joreth | Entries tagged with sjw

Something I want to be careful of is the vilification of gaslighting. And by that, I mean that I want to draw a line between "this behaviour has harmful effects and we need to stop doing it" and "the people who gaslight are evil manipulators deliberately trying to drive you insane".

The reason why I want to draw that line is because characterizing it as the latter makes it too easy for people to distance *ourselves* from acknowledging when we do it. "I am not an evil manipulator, so I can't be gaslighting anyone." Even "evil" abusers see themselves as the victim in their stories.

The reason they abuse is because they have a *belief* that the actions they take are genuinely right, good, acceptable, appropriate, or warranted. Many of them feel that they are a good influence on others or that they are trying to better their victims or doing what they do for their own good. They can't change until they recognize that they are doing something wrong.

See The Villains As Ourselves

So when we use the latter definition, we give them justification room in their minds to excuse their actions. But if we use the former, then we ALL have to take a look at our own behaviour and keep working on bettering ourselves, and we can do that without the cognitive dissonance fighting us and telling us that we are a "good person" so this can't apply to ourselves. This makes it harder for outright abusers to excuse their own actions if the culture around them encourages this kind of reflection and correction of everyone.

Gaslighting is such a normal part of our society that we're mostly all raised with it all around us. That makes it difficult to identify when we do it ourselves.

One of the classic examples I use to illustrate non "abusive", well-intentioned gaslighting is a mother trying to get her child to eat her vegetables, the child says she doesn't like them, and the mother says in exasperation, "yes you do, now just eat them."

We likely have gaslighted people in these kinds of minor situations many times over our lives and never realized it, so never recorded it in our memories. Why should one of these totally normal conversations stick out in our minds, especially years later? It's *the way things are* in so many circumstances.

I can't remember anything specific but I'm sure I've said to people at various times "oh, yes you do!" when they said they didn't like something or didn't want something, and I'm sure I had good intentions when I did it. I'm not "evil", I'm a meat body driven by a belief engine and a product of my environment, which means I'm flawed.

The best I can do now is to be mindful of my language and try not to contradict people when they tell me their inner landscape. If I have reason to doubt them, such as suspecting *them* of trying to manipulate me, maybe I can ask for confirmation or I can point to conflicting *behaviour*, but I will try not to outright tell other people what they are feeling.

In this post, I want to be clear that I'm doing something that I often rant against doing - stretching the definition of a very importantly narrow term. Gaslighting is not simply remembering things differently, or even *just* telling someone with confidence that their memory of a thing is wrong, even if the "thing" in question is part of the other person's inner landscape. The original term "gaslighting" is, in fact, the second definition I used in my opening paragraph.

In the movie Gaslight, which is where the term comes from, a husband is *deliberately* changing the level of the lighting in the house (created by gas lights, not electric lights), and when the wife comments on the change in light, he *deliberately* says there is no change, so that the wife comes to doubt her own senses over time. The husband does all this *deliberately* so that he can have his wife committed to an asylum so he can access her money. This is a 1940s villain caricature, an evil mustachio'd villain who knows he is doing evil and doing it maliciously and selfishly.

The problem is that this is not how real life "villains" operate. And that's the point that I'm making here. It's important to keep a narrow definition of terms like "gaslight" and "abuse" and not round up just anything uncomfortable to these terms. But we have to *also* make sure that we don't keep the definitions so narrow that it only applies to people in black hats cackling in their lairs and stroking their white cats while they plot world domination.

Because that leads to everyday, ordinary people doing horrible things and justifying themselves because they are not evil villains. We have everyday, low-key examples of people trying to convince other people that they are not experiencing the things that they are experiencing. This is not the same thing as correcting people's flawed memories or understanding of factual claims, although that can also be weaponized. I'm talking about "yes, you do like broccoli!" when you do not, in fact, like broccoli.

These small little disregards of our inner landscape *lead* to large disregards of other people's inner landscapes, because it's the same thing but a manner of scope. The mother *believes* that it's in her child's best interest to eat veggies. And she's right, it is in her child's best interest, and the mother is, in fact, in a position of authority and power over the child to do "what's best" for the child. This is the nature of that relationship.

So it's a very small step to go from a parent / child power dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour, to a romantic partnership dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour *for one's own good*. This is a tool we have been given by our society, so it's a tool we may not even notice that we are pulling out and using because our brains are little more than belief justification engines.

And if our society has also encouraged us to see villains as black hatted evil caricatures of people, then our giant justification engines are going to work overtime to make sure that we are not Bad People(TM). And since we are not Bad People(TM), we therefore cannot be doing the things that Bad People(TM) do.

And THAT is the point of this piece. Gaslighting, the action, needs to be understood as a Very Bad Thing, but it needs to be separated from our personal identities as a thing that only Very Bad People do. The action is a tool that we have all been taught how to use. It's normal and reasonable for people immersed in a culture that uses this tool to reach for the tool themselves. It is an *inappropriate* tool, but the people who use it are regular, everyday people who have understandable reasons for reaching for it.

And now that you know it is a common, ubiquitous even, tool in all of our toolboxes, we ought to be on the lookout for when *we* reach for this totally normal, common but unhealthy tool. Gaslighting is not a tool reserved only for the most evil of all evil people. It's a tool that everyone has been exposed to, and taught how to use. All you have to do now is teach yourself how to put that tool down and reach for another one.

"My marriage is permanent! We place the relationship above the people in it! All other relationships are expendable as long as the marriage lasts forever!"

"Wow, that's not cool. Anyone my spouse and I date will automatically become an equal member of our triad! They're not expendable, they're exactly as permanent as the marriage!"

*sigh*

OK, so, I suppose it's a step up that you don't consider other people to be disposable or expendable. Yay? But you're still making the relationship more important than the happiness of the people in the relationship and you're still removing people's agency by deciding ahead of time what each relationship *will* look like, whether the people in those relationship want it that way or not.

I know it's really hard to see, because benevolent sexism is also really hard to see, and these are analogous things, but this is still problematic.

Benevolent sexism is where we switch from thinking that women are money-grubbing sluts who can't do math and shouldn't vote or talk in public and should be stoned to death for showing their ankles to unrelated men, to thinking that women are goddesses and need to be coddled and revered and pampered and who are better at nurturing and domestic tasks than men.

"But wait, isn't it a good thing to treat people well and to compliment their skills?"

Well, yes and no. it's a good thing to treat individual *people* well, but "well" depends on the recipient's definition, not yours. And it's not a "compliment on their skills" to say that "women" as a group are better at things when we all have different levels of ability and interest and especially when those things are things that society doesn't value highly and certainly doesn't pay for the way that we pay for everything else that requires specialized skills.

Malevolent sexism and benevolent sexism are two sides of the same coin - both versions put all women into a box and all women are required to fit into that box whether they actually do or not. And, especially in the case of benevolent sexism, if they don't fit into that box, they are punished for it. So women are still hindered, limited. A gilded cage is still a cage and my wings are still clipped even while sitting on a padded swing.

Plus, studies have shown that benevolent sexism is very strongly correlated to malevolent sexism - meaning that the society that has one also has the other. So just because a single person might think that women are "goddesses", that attitude only exists in a culture where someone else thinks women are "demons". So the benevolent sexist has to contribute to the overall culture of sexism that ultimately harms the women he claims to love (assuming he doesn't directly harm women as well by punishing women for not behaving goddess-like).

This "our third is an equal" attitude is basically the same thing as benevolent sexism. It might *seem* like it's a compliment or benefiting that "third", but it's still putting people into boxes and still expecting them to conform to an externally imposed role. A more ethical way of doing things is to just meet people, see how you click, and then talk to everyone involved to see what each person wants out of each relationship and allow each relationship the freedom to develop however it wants to.

My relationship with Franklin has always wanted to be what I used to call "emotionally primary" (before I dropped all ranking terms entirely, because I learned that even "descriptive primary" still contributes to this whole problem), meaning that our relationship has always pulled us towards stronger emotional connections with each other. But our lives have pulled us physically apart. If we had given up on the relationship just because it didn't meet our preset expectations of what a relationship with strong emotional connections *should* look like, we would have had to break up more than a decade ago.

But then I would have missed out on the last 15 years of a very emotionally nourishing relationship and I would be missing out on the very exciting future that we are trying to plan now.

I wish we would just erase this whole "equal" language from our poly vocabulary because people don't understand how to use it ethically. "Equal" is more often used as a blunt object to bludgeon people into predetermined roles, than out of any sense of equality or egalitarian values.

I am not "equal" to Franklin's other partners and they are not "equal" to me. I am equal to FRANKLIN. He and I have the same amount of power in our relationship to negotiate our own personal boundaries and the direction of our relationship, and *only* he and I have the power to negotiate our own boundaries and the direction of our relationship.

I cannot determine how his relationships go with anyone else, he can't determine how my relationships with others go, and nobody we are dating can determine how mine and his relationship together can go. This is what is meant by "equal".

People who talk about "equal" in this prescripted sort of way, much like people who defend hierarchy, tend to mix up all sorts of elements into the word "equal". The criticisms are almost exclusively about power structures. But these defenders want to throw in strength of emotional connection, time / attention priorities, and financial obligations.

Our relationships with other people are too *different* to be ranked as above, below, or equal to another. Franklin and I both care about our other partners very deeply and we cannot quantify our emotions to say who we care about "most".

So that's the emotions part that most people who talk about "equal" usually get confused about. I think it's foolish, at best, to even bother trying to rank how much you "love" each person, and at worst, it leads to the mindset that allows you to think of people as "disposable" and "expendable" because you don't "love" someone as much as someone else.

Priorities like time and attention are all different because we are all different people. Trying to make everyone "equal" is to dismiss their individuality, which dismisses their very humanity. Even identical twins are still unique individuals. We all want different things, and we all place importance on different things.

And there are *so many* things to account for here! My "quality time" isn't going to be the same as your "quality time" - it depends on our Love Languages, our preferences, our interests, and even our mood at any given moment. Spending time on the couch watching TV together might count as "quality time" most of the time, unless there's some other issue in our relationship that's coloring the experience for us, and then it won't "count".

There are just so many variables and so many unpredictable things to account for, that to even attempt to tally all things up and make them "equal" is an exercise in futility. And, in my observation, usually just tends to make the insecurities about priority worse when you start micromanaging relationships to make them "equal".

Financial obligations are pretty much the same thing - too many variables. People like to winnow it all down to "we have a mortgage and kids", but there are so many different things to consider like income disparity, cultural power differentials between gender and economic class, tax breaks, unpaid emotional labor, other relationship status, other support networks, other dependents ... there's a reason the US tax code is basically inscrutable without a degree in accounting. Finances are complicated.

To start ranking a relationship's importance based on only a few financial criteria is to ignore the impact that all these other criteria have on a relationship. Which is basically how we got to the point of women complaining about emotional labor in the first place.

A relationship between people who share a mortgage shouldn't be automatically more "important" than other sorts of relationships, just make sure that one obligation is cared for, like all the other obligations. That doesn't mean that the relationship overall deserves a higher ranking, or that one who doesn't share a mortgage deserves a lesser ranking. Relationships that don't involve mortgages can be every bit as "serious" and "committed" and "entangled" as those that do.

Just ... stop with the "disposable" shit and stop with the "equal to my other partners" shit. We. Are. Different. Each person is a unique individual, and consequently each *relationship* is a unique entity because the people in them are unique. Even *you* are a different person in the context of one relationship vs. another relationship. Pretty similar, sure, but that relationship influences who you are, which changes who you are.

Which relates back to a recent post I made about how you can't "add a third to our existing relationship" because that relationship no longer exists, having been permanently altered by the change in status. You have created all new relationships, including with your preexisting partner. *Everything* is different now - your relationships and the people in them.

They. Can't. Be. Quantified. Or. Ranked. Without. Dehumanizing. Or. Objectifying. Them.

Which is why even insisting that "our third will be equal in all things" is just the other side of the coin of the "disposable" perspective. It's a prettier side, to be sure. It feels kinder, it feels fluffier, it feels nicer. It even feels more ethical. I remember the first relationship I was in that espoused this canard, and I remember feeling valued at the time. And then I learned the dark side of what this actually means.

Because it comes from the same place - disregarding the uniqueness, the individuality, and the agency of the people in the relationships and valuing the relationship itself over the people in them.

For more discussion on this topic, here is the FB thread that sparked it.

I watch a lot of '70s and '80s sitcom re-runs with feminist characters. Most of the time, that's why I like them. But that was the era of 2nd Wave feminism, which is notoriously sex-negative. So I occasionally have imaginary conversations with these fictional characters defending sex-positivity. This bit popped into my head today after an episode including a porn actress:

We all agree that we should have the right to say "no" and have that respected. But what good is that "right" to say no if we're not allowed to say "yes"?

That "no" is just as restrictive as anything else the patriarchy imposes on us. That "no" doesn't give us any freedom at all. We are still being judged by patriarchal values of sexual objectification. Required to have sex, required to be chaste - it's two sides of the same coin.

I will say "no" when I mean "no" and "yes" when I want to say "yes". And if I want to say "yes" more often than someone else, or less often than someone else, as a warrior for the right of women to own their own bodies, the right to say "yes" should be just as important as the right to say "no".

To be judged as "lesser" than other women because one says "yes" is to buy right into those same patriarchal values that led us to fight for the right to say "no" in the first place. You are still judging me for my sexuality, you are still defining my own boundaries for my body for me, you are still taking away my freedom, my choices, my agency.

You don't have to say "yes" if you don't want to. But I shouldn't have to say "no" if I don't want to. Consent is meaningless if you can't say "no", but the right to withhold consent is meaningless if you can't say "yes".

"But self-respect, blah blah blah."

I respect myself by listening to what my body wants and honoring it, not by allowing men to place their own narrow filter over me, telling me when I am worthy of respect by them (and myself) and what makes me not worthy of respect.

I respect myself when I have sex because I want to, and I respect myself when I don't have sex when I don't want to. I even respect myself when I trade sex for money, at least as much as I respect myself when I trade literally any other labor or experience for money.

It's not the act of sex in exchange for money that makes it disrespectful, it's the commodifying of labor and service to trade for survival that's disrespectful.

I am worthy of respect from myself and others because I exist, and no other reason is necessary. My self-respect is not subject to the whims of other people's values. That wouldn't be SELF respect, then. Certainly, allowing other people to decide what to do with my body against my own desires and interests would not be respecting myself.

https://qz.com/991030/your-single-coworkers-and-employees-arent-there-to-pick-up-the-slack-for-married-people/

Not poly but an example of couple privilege, which is so deeply embedded in our culture that we bring these kinds of values with us into poly relationships unless we are consciously fighting against it.

How many unicorn hunters argue that their mythical "third" should be the one to move in with them because they have the family so it would be more of a hardship for them to move? How often do we see excuses for ignoring or dismissing or mistreating secondaries because they're "single" but the couple has a "family" to protect. How often do solo polys bear the brunt of the emotional labor, the financial strain, and various "responsibilities" because the "family" is a priority and needs to remain as such?

#RhetoricalQuestions #CouplePrivilege #IHaveMyOwnResponsibilitiesThatNeedPriorityButNoOneToHelpMeLikeThat

"In fact, single people do more to maintain their relationships with their friends, neighbors, siblings, and parents than married people. They are better at staying in touch with them, and helping and encouraging them. It is different for couples who move in together or get married. They tend to become more insular, even if they don’t have children. When aging parents need help, they get it disproportionately from their grown children who are single."

"Single people are rooted in their communities and towns in significant ways. They participate in public events more often, and take more music and art classes. They volunteer more than married people do for a wide variety of organizations."

"Ideally, only in special circumstances should employees be asked to justify their requests to take time off. Otherwise, in a culture that still celebrates married people and their families... single people may be treated unfairly. For example, employers may be tempted to take more seriously a request to take time off to care for an ailing spouse than an ailing sibling or close friend."

"When single people are caring for their parents and others who need their help, they do so at greater economic risk than married people are. If they put in fewer hours at work, or step away from their jobs, they do not have a spouse to pick up the financial slack—or keep them on their employer-sponsored health insurance. Similarly, when single people get laid off or lose their jobs, they are particularly vulnerable for the same reasons."

"Even more significantly, single people are excluded from more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit and protect only people who are legally married. ... When lifelong single people die, they cannot leave their benefits to anyone else—they go back into the system—and no one else can leave their benefits to a single person either."

"Financial disadvantages in taxation, Social Security, health spending, and housing expenses add up. By one estimate, single women, relative to married women, lose out on somewhere between a half million and a million dollars over the course of their adult lives."

