Not to point out the blindingly frigging obvious but if you label female people who aren’t attracted to males ‘terfs’, and encourage or excuse violence against ‘terfs’, you are advocating for hate crimes against lesbians.
i think fundamentally i'm gender-critical because i'm an athiest. i don't believe in souls. "i was Meant to be the opposite gender" wdym 'meant'? by whose design? gender theory is a set of beliefs i don't believe in. and that's why it's so frustrating that it's framed as being hateful and spiteful because like. no i just don't believe you are who you say you are. i don't believe you have a "woman soul" or whatever because i don't believe that's a thing. and in my mind, what you're doing is hateful, as my oppressor pretending to be a member of the oppressed class. i refuse to play by the rules of your ideology, just like i don't follow the bible because i'm not christian, or i don't follow a jain diet because i'm not jain, or i don't pray or fast on muslim holidays because i'm not muslim. and if you do believe in woman souls in male bodies, i don't think you should be thrown in jail for a thought crime or whatever, but i do think you're a misogynist, just like members of any other patriarchal religion
A big thing in so-called progressive spaces is criticizing women for being suspicious of random men, and insisting that there must be a racist/ableist/classist/anti-homeless bias at play, while conveniently forgetting that the woman in question (any woman) is a marginalised person doing what they can to avoid being hate-crimed (assaulted, raped or murdered) by a member of an oppressor class.
It’s actually incomprehensible. The amount of human (mostly girls and women but not exclusively) suffering, lives lost, courses redirected into the spiral that someone cannot escape from, and for what? The male orgasm?
A while back, I read a profile of a prominent beauty industry personality known for “breaking down the science of skincare.” She teaches her followers to focus on “what actually matters,” the article said: “What’s inside the bottle.”
This, perhaps unwittingly, is a perfect illustration of how the “the science of skincare,” as defined by the beauty media, is not about science or care. It’s about products.
Over the past few years, Big Beauty has strategically co-opted science as a sales tactic. “Science-backed” has eclipsed “clean” (and “natural” before it) as the marketing term of the moment. Brands with single-ingredient offerings (The Ordinary, The Inkey List) taught customers to cosplay as cosmetic chemists, and dermatologists used their medical degrees to market self-branded skincare companies. Beauty publication Allure released an Ingredient Index styled after the periodic table of elements, and a podcast called “The Science of Beauty.”
via Allure
As the industry’s sole goal is to sell stuff, all of the above present science as the study of purchasable products and procedures. Customers rarely question the conflation. After all, in an era when “follow the science!” is both a health directive and moral imperative — in this case, one goading you to fill your medicine cabinet with face crèmes or face the aesthetic and ethical consequence of “bad” skin — who would dare dismiss “science-backed” skincare?
The $155 billion sector is thriving as a result. You can buy charcoal facial cleansers to get rid of your skin’s natural oils and cold-pressed chia seed serums to replace them. You can use alpha-hydroxy acids to eat away at your skin barrier and ceramide-spiked barrier repair creams to build it back up. You can purchase benzoyl peroxide treatments to eliminate bacteria and probiotic toners to add more. There is no shortage of studied ingredients to smoosh into your skin-holes: stem cells, squalene oil, ceramides, peptides, collagen, glycerin, hyaluronic acid, lactic acid.
“Sure, there are clinical studies that ‘prove’ these ingredients do something,” Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and founder of The Beauty Brains, tells me in an interview for Slate. “But most of these are not really science.”
Really, science says your skin doesn’tneed most pre-bottled skincare products. (Dermatologists, common sense, and your over-exfoliated epidermis agree.) It’s equipped with the ability to self-cleanse, self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-heal, and self-protect; and it can produce all of the aforementioned ingredients on its own, thank you very much.
The beauty industry has confused the science of aesthetic manipulation for the science of skin health.
