So, this meme is making the rounds again.

There is definitely a problem with these men, but not the one never-Muslims memers made up. A better caption would be “They think that a man who ‘allows’ his wife or sister to exist in public, where someone might see her and get turned on, is a cuck who won’t go to heaven.”

The Caption Is Incredibly Misleading

Don’t get me wrong, I totally get the appeal of the meme. I love the idea of turning people’s awful beliefs back onto them. I take every chance I get to show people their own hypocrisies. These men represent exactly the type of Muslim man who has made my life and existence demonstrably harder and more dangerous. I want to fight back, too.

This isn’t one of those situations where turnabout is actually happening, though. Interpreting what these men have to say as “you go to hell if you make videos and people masturbate to you” ignores the primary driver of their opinions, which is, surprise surprise, gender. They’re expressing misogynistic and patriarchal beliefs, not gender-neutral anti-sex ones. Erasing their disgusting views on women isn’t exactly helping to combat those very views.

To figure out what they’re actually saying, I had to find the video. While I wasn’t able to find the original comment shown in the meme, I was able to find the likely source, which is a reposted video clip on the Atheist Republic Facebook page.

The comments range from endless variations on the one in the screenshot (lol I fapped!), to generic “religion bad” comments, to unsubstantiated accusations of all kinds of crimes, to straight-up plain old-fashioned racism (like allusions to violating livestock). Can’t say I expected any better from Atheist Republic, where moderation exists even less than God does. I theoretically align with most of the mission statement and beliefs behind Atheist Republic, but the comments. Oh, the comments.

What the Video Literally Says

That the message people got from this video is “female YouTubers go to hell because men masturbate over [sic] them” is, ahem, interesting, given that the video said no such thing. Not even close. There’s a reference to a man confessing that he has masturbated to a hijaabi Youtuber, and there’s a reference to cucks not being able to smell let alone go to heaven, but that’s about it.

I contend that most commenters are reacting to the caption, not the video. Come to think of it, I’m not sure the person who wrote the caption has actually watched the video, either. As proof, I offer this rough transcript, courtesy of me, because Atheist Republic certainly didn’t bother. I watched and re-watched this video at half speed about a million times so none of you have to. You’re welcome.

Notes on the transcript

• I may have missed some things they said or gotten some words wrong because their strong British accents combined with their use of religious/Arabic terminology makes it hard for me to parse them at times. I’m used to hearing these terms in an American, Pakistani, Indian, or Arab (specifically Egyptian, Lebanese, or Jordanian) accent.
• “(SAWS)” is a standard Muslim initialism representing “salla Allah alaihi wa sallam”, which translates to “peace and blessings of Allah be upon him”, a phrase Muslims are supposed to say after referring to Muhammad.
• Some of the repetition was clearly done for emphasis, so I made sure to include it. I left out some exact and sequential repetition that sounded to me like it wasn’t done deliberately.
• For ease of reference, I’m going to call them #1, #2, and #3, numbered from left to right. So #1 is the one on the left in the black kufi, #2 is the one in the middle and directly behind the microphone, and #3 is the one on the right who speaks first. I do know who one of them is, but that’s information that isn’t in this version of the video, so you’ll just have to wait to find out.
• Re the hadith on not being a cuck that was cited by #3, I found it in Sahih al-Bukhari, but it’s about Sa’d bin Ubadah, not Sa’d ibn Muadh. As these Dawah bros love to say when you call them on their inaccuracies, “wallahu a’alum”, or Allah knows best. Full offense intended.

#3
If your wife is coming out in front of people, showing herself, embarrassing herself, being all hysterical and laughing. And all of this in front of people that are just, maybe they’re laughing at her, maybe they’re, some people are perverted, they’re just, lusted by her or something, they’re in love with her—

#1
I actually knew a guy, one hijaabi YouTuber, he actually masturbated over her.

#3
*disappointed, disgusted noises*

#1
Wallahi [I swear on Allah’s name], yeah

#3
That’s disgusting.

#2
Audhu billah [I seek Allah’s refuge, or may Allah protect us from such things]

#1
I’m saying—

#3
Yeah.

#1
Your wives are putting themselves out there in that way, and you got guys who are perving over them—

#3
Imran gets these emails. I can’t deal with those kind of emails. That’s nasty, man. Imran gets that kind of stuff. How do you deal with that, man?

Well, honest, look. If you as a husband, you know that this is happening, and you let them—this is going to be a bit harsh—and you let your wife do that. And the Prophet (SAWS) said that the dayyuth [basically “cuck”, further defined below] will not enter the jannah [heaven]. If you [who allows that] are not a dayyuth, I dunno what a dayyuth is, honestly.

[If] this person is not a dayyuth, then what [is]? A dayyuth is a person who doesn’t have any jealousy to their female relatives. If this person is not a dayyuth—

#1
He lets his wife go out, how she dress, lets men look at her—

#3
The punishment for that is that they won’t enter the jannah nor will they even smell the smell of jannah. And the Prophet (SAWS) said in a hadith that we mentioned before in Sahih Al-Bukhari.

Sa’d ibn Muadh, he said that if I saw someone with my wife, I would kill him. The Prophet (SAWS) laughed and—not saying that you [are] allowed to kill him—but he laughed and said you are shocked about the, amazed about the, ghira [sense of patriarchal possessive “honor” over wives/female relatives], the jealousy, protective jealousy of Sa’d. And in praising this type of jealousy, he said wallahi, I have more ghira, this protective jealousy, than Sa’d. So it’s a praise, because the Prophet (SAWS) had it, and he said wallahi, Allah has more ghira than me. So it’s a praiseworthy attribute.

#1
*laughing* It doesn’t mean you can kill someone.

#3
It doesn’t mean you kill someone.

#1
The point is that feeling of like, this guy’s like watching my wife!

#3
It’s a praiseworthy—

#1
He’s looking at my wife!

#3
It’s a praiseworthy thing. You know, in some countries, just speaking about someone else’s sister, something like, just speaking about her, like how’s your sister, ask something, you can’t do that.

#1
In my culture, I’m not gonna lie, yeah? Like, um, it’s a bit weird to ask “How is your wife?” Like bruv. The guy never seen my wife, man never seen your wife, but just, he’s being nice. Bruv, don’t talk about—

#3
In Saudi Arabia, in Saudi Arabia—

#1
Talking about my wife!

In This Context, Women Aren’t People

To start, the video is addressed to men, not women. This is extra misogynistic in a very classically Islamic fashion. So much of the Quran and hadith tells Muslim men to tell “their women” about religious teachings. Much less of it is addressed to women directly, even when it comes to laws that are solely for and about women. It’s assumed that men are the ones to enforce these rules. To them, of course a woman disobeying Islamic modesty rules is wrong, but whatever man they believe is responsible for her is worse. He’s a cuck who has either lost control of her or worse, is indifferent to or encouraging of her immodest behavior.

In gleefully insinuating that they have beaten it to these men, the commenters have missed an even more disturbing message: Women aren’t people, or at least aren’t as much of people as men are, and are the wards of men rather than have autonomy.

It’s Our Old Friends Toxic Masculinity And Patriarchy

In Islam, there is the concept of a girl or woman’s wali. Wali is sometimes translated as guardian or chaperone, but there’s no English equivalent (old-fashioned “ward”, maybe?). It’s a term built on a thoroughly patriarchal foundation. What it specifically means to call a man the wali of a woman or girl is to say that this man is responsible for this woman in every way and has more authority over her than she does over herself.

These men are saying that if a wali fails to control a woman, he’s a cuck, a figure of disgust and pity, a failure of a man. The message of this video is not ultimately for or about women. It uses women to talk about what men ought to be, and predicates the value of a man on his ability to force the women and girls in his life to do his will. Like anything related to patriarchy and toxic masculinity, it’s really about men, not women. To them, women aren’t worth their consideration.

This isn’t out of line with a lot of beliefs, implicit if not so explicit anymore, among never-Muslims. When I was seen as a woman by the world, nothing I wore, said, or did had any relevance to how much harassment I got. Instead, my one guarantee against street harassment was the presence of someone the world saw as a man, no matter how young, short, skinny, or otherwise physically unintimidating he was. Under a man’s perceived dominion, I was no longer an object, but a real person’s possession and therefore worthy of respect.