Misanthropic humanism (n): When you know ppl suck but still get pissed when they're mistreated, exploited, oppressed, & deceived. #Atheism ~ @TheGodlessMama

"Wishing everyone on the road would die in a fire and also have affordable health care and the right to use any toilet they want." ~ Rachel Primeaux Jordan

Finally found my philosophical worldview label.

I tell ya, I'm really irritated at men who think they don't act emotionally.

I recall once where I was complaining about someone who emailed me to say that they weren't going to buy anything from my t-shirt shop until I included this one gender combination on my shirts that I had left out when I had come up with like a dozen different combinations, and I said that I was going to refuse to add that combination just because he demanded it and if he wanted that combination he would have to request a custom shirt to purchase like anyone else who wanted something that wasn't already in my shop. My partner to whom I was whining pointed out that I was reacting emotionally, and I said "yup! I am feeling petty so I'm just not gonna" or something to that effect.

I had another relationship once where the entire fucking relationship could be summed up as "he doesn't believe that he reacts according to his emotions and thinks everything he does is perfectly logical and reasonable". OTG he was like the most irrational, illogical, emotion-based person I've ever known, he was just really good at *justification*.

Like the time that he got all freaked out when I started dating someone new. He refused to acknowledge it, but he had been hurt really badly in his first serious relationship (and now that I know more about culturally enforced, misogyny-based abuse, I can see now how he did it to himself, but that's another tale). So every relationship he had after that point was arranged to prevent him from feeling that hurt ever again.

So he refused to tell me that I couldn't date this other guy, which is a good thing. And he refused to *ask* me if I would not date this other guy, which is also a good thing. But he couldn't admit that he was *bothered* by me dating this other guy. Instead, one week, before I and the other guy even decided that we wanted to date, my then-partner counted hours.

So, here's the thing... there was a special, one-time showing of an indie film happening in the new guy's town, which was 2 hours away from me and my then-partner. He organized a group of mutual friends to go and invited me along. My then-boyfriend wanted to go too, which I thought was weird because he never expressed interest in that type of movie before or in that group of friends, but whatever, it was a group outing.

So we get to the movie and the new potential moves into the row of seats. My boyfriend cuts me off to get into the row before me and sits next to the potential, so that I couldn't sit next to him. So I stood there, looking at him oddly until he got up and let me sit between them.

After the movie, everybody hugs everyone goodbye as is common in that group of friends and my potential gives me a kiss on the cheek, which is new for us. The rest of the way home was stony silence until I pushed him into an argument. He got all pissed off at me for inviting him along on this "date", why didn't I just tell him to stay home so that he didn't have to watch his girlfriend making out with another dude?

Keep in mind that this guy was a poly *veteran* and I had 2 other boyfriends at the time, one of whom he has watched flog me and make out with me at parties before.

So no amount of explaining or clarifying that this wasn't a "date", that I didn't "invite" the boyfriend, he invited himself, that we didn't "make out", and that I had already told him that the new potential was a potential and we were dancing around the idea of dating. The argument ended, but never got resolved.

But I tell that story not because of the content of the event, but because the 4-hour round trip car trip that I took *with my then-boyfriend* and the 2 hours spent at the theater *in a group not talking to each other* was "counted" among the hours I had spent with the new potential. Which is bad enough on its own, but then he also *deducted* an entire 24-hour period that I had spent with him that week, which was not scheduled and which cut into my crafting time even though I had a con deadline coming up, but that I offered to spend with him anyway because I could tell he was feeling anxious and left out and I wanted to reassure him.

So, if you add up the 6 hours for the movie and take away the 24 hour spontaneous date, that makes 6 hours for new guy and 4 hours for existing guy, so clearly new guy wins and I'm obviously more interested in him than existing guy and planning to dump him soon. Those are numbers! They're objective fact! There are no emotions here! 6 is clearly bigger than 4! You can't argue against that!!! He's not being irrational or lashing out because of his emotions, he's just plainly stating facts. And facts are facts.

I mean, except for the part that his numbers were completely pulled out of his ass, the point is that he couldn't admit to reacting out of his emotions, which don't necessarily reflect reality. No, he had to retreat into "logic" and "reason", which were anything but logical or reasonable. But to him, he had to have an *argument*, a *case* to win. There was no sharing together, no collaboration, no acknowledgement whatsoever that feelings ARE FUCKING REAL THINGS and affect the way we perceive the world and the way in which we see ourselves.

His problems were way deeper than this example, btw, but I don't want to spend any more time on talking about him because it's not just him. One of the reasons why I always identified more as masculine is because I have such little patience in dealing with emotional conflict. Almost every relationship I've ever been in has ended in *his* tears because he has such overwhelming emotions that he doesn't know what to do with them. But, at the same time, these guys just. refuse. to admit. that they're feeling feelz. So I get stuck in HOURS-long debates, day after day, as they try to "reason" with me about whatever the fuck has them feeling insecure. So after a few years, I just threw my hands up and said "fuck, you guys are so fucking emotional!" and stuck with casual sex for a while because I was so damn tired of managing other people's emotions.

Then, I started getting into poly relationships with guys who supposedly are better at communication and not so attached to toxic masculine standards. Nope, same bullshit. Emotion fucking everywhere, but long "debates" to hide them behind. And Cthulu forbid you point out to them that they're having a fucking feeling! Well, anger is OK to feel, and frustration. But being afraid? Feeling not worthy? Feeling small? Feeling unloved? Shit, even the good emotions - happiness is OK (not to my fucked up ex above, though), but tenderness? Vulnerability? Even elation and non-sexual passion is touchy because if you feel *too much*, that's also not manly. Or something.

But feelings are what give us the motivation to act. They're how we prioritize what we want to act on and how we're going to act. We literally cannot make decisions without feelings. And when some guys get it in their heads to do something that ends up hurting someone else, they get really entrenched in the idea that they've logically, rationally, thought everything through and decided this was the best course of action, when in reality, they *felt* something and reacted and then post hoc logicked up their justifications, which they now are invested in maintaining because to do otherwise would reveal the illusion that they are reacting in emotion.

I'm even willing to concede some things if they say "I want it done this way because I'm feeling emotions" instead of trying to logic me into agreeing with them. I had a freakout with a partner a while back, and I asked him to do something for me that, honestly, is a little unreasonable. But I owned it. I knew when I asked him that it was unreasonable, and I admitted it and I admitted that I asked it of him because I was feeling.

So I also said that it was OK for him to say no, and I had to really mean that. Before even asking, I got comfortable with the possibility that he would say no, and I resigned myself to just dealing with the feelings. If this is how men approached it with me, I might be a little more willing to bend on some things. I might actually be willing to do the unreasonable thing, because this kind of self-awareness and ownership is a good sign that they really will work through the feelings and the unreasonable thing won't be a permanent setting or a pattern of the future.

But, in my experience, that's not what guys do. They have an emotion, they react, and they instantly come up with all kinds of "logical" reasons for taking action. We know that people do this all the time, about, like, everything. There are even studies for it. See? Logic & reason & science, so there! So when I get mad about it, we have to fucking *debate* every goddamn detail like it's a fucking courtroom case that can be won or get thrown out for a technicality, and all of it misses the main point - that he's feeling something.

There are 2 other examples here, both from one guy. In one, he refused to admit that he was afraid and that his fear was clouding his judgement. In the other, he owned up to the fear, but then made his partners responsible for it.

The first example: he was absolutely terrified of HSV. Y'know, the "std" that is the most common and least harmful of all of them? The one you can get from your fucking grandma? But not just from fucking your grandma, just to be clear. So, through a long chain of network metamours, he "discovered" (because he forgot that it was disclosed it to him when he became connected to the relevant part of the network) that some metametamour had HSV, but that all the people between him and that person consistently test non-reactive for it.

So he threw a fucking fit over it and the idea that one of his partners was fluid-bonded to someone who was connected to this other metametamour. He didn't want his partner and her other partner to be fluid-bonded because of his phobia, so he bombarded them with "studies" about how latex barriers reduce the risk of transmission. He retreated into "logic" and "studies" and "science" because he couldn't admit that he was terrified of something that actually posed no threat to him (and I mean that literally, he later tested reactive for HSV himself and had it the whole time, he just didn't know about it because he was asymptomatic). It would be like a big manly man admitting a phobia of mice or something. Instead, he had to scour the internet looking for studies on rabies in mice and people who got sick from exposure to housepets. There's even more outrageousness to the story, but this post is already long.

The other example, he was absolutely terrified of his partners having other partners. And by "terrified", I mean that he described his feelings in terms of someone going through a PTSD trigger episode and he used that to justify the use of PTSD therapy techniques to deal with it.

What I mean is that he admitted that he was having a totally irrational emotional meltdown at the very idea of his wife having a male partner. He owned up to that. But then he *used* that to justify controlling his wife's behaviour. He ranked various sex acts from kissing to PIV, even breaking down different *positions* for sex as their own separate item. Then his wife was not allowed to do each act until he went through a "desensitization" process that included first thinking about them doing the act, then talking about them doing the act, then them doing the act in front of him, and then finally doing the act without him present but her describing it afterwards. Each time resulted in shaking and a literal catatonic state, and only when he could do that stage without shaking and going catatonic could the wife and her boyfriend move to the next stage.

However, as the wife racked up individual sex acts that she was allowed to do with her boyfriend, this guy used that as "proof" that he was "getting over it". See? This is how PTSD is treated! There are papers on it! He's following an approved psychological method! It's science! How can it be wrong?

As I read through Why Does He Do That, on the section on how individual psychotherapy and marriage counseling actually enables abusers because it doesn't attack the root issue and instead solidifies the attention back on the abuser (which is what he wants), this is so clearly what's happening here. He's going through the motions of being a "sensitive" man, of acknowledging his "feelings", but then he pawns off the responsibility for dealing with those feelings onto his female partners and backs up his actions with "logic" and "science" and "reason". And he never reached a point at which he had to stop "desensitizing" himself to things, he just got "desensitized" to specific actions. He still "needed" this massively invasive controlling behaviour because he never stopped feeling his feelings. He just moved various activities in and out of the "trigger" category by making his partner responsible for "triggering" him.

He, like so many others, can't just say that he's having strong feelings and those feelings are making him act like an asshole because it's hard not to act like an asshole when you're feeling strong feels. Just, will guys just fucking start owning up to lashing out in feelings for a change? Maybe then we can start moving onto what to do about those feelings so that you don't act like an asshole in response to them, but right now I'd settle for guys who just own it first.

And you? You right there? The guy who is shaking his head in amazement at all the assholes I've known and feeling just a little bit smug that you don't do this (or you stopped doing this)? Yeah, you probably still do.

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Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic. The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks. But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music. I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded. The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman". It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too. In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

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I am not a fan of Dan Savage. He occasionally says something not terrible, but so do a lot of other people who don't fill the rest of their time with toxic nonsense. Just because a stopped clock is right twice a day, it doesn't mean that you should rely on that clock as your timepiece. A working clock is also right those same 2 times a day, but it's right all the rest of the time too.

This rant is brought to you by Savage's Campsite Rule. This rule states that you should leave your partners "better" than you found them, including no stds, no unwanted pregnancies, and no emotional or sexual baggage because of their experience with you. Aside from that being literally impossible to guarantee, the problem I have with the campsite rule is that it relies on the very person most at risk of being the problem to self-evaluate.

I've been involved in identifying abusive dynamics in my communities in the last several years, and what we've all learned the hard way is that abusers see themselves as victims even while they're actively abusing someone. Asking one of them to take on the responsibility of not leaving their partner worse than they found them is like asking unicorn hunters to take on the responsibility of not harming their unicorns, or the police department to evaluate and take on the responsibility of correcting its own level of racism and corruption. We need objective and independent evaluations, not our subjective opinions of ourselves which are inherently biased to think of ourselves as "Good People".

Abusers blame their victims for their situation. The abuser always come away from abusive relationships thinking that *the abuser* was the "good one" and that the victim is worse off without the abuser in the picture. I'm sure we've all heard "what does she see in that loser? She could have a Nice Guy like me! Women just want guys who are assholes! They don't even have enough sense to notice a good catch like me when I'm right in front of them!"

Abusers think that their victims are not capable of making good choices for themselves and they require corrective action from the abuser. The abuser is the one who knows how the victim should live / date / dress / eat / work / be! The victim is lost without the abuser to tell them the proper way to cook eggs and raise children and dress for work and clean the house and think about themselves! So the abusers say.

So I'm not a fan of telling people to leave their partners "better off" than they found them because abusers - the people most in dire need of these sorts of restrictions - honestly think they *are* doing that. They think that their victims *came* to them with baggage and that the abuser is the only one who can "straighten them out".

In the book Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft, we hear stories from the sessions with abusive men. Without exception, they believe that their partners are the fucked up ones, that their partners need their corrective hand to survive, that their partners will ruin their own lives without their personal guidance, and that they are absolutely justified in whatever tactics they employ to "guide" their victims.

We all like to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own story. In my observation, it's the victims who are most likely to think that they are too "broken" to be a good partner for someone and everyone else doesn't really believe at the beginning of a relationship that they will one day become a bad influence on their partners. Even without being an abuser, most of us genuinely do not believe that we will one day break up and our partners will be a bigger mess because of their experience with us.

I know that I've had partners, in my early poly days, who were absolutely not ready to deal with ethical non-monogamy. And to this day, I still do not believe that I treated them unethically. But their pre-existing issues did not mix well with my more advanced relationship skills or my own flaws and some of them probably have some baggage after dating me. I am not a beginner relationship. If you throw someone into a situation that is too advanced or too complicated for them to handle at that stage, they're likely to come away from that experience with a few issues.

*We* are generally not the right people to evaluate ahead of time what will or will not be "good" for someone after it's over. We're not even very good at evaluating what will be good for ourselves, let alone other people.

So I think that is a terrible metric to use in evaluating ethics in relationships. We have more concrete, objective metrics involving power dynamics and domestic violence red flags. We should not be relying on our own subjective opinion of ourselves when it is ourselves that need evaluation for potential harm. We are too biased for that evaluation.

www.racked.com/2017/1/18/14112366/dressing-like-an-adult-sophistication

This is interesting. I thought it was going to rely on slut-shaming in order to make its point, that dressing "sexy" was bad so, ladies, cover it up! But that's not the take that I got. I also thought it was going to blast millennials by comparing youth to age in this specific time. But it didn't do that either. If anything, it picked on Baby Boomers.

I'm letting my hair go grey on its own. When I visited my mother before the pandemic, I had more grey than she did because shes not ready to let the world see her age (although she finally leaned into grey hair with the social trend that came about during lockdowns of more "natural" hair styles). I have nothing against people who color their hair because they like the color. But I'm not going to color mine because I *fear* my color.

This article wasn't about shaming people for their arbitrary fashion choices of today. It wasn't yet another "kids today don't know what's good for them!" It was a more subtle look at the way our culture dismisses older women (with a nod to the effects older men get too) and an appreciative look at the experience and complexity that can come with age, as seen through fashion.

"Before, girls aspired to wear the sexy draped dresses only deemed appropriate for over-30 women who could handle the consequences of showing off their cleavage. Today, if you were to read some women’s magazines at face value, we’re left with nothing to look forward to past the minimum age of renting a car.

The culprit? The baby boomers and the 1960s Youthquake. "

"“By the age of thirty, most women were married, held jobs, or both,” writes Przybyszewski. “And they were presumed able to handle the eroticism embodied in the draped designs that made for the most sophisticated styles.” Draping gathers excess fabric into unique waves that draw attention to the wearer’s womanly curves and the tug of gravity. “It offers a more subtle eroticism than our usual bare fashion,” she writes. "

"The only acceptable way to present old age in public is to completely efface it. "

"But what if we accented our age on purpose to show off our hard-earned sagacity?"

"You could either get botox or celebrate the raw power of gathering decades of knowledge of yourself and the world. I say, let’s assemble a squad of matronly motherfuckers."

Had a dream that woke me up one morning. I dreamt that I was crashing at a friend's house out of town (as I have been known to do when I work out of town and am on my own for lodging, to save money). I don't know who the "friends" were supposed to be, but y'know, dream.

So I was sleeping over at a friend's house and I had to go pee, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. While in there one "friend" came home and started talking to the other "friend".

Through the door, I heard "it was totally racist, but, like, not white to black people, the other direction."

So I yelled through the door "there's no such thing as reverse racism, that's not how this works!"

