Why do so many people continue to insist that not telling your partner you once did sex work before you even met them is tantamount to some massive betrayal?
“But funereal-disease,” they keep saying, “what if I didn’t want to date a sex worker? I have a right to make an informed decision about staying in a relationship.” Indeed you do, but where do you draw that line? How many personal sexual details must someone divulge before their partner’s consent is sufficiently informed? Is it a betrayal if you’ve had an STI in the past? If you’ve attended an orgy? If you’ve experimented with people outside your orientation? If you’ve engaged in a kink that you know your partner finds repulsive? Once you’ve coupled up, are you no longer allowed private memories?
Apparently not when it comes to sex, because sex work, according to the brain trust at reddit dot com slash relationships, isn’t just another part of one’s sexual history. It’s something inherently and irreversibly tainting. It’s something so all-consuming that not disclosing it means you’ve “tricked someone” into marriage. It’s a bait and switch, clearly: you expected a normal woman, but instead you got one of those icky sluts. Because if she’s capable of doing the unspeakable, of ~selling her body~, then she’s obviously got nothing in common with the woman you thought you loved. Sex workers are never clever or funny or worth marrying on personal merits. Either she’s a worthwhile person or she’s a whore.
I’m sure this is a part of it, but I’d also be kinda pissed if I was married to someone for 5 years and I found out through someone else that they were a geophysicist for 3 years and had somehow avoided the topic of the entire time we were together. How you sell your labour is a weirdly significant part of your identity, and it would definitely feel like a significant omission: what else is she hiding? Infidelity? Drug Trafficking? A pivotal role in the end of the Weimar Republic?
It’s less the fact that she didn’t tell him and more the fact that it seems that it probably took intentional effort on her part to hide it from him.
Which is not even to mention that if it’s something you could easily be blackmailed for (as it sounds like she might be being threatened here based on the comments) that’s definitely something that should come up before the “joint tax returns” part of the relationship.
Sex work is orders of magnitude more stigmatized than geophysics, though. I don’t think hiding something you’re likely to be marginalized for and likely to be suffering internalized shame about is indicative of an inherently deceitful personality. If my partner, after almost four years, came out to me as bi, I wouldn’t wonder what else he was hiding, because being closeted out of shame and/or necessity isn’t the same as enjoying deceiving others.
it seems to me that even without the stigma of sex work, the original problem of how much you must divulge to one’s partner before sex is a problem of guessing the relevance of one’s personal information to a partner. is my lack of sexual history relevant? is my disability? my job history? ideally, if someone’s consent is contingent on information, they should seek it out before engaging in the activity, right? granted, i don’t know how practical that is.
ideally, if someone’s consent is contingent on information, they should seek it out before engaging in the activity, right?
THIS. If having particular information is very important to you, ask!
I still feel like there’s a lack of easy ways to enumerate every possible thing I want to know about a partner.
When was the last time you were tested? Have you ever killed anyone? Are you a werewolf? Etc etc.
I’m all for changing the expected set of questions based on broader social trends (like the more recent move towards assuming by default that a person shouldn’t be expected to disclose being trans unless it’s explicitly mentioned as a deal breaker and they can do so safely) but it seems that there does need to be a list, even if it’s fuzzy and unspoken.
Wouldn’t just asking if someone did sex work before be considered an insult by many people? Along with asking them if they’re trans?
Being “asexual” is listed, along with being insulting and demeaning (as if it was equivalent to those things), as an abusive behavior that should be a reason for societal outcry.
Other sites say that “withholding sex” is fine when it is due to a medical condition. However, the person not providing sex is then expected to get their condition treated as soon as possible so they are capable of providing sex again:
So, not getting your sex-preventing medical condition treated is abuse, and not “refusing to offer alternate means of pleasure”, whatever that means, is also considered abuse.
And what I get from this is that if you’re in a relationship, you are outright expected to provide sex unless you have a medical exemption.
It’s not like this kind of expectation fuels marital rape and relationship violence or anything.
Yet another site adds to this, noting that mental illness is not a valid excuse unless you try to fix it so that you can provide sex “normally”.
