this isn’t a cult lmao please read up on how cults function before you call any group of people that have sex with more than one person a cult
“Polyamory is basically like a cult” wow fuck you too
a poly man: i’m in a relationship with a bunch of people and if other people want to join this relationship the process is kind of selective because i don’t want to date just anyone i want to date people who i click with and there’s a lot of people involved who also get a say because i want my partners to like each other
Woke monogamous ppl on tumblr dot edu: This is LITERALLY a cult? this Literally describes a Cult?
Op just admit you are mad you could never get more than one person to put up with you hshshdjjdjsjsj
Like, no duh it’s kind of selective? Dating is selective. Polyamorous dating isn’t less selective than monogamous dating. Don’t call things cults unless they meet the actual definition of a cult because words actually mean things, OP. Demonizing queer people isn’t cute.
Yeah, unlike what some people might believe, we don’t just fuck anyone. Nothing cult-like about, you know, wanting to choose your partners based on certain standards, like…you know…everyone else.
This is… a really weird uncharitable description of a poly relationship by someone who has never listened to a damn word the person in that relationship said about it.
(I say this as a n obligate mono person who doesn’t really get it either, fwiw. But WOW. The framing here is just…. y i k e s)
Is the way the dude phrased things a little weird? Yeah. But if Jeff Goldblum got up there and said he felt like he’d married his wife 25 lifetimes ago the moment they met, y’all be calling it #goals
This, btw, is what polyam people are talking about when we say “sometimes we face bigotry or oppression for being polyam.” Because OP’s attitude isn’t unusual. Framing a polycule as a “sex cult” is the go-to #1 way even vaguely socially conservative people see us. This is the exact shit that makes us very careful about who we let know about our situations, because shit like this gets you out of a job, or CPS’d, etc.
And god help you if you happen to be a man in a polycule that’s primarily women or that includes at least one lesbian. (Fun fact: Everyone in the polycule isn’t necessarily fucking everyone else in the polycule) Because no matter when you came in or what your position is, you WILL be assumed to be the “leader” of the thing and absolutely will be assumed predatory by assholes like OP. Even in queer spaces, people will be checking on your partners, trying to convince them that they don’t “have” to stay with you.
And while the sentiment behind it is good (trying to make sure people aren’t in situations they don’t want, trying to keep an eye out for possible creepos), it’s also goddamn exhausting.
“um OP don’t you know you’re supposed to have blankets on your bed that you never come into physical contact with” I’m sorry that you live in Actual Real Hell my friend but here in the world of the living I like to be able to rest comfortably without worrying that shifting in my sleep will cause my skin to explode by coming into contact with the Blanket of Forbidden Texture
See this is the kind of thing I was wondering about when posting about why making the bed could take so long. What are you people doing with your beds? I tried to Google this, but it still makes no sense.
Do US people not use those sheets that go on fully around the blanket? And why not? Is the top sheet supposed to function like those sheets, only fifty times worse because there is nothing holding it in place?
Sheets that go fully around the blankets? What the heck are you talking about.
With me you got your fitted sheet (or top sheet that gets tucked in), 5 Soft Blankets and then a comforter.
Do people even use top sheets anymore? I have only seen them at h/motels. Maybe in a very hot climate it would be better to use them versus a blanket? Anyway I have only seen them in-between the fitted sheet and the blankets?
What kavesinisukka means is a sheet that’s like a pillow case for your comforter.
Here we have the sheet that covers the mattress, then you, then a comforter that’s in a comdforter-sized pillow case and that’s it. That’s all the blankets and sheets you need.
You can get an extra blanket on top if you’re Cold but out comforters are designed to keep you warm all through icy winter.
So it’s basically a giant sleeping bag for your comforter? Do you crawl in with it or do you just go under the comforter and comforter case thing???
