Post a controversial opinion

choosing both is also bad tbh

Apple cider vinegar tastes OK.

i have a jar a quarter-full of it next to my sink and the gnats floating in agree!

not to be a bummer here but i clearly remember being told as a fourth grader by several other strident fourth graders that i was going to hell because i didn't go to church and when i told the teacher she said she thought they were right so wheeeeeeeeeeeee public education

hate to tell you, but all tattle-tales goes to hell. for eternity. those are the rules

i know I'll go to hell cause i spent my time in heaven

hell yeah brother

i agree w/ karl. i don't get that worked up about religion one way or the other anymore but teaching kids to believe in hell is just outright fucking abuse as far as i'm concerned. i had a good friend tell me once that she was thinking of going back to church because she couldn't escape the fear that she'd go to hell if she didn't. this was a smart, thoughtful, well-read, v liberal person. i still feel furious that anyone would let a child believe in that evil garbage.

When you next see her, tell your smart thoughtful friend that a literal hell is only a device to smack people upside the head who are unable to grasp the concept of a metaphorical hell sufficiently strongly to understand the desirability of avoiding metaphorical hell. Churches have never been above lying to their congregations in this way, while reserving the true doctrine for smart thoughtful adults who are capable of abstract ideas and can benefit from moral teachings that aren't backed up by the threat of dire eternal pain. Cuz this is the truth about churches and she needs to hear it.

~~ scales fall from eyes ~~

Only rule is that you should actually believe it.

Only rule is that you should actually believe it.

https://i.imgur.com/fEcvjwx.jpg

~~ scales fall from eyes ~~

wow, were you feeling like going back to church to avoid everlasting hellfire, too?

95% or more of adult men have groped a boob and/or a butt without any consent whatsoever, because the opportunity presented itself and when you’re under 25 you are still just a simian with a little less hair.

she knew all the rational objections to the concept of hell, aimless. it was just a gut feeling/irrational terror she couldn't get out of her head. i suspect there are a lot of people walking around with that feeling in the back of their minds. i remember a george orwell essay where he talks about the decline of religion in the UK and says something like, even a lot of the religious people don't seem to believe in the afterlife as literally as they believe in the existence of, say, australia. now i think of that quote and think, george, you never went to america.

Eh, I don't believe in Australia.

I'm sorry to hear that. if she fears something she knows does not exist, and therefore knows the fear is irrational and groundless, but is simply an artifact of childhood trauma caused by lying adults, then going to church to deal with that fear seems to embody an irreconcilable contradiction within her. still, if that's what she feels is imperative, then maybe she should go to church, but not to the same church that lied to her. she obviously has to do something to get her head straight.

My grandmother told me once my folks got divorced because we stopped going to church. This was during her final stretch years, vacillating between total love and insane Irish nun-style judgment. I think she thought it would put the fear into me, maybe I'd eventually become a priest in a small suburban Chicago parish. Anyway yadda yadda yadda eventually I married a nice Jewish girl from the valley.

95% or more of adult men have groped a boob and/or a butt without any consent whatsoever, because the opportunity presented itself and when you’re under 25 you are still just a simian with a little less hair.

― El Tomboto, Monday, December 4, 2017 10:58 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I never did this

Idk if that was meant facetiously or not but still, I don’t think most men have done this.

cf thread title

sincerely good for you though

Tombot you should head to bed a little bit earlier

Not controversial

95% or more of adult men have groped a boob and/or a butt without any consent whatsoever, because the opportunity presented itself and when you’re under 25 you are still just a simian with a little less hair.
― El Tomboto, Monday, December 4, 2017 10:58 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao speak for yourself damn

if you get diarrhea, it's your fault for sliding into first

Now my baby loves to do the cha cha cha
She loves to do the cha cha cha
She likes her, she likes to cha cha cha
Everybody likes to cha cha cha

95% or more of adult men have groped a boob and/or a butt without any consent whatsoever, because the opportunity presented itself and when you’re under 25 you are still just a simian with a little less hair.
― El Tomboto, Monday, December 4, 2017 10:58 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have also never done this, and wouldn't call myself a paragon of virtue.

