But honestly! Renowned French poet Théophile de Viau wrote the poetic ode to King James titled "The Duke of Buckingham," containing the immortal lines "One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde/Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre/And it is well known that the King of England/Fucks the Duke of Buckingham" exactly 400 years ago and people still act like being gay was invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890
Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in the 25th century BC and people still act like being gay was invented by renowned French poet Théophile de Viau 400 years ago
Gilgamesh and Enkidu "loved each other like man and wife" in 2700 BC and ppl STILL act like being gay was invented by Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the 25th century BC
Nearly every social species on the planet has a non zero frequency of homosexuality and most likely had for millions of years before primates first evolved and ppl still act like being gay was invented by Gilgamesh and Enkidu in 2700 BC
[ID: a comment reading, "i fully know what you mean! but! i did also think "Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray 133 years ago as of 2 months from now, and people still act like being gay was invented by the Rocky Horror Show in 1973" and now i cannot stop laughing making more gay history comparisons." /end ID]
"Clouded leopards have the longest canine teeth relative to their body size of any cat species. Their canines can reach two inches (four cm) or longer."
"Doomed by the narrative" is sexy and all but i think the narrative wanting to save a character who is utterly set on dooming themselves isnt as much of a thing and it's so good as a concept
Stuff like this hit's really close to home with me because I had an abusive paternal figure growing up.
It's easy for you to assume that this is an outrageously extreme example that someone's prolly just blowing out of proportion; don't. Abusers often use tactics like this. It's about control and taking control away from their victims. This also means controlling the narrative, and controlling who the victim can talk to about their issues.
The thing is, over issues like this, the best response is to assume the victim is being legit. Even if they're not, wishing them well won't have anywhere close to the same repercussions as assuming a legitimate victim of abuse is lying.
I'm only saying this bit here because there are people in the notes of this post trying to play this entire post off as a hoax. I am talking to them personally now. You are not helping anyone except the abuser. The best-case scenario here is that you are a child who's never had to live with abuse. Because the worst-case scenario is that you yourself are an abuser. Either way, the best thing for you is to stop.
this this thiiiiis AND adding to clarify, one of the biggest signs of abuse is that it sounds fake. which is bizarre, i know, but it’s part of the control.
it’s hard to take abuse seriously even when it’s happening to you. abuse is terrifying, it’s seriously fucked up, so victims don’t want to think it’s real. this happens to everyone. it’s how the brain protects itself.
OP wants to believe that of course their husband is a rational good hearted person who just needs to understand tha water and lights cost money, they’re not hurting the OP on purpose, this is a misunderstanding. no one would do anything so bizarre deliberately, right? it’s unbelieveable. sounds fake.
and it sounds fake to other people, too. OP can’t tell the story without sounding like a crazy lying bitch. i guarantee you if she brought it up in front of a third party, her husband would deny that it’s happening.
that is the abuse. that is gaslighting. he is changing her perception of reality to one that he controls. he is saying, Bizarre and crazy bullshit will happen to you and you have to fucking accept it as normal, and if you dare to talk about it no one is gonna believe your story.
This is sometimes referred to as the “Trunchbull Method”, yes, like the horrifically abusive principal in Matilda.
She does it on purpose, and actually explains why in the book.
Essentially, if you are going to be abusive, she says you should go 150%. Really commit, be as wildly over the top as you can… that way, if your victim ever does get the courage to tell someone about it, what you did will sound so outlandish that no one will believe them.
“Our principal doesn’t like pigtails, so she picked a girl up by her hair and threw her over the fence.”
No parent would believe that… it’s too far. Surely no one would do that. (But if you know the story, you know it happened.)
“My husband leaves every light in the house on and every faucet running all day, and says that it’s literally impossible not to… and when I’ve tried to explain why it’s a problem, his excuse is that I’m not a mechanic, so he doesn’t have to.”
It sounds unbelievable… no one would be that stubborn and off-base, right? And most people who hear that won’t believe it. Which is how her husband wants it.
