I am in a sea of wonders

a bra and a hijab are the same thing in many ways

Hijab is not much different from many different hair coverings which used to be extremely common throughout the world. All of those had their own religious connections with them. Hair coverings were often a tool of both religion and "modesty", the loaded gendered concept. Nowadays it's most commonly associated with Islam therefore it strikes out as Abnormal. A bra too serves the same purpose, yet its considered the "acceptable" tool of Modesty with no loaded baggage whatsoever while Hijab is the "backwards" tool of modesty with Evil Baggage. The same concept, when it's Muslim racialized, is Backwards and Violent, yet the violence of the bra, because it is accepted among White people too, is acceptable and invisible

Can you imagine if tomorrow wearing a bra was seen as completely backwards, but nothing else changed socially for women, yet the new policy was to force women to take their bras off in public? What, that sounds like the wrong way to go about it to you because it would be humiliating and misogynistic? Now lets apply that humanity to other people's cultures

i saw a post on twitter by a european saying americans are fake for their random compliments to strangers and their general cheery demeanor and like no. no no no you don’t understand. if you get a random compliment from an american on the street about your outfit or whatever, that is 100% genuine. we mean it. we aren’t lying we are making a small but fleeting connection with you because our lives are shitty but the human condition is enduring. oh god i’m clutching my chest

If you get a compliment from a random American on the street, know that they tried their best to keep from saying a peep to you but they literally could not hold it in. They HAD to say something.

The other day a tiny gay man in a hurry bumped me on the Metro escalator and said "Sorry, great dress by the way" and then he stopped at the top of the escalator and turned around and said "AND a great hat. THAT is how we do summer!" and SPRINTED for his bus and I coasted on that for the rest of the day.

Love this post!

When I first moved to Prague I had a colleague who had such great style, and I always complimented her because I thought she was hot and cool. Years later when we were friends, she told me that she always suspected me of trying to manipulate her somehow because that is not how Czechs roll, and it was really inconceivable to her that I was simply complimenting her with no ulterior motive, but that's culturally normal to me?

Also, I am married to a British person, and his mother is an artist -- she's a collograph print-maker, and she told me that whenever she wants a pick me up, she sends photos of her latest prints to me, because I can be counted upon to say something nice. What can I say? I love her work? Her prints are beautiful, so...not faking?

Americans have a lot of blind spots and issues, but saying the nice thing in their brains to other people is fine? Like? A little more kindness and connection isn't hurting anyone?

There was a post on r/askanamerican just the other day, by a guy living in Eastern Europe who has a fun backpack (it looks like a reeses cup package with a bite taken out of it!) and said he constantly got compliments on it from American tourists

And he was like...are all of you like that? You say nice things to total strangers as if you're life-long friends??

And the entire comment section was like: Yup. Absolutely. This is 100% a thing we do.

And someone looked up a picture of the backpack and shared it and we were all like OMG THAT IS AN AMAZING BACKPACK yeah if I saw someone in any city on earth wearing that thing I would in fact say something.

Sometimes posts on that subreddit are a trash fire, but we were all so happy to talk about times we've told strangers compliments or been complimented by strangers.

And genuinely, it's one of the few things that makes me proud to be American. Like. We have a reputation for telling total strangers when we like something they're wearing/doing. And we mean it, every single time!

is anyone else getting increasingly disturbed by the memeification of Everything and how badly the online community at large needs to make everything into a joke or a punchline

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.

There’s this idea on the right that the libs or wokes hate blonde, busty, conventionally attractive white women. I believe it’s a conviction borne of projection: they hate us and all our beliefs and aesthetics, therefore we must do the same. We see this in the idolization of Sydney Sweeney that lasted all of minute until they realized she wasn’t one of them. We see this in the Fox News hostess/Republican Stepford Wife look. Of course it’s nonsense, I love busty blondes as much as the next lesbian, but there’s this conviction that waving a conventionally attractive blonde woman in our faces is owning us.

Of course it is a signifier. Desire is a product of culture. A blonde, youthful, white but tanned, light-eyed, skinny woman: you don’t need to be a sociologist to see the cultural forces, most obviously white supremacy, which would generate and reinforce that as the epitome of sexual attractiveness.

