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Catherine Bernard: A question in studying asexual history

Jo Troll

When studying queer history, especially asexual and aromantic history, silence is an immediate problem. The only way to know whether or not someone is asexual or aromantic is through their own identifying as such. The newness of asexual and aromantic communities and silence around sexual orientation has robbed us of this. Finding asexuality historically as an identity, instead of a choice or behavior, is often impossible. Instead of hoping for a definite answer, we must look at behavior, despite every claim that asexuality and aromanticism are identities, not behaviors, read between the lines, and accept that we may never know. (Read Full Article)

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Snowing at sea

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why do people find it so hard to understand that critiquing makeup culture/societal expectations of makeup is not a personal attack. you don't need to defend wearing x amount of products just pls understand the forces behind it. otoh refinery29 posted a 'what its like getting permanent lip liner' article and reading that headline deactivated my almonds. and uh weird way to end this ask but happy 2019!!

I mean if you want a sincere answer to why that happens, I think it’s because we’re at weird point in capitalist hell where brands, particularly the beauty industry, have finagled their image in such a way that buying makeup or wearing heels or shaving your legs genuinely does feel like a badass #empowering choice for a lot of women 

and, like, zero shade on women who do enjoy those things, because that includes some of my dearest friends in the world and we’re all in this hell together anyway and the individual consumer is never the root of the problem, but. but but but. “I like wearing makeup” has been conflated into “I like wearing makeup and it’s therefore a deeply feminist action” which is… patently wrong.

idk how long you’ve been on tumblr and I can’t speak to exactly how far this goes back, but I remember being like 14/15 and seeing all these posts about “weaponized femininity,” which was basically this idea that you could be really conventionally hot - sharp eyeliner, red lipstick, high heels, etc - and that this was somehow going to give you an edge over the men™ by…. tricking them into thinking you were just a pretty woman? when actually you were going to crush their dreams beneath your heels or slit their throats with your eyeliner? or something? it was never exactly clear.

and obviously you can be a conventionally feminine woman and excel in any field you want and compete with the men, but that has absolutely jack shit to do with your lipstick. 

but now you’ve got all these marketing campaigns that conflate self-acceptance and confidence with buying beauty products. some of them are subtle, like those Dove ~real beauty~ campaigns I hate with a passion, because they always resolve around this theme of making women dredge up things they’re insecure about and then going “no!!! don’t worry!! you’re actually beautiful!!! buy our soap!!” 

and this is seen as like… intimate and emotional and affirming, when it’s actually the most shallow inspiration porn imaginable, and doing nothing but reinforcing the idea that a woman’s value is affirmed through her beauty more than anything else. which is basically a huge co-opting of the body positivity movement - originally started simply to affirm that all bodies can be good and functional and worthwhile bodies that don’t determine our worth, now commodified into “all bodies are beautiful uwu buy a face mask.”

(not that I don’t love a good face mask, but that shit gets sold like it’s supposed to fix your life, you know?) 

and then you’ve got the really in your face ridiculous ads. my favorite was an Ulta video that started popping up before things I wanted to watch on youtube awhile back, where they’d play that Alessia Cara song that goes “you don’t have to change a thing” over images of women with full contour and sculpted brows entirely unironically. which is this really fun new spin a lot of beauty industry adverts are taking now - acting like makeup is just a fun way to enhance your beauty that totally already exists, just More!

which would be fine, if makeup actually was just a fun optional extra, but like I’ve said approximately 228 million times now, the daily reality for a lot of women is that it’s not. jobs that have nothing to do with physical appearance require women to wear makeup to be considered professional, trans women are too often required to wear makeup just to be recognized as women, there are girls and women of all ages who feel like they need to at least slap on some eyeliner for a casual night with friends, as if there’s some beauty bare minimum they need to fulfill to exist.

