#queer fetishization

[brainwormcity]

Nothing has made me more aware of fetishization of queer men than my experiences in fandom. Smut does better on AO3 than fluff because people care more about how we fuck than how we love and that is so depressing.

[vicontheinternet]

I will never come between a straight woman and her fetishized mlm ship

[idolomantises]

lol, so after posting my comic on twitter, some guy quote retweeted the post and said they "regretted" making comic dubs of it and was going to delete every dub featuring my comic.

I asked them why (though the answer was obvious, considering i usually draw hot girls with big boobs, and this comic featured a gay man with a pup mask) but i wanted to be sure.

They claimed it was because they're no longer a fan of sexy demons and angels, but i pointed out that they've made several hazbin hotel/helluva boss dubs as well as praised a recent helluva boss episode not too long ago, so they definitely don't have issues with sexy demons. So I decided to be forward and say "is this because the this character made you uncomfortable (the gay man in a pup mask) and they said yes LMAO

anyways, moral of the story, if you can't handle my queer men at their kinkiest, then you don't deserve the sexy lesbians

[future-crab]

It's been said before, it will be said again, but it's still worth saying: the fact that art centering on straight romance is allowed to just be bad, but art with queer romance in it always has to be indicative of A Serious Problem With the Way We Tell Queer Stories makes being a queer person making queer art deeply stressful

[spockandstars]

It’s honestly kinda funny when men act like women having slash ships is exactly the same as straight guys fetishizing lesbians. If a considerable amount of men were writing essays and novels about an emotionally complex romantic relationship between two well-developed female characters, well that would be a different story.

[magidoggie]

A LOOK INTO SHI/HIR PRONOUNS AND THEIR ORIGINS

So I’ve seen people claim that shi/hir pronouns are intersex exclusive (mostly intersex people), and others say they aren’t (mostly non-intersex people)

As an intersex person, I've been confused about this for a while, so I decided to look into it

THIS POST WILL CONTAIN NSFW TOPICS, FURRIES, TALKS OF FETISHIZATION OF INTERSEX BODIES, AND INTERSEX SLURS!

Most of the users of these pronouns seem to be non-intersex people, but there are also intersex people who use them.

I've seen a decent amount of intersex people say that shi/hir pronouns are only ours to use, as they were used against us (like a shortened version of he-she). This would make them basically slurs that only we can reclaim.

I've even seen some claims that Geoffrey Chaucer himself coined these words?? (The chaucer thing, I haven't been able to find a source for. Even so, it is most likely just an old spelling of "she/her")

I’ve seen people say it originated on 4chan. It'd be hard to verify, as 4chan is known for not keeping threads up for long. There are 4chan archives, but I've tried my hardest to look for any combinations of things like "shi" and different terms that could work with it like "intersex" "freak" or "hermaphrodite" . I don't doubt it's been used on 4chan, but I can't find much, and archival sites don't go back far enough.

Regardless, the pronouns seem quite old. One thing I did find under the search of ""4chan" shi hir" on Google, was a.. descriptive post on a furry porn website called e621.net

Okay, 13 years ago, that's a start. It certainly contains the word "herm" (short for hermaphrodite), and the word intersex used with this pronoun.

Godspeed TheShadowfox42 I hope you found the image.

Using Google's "Before:(date)" feature, I searched "shi herm before:2010", and unsurprisingly, I found a lot of furry porn.

Stories on sofurry.com, a furry website that looks to be from at least 2007, if not older. I'll spare you the details, but indeed, there, they use shi/hir pronouns for their "herm" characters. Did these pronouns originate from.. furries?? I put that though aside for now, to look further into other uses.

As it turns out, the journey does not end at 2007. Urban dictionary has an entry from 2003

No slurs here, it looks like a neutral usage. Again, going back to Google. Now, search terms "hir "gender neutral" before:2004"

Many results show up now, now articles rather than furries. American.edu (seems to be a university), Swarthmore.edu (this is a college), both from 2001. jstor.org with a journal article from 1999. Unfortunately I can't read that one, as I have to pay a whole $63 to purchase it. I even found a PDF file from 1994 by core.ac.uk

But, what I've realized now is this is not usage of shi/hir pronouns. All of these use Ze/hir pronouns. I don't know if there is any link, but the last pronoun looking the same must've obscured the results.

From the american.edu article on these pronouns. You can see the usage of "hir" alongside "ze", and below it, the usage of ze/zir pronouns, which seem to be used more today.

Shit.. Doing the search all over again with the pronoun "shi" yields.. very few results apart from people talking about Chinese words.

