Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

Nah, it's Japanese fear of naughty bits. I could write an essay on the ludicrous levels of what's censored and not in this country but it would be level 5 in the Erotica workshop due to different levels of what's illegal in the outside world. As a newspaper-level SFW example, there is an ongoing debate on whether drawn (anime and manga) depictions of child sexual abuse should be banned or not:

 

there was a viral tweet series that went aroun on Facebook once (I dont have twitter, but someone had screen grabbed all of the tweets in the thread and shared it as an album on facebook). it was called "weirded things I've masturbated to" (or "most shameful thing I masturbated to") and i kid you not, one of the responses was that they jacked off to the pictures of the body piles in holocaust documentaries.

 

Not gonna hit "like" on that one, but yeah, fucked up people out there.

 

As a Jewish person myself it is funny to think about. My sense is that TV censors genitals for legal/audience reasons.

 

crazy fonts....



i'm sure they are great books, but i cant get past the font! my eyes are already bad... the first one makes me sea sick

 

I can't work out if it'd be a great (candy shop kinda) or very distracting world if one's a foot fetishist?.. Would slippers be lingerie, would flip flops be kinky?

 

Aaargh. When and why did dolls begin to be referred to as 'creepy?' Suddenly, centuries of one of childhood's most treasured and loved plaything is 'creepy?' I'm seeing it everywhere, even on doll collecting sites. FFS. Was it some stupid movie that started this trend? What a loss, if children are being put off playing with dolls because their parents tell them they're 'creepy.'

 

Sometime during the 19th century according to this article.
The History of Creepy Dolls | History | Smithsonian Magazine

 

I think it's sad, to be scared of toys. I mean, dolls were a part of growing up, especially for girls, for generations upon generations. Now suddenly ..oooo...creeeepy.... Which means that the toys cherished by generations will be shunned. I mean, I thought Barbie dolls were ugly, but not 'dolls' in general. Some appealed to me and some didn't.

Ditto clowns. Now suddenly clowns are also creepy. When I was a kid, clowns were funny, and we had many toys made to look like clowns, and loved them. (Emmett Kelly, Bozo, etc.) They were not creepy. However, some movie came along that made them creepy. And that bothers me. Some movie wrecks hundreds of years of clowns being seen as entertaining and funny and very child-friendly. Such a shame.

 

I think it does usually begin with a movie, usually one of the modern so-called horror movies, which are bizarre, and then it takes root through social media, where most people are drones and clones and sacrifice their inner convictions in order to align with the most popular views and garner lots of Likes and Friends.

Memes play into it as well (like the one I posted above... )

 

That's a very interesting article, but while the concept of creepy originated in the 19th century, it's only recently been routinely applied to dolls. I know the article makes a big deal about the 'reborn' baby dolls being creepy ...but what's creepy isn't the doll itself, but the fact that grown women are pretending the babies are real.

What worries me is that the 'creepy' crap does seem to be filtering down to children. I'm sorry, but dolls that adults are now saying are 'creepy' like the main one in the article photo, were dolls that we children happily played with for years. Now some doll collectors are saying that their grandchildren won't even go into the doll room and look at the dolls because the dolls are 'creepy,' and they don't have any of their own because dolls are 'creepy.' I'm sorry, but I don't think that's something children teach themselves. What a total shame. I spent hours playing happily with my 'creepy' dolls with 'staring' eyes, etc.

Today, somebody put up a photo of a little plain Wishnik troll doll, the kind that was popular back in the 1960s, and called it 'creepy.' I was actually angry. Such a banal attitude.

 

Oh, Tropes too. They're another symptom of the same internet culture. How many threads do we see asking how to avoid this or that trope?

Anything and everything that happens more than once in movies or stories has now become a trope, and people think it means you have to avoid it. It's this unthinking knee-jerk reaction.

