That’s interesting to see that the words are considered pure synonyms by that reference source.

I’ve always used Oxford or Cambridge for my definitions,

Vindictive

having or showing a wish to harm someone because you think that they harmed you; unwilling to forgive

Vengeful

expressing a strong wish to punish someone who has harmed you or your family or friends:

Revengeful

While both vindictive and vengeful are synonyms of revengeful, Cambridge notes that there are different tonal applications (vindictive is a disproving synonym)

So I guess at the end of the day whether you think women are vindictive depends on your definition of vindictive. I can’t break away from the definition I’ve always known, that vindictive is revenge for a perceived injustice and is a disproving judgement. Therefore I don’t think women as a whole are vindictive because I don’t think the injustice is perceived, it’s real and tangible.

Perhaps they did, but it was a first past the post voting system and resulted in a hung parliament.

I mean, I’m anti-meds for treating exogenic issues when something can be done for those exogenic issues.

If I’m sitting at home with the heater on and I start feeling warm and flushed, I wouldn’t take an ibuprofen (as an anti-pyretic) to bring my temperature down, I’ll turn the heater off.

It’s the same for mental health, if the sole source of the stress/sorrow is external, medication is nothing more than a bandaid, which is better than nothing if the exogenic influence is outside your individual control (which it often is)… But we are at a point where the majority of people with mental health issues are experiencing a level of exogenic influence and there are enough of us that if we organised we could change the factors that are causing or worsening our mental health symptoms.

So it bears talking about, is medication always appropriate?

Medication is important, especially for endogenic conditions, and medication is life saving. But if you have exogenic depression and the meds aren’t working, the new prescription is protest.

This is what is breaking my mental health.

Life is not guaranteed to be good, nature is cruel and has no rhyme or reason. People die and suffer in horrific ways every day because of nature.

Why the fuck are we adding to that cruelty!?

The chaos of the natural order of the universe sucks and you’ve got to learn to cope with that. But I’ve always found that side of life easy to accept because it is so inevitably universally unavailable.

I was born with a genetic illness, it causes lifelong disability due to structural deformity, but can also just randomly cause fatal aneurysms in young people. That’s nature, that sucks, but hey, what are you going to do? Figure out how to do what you need to do to live and live it.

But then I’m born into a country with no disability discrimination laws, and no right to access laws. Fortunately we had public healthcare and public disability services, and public welfare services, and when I was younger a disability act was finally brought in (though it’s often just lip service)

Growing up I felt safe and secure knowing I had a good social support system…but the public disability services shut down and was replaced by an insurance model, the public healthcare has been functionally split to a semi public copay system and a private paid system, and the welfare pension is so far below the poverty line that people on a disability pension don’t earn enough money to meet the eligibility for public housing.

(yes, You can be too poor, for public/social housing.)

And it’s one thing for law and legislation to lag behind the needs of the people, it’s another thing altogether when an individual or small group of individuals in power systematically impose laws to remove the support and resources you used to have, for barely no more reason than “they want to”.

I can’t help but feel that a significant portion of my suffering is the result of the few people in the local conservative government that shut down the public disability service providers because it was “costing too much” … Even though the insurance model they replaced it with costs the government more and supports less people than the previous system, and supports them less effectively.

And how do you live with that?

Like it’s one thing for nature to have cursed me to suffer, but a human being heard my story, and countless stories like mine, and still said “nah, fuck em” when it came to vote.

We are living with psychopaths and sociopaths in complete control over our lives. The suffering is happening for a reason, and the reason is that those who are causing the suffering are enjoying the situation (because it gives them money, power, influence, or straight up sadism)

How the fuck do you reconcile that and “learn to sit with your emotions” in one CBT session and in the very next session my therapist is going to teach me about “enforcing my boundaries”… How do I enforce my personal boundary to get the homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and ableist government to stop abusing me? Oh, I don’t, I sit with that emotion.

I can’t afford the pills they recommend.

I’d like to tell you about a wonderful new invention, they call it “divorce.”

Yes exactly. No fault divorce is the simple and obvious answer.

That wasn’t an option for my mother or my grandmother. There was no way for a woman to initiate a divorce.

My mother couldn’t open a bank account in her name, she needed a man (her father, brother, or husband) to co-sign.

So “going out for cigarettes” also wasn’t easy, she could leave, sure, but once the cash she had in hand ran out, then what? Her income would still be going into her husbands bank account, she can’t change where the money goes because she doesn’t have any other bank account for her employer to pay into.

The Second wave feminist movement is what pushed to provide women the right to manage their own finances and affairs, and also gave us no-fault divorce laws.

