tax filing status: no, I’m too beautiful

And that’s just for the whole population of the earth.  Ethnic groups–i.e. people who marry within their own population–have shorter periods.  

What I find hilarious here is the implicit shift to blood purity, much like the old nobility had it, but with the exact opposite premise.  Rather than the nobleman boasting of how pure his pedigree was, when there was nothing but nobility in the last X number of generations (itself a very limited gene pool), the blood of these people are “pure” because there’s no 10th-degree-plus cousins intermarrying (or so they claim).

(The “fun” thing there is how that implicitly makes smaller ethnic groups inherently impure when you follow the train of thought to its logical conclusion.)

It get’s real interesting cuz if you get into the “incest is bad because biology” rabbit hole things get real odd real fast.

So if we assume it’s purely an issue of decent, you get a lot of incestuous couples that don’t count because they can’t produce children *or* “they’re adopted.” That’s already strange. We have laws in place that cover that even. So clearly that’s not neccessarily the problem.

Well, what even is the basis for a biological argument against incest?

During meiosis certain genes occasionally get lost. That’s not a big deal, you *have* two sets, one from each parent. The chances of both parents missing the exact same degradation is ridiculously small… Unless they share an ancestor. So what’s the rate of birth defects, what’s the risk?

In the population at large, the probably of having a child with a birth defect is around 2% (rounded up) between first cousins it’s 3% and amoung people sharing half their genetic make-up it’s estimated to about 6%.

The worst real-world scenario is, oddly enough, marrying first cousins regularly (over multiple generations). At that point it goes up to… 12.5%.

Those are small numbers. Strangely small given the bad press incestuous mutations get. And while I’m hardly going to recommend it, unless you’re gonna be producing 20 kids you’re probably not gonna see anything weird.

Because of this I think as an intellectual exercise Thorki is technically more problematic than Luke/Leia. But I’m too ship and let ship to care.

I think as an intellectual exercise, the question of “why is incest wrong” is super interesting because…. yeah, as risks of genetic mutation go, it’s similar to a lot of things that have a lot less taboo surrounding them.

So if we want to have a coherent definition of the harm of incest, we have to look at harm it does outside of that, and then we get into just like…. massive shades of grey. Because, yeah, I think I agree that thorki is more problematic than Luke/Leia, but…. why does that ring true? Because sleeping with someone you see as truly family is so taboo?

The best I’ve really been able to do is “because, culturally, we have a vested interest in keeping a strong taboo against close family members having sex, not just because offspring but because healthy family relationships”.

But then tbh consensual incest is so rare and so poorly studied that it’s hard to say whether a loosened taboo would…. actually hurt. Like, my gut says it would, but I don’t really have any data backing that up. Abusive incestuous relationships tend to harm the whole family (for example: a parent abusing a child can lead to siblings abusing each other) but…. there’s not really any research on consensual. In the real world it just doesn’t happen that often. (And like, no fucking wonder: if I think of this in relation to my own family my skin crawls. The revulsion is REALLY strong.)

but then!! we get questions of ADOPTION and FOSTERING and ESTRANGEMENT and what we do when blood relatives don’t see each other as family, or non-blood relatives DO, and how do THOSE things play out? Like, I saw someone the other day refer to his husband as “like a brother separated at birth.” And like….. step-siblings?

sometimes I sincerely wish that some of these people with really expansive definitions of incest would like talk to me about how they got their definition and how they justify it, because once genetics exits the picture…. I agree that there are boundaries, but where they are and why is really interesting!

but I’m about 90% sure their answer is “incest is whatever feels gross like incest” which is. Boring

@shaaknaa

But isn’t that’s really only looking at the genetic outcome of one very incestous family though? If you took away the incest taboo, you’d have more than one family involved. It’d be the entire population. The worse case, 12.5% chance isn’t huge for a single family unit but applied to the entire U.S. population, that’s approximately 40 million defects. And that would just be random defects. I assume the rate of some genetic disorders would skyrocket, especially the ones that require 2 copies of a gene to take effect.

I mean, yeah, genetic diversity in a population is so important that almost all animals and even some plants have an incest “taboo” (looking at you, apples). But given that, by all appearances, the incest disgust response is innate, population-level genetic outcomes are kind of a non-issue, don’t you think? Incest isn’t going to become common enough to affect the gene pool, at least not at the kind of rates we’re talking about.

The exception I can see is normalized cousin incest, or other family 1-2 degrees removed from immediate; the innate taboo’s less strong (as evidenced by it having more cultural variability), so in small populations over many generations that can become an issue. But that’s a problem of royal families and space colonies, not modern countries.

And that’s just for the whole population of the earth.  Ethnic groups–i.e. people who marry within their own population–have shorter periods.  

What I find hilarious here is the implicit shift to blood purity, much like the old nobility had it, but with the exact opposite premise.  Rather than the nobleman boasting of how pure his pedigree was, when there was nothing but nobility in the last X number of generations (itself a very limited gene pool), the blood of these people are “pure” because there’s no 10th-degree-plus cousins intermarrying (or so they claim).

(The “fun” thing there is how that implicitly makes smaller ethnic groups inherently impure when you follow the train of thought to its logical conclusion.)

It get’s real interesting cuz if you get into the “incest is bad because biology” rabbit hole things get real odd real fast.

So if we assume it’s purely an issue of decent, you get a lot of incestuous couples that don’t count because they can’t produce children *or* “they’re adopted.” That’s already strange. We have laws in place that cover that even. So clearly that’s not neccessarily the problem.

Well, what even is the basis for a biological argument against incest?

During meiosis certain genes occasionally get lost. That’s not a big deal, you *have* two sets, one from each parent. The chances of both parents missing the exact same degradation is ridiculously small… Unless they share an ancestor. So what’s the rate of birth defects, what’s the risk?

In the population at large, the probably of having a child with a birth defect is around 2% (rounded up) between first cousins it’s 3% and amoung people sharing half their genetic make-up it’s estimated to about 6%.

The worst real-world scenario is, oddly enough, marrying first cousins regularly (over multiple generations). At that point it goes up to… 12.5%.

Those are small numbers. Strangely small given the bad press incestuous mutations get. And while I’m hardly going to recommend it, unless you’re gonna be producing 20 kids you’re probably not gonna see anything weird.

Because of this I think as an intellectual exercise Thorki is technically more problematic than Luke/Leia. But I’m too ship and let ship to care.

I think as an intellectual exercise, the question of “why is incest wrong” is super interesting because…. yeah, as risks of genetic mutation go, it’s similar to a lot of things that have a lot less taboo surrounding them.

So if we want to have a coherent definition of the harm of incest, we have to look at harm it does outside of that, and then we get into just like…. massive shades of grey. Because, yeah, I think I agree that thorki is more problematic than Luke/Leia, but…. why does that ring true? Because sleeping with someone you see as truly family is so taboo?

The best I’ve really been able to do is “because, culturally, we have a vested interest in keeping a strong taboo against close family members having sex, not just because offspring but because healthy family relationships”.

But then tbh consensual incest is so rare and so poorly studied that it’s hard to say whether a loosened taboo would…. actually hurt. Like, my gut says it would, but I don’t really have any data backing that up. Abusive incestuous relationships tend to harm the whole family (for example: a parent abusing a child can lead to siblings abusing each other) but…. there’s not really any research on consensual. In the real world it just doesn’t happen that often. (And like, no fucking wonder: if I think of this in relation to my own family my skin crawls. The revulsion is REALLY strong.)

but then!! we get questions of ADOPTION and FOSTERING and ESTRANGEMENT and what we do when blood relatives don’t see each other as family, or non-blood relatives DO, and how do THOSE things play out? Like, I saw someone the other day refer to his husband as “like a brother separated at birth.” And like….. step-siblings?

