Who needs a title, honestly?

Firmly convinced the world would be a better place if we started treating sex the way we'd treat any other mundane preference in life, like what kind of chips a person likes to eat with their lunch.

unless you want to teach small kids about a laundry list of sex acts, they're not going to even recognise many acts of CSA as sexual in nature. instead, we need to have children who are raised with an expectation of bodily autonomy and who feel comfortable complaining when they're made or asked to do things they don't feel comfortable with. we need children to have the expectation that those complaints will be taken seriously and that they'll receive backup to make sure situations like that don't continue. if their desires for bodily autonomy are consistently ignored, how can we expect them to speak out when something confusing and uncomfortable happens with their parent, cousin, or babysitter? we've already taught them that what they feel comfortable with doesn't matter

we need to get more normal about nonsexual nudity i think

this trend of shitting on peer-reviewed academic studies in favor of tweeting “we already knew this was happening” is so soul-crushing. not to be an elitist cunt, but we have got to open the schools again. people genuinely seem to have forgotten that their personal lived experience isn’t indicative of the larger population, AND IF IT IS…… then you need researchers to support these assertions from a relevant data pool instead of a blog post from 2013 💀

"Believe women and the marginalized" does not replace the value of empirical data.

Hot (ha) take but I think everyone needs to stop with 'oh heat in Britain is extra bad bcos we don't have the infrastructure' and 'oh it's the humidity'. We could upgrade all our infrastructure and 100% of people in Britain could be having a lovely time in the sun and the apocalyptic climate change induced heat waves would still be a problem.

If someone's response to 'this country is having 30c heat waves, which is extremely hot relative to the usual climate in the region' is 'umm but 30c is barely even hot' they have a tiny child's understanding of how the world works.

I said this last year but saying that people are freaking out about 'normal summer weather' is climate change denial 👍

Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all. (The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

there's a lot I don't like about the increase of people feeling the need to offer kneejerk diagnoses of moral OCD on here, but one of the biggest flaws in it to me is that it feels so dismissive and incurious. if you can write off any troubling belief as the result of a disorder (as if people with compulsions and disordered thinking form their ideas in a bubble, without any outside influence) then you never have to actually engage with those beliefs or try to understand how a person might arrive at such a conclusion, you can just sweep it under the rug of nebulous discrediting mental illness. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a silencing tactic, although it does have shades of trying to politely call someone crazy, but I think it's a real easy out for people who have a knee jerk negative response to a very polarized take and don't want an immediate way to strip it of any potential validity.

to cite the example most salient to me and my educational practice, a lot of people, especially young people, have extremely regressive and conservative ideas about sex right now. even those who aren't trying to enforce bioessentialism and restrict human autonomy display reactionary tendencies towards the sexual expression of others and high levels of anxiety around their own sexual appetites. this is a very widespread trend, and I see it wash up in my own inbox with some frequency. and let me tell you it! seeing someone in the replies rushing to write off askers by saying "oh you have moral OCD, get help" is not helpful, ever. and trying to dismiss an generational attitude shift as Mental Illness(TM) (the kind you can ignore because it's not a cute aesthetic identity marker) rather than seriously scrutinizing the forces at play to make people think this way is sticking your head in the sand about it as best

Man, remember when Free The Nipple was a thing and there was an actual substantial amount of feminists who believed even public nudity wasn't inherently sexual and now if you date a short person hundreds of anonymous idiots online will call you a pedophile.