makes pengo look worse since he was the only one who actually begged people not to support her or have anything at all to do with her. they might have been upset but they never set out to hurt him at all. So please try to understand WHY I am saying they need to learn how to deal. Its so no one else can try to drag her name and hard work through the mud over misunderstandings like this. Because some will not believe just because of how you all initially responded.
jumalanna-deactivated20160928 asked:hey that "we are doing autism research wrong" post uses the word cr*pple which? is a slur specifically against physically disabled people and its not rly good to use in an autism context
softautism answered:oh i didn’t notice i’m sorry i guess i didn’t read very carefully i’m so sorry!
i’ll delete it :O
-mod rosie
oh my god, seriously? ok, thing one, the word has a meaning, and is a useful item of english vocabulary. just because a word has been used as a slur in some contexts does not mean it is always a slur in every context. that kind of walking-on-eggshells over-carefulness is WAY more insulting than the word ‘crippling’.
thing two, are you really going to try to keep from ever reblogging anything that has any problematic words in it? because that’s a lost cause, and will cause you to overlook a lot of good stuff, and exhaust you with constantly judging and worrying. don’t go down that road. it’s no good down there.
thing three, for god’s sake don’t star out a single vowel of an ordinary goddamn word as if it’s a magic spell that won’t work if you don’t say the whole thing, jesus fucking christ. if you’re not too old to fall for the asterisk trick, tumblr TOS says you shouldn’t be here.
and for my grand finale: i am mobility-impaired, and i find the word ‘crippled’ does a good job of describing my capabilities on bad spine days. you gonna try and take that away from me? who gave you the right? nobody, in fact, gave you the right, because that is a thing you do not have, so sit your ass down and quit trying to police disabled folks’ vocabulary for talking about disability.
And that post that was tried to be censored because of that word? Was reblogged BY AUTISTIC PEOPLE because it speaks for us. Stop with “lets not offend people by using English” shit.
reminder that labels are just loose descriptions, not hard requirements
sometimes i see people struggling with the question of whether they’re bi or gay or asexual and like
why should it matter what you call yourself
would that really change how you feel
labels are supposed to be shorthand
they shouldn’t condemn you to whatever fixed set of behaviors you think they mean
you can call yourself gay and still find people of the opposite gender attractive
you can call yourself asexual and still have sex once in a while
you can do and feel whatever you want
and you don’t owe anyone an explanation
Anonymous asked:Just keep this as a porn blog m8 it's clear you don't know shit about transgenders.
forbiddenflora answered:Haha. Thanks for the advice but no thanks, I’m going to reply as I see fit to asks I get about gender.
rofl “transgenders”
Anonymous asked:I think you misunderstood me? I do not think PK is the bad one I think "they" need to learn how to deal publicly with situations like this. Thats all, with the way they respond it would be very easy for someone to seriously tarnish their reputation (even though they are IN THE RIGHT). And frankly Pengo's post was just plain sad, it never made pk seem abusive to a reasonable minded person. It just seemed like two people who clearly did know how to communicate/respect each others feelings. And it
haha, i actually got another anon ask along the same lines between these two parts.
on the one hand, sure, tone greatly affects how people interpret a message. sometimes more than the message itself.
but a few things bother me there. like, i’m a loudmouthed jackass a lot of the time, and i fairly rarely get any of this “you’re a jerk because you use strong language” attitude. i don’t have nearly mel’s audience, sure, but i have a few thousand twitter followers, and that one php post i wrote got tends of thousand of reads. (it earned a lot of nasty comments, but none of them criticized my tone.)
the obvious difference is, people on twitter follow me because they like that i’m a loudmouthed jackass, whereas people follow mel because they like her art. then they discover she says things and… i don’t know. feel cheated out of something, maybe? buyer’s remorse?
if it were as simple as not liking the stuff she says, then people could just unfollow her. but she leaves such a strong impression that some people decide she is a bona fide Bad Person. if someone is polite but cruel to her, and she is clearly angry about it, then there will still be a good few fingers pointed at her.
she could just only be polite, or even publicly post nothing but art. but isn’t that validating this behavior, letting the mob decide how she should behave? that’s not cool. she very strongly values saying what she’s thinking, and it eats at her if she can’t. she put her AX rant on her personal blog, separate from her art, and people are still criticizing her for it right now. she put her vent post on a password-protected blog, and that still bit her too.
pretending to be polite certainly works, and it’s a useful thing to know. but i don’t think it’s good that people work this way, i don’t think we should encourage each other to continue to work that way, and i don’t think it’s at all fair to expect people to talk like press releases 100% of the time.
