a smug indulgence. tell yourself, “i’m gonna do this thing because i like it, and there’s nothing you can do to make me feel bad about it!” eat that cake! read that romance novel! be free!!!
I remember I was in high school when it struck me that “guilty pleasure” was not a term ANY GUY EVER USED EVER.
I never heard dudes EVER excuse things they liked with, “Oh, but it’s a guilty pleasure, so you know (nervous laugh).”
Like, it hit me HARD. Men don’t have to justify liking dumb shit. They’re allowed to like dumb shit without question.
AND SO ARE YOU.
“guilty pleasure” is a way to shame women for enjoying things that aren’t “intellectual” or “mature” enough, and FUCK THAT.
Love what you love and just LOVE IT. And if anyone says, “Isn’t that sort of a guilty pleasure?” You stare ‘em down and reply, “No, I just like it.”
And if they question you? Fucking ruin them by refusing to justify. “But why?” “Because I like it.” “But, like, WHY?” “Because I like it.”
“Because I like it,” is 100% a reason to enjoy something. You like it. Enjoy it. Fuck guilty pleasures.
Some of the notes in that one post about gen z and cults going around: “I would start a cult but I don’t have money 😔” “lol new heavens gate here we come” “aren‘t fandoms cults already lol”
Me, a tired cult survivor: you have no idea what you’re talking about. shut tf up.
seriously.
everytime i ssee a “join thhe ___ cult uwu” i have a fuckijg stroke
stop. please.
also the posts about Gen Z having a cult boom are 100% true
and its partially bc no one litsens to cult survivors
no one takes us seriously when we say stop normalizing this shit
and now no one knows the actual signs
we think we’re safe from cults. we think its a thing of the past
when you hear cult you think of blood rituals and shit on tv right? well the one I was in was on a fucking google classroom
so learn the fucking signs and stay aware for goodness sake holy shit
Hi, my name is Nina and I left a cult in 2006.
It is not a joke.
If I told you the name of this church, you’d look it up and go “but Nina, that’s a normal branch of evangelical Christianity, which has its own problems but is not necessarily a cult,” and you would be correct, so we’ll leave the name out of it. This was one specific church that decided to spin right off the rails, in the same way that Westboro is “Baptist.”
It started when a new preacher came, and it started small. He and his wife made us feel special. We were family. Truth-seekers in a frightening world. And at first it seemed so normal. Christians shouldn’t smoke, for example, because the body is the temple of Christ. Okay, sure! Reasonable. It’s not anything that’s not backed up by medical science, even.
Then they started introducing this concept called “Bible quizzing.” It’s actually a whole thing with that denomination, basically teaching kids scripture by having them memorize it and take part in competitions. So far, so good—except that for some reason….if we failed a question, we got in A LOT of trouble. I missed one once because of a typo and I was DESPERATE to get the judges to change their ruling. And this was not a huge error, either. It was like “will enter in the kingdom” instead of “will enter into the kingdom.” The reason for the error did not matter (even though it was outside my control). The tininess of the error did not matter. Only the error mattered, and I was pulled aside by the pastor’s wife when we returned home from the competition to find out if I was “really serious about learning the word of G-d” or if I was “struggling in my faith.” She was “disappointed” I had “allowed Satan” to “confuse me.” And I was devastated. If I was a victim of Satan then I wasn’t special. I wasn’t one of the truth-seekers. I didn’t belong….and oh, I wanted to belong. I had no friends at school. At church I was part of a family. Everybody loved me. I couldn’t “fall away.”
Over the next few years, the weirdness intensified. It became unacceptable for girls to show their knees because it was a “temptation” to “our brothers in Christ.” I picked out a dress for the homecoming dance and was told I should “cover my knees and then get on them and pray for forgiveness” because the hemline of the dress hit mid-knee. I was shamed in youth group because one of our youth leaders said he was going to trace his genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve and I said “but that’s impossible, even if your family had written records all the way back the ones from before the flood would’ve been destroyed.” The pastor began speaking of receiving “visions from G-d” telling him about the sins of the congregation, which he recited in detail while exhorting us to come to the front and pray. At one point I brought the whole service to a screeching halt by saying my grandfather was an atheist and I wanted to pray for his soul to find Jesus. (And oh boy did they pray.)
