Stupid and Contagious

i wish i could see this picture for the first time again

Every time I see some gamerbro edit of a female video game character to make her 'prettier', I always see something I have mentally dubbed Cockroach Wife Syndrome (in honor of the guy who accidentally conditioned himself to only be aroused by a fantasy of his cockroach wife Ogtha).

That is to say, there is a certain subset of gamerbro who interacts so rarely with real women, that his primary touchstone for how women look is fiction: often video games and anime. So when a video game woman looks too realistic--too close to having traits that one might find in real flesh and blood women--this is foreign to them. This is unattractive. They have been jacking it to hentai and blender animation porn for too many years, and have inadvertently conditioned themselves to only be sexually aroused by the exaggerated cartoonish traits of animated women.

So now every time I see one such edit, I can't help but think. My. What a coincidence you've made her look more like an anime waifu. Truly dedicated to your cockroach wife.

You can’t just breeze over something like “the guy who accidentally conditioned himself to only be aroused by a fantasy of his cockroach wife Ogtha” without at least linking a 20 minute video breakdown of this man’s descent into madness.

Oh is Ogtha not common knowledge? Eight years ago this was posted on reddit:

Two years ago, we got this update on the life of this roachfucker:

TLDR it's a guy who became obsessed with human-sized roaches with human intelligence after reading Kafka in high school, an obsession which eventually came to monopolize his romantic interests (and has sporadically had catastrophic impacts on his life ever since).

what the fuck happened to my post

Shh... We're reading about the cockroach wife tulpa

Everything Everywhere All At Once 2022 • dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Protect this dad at all costs

the thing is like. i get that it’s scary and makes people who do desire to get pregnant uncomfortable when we talk about the brutality and violence of pregnancy and the damage that pregnancy can do to your body

but you deserve to give informed consent to that process.

the lies around pregnancy - that it’s inherently safe, that it doesn’t do you permanent damage, that it’s only extremely rare for people to die of pregnancy complications, etc like

all of these are lies constructed so that more people will get pregnant w/o knowing all that

there needs to be more talk about the impact of miscarriages and how common they are, how different abortion processes are and how accessible they are

but also like. talking about how pregnancy fucks your body up should not be taboo

this is a process that permanently changes most people’s bodies, and that’s even if the pregnancy doesn’t do them like. severe illness or injury

and i just think everybody should have a right to KNOW that

bc to live in a society that intentionally obscures and hides facts about a completely optional and dangerous process does so for a reason, and that reason is based in a very sinister ideology that does not value bodily autonomy or informed consent

the number of people who are pregnant and don’t know about what induced labour entails and what post partum bleeding is horrifies me

Here is a story about the depths to which pregnant people are seen as a vessel for a baby, and the importance of finding prenatal care that assumes you are a human and not a baby holder:

When I was pregnant I was in a million forums for pregnant people because (cough adhd hyperfixation) and I had something called SPD (Symphysis pubis dysfunction) (not Sensory Processing Disorder though I also have that) which is where your pubic bones separate early (more or less) because they get all loosey goosey as your body gets ready to crank that baby out.

Except my pubic bone got confused and got misaligned at like 3 months pregnant. I could barely walk. I couldn’t roll over in bed. Doing something that required me to shift my weight from one foot to another like opening a door knob was like an excruciatingly painful knife being stabbed into my pubic bone, I can’t express how intense and blinding it was.

So I am in one million baby forums like “am I dying what is happening why is there a knife in my pubic bone” and all these people are like “I have that too! my doctor says it’s normal and not to worry because it doesn’t hurt the baby. I just deal with it by laying in bed for months in excruciating pain and think about how lucky I am to be having a little miracle growing in my body.”

So lol nope. I went to my midwife and they are like, “Oh squeeze a can between your knees look up a physical therapy youtube on SPD” and I did that can-squeeze thing and it CURED THE PROBLEM in ONE DAY. I had been SUFFERING, y'all, it felt miraculous.

And I was so full of rage (flames, flames on the side of my face) that people are being told “Oh, it’s NORMAL just deal with it” “It doesn’t hurt the baby.” Like, look, yes it’s NORMAL but it’s 100% treatable!!! SPD (again, not Sensory processing disorder) affects 1 in 5 pregnant people.

I was lucky to have amazing midwives (need a gender neutral term for that profession, but they see pregnant men and women)(side note highly recommend midwives if you are gender nonconfirming/a man/etc) and I have DOZENS of examples of shit like this.

(Another example is post partum friends being like “oh I am peeing my pants 900x day after giving birth” and my doctor says it’s NORMAL so I just dealt with it for decades. My midwives were like “Oh that’s normal and also physical therapy cures that in like 2 sessions”)

When my sister was looking to get pregnant she was given the best advice. She was told that being pregnant is an experience akin to being in a moderate sized car crash, in terms of risk and lasting injury.

Some people in moderate car crashes are very lucky, and walk away with zero injury. Some are very unlucky, and die. But most people fall into the third category, where they’ll be injured at the time, then heal, and then for the rest of their life they have some minor and liveable complication from the injury. Like a knee that lets you know when the rain is coming, or a back that doesn’t like seats without lumbar support, or a shoulder that never quite gets its full range of motion back.

