[sionnach-uaine]

To any US citizen who is against KOSA but unsure of what to do: these people will send a letter on your behalf and will also provide instructions on what to say in a call to your lawmakers to voice disapproval of the bill. We've been able to at least push this bill back to the drawing board before and we can do it again. https://www.stopkosa.com/

[percysfoxblog]

[theforestbunch]

Do the people saying “cheating should be a crime” realize they are advocating for legally enforced sexual ownership of another person? That would be a dream come true for domestic abusers whose victims can’t safely just leave them or creepy incels who decide you’re dating them because you were nice to them once. The current legal system already favors abusers, I don’t see why you’d want to give them another weapon. And it’s not like “oh this is theoretical not serious”, there have been times cheating/adultery was illegal (and some extreme religious fascist states where it still is) and it is/was always women disproportionately punished for it including with destitution, torture, mutilation, and/or death. Cheating is a wrong, disrespectful thing to do to someone interpersonally - but legally they still have absolute autonomy over their body. You cannot own someone else, you can’t force them to not have sex with anyone but you. That can only be a mutual agreement.

In general, I think it’s very strange and telling when people think cheating justifies abuse. If someone cheats on you, leave them. Don’t put this much energy into it, don’t stay with them just to find ways to hurt them. To me I’m like “if you don’t want me, I don’t want you. Bye.” There’s other people out there.

[theforestbunch]

I’m deeply confused and disturbed by the people including so called “leftists” who are fucking obsessed with the idea of prison rape as “justice” that happens specifically to people who harm women and children. You do understand that it’s rapists who commit rape, right? And rapists are bad people who do not care about women and children? Rapists in prison are the exact same people as the rapists outside of prison, it’s just a different setting. They don’t magically turn into dedicated vigilantes who care deeply about women and children the second they pass through those gates. Just like on the outside, it is the most vulnerable (mentally ill or disabled people, queer people, young people, etc.) who are raped in prison not the most guilty. That’s the reality of prison rape and that’s who you’re actually reveling in and normalizing the torture of. I just cannot wrap my mind around thinking that someone could commit rape as a righteous action or to avenge women and children, and I really don’t trust anyone who is capable of contextualizing rape that way and enjoying the thought of anyone being raped.

And the way these people REFUSE to critically think - or just think period - about what they’re saying is infuriating and shows they know it’s indefensible. Some of you are out here talking about prison reform and restorative justice then normalizing sexual violence against the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society being enabled by the system wtf?? If you try to tell one of these people that rape is not funny and people in prison are people, they cannot respond to that. They’ll just make some piss brained deflection about “sO yOuRe DeFenDinG (insert whatever bad thing the person they’re fantasizing about raping did)”. This isn’t about what they did. That is utterly irrelevant to the conversation. You could express your anger in literally any other way and yet you constantly choose to salivate over the thought of rape specifically. The comments you’re making literally sound like a rapist, some of the comments get so specific and gross that it genuinely is going to trigger any rape victim seeing it. You’re harming rape victims and then acting like a clueless dipshit who doesn’t know why people would be upset about you going promoting rape.

Also that’s not even getting into how you’re villainizing black queer men because why is it always “a big black guy” you use as your boogeyman? Why is that the most violent and repulsive person you can imagine in your mind? That’s not really my lane to get into but it’s definitely another big issue there.

[vintrage]

can someone please get this girl her dog back

[korolevasansa]

He is a dog, just as he says. A half-wild, mean-tempered dog that bites any hand that tries to pet him, and yet will savage any man who tries to hurt his masters.

[gentlewordsdaily]

Little signs you are healing (even if it doesn’t feel like it):

You pause before reacting, even if it’s just for a second.

You notice your thoughts instead of immediately believing all of them.

You have moments, small, quiet ones where things feel a little lighter, even if they don’t last long.

You are starting to recognize what hurts you, even if you don’t know how to fix it yet.

You come back to yourself a little faster than you used to.

You let yourself rest sometimes, without as much guilt.

You are more aware of what you need, even if you struggle to give it to yourself.

You are trying. Even on the days where it feels like you are failing, you are still here, still moving through it.

You have days that feel okay, and instead of them feeling impossible, they feel… real, even if unfamiliar.

You are learning that not every thought deserves your attention.

You are still hurting sometimes, but it doesn’t feel exactly the same as before.

Healing doesn’t always look like big changes.

Sometimes it looks like this, small shifts, quiet awareness, softer moments that come and go.

And even if it doesn’t feel like progress, it is.

You are not stuck in the exact same place you were before.

Something in you is changing.

Even if it’s slow. Even if it’s subtle.

It still counts.

[theforestbunch]

I think the reason The Hunger Games series seems more grounded in our reality to me than any other dystopian story is it’s celebration of violence, especially violence against children. Our culture celebrates war and military imperialism as a sport, hearing the way Fox News brags about bombing human beings feels truly indistinguishable from Flickerman grinning and getting the crowd excited to see children slaughtered. Every single tax-funded service that actually benefits the public, which is what taxes and society are for, is seen as a waste and scrutinized for every cent spent but the military and the prison industrial complex have money funneled into them endlessly without any question from either “side”. And guns, the fucking guns, machines capable of nothing but killing, are treated as a sacred object that you are blasphemous for suggesting shouldn’t be in our society. We don’t just accept the brutalization of the innocent; we celebrate it, we worship it.

