no really though, can anyone explain to me why fictional depictions of violence are only wrong when they’re sexual? why it’s universally understood that simulated violence can be consumed without danger of influencing society, but any depiction of any part of the sexual violence spectrum will inevitably contribute to real world sexual violence? have any antis made an attempt at really explaining that? I’d love to see it
Obviously I’m not an anti, but as someone who has always had an underlying reaction of ‘this comparison doesn’t feel right’ whenever someone calls hating fictional sex but not fictional murder hypocritical, I wanted to respond.
I think it’s a reflection of how society reacts to sexual assault victims differently from murder/attempted murder victims. Specifically: society behaves as if the thoughts and fantasies of a sexual assault victim have an effect on the severity of their rapist’s actions but does not do the same for murder victims.
in other words: in an anti’s eyes, it’s easy to see that only a murderer is responsible for murder. But rape culture (not the rapists) are responsible for sexual assault and anyone contributing to it (i.e. creators of dark fandom content) is/are responsible for cleaning up and ending rape.
*
Frank talk about about rl sexual assault and murder below.
Neutrally speaking, sex itself can be a good or a bad experience. murder or attempted murder can only ever be a bad experience.
When someone says they were sexually assaulted, society zeros in on whether or not the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about the sex instead of focusing on the being forced part. If we treated murder victims the same way we treat sexual assault victims, we’d concern ourselves with whether the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about being stabbed/choked/poisoned/etc to death instead of focusing on the being dead part.
“[A]s long as society pushes the blame for sexual violence off the abuser/rapist and onto the victim, or the state of society… antis will contribute to this mindset by demanding that the victims and society clean up their act first.”
This is good but I’d like to add: “antis”(or, well, their philosophical ancestors) TOTALLY tried to do this with violence.
For most of the 90s and early 00s, people with precisely this mindset fought HARD to ban or censor games and music(exclusively rap and other “deviant” genres) for violence(and, surely by coincidence, anti-establishment messages) with the same sorts of arguments and on the similar theory that violence in art caused violence in society. That violence and crime in US society during this period were persistently falling inspite of its, to their eyes, ever-increasing “deviance” never seemed to register with them, oddly enough. And before THAT -during the 70s, 80s, and 90s- the same folks campaigned against violence in films, tv, and music. Antis lost all those fights, eventually(well, TV censorship is more complex. The FCC was, and remains, very susceptible to their gaming, particularly on language and sex).
And during all these eras, mostly the same folks were caught up in the anti-porn fight as well. Which also failed. So why does this particular arm of the anti-porn campaign continue? Here’s one theory:
All of this -from slasher flicks to pornography- were normalized by society in the wake of their success; they became, or became part of, billion dollar industries and, in the US, how can something worth billions of dollars be deviant? Commodities are as American as Apple Pie. These are all also Industries controlled by, and profitable to, white men. Fanfic is (mostly)non-profit. It’s non-commoditized and, in fact, very difficult to commoditize due to IP laws. It’s primarily controlled by folks afab. Because it’s non-institutionalized, the sort of structural gatekeeping which keeps poc and non-men out of positions of influence and control aren’t as developed and established(racism and sexism are still social institutions that impact and exist in fandom, obvsl; upholding them is the point of the racist+sexist harassment which happens in it). Fanfic sex remains “deviant”, and thus an open target for christian moralizers(disguised, unaware, or otherwise), because Fanfic communities themselves are “deviant”; more open to those excluded by establishment society, and more difficult for capitalists to integrate into their system of profit-exploitation.
please keep this post in your pocket for a rainy day: you are strong enough to get past whatever you are currently going through. you are capable and deserving of love. please don’t be too hard on yourself, you’re still growing and learning and ‘tough love’ isn’t always the answer
I Was Always On Green Because My Mama Didn’t Play That Shit.
I got a Red for the first time ever cause I launched a basketball at this girls face 😭😭 it was an accident tho I swear lmao
This traumatized so many kids. I knew someone who had no memory of this until I said the phrase “go flip your card” and suddenly they remembered everything
I went from green straight to red because I gave my friend a piggyback ride for like five seconds
America are y’all okay..?
We had to move popsicle sticks into a green, yellow or red can.
I had to move mine to yellow once for “talking out of turn”.
Literally never spoke up in class again.
