#impurity culture

[campgender]

Whenever a player safewords, this is an occasion for mutual support. We understand that nobody safewords from a happy place, and that all of our egos feel frail and kind of runty when we need to back out of a scene. It is completely unethical to respond with scorn or ridicule to a person who has safeworded: S/M is not a competition, we are not playing against each other.

As tops, we have noticed that if we are having a good time and our bottom safewords, our initial feelings may not be happy. Whaddaya mean you don't like that? I do all this work and you don't appreciate it? I'm hot for being in control and you want me to stop? We have felt real anger and felt challenged in our top role... and, on a deeper level, we have felt put down, hurt and rejected. It is okay to have these feelings. It is not okay to act on them. Take three deep breaths and everybody start taking care of each other.

Sometimes bottoms get so deeply engaged in a scene that they fail to safeword, or forget, or so profoundly believe in the fantasy that it doesn't occur to them: many of the techniques we play with, like interrogation, function in the real world to undermine volition. Dossie remembers a scene in which a top offered her a choice of something or other: "I felt very confused. Some distant part of me vaguely remembered having made choices, but the response from my state of consciousness at that time was, Choose? I am not a thing that chooses." So then what is the top's responsibility?

If a bottom does not safeword and you don't pick up on what's going on, and this will happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what's going on.

And just because someone safeworded doesn't mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn't feel like the right thing right now - but most often we find that after we've dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we're still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.

from The New Topping Book (2003) by Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy

(note: the authors use ‘top’ & ‘bottom’ in the historical S/M sense, meaning ‘person performing the act’ & ‘person receiving the act’; the act in question is not necessarily penetration.)

[tiredyke]

every time queer discourse surges on this site everyone is so quick to jump to “it was actually the evil lesbians who divided us” because y’all heard the term “political lesbian” and never bothered to figure out what that meant

[luc1ferian]

So I read "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson and I

[bewires]

oppenheimer criticisms I haven't seen but think would be fair:

-choice to have 90% of florence pugh's screentime being "hysterical topless woman"

-movie does not pass bechdel test at all; otoh it is a historical biopic representing the life of a man to whose field of study very few women had access at the time and the movie makes a point to show those women gaining access. like. it's not a movie about women at all, and I doubt I will see nolan make such a movie ever, but beyond florence pugh's character there are some good and nuanced moments in there especially with emily blunt but also with minor characters

-early sequences of tortured baby oppenheimer dreaming the beauty of physics are very overwrought

-choice to not shoot on location in germany (look this one is just for me I have been to all the places oppenheimer studied (I am not a theoretical physics fangirl but I know several) and the only place they chose not to actually film in person is göttingen which I take personal offense at)

-they cast matthias schweighöfer in a hollywood movie. no excuses for that one tbh.

oppenheimer criticisms I have seen and think are unfair

-"nolan can't make a good war movie" bc he will not make an intersectional war movie. potentially accurate in re dunkirk, which I didn't see bc I don't like war movies, but in this case he did not make a war movie, he made a historical biopic. the war is relevant, obviously, but the movie is not at all about the battlefield or the front, it is about the life of a physicist, and yes, it's not very intersectional.

-the effects of the a-bomb on the people of japan are not given due diligence. I understand people disagreeing about this but I have also seen several posts of people going "I won't watch this but I bet it doesn't" and uh. I think it does. I think every moment in this movie after the trinity test is entirely about oppenheimer realizing the impact of his research and it is shown several times, excruciatingly, how aware he is of what the effects of the a-bomb were. we do not see the bomb, nor do we see japan, because again, it is a historical biopic about this one dude and he wasn't there. this is also the first time I have seen a mainstream hollywood movie make repeat and pointed note of the fact that in a military sense the use of a-bombs in japan was not necessary.

