#X-Men has been woke since the first time they were created; that's their who premise

[siixkiing]

Can I just say...the sheer hilarity of some people calling the new X-Men Cartoon 'woke' like fam what did you THINK X-Men has always been?

[life-as-an-evolving-journey]

Sexual Abuse in Marriage

We’ll start hard and heavy, because this is the easiest way to weed out those who cannot handle certain topics, and that is ok. This story will include abortion and, you guessed it, sexual abuse. It is not an easy read for those who have experienced any kind of abuse, so TRIGGER WARNING. Prep yourself, get yourself in the right mood before reading this in its entirety.

I want to preface this conversation by reminding everyone that abuse is seen on both sides of the gender lines, so as I use my gender terms (so unnecessary), please do not believe that this situation could only happen to a woman. I also want you to understand that any anger I once felt towards my x-husband has subsided into more of an indifference at this point, and there is no need for nasty comments towards him or myself. We all do the best that we can with the tools we had at the time. I will do my best to explain the circumstances from both angles as much as I can, but it is not possible to have every bit of information for his side since I have never spoken with him about this situation.

This is a long one, and I tend to ramble, so please forgive me for the length in advance.

In May of 2013, my x-husband and I decided, mutually, to have an abortion when I got pregnant unexpectedly. In the long run, it was the right decision, but in the moment it did not feel like it. See, I used to be a strong pro-life advocate, with a keen sense of why women should not have abortions. So, having an abortion myself seemed a little bit like nonsense to me, but I agreed to it because my opinions were changing, and it genuinely felt like the right thing to do. My past belief system was not as accepting. In the beginnings of my journey after my abortion, I had to find a way to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, not for myself, but for the people who would have been most impacted by us having another child. That would have been my x-Mother-in-law at the time, as she watched our child while we worked. Between her husband’s business, and my first child, she had a lot on her plate, and weighing her down with helping us with another child would have been difficult for her. So I built this foundation to move forward based on that premise and that premise alone: It would have been hard for her. Then in August that year, her husband quit his private practice and suddenly she had a lot of extra free time. Free time that would not have complicated her life if we had asked her to help care for our toddler, and this potential newborn that we would have had. This completely crumbled the foundation I had built for myself.

Why is this important to the topic of sexual abuse in a marriage? Well, let me explain. After my abortion I was so frightened at the thought of having sex again because I did not want to get pregnant again and be forced to make the same decision. So I avoided it at all costs. This left my x-husband feeling lonely and dissatisfied. At the same time I felt like he was distant and cold when it came to talking about my emotions regarding my abortion. So once my foundation crumbled,I felt I could not “bother” him with my problems, so I built a new foundation based on the worst things possible. I convinced myself that I had murdered my child, that I was undeserving of any kind of love from anyone because I was a murderer. I would have nightmares constantly about different ways I had murdered my potential child, I would fall down in the middle of public spaces when I would hear a baby crying. My legs would just suddenly decide to stop working entirely, and I would fall. (That’s a sign of shock caused by trauma, as I would later learn.) This sequence of thoughts started soon after my previous foundation had crumbled, so around August. By October I had decided that I could not do it on my own anymore, and I went to the one person I believed I could trust whole-heartedly, to create a safe judgement-free zone for me, my x-husband. Well, you can guess that is not what he created, hence the x before husband. I told him about my troubles, and all he had to say was “you need to get over it, and see a therapist” Now, mind you, he is sexually pent up and feeling frustrated towards me because of it, and it is probably what caused him to respond that way. This, however, should not excuse his next response to his vulnerable, emotionally unstable wife.

