Venn diagram math problems middle school

Ok, I know how the title sounds, but before ya’ll grab your torches and pitchforks, let me give you some background info. Also, sorry that it's a long post.
I (35 female) met my husband (40 male, we’ll call him Chris) 11 years ago. We were both still in the party phase of our twenties at that time. We drank excessively, sometimes used recreational substances, and had jobs where that sort of lifestyle was common (I was a waitress, and he worked at a pawnshop). During this time, my money was never well spent (obviously), and I got my car repoed twice, and had to move in with him to survive. This really made him reevaluate our current lifestyle.
Chris dragged me into a healthier lifestyle kicking and screaming. I still wanted to party, but I didn’t want to lose him. What we didn’t know at the time is that I had undiagnosed severe depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The party lifestyle was my way of self-medicating, and we didn’t find this out until much later.
I ended up getting a job as a medical assistant, and he finished his degree and got a government job. We moved across the country, got married, and had a baby, all while I didn’t really have a solid grasp on my mental health struggles.
After the birth of our daughter, I realized that I still had a lot of work to do in order to become the mother that she deserved. I finally saw my doctor about my struggles, got into talk therapy, and was placed on medication. It took a couple of tries, but I am finally on a good regimen, and my mental health is better than it has ever been.
I also took the birth of my daughter as an opportunity to quit my job and start working on a degree of my own. This is where the roles in Chris and my relationship started to become a problem.
As soon as we discussed my plan to go to school, Chris took it upon himself to find a college program for me, and he picked LPN (licensed practical nurse). I explained to him that while I wanted to stay in the medical field, I didn’t want to move into the world of nursing for a variety of reasons. He insisted that it was the best choice for our family, and that I would love it.
I told him that I really didn’t think it would suit me well, but that if he really wanted me to go into nursing, I should try to become an RN, because the pay would be better, and the training would be more comprehensive. Chris disagreed and said that we couldn’t afford for me to be in school for that long.
I really didn’t want to argue with him, and I felt myself shutting down, which is what I’ve always done when presented with conflict.
Day after day he would ask me if I had contacted the school he picked, or if I started the registration process. This constant pressure also made it very difficult for me to move forward. But finally, one day, while he was at work, and our daughter napped, I looked through the different programs available at the school that he picked. I found radiology technologist, and this quickly caught my interest. I called the school, scheduled my placement test, and was put in touch with who would end up being my advisor.
When Chris got home, I told him about what I had accomplished, and how excited I was about this particular program. He looked confused, and said something to the effect of “But I thought you wanted to do the LPN program? When did you change your mind?”
I explained, “No, you wanted me to do the LPN program, and I told you I didn’t want to get into nursing. I only agreed with you because you pushed it so hard. But look, this is also a two-year program, I’ll end up being an X-Ray tech, which I think will suit my strengths a lot better, and it has a lot of the same requirements.”
We ended up agreeing that Rad Tech was the best idea, but his has always insisted that LPN was my idea.
Fast forward two years. I am thriving in school, as a mother, and with my mental health. Our daughter is due to start pre-school in the fall, and I will be transferring schools to complete my degree. I have a 3.9 GPA, I am part of a prestigious honor society, and have earned numerous scholarships. I would like to think that I have grown up immensely in the past few years.
However, Chris still often treats me like a child. He does this in a lot of different ways. I’ll talk about buying a certain toy for our daughter, and if he doesn’t like the toy, he’ll usually just say “No, we’re not doing that.” If I push, he’ll say something to the effect of “You know how I feel about this,” which is his way of saying “End of conversation.” Whatever the issue is, we will almost always navigate through it and find a compromise. I don’t shut down with confrontation anymore and have gotten much better at arguing my points of view. But the way he talks to me seems super dismissive and has the same tone as a strict father talking to a rebellious teen. He can also be a complete man-splainer to an extreme degree.
I finally reached my breaking point with the way he talks to me yesterday. I had gone to my new campus to pick up my student I.D. and to walk around and get a feel for the place. I ended up being able to also get a copy of my class schedule before it was posted online. I realized that they had registered me for a class that I had already completed this past semester.
Chris called me while he was at lunch to chat, and I told him a bit about my day, and the mix up with my classes. I told him that I would make sure updated transcripts got sent to the campus, and I would email my advisor to discuss filling the slot with a different class (To be fair, I did say “with a B.S. class,” but obviously that isn’t how I would phrase it in the email). Chris started telling me “No, don’t do that. First, you have to make sure that you get new transcripts ordered, and then explain to him that you would rather take a humanities class. You can’t say a ‘B.S. class.’” He went on and on for a while.
Essentially, he took almost his entire lunch break to not only tell me what to do, but most of what he said, was what I had already planned on doing. When he had tired himself out with his rant, I stayed quiet, and just said “Ok.” He asked if I was mad, and I simply said “No, but please stop treating me like a child and trust that I will get this done on my own. You basically just took 15 minutes to tell me the exact same thing that I told you.”
Later that night, while I was cooking dinner, he opened the envelope that had my schedule in it, which had my name on it, not his, and started reading the schedule. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, but no matter how often I tell him this, he still does it. He then started trying to explain to me what all the different abbreviations on the form meant (which I already knew), and then started saying that he didn’t like how my schedule was set up. He thought it was too many classes one right after the other (it’s 3 classes in a row and would allow time for me to finish my school day early). He started telling me that I needed to tell my advisor to stretch out my schedule to allow time for a long lunch break, possibly with study time in between, yada yada.
I say yada yada, because I honestly stopped hearing what he was saying after a moment. Was he literally doing the exact same thing that I had asked him to stop earlier that day? Was he really man-splaining my class schedule to me? Was he really under the impression that he could tell me what to tell my advisor? I ended up cutting him off in the middle of whatever he was saying and said “Hey, you’re doing it again. Can you please stop treating me like a child? I’ll take care of this myself.”
He responded “You know I’m just trying to help. But if you don’t want my help, then fine. I’ll just shut up then.”
I lost it at that moment. The flood gates opened, and I honestly had no control over the words that came out of my mouth. I yelled that he wasn’t trying to help, that he was trying to dictate. I threw my GPA in his face, and explained how much I accomplished, while being the full time caregiver to our child, cooking every meal, running every household errand, and keeping our house spotless. I yelled that I wasn’t the dress over my head party girl who needed a guiding hand anymore, and that I was a grown ass responsible woman. I ended it with “You need to stop treating me like a Goddamn child and start treating me like a partner, because I’ve earned it.”
Chris was silent. We haven’t had a fight that involved yelling in years. He wasn’t used to this side of me at all. Eventually he apologized, said that I was right, and then went to have some alone time to process everything.
Here’s why I think that I may have been the asshole, and no, it’s not him trying to gaslight me into thinking I am. As I play the whole thing back in my head, I can’t help but think that I seriously crossed a line or two. First, our daughter, who is only two years old, was in the room with us. I never want us to be the type of parents that yell and scream in front of her.
Second, in the span of just a couple of years, I basically completely flipped the script on him. The beginning, and most of our relationship was spent with him being the grown up, and me being the screw up. I have essentially changed my entire brain chemistry with medication, have had talk therapy to help me grow as a person. Basically, I’ve reinvented myself. While all this has happened over the course of two years, you’d be surprised how quickly that time flies by in your late thirties/early forties, especially with a baby/toddler thrown into the mix. To Chris, it really could seem like this change, and my anger has come out of nowhere.
Also, just because I’ve changed, doesn’t mean that he has. He hasn’t been through the same hormonal and chemical changes that I’ve been through. Maybe I am the asshole for expecting the person he has always been to suddenly conform to the new me.
So what’s the verdict? Am I the asshole?

I got CS2 last night, installed it in the morning and came home and started playing it after school. Played it for like an hour and was having fun with no problems but then suddenly in the middle of a round my PC froze, disconnected from my monitor and then the fans got really loud. I unplugged it, plugged it back in, started the game again and it did the same thing minus the freezing. Unplugged and replugged yet again, reopened the game, turned my settings down from high to medium thinking maybe my PC was having trouble running it. Started a round and my PC restarted itself. Did a quick scan with my antivirus (which I knew was a shot in the dark but oh well), no threats detected, start the game up, no problems for about 30 minutes and it happens again. I checked for driver updates and found I hadn't updated to the latest driver and thought that must have been the issue. Updated my driver, started the game again and this time I haven't even started a round by the time my PC disconnects and gets super loud. I have no earthly clue what the issue could be; I have a decent PC (GTX 1650, i5-7 series, 16GB RAM) and aside from Steam I had nothing else open that could have caused it. Has anyone else experienced this?

First, I want to apologize in advance for the long post.
I guess I'll start by giving some background information. I'm in my early thirties, female, living in the southern USA. Minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. I've never been a financially "successful" person, but since I entered the work force after receiving a Bachelor's degree in art, I've always gotten by. I've mostly worked 1-2 year stints in various childcare positions, making just enough money to afford rent in a one bedroom apartment with my cat. I never had more than the bare minimum health insurance, so it's definitely the case that I've neglected my medical care. I could never get the time off work anyway, because taking off meant not making enough money for rent.
Unfortunately, the consequences of living this lifestyle is that now I'm in my thirties, have practically no savings, have several genetic health problems, and I'm having trouble finding a job. The employment I do get offered isn't enough to cover rent (after hidden fees, cheapest rent is almost $1300 even for a studio apartment), and it's all physically tedious work that exacerbates my conditions. I can't help but blame myself for getting a degree in art for my current predicament, but I also can't afford to go back to school for a degree in something else.
I got out of a 2.5 year relationship with someone who turned out to be lying to me about everything the entire time were dating, and I recently had to move back in with my mother, and we don't get along. My mother was abusive to me in childhood, putting me in the position of parenting my siblings, and threatening me that if I left to go to college, she'd burn the house down with the family pets inside and kill herself. I told myself I'd never come back, but here I am. It's making me feel incredibly depressed and hopeless.
I honestly don't know where to go from here. I've tried applying to literally hundreds of jobs as a receptionist, medical scribe, office assistant, bank teller, tutor, nanny, daycare provider, museum guide, data entry clerk, cashier at places where sitting is allowed, everything I can think of that won't break my already failing body, and I get nothing in response. I've even lowered my financial expectations. Where I was once making $21 an hour, I'm now getting turned down for positions that pay $11.
I tried working at a grocery store for a couple of months, but I had to stand the entire 8 hours a day and do a lot of heavy lifting, and it got to where I was in so much constant pain that I couldn't get myself to the bathroom in the middle of the night and wet the bed instead. Just in literal constant agony. I wanted to die. I was so incredibly angry at my body.
Does anybody have advice for how I can get myself out of this rut? How to make the job hunt easier? What to put on a resume to make employers take a second look? I'd like to add that I am an extremely hard worker, despite what my brief tenure at the grocery store position implies. I show up on time, I do my own duties without arguing, and make sure to help my coworkers with their own work wherever I can. I feel like if I could just get my foot in the door with one of these jobs where I don't have to do physical labor, I could excel, but I just haven't gotten the opportunity.

I am a 24m who's struggled with various addictions over the course of the last ten years. I began smoking weed at 13, cigarettes at 15 and heavy alcohol use at 16. I was the kid who brought a water bottle of vodka into math just to see if I could get away with it, and nobody ever found out. I kept a handle of vodka behind the driver's seat of my car, etc. I have always been very "high functioning," in that I got good grades in high school, got into a very good college, and have since found a fair degree of success out of school. However, the habits that formed a decade ago have not gone away.
I get cross-faded every day, and recently at night, almost like a mantra, I tell myself to stop. That I am destroying my body, that it will catch up to me sooner than I think. I ask what will be the catalyst to change — a health scare? A destroyed relationship? And yet the next night I do the exact same thing.
The thing is, right now my life is pretty good by almost all objective measures. I'm in a healthy relationship with my girlfriend. I support myself financially, although I'm still on my dad's health insurance for another year or so. I have a group of smart, positive friends. And yet when it comes to drinking and smoking it's like my will power vanishes and the demon of habit takes control of my body. I don't know how to stop it.
I've gone through extensive periods of time of daily meditation, which helped me a lot, but I'm not in consistent practice right now. I go to the gym about four times a week. I don't sleep very well, usually going to bed around 3am and waking up around 9am. I also find my addictive tendencies finds other methods of achieving a dopamine rush — daily sports gambling, sometimes wasting full days playing video games, etc.
From the outside I look to be in a very positive, successful position for my age. Inside, I am struggling to stay afloat. I am looking for tools or actionable methods to help bring myself back to my best self. For example, I've tried making a daily schedule for myself in time blocks so that I can stay productive. The problem is I rarely stick to the schedule. I need to train my discipline, will power, something. Any thoughts? (Thank you for reading)

We've been dating since December and we've had 4 break ups or breakup-like talks. The thing is, I never follow through with it, and at this point I'm not sure if I've had legitimate reasons or if I've been an abusive prick. I really need some perspective on this, so I'll go through the five events.

1. She and I are in the same grad department. From the beginning and to this day she wants to keep our relationship completely secret. She hasn't even told her closest friends from school. Also, since the beginning, she's been telling me of a 'narcissistic' ex who broke her heart and damaged her self esteem and confidence in men about 6 months before we started dating. In March, she got a text from someone, she wouldn't tell me who, who was apparently outraged that she was dating me. She refused to show me the text or who sent it, and was actually angry at me for telling someone about our relationship. Well apparently a friend of mine from another department, who knows about our relationship, let it slip to one of his other friends in my department, and word got back to this mystery person. This person was defaming my character and had nasty things to say about me. Over the next few chilly weeks, as I'm continually asking about who sent this text and why, she trickle-truths that it was actually her ex. Apparently they've been in contact and have even been working on a duo concert with each other planned for mid April. This caused our first serious conversation that may have ended in a break up. The problem was the fact that her main issue with all of this was that I supposedly told someone in our department about us, and that she wasn't open to me about her continued involvement with her ex. It really surprised me that they were still in contact and had even planned concerts together (our department is music, btw.) Apparently, he had even brought her chocolate and a card on valentines day. So my concern was whether they were still involved and had feelings for each other. She denied this vehemently, and was even sort of angry for asking. She then said she was going to cancel the concert, really a small performance. This satisfied me so it didn't result in a break up, but she was bitter about her 'having to' cancel her performance for a month after, to the point where it affected our sex life.
   