sometimes I sincerely wish that some of these people with really expansive definitions of incest would like talk to me about how they got their definition and how they justify it, because once genetics exits the picture…. I agree that there are boundaries, but where they are and why is really interesting!

but I’m about 90% sure their answer is “incest is whatever feels gross like incest” which is. Boring

I have a rant buried somewhere in my blog, dashed off the day I encountered people in Detroit: Become Human fandom who were denouncing Hank/Conner as incest. Because (I assume the reasoning goes)

There was more than one breathlessly outraged post about this in the tags that just assumed that particular interpretation being The One True Authoritative Truth was an obvious given. It was a really fucking special moment, let me tell you.

At this point I don’t know how to even begin to reason with purity fundamentalists anymore than I know how to reason with diehard evangelical Christians. The in-group/out-group mentalities and SOPs are so disturbingly similar.

Oh i saw that! The other theory I saw was that Connor is a surrogate for hank’s dead son, and so.... yeah, I guess that means it’s canon and the only way to interpret it, and also, that that even counts as incest???

Like I said the logic is FASCINATING, where it exists. I’ve seen at least one try to pull off the idea that, because quasi-incestuous abuse is a thing (by those in intimate caretaker roles of children, e.g. a nanny), ANY relationship with someone who is or was in a care or mentoring role is incest. (Yes, this was someone trying to argue “Shiro mentoring Keith makes it incest.”)

Which, like..... at least they tried, I guess? Even if that makes NO sense

And that’s just for the whole population of the earth.  Ethnic groups–i.e. people who marry within their own population–have shorter periods.  

What I find hilarious here is the implicit shift to blood purity, much like the old nobility had it, but with the exact opposite premise.  Rather than the nobleman boasting of how pure his pedigree was, when there was nothing but nobility in the last X number of generations (itself a very limited gene pool), the blood of these people are “pure” because there’s no 10th-degree-plus cousins intermarrying (or so they claim).

(The “fun” thing there is how that implicitly makes smaller ethnic groups inherently impure when you follow the train of thought to its logical conclusion.)

It get’s real interesting cuz if you get into the “incest is bad because biology” rabbit hole things get real odd real fast.

So if we assume it’s purely an issue of decent, you get a lot of incestuous couples that don’t count because they can’t produce children *or* “they’re adopted.” That’s already strange. We have laws in place that cover that even. So clearly that’s not neccessarily the problem.

Well, what even is the basis for a biological argument against incest?

During meiosis certain genes occasionally get lost. That’s not a big deal, you *have* two sets, one from each parent. The chances of both parents missing the exact same degradation is ridiculously small… Unless they share an ancestor. So what’s the rate of birth defects, what’s the risk?

In the population at large, the probably of having a child with a birth defect is around 2% (rounded up) between first cousins it’s 3% and amoung people sharing half their genetic make-up it’s estimated to about 6%.

The worst real-world scenario is, oddly enough, marrying first cousins regularly (over multiple generations). At that point it goes up to… 12.5%.

Those are small numbers. Strangely small given the bad press incestuous mutations get. And while I’m hardly going to recommend it, unless you’re gonna be producing 20 kids you’re probably not gonna see anything weird.

Because of this I think as an intellectual exercise Thorki is technically more problematic than Luke/Leia. But I’m too ship and let ship to care.

I think as an intellectual exercise, the question of “why is incest wrong” is super interesting because.... yeah, as risks of genetic mutation go, it’s similar to a lot of things that have a lot less taboo surrounding them.

So if we want to have a coherent definition of the harm of incest, we have to look at harm it does outside of that, and then we get into just like.... massive shades of grey. Because, yeah, I think I agree that thorki is more problematic than Luke/Leia, but.... why does that ring true? Because sleeping with someone you see as truly family is so taboo?

The best I’ve really been able to do is “because, culturally, we have a vested interest in keeping a strong taboo against close family members having sex, not just because offspring but because healthy family relationships”.

