a) laughing so hard at the ratio this trans woman did on this guy terf lmfao
b) alex. sir. as someone who was once a teenage girl and used changing rooms then, I never once showered with an adult there regardless of what bits they had. if you are showering with teenage boys, that’s very not normal behaviour.
as someone who has a disorder that makes me short too: PLEASE stop doing this to partners of people like me. she is an ADULT and so am I. we shouldn’t not have a relationship just because how we look apparently makes you personally uncomfortable. stop it.
and people will be like “bUt PaEdOs mIgHt dAtE yOu AnD pReTeNd yOu’Re a ChIlD”
often paedophiles marry and sometimes even have kids with adults who don’t have any disorders like this. so why is your partner any less likely to be a paedo than mine is?
the idea that because of how we were born, the only people who could ever possibly be interested in us are paedophiles is fucked up and needs to stop.
On top of that, the absolute majority of people who molest children are not pedophiles, they don't have a paraphilia that specifically makes them find children attractive, they just don't care about other people's consent.
even if this guy were attracted to children "consensual relationship with an adult woman who happens to look kind of like an eight year old" is like, the ideal endgame. like if this guy were a danger to kids he would not bother with finding an adult who looks like a kid
I actually hate the concept of death and dying. I want to live forever so I can keep learning and seeing things. But I never mention this because every time I do I get lectured by randos showing up to tell me I just need to accept the concept of death
bitch! I know i'm going to die I just don't have to be happy about it
One of my favorite yuri related things is actually this Japanese article I found once that was like. Directed at younger himejoshi. So I put it through google translate because I was curious and it had a bunch of tips like “if you have a friend who is also a yuri fan… maybe you can go see a movie about girls together! But REMEMBER. Be sure to let her know in advance if you want to be 😳 more than friends 😳” and I genuinely thought it was so funny and cute that it was like “WARNING: we know manga likes to string things along but you cannot do that in real life you need to make your intentions known” LMAO
Consider the god of salmon.
There is a god of salmon, somewhere in the gravel and the pebbles of the spawning redd. All salmon are aware of it as soon as they are born, in their own, private, fishy ways, and remember their god of salmon when they leave the spawning grounds and journey into the saltwaters beyond.
Theirs is the god of journeys and returnings.
Eventually, every salmon is struck by the urge to return to the holy lands of its ancestors. They pray to the god of salmon, asking for protection against bears and other predators on the journey.
“Deliver us from eagles,” the salmon pray.
All animals get their own gods, and those animal gods get their own prayers. The gods of mice and rabbits and other small, squeaking, hunted things usually get prayers along the lines of, “Oh please, oh please, oh please…”
Unlike those fickle gods, parishioners of the god of salmon get results.
Salmon get miracles.
A salmon returns to freshwater and discovers that it can breathe.
A salmon swimming against the current watches its spine curl, its teeth lengthen, sees grey scales turn red.
A salmon comes to a waterfall and discovers that it can fly…
Eventually the salmon complete their pilgrimage, and return to the holy lands of their ancestors.
Many raucous orgies are held.
Hallelujah.
And then, exhausted, the salmon die. The land flourishes as residual nutrients run through creeks and estuaries.
And the god of salmon continues, buoyed on the souls and prayers of millions of martyrs.
The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.
I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.
In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:
My sister's reaction on my coming out was, "Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I'm taking you clothes shopping tomorrow."
A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.
Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.
I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women's tent.
In the women's bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she'd just used the last of it.
All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn't started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.
I've had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.
Cis women are cool. It's terves who are bigots.