So yes, “Quit blaming everyone else for all your problems and leave” is good advice for women who have the legal freedom to move about their country and be independent members of society. That hasn’t historically been the case, and it’s currently not the case for many women in many countries with different laws. Those women have fewer options, and rat poison is cheap.

Even with no fault divorce and the ability for women to own property, have a bank account, and work for an income paid directly to them, There will always be individually nuanced situations that are more complex and don’t allow for an easy exit, especially when domestic violence or financial abuse is involved. (eg: I’m working disabled, my boyfriend holds my medical guardianship, hypothetically, if we mutually broke up, I couldn’t make a “clean break” until I got that legal loose end tied up, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to book a doctor’s appointment or get a flu shot without my ex-boyfriend’s signature, and transferring guardianship takes months, and money. During a mutual break up that’s okay, but if I needed to “leave him” and he didn’t want his affordable maid and nanny to go, I’d have an incredibly difficult time getting my life back to myself… But fortunately it’s 2024 so there is a process I can follow, not every woman has had those same rights to leave like I have.

I would say women are revengeful.

Vindictive is an “unreasonable” desire for revenge, and what makes the desire “unreasonable” is going to depend on every individual situation, so I don’t think you can generalise that women are vindictive.

I would also hesitate to use the term “vengeful” too, due the nuance of vengeful being a perceived injustice over revengeful being for a known injustice. Again that’s always going to depend on the specific situation and context of what has happened.

When you look at being revengeful through a broader lens, I disagree that women are more prone to revengefulness or vindictiveness than men, I think the ways women express their revenge is gender-specific and can draw more attention to itself than masculine approaches to revenge.

So I think it’s fair to generalise that people in general have the capacity to feel revengeful, and as a marginalised class women are often revengeful, and as additional minor injustices are compounded on systemic injustice, the revenge of women is perceived as vindictiveness.

But that doesn’t mean women are vindictive.

Texas feels like Australia’s Queensland, they still have a lot of outdated laws in the books that they can’t enforce, mostly related to “queer crimes” and vagrancy laws.

It’s a conscious choice not to scrap it, because there are people in power who never wanted it to be decriminalised in the first place and they will prevent the law being removed from the books on the off chance they can re-criminslise it when they have more control in office.

The Queensland Youth Crime act is another example, they resurrected an old law in a response to the “out of control youth crime rate” (the youth crime rate increased by 6% on 22-23, but then decreased 6.7% in 23-24, they introduced the new youth crime act at the end of 2024, after the crime rate was already decreasing.)

As a result of the new Act, police can put spit hoods on children “for police safety”, and any child over 10 can be trailed as an adult, oh, and detention is not a “last resort” anymore.

Being a police officer is a job so I completely understand and respect a police officers right to a safe workplace. But putting a spit hood on a kid is not the solution. Properly funding the youth mental health care system, and reforming the foster care system would do so much more for youth crime, community safety and police safety than spit hoods will ever do. In the long run, treating children like animals is only going to increase the chances that they grow up into animals, instead of healthy human members of a society. The justice system is planting the trauma that will resurface as future criminal offences and/or substance abuse issues.

Wow, I’m not American so I didn’t realise Texas was holding out that long, wasn’t Massachusetts offering state sanctioned marriages in like 04/05? That timeline is mind blowing! To have one state doing so much for equal rights while the other fights in court to actively do less.

I thought here in Australia, Tasmania was bad waiting until 1997 when their overseas neighbour to the north (Vic) was 1980… Then we didn’t get any form of same sex marriage until 2017.

But 2003!

You have actually broken my brain with this fact…

Like what?

No no no, we get to eat the tacos in the kitchen while we wait for the jello to set.

I’m a stay at home wife, I make sure my husband has a homecooked meal that I slaved over for hours! Like corned beef in aspic with celery jello salad.

Oops I didn’t make enough for myself, that’s okay I already had a taco as a snack, and my husband works so hard all day to support my life here in this kitchen so he deserves the whole bowl of jello to himself.

While he’s eating I’ll just add some things to the shopping list, we need more marichino cherries, and we’re out of rat poison.

I mean even just from a totally innocent position, I’m exhausted right now and in the past month I’ve almost died falling down the stairs 5 times from the sleep deprivation (the ER is getting sick of my clumsiness)

I know I’ll sleep better once my cohabitation separation is finalised.

This morning I brushed my teeth with my partner’s athletes foot ointment. Didn’t even realise it tasted like ass and felt like wax until I was trying to spit it out and wondering why it was clinging to my teeth. I’m just not human anymore, I am physically and mentally burnt out carrying the entire cognitive and household labour load of the relationship for the last 10 years.

Wow I completely forgot Lemmy existed for a full fortnight, I’m sorry I accidentally ghosted your comment!

