stop saying “gen z brought back bush-era purity politics” i grew up in the bush era and even then people weren’t saying that you’re a sex addict for having boring marital sexual congress in the same house as your children. this is just plain unhinged
Literally almost every millennial I know has a memory of accidentally walking in on their parents or hearing their parents having sex. It’s fucking normal. Human beings have sex. Your parents fuck. Get over it. Being weird about it isn’t healthy.
The idea that you have to get a babysitter/go to a hotel, or be home during the day while you’re kids are at school, means they apparently think poor parents with day jobs should never have sex
Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and she’s the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And she’s STILL ALIVE. We don’t hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.
I was just gonna leave this in the tags until I saw this note and had to bring my tags out to agree with them
Some questions I’ve found to help when choosing a therapist:
Do you have your own therapist?
Why did you get into this job? (“I just like helping people” is not enough and also a bit of a yellow bordering on red flag for me)
How many people do you typically see at one time and how many are you seeing now?
When can and can’t you disclose our conversation with others (also who are these ‘others’)
Where do you stand politically? (Im kinda 50/50 on this question because for me it’s really important as both a trans girl and as someone who’s issues often stem from capitalism and if I have to explain that capitalism ≠ good then that’s not gonna fly with me)
For my fellow queers, I know it can be limiting but please please try and find a queer therapist. It helps soooo much. If you can’t, ask them about their sexuality/gender regardless. Asking straight/cis people to reflect on their identities is a great way to figure out what color those flags are.
Same goes for any racialized people! I’m white so I can’t speak to it with the experience but I would bet my left AND right hand that having someone of the same culture/lived experience is gonna be such a better environment to do therapy in.
Remember, you’re paying the therapist! I know there are some situations where people can be required to be in therapy but even then you aren’t stuck with any one of them.
Listen to your instincts, if things feel not 100% tell them that if you’re comfortable and otherwise finish the session and get outta there!
Therapy is a tool, you wouldn’t use a tool that hurt you so don’t think you have to keep seeing the same therapist just because you’ve been with them this far.
America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups
It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on what’s important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those members’ experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.
The creator of the BITE Model considers abusive relationships to be two-person cults.
Yeah, having extended family who are radically religious and badly abuse their kids, I’ve noticed all my life that it’s the same exact thing, and it goes far beyond both cults AND abusive interpersonal relationships.
I mean, think of the core psyop of both: “you should just be grateful that I do so much for someone as unworthy as yourself.”
This isn’t just how fundies write their God’s dialog or how my cousins were all raised, but how law enforcement and the justice system respond to criticisms of their non-stop human rights violations. How whole governments characterize their endless war crimes. How the military brainwashes its sacrificial human pawns. How megacorps like disney and billionaire manchildren like trump or musk feel about their supposed benefit to the economy. It’s how countless employers large and small want to interpret their relationship with their workers. How celebrities may sometimes frame their “contribution” to popular culture. For that matter it’s how some people even think of their pets.
You can replace “you’re a satanist if you’re not christian” with being a commie socialist if you don’t support the war or a lazy parasite for not accepting a shit job, and so forth. You can replace “you’re automatically going to burn in hell if you’re unsaved” with suggestions that we’ll have economic collapse without the 1% or lose our freedom without the war crimes or always be a loser without going into debt for a college degree.
It’s not so much that everything is a cult but that a cult is just the spiritual version of what simple human greed has always universally looked like, including the “emotional greed” we might call power tripping or egomania. Every facet of human life and society operates on this model depending on who is at the top, all the way up the scale from a one-sided friendship to a dictatorship or even global ideology. It’s all the more frustrating that the tyrannical despot or megacult are able to control millions at a time no differently than a trash mom or dad can control one poor little kid but of course they can, they’re all still just people all the way up and that’s what people do when they’re selfish.
Apparently the creator of the “BITE” model also thinks LGBT movements are cults however, so he isn’t immune to brainwashing either. I don’t think trans people can help existing, or help that they have millions of haters they have to band together against. That’s like saying any group united over anything at all is a cult, which would mean even any form of organized resistance to a cult is a cult, and that’s getting fairly stupid.
Which website did you first go to for the purpose of looking at memes, and how old are you? (whether you knew the word for it or not *viral videos, lolcats etc)
