I disagree that periods *aren’t* gross, but they’re also no more gross than other bodily fluids and waste like urine, feces and vomit. Sometimes life is gross and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you treat periods any differently from the above then that’s a problem and a double standard.
some people have responded to this saying “period blood is as sanitary as venous blood” which, yes is true, but you still wouldn’t want to sit in it on the bus or something, ESPECIALLY since blood-borne illnesses could still be transferred this way. Also, same with urine, while it is “sterile” inside of your body, the openings of your body are not! Once it leaves your body it has already been contaminated by the germs and bacteria around your genitals. The whole point is that, bodies are kinda gross, and that’s ok. Having an accident or a bleed-through happens and it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it also isn’t a pleasant experience for anyone involved and thats! okay!
The moment period blood becomes this “sacred, holy substance”, that’s when you get into misogynist, new-age trad bullshit that’s usually also ableist and transphobic.
Period blood is just blood. If someone next to you on the subway started bleeding, sure, you might get squeamish, but you’d want to help them right? Same with a bleed-through.
It’s okay to be concerned about the hygiene of period blood, because after all, it’s bodily fluids. It’s just not okay to treat people who menstruate like they’re dirty or shameful. You wouldn’t treat someone with a nosebleed like that, right?
Just….stop treating period blood like it’s different, whether it’s treating it like it’s shameful or sacred. Both stigmatize menstruation and lead to harm.
Tuira Kayapó brandished her machete in the face of a government official who was trying to convince indigenous leaders to accept a mega-dam project in the Amazon, 1989
“Electricity won’t give us food. We need the rivers to flow freely. Don’t talk to us about relieving our ‘poverty’ – we are the richest people in Brazil. We are Indians.”
part of kayapó’s speech during this event
also! she’s still alive! that sort of thing is always worth pointing out to show that we really aren’t too far removed from events like this! here’s a 2019 photo of her:
That was somebody’s mom whose dream had always been to be a restaurant owner but sadly she married into the mafia and she was like the mom of someone important and moms are like the one authority italians recognise so when she put her foot down and said “NO. We are going to make them great food and give them the most lovely evening!” Nobody dared disagree and thanks to op she got to live her dream for a night she probably remembers them as fondly as they remember her
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
I think it’s really funny that even though the comparison rings true, even Ogtha’s husband actually treats real women with more respect than gamerbros because he never once blames his ex-gf for feeling weird and he’s very honest with the women he hooks up with that it’s just a one night stand. So gamerbros interact with and talk to even less human women than the guy with a cockroach wife tulpa
See this is an interesting set of tags bc you’re in the right track… the therapist would likely do nothing. Therapy isn’t there to make people “normal”, it’s there to help us continue navigating society and having a healthy life without our afflictions hurting our ability to do so. This guy very likely has a paraphilia, especially since even though he’s lovingly faithful to his wife, he very clearly states he’s attracted to giant female cockroaches. Paraphilias are way more common than people think and they’re mostly harmless, a lot of them being difficult to even enact, but other times enacting them can be extremely harmful and those are actually defined as paraphilic disorders (famously, pedophilia and zoophilia)
That being said, oftentimes treatment for ANY paraphilia is ONLY sought out when the urge to act on it (when harmful) is genuinely debilitating, when the thoughts surrounding the attraction are debilitatingly overwhelming, or when acting on it can be harmful/dangerous for the patient (i.e. autassassinophilia, coprophilia, etc)
In this guy’s case, he is happy and healthy, he has a job, friends, a family, and he’s surprisingly even at peace with the fact that he’ll never be able to have Ogtha as anything but a very vivid figment of his imagination. So there’s no reason for him to seek psychological help, but if he does, the therapist in question would probably just encourage him to keep doing what he’s doing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The people who wrote this law should be in jail. The people at Facebook who shared private information should be in jail (and yeah, they should have known Facebook isn’t private, but that’s beside the point). A 19 year old who made a choice about her own body doesn’t belong in jail.
Fuck
When I say Meta (Threads, FB, Insta) is not your friend I Fucking Mean It.
