#or how y'all wanna characterize every person as a top or a bottom and make that their whole personality

[astromechs]

ok, time to throw down the gauntlet as a psychologist: just as an FYI, anything that attempts to split behaviors or traits into explicit and distinct categories is a trap. human behavior and personality do not work that way. tests like the myers-briggs and anything that purport discreet "types" have basically no real validity because those "types" do not exist.

behavior is contingent upon the situation, behavior patterns change over time, therefore to some extent there are parts of your personality that change over time while other aspects of it remain stable, there is pretty much nothing about human experience that falls into neat categories — even the way our brains interpret sensory information. the mind likes categories because it helps us to process information faster, but the truth is that that NEED to categorize doesn't work so neatly on people.

[grittyreadsfic]

very curious about the new brand of homophobia but also totally respect you not wanting to elaborate?

time is a circle and everything always comes back to people reinventing the wheel except this time the wheel is just homophobia

and you might be asking yourself: grits, we're largely here reading and writing queer stories, how could that be homophobic?

well!

it's not every fic, and it's not every ship, and it's not every writer. you might read what i'm saying and recognize an action you've done and maybe that means what i'm saying applies to you, or maybe it doesn't. this is the internet and it's full of nuance and this isn't a clear cut thing about someone just straight up using a slur (though hrpf did make me read the r slur with no ableism warnings in the last year, so honestly i wouldn't be surprised)

anyway: there's a trend i've noticed, in writing and just in how the community treats the player overall, that if a player displays any "feminine" trait-being on the smaller side, dressing in a nicer outfit, doing more than just basic hygiene, basically anything that distinguishes them from the stereotype of your basic bro-they take that player and make them a bottom. they turn it into an identity that is basically their whole identity and reduce the character to just that one trait.

and you know, there's a time and place. i've said it once and i'll say it again: if something exists, there's porn for it. if it's just porn? whatever, tag it appropriately, do what you gotta, i'm not here to kinkshame anyone. you wanna write force fem porn? sick, go for it

however, when it goes past that-when it's not just porn but it shapes how characters are written, how it influence the perspective on the players-or because this isn't unique to hockey fic, the characters in general-that's where my issue lies

because it's reducing queer identities down to a stereotype. this is inherently homophobic. it's worse than that, actually, because of the issues that arise with that stereotype too when you look at it through an intersectional lens, but that's a whole other can of worms that is for another post.

right, so, this stereotype: the "feminine" guy is a bottom (and like, not to be crude, but i'd argue that for some characters it reduces them further to simply a hole) and it turns the ship into a caricature of queer representation that reminds me way too much of the really limited mlm ships we saw in media ten, fifteen years ago-it feels like someone's about to ask who's the man in the relationship, and who's the woman. and sure, plenty of queer people have preferences about topping and bottoming, and i'm sure for some people it is a part of their personality, but like. i'm seeing characterizations of players getting reduced down to that and nothing else and it just makes me tired.

this becomes a problem when it's widespread. when it shapes entire views of characters or players or, fuck, carries over to how you view the real live gay people in your life.

anyway i was told i should give actual examples of what i mean so here are some of those:

-every smaller usndtp kid is automatically written as a slutty, bratty bottom, generally because of the kind of derogatory side of the stereotypes around twinks. these ones gets reduced to just a hole pretty quick, and like, again, if you're just writing porn, sure, go for it, but it's starting to become to full personality that people are giving them

-i've actually stopped reading tknp fic that isn't by authors i trust or is a fic i've read and liked previously because hrpf people took all the trans people projecting their gender onto summer nolan and essentially force femmed his character both like. in sex and outside of it? i don't know how else to describe it except i kept reading it and it just felt homophobic. it felt reductive and insulting, honestly

-some of you are here just to fetishize mlm and that's really not my business but you might want to unpack that idk

anyway the tldr of it all is that y'all turned top and bottom into secondary genders and there's a lot homophobia (and honestly, some transphobic implications as well lmao) because of it