocates and teens themselves urgently need to understand.

Sexual trends can spread quickly on campus and, to an extent, in every direction. But, at least among straight kids, I’ve sometimes noticed a pattern: Those that involve basic physical gratification — like receiving oral sex in hookups — tend to favor men. Those that might entail pain or submission, like choking, are generally more for women.

So, while undergrads of all genders and sexualities in Dr. Herbenick’s surveys report both choking and being choked, straight and bisexual young women are far more likely to have been the subjects of the behavior; the gap widens with greater occurrences. (In a separate study, Dr. Herbenick and her colleagues found the behavior repeated across the United States, particularly for adults under 40, and not just among college students.) Alcohol may well be involved, and while the act is often engaged in with a steady partner, a quarter of young women said partners they’d had sex with on the day they’d met also choked them.

Either way, most say that their partners never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks. For many, there had been moments when they couldn’t breathe or speak, compromising the ability to withdraw consent, if they’d given it. No wonder that, in a separate study by Dr. Herbenick, choking was among the most frequently listed sex acts young women said had scared them, reporting that it sometimes made them worry whether they’d survive.

Among girls and women I’ve spoken with, many did not want or like to be sexually strangled, though in an otherwise desired encounter they didn’t name it as assault. Still, a sizable number were enthusiastic; they requested it. It is exciting to feel so vulnerable, a college junior explained. The power dynamic turns her on; oxygen deprivation to the brain can trigger euphoria.

That same young woman, incidentally, had never climaxed with a partner: While the prevalence of choking has skyrocketed, rates of orgasm among young women have not increased, nor has the “orgasm gap” disappeared among heterosexual couples. “It indicates they’re not doing other things to enhance female arousal or pleasure,” Dr. Herbenick said.

When, for instance, she asked one male student who said he choked his partner whether he’d ever tried using a vibrator instead, he recoiled. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

Perhaps, she responded, because it would be more likely to produce orgasm without risking, you know, death.

In my interviews, college students have seen male orgasm as a given; women’s is nice if it happens, but certainly not expected or necessarily prioritized (by either partner). It makes sense, then, that fulfillment would be less the motivator for choking than appearing adventurous or kinky. Such performances don’t always feel good.

“Personally, my hypothesis is that this is one of the reasons young people are delaying or having less sex,” Dr. Herbenick said. “Because it’s uncomfortable and weird and scary. At times some of them literally think someone is assaulting them but they don’t know. Those are the only sexual experiences for some people. And it’s not just once they’ve gotten naked. They’ll say things like, ‘I’ve only tried to make out with someone once because he started choking and hitting me.’”

Keisuke Kawata, a neuroscientist at Indiana University’s School of Public Health, was one of the first researchers to sound the alarm on how the cumulative, seemingly inconsequential, sub-concussive hits football players sustain (as opposed to the occasional hard blow) were key to triggering C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease. He’s a good judge of serious threats to the brain. In response to Dr. Herbenick’s work, he’s turning his attention to sexual strangulation. “I see a similarity” to C.T.E., he told me, “though the mechanism of injury is very different.” In this case, it is oxygen-blocking pressure to the throat, frequently in light, repeated bursts of a few seconds each.

Strangulation — sexual or otherwise — often leaves few visible marks and can be easily overlooked as a cause of death. Those whose experiences are nonlethal rarely seek medical attention, because any injuries seem minor: Young women Dr. Herbenick studied mostly reported lightheadedness, headaches, neck pain, temporary loss of coordination and ear ringing. The symptoms resolve, and all seems well. But, as with those N.F.L. players, the true effects are silent, potentially not showing up for days, weeks, even years.

According to the American Academy of Neurology, restricting blood flow to the brain, even briefly, can cause permanent injury, including stroke and cognitive impairment. In M.R.I.s conducted by Dr. Kawata and his colleagues (including Dr. Herbenick, who is a co-author of his papers on strangulation), undergraduate women who have been repeatedly choked show a reduction in cortical folding in the brain compared with a never-choked control group. They also showed widespread cortical thickening, an inflammation response that is associated with elevated risk of later-onset mental illness. In completing simple memory tasks, their brains had to work far harder than the control group, recruiting from more regions to achieve the same level of accuracy.

The hemispheres in the choked group’s brains, too, were badly skewed, with the right side hyperactive and the left underperforming. A similar imbalance is associated with mood disorders — and indeed in Dr. Herbenick’s surveys girls and women who had been choked were more likely than others (or choked men) to have experienced overwhelming anxiety, as well as sadness and loneliness, with the effect more pronounced as the incidence rose: Women who had experienced more than five instances of choking were two and a half times as likely as those who had never been choked to say they had been so depressed within the previous 30 days they couldn’t function. Whether girls and women with mental health challenges are more likely to seek out (or be subjected to) choking, choking causes mood disorders, or some combination of the two is still unclear. But hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation — judging by what research has shown about other types of traumatic brain injury — could be a contributing factor. Given the soaring rates of depression and anxiety among young women, that warrants concern.

