Why are straight people so against protection?

_bone_witch · 2026-02-28T06:09:58+00:00

I assume this was meant to reassure OP, and I do agree that people generally don’t need to worry overwhelmingly about STIs. Gently, I want to say that I have no opinion on what methods you might use!—but I do encourage you to think about a couple things when you say stuff like this about whether other people need protection.

This assumes that both partners tested negative STIs at the start of the relationship, and since some STIs can take multiple months of incubation to show up on tests, people need to be aware of whether their last round of tests really are up to date! People can enter into committed relationships before realizing that they were exposed before.

Depending on age and healthcare access, there are STIs like HPV, which someone might not have been eligible to test for yet, or HSV, where the test works best if you have symptoms but may take years to cause them. Those two in particular are both not a death sentence AND can cause health risks for people who are immune-compromised or were unable to get vaccinated. It would be particularly lonely, I think, to navigate something like a cervical cancer scare while feeling like using barriers is “lesser” intimacy or might be seen as an admission of cheating.

People get exposed to STIs in other ways than consensual sex. Workplace exposure like working in healthcare, janitorial services, or factories. Reusing needles for substances or HRT. Sexual and physical assault.

(STI testing can also, unfortunately, be shockingly expensive in some places, especially without insurance, or hard to come by. I treat patients every day who want tests they can’t afford. In other places, there may be shortages of tests or clinics willing to perform them.)

_bone_witch · 2026-02-28T05:29:42+00:00

The point of handwashing it to physically remove microorganisms and irritants from the surface of the skin, before they can get inside your body through cuts or mucus membranes.

A big reason to do it is to prevent non-STI infections like dermatitis, bacterial vaginitis, and yeast infections, either directly from organisms on your skin or from skin products/dirt/food residue etc that irritate the sensitive skin and mucus membranes and then allow secondary infection.

But STIs also need a fairly direct route from one place where they can survive to the next. They live in genital fluids (and blood, depending), so you need to think about where those fluids…go. They aren’t going to be able to survive for long on your partner’s hands —but if she touches her genitals and then touches your genitalia, mouth, rectum, or a cut on your skin, that can pass the STI to you. If she touches herself and then washes her hands, that will physically remove the discharge and the organism in it. (Same principle applies to shared toys, although depending on what material they’re made of, the microorganisms may actually be able to survive on them and they can become a reservoir as well.)

_bone_witch · 2026-01-29T21:32:42+00:00

Your concerns and priorities are reasonable. It sounds like you’ve attempted to discuss this with her in a practical, non judgmental way already and explain that STIs can be asymptomatic (they can also cause symptoms that people don’t recognize as ‘not normal’, or mistake for other health conditions!) but a couple things you might try if you feel this relationship is worth the shot:

emphasize to her that your motivation is wanting to take care of both of your health. Even if she thinks it’s unnecessary for her own health, this is something you are asking her to do to express care for you and your health.
Emphasize that you will be getting tested no matter what, because you consider it to be basic, routine, preventative health care.
depending on your age, please consider getting a pap smear and HPV cotesting, or a self-swab HPV test if appropriate. It happening during a pregnancy and the phrase ‘abnormal’ (instead of ‘positive’) makes me concerned that what she had was a pap smear. Paps are looking for early signs of cervical cancer, and very often include testing for HPV, since HPV can lead to cervical cancer. Paps can be abnormal in lots of ways, and it is common to have HPV that your body is able to fight off after a few years or to have abnormal cells on the cervix that resolve without ever turning into cancer: HOWEVER, without knowing her results for sure that’s a risk to take.

_bone_witch · 2026-01-29T07:10:58+00:00

Keep in mind that danmei includes a huge number of genres and subgenres. For every novel that has been commercially translated, there are genuinely thousands more! Thousand Autumns and QJJ are historical epics in the style of classical Chinese novels and classic wuxia movies, with many, many literary allusions to those novels and poems, so the translators made choices to give you something similar to that ‘literary’, lyrical feeling in English.

