tree rot > brain rot

it makes me so angry how even in elementary school young girls are the ones being preyed upon by boys.

i remember in elementary school the boys would tell girls to open their mouth and then shake a salt shaker or to poke their tongue in their cheek to look like ‘sucking a lollipop’ which was obviously supposed to be an ‘lol she’s sucking a dick’, and when the girl obviously did it because idk, she’s 10, and doesn’t know what graphic sexual jokes are, it would be met with uproarious laughter from the boys.

Even as young as ten little girls are the butt of sexual jokes from boys their age who have clearly been exposed to porn and other sexual content and take joy in taking away little girls’ innocence and also humiliating girls in a sexual context.

Or how we had co-ed sex ed classes in 6th grade, and the boys of course laughed their heads off at any mention of boobs and vaginas, but the penis was treated as the most important thing ever. Again, another example of little boys making little girls feel bad and humiliated in a sexual context.

I really loathe the culture in "sex-positive", "pro-kink", trans-fauxminist circles in which talking about kinks and sex descriptively, unprompted, even to people you've just become acquainted with is normalized and encouraged.

While we don't want to shame women for casual sex or expressing sexual desire in normal and appropriate ways like what is normalized in many conservative cultures, there is harm in swinging too hard the other direction.

As a sexual assault survivor such unprompted and descriptive discussions about kink and BDSM can be really retraumatizing. While I'm not a fan of the mindset that it's healthy to consistently avoid all triggers, there also needs to be a certain element of mindfulness to what may make other people uncomfortable, and sex is a really vulnerable topic for many people. And often these conversations happen in such a way in which other people are pressured to participate - attempting to change the subject, not engage, or express discomfort "defies the norm" and creates a socially awkward scenario. This doesn't just extend to sexual assault survivors, but to anyone wanting to retain privacy on their sexuality and sex life and not wanting unprompted sexual information about you. Actually, in most cases delivering unprompted sexual details qualifies as sexual harassment.

Additionally being lesbian there's an added level of threat and discomfort pertaining to such situations, as this type of normalization and social pressure often positions gay people to come out. If you're gay and do this, I encourage you to be mindful that other gay and lesbian people might not be so comfortable responding in kind.

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

Please do not leave deaf, disabled, mentally ill, and autistic people out of your conversations about police brutality.

50% of all people killed by police have a disability.

And this is coupled with the fact that Black folks with these conditions/disabilities are way more likely to be seen as having “behavioral issues” or being “dangerous” or “noncompliant.”

They are also incredibly much less likely to be diagnosed. 50% of all people killed by police in the US are known to be disabled, but with the staggering rates of underdiagnosis in black people of ADHD, autism, and mental health problems, the figure is likely be higher.

Melissa Gira Grant, Playing The Whore: The Work of Sex Work

Amazing how far people are willing to go in order to uphold an industry that just reinforces womens’ bodies as commodities to be consumed + the prioritizing of an industry whose existence is directly tied to sex trafficking and the rape of so many women and children, all to satisfy the very small percentage of ‘sex workers’ who hypothetically enjoy their job and think it’s an industry worth protecting, because obviously it’s more important than eliminating a business that harms so many women and children and upholds a culture of male entitlement and rape culture. Also, the conflating of working in the food industry to men paying to rape women is incredibly nauseating. Pimp propagandists out of touch with reality as usual.

I’m not even same-sex attracted and I’m really getting tired of the “gay marriage was the slippery slope to walking girlfriends on leashes in public and teachers wearing sex toys to school” argument. It literally makes no fucking sense. Marriage between two consenting adults is literally the most normal, mainstream, non-deviant thing you could possibly advocate for. Two people of the same sex being married is only considered deviant because of homophobia and misogyny (marriage as an institution was meant to bind a woman to a man so he’d know he fathered her children, that’s literally it). There is nothing actually deviant about same sex attraction, it is a normal feature of our species. You know what the actual slippery slope was? Allowing porn to become mainstream, pimps to promote “sex work is work”, and allowing men who identify as women to demand that everyone else play pretend. That’s how we got here. Not normal people wanting the right to do a completely normal fucking thing. Holy shit.

there is a difference between "omg poor tumblr we have to support their floundering sad baby efforts to compete. CRABS!! ( ᵘ ꒳ ᵘ ✼)"

and

"websites do not exist in a vacuum and are subject to the pressures of late-stage capitalism, so if you want this website you've been using for 15 years to continue to exist, consider buying ad-free maybe bc we aren't going to be able to magically crowdfund to turn it into a community owned org"

like genuinely i understand: evil corporation doesn't care about you, don't be taken in by anything cutesy etc., but

they provide a service i rely on. i'd prefer not to lose it entirely, shit as it is. & that's capitalism baybeee 🙃

