Arguably for a lot of stuff that folk encounter that some count as “subliminal” just means they don’t understand the language and employ of framing devices, juxtaposition, abstraction or rhetoric. We need to start teaching that shit as basic literacy in schools because once you understand them it’s not “subliminal” anymore as it becomes readable text.
The simple presence of an ad in your peripheral vision definitely counts as properly subliminal though and it’s still a menace.
“Being Hot” is never someone’s entire personality. Most of the time it’s just the veneer used to keep people at a distance. There are advantages to not being hot - mainly you are not hassled by people for attention. Getting approached by people who want something from you all the time tends to make one put up walls. It’s easier to be kind when so little is generally expected of you because it’s not being demanded regularly.
Not everyone has the strength to be as nice and polite to the 50th person trying to score their number that week as they are to the first. We as a society spend way too much time dehumanizing people because of this shit. I am not conventionally attractive and I bless my lucky stars that I grew up never being denied affection by family or friends because I wasn’t good looking. I see people at my job talk about the pretty actor folk behind their backs and it sounds just as catty and insecure as the shit people said about me for being unattractive.
I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are just having fun but other times it’s because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it’s lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn’t the way to go about stopping that cycle.
“Vanity makes a person ugly inside” is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It’s moralizing someone’s relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.
Yay for the social sanctity minding one’s own beeswax!
Absolutely LUDICROUS, they always try and walk it in.
The sort of “Band of Brothers” vibe is something I have noticed talking with the two folks from high school that fell that direction that I know. It feels like a high school clique but with parasocial relationships. Like they don’t want the hassle of being king but they do want to be knights lording it over some peasants.
It’s a very common thing for people to equate queerness with other concepts of otherness like “not from my group!” type pearl clutching. Bigots in a lot of places are weirdly more accepting of individual queer folks when they are noticeably foreign and more treat the concept of people being queer as an outside corrupting influence… Nevermind that the existence of queerness is basically a universal. People from non-permissive places really don’t want to believe that their culture will also constantly manifest new queer people. They often believe something along the lines of if they stamp on it hard enough it becomes more rare instead of just more people hiding and struggling in isolation and silence often risking their lives if they misjudge a social situation or dying because of a pervasive sense of dispair.
But no matter how hard you stomp the “problem” never goes away. You have to keep stomping forever in perpetuity. The boot must always rest heavy on someone’s neck and will never touch floor again because there will always be someone there to rise if the pressure ever stops. It’s in part why the concept of people essentially just being “born that way” has been so powerful.
I realize it’s a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it’s actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah… Minimalism is kind of for the rich.
Not… Always… The “you can always come back” thing is not something that you can always count on. Being wholly rejected for trying to be your authentic self can leave some wicked deep scars. It’s always on the wronged person to forgive when there’s a lot of pressure to accept someone back into the fold. It can destroy you when everyone around you just wants to forget what happened in favor of social peace when you have to carry that damage with you. Coming out as trans historically is a lot of people’s last ditch effort to live in that they feel they the status quo is killing them. Sometimes they also look at being openly trans as the last resort failure state but are desperate to find any reason to go on even if the tradeoffs are horrible.
The kicks you receieve when you are at your lowest point you never really forget. Sometimes “trying to make it right with the wronged” means accepting you hurt someone bad enough that you don’t get second chances to try again and having to respect that.
Oh but there is an implied value - superiority. When you give a group of people a descriptive property with no inverse you are basically creating a construct of “assumed default”. This comes with other issues of those falling outside the default having no way to effectively talk about people of the assumed default group without using words that have value judgements baked in. Like if I am calling you “a normal person” the implicit value judgement is that I am an abnormal person. I am “othered”.
This sort of denial of language assumes that a group that you are given tools to talk about never and should never talk about your group back utilizing those same tools.