This is seriously some fucked up shit, jfc.
it’s funny, because it works as a very effective means of discipline/reinforcement. the concept is simple: instead of the teacher disrupting the whole class and stopping teaching to deal with one person stepping out of line and being, themselves, disruptive, they tell you to go turn your card. then they carry on with the lesson while you do it. kidspawn’s school calls it a point out system. you get three warnings, then you have to log into a book. it takes attention away from the mistake and discourages acting out for that attention.
done properly, it puts the choice in the student’s hands. you know the consequence for an infraction, and you choose whether or not that consequence is worth your action. in a perfect setting, it would only be for actual rules, you spend less time talking to school authority figures, and parents wouldn’t flip out about it unless there was a string of repeated red cards. you don’t double punish, after all.
the best way not to get a red card is not to get a yellow card. it really does benefit everyone in a classroom setting if implemented and respected by all who use it. i find it strange that people find this ‘fucked up’. it’s not corporal punishment, which IS fucked up, and it keeps infractions from taking away from instruction time, robbing other students of their education. loss of instruction time is in no one’s best interest.
and in every setting i’ve seen it used properly (both as a student and as a parent) it works exactly like it’s intended to.
I am a teacher working toward my Masters in education, and I spent my entire kindergarten education and third grade (the only two years I had to suffer through a classroom with one of these boards) entirely on red. The Flip Your Card classroom discipline system is in fact unimaginably fucked up.
At first I worked really really hard to try to keep my card on green, or at least on yellow, but no matter how hard I tried, by the end of the day, my mom was getting a phone call all about how I was a problem. I was regularly stripped of every single privilege my teacher conceivably could strip me of. My third grade teacher gave up on taking away my recess because she just didn’t want to have to deal with me for that extra time, every single day. And every single day, there was a bright red card telling everybody, telling all the other kids, telling my parents, and telling me that I was a problem.
Here’s the thing, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my card off red, so it wasn’t this behavior or that behavior that felt like the problem. It just felt like I was the problem.
I did what many kids in that situation do. I gave up. From the outside, it must have looked like I didn’t care that my card was on red, but in reality, I had given up on trying to keep it off red, because nothing worked. It wasn’t apathy. It was hopelessness and despair. In kindergarten, I just checked out and ignored the board. I flat out told my teacher that she could turn my card from then on, because I wasn’t going to. But in third grade, I hit on something worse. Instead of simply pretending the board didn’t exist, I responded to the realization that I couldn’t win by changing the perimeters of what winning was to me. If I was trouble and a problem, I was going to show everybody just how much of a problem I could be. Instead of winning because I made my teacher happy, I won by making everything into a power struggle. Yeah sure, I got sent to the principal’s office and my mom was called, but I didn’t do that thing my teacher wanted me to. Score one for me. That year, I went from difficult to hell on wheels.
This is not actually uncommon, and there are some very good sociological and psychological reasons for why I reacted the way I did. One of the most basic sociological principles is that of labeling theory. This is the idea that people go through life collecting labels, and that these labels affect how we act and how we function in society. People by and large live up to or down to the labels we are given. We can see this in the criminal justice system, where the ways in which we label and treat people, especially juveniles, who commit crimes greatly affects whether or not they will commit a crime in the future, in other words the more someone is treated as a criminal, the more they will act in criminal ways. In a similar manner, being told that you are a bad kid, a troublemaker, a problem, whether outright or through a card system, is liable to convince you of this fact and reinforce that problem behavior. This is one reason why Flip Your Card systems often worsen behavior problems in children with existing difficulties with classroom behavior.
Another failure of the Flip Your Card system is that it has no room for incremental improvement and does not promote reteaching of behavior on the part of the teachers who use it. Most kids with behavior difficulties in the age range where Flip Your Card systems are used are really struggling on learning the rules of behavior and how they should be reacting in a given situation, or learning emotional self regulation. In my case, I had a siezure disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was mid-way through third grade, that aside from being misidentified as behavioral problems also prevented me from learning appropriate behavior by damaging my ability to form memories during the period when they were untreated. I also have ADHD, which I can’t treat with medication, because all of them cause me to have siezures. I needed extensive reteaching, and a teacher who was willing to work with me in the moment to help me find better solutions to the situation I was responding to with bad behavior.
