[ ID: Five successive tweets by C.W. Howell @ cwhowell123 that read as follows: So I followed @/GaryMarcus’s suggestion and had my undergrad class use ChatGPT for a critical assignment. I had them all generate an essay using a prompt I gave them, and then their job was to “grade” it–look for hallucinated info and critique its analysis. *All 63* essays had / hallucinated information. Fake quotes, fake sources, or real sources misunderstood and mischaracterized. Every single assignment. I was stunned–I figured the rate would be high, but not that high. / The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn’t fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them / were unaware it could do this. All of them expressed fears and concerns about mental atrophy and the possibility for misinformation/fake news. One student was worried that their neural pathways formed from critical thinking would start to degrade or weaken. One other student / opined that AI both knew more than us but is dumber than we are since it cannot think critically. She wrote, “I’m not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I’m much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is.” /end ID. ]
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let’s try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn’t cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here’s the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn’t mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn’t make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn’t mean you wouldn’t run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you’re really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women’s sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don’t actively realize it, it’s about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It’s about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it’s gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don’t really matter, they’re just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you’re dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it’s very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It’s a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don’t actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they’re actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe… just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let’s not mince words, there’s also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you’re feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn’t simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone’s kink truly offends you this much.
“Booping the forbidden snoot” is a good way of putting it
Seattle PD sent seven police cars to arrest the guy who filmed them macing a child and are holding him without bail on trumped up charges of “Unlawful discharge of a laser pointer.”
So far, people who get the same answer rb and tag this in VERY SIMILAR WAYS. Which is so cool!!! You know what really kills me though? People who get “you don’t like being held accountable” NEVER reblog it. BUT YOU GUYS ARE THE MOST POPULAR RESULT. I KNOW YOU’RE THERE. which tells me that you don’t like being held accountable SO MUCH that you will boycott a whole ass uquiz bc of it. And that, my friends, that is beautiful.
1) yeah, this is where ur name goes when u enter it in – idk why they even ask for it either
2) Sadboihrs, if you’re out there, I am COMPLETELY UNSURPRISED that you got conflict avoidant.
if you’re friends with @fluffysheeple on steam, you might notice she has been starting skyrim several times in quick succession recently. this is because she is trying to get a mod which changes every npc in the world into a girl to work, but has to fiddle with the mod files because the mod either causes every npc starts t-posing or makes large portions of the ground disappear.
my suggestion to play without the girl mod have been shot down with the incredible counterpoint “but then the game has men in it.”
look. you have to be prepared to sacrifice some things (animations, the floor) to achieve greatness
people talk a lot about how wild shit would have gotten in the fire nation if zuko had joined the gaang at the end of season 2 but i think we’re ignoring that there’s a solid chance that in “The Runaway” zuko and toph would have ended up committing actual highway robbery
katara: can you believe the rest of them? you’re the only other person responsible enough to know not to pull these ridiculous scams–
zuko: oh, sokka said i’m not allowed to
katara: what?
zuko: i suggested a thing i used to do all the time when uncle and i were on the run. i don’t know why sokka didn’t like it, it’s the simplest scam ever
katara:
katara:
katara:
katara: do i want to know
zuko: it’s the one where i point my swords at somebody and they give me all their money. worked every time.
zuko: [is asleep]
toph, earthbending him to the top of the hill away from the rest of the group and then kicking him awake: rise and shine sokka’s asleep let’s go rob some people
zuko, pulling his dao out of his sleeping bag: sick let’s go
i LOVE this because it resolves the whole “everyone else got a fieldtrip with zuko” thing and then the Zuko Bonding Trips would just keep escalating like:
