How can some straight women do 95% of the housework and childcare with little to no help from their husbands and still wonder how two women could raise a child together?
the only thing i knew about sex at the age of nine was that
1) it was for mommies and daddies who were married;
2) it made me, my five year old sister, and my baby brother.
i learned everything i knew about sex from the internet while secretly browsing grownup sites on my 4th generation ipod touch i earned for doing so well at a piano recital. because of the nature of, you know, men and their internet porn, i learned that my sexual role as a woman was to be slapped and pissed on and tied up. i didn’t know what healthy sex was. i didn’t know it should be mutually consensual, or that it was okay to want sex with girls. i didn’t know that sex should be good for both people. i learned that sex would hurt, and that sex was about men and men only, and that i would be forced into sex whether i liked it or not, and that it was normal to have sex with big, burly, grown men as a teenager. i learned it was normal to cry during sex. i was scared of sex for so many years because of that, and the way i was exposed to sex at a young age led to the inappropriate and traumatic sexual encounters i had (occasionally with older people) later on in my teen years.
the day i got my first period, i was ten-and-a-half. i was swimming in the river with my best friend, and when i got out to go to the bathroom, i noticed brown blood on the inside of my mint-green tankini bottom. i knew what a period was, but i hid it from my mother in shame. she found out, eventually, of course. she told me, you have a woman’s body now, and if you have sex, you could have a baby. all i heard was, you have a woman’s body.
i started shaving my vulva when i was eleven, because i saw memes on memegenerator about how disgusting “hairy pussy” was. i wanted to be sexy. i was eleven years old, and all i wanted was to be sexy. it hurt, and it itched, and it made me uncomfortable, and i’d sometimes nick my labia with the razor, but i did it anyway, because i didn’t want to have a nasty, “hairy pussy.”
eleven was the age i first started getting pinched on the EL. i was an early bloomer: i had B-cup breasts already, and my menstrual cycle was regular enough that i could keep a calendar. i started wearing a full face of makeup to school and buying shorts that rode all the way up my skinny twelve-year-old thighs. i remember the day i stopped jumping off the swings the summer after fifth grade. skinned knees weren’t sexy. smooth, flawless legs were sexy, and i was a sexy girl. i was probably the sexiest little girl in the whole world. my parents hated it. they told me i was too young, but i knew the truth. my body was older, maybe 17 or 18, so my brain must be, too.
when i was twelve, i had a secret kik account that my parents didn’t know about. i used it to message strangers. i made all sorts of friends. i wasn’t stupid. i used a fake name. never showed my face. one of my friends asked me for a bra picture. i was a cool girl, right, i was sexy, so i sent him a picture of me in front of my bedroom mirror in my little white training bra with the blue butterflies.
sexy, he said.
that was all i wanted.
i’m not typing out all this bullshit because i think it’s something special. i’m typing it out because it’s not. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to my little sister. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to that little millie bobbie brown, sexiest actress at thirteen. i’m typing it out because i’m sixteen years old now, a girl in the eyes of the law and a woman in the eyes of men.
mothers, talk to your daughters. tell them to jump off the swingset and skin their knees. tell them to get dirt on their dresses. tell them that they’re a woman on their 18th birthday, not at ten-and-a-half on the first day of their menstrual cycle. the world is confused. the world is sick. if your daughters don’t hear about how to treat their bodies from you, they’ll hear it from the sick, sick world, and they’ll do the things i did.
Vader: I used to not understand why people cared so much about their dumb children until I found out I have a kid. If anything bad were to happen to Luke I would kill everyone in this room and then myself
I’ve come to realize that this is literally exactly what happened in return of the jedi and I can’t believe I didn’t make that connection sooner
like this isn’t a joke the way I meant it to be, it’s full on canon
…players can define their romantic experience in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey by courting either male or female characters, regardless of their main character’s gender.
i’ll never get over the fact that there’s a movie called “snakes on a plane” and in that movie there’s a line that is, verbatim, “ive had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”.
that is absolutely bonkers. that’s ridiculous. that’s like making a movie called “gators in the sewer” and having someone in the movie say “im getting really sick and tired of these fucking gators in the sewer”
the funny part is that the alternate title was something mundane like “flight 93″ and samuel l. jackson made the director change it back to “snakes on a plane” bc he said it was the only reason he auditioned
oh my god, the youth have forgotten that there was a huge viral phenomenon when this movie was being filmed, where the internet got wind of the working title snakes on a plane, and a) demanded that title be made official, b) CAME UP WITH the line about these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane, and c) GOT THE LINE INCLUDED IN THE ACTUAL MOVIE
You forgot the part where three up and coming bands in the emo scene collaborated to write a song called Snakes On a Plane and filmed a music video of themselves smuggling snakes onto a plane, and it practically launched all of their careers.
If you think for one second of my worthless life I have forgotten “Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)” released by Cobra Starship (2006) then you can think the fuck again
For anyone who hasn’t had the good luck to see that video…
also Hot Take but reading abigail ashe as being smitten with billy bones or any other pirate is a reductive reading of her story arc. her storyline is all about how acts of kindness & compassion have the power destabilize the cruelty of an oppressive “civilization.” abigail is told all her life that pirates are monsters, but when she encounters flint & his crew she realizes they are men and therefore deserving of kindness and compassion, and it’s abigail’s compassion that saves flint several times over: first when abigail warns flint & miranda that her father hates flint specifically, second when they reach land & flint is immediately arrested but abigail demands that he meet with her father, and finally she saves flint when vane uses her diary as evidence in flint’s trial.
