This Tumblr, MA'AM, was created in response to comedian Jen Kirkman's (Drunk History) hiatus from Twitter-land until her male colleagues speak up against sexism.

http://menagainstassholesandmisogyny.tumblr.com

Here is a portion from one of the blog posts:  After emerging from the Imagination Chamber, maybe you say: “Well, if somebody’s offended by something I say, that’s just because they’re too sensitive. If I were them, I would take it in stride.”

Would you? I’m not sure you would. But even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. You are NOT them. And you demonstrate a shocking lack of empathy and imagination by being unable to place yourself in their shoes, to feel what it might be like to be them, to be subject to the torrents of abusive crap somebody like Jen, somebody like your girlfriend, somebody like your sister, somebody like your mom, has to put up with on an hourly basis.

If you find yourself saying “You’re too sensitive” a lot then it is entirely possible that you are, in fact, being a jerk.

You have exactly zero control over how “sensitive” other people are. But you have one hundred percent control over how much of a jerk you are. You do not have to share absolutely everything that is on your mind.

Not sharing absolutely everything that is on your mind all the time does not make you “not true to yourself” or “a pussy.” It makes you a human being. It makes you a citizen. 

But let’s say you DO say something to a woman and she finds it offensive, so you say, “Hey, cool out, I still think you’re hot!” Or some variation on that theme. This is not a compliment. In fact, it is hard for me to think of a scenario in which this wouldn’t end up being more insulting than whatever the initial jerky thing you said was.

Essentially what you’re saying is, “The insulting thing I just said to you is NOT insulting because I still want to have sex with you. I still hold a low opinion of you, still feel the way I claimed to feel by insulting you, but I would also put my penis in your vagina, and so you’re not not allow to feel the way I caused you to feel.”

If I need to explain why that is an awful message to send to another human being, then you are lost, my friend.

“But,” you say, “I didn’t mean the first thing I said as an insult! IT WAS A JOKE.”

There are jokes and there are “jokes.” And the thing that separates jokes from “jokes” is that “jokes” aren’t jokes, no matter what your intention.

I have in no way experienced the volume of awful things slung my way that many (or, I honestly have to assume, all) of my female colleagues have, but I’ll get maybe three or four mean things said to me on the Internet a week. Which, now that I just wrote it down, sounds like that one day of World War I where they didn’t fight, they just played soccer in No Man’s Land because it was Christmas. But it happens to me occasionally.

-D.C. Pierson

Harper’s Bazaar Turkey by Koray Birand

"Wonder why am so afraid of pruppets. I used to love pruppets."

"Oh, you two are always bickering."

"Two years, no access to the tunnel."

The 1:45 mark

"We are made of the bones of the earth."

-JRR Tolkien 

This exists. And I just threw up.

"Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs. Now the men have nowhere to go."

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/24/war-on-men/

One Jezebel.com reader responded saying,  "You know, fuck it. We're moving past this. My mom warned me when I was a teenager that there was going to be a backlash against all the progress that women had made, and I think that's what we're looking at now with all the hyperventilating about "traditional values." Meanwhile I think that in my science PhD, the percent breakdown of women to men is about 60-40. Let self-hating women like this have paradoxical freakouts in the corner while the rest of us move on and get shit done."

E.W.

“He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”  

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

-Wharton

Edith

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.” 

“They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them, wide and gray under the stars”

“The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal's suffering was intolerable to him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie's hair and that his hand was on her face.” -Edith Wharton

"And farewell goes out sighing"

“Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, 
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, 
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: 
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd 
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
As done: perseverance, dear my lord, 
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang 
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; 
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path; 
For emulation hath a thousand sons 
That one by one pursue: if you give way, 
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, 
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost; 
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank, 
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, 
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present, 
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours; 
For time is like a fashionable host 
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, 
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly, 
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, 
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek 
Remuneration for the thing it was; 
For beauty, wit, 
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, 
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all 
To envious and calumniating time.” 
-Triolus and Cressida

Troilus and Cressida

“He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.” 

"Our bruised arms hung up for monuments"

"Was ever woman in this humor wooed?

Was ever woman in this humor won?

I'll have her, but I will not keep her long.

What? I that killed her husband and his father.

To take her in her heart's extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

Having God, her conscience and these bars against me,

And I, no friends to back my suit withal

But the plain devil and dissembling looks?

And yet to win her? All the world to nothing!"

-Richard III

James Baldwin

A Mid-Summer Night's Dream

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. 

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images

And grows to something of great constancy,

But, howsoever, strange and admirable."

The Almásy's Bosphorus

 "There was that small indentation at her throat we called the Bosphorus. I would dive from her shoulder into the Bosphorus. Rest my eye there."

Almasy: Madox--that place, that place at the base of a woman's throat? You know, the hollow, here--does it have an official name?

Madox looks at him.

Madox: For God's sake, man--pull yourself together.