Wait what about those furries from earlier? The tvtropes.org article does include this:

Chakona space? Chakats? Pronouns he came up with? Admittedly I kept seeing these centaur feline hybrid characters come up quite consistently during this dive, but I had to look into it further.

Oh buddy what did I get myself into. This is from 2001 best I can tell, so we're getting quite old here. I scroll down on the page.

And lower down.

Now this is all very interesting speculative biology, but what I'm focusing on is again, the usage of "hermaphrodite" together with the pronouns "shi/hir". Did a furry artist named Bernard Doove come up with these pronouns.

It gets yet older.. New search, "chakats "shi" before:2001"

Again, Bernard Doove's art from 2000, 1999, 1998,

I find a website called yerf.metafur.org It has furry art, dating all the way back to the mid 1990's, but here, on December 23 1998, is the first appearance of these pronouns on that site.

This Bernard Doove person has been at this project, with these pronouns for a while.

From what I can tell, many of his art pieces, they seem to be quite sexual beings. Quite fetishistic of hermaphroditism at times. (or intersexuality, take your pick)

The other thing I found with my search was a website, furry.org.au/bosshoss/

My search says it's from September 14 1998.

That's certainly some information, but it might come in handy. So Chakat Goldfur provided this website? Who is that? Looking into it, that seems to be a character created by Bernard Doove, that acts as an alter ego. Further down, the person running this website lists some other websites they enjoy. One being "Proxima Centauri", which seems to be another furry artist.

"I met this one at ConFURence 8. Very interesting. (Did I mention shi is a hermaphrodite uni-centaur?)"

(For context, ConFURence is a furry convention held in 1997)

Again, the usage of hermaphrodite, and the pronoun shi. At this point, the website being linked to is long gone, but the wayback machine provides help. The website, http://www.spots.ab.ca/~unicorn/main.htm has been captured all the way back to October 8th 1997.

At this time, the website was under construction. No images are willing to load and haven't been archived, but the description is intact.

So this person uses shi/hir pronouns for their hermaphroditic character all the way back in 1997. There are links to other places where this person used to host their works, but they are all down and haven't been archived. The thread is running thin..

Back to Bernard Doove, the Chakat creator. There must be something more to this. Turns out, there was. On the "yerf" website, I actually found several art pieces that were not picked up by Google.

Febuary 22 1997. Getting yet older. In some art pieces, Bernard references "Forest Tale" and "forest tales", so I went looking for whatever that was.

1995?? you've got to be kidding. It's an adult story involving these "chakat" beings, and sure enough, down the page

Shi/hir pronouns used over and over again.

With the use of hermaphrodite.

But.. This is kind of where it ends. I couldn't seem to find anything older, and I'm not going to contact Bernard Doove over this. Even something as old as 29 years is impressive to me. Bernard Doove states his characters were inspired by other furry artists' creatures of the time, but since it's 1995, there isn't much left for me to find here. Anything before that time is probably lost.

With all the information I have been able to gather, it looks to shi/hir pronouns were created by Bernard Doove who is a furry author and artist. Shi/hir were made to be a midway between "she" and "him" in some way, to be a gender neutral word for hermaphroditic genetically modified beings called "chakats" in his stories. As an intersex person myself, I don't enjoy the use of "hermaphrodite" in such a way, as it's a slur for us. But these types of characters also seem to be very old, and we, and our struggles, were completely unknown to the vast majority of people, even moreso than nowadays.

If you use those pronouns for an intersex person who doesn't use them, it is indeed intersexist, as you are implying we are hermaphrodites.

But as for whether only intersex people can use them? I'm not sure. The original intent doesn't seem be directly linked to intersex people. You could argue that these hermaphroditic characters are fetishized versions of how many people see us, and have seen us for a long time. Afterall, hermaphrodite was, and still is, a common slur for us.

I don't doubt some people have used these pronouns as slurs against us as well, but I also haven't found anything specifically that supports that. It always seemed to be for specific fictional characters that COULD be based off specific intersex attributes

I'm not going to argue one way or the other. This was just me trying to find what I could about these pronouns and their history. Just be mindful of how you use these pronouns, and the connections they have to fetishes revolving around the common misinterpretation of intersex bodies (as in, "having both parts")

Thank you for reading.

I hope you learned something. I know I did, and I now have a headache.