2. The first time I actually had intended to break up with her has to do with how our sex life was affected by this. Specifically, how her desire was changed by all these unpleasant events. Basically, she was pretty sexually unresponsive, and never told me what was on her mind. I finally had a conversation with her about it, which I honestly started pretty aggressively because it had started to affect my self esteem. She threw out a few reasons, anxiety from the above situation, but also that she's finding our sex 'boring' and 'routine,' that essentially I'm not turning her on anymore or doing the things that turn her on. There were a few times when I'd initiate sex in a certain way and she'd say "that's not sexy." This was hurtful, especially since we've only been having sex regularly for like 3 months at this point. So I told her I want out. This of course compounded with the issues I mentioned above. The reason I stayed is because she framed it like I'm shaming her for her lack of arousal, being selfish and insensitive and treating her like an object. Fair enough. I apologized, I felt guilty about it, and we stayed together. Her point of view is that she likes me, finds me attractive, but I'm just not doing it for her right now and it's no big deal. But it's not fair for me to break up with her with because she isn't getting wet. It's childish, entitled, and cruel.
   
3. The next thing happened just a couple of weeks later. I'd known for about a month that after a concert in montana, she was going to spend an extra few days in yellowstone with her bandmates from her home country who were going to visit her. Well a few days before her flight , while we're just making conversation over text about her trip to yellowstone, she sort of corrects me and says that no, it isn't her band, but a single member of her band, the guy male lead singer, who lives in the area, with whom she will be going on this trip. Well, this was an issue for me. Especially given the situation with her ex and the fact that she hasn't said I love you back. I felt that it was sort of disprectful to me to not be upfront about this, but to sort of slip it in right before her departure. We had an argument, but it turned out alright. I even drove her to the airport at 4am. She said I love you for the first time. The night of her concert, after which this guy is supposed to pick her up, she doesnt text me. I get in contact with her finally, and really want to know to answers the questions that I've been asking over the last few days. Where will you be staying? In the same room? Same house? Etc. She seems annoyed, and says that tonight they've got a hotel room, and when they get to yellowstone they'll be staying in a cabin together up all night drinking and talking. This really put a strain. Those few nights I felt nauseous and uncertain. But she'd send very affectionate texts at like 3 am. When she got back we almost broke up. I didn't like the situation, again compounded by those above, but we ended up staying together.
   
4. Finally, I've know for a few months that from the middle of June to the beginning of August, my girlfriend will be away in another state teaching at a music camp. Because of all the issues we've had, I kind of felt uncertain about this, but I decided that I'll stay committed to her and try to make it work, even though are relationship is already very rocky. There was talk about her going away again for the rest of August to her home country a couple months ago. I said that it probably won't work for us, given our relationship, but then she assured me that she won't be going back. Over the last few months therefore we've made plans about how we're going to spend the last month the summer together. Well, two nights ago I get a call from her, less than two weeks before she goes away. She said she really wants to go, that it will be good for her mental health and for relieving anxiety, and that the only thing holding her back will be me. At this point I'm sort of angry, and I went over yesterday to break up with her finally. I'm tired of all this inconsideration from her. Well she explains that she really misses her sister, her only surviving family member, feels guilty for leaving her, and would feel guilty for turning down her invitation to visit. She really misses home. Fair enough! Now I feel like an asshole. Like a total asshole. Her sister's her only family. And I'm being selfish for wanting to break up because she wants to see her. So, we're still together for now.
   

At this point, I feel cruel and abusive for breaking up with her or threatening to 4 times. It can't be fair to her. At this same time, I feel like maybe I've had reasons to. I'd really appreciate your help in getting this sorted out.

I am a 24m who's struggled with various addictions over the course of the last ten years. I began smoking weed at 13, cigarettes at 15 and heavy alcohol use at 16. I was the kid who brought a water bottle of vodka into math just to see if I could get away with it, and nobody ever found out. I kept a handle of vodka behind the driver's seat of my car, etc. I have always been very "high functioning," in that I got good grades in high school, got into a very good college, and have since found a fair degree of success out of school. However, the habits that formed a decade ago have not gone away.
I get cross-faded every day, and recently at night, almost like a mantra, I tell myself to stop. That I am destroying my body, that it will catch up to me sooner than I think. I ask what will be the catalyst to change — a health scare? A destroyed relationship? And yet the next night I do the exact same thing.
The thing is, right now my life is pretty good by almost all objective measures. I'm in a healthy relationship with my girlfriend. I support myself financially, although I'm still on my dad's health insurance for another year or so. I have a group of smart, positive friends. And yet when it comes to drinking and smoking it's like my will power vanishes and the demon of habit takes control of my body. I don't know how to stop it.
I've gone through extensive periods of time of daily meditation, which helped me a lot, but I'm not in consistent practice right now. I go to the gym about four times a week. I don't sleep very well, usually going to bed around 3am and waking up around 9am. I also find my addictive tendencies finds other methods of achieving a dopamine rush — daily sports gambling, sometimes wasting full days playing video games, etc.
From the outside I look to be in a very positive, successful position for my age. Inside, I am struggling to stay afloat. I am looking for tools or actionable methods to help bring myself back to my best self. For example, I've tried making a daily schedule for myself in time blocks so that I can stay productive. The problem is I rarely stick to the schedule. I need to train my discipline, will power, something. Any thoughts? (Thank you for reading)

I am a 24m who's struggled with various addictions over the course of the last ten years. I began smoking weed at 13, cigarettes at 15 and heavy alcohol use at 16. I was the kid who brought a water bottle of vodka into math just to see if I could get away with it, and nobody ever found out. I kept a handle of vodka behind the driver's seat of my car, etc. I have always been very "high functioning," in that I got good grades in high school, got into a very good college, and have since found a fair degree of success out of school. However, the habits that formed a decade ago have not gone away.
I get cross-faded every day, and recently at night, almost like a mantra, I tell myself to stop. That I am destroying my body, that it will catch up to me sooner than I think. I ask what will be the catalyst to change — a health scare? A destroyed relationship? And yet the next night I do the exact same thing.
The thing is, right now my life is pretty good by almost all objective measures. I'm in a healthy relationship with my girlfriend. I support myself financially, although I'm still on my dad's health insurance for another year or so. I have a group of smart, positive friends. And yet when it comes to drinking and smoking it's like my will power vanishes and the demon of habit takes control of my body. I don't know how to stop it.
I've gone through extensive periods of time of daily meditation, which helped me a lot, but I'm not in consistent practice right now. I go to the gym about four times a week. I don't sleep very well, usually going to bed around 3am and waking up around 9am. I also find my addictive tendencies finds other methods of achieving a dopamine rush — daily sports gambling, sometimes wasting full days playing video games, etc.
From the outside I look to be in a very positive, successful position for my age. Inside, I am struggling to stay afloat. I am looking for tools or actionable methods to help bring myself back to my best self. For example, I've tried making a daily schedule for myself in time blocks so that I can stay productive. The problem is I rarely stick to the schedule. I need to train my discipline, will power, something. Any thoughts? (Thank you for reading)

I am very sad and I need help. My 1995 Trans Am was working fine but the headlights were very dim, the front turn signal was out, and one of the reverse lights was out. I thought these were things I could take care of myself. I was wrong.
The story starts last November when I bought LED headlights and an LED turn signal bulb. These were recommended to me by my then housemate, who was helping me and appeared to know what he was talking about. When we took the old headlights out, one of them broke so now we were committed to the replacement. Unfortunately, the new ones had a different connector type so we spent hours driving around trying to find a solution. No luck so I ordered a converter cable online, which took a very long time to arrive.
Meanwhile, we replaced the turn signal bulb. As you can imagine, this was a bad idea and the turn signals on that side went a bit crazy. Some research led to the ordering of a turn signal relay for LEDs and the replacement of all the turn signal bulbs with LEDs. Why did I not just go back to a standard bulb on the one that was out? I don't know but I really wish I had.
In order to get to the turn signal bulbs in the back, the whole rear light assembly must be removed. I also needed to replace one of the reverse light bulbs so that was ok. That bulb socket was super corroded so I ordered a new one, which wasn't the right style, so I ordered another new one, which fit. Meanwhile, the car isn't being driven, it has no headlights, and the rear light assembly has been off for weeks. Several of the other light sockets and/or their wiring were in bad shape so I just ordered a whole new set of them. I bought the wiring diagrams for the car to ensure I did everything right and I have double checked them all. All the rear sockets have been replaced and there is a new bulb in every one.
In the middle of all this, I went on several work trips that kept me out of the country for most of January and February. Then I had foot surgery in February. My housemate kept saying he would get everything fixed and buttoned back up but he never did. I have now kicked him out for other reasons. I was unable to walk until late March and by then I was pretty depressed about the whole thing. I started working on this again in late May. At some point, one of the light assembly parts and all the screws were misplaced so I bought new ones. The LED headlights have also disappeared so I just bought regular ones. The headlights are now installed, all the rear light sockets are on with new bulbs, and I have double checked all the fuses are correct.
The problem happened in stages. When the rear sockets were replaced, all the rear lights worked except for the turn signal lights, but the ones that did work all flashed like a turn signal when the brakes were pressed. I tried swapping them all out for regular (vs LED) but that did not help. I double checked the wiring again and they are all wired properly. Then I installed the headlights, which I did by manually raising them. Once I did that, when I turned the headlights on, they would flip down and the lights would come on. When I turned them off, they would flip up and the lights would go off. I never did anything with the headlight wiring so this makes no sense. I tried various combinations of manually operating them and turning them on and off but no luck. In my fuse check, I noted that the turn signal fuse was 30A but should be 15, so I replaced the fuse and the turn signal relay. This all happened over the last several weeks.
Today, I have everything installed and now nothing works. I charged the battery; the battery charger says it is at 12.7V. Nada. No lights, car won't even try to start. Everything is dead. I give up. What do I do??? Is there something I overlooked? The lights worked just a week or so ago. Should I have it towed somewhere? I am obviously going to just keep making the problem worse. I am beyond depressed about this car. I am in Houston, TX if anyone knows a person or shop that could deal with this.

