#a part of being queer is acknowledging how broad our community is and how different we all are

[borderline-purrsonality]

“I hate how people put themselves into neat little labels” well i love my labels actually!! sorry to you though

[vishwal12santosh]

what does lgbt mean

The term "LGBT" stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. It is a widely recognized acronym used to describe a diverse group of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities. Let’s break it down to understand each component better.

What Does "L" Stand For?

L is for Lesbian. A lesbian is a woman who is emotionally, romantically, or sexually attracted to other women. This term specifically describes women who love women.

What Does "G" Stand For?

G is for Gay. Gay generally refers to men who are emotionally, romantically, or sexually attracted to other men. However, it can also be used as an umbrella term for anyone attracted to the same sex, including lesbians.

What Does "B" Stand For?

B is for Bisexual. A bisexual person is someone who is attracted to both men and women. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are attracted to both genders equally or at the same time; attraction can vary greatly from person to person.

What Does "T" Stand For?

T is for Transgender. Transgender individuals are those whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. For instance, a person assigned female at birth might identify and live as a man.

Also Read: https://digizidoc.com/

Expanding the Acronym: LGBTQIA+

While LGBT is a common term, the acronym is often expanded to include more identities, resulting in LGBTQIA+. Here’s what the additional letters stand for:

What Does "Q" Stand For?

Q is for Queer or Questioning. Queer is a broad term that includes anyone who does not identify as heterosexual or cisgender. Questioning refers to individuals who are exploring their sexual orientation or gender identity.

What Does "I" Stand For?

I is for Intersex. Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that don’t fit typical definitions of male or female. This can include variations in chromosomes, hormones, or genitalia.

What Does "A" Stand For?

A is for Asexual. Asexual individuals do not experience sexual attraction to others. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are not interested in romantic relationships; they simply don’t feel sexual attraction.

Also Read: Boost Your Rankings with SEO Experts

What Does the "+" Stand For?

The "+" Signifies More. The plus symbol acknowledges that there are many other sexual orientations and gender identities that are part of the community, including pansexual, non-binary, and genderqueer, among others.

The Importance of Understanding and Respecting LGBT Identities

Promoting Inclusion and Acceptance

Understanding and respecting the LGBT community is crucial for fostering an inclusive and supportive society. Recognizing and validating diverse sexual orientations and gender identities helps combat discrimination and promotes equality.

The Role of Allies

Allies play a significant role in supporting the LGBT community. Being an ally means standing up against discrimination, advocating for equal rights, and creating safe spaces for LGBT individuals.

How Can You Show Support?

Educate Yourself: Learning more about the experiences and challenges faced by LGBT individuals is a great first step. There are many resources available, including books, documentaries, and online articles.

Be an Ally: Stand up against discrimination and support equal rights for all. Use your voice to advocate for change and challenge harmful behaviors or language.

Use Inclusive Language: Respect people’s preferred names and pronouns. Using the correct pronouns is a simple way to show respect and recognition of someone’s identity.

Support LGBT Organizations: Many groups work tirelessly to support LGBT individuals and advocate for their rights. Consider donating to or volunteering with these organizations to make a positive impact.

Also Read: AI Evolution How Intelligent Machines Are Shaping Our World

Celebrating LGBT Pride

The History of Pride

LGBT Pride events are held annually around the world to celebrate the community and its achievements. These events commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, which were a pivotal moment in the fight for LGBT rights.

Pride Symbols

Symbols like the rainbow flag, created by Gilbert Baker in 1978, represent the diversity and vibrancy of the LGBT community. Each color on the flag has a specific meaning, such as red for life, orange for healing, and so on.

Participating in Pride

Participating in Pride events is a powerful way to show solidarity and support for the LGBT community. These events include parades, festivals, and educational activities that promote awareness and acceptance.

Final Thoughts

The LGBT acronym is a simple yet powerful way to acknowledge the diverse identities within our communities. By understanding and embracing these terms, we contribute to a more inclusive and accepting world for everyone. Whether you are part of the community or an ally, your support and respect make a difference.

Also Read: Boost Your SEO Strategy with SWOT Analysis

[vaspider]

'only tenet of TERFism is transmisogyny' EXCUSE ME NO ITS ALL TRANS PEOPLE. They don't want any trans person to exist. What the hell.

Some people just gotta center their own suffering always, even when they're hurting other people by doing so. I've seen this a lot in younger queer folx of all stripes, this need to be the one that hurts the most, you know?

There's a reason the phrase Oppression Olympics exists, and it's because it's a common behavior or phenomenon in oppressed communities. I see it in the disability community, too.

What I think is important to understand when we talk about how trans people suffer under transphobia is that different groups are targeted differently. I'm not the first person to say this, of course.

Now, like, this is very rough sketchy stuff, and each person's individual experiences will vary, but in my general experience, the rough breakdown of the way in which transphobia lands on trans people kind of breaks down like this:

Binary trans women tend to suffer under a lens of hypervisibility. Everything they do is seen, analyzed, and torn apart. Their struggles are generally the ones centered in the arguments of allies, "allies," and transphobes. Even when trans women are the focus of helpful attention, that hypervisibility can cause exhaustion, because they need to perform perform perform, and be perfect, all the time. It's hard for trans women to just be without feeling like they're on camera, all the time. A lot of the time, they are on camera, because trans women's bodily autonomy and right to privacy are just never respected by transphobes (and often by supposed "allies" who feel free to ask the most invasive questions and get upset when trans women won't answer them), and even if they're not literally on camera, they're supposed to perform as the best examples of transfemininity, because if they don't, then they become the next 'look at this bad trans, all trans are this bad trans' example that TERFs point at and use as a broad brush to paint all trans women. If they're not perfect all the time and have a day where they snap at someone while someone is recording, or make a mistake, or anything, it has a horrible tendency to go viral. You can think of at least three instances right now off the top of your head, right? Right.

Binary trans men tend to suffer from hyperinvisibility. This comes from inside and outside the community -- a lot of trans men talk about being told they can't lead in community because they've 'got male privilege,' that their struggles are discarded, that they're talked over and unable to discuss the things they face, which means they don't get the support they need. Now, there are TERFs and transphobes who absolutely do focus their attention on trans men to the exclusion of or to the deprioritization of the oppression of trans women -- that's where we get Tavistock and Irreversible Damage and Fourth Wave Now and all the other bullshit which focuses on the idea that trans men are "transing the gay away," specifically "transing our butch lesbians" and "stealing butches." But again, generally speaking, trans men face harmful levels of invisibility where trans women face harmful levels of visibility. That's why transmascs in general have issues like lack of understanding even by supposedly trans-competent doctors as to how HRT affects our bodies, why trans men (and transmascs in general) report things like transphobes attacking them with transmisogynistic comments and assuming that every trans person online is a trans woman, etc.

Non-binary (here used as an umbrella term for all identities outside of binary man/woman, to include agender, genderfluid, non-binary, and infinite other identities) AFAB people tend to suffer from a different, very specific form of hypervisibility, unless they start to appear too masculine, and then they slip into hyperinvisibility. This is where we get things like "women and non-binary people" that codes all non-binary people as "AFAB people I can sort of squint and view as women," and people who fall into this category tend to get a lot of attention, a lot of derision from all sides of the spectrum. This is the "blue-haired tenderqueer" sneering that we get from both within and without the queer community, where there's an assumption that these people are just cosplaying an identity, that they're not really trans, etc. Having been in the visibility category and slipped into the invisibility category within the last, oh, year or so, and having two binary trans women in my family to compare notes with, the experiences are unnervingly similar. The difference between the experience that those women have had and the experience that I have had is that according to transphobes, I'm a traitor to my womanhood and performing femininity wrong and taking on a fake identity to escape female oppression because I'm not strong enough to bear up under it, but too cowardly to become a trans man, or... something, whereas they're taking on a fake identity to sneak into women's spaces because they're perverts.

Non-binary (umbrella identity etc) AMAB people tend to suffer from their own very specific form of hyperinvisibility, unless they start to present "too feminine", and then they slip into the hypervisibility which affects binary trans women, but with a little different fuckery in which everyone just assumes they're a trans woman, and therefore they get misgendered by everyone across the spectrum of queer/non-queer/etc. Non-binary AMAB people are generally treated like they don't exist, and when they are spoken about, are often discussed in the context of 'they should just admit they're trans women or gay men,' or if they present 'too feminine,' are subjected to the same sort of horrific attention that trans women get.

Again, a lot of this is very simplistic, and doesn't add in a lot of other complicating factors like race, disability, class, etc. Trans men of color, for example, can run into a different sort of hypervisibility because as they move further through their transition, they begin to be seen in the world as a man of color. It's not really mine to speak on beyond that, but I don't want to neglect saying 'this is really really simplistic and there's more to it than that' over and over.

I really hate breaking it down this simply because it feels like creating another binary (our society does like a binary!) for non-binary people, but like, I can't really talk about my shared experiences with other trans people without putting some framework around it. Someday, I'll be able to do that without categories. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I think we do our entire community a huge disservice when we talk about transphobia as if it's a single snake trying to take bites out of only one part of the community, and not a many-headed hydra, able to attack us from multiple different directions. I also think that focusing on one form of oppression keeps us from forming meaningful solidary and coalitions; the more divided we are, the easier it is for the people who literally want us all to stop existing to pick us off one by one. We see this all across the queer community and it's only ramping up as the attacks on our community escalate from without; people tend to turn on the ones closest to them when they get really scared, and to blame the person standing next to them for the pain they're suffering. It's the "close enough to hit" phenomenon, and it's why we see ridiculous things like "bi women make cis men think that lesbians can be won over," rather than acknowledging that bi women aren't the ones causing that: cis men are the ones causing that. The bi women in that case are close enough to hit. Transmascs are close enough to hit. Trans women are close enough to blame for the problems of transmascs, which makes it possible for TERFs to lure transmascs in and attempt to detransition them, subjecting them to gaslighting and manipulation and then using them as sock puppets.

TERFs do focus a lot on transmisogyny. They focus a lot on transmisandry, too. Debating which one is more prevalent and 'worse' not only misses the point, because transmascs and transfems face very different and totally rotten attention from cis society as a whole, including cis queers. We need to like, not do that anymore: we need to give each other the space to talk about our unique circumstances, but we also need to work harder on looking at each other through a lens of solidarity and trying to see that our struggles are different but not unrelated, and that if we keep downing on each other like this, we're not going to get anywhere except in a much more difficult situation as the people who don't want any of us to exist keep picking us off.

[the-dragongirl]

Hello tumblr. I have returned from a long period of inactivity, because I must bring the good word to the corner of the Star Wars fandom that used to be my main fannish home: there is a new era of Star Wars canon that was made just for our taste. It is called the High Republic.

WHAT IS THE HIGH REPUBLIC?

The High Republic is an giant multi-media project being carried out by the Lucasfilm story group to create a brand new era of Star Wars canon. It is set a few hundred years before the prequel era (so, a long time after the Old Republic era), in a period of peace and stability within the Republic. It currently includes several English language adult novels, a YA novel, two serialized comics, a manga, some short stories, and some short video blurbs published on facebook and youtube. A TV show for Disney+ has also been announced, but is a few years off. This project is unique in Star Wars, in that all of the different parts are being written together by one writing team, and are coordinated to tell a cohesive story. Also, what has been announced is just the beginning – they have stated that there will be three different sections of the High Republic, and everything we have had announced so far is just part one. As a note: this is an era for which there was NO pre-existing canon in Legends, so it is totally new territory.

OKAY, THAT’S NICE, BUT WHY SHOULD I BOTHER TO CHECK IT OUT?

There are SO many reasons why the High Republic is worth your time to explore. I will try to outline some of them here below the cut (without any significant spoilers).

IT IS A LOVE LETTER TO THE JEDI

This is the era for everyone who loves the Jedi and wants to understand how they got to the point they did in the prequel era. It shows Jedi at their best: saving people, working together, being completely in tune with the Force (in so many beautiful and original ways), demonstrating creativity and flexibility and being rewarded for it, actually thinking through the ethics of things like the mind trick, and DEALING with their emotions rather than repressing them. It shows us how the rigid Jedi culture was saw in the prequels was a corruption of something that was originally healthy and uplifting. Jedi in this era are allowed to be flawed, and to grow, and have a community that supports them in doing so. This is the Jedi culture so many of us created as fix it fic for the prequel era, but made canon.

IT IS AN ERA OF HOPE

There are some serious problems in the High Republic Era. Without spoilers, the era opens with a terrible humanitarian crisis, laid over the Republic equivalent of the New Deal from US history.  We see a lot of examples of people doing their best to be good to each other, and working for a more just and kind galaxy. They acknowledge that things are not perfect, but people from many different backgrounds (Jedi, politicians, farmers, pilots, business people) work together to try and make things better. I don’t know about you all, but with the darkness we see in the world today, I NEED some of that optimism in my escapist media. The High Republic provides that.

IT WILL GIVE YOU FEELINGS

The existing material so far is structured to really let you emotionally invest in the characters and their struggles. Unlike with many eras of Star Wars canon, characterization is not sacrificed for the sake of plot (though never fear, there is PLENTY of plot). That means there is huge scope for empathy. I’m not going to lie; I cried within the first three chapters of Light of the Jedi, as did several other people I know. It is POIGNANT in a way that feels truly genuine.

IT IS FUN

The writing team understands that, in the end, Star Wars is space fantasy. If your space fantasy is nothing but serious, gritty grimdark, it becomes pretentious and unbearable. So, for all that there is some heavy content in the High Republic (VERY heavy content – the Nihil should really have their own content warning), it has many moments of levity that keep it from taking itself too seriously. For example, the High Republic made Jedi bodice rippers canon. Also, characters like Geode exist (yes, that rock there is a CHARACTER). The result is something which honors the spirit of Star Wars, and keeps you engaged without being tedious or ridiculously depressing.

THE WRITING TEAM HAS DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES

The main writing team consists of five people: Justina Ireland, Claudia Gray, Charles Soule, Daniel José Older, and Cavan Scott. You will note that includes two people of color, two women, and one out Queer person (in fact, one of the writers is all three of those things). This is a far cry from the white-cis-straight-man-dominated writing teams we have seen in the past. And when they bring in other people to the project, they make a point of looking for perspectives that aren’t represented on their team – for example, the manga is being co-written between Justina Ireland and Japanese writer Shima Shinya, and Ireland has stated in interviews that Shinya is taking the lead on the writing.

IT VALUES MEANINGFUL REPRESENTATION

That diverse writing team means a cast that looks WAY more like the real world than any other era of Star Wars we’ve seen, in terms of representation. There are multiple characters of color, who are both heroes and central to the story. There are at least five canonical queer characters to date (a MLM couple, an Ace character, and two NB character).  [EDIT: Thank you @legok9​ for letting me know about the NB characters]. Among binary gendered characters, there is a very even balance of men and women. The writing team has also stated that they will be incorporating more representation of disability in the works to come. And the story is so much better for it – representation is included here BECAUSE it makes for more creative, believable, and original storytelling.

IT IS ACCESSIBLE

Because of the multiple formats, and the fact that it doesn’t rely on you knowing any prior lore, the High Republic offers many avenues to engage for people with all kinds of needs. Know nothing about Star Wars canon and feel intimidated about catching up? The canon is all new in this era anyway, so you’re fine. Can’t handle flashing lights? No problem – the little bit of video content that exists is totally free from the strobing effects that caused seizure and sensory issues. Need purely audio content? You can still have a full experience of the High Republic with the gorgeously sound-scaped audiobooks. Don’t have the attention span for books or long movies? Then the comics are your friend.

THERE IS SOMETHING FOR ALL

Between the books aimed towards adults and teens (and their respective audiobooks), the kids books, the comics, the manga, the short stories, AND the eventual TV show on Disney+, there is going to be content in the High Republic that suits most audiences. And that is just what has been announced so far – there is still more to come for phases II and III. This isn’t Star Wars written towards one group or demographic – it is Star Wars for everyone.

DID I MENTION THE FANCY JEDI UNIFORMS?

Because cosplayers and fanartists? This is the era for you. We are getting Jedi in silks with elaborate gold embroidery. Jedi with jewelry other decorative elements. Even the practical field uniforms have tooled and embossed leather. If you want to draw or make Jedi that have some of that that sweet LoTR-esque high fantasy aesthetic, the High Republic has your back. (Not going to lie – I am ALREADY imagining the time travel AUs. Put Obi-Wan in fancy clothes!)

OKAY, YOU’VE SOLD ME. WHERE SHOULD I START?

I strongly recommend everyone looking to get into the High Republic (who is old enough to be on Tumblr) start with Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule. I alternated between the physical book and the audio book, and found it delightful in both formats. After that, you have a lot of options. You can read or listen to the audio book of the YA novel A Test of Courage by Justina Ireland. You can check out the currently running Star Wars: The High Republic comic from Marvel, or the Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures comic from IDW. Or you can skip straight to Into the Dark by Claudia Gray. Honestly, there is no wrong order to try out most of the High Republic.

IN CONLUSION

The High Republic is Star Wars written for people who DON’T want Star Wars to be a good ‘ol boys club for salty white dudes who don’t want to see anything but more of Luke Skywalker. It offers broad representation, and optimistic narrative, and whole bunch of awesome Jedi content. If you are someone who fell in love with Jedi in the prequel era, the High Republic will give you more of what you loved. And if you are totally new to Star Wars? The High Republic is here for you too.

So, go check it. And then go write fic for it (please, there are only, like, 14 fics on AO3, I am dying).

[hellomynameisbisexual]

SOME 2 PERCENT of men in the U.S. identify as bisexual. But, for decades, some sexuality researchers have questioned whether true bisexual orientation exists in men.

In 2005, J. Michael Bailey, a sexuality researcher at Northwestern University, and two colleagues showed men who identify as bisexual brief pornographic clips featuring men or women, while measuring their subjects’ self-reported arousal and change in penis circumference. The results, when compared to men who identified as straight or gay, led them to conclude that the men identifying as bisexual did not actually have “strong genital arousal to both male and female sexual stimuli.” This was in contrast to work on sexual arousal in women, which showed that they — whether identifying as straight or gay — were physically aroused by both male and female stimuli.

A New York Times headline covering Bailey’s 2005 study on men declared: “Straight, Gay, or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited.”

But the paper also spurred more research into the subject — some of which has now led Bailey to revise his conclusions. In a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Bailey and 12 colleagues reanalyzed data from eight previously published studies of bisexual-identified men, including the 2005 paper. The new review finds that men who reported attraction to both men and women do in fact show genital arousal towards both male and female stimuli. The data, the authors conclude, offers “robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men.”

The PNAS study has drawn positive coverage and received praise from some activists, who see it as valuable confirmation for an often-marginalized sexual identity. But it has also received backlash from other scientists and many bisexual people, some of whom argue that in attempting to prove, based on genital arousal, that bisexuality exists, researchers are discounting bisexual people’s lived experiences. It has also reignited a broader debate over the ethics of human sexuality research — and about what role, if any, scientists should play in validating the experiences of queer people.

For his part, Bailey defended the research, arguing that the phenomenon of bisexuality ought to be studied in order to be understood. “If we let the possibility that somebody is offended — particularly some identity group is offended — guide us in terms of what research we do,” he said, “we just won’t learn things, including about very interesting and important topics.”

John Sylla, an co-author on the paper and the president of the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB), a private foundation that funded some of the research covered in the re-analysis, said it was simply part of the process of science self-correcting. “It’s frankly one more step towards making bisexuality cool, assumed, and normal,” Sylla told Undark.

But others don’t find the study so benign. “The word that immediately sprang to my mind was condescending — and unnecessary,” said Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who identifies as bisexual.

“I worry most about establishing the premise that in order for people’s sexualities or identities of any sort to be valid,” he added, “they need to be first scientifically proven.”

FOR YEARS, SEX researchers have held differing opinions those who report strong attraction to people of multiple genders. “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual,” the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey wrote in 1948. “The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.”

But some researchers questioned whether bisexual men actually had substantial arousal to both male and female erotic stimuli, hypothesizing that bisexual-identified men were actually homosexual, and only claiming to be bisexual because it hewed closer to heterosexuality and, as a result, felt more socially acceptable. Starting in the 1970s, some researchers tried to bring concrete data to the question through a technique called plethysmography, which measures the change in volume or circumference of an organ or other part of the body.

In penile plethysmography, researchers typically use a circular strain gauge — essentially a small circle of rubber tubing, filled with a liquid conductor and connected to sensors — to measure changes in circumference of the penis. In the studies included in the new PNAS review, researchers instructed men on how to hook their penises up to a plethysmography device, then showed them pornographic videos and measured their genital arousal.

Critics of this method argue that it produces a highly artificial scenario: A participant is in an unfamiliar setting, with a strain gauge fastened around his penis, watching brief clips of porn that have been selected by someone else. They question how much this setup can tell researchers about real-world sexuality.

“It’s frankly one more step towards making bisexuality cool, assumed, and normal,” Sylla said.

Penile plethysmography also has a fraught history. Immigration officials in some countries have used it to test if gay-identified asylum seekers really were gay, and it’s still used by some U.S. courts to assess sex offenders’ attraction to children.

Nevertheless, some researchers have argued that the technique is useful for quantifying sexual arousal. And some early attempts to apply it to bisexual men suggested that their genital arousal diverged from their reported experiences. In Bailey’s influential 2005 study, for example, even though men reported being aroused by both male and female stimuli, their genitals seemed to prefer one or the other.

The study included just 33 men who identified as bisexual, and among these, only 22 produced sufficient arousal to any erotic stimuli to be included in the final result. Later studies would produce conflicting findings, and Lauren Beach, a research assistant professor studying stigma and LGBT health at Northwestern University and a founding member of the Bisexual Research Collective on Health, said that in making such a strong conclusion from a study with so few participants, the 2005 analysis amounted to “shoddy science.”

By drawing on a bigger dataset than in previous research, the new PNAS paper aimed to offer more definitive evidence than those individual studies. Nevertheless, it almost immediately ran into criticism from other researchers. In particular, many argued that the paper blurred the lines between genital arousal and sexual orientation — a concept that, many experts say, is more complex than a physical response. Sexual orientation “has multiple facets,” said Corey Flanders, an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College who studies health disparities in gender and sexual minority individuals. “It’s not just this physiological arousal measured by pupil dilation or genital arousal,” she said.

“Sexual orientation is a really broad and rich construct,” she added.

Jeremy Jabbour, a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Northwestern University and a lead author on the paper, said that he sympathizes with those criticisms. Jabbour, who himself identifies as queer, said that there was some disagreement between himself and the more senior authors about how the data should be presented. “There was a little back-and-forth about how we wanted to frame the paper, what the title should be, what kind of terminology we should use,” he told Undark. “I lost that battle.”

The use of the term “sexual orientation” in the paper, Jabbour said, was meant only to indicate patterns of genital arousal, and he thought it would be “very clear that we’re not talking about sexual orientation as a broader phenomenon.” But, he acknowledged, “that very clearly wasn’t the case.”

Bailey, who is no stranger to controversy, defended the team’s choice of terminology. “If a man produces a clear arousal pattern in our procedure, I trust that result more than I trust what that man says about his feelings,” he said, adding that he believes “that for men, the best understanding of sexual orientation is a sexual arousal pattern.”

To explain the rationale for physiological studies of arousal in bisexual men, Bailey invoked an old saying about bisexual men. “My gay friends, some of them, would say that you’re either gay, straight, or lying,” Bailey said. “I think that they often said this because they themselves went through a stage where they said they were bisexual, and they weren’t really.”

Other sex researchers, however, questioned whether measuring arousal can be used to confirm a person’s sexual orientation, noting that sexual orientation is complex and multidimensional. “We know that peoples’ attractions aren’t always conventional, and different things pique different peoples’ interests,” said Brian Feinstein, another sexuality researcher at Northwestern.

Beach, who uses they/them pronouns, agreed. “Who decides what is arousing?” they asked. “Like ‘you must be turned on by this video and if you’re not, you must be gay?’”

THE BACKLASH reflects a long history of debate over the role that scientific research should play in advocacy for queer communities.

Historically, advocates have drawn on the idea that an LGBT identity is innate to argue for marriage equality and against conversion therapies that claim to change sexual orientation — and that, experts say, are both fraudulent and deeply harmful. Surveys have suggested that people who believe sexual orientation is biologically determined are more supportive of gay rights than those who believe it is a choice.

Sylla and the American Institute of Bisexuality, which was founded by the human sexuality researcher Fritz Klein in 1998, have embraced that approach. The foundation focuses on research, education, and community building, and it runs websites such as Bi.org and Queer Majority. Sylla first reached out to Bailey after the 2005 study, and he told Bailey that AIB might be interested in funding further research. Six of the eight studies in the new PNAS analysis received funding from the organization.

“Who decides what is arousing?,”Beach asked. “Like ‘you must be turned on by this video and if you’re not, you must be gay?’”

“Sexuality has had such a bumpy ride with politics and morality,” Sylla said. “And some people thinking that orientation is a choice. It can perhaps be helpful to show people non-judgmental evidence that, in terms of science, people just have different appetites.”

In recent years, though, as LGBT people have gained wider rights in American society, more advocates and researchers have questioned why they need scientific evidence to validate their experiences of attraction and arousal. “I can understand the desire for AIB and for other bisexual people broadly to want to correct that narrative, to be like, ‘Oh, this research exists and I think it’s wrong, and I have the means and resources to try to step in and help generate a different narrative that more accurately reflects my existence, my truth,’” said Flanders of the AIB response to the 2005 study.

