FailSnail HQ

mrspider:

ngl people coming w u so they can keep talking to u while ur running errands or just chillin in ur room while ur cleaning… love that kind of love

(via voiidwalking)

bauliya:

destroyerofprivateschools:

arundhati roy is an Indian leftist activist and author, and this is a criticism of Gandhi and Gandhian politics. this context is important. she’s lived through the failure of gandhi-esque politics.

(via gallifreysconsultingphoenix)

heartonthefloor:

evolvingessence:

Like….when everyone has mental illness maybe the problem is with the systems 🤔

(via deathcomes4u)

nekobrats:

being part of the enby community and yet not really fitting into it and “passing” as enby is honestly kind of soul destroying for me and it makes it kinda hard to identify under the nonbinary umbrella!!

Like I’m genderqueer but I’m constantly doubting myself and my identity because the enby ppl I’m constantly seeing are these tiny tiny androgynous bodies and can easily be seen as both masc and femme - I am soft and jiggly and curvy & it’s SO FUCKING NEEDLESSLY HARD for me to truly feel masc on days when I wanna be masc bc of that. Plus my body is so inherently femme-presenting bc of my figure, so no matter how I dress, I’m always addressed as a woman - which is bothering me more and more as time goes on.

Fuck bro I just HATE that humanity as a collective constantly needs to carve out an ideal standard for every little thing. I hate that there’s constantly some unattainable fucking standard that we’re expected to meet and if we don’t meet it we aren’t valid. Fuck this.

(via nudityandnerdery)

aliciabenissa:

luckyladylily:

nyxelestia:

athingofvikings:

dykeroguefort:

kallinite:

kallinite:

notyourexrotic:

feotakahari:

ms-demeanor:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

athingofvikings:

kallinite:

athingofvikings:

kallinite:

athingofvikings:

Academically speaking, I still find the whole “anti-shipper” movement to be fascinating from a sociological perspective.

You have what amounts to a extremist purity cult whose beliefs align nearly precisely with those of Conservative American Christianity in terms of sexual purity politics (admittedly with some additional flourishes that I’ve watched develop in real time), but is mostly composed of minority members whose sexual-and-gender identities are opposed and oppressed by Conservative American Christianity.  Additionally, their tactics also mirror religious pro-censorship groups (such as Warriors For Innocence), but their rhetoric is entirely secularized and derived from leftist theory.

Did they arrive at this structure via convergent evolution?  Via socially dominant concepts in the greater socio-cultural space that they occupy?  I doubt it was by direct emulation but the possibility does exist on some levels.

I’m literally doing my sociology research paper on them right now.

Ooh? Go on.

It’s a qualitative study looking at the ways that Tumblr antis define the word “pedophilia”. It’s pretty interesting stuff because the definitions are so unique to Tumblr anti culture. I’ll have to go through my coding more thoroughly, but I think I’ve broken them down into four categories:

1. Legality based arguments where they’re very stuck on the idea of Age of Majority. Usually these people believe that it’s pedophilia if an 18 year old dates a 17 year old because they view age 18 as a hard and fast line from childhood to adulthood.

2. Psychological-readiness based arguments are a lot more subjective. These people often use arguments about differing life stages as a reason to call something pedophilia. Some even bust out that “peoples brains don’t fully age until 25” factoid. For this group, age gaps are a real no-go, even if both partners are legally consenting adults. The acceptablity of age gaps varied.

3. Physical appearance based arguments are focused against people who like young looking or young acting characters, even if those characters are adults. These people define pedophilia as an attraction to the perception of youth. This belief is strongly correlated with anti-DD/LG posting.

4. I’m having trouble naming the fourth category. It’s based around an argument of sneaky pedophilia or maybe an uncovering of the fan creators hidden desires? These antis argue that aging up characters past canon ages and shipping them is pedophilia because they believe that the shipper REALLY wanted to ship the child but didn’t because they were worried it wasn’t socially acceptable. In this instance, the character is portrayed as an adult by fandom and there is nothing childish in their appearance or mannerism. Because the character was depicted as a child in canon, however, the anti believes that the character must always be depicted that way in fandom and that only tricky pedophiles would be interested in exploring that character’s future.

Similarly, I noticed a newer trend of calling adult ships between people who canonically knew each other as children/teens to be called pedophilia or at the very least jailbaity, predatory behaviour. This is particularly true when the characters are a couple years apart. The idea there is that, if they knew each other as children, they’d never be able to see each other as adults. So if they have sex as adults, they’re mentally thinking of the child version of their partner and are therefore a pedophile. I wonder if this is a projection of the beliefs from #4. Perhaps it is the antis who, once introduced to a child/teen, are never able to see them as anything but a child and therefore they believe that everyone else must feel the same? That’s only a guess. I only saw this one a handful of times and it was all pretty recently, so I didn’t include it in the data for my paper. It does seem to indicate a level of escalation in these definitions though. I’ll have to check in again at a later date and see if it sticks around.