The vast majority of people survive and thrive, like. But their body is never the same again. And people should know that when they make the choice of whether to put their body through that or not

my mom had a complication postpartum that caused pain and swelling in her left leg. at the time she was told it was “milk leg” and that it was normal and she’d be fine, but it never went away or got better. she finally found a doctor recently who was willing to do some tests and found out it’s a condition called “May-Thurner syndrome” and had surgery to fix it

she’s been suffering with this since she gave birth to me. I’m 38 years old. she had that surgery last week.

there needs to be more dialogue about the things your body goes through during pregnancy. “that’s normal” or “everyone goes through that” need to stop being used to shut down conversations about the horrific, permanent damage that can be done to bodies during pregnancy and childbirth. just because it’s “normal” doesn’t mean it needs to be endured

I know this is not pertinent to the post but midwife is probably not gendered in the way you think. (The post gets this right btw but I see a lot of people getting it backwards) The “wife” in midwife (with the woman in OE) refers to the person giving birth, not the Obstetrician.

Granted, it still needs to be updated because not just women give birth.

Here is an etymologically equivalent but gender neutral term I just made:

- pregger helper

ALT

Hey also: babies are not medicine, or unconditional love playthings. Having a baby won’t save your relationship, or fix the problems in your life if you haven’t done the work to get yourself in a good place mentally, physically, and emotionally, already. People don’t ask to be born, and having to grow up with parents that transfer their problems onto their children just perpetuates the cycles of abuse and life-long issues. Given you’re not likely to get clear, concise, unbiased healthcare anyway, as seen above, and it will be continually impressed upon you that it is your duty to have children, make sure you’re not succumbing to social pressures, or wanting to be a parent for the wrong reasons.

Genuinely, I think a large part of why so many people are unwilling to talk about risks, complications, pain and injury around birth, pregnancy and lactation is because of how deeply ingrained the (primarily but not exclusively) religious idea that “a woman’s body is designed to have children” is. Because if you actually sat down and looked, clear-eyed, at all the many ways in which even a healthy pregnancy can negatively impact the body, it would be that much harder to believe that design factors in at all, unless we’re willing to argue that the designer was shit at their job. But if you’re sold the idea that pregnancy is some divinely ordained and/or ultimate expression of Feminine Life Purpose, and then you have a bad experience, you’re much more likely to blame yourself, or to think there’s something wrong with you, or to suffer in silence because nobody ever told you this could happen so there must not be any easy solutions, and that makes me so fucking mad I could spit.

Whole video is here 

Please watch the whole video

THE BEAR (2022-) + IMDb trivia

Oh, I love this. Classic!

oscar isaac photographed by luis alberto rodriguez, 2024 via playtusu

A huntress sculpture in the forest woven from willow branches

I like how “forest” is bolded here like that’s the part I’m gonna have trouble accepting.

"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.

You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.

I volunteered with a Catholic non-profit when I was in-between jobs. The people there held all sorts of beliefs that I find despicable, they'd regularly open their mouths and say the exact opposite of everything I believe in. Even stuff that deeply offended me.

But they were the only ones in my old city preparing and serving homemade meals to anyone who needed them twice a day, while also providing showers, washing clothes, hygiene products, haircuts, helping people with their medications, re-dressing wounds, navigating the healthcare system and keeping track of appointments on people's behalf. We'd literally walk across the city once a week looking for people who were sleeping outside and offering them help. I was tasked with bringing fresh clothes to a man who was in a wheelchair and would've had a hard time coming to us several times. The impact we had was immense. So many people were happier and healthier because of us.

There were plenty feminist, queer-friendly, leftist organizations, activist groups and non-profits that I knew of in the city, but none of them were coming even close to doing that much. So I volunteered with the Catholics.

I wasn't the only anti-catholic there either. The laundry was on most days ran by me, a then closeted trans guy, and one of my favorite people there, an older butch lesbian line cook. But we bit our tongues and skipped the prayers because we were there to help people.

Despite their ideological beliefs, the people working and volunteering there were kind. They tried their best to help and even if they often stepped on people's toes because of their beliefs, they gave so much and wanted nothing in return. Things happened and it didn't even have to be said that we would not call the cops. We had no security. The people in charge were all middle aged mothers who handled the majority older male regulars expertly.

I'm sure there were plenty of people in the city with all the right beliefs about homelessness, addiction, poverty etc., but the Catholics with terrible ideas about everything were the ones actually doing shit.

This reminds me of that post from awhile ago that was like "Sure, your boyfriend says he supports abortion rights, but does he do the dishes?" You can spout all the left-wing catchphrases—and even genuinely hold left-wing ideals—and still be a hypocrite and shitty person.

One year during pride in my old city, a gay couple called the cops on a homeless man who called them a slur and I remember seeing it in the news and feeling conflicted about it. Now that I've actually met and talk to most of the homeless people there, I'm not conflicted anymore.

The Catholics didn't call the cops when a volunteer got strangled. He said it wasn't necessary and went right back to serving food. Sure, he'd regularly grumble about guys being shirtless inside on hot summer days with no AC because it's "immodest", but after that I had nothing but respect for him.

oh no dying for me thank you, I just wanted to be on this hill with you