But Flanders is skeptical of the value that the research has for the bisexual community in 2020. “I think I feel similarly to a lot of other bisexual people and bisexual activists around the idea of: Is this a question that we actually need to ask in this way?” she said. “Can’t we take people’s word for it that an individual who identifies as bisexual is bisexual, and therefore bisexual men exist? It’s pretty simple and straightforward.”

Even though the study concluded that male bisexuality existed, “just by deeming it a necessary question, you’re immediately undermining the status of a massive group of people,” said Albery, the Georgetown researcher. Increasingly, Beach, Flanders, and Feinstein all said, human sexuality researchers take it as an accepted premise that bisexuality is a sexual orientation.

And, Beach argues, research questions that seem to doubt bisexual experience can themselves be harmful. “There are psychological studies that show denial and erasure of bisexual people’s sexual orientation,” they said, “causes direct psychological harm to bisexual people.”

“Can’t we take people’s word for it that an individual who identifies as bisexual is bisexual, and therefore bisexual men exist? It’s pretty simple and straightforward.”

Bailey, who has faced such criticisms before, continues to defend his research. “I inhabit a different world. And my world is the world that knowledge is good,” he said.

His research, he added, “has done a lot to de-stigmatize various groups over the years.” Groups expressing offense, he argues, have harmed the field: “I’ve been an academic since 1989. This is the worst time I have ever experienced as a scientist.”

Other researchers think the picture is less bleak. In a follow-up email to Undark, Flanders argued that, when people express offense at research, it can actually make science better, by pushing scientists to account for “a greater array of experience and perspectives.” Some sexuality research, she argued, seems mostly concerned with questioning whether some fundamental part of a person’s identity is real — an approach, she said, that forces queer people “to engage in an academic debate about their personhood.”

Instead, Flanders said scientists should question traditional assumptions about sexuality and center the lived experiences of marginalized people. “I do not believe that people being offended has made the world worse,” she wrote. “I believe people speaking out against systems of oppression is, again, essential to scientific progress.”

[cardentist]

the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target

like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny. it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from

but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other. 

the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.

so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.

the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place

a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well. 

however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example. at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough. this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces 

another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways. the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough? likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.

again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.

but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer. “misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.

in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.

again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level. 

but it just, Isn’t true. this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd.  and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it.  and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about. 

another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do.  again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are. misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations

trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.

part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together? the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.

[letterboxd]

Pure Verhoeven.

Writer and director Jeffrey McHale talks to Dominic Corry about his new documentary You Don’t Nomi—an examination of the cult surrounding Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 “masterpiece of shit”, Showgirls—and recommends a few campy sequels to watch afterwards.

Few films have enjoyed as interesting a post-release existence as Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 film Showgirls. A classic “blank check” movie—that is, a film made with unnatural freedom thanks to a director’s prior success—Verhoeven and controversial screenwriter Joe Eszterhas attempted to build on the success of their 1992 smash Basic Instinct by upping the on-screen sauce in a riff on All About Eve, set in the “high-stakes” world of Las Vegas striptease.

Elizabeth Berkley, at the time still defined by her performance as the (mostly) virtuous Jessie in the Saturday-morning teen sitcom Saved By The Bell, led the film as Nomi Malone, a young woman who arrives in Vegas, gets work stripping in a low-rent club, then ascends to the sought-after position of lead showgirl in a big casino’s “classy” choreographed striptease show, replacing the previous star Cristal Conners (Gina Gershon).

Proudly sporting the otherwise box-office-neutering NC17 rating, Showgirls was marketed as a serious adult drama about ambition and the price of success. It was not received as such, instead met with huge amounts of ridicule by audiences and critics alike. Pick a Letterboxd review at random, and you get, for example, “Beautiful direction, so if you put it on mute, it’d probably be great. But nearly every actor is sorely miscast and the script is the hottest garbage.”

Poor Berkley received a lot of the blame, and although she continued to work, the venomous (and often misogynistic) critiques hindered her career as a big-screen leading lady.

Then something funny happened—the film was re-evaluated as a camp classic, driven largely by the queer community, who embraced its over-the-top ridiculousness. The cult has grown considerably over the years, expanding into midnight screenings and even live stage adaptations. Subsequent DVD releases have leaned into the perception by offering commentary tracks that acknowledge the movie’s glorious failings.

Showgirls’ continued presence in the culture has even seen it experience something of an artistic redemption. Its perception is now well beyond that of being simply a camp classic that is so fun because it’s so bad—it’s a genuine cultural touchstone that tells us a lot about how audiences judge films featuring overt sexuality. Indeed, among the many ironies associated with the film is that it was partially designed to highlight American sexual hypocrisy, then failed spectacularly in a manner that effectively highlighted American sexual hypocrisy.

Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Berkley in ‘Showgirls’.

A brief survey of Letterboxd reviews finds plenty of fans. In a half-star review alongside the exhortation to “please for the love of God watch Showgirls”, Letterboxd member Jesse writes: “There shouldn’t be any shame in liking something you know is bad, I don’t have to try and re-codify Showgirls as a secretly good classic just because of how amazing it is. It truly deserves its cult following.” Jesse makes particular mention of the infamous swimming pool sequence, a scene “so unsexy… that it achieves camp euphoria, a pure moment of enlightened cheese that needs to be seen to be believed”.

“‘So bad it’s good’ it may be for some but I happen to be among the camp that thinks Showgirls is genuine good: a misunderstood work brimming with brilliance,” writes Jaime Rebenal, while Matt Lynch argues that it’s often mistaken for “a satire of American greed and attendant dreams of stardom, when its true target is the apparatus that sells those dreams to an endlessly returning audience of narcissistic suckers.”

Or, as Joe puts it, “The Rosetta Stone for understanding this entire movie (if not life itself) is the shot of Elizabeth Berkley angrily slamming a ketchup bottle on the table and causing a bright red stream of ketchup to come flying out.”

Jeffrey McHale’s ridiculously entertaining new documentary You Don’t Nomi looks at the cult of Showgirls from a multitude of angles, including the evolving critical and cultural perception of the film, how Verhoeven’s characterization of his intentions have changed over the years, the significance of the film within the LGBTQIA+ community, and how Berkley eventually emerged from the whole affair as something of a hero.

McHale makes fantastic use of footage from Verhoeven’s killer filmography to emphasize his points, alongside interviews with a variety of cultural critics. He tells the story of April Kidwell, the writer, producer and star of I, Nomi, a one-woman musical comedy about the life of Nomi Malone before and after her adventures in Showgirls. Kidwell is a fascinating presence in the film, and not just because she also played Nomi in the stage show Showgirls: The Musical! and Berkley’s character in the Saved By The Bell-inspired Bayside: The Musical!.

The twentieth-anniversary ‘Showgirls’ screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

The documentary features illuminating footage from the twentieth-anniversary screening of Showgirls at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, an event that Berkley attended, where she received a rapturous response from the thousands of fans present.

McHale attended that screening, and told Letterboxd that that’s where his deeper interest in the film was properly sparked.

Jeffrey McHale: I had seen it already, ten years prior to that, but that was the first time I saw it with an audience. I think that was, officially, the largest screening of Showgirls that has happened. There were 4,000 people there. I’m not from LA, but I’ve lived in LA for the last eight years, and I’ve gone to a couple of those Hollywood Forever screenings and I don’t think anyone in our group anticipated Elizabeth Berkley showing up. It felt epic. It was a historic moment in the afterlife of Showgirls.

I didn’t walk away [from that screening] thinking ‘I should make a documentary’, but I was mostly interested in kind of finding out more. You’re always curious if you can figure anything out about the intentions or what the filmmakers had in mind, so that’s what inspired me to start consuming everything that had been written about Showgirls. I read the Adam Layman book, the book of poems, [lots of] articles, and I was just scouring the internet for reviews. And what I found was this wide range of really interesting opinions, theories and people’s relationships with the film. Everything was just so different. You set out looking for answers, and it’s not about getting the answer for it, it’s about this ever-evolving relationship that we have with this piece of art.

At what point did you come to realize the degree to which the queer community had embraced this film? As a gay man myself, it feels like it’s part of the fabric of our culture, ’90s culture. The poet Jeffrey Conway, when I interviewed him, he said it perfectly: it’s just like in your DNA, you know? It appeals to the queer culture community, you cannot explain it but you’re just kind of drawn to it. I thought that was an interesting way of describing the experience of watching something like that.

This film appears to only be widening the cult of Showgirls. It’s been a really fun project, and I’ve been blown away by the response it’s getting. I didn’t really know what the end result would be when I started. I knew that whatever you make, there will be a very vocal and excited and enthusiastic fan base. I’ve been very surprised by the broad appeal. These are people who have never seen Showgirls and are really drawn to it, and find the message and the story, the culture, and the way that we consume media, the way that we critically talk about things. It’s been a wild ride.

The twentieth-anniversary ‘Showgirls’ screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

You point out the hypocrisy of how audiences are willing to see Verhoeven’s films as satirical when it comes to the violence (as with Robocop and Starship Troopers), but when it comes to the sex, the audience gets prudish. Paul and Joe talked about that on a lot of their press junket interviews: America’s fine with the violence and the violence gets you rated PG13, but then you have something as human as sex, then that’s shunned and discouraged. It was interesting going back and just looking at the way in which Elizabeth was criticized. And the way that Paul was criticized. Just the way she was ripped apart for her physical features and all that, it was disgusting. I think we’ve evolved a little bit further in that sense. I don’t think that you’d see a Gene Siskel review, the way that he describes her face, those details, like comparing which one was hotter, it was like: this is what we’re reviewing? Actresses’ physical attributes? It was disgusting. I think we’ve gotten better in that sense.

How did you encounter April Kidwell? She brought a lot to the film. She was one of the later additions to the project, after we’d started reaching out to people. I knew that she was in the musical. Then I found out that she had also done Saved By The Bell. It was really interesting that she played two Elizabeth Berkley characters, to get her opinion on it. From the very first phone call, she was just so open. I was blown away by her story and how vulnerable she was, just putting herself out there. She’s been very open about her experience and the way that it was therapeutic for her. She’s the heart and soul of Nomi. She’s somebody who went through something awful, disgusting, terrible, and now she’s found power and strength, within—specifically—the character. The act of performing Nomi on stage was therapeutic for her. It was an experience that no other person I spoke with had. She’s amazing.

Gina Gershon in ’Showgirls’.

I loved how you used footage from the other Verhoeven films to provide additional commentary. How did you come to adopt that filmmaking strategy? When I went in, I didn’t how much of that would play into the narrative. I wasn’t familiar with his earlier work. But when I started to go back and watched all of his Dutch films, I was surprised by how all the dots, everything just felt like it was connecting. All these motifs and scenes and shots. And how repetitively these things popped up. So I wanted a visual way, to kind of make it a subplot, where the characters were interacting with Showgirls, where their experience paralleled the contributors, so that was a way to visually tie it back to the argument that people like to think Showgirls sits by itself outside of all of Paul’s other films, like Starship Troopers, Robocop and Total Recall, but tying it into the argument that it’s Verhoeven at his purest, [which is what] I like to think of Showgirls as.

I’m a huge Verhoeven nut and I’d always been disturbed by the dog food subplot in Spetters [in which a takeout van sells croquettes made with jelly-meat], but I had never drawn the connection to Showgirls [in which Cristal and Nomi bond over both having once been so poor that they had to survive on dog food]. I’d also never noticed how much vomiting is a recurring motif for him. Yeah! Women vomiting! It was always women that were throwing up, which is just bizarre. The doggy chow thing I thought was interesting because [initially] I felt like ‘oh this is a Joe Eszterhas bit’, something from his script that’s just bizarre and weird, but then when I saw that thread from Spetters, it was just like ‘oh my god, you’ve done the whole eating doggy chow thing before’.

I’ve always been interested in Verhoeven’s evolving description of the film himself; how he has recast history a bit to say he was in on the joke, but the funniest thing I thought he ever said about it was that he regretted not putting a serial killer plot in Showgirls, because that would’ve distracted the Americans. Had you heard that? I have yes. I think Adam Layman mentioned that. [Verhoeven]’s like: “Basic Instinct was enough of a thriller that people could watch it.” That was something I’d heard a couple of times before. I think he’d actually been considering it, like a death or a murder or something.

Thanks for making your list of Campy Sequels To Watch After Showgirls. Talk us through them. What did you make of Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven? I’ve only seen clips. It’s a film that might be better in small doses, not one whole thing, because I think it’s, like, two and half hours long. I think it took me a couple of viewings to get through the whole thing. But it’s interesting because [filmmaker] Rena Riffel plays Penny/Hope in Showgirls. She wrote it, directed it and starred in it, and it follows her character playing off Nomi’s leaving Vegas to go to Hollywood. [Riffel] was in Mulholland Drive, so part of me thinks she was trying to do a David Lynch thing. Or a John Waters thing. She’s definitely very aware of the afterlife and the over-the-top campiness of it. So there’s all these little Easter eggs where she’s drawing comparisons to Showgirls. But it’s super low budget, and she kind of embraces that. I would recommend it to hard core fans of Showgirls; it’s definitely not a movie for everybody.