“As far as cosmetics go, these ingredients don't ‘measure up’ when applied topically,” Romanowski says of the factory-born versions of various internal compounds (collagen, epidermal growth factor). Marketing claims are often based on how a certain molecule behaves within the ecosystem of the body, which bears little resemblance to how it behaves in an inert bottle of goo. The stem cells in your body create thousands of new skin cells daily; lab-grown stem cells sold in face creams are “pure marketing gimmickry,” Romanowski says. Internal hyaluronic acid aids in full-body hydration; the HA in your moisturizer is mostly there to lend an air of legitimacy. “It is illegal in the United States for cosmetics to have a structure or function effect,” the cosmetic chemist elaborates.
Mary Schook, an aesthetician and product formulator, clarifies that per guidelines from the country’s Food & Drug Administration, “a cosmetic brand can only enhance or beautify, not treat or cure.” This is why skincare brands often employ aesthetic-focused marketing language; for example, “makes skin look healthier” or “reduces the appearance of acne.” Health — legally — is not the point. (It’s important to note that this F.D.A. policy does not apply to sunscreen, which is considered an over-the-counter drug rather than a cosmetic, and which must go through appropriate, actually-scientific testing.)
Research on beauty products, then, acts as little more than a litmus test for beauty standards, seeking to see if a certain product or ingredient can manipulate the skin’s appearance in some socially acceptable way. Rarely does industry-cited research ask, “Should this ingredient manipulate skin’s appearance in this way?” or “What are the downstream consequences of manipulating the skin’s appearance in this way?”
HA is an excellent example. Short-term, the humectant draws moisture from the inner layer of the skin to the outer layer, creating the surface-level look of hydration. The beauty industry calls this “effective.” However, that surface-level moisture soon evaporates. Over time, continued use of HA slowly siphons the skin’s internal moisture stores, leaving the dermis dehydrated and dependent on a cocktail of other creams and oils and essences to retain basic moisture levels (a cocktail determined by industry “science”).
“In truth, companies have very little incentive to investigate ingredients further than initial, promising results,” Romanowski says. “They almost always will find that the effectiveness isn't real. And if they find that it is real, they don't get much extra marketing bounce. There is no financial incentive for a marketer to determine what is really true.”
What is “true” about products is often irrelevant — or even harmful — when compared to what is true about the skin itself, anyway. For instance, the science of products says charcoal has the ability to “draw out oil and bacteria” and “remove dead skin cells.” These claims are true. But the science of the skin says oil, bacteria, and dead skin cells actually belong on your face. Oil is the skin’s inherent moisturizer. Bacteria make up the skin microbiome, an essential part of the body’s immune system. Dead skin cells absorb external hydration from the environment and keep internal hydration from evaporating.
Think of it this way: The science of fossil fuels tells us where, when, and how to best extract and use these materials. The science of the earth tells us we should not be extracting or using these materials at all. Similarly, the “science of skincare” tells us where, when, and how to best manipulate the skin’s appearance. The science of the skin tells us we should not be manipulating the skin’s appearance at all.
The “science of skincare” offers nothing but a way to intellectualize the physical manipulation of one’s appearance; a way to justify the submission of the body to current cultural beauty ideals.
To be fair, much of the science of the skin is fairly new — which is, after all, the nature of science. It evolves. (It’s why the phrase is “follow the science,” not “stand next to the current science until the end of time.”) Over the past decade or so, studies on the skin microbiome have debunked almost everything experts once believed to be true about skin health. This surface-level ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, mites, and more is essential to the maintenance of the skin and the body as a whole. It kills invading pathogens, produces antioxidants and fatty acids, prevents “bad” strains of bacteria from taking over, and may even repair sun damage. When the microbiome is disrupted, its diversity is lost, and these inherent functions take a hit.
Almost any topical product can alter the delicate balance of the microbiome, injure the skin barrier, and impair the skin’s inherent abilities. Recent research shows that microbial imbalance is very often at the root of inflammatory skin conditions like rosacea, psoriasis, eczema, and acne. “In the case of eczema, Staphylococcus aureus is too dominant versus other microorganisms, and the microbiome can not function properly,” explains skin pharmacologist and microbiome expert Dr. Elsa Jungman. In the case of acne, p.acnes is overly abundant. In all cases, fostering a diverse microbiome helps.
