porn isn’t evil or misogynistic you just grew up culturally christian and are scared of sex
like yeah it can be a brutal industry and i don’t want to minimize the issue of people being filmed or sexualized against their will but like. dudes making sex tapes together isn’t going to kill you. sex workers performing or offering full service because it’s their job and they like having money isn’t a social justice issue you need to get red-faced and give yourself a migraine about. all work and employment is exploitation, the porn industry isn’t special, you’re just uncomfortable with it because you haven’t unpacked your prejudices toward sex workers.
i have a degree in film and pornography was part of the curriculum when i was in university. we studied porn as a legitimately recognized body genre and a medium of art and entertainment. it’s just sex on film. like im a genre abolitionist in many ways but you can’t claim that porn isn’t a real genre of film and tv, you’d have an army of academics frothing at the mouth eager to explain to you exactly how and why you are wrong.
my degree course was taught primarily by gay men and lesbians btw. an older butch woman led the porn modules. i have terfs in the notes of some of my other posts claiming that porn is just a result of sex depraved pervert men and i just want to add that it doesn’t matter who is making or consuming or talking about the porn. you are going to find people of all genders and sexualities and experiences or lack thereof who have their own relationship to pornography and tacking “but icky cishet men that just think about sex all the time!!!” onto your tags doesn’t make your aversion to sex any more socially justified
also if you seriously think that someone filming themselves fucking is a form of misogyny you might be a bit stupid.
“Sex workers are often exploited!” yeah workers in a great many industries are. Workers in all industries should be protected, including sex work. Pretending sex is somehow special and sex work is not real work does not help exploited workers.
thinking about how my mom spent like 2 years getting downright vicious about the houseless folks who were camping in the woods past her house (to the point of getting a BB rifle that looked like a real fucking gun to threaten them with when they crossed in front of her house??) and justifying it with White Lady Fear a la “what if one of them does something to me! I am but a helpless white woman living all alone!!” and like…
y'all, she terrorized those people. every single time she saw someone outside, she was riling her dog up to bark, waving a gun in their faces (that for all intents & purposes they certainly thought was real), yelling at them, calling the cops (thank god the 2 rural-ass cops didn’t actually give a shit), etc.
and she justified it with fears of womanly fragility & inability to defend herself, and I believe how afraid she was! she talked about fearing they would break into her house at night and sexually assault her, and I believe she was legitimately afraid of that. she’s been victimized in many of the ways she was afraid of being victimized by them.
the thing is that it doesn’t matter how real the fear is.
nothing ever happened, nobody ever tried to threaten her, nobody tried to break in, nobody even approached her. she initiated every single interaction. when she told them not to go through her yard, they did the best they could to respect that without giving up their camping spot; which was on someone else’s property, who didn’t mind them being there (not to mention one of them is actually indigenous to this specific land!)
she was a thousand times more threatening to those people than they ever were to her, but her fear of them was still real. and that’s exactly what made her so dangerous.
I need cis women to internalize this ASAP. your fear is real, and it can and will hurt others. your fear is real, and it is harmful. your fear is real, and your hurt is not deserved, and you still need to grow & heal & prevent it from causing harm.
this is starting to get notes, so I just want to add:
this woman is bright & bubbly, she’s pretty and young-looking, she’s charming & charismatic. she’s smart! she’s successful in tech! she’s got a nose ring and tasteful tattoos and she dyed her hair blue, she had an undercut for a bit, she’s fashionably androgynous, she’s got queer friends and she’s An Ally™! (hell, she’d likely be queer herself, if not for the gen X “I don’t like labels” brainrot and internalized misogyny)
I worry that when I describe this side of her, people are envisioning a very unsympathetic caricature of a rural woman who lives alone and waves guns at trespassers. I don’t want yall to picture a stereotypically Bitter Old Hag and distance yourselves from the possibility that you could know someone like this, or that you yourself could ever be this person to someone else.
my mother is on feminist tiktok, she asks me questions about puberty blockers so she can defend trans people to her friends, she shares tiktoks about ADHD with me (and has even shared her adderall with me when the pharmacy has run out of mine. in minecraft.)
she is also deeply conservative in many, many ways, and her fear- which, again, is often justified by her real-life experiences- lies directly at the root of that bigotry.
your fear is not better, purer, or less harmful than hers is.
