#ageism

dingdongyouarewrong:

dingdongyouarewrong:

the way elderly people in large swaths of western culture are treated is honestly so sad and evil.

the way so many elderly people are incredibly vulnerable to abuse and how often they get treated as invisible and forgotten and the absolute grief and loneliness and isolation that already comes with growing old and losing so many people around you and then on top of that add how few people even want to interact with the elderly at all and see them as something to ignore and look away from and how little so many people do to mitigate it at all… it’s so sad and evil i hate it so much

Someone in the replies said it perfectly. It’s largely because in our capitalist Western societies (especially the hyper-capitalist United States) your sense of worth is tied to how you can contribute to the economy through labor. This is also a big reason why the physically and intellectually disabled are looked down on, they’re seen as “burdens” who don’t contribute to society.

So once the elderly retire and stop contributing to the economy through their labor, they’re basically seen as has-beens who are now taking up space and not contributing anything. Never mind the fact that they spent decades of their lives toiling away and generating millions of dollars of profit for the economy, what matters is that they’re not doing that now and so now they’re worthless.

There’s also the inherent ableism of ageism. With old age comes disabilities, and unfortunately a lot of abled people are still pretty unsympathetic towards the disabled (even if they think they aren’t). Some families stick their elderly parents in nursing homes because they don’t want to deal with being a caretaker. And I don’t want to shit on that on principle, because a lot of elderly people dorequire tons of care and unfortunately (in North America, at least) we live in an economic system where basically every working-aged adult needs to have a job (unless you’re lucky enough to have a super high-paying job or you sacrifice a lot to be able to afford having someone be able to be a homemaker).

Unfortunately, nursing homes are kind of a huge shitshow because they’re criminally underfunded and the people who work there make minimum wage. There are so many stories of elder abuse coming out of nursing homes because not only are the jobs not attracting the best people, the staff are overworked, underpaid, frustrated, and often unqualified. Just significantly raising wages and hiring more people would make a huge difference.

It’s just so tragic. And you’re right, it’s largely a Western phenomenon because in most other cultures the elderly are honored and their families take great care of them. I have heard a lot of non-Westerners express shock and disgust at the way Western elderly people are treated.

weepycat:

there’s something so sad about how we treat old people nowadays. historically, humans have accomplished so many great things because we valued our elders, took care of them, and gave them meaningful retirement. meanwhile we have seniors aged 60+ working in retail just to survive. can you imagine working your entire life, just to work until you die? in fucking retail? 

old people are not useless, they’re not a drain on the economy, and theyre not all bigoted windbags. theyre people! people! who have lived their entire fucking lives under capitalism. they deserve to retire peacefully and pursue their interests during the final years of their lives. they deserve to be taken care of. they deserve to go with dignity. 

there’s a hundred things wrong with how society views old people, but i never see anyone talking about it.

Try self-love in lieu of Valentine’s Day hubbub, and to hell with complainers. Instead of buying yourself gifts (or, in addition to), let’s let some things go. For example, our societal mandate to be pleasing to the eye.   This is a paraphrased quote from Erin McKean’s fabulous, entertaining, and long-lived blog, A Dress A Day. The relevant part reads: You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to…

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knitmeapony:

regurgitation-imminent:

knitmeapony:

knitmeapony:

Kids.  Teenagers.  As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.

You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.

And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done moreof it.  

You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends.  You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.  

Go.  Document the shit out of your ridiculous life.  Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in.  Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all.  Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Just don’t hurt people.  That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.

@palejoketagged: #I mean no offense but why a 40 y/o on the hellsite

I think I have talked about this before, but because life doesn’t end at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty and thinking that folks are going to fall out of social media or that there won’t always be someone your age and my age and twice both of our ages interested in [insert anything, ever] is a very limiting worldview.  

Somewhere there is a sixty-five year old who unironically loves Taylor Swift’s music and a fifty-two year old writing Superwholock fanfic and a ninty year old who absolutely livesfor the next episode of Archer and a seventy-one year old that can kick anyone’s ass in k-pop trivia.  There will always be these folks, and all the Internet has done is give fans of all ages a chance to interact in a way that they never had before.

Before BBSes and the Internet and Usenet and the World Wide Web and fanrings and forums and social media, those people would just love it in their own way, in the privacy of their own homes.  But now anyone can make an Ao3 account or a basic fansite or tumbl about whatever they want, and sometimes you’re gonna learn those people are old but they still getit, and sometimes you’re going to find out those folks are still kids, twelve or fourteen at the oldest, and marvel at their maturity and skill and attention to detail.  

