why are we here? just to buffer?

So, first thing, sometimes someone says “I’m struggling to trust my partner because [harmless stuff]” and then when you talk to them, they’re also struggling to trust their partner because their partner lies to them a lot and vanishes for days with no explanation and makes them feel insecure and ignores their boundaries with respect to discussion of their exes and their sex life with previous partners.

And if that’s what’s going on, then what you have is a partner who doesn’t respect you, and you should leave that relationship. 

The rest of this post assumes that there are actually no problems of that type, but I did want to say that first because it is a pattern I’ve seen.

Presuming that there’s no reason to feel jealous except that your girlfriend is close with people who she has had sex with in the past:

It seems likely that you and your girlfriend come from subcultures with different background expectations about what monogamy looks like. I am guessing you’re from a subculture where part of the cultural expectations about monogamy includes cutting off close relationships with people who you have had sex with in the past, and that she is from a community where the cultural expectation associated with monogamy is just ‘don’t have sex with, or sexual or romantic kinds of closeness with, people other than your partner’.

In your subculture, people who are not doing all the things associated with monogamy are probably people who value those norms less. So when someone doesn’t follow those norms, it feels to you like they value a relationship less, even when what’s actually going on is just that those aren’t norms everywhere.

I want to observe that these are different cultures, with different norms, but I don’t want to stop there and say “and all cultures are equally valid and all norms are above criticism”.

I think that it’s often reasonable to compare norms and say “these ones are better, these ones are worse”. I think that the norm “to do monogamy, you need to sever close relationships with anyone who you have had sex with” is a pretty bad one. I think that for a couple reasons. Firstly, I think in general, close relationships among adults are hard to come by, and it’s an enormous cost when you have to sever them. Secondly, I think that the whole idea ‘you can’t really be friends with someone if you’ve ever had sex with them’ is both factually mistaken and part of a cultural thing where we elevate sex to the most defining conceivable thing about two people, where if they’ve been each others’ lifeline and tutor and support system and therapist and best friend and ally for ten years but also had sex once, then theirs is a Relationship Of The Sex Type.

And furthermore, cutting off friendships makes people in relationships vulnerable to abuse, and so having it widely culturally accepted that you’ll cut off many of your friendships if you’re really serious about someone makes it harder for people to notice when their partners’ demands about their friends are unreasonable and controlling. I’m absolutely not saying you’re controlling or would abuse your partner. I don’t believe that at all. I’m saying that when we’re evaluating the sort of norms that we, as a society, want to put our collective weight behind, we want to take into account things like “the more socially legitimate reasons to ask your partner to distance themselves their friends, the more these will be used by bad people to isolate their partners”.  

So I think that the norms your girlfriend has for monogamy - that monogamy is about not having certain kinds of relationships with other people, now, and that it’s possible to respect a relationship without cutting off friendships with anyone who you have ever had sex with - are better. I think they’re healthier, I think they come from, and contribute to, better ideas about what relationships are.

I’m not saying ‘the norms you’ve absorbed about what a healthy relationship looks like are harmful’ in order to say ‘so you should feel guilty over the emotions you have, or the needs you have’. You shouldn’t. And you should feel empowered to ask for things you need, and to end a relationship that doesn’t meet your needs.

But keeping in mind that these are two sets of monogamy norms, rather than just your girlfriend not caring much about adhering to yours, and keeping in mind that there are some benefits to her set, it might be worth treating paranoia about this the same way you’d treat paranoia about getting into cars after a car accident: talk about it with a trusted friend or a therapist, figure out what triggers it and teach yourself mental counters when it comes up, internalize that it’s not rational, and make up stupid jokes to throw at it internally.

It also might be worth interacting with people who do your-girlfriend-style monogamy, so that you can internalize that there are healthy relationships like that, and that people can respect their partners while staying friends with exes.

