you know what BL gives women, regardless of their sexuality, regardless of anything else about them as women? an entire genre of work in which misogny is the bizarre statistical outlier instead of the norm. like do some straight women fetishize gay men in ways that are awful and nasty? yes. but the existence of an entire culture of creative work in which it’s basically impossible to encounter a disgusting or alienating portrayal of yourself, in which men are the objects to be displayed for the pleasure of the viewer, in which being gay is normal and heterosexuality is for side characters with no real backstory or plot relevance, in which men are the Other for once… it’s quite the phenomenon. it’s also really interesting to watch the “okama” trope/caricatures of queer trans culture get dissected and reinvented, etc, because yaoi from the 80s is often also casually transmisogynistic, or like relies on having a drag queen character around for humor, but in the 2010s it’s been really rare for me to encounter BL that shits on trans people. IT’S INTERESTING!!
i have never seen any acknowledgement of this from the gay boys who think women shouldn’t consume or produce m/m media for their own enjoyment and until i do i’m not inclined to take their arguments about ‘male objectification’ all that seriously, much less consider them persuasive.
because women can and sometimes do objectify gay men, and that’s not okay when it happens. people do treat each other as things and that is always damaging. but the vast majority of women’s consumption and production of m/m media is about escaping objectification, as well as (overt) misogyny, not replicating it. it’s about enjoying scenarios where every character is an emotionally realized and legitimate person.
there is i think this idea people always have that when a disenfranchised population seizes power, they’ll enact the abuses that were done on them to their former oppressors. that’s why you get straights freaking out about the Gay Agenda, whites obsessed with Reverse Racism, and, i think, men who don’t question the assumption that the pornography women create of men will be just as disrespectful and exploitative as the portrayals men create of women.
but it’s not like that. women’s creation and consumption of m/m stories isn’t dehumanizing. it’s not misandry, it’s not a desire to reduce, exploit, or degrade men. it’s pretty much just a longing for a world where all participants in a romance are fully recognized as people: a world a hell of a lot of women will never get to see outside of these fantasies.
Tag: huh
I think the issue w a lot of people invested in like “SJ” sorts of things is that they conceptualize ethics as *only* being abt these structural oppressions, so as long as you are acting in accordance w those precepts you literally cannot do anything unethical.
But like, you can be completely Right Politically in a situation and still be acting in a cruel, greedy, careless, vicious, or harmful way. And that doesn’t give that complete absolution.
We need to like, not mistake structural analysis w ethical formation, tho they are obviously connected
I think that’s a part of what’s been so like, volatile about SJ spaces for the last couple of years: people think that if you sublimate your individual ethics into some kinda framework that you’re good and that you can act like an incredibly petty asshole
yeah it’s like people were told ‘you can’t be reverse racist because that is not how the social structure of oppression works’ and heard ‘anything you do to someone who’s more privileged than you is righteous’ which is… not great
remember being little and thinking dandelions were fun or a pretty color or something and every adult in an 80 mile radius wouldn’t let you say that without screaming ITS A WEED
also like:
- dandelions are edible, easy to grow, and are rich in vitamins a, c, k, beta-carotene, calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium
- dandelions can be made into wine, tea, soft drinks, and a coffee substitute
- they are used in herbal remedies to treat liver and digestive problems and as a diuretic
- they’re good for bees!
- they make good companion plants for various herbs and tomatoes; their long taproot helps bring up nutrients in the soil and they release ethylene gas which ripens fruit
- dandelions secrete latex which means they can be used to make natural rubber
- they make great flower crowns
Why ARE they considered a weed? They’re a good flower? Who decided they were bad? =(
You can also make beautiful jelly from the blossoms!
They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
Let’s back up.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
@alarajrogers hit the nail on the head with this:
And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with
Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.
That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:
- what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?
- and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.
So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).
If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.
I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.
#oh ABSOLUTELY#queer things#the SUDDEN BACKLASH against queer again is 100% from terfs#even back in like 2014 people were using queer on here without anybody batting an eyelash#and then one day all of a sudden in 2015 if you called yourself queer#suddenly you were getting a fucking 15 year old calling you ‘violently lgbtphobic’ like. lol what the fuck#(real thing that happened)#and yeah 100% on the ‘I feel like I’m being gaslit’#I TOOK QUEER THEORY COURSES IN COLLEGE#THEY DON’T FUCKING PUT SLURS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#THEY PUT ACCEPTABLE COMMUNITY TERMS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#like#oh my god#the
rise of ‘q slur’ is honestly gaslighting that originated in the
terf/radfem corners and spread until people thought it was the norm#it’s notPlease note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
tl;dr: TERFS started a backlash against queer on tumblr c. 2015 and that’s why a cult of ignorant corrupted teens are frothing against the entire queer world today.
this really sums it up. every argument I’ve ever had with a racist in one tidy list of broken logic.
