im always thinking about that post where someones grandma said “some people have never cleaned a bathroom and it shows” bc it does show
when i was a kid, in 2nd grade (age 7) i and some other kids made a mess in one of the bathrooms at school and the teachers instead of doing the normal canned “punishments” like having to skip lunch recess and sit still inside doing work, had us sit down with the janitors and they talked to us and the janitors explained the work they normally needed to do every day to clean the bathroom, and how what we did created extra work for them. and they took us into the bathroom and showed us what they do and how what we did made it more difficult.
and then they made us clean it all up (with help from the janitors because we were small kids and couldn’t even reach everything, we had like thrown toilet paper high up and stuff) and they were very nice about it and there was no further punishment or mention of it again
and the things i took from this experience were:
i never trashed any shared or public space ever again in my life, even in the smallest way
i developed great respect for janitors which i have kept to this day
i think there are a lot of people who could benefit from this sort of experience.
our society often has so many problems not only because we insulate some people from the implications of their actions, but also because instead of facing them with those implications, we impose outside “punishments” that are often unrelated to the original wrongdoing.
like if they had not done what they did with us, and instead had just taken away our recess and made us do something boring and unpleasant, we wouldn’t have learned what we did and we would have just learned that we need to get better at avoiding getting caught, which is generally how people respond to punishments that are divorced from explanations of how and why what you did was wrong and hurt people. if instead you confront people with those things, they will change of their own accord.
some adults out there are like full-grown children who never learned this stuff. but the solution isn’t harsh punishment like putting them in jail and mistreating them there, the solution is that people need to be sat down with the people who are harmed by their actions and then they can work together to undo the damage, and see firsthand how hard it is.
it is genuinely bewildering to me that adult human beings do not know this but if you are mean to people they will not like you. like tbh they are probably also not going to like you if you are mean to other people but they are definitely not going to like you if you are mean to them. it doesn’t matter if you are funny or if you can use r/aita rules to prove that you are in the right. people simply so not enjoy being treated like shit.
“The report, by the Children’s Society, found that British 15-year-old girls are the most unhappy in Europe.
British girls aged 10-15 are “significantly less happy” with their life, appearance, family and school than the average boy — and their happiness is still declining.
Boys’ life satisfaction, meanwhile, remains broadly stable. (…)
But I still didn’t have an “aha!” moment about why this so disproportionately affects girls until… I talked to some teenage girls.
It was at a party, and I went to vape with them on the patio. Because I take my nicotine like children do.
“Duh — it’s the boys,” one said when I brought it up, as all the others agreed.
“The boys?” I asked.
My last book, What About Men?, had been all about how much boys struggle these days: their loneliness; their suicide rates. I’d spent the past year feeling very sympathetic towards boys.
“Yeah, well, who do you think they’re taking out their unhappiness on? It’s us,” another girl said.
“One boy at school used to draw a picture every day of how ugly I was,” a third girl said. “Every day for two years.”
“They’ve all got ‘Rate The Girls’ polls on their WhatsApps,” the first said. “They mark you down for weight gain, haircuts, what you say.”
“But then, if you’re hot, it’s just as bad, in a different way, because they’ll be talking about how they want to f*** you.”
The girls discussed coping techniques. Bad news: none of them worked.
“The only way you can stop them is if you become ‘one of the boys’ and hang out with them. But then,” the second girl said with a sigh, “all the other girls call you a slut. Because you’ve gone over to the boys’ side.”
“Surely it’s not all the boys?” I said. “There must be some nice boys?”
“Oh, yeah,” one girl said. “But they keep their heads down. Because… well, look.”
She showed me the Instagram account of her friend. Under every picture she posted of herself — smiling in a new dress; with her dog — dozens of anonymous accounts had replied with the most rank abuse.
“Fat.” “Slut.” “You gonna try and kill yourself again, for attention?”
“They’re all boys from her school,” she said. “And look, this one boy tried to defend her.”
I saw a series of messages from a brave teenage boy, posting things like, “You’re all big men, leaving these replies under anonymous accounts.”
As I could see, this boy immediately became a target too. Mainly accusations that he was “white knighting” this girl: “You wanna f*** her, bro?”
“So,” I asked, “you don’t think it’s social media pressure to be beautiful, or the economy, that’s making girls so sad?”
“Well, yeah, them too,” the first girl said. “But, Monday-Friday, 9-3, I’m not on social media. I’m not… in the economy. I’m just with these boys. And no one talks about how horrible they are.”
I thought about another recent report, showing a 30 per cent ideological gap between Gen Z men, who are increasingly conservative, and Gen Z women, who are increasingly progressive.
I thought about Andrew Tate, who has nine million mostly young male followers — and faces human trafficking charges, which he denies.
And I thought: maybe these girls are on to something. Maybe more people need to vape with teenage girls and ask them for the school gossip.”
i’m a writer irl (can’t say who because my agent would rightfully put me into a blender and press the button if i go and out myself as “balrogballs”) and honestly the funniest and most humiliating incident of my life was the time my finished manuscript triggered a plagiarism flag with the publisher for two lines of prose in my literary fiction novel…
…. which was word for word similar to a paragraph in a certain explicit work on FFN starring elrond and his batsman from the hobbit films, aka that one elf that looked like he ate panic attacks for breakfast (i forget his name but it’s Figwit II) where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment.
and if you think i had to sit in front of one if the biggest publishing companies in the world and admit that it was, in fact, me who wrote the fic where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment in order to avoid being wrongly flagged for plagiarism, you would be absolutely correct.
yesterday I told a friend “drown your sorrows tonight but save one bottle to make a molotov tomorrow” and I’m actually very proud of that. might embroider it on a pillow
ALT
amhrancas 