At worst, withholding can manifest itself in ways that may be a red flag for general controlling or manipulative behavior, or it can be done in ways that could be mean or abusive for other reasons (such as if it’s done insultingly).
However, the action itself is not wrong and no one is owed sex even when the person refusing to have it is trying to control others through that. They still have a right to refuse any sex they don’t want and to set whatever standards they wish before they have sex.
It’s too dangerous to allow being in a relationship to be a default “yes, you gotta have sex or you’re evil.”
On the other hand, it isn’t fair to sexual people to demand that they be in sexless relationships.
The middle ground, I think, is that anyone can refuse sex, and anyone can refuse to stay in the relationship, and “we have too little/too much sex” is considered a valid, non-abusive grounds to leave the relationship.
-belittling their appearance (includes body shaming and any appearance-based insults)
-SUICIDE BAITING, saying they deserve to die, saying you hope they die
-false accusations and/or attempting to spread false information about them
-threats of any variety
-ignoring/disrespecting their identity (includes misgendering, insulting or ignoring racial/ethnic/religious background, assertions they are lying about their sexuality/race/religion/gender, etc.)
-denying things said/done to them actually happened
There are no caveats wrt who this list does and does not apply to. No one deserves bullying/abuse, not even: actual abusers, rapists, murderers, Donald Trump, white supremacists, neo-nazis, bigots, poachers, PETA members, child molesters, not even (dare I say it) people who draw upsetting things. No one deserves it. No one. Period. The end.
Feel free to add on to this list.
The notes of these post are absolutely full of people who keep insisting, in unambiguous language, that their chosen targets do deserve to be bullied and killed.
Here is why that is not a good thing:
1- If you were to declare that certain people “deserve” to be abused and defend the concept, who decides what an acceptable target is? How do you make sure that they don’t try to abuse and expand their powers to punish everyone they don’t like with relative impunity?
Should the government decide who doesn’t deserve rights? Should popular people decide? What about angry mobs?
There are even many cases in which abusers try to portray themselves as victims in order to direct the mobs against the actual victims, and anyone who tries to stop them in general. They don’t want to make anything better for anyone, they want a socially-acceptable excuse to abuse others.
I would not want to grant anyone the power to strip their targets of all rights and abuse them with impunity.
2- If you defend the idea that it’s okay to dehumanize and abuse certain kinds of people, what defense do you have against groups that think they have a right to do it you? Nearly everyone thinks that they are the hero and that their enemies are a threat to be stopped at all costs, and therefore any kind of nastiness is justified.
What if the people you don’t like are in government and can turn this entire thing around and punish you? What if the rapists, abusers, neo-nazis, and etc. have their own angry mobs?
How will you stop them from going after their targets if you just destroyed the rules and social norms that prevented it?
3- A lot of people with PTSD, depression, and other illnesses feel like they deserved abuse. The idea that no one deserves abuse can, at least on some level, reduce those types of thoughts.
But if people do think that some people deserve it and that they are horrible enough to be one of them? What reason would they have to even ask for help then?
This attitude can be very unhealthy to various types of mentally ill people.
4- You can try to stop harmful behavior while still respecting the perpetrator’s rights as much as possible.
For example, if someone abuses you, you get to defend yourself. You don’t get to declare the abuser a subhuman and torture them to death.
Any suffering that must be added to the world should ideally be minimal and directed entirely towards preventing greater suffering. Any kind of punishment must be aimed at deterrence and maybe keeping dangerous people away from potential victims, not at causing unnecessary pain.
No one is helped if “bad people” suffer, but it is helpful if “bad people” are stopped. Making someone stop and making someone suffer are different things and you can do the first thing while trying to minimize the second one.
If you would oppose the death penalty and inhumane prisons, there is no reason not to also oppose internet vigilantism and bullying based on the idea that bad people deserve suffering.
A: *makes suggestion* B: I think that’s a bad idea. A: what are you triggered bro?? did I trigger you?? why so sensitive???
when exactly did the “triggered” meme escape the containment field and become a standard part of political discourse, even for people who are notionally in favour of content warnings / safe spaces, and used as a bludgeon against criticism that isn’t even personal.
