#tmi but let's just say it's a real thing for men to abuse women and also brag about how fucking FeMiNiSt they are

[persbaderse]

GGOOOODDDDDDD everything is ick and i don't want to post pics because calliope is completely naked but here's one thing

i didn't know if madoc was going to be exactly the same (he's definitely more shameless and scummy in the comic) but he still does the fake feminist shit

ric madoc die challenge

[onetenthoddity]

A Big Personal Post

So word of warning, this is gonna be a very long tl;dr post about my struggles with my sexuality and I’m gonna get into some real TMI stuff. Also, while it is Pride Month (Happy Pride Month to any LGBT people reading this by the way!!), this is completely unrelated to that and has nothing to do with my sexual orientation or gender identity or anything similar. I’m just a boring cis straight guy. Sorry men, you just don’t do it for me.

This might seem like a weird and unexpected post coming from me, but I constantly keep all this locked away tight and it’s been eating at me for years and years and years and it’s gotten really bad recently, to the point of real emotional distress and depression, so I think I need to just let it out already. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m just gonna jump right into it; I have a very high sex drive. I like sexual stuff; fanservice, big titty anime girls, lots of nsfw art and artists, the dreaded sexualized depictions of women, you know. The usual suspects. And it’s not like any of that is bad. Humans are sexual creatures, it’s biologically wired into us to have a sex drive and experience sexual attraction and desire. Pretending that’s not the case/telling people it’s wrong to feel that way is honestly absurd and really harmful. The real problem is I feel really bad about all of it; I have a huge amount of shame and guilt and embarrassment towards my sexuality. I never really talk about sex or sexual things with anyone, and I get uncomfortable whenever it gets brought up. Like I said, I bottle it all up, and that only makes me feel worse about it all. I’m not even religious at all by the way, I’ve been to church for religious purposes a grand total of once in my entire existence. But unfortunately the US is still a sexually repressive society whether you’re religious or not thanks to those good ol’ puritan roots that still fuck everyone over to this very day, so it was still hammered into me that sex is bad and something to be ashamed of. It’s so ridiculous; I live in an extremely liberal town right outside Boston, my family is full of accepting people, I actually got a good sexual education from school, and yet here we are. Even though I logically know it’s a load of shit, I just can’t seem to get rid of the idea that sex and sexual desire is inherently harmful or wrong. 

But that’s not the only reason I feel so negative about my sexuality; as one of my exes once put it, I perhaps drank TOO much respect women juice. And while I lean very left/am a very progressive person in general, it’s not like I’m one of those male feminists that seem like they’re just trying to get brownie points or moral superiority, nor am I a “nice guy”. No; for most of my life I’ve just been around women. When I was little me and my older sister spent all our time together; she’s even the one taught me how to read. From middle school and beyond basically all of my closest friends were all girls. And since I was an art boy, I took a lot of art classes and went to art club, which were demographically mostly female. Hell, I was the only boy in my AP Portfolio class, and like one of three total in art club. And after that I went to an art college with a 30/70 male to female ratio. No exaggeration, for the past decade I have not had any close male friends, and for the past four or five years I haven’t had any at all. I feel much more comfortable around women than men; I actually have trouble talking to guys, especially guys who are more stereotypically masculine (which I am not at all nor care to ever be). I don’t just like girls from an attraction standpoint, I genuinely like and care about women as people. But because I have such a high sex drive and I like women in a sexual manner too, it kinda makes me feel like a hypocrite; like I’m betraying that fact. There’s always so much talk about how sexualizing women is wrong and harmful, and women face so much sexual abuse from men, that I feel like I’m a bad person for liking things like fanservice or porn or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to the problem. But of course, this too is absurd; sexualization and sexual objectification aren’t the same thing. You can both depict and view someone in a sexual manner without dehumanizing them, and to think just by making someone sexual you also objectify them is honestly kinda crazy. Once again, a lot of this thinking also stems from repressive religious ideologies. Men being shitty to women is much more a problem of gender and cultural norms. But even more importantly; I am absolutely not a bad person. I don’t harass women and I’ve never sexually mistreated anyone, and I have no desire to in the first place. I don’t try and make friends or relationships or do favors just for sex. I’m not a “nice guy;” I’m a genuinely good person. And I know I’m a good person because I can never admit to myself that I’m a good person despite literally overwhelming evidence.

