That’s interesting to see that the words are considered pure synonyms by that reference source.

I’ve always used Oxford or Cambridge for my definitions,

Vindictive

having or showing a wish to harm someone because you think that they harmed you; unwilling to forgive

Vengeful

expressing a strong wish to punish someone who has harmed you or your family or friends:

Revengeful

While both vindictive and vengeful are synonyms of revengeful, Cambridge notes that there are different tonal applications (vindictive is a disproving synonym)

So I guess at the end of the day whether you think women are vindictive depends on your definition of vindictive. I can’t break away from the definition I’ve always known, that vindictive is revenge for a perceived injustice and is a disproving judgement. Therefore I don’t think women as a whole are vindictive because I don’t think the injustice is perceived, it’s real and tangible.

Perhaps they did, but it was a first past the post voting system and resulted in a hung parliament.

I’d like to tell you about a wonderful new invention, they call it “divorce.”

Yes exactly. No fault divorce is the simple and obvious answer.

That wasn’t an option for my mother or my grandmother. There was no way for a woman to initiate a divorce.

My mother couldn’t open a bank account in her name, she needed a man (her father, brother, or husband) to co-sign.

So “going out for cigarettes” also wasn’t easy, she could leave, sure, but once the cash she had in hand ran out, then what? Her income would still be going into her husbands bank account, she can’t change where the money goes because she doesn’t have any other bank account for her employer to pay into.

The Second wave feminist movement is what pushed to provide women the right to manage their own finances and affairs, and also gave us no-fault divorce laws.

So yes, “Quit blaming everyone else for all your problems and leave” is good advice for women who have the legal freedom to move about their country and be independent members of society. That hasn’t historically been the case, and it’s currently not the case for many women in many countries with different laws. Those women have fewer options, and rat poison is cheap.

Even with no fault divorce and the ability for women to own property, have a bank account, and work for an income paid directly to them, There will always be individually nuanced situations that are more complex and don’t allow for an easy exit, especially when domestic violence or financial abuse is involved. (eg: I’m working disabled, my boyfriend holds my medical guardianship, hypothetically, if we mutually broke up, I couldn’t make a “clean break” until I got that legal loose end tied up, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to book a doctor’s appointment or get a flu shot without my ex-boyfriend’s signature, and transferring guardianship takes months, and money. During a mutual break up that’s okay, but if I needed to “leave him” and he didn’t want his affordable maid and nanny to go, I’d have an incredibly difficult time getting my life back to myself… But fortunately it’s 2024 so there is a process I can follow, not every woman has had those same rights to leave like I have.

I would say women are revengeful.

Vindictive is an “unreasonable” desire for revenge, and what makes the desire “unreasonable” is going to depend on every individual situation, so I don’t think you can generalise that women are vindictive.

I would also hesitate to use the term “vengeful” too, due the nuance of vengeful being a perceived injustice over revengeful being for a known injustice. Again that’s always going to depend on the specific situation and context of what has happened.

When you look at being revengeful through a broader lens, I disagree that women are more prone to revengefulness or vindictiveness than men, I think the ways women express their revenge is gender-specific and can draw more attention to itself than masculine approaches to revenge.

So I think it’s fair to generalise that people in general have the capacity to feel revengeful, and as a marginalised class women are often revengeful, and as additional minor injustices are compounded on systemic injustice, the revenge of women is perceived as vindictiveness.

But that doesn’t mean women are vindictive.

Texas feels like Australia’s Queensland, they still have a lot of outdated laws in the books that they can’t enforce, mostly related to “queer crimes” and vagrancy laws.

It’s a conscious choice not to scrap it, because there are people in power who never wanted it to be decriminalised in the first place and they will prevent the law being removed from the books on the off chance they can re-criminslise it when they have more control in office.

The Queensland Youth Crime act is another example, they resurrected an old law in a response to the “out of control youth crime rate” (the youth crime rate increased by 6% on 22-23, but then decreased 6.7% in 23-24, they introduced the new youth crime act at the end of 2024, after the crime rate was already decreasing.)

As a result of the new Act, police can put spit hoods on children “for police safety”, and any child over 10 can be trailed as an adult, oh, and detention is not a “last resort” anymore.

Being a police officer is a job so I completely understand and respect a police officers right to a safe workplace. But putting a spit hood on a kid is not the solution. Properly funding the youth mental health care system, and reforming the foster care system would do so much more for youth crime, community safety and police safety than spit hoods will ever do. In the long run, treating children like animals is only going to increase the chances that they grow up into animals, instead of healthy human members of a society. The justice system is planting the trauma that will resurface as future criminal offences and/or substance abuse issues.

I’m a sweet Tramsvestite, from Transitsexual, Trainsylvania~~~~

The only prison rape jokes I’ve heard in the last 10 years are about paedophiles “getting what they deserve in prison”

Which I didn’t really think was a funny haha joke, just a “I don’t know how to respond or fathom paedophilia, it’s deeply uncomfortable and unsettling…haha”

I also personally don’t know how I feel about those kinds of jokes.

The rule in comedy is never punch down, but hopefully that’s where you’ve got to aim if you’re targeting a convicted child molester, I don’t think I’m better than anyone, I believe all human life has equal inherent value…but I also think I’m better than a child molester and that given control of a runaway trolley, their life has less value.

That sure is some cognitive dissonance, so cracking a joke at the expense of a paedophile in prison is easier than confronting my own opinions towards the value of human life.

