#people have been profoundly weird in the forums

[chaifootsteps]

...nevermind! I have another thing to say and ask.

I just literally searched your username in Tumblr and I got to see a lot of posts accusing you of a variety of things, things like:

being a lolicon / shotacon (steming from you pointing out in a post that fictional children shouldn't be reported and the accuser said that's part of the problem and you're encouraging pedophilia)

being a zoopedo (because of the toothless and hiccup pairing, of course, also managing to see that they've defended and remarked that the "SoftFurArchive" / Norry / idk was trying to warn all of that)

being an armchair psychologist and ableist (because you and an Anon diagnosed Viv with narcissism in a ask)

being a proshipper (an amalgamation of posts, but most focused on the fact of the Toothless x Hiccup ship)

being a KiwiFarms apologist (because of posts about you talking about KiwiFarms and sometimes praising some of the users' comments there)

being a gatekeeper over what's trans (from you saying what a trans should or should not be in a post)

Please, Chai, ease my mind by clarifying if any of this is true or false, or it's just a byproduct of gullible people falling over supposed evidence, or just proshipper puritans attacking you because they don't like you.

— Instagram!Stolas Anon, concerned.

Let's break this down point by point

No, I don't like loli or shota, but I've got a couple of ships that are weird and personal and require convoluted explanations, so I try to extend the same benefit of the doubt to other people.

No, I'm not a pedophile. I'm a CSA survivor, which is why I'm incredibly concerned about things like alarm fatigue. I think certain terms need to be limited to things involving real children and then we can argue about Naruto ships all day.

No, I'm not a zoophile, I like monsters and dragons and generic furry stuff. The term for the former is teratophila. I've been accused of murdering my pets and sent links to actual animal abuse over this.

I don't call myself a proshipper anymore because I'm not playing the "Ah-ha, I think it means X and you said you're that, so you believe what I think you believe" game. I judge people as they come and whether you call yourself proshipper or anti, you're welcome here as long as you can behave.

I've said before that I shouldn't have indulged that ask, but I didn't say that Viv definitely has NPD, I said that if you dangled me over a shark tank and forced me to throw out an armchair diagnosis, it's one I've wondered about. I hope she doesn't, because it's a misunderstood disorder and an extremely sad one. To quote someone who's got it, Nothing's ever OK. You're either too high on yourself for outperforming everyone else, or too harsh on yourself for not being good enough for your own standards.

I'm fascinated by old internet forums and Kiwi Farms is a place that interests me more than any other. It's swaddled in a mixture of misinformation and being exactly as bad as everyone says, but in an increasingly corporate owned, regulated, KOSA-just-passed-the-Senate internet, there are days I'm profoundly grateful that Null's as stubborn as he is.

I'm trans. I genuinely have no idea where this "gatekeeping" thing is coming from.

Let me be very clear. The FBI and NCMEC have literally begged people to stop reporting fictional characters, because fighting pedophiles is like fighting a million headed Hydra. So it burns me when people say things like this.

If you think it's acceptable to do something child protection agencies have again, begged people to stop doing because it gives you a good feeling to do it and you think that trumps the well-being of real missing and exploited children, you are dangerously detached from reality and not welcome on my blog.

TL;DR: All false.

[jcmarchi]

Gaming as the Third Place

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/gaming-as-the-third-place/

Gaming as the Third Place

The culture around social interaction is constantly shifting, but those profoundly strange years of the pandemic were especially jarring. In the wake of such a weird cultural moment, I’m certainly not the only one left wondering how the dust settles, especially as it relates to how we meet up, build friendships and relationships, and socialize. If you’re a gamer, answering those questions requires an additional layer of complexity since we spend much of our free time in virtual worlds. I’ve found myself wondering where our favorite hobby fits into the equation.

For some years, the “third place” gave a name to a thing that’s been part of our lives forever. If home is your first place, and work is your second, the third place is the other social and gathering hub for your life as part of a community. But especially in the wake of COVID, it seems clear that many people have adjusted their relationship to social clubs, churches, coffee shops, bars, and public meet-ups. As many individuals disconnected from some of those social spaces, there’s a void we haven’t all yet filled.

Into that void have come the virtual places of our lives, whether they play out on social media or, as is likely if you’re reading this, in online games. Increasingly, games act as their own communities, often equaling or surpassing the thought and energy we put into other activities.

Indeed, much of that energy is the playing of those games – the countless hours of Call of Duty or Fortnite matches, raiding in Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft, or socializing and joking with friends in cooperative runs at Helldivers 2 or Deep Rock Galactic. We pour our attention into these games and are rewarded with relaxation, the excitement of discovery, and a growing sense of mastery.

Helldivers 2

It’s also the conversations and expertise that arise around those games. We comb through subreddits and community forums to discuss strategy. We read websites (like this one) and magazines to understand the games better. We build friendships that persist for years around shared adventures and discoveries in a virtual space, further fleshed out on platforms like Discord. In these places, even single-player games feel like social hubs for interaction and engagement as we seek out others who share our excitement for a given character or franchise.

Despite my love of games and the friendships I have formed as I’ve played them with others, I have to admit to some ambivalence. I treasure those late-night moments of triumph against a raid boss, but I miss more frequent in-person get-togethers with my buddies. I get excited about the many conversations about a game I like online, but I rarely feel like the connections I make there persist into real friendships.

None of that is to disparage the connections and enthusiasm we all find in our gaming. But there’s no doubt we can get too much of a good thing. Even with a nearly endless selection of games to enjoy, we’ve all come across sobering articles where we learn that many in the same demographic of core gamers feel lonely and isolated. That’s not a clear line of causation, but it does give reason to pause. If gaming is our new third place, is it meeting all the goals that older social gathering places once did? Should we really expect them to? That’s a heavy weight for someone’s hobby to have to bear.

I’d assert that the culture may have moved past the concept of a single third place. Whether it’s individual games, shared virtual social spaces, or traditional gathering places of the past, humans are animals that crave connection, and we make communities in the places we can. I don’t think we need to shy away from the interconnectedness that can arise from gaming, even while simultaneously seeking interaction elsewhere. At the same time, even while acknowledging my great love of games, I think they can be a trap that keeps us from forming other friendships and relationships. Like so many things in life, it’s finding a middle ground – embracing new routes to virtual connections without forgetting about the real-world options just outside our door.

This article originally appeared in Issue 366 of Game Informer

[subliminalbo]

A Much Too Long Story About Subliminalbo

Oh, hi there. My name's Bo. I write mind control smut and make white eyes manips. I've been back on Tumblr for a minute now, but wanted to write a kind of about the author page? This was supposed to be the first section of an info page that included DNIs and content warnings but I'll figure that out soon. This kind of got out of control because goddamn do I like to talk. Anyway, before I jump into my dumb story I want to get the most important part out of the way:

I'm 28 years old. He/him. If you are transphobic, homophobic, racist, or ablest I will not interact with you. I am a cishet male so if I ever say anything that sounds profoundly privileged please correct me. I do not want to be part of the problem.

I'm approaching ten years with a presence in the online hypno manip space. Mind control has been an interest of mine since I was a child, following me from Saturday morning cartoons to weekend Toonami blocks and eventually here. As a kid it was just a trope I loved, and gradually I started recognizing it in more and more places. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Archie's Weird Mysteries, Ben Ten, Code Lyoko, Codename Kids Next Door, The Justice League, Teen Titans, and of course Totally fucking Spies all played their own roles in bringing me here.

As a teen I trolled the internet for whatever mind control related content I could find. I read sketchy Geocity sites and Blogger pages. I joined Yahoo Groups dedicated to cataloging and categorizing incidents of mind control in popular culture, and eventually it led me to the weird little community on Deviantart.

At the same time I was a member of a few non-fetish related role playing forums. (1) That eventually led me to Tumblr where I was an active blogger until the mid tens. The only reason I bring this part of my online life up here is because it was how I discovered white eyes manips. I stumbled on this Supernatural blog that specialized in demon eyes edits. (2) I never actively followed, but would occasionally drop in to see if any celebrities that I liked had been manipped.

When I graduated high school, I found myself both newly single and with a ton of sudden free time on my hands. I started experimenting with GIMP, following tutorials that the owner of the Supernatural blog had posted and soon began developing my own techniques.

I mean like, look how far I've come.

Admittedly the novelty of hot celebs with white eyes wore off on me pretty quickly, and I started writing stories to pair with my manips as soon as I began posting. I picked Deviantart because it was the first place I'd ever known an erotic mind control community to exist outside of skeevy Yahoo Groups.

