FREE ONLINE GENDER QUIZ

libraryoftheancients:

everybodyilovedies:

agent-nemesis:

mxmachina:

acroamatica:

creepycreepyspacewizard:

schazardous:

shacklesburst:

defectivealtruist:

rubegoldbergsaciddreams:

please everyone take this quiz it’s so important

my gender is VENDING MACHINE

Your gender is: THE ANGEL RAMIEL FROM NEON GENESIS EVANGELION

Your gender is: UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Your gender is not yet finished! They’re still working on it – check back in a bit.

Your gender is: THE INKY VOID BETWEEN STARS

Your gender is the void that exists between celestial bodies. It is not completely empty, but consists of a hard vacuum containing a low density of particles, predominantly a plasma of hydrogen and helium as well as electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, neutrinos, dust and cosmic rays.

Your gender is: THREE

Your gender is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4. It is prime.

Your gender is; ALL/NONE OF THEM

You exist in a state of quantum superposition, causing all of your many potential genders to be simultaneously colocated in both space and time. It is theoretically possible to measure either the position or momentum of your genderblob, but ascertaining both at the same time is prevented by the very laws of physics that keep the universe intact. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

so gender

wow

much anti cultrul nroms

perf eyes

many cute

wow

I’m a fucking cube and IT EVEN MENTIONS THAT IT’S ONE OF THE FIVE PLATONIC SOLIDS I can’t even this is literally the most accurate gender quiz I’ve ever seen.

I’m a robot

my gender is missingno

the-real-seebs:

zetablarian:

mashmoments:

writerofthought:

To all the young Millenials about to watch M*A*S*H for the first time, do not be turned off by Max Klinger being a guy in a dress.

For those of you unaware, the character tries several schemes to get out of the army on the grounds of being mentally unfit for service, most notably being a man who wears a dress, which no one buys. It’s played off as a joke but everyone loves him and treats him very respectfully unless it’s a character you’re not supposed to sympathise with.

You might want to call bull on the fact that they’re getting a cheap joke at a man in a dress. But, this man in a dress had a gender identity crisis ON SCREEN (although they couldn’t call it that) and also helped pave the way to allow transgender people into the armed forces.

No, seriously. A congressman who was a fan of the show brought up how Max Klinger cross dressing never was an issue at this M*A*S*H unit and it allowed transgender people to serve in the armed forces!

I’m a trans(masc) millenial and the biggest thing I feel was made fun of was how much some people were bothered by Klinger’s clothes, not the fact that he’s wearing them.

Klinger learns a lot about fashion and sewing and seems to develop a genuine passion for it over time.

There’s even one time when he develops a psychosomantic (spelling?) rash during a short time when he has to wear his uniform. Even after it is clear that he’s not gonna get to go home by wearing dresses, he continues – suggesting either a persistent act of defiance to make him feel better, or a real appreciation of the clothes… or both!

He’s clearly coded as straight, is accepted by his peers, and his character arc and development is barely focused on his clothes (rather it focuses on what he wants to do with his life; his dream future).

For a show made in the 70’s depicting the 50’s, M*A*S*H was a show before its time – with feminist messages and anti-war messages, as well as speking out against homophobia and racism – and Klinger was a groundbreaking character.

This is especially true, I think, if you watch the episodes sans the laugh track. Without the canned laughter, Klinger’s costuming comes off as especially sincere.

Klinger is a good man and a great character and everyone in the camp respects him (and if they don’t, it’s not because of his attire).

The discovery that you can select “English Without Laugh Track” as an audio track has made the DVDs wonderful.

the-real-seebs:

amakthel:

thesocialjusticecourier:

thej-key:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

corpus-vak:

vessel-haver:

thefutureoneandall:

argumate:

marcusseldon:

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

oh my god… that’s why they send dick pics

“witness me!”

There are occasional reddit threads about things like this: “guys who send unsolicited dick pics, why do you do it?”

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily – or at all.

Obviously that’s not universal, any more than all women are catcalled, but it seems like a really serious communication failure to appeal to a sense of objectification that much of your audience has literally never felt, and desperately wants.