The men in this video are saying the quiet part out loud.

Inb4 “No one actually thinks these men believe thAt”

Yes, they fucking do. The commenters are reacting as though they do believe that the caption is an accurate representation of the beliefs presented in the video. Further, I can assure you with 100% certainty that never-Muslims will believe almost anything you have to say about Islam or Muslims as long as what you say aligns with their stereotypes.

I should know. I spent 18 years as a Muslim, a decade of that in hijab, and 17 years after that as a public-facing ex-Muslim, mostly around never-Muslims. Well-meaning bleeding-hearts will argue with me about my negative lived experiences of Islam, while right-wing xenophobes insist to me that I couldn’t have been a real Muslim because I wasn’t a terrorist. If you think I’m exaggerating or referring to outlier examples here, I genuinely envy your charmed life.

It’s to the point where I have to be extraordinarily careful whenever I joke or exaggerate because people will accept it as truth about Islam. In freshman PE, I once joked that “grass stains are against my religion” and was treated to an aggressive interrogation by a classmate who asked me why Islam was against health and fitness. Saying that something you disliked was against your religion was a common verbal meme at my school; that phrasing always indicated that the speaker was joking. It turns out that wearing hijab meant I couldn’t joke like my peers did.

why I care

It’s not that I’m a pedant, it’s the xenophobia. Well, I am a pedant, but that’s not why I am bothering to write and post this. It’s because this kind of inaccuracy serves the widespread narrative of a dichotomy between Islam vs. “The West”. Specifically, if you make Islamic beliefs sound bizarre enough, people won’t understand that they’re neatly aligned with Western patriarchy.

Never-Muslims really want to believe that those scary brown bearded Muzlamics have  beliefs that are incomprehensible to them. In reality, these men’s beliefs are pretty mainstream all over the world, including in Western countries. Trim those beards, replace the kufis with beanies, have them use toothpaste instead of miswak, and translate the words from Arabic jargon into manosphere terminology, and this is literally just Andrew Tate.

Speaking of whom, Andrew Tate has a dedicated Muslim fanbase and even claimed to have converted to Islam at some point. This is not a coincidence. Neither is the fact that the manosphere loves to call men “cucks” and “simps”, and these men use the Islamic/Arabic version of that term.

Masturbating to Memri: Bacon Bullets, But Make It Faux-Feminist

Man #1, addressed as Imran by #3, is Imran Ibn Mansur, aka “Dawah Man”. Even though he’s never said the exact thing the caption claims he did, he certainly has said a lot of choice things about women existing in public, even and especially about women who cover themselves up. Here’s some of it, by way of Memri.

I see this meme as the more allegedly liberal version of the ammosexual “bacon bullets send Muslims to hell” thing. In both cases, some never-Muslim unfamiliar with Islam misinterpreted an Islamic belief, and then made up some way to “pwn” the Muslims they believe hold those views. Also in both cases, the level of ignorance would be astounding if I weren’t long-accustomed to it.

I find this meme more harmful and annoying than the bacon bullets because it glosses over actually-harmful beliefs. Killing someone with a bacon-greased bullet doesn’t harm them any more than if you’d used any other kind of bullet. Making masturbating the point erases the misogyny, which harms the very women with whom the masturbators are claiming to have solidarity.

The Disgust Is Directed at Men, Not Women

#3 says that he heard from a man about masturbating to a hijaabi YouTuber. I buy it. It’s pretty clear to me that Unnamed Masturbator was experiencing guilt about it and, in his attempt to shift the guilt onto whatever man “let” that woman exist online, reached out to someone he believed could help.

If this video were directed at women, I’m sure these men would express disgust at women daring to exist in public. However, here, their disgust is for men who masturbate with, ahem, inspiration from women who aren’t sexually permitted to them in Islam. It doesn’t occur to them to admonish those women because women aren’t full people to them. They expect those women’s fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, or even sons to keep them in line with their Islamic beliefs.

What These Men Actually Think of Your Faps

If they saw your comments, they would be disgusted with you, not convinced they’re going to hell.

Muslim men aren’t obligated in Islam to cover themselves up lest they invoke lust. They are not responsible for evoking lust in women the way women are responsible in Islam for the lust they evoke in men. A woman masturbating to this video would strike the men in it as a sign that the woman has gotten out of line and needs a male relative or husband to control her better. As for men, that’s definitely gay, and to them, homosexuality is a grave sin. In their beliefs, they are not culpable for the sins of a wayward horny woman or degenerate gay man.

Fap to them all you want if you want, but they really don’t care.

The post No, “rubbing one out” to a Muslim man doesn’t make him go to hell appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

[ discussion of puberty, gender dysphoria, and dislike of secondary-sex characteristics traditionally associated with women. body horror overtones/undertones ]

Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post called Everything That My Tits Have Gotten Me in Life.

While I still stand by every word of it, my reading of my own words has changed a lot in the time since I wrote it. As the memes say, big oof.

Misogyny sucks, but, uh, it turns out that sublimated body dysphoria sucks, too.

All these years later, as a happier person on every level, I recognize the seething, coiled resentment hiding under all that hot-take social analysis. That cold-blooded source of venom was motivation to paint the pictures I did in the way that I did. Like all snakes, it was misunderstood and vilified, its true role ignored out of deep-seated fear. I flirted with the idea that I might be trans but backed away in a panic from it for so, so many reasons.

Now that I’ve embraced the serpent, I can see just how bad puberty was for me. It wasn’t just misogyny or religious shame or social norms, it was the secondary sexual characteristics themselves. While I longed to hit puberty, it was in the hopes that I would “outgrow” what adults told me was “baby fat”, gain the respect of adults, and feel more confident and worthy, aka attractive.

Puberty did absolutely none of those things. I stayed fat, awkward, and ignored. And yet, I kept getting promised a better future that never materialized. The pain and sheer exhaustion of menstruation was worse than what I could have expected. “Don’t worry, it gets better as you get older,” soothed the same adults who had also told me I’d get thin after going through puberty. I believed them and was proven wrong again. Age adapted me to my period, but it stayed brutal.

Growing hips felt like my body’s worst betrayal because no one warned me about it. I was confused and angry about the strange jutting things when they emerged to disrupt the even sides of my torso. What were these unasked-for protrusions? Was it too late to put them back? Surely they had been hiding somewhere before and they could be forced back in? I felt ugly, asymmetrical, strange.

Then there were the even-squishier protrusions that were my boobs.

Even though they were expected and not shocking, I resented my breasts from the beginning. They were never the “cute” youthful, pre-pregnancy ones that the older women I knew sighed wistfully about. They sagged and bore stretch marks years before I had even hit my teens. They made my shoulders and back sore. They got in the way. They were big enough to make me ashamed but not big or full enough (especially on my fat frame) to have people consider me especially sexy or busty.

The only times I enjoyed them were when they provoked the reactions I wanted from the people I wanted. Otherwise, I wished for nothing more than for them to retract into my body when I was done exhibiting them for some purpose or another. They felt like an accessory I was always forced to wear even when they didn’t suit me or fit me, which was most of the time. Even when they turned others on in a way I intended and sought, they never turned me on regardless of the type of attention they were given.

Meanwhile, the changes from testosterone have made me feel happy, even the uncomfortable or less “attractive” ones. They feel expected, chosen, and consensual, where First Puberty felt like being forcibly morphed by something I never asked for and never understood. I’m a smelly, emotional, horny, neck-bearded, body-hair-covered, head-hair-thinning, pimply, insecure greaseball and it’s absolutely divine. It’s gotten even better as the intense initial puberty phase has let up some and I’ve adjusted.

Being a happier person has also meant I hate my breasts a lot less. They didn’t ask to grow on my body, any more than I asked for them to grow on my body. They did nothing wrong. Like an old roommate whose annoying habits fade into pleasant nostalgia after you move away from them, they are no longer my enemy.

For me, top surgery will be an amicable, mutual breakup from a long-term polyamorous relationship. Leftie, Rightie, and I have had a good run as a triad. 20 years is a really long time to stay together! We’ve grown and developed a lot together. They’ve shaped my life as much as I’ve created them. They’ve especially been very good wingmen/wingwomen (FYI they’re genderfluid) to me. A little shake and shimmy, the right top and bra… the look certain people got in their eyes upon beholding them was certainly enjoyable, as was what would sometimes follow.

