Collecting Hobbies Is My Hobby

If you've never found yourself as the victim of a cult, or sexual assault, or abuse, the only thing separating you from people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse is circumstance. That's it. Sheer luck. Luck over what family you were born into. Luck over who you were surrounded by when you were emotionally compromised or in any way vulnerable. Ect.

You are not better than people who have been victimized. They didn't do anything wrong to ask to be victimized. Anyone can be victimized by these situations given the perfect storm of circumstances. You are not better than people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse.

You need to understand that if you are lucky enough to have never been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse, it's very little to do with how smart or strong you are or you doing all the "right" things. Someone can be smart and strong and do all the right things and still find themselves a victim given the perfect storm of bad circumstances.

Bullying.

Funny how when I was being bullied as a kid, I did fight back and I did do everything I could to stand up to my bullies. But that didn't make it stop. All the adults at school just told me that the bullying was my fault because I was "giving the bullies the reaction they wanted, if I would just be quiet and ignore them the bullying would stop."

But now that I'm an adult, I hear other adults saying all the time that kids who get bullied are only bullied because they're too weak and insecure to stand up for themselves.

Isn't that funny? How I spent years fighting back and trying to stand up for myself, and this got me told that it was my fault for not just ignoring them? But now I hear other adults, most of whom are parents, saying if a kid is bullied it's their fault for not standing up for themselves or fighting back?

It's a lose/lose situation, either way if the kid fights back, or doesn't fight back, they're told its their fault for how they respond. It's almost as if, the bullying isn't the victim's fault or smthing 🤔

And this type of victim blaming rhetoric ignores that there's in the majority of cases a power imbalance between the bullies and victims.

Common dynamics we see are: white kids bullying children of color, neurotypical kids bullying neurodivergent kids, gender conforming cishet kids bullying GNC and/or LGBTQIA+ kids, abled kids bullying disabled kids, boys bullying girls (he's only teasing you because he likes you!), rich or middle class children bullying poor children, ect. ect.

And this is exactly WHY adults often victim blame bullied children instead of holding bullies accountable, and these adults blaming the children are often privileged themselves. White adult school staff blaming children of color who are getting bullied instead of holding the white children doing the bullying accountable, neurotypical adult school staff blaming neurodivergent children who are being bullied instead of holding the neurotypical children doing the bullying accountable, ect. ect.

a magic stew of flavors savory

of the curse she's ever wary

to never eat of sweets or dairy

and ruin her fine palate.

she knows this from her chefs degree

and so she cooketh steadily

and little other care hath she

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.

further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture

That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now

now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.

That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.

But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up

That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?

The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing

junicorn

day 11

‘pigecorn’