but makeup and beauty culture is deeply ingrained in women’s lives that it’s easier to like it, so women who do enjoy wearing it and otherwise performing conventional femininity have a choice to make: either acknowledge that you are participating in a system that exploits women, or call it empowerment. acknowledging that you’re part of a hurtful system sucks - especially when it’s one that you opted into. Natalie Wynne made a great point about vegans in her video “Apocalypse” that I think is a fair comparison - many non-vegans, when confronted with veganism, feel attacked by the reminder that veganism exists, and that they, as non-vegans, are implicitly doing something that may be morally wrong. rather than confront that part of themselves, they lash out.

ditto with makeup. and I’m not saying that either people who wear makeup or eat meat are wrong (I have no moral high ground on that second one; I was eating a chicken chimichanga last night), but they are part of harmful systems that it’s easier to ignore. and so critiques on makeup culture are often read as attacks on individuals who like wearing makeup, even when - as in my case, always - that wasn’t the intention at all.

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Historically, there are a number of ties between Black and Indigenous communities. In Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq communities provided assistance to Black people escaping enslavement. Mi’kmaq histories record that parents would hide their children in the Black community to protect them from residential schools. There are long histories of relationships between Black and Mi’kmaq people. In both communities, legacies of colonialism and racism mean that there is often not access to records, and family histories have been hidden and erased.

For people who “look Black” who enter the justice system, they find that their skin becomes the marker of who they are. One prisoner recounted:

I identified as Indigenous and they kept asking to see my status card. They don’t even do that for white people. If you want to follow Indigenous teachings and participate in traditional programs you can. So the elder got on the phone with my parole officer, and the parole officer said, “well, of course I didn’t believe him, just look at him.”

Another former prisoner explains:

Because of the culture thing in prison, where there’s the white brotherhood, the Native Brotherhood and BIFA [Black Inmates and Friends Association], they’ve created a colour co-ordination…so as soon as the Indigenous guys saw me, I was with the Black guys. They never looked at it like, he’s got dark skin, but his mother is [Indigenous]. But they were accepting of me anyway, because the Black guys and the Indigenous guys stick together in prison.

A prisoner who converted to Islam in prison and also followed Indigenous religious practices found that staff refused to accept his multiple identities:

I had to go on two different hunger strikes: one for 26 days, and the other for 38 days, to receive Halal. The first one was just to get no pork because they said I was from a Black community, so therefore my family was Baptist so I was allowed to eat pork. So I went on a hunger strike and they put me in the hole.

Prisoners report the widespread attitude among staff that the prisoners are just trying to hustle the system or get some advantage by saying they’re Indigenous. Despite the fact that at every point in the justice system, Indigenous people face harsher outcomes than white people, there is a perception that Indigenous prisoners get unfair benefits just for being Indigenous. One prisoner told me:

When I started following the traditional teachings, that really helped me. But they acted like I was just saying that because I wanted to get out of prison earlier. They should be offering the same programs to Black people anyway. Why don’t we have elders from our communities coming in, or programs that are relevant to our culture and experience? They don’t give us anything as Black people, but then they don’t want us to find our Indigenous culture either.

One of the most common experiences reported was not receiving a Gladue report (mandatory for Indigenous people) at sentencing. “The crown actually opposed me getting a report,” one prisoner told me.

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oh wow… oh fuckin wow.

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I’m skeptical. Here’s why:

1.) The Liberals made a big lofty promise like this before to appeal to those on the left? Electoral Reform, which they killed.

2.) The Liberals have been asked repeatedly to take over Ontario’s Basic Income Pilot. They have not.

3.) Its an election year.

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None of this sounds sincere, especially because of their non-commitment to the idea (”It could one day happen”), and their ridiculous assertion that their child benefit is a basic income:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos have argued that the Liberal-created Canada Child Benefit, among other measures, amounts to a guaranteed minimum income already.

But in an interview this week with The Canadian Press, Duclos said the current suite of federal programs could one day be enhanced to provide a minimum income of sorts to all Canadians, particularly those without children who aren’t eligible for federal benefits for families, seniors or the working poor.

