some things that horror movie culture has taught you are scary…. are just ableist
….clarify?
okay sure. psychosis? scarier to have than to know someone who has it. DID? im more a threat to myself than people around me. wheelchairs and psych meds? are tools that help people live more functional and flexible lives and are not judgments of the persons character and for sure are not scary things. and for real, intellectually disabled people are not threats, but movies love to make them villains because they act different and understand the world differently. and people with notable physical differences? people who’s bodies look different? people with scars, growths, amputations, etc? are literally just people. and seeing themselves painted like monsters on the big screen is absolutely sickening and damaging to how society will see them.
its not only bad writing but its extremely harmful to people who actually live with conditions that are misrepresented in media. when i found out i had DID, my mom freaked out because her only point of reference was Sybil. when i was younger and first went on psych meds, i thought it meant i was set on a track to be a bad person, because in so many movies and video games you find out the bad guy has medication in his bed side table for some sort of psych disorder. the worst thing a hallucination has ever made me do was wake my mom up at 3 AM to check my bathroom to see if the bugs i saw everywhere were real and the worst thing an “episode” of any sort has made me do is hurt myself. my ptsd doesnt make me kill people, my alters dont kidnap people, my autism doesnt make me so morally unaware that ill murder for senselessly, my ocd doesnt make me hurt people etc etc etc
literally the only “horror” is the ableism. and the only way you can write good horror about disability and mental illness is if the focus is on how society and the medical field treat us rather than focusing on how we are apparently so scary, threatening, and bad.
It really, REALLY bothers me when I hear people frame climate change and other environmental crises as something that everyday, average-ass people are responsible for, and not corporations and entire governments.
Like literally, how can a regular-ass person ~opt out~ of all damaging behaviors while still being able to function in society?
You literally can’t.
The future of our planet is not down to whether or not someone recycles their water bottle.
It’s down to whether or not governments and corporations decide to quit sucking up all our resources and poisoning the earth with reckless abandon.
I mean obviously people should still live as cleanly and as sustainably as they can manage where they are and with what they have, but like. THAT isn’t the major issue.
govts and corporations have deliberately put the onus on yr individual choices so the system can continue being as destructive/profitable
God bless this post this pisses me off so much
Also this hyper-individualist shift of responsibility is largely an American thing and consumerism is framed as a solution- e.g., buy more shit that’s sustainable! That’ll fix the problem (buy a new, green water bottle! buy a new, green car! buy a new, green whatever-the-fuck that’ll just ultimately produce more waste)!
I took a course in sustainable engineering.
The professor mentioned that even if every private individual in the world were to conserve resources and the environment the ol’ Jimmy Carter way- by turning down the thermostat, recycling your glass and plastics and metals, cut down on luxuries, take shorter showers, etc., it would only get us 10% of the way to where we need to be in order to avoid global catastrophic climate change.
Private individuals hardly make a dent, even in ideal conditions.
Thank you.
Extra important note for spoonies. Please don’t feel bad for needing disposable medical equipment, pill bottles, long showers, micro fiber blankets, packaged pre-made food, straws, paper plates etc. You’re not individually ruining the environment, you’re doing the best you can while taking care of yourself. The blame is on corporations.
This is so important!!!
So many things that people are leaping on bandwagons to ban ARE NEEDED BY DISABLED PEOPLE.
But no one cares! It’s just like the “Opioid Epidemic” and the knee jerk backlash to just cut them off. It’s ridiculous! It’s solving a problem by making another! But hey, it’ll make some people FEEL like they DID SOMETHING, so who cares who gets hurt? Who cares about the critical life threatening damage and death it causes? Because “Epidemic!” Because “straws are bad!” Because because because!
Because Disabled Lives Don’t Matter to Abled People.
That’s it. We’re already a burden to them. We’re already an annoyance. An inconvenience. We’re different, we’re weird, we don’t fit the mold. So, to hell with us! To hell with caring about us. Even thinking about us. Because it’ll save the precious turtles or birds or something. Because taking away everything that helps us survive is the only way to make people feel like they’re doing something about a huge problem like climate change, when it’s really just screwing people whose lives are hard enough.
I will forever reblog posts like this, because it’s SO fucking important.
