god it is so funny seeing radfems discover that racism spreads thru their ideology like wildfire and instead of thinking abt why that happens like clockwork they just go “guys stopppppp omg stop being racist pls it’s really ruining the appeal of being a terf who judges people’s worth based on biology/phenotype :(“
porn isn’t evil or misogynistic you just grew up culturally christian and are scared of sex
like yeah it can be a brutal industry and i don’t want to minimize the issue of people being filmed or sexualized against their will but like. dudes making sex tapes together isn’t going to kill you. sex workers performing or offering full service because it’s their job and they like having money isn’t a social justice issue you need to get red-faced and give yourself a migraine about. all work and employment is exploitation, the porn industry isn’t special, you’re just uncomfortable with it because you haven’t unpacked your prejudices toward sex workers.
i have a degree in film and pornography was part of the curriculum when i was in university. we studied porn as a legitimately recognized body genre and a medium of art and entertainment. it’s just sex on film. like im a genre abolitionist in many ways but you can’t claim that porn isn’t a real genre of film and tv, you’d have an army of academics frothing at the mouth eager to explain to you exactly how and why you are wrong.
my degree course was taught primarily by gay men and lesbians btw. an older butch woman led the porn modules. i have terfs in the notes of some of my other posts claiming that porn is just a result of sex depraved pervert men and i just want to add that it doesn’t matter who is making or consuming or talking about the porn. you are going to find people of all genders and sexualities and experiences or lack thereof who have their own relationship to pornography and tacking “but icky cishet men that just think about sex all the time!!!” onto your tags doesn’t make your aversion to sex any more socially justified
also if you seriously think that someone filming themselves fucking is a form of misogyny you might be a bit stupid.
“Sex workers are often exploited!” yeah workers in a great many industries are. Workers in all industries should be protected, including sex work. Pretending sex is somehow special and sex work is not real work does not help exploited workers.
Or like, to put it in terms that the “read what you like, who cares if you exclusively read kids’ stuff” crowd are at a reading level to understand:
In the book “Green Eggs and Ham,” the main character insists that he will only eat things he likes, and refuses under all circumstances when presented with an opportunity to try something new. At the end of the novel [spoiler alert] he agrees to Sam-I-Am’s request and tries them, and he realizes that he was depriving himself of a favorite food for years, just out of fear of disliking something he ate. He learns a lesson, moving forward, that if he tries new things outside his comfort zone, that he may dislike some of them, but will enjoy many of them, and if he doesn’t try new things outside his comfort zone, he will not like anything but the one thing he already eats.
Can you think of any situations in your own life where Sam-I-Am’s teachings might be applicable?
Words truly cannot describe how much this is not what this term means
The book never came across as being about anything other than being bullied to me. And encouraging kids to eat moldy food because it was green and they might like it. Did normal colored eggs and ham exist in the main character’s world? Could he have not simply continued to enjoy food that he already knew and liked and wasn’t bullied into trying. I liked the rhymes but I hated the ‘message’. Don’t force people to try new foods unless they want to. Suggesting it is fine, forcing is not.
(Signed, the former kid who was constantly forced to eat foods that made them feel sick and was punished if they refused to do so.)
i don’t think you’re merely missing the point, i think you might just actually be dumb.
Babies understand this book better than this.
Here’s where this analysis fails: “I was bullied and forced to eat foods I didn’t like as a kid, therefore Green Eggs & Ham is about bullying and nothing else.”
Do you see how we are conflating one’s personal experience with the intentions of a story that nothing in the book itself suggests was created to address this experience at all?
Using critical thinking skills also means being able to make abstraction of one’s subjective feelings to analyse the matter at hand. If you are unable to do this, you may live your whole life in a reactive state, constantly on the defensive even when there is no threat to your person at all.
