I Just Want to Scream Into the Void @fayallir - Tumblr Blog

artmagine

The beautiful art of Thomas Blackshear II

kingfucko

i went to his website and saw even more great art! sharing some more which i particularly appreciated

#art

ramshacklefey

If I See One More Person Define Quoiromantic Wrong I'm Going to Scream

When I was a much younger Fey, a friend explained the concept of aromanticism to me.

"But," said I, "How can someone be aromantic? What is it they aren't experiencing? There's no One Thing that romantic love is."

Some readers will now be laughing and shaking their heads at young Fey, who just didn't know he was aromantic yet. Those readers would be wrong.

The term I use to describe myself is quoiromantic: I fundamentally reject the categories of romantic and platonic love. Being quoiromantic says nothing about what sorts of emotions I experience. It's about how I view those emotions and my relationships with other people. Kasumi Nakamura's article "The Quoiromantic Manifesto" is fantastic, and AsexualAgenda did an Ace Journal Club piece on it that gives a slightly more accessible summary.

What makes me want to screech is people defining quoiromantic as "unable to distinguish between platonic and romantic love" or "unsure of the difference" or "doesn't understand romantic love." These definitions cast being quoiromantic as something like being red-green colorblind: "romantic" and "platonic" are two categories which exist and can be distinguished by most people, but I for some reason lack this ability. Charmingly, it also manages to paint being quoiromantic as a kind of immaturity, since being able to identify and categorize one's own emotions is, y'know, a sign of being a grown-up. It also opens up this whole world of people thinking I need their help, or thinking they get to tell me what I'm feeling, the way one might tell a colorblind friend whether the shirt they're wearing is red or not. Delightful.

I understand where the confusion comes in. As the Asexual Agenda post points out, the glossary definitions of Queer Identities tend to treat them all as "intrinsic identities with clear distinctions between them." In Anglo-U.S. circles Queer Identities are focused on inner experiences: what do you feel? for whom? how do you view yourself? We have a major aversion to claiming things as part of ourselves which can't be claimed as intrinsic. (Things that aren't intrinsic are Lifestyle Choices, and Lifestyle Choices can be Immoral, and Immorality can be Outlawed.)

Quoiromantic isn't an identity in that way. Like I said, it's not a description of my inner world. I use the term for myself because it covers a set of ideas I believe are true, and those ideas inform the way I structure my interpersonal relationships.

And the fundamental idea is that romantic love vs platonic love is a false distinction. The categories are incoherent. ("Incoherent" is different than "nonexistent.") You can't fix the problem by adding a "secret third thing."

It's not that there's any particular emotion which doesn't exist. It's that when you look into the distinction between romantic and platonic love, there isn't one. There's love or whatever you want to call it, and it comes in infinite shades and textures and weights, but those two categories are nonsense. Once you start trying to find the actual distinction between them, it's easy to see.

As far as I can tell, all of the following could be considered parts of romantic love:

enjoying Person's company more than anyone else's;

feeling you life would be incomplete without Person in it;

the desire to share a household with Person (meaning shared finances etc, not just roommates);

wanting Person to like you more than they like anyone else and prioritize your needs and well-being over everyone else's (or at least putting you very very very high on their priorities list);

being pathetically attached to Person and feeling you are worthless without their approval;

obsessing over Person (worrying about them, wanting to know all about them, finding them fascinating, etc);

wanting to care for/serve Person and ensure all their needs are met;

wanting to be allies/comrades with Person for life;

being absolute besties who get each other in ways no one else does;

fighting constantly but always making up again;

It's a pick and choose list. They aren't all necessary and there's no magical "romantic if checks this many boxes" number. Probably no one is going to feel all these things for their Person at once. (I left out sexual attraction and oxytocin-induced-infatuation on purpose, and I'll circle back to them.)

Still, feels like a pretty good list, yeah? These are, if nothing else, the sort of things I see people go "there's no platonic explanation for that" about.

