The way I see it, America will eventually have the choice between forgiving student debt or facing the massive destabilization caused by an entire generation being unable to build any wealth.
By destabilization I mean that the millennial generation will eventually become aware of the fact that they will be enslaved by their student debt for most of, if not their entire lives.
Many in this generation still had parents that were able to save and contribute financially to their children’s college education, but that’s also going to be a thing of the past when everyone has their own debt burden to carry well into adulthood – meaning the problem will become unimaginably worse for the next generation.
Once people realize this, you’ve got a social powder keg unheard of since the social question poised by the industrial revolution.
The entire student loan system is little more than a scheme meant to extract every last bit of present and future wealth from society’s youngest members, and the longer it continues, the uglier its inevitable end is going to be.
and so many millennials are choosing not to get married, or have kids because of all the debts they owe.
its having much more severe consequences than people want to admit.
Oh, it’s even worse than you think, because many millennials are making the conscious decision to default. There are no real legal penalties for defaulting (debtors prison, for now, is still not a thing). You’ll get letters threatening to sue you and garnish your wages, but they are almost always empty threats. It doesn’t happen. Your credit will be destroyed, but it is technically possible to live life without anything requiring a good credit score. These are the people who will never own property, never take out a car loan, or make any other large purchases requiring financing, but they were already so strapped paying student loan payments, they couldn’t afford those things anyway!
So where does it get “even worse”? The only real penalty for not paying those loans is that the government can, and will, withhold your social security when you reach retirement age. So 25 years from now we’re going to have a generation full of retirement age people who will not be able to retire for one of two big reasons: 1) they spent their youth living on the fringe paying massive student loans debts, and therefore own nothing to keep them afloat (like a paid off house) and they have to keep working to pay rent and survive, or 2) they chose to default so they could actually live some semblance of a life, but now they can’t stop working because no Social Security checks are coming.
Either way, it’s a massive disaster that the government WILL end up holding the bag for. They will either forgive the loans, or they will have to take the weight of all those old millennials dropping into the safety net. They will also have to deal with the high umemployment of generation Z, which will be a direct result of the Millennials not leaving the workforce to make room for them.
it is responsible, and the mark of a good audience, to critique problematic elements in the media we consume. For example, I love gothic lit – but a lot of it is incredibly sexist and racist. I can acknowledge that these elements are a problem and objectionable while still enjoying the piece for a multitude of other reasons. I can also say to myself “if I ever want to write my own gothic lit, here are some elements I should avoid.” Or, if I do want to tackle the issues of racism and sexism in my future gothic lit, then I can say “I will avoid writing in a way which implicitly or explicitly condones racism or sexism, while still emulating the praiseworthy elements of gothic lit.”
In essence, the fundamentals of intersectional media critique is this: “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators.” By rethinking these elements, I don’t mean utterly doing away with them, but rethinking how we approach them and how we read them.
We enter purity culture when our statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators,” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media].” The implication here is that, if one wants to be a good person, one should avoid [x media], because to do otherwise is to either implicitly or explicitly condone everything in [x media]. This type of attitude towards media is very common in conservative religious circles.
It moves fully into censorship when the statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media]” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore nobody can consume or create [x media] for any reason.” Those who break this rule are seen as evil and shunned. This type of attitude toward media is very common in fundamentalist circles.
A culture of censorship is the natural outcome of purity culture, because purity culture by its very nature seeks purity until even the whisper of objectionable content, in any context, is suppressed.
I would wager a guess that many people who are against anti culture are familiar with either these toxic conservative or fundamentalist attitudes towards media, and we are alarmed by their striking similarity with antis’ attitudes towards media. It is most certainly why I am against anti culture.
I’m not gonna lie, I agree with all of this expect for that whenever I see antis, it’s people who outspokenly condemn the romantification of pedophilia/incest/rape and other such things that we have seen influence society.
Idk, it’s also such a head jerk for me to hear people complaining about people who think pedophilia is bad or writing rape/incest fic as an outlet for own trauma is an unhealthy coping mech due to the ease at which it can be used to groom a next victim or retraumatize the first victim.