“Whether this is going to be enhanced eventually to a broader guaranteed minimum income for all Canadians, including those without children that are not currently covered by a guaranteed minimum income at the federal level, I believe the answer is yes,” Duclos said. “At some point, there will be a universal guaranteed minimum income in Canada for all Canadians.”

As for when, Duclos was less clear: “One day we will get there too, but that day has not yet arrived.”

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The thing is that this absolutely IS  what is happening: the absence of femininity in girls ISN’T tolerated beyond a certain age. Butches, tomboys and gender-non-conforming girls are being dissuaded from being anything but ‘real women’ as soon as they hit puberty, if not before.

 And the excuses made to justify this pressuring can vary wildly: some simply say ‘this is not for girls’, others will go for something like ‘but no one (usually boys, but girls are guilty of this too) will like you’. Or my parents’ favorite : ‘The way you dress is a reflection of us to the people who see you. What will they think if they see you this way?’

I did not grow up into someone gender non conforming because patriarchy made me hate femininity. I was always gender non conforming. It’s my natural state. The well-meaning people, even the well-meaning feminists, made me side-eye most aspects of femininity by obsessing over it. By saturating every woman I was allowed to see in ANY media with femininity, and leaving no room for girls like me.

Honestly I wonder how many women would have “grown out” of being tomboys if we had literally ever seen adult butch women on TV or in a movie or read about one. We occasionally get the little girl character who likes playing in the mud or catching bugs (which, don’t get me wrong, is great) but nothing after childhood. It’s like girls are being told, “we’ll tolerate this for a little while but eventually you have to be consumable.”

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I wasn’t asked to a single dance in high school and didn’t have a serious romantic relationship until I was 22. And like, yeah that shit hurt when I was younger. I had a lot of fears that I was unlovable and that I didn’t deserve to be happy. And every time I would try to talk to anyone about it, the conversation became, “you’ll find someone”, when it should have been, “you don’t need a relationship or a date, you’re lovable & complete & beautiful on your own”.

So yeah, please normalize young people not dating, and please stop shaming them for it. There’s more to life than romance, despite what the media wants us to think.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/13/you_are_stealing_our_future_greta

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I hate this modern misogynistic narrative that is being pushed onto girls and being masked as feminism and girl power. if you’re telling girls to wear a face full of makeup, break boys’ hearts, and wear pink dresses, you’re not empowering girls, you’re pushing traditional feminine values onto them and telling them to adapt to the traits that patriarchy has been forcing them to accept. if you can’t handle girls who hate makeup and girls who don’t want to date boys and girls who are fat and have body hair and wrinkles and girls who are loud and masculine, you’re not supporting girls

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Logging back into tumblr

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Albertans need to stop.

ALBEXIT???

I CAN’T. 🤔

Alberta separatism makes zero sense if you are a landlocked province. How would adding the bureaucracy of having to go through an additional country make exporting oil easier? 🤨

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“Generally, Tumblr allows users to create blogs, share content they like (typically images or text posts), and build communities around subjects that matter most to them — from fandoms to health and fitness to sexual preferences. The ease at which users can anonymously collect, curate, and experience the things that turn them on has led Tumblr to become a safe place for queer women to explore their sexuality, often for the very first time. Searching tags like “softcore” or “fingering” would yield  pages of porn GIFs, sensual black and white images, videos, erotic fiction, fanart, and more. And while there’s plenty of porn on the internet, the adult content on Tumblr was often sensual and intimate, focused more on desire — a radical shift from what’s typically available on explicit porn sites like PornHub. Though made-for-women porn sites exist and are growing in number, many are membership-based or have inhibiting pay walls. Tumblr quickly became the place where women could easily explore what turns them on and discover sexual content that didn’t feel alienating or degrading.”

Super proud of my friend Julia for this piece she wrote for OUT about what Tumblr means to queer women.

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If this site burns to the ground let this be my swan song

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Well, things have calmed down.

And I’m free again to surf the webs uninterrupted. Relatively speaking. I love the holiday break from college.

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The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.