This doesn’t prove that toxic masculinity isn’t a problem. Toxic masculinity and lack of good masculine role models can both be problems. Boys raised by single mothers do not have “100% feminine influence”. In the absence of a masculine role model, they’ll search for masculine role models elsewhere. Maybe they’ll copy what they see on TV or what their popular classmates do.
My disdain for cops is institutional, not individual. Just because you may have a positive personal relationship with someone who is a cop doesn’t change the fact that the law enforcement system in this country is rooted in white supremacy and is used to repress and control the working class while protecting the elite.
All cops have signed up to enforce a system which is oppressing marginalized people in this country on a daily basis. Your personal relationship with an agent of oppression does not change this fact.
when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest
When I was a kid every time i did something embarrassing to my family or something worth being punished for, i learned that if i hurt myself publicly those feelings of guilt would be soothed. Sad thing is, this took the form of me punching myself in the head. once I hit puberty I had to switch to private cutting cause I started knocking myself out at the dinner table
addicts deserve compassion. addicts deserve love. addicts deserve safety and medical care and a warm place to sleep and food. being an addict doesn’t make you a bad or dangerous person. addicts are some of the most violently treated and neglected members of society. it’s time to change
if i say i’m a leftist don’t ask me what branch of leftism do i follow or what old white male revolutionary scholars i have read just know that i want everyone to eat food every day and i’m vibing
a lot of children - especially mentally ill children - end up traumatized not because someone was specifically hurting them but because their needs weren’t being met, or because their problems weren’t being seen, or because they were rendered particularly vulnerable by other aspects of their identity, like queerness or race.
and it can be hard to look at your childhood and go “I was hurt” and also know that the hurt wasn’t deliberate. it’s uniquely painful to not have someone to blame.
you do not have to excuse the people who hurt you, even if it was unintentional. & acknowledging your own pain does not necessarily entail blaming them for it.
you are allowed to do what you need to do in order to recover.
It is the caregiver’s responsibility to take care of a child and their needs, to educate themselves in order to better understand what is required of them in order to fulfil their child’s need for love, attention, protection, communication. The hurt was not deliberate but this is not something that happened one week, it’s years and years and years of having a child in your house and neglecting them. So go ahead and acknowledge your pain, acknowledge your anger, lay responsibility for it where it belongs, blame whoever did not see you, and seek better things, and better people, for yourself now.
If a child doesn’t understand an authority figure’s needs, the child gets punished. If the child wants to have any hope of living without constant punishment, they have to find some way of meeting the authority figure’s needs. The authority figure often doesn’t even have to make sense or even try to make sense.
But if an authority figure doesn’t understand a child’s needs, there are literally 0 consequences. On top of that, if the child gets angry because their needs are not being met, the child is punished.
Disabled children are held to ridiculously high standards, while the authority figures who interact with them are held to almost none.