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sideblogformindtrash · 3 years

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I understand that you’re busy and stuff so don’t rush to get this done, but I’d love to see more of Pastel being afraid of Orfeu. Maybe Farlan and Orfeu have weekly check up sessions just so Orfeu can make sure that Farlan is behaving himself? I can imagine every time Orfeu comes over, Pastel is fearful that that Master is going to let Orfeu use those sharp teeth and nails on him and BB.

apparently pastel is an angry boyo

kind of struggling between must protec BB and omg dont wanna be hurt :c

CW: Dehumanization; nsfw insinuation; pet whump; mentioned beating, tying, breaking fingers, collar; nightmare; biting; blood; orfeu just trying to be a gothic boi and Pastel overthinking;

Pastel knew very well what their Master bringing friends over meant for a pet. It marked an exhausting day, of trying to attend to the demands not only of your known, usual tormentor, but of many unknown faces that were often just as cruel as your Master, and often, enable and encouraged each other to be crueler.

This Master… Barely gave them any time to get used to the new home, before bringing guests over. He probably wanted to show off his new purchase – two little pets, from this famous Pet trainer… Pastel shivered. Their life here, no matter how lavish the apartment, would be one of misery, he could feel.

What he was not expecting is for BB to have already met that man before. Master’s friend, called Orfeu, who, to his horror, Master Farlan stated would likely pet-sit for them with some frequency.

“It’s Blue’s owner” BB smiled at him, whispering with excitement, as they waited on the floor “Master knows Blue’s owner!”

“Is he?” Pastel asked, shivering. Pastel wasn’t sure if it was worse to be babysat by someone who had previous experience with pets or not.

…When the man approached, Pastel wanted to run and hide. There was something… Off about him. Eyes that had a color a bit too green, a solid shade that did not belong on someone’s irises. He smelled… like fresh pine trees, with a vague, vague undertone of leaves rotting and moss growing… The smell of being lost on a dark forest. And his gaze was a fucking dead end. He stared through them, around them behind them. Everything but at them, searching the nothing as if there was something there.

Pastel wasn’t sure if he was being paranoid, or if somehow, all of this flew over BB’s head due to their excitement of meeting Blue’s owner! But there was no way BB missed the teeth, right?

Pastel’s dreams were often abstract and weird – and they were always terrible and frightening in their nosense – but among the usual chaos, he started to recognize that set of teeth and sharp, perfect nails.

He wondered what Master thought about it. It wasn’t normal, not even for humans, to have teeth like that. Master didn’t seem concerned, in fact, he was almost affectionate towards that man.

Pastel had long started to dread the day they would be left alone with him or Master would allow him to hurt them. He could almost envision that man on top of him, the chains and spikes of his clothes rubbing against his skin, his nails tracing red marks, and the teeth, drawing blood.

And worse, how would that man hurt BB? His BB who naively ran up to them every time they came to visit offering him that big smile and showers of questions that the man answered, patiently. He was entertained by BB, for now. But when he got tired, when he decided he wanted to cause them pain… Shit, how would BB feel? Would they feel like they were betrayed again? Pastel wasn’t sure how many more abandonments BB could go through. But maybe BB was expecting it to happen, too. Maybe they were just… trying to make the most out of their niceness, while they could.

And now it was that day.

There he was, on his scary tall boots, harness, a spiked collar… Was that a mockery? A human, wearing a decorative collar, to show then that it wasn’t their clothes, their living conditions, or anything that made then different: It was simply that humans and pets were different?

And all those leather straps… There were so many in his clothes, and it would be so easy for him to use that to tie them up, or beat them with it. Those boots – they could so easily crush fingers, or keep someone pinned down, or just hurt when throwing a kick…

Pastel could do nothing but shiver, standing near the sofa on the living room, as Master Farlan and Orfeu chatted at the door.

“W—why you s-so scared Pastel? W-will be okay” BB smiled, sitting by his side “…S-still nervous a-about him?”

“I don’t know how can you be so calm, BB” Pastel whispered, his eyes glued on Master’s friend “He gives me the creeps…”

“H-he is nice!” BB smile broadens.

“Just because he is Blue’s Master, that doesn’t make him nice”

…BB pouts, crossing their arms.

“I, I, BB knows! BB i-isn’t stupid…” and BB shows him their tongue “He is, is being nice with BB, a-always was”

“What if he isn’t? Master was here the other times, now we’ll be alone…”

“W-will be fine!” BB insisted “BB r-recognizes p-people who are nice!”

…And that was half true because BB thought everyone was nice so… Sometimes they would get it right. But at least… at least they were calm somehow. Having BB scared wouldn’t help, either.

…BB got their hand, squeezing it.

“W-w-will be o-okay. BB knows. P-please Pastel? C-calm down?”

Pastel sighed.

“I’ll… Try. I’ll be good. Of course I will” He always was. He knew the alternative. Play by their rules… And get used to always losing, anyways.

Well, they took a deep breath. Be good. Behave. It will be okay. You will survive. BB will survive.

As he approached them, BB immediately jumped on their feet, hugging his legs. He nearly lost balance, than chuckled, and ran his finger – nails, sharp, dark, painted with red spots to symbolize blood, blood he would get from them later… - through BB’s hair.

Then the man looked at him… And Pastel flinched. He wanted to be a good pet, behave well and not cause trouble… But he flinched just from a glance. And the man smiled at that. Oh, no. He was enjoying how afraid Pastel was. He felt… He felt like he would cry, the man looking at him like a predator at its prey…

“Hey there, Pastel”

...He tried to crawl closer, to swallow all of that and pretend he wasn’t terrified – he was ashamed of being scared like this. But he couldn’t. He trembled, his arms and legs trembled, his face was pale…

“It’s alright. You don’t have to come closer, if you don’t want to”

And that was a trap. If he didn’t do it, the man would punish him. What he wanted didn’t matter at all. But the next second, the man was distracted by BB again, who was pulling him to their bedroom to show a drawing they had made of Mr. Tonsils.

He breathed in relief as they left the living room. It felt like the place was safe again. He closed his eyes, enjoying that feeling while it lasted… But then he thought he couldn’t let alone with BB! What if… What if then he tried to hurt them? He cursed himself for being so stupid and scrambled after them, peeking from the doorway.

…Nothing was happening. BB was sat by his side on the bed, flipping the pages of the notebook Master had gifted them, pointing at their drawings and looking for the man’s approval… And Orfeu was just nodding, making small comments about the drawings and entertaining BB.

After that, the man went out for a few minutes and Pastel was terrified. BB came stand by their side, seeming cheerful.

“It, it’s o-okay, t-they went g-get food…”

“Are…Are you sure?” Pastel whispered, biting the inside of his cheeks. BB pulled him closer, clumsily petting his hair.