-movie is pro-war/glorifies the a-bomb/glorifies oppenheimer. I think the strongest case you can make is that it glorifies the a-bomb because movie splosions are cool. but I also think the movie's biggest strength is its ambiguity. whose fault is it there was an a-bomb? is it oppenheimer's? he sure thinks so! is it einstein's? he sure thinks so at least indirectly! is it the american government's? they sure think so and they're proud of it (all of these according to the various chracters of this movie). is it a good thing they developed the a-bomb? several characters have several differing opinions on this! oppenheimer himself seems very divided and unsure by the end of the movie and cannot make a judgment call. in the end (much like with cillian murphy's other iconic character who wears a hat cough cough) if people walk out of this movie as fans of the character or his actions imo that's on them and not on the authorship of the movie

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

"We tend to read fma with a Western lens, so critiquing its use of the military and genocide ignores the Japanese perspective," sorry but you can't cultural relativism your way out of imperialism, genocide, and pro-military nationalism.

Newsflash: Japan was an imperialist power! Japanese nationalism is a thing! Numerous genocides have been committed and excused/denied by Japan! Japan having suffered imperialism from the USA does not mean that people are now magically immune to pro-imperialism propaganda and historical revisionism, and it isn't absent from Japanese pop media. In fact, much like American mass media it is often highly prevalent in both overt and insidious/seemingly innocuous ways.

Be honest about the imperialist themes of the stories you like or stfu!

[nympho-scene-boy]

[campgender]

Jacqueline looked confused. Then she laughed till tears streamed down her cheeks. “Honey,” she’d start, but she was laughing too hard to continue. “Honey. You can’t learn to fuck from reading Popular Mechanics. That isn’t what makes a butch a good lover.”

This was exactly what I needed to know! “Well, what does make a butch a good lover?” I asked, trying to sound like the answer didn’t mean all that much to me.

Her face softened. “That’s kinda hard to explain. I guess being a good lover means respecting a femme. It means listening to her body. And even if the sex gets a little rough, or whatever, that it’s what she wants too, and inside you’re still coming from a gentle place. Does that make sense?”

It did not. It was less information than I wanted. It turned out, however, to be the information I needed. It just took thinking about it for the rest of my life.

Jacqueline took the rubber cock from my hands. Had I been holding it all this time? She placed it carefully on my thigh. My body temperature rose. She began to touch it gently, like it was something really beautiful.

“You know, you could make a woman feel real good with this thing. Maybe better than she ever felt in her life.” She stopped stroking the dildo. “Or you could really hurt her, and remind her of all the ways she’s ever been hurt in her life. You got to think about that every time you strap this on. Then you’ll be a good lover.”

I waited, hoping there was more. There was not. Jackie got up and puttered around the kitchen. I went to bed. I tried to memorize every word that had been said to me before I fell asleep.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (pg 28-29)

[waywardsalt]

i. get the vibe that the more mainstream zelda fans are allergic to the idea of liking characters who like. do bad things

[angelsdean]

ok but fad diet paleo sam tho

[mishkakagehishka]

Opening the comment section on an intercultural wedding and thinking what fucking year did i stumble into

[musclesandhammering]

This but also: even people with reprehensible traits usually also have good traits- creativity, artistic talent, intelligence, social awareness on certain topics, humour, situational kindness, etc- and acknowledging that you like certain things about someone while also condemning them overall is a healthy thing to do. Refusing to acknowledge the good in a bad person perpetuates the “this person can’t be a [murderer/rapist/racist/abuser/etc], I’ve always known them as a great guy!” attitude.

Everybody is a mixed bag and we have to be able to recognise that for genuine accountability to come easier.

to pretend that horrible people cannot make good art is another way to conflate beauty and talent with integrity and morality. the works of monsters are best examined with knowledge of the author in mind but art is not inherently reflective. human beings are creative, and habitual liars- it'd be stupid to pretend art must always be a portrait of its creator

[thedandelionresistance]

Screenshot is a post with username cropped out which reads:

goodnight to people who are unable to run

goodnight to people who used to be known for 'running/skipping' everywhere until it

became far too painful and dangerous

goodnight to people who have a walking gait that shows deformity and 'disturbs others'

goodnight to people who have limbs that 'move wrong'

goodnight to people who walk with a limp

goodnight to people who stumble and fall

goodnight to people who use a mobility aid

goodnight to people who use elevators

goodnight to people who use shower-chairs

goodnight to people who use ramps

#cripple punk #cpunk #physically disabled #chronic illness #chronic pain

#disabled positivity #this is about physical illnesses and such please do not derail

