Try Me 💖 @cat-chthesehands - Tumblr Blog

Fuck it. I'm no longer gender neutral, I'm gender evil

honestly one of the strangest and worst takes i have heard in a long time.

I wish people actually looked up what grooming actually is, because it's not "when you read something horny before your 18th birthday".

Grooming involves someone deliberately trying to gain a minor's trust and open them up for sexual abuse. The intent is important here, because a lot of the actions that can constitute grooming are superficially completely benign.

For example, being kind, listening to a child when they talk about their problems or giving them gifts can be grooming if the person doing it intends to abuse the child, but otherwise it is just being a decent person.

You can't be "groomed" by an inanimate object like a book because books do not have minds. They can't abuse you. They can't even want to abuse you.

jabberwockypie

At a certain point you need to take responsibility for the fact you made a choice to play a video game or read a book that might have made you uncomfortable. You could also have chosen to stop playing it!

That's developmentally normal - there are always edgy teenagers - and it's something kids have been doing for as long as kids have had widespread access to recorded media.

I know a lot of abuse survivors - people who experienced serious harm and lasting trauma from things other human beings did to them. It's not the same as just being weirded out because you played a game or read a book or watched a movie that was a little too graphic for you.

You can't be abused by a piece of fiction.

beaft

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

beaft

recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."

in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, calmly evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"

beaft