Imagine being told every minute of every day that you don’t matter. That as a woman, your only purpose is to glorify men, support men, breed more men. That it’s the greatest and highest calling of women to surrender your life and your choices to men.

That women are stupid and sinners because of Eve’s actions, and will be forever. So you can never be allowed any kind of authority, because like Eve you’ll just do something foolish or abuse it.

Now imagine everyone and everything around you shows and supports this worldview. All the time.

That’s where it comes from. When something is all you’ve ever known, then it’s normal. And, even if you consciously don’t believe it, it still worms its way inside of you.

Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women.

-Mary Wollstonecraft

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

-C. S. Lewis

He didn’t say ‘ancient alien theorists’, he said ‘racists’.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I mean, you did kinda leave yourself open for that one.

I’m going to give this loon a bit more charitable interpretation and guess they meant we blew up our own buildings in order to have an excuse to go to war in the Middle East so we could get the gold in Nimrod’s tomb.

Which… is even crazier than the tomb being under the twin towers. We killed all those people and destroyed all that real estate to start a very expensive war… for some gold.

I mean, boy, that tomb better be like Smaug’s lair in that case, or our government tripped over a dollar to pick up a dime.

Or just walk through an old graveyard. There’s a pioneer cemetery near my old place with so many children’s graves. One family gravesite has the mother’s name, the father’s name, a couple of their kids, some young, some adults… and one is just titled ‘babies’.

Like, so many babies died for that mother and father they just put them all in one grave, not even names to remember them by…

People following the story of a former Olympic runner: First time?

I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.

But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.

At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.

I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.

Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.

Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.

Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)

It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!

This This is a funny one. It looks like it was drawn by someone who carves wood with a chainsaw for a living. It even has the dark areas where you’d use a blowtorch lol.

Plus bonus parade balloon muscles.

With the source material, at least for me as compared to western stuff like X-men, Superman, etc, is that one, it crosses all genres and appeals to all genders. Comic books for much of their existence were largely geared to a specific, very male audience, and it was made quite clear by their writing and the actions of people into comics at the time that other genders (and, to a certain extent, skin colors) need not apply to join the club.

Since I’m a girl, when I was a kid I got teased a lot for liking ‘guy stuff’ like Batman and GI Joe. The problem was, well, I liked action stuff for one, but back then there just wasn’t anything for girls. Hell, I remember them even taking Wonder Woman’s power away, because apparently women empowerment reasons?

Those comics were all written by largely out-of-touch white guys who had, shall we say, definite opinions of what a woman could look like and should act like. And as a woman, I was never impressed. Especially by the time I got to the hundredth drawing of a woman’s ass and legs framing a supposedly ‘serious’ scene.

Then I found manga, with all-women writing teams, and artists who wrote well-rounded characters of all genders and orientations (Sailor Moon had many adorable scenes between a lesbian couple, just to name one example). They drew women who were people. They were sweet, they were brash, they were rude and crass, they were funny. And who weren’t afraid to fireball their way out of trouble. Hell, they drew varied guys who were weak, strong, silly, spacey… they felt real, in a way that I’d never seen in western comics.

Another thing is that mangaka tell the story, their characters get a satisfying actual ending, and then the artist moves on to another story. None of this ‘Oh, the X-men found happiness and solved their problems! In our next comic, watch as everything goes back to the shitty status quo because we have no idea how to write different stories!’ or ‘Welcome to the 2,171st reboot of Superman, now with Extra Edge^TM (because we hear that’s all the rage with kids these days). And remember that this iteration specifically references that one part of reboot #1,023, so read that too (if you can find it lol).’

And the third thing for me is it was quite a bit more beautiful and fluid and varied than western animation. Especially in the case of the days of Too-Many-Pockets Rob and his wooden doll faces, or the small beady eyes of, well, every comic character ever. Anime and manga faces were much more expressive, the worlds more varied and creative, and they weren’t afraid to draw regular people as protagonists, without muscles bulky enough to make you think you were looking at a Macy’s parade balloon.

‘If you sign a driving citation with blue or purple ink and write ‘without prejudice’ on it, and get it notarized and send it in to the courts, then the court clerk will have to dismiss your case. Because the notary has supreme legal power since there were notaries in Rome and Ancient Egypt.’

It’s because it’s All About Them. Their (as fragile as spun-sugar) ego is all-important, and anything that threatens it has to go. And since they wrap their ego up in Being a Republican, and Being a Strong White Man, and all the racist bullshit that goes with that stance, that makes Harris is a physical manifestation of everything they hate. Such ‘challenges’ to their ego cannot be allowed to exist.

It is, though—women having children later in life are at higher risk for complications for both themselves and the baby. It also has a higher risk of birth defects.

And of course he adds in a picture of John Wayne, the draft-dodging, woman-beating, other wannabe cowboy poser.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. -Winston Churchill

We actually have our own map system, although of course you can use Google Maps too.

There’s a bunch of loonies that believe that there are secret chambers under the sphinx that are a storehouse of esoteric knowledge. Like, how to awaken your innate powers of telepathy or spiritually teleporting to other planets. Shit like that.

It always comes back to racism. The last bastion of fools so depressingly mediocre that their only possible ‘claim’ to greatness rests not on their accomplishments, but on skin color.