Unfortunately, by “dubious” I was only thinking of “does that really seem like an Actual word”, rather than anything more interesting – examples of “more dubious” words by this measure would be Binious and Kanoon (both of which apparently refer to musical instruments). If you’re looking for dick jokes, the nearest match is probably Remating.

my totally uninformed take on The True Meaning Of The Word Bisexual:

the word was originally used to mean “attracted to both” i.e. “attracted to all two”

and when it became more widely understood that there are in fact more than two genders, suddenly it became necessary to disambiguate between “all” and “two”

and different people made different choices (or assumptions) and proceeded to yell at each other for Getting It Wrong

as with all such cases, my opinion is that in practice the original word is irretrievably ambiguous and we need new terms for both(!) interpretations

“pansexual” is attested; i don’t know of a good word for the other one. twosexual? disexual? bi-sexual?

“Ambisexual” looks promising. Anyone know if it’s taken?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - A Dialogue On Love

I often hear it said that abusers are charismatic and good at manipulating others, and I’m sure that is true sometimes but in my experience they are often… not?

The abusers I have interacted with personally ended up being really childish and shallow-minded at their core. Often even pitiful in a way.

And this very site has many highly-visible examples of people who openly abuse others and talk about abusing others and people ignore it as long as the targets are political enemies of some sort. I was never very good at tolerating that kind of thing.

It’s not just tumblr either. There is this trend where parents try to shame their children on the internet or make high-profile posts bragging about whatever abusive punishment they came up with to “correct” their child.

It is not subtle at all, but other parents tend to approve of it because they share the same awful ideas about proper child-rearing.

It turns out that abuse is not always a covert, deceitful thing. It is sometimes obvious and unapologetic yet tolerated anyway because the victims supposedly “deserve” it somehow.

And my solution to that is to never play along with that.

This is not just because no one deserves to be abused, though that is true as well.

If I see someone abusing others, I immediately lose all trust in that person even if I agree with their facts or values. I start expecting them to eventually turn that abuse towards me the moment I displease them enough, even if we would agree 99% of the time. Anyone who willingly hurts others like that is not on my team.

“Jingle-Jangle” is actually a technical term is social science research that describes the challenge of measuring/describing/agreeing on important sociological concepts because either people are using different words to describe the same experience (jingle) and/or they are using the same words to describe very different experiences (jangle).  

(it also could be the reverse. I’m not looking it up to double check)

In my work we keep getting caught in the jingle-jangle jungle around the term “empathy”.  Really. I swear. I’m not just beating you over the head with the lessons of this cryptic parable. I really did have to spend 2 hours this week debating the difference between “empathy” and “listening”.  Oh, you think that’s obvious but IT IS NOT!

Anyway, it’s a real term for a real thing that happens all the fucking time and if you don’t notice it happening you will find yourself arguing with people you don’t actually disagree with. 

The terms seem to have been introduced by Jack Block in Three tasks for personality psychology, published in Developmental science and the holistic approach (pp. 155-164), ed. Lars R. Bergman, Robert B. Cairns, Lars-Goran Nilsson, Lars Nystedt.

I haven’t been able to find anywhere to read it online so far.

My biggest pet peeve is being talked to AS SOON as i wake up. I hate that shit. Stop tryin to communicate with me. Stop askin me questions. Im tryna understand the universe all over again dont talk to me yet ur gonna confuse me and piss me off.

⚠️ MORNING PEOPLE DO NOT INTERACT! ⚠️

I tell people that I am not a morning person and what they hear is ‘I purposely chose to stay up til the wee hours and then it’s my own fault for not getting enough sleep when I am awakened at a normal time when normal people should be up, and I just need to correct this failing to live a happier life’.

What I am ACTUALLY telling them is ‘I have delayed sleep phase disorder, where in my circadian rhythm is different from theirs and my brain does not produce melatonin the way theirs does. When I am forced to get up before I have had a full 9 hours sleep–especially if I am awakened during sleep cycle–I am working at an extremely reduced ability level and will be unable to work at my peak efficiency and effectiveness until the afternoon.

