#specifically the body exposed (sexually. emotionally. physically)

[bionic-penis]

yapping abt the body through the lens of art n shit

the importance we place on the physicality of others and our unwillingness to reconcile with the massive similarities from body to body will never fail to fascinate and frustrate me. our similarities are inherent and impossible to remove without jeapordising the body as a vessel. pisses me off. it extends past the idea of bleeding red. it's in our bones and flesh. whats in my pants? meat. bones. sinew. muscle. same as yours. and this incessant need to divide the body via penis or vulva, especially when looking at anatomy books for artists. especially when we operate at the skeletal or even muscular level. "male" and "female" are nearly obsolete when we get so deep as to investigate the ligaments. wider hips? more fat? stronger muscles? this is not inherent. this is consequential. to paint someone with a vulva versus to paint someone with a penis is not a matter of absolute knowledge. it is a matter of a subject in front of you and your vision as an artist, subjective.

anyway. think its ridiculous that theres still a lot of drawing tutorials that focus on the false dichotomy of a male and female body when there's more interesting ways to divide the body. not only that, but it promotes bad drawing practice to insist that men appear this way while women appear that way. it is a hindrance at best and sexist at worst.

it's also just fun to contemplate on the concept of the body, it's existence as an ever-changing vessel and form, it's ubiquity within our lives and within art. to exist is to possess a body. to have a body is to have existed in a real, culpable, physical way. it is vital. it is terrible. it's endlessly fascinating in all of it's iterations. in a way, to possess a body and to live is to participate in the destruction of the body. it is life that wears it down. but it is also life that allows it to exist.

so it's a very interesting topic. hopefully i can expand on these ideas and trains of thought with my next body of work.

[devouredxmuses]

sᴏʟᴇᴅᴀᴅ ɢᴇʀᴀʀᴅ ; ʙᴀɴsʜᴇᴇ ; ᴛᴡᴇɴᴛʏ-ғᴏᴜʀ

lil stats !

full name: soledad nikola gerard. nicknames: sol. gender: demi woman. pronouns: they/she. sexuality: bisexual. traits: kind & compassionate + distant & reticent family: marcel gerard & rebekah mikaelson ( adoptive parents  ), hope mikaelson ( adoptive cousin ), & ingrid mikaelson ( adoptive cousin ) species: banshee. hometown: new orleans. abilities: death sense & death wail.

lil bio ! ( death tw )

before there was soledad gerard there was a terrified little five year old child found in the middle of the night in an abandoned warehouse. well it wasn't true, they weren't exactly alone. there were a dozen dead bodies with blood trailing from their ears. marcel gerard was the one who found them, took the child to the mikaelson school knowing something was wrong. the child didn't speak for months. everyone terrified them and they spent a lot of time by themself. they only perked up when marcel would visit.

eventually marcel and rebekah thought it might be better to take them home, away from the folks that scared them. still she didn't speak for a few weeks. marcel started calling them soledad, having found them in solitude and seeing that sort of nature within them. one night, rebekah and marcel woke up to a blood curdling, disorienting scream coming from sol's room. upon entering the room they noticed a figure crumpled on the ground at the side of the bed, again, blood rushing down their ears. that was the night soledad finally spoke. they told rebekah and marcel all that they remembered, that they'd been taken in the middle of the night. they had no other memories prior to the night marcel found them. didn't remember their family at all.

it didn't take long for the adults to figure out that soledad was a banshee. the child was unaware, but the witches that took them had every intention to use soledad's abilities to strengthen their coven. marcel figured this out eventually though and vowed to kill every member of the coven who had taken sol. he and rebekah are under the impression that soledad's parents willfully handed sol over to the coven. though to soledad, marcel and rebekah are her parents.

soledad's two abilities are death wail and death sense. the death wail has been around since they can remember, but the death sense didn't come until they were around thirteen years old. at the school, sol was messing around with friends and the second their fingertips grasped their friend's wrist, an image of the friend's death flashed through sol's mind. every single skin to skin touch with another since that day had that person's death filling sol's brain.

something they learned was that one's specific death was not predetermined. depending on the day ( & someone's decisions ), that death could change. seeing the same person die multiple different ways or even just multiple different times, every time they touched another was torture. quickly sol figured out how to avoid touch. they always stayed an extra few inches away from people physically and distanced themself emotionally. then there was what they wore. cloth was always covering every inch of their skin. for a while that meant baggy clothes, long sleeves, long pants, heavy gloves. eventually they wore a lot of mesh underneath or over any clothing that exposed any sort of skin. needing a barrier, but also, fashion.

they're a pretty friendly and compassionate person, they just like to be, slightly removed from people, if that makes any sense. they're an aspiring author and can usually be found with over the ear headphones on with their nose in their journal scribbling down ideas and things. they're also a drummer, but they did NOT go on the murder tour. they turned down the offer and pretty much begged their cousins and co to stay behind. right now they work at the local bookstore on the night shift stocking the shelves alone in the dark<3!

[whoree321]

the bad batch + what romance/rom com movies they watch with you

each of the bad batch x gn!reader

ok first and foremost i really truly believe to the pits of my soul that every single one of these fuckos loves romances and you cannot under any circumstances change my mind

ALSO it’s a gender neutral reader except kinda in echo’s theres like a very brief quote regarding breasts but like i still think even that is pretty gender neutral tbh

so anyway

Hunter: Pretty Woman

this is not the first time that i have publicly declared that i think hunter has a deep rooted connection to the movie pretty woman and it will not be the last

first of all this movie is incredibly soothing to hunters overwhelming savior complex

second of all hunter is literally richard gere (debonaire but emotionally distant gentleman that learns to love) and julia roberts (hooker with a heart of gold) at the same time

he was a little skeptical the first time you put it on but he instantly fell in love with it

the humor, the sensuality, the class divide, the glamour, the unconventional cinderella story of it all. it just really butters his bread

after the first time, when you suggest watching a movie and you pick this one he’ll act very aloof about it (“whatever you want cyar’ika, it doesn’t matter to me”) but secretly he’s really really happy bc it’s one of his favorites (you def know this and def pick it more often)

he absolutely hates the scene when stucky the lawyer hits vivian. like it doesn’t matter how many times he watches it he will fully turn his head away from the screen and say “I don’t like this part” and when it’s over he nuzzles a little closer into you and very tenderly kisses your forehead

he loves the soundtrack too. like he fully exposes how much he likes the movie when you catch him singing or humming “pretty woman” or “it must have been love” absently to himself (you kept it to yourself for a while but eventually you just had to tease him about it. he just smiled a little sheepishly and admitted he liked the songs before promptly changing the subject)

hunter also lowkey definitely wants to recreate the ending where richard gere shows up to her apartment in the white limo with you bc he thinks it’s such a sweet gesture and he wants to treat you like royalty

Crosshair: 10 Things I Hate About You

if there’s one thing about crosshair it’s that he’s a sucker for the enemies to lovers genre

maybe its just him projecting (spoiler alert it most certainly is) but he really enjoys watching the drama conflama of a miserable bastard be tricked into love

and really that’s the true essence of 10 Things I Hate About You

he will grumble and bitch and moan about not wanting to watch a ‘chick flick’ when you put it on, but 15 minutes in and he’s hooked

he has strong negative opinions on literally every single character except for kat and patrick

(crosshair really really wants to think he’s patrick but when it comes down to it he is katarina stratford in every single possible way)

he doesn’t say a word throughout the entire movie but you can tell when he’s annoyed at like bianca or cameron or joey bc he will openly scoff at them

will absolutely hum along in your ear during the “can’t take my eyes off you” scene and make out with you during the paintball scene

(seriously he wants to be patrick verona so bad)

when it’s over and you ask him what he thought he’ll roll his eyes and say “i guess it could have been worse” but his little smirk let’s you know he enjoyed it a lot more than he’s willing to admit

Tech: 50 Shades of Grey

ok hear me out on this one

tech is a huge movie talker. like subtitles are a non-negotiable if you wanna be able to take in any of the movies dialogue bc tech is most likely gonna make commentary over it the whole time

this makes him absolutely indescribably so much fun to watch bad/corny movies with

he will go off about EVERYTHING. the plot, the dialogue, the acting, the costuming, the music, the production quality. nothing and no one is safe. whether you just enjoy letting him talk at you or you join in on the roast, cheesy movies are a hoot between you two

and honey. 50 shades is one of THE cheesiest movies ever

you and tech will literally spend the entire duration of the movie tearing it to shreds

and the thing is tech is a very sarcastic, funny guy when he wants to be (and when it comes to you he definitely wants to be) so by the end of it he will have you in absolute stitches from laughing at the ridiculousness of both the movie and him

with any of the other batchers watching a movie like this either turns into a shy, slightly awkward experience (wrecker, echo) or an incorrigibly horny experience (crosshair, hunter)

but in this context tech literally has no shame or squeamishness about sexual things (why should he it’s a natural biological process?) so to yall the sex stuff is just another thing to roast

literally christian grey could be fully tying dakota johnson down and flogging her and tech will be like “in the last 3 minutes they have panned up to her nipples 4 times. this is criminally shoddy cinematography”

even tho he’s busy giving a detailed play by play critique, he never fails to keep some sort of physical contact with you (wrapping an arm around you and running his hand up and down your skin, playing with your fingers or your hair) so you know he’s enjoying spending this time with you despite his nasty words about the movie

also 1000% after you watch it tech will do extensive research on the ins and outs of bdsm and will have lots of hypotheses he wants to test out (as long as you’re willing and able ofc) ;)))

Wrecker: 13 Going On 30

of all the bad batch members, wrecker is the only one who unabashedly loves any movie that could be considered a chick flick

like he doesn’t even try to hide it or act like he’s too masculine for it. he loves romance and he’s proud of it

this man will have full marathons with you. rom coms, regular roms, tragic roms, hallmark roms, you name it and he’s game

his absolute favorite tho is 13 Going On 30

i feel like he has a huge soft spot for childhood best friends to lovers stories like he finds that type of lifelong partnership so endearing (and he loves to live vicariously through jenna since that type of romance was obviously never an option for him)

wrecker is also very childlike at heart and i think the idea of a 13 year old sweetheart trapped inside the body of a 30 year old cut throat magazine exec is so amusing to him (and maybe makes him feel just a little bit represented in the media)

he is definitely the type to completely engulf you in a cuddle for the entirety of the movie and he DEFINITELY cries into your shoulder at matty’s wedding when jenna is crying on the stoop with her dream house

he wants to try razzles so bad. like so bad. i think if he ever came across them somewhere he would barter at least one of his brothers for them

wrecker really just loves love and watching movies about it just reminds him of how lucky he is to have his own love story with you <3

Echo: The Princess Bride

i feel like it’s glaringly obvious why echo loves this movie

pirates. sword fighting. decades long revenge plots. the value of an honorable, loyal man. true love that never wavers even in the face of devastating tragedy and the darkest of hardships. clever but goofy humor.

echo considers this an action/adventure movie and NOT a romance movie (even tho it 100% totally is a romance movie) and requests to watch it very frequently

he can quote the whole thing. i’m seriously telling you echo loves the princess bride with his whole chest

even tho he refuses to admit it’s a love story above all else, he really does try to model himself in your relationship after wesley

like especially given what happened at the citadel and all the time you thought he was dead, the cinematic parellels are alive and present in y’alls relationship and he strives to be even half the man to you that wesley is to buttercup

literally in your day to day life he will sometimes respond to your requests with a smooth “as you wish ;)” (it doesn’t matter how many times he does it it still gives you butterflies)

when you watch the movie, he snuggles as close to you as possible and does his best to make youre comfy the whole time (he’s insecure about his prosthetics hurting you no matter how much you reassure him they don’t)

he just loves to be able to feel your heartbeat and your laugh when you giggle at the funny bits

every single time without fail at the part when buttercup is about to stab herself he leans down, ghosts his lips against the shell of your ear, and whispers the line in time with wesley: “there’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. it would be a pity to damage yours”

every single time without fail you wind up making out until he pulls away and tells you to watch the next part when wesley challenges humperdinck to a duel to the pain

echo just loves you to bits and wants you to know he’d endure a thousand fire swamps for you