protip
i forgot to point it out at the time, but both of the people who pasted wikipedia’s definition of “gaslighting” to me yesterday overlooked a crucial detail:
it’s only gaslighting if it’s false
re: ableism
ghostisreal replied to your post ableism:
hm… not sure how to feel about this. i think your concern about mental illness being completely destigmatized is misplaced. also, mention of “help” is often used as a form of discounting what other people say under the guise of caring…
i don’t think it’s in any danger of being completely destigmatized (alas), but i think reinterpreting everything as stigmatization is unhealthy. the problem is not that mental illness has a stigma, it’s that it has an overblown and incorrect stigma. like, people think “schizophrenic” means “is going to stab you in the shower”, which is wildly wrong and makes for a harmful perception. but i still assume schizophrenia is an unpleasant thing for a person to have — or we wouldn’t need a name and psychs and drugs for it in the first place.
but telling a person “hey that’s cool no problem you’re among friends we love your thing whatever it is” is pretty much saying “you don’t need help, don’t bother seeking it”. like, why would you do that. if someone truly doesn’t need help, then by definition they do not have a mental illness. if they do have a mental illness, and you say they don’t need help, then you are lying to them to make them feel better about themselves short-term. this doesn’t make sense. we don’t do this with physical illnesses. “oh, no, it’s cool that you have bone cancer, we love you anyway, don’t listen to the ableists, it’s fine”
re “help”, that sounds like the same problem/trap as “concern trolling” — if many other people are using faux concern as a trick, what the hell am i supposed to do with genuine concern? not feel it? not express it? i do wish this person well, and i do hope he can find help for the problems that he himself apologizes for causing a lot of grief in his life. to do otherwise would be needlessly cruel.
ableism
let us have a brief chat, tumblr
i’m like twice your age so i know i’m not hip and cool any more, but hear me out
maybe referring to something like “i hope you find help for your mental problems” as “ableism”, i.e. something to be disdained and eradicated, is
REALLY
FUCKED
UP
the message that sends is: your problems aren’t problems at all! they are like happy magical rainbow fairies that follow you around and color your interactions in all kinds of interesting ways!
what the fuck are you thinking
i have ADD, officially the Babiest Mental Illness Imagineable. i take pills for it and everything. like from a doctor, even. so now that we’ve established my credentials, let me clarify where i stand on this:
ableist: oh, eevee, you have ADD? uhh we’d rather not you work on this project with us, then. or at all. you’re fired.
not ableist: oh, eevee, you have ADD? that sucks, i hope you get along alright
see, an -ism generally refers to unfair discrimination against a group
saying that some kind of problem is a fucking problem is not discriminating against jack. if you are depressed, that sucks. if you have (real) OCD, that sucks. if you are a narcissist or borderline or schizophrenic, that sucks. if you have the common goddamn cold, that sucks. this is why we call them “illnesses”: it’s latin for that fucking sucks.
i mean, you do know that mental illness is defined by having a negative impact on daily life, right?
so hey please let’s stop demonizing the idea of getting help. it’ll encourage people to fucking revel in their problems, and surround themselves with others who do the same, and they’ll all just get worse. (but at least they won’t have anyone expressing sympathy, phew!)
maxpin asked:i'd like to thank you on behalf of all those who love porn of niche characters; thank god that you draw vivian with a pussy. I know you did both but at least you thought about the (minority?) in this case and i appreciate that greatly.
meaconscientia answered:
man it would be pretty cool to not use “trap” disparagingly
this lone panel is pretty much destroying my ambivalence over the word
Anonymous asked:The species sheet of imps says they are intersex but according to eevee, the accurate term for them would be hermaphrodite since it's species wide and apparently they have both types of fully functional sexual organs. Are they that and the species sheet is wrong or is it a meta kind of thing where imps would prefer to be referred to as intersex due to some sort of stigma attached to the term hermaphrodite in that universe?
floraverse answered:Imps are outside of “male and female” sexual organs, even if their genitalia often looks like a mix. Imps are able to reproduce with species that don’t have standard genitalia or standard “male/female” sexes. They have one set of reproductive organs that changes (sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly) according to what’s needed, and that’s not always to “egg/sperm” - hermaphroditic almost fits, but it starts to fall outside of that a little with the organs being able to change to reproduce with things that can normally only reproduce with themselves.
Intersex was picked as a term because they’re almost always going to display characteristics that don’t fit solely “male” or “female” of the species they’re a mix of. For instance, pygmy pyzkyes and regular pyzkyes are female and male respectively (as far as reproductive organs go), normally, but if you had an imp mix — there would be confusion on its appearance because it would be a mix of both. I’d pull up an example of some other male/female differences mixed into one, but we don’t have a whole lot of species with different secondary sexual characteristics yet! But imagine if we did, the imps would usually display a mix of those traits normally associated with “male” and “female”.