The stories weren't even supposed to be smutty at first. My goal was to recapture the kind of stupid mind control hijinks that I remembered from those cartoons. I guess it's just a symptom of being a horny eighteen year old that I immediately turned to smut.

But mostly I just wanted to create the kind of content that I was looking for when I was joining Yahoo Groups. The erotic mind control scene has always been dominated by interests that don't necessarily align with mine. (3) At 18 that meant supermodels, mostly, so my first series was this patched together corporate thriller type thing where an evil lingerie company brainwashes supermodels to sign contracts away from Victoria's Secret. It had sex and brainwashing and inexplicable plot twists.

My first post to Deviantart featured a hastily written caption about Adriana Lima being abducted from a party. Somehow this ballooned into a bonkers seventeen part series called Fleur-de-lis. I've been running away from it ever since.

I felt pretty icky writing stories about real life people though, and soon after I finished Fleur-de-lis I moved onto writing about original characters. I took the philosophy of the old role playing days and used celebrities as the faces for my characters, but have been firm about the line between fiction and reality since. If I'm being honest, at some point I transitioned fully in my mind to a smut writer. If the white eyes stuff wasn't the most popular thing about my work I wouldn't even do it.

It's just a matter of fact for a cis hetero male in this space that there's a lot of soul searching to do. It's not lost on me that I started making manips during a period of intense loneliness in my life. I've been guilty of making more than one goodbye post just to return a few months later. There are a lot of things that I want to do with my life and many of those are creative. This has been my most consistent creative outlet over the last ten years and the thing that always brings me back is the feeling that I'm leaving something unfinished. (4)

It always comes back to the stories for me. I understand that fetishes are one way our minds compartmentalize and even overcome fear and trauma, but I really do believe that for me it was just seeing Ghostbusters too young and watching too much anime. I dunno, I grew up in the church and used to be super terrified of demon possession. Anyway, I am not a dominant person and I don't base the mind controllers in my stories as reflections of my own personality. I feel that in a lot of mind control fiction you can feel the writer on the page, you can see how the hypnotist is a veiled insert of themselves. But I find mind controllers to be some of the dullest characters in these stories. I'm more interested in transformations. How someone can be fundamentally changed into something that they are not, something they never could have imagined they could become. I don't know where that comes from. That feels like a trauma thing.

So here I am. Back on Deviantart and Tumblr after my big retirement, building worlds and overcomplicating the assignment more than I ever have before. If you're reading, I really appreciate you. Feedback is always welcome, positive or negative. Even if it's a few words of support, it means a lot to me to know that I'm not just tossing hard work into a void. I also like to talk a lot. This is just the first of a few "about me" stuff that I'm going to do and it'll eventually become a part of a larger page for FAQs and the much needed content warning. I just wanted to say a few words about myself that turned into like a thousand for some reason?

Anyway, I'm posting this and going to bed. Byye

1. We don't have to talk about the fandom that inspired me to write over 800 pages of dumb role playing bullshit. 2. Last I checked it's still kicking. On the surface it's completely innocuous and has never posted anything that was by definition NSFW, but it kind of has that ASMR vibe where you're pretty sure, somehow, there's something sexual about this. 3. What even is the deal with Kaa? I get for a lot of people Kaa was probably their introduction to mind control tropes as children, but it's a fucking snake. There are literally no good outcomes for these stories. Like is he gonna fuck the ladies? Because I'm pretty sure he wants to eat the ladies. Neither of those are good options to me. 4. I don't plan on leaving again. I've come to accept that fetishes are not necessarily a reflection of some inherent desire to do harm. This is, in part, a discovery made thanks to my partner who has her own problematic fantasies that are counterintuitive to her values.

[hms-no-fun]

Hello, fairly open-ended but I’m wondering what motivates you to write and create, because honestly I don’t think I’d be able to do what you do.

everyone thinks they couldn't do what the artists they admire do, until they do it. i didn't plan for godfeels to be what it is, i didn't even really understand homestuck all that well when i started it. they always say these things just sorta happen to you sometimes and it's really hard to believe it when everything you make feels like garbage from a dumpster, but it's true.

it's hard to pinpoint what motivates me to write. i've always liked telling stories. i think i decided i wanted to Be A Writer when i was like... 12 or 13? and i just wrote tons of stuff. fanfic, forum roleplays, my own original stuff. most of it's garbage and lost to the sands of time thank god. but when i think back on how i felt when i was writing at the time, it's really not much different from how i feel now. i would get ideas in my head of scenes or dialogue exchanges or get really obsessed with one song that i felt like would go great with a particular moment in a story, all of which are things i still do. i'd get those ideas and build a story around them.

