Racing Turtles

They’re passive aggressively cleaning each others faces in the banana bed rn

peace and love on planet earth….

🦌 🐈 🤎

Bongo Bob will you please stop

The biggest suspension of disbelief DS9 requires is that Kira Nerys would shave her legs or her pits

every time i hear a manscaped podcast ad i want to take the entire male population gently by the shoulders and tell them not to let anyone take their bush away, we've already lost so many good girlbushes in this battle don't let them tell you your hairy balls are wrong

#manufactured insecurity is the devil's work#embrace the manbush!(via @isozyme)

Hear Hear!

Just want to add that public hair is Hygienic and Good For Your Health

guy who shaves his pussy but not his legs reported to have referred to this setup as "the devil's tonsure"

@presidentofthehotgirlclub not a kitty video, but i think you'll like this if you haven't seen it already

"There are no monsters in the sea, only the ones we make up in our own heads" Bless you, ma'am.

Of course her feelings about this are informed by her shark-centric life, but I think in general grooming is very satisfying to people, and we can all understand this feeling from our experience in different but analogous situations. And fish of course must have instincts related to this, since there's specialized cleaner fish. Interesting to see this compatibility so far across the tree of life, but every large animal has parasites, so it kind of makes sense.

By the way--notice the chainmail gloves! I didn't notice that until reading an account from someone who went diving with this person (as a customer or colleague I'm not sure), who did get bit by a shark, but "the chainmail did its job, and I was not injured". Also witnessed a hook removal

It's pretty old-hat at this point for pop-scientists to describe humans as "an animal that domesticated itself", and obvsl I hope Im not turning this into an evopsych just-so story, but the intersection of all of this:

Humans evolving towards social living, which coincidentally encouraged selection of already-existing grooming behaviors, which strengthened the human grooming-drive, which then had the coincidental side-effect of making humans better at establishing symbiotic relationships with other animals

is pretty interesting to consider :3

a chihuahua shower

Extremely dangerous how "grooming" in the context of child sexual abuse went from being a very specific pattern of isolation and trust-building with the aim of abusing someone to "telling children anything that contradicts their parents' ultra-conservative worldview is grooming" to "selling rainbow flags in a store is grooming" to "literally anyone I don't like is a groomer".

These days the word seems to most often be used by people who don't care about what it actually means and just want an easy "this person is irredeemably evil, kill them now" button.

its funny, because "isolating the victim and becoming their sole source of information about how the world works" they way that ultra-conservative parents want actually IS a pretty fucking big red flag for grooming.

<3

Continuing the theme of abuse blogging today, earlier I saw a post talking about the phenomenon of wanting to outlaw things (types of media or depiction of certain topics mostly) because "they can be used to groom" or "were used to groom (me/someone I know)"

And I don't want to air my personal trauma on op's post, but like they said, anything can be used to groom, because the problem isn't The Thing Itself but the motivations of the groomer

It's like that posts about wooden sailing ships where people keep saying "hope you like scurvy" or "weren't these used in the slave trade" as if somehow the ships themselves caused those things to happen

Literally anything can be used to groom. Any topic. Any interest. Any object. Abstract concepts like 'relationships.'

My dad groomed me by:

1) being my parent and having constant and unlimited access to + control over me from birth, the ability to define reality and normalcy for me, and enjoying a bunch of social conventions that meant anything he did to me was basically seen as his business and no one else's and the default assumption was that any intimate contact he had with me was harmless or necessary

(I can remember, as a child being taught about bad touching in school, thinking that "only your doctor or parents should touch you in these places" sounded an awful lot like an abusable loophole)

and that it would be worse to baselessly suspect or accuse him of abuse and be wrong than to let me be abused because there wasn't proof

(It was in fact pretty fucking obvious and every so often I think about every single teacher, family member, and other adult in my life who saw how I was and did/said nothing, and how many of those adults actually seemed genuinely contemptuous of me for my Obviously Traumatized Child Symptoms And Behaviors, and am briefly overcome with rage)

And 2) being nicer to me than he was to my brother, treating me like I was special, and doing fun things like taking me on trips.