I got out of the bathroom and made my way back to my room so pissed off that I had a "friend" who would still make that claim, especially because, in my dream-addled brain, this "friend" was supposed to be one of my rational, progressive friends. So, in the dream, I started gearing up for a confrontation and formulating my usual soundbites about systemic, institutional discrimination vs. personal rudeness, etc.

And I got so mad and worked up over it that this is what woke me up.

So there I was that morning, pissed off at an imaginary friend for being racist. Welcome to my brain.

Your sporadic reminder that there is no scale of theist --> agnostic --> atheist. Agnosticism is not in between "there is a god" and "there is no god".

Atheism is not a positive assertion that there is no god. It is absent a positive *belief* that there *is* a god.

Atheism is about lacking belief. Agnosticism is about lacking *knowledge*.

Instead of that line, you have a 2x2 box with theism / atheism on one axis and gnosticism / agnosticism on the other. You have 4 categories: gnostic theists, agnostic theists, gnostic atheists, and agnostic atheists.

It's *gnostic atheists* that claim to know that there is no god.

And to muddle things even further, you can have atheists who are gnostic about some deities and agnostic about other deities.

This is a tired, old argument that has been refuted ages ago and it's very irksome to keep having the same arguments repeatedly over many years just because *this guy* hasn't yet had it *with me*. I have no patience on the 100th time and I don't particularly care if it's your first. Like every other ridiculous debate that's been settled but keeps popping up, go look up where it's been debated before instead of reinventing the wheel yet again.

And for the record, I'm a gnostic atheist about most deities. We have tools to provide knowledge about the possible or probable existence of deities provided one first defines the deity in question. And yet I'm still irritated that we have to keep reminding people that atheism is an absence of belief, not a positive assertion of non-existence. That's my gnosticism talking, not my atheism.

In addition to that, the vast majority of even gnostic atheists don't claim 100% certainty. If we're using science, logic, and empiricism to arrive at our claims then we know better to claim 100% certainty. We just also recognise that one only needs be certain *enough* to operate as if it's true.

For 100% certainty, you have to look to the gnostic theists.

https://theestablishment.co/special-snowflake-my-ass-why-identity-labels-matter-3b976b1899a4/

I've been arguing against the "I don't need no stinking labels!" crowd since I first encountered them. Not "needing" a label is a form of privilege. That's wonderful that you, personally, can move through life without ever having your personhood challenged or needing to do work in order to find people who are similar to you or who accept you.

The rest of us use our biologically advanced tool of language to communicate abstract concepts with each other like who we are and how we work to be "seen" by others and to find each other because we're not as visible or as numerous as some people are and we live in worlds that are hostile to differences.

"Labels are crucial for anyone whose experience isn’t positioned as the default in our society."

"That’s what labels do — they empower marginalized people. Through our identities, we build communities, we learn about ourselves, we tell our own stories, we celebrate ourselves in a society that often tells us we shouldn’t, and we come together to stand up to oppressive systems.
Our identity labels hold power."

"Remember those Earth-like planets NASA recently discovered? Well, they’re currently in the process of naming them — because that’s what often happens when you discover something that you didn’t realize existed. Notice I said “you didn’t realize existed,” not “new.” Many of these identities aren’t new — it’s just that people are only now starting to learn about them and name them."

"On a daily basis, people are discriminated against for being something other than white, thin, neurotypical, cisgender, heteroromantic, heterosexual, and whatever else is perceived as “normal” in our society. If you fit into any of these categories, then you experience privilege. Some of your identities are more accepted, or at least more widely known. You don’t have to explain yourself everywhere you go. You don’t have to worry about facing discrimination throughout your day.

That’s privilege."

"That costs how much?! Please! I can make it myself for cheaper than that!"

Me: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

If, by some miracle, you actually can obtain all the materials for cheaper than the finished product (which, in my experience, only happens when I already have shit lying around the house from previous crafts or when I know someone in a particular industry who has shit lying around from their businesses), this doesn't take into account your time.

As a freelancer, I've had to learn how to view my time as valuable. I charge X amount per hour for certain labor. My time is worth at least that much. So, how many hours am I going to put into this craft? Multiply that times my going rate for work, and that's how much money the craft is "costing" me by not earning that money for that time.

It's easy to rationalize that I wouldn't be working anyway, so I'm just filling my spare time with activities that include crafting. But that's how we end up with the stereotype of the "starving artist" - by not valuing our time commercially, we don't charge enough and/or don't get paid enough for what we do that other people want to have but don't or won't or can't do themselves.

This is how we ended up with "interns" who are legal adults but who can't pay any bills because they got talked into working "for the exposure / experience". This is how we ended up with an entire generation of people not earning enough to feed themselves and another generation thinking that they're so "entitled" and willing to pay them wages that can't they can't feed themselves on.

Also, raw materials are fucking expensive when you have to buy retail or in small quantities for one-off products. Ignoring the more abstract issue of time, materials cost more than you'd think (if you don't already work intimately with those products).

That prom dress costs $200?! Ridiculous! Except that the same material bought at a retail fabric shop for 1 dress costs $300 plus your labor.

I have no problem with anyone wanting to make anything. As a crafter, obviously I make stuff. And, as I mentioned above, because I craft all the time, I probably already have stuff lying around that can be used in my crafts. Kinda like cooking - the first time I had to buy a $15 jar of some spice was a major investment, but if I only use a fraction of a teaspoon per recipe, then the *next time* I make it, it'll be way cheaper. What spice is it? Saffron? that's more expensive per oz. than gold?

But as a *producer* of goods and services, it really rankles me when my work and the work of artists is dismissed on the, usually mistaken, notion that it's "cheaper" to do it oneself. Or on the dismissal of homemade products by people trying to save money as somehow being "less" than store-bought manufactured goods because they don't count the labor involved as part of the financial investment.

There's that one comic out there somewhere that has a guy behind a desk complaining to a graphic artist that he just paid some "outrageous" amount for something that took the artist (or coder, I can't remember) 20 minutes to make. So the artist reminds the boss that he didn't just pay for 20 minutes of work, he also paid for the years of schooling and training that it took to be *able* to do the thing in only 20 minutes. If the boss had invested the tens of thousands of dollars into a similar education, then sure, he could have done the same thing in the same amount of time.

As a poor person, I definitely know how much "cheaper" things can be when comparing up-front costs. I get into that argument all the time from the other side. But then you can't count your *labor* as a dollar value. If you did that, it likely wouldn't be cheaper. And for someone on an income as low or lower than mine, that actual dollar value vs. potential dollar value is significant. I can actually afford some things I do myself because the bank won't come to collect on the 6 hours it took me to do the thing.

But as a content provider trying to make a living off that labor, because the bank won't come to collect on my *hours*, that means that I also don't have any *cash* to give them instead when people snort at how much I charge to perform labor.

Not saying that prices aren't ridiculous sometimes. Capitalism is a fucked up system from top to bottom. Just saying that it's very rarely ever "cheaper to do it myself" when you really add up all the associated costs.

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#CraftersKnowItIsNotAboutSavingMoney #AlmostAlwaysCheaperToMassProduceOrAtLeastBuyRawMaterialsInBulkToHandProduceLargeQuantities #BecauseIAmACrafterIKnowBetterEvenThoughIStillSayThisMyselfSometimes #HolyFuckAmISpendingALotOnMaterial! #CouponClippingAndItIsStillExpensive

When Florida or other southern natives ask me how I like living here -

Me: I hate it here. I hate the weather, I hate the culture, I hate the politics, I hate the income level, and I hate the people. I have some friends out here who are exceptions to the rule, that's why we're friends, but generally speaking, this place is conservative, intolerant, and backwards.

Them: How can you say that? This is Orlando! We have Disney with all the gay people! And all kinds of black people and don't forget the Puerto Ricans!

Me: That's what I'm talking about. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, with influences from San Francisco, LA, Portland, and Seattle. And even *those* places have their problems. But compared to them, this is a small town with delusions of grandeur, complete with the small-town thinking that goes with it.

People who grow up in truly diverse environments would never think that Disney is "diverse" just because it's OK to be out as gay and employed by them, or think that it's diverse or tolerant just because there are people of color physically present. That statements like that are uttered are exactly why this place is too backwards for me.

Them: ...

Them: Well, I guess if you're from San Francisco...

Me: Yeah, that's what I mean.

#RealLifeConversationsIHave #Repeatedly

https://qz.com/920561/conscious-consumerism-is-a-lie-heres-a-better-way-to-help-save-the-world

"Conscious consumerism is a lie. Small steps taken by thoughtful consumers—to recycle, to eat locally, to buy a blouse made of organic cotton instead of polyester—will not change the world."

"Making series of small, ethical purchasing decisions while ignoring the structural incentives for companies’ unsustainable business models won’t change the world as quickly as we want. It just makes us feel better about ourselves."

"There’s also the issue of privilege. The sustainability movement has been charged with being elitist—and it most certainly is. You need a fair amount of disposable income to afford ethical and sustainable consumption options, the leisure time to research the purchasing decisions you make, the luxury to turn up your nose at 95% of what you’re offered, and, arguably, a post-graduate degree in chemistry to understand the true meaning behind ingredient labels."

"Choosing fashion made from hemp, grilling the waiter about how your fish was caught, and researching whether your city can recycle bottle caps might make you feel good, reward a few social entrepreneurs, and perhaps protect you from charges of hypocrisy. But it’s no substitute for systematic change."

"But when it comes to combating climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction, what we need to do is take the money, time, and effort we spend making these ultimately inconsequential choices and put it toward something that really matters."

"So if you really care about the environment, climb on out of your upcycled wooden chair and get yourself to a town hall meeting." And I would add to support science education and bone up on some heavy science yourself so that when you do go to a town hall meeting, you'll know what you're talking about and can propose solutions that are based in reality and more likely to work, like supporting gmo food, vaccinations, geologically relevant climate change policies, and functional education.

This post was originally commentary I attached to a link to some other article that has since been removed and I don't remember enough of the article to search for an alternate copy of it or a wayback machine archive of it. But I've used this commentary in other discussions since, so I'm archiving it here. If I find a relevant article to attach to this commentary, I will amend this post. I think it might have been the story of the real-life "Lord of the Flies" where a group of boys was shipwrecked but they formed a cooperative culture until they were rescued? But I'm not sure.

I got into this argument with a former metamour once. Apparently she had read some well-written book about the Stanford experiment and waxed philosophical about the terrifying nature of people, and I criticized the experiment for its many flaws which means that we can't draw the conclusion that people are fundamentally evil and corruptible, but that *privileged white boys who want to impress their authority figure who removed their accountability in the first place* are the only ones we can draw that tentative conclusion about.

She also really did not like me saying that.

When people are raised at or near the top of the privilege ladder;

When they are given absolute authority with no accountability and no personal history of education or exposure to the responsibility of authority;

When their own authority figure involves himself personally in the experiment instead of recusing himself;

When *someone believes their victim is consenting* (because the victim is a volunteer who, presumably, can "opt out" at any time, and they don't understand what happens to a victim's ability to consent *even when they originally volunteered*);

When they believe the whole thing is play-acting and *are told to take on a particular role*;

When they come from a society that says one class of people is subhuman and then they are told to play a character in charge of said sub-human who is also supposed to be a "character";

When all these things happen, as they are far more likely to do when someone is raised white, male, and middle-class than in any other demographic, THEN you get this outcome.

When someone is raised with empathy as one of their highest values, and are taught throughout their life about the responsibility that comes along with authority, and that other people are real people too, and that consent can be revoked at any time but certain times are really difficult to retract consent from, and that rehabilitation is both more effective and more humane (and that it's admirable to be humane) than punitive justice systems - you don't get this outcome.

As we know, because we've seen how other cultures handle their justice system. And not everyone devolves like this.

There have been a lot of rumblings in my various communities about the lack of accessibility for basically everyone other than straight white educated cismen. One popular option that a lot of people are choosing to take these days (and I wholeheartedly support them) is to look at the speaker lineup, and if they are the only POC or woman or disabled person or whatever on the lineup, then to decline the invitation to speak.

Another option is to do the same thing as a guest. A third / fourth option is to do the same thing *as* straight, white, cismen and to do it publicly as a way to give up your seat for someone who is not (especially if your "seat" is on a panel or podium discussing accessibility issues).

As I said, I support this choice completely. However, the consequence of all POC and women and disabled people et. al. refusing to participate is that these events *remain* white, straight, male, and able-bodied.

So, if we are a member of an underrepresented demographic, and we get invited (or accepted) to speak at an event where the speaker lineup has less diversity than we'd like, and we have the spoons or the matches or the hit points for it, and our lecture topics work this way, I'd like to propose doing more of this in addition to our boycotts.

Give our lectures and workshops and panels in ways that absolutely do not benefit the people who are not us but that do benefit the people we are trying to make these events more accessible for.

This will not be applicable to everyone who speaks. It's most easily demonstrated with something like hearing loss because accommodating people with hearing difficulties tends to be *inconvenient* for people who can hear, whereas many other forms of accommodation benefit everyone or most people even those who do not *need* the accommodation.

One of the things that I do is, in my Simple Steps workshop, where we take dancing exercises and learn how to apply them as actual communication tools, we deliberately arrange this hands-on workshop so that men have to touch other men. Everyone other than straight cismen is socialized to allow some form of physical contact (often whether it's wanted or not), but straight cismen get to indulge in their homophobia because of the homophobic culture.

So we do not accommodate them. They are forced out of their comfort zone in our workshop.

Obviously, this has limitations. People who have mental health issues regarding physical contact will find our workshop difficult for them. We made a choice to focus on this one issue, and the nature of the workshop is to be hands-on and interactive. But the same goes for the ASL speaker in the original meme here - people who have eyesight problems would have had difficulty in his lecture too.

Another thing that I do is I make many of the events I host to be either child-friendly or low-cost / free (or both) because poverty is one of my pet SJ issues. I am not a fan of children. But I make as many of my events child-friendly because I know how expensive child-care is and how difficult it can be to participate in a community when everything costs money and time and there are children at home. Children running around an event is inconvenient to many adults. But without childcare options, poor people (and mostly women) are left out.

I will be considering some of my more popular lectures and workshops to see if I can adapt them to make them less convenient for various target audiences, to illustrate this point. If there is a way to make your lectures more accommodating to the people you are representing while simultaneously making it less accommodating to the non-representative audience, please consider this act of civil rebellion in lieu of just not participating at all.

If we want separate spaces, that's one thing, but if we're asking for more inclusivity, some of us have to be the ones to barge through the door. Otherwise, the room will remain monochrome because we've all decided that forcing the door open is too much effort.

No photo description available.

Event Organizer: We're sorry, there won't be interpreters at the event where you are presenting about Deaf things, sign language, and interpreting.

Me: No problem, I'll present in ASL without interpretation. Hearing people will have to get by.

EO: Ummm ...

I presented for 25 minutes, and opened with a couple of slides in written English that explained the situation. Told them to stay, so that they could "learn a lesson they didn't come here for." They all did.

www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-if-my-wife-teaches-my-daughter-piano-but-I-want-her-to-do-gymnastics/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What can I do if my wife teaches my daughter piano but I want her to do gymnastics?

A. What does your daughter want?

She’s a human being. Her desires for her body, time, emotions, etc. are the only ones that matter here. If you’re funding her activities, you can technically be allowed to place limitations on them based on what you're willing to pay for, but as for encouraging her what TO do (as opposed to what not to do)? That’s all her.

Your interest in your daughter pursuing gymnastics is completely irrelevant. So is your wife’s interest in teaching her piano.

Find out what YOUR DAUGHTER wants to do and stop treating her like an extension of yourself that you get to force into doing whatever it is you’d rather be doing but, for whatever reason, aren’t doing yourself.

If she wants to learn piano, then that’s what she should learn. If she wants to do gymnastics, then that’s what she should do. If she wants to do both, then find a way to allow her to do both If she wants to do neither, then suck it up and treat her like the human person she is, and encourage her in her endeavors like a responsible, loving parent.

She is not your doll, to dress up in the profession and hobby you want her to do. She is a person. She gets to make the decisions about how she spends her time and what she puts her body through.

Honestly, these parents who think their children are extensions of themselves instead of human beings in their own right! This is how you get adult children who stop talking to their parents.

Respect her autonomy. She’ll be a much more loving daughter if you respect her.

People don't seem to understand that everyone has a right to life just not at the expense of someone else's right to choose to not support that life with their own body. We get it when it comes to organ donation, but for some reason not full-body donation.

www.quora.com/Would-you-opt-for-an-abortion-or-put-your-kid-up-for-adoption/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are the reasons you would chose to abort a child rather than carry it to term and put it up for adoption?