Reblogged because thefutureoneandall describes exactly why I have trouble empathizing with feminism columnists.

Can confirm, I’d take literally any compliment on anything at this point, and would cherish it.

one day we gotta get all the men and all the women to sit down together and hash this stuff out between them, how hard can it be.

This discussion kind of reminds me of a story that made the rounds about a year ago, where
a woman, after having gotten a bit tired with dick pics, decided to try to get her “revenge” of sorts, by sending unsolicited vagina pics to 40 random men:

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want
unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would
guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?”
And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina
pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d
initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such
intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy,
his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given
that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics
makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention – with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop –

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap – with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

This alienness is … mutual.

For men, it feels like no men are sexy to women.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.

“It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.”

the conversation has gotten longer, so i’m reblogging

… This is so cool. It actually makes sense.

autismserenity:

aftselakhis-shaladin:

oh-earth:

aimmyarrowshigh:

alvaroarbeloa:

vaspider:

Okay, friends, let’s talk about going to protests and weaponizing our whiteness, if in fact we are white.

You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.

This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.

I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.

Fuck yes I will weaponize the fact that I look like a white soccer mom. And you should do this too if you can. Weaponize the fuck out of your whiteness. If you are disabled and comfortable with doing so, turn ableism on its head and weaponize it. Make it so that the cameras that WILL be pointed at you see your whiteness, see your status as a parent, see your status as a community member. See you in your wheelchair or with your cane. If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.

This has a fair number of notes, so maybe it’s already been mentioned but …

The “Sunday Best” thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s & 60s, or wearing markers of an assigned profession (e.g. scrubs) is an established tactic of social movements. They’re part of what Charles Tilly (one of the academic god father’s of social movement theory) called “WUNC” displays. WUNC can be broken down to:

worthiness: sober demeanor (!!!); neat clothing (!!!); presence of clergy, dignitaries, and mothers with children;

unity: matching badges, headbands, banners, or costumes (!!!); arching in ranks; singing and chanting;

numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents, filling streets;

commitment: braving bad weather; visible participation by the old and handicapped (!!!); resistance to repression; ostentatious sacrifice (!!!), subscription, and/or benefaction. _{(Tilly, 2004, pg. 4 – tumblr-style emphasis my own)}

While I’m very much in support of anti-fascist protesting in whatever form it takes, especially when engaged in a counter-protest, one of the great tragedies of the American political climate right now is that we’ve really forgotten some of the biggest lessons of the Civil Rights Era. King didn’t trot out fresh-faced students, church women in big fancy hats, or the elderly and disabled without knowing what he was doing. He (and the other members of his affiliated organizations) knew that if the police were photographed using violent repression against a mother holding her child, or a student in slacks, a cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses, it would go over very differently than if they were photographed beating up “unruly thugs”. Their presence alone would be notable to people locally, especially in the heat of the south. But so would photographs of repressive violence against “nice people” that would then get picked up by the national media, and maybe in markets that were more sensitive to racial oppression.

[And like, there are other factors as well. People also sometimes think the Civil Rights Era erupted spontaneously from Jim Crowe and segregation in the South, and those are giant factors (”depravation” and “grievance”, in jargon), but there were also legislative things and court rulings brewing since the 1920s (the NAACP had been trying Civil Rights cases, and looking for test cases over the years), and the Cold War meant that America needed to appear to be the perfect image of opportunity and equality (together these things manifest as an “opportunity structure”. again, jargon). Not to get to down on protest as its own thing, but the structuralists do have a bit of a point.]

… There are other types of anti-fascist counter-protesting that have developed in various ways through the years. And like, a big thing in social movement theory overall is that while there are common tactics (”protest repertoires” in jargon), historical contexts matter a lot and some groups will have to do more dramatic performances of the WUNC to get attention. There’s also the move revolutionary antifa-type riot mentality. I’m not gonna call that one wrong either, mind, but since the Civil Rights Movement was brought up, it should be noted that those two forms of protest differed intentionally.