Hi guys,
Thinking back, this is not my first Reddit post of a similar nature. I think all my life I’ve been addicted to things (weed, porn, “self help”, exercise). This is just one that’s been the most detrimental. I am a problem gambler and need help. I think I also need a place to just let it all out. Hopefully people will read and comment/resonate but I’m literally unable to concentrate at work because things are bad again. I apologize for it being long and you will all likely skip but if anyone reads, thank you.
I have a lot of trauma and am very lonely a lot of times. I had a bad experience being social and I think people pick up on my extreme awkwardness but they do not make me feel welcome, they come across judgy and I feel like I’m performing a dance begging for acceptance. So I spend even more time online (and have been like that since childhood) and don’t get much social interaction. This is relevant to how I got so sucked in so far.
Growing up, my parents were not only strict, but very strict about money. We were poor and they always told me to avoid debt but made it more about school debt (which I did avoid). They definitely talked about predatory credit card practices etc, but the one thing they did not ever instill in us was mitigating problem spending and gambling. Not just me but my mom and sister have really bad spending habits on food and unnecessary purchases…but I’m getting a bit ahead…
I didn’t get a credit card until a bit later, and didn’t have a job until about 2018-19 at 21. Even then, I barely used the CC and also barely drank. I hated gambling at a young age because I only know it as the casino in big cities with the excessive alcohol and lights and cigar smells I hated. Of course I was on my high horse at a younger age saying people were just “paying money to lose money and that made no sense”…My parents went to Vegas a lot, not weekly but every maybe 3-6 months because of comps. And us living close. I was mostly there just to watch my siblings and never went down to actually be in the casino. The vibes just always made me uncomfortable.
The one thing I did do was buy stocks. I remember briefly trying to understand the day trading stuff and I was so overwhelmed I just stuck to my traditional buying stocks and leaving them like a savings. Did good all the way until COVID, everything was down and I had to quit my job to move for school and was so burnt out from working (as “essential” while everyone else was not working) that I just took time off from work for like a year and a half. Spent all my stock market savings that was basically just all my money minus the interest made because of the COVID dip. I sold at the worst time possible but chose to do that instead of just getting work or even trying to learn about getting unemployment for my “mental health” LOL.
Right in my senior year of college I had a roommate who used a draft fantasy sports book. Never knew about money lines or anything about sports period,because I was too lazy to figure out sports rules, let alone betting line math…but I wanted to be accepted as a man and thought sports would be a good way to learn and build friendships…and “investing” money into it seemed like a worthwhile trade.
He explained oveunder props. Easy as cake. You think they’ll go over a certain line and you pick that. Even easier to upload your card and make an account. I thought it would be harmless…
I made one, did okay, but no crazy bets just $30-50 MAX like every couple of weeks. Trying to get into sports and fit in with the boys…. Didn’t care too much about losing $20 here and there and that’s my problem…
I then bring this up to a classmate in our data science class in 2022 wondering if there’s ways people can track player data…who tells me about “tailing” people who post their player picks online. Never knew about that/that there was already a market (bc I was new to sports).
He tells me about a guy he follows. Guy has a site with “the best prop data”. Clearly know this other guy is just selling his services but the service seems so beneficial. “Best hit rates in the game!” “No one has data like this”. Straight snake oil salesman tactics and I’m so aware of it, but it’s like I just didn’t care. Of course it’s just like ESPN data all on a histogram and not that revolutionary, and it’s like I already know I’m signing up for getting played but I just accept it(likely because I have settled for a lot in my life). I get a membership. I think oh I’ll make a ROI worth the cost of the membership and more! Right….
That was in about March-ish I think of last year. (Yea it was, because I specifically remember the old classmate asking me about March madness…). From March to June I had losses, but nothing super horrible, I didn’t really track it but I had never spent more than $100 max and probably only spent around $175 a month which was about the rate of all my subscriptions combined. but around this time I had also just had a very traumatic experience getting robbed and abandoned drunkenly during a party on campus. Somehow I made it back from the party to my house and allegedly my roommate helped me vomit/clean up but I woke up to my wallet and phone gone.
I felt violated, confused because I couldn’t remember certain events, sad that my “friends” didn’t even have my back at certain points. I was angry and really embarrassed and depressed and felt like I couldn’t trust ANYONE around me. Of course, them feeling second hand embarrassment from me, stopped inviting me out and our interactions got so awkward after that. I felt like now my reputation was just that drunk idiot who did god knows what while blacked out. And didn’t really have a lot of support.
My gambling got worse, but I didn’t make that much money so I also didn’t really bet that much either? It’s kind of a blur around that time now and I don’t really remember but I don’t think I was on the group chats/apps nearly as much as I am now. I also deleted them around graduation time because I needed to focus and I needed to save $$$ for my move out.
Fast forward I was in okay-ish shape: was able to get an apartment and higher paying job…but my relationship was strained with my now ex girlfriend. It was bad. I redownloaded the apps during this time. I was trying to plan out our future and she was not helping me. I was basically doing everything myself in the relationship and felt like my “investment” in our relationship wasn’t going anywhere…as she was not communicating and not helping me plan, so i began using that money for bets.
Initially it was “it’s just for fun now that I have more income! I can afford it now” then it was “oh it will be like a side hustle”.
But I got worse. I felt so disconnected and burnt out from my new job in finance, also very numb to large amounts of $$ on screens all day that I started betting hundreds daily. Then tie in disconnected from my ex and now had no friends. I was numb and needed to feel something, and alcohol was not enough. I’d drink here and there but never enough to get completely trashed like before because I was scared of that.
Now remember the subscription? This sub comes with a “chat room” FULL of a bunch of enabling children and their ring leader who makes the datasets. I used to respect what the guy does but I have so many problems with his business model: advertising slightly over 50/50 guesses as a worthwhile investment, getting his data out 5 minutes before games start (obviously so he can make his picks on his own first and then tell the followers after), calling his own patrons idiots and trying to make it sound like he’s the best gambler in the world and that if we’re losing we are just “not doing it right” when he’s really using $100,000s of dollars from subscribers to make his for fun bets while people desperately cling to some sort of “mathematical explanation” for why Alpha McThree is a better pick than Johnny Appleseeds.
I digress again. Basically there’s people around my age (20s) older (40s) and possibly younger all in these chats enabling each other to bet. You feel rushed because you have to “beat the prop bumps” when they move the lines. You feel constantly on edge and that anxiety feels good because of the potential payout, and then horrible when you’re off by one or two players and lose everything.
I became obsessed. It is probably the combination of the rush, the colors, the screen lighting in a more comfortable way to social media…the people encouraging you or congratulating you or worse bonding over shared loss, you start to feel in community.
Mind you, the community itself was toxic. I am part of the LGBT community but never disclosed, and there is so much homophobia and transphobia, sometimes even racism (I mean I get that I’m positing this to Reddit LOL) but it’s just weird to me as a POC who is part of this community to see all that stuff everyday and then say those are my people….and to pay a subscription to be apart of it…it felt like a weird digital fraternity. It felt “cool” to have a badge for my sports book, for people to recognize my nickname, to see the same names everyday, it felt like routine.
Everyday I’d wake up and bet. When I got COVID in December the amounts doubled and I was spending $500 in minutes instead of spread across days. I didn’t even care anymore. I’d keep playing and eventually lose it. Every single time like “I’m just gonna play enough to make my money back and pay off some of the debt and then delete everything!”
It never happens. I’m still $6k in debt, am -$230 overdraft and am now doing the one thing I really said would never do: ask my dad for help. I can’t concentrate on work because I’m so overwhelmed. I just got paid, still two weeks left and I have absolutely no money anywhere. And since I haven’t even paid my mom back the first time I am worried about asking again.
My dad doesn’t really reach out, but he texted me the other day. So instead of responding I just sent him a screenshot of my overdraft and told him I had to pay my apartment security deposit (which is true, technically) but it is really the stupid $600 bet that put me overdraft. I basically paid X amount on my credit card, didn’t see it post, told myself “maybe I forgot to do it” and said I had enough for the bets, lost three idiotic bets and then both the misses and the CC payment posted.
I feel like the “bending” of the truth will l start piling up and that things will stop checking out. He’s probably wondering how I’m overdraft and can connect two and two together (he’s seen my screenshots of bets when I was up, and asked me when I get paid and I’m too scared to say I got paid TWO DAYS AGO and am out -$2000) so I’m even more embarrassed and feel like I’m disappointing everyone.
I already owe my mom, and they aren’t even that rich at all so I feel horrible taking their money trying to pay myself back and then ending up back here again. But I am equally worried of them going nuclear and me being trapped back home/having to give up control of my bank account bc of it.
I feel stuck at my job because I need it to pay off my debt and save money/pay bills. I hate it so much, but need to stay here because of how bad the market is and I think dealing with the stress enables my behavior. I feel worse because I should have $20k saved up by now but instead I’m now total down -$26k. (The 20 I would’ve had saved plus my credit card).
So it’s just my lack of control and unnecessary purchase staring me in the face. Every day. While it takes me weeks to make even a dent in my debt. I literally have nothing in my fridge right now. I don’t know what I’m going to eat next week. And throughout all this my ex and I still talk, she still buys me lunch, she is a saint but our dynamic would not work
I’m meeting with my therapist today, and I contemplate either getting a new one specializing in addiction or stopping constantly one because of the cost but two because I’ll talk about it but I feel like I’m not even changing or doing the work…
I feel alone trying to get out of this hole and like this debt will follow me forever. I also wonder if I feel like I’m addicted to the wallowing too? Like now I have a reason to stay depressed.
How do I get better? Is there even any hope for me? I feel like I’m messing my life up and constantly at the mercy of something else and not myself… people around me have cars and solo apartments and I’m living check to check in debt with no purpose. How do I deal with stress?

Note: I know that not every single dumbass Boomer was a hippy, and not every single hippy ended up becoming a dumbass Boomer, but the fact that there is likely a bit of middle ground on the Venn diagram has intrigued me for a while. Thoughts?

I'm currently double majoring in Psychology and Secondary Education with a minor in Special Education as I plan to later become a School Counselor or School Psychologist. For now, after obtaining my degree I would rather teach upper elementary or middle school. How would I go about that? What content areas would I be eligible to test for?
Edit: I forgot to add that. I go to college in DC, so I would be under that license with reciprocity. Other states I would be considering due to proximity and family would be: Massachusetts, Washington (state), California, Maryland, and Virginia.
I would prefer to teach ELA and/or History. Math is alright too -- but nothing beyond the middle school level.

Hey guys, wanted to see if anyone could remember the show I used to watch in elementary school, I’m pretty sure the main characters where a brother and sister who would go on different adventures, each one having a lesson (It’d be math problems, fears, bullying, etc.). One big thing I remember was that the artist was also a character; They would have trouble with something or needed something and you’d see a brush come in to help. The most I remember is an episode where they went to a scary amusement park, they went through a hallway of pictures of clowns I think and had to go up a mountain but could only proceed by solving math problems on it. This was a show that my teachers would put up on the smart board back in 2010’s, on a cd I imagine, I’m 21 now and have had this show stuck on my head for years, if anyone remembers it you’d be helping my inner child lol, thank you :)

One said: "Who are we and where have we come from?" And after decades of debating, we forgot to add one equally important question: "Where are we going?"
Since our independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia has become a dot on Western radars. By "Western," I primarily mean the USA, because the USA is the main ideological powerhouse of the so-called “global West.”
A former Soviet state in the Caucasus region with a troubled (and potentially more tense) relationship with Russia is an asset. Georgia became hard pro-West with Saakashvili in power (undoubtedly a hard pro-Western ruler, speculatively even a USA proxy). During this time, the USA didn’t take any vital steps to strengthen Georgia’s economy, sovereignty, and freedom. The USA gave $6 billion over 30 (!) years to Georgia (200 million a year), which is pocket change for them. In comparison, they gave $26 billion in just one payment to Israel to continue bombing Gaza civilians. It’s also important to mention that most of this money didn’t go to the government and people but to NGOs. But even if this money had been given to the government, it would hardly be anything to strengthen the economy. That’s just not how the economy works. No important infrastructural, defensive, or other partnership deals were made. Georgia went to Afghanistan) and Iraq to pledge their allegiance to the USA and even became the third largest contributor of troops. Georgia lost 38 soldiers in these missions, in wars we had nothing to do with. So having a couple of battalions in the Middle East for just $6 billion is a good deal for Uncle Sam.
The West didn’t even reconsider their relationship with Russia since their brutal invasion of Georgia in 2008. Our “friendly” nations held parades on Red Square, had new deals made, and their leaders ate burgers with Medvedev. As if August 2008 never happened.
There is a logical question: why?
Well, the answer is clear: because they didn’t have to. See, when you have “your bastard” in power of a certain country, propagandizing that all (economic, defensive, cultural) ties should be with the USA only, you don’t need any other investment in that country. In other words: why should we spoil our relationship with Russia if Georgia will be our guy anyway? And for many years that was true actually, there was no real alternative to the USA but now we have a different picture - there is a country, a promising country, a scary country.
Don’t consider this as an anti-Western rhetoric from me. Not in the slightest. Western values of freedom and liberty are most attractive and possibly the best. But being part of Western civilization is one thing, and real geopolitics is another. People often confuse them with each other. One might say: well, USA is our friend!
To that, I’ll answer:
There are no friends.
International politics, and mainly realism school of politics) (started by Machiavelli and now held by John Mearsheimer), is not a matter of family and friends. It’s a free-for-all battleground with no morals and no higher authority. Therefore, there are no relationships as we ordinary humans are used to: there is no friendship, love, or jealousy—there is only one thing: survival and everything that concerns that. There are no friends—only contemporary allies; there are no enemies—only contemporary adversaries. A state does everything in its power to survive, and if something threatens its security, it does everything in its power to eliminate it.
The USA is no friend of ours. No one is, no one was, and no one will ever be. You, the person reading this, will put your personal interests aside if your friend needs help. You’ll act altruistically and self-sacrificially because you love your friend, you have a personal relationship, and you’ve known that person for years. No state has ever done that and will ever do this (in the current system)
We are alone, always were alone, and always will be alone in pursuing our interests. Yes, we have allies and will have allies with whom we share our interests, but no more than that. It is our path to walk, and we should never, ever consider anything but the security and well-being of our people.
Considering what the actual hell is happening in the world right now.
Since the end of the Cold War (not 1991, but unofficially in the '80s when it was clear the Soviets lost), USA became the global hegemony. There was no other global power to threaten its dominance. USA reached its fourth phase , and as others before them (the British, Mongols, Romans, and so many more), it influenced every part of the known world. From the Middle East to South America, there was no country to challenge them, and even if one appeared (for one reason or another), the USA swiftly “dealt” with them. And as we unironically repeat the worn-out phrase “history repeats itself,” it indeed does. Like those before them, the USA is becoming a victim of its own system—in this instance, capitalism. In their golden era, capitalism pushed businesses to move their production lines to “cheap countries,” and the best of them was newly “half-decommunized,” poor and large China. Americans probably never would have thought that they were creating one who would challenge them in the future and possibly even end them. And so, for the first time in 50 years, we have a truly bipolar world. We have entered a new Cold War era.
In the blue corner, we have the reigning champion, devastator of the Middle East, Mr. Coup d'état himself—the mighty and powerful USA!
In the red corner, we have the title challenger from Asia, octopus of economies and surveillance, oppressor of Hong Kong and Taiwan, young and furious—PRC!
Bruce Buffer would have said this in some parallel world (though with the shit happening now, he might as well do it in this one).
We have a situation now where both sides rush to make “factions,” getting as many countries on their side as possible. It’s an unusual situation for the USA because, for many years, there was no alternative—you either were with the USA or were dead. To add fuel to the fire (in the White House), China’s foreign policy is much more attractive to third countries. Xi’s famous “One Belt, One Road” initiative is a clear example of that. On the other hand, the USA still has a lot (and I mean A LOT) of leverage left in other states. By forming BRICS, the global south challenged the USA and the most important and powerful weapon in their arsenal—the US dollar. China does everything slowly and methodically to dethrone the USA, and by the looks of it, everything plays into their hands.
Why does China do that?
When you grow to a certain size, you attract enemies of your size. The USA and China naturally became adversaries because when you grow big, your interests multiply, and so does the overlap between your interests and other big powers' interests. And as we said above, one only acts on behalf of their own interests.
China already has on their side: Russia, most of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Iran, probably Turkey, a lot of African countries (predominantly in the sub-Saharan belt), Hungary, Brazil, India, South Africa, and a lot of countries that were traditionally allied with the West have hinted at jumping ship if they see the China option as winning and more beneficial (e.g., Saudi Arabia and, by extension, all Arab countries). It seems like a race to win Europe, and whoever gets Europe wins the race.
That’s where we come into play.
Unlike the US, whose soft power consists of installing regimes and propagandizing their ideology as the only way of achieving “American Dream™”, China acts differently. They build tight, mutually beneficial economic ties and economic deals only they can offer and that can’t be beaten. With that, they guarantee that certain third states will never misstep from their path—no one shoots a duck that lays golden eggs. So to have Europe, China needs strong, constant economic ties to Europeans. Meanwhile, the USA needs to isolate the EU as much as possible (*cough* Nord Stream 2). But it seems Europe is not keen on maintaining the status quo and also seeks ties with China, since their economy has been slowing down year by year, the workforce is declining, and migrants appear to be more of a problem than a solution. Europe needs more economic diversification (presumably with China), and for this, they will be willing to let go of multilateral peace guarantees between NATO countries.
NATO was beneficial to Europe for decades since they didn’t have to worry about defense and spend money on defense. First of all, when you are bordered by countries that are also NATO members, you have nothing to worry about, and secondly, the USA did all the heavy lifting. In return, the USA requested a unified foreign policy. “If I go to the Middle East, you shut up and go with me.” And it was mutually beneficial for a long time. But as Bob Dylan said, times they are a-changin.
After Russia engulfed Eastern Europe in fire, trade between the EU and China halted, and both of them started seeking new routes since Russia was unacceptable and unreliable for Europe and China was not keen on it either. So the "Middle Corridor" idea was revived, connecting China to the EU through four countries: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia/Turkey. This corridor not only priveded safe trading route but also the shortest one, shortening delivery time from 50 days to just 14. China building infrastructure in Georgia and in the aforementioned countries and also starting construction of a port in Anaklia even more solidified this theory. This route is essential for China, Europe, and most importantly (or as I said, the only one that matters) for Georgia. This route is not only a big economic gain but also a huge security and prosperity guarantee, since both the EU and China will be keen on maintaining peace in the region to not disrupt trade. This may come in different ways to Georgia.
(what I’ll describe below, of course, is the best way scenario, not the most likely one, but realistic nonetheless.)
From China, Georgia can get Abkhazia and Samachablo in one way or another. And no, as I said before, there are no friendships and gifts in geopolitics. This may happen not because China = good, China = kind,but because it just may be very beneficial to them also.. Since they most definitely will want security on their trade route, it’s in their own interests to have no separatist regions near major transport hubs (fortunately for us, the Anaklia port will be right beside the de facto border), and since China has major influence over Russia (especially after 2022), it won’t be hard for them to ask (demand/make a deal with) Russians to withdraw forces. Sounds unlikely ? well china already did this in Yemen (again, because it was in their interest ro have safe passage for their cargo on the Red Sea)
On the other hand, if this route goes through, the EU will most likely want to have more control over Georgia rather than having it act on its own. For that, they might give us EU membership. The other trend that also benefits Georgia in that matter is the gradual shift in power in the EU. As I stated multiple times, entities act only in their own interest. Therefore, EU enlargement happens only when it’s beneficial to the EU. One can be beneficial to the EU in two ways: politically and economically. With the right-sided shift in EU politics, political enlargement will become more and more frowned upon, and economic enlargement will become favored. This will accelerate 10x if China starts bringing some final assembly plants and factories to Georgia since it might as well be cheaper and more profitable for everyone.
But, there always is a “but.”
It can’t go this smoothly, can it? Of course, this project has enemies—quite big ones, actually.
First of all, it’s of course our old one—Russia. Our northern neighbors are losing touch in the Caucasus; they are even losing Armenia. Having a strong, sovereign Georgia right at the border won’t be their dream scenario. It’s also notable that if the “middle corridor” doesn’t go through, the second most likely option is to renew trading through Russia, meaning this project is costing them influence and revenue. But fortunately for us, Russia has become China’s lapdog—an aggressive, pit bull-like lapdog, but a lapdog nonetheless.
But even worse than that, our adversary is becoming (or has already become) the worst single country to have on your enemy list—the USA. This trade route is a big no-no for Uncle Sam, and they will do almost everything to disrupt this project. (Yes, including that.) A country that used psy-ops, bribery, and propaganda to stage coups in more than 60 countries will stop at nothing to halt this project. That is my biggest fear.
Ironically, the viral TikTok trend during the “Russian Law” demonstrations quoting, “Next time somebody tells you, ‘The government wouldn’t do that,’ oh yes, they would,” refers to the CIA pretending to be vampires to overtake the Philippines. No, sadly, I’m not kidding and yes they succeeded.
We must never let ourselves be dragged down by Russia, the USA, or any other country. Honestly, fuck Russia, fuck the USA, and fuck China if it benefits us.
We don’t owe anyone anything.
We must choose sides based on who offers us the most; that's who ends up having deals with us; that’s who ends up winning...
P.S.
Who is a Georgian?
What does it mean to be Georgian?
Is it blood?
Language?
Religion?
nah
For me Georgian is someone who prioritizes Georgia’s interests above all others, even if it goes against their internal beliefs.

