why DO teenage girls go through a witch/occult phase? I had tarot cards and a spellbook and I knew a group of girls who messed with ouija boards and another who had ghost hunting equipment. “oh yeah Cindy’s just going through that girly phase where she tries to raise the dead.”
theory - we want power and know our culture doesn’t want to give us any?
Addendum: witches are one of the few cultural figures of female empowerment that don’t derive their power from their relationship to a man.
Galaxy brain: all women have suppressed magic inside them waiting to be unleashed
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
Hi ok quick google search says that this is about brexit in the uk (hence the “no deal” name) as the government prepares to deal with that. Still objectively terrifying and NOT OK IN THE SLIGHTEST, but for my fellow US people who had a panic attack reading this here’s some clarification
Thank you for the context, really kind pissed people just put this up with no explanation just to cause a shit show.
yanks: *sees english online* yanks: this is for me right? i own this language? i own online? i’m the centre of the world
yanks:
yanks: oh its not about me? oh,, well, thats oke, just make sure you make that clearer next time, i didnt get that from the context of your,,, *squints*, scottish politics blogs
I actually genuinely love dealing with angry and aggressive customers because it’s SO funny. They always come in with a specific level of energy and they expect whoever they deal with to be scared of them and then when I’m clearly not physically or emotionally intimidated they get SO flustered and start doing the weirdest shit to regain power in the situation. Like there’s absolutely nothing you could do to me in this coffee shop that would ever even make my Top 10 Scariest Interactions With People but by all means, keep faking that phone call to your boss who apparently knows the Starbucks mermaid personally.
I also love doing it because I know all my coworkers can get really upset when people treat them like that, which is totally understandable. So instead because they know I don’t mind they’ll just call me in and then gather round to watch like it’s a boxing match
im not INTERESTED anymore in seeing men’s perception of what female leisure time looks like, how we lounge around hairless and small and beautiful on our beds and couches in oversized shirts and lace underwear, unaware and unassuming and all the more beautiful for not Trying to be beautiful, i’m TIRED of it. even our most basic freedom of privacy, time alone with the self, has been butchered and ripped from us by the gaze of male photographers and artists
Vegan: There’s blood and pus in that cows milk you’re drinking.
Me: There’s probably E. coli on you’re spinach because the unpaid labor that all natural organic farm used didn’t offer the migrant workers a place to shit, but touché.
Not to mention E. Coli is a major contaminant that is often found in milk along with other organisms such as Coxiella burnetti (Q-fever), Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, and Salmonella. Plus, as mentioned, the somatic cells, blood, and sloughed off epithelium.
