Arguably for a lot of stuff that folk encounter that some count as “subliminal” just means they don’t understand the language and employ of framing devices, juxtaposition, abstraction or rhetoric. We need to start teaching that shit as basic literacy in schools because once you understand them it’s not “subliminal” anymore as it becomes readable text.
The simple presence of an ad in your peripheral vision definitely counts as properly subliminal though and it’s still a menace.
“Being Hot” is never someone’s entire personality. Most of the time it’s just the veneer used to keep people at a distance. There are advantages to not being hot - mainly you are not hassled by people for attention. Getting approached by people who want something from you all the time tends to make one put up walls. It’s easier to be kind when so little is generally expected of you because it’s not being demanded regularly.
Not everyone has the strength to be as nice and polite to the 50th person trying to score their number that week as they are to the first. We as a society spend way too much time dehumanizing people because of this shit. I am not conventionally attractive and I bless my lucky stars that I grew up never being denied affection by family or friends because I wasn’t good looking. I see people at my job talk about the pretty actor folk behind their backs and it sounds just as catty and insecure as the shit people said about me for being unattractive.
I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are just having fun but other times it’s because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it’s lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn’t the way to go about stopping that cycle.
“Vanity makes a person ugly inside” is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It’s moralizing someone’s relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.
I mean I exist in a very LGBTQIA+ city. My friends across the spectrum of the rainbow have expressed sentiments about how men’s mental health is an issue but it is really hard to interface with it because men like to talk about it… but they seem to want to nope out of and defer spearheading an initiative. Because it’s not easy. It never is easy.
Most of the LGBTQIA have a model. A group who is directly plans a thing and then the people who are adjacent show up. People generally have the spoons to make one to two issues their main. This is usually where they take the effort to spearhead the thing, be part of the committee, figure out the logistics and run the getting the word out. That issue because it is so energy intensive usually is one they feel most directly affected or endangered by… but they can make time and energy to show up for like 10 other things to do fundraising, protests or whatever because they support friends. Stuff where they just need to know where to be and what to do. That’s comparitive low energy.
You could look to the LGBTQIA as help and go to like a Pride committee but generally speaking when approaching people for help you have to expect imperfection.
It’s done unthinkingly a lot of the time. My folks did their best to encourage me to not be cowed by gendered expectations but you as a parent have to contend with other kids, other parents and adults who bring their own baggage.
I think young boys need to be given those freedoms more - to go and get nails done with Mum or not categorically reject pastimes not historically coded for them but that’s not the be all and end all. It’s just the start. We got to recognize ourselves in each other. I am particularly vulnerable to this stuff because women feel like a completely different tribe from me so being treated like one stings extra and not all men accept or see me as one of them which means my behaviour is often policed due to different standards than people I see as my group.
A lot of misogyny when it’s directed at you feels like being treated like a child which when you know you aren’t going to “grow up” in a recognizable way to those people until basically you start looking wrinkly will fuck you up. Conversely I have to make sure my partner isn’t locking his feelings up too hard because despite his parents trying to avoid forcing that masculine coding on him he still picked it up.
As a trans masculine person I got the opposite problem. My anger was never treated as a valid response so after basically being treated as though my anger was funny, stupid or cute but ultimately unacceptable I lost my ability to feel it for a long while. I couldn’t pick it out of the slurry of internal emotions. Functionally anger is a means to not just feel injustices but motive to externalize the source and feel empowered to do something. To fight on your own behalf. Not living without anger meant everything was turned around. I couldn’t fight for myself . When something bad happened to me I would find ways to make it my fault. When I eventually snapped and tried to hurt someone, when I became temporarily physically frightening for short spell to another person, it was so far beyond a conscious process because if I was in the headspace of my conditioning I should have been rendered powerless.
Separating anger out of the mass of just negative emotional mass and being able to not just feel it, but to indulge it and express it took me decades to manage. For a long while I couldn’t help but feel whenever I was angry I was transgressing. I was doing something that was illogical and isolating. I also wasn’t very good at it. I also couldn’t meet resistance without just feeling powerless or like I was in the wrong.
My anger still isn’t treated seriously by other people. I envy cis men their ability to have their anger actually taken seriously at the same time I recognize that a full range of expressions of powerlessness and weakness were always allowed for me and denied them. Not just allowed… but rewarded with sympathy.
