I want to believe you

You want to have a conversation about the valorization of “love”? Great — I hope you mean it.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image by Tristan Chambers, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.]

🍂

I just saw someone use “chemophobia” now.  Bury me.

Judgment Sets

Here’s another one of those things, besides the word “violence,” that gets confusing in ethical delineations of harm — assigning evaluation criteria based on who an act “involves.”

“The sub is the one who’s really in control”

[cw: kink talk, D/s talk, consent talk, rape mention, food mention]

I’ve heard this line multiple times now, so it’s getting its own post here for the next time it comes up again.

Dictating

New clients in my program sometimes look bewildered, as if I were giving a seminar on edible plants and they had wandered into the wrong room.  They can hardly wait to speak, rising out of their seats to sputter at me: “But these are our wives and girlfriends you are talking about. Do you really mean to say that someone else can dictate what we do in our relationships?”

-Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? p. 73

I still think about this sometimes.

I feel like I’m looking at a bizarre flower or one of those alien-looking deep sea creatures, where you’ve got to keep staring at it to assure yourself you’re really looking at what you think you’re looking at.

 

Consent as an Incomplete Metric for Morality

[tw: tangential to David-Bowie-is-a-pedophile discourse and blunt CSA talk in a linked post, w/ my input having a more specific focus on the concept of “consent” and what it means]

I think it’s interesting to see this conversation happen, not because any particular statement within it is especially insightful (although there’s some of that), but because I think it’s illustrative of complications in delineating what constitutes consent & the relationship between that and delineating what constitutes abuse.

more fragments on pleasure and behavioral direction

The copilot asked me to write more about this.

Happiness as a Basis of Evaluation

[cw: very conservative Christian rhetoric, quoted anti-atheist talk, incidental gross url, + some kink ethics debate metatalk]

on perfection and the inevitable

You’ve seen those one-off posts, right?  Varied slices of insight on navigating your ideals alongside the awareness of shortcomings in yourself, in others, in the media you love (often featuring use of the dubious umbrella term “problematic”) because — because on the one hand, everyone is “problematic,” you shouldn’t expect anyone or anything to be perfect, you need to make peace with that, but on the other hand, you need to have standards, don’t use that as a flippant excuse to dismiss valid critiques, don’t use that as an excuse to throw your hands up and shrug, there’s a line somewhere, but on the other hand, you don’t need to burn yourself out in pursuit of the impossible and it’s okay to like something even if it has its shortcomings as long as you’re aware of and acknowledge them, but on the other hand, don’t get complacent, but on the other hand, be realistic, but on the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand–

All these other hands.  All this effort to extrapolate lines and boundaries and reasonable expectations based on a given value set and a conscious rejection of the oppressive and wrong, to reconcile the ideals you pursue with the inevitability of imperfection.

To me, it kind of… comes across as struggling to reinvent the wheel.

on “Victorian morality”

Given how often I’ve seen the idea that disgust toward sex is haughty and oppressive unless paired with a disclaimer, I’m interested in how that erroneous cultural link formed to begin with.  I can only assume it must have something to do with the upper-class elites of the Victorian age, your classic “prudes,” and this post details the best explanation I’ve come to for what we now know as “Victorian morality,” based on what I can put together from what I can scrounge up on the subject.  If you’re more informed and have corrections or additions to make, please let me know in the comments.