(inspired by friends’ dating app woes)
She didn’t just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn’t reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it’s a non-issue.
She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.
That… That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath…
Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven’t; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I’m being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I’m still living with my folks. Don’t get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I’m fucking around on the internet because I can’t seem to make anything of myself.
and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.
At the risk of shallow psychoanalysis I think we found the root cause. She was taught sex is a bad thing so she constructed an elaborate fantasy world to justify it
That was one part of a whole that a never got anywhere near finding out the entire story. With that and her stories of being damn near abandoned as a child, it really worried me as to what might have happened to her that she never felt free enough to tell me.
I tried to explain, “Like, no, that’s normal.” And she was just insistent that it was not. I didn’t know about the believing herself to be half-succubus until later, but when I found that out, it kind of clicked into place that something happened to her and she just cannot believe that a normal person should enjoy sex the way she does. And that is… Really troubling.
That’s so much to unpack
It really was. While there were bits and pieces of this that came up during the relationship, the bulk of this came out as we were breaking up. She had been abused as a kid, though I’m not sure the extent of that abuse. At the very least, she was abused by being effectively abandoned. She said she fended for herself, mostly eating canned food she got for herself through grade school, things like that.
I was upset for a while, she’s not someone I want anything to do with, but mostly I just feel bad for her. She was traumatized as a kid, she receded into a delusion to try and escape that, and her delusion came to define her to the point where she got incredibly defensive if you tried to challenge its reality. She had said that she tried therapy before but that it didn’t work because she knew better than the therapists how to deal with her problems, and I’m certain what that actually means is that they tried to talk her out of her delusion and she wasn’t having any of it.
I really hope she got the help she needs, but I sadly doubt it.
How old was she? Because, while I don’t doubt the mental health aspect of it all, it also sounds a lot like a young person who doesn’t really know themselves and is desperate to feel special.
I don’t remember exactly how old she was, but we were in our last years of university (I failed out, she graduated) so she was definitely in her early twenties, 22-24, somewhere in there.
And, yeah, no, my amateur and as such meaningless guess of a diagnosis was also that part of the delusion was a need to feel special. She talked about how most other people didn’t know the truth, they couldn’t know the truth, because she had magic power that let her know things about the world that normal humans couldn’t. You get that sort of language in conspiracy theorists and other types of people who want to feel special, they want to be in on some secret that everyone else can’t be. So I’d say that’s definitely part of it. But I also think, especially with her believing in a third parent when she was initially abandoned by her father and effectively abandoned by her mother until her father got custody of her again, I think most of it stems from her trauma as a child. Even that need to feel special, with no real parental figure for many of her formative years (I don’t remember how old she said she was when her father regained custody of her), probably stemmed from that lack of anyone encouraging her.
But, ultimately, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me half of this stuff until we were breaking up. And I’m not a psychologist, and she very much needed one.
I had a brief connection with a woman last year who was similarly deluded but in a different way, but also outstandingly kind, talented, intelligent, etc etc, and she was very open about how much abuse she’d undergone in her life, and it just makes me fucking cry. I’ve never cried about anything so much in my life. It feels like there’s no justice.
That’s amazing!
What was she of you? Classmate? Friend or what?
Started out as co-workers in a university work-study job, had a short relationship.
Ok, ty
Can we go back in time to when this was a sexy body for a man? This is dadbod now. I need the bar lowered back to this so I can have a cheeseburger more often.
I doubt you’d be shamed with a body like this…
Seriously. This is very achievable.
Humble brag. Yeah it’s certainly more reasonable but let’s not get carried away and act like this is easy.
Huh? Dude’s like 20% body fat in that pic with a tad bit of muscle, that wouldn’t even require effort for a lot of guys
You’re on the internet, anything under 50% body fat is unachievable to most
[nerd alert] Shatner was known for starting the season toned and then chubbing out during filming.
He was building mass for the next season!
How do you get that second belly button on your chest tho?
Combat with a giant lizard man, I think
Such unrealistic expectations for male bodies. This is always the problem, right? That men are always fat shamed? Yeah, totally, this was always the only problem.
Yes, get angry about a light hearted body positivity comment because its about men. Not sexist at all. Rage into the abyss at people who propbably agree with you by disparaging them for no reason.
You’d look better if you smiled more often.
Username checks out.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone self-reported this way?
You’re bossy.
It must be your time of the month. Let the men do the talking.
What happened to sexy sci fi?
People realized they could just watch porn
There’s an old Hollywood dictum; shoot for X, cut for R.
Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny:
Interesting take. I’d guess it’s pure commercialism. Deadpool went in knowing it was going to be R-rated, and they broke out the strap on. Most of the movies the article mentions are going for PG-13 so they can sell more toys. That’s my take.
PG13 movies from the 80-90 had sensuality too. They were not so sterile.
Anyway, best example of this phenomenon that I can think of is Casino Royale vs No Time To Die. There’s chemistry and sexual tension between Bond and Vesper since the moment they meet.
Fast forward 15 years and in NTTD Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux have nothing at all. Even though they supposedly have a past and apparently a daughter too. The relationship feels, for the lack of better word, clinical. Like just another checkbox to be ticked.
Thinking about it, you’re correct. The last movie I can think of with real heat is ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ and that’s from early 2000s.
No one is horny? Speak for yourselves, I’m horny all the time lol
I get it tho, movies don’t have characters with any libido.
And, everyone is beautiful? Speak for yourselves there too
The folks responsible for the sexy costumes, Roddenberry and Theiss, died in 1991 and 1992, respectively.
See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheissTitillationTheory
The sexiness of an outfit is directly proportional to the perceived possibility that a vital piece of it might fall off.
This basic theory underwrites Stripperiffic clothing, Impossibly Cool Clothes, and pretty much anything else you stick characters into: what makes clothing sexy is the potential for a catastrophic Wardrobe Malfunction. The Trope Namer is William Ware Theiss, costume designer on Star Trek: The Original Series, who first codified the concept.
…
Though Theiss was a costume designer, according to Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herb Solow and Robert Justman, most of the costumes — following this theory — were actually somewhat more modest before being “improved” by Gene Roddenberry.
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So how’s being a newt working out for you?
He got better.
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This is a win for me, spell me up mommy.
They better hurry up and remake this so Lady Gaga can get the part.
That’s a day negative 10 deal breaker. I can be casual friends with a “witch”, but being in a relationship means I have to pretend I believe that stuff, and no one can keep up an act that long.
It’s as fake as any religion. I mean it is kinda one, I think. I have very little awareness of it, I’m pretty sure witches and wiccans are different, but it’s all beyond baloney, so I don’t really care about the subtleties.
I mean… You don’t have to believe someone else’s beliefs to be in a relationship with them. It happens all the time. I work with a “witch” and she’s like every other normal religious person. Wears a necklace, has a thing on her door, goes to work…
Well I guess it depends on if they were calling themselves a witch because they’re Wiccan, or if it was genuine delusion
It’s all of a kind to me whether someone is into crystals or crucifixes. Honestly, I prefer the crystals folks. They’re less likely to actively and vocally prefer my non-existence. But to be honest, I really don’t see a difference between casting a spell to get a job and praying to jesus to get a job. The more it becomes a major focus of one’s existence, the more problematic it is, but I suspect that both numerically and by percentage, there are fewer fundamentalists on the witchy side.
Just please don’t use the crystals as deodorant (unless you have sideburns in the shape of stars)
His NAME is ALEX!
Counterpoint: new age idiots are also some of the most vocal anti-vaxxers.
That’s a fair point, although I do think they ceded first place in the past couple of years. Unvaccinated adults are now three times more likely to be republican than not. They’re not only numerically outnumbering the new agers, they’re anti-vaxxing from the halls of government and via mass media, as opposed to facebook moms in suburban california who also sell essential oils.
I’d also consider myself a humanist. While I’d prefer to not use such condescending language, that’s nearly exactly how I look at it. Wicca and Paganism are religions like any other in regards to spiritualism, and can be subject to the same types of fanaticism. Personally, I really like Wiccans and Pagans. I vibe well with their leftist tendencies
Maybe my gauge is calibrated differently, but I wasn’t trying to be condescending. At most, I thought a christian might consider it condescending because their mainstream religion was being compared to a fashionable new age fancy at best.
