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Within a year I’m going to become the first asexual gatekeeper. I’m going to invent a sharp-toothed asexual politic that actually challenges heteromormativity. I’m already cooking something nuclear. Asexuality is not a spectrum. If you are a sexhaver then you are a fake ace and if you’re begging to be accepted by the cringefest that is the heterosexual, kink or queer community then you have weak principals. Being sex negative is good actually. Gatekeeping is necessary and correct. If you like to sucknfuck then go frolic in the meadows of fruitful freak flowers but around here we are dry as sandpaper and will hold the line. Stop conceding to the institution of Big Sex™️ by supporting weak appeals to normative society with nonsense like “gray ace” and “demisexual.” However, we will happily hold space for those who are on the fence. Stop appeasing normative society with weak sloganeering such as “asexuals can like sex too! asexuals watch porn too! asexuals aren’t repressed!” and proudly stand in your rejection of sex. Am I doing this right lol I’m enjoying myself already, jeez.

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Fuck marry kill: your astrology big 3

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VERNON 11th Mini Album ‘SEVENTEENTH HEAVEN’ Highlight Medley

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for you @vcrnons 🥺

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VERNON 'Spill The Feels' Jacket Behind

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he’s really out there being this beautiful

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he makes me want to chew on glass

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pretty riki

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unironically my favourite tweet ever

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Shoutout to all women who have never dated a man not even once in their life <3

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One turning point in my feminism journey was learning the truth about the adoption industry in the United States, and how many layers of propaganda we're exposed to.

Layer One - "Adoption is beautiful! So many babies need homes!"

Most people figure out that this one is false - that there aren't thousands of babies completely free for adoption, and that adoption is rarely an uncomplicated, beautiful thing. But then we get to:

Layer Two - "Adoption is wonderful but challenging! Thanks to birth control and abortion, there are fewer babies available for adoption than there used to be, but many children and teenagers still need loving homes! And there's always international adoption!"

This is where most people get stuck. On the surface, it makes sense. It matches the "facts" we think we know about the birthrate in the United States, and it acknowledges that adoption takes work and effort from the adoptive parents. But this is still a lie. Those stories about how easy adoption was in the 1950s? Those babies were stolen. International adoption in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s? Those babies were trafficked. Mothers who carry unwanted pregnancies to term typically do not voluntarily give those infants away - but they can be coerced, tricked, and pressured into doing so by relatives, societal convention, and economic need. Paperwork was forged, mothers were lied to about "open adoptions", and in an international context, the entire premise of adoption was misrepresented in some cases as temporary, while adoption brokers profited financially from these abuses of power.

Layer Three: "Okay, so there aren't that many children available for adoption. But you can adopt from foster care if you're patient!"

So, you're rooting for children to be permanently separated from their parents for your benefit? And you think you can be an ethical parental figure while rooting for something that will cause them measurable trauma and harm? You feel like you have the right to be a parent? The needs of a child who has been separated from their parents are distinct from the needs of a child without that type of trauma - you say you're trauma-informed, but are you really? Can you accept a permanent power imbalance between yourself and your adopted child? Can you adjust the structure of your life to accommodate those complex needs?

I'm not unsympathetic to people struggling with infertility, I'm really not. But they've been sold a set of lies about adoption and foster care, and the mythology of both is so dense that in most spaces where "prospective adoptive parents" gather, you aren't allowed to even discuss this reality. There are dozens of posts a day in these online spaces from "prospective parents" -

"Just got my homestudy completed in [State]? How long did you wait before getting your first placement?"

"In [State] looking to adopt, don’t know how to get started …"

"Delete if not allowed, I need to vent and I feel like this group will understand the most. My husband and I are completely heartbroken right now. We've decided to end our adoption process and close out our application. We've been trying to do a state adoption here in [State] for the past 2 and half years. We chose state adoption because private adoption/adoption agencies are unaffordable for us. We did absolutely everything DFPS has asked, I mean everything. After all this time we still haven't heard an approval or denial. They always told us we just need to redo certain things (classes, inspections etc.) because things would lapse/expire due to them sitting on our application. We never even got to the approval or denial part of it. Today they informed us that a new agency will be taking over DFPS here where we live, and when that happens we'll have to start from scratch. Two and a half years down the drain. We decided to stop trying to adopt altogether, it's taken too much of an emotional toll on us. I'm just really lost right now."

Those are all real posts.

No one is willing to tell these people the truth. There aren't freely available babies, or even children, for adoption.

There were stolen babies, decades ago.

There are traumatized children now, who need professional-grade caretaking and continuous re-evaluation of the level of access they want/need with their immediate and extended family members.

I'm not claiming that there aren't abusive and neglectful parents. There absolutely are. The children of these parents still aren't available for adoption, as a whole. They have beloved aunts, grandparents, family friends, neighbors, and older siblings.

Dr. Anne Flitcraft and Dr. Evan Stark were a spousal research team who first applied a sociological understanding of family violence to a medical context. Together, they introduced the first screening criteria for doctors to identify potential victims of domestic violence.

I need to do more reading about Anne Flitcraft's stance on this, but Evan Stark (a sociologist like me) later in life regretted this. He argued that in the decades since the screening criteria was introduced, women and mothers that were being abused by men were reframed by the medical and legal systems as accomplices instead of victims, that willful misunderstanding of child abuse had allowed abusive fathers and male partners to further abuse women and mothers. He identified most cases of "child abuse" as, in reality, cases of "coercive control" - the abuse of children to control and abuse the mother. That where a doctor or judge saw a "dysfunctional relationship" and "abusive parents", in reality, there was almost always an abusive father or male partner using the threat of violence against a woman's children to control that woman, to deny a family access to basic resources in a way that gets recoded as neglect, or using the threat of violence to coerce a woman's children into acting abusively towards their mother. And the doctors and the judges played into this. These men knew that involvement in the legal system would benefit them and harm these women. They leveraged it like another weapon of abuse.

There are not thousands of free babies or children available for adoption. There are not hundreds. There might be a handful of cases where a woman is genuinely interested in relinquishing her child into the care of strangers. But there also might not be any. There likely aren't any. Everything we know about mothers and their children suggests otherwise.

Understanding that as the reality of adoption is a matrix-shattering moment. We've been lied to, and those lies hurt mothers, and they hurt children.

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