Okay, but seriously on the topic of straight people being so overly concerned about their children being exposed to homosexuality…
As some of you know, I am a makeup artist in a holistic beauty boutique in a very wealthy area of eastern New York. The week before Halloween I was offering simple costume makeup designs for both adults and children. So my last client of the evening was a 15 year old girl who came in to get her makeup done for the Halloween dance at her school. I was enjoying a conversation with both the girl and her mother when suddenly the topic of transgender came up. I got a little nervous because I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut when I hear people speaking negatively about these sorts of topics and as I mentioned, my store is in a very upscale, white, conservative area…
Anyway, the girl starts telling us that her friend prefers to be a boy now. She says it very simply and comfortably and it made me happy to see her talk about it as if it was really no big deal.
Her mother says
“How does she even know what transgender is though? She’s a little young to be making a decision like that. I really think the media is taking things too far with all this gay stuff. I’m not against it or anything, but didn’t you just tell me two boys in your class are dating too?”
The girl said that yes, two boys she knew were dating and another boy she knew was gay also. (And she also corrected the pronouns her mother used for her friend)
“I don’t mind that she knows that homosexuality is,” the mother said. “But I don’t think it should be taught at such a young age. Did you know it’s on Disney channel now?”
It took me a moment to respond, I just kept painting the girl’s face until I could figure out what I wanted to say.
“Well,” I said. “We tend to teach heterosexuality literally from the time a child is born. Most children’s books and movies are even centered around a romance of some kind like a Prince and a Princess for example. There’s rarely a children’s movie that comes out where the main male and female character don’t end up marrying each other in the end. If we don’t have a problem flooding our children’s minds with heterosexuality from the time they are able to sit up and watch a movie on their own, what is so wrong with showing them two boys or two girls being in love? We aren’t showing them sex. We aren’t showing them anything inappropriate. Since when is love inappropriate? If we show them love in all it’s forms (be it gay or straight) from an early age, they will see that it’s all perfectly normal and natural and maybe we can finally put homophobic the past…”
The woman considered this for a second and then said “I just feel like they see it and then they start to think that they might be too.”
“And maybe they are. But isn’t it better for them to know that it’s okay? They aren’t hurting anyone.”
Then the girl said. “No ones going around just thinking they are gay because they know what gay is, mom. I know what a chicken is, that doesn’t mean I’m going to wake up tomorrow and start clucking.”
I loved this kid. I hope she does well in all of her endeavors
I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and start clucking
On the Pottermore website,
J.K. Rowling explains how wizards poop.
There’s an excerpt about the Chamber
of Secrets that says wizards didn’t need
toilets because they ‘simply relieved
themselves where they stood,
and vanished the evidence.’ SourceSource 2
i fucking hate jk rowling so much because years and years after this franchise has ended she is still continuing trying to make it bad to the point where she said that every character in harry potter canonically shits themselves and then casts a shit vanishing spell
fuck this is b a d
This reminds me of the hufflepuff group masturbation tweets
The what?
Just imagine you’re taking a test for potions with Snape and the guy sitting next to you just fucking shits himself the nastiest, slimiest shit of his life out of stress. And you literally have to sit there with a straight face while fuckin Todd JingleJangles cleans himself up in the dead quiet room with some stupid ass line like “vanish me poopum” and you just gotta live with the knowledge that some kid just shit himself beside you during a fucking test.
how do you delete someone elses post
I am in tears
Joe what the fuck did you make me read
This gotta be fake
They literally have bathrooms in Hogwarts like theyre pretty important to the plot too did jk just forget about that? The bathroom where myrtle lives (she literally dives into a toilet)? The prefects bathroom? How can she claim there’s no bathrooms??? this post gave me mesothelioma and I feel entitled to compensation
I got to “vanish me poopum” and lost my mind. I’ve been cry laughing for about five minutes.
No porn on tumblr we describe our nudes in detail instead
today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
Not to get controversial or anything but can we stop with making fun of women being abused by their husbands and playing it off as ‘straight culture’
I lost 10 followers for saying we shouldnt make fun of domestic abuse victims.
can we also please stop making fun of men being abused by their wives thanks
Good addition
Can we also stop acting that domestic abuse is just a “straight” thing?
It’s literally teaching our baby gays that any same sex relationship their going into is safe and they don’t need to be worried about being abused and controlled.
As someone who’s worked in several cafes, I’m mad at how accurate this is.
I will forever remember the time my friend and I were out for chinese food. we got up to pay and I (the short one with bottom energy i guess?) revealed that I would be paying for the meal, and the elderly man at the counter just flat out said “Oh, YOU’RE the boss!”
Okay yes the Weasleys were amazing for Harry but just—
We never once meet Hermione’s parents but honestly, her excessive need to prove herself had to have come from somewhere and while there are great fanfictions that paint the Grnagers in a positive light, I always thought they were the ultimate trophy parents who pushed their daughter to do everything she possibly could and never settle for less than greatness. That with a few other clues (we never hear from them in the books, not even when she was petrified, they gave Hermione money for her birthday, Hermione was barely upset over having to erase their memories of her, that whole “they don’t know they have a daughter” comment she makes) implies that they were more distant than Harry or Ron realized.