TITLE: Kant, Herder and Cosmopolitanism: An Inquiry into Historicisms, Universalisms and Eurocentrism.
18th century Prussia was a complex sociocultural landscape, which sported often contradicting imperatives of both cosmopolitanism and ‘nationalism’. While there was a unique cosmopolitan lifestyle, namely thanks to Prussia’s comparative lack of national identity in relation to western European nations, there were also counteractive efforts at establishing this national sentiment. Frederick the Great’s adoption of so called ‘progressive’ policies, such as equality through the law, and freedom of the press, had compounded Prussia’s strategic position in Central Europe, subsequently attracting an influx of trade and diplomacy, most notably from surrounding Germanic states. Regardless, Frederick II’s belief in ‘enlightened absolutism’ yet reflected a dual effort at differentiating Prussia from the rest of Europe, and thus ‘cosmopolitanism’ was something ironically in tandem with so-called nationalism. Thomas Abbt’s Von Tode fur Das Vaterland (1761) had outlined moral imperatives of sacrificing one’s own life for the good of the nation, and efforts at social cohesion were present as far back as 1715, when German became mandated for what was a nationalised schooling system.
Prussia’s cosmopolitan culture was one that was at times combated by, and at other times in tandem with auto-referential imperatives. Both Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder were two Prussian thinkers, who’s ideas were distinctly shaped and moulded by this social context. Cosmopolitanism was not merely a lifestyle in Prussia, as institutions like the ‘Berlin Academy of Sciences’, which were central to Frederick II’s belief in ‘enlightened absolutism’, had stimulated the idea that intellectual prowess was similarly integral to Prussia’s ‘modernising’ efforts. In 1784, Herder had published his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, and later in the year, Kant had published his Idea for a Global History with A Cosmopolitan Intent. Both Kant and Herder imagined ‘cosmopolitanism’ very differently. Where Kant would predominantly focus on the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan order’ as a teleological end goal to history, Herder would instead profess the mere relativity of different ideas and cultural practices. Compared to Kant, Herder had centred intercultural equality as central to cosmopolitanism, and had thus abstained from deterministic, universalist concepts such as that of ‘cosmopolitan order’.
As prevalent as it was in Prussia’s multi-ethnic landscape, ‘cosmopolitanism’ also appears to have ‘triumphed’ in western societies. It is ever relevant today, and these ideas are evidently significant in their legacies. Michael W. Doyle had praised Kant’s ideas for their influence on contemporary ‘liberal internationalism’, while Frederick Beiser had lauded Herder’s ideas for its unique recognition of the relativity of different ideas, particularly when most enlightenment thinkers were instead concerned with arbitrary, universal narratives that he describes as comparatively Eurocentric. Regardless, both historians ignore how both essays may be ‘Eurocentric’ themselves, given the problematic concept of ‘political modernity’ that exists today, and which imbibes characteristically European imaginations as an object standard for societal ‘progress’. Beiser and Doyle ignore this concept, and in this sense, their appraisals reflect a very emanation of this problem. This essay will thus begin with a re-evaluation of the concept of enlightenment universalism, followed by the a formal dissemination of Eurocentrism and its relation to Kant and Herder’s philosophies. Lastly, I will examine the relationship between these concepts and the existence of contemporary ‘political modernity’, with the aim of re-evaluating these essays in the context of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe.
To assess the rigour of current evaluations on Kant and Herder’s works is to first gain a deeper understanding of both essays. Immanuel Kant’s imagination of a ‘cosmopolitan order’ was not an isolated idea, but encapsulated a rigid philosophical framework, which he sets out in his essay. In Kant’s eyes, this ‘cosmopolitan’ future would be engendered by teleological human experiences with conflict, or ‘unsocial sociability’ that would aid in the ‘refinement’ of the human spirit through the use of reason, and gradual, developmental realisation of a ‘universal moral law’. Kant maintained that reason would triumph over the course of history, and despite his rigid, and often uncompromising language, he maintains that his teleology would ultimately culminate in the ‘emancipation of all people, in all places’.
Herder’s profession of ‘cultural relativism’ may be similarly contextualised by his broader beliefs on cosmopolitanism. Herder purports the idea of a ‘volksgeist’ or ‘spirit of the people’ that may define human history, and to Herder, it is the use of rigid, abstract language that is at direct odds with cosmopolitanism. For Herder, cultural relativism is an endorsement of a ‘spirit of the people’, which may only be captured once one abstains from superimposing arbitrary narratives onto the diverse cultural practices of global peripheries. Herder and Kant disagreed on precisely which ideas they could label as truly cosmopolitan, and it is this disagreement that has stimulated similarly opposing contemporary evaluations.
Frederick Beiser’s ‘The German Historicist Tradition’ is a retrospective evaluation of different German philosophies, and maintains a particular focus on Herder’s intellectual integrity. While Beiser takes a critical stance on Herder’s notion of particularism, notably for its incompatibility with the idea of shared, universal truths, he also recognises that it is this methodology that warrants his ‘cosmopolitanism’ to have integrity. Beiser notes that Herder’s work maintains an awareness of epistemological diversity, as much as it does cultural diversity, and in this sense, Herder was thus practicing cosmopolitanism as much as he was arguing for it. Contrastingly, Michael Doyle approaches ‘Ways of War and Peace’ from an inquiry into the influential nature of enlightenment thought, more so than its intellectual integrity. His preoccupation with the idea of ‘liberal internationalism’ is, regarding Kant, a testament to the sensationalism of his ideas. For Doyle, cosmopolitanism is a noble pursuit, but is also one that is only meaningful if it is able to be put into practice. Doyle’s appraisal of Kant thus revolves around the idea that the ‘liberal internationalism’ draws much of its influence from the sensationalism of Kantian ideas, most notably those of ‘cosmopolitan order’ and lasting international peace. For Doyle, it is precisely Kant’s rigid, uncompromising language that has created a more cohesive framework for many to better understand and execute cosmopolitanism bureaucratically. It is clear that Beiser and Doyle maintain ideas of cosmopolitanism that are as diverse as Kant and Herder’s imaginations, and they are evidently to be lauded in the ambitious scope of their works.
I would argue that both historians, in spite of their nuances, ignore how Kant and Herder’s philosophies would yet be constrained in both scope and applicability. Their ideas concern themselves with a global scale, and yet the scope of sociolinguistic influences that informed these ideas is much smaller. When Beiser praises Herder’s holistic approach, he ignores how his ideas were deployed teleologically, reflecting the universalism of history in the same image as distinctly European imaginations. Regarding Kant, Doyle ignores how his abstract, universalist terminology risks contradicting the very diversity of ideas and cultures that he had imagined as part of a ‘cosmopolitan order’. It appears confusing that both imaginations of cosmopolitanism would prioritise universalism, as notably, Dipesh Chakrabarty draws considerable links between the universalist preoccupations of enlightenment culture, and the Eurocentric idea of ‘political modernity’ that they have come to unfortunately encapsulate. When Beiser and Doyle ignore this, they warrant investigation into how these essays may have contributed to this very problem through their use of abstract language, orientalist tendencies, and imaginations on historical teleology.
The ideas that came out of enlightenment were often universalist, and yet may be directly linked to specific sociocultural pressures across the continent. The problem here is that when one universalises what is an immediately relevant concept, they risk robbing other social contexts of their own ‘sovereign’ intellectual expression. Kant and Herder were no exception to this trend, and thus their use of universalism appears somewhat contradictory to the cosmopolitanism they sought after. John Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion maintains that the ‘enlightenment’, as a singular concept, is largely reductive of the multidimensionality of ideas that existed in this period. He identifies how many view ‘enlightenment’ as Franco-German in origin, maintaining that ‘the enlightenments’ may be better characterised by their plurality, given the unique linguistic paradigms that shaped different ideas.
Across numerous historical contexts, such as Scotland and France, thinkers had imbibed diverse imaginations on ‘objectivity’, and yet these ideas were distinctly relative to comparatively minuscule, and subsequently unrepresentative linguistic contexts. In 1698, a failed colony in Panama had accompanied Scottish fascination with scientific enquiry across universities, and in 1748, Colin Maclaurin’s An Account of Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries had conveyed a particular fascination with Newtonian empiricism. Following the 1707 Union Act with England, which brought new trade opportunities not found in Scotland’s failed imperialist endeavours, Scottish thought had merged into a synthesis of empiricism and political economy. Between 1739 and 1740, David Hume would publish A Treatise of Human Nature, which approached political philosophy from an empiricist imagination of the human mind and its ability to form a ‘moral culture’ with other ‘social beings’. These ideas proved influential for Scottish linguistic imaginations, as William Robertson had applied this framework to a study of pre-Columbian populations, endorsing the idea that broader societies may objectively progress in epochs from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civility'. Another example would be Montesquieu’s ‘Spirit of the Laws’, which claimed to assess the ‘utility’ of global religions in his political philosophy, yet this imagination of ‘utility’ was largely contingent on comparatively particularistic linguistic influences; Montesquieu had staunchly opposed the ‘first estate’ taxation privileges of 18th century France, and it is thus no surprise that his imaginations on ‘political triage’ were grounded in the eradication of ‘despotism’ as he had observed it in France.
Contextual forces would not merely inspire ‘enlightened’ ideas, but would also propagate universalist language. When William Robertson had examined pre-columbian cultures as part of his endorsement for Scottish ‘stadialism’, he had done so to justify ‘stadialism’ as a universal, objective concept. These examples demonstrate that while enlightened thought had often claimed to have uncovered ‘objective’ truth, the ‘truth’ of these concepts were only as true as the sociolinguistic contexts that informed them. It appears wrong that any of these abstract concepts may truly be universal, as the universalism of one abstraction ultimately risks obscuring the development and expression of others, which is a testament to the logical equity of different abstract ideas. Enlightenment universalism appears, by default, to be a problematic concept. It is the differential in scope between the influences of enlightenment ideas, and their comparatively global application, that is both Eurocentric and subversive of ‘cosmopolitan’ diversity. Perhaps the biggest irony is that while Kant and Herder had imagined a cosmopolitan future, and on a global scale, they had done so by universalising distinctly particularist influences, which are hardly applicable to the global scope their essays are concerned with. If we are to demonstrate that these ideas disjunct with cosmopolitanism, it follows that we establish the links between Kant and Herder’s universal imaginations and their comparatively particularistic influences.
Kant and Herder had experienced a number of contextual influences that draw considerable links to their philosophies. While Prussia lacked a notable national identity, and involved cross cultural encounters amongst Polish and Lithuanian populations, there was also an extensive state presence in everyday life. Frederick II’s ‘enlightened absolutism’ allowed him to embark on bureaucratic innovations on centralised authoritarian power, most notably through his imposition of standardised military training, and his emphasis on state monopolies as a means of economic regulation. Frederick the Great had prioritised bureaucratic efficiency, yet he was not the first to do so. Instead, Prussia maintained a consistent drive to consolidate its bureaucracy as far back as the ‘Edict of Potsdam’ in 1685. Frederick William I sought to attract Huguenot refugees into the fold of the Prussian economy, and by 1700, French Huguenots had played an integral role in the establishment of the Electoral Brandenburg Society of Sciences, something that would be renamed the ‘Royal Academy’ in 1744 following Frederick II’s patronage of ‘enlightened absolutism’. Frederick the Great and Frederick William I illustrate a historical context of ideological determinism; on the topic of nationhood, Frederick II had noted that “Whoever does not respect and love his own language is not worthy of salvation”. This had followed the standardised teaching of German in Prussian schools (1715), and thus Prussia’s ‘modernising’ efforts were certainly deployed with deterministic presuppositions as to what ‘modernisation’ actually meant (most notably, that of nationhood). Amidst this landscape, Kant had studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Konigsberg, and had personally participated in what would then be the Royal Academy of Sciences. Ronald Calinger describes how the academy had eventually become a hub for intellectual rigour, and given Kant’s scientific background, it is no surprise that Prussia’s ‘modernising’ imaginations would find itself reflected in his use of language.
Prussian imaginations on objective ‘progress’, and the stadialist idea of ‘modernisation’, appear somewhat tangential to a fascination with ‘unlocking’ objective truth, and scientific enquiry certainly reflected a vehicle through which this may occur. Kant’s language is similarly deterministic, and his imaginations on cosmopolitanism appear, in tandem with his scientific background, to be heavily preoccupied with the idea of uncovering universal conceptual truths. This is something exemplified by Kant’s efforts at establishing a metaphysical grounding for morality, a concept which was integral to his imaginations on reason, history, and historical teleology. There is considerable risk that such language risks marginalising intellectual diversity, as converse to Prussian sciences, these concepts had lacked objective grounding, and ideas of an objective ‘moral law’ are still subject to much contention in Philosophy. His philosophical abstractions appear to be intellectually invasive, as while they outlined a ‘cosmopolitan’ future, they had also stifled the scope for ‘cosmopolitan’ diversity by superimposing this narrative onto the image and identity of global peripheries. Kant’s imaginations on ‘universality’ were moulded in the image of a distinctly European experience with ‘modernity’, and in this sense, his argument for cosmopolitanism appears to reflect something of a contradiction.
In comparison to Kant, Herder’s essay is far more particularistic. His belief in ‘cultural relativism’ appears predominantly informed by his fascination with folklore, poetry and diverse cultural traditions that he had observed within Prussia’s multi-ethnic landscape. Regardless, his ideas on historical teleology are similarly universalist, yet link to incompatibly particularistic influences. Ernst Cassirer draws links between Herder’s experience with a multicultural and multilingual landscape and his ideas, but appears to ignore the clear links between his historical teleology and European Lutheranism. Lutheranism, by default, is a denomination enamoured by the idea of ‘divine providence’, which is to say that God plays an active role in worldly affairs. This relates directly to his preoccupation with ‘outlining’ the ‘history of man’, as the idea of ‘divine providence’ is one that naturally invokes the assumption that worldly affairs occur with a deterministic, ’divine’ intention.
Lutheranism was a predominantly European sect, having originated amidst the Protestant Reformation, and maintained notable ties to germanic culture through Martin Luther. Herder was raised in a Lutheran household, and preceding his philosophical career, he had seriously considered a clerical one. The idea that Herder could universalise history in the image of ‘divine providence’ appears problematic, namely thanks to the fact that Lutheranism was synonymous with predominantly European imaginations. Lutheranism was the ‘national religion’ in Prussia, and even after Frederick II’s period of religious toleration, Christopher Clark maintains that principles of the sect had yet become ingrained in education. It certainly appears ‘Eurocentric’ to assume that such particularism is in any way suitable for a comparatively universal application, and despite Herder’s progressive imaginations on a ‘volksgeist’, his teleological approach reflects the universalism of distinctly European norms and values. Eurocentrism is a multifaceted term however, and possesses several characteristics. To better understand Kant and Herder’s eurocentrism, it follows that we embark on a formal exploration of the concept.
Sebastian Conrad has identified Eurocentrism in ‘What Is Global History?’, which he analyses from a perspective of ever prevalent global entanglements. Like Pocock, Conrad maintains a similar awareness of how enlightenment universalism was inherently problematic. More notable however, is how Conrad explores Eurocentrism through the vein of presenting a newer, comparatively more ‘cosmopolitan’ methodology for studying history. Conrad makes the case for ‘Global History’ which effectively suggests that cross-cultural entanglements have since occurred on a global scale, and thus to study the history of different people and practices is to study the agency involved in establishing their intrinsic global connections. In effect, ‘Global History’ outlines the idea that the past is typically subject to power dynamics, which may only be eradicated by the comparatively even medium that is Global History. For instance, Conrad identifies ‘diffusionism’ in intellectual history, where abstract universalisms had historically infiltrated this measurement of global connectivity.
In Conrad’s eyes, diffusionism was an auto-referential mechanism; he details how in any intellectual context, a paradigm of objectivity may occur with relation to abstract ideas and narratives, informing the conclusion that similar ideas worldwide had merely ‘diffused’ from a given epistemological ‘centre’. This had occurred amidst the Haitian Revolution, which, given its imperial ties to France, had inspired the idea from historians like Cyril James that the phenomena was merely an exportation of distinctly European values and events. James postulates on the exportation of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, yet these ideas maintain considerable links to the universalism of abstract imaginations of ‘justice’, as the primary vehicle of ‘sovereignty’ in Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Conrad shows us how other ideas, not conducive to any given epistemology may be both obscured and marginalised, which precisely illustrates how ‘Eurocentrism’ contains multiple dimensions. It is not merely the obstruction of intercultural diversity and equality, but also possesses a malignant agency.
Edward Said identifies this, formally, as ‘orientalism’, which breathed new life into the term following its use in the fetishisation of the middle east. He details how universalist language is often a vehicle for cultural marginalisation, which occurs when peripheries do not measure up effectively to the arbitrary values and concepts of a domineering cultural context. Said shows us how Kant’s abstract language is not merely obstructive of cultural diversity, but also marginalises it. This is supported by how Kant’s philosophical framework adopted a paternalistic view of global peripheries, construing them as inherently less developed than Europe, and in need of ‘modernisation’ through the exportation of enlightened ideas.
Kant’s broader language, such as his idea for universal moral law, appear to have considerably influenced these orientalist tendencies. The idea of an objective morality, for instance, acts as a vehicle through which cultural peripheries may be viewed as deviating from the European ideal. These moral proclivities are particularly uncompromising in nature, and, given his belief that morality itself was metaphysical, it is no surprise that so much of Kant’s abstract language reflected an emanation of these ‘objective’ virtues. While Kant had often encouraged critical debate and open dialogue, his terminology (e.g. cosmopolitan order, imaginations on the moral functions of reason) would all but subvert these principles in the interests of universality; Kant’s belief that these principles were universally applicable had defined his philosophical system, yet equally reflected a lens for the ‘European gaze’ to take hold. Kant believed in the idea of total equality between cultures, and yet his universalist language is something that poises itself against this very notion. In this sense, Kant’s belief in ‘unsocial sociability’ reflects something of a contradiction, as while he had defined it as a destructive act of auto-referentiality, against the interests of intercultural equality, this is equally something that he was practicing himself.
It would appear that Herder’s doctrines of ‘cultural relativism’ would render his essay to be largely conducive to the cross-cultural equality espoused by Conrad’s Global History, and in this sense, it appears difficult to characterise his work as explicitly Eurocentric. His essay does not only value cultural diversity, but Herder goes as far as to define history itself by the progressive imagination of a ‘volksgeist’, which reflects the very appreciation for cultural diversity that Conrad describes in his case for ‘Global History’. Moreover, his inferences around the rise of global entanglements were hardly a local observation, and also reflected the rampant imperial and commercial initiatives that had prompted ‘orientalist’ preoccupations on behalf of thinkers like William Robertson. While his imaginations on cultural relativity subverted eurocentrism in this sense, his teleological approach yet links to a comparatively localised religious sentiment, and his ‘claiming’ of history in the image of these imaginations touches on a much bigger problem with regards to eurocentrism; when it comes to how we imagine history, ‘enlightened’ universalisms have had broad ramifications for what we find ourselves revering as fundamentally ‘modern’.
Dipesh Chakrabarty maintains a particular focus on the overall legacy of enlightenment ideas, which he does through an interrogation into modern historical imaginations, and conceptualisations of both ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. He defines historicism as the contemporary idea that history is informed by uniquely historical forces, rather than metaphysical or otherwise philosophical concepts. He argues that contemporary discourse is dominated by this concept, moreover that it has been often informed by a predominantly European paradigm of experiences. To justify his idea, he interrogates the concept of ‘political modernity’ that has encapsulated the so-called ‘modern’ experience, deriding it as a product of European ‘cultural hegemony’, or dominance, that emerged in part thanks to the universalism of European linguistic paradigms. Chakrabarty applies this framework to postcolonial India, examining how British colonialism had slowly distorted and overrode Indian cultural traditions and practices, fostering the development of a new ‘modernity’ in India. He maintains that these forms of ‘hegemony’ may gradually distort modern understandings of the past, until they are merely reflective of an exclusively European gaze; from his perspective, the universalism of abstract, enlightenment ideas risks ‘claiming’ history in the image of the Eurocentric ideal. Chakrabarty’s overall deductions are not at all reductive, nor are they unsubstantiated in light of how contemporary thinkers have reproduced enlightenment imaginations as central to their own. Not only is this indicative of Europe’s dominant ‘hegemony’, but it is something that Kant and Herder’s ideas have contributed to.
Jurgen Habermas, a German sociologist, had evaluated contemporary western societies as part of a broader sociological inquiry in the 1990s. In his essay, he explores how a ‘post-national constellation’ of decentralised government may engender universal worldly progress against nationalistic conflicts of the twentieth century. He reimagines distinctly Kantian ideas of cosmopolitan order and of lasting international peace, while also maintaining the importance of cross-cultural relativism and universal solidarity in tandem with Herder’s imaginations on a global ‘volksgeist’. His ideas draw considerable links to both philosophies, reflecting a contemporary synthesis of germanic imaginations on universality. His idea for collective solidarity is something that revolves around a universal appreciation for both democracy and universal human rights, yet these doctrines have similarly been moulded in the image of European sociolinguistic paradigms. Montesquieu had been one of the first to universalise on the problem of democracy, and the idea of basic human rights, which was influenced heavily by France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, was hinged on universalist principles of ‘justice’ and ‘sovereignty’ that emanated from predominantly French imaginations on what ‘progress’ may actually entail. ‘The Enlightenment’, as described by Pocock, has long been considered a predominantly Franco-German phenomena, and Habermas’ reproduction of this sentiment merely serves as a testament to its evident ‘hegemony’.
We can observe a clear correlation between the contemporary popularity of enlightenment thought and its historical propensity towards universalism. By imbibing and re-imagining distinctly European philosophies, Habermas exemplifies how European imaginations of ‘progress’ have come to encapsulate what contemporary thinkers imagine as a part of ‘political modernity’. It is not that ‘cosmopolitanism’, or ‘democracy’ are inherently bad concepts, but instead that they ought not to become a vehicle for ‘orientalist’ marginalisation, which is fundamental to the binary nature of ‘modernity’, and how all other practices may be subsequently ‘un-modern’ or ‘backward’. There is an evident contradiction between the subject matter of these ‘cosmopolitan’ essays and their implications for how we imagine history in the image of European ‘greatness’. Perhaps this is the biggest irony of both works, yet this is something that Beiser and Doyle fail to recognise. In this sense, both historians merely praise the ‘political modernity’ that these ideas have come to encapsulate, most notably seen in Doyle’s explicit reverence of Kant for his influence on so-called ‘liberal internationalism’.
It is important to note here the titling of Beiser’s book, ‘The German Historicist Tradition’, when looking at historicism. Historicism is a relatively new concept, and yet Beiser maintains that Herder’s teleology was similarly historicist. What is significant however, is how Beiser defines Herder’s ‘historicist’ principles; integral to Herder’s ideas were that the ‘historical forces’ of global entanglements would characterise history as an interplay of cross-cultural agents, intertwining with one another to form a global cosmopolitan telos. His teleological approach, while reductive, does in many ways appear an accurate prediction for global affairs, as Habermas exemplifies how cosmopolitanism has since taken hold both in immediate reality and in public consciousness. Regardless, we ought to question the origins of this sentiment, particularly given Chakrabarty’s illuminations on ‘cultural hegemony’. While cosmopolitanism is undoubtedly pervasive, it is difficult to divorce this fact from the existence of ‘political modernity’ and how these ideas had, in the eyes of thinkers like Doyle and Habermas, come to encapsulate its definition. While Herder’s ideas appear to have accurately predicted globalisation, his universalisms also present a vehicle for the ‘claiming’ of modern historical imaginations at the direct expense of ‘cosmopolitan’ individuality. We can draw links between how his historicism has, through its contemporary influence on thinkers like Habermas, become its own ‘historical force’, complicit in forming and moulding modern historical imaginations. While Beiser was right to laud Herder for his methodological integrity, his preoccupation with a universal historicism is what had ultimately undermined these principles.
Kant and Herder utilise various Eurocentric forms of language in their universalist accounts of history, and while both maintain ties to ‘political modernity’, their works also differ fundamentally on the problem of orientalism. Beiser certainly appears more perceptive in his approach to Herder’s ideas, and while ‘cultural relativism’ has become a pertinent and often contentious term, its illuminations into the origin of many ideas, both culturally and linguistically, most certainly appear beneficial for public relations and broader intellectual conversations. Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, was far more rigid in his language, and it is this fact that enabled greater scope for the orientalist marginalisation of global peripheries. The legacies of these ideas is incredibly nuanced, yet their most problematic legacy is something that lies in their historical reverence, and what this means for how we imagine ‘modernity’. We ought always to check our own biases when we choose to revere only characteristically European ideas as ‘progressive’, as, even as cosmopolitanism shows us, the very imagination of such a beneficial concept may yet be ‘claimed’ in the image of European ‘greatness’.