In his 2020 book “Clean: The New Science of Skin and The Beauty of Doing Less,” Dr. James Hamblin writes, “The ecosystem does not need to be maintained in any elaborate way that we didn’t already know made our skin look good: sleeping and eating well, minimizing anxiety, and spending time in nature.”
In other words: The science of the skin refutes the science of skincare.
This isn’t to say the skin doesn’t need day-to-day support. It does! That support rarely needs to touch down on the dermis, though, since — disruption from topical products aside — the root cause of skin conditions is rarely surface-level. Take acne, for example: The condition is tied to gut issues, stress issues, hormonal issues, or genetics. No matter how “science-backed,” no serum goes that deep. The buzzy beauty ingredients inside said theoretical serum can all be otherwise obtained, anyway, from sources that leave the skin barrier and microbiome blissfully unbothered. Eating salmon and nuts supplies the skin with essential fatty acids. Exercise elevates antioxidant activity. Sleep stimulates self-exfoliation. Facial massage boosts lymphatic drainage. Meditation increases moisture (seriously). Vitamin D regulates oil production and vitamin C contributes to collagen production.
Cue the chorus of skincare influencers: “Well actually, the skin stops producing sebum and hyaluronic acid and collagen as you age, so you’ll need more skincare eventually!”
That’s true, in part. The skin’s production of these chemicals does slow over time. But churning out less hyaluronic acid in your fifties is no less “healthy” than, say, entering menopause or going gray. It happens. It’s fine. It’s life. Bodies change. Collagen levels drop. Trying to compensate with collagen crème “doesn’t help,” Romanowski says. “It’s like trying to fix a hole in a cotton blouse by dumping strands of yarn on the shirt.”
“We can try to control or coat it with topical products, but [skin] is ultimately a force of nature reacting to the constant signals coming from underneath and outside of it, as it evolved over millions of years to do,” writes Dr. Hamblin.
As it turns out, it’s not “what’s inside the bottle” that really matters. It’s your skin.
The beauty industry has confused the science of aesthetic manipulation for the science of skin health.
Lab-grown stem cells sold in face creams are “pure marketing gimmickry,” Romanowski says. Internal hyaluronic acid aids in full-body hydration; the HA in your moisturizer is mostly there to lend an air of legitimacy. “It is illegal in the United States for cosmetics to have a structure or function effect,” the cosmetic chemist elaborates.
Happy Pride Month here's your much needed reminder that same sex love is beautiful it's 1000% okay to reject dick havers for any reason and anyone who tells you otherwise is backwards and homophobic 🏳️🌈👩🏽❤️💋👩🏾
"We're just making up for the girlhood we never got to have!!"
My friend who left her Amish order at age 19, who was the eldest daughter to a family of nine, who never had a birthday party, whose days of cooking and cleaning and farm labor and taking care of her younger siblings started at 4:30 am, has never felt the urge to do ageplay
My coworker, who raised her violent younger brother and fended for herself in a filthy double-wide trailer where her parents were either gone or raging drunk at home, who couldn't even dare to invite a friend over because of how horrifying her home life was, has never felt the urge to have a slumber party pillow fight
My neighbor's mother, who grew up as a house girl in southern India, who was born into a life of drugery and hiddenness and abuse, who wasn't allowed to even touch the toilet or dining utensils of the house she was forced to work in for 10 hours a day as a child, has never felt the urge to drink out of a Disney princess sippy cup
MTFs do not want to experience girlhood. Girlhood as we lived it would have made these pampered, whiny, milksop men kill themselves. They want to live in the sexualized schoolgirl anime that was contrived entirely in the minds of men. None of us got to experience that girlhood, and yet none of us are desperately trying to recreate it as adults now.
