broseidon92:

Listening to “Santa Baby” at work makes me want to use my sex appeal to sell phones.

Happy Birthday Jon Stewart!

Happy Anniversary William Shakespeare!

“‘But what is the reason of all this dissatisfaction?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you go to your husbands and brothers to be set right, as of old?’

‘Ah! when you ask me that, you get to the first cause of the trouble,’ she answered. ‘The truth is, that we have lost faith in our men. They claim some superiority for themselves, but we find none. The age require[s] people to practice what they preach, and yet expects us to be guided by the counsels of those whose own lives, we know, have rendered them contemptible. They are not fit to guide us, and we are not fit to go alone. I suppose we shall come to an understanding eventually—either they must be raised or we must be lowered. It is for the death of manliness we women mourn. We marry, and find we have taken upon ourselves misery, and the life-long widowhood of the mind and moral nature. Do you wonder that some of us ask: Why should we keep ourselves pure if impurity is to be our bed-fellow? You make us breathe corruption, and wonder that we lose our health.’

…

‘I don’t think the world is worse than it ever was,’ I said dryly.

‘Not worse, when we know so much better…Not worse, when we have learned to see so clearly, and most of us acknowledge that

                              It is our will

            Which thus enchains us to permitted ill!

It is nearly two thousand years since Christianity began its work, and it is still unaccomplished. Do you know, I sometimes think that all this talk of virtue, and teaching of religion, is a kind of practical joke, gravely kept up to find a church parade of respectability for states, a profession for hundreds, and a means of influencing men by making a tender point in their nervous system to be touched, as with a rod, when necessary—a rod that is held over them always in terrorem. We all talk about morality; but try some measure of reform, and you will find that every man sees the necessity of it for his neighbor only. Goodness is happiness, and sin is disease. The truism is as old as the hills, and as evident; but if men were in earnest do you suppose that they would go on forever choosing sin and its ghastly companion as they do? Do you know, there are moments when I think that even their reverence for the purity of women is a sham. For why do they keep us pure? Is it not to make each morsel more delicious for themselves, that sense and sentiment may be satisfied together, and their own pleasure made more complete? Individuals may be in earnest, but the great bulk of mankind is a hypocrite. When the history of this age is written, moral cowardice and self-indulgence will be found to have been the most striking characteristics of people. There is no truth to be found in the inward parts.’”

Ideala, Sarah Grand, 1888.