Obviously I understand that there are crazy people who call themselves antis and go on purity rants and triads, but frankly I’ve never seen them. And the fact that they’re all called antis is also annoying af bcus I can never tell if we’re talking about that crazy person sending death threats to content creators for putting xy together over zx or the people vocally calling out the prevalent pedophilic and abuse promoting nature of some content ¯_(ツ)_/¯
God I don’t have the energy for this censorship-lite BS right now, can someone else reply to this?
fundamentally, the responsibility for harm lies in the person that causes it. simple, right? if you (hypothetical you) use a piece of heavy spiky modern art to bludgeon someone into the hospital, is that the artist’s fault for not putting tennis balls on the spiky bits? no, it’s yours. bc you hit a guy with it.
same thing with written work. sure, a piece of “problematic” fanfiction could be used to harm someone else, but there’s two things wrong with holding the creator responsible for the harm done by a third party. the first is that this is true for literally any piece of media. I have spoken with people who were groomed using children’s toy sets, nevermind totally innocuous pieces of writing like harry potter. there is nothing that persecuting certain fanwriters could do to stop that.
the second is that when you decide the place responsibility on the creator of a work, instead of the person who chose to use that work to harm another person, you are absolving the actual perpetrator of guilt. full stop.
you are not actually qualified to decide what is or isn’t an unhealthy coping mechanism for another person. that is not your decision to make. there are actual steps we can – and do – take to mitigate the potential harm of problematic fanworks, but I very rarely see antis advocating for them. appropriate tagging and content warnings is one. education on critical thinking and what it means to click “yes I consent to see this work” is another.
at the bottom of it, advocating for censorship of things you find icky or disturbing or potentially harmful – without exploring or even actively ignoring the other ways that harm is mitigated and avoided – will always do more harm than good. always. there is no excuse for censorship rhetoric, none whatsoever, especially one as flimsy as “but think of the children” when evidence does and has always shown that no one in the anti movement actually gives a shit about “the children” except as pawns to further their own controlling agendas.
I actually didn’t find your response aggressive, especially compared to what I’ve seen on this blue hellscape lmao
I do agree with you that “protect the children” has been used as a rally cry for bullshit in literally every community.
I will admit I’m ignorant to the depths of anti community seeing as my only interactions have been anti-ddlg kink and anti people who would rather adults didn’t write explicit porn about a child/young teen and an adult. But I don’t doubt that there are some antis who go so past too far that they wander into ‘holy fuck’.
And no, I do agree that the one who causes harm may not have been the one who created the weapon. I just also believe that content creators should be held partially responsible. I fully support ‘don’t like don’t read’ but there are times when, like the op kinda mentions above, that we need to be critical of the content created and not to consume it blindly. I believe we also shouldn’t produce it blindly.
I’m sorry that the way i responded above made it seem like I placed sole responsibility on the content creator, bcus I don’t. I absolutely do not want to help absolve those who use any tool in their hands to abuse people, but while someone can use both a pencil and a bat full of nails to do damage, one is going to be much easier to inflict more damage quickly with, you know? The main fault of course lies with the sicko who picked it up and decided to use it as a weapon, but why would someone put nails in a bat?
And to me, there is also context. Like Lolita is a good example of what you mean of a piece of art in an exhibit being used as a weapon. The author clearly made the MC disturbed and an unreliable narrator and assumed that people would read it critically and see him as the monster he was written as, but sadly it didn’t work like that. His art has been used as a weapon, and while he clearly made it with no intentions of it being used in such a way, it has been.
Fan fiction that I’ve seen is like leaving that spiked bat in the middle of a dark alley. There is little chance it was written as ‘this is bad and traumatizing and I’m going to explore this dark area’ but more as ‘I have a rape fetish and enjoy thinking about one 15 character raping another bcus he loves him SO MUCH’ -and yes, that’s an actual thing Ive seen, and a grown woman has admitted it several times.
I think what also trips me up is how much grey area there is, and how much responsibility we are then laying on everyone involved, you know? It’s complex and on so many layers of society that it’s hard. Especially when I think of how naive and susceptible I was myself as a kid. I think my main thing that I disagree with is the assumed reaction of ‘let people create whatever they want, it’s the people who use it who are the only bad people’.
Bcus if that piece hadn’t been created, they would have one less tool to inflict harm, or inflict it as easily as they have.
I really appreciate your approach here, I want to thank you for that, sincerely. this is gonna be long and probably rambly bc my focus isn’t great today but hopefully I can get my point across.
so, lolita. should it have never been written? I’ve never read it, and I don’t intend to, because the subject matter would likely do a number on my mental health that I’m not prepared to deal with right now. there’s actually a lot of shit like that, that I can’t even skim without feeling sick to my stomach. but honestly, that doesn’t matter. I cannot, should not, say that an author should never have written a thing just because I find the subject morally abhorrant.
and I feel you’re missing my point, here. it is not, it has never been, just the icky stuff that’s been used to hurt people. for every instance of a young person being groomed using sexual media involving people like them, there are ten more where the grooming material was fully legal fully vanilla adult-man-on-adult-woman porn. the content of the work means very little, compared to its emotional attachment to the victim and the skill of the manipulator. this is why I say that banning all work of a certain type is not only wrong, but useless. talk to survivors, listen to what they have to say about their experiences. theory doesn’t matter here, especially when theory ignores the real lived experience and testimonies of survivors of abuse.