#do not derail

Oooh what a nice positivity post, I can't walk because of a condition generally considered neurological (it's under-studied so that's just what we currently understand of it) and also severe executive dysfunction that can leave me catatonic or nearly s-

Oh it's not for people who are in these categories for the "wrong" arbitrary reasons. If your illness is not considered "physical" even if it impairs or completely gets rid of your ability to walk get fucked I guess? /s

Like of course these kinds of people are always like "oh but if it physically disabled you then it's a physical illness" but if you say "okay, my schizophrenia severely disables me to the point of being unable to move" they always say "no it doesn't you attention seeking abled faker!!!"

Like, even setting aside that all neurological conditions are considered neurodivergence, including migraines, seizures, chiari malformations, traumatic brain injuries, depression, PTSD, and so on (neither being permanent nor being something you're born with are requirements for something being neurodivergent, just that they make your neurology different from the norm)...

There is no even divide between physical and psychiatric/neurological conditions.

Schizophrenic catatonia can cause people to literally be completely able to move for YEARS to the point they need a full time carer (I'm lucky that my episodes tend to only last less than an hour/not always be full body and tend to be triggered more when sleep deprived, but I have still nearly LITERALLY DROWNED in the bath because of them, and have had lesser episodes that resulted in me soiling myself because I could not move).

ALS is a degenerative neuron disease, one that affected Stephen Hawking and was the reason he needed a wheelchair and AAC device over time.

Potentially deadly heart conditions are extremely commonly comorbid with anxiety.

Conditions like IBS, which have an extremely high mortality rate when untreated, are highly comorbid with... well, half the DSM, so to speak.

Trauma is suspected to be a possible catalyst for or driver of multiple multisystemic chronic illnesses, including mast cell disorders.

Many common "mental illnesses" can cause tremors, heart palpitations and chronic tachycardia, gut dysbiosis, and more.

Many physical chronic illnesses directly have neurological symptoms, including severe cognitive impairment/dysfunction, and mood swings/emotional dysregulation, to the point where cognitive impairment is part of the diagnostic criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome that can be used even in the absence of orthostatic intolerance (which is a symptom understood to be typically neurological, as well, though not neuropsychological).

Even ADHD can severely physically disable you, because it essentially shuts down your bodily control center's ability to send commands and run physical tasks. I know so many people think ADHD cannot be that disabling and that it either must be something else or people are just lying, but it turns out that ADHD isn't just not being able to find your keys where you last set them down and being a bit late to scheduled events!

No good night for me, because my physical and psychological symptoms can't be neatly sorted out into simple palatable little boxes. Yeah, I've heard all the "but if you have physical disabilities that counts!! If you have physically disabling symptoms of a condition, that makes it a physical disability!!"

Those same exact people called my housebound, sometimes bedbound, semi-ambulatory wheelchair-using, incontinence-product-needing, caregiver-reliant ass a liar, a faker, attention-seeking, abled, drug-addicted (in a derogatory way, we don't fucking shame addicts here), crazy, delusional, "schizo" freak who just wanted to feel special and talk over "real" disabled people.

The people who said "hey, the brain is a physical organ and part of your nervous system, psychiatric conditions are a result of biochemical and physiological processes in that organ, and often because your brain controls your body and has a lot of interaction with every other system, symptoms and conditions don't neatly fit into one category or another" were the ones who believed me about my experiences with disability, interpersonal and systemic ableism, my mental illness causing actual literal physical inaccessibility in the same way a lack of a ramp for my wheelchair does, that ADHD is my most disabling condition including over ones that could cause me to go into actual organ failure, and so on.