Anyway, as someone turning in a dissertation on this in a couple of days, here’s some drive-by political-sociology. If you want to learn more about the research behind processes of social movements, where they succeeded, and where they failed, I totally recommend checking out:

Charles Tilly (2004) Social Movements 1768-2008,

Sidney Tarrow (2011) Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics,

Sidney Tarrow (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,

Frances Fox Piven & Richard A. Cloward (1988) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, (this is on the Civil Rights Era protests and the somewhat fraught legislative follow-up exactly)

McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) The Dynamics of Contention

(McAdam has a quite well-regarded book on the Civil Rights Era specifically. I haven’t read it personally as it relates less to my regional context. However like, that’s worth noting and looking into. Also all of these are stodgey academic texts, but they’re not uncommon in university libraries, or even in some bookstores. They’re also all a bit old now and shouldn’t cost you a ton online.)

As a note – My point here isn’t to descend from the Ivory Tower of Academia and say “you people on the streets are doing this wrong!!1!”. Theory doesn’t always match up with Practice, and as noted by pretty much every notable theorist anyway… Context matters a TON. Not all movements will be able to use the same practices or performances. Sometimes their inaccessible, sometimes they just don’t have the cross-context appeal. It’s about experimentation and finding opportunity. To be clear, this isn’t about me telling folks how it should be done. Still, I think it’s worth sharing information when it’s available, especially if people who might not know are trying to draw specific links to historical cases. Social movement theorists have pretty much all agreed that WUNC displays (along with other factors like media diffusion) are super duper important and can be recognized in movements across historical contexts. I think it’s worth it for younger activists who might be looking for protest repertoires that work for their movement as it’s developing to take heed of the successes and failures of the past. Especially since a lot of it is either a) so much a part of history and culture that it doesn’t really get examined for its constituent bits, or b) has been mythologized to the point that it’s hard to look for really good popular historical information on its technical processes.

(If people have questions, feel free to DM me. I might be a little slow the next couple of days as I finish up proof-reading and checking all my citations but yeah. Let’s share knowledge and smash the fash.)

The Nazis of 2017 gained the ground they have with articles about how they were “dapper.” That was a political choice, and it worked. It snowed a lot of gullible goyim. People refused for almost a year to call “the alt-right” Nazis because they looked “like average white people.”

Nazis see their whiteness as a weapon already. Get yours out there and show them – they will never sway everyone. “If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.”

Not someone who typically adds to an already long post, but I have done the whole dressing dapper af thing and it WORKS.
A few years ago there was this big city council vote about an anti-discrimination ordinance that was going to be passed in my relatively progressive, but still very southern hometown. There were huge protests on both sides, both for and against the ordinance, with each side wearing a specific color (red was for, purple against) to show which side they supported. Most of the people against the ordinance were bussed in by hyper conservative churches and many didn’t even live in the town. It was a lot of old people and many of them wore nice clothing. I knew this would probably be the case, so I, being a southern girl at heart and knowing how these people work, broke out my crinoline and nicest red dress and perfect white gloves. I curled my hair and put on makeup and I showed my ass up to the protest. Made a point to be the picture of a perfect southern belle. And it threw the bigoted assholes for a serious loop. It was like they were short circuiting or something. They kept telling me how I reminded them of someone from their church or how pretty I looked and “how would a nice girl like you like a big cross dressing man in the ladies room???” which of course allowed me to explain, ever so nicely, that they were being bigoted assholes. And they Did Not Like that, because I was forcing them to look in the mirror, at someone who looks like them/someone they claim to be “protecting” and question their motives and beliefs.
Seriously guys, it fucking works. Weaponize the fact that you look like the oppressor and throw it in their faces.

To be quite honest, I do not think WUNC would work in current climate. In Poland, only violent protestors are ever listened to, and nonviolent ones are being accused of the most horrible crimes, even when they are nurses on hunger strike. And please bear in mind that in America government has much more social consent to use violence (in democratic Europe, it has zero). Plus nowadays the government is explicitly on the side of the nazi, and the nazi do not care how you look or behave, as for them you are a rat in a tuxedo.