I F(23) and my bf M(29) live together. When he and I drink together we usually have a blast. Deep, beautiful conversations, and plain old fun.
However there are times when he asks me, "are you cheating on me" "you better not be talking to anyone" or variations of this. I have never done this, I have never even messaged or done anything with guy friends, and I really don't have any at this point in my life.
He has messaged pornstars and is an active PA. Which I'm trying to help him with because I love him. Now I say this because it makes me so frustrated that he's worried I will cheat when l've given zero reason for him to think so. (I get he has past trauma I'm always very sweet every time I can see he's asking out of worry) now I have an actual reason to be worried. That's also what I'll say when he asks me if I'm cheating on him. That I have given him no reason to think that. Then I reassure him l'll never do that. I offer my phone, I have a car camera I say go take a look at that. Then I say (not every time be l've learned not to) that I have more of a reason to worry than he does. That's when he goes "you're still bringing that shit up" "well you can just pack your shit up and leave then" I did not like that one bit. I told him if you say that again I will leave. He said it many times after that.
Other times he'll say it is when I ask him rightful questions, like, "why are you still looking up your old states arrest records everyday to see if you ex has been arrested" tell him love and hate is a thin line. He "hates" his ex to his core and wants to see her arrested which I highly doubt will happen.
He had a "middle school friend" who only posted pole dancing videos. Meanwhile he told me she was a ballerina. Literally made me laugh out loud. I didn't feel comfortable with him following her(he had many exes/old sex partners who were strippers/posted sexual things that he was still liking/following as well that I wasn't comfortable with) when I told him I wasn't comfortable with it, he just goes "great l'm losing another friend” which he has many female friends who I think are cool, and have zero problem with him talking to/following. But not the ones you're only looking at their sexual content and used to fuck. AlTA??
Anyways after I bring that up, or how I don't like that he watches so much porn to the point he can't touch me, he tells me to pack my shit and leave if I have such a problem with it. Then will apologize the next day, tell me I'm right and he removes them.
Well he said it again one night and that was it. I started packing my shit. I grabbed garbage bags and was packing my clothes. He came back to the room and told me to stop. I said nope. I told you if you say it again I'm done. It's hurtful and it means you're okay to throw away our relationship just because you can't have an adult conversation. He then started yelling at me. He grabbed me and threw me on the bed and yelled so loudly, "fucking stop!!" was obviously shocked and stopped. Hes never grabbed me like that.
He's said it so many times after and then will apologize in the morning, saying he didn't mean it and he just wants to have some kind of "ammo". Now it's gotten to the point where l'm waiting for it. I will pack my shit and leave. Even if it is the next morning.
Also believe it or not, this is the only time we EVER argue. That's why him telling me to "just leave" catches me so off guard and hurts. We have so much fun together sober, and not sober. It's only when he or I bring a concern up.
Even when he's not drunk, just a beer or two, he still says it. Then apologizes the next day.
My question is, is this normal, is this okay? Does this mean he doesn't truly love me? Would you leave?
What do I do. l've talked to him about this so many times after he apologizes or on a random sober day telling him he cannot say that to me, he'll agree. Then it happens again.
RL;DL What do I do with a bf who tells me to just leave if I have a problem with him, then apologizes the next day and says l'm right?