And that is rad as hell, that is fucking incredible, that is… whatever the kids are saying these days, hah.

As a sidenote, once, about a decade ago, I decided to email one of my favourite authors before she bit it … she was pushing 90 at the time. ( … she’s still alive now).

Anyways, we got to having a long discussion, because I shared my deadname with her late husband, and I actually had quite a long conversation with her.

The part of the conversation I’d like to share with you about this now pushing 100-tear-old author isn’t that she developed a liking for her breakfast eggs from her honeymoon in Vienna, or that her Husband would sometimes steal her drafts to read them as soon as he could, or that she superglued a potted plant to her bookshelf to watch her orange cat try to knock it over and fail.

Nono, I mention this to bring up what she would do as a writing exercise whenever she didn’t feel like writing her serious work.

In short, erotic darkwing duck slashfic. You can find it online.

This is the greatest addition this post has gotten so far.

Because why shouldn’t people later in life have a scene phase?

This may seem like a joke post, and I’ve headlined it in the most deliberately provocative way I could think of, but I’m completely serious.

We as a society seem to have decided that adults over about 30 are just Not Allowed to experiment with their identity or their personal presentation at all. If you come into work or a party suddenly looking considerably different, a lot of the time, people get upset about it - especially if you try something that does not “work”, in other people’s opinions.

At least some of this is directly tied to the fact that certain styles are considered “too young” for a certain phase of somebody’s life, and that it’s automatically “cringe” to not continuously broadcast awareness of the stage of the aging process you’re in (and, by extension, your waning relevance as an agent of social change, and your own proximity to your impending death).

And while there are certainly some elements of maturity that absolutely should be expected of adults (mostly related to not being an asshole or manipulating people significantly younger than oneself), harmlessly experimenting with personal presentation shouldn’t be one of those things.

So we’ve backed ourselves into a corner where you need a Profound Reason to decide to change things up in anything beyond a subtle way. It has gotten to the point where Halloween costume parties are basically our only relief valves on this particular societal pressure (and even those are considered somewhat immature), and where makeover reality TV shows exist specifically to lend structure to something people normally just can’t do.

It gets worse. You know what group of people really, really need the freedom to experiment with their personal presentation with as little judgment as possible?

Transgender people.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people say about late transitioners, “I’d respect them more if they actually dressed their age”. And while I think it absolutely is possible to go to a place with that that’s genuinely creepy (i.e., actual predatory behavior), I think there’s an element of that criticism that’s inherently unfair, because we as a society have decided that experimenting with your presentation is something you’re expected to have finished when you’re an adolescent. And in the case of transgender people, that’s doubly unfair because they often just completely missed that window when they actually were that age.

Also like, autistic people often have idiosyncratic senses of fashion, and sometimes people just (for example) have a hobby doing period costuming.

There are lots of perfectly valid reasons to loosen these expectations, and I think we’re genuinely making life more miserable for everybody by not doing so.

weepycat:

when i was 15, i felt like… really deeply DEEPLY uncomfortable with the fact that there were cameras everywhere at my highschool. the sensation of not being able to walk to class without being monitored somehow really fucked with me for some reason.

this only worsened after seeing this segment on the school news that featured various stupid stuff caught on the hallway cameras, like people falling down or readjusting their underwear when they thought the hallways were empty. 

but they werent. there was someone watching, and they forgot to police their behavior and ended up getting embarrassed for it. everyone laughed at this segment. i remember the classroom being filled with snickers as someone fell flat on their face. i wasn’t a “superwoke” kid or anything, but i didnt think this was funny. i thought it was scary. what if that was me? what if i got caught fixing a wedgie on camera without even knowing it? 

i remember these cameras being used for everything – spotting dress code violations, catching students skipping class, etc. you can argue that they shouldnt have broken the rules, sure, but that doesnt excuse the concept of Being Constantly Watched. 

and what about the times when they weren’t doing something wrong? like when they were walking back from the bathroom or tripping over their own feet? did that warrant embarrassment and shame from their watchful spectators? does existing in a school hallway warrant surveillance? 

this brings me to the concept of anti-shooter architecture. there is a rising interest in school layouts that prepare for the possibility of a shooter roaming the halls. these improvements include bulletproof glass, concrete cover, and…. something scary. 