The most personally profound moment in Hamlet

OPHELIA

My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd,
Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ancle;
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors,--he comes before me.

     He took me by the wrist and held me hard;

Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;
At last, a little shaking of mine arm
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being: that done, he lets me go:
And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out o' doors he went without their helps,
And, to the last, bended their light on me.

Gender

V. If I did love you in my master's flame

With such a suffering, such a deadly life,

In your denial I would find no sense

I would not understand it.

O. Why, what would you?

V.  Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house,

Write loyal cantons of contemned love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out, "Olivia!" O, you should not rest

Between the element's of air and earth

But you should pity me.

O. You might do much.

-Twelfth Night

Good God, David. Good God.

My birthday cannot come soon enough.

Fairest Cordelia

“Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon:
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
Gods, gods! 'tis strange that from their cold'st neglect
My love should kindle to inflamed respect.
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France:
Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unprized precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind:
Thou losest here, a better where to find.” 
-King Lear

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”

“These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there's son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there's father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! 'Tis strange.” 
-King Lear

“When the mind's free, the body's delicate.”

-King Lear

A world, encapsulated

T.S. Eliot

"The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men."

                             

Photos taken in Bermuda

Poem inspired my Mira, http://etchedroots.wordpress.com

"So trust me, trust me, darling dear"

"I could say that I'm hurt

But it wouldn't be true,

The knife in my back

It reminds me of you."
-Terrance Zdunich

‎"Beware, lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadows."

-Aesop's Fables

Outofprintclothing.com has all of my Christmas needs

Ohmygodseriously?!

"So. Instead of drowning yourself, you're going to write a sad poem in your journal and move on."

Never gets old. Ever.

Hark, a vagrant!

The line should be, "I am too much in the son."  That part is vital.  Otherwise, these are hilarious. 

Hart Crane

"...And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals … And I, their slave!

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes

My veins recall and add, revived and sure

The angelus of wars my chest evokes:

What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . ."

The Grey

"There's not a second that goes by that I'm not thinking of you--in some way.  I move like the damned do, cursed. And I feel like it's only a matter of time. I don't know why I'm writing this..."

Euro Personal Ad of Dreams

"Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."

Hamlet

When you have the uninterrupted time to sit down with the lights off and watch 27 minutes of absolute, wrenching brilliance-- watch this.

An Occurrence at Own Creek Bridge is easily better than most full-length films

"My reformation, glittering o'er my fault"

Starting at the 16:06 mark, watch Ralph Fiennes shake the heart of any Hamlet lover.

Somerset Maugham

“His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.” 

Heartbeat: My Involuntary Miscarriage and 'Voluntary Abortion' in Ohio

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamara-mann/heartbeat-involuntary-miscarriage-and-voluntary-abortion-in-ohio_b_2050888.html

I was withered, but functional. I knew this could happen and knew that I could recover. I had been blessed with a healthy child in between and felt, in my Nana's words, "Why should this be easy?" I decided to wait out the week. Looking pregnant, I returned to work, still hoping that maybe with more quiet time, with more love, next week the baby would be better. As I sat down at my desk, my own doctor called. To him, it was a fetus. "Tamara, I have looked at the scans and I have shown the scans to doctors in my office. I want to tell you that we all agree that this fetus is not compatible with life. It will not survive the pregnancy. You should get it removed immediately. The longer you wait the more risks are involved." I hung up the phone. 

The idea of "removing" my baby, my fetus, while its heart was still beating was simply unbearable. Was it living? Was it still growing? Would I be stopping the heartbeat, cutting short its life? And what do I do after the operation? Do I bury it? I didn't understand what I had inside of me and I didn't understand what I should do. I called a dear friend, an Orthodox rabbi, who I knew would be both compassionate and firm. After consulting with his rabbi, he said the case was clear. In situations where the mother's health is at risk and the fetus (he explicitly said fetus) is not viable, Jewish law errs on the side of the mother's health. I should have the operation and I should not bury the fetus -- it is not a life...

“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”

Bondage

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.” -Somerset Maugham

Maugham

“He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.”

“Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.”

“Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.”

“There is no dead matter,” he taught us, “lifelessness is only a disguise.”  His voice sank pressed against the wall, “We have lived for too long. We wish. We wish; we want, we want we want-- We are not,” he said, “long-term beings.  Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary.”

“How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.”

-J.S. Foer

“The rest, is silence.”

Hamlet

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

-W.S.

Anais Nin

“‎Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one. I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”

Auden

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead."

“How cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling.” -W.H.

‎"You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! This room's the greatest arsenal we could have -- arm yourselves." -Dr. Who

The True Story of a Vampire

"His figure had something- I cannot say what- serpentine about it. The features were refined; and he had long, slender, subtle, magnetic-looking hands...an attractive smile, which belied the intense sadness of the eyes."

"...and he sat down at the piano. Then he played a Hungarian csardas- wild, rhapsodic, wonderful. That is the music which makes men mad." -Eric Stenbock

Dracula