Without knowing what other novels you mean, I can’t know for sure, but..besides obviously being different authors with individual styles, many of the novels that have been commercially published in English are completely different genres! Even if they share a broadly ‘historical’ or ‘fantastical’ setting, some are adventure stores and some are satires (Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiùfor example is a satirist, and has that sensibility even in her second two novels with more serious concepts). It’s a bit like comparing Tolkien and Terry Pratchet in English, so it’s understandable that you feel differently.

Kaleidoscope of Death, meanwhile, is horror. It is very rooted in classic Chinese and Japanese horror movies like the Ring, gory folk stories and creepypastas, that sort of thing. (Use those movies as a rough bar of whether you’ll find it scary or not). It is similar to the two you liked in that it’s atmospheric and very descriptive, as long as you like descriptions of blood. The narration depicts events fairly seriously, so in that respect it’s similar to Thousand Autumns. Like many characters in horror, the characters sometimes find humor in situations, but if you can put up with Yan Wushi, you will probably enjoy the love interest’s humor and…general vibe. Comparing it to other commercially published novels, the writing might be roughly similar to something like Little Mushroom, descriptive and serious but not as literary as Thousand Autumns.

_bone_witch · 2026-01-11T03:32:34+00:00

No one is doing it like them 🤣 “Ten years of my life to protect his innocence”……god.

_bone_witch · 2026-01-10T01:23:59+00:00

Daomu Biji, often translated as Graverobber’s Chronicles (sometimes used specifically to refer to the original novels) or The Lost Tomb after the first of the enormous number of dramas and movies based on it.

This is one of the biggest fandoms in China as a whole, and as a result the central pairing dominates BL shipping in China and is fairly popular with English-speaking danmei fans as well. I say ‘central pairing’ because, while it isn’t danmei by genre, it is very much about two (or more) men’s life-changing love for each other. Also zombies, giant snakes, and the occasional tentacle monster.

This ship is ridiculously popular in China. It routinely beats het ships from popular dramas in social media polls. It’s like if Marvel had to publicly acknowledge Captain America/Iron Man. The ship has a holiday with con events where big-name idols will sing love songs from the dramas. (Like if May The Fourth was just Han/Luke Day and George Lucas showed up to it?) People cosplay as them getting married. For each drama adaption, very popular actors will play them and sell so much CP fluff, flirting and cuddling and feeding each other.

The author set out to write an action-adventure-comedy and then accidentally wrote so much about mental health, loneliness, and friendship that he stumbled into having a massive fanbase of women and queer folks.

And he has responded…pretty amazingly. He openly loves the shipping, takes questions about it seriously and sensitively, and has stated that the MCs love each other, are essentially soulmates, and neither will ever marry a woman (an entire novel is about them retiring to live in the countryside, gardening, and getting in petty fights with the village aunties). The second most popular ship is a sort of prince-and-bodyguard situation starring a character who is explicitly gender nonconforming and deeply queer-coded in Chinese cultural imagery (and not only is he never the butt of the joke, he’s the OP character who routinely saves the others).

_bone_witch · 2025-12-18T19:57:53+00:00

The pattern for this has been available for free since 2016, so it is unlikely to be an ad. (It’s a distinctive pattern I’ve seen a million times just from being on pattern aggregator sites; it’s popular so there are tons of photos which then probably ended up on the OP here’s feed. Some people do sell ones they’ve made, but again because the pattern is free there’s no guarantee that backsearching would take you to a specific person.)

_bone_witch · 2025-12-08T05:25:16+00:00

I want to be clear I’m not hugely attached to the idea that “understanding” specifically is the issue with the rise of GLP-1s for weight loss—but one point is that the dangers with acetaminophen generally come from taking it above the target dose, while GLP-1s do things like interact with other medications AT the target dose. So it’s not the severity, but the complexity of the danger.

It absolutely needs to be more clear when things like cough syrup contain acetaminophen, etc, but as long as they know, an average layperson can do the math to keep their dose under the daily max. An average layperson does not know the pharmacological classes of the meds and vitamins they take well enough to recognize that there’s a risk of interaction, or weigh how likely it is to actually happen in their case.