Omega: Clueless

i have this really specific obsession with omega being a total girly girl and having very traditionally feminine interests as she keeps experiencing the universe and being exposed to a spectrum of gender expression beyond clone (masc and boring) and kaminoan (ugly)

so with that headcanon of her in mind, it’s vital to me that she sees clueless as soon as possible

clueless is an essential piece of media for a girl entering adolescence and i will die on this hill

it has literally everything you want and everything you need to develop into a well-rounded young woman

it’s so deliciously 90s and glamorama and valley girl humor and camp. its got meaningful female friendships and valuable life lessons and paul mf rudd

if there’s one thing you should encourage a burgeoning hetero teen girl to do, it’s to stick to dating guys like paul rudd in clueless. the earlier this message can be broadcast the better

the second you’re able to steal omega away from hunters watchful eyes (“hunter we’re just gonna watch finding nemo i swear!”) you show her this movie

at this point omega is not really a girly girl, but omega also has absolutely zero feminine influence in her life

the first time she sees clueless she is absolutely obsessed. like seriously she is so enamoured with the glitz and glam of cher horowitz

she asks you questions the entire time. she wants to know about EVERYTHING. the makeup, the clothes, the hair, the slang

(she definitely goes around saying stuff like “i’m totally bugging” for long enough afterwards that almost all of the boys have slipped up at least once with some ridiculous valley girl slang. you thought you were gonna die of laughter when you overheard tech say “as if!” to wrecker in the middle of an argument)

it just really introduces her to this whole world of femininity that she didn’t even know existed and she absolutely loves it

she makes you watch clueless with her seriously once a week at minimum. she begs you to style her hair like tai’s and you can’t help yourself when you happen to run across a little yellow plaid dress and buy it for her on sight

(hunter was gonna scold you for recklessly spending credits until he saw how omega almost cried from how happy she was for the gift)

honestly she enjoys the romance of it all and paul rudd is def her first celebrity crush but she enjoys more that you and her now have this special thing of hair and nails and pretty dresses

she loves how confident and beautiful and special you’re able to make her feel, and you love that you get to bring her that small sense of normalcy and happiness

[kcpolh]

Lost judgment

#LOST JUDGMENT SERIES#

You don't need to have played the original Judgment - or, indeed, any of the Yakuza games - to easily get into this non-numbered follow-up. It's an expansive game that players can expect to spend upwards of 50 hours exploring, should they seek out everything it has to offer. Our hero has a trio of fighting styles he can quickly switch between, each of which is best suited to specific situations, such as the Snake style, which is useful to scare and intimidate enemies. Along the way, players will run into plenty of shady characters who aren't willing to let Yagami proceed unscathed, resulting in intense kung fu encounters.

#LOST JUDGMENT SERIES#

Side quests provide breaks from the main story, including a series of fun investigations set within a high school, where Yagami teams up with the Mystery Research Club to uncover the misdeeds of an enigmatic figure. Players spend much of their time exploring urban streets and engaging in a variety of activities, from trailing suspects and looking for clues in order to further their investigations to playing a variety of mini-games, including drone races, dance challenges, classic arcade games, cat and dog interactions, dating, and more. He finds himself becoming embroiled in a complex criminal investigation involving the alleged murder of a student by a police officer who's grieving his son's suicide, which was apparently caused by bullying. LOST JUDGMENT, a sequel to Judgment (a spin-off game in the Yakuza series), puts players in the shoes of Takayuka Yagami, a private detective and one time lawyer. Characters frequently use very strong language, including the words "f-k," "s-t," and "d-khead." Show more Parents should also note that Yagami and other characters smoke and drink to excess, and that certain challenges and achievements involve getting drunk and increasing his alcohol tolerance. Players will also encounter frank conversations about dating, sexual assault, and prostitution, with words like "groping" and "slut" appearing in dialogue. But these issues are handled with some delicacy, the main characters discussing how best to protect victims emotionally and physically before taking action. Story themes are mature, with talk of sexual assault, suicide, and bullying in a high school setting. Plus, players are exposed to blood and gore in non-interactive scenes, including a dead body covered in flies and maggots. Yagami is generally a law-abiding fellow who stops short of killing his attackers, but his enemies use knives, guns, and other weapons in a bid to kill him. Players spend most of their time investigating - talking to others, following suspects, taking photographs, and looking for clues - but occasionally get into frenetic, highly stylized fistfights with bone-crunching melee attacks. It's set in free-to-explore urban locations in Japan and stars a lawyer-turned-detective named Takayuki Yagami, a master martial artist who uses a mix of street smarts and fisticuffs to discover the truth for his clients. As part of Sony's July State Of Play Presentation, a new gameplay video was also released showcasing new minigames, which we've included below.Parents need to know Lost Judgment is a detective/action game for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. He can ride around town with a skateboard now, and Lost Judgment also features a playable Master System, emulating games like Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Penguin Land. Yagami's gained some new fighting abilities, namely a third fighting style called Snake, which focuses on counterattacks. There's greater focus on the detective elements, including improved chasing and tailing sequences, alongside stealth options and platforming sections. Lost Judgment - Gameplay Changesĭuring the Judgment Day stream, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio outlined details. Sega has confirmed we'll be exploring Kamurocho once more, alongside Yokohama, the latter having served as the primary setting for Yakuza: Like a Dragon. It'll once again feature detective Takayuki Yagami, who'll be investigating another mysterious murder mystery - one considered to be an impossible crime - with ex-yakuza partner Masaharu Kaito.

[shu-sakamaki]

Administrator, why did Shu become an extreme sadist?

((This is not an easy question to answer, but we need to go in-depth with triggering topics so... TW for this))

((First, let’s talk about Shu’s childhood; I think, along with me, everyone can agree Shu did not have the “worst” childhood out there (compare his to Ayato, Laito, and Subaru), hell... Shu’s childhood is a reality to plenty of people; I know it was mine))

((The worst that happened with Shu was Edgar’s death and the village going down in flames... As Shu described it; the smell of flesh and blood burning; wild dogs eating people’s corpses... We can easily say that such a thing is not something a child should go through))

((Well, but that was the one and only real “mental damage” situation Shu went through...))

((Why I’m mentioning it; because there are two theories about sadists - one, you are born as one; And two: You’re taught it, you learn it.))

((Let’s see what Dr. Allan Schwartz has to say about it   (link)

[...] One explanation is that the perpertrators of these horrors were harshly and constantly emotionally, physically and sexually abused during childhood. Unfavorable experiences during childhood or in early stages of sexual development are believed to be one of the major contributing factors in the development of a sadistic personality. 

It has also been observed that sadism or a sadistic personality can also get developed in an individual through learning. For instance, continually being exposed to situations in which sexual enjoyment or of excitement with the anguish of others can cause sadism or sadomasochism. In other words, the suffering of others gives pleasure and observing that suffering feels good.

((Well, I think Subaru and Laito have a lot more reason to be way more sadistic than Shu, right? Maybe Not...))

((Let’s talk about PERSONALITY DISORDER:))

“A personality disorder is a type of mental illness in which you have trouble perceiving and relating to situations and to people — including yourself. There are many specific types of personality disorders. In general, having a personality disorder means you have a rigid and unhealthy pattern of thinking and behaving no matter what the situation. This leads to significant problems and limitations in relationships, social encounters, work and school.” 

 Mayo Clinic

((Where I want to get with this? It is possible that Shu may have a Mental Disorder; non-assisted depression may cause, what we call multiple personality disorder, Shu has a posttraumatic experienced caused by the fire he witnessed years ago in Edgar’s village, that + the pain of losing his one and only friend - clearly caused a high Depression state in Shu that, obviously, was not attended by his mother.))

((Now, while Laito, Subaru and Ayato went through a lot more to “excuse” their sadism, Shu went through one only very intense experience...Let’s put their pain in perspective. Shu’s “pain” was to be too treasured, that was the worst to happen to him till then... Always so guarded, in his world so full of protection, “painful” and “ugly” things were always far from his reality... Till what happened to Edgar. Is like... Hit everything at once in one single blow. A huge impact with a mind that was too pure and not prepared to such a thing))

((So, in proportion, Shu’s trauma happened at once, with one single hit.  While Laito, Ayato, and Subaru grew up with it, dealing with it daily - each day getting “easier” till they could finally “blow” up.))

((Shu could never blow up... He finally did when he kills Reiji in HDB End2))

((Shu is depressed and has destructive thoughts of himself; he never shows any care if he will die or not, for him, to feel pain means you’re alive - To live, is to feel pain; to be in pain))

((So what makes Shu so “Horny” and sadistic... Is that he needs to see his S/O feel the pain to show him they’re alive. Because Pain=Life))

(( Now, why I mentioned the multiple personality disorder? Simple. This:

Shu and the Fire

((Shu is distant, calm and cool... Unreachable even. That is... Till he “returns” to his child self. An event we can easily see triggered by traumatic things such as Fire. Shu has this inner... Childish him still inside him whenever he panics; is also his “soft” side))

((Shu’s personality changes from water to wine whenever he triggers. He gets more emotional.))

((Shu shows a completely different character, he has two very opposite extremes. The one that cares enough to make him murder his brother, father, and uncle... And his “other” extreme, the completely listless one))

((Not even Shu is aware of his inner struggle, as well shown here:

((Shu is completely confused as to why he jumped in to save the MC, and why he just kissed her afterward. He doesn’t know why))

((Shu is not in touch with himself, he doesn’t understand well his own feelings and emotions... He has two, completely, opposite extremes - How can one be so listless, but next, care so much he shields someone with his own body?))

((That is why Reiji says Shu “never changed”))

((Followed by a comparison between Adult Shu and Child Shu - Again, showing Shu under so much stress that he revert to his “child self”))

((Shu’s extreme sadistic side is, imo, a result of a dissociative disorder caused by a trauma that left him fragmented))

((Shu is fragmented))

((Is how I interpreted his character... But, once he finally explodes by killing Reiji, Shu feels like a huge weight is off of his shoulders...  We see Shu in peace with himself. He is aware of his reason, his worth... He is finally in touch with himself, knows he belongs.))

((I think Shu killing Reiji was even symbolic - Is like killing everything that “went wrong” with his life till that moment.))

((Shu assumed a personality to hide from others... And during it, he lost himself to it. Is what people usually do when they go through traumatic experiences.))

((So, why is Shu so extremely sadistic? Probably a Mental disorder, because his posttraumatic disorder + depression scarred him, was not accompanied, causing Shu to see things distorted - Pain= Life. You’re alive, you feel pain... I want you alive. So, please, scream in pain for me))

[postsforposting]

Psychiatric care is fully exempt from standard malpractice and abuse laws.

You know how you hear about stuff like people being drugged against their will, lied to, physically abused, sexually abused, threatened with rape and sexual violation, all sorts of “standard” abuse that you would see from shitty parents and doctors and things like shock collars and devices, things like ABA “therapy” where the client is punished physically/emotionally/mentally and it’s basically conversion therapy?

All of this is absolutely legal for mental health facilities and staff to use against patients. They are specifically exempt from laws governing abuse toward patients. They are explicitly exempt from all basic standards of care. On top of that, they full well know that lawyers, medical boards, and governments do not care about violations against patients unless it is grossly actionable--and even then generally they just cover it up and ignore it. Reputation is the master they serve, not public rights and justice. Lawyers do not care if you are raped and injured because it does not make them money to prosecute your case. Doctors know that lawyers do not care and will not help you, so they do whatever the fuck they want because there are no consequences--literally they are legally protected and practically speaking lawyers just won’t do anything.

Doctors are legally allowed to cripple you and nothing will happen.

Medical malpractice lawsuits, however, are extremely difficult to win in [state].  Because of this we are forced to limit our practice to cases of clear cut negligence that involve catastrophic injuries or death. In addition, [state] law insulates mental health providers by requiring people prove not just negligence, but gross negligence in order to prove your case. This creates a very high and difficult bar to clear in order to support a case. 

....

Negligence is an action that causes injury unless preventative measures are put in place. The standard of ordinary negligence is what conduct one expects from the proverbial "reasonable person". If the accused is a professional, such as a doctor, the "reasonable person" is then defined as a doctor of average intelligence in the same field. To put it another way, negligence is a failure to exercise reasonable care.

Gross negligence is reckless and willful misconduct causing bodily injury. With gross negligence, the standard of care is ignored to such an extent that the action is almost intentional. Within the context of medical malpractice, gross negligence is an action that is obviously an error even to someone without any medical training. A Supreme Court judge pointed out the extent of gross negligence versus negligence many years ago by saying, "Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked." For someone to be accused and found guilty of gross negligence, it must be proven that they had a conscious and voluntary disregard for your reasonable care, and caused foreseeable grave injury or harm to you.