For example the one known as the manic pixie dream girl (usually identified only by the acronym, because of course everybody knows what MPDG is and how terrible it is, right?) Ok, I totally agree, if something has been overdone to the point that it becomes a cliche, then avoid it or at least make sure if you step into that territory you do it in an interesting way that's meaningful in your work.

But there's a deep powerful meaning behind this trope that people totally miss. And no, just because there's a manic pixie dream girl in a story doesn't mean the author is saying all women are like that or anything so ridiculous. Unless all their female characters are like that.

Men have an inner feminine component in their psyche that Jung called the Anima. Women have a masculine component called the Animus. Their purpose is to show you important things you're neglecting in your life, for instance a man who's too concerned with the boring business aspects of life is missing the zest and the zing, the wildness of it. This will often show up in his dreams in the form of what has come to be known as the MPDG. It's your anima figure, showing you what you're missing and what you need to pay attention to in life. It's something you would psychologically project onto females around you (this is how the anima works).

However, when it became a trend and a cliche then yes, it became important to either avoid it or make sure you understand what it really represents, so you can do it in a meaningful way.

Also of course, the same internet mechanisms that allow all of these ideas to become so over-simplified and ridiculous also allow the spread of simplified ideologies that have come to replace a more nuanced understanding of life, and that plays in as well.

 

Yeah, if you were genuinely scared of them, fair enough. But what I'm sensing at the moment, is a 'trendy' attitude in many people. Oooh, dolls are creepy. Seriously. No. They were beloved toys for generations and generations—and instead of being creepy, were often a child's best friend. What a shame if that aspect of childhood has come to an end because it's now trendy to tell children that dolls are creepy—because of horror movies?

 

The way manufacturers of anything medicinal or germ-killing, such as vitamin pills, live yogurt drinks, anti-bacterial sprays, etc etc, are now not-so-subtely suggesting it will somehow help us in our fight against COVID.

 

24 hour news. Okay we’ve told you what we need to tell you about the Washington protests in about 10 minutes, now we’re going to go round in circles telling you the same thing for the next 4 hours, only we’ll have to add some pointless observations to make it sound important. “In the back...ground you may be able to see the.... police. Some of them... uum... wearing hi-viz jackets. And if I’m not mistaken.... some of the officers have.... blue eyes (puts finger on her earpiece) Yes, I can now confirm some of the officers do indeed have blue eyes....”

 

When my son was a toddler, he was scared of anyone who hid their face. Halloween, cosplay, even cartoons where the characters didn't show their faces would absolutely freak him out. None of this behaviour came from any of the people who he was around as we've always loved clowns. I think some people are disposed to hate masks of any kind on a person's face. It's an innate behaviour for many. That's unfortunate for the clowns.

 

Yeah, there are always people who have individual things that scare them. My sister was scared of nuns in full habits because she thought they were witches! I mean she would scream and run if she saw them walking by. (Okay ... just don't go there....) And me? I used to be scared of seeing pictures of men in beards. I was scared of pictures of Jesus! And I had a Bible Stories book that I refused to look at, because of all the beards! (Ironically, I'm married to a beard!) Who knows? If Jesus had been clean-shaven, I might be religious today.

What concerns me is that SUDDENLY everybody is supposedly 'scared' of clowns. And I mean suddenly. Do you think McDonald's would choose a clown for its symbol today, if it was just starting out? It chose a clown, back in the 1950s when it was starting out, because children loved clowns. Now, suddenly, it seems fashionable for adults—never mind children—to be 'scared' of clowns. It's the faddiness of this phobia that annoys me about this issue, not somebody's individual fear.

 

Man, I'm sure this belongs in the discussion somewhere:

 

Sure people have a clown phobia, and then there are the normies
that aren't bothered by them. Then there is a third party that fetishizes
them. Somehow I don't see how dressing up as Bozo's deranged fantasy
domme and getting spanked with a rubber chicken is all that fun, but
everybody has their weird niche hobbies I guess.