Folks often act like you need to be some sort of math genius to be a computer programmer, but in practice, I find that my skills as a writer end up helping me more than my skills as a mathematician.
Programming is basically explaining what you want to happen.
Just, like, you’re explaining it to a helpful but exceedingly literal-minded space alien from the Eleventh Dimension who’s only had physical existence described to them, so you need to choose your words carefully!
Then how come, if I was in the 95th percentile on the writing portion of the ACTs, working with Rstudio in Statistics class was nearly the death of me?
Well, it was a statistics class. The thing you were attempting to explain to the computer was how to do (a certain kind of) math. You don’t need to know your math in order to write good explanations in general, but you do need to know your math in order to write good explanations of math.
Accurate
Eh, I don’t think this holds true across most people. I was a terrible programmer and most programmers I knew were at least as bad at writing. Some were worse.
The trick is that most programmers are terrible programmers, especially the ones who think that cultivating good communication skills is beneath them. I have never in my life met someone who could write good code who couldn’t also produce an easily understandable explanation of how it works – the two skill sets go practically hand in hand.
(Now, granted, I’ve met any number of folks who can write very clever code who couldn’t explain how it works to save their lives, but when you’re coding as a profession rather than a hobby, you quickly come to understand that “clever” and “good” are not the same thing!)
it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.
example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)
thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.
the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground – the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.
pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.
so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.
so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.
Empathy and universal design are for more than just people with disabilities.
Also, I love this quote: “it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.”
Jenny Holzer – Living (1980-82)
Competing access needs strike again, I guess.
I think a lot of people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being forced to grow up too fast”. Having things they weren’t ready for pushed on them, whether that was being sexualized against their will or tasked with raising younger siblings in a parent’s absence. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where vulnerability is acknowledged and a strong boundary is maintained between dominant people and their potential victims. Hence the “I don’t care how mature she is; having sex with a 17-year-old is wrong” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are valid.
I think a lot of other people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being infantilized against their will”. Things like growing up in a family that didn’t acknowledge your sexuality, or being institutionalized, or being disabled and therefore seen as a child long past the age of maturity. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where their agency is affirmed and no one will try to control them “for their own good”. Hence the “I may be young, but please believe me when I say I know what I’m doing sexually” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are also valid. And neither group deserves to take precedence over the other,
I, personally, fall into the latter category. My experience of abuse involved being treated like a petulant child who didn’t know her own mind or desires. I could not be in charge of my spirituality – of any aspect of my inner life, really. I couldn’t have the things I wanted; I couldn’t even be trusted to know what I wanted. And all of it, all the micromanaging, all the gaslighting, was allegedly for my own good.
So when I see statements like “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says”, I have a very deep, very instinctive middle-finger reaction. I have had enough of being told that what I want doesn’t matter, isn’t important, and isn’t even really what I want. I can’t make my own decisions? Fucking WATCH ME.
That said, the statement “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says” may be enormously beneficial for someone from the former group! I can absolutely see how, if someone has been sexualized against their will from a young age and groomed into wanting things they now regret, that someone might find it empowering to admit “I said I wanted it, but I wasn’t really mature enough to make that decision, and the adults in my life were at fault for that”. We just have to be mindful of splash damage to Group B, who will, predictably, prickle at the notion that what they say doesn’t matter.
It applies in non-sexual situations too. Someone from Group A, who was forced to drop out of school and raise their siblings after the death of their parents, might say something like “teenagers just aren’t capable of taking care of children. they’re still developing; they deserve to have a youth”. Meanwhile, someone from Group B, who is developmentally disabled and has fought for years to be allowed to babysit their siblings, will see that and think “fuck you, I’m just as capable as anyone else”.
I also think each group makes the mistake of projecting an abuser-centric view onto the other. Group A, for instance, might accuse Group B of secretly wanting to sexually coerce young women, while Group B might accuse Group A of wanting to sexually restrict those same young women. This is a mistake. Because both groups are speaking from their own trauma, neither is necessarily serving the needs of abusers. They are talking about what they, personally, need in order to feel safe and to extend aid to those like them, and both models are valid. We just can’t pretend that one can exclude the other.
