irishunic0rn

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me trying to organize my life

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Art by Shaharkem

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Wholesome Cat Posts That Will Hopefully Make Your Day.

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canon: they died

fanfic: fUCK YOU

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So true, we should never assume we know everything and stay curious and open to new knowledge. Plus, animals are awesome.

“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you” …..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??

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“The more psychotherapy an abusive man has participated in, the more impossible I usually find it is to work with him.

 The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts

he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight.  Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: “From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn’t really her I was hitting. It was my mother!” He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague

peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation. “No,” he said, “you were hitting your wife.”

 I have yet to meet an abuser who has made any meaningful and lasting changes in his behavior toward female partners through therapy, regardless of how much “insight”—most of it false—that he may have gained. The fact is that if an abuser finds a particularly skilled therapist and if the therapy is especially successful, when he is finished he will be a happy, well-adjusted abuser—good news for him, perhaps, but not such good news for his partner. Psychotherapy can be very valuable for the issues it is devised to address, but partner abuse is not one of them; an abusive man needs to be in a specialized program.

Therapy focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support, no matter how unreasonable the attitudes that are giving rise to those feelings. An abusive man’s therapist usually will not speak to the abused woman, whereas the counselor of a high-quality abuser program always does.

 Therapy typically will not address any of the central causes of abusiveness, including entitlement, coercive control, disrespect, superiority, selfishness, or victim blaming.

 It is also impossible to persuade an abusive man to change by convincing him that he would benefit from it, because he perceives the benefits of controlling his partner as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many men initially take steps to change their abusive behavior but then return to their old ways. There is another reason why appealing to his self-interest doesn’t work: The abusive man’s belief that his own needs should come ahead of his partner’s is at the core of his problem.

 Therefore when anyone, including therapists, tells an abusive man that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You can’t simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it.

 Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her. I have saved for years a letter that a psychologist wrote about one of my clients, a man who admitted to me that his wife was covered with blood and had broken bones when he was done beating her and that she could have died. The psychologist’s letter ridiculed the system for labeling this man a “batterer,” saying that he was too reasonable and insightful and should not be participating in my abuser program any further.

 The content of the letter indicated to me that the psychologist had neglected to ever ask the client to describe the brutal beating that he had been convicted of.

As a routine part of my assessment of an abusive man, I contacted his private therapist to compare impressions. The therapist turned out to have strong opinions about the case:

THERAPIST:  I think it’s a big mistake for Martin to be attending your abuser program. He has very low self-esteem; he believes anything bad that anyone says about him. If you tell him he’s abusive, that will just tear him down further. His partner slams him with the word abusive all the time, for reasons of her own. His wife’s got huge control issues, and she has obsessive-compulsive disorder. She needs treatment. I think having Martin in your program just gets her what she wants.

BANCROFT: So you have been doing couples counseling with them?

THERAPIST: No, I see him individually.

BANCROFT: How many times have you met with her?

THERAPIST: She hasn’t been in at all.

BANCROFT: You must have had quite extensive phone contact with her, then.

THERAPIST: No, I haven’t spoken to her.

BANCROFT: You haven’t spoken to her? You have assigned his wife a clinical diagnosis based only on Martin’s descriptions of her?

THERAPIST: Yes, but you need to understand, we’re talking about an unusually insightful man. Martin has told me many details, and he is perceptive and sensitive.

BANCROFT: But he admits to serious psychological abuse of his wife, although he doesn’t call it that. An abusive man is not a reliable source of information about his partner. What the abuser was getting from individual therapy, unfortunately, was an official seal of approval for his denial, and for his view that his wife was mentally ill.”

—“Why does he do that ? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling men”

by Lundy Bancroft

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This is charming

Living Alone by Yaoyao Ma Van As.

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“I think fanfic is the sign of a healthy show. Here’s what it boils down to: you’re telling me that in today’s crowded media space, our show made someone love it so much they take time out of their own life to talk about it? Holy. Crap. To be fair, I have a somewhat different attitude toward media/fans than most people. I think what TV/corporate media had wrong for a long time was how they understood the idea of a “water cooler show.” They saw it as making the audience talk about their show, on their terms. So any fan-created media is them losing control of their material. I see this more as the natural evolution of culture in a shared digital age. I will be blunt – other than the satisfaction of our own creative urges (and all that entails: the quest for perfection, artistry, craft, etc), our job in media is to give you stuff to talk about in your conversations, to integrate into your social circle in whatever way you see fit. I doubt that’s TNT’s official stance, btw, but they are much cooler about this stuff than most companies.”

— John Rogers, on fanfiction.