The final problem is that I have built up an extreme amount of sexual frustration. I am a super introverted person with a lot of social anxiety and self esteem issues, or, as a therapist might put it, a very lonely person. I don’t have a huge desire to be social and I spend most of my time at home, and my anxiety tends to prevent me from being social when I actually want to. So, shockingly, I’ve never had sex. I’ve had a grand total of two relationships, both recent. One lasted four years and another four months, and while both had a sexual component to them neither went all the way. The four year one was especially frustrating, and in the last year of that relationship we basically stopped doing anything sexual, which really piled on the stress/guilt/shame for me (it turns out she was actually a lesbian; we had an amicable break and we’re still friends to this day). I’m also not interested in casual sex at all; I’m one of those truly disgusting people that needs an emotional connection and genuine feeling and such, which really doesn’t help matters. It feels like my sexual frustration is completely out of my control, and a lot of the time I feel like I’ll just never have sex. Like it’s something for me to admire from afar and never get to participate in myself, no matter how much I want to. I also feel like I’m just not very sexually attractive; the idea that someone would want to have sex with me doesn’t seem believable to me (if you knew what I looked like you would probably smack me upside the head for saying that, by the way). I do my best to try and manage my frustration on my own, but in the end I can only do so much. All of this frustration just ends up making me resent my sexuality, which just makes me feel more shame. It also makes me feel lonelier than I already am, especially in a romantic sense.

I made a deviantArt where I post NSFW art (along with my usual stuff) as an attempt to channel my frustrations and to try and accept and express my sexuality, but I don’t know if it’s helped that much, and honestly I’m terrified of someone close to me finding out. The link was on my tumblr before, but I tried to not draw attention to it because, you know, the shame and embarrassment and stuff. You can find it here: https://www.deviantart.com/asaragi

I think that’s everything I wanted to get off my chest. As I said my negativity towards my sexuality has been growing and gnawing at me from inside for a very long time, and combined with my sexual frustration it has really impacted my mental health recently. I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life recently, and by all accounts I should be feeling a lot better yet I keep falling back in a depressive low, and I keep having trouble sleeping. I knew this was a problem but I was hoping I could just ignore it, that I could work on the other areas of my life that were causing stress and that would fix my depression. I was really hoping that the other stressors were just exaggerating my sex issues. I didn’t wanna face my shame or talk about it with anyone; I can’t even talk about it to my therapist. But no more; it’s time that I accept myself. I’m never gonna get past this if I don’t, and besides, it’s not healthy to hate yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve really come to understand recently, it’s to be kind to yourself and embrace yourself. My sexuality is an important part of who I am. It’s not something for me to be ashamed of, and it doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s simply part of being human.

This was really hard for me to write, so if you read it all, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to be kind to yourself <3

[aeroknot]

some thoughts on the latest wynonna plot twist

i’ve been working on this for a little while. 

i just want to explain a large part of my resistance to the wearp development of season 2. it is very personal (perhaps tmi) and reveals a deep bias infiltrating my ability to whole-heartedly accept or celebrate the plot line. I still think it’s worth expressing, though.

ok so like… i’ve felt a range of emotions regarding this pregnancy plotline, most of them negative and just varying in the degrees of pissy pessimism i can shift between, and at first i was really self-interrogating and just being like “are you being an insufferable asshole about this because of wyndolls?” and i thought about it and y’know, probably, like, I’ll be transparent bc who the fuck else am I gonna be real with about this show other than strangers on the internet? and yeah, 10% of it’s wyndolls-related dread, sure, but honestly??