Wow, I’m not American so I didn’t realise Texas was holding out that long, wasn’t Massachusetts offering state sanctioned marriages in like 04/05? That timeline is mind blowing! To have one state doing so much for equal rights while the other fights in court to actively do less.

I thought here in Australia, Tasmania was bad waiting until 1997 when their overseas neighbour to the north (Vic) was 1980… Then we didn’t get any form of same sex marriage until 2017.

But 2003!

You have actually broken my brain with this fact…

If the Queer Eye fans of today watched an OG episode I think they’d pass out from shock.

I was living under a rock when the new Queer Eye came out and some of the young residents at work were raving about it. The things I kept overhearing had me thinking “They can’t possibly be talking about catty old Carson”

The homophobia of the 2000s paired perfectly with all the other toxic body shaming and slut shaming the media was doing at the time.

Bridge building was exactly right. It was about getting the language of “gay” into the homes of everyday people and in a tone that was happy and humerus, not divisive. Yeswere the butt of the joke, but at least it was just a joke, unlike in the years prior when it was violence.

We still have the language in the household of everyday people, but in many households the only reason the word “gay” gets brought up is for someone to spit at it and praise Trump. The happy humour is lost, the tone is shifting to vitriol and if we’re not careful the next step will be violence again.

Yeah, having lived on the cusp as well, it sucked but it sounds like you and I both managed to catch the better half of that cultural transition.

In the early 2000s, coming out of the 90s it felt like every week someone you knew got jumped on the street and was in hospital getting their face sewn back together.

A boy at a school near me was violently raped and murdered by 2 other boys who then claimed gay panic as their legal defence. I remember the details of this case (which I won’t go into, it was vile) because it was so close to home and so grotesque, but stories like this were a seasonal occurrence across the country.

I myself coped my fair share of physical trauma, I was lucky to only get bashed once and I was with a group, but I was less lucky when it came to correctional sexual assault.

And it felt like this for most of my youth, and I pushed to build confidence and assertiveness and develop vigilance skills to protect myself.

Slowly over time I felt less afraid, and it was only in hindsight, as the “FCK H8” campaign started spreading in my country from America, it dawned on me that I didn’t feel safer because I was getting more confident, I felt safer because it was safer. Sooooo much safer.

And that was just in ~8 years of my adolescent life in the 2000s, so I can extrapolate from that how bad it was in the 8 years before I was paying attention to the world, and the 8 years before that, and before that.

My state is currently considered the more gay friendly, ironic seeing as we were the last state to reduce the criminal sentence for homosexuality from the death penalty in 1949…but then my state was the 2nd state to decriminalised homosexuality in 1980 compared to the last state in my country, 1997. So I guess we picked up queer steam.

For added historical context, after it was decided that death might be a little to harsh a punishment, “attempted buggery” (aka, two men flirting with each other) could carry a 7 year sentence, and buggery “with or without consent” anywhere from 14 to life.

In 1957 they re-opened a whole ass 19th century goal exclusively to house hordes of gay prisoners who had been arrested for gay crimes.

If you’re interested in some history, dig into “Cooma” the world’s first and only (hopefully) gay prison. Police inflated arrests with entrapment stings to stock the cells because the prisoners were being used for medical experiments around chemical castration and conversion for scientific research and “rehabilitation”, the men were tortured in an attempt to “cure” them so they would be “safe to release”, the prison conveniently lost their archives so they can’t say when they stopped experimenting on gay prisoners, but the last gay prisoners to be sent to Cooma was around 1982.

Edit: I rambled so long I never made an actual point.

It sucked for us in the 2000s, but it was exponentially worse for every year you go back. That’s a trend I want to continue, I want kids 10 years from now to say “wow it’s tough being queer, there’s so much queer baiting in the media” because it would make me so happy for that to be the biggest problem gay kids face.

I don’t say “back in my day things were worse” to mean “be greatful and shut up” but rather “wow I can’t believe the young people in our community are still suffering, at least they’re not being physically harmed like it was back in the day, but this is still not okay, let’s look at where we came from to remember where we are going, and keep fighting for our rights, together”

My talent as a homophobic millennial knew no bounds in the 2000s

I’d unironically call some straight girl a raging lesbo for wearing old burkes, then jump on the GSA forum and tell some teenager “it’s okay to be gay, it gets better, when I first came out you’d get bashed so things are improving” like I wasn’t part of the ongoing problem…

What was wrong with us back then!?

(I was definitely transphobic AF back then too! I have no excuses for it, especially because it turns out I tick that box as well)

Like what?

No no no, we get to eat the tacos in the kitchen while we wait for the jello to set.

I’m a stay at home wife, I make sure my husband has a homecooked meal that I slaved over for hours! Like corned beef in aspic with celery jello salad.

Oops I didn’t make enough for myself, that’s okay I already had a taco as a snack, and my husband works so hard all day to support my life here in this kitchen so he deserves the whole bowl of jello to himself.

While he’s eating I’ll just add some things to the shopping list, we need more marichino cherries, and we’re out of rat poison.

I mean even just from a totally innocent position, I’m exhausted right now and in the past month I’ve almost died falling down the stairs 5 times from the sleep deprivation (the ER is getting sick of my clumsiness)

I know I’ll sleep better once my cohabitation separation is finalised.

This morning I brushed my teeth with my partner’s athletes foot ointment. Didn’t even realise it tasted like ass and felt like wax until I was trying to spit it out and wondering why it was clinging to my teeth. I’m just not human anymore, I am physically and mentally burnt out carrying the entire cognitive and household labour load of the relationship for the last 10 years.