“Y-yes. He, he w-went get p-pizza f-for u-us b-b-ecause he can’t c-cook and Master is, is p-paying anyway…” BB chuckled.

“BB… His teeth… And… And the things he wearing…”

“T-t-they look c-c-ool d-don’t they?” BB tumbled their head to the side “BB would want t-to be like that if, if BB w-wasn’t B-b-blue’s copy already…”

“…You are not ‘Blue’s copy’. You are BB, you don’t have to-”

“N-not that now P-pastel…” They whimpered, pulling away from the hug “O-only Pizza”

“If… If it’s really pizza…”

…And well, to his surprise it actually was. And they actually got to eat more than scraps, while BB and Orfeu cuddled on the sofa and Pastel just… Sat nearby. Far enough that the man couldn’t suddenly grab him, but close enough that he would be able to do something if BB was in danger… At least he hoped so.

So the time he was truly scared of came. They went to sleep. And… Nothing happened then, too. Orfeu tucked BB in, whispered a soft ‘good night’ to Pastel and went to Master Farlan’s bedroom for the night.

…After he left, Pastel felt a bit safer. He crawled in bed by BB’s side, pulling them into a hug. They had a smug smile.

“…S-see? BB knows. N-nothing bad h-happened…”

…He agreed, a bit grumpy. Still, he dreamed of teeth and nails.

#pet whump #whump #orfeu and haru #Pastel <3 #BB: Baby Blue #Farlan B)

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onecornerface · 4 years

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[Note: tentative rant, typing while angry]

I made a comment on social media to the effect of saying most people who use meth are normal people. Some people were aghast that I would say such a thing.

I did overstate my case, and so after the initial pushback, I made a more nuanced comment to follow up on it. I noted my use of the term “people who use meth” is ambiguous. Does it mean “one-time users,” “regular users,” or “occasional users”? This matters, and the prevalence of all kinds of problems could be very different in one subset than in another subset. I also noted the colloquial term “normal” is very ambiguous and loaded, and that it may be preferable to avoid the term. This was another flaw in my initial comment.

I granted that I did not have the evidence to justify thinking a majority of regular meth users were normal people by various important standards one could use-- the evidence is too complex and ambiguous for me to confidently draw such a conclusion. I granted that making casual comments of the sort which I made could be dangerous in sending the wrong message about whether it’s a good idea to use meth.

But you know what? The message I sent isn’t the only dangerous one. The messages sent by most other people are at least as dangerous. It’s hard to send a nuanced message about drugs that isn’t itself dangerous. It’s hard to strike a balance somewhere in between “using hard drugs is a fine idea which is not highly risky for countless individuals” and “using hard drugs is so stupid, you’d have to be a dumb asshole to do it.” Dammit, at least I’m trying. Many people aren’t trying.

People who use meth are getting shit on from all corners and all levels of society. Stereotypes about them are used to justify mockery, ostracism (which raises addiction risks & other medical risks), the withholding of evidence-based public medical care, the removals of socioeconomic safety nets, violence by the criminal justice system, and all kinds of really bad things. Much of this is classist, racist, and ableist (and other kinds of -ist) as hell, too.

Even a lot of people who sincerely support ending the war on drugs often still buy into a lot of dehumanizing attitudes and stereotypes against people who use meth. For one, the media bias is quite extreme, and many good people absorb this sort of bias over the years by osmosis. Obviously, meth users who cause trouble are disproportionately likely to make it onto the news, relative to meth uses who don’t cause trouble-- screwing up the representation in people’s minds. And the government-financed scare campaigns have been abundant over the decades, usually with little regard for the humanity of people who use meth.

I’m fine with saying that using meth is generally a bad idea. My adopted brother’s biological dad couldn’t take care of him, because he was addicted to meth and this caused all manner of problems. He initially used meth recreationally, then became addicted after an unforeseen personal tragedy. Of course it would have been a lot better if he hadn’t started in the first place.

But many people think using meth is so outrageously stupid that they end up thinking stuff like that all meth users deserve anything bad that happens to them, or at least consented to the risks and so aren’t entitled to help, etc.

Maybe it’s worth pushing back on some of these messages, and acknowledging the complexity and diversity and humanity of people who use meth.

When taking on a society full of dehumanizing stereotypes that are casually accepted by most people, dammit, I think it’s pretty excusable if I sometimes inadvertently make comments that go too far in the opposite direction. It’s a mistake on my part, and it’s a mistake well worth correcting. But I guess I’m not that sorry for making this mistake once in a while. I guess I’m not that sorry if I occasionally come across like I’m sending the wrong message to the children, etc.

I’ll accept being lectured over this by a serious scholar or activist who knows a lot about meth, meth use, meth users, meth addiction, etc. I will not accept being dismissively mocked over this by people who (as far as I know) don’t know shit about the subject matter and whose commentary is far more flawed and prejudiced than my own.

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cienie-isengardu · 6 years

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Some thoughts about TLJ

I rewatched The Last Jedi, and finally - after getting enough sleep - I’m ready to rant about some things. Spoilers ahead!

In general, I can’t complain about characters itself - actors did really great job, and visual side of movie was pretty awesome. Yet, story wise, there are some things that bothers me badly. In no particular order:

♞ I dislike the whole drama with vice admiral Holdo. Was there even any reason why she couldn’t tell Poe and crew about her plan beside creating an unnecessary conflict? Like, anything beside that?

Because I think that telling people under her command that there is a plan to save them & Rebellion, would benefit everyone. Or, why the hell she didn’t told the plan when Poe tried to overthrow her?? It doesn’t make much sense to me, and it feel so forced, just for the drama’s sake and I hate such moments. Especially since Holdo already made a comment about Poe, how hothead and dangerous he was. So, why not tell anything if not to raise the morale of people on the verge of hopelessness, then at least to make sure that Poe will not take actions that may jeopardize their chance??

Also: if she already decided to sacrifice herself by staying behind on the ship (why there must stay someone at all? couldn’t they programmed the ship or leave a droid in charge??), why it takes so many people to die for her to take any action to save her comrades? She could jump into enemy ship right away, or put the ship between running Rebels and enemy fire, and save so more people. It just, well, irritated me.

( Also, I’m kinda shallow here, but why the hell a fucking officer wear a dress instead of uniform, especially during warfare?? I may forgive general Leia, because well, this is princess Leia, but man, that dress kind of bothered me.)

Okay, so Holdo maybe wanted show Poe his place, but it sill doesn’t make much sense why he was denied simple knowledge that there is a plan that may save them all. It’s no wonder why Poe acted against her. Also, I kind of disagree with blaming Poe for the action against super-powered enemy ship. If Resistance didn’t destroy that ship at the beginning of movie, its canon could probably destroy or at least weaken the shields of their ship much faster, given the chance.

