hellomynameisbisexual:

Merry Grinchmas and Happy Who-lidays! 2020 stink stank stunk but we’re getting through it, and hoping for a happy who year. ❤️❤️

I remember once…

In middle school, my friend would give me lunch money because my dad stopped giving it to me. He didn’t say why, he just said something like ‘we can’t afford it’. You sat down in the order the line went so she would give me 50 cents to get a milk so I could sit with my friends.

After about a year, my mother finally got Social Security disability. As her dependent, I got money as well for stuff for school. Like lunch. I remember when my parents told me I was going to get money every month, that was the first time I ever teared up from happiness.

I said 'I can finally get lunch since you used my lunch money to buy her (mother’s) cigarettes.’

Apparently, that comment started a fight. Later he told me 'that little comment got me in trouble’.

I didn’t care.

I finally could have lunch.

Ohhh, siblings always pick on each other.

CAN WE STOP NORMALIZING THIS?!

My half brother, whom I barely knew as a child (lived with his father), used to terrorize me and my parents just brushed it off as ‘just picking on’ me.

He would lock me in closets. This caused me to develop claustrophobia.

Hold me upside down by my ankles when I did not even want to be touched by him. This caused migraines lasting the rest of the day, usually resulting in puking by nighttime.

Used to play pranks on my parents then blame them on me, and they believed him. This caused one of my deepest fears of not being believed.

One day, he found my diary (I was like 7, so he was about 15), and read it. When he saw me, he mocked me about it, opening it and reading form it loudly. It humiliated me and broke my trust, invaded my privacy, and caused me, a fucking 7 year old, to have a full on emotional breakdown. Hysterically sobbing, I ran to my room and locked my door. He told me he had the key (usually kept on top of the door jamb of my parent’s bedroom door) and was coming in to make fun of me again. I pushed my toy chest (a big fucker) against the door and no one could get in, not even my dad who tried to push in later. I stayed in there for hours despite his bullshit half assed apology my mother made him give me.

To this day, I have reoccurring nightmares of my family not listening to me, and no matter what I say or how loud I scream, they won’t listen. I’ll try and run to my room and close the door just for some peace, but the door won’t latch. They constantly barge in, and I scream at them, kick and push them out, and try to barricade myself in. It never works. I’m stuck in this loop of them not listening to my shrieking pleas for them to leave me alone and am often woken up by my real feet kicking in the air. My boyfriend says I’ll be doing it for about an hour before I wake up. I call these 'screaming dreams’ and I always wake up mentally and emotionally exhausted. My boyfriend knows when I tell him I had a screaming dream last night I’ll be down all day.

My parent’s response to this harassment was almost none.

Mother would always half heartedly tell him to stop and he never would.

Father will tell me to just stop reacting. 'They only do it for a reaction. If you stop reacting, they will stop.’ (Sometimes my sister would join my brother in teasing me.)

HOW ABOUT YOU TELL THEM TO STOP FUCKING BULLYING ME.

When I grew up I told my dad that recently my sister had been making fun of me a lot. I have no fucking idea why I confided in him, it was just conversation. He said something along the lines of 'Siblings always pick on each other. I pick on (his brother).’ Sometimes his brother does something not so smart.

I said 'But there is a difference between poking fun and putting your sister down.’ He grumbled something and didn’t respond.

I guess people think abuse is supposed to happen?

It did not make me stronger.

It did not toughen me up.

It did not mature me.

It hurt me.

It scarred me.

If anything it has made me weaker on so many levels.

I can’t trust.

I can’t move on.

I can barely god damn function.

And 20 years later it’s still raw on my heart.

i never had the privilege of knowing who I am

but I’ve always known who I am not

and that’s you

I’m not you

I won’t allow myself to be

dragon-in-a-fez:

why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:

@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.

unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.

in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.

the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.

but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.

when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.

this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.

history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.

and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.

and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.