i love when words fit right. seize was always supposed to be that word, and so was jester. tuesday isn't quite right but thursday should be thursday, that's a good word for it. daisy has the perfect shape to it, almost like you're laughing when you say it; and tulip is correct most of the time. while keynote is fun to say, it's super wrong - i think they have to change the label for that one. but fox is spot-on.
most words are just, like, good enough, even if what they are describing is lovely. the night sky is a fine term for it but it isn't perfect the way november is the correct term for that month.
it's not just in english because in spanish the phrase eso si que es is correct, it should be that. sometimes other languages are also better than the english words, like how blue is sloped too far downwards but azul is perfect and hangs in the air like glitter. while butterfly is sweet, i think probably papillion is more correct, although for some butterflies féileacán is much better. year is fine but bliain is better. sometimes multiple languages got it right though, like how jueves and Πέμπτη are also the right names for thursday. maybe we as a species are just really good at naming thursdays.
and if we were really bored and had a moment and a picnic to split we could all sit down for a moment and sort out all the words that exist and find all the perfect words in every language. i would show you that while i like the word tree (it makes you smile to say it), i think arbor is correct. you could teach me from your language what words fit the right way, and that would be very exciting (exciting is not correct, it's just fine).
i think probably this is what was happening at the tower of babel, before the languages all got shifted across the world and smudged by the hand of god. by the way, hand isn't quite right, but i do like that the word god is only 3 letters, and that it is shaped like it is reflecting into itself, and that it kind of makes your mouth move into an echoing chapel when you cluck it. but the word god could also fit really well with a coathanger, and i can't explain that. i think donut has (weirdly) the same shape as a toothbrush, but we really got bagel right and i am really grateful for that.
grateful is close, but not like thunder. hopefully one day i am going to figure out how to shape the way i love my friends into a little ceramic (ceramic is very good, almost perfect) pot and when they hold it they can feel the weight of my care for them. they can put a plant in there. maybe a daisy.
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thoughts on "tradwives" as a 19th-century social historian
It's great until it's not.
It's great until he develops an addiction and starts spending all the money on it.
It's great until you realize he's abusive and hid it long enough to get you totally in his power (happened to my great-great-aunt Irene).
It's great until he gets injured and can't work anymore.
It's great until he dies and your options are "learn a marketable skill fast" or "marry the first eligible man you can find."
It's great until he wants child #7 and your body just can't take another pregnancy, but you can't leave or risk desertion because he's your meal ticket.
It's great until he tries to make you run a brothel as a get-rich-quick scheme and deserts you when you refuse, leaving your sisters to desperately fundraise so your house doesn't get foreclosed on (happened to my great-great-aunt Mamie).
It's great until you want to leave but you can't. It's great until you want to do something else with your life but you can't. It's great. Until. It's. Not.
I won't lie to you and say nobody was ever happy that way. Plenty of women have been, and part of feminism is acknowledging that women have the right to choose that sort of life if they want to.
But flinging yourself into it wholeheartedly with no sort of safety net whatsoever, especially in a period where it's EXTREMELY easy for him to leave you- as it should be; no-fault divorce saves lives -is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Have your own means of support. Keep your own bank account; we fought hard enough to be allowed them. Gods willing, you never need that safety net, but too many women have suffered because they needed it and it wasn't there.
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I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.
i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.
i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.
nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.
the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.
what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.
that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.
but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.
i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.
the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.
if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.
even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.
children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.
which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.
individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.
if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.
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you’re watching the maury show on your computer when katsuki marches into your room without a word and flops down next to you on your bed.
“ hello to you, too.” you snort. his words are muffled by your sheets but you’re about 90% sure he told you to shut up, you ignore it.
he lays face down on your bed for a while not saying anything and you know he’s had a long day and wants to be close to you without actually talking. you don’t mind, you’ll give him his space until he reaches out himself.
and he does after a little bit, turning his head around to face you as he looks from you to your computer screen, eyes focusing on the woman screaming that the man she cheated on her husband with was 100% not the father of her baby, mixed with the cheers of the audience.
he looks at you and raises a brow “ what’s happenin ?”
“ lady cheated on her husband with his brother.” you respond.
“ his brother ?” he repeats. his eyebrows furrow and you know he’s hooked. if there’s one thing katsuki loves but will never admit he does, it’s trash tv.
you nod, grinning somewhat evilly “his brother. now they’re trying to find out which one’s the father.”
he hums, scooting himself closer to you so he can see the screen too. he flips himself around so his neck isn’t craned at that awkward angle anymore and settles himself down right next to you. hook, line and sinker.
he wraps his arm around your shoulder and shoves his head in your neck, breathing you in. you both don’t say anything. “do you want me to play it from the beginning for you ?” he shakes his head in your neck. you reach your hand up to scratch at his scalp and you smile when he sighs. he holds you a little tighter, pressing feather light kisses into your neck.
katsuki’s never been good at expressing himself with any other emotion that isn’t anger. it makes him feel stupid and weak and soft. he’s had a long fucking day and he doesn’t wanna talk about it, simply wanting to indulge in you but he can’t tell you that, can’t find the words to, so he tries to find other ways to tell you and he hopes you understand and you do.
katsuki’s thankful for you because sometimes he wants to talk, wants to open up about what’s bothering him but sometimes he doesn’t. he doesn’t and you don’t pry when you know he doesn’t and he’s so thankful for you. he presses kisses on your skin and soft bites at your flesh to convey just how thankful he is, how grateful he is for having you. he hopes every warm press of his lips against your skin can convey how much he loves you loving him. and it does, because you turn your head and kiss the side of his head so sweetly and he knows you’re it for him.
he’ll tell you all of this one day, he promises. he’ll tell you all the thoughts swimming around in his head one day, but he hopes this’ll do for now. and unknowingly to him, it absolutely does.
he pulls his head out of your neck and kisses you hard on the cheek one, two, three times and you giggle. you feel him smile into your cheek when he kisses you a fourth time.
“fuck’re they screamin’ about ?” he says and you turn to look back at the screen. the woman is yelling at her husband’s brother vehemently denying the possibility of him being her baby’s father. you feel a little bad for laughing. “ she says he’s not the dad” you answer.
he clicks his tongue “ why the fuck is she on the show then.” he says, turning his attention back to your computer but his grip on you stays secure. you press yourself a little closer to him.
you’re still smiling lightly when you look back at your screen, simply shrugging. “ she said something about her having more sex with her husband than with him.” you answer and he snorts.
“ ten bucks neither one of them’s the father.”
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