Now I kind of wonder, how the movie would go, if instead of Poe, Finn and Rose conspiracy, they actually were allowed to take some action to stop / distract the enemy. I wouldn’t mind to see more team work between them. Or actually some infiltration of First Order by Finn and Rose.

♞ I dislike idea that Kylo is now the Supreme Leader, because that makes little sense. I mean, yeah, he was apprentice of Snoke, but why First Order would care to follow him? If the movie ended with some blowing mind victory thanks to Kylo’s command, sure why not. But there is so little about Kylo and his position or relationship with members of FO, that I don’t see why they would accept Snoke’s death like nothing happened. To be fair, I would prefer if Kylo persuaded Hux to lie that Snoke is alive and all right, while working together to keep First Order in one piece. I know they aren’t the biggest fan of each other (though it’s shame we saw so little of their interaction after TFA), but I guess A) not so many people were allowed to see Snoke and B) Supreme Leader’s death (and by hand of some girl from nowhere) wouldn’t have a positive impact on soldiers' morale and soon the fight for power would tore First Order for good. Divided FO wouldn’t last for long, and Hux seems like enough pragmatic person to seize the opportunity to take power for himself. It’s better to rule than being ruled by some asshole that can hurt and humilated you in front of everyone at whim.

Also, it could be fun to see both Kylo and Hux lying to everyone and comming with weirder and weider stuff to say knowing full well the other can’t deny that otherwise the truth would destroy them all. Because why Hux wouldn’t agree to actually command his troopers the way he wants instead of being humilitated publicly? And to be fair, if Kylo was smart, it would be better to operate from shadows, while letting Hux to deal with political stuff. If only they were capable of working together. I mean, I don’t even need them to like each other, but some kind of Vader-Tarkin interaction would be nice.

To be fair, I would like to know more about Hux - as much as it was funny to see space fascist get pushed into wall or knocked into ground via Force the first time, it makes me wonder how often Hux was a target for Snoke’s anger? How often he was humiliated (and hurt) publicly? Is he glad that Snoke died or if he is so used to be treated like that, it doesn’t bother him anymore? I wonder about it, because as much as movies alone don’t give us much details about his past, he didn’t have much choice to be anyone than imperial /part of FO from what I’m remember from EU, since he was born in very pro-Empire family. I guess it’s easy to dismiss, since Hux is part of the evil regime (and enjoy it??), but in a sense he isn’t that different from Finn (a stolen baby forced to grew up as soldier for FO) or Kylo (a strong in the Force child with special blood line that became target for Snoke). I mean, in the end, the character’s choices are what matters the most, and some, like Finn, had a courage and opportunity to decide about their own life, but some were stuck for too long between forces too powerful to escape. Hux is part of evil regime, sure, but still I don’t enjoy how he became a punching bag for Snoke or Kylo.

(Also, how so pro-Imperial people like members of FO actually accepted Alien as their Supreme Leader??)

♞ And about Skywalker family... I’m not really that much surprised about Luke’s sudden lack of faith in the second chance. Jacen Solo, anyone??? Yeah. What got me really, is that Leia now thinks that too. What is sad, because she felt her son during battle and I assume she knew, he didn’t pull the trigger to kill her when he had a chance. Same with killing Snoke to save Rey. There is still some sparks of Light in him, but yeah, let’s ignore this.

Frankly, I’m so angry that once again there is a child that get trapped in the fight of Light and Dark and the adults, instead of stopping Snoke, blame Ben Solo for his Fall. I know, Kylo isn’t without fault, sure but I mean, Leia admitted in TFA that Snoke influenced / tempted her son since he was a kid (via mind-link or something like that, maybe??). Unless I mixed informations, that’s why she wanted Luke to teach Ben. I’m not sure how Snoke get so close to young Solo, especially since he was with Luke and other padawans, but this is so Jedi thing to fuck up. Why don’t find a way to stop Snoke, instead of blaming a struggling kid because there is darkness in him? Blaming to the point of thinking about killing him in sleep. So, Luke just saw something in Ben that scared him, but did young Solo already killed someone, planned a mass murder? I mean, Luke saw a Light in Darth Vader, full pledged Sith Lord who for two decades committed so many awful crimes and yet gave up so easily with his young nephew, so what the hell he saw in young Solo? What was so bad about the boy/ teenager? Does Leia even knew that her beloved brother almost killed her son because he decided the boy was too dangerous? That is... fucked up. Jedi-level fucked up. And then Luke, like so wise and great master Yoda, decided the best solution is to hide himself and wait in peace to die. Just... good Force, I’m so glad that Leia is more like Anakin (and Padme) - always ready to fight, to take action instead of sulking somewhere far away from war. To take responsibility, when the legendary Jedi hide and sulk. Bless you, Leia.

♞ Frankly, I would prefer if Force-connection between Kylo and Rey didn’t became so tangible. I like the idea of them learning stuff about each other, but I’m not sure if I like the way it was presented in movie. And some memories from their past would be nice too, I guess.

♞ As much as I like Finn and Rose working together, I was kind of meh at the whole saving what we love thing. What partially comes from my general dislike for likely to happens romantic storylines, but also a fear the characters (especially females) will be pitted against each other in the next movie :(

Then again, I wouldn’t mind to see more about Finn’s situation in Resistance. We know he seen as hero - stormtrooper of First Order who run away, saved Poe (a trusted man of general Organa), helped to destroy enemy weapon - but at the same time, does he really think about himself as one of them? Especially before the final battle? Or how similar and different is/will be his life from the one in First Order. Or how does he feel about his former comrades / other stormtroopers? Sure, Phasma and Hux pretty much hate him (and vice versa?), but I, for one, would like to see if Finn’s betrayal has any effect on other stormtroopers - children kidnapped and shaped by abuse / dehumanization into soldiers for regime that doesn’t care much for their life. The Resistence is the spark of rebellion, right? Wouldn’t be it nice if Finn somehow inspired people like him to fight back the regime for their own freedom?

♞ Still disappointed there weren’t Anakin/Vader!Ghost scene. I wouldn’t mind if he knocked some sense into characters. Starting with Luke.

♞ OKAY, to not make the rant only about negative feelings, I’m really glad that both Resistence (the good side) and FO (the bad side) is much more diverse than original trilogy. I’m also glad there is more female characters on screen, that they have a bigger roles than in previous movies. I hope their importance will not be erased with time. And some team work between female characters would be pretty nice too.

♞ Side note: Was Yoda so happy to burn the Books of Jedi because these were about Balance and didn’t support his idea of Light as the only right and natural Side of Force? Okay, just my personal joke I made up with my close friend XD

♞ Side note [2]: I’m the only one that think Rey theme sound a bit like Beauty and Beast main theme??? The bells(?) sounds at least?

#star wars #the last jedi #my rants #the last jedi spoilers #poe dameron #vice admiral holdo #general hux #luke skywalker #kylo ren #leia organa #supreme leader snoke

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn

Content warning: This article includes firsthand accounts of sexual abuse.