A. I don’t want to be pregnant. As said elsewhere, there shouldn’t need to be any further explanation. I do not want to donate my body to the incubation of another.

Lots of people don’t want to be organ donors either, but nobody is lining up to take away their right to bodily autonomy and force them to donate organs without their consent, even though it would save someone’s life. Even though it would *kill someone* to refuse to donate. An actual human person with history and loved ones and memories and plans, unlike a fetus.

I do not want to be pregnant. My reasons for why I don’t want to be pregnant are not necessary for anyone else to know. I want to have the same rights to bodily autonomy that you have as a corpse, where even in death, nobody can make you use your body to give life to another if you don’t want to, regardless of your reasons why.

I don’t want to be pregnant and it’s my fucking body. That’s enough of a reason.

www.quora.com/Wives-would-you-be-upset-if-you-are-overseas-and-your-husband-hangs-out-with-a-gold-digging-female-friend/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Wives, would you be upset if you are overseas and your husband hangs out with a gold digging female friend?

A.

I am not overseas but I am literally about as far away from my spouse as I can possibly get without crossing an ocean or international borders. We live on opposite coasts and also on opposite north/south borders.

I do not police who my spouse hangs out with. He's a grownup, he can manage his own friendships. Nobody can do anything to him that he doesn't permit (short of actual robbery or violence). I have nothing to fear from any other person. Should my spouse do something with another person that makes me upset, that would be his fault, not hers, because he is responsible for his own actions.

I do not make assumptions about the motivations of other people. This question implies the assumption that said "female friend" is not just interested in securing economic stability, but that she is planning on doing so at the expense of my spouse. That's a whole lot of unspoken assumptions right there.

Should any woman attempt to manipulate my spouse into some kind of con for the purpose of getting his money, I probably wouldn't do anything about it but laugh at her. My spouse is broke. Of the two of us, I'm the one with the money, and even I live below the poverty line. Plus, we have a pre-nup and our finances are separate and we maintain separate households. He might get swindled, but my finances won't be touched. And then he might learn a lesson about being too trusting too soon.

I do not throw other women under the bus. Other women are not my enemy. The term "gold digger" was deliberately and consciously subverted by a wealthy patriarchal class who was offended at the idea of women achieving any socioeconomic power of their own: https://nationalpost.com/life/relationships/in-defence-of-the-gold-digger-and-the-fight-for-class-economic-and-gender-equality & http://skepchick.org/2013/10/in-defense-of-the-gold-digger/

tl;dr - No I would not be upset if my spouse was hanging around with anyone, let alone a woman who prioritizes her economic stability. Good partner selection solves an awful lot of problems before they ever come up, and treating people as individual agents rather than children, dependents, servants, or things solve most of the other problems.

www.theatreartlife.com/technical/performing-arts-overworked-staff

"We need to stop pretending we're okay. We're not. We're tired, and crying in the dimmer room. Let's come out of the shadows into the light and do something about it."

I am pretty sure I know how I will die. It will likely happen one of two ways - I will suffocate to death because of the fucking chronic respiratory problems I developed after getting whooping cough when vaccination rates dropped, or I will be killed in an accident or die from something related to my shitty eating / sleeping / overworking habits on job site.

We have a saying - there are no old stagehands. I mean, of course there are, but so many more of us die early than we should, and most of the time it's preventable. We eat crappy food, we don't sleep enough, we stay awake too long doing dangerous manual labor, we work physically harder than necessary (dude, we have a forklift to unstack those!), we drink too much and do way too many recreational drugs.

One year, I actually stopped keeping track of the number of conversations I got into that started out like "hey, did you hear who died last week?!"

Our employers want to treat us like real employees when it benefits *them*, with dress codes and long lists of behaviour rules, but then turn around and treat us like freelancers in the monopoly days when it doesn't, with "oh, you can just push through one more hour without a break, can't you?" and "the show starts in 2 days so we will stay as long as necessary to get it going rather than schedule an extra couple of days for a reasonable work day length" and "sorry, we don't compensate for the $25 parking fee" and "no you can't wear that piece of clothing for medical reasons because it doesn't match our aesthetic" and and "but we gave you 8 hours between shifts, that should be plenty of rest even though you have to drive 2 hours each way and have things to do when you get home!" and "what do you mean you need a different person for each job position? Can't you do 3 job roles by yourself?"

No, we need a break every 2-2.5 hours, with a meal break on the 4-5 hour mark. We need OT for ever hour worked past 8-10 hours, and we need days that don't go past 10 hours *regularly*. We need enough time between our shifts to GET 8 hours of sleep, which includes our commute time and eating dinner when we get home and doing laundry and showering, not exactly 8 hours from the time you stop paying us to the time you start paying us again.

We need enough guys on site to accomplish the job safely, not as few as is *possible* to set a Guinness record. We need equipment that works. We need heavy equipment to do the heavy labor, like forklifts and scissor lifts, not rickety A-frame ladders and 4 tall dudes just because you think "tall" = "strong enough to lift this case that you used a forklift to stack back in the shop".

WE NEED ACTUAL MEAL BREAKS. 30 minutes is barely sufficient if food is provided and sitting there, hot and ready, the moment we go on break. An hour is the minimum if we have to go off property to find our own food, because it's still a 10 minute walk to the parking lot and another 15 minute or more drive to find food. And no, the solution to a crew who is not doing a satisfactory job is NOT withholding meals, but sending them home. If the crew is truly doing a poor job, you don't get to keep working them 10 hours without food. Fucking send them home and hire another crew.

And the clothing! We're fucking backstage! As long as our clothing is protective and not hindering our abilities, IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER WHAT WE LOOK LIKE. I can lift the exact same amount of weight in a polo shirt as I do in a tank top. Except in a tank top, I won't overheat when I lift. I can run my camera to the exact same skill level in a jacket as in a dress shirt. Except I won't be shaking the camera with my shivering if I'm warm enough and I can focus slightly better when I cut the wind from the a/c blowing in my face and drying out my eyes. When we are not in a public-facing customer service position, our attire does not matter past the point of legality or job performance.

If you want to pretend like you're a &"regular corporation" with all the rules and shit, then I want a fucking annual job performance review where someone sits down with me in an adult fucking manner and goes over my accomplishments and my areas for improvement, training opportunities, and a goddamn annual raise every year I work for you. I want anonymous supervisor surveys. I want salary standardization. I want an HR department that holds the company accountable for not treating people well. And I want some structure.

If the company can't provide all that shit, then don't pretend you're like a regular job. We're freelancers, either we get the benefits of freelancing that go along with the shit, or we get the benefits of a regular corporation that goes along with that shit. We should not get the shit of a corporation with the shit of freelance.

So stop treating us like shit.

#backstage #AVTech #AVLife #roadies #stagehand #entertainment #IMayHaveSomeOpinionsAboutThis #SoTired #AndYetStillSoPoor

www.quora.com/Why-has-it-become-common-for-married-people-not-to-wear-their-wedding-rings/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

There are an awful lot of assumptions buried in this question.

Q. Why has it become common for married people not to wear their wedding rings?

A. It was not common in the US for wedding rings to be worn by men until the 20th century, so it had kind of a similar effect as branding livestock - it said that the woman belonged to someone, but the man (because same-sex marriage did not exist at the time) had no such corresponding mark of connection or ownership.

So it was only “common” for some people to wear rings, and it was only common for other people to wear rings for a short span of time in our nation’s history. Wedding rings being common is a relatively modern practice, however they continue to be common today. While it may be more noticeable now that some people do not wear their rings, and there may indeed be an increase in that number from previous generations, it is still more common for married people to wear a wedding ring than not.

But reasons why someone would not wear a wedding ring can include:

Historically, the wedding ring was connected to the exchange of valuables at the moment of the wedding rather than a symbol of eternal love and devotion. Wedding rings are an archaic tradition used to mark humans as being “taken” or “owned” by someone else through this exchange of wealth. Some people choose not to be marked as such or to engage in archaic practices that are not relevant to their modern lives.
The modern version of wedding and engagement rings were a deliberate propaganda campaign by the jewelry industry to sell more products, said jewelry industry contributing to war and slavery in their goal to obtain more product to sell, and some people are conscientious objectors.
Jewelry is often inconvenient or even dangerous in certain lives.
Jewelry is a very personal expression of the self and a wedding ring may not match the aesthetic that a person is going for.
Some people just don’t like things on their hands.
Some religions discourage the display of wealth and jewelry. Methodist teaching says that people should not be "adorned with gold, or pearls, or costly apparel" (John Wesley, “The General Rules of the Methodist Church”). Mennonites do not wear jewelry, including wedding rings, as part of their practice of “plain dress”. Certain branches of Quakers have a “testimony of simplicity” and therefore do not wear jewelry and keep to “plain dress”.

I don’t wear my wedding ring because jewelry is dangerous in my job (#3). I work with heavy machinery and anything that can’t easily tear away, such as metal around fingers, necks, and through ears and noses, could get caught in something and rip said body parts off. My cousin’s fiance lost his ring finger a week out from the wedding (no idea why he was wearing his ring early) and had to go through the ceremony with a bandage on his hand and she put the ring on his right hand instead of his left. I play piano. I’d prefer to keep all my fingers, thank you.

As such, I have not worn rings in many, many years, so when I do put on a ring for an aesthetic look for dressing up or for a costume, it feels uncomfortable and gets in my way, much like long fingernails feel on people who do not wear their nails long normally (#5).

I object to the diamond industry, which is wrapped up in the jewelry industry in general, so I do not participate in displays of wealth and jewelry with materials associated with the diamond slave trade, the various gold rushes, or with the De Beers corporation and their capitalistic campaign to artificially create a market for themselves through their manipulation of the market (#2) with deceptive advertising. Diamonds and gold are symbolic of that campaign and the horrific atrocities committed to obtain precious stones and materials for jewelry for rich people. This could technically leave other materials and stones available to me for use as wedding rings or other jewelry, but I have other reasons for eschewing them in general.

I do not like being treated like someone’s wife (#1). I prefer to be treated like an individual human being. I have noticed that the way that strangers treat me changes based what they think my jewelry says about me. As a teenager and young woman, I used to wear a wedding ring deliberately to avoid getting hit on in public spaces.

As an older adult, even though I am still getting hit on, I find that not being hit on just because I have signaled that I belong to someone else is more offensive. My “no” should be more impactful than “there is a man out there somewhere who owns me and would not approve of you making moves on his woman”, so I would rather reject advances on my own than let the implication of some other man’s disapproval do the rejecting for me.

Aside from advances, I am treated more respectfully and with more deference when people find out that I am married (or when they think I am, such as when I used to wear a ring and was not married). Again, I would prefer to earn that respect just because I am a person and deserve respect, than because I have met the social obligation of tying my fate to someone else.

So a side effect of not wearing a ring due to danger, comfort, and personal aesthetic (the actual reasons why I do not wear a ring) is that I get to challenge people’s assumptions and demand respect based on who I am, not my connection to someone else. Some days I don’t want to put forth the effort of dealing with that challenge, so I might wear the ring to avoid it. But mostly I see this as an opportunity for change rather than a drawback. I consider it a feature, not a bug.

While it's not usually a good idea to hijack a thread talking about oppression of one class for another, this one explicitly asked the question if another class experienced anything similar. Since oppression is about one group of people benefiting off other classes, the tools of oppression are often similar from one class to another. A lot of what is done to women to keep us "in our place" is also done to people of color to keep them in "their place". And intersectionality is when several axis of oppression cross and the tools are used doubly or triply to keep people in "their place" because they belong to multiple classes that all get held down.

Don't tell people to smile (unless you're a photographer and it's your job to get happy pictures). Nobody exists to look pleasantly at you. Nobody needs to gain your approval for existing in public or in the space they occupy (unless it's legitimately your personal, private space).

Y'all think you can read emotions on people, but you can't. There are some great studies out there that show we are absolutely terrible at reading other people's emotions. Not smiling does not equal "angry" or "sad". Not smiling is merely an absence of emoting happiness, it is not the *opposite* of happiness. You need other cues for emoting non-happiness emotions.

But, as atheists have been trying to explain forever, the absence of a thing does not mean the presence of the opposite thing.

And even if it did, it's none of your fucking business anyway.

May be an image of 6 people and people smiling

This is partly why I cuss. I deliberately and consciously include swear words in my vocabulary for 2 reasons:

1) to point out the arbitrariness of assigning an "offensive" value to a collection of sounds when a different collection of sounds with the same meaning is acceptable;

and 2) because of this. I'm swearing because the topic deserves to be cussed out. I swear because the content is worthy of all the rage and offense that comes with "bad words". I swear because fuck you if you are more concerned about those 4 letters in that order than about the violence, brutality, and evil I am using those 4 letters to talk about.

My all-time highest shared post was also one of my angriest. It was a cuss-laden rant about fuckers adding anti-trans bathroom bills to their local legislation. I got bombarded with "I like the sentiment but you shouldn't use so many bad words because I can't share this on my timeline" and "well I would agree with you but your language is so foul that it turned me off your argument".

Unfortunately for them, I also got bombarded with share notifications. It may not have gotten news media attention and re-shared by celebrities or buzzfeed or whatever, but pretty much all of my shares are in the double digits or less, while this one hit 4 digits.

So fuck them and fuck you if you are more concerned with the comfort of the reader over language use than what that language is used to say.
The N-word is "bad" because of what it *means*. "Bitch" is bad because of what it *means*. "Shit" is not bad because it's acceptable to say "poop" in its place. If the meaning stays the same while the letters change, then clearly the meaning is not bad. "Asshole" is not bad when you're talking about an anus, but probably bad when you're calling someone one because the first is a neutral meaning and the second is a deliberate insult. The meaning is what makes the word "bad".

"Fuck" is not bad when it doesn't mean anything you wouldn't want to say anyway, just as long as you don't use those specific 4 letters in that specific order. If you are so uncomfortable over the presence of certain letters than the topic being discussed, then you're just looking for a reason to not hear the message.

Because this shit is far more disturbing than a bunch of arbitrary, random sounds that we've designated as "bad".

www.quora.com/What-are-the-simplest-things-you-had-to-explain-an-adult/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most surprising thing you've had to explain to an adult?

A. I find it very surprising that I have to explain to adults that my body belongs to me and nobody else. And not only my body, but my time, my emotions, my money, my labor, and my attention. For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that I owe them things that belong to me, or that they get to have a say in what I do with the things that belong to me.

Some people seem to think that their dearly held desires for my things are at any way equal to my own dearly held desires for my things, and that what I want to do with my things somehow affects them even when it doesn’t, just because they happen to have strong feelings about my things.

And also that the things that happen *to my body* and *in my body* are also things that only I should have any control over. If I can prevent you from harvesting my organs even as a corpse, and if I can refuse to give you my organs even if it would save your life *even as a corpse*, then anything else I do with my own body even if it involves someone else’s life is my own business too.

And no, not even my spouse owns these things. Even he does not get a say in what I do with the things that are mine.

Another thing I was surprised to have to explain to an adult was that women don’t get “crotch rot” from living on a submarine. Yes, seriously.

You see, his CO explained to him that women can’t live on submarines in the Navy because they get “crotch rot” *specifically from being underwater* and it’s too expensive to keep resurfacing to get them proper medical treatment (and, by implication, men don’t get this because it literally has to do with vaginas being under water, they don’t have medical personnel or equipment onboard, and that subs never have to surface for men’s health issues, with or without this dearth of medical treatment capabilities).

I was also surprised to explain to an adult that the people who utilize the county health services facility for things like STD testing and counseling are not all homeless, diseased, drug addicts (not that those people deserve to go without medical treatment either). That this is an affordable medical service and all kinds of people utilize it because that’s what it’s there for.

Another surprising thing to explain to an adult was that two people speaking Spanish in public in his vicinity was not an offense committed against him, nor is it “rude” because they might be speaking about him without him being able to tell. I had to explain to him that we were talking about those same two people behind *their* backs, so if merely talking about people “behind their backs” was rude, he was equally as guilty.

But besides that, people have every right to privacy in a conversation, even in public. We may or may not be able to hear or understand what they’re saying, but we don’t have a right to insert ourselves into the conversation just because they happen to be *in* public, when they are not addressing us or the public.

Also that people do not always have the luxury of learning to fluently speak another language before moving to the country. And that you have no idea if they live here or are visiting, and lots of tourists (especially in Florida, where we live) do not bother to learn an entire language before vacationing. And also maybe they *are* learning the language, but he just happened to cross paths with them at a point early in their education.

