🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Feb 26

I'm not a car person, so I never really paid attention to car makes or models before. Sure, I knew that there were Hondas and Hyundais, but unless someone was actively pointing them out, I couldn't tell you which was which.

Then I became the owner of a little red Ford Focus, and I started driving it around.

Next thing I knew, I was spotting them *everywhere*. I'd come out of the grocer and there'd be identical ones parked on both sides of me! Hell, I eventually got a window decal so I could more easily tell which was mine 😋

A couple years ago I discovered I was lactose intolerant, and—bear with me, these stories are connected—I started keeping lactaid with me wherever I went (just to be safe). I started paying attention to just how much dairy was in things, and wow, spoiler: it's in like *everything* 😅

Over the past couple years, I've gotten pretty used to being lactose intolerant. I keep lactase handy, and I watch out for things with "too much dairy". It's just become background noise—like noticing other Ford Focuses (Foci?). It's just part of my life now.

A couple months ago I got propositioned by a creep in my hotel's lobby.

A couple weeks ago I had slurs yelled at me as I walked down the street with my mom.

A couple days ago someone told me to kill myself in a DM.

Every day, someone says "really? I don't see stuff like that here".

Show thread🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Feb 27

Just to be explicit, that post was about how all the institutionalized/everyday/inherent sexism, racism, homophobia, bigotry, etc. is invisible to most folx until it directly impacts them.

Just like I don't see 99% of the racism that #BlackMastodon does until someone points an example out to me, and just like I would've told you that I don't know anyone who drives a red Ford Focus until I started driving one myself.

It's fucking everywhere...

And to those it affects, it's just the background noise of existing while black/queer/femme/disabled/neurodivergent, and so on.

Show threaddisorderlyf

@alice While I truly don't see it on this site, I'm fully aware there's easily thousands, tends of thousands even, of accounts and instances the admins of the instance I use have successfully whacked the banhammer at are largely why that's the case. I also deliberately don't hang out in large spaces on the internet because even the best intentioned and most respected mods in sufficiently large spaces will have people slip through the cracks.

I'm not saying anyone is at fault for not doing either of those things. I wish I didn't feel the need to do it for my own mental health. I wish I could feel comfortable that I could exist in larger spaces than I do with less aggressive moderation without suddenly facing an onslaught of precisely the abuse you described and more I suspect you didn't but also go through as someone with a significantly larger presence than my own.

[edited to fix a typo]

Feb 27 at 4:02amWeb
Show threadOblomovFeb 27
@disorderlyf @alice oh yeah the structure of the Fediverse compounds systemic blindness significantly. Even for trivial things we have very different views of what happens here. Even more so than on the commercial silos.
Show threaddisorderlyfFeb 27
@oblomov @alice Honestly, it's been hard for me to use more mainstream social media because everything being centralised means I start to run into shit I never run into here pretty quickly.