just had the weirdest interaction. this off-leash Yorkshire Terrier wobbled up to sniff my ankle, and then its owner said “the vet wanted to euthanize her”
and I was like “……oh”
and she said “4 years ago. she had a stroke, but I went to church and prayed to the Virgin Mary, and now she can walk again. but sometimes she drops, which is why I have this stroller”
and I was like “oh, okay.” I didn't know what to say after that, so I was just like "it's a cool dog" and kept walking
I honestly think that the lack of non-sexual nudity in public spaces has done horrific damage to American society.
We deeply struggle to understand the natural diversity of bodies because we only see naked bodies in a sexual context. We are taught that seeing nudity is somehow inherently harmful, especially to children. We struggle to differentiate between sexually suggestive and sexually explicit material.
It fucks up the way people think about and talk about sex ed. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about breast feeding. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about queer folks. It feeds into fatphobia and ableism and is all rooted in this deeply harmful puritanism.
Like, I need people to understand that seeing a bare titty in public is not going to hurt a child. Seeing a man in a banana hammock isn't inherently traumatizing. I would argue, in fact, that adults treating those things as dangerous and gross and scary is going to do way more damage to a kid's psychology than seeing the nudity in the first place.
"Wanting to expose myself to children isn't the problem, its you being upset that I wanna expose myself to children that's the problem"
See, this is what I'm talking about. Nothing I said in this post is about *doing* anything *to* children, and the fact that you cannot imagine a scenario where a person might be unclothed that doesn't directly involving harming children isn't healthy.
This post is about breast feeding. It's about nude beaches. It's about clothing optional saunas and onsens. It's about the changing room at the gym. Settings in which some *non-sexual* nudity can and do exist.
This post isn't about "oh wow, I sure do want to be naked around kids for nefarious and predatory reasons." It's about how our culture's insistence that ALL nudity, regardless of context and setting, MUST be sexual and MUST be predatory is divorced from reality and leads to unhealthy mindsets surrounding our bodies and the bodies of others.
You literally mentioned it not being harmful to kids you fucking retarded pedo
Yes there exists settings where nudity is non-sexualized, most people understand this, however mentioning children makes it incredibly suspicious. Who the hell thinks of children in the context of nude beaches, gym changing rooms or saunas?
See, but it's not suspicious. One of the main pearl-clutching arguments about any nudity or even just less conservative clothing is the "think of the children!" fear mongering. That seeing a person breast feeding a baby in public or seeing a man in a thong is somehow inherently traumatizing. I'm literally just referencing and responding to the most common puritan argument against non-sexual nudity.
In countries that have them, children can go to saunas. Children can go to onsens. Children can use the changing room at public pools and gyms. Most nude beaches around the world don't have any kind of age requirement. Because in these places, there is an understanding that these are not sexual settings, and trying to have sex in those places would be seen as deeply, deeply inappropriate.
Again, the idea that nudity of any kind is only appropriate for adults is leaning on the assumption that nudity is somehow inherently sexual and harmful to children. (Which feeds into so many toxic and harmful mindsets. That people wearing skimpy clothing are 'asking for' sexual attention, that only people who are 'sexy' should wear the kind of clothing that shows skin.) It creates a culture of shame and secrecy about all aspects of your body, which really fucks with our sex ed and body image. It negatively affects people's willingness and ability to care for their loved ones as they age. Read through the tags on this post, and do so without the assumption that anyone who isn't a pearl clutching puritan is a fucking sex criminal.
You had me until you decided to say that having men in thongs around children is okay.
Explain to me why you think children being in the same area as someone wearing a particular style of swimsuit (one that still completely convers the genitals even) is "not ok"?
Ah, ok, by that logic, it’s okay to shove my ass in a kid’s face, because it’s “not sexual”, right?
Define "shoving your ass into their face."
Do you mean- physically touching a child's face with *their ass cheeks*? Because no, that's not ok.
Do you mean - being visible and in the same general area while wearing a swimsuit? Because then yes, that's OK. It's in fact no different than a woman wearing a bikini within the potential sight of a child. *seeing* another person, even if that person is wearing fewer clothes than you expect, is not *inherently* harmful.
