"In the weeks that followed, my mom used all kinds of emotional abuse to get me to stop criticizing her. [...]

One evening, when I was exhausted from arguing with her, I collapsed on the couch. She sat next to me and stroked my head, and told me I could trust her, and that she loved me, and that she hoped I’d get better, and said how she thinks I’m an awesome person.

It was like being cuddled after a nonconsensual BDSM session, as I told a friend a few days later. Had I not read a post on tumblr criticizing the lack of consent in Fifty Shades of Grey, I would not have recognized what my mom was doing that night.

Then I realized she’d done this all my life: attack, threaten, comfort. Hurt, and then flatter."
—How a Logical Girl Talked Herself into Fundamentalism, Part 3

From a lovely blog that is probably well outside of the filter bubble of the rolequeer discussion. For a little context, there’s an initially shocking amount of kink/BDSM among the survivors of Fundamentalist homeschooling.

There has not been much criticism of the BDSM scene from the exhomeschoolers, although I don’t currently feel like that’s on their heads so much.

So let me start it now.

With the context of ubiquitous physical punishment and emotional abuse, it is perhaps not surprising that for many of the people who grew up in these environments gravitated to the BDSM subculture when they left. After all, we were used to a male dominated, seniority based authoritarian structure, with physical punishment, normalized abuse and so on. The right to chose our own jailers felt like freedom.

But the BDSM Scene is the exact same lie as the Fundimentalist homeschooler subculture we walked away from.

--isaacsapphire

cool-yubari, you were homeschooled, right? Was it anything like this? If not, why not?

--thebrightobvious

No. There’s overlap, but no.

I’ll try to summarize the personal parts, but this is going to get long. ( Read more )

[I dislike posts that involve scrolling through a ton of images to read a modest amount of text. So here's what it said.

Narrator: The Keekorok [baboon] troop took to foraging for food in the garbage dump of a popular tourist lodge. The trash included meat tainted with tuberculosis. The result was that nearly half the males in the troop died.

Sarpolsky: It wasn't random who died.

Narrator: Every alpha male was gone.

Sarpolsky: And what you were left with was twice as many females as males, and the males who were remaining were, just to use the scientific jargon, they were good guys. It completely transformed the atmosphere in the troop. This particular troop has a culture of very low levels of aggression, and they're doing that twenty years later. If they're able to, in one generation, transform what are supposed to be textbook social systems engraved in stone, we don't have an excuse when we say there's certain inevitabilities about human social systems.]

shitifindon:

skysquids:

jhameia:

driftingfocus:

anogoodrabblerouser:

disquietingtruths:

universalequalityisinevitable:

Robert Sapolsky about his study of the Keekorok baboon troop from National Geographic’s Stress: Portrait of a Killer.

Thiiiiiiis, people, thiiiis!

1. Kill alpha male types
2. Achieve world peace

Got it.

I’ve actually read a lot of Sapolsky’s work.  He’s one of my favorite scientists in the neuro/socio world.

I just watched the documentary and there is so much more about the troop that isn’t in this photoset—not only does the troop have a culture of little aggression and greater cooperation, but any incoming jerk baboons learned within a few months that their shitty behaviour was in no way acceptable, that the troop only rewarded sociability, and they changed accordingly. 

If effin’ baboons can learn this there’s pretty much no reason to believe that our only option in dealing with assholes is to just ignore their behaviour and let it continue.

there really is no excuse.

"incoming jerk baboons" hahaha