the root of it is that I don’t like kids right now, especially infants, and this intensely combines with the fact that, as a 27 year old with shared qualities with her, I was projecting onto wynonna hard. a big specific fear we shared was where I constantly wonder about whether I truly have choices in my “fate” (mostly, re: am I doomed to repeat my parents’ mistakes? and also am I doomed by my depression? a deep and real limitation that really honestly does feel like its own kind of curse. and, would I pass this onto a child and doom them?) I was ecstatic to be connecting with her and key tenants of her personality, as well as her past traumas (such as but not limited to: child abuse from an alcoholic father, being institutionalized, and acting things out sexually with guys) that I found so relatable. a smaller part, but most relevant to this discussion, is that liked to think of her as a woman who, also, at this point in her life, was wholly uninterested in motherhood, for a whole shitton of reasons; many of which I could relate to, but particularly based in her family trauma/this curse/complicated relationships with men, and also her general attitude of prioritizing her needs above everyone else’s except maybe waverly’s and her partner(s)’. working on herself. and i loved that. it resonated with me.

a baby has really thrown a wrench in this experience, and this is largely because a not-so-insignficant emotional dufflebag that’s been chained to my ankle since my ex left is all the times he told me I’d be a terrible mother, and how i’ve been processing that and moving on from letting that hold any more weight in my life completely opposes being excited about a plot development like this.

after I finally picked myself up off the floor of my shame spiral into his evaluation of me, I rebuilt myself by asking: what right did he have to evaluate my worth based on an abstract, idealized, and hypothetical version of motherhood he imagined – specifically myself as a mother, when, might I add, neither of us were even close to being stable enough even as individuals to be ready for parenthood – (answer: no real fucking right). so: would it be liberating and healing to discover that I can be a woman without procreating? could I still find my worth in myself if it never happened for me? could I erase some of that disdain for my character away by moving the goalpost and allowing myself to say: I don’t need this to be a woman worth admiring and loving-- and I could remain someone a person would desire in a long-term romantic relationship? and did I even fucking want children? was it a good idea for me to have them? I don’t completely have a definitive answer and even if I did decide I didn’t want some, maybe if I met the right partner and i decided -- regardless of what my partner wanted -- that I wanted a baby more than I was afraid of a baby, it’d change, maybe. or I’ve thought about adoption later in life. but for now, and what’s feeding into my disappointment and discomfort with wynonna’s arc, is the fact that I have been experimenting with expressing disinterest in children, publicly and privately, and testing out how that makes me feel, and lately, I’ve felt pretty damn good thinking about a childless future, and after the pain I felt with ‘being inept at motherhood’ lorded over my head as a deep insult to my character, it’s very healing and empowering for me to be able to say “I could live without kids” or “having children is perhaps not in my path” and even go so far as to admit “I don’t think I even like children right now.” 

I don’t dislike children, per se (though I do resent I even feel the pressure to have to put that as a disclaimer!!). I’m nice to them. I love my young cousins. I think children are often hilarious and inquisitive and generally good-natured. but they’re…. they’re like how men are to me right now. the idealized ones are really neat; the fictional ones and the ones over there and the ones other people really love are really cool and I’m happy they make others happy and sometimes I get to spend some time with them too, but as a general practice I’d like to just not prioritize them in my life right now, and women are asked to prioritize both all the damn time or else believe there’s something wrong with them, and I’d like to create space and consume some more media where maybe we just… don’t allow that as much? I promise I’m not going around kicking kids nor am I telling other people to kick them. but I am letting myself feel what it’s like to admit that maybe I don’t think they’re the greatest thing on earth, which is what I feel pressured to say (oh god damn, especially in my Christian work environment, dear lort). I’m experimenting with allowing myself to say to someone who invasively inquires about the status of my reproductivity, “y’know, I don’t really like the idea of being responsible for a very sensitive, innocent, impressionable, and defenseless young soul who deserves a lot of time, energy, and self-sacrifice in order to care for and raise; emotional and physical and mental labor that I don’t feel like designating to anyone but myself right now.” basically, I just don’t find them as enthralling as I used to (I once worked at a daycare and wanted to be a teacher), and I’m even questioning now how much of my enchantment back then was authentic and how much of it was indoctrinated.

