"My friends in the UK complain about travel time and distance to get to relatives houses on holidays when the relative is only 60 miles away. I used to drive 60 miles just to get to work."

A phrase that I've heard that captures the contrast well is:

In the UK, 100 miles is a long distance; In the US, 100 years is a long time

As a Brit, I can't imagine driving 60 miles to get to work.

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes take a day trip out to the seaside, which was 63 miles away. If we wanted to do this, we'd have to get up super early so we could have enough time there.

For a longer holiday in the Summer, we would occasionally take a trip to a different place a bit further down on the coast, which was an 85 mile journey. We viewed that as being prohibitively far away for a day trip, and I don't remember ever going there if we weren't spending at least 4 days there (including the travel days).

It's insane how relative our perceptions of these things are.

What are you getting at? I might be misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you're implying that it's not depressing to be a woman in this situation (I.e if we don't reverse the question)

"Whatever I thought I understood before from listening to women, it's nothing compared to what it's like to live it."

I'm reminded of something I read a while back, where a man named Marty accidentally was mistakenly sending emails with his female coworker's email signature and was puzzled for a while on why people were being so difficult. When he realised it, he and his colleague, Nicole, decided to switch emails for a week, as a more deliberate, extended experiment. They both did a write-up of the experience. Marty's was a Twitter thread that I can't access anymore, but Nicole wrote a blog post covering her side

In Nicole's words:

"Nothing changed, except that our clients read me as male and Marty as female. I had one of the easiest weeks of my professional life. He… didn’t."

What I found so interesting about this story is that it sounds like this Marty guy was a genuine ally. Like, when Nicole called him out for speaking over her at meetings, he listened and started using his voice to bring attention to Nicole (and other women) at meetings. Iirc from his Twitter thread, he thought of himself as an ally who understood how hard women have it. Until this thing with the email signatures, that is.

I think you're right that even if some of the harassment you've experienced is transphobia related, a lot of it will be misogyny. And I think that part of why trans women are so prominently discussed by transphobes is because of the prevalence of transmisogyny specifically.

She got drunk and was crying about her regret about not aborting me. She came from a larger family and wanted more kids than she ended up having, but my dad's personal limit was 2-3 kids — and kid number three was only to try for a daughter if kid number 2 ended up being another boy. Me being a girl meant that she could only have two kids, and the fact that I was pretty fucked up means that she felt like she'd "wasted" a kid on me, so to speak

I don't blame my mum for having these thoughts, as awful as they may be. At the time, I had not long since been diagnosed with autism, and my mental health was pretty awful too, which must've been a lot of stress for a parent to handle. What I do blame her for is being deeply depressed and having her teenage daughter be her primary (and basically only) emotional outlet.

Whilst I am theoretically open to having a relationship with her in future, if she ever got sober (though that seems unlikely I'd learn of her being sober, as I went No Contact with her years ago), I'll never be able to forget how much she hurt me. She wasn't the root cause of my mental health problems, but she certainly made them a hell of a lot worse. And given that she never remembered the stuff she said when she was this drunk, I'll never get the closure of a genuine apology.

What's especially tragic about my mum is that she's actually pretty well adjusted, considering the awful childhood she had. The main thing she wanted from life was to be a mum, and to do a better job than her own mum had. I do think she achieved that, and there are so many things that I feel appreciative of her for. Unfortunately, no amount of good can make up for the hurt that she caused when she'd get drunk and pile her grief onto me. Most of the time her drunken tears were far less hurtful, but it's still a heavy burden to put on an already struggling teenager.

It's a shame, because I think she could've been an incredible parent if she'd been able to get therapy in the few years after she moved out but before she fell pregnant.

I'm not sure I understand the title of this post. What are you on the fence about?

When my mum was a child, when she wet the bed, she had her nose rubbed in it, like a dog.

Her step dad used to get her half siblings to restrain her arms as one of them beat her up.

When still a child herself, she was made responsible for the wellbeing of multiple of her very young siblings, necessitating her teaching her younger brother to help her shoplift food if they wanted to eat anything before their evening meal.

The thing is with my mum is that the good times were very good, and on average, she was still pretty decent — and that's with awful things like the emotional abusive dragging down that average. As much as I still feel hurt over what she put me through, I also feel a like of sympathy for her. She tried to be better than what she had, and whilst she did succeed in that, that says as much about the extremely low bad as it does about the good she achieved as a parent.

I actually love them. I do find it delightful how we, as a community, have such strong but varied preferences when it comes to cutlery

My mum wanted kids because she was pretty heavily parentified when she was still a child herself, and was often put in the impossible situations like "I need to figure out how to feed my toddler younger brother who I am responsible for", which led to her having to teach him help her shoplift by hiding food when he was sitting in the shopping trolley at the supermarket. She wanted the opportunity to be the parent that she wished she could've had.

That's certainly a more noble goal than simply wanting to continue one's family line, but there's still a deep immaturity to it in hindsight. Her childhood left her pretty thoroughly fucked up, and you can't move on from that kind of trauma just by deciding to be better. Healing requires a lot of support, time and effort. Although she did infinitely better than her parents did, her baggage ended up bringing a lot of toxicity to my teenage years, and our relationship was permanently harmed by that. Some of her most toxic traits were as a result of overcorrecting after deciding that she wanted to be nothing like her parents had been.

