#this is what feminists mean when we say that women are treated as subhuman by men

[she-is-ovarit]

I see straight and bisexual women suffer so much from male partners in the smaller ways.

When he doesn't put the time in for you and misses events that you would never miss for him—such as your birthday—or maybe you always schedule birthday parties for him and he has never returned the favor.

When you take a ton of photos of him on your phone and he has maybe four or five of you and you've been together for years.

When you've spent nearly every holiday with his family and he's only gone over to your family's place with you for the holidays once or twice (just enough to argue that he has) and you've been together for years. And maybe he argues that it's because of the distance because, surprise surprise, you have moved to a closer location to his family rather than the other way around.

When he has fathered a child from another woman yet you frequently find yourself stepping in to protect the wellbeing of this child because he doesn't put much effort into bonding with them and gradually you find yourself assuming a lot of the emotional and logistical parenting duties.

When he's hyperfocused on his job and money and seems to consider whatever job or career you have as more of a "hobby". Or, the reverse, you have a well paying and meaningful career and make more of an income than him and he becomes incredibly resentful of you and insecure in himself.

When you put in effort to cook decent and healthy meals for both of you for lunch or dinner and he puts in no effort to learn how to cook or intention to nutritionally take care of you.

When every show or movie you watch, or any game you play, seems to always depend on his preferences and he's unwilling to try anything new that you're interested in.

When he always drives and is rarely if ever the passenger, and if you express you'd like to drive (and be more in control of where you go and the safety of your lives) he becomes reactive in some way.

I can really go on, but the point is, when he is the main character in both of your lives and doesn't practice even a basic standard of consideration and respect for you (except for a short time after you've had an argument maybe), don't ignore this and don't let this go. Forget how he seems to know exactly the right things to say and how to say them to you to smooth things over and pay more attention instead to his actions and behaviors. Would you do these same neglectful things to him?

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.

They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.

Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”

Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.

The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 

When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.

I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 

I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.

Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 

The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.

Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.

This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.

Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.

I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 

We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.

I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.

This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.

[ninazenika]

i feel very let down by feminists (or at least by the mainstream feminist movement, but i don’t want to give niche groups a pass because many of them are guilty of this as well) as a plus size woman. in calls for diversity in media, plus size women are never included as potentially marginalized individuals that need representation desperately. i spent years struggling (and nearly dying) of anorexia because i didn’t think i should be allowed to exist as a person if i wasn’t thin, much less enjoy life. we are constantly given that message, both implicitly and explicitly: if you aren’t thin, you don’t get to fucking exist. or if you do, you’re a joke, you’re a freak, you’re subhuman. in all honesty the fat positivity (not saying body positivity b/c you all co-opted and ruined that lol) community on youtube/instagram saved me. i got to see people with my body type just living their lives--even if their lives weren’t perfect, even if they weren’t perfect, they existed. they were out there. there was a possibility that i could live, that i could even be happy. 

but you all don’t fight for us. i’m not joking when i say that it’s a matter of life and death for me (and for many others) and feminists have failed us so much. you all co-opt “body positivity” to mean it applies to absolutely everyone (including skinny white girls whose bodies are constantly portrayed as not only the ideal but the only acceptable option). like fitness bloggers are out there claiming body positivity for themselves because they’re “strong not skinny” when they’re literally size fours. every single post about how fat girls are treated worse is derailed by skinny girls who complain about that time they were told to eat a cheeseburger. [[guess fucking what: as a former anorexic, being called “basically anorexic” is not even remotely comparable to the experience of being a fat woman in society, and if you try and make that comparison, i genuinely hope you choke.]] no one adds “plus size characters” to list of characters they wish were represented in media, not even people who are otherwise stalwart champions of diversity and representation. no one thinks about us, no one uplifts our voices, and g*d knows no one makes an effort to unlearn their own prejudices towards us. 

honestly at this point i feel backed into a corner because we keep saying this, we keep screaming it, and no one listens. not self-proclaimed feminists, not people who pat themselves on the back for being progressive and inclusive. it’s exhausting.

[princess-of-the-void]

Visual Pleasure in Alex Garland's Ex Machina

tw: sexually violent language

The Sci-fi genre and horror intersect in many films, tv series and books. Ex Machina is one of those films. This film deals with many themes that appear in the Frankenstein narrative- human vs God, what determines humanity, and the like. I will go over the Frankenstein narrative in an upcoming series titled Frankenstein through the Ages. This article will look into the use of scopophilia in Ex Machina through the lens of Laura Mulvey's article "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema."

The language is Cis normative and I apologize for that. I did not know how to get away from that with this source material.