Huh i just learned a new thing
Heh I suppose that description works. A very thin sleeping bag made of sheet for your comforter. You don’t get into the bag yourself. The sheet is there as a protective and decorative casing around your comforter, protecting it both from dust but also from you, so that you can take it off and wash it every few weeks, because the comforter itself is not supposed to be washed.
This strikes me as something rich people do that needlessly complicates things. I barely have time to make my bed after changing the sheets, you’re telling me people spend time wrestling a giant bulky blanket into a sleeping bag sleeve every so often? It’s hard enough getting the fitted sheet on the mattress!
Why on earth would I own something I use daily that I can’t wash.
But… it’s the opposite… the sheet stays on the blanket/comforter the whole time. When you wash your linens, you only wash the sheet and you just put a new one on the blanket. It’s less work, not more
How I make my bed: mattress cover, fitted sheet, flat sheet, blankets stacked on top depending on the season.
How I think you make your bed, after reading this thread: mattress cover, fitted sheet, flat sheet, stuffing a blanket inside a sleeping-bag wrapper for some reason.
And you never wash this blanket, you just wash the wrapper? Why don’t you have blankets that can be washed? What are these non-washable blankets made of?
After wrestling the fitted sheet on, all I gotta do is stack blankets on over the flat sheet. I don’t have to stuff a blanket inside a special wrapper. If I had to stuff one of my blankets into a special blanket wrapper, that sounds like more work to me.
Hold up, I think they’re using a Duvet cover? When I do my linens, I tend to use a duvet cover so I can air out my down blanket and then wash the cover. It’s also hella warm, so I only use it in the cold seasons, but it’s a way to let my blankets get washed without needing a full wash because they’re heavy and I always worry they won’t dry or fluff up properly. So it goes: Fitted Sheet, Flat Sheet, (layer thin but plush blankets if needed for ++ warm), and then down comforter inside of a duvet cover.
what fresh hell is going on here
….
Apparently Americans as a group don’t know what a doona (or duvet) cover is.
And that’s terrible.
Yes. They’re so much easier to wash than a whole duvet.
Possibly gross: I use a comforter cover because allergies mean I sneeze very often. If I didn’t cover my comforter with something it would be rather covered with sneeze residue in pretty short order, which would be difficult to remove because you’re not supposed to wash comforters.
I’m continually baffled when tumblr acts like (thing some people do or use because they need it to more easily solve problem x) is “a rich people thing”
Like, I’m bougie because… I sneeze a lot?
Tumblr has this horrifying strain of incuriosity that I find really troubling. Like, no one can know everything, and if you’ve never used a duvet cover then you’ve never used one, but “I’ve never heard of it, so it must be a stupid rich people indulgence with no purpose” is a deeply flawed line of reasoning that I see on this website all the time.
Yeah, I mean, apparently I’m bougie because I do my own laundry.
The whole point of a duvet cover is that they’re easily washable…
Hang on, are these people actually just sleeping under thick fluffy comforters that have actually never been washed!
….I think OP may have been talking about something like this:
my late grandma used to make blankets like this for all her grandbabies at every major life event. it was a very sweet and thoughtful gesture, and I still have one of the ones she made me.
the trouble is… especially if you use cheap yarn to make them… these things feel like concentrated death. they’re scratchy. they’re full of holes, so they’re not really warm unless you’ve got at least another sheet under there. it’s hard to get comfortable under one without stretching the blanket out to the point it might unravel.
so they’re really more for decoration than anything else. I suspect OP was complaining about blankets like these.
Looking at that example and imagining certain yarns, I’m kind of glad my family has tended more toward gift quilts 😕
The OP was referring back to another post about sensory issues with a specific type of (not so decorative) hotel blanket–and people feeling a need to wade into notes with comments like “you just don’t know how to properly use a blanket”.
I remembered that series of posts, mainly because I’ve had about the same reaction to those scratchy blankets to the point of phantom itches looking at them. A normal top sheet usually isn’t enough to keep the horrible blanket material totally away from your skin all night. A duvet cover might actually do it, as long as you got someone less bothered by the texture to wrestle it into the cover.