Yeah, I would imagine it definitely depends a lot on those types of things.

In the US, there’s still a lot of lingering influence from the Puritans, so the general public tends to be really focused on how you look, on whether you “look” like a worthy and good person to them or not.

The Puritans had this idea that if you were privileged/rich, or if you had a good life in general, it meant you were a good person. Because it meant that God was rewarding you for being a good person. And therefore, if you’re oppressed, it’s because you’re secretly bad/unworthy.

So there’s this centuries-long culture of basically retconning people who have bad experiences, trying to find a reason to blame them. Basically so that you can pretend whatever happened to them would never happen to you. Victim-blaming.

Plus, the US is ridiculously large, thanks to our bullshit colonialism and genocide. Which makes it really difficult to govern. And the focus on states being able to mostly govern themselves also takes some power away from the federal government.

So even though we have a system of government, in a lot of ways public opinion is just as powerful as the government is. If the media sees a large force of “good” people speaking out against Nazis, (who are by definition “bad” people, except they tricked the media into treating them well for a while by dressing “good”), then the media jumps on board and starts telling everybody that there are bad terrible Nazis around. And that Good Americans are fighting them.

And then politicians either lose political power by ignoring that, or gain it by going along with public opinion.

I mean, that’s a simplistic explanation. The current administration doesn’t care what people think, because the current “President” is not a politician. But when public opinion is against everything he does, the politicians in his party stop supporting him enough to pass the kinds of legislation he wants.

TL;DR: around here, violent protesters are immediately seen as Bad, and therefore their positions must be Wrong. (Which is a big part of why the police does use violence against protesters. Because the public will immediately assume that they would only have used violence against Bad and Wrong Violent People.)

If you can make it look like it would be really, really dishonorable to use violence against you, because you are so clearly Good, because you have a suit and tie on or some shit, then the government/police can’t use violence without looking like THEY’RE Bad and therefore Wrong.

It’s a fucking ridiculous place TBH.

roachpatrol:

i saw a post encouraging new artists to practice and then other people discussing how it’s intimidating, and kind of condescending, to be told to practice without being told how or why. and i thought i would chime in to say that what works for me is to think of it as studying.

it’s like this: if you are in class, you take notes, right? drawing from life, practicing, studying, it’s just like that. your notes aren’t an essay. they’re not a finished work. they’re definitely not an authoritative document. they’re just your observations on the subject. you’re talking to yourself about what you’re learning: summarizing here, elaborating here, jotting down reminders there, trying to get a handle on new material.

take some paper and a pen, and approach virtually anything, from a cat to a flower to a trash can, as if you were making notes on it. but now your notes are visual.

draw the leaves of the flower, observe the veins, the stem, the petals, the shadows. cross out what seems wrong, try a couple times to get some detail right, focus on different parts, try different angles of approach. you’re not trying to Draw A Beautiful Flower, you’re just talking to yourself about what makes that flower a flower. you’re free of the terrible pressure of Making An Art: instead, you’re just studying. it’s okay to take your time, throw away the notes that don’t work, fill up a whole journal on leaves that don’t look good.

the best way to get good at anything is to embrace the process of learning, and to do that you have to recontextualize ‘failing’ as part of the process of discovery.

so when people tell you to practice, don’t get frustrated, and don’t give up. you’re not making one bad drawing after another. you’re just taking notes on the way to whatever comes next.

curlicuecal:

I was thinking last night that maybe one of the more important experiences in my life was how this girl who spent an entire school year bullying me ruthlessly at recess wound up being one of my good friends a couple years later when we were in orchestra together. We didn’t recognize each other for a while. It was strange.

This isn’t my *only* experience like this, but it’s one of the ones that really cemented his idea I have that, like…. circumstances matter. Sometimes you just weren’t in the right place or time or headspace or context to connect and communicate as humans, but almost anyone *could* be a friend if life went the right way.