Some examples of medical malpractice gross negligence (again, these do not matter unless there is permanent, extreme damage caused):

*Giving a patient a drug that their chart says they are allergic to 

*Amputating the wrong limb

*Leaving a surgical instrument inside a body cavity

Doctors can lie on your records. Lie to you and treat you without your consent. Drug you after lying to you about what they’re doing. Permanently damage you by those actions. Feed you things you’re allergic to, deliberately, repeatedly. Lie on involuntary commitment paperwork and forcibly commit you, destroying your life forever. Sexually abuse you in the name of “mental health treatment”. Threaten you with sexual abuse. Violate the rights you’re supposedly entitled to as a mental health client. Expose you to abuse and demand you rescind claims of abuse by people threatening your life. Hand over your personal information to your abusers who are actively threatening your life, endangering your life more. Make it a condition of your release and of their cessation of abuse towards you that you submit to your abusers. Put you in danger from other people being held with you and claim they have no responsibility to keep you safe. Deny you basic ADA rights and accommodations. Destroy and remove documentation from your records to cover their own asses; refuse to document anything in the first place and retaliate against you for demanding your basic medical rights. They can claim as their entire defense that you are retarded and delusional and schizophrenic and so cannot be trusted. They can physically cripple you during the course of treatment and call that medically necessary. They can lie about what they did and why. Unnecessary procedures and treatments? Doesn't matter if it doesn't cause enough and serious enough of damage. Ruins your life? Lol no.

And no one gives a fuck about what happened to you because all of this is legal and you’re just a lying, golddigging whore, like Britney Spears. It is literally legal and considered correct practice to cripple and threaten and abuse a mental health patient. Once you have a mental health designation, you are available to abuse, rape, and cripple to any healthcare worker who chooses to do so. All they have to do is claim you needed it or just lie about it, and they’re free to do it as often and as cruelly as they want. 

“Mental health” and “psychiatry” started as torture parks, started as places to rape and abuse people into behaving better, as places to experiment on people who didn’t matter, who weren’t considered human. Legally, they still are torture parks. Nothing has changed. They are no different from the horrors found in jails. You are not human inside those walls. You have no rights. It doesn’t matter if you belong there or not: they can force you there and lie about it, and it doesn’t matter. There is no justification for these places to exist.

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

[mickibloo]

Human Rights and Veganism

I speak frequently about my passion for human rights and how this is often dismissed by nonvegans on the basis of me being vegan, and seeing how many other vegans have related to my struggles, I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the human rights issues animal agriculture is responsible for and/or perpetuates. This will not be a list that 100% encapsulates the extent to which human rights are violated by these industries, but I think it is still a really great introduction, if nothing else, to how ubiquitous the oppressive nature of animal agriculture is. This post will be mostly guided by links to sources and some key quotes and phrases from those sources. 

1. Slaughterhouse Workers

Slaughterhouse workers are one of, if not the most, abused, mistreated, and neglected groups of workers to exist within western countries. The traumatization they face as a result of their job is often ignored by almost everyone who is not vegan or who does not research the topic. 

“A Call to Action: Psychological Harm in Slaughterhouse Workers“

“These workers perform a job that, by its very nature, puts them at risk of psychological disorder and pathological sadism. This risk emerges from a combination of many factors of slaughterhouse work, one of which is the stressful environment that slaughtering creates. A large portion of this stress comes from the exceptionally high rates of injury among the workers.

“However, slaughterhouse work is unique among major industries due to its innate violence...one of the most prominent studies investigated the impact of having a slaughterhouse in a community on crime rates within that community, using this as a metric for psychological health... Though the industries they used for comparison were nearly identical in other predictors of changes in crime (namely worker demographics, potential to create social disorganization, and effect on unemployment in the surrounding areas), slaughterhouses outstripped all others in the effect they had on crime. They led not only to a larger increase in overall crime, but, disturbingly, disproportionate increases in violent crime and sexual crime.

“Creating and sustaining oneself with “good” moral character and having another self that can mechanically end lives for hours each day not only serves as another source of psychological stress for workers, but exposes workers to the risk that their pathologically un-empathetic work selves will slip into their community lives. This is another explanation for the “spillover” that affects slaughterhouse workers’ minds and communities.

“Living with the knowledge of their actions causes symptoms similar to those of individuals who are recipients of trauma: substance abuse, anxiety issues, depression, and dissociation from reality.

(Testimonies from slaughterhouse workers): “And then it gets to a point where you’re at a daydream stage. Where you can think about everything else and still do your job. You become emotionally dead.”

“So a lot of guys at Morrell [a major slaughterhouse] just drink and drug their problems away. Some of them end up abusing their spouses because they can’t get rid of the feelings. They leave work with this attitude and they go down to the bar to forget.”

Confessions of a slaughterhouse worker

There are things, though, that have the power to shatter the numbness. For me, it was the heads.

At the end of the slaughter line there was a huge skip, and it was filled with hundreds of cows' heads. Each one of them had been flayed, with all of the saleable flesh removed. But one thing was still attached - their eyeballs.

Whenever I walked past that skip, I couldn't help but feel like I had hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me. Some of them were accusing, knowing that I'd participated in their deaths. Others seemed to be pleading, as if there were some way I could go back in time and save them. It was disgusting, terrifying and heart-breaking, all at the same time. It made me feel guilty."

I know things like this bothered the other workers, too. I'll never forget the day, after I'd been at the abattoir for a few months, when one of the lads cut into a freshly killed cow to gut her - and out fell the foetus of a calf. She was pregnant. He immediately started shouting and throwing his arms about.

I took him into a meeting room to calm him down - and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes." I remember one day in particular, when I'd been there for about a year or so, when we had to slaughter five calves at the same time.

We tried to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so small and bony that they could easily skip out and trot around, slightly wobbly on their newly born legs. They sniffed us, like puppies, because they were young and curious. Some of the boys and I stroked them, and they suckled our fingers.

When the time came to kill them, it was tough, both emotionally and physically. Slaughterhouses are designed for slaughtering really large animals, so the stun boxes are normally just about the right size to hold a cow that weighs about a tonne. When we put the first calf in, it only came about a quarter of a way up the box, if that. We put all five calves in at once. Then we killed them.

America’s Slaughterhouses Aren’t Just Killing Animals

“I’ve seen bleeders, and they’re gushing because they got hit [by a knife] right in the vein, and I mean, they’re almost passing out,” she said, “and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops.”

In Texas, where private employers are not required to carry workers’-compensation insurance, Tyson has opted out of the state system completely. When a worker gets injured at the Tyson beef slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, in order to get medical care from the company, that person must first sign a document saying:

I hereby voluntarily release, waive, and forever give up all my rights, claims, and causes of action, whether now existing or arising in the future, that I may have against the company, Tyson Foods, Inc., and their parent, subsidiary and affiliated companies and all of their officers, directors, owners, employees, and agents that arise out of or are in any way related to injuries (including a subsequent or resulting death) sustained in the course of my employment with the company.

The pressure to sign was enormous. When a worker named Duane Mullin had both of his hands crushed in a hammer mill at the Amarillo slaughterhouse now owned by Tyson, a manager employed by its previous owner persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his teeth.

'We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war

The company is now measuring workers’ temperatures as they report for work, and began supplying surgical facemasks, but, according to Fields and workers interviewed by the Guardian, Tyson continues to suppress information on employees who have tested positive for Covid-19.”

One worker, a central American migrant who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her job, told the Guardian that the company was not enforcing social distancing. 'We are all given bathroom breaks at the same time and there are hundreds of us waiting to use them. There are only seven bathrooms,' she said. 'They [Tyson] don’t care about the worker. They don’t care if we get sick.' A spokesman for Tyson said the company was taking 'several measures' to allow social distancing but did not address the bathroom break allegations."

One African American worker at a Koch facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. 'They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,' the worker said. 'I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.'

The sociologist Lourdes Gouveia has studied the meatpacking industry for three decades and said the Covid-19 outbreak is simply highlighting again the dangerous conditions in processing plants. Gouveia said the industry has perfected a formula which allows it to maximize profit while producing relatively safe meat by resisting regulations and utilizing low cost, mostly immigrant, labor in unsafe conditions. 'All of these elements are of a highly perfected formula or maximizing profits that is unlikely to change fundamentally,' Gouveia said."

2. Environmental Racism and Classism

Animal agriculture, and factory farms specifically, tend to locate their facilities near poor communities (often black or Hispanic) who do not have the financial means to take them to court over the ways in which these farms affect their health and wellbeing. 

How Swine in North Carolina Affects real People | René Miller Excerpt

“When you go back and you look at where these hog facilities are located, there’s a disproportionate number of them that are located near communities of color, low income communities. It is definitely a human rights issue.”

“Now see, if you lived here, and saw the way they do, you wouldn’t eat no pork. I don’t eat bacon, because I know where it comes from. When they die, they go into a box, and they decompose because they swell in the heat. A truck come and pick them up, take them to the processing plant in Roseo, ground them up into feed, and feed them back to the hogs.

“It hits you right in the face. Smell like something that you had never smell before. Smell worse than a dead body.”

“When we go to the funeral, he used the spray. If we wanna have a cookout on Sunday, he’ll spray. He always sprays Sunday.

“Do you think it’s also a civil rights issue?”

“Yes, I do.”

When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting

Like many other hazardous and exhausting low-wage industries in the United States, this work depends on the labor of America’s most marginalized communities. Most workers in the industry are people of color, many are women, and nearly one-third are immigrants.

In 1983, wages for workers in the meat and poultry industry fell, for the first time, below the national average for manufacturing work; in 1985, they were 15 percent lower; in 2002, they were 24 percent lower; today, they are 44 percent lower. Workers earn, on average, less than $15 an hour.

Jobs in the meat and poultry industry have long been a starting point for many groups of new immigrants to the United States as many positions require little formal education, experience, or English-language skills. In 2015, nearly 30 percent of meat and poultry workers were foreign-born non-citizens—about three times more than the percentage of manufacturing workers nationally.

Even immigrants with work authorization can remain vulnerable to coercion from employers, as many are not aware of their workplace rights, may not be familiar with technical terms in English, or are otherwise hesitant to navigate the complex, and potentially costly, procedures to vindicate their rights. The result is a significant part of the low-wage workforce who are less likely to report workplace abuses or even injuries, and are therefore more easily exploitable than US citizens, for fear of their employers’ power to fundamentally disrupt their lives and the lives of their families. “Us workers are afraid to lose our job,” said Rebecca G., an immigrant worker at a poultry plant in Arkansas. “[P]eople don't speak up or say what's wrong about the chemicals, or the speed of the line, or the discrimination.”

3. The displacement and murder of indigenous peoples

The Companies Behind the Burning of the Amazon

The burning of the Amazon and the darkening of skies from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, have captured the world’s conscience. Much of the blame for the fires has rightly fallen on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for directly encouraging the burning of forests and the seizure of Indigenous Peoples’ lands.

But the incentive for the destruction comes from large-scale international meat and soy animal feed companies like JBS and Cargill, and the global brands like Stop & Shop, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart/Asda, and Sysco that buy from them and sell to the public. It is these companies that are creating the international demand that finances the fires and deforestation.

The transnational nature of their impact can be seen in the current crisis. Their destruction is not confined to Brazil. Just over the border, in the Bolivian Amazon, 2.5 million acres have burned, largely to clear land for new cattle and soy animal feed plantations, in just a few weeks. Paraguay is experiencing similar devastation.

After years of remarkably successful conservation initiatives that cut Brazil’s deforestation rate by two-thirds, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has reopened the doors to rampant destruction as a favor to the agribusiness lobby that backs him. That industry is accountable for the atmosphere of lawlessness, deforestation, fires, and the murder of Indigenous peoples that followed. According to data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon in July 2019 increased 278 percent over the previous July. Bolsonaro responded to this news by firing the head of the INPE. 

I would like to close this post by saying that I understand this may leave nonvegans with some questions; What can consumers do about this? Should consumers be expected to do anything, or would that simply be misplacing the blame for these things? Aren’t all industries awful in similar ways since there is no ethical consumption under capitalism? If you have these questions, I am more than happy to engage in a good-faith conversation about them. The purpose of this post, however, is not to answer such inquiries. I made this purely to raise awareness about these issues because the only people I ever see discuss them are vegans, and these are extremely important topics that I think deserve far more attention than they receive. 

[rejectclone]

I’ve been meaning to update the mini bios for my OCs, it took me some time to try to condense their core aspects and backstory stuff into smaller paragraphs but I’m finally done!

NAME: Jared Clements

AGE: 28

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Bisexual

RACE: White (is of Hispanic descent)

OCCUPATION: Detective/Deputy

ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good

SHORT BIO: Who was once one of the greatest detectives in Neo York City’s police branches, now a shattered former shell of himself after the Incident. Physically and emotionally mauled from the explosion that killed his partners and his reputation, he now ruminates at the station, plotting for his revenge against the criminal organization that led to his fall. Formerly known to be the most kind and upbeat member of the station, he has become cold and callous to everyone, but the new recruit might pull him from his self-imposed darkness.....

