HYPERSENSITIVITY

This all started when I was reading Busty Girl Comics.  For the record, BGC are not porn.  I’m sure some disgusting and desperate soul somewhere has masturbated to them, because it’s the internet, but that’s the kind of person who could probably masturbate to pictures of missing children on milk cartons, so they don’t count.  BGC, simply put, is a series of simple but well-drawn comics of the types of problems that women with large breasts run into on a day-to-day basis — problems that women with small breasts (or men like me, who generally don’t have breasts) — may not know about.  Here’s an example.

See?  You’d have to be the kind of religious maniac who throws feces at little girls for not dressing modestly enough (not making that up) to be offended by that picture.  Most of us will enjoy a brief chuckle and move on.

Meanwhile, in a parallel sector of the internet, some girl posted this photo, presumably in response to the kind of women whose Twitter pictures are just diagonal photos of their cleavage.

That prompted many responses as well, this being my favorite:

But the important one, to tie this all back into BGC, was this.

That was drawn, in case you couldn’t tell, by the same Paige “Rampaige” Halsey Warren who draws the rest of BGC, and is intended to say that you shouldn’t be ashamed of your body.  Specifically your boobs.

So let’s recap.  In response to the enormous number of women taking pictures of their bodies in order to show them off to the internet (often under the guise of “tanning!” or “new shirt!”), Instagram user officialsabrina_xo posted a picture saying, basically, let’s not be naked all the time.  Rampaige responds in turn by saying that this doesn’t mean you should be ashamed of your boobs, you should be proud of your boobs.  Positive sentiments all around, right?  Good.

But wait!  Some people are not to be satisfied with other people saying nice things to each other, and so this showed up, from an anonymous commenter with a stick up its ass.

First of all, I hate anonymous commenters.  Most of the comments on my blog are anonymous, and the ones that aren’t are usually positive.  The anonymous ones are the ones making face-palmingly inarticulate arguments against whatever I’ve written, hiding behind the anonymity of their username because apparently the fact that it’s the fucking internet and I have no idea who you are isn’t enough.  Come up with a username, for fuck’s sake.  Otherwise you’re just yelling.

Anyway, this particular anonymous commenter says it’s transphobic (like homophobic, but against transsexual people) to say that your boobs are something you should be proud of.  The only reason I can think that this would be the case is that there are people out there in women’s bodies, replete with breasts, who wish they were men (or feel that mentally they are men but have women’s bodies) and either way they would rather have men’s bodies to reflect their mental gender, so telling them to be proud of something they wish they didn’t have is discriminatory.  Not just that, it reeks of transphobia because this is a serious issue and dramatic language is required.

What the actual fuck.

Where does this kind of thing end?  If I made a comic about “Tall People Problems” and pointed out that my friend Levi (6’5″) can’t walk upright in a local bar called The Sink because the ceiling is about 6 feet off the ground, and then said “by the way, don’t be ashamed of being tall, after all you can always see the stage at concerts,” and and then someone wrote in and said that that was phobic against people who are tall and wish they weren’t, we would laugh that person all the way off of the internet.  Or at least I would.

Boiled down to its essence, what I’m saying is this:

Just because you’re insulted by something doesn’t make it an insult.

As someone who issues both insults and things that are insulting, it’s important to be able to distinguish the two, because you sometimes have to apologize for the former.

Think of something you’re proud of.  Maybe you’re proud of the money you’ve made.  Maybe you’re proud of your grades, or your new job, or your muscles, or your tan, or your car, or whatever.  Maybe you’re proud of your boobs or your sexy haircut or your blowjob skills (I know several women and at least one man who are).  Hell, there are probably people who are proud of not giving blowjobs.  It doesn’t matter.  Somewhere out there is someone who does not have — and wishes they had — what you are proud of.  Someone out there is fat or has bad grades or sucks at blowjobs.

That’s unfortunate for them, but it does NOT mean that you have to stop being proud of things.  I’m not fat, and proud of it.  Sometimes I take my shirt off where other people can see me, partly because it’s hot out and partly because I like how I look with a shirt off.  If someone came up to me and said that I should put my shirt back on while I run because a nearby unfit person felt bad about how they’re not fit, I’d tell them to go fuck themselves.  That’s not my problem.

Similarly, if I say that I love being a man (true) and that I love having sex with women (also true), that is not an insult to men who don’t love being men or don’t love having sex with women (or both).  The existence of people who are different from you is not an inherent insult to you.

This applies especially to minorities.  If I make the generalization that you should be proud of your body, it’s true that I’m ignoring people who aren’t, and don’t think they should be.  But those people are something like 3 out of every thousand.  And they know that.  If I (or Rampaige) is talking to a human person, it is SAFE TO ASSUME that the gender with which that person associates is the same as the one indicated by their downstairs parts.  If I sneeze and someone says “god bless you,” it’s safe for them to assume that I’m a religious person and will interpret that as a kind sentiment.  They’re wrong, and I’m not, and I interpret it as a silly and outdated sentiment, and besides, they’re only allergies so leave me alone.  But it’s a safe bet.

Now, there’s an important point to make here.  Everything I’ve said does NOT mean that you should intentionally ostracize people who are different from you.  Saying that transgender people are abominations and should be ashamed, or that atheists should be taxed extra or deported, or that gay people should suppress their feelings or whatever, is not cool.  It’s possible that the word “should” in Rampaige’s statement was interpreted that way, but that’s a stretch.

That is not what’s happening here.  What happened here is simple.  Person A says something nice to Group A.  Person B is not in Group A, and is therefore not an object of Person A’s sentiment.

Person B becomes upset because there are sentiments in the universe that are not addressed to every other conscious creature in the universe.

Person B needs to shut the fuck up and learn to let the little things go.