one of the dogs I groomed today was skunked at some point, and every time I bathe her the old skunk smell resurfaces and it is fucking disgusting. because of that, and because the smell is still lingering in my nose and brain, I’m going to take this opportunity to advise you all on how to deal with a skunked cat or dog.
a common method, one that is even advised on the BC SPCA website, is to use a combination of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dishsoap. do not do this. people use this as a cleaner for grout and a bleach for hair. it’s not appropriate for use on animals, particularly when there are safer methods available.
so with that in mind, here’s an effective method to best mitigate the smell should your pet get skunked:
do not get the animal wet. as soon as you get them wet, the hair follicles will close up and then the spray is locked in. for dogs, it takes up to seven years for a hair follicle to turn over which means your dog could potentially smell like skunk for literal years.
instead, load them up with baking soda. I’m talking so much that a black dog turns white. let it sit for ten minutes, or more if the animal is not in distress. you can even shake it out and add more. do not rinse.
add concentrate dog shampoo or dawn dishsoap. I’ve been told repeatedly that dawn is the only acceptable dishsoap to use on animals (and only as a last resort, as dishsoap simply is not designed for use on animals). if you can get your hands on proper concentrated dog shampoo that’s better. lather that shit up and add vanilla extract, then rinse. if you are still getting wafts you can add more baking soda even though the water has set.
for dogs, when they are cleaned to the best of your ability, you can add conditioner (my grooming instructor taught me not to use conditioner on cats, and she had a reason but I cannot remember what it was, so I’m erring on the side of caution here in not advising it). if you can, book a bath with a groomer for 3-4 weeks later (given the 28 day cycle of skin on average) or bathe at home, not for the clean but for the conditioner. this is to offset the strip of oils from the coat during the initial deskunking.
unfortunately by the time I have the opportunity to share this method with people, they’ve typically already stuck their dog in the tub and bathed them or bleached them with hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. hopefully this helps prevent some unfortunate people and pets from ending up in that scenario.
In the 1850s, a white woman wrote an article on Sojourner Truth and referred to her “muscular,” “manly” body – how energy seemed to “flow” through her and how her body and labor could support and rally (white) women’s rights movements.
White men and women in colonial times considered brown women – e.g. in India – as inhumanly strong and created entire aesthetics of frailty, purity, and paleness to oppose the image of the laboring Black and brown woman. The concept of the British Woman was formulated directly through the acts of colonization and slavery. And the strengths assigned to especially Black women were done so in order to justify the labor placed on Black women slaves in the Americas and Caribbean and resist empathy.
The colonial – political, legal, medical, social – view of Black and brown/indigenous bodies as having strong physicality is centuries old and continues to be used in opposition to / as a goal for whiteness in modern (post-1900) medicine:
“The most significant proponent of that view was Georges Hébert, who, from the early years of the twentieth century, had asserted the superior physique of dark-skinned colonial subjects whose lives had allegedly remained closer to a natural state. The problem with modern man was that he had lost the physical edge that a simpler, ‘primitive’ life, without the comforts of modernity, would have preserved. His advocacy of exercises such as walking, running, and jumping was founded on the conviction that the uncivilized specimen demonstrated ‘perfect and complete muscular development acquired without method.’”
White wlw have a history of taking specifically Black lesbian + other wlwoc terminology, dance, and style while rejecting credit and their presence in lbpq spaces. White wlw prey on and sexualize us in specific ways, fetishizing the violence that we experience as woc and mapping that on our bodies – making us out to be violent and destructive while using old colonial tactics of dehumanization in a way they think will flatter us into submission. Our expression of gender and sexuality is always violent and frightening and alien, and in ways that have historically been tied to transmisogyny in the above examples.
tldr: boring
since this is going around again, some more writings on this:
By projecting onto black women a mythical power and strength, white women both promote a false image of themselves as powerless, passive victims and deflect attention away from their aggressiveness, their power, (however limited in a white supremacist, male-dominated state) their willingness to dominate and control others. These unacknowledged aspects of the social status of many white women prevent them from transcending racism and limit the scope of their understanding of women’s overall social status in the United States.
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
The black woman was ideologically constructed as essentially ‘non-feminine’ in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness. Pro-slavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped.