"Parents usually try to protect girls more and dress them in pretty dresses" — yes, because for centuries, women's lives depended on whether the rich rapist would like them and buy them or not. Woman were literally raised for sale like cattle.
Just remember that "princesses," contrary to the stereotypes about their pampering, were mere bargaining chips. They were artificially pushed out of power, driven back to tea parties and dress fittings, because their primary function was to be sold and then regularly subjected to sexual and reproductive violence.
Your idea of womanhood or girlhood is literally built on the propaganda of misogynists (who don't want to lose the opportunity to rape women so they block women's right movement) and the mockery of femicide. Just think about that twice.
it feels so disingenuous whenever i see posts about how feminists are causing trans murders because they always make it seem like trans people are getting shot by lesbians who hate penises and not by violent men targeting sex workers
“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid
if ur man doesn’t like your pubic hair there’s something majorly wrong with him. ppl who like women are like ooooo awooga when they peek a bit of bush.
honestly you’re an idiot for letting him touch you and possibly leak his deficiencies into the gene pool. that’s how u get so many perverts is bc many ppl would rather lie to themselves and be with a pervert than be alone. there’s no point to this post i just wanted to talk
I think we as women can only start healing after we admit to ourselves that female socialization is inherently traumatizing and that our insecurities about our bodies were manufactured to distract us and hold us back
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
#all of the issues raised in this paper are patently obvious if you think about it for one second#I don’t have an tech background at all and I instantly recognized all of these issues except the environmental one when I first learned#about AI back in 2021#that’s not meant to be flex either#i think any tech bro or ai pusher is lying about these issues#I don’t think that they see it differently#I think they outright know all of this is an issue and don’t care because they want to make money
there are all of these completely bizarre and basically unprecedented ills in society now, including irrational economic pessimism, which are having obvious negative effects on society (like electing trump over and over), and which are located entirely inside the human mind - like there's no reasonable explanation other than "many people have really disordered thinking, they have warped views of themselves and society" and all of these ills appeared in like, the last 15 years, and accelerated during covid, and yet so many people refuse to believe it has anything to do with social media and constant access to social media via the phone. it's actually really funny. like far and away the most obvious and logical conclusion to draw and people just, i guess, do not want it to be true
same thing with this "gender wars" shit. the obvious problem is that internet porn has warped the minds of many men and made them delusional and their behavior toward women strange or abhorrent. but this just isn't occurring to people despite how obvious it is. "wow, most men spend a lot of their time having an orgasm in response to the sight of women having sex with other men, who often are brutalizing them. and at the same time, a lot of men are suddenly brutalizing women during sex, or are walking around seething because they're convinced that women are all whores who are constantly fucking other men. these things can't be connected though" That's cool that you're all really stupid and have zero pattern recognition abilities and refuse to ever acknowledge the actual source of a problem let alone fix it, and will continue at this until civilization has basically been destroyed. I appreciate that
the thing about being a homeschool abolition hardliner is that people always want to come to you with some bullshit sob story about how you hate disabled people because they were bullied for being autistic and homeschooling was so amazing for them. and it's just like well unfortunately homeschooling is also a widespread tool of coercive control in child abuse used by christofascists to raise kids without the tools they need to function in the world so that they will always be afraid, dependent, and unable to think critically and discern right from wrong and truth from lies. so unfortunately i do think this is a situation where in order to prevent enormous harm to untold numbers of children those bullied kids who just don't wanna go to school are going to have to suck it up. (and in reality what i always propose is a more robust system of alternative/magnet public schooling set up for kids who are basically on grade level but who DO struggle to thrive in a mainstream setting, but nobody ever wants to hear that, they just want to guilt you for not thinking anyone who ever gets picked on should just get to stay home and play vidya and do all their lessons on zoom. and it's like honestly i don't think you're having this argument in good faith bc you are very much centering hypothetical discomfort you MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY have experienced over, again, widespread child abuse and neglect. so.)
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