I needed to see this today
since regrettably most of my followers aren’t vietnamese, i’d like y’all to know that the vietnamese language is pretty moderately gendered, most of our honorifics are gendered, so nonbinary vietnamese people have been creating their own gender neutral pronouns like by combining “chị” (girl older than you) and “anh” (dude older than you) into chanh, but chanh is also the word for lemon lol. so for a short while lemons became a symbolic nonbinary thing, but some nonbinary viets were like hmm we don’t like how that pronoun is defined by a gender binary so they created a new pronoun, “cam” which means “orange” like the fruit lmaoo
funny when buds ask ‘this author says evil things can i still enjoy them?’ ANWSER: ‘I DONT KNOW, CAN YOU?’ folks ask as if someone else has the answer. no bud, you dont get to weasel out of the complications of art that easy. this is the question: can YOU still enjoy them?
personally, most of the time chucks answer is: i cant. but that has nothing to do with you.
what do YOU tolerate on this timeline? how do YOU prove love?
in other words, do you want to make that choice because someone told you what you are supposed to do? or do you want to make that choice because you stand up and say ‘no thanks’ to hate when you see it?
you dont need to ask someone else bud
#tingle-wisdom
There’s a story about William Penn, who had a dilemma after he began to attend Quaker meetings. He was a flashy dresser and men of his rank wore swords as a mark of status and by tradition. He was starting to be worried about how that looked, wearing a sword among plain-dressing pacifists, so one day he asked George Fox, founder of the Quakers, what he ought to do about his sword. Fox said to him, “Wear it as long as thou canst.”
It’s a little bit of a joke, because Quakers are generally very dedicated to the principle of low waste and reuse – in one sense, it may have had the double meaning even then of “wear things until they wear out”. But of course in a more direct sense it meant that only Penn could know when it was time to set aside his sword, and what that would mean if he did (or didn’t).
In questions of morals and ethics, you can’t abdicate responsibility for your behavior to someone else; you can ask for advice, but you have to be the one who will decide what to do.
In the words of another thoughtful Quaker, Rex Stout, “Use your intelligence guided by common sense, or vice versa.”
also like in all seriousness furry hate is 10000% a warning sign as a sort of garden-variety expression of homophobia and transphobia. call me insane or delusional, and pardon the animal metaphor, but furries are consistently one of several common canaries in the coal mine when it comes to Acceptable and Reasonable hatred of Degeneracy. it almost always snowballs from there, too!
I might not be a furry myself, but y'all are safe here and I accept you. You are valid, and I love you same as everybody else. I also neither automatically sexualize nor automatically squick the same. Y'all do y'all. And, if somebody is coming after you, I'll be there to stand with you against that mess.
I talked to an actual union organizers today and they were like "yeah 90% of people on Twitter are insane and wrong about actual union organizing. It's a slow and unglamorous process and it feels like very few people actually understand how it works." and I cannot tell you the wave of validation and relief I felt there.
As a newly minted president of the executive board of our baby union:. THIS.
Choosing to interpret this as you unionizing babies.
Did they actually not take Osama bin Laden off of the no fly list? What, just in case he comes back?
me: i really dont get why non-floridians lose their fucking shit when they see a beach. it’s just sand and water. who gives a fuck
also me: *sees one (1) mountain* ohohohoohohohohoh holy SHIT holy fuck that’s a big fuCKING ROCK
i love this post. i have never related to anything less
me, grown up in the Cascades range: *sees open plains*
me: oohhoh no. no ba.d . where . are teh rocks. wheres the woter. oh god it’s just drit everywhere for a million miles I need TREES dammit where are my lumber guardians
Me, grew up in Nebraska, the Great Plains: *see a forest*
Me: wHy ar e there s.o man y trEes??? They all g.ott so BiG wher is th skY
Me: Grows up in Boston, mostly travels to cities and Central America: *travels to the Southwest*
Me: where is everyone? Where is everything? What great calamity flatten this world?
Me: Grows up in rural Australia, travels to Europe: Green? How so much green?? Paddocks aren’t green! Why is it full of green grass like a cartoon??
Me: Grew up in the American Midwest *arrives on the coastline of any ocean, sprinting up and down the beach very fast* SHARKS? SHARKS?SHARKS? SHARKS? SHARKS? SHARKS?