So basically, I picked “intersex” because they often look like they’re between male and female secondary sexual characteristics. I didn’t list “hermaphrodite” because I didn’t want to capture the idea of “male and female” organs since theirs are something different, allowing offspring with any individual who’s not sterile. This only matters more to mention as species with different methods of reproducing are introduced. For instance, Heartbreakers and Moonmen don’t have a normal set of “male/female” organs, but imps can reproduce with them regardless. In practice, it can look like hermaphroditism, but it should be differentiated. There’s no actual word for this in English that I know of, which makes this hard.
Also: I apologize, on the sheet it looks like BECAUSE they’re intersex they can reproduce with almost anything, when it should be that they’re intersex and CAN ALSO reproduce with almost anything. I didn’t mean to imply that being intersex caused the the reproductive ability, and should have taken a little more space to clarify that. (Hopefully words here will suffice in that regard.)
OK my bad
zhorken replied to your post: Is futa/futanari an incorrect or offensive term as well? …
I object to all weird fetishy words for girls with dicks, just say “girls with dicks”
that could mean… basically any combination of sexual characteristics as long as one of them is a dick
that’s not inherently a problem or anything, but istm there are a great deal of people who would like to distinguish more finely for the purposes of porn perusal
idk what the right thing is here. any terms coined are doomed to end up fetishy; there’s just no need to use them outside of porn, and usually fantasy porn specifically
Re: Advice!
hey guys! it was brought to my attention that they way i refer to my ‘sona’s gender identities is offensive to some people, and i sincerely apologize if i’ve made any of you upset with this! the last thing i want to do is to offend any of you or any of the supportive communities here. if i ever act in a way that concerns you in this matter - or any other matter - DO approach me about it so i can fix it.
i’m asking those who follow me, or those who are more knowledgeable about it, to please let me know what would be a more appropriate term for me to use to refer to my ‘sonas identities?
Yeah guys! Mise and I are asking for a little advice so if you have any info please let us know! Mise’s original post has an answer section, so please go there! :>
alas, there is no appropriate term
“hermaphrodite” is the only word for describing an individual with fully-functional genitalia of both reproductive sexes
i see this post has already gotten a suggestion to use “intersex”, and that troubles me
the whole reason “herm” got a bad rap in the first place is that people kept referring to porn as “herms”, and also to intersex people as “herms”, and then started thinking that’s what intersex was about
but hermaphroditism in humans is impossible; it’s really only something that occurs within a species as a whole, not individuals. (except in fantasy porn land of course.)
so now we coined “intersex” to make the difference more clear… and i’ve seen a good few people suggest using “intersex” to label herm porn with the intention that it’s a nicer word to use
but that recreates the exact same problem!
they are different words that mean different things. “intersex” is not a more polite synonym for “herm”. the whole reason “intersex” exists is to emphasize the difference from hermaphroditism.
i’m starting to wonder if the people who take issue with “herm” are intersex themselves, or are misunderstanding the situation
i can’t speak to whether intersex people tend to have a problem with “herm” used literally, but afaik it doesn’t have any synonyms — and definitely not “intersex”.
(anecdote: someone i know actually tagged herm porn as “intersex”, and someone sent him an ask complaining that intersex people don’t want drawn porn in their tag, and i had to explain to him that this person wasn’t just being a jerk)
There’s a tag on twitter called “gamergate” where hardcore gamers are “rallying” for journalistic integrity in the gaming community.
Which really, they’re piggy backing the Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian drama to promote an idea that women who speak up in media should have solid proof of harassment before speaking up about the toxic culture of the gaming community. Which, ya’know, is kinda shitty.
Yes, there are some legit claims in the tag, but those were not what I decided to comment on. Briefly. This morning.
Which was a huge mistakeeeee. I’m now getting @replied by a buncha people who have received misinformation regarding my comments about making gaming culture more inclusive and comfortable for women. Mostly because some drama-accounts are stirring the pot by mass-hastagging out-of-context tweets I made in response to other conversations. SIGH
then, after removing myself from the conversation, I just started blocking people. Which made them more mad. Now my twitter has been posted to either 4chan or reddit and I keep receiving shitty @ messages, some of which make no bloody sense at allllllllll. (like how I’m whiteknighting to get some feminist tail, or how I’m ACTUALLY the misogynist because im blocking ladies who @ reply me shitty messages)
So uh, I’m shutting off Anons again. bc i’ve started getting them here too. Just to clue y’all in on whats going on in my neck of the woods.
wow wtf harsh i never got Twitter Targeted
maybe this will cheer you up:
“gamergate” is a real word and it literally describes a hivemind of only male drones trying to make it without any women http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
move along if you don't care.