Here's the fun part:

Everything on this list is something folks feel about their close kin. These are all things normal people feel about their parents, children, and siblings. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume we agree that none of this would indicate romantic love in those situations. (Which is why I specified close kin, rather than friends.)

I'll go further and say there's almost nothing (again, I'm getting to the sex part) you could add as a necessary element of romantic love which would set it apart from an emotional state a normal person could experience toward a sibling, parent, or child. Because the thing we call "romantic love" isn't a specific, unique thing by itself.

Which is fine. What's the point of setting apart something we call "romantic love" in the first place? How does doing that help us? What benefit do you get out of being able to categorize all your emotions this way? Would it change how you approach finding friends, choosing roommates, deciding who you want to fuck, or raise kids with, or share finances with, if you didn't have the amorphous concept of "romantic" hanging over you? Would you love more easily if you didn't feel the need to grasp at one, imagined category so tightly it shredded you every time someone went away?

I can't see anything to lose by tossing the category, as long as I get to keep the feelings and see how they're actually so much richer and more varied and colorful than I could've imagined. The way they show up in so many more places in my life's tapestry, and the way I get to be so much freer to be honest about giving and accepting love.

That's why I'm quoiromantic.

And why I'm going to bite the next person who says I just can't tell the difference between emotions. _____

Post-script:

OKAY FINE let's talk about sexual attraction and infatuation, the two things people always bring up when I say romantic love doesn't exist.

Sexual Attraction: Outside the queer tumblr scenes, this is the delineating factor for romantic love generally. It's some combination of things on the list up there + sexual attraction. Honestly? If that's really the entirety of your definition, I'm fine with that. It makes romantic love into something quite trivial when you think about it though. "I wanna fuck you," is quite the mundane sentiment all told. But if you're willing to separate it from everything else, I'll accept your definition. Oh, but one more thing. Could you tell me. Does all sexual attraction to someone indicate romantic love? If not, you're right back in the same problem as before you brought this one up. If sexual attraction does always indicate romantic love, then you're just made romantic love and sexual attraction the same thing. Which. I guess you can do. But I'd suggest having a good sit-down-and-think before you make any life choices based on who you wanna fuck today.

Oxytocin/Infatuation/Being in Love: This is an interesting one, becuase it does point to a specific emotional state, which we can sorta "measure" (the way we'd measure anger or fear via brain chemicals, not measure subjectively). This intoxicating cocktail of hormones does a number on your brain and yes, is responsible for the "in love with" feeling of infatuation. Do we want to use it as the defining feature for romantic love? Well, it'd be good to remember that this is the same thing experienced by new parents bonding with their infants. It's the "glue these two humans together because one of them stands to immediately die without the other one" cocktail.* It's heady and exhilerating and absolutely not sustainable long-term. As in your-brain-cannot-physically-manage-that-it-would-be-bad-for-you. With this one again, I'd actually say if this is your whole definition of romantic love, then I'll work with it. I'll also say that if this is your whole definition of romantic love, then you need to entirely rework what place you think romantic love has in your life. Making decisions based on this state of mind is about as reasonable as me making decisions during a manic episode. *("Caretaker not paying enough attention to me" is a literal existential threat to a baby. Cigars be cigars but it's hilarious to me that "Person not paying enough attention to me feels like an existential threat" remains an effect of this chemical state in adults, and it's considered a Normal Way to Feel.)

wildehacked

things in fic I'm used to people kind of faking their way through writing about:

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

what french toast is

headspace-hotel

read through the notes on this one trust me

kiragecko

Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

#this is a niche thing so i'm not surprised people get it wrong #but when the holdovers came out a few years ago it was set in a private boarding high school #and someone from my school was in the movie so i looked it up on ao3 out of curiosity and people have no idea how prep schools work #it's a lot like a tiny snobby college with a curfew and teachers + their families living in dorm apartments instead of RAs #also it's a lot like a public high school for that matter #children of the head of school are not treated like Literal Royalty

chutzpahchesed

The people who say they can’t utter the charge are saying it from the biggest stages on earth. The people who actually can’t speak don’t get

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

The ones who say they cannot criticize Israel are speaking from the loudest rooms we have. The ones who truly cannot speak are the people who were set on fire for showing up. One of those groups is on a stage at Cannes. The other is in the ground.

aromantic-journal

"everyone should get more aromantic" can appeal to tumblr's sensibilities but I genuinely think everyone should also get more asexual. I don't mean everyone stop having sex, what I mean is

Sex is not essential. You can live without it. Full stop.