So I'll make a positivity post for people with mobility and gait issues who use mobility aids and such, that doesn't shut out anyone with neuro and psych issues causing those things, that doesn't draw a smug and quite frankly unnecessary line in the sand just to stick it to people they don't consider to be "really" disabled or ever as disabled as "physically disabled" people (something that these kinds of people have directly admitted to my face, that they don't believe neurodisability can ever be as severely disabling or dangerous as physical disability, or even really significantly disabling, while also accusing me of tokenizing myself and other low functioning high support needs neurodisabled people).

I mean, this is the flip side of the coin of making posts about universal or (category-transcending) general ableism or disability experiences and claiming they're physical-disability-exclusive. It's making a post about symptoms that clearly manifest physically, then saying "don't derail and make this about NON-PHYSICAL stuff," with the unspoken threat that any mention of a diagnosis or symptom mechanism they refuse to believe CAN cause significant physical issues will be considered derailing.

I know because it's happened to me a thousand times already.

I honestly hope no one like that sees this, but if they do, be honest with yourself.

What would you do if the 87 percent of autistic people with gait issues talked about their experiences with those things overlapping? What would you do if I talked about how I had to go to occupational therapy as a toddler to change the mobility issues caused by the trauma of infant CSA (with no actual physical injury or trauma related to it)? What would you do if schizophrenic people talked about how catatonia causes them to need mobility aids? What would you do if someone talked about how OCD or delusions or uncontrollable stimming or Tourette's causes their limbs to "move wrong" and "disturbs" other people? What would you do if someone uses a mobility aid, physical accommodations, or has mobility issues for the "wrong" reasons; because of a "mental" illness.

Don't immediately react. Don't jump in to defend yourself about how "oh you'd accept that because it's a physical symptom and therefore a physical disability". Don't tell me, because the majority of you have already SHOWN me what you'd really do. I'm not talking about a small amount of people.

I'm talking about thousands of people who have admitted, either directly or in other posts of theirs, that they actively deny the experiences of, fakeclaim, and speak over people who are physically disabled AND neurodisabled, especially those of us who cannot divide our conditions and symptoms neatly like that.

I'm talking hundreds of examples of blatant sanism and neuroableism, from calling me and people like me crazy and stupid and dangerous and saying we should be institutionalized and have our autonomy stripped from us and even directly using my trauma from exactly that to try and trigger me into a meltdown or self-harming.

I'm talking telling me to prove autistic meltdowns could be dangerous by going and giving myself the brain damage I pointed out self-injurious behaviors during meltdowns can cause. I'm talking people telling me that my suicide attempts should have been successful and that they hoped I'd face actual ableism, often on the same days I was in the ER as a direct result of ableist medical neglect.

Saying "oh but we'll be nice (if we choose to believe you) if you say you're physically disabled" for optics, so you can look like the reasonable tolerant victim of those meanie able-bodied barely disabled neurodivergent disabled people (who are most often also profoundly physically disabled) when they point out your actual behavior towards them 99 percent of the time" isn't going to fly.

Because saying your post is about physical illnesses isn't actually about derailing. If it was, you'd say it's about mobility aids and issues. Because I guarantee it's not about every other physical illness, from sensory impairment to non-mobility-related gut and organ dysfunction and failure to allergenic disorders.

But it is about exclusion. It's about controlling the narrative. It's about a shibboleth to denote that only other people who agree that neurodisabled people are stinky mean invaders in the disability community who make everything about them, while making posts claiming shared experiences are exclusive are all about you and your disability. It's deflecting accountability by giving yourself the out of "oh but see this isn't about anyone with these issues and if you think it is maybe you're the meanie able-bodied ableists we write it for" and weaponizing your own neurodivergence to claim you're not neuroableist in the same post you claim someone is lying about how disabling their neurodivergence is because in your own words yours doesn't disable you that much.

So no, it's not actually open to all physical disabilities, even assuming generously that that's what you mean when you specify physical illnesses (which would generally imply that nonphysical illnesses with physical symptoms don't count to most fluent english speakers).