I’m probably gonna get a lot of flak. but I really don’t care. Jontron does not deserve the shit hes getting on twitter right now. people have the gall to claim getting harassed is so horrible and immoral and then turn around and call this man human filth. scum. make fun of him and treat him like…
hello yes i am here to deliver the flak
this is, like, really apologetic
the irony being that jontron is not
Jontron is an honest man. he can say things the wrong way sometimes. a lot of people do that. but ultimately you can see if he truly feels he is wrong by logical standards he will back down and apologize, any reasonable person would.
but he didn’t. or, at least, he didn’t feel he was wrong by logical standards. instead he went off about ‘censorship’, which i guess he has confused with 'compassion’, because someone asked him to not use a rude word.
me and my friends usually make jokes. I make black jokes in front of my black friends and they make white jokes about me and we both laugh because we’re friends. if they are ever offended I apologize.
maybe that’s because you’re friends and not, say, one person broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of other people.
you should probably not make cracks about oppressed groups unless you are really sure your entire audience will be in on it with you.
and again, jontron did not apologize. he doubled down. (and then drew a naked comic of a female game developer, as i understand it. what a charming young man.)
they prefer to attack small jokes and friends because they’re easier than paying attention to actual issues that have an effect on minorities.
maybe having public figures constantly crack small jokes does have an effect on people. maybe. let me ask them.
ok i just checked and it totally does
they have no forgiveness in their hearts and it makes me sick to watch them treat people who do like trash and hurt them like it’s okay to treat anyone like that for having an opinion.
forgiveness? he didn’t apologize. he has shown no remorse. he has given entire interviews about how right he thinks he is on this.
hurt them? what if his words hurt someone else? why is only the backlash invalid, but you excuse his original actions — even almost-implying that he apologized or regrets them, multiple times?
for having an opinion? calling someone “retarded” is hardly an opinion.
i know the whole point of your post is to try to offer perspective, so fyi: immediately after reading this post, i glanced at twitter to discover that apparently someone has made “some very scary threats” against anita sarkeesian and her family. that is what is going on in the game industry right now. threats of violence over an internet documentary about video games.
but what really gets to you is that some famous youtube douchebag can’t be a dick without having people call him a dick.
maybe we’d be better off if people got called on being dicks more often.
lotuslizard asked:Just to let you know, upon getting a bit into this whole JonTron thing, I looked into and learned more about slurs. In your article (I think that's probably referred to as article) you used the word "idiot." Learning more about slurs, it turns out "idiot," "moron," and "imbecile" were used as terms for different levels of handicapped persons. It was never used as a slur for them like the r one, so it probably doesn't actually really count as an awful thing to use, but in case you'd wanna know.
i’m aware of the etymology, but i suppose those aren’t slurs because we don’t use them to refer to people with low IQ any more, and i’m not aware of any significant period of overlap where the words were used in both waysWasn’t saying in any sort of accusatory way, just wanted to let you know in case you’d consider it a negative thing after learning about it (assuming you hadn’t already). And I ran out of spaces in the ask to add this part, haha. After all this and learning those things, I’ve been trying to stay away from possible offenses as well, as I noticed when you mentioned trying to avoid “crazy” like I am.
beyond that it gets fuzzy
like i cannot recall ever seeing anyone use “crazy” to refer to a person with a known specific mental illness. i’m sure it happens and i know the stigma exists, yet i’ve encountered more overt racists than people who feel a need to mock the ill.
on the other hand, “crazy” is pretty frequently used to refer to people just to dismiss: “this doesn’t make sense to me, therefore it is not worth listening to or considering at all”. i have apparently done this more than i’d like to think. so i certainly don’t mind seeing that usage go.
i mostly have the urge to use “crazy” to refer to situations or outcomes or rules that are wildly different from my vaguest expectations. which is, ultimately, what synonyms of “insane” mean in the first place. the implication is that this is unfortunate, hence the push to stop using the words at all. i doubt anyone with depression or schizophrenia or OCD thinks those are good things to have, but i can totally see how having your own condition used as a euphemism for undesirable things would suck a bit.
