Family story time: my family is full of academically minded people (three of my grandparents worked as Latin teachers), with varying levels of snobbery and reasonableness. One of the first times my dad went to my maternal grandparents house for dinner, someone said “margarine,” pronouncing it with a hard g. My father asked why, and my grandfather explained that there’s no soft g followed by an a in English.

My father accepted this, and looking to change the subject, asked if my grandparents could offer any help analyzing “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

Anders loves Maria

You definitely don’t have to watch her! I liked that video a lot, but don’t care about tech, so I won’t watch her channel either.

It just feels disrespectful to contradict someone we don’t know about the reason she acts the way she does, especially because she gives a logical chain for her beliefs.

I don’t know if it’s a healthy way to deal with her trauma, but as she said, she’s just glitchy, as are we all. I can’t look down while going down stairs that I can see through, because my brain tells me they’re less safe than opaque stairs. Is that real? No. Does my understanding that it’s not real make my heart rate slower or my palms less sweaty? No, it’s a glitch. Mine’s more common and probably easier to empathize with, but if I only hung out with rock climbers, they might not understand at all. If they said I was playing a damsel for male attention, it would be infuriating.

For me, the imagery of hyper masculine leather daddies was a eureka moment (what a fucking sentence). I don’t think they’re doing it to be ‘marketable’ to women or men (on an immediately, trying to attract someone that day basis), it seems much more obviously just a style thing.

Plus, she’s right that she’d make more money with smaller breasts- a C-cup on her frame would probably appeal to more men, while looking natural enough that people like you might be interested in sharing her videos with others. I can’t imagine that’s new information for her (YouTube comments sections are not the most tactful places), so she probably would have tailored her look to appeal to more men over time, if that was her goal.

She thinks that unless she’s wearing absolutely skimpy clothing that someone’s going to mistake her for a boy.

I don’t think that’s likely at all, but I do believe her brain whispers that to her until she stops treating herself well. Mainly because truth is stranger than fiction- a 160 cm tall person (even in the most southern part of china, men’s average height is 168-170 cm) who has very long hair, shallowly set eyes, narrow shoulders, a high pitched voice and zero facial hair is not plausibly going to be mistaken for a man on a regular basis. That would be such a 4 year old lie to make up. Maybe she’s betting on that and it’s a ruse, but that’s a risky move if anyone who knows anything about Thai queer culture can out your lie.

They gave a nuanced reply. You wrote that.

It actually does. It’s a forty minute video and it was worth it for me, who had never heard of her and doesn’t care about tech at all (sorry lemmy).

Tl;dw: imagine a woman talking about how Freddy mercury’s chest hair makes her uncomfortable because she thinks he’s peacocking for her. That’s you. It’s initially very understandable- you saw something with one known cultural marker and assumed it tracked, I did too. It’s just not the same cultural marker (just like a Chinese person without much international contact sixty years ago would probably have a very different assumption when looking at a picture of a woman in a western wedding dress).

I know 11 year olds who would rather take a chance with a gunman than piss themselves in front of their whole class. Giving them a more dignified way to do things is only a good thing

It would be perfect for assisted living facilities or care home situations where accessibility is key