But then tbh consensual incest is so rare and so poorly studied that it’s hard to say whether a loosened taboo would.... actually hurt. Like, my gut says it would, but I don’t really have any data backing that up. Abusive incestuous relationships tend to harm the whole family (for example: a parent abusing a child can lead to siblings abusing each other) but.... there’s not really any research on consensual. In the real world it just doesn’t happen that often. (And like, no fucking wonder: if I think of this in relation to my own family my skin crawls. The revulsion is REALLY strong.)

but then!! we get questions of ADOPTION and FOSTERING and ESTRANGEMENT and what we do when blood relatives don’t see each other as family, or non-blood relatives DO, and how do THOSE things play out? Like, I saw someone the other day refer to his husband as “like a brother separated at birth.” And like..... step-siblings?

sometimes I sincerely wish that some of these people with really expansive definitions of incest would like talk to me about how they got their definition and how they justify it, because once genetics exits the picture.... I agree that there are boundaries, but where they are and why is really interesting!

but I’m about 90% sure their answer is “incest is whatever feels gross like incest” which is. Boring

On ending friendships with antis/fanfom assholes

So I get a lot of asks abt friendships fracturing in the current fandom, and feeling bad about being unable to just “block and move on” when dealing with people they know. and I have an experience with that that i think might help people feel less alone in it?

So: once upon a time a few years ago I made a new friend in a fandom I was really excited about. We were both writers who were active in the still-small community and who loved each other’s work. In the course of about a week we added each other on skype, started collabing on a fic, started a new edit trend in the fandom, and talked basically daily.

And then she asked me to edit a story, in which a character that I read as an abuser gets together with his victim and they are much happier and sexier together than the main ship.

I tried at first to just say I didn’t like the ship and didn’t think I was the person to edit it, but on pushing admitted that I read him as an abuser in canon and wasn’t comfortable with how dismissive her fic was of his behavior. She took this.......... poorly. Basically said I was accusing her personally of being an abuser, because she related to this character, and that I was trying to manipulate her into only writing the pairing we had in common. I said “no, I just don’t want to beta this fic for you”, and we..... sort of dropped it.

But - and you may have noticed this about me - I can’t leave a topic well enough alone if my life depended on it, and her insistence that I was reading him as an abuser to spite her annoyed me, so I wrote a post breaking down basically everything the character had done so far, how his ex acted and spoke around him, and how those look a lot like abusive behaviors and trauma. And... well, let’s just say just about everyone in the tumblr fandom saw it within the next couple days.

I spent about 12 hours getting positive responses and “I don’t agree but I appreciate the thought you put into this”. And then his stans found me.

I.... don’t think I need to go into how this went? We know the song and dance; I had to shut down my askbox, locked my social media profiles, stopped accepting Skype friend requests, and endured a ton of people telling me that I was A) calling them, personally, abusers or B) was trivializing abuse and was the worst kind of tumblrite or C) should just choke and die already. Sometimes all three, it was a very fun..... 72 hours or so.

Anyways. After the initial backlash, there was a group of about 8-9 people who were still stubbornly going after me and anyone associated with me on every platform they could find. (I would find out later that they made a group chat and all became friends over their hatred of me, which is kind of flattering and kind of fucking obnoxious.) One charmingly implied, after I admitted to being an abuse survivor, that either I was lying or I deserved it. My new friend, who’d been mostly silent through all this, was mutuals with all of them.

I went to her with their behavior, and she said, essentially, “it’s not my business, you said stuff that really hurt them” and I said “I literally wrote meta, it is not my fault that they took it this personally. I’m a real person, this character they’re defending isn’t.” and she.... wasn’t willing to talk to them, or ask them to stop, or even just not share my content with this group (god, remember when tumblr’s blocking features were even worse somehow? Me too). After about a week and a half I decided I had to just block her too and move on with my life, because I was miserable and anxious and wanted to unlock my damn accounts.

