I Didn't Know Until Recently.

I didn't know until recently.

But it turns out that advertisers tend not to use actual athletes in women's sports advertisements. 🤦🏾‍♀️

This is because many women who train extensively in sports, won't fit the delicate look of what mindless sexists deem to be an "appropriate" (lesser) amount of muscle development, size, and definition.

Advertisers will even prefer to find a model who isn't athletic in the slightest, then just slap athletic wear and gear on them, and use pictures of them running around for their commercials.

The problem is SO bad, that some women athletes will actually try NOT to train beyond a certain point: so that they can maintain the softer, feminine look that will attract corporate sponsors. 😰

...Meaning that these women athletes probably COULD perform even better than they already do.

However: if they can't get the sponsors to fund their their training and participation in the sport, then these women athletes can't afford to, right?….

Which ultimately loops right back around and affects what the general public thinks men and women are even capable of as far as physical prowress...and, artificially narrows our ideas surrounding the range of how men and women can naturally look when performing at high levels of athleticism….

Just another way that capitalism ruins everything!

Reminder: Cis women can have boyish builds, or muscles, or tall, angular body frames and features (or all three) of their own.

Cis men can have curves or petite builds or soft features (or all three).

People aren't fucking barbie and ken dolls.

They're not cookie cutter. They're not clones.

They come in all kinds of different proportions and shapes and types and sizes! 🎉✨

It's not wrong to not need to be "saved" or "chosen" by a god.

You don't need a god to follow good morals.

And you don't need a god in order to live a good life.

Humans evolved to thrive when they have good connections with:

1.) Themselves (i.e., they come to know and understand and accept themselves as human beings);

2.) Their Environment (i.e., they spend time in, and, if they so choose, nurture and do a bit of tending in the natural landscape that they call home); and,

3.) Their Community (i.e., maintain authentic, mutually-consensual, and close ties to family, friends, and/or other members of their community: building and becoming part of the interconnected support networks that help their communities to function and thrive).

We have sentience apart from these foundational human wants and needs; so we get to choose to pursue skills, crafts, fields of knowledge; and personal or communal goals that appeal to us and that make us happy...but aside from choosing that purpose voluntarily for ourselves, what is wrong with just living a good life and loving and caring for and helping the people and the lands around you in whatever little ways you like?

Why is that not enough?

Does everyone really have to have an overblown 'Chosen One' complex in order to be worth anything?

Because all those little ways of being can add up to something immensely beautiful and satisfying... provided, of course, that the current systems in which we live aren't actively preventing, undoing, and sabotaging our connections to them.

I actually wound up liking "The Woman King" as a movie way, WAY better than 300.

It is beautiful cinematically, it touches on some things and addresses some things that are good…

But please don't get it twisted, because that was NOT a historical movie. ^^;;; We know that.

The sunrises were beautiful, but I do not perceive it as a society that I wish to return to.

Because it does envision a world in which most of the hierarchies that plague us now, are still in place.

If you pay attention to the beginning, they're pretty adamant about showing this.

A lot of what is depicted seems like an attempt to say, "Look! This society in Africa was just as good as white people's, because, see: we had money, and patriarchy, and rich people, and kings, and war, too! That's what makes a civilization!"

For me, that whole attempt misses the plot on what it means to be a human.

There's a fundamental thing that I think that we miss when folks say, "Well, but look: white people are right, because they have all the money and all the power. They're "winning"!"

…Sure, that's winning….

If you enjoy being hated by your kids and having to down twelve Zoloft and two bottles of wine and step on the necks of fifty different people before breakfast, just to be able to stand being yourself for five fucking minutes… :/

Let's not pretend that these "winning" rich people and monarchs and oligarchs have healthy relationships with themselves, much less their families, much less anyone else.

The image of happiness that they project is often just that: a very carefully (and desperately) maintained IMAGE.

Even more basic than that: It's winning if you're a virus.

If you are an unselfaware gorilla, who lives in a troupe rather than a society, and your only idea of a "good" life is about domination and control. About who can you manipulate, who can you threaten, who can you hit over the head with a stick and gain power, for the sole purpose of just having power.

That is an ape troupe's idea of winning.

The kind of "winning" where scientists start to study you to try and figure out what's wrong with you.

We are apes, and descended from apes -- but we're not in an ape troupe...or really, we're not supposed to be.

We are HUMANS.

Humans are a KIND of ape, but we became different for a reason.

The fossil record shows a point, hundreds of thousands of years back in history, where the strongest apes -- the ones who were using violence and strength and threats to control and lord it over the other members of their community -- started dropping like flies.

Because one of the weaker apes had invented the blow gun.

And one of the other weaker apes knew how to make poison.

And all the other weaker apes agreed, "yeah, you know what, this guy is a fucking asshole, he needs to go!"

This happened multiple times across the populations of our ape ancestors, at roughly the same time frame in human evolution.

…And afterwards?

After our ancestors ended these strongest apes?

That's when our ape ancestors began to evolve at an EXPONENTIAL rate.

That's when we started to live by collaboration, consent, community, and trying to continually make conditions better for each other; instead of constantly trying to hoard and compete and get over on one another…that's when we started to have each other's backs on the regular.

After our ape ancestors sent their tyrants into the dirt; THAT'S when you start to see extremely complex language and tool-making and art and architecture EXPLODE across human culture: opening up all kinds of different options for life and for living.

All the things that make us FULLY human -- not just apes -- all these things resulted from us looking at nature's 'Might Makes Right', 'Red in Tooth and Claw', types of "winning", and saying to each other, "I'M SO SICK OF THIS SHIT!"

Nature is beautiful, yes. It birthed us. We need to cohabit with it sustainably and respectfully in order to live.

Yet, becoming human was an ancestral act of REVOLUTION.

It is relatively only very, very recently in the span of human existence when folk whose only loyalty is to capitalism and the made-up concept of whiteness, have swept across the world and RE-reframed the concept of "winning" according to fucking ape-brained bullshit that humanity had gotten rid of LONG ago.

They're doing it in ways that hurt not just everyone else, but themselves, too.

They are literally murdering the global ecosystem to do it.

And it disturbs me how many people have accepted that return to an absolute trash concept of "winning", instead of seeing it for what it is: NOT "the way humans just are"; but a regression, back into semi-conscious and ultimately suicidal ape-troupe mentality.

Internalized Fascism

Seriously.

If you want to know the shape of the fascist cage that media has constructed inside our minds, our parents' minds, and our grandparents' minds over the years?

Read that awful "Screenwriter's Guide for Americans" slop that Ayn Rand wrote.

And then, if you're a creator?

Go forth, and do your damnedest to make works that depict and stand for the OPPOSITE.

Conservatives have, 10,000%, wrapped up a bunch of truly awful, harmful relationship behaviors, and feverishly labeled it "tradition"…

It's like…."Grandpa, 'tradition' is food, clothing, holidays, folktales, music, language, and things of that cultural nature. What you have ahold of there is lack of self-awareness, consistent consent and boundary violations, and probable jail time. 😭 Now, let's get you to a therapist!"