Also Tumblr: *adds a gay romance plot to every story*
Tumblr: It’s okay when we do it, because it appeals to our fetishes, even if we say it’s “because progressiveness!”
to be fair a lot of hetero romance feels forced as fuck, and if it wasnt literally everywhere i wouldnt have an issue with it. dont really watch movies but seeing actually healthy gay relationships is rare the times i do watch tv
a lot of women: we’re really tired of constantly seeing trite heteronormative bullshit romances shoehorned in to every piece of media, no matter how flat the female character or unappealing the male character, that never lets us forget our place as sexual accessories to men. also, a whole bunch of us are queer. also queer men are here too.
a lot of women: so we’re going to write our own romances that are actually hot and appealing as well as useful for exploring— or escaping— the various traumas and kinks we’ve picked up around living in a world that sees us as sexual accessories. relationships based on equality and friendship, or relationships that specifically foreground inequality and exploitation, are really hot and fun to examine in the context of a couple hundred thousand words of hardcore gay smut—
inevitable dudes: but this makes us uncomfortable! because you’re sexual accessories, your involvement with sex should be as a passive receiver, a subject, not an active agent, let alone a creator or an instigator. we’re going to make fun of you now until you stop.
a lot of women: it turns out that once you read a couple hundred thousand words of hardcore gay smut you get a lot harder to shame.
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.
Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate.
This is incredibly important. Please read!
Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
Gonna Reblog this every time
Reblogging because this is really fucking important
This is so important there is enough hate out in the world already .try to be alittle kinder to each other .love not hate.
the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family
Just saying this is truly one of the best “discourse” posts on this site like……this hits the nail directly on the head re: what is going on with language right now and everyone pushing back in the notes only serves to further prove the point it’s making
I finally managed to get hold of a copy of my dissertation! You can read it on Google Docs HERE. Please feel free to download and cite the work if it helps you with your own studies. 🙂
You guys, this is 70 pages of analysis of tumblr language and you should probably read it. I know I’m going to.
I’m sold on the strength of the table of contents alone
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn’t we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn’t we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes – at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts – and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them.
The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!)
But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. ❤
– Praise the living daylights out of a show and shove its greatness in everyone’s face
– 2 years later, pick it apart violently and insult everyone who still enjoys it in as edgy a way as possible because negativity is cool
!!!
uhh maybe marginalized ppl were excited at the possibility of a show (such as su) representing them, only to be rightfully angry when the show ends up racist, homophobic etc. anyway, super bad post all around
I feel like a lot of hardcore accusations of problematic and offensive content that get thrown at media that was previously lauded as progressive come from a few sources; first, the creators are often a lot more accessible than the creators of mainstream media. you can message rebecca sugar on twitter personally to call her a racist bitch, but you can’t do the same to, say, jj abrhams or another large-scale creator. likewise, you can’t stand on a streetcorner and scream at people until they agree to stop watching law and order, but you can certainly bully large groups of people online until they stop supporting an independent creator.
second, the fandoms that tend to form around progressive media tend to be younger, more volatile, looking to media and fandom as forms of activism. mainstream media they can write off as garbage, but progressive niche media that makes a sincere attempt to represent marginalized folks must be Absolutely Perfect. the idea that a piece of media can have good parts and bad parts, that it can try and only partially succeed, but that that partial success is still worth something, is completely lost on many young fans. either its irredeemable garbage or its the literal messiah, there’s no in-between. so if a show falls short of perfect, as is inevitable, then it goes straight into the “total garbage” pile and must be condemned by the masses.
genuinely trying to represent certain groups and making a few missteps is not the same thing as being ignorant or malicious. making a sincere effort to mean something to folks who don’t get a lot of things made for them is something to be proud of. would you rather go back to the times when fucking nothing got made for us? when the only characters we saw that we could relate to were only there to be made fun of? you’re spoiled by a rush of new creators who took “go make your own thing then” to heart and set out to make content for people like them, you have the gall to look at what they’re trying to do and spit on it for not being better. no creator owes you shit, no creator has to bow to a bunch of teenage bullies who do nothing but demand and harass, that’s all there is to it.
Dear lord can everyone please read this post because it’s so relevant
This even happens to me from time to time because over the course of running this blog, I went through thousands and thousands of submissions and I apparently do not remember all of them so I’ll see some older submission on my dash and get confused or worried for a good few seconds until I see my icon and realize, ah, that’s just me, phew.
@one-time-i-dreamt so, you’re telling us that the person who RUNS the freaky dream blog forgets to read the user name?!? I feel better now
The fact that one-time-i-dreamt is scared of her own posts is weirdly reassuring
just moving along like everyone else 