NAME: Devon Cox

AGE: 25

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Straight

RACE: ‘White’/Ambiguous (HEAVILY mixed, but he identifies mostly with being Italian)

OCCUPATION: Trainee Officer, former illegal bloodsport boxer

ALIGNMENT: Neutral Good

SHORT BIO: The bastard son of a seedy bookie and a mother who clearly did not take good care of herself, along with being the only mute member of his family, he was deemed a unwanted child. Eventually, his parent’s actions caught up to them one night out, and as they were slaughtered, their son was left alone at home. Soon adopted by his uncle on his father’s side, he was essentially forced to ‘repay the debt’ by becoming a bloodsport fighter, regardless if he wanted to do it or not. As a adult, the illegal ring has fallen due to on-going corruption, he is now again left alone as his corrupt uncle got hauled off to prison. Left to his own devices and lamenting his actions, he now wants to pave his own path by repaying his own debts by joining the NYPD. Unknown to his new coworkers, he has spilled blood numerous times and won’t hesitate to do what must be done in some situations.....

NAME: B055 M4N

AGE: 24 in 4027 (BEFORE DEATH) 80 in 4083 (POST RESURRECTION)

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Straight

RACE: White

OCCUPATION: Lieutenant

ALIGNMENT: Lawful Neutral

SHORT BIO: He was supposed to be the next gleaming star in the NYPD’s legacy of lieutenants, all from the same bloodline spanning across decades...... until he was assassinated at his induction ceremony in front of the general public. Ironically, his fate was not sealed there, as a week before his induction, he was coaxed into signing up for a ‘organ donation program’, to a incredibly specific experimental medicine company. He never expected his corpse to be used in a unethical program to create a supercomputer, devised of a human consciousness instead of a AI, to ensure that it will have a good stance on logical proceedings of organization and the law, and will not suffer from conflicts of interest. Unfortunately for him, the total conversion to a machine was semi-successful, as they could only resurrect his head...... Now doomed to be a severed head in a jar filled with PFC and the inability to speak (well, at least without using text-to-speech), he has been forcibly instated to be the permanent boss of the station. His true appearance is a facade to essentially everyone, as the ‘higher-ups’ creates false non-existent lieutenants to be instated every few years to keep the act going, except a very select few know of his current situation.

NAME: Lydia Hall

AGE: 25

GENDER: Female

SEXUALITY: Lesbian

RACE: White

OCCUPATION: Psychiatrist, uses ‘personal nurse’ as a cover

ALIGNMENT: True Neutral

BIO: She is considered to be one of the ‘greatest’ newer psychiatrists to ever grace the continental US, but nobody expected her to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, upon getting a ‘promotion’ one day. Unknown to almost everyone, she was coerced into the psychological monitoring of one of the company’s most experimental projects, the undead severed head turned database at the local NYPD station. His previous care taker had to be laid off due to ‘concerns’, and thus she now must monitor him on a near daily basis, cleaning out his tank, making sure he is still sane, and to just stay there to entertain him basically. She never expected her career to be basically reduced to a personal nurse, and yet here she is. Unfortunately for her, the true nightmare unfolds when a certain hazmat wearing being stumbles into the picture.

NAME: Lawrence Grey

AGE: 47

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Straight

RACE: White

OCCUPATION: Geneticist

ALIGNMENT: Neutral Evil

BIO: A famed scientist who has been working for ages for a experimental medicine company. He was renown for his research in advancing certain projects, some more well received than others however. A overall stoic man, his coworkers reluctantly follow his command, never fully knowing what he thinks of them. Dedicated to his work, the higher-ups gave him access to a incredibly hidden cloning program, regardless if he wanted to work there or not. Not wanting to bond to his ‘projects’, he continued his intimidating aura, until one of them in particular piqued his interest. It would have been better if the clone never showed any promise however, as the impeding transport to another lab will lead to his escape, and his ‘father’s’ coma.....

NAME: [REDACTED]

AGE: [REDACTED]

GENDER: [REDACTED]

SEXUALITY: [REDACTED]

RACE: [REDACTED]

OCCUPATION: [REDACTED]

ALIGNMENT: [REDACTED]

BIO: ……………… he wasn’t meant for this world. The forced byproduct of a illegal cloning procedure, made to be a rejected failure on purpose. As for why? The higher-ups of the organization believed that the more malformed and sickly the clones are, the higher the chance they might carry new genes that can cure said sicknesses. The #439th clone to be made, he seemed to be another waste of flesh and blood. If it wasn’t for his ‘caretaker’, he would’ve been euthanized after a month. Desperate to ‘spare’ this subject, the caretaker demanded him to be transferred to another laboratory base, as rumors began to spread that the project has been leaked to shareholders. That fateful night, he was given a technologically advanced hazmat suit to conceal his inhuman appearance, and was shipped off to his new ‘home’. Alas, as fate would have it, the hovervan he was in along with his ‘father’, crashed, leaving him to wonder aimlessly in the pouring rain, hiding in a alleyway until he was spotted by two odd looking officers, trying to close-off the crash site. He was taken in to the station, where somebody claimed it was his ‘son’. Taken up to the lieutenant’s office, much to the confusion of many, this clone will blend into daily happenings of the station.

NAME: Ren Nakamura

AGE: 22

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Robosexual

RACE: Japanese

OCCUPATION: Future heir to the head of a crime syndicate, doubles as a criminal lawyer as a cover

ALIGNMENT: Lawful Neutral/Evil

BIO: The next in line to his family’s criminal syndicate legacy, he is reluctant at first, but must come to terms to what he must do. Raised up to be cold and unrelenting towards his underlings and other syndicate bosses, he will never back down from a fight, always striving to be on top. However, nobody really expected him to come up with a plan to undermine other syndicates, by actually studying criminal law and becoming a legitimate defense attorney in order to coax his clients into exposing future plans (in which he will immediately inform his father of...). Recently he was assigned a personal body guard, who has a ‘unique’ physical composition and will surely make a great hitman. The two of them go along quite well, considering their popular opposites in personality.

NAME: Deangelo Moore

AGE: 25

GENDER: MALE

SEXUALITY: Gay

RACE: German-American

OCCUPATION: Cybernetic hitman, uses ‘criminal lawyer’ as a cover

ALIGNMENT: Lawful Evil

SHORT BIO: Neither fully man nor machine, this once respected art dealer has gone fully into the seedy underbelly of Neo York. As a escapee convict test subject from a experimental ‘liquid metal’ cyborg program, he is a con man on the run, until as fate would have it, he was accepted as a personal ‘body guard’ for one of his former clients’s son. With no real home to go to anymore as his public reputation has been disgraced, he now gleefully takes in stride that he is a ‘ghost’ among the populous, a potentially unstoppable killing machine who is only curbed by his greed and urge to be respected by other powerful beings. His former life now gone, he now works for his employer as if they were blood relatives, and even agreed to do a surreal operation, to directly siphon information from other rival ‘organizations’ by acting.........as public criminal lawyers who defend them..........

NAME: ‘John’ (he was never properly named by any of the scientists, so he named himself. His ACTUAL name is Specimen - 1257)

AGE: 21

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Straight, but questioning

RACE: Literally nothing

OCCUPATION: Chemist, radiobiologist

ALIGNMENT: True Neutral

BIO: After two nuclear wars ravaged the Earth, odd things will happen to all sorts of life. This is one of them, a human who has the unfortunate pleasure of having their physical composition be mainly nuclear radiation. Much about his early past is kept under wraps by the US government, who sent him away as a infant to a remote chemical research base in Alaska, in fear of him being the next nuclear detonation. Left without proper social interaction and is just seen as a genetic anomaly, it left him with a warped view of life. With incredibly poor socialization skills but a surprisingly large scientific intellect, he has been reduced to hidden-away lab worker, who’s aware of essentially being a captive but is shocking content with it. After all, if he were to be released, the genral public wouldn’t take too kindly to a mannequin-like being with stark white skin and exposed green goo leaking out of his facial orifices, with a near constant glowing aura.

NAME: ‘Mark’ (he was never properly named, and this is just a name given to him by ‘John’. His ACTUAL name is Specimen 1258)

AGE: 21

GENDER: Male

SEXUALITY: Literally doesn’t care at all

RACE: Literally Nothing

OCCUPATION: Convict, former hitman

ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Evil

BIO: What’s more strange than one severely irradiated human being with physical nuclear radiation as flesh and blood? His red colored doppelgänger. With a past even more shrouded in mystery, this ‘man’ seems to originate from the wastes, the former parts of the US that were scarred from the previous two wars. Claiming to be the next step in human evolution, he is incredibly cruel and harsh, and when introducing himself to the criminal underworld as the ‘best’ hitman, he was severely feared by many. Even other rival hitmen who genetically or cybernetically augmented themselves saw him as a legitimate threat to themselves, as after all, he’s a actual living biohazard. They all chipped in together to pin him against who they believe is true my IMMUNE to him, another ungodly hitman with a liquid metal composition. The plan worked, as letting him just step foot into NYC triggered radiation alarms, thus exposing him to the government for the very first time. After a short stint at a supermax prison, he was given a deal: stop irradiating the guards and convicts, and we’ll move you to a more private place where you can do basically almost anything you want. The place in question? A remote research base in Alaska.....

[nmik-agere]

♡ Littlespace ♡

Sadly, I accidentally deleted an ask regarding littlespace while trying to edit it and add on to it so I decided I needed to make a post regarding it!

What is littlespace?

Littlespace is a term that derived from the 18+ ageplay kink community. It is a term that submissives in the ageplay/cgl community use to describe the voluntary psychological shift they create themselves to motivate themselves to metaphorically feel younger and happy. Littlespace is a term to describe a certain mood; or headspace a person has while consciously being aware of their chronological age and withholding to their cognitive abilities while still being aware of age appropriate behavior that they themselves can control. It is a hobby and a coping mechanism people use to cope and distress and enjoy embracing the innocence of childhood and releasing and expressing their alter ego or the child within. It is also a type of subspace; a distinct, noticeable shift in a persons mental and physical state provoked by BDSM activities, specifically BDSM activities that fall under the subcategory of ageplay, such as ageplay itself or cgl and it’s variants and ab/dl.

Didn’t the term littlespace derive from the DID community?

The term Littlespace did not derive from mental health facilities towards those who have dissociative identity disorders. The term you are getting confused with is the term Little. In dissociative disorders a system; a person with DID or OSDD may have a child alter that they refer to as a Little because that person in their system is a child. Trauma at a young age is the cause of developing a dissociative disorder and experiencing age sliding or having a child alter, which is a form of age regression. The term littlespace has never been used in context to refer to age sliding or a child alter fronting. Littlespace is not a clinical DID or OSDD term, It has never been used by clinicians; psychologist or therapist.

Is littlespace an alternative term for regression?

No! Despite the improper use of the term littlespace on social media, littlespace is not a term to describe the regressive mindset that is due to trauma, psychiatric disorders, neurological/developmental disorders, and intellectual and cognitive disorders. Regression is a defensive coping mechanism. A defense mechanism is an automatic response or reaction of the body that is an unconscious mental process used to avoid conscious anxiety or conflict. Age regression being a defense mechanism means it can not be a deliberate activity, unlike littlespace. Littlespace is about distressing, coping, and recreation, It has nothing to do with safeguarding your mind unconsciously as an instinct learned through trauma against feelings and thoughts that are too difficult for you to cope with consciously in order to escape and protect yourself. It has nothing to do with the loss of intellectual or cognitive abilities or experiencing a dissociative intrusion or an emotional flashback due to being triggered. When a person is in littlespace they are not retreating to an earlier mental or behavioral level that is the reversion to a chronologically earlier or less adapted pattern of behavior and feeling that they have to periodically live with. Littlespace is not a defensive mechanism because it is voluntary. When people put themselves in this certain headspace as a coping mechanism or as a hobby, physically, emotionally, and mentally they do not believe they are chronologically and biologically a child.

The term littlespace has also never been used in the medical field or the medical community by psychologist, therapist, or patients. If it was an alternative term for regression or a term that was cohesive with regression it would be known by those who work with people who regress in the medical field and by the community of those who regress since regression is a psychological term. There would be a history of the term littlespace associated with trauma, psychiatric disorders, and intellectual and cognitive disorders, and it would be a term used sometimes when referring to having a dissociative intrusion or an emotional flashback. The term littlespace hasn’t been associated with regression until 2016 due to online tumblr community discourse. The CGLRE community in particular. People who use the term littlespace to identify regression are using a term that derived from a subcategory of BDSM in replace of a psychological term made to describe their experiences and they are misinterpreting the original definition of littlespace; mixing a defensive mechanism with a voluntary hobby and coping mechanism. In other words they are mixing a conscious process with an unconscious one. This is not okay. Using the term Littlespace to explain regression can also make people misconstrue the definition of regression. This should not be supported.