This is relevant to a lot of the discourse.
this makes a lot of sense to me, and also explains why i crashed so dramatically into all the pedophile drama. i’m definitely a member of Group B, who chafed all my adolescence at being condescended to and controlled, and couldn’t wait to be grown up and powerful. i hated the idea that i was too young to do anything, especially anything sexual, and i admired my upperclassmen who maturely discussed smut and yaoi like they were suave experts. i had sex as soon as someone i liked was offering, at 16, and never regretted it. i was really enthusiastic about sex in my late teens, and had as much as i could. i was writing smut by the time i was 18.
so to me, 16 always seemed like a perfectly normal and healthy age for consensual age-appropriate sexual relations, and i was totally startled to find out a lot of 16 year olds disagree. i was then an idiot who realized way too late that it’s incredibly creepy for a grown woman to be arguing with teens that they are too old enough to have sex, and by the time this fact was rammed through my dense skull i had said some stuff that Group A people interpreted (incorrectly but understandably) as sexually predatory. and of course, call-out posts never include a user’s apologies or retractions…
ironically, my abuse was a kind of group C – people being rulebound and judgy in a very personal and dehumanizing way, controlling and punishing not because they wanted to infantilize me, but because they saw themselves as heroes and me as a monster. they didn’t want to make me into their baby doll or their sex toy or their ego stroker or anything at all; they wanted me to not exist.
which means the entire fucking discourse is a huge trigger to me, whichever side it’s coming from. although the anti side is much MORE triggery, seeing as they tend to play the hero/monster game.
i was seen as a monster because i’m autistic – my expressions are wrong, my tone of voice is wrong, my eye contact is wrong. pretty much everyone in my childhood except my parents, and uncountable other people through my youth and adulthood, many of them in positions of power over me, decided i was Bad or Not Real and treated me accordingly, and nothing i could do would change their minds. now roach is being seen as a monster ecause she’s been honest about her lived experience, by people who actively campaign to spread vicious rumors, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.
it’s a NIGHTMARE.
The Polybius Mystery:
Polybius is an arcade cabinet described in an urban legend, which is said to have induced various psychological effects on players. The story describes players suffering from amnesia, night terrors, and a tendency to stop playing all video games. Around a month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace. There is no evidence that such a game has ever existed.
The game has shown up in movies & tv shows like The Simpsons and Wreck it Ralph.
I want to believe
absolutely my favorite urban legend by far, I used to follow a forum dedicated to just pooled information about cabinet sightings in old scrapbook photographs and family members who claim to have seen or even played the game. most claims on the forum say the can’t really remember anything about the game down to even what kind of game it was.
I still love this
The Polybius legend is so fricking creepy because it seems like it could actually be true O.O
i have never heard of this
it is SUPER creepy though wow
Real life is full of so many CREEPY MYSTERIES O.O
IT IS
AND I LOVE READING ABOUT THEM
YYEEEEEEE
Real life Creepy Mysteries are one of my fave things!
tho I have too often made the foolish mistake of reading about them when alone in the house when it is dark ;_;
The really fascinating thing about the Polybius urban legend is that most of the individual elements are confirmably true.
For example, some early arcade games really did have a tendency to induce brief amnesiac episodes in players, owing to the fact that they triggered photosensitive epilepsy; prior to the advent of arcade games, bright flashing lights in rapidly cycling colours were rarely encountered in everyday life, so most people with photosensitive epilepsy didn’t know they had it, and there was little public awareness of the condition, creating the impression that the games themselves had some sort of mystical power.
Likewise, many early video arcades really were subject to covert monitoring by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, though it had less to do with unauthorised medical experiments and more to do with the fact that video arcades were suspected – sometimes correctly – of being fronts for illegal gambling rings.
Basically, a whole series of unrelated events added up to a single freakishly plausible conspiracy theory. Taken by itself, each claim made by the theory could be independently verified – it’s just the connections between them that were spurious.
Prokopetz’s informative post seems to explain why a lot of rumors over a “haunted arcade machine” would spread.
Really, there’s only one question left… did Polybius exist?
It’s highly unlikely that it did, if only because of the timing.
The general idea of mysteriously appearing arcade cabinets that had mind-altering powers and were monitored by sinister Men in Black had begun circulating in popular urban legends at least as early as 1981.
(Fun fact: those legends inspired the 1984 feature film The Last Starfighter!)
However, as far as anyone can tell, the name “Polybius” didn’t become attached to those legends until around 1998.
Given that there’s a gap of at least 17 years in there, the most likely scenario is that Polybius is a later fabrication based on an existing bit of urban folklore.
just moving along like everyone else 