I’m currently using Reef 50+ SPF sunscreen oil.

I swapped to sunscreen oil instead of cream last year after I started using an oil based toner and realised that I prefer the slick oily feeling of actual oil over the sticky greasy feeling of sunscreen creams or the drying chalky sensation of mineral sunscreens like zinc.

I am myself on the hunt for another brand of sunscreen oil, because Reef is coconut oil based, and I have a friend who’s deathly allergic to coconut, so if I’m hanging out with her I need to swap back to the gross greasy 1L bottle of Bunnings sunscreen that’s probably expired but it’s what I’ve got.

And I’m worried I’ll forget one day and kill my friend by hugging her while wearing sunscreen.

I’m on board!

I’m a big fan of the word cunt in all of its current uses it’s my preferred slang term for my own, though it’s rare to find someone who’s not taken aback by that in the bedroom.

Would it be a grammatically consistent pronoun? “oh, someone left cunt wallet, I hope cunt come get it” or do we need a cunt/cunter situation? So cunt can collect cunter wallet.

The way the OP phrases it rules out trans men who have vaginas, trans women who have vaginas, and a bunch of cis women who’ve had certain pelvic traumas or cancers and therefore don’t have vaginas.

What he’s trying to say is “if you were born with a vagina and you align with it” which is actually still funny because I was born with my vagina, I like my vagina, I’ll be happily keeping it even after all my surgeries…but if this OP saw my face he would put me in the “trans man” bucket because they lack nuance around identity.

You need to get big into two tone ska, then the fedora is socially acceptable again.

partners they could hypothetically reproduce with

“fertile women”

“women capable of pregnancy”

Outdated, slight red flag option: “gynephile”

Or you could even try “I find women attractive and would love to have kids with the woman I love one day”

There, language isn’t that hard.

I love that half of these are fully gender neutral terms of endearment in Australia 😂

Can we trade? Every year I ask for socks, sunscreen, and cash, and I get useless stuff that is so lovely but so useless to me.

I’ve got a luxury nail care manicure set for Christmas this year that I’ll be hauking as soon as my family blink so I can buy some sunscreen for myself for Christmas since I’m out and I need it.

It’s a thoughtfully misguided gift - they know I go to get “treatments on my hands” and they keep thinking this is at a spa, so a kit to do it myself at home is a thoughtful gift to help me save money.

Except that I’ve explained thousands of times “it’s medical treatment, at a physiotherapist clinic, for palsies, not relaxation treatment, at a spa, for pleasure”

I can’t even really use the manicure set by myself because of the palsy.

For my actual nails I just bite, and occasionally file them… like a normal guy.

I was made redundant this year in November, so I need cash and socks, not a manicure set.

I hate feeling so ungrateful towards gifts. But I really do feel like they’ve gifted me guilt, when I asked for socks.

See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.

“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.

As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?

It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.

I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.

I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.

I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.

what were you doing this whole time

Assuming it was this hard for everyone else and I was just really, really, inexplicably bad at this…so I’ll work harder to overcome my personal shortcomings!

Undiagnosed thought: “I’m always forgetting my important things, this is really difficult”
Society: “everyone forgets things”

Undiagnosed thought: that fluorescent light is so incredibly loud and the way it flickers is creating this strange rainbow effect on my computer and it hurts my eyes and I’m really struggling here.
Society: working in an office sucks, the lights, the distractions, it’s normal to have unfocused moments.

You repeat enough of these thoughts - I feel like I’m struggling with my emotional regulation, could it be ADHD? Well as a teen it was hormones, as a uni student it was “freshman anxiety”, then I was getting divorced so my emotional state was blamed on that, then I was always moving house so it made sense that my mood was always a hair trigger.

There were always just enough environmental factors to mask the underlying condition.

And it works! Until you burnout in your 30s because no one else is actually giving 150% all the time.

I did the same with a physical illness! I was born with a hip deformity so my whole life any pain or issues around my hips was just totally brushed off until I got aggressively assertive in my 20s because with the physical symptoms I was able to feel more confident in my perception of my reality and advocate to my doctor (where as with mental health, it’s harder, sure I think I feel this symptom but it’s in my head it’s fleeting what if I’m remembering experiencing my own thoughts wrong? Years of describing how I feel to therapists, being told it’s nothing out of the ordinary, so I’ve convinced myself it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing)

Turns out I had nerve damage in my spine the whole time, but we all just assumed I was being overly dramatic and sensitive about the known hip issue.

Same with my ADHD. We all (myself included) thought it was just really bad anxiety in addition to me being bad at sticking to the homework for therapy so it made sense I wasn’t getting better.

But we know more about how it presents, so if I was a kid going through the process again I’d be less likely to be misdiagnosed in the first place.