Now consider that every year Dr. Herbenick has done her survey, the number of females reporting extreme effects from strangulation (neck swelling, loss of consciousness, losing control of urinary function) has crept up. Among those who’ve been choked, the rate of becoming what students call “cloudy” — close to passing out, but not crossing the line — is now one in five, a huge proportion. All of this indicates partners are pressing on necks longer and harder.

The physical, cognitive and psychological impacts of sexual choking are disturbing. So is the idea that at a time when women’s social, economic, educational and political power are in ascent (even if some of those rights may be in jeopardy), when #MeToo has made progress against harassment and assault, there has been the popularization of a sex act that can damage our brains, impair intellectual functioning, undermine mental health, even kill us. Nonfatal strangulation, one of the most significant indicators that a man will murder his female partner (strangulation is also one of the most common methods used for doing so), has somehow been eroticized and made consensual, at least consensual enough. Yet, the outcomes are largely the same: Women’s brains and bodies don’t distinguish whether they are being harmed out of hate or out of love.

By now I’m guessing that parents are curled under their chairs in a fetal position. Or perhaps thinking, “No, not my kid!” (see: title of Dr. Herbenick’s book above, which, by the way, contains an entire chapter on how to talk to your teen about “rough sex”).

I get it. It’s scary stuff. Dr. Herbenick is worried; I am, too. And we are hardly some anti-sex, wait-till-marriage crusaders. But I don’t think our only option is to wring our hands over what young people are doing.

Parents should take a beat and consider how they might give their children relevant information in a way that they can hear it. Maybe reiterate that they want them to have a pleasurable sex life — you have already said that, right? — and also want them to be safe. Tell them that misinformation about certain practices, including choking, is rampant, that in reality it has grave health consequences. Plus, whether or not a partner initially requested it, if things go wrong, you’re generally criminally on the hook.

Dr. Herbenick suggests reminding them that there are other, lower-risk ways to be exploratory or adventurous if that is what they are after, but it would be wisest to delay any “rough sex” until they are older and more skilled at communicating. She offers language when negotiating with a new partner, such as, “By the way, I’m not comfortable with” — choking, or other escalating behaviors such as name-calling, spitting and genital slapping — “so please don’t do it/don’t ask me to do it to you.” They could also add what they are into and want to do together.

I’d like to point high school health teachers to evidence-based porn literacy curricula, but I realize that incorporating such lessons into their classrooms could cost them their jobs. Shafia Zaloom, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, recommends, if that’s the case, grounding discussions in mainstream and social media. There are plenty of opportunities. “You can use it to deconstruct gender norms, power dynamics in relationships, ‘performative’ trends that don’t represent most people’s healthy behaviors,” she said, “especially depictions of people putting pressure on someone’s neck or chest.”

I also know that pediatricians, like other adults, struggle when talking to adolescents about sex (the typical conversation, if it happens, lasts 40 seconds). Then again, they already caution younger children to use a helmet when they ride a bike (because heads and necks are delicate!); they can mention that teens might hear about things people do in sexual situations, including choking, then explain the impact on brain health and why such behavior is best avoided. They should emphasize that if, for any reason — a fall, a sports mishap or anything else — a young person develops symptoms of head trauma, they should come in immediately, no judgment, for help in healing.

The role and responsibility of the entertainment industry is a tangled knot: Media reflects behavior but also drives it, either expanding possibilities or increasing risks. There is precedent for accountability. The European Union now requires age verification on the world’s largest porn sites (in ways that preserve user privacy, whatever that means on the internet); that discussion, unsurprisingly, had been politicized here. Social media platforms have already been pushed to ban content promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide — they should likewise be pressured to ban content promoting choking. Traditional formats can stop glamorizing strangulation, making light of it, spreading false information, using it to signal female characters’ complexity or sexual awakening. Young people’s sexual scripts are shaped by what they watch, scroll by and listen to — unprecedentedly so. They deserve, and desperately need, models of interactions that are respectful, communicative, mutual and, at the very least, safe.