this is gonna be a wild tangent but, i've always been the sicko who played grand theft auto games to do violence. to this day i will spend hours in sandbox games just wandering around blowing stuff up. make of that what you will lmao. anyway years ago i was playing red dead redemption 1 with cheat codes that made you invincible and have infinite ammo. and i was going around blackwater killing everyone. at first it was funny, because your one-hit-kill animations are SO over the top, and of course the cops never stop coming and the town never runs out of innocent bystanders. but after a while it stopped being funny and became really macabre and upsetting. like who is this dead god that is just wiping out a town of people for no reason? why do bullets pass through him, why is he so brutal and merciless? why doesn't he stop? i thought about what it must be like to watch someone do this, which of course called to mind a few choice sections of stephen king's dark tower series (king, fwiw, was a HUGE inspiration to me in my earliest days and up until about 8 years ago i had read almost all of his books).

i kept this rdr murder spree up for, no joke, two hours at least. most of that time i was quite profoundly Not enjoying myself. god i think i may have cried at one point??? not much but just like, somehow the horrifying absurdity of this spectacle was so entrancing and evocative that i couldn't stop. i wanted to see how far i could go before it got to be too much. i can't really say why i did this. besides depression and undiagnosed etc etc. i mean, this is kinda just how i play open world games. i spent months building a pyramid to the skybox in minecraft when i was in college. i 100%'d the ps4 spiderman game (with the exception of time trial shit because i hate time trial shit) despite the fact that i did not like the game very much.

no i haven't been diagnosed with autism, why do you ask? lmao

anyway, this rdr murder spree rattled around in my head for a long time, and eventually i decided to turn it into a story. i think i called it "what happened at arthur's mill" but it never got very far. there were some great images, i had a feeling of a MOOD and a tone, this tragic old god stuck in the wild west, but it wasn't enough to build a story on. so i set it aside like i do for most of my ideas.

then, years later, i started working on a book that i thought of as (i'm so, so sorry) an anime-inspired world war I fantasy novel. this is probably going to be the story i work on after godfeels, actually? anyway this story, "sunset war," involves a series of women trying to cross over an active warzone no-man's-land to go to this remote place to find out why some weird shit is going on with them. and at some point i remembered that arthur's mill story and was like, wait a second, this is PERFECT. so i took that idea and transplanted it into this setting. so this woman, reki, she's a sex worker who spends a night with this Wandering Gunman type who just wants someone to hold him while he cries, and in the morning like thirty lawmen show up to arrest him because he wiped out a wholeass town, and reki tries to defend him only to get shot to death. and the guy basically gives her his immortality and his magic Infinite Ammo Revolvers and tells her to go to [place] for [reasons]. so it’s not a hugely important backstory in a plot sense but it fits in this setting and defines it for me in a way that wasn’t happening before i connected all the right dots.

i share all this because this chain of events is an example of what motivates me to write, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. i love love love connecting dots like this. putting ideas into a soup and seeing what comes out. like you’re building a puzzle over the course of your life out of random pieces you find in the street.

there are so many moments, conversations, encounters in daily life that feel thinner than the rest. they stick out to you as Meaningful in some way. evocative. they're so thin you can practically see through their physical reality into a kind of symbolic superstructure. some people might call that an encounter with God. i like carl sagan's description of it as witnessing the numinous. becoming aware of one's place in the universe. call it whatever you want, rationalize it however, it doesn’t really matter. what matters is the feeling. you cross a street and you see powerlines zigzagging in a certain way against a cloudy sky, and it’s just the right time of day that a bunch of birds are out, and there’s a lull in traffic so you can hear the wind for the first time all day, you can hear everything in the world that isn’t human, and in your gut you know... this is important. this means something.

why is it important? what does it mean? to whom? those are your questions to answer.

i write towards these moments, or at least i try to. sometimes writing feels like that. feels like you’re seeing something real under the fabric of reality. what motivates me to write is the joy of losing myself to the act of writing. the joy of making people see what i see, and the vindication of having them respond the way i wanted them to. and the joy in being surprised by their reactions! i even enjoy being criticized, because it means i have room to improve.