It's not open to those of us who have messy complex disabilities and who acknowledge that all of emotions and intelligence and cognition and identity is caused by electric currents and chemicals being sent through a slab of meat wrapped in bone (and even that we barely understand, with scientists discovering that a lot of those things might actually be partially caused or driven by processes elsewhere in the body, even leaving aside that the brain itself is also just the CPU of the whole machine and that CPU issues do in fact affect not just the whole operating system but can even cause or lead to hardware issues themselves.

It's not for any of the people who experience or understand these things the "wrong" way.

It's for your little clique to be able to say "you can't sit at our table" and then put on convincing crocodile tears and play victim for your followers when someone dares to call you out for being a petty bully punching sideways at MOST at the severely disabled people you're claiming are your oppressors.

Yeah no, honey. I've seen it in a dozen marginalized communities and every time it's the most vulnerable members that get fucked over by it. I'm not playing your games or engaging with your pathetic power grab.

If anyone is actually interested in how you can create spaces tailored for specific needs and experiences, we're going to shamelessly plug our own medium article about Selective Inclusion. (We probably need to redraft it honestly, but it's got the point at least.) For a brief explanation, selective inclusion is about choosing to focus a space around a need, experience, or identity, and then letting anyone in who believes they share it.

Now, that sounds like what "oh but if you have physical symptoms that counts" covers, but even if that weren't a pretty falsehood, selectively inclusive spaces around an identity focus on the identity itself, without claiming shared experiences are exclusive or that shared needs should only be met for people who use the right label. It is a space explicitly intended to be safe and comfortable for people who are "[identity] AND" - som a space that allows neurodivergent physically disabled people (and people with only "neurodivergent diagnoses" who have physically disabling symptoms) room to talk about how their identities intersect and affect each other and how sometimes they cause seemingly contradictory effects and experiences.

That is not what cripplepunk spaces, which co-opted a word that has historically been used against all of us*, and claimed its reclamation is exclusive only to some of us because a person not fully aware of its history (because I choose to believe it was not maliciously coined) defined the rest of us out of our own history.

*Despite people denying not just disability history but direct evidence of it, the term "mental cripple" appears in a number of actual scientific papers and was in fact the official term for a time, and was used specifically in the context of the institutionalization and brutalization of neurodisabled people in asylums. People were tortured and even lobotomized for daring to be a cripple whose "deformity" (another historically used term for neurodivergent people) was in the brain. But of course, historical revisionism and claims that it's an "outdated" usage despite lived experiences of neurodisabled people contradicting that are "counterevidence" to this.

Anyway usual disclaimer if you're just here to insult me, ignore everything I've said and try to argue with things I either didn't say or that aren't true, fakeclaim me, or all the usual stuff, just block me. You will be filtered and blocked by my comment screener before I ever see it anyway.

People who want to ask good faith questions or discuss personal experiences (including with neuroableism and corpoableism in the disabled community), as long as you don't act as if ableism is stored in the (physical or neuro) disability, you are welcome to interact. I am usually pretty good about assuming good faith and giving the benefit of the doubt as long as there is any to give, and I think it is really important to have conversations about lateral ableism that the majority of us are absolutely capable (hm, maybe an ironic word here, but I think still accurate?) of perpetuating.

[mrtheinsatiable]

Lmao what the fuck

[variousqueerthings]

"When people talk about gender-affirming surgery using words like “mutilation,” that's not very nice. Is that how you think about people who've had surgery for other things? It's a disgust reaction, and I do not take disgust into account as a legitimate point of discourse. I don't have to entertain it and I'm not going to. It's a waste of everybody's time, it's knee-jerk, it's not grounded in reality, and it's not useful. And it's a squeamishness about medical intervention. I think the idea of making legislative or cultural decisions in and around [that] is laughable. Your squeamishness is not what the world turns on; it doesn't matter."

Liv Hewson in Teen Vogue

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

[rhaenys-queenofkhyrulzz]

One bad thing about living in a Muslim household is that you know exactly when your parents just had sex 💀💀💀

[campgender]

my theory about my first femme self-fashioning being after purity culture’s spectre of the slut bc that was the only non-normative femininity i knew: sooo true & i’m so proud of you baby