If he can break her down and make her doubt her own sense of reality and logic over something as trivial as a lightbulb, that leaves her wide open to manipulation on major issues like money, pregnancy, property.
The Trunchbull Method is insidious, especially when there’s no physical abuse and it’s just emotional/verbal. With the right conditioning, most of the victims don’t even see it as abuse.
Notice how she’s the sole member of the household with a job, that he’s mooching off her and has been for some time, and has been gaslighting her (while wasting hundreds of dollars, if not thousands) for months, to the point where she is genuinely wondering if she is insane…
…and even when people point out the abuse, she still firmly believes that it’s not? She wants to reach out for help, but she still feels guilty, because he tells her it’s her fault… and a part of her believes it.
This is exactly how this method of abuse works. When someone tells you what’s going on, and it sounds like abuse, calling them a liar or saying you don’t believe it will only ever help their abuser.
Believe them. Help them. Make sure they know you support them. Help to ground them in reality if you can, assure them that they aren’t crazy. That their thought process is rational.
example: “You’re right- turning off lights when you leave a room is very easy. And small children learn to turn off faucets when they’re done with them. You’re correct. His behavior doesn’t make sense, and neither does his excuse.”
Make sure they know you’re in their corner and will stand by them.
On average, it takes seven tries to leave an abusive relationship. Seven.
The more support a victim has, the faster that number goes down.
There was an arrest across the street from my place in Oakland one day – three cop cars with a bullhorn and guns out – and before I could even get out the gate there were a couple people posted up and one of them was filming and another one was narrating in a calm but very loud voice, just
“HE IS COOPERATING! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS DOING WHAT HE IS TOLD TO DO! HE IS HOLDING STILL! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS NOT BEING THREATENING! HE HAS PUT HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS HEAD AS ASKED! HE IS NOT RESISTING!”
and that was something I hadn’t thought to do before. It certainly let the cops know what the narrative of eye witnesses was going to be.
I especially liked “his hands are empty” because this statement would still be true and a witnessed reason the police should not become violent even if it turned out he had a weapon on his person somewhere.
If you don’t feel comfortable with doing the narrating thing (which really is quite clever), even just standing around and blatantly staring actually legit helps immensely.
There are studies that show that even an image of someone looking can be effective to change people’s behaviours.
Sidenote: If you see a cop stopping an Indigenous person, the same protocol applies.
I did this in a parking lot when I saw a group of Black men and teens being harassed by a cop. Stayed in my car, but whipped out my phone and started to record, pointing out via narrative when I could hear the cop contradicting himself and changing his story. At the eight-minute mark, when I knew he was past the reasonable-stop guideline time (thanks, legal tips side of tumblr!), I flipped on my dome light.
Fam, what happened next was INCREDIBLE.
The cop had been gesturing in a wild way, almost flailing, like he was actively trying to get these guys agitated. He saw my dome light, saw a white face with a phone, and suddenly his hands came to rest on his vest. Within 90 seconds he’d packed his shit up and gone.
The most outspoken gentleman in the group came up to me and went “whatchu doing in there?” So I straight-up told him “it looked like you were being harassed, so I was recording.” The whole group recognized someone who was on their side, and started venting about the shit that had just gone down.
Turns out the asshole had had them stopped for a good five minutes before I pulled in. That means they were stopped, with no probable cause and a cop changing his story no fewer than three times, for AT LEAST THIRTEEN MINUTES. While chatting in a parking lot. One car had pulled in next to another that turned out to belong to one of his buddies and they were just shooting the shit when Officer Bacon came by.
Want to know the kicker here? One of the cop’s stories was that a group “matching their description” had been reported by the grocery store security guy for shoplifting. Black man, red shirt with a sports logo, jeans. Know what this convenient report didn’t mention?
HIS HEIGHT.
This guy was, without exaggeration, at least 6’10”. I assure you any report of him would have mentioned his height FIRST. And you’d best believe I pointed that out in my narration.