So she goes from this distant perfectionist home to the Burrow and it’s this busy, dirty, household filled with the most loving people in the world and Fred and George keep leaving their inventions laying around for unsuspecting family members to ‘test’ and Ginny’s practicing her spells on the garden gnomes, accidentally sending them flying through the windows, and Arthur just managed to explode something in the shed, and Ron’s trying not to crash his old broomstick as he shows off his moves, and the ghoul’s banging on the walls, and Mrs. Weasley’s bustling around with a spatula in her hair, and they all love her and they all care for her and not once do they ever criticize her for her bad grades or for not knowing an answer or for doing something wrong.
Mrs. Weasley makes her heartfelt presents and Mr. Weasley talks to her about Muggle items and and Fred and George cheer her up when she’s sad and Ron protects her and Ginny avenges her and they all care about her.
The Weasleys were so important, okay?
Not just for Harry but for Hermione too!
I read them as the opposite!
Hermione had self care and self advocacy skills at 11 years old that most people don’t get until after college. I don’t think her parents pushed her I think they neglected her.
Who’s parents are BOTH dentists? How would most wizards know how much money she’d gotten if they can’t cound muggle money? Why didn’t she have the social skills to make friends her first year, and why is she so fiercely loyal to the people who protect her? It’s because she’s never been cared about before and she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
*squints* but like. it can be both. you can push a child academically, be overprotective and want them to succeed, but neglect them emotionally.
Hermione sometimes thinks that accepting the existence of magic wasn’t all that difficult for her parents. The eleven years before that—those were difficult. It wasn’t the letter from Hogwarts, or the owl that delivered it, or the cat at the door that transformed into a tall, beautiful woman in the blink of an eye. It was that her parents had always been fiercely logical, and over the years, tiny, illogical things had attempted to erode that logic, and they clung to it more and more fiercely in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
To some extent it was a lucky thing that her father had ever taken an interest in physics. Her mother didn’t take the news all that well, Hermione thinks now, but her father had always paid more attention to the ‘odd goings-on’, never shrugged them off quite like his wife had. He’d absorbed them, commiserated with Hermione’s hapless mum when she couldn’t account for vanishing spoons, or teacups transforming into miniature flower arrangements. When the discussion turned to ‘magical boarding school’ and ‘magic’, Hermione remembers her father shrugging, saying that the universe was large and people couldn’t explain most of it, so why not, after all, have magic in the world?
That about settled that.
Of course, her parents were convinced that certain truths would never change, regardless of whether there was magic in the world—or even an entirely separate magical world. To succeed in life one had to work hard, to learn everything that could possibly be useful, polish all of that knowledge to perfection. Surely, that didn’t change regardless of whether you were magical or not?
They couldn’t help her, though. They couldn’t tell her what would be useful in her life anymore. They used to tell her that she would need maths in her life, that she’d best pay attention to science classes, physics and chemistry and biology. They would insist that this would be useful one day—though, of course, it would be embarrassing if she somehow managed to earn poor marks in literature. After all, literature was easier than maths.
It took Hermione a very long time to realise that they were afraid for her. Her parents, dentists with imperfect, often painful teeth, who hadn’t grown up with much of their own, who couldn’t help her with much more than some money to buy her books with and ask her if she was doing well at school.
She hadn’t the first idea how to explain that it wasn’t just magic that flew in the face of a logical world order, but the magical world itself had somehow suspended all common sense. That numbers, which made sense of so much of the real Muggle world were feared or scorned or avoided. Nobody had even heard of physics; gravity could suspend itself for brooms; people could, theoretically, levitate. Chemistry was potions, but frankly it was all Hermione could do to keep up, trying to keep track of all ingredient properties. Her classmates didn’t have the inclination to research every single leaf and berry and powder that went into the cauldron, and for that matter even the properties of the cauldron and specifications for brewing time. She had the feeling that Herbology should have been able to cover that lack, but the curriculum didn’t match…
But for the most part, she could figure out what she needed to make it all work in her head on her own. Even if it took her hours’ more work than her classmates, who just accepted that magic could do that.
… Of course they did.
And, sure, Hermione had a strong sense for when someone was wasting her time. She’d learned that from teachers who’d ruined her favourite subjects for a year by making them boring, and by punishing her for trying to get ahead. It was never good to be know-it-all.
(When she first got a letter from Hogwarts, Hermione thought she finally understood why she’d never fit in. It wasn’t until the day with the troll that she’d realised people could be jealous of her, for knowing things. Sure, she knew that for some it was more difficult to learn and remember things than it was for her, but still—jealousy? What was the point? Though in a way it was weirdly comforting to know that while the Wizarding World was confusing and senseless much of the time, at least the human nature was more or less the same.)