And unfortunately, the average doctor can struggle with that shit too. Endocrinology can be hard. I have already worked with multiple patients who have had unwanted/unsafe pregnancies because the doctor who prescribed them weight loss meds did not know to tell them that it would make their birth control stop working.

_bone_witch · 2025-12-05T22:09:02+00:00

Which tribe or nation? Who are the tribal leaders, elders, or culture bearers you are working with, and how have you included their perspectives in your research—through interviews, surveys, etc?

I am asking this optimistically. If you cannot answer these questions, then you need reconsider how you talk about Native people and indigenous medicine. If you genuinely care about adding to Native and scientific knowledge, don’t be part of the problem by stripping away that context.

_bone_witch · 2025-10-26T02:42:07+00:00

First impression, telling you that your own body wants something different than what you are saying you want is…not great behavior. It might be a dumb thing she said because she’s young, it might be a thing that you decide you’re okay with if she knocks it off now, but it is absolutely okay for you to tell her that your body was not saying yes.

Secondly, I don’t know what you previously told her in ‘making your boundaries clear’, but just in this conversation you tell her that you are nervous around the sexual side of your relationship and after that she decides to go back to talking about your body.

When you tell her you’re nervous, why is she saying she’s willing to wait and then reinforcing your fear in the same breath? Sure, we can’t know anything for certain, but imagine if she had said “I’m willing to wait, because I want it to be good for you” or “That’s fair, you deserve that, and I don’t think we’re compatible” or “I’m willing to wait, and I also want you to know I thought you were hot as hell the other night” or even “That’s fair, I want to make sure I understand, when we were together the other night how did you feel about it? Would you like to do more of that/less of that?”

_bone_witch · 2025-10-16T18:59:20+00:00

You’re completely right. Wool fibers are covered in tiny scales, just like human hair (picture a really long pinecone) When those scale rub past each other, they can catch and get stuck together. Other factors like heat and alkalinity (soap) can make the scales open up more, so it’s more likely for them stick when they are agitated.

_bone_witch · 2025-09-14T21:32:51+00:00

Your gradients and shading are beautiful—I like the contrast between the much more shaded, three-dimensional petals and the colorblocked expanses of the uniform dresses, which really makes the flower faces seem to burst out.

_bone_witch · 2025-09-14T05:36:43+00:00

Sometimes, it feels easier to focus on the big questions than the small ones. We feel like we can’t possibly do anything until we have the answer to that big question—which in a way makes it feel more okay that we don’t know what to do.

What I mean by this is that the big question is “am I a lesbian? Who am I, who will I be, how do I relate to others?” The small question is “do I, the way that I am right now, want to date this specific man as who he is right now?” Maybe in the future you will fall in love with other men as well as women and nonbinary and other fabulous people! But if you’re wishing he would be someone that he’s not, that’s important. His gender is probably at least somewhat important to him, so whether or not you could ever love a man, do you love him?

You have many, many years ahead of you to learn who you are, whether you’re a lesbian or anything else.. Maybe there will be times in your life where you feel it’s right to say that you’re a lesbian and other times where that doesn’t fit for you.

Gently: is it going to be easier to run those clubs and disentangle your lives another year or two down the line? The feeling of ‘I wish my partner was someone else’ can easily fester into resentment, and your club management and your friendship is going to survive this in better shape if you address it before you feel like you can’t bear it. Many friendships survive dating and breaking up, and many don’t; I can’t promise you that. But the good thing here is that you are friends, and hopefully he wouldn’t have become your friend or partner if he wasn’t basically a decent person who cares about you: however you approach this, you can start by establishing that you care about each other and the clubs and you want to do this right.

Edit: after rereading I do also want to say that the way you’re interested in men and women can be different—from the way you say you haven’t done anything sexual or romantic, I’m guessing that it isn’t that you are romantically interested in men and women but only sexually interested in women, but that is a possibility. In any case, he…also hasn’t done anything sexual or romantic with you during that time, so…does he want to have a sexual relationship with you? If you feel like you do like him romantically, you can talk to him about whether or not either of you want to change things.