Is the term littlespace SFW?

No! SFW stands for safe for work. Littlespace is not safe for the work place! Since the term littlespace oriented from the bdsm kink community it makes the term littlespace inherently NOT safe for work. It is clear for people to understand that CGL (DDLG) is not safe for work because it is a subcategory of BDSM; it is inherently a Kink whether or not it’s non-sexual or not. You can not take a term that derived from a subcategory of BDSM and make it completely safe for the public. Something that is safe for work is content, actions, and speech that would hold no issues if your superviser were to find out about it. It would also be content, actions, and speech that would be okay to be shared with your boss and your coworkers. If individuals at work were to see you using an adult pacifier at work or looking at text post or photos regarding people who are not physically babies or toddlers using baby items it would be deemed as inappropriate regardless if it’s not sexual and there is no topic of BDSM mentioned. The content, actions, and speech that comes up on your search results from looking up the word littlespace could be considered obscene material because the supreme court and the states have a direct interest in public morality. Material is also considered obscene if the material appeals to prurient interest or depicts offensive sexual nature. It is clear to see that Littlespace is stigmatized to adult themes, it can be traced back to its roots, the kink community. Your boss could identify your behavior as engaging in inappropriate activity at the workplace. The first definition of littlespace that you see by looking up the term in google is “the mindset or headspace in which an adult baby or little feels most carefree, accepted, and mentally youthful. Some adult babies or littles are only in littlespace during certain times while others may always be in littlespace as part of their natural personality.” It is not okay to behave like a child at work. The bold words are also terms that can be found within the BDSM community. SFW does not mean nonsexual and non-kink, and just because your hobby or lifestyle is nonsexual and is not apart of bdsm because what you’re doing isn’t a playful usage of sexual concepts that are overt, accentuated, and unambiguously expressive of sexuality, sensuality, and intimacy doesn’t mean it will always be seen as something cute, innocent, and harmless towards an outsider. A lot of people do not find “littlespace” as something tasteful or healthy. Some alternative lifestyles are too taboo to be considered appropriate regardless if it’s non-sexual. At the workplace you want to make sure on your break you are viewing and partipating in normal mundane activity that doesn’t hold any risk towards you getting in trouble or being fired from your job. You want your behavior to be considered as something society would see as normative and morally okay to do and view at work that wouldn’t require an inappropriate explanation. Unless you work at a very liberal work environment, little space is not SFW!

Disclaimer: I am not saying that it isn’t okay for people who have natural childlike personalities and characteristics to work. Nor am I saying that anyone who has childish interests or an alternative lifestyle where they like a collective of cute and playful items or they employ tendencies much younger than they chronologically are can not discreetly express or look at different interests, traits, or habits that make him/her/them unique and shows a part of who they are. For example wearing a Disney necklace or watch at work, having a childlike picture frame on your desk, having a plush keychain on your bag or briefcase, or looking up shopping photos of teddy bears or a set of colored pencils, there is nothing wrong with doing so. Littlespace isn’t about being naturally childlike though, it’s more so refers to getting yourself consciously in a chronologically younger headspace, where in that headspace role play is heavily involved and so is heavily presenting behavior people wouldn’t prescribe as age appropriate. Littlespace is a hobby and a coping mechanism, not an identity of self expression. Littlespace can be considered a act of releasing and expressing your alter ego or the child within you that you don’t normally publicly expose. It is not safe for work.

Should you support people not in kink using the term littlespace?

Supporting people who aren’t in kink using the term little space is very ambivalent. Logically people who aren’t involved in kink should not use the term littlespace because it is a term that was created in the bdsm kink community and it was inherently for people who are within the subcategories of bdsm, specifically ageplay and it’s subcategory cgl and it’s variants, and ab/dl. Using the term littlespace when you are not in kink can be considered appropriating from the BDSM ageplay/cgl/abdl kink community. Not believing the term littlespace is a kink term in itself doesn’t mean it isn’t considered one by a majority of people, especially those who are apart of the communities that created the term. Since the term littlespace is associated to an adult community and adult activities it is not safe or appropriate for minors to use this term. It is also not okay for adults who allow minors in their space to use this term. Using the term little space when you are not a submissive in bdsm allows people, including abusers and predators to misinterpret your interest and what you do. Minors should not be associated to an adult community centered around prurient interest and actions they can not consent to. (sex, fetishes, bondage, discipline, sadochism, masochism, dominance, and submission.) Using the term little space as a minor or a person not in kink is sharing a term with an adult community and it makes you associated to kink even when you aren’t a participant of it. No one wants to be responsible for jeopardizing safety if a danger were to occur from promoting this behavior. More than anything safety should be more important than the popularity of a term or liking how a term sounds. It doesn’t make sense to use the term little space in an environment surrounded by kinksters who also use that term. Separating non-kink communities and labels from kink communities and labels is important for safety and educational purposes. When people use the term littlespace when they are not a submissive in kink they are misconstruing the definition of the term. It is also not ethical to tell an entire community that has established something years ago that certain terminology isn’t theirs anymore just because you want what they have. You can not reclaim terminology that wasn’t yours or your community’s to begin with.

On the other hand, the word little is an adjective. According to context the definition of the word little is something small in size; not big; not large; tiny. It is small in number, or small in amount or degree; small in condition, distinction, or scope. It means young. Lastly it can be referred to something or someone that is pleasingly small. The word space is a noun. According to context the definition of space is a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied; it is a place that is available for a particular purpose. It is also the freedom or opportunity to express oneself, resolve a personal difficulty, be alone, etc. by distancing yourself from other people or things in order to remain comfortable. There should be no problem supporting nonsexual roleplayers and people who have childlike personalities that naturally employ childlike tendencies, characteristics, and interest using the term littlespace as long as they are using this term in appropriate places where the meaning of this term will not be misconstrued. Language is fluid and it is everchaging depending on what’s said and what’s understood. A word or acronym being used a certain way does not mean it’s connected to another group that uses that term the same way, regardless if it’s similar. A lot of words share similar or identical spelling but mean completely different things! The definition of the word littlespace has changed drastically over time. It has adapted to the wants of others in a different environment. This is called semantic change. Semantic change is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage. The term littlespace has also gone through what is called polysemy. Polysemy is the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word, phrase, or concept. Polysemous words share the same or related origins or roots according to history.

The following sentences contain some examples of polysemy:

He drank a glass of milk.

He forgot to milk the cow.

The enraged actor sued the newspaper.

He read the newspaper.

She ran to get the groceries.

I finally get the joke you told the other day.

He fixed his hair.

They fixed a date for the wedding.

People should be able to call their environments and creations whatever they want to call their environments and creatons. It is inappropriate to label something a child made or is doing as a kink if a child were to tell you they named their environment or creation as something and they explained to you in an appropriate way why they chose that name. As an adult you should keep that to yourself. It is wrong to project your kink on to minors and unconsenting individuals. Interpretatng words involves much more than etymology and definitions. It’s also about context and conventions and how the word is used and what it is intended to convey. Littlespace is a well established term that is understood and is respected as not associated to kink. Despite its origin and many submissives in kink still using the term littlespace how it was originally intended: as a form of subspace or a term to express indulging in the fetish and sexual activity of ageplay, the term littlespace is only refered to describe the voluntary psychological shift a person creates themselves to motivate themselves to metaphorically feel younger. Littlespace is a word to describe a headspace people have as a hobby and a coping mechanism used to cope and distress and embrace the innocence of childhood. It is not a term owned or used only by participants of the kink community anymore. Online today it is used more by those not within the subcategories of BDSM, and a vast majority within these subcategories see littlespace as something non-sexual. As long as people understand the origin of the term littlespace for safety reasons and kink spaces are separated from non-kink spaces anyone should be able to use the term littlespace. No one can claim the name of something that is now considered as an entire concept and use it to exclude others. So many people have sentimental value towards the term littlespace. Littlespace for a lot of individuals is a term that helps them feel calm and grounded and many people have memories attached to the term. It is not fair to take that away from others since the term is polysemous now. If people using the term littlepace aren’t causing harm to anyone and It is not illegal for those not in kink to use this term then people need to ageee to disagree and leave them alone by not interacting with each other.

How can I use the term littlespace safely if I’m not a participant of kink?

Using the term littlespace as a minor or a person not in kink is best off of social media and only around people you trust who feel the same way you do about the term. If you are already using the term littlespace on social media it’s best you do so in an environment where the term will not be mixed in with how those in kink use this term. This means it is best to use this term on social media platforms where you can make your account private, such as Instagram and Twitter. Not using the tag littlespace itself and not allowing those who can’t see the that the term littlespace is polysemous in your interaction criteria (DNI) is also important. If you are a minor, no adults in kink communities should be following you. As always you have to continuously be careful on the internet. Please remember internet safety! Always block those that make you uncomfortable. 💗 Please be careful.

*People will still be uncomfortable regardless of either way you decide to use the term (for kink purposes or for non-kink purposes) Please treat others how they should be treated and respect everyone! If you don’t have anything informative or nice to say don’t say anything at all.

[blackandblueandstars]

Just Another Day Pt12

TRIGGER WARNING: Discusses non-consensual relations and violence

Pt1 Pt2 Pt3 Pt4 Pt5 Pt6 Pt7 Pt8 Pt9 Pt10 Pt11

The prosecutor began by asking Guy about the shooting and his role in it.

"So you were the one shooting, is that correct?"

"That is correct," he answered.

"So," asked the prosecutor, "Why did you come here and go to that specific mall?"

"That's where Amy was," he said. "That's where she told me to go. That's where I was supposed to shoot her, so that she could fake her death and we could leave."

"And how did you communicate with Amy?"

"Texted," said Guy. "Met in person."

The questions continued. They showed the text messages, made their claims about Amy's invovlement. Gloria rebutted many of the claims, and even tripped Guy up once or twice, exposing holes in his story.

"So tell me about your relationship with Amy," said Gloria.

"I loved her, but not as much as she loved me. She was desperate to be with me. She wanted away from this life. She wanted back, and I mean, who can blame her?" he asked, winking at Amy.

Kamilah, eyes glowing red, jerked forward only to be stopped by Adrian and Jax on either side of her. Adrian took her hand briefly, quickly pulling his hand out of her grip after she crushed it.

"So why did you go out of your way to come here and shoot people?"

"I..." Guy stuttered.

"If she was so desperate, why didn't she follow through and fake her death?"

"Uh..." said Guy.

"I mean, you seem like the desperate one to me."

"Objection!" shouted the prosecutor.

"Withdrawn," said Gloria.

"What's so special about Amy? All those girls and you followed her. Is it because she didn't want you?"

"She wanted me," said Guy.

"Is it because you just didn't do it for her?"

"That's not true," Guy said darkly.

"Is it because you couldn't keep her under your control?"

Guy leapt from the bench. "I own that bitch," he shouted. "She's mine. She'll be back with me. One way or another!"

The bailiff rushed forward to control Guy and thr judge demanded order.

"No further questions, your honor," said Gloria.

Kamilah clasped her hands as she watched Amy take the stand. Gloria went easy on her, establishing a timeline, reiterating that the text messages were never read as proved by the cell phone company, visiting gee relationship with Guy and her current life and how she felt about it.

When the prosecutor stepped up, Kamilah took a deep breath, preparing herself for the worst.

"Amy, are you a lesbian?" he asked.

Amy was off balance, Kamilah could see it. What was the relevance of her sexuality?

"Um," said Amy. "I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?" he asked, in her face. "How can you be in a loving, committed relationship if you don't even know if you're attracted to her?"

Amy began to answer but was cut off.

"But you like Guy's dick, right?" Gasps went through the courtroom. "He got you off in ways this," he paused for emphasis, "woman never could." He sneered in disgust at the mention of Kamilah. "That's why you needed him back. Why you were willing to kill people. Because you desperately needed a good fuck."

"Order!" shouted the judge. "Counselor, watch your language."

"The prosecution rests," he said, ending the questioning. Amy stood, confused and panicked, looking between Gloria and Kamilah. She had spent weeks preparing, but she was not prepared for whatever that was.

Kamilah sat there, shocked. What was the play here? What was he trying to do? None of this made any sense. The jury went to their quarters for deliberation and the court room cleared out.

Kamilah sat there, mulling over what she had just heard. Nothing about this trial made sense. It was almost as if it were an attack on her relationship with Amy rather than a legal matter. Something wasn't sitting right with her. She looked at Adrian.

"Something is wrong," she said. "Something about this entire thing is wrong."

Adrian responded. "How so?"