‘Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven’, featuring writer-director Rena Riffel (right) as Penny.

Grease 2 ‘Cool Rider’—amazing. Christmas-tree dress. I like that the gender roles were flipped. And it’s a fun movie. It’s a fun movie that I always enjoyed as kid.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch That was another one that I saw late. And I mean, the musical number, Hulk Hogan, just knowing that the director went all out and didn’t hold anything back. I mean—Vegetable Gremlin? There are just so many things it in that are bizarre, and it didn’t follow the traditional 80s/90s sequel formula.

Beyond The Valley of the Dolls Yeah. You know that Roger Ebert wrote that, right? That’s another one that’s probably closer to Showgirls 2 in the Russ Meyer aesthetic of it. But these are all films that had similar [critical trajectories]—it was panned when it came out but got [a] second life. I mean not to the scale that Showgirls has, but I think people revisit it and embrace it for what it

Magic Mike XXL It feels like they’re more in on the joke, and I kind of found it more enjoyable than the first one, just because it didn’t seem like it was taking itself so seriously. And Jada Pinkett Smith is kind of playing the Matthew McConaughey role. It’s The Big Chill meets Chippendales. And as far as the dance numbers go, it feels a lot campier and they’re a little bit more aware of what’s happening. Not as much as like a failed-seriousness kind of camp, but there’s something going on there.

Final question. Showgirls: good or bad? I call it a masterpiece of shit.

‘You Don’t Nomi’ is available to stream or rent on digital and VOD services.

[digitalhovel]

A review of “Juno Steel,” a hilarious and emotionally-driven queer space opera

           I recently began work as a DoorDash driver, and you know what that means: living in fear because you have to constantly expose yourself to shitheads who aren’t wearing masks? Yes. And also, lots of time in the car with nothing to do but listen to stuff. Which means I decided to go back and binge the first two seasons of one of my favorite podcasts, The Penumbra Podcast’s “Juno Steel” series. “Juno Steel” is an enjoyable, enthralling story about home, mental illness, and what it means to be good.

           The Penumbra Podcast, created by Sophie Takagi Kaner and Kevin Vibert, is an anthology series that focuses on telling interesting stories while representing marginalized sexual, romantic, and gender identities. It began with a Twilight Zone-esque series of narratives, each with a different setting and characters, but they now run two main storylines: “The Second Citadel” (a fantasy setting examining prejudice and relationships) and “Juno Steel” (a dystopian space noir set in Hyperion City, Mars). The Penumbra Podcast is one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, and it’s still going strong.

           The following contains spoilers for “Juno Steel” season one. If you want to give them a listen, try the remake of “Juno Steel and the Murderous Mask.” Episodes are 30-60 minutes, but the commitment is well worth it in the end.

The characterization in “Juno Steel” is one of the series’ strongest points. Juno Steel is a classic noir detective: determined, depressed, and damn stubborn. The first season of Juno Steel follows him as he uncovers a plot to harvest ancient Martian tech in order to kill the citizens of Hyperion City. Along the way, he develops a complicated relationship with a thief, Peter Nureyev, and their lives become inextricably linked. Juno is an ex-cop and struggles with several issues: trusting someone whose expertise is being untrustworthy, and also trusting literally anyone else. (Note: there is a brief, problematic moment between Juno Steel and a woman PI named Alessandra. I’ll explain at the bottom if you want a warning before listening.)

          Juno Steel is blunt and focused on good, on solving the problem, on doing his best even if it kills him. He struggles to take into consideration the wants and cares of others, and he often jeopardizes his relationships by jumping to conclusions and acting before thinking. Peter Nureyev is suave, collected, and always has a plan. Their dynamic is incredibly fun to listen to because

1.      The acting by Joshua Ilon (Juno) and Noah Simes (Nureyev), is incredible (as is the work of everyone in the cast), and the writing carries their chemistry incredibly well

2.      They are forced into situations where each must give up their expertise and authority to help the other

This challenges their pre-conceived notions of the world, and it gives their characters places to develop and grow throughout the season. It also provides rife opportunities for comedy. Juno is sardonic and blunt, and Nureyev is witty and concise. Every character has a distinct voice, a distinct sense of excitement, and a distinct humor that makes each episode worth listening to as the creators tackle various tropes in the genre and spin an exciting mystery. While Juno often has a low speaking tempo, his secretary Rita gives monologues in seconds. These small moments of contrast build a broad and unique cast that make every interaction dramatic, and often hilarious. These character beats continue to influence the characters in season two, as Juno has to begin grappling with his own senses of responsibility, his past, and his guilt as he continues trying to do good in the world.

          This idea of ‘good’ pervades the message of both seasons of Juno Steel. The Juno of season one is obsessed with self-sacrifice and self-destruction. The creators have never been shy about Juno having mental illness, namely, depression. In his case, he lashes out at people who disagree with him and can’t see consequences of actions that aren’t his. Somehow, it’s always his fault. But the rest of the characters disagree with that philosophy. The Penumbra Pod presents a great deal of viewpoints on coping with feelings of grief, responsibility and guilt, from self-destruction to bottling it up and moving on to just trying to live every day to forget about the one before. No one is right, but the diversity of opinions provokes genuine thought in the listener. The show deals with heavy themes but the characters are grounded and deal with their grief, guilt, and fear in realistic and dynamic ways, letting the audience learn alongside Juno as his perspective slowly opens up.

          The following contain serious spoilers for “Juno Steel,” season two.

          It’s a testament to the writing that Juno learns from these lessons. In season two, he’s less self-destructive, but still driven to making the world a better place, fueled by his guilt and his past. Season two of Juno Steel features and more nuanced villain, Ramses O’Flaherty (heavily influenced by Walt Disney). Ramses wants to create a good world, plain and simple. The issue is, he thinks his version of good is universal, and he has the power and resources to try to enforce it with impunity. It’s a tense narrative that forces Juno to examine his own motivations for doing his job and perspectives regarding the place he calls home. He struggles between idealism and defeatism, even deciding whether violence is needed or useful in his line of work. But again, the core message of the series is simple: we can never make those changes alone. Only by working willingly with others and listening to them can Juno begin to decide what he considers to be good. While the political situation of “Juno Steel” season two doesn’t mimic our own (I wish our public leaders had only good intentions [they don’t]), it is an inspirational story about the value of trying to grow as a person and begin accepting help from others and trusting them when it’s needed. Because goodness is based in how we affect the world and the people around us. These days, found family can be more real than blood relations, and solidarity is the greatest path towards building a better world.

          In short, The Penumbra Podcast is great. They’re telling interesting, unique, entertaining, queer, gender-diverse stories through personal and diverse lenses, and they’re doing a great job of it. “Juno Steel” has been influential in my life, both as validation for my emotional and psychological experiences, and my changing perspective as I try to learn about myself and do better all the time. Because Juno isn’t perfect. He makes mistakes; we all do. But we get to watch him learn, and in the process, maybe learn something about ourselves.

          If you do listen to them and enjoy it, here’s a link to their website, where they host episodes (you can also find them on most podcast-listening mediums), and their Patreon.

*The creators of The Penumbra Podcast have addressed this, but in “Juno Steel and the Prince of Mars, part 1,” Juno non-consensually kisses Alessandra Strong. The writers have said they wish they hadn’t done it or could redo it because it’s a problematic noir trope, and they wrote it in to confirm that Juno is canonically bisexual. The incident does not come up again, and in future discussions, Juno and Alessandra have a relatively healthy working relationship. Some other concerns have been raised with their presentation of other relations on TPP, and the creators have acknowledged that they are also growing and trying to do the best to present their stories in a positive way, but they also can’t be made into pillars of the queer community. They have individual perspectives and are trying to reflect that. I, for one, believe them, and I hope you’ll still give their podcast a try.

[scripttorture]

Torture in Fiction: Tokyo Ghoul, Volume 7

My dear, sweet Anon- what on earth did I just read?

Tokyo Ghoul is a manga centred on a young man called Ken Kaneki in a world where humans share the world with ‘ghouls’, supernatural people that eat human flesh (and coffee for some reason). After an accident Ken has an organ transplant which turns him into a half-ghoul.

At the start of the volume I read Ken has been captured by a group of ghouls. He’s tortured. His torturer has Ken do simple arithmetic as he’s tortured, allegedly to ‘keep him sane’. For some reason his hair turns white.

The ghoul torturing him (Yamori) tells Ken his backstory, which essentially boils down to the idea that Yamori became a torturer because he was tortured.

Ken hallucinates a fair amount during all of this, reflecting particularly on his relationship with his mother and the ghoul whose organs saved his life.

Yamori returns with two human victims, a mother and child. He tries to make Ken choose which one should die. Ken refuses to choose and Yamori kills them both. This   somehow leads to Ken having the strength to break out of his restraints.

Ken and Yamori fight, Ken eventually gains the upper hand. He eats part of Yamori, making Yamori do the same mathematical exercises as he does.

Ken escapes, running into a group of friends as he does. He takes charge of the group and leads them safely out.

As is probably obvious I didn’t enjoy reading this much. But I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the manga itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

I’m giving it 1/10

The Good

1) Torture does not turn Ken into a passive object. Throughout this chapter his opposition to Yamori is clear and torture only entrenches that.

2) Torture has an effect on Ken. I don’t like the way it’s handled but the story doesn’t have a survivor walking away completely unaffected.

The Bad

Alright where do I start? Let��s start with the small things.

1) Nico seems to be there to provide a stereotype of queer people. It’s unclear whether Nico is supposed to be a gay man or a transwoman. They’re in the story to get eviscerated by Yamori. This is to ‘calm Yamori down’ and stop him killing Ken too soon. I have- Issues with the only queer character being a stereotype who exists to be abused by their significant other.

2) I have no idea how turning Ken’s hair white is supposed to add to these scenes. To me it feels very much like an insistence that survivors have some kind of obvious, physical mark of torture. Even when they have superhuman healing powers.

3) While Ken does undergo a pretty drastic personality change (which we see via his hallucinations) and might be experiencing depression- immediately after torture and a huge fight he lurches straight into a leadership position. This is framed as him being sensible. It downplays the effects of torture to a huge degree.

4) The human victims only exist as a way to effect Ken. They don’t seem to have any personality or story of their own. They don’t resist. They cry and beg Ken to save them. And this positioning reinforces the idea that torture turns people into passive objects by making their victimisation all about Ken.

Yamori- oh lore what a mess. This story depicts torturers in an incredibly unrealistic way, it echoes arguments that are used to block real survivors from the treatment and protection they deserve.

5) Yamori is depicted as enjoying and excited by violence, treating torture as a hobby. This is not how torturers behave. The narrative links this to insulting stereotypes about mental illness.

6) The evidence we have suggests that torturers are sane before they torture and that it is exposure to violence over a prolonged period that causes their mental health problems. These illnesses do not make them ‘enjoy’ violence. In fact they’re the same broad symptoms that survivors suffer from.

7) Yamori’s open enjoyment of torture isn’t just unrealistic in the context of torturers, it’s linking mental illness that he explicitly developed as a result of being tortured to violent behaviour. It’s essentially saying that torture survivors become violent. That this abuse produces abusers. There’s no evidence to support this notion and it’s an argument that’s routinely used to deny real survivors support.

8) I really dislike the way the narrative implies that Yamori’s abuse makes Ken ‘stronger’. That he needs to be tortured and watch people die before he can physically break out of his restraints. Torture doesn’t ‘toughen people up’, it destroys lives.

9) I think that leaves the arithmetic. I’m honestly not sure what the author is going for with this. Ken says something to the effect that if he hadn’t done mental arithmetic while he was tortured he’d have ‘gone mad’. Which tells me that the author doesn’t really understand mental illness. Some torture survivors report mental exercises helping but they don’t protect from or negate symptoms. They don’t make survivors ‘sane’. And ‘madness’ doesn’t make victims stop feeling or stop caring about, pain. There are a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes about mental illness bound up in this idea and I’m not convinced the idea itself brings anything to the story.

Miscellaneous

The torture in this story is scarring and obvious. Usually for a story set in the modern day I’d put that down as a negative. Because most torture now doesn’t leave obvious external marks.

But this is also a fantasy story where the majority of the cast have supernatural healing powers. Techniques that would be scarring or fatal for a normal person wouldn’t necessarily be either in this setting. It would make sense for there to be differences between the common torture techniques in our world and in this one.

As a result I don’t think this is necessarily a negative point. But I’m not convinced the author thought about that before writing this.