A lot of the things he said and did to me as a child were self-evidently abusive and dysfunctional, like outright telling me it was normal for parents to have favorites, not only playing me and my brother against each other for his affection but me and my mom, telling me he knew me better than I knew myself and could tell what I was thinking and feeling just by looking at me, making me into his personal therapist and constantly telling me in graphic detail about the abuse he suffered as a child + his history with drug use and abuse + his marital problems with my mom + his mental health issues + his sex life and sexual interests (this also functioned as a way of training me to keep secrets, because he'd tell me things he Wasn't Supposed To so then I'd feel like we were co-conspirators and I was special and mature, etc etc)

but the fundamental thing underlying all of these specifics was making me feel special and uniquely loved by him, and then manipulating those feelings and that attachment in order to use me for his sexual as well as emotional gratification without having to worry about me fighting back, arguing, or telling anyone.

A lot of the stuff he did would have been otherwise normal if it wasn't him doing it!

There's nothing wrong with taking your kid on a business trip with you because you travel for work and it means they get to go all around the country and see places they might not have otherwise, if you're not molesting that kid.

When I was very little, he had a ritual where every weekend he'd ask me to name three things I wanted to do that I'd never done before, and then we'd go do those things. That's a great way of introducing your child to new experiences and bonding with them and making them feel like you love and value them and their thoughts, if you're not molesting that kid.

So are we going to ban parents staying in hotels with their kids? Roadtrips? Daytrips?

I do think there are a lot of problems with the current nuclear family structure as well as the social and legal concepts of 'the family' that make it much easier to abuse children and much harder for those children to get help, but the solution isn't "no one should ever have a child because parents can abuse their kids", it's to create structures that make it harder to abuse kids with impunity and easier for abused kids to get help.

This is just one specific instance of abuse, but I think it's illustrative of the flaw in the "ban all things that could plausibly be used to groom" reasoning. There isn't a single thing or topic you could have banned that would have kept me from being groomed and abused.

The reason it happened is because my dad was a deeply dysfunctional person who ended up with access to two children who couldn't leave and didn't know any better, and the only thing that might have kept it from happening in the first place was if social support systems existed so that my mom hadn't been so afraid of being a single mother when she got pregnant with me that she married him despite knowing it was a bad idea and being warned away by his own mother.

"If gross stuff that makes me uncomfortable stops existing, abuse will stop" is a child's logic. You weren't groomed because of porn or Twilight or incest fiction or shotacon hentai. You were groomed because a person decided to manipulate and abuse you using whatever tools they thought were most effective, and if those specific ones hadn't been available they would have used something else. Blaming the material is like running into a door and blaming it for being there.

"we need to ban things that are used to groom minors" ok. you're gonna start with church, the cops, and the school system right

In approximate order, the things my abusers used to secure access to me and isolate me from well-meaning bystanders in systems of personal exploitation (yes, including sexual exploitation, and yes, when I was a child) were suburban anomie, the Boy Scouts, and web 1.0 radical feminism. I'm sure if the extent of my problems was being squicked out by fanfiction by and large written by actual children I'd think different, but I am an adult

There is a position I can vaguely respect that is opposed to all of the things I mention, including the last one. The issue is that I somehow doubt they're imminently going to abolish the nuclear family and the bourgeois state and throw all the billionaire pedophiles into a quarry to break rocks into smaller rocks for the remainder of their days, whereas I'm confident in their ability to isolate and murder random queers who give them icky vibes

@vancekilo how does it feel being the most correct person to ever comment on a post

HUMAN, I was NOT DONE with the brushing. The brushing will CONTINUE.

#how wonderful to be a human in a world of creatures who love to be petted (via @arrows-for-pens)

watching my kitties groom eachother and being like “waow thats love” and then continue watching as one of them immediately pummels the shit out of the other for looking at them wrong

that is also love

this is long but i think it's a good read about the kind of weird shit even "normal" christianity does to women lol

my own addition is one time during our youth drama practice a boy could see a girl's lower back peeking out during a movement so he told the pastor about it, who then made an example of both of them by bringing them to the front of the group to discuss it at the next rehearsal. we applauded the guy for being Very Strong And Brave! while the girl in question stood there on display and didn't say anything while a middle aged man and a teenage boy discussed her body with the youth group for ten minutes.

also because this is a thread about women and people are ghouls: i'm trans, exclusionists go make your own repost. everyone else feel free to add your own weird christian purity stories lmao