Since conversion therapy is looming in everyone’s consciousness right now:
This is your regular reminder that ABA, the generally-recommended therapy for autistic children, is literally conversion therapy with an extra dose of “auties aren’t even real people” thrown in for good measure. It was conceived by the same people, from the same research, for the same ends: To brutalize and torture children into a narrow range of “acceptable” behaviour.
And it is considered totally legitimate and valid and even preferred by the overwhelming majority of the medical industry.
Do not leave disabled people out of your activism.
the idea of people having to be ‘useful’ is just so gross, like people do not exist to be used
having to produce something and have a use is a capitalist ideal and not an intrinsic part of humanity
just by being alive you are human and you are worth something and you can never be useless
this applies to animals as well
“Having to like DO THINGS is SO OPPRESSIVE. No one had to like DO THINGS before evil capitalism. In ancient times food, water, and shelter just existed and everything was taken care of for me”
Guess what happened to people who didn’t do things before capitalism? They died. Cause if you weren’t hunting, gathering, or useful in some aspect of nature. You were killed, died or starvation, dehydration, or exposure.
Being useful is literally part of our biology. Fucking moron. You pull some idea out of your ass because you literally don’t want to get off your ass.
I’m not saying nobody should ever do things ever, I’m saying people don;t have to produce to an arbitrary standard in order to prove their right to live
And if you really think disabled people deserve to die if we can’t ‘contribute’ or be useful in a way you approve of then congrats youre a fucking monster
actually there’s significant evidence in terms of Neolithic burials that disabled people who would not have been able to hunt for themselves (the archaeological evidence mostly shows mobility disabilities because it’s visible in the bone record) were well fed and cared for by their communities
so the “people like you would have been left to die” argument isn’t just cruel and violently ableist, it’s extremely historically inaccurate and based off of projecting modern prejudice on prehistoric cultures
sources because I’m on my laptop now!
note: in the neolithic era, a person in their 40s or 50s would be considered elderly
Our society continually propagates the myth that our ancestors’ lives were miserable, but the truth is human beings figured out how to live cooperatively and humanely a long time ago. Really the agricultural revolution fucked everything up.
Cuz clearly people only died and starved before capitalism
Anthropologically, proof of fixed femur fractures in ancient hominids shows that is one of the signs of civilized people– caring for the sick and injured is a cornerstone of civilization. So lmao go fuck yourself with the injured and disabled died thousands of years ago if they couldn’t help provide for their group.
Stop turning ancient hominids into these cruel “survival of the fittest” images. Especially cause that isn’t even what is meant by that phrase.
Even Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured. Which says a lot about those who are against the idea.
Another point: back in the ancient times, pretty much ALL work that got done was work of the “if it doesn’t get done, you starve” variety, perhaps embellished a bit by the “if it doesn’t get done, you’re uncomfortable” sort. Work was vital, yes, but all the work that was vital was vital.
Nowadays, on the other hand, we have excess, and waste, and an absolute shitpot of arbitrary work that gets shoved into the “necessary and vital” pile just because somebody else can make a buck off it, made as much off of cut corners and financial shenanigans as of anybody’s honest labor. Shitty Wal-Mart plastic pitchers and crap toys that capture attention and drop it just as fast, “fast fashion” that you wear twice and it falls apart, shiny chrome washer-dryers that are going to be replaced in five or ten years because planned obsolescence meets upgrade culture, and produce that gets rejected because it doesn’t look shiny and uniform and perfect.
If you’re a cashier, you have to stand even though you could do your job just as well sitting. A fast-food place throws out pounds of fries, empties the whole assembly-line of prepared food into the dumpster at the end of the night, and if you take any of it home to eat, that’s called stealing. Grocery stores throw out entire cartons of eggs because one out of twelve is cracked and lock their dumpsters so nobody can scavenge food from the tons of what’s thrown out still edible. Tech stores demand that unsold computers be destroyed with a sledgehammer before being thrown out, and all the labor that went into making it, assembling it, forming its component parts and mining its raw materials, is all wasted.
We can see this shit going on, we encounter it and sometimes we’re ordered to carry it out, in our workplaces that pay us shit, and let me tell you, there’s a hell of a difference between “if you don’t get the wheat harvested we’ll have no bread all winter” and “you need to spend the next eight hours cooking food so we can hold a profit after throwing a quarter of it in the garbage.” A multitude of people would benefit greatly if allowed to access that waste or allowed to not produce what’s likely going to be wasted.