The one and only difference between America and The Capital is they don’t pretend to condemn the murder of children while their every single action and belief supports murdering children as the ultimate goal.

Oh, and also in The Hunger Games books (it was mostly glossed over in the movies), the victors are sex trafficked because they are seen as commodities for the elite and no amount of violence against them satisfies their depravity. Just another thing in fiction.

[theforestbunch]

Minors looking at porn is not that big of a deal. When people go through puberty, they will be curious about sex, and reading and watching porn is a safe way to explore that. It’s developmentally normal. There are plenty of issues with the porn industry but the reason minors have bad ideas about sex isn’t just because they’re watching porn - it’s because they have no comprehensive sexual education and porn in their only influence. And also because there’s a lot of bad social ideas about gender and sex.

The U.S. Government trying to pass laws to keep minors away from videos and pictures and even just text instead of banning child marriage that legalizes child rape and allows children to be trafficked and legally tied to rapists by their parents is the definition of performative.

[residentofincelistan]

But it is

This is pedophillic behaviour from you. If yer an adult, you're encouraging kids to watch men raping women on screen and call it sexual development. Gtfo, actual sexual development is found in comprehensive sex ed and having sexual relations with your peers instead of watching rape on tape.

[theforestbunch]

I never encouraged anyone to watch porn. I wasn’t even addressing minors at all in this post. I criticized the way the government is using minors watching porn as an excuse to implement 1984 surveillance, data mining, and censorship on us by the government and mega-corporations neither of which have our, especially minorities, best interest. If you think that allowing the most misogynistic christian nationalist government we’ve ever seen in this country to have the power to control everything we see and say online is going to protect women or reduce misogyny, you’re a fucking moron. And normally I would be nicer but considering you decided to call a child sex trafficking survivor “pedophilic” for recognizing the fucking fact that government and corporate surveillance and censorship is never about “protecting children” means you deserve no respect in return. Clearly you were too fucking stupid to understand my post or to read more than the headlines of your google search. Have the life you deserve 🖕

[theforestbunch]

The older I get, the more and more it is reaffirmed to me that cops never help situations. Compared to how firemen and EMS act on scenes, cops are just strutting around making everyone more upset at the best case scenario. I had my first car accident as the driver last week; car totaled, I was injured (though thankfully nothing serious), and I was so upset shaking and terrified. The EMS helped talk to me and calm me down. The cop showed no concern at all, he just started interrogating me with leading questions trying to get me to admit to being on my phone (I wasn’t) or speeding (I also wasn’t). As an abuse survivor, that only made the situation 10x as traumatic as it needed to be because I knew he was trying to take advantage of my vulnerable state to get me to incriminate myself because I’ve seen and read so much about how cops do that. Every single other first responder and ER doctor, nurse, etc. was calm and reassuring and actually helpful meanwhile the cop was just there to try to get me in trouble for something he didn’t see and had no reason to think I did before we’d even ruled out if I was internally bleeding or not (which was a concern given the heavy, painful bruising in my abdomen from the seatbelt). He also did a piss poor job of controlling traffic and made me walk back across the major road without even blocking it off at all which I thought was the main thing cops were supposed to do in car accidents? Or do they only use those lights when they want to speed without even having sirens on in a rush for their lunch break?

It wasn’t much better in the last car accident I was in as a passenger, we were stranded on the side of the highway with open toed shoes in near freezing rain and the bystander who was giving a statement had to ask the officer to let us in his car to not freeze to death. Then he was weird about calling a tow and wanted us to try to drive our car upwards out of the muddy median back onto the highway after it had been hit in the wheel damaging the frame. Like they are so fucking useless and everyone I’ve talked to has had similar experiences, and when I think about how much of our tax dollars are being spent on these pieces of shit who are consistently the worst humans alive, the most likely to be abusers and murderers, who offer no actual service to the community the more fucking angry I get. Every time I see a cop now I’m just like “Fuck you, I hate you” because genuinely I don’t think in any situation they would ever be of any help. I have called for police specifically once when I got sexually harassed and groped and solicited for sex trafficking by a crackhead on the street and as far as I know they did nothing. I already got myself out of the situation by calling my mom, I really only called them because I was worried about him doing this to another girl especially since he said he thought I was underaged which I do look young and I was on a walk across the street from a High School when this happened.

All that to say fuck cops and fuck morons who are like “Who would you call if XYZ happened” because we deserve better resources to be avalible and funded than someone who will show up late and shoot your dog or your husband. Speaking of which, I’ve seen cases of actually vicious dogs like those dogs that chewed off the dog walker’s fucking face leaving her looking like the Travis The Chimp lady and the cops left her in the house with them blood smeared all over the carpet and dog bed for like 45 minutes. It’s literally a miracle she didn’t bleed out in that time. So, they are only good for shooting dogs except when they actually should shoot dogs, then they don’t even do that. It’s almost comical how averse they are to protecting people which we know is just a slogan not something they have to do at all ever.