Not having sex isn't shameful or a sign of failure. It also doesn't make anyone boring.

You are not entitled to having sex with anybody and nobody is entitled to having sex with you.

Sex is not what makes someone an adult.

Nobody's worth is defined by how much sex they have or don't have.

Sex is not equally important to everyone.

You can have fulfilling and happy relationships without sex.

You should only have sex on your own terms, not because you feel like you owe it to someone, or because you feel like you'd be incomplete without it.

Know your boundaries around sex and be firm about them. Know how to respect other people's boundaries.

The previous point also applies when it comes to discussing sex. If someone doesn't wanna talk about it or hear about it you have to back down.

Anything can be sexual but not everything has to be sexual.

chaifootsteps

Firmly convinced the world would be a better place if we started treating sex the way we'd treat any other mundane preference in life, like what kind of chips a person likes to eat with their lunch.

likeniobe

When does the play close? When its "action" stops? But does not that include, at least to some degree, the curtain call (which, of course, the actors rehearse)? For at this point the actors appear before us only partly as their "real" selves. They remain partly, and significantly, still "in character," retaining mannerisms, perhaps, of the characters they have been playing. Who are they, then, at this point? Hamlet is not the prince (for he is dead), but he is certainly not the actor who played the prince either. He does not laugh or caper about as a man might who has scored (in the soccer fashion) a success. He may smile, wanly, as befits one recently slain; he may take (ruefully?) the hands of his no less "dead" opponent Claudius; he may even embrace the long-dead Ophelia. Is not this still acting? (The actor "playing" himself-as-actor.) Is not this part of the action? [...] It is the point, in short, at which we see the "edge" of the play before it disappears entirely.

from terence hawkes, "telmah," in shakespeare and the question of theory (1985)

mini-wrants

The thing that’s always missing from the “women didn’t fight for the right to work they were already working they fought to get paid” is that many women also very much wanted to work.

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

I know not everyone is born with intellectual curiosity or drive or determination but some people are and many of those people are women.

mini-wrants

Literally.

theboost

Why don’t we let the guy whose every plan could be reasonably construed as an abstract suicide attempt take a crack at it

#six of crows

revacholianrobot

In hindsight it's very insulting to be told that flunking out of college due to adhd is actually "quite common"

revacholianrobot

just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.

yourheartinyourmouth

only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!

that should disgust and enrage you.

if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening

when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.

but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student

at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.

but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus

jecook

Pulled these from a couple articles really quick but yeah the statistics are not kind. I remember writing a scathing essay about my issues with ADHD and college as part of an assignment for academic probation. I got back an email calling me entitled and lazy. Somehow, this thread helps me feel a lot better. I still have about a semester of school unfinished that I’m unsure if I’ll finish but… yeah. Makes me feel better to know it’s not just me.

lady-harrowhark

PSA: The Job Accommodation Network maintains a searchable database of accommodation suggestions for a wide variety of disabilities.

The full database can be accessed here and the ADHD page is here. The full database can be filtered by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation. Many of these accommodations are applicable to academic settings as well as the workplace.