Overall

I read this in isolation so I’ll happily acknowledge that context may have given the book more emotional weight. But mostly- damn I found this dull.

The impact of the scenario seems to rely on a reader not having encountered torture in a story before, or at least not in a way that focuses directly on the abuse. Looking at it, every other panel seemed to be screaming ‘LOOK! HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING SO AWFUL BEFORE?! FEEL SOMETHING!’

This rather loses it’s effect when you have even a passing awareness of torture in the real world. Because it shifts the internal response to the work from ‘oh my gosh how horrid’ to ‘oh, I see you traced that from the Abu Ghraib photos’.

When that’s mixed with an author who clearly lacked either the ability or the will to engage with the subject matter the result is flat. There’s no emotional resonance in any of these scenes for me, no reason to care about the characters. Rather then being shocked I found the ‘twists’ incredibly rote and predictable.

The way torture is used to reinforce Ken’s opposition to Yamori could have been quite positive. But it’s the exception in this portrayal of torture rather then the rule.

Torture turns Yamori’s other victims into passive objects who in Nico’s case seem willing to be victimised. It turns Yamori into a torturer. As a result the end message isn’t that people generally can survive torture and keep their humanity; it’s that only exceptional heroes can.

You could argue that for someone who doesn’t know anything about torture a rote story like this could be moving. But that seems pretty meaningless when the story in question misrepresents torture, torture survivors and torturers at every turn. The use of torture in this story reinforces misconceptions that harm victims and that allow torturers to act with impunity.

Torture apologia shouldn’t be anyone’s introduction to a complex and emotionally demanding subject.

The end result is that I don’t think torture added anything to this story at all. In fact I think cutting out all the pages of torture would have left room for a much more impactful story about Ken’s friends desperately trying to find him as the police close in around them all.

If anything I think torture takes from this story; it blunts the emotional impact of what could have been a powerful plot by focusing on torture apologia and gore.

For all that it borrows imagery from real world abuses it pulls back from the horror of those abuses. Because central to the image of a boy tied to a chair in a police station is this: people can be made to vanish. No matter how loved, how cherished, how important. Sometimes, for some communities, children can go out and never come home. And often there are no answers, no closure. There’s certainly no rallying in the local coffee shop and deciding to take on the mob or the police.

There’s just loss and mourning and false hope. It’s happening today.

I suppose ultimately for me, it feels as though Tokyo Ghoul chose the most tedious way to tell this story.

Available on Wordpress.

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[sophygurl]

WisCon43 - re: programming

I’ve been thinking about conversations (both online and off) held this year about WisCon’s programming - lack of certain kinds of diversity, reasons why that might be, and what to do about it. As someone who writes up a lot of panels, goes to a lot of panels, sits on a lot of panels, and although I didn’t mod this year - has moderated her fair share of panels, I’ve been thinking about it from all of those perspectives.

My perspective is also of someone who has a balance of ways in which I am and am not marginalized. I won’t list every single thing as that would be tedious and non-productive, but to share some of the biggies: I’m disabled, queer, and genderqueer; I am also white, cis, and neither an immigrant or the child of immigrants. If I get stuff wrong in any of the areas I’m privileged in, I very much welcome correction and feedback. Also, none of us these communities are monoliths - so conversation from all angles is always helpful. 

To those who may have missed some of these conversations, my impression is that it flowed from a few starting points: 1) people new/new-ish to WisCon who therefore weren’t as aware of how programming works differently at this 100% volunteer-run con, 2) people unaware that certain demographics of the con (specifically mentioned were poc - particularly blpoc, and trans/non-binary folk) have grown tired of being The Diversity People on panels, 3) some incidents at last year’s con - while handled by safety and anti-abuse teams well - did contribute to folks from certain marginalizations either not wanting to come or at least not wanting to actively participate in programming this year.

I don’t have a lot of thoughts on those points. I have never been on the concom, don’t know a lot of about the behind the scenes stuff that goes on, and while there are certainly things we can do (”we” meaning both the folks officially doing stuff bts and all of us as a community who care about the con) to make the con feel and be safer for everyone and to encourage more people to participate - we certainly can’t make people continue to do frustrating 101-level work educating people about their own identities year after year.

What I DO have thoughts on are the other starting points some of these conversations flowed from, which I perceived to be: 1) this panel description touches on specific marginalizations but the issues affecting those marginalizations were not brought up by panelists, 2) when someone from the audience asked questions relating to those marginalizations, the panelists didn’t know what to say, 3) when there were people with and without certain privileges on a panel - sometimes the people with privilege talked over the people without them.

These are all very fixable issues, and indeed I have seen these issues dealt with in very positive and productive ways in the past, so I wanted to share a little bit about my experiences when I’ve thought it has gone well.

Panel Writing.

The first stage of programming at WisCon is submitting panel ideas to the programming department. I write a lot of panels up (ask the programming department lol), and I write up panels on a broad variety of topics from Important Issue panels to fun squee panels. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when writing up panels with a nod to intersectional feminism and diversity inclusion:

When writing a panel about a Serious Issue, make sure there is some language about the ways in which other intersections are impacted by the Issue. For example, if I’m writing up a panel about queerness, I might slip in a phrase also asking the panelists to think about ways in which race or class affect the Queer Issue at hand. That way it’s baked in. Hopefully (and you can’t control this if you’re not on the panel yourself - but hopefully), the moderator and panelists will take those intersectional issues into consideration in their discussion. 

When writing up a more fun fannish panel, STILL make sure to include a statement or two asking the panelists to consider ways in which Fan Thing touches on issues of race, gender, what have you. For example, “yaddayadda fun thing! Also, how do we feel about the show’s treatment of race?” Again, the idea is to bake it right in there so that the panelists are already (hopefully) thinking about those things and won’t be caught off guard when the audience is wanting or expecting them to discuss it a little bit.

When suggesting a panel, you can suggest potential panelists. You can either do this specifically as in “Person A would be a great addition to this panel!” or more generally with a note asking “please make sure at least one panelist is X identity”. None of these things are guarantees, of course, but it helps programming see what you’re going for. Another idea for when it’s essential that a panel is comprised of specific folk is to hand-staff the panel. That means it’s not open for volunteers and only the people who have been pre-selected can sit on the panel. (I believe this is how panels at many other cons are naturally run?? It’s just not the default for WisCon where we like lots of volunteers and self-selection.)

Another thing to keep in mind is thinking about who your potential audience is going to be. You can delineate in the panel description whether this is meant to be a 101 or higher level discussion. You can bake in the idea that this panel is jumping off from a panel held in a previous year and the panelists won’t be doing much in the way of backgrounding that. You can say “this is NOT a panel about ...” to make it clear this panel is about Issue Y and only about Issue Y. There are lots of ways to make it clear what the panel should and shouldn’t be about, which again, is not a guarantee, but certainly helps move the panel in the right direction.

Panel formation.

When asking to be on a panel, you can make a note about why you want to be on it, or why you want to moderate it. This is a handy place to speak about your identity pieces (IF you want - nobody is forced to do this). For example, on a panel about disability, I might type in a little note talking about my specific disabilities and possibly how my queerness informs my disability. That way, if there are ten people with similar disabilities as mine asking to be on the panel - programming can decide that maybe I don’t need to be there. Or if no one else has mentioned queerness as part of their identity, they might put me on to make sure that’s a voice being included. 

When you get assigned to a panel, you see the names and emails of the other folks on the panel with you. If you’ve been coming to the con for awhile, you might be able to see right then where a problem area might be - like, holy cow this panel about TV show with black main character is skewing very white! Or perhaps that panel about the intersection of X and Y has mostly folks with experience X and not Y! What do? Well, there’s a few things that I’ve seen done/have done.

One thing is to reach out and see if people from the underrepresented group want to join you on the panel! You can do this quietly by asking folks you know personally, put out calls on social media, ask programming to help you locate some folks, or even put up notes in the green room once at the con asking for folks with identity Y to volunteer. 

I’ve also been on panels where none of the above happened, but I’ve looked out into the audience and seen friends with Identity Y who I know are usually up for talking at a moment’s notice and asked if they’d join us. (This can backfire if your friend with Identity Y is just sick to death of talking about their identity, but if you ask it in a nice enough way, hopefully they’ll feel comfortable saying nah, I’m here to listen this time) 

This can also happen as the email conversations begin and everyone starts sort of awkwardly saying things like “well, I think we should talk about asexuality but I’m not ace...” and suddenly you realize you’ve left out an important part of the conversation. As in the above scenario, sometimes you can reach out and include that perspective. But sometimes you can’t. What do then?

One thing I’ve seen done/have done is to have the moderator acknowledge the issue at the start of the panel. “We all understand that an ace perspective, or perspective X, is an important one for this topic, but none of us are ace, so we’re just gonna do our best on that part and if we mess it up, we hope someone with that perspective will correct us!” This accomplished a few things: 1) it lets the audience know that you know there is a flaw there so they’re not sitting there wondering why tf you’re not talking about Thing X as much as they’d expected, 2) allows folks in the audience with perspective X the opportunity to speak up if they’re feeling like they want their perspective shared (example: “you mentioned that none of you are ace, I’m asexual and wanted to share that...”). It might be important for the mod to even seek out “comment not a question” in those specific instances. 

Sometimes, as happened my very first time moderating, it turns out that someone in the audience has a very unique and important perspective and the rest of the panelists just kinda do chinhands listening to them for a bit and THAT IS OKAY. 

You might even get all the way to the panel and not realize until someone in the audience speaks up that you are lacking an important perspective. What do??

This weekend, I witnessed a panel where this happened and the panelists all just asked the audience member if they’d come up and be on the panel with them! Now, like the example above of asking a friend in the audience at the start of the panel, this won’t Always work. Perhaps the audience member does not Want to share their perspective - they only want to make sure that perspective is being covered. That is 100% fair! No one should feel forced or pressured to insta-join a panel! But giving someone the option can be a great way around accidental gaps in inclusion. 

Doing the panel. 

Now, it’s not always possible to flesh your panel out with diverse perspectives. Despite trying all of the other things, perhaps no one with Identity X wants to sit on your panel. Or perhaps there are too many intersections for a panel of 6 to even cover all of them. Or maybe no one even realized how important Issue Y was to Panel Z until Panel Z got underway. But STILL there are things you, the panelists and moderator, can do!

The most important thing you can do is to make sure you’re prepared for the stuff baked into the panel. Even if you believe the make-up of the panel is sufficient to cover a specific issue, what if the 2 poc panelists end up unable to make it to the con or the 1 Deaf panelist got sick or the person you thought you remembered was Jewish - ooops turns out you had mistaken them for someone else? Listen, this stuff happens. So Be Prepared. 

No, as a white person, I absolutely cannot and should not speak on the experiences of people of color. That would be wildly inappropriate. But what I can do, and try to do, is educate myself ahead of time on how the topic at hand affects or is affected by issues of race. If there are poc on the panel willing and able to touch on those things - perfect! Worst thing that happens is that I got a little more educated, which is the opposite of a problem anyway. But if it turns out that it’s only me and another white panelist and the audience is asking questions about race, I can at least say something like “from what I’ve read in this article/heard my poc friends saying/saw online from poc fans.... it seems like XYZ might be true but also could be a problem because of ABC”. Heavy disclaimers should abound, but, yes, it is possible to at least address an issue even if that issue doesn’t directly affect you. In fact, Tired Queer in the Corner might be really happy that you Straight Ally on the Panel did your homework. 

If you can’t prepare - if an issue sneaks up on you - just be honest about that and still try to do your best! “Oh, wow, I just realized we never discussed in our pre-panel discussion how the issue of religion impacts this topic, but now that this audience member has brought it up - can any of us speak on that?” If it turns out that, no, none of us can speak on that - toss it to the audience. “Can anyone else address this?” Again, this is a potential backfire situation, but worse case scenario no one wants to address it, you can apologize, pledge to do better next time, and move on. The toss-it-to-the-audience approach also only generally works in smaller panels where audience participation is easily done. If you’re on a dais with a large crowd and no wireless mics - you might have to forgo that particular work-around.

Other options include post-panel discussions. Moderator: “We only have ten minutes left and we never did hit topic X. If anyone - panelists and audience alike - would like to discuss this, we can move into the overflow room to dig in deeper.” That’s one approach. Another is to take it to twitter, or other online discussion. “Sorry we didn’t get to any audience questions about Y - but please add your comments to the # and we’ll do our best to reply in the coming days!” Last year I moderated a panel with a lot of very intelligent and wordy panelists and we literally ran out of time right before I would have gone to audience questions. But that hashtag was busy and lots of us went to it after the panel and had some lovely conversations with some of our audience members that way. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s another way to try and get to the stuff that might otherwise be missed.