All of this culminated in me being kidnapped.
That was the point where I was starting to have doubts. Things between the old and New Testaments didn’t add up and also I didn’t understand how I was supposed to be going to hell for wearing jingly earrings when earrings were right in the Bible. At this point I was seventeen, and I stopped attending. My family moving made it easy; I had to find a 20-mile ride most weeks to attend, and it wasn’t easy. But then I started college literally within walking distance, and my previously-clockwork attendance remained patchy, and became moreso after I got enmeshed in what very quickly (like, two dates quickly) proved to be an abusive relationship. The pastor told me it was my duty to stay in this relationship because I’d been “chosen by G-d” to “heal this man’s soul.” I’d already tried to kill myself once for the sake of the church, because I couldn’t pray myself straight and I didn’t want to go to hell for lust.
So here I am, 18 years old, for the first time telling my pastor “I’m not so sure.”
Within two days the youth leader showed up at my door and told me I’d been sponsored to go to an event called Acquire the Fire. I said I couldn’t go because of midterms and was told that I would go, or they would tell my professor I’d had a family emergency and they’d pick me up.
I went. It was three days of hell—Christian death metal bands physically hurting me due to problems with my ears, and a “laying on of hands” right in front of the speakers while I sobbed because “the devil is in you, or the name of the lord wouldn’t be causing you pain.” (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t the name of the lord, it was the insane decibel level.) At one point the pastor’s daughter took me outside to get away from it. It was three days of being told so many lies, hearing that I should completely obliterate my identity in the name of Christ, being told AIDS was a judgment from G-d, cancer was a judgment from G-d, Starbucks was a tool of the devil, that the speaker could hear our thoughts and none of us were heavenbound.
I got back home and alerted campus security that I was under risk.
I never went back—that was one of many reasons, but it was the biggest, and I was done. But I spent another five years slowly deprogramming. “Our G-d is an Awesome G-d” is still a trigger for me. I’m religious (I eventually converted to Judaism), but walking into a church for any reason makes me profoundly uneasy.
And it all started with a lonely ten-year-old who wanted to be special and was told you are, you are, you are, that’s why you get to know so many special things, that’s why people are cruel to you, they just don’t realize the truth….and it ended with me nearly dying.
You may think this sounds wild. It is. But I’m still in touch with another survivor who’s here on Tumblr, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make themselves known.
It isn’t a joke. It isn’t funny. It is a very real danger and the smarter you think you are, the worse it is, because these cults are savvy and they know just how to deal with people like you.
Don’t fuck with cults unless you want to die miserably, probably alone and in pain.
Just don’t.
I never managed to get that deep into shit at any of the churches I went to, but I know it was going on. Hell, I’ve been to Acquire the Fire rallies, more than once, willingly because that level of fervor is how I was raised, and lemme tell ya that shit is insane to look back on, it’s the worst kind of big tent revival hellfire stuff but it’s aimed at teenagers. Fucking children.
Hell, a close friend of mine had ended up in a household-sized cult of personality that revolved around one very manipulative abusive person (very Andy Blake in many many ways, and google that mofo if you want to see how that shit can get heavy fast)
And there was the period of me and my wife’s life where - very recently - our finances were almost entirely managed by a cult bc my dad helps us financially and he was friends with the “Pastor”/cult leader, and decided he wouldn’t help us anymore unless we let the cult be in charge of a bunch of shit in our lives. We knew basically from day 1 what it was, but we didn’t have a choice, and even though we were members they tried their damnedest to control us a lot more than they had any right to.