‘As a result, I may rely on caffeine and other stimulants for the first 5 hours of the day, which also contributes to insomnia, and burnout in the late afternoon means I may snack on carbs for the energy boost. It is the equivalent of having permanent jet lag such as when you are 5 hours off from everyone around you.

‘It is not something that can be cured, only a condition to manage, and requires the people around me to make reasonable accommodations such as not trying to force me to interact with them and be decisional when I first wake up.

‘I also have ADHD, which means I have difficulty working when there is noise and chatter preventing me from being able to concentrate. I need calm quiet to be able to do my best work, and the only time I actually have calm quiet is when the rest of the world is asleep.

‘During the day, I artificially create this quiet during the day, using noise-cancelling headphones when I am forced to work in a noisy environment, or by working alone in a quiet space. And when you deny me that quiet, I expend a tremendous amount of energy just trying to focus. And I am much more likely to miss steps, or make errors, affecting the quality of my work as well as how long it takes me to complete.’

And what people hear is ‘I am lazy and unwilling to change,’ when in reality THEY are the ones unwilling to change because it is inconvenient, or requires them to be considerate of others.

So, yeah. I am not a morning person.

Hey op *are you me?* This. ThisthisthisThisTHISTHISTHIS. all of thiiiiiis.

personally i believe shakespeare would be thrilled to see his plays turned into trashy teen rom coms

you say “turned into” like they weren’t already,

Rhea’s Day in the Sun (desktop/laptop) Click the image to download the correct size for your desktop or laptop in high resolution

my mum got this on the car because she thought it was cute but she doesn’t know what it means 😭😭

I told her what it means and she was mortified lmaooooo

what’s the problem with blue lives matter?

hmmmmm yes I see

So whats wrong with blue lives matter?

American police force receives an amount of hero worship disproportionate to their actions. In particular, the slogan implies that the job is so dangerous that cops are justified in killing anyone they suspect to be threatening.

In actual reality, a third of people killed by a stranger are killed by cops, and cops are statistically less likely to die on the job than postmen and pizza drivers (and even then from traffic accidents or woods-related stuff) so they’re not justified in this.

That’s before I get to the racist stuff.

hey, um

his username means “evil member-of-the-literally-blueblooded-aristocracy”.

as in, he says himself, right there in his username, that he’s a bad guy.

i think this might be a joke blog.

Letter To My Father

I think I’ve finally, finally understood the basis of my father’s parenting style. Which is also why I can finally articulate its fatal flaw.

My dad recognised that there are certain virtues you need to know, feel, and reflexively practice. Things like thrift, honesty, reliability, hard work, perseverance, attention to detail, and not complaining instead of acting. So, he did the obviously logical thing and tried to instill them in me through explicit instruction.

The thing is, virtues generally can’t be taught. Knowing about them is only part of the problem. You have to be able to feel that they are true. And that can only happen when they’re harnessed in the service of doing what you actually value. Of bringing about the satisfaction of your own purpose, rather than anyone else’s. Of creating the world you want to live in.

Which meant I didn’t immediately get them. I would have to act in the world until noticing the patterns in my own actions made them click. The problem is, he was terrified of the ways I might hurt myself if I didn’t know these things. So he didn’t see giving me the opportunities to make mistakes until they stuck as being the most important things he could be doing if he wanted me to Get this.

And, well, I just didn’t live in a world in which this was true. My time wasn’t my own, so I couldn’t use it to pursue projects that might fulfill me. Instead I had to use it going to school or doing homework or working in the garden or on otherwise externally imposed tasks.

But the problem is, not a single one of those tasks inculcated a sense of meaning in me, because none of them affected my goals. They didn’t contribute toward anything. It was clear from primary school that I would do as well in school whether I showed up every day and did all the homework, as if I showed up once a week and never took notes. I was once bumped from grade 5 into grade 6 for two weeks and followed all the lessons perfectly, despite showing up in media res.