I’ve seen all of those as well, and I’d be fascinated to see your results when you’re published.

As for names for the fourth category, can I suggest Canonical Stasis arguments?  As in, “the characters are forever frozen at the ages that they are presented”.

This is fascinating.

Infuriating as always, but fascinating.

Maybe I’m just new to the particular depths of this discourse but I’ve recently found out about criticisms of some ships that has cross-pollination between types 2 and 4 in defining ships as incestuous because characters are “sibling coded”??

Reminds me strongly of the Reylo antis who insist that Reylo is shipping pedophilia because of the age difference between the actors.

(also repeating the purity spiral - can’t let the teens be alone unsupervised, if Sally and Bobby are left unattended they might develop pantsfeels and since they’ve been friends since childhood that would be inappropriate and therefore must be prevented)

There was a point in time when TV Tropes banned entries about an NSFW Tangled fic. The fic was about adults who are canonically married, but because the target audience for Tangled was children, the fic was considered “pedo porn.”

I don’t know if canonical statis necessarily explains #4. #4 (and really all of them, but especially #4) seems to be reflective of this idea that “monsters” have very specific characteristics, tastes, and values - that you can always spot a monster using various tells. And if they dare do something like what #4 suggests, they are hiding those tells, so they are extra monstrous.

There is likely a very real anxiety around not being able to tell offhand who is safe and who isn’t, about predators that hide in the midst. “You never know who you’re talking to on the internet!!! They may be GROOMING YOU!!” This may seem to be an attempt at unmasking these predators, these monsters - but, as someone who’s had the misfortune of knowing such monsters first-hand, it’s not particularly effective.

I was originally thinking something similar. That’s why I had written it down as “sneaky pedophile” at first. lol Upon further reflection, however, I think that canonical stasis is more accurate. That pedophiles have specific tells and that aging up is an attempt to subvert those tells is the argument. The underlying belief for that to work, however, is that canonical ages must remain static. Otherwise the argument falls apart. 

That is similar to the reason I went with a psychological readiness label for #2. Originally I had just put down “age gaps”, but age gap only encompasses the argument. The underlying belief for the problematic elements of age gaps is that one partner is psychologically/emotionally unready for the relationship. This strikes at the core of the concern, which is the perceived power imbalance between the partners. This power imbalance is then sometimes conflated with pedophilia. Age gaps are just one of the ways this is expressed. Other arguments in a similar vein are that the characters are in differing life stages or that the characters brain is not yet fully developed (some psychological studies suggest that the human brain is still developing up until age 25, so some people argue that people under 25 are still too young for relationships with older adults).

The paper is done! Check out my Tumblr post for the link!

op and all the comments on this post have brain worms

Gotta love how they just respond with insults.  And by “love”, I mean “time to block another one.”

Really looking forward to all this. I also wanted to add a very subtle way in which these mindsets have also started to affect real life people / influence how puritanical antis have started to view the world: the weird insistence I started to get to a funny old story that in denying my supposed “victimization” between my adult self and another adult, I was supporting the perpetuation of pedophilia.

I scened with an older guy at a BDSM club, including sexual activity. Afterwards, the guy’s friend and the host of the party came up to me and asked, “Hey, did anyone check your ID at the door? You look so young, I want to make sure you’re safe.” I do look very young - I’m on a fast track to thirty and people still ask me what grade I’m in - so I’m used to stuff like this. This was a generally funny moment for me, and I had a good time that night. The closest thing to duplitious intent I could imagine of those men is the typical “implying a woman looks young to flatter her” cliche - and to be honest, I fully expect that was basically happening here, since BDSM communities tend to have a culture of safety, with a built-in way for interrupting scenes if someone might be in danger (i.e. safewords, DM’s, etc.)

But what frustrated me about telling this cute story online was how people started to say that these guys must be pedophiles, because if I really look so young, then what does it say about them that they enjoyed sexual activity with me?

This was a real life instance of people projecting those last two types of pedophilia definitions onto me. In theory, if this were pedophilia, I would be the “victim”, both for being chronologically younger than these men, and for looking so significantly younger.

It’s particularly infuriating because their worldview is effectively punishing me for appearing the wrong age - which is typical of misogynistic and patriarchal ideals of feminine appearance. Women must be punished for looking the “wrong” age, and while we normally see this as woman being devalued for appearing older than the ‘ideal woman’, this also certainly felt like an instance of being punished for appearing younger than the ‘ideal woman’.

Under this logic, I, a 100% consenting adult, can never have sexual activity with anyone, ever. Any actual adult who participates with me is only doing so out of a secret desire to have sex with a child and using me as a substitute, so even if we’re both enthusiastically consenting adults, I’m perpetuating or enabling pedophilia. Meanwhile, if I were to have sexual activity with someone who actually is the chronological age I appear as, they would be minors and thus I would be the predator.