Here are the section headers for ADHD accommodations ideas to give an overview of what the page contains - this post would become Do You Love the Color of the Accommodation if I attempted to list them all here

The ADHD page linked above also includes case examples and strategies for determining what sort of accommodations might be necessary. More broadly, the JAN website as a whole is a treasure trove of information related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and resources for both individuals and employers.

trambrosia

Oh fuck that's really nice, I will read it

Also just heard a podcast interview with a software developer who had good suggestions

Do you feel like ADHD is holding you back? Maybe you don't personally have ADHD but you work with folks who do and you'd like to support the

dandelionsresilience

The head of disability accommodations at my college just kept ablesplaining to me that “accommodations are to level the playing field, not give you an advantage,” and that her job is to “protect the school’s rights” rather than help disabled students. The only accommodations they would offer me were 1. extra time on tests, and 2. an alternative test-taking location - neither of which I needed. I ended up getting (most of) what I actually needed by unofficially asking the individual professors, but it should have been legally protected.

xxxball-fondlerxxx

oh my goddd yes. i remember in high school when i had a meeting to get a 504 plan it was so terrible. it took MONTHS to even get the meeting, and then they also did not tell me what accommodations were available, they talked down to me the entire time like "you know this isn't gonna just get you out of doing your work, right?", and thats not even MENTIONING the fact that i only found out about the existence of 504 plans in my sophomore year, and i found out about them from other students, not the school!

vyvilha

need some female director to lock in and make a movie where a grotesquely ugly and disgusting and monstrous woman slasher killer butchers handsome men in humiliating and sexualized ways. and it CAN'T be because they are rapists or abusers or otherwise misogynistic okay, she has to do it because she's a fucked up pervert

doyoulovethewayzeylily

you'll feel like a total dipshit train wreck and no matter what some girl is gonna see you and think "role model". you can't kill yourself you have to go be clocky in the gas station so a 14 year old can have the trajectory of her life altered forever

duchessvongooseberg

as annoying as it is to work fast food, at my previous job one time a kid recognized the theta delta pin on my hat and was so fucking excited because i was the first other therian they had ever encountered offline.

"hey....are you a therian?" "yeah!" "what kind of animal?" "eh, some kinda dog" "😲😀 im like a wolf coyote hybrid" "that's fuckin awesome"

to be weird is to cast lifelines all around you

doyoulovethewayzeylily

tags from @k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl

what really drives me nuts is that like. this happens an average of x times per year as a visibly weird person, but we only get made aware of it a small fraction of the time. you can't kill yourself you have to be clocky in the gas station.

analog-delight

Being clocky when i was working as a barista was one of my big joys. Being clocky when i was teaching high schoolers how to play the marimba was my reason for being for half a decade. It sucks how scared I am to leave the house I live in now. But I still need to try and be clocky at the grocery store. I wish i had a job to be clocky at. Being visibly me is one of the most radical acts I'm capable of, and I hope that one day we live in a world where it isn't radical at all.

doyoulovethewayzeylily

that's exactly what I was feeling when I wrote this. we all find ways to defy our fear, love is an excellent motivator.

fajitajane

I love going out being clocky. I love seeing a young queer as a cashier. Usually I'm wearing a mask so I imagine folks can't quitr tell until I speak. I almost always complimented on my hair by these folks too. I love being able to thank them and give them a compliment in return.

tsarina-anadyomene

uh i understand your knight kink post is engaging with the literary construct of the knight rather than the historical actually existing social role but you really failed to engage with the themes and tropes of late medieval grail literature

storyweavingspider

If you are a white person in a racialized person’s life, especially as a partner or close friend, you should go out of your way to ask regularly “hey is there anything you have been holding on to that I did?” and critically both fix it and NOT DO ANYTHING TO PUNISH THEM FOR TELLING YOU.

As a white person raised in a white supremacist society, you’re gonna fuck up sometimes. That’s just a fact. But racialized people often aren’t able/comfortable speaking up when y’all do some shit because of the power imbalance/not feeling up to educating when you may be resistant/don’t think the “fight” will be Worth It.

Show initiative without making it A Struggle or playing the white guilt card. Show you actually care about them, their struggles, and the way you interact with them BEFORE they have to have a bigger Conversation with you, beyond when they need to yell about someone else being racist.

