Huh. That's interesting. The going on adventures thing is Rumspringa. The solar panel thing - like, it seems like, since the fundamental Amish objection to society is that it's corrupt and consumerist and weakens family and community ties - solar panels or other renewable energy seem like they'd be more acceptable, because it enables them to stay off the grid and a more insular community while also doing things like powering phones.
i'm rereading player of games, thanks to seebs' and jesse's recommendation, and it's got me thinking about my anxiety. about how the main character, gurgeh, lives in a risk-free society and wants to experience risk 'cause he has a gambler's personality and likes adrenaline and challenge and stuff. and how i think he is really lucky to live in a risk-free society and i can barely fathom him wanting to leave it. 'cause, like, a society with challenge but without risk sounds like heaven to me. and my anxiety would probably make me feel the sensation of risk even in a place without any - i just would feel it less, probably, and that would be a relief, honestly.
https://the-real-seebs.tumblr.com/post/161714760188/okay-so-just-a-reminder-if-you-take-the-time a few years back i got into an argument on tumblr that ended with the other person telling me how wrong and bad i was and then blocking me. it was pretty unpleasant for me, that feeling of being publicly shamed and then silenced. actually it's still unpleasant now if i think about it, which i mostly try not to do. and i stalked the other person's blog for a long time because i felt resentful of them and wanted to remind myself that they were a person with reasons for the things they said and interests other than making me feel bad. (that probably sounds kind of creepy, but it worked out okay, i think. i never messaged them or anything, they were clear that they didn't want to continue talking to me and i respected that. i just needed to not let that experience be the only thing i knew about them.) anyway, i'm not sure if i agree with what seebs said (i know silencing can be abusive, but i don't know that it always is.) but that post made me think about it again.
@jacktrash Re: this: my mom works in a related field, and was actually complaining to me a week or two ago about how for a while every academic and their dog felt like they had to have their own model for How Stuff Works, but most of them are almost the same except in very tiny areas and practically all of them use the same words to mean slightly different things and it's godawful.
necroing thread to solicit anecdata about kids wanting to grow up (see this post.) i don't remember wanting to grow up as a kid. to be fair i don't remember not wanting to grow up either, really. i do remember that my usual answer to "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was "an author" but since i was writing stories by the time i was 9 and telling stories whatever way i could long before then it wasn't like i was anticipating it a lot. i was already doing what i wanted to do, i just figured on getting some official recognition once i was older. oh, also i wished i was like my parents and didn't have a bedtime, but i don't think it was "i wish i could grow up faster and not have a bedtime because i'm an adult" but more like "i wish that i, a child, didn't have a bedtime right now." in my early to mid teens i fantasized a lot about getting married and leaving home as soon as i hit 18. i'm pretty sure that was because my home situation had become stressful and that was the only way i could think of to leave it. also, the idea of getting married at an age that many people would find concerningly young appealed to me because i am contrary like that. i asked two under-18s who were nearby whether they wanted to grow up and both said they don't. one has always wanted to get to 16 and then stop, and one has been content with being a kid as long as they can remember. that's my anecdata!
I never wanted to be an adult; I wanted the privileges of adulthood, but by 10 or so I knew about the responsibilities that came with, and I didn't want those. When I was 12 I wanted to be 16; at 16 I wanted to be 16 forever; and at 30 I'd love to go back to 16 again. It was the age with all the privileges and none of the responsibility.
When i was very young I desperately wanted to grow up, because i wanted autonomy and to be taken seriously. That never stopped being a thing but later I also got the conflicting fear that i wouldnt be able to fulfill adult responsibilities.
i kind of figured i'd just die or get abducted by aliens before i hit 18 and so i didn't plan for anything ever and now it's hard to make sure i know what i'm doing next year
Spoiler: anecdata, abuse cw I wanted to be an adult, but I was also scared of it, because my mother gave me the impression that adults didn't have any real friends. Adults just had people who were waiting to use you. She didn't really have any friends, just people my dad was friends with who did, indeed, tend to use her to get money or transportation or favours. I had the impression that that was just how adulthood worked! But because I had to take on a lot of adult responsibilities as a kid, I wanted to be an adult properly so that I'd actually have the power to take care of things instead of just trying to herd my parents into paying the bills or whatever. It seemed like it would be a lot easier to take care of things if I actually had adult powers. I also tended to make friends with people who were older than me, because my parentification (alongside bullying) made it difficult for me to relate to kids my age. So I wanted to grow up so that I would fit in with the people who I more often socialised with.
since the topic of the day is apparently gender eu/dysphoria: "resounding 'meh'" is also an option. I think I've talked about this in one of the xx/xy threads somewhere, but ime in addition to "strongly masc/femme/No" responses there are also times when any particular gendered address is just..... yeah sure whatever let's go with that. This often renders as cis-by-default in practice, because I Don't Care enough to correct those who assume in any given direction, but it's a thing.
Anecdata re: this: I've definitely known cis women who consider pregnancy a body horror scenario. 'cause it kinda is. Also, anecdata example re: dysphoria-while-cis: I am a cis woman with boobs so large as to make shopping for bras a nightmare, running nearly impossible without pain, and shirts that don't look like sacks on me difficult to find. They are, in general, an incredibly annoying inconvenience, and as I am aro ace and very uninterested in having children, not really serving any helpful purpose. My mom once made a comment while in the middle of Bra Shopping Hell that maybe I could get breast-reduction surgery someday, and despite all of the above facts, just the thought of being slightly less busty made my brain start screaming and panicking. Not even anything that would change gender presentation or perception! Just. Body being shaped slightly less like how my brain thinks my body is supposed to be shaped.