[snarltoothed]

“Exceptions alone do not, however, disprove the validity of generalizations. If I make a generalization that people stop at red lights while driving, certainly it is true that occasionally, some people do not; however it is an accurate and useful statement that people stop at red lights. It describes, with reasonable accuracy, a social phenomenon. To say that the generalization is not true simply because a few people do not fit it, is ludicrous and leaves us unable to describe or name even the most obvious social norms. The overall effect of this turn away from “meta-narratives” is to stop people from being able to describe their social conditions, from being able to generalize about personal experiences in their lives, from being able to see the commonalities of experience that can mobilize them to see problems as political rather than personal. The net effect is a lot of women’s studies students saying, “You can’t really say that,” about even the most basic truths.”

— Let them eat text: The real politics of postmodernism by Karla Mantilla (via philo-sophi-a)

[snarltoothed]

The Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men

"Since the birth of the twins, Denise felt a great sense of loss after leaving her previously rewarding job, James’ work increased in duration to compensate for the shift in income, and Denise’s identity as a mother superseded any sense of herself as a partner or lover.

She lost desire for sex and for James completely and perceived his requests for sex as intrusive; they were yet another demand placed upon her following a full day of devoting herself to her two demanding children who slept no longer than 4-h intervals through the night, even now at 22 months old.

James withdrew from childcare and household chores and activities, in part due to exhaustion following his 14-h work days and in part to “punish” Denise for withholding sex from him.

She resented him for expecting that she would be the sole caretaker for their children, and lost attraction for him as he increasingly retreated to online gaming late at night after the twins were asleep.

(…)

And yet, as they went to leave the end of their first session with the therapist, James turned to the provider and asked, point-blank, whether she thought that “the female Viagra” could help solve their woes.

This case study is one example of the issues plaguing perceptions of low sexual desire in women partnered with men.

That is, while James and Denise’s situation seems an obvious example of contextually-determined low desire, James ascribed the problem to a biological dysfunction in Denise’s body.

The idea that low desire rests in the individual reflects an essentialist view of sexuality that has been advanced by the medical field for decades and cogently critiqued. As such, James’ reaction is not particularly surprising or uncommon.

(…)

But why have essentialist, medicalized views of sexuality come to monopolize how people understand low sexual desire?

One argument is neoliberal—that locating the problem of low desire in individuals’ bodies has high financial stakes.

Naming low desire as an individualized biological dysfunction creates a demand for biological (i.e., medical) solutions; thus, pharmaceutical companies stand to gain by selling a “treatment.”

(…)

It reflects what has become a suspiciously common pattern in women’s relationships with men more broadly, where a woman’s sexual desire disappears and/or becomes “too low” and then is deemed a dysfunction within the woman.

This pattern is suspicious because the numbers of women reporting low desire are so high that they might be modal, if not ordinary; and, they are certainly too high to reflect individual pathologies within individual women’s bodies.

It is also suspicious because many women who report low sexual desire describe considerably similar interpersonal problems with their men partners.

Thus, while low desire is likely not an individual problem within Denise’ body, the issues and inequities it results from are also likely not an individual problem within James or the interpersonal dynamics of James’ and Denise’s specific relationship.

Instead, we turn to a structural level explanation: gender norms, following other foundational work.

(…)

Desire is often situated as low because of its relative status to a partner’s level of desire.

Interestingly, however, this is not a gender-neutral process and the bound is often set with the man partner as reference point.

Accordingly, when a woman experiences lower desire than a man partner, her desire is often labeled low.

In the converse situation, however, men are still the referent: in the case of a man reporting lower desire than a woman partner, the woman’s desire is labeled too high (e.g., they are labeled insatiable or “sluts” in negative ways), rather than the man’s desire being labeled too low.

This highlights the gendered subjectivity inherent to conceptualizations of low desire, where low desire is most often seen as residing not just in bodies, but in women’s bodies relative to men’s desires.

(…)

In Prediction 2.1, heteronormativity’s inequitable casting of women into a caregiver-mother role to men partners contributes to the women’s lower desire.

While heteronormativity slots women into nurturant caregiving roles in general, this caregiving is also directed at men partners specifically.

Nurturance—warm, loving, and caring treatment—is a critical aspect of long-term and/or successful relationships, but one inequitably shared between women and men in relationships with each other.

Heteronormative asymmetries in caregiving can matter not only because they are inequitable, but because they translate into dependencies that contravene contemporary norms of relational interdependence.

Interdependent relationships involve a mutual ethic of care, with partners supporting each other simultaneously or sequentially, akin to a something like a mix of equals, friends, and sexual partners.

The gender inequities inherent to heteronormative framings of complementarity violate norms of relational interdependence, transforming expectations of a partner–partner relationship into something closer to one that is caregiver-dependent or mother–child.

Women end up doing many of the same things for their men partners as mothers do for their children, e.g., reminding them of chores, organizing social events (or playdates), buying clothes, ensuring there is food for snacks and meals and that these are made available.