A collection of thousands of photographs of naked women that is being used to create machine learning-generated porn includes images from porn production companies that have been accused of lying to and coercing women to have sex on camera.

The dataset, which is circulating in deepfake porn creation communities online, includes images scraped from Czech Casting, a porn production company in the Czech Republic that police have accused of human trafficking and rape, as well as still images from videos produced by Girls Do Porn, which was ordered to pay almost $13 million to 22 women who appeared in its videos, and whose founder is currently a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list.

Much like thispersondoesnotexist.com, which uses a machine learning algorithm and thousands of pictures of human faces to produce photorealistic images of people who don't exist, the dataset is being used to generate photorealistic images of nude women who aren’t real and don't look exactly like any one person. One person using the dataset is creating what he describes as "a Harem of millions of actresses" that can be inserted into deepfake porn, while another is using the dataset to create what he describes as "porn generated entirely by AI."

Motherboard has downloaded and viewed the dataset containing images from Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn, as well as several others being used to create machine learning-generated porn.

The people who anonymously use these datasets say that since the final algorithmically-generated images they create technically aren't of real people, they don't harm anyone. In fact, they argue that their creations are a step towards a future where porn will not require human porn performers at all. But legal experts, technologists, and women who are included in the datasets described these creations as uniquely dehumanizing.

Motherboard has written extensively about how deepfakes and internet platforms' inability to sufficently curtail the spread of nonconsensual pornography upends the lives of and continually traumatizes women. This new form of machine learning-generated porn and the datasets it relies on introduces a new form of abuse, where the worst moments of some women's lives, captured on camera, are preserved, decontextualized, and spread online in service of creating porn whose makers claim to feature people who don't actually exist.

Honza Červenka, a lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, is originally from the Czech Republic and has been following the case of Czech Casting, which is owned by Netlook, the country’s largest porn company. He told Motherboard that the idea that images are less harmful because they're run through an algorithm and "anonymized" is a red herring.

"It's mad science really, and completely and utterly re-victimizing to the victims of the Czech Casting perpetrators," he said.

"It feels unfair, it feels like my freedom is being taken away," Jane, a woman who said she was coerced into shooting a scene for Czech Casting, told Motherboard.

The casting couch trap

Jane, who asked to remain pseudonymous to speak about a traumatizing incident, remembers her hands shaking as she read over a contract for Czech Casting. She was there to support her friend, who needed money for rent. They'd answered an advertisement for a modeling gig, and decided to go together. They'd both just turned 18. They didn't know what kind of modeling it was; the ad was vague about details. Someone picked them up at a metro stop and took them to a house on the outskirts of Prague.

(In an interview with Czech bodybuilder Antonin Hodan posted to YouTube, a male performer in Czech Casting videos named Alekos Begaltsis admitted that the women who show up for shoots sometimes don't know what they're in for because of deceptive advertising.

"The girls get here through agencies as well with the help of private agents or through friends, anyone can recommend," Begaltsis said. "We can't control every piece of information in the advertising. It can happen that a girl gets here thinking she'll do an underwear photoshoot. Which sucks because we are powerless in these situations. We are trying to push them to write the truth [in the ads]. Unfortunately it's not always the case. But once she gets here, we inform her about everything.")

Once at the studio, a woman at the reception desk took Jane's ID.

"We sat in a waiting room and got up to leave two or three times, but someone would always come up and tell us to stay, to not be afraid," she said. "We were scared to leave so we stayed."

A woman called them one by one into a room with a white sofa where the filming would take place, and handed them a contract saying the videos wouldn't be accessible to anyone in the Czech Republic. This part of the arrangement is similar to the lie Girls Do Porn told women about how their videos were only going to be distributed to "collectors" in New Zealand. In reality, Girls Do Porn videos were published and sold in the U.S. and promoted on Pornhub.

Czech Casting does indeed block users trying to access it from the Czech Republic, Motherboard confirmed by trying to access the site using a virtual private network. But people within the country can also easily circumvent the block using a VPN, which is free and easy to set up. Additionally, as women who accused Czech Casting of wrongdoing have said, their families and friends quickly discovered their videos, which were reposted to popular free tube sites, where sometimes their real names were doxed.

"Weeks later I started getting messages…These were mostly from men saying how beautiful I was and if they could have sex with me," Jane said. "I got so many of these messages and keep getting them. I even changed my Facebook name because of this."

After she signed the contract, a man came in and asked her if she was a virgin. She said that she felt like she had no way out, and that she couldn't leave without her ID.

"After I said yes, he took the camera and told me to get naked," Jane said. "I was told they were going to film something soft. . .I was scared to speak out."

Jane said they put the money into her hands as she was leaving. She wasn't given a copy of the contract she signed, or any proof that she'd been there at all.

"My friend found the room we were in on a porn site," Jane said. "I realised this was a massive fuck-up. I kept thinking we should have left even if it means not having our IDs on us."

In another Czech Casting video, a woman, who Motherboard was able to confirm is included in the dataset, starts crying while having sex and asks the man to stop. The man stops, and the camera zooms in to show that she is bleeding. He hands her a towel and tells her to clean up the blood.

Jane's story about Czech Casting isn't unique. Multiple women have accused Czech Casting of coercing them into having sex on camera. Czech police have charged nine people involved with Netlook, the company behind Czech Casting, of human trafficking and rape. Daisy Lee, a woman who went on to a career in porn after her Czech Casting scene and who is now friendly with Begaltsis, said the site has ruined lives.

"I was 18 and didn't know what I was getting myself into. Most girls do not. The majority of them stay, but some leave. It ruins many lives," Lee told Motherboard.

In a statement published in July by the adult entertainment news site Xbiz, Netlook denied the accusations and said it is cooperating with the police. Netlook did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

GeneratedPorn

In September, four years after Jane shot her scene for Czech Casting, a PhD student opened a new forum to show off his latest personal AI project: algorithmically-generated porn.

The person making these videos goes by the username "GeneratedPorn," and named the r/GeneratedPorn subreddit to post about the technology (we'll refer to this user as "GP" in this story). He said he started the project because he wanted to improve his machine learning skills. Like some of the earliest deepfakes that were posted online in 2017, what he shared were glitchy, spasming facsimiles of the images they're trained on: thousands of porn videos and images. Unlike much deepfake porn, the images GP is producing wouldn't fool anyone into thinking they are real porn. The final result barely looks human, let alone like a specific person.

Do you have experience with “casting couch” producers, or knowledge of how non-consensual porn spreads online? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on the messaging app Signal at +6469261726, direct message on Twitter, or by email: [email protected]

But much like early deepfakes, they're rapidly improving in realism. GP has posted several experiments in the past few weeks featuring increasingly accurate naked human bodies, and even some slightly animated images, showing that convincing "porn generated entirely by AI" is not impossible.

