to me, there's an innate horror in tradwife content. it's always a pretty young girl in her late teens, early 20s. she's so young. she's basically a baby herself. maybe she's about your age. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
either way, she always has at least three kids, sometimes more. you don't want to ask when she had them, but she had to have them young because her youngest had to have been born when she was at least seventeen based on how time works. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
she's smiling but there's something missing in her eyes - a spark that should be there. there's no passion, there's just the movements of the day. sometimes she'll give an interview where she says she barely feels like getting out of bed, and other times she says nothing. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
her world isn't real - it's neat kitchens and made from scratch cheese. she tells you how she doesn't need feminism because she likes this life, she likes wearing pretty dresses, don't you dare pity her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
you scroll up to an ex tradewife in her forties talking about how her husband divorced her and left her for a younger girl, leaving her destitute and penniless and twenty years out of the workforce. you scroll again to a pretty young girl saying she doesn't need a job, her husband will take care of her. you scroll again. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
another woman, this time in her early thirties, talking about how she just managed to leave her abusive husband and has nothing and he took the kids, warning and pleading young girls to not fall for tradwife lies. you scroll again to a young tradwife girl saying that would never happen to her, and you're just jealous of her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
you scroll again. a teen girl tells you that she'll just track her period, she doesn't NEED a toxic chemical like birth control. you scroll again to an obgyn pleading with young girls to understand birth control is just hormonal, and that period tracking isn't effective. you just watch happen. you can't save her.
you scroll again, and it's jd vance saying how women belong in the homes and shouldn't be allowed to vote. that their husbands should decide how they should vote. you scroll again to a domestic abuse counselor telling women their vote is private and they can lie to their husbands. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.
she doesn't want you to save her. how dare you pity her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her. a horrible feeling washes over you. you just watch it happen.
yeah sure you're not ableist... but are you cool with visible medical devices?
are you gonna be weird about feeding tubes? are you gonna ask invasive questions about catheters and ostomy bags? can you cope with seeing someone give themselves an injection? could you walk up to someone with a tracheostomy and talk to them? how about someone with a central line?
does your disability acceptance extend to people with visible medical devices?
Do not forget that discord is still planning on moving forward with age verification and has only "delayed it" until "the later half of 2026." They are hoping you will forget while they quietly roll it out when no one is looking. Continue to message them about it. Continue to talk about it. Make it clear this is unacceptable. Discord is one of the only places left you can even talk about or share adult content in private at scale anymore. They will tell you "its not that bad if you dont use it for nsfw" but fuck them and fuck people who say that shit.
we went from “just google it” to “just ask chatgpt” too fast.
people in my life, my friends, family, colleagues, they don’t say “google it” anymore. they just say “ask chat”, “just ask chat”, “let me ask chatgpt real quick”. like only a few years ago we were googling shit man
i was talking to ship about this yesterday but I have realized that like... like, re: being an ant that smells like termites to the other ants, the kind of relational trauma I have from being autistic etc means that whenever I am actually received by other people in the way I am intending to come across, it's almost shocking to me. having people take me in good faith and like, see and recognize and appreciate the qualities that I am working really hard to prioritize and value and reflect in my behavior and stuff, is shocking to me. I am not used to it. I've spent my whole life having people react TERRIBLY to everything and take everything in the worst possible faith and punish me for things I wasn't trying to do, constantly, so fucking much, that as an adult just like... showing up somewhere and having people be like :) Oh yay it's Pip we like Pip and we are glad Pip is here and interacting with us! :) is like. insane. for me. to experience. like I am used to experiencing it with trusted close friends and loved ones, but from people I don't know super well? from STRANGERS? almost never.
anyway I did cry while we drove home from the wedding just because no one was like... mad at me. at my friend's wedding. which is deranged, because why would anyone be mad at you for being at your friend's wedding when they invited you to attend their wedding. like lol what. anyway
I have "joked" since I was a kid that my secret superpower is the ability to piss people off. I am the Antagonizer. I can literally just sit there, minding my own goddamned business, and people will get upset with that and come at me. They smell neurodivergence like blood in the water and they can not STAND it.
I have had this exact same experience my entire life, right up to the same feeling of complete shock and... I don't know how to phrase it. Difficulty comprehending? When I find myself in the company of one of those rare people who don't treat me like a termite in an ant nest and instead just, like, gets to know me, and likes me.
It's impossible to get anyone who hasn't lived it to understand just how absolutely and completely BIZARRO WORLD it feels to make a joke... and have someone laugh. To have someone willingly pick the seat next to you. To be invited into a conversation. To be liked, at all- not even in an over the top "this is my best friend she's the coolest" way but just in a "I am happy to have this person around and I'm not going to willfully go out of my way to misinterpret everything she says and every subtle mannerism of hers in the worst possible way" sort of way.
Because when you've got this superpower, that's what it's like. From most people, most of the time. You walk into the room and you're already tagged as an enemy. Some people are nice on day one but by the end of day three they don't want to engage with you and start muttering behind your back. You get alienated from every group interaction, up to and including official business ones. It doesn't matter what you say or choose not to say, it's never right, and SOMEONE will be upset about it. If you keep to yourself you're haughty, if you make small talk you're nosy, and they NEVER like you, and you're NEVER right, and you grow up just KNOWING that it's you. You're the problem. A rare friend or parent might say there's nothing wrong with you but you know in your heart that the only consistent factor in your problems is YOU. Everything you say and everything you think is poison, you're just loathesome like that, nobody wants you around, no one has ever wanted you around...
