#manage your own expectations

[serpentface]

What's the Wardi cultural take on Akoshos sleeping with/partnering with/marrying other Akoshos?

It's not highly regulated to a degree that there are overwhelming cultural norms about it. There's a lot of societal focus on akoshos being theoretically suitable sexual partners for both men and women due to being dual-gendered, but not to an extent that relationships with One Another are stigmatized.

They also largely get to escape from the most severe concerns about penetrator/penetrated power dynamics because they're not regarded as Men (they're regarded as dual-gendered, and they're a female social class on every practical level), there's no status of manhood to Lose by receiving sexual penetration. The only real thing you see in that department is people assuming that one acts as 'the man' and one acts as 'the woman', but this is largely due to preoccupation with a notion of sex being Penetration With A Penis (and that Penetration With A Penis means that one person is in a Man's Role and one person is in a Woman's Role). But this will not be regarded as unnatural as in same-gender male relations, akoshos will Have to take up a position in this sexual dichotomy if they want to have Real Sex (Penetration With A Penis) with each other, and this is not unnatural and doesn't involve gaining or losing status since they are simultaneously male and female, not men.

So like you might see individual culture critics finding stuff to nitpick about it as their annoyance of the week or a singular Guy here or there who thinks it's weird, but this isn't a widespread norm. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about akoshos having sex with each other. The worst thing you're likely to experience Solely by virtue of being in an akoshos-akoshos relationship is someone asking you (probably with genuine curiosity) which one does the man stuff and which one does the woman stuff.

Akoshos also don't experience Hard expectations for marriage (though there are societal pressures that make marriage an attractive safety net all the same, ESPECIALLY marriage to a man) so unofficial life-partnerships between akoshos are pretty much the Only same gender partnerships between unwed people that are going to go unquestioned. ((Sworn brotherhood is technically a same gender life partnership for men that is Functionally similar to marriage (in that it's a kin-making practice between unrelated adults), but the tradition is Built upon the assumption that both parties will be married to women and that a primary goal of this kinship is to provide security for both parties' wives and children)). Marriage obligations in general are more lax in the economically secure but not Wealthy lower mercantile classes (as obligations to support and perpetuate one's family are universal, but these obligations can be filled simply by having at least One son who can get hitched, and marriages in the lower classes have no political functions and therefore there's less reason to ensure All your children are wed (there's still incentives like dowry, but this is not desperately needed when a family is economically secure)). So akoshos in this class group tend to have a Lot more freedom in terms of their life arrangements and chosen partners (though still experience the limiting frameworks of structural misogyny in other capacities).

The only thing that is out of the picture is akoshos/akoshos marriage. Marriage in this society has a predominantly reproductive function, the concept of reproductively non-viable marriages is generally considered absurd. This is not JUST this culture's form of homophobia, as marriage is a very practical arrangement at its core - both in a reproductive capacity and as bedrock for the patriarchal blood-kinship family system that forms the core social unit. The idea of same gender marriage isn't just absurd because 'ewwww weird' it's like, that Cannot work within this system, it Cannot fill core functions of what a marriage intends to do here, the ways on which marriage and kinship are BUILT makes same gender marriage practically (rather than just socially) untenable.

The sole exception to the 'marriage = reproductively viable" rule is that akoshos can be married to men (which in practice is almost always as a remarriage after a man has secured At Least an heir). This has a Little bit of internal logic here in that they perform predominantly female social roles (thus are suited to being a wife, even if they can't bear children) (and also on practical levels of them having the same legal status as women) but it's really more of a 'this is just how it's always been' kind of thing. A lot of the older pre-Wardi identity dual-gender roles that got mashed together under the 'akoshos' name would have involved marriage to a man as a second wife/concubine, in addition to his primary wife who would bear his children. Men potentially having multiple spouses has not been retained as a cultural practice, but the notion that an akoshos Can be a wife to a man has survived into modern day legal and doctrinal practices around marriage.

So like this being said, marriage as it is legally defined is only between a man and a woman, a man and an akoshos, or a woman and an akoshos. In practice the latter two are comparatively VERY rare- a man/akoshos marriage cannot provide children (though an akoshos can practically fulfill all other obligations and duties of a wife), a woman/akoshos marriage Can provide children (and while akoshos cannot function as a male heir, these children Will take their akoshos-parent's family name (though the wife retains her father's family name)), but akoshos are legally grouped with women in terms of rights and privileges (including being permanently under legal domain of their father unless they have been legally handed off to a male husband) and Cannot provide hard power patriarchal support that this family system is built upon and therefore depends upon, which makes these marriages socio-economically insecure. They can obviously still be a good partner and parent, but this is not the same as having the Legal hard power of a patriarch.

Akoshos marrying each other would be reproductively and socially nonviable, and is treated as a similarly absurd concept to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. It's just not a part of the marriage and kinship framework, it's not a thing that you can Do.

[evankinkley]

half the fandom believing agatha and rio are the main characters of AAA, while the show, press, interviews, cast and crew couldn't be more clear that the main characters are agatha and billy.