(speaking of, “suck” is only a few decades old, and derives from exactly what it sounds like: suckin dick. so using that to mean “is bad” suggests performing fellatio is bad. same for “blow”.)
this isn’t a problem with “cancer” as a metaphor, because we consider people to have cancer but be schizophrenic etc. so the root problem is not so much mere words, but our inability to separate a condition from the person afflicted by it
and yet sometimes that’s not unreasonable, either: a person with severe delusions or narcissism or what-have-you is going to be very difficult to tease apart into the “real” person and the effects of the disorder. (i know people whose home lives were hell because of a parent who was bipolar or borderline or similar.) hell, we can’t even define what the disorders really are; we just categorize them by symptoms. we can look at and see most physiological illnesses. all we can do for mental illnesses is give them acronyms if they happen to interfere with normal life. is ADD an illness, or just a personality trait that’s only a problem because life has gotten complicated now? is high-functioning autism an illness, or just a different way of interpreting input? i don’t know. nobody knows. we’re making this up the best we can as we go.
someone once chided me for using “sociopath” to refer to people who were skilled manipulators and used that ability to be cruel towards their perceived enemies and hide the cruelty from their circle of supporters. but what other word do we have for that behavior? these people will never be diagnosed professionally, but even a diagnosis is just matching symptoms with the fuzzy list of things we use the word to mean. is it inappropriate to make an amateur judgment call, having at least a vague grasp of what sociopathy is supposed to be?
there are other synonyms i haven’t seen any objections to: “deranged” comes to mind, and literally just means “insane”. is that ableist? what about “out of your mind”, which is a pretty clear idiom?
even “dumb” refers to people unable to speak, and “lame” refers to an inability to walk. are those objectionable? does anyone use those words with those meanings any more? i’ve only ever heard “lame” refer to a horse.
curiosity: “bizarre”, “wild”, “outlandish”, and “strange” all derive from some flavor of “foreign”, i.e. literally from a different place.
there are some mild grumblings from cis people that “cis” is a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. TERFs have referred to “TERF” as a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. i have had someone tell me that “denier” (in the climate change sense) is a slur, presumably because it’s only used to say something negative. “ha ha!” you say. “that’s silly! literal descriptions can’t be slurs!” and it is here that i politely remind you that “negro” is literally spanish for “black”.
context is everything, but all the context here is huge and murky.
to tell cis people that “cis” is not a slur is to tell them that their offense is unreasonable and unworthy of attention. but in this case that’s pretty reasonable, because the offense is really “boy i’m sick of hearing trans people complain about how everyone else keeps murdering them and whatever”.
strangely this doesn’t seem to come up very often; people just laugh and assert that no of course cis isn’t a slur, as self-evident. but offense is not created equal. being reminded that your grandparents were literally owned or put in small camps or whatever by the grandparents of the person talking to you is a little different from being reminded that the person talking to you is angry about having to exist on the fringes of society.
sort of like how having a panic attack when you’re reminded of the assault you experienced is a little different from being reminded that you don’t like tornadoes.
i wish we’d stop diluting words like “trigger” that have no effective synonym. words change, language evolves, but we do ourselves a great disservice if we remove the meaning from specific words that have no substitute.
anyway
i don’t know anything
maybe we should stop deriving pejoratives from words that are intended to apply to people. but it’s a bit late for that now
the real problem is that we want pejoratives to use on people in the first place
yeah i like to call people “idiots” when they do stupid things. (whoops, “stupid”. how do i even rephrase that? things that i expect them to realize have unfortunate consequences.) maybe that’s different because we understand “idiot” as usually being a contextual response to a specific event, but use “crazy” to dismiss an entire person outright. words we use the latter way — including racial slurs and slurs relating to handicaps — suggest that both the target and the entire named group are worthless.
that makes a lot of sense to me. i don’t like even using “liberal” or “conservative” if i can help it, because i know half the US would read it as “someone i can already assume is not worth taking seriously”.
so after much rambling, maybe that’s the secret: feel free to pick on the idiot things people do, but don’t dismiss people outright.
idunnillustrated:
hi
“hermaphrodite” is not a synonym for “intersex”
in fact the word “intersex” was coined to get away from “hermaphrodite”, which refers to a phenomenon that cannot happen in humans
so it’s kind of frustrating to see you use them interchangeably, especially in a post where you’re railing against misused terminology
“intersex” means (literally) somewhere between two types of genitals (and maybe other sexual characteristics), and it happens to humans sometimes
“hermaphrodite” means simultaneously having multiple forms of genitals; it generally refers to members of an entire species for whom this is the norm. this is most likely what you’re gonna see in porn. there cannot be a human hermaphrodite, because our genitals develop from the same tissue. it can develop into a dick and balls, or a clit and ovaries, or sometimes somewhere in between (intersex), but you cannot have both.
stop the misinformation, people. it takes about 60 seconds of google searches to find these terms and educate yourself