"This all started as a quest for me to learn how all of this cool tech worked but then I ended up pivoting into the porn generation stuff as I thought it was a cool concept, especially after watching the movie Her," GP said in an email to Motherboard.

GP explained his process to Motherboard over email, as well as in detail on Reddit, posted in the popular r/MachineLearning community. He used a Stylegan2 model that's available on Github as open-source code, but loaded it with datasets of porn. It's similar to how any other face-swapping deepfake is made, but instead of using a dataset consisting of many expressions of one person's face, he pulled from multiple datasets found online.

To create the videos, GP trained the algorithms using datasets from around the web, including one that primarily consists of images ripped from Czech Casting. The datasets, which are hosted and are free to download from popular file sharing sites, are compiled by users experimenting in deepfakes and other forms of algorithmically generated images. GP found the Czech Casting dataset on one of these file sharing websites, but said that if he didn't he would have written a web scraper to collect the images from Czech Casting.

This is because of the scope and uniformity of the porn that Czech Casting has created.

A censored sample of the Czech Casting dataset.

Creating algorithmically generated videos of a full, naked body requires many images and videos of real, nude people, and it's hard to imagine a more suitable resource for the task than Czech Casting.

Czech Casting, much like Girls Do Porn, specialized in casting couch-style porn, and has posted thousands of videos of women over the years. Its production style was almost algorithmic to begin with: Each video of a woman also comes with a uniform set of photographs. Each set includes a photograph of the woman holding a yellow sign with a number indicating her episode number, like a mugshot board. Each set also includes photographs of the women posing in a series of dressed and undressed shots on a white background: right side, left side, front, back, as well as extreme close ups of the face, individual nipples, and genitalia. In recent years, Czech Casting also started including 360-degrees photographs of the women, where they pose for interactive VR-style content.

"The main reason people opt for a data source like this, is that the generative adversarial models (GAN) people use, are trying to learn a general structure of an image for the class of objects you're trying to generate," GP said. "If your images are structurally similar, the model can learn more about the finer/granular details of the item class, like dimples or freckles on a face. Which leads to a higher quality result."

GP sent Motherboard a sample of the dataset he's using, which also included images from Girls Do Porn videos. Other datasets that GP is using, which Motherboard has viewed, include images that appear to be scraped from across the internet, including other porn sites, social media, and subreddits where users post selfies, like r/roastme, a subreddit where people post images of themselves for other people to judge.

Gigabytes of questionably-sourced images

In a post to the r/MachineLearning subreddit explaining how his algorithmically generated porn works, GP pauses halfway through the explanation to address "a potential ethical issue."

"I wasn't sure what to do with it, other than it being this cool thing I'd created… I'd contemplated making an OnlyFans and offering personalised AI generated nudes that talk to people," he wrote. "But someone I knew frowned upon this idea and said it was exploitative of Males who might need companionship. So I decided not to go down that route in order to avoid the ethical can of worms."

He also noted in that post that training dataset ethics is something he's concerned about. "Are the images we are training on ethical or have the people in the images been exploited in some way[?]" he wrote. "I again can't verify the back story behind hundreds of thousands of images, but I can assume some of the images in the dataset might have an exploitative power dynamic behind them," noting that some of the images are from Girls Do Porn. "I'm not sure if it's even possible to blacklist exploitative data if it's been scraped from the web. I need to consider this a bit more."

These questions didn’t stop GP from building the project in public, on social media platforms, which means he’s perpetrating harm regardless of whatever ethical quandaries he says he may have. Much of the most harmful nonconsensual content is spread on the internet through surface-level platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OnlyFans, and tube sites like XVideos and Pornhub.

"So many mainstream porn websites host child pornography and nonconsensual pornography, and does depict rape, and profit from those through ad sales," Červenka said.

When Motherboard contacted Reddit for comment, a spokesperson said Reddit's site-wide policies "prohibit involuntary pornography, which applies to all content, including deepfakes." Reddit banned deepfakes in 2017. Both r/GeneratedPorn and r/AIGeneratedPorn were shut down after Motherboard's request for comment.

Generated Porn's user profile on Pornhub was also taken down after Motherboard contacted Pornhub. A spokesperson for Pornhub declined to comment.

Porn tube site xHamster took down GP's user profile pending further review: "These new types of content are indeed grey areas and we will need to review with our own machine learning team and TOS team to determine how to evaluate and where necessary prevent," a spokesperson for xHamster said.

XVideos, another free tube site, directed Motherboard to a content removal form.

OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment. Patreon, where GP was asking for people to fund his project with little success, told Motherboard that while funding nonconsensual sexual content isn't permitted on the platform, if an account does contain nonconsensual porn, the platform works with the creator to bring the account within its terms of use. The project was taken down from Patreon as of Monday.

Twitter directed Motherboard to its nonconsensual nudity policy and rules for sensitive media.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images?”

In an email to Motherboard, GP expressed another ethical concern: that the algorithm might produce something that is recognizable as a real human—a result that would negate the whole point of his project: anonymity.

"It's quite possible for the algorithm to reproduce fake people who resemble real people, but it wouldn't be a 1-to-1 replication of the data it has trained on," he said. "This presents an ethical problem I'm trying to navigate around, which is identifying the rare situations where it does replicate a person from the ~7,500 images it's learning from. It's something that plagues generative networks… It's possible and I'm not quite sure how to 100% avoid the possibility of this happening. But I really do want to avoid this. I'm not interested in deep-faking anyone, even by accident, it's a bit scummy imho!"

GP is far from alone in this type of project. The creator of the first deepfakes told Motherboard almost the same thing in 2017: that he wasn't a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning who “just found a clever way to do face-swap,” he said.

These Nudes Do Not Exist and a subsequent project from the same creator called "Harem" most likely draws its data from Czech Casting—the images come out looking unmistakably similar, but the creator of that project hasn't responded to requests for comment on where the images in their dataset come from. Another abandoned project at r/AIGeneratedPorn did the same.

The real ethical issue plaguing this project is not the risk of parting lonely men from their money. It would take one search online of Czech Casting, and some basic awareness of the concept of pirated content being harmful to creators, to recognize the datasets these non-existent women are built from are comprised of gigabytes of questionably-sourced porn, some of it potentially depicting sexual assault.

On Monday, the night before this story was published and after his Patreon account was suspended, GP told Motherboard that he “decided to shut down the project.”

"It certainly should be illegal"

Jane told Motherboard that she was hoping her video would get lost among so many others online, and no one would find it. "But there is always someone who manages to fish it out from the depths of the internet," she said.

Červenka, the lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, told Motherboard that because some of the Czech Casting videos were allegedly edited to look consensual from the start, they have always been deceptive and harmful—and churning them through the meat grinder of machine learning algorithms doesn't make them less so.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images? It's awful, on a personal level, and it certainly should be illegal," Červenka said.

