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Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
funereal-disease
funereal-disease

You ever get the feeling in certain sexually liberated subcultures - kink, poly, body positivity - that you’re expected to find everyone attractive by default?

Like you’re supposed to choose your partners pretty much at random - your preferences can be superficial but never integral to your sexuality, and they must always be toothless. Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect. We’ve looped right back around to calling sex and romance the highest forms of human interaction: to deny them to anyone, the logic goes, is a slight to their very humanity.

I’ve been noticing that a lot in poly communities lately, but this article really crystallized the concept for me. To wit:

When you call a fat body “cute,” it’s patronizing and de-sexualizing. … [W]hen someone calls me “cute” in a setting where I am showing my body or expressing my sexuality, it plucks me right out of the narrative I am trying to create.

…

Try “beautiful,” or go out on a limb and say “sexy.” And don’t panic when you find that “beautiful” and “sexy” start to change in meaning for you. They should. These are words that belong to everyone who wants them.

You are entitled to express your sexuality in any context you want (in this case, a Facebook group for nude photos), but I am equally entitled not to participate in it. The idea that someone posting nudes in a group I happen to be part of obligates me to express sexual admiration for them - well, as we say in The Industry, it creeps me the fuck out. Would the author of that article apply the same standard to a dude showing off his erection?

By all means create your own sexual narrative, by all means claim any word you feel you deserve, but the minute you obligate me to take part in it is the minute I get the fuck away from you. Desexualizing a person is not the same as dehumanizing them.

fierceawakening

Very yes.

“Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect.“

As an obligate monoamorous person (why. is. that. not. a. word?!) this is how 99% of Bad Polycourse feels to me, too.

funereal-disease

And it’s so weirdly regressive, too - I thought we had agreed that romance doesn’t have to be The Ultimate in relationships! Suddenly we’ve gone right back to “if you really loved your friends you’d be dating them” and I’m just like…when did we decide that friendship was lesser?

mitigatedchaos

Status competition in sex runs deeper than ideology, I’d wager. Much deeper.

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kissingerandpals-deactivated201
kissingerandpals kissingerandpals

Politics is just a mask for a lot of complex personal problems, huh

argumate

how dare you drag my mother into this discussion of tax policy

earlgraytay

…consider: politics is complex personal problems. 

a nation is just a very large group of people. democratic politics is the fine art of getting them to come to some kind of consensus about how they want to live. interpersonal mediation on the grand scale. with guns.

kissingerandpals kissingerandpals

That’s all well and good, but most of these people should probably work on their own lives before they turn to Utopian visions of how the world around them should be different. Especially teenagers on Tumblr.

mitigatedchaos

I’m not sure how much this is about me (considering that my typical post is something along the lines of “Actually, having governments and borders and taxes is Good, and polygamy/cousin marriage is Bad”), and certainly I do have my own matters to work on, buuuut…

Much of the Rationalist Sphere on Tumblr and those around it are neurodivergent in some way, and thus have different natural intuitions sometimes, leading to Weird Politics.

Though I guess also there are teenagers.  I do try and put on a reasonable face for teenagers when I know they’re watching.  It’s important that people that are looked up to model good behavior.  (Conservatives kind-of know this but also have too much threat pattern-matching as if to balance out leftists not having enough.)

the rationalists

@poipoipoi-2016

In response to that last, I’ve heard enough stories about my paternal grandparents to really want divorce to be a thing that happens more often, but at the same time, I heard enough stories about Grandma and her six husbands to be deeply suspect of divorce.

I realized that something related showed up in my life. There was a guy I knew online. Black guy living in a city. His step dad had him working at his small business, and it interfered with his ability to complete school. Then he was of age, and the step dad tried to kick him out, but he didn’t have a job, so he was sneaking into the house to avoid ending up homeless. His resume was terrible, just a few cobbled-together, unformatted paragraphs. I would say “shouldn’t they teach resume writing in school?” but even if they did, the terrible step dad might have had him working or something so that he wasn’t able to attend or complete that! But he was a decent guy, and had a good work ethic, so I went through carefully building a resume with him, and he got a job soon enough after and was able to move out. It’s no wonder he had been depressed earlier! And, like, in between then, we got advice from my ex-girlfriend’s partner, who has lived the low-class life, on how to try to keep him out of the street at night until he could move out.

But how many guys like him are out there, even in this country, you know? Who don’t have a hand-me-down laptop and a connection to a bunch of random nerds who know how to write a resume for him so he can get a stable income?

So I can’t really be a true GOPper, but also the risk with the step parents stuff is real.

私 personal politics social centrism

Anonymous asked:

what's your type, and how do i accomplish my new life goal of becoming as similar to it as possible?

Based on previous relationships, my ‘type’ is subbish bisexual nerd women who I can talk to for hours on end (at least at the beginning).

My first girlfriend and I spent a lot of time together, hmn, let’s call it developing video game content piecemeal.  Also worldbuilding.  Lots of worldbuilding.  And various other things.

But that isn’t necessary in specific.  That’s just something that happened.

Like, I could name out an exact list of traits and so on, but these things aren’t usually cut and dry like that.  They have to be felt out a little.

anons asks 私 me personal
isaacsapphire
inquisitivefeminist

Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds?  Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed.  Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure?  (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).

Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?

random-thought-depository

I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.

13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.

isaacsapphire

Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*

I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.

mitigatedchaos

Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.

I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.

Source: inquisitivefeminist 私 personal politics
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