Maybe this is why I like the “opposites sides forced to work together” and the “enemies to friends” tropes so much, but it’s just… fascinating to play with context in fanfiction. What does it take for two people to understand each other?

jabberwockypie:

PTSD is your brain trying to make sure you DON’T DIE.

Humans are really good at adapting so that we don’t die. That’s kind of our whole *THING*. We adapt.

If something BAD and SCARY and DANGEROUS happens, your brain tries to teach you to react better next time. If the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happens a lot, that’s reinforcing it. With CPTSD, the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happened often enough and frequently enough that your whole psyche developed around it.

You learn to notice the tiny things that signal the Bad Scary Dangerous Thing might happen – even if you don’t consciously know that you know that – so that you are braced to react and defend yourself. They become triggers so that you are primed to respond.

Hypervigilance? Better to panic unnecessarily than to get dead because you didn’t recognize a threat in time, right? It’s uncomfortable and a waste of energy but you’re not dead.

Nightmares about the Bad Thing? Dreams are PRACTICE. You are trying to learn how to react better or faster or more effectively next time.

Avoidance? Dissociating is better than just completely breaking and shutting down entirely.

The thing is, even if you are not in that situation anymore, your brain did not get the memo. It is trying! But it takes a lot of work to convince it that “No really, it is safe now!”

I guess what I’m saying is cut yourself some slack. You are doing your best and you’re not dead. ❤

butterflyinthewell:

psychabuse101:

yaschiri:

hobbitkaiju:

paskakissa:

biggest hetero lie i’ve been told: fighting is a part of a healthy romantic relationship

Disagreements are a part of every healthy relationship. Having bad days when you’re not your best self is a part of every healthy relationship. Fighting, disrespect, and insults? Those are not healthy at all.

NO OKAY THIS IS SO FUCKING TRUE. THIS BOILS MY GODDAMN BLOOD.

STORY TIME.

When I was 16 I had recently moved, and was attending a new school. About half-way through the school year, I started dating a guy I was friends with. He and I got on REALLY well. Like yeah we had disagreements and shit, but we always, ALWAYS talked about it and discussed our feelings and why things were making us upset. Every. Single. Time. We had a good system. And when we had disagreements we resolved them immediately. Otherwise we got along SO WELL. It was great I was really freaking happy and he was too!

About six months into my relationship, people, mostly my family members, commented about how WELL we got along…a l m o s t like it was a bad thing. I didn’t really think about it though, too involved in my own brain.

Skip ahead, to about a year-ish in. Friends of mine would sometimes get into fights with their significant others and they’d tell me ALL about it and I’m a good friend so I’d listen and try to give advice. Except I never had anything when they’d ask me, “Oh well what do you do when you and J get into fights??”

And I never had an answer other than “Well we don’t fight.”

And they never believed me. Or worse they’d insist that was UNHEALTHY. “Fighting is healthy, it lets out tension building up! You just need to sometimes!”

I never, EVER EVER felt comfortable with that, and I’d shrug it off and insist we didn’t NEED to fight. Our relationship was ALREADY healthy, especially because of the way we handled disagreements. People never listened and insisted there was something wrong, whether out-right stating it or hinting at it.

Even my best friend insisted that fighting was healthy, and I listened to her on nearly everything. Except for that. I didn’t budge for anyone.

DO NOT LET PEOPLE FOOL YOU. FIGHTING IS NOT HEALTHY. DISAGREEMENTS ARE. BAD DAYS ARE OKAY. LEGITIMATE SCREAMING AND GOD FORBID PHYSICAL VIOLENCE IS. NOT. OKAY!!!

Don’t be fooled guys, please.

Talking to one another through disagreements is the ONLY healthy way to handle disagreements in a relationship.

Verbal, physical and psychological violence is NEVER healthy.

^ All of this!

universe-c:

Every so often a post comes across my dash accusing women who like gay porn (aka slash fandom) of being just as disgusting and exploitative as men who like lesbian porn. I disagree.