Alex Garland’s directorial debut, the 2015 sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, deals with the ideas of humans as gods and the humanity of human creation. Yet, the most enthralling theme and the one which has led it to be considered the silent feminist film of the 2015, next to George Miller’s Mad Max, is the theme of the role of the female body in relation to the male psyche. The film is centered around four characters, only three of these characters ever speak. The three key characters are Nathan, a brilliant and reclusive programmer who is worth millions of dollars, played by Oscar Isaac; Caleb, a programmer at Nathan’s company Blue Book, played by Domhnall Gleeson; and Ava, the beautiful, humanoid robot that Nathan has built, played by Oscar winning actress Alicia Vikander. The fourth and silent character is Kiyoko, Nathan’s humanoid robotic assistant played by Sonoya Mizuno. The plot of the film is that Nathan has brought Caleb to his remote home as a winner of a contest where the prize is to be the human component in a Turing test to determine whether or not an AI has consciousness. Caleb is conflicted when he meets the robot, Ava, because she has the body of a human and an extremely beautiful  face. He is thrown into a whirlwind of debate with Nathan on Ava’s pre-programed sexuality and his uneasy attraction to her. The audience gets to see Ava interact with Caleb on a human level and is left wondering until the very end if she does indeed have consciousness or is she is simply simulating it. We see her manipulate the men around her in order to gain a fundamentally human desire: freedom.  The audience also sees Ava’s rebellion against her creator, Nathan. In the end she cuts her ties with both Nathan and Caleb by killing the former and leaving the latter for dead as she escapes the remote location. Throughout the film, Laura Mulvey’s ideas from her essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema are proved correct by Ava’s behavior. She seems to fit the mold for the female place in cinema. yet, in the final scene Ava’s violent act subverts these ideas while also proving the men’s castration anxiety to be true. Thus, completely rewriting the female place in modern cinema as defined by Mulvey.Laura Mulvey says that women are the object of male scopophilia and that the camera in turns treats women in a scopophilic way by dehumanizing their bodies. In Ex Machina Ava is the center of everyone’s attention: the male characters, the audience and the camera. The men see her as an object to be viewed and studied; Nathan questions her humanity and keeps her in a glass room while Caleb finds himself spying on her through the CCTV cameras following their sessions together. These two men have come together to prove her humanity yet neither one acts as if he believes her to be anything less than subhuman. The camera treats Ava like it would any other female character by fragmenting her body for the audience. She is seen as a body able to be fetishized and sexually sought after. In one scene,  she puts on a dress and a wig for Caleb, the camera lingers over her robotic torso and arms as she dresses. It pulls her apart as it would a typical human woman, bringing the eye to her sexualized body parts and making her into nothing more than an object. The camera leaves her mind out of how it captures her. Laura Mulvey describes how women are used by the camera:

The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close- ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. (47)

Ava has been dismembered in this scene and fragmented for the sexual pleasure of the viewer. She has been created to fit the female ideal and is treated likewise by the camera as well as the men in her life. The audience believes she is simply an idyllic creation and assumes any humanity within her is simulated because she has been successfully dehumanized by the camera. The unnerving idea in this is that this is how the camera in modern cinema also treats human female characters. Garland has in turn made Ava into a human by turning this traditional fragmentation of women into a tool for the film. The audience is directed to think of Ava as only a body in another scene as Nathan tells Caleb of her mechanical sex organs. Nathan tells him that she has a space between her legs that if it were stimulated properly she would feel a pleasure response. Nathan says to Caleb “You bet she can fuck.” In this statement Nathan makes Caleb see Ava as nothing more than an object capable of sexual intercourse. He reduces the sexuality he has given her down to the mechanics of her body. He never discusses if she would want to have sex or if sex with her could be consensual. The audience dismisses her as nothing more than what we can see of her. She is a feminine shell to be looked at, as well as sexually engaged with but not a human with consciousness or capable of giving or revoking consent. We see her as a robot in a world of true humans. That is, until the end when she surprises us with her self-preservation motivated actions. She changes the way her femininity is seen by throwing out the idyllic behavior the audience is expecting.

 As a woman this line sent shock waves through my body. To hear a man depict a woman as nothing more than her ability to pleasure a man sexually is disgusting and disturbing. Yet, this scene worked well on me. As a viewer I questioned Ava’s humanity and this scene pushed me away from seeing her as anything other than subhuman. The first time I saw the film the ending shocked me because I had been shown Ava as a sexual object and nothing more. To see her assert dominance and independence was beyond satisfying. The characters of the two men also fall in line with Laura Mulvey’s ideas on cinema. Nathan is shown to the audience as in prime physical condition and as brilliant. He lives in a home which looks like it cost millions of dollars and his personal assistant is a beautiful young woman he has created to serve him and even has sex with him. He has created a woman whose sole purpose is to serve him. It is no wonder he believes Ava will also be submissive. Caleb on the other hand is thin and at times unremarkable looking. He has a good job with an apartment. He does not have a girlfriend and seems to have little personality past his curious and calm outer demeanor. He is easily seen as what the gaming community calls a “neutral mask character.” Caleb is easy for the audience to slip themselves into. Also since this film is marketed to science fiction fans, which are assumed to be male, Caleb is all the more easy to put oneself into. This “every guy” kind of character  gives the audience the chance to see themselves in the romance with the beautiful Ava. As Laura Mulvey says in regards to identification with male leads in film “By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too” (49). Throughout the entire film Ava is regarded as a possession; first of Nathan’s then of Caleb’s, and through him as a possession of the audience.

Returning to Caleb’s possessiveness of Ava specifically; during his first night at Nathan’s home Caleb discovers that he has connection to the CCTV cameras in Ava’s room. He thus spends each of his nights in the residence watching her.  This behavior directly correlates to Mulvey’s idea of male scopophilia in modern cinema;“Fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (46). His obsession with watching Ava on the television resembles the audience’s interaction with her. Both relationships are purely scopophilic and are directed by a camera’s view..  In their third to last meeting Ava has dressed yet again as a human woman, complete with demure dress and sweater and short brown wig. She tells Caleb that she fantasizes that he is watching her at night on the cameras. She is thus supporting John Berger’s idea that women are both surveyors as well as conscious of their role as the surveyed. Ava knows she is being watched which serves Berger’s idea fully:

Women watch themselves being looked at.This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight (Berger, 47).