Cops WILL try shit. You CAN stop them. I did it and it was as simple as having some patience and a camera.
Honestly, this applies to everyone. It’s a higher priority for the aforementioned groups, but nobody is safe around the police. The police are the enemy.
Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?
Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.
All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)
But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.
But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.
I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?
It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.
Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.
Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)
Let me preface this with some personal history. It’s not relevant to the sins of the advertising industry perse but it illustrates how I started to grow to hate it.
I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up, but to be a vet you basically have to be good enough to get into medical school. I do not have the math chops or discipline to make it in medical school. I went into art instead, and in a desperate attempt to find some commercial viability that didn’t involve moving to California, I went into graphic design.
I’ve been a graphic designer for about seven or eight years now and I’ve worn a lot of hats. One of them was working in a print shop. Now, the print shop had a lot of corporate customers who had various ad campaigns. One of them was Gate City Bank, which had a bigass stack of postcards ordered every couple months to mail to their customers.
Now, paper comes from Dakota Paper, and they make their paper the usual way. Somewhere far, far from our treeless plain there is a forest of tall trees. These trees are cut down and put on big fossil fuel burning trucks and hauled to a paper mill that turns them into pulp while spewing the most fowl odors imaginable over the neighboring town and loads the pulp up with bleach to give it a nice white color.
Then the paper is put on yet another big truck and hauled off to the local paper depot, then put on another big truck and delivered to my print shop, where I turned the paper into postcards telling people to go even deeper into debt to buy a boat because it’s almost summer. The inks used are a type of nasty heat sensitive plastic that is melted to the surface of the paper with heat. Then the postcards are put on yet ANOTHER truck and sent to the bank, which puts them on ANOTHER truck and finally into the hands of their customers, who open their mail and take one look at the post card and immediately discard it.
Heaps and heaps and literal hundreds of pounds of literal garbage created at the whim of the marketing team several times a year. And thats just one bank in one city.
I came to realize very quickly that graphic design was the delicate art of turning trees into junk mail.
And wouldn’t you know it there are a TON of companies that basically only do junk mail. Many of them operate under the guise of a “charity,” sending you pictures of suffering children or animals and begging for handouts and when they get those handouts the executives take a nice fat cut, give some small token amount to whatever cause they pay lip service to, and then put the rest of the cash right back into making more mailers. “Direct mail marketing” they call it.
Oh but maybe it’s not so bad, you can advertise online after all. Now that there’s decent ad blocker out there and better anti-virus ads usually don’t destroy your computer anymore just by existing.
Except now when I search for the exact business I want on Google it’s buried under three or four different “promoted search items” tricking me into clicking on them only to shoot themselves in the foot because I searched for the specific result I wanted for a reason and couldn’t use those other websites even if I felt like it.
And now we have advertising on YouTube and on every streaming service, forcing more and more eyes onto the ad for the brand new Buick Envision that parks itself because you’re too stupid to do it on your own.
Oh thats ok maybe I’ll get Spotify premium and go ad free and listen to some podcasts- SIKE we have the hosts of your show doing the song and dance now. Are you depressed and paranoid from listening to my true crime podcast about murdered and mutilated teenagers? That’s ok, my sponsor Better Help can keep you sane enough to stay alive and spend more money.
It’s gotten so terrible that now you have content farms, huge hubs of shell companies that crank out video after video to get more and more precious clicks. Which if the videos were innocuous maybe that wouldn’t be so awful except now you have cooking hacks that can actually burn your house down and craft hacks that can electrocute you being flung into your eyes at the speed of mach fuck so some slimy internet clickbait jockey doesn’t need to get a real job.
It of course goes without saying that animals are also relentlessly exploited by clickbait companies that will put them in compromising situations on purpose to create a fake fishing hack video or even just straight up killing them for sport by feeding small animals to a pufferfish that rips them apart for the camera.