[lgbtqtext]

[aaronsinferno]

They’re constantly hijacking and policing queer spaces, silencing queer voices that don’t align with the interpretations they get from fics online, and happily push harmful stereotypes in favor of their delusional fantasies. They throw slurs around and double down on them when called out, wish death on us along with certain actors, and then pretend to support Black/poc LGBTQ+ folks/characters as a smokescreen for their personal toxic agendas. For a fandom that’s been happily open to the idea of gay firemen, it’s been giving “no gays allowed” around here a LOT lately.

And now the new narrative is that Oliver Stark doesn’t like LFJR and hates Buck’s bisexual storyline because *checks notes* he didn’t post them on his ig story….

[sukibenders]

The hate from, primarily, straight women in regards to Michael being turned into Michaela is disgusting because it really shows how poorly they, not only, treat wlw ships but also have internalized misogyny because the way they are also talking about Benedict and Sophie but so clearly in a way that's borderline fetishizing--- I can't, especially because what do you mean Francesca's infertility plot is erased now that she's in a sapphic relationship? Like, you don't think that wlw relationship can't struggle with this as well? Be so for real.

[skadream]

i just straight up dont think that yaoi or slashfic is about girls fetishizing gay men like it wouldnt be such a Thing that exists if thats ENTIRELY what it was.

i feel like there was an article about yaoi as a way for women to explore darker tropes in romance which i dont agree with because women have been writing straight romance with dark tropes since forever but the reason that article was torn apart was just to immediately dismiss the entire concept of BL as women fetishizing gay men. am i making sense lmao.

i dont DISAGREE that there were and are a lot of people whose only/earliest/most prominent exposure to queerness has been through slashfic / fandom shipping / BL and that can have an unfortunate side effect of not knowing how to handle queerness in real life but thats usually just the case for young people who learn and grow out of it AND!!!!! we live in current year where people are just more open about queerness and theres more real life stories out there and more representation out there

i guess maybe there IS something to be said about women using the lens of a queer male relationship in order to explore darker tropes being kinda weirdly heteronormative but also maybe a way to fantasize about such things without having it involve any dark tropes toward women, and we can talk about THAT cuz i think THAT could be an interesting path to explore and discuss, but it always just kinda ends at "fujos bad women who fetishize gay men are bad" etc without any further nuance

or we could talk about the fact that male writers just dont know how to write women so the closest relationships ALWAYS end up being between men even when the male lead has a female love interest, so those male relationships tend to be what people gravitate toward

or we could talk about how a lot of the women who write M/M are queer themselves! many are even lesbians! but theyre still just women who fetishize gay men so i guess thats all there is to it

its almost like its misogyny all the way down or something idk

[sirpseudonymphoapish]

We need to stop sanitizing spaces that are meant to be weird. this goes out mostly to the queer community. the word queer literally means strange or unusual. we are SUPPOSED to be different. you do not have the right to claim that you are "queer" and then shit on the people in your own community because they're weird and different. sometimes people's labels overlap and dont make sense. sometimes people dress weird. sometimes people have weird interests. sometimes people have weird kinks. sometimes people have relationships that go against traditional standards (hence the whole idea of being queer in the first place.) sometimes people are ugly. sometimes people are old. sometimes people are just fucking weirdo freaks and thats the whole beauty of it!!!!! if you, as a gay person, have the audacity to make fun of the "cringe" gays, whether that be because they use xenogenders, they dress in bright colors, they like stupid things, they're furries or attracted to objects or whatever the fuck, they're simply having fun and being themselves and NOT HURTING ANYONE,,,,,,,, then you do not belong in queer spaces. because queer spaces are safe spaces. the people that faught for your right to be here today were sick freaks and that will continue on for every generation of queer people. if you want the right to let queerness exist, then you need to get over yourself and let ALL queerness exist. case closed.

anyway this was a very dumbed down version of a rant thats been stuck in my head for months now. enjoy

[loveaankilaq]

Being a white person who has experienced discrimination or violence due to your queer identity still doesn't magically make you immune to vicious racism. You still have systemic power over poc, and you hurling racism at poc esp queer poc you criticize you or are talking about their specific experiences with racism means you are in fact a perpetrator in racial violence, it does not matter what your own past experiences are.

[thepastneverforgets]

every single time I scroll through tiktok or twitter, there's a new post or two that pops up of bvddie cry babies making mocking commentary about bt and all the fan reactions, meanwhile bt fans are analyzing episodes and writing break up/make up fics and actually talking about the progress of the show as a small community circle

like it's so obvious half these ppl just get off on being mean girl fetishizers obsessed with their one right chosen mlm ship. don't actually care about queer men and rep, just care about emotionally getting off to the mlm ship they can project all over