miranda is killed bc the man who shoots her refuses to see her as anything other than what society has told him she is: a monster. he refuses to have compassion. and when miranda is killed, lord ashe refuses to show any compassion to flint. treating flint with compassion would mean compromising his power over charles town, and he’s not willing to relinquish that; thus we see that kindness & compassion are incompatible with any “civilization” that is built on oppression & violence. such a civilization must squash compassion towards the groups it has othered because an act of compassion would compromise the social order.
abigail, then, learns that it’s not the pirates who are the villains, but her hypocritical father, a man whom she thought represented justice & goodness. however, justice and goodness is impossible without compassion.
flint, then, burns down charles town; he becomes the monster that society wants him to be. the destructiveness & violence of “civilization” is perpetuated because he and miranda are not shown compassion or kindness.
like idc if you want to read abigail ashe as being smitten with billy bones or whoever that’s your prerogative but you also have to realize that abigail’s attitude towards the pirates are driven by a compassion much more profound than a schoolgirl crush. and in terms of genuinely shipping her with any of the pirates……she’s a teenager so. dont do it.
What’s happened is, is that Hatshepsut died of bone cancer (carcinogenic face cream kids!), and seems to have been buried in KV60. This tomb is actually the tomb of her Wet Nurse, whose body was identified immediately and then there was another ‘unidentified female’ in the tomb. In 2007 the other woman was identified because she was missing a molar, and everyone thought ‘hang on a hot second, don’t we have a tooth in a box that we definitely know is Hatshepsut’s?!’ So they tested the DB320 “canopic box” tooth and the teeth from this unidentified female, and it turns out they’re a DNA match! We found Hatshepsut!
When this was announced, the Cairo museum displayed both Hatshepsut (the first image) and her wet nurse (the image everyone thinks is Hatshepsut) together and the media got them mixed up when labelling photographs, which has led to years and years worth of confusion by the general public.
TL;DR: The media mixed up the labels on the mummies and the photo of the wet nurse has been mistakenly labelled as Hatshepsut every since!
hello and welcome to another episode of Weird Biology with me, your host Bunjy! this week’s creature is hard to see and kind of dangerous, so we’re just going to watch our step as we-
OOP WATCH OUT!
you almost stepped on him!
you should be more careful, you could have really hurt his feelings.
it’s time to meet-
*muffled hysterical laughter*
the Gaboon Viper is found in the forests and savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. its boldly patterned scales are perfectly camouflaged against the forest floor, making it all but invisible.
its incredible striking speed and strength are renowned throughout the reptile world, and its venomous bite is powerful enough to kill even a grown man! clearly, this is not a creature to be trifled with.
and it is, as they say in herpetologist circles, a Swarthy Lad.
*continued hysterical laughter*
as you may have noticed from the pictures, the Gaboon Viper is very, uh, wide. and flat. like a pancake. a pan-snake, if you will. in fact, they’re so wide that their wikipedia page has an entire measurement category called “girth” just for them. (no, I’m not joking) and it’s over 14 inches, if you were curious. that’s usually a measurement reserved for pizzas.
there’s good reason for this, because the Gaboon Viper is the heftiest viper in the world! they generally reach only 4-5 feet long, but may weigh nearly twenty pounds. that’s completely fucking ridiculous.
that’s like a normal snake, if that normal snake had just eaten a couple of 7-pound free weights.
Gaboon Vipers are at the top of the snake list for a lot of different qualities, as it turns out. it’s not just that manhole cover physique, this snake has the WHOLE package. they are known for being incredibly fast despite their size, and for wrestling prey to the ground with their sheer strength like it’s the last five seconds of a ladder match. but now get ready for a real double whammy-
they have the longest fangs of any snake! OF ANY SNAKE. they also produce the most venom per bite of any snake! OF ANY SNAKE. wow! fuck!
aaaa! I still think you’re adorable!
those fangs are two fucking inches long, for reference. two inches. let’s think about that for a minute.
oookay we’re done thinking about that. so now let’s consider the fact that a Gaboon Viper can deliver up to 7 ml of venom per bite! alright, so that doesn’t sound like a lot. but please remember that the lethal dose for a human is 0.06 ml. jesus. imagine carrying enough poison in your face to kill like a thousand people.
and for a species that mostly eats small animals like rabbits, this is absolutely stupid amounts of overkill. like, hunting-pigeons-with-a-rocket-launcher levels of overkill.
people probably would be into that if it was allowed, actually.
alright, so we’ve definitely laid out the facts that make Gaboon Vipers so terrifying. but now I’ll hit you with the good news!
human deaths from Gaboon Viper bites are very, very, very rare. and it’s because Gaboon Vipers are very good flat boys.
no seriously, some of that is because Gaboon Vipers live way the fuck out in the woods but it’s mostly because these snakes are some of the most laid-back reptiles in existence.
(WE DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS. SCIENTISTS ARE OFTEN A LITTLE NUTS.)
apparently the snakes just kind of went along with it. maybe they were bored?
usually when people ARE bitten, it’s because they didn’t see the snake and fucking stepped on it. and even then, stomping on a Gaboon Viper doesn’t always earn a bite. (BUT DON’T DO THAT. IT’S MEAN.)
they’re good sweet boys, is what I’m getting at here.
the GOODEST good boy. look at his widdle face.
thankfully, the Gaboon Viper is doing pretty okay! the species is still widely distributed, and has a conservation status of Least Concern. (it probably helps that they have so little conflict with humanity! chillness is its own virtue.)
it’s not often that I close a Weird Biology article with that kind of good news, so this deserves to be celebrated! clap your hands and jump around a bit! Yaaay, Gaboon Viper! we love your chubby little face and your ridiculously chill lifestyle!
maybe we could all take a lesson from the Gaboon Viper, and relax a little more.
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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.
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