But with the original, as the OP notes, it was sincere and unexamined. It was calculated, yes, but calculated to sell burgers. Here is the all-American Beauty—Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson—and a burger. You want the girl, because every piece of media you’ve seen since birth says that is what beauty is and that you should desire her, she’s eating a burger, and enjoying it, almost as much as she’d enjoy you, so now you want the burger! Maybe they briefly considered that it’d piss off feminists or conservatives but hey, that’d be free publicity, advertising for the advertising! Now it’s purely a product not to sell a product but to signify a place in the culture war. “Trump won, chud culture is ascendant, therefore we’re going back to our pre-woke ways! Not out of conviction or desire, but to signal to the president and his base we’re on their team!”

The original was selling the American Dream: a hot, juicy burger, an ice cold Coke, getting lucky with the girl next door in a new American made car. This is selling a simulacra, the phantom of the American Dream not for its own sake, not to enjoy, but to show contempt for those you hate.

holding your hand while i say this: heated rivalry has reached the point in it's lifespan where people are going to start picking it apart in bad faith. this is historically what happens when something is overexposed and also when it's beloved by a largely female/queer audience.

don't engage with people who were never going to give it a chance to begin with. understand that it does not need to prove it's quality to anyone, and regardless, it will likely remain a cherished romance for many millions of people from here on out.

It’s really crazy to see how hard people flounder if you are even remotely confrontational like we have a generation of people who think they can communicate through passive aggressive games of telephone and insta stories and get scared if you tell them no. This sounds like something someone’s boomer grandpa would say but it’s true though

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

It was said by Resmaa Menakem, and the full quote is: “Trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family can look like family traits. Trauma in a people can look like culture.”

This quote was taken from a podcast interview which Menakem participated in, which you can find here.

I highly recommend “My Grandmother’s Hands” for more of his thoughtful and nuanced words.

ID: A post by Maladroithe @/Maladroithe, reading "I can't place where I read it but I recently came across the sentence 'trauma responses passed down through generations can start to look like culture' and I can't stop thinking about it" /End ID

the fact that neonazi slogans pretty much seamlessly slip into common lingo is both obviously frustrating towards efforts to distinguish dogwhistles from background noise, but also testament to the oversized influence that reactionary, functionally comforting and nonconfrontational, rhetoric has. like it's both the case that someone saying 'hell yeah brother, reject modern degeneracy, embrace tradition' could just as easily be a dedicated klanner as much as a he/they cottagecore fanartist, as well as that the average westerner will need to overcome a lot more discomfort with 'the people's republic of china has the best green energy policies and affirmative action in the world' than with 'we must return to traditional lifestyles and secure a future away from Urban life', because one of those things is associated with all the comfy apolitical animated films they loved as a child, and the other is something they've been explicitly taught is dangerous ideas they should be afraid of considering

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:

No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.

Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.

Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.

John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!

Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.

The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.

It's all fiction.

None of it is real.

The characters are fake and do not exist.

Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.

[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]

Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression

You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.

Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.

I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.

But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.

You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.

You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.

You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:

You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.

When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.

Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.

In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."

Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”

Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."

Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.

Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.

Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.

My main sources for this post are:

And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:

maybe I am just sentimental and easily impressed but tbh I disagree with the whole “yes local theater is almost always bad but it’s still important” thing bc I think a lot of local and amateur theater is really good actually! like yes I also agree that it’s important to support local arts no matter what the quality so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad message but I also think if we really want people to go out and support community theater it’s also important to remember that there is a lot of talent outside of broadway or major touring productions so yeah going to see community productions is not something I feel I need to begrudgingly do just out of principle it’s something I genuinely enjoy.  

I am just breaking into the world of professional theatre and the way some people in the business treat amateur and community theatre is absolutely atrocious. I genuinely don’t understand it! For once, it’s incredibly disrespectful to amateur theatre makers who pour so much time, effort and love into making community productions while balancing their hobby with another job or education, and who, as OP rightly said, often *do* produce amazing shows. But it’s also a shit way of treating theatre professionals who started out in community theatre, which is just so many of us! Not all of us went to “the Theatre” as kids - I sure didn’t. But my family has always been involved in community theatre, and this shouldn’t make me less prepared for a job in the business than someone whose parents took them to the opera. Professional theatre would lack so much of its talent without community theatre, and treating it like a lesser form of art does everyone involved a huge disservice.

