Feminist 💕

“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”

and I would just like to say:

adults who think parents hitting children is discipline but children hitting parents is the height of intolerable disrespect

adults who think children should obey every order they’re given and if they feel comfortable arguing or negotiating that means they’re “taking control” and “making demands”

adults who think smartphones and cars are necessities of life for themselves but that any teenager who wants a smartphone or a car is “entitled”

adults who interrupt children all the time but yell at children when they interrupt adults

adults who act like lowering the voting age is going to cheapen their vote somehow

Obviously this doesn’t apply to minors who contribute to their households, buy their own shit (with the money they themselves earned, not a friggin allowance), and have legitimately abusive parents. Kids are entitled if these circumstances do not apply to them, and they’re still making the above demands. If you want to live life on your terms, become completely independent. If someone is bankrolling you, put up with their rules and don’t be an entitled brat. If you want equality with your parents, contribute equally in terms of work and financial input to your household, otherwise you don’t have a leg to stand on. 

and as for the assertion that kids should earn their own money to pay for things…guess what. they can’t. they can’t because adults have decided that “for their own good”, kids can’t work for any significant pay - instead, they have to spend between 60 and 80 hours a week at school and on school-related activities, contributing to a trillion-dollar education industry that gainfully employs millions of adults, and never see a cent of income from that labor. and when adults, over the years from around 1870 to 1950, decided that was going to be the new social contract for kids, they agreed to fucking pay for things for them. just like on an individual level, when adults decide to have kids, they agree to fucking pay for things for them. you don’t take away the ability to earn money on a scale greater than pocket change from 1/3 of the population and then say “well, why should you feel entitled to things if you can’t pay for them?” see above, re: capitalism and ageism fucking you in the head.

also, using the word “disobedient” to describe a human being is creepy as all hell, because it presumes that submissiveness to someone else’s commands is the default state for that person. what you’re describing when you talk like this is abuse. (no matter how many times you say “oh but of course I don’t mean kids who are *actually abused*” - as you define it, of course.) no human being is morally obligated to be “obedient”. believing they are is an abusive mindset.

and before you go off on some dumbass tangent about kids playing in traffic, I’d like to point out that the sheer number of adults who think not letting someone you love get killed is functionally the same as insisting on the right to absolute power over their daily lives is the scariest goddamn thing I’ve ever encountered.

“respect and obey their parents”? no. fucking no. when parents say “respect”, they do not mean “respect”. they mean “treating my word as law, my whims as edicts, and my desires as more important than your own, and being thankful for the privilege.”

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

“Big T Trauma”, the logic goes, is for things that are “actually bad enough’, like war veterans or rape survivors. Or people who survive natural disasters or terrorist attacks or car accidents.*  “Little t trauma” is said to be for things like “interpersonal conflict”, infidelity, divorce, “financial worries or difficulty”, “legal trouble”, “death of a pet”, “bullying or harassment”, “loss of significant relationships”, or emotional abuse.*

And it’s bullshit.

*Examples taken from various articles on the subject I just looked up in preparation for this rant.

Plenty of people survive car accidents and sexual assault and war without lasting mental health issues.

The perceived severity of the traumatic event doesn’t actually matter. What matters is how your brain reacted to it.

You can have PTSD or other serious traumagenic disorders from bullying at school, or “just” emotional abuse, or neglect, or just from not having your needs met. If you’re marinating in stress long enough, it causes SO MANY problems.

Poverty is extremely traumatic! Your brain doesn’t necessarily understand the difference between “someone is routinely causing me serious physical harm” and “we run out of money for food by the third week of the month”. It just knows to interpret these things as threats to your continued survival. They cause you to produce stress hormones and other physiological responses. I’ve probably known people who have severe, ongoing issues due to just about everything on that list!

Your brain is trying to make sure you don’t die, and all the fucking logic in the world about “Well I wasn’t ACTUALLY in danger” or “Well she wouldn’t really have hit me” or “it was just kids being kids” doesn’t change that.

Every single trauma survivor I’ve ever known has thought that what happened to them Wasn’t Bad Enough to Count, because Other People Have it Worse. Every single one.

I think we’re so close to starting to realize that, as it turns out, a whole metric FUCKTON of people have experienced traumatic events and it’s affected a LOT more people than we initially believed. We’ve started to understand that it’s not just war vets who get PTSD.

But it’s like we’re desperate to come up with a reason that no, actually, it’s not that the systems we have in place routinely damage people severely - or that a lot of very common parenting techniques cause serious harm. We have to subdivide it further into little categories, and you should stop being so dramatic. OBVIOUSLY it that wasn’t bad enough. To be clear, I understand that this terminology was PROBABLY well-intentioned. “Look, a whole host of experiences can be trauma! We should acknowledge that!” - or at least I hope it was. But it’s that implied “[but obviously it’s not as bad as the people who have REAL problems. Don’t you know some people had to deal with TERRORISM!?]” that makes it bullshit.

People who are really struggling with awful, serious things already have enough trouble being taken seriously and taking their own pain seriously.

2021:

2018:

2016:

2012:

2010:

I haven’t pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.

So let me scream it from the hilltops:

Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.

2022:

2023:

2024:

2025:

For example, being exposed to corporal punishment as a kid makes it more likely for a person to commit domestic violence against a partner. In places where corporal punishment is normal, people are more likely to think that rape and intimate partner violence are normal. Kids who are spanked are more likely to be violent with and to bully other kids.

Spanking is literally teaching a kid that violence is okay and normal and it affects the whole society.

yeah. and you can even include "thing that reduces the barrier to doing the task" as a catalyst/enzyme