"5 reasons earth is worth protecting" "why we should save the earth" because we are no more inextricable from the earth than our cells are from our bodies. hope this helps

there’s obviously a lot of nuance to to this conversation, but I feel like the way that people nowadays talk about friendships is so cold and devoid of love or empathy. like you aren’t allowed to complain or be sad, ur burdening ur friends with ur problems, helping someone through a hard time is ‘emotional labour’ and ‘you don’t owe anyone anything’ and I’m just thinking what does friendship even mean to you then? like honestly? people say ‘I’m not your therapist’ as if therapy is the answer to everything. what a sad world where a paid clinician is the only person you’re allowed to be emotionally vulnerable with. this ultra individualistic mindset leads to everyone feeling alone and isolated and we’ve lost all concept of community and support systems

I truly believe social media has damaged young people's understanding of friendship in a MASSIVE way.

I talk about this all the time, but honestly, one thing that really drove it home recently was the weird behavior of the anon who repeatedly accused me of being in love with my male friend and business partner (who I quite literally see as family and thus could not ever fathom being into even if I was OSA) despite the fact that I'm happily married and very much 1000% only into female humans.

I truly am questioning more and more as I observe the behavior both online and IRL of people under 30, what exactly their understanding of interpersonal relationships looks like. I've seen SO many people argue that a romantic relationship where the partners involved are not having sex is not, in fact, a romantic relationship, and is "literally just friends." As if there aren't countless reasons two people who are in love and in a committed relationship might not be sexually active - bed death, life stress, medical problems, waiting for marriage, etc. There's something so sad about the idea that so many young people seem to believe sex is all there is to romantic partnerships.

Many of my deepest, most fulfilling, most meaningful, and closest relationships in life have been purely platonic. I swear it wasn't long ago that you'd hear people say things like "soul mates don't have to be romantic! my best friend is my soul mate!" The current attitudes toward platonic and romantic relationships honestly concern me. Especially when recent studies show that loneliness and isolation is endemic among the younger generations right now. Especially when I'm seeing so many people my age and younger act as though "friend" just means "someone you party with," and seem to have no idea how to form deeper connections without jumping to romance - often incorrectly. I've seen so many "relationships" fail because they were founded on the misconception that having emotional intimacy with someone means you must be in love with them and want to be with them romantically. The ability to differentiate between platonic and romantic feelings is a really crucial life skill, and it's worrying to see the level of confusion about it that I have been seeing recently.

I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.

In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!

Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.

Anyway dragonfly for admiration:

Calico pennant by nbdragonflyguy

Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.

This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.

You can read more about Leave No Trace here.

A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.

Benthic invertebrates in streams are a CRITICAL part of a lot of food webs — because they are so diverse, they have a lot of feeding strategies that move calories up the food web and nutrients into the ecosystem around them. Some consume oil-rich diatom films, a critical source of essential fatty acids throughout the food web, some shred leaves and twigs into tiny bits that decompose more easily, allowing streams to remain clear and flowing, some filter out particulates from the water making it clearer, some are predators, concentrating nutrients — and they do this as larvae, and then the adults fly out of the stream, bringing the nutrients and calories from the stream to the surrounding landscape. The whole ecosystem is richer because of the diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates — which is why it’s important to preserve their habitat, though this is more “maintain dissolved oxygen levels by protecting temperature and limiting sedimentation” and “have a mixture of shaded and unshaded stream reaches” day to day. I do think “Don’t destroy the physical habitat for art projects” is an easy action to take but like. It’s fine to do that OUT of the creek? Build the stacks of rocks on ridge tops, where they aren’t habitat for stressed critical species? (caveat: I am in western North America and I have limited understanding of other parts of the world.)

A good addition that goes into more detail about WHY these critters are important to their particular ecosystems that I didn’t bother with on the original post because I didn’t think it would get so much traction.

But I’d say don’t stack rocks anywhere in parks. If you want to stack rocks on your private property, go nuts.

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women exiting the sex industry don't all only need vocational training. a lot of them will need lifelong financial support because they are way too disabled to safely work , both bc disabled women are at increased risk of exploitation and bc being sexually exploited is really bad for your heatlh . And they should get it

Barbie movie has gone completely woke and left out the old fashioned morals and ways of playing (no barbies scissored in movie)

I know people are saying Barbie's social commentary is too simplistic but like there are plenty of people here on the leftist feminism website who can't even grasp the "women shouldn't be expected to wear make-up" concept

Honestly its only "too simplistic" to people who are chronically online and detached from the reality of how much regular people actually consume or analyse social commentary on feminism

this was the only thing i thought about during his conversation with barbie

The fact that men are upset and calling this movie misandry. I swear men are the most privileged and entitled groups to exist. Imagine playing victim over movie and acting oppressed over it, that is men. 

Men will call anything that isn't actively praising them, misandry. But they won't call anything misogyny, even if it is blatant and obviously anti-woman. Reason #1726 why I don't associate with males

dialectic synthesis