that kind of grateful

Is it to keep them carefully sheltered from sex, to carefully police all sexual content and only permit sexuality to be expressed in certain ways? Or is it to shift our focus away from sexuality as inherently dangerous, and focus our efforts on allowing people to talk about and deepen our understandings of abuse, and giving children the skills and abilities to make their own decisions about sex? 

If you permit more sexual freedom, there is in fact a danger that someone will use it badly; but if you keep someone ignorant and isolated about the fact that sex feels good, they might want to have it, and how they pursue that is entirely up to them, they might actually be more vulnerable to the first person willing to break the rules and share forbidden knowledge with them–and that person is more likely to be someone who will violate boundaries in other ways too.

Antis think censoring fiction will reduce sexual violence. Or rather, they feel that it will, even though they don’t have any scientific studies or research to back that up. Anti antis, on the other hand, can point to evidence that pornography doesn’t create more violence, that having only stereotypes and politically correct depictions of abuse means many people don’t realize they’re being abused, and early sex education makes teenagers less vulnerable to abuse.

Approximately 400 billion pan, bi, trans/nb, ace/aro, qpoc, etc people simultaneously speaking so loud they register as an earthquake scaling on the Richter at a 14.3: That has happened to me so many times I’m scared shitless of ever entering a community “safe space” ever again. 

Version A: sneering drawl

Version A: “I didn’t say the bad word so you’re not allowed to get mad at me.” 

girl’s friend: “wow.. thats so creepy…”

(And of course the generation who raised us loves to act fake shocked like “my grandkids don’t know how to boil water” like yeah, Janice, that’s because you took your kids out to eat 6 nights a week and baked Stouffers lasagna one night)

And now we are broke. And can’t afford to pay $60 to have every pair of pants we own hemmed (shoutout to shorties!). We are making yogurt because we can’t afford to pay $2.50 for one yogurt.

I’ve learned to knit to make myself wool hats and scarves. I’ve learned to sew so I can make items that would otherwise cost me 4x the cost to make it. I’ve learned to make yogurt because I would prefer to spend $2 for a gallon of milk and get 24 yogurts out of it rather than just one.

I’ve planted fruit trees in my yard so I can reduce the carbon footprint of the fruit I eat, and because produce is expensive.

I raise egg-laying chickens so I don’t contribute to factory farming.

My husband hunts deer so that we can eat lean, virtually fat free meat, and also not contribute to factory farming. The deer live happy lives and are not allowed to suffer. (Hey PS also, hunting up here plays an important role in ecology, as otherwise the deer population would explode, and deer would starve in the winter. Thanks for coming to my TEDta…)

And they mocked each other for admitting ignorance, which just made those who didn’t know a needed, useful skill less able to acquire it. And the only people you COULD really learn from most of the time were those around you, so if nobody around you was actually GOOD at a skill, you were fucked. 

Skills were often stratified by class, by location, by subculture and by gender. 

T1J -  How Patience with People Makes the World Better

Summary: “People don’t get “woke” overnight. Sometimes we have to be patient and help them get there.“

Transcript below:

Your medieval knights can share a pallet at night because it’s cold in this castle and they’re demonstrating their respect and affection for each other by sharing physical proximity.

In the far future, your dude can be a scientist adventurer robot captain, but he can also make food for people to demonstrate his affection and dance to show off his happiness.

Many cultures alive today expect the average man to be good with children, to be able to diaper a baby, to know how to assist in childbirth. Your men don’t have to go, “Oh god, an infant, I’ve never touched one of those before.”

Before modern Europe, there was nothing unmanly about loving colour, fashion, art, and decoration. Flowers weren’t always emasculating. Emotions weren’t always considered signs of weakness. Men got to want and have warm, close, affectionate friendships with other men.

This is kind of a tough subject to source, like medieval underclothes, because it only shows up in the surviving texts if people are doing something OUT of the ordinary. So in many medieval romances the issue of co-sleeping comes up when a knight needs to share a bed with a lady and then he has to promise nothing sexy will happen, so he puts his sword between them in bed.

So a lot of our examples of medieval bedsharing between men come with this back-and-forth of “Wait, that sounds gay” and “It’s totally not gay, men just slept together and kissed a lot back then!” and honestly it’s a bit of both. Some examples of bedsharing, like Henry II and William Marshal, have no known overtones of queerness. Other medieval pairs, like Edward II and Piers Gaveston, had VERY strong overtones of queerness. Men were more okay sleeping together and kissing back then, AND they were sometimes gay. 

Because same-sex sexuality was still actually, genuinely Not Okay. In fact, no sexuality except Properly Married Heterosexuality That Fulfilled The Three Goods Of Marriage (one of which was procreation!*) was Okay, and even then like if you could just be celibate and chaste and just never have sex your whole life, that was holier, okay? The whole Proper Married Union thing was a safety-catch for the fact that most people just couldn’t be asked to give up sexuality entirely. 

Lust was bad, hetero marriage was a sort of safety zone for lust, and otherwise no good people are having any kind of sex at ALL, are they? That’s what we thought! 

But the fact of the matter is, humans are shit at even that kind of set up and we find ways. It’s just that at that point in time it’s important that these ways are Plausibly Deniable. 

Nunneries? Were absolutely hotbeds of sapphic relationships. And as such they were also subject to significant attempts by those in charge to clamp down on sapphic relationships depending on whether or not whoever was in charge at that time felt that it was worth the effort. Ditto all-male monasteries. 

And knightly orders and all kinds of shit. 

But in some ways because the fact was that nobody was supposed to be having a same-sex relationship, it was at the same time easier to hide your semi-official same-sex relationship behind the fact that no for reals: we’re just bros. With a man and a woman there was ALWAYS the fully socially recognized chance (even likelihood!) that Sex Was A Factor, so that’s where you get the things with the knight sleeping with a sword between them. 

Since sex between men and between women was Simply Not A Thing, why would anyone think anything of two men or two women pledging forever together in friendship on and on and so on? 

(This was actually a feature in Reformation anti-Catholic stuff, although even they preferred to Allude Circumspectly to the issue.) 

So to some extent, it’s deliberately opaque whether or not any given case of a life-long pledge of whatever between two dudes who then shared a house forever was basically them being gay-married in plain sight, or whether it was in fact Just Really Great Friends. And both totally happened, and the latter obscured the former because as long as no convincing witnesses with malice aforethought actually saw you fucking, nobody could argue. 

(Of course, if they could, you’d be very possibly executed. That’s the downside to this model, or at least one of the many, many downsides to this model.) 

(And of course the ways in which ace-spectrum stuff is also naturally obscured in there is a thing!) 

(*by which I mean there were literally specific cases where infertility could viably annul a marriage, which is to say make it so that the marriage had never happened; they were specific - and “this woman has just never had a baby so she MUST be barren” was NOT one of them; it was actually more frequently, let’s be blunt, erectile dysfunction on the part of a husband that could do this, as long as the wife didn’t know about it before they married** - and limited, but they EXISTED, because reproduction was One Of The Points Of Marriage.

Clueless boss and long-suffering employee, whose powers are basically the magical equivalent of pilfering office supplies for personal use

Scheming master and duplicitous apprentice who are totally open about their loathing for each other and are keen to see who betrays whom first

Bureaucratic devil and soul-peddling diabolist with a contract a mile long, each honestly believing they’re getting the better of the other

Glowering quartermaster and loose-cannon operative, whose record for getting results just barely justifies the expense of employing them

Indifferent parent who pays their estranged offspring’s allowance like clockwork but otherwise prefers to deal with them as little as possible