and a large part of what I’m realizing is the fact I’m made deeply uncomfortable and displeased by the idea of carving out parts of my identity and my life in order to create the large, large space a child deserves in order to fit one into my story. I don’t like the permanence of adding a child; I don’t like the irrevocable nature of such a huge undertaking that will impact every single facet of a person’s life from that point forward. maybe I’m selfish. maybe I’m just not ready. call me what you want, I’m still walking this path for now, though, and I’ll assert I deserve respect even if I don’t want kids.

so to watch this story that I was feeling so connected to for reasons really opposite of this whole storyline so quickly suddenly make room for a baby while I am resisting motherhood as a measure of a woman’s worth and also very freaked out by the permanence and weight of being responsible for your offspring? yeah. it’s a little disheartening to me. like dolls said, it changes everything. and it’s like…… any way they shake the story out, I think I’ll be upset, because I’m... not personally invested in the baby even sticking around, even though I know that sounds sort of horrible.

I admire the way they’ve done it so far in the aftermath of this reveal. I admire the dialogue. and I think admiring and respecting how they’re doing it while still not liking it is valid, and is also a testament to how well-executed it can be. but I’m still hesitant, skeptical, and resistant.

and this is all hard for me too because like… I think I WOULD think it’s awesome if post-broken-curse, older, perhaps in-a-loving-relationship-wynonna and forgiven-herself wynonna kicks down a door while pregnant, and asserts she can still be a hero while pregnant, and she’s still this or still that and not an invalid fragile incompetent person at her job, etc, etc….. demon-hunting mom who pisses off the PTA moms because all their kids think she’s so cool. but it... it’s sudden. it’s “too early” in my head. and of course I understand why that is. but I’m still grumbly about it.

i’ve also realized that I was a child who was somewhat unwanted. conceived between two people with an unhealthy relationship who did not want to be tethered together for the rest of their lives. and as a child in the middle of that stress, as an unplanned baby who MY MOM GOT PREGNANT WITH WHILE ON BIRTH CONTROL, I know what the downsides are to have that origin story. with this context, it makes sense this is a big hang up for me, something I’m recoiling from. and my mother made me her impetus for change and growth and when she failed at healing herself through me, it made me feel like the failure and a waste of space and “not worth it.” (it’s similar with my dad, but fatherhood’s not really the point here.) to be entirely both the source and motivation for your mother’s (and sometimes father’s) personal healing is a lot of pressure. and it feels suffocating. to be the only reason your mother works on herself when you live with her, but then devolves when you’re not with her-- it serves up some real emotional erosion. we can’t say for certain this is what wynonna would do, but even a whiff of this makes me want to run the other direction.

I’m also upset about the issue of consent in the pregnancy. her opportunity to choose was taken from her by the time demon, and that makes me uncomfortable. she’s doing amazing now, she’s so fucking strong, but I’m still upset. it was clever, but if you really look at it, it was another way she had no choice. &... I appreciate her anger about it! i really do! that is one of the things I do really respect: I appreciate her sadness being allowed time onscreen, and Melanie’s acting is uh-mazing regarding this.

see, I have a lot of conflicting emotions about this. I’m trying to articulate it as best I can.

so then I’m even further flabbergasted by all the ways my brain is trying to cope and trying to make the story cool, trying to patch it, trying to adapt it, trying to twist it, and trying to sneak in lighter and happier moments, and trying to find optimism in things like “oh well I love Jane the Virgin and that’s baby-heavy from the get-go.” .... though therein sorta lies the fundamental difference. you knew a baby was coming from the very first episode, the baby is literally the impetus for everything, and so even though there were consent issues even in Jane the Virgin, there was no real transition from Main Plot to Suddenly A Baby Gets To Be The Center of Everything..... but.... making this comparison also helps me to maybe trust a bit more. I love Jane the Virgin (but.... even still, I’ll be honest that I’ve kind of lost interest since Mateo was born and I haven’t been keeping up as regularly as I used to. I need to stop with that, but I feel it’s another example of just how much I’ve been disinterested in kids these days.)

anyway...

i’m trying to…. well…. respond to the prospect of this fictional baby the exact opposite of how I’ve been trying to react to real babies lately. and it’s just… it’s all a perfect storm, I guess.

