Well, look, I mean, teens ARE sexual beings. Full stop. It’s not like someone magically flips the switch at 18. And kids possess an idea of sexuality, even though it’s amorphous and doesn’t exactly translate to SEX, per se. It’s an uncomfortable reality, but it is a reality. So denying that isn’t going to help anyone,…

But we can agree that there’s a difference between two 13-year-olds making questionable decisions together and an adult or older teenager taking advantage of a 13-year-old, yes? I’m not yet a parent, but I was a teenager once, not so long ago, and I can very much tell the difference between me as a 14-year-old having…

Follow up: my therapist preeeeeetty much told me I should talk to him about it, so that’s happening in T minus 1.5 hours

Honestly, I think of it more as protecting him. I don’t think he’d try to have me hospitalized or anything like that, but it would upset him, and he’s a sensitive person, so I’ll just keep it from him until it comes up in an unavoidable way. I just kind of think of this as my burden to bear, I suppose.

Yeah, it’s not something people really know how to react to. We’re all so uncomfortable with mental illness in American culture (I’m assuming that you’re in the U.S. as well). I try to be open about the milder parts of my OCD and depression, but honestly the suicidal ideation is something I’ve told exactly two people:…

Yeah, I often feel this way, actually. I’ve got more of the suicidal ideation without the actual will, though. For now I’ve settled into a more-or-less comfortable nihilism. So I don’t really interact with these people either.

Right? Like — that’s nonexistence. I can’t make a decision about nonexistence and nonexistence can’t make a decision about me? But I wouldn’t expect someone making that argument to dig quite that deep into the logic.

I never understand this line of thought. It’s MUCH less emotionally-charged, of course, but pro-lifers will say some variation of “aren’t you glad YOU weren’t aborted?” to literally anyone, and all I can say is “I.......have no way of answering that question?”

I mean, hindsight is also 20/20. While this line of thought was clearly wrong (assuming it was employed), I can also see them thinking they’d only make it worse if they told him no. While we can look back now and see his politics in high school as the insidious foreshadowing of his current position in the Trump…

You gotta kick that shit to the CURB. It’s hard with a kid though, because it’s not like the dishes where eventually someone will cave and do them.

Oh gosh, of course! And he’s related to you and your partner, so clearly he’s smart and has his head in the right place. Masculinity is just an intoxicant, you know? When you have no personal frame of reference for oppression (I’m assuming here! Perhaps your son is a POC/non Christian and I’m talking out of my ass) it…

When he’s a little bit older you could also introduce the idea of confirmation bias (e.g. do the girls REALLY get bad grades on so many quizzes, or do you just remember the ones they get bad grades on?)

I actually had a similar experience (though boy howdy did I meet resistance to this idea in high school). Are you a secular Jew, the child of a single mother, or both? Or, alternately, did you go to Catholic school taught by nuns? I was raised to believe that men are absolutely incompetent and useless and these are…

Look, Hillary Clinton ran a shit campaign in the Midwest. I voted for her too! Even in the primaries. Even in the primaries against Obama. I’ve voted for Hillary Clinton every chance I’ve had in my adult life. But she recognized what we recognized (and honestly what all the make-a-point 3rd party voters recognized)…

Hear me out.

And to the point of “widening the door,” that in this case would mean only driving racing cars that she had designed herself. Who knows if that was an option?

You have to admit that you did lump lesbianism and the mastectomy in with being a Nazi as reasons to find Morris repulsive. Your exact words were “even a Nazi torturer with her openly expressed positions on sexuality and choice to mutilate her own body to fit into a machine is not enough to repulse people[...]” It…

Yes, actually, fuck you and your patronizing tone. “Smug isn’t a cute look,” huh? Excuse me for feeling rightfully superior to a group of people that thinks anal sex will sentence you to eternal damnation.

A lot of other people are already tackling the ways that your statement about this explaining something about Trump voters makes no sense, so I’m just going to ask why exactly you find a double mastectomy and lesbianism to be repulsive? Being a Nazi torturer, yes - but you seem to be lumping all three together and one…

.......so your standard supporter of LGBT rights (which does actually apply here since she was certainly not straight) is stupid? Really?