• it/its

// the deer!
// plural deer therian θΔ, trans demigirl
// stray pet with a keyboard
// i'm 20 & account is 18+!
name-color: #ebe41e
// yeah



bruno
@bruno

I think people are so feral in the way they talk about microplastics (in ways that they are notably not feral about much more demonstrably hazardous pollutants like heavy metals) specifically because Western culture is steeped in this idea of the body as an inviolate perfect thing separate from its environment over which we exert control.

This is, of course, nonsense; the body is just a mass of random garbage from its environment that has contingently and temporarily clumped together. You're made out of stuff from the environment, of course everything that's on the environment is in you.

But it's an ingrained, culturally-bound illusion, and people seem to encounter as body horror the idea that they aren't, like, a pristine divine entity that exists within a membrane, apart from the grimy world. In particular there's horror at the idea of an inescapable invader to the body, something that's in you (even if, really, whatever effects it has are probably marginal to a million other things going on in your life) and therefore that you can't put into the box of things that happen to other people – the same box that the average young person online uses to hold concepts like 'illness' or 'fatness' or 'disability', you know.


bruno
@bruno

Like we can dig up the bones of the long-dead and we can find the heavy metals in their marrow, we can find the stress fractures from walking all day on long hunts, we can find the cracked teeth from eating grain milled on soft stones, we can find the warped shoulders of English yeomen. No animal has ever lived without its environment worming its way in. Every beautiful charismatic wild tiger you see in a nature documentary is riddled with parasites.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

I gotta wonder if people would be as bothered by them if every populated area wasn't visibly choked with macroplastics in the form of plastic bags and bottles and shit. AFAICT most folks just think lead asbestos CO etc. got outlawed in the 70s or something and don't really exist anymore; you don't see drifts of lead ingots clogging the drainage ditches these days do you?

in reply to @bruno's post:

the ancient Egyptians apparently didn't have a way to get the sand from their millstones out of their flour entirely, so their bread was kind of gritty, and specimens of their teeth we've found are all worn down by that. sounds awful!

the microplastics thing seems like it might have started from a more science-focused position of legitimate medical concern but it's gradually mutated into various unscientific woo phobias and right wing codings alongside "seed oils", "forced to eat bugs", etc, which are very explicitly about that false idea of the body as a perfect pure thing that a great enemy has deliberately infiltrated and polluted, rather than just... us not knowing how to do a bunch of stuff with any material better than plastic.

i had a gastroscopy recently and one of the milder things they were checking for just in case is a totally normal stomach bacteria called "helicobacter" which, when i looked it up, found out he is a little guy with little flagella that he uses to dig into your stomach lining so he doesn't get swept away, and he secretes something that raises the pH around him so he doesn't die from stomach acid. kinda realised all at once that i always thought of "bacteria" as a completely vague substance. but it's guys. your body is a temple with a massive congregation.