a tweet reads “the US is obviously hurtling into a serious “gender critical” movement” and frankly i have no idea how we’re supposed to combat it given that nobody who isn’t trans seems to notice or care”
it is replied to with this thread
“Aight Imma spit real quick and hope my FBI agent doesn’t turn my phone off /j Let’s talk real quick.
There was a movement in Black History around the Civil Rights when there was a currently-unimaginable amount of coalition building. It is truly amazing to me that a letter from the Panthers talking about queer rights was signed by Mexican, Chinese, Black etc activists.
During that time, and the time that followed, the government dedicated themselves to wedging as much bullshit between our groups as possible. Crack. AIDS. Model Minorities. Super predators. The list goes on and on.
Every time class consciousness gets a little bit closer to being realized, shit like this comes out in full force. We see BLM being branded as ultra violent. We see gender critical movements get a flux in support. We see how disabled people are basically being euthanized.
It’s just straight facts that our government is experienced in disrupting and assaulting leftist movements. All of it is on public record. Our own country is included in the collective that had to be broken down and “readjusted” for the benefit of white supremacy and capitalism.
The good thing is that we know we’re getting closer, cuz they’re scared. The bad thing is that we loose lives and are pushed a few steps back. Trans people are more of a target than we were before, and it was already bad. Disabled people. PoC. The intersections therein.
I kinda miss the slogan “all power to all the people” Because “all the people” means EVERYONE. It’s inclusive. It implies that the work of deconstructing our isms is how we empower ourselves and are able to collect under mutual interest. All power to all the people y’all.
Anyway. Just do what you can. Just surviving is a revolutionary act. If you can do more, do so. We’ll figure this shit out somehow. END ID]
If the actual bias of local news is not “right or left” but “sensational stories with jazzy visuals” (like a crime with a headshot or blood on the carpet)…
then the actual bias of social media I think is prioritizing “interesting arguments about principles” instead of “boring facts of the outrage du jour.”
Everyone I see is arguing on the basis that Elon Musk will buy twitter and remove content moderation, and the gates of either free speech or harassment will open.
This is Elon fucking Musk. He fires employees for off work blog posts. He sued a guy who didn’t like his underwater sled plan. He tells that law firms that he hires to fire their lawyers on other cases that he has a grudge against. He has amazingly thin skin, and has never shown a principled stance on ideological matters if it cost him money or pride.
(He’s also done amazing things and has many virtues. Just a stiff temper is not one of them.)
If he takes over twitter, and ifas owner he actually effects the day to day content moderation (it’s surprisingly hard to reach down into the cogs of the machine and change things the way you want - ask Trump), then that effect will be “ban people who say mean things about him” and “celebrate people who say nice things about him.”
Like this is very clear. He is not a sober jurist who will “hate what you say but defend to the death your right to say it.” He will tweet 420 and ban you for saying Dogecoin is overpumped.
But to say Elon is hot-headed is an easy argument to make and kinda boring. It’s way more fun and ***engaging*** to argue for the thousandth time about free speech vs hate speach.
As we know, there’s a pretty huge number of “defund the police” liberals who have made it clear they’d be totally okay with cops if cops were given a nice-guy, educated-professional rebranding. My guess is that this almost certainly correlates with a similar number of people who would happily sign up to be cops, if it weren’t for cops’ horrendous public image. In the case of the Twitter users with masters’ degrees in clinical psychology saying “replace police with mental health professionals,” it’s clearly literally the same people, but I don’t think the Venn diagram has to be a circle for the point to stand.
This point about people who would sign up is important: at the same time that cops have fought every form of “defund the police” tooth and nail, police departments all over the US are facing up to the fact that they have a recruitment crisis, and it’s only getting worse. Depending on the size of the city, a given department is probably understaffed anywhere from dozens to hundreds of officers. And I don’t mean to take cops’ assessments of their own personnel and budget needs at face value here, but appreciate that in the neoliberal era cops have been delegated all sorts of responsibilities that used to be the job of social services: those responsibilities do in fact take a huge amount of money and manpower to execute, even if you’re going about it in a fundamentally evil way that only makes things worse. I don’t think cops are intentionally lying when they claim to be exhausted and short-staffed, even if I disagree with every single assumption and every claim made in connection with that.