However, it’s time for us to move on before I start perceiving them as a burden in this new phase of my life. They were never a great fit, and they’re starting to become a safety hazard. I’d say we’ve drifted apart, but they’ve always drifted apart from each other whenever they weren’t being forced together by a wire contraption anyway.

The post Everything My Chest Got Me in Life: Revisited appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

Update 23 Dec 2020: This is one of my most popular posts ever. It looks like I’m very much not alone! I’ve added info about n-ha to the Carifree description. I’ve also added my review of Kingfisher Fennel and Tom’s of Maine Strawberry Fluoride rinse.

My latest stuck-at-home low-stakes project is finding a good non-mint toothpaste with fluoride. The extreme flavor of mint toothpaste makes me balk at brushing; what if I want to eat or drink or sleep not long afterwards? Mint sometimes is a sensory nightmare for me, so I’ll avoid it especially when I’m already stressed out. Not brushing is already easy enough to do when stuck at home without a routine and without external motivation to de-stink your mouth for others’ benefit. Having nice-tasting toothpaste — or even just not painfully-tingly toothpaste — means brushing more regularly.

Here’s the tl;dr list of not-overly-minty fluoridated toothpastes that I recommend.

• Top Overall Pick: Twice Twilight
  Though its flavor is described as “peppermint with vanilla and lavender”, it’s incredibly gentle and pleasant with very little mint. Available online or at select CVS locations.
• Truly mint-free, for special concerns: Carifree CTX4 Gel 1100
  A unique re-mineralizing formula that keeps your teeth plaque-free for an almost disconcerting amount of time. Both the Citrus and Grape flavors are fully mint-free. Available at multiple online outlets.
• A mint-free, not-too-sweet kids’ toothpaste: Tom’s of Maine Outrageous Orange Mango
  I wasn’t impressed by it but others seem to love it. Available at some retail stores and online. Be sure to get a fluoride rinse if you’re not a very young child and you plan to use this as your primary toothpaste.
• Best traditional adult toothpaste: Colgate Active Lemon & Salt Healthy White Toothpaste
  Made for the Indian market, it’s a pretty standard toothpaste but without the harsh mint. I found the lemon to be pleasant and the mint to be almost not there; I couldn’t taste the salt much at all. Available online if you’re outside of the Indian market.
• Most interesting flavor: Kingfisher Fennel Toothpaste
  Don’t buy this British toothpaste unless you know you love fennel. I love fennel, so I love this. Available online if you’re outside of Britain.
• Easiest to find: Arm & Hammer
  Though I’ve not tried it, enough people I know have recommended the brand to me that I feel fine about endorsing it. The lines specifically mentioned to me were Arm & Hammer Essentials, Arm & Hammer PeroxiCare, and Arm & Hammer Sensitive. You can find it pretty much anywhere toothpaste is sold.

Note: If you are concerned about the vegan and cruelty-free status of toothpaste, see Ethical Elephant for a list of brands. The list should include Twice as it’s both cruelty-free and vegan. Kingfisher is also listed as fully vegan on their site.

Far too many details regarding my toothpaste quest and experiences, including the ones I recommend you avoid, are below the fold.

The year I was first allowed to decide what kind of toothpaste I wanted to use all by myself and all for myself was 2007. The very first tube of toothpaste I bought came in a delicious citrus flavor. I loved it. I got the citrus mouthwash, too.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being ruined for life for all the other toothpastes.

I had stumbled into that strangely small yet oh-so-adult decision about personal oral care during what turned out to be a relatively narrow window. A few mainstream brands made non-mint toothpastes with fluoride for adult for about a decade, in varieties like citrus, vanilla, or cinnamon.

Then, they were all discontinued. Lack of demand, the brands said. Yet I know that I’m not the only adult chasing that not-having-my-mouth-burned high. There are petitions and tweets and blog posts and forum rants from people eager to buy non-mint toothpastes.

It’s not all talk, either. The niche toothpaste market is absolutely exploding right now. I found out because Facebook and Instagram keep showing me ads for bougie dental products. This stuff comes in packaging so chic that the tubes and vials and tubs rival the fanciness of the very skincare that, I suspect, led the social media sites to show me the ads in the first place.

And oh, the flavors! There are spices like chai, neroli, lemongrass, neem, myrrh, anise, fennel, clove, ginger, nutmeg, and cardamom. Juicy fruit notes like peach, pineapple, mango, cranberry, and watermelon. Florals like juniper, daisy, hibiscus, jasmine, and rose. They sound less like mundane toothpaste I’m forced to use to keep my teeth and more like delightfully fancy beverages. Some even come in pellet or tab form, which is less messy and involves less packaging than tubes. There was a luxe Japanese brand for a minute that sold no fewer than 28 fancy varieties.

Alas, these niche brands make a point of not including fluoride to their toothpastes. So the ads mock me as I scroll and lead me to look up toothpaste, which in turn means I see more ads.

And how much have I been looking up toothpaste lately! Finding currently-available non-mint toothpastes that have fluoride is challenging, since most fluoridated toothpastes don’t advertise themselves as such (fluoride is considered standard). Meanwhile, their very lack of fluoride is a selling point for the aforementioned hippie toothpastes. You know, the ones that come in all those great flavors.

I don’t give up easily, though. I crowd-sourced and researched and asked around and dug into it, even trying out some of the options. If you don’t want to blast your face-hole with aggressive mint, but do want to have effective tooth care, you’ve got a few options, which I’ve arranged from what seems to me to be the least fussy, all the way to options with multiple steps.

Keep in mind that none of these options is ever going to be as cost-effective as just getting whatever Costco has or whatever’s on sale with a coupon. You definitely want to use the amount you actually need rather than what looks good in ads when you’re spending this much money, time, and effort on a basic daily product.

Gentler Mint

Not all minty toothpastes are so harshly minty that you might as well be brushing with Listerine. It’s not even that hard to find, you just have to know what you’re looking for.

I’ve used Twice Early Bird, the only bougie toothpaste advertised to me that actually has fluoride in it, and it’s fairly gentle and mild. You can find it online or at CVS.

As a general recommendation, mainstream brands sometimes will issue a toothpaste intended to be used at night. The mint flavor is lighter in those lines. The packaging tends to be darker and include a moon or bed logo. They go by names like nighttime, bedtime, twilight, after dark, or evening.

Sensitive tooth formulas tend to be gentler rather than burn. My spouse has used Sensodyne for years. Whenever I’ve borrowed it, it’s never burned me as much as the regular stuff, especially the varieties not specifically advertised as mint. You can find it anywhere. We get it at Costco.

Other leads for mint toothpaste that doesn’t overwhelm:

• Transitional kids’ toothpastes, intended to take older kids from the sweet flavors of childhood to the harsh mint of the grown-up world. One example of is Tom’s of Maine Wicked Cool Mild Mint, available at Target or online. Depending on its fluoride content, you may want to follow up this type of paste with a fluoride rinse (see below).
• Arm and Hammer. Multiple people I know have recommended the brand as effective without being harsh. The lines specifically mentioned to me were Arm & Hammer Essentials, Arm & Hammer PeroxiCare, and Arm & Hammer Sensitive. You can find it pretty much anywhere toothpaste is sold.
• If you’ve ever had any kind of oral piercing, you probably know about Biotene mouthwash. There’s also Biotene Toothpaste. You can find it at most drugstores or online.

Children’s Toothpastes

Lots of toothpastes intended for kids are fluoridated and come in fun flavors. The downside is that they’re often really, really sweet and come in flavors I loathe, like bubblegum or generic fake-tasting “fruit”. If you like that kind of thing, though, there’s nothing wrong with using kids’ toothpaste as an adult. It has slightly less fluoride, but that’s unlikely to cause much of an issue. Just be sure it’s not the toddler/starter kind, which has no fluoride. You may also want to use a fluoride rinse (see below) since the children’s stuff has less fluoride.

A repeat recommendation I got was for Tom’s of Maine Outrageous Orange Mango. I purchased it online, as no retailer near me had it. I was disappointed by it. The thin formula doesn’t foam up very much nor does it do a great job of cleaning. On top of that, it’s made with several acidic fruit juices, which makes me question how healthy it is for brushing adult teeth. I won’t be using it again.

