I told @mistresskabooms over and over again that she could come to me about anything, and I'd still love her tomorrow.
She asked me about what the words "wage gap" meant when she heard them on the news. She told me when her friends in elementary school were "pretending to be mean to their imaginary girlfriends," and she asked me if she'd done the right thing by leaving "and taking their girlfriends with me." She told me when the kids on the bus started calling her a faggot. She talked to me when she read Night in school.
And she told me she's a girl.
If kids don't feel safe coming to you about everything, they won't come to you about anything. Not anything that matters, anyway, because they won't be sure that the thing they're coming to you about won't get them into trouble.
But, of course, that's exactly the point here. These things - we know this, right? - aren't about "keeping kids safe." They're about control, and they're about keeping kids ignorant and - most of all - afraid.
If you are afraid of being contaminated mentally, of being accidentally ruined, of seeing something Bad and becoming Bad yourself, you become easier to control. If you understand that reading about something doesn't mean you agree with it, and that words and ideas may be scary but that simply knowing that an idea exists, or reading about a thing, does not make you that thing, you become much harder to control. You become harder to control because you become more able to test the things you think that you know against new ideas, things like "are gay people Bad, actually?" and "what if a pregnant person could have more legal rights than a corpse?" and "what did the water and sky look like before the EPA?" or "wouldn't ranked choice voting be neat?"
The idea of "mental contamination" is big in Evangelical circles, but that ain't the only place, not by far. If you're thinking, "Man, that idea sounds like a concept that shows up a lot in leftist spaces and on Tumblr," you are correct.
This concept is a concept of control. It does not exist to make you stronger. It exists to make you afraid and to keep you from questioning yourself and the world around you. This lack of questioning becomes like wearing a cast around your leg forever. Technically, yes, it keeps your ankle safe, but in the process, the lack of exercise withers your calf muscle.
This leaves you with a worldview that cannot stand up to any kind of meaningful stress or challenge. Things are right because they're right, not because you can defend why they're right. These kind of default beliefs are fragile, soft, and easily shattered or shredded.
This shit doesn't protect kids. It makes them fragile and weak, unable to formulate worldviews they understand well enough to defend and worldviews strong enough to hold up to the rigors and stresses of life.