Additionally, women often take on tasks for their husbands or other men partners that were originally performed by the men’s mothers, perhaps an implicitly-held leftover from more historical understandings of marriage.

(…)

In Prediction 3.1, the heteronormative push for women to focus on their appearance, especially during and in reference to sexual activity, contributes to their low desire.

Heteronormativity focuses on women’s sexual appearance over their pleasure, socializing women to be sexy rather than sexual.

It positions women as sexual objects for men partners, and women’s bodies as offerings gifted to men for sex as part of a relationship contract.

This can result in sexual objectification.

The internalization of this objectification—sexual self-objectification—means that women’s desire is often contingent upon whether they think they are desirable.

(…)

Penetrative intercourse is painted as the only version of “real sex” within heteronormativity, but women have a low likelihood of experiencing orgasm (a highly pleasurable experience) with penetrative intercourse.

Heteronormativity means that, though women may want to be sexual, even with men partners, they are often taught that they can’t be in the ways that are more likely to feel pleasurable for them.

This ongoing separation between experiences of desire and sexual pleasure may dampen desire because it is not reinforced or followed up by sexual activity that actually leads to sexual pleasure.

In Prediction 4.3, seeing sex as a duty to perform with men will contribute to lower desire in women.

Some women have sex they want, and some women have sex that their men partners want and that the women are open to.

But a number of women (and almost no men) have reported in a nationally representative survey that they engaged with sex because it was part of their job, a duty or obligation of being married, which is a heteronormative hallmark.

“Duty sex” is not very sexy, and people—including men—report losing sexual interest in this situation, as occurred in our case study above.

(…)

Moreover, that low desire is seen as a medical and health issue could make for a circular association between it and chronic stress.

Women come to know their desire as “too low” and report feeling like failures as women and partners, making for an iatrogenic source of chronic stress.

Locating the “problem” of low desire in women’s bodies and minds ultimately places the responsibility for it on women, arguably a form of gaslighting when the problem exists outside women and will not be fixed with individual effort.

This can exacerbate women’s stress, by placing yet another responsibility on their shoulders but one that is impossible: to fix their desire problem by fixing themselves, when they are not the problem."

[snarltoothed]

[snarltoothed]

Idk if y'all are familiar with the phrase "anything worth doing is worth half-assing," but I honestly think radblr would benefit from approaching separatism from that angle. Like, separatist action doesn't have to be full and complete severance from the male population; it can be as small as choosing a female doctor, attending an all-women book club, making dedicated time for female friends and family members, talking to/learning from older women in our lives...

Complete isolationist separatism is just not realistic for a lot of women, and since that model of separatism is the main one discussed in rad spaces, women who aren't able to pursue that lifestyle end up feeling discouraged or like they can't center women effectively. So separatism remains a very niche and elusive form of activism for most women in the world.

I think meeting women where they are is a huge part of feminism and the pursuit of female community and liberation; surrounding oneself with women who come from all different backgrounds, communities, contexts is critical for developing fully-rounded and intersectional praxis that takes into account the variable needs of women both inter- and intraculturally. There's a tendency in any space, real or virtual, to seek out others with the same viewpoint, but growth (emotional or intellectual) comes from interacting with a richly diverse group, and wrestling with unfamiliar or even uncomfortable viewpoints - working through that friction - rather than running back to the familiar - strengthens and enriches understanding, and informs activism that reflects this more nuanced mindset.

[snarltoothed]

SCRANTON, PA — Female athlete Kelly Baker was expelled from her university this week after refusing to have her skull fractured by a man, reports claim. During a press conference, she was officially rebuked as a bigot which, according to NCAA guidelines, bars her from joining a competing school.

"I just don't want to have my skull crushed, that's all," said Baker in a statement. "I believe every person is made with equal dignity, and I am not in any way afraid of trans people. I am, however, afraid of brain hemorrhages. I'm sorry, but I'm only going to do karate against other women."

Baker was officially removed from the team after she declined to fight a 250-pound man named "Julianna", who sent his past three female opponents to the hospital with broken craniums. "It was so dehumanizing how Kelly didn't let me bash her face in," said Julianna, formerly known as "Gary". "Karate is all about technique, anyways. If Kelly cannot handle getting a subdural hematoma from a beautiful woman like me, she needs to get out of the sport."

According to sources, Julianna holds the record for most broken bones in a single karate tournament, but gender experts maintain this has nothing to do with higher testosterone levels.

At publishing time, Julianna had been crowned champion of the tournament as all of the other competitors were unconscious.

#the way people can’t tell this is blatant satire #i mean it is based on fallon fox i’m pretty sure but still