My high school experience was weird looking back because my friend group met at a christian homeschool co-op and none of us had sex or did drugs but there was someone who had watched the human centipede
come to think of it, tumblr gives y'all the wrong impression of how cool™ and worldly people who drink and do drugs actually are. My real life friends that drink and do drugs get their memes from instagram and their idea of a good time is watching a show for 3 hours
When I was 15 “a good time” was dressing in matching unicorn onesies, piling 7 people into a car with 5 seatbelts at 1:30 am, tearing off down the road at like 80 mph swerving and slamming on the brakes unpredictably while blasting the most obnoxious, explicit pop song we could find, and just standing around in a steak and shake to weird people out. For my 16th birthday we went to walmart, bought a watermelon, and took photos with it like the watermelon was a baby. like they were maternity photos or something. I can’t remember why we did the things we did to hang out or how we thought of them.
if I remember right that was the same birthday party where one of the gifts I got was the shortest french fry they could find (from Rally’s) and the longest french fry they could find (from McDonald’s) and they wrapped both of the french fries individually in wrapping paper
Definitely, for sure. And to be clear i think adults can do as they please with their bodies. i think my friends are cool also please don’t take this as negative toward them
This post is not about kids who are dealing with addiction from a young age, it’s about people who are adults and think “partying” and trying weed in high school makes you cultured and interesting. And also the experience of being Extremely Sheltered until later in life when you’re surrounded with people who had a “normal” high school experience and then realizing that the “sheltered kid” experience you had was just something…Else. Yeah. Very else.
Like I think messing around with alcohol and weed as a teenager is pretty common, not like being an alcoholic or doing heroin or something but like, idk stealing wine coolers from your parents or something to feel cool, as is dating and having sex as a teenager. And it’s super weird when people are adults and they still feel superior to those socially deficient uncool weirdos that didn’t have this experience, not gonna lie.
also like…being a Sheltered Kid has a weird way of exposing you to stuff that’s not better but very, very different than the stuff most kids are exposed to. The fucked up things in Sheltered Kid social circles are just a different breed.
my observation is that weed has no impact on a person’s overall coolness level, level of Knowing Things About The World, or level of being normal. Devastating news to the people on Tumblr who have a superiority complex over people with picrew icons
As for what the “normal” high school experience is, rural or small-town sheltered kid experiences and Christian homeschool experiences just lie on a different axis from “normal.” there’s no partying, most of you are not even allowed to date, and you’re bored all the time because there’s nothing to do except like, go to walmart, unless you get creative. Half of you don’t know basic facts about sex. Half of you are debilitatingly addicted to the internet and have seen horrors.
As your friends approach 17-18 you watch a lot of them explode immediately into their rebellious phase, except instead of doing drugs they start listening to music with lyrics like “WRUUFSGGGGFDAAAAAAAAA FUCK ME WITH A RUSTY KNIFE” or planning spontaneously to move to Alaska, and some of them just vanish off the face of the earth and you have no idea what happened with them. A lot of them end up in horrible toxic relationships with Good Christian Boyfriends that turn out to be more screwed up than thought possible, or end up in relationships that their parents don’t fully approve of and get no support because of it. Like you’re 18 suddenly and you barely know what sex is but you want to try dating, but if you don’t want your parents and religious community to dictate your entire life, you have to throw away their support and try to learn the hard way about relationships. There’s no good way to win it.
The fun thing about homeschool communities is that they’re generally small enough that cliques are always heterogenous in bizarre ways. The girl that’s not allowed to watch disney movies and the girl that watched the human centipede are in the same clique and may in fact be “sheltered” the same amount
“…an ever-present truth about Christian fundamentalism: Fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals must always believe they are facing persecution like the first century Christians faced. Despite our faith’s privileged status in American culture, this branch of Christianity always insists it is being mercilessly persecuted by a growing secular culture and by apostates like me.”
I heard this metaphor growing up, and in my case, it backfired supremely, because I went out into my neighbor’s backyard where a rose bush was growing, and the one I tested had like 30 petals (it was yellow, but definitely a rose of some kind), and as a very logical lass, I came to the conclusion that you could have premarital sex AT LEAST ten times before your future husband would even notice something was up. Moral of the story? Test your metaphors on the weirdest and most neurodivergent child you know before writing your weird religious propaganda.
[Image capiton: a small plastic envelope with a little gold-colored rose pin, and a card reading, “You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in premarital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don’t leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.” End caption.]
the thing that strikes me about this latest wave of anti-trans hate and legislation in the U.S. is that it feels like it’s *kind of* about trans people but really about a fear fundamental to all conservatives that a day will one day come when they will no longer be able to completely control their children
american conservatism is a death cult. trump made this incredibly obvious but it’s been trending that way for a while. it is spiteful, bigoted, cruel, morally bankrupt, and all evidence in support of it has either been fabricated, forged, deceptively edited, or disproven. being conservative goes against a fundamental human desire to be kind to those around you and I think on some level conservatives know this, and thus, they know that the only reason children would subscribe to these values is if they are indoctrinated into them with cult-like single-mindedness
Conservatives have been pushing for homeschooling for decades, they’ve been raising concerns about teaching evolution in schools since the early 20th century, they’ve made wedge issues out of sex ed, history textbooks, and now gay and trans teachers. They want a world in which children are taught to be conservative from birth and any attempt to teach them anything else is a literal crime. They want this because they know, deep down inside, that most children would not agree with them unless they were literally brainwashed into it.
also worth pointing out that most child abuse (sexual or otherwise) takes place within a “traditional” family structure or a “traditional” religious institution and I have to wonder if people who want to abuse kids have a fundamental investment in preserving strict hierarchies in which adult men have unquestioned authority over children
Like I’m not saying *every* conservative is like this but perhpas their emphasis on “groomers” is a wee bit of projection
Anyway abolish the family trans rights are human rights institute fully automated luxury gay space communism now
this is also how i became a leftist after being raising very traditional/conservative/catholic tbh
hearing them break down ‘bad’ leftist ideas and i was just sitting there waiting for the bad part that didn’t come…and i’m like….yes? you should probably give free lunches to kids when their parents can’t afford to feed them dinner? why do you not want this?
trying to figure out politics was me just moving further to the left the more i learned about pretty much every single issue because of the traditional/catholic parts of my upbringing which is why i’m so baffled that so much of my family falls much more red than blue and i’ll probably never understand how that happened
i’ve had family straight up ask me why i support programs like free lunch and i had to explain that i support them because they taught me that i should care about other people and try to make the world a better place and the golden rule…they never seem to have an answer for when i ask them back why they don’t support those same programs
[Image caption for original post: tweet by The Irony Giant (@PrettyBadLefty) reading: “Some of my best ideas for leftist policies come from the irrational fears shared by conservatives on twitter tbh. They be like ‘Leftists want the post office to also sell weed and make mail carriers deliver it’ and you gotta jot that down”.
Image caption for pengychan’s comment: tweet by Riley (@kayraisabitch) reading: “It’s so weird being raised by christians and spending your entire childhood being told to care about others then one day they’re just like you’re not actually supposed to care about others you stupid socialist.” End caption.]
