When I was a kid, I used to go over to friend’s houses and notice that their parents never seemed to bully them or hit them. I assumed this was just because they had a friend over, and that their parents terrorized them all the time when I wasn’t around. I didn’t identify my situation as abuse or reach out to a teacher or counselor because I thought everyone had to live through this. I was probably twenty by the time I realized that some families really don’t humiliate and belittle their kids, ever.

I wish someone had gotten that through to me. I wish instead of saying vaguely and uncomfortably “you can talk to the counselor if you have problems at home,” my teachers had said flat-out “it is not normal to be afraid of your parents, and not normal to be unhappy whenever you’re at home, and you can ask us if you’re not sure if something’s okay or not.” I wish someone could have taught me that wanting to be safe was human instead of selfish.

And I’m probably going to make a whole post about this so I won’t belabor the point right now, but this is why feminists care about media and memes that normalize rape. (Or that stigmatize the words “rape” and “rapist,” but enthusiastically normalize the act of forcing sex on people, as long as you don’t call it that.) Because it tells people that rape is normal, that it’s a popular and accepted way to express romance and/or dominance, and we can’t assume that everyone absorbing this culture knows “of course that’s not how it really works.”

The Pervocracy, Everyone else is doing it… right? (via slutwalksignideas)

“I wish someone could have taught me that wanting to be safe was human instead of selfish.”

(via obscenepromqueen)

woww yeah, it wasn’t until very recently that i realized abuse from family members (friends, partners) wasn’t normal and it wasn’t something i just wasn’t “tough enough” to grin and bear, because I was absolutely sure that everyone else was going through the same shit. it didn’t occur to me that the deep, meaningful moral of “suffer in silence” that my mom preached to me was actually bullshit and dangerous and her way of exerting control over someone who wouldn’t take her shit.

especially since my mom was VERY good at being “cool” when friends were over, and everyone was constantly telling me how awesome she was and how lucky i was, and i just sat there and nodded and smiled and i was sure they must be right and i was just selfish and didn’t appreciate her, like she always said.

(via sexxxisbeautiful)

Source: slutwalksignideas

Xina's House: Brave: Don't See It. Please. (TW: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sympathy for abusers, victim-blaming, fatphobia,...

boyprincessdiaries:

nobody-nowhere:

boyprincessdiaries:

allurose:

Brave was really, really awful. It is abuse enabling and victim blaming. This movie was obviously written by abusers. It is NOT what the previews lead you to believe. It is not a “progressive” or “feminist” movie with a strong female lead like the previews imply. Mulan was FAR more progressive in…

Wow. Gross.

Wowwww, that’s awful & so disappointing. I was pretty excited to see Brave, but I think I’ll probably avoid it now. It sounds like it could be triggering. This is why I still haven’t seen Tangled… the mother in that movie seems really abusive as well.

[TW: triggers, abuse]

As a survivor of child abuse and gaslighting tactics, I will say that Tangled is extremely triggering, but also fucking amazing. I watched it a couple days ago and it was so good. I ended up crying for half an hour afterwards. It is really triggering (there’s even a scene of VERY intense gaslighting), but it was the sort of trigger that (for me at least) is really helpful and brings up a lot of emotions but doesn’t invalidate your experiences. The abuse in it is actually recognized as terrible and fucked up and the abusers get their comeuppance in the end, so it didn’t end up participating in abuse-culture.

Now, it did have some really important problems, like how I don’t think I saw a single PoC in the entire movie even in the background. There’s probably lots of other problems that I didn’t catch because I was too regressed and triggered from the abuse stuff, but I thought it was worth the watch as long as you go into it knowing that you’ll probably get triggered but also end up feeling happy things turned out the way they did.

Oh, gosh, this is so disappointing but I’m glad I found out about this before I got all excited to go see the movie. I was so looking forward to it. Pixar, why you do this to me?? :C

I don’t usually write so much about myself on the internet, and I have no idea who will even read through it, but…

About Tangled, I had a whole lot of problems with it too, most of it being immensely triggering for me. A huge part of the problem was all these artists on websites I was visiting were drawing pictures of the evil mother character and saying things like, “she was so funny!” “she was such a great character!” “i kind of felt sorry for her!”
and I watched this movie with those comments in mind and freaked THE FUCK out because that character is such an alarmingly close depiction of my own (emotionally/sexually abusive, constantly gaslighting, victim-blaming, transphobic, racist, ageist) mother. Even down to her making horrible threatening jokes and saying “JUST KIDDING!”

I grew up with her constantly telling me how scary the world (particularly sex) was and how nothing will ever prepare me for it. She always told me I needed to “learn to suffer in silence”. There was a lot of rambling in Tangled about how scary the world is, etc., and any scene with that evil mother character was automatically painted over with my own mother, and honestly I couldn’t help but constantly find similarities between Rapunzel and myself, which certainly didn’t help.

The last four months I lived with my mother, I was sleeping in the garage, which was really awful just by itself, but eventually my mother and Mark (stepfather) would lock the garage door so that I couldn’t get into the house to eat or go to the bathroom. All the while, my mother blamed everything on how “Mark doesn’t want you in the house” and of course “I’ve tried so hard to convince him otherwise, but you’re really not pulling your weight!” I couldn’t even finish reading the descriptions of being locked up in Brave without completely dissociating, I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I had gone to see the film in theaters, especially because movie theaters kind of freak me out to begin with.

Oh gosh, that was really long-winded, and I cut it down to about half size, and it’s still a bit rambly.

Anyway, I don’t know why these movies are constantly showing parents locking their children up as some form of control. I suppose in Tangled it was better because yes, she was obviously the villain and gets what’s coming to her, or something. But I really can’t fathom why anyone would think this was the sort of thing you’d want to support. I guess OP’s right in saying Brave was made pretty exclusively by abusers.

I honestly thought Pixar would be better than that. :(

(via theboyprincessdiaries)

Source: xinashouse