"It doesn't feel like a regular mortal legal dispute," she said. "It feels like someone is coming after Amy and me."

"Hm," said Adrian. "Who, though?"

"I don't know," said Kamilah with a sigh. "Perhaps I'm just being paranoid."

It was a little over an hour when they jury had decided on a verdict.

"That was fast," said Lily.

"Too fast," said Kamilah, worried.

The jury filed back out, sitting down. The judge reviewed their verdict.

The verdict was read. Kamilah heard the words "no bill" and began to weep in happiness.

They had done it. Amy was free.

Amy hugged Gloria tightly, tears of relief running down her face. She moved through the crowd to Kamilah, jumping into her arms.

"You did it," said Kamilah.

"We did it," Amy replied, crying into her neck. "Thank you for sticking by me."

Kamilah smiled, running her hand through the girl's hair.

"There is nowhere else I'd rather be," Kamilah told her.

Kamilah pulled away, allowing their friends to speak with Amy. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a familiar face. She grabbed Adrian by the elbow.

"Adrian," she said, "isn't that one of the Baron's men, there, talking to the prosecutor?"

Adrian looked in the direction she pointed.

"It is," he answered. "You don't think..."

Kamilah started towards the man, Adrian scrambling to keep up.

"As a matter of fact, I do," said Kamilah, enraged.

The vampire spotted her and turned to flee down a hallway. She quickly gave chase, cornering him.

"What are you running for?" she hissed.

"I--I--" he stuttered. "I was just following orders."

Adrian interceded. "What orders?" he asked.

"Th-the Baron told me to put pressure on our dirty cops and the p-prosecutor to charge Amy," he said.

"I will rip your arms from your body!" Kamilah shouted. Adrian held her back, trying to keep the peace. Jax, Lily and Amy appeared.

"What's going on?" asked Amy, seeing how upset Kamilah was.

"He set you up," Kamilah seethed.

"Jax, can you escort the man? He's coming with us for further questioning," said Adrian.

"And then I kill him," said Kamilah, eyes blazing.

"Kami? " said Amy.

Kamilah closed her eyes, willing herself to calm down. She turned, looking at Amy.

"I'm sorry," she said, taking her hand.

"It's okay," said Amy. "Can we just leave?"

"Yes," Kamilah answered. "Let's."

Jax grabbed the goon by his arms and led him to the car. The group went to Raines Corp. While Adrian and Jax interrogated the vampire, Kamilah and Lily sat with Amy in Adrian's office.

"Kamilah," Amy said, after being quiet for a while.

"Yes, my love?"

"I..." Amy started. "I love you. I want to be with you..."

"Am--" Kamilah tried to interrupt her, but Amy raised her hand.

"No," she said, quieting Kamilah. "I need to say this. You make me happy and you meet all of my needs, emotionally, mentally, physically. I don't want this experience to make you doubt my love for you and how happy I am in our relationship. You're my dream come true, Kamilah. I never thought I deserved someone who treats me as wonderfully as you do. I thought Guy was the best I could do. But you proved me wrong, and I never ever want you to feel like you're not enough, because you are so much more than I ever imagined. I love you."

Kamilah smiled softly at Amy, pulling her in for a deep kiss.

"You deserve all the best, Amy. You have no clue the ways you've saved me, revived me. You're special, my firefly. Never ever doubt that."

Lily made a faux gag sound. "You guys are so cute it's disgusting," she said.

"Shall we check on our captive?" Kamilah asked.

"Yes please," said Lily, cracking her knuckles.

Part 13

Tag list: @h-doodles @scarlet-letter-a0114 @idkbutkamilah @lightning-fury @galaxyside-0 @blogsupitssam @ilovetaylor13m @hellodemoiselle @morgensternfe11 @save-me-the-last-dance @la-guera-69 @adrianrainesworld

[elenatria]

I think my question got cut off: Is it okay to have sexual fantasies or kinks? I just feel guilty about pursuing what I might like sexually. I feel like my parents or my friends or other people will judge me. (I’m on the younger side) Do you have any advice?

I’m glad you sent it again. ^^

To be honest, I’m not an expert or a professional and, seeing that I don’t know more than you tell me, with no specific details at my disposal, my answer would be inadequate. I’m not so sure if I’m qualified to give advice because I don’t know what you’re after and what you mean by kinks.

That said, we must first make a distinction between reality and fantasy. There is stuff that is both illegal and immoral (pedophilia, bestiality, torture) and then there’s... everything else, meaning stuff that inflicts no unwanted pain to yourself and others. 

As far as fantasies are concerned, you have free reign over what you imagine and no one can tell you not to. I know that the purity police have been saying for years that it doesn’t take long for someone who draws/writes dark kinks to actually practice them but that’s bullshit, I have seen many films with Hitler but I’m yet to invade Poland. There’s a whole list of “dark” kinks that I don’t think I have to mention (dub con etc etc), kinks that people want to explore through their works but when it  comes to real life, that’s a different story. You must stay safe no matter what you do and you mustn’t expose yourself to people who might take advantage of you or hurt you, physically or emotionally.

But if you just want to enjoy your body (and your mind) freely whether you’re straight or LGBTQ, and as long as you’re not into cutting yourself or... killing people, my opinion is that you should let go of guilt and shame. 

Your parents would tell you to wait until you’re an adult, and I’d probably say the same to my kids.

So I’m not here to tell you “yes you have permission to do whatever you want right NOW”, this is not my jurisdiction. 

Rather, I’d tell you that YES, it’s totally ok to have sexual fantasies and kinks. As for pursuing what you like, and since I don’t know what you like, I’d say you must find yourself, who you truly are, never mind what others say. As long as it doesn’t involve hurting yourself and others. :-)

[datmornstar]

3:24am (Possible trigger warning)

When I can’t sleep my mind goes all over the place. One thing that’s been on my mind is how I used to believe that as a man that’s attracted to other men, the only way I would have any relevance to other men would be how my body looks. It’s the first thing that people see. My face, my size, my color, my build, all would determine my worth in others eyes.

Today I shared an experience about the first and last time I’ve modeled nude in a photoshoot. As a dancer I was comfortable being around other bodies and in the environment I was in while I was still an undergrad, sexuality was pretty much shoved in my face all the time. At some point I’ve became sort of numb to it and to this day I can’t relate or understand how sexually driven other gay men are, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Anyway, because of that and the common body types being constantly favored, I was for lack of better terms undesirable in the eyes of the gay community here. Back then, as someone who was attracted to men but unaware that it was more on a romantic scale than sexual, I couldn’t understand that just because I wasn’t deemed “attractive” or a part of a “preference,” I was pretty much an after thought to a lot of people when I merely wanted to make friends at the time. I was incredibly lonely.

I don’t remember exactly how but I came into contact with a photographer that specifically photographed gay men. I noticed that there was a great deal of colored representation, specifically native, and I felt comfortable making conversation about a possible photoshoot. I felt like maybe if I was under the right light or seen at certain angles and had something to be proud of in regards to my body, people would finally give me the time of day. I felt comfortable exposing myself in this manner if it meant someone giving me the time of day. The photographer and I got on friendly terms and we started talking often. He would make advances toward me but I paid it no mind; it was refreshing to have someone “want” me, at the time. He said he would do a photoshoot of me for free, what more could I ask for? Naturally, I asked an acquaintance at the time to come with me for safety purposes, and we both went together to have photos taken.

I recall feeling a bit out of place, but having someone I knew with me helped me feel more comfortable. I went first, and he went second. Then we were asked to take our shirts off. I felt somewhat okay with it, since my friend was more than willing. We got asked to take some shots together, in which I started to feel awkward, because I’ve never been physically intimate with that friend, let alone having our skin touch like that. We were offered alcohol at some point, but we both declined, which should have been a red flag for me. Then we were asked to take our clothes off. I realized now that I was only going along with everything because my friend was, and he was a lot more comfortable with expressing his body and sexuality than I was, and we were never really close friends to begin with, so I went along with everything because I felt it’s what I was expected to do. I never felt so alien in my skin before. I felt guilty because I felt like I was supposed to be erect. I felt scared because I didn’t know if backing out meant I was going to get blacklisted, or that I would look bad in front of my friend who did everything without second thought. In the end, there were about 5-8 photos that were finalized and kept. Couple years later I asked for them to be taken down, but got denied. I don’t know if they’re still up on his website. I’m afraid to look.

Doing that photoshoot gave me nothing. What’s a few likes and/or reblogs over your emotional well-being? It didn’t cure my loneliness, or body insecurities, or make me feel anymore special or worthy. It didn’t give me the friends I wanted, or the attention I needed. After all these years I can’t say one positive thing about having my naked body on the internet now, and thankfully, no one is looking for it, nor has seeked that out, because I am comfortable now not being what every man wants physically. I don’t want to be seen or known for that. I don’t want a following because of my body, and there’s no shame for the people who do; you are happy and proud of your physical appearance and that’s a special thing. I just know that that’s not for me, and isn’t going to be for me, and I’m okay with that. I want to be known for what I have to offer emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Like my Twitch for example. I kept thinking that maybe if I looked a certain way I would have more of a following, but that was just me being insecure. I want to build my Twitch community based on my hard work alone and the connections I’ve made to people on a personal level. That’s what I aspire to do in everything I am.

I’m not the only one who’s insecure about their body on here, that’s for sure. Hell, even the people who you follow and reblog constantly because of their body, can be insecure about themselves. Self-doubt isn’t biased, and isn’t reserved for those who are deemed “unattractive” or “not your type.” I guess something to take away from this is that what matters more is what the person in front of the mirror thinks of you, and not everyone who’s behind a screen. Work your way towards accepting your body despite its “flaws” that you deem it to have. No amount of likes or reblogs are going to make YOU love yourself in the end, so don’t be dependent on other people’s opinions or approval. Just be yourself for yourself.

[parentsnevertoldus]

little-t trauma

CW// health issues, death, suicide, homophobia, racism

When I was little, I thought that “drama” and “trauma” were the same thing. Middle school drama consisted of which popular long-haired sk8er boy was scooping the boobs of which popular pubescent girl; whose secrets were exposed when someone was ousted from their friend group; which 8th graders were dating high school seniors. While, in my experience, these words can often describe each other--drama can be traumatic and vice versa--they mean two different things. However, looking back on my childhood as I got older, I realized the way I had used them interchangeably was, well, correct. 

Whether it’s “Big-T Trauma” or “little-t trauma,” the psychological and physiological responses are the same. Big-T Trauma is an event that happens once but is extremely impactful all at one time, for example, death, assault, and attack, or witnessing an attack. These instances are often more accepted by wider society as stressful. Little-t trauma is by no means less traumatic. However, these recurring events are often invalidated and normalized by society; the burden is often shifted to the victim with the expectation that one should just “get over it.”  Examples of these include chronic bullying, racism, body-shaming, sexism, and other forms of everyday violence and discrimination. What determines whether we call it trauma in the first place is how we feel after the experience. The more frightened or helpless you feel, the more likely that this is trauma. 

Having to let boys playfully “scoop” your boobs every day at school or risk social ostracization? Trauma. Having your deepest darkest secrets exposed at school? Trauma. Being ousted from your friend group? Trauma. Dating someone way too old for you? Trauma. Being the only Black kid at your school? Trauma. Trying to pass for straight? Trauma. Hiding your gender identity from everyone you know? Trauma. No one deserves that.

Minority Stress is a little-t trauma (in contrast to the big-T Trauma of a hate crime).  The term minority stress refers to the excess recurring stress to which individuals from stigmatized social categories are exposed as a result of their position as a social minority. This stress from alienation accumulates over time and results in both physiological and mental health issues.

How Trauma Affects the Body

Increased blood pressure: have you ever heard the expression “higher than a Black man’s blood pressure?” Some epidemiological studies have found that exposure to racial discrimination was positively related to elevated levels of blood pressure in Black people (1). Experiencing discrimination in a broad range of contexts can induce considerable stress. 

Higher rates of chronic disease: Everyday discrimination is positively associated with coronary artery calcification (9),  diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, depression, cancer, and early death (12). Because of this, not only do POC (specifically Black people) experience worse health earlier, but this deterioration accumulates giving rise to higher cortisol levels and inflammation in racial, sexual, and gender minorities alike (13).

Poor sleep:  Black people are less likely than white people to have a decline in blood pressure during sleep, which is associated with increased risk for mortality and traumatic cardiovascular events like heart attacks (11).

Birthing mortality: The weathering hypothesis proposes that the health of Black women may begin to deteriorate in early adulthood as a physical consequence of cumulative socioeconomic disadvantage. This age the body via an increase in allostatic load, the physiological burden imposed by stress: norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol, and DHEA-S which gives rise to elevated blood pressure & cholesterol (14). During childbirth, these problems are correlated with higher rates of fetal/neonatal death and death of the birthing person as well as low birth weights and prematurely born babies.

