dustybandit

[dustybandit]

funniest aspect of being in a transfem for transmasc marriage is that I'll show my wife my gender goals, which are like, photos of onlyfans models, and she'll be all "hubba hubba awooga arf arf arf" and then he'll show me his gender goals and it'll be a man who looks just so unfathomably busted like he looks like he got put into a food processor and then killed with hammers

[dustybandit]

Mastercard and visa have reported to a couple news outlets that they are currently being swamped with calls and complaints. Keep up the pressure and try to (politely) insist that you leave a complaint via phone instead of letting the rep direct you to emails. It's way easier to be overwhelmed by a much smaller number of calls so each one counts for a bit more!

[dustybandit]

the morbius jokes got stale fast but sony misunderstanding them and rereleasing the movie only to cause it to lose even more money was an all timer moment. we couldnt recreate that situation if we tried

[dustybandit]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[dustybandit]

[dustybandit]

[dustybandit]

i love the never kill your self meme like yeah joy can be found in humble places peace and love on planet earth

[dustybandit]

[dustybandit]

The Tyranny of ‘the Normal’: Why the BMI has always been a hot ton of oppressive bullshit

A few years ago I was getting a pap smear. The doctor—whom I had just met that morning—had me in those cold metal stirrups and was rooting around in my vagina when she asked, ever so casually, “so, do you know what the BMI is?”

I laughed.

As if a woman who has been fat all of her life might have never heard of the BMI.

The thing is, we all know about the BMI. It’s a simple chart that measures our height against our weight, right? The number that comes out of that equation places us into categories—underweight, normal, overweight, obese.

The BMI is supposed to be a value-neutral way to assess bodies across populations.

Except that, did you know that the BMI has never been neutral?

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847), a French statistician, came up with the system we know today as the Body Mass Index. But Quetelet, influenced by early 19th century astronomers (!), charted human height and weight in an effort to establish ‘normality’—not health, or anything to do with medical risk at all. Quetelet believed that by constructing “l’homme moyen,” (the ‘average man’) through his chart, one could determine at what point bodies could be identified as deviant (by the way, Quetelet was also super interested in criminology and his work influenced the super shitty and oppressive fields of phrenology and eugenics). The chart shows that variances in body size more or less fall into a bell curve.

He noted in his work that artists have long used a similar way of looking at bodies: “deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted [for artists] ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution”. Quetelet noted from the get-go that the BMI is not understood in neutral terms, but is instead inscribed with cultural meaning.

So, Quetelet—this genius-level polymath with zero interest in health and 100% interest in categorizing certain bodies as ‘normal’ and the rest as ‘deviant’—created this nifty chart that even he knew was not value-neutral.

Then, in the early 20th century, life insurance companies decided to adopt Quetelet’s index as an indicator of mortality. The chart was a way for them to justify charging deviants—people at either end of the bell curve—more money for insurance.

You guys, the BMI is about capitalism.

Okay so eventually the medical community caught on, and studies were conducted in order to confirm that this NOT value-neutral categorization system could at least show us that some things were true about the different categories across incredibly large populations (but not at the level of the individual).

So again, a chart that was created to measure normalcy and deviance, which was acknowledged from the beginning as not being free of bias, was adopted by one industry as a way to make money, and then another as a “neutral” predictor of health risk??

Right. Okay.

Fat studies and disability studies academics have written about the BMI—and its construction by Quetelet—at length. Disability activist and theorist Lennard Davis calls Quetelet’s index “a symbol of the tyranny of the norm”. The norm, he argues, is even far more oppressive than the ideal: whereas the ideal is understood by most to be unattainable, the norm is something to aspire to, a “hegemonic vision of what the human body should be”.

Rosemary Garland-Thomson, another disability theorist, argues that the superiority of the ‘normal’ body (white, male, able-bodied, thin, etc.) appears “natural and undisputed”.

This is important. Because of the BMI, because of work by people like Quetelet, because of the way we value bodies culturally, what we think of as normal is actually just a social construction that seems natural because it has been hammered into our heads over and over again for the last 200 years. First by artists, then by astronomy-obsessed statisticians, then by money-hungry insurance companies, and, finally, by the medical-industrial complex.

Of course, it doesn’t take all this research to know that “normal” is a fucked up oppressive concept. But it was definitely fun to see the look on the doctor’s face when, still knuckles-deep into my vagina, I told her just how much I knew about the BMI.

(Note: information from here, here, and here.)

[dustybandit]

Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.

Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?

Me: I am going to eat you

[dustybandit]

Uk media reporting on the OSA:

Reality:

[dustybandit]

Sex Isn't Real And You Can't Have It

[dustybandit]

porn is at the forefront of my concern about the financial censuring from credit card companies btw. not even because of the implicit/down stream impacts on sfw queer creators. but because porn and sex work is important and something I care deeply about and is worth fighting for.

[dustybandit]

sorry wait. I contacted visa to file a complaint about the censorship stuff they've been doing and their AI. immediately threatened to kill itself?

[dustybandit]

couldn’t have said it better myself.

[dustybandit]

Being a flop changed my life. The world is not my oyster, I am glowing. I walked into a pole this morning. There's very little I wouldn't do for $1,000