This is also how it feels to drive at any time, ever, with undiagnosed ADHD.

[ID: An animated gif of a busy road; every car on the road is outlined in frames labeled "car" in bright yellow, while one person is outlined in purple, and two buses are outlined in dark pink. As the cars move, the labels and frames jump and jiggle, filling the image with visual noise.]

despite being interviewed individually, all four gave the exact same response

*clicks pen* I guess their alibi checks out; bring in old man Jenkins.

Except it is, and believing you can tell the difference between “bad chemicals” and “good chemicals” from the label is exactly how marketers trick you into thinking something is healthier than it is just because they say “derived from natural sources” instead of the chemical name, which is not necessarily true.

Further, that “weird shit” serves a purpose. Potassium sorbate, also called E202, for instance, inhibits microbial growth in food and beauty products and stops unwanted additional fermentation in wine and cider. So unless you want sour wine, contaminated cosmetics, and things going mouldy in your cupboard in three days, it’s good for potassium sorbate to be in there. And if you were brewing your own beer/wine/cider at home, you would use it too. Various acids are used to lower pH in preserved fruits and vegetables in order to prevent botulism. Potassium metabisulphite/pyrosulphite is also used to prevent microbial growth in wine.

Some things are unhealthy, absolutely. Look at what happened with trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils, which serve no purpose except to cut costs. It’s good to know about those things. But I have also seen so many products intentionally marketing themselves to appeal to the “natural” consumer that are the same exact things as the “scary chemical” stuff they’re just called something different. Like I’ve seen a lot of soap labels where they call the ingredients “natural cold-pressed extract of Helianthus anuum” to make it sound healthier and less processed than if they’d said “triglycerides” or “sunflower oil,” which is what it is. It works the other way, too, where labels will intentionally play up scientific jargon the average consumer doesn’t know the meaning of so that their product sounds like it’s different and worth paying twice as much for, like, for instance, “micellar” soaps, which is just regular soap.

Other stuff serves an aesthetic purpose that does not have a negative health effect and is also not strictly necessary, but which if it was not there, people would think the product was worse, like the lecithin emulsifiers that keep your mayonnaise and yoghurt and peanut butter from separating unpleasantly, the sulphates added to shampoo to make it lather, or the carrageenan or alginate added to toothpaste and ice cream to make it smoother (lecithin and carrageenan both come from natural sources, actually — lecithin often comes from from soy, and carrageenan and alginate come from seaweed — but they aren’t always listed that way, so they sound like “scary chemicals” to skittish people). Alum is used in pickling to keep pickles crunchy; it’s not necessary, some people pickling at home prefer not to use it, but if you got a mushy pickle at the supermarket you’d be turned off by it. Sodium citrate is a salt of citric acid, which can be “natural” from citrus fruits or artificially-produced but which is identical in either case. It helps emulsify melting cheese to keep it from getting a gross oily layer separating out and to regulate pH in things like gelatine products, which would not hold their structure if the pH got outside of those bounds. These things are there for a reason.

As I said, not everything is benign or good for the customer, and that’s important to be aware of, but “ah this is a chemical I can’t pronounce so therefore it’s Unnatural and Bad” is NOT the same as being an informed consumer, and it actually makes you way easier to manipulate through marketing. Deciding that something is good or bad for you based on how it sounds when you don’t actually know what it is or why it’s there is not “doing your research” or whatever the granola hippies in the Facebook mommy group say.

I’ve been around long enough to expect that no one on this post will even read any of this, but in the interest of promoting actual consumer health literacy, I have to say it for those people who do.

The most buckwild thing to me, is seeing those types of ‘I should be able to pronounce all the ingredients’ folks get very up-in-arms on the subject of food waste. I cannot imagine how many safe preservatives they can’t pronounce, but i DO know how much more food waste there would be if said ‘chemicals’ weren’t in use.

Learning from every source in your life that sex is disgusting and sinful, that you should be ashamed of your feelings, thoughts and desires and then having someone in a dog mask tell you, "No, it's all cool, actually," is mind-blowing lol

"One funny thing: At most of the kink parties Selena went to, no one was doing anything that seemed to be sexual. People would say, 'I'm tying someone up, that's sex,' but much of the time it didn't seem to feel sexual and nobody could explain how this made sense. Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn't care about sex, but she did love rope, so it was unclear exactly what was happening here, and what she actually wanted.

mxbutchtwink:

mxbutchtwink:

I actually love kinksters so much

Learning from every source in your life that sex is disgusting and sinful, that you should be ashamed of your feelings, thoughts and desires and then having someone in a dog mask tell you, "No, it's all cool, actually," is mind-blowing lol

In the comments seeing a lot of aces saying "Yeah I appreciate that kinksters are often accepting of ace people" and that is because there are many asexuals in kink! Sexual attraction or behavior is not essential to kink/BDSM.

My spouse and I are both a-spec kinksters who do a lot of Kinky Activities and exactly zero traditional genital-involving sex. I write about being nonsexual kinksters professionally as well.

Intimacy, it turns out. Selena cared about intimacy, and kink was a way for her to be intimate with others. Intimacy and sex are not the same. Intimacy can be in service of sex or sex can be in service of intimacy, or they can be completely separate..."

-Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex