u/labia--majoras--mask

tonight, for one night only, and also tomorrow morning, i am here to answer your questions. (i have had writing block for 3 days straight)

ask me about the mysteries of life and love, the one true answer to solving your biggest problems, how you will die, etc.

I am sure most of us here are upset about this, since the current publicity on the Cornell frat case has stirred up a lot of discourse.

reminds me of the amber heard trial era where everyone was talking about how fake abuse is.

just saw a post talking abt "ohh actually regretting it two days later doesn't mean it's rape."

actually sometimes you replay an event in your head over the next two days, and you remember how many times you tried to say "hey maybe not" or "im not so sure" or tried to wriggle away but were blocked from leaving and are like .... oh that was actually not a consensual experience!

i think there's a lot of men out there who have committed these gray area sexual assault, and they get really really uncomfortable when they realize that they might have actually been raping people.

before i got depressed and lost tolerance for sculpting, i was a master polymer clay artist, and i have basically explored everything that medium has to offer. but most of the techniques seemed to be in service of making the ugliest, heaviest earrings physically possible -- and i know that shit is brittle as fuck too.

who here is actually wearing polymer clay jewelry

EDIT: I am not making jewlery, and have no intention to ever make jewlery. I am not looking for advice on making jewelry bc I am not going to make any. I am not looking for sculpting advice either, I already know what I’m doing. I’m just confused why online content about polymer clay is all people making ugly earrings if no one is even wearing these earrings.

New misogyny technique just dropped! Well, it’s nothing new. It’s the same old slut-shaming tech that already existed, just in a new wrapper. And we will start discussing the new insecurity through its narrow use in the context of slut-shaming before broadening it to describe its use as a general social-control technology (which, to broaden briefly, is a large chunk of what shame is).

Traditionally, insecurity means a lack of confidence/uncertainty in a specific aspect of yourself (e.g.: appearance, intelligence, competence in the workplace) or uncertainty about your standing with a certain person or within a certain group.

I have also noticed insecurity conflated with low self-esteem, but think of insecurity as specific and situational, whereas low self-esteem is a holistic view of oneself as generally unworthy.

I noticed this linguistic shift suddenly when I saw immodest outfits being referred to as “low-self-worth outfits.”

Rather than a skank and her skankly way of comporting herself being called simply immodest or improper or impure, we are now using the rigorous school of TikTok psychology to impugn her behavior.

It’s not that she’s just wearing revealing clothes or being promiscuous, it’s that she is doing this because she doesn’t love herself. Because she doesn’t value herself. Because she is insecure.

And sure, it is indeed entirely possible that insecurity does drive promiscuous behaviors. Perhaps a lady does not feel that she is actually that hot, so she posts a thirst trap online in order for strangers to validate her and her appearance.

But you know what else can lead to someone posting sultry imagery of themselves online? Being like, damn, I look awesome, and then reveling in the attention they get from looking good. You can like and value yourself while still being an exhibitionist and horny.

And here is where one may begin to clutch his or her or their pearls.

B-b-but… if you already believe you’re hot, why would you need to post photos online for further validation?!?!?!

Here are a series of reasons: you’re horny, you like attention, you liked the picture, you’re an exhibitionist, you want suitors to hit on you because you are freshly single, you want to record good pics of yourself for posterity, you like the rush from a lot of likes, or it feels good to receive compliments.

Are some of these behaviors otherwise objectionable? Sure, yeah, hornyposting is arguably still a bit gauche. Wearing revealing outfits to the supermarket is still sorta trashy. Slutty behavior in general is still, to many, breaking social propriety norms.

But “more liberal” sexual behaviors… things that are generally socially aberrant, slightly gauche, and perhaps improprietous have now been attributed to someone being insecure.

A lack of virtuousness — or, more specifically, behaving in socially unbecoming ways — is now attributed to insecurity/low self-esteem.

Let us now broaden the scope of the conversation to interpersonal relationships in general (but, of course, especially romantic ones, since these are the most emotionally salient, and so they bring out the best and the worst in us).

Other things I have seen attributed to insecurity include:

- Staying in less than savory relationships
- Jealousy
- Wanting reassurance
- Bragging/boasting
- Caring about being perceived a certain way
- Being upset by rejection or loss

Again, can many of these behaviors indeed stem from insecurity? Obviously. And many probably often do.

But let us now contemplate other reasons the above behaviors can manifest.

🫧 Staying in less than savory relationships:

- Lonely
- Deeply attached
- Trying to be patient and understanding and forgiving despite them wronging you
- The options are (or seem to be) complete isolation or this less-than-stellar relationship
- Love

🫧 Jealousy/needing reassurance:

- Your partner did or said something specific that made you feel hurt
- Your partner has an inappropriately close relationship with another person
- Your partner repeatedly does something that you have already told them hurts you

🫧 Bragging/boasting:

- You are dripped out and want everyone to notice
- You are trying to impress someone/peacock
- You did something cool

🫧 Wanting to be perceived a certain way:

- You know in your heart of hearts you have a certain trait/characteristic, so when people don’t see you that way, it is shocking and sometimes hurtful
- People regarding you in a positive light confers various social benefits
- People regarding you in a certain light confers various social drawbacks

🫧 Being upset by rejection/loss:

- It hurts to lose someone you love
- It hurts to not get a chance with someone you saw potential with
- It hurts to not get a job/be fired
- Not getting a job/losing a job can cause existential threats to your living situation
- Losing relationships can cause existential threats to your living situation
- Losing relationships means you have to reorganize your life, sometimes radically, sometimes for the best, often for the worse
- Social rejection causes the same circuits to fire as physical pain

That was the long way to say… people can do a lot of unsavory things with perfect emotional logic behind them. It hurts, so you cry. Someone hurts you, so you ask for reassurance. You’re doing something cool, so you look around to see if people noticed — like a kid getting the hang of riding their bike and looking over their shoulder to see if Mom saw.

