Jesus Christ, I Wish To Just One Day Be This Pinnacle Of Wit, Horniness, And Sacrilege.

When we talk about men’s issues, it feels like it’s always the same handful of things (high suicide rate, drafting, divorce court, etc.) and even then it always feels like a token gesture. This is something that I always felt like us leftists need to talk more about, precisely because it’s something the movement actively needs to fix within itself. As a cishet man, it can be very strange to see how, no matter how much I value consent and the happiness of my partner, and no matter how deeply I understand that, as good as sex feels, a fulfilling emotional connection is more important, my sexuality is still seen as evil by a pretty big chunk of the movement. And of course, I understand why this is. Men have a long history of rapey behavior and right now it’s sorta getting better and worse at the same time, with lots of guys learning to confront and unlearn their misogyny and lots of other guys looking to people like Andrew Tate for solutions to their loneliness. I don’t think activism should be reactionary though. I mean what good do we accomplish if our “activism” is just reacting to societal issues that make us upset in whatever way feels right to our monkey brains? We should have an ideal that we’re striving towards, a specific vision of a better world that we have a plan for achieving. I know that to me, that ideal is a world where no one is ashamed of their sexuality while also still knowing where it is appropriate vs inappropriate to display it, and that we trust each other and that trust is earned because we’re all tuned in to each other’s wants and desires. That ideal doesn’t change depending on how mad or happy with men and/or women I am.

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

Dear friends and kind strangers,I urgently need your support to help me raise funds to evacuate my family out of Gaza. This is the only way to help them survive. It breaks my heart that it has come to this, but this fundraiser is my last window of hope to secure the necessary funds to evacuate them. My father and my two brothers urgently require medical attention, and time is of the essence. I am Eman Abu Hayya. I have survived four Israeli assaults on Gaza before leaving to pursue my studies in Philosophy in Doha, Qatar, back in 2017. While I reside in Qatar, my entire family remains in the Gaza Strip, trapped amidst the cruel and harrowing reality of ongoing genocide. My aim is to facilitate the evacuation of my loved ones from Gaza to ensure they receive the critical medical care they urgently need and to shield them from the constant threat of Israeli bombings and the dire scarcity of clean water, food, and healthcare. My family consists of 11 members: my mother Najat (49), my father Akram (60), three brothers Ahmed, Yahya and Zakaria (30, 27, and 22), one sister Shaima (24), two sisters-in-law Wafa and Hana (25 and 24), and three young nieces and nephews Najat, Hayat and Gaith (aged 1, 2, and 5). They deserve the chance to live full lives, and I cannot bear the thought of losing any of them. My two little nieces’ names mean Life and Survival (Hayat and Najat), respectively. Let’s help make these two names a living reality through your kind donations.

Please help Eman. Donations have slowed down but my family's situation remains dire. Her family's house was destroyed. One of her brothers sustained a serious injury during the bombing which requires surgery while another has a serious medical conditions requiring immediate medical intervention. On top of all of that her father has diabetes. Not to mention the two children above.

Please please donate. Share if you can't

gofundme.com

Donate to Evacuate My Family from Gaza for Medical Attention, organized by Eman Abuhayya

Dear friends and kind strangers, I urgently need your support to … Eman Abuhayya needs your support for Evacuate My Family from Gaza for

Continue Escalating

I don’t really get the joke. Could someone explain the punchline?

also "finn cant be trans because he was still called a boy as a baby" wrong. minerva is The Best Helper in the world, she can easily tell if a person is transgender even if they were just born. especially her son. ergo finn is the worlds first amab trans guy.

nytimes.com

Israeli and Palestinian Activists Ask Americans to Take Side of Peace

Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli, found polarization in America over the war in Gaza. They

When Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green flew from Israel to New York last week, they found a version of the United States they’d never seen before: split by the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with fractures tearing at the worlds of art, business, books, academia and even food.

Ms. Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said the situation felt so toxic that they feared their 10-day trip to talk about the ways Palestinians and Jews can work together would only lead to attacks from all sides.

Instead, in New York, Washington and Boston, they found packed auditoriums and eager audiences in community centers, synagogues, libraries and the offices of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their days have started at 6 a.m. and ended after midnight.

Their quest can be lonely, standing in the face of intense grief and anger — over Hamas’s attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliatory campaign in the Gaza Strip — and factions that have spent decades staking out positions against each other.

But the staff of their organization, Standing Together, is trying to teach Americans — anyone who will listen, really — about their lived reality and the only path they see moving forward. They describe that path as one that cannot be boiled down to a hashtag: one in which millions of Israelis and Palestinians would remain on the land they each call home, and one that would require enough popular political will to demand peace.

“We’re trying to play a different game in Israel and Palestine,” Mr. Green said on Nov. 9 to a group of people organized by a group in Brooklyn, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “And this game is very simple. It says that both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”

“We need to start working from this point,” he said, receiving a wave of nods.

It’s a message that has not been prominently heard or seen in many American protests and rallies. Most events have taken place under an Israeli or Palestinian flag, focusing on one people’s pain, struggle or victimhood.

That type of narrow approach can erase everything around it, said Cara Raich, a conflict adviser based in New York.

“As with most conflicts one feels deeply and personally, a binary choice often offers the simple comfort of pro and con, or right and wrong,” she said. “The magnetic power of false binaries sucks everything that it touches into that paradigm.”

For that reason, the conversations Mr. Green and Ms. Abed came to have with Americans have, at least for their audiences they draw, been something of a spiritual salve. In dozens of talks up and down the East Coast, the two activists have described a desperate need for new Israeli and Palestinian leadership, including leaders willing to work together.