I F(23) and my bf M(29) live together. When he and I drink together we usually have a blast. Deep, beautiful conversations, and plain old fun.
However there are times when he asks me, "are you cheating on me" "you better not be talking to anyone" or variations of this. I have never done this, I have never even messaged or done anything with guy friends, and I really don't have any at this point in my life.
He has messaged pornstars and is an active PA. Which I'm trying to help him with because I love him. Now I say this because it makes me so frustrated that he's worried I will cheat when l've given zero reason for him to think so. (I get he has past trauma I'm always very sweet every time I can see he's asking out of worry) now I have an actual reason to be worried. That's also what I'll say when he asks me if I'm cheating on him. That I have given him no reason to think that. Then I reassure him l'll never do that. I offer my phone, I have a car camera I say go take a look at that. Then I say (not every time be l've learned not to) that I have more of a reason to worry than he does. That's when he goes "you're still bringing that shit up" "well you can just pack your shit up and leave then" I did not like that one bit. I told him if you say that again I will leave. He said it many times after that.
Other times he'll say it is when I ask him rightful questions, like, "why are you still looking up your old states arrest records everyday to see if you ex has been arrested" tell him love and hate is a thin line. He "hates" his ex to his core and wants to see her arrested which I highly doubt will happen.
He had a "middle school friend" who only posted pole dancing videos. Meanwhile he told me she was a ballerina. Literally made me laugh out loud. I didn't feel comfortable with him following her(he had many exes/old sex partners who were strippers/posted sexual things that he was still liking/following as well that I wasn't comfortable with) when I told him I wasn't comfortable with it, he just goes "great l'm losing another friend” which he has many female friends who I think are cool, and have zero problem with him talking to/following. But not the ones you're only looking at their sexual content and used to fuck. AlTA??
Anyways after I bring that up, or how I don't like that he watches so much porn to the point he can't touch me, he tells me to pack my shit and leave if I have such a problem with it. Then will apologize the next day, tell me I'm right and he removes them.
Well he said it again one night and that was it. I started packing my shit. I grabbed garbage bags and was packing my clothes. He came back to the room and told me to stop. I said nope. I told you if you say it again I'm done. It's hurtful and it means you're okay to throw away our relationship just because you can't have an adult conversation. He then started yelling at me. He grabbed me and threw me on the bed and yelled so loudly, "fucking stop!!" was obviously shocked and stopped. Hes never grabbed me like that.
He's said it so many times after and then will apologize in the morning, saying he didn't mean it and he just wants to have some kind of "ammo". Now it's gotten to the point where l'm waiting for it. I will pack my shit and leave. Even if it is the next morning.
Also believe it or not, this is the only time we EVER argue. That's why him telling me to "just leave" catches me so off guard and hurts. We have so much fun together sober, and not sober. It's only when he or I bring a concern up.
Even when he's not drunk, just a beer or two, he still says it. Then apologizes the next day.
My question is, is this normal, is this okay? Does this mean he doesn't truly love me? Would you leave?
What do I do. l've talked to him about this so many times after he apologizes or on a random sober day telling him he cannot say that to me, he'll agree. Then it happens again.
RL;DL What do I do with a bf who tells me to just leave if I have a problem with him, then apologizes the next day and says l'm right?

I went to Miami for a week back in March to visit my older sister who I haven't with interacted with in a year and a half. When I got there, she took me to out to some great places such as the Florida keys, casino, steakhouse, etc. I had a great time and I felt like I was living in the moment as I am 21 years old. I almost shed a tear when I was in the plane going back north leaving my sister as she made sure I had a great time. After I came back home, I resumed to my life of living with my parent with a part time job and going to community college like nothing happened.
Two months later in May, it was mother's day and I got up earlier than usual just to cook breakfast for my mom. After that, I spent the rest of the day in my room finishing up my schoolwork as I had assignments due that day. My dad came back home from work and took my mom out to dinner, but beforehand questioned why I didn't get my mother anything for mother's day. He was very annoyed that I didn't get her anything and just left me in the house while they went out to dinner.
The next day, as I was leaving my final day in class, I went across the street to the mall and decided to go to a clothing store to buy a pair of clothes for my mother as I decided to giver her a late gift. I had no idea what size she wore, but I wanted to be sort of a surprise at the same time, so I decided to give her a $25 gift card to the store that I was in. I also decided to buy my sister from Miami a box of perfumes with her favorite rap artist on it that costed $16 as a sort of "thank-you gift" for all the stuff we did back in March. Later that night, I gave my mom the gift card and she was like "I don't even shop at this store, why would you give me this?". I was confused because I did have memories of her shopping in there, and I was just like, "You like shopping for clothes every week, I thought this would be the best for you." This would be the start of something really bad.
Two days later, I went to send the box of perfumes off to my sister and went back home. When I went back home, my mom found out that I went to send in the package and she was like "So you're going to give your sister something, but give me absolutely nothing?". And I was like "But I did give you something, what are you talking about?" And that genuinely pissed me off, but I was "used" to her behavior since she always acted like I did nothing for her, so I just went on with my day. Keep in mind that both my mom and dad are in their 50s.
Later that day, I took a nap and woke up with a phone call from my sister who sounded like she was in distress telling me to just "send the package back" because mom is mad that I "got my sister something but her nothing", and that would get me infuriated so badly that I released my temper in one of the worst ways possible. I yelled to myself that my mom was an "ungrateful asshole" and punched the wall so hard, that I accidentally created a hole in it.
What followed with both my parents coming in, rightfully mad about the hole in the wall, with my mom, violently screaming and crying at me acting like I punched her in the face or physically abused her, all because she heard me say that I thought she was an "asshole", and then yells that "IVE DONE EVERYTHING FOR YOU AND I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE HAVE CALLED YOU AN ASSHOLE, YOU NEVER GIVE ME SHIT, YOU ONLY GIVE ME FIFITY DOLLARS FOR RENT, FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ILL TELL EVRYBODY WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT ME!!! GET THE FUCK OUT, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!!" she says all of this as she gets up all in my face and hits me with my laptop. My dad pulls me by my arm out of my room like I was a little kid and he was like "oh hell no, you're not going to be disrespecting my wife". He then basically tells me without hesitation that I am being kicked out of the house and was no longer welcome as he shrugged his shoulders. "Hey, I tried, but you refuse to listen to me. I can't help you anymore. I really did try to teach you so many things, I don't know what went wrong with you." my dad says as he was now (and continually) talking to me as if I was one of his biggest failures in his life.
Everything happened so fast and so quick. It felt so surreal and I was puzzled of what happened. I had to process that, my own family wanted nothing to do with me anymore after what happened and I was already struggling to make friends, now It seemed like I was going to have no family as well and was also going to be homeless. To pause the story for a moment to give out my opinion, I have did a handful of things for my mother, such as take her out to breakfast at least once a month, gave her fifty dollars (which is the amount that they literally said to give them when I had to start paying them to stay in their house), bought her a $300 dollar bike that she kept constantly bringing it up to me about because I was using her old bike (only to barely even use after I bought it), and tried to cook for everyone a numerous amount of times. My mom pretends that none of that happened, and my dad will agree with everything my mom has to say and defend her even if I am in the right. Was I wrong to punch a hole in the wall? Obviously, yes, I was, and I even said that I was going to pay for the wall.
I spoke to my big sister on the phone, told her that I was getting kicked out of the house, and she offered to let me stay in her place. I felt like she was my last hope. It was very kind of her to do that and I thanked her for the offer. Later that night, after all that happened, I decided to check in a motel for a week until my ride to Miami because I did not wanted to be in the house after all what happened. I just wanted to be alone. I went back to the house to bag up some supplies of my own and carry it to the motel in the middle of the night.
The first night there, I could not sleep, so at around 7AM, I went to walmart to shop for some things in order to pack up. Day 2, I nervously asked a co-worker if she could help me with driving to my parents house (since I did not have a drivers license and was long overdue for one) to pack some of my stuff with some bins to send to UPS. She agreed and dropped me off to the house while my parents were sleep, and I packed up my stuff, then proceeding to leave it there to get it the next night.
Day 3 was interesting, but not in a good way. My co-worker and I went back to my parents house to get my stuff to send to UPS the next day. It was shortly after 12AM, and I went in the house as she stayed in the car. My dad caught me coming into the house and we almost got heated with each other. I remember him saying "I don't know how you got so messed up. I'm tired of you disrespecting me!" I said to him "You know, how am I even disrespecting you?" Then he raised his voice and I just ignored him. The last thing I said to him was "There's nothing you can say to me anymore, we're done!" I saw one of my little sisters coming out of the room, and she was so scared. I told her that I would come to her school to say goodbye and apologized for everything that happened. My co-worker wanted me to quickly get back in her car so I would not fight with my dad. We got out of there quick. She helped me lift some of my supplies, and I gave her $20 as a token of my appreciation for helping me, and she was extremely hesitant, but said "Ok fine, this the only time I'll take money from you, but you don't have to do this you know!" She also said to let her know if I needed anything.
Later at 6AM, I went back to walmart since I could not sleep again to get more stuff. I went out of the store and walked in the rain to mcdonalds to get some oatmeal while still processing the information that my parents most likely hated me at this point. I went back to the motel and went to sleep and then my big sister called me and said to not send anything off to UPS and to take it back to the house. She spoke to my mom and said that she wanted to call me. When my mom called me she was all like "I did not kick you out of the house, I was just mad that day and you hurt my feelings, you gotta stop taking things so literal." and all that as I was just sitting here to myself like "What the fuck is even going on here anymore?" She also said that they were looking for me and where I was staying at and I told her she can come pick some of my stuff up from the hotel if she really meant that.
That night, I had a talk with my manager at work and I told them everything that happened, and I was like, "Now my mom said she doesn't want me gone, I don't know what's happening anymore!" My manager had a heartfelt conversation with me and we decided that I would be on leave without pay status until the end of July only if I decide to come back.
I said goodbye to my coworkers on my last day there, and the day came when it was time for me to go back to miami, as I am currently now temporarily staying with my sister for god knows when to do a handful of stuff including getting my drivers license.
In conclusion, I really have no desire to go back to my parents. I feel like I have irritated and hurt them long enough, and at then end of the day, no matter how dumb the situation was, I still made my mom cry and that is a sign that I should have move out of their place a long time ago. I have realized that I have the same bad traits from my parents, such as anger issues and easily emotional. I had an anger problem ever since I was first grade, with the worst being in 5th grade where I would get into multiple arguments and fights with all the students. I thought my anger problem was gone, but it turns out that I just became good at hiding it for a very long time.
I had no real friends growing up, because I was scared of talking to people, and my parents did not take me seriously and did nothing to help me when it came to my mental health. They only cared that I got decent grades in school and I really wasted 3 years of my life after high school still living with those two, thinking that I was doing something for them while in actuality I (supposedly) did nothing for them. I want to move forward in life. I want to be out on my own now, since I was previously not willing to do that because I was so socially inept. But now, I am willing to try. My parents are unfortunately the reason on why I am not moving forward, and it's clearly obvious that my dad does not want to help me anymore since he is only worried about my mom and only my mom. My sister told me that it's best to go back to my parents because paying rent is complicated, but I honestly don't even care anymore. I just don't want to hurt anymore people ever again.
TLDR: In March, I visited my older sister in Miami after not seeing her for a year and a half. Tensions rose when I returned home and failed to meet my parents' expectations on Mother's Day, leading to a heated argument and me being told that I was being kicked out of the house. I chose to spent a week in a motel before going back to stay with my sister, reflecting on my strained relationship with my parents and anger issues. I've decided I want to move forward and leave my parents after years of disappointment, hurt and social anxiety.