Ava is more than aware of her sexual appeal to Caleb and thus uses his hope of possessing her to her own benefit. She even goes as far as undressing herself, as a human would, in front of the cameras she knows he is watching. She slides her tights off slowly and pulls her dress off over head, revealing the outline of an idyllic female body. She turns herself into a sexual sight for Caleb in this scene. This keeps his sexual interest and engages a savior complex which benefits her in the end. His desire for the sight of Ava makes him want to possess her outside the frame of her glass cage. Ava then uses his savior complex and desire to physically possess her to convince him to rescue her. She tells him that she wants them to go on a date outside of her glass cage. She also begs him to help her and inserts her fears of being switched off into their conversations. She makes him believe she relies solely on him for her life. The audience should not believe this trick as easily as Caleb does. Ava is intelligent and derives her intelligence from her robotic connection to the world’s web. The audience should see the poor treatment of Ava at the hands of her two male companions and understand her motives for tricking Caleb. After he has done what was necessary to free her she turns on him and leaves him to die. She realizes his motivations are not purely for her benefit but are instead for his. He believes his actions to save Ava will make her belong to him. Instead his actions lead to her independence from both male figures.The two men’s possessiveness of Ava is visually seen through her captivity. In one of her first meetings with Caleb she shows him a picture she has drawn of fractals, he tells her to draw something that is physical and she tells him she does not know what to draw because she has never been outside of the room she is then residing in. Nathan also alludes to Ava’s perceived ability to manipulate sexually, specifically her ability to manipulate Caleb, which is another reason for her imposed living situation. Her sexual danger leads Nathan to display tendencies of Castration anxiety and thus punishes Ava for this. In regards to punishment of the sexual object Mulvey says “The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma, counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object” (49) Nathan combats his anxiety with punishing Ava with captivity while Caleb fantasizes about saving her from her punishment. Both men find Ava to be the trigger for their anxiety and thus must combat her female will as they see fit.

Most of Ex Machina strongly supports Mulvey’s ideas. This remains true until the very end. After Caleb has helped Ava escape her glass room she turns the whole affair on its head. First, with the help of Nathan’s assistant Kiyoko, Ava kills Nathan. Following this death she dresses herself as a human one last time, while Caleb watches from the next room, and proceeds to lock him into the room and leave the residence. The audience knows Caleb will eventually die and this destroys the hope for consummation. Ava destroys Mulvey’s ideas by actually being threatening to the men in her life. Their anxiety is realized and her last violent act confirms this. Ava also kills both men in extremely symbolic ways. She kills Nathan with a symbolic penetration. He has reduced her to a sexual object and has even had sex with his robotic assistant Kiyoko. He has created these two women, among others, and subjected them to a sexist outlook on the female form. In his death these two women reduce him to simply a body to be penetrated as he did to them. When Ava leaves Caleb for dead in the locked room she is exacting revenge on the man who left her inside her glass prison for the sake of science and only lets her out of her prison for his own sexual fantasy. In this finale act  Garland’s female lead subverts the narrative norm and destroys the sexual bond between herself and Caleb, as well as the sexual bond between herself and the audience. She does this by using the men’s Freudian fears and exacting them upon these two men. She is almost saying “if you want threatening I will show you threatening.” Her use of their castration anxiety reduces these men to nothing more than their fears and lifts her up to the standard, if not a seemingly flattering version, of the independent Woman. Many may see her depiction of female independence as reassuring the need for female punishment and controlling male figures. In my opinion, this film shows the extreme lengths woman have to go to in order to attain independence. The audience should feel strongly for Ava because she has no choice but to behave violently. She is not the reason society fears women but instead she is the result of a dominating patriarchal system. Garland solidifies this believe for me in the final scene. Ava is seen covering her robotic body with a skin like material and clothes. While she is doing this the camera fragments her body like it has in earlier scenes. Once she has covered her robotic exterior with a human exterior the camera shows her as a whole body. She is finally human to the camera as well as the audience. Her subversion of traditional femininity is what inevitably gives her true humanity.

[notevilslytherin]

Feminism is not exclusive

I don’t claim to be an expert on what’s going on right now between TERFs and Trans-women, but what from what I know and understand, both sides seem to be at fault have people that are intolerant and prejudiced. 

On one side, Trans-women are trying to silence feminists from talking about periods, and abortions, and other uterus-exclusive things. And they are feeling excluded because, basically, they don’t feel included when feminists counter the whole Donald Trump “grab her by the pussy,” fiasco. There is one situation that I heard of where protesters were wearing cat-ear hats, and holding signs that referenced the Donald Trump incident, and they were called out for being misogynistic because they were talking about their bodies, and that made people without these body parts feel excluded. And because of this exclusion, women’s struggles are being invalidated because it does’t always concern the struggles of Trans-women. This silencing of women should not be tolerated

But on the flip side, many Feminists are completely excluding Trans-women from the cause, trying to push biology onto them. That because they weren’t born women they couldn’t possibly understand the prejudice and misogyny. That because they don’t have a period they shouldn’t be defined as women, and that their struggles shouldn't even be mentioned because they aren’t relevant to the cause at hand. Like I stated earlier, I am no expert, but it seems to me that some “feminists” are treating Trans-women, and transgender people in general, like they’re subhuman (which, by the way, is how hitler viewed the jews). This is invalidating their struggles, and causing a lot of Trans-women to go unheard. This is misogyny(and transphobia); this should never be tolerated.