Monkey very excited about exploring new biome.
i have to carefully avoid thinking too hard about any time period before like the 1900s because i start thinking about all the dead babies and i fucking lose it
like!!!! i trully cannot countenance any argument that the past was better when nearly HALF of all young children died.
whenever I wonder about why humanity started getting so much nicer in the second half of the 20th century I conclude that it may be related to the fact that we weren’t constantly surrounded by tiny skeletons.
yeah.
the messed up thing is that I’ve heard literal history teachers (and my own parents) say that the people of the past were used to it and that it didn’t have as big an effect on them as it would have had on us…which is absolutely untrue and so, so freaking dehumanizing - see the 14th century poem ‘Pearl’, in which a father mourns the loss of his infant daughter, with palpable pain
Since in that spot it slipped from me I wait, and wish, and oft complain; Once it would bid my sorrow flee, And my fair fortune turn again; It wounds my heart now ceaselessly, And burns my breast with bitter pain. Yet never so sweet a song may be As, this still hour, steals through my brain, While verity I muse in vain How clay should her bright beauty clot; O Earth! a brave gem thou dost stain, My own pearl, precious, without spot!
I think…that some people have difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of death in the past and so, choose to believe that the ones experiencing it were different from them
oh man, Pearl fucked me up so bad when I first read it in university. We know nothing about the Pearl poet (who also wrote Gawain and the Green Knight, plus two other poems, called Patience and Cleanness), though we have four of their poems, and based on the vivid language and the subjects of the poems it’s tempting to infer things about the poet’s life. and I have a really really hard time imagning the Pearl poet was not a parent, bc Pearl is this beautifully wrought poem, with intricate alliteration and repetition and a really thoughtful exploration of the theology that is supposed to comfort us (was supposed to comfort them) when contemplating the death of someone beloved–and at the end of the poem, in this vision where the father is beholding his dead daughter in the paradise of the New Jerusalem in heaven, when she turns to go he can’t help but dive into the stream that separates them, whereupon he suddenly wakes and finds himself alone.
Sometimes the values of the past are a bit strange to us and we have trouble imagining ourselves caring about the things they care about, and sometimes the common bond of humanity shines through in medieval or ancient literature so bright that it astounds you. Pearl definitely belongs in the latter category for me.
By the way, if you’re ever wondering why subsistence farmers of the past tended to be conservative and resist revolutions even though they were getting the worst possible end of the stick, it’s related to this.
Because a bad harvest or a famine didn’t typically look like people starving. That happened when things were apocalyptic, but it was much more common to simply have bad years where there was enough for everyone to survive, but not quite enough to be healthy about it. And do you want to know what that looked like, for subsistence farmers who had to do hard farm labor to grow their food?
It looked like the adults in their prime having to eat their fill while they watched their children and elderly parents not get enough. It meant watching your parents nobly turn away half of their portion, and eating a full hearty meal while you watched your three year old kid beg for more food. Because if you were an adult in your prime and you didn’t eat your fill, you would not have the strength to work the fields, come planting and next harvest and grain preparation. And your entire family would surely die the next year.
But eating that much less typically would not kill your parents or your kids. Typically. It didn’t cause them to keel over and die of starvation directly. What it did was make them more vulnerable to disease. So every year your town had a bad harvest, every year war meant you lost food to the army, whether your own or a hostile one? You were rolling dice. Was this the year your youngest kid would get a winter cold and not have the strength to fight it off? Was this the year your mother finally caught a fever and didn’t wake up in the morning? Maybe, who knew.
So when some revolutionary came around asking you to risk disruption and chaos and possibly war to improve things … what’s going through your head? Trauma. You’re thinking of the two kids you already lost, the bad winter where your father passed, and this fucker is asking you to roll those dice again.
And tradition was so important for the same reason. These subsistence farmers relied heavily on horizontal social ties to get them through individual bad harvests. If you had a good year, you contributed to festival feasts and feted your neighbors, so they would do the same for you if you had a bad year. You did everything you could to ensure that a bad harvest had to occur to the entire town to make you roll the dice. And that meant participating in all of the local traditions, and being on good social terms with your neighbors, and it often meant being in good standing with the local religious organization. Tradition wasn’t just a set of obscure actions, it was a necessary component of not rolling the dice on withholding food from your suffering kid while you rolled dice in your head about whether or not they would die.