https://sci-hub.st/10.1057/fr.1988.4 Feminist Review, No. 28, Family Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse (Spring, 1988), pp. 56-64
In the early 1970s, when a radical feminist consciousness pulled [incestuous abuse] out of the closet, we thought we were engaged in an unprecedented discovery. In fact, charity volunteers and social workers a century earlier dealt with incest cases daily, understanding them to be a standard, expected part of the caseload of a child-protective agency such as a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. How are we to explain this historical amnesia? Like the suppression of so much women's history and feminist analysis, this hiatus was not created simply by the decline in feminism between 1920 and 1970, but by an active reinterpretation of child sexual abuse. I shudder when I think about what this meant: not only because of the incest victims rendered invisible and mute, but also because of its threat to us today, the threat that great achievements in consciousness-raising can be rolled back by powerful ideological tanks. My motives in writing a history of family violence were thus far from disinterested.[1]
Charity and social workers in the late nineteenth-century United States were familiar with child sexual abuse and knew that its most common form of abuse was intrafamilial—that is, incest. Ten per cent of the family-violence case records of Boston child-saving agencies which I sampled, starting in 1880, contained incest (Gordon and O'Keefe, 1986; Gordon, 1984). Moreover, in their upper-class way these child savers had a feminist analysis of the problem: they blamed male brutality and lack of sexual control. They could safely offer such explanations because they believed the problem to occur exclusively among the Catholic immigrant poor, whom they perceived as of "inferior stock," crowded "like animals" into urban ghettoes. Thus, ironically, the very upper-class base of child-rescue work at the time promoted the identification of problems unmentionable by standards of Victorian propriety.
Despite these class limitations, the sympathy for child victims entailed by this sensibility was one of the major achievements of the nineteenth-century feminist movement. The attack on male sexual and familial violence was often disguised in temperance rhetoric. American women's historians have recently conducted a reinterpretation of temperance, acknowledging its anti-Catholic, anti-working class content, but also identifying its meanings for women contesting the evils that alcohol created for them and their families: violence, disease, impoverishment, male irresponsibility. Moreover, the feminist anti-violence campaign had significant successes. In the course of the century wife-beating was transformed from an acceptable practice into one which, despite its continued widespread incidence, was illegal and reprehensible, a seamy behaviour which men increasingly denied and tried to hide (Pleck, 1979). Indeed, the whole movement against child abuse which began in the 1870s was a product of a feminist sensibility in several ways: first, in opposing corporal punishment and preference for gentler methods of child training; second, in challenging the sanctity of the Victorian home and authority of the paterfamilias. Most manuals of child raising by the last quarter of the nineteenth century recommended physical punishment only as a last resort (Reposter note: Of course, this would still be child abuse. "Child training" is still a dehumanizing term. They didn't go anywhere nearly far enough.), and women's legal victories in child custody created a preference for maternal rights to children for a century.
Consider a few examples of incest cases from the late nineteenth century:[2]

In 1900 a thirteen year old girl has been placed out with a family in which the wife is absent. The SPCC worker reports that the "child's bed not slept in but [the father's bed is] much tumbled. The girl cries and dreads the night." (Case #1820A)
An incest victim reports, sometime in the 1890s, that her father "told her that it was all right for him to do such things and say such things to her, for all fathers did so with their daughters. Tried to force her to go to a hotel in Boston with him once. Also advised her to go with fellows to get money. Said that if she got in trouble he would help her out.…" (Case #2058A)

There were hundreds of these stories telling us not only that [incestuous abuse] occurred, but that child-saving agencies were aware of it and taking action against it. The publicity and fund-raising efforts of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children focussed on intrafamily "carnal abuse" directly, unembarrassed to include it as part of the need for SPCC intervention.
In the early twentieth century the child-savers' view of child sexual assault changed significantly, and incest was de-emphasized. By the 1920s, although child-protective agencies continued to meet many incest cases, a three-part interpretive transformation had occurred: the locus of the problem was moved from home to streets, the culprit transformed from father or other authoritative male family member to perverted stranger, the victim transformed from innocent betrayed to sex delinquent. In other words, the fact that child sex abuse is overwhelmingly a family problem was obscured; instead it was pictured as rape by strangers on the streets. (Anna Clark has shown how a similar reinterpretation of adult rape took place (Clark, 1987).) This is not to say that there was no extrafamilial sex abuse; there was, but, compared to incest, it was greatly exaggerated in both public and professional discourse.
Several factors contributed to this reinterpretation. The professionalization of social work tended to weaken the influence of feminists and social reformers among child protectors, even as, ironically, more women entered child welfare casework as salaried workers. After the women's suffrage victory in 1920 the organized feminist movement fragmented and weakened. During World War I venereal disease became a major problem for the armed forces (it was for this reason that condoms became widely available at this time, first issued by the Navy to sailors); servicemen were presented as victims of disease-ridden prostitutes. After the war, fears of Bolshevism, sexual freedom, and feminism combined to create a "pro-family" backlash.
The implications of this reinterpretation of child sexual abuse were pernicious for women and girls. The existence of sexual abuse became evidence requiring the constriction and domestication of girls, and their mothers were blamed for inadequate supervision if the girls were molested or even played on the streets. What was once categorized as carnal abuse, the perpetrators virtually all male, was often now categorized as moral neglect—meaning that the mother was the culprit and the behaviour of the victim was implicated. Some of the "sex abuse" was relatively noncoercive teenage sexuality. Female juvenile sex delinquency was constructed as a major social problem in early twentieth-century America, and it was a vague, victimless crime. Girls who smoked and drank, dressed or spoke immodestly, or simply loitered on the streets were convicted of sex delinquency in substantial numbers and sent to reformatories (Schlossman and Wallach, 1978). During World War I near armed-forces bases it was the servicemen who were the innocents, their girl partners the sources of pollution. Even girls who had been raped were no longer victims but temptresses. I do not mean to deny that some girls behaved in socially dangerous and self-destructive ways, nor that they sought out sexual adventure but, as many students of sex delinquents and other runaways today have observed, high proportions, quite possibly a majority of these girls, were first victims of sexual assault, typically familial. They were, so to speak, squeezed out onto the streets in search of safety and/or self-esteem from homes that were even more destructive than the street boys or men who exploited them.
Above all, this reinterpretation of child sexual abuse removed scrutiny from family and home, restoring the curtain of impunity that surrounded those sacred institutions. This was the period of the discovery of the "dirty old man," the "sex fiend," and the "pervert," the stereotypical culprit in child sex abuse cases in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. As before, I do not wish to deny that such figures existed. Child protection agencies uncovered child prostitution, pornography rings and sex criminals who molested literally scores of children. The victims were not always brutalized; the children of the very poor—not only in the Depression but in earlier decades too—could be bribed into acquiescence and silence with a nickel, an orange, a pail of coal. However, even these nonfamilial molesters were rarely "strangers." They were often neighbours, accepted members of communities, often small businessmen or janitors who had access to private space.
There were two peak periods of hysteria about sex crimes: 1937-40 and 1949-55. The panic had official government sponsorship, led by none less that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. In 1937 he called for a "War on the Sex Criminal." Hoover's rantings about "degenerates" threatening "American childhood and womanhood" assimilated these sexual anxieties to nationalism, racism and anti-Communism. It bears notice that, in contrast to earlier periods of public agitation against sex crimes, as in campaigns to raise the age of consent in the Progressive era, women's organizations played no role in this campaign (Freedman, 1987).
Meanwhile social workers became less likely to investigate girls' typically euphemistic accusations of their fathers.

In 1935 a mother turned her daughter in for sex delinquency. Investigation reveals that the daughter, fleeing from an abusive father, who also beat his wife severely, had spent most of her time for 4-5 years with her maternal uncle and aunt. She accused her maternal uncle of molesting her steadily. However, the MSPCC physical exam indicated that she was a virgin,[3] so no action was taken. (#3555A)
A battered woman, terrified of her husband, is told by their daughter, who has become a "sex delinquent," behaving "vulgarly," that her father has criminally assaulted her. The mother says "she would speak to him." At court the police chief says he is doubtful about taking up the case as the girl's word is the only evidence the Government could produce; he would not question the father "as it would be asking [him] to incriminate himself." The daughter was committed to an institution. (#2057A)
In 1920 a mother is so fearful that her new husband will abuse her daughter (from a previous marriage) that every time she goes out she hires a babysitter to chaperone them. Yet when the daughter, now eleven, says she has been raped by a "stranger" whom she refuses to name, the social workers not only fail to question whether she might be shielding her stepfather, but decide that her accusation is not credible and brand her a delinquent—a liar, immoral, and uncontrollable. She is boarded out as a domestic. (#3085A)
In 1930 a 14-year-old girl alleges sexual abuse by her widowed father and begs to be taken out of his home. No action is taken until the father brings her to court on stubborn-child charges and she, as well as her younger sister whom she has been trying to protect are sentenced, separately, to institutions. (#3585)

In addition to references like these, in which the agencies did not investigate or prosecute, there were many others in which agency workers simply did not pick up the broad hints that girls threw out, hoping to draw attention to their plight. Social workers ignored statements like, "I asked my mother for a lock on my door." These girls were not usually bribed or intimidated into silence. Some of the recent discussion of incest emphasizes victims' fearful silence, but this evidence is based on the work of therapists, counselling incest victims years later, who have often by then reconstructed their stories on the basis of their guilt; my evidence, contemporaneous with the abuse, showed that these children were usually very active in trying to get help, more so, for example, than victims of nonsexual child abuse (Gordon, 1986).
Not only did social workers de-emphasize incest, but academic experts dismissed it as an extremely rare, one-in-a-million occurrence (Weinberg, 1955). Psychoanalytic and anthropological interpretations, associated respectively with Freud and Levi-Strauss, attributed to incest taboos a vital role in the development of civilization; this logic brought with it the assumption that these taboos were effective and that incest was, in fact, rare; but in terms of impact on treatment of actual cases, Freudian thought did not so much cause social workers to deny children's complaints and hints about sexual mistreatment as it offered categories with which to explain away these complaints. As Boston psychiatrist Eleanor Pavenstedt commented in 1954:

Most of us have trained ourselves to skepticism toward the claims of young girls who maintain they have been seduced by their fathers… We must ask ourselves whether our tendency to disbelief is not in part at least based on denial. The incest barrier is perhaps the strongest support of our cultural family structure, and we may well shrink from the thought of its being threatened. (Pavenstedt, 1954)

So did the dominant sociology of the family, which inverted Levi-Strauss's functionalism to prove that the incest taboo was operative because it had to be. For example, "No known human society could tolerate much incest without ruinous disruption" (Gebhard, Gagnon, Pomeroy and Christenson, 1965: 208; Davis, 1949; Bell and Vogel, 1963). The few nonfeminist historians to study incest replicated that error by studying public beliefs about incest, not behaviour (Wohl, 1979; Strong, 1973).
The rediscovery of [incestuous abuse] in the 1970s was, then, merely a reinterpretation, and it did not come quickly. Nonsexual child abuse was resurrected as a social problem in the 1960s in a movement led by physicians but stimulated by the influence of the New Left, with its sympathy for youth and critique of authority and the family. Without pressure from feminists, [incestuous abuse] first reappeared as gender-neutral. Indeed, the very classification of all forms of intrafamily sexual activity as [incestuous abuse] obscures the meanings of these behaviours. For example, sibling sexual activity, or sex between other relatives of approximately the same age, is extremely common, difficult to identify and not necessarily abusive. Mother-child incest is extremely rare and, in my findings, more often than father-child incest, associated with adult mental illness; by contrast incestuous fathers have extremely "normal" profiles (Gordon and O'Keefe, 1984; Herman, 1981). (Reposter note: I am skeptical about these two claims. Maternal CSA is significantly rarer than paternal CSA, yes, but I doubt that it's "extremely" rare, and an analysis of adult supremacy as an axis of oppression intersecting with misogyny clarifies this. I am also skeptical of all pathologization and saneism-inflected broad claims about abuser psychology. I have reason to believe she and her sources were biased by heterosexism in reaching this conclusion. In contrast, youth liberation feminists would emphasize the adultism, domestic power, and authoritarian motives in an intersectional manner.) Yet many child abuse experts throughout the 1970s ignored these gender differences (Kempe, 1980; Money, 1980). Others found ingenious ways of explaining away actuality with speculation about possibility. Thus social worker Kate Rist argued that "society has created a stronger prohibition against mother-son incest" because "it is most likely to occur. This has led to the intriguing situation in which father-daughter incest appears to have a lower natural probability of occurrence, is therefore less strongly prohibited, and in practice occurs more often" (Rist, 1979; 682).
Historians do not usually like to speak of the "lessons of history," as if she were some objective, finally definitive schoolteacher. But in many years of work at the craft, I have never come across a story that so directly yields a moral. The moral is that the presence or absence of a strong feminist movement makes the difference between better and worse solutions to the social problem of child sexual abuse; more, that the very same evidence of sexual abuse will be differently defined in the presence or absence of that movement. Without a feminist analysis, evidence of child sexual abuse means that danger lies in sex perverts, in public spaces, in unsupervised girls, in sexually assertive girls. There are few ironies more bitter than the fact that rape of children—that most heinous of crimes—has also been the crime most drenched in victim-blaming. As with adult rape, child sexual abuse without feminist interpretation supplies evidence and arguments for constricting and disempowering children.
Such a reinterpretation arose again in the United States in the mid-1980s, a reinterpretation aided, of course, by the real and increasing incidence of deranged killers attacking strangers. In the school year 1984/85 my then second-grade daughter was taught three separate programmes in her classroom about how to react to sexual abuse attempts, all of them emphasizing strangers, and all of them gender-neutral. The most publicized sexual abuse cases have concerned daycare centres, and often female teachers, although daycare centres remain, on the whole, among the safest environments for children. The statistics about child sexual abuse remain what they were a century ago: the most dangerous place for children is the home, the most likely assailant their father. Similarly a panic about missing children not only exaggerated their numbers a thousandfold, but completely misstated the source of such "kidnappings": neglecting to mention that noncustodial parents are overwhelmingly the main kidnappers; and that teenage runaways, often from abusive homes, are overwhelmingly the majority of the missing children.
What then is the best policy? My argument should not be taken as an implicit call for de-emphasizing the problem. On the contrary. The children's educational programmes and pamphlets have strengths, particularly in so far as they offer assertiveness training for children: if it feels uncomfortable, trust your judgement and say no; scream loud and run fast; tell someone. Of course it is difficult and inadvisable to sow distrust of fathers, particularly because the more intimate fathers are with children, the more responsibility they have for children, the less likely they will be to abuse them sexually. (Reposter note: I get what she's trying to say here, but this is phrased poorly IMO. Sowing distrust is fine. If it's genuinely unjustified, then the problem will resolve itself.) However, education for children should contain a feminist and an anti-authoritarian analysis: should discuss the relative powerlessness of women and girls, and praise assertiveness and collective resistance in girls; should demystify the family and even discuss that ultimately tabooed subject, economic power in the family. Education for boys must be equally brave and delicate. Boys are children too, and often victimized sexually, but they are also future men, and school age is not too early to ask them to consider what's wrong with male sexual aggression, to teach them to criticize the multiple and powerful cultural messages that endorse male sexual aggression.
Probably the most important single contribution to the prevention of [father-daughter] incest would be the strengthening of mothers. By increasing their ability to support themselves and their social and psychological self-esteem, allowing them to choose independence if that is necessary to protect themselves and their daughters, men's sexual exploitation could be checked. In the historical incest cases I sampled, one of the most consistent common denominators was the extreme helplessness of mothers—often the victims of wife-beating themselves, they were often ill or otherwise isolated, they were the poorest, the least self-confident and the least often employed of mothers in these case records. This is not victim-blaming; their weaknesses were not their fault, but part of the systematic way in which male supremacy gives rise to [father-daughter] incest. It was a gain that wife-beating and [father-daughter] incest have become more criminalized, but we cannot expect women to prosecute aggressively if their prospects for single motherhood are so bleak.
Moreover, women's very subordination often contributes to making them child abusers and neglecters. Although women do not usually abuse children sexually, in these case records they were responsible for approximately half the nonsexual child abuse (the same proportion they occupy in many contemporary studies). Unfortunately, feminists have avoided women's own violence towards children and analysed family violence in terms of stereotypical male brutality and female gentleness. Women's violence should not be regarded as a problem that will somehow weaken our feminist claims; on the contrary, these claims should not rest on assumptions of women's superiority […]. Women's mistreatment of children also needs an analysis of the damages caused by the sexual division of labour and the pattern of women's exclusive responsibility for child-raising. In the US, too, the rather middle-class radical feminist groups never made issues of social services a political priority, although such services are fundamental to women's ability to resist violence, to protect their children, and to parent better themselves.
This is not to say that a good feminist line will solve the problems of child sexual abuse, especially not where the abuse has already occurred. Like everyone else, feminists who deal with policy or individual cases must wobble through many contradictions. For example: the victimization is real, but the tendency to exaggerate its incidence and to produce social and moral panics needs to be resisted. The problem emerges from the powerlessness, the effective invisibility and muteness of women and children, especially girls, but the adult anxiety has led to children's false accusations, and children's sufferings will not be corrected by eroding the due process rights and civil liberties of those accused. Child sexual abuse needs a political interpretation, in terms of male power. However, the prosecution of culprits—however necessary—and the breaking up of families that may result do not always benefit the child victims. Especially if they are incestuous, sex abuse cases have something of the tragic about them, because once they arise, tremendous human damage has already occurred, and a politically correct analysis will not ease the pain. Still, that analysis, situating the problem in the context of male supremacy in and outside the family, is the only long-term hope for prevention.
Notes
Linda Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin/Madison. She is the author of Woman's Body, Woman's Right and the forthcoming book on family violence noted below.
[1] My book, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence, is forthcoming from Viking/Penguin US in early 1988. References to my sources and more information on my research methodology can be found there.
[2] These and other excerpts are from case records of Boston, Massachusetts, child-protection agencies (see Gordon, 1988).
[3] The standard response to a sex abuse allegation was to look at the condition of the hymen (Gordon, 1988).
References
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BREINES, Wini and GORDON, Linda (1983) "The New Scholarship on Family Violence" Signs 8, pp. 490-531.
CLARK, Anna (1987) Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 London: Pandora Press.
DAVIS, Kingsley (1949) Human Society New York: Macmillan.
DUBOIS, Ellen and GORDON, Linda (1983) "Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-century Feminist Sexual Thought" Feminist Studies 9, pp. 7-25; also Feminist Review no. 11 (1981).
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WOHL, Anthony S. (1979) "Sex and the Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes" in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stress ed. Wohl. New York: St Martin's Press.