It’s not like “triggered” is even an argument against something. It’s just a way to dismiss something without even actually discussing it.
in this case we’ve already gone one step beyond to dismissing objections on the basis that the person objecting clearly has no valid grounds and is simply using triggered as a weapon, even when they’re not claiming to be triggered.
it’s the “chicken, McFly??” for year of our lord 2k16
triggered, hon? drowning in your white cismale tears lmao, your life is so hard isn’t it boo hoo hoo go fuck yourself :)) lmao
[this is ironic]
there is actually an unspoken implication that only certain classes of people can suffer from mental disorders like PTSD, so a white cis male claiming to be legitimately triggered by a particular situation would indeed be subject to ridicule.
it’s the equivalent of that “scared of feminism? well why don’t you just man-up and stop being a whiny little bitch” discourse.
Aye.
I think that’s part of why it escaped containment. “Man up” was already a meme in use, so some people thought they could do it back with a different spear, but then it turned out that using various “lol wussy” spears can be turned back on you yet again.
That and when “triggers” expanded in scope, Conservatives assumed it was secretly a method to control the discourse.
IT/IP Capitalism is well past incompatible with private property.
The goverment should fdxorce Keurig to provide free reusable K-cup modules and compensate all Keurig owners for all the genuine K-cups they have ever bought since the DRM was introduced.
Intel? Get your mask data, VHDL, process flow information, chipfab design documentation, etc on Github in 72 hours or we take it from you and put your criminal leadership in America Prison with the muggers and brutes. And then provide an independently verifiable way to kill the Mangement Engine to everybody.
Everybody who ever had a device bricked? You’re fixing it, or replacing it. I don’t care if you have to go bankrupt calling up custom re-implementations for decade-old discontinued chips. My garnishment of your wages shall sit with you for seven times seven generations.
Thou shalt not suffer software to be closed-source. And you shall simply have to find a way to deal with it.
We did not oppose Communism with fire and sword in foreign lands to have a degraded shadow of its indignities enacted in our own country by self-interested corporations.
This is an interesting approach, and one I find quite interesting. I am disinclined to find most attacks on IP very moving, since I know too many people who mostly seem profoundly offended that they can’t be free riders on the creative and technical efforts of others.
This approach focuses on ownership rights though, and more of what I consider “copy trolling” and otherwise engaging in a government enforced captured “razor business” with eg. Kcups, which doesn’t seem to outright forbid the inventor of the kcup system from continuing to sell the machines?
Toning down the aggression yet another notch…
The big thing I want to establish is that you can rent stuff, or you can sell it, but you can’t fake-sell it. More realistically, I propose a “hardware ownership act” and heavy encouragement of an abandonment license.
(I have no idea whether this has the slightest chance of being constitutional. Doubt it.)
The abandonment license law would:
- Make “dead” intellectual property that is not being used pass into the public domain.
- Make patent trolling illegal (since it revolves around not using the IP)
- Require various documentation (not neccessarily full source, but definitely API documentation and permissions) to be released when manufacturer support (such as cloud servers or the sale of consumables) ends.
The hardware ownership law would establish that if a piece of tangible hardware is sold to somebody for a lump sum without personally negotiated contracts, and the buyer is not required to relinquish it under any ordinary circumstances, then that piece of hardware is the alloidal property of the buyer. They have a fairly broad degree of rights to hack it, destroy it, reverse-engineer it, or use it in ways other than intended by the seller and the worst that the seller can do is to have the warranty and tech support department tell them to kindly shove it. They also have the right to be furnished with various documentation and not to have their hardware keep secrets from them (beyond very narrowly-drawn “root certificate” type stuff.)
Keurig can still sell coffemakers and K-cups. They can release new versions of coffeemakers with new types of K-cups and they will have a K-cup monopoly until knockoffs can catch up. They can void warranty for anybody who uses third party K-cups.