Likewise, Flip Your Card systems do not recognize incremental progress. I have a student who just last week refused to come inside when it started thundering, because he wanted to stay outside and spend time talking to his little brother through the fence between the toddler and preschool playgrounds. This is normal for him. Separation from his brother causes him a lot of stress. But I was able to get him to come inside with a little persuasion and a kiss from his brother, and as soon as we were inside, he washed his hands and went to the cozy corner to calm himself down. This is progress. This is in fact the kind of progress that I told his mother about with pride at the end of the day. Once he was calm, I also talked with him about how he should be proud of himself for using some of the skills he was working on to calm himself, and what we could have done differently together outside. Under a Flip Your Card system, his behavior was the kind where he would be required to flip his card to yellow, his progress ignored. What I did instead was to construct a label for him of a student who is working hard on behavior, and affirm for him that I can see the progress and effort he has made. I also established us as partners in helping him reach behavioral and social emotional goals.
Another problem with things like the Flip Your Card system is that much like zero tolerance systems, or any system that are supposed to make things fairer by taking out teacher judgement is that they do not in fact take out teacher judgement. One of the big discussions right now in computing is that the way in which algorithms for job searches or hiring software, or worse algorithms for software used in the criminal justice system, are biased on racial and gender lines, both because of the algorithms themselves and because of the biased information fed into them. This is another example of that. A supposedly unbiased system that becomes very biased because of its nature and because of incorrect input. I already talked a little bit about how students with disabilities that affect their behavioral and social and emotional development are penalized by this system, but another factor is that disabled students, students of color, and especially disabled students of color, are much more likely to be asked to flip their card for behavior that would go unremarked upon for a white or non-disabled student. This is also true of so-called zero tolerance policies. This means that the toxic effects I outlined previously of labeling children as bad fall especially heavily on childen who are already especially vulnerable to being funneled into the school to prison pipeline.
Flip Your Card systems and other similar systems (and throughout this essay I talk about the Flip Your Card system, but Move Your Clip, Name on the Board, behavior charts, and all such similar systems are analogous) also do not promote student choice and autonomy as ouyangdan asserts. They are a classically behavioralist model of classroom management, one that functions on a system of reward and punishments. Reward and punishment systems increase student feelings of powerlessness and decrease their feelings of control. Giving a child a choice between a punishment and doing what you want them to is not giving them a real choice. It’s the same as a bully saying “give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up, it’s your choice.” These behavioralist systems of classroom management also decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to behave, and replaces it with an extrinsic modivation. This can be seen in my case when my intrinsic modivation to try to behave for my teacher and my fellow students was overriden with the extrinsic modivation of the Flip Your Card board, which didn’t work because I gave up on avoiding the punishment. With my intrinsic motivation leached away and the extrinsic modivation proving ineffective… But this can also be seen in kids who behave well in class. Instead of learning the whys of good behavior and learning to regulate their emotions and reach consensus, and other skills of living in civil society, they learn that to be good is to be obedient and avoid punishment, to please the person In Charge. This is what happened with @thecityhorse higher up in this thread. They learned that speaking up in class brought pain, so they stopped, at a detriment to their education and their psyche.
So why are behavioralist approaches like the Flip Your Card chart so popular? One reason is that for most students they work in the short term very well. Humans like to avoid humilation and pain. This makes them convenient for teachers to implement, even if they cause other problems. Another reason is that they look fair to most adults even though they are not. Also it’s impossible to discount how thouroghly we as a society believe in certain ideas about a child’s place as obedient and subservient to adults, especially parents and teachers, and view enforcing this idea as a good in and of itself. Most people, even teachers, who absolutely should know better, and have in fact been learning better in teaching programs for decades, don’t step outside this paradigm. Behavioralist systems of reward and punishment reinforce this obedience.
Behavioralist approaches to classroom management are so normative that it can be hard to think about what the alternatives to them are, and when I talk to people about the alternatives to behavioralist methods, they express scepticism about the effectiveness of these methods. The biggest method I use is to get to the root of a behavior. Johnny screems during play, which causes Tommy to hit him. Tommy gets scared when Johnny screams in a way that seems aggressive, so we work on reading body language and what to do when we’re scared. Johnny screams because he gets wound up and overwhelmed playing chase, so we work on stopping and leaving the game before he gets that overwhelmed. I do a lot of teaching my students to recognize and name their own emotions, and recognize and name each other’s emotions, and think about what caused those emotions. I teach them ways to calm down, to get what they want and need in acceptable ways, and I build a relationship of mutual respect in which they want to do things for me and for their classmates because they care about us. This is that intrinsic motivation I talked about. And yes, many of the kids I work with have some pretty severe behavioral challenges. This was also the method that worked with me as a child. My fourth and fifth grade teachers both worked hard to develop relationships of trust and respect with me, and worked with me on processing my emotions and understanding the needs and feelings of others. This method really does work, and it promotes empathy, self-awareness, and moral self-reliance, which are important lifelong skills.
