gaminegay - Tumblr blog

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Okay to reblog to help sample size!f

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if you're wondering why THIS tiktok ban bill made it through the senate unlike last time...

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Me when I use the blender that makes 50% of all turtles feel immeasurable pain

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by far the most interesting part of the latest You’re Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call “official” suppression.

essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didn’t know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it down–or talk to any other naturalists about it.

and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didn’t write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in it–miller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.

“official” suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldn’t get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicion–i.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?

and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, “well, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?” would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.

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Sometimes I get this weird out-of-nowhere anxiety about how I'm like, not in the Right Place in life (that place according to my brain is in a nuclear family with a baby and a house and a stressful job or something adjacent- don't ask me why this persists despite being a nightmare to me)

But like what more could I ask for I'm healthy and happy I got a job that feeds me and lets me keep my hobby up I'm styling I have so many friends I'm comfortable with myself and by myself I feel like I'm living the dream rn. A modest dream sure! But I feel real good in it

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You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

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Art by Alexander Chernobai

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Okay I get that the toxic positivity way I was raised is bad and venting about things is good and healthy but there's a grim sort of hilarity in the complete miscommunciation between how my boyfriend and his family process complaining and how I was raised to do it. Because I was raised with the attitude that if you've got a problem, you either do something about it if you can, or focus on things you can control if it's something you can't change. And the way he was raised, simply complaining about things because they worry you is just what you do to process things, venting to make yourself feel better.

So when he brings up something that bothers him, and I ask him what he thinks we should be doing about that, it's a baffling question to him. To him, verbally stating that Life Is Just Bad Sometimes is a neutral thing and not a prompt to start coming up with how to solve this issue. And my brain just fucking short-circuits right there.

So when he's just stating out loud that things just be like that sometimes, what I'm hearing is "life is intrinsically, ontologically bad in a way that cannot be in any way improved, endured, nor ignored, and there is no hope of it ever being any other way." And like a solution-seeking missile, my singular brain cell jumps into the next passably logical solution and goes

"So are you suggesting we should do double-suicide?"

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a stud in black leather on a black motorcycle just revved their engine at me and thank god I tore my demonic uterus out ages ago because I think that would have finally knocked me up

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i love you <3 *queerplatonics your ship*

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Today's Seal Is: Unlimited Scraggliness

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waiting so desperately for my milkshake to soothe my angry stomach full of hot sauce but they're taking their time and with every minute that passes I get closer to s volcanic eruption

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This is what posting your artwork after a mutual posts a big life update feels like

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Nothing gives the same kind of random ego boost like managing to finally clean up your home and making it nice. Like ooh look at me, I'm living like people do, I made myself iced tea and I am eating my snack from a real plate. I got floors and shit.

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