This may make you paranoid, aggressive, and unreasonable. It may also make you self-righteous and self-pitying at the detriment of your ability to express empathy/sympathy and relate to other people, which is isolating. It may make it very difficult for you to have productive conversations with other people because being constantly stuck in a fight or flight response may make you self-centered, so you will not be able to relate to other people, understand them, or feel understood. Again, very isolating.
Critical thinking skills are important not just for media analysis, but also everyday life! They make you a more reasonable, empathetic, comprehensive person, and help you connect with other people. This is why it’s important to challenge yourself with the media you consume. Not All of The Time, certainly not Everytime you consume media, but at least from time to time.
Go at your own pace and give yourself the right to examine your thoughts and your feelings objectively so that they don’t rule your entire life and prevent you from richer and more fulfilling experiences. You can take a break whenever you feel overwhelmed. You can decide a specific piece of media is too challenging for you and that you simply aren’t learning from it or don’t care for what you’re learning from it, and put it aside for a time or forever.
But at least you’ll know more about yourself and the world, which helps make life a lot more manageable, and allows you to experience it on a deeper, calmer, and more actualizing level.
I do want to add, since it hasn’t been mentioned, that the main character repeatedly tells Sam he is not interested and wants to be left alone and Sam does not respect that. That type of behavior is not something that should be overlooked and instead should be addressed. When a person sets a boundary, doesn’t that boundary deserve to be respected? You can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to do without that being viewed as problematic. Even if in your personal opinion it would improve their quality of life or whatever.
I’m choosing to believe you’re doing some sort of unbelievably unfunny bit because the alternative would be to believe you’re actually serious about this reply, a reality that, if confronted, would turn me into the joker like from the movie “the dark knight” starring the joker
Okay but Its still not okay for parents to force their kids to eat something they don’t wanna eat. Let them refuse to eat it. Just because there’s a book about the potential of new foods doesn’t mean that we should like, treat it as dogma. You all are way too serious about this topic and Dr Seuss was a racist anyways
Yes it actually is, if that thing is “vegetables, broadly, at all” because if the kid doesn’t eat those despite not wanting to, they will not survive to be anything but a kid. Your tag telling yourself to “shut up bubbz” was apt. Take your own advice more often.
Tumblr is fascinating. There seems to be a decent chunk of people who are completely incapable of applying any kind of thematic analysis to books written for adults (the curtains are just blue! Lolita is pedophilia apologism because Nabokov did not explicitly include the sentence “Humbert Humbert is a bad person!”)
At the same time, there’s like seven layers of lit crit being applied to a rhyming book for preschoolers with the message that trying new things can be difficult but rewarding. There is no moldy food in this book. There are no parents force feeding their children in this book. This book was never meant to be dogma. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, a book for small children intended to encourage flexible thinking and openmindedness as they practice their phonemic awareness.
It is genuinely fascinating to me to see people saying “you are just stupid because you cannot see the Obvious Message, this means you are bad at literary analysis” to people pointing out that books have subjective and not just objective meanings.
So… are these people just bad at understanding books, or are you pissed off that your One True Meaning doesn’t carry through for everybody? Do you think that five-year-olds who keep trying to say 'no, I don’t want that, and I’m not the same as the person being spoken to by Sam-I-Am, I won’t like it,’ hear the book the same way that you want them to hear it, and that they’re just wrong if they hear their life experiences reflected in the books which they read or which are read to them? Is it shocking to you that these opinions and experiences might stay with them later? Is it simply not acceptable to any of the people saying 'you are just stupid for not hearing what I hear’ that someone might take away a different message?
I mean, it’s just… very silly, all of it.
Two things can be true at the same time:
Trying new things can be rewarding.
Sam-I-Am is a bully who doesn’t take 'no’ for an answer.
Which of those two things you are more inclined to take away from the book might function as an indicator of how much your bodily autonomy was respected as a child.