Hilary Beckles, Centering ‘Woman’: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society
It’s in how mainstream feminism often gets constructed as women being allowed to freely perform “masculinity” through icons like Rosie the Riveter, because while white women have historically been forced into the role of delicate and infantile femininity, Black women have been combating narratives which see us as being nearly always-already too masculine and indecorous. We are constantly left out of the narratives of mainstream feminism, just as we are too often left out of the narratives of mainstream action films.
and regarding the sexual fantasy of being harmed by women of color, I think there’s a necessary connection to the ascription of r*pe to colonized peoples:
Depictions of the vulnerable White woman in need of protection were juxtaposed with portrayals of Indigenous degenerate wantonness during periods of threat to imperial rule, whether real or imagined, so as to legitimize the coercive measures needed for control. Because White women were symbolically aligned with the social/moral purity of imperial rule in the British colonies, images of the “ravaged white female body” became a signifier of colonial upset, suggesting that “the stereotype of the dark rapist” aligns directly with pending failure of the “civilizing mission”, which is why rape stories emerge during periods of political instability, providing a convenient rationale for oppression of Indigenous men as well as Indigenous women, discursively represented as potential rapists and unchaste ‘squ*ws’, respectively. As Stoler concludes, a common theme emerges in recent histories of European women and colonialism: in colonial situations, varying in historical period and location, protecting the honour and virtue of White women became a pretext for controlling and suppressing the Indigenous population; “any attempted or perceived infringement of [W]hite female honor came to be seen as an assault on white supremacy and European rule”…
The Oriental Woman is therefore available to satisfy desires that would normally otherwise be socially and morally unacceptable if acted upon the bodies of white women
The Oriental Woman, for example, normatively permits acting out such desires such as p*d*philia and sexual aggression and sexual violence upon the bodies of Asian women.
Although the majority of lynchings did not even involve the accusation of sexual assault, the racist cry of rape became a popular explanation which was far more effective than either of the two previous attempts to justify mob attack on Black people. In a society where male supremacy was all-pervasive, men who were motivated by their duty; to defend their women could be excused of any excesses they might commit. That their motive was sublime was ample justification for the resulting barbarities.
Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist.”
And so there is something deeper here, and very curious, the ways that violence – including sexual violence that mimics the sexual violence ascribed to colonized people in order to control and murder them – is mapped onto women of color, especially Black women, rendering these fictional women into symbols for colonial anxiety and white sociopathy (a process which critically intersects with transmisogyny). This is why media matters.
And @ everyone in my notes and the tags, yeah, you are aware of it.
I literally did not make a cent off of my last donation post and I’m freaking out. I really need to go to the grocery store and I really need to somehow pay rent in full. Neither of those can happen off of bf’s paycheck. We don’t live in an actual apartment, we live with bf’s friend’s parents.. so they can kick us out whenever they want if we don’t pay up our half of all of the bills. It’s either eat or live on the streets and it’s so unfair. I do not know what to do at this point. I guess if you’d like to help, I’ll put my stuff below. Thanks for reading.
The US pretending to bring democracy to other countries is so funny when we vote on a non-holiday workday where people can wait up to six hours for a machine that may record their vote incorrectly to defeat a minority party that controls all three branches of government.
i realize it’s hard but “some people join the military to go to uni/get a job/bc they’re poor??” is a fucked up mentality and must be let go. i realize people think the blame should be on The State and not the individual soldiers “who were trapped and brainwashed” and they think they’re being nuanced and compassionate but please realize what you’re saying; (1) you are implying that the poverty of those soldiers is enough to absolve them of partaking in the literal destabilization of nations – you’d never use this excuse to forgive brown/muslim/foreign soldiers that were invading *your* neighbourhood & killing your fam so how dare you do the opposite? (2) you are (whether you like it or not) validating the decision of other poor people to go and kill brown people (who are also poor lmao) overseas so they can go to University of Arizona or whatever the fuck.
and please realize how insulting it is to poor brown people for you to go around saying “they have no way out!! they have no choice!! they were brainwashed!!” statistically the military has always been rich, white and very educated. anti-military people have always been poor, racialized and subject to the same propaganda as these “brainwashed” soldiers. don’t use us as your talking point to protect foreign invaders of our own countries lmao.
finally: repentant soldiers exist. and they agree with me. so who are you really protecting?
It’s so funny bc all the people writing 7 pages just to say *absolutely nothing at all* cannot answer the initial question this post raises:
If brown, Muslim, foreign soldiers were coming to YOUR neighbourhood, fucking up YOUR life, destabilizing YOUR government, would you look at that situation and say “well. they were poor back home and, no there wasn’t a draft and no nobody forced them to join BUT i can’t blame these individuals bc they wanted to go to college )): the state asked them to do it so they can’t be blamed for shooting my fam )): go ahead, ruin my life guys!!” ?? Would you do that??
we all know what the answer is and that’s why people are having such meltdowns in the notes it’s bc they know once and for all they’re being outed as imperialist sympathizers, racists etc and they just can’t justify it!! ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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