I would like to share this beautiful passage with all of you, it’s long, but worth it. And I swear to god I didn’t alter any of this.
….
Her long hair, still wet from the shower, had been combed down her back in a wet swath. Hilda was sitting on the floor, her round, wet boobs still wet from the shower’s water. She dried off the water with a towel, which then became wet.
Hilda gasped when she saw a reflection in her bedroom mirror: through the slightly open door, she caught a glimpse of the chiseled abs and square jaw of the mysterious stranger who shared her cabin. She stood and spun around, her breasts swinging heavily with the momentum. She grabbed the door and flung it open, revealing shirtless Torolf (which is seriously his name) quivering with desire in the hallway.
Torolf was ashamed at being caught, but his shame made him even hotter – hotter for sex. He stepped into the room, and his bulging abs accidentally smushed into Hilda’s rich chest.
As Hilda’s buttermilk bosoms squished up against his granite abs, Torolf almost had a dick aneurysm. “Hilda,” Torolf murmured thickly, his throbbing meat wand pressing against Hilda’s warm thighs. “There is a secret I need to not tell you: You are my forbidden desire.”
Hilda had been waiting to hear these words. Her heart was lifted on golden wings and soared toward a radiant sun of perfect joy. She saw herself and Torolf happy together, bathed in the golden light of love. Her snooch got all warm, too.
“Torolf,” Hilda moaned, her lush teats straining with desire. “I need you.” Torolf, coarse abs pulsing softly in the moonlight, stood silently. Hilda looked at him expectantly. “Oh, sorry,” she added. “Torolf, I need you – sexually.”
At hearing those beautiful words, Torolf flexed his rough-hewn abs and Hilda found herself being guided to her soft bed by the sheer force of Torolf’s undulating midsection. She parted her thighs in anticipation, exposing the soft pink petals of her clunge.
Torolf entered her like she was a lottery. His engorged pecker pushed inside her and she felt fulfilled with sexual fulfillment.
Hilda clutched at the bedsheets with lust and ecstasy and her hands. Her spongy love mountains hurled to and fro with each pounding. Her body was like a beautiful flower that was opening and somebody was pushing their dick inside it.
Then Torolf moaned, arched his back, and suffered from dick Parkinson’s. He pumped in all of his hot pearlescent sperms as Hilda spasmed with so many orgasms!
The two lay still for a moment as the stinky scent of lovemaking billowed around the room. Hilda got out of bed, still shimmering with orgasm. She glowed with contentment, like a cat who ate the cream of the crop.
She walked across the room and picked up her towel, still wet with shower water. “Torolf,” she said softly, “there’s something I have to tell you…”
But her bed was empty.
Torolf was gone, escaped out the bedroom window. In the distance, Hilda heard the fading sound of galloping abs.
….
DICK
ANEURYSM
GALLOPING ABS
Who told this lady she could write?
Why did she ever stop?
IT GETS WORSE THE FURTHER IN THE PASSAGE YOU GO OMG
i fukcing lost it at meat wand
How could I NOT share this
IS THIS REAL LIFE
If you need some self-confidence in your writing abilities, read this!
Each and every fanfic I have ever read, including even those written by me, are so, so much better than this hahaha
“HER SNOOCH” “HER CLUNGE”
sandra hill absolutely knew what she was doing, and what she was doing was getting paid by the word while her editor was out sick.
argue about ‘my immortal’ all you want, but never doubt sandra hill wrote this crack migraine on absolute purpose
she may well have been drunk on night train, flipping double birds at the sky in between typing fits, or she may not, but i guarantee there was cackling
honestly “i’ll do whatever you want” “then perish” is the single most powerful exchange possible in the english language and it’s from some bizarre “hewwo” obama rp
And there was that other post where someone dreamt that Obama said “violence for violence is the rule of beasts” like what is it about Obama that makes people come up with such raw fucking dialogue for him
my mother had a dream where he lived in the forest and she had a cigarette with him and he said “to become god is the loneliest achievement of them all” and put it out and walked into the mist and i’ve never fucking forgotten that
just moving along like everyone else 