I am a gay, nonbinary trans dude. I didn’t really fully embrace this fact about myself until I was in my 30s. But I have known I was genderqueer since I was 19, and felt deeply uncomfortable with identifying as female or straight for even longer. In the 15 years between coming to terms with being genderqueer and actually starting to transition, slash fandom WAS my only real access to a community supportive of my queer identity or queer sexual exploration. Why? Because when I tried to come out to IRL gay friends I was called an attention-seeking faghag, a pervert and a dyke in denial. This attitude of ‘oh you’re just a tourist straight girl and your presence is a threat to our identity’ kept me in the closet for over a decade.

If we want to normalize the idea of queer people, we also need to normalize the idea of enjoying queer sexuality. Gay sex between consenting adults is normal, healthy sex. Enjoying queer porn doesn’t equate to harming IRL gay people or threatening anyone’s queer identity, no matter who is doing the enjoying. If liking queer sex is perverted then by necessity all queer people are perverts.

The grossness of both icky slash and icky mainstream porn do not come from straight people being straight in gay spaces. They come from the gender essentialism and violent misogyny that we have all been indoctrinated with since early childhood. Gender essentialism and violent misogyny are not integral to being straight, and the assumption that they are helps to perpetuate them.

jumpingjacktrash:

queeranarchism:

I’m disappointed in a lot of the conversations about neuro-normativity in inter-personal interactions, mostly because of how absolutist they tend to be and how useless that is in most real life interactions.

A lot of conversations ignore that you can’t be sure you’re not talking to another non-neurotypical person but more to the point they also overlook the fact that ‘neurotypical’ people (which I sometimes think is more a society wide enforced ideal than an a human reality anyway) can be emotionally hurt, triggered, sensory-overloaded, extremely exhausted or emotionally fragile in some other way. Neurotypical people have meltdowns and panic and moments when they are so so fragile.

So when someone doesn’t respond well to your non-neurotypical behavior, maybe they’re a huge ableist asshole, or maybe their needs are incompatible with yours in that space, maybe your bouncing leg is pushing their sensory overload over the edge or your directness is something they are too emotionally vulnerable to deal with, or your uninterrupted talking is speeding up their panic attack, etc. Maybe their melt-down is as unavoidable as yours.

Like, maybe it’s just me, but a lot of my bad experiences seem to come from incompatible neuro-needs, like when my partner really needs to hear that one song to calm down and I really need to not hear it to calm down, when I really need clean uncluttered spaces to relax and a friend really needs company in their own home, which is a cluttered space. Our needs clash, and the language or neuro-normativity in the ‘you are ableist, I am not’ absolutes doesn’t cover our situations well. We can’t use the language of privilege vs. oppression to handle these moments. We need tools about neuro-diversity that work from a place of mutual understanding and assume that we are both vulnerable and we are both doing the best we can.

my theory about stimming and other autistic behaviors is that nt’s (i’m using this here to mean ‘has no neurological disability’ not ‘has no mental illness’) do the same things when stressed to the same extreme, it’s just that sensory processing disorder and other elements of autism mean i’m pushed to that point a lot sooner, and by a lot of things nt’s aren’t bothered by.

but you take an nt into the megamall on black friday, and after a few hours of shopping they’re going to have the same planked stare that i get from hanging out with six friends having fun. they’re going to be stimming, too. look for it. they’ll be fiddling with the zipper on their coat, running it up and down, or twisting their hair around their fingers, or some other ‘nervous habit’ that you’d call stimming if an autie was doing it. they may go semi-nonverbal – although, not realizing it, they might yell at people or say stupid shit instead of accepting that talking is not working right now.

a lot of what we talk about as autistic behaviors are really universal human stress behaviors.

it’s just that you see me doing them a lot more often because nt’s don’t experience a flickering fluorescent light like a moth fluttering against your eyeball, and can put up with hours and hours of it while i have to shield my eyes from it by hunching over, and thus look like i’m too stupid to understand sitting.

tl;dr: everybody stop gatekeeping useful terms like stimming and spoons. stop now. that’s over. you’re done.