This whole situation is disgusting, and has gotten way out of hand due to miscommunication and intolerable attitudes. Feminism is for everyone, where everyone should be heard. A community of people helping each other to better society and the misogyny that has claimed countless lives. Everyone has the right to voice what is happening to them in their lives without fear of it being rejected under the false pretence of exclusion or biology. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this situation, but I believe this problem could be solved with communication and understanding from both sides. Understanding is not exclusive to one side. If we are going to make any difference we need to work together. 

Feminism is not exclusive.

****I understand that people have the right to mad and speak out about the injustice when people who they thought were their allies turn their backs on them, asserting that they are not worthy of respect, especially damaging when people think they have the right to call people any pronouns they want, even if they differ from what is preferred. Each side has people who go to the extreme, and those are the people who are in the limelight, painting a bad reputation for the others who just want to fight for equality without turning on each other. Each side has flawed people who lose sight of the big picture; that is a movement for everyone, and that means that everyone has the right to share what they have experienced, and to speak out for others who can not. I understand that many people believe that Trans people are predatory, and have a fundamentally flawed prejudice against them, and I definitely believe that has to change. I don’t deny the existence of prejudice against trans-women. Feminism is for them. It is for everyone. 

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, Trans-women deserve respect just like every other women. Just because they were born male doesn’t mean that they are predatory (or men, in general). They deserve to be called by the appropriate pronouns, and by all accounts, are real women.

[strawberry-milktea]

Out of curiosity I looked though your blog and came across a post you made about not condemning all anime based on a few you don't agree with, in which case why condemn feminists and pro-choice folks if it's not something you agree with? I mean no offense I'd just like to see your logic on it

Sure, no offense taken, I don’t mind explaining that for you.I don’t mean this with any ill intent when I say this, but I’m a little taken back that you draw a comparison between something as innocuous as the genre of anime versus major movements with ideologies that effect the world in various profound ways such as feminism and the topic of abortion. They’re drastically different concepts that I personally don’t find analogous. I’m going to address your question from a comparison standpoint, but I just wanted to state from the start that I don’t find such vastly different things to be comparable.Another thing I want to address is where have I ever “condemned” people? Disagreeing with people, not supporting a movement, and being honest when people are behaving unacceptably within said movements is not equivalent to condemning people. It’s a problem nowadays that people tend to think disagreement equates to hate and condemnation. I never said all people who identify as feminists or all people who are pro-choice are “bad people”. That would be a huge blanket statement and judgment on countless people whom I don’t even know. But I can say that there are major problems with the ideologies they subscribe to and how those ideologies are harming society. And I can say when people are behaving in ways that are harming themselves and others.All that being said, anime is a genre that encompasses a variety of series. It’s Japanese animated cartoons. Just like animated series of any country, anime can range from completely harmless series to pornographic and/or violent series. Just because I watch and enjoy harmless series doesn’t mean I watch or condone those with explicit content. I can dismiss and disapprove of those with vile content and still say I can enjoy anime because there are series within the genre that are wholesome and harmless. Pornography and/or violence are not the defining traits of anime as a genre.Feminism and the pro-choice stance on abortion are movements. These movements are based on core values and beliefs that define them, which I cannot and will not ever agree with. Today’s feminism is riddled with problems that paint women in the west as oppressed (when we aren’t) and a common troublesome behavior that is exhibited by far too many supporters of the movement is shameless misandry that treats men as if they’re subhuman merely because of the anatomy between their legs. You may say that not all feminists treat men this way, which is true - I agree with you there. But the core principles of feminism today are still something I can’t subscribe to. The movement promotes beliefs that have been proven to be false, such as the wage gap and claims that majority of rapists go unpunished. It also promotes values that I don’t support, such as the promotion of sexual promiscuity in the name of “sexual freedom” and promotion of abortion as a woman’s “right”. When the core ideologies of a movement are problematic to me and something I can’t agree with, why would I support it? What is there for me to support? Using your example of anime, think of it this way - if the core trait and defining feature of anime were that it was a pornographic genre, I would dismiss it completely because it doesn’t offer anything I would want to expose myself to or follow.The same idea applies to being pro-choice. I am pro-life and I firmly believe abortion is murder, with both my faith and scientific evidence to back my stance on this. In what way could I logically support being pro-choice when abortion is murder in my eyes? In no situation would I view abortion as something acceptable or morally appropriate. There are some individuals who are selectively pro-life and condone abortion in certain instances, but that’s not me. The core belief of being pro-choice is that killing the unborn is acceptable and I am firmly in opposition to that belief. So again, like I stated in my commentary about feminism above, if the core ideology behind the pro-choice movement is in complete opposition to my beliefs and values, how could I logically support any aspect of it? In no situation would it make sense for me to be supportive of the pro-choice movement.I hope I explained the distinction in a way that answers your question. If you want to discuss this further, please let me know.

