Everyone Has Their Own Story

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It's so telling that the 3 main arguments against consanguinamory are birth defects, assault, and personal disgust.

"What if the babies are born disabled?!"

What if they don't want kids? Hm? What then? Also, even if they did want kids, that's also fine because it's take generations for a debilitating disability to form, and the chances of that only increase by 3% and since I'm gonna wager most people aren't consanguinamorous, I don't see why that matters. Non-relatives give birth to disabled kids all the time. Being disabled isn't a bad thing. Being inbred doesn't mean you're automatically going to be born disabled. They use the whole think of the children bullshit to shut down the conversation.

"But my relative assaulted me/there are relatives out there who assualt their family, therefore consanguinamory is bad!"

If it isn't consensual, it's not consanguinamory, it's abuse. This is like if someone said, "Gay men are bad because some gay men have assaulted other men." Oh, wait, they do say this, don't they? And y'all keep reinforcing it with this kind of thinking.

"I just think it's icky."

That's fine, but your personal disgust shouldn't dictate how others should or can live their lives. No one is forcing you to date your relative(s). Not everything is for or about you. If people are happy and aren't harming anyone, then it's fine. It's fine, y'all.

Remember kids: one of the punkest things you can do right now is to look out for your neighbors and make sure they are safe

i think that the limited contact stance of “to consent to sex you must understand sex” is like. a little bit ableist? there are a lot of people like me, who are disabled, and want, like, or consent to sex, for whatever reason. but some of us dont have the mental capability TO understand sex, even when we are adults. that doesnt mean we arent able to not understand the possible effects of sex, it doesnt mean we cant say no or yes, it just means we dont understand it to the same level an able bodied person would.

As you said, understanding sex doesn't mean the same for everyone. Disabled people can understand sex, even if it is slightly different to the understanding of an abled bodied person.

I can just imagine saying “lobotomies are bad” in like 1949 and having someone say “you’re wrong, the science is settled, lobotomies are the best way to treat mental illness” and guess what? In 1949 I might be the unpopular and socially wrong one. The person with the backwards, conservative thinking. That is the year that António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomies.

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Scoville couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.

Lobotomies were bad the whole time.

just gonna post this here

“source?” divine intuition, gut instinct, and cryptic symbolism from my dreams

One of the things that make us personally uncomfortable with the notion that child-appearing or young-appearing headmates can never consent:

We have a genetic condition that makes our body look a lot younger than we actually are. We didn't look like an adult til our late twenties/early thirties and even then, just barely.

But we WERE an adult when we got married. And there was no harm in anyone, including our ex, being attracted to us. Or our current partner, who's several years younger than us but looks several years older.

When we got married, our headmate Sunni Willow felt about 16, though we were bodily 21. She could give consent because our brain was that of an adult.

Our ability to give informed consent matters. And is the only thing that matters.

Tbh I think the fast fashion conversation should involve poor ppl but not in any way in the form of shaming but more like: “you are being taken advantage of by large corporations that have women and children enslaved to make crappy clothes in excessive amounts that have literal lead that will damage ur body in serious ways that ur pressured to buy via influencers that form a parasocial relationship with you and don’t care about you to overconsume them in large amounts that won’t last and have to be thrown away at some point and all that ends up fucking the environment. Plus, the cycle of consumerism is damaging to ur finances to keep u in poverty and mental health of always wanting more but never satisfied.”

I am saying right now you don’t need to throw out fast fashion items you currently own, if they fall apart, they can be repurposed. I am also saying I’ve been guilty of shopping fast fashion but am also making a commitment to eliminate fast fashion purchases and mindset in my life. The root cause of these fast fashion corpos to keep doing what they do is purely based on you buying from them and you, the consumer in this capitalist world, have the power to change that. Obviously there’s little you can do to avoid big oil or buying things made with prison labor without serious direct action but the fashion industry is one that is by design meant to be maintained by mindless consumerism and overconsumption.

If you are poor, please do whatever within ur means to avoid fast fashion, whether it’s buying from thrift stores other than goodwill and just buying less clothes and focusing on more important things in ur life. A better tomorrow is still possible if you allow it.