In the time I have spent consuming media that involves popular bad™ male characters and/or M/F ships where the male character is morally gray or outright evil or conflicted or basically anyone who isn't completely safe and defanged, I have often comes across this statement and its countless other variations.
"Stuff like this is made to brainwash young girls into thinking that they can 'fix' dangerous men. Such girls usually end up in abusive relationships and their parents are right to worry."
It is rather strange to come across such a gross generalization, operating on an assumption that girls are blank slates whom anyone can manipulate and who can't distinguish between real and make believe on top of it.
In my entire "career"(if you can call it that) of engaging with fiction , the girls and women that I have run into in fandoms happened to be some of the most intelligent, talented, cool, witty and insightful people I have ever met. I've devoured the fics they have written. I have delighted in the arts and edits they've made. Their perspectives and interpretations about the characters and their relationships are genuinely fascinating to read about regardless of whether I agree with it or not. They are the ones who are most often at the receiving end of the antis' ire for no valid reason but they just keep deriving joy and inspiration from their favourite characters and ships and keep sharing it with others through stories, art and thoughts. They are not just smart but incredibly resilient, sensitive and aware not just about the media they consume but about the world around them and its issues.
I look up to their brilliance. I marvel at their passion. I admire them. I adore them.
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Reminder as we go into the midterm elections that tumblr has had a major, documented, and verified problem with Russian bots and propaganda bots during major US elections since 2016:
Russia 'meddled in all big social media' around US election
-via BBC News, link and more details below. December 17, 2018.
YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter were targeted in the 2016 US election, a report says.
"Russia used every major social media platform to try to influence the 2016 US election...
New research says YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and PayPal - as well as Facebook and Twitter - were leveraged to spread propaganda.
The report, released today by the US Senate, exposes the scale of Russian disinformation efforts.
Its authors criticise the "belated and unco-ordinated response" by tech firms.
The report was put together by University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Project and the social network analysis firm Graphika.
It is the first analysis of millions of social media posts provided by Twitter, Google and Facebook to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
While Facebook and Twitter have previously disclosed Russian interference, little has been known about the use of other platforms.
The report suggests YouTube, Tumblr, PayPal and Google+ were all affected, with Russia adapting techniques from digital marketing to target audiences across multiple channels.
"It's a whole family of social media sites," says Philip N Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. "We think the goal was to make the campaigns seem more legitimate."
The report says Russia had a particular focus on targeting conservatives with posts on immigration, race and gun rights.
There were also efforts to undermine the voting power of left-leaning African-American citizens, by spreading misinformation about the electoral process.
Another report, also released today [2018] by the Senate, by the research firm New Knowledge, similarly highlights Russia's efforts to target African-Americans...
One IRA campaign highlighted in the Oxford and Graphika paper, Black Matters US, existed across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and PayPal. These various accounts would promote each other's posts and events.
When Facebook suspended the group on its platform, the group's Twitter account complained about the move and accused the social network of "supporting white supremacy".
"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party - and specifically Donald Trump," the report says.
"Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."
-via BBC News, December 17, 2018. Emphasis mine.
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.......hey have we considered that half the reason that tumblr is constantly banning trans women is that someone (Russian or 4chan or rad/fem or whoever) made bots to just mass report posts that mention trans people or trans women specifically?
To be clear, this is in no fucking way an attempt to give Tumblr any credit. Tumblr's policies, enforcement, and CEO are absolutely, verifiably transphobic, transmisogynistic, and racist.
But @reasonsforhope is actually afaik still shadowbanned because I made a cutting joke about transphobes on @directactionforhope (a different blog!) over a year ago (disclaimer: I haven't actually had the time or spoons to try to fix that, due to my ongoing health issues. it's on the long, long to do list) and got mass reported. So like. Food for thought, perhaps. Certainly it has been food for thought for me
being turned on by proficiency makes going to concerts really embarrassing. yes you got up in front of me and sang a beautiful song for 2 hours and now i want you to hit. I’m no better than a songbird
Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do
I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you
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"You can say that [orangutans] are not dependent on social support and approval, and if you admire this in them, that an orang is irredeemably his own person, 'the most poetic of the apes', researcher Lynn Miles told me once in an unguarded moments. What she had in mind was the difference between orangs and chimps in the way they carry on their discourse with the world.