BUT: it’s my own personal shit. and maybe I just need to set it aside. 

and maybe, even.... this take on motherhood onscreen, seeing wynonna, who I relate to so much, be a mother... perhaps it may even heal some of the wounds I’ve felt regarding the subject since the shame was first implanted by my ex, and reinforced by my own childhood and genetics and immaturity as an “adult.”

maybe. 

we will see.

[mavwrekmarketing]

A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of the Drupal community, to leave the Drupal project. Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in response not least because the reason clearly has much to do with Garfields unconventional sex life.

More specifically, Garfield is into BDSM. Even more specifically, hes a member of the Gor community, an outr subculture of an outr subculture, one built around a series of thirty-odd books by John Norman which are, basically, John Carter of Mars meets Fifty Shades of Grey. Essentiallyas I understand ita community who are interested in, and/or participate in, elaborate (consensual!) sexual subjugation fantasies, in which men are inherently superior to women. I know all this because of Garfields lengthy public response to his ouster, self-deprecatingly titled TMI about me:

Yes, I am one of those people Despite the total lack of evidence that alternative lifestyle cultures offer any harm to anyone, there is still a great deal of prejudice and bigotry regarding it someone, I do not know who, stumbled across my profile on a private, registration-required website for alternative-lifestyle people that information made it to the Community Working Group (CWG), who concluded there was no code of conduct violation present for [them] to take any action on in my first contact with Dries, he asked me to step down from Drupal Drupal has been the cornerstone of my career for the past nearly 12 years Dries wouldnt budge on me leaving, including making it clear that it wasnt an option, but an instruction informing me that Id been summarily dismissed from my position as track chair and as a speaker at DrupalCon, per [my] conversation with Dries here I am, being bullied, harassed, and excluded because of my personal activities, which I dont even publicize much less advocate for in tech circles.

Buytaert (who is also co-founder and CTO of Acquia, a Drupal platform which has raised ~$175 million over the years and has been struggling to IPO for a few years now) retorts:

when a highly-visible community members private views become public, controversial, and disruptive for the project, I must consider the impact all people are created equally. [sic] I cannot in good faith support someone who actively promotes a philosophy that is contrary to this any association with Larrys belief system is inconsistent with our projects goals I recused myself from the Drupal Associations decision [to dismiss Garfield from his conference role] Many have rightfully stated that I havent made a clear case for the decision I did not make the decision based on the information or beliefs conveyed in Larrys blog post.

Sigh. This sad mess is something of a perfect storm of Code of Conduct conflicts. It is one which raises a number of interesting questions. It also raises several quite boring ones, so lets get them out of the way:

Does this matter? (Isnt this just prurient clickbait?)

Is it OK for an open-source community to ban/ostracize a member for being involved in BDSM, or other forms of unconventional but consensual adult sexual behavior?

More generally, is it OK for an open-source community to ban/ostracize a member purely because their belief system perhaps better described as a complicated fantasy milieu in which they happen to spend their personal time was doxxed?

These questions are boring not because they are unimportant, but because the answers are so obvious: yes (no), hell no, and hell no.

Ill unpack the first: open-source communities/projects are crucially important to many peoples careers and professional lives cf the cornerstone of my career so who they allow and deny membership to, and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly consequential.

I really, really hope I dont have to unpack the two hell nos. But in case I do, let me quote this excellent blog post from Nadia Eghbal:

In the past, Dries mightve kicked Larry out because BDSM is a threat to family values. Today, leaders like Dries kick Larry out because BDSM is a threat to gender equality. Unfortunately, the end result is the same Beliefs are not actions. We cannot persecute people for what they believe, no matter how much it disgusts us, and simultaneously maintain a free and open democracy If diversity is our dogma, call me spiritual, not religious. I still pray for the same things as you, but I wont be at the witch trials.

