im in your vents teehee :3

And you’re like… “okay??”

and he’s like “great! it needs its own environment because it’ll die if it touches ours. we also need to make food for it. also we should let it teach our kids because it was a teacher on its home planet. Have you considered polygamy?”

i posted a few weeks ago about two baby kittens that were abandoned outside of my work, and it turns out one of them, who we've named dinah, had a rare medical condition called pectus excavatum that required corrective surgery. fortunately we caught it early which makes it easier to fix, but unfortunately it cost thousands of dollars. this is not my cat and i'm not planning on keeping her, but i couldn't resist getting her the care she needed after someone literally left her in a hot parking lot. the day after her surgery i ended up rushing her to the ER because of some breathing problems, so that just added to everything. also a few weeks before this i had to pay thousands of dollars for my own cat to undergo a medical procedure due to an infection she developed and so i am really struggling to keep up with all these vet bills

i've made a gofundme to try and help cover the costs of dinah's vet bills and i would truly appreciate any help anyone is able to provide, genuinely anything helps. i've never charged for gif/icon/header requests before, but if you'd like something made in exchange, i will absolutely take requests 🙏 examples of my gifs are here!

she's truly the sweetest girl and i just really want her healthy before her and her sister are able to find a forever home <3

$300/3000

Simultaneously, I’m an adult who, in my spare time, enjoys engaging in adult fiction spaces. As a result of that, I have, unfortunately, been shouted at a decent number of times by young adults (18-25 seems to be the common range) about children, and their well being, and how what happens in adult fiction spaces causes harm to children, and themselves by proxy. (I’ve also been yelled at by actual children, but I’m happy to ignore them, given many of them have been influenced by the previously mentioned young adults to behave that way.)

“Grooming” isn’t truly a technical term, though my industry uses it as one often. It doesn’t have a precise definition or pattern of behavior beyond “inappropriate conduct with a child.” It’s had other uses, of course, like saying someone was “groomed to inherit a title” or similar. But generally what we mean online is “this has to do with child abuse.”

Children are, no joke, one of the most uniquely oppressed classes of human being in the world. Most of the time, they simply have no recourse, no legal right to self-advocate, no ability to retain counsel, choose their own living environment, what they do, how they dress, what they eat. To even report their own abuse — which I assure you, most children are perfectly aware is abuse — they must first be believed by an adult, who may then choose to do something on the child’s behalf, or not. Any option a child has for safety or freedom of choice is entirely dependent on an adult deigning to humor them in the first place.

When you turn the age of majority in your country, you are automatically given a new set of legal and social rights. Even a severely disabled adult, in most places, may advocate for their rights on the basis of their legal adulthood. (There are constant failures here by the legal system, of course, but the point is that you are allowed to advocate in the first place.) You become a different class of person, who can do and ask for things that children are simply not allowed to.

When you try to say that “adults can be groomed,” by bringing up all kinds of random possibilities like “well what about cults” “what about age gaps and different levels of life experience” “what about this or that,” you’re still ignoring the idea that the exploited adult has recourse, in those situations (again, leaving out that there are many failings with the system that allows that recourse does not eliminate the fact that recourse is an option.) Restraining orders. Moving away. Going no contact, with no parent to force you to continue to see that person on holidays. Even if you are young, you are not helpless. You have an agency allowed to you that children simply are not given.

Of course, an 18 year old can be abused and exploited. And I absolutely am wary of a 19 year old dating a 40 year old — personally, I question the shit out of that. I’d even suspect that that 19 year old was previously groomed in some way. But the distinction is important to me, here, not to diminish the abuse that young adults can face, but to ensure that the plight of children is properly understood.