Even for professional porn performers, stolen content is an issue that plagues the industry. Adult performer Leah Gotti, whose images are part of the datasets GP is using without her consent, told me that the problem of stolen content isn't just disrespectful—it's dangerous. She's currently working to stop a stalker-fan from creating fake Instagram accounts of her and targeting her family by stealing her content and reposting it.

"It just goes back to, no one truly respects sex workers," Gotti told me. "All those things are pirated, and that's supposed to be against all the rules, but because we're having sex on camera they're like, well, she asked for it."

Earlier this year, a rumored OnlyFans leak of a database of stolen porn threatened to put sex workers on that platform in danger of being harassed or doxed.

Daisy Lee, the performer who started with Czech Casting when she was 18 but continued working in the adult industry after, told Motherboard that she blames herself for thinking that the videos wouldn't go viral worldwide.

"They don't put it on Czech servers but people download it and re-upload it everywhere," Lee said. "Every girl that goes in thinks it won't be visible to their friends and family… 14 days later [my] video was everywhere. It destroyed my reputation and spread around my home town within hours. But nobody forced me to do anything, no drugs, nothing like that."

Many of the women who were targeted by Girls Do Porn also blame themselves for believing the company’s lies claiming that the videos would stay in a certain region—in that case, in private New Zealand collections, on DVD. But the entire system of porn online, and all content online for that matter, is set up to spread videos and photos the harder one tries to remove it. Algorithms are driven by what people feed them. One Czech Casting model lost her teaching job after students found her episode online, and when she spoke out about feeling victimized by the company, people sought her video out more.

Collage by Seth Laupus

"The researcher in me feels like 'if it's been published online it's open source and fair game' however the budding capitalist in me feels like that violates IP in some sense," GP said. "I'm a bit conflicted. I've personally accepted that any data I ever create as an individual will be used by others for profit or research."

GP also said that he thinks the type of abuse Czech Casting has been accused of is "horrible," but that it's difficult to screen for this kind of abuse when creating or using datasets.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent”

"Now that the abuse is present I can opt to not use that data and source data from elsewhere," GP said. "Others in the area may not care and may decide to use it anyway. It's quite difficult to screen for this data completely. Doing a google image search for 'female standing nude' gives you a bunch of Czech Casting images. Throwing on the flag '-"czech"' catches a lot of them, but some still get through the cracks."

While GP said that he could choose not to use images produced by Girls Do Porn and Czech Casting, he didn't say that he would, nor is it clear if his project and others similar to it could function without those images. GP also suggested that his project could also somehow help these women.

"I feel bad for the victims of this abuse and I can't say anything that may make them feel better," he said. "My only hope is that technology such as the tech I'm working on, now and in the future, leads to a reduction in harm to others. By making it an economical and technologically inferior choice to commit abuse."

Červenka said that even after three years of deepfakes panic and decades more of nonconsensual porn online, the laws to stop them haven't caught up. Victims could make a legal claim that they've been portrayed in a false light or defamed, especially when content is edited deceptively to make it look consensual. But that's often not enough.

"These laws have been around for a long time, and we are just trying to use them in the current context, because we don't have anything else," Červenka said "The legislature is unable to truly grapple with what people do online, and how to regulate harmful effects of what people do online."

It also becomes harder to go after anyone hosting the content if they're hosting it anonymously, all over the world, where every legal system is different. Even in the U.S., where some states have enacted deepfakes-specific laws, it differs from state to state.

When the content is buried inside a dataset, the problem is that much more difficult.

Is ethical AI porn possible?

The abuses the women in Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn endured happened in the real world, but the videos spread online made it worse. Some Girls Do Porn victims were forced to change their names, move states, drop out of school, and lost their careers or relationships with family and friends. Czech Casting victims have similar stories.

Revenge porn victims—as well as professional and amateur adult performers—spend hours sending takedown requests to websites that host their images. Often, those requests are ignored. And when it comes to datasets used to create more porn, it's hard to know where your images live on, unless you can locate where it's hosted and download a huge set of files, then sort through them to find yourself. Their worst moments are enshrined forever among gigabytes of others.

There have been efforts in recent years to create machine learning datasets that are fully consensual. After the privacy failures of MS-Celeb-1M, a dataset of 10 million photos from 100,000 individuals collected from the internet, ranging from journalists to musicians and activists, there's more awareness than ever toward ethical uses of people's faces. In 2019, for its "Deepfakes Detection Challenge," Facebook launched a dataset consisting of 100,000 videos of paid actors, for researchers to use. One of the sponsors of that challenge was data science community site Kaggle. One of the datasets Generated Porn used is hosted on Kaggle, and appears to be largely stolen, scraped porn content.

If machine learning engineers interested in creating AI porn wanted to start a fully-ethical project, they would do something similar to what Facebook did with its challenge dataset.

"They would get consent from people who want to be nude models, and say this is what we're going to build it for, and everything's on the up and up," Rumman Chowdhury, data scientist and founder of ethical AI firm Parity, told Motherboard. "And maybe even [models] would get royalties, [engineers] would go build their AI, sell it as a porn, and they would actually do pretty well." But doing things the right way costs money, and when you're tinkering with porn as a side project, it's usually money you don't have. r/AIGeneratedPorn's project died because renting server time and running the training was too expensive, according to a post in that subreddit before it went down.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent," Chowdhury said.

"How can a tech that at its core has rape videos be anything but a perpetuation of rape culture?" Červenka said. "I don’t think I would sleep well at night if I were [GP], because he's relying on images of abuse to create a Frankenstein's monster."

‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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self-shipper-snowdrop · 5 years

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Welcome to my blog!

Nice to meet you all! I’m just a silly girl who really loves her f/os, and finally decided to make a blog and join the self-shipping community. I was really excited that I wasn’t alone in my self-shipping and I was super happy to find this community! I hope we can get along!

♡ A little about me ♡

♥︎ I go by Elizabeth, Red or Silently. But I’m also okay with being called Lizzy! If you want to give me some other nickname, then feel free to run it by me!

♥︎ My self-insert character is named Bronwen, so that’s what all my f/os call me. Some of my f/os call me Bunny or Bird.

♥︎ I prefer fluffy and romantic content, or really anything sappy- especially weddings, engagements, love confessions, anything cheesy. But when I’m struck with the mood, I’ll write some angsty stuff- even though you’ll see me follow it up with something extra sappy not too long after. What can I say, I don’t like fighting with my babes, lol.

♥︎ I have… a lot of f/os. I definitely don’t mind sharing though. I treat every relationship like it’s own AU, so they happen ‘independently’ of one another that way. Thusly it doesn’t bother me that others have the same f/os. You all are adorable anyways! I wouldn’t want to scare anyone away by being selfish, anyways.