I would like to add that it is okay to be afraid when the unknown is pressing against your safe space. And it is okay to make your space safer by adding more locks, alarms, etc.
What is not okay is going out of your way to terrorize others because you think that makes you safer. It is not making you safer. You are putting others (who are actual victims of shitty circumstances) in danger.
I appreciate the sentiment & attempt to help folks understand, but I think you missed my point. This post doesn’t outline a “this is okay” and “this is not okay” for a reason. I did that on purpose!
What I want people to take away from this is that they should interrogate their fear. Their fear may be valid, their fear may be acted upon in benign ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally pure or above scrutiny.
My mom doesn’t think of her fear as “fear of homeless people”, but that’s what it is. There was no good reason for her to feel differently about her homeless neighbors than she did her housed neighbors who, if anything, lived closer to her home. There was no good reason for her to think differently about her homeless neighbors walking past (often not even really through) her yard than she did the rich guy who walked through her yard to mow the grass of the property he owned that bordered it.
But she thought of it as “fear of the unknown near her safe space”, even though those other people were just as- if not moreso- unknown to her.
We all have blindspots like this. All of us. And learning how to avoid acting on our feelings in ways that harm others is a great first step, but that’s not the point of this post.
Fear is a core tool of white supremacy. It is a core tool of all bigotry. Your* fear might be entirely justified and based on real experiences, and it isn’t my place to tell you how to feel. But you still need to interrogate it. Even when it comes from your own experiences of oppression, it isstill dangerous. You need to be aware of that, and you need to pay attention to it, and you need to tend to it.
I’m not telling anyone what to do; it should be obvious that waving a gun in a homeless person’s face is fucked up. I’m telling you a story about a woman whose fear of strange men harming her led her to threaten marginalized people with violence because I want you to think about how your very real, very justified fears might drive you to do harm and perpetuate systems of violent oppression, even without realizing it.
No, it’s not hurting anyone to lock your doors, and oftentimes it’s the correct and reasonable thing to do. But if you’re stoking your fear when you do so, you need to take a step back and interrogate that feeling. I don’t care if you keep locking your door or not. I’m not asking you to stop; if anything, you should keep locking it. I’m asking you to be introspective, and I’m asking you to grow.
*“You” is the royal you here, I’m assuming you’re on the same page generally & just kinda missed my point up top!
thinking about how my mom spent like 2 years getting downright vicious about the houseless folks who were camping in the woods past her house (to the point of getting a BB rifle that looked like a real fucking gun to threaten them with when they crossed in front of her house??) and justifying it with White Lady Fear a la “what if one of them does something to me! I am but a helpless white woman living all alone!!” and like…
y'all, she terrorized those people. every single time she saw someone outside, she was riling her dog up to bark, waving a gun in their faces (that for all intents & purposes they certainly thought was real), yelling at them, calling the cops (thank god the 2 rural-ass cops didn’t actually give a shit), etc.
and she justified it with fears of womanly fragility & inability to defend herself, and I believe how afraid she was! she talked about fearing they would break into her house at night and sexually assault her, and I believe she was legitimately afraid of that. she’s been victimized in many of the ways she was afraid of being victimized by them.
the thing is that it doesn’t matter how real the fear is.
nothing ever happened, nobody ever tried to threaten her, nobody tried to break in, nobody even approached her. she initiated every single interaction. when she told them not to go through her yard, they did the best they could to respect that without giving up their camping spot; which was on someone else’s property, who didn’t mind them being there (not to mention one of them is actually indigenous to this specific land!)
she was a thousand times more threatening to those people than they ever were to her, but her fear of them was still real. and that’s exactly what made her so dangerous.
I need cis women to internalize this ASAP. your fear is real, and it can and will hurt others. your fear is real, and it is harmful. your fear is real, and your hurt is not deserved, and you still need to grow & heal & prevent it from causing harm.
this is starting to get notes, so I just want to add:
this woman is bright & bubbly, she’s pretty and young-looking, she’s charming & charismatic. she’s smart! she’s successful in tech! she’s got a nose ring and tasteful tattoos and she dyed her hair blue, she had an undercut for a bit, she’s fashionably androgynous, she’s got queer friends and she’s An Ally™! (hell, she’d likely be queer herself, if not for the gen X “I don’t like labels” brainrot and internalized misogyny)
I worry that when I describe this side of her, people are envisioning a very unsympathetic caricature of a rural woman who lives alone and waves guns at trespassers. I don’t want yall to picture a stereotypically Bitter Old Hag and distance yourselves from the possibility that you could know someone like this, or that you yourself could ever be this person to someone else.
