There are many large wild animals near where I live and I am largely reasonably-cautious-but-comfortable with this. However. Being nearly three miles down the trail on the conservation easement with someone else’s dog when suddenly the wind changes direction and buddy full on crouches belly down and starts shaking is, shall we say, An Experience

This is just one reason the nominally-left wing granola hippy/Norse paganism/Catholicism really went off with the aesthetics/astrology nature goddess essential oils nurture-your-feminine-energy woo* -> tradwife pipelines are such a thing btw. Aestheticization of politics baby. It’s not that only reactionaries like sourdough bread and gardening or whatever, it’s that vibes-and-aesthetics based politics are a dark road to start down

Anyway this is an unpopular opinion on social media but it really shouldn’t be: aesthetics-as-politics is one of the scourges of our time. Do not misread me. I am not saying that everyone who (eg) enjoys cute cottagecore posts is a terf or a tradwife, nor am I singling out any one particular aesthetic as the natural home of reactionaries. I am saying that ANY time you see somebody get really into Political Aesthetics - whatever the aesthetic - it should at the very least set your spidey senses tingling, because fascists were and are the absolute kings of that shit. I am saying that (maybe especially in our time and on social media) heavy aestheticization is advertising, and advertising is selling you something

I am once again asking everyone to read Eco’s “Ur-Fascism.” (Also other literature on the subject! But that essay is a particularly approachable and to the point.) Maybe then fewer self-proclaimed internet leftists would thump their chests about punching nazis whilst also losing their minds if you side-eye cottagecore blogs or question their God-given right to call people they dislike degenerates.

Know thine enemy etc etc. Bad ideologies are ideologies and you should understand how they work, if you are a serious person who takes the threat posed by those ideologies seriously

Anyway this is an unpopular opinion on social media but it really shouldn’t be: aesthetics-as-politics is one of the scourges of our time. Do not misread me. I am not saying that everyone who (eg) enjoys cute cottagecore posts is a terf or a tradwife, nor am I singling out any one particular aesthetic as the natural home of reactionaries. I am saying that ANY time you see somebody get really into Political Aesthetics - whatever the aesthetic - it should at the very least set your spidey senses tingling, because fascists were and are the absolute kings of that shit. I am saying that (maybe especially in our time and on social media) heavy aestheticization is advertising, and advertising is selling you something

tumblr stop recommending I follow hedgehog-moss

no multi option, agonize and choose, no results option, pick one to find out or scroll onward

Example:

May I draw your attention to the meaning of the phrase “et cetera,” and also the fact that you can only write a very limited number of words in each poll option

People on this website will go on tangents in the tags that make it extremely evident that they did not fucking read. Sometimes this is annoying because they accuse you of pissing on the poor and try to start shit over it. Other times it is essentially harmless, but still lowkey annoying in that it is yet another reminder of the way so many people do not fucking read

People on this website will go on tangents in the tags that make it extremely evident that they did not fucking read. Sometimes this is annoying because they accuse you of pissing on the poor and try to start shit over it. Other times it is essentially harmless, but still lowkey annoying in that it is yet another reminder of the way so many people do not fucking read

sorry the idea that there's this Grand Meaningful difference between GNC cis people and trans people is stupid. it's stupid when trans people promote it and it's stupid when transphobes promote it. there are trans people who feel very different than GNC cis people and there are GNC cis people who feel very different than trans people, there are people who feel like both or like they are in the middle.

But more than anything, on a very real level, we are all gender criminals. Crossdressing laws affect us all. Gender roles affect us all. And even more: little kids being allowed to freely experiment with gender helps us all. Letting people identify how they want helps us all. Gender neutral bathrooms and banishing the idea of the "predatory crossdresser/butch" helps us all. If you are GNC and you are transphobic you very much are cutting off your nose to spite your face.

in the world of baffling recipe blogs and even more baffling comments left thereon, the one that always gets me is the small but loud minority of people who react with absolute revulsion to videos of people touching food with their hands. Ma’am. Sir. #1 This is not an Arby’s but their home kitchen, #2 I’m going to assume they washed their hands (and even if they didn’t, I’m not eating it and nor are you!), and #3 it’s about to go into a 425 degree oven for an hour

Something that gets lost in the contemporary pressure to have an iron-clad identity is the subversive power of saying “it’s none of your business.”

I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it

When I am feminine it is in a masculine way and when I am masculine it is in a feminine way. What’s not clicking.

Parents trans their kids gender all the time; they do it on the fly; they do it without even noticing they’re doing it and the effect they have on their child’s gender shapes their relationship with it for the rest of their life.

even something as simple as letting a child know that they are failing their gender, that they have stepped outside of the acceptable boundaries for what a girl or a boy is supposed to be, puts that kid square in the awareness that their state of gender exile is threatening their attachment to their primary caretaker— they have to re-gender themselves within the acceptable limits to restore the connection. You cannot re-enter a space without first being expelled from it.

i don’t think most cis people realize that we already live in a society that on some level believes there is more than two genders.