It’s not that we want something for nothing–it’s that we want the stuff we’ve put work into creating to benefit us, or someone who could use it, and not see good work twisted into benefiting no one while still being demanded and still being underpaid.
If people in agrarian societies of the past starved it was frequently due to an uncontrollable act of nature (drought, flood, locusts, plague).
Now people starve because they don’t “produce” in an acceptable way for our capitalist system, which has a very narrow and limited definition of what being “useful” is, and because our corporate overlords would rather throw food away than feed someone who is starving.
We have enough food, but people are starving to death.
We have enough houses, but people are dying of exposure because they’re homeless.
We have enough medicine, but people are dying because they can’t afford to pay for it.
And we accept this as correct because we’ve been brainwashed that only “useful” i.e. “capitalist productive” people deserve to have food, shelter and healthcare.
STUFF TO NOT EVER DO: tell a person with depression/anxiety/eating disorder that their illness makes YOU suffer never ever do this please this is the worst fucking thing you could ever tell someone who is sick
I got anon hate for this post, keep reblogging it
Same for sensory sensitivity disorders! NEVER get mad at someone for their sensitivities and tell them that it’s making YOU feel bad. Never ever do it.
my abnormal psych prof and i dont always see eye-to-eye on things but a while back he told us all something that i think Certain Groups on this site could stand to learn:
you can’t force treatment on people who aren’t an active danger to themselves or others. that means that no, refusing to tag trigger warnings isn’t the same thing as exposure therapy, and you’re not obligated to try to dispel people’s delusions if they’re not actually hurting themselves or others. you are not entitled to police other people’s coping mechanisms if they aren’t using them to hurt other people. you are not allowed to send otherk!n “YOU ARE A HUMAN” over and over and over again because you think you’re “”””””discouraging a delusion”””””””.
basically the moral of the story is: stop trying to play armchair psychologist to strangers, actual psychologists with degrees think it does more harm than good.
Skylanders is planning to donate a large amount of money to Autism $peaks, not just from these special figures but potentially from all Skylanders sales.
Please participate in boycotting Skylanders and this harmful organization. If you are able to, consider contacting Skylanders and asking them to end their support of A$. Their website is here, and their Facebook page is here. A few people have spoken up already, but the more negative comments they receive, the better the chance they will reconsider.
More information on the Boycott Autism Speaks movement here.
Every time you look at a tiny house, ask yourself: “can a wheelchair fit in there? Can someone with limited mobility live there? Why not? Could they go up and down the stairs to that loft bed? Could they pull down the folding bed?”
If your answer is “it shouldn’t have to, this isn’t for everybody,” then what you’re really saying is “this new world I want to build doesn’t have room for disabled people in it.”
Admit that to yourself. At least be honest about your ableism.
In case you’re wondering what defensive, non-apologetic ableism looks like, I found one!
Edited to add: seriously, if I start out with ‘ask yourself’ and follow up with ‘if your answer is that this isn’t for you’ then maybe you should #notallabledpeople yourself right out the fucking door if you decide you want to come fuck with me right now.
Today is not a day where I have patience.
The whole fad seems to be catered to young abled hipsters. The ones I’ve seen don’t seem to be built for people who need room to cook for large families, can buy their own property, don’t need to live in a big city (or have their own transportation to commute/ move their new home easily), and the ones I’ve seen where kids ARE involved never seem to capture the ‘STOP TOUCHING ME’ that young kids in the back seats of cars develop, or anyone with claustrophobia. I also haven’t seen that come with physical basements, for people in areas likely to get hit by tornadoes. Mind you, I don’t follow the show very well – my parents like the idea, so I usually see some when I’m home – but that seems to cut out an awful lot of people, right off the bat.
What has fascinated me about the response to this post the most is that a large number of responses to it have come in the form of IT’S MY HOUSE DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO or CLEARLY WHEELCHAIR COMPANIES HATE PEOPLE WHO CAN WALK, THEY’RE NOT BUILT TO USAIN BOLT or whatever.
And all that this tells me is that people jumped as fast as they could to what would allow them to be pissy, and didn’t actually follow the things I said. And that’s cool, I guess. But what I was actually explicitly addressing was the idea that small houses (which are touted as the new, environmentally-awesome, space-okay, cost-efficient, way to live) don’t need to be accessible, because tiny houses are, by definition are just not “meant for you.”