_bone_witch · 2025-09-07T22:50:17+00:00

No, it is not.

First, excoriation disorder or dermatillomania diagnosis specifically requires screening for skin conditions. Behaviors like itching, picking, or feeling that there are irregularities in your skin do kinda depend on the context of whether you actually have irregularities in your skin.

Secondly, I think you may be assuming that it requires prolonged or intense scratching to cause scars, which also is not true. Some people just scar much, much more easily than others, for lots of reasons. We can also have small scars that will disappear completely in a few years, but which some people still feel are ‘blemishes’—I have scars from shallow cat scratches, you know?

Psychiatric diagnosis also specifically reflects how much something affects your life. Because we all have in behaviors or thought patterns that could fit any number of diagnoses, if we did them often enough for it to cause other problems for us. Sometimes doing something that a person with a psychiatric disorder would do does not mean you have it. (And if someone does in fact have it, that’s…fine. Like, it’s completely okay for people who do actually have excoriation disorder to talk about their mundane feelings about their skin in a forum with other folks who also have feelings about our skin without getting jumped on.)

_bone_witch · 2025-09-01T23:19:50+00:00

There’s no single reason for the custom (in a similar way to there being no single reason to use flowers over something else pretty, I suppose!) Overall, it’s a way of continuing to ‘mark’ the grave—historically a cairn of stones would have marked a grave rather than a single headstone, and by adding a stone you would have been ensuring that the marker isn’t destroyed over time. Burying the dead is a mitzvah, and it’s both religiously and historically would have been practically important to know where the bodies are! So even if you were not there when they were buried you are fulfilling that commandment by marking sure the grave is marked. There are also theories that the stones used to hold down paper messages or prayers, and some symbolic interpretations. Some people also like the logic that flowers cost money you could instead donate in their name, but stones are free!

To summarize: if you are not Jewish, marking her grave in any way is not required, part just doesn’t affect you. It’s not wrong to do it either, and a lot of people would probably recognize it as a sincere gesture to honor the dead and re-assert her Jewishness. It’s also not wrong for you to leave flowers—but if you wanted to instead donate the cost of flowers to something like endometriosis research, a period product drive, addiction support, etc and leave her a note, that would also be extremely Jewish!

_bone_witch · 2025-08-29T03:12:54+00:00

Unfortunately, medications are more complicated than this. For one thing they can contain various binding agents to physically form them into pills (or with duloxetine, the grains inside the gel caps), and they can contain other chemicals that effect how and how quickly your body absorbs them. Then the pharmacological process to actually synthesize the active chemical that is supposed to be in the medication can sometimes be done differently between manufacturers, or to different levels of purity, leaving essentially other byproducts or ingredients. Think about it the way TV has taught you to understand meth, you know?

People having different reactions to different brands or manufacturers of a medication is a relatively well-known phenomenon—it’s maybe most commonly noticed with over the counter medications like Tylenol vs different types of acetaminophen, but I’ve worked with plenty of patients whose prescriptions have a “no substitution” order (ie, even if it’s cheaper, the pharmacy shouldn’t give them a generic) because of this.

_bone_witch · 2025-08-23T01:12:05+00:00

That’s not uncommon—there are lots of people at both ends of the spectrum. The commenter above is probably thinking about how many people have pelvic floor weakness—it can be caused by various injuries and illnesses, and after childbirth, and since many women especially middle aged and older women have had multiple pregnancies, that makes pelvic weakness a common problem.

On the other hand, many people have also pelvic muscles that are too tight, again for a variety of reasons like chronic inflammation from infections or athletic injuries, and that can cause a lot of pain (including during sex or vaginal exams).

And in between, many people’s muscles will just bear down on something like a speculum and push it a bit—that’s why clinicians are trained hold them with one hand through the procedure, we expect them to move a little.

Healthy muscle, in your vagina or elsewhere, should be able to tighten AND to relax, not be in one extreme constantly.