It doesn’t always have to do with being unsure of your social position or your social standing with another person or within a group. It can. But not always.

Now, calling someone insecure — saying that their behavior indicates insecurity/low self-esteem — is basically shorthand for “you are displaying emotions/behaving in a way that I consider undignified or improprietous or lacking certain social grace.”

And I think it is actually more damaging to call someone insecure than just calling them inappropriate.

It’s a sort of wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing problem. A sort of false care.

Calling out certain behavior as simply inappropriate is straightforward. It can still be incredibly damaging (see: traditional slut-shaming). But there aren’t as many layers. It’s just… doing that makes you seem like a slut, so cut it out.

Again, still bad. But easier to notice — at least, now that it has been in feminist discourse for decades.

Seeing skankly behavior and telling a person, “I am concerned that you do not value yourself because you are doing XYZ,” not only implies that they are doing something you think is wrong but also that they have a fundamental psychological deficiency within them — it positions you as not only a moral authority over them but also a psychological authority over them.

The semantic shift of insecurity has also shifted “I disapprove of you” into “I’m concerned about what your behavior reveals about how you feel about yourself.”

It also collapses the behavioral criticism into one category, whereas there are a lot of negative words to describe unsavory behavior already: vain, undignified, possessive, indecorous, needy, boastful, jealous, attention-seeking, etc., etc.

And now two disparate critiques have been collapsed: the moral value we ascribe to it and what we think motivates it.

I have plainly demonstrated already that these are separate categories. And moreover, disliking a behavior doesn’t give psychic access to the mental and emotional mechanism producing it.

And the final issue is that insecurity/low self-esteem actually do cause a whole slew of antisocial and self-sabotaging behaviors in really intricate and interesting and devastating ways (e.g., Bladee sings in Thee 9 Is Up, “He’s sure that something will go wrong, and that makes everything go wrong”).

Some examples:

- Preemptively rejecting people before they can reject you
- Withdrawing during conflict
- Catastrophizing small ruptures
- Refusing to face someone who is angry with you
- People-pleasing
- Lying to cover up mistakes
- Self-exile as “care”
- Self-fulfilling prophecies of failure (see Bladee lyric)
- Guilt metastasizing into shame (which is where a large chunk of these issues (probably) stem from)
- Shit-testing people
- Distrusting affection
- Pulling away after intimacy and vulnerability
- Turning hurting someone else into such a catastrophe that the hurt person ends up comforting you
- Choosing cruel people because their behavior fits your model of yourself
- Treating forgiveness as ignorance (“If you knew how bad I truly was…”)

These are but some of the behaviors that a person with low self-esteem or an insecure person can exhibit in interpersonal relationships that are extremely damaging to themselves, and especially to the other people around them, that aren’t just the stereotypical asking, “Am I pretty? Am I really?” over and over again.

Instead of “I did something bad → okay, fuck, how do I fix it?” it can look like “I did something bad → this means I am a terrible, irredeemable swine → flee/attack/fawn,” and the antisocial destruction comes from these fight/flight/fawn reactions.

Do all of these stem from someone having a shame attack instead of feeling guilt (as I hypothesized in my ninth bullet point)? Of course, we can’t know the exact mental math rattling within people’s noggins — but from my understanding, a person whose reaction is more of a low-self-esteem-style self-condemnation than feeling guilty and then working to fix it can look a lot like the constellation of behaviors I described in the bullet points.

And trust me, that is way, way, way more antisocial than someone just hornyposting when horny because they’re horny. Like… trust me, being subjected to this behavior can ruin your life…

I’m not going to say that we need to eliminate the new meaning of insecurity… like, the ship has basically sailed on that front… the semantics have already shifted.

But it makes it harder to describe behavior that is indeed affected by insecurity, or by low self-esteem more broadly, when insecurity itself now carries a connotation of moral condemnation. So when insecure comes to mean socially unbecoming, you lose precision in both directions: you falsely psychologize ordinary impropriety and you moralize actual psychological insecurity.

And like... if you want to critique someone’s behavior, either get more specific about it. Use delicate yet precise Victorian adjectives or write long moral philosophy treatises. Or get as general as possible. Just say, “I don’t like this, and so it & you are bad.”

The middle ground where multiple judgments are collapsed is disingenuous, intellectually lazy, and often inaccurate.

Anyway, shoutout to the actually insecure and low-self-esteem men (self-described…) who have made me have to think about these concepts to death… love yall.

💕hugs xor kisses,

labia

trashiest people of all time posting fights with thier partners and families for autopsy. deadly serious ethical dissections in the comment sections. often-unstable OPs who fight viciously with commenters.

really makes you remember that everyone is allowed online and moreover that half the population is indeed of below average intellect (me especially for spending my precious, ever waning time on earth browsing that subreddit).

be honest .

he is an esteemed and accomplished colleague, and it is demeaning to baby talk him.

Like, yeah… someone who is depressed/anxious and hates themselves is indeed more likely to treat you badly. Schizotypal people will alienate people with their extreme and delusional POVs, and thereby alienate others from you when you defend them. And basically all mental illnesses just plain put people in bad moods a lot of the time, and it sucks to be around grumps.

And then there is this ouroboros effect wherein what often alleviates mental illness is solid social support… but the mental illness pushes people away, so you get more sick and harder to support, etc., etc.

One of the beautiful ironies of life!