Month: January 2018

isanah:

aworldunturning:

jihaad:

jihaad:

when are we gonna stop using the word “abusive” as a synonym for “just being an asshole”

hate 2 break this 2 yall but the world isnt split up into nice people and abusers. being cruel or manipulative in the absence of an observable pattern of behavior and an established power dynamic isnt abuse. sometimes people are just shitty

This is true – but also, a lot of abusers use this kind of discourse to defend actual abuse (”I know I groped her without her consent and called her a whore and told her she was worthless without me, but those were isolated incidents! We can get past those!”), and as such, I am rather wary of contextless posts decrying a culture where people are supposedly being accused of abuse when they are not, in fact, abusive. In the world we actually live in, it is far more common for people who come forward with stories of abuse being slandered as oversensitive and judgmental. We certainly don’t live in a world where people treat accusations of abuse too seriously or with too much faith.

This. I’m getting really sick of seeing the original post being circulated because, sure, sometimes people are just shitty, but one of the factors that abuse victims/survivors have a problem with is whether or not the abuse happened or whether or not it was *really* abuse, and believe me, in the beginning, stuff like this was horribly invalidating. You really, *really* need context to separate abuse v. shitty people and I don’t see that in the original post.

Coming at this from a slightly different angle, there is no special monstrous category of Abusers™ who can be readily distinguished from Just Plain Assholes at a glance.

There’s a continuum of treating other people disrespectfully, with degrees of power to do serious damage with that shitty behavior. None of it is right. None of it is inevitable. It all hurts people.

And just because an asshole isn’t in a position of power to establish abusive patterns of behavior over one person? That doesn’t mean they’re not doing so wherever they can get away with it. We already know they’re treating people like shit; that’s not even in question.

I am very suspicious of efforts to draw sharp divisions there, including for some of the reasons already brought up.

It is also very similar to some of the very unhelpful framing around sexually predatory behavior which has been getting more attention again lately, with Real Rapists™ as this category somehow separate from “just” people engaging in terrible behavior.

Doesn’t help anyone who is not treating other people that way, and it gives them cover.

Part of what makes the idea of micro-cheating harmful is that it presumes that any interest in another person is inherently bad. But the fact of the matter is that everyone gets crushes. Everyone finds themselves infatuated with another person or finds themselves having sweaty thoughts about somebody – regardless of their relationship status. It’s part of the human condition; no one person can be all things to us. We are all going to be interested in other people and no amount of monitoring is going to change that. Monogamy just means that we choose not to sleep with other people, not that we don’t want to.

And that’s fine. But trying to safeguard the primacy of your relationship by watching for signs of “micro-cheating” just creates a system of confirmation bias; you’ll find reasons to be suspicious because you’re expecting to see them. It discourages trust between partners and actively damages the relationship. Relationships aren’t depositions. You aren’t obligated to account for every thought, every action and every line of text, just because you’re dating someone. Putting a ring on it doesn’t mean that you no longer have an expectation of privacy. You always have the right to your own life and your own secrets.

No, Micro-Cheating Isn’t A Thing – Paging Dr. NerdLove (via brutereason)
Source: doctornerdlove.com

The current poverty measure was established in the 1960s and is now widely acknowledged to be flawed.2 It was based on research indicating that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food – the official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the figures have been updated annually for inflation but have otherwise remained unchanged.
[…]
Food now comprises only one-seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately. Thus, the poverty level does not reflect the true cost of supporting a family. In addition, the current poverty measure is a national standard that does not adjust for the substantial variation in the cost of living from state to state and between urban and rural areas.

National Center for Children in Poverty: Measuring Poverty in the United States (May 2009)

Personal note: and there’s little incentive now, to change the system of calculations.

(via aegipan-omnicorn)