[anautisticdragon-blog]

Is the Alt-Right a Neurotypical Spectrum Construct?

This might sound like a funny thing to ask unless you've actually read my other posts, perhaps had a little bit of a think about it, and actually delved into why it exists. Yes, the alt-right does have some individuals who're on the autistic spectrum (and other spectrums) amongst their number, but they effectively seem to be suffering with a variant of Stockholm Syndrome as they've picked up the loathing the alt-right has for autism and internalised it. It can happen to anyone who's been abused as they're desperately looking for an escape. It happens to women who've internalised the nasty misogyny of the alt-right as a means of removing themselves as targets, and that's precisely what the alt-right desire. This is the kind of goal they're shooting for. The alt-right will pretend that they're autistic or that they have 'large numbers of women who support their views' because they can use that as a platform of racketeering. It's effectively what this is. It's an 'insurance' tactic. If you're one of us and you're a proxy for our toxic brainwashing, then we won't target you, you can live happily ever after. You won't ever have to look over your shoulder and worry that some alt-righter is nefariously readying a doxxing attack against you, you wouldn't need to feel too nauseous to even get out of bed in the morning as you can't face the sheer hate of it all. They've tried to pull this with Sarkeesian to 'convert' her. I've talked about this kind of thinking before where the alt-right is effectively a religion of binary thinking, an incredibly neurotypical construct if ever there was one. You are a part of their tribe or you're an enemy, there is nothing else, it's a very 1 or 0 affair. I've pointed this out before, there's this rather obvious lack of autistic people proselytising others to join a tribe. Why? Autistic people don't see the world in this stark, binary way. The neurotypical mind is one spectrum that seems to default to binary thinking, to dualistic perception. There are other spectrums out there, however, which have varying degrees of immunity to troublesome simplisms like dualistic thinking and the folly that follows. What I keep finding is that the NT spectrum (which is to say the sociopathic spectrum, ranging from extraverted on the shallow end, to sociopathic on the extreme end) is very prone to this kind of behaviour. They view everything as a binary of 1 and 0. And all of those 1s are their mental groups, you see. They separate everything into these rigid, simplistic categories. I don't even think that 'category' is the right word for this, though, as there is a scientific basis for categorisation that they aren't using. I think a more accurate descriptor is 'tribe.' They have 'thought tribes.' Every 'thought tribe' a neurotypical is a part of is a 1, everyone who is outside of that thought tribe in any conceivable way, regardless of how arbitrary, is a 0 and needs to be either proselytised into their tribe or socially ostracised and shunned. Any autistic person who's interacted with NTs in the big, outdoors world will have encountered this kind of thinking where if you aren't interested in being forcibly and immediately inducted into the NTs social group so that they can fit you into one of their thought tribes? You're shunned, ostracised, and you cease to have any meaning as a sapient person. You're immediately relegated to subhuman status and treated as though you're a troglodyte simply because you don't immediately align yourself with a tribe. Incredibly typical behaviour. Neurotypical behaviour. The alt-right uses this to their advantage as an 'insurance' ploy. They take it one step further than simply socially ostracising or shunning someone as they're more cosy with the sociopathic end of their spectrum. They will happily use forms of abuse, bullying, marginalisation, and even death threats to break down a person's will and try to brainwash them into joining their tribe. The problem here is that the vast majority of autistic people are incredibly immune to this for a reason I covered recently where I linked an article showing that autistic people aren't so easily taken in by these manipulations. The autistic mind seems to have a degree of immunity against marketing and propaganda, instead of just emotionally and irrationally buying into whatever some tribe wants us to think, we ask for the empirical evidence. We're very much interested in what is or is not real. If the evidence doesn't convince us, and we find that the person is still trying to push their perspective on us, we immediately twig that this isn't about an ideology at all, rather it's someone who's proselytising. Now here's the big one that's going to offend a lot of the neurotypicals out there. I feel that Christianity was the alt-right of our past, it held the same kind of position and utilised many of the same tactics. The systems of proselytising to convert people to their tribe, often by force, are exactly the same tactics that the alt-right use today to bully and threaten people into joining and obeying their tribe as a means of 'insurance' This is how conversion works, you'll promise a person peace and prosperity, then you'll show them the kinds of horrors that will befall them if they don't kowtow to your will. Those who unfortunately have weaker wills and minds will fall for this and be converted. There's something strange going on with the neurotypical spectrum where they can't escape this tribal perception of reality. The interesting thing is that other spectrums out there (including the autistic spectrum) don't seem to have this problem. We don't put everything into these little tribal boxes, instead we're able to have more fuzzy definitions which exist outside of the absolute binary states of 1 and 0. We can have 1 and 1, 0.50, and other mathematical realisations beyond the simplisms of binary. We can look at another group of people and say 'us' instead of 'them.' This is why I'm all but convinced that the alt-right and processes of systematic tribe proselytising like it are a neurotypical