bogleech:

While just as many people started following me (thanks!), my Skyrim Arachnophobia post seems to have pissed a couple people off…and here I thought I’d heavily toned down my true sentiments. I can’t help it, I completely hate arachnophobia’s prevalence and wide-spread acceptance. It is not normal, it is not healthy, it is not just something people are born with and can’t help. Here are some real facts about both the phobia and spiders:

1) Arachnophobia is learned. It’s most easily passed on from parent to child through example. At a young enough age, kids look to us adults as pillars of bravery. If they see you even mildly freak out about a teeny, tiny eight-legged animal there’s a strong chance you just fucked with their brain for life.

2) Most people willing to overcome Arachnophobia are successful. The only reason so many people appear “stuck” with it is that they either don’t consider it a big enough problem to bother changing, or they convince themselves (as I have personally witnessed a majority of the time) that fearing spiders is rational; the common “everyone should hate them because they’re evil hellspawn” mindset.

3) The incredibly high frequency of arachnophobia is both recent and regional. Spiders and other arthropods were staple foods to our ancestors and still are in many countries, obviously people aren’t terrified of them in these cases. This goes for insects, worms and all other invertebrates; it is not, and never was, normal or healthy for humans to be horrified of the most common animals around to eat.

4) The Sydney Funnelweb, arguably the world’s deadliest spider, is restricted to Australia and hasn’t killed anybody in decades. The dreaded black widow is only dangerous to infants, the elderly and the sickly with less than a 1% mortality rate in untreated bites. A majority of other supposedly “deadly” spiders are only theoretically deadly and have never gone on record biting a human being - their danger levels have only ever been assessed by testing their venom on laboratory animals. There simply aren’t enough spiders dangerous enough to justify a knee-jerk terror of all spiderkind, and flipping your shit over them is far more likely to injure you.

5) Most people have never been bitten by any spider at all. Chances are pretty high that you probably believe you have, but unless you physically saw the spider that bit you, chances are vastly higher that the itchy, splotchy rash you woke up with is an infected scratch or agitated mosquito bite. Spider bites are grossly misdiagnosed and often confused with a variety of other skin conditions; it hasn’t even been conclusively proven that the brown recleuse really causes the skin lesions it’s so infamous for.

6) Spiders don’t want to have to waste venom on you. You’re not food. You’re not little enough for them to kill and eat. Venom costs a great deal of nutrient energy to produce, and wasting it on something inedible severely weakens a predator. Spiders bite only as a last resort when they feel completely trapped, and even then, they may bite without actually injecting any venom. When they do, most species still don’t produce a venom your body will ever notice.

7) spiders have adorable precious faces only mean people can hate. This is a science fact from science.