Obviously not news, but I thought it would be fun.
Mine is, “It was in the closet..not downstairs.”
Mine was: ‘I’d like vodka please’ - my bf was at the shop and texted me to see if I wanted anything :)
Mine to my daughter: “Yes. Nothing else going on here.”
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“Disability exists in the context of the environment” is pretty much the definition of disability, really. I mean, a shit ton of people do not consider themselves visually impaired because they wear glasses. But in a time or place where glasses aren’t available? Hello visual impairment. Without mine, I’m pretty much blind. Not full white-out blind, like, but if I hold my own arm out in front of me at full stretch, my hand is blurry.
Hey, here’s another: what about asthma? I’m asthmatic. Salbutamol is my god. To be honest, my lungs are now at a point where I’m Mostly Fine, but if I didn’t have inhalers to fall back on, I would have to be so, so careful every winter of not over-exerting myself for fear of cold air + exercise giving me an asthma attack. My husband would be royally buggered, and basically confined indoors.
The fact is, we have invented some ability aids that negate some disabilities. We have not bothered to invent or accommodate some others. We have created environments that remove some disabilities entirely; we have created environments that worsen others considerably. Disability always exists in the context of the environment.
Almost everything matters!
I’m starting to get tired of this leftist habit of declaring things irrelevant.
On second thought, this deserves its own post.
I’m tired of leftists saying that any policy which doesn’t fix everything doesn’t matter.
“A female President will still bomb people!” “A stronger social safety net won’t stop corporate greed from consuming everything it can!” “Gay marriage won’t end transphobia!” “More black representation in movies won’t solve racism!”
No shit. Patching a hole in your bedroom wall won’t make your teeth whiter or cure your grandmother’s dementia. It’s still worth doing.
A female president might still bomb people, but if this potential female president will bomb fewer people than that potential male president (who has indicated he’d happily use nuclear bombs), that means people will live who would otherwise die.
A stronger social safety net may not stop corporate greed from consuming everything it can, but it will effectively limit what corporate greed can consume, and help people whose livelihoods have been eaten.
Gay marriage might not end transphobia, but it will undermine hostility to gender nonconformity and assist many trans people in getting to marry or getting to stay married, by not making everything dependent on their legally-recognized gender.
More black representation in movies won’t solve racism, but it’ll give black people a better reflection of themselves and get white people used to seeing black people in places (the hero, the enjoyable antihero, the fan-favorite antagonist) they’re used to only seeing other white people, and that will affect how they’re equipped to see black people in real life.
Nothing will fix everything, but it’s still important to fix something.
it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
flourish.
Everything they tried to hide and ignore all these years is finally here.
Ana Navarro rips into a Trump defender: “You seem insane. … He is a bigot, he is a racist, he is a misogynist.”
so last week I was walking downtown and a girl leaned out her car window and yelled “YOU LOOK LIKE A PRINCESS” and today a girl walked past me on the sidewalk and said “I love your socks” (they have birds on them) and I suggest we replace all cat-calling with girls complimenting each other on the street because honestly I have never felt more pretty or into girls in my goddamn life
Catcalling is a compliment when women do it
no, complimenting isn’t catcallng because it’s actually trying to make the person happy as opposed to deliberately harassing someone as a power trip
one of the best moments of my life was biking past this group of late-teens girls and one yelling “I LIKE YOUR BIKE,” and i smiled and waved, and another yells after me “and you’re pretty!”
women supporting other women is pure and will always be a good thing; men harassing people because they feed off of asserting dominance over people without power will always be trash
If men want to yell things like your socks are cool and I love your hair, that would be well appreciated. But instead they’ll just bark at me from their cars.