oh. i just found out that the writer of the vincent van gogh doctor who episode wrote it as a tribute to his sister.

But half way through her life she was hit by depression and intermittently it hurt her for the rest of her life. And a few years before this show, like Vincent, she took her own life.

And in the key scene of the episode - when they bring Vincent to the future... that was me trying to show Bin how glorious she had been in our lives - and how nothing could change that.

And then also to deal with the fact that mental health issues are hard - and the capacity for joy, as I know Bindy did know how much she was loved, is intertwined with the immense difficulty of the illness sometimes...

So taking her own life wasn’t a failure by her, or a rejection of all of us. It was, as they say on Love island, what it was."

okay, follow-up to this post

you, personally, can feel that sex is a casual activity without any special significance. That's fine

However, a person's physical body is, I think, very, VERY different than their car, an hour of their time, or a book you borrow from them.

If you borrow someone's book and don't give it back, decide to hike the trail you want instead of the one your friend wanted to hike, or refuse to turn off the music in your car that your friend hates, you're a bit of an asshole but you are not a rapist.

There are degrees.

If you give someone food and lie about the ingredients to trick them into eating it, you're still not a rapist but you've done something horrible. If you know someone hates hugs and you hug them anyway, you're creepy and people should stay away from you, but it's still worse if you know someone doesn't want sex and you make them have sex anyway.

Consent should matter throughout life, but consent in regard to a person's body carries more weight than respecting their preferences about things external to them.

If we framed sexual consent as basically the same as respecting someone's choice about what movie they want to see or what store they want to go shopping at, that would be really bad.

Whenever I've brought this up, it seems like I get "well, you shouldn't coax your friends do other stuff they don't want to either!" which seems a little out of touch with reality, because there are occasions when people decide to be a good sport about something they don't enjoy for the sake of someone else, and if that thing is a bad romantic comedy movie, it's very different than if that thing is sex.

Now, can people with a healthy sense of their boundaries approach sex with the same framework? Sure, if they want to. Should this be the default approach to sex? HELL NO.

I think that healthily having a "casual" attitude toward sex where it is nothing "more" than just another activity requires a good sense of your own desires and boundaries and confidence in asserting them. "Sex is just another thing you can do with someone" is good for people who know themselves well enough to feel secure and confident making that call, but it sucks as a starting point for defining the significance of sex to humans.

Something that involves letting another person within the personal boundaries of your body doesn't have to have a "special" significance to it, but you have to undergo the process of figuring out what significance it has to you. Does that make any sense

Like. It's painfully common for people to experience grief and trauma from their early sexual experiences being subtly coerced or pressured or just something that happened without a foundation of trust and attentiveness to emotional needs being there

Even if an encounter was technically consensual, it can still be traumatizing if the person otherwise treats you like shit.

And it's really important to me that people hear "no, you're not overreacting or crazy, they hurt you by not paying attention to your needs or checking to see if you wanted to keep going."

I saw an experimental standup show by a comedian (his name is Corey White tho he’s not active anymore) who talked extensively about the neglect he experienced in his family of origin and then the sexual abuse and violence he went through in the foster system etc, and at the end he was talking about getting a scholarship to attend a private school. He found The Metamorphosis by chance on the shelves in the library when he was like 15? And when he read it, he saw this character, Gregor, and how he was rejected totally by his family for something that wasn’t at all his fault, and yet his love for them was constant and unconditional.

And being a fifteen year old boy who’d been brutalized his whole life by the people who were meant to care for him, for no reason at all, Corey broke down and cried in the middle of the library. And obviously this stuck with him because he was given this national platform (an hour-long stand up special) and he finished it with this memory. That story and the message he took from it stayed with him long into adulthood, he said suddenly he didn’t feel totally alone in his experience as an abused child. Who would deny a young person that kind of catharsis??

People have even gotten to the point where they’re saying that children can’t experience stories about death, as if death is something “too grim” and “too upsetting” for a child to possibly understand. But children are exposed to death all the time. Children have grandparents who die, parents who die, siblings who die, friends who die, and they know what it’s like go go through that grief. Overall, to act like childhood (which people paint with a very broad brush, sometimes they mean six-year-olds and sometimes they mean middle schoolers?) is a period of complete and total innocence and that children never experience any suffering, any grief, any bigotry, is really deliberately ignorant. People are talking about a fictional, idealized, archetypal Childhood and fictional, idealized, archetypal Children who are nothing but innocence have never experienced any kind of suffering

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” – G. K. Chesterton

Let children see what the world has to show, and let them learn how to slay its monsters.