And that’s not even touching the ridiculous assertion that “if you don’t eat vegetables, you won’t survive.” Actually, you probably will if you live in the US or a country with a similar food culture, though your health will not be optimal. Modern American food is incredibly enriched. Is it optimal to not eat vegetables as a child? No. Will you starve and die and not make it to adulthood?
Don’t be fucking absurd.
I raised an autistic kid who, if she’d had her way, would have only eaten dinosaur nuggets and fries for basically every meal her entire childhood. The advice I got from our pediatrician was that bullying or coercing her into trying new food was much more likely to create a deeply unhealthy relationship with food which would stick with her for her entire life, that we should do our best to introduce her to new foods and give her the opportunity to try them, but that we should not force her to try anything or force her to eat anything.
Sam-I-Am would have failed this. Obviously.
That kid ate a lot of chicken nuggets. She turns 25 in a couple of weeks, so she didn’t fucking die. She makes a mean Mongolian beef these days, and she really likes grilled baby bok choy with olive oil and salt, but she’s also perfected her homemade chicken strips, which are legitimately the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten.
Like, yeah, Dr. Seuss wrote a book that was supposed to encourage flexible thinking. He also wrote a bully berating someone into trying a new food. This might shock you, but both of those things can be true.
all politics about ai aside if you use it to create fanwork you’re just a fucking dweeb
not to show my jock colors on this my nerd blog but the whole fucking point is that it’s for love of the game. sweat over it or get the fuck out. i’m no gatekeeper but if you’re using ai you’re not even playing. you’re trying to pave over the baseball diamond and make it a parking lot.
tbh the current default state of operating systems & internet browsers looks fucking indistinguishable from when i gave the family desktop one billion viruses downloading Free Neopoints Hack in 2005
not to be a millennial but back in my day getting blasted in the eyeballs by ads on your desktop the instant you turn on your computer used to mean something was extremely wrong
I think we should bully americans more when they don’t clarify that they’re talking about America
“oh yeah I’m from the east coast” which fucking one
“i hate the president” i mean i agree but there are multiple presidents of multiple different countries, would it kill you to not act like America’s the default
“what state are you from” i live in this little known place called The Rest Of The Entire Fucking Planet
Just play their same game:
“I live in the east coast” => oh nice, I love the Mediterranean
*I hate the president" => fuck I didn’t realize you are a right winger
“what state are you from” => that’s a weird way of call province, but I’m originally from Asturias
Make them as confused as they make us 🥳
(this post had been sponsored by all the anon asks I’ve received lately about donating to Luigi Mangione’s defense fund… Look, the guy is cool as hell, but not my circus, not my ponies, etc etc)
I was going to make a post that was like “it’s crazy how someone 5,000 years ago snatched a cat out of the wild and now I’ve got 2 of those little fuckers living with me” but the domestication date for cats is much earlier than that
remembering that time i met someone who attended high school in west bend, wisconsin and they told me how their school district works. to them it was completely normal while i was wondering if they were messing with me.
their schools are conjoined twins???
west bend west and west bend east is so cartoonish
remembering that time i met someone who attended high school in west bend, wisconsin and they told me how their school district works. to them it was completely normal while i was wondering if they were messing with me.
their schools are conjoined twins???
west bend west and west bend east is so cartoonish
There is no crime where torture is an acceptable punishment.
There is no crime where sexual assault is an acceptable punishment.
There is no crime where slavery is an acceptable punishment.
“Well obviously people arrested for drugs and other non-violent crimes shouldn’t be forced to work but—”
No! There is no but!! There is nothing in the world that makes slavery okay!!!
I could talk about people being charged for crimes they didn’t commit. I could talk about coerced confessions. I could talk about people being charged with more extreme crimes than what they did to fill prisons. I could talk about how making slaves out of certain types of criminals creates an incentive to charge more people with certain crimes.
But I’m not going to actually talk about any of that because it doesn’t matter. No one should be enslaved. No one should be defending or justifying slavery. This should not be controversial.