And yet so many hours of my day were directed toward this. I had to take notes in class. Would whether I took notes affect anything about my education? Empirically, no. Would doing homework affect anything? Empirically, no. Would studying for tests affect anything? Empirically, no. Would going to class affect anything? Empirically, no. I’d even do just as well on exams, despite all of this.

Every single time I tested whether something adults were forcing me to spend time on affected my education in any way, the answer was always no. Literally the only things in school which affected the progress of my learning were having conversations with teachers and getting new books. Everything else was a distraction, and I knew it was a distraction. And once you know that, it’s impossible to value the thing anymore.

So I always hated being in school, and in addition to this had to deal with the fact that all my peers had it out for me. But this combination of experiences - meaningless dead time loosely related to learning, and constant bullying - was allotted a huge amount of my time by forces external to me. And when it wasn’t that, it was something else my parents had decided I should be doing.

Furthermore, at the time, I didn’t have a very secure sense of property. Most of my things weren’t really “owned” by me, so much as they were treated as being on loan from my parents. My school treated it as axiomatic that any student’s belongings could be taken by teachers, and the other students took it that my belongings could be taken because I didn’t fight back at the time. (That’s another essay.)

I also didn’t have much persistence for anything I owned. We moved a lot, based on my parents’ plans, so pretty much at random (from my subjective perspective) I’d have to choose which things I’d have to abandon to move to a new place. And, of the things I carried, some of them were on loan from my parents, so who knew when I might stop having them? In my early years, I cried a lot any time the things I thought of as my possessions were taken from me. Over time, I just realised I had to stop caring about my things, because they weren’t really mine anyway.

My father is quite familiar with classical economics. He knew that in societies where people have an insecure sense of property, they also don’t value labour. He also knew that I wouldn’t have had a secure sense of property and I didn’t value labour. In retrospect, I’m kicking myself wondering how he didn’t put these two together. Or, if he did, why he didn’t make the obvious adjustment.

(Things started improving in this vein when I started getting a weekly allowance, but definitely the best thing they could have done would have been to give me more opportunities to earn more money, plus a belief that I’d get to keep things I paid for.)

So, I lived in a world where most of my time was taken by others, and nothing I made or acquired persisted. So I just gave up on the outside world. Turned off and dropped out as far as external circumstances were concerned. Why should I care about anything going on outside of me? It wasn’t like any choice I made would affect it.

So, instead, I exclusively paid attention to the inside world. I thought and studied and theorised. I followed whatever was interesting until I could find cool surprises. I solved problems only when the rewards of the action existed solely in my head. After all, if I solved a problem in the outside world, there was no reason to think that I would get to keep anything valuable that was produced.

But I could always keep knowledge and carry it around inside me. Knowledge was the only thing no one else could take away, so it was the only thing I cared about. My father always thought I was a wuss because I couldn’t take even minor pain. But the problem was, I couldn’t take minor pain for no reason. What, you want me to do this slightly painful work that will have exactly zero benefit to me? Of course I’m going to complain!

Meanwhile, at seven years old I was coming in covered in ant bites every day, because I couldn’t stop performing experiments on ant colonies to figure out how they worked. The collective agency of ant colonies was fascinating, and anything I learned about them was truly mine. That information belonged to me; earned by my own investigation. And if I really was gaining something from it, I could endure however much pain being covered in fire ants brought me. Just not the stubbed toe I might get from doing externally-imposed work.

But it’s really obvious why my dad’s lifestyle contributed meaning and virtue to him, but his attempt to propagate it didn’t contribute meaning to me. His family was actually living at the edge of their productivity. Any work he did was really work that would contribute to all of them. If he built furniture, he’d sit on that furniture. If he planted crops, he’d eat those crops. His actions improved his world, so he identified with them.

