Usually I kind of think, oh, it’s possible that they both stumbled onto the same beat, most popular stuff is playing around with the same elements so it’s bound to happen sometimes.

Heterosexual men definitely experience emotional abuse more frequently than we would expect. I’ve learned a lot about it in the last few years and it is pretty confronting. I work in a non-clinical role in the mental health sector and started asking clinicians for their help in finding emotional support resources to…

I know someone who is being stalked by an ex-girlfriend and she’s essentially systematically ruining his life, but almost nobody believes him because women don’t generally do that to men. I only believe him because I have first-hand eyewitness knowledge of certain situations that have been lied about. Over time it’s…

I’m Aussie and I feel like most people I know relate to Tan the most, and this is probably why. I love him, especially his segment with Hasan Minhaj. I could have watched an entire series of them together.

I think it’s something about a shared wish for the happiness of other people, too — the desire of the Fab 5 to help people reads as completely genuine, as does the kindness of the people they’re helping, and there’s an intense comfort in that at the moment, when everything feels so divided and hateful.

I agree that when a friend affectionately calls a friend Mary, or if somebody self-identifies using other effeminate terms (eg, Nancy) it’s not inherently offensive and I don’t have any specific problem with that.

I’m telling you that as a woman, I still find the usage as you’ve outlined here misogynistic and think it always was. I understand how it was used. I understand that it wasn’t consciously intended to be misogynist. But it was.

As a woman, it was always misogynistic to use a woman’s name as an insult. It’s just that nobody cared about it back then. I won’t hold it against people who used it in the 1980s, but it’s 2019 now. It’s time to plainly admit it was messed up.

Thank you for pointing out the misogyny.  Now isn’t 30 years ago. We need to move on from these outdated expressions. 

Seriously. I hate to be the ‘imagine if the genders were reversed’ person, but seriously, imagine if the genders were reversed! If a troubled teenage boy was sending a troubled teenage girl a ton of messages encouraging her to kill herself while planning to use her death to get attention and sympathy from his peers,…

Right. This is one of those cases where the more I knew about it, the more I actually felt she bore some responsibility. The Court Junkie podcast did a really detailed, even handed episode on it. More context doesn’t make her seem less culpable.

There’s a wide chasm between causing a war and being a total non-event and this would fall into it — it would still be a big deal to a lot of people, and the potential gay king’s every move would be controversial. I don’t think it has to cause a war to cause them emotional distress.

It seems like people haven’t realised that most of the politics in Game of Thrones was loosely based on the principles of actual European monarchies.

This is what would happen but that wouldn’t mean the media/public/other royals wouldn’t have gross endless discussion about what a problem his homosexuality was for the monarchy.

Charles also does lots of gardening!

They’re not like the US first children. They’re being groomed to be King or Queen one day, and also the head of the Church of England. That is supposed to take precedence over everything. As long as they’re living in a homophobic power structure, there will be enormous pressure on them to sacrifice their personal…

Agreed. The pressure would absolutely come from outside the monarchy. For one thing, a lot of people who are interested in the monarchy are also deeply conservative. It’s hard enough when royals are straight, and it’s fairly obvious that public scrutiny made William and Harry miserable growing up. Paparazzi basically…

Yeah, this made me feel icky considering he’s well known for just trying to quietly live his life outside of his movies. Do we have to focus negative attention on him just because other people have been a little overexuberant in giving him positive attention?

There’s context above pointing out that this film is specifically about the violence of Australian colonial history, which Australia is definitely still very much in denial about. Even when we talk about the mistreatment of the convicts who were exiled here we do it in this very Oliver Twist way, there’s little…

This is very true. I thought I was pretty well educated on what colonisers did to the Indigenous people in Australia but I still periodically learn things that shock and sicken me. A movie that accurately depicted the truth of what we did would make A Serbian Film look tame.