♥︎ Rarely I’ll write a mega self-indulgent piece where a bunch of them spend time with me, but that’s only when I have really bad days.

♥︎ I’m a bisexual girl. I’m also probably the most feminine person on the planet, so my self insert is, surprise surprise, the girliest and most feminine girl in existence. I especially love victorian dresses, Lolita styles, and 1950s-type clothes (I even own a few rockabilly style swing gowns). Due to personal reasons I feel very dehumanized and panicked when I’m defeminized, so as a result, my self inserts are pretty much always all dolled up. So don’t be surprised to see my self insert running around n petticoats and heels 24/7, lol.

♥︎As a result I’d really appreciate it if no one comments on my s/i’s clothing or calls it impractical. Trust me, I know it is, but I really can’t handle being defeminized due to emotional trauma.

♥︎ I’ll probably reblog more stuff than write, but I do adore writing with all my heart- especially about my f/os.

♥︎ My messages and inbox are always open. Wanna gush about your f/o? Go for it, I’ll gush over how cute you guys are! Wanna talk? Sure, I’m a slow responder but trust me, I’m always happy to! Need to vent? I’m happy to listen, give advice or whatever you need. I’m also happy to make friends so don’t be afraid to talk to me.

♥︎ I Roleplay/RP! Both with OCs and self inserts! I usually RP on a website called Quotev, as I have groups and rules already established there, but I’m chill going to Discord as well. Usually I RP love/romance, but I’m open to whatever. Usually the way I do it is the ‘I play your love interest you play mine’ style. If anyone is interested, please message me! Also yes, I am saying this because I am 1000% down for self-indulgent self-shipping storylines. I’m also open to sending people writing samples if they’re curious to my style!

♥︎ I do draw, but my drawings are terrible so please be kind to me, lol.

♥︎ My f/o and fandom list has it’s own special tag, which can be found in my description. Some of my f/os are dumpster fires or overall just bastards, but they’re my dumpster fires to please be nice.

♥︎ This is a side blog! Thusly I can’t like anything, just reblog stuff and all that jazz. I’ll only give out my main via messages, since I don’t really want my sis or friends to judge me ^^; (this is basically my safe space)

-DNI-

This is going to be short but I have a few types of blogs that I would prefer not to interact with me.

♥︎ Please refrain from interacting if you are a discourse-centric blog. Once again if you interact from your main (assuming it doesn’t have a lot of discourse stuff) or just your self-ship blog, then that’s fine. I just don’t want to be involved for the sake of my own mental health since I find it very draining. This includes ALL kinds of discourse, not just self-shipping related discourse.

♥︎ Please do not interact if you are a fan of or support Onision. This probably sounds stupid and hyper specific but his videos and channel have caused personal harm to me so if you support him then please don’t interact with me. I don’t want to hear about him, and this is my safe space, so I’d rather just avoid it for both our sakes.

♥︎ Please don’t interact if you’re here to police how I ship or question the validity of my personal traumas. I know most people probably won’t, but I really don’t need that. I’ve been through a lot and just don’t need that, and I shouldn’t have to prove myself to anyone. Anything I share will be tagged but if you’re coming in to try and say I’m a liar, please leave. I deal with that enough in real life because of where things took place, so I don’t need that here.

♥︎ If you are anti-recovery or otherwise try to push for people not to recover from past traumas/etc, please don’t interact. I try very hard every day to heal and become the best person I can after everything that I’ve been though, as well as to manage my symptoms and recover, and people who try to push an anti-recovery agenda make me extremely uncomfortable. I am doing the best I can and I am not perfect, but I don’t want to be a victim of my past and the resulting PTSD forever, so if you push an anti-recovery agenda I don’t think we should interact. Please don’t take this as a personal attack because it’s not. I just feel uncomfortable with stuff like that so I don’t think we should interact if you’re one of these people.

Obviously I can’t stop you from interacting, since that’s not how the internet works, these are just the groups that I would prefer avoided my blog and posts if possible. I have nothing against anyone as a person, I just think it would be best for both our sakes if we just avoided one another, especially in the final case listed.

That should be pretty much everything! I hope we can all get along, and I hope everyone here has a great day!

Don’t forget- your f/os love you, forever and always ♥︎ happy shipping!

#new blog #self shipping #self ship community #about me #my introduction post

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traumaticexperiences · 7 years

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Anonymous:i think it's abuse, but i'm not quite sure.

so, years ago, middle school-early high school, my mom got more physical. Used to grab me by the arms or shoulders, if she grabbed by arms + dug her nails in i would too. one time she slammed me against a wall and started hitting/punching? me (cant remember entirely). didnt leave marks like bruises or anything, just red fr little while. eventually she got less and less physical, and then hasn’t hit me in… idk, awhile. at least a year probably. But was this physical abuse?

aside from that, ever since i can remember, she has a horrible temper. Calls us all names. When I was younger, elementary school-ish, I remember calling my cousin a bastard. I didn’t know it was a bad word because my mom called me + my brothers that sometimes. I figured it wasn’t as bad as “bitch” because she said it less, or something. She has called me names like that, and worse things like “cunt” countless times. Same w my brothers. But a lot of times we get into a screaming match and I say mean things too. but I think that’s a newer development. Eventually I got fed up of taking it and started yelling back instead of crying and just letting her make me feel like shit. I remember a time in elementary school she told me to go drown in the shower. I remember because I was in some fandom chat room thing and I was sad, and I told them what she’d said and they (mostly older kids, teenagers) were all horrified and comforted me and stuff.

Also I’m a lesbian, and this was a five-ish year long ordeal that began with her first stealing my phone in 8th grade-ish and reading my text to a friend saying I thought I was bisexual. It was turned into me “hurting her” because she couldn’t handle it being in “her family”. She wanted me to just try being with a boy. I never have and never will. After getting a girlfriend in senior year of highschool, and after she talked to some close friends of hers, she became more accepting. But before then, and even after that point sometimes, she’d still call me a dyke when she was mad, usually over my appearance.

Which always has been and apparently always will be a huge thing for her, too. I don’t like makeup much. I’m pretty feminine but I don’t really do my hair or makeup ever. I just brush my hair, that’s about it. This always upsets my mom. My grandpa who recently died was in the hospital a year or two ago, and she yelled and screamed at me before we went to visit him the first time because after she asked me, I told her I wasn’t intending to put on makeup. She was telling me she never wanted to be seen in public with me if I didn’t have makeup on, telling me I “look like a piece of shit without it,” etc. In high school she’d often have to pick me up because of doctor’s appointments (I have many physical disabilities/ am chronically ill / have mental illnesses) and so often she wouldn’t even say “hi,” or “how are you,” but rather her first thing would be “Wow, all these other girls come out of school looking so wonderful, I want to cry when I see that disheveled mess is my daughter.” I remember so many times doing my best not to cry in the car, looking out the window at the clouds or the sun thinking it would help me not to cry because that was letting her win or whatever, or at least I thought so. I would just say “I don’t care” over and over again because arguing with her obviously did no good and just made her yell more. But even though I really have no desire to do my hair and makeup every day and look super pretty, her comments did get to me. I’m a freshman in college right now and sometimes I’ll apologize to my best friend / roommate for looking like shit and she’ll have to really convince me that I don’t. My mom’s disparaging comments really stick with me even now. I’ll walk out the door and feel super self conscious and have my mom’s words echoing in my head but still not actually do anything about it (do my hair, or makeup, that kind of thing).