Mental health and physical health are inextricably linked. 

How Trauma Affects Us Socially & Emotionally

Psychological distress: Perceptions of discrimination are related to high levels of psychological distress, low levels of life satisfaction & happiness, depressive symptoms, poorer physical health (2), & cognitive impairment (10). Internalized racism is correlated with higher levels of alcohol use (3) while internalized homophobia correlates to higher levels of illicit drug use.

Fatalism:  Understanding one's position as a victim of oppression, rather than lessening the degree of personal responsibility, diminishes feelings of self-efficacy. This leads to a fatalistic attitude that reduces coping effort in the face of adversity (4,5) and, in gay men, is correlated to increased risk of death by suicide. 

Stereotype threat:  When someone is aware of the negative stereotypes that are applied to them, this creates expectations, anxieties, and reactions that can adversely affect social & psychological functioning (6). When a stigma of inferiority is activated for Black people in experimental conditions, exam performance worsens. Similarly, women who were told that they perform worse than men had lower exam scores than control groups (7). Stereotype threat can increase anxiety, reduce self-regulation, & impair decision-making processes and communication abilities (8).

Trauma makes it hard to trust others; it makes us want to self-isolate from friends and family, snap at loved ones more frequently, makes us more susceptible to disease and chronic flare-ups, and startle more easily. Traumatic experiences, especially ones we face daily and have little control over (microaggressions, anyone?), can lead to hopelessness and chronic mental illness. And while white cisgender heterosexuals have problems too, the problems that oppressed minority groups face have a much larger effect on their cardiovascular systems and overall health.

Discrimination and oppression are literally killing people. In a capitalist society where you are only as valuable as your economic or reproductive output (#tbt to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade), where women and minorities are barred access to equal healthcare, thus decreasing their values as workers, the cycle of poverty continues.

Ever wonder where the Angry Black Woman stereotype came from? Ever think that maybe her anger was justified?

While this article focuses on Black people and cishet white gay men, let's remember the overall message: experiencing oppression (external and internalized) causes mental and physical health problems that are NOT YOUR FAULT. These experiences are compounded at the intersections of our marginalized identities which further aggravates the tangible effects of systemic oppression. And guess what? You deserve fucking better.

Click here for some self-care ideas and techniques!

Sources

1.  Krieger N. & Sidney S. Racial and discrimination: risk factors for high blood pressure? Social Science & Medicine. 1990; 30 (12): 1273-81.

2. Williams & Chung, in press (NSBA)

3. Taylor, R. J., & Chatters, L. M. (1991). Nonorganizational religious participation among elderly black adults. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 46(2), S103-111.

4. Jones, E., & Matsumoto, D. (1982). Psychotherapy with the underserved: Recent developments. In L. Snowden (Ed.), Reaching the underserved: Mental health needs of neglected populations. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

5. Neighbors, H. W., Jackson, J. S., Broman, C. L., & Thompson, E. (1996). Racism and the mental health of African Americans: The role of self and system blame. Ethnicity and Disease, 6(1-2), 167-175.

6. Fischer, C. S., Hout, M., Jankowski, M. S., Lucas, S. R., Swidler, A., Voss, K. (1996). Inequality by design: Cracking the bell curve myth Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

7. Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52(6), 613-629.

8. Inzlicht, M., Kang, S. K. (2010). Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 467-481.

9. Lewis, T. T., Barnes, L. L., Bienias, J. L., Lackland, D. T., Evans, D. A., Mendes de Leon, C. F.(2009). Perceived discrimination and blood pressure in older African American and White adults. Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 64A(9), 1002-1008.

10. Barnes, L. L., Lewis, T. T., Begeny, C. T., Yu, L., Bennett, D. A., Wilson, R. S. (2012). Perceived discrimination and cognition in older African Americans. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 18(5), 856-865.

11. Profant, J., Dimsdale, J. E. (1999). Race and diurnal blood pressure patterns: A review and meta-analysis. Hypertension, 33(5), 1099-1104.

12. National Research Council (US) Panel on Race, Ethnicity, and Health in Later Life; Anderson NB, Bulatao RA, Cohen B, editors. Critical Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health in Late Life. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2004. 14, Significance of Perceived Racism: Toward Understanding Ethnic Group Disparities in Health, the Later Years. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25531/

13. Gender differences in age-related changes in HPA axis reactivity.

Seeman TE, Singer B, Wilkinson CW, McEwen B

Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2001 Apr; 26(3):225-40.

14. Price of adaptation--allostatic load and its health consequences. MacArthur studies of successful aging.

Seeman TE, Singer BH, Rowe JW, Horwitz RI, McEwen BS

Arch Intern Med. 1997 Oct 27; 157(19):2259-68.

[evanfleischer]

Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense. —  W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter”

Walter Benjamin spoke of an “angel of history” in his unpublished-at-the-time essay, “On The Concept Of History,” writing that  — 

His [that is, the angel’s face] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s definition of ‘the angel of history’ enables us to look a little bit more closely at the function of the symbol and the idea of ‘an angel of history’ in The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. It’s also in discussing both Walter Benjamin’s angel and The Rings of Saturn that we can discuss Wings of Desire and take note of how the three engage with the other.

There are literal connections and all but literal connections that can be drawn between the three texts: in the library scene in Wings of Desire, per the screenplay, one reader studies Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” which is referenced by Walter Benjamin in relation to “the angel of history” (and which prompts the above-quoted paragraph), which itself serves as a point of intellectual reference in The Rings of Saturn.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystalizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history  —  blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled (orig.: aufheben) … The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

The Rings Of Saturn is manifestly aware of an oppressed past and the notion of “blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.” The text is aware of how frequently it looks upon a “wreckage,” so aware that the voice of the text frequently slides upward into a register filled with hauntings — but not just Gothic-styled hauntings pegged to a specific object, i.e., a single ghost haunting a single house because of a single terrible act committed one generational leap back into the past.

Sebald pursues a different path: when the reader ascends to a certain level in the text when one might feel a more ‘direct’ encounter with a ‘ghost,’ i.e., that space between a pile of herring and the bodies of those murdered in the Holocaust as defined by the implicit metaphor, we also share an intellectual space with thinking over of what generational trauma means while also operating in the middle of an encounter with ‘place.’ (The narrator can be expected to only accomplish so much, being human, after all.) The book has names for the things that have produced that “wreckage” — imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and fascism; and the book traces their evolution well — but merely indicting a large ‘-ism’ isn’t where the mission of The Rings Of Saturn begins or ends. Sebald the narrator seeks out a saint in Nuremberg. An angel seeks to become human in Berlin. Each are on an analogous path and make use of similar tools. In a small essay called “Why Do You Make Films?” written in 1987, Wim Wenders remarked that “The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.” Sebald himself was quoted in an interview flagged by the podcast Backlisted as saying that “The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in an attic — a nomadic thing that has a small chance only to survive,” making their survival — and the act of ensuring their survival — all the more striking.  And, more often than not, both Sebald and the angel seek to commune with nominally empty spaces.

To explain what occupies this emptiness requires us to talk for a moment about what we mean when we use words like trauma, collective trauma, and generational trauma.

With all three, there’s a rough feeling that lingers with us where we can say that we know it when we see it, feel it, or hear about it. We know it when we keep friends safe in the middle of the night, telling them over the phone to breathe in and breathe out. We know it when we hear a blues song scratchily emanating from the side of an open and otherwise quiet car mechanic’s garage late at night. We know it when we read a book like The Body Keeps The Score and we know it when we watch a television show like Watchmen.

Now, there’s a DSM-5 definition we can break out — which talks about “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” — but that doesn’t incorporate a thousand other things that are part of the landscape of trauma. There is also a certain level of complexity in tracing generational trauma from one generation to the next at the level of biology. As of 2018 — insofar as this writer can make out — no studies exist that follow the trauma a mother might have before she conceives a child, how that trauma changes the genetic make-up of an oocyte (a cell in the ovary that changes to form an ovum), and how that link between the trauma established before conception and the trauma felt by the child is established after the child has been born.

That difficulty doesn’t mean the investigation into generational trauma is illegitimate. In 1966, Vivian M. Rakoff, a Canadian psychologist, described the children of parents who survived the Holocaust as suffering more acute psychological symptoms than their parents. In the 1990’s, as Rachel Yahuda and Amy Lehrner note in World Psychiatry, as technology developed, time passed, and more investigations were made — 

… offspring of Holocaust survivors were more likely to show HPA axis alterations associated with PTSD, such as lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness … Subsequent investigations documented that maternal and paternal PTSD were associated with different biological outcomes. A post‐hoc analysis of cortisol circadian rhythm data indicated that lower cortisol levels in adult Holocaust offspring were associated with maternal, but not paternal, PTSD.

The HPA axis refers to the connection between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and adrenal glands. GR responsiveness refers to glucocorticoid receptors, which are found throughout the body and play a role in regulating the genes that control development, metabolism, and immune response.

Looking at these results suggests that it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to offer up the reductive assertion that lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness means that someone is both hyper-sensitive and might not feel the stress that the body should otherwise feel if it were in a ‘flight or ‘fight,’ trauma-inducing situation. In other words: the children exhibit the symptoms of the traumatized.

There is much more detail at hand here — studies involving GR gene methylation that parallel but don’t explicitly show genetic transmission of trauma, mothers with PTSD who experienced September 11th rating their children as having higher anxiety in the morning than mothers without PTSD, animals exposed to “chronic stress in utero [that led to] increased male, but not female, HPA stress reactivity,” and ‘secondary traumatization’ — but we should zoom the camera lens out to flag the fact that trauma simply makes itself manifest in the day-to-day lives of individuals in a variety of ways. In Bassel Van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score, the doctor describes patients who “felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart were frozen and [the individual in question was] living behind a glass wall,” as well as other patients who were “suffering from memories,” and notes that “I [the author] could not be [the doctor of a traumatized group] unless they made me one of them.”

This characterization brings us back to the idea of the lead characters in The Rings Of Saturn and Wings Of Desire encountering nominally empty spaces. At Somerleyton Hall in The Rings Of Saturn, the narrator thinks of how “fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion,” a house where “there are … moments, as one passes through the rooms open to the public … when one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent.”

The house is only ‘nominally’ empty because of the action implied by the phrases of “the Arctic Ocean” and “in the heart of the dark continent.” Open up the door of the latter phrase and voices will come rushing through. The alexithymia of trauma located in more than one place — in both the house and the ‘dark continent’ — will find a voice — of exploitation, cruelty, and worse. (Later on, the narrator goes so far as to suggest that the colonial violence of the Belgians in the past makes it manifest in physical deformations in the near-present.)

Consider two scenes in Wings Of Desire. The first is the montage that shows us a glimpse of what happened to Berlin in the war: the camera passes by a destitute man, a domestic argument, and a child screaming for his mother in the street before we transition to the sounds of a bomb siren, see for ourselves the bombs flash bulb across the sky of the city, the shadow of planes and white-yellow search lights, and buildings on fire. Or, as the English writer Thomas Browne puts it in one section of The Rings Of Saturn —

The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so … one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn — an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

The second scene is Peter Falk standing outside a small snack bar in the middle of a muddied expanse. He talks to Bruno Ganz, the angel, and — even though the angel says nothing — they share a moment.

I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face. Just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good. Or, here … To smoke. Have coffee. And, if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or … to draw. You know, you take a pencil, and you make a dark line … then you make a light line. And, together, it’s a good line. Or when your hands are cold — you rub ’em together. You see, that’s good. That feels good. There’s so many good things. But you’re not here. I’m here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me, because I’m a friend. Compañero.

It is agonizingly tempting to liken Falk’s voice here to Sebald’s voice in a one-to-one ratio, even in spite of the fairly central role ‘wreckage’ and melancholy play in The Rings Of Saturn, especially if one were to factor in the consistently sumptuous turns of Sebald’s language, i.e., how the scratchy sounds of a transistor radio playing on a beach are “as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other”; how — instead of a child — one couple in The Hague has an “apricot-colored poodle”; and how — “every now and then” at the Schiphol airport — “the announcers’ voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone’s name.” But just before that scene in the film, Falk is seen wandering through a muddied expanse of earth. “Walking and seeing,” he says in voice over. He turns and looks off in the distance to his right (and the lingering background of the shot.) “That must be the station — not the one where the trains stop, but the station where the station stops.”