My actions didn’t improve my world. The chores I was assigned weren’t actually at the edge of our productive potential. Important things weren’t left to me until late in my teens, so in the meantime any work I did was work whose value I’d never see. It would never provide anything to me. Even working in the garden was completely meaningless, because I didn’t consume any of the plants we grew (other than sorrel, the one thing I liked being involved with).

Nietzsche’s idea of master morality vs slave morality is really just about this. Master morality is identification with your actions, because their consequences belong to you. You act because it will bring you benefit, so you want to act. Slave morality is alienation from your actions, because their consequences don’t belong to you. You act to avoid punishment for inaction, but action itself doesn’t bring you anything but the absence of punishment.

And as a child I had a huge amount of slave morality because I had the circumstances that foster the subjective experience of slavery. I’ll call this experience of the world ‘slave condition’. I gradually shook off this slave morality in various areas of my life, but it actually only started coming off at home by complete accident.

In my mid-teens, my dad started assigning me work in the garden any time he saw me walking around unoccupied. This pretty much destroyed my subjective quality of life. Until then, the only place I’d gotten meaning in life was being able to pace and think, and now I wasn’t able to because any time I tried to use for that would be stolen. So I just became suicidally depressed because continued life no longer contributed to any feeling of gain. During this time, I eventually gave up on complaining when forced to work, and instead just started internally fantasising about death any time I was working.

However, I think he misinterpreted this as me somehow having acquired the relevant virtues that correlate with not complaining, when what had actually happened was that I no longer valued my life enough to argue for it. But after a few months of this, he started trusting me to have more control over my life. And then, the moment I was exchanging this otherwise meaningless labour for control over my own life, I suddenly became way more enthusiastic about working.

Which of course was the point at which I started acquiring virtue, and my father started trusting me more, and I started acquiring more virtue. A virtuous cycle, if you will. However, what this means is that basically the entire course of my learning to be a real person happened between 15 and now. I’ve had 5 years to become a person, because for the first 15 years I was in the stasis of slave condition.

And you know what’s the most horrifying thing about this? It was an accident! The ideal way of raising a child, it’s now apparent to me, is to give them as much power to control their lives as possible - within moderate safeguards - while letting them keep or lose what they earn or squander. Basically, putting them in the master condition so they develop master morality. And then they’ll have all the virtue they need to succeed in the world.

Meanwhile, I was in the slave condition for the first 15 years, and so had slave morality. It’s only because my father accidentally pushed me over the edge from “low meaning in life” to “no meaning in life” and then mistook depressed nihilism for virtue once that I ever got placed in the master condition in the first place. And then I’ve spent the past 5 years trying to develop increasing levels of master morality.

But it is utterly horrifying that I could have just never made it due to this one simple mistake. The mistake of thinking that one must be a master to be allowed to be in the master condition, instead of realising that the master condition creates masters. I could totally be like one of my uncles right now if I’d either failed to get depressed or my father had been better at accurately judging emotions. I was saved by a coin toss. *internal screaming*

I mean, luckily enough, now I’ve got it. Now I’ve fully internalised that I can make my own world. Now I value working hard, because I get to keep what I work for. I love earning money so much - not even because of how much money I’ll have, but because I made that dollar. My life is on a clear upward trajectory, and it only took insights my father already knew, plus one that apparently he didn’t:

To truly value action, actions must bring value.

I expect this is still an ongoing problem, even now that I’ve emigrated. When I left, the only notable conflict between my parents seemed to be over division of labour. My father wanted my mother to do work she didn’t value, and thought she was lazy for not wanting to do it. But he doesn’t seem to notice that the things that bring value to him aren’t the same ones that bring value to other people. No one else in the family wants to work on the garden because the garden is effectively his hobby.

If you want people to be active and motivated, you have to let them do things that will actually improve their lives. You have to let them take actions that improve the quality of things they actually care about - not things you think they should care about. I hope my parents realise this in time for my younger brother to become a master on something other than a coin toss.

