"Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?"

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.

Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.

Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.

it’s sad to see over 400,000 notes on this!

parents shouldn’t ever invade their childrens privacy and violate their boundaries and i am so so so so so sorry if this has happened to you before!

i am sending you all my love <3

I had to see this image so now you do, too.

yall aint ready for her dropdown

I lost it here

hello excuse me what the fuck is a gyal womanist mermaid

all at once?

So no Poland?

That feeling when the label collector claims to be from every country on Earth except yours

Who is this bitch, Captain Planet?

why are you all bullying this person when she is literally everyone this is your mother and your daughter….

J. K. Rowling’s latest character

“So what country you are from?”

Reading every addition to this post feels like falling down a set of stairs

Reblog this and put in the tags what country you’re from and all the science classes you took in high school (for non Americans that’s approximately when you’re 14, 15, 16, and 17 years old)

Properly introducing Krinkle, miami-phase corn snake hatchling, 4 weeks old.

Got to chat with the vet over the phone. Her opening words were that Krinkle is very accurately named. She is intrigued and confounded by him but doesn't see anything as an immediate cause for quality of life discussions provided we can get him eating. I have some carnivore care in case I feel that he needs tube feeding, and his dose per meal would be... 0.1cc, an absurdly tiny amount. Real question would be trying to determine where his stomach is.

Y’ALL LOOK AT MY FIRST COVER

Thank you @oficmag for choosing my work to be on the front of your magazine, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and I’m so honored to be part of this magazine.

I did this on my twitter, and I’m going to do it again here. Here is my brief ode to fandom from a recent law graduate waiting on their bar results:

I joined my first fandom in 2008-ish. I was twelve. I loved the Warrior Cats books (and still do, as seen by one making me cry earlier this week). I was testing my writing skills on the Neopets boards, and I imagine they were what you would expect out of a 12 year old.

I loved every second of it.

I made some of my life long friends that way and some short term friends as well. People that I have considered vital to my life at one point or another.

Not long after, I started creating my own characters, which admittedly, you could tell were written by a twelve year old. I loved them and still think of a few of them fondly. (Shoutout to the former cop in a supernatural universe who realized the error of her ways after losing a leg and lived in an abandoned chocolate factory helping out those she used to chase down)

This was many years before I would do much more than write for myself and my friends. I probably wrote hundreds of thousands of words in these years up until high school when I started picking up poetry. I had found a way to express myself that resonated in my bones.

This is about the time I also started writing fanfics that I actually shared. They weren’t great, but I hold onto them as a testament not only of how far I’ve come but also in how I found my identity as an ace creator and created the representation I so dearly wanted in media that didn’t exist in 2012-2014.

In 2016, I started creating collages. The ones for class weren’t fandom based, but I still pieced together other peoples work for my own. I don’t know how readily I would have considered such a thing an art form if I wasn’t already used to piecing together other works to make my own.

It wasn’t until 2020 that I started getting published regularly, and on a huge scale. Nationally and internationally, my collages started finding places in literary magazines and national competitions and international publications. It has reached people I will never meet, nor will I ever see.

I’m nearing nearly 500 collages in six years. With focuses on nature, people, politics, protests, the world around me, and yes, my favorite fandoms. Our Flag Means Death, Warrior Cats, Kim Possible, Winnie the Pooh, Phineas and Ferb, Castlevania, and so many others continue to inspire my work, even my original work.

In the last year, I have finished two manuscripts, one fiction and one nonfiction, on top of continuing massive ongoing fanfics that are important to me. Both of which need a publisher (so if you’re looking for a vengeful nonbinary Cinderella or a coffee table book of pride flags, I’m here!)

I have also received my law degree where I have read and written thousands of words to argue for causes I believe in.

To me, it is a clear line from that 12 year old that loved my Warrior Cats to today, and I don’t know where I would be without it.

Wet beast Wednesday

Oh they're notching her tail. See the little bit taken out? That tells whoever catches her next to let her go-- it's a sort of "hey, this is a reproductive female; let's keep the cycle going by putting her right back in the water" signal. The bit will grow back in 2-3 shed cycles, which takes a couple years.