Also - be aware of your privileges and make sure you are privileging the voices of those you have privilege over. This weekend, I caught myself interrupting a fellow panelist of color and stopped mid-interruption, doing the sort of “no, continue” motion and set the mic down to make sure I didn’t do it again until they were finished. It happens to all of us, and most of us at WisCon are in positions where we have some and don’t have other privileges. As a panelist - try and remember where yours are and be mindful of when to stop talking. 

As a moderator - you have to do this and Also keep in mind your fellow panelists intersections and possibly step in when you notice the white lady keeps monopolizing the conversation or the cishet dude to keeps talking over the queer woman. It’s part of the mod’s job to make sure everyone is heard, so if you don’t believe you’re capable of doing that part you need to either 1) ask someone to help you or 2) not moderate in the first place. [And BTW, asking for help is okay! We don’t all have the same skill sets, so asking one of your panelist buds to help you in an area you lack is not a bad thing to do!]  

So those are some of my ideas on how to make sure more voices and types of voices are being heard in panels. I’d love if people added their own! Thanks to everyone who made it a priority for us to keep having these conversations. 

[magicianmew]

Low magic, gender, ceremagi, a big clusterfuck pie...

So this is something that has been gnawing away at me for damn near the entirety of the time I've been firmly planted in my practice, but especially since the whole this-is-douchecanoe thing went down (they're not worth my tag).

A few days ago I reblogged this post, which talks about how this-isn't-sparta is clearly coming from an occultist background, and seems to be embodying all of the sexist, ableist, elitist, and dogmatic crap that we've come to know and love from a particular and unfortunately vocal segment of that community.

But then this happened.

These practices within themselves are very male-centric. They seem more left brain than right. More confrontational than accepting.

Wait, what?

Now, I am not trying to call anyone out at all here. I ain't mad. I just wanna unpack this a little bit and actually look at it. 'K? I’m only using this because it's a convenient and ready-to-hand example, but the mindset is absolutely everywhere in the magical world.

Why do we as a community view low magic as being an inherently a "feminine" and "illogical" branch of magic? Why do we view it as something that is yielding and disorganized and void of the sort of study that can go into ceremonial magic? Even the people who practice it seem to accept this stereotype, even as they're surrounded by books and attempting some extremely punishing hedge work for the 34928057498th time.

I actually don't know. Because none of that is remotely true, in my experience of practicing primarily low magic.

Also note: I continue to refer to it as "low" for the same reason I continue to self-identify as "witch." In both cases, it's a practice usually associated with the underclass, which is an important part of the history of these practices. And I don't want to erase that. It keeps me humble. Anyway...

Let's talk about low magic. Folk magic. Po' people magic. Community magic.

Obviously there are thousands of different varieties of low magic -- several just for every culture in any given era. But they share a few broad things in common.

Firstly, they have an absolutely vast knowledge base. In order to effectively work most historical or true traditional forms of low magic, you need to have a working knowledge of botany, geology, history, cooking, distillation, the food web, migrational patterns, astronomy...

Learning how to perform the full body of work of most low magical traditions literally requires a full interdisciplinary education, fam. They involve a shit-ton of left-brain thinking, knowledge acquisition, and logical work. I have learned more about science from my practice than I did from my formal education, ok?

Even if you try to whatabout modern, novel forms of low magic, it still stays true. A tech witch, for example, might require a damn near photographic knowledge of the grid of their city and a couple of different coding languages, in addition to several of the disciplines above.

Let's keep something in mind, here. Low craft is the mother of modern medicine. The magician and the healer were the same person throughout most of history, and if you look back on what few ancient low magic books exist, you will find medicinal concepts that we still use to this day.

Low craft is, and has always been, a deeply research- and knowledge-based way of working. It couldn't possibly have given birth to something as expansive and world-changing as medicine if it weren't.

What is different about low magic compared to ceremonial, and I think where this concept of it being "less disciplined" comes from, is that low magic is performatively flexible. Because it is a craft developed and used by people with unpredictable access to materials, time, or places, it is meant to be adapted to a non-ideal situation pretty much on the fly. That is exactly why it has such a vast body of knowledge behind it: because the more you know, the more ready you are to do the work you need no matter what situation you might find yourself in.

Ceremonial magic is, well, what it says on the box: ceremonial. And because the experience of watching a ceremonial working seems much more procedural than watching a low magic working, people have somehow concluded the low magic involves less knowledge. That is not remotely true. The knowledge just comes in at a different point in the process, i.e. how they even got to the point of doing a working at all, when they had nothing but a spoon, two pennies, and a waxing moon at their disposal.

Hell, low magicians even adapt ceremonial magic. Hoodoo workers know all about the Seals of Solomon, and they make them work beautifully even without the usual prescribed ceremony.

Now let's talk a little bit about these... gender ideas. This is a whole complicated ball of icky, slippery worms.

There's two concepts going on here:

That ceremonial magic is "male."

That "male-ness" is confrontational and intolerant.

Ok. *rubs temples*

It is undeniable that ceremonial magic is dominated by men, and it always has been.

But that does not mean that low magic is "a woman's practice." That is not even remotely true, and it never has been.

Low magic has historically been communal. In many places, it still is even now. Practitioners have always been both male and female. Sometimes they held different titles, sometimes they didn't. Usually, deference was simply determined by age and length of time practicing, not gender or anything else.

As a matter of fact, magical practice was one of the few places where we continued to see relative gender equality even after patriarchy began to take over many societies in the world. Magic continued to be a practice of merit and communal assistance, not something where your gender decided your competence or your station in the magical community.

From Britain's cunning folk to black root doctors, both African and diasporic, both men and women have always been magic workers in low practice, and there is little to no evidence of them disrespecting each other, or assuming one's magic is inferior to the other's because of their gender alone. There is no black man who ever wanted to cross a root working woman, I guarantee you!

Ok. So now let's tackle this "male-ness is confrontational and intolerant" thing.

No. Toxic masculinity is confrontational and intolerant.

So then why do we see that particular problem more often in ceremonial magic, which has always been a male-dominated practice?

Because ceremonial magic is not just male-dominated. More specifically, it is dominated by white, Western, higher-class men, who are also usually straight and virtually always cisgender. Let's just get that right, here.

This isn't a problem with "male-ness." It is a problem with the people at the very top of the kyriarchal totem pole, and it's the same problem we always see with this group of people, whether we're talking about Congress or gentrification. It's no different.

Ceremonial magic has historically been the property of powerful, wealthy men who were part of the ruling class. From popes to aristocrats, the development of ceremonial magic has grown directly from that power system.

"Male-ness" does not dictate one's personality. "Male-ness" does not inherently make one intolerant of other people. Unexamined, unchecked privilege is what does that. "Male-ness" means nothing other than the state of occupying a male-identified gender and/or body.

The strong and persistent community of men that has always been present in low magic alongside their female counterparts is no less male. And we shouldn't degrade the potential and decency of men who work at these things by assigning them a personality without even examining it for truth first.

We also really need to stop defining everything feminine as yielding, weak, or illogical -- the implicit opposite of the strong, dominating, and procedural "male" practice. It doesn't lift up women to define their work and their encyclopedic knowledge as being somehow lesser or weaker like that.

I know that, most of the time, people don't mean it like this because it's just beaten into our heads to think of female-ness this way, to the point where all of us will, at some point, just parrot it back without even thinking about it (me included), but it's a back-handed defense at best. We need to acknowledge the power, knowledge, and work of the magic women do. We need to get better at examining those assumptions within ourselves that their work isn't as good.

Just as a general concept, we need to stop trying to shoe-horn the gender binary and its tired stereotypes into the way we see ourselves as magic workers, and the way we see our magic. That’s as true in low magic as in ceremonial.

And finally...

I can pretty much hear all the ceremonial magicians who are mad as fuck at me right now and ready to bang away at their keyboards about how they're female or disabled or queer or whatever.

Ok, stop for a second.

I know.

'K?

I know that. I know there are lots of you coming from less privileged backgrounds, struggling for the spoons to do your work, etc.

And I really hope you're going to use that to take back ceremonial magic from that ugly history, and turn it into something that's for everyone and works equally for the magical empowerment of all people.

You can totally do that, now that we have this here thing called the internet. And I follow several people who partake in problematic practices with the specific intent of re-envisioning them as something better. Great. Wonderful. Please do that.

But in order to do that, you have to recognize the roots of where it came from. You can't tackle these problems by pretending they don't exist, just like you can't be an ally to black people without acknowledging the problems of whiteness.

It's not personal. It's a fact of both the historical and present-day climate of that community.

We need to acknowledge that people like this-are-donut are pretty common in that community. And in order to make it a better space for you, it's to your benefit to fight back against that degradation of other people just as much as we do in the low magic community. I mean, let's be real, those people don't respect you any more than they respect me. What do you gain out of defending them? Nothing. If you won't do it for any other reason, do it for you.

To those of you already cleaning house, thank you.

To those of you who are gonna say my community has problems too, yes, I know. Name me one time ever that I've denied that or not come out against it whenever I see it, from racist crafters to Nazis in paganism. So please just... don't. Today we're talking about ceremagi's laundry. I talk about mine plenty, ok?

So anyway.

TL;DR If you're a low magician of any sort, your knowledge is just as deep and hard-won as that of any ceremonial magician. Stop accepting the premise at face value that it is somehow a lesser practice.

We also need to stop associating low magic as being "for women." Low magic has a rich history of gender inclusion, and in some societies even LGBT inclusion. Men have shown themselves perfectly capable of working peaceably with us. There is no reason they can't in ceremonial magic just as they have in low magic.

In the spirit of the holiday, let's try to keep this productive. I've really tried my best, here.

Happy Ostara for my pagans buds, and Happy Easter for my Christian witches. Have a good'un.

[2rebeccakeyte]

Podcast Script

Taking vs. Making: Exploring Cultural Appropriation In Music 

Intro:

Hi there! I’m Rebecca Keyte, and today I’m going to be exploring cultural  identities and appropriation in music. I will be discussing the concept of world music, cultural appreciation vs. appropriation, and why the history of african american music is so important to todays industry.

World Music:

Oxford Dictionary defines the term “world music” as: “traditional music from the developing world, sometimes incorporating elements of Western popular music.” 

I’m sure a lot of you will agree with me when I say that I feel like this definition is culturally insensitive, I mean why is Western music almost placed on this capitalist infused pedestal above everyone else, with all of these various intricate sub-genres, while music from other cultural backgrounds is just sort of lazily dumped into the same category as “music from the rest of the world”?

You’ll find a lot of people agree that this term is outdated and outright offensive, I”m going to read a statement from 2015, but sadly it’s still relevant today, this was written by a journalist called Mulu for True Africa .com, he states 

“The term ‘world music’ has no place – and never had a place – in the world in which we live. It might have been created with the best of intentions but it is not a representative and universal term. It segregates music.” And he goes on to say, 

“It’s born from the untrue, unsaid, unexpressed thought that everything that comes from the west is the pinnacle of everything; that it is the one thing that is happening in the world that is worth taking the time to enjoy; the only way forward; the only way to the future.”

Now this was five years ago, yet cultural appropriation in Western Music seems to be becoming a larger and larger issue. People are still talking about it and having conversations like we are right now but nothing seems to be changing, surely there must be a better way to market music that comes from all across the globe?

Black history in music:

Cultural appropriation in pop music, in my opinion, is only making this matter worse. Now, this is a very broad topic but I’m going to focus on African American culture in music as a prime example. In order to truly understand why these terms and outdated perspectives are truly damaging and offensive, I personally believe that you need to understand the roots of popular African American music in the Western World.

If I say the name “Big Mama Thornton’,  you probably wouldn’t know who I’m talking about but of course you’ve heard of Elvis. Big Mama Thornton was the original writer and performer of Elvis’ hit single Hound Dog, but because she was a black, queer woman, they gave the song to a young white man and almost put the record through a westernised filter to make it more marketable to the public, keeping the blues elements that made it such a great song, but stripping it of any passion and authenticity that this woman originally poured into the track.

And this is what they did to black performers at the time, blues and jazz came from the sorrow and oppression that african americans in harlem felt at the time due to being treated like second class citizens because of the colour of their skin. a black, queer woman called Ma Rainey was practically the godmother of blues, but most of the songs she wrote and performed were sold to major record labels, highly censored and given to white performers. 

Oxford defines cultural appropriation as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices and ideas from other cultures” so I believe that the cultural appropriation that occurs in music today is still so damaging due to these terrible origins of taking from the oppressed.

Appropriation and Examples:

So lets explore modern cultural appropriation in music, and with that historical context i just gave, i hope that I can highlight just how awful a lot of the things that are happening in the industry today truly are.

I’m going to quote the journalist Michele Mendez because she puts this so well, she states:

“Post Malone, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars and Iggy Azalea, all non-Black artists, are known for performing music like R&B and hip-hop influenced by Black people and culture.“

And she looks at the white rapper Iggy Azela in quite a bit of detail, goes on to say

“Azalea’s performances, particularly the voice she uses while rapping, is an example of appropriation. Azalea uses a “blaccent,” an imitation of a Black accent by a non-Black person, while rapping. When she raps, she sounded like a poor imitation of a Black woman who lived in an urban area in America, but when she speaks, she speaks in a dignified Australian accent.” 