[necrotic-nephilim]

i’m feeling messy. for the new ask game, 5 :)

for the choose violence ask game!

5. worst discord server and why

of COURSE you would choose to be this messy, you lil rat. <3 i will be kind enough to not name the server, it's a general Batfamily server i found on Disboard. most Bafam discord servers tend to be... anti leaning so it's something i sort of expect, but this one has a "ship advisory list", including ships you're not allowed to share media of (like fanfic or fanart) and if you discuss the ship you can be told to stop talking about it. and there were the typical ships you'd expect like Joker/Harley, BatJokes, and ofc a "no proships" umbrella ban. but some of the ships fucking baffled me. like canon ships were on this list. ships i to this day can't figure out why they'd be banned. the top ships of the list that just *got me* in terms of "... what is bad about this ship???" were

DickBabs

DonnaDick

Barry/Diana

Barry/Dinah

JayRose

Catwoman/Penguin

Talia/Bane

some of these i didn't know were shipped in the *first place* but even if they are, i can't fathom what's wrong with them. some of them are canon, normal ships? like what did JayRose do wrong. it's one of Jason's healthier relationships. and DonnaDick somehow gets me the most. my only guess is that antis heard them referred to as the Wonder Twins and thus decided the ship was incestual. bc otherwise how. why. i laugh everytime i think about DonnaDick being problematic.

on one hand i do think it's fucking hilarious of a list and it always makes me laugh bc i cannot fathom the mentality. but on the other hand it is sort of depressing that so many public social platforms for discussing the Batfam are becoming *so* anti-leaning that ships can be banned simply bc the mods of the server decided they were problematic for some unforeseen reason. it was the biggest depiction of "i don't like this ship so it's problematic" i've ever seen. like where does the goalpost stop moving? when does it somehow become problematic to ship things in general? it was wild even for anti stuff. truly the most baffling server i've been in.

[bondagebimbo]

LOVE when the pharmacy decides to fucking dick around with my meds so badly that now I’m off my mood stabilizer, my pain meds, and my fucking birth control (in a few days) because they’re insisting I should have extra fucking bottles of each one and I DONT because they don’t let me pick up more than a one month supply of narcotics at a fucking time so do explain where these extra bottles are, hmm ????? and they didn’t have enough caplyta ordered last time to even give me my usual 3 months supply of that so … ???? get your fucking heads out of your asses and give me the fucking meds you owe me ??? like ??? but I’m in a nasty headspace right now so if I call the pharmacy this morning, I’m going to be that cunt ass customer they bitch about all day because this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. in fact, the first time, they straight up committed insurance fraud by marking one of my scripts as filled and picked up WHEN, IN REALITY, THEY FUCKING LOST THE SCRIPT AND HAD NO RECORD OF IT BEING FILLED OR PICKED UP IN THEIR SYSTEM, BUT YET, MARKED IT AS SUCH AND CHARGED MY INSURANCE AN ALMOST 8 GRAND FOR THE FUCKING 3 MONTHS OF MY MOOD STABILIZER THAT I. NEVER. RECEIVED. I’m genuinely about to report this entire pharmacy to the pharmacy board because I’m so fucking done with this place. it needs to be shut the fuck down because you’re telling me, out of an entire pharmacy, y’all share the same IQ point AND dead brain cell, collectively ??? then don’t fucking work in healthcare where people rely on you to know your shit and keep track of their fucking meds because you’re just constantly making shit worse on people since you can’t seem to not fuck around with these meds and not ‘lose’ scripts. fuck out of here.

and I’m pretty much out of weed, which is usually my back up pain management method, without the money to afford a delivery order by their cut off time to order in 3 hours because I just paid my fucking bills and have SOME to go towards it, but not enough for delivery to be free, and I’d still have to walk my ass to one of the ATM’s nearby because they don’t accept my bank as a prepaid method OR any of the cards I have on my person. 🫠

I can literally feel my back spasming and seizing on and off while I’m laying on my fucking side, I’ve had a migraine with a stupid ass aura for almost a week now because chronic migraines fucking suck and i was REALLY hoping this one would be over by now, my muscle inflammations that my pain meds are supposed to limit are already beginning to start their itching deep in my muscles so soon they’ll blossom into a whole fibromyalgia fucking episode and become entirely inflamed, my joints in my hands fucking hurt because of the dreary weather so I really need to get into a rheumatologist at some point soon as well and get that shit figured out, I’m nauseas as fuck from all the pain, and I’m moody, hormonal, and just feel like fucking death physically.

I’m just. I give up.

this shit is exhausting and painful and so mentally fucking taxing to constantly deal with and I just want a fucking break from all this fucking shit. I wish I could just … not exist … for even just a little while with how fucking painful existing actually feels right now 🫠😭

[mars-ipan]

hey folks did you know i love super dangan ronpa 2

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I feel like the post I just reblogged pointing out the all-or-nothing in how many people interact with their deconstruction of systems of oppression is resonating for me right now with so many different moments in my life where someone decides that because some part of myself has access to some of the levers of control/influence/etc that come with the relationship to power, and decides what that must mean about all the other parts of me that might be explicitly refused access to those same levers.