But I’m not perfect. I forget things a lot. Like if she tells me to do something I might just forget to do it. Or if she wants me to clean and I just can’t find the motivation to do it. Or if I do it but I don’t do it well enough. It gets into this awful cycle where I don’t do something and she gets mad, and then I get depressed so I just lay on my bed and do nothing, therefore making her more mad, etc etc. It’s hard because she has chronic pain too from a surgery that went wrong like 16 years ago that messed up her leg.

And when she’s nice to me, I really do love her. She’ll help me calm down from panic attacks and she brings me to doctors and gets me the medicines that I need. I was in the hospital a month or so ago and she drove down to my college (4 hours away) at midnight just to be there with me since I had to stay overnight.

It’s like, I know she loves me. And the first few weeks of winter break back in December were good. But if I stay home long enough she goes back into how things were before I left for college. Eventually the honeymoon sort of phase wears away, and she’s back to treating me like shit, and I’m back to wanting to go away to college again. Right before I went back to college I remember she said something about how I do nothing for her no matter how she talks to me, “whether she’s nasty or sweet as pie to me”, and I responded in frustration that she was always nasty to me. And at that moment I was doing dishes as she told me to do, and she came up next to me and started slamming dishes down and told me to get out of her sight, to not do the dishes and to do them later when she was gone so she didn’t have to see me. But at that time, she was trying to get off of cymbalta, which apparently has horrible withdrawal symptoms. So I guess it made her temper even worse. When she was slamming stuff I flinched, I really thought she was going to hit me (she hadn’t in a while). But she didn’t. But I still flinch at sudden movements in daily life–yesterday in the dorm bathroom as I walked out, someone walked in, and I flinched really violently just because I hadn’t seen them coming (pretty embarrassing lol).

Also not sure how common this is, but when other people around me get into arguments I get really anxious? My best friend’s family treats me like their own, and her cousin+cousin’s husband took us out for dinner, and on the way home they got into a disagreement and I got unbearably anxious, I actually had to do deep breathing exercises to try and keep myself calm. I get kinda anxious just thinking about it. The people involved have never yelled, they’re always super nice to me and each other–it was a perfectly civil disagreement that they were in, just very passive-aggressive tbh. But it never escalated. They just kinda bickered and then we got to our destination and they solved the problem, and that was that.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. That first thing I mentioned, about her shoving me against the wall, happened like 5 years ago. I thought I was over it until I tried explaining it to my best friend and ended up a sobbing mess in the process–I couldn’t even talk. I angrily mentioned it to my mom at some point more recently and she laughed at me, saying she “barely touched me” and making fun of me in front of my brother, who joined in saying how ridiculous I was being and laughing at me. That experience has made me really question everything, to be honest. My mom has a lot of shit to deal with, and I’m not the best daughter in the world, far from it. I get good grades but that’s about all I’m good at, all I can be counted on for. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. I can’t tell if how she treats me is normal, and I’m overreacting, or if it’s abusive, or if she’s just angry at me and I deserve it. Any advice on that front? I’m sorry this got so long.

It would be nice if this is anonymous. But could you tag it as “mint” so I can find it if you make it anonymous? Thank you. And thank you for running this blog.

//////////

yeah your mom roughly grabbing your arms and shoulders and slamming you against the wall and punching you sounds terrifying, the fact that it didn't leave marks and bruises just shows that she wanted to hurt you, but didn't want any proof of it left over that could be used against her. it's horrifying. It is physical abuse, and even if it lessened it's likely because physical abuse is used to permanently keep someone scared, intimidated, and obedient, being abused this way in the past is enough for long term consequences, so they don't even have to hit you in the present because your body remembers abuse from the past and is ready to obey them in order to avoid more!

Name calling is abuse, and being told to drown in a shower was basically telling you to die, holy shit, that's horrible! I'm glad you got some comfort afterwards, that's really traumatic.

Refusing to acknowledge your sexual orientation and then using it as an insult is crazy abusive, it sounds like she really hated you and everything you are. Also that is a lot of abuse just over your appearance, the worst is comparing you to others as if you're inferior or something to be ashamed of, it's awful! It's severe emotional and psychological abuse, and it's no wonder you were doing your best not to cry, and still don't feel like your appearance is good enough. You're in the right here, not wasting your time to adjust your appearance to how others would prefer is good! looking the way you feel comfortable is the best decision for you, and your mother had no right to dictate it or to shame you for it, you're a human being, and that matters more than your appearance, and anyone using your appearance to imply that you're less is dehumanizing you, and negating your worth as a human.

You don't have to be perfect in order not to be abused, and even if there were some times where she wasn't abusing you as much, it just means she is able of not abusing you, but she still abused you all the other times. Not abusing you or being nice to you for a short while is absolutely no excuse for abusing you the rest of the time. She sounds really terrifying and it's dangerous to believe she loves you, i don't think someone who cares even slightly about your well being could ever hurt and abuse you this much.

For abuse survirors it is common to get scared and anxious when getting into arguments because in the past you were taught that arguing risks abuse, risks someone accusing you of provoking them or being at fault because you didn't just do as you were told. After that, even if you were in a civil argument it would be scary. Your brain gathers all information about arguing and if there was danger in the past, it expects danger in the future, and sends out warnings and anxiety whenever you have to argue.

It's hard to ever be over someone who you love and trust shoving you against the wall. It's terrifying to just know that person is capable of that, of wanting to hurt and scare you that much. And your mom is gaslighting you and pretending it didn't happen because she knows it was abusive and cruel, and she doesn't want to deal with consequences of that. I'm glad you're questioning everything, and you don't have to consider what your mom has to deal with, this is about you, and how your mom affected you, and what is the shit YOU have to deal with, because of her. You don't have to be counted on for anything, you're a human being, not a tool, not a robot, not there to be of service to others. You deserve good things even if you don't bring profit and good things to others. I don’t know about advices, but I hope you keep questioning your mom’s intentions and actions and do what’s best for you, regardless of what she wants. Remember your life belongs to you, and you do not have to live for her and her ideas of what you should be. If you feel you could be happier without her dragging you down and burdening you, try to get free. Good luck.

#trigger warning #child abuse #emotional abuse #homophobia #abusive parents #gaslighting #submission

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