spectrum problem. A neurotypical doesn't know how to deal with anything that exists outside of 1 or 0, which just so happens to be every autistic person on the planet, sadly for them. I think we must cause them so much pain, not fitting into their notions of how reality absolutely must work. It must be nasty, all those autistic people creating such cognitive dissonance, showing that you don't have to perceive everything as an absolute binary, that you can think of reality in ways beyond odd little tribal boxes they call 'categories' (which aren't actually categories). In fact, let's look at categories to understand what's wrong with how the neurotypical mind uses this. Or misuses it, as I'm going to posit the case is With a system of scientific categorisation (and you can look this up), object A can concurrently exist in categories A, B, C, D, and E for having certain traits which fit those categories. For instance: A man is fully able to uphold feminist views. I can hear their minds exploding. Anyway, the NT perception of categories is that every object has an absolute category, so object A goes into category A, which means that it cannot concurrently exist in any other categories. Science would dictate it would also exist in categories B, C, D, and E, but I often find neurotypicals aren't practitioners of good science. So when you think of these arbitrary categories which function as absolute containers for any objects within them, the problems with minds on the neurotypical spectrum will become more obvious. The claim I'm making here is that the NT mind cannot realise that object A can also exist in categories B, C, D, and E by default. It takes years of education and rote memorisation for them to pick up on this and I'm still even remotely certain whether they'll believe it, just that it'll be there in their background knowledge. The autistic mind, however, has no problem with an object being concurrently contained within any number of categories at the same time. Let's take a frivolous example to show how we can apply this to reality to see that I'm really not making all this up. I think that most people are familiar with video games, so we can use that as our example to put this on display for everyone to see. I'm an autistic person who plays video games, as such I enjoy the Switch (a console), and the PC (not a console) equally as much. I also have nothing against people who play games on the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One, I am happy that people have systems on which they're able to enjoy their favourite games. I think that entertainment is a human right, and video games are a bloody good form of entertainment. Now, let's look at what would happen if I were a neurotypical. PC: Console owners are morons who couldn't understand computers, that's why we're the master race because we're actually smart enough to use a computer. I wouldn't want one of those filthy peasants going near a computer, they'd wreck it. Xbox: Sony fanboys are idiots. Their console is underpowered and Microsoft has a superior console in the works which will blow theirs away. Also, their exclusives are just so entirely shit that no one would want to play them. PC owners are just shitlords who think money makes them better. PlayStation: Xbox fanboys are idiots. Their console is underpowered and Sony has a superior console in the works which will blow theirs away. Also, their exclusives are just so entirely shit that no one would want to play them. PC owners are just shitlords who think money makes them better. Do you see? This is NT tribalism at its finest and it extends to every facet of life. In the everyday NT mind you cannot be a fan of Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and computers all at the same time. This is a paradox, it's untenable, and you're being a liar just to look cool. It's not like this is new, either. When I was young it was SEGA vs. Nintendo. What if I happened to enjoy both for different reasons? What if I thought that both consoles played up to different strengths? I'm not allowed to think that? Okay... And it's everywhere. Nations. Cars. Food. Pick a topic and you can see NTs belabouring which tribe is better, which is superior, and which deserves your allegiance to just about anyone who'll listen. It's not like each option could have its own merits. Oh no, that'd be too reasonable, and no one is that reasonable. Well, except for everyone not on the neurotypical spectrum, that is. This is why I linked the article which showed that persons on the autistic spectrum are immune to marketing as it's for precisely this reason, we don't fall into tribalistic thinking. And I'm sure that there are other spectrums which evade this tribalistic thinking every bit as well as autism. If I've said this once, I'll say it a million times: We need to investigate this, I feel. There needs to be a study involving every spectrum out there. Gather NTs along with those who have autism, ADD, Down, Parkinson's, or any other kind of mind that puts them outside of the neurotypical spectrum. Then ask questions designed to trigger tribalistic notions and see which kinds of minds fall for it. We need to see who'd bite. We already know that NTs will, as they do, because everything about how they parse reality is focused upon this kind of dualistic thinking. They perceive everything as either an absolute of 1 or 0, regardless of how arbitrary. It's all so binary for them. In tribe or out of tribe. This gives rise to white supremacy, white nationalism, misogyny, and everything else we commonly see alt-right thinkers profess. It's because the tribe in question here is 'straight, white, cis-gendered male and relevant allies.' Anyone who isn't a part of that tribe needs to be proselytised, hassled, threatened, and bullied until they submit and convert to the cause of the alt-right. Don't do it because you believe it, absolutely not, do it to end the bullying. And sadly, this worked on Laci Green. We watched this work so well on Laci Green who just buckled over and allowed herself to be proselytised, converted to the alt-right tribe in order to have some peace