“The station where the station stops” is a roundabout way of talking about “the zero hour,” the end of history, or the “inclusion of all exclusions,” which is how the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once described the apocalypse. Falk goes from contemplating the “inclusion of all exclusions” — an enormous collective trauma collectively felt — to talking about simple things with a spirit he can’t see, a spirit who doesn’t feel like it’s part of humanity and wants to be a part of humanity. And Falk wants that spirit there.

Sebald’s narrator has a role in reaching out to the spirits. The angel has a role in reaching out to humanity. Each are working to build a narrative bridge over which those impacted by collective trauma and generational trauma can pass into the story of the present. The aforementioned individuals who felt “emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart[s] were frozen and [they] were living behind a glass wall” might now have a better idea of the path they need to take to unfreeze the heart and come from behind said glass wall. (Or, as it was put in HBO’s Watchmen: “Wounds need air.”) Neither narrator in either text can accomplish the project of building this bridge without the other, as is evidenced by the fact that The Rings Of Saturn all but ends amongst a reconstructed Temple of Jerusalem — an appeal to the judgement of eternity — and Wings Of Desire ends with the angel becoming human and falling in love.

There are a few complications that linger along our path: on one level, Sebald’s narrator doesn’t really ‘do’ much of anything. He walks around, has some associative thoughts, and eventually ends up in the hospital. The same judgement could be passed on the angel: he drifts, becomes human, and — for his troubles — ends up with a colorful coat.

But that reading ignores the role of what it means to be a witness.

“A witness is needed in order for the particular narrative to rise from the inundation of universal sound,” Xavier Vila and Alice Kuzniar wrote of ‘the library scene’ in Wings of Desire in the 1992 Spring issue of Film Criticism, and witnesses abound in both Wings of Desire and The Rings of Saturn. Roger Casement is witnessed on television. The gaze of the painter is witnessed in The Anatomy Lesson. The pathway of a Nazi who becomes the head of the United Nations is witnessed from one era to the next. The descendants of the colonialists — as well as what they took — are witnessed. In looking at a bridge crossing the river Blyth, the narrator also performs an act of witness concerning the growth of capitalism and empire in China.

It is this repeated act of witness that lends a shape of characterization to the seemingly unobserved, un-filled-in narrator. In observing this, we observe a man who is quiet, decent, and thoughtful. We observe a man who knows what it means to genuinely ‘live in the moment.’ We observe his silence in the same fashion that the narrator and housekeeper observe the silence of Major George Wyndham Le-Strange after the latter was one of the ones who liberated Belsen.

By contrast, the angels in Wings Of Desire observe things in an earthward direction, i.e., someone reading in a library — or someone dying as the result of a motorcycle accident  and seeing their life flash before their eyes — 

Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The spots of the first drops of rain. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The blowing grass. The color of stones. The pebbles on the stream’s bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of the house in the house. The dear one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sundays. The horizon. The light from the room in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child.

In each case, we see a deepening of the role of the angel of history as described by Benjamin in his essay. It isn’t just that the angel witnesses the wreckage; it’s that the angel has emotions about the wreckage it wants to share with us. It isn’t just that the storm propels the angel into the future; it’s that the angel has an opinion as to how that wreckage should have conducted itself. The angel of history isn’t about the truth or falsity of history; it’s about who is acknowledged and what it means to share care and concern for those initially lost to history.

The other complication to the arc of this argument is that solely ascribing an interest in the traumatized ‘lessens’ the work of either text — that it strips them of the necessary ineffable mysteriousness that makes art ‘art.’

If that were to hold true — if we were to push our concern with trauma to the side — it still wouldn’t get rid of the fact that there is an emotion we can ascribe to the wreckage of history as described in The Rings Of Saturn. You can’t look at the very end of the book — wherein Sebald notes the death of his father-in-law — and not feel an emotion — that, over the course of history, when a ‘lady of the upper classes’ suffered a grief — which the reader could reasonably read as barely concealed code for ‘a very important woman’ — this is how history would respond (ergo, how we could respond), with …

… heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crêpe de chine … black Mantua silk of which the Norwich silk weavers … had created … to rape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field …

 — but the text doesn’t just stop with the emotion. It begins to move and slides upward to note that these arrangements were done so that  — 

… the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.  

In other words: amidst the wreckage of empire and silk, as you cross from a story about Queen Victoria to fictitious words falsely attributed to Thomas Browne, we realize that a bridge has been built for a dear one close to the narrator’s heart. In fact, all of this is done in the name of building a bridge: the angel bearing witness to the words of a dying motorcyclist in Wings of Desire; Peter Falk (as an ex-angel) bearing witness to an empty space on his way to get a cup of coffee; Sebald’s narrator bearing witness to an empty house or to fishermen on the beach who looked

… as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings.

The late David Foster Wallace once characterized true heroism as “minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer.” The actions undertaken in Wings Of Desire and The Rings Of Saturn highlight just how much weight the words ‘probity’ and ‘care’ carry over the course of a story, as well as what it takes for someone to actually earn that epithet of praise.

[missmentelle]

Could you describe what an emotionally abusive father/the rest of the family would look like? I’m looking back at my life and having an epiphany that maybe my dad was, but he never outright put me down; he’s just super manipulative and has extreme anger problems (usually throwing things to get his point) and then he turns around and acts like a victim because “none of my children love me or want to be my friend”. I’m 23 and out of the house but I still get anxiety when people near me get angry.

There are a lot of possible ways for a parent or family member to be emotionally abusive. In the words of Leo Tolstoy, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. It’s possible for two people to come from equally abusive households and have very few experiences in common. Your family member doesn’t have to have all the characteristics on this list to be abusive, and this list doesn’t cover all possible abusive traits and behaviours - this is just a general guide to the major things that you can expect to see from an abusive family member:

Name calling, put-downs and insults. It is not acceptable for a parent to say harsh, cruel things to their child or call them insulting names. This is not an okay form of discipline. Parents are expected to express their anger and disappointment in healthy ways, even when they are upset. Removing privileges and giving a child a stern talking-to for a bad report card is acceptable. Calling the child “stupid” and telling them they’re an embarrassment is abusive.

You were punished for having emotions. In a healthy household, you have to have the freedom to feel the full range of emotions - sadness, grief, fear, anger, insecurity - without fear that you’re going to be mocked or punished for how you feel. In a healthy household, parents validate their children, comfort them and help them work through their feelings. In abusive households, parents are unable to deal with negative emotions, and demand that their children only display happiness or neutrality in their presence. Any sign of negative emotion is not tolerated.

A complete lack of privacy. Responsible parents should monitor their children’s activities in an age-appropriate way; however, all children need some amount of privacy, and this need for privacy increases as they get older. A parent who reads all diaries, goes through all belongings, reads all messages and constantly accuses you of hiding things is an abusive parent. Parents should also know when to keep your issues between you and themselves; a parent who insists on discussing your most humiliating issues in front of others is not a healthy parent. 

Your goals or ambitions were belittled and mocked. Parents are supposed to support their kids’ dreams. That’s a pretty low bar. It’s natural for a parent to have concerns about a child with risky or unrealistic career ambitions, but a decent parent still finds ways to support their child. A parent who mocks your dreams, implies that you think you’re better than other people, or makes fun of you for not being “good enough” is an abusive parent. 

You were expected to lie for your parents. Abusive parents’ biggest fear is that their behaviour will be uncovered, and they often force their children to lie in order to cover up problems at home. Forcing a child to lie causes stress and guilt for the child, it teaches terrible habits for future relationships, and it prevents issues in the home from being addressed. 

Isolation from others. Abuse generally requires that you not have a support network to help you recognize and escape the abuse, and so abusive parents will do everything they can to keep you isolated. They forbid you from hanging out with friends outside of school. They forbid electronic communication, or monitor everything you send. They sabotage your relationships with your siblings. They convince you that the world outside is dangerous and not to be trusted, so you won’t confide in teachers or peers.

Fear is used as a weapon. A parent doesn’t have to hit you to abuse you. Punching walls, breaking objects, throwing things, slamming doors and screaming are all abusive tactics. These are scary behaviours, and they make you live in constant fear that the parent’s next outburst might involve hurting you or your siblings or pets. 

There is constant emotional manipulation. Healthy parents explain that your misbehaviour has disappointed them, remind you of what is expected of you, and try to work with you to correct the problem. Abusive parents accuse you of never loving them, tell you that you’re the reason they don’t have any friends and tell you that you’re responsible if they die from a heart attack. Small situations get escalated to emotional catastrophes and everything is always about them. Your emotions never come into play - you live your whole life in orbit of your volatile parent.

Expectations of you are unrealistic and constantly changing. You’re never good enough. Ever. Your 95% average should be a 99%. Your lead in the school play is a waste of time when you should be playing sports. Your sports career is a waste of time when you should be getting a job. There is zero tolerance for mistakes or imperfections, and the goal posts are constantly moving. The point isn’t really to ensure your happiness or success - the point is to make sure that you always feel like a failure. 

Mistakes are never forgiven or forgotten. A failed math test from the 4th grade is trotted out as proof that you’re a bad student until you graduate from high school. The one time you talked back in middle school is used as proof that you “never listen” for the rest of your life. There is nothing you can ever do to repair or move past a mistake, no matter how hard you try. You are reminded of all your flaws and shortcomings over and over and over again, and all of the many things you’ve done right pale in comparison to the handful of things you did wrong. 

You are exposed to physical abuse. Witnessing physical abuse is still abuse, even if you never get hit. A parent who abused your other parent or your siblings in front of you was abusing you too. The fear, stress and anxiety that can be caused by living with abuse can be just as severe as the stress of actually being physically abused. 

Affection and love are withheld. Healthy parents hug, kiss, cuddle and smooth your flyaway hairs. They tell you that you are proud of you and ask you how school was. They attend parent-teacher meetings and generally act like they give a shit. A parent who doesn’t care if you live or die is an emotionally neglectful parent, even if you are well-fed and clothed. Similarly, a parent who withholds affection specifically as “punishment” is abusive - children need to know that they will still get love and goodnight kisses, even if they screw up. 

Your parents interact with you as if you were an adult. The parent-child relationship is inherently imbalanced, and parents have to be the adults in the relationship. When a six-year-old tells you that you’re a poo-poo head, you don’t take it personally and start an adult argument. You chuckle and tell them that they’re not being very nice, because they’re too young to engage you as an adult. Abusive parents don’t understand this - children are held to the same expectations as an adult, even when they don’t have the emotional maturity for it. A parent with a rocky marriage may also use a child as a “substitute partner”, forming an inappropriately close relationship where the child is expected to listen to their parent’s adult problems. This could include listening to a parent talk about their financial issues, body image issues, or sex life - issues that children should not be dealing with. 

Trust is constantly betrayed. Your parent gets angry with you for not trusting them with secrets. As soon as you’ve confided the secret, they tell all their friends and neighbours and discuss it openly at the dinner table. This happens over and over, and if you get upset or point out this pattern, you are the one who somehow gets in trouble for it. 

The environment is sexualized. You don’t have to be sexually touched or molested to have experienced sexual abuse. Children should be introduced to the idea of sex in a gradual, age-appropriate manner. A parent who shows a young child pornography, has sex in front of their child, or tells their child graphic details of their sex life is committing child abuse. Likewise, a parent should not be constantly making comments on their child’s body, nagging their child to be more sexual or pressuring their child to engage in sex acts with others. 

Intentional humiliation. Some abusive parents enjoy humiliating their child, even if they deny it. They might intentionally buy their child clothes that are unflattering or ill-fitting, or force their child to get unflattering haircuts. They might also constantly force the child to do things they are bad at, in order to laugh at them. No matter what their tactics, abusive parents know how to wield shame and humiliation as a weapon, and they have no qualms about doing it. 

Obvious cries for help are ignored. No healthy parent could notice self-harm cuts on their child’s arm and walk past without a word. Healthy parents look for signs that their child might be struggling, so that they can intervene. Abusive parents don’t give a shit. They will ignore cuts, bruises, obvious signs of drug use, or any symptoms of mental illness. You could be sobbing in the living room, and they wouldn’t bother to ask what’s wrong. 

It’s important to note that no parents are perfect, and that everyone screws up from time to time. You are not an abusive parent because you flew off the handle one time and called your child a name. Abuse means that these behaviours occur as part of an ongoing pattern. A parent doesn’t need to check off every item on this list to be considered abusive - even having a handful of these traits is a problem. Frankly, from the sounds of it, there was some emotional abuse going on in your household - it sounds as if your father was emotionally manipulative and wielded fear as a weapon. This wasn’t an acceptable way for him to behave. Realizing that a parent had abusive tendencies does not mean that you automatically have to hate the parent or cut off contact with them - mostly, the point of realizing the abuse took place is so that you can heal and learn from it, and avoid passing these behaviours down to your own children. 

Hope this answers your question!