These two things, the “defund the police” crisis and the recruitment crisis, have the same root. No one likes cops, and no one wants to be a cop, in large part because everyone knows no one likes them. What’s more, it’s not just the cultural stigma against police that’s driving recruits away: cops’ own “thin blue line” self-image, where they only talk about how they’re hardened spec-ops badasses and the lethal danger they face every day, isn’t exactly tailored to attract your average meathead who’s not totally down the reactionary propaganda rabbit-hole and/or doesn’t daydream about shooting people and getting shot at. There are people who are physically and temperamentally suited to be police (after all, the job is not in fact very dangerous) who are almost certainly getting pushed away by the current branding.
So here’s what’s funny. Despite everything I just said, existing cops are so wrapped up in their deranged warrior identity, and/or obsessed with “owning the libs” and manning the culture-war trenches, that they don’t even register the fact that “the libs” are trying to hand them the solution to all their problems on a silver platter. These bluecheck Twitter freaks are all but begging for a reason to resume liking cops and celebrating cops and advocating for increased police budgets (the natural order of things for people who benefit from existing socioeconomic arrangements), to the point of saying “here’s the excuse we need, please give it to us, all you have to do is stop calling yourselves police, that’s literally it.” And absolutely no one on the cultural right, or in police departments, has bothered to pick up on this. It’s wild to me.
umm btw stuart semple (guy who made the pinkest pink and the blackest black) is super into nfts now so
Probably a good time to remember that while the AnishKapoorThingTM is funny, Kapoor wasn’t particularly restricting the use of Vantablack beyond standard businessartist boilerplate. Semple made it into a big thing and a meme to boost his own publicity. It worked, and AFAIK Kapoor couldn’t really care less, but…not really a nice thing to do. I’m not surprised he’s jumped on the NFT crypto tuliptrain.
yeah, people in the notes have obviously been talking about but the anish Kapoor thing was kinda unwarranted harrassment of a Jewish Indian artist who’s worst crime was being a lil pretentious. also I feel like it should be noted: Anish Kapoor is not only not into nfts but he has had his art stolen and sold as nfts multiple times so ,,
I’m not sure how to say this, but I’m annoyed at how this post finds out that Semple is on the Bad Side of a known issue and immediately sets to reversing the narrative between him and Kapoor. Maybe Kapoor was a chill guy all along and didn’t deserve the reputation he got, I don’t know, but in this context it feels more like a human craving for narrative symmetry. The good guy is bad now, so the bad guy must be good? Highlighting his race and religion to emphasize victimhood and its associated requisite goodness? It just… Doesn’t feel great to read, somehow.
Anish Kapoor had a reputation as a rich-ass dick prior to Vantablack (see: The Bean), and Semple was not the only person upset with the way the Vantablack thing shook out since it very much was NOT a standard boilerplate. Semple did decide to use the feud for his brand, and Kapoor responded in a way that fueled Semple (you could have ignored the pink pigment, dude, I promise). Anyway, NFTs are dumb and Semple can make a bad decision without it having anything to do with Anish Kapoor. Kapoor‘s still a pretentious rich dick, and Semple is ALSO A Pretentious rich dick. Congrats, welcome to art history.
The study checked how bisexual, pansexual and queer women define bisexuality.
Pansexuals and queer women said that bisexuality is binary and means attraction to cis men and women and they also “felt that claiming a bisexual identity indicated an outdated, offensive belief that there are only two genders”.
whereas actual bisexuals defined bisexuality as broad and inclusive of all genders.
It’s also interesting that all the people claiming bisexuality was transphobic were cis whereas the trans people interviewed didn’t have a problem with the bisexual label.
In addition, bisexuals expressed that they found the debates around whether bisexuality is inclusive very upsetting and it made them consider hiding their bisexuality or changing their label.
“While experiencing one’s chosen identity as personal and meaningful was not unique to the bisexual women in our sample, bisexual women often described an added layer of psychological distress upon learning that others define bisexuality in ways that reinforce a traditional gender binary, which contradicts their own definitions and lived experiences of bisexuality.“
i am losing my mind at the people trying to “debunk” this with scientific sounding arguments such as “the sample size is too small to mean anything” - literally the most anti-science thing you can say
1. it displays that you have no understanding of basic research concepts such as the difference between quantitative and qualitative research, what they’re used for and what kind of sample sizes are viable for them
2. trying to dunk on peer reviewed research with a snappy one liner because the findings make you feel bad or clash with your pre-existing beliefs
Let’s take a look at this study. It does not appear to be publicly available, but I managed to get a PDF, so if anyone wants a copy feel free to DM me.