"people can wear various clothes and it's not a bad thing"
Oh so i can but my bare ass directly in the face of a child?????
Dude, you're the problem. Healthy growth involves knowing what growth looks like. Being able to look at a regular human body in any state of dress and going "oh so that's what I'll look like" is very very good for development.
You're doing the equivalent of weirdos sexualizing shoulders.
You know if they don't get that out in reality where they're actually going to get it? Porn.
Up until like the 1950s kids were subjected to nudity in various locations with little to no issues. People were breastfeeding in church and kids would go to public bath houses or see their neighbors washing themselves outside. They all lived. Kids will survive a thong from across the street. You on the other hand... Jury is out.
Absolutely wild how people react to something like “nudity is not inherently sexual because you’re not having sex every time you take your clothes off, including in front of children” and go “So I can have sex with children” like…are you fucking reading this post?
Are you gonna accuse the person giving kids cookies of also giving them heroin? Why not, when sugar and heroin are both chemicals that make people happy?
Yeah, part of the problem, is that for a LOT of people, the only time they are actually naked is when they are 1. alone, bathing and 2. having sex. And the only time they see OTHER people naked is when they are having sex with them or watching porn of them.
Which is exactly the problem.
fuck me all my friends have jobs which means they have no time to play toys with me and its fuycking ruining my life
fuck me i have a job which means i have no time to play with my friends and its ruining my life
person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this
Thought this could fit in well here
Ok I don’t mean to be doing this too often but I literally just wrote a paper about this so I thought I would comment! The English translation is The Cursed Woman but the original French is La Femme Damnée. “Femmes Damnées” was the title of a Baudelaire poem from his acclaimed 1857 book Fleurs du mal, which was known, among other things, to be a collection that famously dealt with the subject of lesbians. The poem tells the story of the desires and passionate love between two lesbians: Delphine and Hippolyte. As a result of this poem and of the book as a whole, the terms “fleurs du mal” and “femme damnée” became lesbian monikers of the turn of the century. Though some have deemed the term “damned women” to be accusatory of some moral dissonance, the poem it is derived from is actually quite sympathetic to the condition of lesbian love as it is a love which is unable to fully flourish in that time. Regardless, the translated title of Tassaert’s painting is misleading, as the original French is less accusatory and more identifying. The title is more accurately “the lesbian.”
And she’s doing fine
Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.
Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.
Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.
Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer
...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...
Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.
But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--
And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.
This is good advice, but also why this picture?
It’s hard for two horses to be intimate when there’s an erupting volcano nearby. What’s not clicking
top three talents are being a whore, being a fag, and being oh so sleepy
passports…should not expire
actually i have decided that passports shouldn’t exist at all
i love it here
Me when I'm about to do a terrorism but I am stopped by a cop asking for my passport
More people should abandon Internet discourse and get into observing/engaging with local politics. I say this not because local politics often offers more meaningful opportunities for effective praxis (although it does), but because local politics often offers just as much highly toxic and entertaining petty drama.
I highly recommend city council meetings. You might make yourself an informed voter and active community member or something. You also might get to watch an ongoing soap opera of old men ready to murder one another over trash collection ordinances, and unlike the Internet, none of them can effectually tell one another to kill themselves no matter how hard and how clearly they are thinking it.
a good experience more people on this website should have is confidently bringing up some leftist talking point you picked up from tumblr around family members, only for them to ask extremely basic and predictable followup questions/rebuttals that you have no response to because you just internalized the three-paragraph post with 3k notes. this only needs to happen a few times for the lesson to stick and the sooner the better
Hey when you move out on your own the most important food tip I can give you is “maybe you don’t hate x maybe your guardians just cooked it wrong”
The number of foods I have learned I really like if they’re Fucking Seasoned
The number of foods I’ve introduced friends to that they warned me they’d always hated til I let them try a piece of mine
Also marinade things for 24 hours the second you have your own fridge it is a GAME CHANGER you thought you knew food but you have never met her
