not to offend anyone on here but like,,,,y’all need to get outside more, exist in the real world for a while and stop getting pressed over trivial shit that really genuinely doesn’t matter in the big picture that is life
We need to have a nomination for “Stupidest thing Tumblr.com has ever believed” and just move into an official Top 10 List.
For my nominations, I’m putting up:
If you eat a chocolate bar a very specific way, you will break physics and get infinite chocolate.
or
It is impossible that you spelled “Berenstain Bears” wrong and is, instead, more likely that the universe fractured into separate, overlapping realities in the last 20 years.
I can’t decide which is more beautiful. It’s why we need a vote.
this is a picture of the human brain at the moment of death. tragic and beautiful
Fuck. That is a damn good nomination.
if you close your eyes when the train hits your brain will assume you are dead. Some find this comforting.
We’re getting into the good ones now. This is some classic Tumblr.
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematic but true believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™
don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
this parallel is incredibly apt.
i grew up a liberal protestant and watched my mom deprogram conservative women’s circles like some kind of jesus-freak natasha romanov, and i swear it looked a whole lot like roach and seebs dismantling sjw circlejerks today.
you don’t have to stop believing; you just have to start thinking too.
another place the parallel works is with people getting the most angry and doubling down on the worst instances of doublethink. the less defensible it is, the more they’ll cherish it, because it’s the gas vent of their death star. one shot there, if they let it in, will blow the whole edifice.
compare: conservative protestants furiously defending their love of war and violence, in direct contravention to everything jesus ever said; tumblr wowzers attacking women about sexuality, in direct contravention to everything real life social justice advocates stand for.
and i gotta say, being a quaker on christian forums really prepared me for dealing with these folks. y’all can’t rile me. i’ve turned the other cheek to southern baptists. i might get cranky sometimes when they tell nasty lies about people i love, but i’m not gonna lose hope or give up. i’m also not going to crack and show the seething evil beneath, or whatever they’re hoping will happen if they keep attacking long enough. this isn’t kayfabe. my faith and my activism both go all the way to the core, grown from seed over decades.
now that i think about it, i would be very interested in what the (raised)religious demographics are on this site. early programming matters a lot to how you approach problems (and problematics).
I think the issue w a lot of people invested in like “SJ” sorts of things is that they conceptualize ethics as *only* being abt these structural oppressions, so as long as you are acting in accordance w those precepts you literally cannot do anything unethical.
But like, you can be completely Right Politically in a situation and still be acting in a cruel, greedy, careless, vicious, or harmful way. And that doesn’t give that complete absolution.
We need to like, not mistake structural analysis w ethical formation, tho they are obviously connected
I think that’s a part of what’s been so like, volatile about SJ spaces for the last couple of years: people think that if you sublimate your individual ethics into some kinda framework that you’re good and that you can act like an incredibly petty asshole
yeah it’s like people were told ‘you can’t be reverse racist because that is not how the social structure of oppression works’ and heard ‘anything you do to someone who’s more privileged than you is righteous’ which is… not great
i don’t mean the prevalence of (over?)sharing broad-brush feelings like sadness and anger and love
i mean the ones there are no words for, the ones you thought you were experiencing alone, that turn out to be universal once someone comes up with a way to depict them in a post
take for instance ‘cursed image’ and ‘blessed image’
it’s not that the feeling that describes is new – i guarantee you as far back as like 1978 i have looked at a picture and felt squirmy and uncertain like it changed my brain in a way i didn’t consent to, even though it wasn’t a picture of a bad or scary thing happening.
but it would never have occurred to me to even show such a picture to someone else and elicit their reaction, let alone that the reaction is a thing humanity shares.
it took tumblr’s unique combination of oversharing, relatability-seeking, and memes to stick the caption ‘cursed image’ on, say, a gas mask full of spaghetti, and suddenly we all discovered we knew EXACTLY what they were talking about.
same with ‘blessed image’ – it can’t just be any old cute or nice picture. a kitty touching someone’s hand is just a pet photo. but this
is a blessed image. i can’t put into words why. but you know it is.