It’s a sample size of 25 women, including 13 bisexual women and 5 pansexual women.
All five pansexual women and only four of the bisexual women defined bisexuality in an exclusive way rather than an inclusive one:
There were two trans women in the sample, one bisexual and one pansexual, and they both expressed a certain amount of antipathy towards the whole debate:
Most of the bisexual women did directly say that they found the debate uncomfortable and disliked the implication that their identities weren’t inclusive:
I think the way the OP presented all this is a little silly, especially in the most recent reblog. There are a grand total of five pansexuals interviewed here, and four of the bisexuals also defined bisexuality in an exclusionary way. “Nine midwestern women hold stupid view about bisexuality” gets stretched to “research proves pansexuals are biphobic”.
Also - sample sizes do matter, social science research has approximately a thousand issues with it, and the fact that a study is peer reviewed does not mean it will replicate. Appeal to authority here, especially trusting psych research on sexuality, is not smart.
That said, I don’t really have any issues with this study, as it’s telling us something that we already know: we have two words for the same sexuality, and the resulting discourse kinda sucks for everyone involved.
I performed a study asking bisexual women if pan people are biphobic and if that has had any negative impacts on their mental health. the answer, universally, was ‘no’.
the sample size was on the smaller end (n=1) but since this is qualitative research it seems frankly anti-intellectual if anyone objects
Lmao, people in the notes arguing that “AKCHUALLY 25 is a good sample!” are outing themselves as Bullshit majors.
Really baffled why “abortion allows men to have low-stakes consequence-free casual sex” is considered to be like a negative downside to abortion rights, or like a potentially sinister bad reason to support abortion rights.
“Abortion allows women to have low-stakes consequence-free sex” is often the primary argument for why it should exist! Allowing people to plan parenthood, allowing them to pursue their natural urges for love and sex without necessarily having to make huge life-altering commitments to marriage or parenthood upfront.
Besides religious beliefs about the sanctity of life, this is the primary reason conservatives hate abortion. It makes fornication and delayed marriage a low-stakes choice for women. And conservatives hate that! They want women to get married young and be tied down into a family unit as early as possible. Normally, a pregnancy is a powerful force for compelling young women to do that. But abortion makes it optional and voluntary, and they do not like that!
I don’t understand why we would think it’s a bad thing that abortion offers men the same liberty.
Really baffled why “abortion allows men to have low-stakes consequence-free casual sex” is considered to be like a negative downside to abortion rights
Because these people are conservatives at heart, duh
Speaking as a Catholic: banning abortion is not pro-life, by pure measure of statistics.
Banning or restricting abortion does not stop abortions, nor does it significantly reduce the rates at which people seek it. What it does do is ensure more people die, whether from pregnancy related complications or from seeking out unregulated, unsafe methods of abortion or from any number of related factors. Not to mention the many grieving parents who will be wrongfully imprisoned for miscarriages and birth complications.
The solution to abortion, if that is what we supposedly seek, is not spending millions on self-congratulatory “marches for life” or lobbying for bans or political campaigning, but to invest in a society that actively addresses poverty, roots out racism and ableism, supports young parents, provides appropriate and comprehensive sex ed, makes medical care accessible, and ultimately addresses the root causes that motivate many parents to terminate a pregnancy. Suggesting anything less is often smug, self-serving bullshit.
This isn’t true. Obviously there are other likely factors at play, such as contraception, but abortions very visibly increase dramatically when legalised and decrease when banned or otherwise restricted (the last being perhaps easiest to observe). This shouldn’t be surprising, as there are many anecdotes of women who wanted to have abortions but felt they had no choice but to carry the child to term.
The known legal abortion rate in the US in 1980 was 1.3 million, higher than even the highest estimates of illegal abortions pre-Roe. Even accounting for the increase in population, the overwhelming majority of estimates agree that abortions increased.