many of these highschool floor plans include some type of circular or central “watch tower” feature, and the designers actively boast about it being a panopticon. a panopticon. the same thing they use in prisons to enforce the idea that the prisoners are always being watched, though they can never really know when. 

what kind of effect will “anti-shooter architecture” have on kid’s minds? the constant threat of violence is already taking its toll on teenagers who have undergone active shooter drills, and this concept of air-tight security (clear backpacks, metal detectors, camera surveillance, constantly locked doors, etc) is not really an environment you would want to raise a child in, so why are we sticking kids in schools like that for 7-8 hours a day?

which leads into the next thing. many people’s solution to this is more guns, which equates to police presence in schools. ive already seen videos coming out of school cops beating black kids and ordering muslim girls to take off their hijabs. but beyond the racism and xenophobia, it’s another (now living) reminder of the unsafe environment these kids find themselves in. another reminder that theyre being watched and their behavior is being judged according to the law, or whatever the cop or teachers find inappropriate. that standing up for themselves or arguing can be taken as hostile and warrant physical intervention. 

police presence on campus grounds is DIRECTLY used to suppress student activism. you know that.i know that. we know that. you remember that photo of the cop spraying a line of peaceful protesters? you remember that cop that tackled a student for holding a sign? you remember the fucking car fuls of kids that were arrested for protesting? 

police are our enemy, but they can be found in plenty of highschools and colleges now. even in elementary schools, where young children are being taught to obey and trust cops. the conditioning is being started young, and if you don’t conform to it, you become a watched enemy on your own campus. 

what kind of affect will this militarization and surveillance in schools and campuses have on future generations? it’s impossible to deny that environment has an effect on development, so what kind of behavior are we encouraging when we educate children & young adults in schools that not only prepare them for violence, but instill them with the idea that they are constantly being watched, monitored, and judged? that they could be victims of gun violence at any time, or that protests are an excuse for police brutality? 

psychoticallytrans:

carnivoroustomatoes:

You might not want to hear this but people with anger issues and/or violent impulses need social accommodations. And no by accommodation I don’t mean walking on eggshells around them, actual accommodations for people with these issues comes down to giving them a space away from what’s triggering them to process their emotions and calm themselves down same as what kind of accommodations people who get sensory overload or just any kind of overwhelmed. There is no moral value to having anger issues or violent impulses, people with them are deserving of accommodation the same as everyone else.

I had severe anger issues growing up, and the only way I was ever taught to deal with them was deep breathing. For some reason, deep breathing just triggers me to get angrier. But it’s the only coping skill I ever got taught for it. Here’s a few better ones.

• Go and exercise. Get all of that energy out and away from the people you love.
• Get a hang of when you’re winding up to a rage and learn to tell people that you need to step away. I will warn you that the first time that someone refuses to let you go once you learn this skill will spook the hell out of you if you don’t have a backup skill, so figure out ahead of time what you’re gonna do if they won’t let you leave.
• Learn to set boundaries. One of the best things I ever did for my anger issues was tell people that I can’t deal with people stealing food off my plate. Second best was when I’m mad, telling people not to touch me. I spook easily when I’m already angry.
• Get a pack of pencils and if nothing is working, break one. Sometimes you really do need to break something in order to feel better, and pencils are cheap.
• Don’t cook with a knife when you’re mad. If you get too much adrenaline, the knife can slip and hurt you.
• If you have anger issues that pop up without any seeming reason and frighten you, I would strongly recommend going over the situation and over your mental health. If there’s anything consistent with a mental health condition or with something particular happening to trigger it, seek to eliminate the trigger or treat the issue. Depression, anxiety, trauma, you name it, it can probably present as anger issues under the right circumstances.

Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:

• Fear transmutes into anger really, really well if someone’s fear response is “fight”. One of my guesses for why so many men have anger issues is that we’re told we’re not men if we have any other response to fear. However, this issue is far from exclusive to men.
• Don’t box people in when you’re arguing with them or soothing them. If someone is backed up against a wall and upset, then getting closer to them without permission is a bad call for your safety and for their soothing, because that removes the ability to get away from you. Ask before getting close. This goes double if someone is injured or otherwise vulnerable.
• Teaching angry people that are distressed about being angry the pencil trick on the spot is really easy and works more often than you can think.
• Respect people’s requests and boundaries. A lot of people think that some of the boundaries I set up are silly or that once we’re pals, they can ignore them. No, because a lot of my boundaries are related to trauma, and crossing them will trigger me and bring up my anger.
• All of this goes for children with anger issues as well. I was a child with anger issues, and a lot of disrespect for my boundaries and needs was because my anger was dismissed because I was a child. Respect children’s anger.

Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.

An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.

An end note for people with anger issues: It really can get better. You can find coping skills and perhaps meds that help cool you down and settle you. You can find people that will accept that doing that one weird thing spooks the fuck out of you, and will let you leave if you’re scaring yourself. You can gain control of yourself without shutting down emotionally. It’s achievable.

anerdyfeminist:

tanadrin:

as an adult, I am pleased to note that virtually everything that my parents or other authorities did that pissed me off as a kid, i was 100% justified in being annoyed at.

“You’re too young to really understand” SURPRISE it’s adult me from the future here to butt in and say “I’m not too young, you’re a bad person.”

dragon-in-a-fez:

unicorns-at-arbys:

dragon-in-a-fez:

for real there’s nothing worse than seeing actual teenagers trot out the “your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25!” bullshit. that is a view of brain development that falls somewhere in the spectrum between “way oversimplified” and “just plain wrong”. it gets pushed and repeated because it helps prop up social norms that include robbing young people of autonomy and consent, regulating them out of the public sphere, and silencing their voices on important issues. and my heart just breaks to see teens internalizing this narrative of “you’re inherently stupid and untrustworthy because your brain is programmed to be shitty for another 10 years”. it’s like some kind of mass stockholm syndrome. young people please love yourselves and realize you do not have to wait until your mid-20s to be a whole and real person with the right to be taken seriously.

So, I agree that young people’s opinions should be taken more seriously, but could you expand on the first bit? Why do you see the fact that the brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25 to be nearly plain wrong? It’s fact that the prefrontal cortex– the part of the brain in charge of risk vs reward, decision making, control of the ego, etc.– finishes developing at 25, and is the last cortex to reach maturity. While I agree it has become overused to write off young people’s rights, it is in fact a true statement.

so, this is a big issue. I’m going to try and break it down into a few vital points but I’ll probably miss some things.

first, there’s the problem of science being poorly reported or even entirely misrepresented in popular media and in social discourse at large. a magazine called Parenting Science ran a great article about this in 2009. they used the example of a brain imaging study that had found teenagers showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain associated with social decision making - than adults in certain situations. the scientists who did this study posited that this result might have something to do with teens having less social experience to draw on, and thus needing to think harder to understand subtle cues and predict others’ behavior; or with the more flexible but less efficient neural networks that characterize young brains. but when it hit the popular press, this study was reported, incredibly, as “teen brains lack capacity for empathy”. and not just in niche blogs or local rags - WebMD, MSNBC, and CBS all ran this story, saying that a study that had nothing to do with empathy whatsoever had scientifically proven that teenagers were less capable of caring about others than adults.

what’s happening here is that science is being twisted in public consciousness to support pre-existing stereotypes of young people. this really isn’t surprising if you study the history of science and society - any research about a group of people commonly treated as a cohesive social category will get misused to some extent.

next, there’s the issue in both general public discourse and academia itself of going into research with biased framings. our culture approaches childhood with what you might call a “deficit model”: any differencebetween young people and adults is taken to mean that adults are better. example: everyone knows teens think they’re invincible and don’t understand danger and that’s why they’re risk-takers, right? so we get year after year of research that aims to figure out exactly what part of the brain is responsible for that dangerous behavior, and never questions the underlying assumption. this study in the academic journal Nature turns this assumption on its head by saying teens aren’t irresponsible and reckless, they’re tolerant of ambiguityand uncertainty.

and really, this makes a lot more sense than thinking about it the other way. there’s no reason the human race would’ve evolved such that our brains have a diminished capacity to understand danger in the years before we procreate. what’s the survival advantage of that?? but it makes a hell of a lot of sense that we would’ve evolved such that in the early years of our independent lives, we’re more accepting of situations we can’t predict or control. and in fact, this study in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (paywall) suggests something very much along these lines is at play: young people who engage in potentially hazardous “exploratory behavior” with their peers learn faster and show better performance on similar tasks later.

now, of course, that might still look like “risky” behavior from an objective outside point of view. but when a researcher starts out from the unbiased perspective of “how do adolescents approach decision-making situations?” rather than the biased perspective of “why are teen brains so screwy?”, very different results emerge about the mechanisms behind age-related differences, and the potential value of those differences.