So Anglish is a fascinating concept and I thought I’d try to write some libertarian (Freedomish) stuff in the language but as it turns out, trying to write about law, philosophy, and military force without using any loanwords from latin, greek, and old french is completely impossible and I have a new appreciation for the horror inherent to the concept of newspeak.

For reference, “Non-Aggression Principle” becomes “No-Attack Idea”.

“Ethical” becomes “goodken”

“Stance” in this context becomes “outlook”

“Inherently” becomes “in itself”

“Illegitimate” becomes, simply, “Not right”.

So I got as far as

“The non-attack idea is a goodken outlook which says that attacking is in itself not right.”

Unfortunately, “idea” is from the greek.

Step 1: Translate into a Germanic language with slightly fewer Mediterranean loan words

Step 2: Excise remaining loan-words

Step 3: Back into English

[0] I am deeply suspicious of attack. It has a clear etymological line to Italy (Viz: Attacare) but it appears maybe Italy took it from Germanic in the first place (Viz: Stakon) so I’ll use it.

[1] Rightwise rather than righteous because “-teous” comes from re-aligning the word with “courteous,” from the French (which is not a problem when the French is from the German, but in this case it is from the Latin)

[2] Turns out “purpose” is from the Latin as well, as is the shorter “use” but “use” is so short (and therefore, hah, “useful”) that it has completely supplanted older words. Searching through Danish and German synonyms, when translated into English they all become “use-” derivative words. Regard, thankfully, comes from the German.

[3] Turns out all common synonyms for “force,” and “interference” are latin. I almost ended up at “mightful meddling,” except of course “meddle” from the Latin “miscere” so nope. Involvement? Nope. 

MoreRightwise

An elf is stalking Eveland – the elf of sharedom. All the mights of old Eveland have stepped into a holy gathering to cast out this elf: Christish Allfather and Russlandish King, Metternich and Guizot, Frankish Rooters and Dutchlandish townwarder-tattletales.

I like to say good folksy words when I can, instead of making up new ones. Like so:

A good oversetting (putting words from one tongue to another) doesn’t have to be word-for-word.

— Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (via frenchrollo)

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

A little doodle for one the most beautiful lines from any poem, The Old Astronomer.

This is not a little doodle. This. THIS. This is fucking MAGIC. You have captured pure wonder and whimsy and romance and bliss and that almost melancholy wholeness when you look up at the sky and just feel the smallness of your being and the grandness of the universe. All this captured with a lover’s eye. We cannot see her face but I feel the tender passionate ardour for this petite but mighty creature in the world. While at the same time I feel the bittersweet swoon of wanting to be gazed upon myself with such whole and overwhemling admiration and love. It is goddamn masterful.

I am fucking following your tumblr charliebowater you are amazing.

THAT’S THE NICEST COMMENT I’VE EVER READ.

also this is your irregularly scheduled reminder that if you or anyone you know is hungry all the time despite eating normal or larger than normal amounts, get them fucking tested for celiac. it’s not on the standard symptoms list or at least it wasnt last i checked, but i was hungry for over a decade before i got diagnosed and went gluten free and learned what it feels like to be full (weird and kinda surreal). your kid says they’re always hungry? they try to sneak snacks all the time, eat too-large portions, never stop seeking out food? they’re not a glutton. something is wrong. go find out what it is.

So, the thing where lack-of-nutrition makes you hungry all the time, and screws with your metabolism, is an acutal thing worth being aware of. Note that this isn’t just a matter of calories; if you’re missing other nutrients, your body will know it needs more nutrients and tell you so. And it isn’t complex enough to express “I want more nutrients but we’re good on calories”.

So, yeah. Check stuff out with actual doctors and things.

There should be an extension that allows you to mark certain websites as bullshit so you don’t make the mistake of visiting them twice. Does such a thing exist?

