since the whole Gay Babadook thing got popular, i’ve honestly gotten less paranoid being home alone in my (pretty creepy) house. whenever i hear a bump, i just think “oh that’s just the babadook in my my basement, doing his gay shit” and it’s suddenly not scary
Thank You, Gay Babadook
well, he only gives you a hard time if you don’t acknowlege him, so i reckon he’s okay company if you give him a little flag to wave and share your cupcakes
Wish people didn’t use “social construct” to mean “fake”
Exactly. Fucking everything is a social construct at least in part. Language is. Politics is. Science is! Yes, its social construct cannot grossly contradict observed reality for long without correction because that’s part of the way we’ve constructed it, the purpose it exists. But its structures and classifications and ways of looking at things are social constructs.
It’s what we DO. It’s how humans deal with the world, because we are highly social creatures in the main and very little that we do does not involve dealing with other humans.
it’s messier than that, i’m afraid.
my spleen is not a social construct, it’s a busy meat item that objectively exists. the word ‘spleen’ and its use to denote anger or bitchiness as well as to describe the physical organ, those are social constructs. so if you say ‘spleen is a social construct’ are you saying my internal organs aren’t objectively real, or are you speaking from the assumption that the social construct of spleen-as-ire is the only one under discussion? well, nobody stops to discuss that before launching into discourse with elbows swinging.
so when someone says ‘gender is a social construct’, well, some of them mean it’s fake altogether, and some of them mean there are a lot of social constructs attached to it. and then you’ve got people going “excuse me, my experience of gender is direct and empirical, it is as real as peanut butter and jelly.” and some of those are in fact talking about direct experience of gender, and some are talking about direct experience of social constructs of gender, and not realizing there’s an extra layer of abstraction between themselves and the experience, because it’s never not been there for them.
so that’s how you end up with people using the exact same words to argue opposite points. it’s a mess.
All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt for saying no.
read it again and again
Understand that this applies even to non-sexual situations. Women are more likely to be asked for favors from coworkers. Regular “can you file this for me” / “can you cover my shift” / “can you finish up this paperwork” workplace favors. Men are less likely to return those favors. Women are more likely to be seen as “difficult to work with” if they refuse to do favors when requested. Being viewed as ungenerous has negative social and professional consequences.
So yes, even gay men benefit. All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt, not just physically, but also socially and professionally, for saying no to anything at all.
But unless that’s actually the most efficient use of people’s time, everyone also suffers from it.
I’d guess that, on the whole, the net impact is negative even for the people who “benefit” from it. Yeah, they’re getting a larger share of the pie, but it’s a much smaller pie.
Not necessarily. Everyone’s total effort/efficiency does not all go into the same pie. Sticking with the ‘workplace favors’ example, it could easily be the woman’s family/leisure that suffers from her spending extra spoons at work, rather than the total productivity of that company. If the male and female co-workers don’t interact socially outside work, he loses nothing, because the ‘company success’ pie is the same, and the ‘woman’s home life happiness’ is the one shrinking, while ‘man’s home life and happiness’ is either the same or larger. Which might be to the detriment of other men who are in the women’s life outside work, but her co-worker still benefits.
I’m not talking company-scale, I’m talking species-scale.
The problem here isn’t just “who gets the time”. It’s that inefficient resource allocation is another way of saying “resources wasted”. And the cumulative effect of wasting so much of so many people’s time and effort is enormous.
Like, if we’d stopped doing that in the 1800s, I suspect cancer would be long past-tense by now.
So, he still loses a lot. Because it’s not just that one woman that’s being inefficient; we’re making bad choices about the productivity of at least half of our species.
I…kind of suspected you meant it that way. But the men from the 1800s are dead now whether we today have a cure for cancer or not. I guess my point is that high-cost short-term gains have a bigger impact on their individual lives – certainly a bigger observable impact – and the original post is taking about small scale individual actions. Both perspectives are worth thinking about, but I think the short term, where the effects haven’t propagated yet around the whole society through averages and back to the original guy, is what the post is actually trying to make people aware of. And I suspect that most of men who actually care about long-term future wellbeing of society also care about profiting from the women they know everyday, which is a much easier thing to see/verify. It’s also much easier to feel like they can individually make a change that matters in their own workplace than ‘the general culture and industry of the next generation or two.’ I feel like smaller-scale and personal concerns are more likely to prompt change that a much wider view, even if the wider view involves their self-interest. Then again, I’m not sure I have a single cisdude following me, so maybe it doesn’t matter what I say at all.
Prisoner’s Dilemma strikes again: You’re personally better off if you betray everyone else, probably, but we’re all better off if no one does.
holy shit literal children should not be taught abt sex and preteens that do experience sexual attraction have no privilege over their peers who might experience it later or not at all
ok but leaving the discourse behind, sex education is actually really important though??? i mean, my elementary school taught that so sex wouldn’t be a stigmatized thing for in the future
literal children are already taught about sex, i don’t understand. in my elementary school, in 4th grade we were taught about “”“male and female”“” development and “urges” we would feel. in 5th grade, we saw actual pictures of naked adult bodies, and in 6th grade we were taught about “types” of sex and protection and pregnancy.
my parents gave me a book targeted at 7-12 year olds that also taught about sex and the body and sex organs and shit like that, like. this post is objectively bad. education from a young age is good and important for the destigmatization of sex in society. i don’t understand, is there a point you hadn’t made clear that i’m misunderstanding, maybe?
let’s not show nudes to ten year olds what fucking school did you go to
learning abt puberty =/= learning about how to fuck and 110 versions of asexuality
I… wha… where the hell were you raised that you think there’s something wrong with kids knowing what a naked body looks like? What century is this?