once again this is a situation where i don’t know how to give actually actionable advice, because i’m an insufferable hippie who likes making wavey motions with my hands when i talk about art. but i think that if you can find a way to catch that thinness on the page, even if for an instant, you won’t be able to help yourself. sooner or later you’ll make something that resonates with people. i guess this is another way of saying “be true to yourself” or “write the story you wish existed in the world” or whatever, but even as i agree with those sentiments i find them too specific. all that matters to me is soul. forget three act structure, forget wordcounts, forget genres, forget what’s publishable, forget what you think anyone will read, forget everything. if you can write with soul, it won’t matter whether what you wrote is good. it’ll be yours, and you’ll feel it in your gut that it’s yours. release that thing even if you think it sucks, and then move on to the next thing. do that enough times and eventually you’ll realize that actually you’re pretty good at what you do, and even if it doesn’t pay enough you still really enjoy doing it. eventually you’ll be 32 and realize that all those years you thought you were languishing and wasting time, you were actually building up a skillset. and with that skillset, built as it is around this soul you are writing towards, you realize you can actually be pretty versatile as a writer. and the more you do it, the better it gets. no matter how good it is, somehow it always gets better.

as much as i talk about writing as if it’s a kind of magic, it isn’t magic. at least, no more than kissing your partner is magic. you don’t need motivation to kiss your partner, you just do it because you love them. there is tremendous satisfaction in finishing a puzzle out of pieces you found on the street over the course of years. does there need to be a why? it’s rarely easy, it can be torturous, but that’s true of doing taxes. that’s true of everything. but if you can cut through all of that and get to the soul, get to that thin boundary between reality and a real fiction, you can do anything. that is the well that will keep your crops watered and your family hydrated for years to come. that’s what i believe, anyway.

[definitelynotplanetfall]

One downside of having public facing social media and a brain that only occasionally spits out something that is cogent and not angry, is that for every cogent + not angry thing it spits out you have to choose whether to shout it into the void (the ”””correct””” thing to do but really kind of pointless) or send it privately to a friend (more likely to elicit a response but good luck justifying that one on the mental energy balance sheet).

Like people will talk about how the concept of “wasting an idea” is silly and perhaps it is silly if your idea-generation module hasn’t been damaged by your brain constantly screaming misogynistic questions at itself for the past ~seven years and calmly answering every one with “I would kill myself and wake up.”

But my idea-generation module is (gestures upwards) and thoughts have to be carefully pickled for later usage and it’s just - look is this just a me thing? Does everyone else just post their nonsense and also email it to people that aren’t on the platform? Because the thought of doing both feels profoundly weird to me and nobody that talks about things that are profoundly weird to them ever talks about this so either a) I am uniquely stupid or b) this was explained at the same meeting everyone else went to that told them the school scaremongering about being online was just exhortations to caution and it was not literally true that posting on a forum once would manifest depraved ugly men (but I repeat myself thrice!) to harass you.

This was going to be the lead-in to one such thought (a shallow and no-doubt-stale media opinion) but the tone sort of got away from me.

[rositaspigtail]

Don’t talk about it

Sometimes a Tumblr post hits you where it hurts most. So I’m going to share, and hope no one ignores it because it’s pretty important.

I’m pregnant with my first child. I’m so nervous, scared even. I browse forums for advice. People say parenting is the hardest job in the world. They say ‘it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but the reward is so worth it’. But they don’t actually discuss individual challenges, it’s all kept to vague, trite sentences repeated verbatim. I’m scared. What if I’m not a good mum? What if the first thing I do is drop the baby on it’s head? But all the other expectant mums just talk about their excitement and how they can’t wait to meet their little bundle so I don’t talk about it. I’m the odd one out.

Everyone talks about how you get a rush of overwhelming pure love the moment you first hold your baby. No one says they didn’t feel this. No one talks about what it could mean if you don’t feel this. I’m expecting it, but when the midwives put my new baby in my arms I just feel... tired. No rush, no surge of emotion. Just a detached observation that his face looks weird and squashy. Within minutes of his birth I’m thinking ‘Am I a bad mother?’ But I don’t talk about it, because I can’t let anyone KNOW that I’m weird.