Chimps are much admired for their tool use and for their problem-solving relationship with things as they find them...the orang is, let us say, not so replete with enterprise. Give an orangutan the hexagonal peg and the several shapes of hole, and then hide behind the two-way mirror and watch how he engages with the problem.
And watch and watch and watch--because he does not engage with the problem. He uses the peg to scratch his back, has a look-see at his right wrist, makes a half-hearted and soon abandoned attempt to use his fur as a macramé project, stares dreamily out the window if there is one and at nothing in particular if not, and the sun begins to set. (The sun will also set if you are observing a chimp, but the chimp is more amusing, so you are less likely to mark the moment in your notes. An orang observer has plenty of time to be a student of the vanities of sunset.)
You watch, and the orang dreams...when casually and as if thinking of something else, the orang slips the hexagonal peg into the hexagonal hole. And continues staring off dreamily."
Vicki Hearne, "The Case of the Disobedient Orangutans"
you can honestly be having the worst day of your life, open tumblr and there's your long time mutual who has recently gotten really into toy story yaoi just posting away
#since buzz and woody dont have genitals the convention in toy story porn is for them to have sort of pseudoclits#in the form of the button that makes buzz's wings pop out and woodys voicebox pullstring respectively.#just in case u were curious. i learned this years ago under very clinical circumstances
image description: tag screenshot reading #i wish i could draw the face i made whilst reading this and add it in the tags like an emoji #the existing emojis just aren't specific enough /end description
Transphobia is so antithetical to genuine feminism it blows my mind there's such a wide overlap like you either believe in autonomy and self determination or you don't
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If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
the media literacy on this website may be piss poor but still when i see someone handwringing about media literacy ~70% of the time they're just complaining about the fact that other people disagree with them
Television producers who find their message ‘failing to get across’ are frequently concerned to straighten out the kinks in the communication chain, thus facilitating the ‘effectiveness’ of their communication. Much research which claims the objectivity of ‘policy-oriented analysis’ reproduces this administrative goal by attempting to discover how much of a message the audience recalls and to improve the extent of understanding. No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative. But more often broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they — the broadcasters — intended. What they really mean to say is that viewers are not operating within the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code.
Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.
no, no, come back here and tell me how stupid it is to talk about how the power dynamics inherent to christianity are built upon the rhetoric that failure is unavoidable and there is never enough you can do to make up for it
the thing about (mostly cishet) men insisting that women are never interested in cars (and i suspect this is true for many male dominated hobbies) is that if you hang around in car nerd circles enough you will quickly discover that that's completely untrue and what is actually happening is that women who are interested in cars are not telling men that they like cars unless they know the guy is normal because like 75% of the time these guys respond by either acting super condescending or sexually harassing them
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the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.
Pre-menstrual depression is always depicted as like "He He! I had a box of icecream bars and cried while watching the Titanic!" But in reality, it's more like, "I'm standing the edge of an abyss. There is nothing good inside of me, I'm filled with rage and desperation."
It's crazy that being told how to deal with that is never a part of anyone's menstrual sex education.
This has already been said in the notes, but if PMS causes extreme depression and even suicidal ideation, that is in fact something that most people do not experience and it can be treated
Like for the majority it really is "oh i'm hungrier and moodier than usual"
^this should be a part of sex education so the point still stands
I went to my doctor after I was walking to work one morning and saw a bus coming and actually took a step to throw myself in front of it before I pulled myself together. Later that day I started bleeding and was literally like someone flipped a switch and I didn't feel suicidal anymore. Which made me feel like I was loosing my mind because who goes from 'I want to throw myself in front of a bus' to 'I'm perfectly fine' just like that? I did some research, I went to the doctor and described my feelings, he looked me in the eye and gently asked what I thought it was, I said I'd read about PMDD and I thought it might be that, he said 'I think so too' and wrote a prescription.
If, before you get your period, you feel furiously angry, suicidal, irritated by every tiny thing to the point you want to murder someone, stuck in a black hole you'll never escape from. If you are experiencing extreme emotions for what seems like no good reason, especially if you get your period and those extreme emotions just go away. You're probably not just PMSing , you may have PMS's feral big sister PMDD and it's treatable.
Also this is something that can develop as you get older. So if you used to get normal PMS but what I wrote above sounds more like your norm now then don't just write it off as regular PMS.
