goth in training

katie, 27, she/her, ⚢

[loveridden1999]

problematic sudoku solving skills gap

[featuringmarkhoppus]

[blignick]

[roycohn]

there's an old anne rice interview circulating on twitter rn that i remember reading ages ago where she makes a pretty salient point about how submissive men who have bdsm fantasies etc will go to a sex worker and basically order the ala carte version of their fantasy to be performed in real life but women don't really have that same option and certainly not at the same point of availability so they read her horny books instead. and honestly that argument has been in the back of my mind every time people get on their high horses about the popularity of booktok romantasy novels or heated rivalry or whatever the "women are horny and we're upset about that" cultural property du jour is ever since. women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.

[atinymekanie]

The only issue I genuinely ever take with the romantasy tropes is that often they seem to be utterly nonconsensual on the part of the woman, as she is simply accepting (often with a lot of internal monologue about how she’s scared/concerned/upset about) the man treating her in whatever way his fantasy runs, which usually seems to be very dominance-based.

In this world where women are already subjected to the sexual whims of their male partners and their own desires are often ignored or belittled, I very decidedly don’t wish to read about that exact same thing happening to the FMC. Now, if the FMC is living her best life whilst being subjected to these tropes and shadow-daddy MMCs, then good for her!

I just really wish that the FMC’s pleasure and desires would be centered, rather than just assumed to be submissive and then executed as such without first asking.

So yeah, am I asking to see the kink negotiation scene? Hell yeah, I am.

[ariaste]

Nope. Because in a book like that, the BOOK ITSELF IS HAPPENING WITHIN THE KINK SCENE. The kink is non-diagetic! It's like saying "I don't like when movies have music that comes from nowhere, I wish they would show us where the musicians are, how do you have an orchestra pit when the heroine is running around the moors in the fog and the rain??" The kink negotiation scene isn't happening between the characters, it's happening implicitly between the reader and the author, and your power to withdraw consent is perpetual and ongoing -- all you have to do is close the book and walk away. You're allowed to do that, and I encourage you to do it.

But for things happening between the characters, if the FMC is scared-AND-horny or whatever, that's what the fantasy is supposed to be and you as the reader are expected to do some basic suspension of disbelief in order to engage with the idea that (just like in a kink scene!) this is not real, this is just for pretend, everyone is safe and no one is actually getting hurt. On account if it is fiction.

Now, if you're not into that, that's perfectly fine, I am not saying you have to be into reading things that you don't like. If you want to see some kink negotiation, that's cool. Sometimes, there are books that are about diagetic kink, and they do include those negotiation scenes. But for non-diagetic kink (aka the thing you're "taking issue" with), I don't think that it's fair to say that it's wrong for those books to be written that way. A woman's desires ARE being centered -- either the author's own desires or what the author is envisioning the reader will desire. If you're not into it--again, that's perfectly fine, it's just not the right book for you or the right genre for you. Read something else.

You missed the point of the first post, @atinymekanie, so let's read it together again:

women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.

"yes but the only issue i take with romantasy tropes [...]" literally is just "someone else's private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable" in different clothing. Do you see what I'm saying? You're doing the same thing. "Yes but when it comes to the thing *I* don't like, people shouldn't do it that way." Not everyone is doing it that way! Read different books!

[joannaismyqueen]

I don't have problems with tropes or kinks. I have issues with how fucking badly those books are written. There are books for children with better prose. And once the trend had gone up you suddenly have shitton of people saying that SJM is next Tolkien.

[roycohn]

buddy, if you think "sexy books with workmanlike prose" is some kind of trend, i highly recommend seeking out some pulp fiction or bodice-rippers from before 1980. there is prose there that makes SJM genuinely look like the next tolkien. if you're not enjoying it, it's not for you. move on. grow up.

[plainclothes2025]

bork is on sale

[theamiableanachronism]

[diamantefangs]

[xeansicemane]

This is kinda ominous ngl

[vexwerewolf]

Gotta compliment him on his reflexes. No hesitation. Just described exactly what he was seeing, regardless of what it was.

[wherefore-whinnies]

[VD: A weatherman is giving a report and pointing to a map, saying "feel like temperatures really take a tumble too, because after the storm-" before he is interrupted by the screen going black and then displaying a picture of some baby spinach. He says, "um," then immediately points to the screen and confidently announces, "this is baby spinach." /End VD]

[pitviperofdoom]

I try not to fall into the "I never liked their work anyway" ditch when an artist/creator reveals themself to be a terrible person

BUT

a feeling I do have and will stand by is "While I enjoyed their work overall I did have some gripes that I overlooked out of affection and whimsy, but now that my loyalty is gone and my affection tainted there is nothing holding me back from enumerating my many grievances, to which the revelations of the creator's shittiness may or may not provide a new and infuriating context."

[beatrice-otter]

#such a good summation of this actually#because yeah there’s usually things that were always present#but which were easy to overlook or give the benefit of the doubt#that suddenly become relevant after a revelation about the creator#and it’s really not the same thing as the self-defensive “’I never liked it anyway’

tags via chimaerakitten

[folk-punk]

how can you eat the fried hearts of something that once was alive and had a beating heart? do you feel any guilt? i hope you do.

please google what an artichoke is

[eldritchblep]

“Say my shuttle exploded. I died, and it was such a shame. Give me a break, Crux, I’m begging you here—I’ll trade you a skin mag. Frontline Titties of the Fifth.” This rendered the marshal momentarily too aghast to respond. “Okay, okay. I take it back. Frontline Titties isn’t a real publication.”

I spent the better part of a day painting this and looking at a lot of smutty pulp covers for palette and typography purposes (and for science.)

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Phillip Light

[despazito]

Another one for "objectively funny crimes should not be punished"

[cranity]

sanji is one of the few on the crew that grew up around pirates and the ocean right

[depsidase]

[wayfire-official]

Sex should have a secondary gameplay loop where you build bases, manage resources, and expand your territory

[flammableengineering]

polycule

[interestingmistakes]

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

[blackbearmagic]

one time I saw a photo of a skinned whale/dolphin flipper on reddit or something and I've just never recovered

there's just. A paw in there.

[gallusrostromegalus]

One of the most spiritually profound moments of my life was when I was sixish and at a natural history museum with my parents that had a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

So thanks dad, for pulling your shoulder a bit to show me that I am part of the universe. I love you too.

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

well maybe you should blearily wake up at 5:08 in the pre-dawn light and find the sleeping soft tiny mammal body of your cat just inches from your head like a miracle too beautiful for speech, and you should rustle one hand out from your blankets to rub fingertip circles across the warm eggshell dome of her little velvet-wrapped skull and on the bristly patches just where the cups of her ears begin, and as she inclines her head into your fingers and purrs without ever opening her little eyes you should feel a love so tender that you understand how that love could have reached out from the fireside into the inky spangled nights long gone to reach her, and then you'll feel better

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

i am at a complete loss as to how to adequately express to you how much this cat throws up yeah

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tumblr tag from hotTubSharts reading: and then maybe she'll wake you again at 6 to the sound of her puking on the floor. maybe /End ID]

[ndnbutch]

personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist