(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.
She downloaded Tiktok into her brain. Big mistake.
She fell prey to one of the classic blunders.
Never go in against the Red Cross when blood is on the line?
Inconceivable!
Knowledge passed down from the ancient days of Tumblr…
As someone with a twin with a completely different personality the idea of horoscopes has always been sily
If you think horoscopes don’t make any sense, you’re really going to be boggled by its sister, numerology.
Well to be fair your post does have 10 likes at the moment
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
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!
You need some chicken and broccoli.
(Aka steroids)
TIL.
Is that really a common expression?
It’s more of in-joke about what celebrities say when they’re asked how they maintain a 350 lb 2% body fat physique than a street name.
It is generally a good diet for building muscle and losing weight though.
But so are the steroids, because muscle costs calories to maintain.
I can’t remember the exact joke or who made it. The essence was that rich people call cocaine ‘White Lady,’ regular folks call it ‘coke,’ and poor people call it ‘…but Officer.’
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?
This is a win for me, spell me up mommy.
Never Stick Your Dick In Crazy
Have Them Peg You Instead
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=tt4cR9szMS8&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What happened to sexy sci fi?
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.
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…
You don’t have to pretend anything, I know quite a few couples where one partner is an atheist and the other one is a believer.
But how can you respect someone who legitimately believes in magic?
they’re also human
Love is a chemical process, you can’t really choose who you fall in love with. There are all kind of relationships, not all are based on respect.
Attraction is a chemical process, long term relationships without respect are doomed to failure
Don’t forget that believing in a reality beyond the senses is a religion too. All atheists are solipsists.
I am an atheist and I am not solipsistic, therefore not all atheists are solipsistic.
I don’t believe you’re an atheist, because you believe in reality. That’s religious thinking.
If you want to believe that belief in external reality to your senses requires a similar leap of faith that belief in unprovably extant supreme beings requires that’s fine, but that’s not what the word atheist means. That’s not how people use it. They don’t use it to refer to people who refuse to believe in things requiring faith (as in believing in something that can’t be proven). It is used to refer to people who don’t believe in gods.
Reality is god to realists. That’s what they believe in. They worship it, they obey it, they demand others have the same respect for it. It’s theism.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
They better hurry up and remake this so Lady Gaga can get the part.
Really depends on her definition of being a witch. For the most part, hell yeah, I’m on board.
I couldn’t possibly pretend to respect someone that thinks they can do magic and is almost certainly into homeopathy and astrology for very long, but you do you.
Now, the girls who are like “I just want to make conservative Christians mad,” that’s something to explore.
deleted by creator
If you have to ask, you’ve probably got something that’s a deal breaker for the witch
Like not believing in fantasy?
If you don’t believe in fantasy then your life must be very boring
I can find interesting things in my life without resorting to delusion
When you realise that’s his idea of formal wear.
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.
Don’t you mean Sandwich?
Because of the aluminium foil…
anyone can be a witch of the choose to
That’s a plus for me!