next, there’s the fact that there’s stuff about the young brain we just don’t know yet, and some of it could have the potential to seriously change what supposedly settled science means. this study by researchers at Washington University in St Louis found that children and adults actually use different parts of the brain to perform the same tasks. specifically - this is the fascinating part - children tend to use more regions toward the back of their brains to do cognitive tasks that adults would tend to use more regions toward the front of their brains for. the lead scientist on the study specifically said this could be a way children’s brains compensate for the slow development of frontal regions.

now, this hasn’t been explored specifically yet as far as I know, but what this couldimply is that those studies that show less activity in “the region of the brain associated with self-regulation” might be effectively meaningless. if kids can do the same things with different parts of their brains compared to adults, maybe they don’t need “fully-developed” prefrontal cortices to do what adults rely on our fully-developed prefrontal cortices for.

there’s also the fact that biology may be taking credit for what is, in fact, the province of culture and society. psychologist Robert Epstein wrote an article in Scientific American in which he attempted to remind us all that brain imaging studies are correlational, not causational; in other words, they can’t say whether or not differences in brain structure and function are the cause of different behavior. and the relationship between emotions/experiences/behavior and the brain isn’t a one-way street. the way we act, the way we feel, and what we see, hear, and do all change our brains in profound ways. “if teens are in turmoil,” Epstein says, “we will necessarily find some corresponding chemical, electrical or anatomical properties in the brain. but did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil alter the brain?”

in other words, even if teenagers are categorically more reckless, more prone to destructive and criminal behavior, more likely to suffer mental illness, and even if teen brains are categorically different from adult brains…we don’t have any solid data by which to blame the one on the other. it is just as likely, if not more likely, that the way our society treats young people (subjecting them to ten times as many restrictions on their behavior and experiences as the average adult and twice as many as incarcerated felons, Epstein points out) is the cause of this tumultuous adolescence, which in turn causes differences in brain function - rather than teen brains being naturally different, and that naturally causing teen turmoil.

the final point I want to make is that even when the science is relatively settled, how it gets perceived and interpreted in everyday thought and discourse is often the result of it being filtered through preexisting prejudices. as an example: there are things the young brain is better at. young children’s brains are (on average) superior to adolescent and adult brains in skill acquisition and sensorimotor processing. adolescent and young adult brains are superior in processing speed, short-term memory, and creative thinking. adult brains are superior in emotional regulation, executive functioning, and critical thinking. (I can find sources for these if anyone is curious, but they would all be different and I didn’t want to be giving 6+ links in the middle of a paragraph.)

so why do we consider a brain “fully developed” when it’s reached the peak of its executive function prowess, instead of the peak of its processing speed and creativity? because society, not science, says adults are “fully developed” humans, and so any aspect of young brains which is superior is considered unimportant. we admit, quite freely, that young people are often more creative and better at learning - but we ultimately don’t care. meanwhile, the aspects of cognition that happen to be stronger later in life get held up as marks of some sort of ineffable completeness.

to be honest, I would go so far as to say it’s completely impossible to actually understand age-based differences in human cognition within the current social framework of how we understand childhood and adulthood. I question at a base level whether unbiased scientific knowledge is even accessible in this kind of cultural climate. I’m not saying research on this should all just stop, but we should start having the same conversations we’re having about research on the brain and gender, for example.

this is probably the longest post I’ve ever written on this site now, but science and society is such a fascinating topic for me generally, especially when it gets paired with social justice issues. I hope what I’ve written here make sense and is helpful in understanding why it’s so problematic to just boil everything down to “your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25″. send me an ask if you want me to clarify anything!

I rarely see anyone writing middle-aged women characters around here, and some of what I do see tends to come off as little more than little-old-lady parodies. Jokes about aches and pains and hot flashes. Yeah, those are inherent with aging, but the descriptions of being tired get… tiresome.

Sometimes, strength can be found in age.

An example:

He notices…

Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he doesn’t think so.

Running the clippers over the back of her head, shearing off several months of hair reveals new gray behind both ears. The salt-strewn patches seem larger than they should in their sudden revelation, rather than the subtle intruding creep he’s noticed in his own hair over the last few years. He says nothing, pausing to look at the tuft of silver curls in his fingers.

“What’s up?” she asks.

Not knowing what else to do, he hands it to her over her shoulder.

She’s silent for a moment, as if she’s staring at her own mortality in her hands. “How much is there?”

“A lot.”

They both suspect the same cause.