thing is, fanfiction really isn’t like a spiked bat in an alley. it’s like a spiked bat in a glass case, in a room with a sign on the door that says “sharp things ahead”. sure, someone could still break in and steal it for harmful purposes, but they’re not supposed to, and you can’t place blame with the building owners for not preventing it bc they did what they were obligated to, which was to put the damn thing in a glass box and put a sign on the door. would the world maybe have been safer if we didn’t make art installations out of dangerous objects? maybe. but the fire extinguisher is also right there, a very useful item that saves lives every year, and yet it’s still very heavy and ideal for bludgeoning.
if our hypothetical abuser was truly prevented from accessing our bat with nails, it might be harder for them to inflict damage, sure….. but it probably wouldn’t be. people got fists. people got kitchen knives. people come fully equipped with anything they’d need to do serious harm to another person, and we as a society both can’t prevent someone from having access to everything that could possibly do another person harm, and we shouldn’t do that either. it’s not right to force someone into such a small box, for the sake of hypothetical victims. it is, fundamentally, not right to prohibit artistic action out of moral outrage. there’s a reason there’s something called “legal obscenity”, which can only be decided upon on a case-by-case basis in federal court, by ruling of a judge. there is a reason a piece of media must be declared to have “no artistic merit” in order to be classified as legally obscene. there are so many court cases that have involved this, and the vast majority of them have been ended without an obscenity charge. they’re educational reading, if you feel like digging them up.
fiction is a place to put things that are too horrifying or disturbing to deal with in real life. it is a place to engage with abhorrant themes at arm’s length, to deal with them on your own terms and at your own pace. I get the feeling you’re under the impression that people only write and consume problematic fic out of fetishism, but the fact of the matter is that dark fiction is immeasurably valuable to people who have suffered or are currently suffering. I’ve heard testimonies from people who legitimately did not know what was happening to them was sexual abuse until they read a fic where a similar thing occurred and was treated as the horrifying thing that it is. seeing yourself represented in fiction as a survivor has measurable and documented positive effects, and knowing what abuse looks like is vital to fighting it.
and if a survivor isn’t coping the “right” way, and it looks like they’re enjoying dark fic for the wrong reasons? still doesn’t matter. there is no excuse for harming that person to potentially avoid harm to others, not when there are other ways of avoiding that harm that do not have survivors as collateral damage. I will aways prioritize methods that result in fewer future victims and that do not involve throwing existing victims under the bus.
tldr, prohibiting artistic expression via darkfic is both ineffective and morally questionable at best, and the data points to it harming more people than it helps. there are other, better, more effective ways of ensuring the safety of vulnerable people, and that is where we should be concentrating our efforts.
I also love how this bill doesn’t follow the ableist agenda that’s been going around lately that demonizes mentally ill people. The bill carefully specifies that the ban is for convicted domestic abusers. Good job Oregon.
it was really heartening to learn that the purpose of creating such a thick uterine lining during the menstrual period was to prevent the implantation of embryos rather than encourage them, and that our uterus is basically flushing out anything it deems unworthy during the period itself rather than “punishing” us for not being pregnant (which is how it’s usually framed). it’s almost as if your female body is more concerned with the protection and continuation of itself rather than being used as a procreative vessel.
the fact that we’ve come to accept the idea that our reproductive organs are punishing us for not being continuously pregnant is proof of how deeply patriarchal brainwashing has convinced women that we are nothing but broodmares for ‘their’ children.
i think the moment i was disillusioned about life was when i was maybe 7 years old and realized the reason all my friends had become assholes was because boys aren’t allowed to have any physcial contact that isn’t fighting
my parents were hippie feminists so my brother and i could play clapping games and sleep in puppy piles and give each other weird hairdos, but all the ‘normal’ boys just up and stopped knowing how to touch anyone without hitting sometime between kindergarten and first grade
and my little kid mind briefly saw the vastness of life stretching out in front of all of us, and all the hugs everyone would need and not get, and for a moment i was just like
maybe life is not such a good idea after all
I grew up around a Russian ballet school. Let me tell you something about Russian men: They touch each other. Especially dancers, who are in my experience almost always super tactile people. They rough house like Americans, but they also hug each other, and sit on each other’s laps, and share blankets when it’s cold backstage.
So I grew up knowing full well that the whole Men Don’t Touch thing was puritanical bullshit.
What I was absolutely not prepared for, however, is the super intense effect it has on straight men’s romantic relationships.
Because when you are literally the only person it is okay for your boyfriend to touch, Jesus fucking Christ, that changes the game.
I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.