... and then you meet the right person, and, like. The superpower just doesn't affect them. You say things, and they hear the actual thing you said. You can talk to them. You can answer questions or offer suggestions and they'll listen to you. You can make jokes or be sarcastic and they'll be amused. You can be REALLY daring and be a little rude and they'll just laugh or shrug it off or just tell you that was rude and everyone moves on without treating you like a monster for it. And it's just as easy as the interactions that everyone around you have always had, and you didn't have to change a damned thing about yourself to get there. Because it turns out the problem wasn't you in the first place.
Sorry to hijack this with such a personal ramble but this specific "smells like termites" experience is one near and sharp up close to my heart, and I feel you. I am very glad that you got to experience such a fun wedding. You and your partner both looked fantastic in those pics and looked like you were having a genuine and wonderful time, and I wish you many many many more affirming get-togethers like this in the future.
i think the hardest part of when you interact with people who just respond to you like you're a person is that it makes it so immediately clear how like... it DOESN'T take some sort of superhuman effort to interpret you that way. the people who take you in good faith AREN'T working twenty million times as hard as everyone else somehow. they're just ... treating you like a person. everyone who made you feel like your expectation or desire to be treated like a regular person was somehow Asking Too Much of them was lying. it is not asking too much. the people who do it do it easily.
its really, really hard to maintain the kind of prosocial optimism about human society that I work really hard to maintain when I'm reminded that people are often making choices NOT because the alternative is just too hard. but because they simply don't think it's important to look beyond instant kneejerk emotional reactions to people. they simply don't think it's important to not Punish People who have done nothing actually wrong except sort of give them the creeps. they're lazy.
Validating that there is indeed a thing neurotypicals are doing wrong in these interactions, there is a horrid cognitive bias many neurotypicals carry that they could choose to work on in themselves:
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including those who otherwise require less support, face severe difficulties in everyday so
edward likes taking bella to the meadow because she gets eaten up by mosquitos who then become flying little snackies that edward doubles back for. edward leaps about the meadow snatching them up like a bass jumping from a lake
u know that reminds me of this tweet going around making fun of dark mode users like 'haha do you guys need your books on dark paper' and it's like yeah some people can't read text printed on white paper? regular books aren't accessible to some people for that reason. whats the joke.
source: used to work for a company that produced large print documents and one of the services we provided was putting documents onto different coloured paper for people who couldn't read black on white 👍
My mom is very dyslexic and has always had a really really hard time with reading, especially black text on white paper. When she went back to college to get her degree, she found that using a colored transparent folder (she says that highlighter yellow and greens worked best for her) over a printed paper helped her distinguish words a LOT easier!! Of course, this may not work for everyone, but it helped her a lot!! She says it's the only way she was able to pass her ethics class :]
tag by sunderwight: #people mocking accessibility stuff always end up going 'what's next? another thing that is actually a good idea and already done sometimes?'
worst part of anxiety/ocd is that sometimes your fears actually do happen and you have to wag your finger at i like this still doesn't prove you're right asshole. it's like having a venom symbiote except you don't even get to have gay alien sex
Martina McBride didn't win Country Music Association Song of the Year for a song about how burning your house down with your abusive husband still inside it is good, noble, and an allegory for the American Revolution for people to act like the genre belongs to bootlicking fucks
how the hell did I leave Morgan Wade off this list. wrote a song about being depressed, alcoholic, and suicidal and how mental illness stigma sucks, saw how much people connected with it, wrote a Part II of that song about how she's doing better now but you're never totally free of the risk of relapse. fucking icon.
I specifically curated this list so people couldn't be like "ah yes but you see here is my simple binary of good and bad country music which always works", I made sure to add different genders, eras, subgenres, etc and y'all are still pulling that shit in the tags!
listen. Alan Jackson, the archetypal mister big hat man sitting on a tractor singing about a pickup truck, wrote a shockingly normal song about 9/11 that was like "yeah I don't know jack shit about politics but my copy of the bible says we're supposed to love everyone" and then went on the radio and explained how he specifically wanted to write a song about that day that "wasn't vengeful". Miranda Lambert took the southern leftist slogan "y'all means all" and made it the title of a corny ass pop-country song for the Queer Eye soundtrack. Kenny Chesney stole a horse from a cop and Tim McGraw put the cop in a chokehold defending him, and I know that's not about their music but it is, and this is very important, fucking sick as hell
it's fine if you only listen to female country artists or pre-1990 country artists or whatever the fuck you want but stop acting like you've cracked the secret code to dividing a whole genre of art into good pure anti-establishment folk songs vs bad corrupted right-wing sellout pulp
Luke Combs covering Fast Car and keeping the line "I work in the market as a checkout girl" and doing an interview about how he couldn't change a single word because it's not his story. king shit
Morgan Wallen doing I Had Some Help, literally the first song that spoke to me as a male survivor of domestic abuse. also shoutout to the guy for getting caught saying a racial slur and responding by specifically telling his fans not to defend him and raising a bunch of money for the Black Music Action Coalition. bro had an engraved invitation to the culture war and said "nah I'd rather be normal"
Shaboozey just absolutely obliterating the drunk roadhouse anthem glass ceiling
Maren Morris and Brothers Osborne with a song that okay, released in 2019 but I didn't hear until recently, about how good friends mind their own business and let you love whoever you want and also get high with you when you're broke
Kimberley Perry! If I Die Young Part 2!! "actually I'm glad I lived, bitch" ass song that I bet is gonna mean a LOT to kids fighting depression
Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan with Cowboys Cry Too. okay it's shallow and corny but genuinely a shallow and corny song about how men shouldn't be afraid to have feelings is what a lot of men need