and quiet, so she wouldn't have to face all of their hate. It's not like this is some big secret, either. When Laci Green was taken into the alt-right tribe we saw people saying 'she won't be autistically screeching at us any more.' They didn't exactly use hushed tones when they talked about how they could stop bullying, threatening, and harassing her now that she was converted to their tribe. It's just how brains on the neurotypical spectrum work. You are either a part of the tribe, or you're an enemy of the tribe. It's not like it's a conspiracy theory or anything either because, as I've pointed out, you can see it in every walk of life. Even in the system an NT chooses to play games on. The person on the NT spectrum will pick a system and stay completely loyal to that tribe no matter what, attacking anyone who isn't. Whereas any person who isn't on the NT spectrum may flip-flop between systems, or even have multiple systems to call their own as they understand the benefits. If we need more evidence, there's a study which gathered NT Apple fans and Christians. The study scanned the minds of both whilst showing them imagery. As you might've guessed by now, the Christians were shown iconic imagery of Christ whereas the Apple fans were shown brand logos. The exact same parts of their brains lit up. Why? "Cor, that's my tribe, that is! I love that tribe, me! Fuck any sod who's not that tribe!" At this point I defy you to tell me that this isn't a neurotypical problem. I've been researching this my entire life and what I've found that only people on the neurotypical spectrum fall prey to this binary thinking, only NTs proselytise. It's just something about how their brain is designed to work. Whereas other kinds of brains have left the ridiculously arbitrary systems of dualistic thinking and tribalism behind, the NT spectrum seems to cling to it for dear life as though it were still necessary and relevant to their survival. This is why it's so easy for an NT to be a part of a toxic group. There's a reason why minds not on the neurotypical spectrum don't tend to gravitate toward the alt-right, white supremacy, white nationalism, men's rights activism, and so on. They realise that it's all a bit stupid, frankly. It's all very arbitrary and not at all relevant ot the kind of world we live in. This is where I feel neurotypicals are somewhat disadvantaged when compared against any other kind of brain. They can't stop perceiving the world in binary absolutes, they just can't. I think we need to study this to see what we can do about it. I think that it's far more important now, than ever, to teach NTs when they're young, impressionable, and still in school the dangers of binary thinking. Of why they shouldn't exclude anything they perceive as different based on entirely arbitrary factors, as their mind will otherwise always default to that state. I think we need to accept that this is very much a neurotypical spectrum problem, only then can we fix it. The truth is is that I don't necessarily blame them for their tribalistic thinking. It's obviously as much a disorder as any other kind of disordered thinking, isn't it? If their mind is simply built to work in a problematic, toxic way, I'm not sure we can really say that they're to blame. It's not like they've earned the self awareness to see that they're doing this, is it? They just tend to double down on their binary thinking whenever we confront them about it, so I think that we need to take a different tack and try to better educate our youth so that they won't end up experiencing this form of disordered thinking. If we do that, the alt-right disappears. Every hate movement would go quietly into the night as every hate movement is very much fuelled by the arbitrary factors of binary thinking that NTs aren't currently aware of. They don't realise that they're trapped in binaries. We haven't exactly helped them to understand what they're doing wrong, have we? I really do think that this is a disorder, it's just one that hasn't gained enough traction and recognition. If we could get this officially recognised then perhaps we could then figure out what our next step should then be with regards to fixing it. I think that CBT to help increase awareness to help neurotypicals counter their dualistic instincts would be a really good start. An extremely toxic aspect of this that I would also like to talk about is how NTs love co-opting other tribes if they think that they have some advantage that they want. This is what leads to many NTs claiming to be, say, autistic when they're about as overtly neurotypical and extraverted as a person can be. They likely self-diagnosed themself as autistic to be a part of a special tribe, since that's how they believe this works. They proselytise themself into a tribe, and now they're one of us. Errrr... No. I'm sorry neurotypicals but that's not how this works. There aren't any tribes here but rather scientific categorisations of spectrums of brains which are differentiated by different functioning systems. And before you say it, it really isn't just systems 1 or 0, either. It's more like spectrums A, B, C, D, E, et cetera as I've belaboured before. You don't just proselytise yourself into being an autistic person, you have to be diagnosed and identified as one by an expert who's capable of seeing the difference. Whether one is of the autistic spectrum or any other isn't simply an effortlessly adopted choice, it's something you're born with. Which, deep breath, brings me to how neurotypicals see gay people. You see, the NT mind sees everything as a matter of tribes and choices of allegiance to or not. They don't seem to parse that a person might be born with a genetic factor that makes them gay. Nor can they grasp that a person might be born with a specific set of chromosomes that exist outside of 'man tribe' or 'woman tribe.' The interesting factor here is their flawed perception of gender as a binary. So NT men see the 'woman tribe' as 0, NT women perceive the 'man tribe' as 0... but there's another tribe? That's not binary... "THAT CANNOT BE!!!!! IT IS A LIE!!! THERE. ARE. TWO. GENDERS."