I know for certain that the framing of any and all platonic physical contact as un-manly has been directly responsible for a lot of sexual dysfunction (and then the attendant misery of trying to get that treated at the ripe old age of 22) with at least one of my exes. It’s a mess when you can’t get it up because you’re depressed and want to be held but you’ve been brainwashed into thinking what you actually want is sex because being held is for girls.
Amazing how the erectile dysfunction went completely away when he learned the difference between feeling horny and feeling cuddly. /sarcasm
“I strongly suspect that a lot of Str8 Dude feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of their wives and girlfriends, is a direct result of those women being the only non-violent physical contact they’re allowed to have.”
Omfg
No wonder the worst of them seem crazy… profound isolation does exactly that
When I taught in Japan, the boys were all super comfortable with each other. They’d sit on laps and hug and roughhouse and it wasn’t seen as bad ? Like it surprised me at first, but then you realize the problem is with so many men feeling that they have to prove… something? I dunno. I personally don’t like hugs or touches, but that is my own personal reasons and nothing of how I was brought up.
Because when you are literally the only person it is okay for your boyfriend to touch, Jesus fucking Christ, that changes the game.
Things I never thought of…I couldn’t imagine if my husband were the only person I was allowed to touch. As I think on it, that extends to the kids, too. The dudes aren’t allowed to really even cuddle their own damned children or nieces and nephews.
Wow.
Also explains why western media romanticizes co-dependency in romantic relationships to such an insane degree.
some dude on survivor outed another survivor who happened to be trans and called it “deception” like this was some damn soap opera and everyone was like ”lmao that’s personal and not your fucking problem?” and the host immediately said “We don’t need to vote, just grab your torch” and had him kicked off. that’s some instant fucking karma.
and then they let it air and outed someone to everyone ??
Yeah, they still aired it. I bet any money they knew he was trans and were counting on that coming up, perhaps only for tokenism rather than drama, but I have doubts.
Just coz they played the role of “look what such good allies we all are” doesn’t mean they didn’t just exploit a trans person and leverage transantagonism for ratings.
Zeke applied for the show without telling them he was trans because he wanted to be Zeke the survivor contestant and not just the trans survivor contestant. It was after the producers contacted him to say they were interested in casting him that he revealed it only to the producers. So yeah, they knew he was trans, but not because of the drama or as a token, they were already going to cast him before they knew because he wanted to make sure he wasn’t cast just to be a token.
Zeke and Jeff Probst (the host) had talked about how he would be able to decide whether or not he wanted the fact that he’s trans to be part of his story and when it would be revealed on the show if it would be revealed. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pick when because Varner outed him.
They kept it in the show because Zeke wanted it to be aired. Zeke got to decide with the producers and the help of GLAAD how the episode would be handled and they had been discussing it since the tribal council happened when the show was filmed 8 or 9 months ago up until it aired yesterday. He was happy that because his tribemates came to his defense and he was able to speak about his own feelings about what happened that something positive came out of a horrible situation and that’s partly why he wanted it aired.
Here’s an interview he did on The Talk earlier today where he talks about how he felt and why it was still aired. And here’s the essay he wrote for the Hollywood Reporter. In the tribal council (Part 1Part 2Part 3) he talked about his feelings of wanting to be just Zeke the contestant when he applied to the show.
Edit: Don’t just read what I’ve written here. Click on the links and read the articles and watch the videos, especially the video of the tribal council because that’s the footage of when he outed. His speech about being Zeke the contestant came after 5 minutes of his tribemates defending him when Varner outed him.
Edit: It’s been a year and some of the links don’t work so I’ve edited them.
do you ever think about how weird it is that the moral of Frankenstein is kind of less just “graverobbing is weird and creepy” and more “take some fucking responsibility if you’re going to do so”
“if you’re going to create a large corpse son, you better be ready to love him”
Stop all that “you attract what you are ready for” shit. Sometimes life is just terrible. It’s not always my fault.
“Life never gives you more than you can handle.” Yes, it does.
“People are placed in your life to teach you a valuable lesson that helps your soul on its way to enlightenment.” No, there are a just a lot of people who feel empowered when they act like assholes. We live in that kind of society.
“You keep finding yourself in the same situation because you haven’t discovered the message the universe is trying to send to you yet.” Sometimes unpleasant things are stuck on repeat, because you have a mental or physical condition, and it is a symptom. Symptoms are like that.
“The truth always hurts.” No, it doesn’t, and what hurts often isn’t the truth, but is instead someone’s biased opinion.
I really appreciate this comment. Thank you thank you thank you.
This is what I need to hear. I blamed myself for so long for the abuse I endured and for attracting the people that hurt me.
In reality, abusive people groom abuse victims from a very young age usually as children or young adults. And Abusers can detect already groomed people fairly easily and direct their abuse at them. It’s not your fault, but you it may be possible to learn to detect abusers and learn techniques to repel them. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth trying at least.
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 