I am frequently surprised at how often I have to explain that monogamy doesn’t prevent people from feeling jealousy, so there’s no reason to be biased against non-monogamy on the basis that the people might feel jealous in non-monogamous relationships.

I am often outright shocked at having to explain to grown adults that just because it’s a woman doing it to a man, hitting one’s partner, threatening them with knives, throwing things at them, *and attempting to run them over with their own trucks* are all examples of physical abuse. I’m actually losing count at how often I have to say, specifically, that attempted vehicular homicide is abuse. Property damage is abuse. Controlling your social circle and isolating you from external support is abuse. Name calling is abuse. All the things that men do to women that is abusive is still abusive when women do it to men or when any gender does it to any other gender.

I can’t believe, in this day and age, that I still have to explain to grown adults that evolution really happened, that “just a theory” is nonsense and then I have to explain what “theory” actually means, that vaccines do not cause autism but lack of vaccines do cause mass death, that the planet is really round(ish), that magic sugar water will not cure anything, that the fad diet du jour or “miracle food” is not going to help you lose weight or get healthy *except inasmuch as generally eating better and eating fewer calories than you burn does anyway*, that you can’t “boost your immune system” and even if you could you wouldn’t want to because that’s what allergies and rheumatoid arthritis are … I could go on and on and on for literally years about the kinds of bullshit that I regularly have to explain to adults (I know, because I have been going on for years about this bullshit). I still find it surprising though.

I am disappointingly, heart-brokenly surprised every time I have to explain empathy to adults. When I have to explain that we shouldn’t do a thing simply because it hurts other people, and especially when I have to explain I don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to prevent me from doing things that hurt other people because I have empathy and I just don’t want to hurt people, I feel deeply sad and surprised at the same time.

Basically, there are a lot of things that I am surprised that I have to explain to adults about.

[Edit] Because apparently people can’t quite get past this part, I’m going to clarify. The asshole with the crotch rot story is not talking about any legitimate medical condition. He was very specific that vaginas *rot* under water and in a pressurized cabin, and that the treatment for this “condition” could not be taken care of with the medical supplies and personnel aboard a submarine, so the sub would have to surface regularly to get people with vaginas to proper medical treatment.

Because people with other sets of genitals also get things like jock itch and bacteria infections, and these things can happen to other body parts too, and if humidity or pressure was a contributing factor to it happening in a vagina, it would also happen to other body parts. As pointed out in some of the comments [on the original post], foot fungal infections are quite common and pretty much anyone who could serve on a military sub has feet.

This asshole also never served on a sub himself, nor was he affiliated with any medical training. He was a ground-pounder who got dishonorably discharged. He is not smart enough to be anything other than cannon fodder. We’ve had many other arguments about many other topics. It’s astounding the complete lack of basic knowledge this fucker had. I’m honestly surprised he can tie his shoes in the morning.

https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

I have a couple of exes like this, and pretty much all of my online flame wars are with dudebros like this (with an exception being a small number of actually "emotional" people who are feeling feelz that are not necessarily connected to reality and expecting everyone around them to cater to those feelz).

And this is the reason why I consider myself a New Atheist but refuse to associate with the "movement" and I don't attend atheist events. I believe in anti-theism, which is what the New Atheists are more or less founded on, but their toxic pseudo-logic justifications for sexism and racism make the community a place that I just don't want to be around.

"Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. ...

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies"

"Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth,"

"But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs."

https://www.quora.com/My-wife-has-changed-since-marrying-me-She-isnt-as-laid-back-and-free-spirited-as-she-used-to-be-The-same-thing-happened-with-my-ex-wife-too-which-led-to-our-divorce-Why-do-they-get-bitter-after-marriage/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. My wife has changed since marrying her. she isn't as laid back and free spirited as she used to be. The same thing happened with my ex-wife too which lead to our divorce. Why do they get bitter after marriage?

A. As they say, “if all of your exes are crazy, the thing they have in common is you”. Lots of other commenters are pointing this out.

First, losing one’s free-spiritedness is not “bitter”. As someone else said, the opposite of laid back is not bitter. So one does not follow from the other. If they’re both “bitter”, then something serious is going on. But if they’re just not as fun as they used to be, then it’s probably your problem for expecting them to perform their personalities for your entertainment.

Either way, the problem points to something you’re doing that results in your partners ending up unhappy, which is point number two.

Third, women, in general, are still expected to be the Household Managers, even when their hetero relationships are more or less “equal” in other respects. When a man gets home from work, he might have to take out the trash or wash the dishes after dinner, but his job is essentially over when he clocks out. When women get home from work, they start their second job.

Even when *chores* are split evenly, women are still expected to be the manager. Men “help out around the house”. Men often say “if you want me to do something, just ask”. We shouldn’t have to ask. As an adult living in the house, you ought to know that the trash needs taking out and the dishes need washing and the kids need to be fed and the floor needs vacuuming and, and, and.

Project Management is a full time, highly paid job. But a lot of women are expected to do it for free, and without notice, when they get home while a lot of men are given all the credit for “helping out”. So a lot of women who, as single women with only themselves to care for, get married and have children and end up losing their “laid back” and “free-spirited” natures because shit has to get done and nobody else will do it unless they take the reins and make them do it. The household needs to be managed. It’s really difficult to be “laid back” and “free spirited” when there is shit that need to get done, especially when the people you’re responsible for overseeing don’t realize that you have a legitimate job as the overseer.

I’m a freelancer in an industry where crews are hired to perform job duties for a particular contract, and when the contract ends, we go on to find other contracts. Many of us who have been working in the industry for a while know each other and we often find ourselves on crews of the same people over and over again. Between regular contact and our industry’s traditions of networking for gigs, many of us are friends outside of work.

Because of this, we can often find ourselves working on a crew one day where our friend Joe was hired as the crew chief. And perhaps the next week, Emily got hired as the crew chief for this other gig and Joe has to work under Emily’s supervision when Emily was working for Joe just a week ago.

Some people who are new to the industry find it difficult sometimes to work for their friends. They go from being buddies who drink and smoke pot together, to now their buddy is “in charge” and making demands of them and they can’t respond to their buddy like he’s their buddy. Yesterday, he was their buddy. Tomorrow, he’ll be their buddy again. But today, he’s the boss.

When people get married, and someone ends up taking on the Project Manager role for the Household Manager, they are no longer that carefree, laid-back, free-spirit you went on dates with. Now they’re in a managerial role, and possibly a role they didn’t ask for and might not even want. And here you are wondering where your date buddy went, now that she’s been promoted to Project Manager and there is shit that needs to get done.

You will probably find that your wives are better able to act more laid-back and free-spirited if they had a little less management responsibilities on their plate. I know that I’m usually too tired for a spontaneous decision to get dressed up and go out dancing all night when I’ve put in 12 hours at work only to come home and find the house a mess and someone waiting for me to ask them to make dinner.

And I find that a lot of my last-minute “let’s just get in the car and drive and see where we end up and spend the weekend there!” plans to explore and adventure get scrapped when I have a grown-up job and a mortgage to pay and kids with homework that need to be done and dentist visits to schedule and swim meets to attend.

The ability to be “laid back” and “free-spirited” is directly negatively correlated with how many responsibilities need one’s attention and how many other people require attention to those responsibilities for their survival.

If you want your wife to feel more “laid back” and “free spirited”, then you could start by taking some of the responsibilities off her plate.

The Invisible Workload That Drags Women Down - “To truly be free, we need to free women’s minds. Of course, someone will always have to remember to buy toilet paper, but if that work were shared, women’s extra burdens would be lifted. Only then will women have as much lightness of mind as men.”

Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up - “that I was the manager of the household, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work. Delegating work to other people, i.e. telling him to do something he should instinctively know to do, is exhausting. … Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor becomes emotional labor.”

Why I Don't "Help" My Wife - “When you make a mess, you shouldn't expect your wife to clean it up. It's your job to clean up your own messes. You both live there, you're not “helping” her with anything because it's your home.”

www.quora.com/Can-you-choose-to-be-LGBT-Why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper/comment/85632057

In a quora question about whether we could "choose" to be LGBTQ, I responded that I *wish* it was a choice because men basically suck and I'd love to not be attracted to them anymore, but I just am and I'm simply not attracted to not-men.

So some douchenozzle comes out and mansplains to me in a reply about me being fed up with the shit that men do.

Because of course he does. Because #LewisLaw

Apparently I just have to learn how to find people with common interests. Because that's NEVER FUCKING OCCURRED TO ME EVER IN MY LIFE (says the person who literally gives that answer to everyone asking how to find other polys) AND I'M NOT ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT A BIGGER ISSUE.

Ernie Dunbar: It's worth noting that everyone has this problem.

The problem is finding someone who's compatible with you. It's no wonder that everyone thinks there's only one person in the whole world that fits just right, because when dating, we never narrow it down beyond “singles” before starting the search.

Personally, I've found a great deal of success by hanging out with people who have common interests. So long as there's a sufficient number of people open to a relationship in that group, you'll find what you're looking for just by narrowing the field down a bit first.

Joreth Innkeeper: Are you serious? You think my big problem is that I can’t find anyone who shares my *hobbies*?! And that I’m *alone* because of it?

I’m married. I’m polyamorous. I’m a community organizer. My own relationship network is about 50 people. I already know how to make friends and “hang out with people who have common interests”.

I’m not talking about compatibility. I’m talking about gender issues, sexism, misogyny, and feminism. And mansplaining like this is part of why I’m fed up with men and wish I could just chuck the lot of you out the airlock.

Here’s a newsflash for you … men who share my interests CAN ALSO BE ASSHOLES. It’s fucking easy to find people with common interests. It’s not easy to find men who aren’t mansplaining, privilege-denying, entitled jerkoffs and I’m too fucking tired to keep doing the emotional labor, the Relationship Maintenance labor, the Household Management labor and All The Intersectional SJ Educational labor every time I meet a guy who happens to share my interests in movies and music.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-feminist-women-are-gold-diggers/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Do you think feminist women are gold diggers?

A. Feminists are people who believe that everyone should have equal power and freedom and opportunity in a society where women currently are disempowered, and the goal is to empower them to full autonomy. Under a capitalist system, that means that women have their own economic security.

A “gold digger” is a patriarchal term where society sets up women to be economically disadvantaged, offers them only one way to improve or secure their economic status and that’s through romantic relationships, and then socially punishes women for pursuing the only avenue available to them for privilege, empowerment, security, or simply survival by calling them names for doing the one thing they are supposed to be doing.

So, by definition, feminists want to dismantle the entire system that puts women into the position of needing to pursue romantic partnerships with men for economic security.

Which would make them the opposite of “gold diggers”.

The way to remove the trend of women using their romantic relationships to improve or stabilize their economic status is to provide more opportunity for women to improve or stabilize their economic status in ways that do not involve romantic partnerships - i.e. equal pay, equal job opportunities, social services for drains on finances like childcare, healthcare, housing, food, etc. Separate the means of survival and economic status improvement from relationship status, and you remove the problem of women pursuing men for economic reasons.

Had to explain to someone the other night that the fact that "what happened to my ancestors doesn't affect me today" is exactly an example of that white privilege he claims not to have. I pointed out to him that black people today, in Orlando, are poor and have poor health, because of deliberate racist decisions made by the city in housing zoning, railroad building, and freeway construction. Their outcomes today are directly affected by what happened to their grandparents.

The fact that his white ancestors probably kidnapped George Washington (a story he seriously told me as evidence of how hard his ancestors had it in the past) and were outcasts during the Civil War and yet he suffers no setbacks from that because he "works hard to get what he has" is EXACTLY that "privilege" that the coworker he shut down was talking about.

My parents were refused food service and housing because they were a mixed marriage. They still managed to be lower-middle class in the '80s, but how much further could they have gone if racism wasn't a thing? If my dad could have used his forestry degree instead of working in a machine shop to support his family? If my mother wasn't relegated to "secretary" job positions? Where would I be today if sexism and racism didn't exist and didn't hold back my parents?

Maybe I'd be in the same place, I dunno. The economy was completely fucked by the Boomers, so maybe I still would have chosen this career and still been thrown into poverty because of a gig economy. But maybe I wouldn't be. And maybe I, personally, would have but statistically people with my heritage would have *on average* better outcomes because their own parents and grandparents were not denied housing, jobs, or subsidies.

When your grandparents are funneled into ghettos, and then your parents are given crap education because schools are funded by property taxes, who then have shit jobs so that you grow up malnourished and without the opportunity for skills or clothing to impress employers, what happened to your ancestors very much affects your present day.

When your great great grandparents were paid for the slaves they lost, and when they were hired right off the boat because they were white and already spoke English, and when they were given the opportunity for free or low-cost land that other people were not afforded, so that each generation after them started with a walk to first base, what happened to your ancestors also very much affects your present day.

And the fact that you can look at some individual hardships that some 3x-removed uncle once suffered and say "see? My family had some shit too, but I don't let it affect me, I just work hard and earn my stuff"! and not see how that's actually reinforcing my own point, that's exactly what privilege is.

https://jezebel.com/rewriting-the-fairy-tale-adoption-narrative-1831433433

Adoption is not the "abortion alternative". It's an industry (yes, I use that term deliberately) fraught with corruption, racism, and capitalism.

I had a pretty good adoptive experience. But growing up, everyone else I heard about did not. My own sister spent her entire life feeling abandoned, grieving for her bio-parents, and turning to drugs and sex-too-young to fill the void. My uncle met my aunt when she was pregnant. She gave up that child and later was found by the child. The adult-child's story was pretty bad - neglectful adoptive parents, drug use, abuse ... They've tried to maintain a friendly relationship over the years but it's always been rocky.

I say that I was better off for my bio-mom not parenting me. It's one of my main arguments in favor of allowing people to opt-out of parenting. But the adoption system is not conducive to stories like mine. Far too many people are not "better off" for the parents they ended up with. Or, possibly they still are, but they still didn't get a good deal out of the arrangement.

Adoption is its own reproductive rights fight. The system is terribly flawed and desperately needs an overhaul. It is not a safe "third option" to avoid the issue of abortion.

I am glad I had an abortion. I am more relieved by it every passing year. It was absolutely the right choice for me. Adoption was not. I didn't want to avoid parenting, I needed to avoid *pregnancy*.

And the bullshit "gotcha" thought-questions about "what if we had transporters that could take the fetus out of your body and put it into someone else's, would you support that over abortion?" DO NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Or, rather, they might possibly remove one objection, but they introduce a whole bunch of other problems.

Look, I had signed up to be an egg donor at one point. So I *also* get it from the standpoint of "my genetic offspring will be out there, somewhere, being raised by someone else". Clearly, I'm OK with that possibility. But the irony of people, particularly white men, who insist that they want to have "a child of their own", posing this gotcha question and suggesting that women give up "their own" child for someone else to raise, is thick.

Adoption is not an "abortion alternative". Adoption is its own issue and the adoption system is fucked up. If you really want to reduce abortions, support preventative care and post-natal care.

Oh, but that would be "socialism"!

Yeah, well, you care so much about all those little "babies", then fucking pay for their parents to care for them or to better avoid having them in the first place.

https://www.quora.com/Some-women-say-they-dont-want-a-guy-to-ask-for-permission-to-kiss-them-They-say-Just-do-it-But-the-MeToo-movement-and-current-culture-seem-to-make-it-risky-for-a-man-to-take-any-actions-without-getting-consent-How/answer/Franklin-Veaux

Consent is so difficult for some people to grasp!

So, I have a non-consent fetish. I really like rough, violent sex. I like it when it feels like my partner is so overcome with lust for me that he just takes me without regard to my feelings on the matter. My interest in violent sex waxes and wanes depending on other variables in my life. Sometimes I really don't want any violence at all and I'm totally into the whole sappy romance-with-candlelight-and-soft-focus-filter thing. But when I'm in a depressive state, my interest in violent sex is particularly strong.

I happen to be in one of those depressive states right now, while simultaneously actively looking for new partners. Which means that dating is particularly frustrating for me, because I really want that whole swept-away, passionate, lustful experience but men are just awful and I can't stand them right now because politics and depression. When some of the people on the dating apps that I'm using start right out with the kind of aggressiveness that I could have been into, I get pissed off at them. So, things are complicated for me right now.

But if I was out with someone, and there was some chemistry between us, and he did this to me ... I'd probably drop trou right there. Aggression, control, and still consent.