Just like Picard’s four lights, eh? Gosh. It must be a conspiracy theory!

Indeed. That's how the neurotypical mind seems to perceive this due to their default obsession with dualistic thinking. It's all a binary, you see? And every NT wants each and every tribe they ascribe to to be a special snowflake, superior to another diametrically opposite tribe which is 0. This is the problem with NT thinking, that there must always need to be a 0 to their 1. That it can't be 1 and 1, 0 and 0, or even 0.5, 0.2, 0.5, 0.7, 1.4, and so on. The NT must have this absolute hierarchy of being the 1 above another group's 0. Suddenly every prejudice makes sense. Why do white supremacist NTs hate anyone of a different ethnicity? White supremacy is their special snowflake tribe, so everyone who isn't white is therefore subhuman. Why do MRA NTs hate women? MRA is their special snowflake tribe, so everyone who isn't male must be subhuman. Why do trans-exclusionary feminist NTs hate transgender people? TERF is their special snowflake tribe, so everyone who isn't cis-gendered woman is subhuman. God, I could go on like this. It's so obvious, isn't it? As an autistic person, this bothers me as my mind doesn't work in this way. I don't need to be a 1, therefore I neither want nor desire a 0 to my 1 as I don't have a 1 to begin with. Grok? This is why I'll see people like Sargon of Akkad, Teal Deer, and others on YouTube and immediately have them pegged as NTs because they have their special snowflake tribes that they're supporting without a moment's doubt and railing against their tribe's pariah who exists to be a 0 to their 1. This is versus people like Captain Andy, Shaun & Jen, and other 'Tubers (po--no, no, I have to stop that, it isn't funny any mo--TATO damn it) I personally enjoy watching. You see, Cap'n Andy and Shaun & Jen alike can say bad things about 'SJWs' when they have done something that they believe is wrong. Shaun & Jen, for example, has vehemently railed against the doxxing of the alt-right. You see how this works? There is definitely a problem here with disordered thinking amongst neurotypicals that we not only need to acknowledge but also fix. I want to see this recognised and diagnosed so that we can help these people. It's not necessarily their fault that they experience disordered thinking, it just means that they need help to overcome it and I can already think of a number of CBT systems to raise awareness of this and help these people overcome their arbitrary binary thinking, help them see reality outside of whatever tribe a person is a part of. I can't be too hard on them for it as an NT I'm still fond of defaults to tribes and binary thinking. I think that this is just a case of disordered thinking. I'm hoping that eventually I can raise his awareness enough to actually see this. As I said, I don't think that everyone on the alt-right is actually irredeemable, but rather they're being played by sociopaths who're exploiting their binary thinking in exactly the same ways that marketing departments exploit NTs to get them to be loyal to a brand. As I showed in the study I linked in my last post, but also detailed in the study that proved that Apple fans are entirely as capable of being ideological zealots as Christians are. There should be enough evidence out there now for people to go 'hmmm' and realise there's actually something to this. You see, as an autistic person, I opt for the details over the 'bigger picture' because the details allow me to weigh things up based upon their value versus just joining some ideological tribe that sounds like it would appeal to me without really thinking too much about it. Again, as per the last post I shared which proved that this is a fairly commonplace skill amongst those on the autistic spectrum. I also still posit, however, that there are very likely other spectrums which aren't prone to tribalistic thinking. I do believe that this is purely a neurotypical problem which exists thanks to disordered thinking. Still, that can be overcome. I think that for every neurotypical that becomes aware of this and realises how they've been taken in by this binary thinking, they're going to become resistant to it and these hate groups will continually lose more and more of their power. That should really be the goal we're shooting for, here, to raise awareness of this binary thinking, this tribalistic focus as disordered thinking. Which, let's be honest, it really is. I'm going to be wrapping this up, soon. So I'm going to leave you with a few things to ponder about. One of them is a thread from Wrong Planet where an alt-righter turns up to try and proselytise at the autistic people there and they quite flawlessly use logic to see through all of the foul manipulations being used. And a quote, too, from that thread that absolutely made my day. "What The Alt-Right Is, then, is some bizarre deadpan parodic comedy art-terrorist project that's getting way out of hand."

Giggle.

I suppose I'll also add a footnote that perhaps I'm misguided here and I'm blaming the neurotypical spectrum for this when that's not specifically the cause. All I can do is go by the studies, the findings, and my own anecdotal evidence, all of which seems to support that this is a neurotypical problem. Still, disagree with me! It's okay. I mean, I'd like it if you were nice about it (like, say, Shaun & Jen and Captain Andy always are), but you absolutely don't have to agree with me that NTs are the cause. Perhaps there's something else that's causing this absolute binary thinking and these tribalistic perspectives to occur. I'd love some input too as to whether you think that's what the problem is and whether that's why the alt-right exists. I'm fascinated by this topic and I'm open to being proven wrong. I'm just so certain that this binary thinking along with the tribalistic focus is the driving force behind groups like the alt-right. I Universally see this mindset amongst NTs, too. If I am wrong though, disagree! I'm open to your views and your evidence. I'm not an echo chamber like the alt-right, not even slightly. I really hate it when people try to force themselves to agree with me, or try to strongarm me into agreeing with them. The world doesn't need to work that way. We can agree to have differing opinions, because that's how we learn. I'd go so far as to say that that's how science and advancement have always worked for us. Everything we have is thanks to polite disagreements and the interesting questions that arise from polite disagreements. There's nothing better in life than a really, really good question. And that's what this article is, in a way. It's an interrogative to raise awareness, I want to be challenged on this topic. Do you see the absolute binary thinking and tribalistic focus I'm talking about, here? Do you think it's the problem? Do you think it's a neurotypical spectrum problem? What do we do about it? Because questions, y'see? Questions are glorious. With every question we grow. As a person, as a people, and as a species. So don't just take my word for any of htis. Question all of the things. All of the time. Why? 'Cause if you're always asking questions, you're doing something singularly marvellous that we humans don't do nearly enough. You're thinking. And if you're thinking you'll end up with better questions to ask me, then I'll ponder that meself and I'll be thinking. I couldn't ask for a greater gift. It's why I'm so anti-assertion and why everything I do is a thought exercise designed to encourage questions. An assertion is just doubling down on the preconceived notions you believe are facts whether they actually are facts or just entirely incorrect assumpitons and simplisms you've accrued and never think about. A question forces you to evaluate information, new and old, internal and external. A question intrinsically has far more value to us as a species than any base claim ever would. I'm sorry for the digressive tangent at the end here... I just want you to take this and parse it in a way that would result in new questions, what I don't want is for anyone to double down and just opt into base denial because that gets us nowhere.