i would also like to bring up ‘a real feeling’, the tumblr outgrowth of the general internet ‘that feel when’ meme
‘that feel’ goes for the obviously relatable, like getting dumped, eating food, watching tv, etc; ‘a real feeling’ goes for the stuff so niche that simply mentioning it is evocative, and that it turns out to be relatable is a huge surprise. i tried to find examples but they’re hard to search because ppl don’t tag them. it’s just like, “a real feeling is when you feed a parking meter in ohio and pretend you’re in new york” or “a real feeling is knowing how to float on your back in a pool but you can’t quite bring yourself to stop paddling a little bit anyway” – little glimpses into someone’s life that turn out to be things you’ve experienced, or can imagine so well that you feel like you have.
a lot of the posts i see going around that credit millennials for inventing some form of communication are wrong – y’all are not more sarcastic than gen x, sorry, you just ain’t – but this one? congratulations, you did this, and it’s very cool.
I had the lightning rod realization why The Discourse about fiction feels so alien to me
It’s because 99% of the arguments boil down to denying an individual’s agency
Fiction is one of the safest ways to exercise your right to choose – especially fanfic, which comes with an entire culture of tagging and content warning etiquette
If you go seeking fanfic on AO3, you can try new things with a fairly good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into
And if you get in over your head – you can close the window and walk away with no regrets
No real people were hurt in the production of words on a page – you aren’t sitting there thinking “gosh, I hope those people in this YouTube video survived that fall”
Fiction gives you the right to try on all kinds of ideas
Which is why I get so indignant when I see stuff like “XYZ content could be bad for some people, therefore it shouldn’t exist”
Or “what if minors clicked on porn for ABC fandom uwu”
The truth is, you have agency
My god, but you have agency
If you are old enough to be poking around these sites without parental supervision, you are old enough to start reading the warning labels on what you consume
And if that isn’t true for you? Then ask someone in your real life for help
(I have some pals who do ask me to screen fics for things that might trigger them)
But seriously, with fiction, you can choose what to access, and learn (in private) what you can handle
Don’t let anyone take your power
antis straight up don’t believe that people have agency. or at least, not agency enough to cancel out the other things that they believe have power over us.
they’re rooted in the same politics that gave us terfs/swerfs, aka radical feminism, which believes among other things that women can’t make free choices under patriarchy – like the choice to do sex work or engage in kink or any number of other things. the reasons women give for doing these things aren’t real reasons, the only reason they do them is because patriarchy has manipulated and brainwashed them into thinking these are acceptable things to do. it’s a “feminism” founded on the idea that most women (except the radfems themselves, of course) are not real agents.
hence the transphobia – because being a woman isn’t about how you feel, only about whether you were assigned in childhood to a particular sex-based second class
hence the biphobia – because bi is a “lesser” kind of gay, because it taints the true equality of gay relationships with imbalanced man/woman ones, which are always inherently coercive towards the woman because the man has all the power
hence the hate of kink, of stories with cruel or abusive themes, because if you like that sort of thing you can’t be trusted to know your own mind. at best you’re participating in your own oppression, mindlessly acting out the desires of a bunch of old white men circlejerking it to your humiliation. at worst, you’re a traitor who’s enabling and encouraging our pedophilic anti-woman overlords, the creators of all cruelty, without which we’d live in a lesbian separatist paradise with no war or suffering.
it can never be just because you find something valuable in reading about weird shit – the only people who could do that without gagging are oppresor menz or brainwashed women. (nb people don’t really fit in here, so they’re ignored.) try on ideas? but some of those ideas are Dangerous, Corrupting, Objectively Sick, and it’s our job to keep you away from them. there are some thoughts that are too awful to ever be admitted into your head, even for a moment, because they’ll change you.
i mean, this sounds like a stretch, but the more i read the more i see it all fit together. it might not be what people consciously believe, but it’s what created this radical exclusionary politics.
ironically, women believing that their only power is to control other women both arises from and perpetuates a toxic patriarchy.
just moving along like everyone else 