Christians - some of them - think that the existence of Aquinas means that their religion is intellectual at its core, wh i in their minds renders paganism mere cosplay. I’ve had exactly that argument made to me.
In any case, that was just a benign musing. When I condescend to condescend, it’s ridiculously obvious. Apologies for any offense - it was friendly fire.
Is paganism not just cosplay? There’s no continuity of tradition for pagan religions, they just picked it up because it was cool a few decades ago.
The ones I interacted with seemed more to the right in my opinion, but maybe I am too far left already?
I feel like a lot of people on Lemmy suffer from this issue: they see things as right-wing just because their POV is decidedly left. I know the basic left-right spectrum is too simple, but we do need to recognize politics is relative and that just because you are further one direction than someone else doesn’t invalidate the fact that by common standards they are on that sane side of the spectrum.
Well, there are other things too. Like how you are with feminism for example : do you see women as naturally caring and emotional and men as naturally strong and violent and providing? That’s hard right for me. And sometimes the pagan things are about some kind of empowerment or attempt at progress that falls flat into conservative or reactionary ideology.
The most difficult though is about liberals. It depends on where you live obviously. But they tend to consider them center, or even left if they are progressive in any way. Yet I will never consider individualism a progressive ideology anymore.
They tend towards the left, but that’s not always the case for every individual. The ones I know are anti-capitalist, but I’m positive that there are liberal Pagans too
Well, to be fair quantum physics has scientifically proven that to witness something is to change it. So something spooky is going to be part of the human condition. Trying to define the changes that occur when we observe things is a kind of magic. In my humble opinion
So there isn’t anything spooky going on there it’s just that viewing particles involves bouncing photons which of course impacts the particles you’re viewing. Measuring is changing. It’s like if in order to measure mass you had to burn a thing (kind of like how we measure calories), in that case measuring it changes it. Nothing spooky, just an inherently destructive measurement process
Is there really a difference?
It’s a spectrum, Wicca is somewhere between believing in the healing power of certain plants (certainly true) and full on “I can make spells that can hurt you because I watched The Craft.”
I recently went to a “Witchcraft Fair” and there were so many people from every little niche thing. Tarot readers, crystal girls, candle spells and intention prayers, sex magic, literally dozens of different specific ways people did their thing.
Tell me more of this “sex magic” you speak of
Sex is like magic, at least in my experience.
I have never experienced magic.
Is the “healing power of certain plants” about how like yarrow contains a natural antibiotic and you can chew it and put it on a wound if you don’t have access to first aid … Or about how overpriced arnica salve will cure your bad feelings?
Certain plants really do have healing powers, but in my experience every time someone is talking about it they’re just trying to sell snake oil.
sure. there are secular witches and they are generally accepted.
you probably can’t be a secular Christian
Wiccans are deluded though.
Most reasonable people have decided that everyone gets to have an unsubstantiated belief system that goes into the “Religion” slot and it’s not a big deal as long as no one makes it a Big Deal. Reasonable people have decided this because trying to proactively eliminate it is way harder and god-awful than just letting it ride (once again, as long as no one makes it a Big Deal).
This was the best fucking ELI5 of religion I’ve ever read. Bravo.
Reads like Douglas Adams
I love this explanation because it sounds silly, but it’s also exactly how it works.
Too bad the entire thing with religions is that they think it’s a Big Deal.
All the religious are.
If you have to ask, you’ve probably got something that’s a deal breaker for the witch
Like not believing in fantasy?
Nope. You may want to read the real-life accounts of the salem witch trials. Just because they weren’t actual witches didn’t mean they weren’t killed for being witches.
Really depends on her definition of being a witch. For the most part, hell yeah, I’m on board.
Deal breaker for me. Real or no, I don’t fuck with magic.
It’s the magic that turns you off? Not the crazy? Don’t fuck with crazy.
I mean, both? Both is good.
When you realise that’s his idea of formal wear.
Don’t you mean Sandwich?
Because of the aluminium foil…
I’m going to allow this
As a ceremonial magician myself, I see this as a plus.
I support her right to identify as whomever she wants to be.
Also, that’s a really cute outfit.
Can we normalize retro futuristic space outfits?