This is a great modern example, and there are so many others in pop music today that I don’t have time to cover. Mendez goes on to claim

“When an artist tries to profit from the music style without showing respect to the culture, they are demonstrating cultural appropriation” 

I couldn’t agree more with this statement, and as an audience I think we need to start acknowledging and heavily voicing these opinions, and start celebrating black artists that specialise in these musical styles, and deliver them with authenticity and passion.

Appreciation and examples:

When identifying whether an artist is culturally appropriating, or simply just appreciating another cultures musical style, Chris Richards from the Washington post expresses the concept of musical tourists vs musical travellers. Here’s a quote, he says:

“Here’s one last question that might be helpful to ask of white rappers, or any musician who appropriates: Are they travelers, or are they tourists? Travelers move through the world in order to participate. Tourists simply look around, have some fun, take what they want and bring it back home.”

I think this is a great way to truly identify in depth which artists have authentic intentions with their music when exploring other cultures.

So Miley Cyrus twerking, wearing grills, and claiming she wanted her album Bangerz to quote, “feel black”, become extremely questionable, and I feel like she’s definitely a musical tourist who is appropriating another culture. It’s all about taking, vs. making in a sense.

However, if we look at the 80s group Talking Heads, they traveled to Haiti, learned about the culture, took part in ceremonies, they were deeply touched by African American culture and wanted to celebrate it with their album. They didn’t take, they made it into something different and recorded their album Remain In Light. They used african beats and musical techniques because they had developed an authentic bond with a group of people from this culture, and they intentionally collaborated with so many local african american artists on the record in order to do it right. They didn’t appropriate, they created something completely new, the album is a splurge of all different genres and influences. 

Outro:

So, next time you hear the phrase “world music”, or hear a white artist being a bit of a “musical tourist”, I hope these concepts remain fresh in your mind, because cultural appropriation stems from an outdated racist attitude in our society, and the industry isn’t going to change until we start educating ourselves and widening our perspectives as a community. We must voice these opinions and search for authenticity in music. Thank you for listening!

[stabbedinthenameofscience]

I posted this on facebook with a less-than-stellar article and instead of actually discuss the points, all people did was talk about the nitpicking they had with the article.  So I deleted the post, fuck it, and I’m posting it here without the article.  It doesn’t need it to stand.

One of the things I've always been bugged about with most political candidates is that when faced with questions pertaining to smaller groups, such as trans* folks asking for commentary on their own economic needs, I rarely (if ever) hear the explanation tailored to address them. Yes, looking at economic and job opportunity factors will help them...but only if they can get a job in the first place because they have little to no legal protection. The broader sense is where I am frustrated with most political candidates. It's like the recent equal pay amendments I've seen popping up. Yes, equal pay for women is great, but if you're a lesbian and you can be fired for having a photograph of your family on your desk at work, does it really benefit all women? And why, when I have brought this up before to folks, is the response that incremental progress is what we have to settle for? Incremental progress sometimes unintentionally further marginalizes already struggling groups by leaving them out in the name of getting something done. It doesn't make them feel included or valued (and is one of the reasons i'm seeing more and more of my friends end up so disheartened by politics that they refuse to even be a part of it- it becomes a mental health protective measure to withdraw). It isn't that it's not important to discuss- it's that the discussions I have heard are too broad and don't address the interconnected details that make $15 an hour, the necessity of strong unions, etc. enough to make a difference in the lives of people already largely excluded from accessing even the shitty job market we have. To me, it would be anti-trans* to discuss economic issues without acknowledging that the refusal to hire them in the first place (often in the name of religion) is a huge piece of that puzzle. It would be anti-trans* to keep at-will employment contracts that allow people to be fired without stated cause. It would be anti-queer to refuse to acknowledge the role that a lack of anti-discrimination laws play in hiring, housing, etc. It would be anti-parenting to not discuss how family and parental leave impacts economic capacity and also how maternity leave (or lack there-of) destroys opportunity. It would be anti-family to not discuss how single parents face different economic barriers due to our overall lack of quality affordable childcare and how that also is impacted by funding threats to Head Start and GSRP. It would be anti-addict to not discuss our shitty support systems for addiction. It would be anti-mental illness to not want to discuss how our media makes it harder for the mentally ill to seek help because of how they handle shootings and further marginalize us, thus making coping with workplace stress even harder. It would be anti-inner city to not discuss barriers to transportation and food deserts right alongside all this, because the means to get to work is a part of it and the time and distance people have to go to get food is also a depletion of economic capacity in other areas of life. All of these things play into economic justice and I haven't heard it in candidate conversations, publications, speeches- I know it would be downright impossible to address everything that everyone needs, but I don't feel like I hear enough an acknowledgement of just how complicated this all is and how many intricacies "economic justice," as a phrase, includes. That's not to say it doesn't exist in organizations not in the national eye, but I was latching on to the fact that candidates don't seem to ever really draw this in and all of them need to acknowledge that economic justice looks different for different groups of people. If we are to discuss economic justice, we have to also examine exactly how that plays out in different communities and what systemic overhaul actually looks like for queerfolk, trans* communities, people of colour, addicts, the extremely impoverished...because they all have barriers to access that make things like $15/hour something they would have difficulty benefiting from without removing those barriers and acknowledging them in discussions. This would be difficult to address on the campaign trail. But for some of these groups, to have someone say "I actually hear your needs and want to make things better for *you* and understand that takes more work" would be a completely new experience and would mean the absolute world.  There's a need being unmet and that's leaving people out and I think that, the idea that identity politics needs to be set aside in order to focus on "bigger" issues, is a dangerous one, because identity politics is exactly what makes that bigger issue a matter of justice for all.

It's a very specific frustration, one I have with nearly every politician out there, and one of the reasons I have heard for people feeling like they don't matter and won't participate in politics or vote. If it's an impediment to participation, I think it needs to be critically examined and dealt with.

[googlenewson]

When our firm signed on to an amicus brief in Bostock v. Clayton County and two other cases last summer, we were proud to stand alongside 205 major businesses in expressing the importance of workplace protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6-to-3 in favor of the plaintiffs in this case, which tested the applicability of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to these critical elements of individual identity and experience.

Certainly, we believed the case to be strong; as Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in the majority opinion, “The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

Given a shift in the court’s ideological makeup, however, it would be inaccurate to suggest that we expected it to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. This shift was all the more reason, we believed, for businesses to stand firmly in support of what is best for employees, organizations, society, shareholders, and our firms: the removal of a critical barrier to the psychological safety required of productive and meaningful workplace cultures.

As a cisgender, gay CEO of a global leadership firm, I celebrate the notion that this psychological safety—the ability to bring one’s full self to bear healthily and appropriately without fear of retribution or other negative consequences—is a critical element of the best workplaces.

Of course, the mere notion that individuals are legally protected from workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity does not, in and of itself, enable psychological safety. Legal protection is a helpful but incomplete precursor to crafting truly hospitable environments for LGBTQ employees and others with historically marginalized identities.

Implicit in the notion of legal protection is the idea that an individual or community is at risk because of some critical aspect of who we are—or what others attribute to those individuals, based on stereotyping or inaccurate perceptions. For LGBTQ individuals, expressing the parts of ourselves that do not align with broader expectations of how we should look, behave, or love based on our assigned sex at birth has often resulted in derision, rejection, exclusion, violence, or just plain silence in the workplace.

But that expression of this essential element of our identities can no longer result in legal termination of employment in the U.S.

The court’s decision has opened the door for leaders to engage with these critical components of identity and culture in a much more sophisticated and powerful way. Rather than operating from a place of legal protection for themselves—that is, treating this latest ruling merely as occasion to conduct antidiscrimination trainings and other risk mitigation activities—employers have the opportunity to reconsider the benefits of identity-diverse workplaces.

Recognizing that the law confers protection on an identity group is humanizing and energizing. When we understand that the most important parts of our identities matter and must be protected at work, we internalize the idea that our work can be a source of the very basic human need for meaning and purpose. Taken in the context of other major events last week—the first broad, mainstream recognition of Juneteenth as a major marker of black American civil rights; a second Supreme Court decision prohibiting the elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without reasoned explanation; continuing daily protests across the country for equity and justice for black Americans—the impetus for leaders and organizations to cultivate work settings that recognize and harness the power of difference has never been more profound.

Wherever any particular organization presently stands on its journey, there is room for growth, development, and evolution embedded in learnings from the Bostock ruling. For employers who are new to recognizing their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees, acknowledging the importance of allowing individuals to bring their full selves to work is an important starting point. 

For employers that already celebrate their LGBTQ team members and colleagues, fostering similar celebratory conditions, just treatment, and psychological safety for individuals and communities across a wider range of identity groups creates a reservoir of positive energy in the organization. And for all of us, every day in the workplace (be it physical or virtual) affords the opportunity to demonstrate the kind of meaningful interpersonal connection that affirms our individual and shared humanity—to the benefit of our lives, our organizations, and our communities.

Eric Pliner is CEO of YSC Consulting.

More opinion in Fortune:

19 Black economists to celebrate and know, this Juneteenth and beyond

Rep. Marcia Fudge: Black history is American history. Let’s start teaching it that way

We can’t breathe at work, either: John Henryism and the health impact of racism

A step toward justice: The pandemic is opening the theatre to BIPOC audiences

Why the future of financial markets is in the cloud

from Fortune https://ift.tt/2zZRuNG

[afearing]

since apparently theres no consequences for delivering unto this website extremely long and good takes i will present to you my hot take on the ace d'escourse, with no sources because I Dont Feel Like It. its more words than is reasonable bc i have been stewing in this for like 4 years and if i dont type it out at some point im going to fucking lose it. no, literally, it’s 3 pages long in word about shit no one cares about anymore. please remember to like and subscribe.

some background on me, i id’d as ace for something like 8 years, from the first time i read the wikipedia page on it back in maybe 2009 or thereabouts. i also id’d as aro for about a year in 2016. that is to say, i have a lot of compassion and understanding for asexual individuals and feel i understand the inclusionist side of the argument pretty well, as i never questioned inclusionism until maybe 2014 or so, when the discourse blew up. i took some time off tumblr because i was so fucking distraught to think that, as i id’d as aroace at the time, that i had to come to terms with not being lgbt. lol i was a little too attached to being ‘gay’ because... fun fact, past dumbass self... you are gay. anyway, i really dont want anyone to feel that i hate them, but after i cooled off a little bit i realized that the exclusionist take on asexuality just makes more sense. hopefully i can explain why clearly enough.

i really believe that what is understood as aphobia is 100% of the time simply a manifestation of our culture’s expectations surrounding sexuality. while “expectations surrounding sexuality” as a very broad topic does indeed cover both the lgbt community and people on the ace spectrum, facing these issues does NOT make a person lgbt. i subscribe to the idea that lgbt is for people targeted directly by homophobia and transphobia. ace issues ARE super important to talk about and the whole inclus/exclus nonsense is entirely because this discourse has been put under the wrong category. im aware that probably most people will not care that much about my opinion on the correct framing of asexual activism as i no longer id as ace but i think this is important for everyone. sexual expectations also weigh on straight individuals, especially women, and i’m going to describe a few examples to try to demonstrate why i believe both that it doesn’t make sense to consider asexuality lgbt as well as why it does make sense to frame it as an issue based mainly in misogyny.

call out post for myself, i use reddit, and i think the r/childfree community is a good example of what i think the framing should be like. although it’s acknowledged that not wanting children has larger social consequences for women, both men and women talk about their issues in the forum, including horrific accounts of reproductive coercion and rape, the intersections with race/being lgbt/ageism (although they could do a LOT better with intersectionality, many posters do touch upon it), profoundly cruel comments made by those who have/want children, difficulty finding an understanding relationship partner, discrimination at work, misunderstandings and even hatred from family and acquaintances, discrimination in healthcare, etc.

i think you can tell where i’m going with this. even though being childfree cuts against the expectations for sexuality in most societies, even though it leads to unfair judgment from others, and even though they face discrimination on the basis of the way they express their sexuality, childfree people do NOT frame parenthood/childfreedom as an axis of oppression, nor do they claim that their lack of desire for children makes them lgbt. it’s not even a question if straight childfree people are straight, because duh? nor if the presence of lgbt childfree people makes the whole community fall under the lgbt umbrella, because it obviously doesn’t.