[winterosiee]

“If Lady was here, I would not be afraid.”

commission by @malotte00 <3

[melrosing]

bran ii, adwd

[theforestbunch]

The biggest flaw of House Of The Dragon is it set up a good side and a bad side (or attempted to which actually just came off hypocritical). It reduced the entire conflict between Aegon and Rhaenyra’s claims to sexism, acting as if Rhaenyra is the decisive “rightful heir” and Aegon usurped her solely because she’s a woman. Patriarchy obviously plays a large role in the conflict and story but Rhaenyra’s claim is not only questionable because she’s a woman but because Kings/Lords “naming” heirs isn’t how inheritance law works in the ASOIAF universe (or in historical contexts). If that was how it worked, Sam wouldn’t have had to be sent to The Wall for his brother to be heir, Tywin wouldn’t have to give Tyrion anything, etc. The series is full of examples of parents with extreme favoritism and that favoritism doesn’t change inheritance law because it’s just that - laws. There are exceptions to that and Rhaenyra does have a claim but Aegon also has a legal, legitimate claim regardless of whether Viserys said to make him heir with his dying breath or not because who is the “rightful” heir is not just up to Viserys’ “because I said so”. Screaming that Rhaenyra is the only rightful heir and Aegon is just a “usurper” is dumbing down the world-building of the whole series and erasing all political nuance.

“Oh, but they swore fealty to Rhaenyra as heir!” Yes, they did, and then Aegon was born. That changed things legally and politically even though Viserys The Avoidant wanted to just pretend it didn’t. Aegon’s claim to the throne by birth does challenge Rhaenyra’s claim by declaration, they both have rightful claims. That’s why it’s politically interesting and why a conflict was next to inevitable without a very strong ruler to proactively solve the problem which Viserys was the antithesis of by just popping out kids and then pretending they don’t exist for the rest of his life. In his arrogance, Viserys thought “Because I said so” would hold up after his death and against one of the most foundational laws of the land. And that’s the theme here - Arrogance. Vanity. Pride. Greed. This family was destroyed because the most powerful people in a world of severe inequality and suffering couldn’t help squabble for a little more power that they didn’t plan to do anything of value with but stroke their own egos. This is a critique of power, of systems that aren’t undone because of the identity of who is running them. Rhaenyra just gives off-hand lip service to helping the poor while she’s starving them with a blockade (having never been hungry a day in her life) and starting a war that will kill their loved ones so she can arm wrestle her brother for a chair and title. Rhaenyra becoming Queen wouldn’t materially advance women’s rights or human rights as a whole in Westeros. Women are just as capable of upholding the paradigm of patriarchy (as we should well know by now).

But instead of that nuanced critique of systems of power and how they corrupt people who benefit from them, the show was like “Mmm let’s make Rhaenyra a dragon queen girlboss and Aegon a rapist and child fighting ring… guy (that was weird and just never mentioned again) so the audience knows there is no nuance allowed in this story!” But also Daemon is allowed to groom his niece and murder and assault female partners with it being romanticized and absolutely no one ever having an issue with it even when they should per their character because violence against women is only a deal-breaker for Team Green not Feminist(TM) Team Black. Daemon is also allowed to say every misogynistic slur under the sun including to mock the family of the innocent woman he sadistically murdered but if Criston calls the woman who sexually assaulted him pushing him to the edge of suicide a cunt one time and instantly apologizes he’s an evil “incel”. Ahem, but I digress.

[litkitkat]

melancholic wet dog of all time ohhhh jon snow

[theaisyapping]

[theforestbunch]

What the fuck is up with these porn ads - most of which are either AI generated or at least the scripts probably are? They’re on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, everywhere, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s actual soft core porn happening in the ad itself. Nonstop corporations and the government have been trying to stop people from using social media to discuss sexual topics or make sexual content, now every ad forced in my face is pornographic?? So, humans aren’t allowed to be sexual but the robots are??

[theforestbunch]

Kids aren’t being “taken from their parents and transistioned by the state”. Trump is blatantly lying as usual. In some cases, a parent who is creating a hostile environment to their LGBT child because they don’t support them has lost custody with the child expressing that’s what they want and with it being shown their behavior is harming the child’s mental health. And in every case I’ve found, they’ve lost custody to another parent or kinship guardian or the 16/17 year old was emancipated, I’m not aware of any case where that was the sole reason they were taken by CPS and put in foster care without physical abuse or severe neglect (and that isn’t how CPS works).

This is just a credibly accused child sex trafficker and serial rapist defending emotionally abusive parents keeping custody of teenagers who explicitly don’t want to be around them and have a safe alternative place to be - almost like he doesn’t care about consent or kids wellbeing. Weird.