idk if y'all have had this experience but the way cis women talk about hormone cycles triggers my fight or flight response. feels like half the time i see something about your cycle is either an advertisement for an app that tracks and sells your pussy data or thinly veiled “women belong in the kitchen because our wombs are synchronized with the divine hearth” propaganda. straight up gives me the heebie jeebies
#yeah like some info is genuinely helpful to know#like your strength and energy levels can fluctuate based on your cycle#which can be helpful to know if you work out to know when to maybe go easy on yourself and whatnot#but i have seen some weird shit esp on tiktok that’s advocating essentially to structure your entire life and routines around your hormones#definitely one of the most bizarre forms i’ve seen gender essentialism take on
YES this is the shit I’m talking about. i saw some woman on Insta doing yoga while doing a big announcement how she had to go offline for her luteal cycle… like do whatever you want god bless etc. it is good to be aware of your body & how it affects your mental state and all that. but this all just feels so sinister, the way hormone phases are treated like God’s plan for your life? i do not like anything that promotes the idea that “females” are controlled by their hormones and our actions should be directly based on our cycles. & it’s always “divine feminine” “law of attraction” cis women saying this shit. heebie! jeebies!
I feel like I would have been diagnosed with OCD a lot earlier if the vast majority of screening questions (for mental illnesses in general) weren’t based on the person’s perception of their own behavior, in isolation. and what i mean by that is asking someone with OCD “do you wash your hands excessively?” is not a good question.
a person with OCD believes they are washing their hands the correct number of times. it’s not excessive. we believe we’re exhibiting best practices and helping to keep everything clean.
better questions might be, “does it seem like you wash your hands a lot more than your friends or family?” “do you get dry patches or cuts on your hands from washing your hands?” “do you find it deeply distressing, more so than how you’ve seen other people react, when you get something on your hands that you can’t clean off right away?”
being asked “are you overly preoccupied with bugs, symmetry, and contamination?” also got “no” responses from me years ago in my life. what they didn’t ask for, and didn’t know, was what *exactly* I was doing in my day to day life that genuinely ate up my time and mental space to a concerning degree, but I *didn’t know* that other people don’t do this.
“do you spend a lot of time cleaning?” -> no, it’s not a lot. it’s a good amount. why?
“do you become frustrated because it seems like no one else meets your organizational and cleanliness standards - do you often ‘take over’ for other people because they can’t do it right - do new friends seem surprised by how strict you can be about your living space?” -> oh. yeah. yeah I get it now.
if the screening questions on the mental illness test sound at all like “are you already aware you’re mentally ill?” then, shocker, it’s not going to work all that well!
Something that’s awesome about tumblr compared to other sites is that we’re still passing around images and things that people posted on here upwards of 15 years ago like I saw this amazing photo on here earlier with only like a thousand notes and the timestamp on the post was like this time of year in 2010
Everybody is just on here sharing cool stuff that they enjoy and there’s no shelf life on posts here. I love that
