I'm especially thinking of "trypophobia." There are others, but it's the worst. I'll start out by correcting the word, at its most basic level: these motherfuckers have trypophilia. Yeah, I fucking said it.
You know why I'm saying that? Because every one of these fuckers who claims to have the "phobia" in question CONSTANTLY SHARES IMAGES OF THINGS THAT SUPPOSEDLY TRIGGER THE PHOBIA.
That's the opposite of a phobia, you fucking nimrods. People who have a fear of dogs don't post pictures of pit bulls and dobermans, in their goddamn group chats and subreddits. People who can't get on airplanes don't go looking for graphic photos of air disasters. People with acrophobia don't flock to that glass-bottom walkway, at the fucking Grand Canyon.
But, again, these assholes who are supposedly stricken with trypophobia constantly share pics of bubbly English muffins, collanders, plant pods, etc. THAT'S A FUCKING PARAPHILIA, YOU INCONSIDERATE FUCKING FUCK-STICKS.
At the risk of repeating myself, that is the opposite of a phobia. These intolerable douche-tubes even pervert the word "trigger" into a horrific parody of its actual use. They'll slide a particularly spicy picture of a slice of Swiss cheese into a discussion, and be like "ooOOOhhhH, this triggered me so much."
For "triggered," you can substitute "gave me a twitching hard-on."
Once again: this is NOT how it works for real phobias. If you've got hemophobia and someone shows you a picture of someone bleeding, you are NOT GOING TO REACT THAT WAY.
You do NOT seek out pictures of your phobia triggers. You do NOT discuss them in a basically lewd way, like the goddamned trypophiliacs do.
If you have a REAL PHOBIA, and you actually do get that shit triggered, it's, ya know, ACTUALLY TRAUMATIC. Again: you avoid those triggers, even if it costs you job opportunities, social standing, personal relationships, etc.
People with real phobias are living with real fucking problems, as a result of them. They work and struggle and research ways to try and lessen their effects. That might involve exposure therapy, where they deliberately interact with the object of their fear, but they are NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THOSE SESSIONS, AT ALL.
They are suffering. They are suffering with real mental illness symptoms.
When you post your "oooOOHhhH, look at this seed pod, it's sooooo trigigigigigerring my trypophobia" shit, that is as close as you can get to spitting in the faces of all the people with real phobias, out there in the world.
I hasten to add that I don't have any debilitating phobias, myself. But I know people who do. And that struggle is painful to see. If you're out there faking a phobia, turning it into a paraphilia for shits & giggles, on the internet, FUCK YOU.
If you're out there doing that shit, I hope you develop a real phobia, and experience every iota of the real pain and suffering that it entails. That would be justice.
That's part of the damage I'm talking about. I just went over to reddit's /r/claustrophobia, and it does indeed look just like /r/trypophobia. Are there any posts about where you can get therapy? Are there any threads, offering or asking for support, after people have had to flee confined spaces, and maybe that hurt their careers or their relationships?
Nah. None of that. If that stuff was ever there, it's gone now. It's been replaced by post titles, like "Saw this on tiktok and got my heart rate WAY up."
That's a real title, over on /r/claustroophobia, right now. The fucking trypophiliacs have SPREAD their fucking perversion. It's not just that one post, either. It's all just a giant wall of people one-upping each other, with more and more extreme confined-space-porn pics.
God help anyone who does want a place where there are significant trigger warnings. Those places have apparently been taken over by the "oooOOOOooOoh, that got my heart really racing," fetish people.
I'll be as clear as possible: I don't think the claustrophobia subreddit is populated by real people suffereing from claustrophobia, anymore. It's now being run by people who are using the memetic idea of claustrophobia as some kind of mental masturbation thing.
Are you really going to defend that, further?
Ok but if you are looking on Reddit, first of all you are whining to the wrong people about it. Most of us aren’t over there and don’t give a flying fuck about them.