Well, you stuck around with me this far. This is where it gets difficult for me to even type about. About two weeks after his cold response to my troubles, he comes to me requesting, nay demanding, sex. He says “I need it, I deserve it. Think about all of the sacrifices I ever made for you.” (Last statement is another story for a different time.) Lording my past mistakes over me like I owed him for the sacrifices he willingly chose to make. Dear, that is where sacrifice becomes debt, not sacrifice. But this, this is what he says to me. I respond with “no, I’m sorry, I’m just not ready yet.” through a river of tears as I feel awful that I am leaving him out to dry sexually. Instead of leaving it where it lies, he continually pesters me 3 or 4 times a day for the next week. Same argument, same response. He is relentless, and I feel trapped in a corner. If I don’t give it to him he will never leave me alone on the topic, never. So the, approximately, 21st to 28th time he asked, I agreed to it. To cope in the middle of it, I disconnected myself entirely from the situation, basically numbing myself, and thought about my dead child the entire time. He finished what he was doing, went back to playing his video games, and I cried myself to sleep on that lonely bedroom floor. I woke up feeling different, but not knowing what it was exactly, because in my head, at the time, it was not sexual abuse. He was justified in asking for it, and I had agreed. Little life lesson, that does not mean it was not sexual abuse. A partner emotionally manipulating you into giving them something they want that you do not that oversteps a personal boundary, ESPECIALLY a sexual boundary (something very sacred in a marriage), should always be respected, period. That is what makes this sexual abuse,because he did not respect my boundary. What makes this far worse, is that Physical Touch is my secondary love language, behind Quality Time, and this hit deeper than I could ever explain.  It has affected my life in numerous ways. I, to this day, have difficulty trusting straight men because I am so frightened that they are staring at me sexually. They don’t even have to act on it, they just need to be staring at me that way. I no longer want to feel pretty, because that would only entice a man. I haven’t had the pleasure (dripping sarcasm) to be in the same room alone with my x-husband since we got divorced in 2016, but when I think about it i tense up in ways I wish I didn’t have to experience. 

This instance, unfortunately, was not an isolated incident for the two of us. I began to see him differently, in ways I did not entirely understand back then. I started to feel ashamed of my body around him. I wanted to hide it so he could never touch it again. I explained this to myself by saying that I was just protecting myself from getting pregnant again. It’s not him that is the problem, it is sex. So he responded to getting sex from me using the same emotional manipulation tactic for the next 3 years before I left him. He would also get me drunk to get me to do things that I wouldn’t normally do. I only know this because he openly admitted that to me once.Sex eventually became a scheduled event for us. I attempted to compromise with him, but his version to compromise was to have sex 4 times a week, and it was unreasonable, but he refused any other offer. He said that I just need to do that for him for a couple of weeks, and then he would be satisfied for a while, but never defined how long “a while” was. Even after I left him, about 2 weeks later, I agreed to meet him at Starbucks. He got the wrong impression about why I agreed to it, and once he realized that, he changed the topic immediately to getting sex from me one last time using the same emotional manipulation tactic statement I mentioned before. Thus proving to me that there was no limit for him when it came to crossing my boundary expectations on sex. During all of this I eventually convinced myself that I could never do anything correctly, and I would never amount to anything special. This type of thinking is what made me excuse a lot of his abuse over the years. 

To sum all of this up, I wouldn’t post something so personal so publicly if I did not think that telling my story wouldn’t help someone on their own personal journey with something similar. You are not alone if you are sexually abused by your partner. Marriage does not make sex obligatory or a requirement, and never let someone convince you otherwise.

[incarnateirony]

To the Nonnie that left a 5 parter in my inbox:

I am not going to post your nonsense.

I am not going to circulate your redefinitions, your new goalposts, your explicit deletion and argumentation against a far larger bulk of openly identified bisexual people, and your raging. I have already addressed these, and they boil down to “You’re literally destructive to the LGBT battle while you think you’re being progressive.”

I am not going to be part in circulation people’s own manufactured dialogues they put between their own ears anymore.

You are not promised platform. You are not promised my inbox. You are not promised any specific performance from LGBT creators within the demographic they are writing the text that would be representative in if you have paid *zilch* attention to their working conditions.

In fact, you literally don’t even get to fucking pretend you’re here about representation while *overtly denying the words, sociopolitical representation commentary, and working conditions of the LGBT creators you’re hot dogging right now*. Half the fucking fight is also behind the scenes GETTING LGBT CREATORS CREATING, even if at times they’re limited. 

