Does anyone ever think about how heroes with a "no kill" rule are almost always male, and their staunchest defenders also tend to be male? I've noticed a trend both in fiction and with a mindset I see among people (mostly white men) in leftist spaces that everyone can be rehabilitated and that nobody is just evil.
Not trying to generalize too hard, but I feel like this mindset kind of reflects male privilege, along with other forms of privilege. Obviously there are exceptions, but I feel like women and minority groups are much more likely to understand from a young age that not everyone hurts you out of desperation. Some people hurt you simply because they enjoy doing it and there is no amount of social reform that will stop them from taking what they want. They simply enjoy the feeling of overpowering another person and causing them pain.
People with privilege do not understand this so intimately. While they think they are being altruistic, they are actually displaying ignorance to a side of human nature they are not exposed to as often as we are.
He traces his hands from her neck to her lower stomach, with the gentleness of somebody touching a beautiful old painting, his nose still pressed firmly between her breasts.
He pulls up for a quick breath and to say, "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." before beginning to gently suck on and kiss her breasts.
Neglect is a form of abuse. That includes emotional neglect.
Emotional neglect occurs when a childâs caregivers fail to notice, validate, or respond to the childâs emotional needs. This isnât always intentional. Often, parents were emotionally neglected themselves. They may provide food, clothing, and shelterâbut emotionally, they are unavailable, overwhelmed, or misattuned.
Prehistoric graves show women wielded more than early archeologists gave them credit for.
"Some 6,000 years ago in the northern reaches of modern Latvia, a young woman died. Afterwards, a group of early humans buried her in an ancient, sacred place along a lakeshore. They carefully lowered her small teenage frame into the ground, gently placing a stone ax, 28 flint flakes, 15 blades, and a stone scraper beside her. Stained with ochre, the stone implements were part of her last rites. This young woman remained there thousands of years, until, when archaeologists discovered her along with more than 300 others in the 20th century. The site, known as Zvejnieki cemetery, is one of Europeâs largest Stone Age cemeteries.
Research conducted at Zvejnieki has often challenged longheld assumptions about gender roles in prehistoric Europe. For instance, the young woman interred in burial 211 described above is one of several women and children buried with stone axes at the site, upending the notion that axes only belonged to Stone Age men. Now, a new study published September 10 in the journal PLOS One again upends gender stereotypes, demonstrating that women and children were just as likely to be buried with stone tools as men. The woman in burial 211 alone was laid to rest with a staggering 45 different stone objects.Â
(...)
This flies in the face of a decades-old stereotype that Stone Age women didnât use stone tools as frequently as men. The women were too busy cooking, crafting, and caring for the family to bother with the stone tools used by men in hunting and building. Or so the outdated story went.
âOur findings overturn the old stereotype of âMan the Hunter,ââ Little said in a statement. Historically, this stereotype âhas been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools.â
Study co-author Dr. AnÄa PetroviÄ of the University of Belgrade echoes Little: âThis research demonstrates that we cannot make these gendered assumptions and that lithic grave goods played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women, as well as men.â"
My biggest problem with plenty of sex/kink/gender educators on this site is the feeling of a large amount of these users that all criticism of them, perceived and real is somehow an indicator of oppressive/suppressive action or thinking when it is obvious they are just an undereducated anarchist with a blog.
Even without dwelling on how good educators maintain awareness of their gaps in knowledge and allow themselves to be proven wrong so that they can research and take in new information, I wish they would regard their platforms and audience as ones born of choice and not their divine right and destiny to run an hrt blog like lol. Lmao even.
Alot of bad faith would be dispelled if you had an awareness that choosing to be an anarchist educator, a good and honorable thing btw, puts you under a completely fair level of scrutiny directly related to your lack of formal degree.
Even if you don't believe in meritocracy, it already exists in the education and science fields very purposefully as a way to weed out misinformation and biased bullshit.
So, if all you spew is misinformation and biased bullshit and your only response to such critique is you're being oppressed and silenced:
1. Your resources and sources will stagnate as you double down, keeping your topic scope small and your audience fanatic and politically complacent, feeling they are doing enough by following and being placated by you.
2. You will wake up in a faux progressive sphere where no one acts any different than stonemasons and flat earthers. Like if your information cannot update or be critiqued, it might as well be godsent, your ethics mystical and your loyalists cult like.
And it's like. Again. No one forced you to make your page the center of the internet sex ed universe. It's also not and refusing to point people towards information directories founded eons ago essentially speaks to a part of the problem. This shit is so embarrassing and it's why I don't follow many of these pages at all.
recently saw a comment section full of people, primarily women, talking about loving living with their best friend and being sad about having to live separately one day. some people talking about missing living with their best friend, some talking about âgettingâ to live with their best friend âuntilâ they find partners. saw one person mention that moving out to move in with a partner felt like a divorce. it makes me so genuinely sad⊠all these people recognizing the joy they can find living outside the norm, letting themself live with a friend instead of a romantic partner, but still feeling like they have to live with a spouse eventually. like itâs not even a decision, just an inevitability.
similarly, it makes me sad when someone shares their happiness from living with a friend with others and the biggest response is people insisting/assuming they must have a secret unrecognized romantic connection. just taking over a moment of joy to insist theyâre wrong about their own life and feelings; all to reinforce the lifestyle everyone is already expected to conform to eventuallyâŠ
I watched a tiktok by a school teacher who hasn't assigned any homework in 12 years a few days ago and I'm still thinking about it because she made some great points. I'll link it here but it's in German.
I'll go ahead and summarize the arguments she made as to why she thinks homework sucks:
It doesn't actually promote self-sufficiency. Kids who don't struggle with organization and discipline at school will also not struggle with their homework, but kids who do struggle at school and need more help will also struggle while trying to get anything done at home.
It's inherently unfair/unequal. Children's home situations are so very different, some kids have their own desk and computer in a quiet room and at least one parent around who has the time & knowledge to help them plus the financial means to hire a tutor, while some children don't even have their own room and their parents might not be around or lack the education and means to be of any help at all.
AI exists and can be used to do almost all homework and most kids use it.
Assigning and checking homework and enforcing consequences when students don't do it is a waste of class time and creates an unpleasant atmosphere.
And also a very important point that many people in the comments made based on their experiences as both students & parents of students:
In addition to being a huge stressor for children and bad for their mental health, it also puts a lot of strain on the parent-child relationship. In cases where a parent already has a tendency to be abusive, conflicts over homework can quickly escalate and lead to abuse, which can then cause trauma around learning itself.
I just saw a post where one of the comments was a woman saying that they don't care about the POV or internal life of female characters in general, and I didn't want to reblog that post because I didn't want to go after that specific person, but I did want to say:
If that is how you feel (regardless of what gender you are), if every time you read a female character (but only a female character) you think, ugh I don't care about them, they're so boring, female characters never have internal lives worth reading about, you need work on that.
I'm serious. Figure out what your hangup is, reevaluate how you're approaching stories, maybe get some therapy or talk to someone about it if you need to, and figure out how to get past your dismissal of female POVs as being worth reaing.
Because whatever problem you have with the internal lives or POVs of female characters, it's an issue you also have with women. It's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from real women that everything you find so dull or shallow or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters is fictionalized--and, it's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from male characters that everything you find so shallow or dull or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters isn't also present in those male characters in some very similar way.
And if your excuse is that men can't write women--read more things written by women. (Some men can write women well, but you should read things written by women anyway.)
Tl;dr: If you find yourself looking at every female character you read, or every Black character, or every disabled character, etc. and thinking that somehow none of them quite live up to the male/white/abled characters that you are used to reading, that's something you need to work on.
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