OTOH, a lot of Europeans don’t use layers of top sheets and blankets at all, just duvets with the easily washable huge pillowcase type covers. Sometimes with a separate top sheet too as mentioned here, sometimes not since you do effectively have one built in. (Source: I married one of them.) Across socioeconomic groups, as far as I am aware with not knowing anyone who is wealthy.
I personally burn completely up without adjustable lighter layers, thanks to some other sensory issues, so we keep separate covers. I’ve actually dragged some less horrible-textured blankets back from US to get the kind I wanted. But, if you do like comforters? The washable covers are a great way to go, and it’s a shame they’re not more common back home.
Coming from the US, I wasn’t aware how common the duvet approach was until I moved where that is How To Do Bedcovers. So, I can totally understand some confusion about what people are even talking about on both sides there. The leap to “a rich people thing” is what really confuses me, though.
The other thing about age gaps is that most arguments against them rely on, and thus reify, existing prejudices.
“There must be something wrong with him if he can’t get women his own age.” Okay, let’s unpack what might be “wrong” with such a person. Maybe he doesn’t want to be a father and most women his age either want children or have them already. Maybe he prefers casual relationships and thus seeks women who aren’t ready to settle down. Maybe he has less money than other men his age, so his lifestyle meshes better with someone who’s living on a student budget. Maybe he’s involved in a hobby or subculture that skews younger. Maybe he’s developmentally disabled!
None of these things is wrong. All of them are mocked for not conforming to the “normal” trajectory of adult life. And yeah, maybe the thing that’s “wrong with him” is that he’s a tool and all the women his age are sick of his shit and know better. That does happen. But the way actual jackass behavior is so often conflated with things like “has a low-earning job” and “has stereotypically youthful hobbies” is rather telling. It’s not at all easy to divorce actual fears of predation from prejudice against adults who don’t adult “properly”. I wish we’d stop acting like bigotry never informs these things.
Also, “there’s something wrong with a person who can’t get a date” is an abhorrent appeal to the just world fallacy, and if I never hear it again it’ll be too soon.
What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’snot merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
What prokopetz thinks I’m saying: I miss being elite
What I’m ACTUALLY saying: you’re telling the disabled misfit most people hated that calling her smart was bad for her. does a modern day version of her get any compliments at all now or nah
What middle class people on the internet think I’m saying when I bring up giftedness: Hi, I’m an arrogant narcissist and my mother trained me with flash cards and used me as an extension of herself and also she didn’t want me in the same classroom with kids who weren’t white and rich, and I think I’m special and smarter and better than everyone.
What I’m actually saying: I grew up and still am working class, my mother didn’t have the resources and knowledge and social capital of a middle class mother and she never advocated for me and she was never pushy about me at school, she certainly didn’t pressure me and train me with flash cards, and my brain works differently than normal and some of the differences fit into a pattern that our society calls “gifted” and that doesn’t mean that I’m better or worth more than anyone else. Different is different, not better or worse.
I think that the middle class experience of growing up with the gifted label is extremely different from the working class experience, and that causes a ton of communication problems.
Really though even within the same group, people can have very different experiences based on their parents, their schools, the culture of their particular area, their personality, their circumstances, etc. And then we universalize our experiences and assume that’s how it was for everyone and we start yelling at people as soon as they mention the word, without thinking about how their experience was probably vastly different from ours.
ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”
more cis feminists should have this mindset
one of the first examples that she uses to introduce her point about how perception by others can shape a person’s performance actually uses a trans woman. it explains that as a certain trans woman became to be seen as a woman more and more frequently, the ppl arond her eventually started viewing her as being ill equipped for tasks that they did not bother her about pre-transition. eventually she even found herself underperforming in these tasks herself.