Which is brilliantly put and I hope settles the previous questions. However. The Garfield Situation also raises two questions which are far more complex and interesting:

Under what circumstances, and via what kind of due process, is it OK for communities to publicly condemn people for secret reasons?

Is it OK to ban/ostracize community members for (legal) behavior which occurs entirely outside the community?

Obviously sometimes organizational decisions have to be made based on information that must remain confidential, for legal or ethical reasons. But if youre making such a decision, you really have to do so in the right way. What is the right way?

Probably something close to the opposite of what Buytaert and the Drupal Association did. Even if their decision was correct, which currently seems at best suspect, their complete lack of process transparency, and Buytaerts vaguely worded hinting-without-really-saying-anything statement, makes it very hard to have any faith in it.

Their accusations are so vague nonexistent non-accusations, really that Dries & co. could surely have told the community substantially more (indeed, anything) about Garfields problematic behavior, if any, without revealing sensitive information. For instance, they could have said theyd received reports of threats, harassment, or coercion by Garfield, if any such reports existed. They have said nothing of the sort.

(For what its worth, a well-informed source of mine reports: Its worth noting that a handful of women who worked with Larry did not report harassment or abuse from him in the workplace. We cant know for sure if he committed offenses, but if there were allegations or even rumors of his mistreatment of women we would be having a very different conversation right now.)

They could also have cited which elements of the Drupal Code of Conduct he violated, if any. They have not done so but theyve expelled him anyhow. Isnt that Code of Conduct, and its associated Conflict Resolution Policy, supposed to be what dictates the rules of behavior and interaction in the community? Doesnt overruling that written code with arbitrary decisions made for secret reasons reveal that in practice it is an irrelevance with no actual weight or importance?

I reached out to Buytaert in the hope of clarification; he did not respond.

Its hard not to get the impression, from the little that we do know, and the manner in which it has been miscommunicated, that whats actually deemed unacceptable here is that Garfields kink has spilled outside of his personal life i.e. that his real sin is that he was doxxed. Which, as noted, is firmly in hell no territory.

It is of course entirely possible that this impression is incorrect, and that Buytaert and the Drupal Association have done the right thing. But they have offered no evidence, no arguments, and no reasons for their decision. It seems obvious to me that they have a moral obligation to their community to do so. You cant ban people without at least sketching the outline of what it is they did wrong. Just trust us is not enough

especially since it also seems possible that the CTO and co-founder of a heavily funded pre-IPO company has participated in expelling a man from what his been his professional community for the last twelve years, ignoring that communitys own Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution Policy, because it was decided he was guilty of, essentially, thoughtcrime; that no real accusations have been made, and no allegations of problematic behavior have been cited, because none such exist.

A third plausible scenario, based on the tea leaves of Buytaerts phrase actively promotes, is that Garfield has been banned for expressing views outside the Drupal community which are deemed unacceptable inside. This is not a new issue in the open-source world: I wrote about it last year, in the context of Curtis Yarvin and Opalgate:

Should communities accept people who hold repugnant views, as long as they dont express them within that community? Or should they be expelled, because its assumed that their views influence their community work in a negative way, or because their presence makes other people feel unsafe?

Personally, both answers make me feel deeply uneasy. Humans are messy, complex, and contradictory; human interactions are that squared; the results are so complex and context-sensitive that they often need to be judged on a case-by-case basis, rather than by any hard-and-fast rule.

although in those cases, the views in question were clearly expressed publicly, not privately, and were not intended as part of any BDSM fantasy world. Does that apply here? Who knows? Certainly not the Drupal community.

Its impossible to judge the Garfield situation, because all we are permitted to know is that it has been prejudged for us, by people who refuse to tell us anything about either their evidence or their decision process. It is, however, very easy to judge whether the people who have made and communicated this decision are, by the way they have done so, actually serving their community. And that answer is, once again, Im sorry to say: hell no.

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