MANMADE

CAUTION ⚠️ TRANSGENDERED STINGING WASPS IN YOUR AREA ⚠️ White USAmerican Man | Philosophy, languages, nuclear stuff, bugs 25+ mdni

[thoughtportal]

I hope we all make it

[omegaversereloaded]

Standing outside the club w no ID dressed as benoit blanc and asking women if they could help me solve the mystery of where my hug is at

[glutko]

[medievaljournalist]

im dodging tornado attacks like its nothing

[caspercryptid]

I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird

[caspercryptid]

If someone is doing things that don't make Sense, try to understand that it is entirely possible that their brain is probably under an enormous weight and fracturing under the pressure. People who have been stabbed will sometimes talk a circle around the fact that they've been stabbed because stress and shock prevent you from recognizing the distress you are in and what you need to do to seek help for it. PTSD will do this also. You will find yourself repeatedly jamming a bag of frozen fruit into the same spot in the freezer where it doesn't fit and keeps falling, over and over and over, focused on nothing but that bag. You will decide that a beanbag chair is 10000% necessary to your life. You will lose your entire shit because you stubbed your toe on a table and that means the whole setup of your furniture is wrong. These are largely harmless examples. People under strain will also hurt themselves and others. Cornered animals bite. And it doesn't heal the bite to go "Hey, are you okay?" But it might get you to an animal that stops biting, so you can start to heal. And before you had an animal that bit, you probably had an animal that kept doing shit you didn't understand as stress signals

[caspercryptid]

Mental illness is Off-putting. Trauma and stress make people hard to be around. There are no perfect victims. If your framework for someone under pressure are people who cry photogenically at home in the bathroom or at night when everyone else is asleep and then wake up and act like they're fine then you will fail to recognize it when your coworker who's normally really nice suddenly blows up on someone for leaving forks in the company sink.

Everyone is going through shit. And it doesn't make it okay for them to treat others badly, but it also sometimes makes it difficult for them to recognize that they're treating you badly, like the person on the phone with 9-11 who no longer realizes that he's telling the operator about his day and not answering questions. When your friend of ten years who has a new boyfriend suddenly starts being a massive bitch to you about your weight maybe she's just being a cunt, or maybe she's internalized some bullshit. You don't have to take that, but you Can go "Hey, what the fuck?" And that is often more helpful than you realize. It is easy to assume that someone who does something cruel is acting with intent, but especially in cases where someone's behavior changed in a short span of time, they aren't, any more than the person who is convinced the beanbag chair is going to fix them.

You don't have to give people endless chances. But you should give them at least one chance. Because on your worst week, it's going to be you crying at your friend's birthday party because she ran out of chili before you got to have some, and you're going to want some grace for yourself.

[acertainmoshke]

All of this and also, sometimes you just cannot control your reaction even if it’s harmful or mean. Which also doesn’t make it acceptable to treat people poorly, but it does tie into the give people a second or third chance and communicate before deciding they’re just terrible now

[goobra]

you want me to get high? the thing that killed icarus?

[scramratz]

Its super easy to engage with "problematic" media when you dont tie your entire personality around the media you consume

[sawed-on-shotgun]

people say twink like they wanna say faggot a lot im noticing

[nightcord-at-25]

watch leftists conveniently ignore this

[flunkett]

i dont think lolcows are funny. i dont think its funny to make fun of people. chris chan, birdie, idc. it never comes from a place of genuine criticism and is always just a way to bully people who are deemed less than human, to easily get away with being a jackass

[puppyloathing-deactivated202605]

real talk now. let me set the scene.

imagine me, a trans man in a room with a cis woman. the door is closed, we sit across each other at a table. we are talking about our shared hatred of the patriarchy, and the oppression and dangers we face. she knows i’m a trans man, i know she is a cis woman. she says:

”yeah, honestly! kill all men! and ngl, you too, i see you as a man and y’all are disgusting”

and i blankly stare at her in response.

because she doesn’t, not really. her anger about the fear inflicted on her throughout her entire life to control her, and all the women before her, is directed towards cis men. she is aware of the violence they are systematically capable of, as well as how it’s still socially acceptable.

but she doesn’t fear me. we are alone in a room with the door closed, and she does not fear my reaction to her words. because she acknowledges my weakness, and that i’m either too scared of HER to react or she’d overpower me with ease. maybe she didn’t consciously acknowledge that inequality of power between us, but she still did.

so, not only did she lie just because she thought it was the woke thing to do, she also dismissed her own societal status and power as cis compared to someone who is trans, to justify fantasizing and desiring to be violent towards another minority.

do we understand the issue we’re trying to address? are we finally catching up?

trans men are men.

cis men are men.

trans men are not cis men.

trans is not the same as cis.

trans does not mean ”less than cis”.

trans and cis are just different.

if you think ”different” has a negative connotation or invalidating implication, i’m sorry you were raised to think that. it is however your responsibility to unpack the belief you have internalized, instead of projecting it onto other people.

trans men are not responsible for the irreversible damage to women’s safety caused by cis men.

trans men are actively affected by that same system built by cis men, and cis women are encouraged to help keep this system up.

dismissing that is part of the problem.