[Heroic spoiler of monumental badassitude]

She lowers her hand, dropping the tuft for it to join the rest on the floor. She takes a breath. “Are you still okay with… moving forward today?”

“Yes. Of course.” His response is immediate and firm, and he grips her shoulder, locking her gaze in the mirror. “That’s how you earned this,” he says, indicating the mudhorn inked there. “It’s just another kind of scar. We’re both riddled with them. We’ll both earn a lot more before we’re done. You know I understand this.”

So yeah, pairing Mando with a woman his own age and having her be a badass is possible.

comicsansvanjams:

neverlands-justice-system:

I’m not racist, I swear. I just hate everyone equally.

This is ageist as fuck

lordhellebore:

nederys:

janiedean:

tenitchyfingers:

veraxplus:

bai-xue:

It’s been said before but SO MUCH of tumblr’s disgust for older people in fandom is just misogyny repackaged for so-called leftists. It’s usually directed at fandoms that skew older and female (reylos, for example).

Because how DARE a Woman of a Certain Age™ have interests outside of a partner or children, right? How DARE she spend her time doing things she actually enjoys, and identifying with those hobbies, rather than giving up her hobbies to dedicate her time and identity to socially expected pursuits.

And lbr, this is especially prevalent in anti communities.

Tumblr fucking hates adult women and it isn’t even subtle. As soon as a woman is done being a ~cute soft pastel teen/young adult uwu~, y'all want her silenced and in the kitchen and out of the fandoms she helped create.

Imagine actually never outgrowing things and playing with children’s toys well into adulthood

@veraxplus except adult women createdfandom. It was nevera space meant for minors. Learn some history of this community before opening your useless stankhole.

imagine thinking that - among other things - writing fanfic with explicit sexual content is the same thing as playing with children’stoysand then assuming that y’all’s fandom policing is made to protect children ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

also @veraxplus fyi when I was a kid I read a lot of shit but I never felt like writing my own stories featuring previously established characters, I started when I was fourteen. I mean, I never even considered it period, maybe fanfic is not such a children’s thing in the first place.

plus you can like use toys if you own them, it’s fucking hurting nobody, there are worse (to say actually bad) other things happening in the world to care about

What the others said, and also: Imagine growing up and maturing to a level where you realise that toys are just toys, and that there’s nothing immature or even wrong about adults playing with them. It’s fun, which is something all of us sorely need.

This idea that “grown adults” need to behave “like adults” 100% of the time is bizarre and playing into the hands of those who want to advertise that we only live to contribute to capitalism and to raise children. “Behaving like adults” is twisted from “taking responsibility for your own life and actions and living it to your tastes without harming others” to “working, sleeping, (raising children,) and having sharply defined ‘adult hobbies’ like, idk, knitting and gardening and sports”. 

Notice how different the two definitions are, notice how #2 has been narrowed down from “live how you like without harming others” to “only partake in these narrowly defined activities because anything else is ridiculous and/or harmful”.

Let’s hope these teens and young adults in their 20s will grow up and understand one day that “being an adult” isn’t at all what they imagined and that they don’t stop being themselves or liking the things they did just because they reached some imaginary line from which on their hobbies and tastes are objectively “inappropriate”. 

The disdain for appearing “childish” due to tastes/hobbies/activities is a distinct teenage phenomenon, and eventually, many people will mature out of it. I hope you’ll belong to them. Life’s much easier that way.

bouvardia-against-bourgeoisie:

Has anyone on swedengate tag brought up the literal genocide of the indigenous Sami people… along with their imperialism in general like…

Also FYI I’m not saying “why is no one talking about this ” I’m saying now that Sweden is trending it’s a good time to bring up Swedens other more serious wrong doings so more people learn about them… which is what this post is saying… i literally picked this tweet bc it was in a nice list format

[Image description: Tweet from Alicia @alicepebble 23h ago. Alicia’s icon is beige with black lines, possibly a picture of something microscopic?
Image text: Things that destroyed Sweden’s image:
(red X) Weapons’ selling leader
(red X) Sami genocide
(red X) Unethical experiments with disabled patients
(red X) Forced sterilizations until the 70s, 2012 for trans
(red X) Not accepting old people into hospitals in pandemic
(green square with white check mark) Not giving a sandwich to a kid
the tweet is tagged #Swedengate and has 31 replies, 228 retweets, and 890 likes. End image description.]