There’s a line in the Two Towers movie that wasn’t in the original: Theoden saying “No parent should have to bury their child.”
It wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t be. Because Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949. And while parents grieved horribly for their lost children… everyone just knew that parents buried their children. A lot. That women bore three or six or eleven children, from when they were 16 or 18 or 20, until they were about 40, and buried almost half of them.
The line wouldn’t have been in the book, not because parents didn’t grieve, not because 1/3 of all people’s children died (of course, wealthy families were much less prone to infant mortality), but because at the time, nobody could imagine a world where it was unnatural for parents to see their children die.
By the time LotR was written, infant mortality had improved greatly. But that’s not the world he grew up in, and he wrote LotR after serving in WWI. As far as he could tell, “more children are living through their first few years” could just mean “there’s been a war so fewer children are being born.”
It’s not that Tolkien couldn’t write about a deeply grieving parent. It’s not that Middle Earth is so directly based on European middle ages that he designed that same level of child mortality into the background of his worldbuilding. It’s just that, he wouldn’t have that parent even imply, “it’s against the natural order of things,” because such a concept was outside of his experience. (It’s not against nature. The natural order of things, for a couple million years, has been that about 1/3 to ½ of all human children will not live through puberty.)
Grief was constant.
So was callousness developed to stave off grief.
So was mourning so deep it was almost catatonia; people got lost in their thoughts and just… stopped interacting with the world around them.
Part of the industry and productivity changes in latter half of the 20th century was due to communities not spending so much time either grieving or panicking about who would be gone tomorrow.
Fathers mourning their sons is, in fact, a big part of Tolkien’s work.
But not in shock; In despair
Fathers mourning their
sons is, in fact, a big part
of Tolkien’s work.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Vaccines work.
i get where that 'u are not immune to cult conditioning' sentiment comes from, but if u spend any time actually reading cult stories u notice pretty quickly that there are always ppl who do successfully resist, ppl who leave when things start getting bad and ppl who see through the bullshit in the first place. there is a large gradation in susceptibility to con artists and there are things u can do to get better at spotting them. treating cult leaders like they're irresistible mind control supergeniuses is kinda just doing their propagandizing for them.
The important thing to emphasise with the “you are not immune to cult conditioning” phrase is that there is nothing inherently different about people who join cults. It doesn’t mean cults are all powerful mind control, it means you’re not smarter, stronger, or more moral than a cult victim. It can happen to you too, so stay vigilant, educate yourself on cult tactics, and treat cult victims with dignity and respect.
what the fuuuuuck
this is a short horror story
Please make sure to reblog this with the explanation you guys:
The toddler doesn’t know Alexa is a name; as far as they’re concerned it’s a word that makes things happen. If the kid was saying “please play baby shark” it would mean literally the same thing to them because they don’t really understand language yet.
The toddler is mimicking adult behavior because they have seen adults say things that start with “Alexa” and have learned that starting a request with “Alexa” makes it more likely to be fulfilled. This kid has learned something about how their world works purely through observation! This isn’t a bad thing! It’s just been misapplied and it’s up to the parents to correct their speech as they grow enough to understand the difference.
lemony snicket did more for me as an abused kid than any social worker
im not saying the series was perfect far from it but daniel handler saw kids as people as vulnerable people who got hurt and taken advantage of and ignored by the ppl meant to prevent that and he made a series for these kids that acknowledged openly sometimes it wont actually get better and sometimes ur support system isnt going to help u and that doesnt mean ur bad and that doesnt mean ur alone
There's discouse on finnish reddit concerning the finnish transgender law. Grown-ass people are actually unironically claiming to not understand
Everything else I was prepared for but point number one takes the cake. Everything else could be excused as something that people who have never had to think about these things wouldn't have thought of before, but you'd think it's pretty obvious why a person whose passport doesn't match the owner wouldn't get through customs at an airport. How does an adult with average cognitive skills pretend to not understand that with a straight face. Like even if you've got no qualms about being willfully malicious, wouldn't you be at least slightly embarrassed by insisting you are that stupid?