This boy doesn’t sleep. He screams for hours through the night. His daddy is asleep upstairs because he has to go to work in the morning so it’s just me and the sound of screaming bouncing off the walls at 3am and I’m exhausted and I’ve tried EVERYTHING and nothing works, he just cries and cries and cries and in the end I’m crying too because I’m so tired and I don’t know what to do. But I don’t go into detail with anyone, I just say ‘he just doesn’t sleep’ because everyone knows babies keep you up at night. I get about two hours sleep a night for over a year and I can’t function properly. I just drag myself through each day feeding, changing nappies and all the rest in a numb haze. But this is normal right? Everyone else manages, why am I so useless? Just a bad mother.

Breastfeeding hurts. Every time I feed him it feels like my nipples are being put through a shredder. My whole body clenches every time I feed him. I mention this to both my mother and mother-in-law. They both say ‘it’s normal for it to hurt a bit at the start’ so I don’t talk about it any more. I shut up and clench my teeth and get on with it and dread the next time he’s hungry. His weight drops even though he feeds so often I can’t bear it. It’s the most natural thing in the world and I can’t even do that right. Bad mother.

Having my second child is an eye opener. I’m still the same person, but this is a different baby entirely. In the night when she wakes I feed her, put her back down and go back to sleep. A totally different experience and I have no idea why one child would scream so much when the other goes back to sleep like a dream. Even though she wakes me several times a night, I’m not tired, I can function. The local breastfeeding counsellors have finally had the training and when I go to them and say ‘it’s hurting’ they say ‘that’s not normal, it shouldn’t hurt’ and help me correct the way she’s latching on. It’s the same way her older brother latched on as a baby, and if I’d had the same help back then feeding him wouldn’t have been so miserable and he wouldn’t have been hungry all the time.

Everyone says parenting is hard, but they never share their frustrations and struggles. They just post instagram shots of their adorable kids and gush about how much they love their kids and their lives wouldn’t be the same without them. I look at these other parents who have it all together and wonder why am I like this? Why can’t I manage when everyone else copes just fine? There are days when my brain starts telling me that I should walk out, leave the children behind because they’d be better off without me. But I can’t bear the thought of never seeing them again and I stay and I hate myself for it because how selfish can I be. Bad mother, weak and useless.

He’s six years old when I sign up for a parenting course because I still feel like the worst parent ever and why can everyone else do it but I can’t? And sometime in that course I mention that I never really felt that I bonded with him. You don’t say that (bad, BAD mother) but the group leader pricks up her ears and asks me a couple of questions and then says ‘That’s post-natal depression’ and now it makes sense and if I’d only been able to talk about it sooner I would have been able to get help. But I didn’t because everyone knows parenting is hard and if you can’t handle it why did you have kids in the first place?

I go on anti-depressants and it takes time but it helps eventually. There are still struggles and I still don’t feel that I can be open about it because I have a diagnosed mental illness and if I share maybe they’ll report me to social services and maybe I’ll lose my kids and I can’t have that so I still tend to hold back. But now I’m starting to see people sharing more about their everyday struggles. The times morning just go so damn wrong and they end up getting the kids to school late, women making funny videos about the challenges of parenting and I feel less alone, I feel more normal. I realise that, actually, I’m doing about as well as anyone else.

And now here I am scrolling through my dash on Tumblr and I see a post ‘I wish parents would stop talking about how hard it is. Everyone knows parenting is hard if you can’t handle it why did you have kids in the first place?’ ‘parents should love their kids unconditionally’. And it throws me right back. I feel that damned heavy weight in my chest again and that little whisper in my head pops right back up: bad mother, bad mother, selfish, useless, weak pathetic. I scroll past but now it’s bothered me for two days so I have to let it out and open up.

Everyone knows parenting is hard, but this means that sometimes we need support, a shoulder to lean on. Not talking about it cuts you off from that support, and it makes you feels worse, which makes your parenting abilities suffer so the kids suffer for it too. I’m convinced that my son had some kind of physical issue going on as a baby but I will never know what it was because ‘babies cry, babies wake at night it’s normal’ so I didn’t realise how profoundly NOT NORMAL it was and couldn’t get him any help. So when you don’t share those experiences and gain insight from the experiences of other parents, the children suffer for it.

As for unconditional love. Struggling doesn’t mean you don’t love your children. There were so many days (more than I can count) when I would be in the kitchen cooking or cleaning up and I’d find myself holding one of our sharp knives just ready to end it all and find some peace. An end to all the pain and doubt and self loathing I felt. Every time I’d end up putting the knife away because ‘who will look after the children?’ I only stayed for them, and if that’s not unconditional love I don’t know what is.  So fuck anyone who says parents shouldn’t talk about how hard it is. We absolutely should. We should share and support each other and seek help when we need it because that’s how we resolve our problems and become better parents.

