omg imagine being born and you are on a spaceship and everyone aboard is sooo so mad at you just because you burst out of some guy's chest to be born. like um sorry i've not been alive before i didn't even know that's not allowed please be nice to me um the spaceship floor is cold is no one going to knit me some little booties i am calling child protective services
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On Discomfort and Morality
My father finds gay men uncomfortable.
He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.
In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.
When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.
My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.
He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.
I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.
The next time you see something and you automatically think it's disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?
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I first read “if you were lazy you would be having fun” on your blog and it has genuinely been a life-changing piece of advice for me and my friends - I’ve said it to like four of my other executive dysfunction judies and without fail it earns a ten second silence followed by a single revelatory “fuck”
My dad and I actually ran into the speech language pathologist who told me that over 20 years ago at a town hall a few months back—she is retired now, but still advocating for disabled students at IEP meetings and being a nuisance to school administrators. I thanked her for everything, and she was delighted to hear that I was passing her words along to other people who needed to hear them!
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