my mother is on feminist tiktok, she asks me questions about puberty blockers so she can defend trans people to her friends, she shares tiktoks about ADHD with me (and has even shared her adderall with me when the pharmacy has run out of mine. in minecraft.)
she is also deeply conservative in many, many ways, and her fear- which, again, is often justified by her real-life experiences- lies directly at the root of that bigotry.
your fear is not better, purer, or less harmful than hers is.
I would like to add that it is okay to be afraid when the unknown is pressing against your safe space. And it is okay to make your space safer by adding more locks, alarms, etc.
What is not okay is going out of your way to terrorize others because you think that makes you safer. It is not making you safer. You are putting others (who are actual victims of shitty circumstances) in danger.
I appreciate the sentiment & attempt to help folks understand, but I think you missed my point. This post doesn’t outline a “this is okay” and “this is not okay” for a reason. I did that on purpose!
What I want people to take away from this is that they should interrogate their fear. Their fear may be valid, their fear may be acted upon in benign ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally pure or above scrutiny.
My mom doesn’t think of her fear as “fear of homeless people”, but that’s what it is. There was no good reason for her to feel differently about her homeless neighbors than she did her housed neighbors who, if anything, lived closer to her home. There was no good reason for her to think differently about her homeless neighbors walking past (often not even really through) her yard than she did the rich guy who walked through her yard to mow the grass of the property he owned that bordered it.
But she thought of it as “fear of the unknown near her safe space”, even though those other people were just as- if not moreso- unknown to her.
We all have blindspots like this. All of us. And learning how to avoid acting on our feelings in ways that harm others is a great first step, but that’s not the point of this post.
Fear is a core tool of white supremacy. It is a core tool of all bigotry. Your* fear might be entirely justified and based on real experiences, and it isn’t my place to tell you how to feel. But you still need to interrogate it. Even when it comes from your own experiences of oppression, it isstill dangerous. You need to be aware of that, and you need to pay attention to it, and you need to tend to it.
I’m not telling anyone what to do; it should be obvious that waving a gun in a homeless person’s face is fucked up. I’m telling you a story about a woman whose fear of strange men harming her led her to threaten marginalized people with violence because I want you to think about how your very real, very justified fears might drive you to do harm and perpetuate systems of violent oppression, even without realizing it.
No, it’s not hurting anyone to lock your doors, and oftentimes it’s the correct and reasonable thing to do. But if you’re stoking your fear when you do so, you need to take a step back and interrogate that feeling. I don’t care if you keep locking your door or not. I’m not asking you to stop; if anything, you should keep locking it. I’m asking you to be introspective, and I’m asking you to grow.
*“You” is the royal you here, I’m assuming you’re on the same page generally & just kinda missed my point up top!
the first sentient robot to realize deceased humans and animals can’t be repaired or backed up on a server is gonna be so devastated
Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudging a body: i fix Little robot, nudg
why do so many teenagers follow me. you know i do drugs right.
advice for teens: don’t do drugs and drive, don’t do drugs with people that don’t care about you or people you feel responsible for, don’t do drugs for the first time in public, and don’t do drugs for the first time alone. also tbh i would recommend not doing anything stronger than weed or alcohol until you’re above the age of 18. also nicotine isn’t as good as you think it is. addiction is real and seek help if you find yourself leaning on a substance to clear your head/relax more than, like, twice per week. stay safe.
telling teens not to do drugs doesn’t work. practical advice like this is so important.
!!!
All of this. In my experience, these days, People are experimenting with drugs for the first time mostly in their late teens and early 20s. Drugs can be safe and fun if you’re safe about them. We’re all just shambling piles of chemicals, might as well tweak the chemical mixture around a bit and feel nice. Here are my quick additions:
Reemphasizing not to consume a mind altering substance for the first time alone, and make sure the other person is sober too. You can think you’re going to adhere to all of the other points while sober, but make sure you have someone to hold you to that until you know how you act while under the influence of a particular drug.
Don’t mix drugs for your first time taking them. There are some combinations you should never mix, and make sure to research those before you try.