[heyitssharpie]

What is worrying me lately

-Everything around me is moving so fast and it feels like I am standing completely still just watching it all happen. Everyone is off doing all these amazing things and I haven’t done a single thing worth noting. Since graduating high school, I’ve had several friends move to new states and make beautiful lives for themselves, friends who got married, had children, gotten their first adult jobs or started their careers. And here I am. I have done nothing worth being proud of. I haven’t accomplished anything. I am aware that everyone progresses differently and that everyone has their own path that they discover at their own pace. But, here I am, the same old chick.

-I’m graduating college in a frikin’ year and I have no idea what to do next. Do I continue on and pursue my Master’s degree? Take a break and find some work? Buy a house maybe? Am I going into the medical field? Law? Pharmaceuticals?

-I am 20 years old and I have no life skills. I don’t know how to do anything practical. Cooking isn’t my strong suit and I abhor cleaning up after others, although there is one person I don’t seem to mind the thought of doing it for. I gave myself food poisoning for goodness sake! No one told me that you can’t eat turkey from the fridge after 7 days. I have no clue how to write a check or how to do my taxes. I don’t know what kinds of questions to ask when making big purchases. Its all a mystery to me.

-My father isn’t answering any of my messages and I have a feeling that something is wrong with him. His health is already in shambles and his death is much nearer than it should be at his age. He won’t get to see me walk down the aisle. He won’t get to meet his future grandchild. He won’t get to see me receive my degree. And the saddest part of it all, I can’t seem to find any emotions for it all. I feel no sadness, no pain, just nothing. And that is the scariest thing of all. I should be terrified, I should cry, but I can’t. I want to believe that it’s because we never had a relationship that really spanned beyond being good friends, but that can’t be it because the thought of losing good friends is soul crushing for me. Maybe it’s because I cut myself off emotionally from him a long time ago to save myself the heartache when he inevitably disappeared again. which leads to yet another thing that is worrying me.

-I never learned to deal with my emotions. Growing up in my family, I was the odd one out. Any forum I tried to use to express myself was shot down and deemed “weird” or “strange”. I wasn’t allowed any positive form of expression and I had no one to talk to. Any attempt to explain my depressive, anxious thoughts was met with resistance and I was more often than not told that I was exaggerating, a hypochondriac, or that I needed to stop acting out for attention. I had no choice but to learn to suppress my emotions, but i think I learned to do it a little too well. I come off now as this steely, heartless girl who’s feelings are never hurt but in actuality I’m incredibly sensitive. I am very aware of how people around me act and I notice when things change and sometimes that can cause me to shut down emotionally in order to protect myself. I feel things very strongly and I know when something will break me. Lately, as I’ve been trying to become a more open and expressive person for myself and for the person I love, I’ve unlocked a lot of doors that have brought on a wave of anxiety the likes of which I have not felt in years. Yesterday, she brought up something that made me feel pretty bad. The fact that she has really no knowledge of my anxieties. I feel awful about that because she has been very open with me about hers and about where they stem from, and I have not. It made me think seriously about what I have divulged to her and how much I’ve held back seemingly for her sake but in all honesty for my own sake because I’m afraid that she’ll up and leave. In order for her to understand the things that cause me anxiety, there is a lot of backstory that I would have to tell and that made me think about how odd it is that I’ve never told her any of it before. How closed up must I be that I didn’t even tell my best friend about these things that effected me so profoundly? I’m terrified truthfully to express some of these things because I don’t want them to come out as being accusations at all or as me limiting the things she can do because I don’t want her to feel like I’m trying to tell her she can’t do things or like I’m being controlling. As someone who has been in a relationship before that was incredibly controlling, I don’t ever want her to feel that and I don’t ever want to be the reason anyone feels that way. I’m worried that I will never find a way to express how I feel to her or explain the things that give me anxiety and she’ll get tired of me and leave. I feel like I waited so long for a chance that I never thought I’d get with a beautiful soul that deserves so much better than me only to blow it because I can’t put on my big girl pants and tell her things she needs to know. I’ve never had problems communicating to anyone like this before but also I’ve never felt so strongly about anyone before. Ugh.

[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*