Representation isn’t just on screen, diversity in writing crews behind scene is the fight, and if you pretend it isn’t just to gang bang LGBT creators for not performing how you want, without *ANY* fucking human consideration for why things are the way they are? *You, deep down, don’t give a shit about representation, or production team diversity, or LGBT creators -- you give a shit about getting exactly what you want exactly the way you want without even recognizing that may not be universal to LGBT people as proven by my notifs right now -- and largely with the reductionist point of wanting to win against trolls on the internet at which point YOU HAVE LEFT THE REPRESENTATION WHEELHOUSE (x); or if you do truly believe what some rando -- probably a woman, rather than the LGBT male POV -- said, you need to DRAMATICALLY RE-ALIGN AND CONSIDER YOUR POV*

“The whole idea of representation” that you have is close, but still a made up thing. It’s what perfect representation is. It’s not what the battle is. It’s never been what the battle is.

So just because you’ve dreamed up, say, a GA opposed to you, while the GA openly fucking talks about all this shit (right down to “marriage/dark point in the romance/divorce/breakup), on non-fansite major news publications, rather than fangirls that are scared of losing their website traffic in this fucking bog of bitterness, liars, extortionists and tinhats?

It doesn’t fucking matter.

Text is text is text. Queer text is queer text no matter how upset you get on if it was *visible* enough for you. That will continue to stay true. It will continue to be true when you make GA monsters in your head that don’t exist anywhere in reality. It will continue to stay true when you want to argue with a clout monkey that doesn’t even believe what they say. It’s going to be true. 

It’s fine to want more visible text. That IS the nature of the fight. The nature of the fight is NOT deleting low visibility text. And i’m going to ask you to PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS FUCKING HOLY, ACTUALLY EDUCATE YOURSELF ON LGBT MEDIA HISTORY AND THE REPRESENTATION BATTLE.

Not just a random link convenient to someone’s article that vague blogs the general history. Actually educate yourself if you’re going to get in this fight because HOLY SHIT the children that have tried have *MISERABLY FUCKED UP* and then quite unfortunately normalized that fucking up, that everybody thought it was the new brand of woke because of herd mind.

If you’ve internalized enough phobia from the abusive manipulations within this fandom that you’ve convinced yourself bisexual people are *SO DAMN INVISIBLE* that nobody gets what’s going on while the GA is all “SHIT MAN THEY GOT A DIVORCE T_T”, that’s a you thing.

I am not your therapist. I am not your mother. I can not *force* you to get in touch with what the GA, or the creatives, or anyone else has said on anything related to this content, because I’ve been blogging it all and here you are, clearly not reading any of it. I can not force you to stop erasing LGBT text you, personally, nonniemcnonface, don’t like the visibility of. BUT I CAN STRONGLY ENCOURAGE IT.

But nobody owes you anything. Not my inbox. Not the platform on my blog. Not *your, specific, preferred, very precise point of view*. When you are a middle aged LGBT cis man raised in the 80s in patriarchal environments, and/or hold a great deal of conversation explicitly with the demographic and its representation in question, and by that I mean not 1, 2, 3, or even just 10 LGBT men within a step of that demographic. Because that’s the story of the character being told. It’s not *your* story. It’s a story you may resonate with depending how close to it you are. But *that* is what representation is: creating a universal platform of diverse, queer stories until it is saturated into the media to such an extent you *will* eventually find someone that ticks all your demographic boxes when you turn on your TV (be that race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, or whatever else.) Demanding everyone’s unilateral demands be met when they aren’t even in the intersectional demographic isn’t representation. It’s tokenization. It’s the exact same way we end up with stereotyped gays to try to fit everyone’s “visibility” wants. It’s why there IS such a problem with LGBT male and, most explicitly, bisexual male representation. You are making half of the problem unto yourselves.

Until then, you don’t get to talk over those people. No matter how many anons you send thinking it sounds *gr8* because you haven’t read the entire discussion, you just got *mad* at part of it and didn’t want to introspect. That? That’s a problem.