They have called Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, both “the enemy of the Palestinian people” and a “fertilizer for radical Jewish extremism.” And they have voiced a frustration over what they see as a war for the moral high ground, happening outside of Israel and mostly over social media, that denies their experiences.

Libby Lenkinski, a vice president at the New Israel Fund, an organization that funds and supports Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, has had a front-row seat as a moderator. She said she has seen a “palpable sense of relief” among attendees who audibly exhale or place hands over their hearts. The message is so resonant, she said, because of it offers a different kind of simplicity than choosing one of two sides.

“This isn’t, ‘Kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and love each other,’” Ms. Lenkinski said. “It’s: ‘There’s actually no way that one side is going to win. Our futures are intertwined and the only way that we can keep ourselves alive is by keeping each other alive.’”

On Sunday, a group of Israeli peace activists in New York City organized a vigil with that sentiment in mind. The demonstration called for both a cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the release of more than 200 hostages held by Palestinian militants. All were welcome, flags and signs were not.

Some 200 attendees gathered to mourn and read testimonies and texts from people in Israel and Gaza.

Tamar Glezerman, one of the organizers, said she had protested in support of a cease-fire before, and does not “find myself in protests that don’t include the demand for an urgent stop to the bloodshed.”

“But at the same time,” she said, “I feel that, on a very personal level, I am being demanded to omit the humanity of my loved ones, those who have died on Oct. 7 and those who have friends and families among the kidnapped, in order to attend most of the protests demanding a cease-fire.”

She said that those demonstrations “have by and large completely omitted these civilians, for either ideological or strategic reasons, as if empathy for brutalized civilians was ever a zero-sum game. As if one war crime could ever justify another. As if acknowledgment means historical symmetry.”

Ms. Abed and Mr. Green were in Washington during that vigil, meeting with a range of Democratic politicians. They said that, sometimes, they struggled to get to the car for their next meeting because people swarmed to ask what more they could do to help.

Friendship has helped carry the pair on, they said, even as exhaustion has weighed them down.

They did not sleep much back home, and they have not slept much since arriving in the states. Mr. Green said he’s afraid to stop working. Ms. Abed worries that he’s not giving himself the space to fall apart, at least a little bit.

Midsentence, Mr. Green gasped. “A goose!” he screamed — Ms. Abed echoed, “a goose!” They laughed and gawked, getting closer to the bird. There are not many geese in Israel.

But it was not quite a wild-goose chase. They were summoned on to their next meeting, one with students, staff members and faculty at M.I.T. “So many people tell us ‘You are our only hope,’” Ms. Abed said. “It’s like, we’re your only hope?”

Mr. Green said that, despite the loneliness they often felt, they had no choice but to keep trying.

“We have only one home,” he said. “She’s Palestinian and I’m Jewish, but the only home we both have is the same home.”

This is for the support of Gaza's Municipality Services - which help ensure clean drinking water, waste collection, debri removal and sanitation services - life saving services to run a state - reader I imagine wherever you are or how lacking the municipality services in your city is, it's not worse than Ghazza.

Currently it's only at 11% - please donate -

gaza-city.ensany.com

Life For Gaza

Life For GazaDrinking Water, Waste Collection, Debris Removal, and Sanitation Services for the Residents of Gaza City - Gaza Municipality

Before I make any more assumptions @charadreemurr7 you tried this already too, right?

The mailing list isn't real

Fuck it, I'm saying it. I don't believe you. None of you telling me the mailing list is real and sending pictures are telling the truth. I guess they're all fanmade fakes, because it literally isn't possible to sign up for the letter. There's a website that SAYS you can sign up for it, but it doesn't work. I've used multiple devices with multiple unique emails, one made explicitly and exclusivly for the newsletter. I signed up. I signed up again. I signed up again. Different device. Difference browser. My main email instead of the dedicated one. Different wifi networks. It's always the same thing. "We sent a confirmation I promise" and there's no confirmation. Not in promotions, not in social, not in spam, not in the standard inbox, not in all mail. There's nothing. No confirmation email. No newsletter. I don't think you're telling the truth anymore. For reference this is a post I made on reddit about the topic SIX MONTHS AGO: https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/1c4n20z/is_the_mailing_list_even_real/ the best I could be told was "well it works for ME". Fuck you. I don't believe you anymore, I don't think it does.

A little piece of advice for Americans navigating what will be an increasing number of posts about US politics in the coming year:

If a post makes you feel angry, upset, and hopeless, while offering no actionable information, scroll on and don't reblog it. I know that is going to feel harsh in some cases. But it's important to spend your political energy on what you can actually do and not be sunk into helpless rage and despair that benefits no one.

Urgent Appeal for HelpGazaChildren: Help refugees flee to Khan Younis!

Because of the looming invasion and brutal bombing throughout the most densely populated area in Gaza, Rafah, many refugees are looking to evacuate to Khan Younis!

The bombing is random and even the areas not included in the evacuation notices are bombarded. Many refugees are asking Hussam for funds to help them evacuate to Khan Younis to help keep their families safe.

The above is a screenshot of a facebook post from someone in Rafah. A tent can be as much as $700 and the transportation costs anywhere between $250-$400 per family. This cost is primarily for gas alone!!

Please donate so that people may be able to evacuate while also being able to afford basic necessities.

Even if you're unable to donate, please share this post and the fundraiser even outside of tumblr and on other platforms! This is incredibly urgent!!

Donate to our GoFundMe which goes directly to Hussam, who manages camps in Rafah, with NO middleman in between!

HelpGazaChildren Notion Site || #helpgazachildren tag

GoFundMe Link