The growth of purity culture in fandom, on Tumblr, and the social media world in general is starting to influence how people view real world sexual activity - and the real life people having it.

I feel like there is a degree of assumption of good faith given to antis here that is not deserved.

The general assumption I am seeing be made is that antis start at a definition of pedophilia and go forward from that - that they check against one or more predefined definitions of pedophilia and if one or more of the definitions fits then that is where they have a problem.

I think in many, many cases it is the opposite. An individual experiences a reaction of disgust, assumes their reaction of disgust is an objective assessment of a problem, and then put into words the reason for their disgust. Having put the offensive into words they assign that “pedophilia” to create a moral justification for their disgust. These ‘accepted’ definitions of pedophilia then get picked up by people to explain why their disgust is objective truth, conflicting ideas pile on top of each other and are cherry picked to suit their purposes in any given situation.

I feel like this more accurately describes anti behavior. A given ship or behavior is disliked, and so one of the definitions of pedophilia is forcibly applied or a new definition invented if one does not exist.

Basically, the core belief is not in any of these definitions of pedophilia. The core belief is that their gut reactions are reflective of objective truth. This is why the behavior patterns of antis are virtually identical to Conservative American Christianity and sexual purity cults while their justifications are built around progressive language. Judging righteousness by gut reaction is a core Conservative American Christianity teaching. The idea is pervasive through our Christianity dominated culture (both secular and religious). You tell what is right not by well reasoned ethical and moral principles but by gut reactions (aka the spirit of god, a conscience, etc.)

What is more, all of this constitutes well understood behavior patterns followed by many groups under many circumstances. Racists being disgusted by the intermingling of races, homophobes being disgusted by gay people, terfs being disgusted with trans people. The pattern of behavior and underlying motivation is always the same, and various justifications are given after the fact by every group. And it is particularly telling that in virtually every case concerns about pedophilia are cited.

Antis, their behavior patterns, and their obsession with using an ever widening definition of pedophilia as a justification for their behavior is pretty much standard for any moral panic. Their justifications are slightly modified in self serving ways, as is the case for all moral panic driven groups.

@nyxelestia I just had something similar happen to me with porn abolitionists insisting my ability to consent is compromised because I have PTSD and that therefore I cannot enjoy sex and should not have it. So there’s ableism bred into these views as well.

(via thebisexualmandalorian)

fecktrecool:

wemblingfool:

heyyitsjayy:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

ironychan:

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

• We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
• We know they had remarkable vision.
• We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
• We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
• We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

(via alethiometry)

finnverbose:

msnikkimoneypenny:

The Olympics are really coming for Black people this year….

It ain’t just She'Carri Richardson

Racists are too fucking scared to stand upon their actual athletic accomplishments so they have to literally fucking cheat.

The whole point of the olympics is it’s supposed to be competition between the world’s best athletes and anyone who wins without these people being in the competition has earned nothing.

(via vaporion79)

dingdongyouarewrong:

mycroftrh:

dingdongyouarewrong:

man y’all remember when the avengers movie came out and everyone headcanoned that all the avengers would live together in the tower and had all these cute posts about various fun ways they could interact and then the movies literally never had any of them even be friends

I want to state, for the record, that “all the avengers would live together in the tower” wasn’t collective headcanon, it was canon. The very last scene of Avengers (2012), the one they left us on, is Tony redesigning the tower, designing a living area for each Avenger. That was, canonically, what was supposed to happen, in canon, and they just changed their minds and decided to… not. For whatever goldarn reason.

GHHFDGJHFDS THATS EVEN FUNNIER WHY IS MARVEL LIKE THIS

(via vaporion79)

nug-juggler:

Liara: next time we go to war, maybe the Alliance can spring for air support

Shepard: …

Shepard: …

Shepard: You mean that after Thessia refused to help with the war effort for months, only admitting they had the literal key to finishing our super weapon the entire time on their planet after the Alliance, the turians, the Krogan, the batarians, and the elcor had been invaded, and only because suddenly their own planet was threatened, YOU think that somehow the scope of the damage here is the Alliance’s fault for not providing air support on a secret mission that never should have been necessary in the first place if your government hadn’t broken galactic law for centuries??

(via novoprocaine)

missjukebox8bit:

seravph:

seravph:

2012 was such an insane cultural moment

no but for real . Gangnam style call me maybe riptide we are young . lana releases her first album and changed pop forever . Frank ocean releases his first album . 1D premieres . grimes releases genesis . and the movies. don’t even get me started. the first avengers movie the last twilight movie hunger games the hobbit les mis. like them or hate them they were cultural phenomenons. minecraft was at its peak before it was deemed cringe and before the minecraft renaissance. 2012 was one of the last good years of youtube too . and everyone was rlly into moustaches for whatever reason

half of the people thought the world was gonna end so we decided to go out with a bang

(via novoprocaine)