Let’s say you work at Subway and they say you can only put 6 olives on a footlong without charging extra. Your boss vaguely holds that up but doesn’t micro count your olives so sometimes you give them 7 or 8 because you feel bad, and you want to give as much as you can to the customers. But if corporate notices somehow you’re burning through a shit ton of olives, it doesn’t matter what your intent is. It doesn’t matter if your manager agrees. If corporate comes down and tells you to stop putting down extra olives, you have a choice to completely quit/be fired from making sandwiches for people or to comply. Or, at least, to wait long enough to squeak new extra olives in.

*WelComE tO thE coRporAte chAIN and AduLT reALitY* -- Bobo sitting here piling as many olives on as he can until magically suddenly stopping for a year at a time and then y’all are bitching because he didn’t put the whole assed olive tree on your sandwich. When you get up to the counter, and start throwing a goddamn shitfit, you are now Karen. Don’t be Karen.

And no, Karen demanding that if she can't have as many olives as she wants then nobody should get any olives and to stop putting down olives is not anywhere in touch with functional reality.

And UNTIL you learn to pay attention to what the LGBT cis male raised in the 80s middle aged author on crew says on *this specific topic*, who was writing on sociopolitical LGBT representation issues probably since you were in *diapers*, and the methodology and struggles therein? You don’t really get a say. Once you’re able to sociopolitically contend with what that very author postured about representation *16 years ago* and have an equally well addressed set of points, then you can at least hold debate with his ideas. Until then, this is “WHAT I WANT BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH”

Go away.

Like god fucking damn Bobo “I stand in front of ICE walls”, “fuck every candidate but Bernie sanders” Berens, highly progressive left wing sociopolitical queer author still fucking understood incrementalization 16 years ago can you all fucking CATCH UP?

He didn’t fucking like it, but he understood it. He addressed it as a necessary evil that has been formative in our process and progress and expansion in visibility. You don’t have to like it either, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you can’t *understand* why it works like that. Just like “text that isn’t visible enough for you is still text”, “real world issues and methods you don’t like are still real even if you don’t like them.” Bobo got it. Your turn. Cuz he doesn’t have to like his working conditions. But he can work through them the best he can. And addressed this many moons before ever writing his first SPN episode that was the first recorded time a showrunner told them to lean into it being played like lovers. Yeah. That? That was Bobo’s episode. In fact, 99% of the shit y’all uwu about is Bobo’s. Steve. Collette. The mixtape. The breakup. Gosh golly gee it’s almost like he’s fighting his ass off to tell you a story in what incremental methods he’s allowed and you’re all just trying to fuck him for it. Hell even this episode in question, Jeremy’s, Jeremy went out of his way to thank Bobo for all his guidance and help.

We’ve made progress via incrementalization, and just because you can name a few other shows that have entirely different bankrolling, marketing, distributions, demographics, that HAvE gAy shIT doesn’t mean shit. You don’t think every product a store sells comes from the same production line in the same premises with the same materials and the same target audience when they sell a wide brand of merchandise, do you? I promise you Great Value macaroni is managed and distributed differently than LED light bulbs and bicycles. These are not the same products.

The presumptuous, self-serving, personalized and franky manufactured wants and demands cloaked in a representation suit while choosing to do active harm to what progress we have -- intentionally ignorant to the actual representation battle and imagining what it is, and is like, and is about -- literally talking over the long-standing voicebox of an LGBT creator making the content who has been ENGAGED. IN THIS FIGHT. SINCE MOST OF YALL. WERE IN KINDERGARTEN? It’s fucking gross. It’s manipulative. It’s abusive. Maybe you’ve been manipulated into not understanding that, and you really believe what you say, I really don’t fucking know. But I do know you need a HUGE crash course in HOW THIS ALL WORKS and WHAT THE TARGET POINTS AND METHODOLOGICAL TARGETS ARE.

There is no magic clap on clap off bullshit. That isn’t how. It works. If it worked like that, we wouldn’t HAVE a fucking fight. (Imagine thinking that critically. Please, I beg you.)