Fellas! Better hold on to yourselves, because I’ve got some terrible news for you.
Actually, you’d better NOT hold on to yourselves. Because this is the news, straight from that always 100% reliable news source, the Men’s Rights subreddit:
I wonder if manginal orgasms are still allowed?
@katz
Well, she thinks Clinton did some illegal to make the economy good in the 90s. So, I guess it isn’t much of a reach. There is a “logic,” though.
-His parents make more than my mother.
-They vote for “higher taxes,” especially higher taxes on people like themselves
-No one can possibly think paying taxes is okay
-Therefore, what they vote for must not affect them because they are cheating.
Of course, a big part of this is my mom (mostly) only being out for herself and assuming everyone else is as awful as she is.
My boyfriend’s family is great, though, and it is nice finally having a good mom.
I have stopped talking to my mom for months at a time before (like when she said people celebrating Obama’s victory were being offensive), but I always end up talking to her again. She’s only mildly annoying most of the time and eventually the guilt gets to me. Especially as she suffers from depression and I feel like, as the only other family member with mental illness, I should help her with it. She doesn’t deserve it, and I know that, but I still feel like I have to. Sucky family stuff is the worst. 🙁
RE: Some Gal
Enh, my folks are generally not too bad. I just became something they couldn’t deal with, and relations became such a toxic, baggage-ridden mess that it seemed most honorable to just walk away. I still have trouble realizing that I don’t ever have to go back.
I’m lucky, I don’t have anyone bad in my family that I’m in touch with. The only real issue is that my sister and BiL are racists. It’s quite strange to think of the contrast between my sister’s concern for animals – she’s pretty involved in animal rights activisim and we’ve been on a couple of protests together – and her blinkered notions of people who aren’t white. It’s one of those “try to steer the conversation away” situations because in all other respects I’m really fond of her, and I’m sorry she’s moving interstate.
With Mum, it’s just the pressure that comes on being stuck with each other because neither of us has ever had the money to live alone, and her having had a stroke a couple of years back and not being so mobile as she was. She was kind of lucky, it didn’t affect her speech or thinking at all, just her sense of balance. But it bumps up the level of background stress a bit.
And I’m bloody lucky she’s never given me grief about Mr K. She doesn’t like men much after her experience with my father, so me not being interested in chasing guys wasn’t something that upset her! 😀
I’m gonna reply real quick while I still remember who said what then read the rest:
pecunium: you really have done everything! You’re a surprise at every turn. That’s a good thing. 😀
Cassandra: I really wouldn’t worry about it. Opinion is really divided on the risks – they would have broken down the bottle so it didn’t cost you a million dollars. It is the only thing that works that effectively on inflammation, it’s a wonderful drug.
blitzgal: Bear in mind that chemo for animals isn’t nearly as awful as chemo for humans. Humans they try and *cure*, which means high dose rates and horrible side effects. Animals they’re balancing longer life and quality of life so it’s not nearly so bad. We have a Border Collie we’re doing chemo on at the moment. ALL her lymph nodes were huge. We did a biopsy and yup, cancer. After the FIRST session they went down to normal size. (Obviously we’re not done yet.) That is unusual of course but is pretty amazing to see. She’s such a lovely dog and her owner is so sweet. 🙂
Also, your brother is a douche. 🙁 I am pretty down with hunting but the macho bullshit that so often goes along with it pisses me off.
Kittehs: thinking of you and your babies. *hug*
hrovitnir – Hugs back.
How typical is this? Mads is playing with her ball-in-a-ring thing, flinging herself around. The minute I get the camera out, she lies there blinking “Oh I’m too tired to do anything now.”
What he said. If you get off on it, I am judging you. Which doesn’t mean hunting for the thrill of it is innately wrong IMO… but there is a big difference between the exhilaration of succesfully hunting something and enjoying killing something.
I’ve never been comfortable with hunting predators that aren’t being pests but I try not to judge. :/
Weirdest story to me was my partner’s boss asking him (she was brought up on a farm): “if [your pet] died, would you be sad?” Partner: “??? YES, OBVIOUSLY.” Like… you can’t even conceive of it? O_o
Re: parents sucking, if they’re big enough jerks to you that you choose to cut off contact to one degree or another, they are going to be big enough jerks to paint you as the bad guy. When you don’t talk to them, you don’t have to care!
I haven’t talked to my father in 5+ years and it was beautiful. I love him and I don’t even really hold his abusive behaviours against him, but it was just wonderful not to deal with any fucking drama. At all. *sigh of relief*
I wouldn’t have any contact with my mother if it weren’t for the kids (my 13yo brother lives with us 1/2 the time as of last year, I’m hoping to get more influence over my 11yo sister eventually!) Sadly, while we were closer than I was to Dad, her treatment of me has been much more damaging and now she is just the mother of my siblings. She loves me but I can’t love her, though I care for her in a way.
I thoroughly recommend cutting off contact for at least 6 months to people who are anguished by the pain + loyalty + love of fucked up parental relationships! It’s easier than you think!
lol Kitteh. SO TYPICAL.
Oh and I forgot to say HURRAH! to urine (even a little bit of bloody urine), Cassandra.