"lean in and whisper in someone’s ear, “You’re very attractive and I would love to kiss you, but I’m not going to unless you tell me you want it.”"

What if something like that happened at each stage?

"I want so bad to touch you right now, but I will not unless you tell me you want it."
"Tell me how much you want to stroke me, and then do it."
"I want to feel your heat, your wetness, I can tell you want me to, but you have to ask me for it first."
"You smell so good, I want to taste you. As soon as you tell me you want me to."
"I'm right here, about to penetrate you, but I'm not going to, unless you tell me you want it."

When my oldest nibling was in high school, we went to the mall together once and he saw a belt with an Iron Cross buckle. He went up to it and expressed interest in buying it. I leaned down and asked him if he knew what that symbol stood for. He said no, he just liked how it looked and he's seen other people wear it. I quietly told him that he ought to research the history of that symbol before he wears it.

He asked why. I told him that, although that symbol has other associations, the one that most people know it for is its association with Nazis, so that's what people will assume if they see him wearing it. Did he really want people to think that of him? I said that if he goes home and looks up the history of the symbol, and then still wants to wear it, then at least he will be making an informed decision and can defend his choice to everyone who challenges him about his belt.

He never did buy that belt buckle.

The things we wear tell people about ourselves. Sometimes, those things are lies, propaganda purposely spread to discriminate against people, such as "hoodies = thugs". Most of us wear hoodies, but when young black men wear them, especially with the hood up, people who aren't young black men automatically assume they are participating in criminal activity. Even when it's cold outside.

Other times, those things are truth, a shining beacon telling the whole world your inner most beliefs about those around you.

Like how I wear an infinity-heart symbol so that everyone who sees it and knows its meaning will know that I'm polyamorous. I might still have to clear up some misconceptions, but there wasn't a deliberate smear campaign to associate an infinity-heart with, say, puppy-kicking or something.

Know what you are saying about yourself when you choose your symbols. If you think the assumptions about your symbols are wrong, then you can go out into the world prepared to defend yourself but only if you know what those assumptions are.

If you're OK with the assumptions your symbols say about you, then you don't really get to whine when people who don't like the message call you out on it.

I just hosted a Brat Pack drama marathon. It was 3 of the movies that literally define the Brat Pack. David Blum, a reporter for the New Yorker, started out writing an article about Emilio Estevez shortly after St. Elmo's Fire. One night, Estevez invited Blum out to hang out with most of the cast, as they often did. Blum changed the focus of the article to the whole group and called it Hollywood's Brat Pack.

I grew up in the '80s with the Brat Pack as my role models. I watched a lot of movies in the '80s. If it hadn't been for my love of books and music, I very much could have been Xavier Cross from Scrooged with how much television I watched as a kid. Those Brat Pack movies, though ... Most of what I enjoyed in the '80s did not age well. I go back to watch the classics now as an adult and I'm really kind of horrified, if I'm being honest. I still love my old movies, though, because nostalgia is one helluva drug - forget about beer goggles, you oughta try on rosy nostalgia glasses sometime!

Anyway, the media I consumed as a kid was ... well ... rough. It was hard. It was deep. Frankly, it's no wonder that GenXers are pretty fucked up. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Old Yeller, Neverending Story ... I'm still not over Artax's death. We grappled with some shit back then.

I also read a lot, as I mentioned. One of my favorite authors back then was one of the most popular authors of the time - Judy Blum. She tackled some pretty hard stuff too. Her coming of age novels were grounding. I remember the controversy over her 1975 novel, Forever. That book examined both suicidal depression and teen sex. Talk about heavy topics. In the story, the main character has premarital sex at the end of high school, believing she will be with her partner "forever", but in the end [spoiler alert] discovers that one's first love rarely lasts forever and she will move on from him.

The fact that the characters have sex as teenagers and do not end up married, and the main character uses birth control, makes this book come in a whopping #7 out of the top 100 "most challenged books" in the US, for how often it gets censored and banned.

I bring all of this up to talk about Cuties.

I finally watched the movie Cuties. I've been defending it and haven't even watched it yet. So I decided that if I must watch something before I criticize it, then I must also watch something in order to defend it. So I did. To be totally honest, absolutely nothing I have read, both pro and con, accurately explained to me what Cuties was about.

[SPOILER ALERT - The entire plot of the film follows]

Amy is an 11 year old Muslim girl growing up in France. Her family is, by my standards, extremely repressive. She is required to cover her body and hair, and pray for piety and modesty. She is moved into a new apartment and, presumably, a new school, where she meets the Cuties - 4 girls who have formed a dance team of that name.

These girls show their skin and defy authority. They are rebellious and obnoxious, but really not any worse than all the kids I knew at that age. Their first act of rebellion is to convince the entire schoolyard to pose and freeze one day when the bell rings to summon them back to class. I mean, that's hardly dangerous or scandalous. Just irritating to the authority figures.

After some routine bullying, Amy eventually gets accepted by their group and starts hanging out with them. She starts wearing less modest clothing, but again, nothing worse than anything I did at her age. She shows her legs and her midriff. I probably still have some of my old crop tops from the '80s. I have always been proud of my stomach and I liked showing it off.

As for legs ... well, I grew up in an era of knee-length shorts and I am still uncomfortable in anything shorter (although I have no problem with *skirts* that short, but shorts have to be to my knees). So let me tell you sometime of the nearly impossible task of finding shorts for women or girls that don't have half my ass hanging out. I literally have to wear men's shorts in order to find any long enough to make me comfortable. Girls wear short shorts because that's what's readily available.

Anyway, so the girls are dressing less modestly than Amy's Muslim family would like. But not any less modestly than any tweens I have seen since ... oh, probably the '60s. In fact, the tight mini skirts we see the Cuties in when we are introduced to them look suspiciously like the skirts I had back in the '80s. In the '90s, one of those mini skirts literally got me my first mall job when I was 16 - my boss liked my ass in that skirt and wanted to watch me reach up and straighten the suit jackets in that skirt all shift.

So, the Cuties have heard of some dance competition and they want to enter. So they rehearse all the time. All of their routines that we see are pretty standard hip hop routines - nothing particularly special or controversial. No twerking or crotch-splits or anything.

Amy wants to join their dance troupe, but she has never danced before. So she steals her older cousin's mobile phone to watch the practice videos the Cuties have uploaded so far and searches the internet for music videos to learn by. Unfortunately, she finds videos of voluptuous women in thongs twerking. So, guess what kind of moves she learns?

Here's the thing ... the right-wing propaganda of this film is totally wrong of course. It has nothing to do with pedophilia or sex trafficking or child prostitution. It is, of course, a criticism of the oversexualization of young girls, just as the producers and directors say it is.

But the defenses of the film led me to believe that it was a criticism of *the dance industry* and how *it* oversexualizes girls. But that's not true either.

The Cuties are not part of any dance studio or dance industry. They're 4 tweens (and Amy) who want to be famous dancers who emulate what they see in pop media. With, as far as I can tell, absolutely no adult supervision or guidance. Certainly no *pressure* to dance this way.

Amy's mother has no idea what she is getting up to. She has 2 small children to care for and a husband who is off somewhere courting a second wife (without telling her about it until it's a done deal). I'll get back to this in a minute. The only time we see Angelica's family is when she and her brother get into a fight and her dad yells that he's trying to sleep ... in the afternoon. We see Yasmine's mom, who seems nice enough, but clearly has no clue what the girls are getting into. None of the other girls' parents ever enter the picture.

So Amy, desperately trying to fit in, learns these very adult dance moves on her own. Then, when Yasmine gets kicked out of the group, and the group freaks out because the preliminaries for the dance competition are too soon to teach another girl the routine, Amy jumps in, proves that she's been studying their home videos and already knows the routine, and also introduces the other girls to the very adult dance moves she has also been studying.

These moves get incorporated into their routine. This routine wins the girls a spot in the competition during the primaries. When they get caught sneaking into a laser tag facility, Amy gets the girls out of trouble by explaining that they are dancers and celebrating their acceptance to the competition. To prove that they are really dancers, she starts doing the adult dance moves, making the two male employees so uncomfortable that they just let the girls go. The girls don't realize that the men were uncomfortable and trying to get out of watching tweens twerking, they think Amy just convinced the guards that they are legitimate dancers which, for some reason, gave them a free pass.

As they practice for the competition, Amy becomes more and more self-confident. She starts wearing even more revealing clothing and moves through her school with the same arrogant attitude as the other Cuties. Later, she picks a fight with a rival dance team, who manage to pants her and take pictures of her in her underwear to post on social media, mocking her for her childish undergarments.

Amy, filled with lots of really big emotions at this stage in her development and with her oppressive home life and her humiliation on behalf of her mother for her father bringing home a new wife, starts making really bad choices. She steals lots of money from her mom's purse and takes her friends and her brother on a shopping spree for more adult underwear and clothing.

Amy's mom eventually learns of the theft and freaks out, yelling and hitting Amy for getting out of hand. She even calls in a priest to do an exorcism, but the priest says there are no demons there. So Amy's mom and grandmother strip her and splash her with water, having earlier established that water washes away sins. Amy goes into a kind of trance-like convulsion partially consisting of some of her booty-shaking new dance moves.

Later, when her cousin discovers that she still has his phone and tries to take it back - her one connection to this grown-up, outside world of music videos and social media - Amy locks herself in the bathroom and takes a picture of genitals. I am unclear on if the picture includes her new adult underwear or not. The film shows her taking the picture but does not show us the picture (thankfully). She then posts this picture on social media.

Now her new friends hate her because she went too far. They call her a whore and say that they are receiving harassing messages to show off their private parts like Amy. So they kick her out of the group and bring back Yasmin. As her father's wedding day approaches and her grandmother continues to push her into being a dutiful, subservient, Muslim Senegalese young woman, and her period begins, all of Amy's really big feelings take over.

Amy sabotages Yasmine and shows up to the dance competition. With no time to wait for Yasmin, they accept Amy and run on stage. This is the one scene where we see the routine in full. And it's ... discomforting. The girls look like strippers. And I don't mean they look like some of these hip hop dancers who have some sexualized moves in their routine. I mean that I don't recall any hip hop in their new routine at all. The entire routine consisted of them humping the floor and putting their finger in their mouths and grabbing their crotches.

And the audience is having none of it. Except one dude, apparently. He seemed to think the routine was fine. But everyone else in the audience was shaking their heads, one mother covering her young daughter's eyes, some booing, lots of mumbling. The judges, however, all seemed to think it was fantastic, if their smiles and nods were anything to go by. That's disturbing.

While dancing, Amy seems to have some kind of emotional breakdown. Everything that has happened up to this point seems to have all come crashing in on her mind as she realizes what she's doing. She starts crying and flees the stage in the middle of the performance.

She runs home, where her grandmother sees her competition costume and calls her a whore, and then attacks her mother for having raised a whore daughter. Amy's mom finally stands up to her mother and tells her to back the fuck off and takes Amy into her room to comfort her. They seem to reach an understanding. Her mom tells her that she doesn't have to attend her father's wedding if she doesn't want to, which is about to start. So Amy changes out of her dance costume into a reasonably modest pair of jeans and a sweater, skips the wedding, and goes outside to play jump rope with the neighborhood kids.

And that's where it ends.

There was no "dance industry" in this film. It was mostly just 4 girls with too much unsupervised, unguided exposure to grown-up media. Had they been a part of a studio, it's quite possible that they would have been discouraged from the dance routine they choreographed.

This movie was far more like a Judy Blume novel, or a John Hughes film. It showed young kids under immense pressure with either not enough parental guidance or the wrong kind of parental oversight. Then, left to their own devices, their very large, overwhelming feelings drown the hormonal tweens and leads them to make very poor choices while they try to figure themselves out.

In the end, Amy figures out that she made some poor choices. But she can make other choices, and life will go on.

A few days ago, I just spent several hours watching teenagers kill other teenagers, get into large-scale fist fights with each other, learn how to use machine guns and grenades and kill enemy soldiers, and then barely-out-of-teens having lots of sex and snorting lots of cocaine and drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. These movies were also about young people figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on (maybe not for the ones who died, but the rest will go on).

A whole bunch of years ago I read books with girls getting their periods, having sex, dealing with death, feeling lots of feelings, and also figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on.

This is what it means to have a "coming of age" drama.

There is a country song that says "I believe that youth is spent well on the young / 'Cause wisdom in your teens would be a lot less fun". I don't happen to agree that youth is spent well on the young, but I definitely agree that wisdom in your teens would be a lot less "fun", for some value of "fun". I am frankly amazed some days that I lived to see adulthood. Between racing my car and rolling it down a hill and running from and waiting out a mountain lion from atop a water tower and sneaking out at night to party with kids doing way to many fucking drugs, it's really only luck that allowed me to live to see "wisdom". I'm not sure that my middle aged wisdom would have resulted in less fun, so much as different fun. I'm having lots of fun as an adult too, only with much less risk.

My point is that the teen years are a pretty fucking foolish age. It's when bodies change and emotions get really large but the brains are not yet developed enough to know what to do with with it all. Everything is confusing, everything is humongous, everything is immediate, everything is absolute.

And that's what we see in "coming of age" stories. These stories are uncomfortable. These stories are challenging. These stories are difficult. These stories are often a little bit ugly. Because that's what the teen and pre-teen years are - uncomfortable, challenging, difficult, and often a little bit ugly.

Which makes Cuties a pretty damn good representative of the "coming of age" genre.

The movie does not draw any hard conclusions, as a good "coming of age" drama ought not. But what lesson it does impart is that the oversexualization of these young girls was definitely not for their own good. Amy was caught between too repressive and far too unfettered at a time in her life when her emotions were also too big whilst her knowledge and reason was far too inexperienced.

This led her to ping-pong between extremes, both being wrong. She needs to stop bouncing back and forth off the opposite walls and find a path between them that she can walk at a more reasonable pace without banging herself up on both walls. Which is, I feel, a common dilemma for many young girls. It certainly was for me.

Telling an uncomfortable story about an uncomfortable situation does not necessarily condone or support that situation or that action. It depends on how the story is told. For instance, 50 Shades very clearly romanticizes abuse by not recognizing what the character does as abusive and perpetuating the trope that a man can be "saved" by a good woman.

Flowers In The Attic wasn't romanticizing parental abuse or incest, although both were the vehicles for the tension in that novel. It was telling a story intended to make the reader feel off-kilter because of the horrific things happening to the characters. It was definitely never defended as some sort of introduction to a world people were clamoring to get into. Not a single person read Flowers and said "sure, it's not totally accurate about incest, but at least it got people talking about it, and maybe we can guide them to the correct way to do it!" You were supposed to feel uncomfortable when you read Flowers, even if you could empathize with the characters.

Cuties told an uncomfortable story. It showed a girl chafing at her repressive upbringing, flinging the chains off and jumping head-first without the benefit of a parachute, and only then realizing that she actually just jumped out of a frying pan and into a fire. To mix my metafores, which I have a tendency to do.

The movie seemed to imply that it was the influence of the media (social media, pop media, etc.) that was responsible for Amy's decent into hypersexualization. And, yeah, there is a lot of it out there for children to stumble across. But I also think that this is the inevitable outcome when children aren't given any guidance for how to navigate that media and what it means. I saw little to no adult mentorship in this film, other than Amy's occasional lessons to pray for a life of subservience to a man and no respect for her agency in any form.

What I definitely saw absolutely none of was pedophilia, btw. Pedophilia is a mental health condition where adults are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Most pedophiles do not harm children. Most are aware that they have a dangerous condition. Sexual assault tends to be perpetrated by people who are not pedophiles. I know this is difficult to understand, but assault and abuse (in all their forms) are not about *attraction*, they're about *power*.

There was absolutely no pedophilia anywhere in this film. There was nothing about adults being attracted to pre-pubescent children. In fact, everyone (but one older teen in the audience of the competition) was repulsed by the sexualization of the girls.

There was also no *system* or *industry-wide* hypersexualization of children. This was not Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms, where the industry itself is so competitive that it keeps falling into more and more adult requirements of children for the sake of competition.

But there *was* children exhibiting sexualized dance moves that they learned from pop media. And the tone of the film clearly disapproved.

We can possibly have a conversation about the ethics of a director teaching children how to play these kinds of roles where their characters are doing adult dance moves, but if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to talk about children in horror movies for the last 50 years, and docudramas showing young guerrilla soldiers, and every movie from the '80s showing teen violence and bullying. There better not be a single person complaining about Cuties who also thinks Lolita or The Professional are good films.