I love that phenomenon where ur talking to another neurodivergent person for the first time and u haven’t quite grocked their flavor of brain yet and they haven’t grocked yours and you’re both using your Acceptable Friendly Person Getting To Know You Script on each other but of course those scripts have been calibrated mainly for use with, like, normal people, so you just end up being like two conversational roombas bonking gently off one another like “hello fellow human” “hello fellow ‘hello fellow human’” until you both at some point manage to adjust your programming and actually like, communicate

It’s like when I was a kid I had two furbies and when you put them next to each other they’d just natter nonsensically past one another for a bit and then at some point one would abruptly recognize the other with its furby sensor or w/e and it would shout “DANCE!” and the other one would flap its ears and reply “HEY, DANCE” and then, in perfect unison, they would begin to rock back and forth while chanting “doot doot doo doot doot doo”

It’s exactly like that. I love it. Crazy people are the best, we are super excellent, i love us, i love crazy ppl

I wrote this post in my head while having a major dissociative episode in the bathroom and its the best and truest thing Ive ever said

people who haven't opened a book since high school love calling shit pretentious it's like a little bump of k to them

gonna be real i posted this because while i was in the shower i remembered the time four years ago that a coworker (brewery hot sauce full sleeve tats beard culture guy, "anarchist") called me a pretentious little hipster for telling a different coworker (cool, normal) that The Lighthouse seemed like it was gonna be a good movie and the memory made me so annoyed i immediately turned off the water so i could pace around naked and mad

Honestly as much as I love Tumblr now, I’ll never forgive this site for the “ace discourse” era that nobody has ever fucking apologized for. Irreparable damage was done to aro/ace people and our communities and now that shit is being recycled on TikTok. And then aphobes have the gall to say “well it’s not like you guys have ever faced any hardship in your lives” as if they still don’t bully and discriminate against aro/ace people to this day.

Go rot.

love love love that the people who engaged in this are rebranding it as a silly toothless phase rather than accept even the faintest smidgeon of responsibility like

lol remember when it was acceptable to tell people they were lying about being correctively raped, and that even if they weren't lying it was appropriation? reblog if you're part of the ageing tumblr userbase!

omg and when we'd talk about how conversion therapy was fine if it happened to asexuals bc something something antidepressants and lmao is it really ""oppression"" if you can't go to your doctor without them repeatedly trying to alter your sexuality? so cringe

who was around for the onceler fandom and responding to people opening up about coming out to their parents and facing utter rejection or outright abuse with "ew gross what kind of freak would tell their own parents about something as disgusting as their sex life??" anyway what is with all these puriteens yelling at pride marches nowadays?

good times, glad we've all neatly compartmentalised that into harmless memeposting so we can all pretend to be very surprised that in 2023 people think it's appropriate to emotionally bludgeon a trans hacktivist over an orientation they don't understand and therefore think is worthy of bottomless abuse

Honestly we really need to stop being weird about older adults who are virgins.

& not even purely in a "I'm sex repulsed &/or ace &/or not into the idea of so I willingly didn't have it" but also in a "I'm 80, I would've loved to have sex, but it takes two to tango & no one wanted to have sex w/ me-" and in a "I'm 60 & I wanted to, but I had anxiety so bad I just didn't put myself in a situation where I could've" way, etc. [But yes also the people who are like "I'm a virgin because I never wanted to have sex"]

Someone made a post about having their 40th birthday & still being a virgin & someone commented about how it was heartbreaking... [The OP talked about all their other achievements they reached & how they were happy - just never had sex btw. They weren't lamenting about how they never had sex]

You don't need sex/sexual intimacy to be happy. You don't need romantic intimacy to be happy. [Obviously having those may add happiness, but like you won't live a sad depressing empty life if you're single forever &/or never have sex]