(The increase in abortion is high enough that some experts have suggested it decreased crime rates, which would be
Every few weeks someone will complain abt a trend that’s entirely avoidable if u just never made a tiktok account and I always think like, you deserve to see it. You deserve to be tricked into reading a terrible book and listening to a shit song and making a fail recipe and getting scammed by a fast fashion website. That was the path you willingly stepped on when you decided to listen to a clout addicted 18yo with an iPhone
…I find myself a member of a community presently under attack by accusations of “grooming” and predation. It’s made me particularly sensitive to insinuations from any political stripe that the gays are sex monsters trolling for their next victim, or that we’re all just victims in waiting, idling around until one of those nasty older gays creeps up and takes advantage of our vulnerabilities.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing here, but again, what two consenting adults (ADULTS) do is not my business. I can make my own judgments, but I don’t have to give my rubber stamp of approval on it. I don’t have to formally condone or condemn it. If harm hasn’t been explicitly stated, then I won’t read harm into it just because I’m uncomfortable. I am not entitled to a perpetual state of comfort.
I hope you find erotica that speaks to you better!
coming from an evangelical background, I can tell you also that “you are what you consume, garbage in garbage out,” is a mentality HEAVILY propagated throughout evangelical communities, so if you also come from the same kind of background, it’s time to start unpacking that.
the same people who are like “don’t write explicit fic of characters when they’re older bc they’re BABIES in the show!!!!!!!!” are also like “even though azula is 14 she is an irredeemable imperialist pig”
like…. which is it ? are they children or not lmfao
i am sincerely sorry for those who’ve dealt with grooming or csa. i understand that’s traumatizing.
but, and i’m so sorry that i have to say this, but the unfortunate truth about trauma is you have to handle your triggers and squicks yourself. i have a huge trigger. a giant trigger. i’ll break down. it caused me to mentally spiral.
but it’s on ME and me only to protect myself from that. i filter tags and ao3. i don’t engage in that content.
the world and the internet is not a safe place. i’m so sorry. it’s just not. the internet is too big and too vast.
and you can’t demand that a fandom be made into a safe place for you. you just can’t. it’s up to you to form your own community within fandom. it’s not up to anyone else.
1) atla isn’t meant to be for kids as young as disney junior, just to clear any confusion up. while nick is for children and young adults, it has always had an older audience, and the initial demographic was definitely older children
2) it wasn’t aimed towards children now. it was aimed towards children from 2005-2008 or whenever it ended. those children are adults
3) simply put…. no. harry potter is a kids movie, star wars has kids shows, u get the point. we also need…. to have a discussion about demographic. the target demographic for shows doesn’t mean….they’re the only ones who can watch it? like that makes…. no sense. zero sense. star trek’s initial demographic was stay at home moms
4) you can literally see the intention for this show to age with its audience. LoK was made for the initial audience as they got older. this wasn’t made for kids now.
5) kids consume a lot of media not made for them. should they stay out of that fandom bc it isn’t for them? when i was a kid i watched sherlock and engaged in fic, even tho that’s an adult show. should minors only be allowed to engage in fandom for minors?
i know it sucks, but the world doesn’t revolve around you. not everything is made for your consumption. suck it up.
jet and haru are childhood friends who start dating in hs/into college
but haru’s very insecure about his relationship with jet for some reason
and then overhears a group of people criticizing and discussing people having intimate relationships with SOs they’ve known/had for some time
and haru gets even more insecure about when he started seeing jet that way, is it a bad thing that he sees jet as his bf/partner in an intimate way even though they started out knowing each other as children
and then they have a mature, heart-to-heart conversation about boundaries, consent, and safe sex
poppin back over here to remind everyone that jet and haru would encourage you to mind your business and block tags you don’t like.
also, jet and haru would like to remind you that tagging those “adults are bad” atla posts as anything to solely do with zukka is homophobic ✨ and yes, you can be queer and a homophobe
fuck it, we did the math.
7% of atla fics are rated E. SEVEN PERCENT
of that, only 1.7% of atla fics are E rated zukka.
so what can we figure from here.
1) y’all are starting discourse over 7% of fics. y’all really can’t filter that out?