But also if you expect every group to do everything, you are sorely mistaken as to the way the internet works and the way communities work, especially niche ones..
You aren’t in the Apple ecosystem here, this is the real world where people form the groups they want and they don’t give a fuck about your feels and that doesn’t make them less legitimate than whatever your ideal view of someone with a phobia is.
Grow up, we exist in the world and we make groups that feed into what we want to see and if you have a problem with that you literally have a problem with the way humans function in a social setting… you’ll learn someday that it’s so much easier to just let people be people. They will figure themselves out and they will like the content they like. You can’t change that, don’t bother. You’ll frustrate yourself because whatever you think people should do isn’t what they do in practice.
Best you can do is try to offer something better.
In this form, your point is largely unassailable. I concede, at least, that I have no power to act as the moral police, and impose any demands on people, no matter how much I'd prefer them to just replace "phobia" with "philia" in the names of their subreddits.
But it would be more polite, if they did.
And, just to refresh that point, that's all I'm really asking for. I'm just saying, it would objectively cause less harm in the world, if the default "_____phobia" subreddits were serious-minded, trigger-safe, sober places for people to go, when they really need help with their phobia, need advice, need to vent, need help finding treatment, etc.
There was a time, when reddit specifically, and the web more broadly, was quite a bit more useful and quite a bit less meme-ish. And I don't even mind memes. Most of my time on Lemmy is spent on the fucking meme boards.
But I'm not kidding myself, nor am I blotting out any formerly safe spaces, for anything serious. And yeah, again, I do know that I have no power over the people who are turning phobias into memes. I just don't have to fucking like it. In all honesty, simply pointing out that I can't control those people isn't adding much to the discussion. I made a rant, it's probably an unpopular one, and that's why I put it in this community.
I think I understand our disconnect despite apparently agreeing. You seem to conflate the posters of the content for the consumers consumers of the content, I think..? But.. They probably aren’t the same group at all.
Sure, the person posting might be into it… moooooore likely they are into making people uncomfortable, whatever form, and that’s an easy way. And you know, we sort of need people to make those posts because we aren’t gunna seek it out otherwise?
Like the last super claustrophobic movie I watched, I watched it because people told me it would be fucking hard to watch.
Edit - have you ever looked at more general forums for phobias, rather than just super niche stuff? Reddit is a bad example but so is a single phobia.. you’d be better off looking at r/phobias (I assume that’s a place I’m just saying, general is the way)
Those are interesting points. I hadn't considered the possibility that the current form of phobia discussion on social media might be some kind of symbiotic relationship, between people bringing in content that will be hard to watch for other groups, and then those people drawing from that well, to expose themselves to the triggering content, in a way that I might indeed classify as "healthy."
I will concede that I might be applying old-fashioned values to that paradigm. Maybe it's genuinely helping people, even if I still view it as...I suppose, "unwholesome" might be a good word for how I feel.
The point is, I was making too much of a snap judgment, and not even beginning to consider that there might be a true, valid middle ground between "we're pretending to discuss a phobia, while we mentally masturbate" and "we're engaging in super serious, ideally professionally directed exposure therapy."
I belong to the Geriatric Millennial age group, and so I'm bringing my own particular sensibilities about political correctness and social interaction into the discussion. In other words, I have unconscious biases, like anyone and everyone. In this case, those biases may have given me a real blind spot.
That’s the problem with being a millennial. All the things we “know” mostly don’t apply anymore, really. And whatever you manage to catch in passing is your new paradigm.. exhausting to learn, when the next gen runs at the speed of computers.
Things have changed a lot in ways even we don’t recognize, and like we used to call those people attention whores and whatever.. now we call them content creators, because they have a different medium.
But I’m glad to have made a difference :) “let people be people” is honestly the best and easiest advice to live by because we have records from thousands of years ago and they could have been written yesterday. And if we actually did it we’d have moved on from that :)