 If you can’t be in a relationship happily, it’s okay to end it for any reason - you don’t need to have decided your partner did something wrong to decide the two of you aren’t suited. If you can’t be happy dating people with different monogamy norms, then for G-d’s sake don’t date people with different monogamy norms, and don’t feel guilty over it.

submissive

extremely obedient

silent about their needs

always content with what they get, even if it’s much less than they need

pleasing to everyone around them

giving others what they want even when it’s harmful and painful to do so

expecting punishment at merely displeasuring someone

expecting pain as soon as they don’t meet someone’s expectations

not good enough unless they make everyone else happy

putting their needs last, or not having needs at all

extremely grateful for every little bit of human decency they get

best in the world in everything, or else they’re worthless

recognizing that people who hurt them most likely do it unintentionally or even worse, out of love

accepting hurtful behaviour without calling it out, complaining about it, or even letting the perpetrator know how much they got hurt

extremely forgiving, to the point where they forgive without even getting an apology, or with the hurtful offense still going on

tolerating insults, humiliation, slurs, and hatred being directed at them

never showing outright anger, rage, resentment, or hold a grudge

never fighting for their rights

never refusing to do what’s asked of them

accepting that they might be unlovable and that nobody will ever want them

The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back.

Enclosure wasn’t the result of a single Act of Parliament, it had been going on since ~1200, and little by little it grew worse, as the landlords became more powerful and the peasants did not.

The right to use the commons - lands, on a lord’s estate, where people could enter and forage for themselves, fish, herd, gather wood etc - was taken very seriously, and was often necessary for the peasants’ survival. Enclosure was basically the privatisation of a previously communal resource. It was landlords putting up hedges and digging ditches around common lands, and saying “nope, you can’t enter any more; IT’S ALL MINE, and if you pick a berry it’s now THEFT”, either because an Act of Parliament allowed them to do that (remember that Parliament was comprised of landlords…), or just because they could. In the tug-of-war between King and Parliament, the law occasionally attempted to limit enclosure… and generally failed.

And every time commons were taken away, by law or by force, at any point from the 13th to the ~19th century, you had misery and suffering, because people were unable to sustain themselves. And then of course you had unrest, you had masses of destitute vagrants and/or pissed off outlaws, you had riots and armed revolts, again and again.

For example, when Kett’s Rebellion erupted in Norfolk in 1549, this “Rebel’s Complaint” was issued:

“The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition miserable. These abound in delights; and compassed with the fullness of all things, and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after gain, inflamed with the burning delights of their desires. But ourselves, almost killed with labour and watching, do nothing all our life long but sweat, mourn, hunger, and thirst. […]

The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away. The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several [“severals” were hedged plots of privately controlled land]; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out. […]

We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms, and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty. […] We will rend down the hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. […]

We desire liberty, and an indifferent (or equal) use of all things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our lives shall only be ended together.”

In the 17th century, enclosure was becoming rampant again, now with the full support of the law, and even more trouble was caused by disafforestation - the sale of royal forests (which were not necessarily woodland, mind you, they were just called that way, and at that point they included common lands), to new owners who enclosed them as soon as they got their hands on them. More suffering, more indignation, more unrest, more revolts.

This website has a bunch of download links for IPA Unicode keyboards. The small, technical-looking words can be daunting but if you read the descriptions of the links in the section for your computer you can find what you need to download pretty easily.

You end up being able to type the IPA as easily as other keyboards

What I usually do is pull the keyboard up on the screen to see what characters I’m pressing

This is what it ends up looking like. You can move it anywhere on the screen and make it whatever size you want. The key you press lights up. The orange legs show what you can press to show more symbols.

It has literally everything I’ve ever needed. I hope this helped!

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

5. out

4. guilty

3. wanting

2. lacking

On the one hand we would not want to endorse naive anti-scientism which allows the reduction of science to power to lead us to an opposition to scientific inquiry. We can simultaneously hold the scientific method as a human accomplishment which results from certain formulations of power/material economic social structures and recognize that scientific inquiry can give historically contingent insights into our relationship to materiality.

Because pockets are not a natural right.

Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely. /end transcript]