They know she's able to reproduce bc she was caught with eggs.

the top 12 most mouth-actor-y mouth actors of all time: ranked

as always grateful for the internet for allowing extremely niche abilities to flourish and come to my attention.

Holy shit

People get so mad at modern poetry, dude. Why don’t you have fun with some line breaks and maybe you’ll calm down

Try putting some line breaks in your sentences to fit a vibe. Try taking out all the punctuation. Try reading some bad Twitter poetry. Make up a metaphor. Do some blackout poetry. Live a little.

did i do it

tumblr is like a picture book to me, i just scroll through looking at the funny images and ignore any text, i dont have time for this reading nonsense

I wish this post had pictures so I would know what it's about :(

woah bug! cool :)

I stopped reading DNIs because 90% of the time they were just fucking inscrutable to me. I’d go to somebody’s page and it would be like “DNI if you’re a COSLA apologist,” so then I would Google COSLA and it was just like “Welp, either things are really heating up in the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities fandom or I still have no idea what the fuck this person is talking about.” Or “DNI if you identify as ANFO.” Okay, well, I definitely don’t identify as Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, but that’s probably not what you meant (although hey, maybe you did; I obviously don’t know enough about your views on chemical compounds to outright dispute that option).” Like, you have my blessing to hate whatever obscure fandom pairing or super niche kink group you want, but just know I am embracing ignorance on this one and will not be looking that shit up. Peace.

#op i know you’re joking about the convention of scottish local authorities fandom#however when four of the councils bounced in 2015 i did hear the irl equivalent of ‘dni if you’re a cosla apologist’#from a lot of the glasgow labour and labour-adjacent crowd & it was very much a Thing for a couple years

The BEST addition to this post, hands down. I am absolutely cackling, thank you.

[ID video of a gamer controlling the player character by playing a recorder. the play character is looking through a scope at an enemy.  after playing a bit to follow the enemy’s movements, the player plays a high note which fires the gun, getting them a headshot. /End ID]

Once again looking for some alchemical substance that will turn me into an immortal wizard (NOT mercury this time)

I will try lead.

baby: *choking on a lego*

me: not now sweetie daddys in a boss battle

it cracks me up every time some pissy radfem girlie comes into my inbox being like “ur just a straight girl!!!!!!!!!!!” as if that’s gonna affect my life in the slightest. some 17 yr old in conneticut thinking i’m a straight woman isn’t gonna stop gay dudes from wanting to fuck me or calling my bottom growth a cock or begging me to top them. like i am truly sorry but gay sex will always be a stronger force in the world than transphobia.

every time a radfem whines in my inbox abt me being a gay man i gain another cm of bottom growth

Damn, your dick must be long as hell.

radfems funding my diy bottom surgery

reblog to give a trans woman a mindblowingly fantastic rack and a trans man a dick made by apollo himself

reblog to give a trans person both a mindblowingly fantastic rack and a dick made by apollo himself

Why is Apollo making dicks??? He’d just be sucking the- *gets shot by an arrow and dies*

reblog to get ur dick sucked by apollo

I feel a lot of people have moral systems that are completely detached from centering avoiding real harm to real people and are mostly based on completely arbitrary obsessions with symbolic and abstract "wrongs" and gut feelings, and then they join progressive politics and make an absolute fucking mess out of everything with their weird little moralist obsessions that actually don't help improve anybody's life or serve any purpose besides making a few people feel morally superior. This is why for example anti-kink politics went from having a pretense of being about protecting vulnerable women from abusive men to just being very blatantly "if you have ever done kink at all you're ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew".

I think if you cannot describe the mechanism through which an action brings harm to real people then you probably don't have an actual argument as to why you consider the action in question to be immoral, and even if you can, you might find some people don't agree with your definition of harm or find the evidence for the existence of this harm mechanism to be lacking. Secular morality is a lot more complex than a lot of angry social media users might want you to believe it is.

relationship goals

gay shit