Cults are not funny. They’re not quirky. They’re destructive and terrifying and I am begging all you younger folks who don’t know about red flags for shit like that to please educate yourselves, and be wary and cautious, because this shit can fuck you up for life, even if you escape it.
Also a quick google showed the cult that we had running our finances for a while is now reaching out to gen z/teenagers specifically, so if you see the accounts @nffrecovery or @nffgenz anywhere, or hear about a group called New Found Family in the Largo/Clearwater/St.Pete area of Florida? STEER FUCKING CLEAR, they are manipulative abusive bastards, and they will fuck your life up. At least four separate people who worked directly with us - including the Pastor’s wife - ended up leaving or being full on driven out of the group because they weren’t blindly obeying the things they were told to do, and saw how culty and manipulative things were. Stay away from them, and learn to recognize cults on your own.
Please be gentle with yourself. Living through a pandemic is not a normative experience. This is traumatic. This whole experience may be even more difficult for you if you have gone through something traumatic before. So please be kind to yourself. You’re doing the best that you can.
It kind of baffles me that a lot of people never got to experience the Mishapocalypse. Not like it was something that was good, more like, it was something you’d only see on this website in like…10 years.
Imagine you wake up on April Fool’s day. You log into tumblr. Immediately your dash is encompassed with Misha’s face. Everyone’s icon has been changed to that same, staring, blank face. You check your followers. Every single one of them has that face. You try going into your normal tags. Even those are filled with Misha’s face. Nowhere is safe. Misha is everywhere. You go to Twitter to complain about it. Misha’s face is there too.
Within hours of the event starting, there’s already a wiki entry and an urban dictionary entry for it. Gifs that you may have recognized of being popular at that time have Misha’s face photoshopped over them. Repeating patterns of Misha’s face. Misha illusions. Misha’s face OVER MISHA’S FACE.
Eventually, even Misha is like, “Yeah, this is fucking weird. What the fuck are you guys doing.” But it doesn’t stop. People hit post limit. They can’t post anymore. Suddenly, you notice that your dash is starting to thin out, slowly, one by one. There’s a hypothetical tumbleweed bouncing across your dash by 10pm that night.
Anyone who tried to blacklist the Mishapocalypse suddenly found that their dashboard was sent into the shadow realm. Nothing is there. They tried to unfollow people who were participating in it. They had no blog content at the end of the day.
The next day, we all wake up and continue on with our lives like nothing ever happened. It was like a fever dream. What the fucked happened. Where did our lives go for that day.
That was the Mishapocalypse.
It looked a little something like this
and it was absolute hell
It was over within like a day though that was he weird part. There were stragglers through the following weeks but the main bit was over within hours it was the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen
Listen, cringe culture is a drag so I’m gonna say it. I still unironically think the Mishapocalypse was fucking hilarious.
It was an entire platform spontaneously “yes, and” -ing a dumb joke for the sheer joy of being a part of something. An entirely organic, un-manufactured zeitgeist that was just a fun play in the space, a snowballing of the collective need to just be silly about something that didn’t matter. It was wonderful in the truest sense of the word.
Y'all can we please stop putting down other wlw shows for giving us what they can?
Stop shitting on Korrasami when they had to fight hard to even give us that ending.
Stop shitting on Steven Universe when Sugar was the first to really give us an actual wlw marriage on screen.
Stop shitting on She-ra for “not giving it to us till the last episode” or “some six blush lines vs a whole red face” when Noelle had to strategically plan the show to make sure it ended the way it did.
Stop shitting on and putting down actually good representation that we get in these shows. They’re all important.
Korrasami, Catradora, Garnet (Ruby/Sapphire), Bubbline have all been extremely important and have done so much for us. And I’m glad they were able to pace the way to give us what we have in Owl House
do most people on mobile tumblr know you can hold down the reblog button to fast reblog a post to your blog? you know you can reblog things with one click right? please please reblog things if you enjoy them, lack of exposure is killing content creators on this site