Every time Hermione came home for the summer months, her mother never missed an opportunity to tell her that she was worried, that she couldn’t help her daughter, that Hermione had to figure out how to navigate this new world on her own. Hermione nodded, tried not to give into her irritation at the needless reminder, and curled up with a book to read. Practicing spells with a wand was out of the question, but she could read history, learn runes. Make basic potions, too. She’d started to do that, after the first year, when her parents asked her what she was learning and Hermione didn’t really know how to tread the line between the Statute of Secrecy and reassuring them that she would be fine.
They’d also panicked when she let slip that Hogwarts didn’t teach mathematics or science. Hermione appreciated the effort in two months of crammed home-schooling, but she sometimes couldn’t help but resent it—particularly some of the conversations that started afterwards made her truly regret the slip. She could have figured out how to learn those things herself. She could have done. Then she wouldn’t have to listen to the rest.
Why are you still going to that school when they don’t even teach you how to survive in the real world, are you going to just fix every problem you run into with magic? What if you don’t want to work there, what if you’d rather have a life in this world, what if you marry someone without magic, what if this, what if that…
Hermione couldn’t remember when she stopped answering. She couldn’t remember how many times she said ‘but I have friends there’ or ‘I finally fit in’, and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever said those things out loud. Emotional appeals didn’t work with her parents, she’d learned that even before Hogwarts.
She had no idea how to tell them about the war. About Voldemort, and the Boy Who Lived, and chambers and diaries and talking snakes and escaped convicts that masqueraded as big black dogs and Dementors who attacked her friend. She had no idea how to explain any of it, but she wasn’t a good enough actress to hide just how much it worried her, how it was a problem she was turning over in some part of her mind all the time. How she was a friend to one of the biggest targets in the Wizarding World. How that made her a target, and her family, all two of them.
The strangest thing was, she never had to work so hard on her lies with anyone else. She’d hated lying to her parents, and hated that they almost always found holes in her stories, hated feeling like she had to lie. But with the Healers at St. Mungo’s, when she’d feigned concern and pity for Professor Lockhart, and had, out of curiosity, asked if it would be possible to create a false memory for him, if ever those missing years were to cause him distress—they’d believed her, and they’d answered all her questions. More than—they explained the theory behind the creation of False Memories, explained the need for them to correspond to the person’s past life and wishes at least a little, or else the conflict would result in depression and even greater distress.
Once, she’d somehow managed to get Kingsley and Moody to tell her about their old Auror assignments, protecting witnesses. Hermione had wondered aloud if they’d ever tried hiding wizards in the Muggle world, then asked about Muggle loved ones, and listened intently. Moody, for all his talks of “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”, didn’t seem to notice the directed line of questioning.
Kingsley did. He’d watched her closely, calmly, all throughout that conversation, and it gave her a familiar prickle up her spine. Later, he found her in the library, and struck up a conversation of his own, about her parents, about how she was at Grimmauld Place on Christmas, and wouldn’t she have preferred to spend time with them for the holidays?
So, she supposed, she’d met her match in an Auror. That wasn’t half-bad. She’d just have to work harder to improve. In the meantime…
In the meantime, she was too tired to lie about this. Tired of protecting her parents on her own by omission of important, incomputable truths, well aware that it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t protect them if Death Eaters came to call. Hermione couldn’t decide if it was stupid or selfish to keep them in the dark. But, then again, if she so much as mentioned what had happened at the Quidditch Cup, the Triwizard Tournament, her parents would readily uproot and take her to France again, or to Australia where they’d been born. She wasn’t even sure there was any place far enough in the world to get away from Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
In the end, the False Memory Charm was her own work. It was the most intricate bit of Mind Magic she’d ever attempted, but she’d always been good at details. Kingsley arranged a place for them in Australia to her specifications, with carefully built wards, and a two-way mirror she could use to make sure they were all right.
It was tempting. Perhaps never more so than in the Forest of Dean.
It was also… painful. She’d been right to act quickly—Yaxley had set off the wards on her home the very day after her parents left for their new life in Australia. But her False Memory charm, her instructions to Kingsley, it was all too perfect. They looked happy.
Her own fault. Hermione had written herself out of their lives, after all. Her parents’ faces had always been pinched with stress and worry. Now they looked years younger. It was a relief, and it was a terrible, terrible pain, to know that they could’ve been happy if she’d never existed. Happier, even.
It didn’t really occur to her that in the great span of possibilities, if the Grangers had never had a daughter, they would never have left Australia to become dentists with a private practice in England and a chip on each shoulder, and a fierce desire to see that their daughter have everything, and be able to achieve everything herself. Not really until she was lying on a rich man’s floor with Mudblood cut into her arm, wondering if this was the last thing she’d see. She’d thought about them then, thought how good it was they didn’t see this, didn’t know any of this, just like everyone else in the Muggle world. Thought about how happy they were, last time she’d dared to look in that mirror.
Realised, with a start, that they’d looked happy, but the look in their eyes was also just a little bit haunted, a little bit lost. Like something’s missing. And she’d never said goodbye.