Turns out it does! It’s called Personal Blocklist. The one for Firefox has poor English in the description, which might mean it’s shady? I dunno. But also this only exists for Google, not for StartPage or DuckDuckGo. So now I have to choose between hiding data from Big Brother and punishing shitty websites with all their pop-ups and obnoxious ads. Which should I do?

You might be able to hack something together with Foxreplace? And/or, uBlock Origin or uMatrix should be able to prevent the sites from actually loading if you do click through to them.

Cunnilingus class is cancelled until further notice

A former progressive sex store worker conducted some great blowjob classes, but:

Predictably, we’re treated to a thousand more words about how men fail their female partners, how capitalism ruins everything that patriarchy hasn’t ruined already, blah, blah, blah. 

Yet… Y’know who else performs cunnilingus? Lesbians! Bi women! A variety of other gender combinations! One can only assume that the author believes they are sufficiently in tune with the earth goddess to perfectly pleasure a partner without need for pointers. 

As for the dudes, why wouldn’t they take lessons from someone who says things like this?

If we’ve learned anything about pedagogy over the centuries, it’s that the most effective teachers assume their students are both incompetent and don’t care that they’re incompetent.

But surely she’s not 100% representative of the kinds of people who work at these stores, right? As a matter of fact, her coworkers are “young feminists and queers with college degrees and great haircuts.” And, pray tell, what was the sales style?  “[W]e stuffed intersectional, trauma-aware education in the bag as the gift with purchase.”

What about this signals to men that they won’t get belittled if they ask the wrong question? Could you imagine how much invective, misplaced anger and high theory gobbledygook she would have to suppress to power through the 10-minute post-demo Q&A? One wrong move and she starts on long digression on how “power differentials” mean that any “yes” from some poor schlub’s wife of ten years is suspect. I’m glad she never got to teach a cunnilingus class to a room of eager men.

The discomfort caused by feeling by out of place is valid. We recognize it, but only when the person feeling out of place has identity markers we’re supposed to care about.  Men are chided for not expressing feelings, but express the wrong feelings or express the right feelings incorrectly and you’re still in hot water. I can tell where I don’t belong and behave accordingly.

The author treats customers like allies. The leader insults the ally, says “if it’s not about you, you won’t be offended” and then sees if they flinch. Makes zero effort at compromise and wonders why so few flock to her side. It’s no wonder men aren’t signing up to hear her talk about pleasure!

The solution, one might suggest, is for male sex stores to step in. Such stores exist, much older than the pink and fluffy downtown boutiques, in the edge of town due to the taboos of another era. You can find them between warehouses and garages, or under elevated interstates. Given the difficulties of funding a business that dealt in questionably legal material and suffering the occasional raid, the mob was often deeply involved and sex work crept up in the margins.

These stores never really stuck the landing on the transition away from porn on physical media. Working under the red neon lights out at 18493 Industrial Access Road is nobody’s feminist lifestyle choice, so the “sex nerd” types who can help you pick out the perfect butt plug aren’t showing up.

Most challenging of all is that the incredible leaps in how openly women can talk about their sexual needs, performance and interests. Men’s sexuality, when not considered vaguely ridiculous, is dangerous.

Given how some feminists have pinned their moral authority on the threat of male sexuality, nobody is coming to the rescue.

Sure, stores exist to cater to gay men, but they mostly either follow the old porn-and-slatwall model or more gift-oriented stores with a sea of pride flags and cheeky greeting cards between door and dildo.

So who will step up to create a new positive masculine sexuality? Not male academics. Gravely outnumbered in the relevant departments, they tow the line: male thought is the base instinct of violent brutes, heterosexual relationships are to be analyzed through the muddy lens of Marxist power dynamics. These are the sort of people who, when asked for a positive model of masculinity, can only come up with better ways for men to serve women.