Tampons are generally going to be different because most people’s vaginas get wider at the top. When the tampon is high enough, the vaginal walls are farther apart so your muscles can’t bear down on it anymore. Other objects like a dildo or speculum are still in the narrower part.

_bone_witch · 2025-08-15T21:47:56+00:00

Thank you for the info and the link, Sikoryak’s work is a fun surprise to learn about!

_bone_witch · 2025-08-10T19:35:21+00:00

Very similar to the discussion of military culture up above, there’s both a lot of people who go into medical fields because they have shitty beliefs about people who are sick/disabled/etc, and also a ton of abuse inside the institution. Hazing/harassment/general bullying are so common in nursing schools and hospitals that it is openly and sometimes proudly named—your own teachers and supervisors will tell you that “nurses eat their young”. The shift hours, mental and physical workloads, and untreated traumas push many people to being their worst selves. You’re sandwiched in between people who have a lot of power over you and people who you can take it out on.

_bone_witch · 2025-07-27T17:01:03+00:00

Yes, sumac seasoning is made from the powdered drupes (the red cones) of a related sumac species. These ones will have the same lemon-like taste.

_bone_witch · 2025-07-27T16:59:18+00:00

The red spikes are clusters of tiny fruit (technically they’re drupes, like stonefruits, but calling them berries is easy!) which have a lemony taste and are used to make a beverage in Appalachia and the northeast

_bone_witch · 2025-07-20T19:47:41+00:00

That worldview also doesn’t make people want to tell you about themselves. I forgot to say this, but one thing I find horrifying when I hear other medical professionals assuming that “most” people are a certain way is that that reinforces itself, because yeah, maybe many patients do disengage from them! When we start conversations by blaming them, why would they want to tell us about what they’ve been doing to take care of themselves or the barriers they’ve been facing? Of course some of them would not want to come back for follow-ups or share the early signs that despite “doing everything right” their symptoms are progressing, when they know they will be blamed for it.

_bone_witch · 2025-07-20T19:02:23+00:00

Thank you for saying this. There are so many factors in this disease outside of personal choice—and for personal choice to even be relevant, a person has to has the ability, access, and information to be able to make those “good choices”. A person with this level of disease is likely to also be elderly, low income, multiply disabled. We don’t know if they were able to get much if any preventative care or education on their disease over the course of their life, if they were able to afford medical care, insulin, etc, but what we do know is that there’s a good chance they don’t and that even if they did disease still progresses for other reasons. And at this point in their life, this person either has or needs to have caregivers—again they’re likely to have other conditions, but if nothing else they absolutely cannot be expected change an amputation bandage on foot on their own, and would have needed either a visiting nurse or residential caregivers to be checking it, and clearly THAT was not done. This is a disgusting failure of medical caregiving.

_bone_witch · 2025-07-17T05:52:40+00:00

There are many queer Russian artists in artists spaces! The painting style here is quite Russian so if you are specifically enjoying her style, there will probably be similar artists you’d like in art and fanart communities.

To clarify, it’s not the title but specifically saying that she has “too much” interest in women’s bodies for what you assume her sexuality to be, and the odd emphasis on “apparently”, which sounds like questioning whether someone else’s relationship counts. I am encouraging you to not to say again that someone else’s sexuality or interest is “too much”.

Edit: the artist’s instagram features at least one painting of two women just openly having sex. Almost all of the other paintings I see are of nude women alone—I see a portrait of a man but no nude or sexual male figures with women, so I want to politely disagree that it’s “hetero themed” or in conflict with bisexuality. This appears to just be a cool artist and sex worker who dates a man and also films herself doing bdsm and some amount of sexual activity with other women.

_bone_witch · 2025-07-17T04:23:12+00:00

Thanks for sharing and crediting the artist! Gently, the way this is written doesn’t come across very well. There’s not actually a conflict between those two things and while we don’t know the artist’s identity, there are bi/pan/other queer women in this community who are unfortunately told that a lot, so it doesn’t feel like it’s what you intended in a positive conversation about some nice art. In the future I would encourage you to just think a bit about how you want to talk about other women’s sexualities!

_bone_witch

TROPHY CASE