I haven’t spoken to my father in something like twenty years and my brother in about thirty-five. Good riddance to both of them.
Mads is totally in a “Pay attention to me! Leave me alone!” mood. I have the scratches to prove it! 😀
Sorry to hear about sick pets. And jokes about killing sentient beings are awful.
Re dealing with difficult relations, I avoid my mother and brother (and his wife and children) because of the racist things they say. For my mother, who has been abusive all my life, including physically abusive when I was a child, I can’t emotionally or psychologically deal with her shit any more. The last time I saw her, around at a friend’s house (brother will take mother there, but not his wife and/or kids even though friend and friend’s children have children the same age as his), she made a big deal about how a cat got her free-roaming rabbit. This included details on the rabbit screaming and how he (the rabbit) died in pain under her deck. She knows how I feel about animals, so this was just sick.
Just because they’re my blood relatives, they don’t get a pass on being horrible people. Sadly, it also meant losing a friend who wouldn’t tell my brother to piss off, and knew I was avoiding visiting her because I couldn’t deal with my family being there. Basically, when I was younger, any friend I made both my brother and mother would try to friend them too, like friend vampires. Life is so much easier for me now that I don’t see them, and they don’t know who my friends are.
It is horrifying how many people here have stories about relatives making animal-cruelty jokes!
This. People want to use the “but family!” idea to say they’ve a right to fuck other people around, they should lose the family.
Tangent, but I wonder how many of the it’s-funny/manly-to-hurt-animals brigade are also of the “but you’re killing a BAYBEEEE” mentality when it comes to aborting an embryo?
It just strikes me that it’d be bloody typical if they can’t grasp what a sentient being is (and is not) in that context, too.
To be honest, I’m kinda startled at how passionate the responses have been. But then again, my dad hates cats, and his mom hates/fears pretty much all animals, so yeah.
@Kitteh, and how many of that lot are also pro-death penalty, particularly for non-white people who are convicted (I refuse to call them all offenders, as some of them are innocent). So right-to-life seems to have an end-point. I consider this false advertising, it should be immediately renamed to “right to life for anything I deem to have a right to life”.
Oo, I bet a lot of them are. Or at least deeply uncomfortable with abortion. Probably keep their animals entire and don’t believe in abortion for animals either. OK, now I’m being a jerk but too bad. 😛
Young guys often think it’s SO FUNNY to talk about eating our guinea pigs at work. Because people eat them overseas, get it? -_- You are not edgy, people eating them is not a problem for me but these ones are pets, go away. *rolls eyes*
“It is horrifying how many people here have stories about relatives making animal-cruelty jokes!”
Seconding that — my brother can be a real asshole sometimes, but animals are Off Limits. He’s got more respect for my fish than our father does for the cat (now he’s another matter!)
I can’t imagine people finding the thought of killing pets funny, even my asshole father only goes so far as intentionally pissing off the cat and then smacking her when she claws him (one of these days she’s going to really attack him, and we’ll all laugh that he had that coming)
To quote my brother “she good kitteh!”
LBT – for me, it goes back to what hrovitnir and I were saying in response to deezers’ page about her cats being child substitutes: we’re both of the “I don’t like babies and don’t want one, I love cats and that’s where my maternal instincts go”. I get angry and distressed at cruelty to any animal, but with cats in particular, it’s visceral. I feel … well, think what a loving parent might want to do to someone who tortured their child.
There’s also the element that animals can never speak for themselves and there are all too few humans to do so for them.
Pattern of today:
Cat winds around ankles
Cat allows me to reach down and pat her
Cat complains
Cat walks off and sits looking meaningfully at me over her shoulder
I go to pat cat
Cat purrs/thrashes tail
Cat winds in and out of furniture expecting more pats
Cat runs away
Rinse and repeat
The thing I don’t get about my dad in particular is that he likes animals; at any rate, he is very very fond of dogs (and doesn’t have any particular antipathy to other animals). He apparently just…thinks it’s funny to joke about dismembering them.
Cognitive dissonance? How does he react to actual cruelty if he hears about it?
On the metacam, not doing it. I’ve known far too many cats who developed renal failure after taking it, some after just one dose, and I nursed former kitty through 3 years of that…new kitty is just a baby, I’m not putting her at risk of that. I wish I hadn’t given her even the one dose. Right now we have her on a regular painkiller and I’m trying to get as many liquids as possible into her. She’s eating again now, thankfully. Wouldn’t eat the food she had been eating though, maybe she’s associating it with feeling crappy.
I think he’d be angry about actual animal cruelty and would not find it funny at all. Maybe it’s like dead baby jokes? Never got those either.
“I always feel like I end up being considered the rude one who needs to apologize and change her attitude, even when other people were being hurtful to me, and sometimes when I wasn’t even present.”
I’ve just gone with my inappropriate-for-a-grrrrl attitude and suffered the consequences : / It sucks, but better than always swallowing my normally blunt/honest/it’s-my-goddamn-boundary-so-eff-you personality. And when you start paying attention to the relentless double-standard allowed in that for each gender, it sucks slightly less. Slightly.