I lost a job a year ago for a fairly tame expression of anger. The sort anyone more comfortably coded as a man would be excused for just for feeling his feelings. My cis male coworkers around me validated that anger as perfectly rational and my reaction as fairly analogous to stuff they had done and easily gotten away with in the past…but it was treated as an unforgivable sin in my case because I was held to a different standard of emotional control. I know that when it comes to interfacing with other am never supposed to act on my feelings of anger directly. I am culturally supposed to seek concensus and sympathy from other people by at best talking about it or outwardly displaying helplessness at the injustice. People who recognize and treat me as a man will acknowledge my anger better because they recognize that aspect of them in me. Those that code me as female generally however don’t really don’t recognize my anger as valid and treat me as though I have lost my mind. I recognize there are missing tools in my social kit that were stolen from me and it sucks absolute donkey nuts.
Gendering emotions cause real harm and internal disregulation. Being culturally frozen out of your feelings regardless of the targeted feeling is awful. I really hope it gets better for you. Being stuck with half a kit is excruciating.
It doesn’t matter if a lot of people care about something if they don’t fight for these things to happen “society” ie the beaurcratic powers that be in different institutions will not automatically feature your issue. Inertia is more efficient for them. The reason so many minority initiatives have worked is because small but dedicated groups worked extraordinarily hard to pressure “society” to change. It’s Pride month, look at that situation. The LGBTQIA is a small fraction of society, smaller back at it’s Pride origins by far because a lot of people were scared out of their minds to come forward.
I understand that the instinct is to mope, to treat these problems as too big to change but that isn’t healthy. What people need to remember is that just wishing or creating reasons not to try doesn’t make things so. It is an unfortunate issue with straight cis men that they are not primed to organized guerilla social action. In part I think it is because there’s this toxic internal expectation that someone else should be doing that work for you on your behalf. There isn’t. If men want this to happen the movement has to start with men. Other people will join you and help you but they aren’t going to do the basic work for you. That whole “elevate ( ____ ) voices” thing? Men could fill that space but that’s the thing you have to put the work in to create the movement that treats your word as the authentic voice of the concern. Your voice needs to start that snowball effect and you need to make and start executing the plan.
Venting isn’t all that useful on it’s own mental health wise. Get it out of your system but add a second step. Ask yourself what you are going to do about it. Then find people in your area and organize. Be a leader of the movement or support one.
I mean it could be using the percentages of another number. Like if there’s 20 ingredients and you drop one it’s a 5% reduction or if you added other non natural ingredients that would cause the percentage to drop… But whether it’s less or fewer would depend on information we don’t readily have because we don’t know if it’s ingredients by volume or of it’s a reformulation of ingredients… and may be at the crux of this grammatical problem depending on what you assume is going on?
It depends on context. If you are dealing with a percentage of overall types of ingredients by volume without changing the variety of ingredients you would probably use “less”. Like if you reduced the mix of milk related ingredients. You would use “fewer” to indicate that the number of individual ingredients had changed. Like if they got rid of two of the ingredients of an original ten.
This could be a category error?
Absolutely LUDICROUS, they always try and walk it in.
I work film and we are both heathens that will eat anything brought to us in a cardboard box regardless of quality… And also drive 30 minutes to get bougie treats to share. Being able to expense food brings out the raccoon in all of us
The sort of “Band of Brothers” vibe is something I have noticed talking with the two folks from high school that fell that direction that I know. It feels like a high school clique but with parasocial relationships. Like they don’t want the hassle of being king but they do want to be knights lording it over some peasants.
It’s a very common thing for people to equate queerness with other concepts of otherness like “not from my group!” type pearl clutching. Bigots in a lot of places are weirdly more accepting of individual queer folks when they are noticeably foreign and more treat the concept of people being queer as an outside corrupting influence… Nevermind that the existence of queerness is basically a universal. People from non-permissive places really don’t want to believe that their culture will also constantly manifest new queer people. They often believe something along the lines of if they stamp on it hard enough it becomes more rare instead of just more people hiding and struggling in isolation and silence often risking their lives if they misjudge a social situation or dying because of a pervasive sense of dispair.
