bones *nom nom* @zooeyzoo - Tumblr Blog

“But there are dark, untouched corners within all of us. Sex can be very exciting in one moment and barely tepid the next. It can feel like love but not be love. It can feel like possession and then the person walks away. You can’t possess another person. You can’t make another person not die. If nothing else, at least my vomit fetish is mine. It’s mine and it’s real.”

— Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

kunaigirl

just casually leaving this here for no particular reason

kunaigirl

You know what? Fuck it I'm adding more context. Sesame Street has talked about the topic of death more than once and it's done with such gentle carefulness without watering down or censoring the heaviness of the situations. It treats heavy subject matter with respect and dignity and has been for DECADES. From the early 1980s:

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

Whenever I see people censoring words because it "might offend" someone or the big ad companies that are currently trying to run everything? I just want to say to them: "What? Is Sesame Street too mature for you?" Because really...what the hell are we doing.

kunaigirl

I'm back with even more examples! Sesame Street once again to this day is out here handling extremely difficult subject matter with incredible care and respect. "We can't let kids learn about uncomfortable things!" Oh, really now? Even though they're things that happen in everyday life that they'll face one day at some point anyway? Interesting. Let's see what else this show has covered that people (for some reason) think should be avoided and hidden. Here's more on death of loved ones and greif:

Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?

Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?

Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!

Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!

They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.

Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.

There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.

It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)

When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.

Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.

Don't fall for it, always side with Sesame Street.

mybloodstream-caffeine

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? -> but it's Shane making a deal with his very own devil, Ilya

mybloodstream-caffeine

Adding @scunthotter's tags because they literally did all the heavy lifting for expanding this vision for me:

Does anyone else ever get the urge to just. Help the blender out? Like it’s almost there, so close, but the one clump at the top isn’t getting to the blade BUT I could fix that so easily… and then I have to consciously will my hand to stay out of the blender. Because I like my fingers, please and thank you.

#blender thoughts #like shower thoughts but blender

stephexmachina

proposing a new genre of fiction called an anti-romance where u r presented w a couple at the start & the story is about their emotional journey towards a catastrophic break up

stephexmachina

will they won't they (end this farce). there's only one bed (but for some reason they don't really want to share it). out of context eavesdropping (that paints the relationship in a better light than it deserves). chasing after them to stop them getting on that plane (and stopping them from finally being free)

stephexmachina

nobody understands my vision i don't mean any old story where a relationship fails and it's tragic or w/e i mean a story where the intention is for the audience to root for it failing the same way u root for it succeeding in a romance. & when the relationship finally implodes at the climax of the story it's all very cathartic & everybody cheers.

stephexmachina

like have u never wanted a fictional couple to break up so badly it hurt?

depsidase

hppjmxrgosg

proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.

hairspraywhore

>no idea what a tumblr accent even is

>”oozes off of me like a thick miasma”

psych-is-the-name

im angry at myself for walking into that so perfectly

gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain

it’s actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you don’t realize it if you’re someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why it’s so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this country’s median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who aren’t their coworkers or people they met on dating apps

gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain

saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just “ummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) don’t you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))”

gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain

it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family you’ll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits

gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain

important points which I did not address but should be appended ☝️☝️☝️☝️

gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain

ITT:

- people giving their life story to explain why they have a special secret valid trauma reason to be a reactionary tar pit

- white true crime women assuming I don’t know what it’s like to fear rape

- fascists calling me a euroslave

- cybersmith, for some reason

the-haiku-bot

- white true crime women

assuming I don’t know what

it’s like to fear rape

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

i think crying may be undoing my orthodontist’s efforts. My teeth are throbbing. My sinuses are filled with scalding, gritty sand.

genderkoolaid

Transmasc person here (and fully coming from a place of ignorance here), regarding your addendum to the really sweet post about how the world gets richer with transmen folks, what do you mean by amab transmen? I’m hoping this question doesn’t come off as rude, I’m just generally confused by what that means.

Not rude at all!

“trans men assigned male” can cover a few difference experiences:

Many intersex people have a complicated relationship both assigned sex and gender; there are men who were technically assigned male at some point, but then have that maleness denied throughout their life; for example, someone might be assigned male at birth, only to then be re-assigned female when it is decided that would be the “easier” assignment, forced to undergo IGM (intersex genital mutilation)* such as a clitorectomy/penectomy, and then raised as a girl. Alternatively, a man might be assigned male and raised as a boy, but goes through estrogenic puberty, grows breasts and develops hips, and thus experiences life as a man who is forcibly feminized and denied his gender identity as a man, and so feels his gender is more trans than cis.

Otherwise, many people who identify that way are nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender-non-conforming men who feel their manhood is trans, while also having been assigned male. This can be for a lot of reasons. I can say that I myself was raised as a “girl” (technically) but am multigender, have always felt any womanhood I possessed was inherently trans, and after having gone on testosterone HRT “trans woman” increasingly just made sense on every level. I am sexed by random strangers as male or female depending on the day and my presentation, and I am frequently read as a trans woman assigned male in public. My womanhood exists within the context of me also being a man, and agender and neutrois and maverique, and my body which has been reshaped by testosterone, and so there really is no context where my womanhood is cis (I am also intersex but it doesn’t play as big a role in my womanhood as it may for others). Trans men assigned male can have similar experiences, although they can have many others! Some are be plural, some are be former trans women who now feel “man, but trans” better captures their identity, some are nonbinary people who are more “man-adjacent” or have some connection to manhood (such as being gay men) while still being very much a nonbinary/genderqueer individual, etc etc.

Notably, if someone says “I am a trans man who was assigned male because xyz,” that doesn’t mean they think that being a trans man assigned female requires xyz. When I point to my multigenderedness or my androgynous body as part of my identity as a trans woman, I am not saying “being a trans woman is defined by being partially male or physically androgynous.” Rather, I am a woman who has a trans body and a trans identity, and I am also transfeminized regularly in public, so on both a personal and social level it is something that makes sense to apply to myself, although I don’t talk about it often because people have not historically been the chillest about it. But its gotten a lot more discussed as of late, and people have even started pushing away from using AGAB entirely, so I’ve decided to be a bit more open about it.

Anyways! That’s why I wanted to shout out trans men assigned male <3 I love my brothers in not being defined by what people thought of our genitals at birth, I love my brothers in transsexuality and genuinely for real changing your sex, I love my brothers in nonbinarity and genderqueerness and the experience of being binary in a nonbinary way, I love my brothers in being denied validity in the very category you were forced into because you were a weird little queer from childhood.

*AGAB language was originally coined for use in nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children, pioneered by notable monster John Money. so if this is surprising to anyone, It Really Should Not Be.

the-haiku-bot

“trans men assigned male”

can cover a few difference

experiences:

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

zooeyzoo

I love you haiku bot

cherryhatter-deactivated2015072

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

visibun

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

drtanner

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

doubleca5t

Many ppl have made the observation that looksmaxxing feels gay and this is true to the extent that there is a good amount of overlap with the practices of some communities of gay men (I saw one poster mention how the overlap with circuit party muscle gays is particularly pronounced). However I would argue looksmaxxing is not a form of thinly veiled homosexuality but is in fact an intensified, concentrated form of heterosexuality as filtered through the lense of patriarchy and systemic misogyny

doubleca5t

Straight men desire women but are taught both overtly and subconsciously via patriarchal structures that women are lesser than men and their thoughts and opinions are not to be valued. How do straight men square this contradiction of desiring that which they are taught to look down upon? Through objectification. Women are valuable as objects of desire, not as people. As with any object, value follows a demand curve. A woman's worth is not measured by how attractive she is to you, but how attractive she is to other men. Being seen with a woman who many men desire, but only you have, establishes your dominance over other men and thus wins their approval, which is what actually matters. Sexual gratification is a secondary concern.

Incels are born from this thinking. They are men who for one reason or another cannot attract women who will impress other men and thus feel emasculated. They search for answers but find only snake oil. Understanding why they can't attract the type of women they want or why this upsets them so much would require a degree of either feminist education or self reflection, and both of these would make them uncomfortable. Thus they blame external factors. Women are hypergamous. Feminism created a generation of man-haters. Dating apps made it impossible for some men to get dates. The jews are somehow to blame because why not. But one of their favorite scapegoats is looks, since while you do have *some* control over how you look, it's a lot less than your control over how you think. And after all, men mostly just care about looks when it comes to women so it only makes sense that women would mostly just care about looks when it comes to men.

But even though you have *less* control over your looks that doesn't mean you have *no* control. Enter the looksmaxxers. Men who "optimize" their appearance through bodybuilding, dieting, surgery, drug use and a wide range of pseudoscientific nonsense. How does one "optimize" beauty when beauty is, as the saying famously goes, in the eye of the beholder? You create a standard. Objective measures of height, jaw shape, facial structure, muscle definition. This way beauty doesn't have to be an abstract concept that you nebulously struggle towards: it is a test. It is graded and thus possible to pass.

Looksmaxxers will tell you these standards are based on actual scientific research that proves these are the traits women find the most desireable but almost all their sources are shoddy or badly misinterpreted from their original context. Any woman attracted to men could tell you this upon a quick glance. Conforming to this standard does not, in reality, make you more attractive to women, it makes you more attractive to other looksmaxxers. Scoring high on the PSL scale allows you to signal that you have the ability to attract hot women, and thus win the approval of other men, without ever having to actually talk to a woman. You reap the rewards of heterosexual partnership without having to deal with the negative externality of listening to a woman's thoughts. It is heterosexual patriarchy stripped down to its barest essentials. It is heterosexual patriarchy without women.

apricops

Happy Ever Givenmas.

apricops

It has often been observed that the sacred and the profane are next door neighbors. Consider the way that saints and prostitutes are both considered rapturous nuisances, public goods which are best consumed in private. Or, for a less abstract example, consider how the easiest way we can still get a little privacy is when we’re praying or shitting.

The Ever Given, naturally, exists at this intersection: a container ship in the Suez canal, the center of the spider’s web of globalization, the culmination of a century of engineering, administrative, and logistical challenges which shaped - literally and figuratively - the modern world, a deliciously rich symbol. It is, at the same time, a big fucking boat that got stuck. That’s it!

Attempting to explain why the Strait of Hormuz is blocked today requires an entire lecture series of geopolitical context: “it all starts with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Well, it starts before that. Have you ever heard of ‘the Great Game?’ So in 1830…” Explaining why the Suez canal was blocked in March of 2021 took five seconds: a big fucking boat got stuck. People tried to drum up more context for it, poor working conditions on cargo ships, corruption among Egyptian port authorities, but it didn’t take. Because that had been true for a million ships that went through the Suez canal just fine. But the Ever Given was just a big boat that got stuck. It’s a wonderfully euphonic phrase: “the big boat got stuck,” a sentence of monosyllabic words that wouldn’t be out of place in a children’s book. It’s fun to say, with the bouncing b’s and the flip of the tongue.

The 21st century has kept such a delirious and dolorous pace of change that sometimes reality seems to disappear beneath an avalanche of proprietary apps and AI podcasters shilling sports betting. But the Ever Given was a reminder, a reassertion: all of this can be put on hold if a big fucking boat gets stuck.