2) yes, you ARE being homophobic! 1.7% of all atla fics are E rated and zukka. 1.7. read it again. 1.7.
there’s this specific brand of lazy media criticism seen on tumblr and twitter that I like to call “checklist criticism”. it is called like this because it consists on checking for the presence of superficial signifiers of a Bad Trope™ (as if going through a static checklist) in a given piece of media and declaring said piece of media to be, therefore, bad, without taking into account factors such as context, nuances, the handling, the framing, and, most importantly, what makes this bad trope bad in first place, and if the harm it usually causes is still being perpetrated in this particularly story given the aforementioned contextual variables.
an example of checklist criticism that happens a lot is the common “[x] this tv show has a female character [x] who dies before the show is over, therefore = Woman In The Refrigerator™, show bad!” Okay but, how did she died? What were the circumstances around her death? What purpose did it serve in the larger story? Did she die just to advance someone else’s story or she died fulfilling her own arc? Did she had any agency in the way she went or was she a passive victim of circumstance? Was her death dignified or unnecessarily violent? Are there any other important female characters that make it to the end? The Woman In The Refrigerator™ trope is not bad because women dying in fiction is inherently bad – if no female character were ever allowed to die, even in war or crime or post-apocalypt fiction, there’d be very low stakes for female characters, and low stakes mean very little reason to care about them. The WITR trope is bad because it’s about treating female characters as more expendable than male ones, banalizing violence against women in fiction, and cutting short female representation from pieces of fiction – which, most of the time, is already low. A female character whose death has an actual point in her own storyline, who’s afforded the same weight and dignity as male character’s deaths, and in a story where there’s no shortage of other female characters that survive the end of the story, is not a Fridged Woman, she’s just a female character who dies.
Another example – and here I’m taking an example from my own identity, so I don’t get accused of stepping on anyone’s feet – would be something like “this book has a [x] latina character, she’s [x] loud and spontaneous, she likes to [x] flirt and sleep around. Spicy Latina™! Book racist!” Okay, is she a caricature of a loud and spontaneous latina or is she a fully realized human being with a fully rounded personality, including dreams and wishes and opinions and vulnerabilities and agency, who just happens to be spontaneous, like so many people across multiple ethnicities happen to be? Is being flirty and spontaneous her only character traits or does she have more (that may go against other stereotypes about latinas)? Is her flirtness and sexuality framed in a fetishistic way that favors a (white) male gaze or it is framed in a nuanced way that prioritizes her pov and her agency and her pleasure and her happiness? Did the author really give her those traits because they’re a lazy fuck that couldn’t think of other traits to give his latina character other than spontaneous and flirty or do those characters traits have an actual point in the context of this particular story? Again: keep in mind why bad tropes are bad in first place.
We live in a time where reductive criticisms are an easy source of clout over actually thoughtful and deep analysis that don’t easily lend themselves to the type of short and snappy hot takes for twitok format and I’m exhausted.
Like, this lack of understanding of what makes certain bad tropes bad is how we ended up with a plethora of male writers patting themselves in the back for creating a ~deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope~ by writing stories where the male protagonist has to learn that the girl they assigned as their personal MPDG is not interested in fixing him, while still making it all about their male protagonists POV and their story and their arc. The MPDG is not bad because women being quirky is bad or because people helping their partners grow is bad. The MPDG is bad because it’s about women being narrative tools with no inner life helping the growth of the male protagonist, and if you write a story where she still has no personhood and is still pretty much defined by your male protag’s view of her you’re not changing anything just because the dude has to learn by the end that his view of her was wrong and she never wanted to save him. you still wrote a story about a flat female character that helps the pov male protag learn a lesson, only this time it was a different lesson, you just changed the window dressing.
During closing arguments in the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, one of Heard’s attorneys, Benjamin Rottenborn, described a series of Catch-22s that often ensnare women who, like Heard, accuse their partners of domestic violence. “If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen; if you did take pictures, they’re fake,” he said. “If you didn’t tell your friends, you’re lying; and if you did tell your friends, they’re part of the hoax. If you didn’t seek medical treatment, you weren’t injured; if you did seek medical treatment, you’re crazy.”
I mean it strikes me that people’s issues with Heard aren’t so much that, put in a no-win situation, she didn’t win, but that she was even trying to win, that as she continued in the relationship she acted in ways that weren’t even attempts to get what she wanted in the relationship, but set herself up in a better position to portray the relationship to others afterwards – including but not limited to in court – in a way that won their sympathy and advanced her overall position in life to which the relationship was just one aspect (presumably, in expectation of it ending – it’s unclear what she could do with documentation of abuse in a world where the semipublic relationship continued)
It strikes me that this – conducting your life for the sake of winning public sympathy battles after the fact – might be the real of-the-moment thing the culture is publicly condemning here.
