Man, somehow I forgot how absolutely ridiculous people are on the subject

[conuly]

of thumbsucking. If you bring it up, people suddenly get amazingly hysterical and self-righteous for absolutely no good reason. Of all the bad habits a person can have, this seems pretty low-key, but wow.

I had managed to forget that people have no sense of perspective when it comes to this one niche part of policing other people's bodies and behavior. )

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Comments

[kengr]

Actually, there's a lot of body policing and just about all of it is ridiculuous. Weight, hair length, body jewelry, tatoos. The list goes on.

[kareina]

When I was little the adults in my mom's hometown told us kids not to suck our thumbs, that Aunt Dorothy used to suck her thumb, but then she sucked it right off! I never really believed them, since Aunt Dorothy had a scar across where her thumb used to be with clear stitch marks, and I was convinced that if one sucked the thumb off there wouldn't be that sort of scar (I don't recall if I had any opinions on what sort of scar, if any there should be, but I knew it wouldn't look like that). However, neither did I suck my thumb...

[lilysea]

I can see "don't put unwashed thumbs in your mouth during a pandemic" being good advice

but outside of COVID-times

thumb sucking seems like a complete non-issue...

[conuly]

You'd think, but apparently not.

[lilysea]

Mind you there are parents who get upset about their child touching the child's own genitals in the child's private bed in the child's private bedroom in private, so...

[baranduin]

There was a movie called Thumbsucker. Elijah Wood was supposed to play the lead though I don't think that happened. / kind of random

[wpadmirer]

I am learning that a lot of people have no perspective on anything. I don't get it.

[greghousesgf]

I'm intensely curious about the stuff about people getting hurt badly in haunted houses, is there more information about that?

[adrian_turtle]

Most haunted houses have people walking through a dimly lit (or dark) building, listening to scary sounds, sometimes being shown scary things across the room (or overhead, or a few feet away.) It's theater. A badly-designed one can be dangerous, in the sense that a person can fall down the stairs or a prop can accidentally fall on somebody's head.

A few are interactive, more like LARPs. You don't just see the monster's victims and hear the monster making creepy noises behind you...the monster actually grabs you and tries to carry you off. It's a different game, and some people play very rough. If you're going to do bdsm within the framework of a haunted-house scenario, it would call for a whole different consent framework, and "I double-dog-dare you!" is pretty unethical. So is bribery. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/30/an-extreme-haunted-house-requires-page-waiver-critics-say-its-torture-chamber/ )

[greghousesgf]

I've only been in the Disneyland one and a few amateur ones. It's a good thing I've never been in one of those interactive ones, I'd probably kick the monster in the junk.

[conuly]

I bet they wear protection.

[adrian_turtle]

To my knowledge, the interactive ones all make people sign consent forms before going in. So you'd have the option of standing outside and saying "Nope. I don't want to play this game." For some people, kicking the monster in the junk would be more fun than waiting around while their friends go through the haunted house (especially if their friends might call them chicken. Social dynamics are complicated.)

When they set the thing up on a Tuesday morning in September, they realized they didn't want customers who would really hate it. They didn't want to get sued, or beaten up, or even have people go home and tell all their friends not to go. They only wanted customers who would be the good kind of scared, who would go home and tell their friends they loved it. But after dark when they've been doing it for a while, some of the people on the ground get caught up in the thrill of scaring people and get pushy.

[eva_rosen]

My younger brother used to suck not his tumb, but his index finger. My parents had no opinion on it, and my grandma only nagged him about whether his hands were clean. He kept it up until his early teens.