Weapons sales in sweden - link

Sami Genocide - link

Experiments on disabled people -link

Forced sterilization - link

Elderly people denied care - link

tdldproblems:

maltedmilkchocolate:

birthcharts:

me reading someone’s about and not seeing their race / ethnicity, then seeing a “longer about” link and click on that and STILL not seeing anything about their race or ethnicity

As someone who grew up with the internet, in the huge era of online safety campaigns, and the constant drilling in of not sharing your personal information online because it’s not safe. I will say this:

No one, not one single person, on the internet owes you their personal information.

What I share on my blog, is shared out of a choice, because that’s a decision I chose to make. Because I talk frequently on neurodivergence and sexuality, and I know I have followers who connect with that.

But I don’t owe people that information.

Strangers on the internet are never entitled to know:

Your name.
Your gender.
Your age.
Your date of birth.
Your location: City, State, Country, wherever. 
Your religion.
Your ethnicity (your culture, your nationality)
Your race (skin colour)
Your mental health.
Your physical health.
Your sexuality.

Your anything at all.

That information is personal. If you choose to share it, that’s your choice, but it is nobody elses right to have it, or demand it, or to manipulate it out of you.

If someone chooses not to share that. That is not some neferious plot.

This is something important to understand, especially for young people on the internet. Kids in highschool. Your information is your own personal right. Keeping that safe, keeps you safe online. 

We’re in this very questionable internet scape where your information can be taken, and searched, and found. Where there are people who can dox you because they had access to basic information that lead them to deeper info. Where one bit of information can be used to make a smear campaign against you. Or used to target harrassment.

(This is also a really shady time where our information is being quietly sold through advertisers, and taken by data breeches, and DDOS attacks. Where there’s literal fuckin nazi’s on this site that tumblr doesn’t seem to care about because apparently breasts are worse?????)

This is why protecting your privacy and safety was such a huge campaign.

Everyone on the internet is a stranger. And yeah, imma cry ‘stranger danger’ here cause that’s what I grew up with, that’s what I was taught as computers became the big thing, and I was growing up on forums and chat messengers at a super young age where I was incredibly vulnerable. And i’m very lucky to have not encountered what some people I know did.

A/S/L was the most frequent question people would ask, and no it’s not american sign language. Age/Sex/Location. People wanted your info.

You do not need to share that information with anyone. 

There’s another good post on this topic here more focused on sharing age.

There’s a huge difference between sharing your interests and hobbies and fandoms and the general knowledge ‘trivia’ of yourself in an ‘about’ page, VS sharing the entirety of your personal information.

So if someone just has their name, age, and pronouns, but doesn’t list anything else beyond their music interests and fave bands. That’s not malicious, that’s not nefarious. That’s exercising a right to choose what you share.

They don’t owe anyone an indepth analysis of their gender. They don’t owe anyone the knowledge of where they live. They don’t need to reveal if they have a disability or not. They’re just 21 yr old Vera, who likes music and wants you to use they when refering to them.

Protect your information on the internet. 

Be safe on the internet.

And don’t let anyone pressure you, or guilt you, into sharing information you don’t want to share.

Feel like this is also relevant to seniors with little tech know-how.

Way to be

sexist
ageist
Islamophobic
Nationalist
Racist
Ableist
and homophobic

How about this - fucktelling people what to do?  Some people can ONLY express things about themselves on the internet and they don’t need you to tell them “it’s not safe for you anywhere.”  Fuck the hell off back to Trump Tower.

sassafras1992:

For anyone interested in social justice issues, please learn about youth rights/youth liberation. The subjugation of children and young adults isn’t called out enough in mainstream circles! The justifications used to deny young people rights are similar to ones that targeted BIPOC, women, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, and people with mental illnesses.

enoughtohold:

Feisty. Touchy, excitable, quarrelsome, like a mongrel dog. [(American Heritage Dictionary, 1975)] “Feisty” is the standard word in newspaperspeak for an old person who says what she thinks. As you grow older, the younger person sees your strongly felt convictions or your protest against an intolerable life situation as an amusing over-reaction, a defect of personality common to mongrels and old people. To insist that you are a person deepens the stigma of your Otherness. Your protest is not a specific, legitimate response to an outside threat. It is a generic and arbitrary quirkiness, coming from the queer stuff within yourself — sometimes annoying, sometimes quaint or even endearing, never, never to be responded to seriously.

— Cynthia Rich, “The Women in the Tower,” Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism, Expanded Edition (1991) by Barbara Macdonald with Cynthia Rich.