It has happened in so many spaces/aspects of my life, and it can be so hard to feel safe and seen and trusting of others when that's my chronic relationship to being perceived - half truths and obfuscation.

It doesn't really change regardless of who's doing the assuming either. Like, where they land in relation to systems of power may influence which direction they lean in their assumptions about me, but even that is often inconsistent. Both sides of the equation (those who share my marginalizations and those who exist in spaces of closer proximity to power) will still do it nonetheless.

When I was doing my liminal social identities work in undergrad, this was actually a big part of the conceptualization we explored of traumtic alienation of self as individual from self as collective, and what it can do to people to exist in this liminal relationship with your environment and the people in it. As I'm starting to gather my thoughts about my stress modeling, this conceptualization is bubbling back to the surface. I'm finding myself meandering through it on both a path specifically my own, and in an effort to better understand what other paths may be available to people during their version of the process/experience.

Selfhood is so fragile, and so in need of balance between self-construction and co-construction for us humans, and that gives us so many beautiful, even spiritual, experiences of meaning making and generativity of self. It also createa many pivot points where we may find room in our path for vulnerability or blurring of self. As much as these pivot points can be distressing, I think they also sometimes become our foundations of change/personal evolution, when we find that through the distress of existing in shift, something meaningful is occurring or observable in our experience of self-in-transition.

I think something I've valued especially about my own relationship with self is its transience. It doesn't always end up somewhere I would be happy to sustain, but it always allows me a degree of comfort in complexity that I think has made my body-mind a safer place for me overall.

[rwby-confess]

Confession #125

[catalisst]

[vse-kar-vem]

how to write vent post title that does not come off as self-pitying and or accusatory (because it's NOT !)

[deus-ex-mona]

s. s ave me, meoto…

[mintedwitcher]

I just saw a "life hack" video (I hate that term but that's what the OP called it so) for an alternate way to open a pull-tab tin, by slotting a fork/spoon through the tab and using it as a lever to open the lid. I thought it was pretty great. Pull-tabs are my enemy in the kitchen, mostly because nearly every time I open one by hand, the momentum of the lid opening causes the contents to splatter. It irritates the fuck out of me. Now, I have a hard silicone hook tool to open them, which I love, but I've never actually tried using a fork or a spoon to do the same job. So, I thought it was pretty cool that OP was sharing this.

Tell me why there are hordes of angry, defensive assholes in those comments making fun of it. "How to make an easy job harder!" "Just open it by hand like you're supposed to!" "The Laziness has peaked!"

First of all: disabled people exist. Elderly people exist. People with mobility, dexterity, or strength issues exist. Just because you're not one of them (yet) does not mean these ideas are useless or lazy. And the implementation of these ideas by someone who is not disabled or elderly does not make someone lazy, either.

Second: just because you see something posted online does not mean it's automatically made for you! See there's this thing called a target audience, which means a select demographic that the content is aimed for. And to help determine who that audience is, we normally use these things called context clues. In this case, clue number one: can you easily open a pull-tab by hand? Yes? Then this isn't for you, move along.

This should not be this complicated. If a tool or an idea or a 'hack' is not 'useful' to you, then it's not for you. You're not the target audience. If you can find use for a tool or an idea or a 'hack', then congratulations, it's for you! Use it! It's literally that simple! But we should not have to be explicitly labelling every little idea with "THIS IS FOR XYZ" for you to even consider that maybe, some things just are not for you.

[whoviandoodler]

you ever go into a tag for a show or whatever and find several painstakingly created gif sets from interviews with the actors where they're just like. fully mocking fans? talking about them like they're the most despicable thing on this earth kind of bitter mocking. and on the one hand you're like, okay, i get it, fans can really be shit and get overly parasocial and think you owe them something beyond the work you created but on the other it's like. bro this makes me not want to engage with anything you do at all. ever. you don't have to sing your fans praises but you can do them the basic courtesy of professionalism and not ridiculing the entirety of everyone who both engages with your creative work and whose interest ultimately results in your paycheck.

[starbuck]

good things today:

National Park agreed to let us do a year-long research project starting in January which is gonna look REALLY good on my resume (and also be fun!)

difficult conversation with my boss went well (I think she agreed with me and I’d gonna follow my advice/had already reached the same conclusion herself)

fun concert (with banjo!)

made plans with a friend for tomorrow

got school work done

[anaalnathrakhs]

btw my mom said it. she said it to me looking me in the eyes. i told her about how difficult it was for me to get through those family reunions, and she admitted it was very important to her, important enough that she was just going to do it anyway.

[angeart]

the boatem circus mumbo rambles might be late...

[crazy-fruit]

Not surprised but still disappointed that my university seems to have 0 funding for students attending conferences (and possibly presenting their own results)