Sex education isn’t just learning about puberty; it’s learning about sex, relationships and consent, and it’s goddamn important even for children.
I started having sexual fantasies when I was 4 years old; I just didn’t know what they were at the time, or why they made me feel strangely good. My Mum gave me my first book on sex and sexual health when I was 8, but by that time I’d already heard years’ worth of playground rumours about “sex” ranging from the improbable to the downright terrifying, and had at least one inappropriate physical encounter with another child. It’s much better for kids to be taught healthy and safe attitudes to their own sexual development – physiological and mental – than for them run off fifth-hand misconceptions they pick up from equally clueless kids.
I’m not saying we should be teaching five-year-olds about reverse cowgirl. I’m saying it’s never too early to teach kids messages like, “If she’s not having fun you have to stop.” I’m saying most kids have some awareness that sex and sexuality exist, even if they don’t fully understand what those things are. I’m saying some kids have feelings about getting physical with other people from a very early age. I was particularly precocious, but the average age people start experiencing sexual attraction is 10 years old.
And I’m saying that all of these things are why it’s crucially important to give kids the tools and information they need to contextualise and process their understanding of sex and sexuality, both in terms of their own possible sexual identities (all possible sexual identities), and of course in terms of consent and bodily autonomy.
Apart from anything else, we’ve seen proof that this makes kids safer in terms of identifying and reporting sexual abuse. The puritan myth that kids live in some magical fairyland isolated from any conception of sex or sexuality literally causes harm to children. You’re not protecting them from dangerous information, you’re depriving them of information and support they need to safely contextualise their experiences and feelings.
Teaching kids about sex is not the same thing as encouraging kids to have sex. That is literally the exact same bullshit argument that religious fundamentalists use to try to justify abstinence-only sex ed.
Studies show that teaching kids about sex actually delays their sexual debut as well as reduces the risk of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. The more you teach kids about sex, the less they actually have it.
Children live in a sexualised world. All 10-year-olds have already been exposed to sex in advertisements, on TV, and on the internet. If they don’t know what sex is, only that it’s this secret, shameful, dangerous thing they’re supposed to want and which will make them cool and successful people if they have it, they’ll explore their own sexuality in ignorant, harmful ways. This is why the USA have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the developed world:
The only way to keep children safe is to empower them with the knowledge to make informed decisions about their own sexuality. No one was ever protected from something by keeping them ignorant of it! And no information is actually harmful if presented in age-appropriate ways – which, by the way, also doesn’t mean what antis and Americans think it means.
My school showed us a video of what was essentially softcore porn at age
10. I mean full on nudity, an erect penis, how to roll on a condom, a
man and a woman having gentle sex, and then how to remove the condom and
tie it off. It completely undid the ~mystery~ of sex and made us go
‘huh, that’s it? nah, not really interested actually.’
You can watch the sex ed video here on the Danish National TV’s web archive; it’s in Danish, but you can jump to 10:10 for the sex scene, although honestly I think you’d find the whole video fascinating even if you can’t understand what they’re saying.
My fav trans writer just made this on her Twitter so I thought I’d share.
The major unlock for me was realizing that wanting to be a girl was a symptom of being a girl.
Me realizing I was trans was me going “Wow. I wish I was transgender., I’d like to be a girl.” for MONTHS (this was when I started seriously questioning) till one day I was wishing I was trans and then I was just like:
I remember when I was like 13 I read something about trans people in an informative way for the first time and in the span of about three seconds I was just like “oh. That’s a thing. That makes a whole lot of sense.”
that post i made a while back asking cis people about their experience of their gender identity is getting bounced around yet another ring of TERFS and so far my favorite comment is ‘roachpatrol is a man, right?’ based on someone’s conclusion that only a man could assume that women enjoy being women
TERFS: We are miserable being women! Being woman is pain! Everything about being a woman is bad!
Trans women: But actually we feel like there’s something wonderful about being female and we strongly feel that we are women and we love it when the world acknowledges us as women.
TERFS: You are lying! No one could ever want to be a woman! And since men are evil, and no one could possibly want to be a woman if they could be a man instead, you must be scamming us so you can infiltrate our ranks and spy on us for the patriarchy!
Trans women: Huh? That makes no sense.
TERFS: You don’t need to make sense! You’re men! Men are just born evil for no particularly good reason! Men are born to hate women and make them suffer!
Trans men: We disagree. We don’t hate women or want them to suffer and we feel that we are men.
TERFS: Oh, poor honeys, you hate being women so much you want to be men! We understand perfectly. That’s normal for being a woman!
Cis women who are not TERFS: No it’s not.
TERFS: No one asked you.
TERFS: Also, we are completely 100% pro woman! We are the only pro women people on the planet! Every woman who claims she actually likes being a woman has a false consciousness! Being a woman is pain and suffering and awfulness and the only way to solve this is to commit gendercide against men because men are the root of all evil! If you don’t hate men and you don’t hate being a woman, it’s just because you’re too stupid to understand how the patriarchy has brainwashed you into being happy with being enslaved!
The rest of feminism in general: How is a stance that says that being female makes you inherently miserable and this cannot be changed as long as men exist and so we’d basically have to wipe out half the human race for women to ever be happy a pro-woman stance?
TERFS: FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS! shut up, brainwashed slaves of patriarchy!
this is exactly what keeps happening on that other post, yes
just moving along like everyone else 