Other leads on kids’ toothpastes that aren’t bubblegum or fake-fruit flavored:

• Tom’s of Maine Silly Strawberry or Tom’s of Maine Fruitilicious (just be sure it’s the fluoridated kind, as ToM makes fluoride-free versions of the same flavors). It can be found at some retail stores (you can check Instacart for availability in your area) or online.
• Tanner’s Tasty Paste comes in chocolate or vanilla. It’s exclusively found online via Amazon or eBay.
• Hello Blue Raspberry, Hello Watermelon, or Hello Wild Strawberry. Find it at Target or online.

Cinnamon

I do not care for the burn of cinnamon in mints or toothpaste. Some people do.

• Tom’s of Maine Cinnamon Clove can be found online.
• Crest Complete Whitening Plus Cinnamon Expressions is available at some stores (check Instacart) or online.

The White Whales of Toothpaste

Here it is, gentlepersons. The toothpastes you and I want, those holy-grail the white-whale varieties: Not-Primarily-Mint Non-Cinnamon Toothpastes with Fluoride for Adults, tested and reviewed for your edification.

Caveat about my reviews: My oral care habits and preferences might not match yours.

• Once a day, I floss, then brush with a circular Oral-B electric toothbrush fitted with inexpensive knock-off heads I get on eBay, and then scrape my tongue. I don’t often brush at night and it’s never caused me problems. If you brush more or less often, your experience of a toothpaste’s efficacy will differ. If you don’t floss and tongue-scrape daily, and/or if you use a manual toothbrush, you’re likely relying more on your toothpaste for freshening power than I do.
• I don’t use mouthwash very often, maybe once a month. If you like to use it as part of your oral care routine, you won’t need your toothpaste to be as freshening.
• Thanks to a combination of genetics, electric brushing, luck, and excellent childhood dental care, I have good teeth. Though my dentist visits are short and uneventful, I do go at least once a year (twice if my insurance is in order). If your teeth are more prone to issues than mine, and/or you haven’t/don’t go to the dentist as much as I do, you probably need more out of your toothpaste and other oral care products than I do.
• I can’t attest to the whitening power of any product because I actively avoid thinking about tooth whiteness. I generally avoid whitening products because I care about the long-term integrity of my dental enamel more than I do about having a perfectly-white smile.

Top Overall Pick: Twice Twilight

Twice is explicitly anti-pseudoscience (!) and pro-social. Thought it’s not the cheapest, you can buy a small size to try it first and cancel the subscription if you don’t like it. As mentioned above, as far as mint toothpastes go, the Early Bird mint version pretty good.

The Twilight variant, intended to be a nighttime toothpaste, is a true White Whale. Though it’s advertised as “bold peppermint, smooth vanilla and a touch of lavender”, the mint is barely there. It works like a high-quality version upgrade to standard toothpaste, a smooth formula that foams up nicely when you brush and leaves your mouth feeling clean but not minty.

My only complaint is that I’d likely eventually get tired of it, since vanilla and lavender are a little boring as far as flavors go. Add the fact that my partner’s partner is very allergic to lavender, and Twice Twilight can’t be the one for me. It is my top overall pick regardless.

For Special Concerns: CariFree CTx4 Gel 1100 Citrus

I discovered CariFree CTx4 Gel 1100 when I was looking into alternative options for my husband’s sensitive teeth and was excited to see a Citrus variety (it also comes in Grape in addition to regular old Mint). This stuff supposedly builds and re-mineralizes teeth using Nano-hydroxyapatite, aka n-ha, rather than soothing or numbing tooth pain the way Sensodyne and the like does. My spouse hasn’t used this for long enough yet, so I can’t speak to its longer-term effect on sensitivity. He does like it so far, so I tried it.

As far as the taste goes, it’s as mild as it comes, barely having any flavor at all, which rather disappointed my citrus hopes. Setting aside flavor, it’s as effective as it is odd. It feels kind of gritty and doesn’t foam up. It’s runny, but a little bit goes a very long way. So long, in fact, that I straight-up got distracted and forgot to brush the next day. My mouth may not have felt as freshened right after I brushed, but my teeth stayed smooth and plaque-free and my breath neutral for a whole extra day, as in I used it one morning, slept, woke up, and went through a full day with a clean mouth.

This wasn’t what I was looking for, but it filled a niche in my household regardless. If you have trouble brushing daily, are especially prone to cavities, and/or have sensitive teeth, this stuff could be very helpful to you. As far as I know, you can only get it online.

It’s not the only toothpaste out there that has re-mineralizing ingredients, although it’s the only one I’ve found in non-mint flavors; Apagard and Linhart both have similar active ingredient claims and are both described by reviewers as less harshly minty than other toothpastes. Could be worth a shot.

The Classic Citrus: Colgate Lemon & Salt

Finding Colgate Active Lemon & Salt Healthy White Toothpaste sent me down a bit of a non-US toothpaste rabbit-hole. Mint toothpaste obsession isn’t universal, it turns out. In India, and possibly other countries, it’s not difficult to find toothpaste flavors for adults that would be considered wacky in the US. The ones that tend to make it to US sellers, alas, tend to be the fluoride-free ones, imported for woo reasons.

I did find and try this one, though, and I like it. It’s your standard toothpaste in both formulation and feel, just lemon-forward instead of mint. I couldn’t really taste the salt, which is a plus. There’s nothing special about it other than the taste, which I’m enjoying enough to know I’ll finish the tube. If I drink something citrus-y after, the toothpaste enhances it.

To round this one out, here’s a tidbit on a toothpaste intended to be sold outside the US via a Facebook comment:

the previous drug product my company was working on was a toothpaste that had to be non-mint (because we wanted to market in China, where mint is not popular) and i did extensive formulation taste tests before making a watermelon-lavender-berry toothpaste

The Weirdly Good: Kingfisher Fennel

Update [23 Dec 2020]

I grew up chewing on fennel seeds after meals to freshen my breath and aid in digestion. As an adult, I’ve developed a real taste for fresh fennel bulb and fennel fronds in my food and as DIY tisane. I do a happy dance when fennel is available in my produce box. Saying “I love the taste of fennel” is a complete understatement. So, I absolutely had to try Kingfisher Fennel Toothpaste even though I’d already long published this post.

Kingfisher is a British brand. They make flouridated and non-flouridated (UGH) versions of their toothpastes, so if you’re buying it, be sure you get the right kind. Unlike some American brands that do this, theirs are helpfully color-coded so that you can immediately tell on sight if you’re getting the woo or non-woo type.

The texture is a little runnier and grittier than standard toothpastes, but it’s not bad. It left my teeth feeling a little odd, but again, not horrible. As for the taste? It tastes very much like fennel. If you like fennel, you will like it. Make sure that if you’re eating or drinking not long after brushing that whatever you consume doesn’t clash overmuch with fennel.

And now I’m semantically-satiated on “fennel”.

The Ones I Didn’t Try (And Why)

There’s at least one Korean Beauty toothpaste brand with some intriguing fluoridated flavors. Bonabits comes in Royal Lemon Herb, Noble Peach Blossom, and Velvet Rose Apple Balm. They sound as fancy and awesome as can be. At a whopping $15 per small-ish tube, though? Hmm. I’ll update with my impressions if I ever succumb to that expensive temptation.

The Hell No: Hell(N)o Activated Charcoal + Matcha

I hate the activated charcoal trend. It’s harmful as heck, especially now that people are using it as toothpaste. Activated charcoal is too abrasive to be very good for your teeth, isn’t that good of a whitener in the first place, and might even render the fluoride inactive — that is, if your trendy toothpaste even has fluoride in it to begin with.

I tried this toothpaste anyway. I’m not linking to it because that would be promoting my irresponsible choices. My reasons were: It’s available at Target, which has a good return policy. It has fluoride but is also made with a really popular and trendy ingredient. It’s from a brand people seem to love. The flavor intrigues me. One little attempt couldn’t hurt me, as I’m not on any medication that would be affected by exposure to activated charcoal.

My first disappointment of many with this stuff came when I picked it up at Target and looked at the box, which advertises its fancy mint sourcing. So is it just mint but with extra steps, along with being pseudoscience? Turns out that the one good thing I can say about it is that it’s not very minty. It’s runnier than regular toothpaste and looks pretty dark. It tastes strange, starting with not much of anything but ending with a gritty aftertaste of cheap matcha tea dregs mixed with charcoal. It foams up some, though not as much as a standard toothpaste. The cleaning and freshening power is middling.

Its relatively high rating on both the Target and Hello sites absolutely flabbergasts me. Who wants this? Who was it made for? If you want a charcoal toothpaste, you probably don’t care about science and therefore would be indifferent at best to the presence of fluoride. If you want a fluoridated toothpaste, you care about science and therefore wouldn’t want activated charcoal to render the fluoride useless. I feel really bad for the person in the reviews who got it because it has fluoride and she doesn’t have fluoride in her water source(!).

Please don’t get this stuff. If you really want to try it, I’ll mail what I have left to you (4 oz minus a couples of little dabs). I’m serious. I have no idea what to do with this tube of toothpaste that I will never willingly use again. Two tries and my teeth actively look worse.

Fluoride Rinses

One of my friends suggested using whatever hippie toothpaste you want, then adding a fluoride rinse at the end.

That defeats the purpose for me. If I get fancy toothpaste, I don’t want to replace its taste with another one afterwards. I also don’t want to add to the market for fluoride-free toothpaste. There’s a reason I refuse to link to any exclusively fluoride-free brands (and am annoyed about Tom’s of Maine and Hello and Kingfisher). I want to avoid supporting their anti-scientific stance against what is actually a very beneficial additive.

However, if a stance isn’t your priority and you want to use one of those toothpastes, or if you choose to use a children’s toothpaste, you’ll need a fluoride rinse. Here are your non-mint options, none of which I’ve tried.

• CariFree CTx3 Fluoride Rinse Anti-Cavity (Citrus)
  From the same people who make the odd yet effective toothpaste I recommended above is a rinse meant to help strengthen teeth. Like the toothpaste, it’s probably helpful to those with sensitive teeth, who are especially cavity-prone, and/or have trouble brushing often enough. Available at various online outlets.
• Tom’s of Maine Silly Strawberry (children’s)
  A non-mint rinse available at some Target locations and online.
• Hello Oral Care Kids Fluoride Rinse, Natural Wild Strawberry
  This brand makes the toothpaste I don’t recommend, but this might work for you. Available at some Target locations and online.
  Update [23 Dec 2020]: I found it on the clearance rack at the supermarket, so I tried it. I absolutely abhor overly-sweet fake strawberry flavor, but this isn’t that at all. It was actually very pleasant to use after brushing and left only a faint, slight taste that faded gently.

By happenstance, I did end up trying the fluoride-free toothpaste followed by a fluoride rinse method. At my local discount market, they had Schmidt’s Coconut & Lime Toothpaste along with Listerine Nightly Reset Mouthwash in Twilight Mint. The toothpaste didn’t foam up and was very thin. It did an average job of cleaning, but not of freshening. The flavor was very faint and nearly undetectable. I won’t be using it again. The rinse felt about a quarter as minty as regular Listerine, starting off very gentle and mild then peaking about ten minutes after I spat it out. So, as I suspected, it was mint with extra steps, but at least less painfully so.

The post My White Whale: A List of Non-Mint Fluoridated Adult Toothpastes appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

I’m going to be running an online trivia fundraiser for Skepticon in about a month and I need play-testers.

The only requirements are that you:

• have a Facebook account (I’m running it via private FB group)
• are capable of not leaking the content to anyone at any time prior to the event, and
• want to do it.

That’s it! You don’t even have to know what Skepticon is, be good at trivia, or anything like that.

I’m also open to your ideas for questions and topics that you think Skepticon attendees would enjoy. I’m happy to credit you for it if I use it.

The post Skepticon Trivia Fundraiser: Play-Testers Wanted! appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

Someone posted something on that endless source of schadenfreude, r/AITA (Am I the Asshole?), that made the rounds yesterday. Most of the responses I saw to the situation rubbed me entirely the wrong way. I immediately saw the situation as one arising from arranged marriage culture, likely Desi, and few to no responses seemed to take that into consideration.

I know, big surprise. Reddit, known for harboring mostly white people and coddling the worst of white men, doesn’t understand Desi arranged marriage culture. At the same time, the responses I saw on Twitter and Facebook were no better, even those from non-Desis who claimed to understand arranged marriages.

It turns out that I 100% called it. The AITA OP revealed herself to be Indian several updates in. If you’re not from an Indian or similar culture, you’re probably missing a great deal of context and understanding, and therefore misinterpreting a great deal about the post. I don’t care how many Desis you claim to know and love.

While this is just one post on the Internet, the way people interpreted it reveals a lot about the difference in mindset between typical Western dating/love marriage culture and Desi arranged marriage culture. While I wouldn’t say OP is some kind of angel, she’s not exactly the mustache-twirling villain Reddit and others decided she is.

Read the post first (this is an archive link in case of removal). Note your reaction to the terminology, people, and dynamics involved. Now, let’s break it down.

Arranged Marriage

The general response’s disregard for how OP’s now-husband was engaged as part of an arranged marriage situation stands out to me. I saw multiple non-Desis claiming that arranged marriages aren’t so bad as per their Desi friends, who said they had a lot of agency in the process. There was an assumption that if someone is in the US, as in the case of OP’s cousin, then they have complete free will and agency and aren’t subjected to pressures from their home country.

Because OP (and frankly most Desis) are invested in rendering arranged marriage culture palatable to outsiders, they’ll often paint it with a softer brush. They also assume outsiders are subjected to the same level of social pressure to conform as Desis are.

The reality is obviously more complicated. The details of how an arranged marriage works depends on the family and community in question. There is a lot of variation in how much pre-marital contact is permitted between prospective spouses, how empowered someone feels in saying yes or no to a particular match or to any matches at all, whether someone believes their family would accept a spouse they found for themselves, etc.

There are some things that are generally different for arranged marriage culture, which greatly affect what people from dating culture might think about the situation.

Dating

In arranged marriage contexts, when your parents introduce you to someone and you say yes to dating them, you’re not saying “Sure, I’ll give it a shot! Let’s see how this goes, shall we?” You’re saying “My initial impression of this marriage prospect is positive, and we’ll get engaged soon unless spending some chaste time together reveals a big red flag I can use to gracefully say no to them.”

Dating, then, isn’t an end in itself. You don’t date to find someone you might want to be in a relationship with, then maybe eventually promote that relationship to an engagement, which you then hopefully end by marrying the person, and then perhaps stay together rather than divorce. This type of dating is meant as a straightforward path to a lifelong marriage. You’re dating on a deadline with all eyes on you.

Those eyes are often literal. Dating may be chaperoned either directly by a person or indirectly by social norms, meaning very little or no chance for sexual activity and other forms of intimacy many people associate with dating. Even if the opportunity comes up, one or both members of the prospective engaged couple may not feel it’s worth the social risk to get physical.

Cheating and Ending A Relationship

A lot of responses said that OP buried the lede and that, as a filthy dirty rotten cheater, she should expect not only for her father-in-law to loathe her, but also for her husband to cheat on her and everyone to revile her forever. Why didn’t OP have her now-husband break up with his fiancee first?

The answer, of course, is that it wouldn’t have been easy for him to call off his engagement after having already agreed to date and then become engaged to OP’s cousin.

In an arranged marriage context, one half of a couple doesn’t get to just end a relationship. Everyone and their mother is, at that point, already involved with the relationship, which is seen as a union between two families. Even if he had said “Mom and Dad, I’m in love with someone else and need to end my engagement,” they likely wouldn’t have accepted his feelings as a valid reason to break it off. The cheating was probably his only truly viable escape hatch. His parents couldn’t refuse his decision if he’d already been caught with someone else.

Getting caught cheating with someone probably limited OP’s socially-acceptable responses, too. Word gets around. Just being “too picky” or willful about offers of marriage as a woman is frowned upon, so imagine the damage that having a clandestine affair did to her reputation. She may have felt that marrying him ensured she could get married at all.

On a related note, for all the blanket, aggressive condemnation of cheating I see from dating culture, cheating is used as an escape hatch within it, too. In dating culture, to “fight” for a relationship that’s harmful to both parties and dead in the water is seen as a virtue; longer relationships are seen as valuable based on their longevity alone with no thought as to the happiness of the people involved. Given that you’re supposed to stay in a relationship no matter what and are seen as a morally-superior person for doing so, it’s no wonder people cheat to get out of a relationship.

“Inappropriate” Relationships

Context makes OP’s suspicions about the relationship between her father-in-law and cousin both more and less understandable.

One the one hand, since breaking off a relationship is a bigger deal involving more people in arranged marriage culture, it might make sense that the father-in-law would maintain contact with a young woman he looked forward to having as a daughter-in-law.

On the other, there’s a lot of social precedent for being suspicious of this type of relationship. Having a close relationship with someone of the other binary gender who isn’t a direct relative is seen as inappropriate, period. This is especially true when considering a man’s investment in a prospective daughter-in-law. Older men marrying their sons off to women with the intention of sexually coercing or assaulting the daughter-in-law is a known phenomenon, and more likely given how common it is for a new couple to be living with the husband’s extended family.

Less sinister (though no less creepy) is how prospective fathers-in-law might evaluate a future daughter-in-law’s suitability. These men aren’t generally picking future daughters-in-law based on deep personal connections or conversations. They’re probably using superficial criteria including, if not always limited, to physical attractiveness.

The post Arranged Marriage Culture: You Know Even Less Than You Think appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

The first time a white person mistook someone else for me, I was a teenager being scolded for offending someone I’d never met. I’ve also offended white people by failing to notice a trait, or imprecisely labeling a trait, that they considered to be practically personality-defining. These two types of mistakes are more related than not and shed light onto how “they” truly can all look the same to you.

If you find yourself mistaking one member of a certain ethnic group for another, you can improve by rethinking how you tell people apart.

A Brown Girl in a Headscarf

In my penultimate year of high school, I faced a baffling conflict. My sister’s friend (let’s call her Becky) said her mother (who I’ll call Karen) was really angry at me about the prior evening. I had behaved abominably and ought to be ashamed of myself. After being pressed for details, Becky said that her mom had sat next to a very rude person at the football game. That student, Karen had sworn, looked exactly like my sister, but older. So, the mother-daughter pair had concluded, it must have been me.

About a year later, I graduated without having ever attended a single football game.*

I never did figure out who had so infuriated Karen. What I did get from Becky was that the resemblance of the offender to my sister, and by extension to me, was limited to a headscarf and a skin tone darker than Benedict Cumberbatch’s but lighter than Nyakim Gatwech’s. She wasn’t seeing the traits that would’ve not only told her that she wasn’t angry at me, but also that my sister and I actually don’t physically resemble each other all that much.**

All she saw was a covered head and a face with a brown skin tone.

What Are Even Colors?

After being schooled among few white people and in an environment where most women and girls’ hair was covered anyway, I had no good frame of reference for how to talk about the physical traits most prized among white people. I had to learn to notice the physical traits by which white people differentiate themselves and then to speak of them in an inoffensive manner.

Having been exposed almost exclusively to people whose hair and eyes came mostly in various shades of brown/dark***, I spent my early years classifying hair and eyes as “darkest color” or “not darkest color”****. After having offended a few too many white acquaintances by not knowing their exact eye colors, I trained myself to register a more precise assessment.*****

I also had to learn the language white people use to talk about their own eyes and hair. Eyes I saw as “yellow” or “teal”, for example, are more commonly called “blue” or “hazel”. Even though my family had told me my whole life that I had “hazel” eyes, I was told, with downright anger or condescending amusement, that my eyes were “brown” to white people. A worse minefield than precise eye color terms were those for hair color. People whose hair I called orange or rust called themselves “redheads”, but people whose hair I saw as pale red were “strawberry blond”, and if I used the wrong word, they got really angry.

To this day, I avoid calling hair, especially white people’s hair, by any color term at all. If someone asks me what I think their own or another’s hair color is, I pretend that I’m too clumsily unobservant to have noticed. Even terms they themselves have used for it could be a joke, so I simply say nothing. Getting shrieked at for calling someone’s hair “light brown” instead of “dirty blond” is an experience I’d rather not repeat.

I suppose I could start telling them that I, like them, don’t see color.

Why We See the Traits We See

If you’re white and/or have mostly have had to differentiate white people from each other, you probably use hair and eye color as defining traits. Further, you probably see brown eyes as a single category, dark hair as all one thing, and textured hair as a monolith.

We’ve been trained to see the world this way.

Think of which physical traits are presented as defining on identification documents in the United States, and which variations of hair and eye colors are selectable options. At least half the world has some type of brown eyes, and somehow we’re all lumped into a single category?

Consider how boys and men are asked if they prefer blondes, brunettes, or redheads, despite just how many different human combinations of physical traits fall into the “brunette” category. The overt exclusion of black-haired people from the three categories is egregious given that black is the most common hair color in the world.

Recall the classic children’s game of “Guess Who?” and which traits you have to ask about (and not ask about) to play effectively.

When we’re told practically since birth that a wide spectrum of human variation belongs in a single “dark” bucket, we don’t attune ourselves to the nuances.

Retrain Your Perception

To be able to tell people apart, you have to expand the very criteria by which you tell people apart in the first place.

Cheekbones

As strange as this may sound, cheekbones are a great place to start with learning to tell people apart by traits other than eye and hair color. If you notice someone’s cheekbone placement, prominence, and shape, you end up noticing their facial structure and face shape along the way. You’ll also likely notice their skin tone, since seeing cheekbones requires noticing the interplay of shadows and highlights on a face. This article breaks down face shapes from a beauty perspective, but you can ignore the advice and just look at the examples and descriptions.

Skin shade and tone

There’s more to skin than just black and white, or even black and white on different ends with brown in between. Take a peek at the Fitzpatrick skin phototype document from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency to see some examples of the six skin types used by medical professionals. The Smithsonian has a great image depicting a dozen different skin tones along with scientific information on how and why human skin tones vary so much. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line has fifty different shades of foundation; click through each shade to see a different matching model showing it off.

On a related note, “tan” isn’t a single skin color, and darker people can and do experience variations in their skin tone based on sun exposure levels. Stop telling people who aren’t ivory-skinned that we’re “naturally tan” or that we can’t be pale from lack of sun exposure. My cousin’s kid had rickets because he’s dark but his family followed standard sun exposure guidelines — you know, the ones designed to protect the very pale, as though skin tone differences don’t matter for Vitamin D absorption.

Hair texture

Hair isn’t just textured or straight. A curl isn’t a wave, and there’s not a single type of curl. There’s a whole system of hair types. Learn to discern different types of hair texture.

Different shades of brown eyes

Some people’s eyes are so dark that it takes more than a quick look to differentiate the pupil from the iris. Others’ are like liquid gold. All those eyes, from amber and honey to mahogany and chocolate, are considered to be in the “brown” category. Brown eyes can be a lot of things.

Eye shape

Eyes aren’t just big or small. Eyes can be deep-set, mono-lidded, hooded, protruding, upturned, down-turned, close-set, or wide-set — not to mention those categories aren’t all mutually exclusive. You can consider the different eye shapes in terms of optometry or from a beauty perspective.

Dark hair differences

Black and brown hair don’t look remotely the same. Brown hair comes in a range of shades. When you stop categorizing all dark hair as the same thing, you can start seeing the variation.

Hair patterns and distribution

People have all kinds of things going on with their hairlines, from the presence or absence of baby hairs to differing shapes.

One of my favorite things to look at on people is eyebrows, noticing their shape, sparseness, thickness, arches, length, and grooming levels. People’s brow ridges jut at different levels, too.

When it comes to facial hair, it’s not just presence vs. absence of a mustache and/or beard. Even people who we think of as not having facial hair often have some amount of upper lip hair, sideburns, and chin hair.

Other traits

People vary endlessly. Height, lip shape, nose tilt and width, freckle and mole distribution, overall body build and frame, clothing style, voice pitch and volume, signature hairstyles, outgoing or quiet presence — the list goes on. It’s not hard to tell people apart if you’re looking for what makes them, them.

Semi-Snarky Endnotes

• My parents would’ve never allowed me to go to a football game. They saw it as an all-American cesspool of freely-intermingled sexes. The cheerleaders’ gyrations in their skimpy skirts was an obvious seduction tactic that encouraged kids to have sex under the bleachers. A football game ranked only just below the prom on the haraam scale. As for prom? That fabled dance was as appropriate for good Muslim girls as an orgy.