Child actors are still actors. They are required to play roles to tell the story. Sometimes their characters are bad people and sometimes they do bad things and sometimes bad things happen to them. This is unavoidable if we are going to tell stories about the experience of children. It's challenging to protect a child from the experience of playing a role, and that's an ongoing conversation that needs to continue. But children in real life go through some shit, and if we're going to tell stories about the lives and experiences of children, we're going to have to see that shit they go through. We have to be able to share our stories as children.

And that's what this film is, by the way. It's the dramatized experience of the creator - a Black Muslim Senegalese-French woman. This is her story. She needs to be able to tell her story, and we need to be able to see it. And this story very clearly tells a tale of a young girl who lived through some shit and made some poor choices, as children do, and life went on.

Just like every good "coming of age" story ever.

Now, having watched the movie, I would not say this is a film critiquing the dance industry's use of children's bodies. I would say that this is a film telling the story of a young girl experiencing things that some young girls experience, many of which are harmful and cause hardship to the child. That makes it a "coming of age" film. And one that has an opinion of some of those experiences, and that opinion is pretty solidly against them.

www.quora.com/Can-you-please-reply-with-a-good-white-magic-spell-to-get-hot-sex/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is a good white magic spell to do to get sex?

A. Even if magic did exist (which it doesn’t), using it “to get sex” would be violating another person’s agency.

Which is rape.

There is nothing “good” or “white” about making someone have sex against their will, regardless of the tool or method.

Learn how to actually talk to people and find people who might want to have sex with you. It might be a slower process, but it’s the only one that will work and the only one that doesn’t make you a creepy rapey creeper.

So, I was actually challenged by someone on my stance on abortion. They seemed to try and catch me in a "gotcha". My position is that I do not want to be pregnant, and as its my body, I am the only one who gets to have a say in whether or not I am pregnant. The opposing position was the usual tripe about how men "deserve" the right to be fathers and it's not fair that women can unilaterally decide on behalf of men that they will become fathers or not be allowed to be fathers, just because women are the ones who carry the fetuses.

The question was what I would do if I could transfer the pregnancy to the father, in some hypothetical magical medical machine that would transfer the fetus with absolutely no side effects or permanent changes or damage to my own body. The unstated implication in the question was that he expected me to still choose the abortion, for ... some reason.

Instead, I said "I don't fucking care how the fetus gets out of my body, as long as it gets out of my body without damaging it and I don't have any financial ties to it." If the fathers really want to take on sole responsibility the way women have been forced to forever, that's their choice, but I suspect very few will really understand what it is they're taking on as single, solely responsible parents.

He didn't actually know how to take that response. Apparently it didn't occur to him that anyone would actually accept that as a viable option. Except I'm not pro-abortion because I'm pro-killing-fetuses. I'm pro-abortion because I legitimately do not want to be pregnant nor can I afford to raise a child. Whatever method results in that solution, I'm willing to entertain.

As an adopted child, and as someone who was once so poor that I signed up to be an egg donor, I have absolutely no qualms about someone else raising "my" child. I believe children should be raised by parents who want them, and I don't want them.

But I'm quite sure most men don't really want them either. At least not the way they *think* they want them. And being forced to carry a fetus will reveal that. Could you imagine the outcry if this magical machine was available to anyone carrying a fetus and the default option was to implant it in the other genetic-contributing parent with OR WITHOUT their agreement?

Like, we as a society don't like abortion, so this magic machine is created as a solution to abortion, which means that if the pregnant person wants it out, the fetus has to go SOMEWHERE, and the other genetic donor was obligated to take over the responsibility in the way that the current fetus-carrier is currently obligated by increasingly aggressive lack of abortion options? Passing it onto someone who is not genetically related would require both a consent form and a medical exam to make sure they could biologically carry it to term (like current surrogates), but if one parent doesn't want the fetus, the other has to take it, since getting rid of it wouldn't be allowed.

I'm not actually proposing that we have a solution that merely passes on the violation of bodily autonomy. I'm just saying that if the gender that has never really known what it means to live a life under the threat of no autonomy was suddenly faced with it, the arguments would change right quick.

What I find very ironic is that a lot of supposedly progressive types get up in arms over these clear and obvious abuses of power, and yet they themselves take up positions of authority in their companies or communities and also get involved with much younger women, but see it as somehow "different" because they're not *as* famous or they're not rich (because, honestly, who the fuck becomes rich as a community leader or speaker or writer or organizer?), and because she's technically of legal age already once they start.

It's not as simple as "him rich & legal, her illegal = morally wrong". The span of the age gap, which life stage each person is in, how much community standing the older person has, how the younger person views them ... these things all affect the impact that this power imbalance has.

When I was 15-17, I actively courted men who could legally vote. This is a fuzzy area. However:

I was not an up-and-comer in an industry and they were not people of power who could influence my career. They didn't hold any position of authority over me at all and had nothing to benefit me other than the fact that I wanted to sleep with them.

There is a huge difference between a 16 & 18 year old both still in high school and a 14 & 35 year old, and also a big difference between them and a 35 & 55 year old. The bigger the age gap and the more different the life stage (i.e. the younger the youngest one is), the bigger the impact is.

I had comprehensive sex ed and control over my reproductive choices, and I made my decisions knowingly and on my own because I wanted to have sex, not because some older man convinced me that he "loved" me.

That still doesn't make what the older men did *right*, I'm just acknowledging that there is some nuance in the discussion. I had control of my sexual agency when I was a teenager because of my specific life circumstances and my available options. But older men still should have known better.

And now, with men I know in their 30s, 40s, and 50s all vocally condemning these statutory rapes, yet some of them justifying getting involved with women not very long out of their teenage years because "she's an adult, if I don't have sex with her, I am robbing her of her sexual agency" ... while it's true that it's not the same thing as 40 year old rock stars marrying 13 year old children, it's also the same *excuse*, just moving the age of "agency".

I don't think all "crimes" ought to have the same penalties. The crime of copyright violation shouldn't carry the same sentence as mass murder. But as someone who has had my artwork stolen, I'm kinda sensitive to people justifying one "crime" while being opposed to others. Same thing with these kinds of things - yes, there is nuance in the discussion depending on the variables, but that doesn't make it *right* when something is less bad than something else.

I'm just saying that I have noticed a lot of people willing to hard-line condemn some people for obvious atrocities, but who then do things that are ... a little less clearly bad, using the same *excuses*.

And this is, IMO, why we should both a) switch away from the Scorched Earth Policy as a blanket policy in SJW circles and work on more nuanced forms of justice (where earth scorching and banning are still options but not the only tools, and in fact are the last resort), and b) be a little more introspective and careful with our own "minor" infractions so that we don't emulate these clear examples in our lesser offenses, which leave doors open for the big offenses.

As I've said in other contexts before - if you don't want other people thinking your relationship is abusive, perhaps you shouldn't be doing the same things that abusers do.

If you want to take a hard stance against rape cases like these, perhaps you shouldn't be having the kinds of relationships where your justifications for that relationship are the same ones that these rapists use for their relationships.

And while acknowledging the severity of the hard-edged cases, if you don't want to find yourself on the receiving end of the kind of "justice" you promote, perhaps also acknowledge that life is complex. While striving to do better.

Speaking of working retail...

"Excuse me, where is..."
Right beside you.

"Can you tell me how much this costs?"
Sure, I'll just scan it with this publicly accessible price checker you're standing next to.

"How much is this?"
According to the price sticker on the package, it costs this much.

"Can you help me get something off the high shelf?"
Well, I can hand you the one just below it on the shelf at waist height.

"Where is the bathroom?"
Right here, under this 6-foot tall sign that says "restrooms".

"Do you have [some kind of completed artwork or home furnishing]?"
No, sorry, as a craft store, we tend to have the materials for making art and furnishings. If you'd like finished objects, you might want to try a home furnishing store.

"I have this list of items I need to buy. Can I just hand it to you and you find them for me?"
Well, personal shoppers charge about $200 an hour, but I'll do it for half that rate since I'm also making minimum wage here, and that's plenty for me!

"Do you have [this seasonal item]?"
Not at the moment. It becomes available during that season, and then we get rid of those things to make room for the next season's things.
"But I'm sure I bought it here before!"
I'm sure you did too, but that was probably last season. We don't have it now.
"Any idea when you'll get them in again?"
Probably next season.
"Can you check?"
No.

"Do you carry this item?"
No, that's not something we carry.
"Can you check another location to see if they have it?"
No, the entire company does not carry that item.
"Can you call a different company to see if they have it?"
No.

"Do you have this item?"
I'm not sure, let's check this public tablet device conveniently located right in front of you under the giant sign that says "shop here!" to see if we carry it.
"Can't you just look it up for me?"
No problem, I'll just come out from behind my counter to stand where you're standing and I'll surf the app for you instead of addressing all these other customer's needs who are waiting in line behind you.

"Excuse me, do you work here?"
[in plain clothes, with bag/purse, no nametag, drink in hand, and obviously in a hurry]

"Excuse me, do you work here?"
[in brightly colored store shirt with store logo emblazoned on front and back, large apron with store logo embroidered across the front, radio with earpiece on, giant RF gun hanging from my belt]

"Can I just come behind your counter where your cash register is and plug my cell phone into the outlet powering your sensitive store electronics?"
No.
"But my cell phone is dying!"
Sorry, but nobody is allowed behind the counter where the cash register is. It's a security risk.
"But I just want to charge my cell phone!"
That's what a robber might say too. Sorry. There's a Starbucks in this same shopping plaza.
"OMG YOU'RE SO RUDE I WANT TO TALK TO A MANAGER RIGHT NOW!!!"

#ActualConversationsIHave #AdventuresInRetail

Typical Unicorn Hunters -

Them: "Hi, we're kinky!"

Me: "OK, what does that actually mean though?"

Them: "He's in charge and orders us around and I live to pleasure him."

Me: "But, like, how? Does he like electrical stimulation like violet wands? Does he practice the art of aesthetic rope work called shibari? Do you wear puppy ears and a tail butt plug and crawl around on the floor and bark at him to pet you? Do you have a vacuum table that one of you gets sucked into a latex bag for compression and restraint? Do either of you get hung in the air by flesh hooks piercing your skin?"

Them: "What? No! I just mean that he tells me when to give him head and when to have sex and what to wear and sometimes spanks me when I talk back to him!"

Me: "Yeah, that's not 'kinky', that's just patriarchal heteronormativity masquerading as 'kink' thanks to 50 Shades."

https://www.quora.com/If-someone-asks-you-to-use-a-pronoun-for-them-other-than-the-normal-ones-what-is-your-response/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. If someone asks you to use a pronoun for them other than the normal ones, what is your response?

A. I use them.

Just as I use whatever name they tell me is their name. I don’t ask to check anyone’s driver’s licenses or birth certificates to make sure that the name they’re asking me to use matches whatever name somebody official said was theirs.

I just call people what they want to be called. Because it’s fucking polite.

Me: I have this song that I've been totally obsessing over lately [plays song for someone].

Him: The dude in the song is kind of an asshole.

Wrong Answer: No he's not! You have to understand the culture he comes from! It's very machismo and he's expressing his strength and virility and the women find it attractive! That's the culture and time he comes from! That's how he's *supposed* to sound in order to find partners!

Correct Answer: Yeah, he really is. But the hook is just really working for me, so I've been listening to a lot it lately.

Watch on YouTube

Me: I totally love this song! The juxtaposition between the lyrics and the mood of the melody is hilarious! [plays ridiculously bouncy song about "violent" sex]

Them: Uh, that song is triggering for people who have had violent experiences.

Wrong Answer: No it's not! You're just overly sensitive! It's totally meant ironically when sung today. And anyway, in the era in which it was written, it was considered a sign of one's passion to be stricken with strong feelings for someone! You just need to listen to it in the appropriate context!

Correct Answer: Yep, I can see that. I interpret it differently because of my long history with kink, so I will only play it for people who have a similar interpretation and background and who can appreciate irony and also dissonance in lyrics vs. melody.

Watch on YouTube

Me: This is one of my favorite pornos [plays classic porn from the '70s].

Him: Wow, she has absolutely no concept of boundaries, does she?

Wrong Answer: That's not true! You just have to look at it this way! She's a woman, so it's totally OK to cross those kinds of lines! Especially in the era in which it was made! Men prefer that!

Correct Answer: Yeah, she does. The story line was written for a particular sort of interest, so a person can really only enjoy it if that kind of boundary pushing is your thing, or if you can enjoy things in fictional porn that you wouldn't necessarily want in real life. I like the freedom she has in this story, and that's what does it for me. But her behaviour would be totally unacceptable in real life.

Watch on YouTube

Me: I listen to country music.

Them: I hate country! It's so misogynistic!

Wrong Answer: No it's not! It's respectful and chivalrous and men and women are just different so they behave differently! It's just a party song, don't get so worked up over it! It doesn't mean anything! He has a wife, so obviously he can't be *that* misogynistic!

Correct Answer: Yes, a lot of it is, and a lot of all kinds of music has misogynistic themes because the music is written from within a misogynistic culture. There are some songs that I can't listen to either, even though I'm able to like the sound of other songs while ignoring the lyrics.

Since you're aware of and bothered by misogyny, you might be interested to know that singling out country music specifically, or rap music specifically, as being misogynistic is a consequence of classism, and I can go into the why of that if you'd like to have that discussion.

If the sound of the genre doesn't bother you but you can't ignore the lyrics in order to like the sound of a song, I also have an entire library of music that is less misogynistic or not at all, if you're interested.

Watch on YouTube

#ItIsNotThatHard #ActualConversationsIHave #ItIsOKToLikeProblematicMediaJustBeAwareAndHonestAboutTheProblems

I mostly post about poly stuff, so most of the people on my various social media Friends Lists are people who found me through poly venues - lectures, my writing, etc. I also write a lot about feminism so other SJWs find me through those means.

But occasionally I write about skepticism or atheism too. And every time I do, somebody gets horribly offended at something I've written, and since it's usually on a topic that means enough to me that I bothered to write about it, it's often a rage-trigger for me too, so somebody who used to think that I'm the bees knees ends up getting blocked over something like whether or not fairies exist at the bottom of the dell.

So anyone who hasn't seen me write about these topics yet because you found me through other venues - fair warning: I am an atheist and a skeptic, I am vehemently pro-abortion, pro-science, pro-GMOs, pro-vaccines, anti-homeopathy, anti-conspiracy story, anti-Trump, and anti-magical thinking of any kind.

I'll do my best to keep my nose off your own timeline on these topics (unless you ask for opinions / advice and I have some or unless I think you're actively perpetuating harm), but on my timeline I will pull no punches if you face off with me and you will get blocked because fuck you, I have no patience for what I see as harmful, willful ignorance.

I do have an "author page" where I keep my posts to my most public-friendly (although there is some cussing that sneaks in) posts on relationships and the occasional feminist post and I don't engage in flame wars through that page. If you would rather have just the relevant things that I say, and not the atheist, skeptic, or even the more personal stuff like cats, sex, all the f-bombs, random thoughts, etc., Like and Follow my page instead: Joreth Innkeeper d'Squiggle

Thumbnail sketch on what is Emotional Labor for those who are still struggling with it:

Emotional Labor is when you perform emotions as a form of labor, usually to manage other people's emotions.

Originally, it meant "labor" in the capitalistic sense, meaning you perform emotions as part of your actual job. So, like, customer service reps perform "happiness" in order to manage the emotions of their customers, i.e. keep the customers happy. It has been stretched to include the unpaid labor found in interpersonal relationships, which would include things like performing happiness or performing calmness in order to keep your romantic partner or kids happy or calm or satisfied or whatever.

I feel that this stretch is within the bounds of "reasonable evolution of language", where certain terms are coined to address a very particular concept so we need those terms to be limited to that concept in order to discuss them. But over time the term grows to cover adjacent or related concepts. Sometimes that stretch is reasonable, and sometimes the stretch results in the term becoming so widely applicable and so widely used that it effectively renders the term "useless" for addressing any particular issue.

The further stretching of the term "emotional labor" to include basically any job duty or function typically performed by women in interpersonal relationship, jobs, or social settings, especially if she is not happy doing it, is, I believe, an *unreasonable* evolution of that term.

Because then the term is stretched so widely that nobody really knows what we're talking about anymore and the original problem of requiring mostly women to perform emotional states in order to manage other people's emotional states is still a problem that we need to address but now we can't talk about it because the waters are muddied with all this other extraneous stuff.