But no matter how hard you stomp the “problem” never goes away. You have to keep stomping forever in perpetuity. The boot must always rest heavy on someone’s neck and will never touch floor again because there will always be someone there to rise if the pressure ever stops. It’s in part why the concept of people essentially just being “born that way” has been so powerful.
Hai Hai La Curry… I think I am a Japanese fast food chain restaurant…
You are correct in some instances. The construct of gender is for a lot of us just used as a tool. Some of the time it’s to alert people to how we wish to be treated… Which is the passable but non-ideal win. It’s not the fault of people’s brains encoding us to a binary standard that is keyed to read our characteristics as vital information. At some level we are animals and our brains treat info about sex as important. I have friends I know are trying their damnedest to respect my mental health by using language and means of cultural inclusion which don’t hurt but a lot of them slip because their brain isn’t naturally processing me into the correct category. They are looking out for me and trying … but the switch obviously hasn’t flipped.
When the switch does flip and you are properly read people legitimately treat you differently. It feels so bloody natural and fast like you are used to dealing with lag and all of a sudden you are on a fast newly formatted machine not bogged down by bloatware. Moreover a lot of things stop feeling artificial and like someone trying to calculate how they are supposed treat you. Getting that switch to flip is aided by social constructs - gender expression which the brain learns to read as just more markers of sex. It’s the extra power to get us over that hurdle.
It’s imperfect though. To use gender constraints as a tool can get you what you need but sometimes at the cost of what you want. The number of transfemmes out there envying the cis girl wearing the low effort androgynous shlumpy t-shirt and jeans and still effortlessly getting correctly gendered when they go out to do stupid bullshit errands… Is like the trans Cinderella wish… Most of the trans femmes I know are one " Oh fairy godsmother I wish I could go to the 7-11 without eyeliner and not have the cashier call me “sir”." away from selling their souls to the fae.
On the flip side Try being a pre-T flamboyantly gay transmasc with not uber straight masculine vibes… You can perform like a puppet on a string to a rather stupid and arbitrary social convention of rigid gender performance or you can have people hammer on your feel like lukewarm invisible crap button all day making every social interaction you have feel like an exercise of utter pain as your dopamine rapidly flees your body and leaves you an empty husk.
Most of the time you kind of have to pick one. We are slaves to the construct cage of gender more than most. What is underneath it all is something we do not wholly control. What I experience daily makes no logical sense from the idea of gender always being a choice. I can learn how I work but not change it… Furthermore if it were something I could change I don’t think I would. It would be far greater violation of selfhood to change something that has colored every relationship with myself and every human being I have ever known just so I could be comfortable in a body I don’t like.
Well I mean… Not exactly limited to girls. Who doesn’t like a nice shiny rock? Nobody, that’s who. Show me one person who claims to not have at least one good rock somewhere in their house. Can’t do it can yeh? Didn’t think so.
It is more of a rich trendy thing. I have seen it particularly in mansions and high end apartments and things that I have been given access to via my work but I don’t think I have ever seen anybody who is strictly working class pull it off.
Hoarding is more common but with hoarding there’s more of a psychological element where they are anxious about removing objects from their places. Sometimes it’s from a place of having experienced traumatic scarcity but it seems to me more often it’s more about believing there is a larger connection between memory and stuff than actually exists. Like "I can’t throw out this half melted kettle or I might forget the day it boiled dry on the stove and everybody laughed about it! " - there is a lack of trust that they will remember it without the item or that all memories are worth clinging to to the extent of impacting their physical space. The Archive of memory hoarder is also the worst to try and help because after the fact if they ever feel the need to revisit something they let go for any reason they will blame the people who tried to help them with their total consent to cut down on their stuff and some of them never get over that resentment.
You’re thinking of the more nebulous “decluttered lifestyle”. Minimalism is an aesthetic design choice. Think of those houses where like there’s no shelves, no storage tucked out of the way.
Oh but there is an implied value - superiority. When you give a group of people a descriptive property with no inverse you are basically creating a construct of “assumed default”. This comes with other issues of those falling outside the default having no way to effectively talk about people of the assumed default group without using words that have value judgements baked in. Like if I am calling you “a normal person” the implicit value judgement is that I am an abnormal person. I am “othered”.
This sort of denial of language assumes that a group that you are given tools to talk about never and should never talk about your group back utilizing those same tools.