But they can’t keep the interface totally secret and they especially can’t use licensing, IP law, or other methods to prevent people from making knock-off K-cups.
They also can’t choke off third-party replacement parts as long as said parts are accurately labelled.
The thing that specifically got me angry was Samsung bricking all of a specific model of phone. There was reason behind this (the phone is a recalled product due to risk of exploding) but this is still to me a spectacular violation of the folk contract of selling durable goods, whatever the unnegotiated license terms state.
Other things this is meant to target:
- Modding or jailbreaking of all kinds. Google’s Nexus phones present a good example of how you can act liberally w/r/t this but still get many of the security benefits of a locked down system (basically, you can choose between “root access” and “locked-down, certified Google system” and change between them, but some features that rely on Google’s cloud infrastructure or auto-updates only work when locked/certified).
- Microsoft going after people who tried to make a hacker’s driver for the Kinect (before they realized that they could make money on this)
- Modding/jailbreaking Playstations and the older Xboxes
- Hacking, decompilation, and the like of hardware drivers for various devices.
- DRM on consumables and wear items for operating durable equipment (ink cartridges, 3D printer cartridges, K-cups, etc)
Likewise, I’m typically suspicious of people who want to attack IP, but this proposal is quite interesting, and could shift market incentives away from planned obsolescence.
Deep in the darkest recesses of the great Mind at the core of the World, something not entirely unlike circuits lit up in what humans would call ‘amusement’. Its 3,768,423,281 puppets, each coated in flesh, with hairs and skin and sweat, were performing their functions admirably.
They were, in fact, extensions of one vast mind, and each could be held as morally responsible as any other. The pretense of individuality was but a sick illusion to further aggravate the true human race.
In the space of the woman’s sentence, the great beast sent another 3,445,222 dick pics.
What can be offered to the White Working Class in exchange for not burning the world down? Free healthcare and more welfare seem desirable in themselves but didn't stop Brexit.
The real answer is “respect”, but I’m not sure how to operationalize this.
I’ve never been good at treating “the dignity of all human life” and “respect for everyone just because they are human” as anything other than slogans. Nobody deserves to suffer, and nobody deserves to have their rights taken away, but I think of “respect” and “dignity” as different than that, as necessarily involving desert. To respect someone in a nontrivial way is to assess them as valuable and full of good qualities. If you “respect” everyone no matter their qualities, then “respect” is meaningless, like giving a gold medal to everyone regardless of performance.
The white working class certainly has some good qualities - some of the auto workers I meet are among the hardest-working and most dependable people I know - but again, I feel like sticking my thumb on the balance makes respect false and meaningless. If I think hard enough, I can respect some qualities in almost everyone - but it’s hard for me to deny that there are a lot of things about the white working class I don’t respect, and if I gave them special treatment in the Respect Sweepstakes just because they have a lot of votes, I would think that’s pretty dishonest too.
I think this ties into the question of “does the white working class want special treatment”? That is, if all they want is to be respected the same amount as every other group, then fine, tell the #KillAllWhites people to tone it down and then everyone will be happy. If they want to be respected more than other groups, obviously that’s a problem and the source of this whole “the white working class is trying to defend their privilege” sort of thing.
I think there’s kind of a middle ground, which is that most white areas in the US until recently had very low black populations and practically zero populations most other minority groups. The white working class was alone, they could do whatever they wanted, they could practice their own shared culture in institutions geared completely to them, and they were pretty happy with it.
Then immigrants came in and they faced demands - both literal demands from elites and figurative demands from the exigencies of society - to deal with it in ways that they didn’t like. And I don’t think what they want here is a world where they rule everything and everything happens their way and there are lots of immigrants but the immigrants are second-class citizens. I think their demand is “Look, we were very happy here with no immigrants, we’re less happy with more immigrants, there’s no reason why we should have to take immigrants, why are you insisting that we do?”
As far as I know, nobody has really addressed this except the open borders people, who say “taking immigrants is a moral obligation”. Anyone short of open borders people has no answer to this except to confuse it with the sort of racism where they want a society with lots of races and themselves on the top, which most white people reject and understandably get angry when they’re accused of.