No. The physicists have levelled up. This is the next logical step

I miss my Nexus 6. It was my first Android phone, and got me into tinkering with android. I remember that the device codename, relevant for finding compatible ROMs, was "shamu". I miss that big old whale

A lot of what I miss is the software side of things. Google Assistant used to be way more capable than it is now. And now they're replacing that entirely with Gemini.

Most importantly, love requires both partners to be emotionally vulnerable, right? So then under gender roles, men can't love women, only objectify them? Wouldn't this make society one giant trauma factory where men are traumatized into detached sociopathy and women are traumatized into servitude?

Yup, basically

So what the hell are conservatives doing in relationships? Are they all loveless relationships

I think that whilst there are some conservative men who "cheat" and allow themselves moments of escaping from their gender roles, there are a lot of miserable people. Like, have you ever noticed how conservative media is just constant ragebait, and makes people just get angry at how shit the world is, then it will make them feel scared and powerless, but then because they don't have the emotional capacity to explore those emotions, they channel it more into rage. I think that you're right on the money when you describe claiming power under the patriarchy as being a "Faustian bargain".

Although you probably feel like you're socially delayed because you're not just now working through all this stuff, speaking as someone who's 29, I have known plenty of people who didn't reach this realisation until they were a fair bit older than you, so from my perspective, you're probably ahead of your peers. Some people may seem like they don't need to work on this stuff, but often it's just that it's less easy to detect until it really becomes an issue later in life. What you discuss is why I vehemently consider it to be an aspect of my duty as a feminist to work to understand how the patriarchy harms men, and restricts masculinity in general.

If you want to explore this more, a book that I would hugely recommend is "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love" by bell hooks. It's an incredible book, and I think we'd live in a far healthier world if every man read this book. It's old enough that you can find it for free on Archive.org

The problem is that even though the BBC do report on things like killings by the IDF, food shortages and other war crimes, they don't seem to be applying editorial standards equally. This means that the bias can be hard to notice unless you're actively comparing how Palestinian deaths are reported to how Israeli deaths are reported.

It's stuff like emotive terms being used far more often for Israeli casualties than for Palestinian casualties. A group of Israelis are "massacred", whereas the same number of Palestinians might be described as being "killed". Similarly, an individual is far more likely to have been "murdered" if they're Israeli. That's just one example, but there's many more (with plenty of data to back it up) in a report by the Centre for Media Monitoring (linked page has a good summary of the report's key points, because the actual report is pretty big)

Criticism of the BBC has come from within too, such as in this open letter published in late 2024, signed by over 100 BBC employees concerned about editorial double standards when it comes to reporting on Israel-Gaza. People's concern isn't just about the human rights of biased reporting, but the fact that such editorial double standards degrade people's trust in the BBC's reporting in general.

We can find other examples for comparison beyond this conflict itself. Especially nearer the beginning of the genocide, there were even more instances of war crimes not being called war crimes than there is now. Defenders of the BBC would argue that this was consistent with the BBC's stance of being an apolitical news source, and that they didn't call things war crimes because there weren't any rulings from international courts to support this term. However, this didn't stop the BBC only 36 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, with the headline "Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv".

In an ideal world, I want my news reporting to be consistent with the actual world, but I get that perfect objectivity is impossible in a subjective world. However, it's far beyond any reasonable leeway when each Israeli death gets 33 times the coverage of each Palestinian death, despite there being 34 times the number of Palestinian casualties. That gap in reporting is insane to me. When their own editorial standards mean so little to them, I just don't feel comfortable trusting them.

This level of systematic bias isn't really something that's viewable by any one person — though it's good that you tried to look into the claims of bias that you've heard. Unfortunately, the scale of this conflict (and the subsequent reporting) is too large for that to be able to give an accurate view. I'd encourage you to check out the summary of the Centre for Media Monitoring report that I linked above if you want to get a more "from above" view

Your last two paragraphs perfectly encapsulate a sentiment that I wanted to include in my comment, but couldn't capture well enough.

He's also been more prominent in mainstream politics in recent months, including doing interviews with journalists, using his platform to endorse candidates, (potentially) interviewing candidates on his stream, and generally being more visible

(I don't know much about him — I only know this because I have a friend who is a scholar of the politics of fashion who was telling me that he's a super interesting case study in her field because he's apparently started wearing suits recently, and this has coincided with his edging into the mainstream)

"One of her stories is during anal sex she defecated on a $10,000 fursuit"

Oof. However, I'd argue that if someone owns an expensive fursuit that is coming anywhere near to the act of anal sex, that's just playing stupid games, which comes with the risk of winning a prize

This is the first one on this thread to really make me laugh — and your follow up comment makes it even better.

Yeah, it's a skill like any other. For a lot of men I have known, that process was only able to start taking place once they had people in their lives who were safe to do this kind of exploration around. It always feels clunky at first, but with enough practice, it can become a habit.

And it does get easier too — especially because as you cultivate more healthy modes of being, it becomes easier to find people who help promote this kind of healthy vulnerability

I keep a small list titled "illegal heroes", and these hackers are on that list. It's bullshit that they're being hounded like this.

I really appreciate iFixit and how they help bring the discussion of repairability to the forefront.

"Some DOGE staffers [...] fear that [this shitstorm] could leave them vulnerable to political retribution and damage their future job prospects"

I wanted to make a sarcastic comment about how so many of them are super young, and so this must sting especially. However, I couldn't figure out a way to say this in a sufficiently mocking tone. Fuck 'em