I did talk to my coach about the weirdness about self sabotaging after that dude hit on me.

& I will probably write about it here if ya'll don't mind.

Tw religious trauma

Probably some deep seeded religious trauma there. My parents were nutty granola evangelists.

When I was 16, I kissed my boyfriend.... my dad found out & I was terrorized by home Bible studies, lectures where I was forced to stand in the corner and get yelled at and grounded for a year and a half... until I turned 18.

And my boyfriend was younger, there was nothing happening there. He was a terrible kisser.

But the shame. Good god. I don't know how to absolve myself of the shame. I have been in mostly gay relationships ever since. Normally long ones.... but why do I feel so shitty when people perceive me as pretty?

I need to be able to be In public occasionally without running to a fucking buffet every time I get hit on. Even at my age, it is going to happen occasionally.

Being hit on does not make me anything. But my brain says I am a whore and the lowest being on the planet.

None of that is actually true. I am in a stable gay relationship with a gal I adore. We are celibate.

I am not a cheater & I haven't done anything wrong.

I was just raised by a dude who thought all women were inherently evil whores that were going to chest and lie.

A real misogynistic bastard. My mom was a steadfast, faithful woman. His issues were with his mother and his first girlfriend or something.

But those issues aren't mine.

I deserve a healthy life in a healthy body.

By: Martha Lee

Published: Nov 7, 2022

As women in Iran have continued to remove and burn their hijabs in protest against the regime that killed 23-year-old Mahsa Amini in September, Western Islamists have been more outraged about the protesters taking off their hijabs than they are about the death of Amini in police custody. They also seem indifferent to the deaths of more than 300 protesters in the streets of Iran since mid-September. Such reactions are a reminder that the desire to impose hijab on women is evidently not limited to Islamic theocracies, but is also found in Muslim communities in the West.

Well-known Islamist Roshan Salih denounced the women as “Western stooges.” Salih, who runs the British Islamist publication 5 Pillars, was among the most aggressive detractors of the protesters, claiming that the Iranian women opposing the regime were “insulting Islam” and that “Muslims all over the world are looking at [them] in disgust.”

Salih’s 5 Pillars published a series of op-eds on the hijab by Muslim women. One piece, written by Anjum Anwar, was titled “Message to liberals: I do not need rescuing from my hijab.” Another took a more Islamist perspective, claiming that “[hijab-wearing women] are the flag bearers of Islam” and warning women who burned their hijab that they had also burned “the bridges that will lead them to the submission of desires in place of their Lord.” In a third op-ed, activist Shabnam Kulsoom asserted that “Muslim women who disrespect hijab should not be “celebrated” and described the hijab as a “a magnet for attracting respect and repelling disrespect.”

Islamist religious figures assented. Prominent Canadian imam Younus Kathrada criticized as “completely false” the idea that no one could tell someone else how to dress. Kathrada accused certain hijab-wearing women, who support the right of other women not to wear it, of sounding “like the rhetoric of the modernist ‘scholars’ who support the rights of people who want to commit sodomy and live contrary to the [nature] God created us upon.”

Youssef Soussi, a Californian Islamist imam, explained that “the so-called [Muslim woman] who burns a veil/hijab in this [world] may very well be the reason why she burns in Hell in the [next world].” American Islamist Ismael Royer argued that the protests were evidence of “mental self-colonization.” Meanwhile in London, the director of the Islamic Centre of England accused the protesters of being “soldiers of Satan.”

Hardline Islamist Daniel Haqiqatjou, who runs the Islamist publication Muslim Skeptic, declared that not “mandating hijab is a crime against humanity” and claimed that “Islam protects” the “fundamental human right” of having a “modest public space free from promiscuity and harassment by the inappropriately dressed.”

Haqiqatjou’s publication, Muslim Skeptic, published an op-ed on the “Hijab Burnings in Iran and the Liberal Muslim’s Hatred for Islam.” The writer condemned liberal Muslims’ “colonised worldview” as “the biggest hurdle” to the Muslim community’s “attainment of the leadership of the world.” A couple of weeks prior to the protests, Muslim Skeptic’s regular contributor Bheria had penned a piece on “the Inevitable Failure of Political Shi’ism: The Secularization of Iran.”

As for the Council on Arab-American Relations (CAIR), it published an op-ed warning that supporting women who remove their hijab but not those who put it on “translates into Islamophobia that risks perpetuating more violence against girls and women.”

Others were busy attacking Muslim minority sects. Writer Talha Abdulrazaq, infuriated by Ismaili professor Khalil Andani’s stating that there is no consensus that hijab is mandatory, accused Ismailis of “thinking it’s ok to burn down mosques” and concluded that “hijab burning is nothing to [Ismailis] by comparison.” Ismailis are a Shia sect of Islam that embraces an inward understanding of the religion and is reputed for its support of women’s rights. The 48th Ismaili leader completely abolished the hijab for Ismaili women while encouraging their education.

Western Islamists are, of course, not in a position to legally impose the hijab on Muslim women but their reactions leave little doubt that they would gladly do so. Many Muslim communities in the West continue to be dominated by hardline religious figures who give women the ‘choice’ to wear the hijab or be ostracized and go to hell.

==

This is why you laugh off and ignore accusations of “Islamophobia.”

Excerpt from this story from Vice:

It was the height of summer and Pastor Farris Wilks was warning that if we didn’t all stop sinning, God was going to scorch the Earth and melt the polar ice caps.

“We’re going to reap what we have sown, and what we have sown has not been good,” Wilks explained in his self-assured Texas drawl. “Think of all the murder that has happened in this country… all the babies that have been murdered… sexual perversion of all kinds.”

Wilks told his congregation in the small Texas town of Rising Star that the spike in global temperatures could be related to these sinful excesses. Maybe, he said, us “getting a little scorched here” was a message from God, and there was little if anything we could do about it.

“We didn’t create the Earth, so how could we ever save the Earth, or save all the animals even on the Earth, or save the polar caps?” Wilks said that day in July 2013, according to a recording obtained by the watchdog group Right Wing Watch. Ultimately, the fate of the planet was up to God alone: “If he wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there.”

Wilks was no ordinary pastor. Along with his brother Dan Wilks, he was one of the U.S.’ newest billionaires. And their fortune came from an industry directly related to the planetary changes Wilks described in his sermon: fracking for oil and gas.

The previous year he and Dan had sold their fracking company Frac Tech for $3.5 billion and each pocketed $1.4 billion. They now intended to use their new fossil fuel fortune to shift the moral values of the entire country—and the right-wing influencers they enlisted for the cause went on to become some of the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation.

In 2013, the same year Farris gave his sermon on “polar caps,” the brothers decided to donate more than $6.5 million to Prager University, which doesn’t have a campus and isn’t actually an accredited university. Founded by conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager to fight against “liberal bias” in American classrooms, it packages right-wing ideology into viral videos aimed at young people. That model, aided by YouTube recommendation algorithms, has resulted in billions of views across their digital platforms.