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I love horses and Good Omens, so decided to combine the two :)

#good omens #ineffable husbands #horse drawing

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😂🤣

oh good

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Exactly

last post of the day about this evil topic I hope but no matter what your intentions are, if what you create is a narrative where the interactions between a man and a woman proceed literally inevitably from meeting to having sex to the implication of a happy relationship and marriage, while a relationship between two men has to reside in the realm of ambiguity and unconfirmed subtext, you have not even remotely challenged society’s ideas about sex or relationships and have in fact actively reinforced the straight status quo

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Honestly something that bothers me more than most things is having my compassion mistaken for naivety.

I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.

I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.

I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan. 

I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.

There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.

I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.

I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!

So just leave me alone alright thank u!!!!

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do you ever think about how magical fandom is? you decide you like a thing, you see characters you know are in love, or characters you simply love, and then—you’re plunged headfirst into a place where everyone’s talents are buzzing with vibrancy for the good of providing more and more for each other. never does the concept of “well-fed” resonate more for me. 

strangers gather and cluster together on platforms and in chats and talk and talk and become closely knit because they love an idea. we love an idea! so we find each other and then we can’t stop giving gifts, since we’re in love. gifmakers bring our favorite scenes to life so that we can see them again and again. artists draw those we adore in stunning ways we wouldn’t get to see them appear otherwise. writers are there to give us hours and hours immersed in the scenes we’re dreaming of or sharing new dreams we hadn’t known we needed. meta-composers dig into what we might have missed, vidmakers create movies all our own with just the very best parts, shitposters make us laugh and invite levity in. so vital and beloved are the people who click and read and comment and reply and watch and reblog and retweet and take our excited feelings father across the world, saying here, this thing, look at this, can you believe it—

i know well enough that there’s toxicity and darkness in fandom as there is in anything else humans make, but few other experiences in my life contain as much magic. thank you for what you do and who you are. sometimes it’s hard to believe we all found our way here. sometimes i think about how so many people will never experience the kind of infectious enthusiasm that makes us want to create for no other reason than for each other, and because we loved an idea. 

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Apparently, I can’t embed the video and include privacy controls so I am linking to it.

Keep reading

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not to drag myself into this discussion, but - as an ace disabled person, i’d just like to throw out there a point which comes up a lot in disability spaces, which is that there’s a distinct and important difference between someone being asexual versus being desexualized. me being ace is me having investigated and claimed my identity, me saying for myself “this is a part of who i am;” disabled folks - among other groups - being desexualized is us being denied autonomy, agency, and humanity, because others are deciding our identities and desires for us.

in the context of good omens, neil gaiman saying “oh aziraphale and crowley can’t be gay because they don’t have a human concept of gender and sexuality” (which is proven false throughout the book and show, anyway, but others have already said that better than i can) is desexualizing them, and doing so in the most homophobic way possible, whereas characters headcanoning them as ace and/or agender is still allowing aziraphale & crowley a sexual orientation and gender identity. it’s the difference between filling in the blank with “n/a” instead of just erasing the question entirely.

that’s why, as many people have pointed out, aziraphale & crowley aren’t ace and/or agender representation, despite neil gaiman claiming they have no gender or sexual orientation - being ace and agender is a conscious identity, not an absence that denies the possibility of a person or character being capable of determining their identity for themselves.

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Good Omens and representation (or lack thereof)

I love Good Omens. I really do. But i’ve just come off a fourth watch (obsessed, much?!) of the sixth episode, and it really hit me how much straight representation we’re getting from not one but TWO couples (Newt & Anathema and Madam Tracy & Shadwell, who are clung to each other throughout almost the whole Air Base scene) even though I could argue that the heart of the GO story is about Aziraphale and Crowley, and the love and respect they’ve built for each other against all odds. Meanwhile Aziraphale and Crowley have known each other for six THOUSAND years and dont even reach out to each other when the ground is shaking and Crowley has fallen to the ground in terror and pain. I would be ok with this if I felt like it came from a place where the creators deliberately wanted to represent ace people. And I get that NG didnt want to take a representation leap into the gay side of things without his friend and co-creator’s say so (RIP Terry). HOWEVER unfortunately I think it came from a place where there was a deliberate effort to avoid any physical contact whatsoever that could be construed as ‘gay’. Witness the body swap at the end. Crowley holds out his hand to Aziraphale, who then has to lean forward and twist his whole body in order to grip Crowley’s hand in a formal handshake configuration. Seriously? Ye’d go to that much effort with the choreography to make sure there’s nothig that can be remotely construed as a gay touch of any kind? Anathema and Newt have known each other for all of 24 hours and we see them holding hands. I call BS. This isnt ace representation. It’s an effort to avoid any gay physical representation whatsoever. Good Omens is a beautiful love story between celestial beings, sure. But the real world context in which this story is being told can’t be ignored. There’ll never be full LGBT+ representation in the world when storytellers aren’t even capable of showing their characters (who are in love with each other!) doing something as small and sweet as holding hands. Surely we can do better than this?