(Disclaimer: this is a post about white people. Specifically white people who toss aside white notions of aging for the sole purpose of gaining clout.)

I’m getting pretty goddamn tired of white queer people in their 30s and 40s using the genocide wrought by the AIDS crisis to justify crowning themselves “queer elders.”

It’s fucked up to fantasize that the AIDS crisis devastated the community so completely that you (random white 40 year old) have no choice but to take up the mantle of “elder queer.”

Newsflash: there are queer people who survived the AIDS crisis (some of whom are living with HIV/AIDS today) and are now objectively fucking old.

Young white people cosplaying as queer elders are doing Actually Old Queers no favors by pretending they don’t exist or are so vanishingly rare as to be unreachable and insignificant.

You are not an elder just because you are the oldest person in your friend group, or because you don’t know any Actually Old Queers. That’s not how age roles work for white people, and you fucking know it. (If you didn’t, you wouldn’t remark on how special you are for being a millennial elder.)

Is generational isolation a problem in queer communities? Yes, very much so. In the US, ageist power structures isolate Actual Old People from society. When ageism is compounded by other systems of oppression (such as cissexism and heterosexism), isolation grows more intense and complex.

The absence of Actually Old Queers from queer spaces is a serious social problem. And let’s be honest: a lot of online spaces (queer and not) are set up (intentionally or not) to exclude Actual Old People. Hell, a lot of physical space are set up to exclude Actual Old People. Ageism is a fucking thing, people.

The solution to this isolation and exclusion is not shrugging your shoulders and saying, “I guess that makes me, a white person in their fucking 30s or 40s, the queer elder now.” That doesn’t fix the problem (unless the problem is your own fucking ego).

If you actually value the role of queer elders, if you actually mourn the loss of intergenerational connection amongst queer people, fucking do something to address the isolation and exclusion faced by Actually Old Queers. Investigate why Actually Old Queers aren’t participating in the same forms of community as you are. Fix physical, technological, financial, and attitudinal barriers to participation. Work to make your corner of the community appealing to older people.

You can also figure out where Actually Old Queers are and meet them where they’re at. Hang out on their terms. Talk about their interests. Do what they want to do. If intergenerational connection is as important as self-proclaimed “queer elders” profess, then leaving your comfort zone should be worth it.

If, after years of studying the issue, you find that there truly are no Actually Old Queers in your specific geographic or interest-based queer community due to the AIDS crisis, then mourn them and organize in their memory. Don’t grave rob their status as elders. Wait your goddamn turn.

palominocorn:

lady-writes:

liberalsarecool:

#LateStageCapitalism

(sigh)

It wasn’t boomerswho made it impossible to survive on a librarian or gardener’s salary - it was rich people. 

Plenty of boomers work as librarians, teachers, gardeners, and so forth, and are finding that as the cost of living skyrockets and corporations take over more and more of the world, that their salary is no longer able to support them.

And thus you have boomers - who understand how much you want to be a librarian because they also work as librarians - going bankrupt, losing their homes, drowning in debt, and dying because of unaffordable healthcare. And they get why you’re becoming an IT specialist instead of a librarian - because they! Know! That you can’t survive! On a librarian’s salary anymore!

On the flip side, the rich people sucking money out of every service and person they can! Aren’t! Always! Boomers! Tons of them are Gen X! And an increasing number are millennials! I haven’t seen a Gen Z billionaire yet but I’m willing to bet there’s a couple by now!

Oh, and it’s not like they “don’t know” how much people want to do these sorts of jobs - they do! That’s how they justify underpaying people, because it’s your passion, you don’t ~need~ to be paid a living wage for your passion.

You have more in common with poor boomers than you do with Kylie Jenner (born 1997). Go and talk to them. Organize with them. You’ll find they have a lot to offer once you stop dismissing them as rich old folks who ruined the economy.

Research shows that, contrary to popular belief, people’s political views don’t actually get more conservative as they get older. The label they give themselves may go rightward - a liberal may eventually call themself a moderate, for example - but that seems to be more about society itself moving leftward.

Like, Jolene may support expanding Medicaid but be wary of UBI, so she calls herself a moderate because she thinks you have to support UBI to be a liberal now. But her opinions on civil rights or abortion probably haven’t changed a lot since the Hippie 60s.

What I mean to say is, just because someone is old doesn’t necessarily mean they are a Republican who hates poor people.