sugaryumyum:

androphilia:

Life With The Hijab By Sadaf Syed

① University of Michigan’s DJ Hadeel Al-Hadidi created and broadcasts her own hour-long radio program.
② Scholars teach that Islam encourages sports and physical activity for all, wrote Sayed. The prophet Muhammad is said to have invited his wife Aisha to a foot race.
③ Nadia Afghani, left, and Nadia Chohan make up Hijabi Deafness, a Muslim punk rock/hip-hop band.
④ Michelle Yim, a network engineer, skis, swims, body surfs, rides motorcycles – all while wearing the hijab.
⑤ Atlanta-based Mariem “Punchenella” Brakache (5-5, 1KO) is a former IBA Junior Middleweight Champion, boxing coach and renowned trainer.
⑥ A ballerina and tap dancer from Texas, Hiba Awad is anxious to prove “how versatile and unique a Muslim woman can be.”
⑦ Nousheen Yousuf said the practice of tae kwon do “taught me to treat daily prayers as a real meditation, where the focus is on my relationship with God.”
⑧ Nosheen Cassim, a part-time makeup artist and full-time mother of two, was born and raised in Illinois, but has been threatened by strangers who told her to “go back to where she came from.”
⑨ No matter how different they may look from other beachgoers, Sama Wareh, left, and Aurelia Khatib believe in doing what they love, including surfing.
⑩ Asma Azim, a step-grandmother from Pakistan, has been a manager of mechanics and a truck driver for more than a dozen years. She said her male contemporaries treat her with respect – especially when they discover she can repair her own engine.

STOP assuming that women who CHOOSE to wear the hijab are oppressed and in need of your salvation.  Instead, they’re out having lives a hell of a lot more awesome than yours!

"I suspect it’s difficult for men to imagine a world in which their bodies have long been inextricably linked to their value as an individual, and that no matter how encouraging your parents were or how many positive female role models you had or how self-confident you feel, there is an ever-present pressure that creeps in from all sides, whispering in your ear that you are your body and your body defines you. A world where, from the time of pubescence on, you can feel the constant and palpable weight of the male gaze, and not just from your male peers but from teachers and sports coaches and the fathers of the children you baby-sit, people you’re supposed to respect and trust and look up to, and that first realization that you are being looked at in that way is the beginning of a self-consciousness that you will be unable to shake for the rest of your life.Even if they are never verbalized, the rules of bodily conduct for females become clear early on: when school administrators reprimand you for the inch of midriff that shows when you lift your hands straight in the air or youth group leaders tell you that the sight of your unintentional cleavage is what causes godly young men to fall, you learn that your body is dangerous and shameful and that it’s your responsibility to cloister it in a way that is acceptable to everyone else. You learn that your body is a topic of public debate that everyone is entitled to weigh in on, from a male classmate telling you that those jeans make your ass look huge to the male-dominated United States Congress dictating the parameters that rape must fall within to be considered legitimate. To be a woman, and to live life in a woman’s body, is to be held to a set of comically paradoxical standards that make you constantly second-guess yourself and jump through a million hoops in pursuit of an impossible perfection."
Stop Catcalling Me  (via albinwonderland)

(Source: lancyann, via mikalamode)

storyboard:

In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence

This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.

It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?

Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.

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visualamor:

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intotheoven:

ohjeffreyno:

Engraved Zippo lighters from the Vietnam War. From Cowan’s Auctions

“We the unwilling…”

Thoe I walk through the valley in the shadow of death I fear no evil for I am the meanist mother fucker in the valley 

I used to collect these, but I started having weird dreams. 

(via beahomebody)

ruineshumaines:

Franck Allais

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