I knew it was this book before I’d finished reading the first two lines. Honestly this book is indispensible if you want to debunk any gender determinism people claim is science. I can’t recommend it enough.
(Bonus bonus: I am myself a neuroscientist, and the old white men mentioned above – who are not – could not have missed the point harder if they’d actively tried. Which. Maybe?)
Reminded again by this post, as an adult I am impressed in some different ways by the fact that when I had some horrific GI symptoms as a kid? The go-to explanation was always “stress from school”.
(It really was a pretty stressful experience, what with the bullying and all. The main thing causing those problems was unrecognized celiac, however.)
I mean, doctors were taking it as a given that the educational system is regularly stressful enough for kids that they will develop things like frequent otherwise unexplained vomiting and explosive cases of the runs in response. (Plus migraines, and you name it.) Whether it’s “just” from the direct physical effects of stress, or some weird psychosomatic ploy to try to avoid a stressful environment, and/or best attributed to mental health problems brought on/aggravated by school stress.
This evidently seemed totally reasonable, to the point of being the default assumption whenever they encountered a school-aged kid dealing with health problems which they couldn’t immediately figure out. (Then no further investigation required…)
This seems disturbing enough, on its own.
What really gets me, though, as an adult? The answer to this was never once “Gee, if this stressful environment is making children sick, maybe we should figure out how to change the situation to be less stressful!” Or even trying to make some changes to take pressure off the individual kid who is barfing in their office here and now. No, they apparently need to just get over it, if they are not actively milking it to avoid going to school like they should be doing.
Of course, I understand a lot more about institutions now. It’s still seriously messed up, how accepted and enabled some of the harm coming out of bad ones can be.
The Spanish explorers assumed they encountered discrete gestures–not a language. Today’s scholars confidently argue that signed language among indigenous nations served deaf and hard of hearing people as well as the communication needs of peoples of different languages. European explorers benefited from already existing signed languages or signed communications, but dismissed them as unsophisticated hand signals.
Spanish explorers were contemporaries of the Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584), who was just beginning to argue that deaf people could be educated and is credited with developing the first manual alphabet.
North American indigenous sign languages thus existed long prior to any signed language in Europe. (France, the home of other early explorers, became a leader in deaf education, but not until the 1700s.) Members of indigenous nations believed that people born deaf had intellect and personal capacity. European peoples tended to believe the opposite.
Humans had enough trouble seeing other humans as human. We are not even remotely smart enough to know how smart animals are. We would have a huge existential crisis if we realised other creatures are as sentient and aware as we are.
Its also important to recognise that this is not just human ignorance, we all have a vested interest in pretending animal intelligence cannot ever compare to ours. How intelligent an animal is when compared to humans shouldn’t even matter, but it turns out it is much easier to exploit and kill animals if we pretend they are mindless automaton.
This is all true, and important, BUT animals deserve bodily autonomy regardless of their intelligence. Intelligence is not a marker of worth. To suggest otherwise is ableist.
There’s this guy that sits in front of me who you would think is a conservative redneck bc his entire aesthetic is southern lumberjack w boots and denim and hats but he’s actually one of the most inclusive and anti trump guy I’ve ever met and today he wore this hat that sums up his entire personality and I’m screaming.
Don’t judge a book by its cover; make cornbread, not war.
Hey, this is the motto of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and among other things, they have an AMAZING podcast called Gravy, which ‘shares stories of the changing American South through the foods we eat’.
You like this hat. Listen to that podcast. You’ll be happy.
Y’all need to stop being surprised by the radicalism in The South. The idea that Southerners are inherently more backwards is steeped in classism and ableism and erases all the awesome work marginalized folks are doing out there
Yeah if you’re from the south at all yall know theres that whole ass saying about 1/3rds of folks in the appalachias being communists, only liberal yuppies from the north are ever surprised by this lmao
Appalachia is the land of kindly lesbian witches who chain themselves to trees to protest pipelines.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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