You know what really sucks? Going to auditions in February. Audition dresses and heels aren’t warm and are possibly the worst things to be walk through snow and ice in.
While this issue exists in musical theater, it is much much worse in opera and classical music. As a soprano, in auditions and performances, I am simply not allowed to wear pants. Period. The only women in opera that can wear pants are mezzos…and only when they’re singing a pants role (playing a boy). Some people even say that women, especially shorter women like myself, should always wear heels in auditions and performances.
This is not even to mention non-binary folks. Concert attire is heavily gendered, and it doesn’t need to be. If you’re focusing more on what somebody is wearing than their performance, you have a problem.
Some opera and MT companies are changing, but it is a tiny minority. These rules are outdated and unnecessary. Let people wear what they want.
Request: A floral graysexual flag for anonymous! I felt bad about the mix-up with what flag ya wanted, so I made three different variations, hope that’s ok! Anyway, hope ya like it, anon!
lay out intentions like paving of ease in future moments. “i’m gonna have fun in class tomorrow”, “when i go for a walk i’m gonna see so many beautiful things”, “i’m gonna have the most cozy night tonight”, “i’m gonna be very present with my friend on wednesday”, etc. see how easily the moment adapts. it’s like a little spell to set yourself up for goodness
Horror films where you can tell they’re putting angry dog noises over a dog clearly having fun munching on a fake body part probably made of dogfood: 👍
i know ive talked about this before but we literally have no reason not to bring the original gay flag made in the 70s by gilbert baker back to regular use!
the pink originally symbolized sex and the turquoise was for magic/art and it would just be really cool if we could bring both the stripes back into regular use again since there wasn’t any significance behind the removal of the stripes and we’re perfectly capable of mass producing flags with all the stripes again!
Making fun of girls who dream of being a wife and stay-at-home-mom actually doesn’t make you progressive or feminist or cool, it just makes you a person who shits on someone else’s dream, a.k.a an asshole
Whenever someone says that I say “Okay, whatever floats your boat, I guess” and then I think “Why would she want that? Isn’t it boring to just sit around all day and do nothing?”
Moms don’t “sit around all day and do nothing” – they have a incredibly important 24/7 job: raising little human beings. Don’t devalue that by calling it “nothing”.
Man, my mom cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, went grocery shopping, did my hair every morning before school and every night (which, as a white woman with no prior experience of doing black hair, especially on a tender-headed child, is no easy feat). She helped with my homework, consoled me after a bad day, frequently volunteered at the school. She even picked my anxious, crying ass up from kindergarten early nearly every day for the first semester and would lie down with me every night when I was a child until I fell asleep (and that usually took several hours). That’s not even scratching the surface of all the things she’s done for me and my siblings. She was always the first person up and the last person to go to bed. Nothing about what she did, and continues to do to a lesser degree, is easy.
Domestic work is constantly undervalued even though every family depends on it. My grandmother on my mom’s side would go hungry just so her kids could eat – that is not nothing.
Also, if you would commend a man for being a stay at home dad and doing exactly what women have been doing for centuries, don’t pretend you care about women’s labor.
Women’s labor is always undervalued and underpaid, and what’s truly insane is that what constitutes women’s labor changes wildly depending on culture, context, and time period.
Cooking? Pfft! That’s women’s work! Unless it’s in a professional kitchen in which case only a man is qualified to be an executive chef. Sewing? Pffft! Women’s work! Unless it’s New York Fashion Week.
Usually, when an activity was considered men’s work, it was valued and highly paid, and when it was women’s work, it was devalued and underpaid, or down right UNPAID – even if it’s the EXACT SAME WORK.
If you tallied up all the hours and varied necessary skill sets that Moms/Homemakers put in and compensated them fairly for their labor, it’d be one of the highest paid professions, guaranteed, because it definitely is one of the most demanding and rigorous, requiring a very broad set of skills and 24 hour on-call duties.
This isn’t even taking into account “invisible labor,” which still gets automatically assigned to women without consent. Consider this: Who in your family cooked the Thanksgiving turkey? Who had to remember to plan the meal and buy the ingredients? Who remembered to call all the cousins and ask what time they were coming? Who planned how long the turkey would take to cook and what order the sides had to go into the oven and what time dinner would be ready and who should sit where at the table? When the conversation got heated at the dinner table, who changed the subject? Who remembered to put Agnes on the opposite side of the table from your Uncle Andrew, because those two have been feuding since the 90’s? When the kids had a melt down over some silly thing, who calmed them down and found them an entertaining distraction? Who cleared the table and did the dishes and made the coffee?
Now – ask yourself – who DECIDED who would do these things? Was there a discussion? Did people draw straws, volunteer? Or was it just ASSUMED?
Men take pride when they do things…but they do as much as they want, and then stop. For example, at our Thanksgiving dinner, the man of the family made the turkey. He brined it and followed a recipe, and was very proud of the turkey he prepared and received glowing praise. (Rightfully, it was delicious.)
But his wife did LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, the entire day, including all the prep, clean up, and most of the dealing with the kids. When dinner was done, every single woman at the table stood up and went to the kitchen, unasked, and got to work helping. The men lingered at the table, chatted, and then retired to the living room to watch foot ball. And my family’s pretty “progressive” by most standards. We all just fell into this ballet, following this script without discussion or consent.
Minimizing the labor of women, particularly as relates to homemaking and parenthood, is antifeminist.
Earlier I got a request for lesbian and asexual edits of this post. I changed the background color to gray in order to accommodate flags with black stripes.
(Image description: a gray background with pride flags on the left side of the image and green text on the right side which reads “still here, still queer, won’t be erased.” The post includes the nonbinary, asexual, more color more pride rainbow, bisexual, lesbian, pansexual, genderfluid, bigender, aromantic, and intersex pride flags. End image description.)
Firebird Scratches 