to drive the point home, the reason why this is NOT an axis of oppression is because parents face a ton of issues as well! they also face reproductive coercion as well as judgment over the number of kids they have, constant scrutiny and moralization over every aspect of their parenthood style, judgment based on parents’ age/wealth/sexuality/marital or dating status/race, housing and employment discrimination, especially for mothers, the government hating poor parents and cutting their benefits, and more i’m sure i’m not thinking of. again, this is due to societal expectations of sexuality. to complete the analogy, people who aren’t ace face their own set of challenges and discrimination. part of homophobia/biphobia is tinged with hatred of our sexual attraction; no one except for straight white men is allowed to really express their sexuality without backlash, and even then there is this shame leading to a lack of proper sex ed and horribly unhealthy understandings of sexual attraction in a large portion of the populace. so calling aphobia an axis of oppression is just not right. and in addition, the large proportion of lgbt aces doesn’t make asexuality lgbt, that’s not how groups work.

some more on what i mean by ‘expectations around sexuality’... in terms of my experience in the US, there is some blueprint in many people’s minds of what a person should be like in terms of sexuality, and that is something like “cishet, abled man, who is neither ace nor aro, who gets laid regularly (but not to excess) starting no later than 18 and ending no later than 28 when he settles down with one cishet abled wife, also neither ace nor aro, who has only had sex with up to three committed boyfriends, and they have precisely two children, approximately two years apart in age, whom the parents can financially and emotionally support to the utmost, because they are also moderately to very well off, and the parents work under traditional gender roles to raise their children as conventionally as possible.” and if you deviate from this script in ANY way that’s viewed with moral panic and scrutiny by someone. and the connection to misogyny is that women are seen as sort of the bastions of sexual morality. we are punished especially harshly for nonconformity.

if you’re poor you’re fucked because either you don’t have kids or you can’t send them off to private schools and feed them fancy organic shit. if you’re lgbt or polyamorous or aro or ace? fucked! if you dare to reproduce as a disabled person, and if your disability impacts your parenthood, especially for women, you’re practically crucified even in liberal circles. if you have too few kids or too many (don’t you know only kids turn out weird? / how can you possibly raise 5 children properly?), if you have too much sex or too little, if you split up the work in your relationship not along gender lines, if you do unconventional things in your parenthood, like accept your trans kids or move a lot or any number of other things, the social judgment rains down like the fires of fucking hell. meaning practically no one can escape it!! huge bonus to the screaming crowd with pitchforks if you’re a person of color or a woman, mega ultra bonus to women of color.

but does that make everyone i just talked about lgbt? no! although every single one of the groups i mentioned is tangentially related through this issue, even though all of them face a lot of horrible problems and discrimination, that does not make those issues inherently lgbt. again, they are tangentially related and i could see a good case for solidarity among many of the groups mentioned; all of them are fighting for greater acceptance of different kinds of relationships, greater acceptance of seeking happiness and being who you are rather than pressuring everyone to conform as much as possible to the LifeScript. but all of those groups are equally related to the lgbt community - that is, tangentially only. just as you can be childfree and straight, a stay-at-home dad and straight, a straight woman of color, so too can you be polyamorous and straight, ace and straight, or aro and straight.

that’s it for my main point. ace and aro people? your lives are hard. i’m not going to downplay it in any way because i know there are a lot of people who actually hate your guts. fuck, i’ve seen people full-on shittalk asexuality, in the internet and real life, in the most blatant of ways, so it’s not just something you can necessarily escape by logging off. not as much so for aro people tbh but i predict as much once the Public gets more wind of your existence. i fully believe that you face a higher risk of sexual assault; discrimination in relationships, housing, and the workplace; horrible comments from everyone who thinks their shitty opinion on your sexuality and love life matters; and I believe you that that hurts and is terrible and that you deserve a place to discuss and provide support.

but. those issues are not exclusive to you. they’re not exclusive to lgbt people, or oppressed people, and so those issues don’t and cannot make you lgbt, nor do they make ace/aro vs. allo an axis of oppression. our communities intersect, yes, considerably, but you are not a subset of lgbt. perhaps our rhetoric can help you, but because straight ace and aro people exist you cannot and should not consider yourselves lgb+. i think you understand that the issues you face are a form of oppression, but they are the result of the toxic and misogynistic sex culture in this society, which, yes, targets lgbt people but also, practically everyone, including groups which are definitively absolutely not inherently lgbt, such as parents, gnc straight people, poc, disabled people, the list goes on.

to conclude, what really converted me to being an ace exclusionist was the example of a straight grey or demi ace. how could you possibly argue that someone who falls in love with the opposite gender only, but with more conditions or less frequently than someone not aspec, is lgb+, can call themselves queer, etc.? exactly what material reality does that person share with a gay or bi person? i think that their issues fall in line with aspec community issues but extremely clearly not at all with lgbt ones. 

the end but post script since i brought up orientation modifiers: perhaps it isn’t my place to say, but i don’t think that microlabels are very healthy and that it would make more sense for the ace community to work on expanding the idea of what sexuality is than to try to create a label to describe every single person’s experience of their sexuality. not that i think you should necessarily kick grey ace people out of the aspec community or that they’re not valid or whatever, but that perhaps it makes more sense to say that some people experience sexual attraction less frequently, and that’s alright. i don’t know.  i spent sophomore year of high school poring over those mogai blogs looking for some new orientation label that would make me go like, oh my god that’s me! and believing that if those labels helped people feel that way they weren’t doing any harm. but what actually finally made me feel like that was expanding my understanding of what attraction is and a better conception of lesbian issues and why i might feel so disconnected from my sexuality and why i might be obsessing over every interaction with a guy looking for signs i was attracted to him but feel super disgusted whenever they exhibited interest in me. i spent so long trying to go like maybe im cupioromantic lithsexual and feeling terrified that that i had such a weird and esoteric sexuality that no one could ever possibly understand enough to be in a relationship with me... like, ok dyke! i know a lot of people have had similar experiences and i don’t think i know a whole ton of people now in college who are still doing that, which makes me think those labels are more harmful than not. 

i guess that’s anecdotal but it’s easier for me to believe that a person could cling to those labels due to internalized homophobia than actually have a new form of sexuality heretofore undiscovered throughout all human history, but that’s just me. and so many of them just sound so unhealthy, like dreadsexual. i really wish people would work on expanding what not being asexual can mean and look like and i dont think there would be this drive to create these labels anymore. even demisexual which i think is probably the most mainstream conditional orientation, i think many people who have never heard of it and are perfectly content not to would describe the way they experience sexuality a similar way and just consider it normal. sexual attraction isn’t necessarily having your nethers set aflame upon first making eye contact with someone, it looks different for every person and it’s alright to just be how you are without making it part of your whole identity.

The End II. this is 2,200 words. if you read this far you’re a fucking mad l- *the academy cuts my mic line while looking directly at the camera like in the office*

[fashiontrendin-blog]

How RuPaul’s Drag Race Challenged My Gay Identity

http://fashion-trendin.com/how-rupauls-drag-race-challenged-my-gay-identity/

How RuPaul’s Drag Race Challenged My Gay Identity

A

s even the most casual viewer of RuPaul’s Drag Race will tell you, the show is one meme-worthy, GIF-able moment after another. From the now-infamous Linda Evangelista rant to deep cuts like “Get her, Jade,” the show has spawned a shorthand of its own. But there is one specific scene from the show’s decade-long history that will always stay with me. It’s a testimonial clip from the seventh season (admittedly not the show’s strongest) in which Trixie Mattel reveals the origin of her drag name: “Trixie” was a homophobic slur used repeatedly throughout her childhood, a name intended to cause harm to a little boy who didn’t fit into a certain predetermined mold of manhood. Taking that slur and building her drag identity around it was an act of defiance on Trixie’s part, a way of reclaiming power and owning her identity.

The moment had such a profound impact on me was because it wasn’t until I began watching Drag Race in 2014 that I realized just how much I had been holding onto my own misguided ideas about what it means to be a gay man.

I was a scrawny and bookish little boy, and because I didn’t quite fit in, I found myself identifying with Disney heroines Belle and Ariel, who were outcasts in their own ways. I would sit in my room for hours, reading and making up stories and casting myself in lavishly imagined adventures. I had no idea that these things would code me as queer in the eyes of other people. I was called “camp” when I was still in primary school, before I even knew what the word meant, and long before puberty hit me like a bus called Priscilla and brought with it the first inkling that I might like boys.

When I later came out as a teenager, I almost immediately became preoccupied with being the “right” kind of gay.

When I later came out as a teenager, I almost immediately became preoccupied with being the “right” kind of gay. Since I didn’t personally know any other openly LGBTQ people, I can only assume I internalized what that entailed from the meager, sexless queer representation in the media at the time and from the constant jokes made by my peers. I went to an all-boys grammar school that had been so steeped in the myth of masculinity over its 350-year history that you could practically smell it as you walked down the halls. (Male privilege, it turns out, smells a lot like AXE body spray.)

Moderating my own behavior became second nature, and that habit followed me into adulthood. Was I being too loud? Too effeminate? How was I standing? What should I do with my hands? Even dating other gay men, I would feel this impulse to tone myself down, to put on a rather weak show of perceived manliness, assuming that would be what they found most attractive.

RuPaul’s Drag Race was a real “come to Jesus” moment for me. In addition to being one of the most consistently, outrageously entertaining TV shows of the new century, Drag Race synthesizes the battle that goes on inside a great many gay men in a way that I had never seen on screen before. The queens share many personal stories about playing with mom’s makeup and trying on her clothes, or feeling somehow separate from their peers and siblings when they were growing up; as a kid who was constantly described as “sensitive” and “creative” in a very particular tone, I could relate.

Unlike so many other gay narratives where you follow a character from their traumatic coming out to their inevitable death by HIV/AIDS, RuPaul’s Drag Race was perhaps my first unapologetically optimistic, joyful gay viewing experience. It takes all of the things it seemed I was encouraged to feel embarrassed about, the weirdness I often wished I could leave behind me in the closet, and it reframes them as important, integral elements of a greater collective identity. Here were men like me, who had also idolized Disney princesses as children and were now channelling and reinterpreting those characters, retelling those stories with themselves cast in the lead roles.

The acts of reading and throwing shade (described by drag queen Dorian Corey as “the art form of insults”) were also immediately familiar to me. After all, the stereotype of the acid-tongued gay man is rooted in some truth; if you spend your formative years being taunted or feeling like you have to read the room in order to better fit into it, then it makes perfect sense that you would become an expert at picking up on other peoples’ insecurities and retaliating with perfectly formulated barbs. What makes the show’s iteration of this so gratifying is that when a queen is read for filth, she will shriek with laughter because she appreciates the artistry of the shade. Drag queens wield language like a weapon, but those volleys are shot across an equal playing field. Bullies they are not.

  I can say with certainty is that I wouldn’t be so openly affectionate and supportive with my gay male friends, so unafraid of showing vulnerability, if I hadn’t learned how by watching grown men share wigs and lovingly call each other “sister.”

As the show’s popularity grew, it became something of a gateway drug to queer culture for its audience. You can’t praise Drag Race without first acknowledging the debt it owes to Paris Is Burning (a legacy the show references proudly and often). And you can’t talk about Paris Is Burning without recognizing how much gay vernacular and iconography comes from black and Latinx communities, and trans women in particular.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have the circle of queer friends I do now if I hadn’t become so enamoured with Drag Race, but what I can say with certainty is that I wouldn’t be so openly affectionate and supportive with my gay male friends, so unafraid of showing vulnerability, if I hadn’t learned how by watching grown men share wigs and lovingly call each other “sister.”

I was in my late twenties when a friend initiated me into the cult of Mama Ru. Watching Drag Race become such a mainstream success and inspire a generation of younger fans has been hugely encouraging; queens like Trixie and Katya especially have stans who are still in adolescence, right at the beginning of their journeys to find themselves. It makes me so happy to know those kids are growing up hearing Ru’s message of self-acceptance: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” It makes me wonder how different things might have been for me if I’d been exposed to such a philosophy at an earlier age.

The show is not without its challenges. The conversation that has emerged during more recent seasons about the way black queens are received by fans of the show compared to their white sisters, and this season’s disproportionately negative viewer reaction to The Vixen (who correctly anticipated that she would be stereotyped as an “angry black woman”) is both illuminating and damning. This dialogue, and the fact that we are only now beginning to openly talk about race on the show, is in many ways a microcosm of the ongoing discourse on racism in the gay community at large, where whiteness (along with, yes, masculinity!) tends to be centered.

RuPaul herself might occasionally misspeak on certain issues, but RuPaul’s Drag Race as an entity has become a broad church in which queens of any ethnicity, gender identity and body type are celebrated. I eagerly await the day when that kind of acceptance is reflected in mainstream, everyday life so that young LGBTQ people won’t be inhibited by the same kind of gatekeeping that still occurs even within our own community.

The time has come for outdated ideas of being the “right kind of gay” to sashay away. Until then, it’s reassuring to know that there is at least one mainstream outlet for joyful diversity in the form of Drag Race; I hope it continues to open people’s’ eyes like it has mine.

Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the U.K. You can follow him on Twitter @Philip_Ellis

Photos via VH1. 

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