So, Emotional Labor is when people have to perform or express emotions that they may or may not be feeling as a form of labor, either as part of their paid jobs or as part of their roles in interpersonal relationships, and is disproportionately assigned to those jobs and roles overwhelmingly held by women.

If we want to talk about also being expected to do the domestic chores, or do the managerial duties, or do the Relationship Maintenance, which are all topics that need addressing both on a personal level within our relationships and a cultural level as it pertains to systemic power imbalances, I recommend removing these topics out from under the umbrella of the "emotional labor" phrase and instead try calling them "domestic labor", "managerial labor", and Relationship Maintenance, respectively.

And I'm sure other similar terms could be found that would adequately convey the concepts, as well as I'm sure there are other adjacent concepts that would benefit from being named and discussed.

Are you expressing emotions authentically? Are you repressing emotions because of your own personal beliefs on the appropriateness of the time / place / situation? Then you are probably not doing Emotional Labor right now.

Are you doing all the physical labor keeping the household running and feeling resentful about it? Feeling anxious about it? Feeling angry about it? You're probably not doing Emotional Labor right now, whether you are expressing emotions or not.

Are you behaving in a way that implies that you are feeling an emotion that you do not feel? Are you behaving in a way that implies you are NOT feeling an emotion that you do feel? And are you doing so for someone else's benefit, to make, encourage, or support them in feeling a particular way? And is it part of your duties in a role you are in? Then you are probably doing Emotional Labor.

Emotional Labor, as a concept, is not necessarily always a bad thing. It's kind of the definition of acting, as a profession. It's part of what caregivers do, and therapists, and bartenders, and funeral directors, and sex workers, and people who go into other empathetic professions where compassion for their clients / customers is part of the job.

And when someone in a romantic or familial relationship is having an emotional meltdown, it's really freaking helpful to have someone else nearby remain the grownup and help either keep things together or pick up the pieces. Often we can afford for only one of us to fall apart at a time.

The big problem with Emotional Labor, and the reason why the term was coined, is that this particular duty falls disproportionately onto women, and in roles where managing other people's emotions is not a necessary function of the role they agreed to play.

As your secretary, I agreed to answer phones and type dictation, not pretend to be cheerful while you overwork me just to keep you happy with me so that I don't lose my job. If I'm having issues at home, I should be able to grump about while filing, so long as the filing actually gets done and I'm not taking out my grumping on my coworkers. Being "happy" for 9 hours a day is not actually necessary to successfully performing the job of a secretary. Being *polite* might be, but not being *happy*.

So - performing or expressing emotions as part of one's duties in a role, usually to manage another person's emotions - that's Emotional Labor.

It kind of amazes me to what lengths people will go to justify liking problematic media. "No, it's not really problematic! Listen to all these excuses that, if you squint really hard and stand on your head and also totally invent a different backstory, it's actually very progressive!"

Look, almost all our media is problematic because it was created and it exists in our very problematic culture. Like what you like.

Just don't try to make it less problematic than it is, especially when people are upset about it. Acknowledge that it's problematic and that other people are hurt by its themes or messages and enjoy it anyway. And let those people be upset about it, don't try to justify yourself to them or get them to be less upset.

I've given up some forms of entertainment because I just can't divorce myself from the context (like anything made since I discovered the problems with Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp). Other things I just say "yep, it's awful, but I love it anyway". I mean, I listen to pop-country music.

If you can't still like it knowing that other people don't for very valid reasons, then maybe you shouldn't be enjoying it.

#ThingsIWantToToon

A large dam is broken and hemorrhaging water. Entire villages along the banks are flooded, people and animals are being swept away by the flood and the river is full of the dead.

A person with an evil grin is placing bombs along the dam. Another person is on the ground trying to organize the disaster relief.

There is a long line of people bringing sandbags to try and control and redirect the flood.

Some of the people who handed over a sandbag have also started organizing to go after the saboteur and stop them from blowing more holes in the dam.

There is yet a third group of people in the distance with blueprints and maps and are clearly a long-range rebuilding team who will get to see the fruits of their labor only after the immediate disaster is controlled.

Off to the side, two people stand talking. One of them says "I'm not going to bring a sandbag. I just don't think it will help anything."

The other one says "the person in charge of all of this isn't perfect. Look, they're getting paid for their work here, and I heard they even backed into someone's fence with their car once. Clearly they are just as bad as that guy up there blowing up the dam, so I can't support their efforts to block up the dam or clean up the mess from the flood."

#IfYourVoteDidNotCountWhyAreTheRepublicansSoIntentOnTakingAwayYourVote? #LesserOfTwoEvilsMeansOneIsStillTheGreaterEvil #DamageControl #HarmReduction #MultiFacetedPlan #ShortTermTriageLongTermRecovery #StopTheBleedingFirstThenStabilizeThenHeal

*sigh* There's a meme going around that like everyone on my family-and-coworker feed are passing around, complaining how much they pay in taxes and declaring themselves to be slaves to the government tax machine or something.

And I'm just over here like "I just called 911 on a gunshot going off outside my window last night, and I live down the street from the fire station, a street, btw, that my taxes paid for, and I grew up in the library which is why I have such a high vocabulary and know as much as I know and my current library provides me with a high tech recording booth for my podcast that I can use for free..."

I mean, we can argue over the specific places that our taxes go, and how much of the tax they collect goes to what, but it's not like the government is just taking our money. We are *paying* for things in exchange. Y'all want to live in a capitalistic society, shit costs money. We get stuff BACK for what we pay.

Now, I, personally, didn't particularly want to get a bloated military and way overpaid politicians who keep taking away my rights. So I'm going to complain about stuff like that. But not about the concept of taxes in general. Those taxes pay for things we get in return. Just like everything else in capitalism. Taxes are an exchange for actual things we get that only something as big as a government can provide.

If you don't like some of the things that they provide, fine, you can take that up with them (go vote!). But I better as fuck not ever see you driving your cars on paved roads again, or calling the cops for fucking anything (especially black people just living).

I've been saying this for several years now. As a former member of the Scorched Earth Club, we need to recognize nuance. We need to stop labeling everything that we don't like as "abuse" or whatever. We need to stop throwing people out for every single infraction.

You, as an individual, can make your own decisions about who to interact with and in what capacity.

But we, as communities, need to have space for mistakes, space for changing minds, space for learning and growing.

And we as individuals within those communities need to learn some coping mechanisms for dealing with people in our communities with whom we have problems that don't require mass shunning or forcing people to "choose" between us.

Because I guaran-fucking-tee that you're not perfect either, and you're also "problematic" to some people.

Losing community is devastating. It's cruel. And it usually doesn't work as a "punishment". It tends to only push people further into whatever mindset is responsible for the behaviour that got them shunned in the first place.

So make very sure that someone is truly a lost cause before pulling the nuclear option. They will not "learn their lesson" and become better people for the shunning, they will likely polarize against the community's values. Some people really need to be dumped. But others need to be pulled in and taught how to be better.

Again, as an individual, you, personally, are not obligated to be The One who teaches everyone how to be better. But we, as a community, ought to be obligated to working harder to learn nuance and to offer better options for redemption and correction than resorting to every infraction with the banhammer.

I know that Black Lives Matter is getting the most press among the ethnic groups fighting for equal rights these days, and that the history of oppression of black people is horrific and different from the oppression of other POC in the US...

but there are other groups of people who experience racism in the US, including violence, internment, discrimination, microaggressions, and even internalized racism when people use the same tactics against each other as are used against them.

This is not an either/or issue. This is a yes-and issue. As each international incident flies past the headlines, the groups associated with that incident see a spike in both violent and casual racism, and our current US administration only encourages it each time. But then when another "incident" happens, that group's oppression gets forgotten as we focus on the next group du jour, while the blatant and subtle and internalized tactics of bigotry continue unchecked because we're not looking at that group anymore.

Intersectionality is complex and difficult. In our race to be The Most Woke Progressive, when defending one group, we can't afford to ignore how our defense affects the other groups. While each group has its own unique background and sometimes differing needs, that doesn't give us the right to ignore the toes of one group while standing up for another.

By now everyone should know that I believe the book Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft should be required reading in middle school and that absolutely everyone must go out and get that book and read it if you haven't already (and I can help you get that book if you need help - it's that important to me that everyone reads it).

However, that book focuses on male-on-female cisgender hetero abuse. Which, to be fair, is a significant enough problem to focus on. In a patriarchal society, men have power in a multitude of ways that encourage and support their abuse of women partners. However, patriarchy can backfire on itself in a variety of ways too, including erasing women-on-men abuse due to the faulty premise that women *can't* abuse men because men hold all the power. Which simply isn't true.

Men and women both abuse their partners using mostly the same tools. But men are *protected* from the consequences of their abuse because the patriarchy empowers them, and women are *emboldened* from their abuse of men because the patriarchy renders their strength and power invisible and punishes men for being "weaker" than women (which, by the faulty patriarchal logic, would include any man who found himself abused by a woman as "weaker", by definition).

So, women don't have the systemic structural support to their abuse, but their abuse does tend to go unrecognized and insufficiently punished because the system doesn't acknowledge their power. And men victims don't have much in the way of structural support for the same reason, whereas women victims have tons of support (with varying degrees of effectiveness, given the nature of the society).

Which means that there ought to also be resources out there addressing the specific issues that men face at the hands of abusive women (or, rather, there ought to be resources addressing men abusers, women abusers, men victims, and women victims, because each category has its own unique qualities). Unfortunately, I do not know what those resources are. Does anyone know of a seminal book on women-on-men abuse the way that Why Does He Do That is, in my opinion, the seminal book on men-on-women abuse? I would really like to read it and add it to my library and my recommendation list.

Emotional Blackmail is another great book, I'm told, although I haven't read that one either. But I would recommend it second-hand on the word of some trustworthy sources who have read it.

It's weird. When I see arguments about sex work, and people shorten it to "sw", for some reason that makes it easy for my brain to just skip over the term entirely.

So then, if I don't have the word "sex work" being said in my head along with the rest of the words in the sentences, my brain just substitutes "retail job" automatically because all the anti-sex-work arguments apply to my retail job - customers being dangerous, forced into work I don't like just to survive, demeaning, customers who don't value my services, even the false equivalency to sex trafficking (which, again, is not the same thing as "sex work") works for the retail industry because of the sweatshop problems in the production side of retail.

But I have never had anyone tell me that I was immoral for spending literally hours standing on tile (because retail workers in the US are not allowed to sit, even when they're cashiers and don't move from their post), working my body for poverty-wages to make some CEO richer.

I have never had anyone tell me that I was "selling my body" when I perform a dance routine on stage, or climb a truss or load a truck, which is all manual labor using my body in exchange for money, or tell me that I was a bad person for doing so or that I should find some lower-paid job where I didn't have to "sell my body" because that would make me a higher value person / potential wife / mother.

I have never had anyone tell me that they support me but my customers are evil and should not spend money on my services (even though banning all my customers would then put me out of a job).

I've never had anyone shake their head in shame over my being exploited by capitalism (but I've had plenty of people shake their heads at me over requesting a living wage in a capitalistic society).

I've never had anyone tell me that by consenting to work for a retail employer, I am indirectly supporting those aforementioned sweatshops.

Not only have I never had anyone tell me that my job is demeaning, but I have had lots of people try and tell me that it's noble to "earn an honest day's pay for an honest day's work" and to take pride in a job well done no matter what kind of job it is. The harder the job (and often the lower it pays), the more "noble" it is. Unless it's making your fast food, I guess.

It's funny how these arguments only apply when the job in question is sex, but it doesn't apply to retail, to cleaning services, to farm workers, to call service employees, or any of the other hundreds of low-paid, high-labor, emotionally and physically draining work. But Horus forbid a person likes sexyfuntimes enough to want to trade it for money, and someone else has the money to trade it for sexyfuntimes with someone who enjoys the trade.

Literally, replace "sw" in any anti-sex-work argument with "retail" or even with "freelance art / content producer" (such as people who make a living from their Etsy products, or classic artists, or photographers, or musicians) and it applies to my life.

I HATE retail work. I loathe it with every fiber of my being. Even though I like the creative process of designing and building custom frames, I hate showing up to my job, I hate my 4-hour shifts that costs me almost as much in gas to get there and back as I make that day, I hate hate HATE our customers, I hate the physical and emotional pain I suffer from walking and standing on that goddamn tile, and I hate my pittance of a wage that I earn in exchange.

I love my freelance work, but I hate the part where I don't work for several months in a row no matter how many clients I call and beg for work, and I hate that I can be fired from a gig for the completely functional clothing that I'm wearing and my employers can pretend that I'm not being "fired" because they can just not call me for more work, but I'm not technically "fired" because this fucking state has no union power for my industry because our union sucks.

Everything that's "bad" about sex work applies to my jobs. So unless you have a solution to capitalism itself so that *nobody* has to trade *anything* for money, any objection to sex work (as opposed to sex trafficking) or to legalizing and supporting sex work and sex workers is just sex-negative condescending bullshit.

When I see you fighting just as hard to, not just abolish capitalism but replace it with something that doesn't result in me starving to death because I can no longer earn a living, as you do justifying why sex work is bad (or sex work is good but people who use sex services are bad), then maybe I won't block your ass for your deeply embedded misogyny and sex-negativity.

And I better not catch you patronizing a kink club or using sex toys (which were probably manufactured in one of those sweatshops in Asia that more closely resemble your sex trafficking ring that you're so concerned about), or taking pole exercising classes, or wearing lingerie (or regular undergarments, or any clothing that you didn't personally make with your own self-harvested fibers that you wove yourself and then cut into your clothing for that matter) either. You fucking hypocrite.

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

The Vilification Of Gaslighting
Malicious & Benevolent Hierarchy Are Two Sides Of The Same Dehumanizing Coin
Imaginary Conversations With Fictional TV 2nd Wave Feminists
Your Single Coworkers & Employees Aren't There To Pick Up The Slack For Married People
Misanthropic Humanism Is Now My Worldview Label
But Men Are Not Emotional, They Are Logical!
Feminist Country Music
Dan Savage's Campsite Rule Is Bullshit
We've Forgotten How To Dress Like Adults
When Even Your Dreams Are About Social Justice
Reminder: There Is No Theist->Agnostic->Atheist Scale
Why Identity Labels Matter
It Costs That Much Because My Time Is Worth Something
But Orlando Is So Progressive!!! (Hint: It's Not)
Conscious Consumerism Is A Lie. Here's A Better Way To Help Save The World.
We Cannot Extrapolate From Young White Cismen What Everyone Else Would Do
Malicious Compliance & Public Speaking
How Can I Make My Child Do My Hobby And Not My Spouse's Hobby?
Why Would You Choose Abortion Over Adoption?
Your Hubby Hangs Out With A Gold Digger?!
Performing Arts & Overworked Staff: Let's Not Pretend We're OK
Why Do Married People Not Wear Wedding Rings?
Resting Bitch Face And Intersectionality
I Cuss Because You Fucking Need To Feel Uncomfortable
Surprising Things I Have Had To Explain To Adults
The Magical Thinking Of Guys Who Love Logic
Why Do Women Get Bitter After Marriage?
Mansplainers Mansplain Feminism & Dating Advice To Me
Do You Think #Feminist Women Are Gold Diggers?
Not Being Disadvantaged By Your Ancestors Is Exactly An Example Of Privilege You Claim Not To Have
Rewriting The "Fairy Tale" Adoption Narrative
Consent Is Not Just Sexy, It Can Be Hot As Fuck
The Things We Wear Tell People About Ourselves
Movie Review: Cuties
But How Can I Rape Someone And Still Be A Good Witch?
Gotcha Feminist Abortionists!
If It Looks Like A Duck But In Miniature… aka When Lesser Evils Are Still Bad But Also Lesser Evils
Adventures In Retail
We're Kinky In A Heteronormative Vanilla Sort Of Way
What Do You Do When Someone Asks You To Use An Unusual Pronoun?
How To Respond To Accusations That Your Favorite Media Is Problematic
I Write About Atheism, Skepticism, Polyamory, Science, Politics, And Other Controversial Topics
The Definition Of Emotional Labor
Like What You Like But Acknowledge When It's Wrong
#ThingsIWantToToon: The Dam Is Breaking
For Fuck's Sake Taxation Is Not Fucking Theft It Is The Cost Of Living
We Need Nuance Around Concepts Like "Problematic"
Intersectionality For The Most Woke Progressive
What Is The Reverse-Gendered Equivalent To Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft? #WomenOnManAbuse
Sex Work Is Bad But Low Paid Manual Labor Is Good

August 2024

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Ranty Lessons by Joreth

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