I wasn’t allowed out much anyway. The evening of the football game, I was at home having cybersex with random men I’d met on Star Wars forums, not angering moms at sporting matches.

** As non-scarf-wearing adults, my sister and I have had numerous people blatantly refuse to believe we’re “real” siblings. That’s how different we look.

*** Desi people I know confusingly insist on calling eyes that aren’t dark brown “colored eyes”. Desis also obsess over “colored” eyes, to the point where people ask me if those are “my” eyes (as opposed to contacts). When I was a teen, upon hearing that I wasn’t wearing contacts, people implied to me, in a way I’m sure they thought was kind, that a man might overlook my fat body so that he might access lighter-eyed children through it.

I hated that mentality then and I hate it now. Dark brown is a color, not a colorless void, and I have always had a lot more to offer the world than the potential to pass down the genetics that give me hazel eyes.

**** Non-white people can have eyes and hair of all colors, of course. If you take the world population as a whole, though, most people have hair and eyes in the broad category generally deemed “brown” or “dark”.

***** Given that I’m autistic and loathe direct eye contact, plus was raised to believe eye contact with male human beings was inappropriate at best and a sexual solicitation at worst, looking at people’s eyes enacted a steep religious and psychological cost. I adapted anyway.

The post When They All Look the Same to You appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

Since I got my account in 2005, I’ve attempted to catalog every book I’ve ever read on Librarything, even the embarrassing ones. The count is over 2000.

The reasons I’ve read what I read include many silly ones, yet there’s only one reason I’ve ever been challenged for reading something.

Reasons I read books that I knew literally nothing about that no one criticized me for, in approximate order from most to least recent:

• It’s about pandemics and we are in a pandemic and I required emotional release.
• It was written by a writer who was interviewed by a writer I like.
• It was written by a writer who interviewed a writer I like.
• They made it into a musical I hadn’t seen.
• The film or TV adaptation was coming out soon.
• People I didn’t care about wouldn’t shut up about it.
• I wanted to yell at people for liking it based on pull-quotes, but the author and their apologists kept saying I had to read it first, so I did.
• One of my few offline social outlets is a book club, and this was what they picked.
• I wanted to read a critique of it by an author I liked, so I read the original first.
• The audiobook for it was available and I was out of listening content.
• The cover and/or title implied it was ~*~*~innnnnnn spaaaaaaaace~*~*~
• It had the Oprah book club seal.
• There was a vaguely positive blurb from an author I’d kind of heard of on the back.
• It had an intellectually-provocative title.
• It had a sexually provocative title.
• It looked or sounded like something someone had mentioned to me once but it turns out it wasn’t.
• It was set in the Star Wars universe.
• I was forced to read it in school.
• It was one of the options other than the one I’d picked on the school summer reading list.
• A classmate I loathed liked it, and I wanted ammunition.
• A classmate I loathed hated it, and I wanted ammunition.
• My sister read it for school and told me about the orgy-porgies so I had to read it.
• It was a religious text.
• It was in the clearance bin.
• My cousin gave me a random mixed box of books she didn’t want anymore and it was in there.
• A cute boy said it was good.
• It had something (anything) to do with the Arthurian mythos, even just the title.
• It had something (anything) to do with retelling (classic European) fairy tales, even just the title.
• It had full-color inserts of movie stills. I have read an embarrassing amount of movie novelizations, including movies I still haven’t seen, because of those pictures.
• My mom had it and I wanted to relate to her, even on things wholly irrelevant to me like being pregnant.

The only reason anyone has ever criticized my reading choice, even if it was more a reading prioritization and the book was already on my list for years based on multiple recommendations and taste overlaps:

• The work prioritizes the perspectives and centralizes the experiences of people who are not white, straight, cis, male, and/or from the United States.

The post Why I Read What I Read appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

Content Notice for detailed accounts of sexual unpleasantry and mentions of sexual assault. For the sake of this post, “men” are “people categorized as straight men by society” and “us” are “people not seen as men by society.”

An ex of mine, who is otherwise a decent person, didn’t believe me when I told him that I didn’t want flowers. How absurd! All women want flowers, even the ones who say they don’t. Here, have the flowers that you want. And I had to stop protesting and accept the flowers because who complains about getting flowers? When he asked, I told him I dried and kept them for posterity, because I figured out that he would only hear what he wanted to hear. Years later, a man told me he didn’t understand why Jessica Jones was “such a bitch” about Killgrave doing something nice for her, like acquiring her childhood home and refurbishing it for her.

The sexual context is no different when it comes to men demanding we not only not ask for what we want, but also gratefully accept what they want to give us.

When we talk about what happens when we get into bed with men, no matter how jokingly or seriously, we get told to “just tell them”. Orgasm gap? What orgasm gap? Just tell them! Put on your “big girl panties” and ask for what you want! Walk away with your middle fingers raised in the air if they don’t do what you want! Communicate!

Yet communicating my wants has never been my issue. I spoke, and spoke, and spoke, through my many pants-less encounters with men. How much I spoke didn’t matter when the only one listening was me.

I like sex.

Early on in my sexual life, I said as many variations of this as was possible to all potential partners. I acted like it, too, because it was true. I was a repressed Muslim virgin who had never been kissed and had been utterly convinced that I was too fat to be allowed to even give a blowjob to a man, until I was suddenly 18 and horny and on the non-swipey version of dating sites, talking to men near and far.

Not only did they deign me message-able, they told me they would have sex. With me.

I was delighted. I was excited! I wanted to get down, and I told them so.

In response, they said they were horny. They were so excited to meet a woman who wanted sex as much as a man did. They had issues with past girlfriends, frigid bitch exes who didn’t want sex as much as they did. They were all smirks and erections.

Until we actually got down to it a few times, and the game was over. They seemed emasculated by anything I said, no matter how kindly or sweetly. I asked them to have sex  too much. I asked for them to do too much. I was too wild, too experimental. Was I sure I was as inexperienced as I said I was?

I Just Want Sex

When my first and only monogamous relationship ended, I decided I wanted to have sex with as many men as it took to forget how my first boyfriend felt. It felt so good that, long after I needed the promiscuity to keep the grief of losing my first loving romantic relationship at bay, I kept going.

I was always straightforward about what I wanted. I spoke sometimes seriously and sometimes jokingly, but always matter-of-factly: It was strictly sex.

They didn’t care what I said. Afterwards, it was all about what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a relationship. I didn’t want to cuddle. I didn’t want breakfast the next morning. I didn’t want to date them. I didn’t want to stay over if I didn’t have to. How dare I.

Don’t Stop, Keep Going

Positive feedback and reinforcement is the solution, you say?

Facebook post, Fall 2017: After-dark type question for men who have sex with people with vaginas: We the latter group commiserate with each other about the following scenario, which occurs altogether too often. What gives?????

Me: *during non-PiV/PiA* “Right there, yes, don’t stop, just like that, keep going, exactly like that…”
Dude: *changes up the thing he’s doing*
Me: ………
Me: *has blue clit*

(Keep in mind I only started saying stuff like that, the precise urging, because without it, dudes in general don’t keep a steady rhythm and escalate/change things up too much for me to cum.)

Reply: When you become conscious that you’re doing something, it’s harder to deliberately do it.

Reply: “This is the best thing, please continue” leads to physical reactions from the requester which alter body mechanics in such a way that makes continuing the thing difficult or perhaps temporarily impossible.

Reply: It’s like thinking about walking. One might walk a certain way subconsciously, and as soon as they’re told “Yes! Walk exactly specifically just like that” it suddenly becomes harder to walk that way deliberately. I’ve had it playing music, too, where someone says my tone is good but then I’m thinking too hard about my embouchure to reproduce whatever was happening naturally that got the desired sound.

Reply: Perhaps they know what they’re doing is something you like so they then try to improvise but fail.

Don’t give direction. We aren’t paying attention to what we’re doing. Don’t say what you like lest you cause it to stop; the stopping is all your fault. You’re wholly at the mercy of your partner’s subconscious whims. If you don’t ask, they don’t know what you want, but asking isn’t okay either. Shut up and put up.

