Inspired by @meta_meg ... How many tweets would it take you to list every job you’ve ever had?
Had a lot of temp jobs in my youth and side hustles in my early adulthood. Have never actually counted until now (and not sure how many tweets this would fill to list them) but I think I’m at 40+ jobs in my lifetime 😶
The only job I ever got fired from was Kmart, at age 18. Not long later, my manager was fired for sexually harassing teen girls. Turns out being awful at customer service saved me!
A few years later, I was similarly awful around rude customers at the mall-store gift wrap section where I worked. But my little old ladies coworkers loved it & just had me be gift wrap bad cop. It was great (I am, incidentally, still really good at gift wrapping if I want to be)
... a year or so later, when I was about 19, my retail boss whipped his dick out at me in the storage room. But I was just like no thanks!, and stole a cool Zippo I’d been eyeing as compensation for the awkwardness, and then worked there for two more school breaks w/out incident
(This thread has taken a weird turn as I go down memory lane, apologies)
I think that about that retail experience a lot whenever sexual harassment conversations come up. I think a lot of people would’ve criticized my nonchalance and condemned my boss. He had 15 years on me. He was also recently divorced, and drunk, and weirdly vulnerable—
—I was a decade plus younger, and his employee. And yet I felt then (and turned out correct, I think) that I had the power in that situation somehow. & that his advance, however ill-considered, wasn’t actually coming from a place of harassment or manipulation, just bad judgement
This isn’t always the case in these sorts of situations, of course! But... idk. In my case, not taking a black-and-white victim-predator-punishment stance turned out to be exactly the right path
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It's hard to overstate just how bad the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is
The Senate is likely to vote on it today, so let's take a look...
KOSA requires online businesses to "prevent or mitigate" minors from being exposed to anything that could cause basically any sort of "harm"
There are two ways to do this, and neither is good: Censor massive amounts of free speech, or age verify everyone reason.com/2024/07/24/sen…
KOSA would be cataclysmic for the internet when enforced in the most neutral of ways (think FOSTA but instead of just applying to sexuality, it's applied to just about everything).
But the real kicker is that it's going to be enforced *by political appointees*
It seems like every literary or journalistic depiction of motherhood these days is dark af and somehow always elicits ample praise for being brave and truth-telling. It's... bizarre nytimes.com/2023/03/18/boo…
I'm all for society sugarcoating motherhood & parenthood less but... it feels like we've slipped into a weird pathology in certain circles where all people do is warn about how miserable it is & the only accounts accepted as truths are litanies of neverending hate & terror & pain
Related to this, people love to tell expecting or new parents that their lives are going to be miserable. @swin24 & I got sooooo much of this — often from internet strangers, but also friends & acquaintances — when I was pregnant.
Here's a roundup of various state bills seeking to make changes — some good and some bad — to prostitution laws reason.com/2023/03/17/sta…
In 3 states — New York, Vermont, & Hawaii — lawmakers have introduced measures to decriminalize prostitution between consenting adults reason.com/2023/03/17/sta…
The Hawaii decrim bill (SB 1204) was introduced in January & comes from Sen. Carol Fukunaga, who's also proposed a bill to "study the effects of New Zealand's model of decriminalizing prostitution on sex workers, their clients, and the broader community" capitol.hawaii.gov/session/measur…
Today's #ReasonRoundup highlights a few new findings on abortion.
First: The number of legal abortions in the US dropped significantly after SCOTUS overturned Roe. There were 6% fewer abortions in August 2022 than April—though more from virtual clinics reason.com/2022/10/31/nea…
Support for total bans on abortion is down! PRRI poll finds it dropped from 13% in 2020 to 8% this year, with steepest drop among Republicans
48% of voters in a new ABC-Ipsos poll prefer pro-choice candidates, while just 33% prefer candidates who support strict abortion restrictions (18% don't care)
This is why it’s odd that Musk said he aims to make Twitter more open to free speech AND "the most respected advertising platform in the world" … the two goals are fundamentally at odds
I love people suggesting this will just lead to Twitter keeping the right kind of advertisers. The number of advertisers — esp big ones with deep pockets—who don’t care what kind of content their ads run beside is small to nonexistent…
Corporate advertisers & people who want less content moderation are 2 groups with no overlap