[creekfiend]

I understand that there is discussion of masking by autistic people that is much more honest and in-depth, but so much of the stuff I see sort of leans on the assumption that masking is something one chooses to do in order to appear "normal"

In reality, I think the behavior pattern that we name as "masking" is the natural behavioral and psychological result of being consistently punished for attempting to acknowledge your own reality during formative developmental periods. And I'm not sure that "masking" is a clarifying word to use for this

[creekfiend]

OK OK OK, someone in the tags said that they don't know the degree to which they are masking, bc they don't know what is normal/expected and therefore have no way of knowing how much they're altering themselves to fit into that expectation (thank you for articulating that!!) and I think that clarified a lot for me about my problems with the framing of masking.

Because that method of trying to "unmask" will always fail, bc it hinges on the assumption that there is a core underlying Self that is being Covered Up with the mask.

In reality, one does not have a chance to develop a true "self" due to the circumstances of their development. this is broadly true for almost all humans (SHOW ME AN UNALTERED TRUE HUMAN SELF,) because of the heavily social nature of how our selfhood intersects with other people's perception of us, but in some people it is much more marked and detrimental than others. What I think is the issue at hand is not the Self, but rather the internal experience. The Self is a construction we build to understand ourselves as beings, and it is heavily informed by our understanding of our own experiencs. understanding of those experiences is the actual issue. Being able to identify and name the effects that moving thru the world have on you. And teasing out how those acknowledgements of one's internal experience have been punished out of us.

The "recovering from burnout as a high masking person" post does use this framework, but I think that referring to people whose sense of their own internal reality has been so warped and shattered that they have to completely learn from scratch as "high masking" is just not intuitive and that it communicates what is being discussed... Poorly. I understand that that is the language that is used by the community broadly rn, and I don't object to individual instances of its use, but I do think that we would be better served in these conversations by framing it differently than "masking"

[grison-in-space]

I also see people framing even the most basic social skills (things like "tolerating mild discomfort" and "avoiding offensive phrasing of desires") as masking. At a certain point I think we have to be aware that there is a degree of curtailing one's personal self expression inherent in existing within a society, and that autistic people are not the only people who have to be aware of societal norms and contort selves to exist within them as part of experiencing that society. The difference is of course in the degree of contortion required to fit neatly into the society, not the phenomenon of having to contort in the first place.

It bugs me! And I think it creates unnecessary friction among communities of people first discovering autism and is susceptible to a weird kind of reverse curb cut effect where unmasking (== "stretching out and de-contorting from the society in which you live into a more comfortable shape") is set aside as something Just For Autistics, as if there aren't lots of groups of people whose existence is policed and shaped and bonsai-trimmed into painfully stunted or twisted shapes. Which, of course there are, and not all of them are groups where a mental health framework is remotely appropriate (e.g. constraints on the acceptable behavior of black people especially in gendered contexts), so why are we framing so much advocacy this way?

[creekfiend]

YESSSSSS

[romancenjoyer]

anywayyy i will not be made to feel crazy or delusional for believing that people shouldn’t have to earn their place in the world. that everybody should be afforded dignity, even beauty, and life, regardless if they have ‘worked hard’ or checked a box or not. regardless of who they are and where they are born. the laziest person in the world is not less deserving of happiness than the most hardworking person. deserving means nothing. free your mind of the idea of deserving and you will begin to be able to think!!

[littleorangemushrooms]

Well, friends, today has been a day but we're still here. Have an earwig, Complex Forficula auricularia.

Broadleaf woodland, Wales

[radiqueer]

Human relationships are not transactional but they are reciprocal, which I think many of you with your ‘i don’t owe anyone anything’ shtick are too happy to forget

[aromanticduck]

Transactional: everything has to be exactly 50/50 all the time, pay me back for the £5 sandwich or buy me something worth exactly £5, I refuse to make an effort for you if there’s nothing in it for me

Reciprocal: you were there for me when I needed help, and I’m going to do the same for you, it doesn’t matter if one of us needs more or is capable of less, because the point is not equivalent exchange but mutual care

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[tysonfurybattlepass]

public defenders get behind me. i’ll defend you this time

[tysonfurybattlepass]

“so you like criminals?” I LIKE THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL.