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afraid to fuck around but i wanna find out

@firecatwashere

Bead lizard • in my 20s • e/em/eirs

Say I love you to your friend who walks slow. Who pauses long and often to gather their thoughts. Who forgets what they were trying to say. Who can’t focus on you because of pain. Who can’t give complex responses even though they wish they could. Who struggles to ask for anything because the answer could be no. Say I love you to your friend who feels safe enough to be slow around you.

IDK I think if cis men are being told that being fat will lower their testosterone and make them Insufficiently Masculine, and cis women are being told that being fat will raise their testosterone and make them Excessively Masculine, and fat trans people are being denied the right to medically transition if they're fat, and thin trans people are warned against HRT because it will make them fat (and this is said about both testosterone and estrogen HRT), and androgynous-presenting people are told that only thin people count as androgynous...

Then maybe...

Maybe...

Maybe the weight loss industry is just using Gender to enforce fatphobia.

Watched a documentary about abuse and advice one guy said to give children was, "Tell them that if someone is hurting them, to tell someone - and don't just tell one person. Tell as many people as possible, and keep telling as many people as possible until the abuse stops." and i really liked that

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

Just really good advice. Not suprised I don't hear it more often.

i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!

Reasons to use "SA" online:

  • Algorithm hides posts that use the "S word."
  • Microblogging site where posts have a character limit
  • Writing an article that mentions it over a dozen times; you spell it out the first time and use the acronym after that
  • Conversation by text (IM, whatsapp, discord, whatever) and it's faster not to type out the full words
  • The app you're in censors the actual words and replaces them with something else (like Steam's **** for what it thinks is profanity)

Reasons to use "SA" in person:

cheese sits on the toilet while we take showers, and i like to stand on my tip toes and draw his silhouette in the steam from a high angle, then stand back to see how warped it is from his actual shape

oil and acrylic on masonite

This amount of individualism is exactly whats gonna kill us all btw

"Going a couple hours without eating a single kind of food? No thanks, I would rather kill a child" is such a wildly horrifying take to see MULTIPLE people proudly stating.

you stumble across some manner of varmint ceremony

compound artfight piece for sophmobile and paulinedraws

many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think

love seeing revisionism in the wild “free the nipple never meant you can walk around topless every where that’s still sexual harassment it just meant for like breastfeeding and stuff”no it literally means you should be able to walk around topless anywhere because get this. breasts aren’t fucking sexual organs.

I remember when I was about 12, I watched a show on TLC that followed people as they got somewhat uncommon medical procedures.

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

"Free the Nipple" was calling out arbitrary bullshit like that, because someone just existing with their body parts should not be considered obscene, and the double standard that men can be topless but women can't is so blatantly ridiculous. All nipples are just nipples. If you get turned on or bothered by them, that's on you.

So we all talk about being in fandoms for things that are charmingly bad, and being able to acknowledge that they’re charmingly bad. But of course some people are in fandoms for things that are Actually Amazing. There are people out there who write fanfiction for The Best Science Fiction Novel Of The Twentieth Century. Or who draw fanart exclusively of The Best Movie of All Time. And there are even more people who are in fandoms for things that are Actually Pretty Good, which is not quite amazing but is closer to it than to Charmingly Bad.

And sometimes, you have a string of fandoms that are Actually Pretty Good. And the danger of this—the very great danger—is that when you have a string of Actually Pretty Good and even Actually Amazing obsessions, you start to believe that maybe you have taste. Perhaps you are now immune to the indignities of losing it over something mostly bad.

And then it is shattering to discover that no, bad things can still stick a fork in your brain. 😔

So I understand why the “transformative fandom gathers around things that are not good because there being a problem makes people desire to fix it” model is popular. I even agree that it’s accurate in many if not most cases. However it is not what this post is about. Plenty of people do transformative and creative fandom activities for things that are very, very good. Simplified models do not encompass everything.

And frankly, it’s starting to really get on my nerves when people read “I think this thing is good. I wouldn’t change a thing about it and frankly I don’t even think there should be more canon added to it, but I am still going to write thousands of words of fic, make a cosplay, and draw fanart” and then completely misunderstand and respond with “yes I agree—I like things that are good too. But I never feel the transformative/creative fandom instinct for them because they are too good.”

Some people do not feel it. Other people do. Stop misreading me to avoid having to adjust your mental model of how fandom works.

one of the ways a Canon work can be fandom bait is by missing something that fans want to fix, i.e. "it's bad", but i think this is only one way out of multiple that something can be fandom bait.

  • compelling worldbuilding (invites interaction with the setting)
  • interesting gimmick (see: daemons, drift compatibility. subcategory of compelling worldbuilding)
  • shipping bait (duh)
  • original character bait (in-universe categories/factions and design elements that make it fun for people to create their own characters)
  • compelling narrative (invites interaction and tweaks to the storyline: AUs and fixits and so on)

basically anything that invites interaction and recombination. but fandom also has a sort of multiplying effect: the larger the interactive audience of fandom is, the more likely it is to generate ideas and works that draw in more participants. so:

  • network effect (the larger the established fandom, the more likely it has subfandoms and infrastructure that appeals to niche audiences)

Yes this exactly, thank you bless.

Things that have space to play in are fandom bait, but space to play in does not equal holes.