Anyone trying to sell you grand revelations and life changing experiences with a drug is probably not to be trusted, tbh.
Recreational drugs can and will be used to make you more pliable, suggestible, or in states where its more difficult for you to refuse something. For any situation where you’re doing drugs with unfamiliar people, make sure you have a backup plan to leave the situation- whether thats a trusted person to pick you up, a safe place within a safe walking distance, etc.
I’ve been hurt badly by all of these, even with “benign” intoxicants like alcohol and weed. I’ve started consuming again safely, however, and I still enjoy it.
Stay safe out there and have fun.
on a similar note to not mixing drugs, CHECK FOR INTERACTIONS WITH ANY MEDICINE YOU ARE TAKING. You do NOT want to find out two hours too late that your painkillers don’t work all of a sudden or your daily pills are neutralized. IIRC nicotine reduces the effectiveness of hrt as well so thats another reason to avoid it
That second part appears to be the AI giving advice to adopt a fantasy dragon
ohhh, this is interesting, because I’ve very rarely been able to source exactly what the AI is plagiarizing, but in this case it’s very clearly this piece of creative writing by Kim Watt
Something about giant machines that are able to completely alter the ecosystem around them.
Something about giant machines that are big enough to House cities on their backs.
Something about the creators of those machines becoming dependent on them for shelter.
Something about giant machines with fleshy insides.
Something about giant machines doomed by their purpose.
Something about giant machines continuing to fulfill their purpose even though their creators are no longer there, simply because they have nothing else to do.
2am thoughts be like “okay but what if i brought back the safavid dynasty in the mojave desert and led it as the shadow of god on earth? it would probably work because the ottomans arent real anymore”
when i crown myself as shah abbasid the younger my first command is that you shall all pluck out your eyes to cushion my feet as i walk should i demand it. my second command is that i am assigning you all fursonas and you DO have to jack off to them
this is why i really should never be given more authority than a moderator of a modestly large but still very close knit discord community btw
This comic is from our third collection, Cute! It collects over 200 pages of comics and you can get your very own copy over at shop.oursuperadventure.com :)
I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.
One time they just stuck him in a hole in the ground for a whole episode.
This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.
If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.
i hate you “pair the spares”/“everyone must be paired” tropes, i hate you forced last minute romances, i hate you implication that a happy ending means a romantic partner, i hate you amatonormativity
Please note: this was a midterm ballot question. This only passed because people showed up to vote for something other than president. Please don’t ignore local races.
yeah we put your girl in the fandom and they villainized her beyond comprehension. yeah sorry they took out all the nuance and made the argument completely black and white. yeah my bad. we can’t reverse it. sorry.
We put your girl in the fandom and they still managed to make her posts about a popular male character. Sorry. Yeah, it was basically inevitable. I know. Yeah. Nothing we could’ve done. Sorry again
speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don’t say numbers. don’t give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it’s secondhand.
the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don’t let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.
you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it’s no fun anymore.
Astronaut Mark Kelly smuggled a gorilla suit into the ISS, without telling the rest of the crew
Winston
Winston
My favourite incident like this was the Skylab 4 mission, where the crew arrived at the empty station, only to find several people already inside, to their great alarm. Upon investigating, they realized the intruders were wearing the Skylab 3 mission patches… and were also just dummies the Skylab 3 crew had made and left there without telling anyone, specifically to fuck with the next team.
Can you imagine entering a supposedly empty space station and seeing this? Fucking terrifying. I love it.
I’m just impressed that, in an environment where weight and available resources are so carefully accounted for, people still find windows to pull bullshit like this.
Winston
Space Rajang, the final boss of Monster Hunter Wilds
Of the Americans who fought in Korea or Vietnam, none were “innocent” by virtue of having been drafted. The moral choice there was to either dodge the draft, defect to the other side, or frag the guy giving orders. Anyone who chose otherwise was a criminal and a murderer. And once the draft was over and the army became volunteer-only, all the excuses vanished. Yes, there are people who were in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria who regretted it, but regretting your crime doesn’t undo it. That’s just the minimum requirement for being a decent human being in the aftermath.
To everyone who says “you leftists can’t go around hating on the troops, don’t you want them to join the revolution?” I say “why would they join us if they couldn’t handle being told the truth about the genocidal terrorist organization they volunteered for?” If their reaction upon hearing people call the US military murderers and terrorists is to deny or equivocate or rationalize their participation, then they’re not yet fit to be a revolutionary. If we’re trying to dismantle the imperialist warmongering empire that continues to use its might and influence to murder millions around the world that is the United States, what good is a person who balks at the notion that the troops who volunteer to pledge their lives and their loyalty in service of this empire might be complicit in its crimes?
An American soldier or veteran who is not ready to admit they were wrong will not be any more ready to join us if we lie to them and say they made no mistake in joining the US military. We only weaken our own messaging and our own position if we refuse to condemn not just the US military as an organization but all those who continue to participate in and defend its actions. The troops are not innocent.
I don’t agree with this. I understand the baseline argument here, but not everyone actually had options. These were mostly kids getting drafted. Like, straight out of high school. They didn’t have life experience, or political awareness, or an understanding of what was really going on. This also downplays how effective propaganda is. Some 18 y/o from the rural deep south just isn’t going to have the tools to make the informed decisions that you or I could with the ocean of information and opinions we have now. It was a fucked up, rigged system from the start and we should focus on the monsters that run that system and not the civilians that get caught by it.
Where did I say that we should “focus” on people who were drafted into Korea or Vietnam? Obviously the draft sucked for a lot of reasons and it wasn’t the fault of anyone who was drafted against their will. That said, if someone holds a gun to your back and tells you to torch a home with kids inside, do you think the moral choice is to do it? The draftees weren’t threatened with death if they refused. 99 out of 100 draft dodgers during Vietnam (and that’s out of those that actually dodged the draft, not those with deferments) never even saw a day in prison. Prison time was also rare for those charged with desertion or cowardice. If we can agree that “just following orders” wasn’t an excuse for the Nazis, who had far harsher punishments for draft dodgers and deserters, why should that be an excuse for American soldiers in Korea or Vietnam?
Why should propaganda be an excuse, either? Propaganda is a reason why someone would willingly sign up for military service. It’s not a legal defense. US soldiers aren’t brainwashed. Most of them, I would assume, had the full capacity to make their own decisions. We have US soldiers on record talking about how they were aware they were killing civilians in Vietnam and that the government was fraudulently reporting those deaths as enemy combatants. You could say they couldn’t have known what Agent Orange would do, but you can’t say the same for bullets, bombs, or napalm.
US troops were complicit when they followed orders to “shoot everything that moves”, when they bombed cities and towns and villages, when they raped women and children. US troops were complicit when they saw their fellow soldiers do these things and kept their mouths shut. Being drafted doesn’t explain why these things happened. Propaganda doesn’t explain why these things happened. Racism and imperialism explain why these things happened.
The US government made the choice to invade Korea and Vietnam, and the US troops made the choice to follow orders, or worse. If we have to append “but remember, the troops were drafted!” to the end of every statement condemning the US atrocities in these wars, we’re only undermining our own argument. The US military is not a liberatory force, and US troops are not pawns with no agency or motives of their own. I think it’s a lot better to tell anyone still in the military that they have a choice and can think for themselves and choose not to be a racist imperial stooge than it is to tell them “you have no agency, you’re just a tool for the government, and you are not to blame for anything you do”. Let’s praise the draft dodgers, the deserters, the defectors, the whistleblowers and the saboteurs. Let’s raise them up as an example of good conduct for every US troop to follow.
I love that the internet saw people comparing women and other alienated groups of people and went, “they’re dating,” and, “they support each other.” We’re improving as a society.
Does anyone know who these artists are?? They’re brilliant and I’d like to credit them!!
THIS IS HOW TO TAKE A TRASH OPINION COMIC AND MAKE IT BETTER. THANK YOU.
I love this!!!
I think that the evolution of these “not like other girls” comics being popular to “these two are doing well now and are in love” comics being popular is VERY sexy of us
This is my Roman empire
i think its amazing that we saw girls pitted against each other and went “now KISS”
every pride month some chronically online dipshit makes a post that’s like “if you’re a bi person and don’t eat pasghetti and meatballs you’re not a true bisexual” and it gets 6k likes on Twitter and all the replies are like “yea yea op has a point all bisexuals HAVE to eat pasghetti and meatballs”
I understand the sentiment, but you could have picked a better example since, while I can’t speak for all bisexuals, if I do not eat pasghetti and meatballs I will Die
ALT
ALT