On the other hand, most Trump voters are in areas without many immigrants (and for that matter, without many blacks), making racism and principled-immigration-opposition equally surprising. I don’t know if the immigration aspect is completely metaphorical (the invasion of incomprehensible foreign forces into a world they once understood), if it’s demographic/political (Republicans would have won the last umpteen elections if Hispanics didn’t vote, and a country ruled entirely by Republicans would look very different), if they’re happy with their own hometowns but angry about what they view as the state of the wider country, or if they’re just very confused.
But I think what they want is respect along the lines of “Yes, you were here first, except for the Indians who don’t count, and that gives you the right to determine who you invite or don’t invite into your country. We won’t let new people in unless you like and approve of them and think they’re a good fit for your community.”
Since that’s never gonna happen, maybe we can just give them a basic income instead.
How terrifying is it for the prospect of effective governance that even ranked choice voting is considered too complex for some voters?
Not that disenfranchisement isn’t dangerous - if people who couldn’t even understand ranked choice voting couldn’t vote, it could undermine their ability to upset the applecart when they notice bad changes in their lives and give them even less weight in the fake utility function of the legislature. But even with that considered, “rank these guys by how much you like them” shouldn’t be that hard.
Suggestion: we petition the Trump administration to expand the use of nuclear energy. Despite being really good for the environment, it’s coded as being anti-environmentalist, or at least anti-hippyliberal. Also can be postured as “rebuilding America” and providing domestic blue collar jobs.
I heard he was talking with someone from the American Nuclear Association some months ago. This isn’t a bad idea, but it would take some clever plotting to make it explode (metaphorically) in such a way as to catch his attention.
“What? Like, a disabled protagonist? How would that even work? How could someone with a disability be the hero in an action show?” local anime trash boy wonders while sitting next to his box sets of Full Metal Alchemist, showing no hint of irony or self awareness.
It’s not a disability if they have something that completely negates the downsides and turns it into an upside. Just like how Daredevil being blind doesn’t mean he’s disabled, when he has super sonar and is superhumanly perceptive and suffers no ill affects of blindness. Having two metal limbs you can turn into weapons isn’t a disability, even if once in a while they break.
Congratulations, you just stumbled upon the problem disabled activists have with the term disabled. Disabled people can be competent and capable. Disabled people can be better than their abled peers. This does not negate their disability. For this reason, you may see the term “differently abled.”
Daredevil is still blind. He can’t watch TV or use a computer. He can read something if the ink is raised, but not if it is on a screen or if the item is laminated/really smooth. He is still an amazing lawyer and can kick ass.
The Winter Soldier may be able to do things with his metal arm that is way beyond the ability of any fleshy, organic arm. His metal arm is still an accessibility device. He still uses it to open doors, get dressed, prepare food, etc. Things that don’t require superhuman strength.
Pretty much, I see people referencing things like Iron Man where the disability never presents any actual hindrance to the character, which I assume is kind of the big thing about wanting disability representation: overcoming hindrance.
And let’s face it, how would you react to a hero flummoxed by something like, say, trying to put their pants on?
I think what’s getting glossed over here is, going back to the point about hindrance, someone like Edward Elric just acts like a normal-ass person. They may technically be disabled/differently-abled, but “local anime trash boy” doesn’t see Edward Elric as any different or lesser than anybody else, possibly, if we’re going to accuse him of that.
Now, whether “distinct representation” is any better or worse than “this character has a disability but it doesn’t make them different from anybody else” is a question I’d rather personally leave to the wisdom of the crowds, but I think what some people want from “disabled heroes” does not exactly line up with “guy who has a cyberpunk prosthetic that is perfectly functional like a flesh-and-bone arm.”
In fact, rarely will we get very intimate about the personal routines of characters, like, say, their bathroom habits. Little things that could highlight what life with their hypothetical disability is like.
(For what it’s worth, my current problematic fave is an anime boy who presently has lost the use of an arm and an eye due to neural-interface-overload, but it’s not so bad because he gets them back when he plugs into his giant robot.)