That, yes, is ableist. If the “new way of building” and so on – if this movement actually gets off the ground – is explicitly exclusive of disabled persons, that’s a problem. And if saying ‘trololol this isn’t for you, why are you making my house about you’ is your response, yeah, that’s pretty ableist, guys!
And this isn’t theoretical in its long-term effects. There’s a pretty predominant house type that was faddish a while ago near where I live – a tall, skinny rowhouse that’s really, really not accessible at all. If you want to buy a house near where I live (and no, “just move” isn’t an answer), the affordable houses are all these tall, narrow rowhouses. The difference between buying one of these homes and a house which either is already accessible or can be made accessible is an order of magnitude. The ranchers or potentially-accessible homes cost literally twice as much.
These buildings have narrow doors; narrow, turning stairs which are not even easy to install a chair lift on – even if your insurance company will pay for you to get a chair if you live in one, which, guess what, that’s why my wheelchair was declined; they usually have multiple sets of stairs leading up to the front door, making installing a wheelchair ramp nearly-impossible.
These houses were built more than a generation ago, and cannot easily be modified to become accessible. (I know, because we’re currently trying to find a way to make it so that I can get my wheelchair into and out of my house without someone else doing it for me. That’s kind of the opposite of accessible, if an able-bodied person literally has to fold up my wheelchair and carry it down two sets of stairs for me to take my wheelchair out of the house.) They also form the entirety of affordable housing where I live.
“Just rent an apartment” isn’t an option either. Not only is that a blindingly ableist response in and of itself, because inherent in it is “you don’t get to/need to have the stability of a mortgage payment, or the ability to built equity or eventually have a house that’s paid off” but rent for an accessible apartment around here actually costs more than my mortgage. I could absolutely not afford an accessible apartment where I live – the last time I checked, a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment in a neighborhood similar to mine cost half-again as much as my mortgage payment.
Which is kind of my point. Housing movements and trends matter across generations & if you dismiss the entire thing as “well this is my house, it’s not about you, why should this movement have to think about you?” then, yeah, that’s exactly the ableist mindset I’m saying is pretty bullshit.
California housing is just as bad. My family has a townhouse, because that was what we could afford and it was also the least scary looking place we could find after months and months of looking. The stairs are too narrow for a lift of any sort and the railing is… not good. We can’t afford to fix that. We are all disabled to various degrees, I’m the worst off when it comes to mobility, but my parents are looking into maybe trying to find a single floor place in a few years because we just cannot and should not deal with stairs.
We probably won’t be able to afford one though. None of the places in this area that we can afford (that are also not clearly the set to a horror movie) are single story. One we looked at 5 years ago was on fricking STILTS.
And every time I need to go down to get food or go up to the shower or my bedroom I am reminded of the time i had to crawl from my room, down the hall, and down the stairs to get to the car and go to the ER because I was fine one minute and then I was suddenly in too much pain to sit upright or stand…
I am constantly in fear of one of the joints in my leg popping out while i’m on the stairs, or my spine acting up like that first time, and falling down the stairs… I have in fact had joints pop out on the stairs and caught myself on the walls and caused myself more injuries doing it.
And this isn’t accounting for any of the other dozen quirks of the house that make my life more painful because I am not able bodied. Accessible housing needs to be a more easy to come by thing.
If I could somehow find everyone who ever bullied me and ask them why they targeted me, not a single one would say it was because I was autistic. None of them even knew I was.
Instead they’d say it was because I liked Pokemon too much after it stopped being cool, or my clothes looked ridiculous and I wore the same pair of jeans 3 days a week, or that I was just weird/nerdy/unpopular. In many, many cases, that is what neurodiversity looks like. Not someone with an obvious disability, but someone who’s just weird.
I see so many allistics and neurotypicals on here that claim to be anti-ableism but turn around and make jokes at the expense of people who are eccentric but harmless.
If you’re an allistic that claims to support autistic people, but then you turn around and make fun of the woman who wears a bizarre outfit or the guy who speaks in a monotone or the teenager who carries a teddy bear everywhere, you’re a bad ally and I don’t trust you.
This Is a Backup Blog 