And for fucks sake if they’re making/showing you something from their culture fucking act like you realize the importance of that, that they’re showing you shows they grew up with or making you food they made with their families, that they’re letting you in and trusting you more than other whites in their life.

mintendo96

This would honestly be life changing for me. The idea came up because I feel so incapable of telling the people in my life when they do racist shit. And like furthermore, actually respond beyond just an I'm sorry. Like for the love of god actually internalize the shit the Black and Brown folks say to you.

fudemushi

If you met someone with the same last name as you, how surprised would you be?

Not at all, it's very common

A little surprised, but wouldn't immediately assume a connection

I would be surprised and assume there was some relation

I would be very surprised that I *hadn't* met this person, we must be related

Does anyone else with this last name even exist?

Voting ended onJun 3

#not surprised at all #my first name on the other hand

hyperlexichypatia

The thing about the "hypocrisy" of conservatives bleating about "pedophiles" but supporting Trump is that to a lot of conservatives, the definition of "pedophilia" is "that which supports young people's autonomy or individuation from their parents/authority."

That's why a children's book that says "Be yourself! Everyone is different! You don't have to fit in!" is "pedophilia," but Trump raping a 13 year old girl isn't -- it was done to her against her will, so it didn't facilitate her dangerous autonomy. That's fine. Like child marriage -- it's perfectly fine, because the parents force it on the children. Parental authority is preserved.

A point my partner has made is that discussions of historical or cross/cultural variations in "age of majority" really underestimate the depth of patriarchy. "At what age is a girl considered a woman?" presupposes that a woman can ever meaningfully be considered an adult, which, in many forms of patriarchy, she really can't.

In the broadly liberal tradition, "children" are, broadly, defined as a class of people denied bodily autonomy and civic rights, but spared from the responsibilities of hard labor and harsh punishment; while "adults" are defined as a class granted bodily autonomy and civic rights, but subject to hard labor and harsh punishment. Which is why ageists (and ableists who infantilize disabled people throughout the lifespan, sexists who infantilize women throughout the lifespan, etc) think they have a real gotcha with "Well if you think young people (disabled people, women, etc) should have bodily autonomy and civic rights, then they have to have jobs! And go to prison! Or else you're Having It Both Ways!"

But many patriarchal authoritarians have never accepted this vague and never-actually-evenly-applied liberal construct in the first place. Everyone should be subject to hard labor and harsh punishment, and no one should have civic rights or bodily autonomy. Everyone should be subject to the authority of the patriarchal order. There is no "contradiction" between "a 14 year old should be married and a 24 year old should not be allowed to transition." They aren't saying that a 14 year old is "old enough/mature enough to decide for herself" whether to get married; and they're not really saying that a 24 year old is "too young/too immature" to transition. Marriage is an obligation and gender conformity is an obligation. Hard labor is an obligation and obedience is an obligation. The concept of being a "child entitled to protection, safety, and support" does not exist, and neither does the concept of being an "adult entitled to autonomy, self-determination, and political representation." They aren't even going to understand "If a 14 year old can be tried as an adult and go to prison, why can't they vote?" as a question. Everyone should be subject to prison and no one should vote. Life is about obligation and obedience, and age has very little to do with it.

x-v4mp3y3lin3r-x

I view reading fantasy/sci-fi stuff as "this work of fiction is being translated into english so that I can understand it, meaning some phrases should not be taken literally" lord of the rings style, and then I meet people who nitpick every word or phrase that "shouldn't exist in this story" and I'm like wow you guys are truly miserable and unimaginative. and also you tend to assume that english words all popped up in the 19th century and you never bother to check the etymology of the words you're claiming "shouldn't exist in this universe"

like sorry but in an apocalyptic alternate-universe earth, the phrase "train of thought" is plausible even in a world without locomotives, because the word "train" comes from the 14th century, and it meant "to drag"

that's why we call dress trains "trains". because they drag. the word wasn't invented for locomotives.

y'all say shit so definitively like idk man I think it depends. the english language is OLD AS FUCK. a lot of words you believe are modern just aren't

kalatannya

"Age in bio or i'll kill you"

You better pay close attention to the first one, and read it very carefully. I will quiz you on it later.

kalatannya

So much good tags

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