It hurt. I guess that’s what I’m getting at. I knew her for maybe 20 days total, and we barely spoke for the last 10, and yet it still hurt, y’know? It can really, really suck, to have people you connect with turn out to be totally willing to hurt you, or leave you out in the cold, because of an opinion about fiction. If I was younger when this happened, I may well have backed down on my opinion to save the friendship. As it was I had to get a LOT of reassurance that I hadn’t done anything wrong and didn’t deserve what happened.

This isn’t something with a grand solution. It sucked, I got hurt, I had to end a friendship for my own health and lean on my other friends while I got over it. If I’d known her for months, or years, I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been. “Block and move on” is ok advice when it’s strangers shouting at you; it is infinitely harder when it’s mutuals, friends, people you trust and like doing this to you. I have nothing but sympathy for people who struggle with leaving friends because those friends are being assholes about fandom opinions. Cutting friends off is hard, of course it’s hard, and it’s a personal decision. Just because it’s technically easier to cut someone off online doesn’t mean it’s emotionally easier. Be kind to yourself about this stuff.

it’s interesting that because you and your friend were into the same ship originally, she (I guess) assumed you would be into all the same ships she was. the whole “you’re either with us or against us” mentality I see so often in fandom is so divisive and awful. we all have different perspectives and opinions on various ships and that SHOULD be okay. it’s frustrating that for so many fans, it’s not.

Yeah. The irony is that I did end up kind of liking that ship later, when it was written as unhealthy and a bit twisted, and even wrote fic of it that she liked on AO3. But she and her friends taking my meta of “the canon is depicting abuse” so incredibly personally meant that we never had a chance to bond over the ship.

(Tho, People also got angry at me for tagging that fic with “abusive behavior” which made me want to rip my hair out since the fic contained forced drug use and pressuring his partner into life-threatening situations which like could not be ANY more blatantly abusive? I feel? oh my god how am I still so irritated about this years later)

antis is just peta 2

@cheesycoke don’t just hide this in the notes

if someone has an icon and/or url for a series but does nothing but talk about much they hate the series and its author that's red flag behavior, do not interact

Or maybe ppl are. Idk. Allowed to be critical of media they consume. Lol.

>implying that constantly shitting on a series and “being critical of media you consume” are the same thing

You're allowed to have mixed feelings about things you like lol and even then op reeks of "dont ever talk badly of media you like" and also says that disliking the author of something you like is bad lol so likeee

>implying that having mixed feelings about something you like is the same thing as constantly complaining about a thing you claim to like

Yup

Like... this post is pretty specifically talking about the people who do nothing but complain. Not “being critical”, not “mixed feelings”, just complaining.

It’s like if I ran a Marvel fanblog and did nothing but complain about Marvel movies.

Criticism of media or talking about things you personally didn't like about something you enjoy as a whole doesn't actually look like a neverending stream of posts tearing it and its creator to shreds. People who enjoy things actually talk about liking it and have fun when they watch it.

Btw personal gripes don't automatically count as criticism and I wish more of you "uwu criticize everything you like or you're nasty!!" types would understand that.

I frequently worry that when “”””critical”””” blogs talk about mixed feelings, one of the feelings they’re referring to is guilt.

Anon you disgust me more than ybid does atm. Wtf is wrong with you? Please block me and everyone else in the pro-ship community if you still insist on acting like this. We want nothing to do with you.

BAD PEOPLE GET RIGHTS, THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED "RIGHTS" AND NOT "REWARDS FOR BEING GOOD"

the issue isn’t that some people think abuse is good but that many people don’t recognize abuse at all

It would help if we had more practical conversations about what constitutes abuse from an early age. It would also be fuckin super if it weren’t romanticized by the media

I mean, true. But most media that romanticizes abuse is able to do so because it doesn’t call it abuse, so I think a wider understanding of what abuse is - and, hell, why it sometimes makes a good story while still being a bad thing - would be really helpful.