The PUAs have some interest in making men better lovers, right? Sadly, the dominant style in that community doesn’t care about a partner’s pleasure. Given The dominance in PUA of clever hacks selling snake oil to chumps, you probably wouldn’t want to do business with them anyway.

MRAs are sad and mad and little else. If they were going to develop a vision more robust than punishing their ex-wives, they’d have done it already.

That leaves capitalists. Pitching a product as “[X] but for men” is obviously sellable, at least judging by the jet black yogurt containers and the gunmetal gray body wash at Target. Selling empowerment works for everything from sneakers to Naval enlistment, so why not cunnilingus? Pay a few sensitivity readers to keep it safe from the hostile Twitter mobs, add some dark wood accents and… boom!

The counter-argument is that those women-owned sex stores are mission-based, often cooperatives, and thus probably not that profitable.

But a boy can dream, can’t he?

great, we’re five minutes from pivoting to “only dudebros go down on women”

Growing up, I was told from many sources (books, tv, parents, teachers, inspirational quotes) that you should never half ass anything. That in everything you do, you should give your all. Honestly, that’s a recipe for misery and burnout. You need to half ass most things so you have enough ass left to give your whole ass to the things you care about. Or at least I do.

Executive function is absolutely a thing. But there’s a lot of things that are Done Better if you do them carefully, and doing them badly ends up being a spoon drain. The trick is learning to figure out which ones…

also asking yourself occasionally, “does this deserve my whole ass?” because quite often the task deserves about 28% of the left cheek

When I subscribed to “whole ass for all” it wound up an excuse to give no ass at all. Because if it was gonna be half assed it allegedly was not worth doing and as a disabled person a lot of things simply cannot be whole assed. Like, ya just cannot. Getting something, anything done is better than getting nothing whatsoever done though. Half assing and quarter assing has honestly changed my whole life. Whole assing for disabled or neurodivergent peoples is a toxic and destructive mindset. Break it. Love yourself. Do what you can when you can. Askf or help as needed. It’ll be enough.

Even whole assing everything for neurotypical people can be unhealthy. And America, at the very least, has an unhealthy outlook on productivity and an abusive relationship with competition.

You do not need to be the best at everything to have a happy life. You do not need to give everything your all to be happy. Give yourself some slack and flip off anyone who says you’re not doing enough. They’re not the ones who have to live with exhaustion.

Plenty of people have outlined what’s fucked up about that “white male atheism is fundamentally different from Marginalized Atheism” post, but I just hit on the main reason it bothers me:

It positions religion as the human default, from which you are excused only if you’re sufficiently damaged. Like “I guess it’s okay if you’re shipping to cope” – if it’s just a consolation prize for being broken and pitiable, it’s not really okay at all. It’s okay if you can’t be religious because of trauma, but always remember that this is a personal flaw, a result of your damage, and that *healthy people* are religious.

Under this schematic, atheism isn’t simply another way to be human and think human thoughts. It’s a deviation from the “natural”, i.e. religious, state, and you’d better have a damn good reason for going against the grain. You think you can defect from normal society just because you *want* to? That’s just your white male privilege talking. Marginalized people have suffered enough to earn the right to defect, but you’re gonna shut up and praise God like a normal person.

…actually, I wonder if something similar is what underlies the ambient hatred and mockery of weirdness in some corners of SJ. You know the sort of person I mean – they’re all for nonconformity as long as it explicitly aligns with an axis of marginalization. Things like pride parades are fine, but things like furries and cishet crossdressers and middle-aged virgins with extensive action figure collections are gross, embarrassing, fundamentally cringey.

This sort of mindset, though it’s carved out exceptions for the sufficiently oppressed, is conservative to the core. It’s okay to be weird if you’ve earned it through a lifetime of suffering, but if you’re just weird for the sake of being weird – well, what’s your excuse? Instead of interrogating why we need to shame the eccentric in the first place, it’s merely shifted certain people from “eccentric” to “respectable”.

I See Trad People seems relevant here.

(Bolding-for-emphasis mine.)