Oh wow, me too. I've only recently managed to deescalate my own internal consideration of gender from Defcon Do Not Touch Me With The Poo Stick down towards the "informed by levelheaded consideration of current feminist conversation" level. It registered to me as "resounding meh" because I hadn't yet put together the pieces to build a useful rail system for that train of thought. More thinking wasn't enough. I doubt I'd ever have gotten there on my own. Getting to know more people who weren't cis was pretty key. Also vital was discourse regarding gender, from personal yelling to academic studies. It's too big a conversation to have by yourself.
i think part of why pregnancy is so squicky for people is the potential lack of agency and the fact that there are people threatening afab people's reproductive rights. like, even though people in developed countries do have access to abortion now, that right is under threat from the right-wing and therefore doesn't really feel all that secure. so it feels like, if i was to get pregnant, there'd be no guarantee i'd be able to end it if i wanted to. and some of the talk about Why Pregnancy Is Good comes from the right-wing and just generally feels really conservative, which taints the whole pregnancy thing altogether. so the squick is partly political.
As far as I can tell I'm a cis woman. From what I've gathered from many conversations with other women, it's pretty normal to be repulsed by the idea of pregnancy at least some of the time. When I was in a really good relationship with a guy with whom I felt comfortable discussing a future together, we talked about maybe having children someday and that felt surprisingly okay. Other than that, the idea is almost always horrifying. Right now thinking about going through a pregnancy causes me revulsion and distress. I had a conversation with a woman who has tried very hard to get pregnant about how neither of us could imagine the idea of wanting to have a baby when we were teenagers. It seemed horrific. There may have been girls who did have that desire at the time, but it always seemed very foreign back then to me. I do know several cis women who just don't ever want kids and find the idea of pregnancy extremely repulsive.
Belated, but further anecdata: I'm a cis woman who does want kids...but the idea of being pregnant fucking terrifies me and always has. I can't explain why. I wouldn't call it a pregnancy phobia per se, because I'm fine with other people's pregnancies and it doesn't bug me in fiction or anything, but I guess it's still a phobia because it evokes that visceral fear/NOPE combo that phobias tend to give me. I actually had a mild pregnancy scare before I came out, and it scared the absolute living daylights out of me. I knew immediately that if I did turn out to be pregnant, I was getting an abortion, because the thought of carrying a child at all--even if I had been ready to have a kid at that age, which, I mean, I'm still not ready for that but I was even less ready at 19--was so unimaginably horrifying to me. (Fortunately I also have no desire to have biological children, because I don't want to pass all my shit genes (mental health problems and various physical issues are both very common in my family, and I don't want any child of mine to have to go through what I've gone through), and I'm dick-repulsed and gay so it's not like I'm likely to have to deal with accidental pregnancy either, but yeah. The thought of being pregnant is scary as shit imo.) EDIT: For the record, my plan is to either adopt or for Hypothetical Future Wife to carry Hypothetical Future Kid (if she wants biological children).
Yeah, when I was discussing the possibility of having kids with a partner with whom I could imagine that kind of future, it was still a weird idea. It was still frightening and not something I would ever rush into. But suddenly it seemed like I could see a vague potential for it to also be something wonderful. It was a leap of faith I was at least willing to consider as long as we’d be taking it together. But most of the time the idea of being pregnant gives me the exact same visceral No Get It Out reaction as the idea of a parasite or tumor under my skin. But there are far more levels of nope with much greater complexity with pregnancy. It’s almost funny, all those asshats who don’t want to acknowledge women’s reproductive rights. They’re absolutely right that there are important additional factors worth considering if it’s a pregnancy instead of a parasitic infection. But they’ve monopolized that conversation so thoroughly that I don’t know if I’d be able to even imagine what it would sound like in my own voice instead of theirs. Their voice is both repulsive and unconvincing. I guess that in the same way that pregnancy might be something I would be willing to consider in the right circumstances, such as profound love and trust, it’s something I am completely unwilling to consider under hostile circumstances. Anti-rights people are a hostile circumstance. I definitely have no issue with other people’s pregnancies. I’m also totally cool with pregnancy in fiction. If I see it tagged in fanfic I’m more likely to consider it a potential pro than con. I just am generally violently opposed to the idea of doing it myself.
i personally interpret "don't sexualize people/women" as meaning, when people seem like they are being reasonable about it ('cause there might be people in sj that really do mean it as 'no sexual attraction ever'): - don't reduce people/women to their sexy attributes - people/women are people - people/women have thoughts and feelings and opinions, and those matter - people/women's consent matters i don't read it as "no sexual attraction ever" unless the person saying it has said/is also saying other extreme things in that vein
My personal opinion is that "don't sexualize [woman you are interacting with in meatspace]" is such a terrible way to phrase "don't do the things that cause people to go 'ugh, straight men'" as to be effectively useless. Because regardless of how it's intended, people will interpret it as "you're not allowed to find women attractive or react to their attractiveness," and that's not remotely where the actual minefield is.
yeah i think i might've only understood what it meant so easily 'cause i was already familiar with theoretical underpinnings of it like, i had read enough about sexism and sexualization in other places before i heard the phrase to pick up on the most reasonable meaning of it from context