I’m at my wits end. I feel so trapped in my own life. This man is a toxic, psychologically manipulative narcissist. We used to be so close, my dad(52), and I(23F). Our daddy, daughter relationship was unmatched. I put him on a pedestal and I shouldn’t have. Our relationship took a downward turn during COVID and after I graduated high school(2019). We have been sharing a room together for the past 11 years. We sleep on the floor about 3ft apart from each other. I’m just tired of being so close to him 24/7. It’s driving me crazy. How did we end up in that situation? Very long story. I’ll try to keep it short, when I was 12 my birth giver was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. After that, she made the conscious decision that she didn’t want the responsibility of raising 2 kids anymore. So she packed up her life and moved from California to Atlanta, leaving us behind. We didn’t want to live with her and she didn’t want to wait for my dad to get his own place and take us in. So she manically left. My older brother went to live with my grandmother and I was forced to move 3 hours away from the city I grew up in. I had to move in with my aunt, her son, and her granddaughter(my cousin). After a year spent with them, my dad came to get me so that I could live with him. But when he got me, he was homeless. He was living in a motel six. No car. $2000 to his name. I didn’t care though. I was just happy to be with him. Something familiar and comforting. The year I spent with my aunt was rough. I was raised completely different from the way she was raising her granddaughter. I couldn’t identify with them. I was raised in the suburbs. My parents had good jobs. They’ve lived in apartment complexes in bad neighborhoods all their lives. My cousin had a teenage mom and a dad in prison. She fights in school. She’s fast with boys. She wears booty shorts with pride and watches Bad Girls Club. I liked Bratz dolls and twinkle toes and iCarly. We bickered often. I was expected to fight her battles when she would pick fights with girls bigger and uglier than her. Because “you the oldest cousin”. I got called a pusy often for not wanting to fight. I would complain to my birth giver but she’d just say “yeah beat her a”. Knowing damn well she’s ran from every physical altercation brought to her. I just didn’t feel comfortable around them. I felt unheard and unwanted. I felt like I didn’t belong to anyone. I wanted to die. I ended up being pulled out of school and I was sent to a mental health facility for suicidal teens. I was placed on suicide watch for a week. I was having a lot of self-conscious issues and insecurities. The normal teenage girls stuff. but my cousin,(miss I’m that btch) was fortunate enough to not have the same problems as I, so my issues were looked at as “abnormal”. So I was labeled as mentally unstable. I was treated like I had a virus My dad still had a job. But it was an hour away from my aunts city. He had no car so he had to take public transportation. While he worked, I stayed in the motel room alone. Eventually my godmothers best friend took us into her home. And we’ve been here ever since. Yes, I’m in my dad’s custody. Yes, that’s what I wanted. Yes, I am grateful that he came to get me (even though he wasn’t financially ready). But my internal issues aren’t just going to go away because I got my daddy. My Borderline Personality Disorder isn’t going to disappear just because daddy’s home. My insecurities, my sense of self. He tells me that all of that should’ve went away the moment he came and got me. “You should’ve been good. But you just HAVE to dwell. Oh, my mom abandoned me so I’m gonna cut my wrist.” He said that. I still remember that day. I remember everything violating that he says to me. Problem is he doesn’t. I’ve made a lot of silly kitty mistakes in my life. And I’ve had to deal with all his “life lessons“. He used to tell me all the time that if he died tomorrow, I wouldn’t know what to do in this world without him. I’ve learned to handle his verbal blows silently. I used to cry when I was a kid. But then he would demand that I tell him why I was crying, then another argument ensues. So after a while I learned to block him out when he starts. I just blank out and go into a different headspace. I pretend that I’m not present. I choose not to listen when he’s being negative. When he talks about my hair, my weight ,the things I eat, my career choices, the type men I like, my sexuality. At this point, there is nothing that he can say to me that will hurt my feelings. Because I feel like he is deflecting his insecurities. It is his actions that are literally digging me into a deeper hole. He is using me for his own personal gain and financial support because he feels like I owe him. I owe him because “he’s busted his ass raising me and he’s done everything for me since I was born”. I hear that a lot. I heard that when he took half of my paycheck for himself because he didn’t get paid while he had COVID. I heard that when he took my debit card while I was sleeping and put bills on it without telling me. I hear it every time I have to pay for his alcohol and his marijuana because he refuses to go to the DMV because he doesn’t want to stand in line. My dad is a functioning alcoholic. I mean, highly functional. I have witnessed him chug, a full bottle of wine and then drive me to work. I am feeding this man’s addiction against my will. I can’t even come home after work and take a nap because I have to stay awake for his weed delivery. Like come on now you’re 50+ years old why am I paying for your alcohol like you’re under age? I try to find the nicest way possible to tell him things like this are not normal nor fair to me. He gets extremely defensive. “I’ve done everything for you. I raised you since you were two years old and you can’t even pay for my weed.” those were his exact words. Am I crazy or does that not sound crazy? He guilt trips me and I’m forced to give in. He does all these things to me on a daily basis and when I ignore him or give him the cold shoulder, it’s “what have I done to you to make you treat me this way?” You’re probably asking why don’t I just move out? To make it simple, I don’t make enough money. When I was 21 I became a CNA and stayed in that field for 2 1/2 years. I formed a really good relationship with my classmates. We would help each other study and supported each other through training. We all wanted to become LVN eventually. In the state of California, you have to had worked as a CNA for at least six months before you can become an LVN. we all made a pact that we would work our one year at the same facility and then go to the same medical school together. Just to get our experience in. LVN school is 18 months long. And from what I was told a great majority of your hours should be spent studying. LVN students still work but not that much. maybe part-time or under a contract. But my dad didn’t want me to stop working for 18 months. He wanted me to keep working so that I can help him pay off his debts and bills so that we can move. He was afraid that our landlord was gonna kick us out while I was in the middle of my school semester. (She wasn’t. We’re helping her pay off her mortgage by renting this room.) Ever since we’ve moved into this room consecutively year after year, he has promised me that we would move out and get our own place. My dad is not very good with spending and saving money. The reason why he doesn’t have a car now is because he can’t afford to buy nor keep the car. He has so much debt from unpaid rent , unpaid card notes, phone bills, and other IRS stuff. His credit score is currently under 215. Meaning it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for him to qualify to live anywhere. He is delusional to the fact that he cannot fix this himself. So he just gives me false hope year after year. I genuinely believe that he thinks he’s God. I hated being a CNA and wanted out as soon as I could. I just wanted to do my one year and then start nursing school. He says to my brother, “she wants to go back to school, but she can’t until we get out of here”. After I heard that I pretty much gave up on my nursing career. Because I knew that if that was the case, I would never be able to go back to school. So I gave up. I continue to work as a CNA until my certification expired. He got pissed at me because I told him that I wasn’t going to renew it. Why do I have to work a job that I hate for you? Someone who won’t allow me to elevate? If I can’t be an LVN the next best thing that’s gonna get me away from wiping old peoples butts is medical assisting with phlebotomy. The school that I got my CNA certification from was offering a medical assisting course with no tuition. That was the route that I was going to take, but they told me that I didn’t qualify to be in the program because I am alumni. There’s another medical school close to where I live, but it’s private. And I wanted to avoid having student debt because tuition is 10k. They offer financial aid, but I feel like even if I do apply, I’m gonna get the minimum amount or nothing at all. I don’t have any debt currently. Hell, I don’t even have credit. And I wanted to avoid that, but I’m desperate at this point. The next course is July of next year. That leaves plenty of time to apply for financial aid and grants. But the debt after completion is what’s nerve-racking to me. My dad tells me that I can’t handle any stress of any kind so I HAVE to make as much money as possible and avoid debt to avoid stress. Whether what I do makes me happy or not. But I’ve made plans of my own that will NOT include him. My grandmother (dad’s mom) passed away about 15+ years ago. She left her life insurance to myself my dad and my brother. 20K each. But my brother and I couldn’t get access to it until we turned 25. I turn 24 in two weeks and 25 next year. My plan was to take that money by myself a car and move TF out. As far away as possible from him. Cut off contact and all. Then I would start school a month later. I just don’t want him interfering with my plans. He still likes to hold some type of control over me. And if my plans don’t include him, he will force himself in. He wants to go to family therapy with me. But honestly, I’m not interested. I’m so drained, I don’t want to talk anymore. The only way that our problems will stop is if we don’t live together. I have tried to walk out and just leave multiple times. and each time he has physically stopped me from walking out the door. he tells me I can leave and find my own place but when I try to, he stops me. When I was 19 he called me an ungrateful piece of shit because I told him I didn’t want to live with him anymore. I’ve suffered at the hands of his verbal abuse and being his scapegoat and his last resort for too long. I am beyond done. You can’t treat me this way just because you raised me. When he talks to me the way that he does he tells me that I’m too sensitive and that I shouldn’t take it that way because he’s my dad. He tells me that I should be able to separate him from everybody else. That is his golden excuse. “I’m your parent“. being my parent DOES NOT give you the excuse to disrespect me. I would never do that to him because he has violent tendencies. and I am not one to hesitate to call the police when I feel threatened. he has threatened to put hands on me multiple times. if he touches me, I’m calling the police. Simple. I don’t ever want it to get to that point because he has a good job. In the moment that he gets put into handcuffs that shit is over with, and he’s back at square one trying to figure out his retirement. Now, what did he do that made me type all this out? I had to pay for his weed again, using my ID card. I currently have a job position pending due to background checks and I work but only two days a week. I don’t have a car so I use Uber and Lyft to get myself to work. I make $18 an hour and the Uber rides are $60 combined. whenever he places in order, he sends me the amount of money to pay for it. but there’s an ATM fee each time. and guess who had to pay the fee with the rest of everything that was in her account? I have nine cents in my checking account as we speak. and he doesn’t care since it’s not him. he offered to pay me back the difference, but it’s the principle of the whole thing. Why do I have to do this to myself FOR you? And because he’s an alcoholic with no car, I have to use DoorDash to buy his 20 liter of wine. I live in a small area so a lot of the times we get the same Dasher over and over. I get so embarrassed when I answer the door and give them my ID. I feel like they think it’s me ordering alcohol every single day. but my dad tells me I can’t care what people think. I just feel trapped under this man’s hold. I have no friends. i’ve never had a boyfriend. i’ve never had sex. I don’t have a drivers license because I don’t know how to drive. because I don’t have anyone around me that owns a car to teach me how to drive. I already cut my birth giver out of my life. that’s another long story, but basically my brother was homeless for six months as a result of something she did. so I don’t have a mom and I’m about to not have a dad. this man disgusts me. He makes me feel like I’m crazy for feeling this way. Am I crazy? AITA for filling this way. WIBTA if I cut him out my life? or am I being dramatic?