Yes, I Would Like That

A brief and non-comprehensive list of ways men weaponize consent culture and feminism or why straight women really ought to unionize:

• “Now it’s my turn.” (uttered after doing a rather perfunctory job at unasked-for oral sex)
• “You’re a strong woman who doesn’t need a man, take charge of your own orgasm.”
• “There’s nothing degrading about [sex act]. Women are equal, so why are you saying no?”
• “I respect women so much that I must call you Mistress, online female stranger.”
• “Most men wouldn’t do this, so you have to appreciate that I would even bother to do it.”

No, Not Like That

If I included the story of my sexual assault here, would you smile knowingly? Would you “aha!” and tell me that you knew all along that I had it all wrong, and this finally confirmed why? That I have particularly bad taste in men and that’s why my experiences are the way they are? That I can’t stereotype all men based on my personal pain?

Would it matter if I told you that the assault was well into my sexual life as an adult? That part of why I reacted to his consent violations the way I did was because I’d been trained out of speaking up?

I Spoke. And Spoke and spoke and

So yes, I spoke. I spoke until I went blue in the face, until I went from being happily slutty to…. whatever it is I am now. Speaking has never been my issue. You can only speak so much when you are glaringly not listened to. You learn to stop speaking and start doing what actually works.

What works depends on who you are and what your needs might be. It might be only having sex within a relationship so that you have some leverage to get him to maybe listen. It might be developing a preference for men who openly admit they don’t know what they’re doing and need help. It might be celibacy. It might be exhibiting what looks like extreme pickiness from the outside but is actually ensuring your time isn’t wasted. It might be fetishizing and eroticizing what men are willing to give you in bed so that you can artfully turn the scraps they throw you into a real meal. It might be trying to get men to listen in a less sexually-charged and less personal context.

What it isn’t is a lack of trying. It’s a lack of being believed. They didn’t believe what I had to say when I spoke up, and now they don’t believe me when I say that I did speak up.

The post On telling them what you want appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

It’s hard to not think about death right now.

One of the most commonly-cited criticisms of atheism is the lack of comfort it offers in the face of death and tragedy. Atheism doesn’t provide any kind of solace when loved ones and innocent people die, the reasoning goes, so why rob people of that happiness?

I can’t say that I relate to that line of thinking at all, personally.

The vice I felt tightening around my godless heart as I read through as much of the New York Times front page list as I could stand? The pain couldn’t compare in the slightest to the soul-crushing agony I used to go through upon the most minor news of tragedy when I was a Muslim. When I was a believer, that allegedly comforting belief in an afterlife was agonizing torture.

Why I found the afterlife to be upsetting rather than reassuring comes down to confidence. I’ll never cease to be astounded by the confidence of religious believers who are so sure they and their loved ones will all make it to heaven. When it came to my own worthiness, my assessment of others, my interpretation and even choice of religion—I was self-assured in exactly none of it. To be so confident seemed to me to be playing god, a grave sin.

As a believer, I left a lot up to my god. The only reason I remained a believer in Islam through my teen years was that I humbled myself in deference to Allah’s wisdom and majesty. I resolved whatever issues I had with the religion by comparing my own judgment to that of the eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing being who had created me. To find fault with what my god had ordained seemed unspeakably arrogant. I knew that I was a single flawed being, with a mortal and very narrow perspective, and so I believed myself in need of divine guidance in order to comport myself correctly.

That humility translated to a complete lack of the very certainty assumed of believers.

What Lurks in the Hearts of Others

Because I wasn’t Allah, I didn’t believe that I had the right to play god and judge others. While that might sound like a positive and wonderful way to live, it really wasn’t. Because I couldn’t know what others truly felt or believed or did when no one was looking, I didn’t believe I could judge anyone either way, good or bad. That meant that I could’t rest assured that my loved ones would make it into heaven, no matter how adherent they seemed to Islam. I also couldn’t tell myself that bad people would go to hell and be punished for their misdeed.

Stories abounded in the Islamic texts I read of people who seemed destined for hellfire but were actually heaven-bound, and vice versa. The point of those stories was to destroy any sense that a human being could judge another. Allah said there were people who called themselves Muslims and even acted as though they were true believers and good people, but whose minds harbored evil, sometimes to the point of sordid bad deeds. Only Allah could know the truth about people.

My own life provided evidence for the existence of extreme hypocrites. After all, didn’t my own father lecture others piously in public while punishing me for my devotion and faith in private? And didn’t my own internal moral compass contradict Islam constantly? To have faith in my own judgement instead of what Allah told me wasn’t something I could fathom. So I cried and fearfully prayed for myself and those I loved, hoping we were doing the right thing and humbly asking Allah to forgive us.

I knew my own faults, flaws, and sins all too well. What could I know of others’ worthiness or lack thereof?

My Own Worthiness

There are a lot of ways to be a sinner in Islam. Every school of thought, every interpretation, offers fresh and interesting takes on ways you might be offending the One who is your Lord and the Lord of all. As a sincere believer desiring to do right, I often felt lost. My internal moral compass was of no help. It contradicted what Islam, my father, my family, religious authorities, and our Muslim community said so often that I strove to ignore it as much as I could. I considered my own compassionate impulses as temptations to avoid.

On top of the confusion, I had to feel guilty and secretive about how torn I felt. Allah said that Islam was a clear, perfect, complete, and simple religion. My very uncertainty and doubt couldn’t be expressed, since it was an indicator that I wasn’t believing hard enough. Those times I managed to express my feelings, no one seemed to understand what I was asking.

I’ve considered that this might be a faith vs. works thing. In a simple faith-as-salvation theological framework, I could perhaps conceive of feeling confident in one’s understanding of one’s own ultimate destination, if not that of others. Even then, though, how could you be sure you believed in the right religion? Most believers think they happen to have been born into the right faith, and they can’t all be right.

Pascal’s Wager, But Which?

Pascal’s Wager has never done much for me other elicit a rueful chuckle or two. Presenting Pascal’s Wager as a reason to believe is a disingenuous move for most believers, especially those who believe in Christianity or Islam. The fringe sects that allow for a person to go to heaven based solely on a vague belief in a non-specific deity and a generalized afterlife are few and far between. Generally speaking, you have to at least have a very specific set of beliefs, if not the accompanying and appropriately-matched set of deeds, to earn a ticket to a torture-free afterlife.

Choosing the right religion isn’t enough, either. Religious in-groups have squabbled and civil-warred themselves to actual literal death since the dawn of time. Muhammad himself said that as the world neared its last days, the Muslim population would be divided into dozens of sects, but that only one of those sects would make it into heaven.

I could have never thought so much of myself and my own judgment to rest assured that I’d happened upon the one correct interpretation of the single correct sect of the only correct religion.

The post Is believing in an afterlife really so comforting? appeared first on Heinous Dealings.

Today I learned that this blog has fomented marital strife in the lives of strangers.

From today’s Ask Amy column:

Dear Amy: I’m writing about a curious thing my husband does that tends to hurt my feelings. I’m not sure how inconsiderate he may be or how oversensitive I may be.

He tends to look for negative information about people and things I like. He also does this for things he likes.

For the most recent example, I regularly read the web comic xkcd. For no obvious reason, at dinner on Sunday, he handed me his phone with a lengthy blog post from a philosophy major about how dismissive the author of xkcd is toward people outside the STEM fields.

I’m not completely unsympathetic to philosophy majors, but I don’t really care. It’s just a funny comic.

That’s my work he printed out and pushed into his spouse’s face. My recent post.

Oops?

In the response, Amy, well, ahem:

Dear Don’t Knock: I think you’re being oversensitive. Your husband seems to be consistent in his desire for information, along with his choice to follow that information trail to a conclusion, even an unpleasant one. He applies this metric to many and varied cultural issues, including those that engage him.

You simply want the freedom — and have the right — to like what you like, unencumbered by the ramblings of blogging philosophers. You don’t say that your husband shames you, but it seems that access to any potentially negative information will make you defensive.

Add “rambling blogging philosopher” to the list of things I’d have on my tombstone if I wanted to be buried after death, I guess!

While I don’t agree with Amy most of the time, and this time isn’t any exception (“random blogger finds it annoying” is not the same as “associated with the right wing”, plus I don’t think “sensitivity” is a problem), I do agree with the idea of sending a partner a link and opening a discussion rather than asking them to read a whole post while out for a meal.

The post Please don’t punish your partners with public phone-reads of my posts appeared first on Heinous Dealings.