TOmbot otm imo

He’s cutting the over 25s too much slack.

fair

tombot otm m/l

"speak for yourself" is not a productive approach when looking at systemic issues imo

Neither is "whaddaya expect, men are garbage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ " - it's just "boys will be boys" wrapped in a layer of cynicism

has anyone said that

That's how I read Tombot's post, not sure how else it can be read tbh

acknowledging guilt/the scale of a problem is not the same as throwing up your hands in the face of it

when you’re under 25 you are still just a simian with a little less hair.
― El Tomboto

This is dehumanizing rhetoric and can only serve to alienate young men from feminist perspectives. I mostly see male feminists talking this way — people like Stephen Marche who wrote a column in the Times about the bestial nature of male sexuality. I don’t know why it’s considered constructive to make these essentialist arguments but people are doing it. Seems to have little to do with the purpose of the #metoo movement, which as I understood it was about stopping sexual harassment and assault, not insisting that we are all guilty in the eyes of God style fatalism.

thanks ogmor. that is the correct interpretation per the author.

Luna probably right though, was just using the old “the prefrontal cortex isn’t done baking until” age as my plimsoll line in this case.

also I of course am in the 98th percentile of virtue I have no idea why anybody would think otherwise my decision making in my teens and twenties was impeccable how else do you think I wound up in the military harrumph.

I’m not sure how acknowledging that a lot of men currently living are likely to have engaged in sexual harassment and/or battery when they were young dumb and you-know-what is “dehumanizing” unless you think it’s dehumanizing to acknowledge anything else that you ought to be fucking ashamed of

Be careful you don’t hurt your ankle coming down though

Because saying that almost everyone has done it lessens the implied individual guilt. Also element of "we're animals, we can't help it" - no, we can help it.

^^otm

Arguments like these are never about severing individual guilt, and always about leaving as much space as possible for individual innocence. #ControversialOpinion

I don’t think there is any “nature” to make sexuality, it’s nurture all the way down. “Boys will be boys” is an insipid tautology and to accuse me of thinking that is an insult (the other day when I posted something to that effect on the Weinstein thread after deej and shakey had their massive spat about who the king of jerk mountain was or whatever, I was trying for caricature, forgot about the five things that don’t come through in prose).

Male sexuality’s “nature” is learned and it’s good to hear that posters who grew up after the age of Benny Hill, Porky’s, Animal House etc feel confident telling me I’m wrong. That alone is a good sign.

I for one also suspect the sexual assault crises in the military services and on college campuses was there all along; it’s just being reported, investigated and accounted for now because our society is better and we’ve had just about enough.

the five things that don’t come through in prose

wait what are the other four?

I made that up

We should have a thread for nominations

You're otm though. The military, college/uni, the entertainment biz, and let us not forget the church: all institutes with huge power dynamics.

xp the fact that you made it up didn't come through your prose so that's one

I’ll fess up that the “simian with less hair” bit is both dehumanizing as well as universalizing bad conduct. It wasn’t necessary either but I reflexively needed to speciate youth from maturity 🤔 🤔

saying that almost everyone has done it lessens the implied individual guilt.

I don't think this is true, but what it does do is highlight how insufficient individual guilt is as a response

My memory of my teens and twenties is hazy, but I think I performed being a Sensitive New Age Guy, perhaps overmuch. I went to protests and held signs. I wore buttons. I attended lectures by Naomi Wolf and Germaine Greer; I read Susan Faludi; I did a non-insignificant amount of graduate-level Woolf scholarship.

To a degree that I am not proud of, I think this was at least partly a dating strategy. In retrospect, I can't say how much of it was following my own lights and how much was "will artsy feminist riot-grrly chicks dig that I am doing this?" With the unspoken corollary that they would presumably reward my wokeness by going to bed with me. If I was reading something very woke and third-wavey I sometimes tried to casually make sure that the women in my life knew it.

As I said, not proud of the simian side of that behavior pattern. Of course this was happening in a specifically chosen cultural surround: liberal arts school, bohemian neighborhood, lots of sex and drugs. In that surround, wokeness-avant-la-lettre was valued, not frat-bro alpha-male jock confidence. I have no idea how I would have behaved in a different environment.