And all of this, ALL of this doesn’t even touch how adveritising is the death of art in general. Queer topics, any kind of interesting art, any kind of sex or substance use topics are scrubbed clean and hidden at the behest of advertisers.
Sex education, a nude statue, topics such as racism or sexism or bigotry in general have tags purged or hidden from search, even life saving information about SDTs or drug use, because if someone saw that and complained then Verizon might sell fewer tablets and we can’t fucking have that.
Conservative talking heads often bitch and moan that they’re being censored on social media. The stupid part is, they’re right! They are being censored! But it’s not by a woke mob, it’s by ATT and Coca Cola not wanting their adspace sharing screen time with their stupid fucking opinions.
However, they won’t ever figure that out, because the talking heads they get their marching orders from like Tucker and Jones ALSO rely on the sweet milk flowing from the sponsorship teat and they aren’t about to turn on their meal ticket so they have to come up with even stupider shit to say for the train to continue rolling.
I managed to rant this far without even getting into the ads I see for the beauty industry. The other day a botox ad described wrinkles as “moderate to severe crows feet” as if wrinkles are a symptom of a fucking serious disease! Like having a flaw in your skin is a medical problem that you need thousands of dollars of literal botulism toxin to fix! I was incandescent with anger.
Advertising is a polluting, censoring, anti educational and anti art industry at it’s very core. It destroys human connections, suppresses human thought and makes us hate our own bodies. It ads no value, actively detracts from value, and serves no real purpose and I believe it should be almost if not entirely banned.
"what's your dream job??" Uhh to have 17 weird little hobbies that I don't have to be good at and hang out with friends. I get money via being the world's specialist little princess
actually this is a specific post i’ve seen circulating on my dash for a few months. i’m not blaming anyone for reblogging it but i think a lot of people don’t know enough about what a library is
getting a card is great, don’t get me wrong. but not using it isn’t good. yes, we can run reports that say how many cards were made in a year and we report it to our board (which the mayor is part of and the mayor has a big say in our budget -- see the cuts to nyc library funding by eric adams). but it’s bad if no one is using the cards. we do track circulation (items that are checked in/out, are lost or go missing, etc.), and if no one is taking out items that looks bad for our acquisitions budget. is there a manga series you like that’s 1000 issues long and still ongoing? if our budget gets cut we might not buy new books in the series. if you don’t use the ebook services we provide (libby, overdrive, etc.) those go away. if you don’t come to programs, program budgets get cut. if you. don’t keep track of what’s going on in your library, things you do not want to happen might happen anyway. go to the library. get to know the librarians, because if something comes up they will tell you about it. they might tell you that they’re holding a board meeting because a book was challenged by another patron. go to that board meeting to object to the challenge. and if you can’t physically go, get it in writing. e-mail the director -- you can find their email on the library website or somewhere on the internet. public librarians work for the public -- our info is out there. the director will read the email at the board meeting.
being an active member of the library is so much more than getting a card. not every library is great at outreach (my library is working on it, but we’re a small town, too), so sometimes you need to go to the website or call the library and ask. we’re more than happy to help. we want people in the library. it’s how we justify our existence, especially now when the far right really hates us and thinks we’re all pedophile indoctrinating children and will do anything to defund us. bigots are loud -- you have to be louder.
we all agree that book bans are bad and libraries closing are bad. but you have the power to stop it. and yeah, budgets are sometimes cut because there’s nothing else the library can do, but showing you actually want the library and the resource it provides to be around is important. i cannot overstate how much your voice matters. it matters over the staff, honestly, and i have a literal degree in library science. so i’m using my grad school knowledge to tell you to actually use and advocate for your public library
I was a pretty weird outcasted child so one of the greatest wonders of my adult life has been realizing that you can just go someplace and meet some people and casually make some friends, and they might not be in your life forever but you can hang out for a while, and then you can go somewhere else and do it again, and again, if it doesn’t work out no biggie, etc.
ALT
