#sometimes cishet white women will do it too but i personally find the male cishet white inserts to be much more insufferable

[johannestevans]

“when you’re in a gay male space, you will very rarely hear them even mention women” cis white gays are sometimes some of the most misogynistic men out there, under the guise and pretense of being sassy. i’m not buying into this AT ALL and you’re one of these dudes who weirdly and grossly bashes women— don’t think we forgot when you called some woman ugly and loudly asked why women are the image of beauty when they’re often so UGLY in the near vicinity of some poor stranger and then proudly posted all about it online as if it was cute and funny and quirky. uplifting gay spaces as woman-neutral and bashing lesbians as man-haters (again! literally the whole stereotype that straight cis men use against lesbians too?) is fucking bogus when you’re literally a prime example of a gay man who can be really fucking weird about women

babe you can just move on with your life and not engage with me or my takes lol, thats very much a thing you can do

like its grand to write fanfiction about things ive said or jokes ive made, have fun with that, but you can also do real things with your time as well

i spend a lot of time with beloved dykes offline (which i would recommend heartily for the too online ❤️) bc of the long standing fag dyke alliance and its literally fine. there is crossover between us, even, bc dykes and fags crossover so significantly

im totes weird about women bc i dont want to have sex with them and bc i base my personal standards of beauty on men rather than women (which in itself is also an act of rebellion against a cishet society, soz to break it to you)

but women werent made for me? i wasnt made for women? my distaste for the expectation of that Everyone Must find women ~objectively beautiful~ (which in itself is a tenet of misogynistic ideology bc it insists that Male / Female exist in a binary of Ugly / Beauty in part TO discredit women and women's ideas) is not actually hurting you or anybody else

[gracegrove]

I find it a bit laughable or at the very least ironic at times that for the longest time prior to joining this fandom, I rp'ed and portrayed a character with a majority (and sometimes all or more) of the qualities that Billy antis warn and complain that he has. And yah know what? I was one of the most popular OC character blogs in the Hobbit and LOR fandom at the time.

For approximately 5 years, I portrayed a (mostly) cishet white male OC. He was rich and entitled. He took whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. He felt like the world owed him everything. Why? Because his father was the Lakemaster of Laketown and also because my muse believed he was rather exceptional in his own right as well.

He was an asshole. He stole items from vendors and never paid for things. Demanded the good life because of his status. He slept with whomever he wanted and felt that buying affection was just as easy if not simpler than true acts of kindness. When he did catch feelings for someone he'd try to chase them away or he'd literally hide in his mansion and not come out (v. dramatic guy I know). He could be laughably pathetic at times. Highly competitive. Spiteful. Fiery. Sexy. Naive. Villainous. Annoying.

He was a raging misogynist. He believed with his whole chest every gender-based stereotype that there was to believe. Sure he may have been chivalrous... but he also believed that women couldn't wield a sword to save their lives. He would pour on the charm the minute he saw someone worth pursuing, but act bored or entirely disinterested when they weren't his type. He may have gone back for sloppy seconds if he was desperate, but he was prideful and always believed that anyone he fucked would come crawling back to him and never the other way around....

He was a bigot. He was highly highly, and I'll stress again. Highly privileged. And yet because he did face some circumstances of adversity, and because he did have a raucous upbringing... he then believed even more so that he had to a believable degree worked hard for his allotment in life. It was very hard for him to not look down his nose at transient or traveling characters he interacted with. He was highly mistrustful of the dwarves when they returned to Laketown. And he was in constant competition with Bard the Bowman (even though that man was nearly 10 years older than himself).

He also had a quick temper. He absolutely hated being compared to his father, even though he rode that man's coattails in life and was too naive to recognize it. He would brashly threaten or challenge others to duels if they pushed this issue. He would sooner die than become his father, even though that's exactly what he was doing... Living off the backs of the townspeople. Living it up whilst others scraped by. Blaming people's misfortunes on moral faults rather than on things he may have actually had a hand in.

He was vain. The blondest curliest mane to ever appear on a mortal in Middle Earth. He adorned himself in velvet capes and long silken feathers. And absolutely adored baubles and would pass one to a lover to pin them down. Because he was horrendous with words and believed if the jewel was heavy enough that might make them stay. They never did. He had at least 12 children though.

Why was he such a terrible person? Aside from the fact that his father was also a horrible person? Well, I'll tell you... His mother left you see. It's not entirely clear whether she truly "left" or if she died. I left that open to interpretation, but I allowed my muse to grow up in a household seeded by a marriage of necessity and harvested in discord. His mother simply disappeared after one evening when he was 8 years old, and he never knew why. His father incessantly told him, whenever he asked that it was because she didn't love him and that she was a "whoring wench." Shortly thereafter when he was 10 years old, his father sent him away to Gonder for military training. In reality, his father just wanted him gone. He didn't return to his home until 11 years later. I framed his trauma history around his parents being highly volatile with one another, but my muse not typically being pulled into it. I had one or two scenarios where he tried to intervene on his mother's behalf and his father ended up locking him away in his room for nearly two days (bc he had forgotten he did it). Once his mother left, his father didn't really care for him as a boy, saw him as in the way of his daily duties, and thus sent him off. His relationship with his father is a mixed one of resentment (not quite hatred) as his father has always been more absorbed in his money and his job than anything else, loyalty/fealty he feels he owes as a son, duty because he's being trained to take over the city eventually, but also not fully realizing he was neglected in his childhood.

My lovely Destrian of Esgaroth. ❤️

like y'all popping off about a netflix character when I was doing just about the same damn thing....

[syekick-powers]

ugh i know i talk about my self-insert writing on tumblr a lot and i know ive talked about my tendency to self-lampoon but sometimes when i see mainstream writers make characters that are obviously self-inserts and then try to pretend they’re not and you can just. tell. they’re self-inserts because the writer presents the character in such a self-congratulatory way it really irritates me. like the character always has a smooth Retort for people criticizing them and the criticizing characters are always portrayed as in the wrong and the character is never seriously challenged i just. want to stick my face into the dirt and scream

like idk if it’s just my low self-esteem but i cannot imagine writing a self-insert without putting them through hell. i see the self inserts of cishet male writers who are like these smooth criminals who always have a slick retort and sleep with a bunch of interchangeable women and do cool gun stunts and i am shocked at how boring they are. Adventures of Jimothy WhiteStraightMan. i cannot imagine writing a self insert without 1) putting them through living hell, and 2) making them look like a fucking jackass. actual words ive said about one of my self inserts: “he has entirely too much dignity and i need to reveal him as the clown he is.” again, maybe it’s just my low self-esteem but when i write self inserts i want the character to fuck up. in spectacular and embarrassing ways. i want them to look like dumb asshats sometimes because sometimes i am a dumb asshat. and like... yes, writing power fantasies is fun. but “power fantasy” does not completely preclude conflict and banter. you can have a character that is a power fantasy without automatically handing the entire plot over to them on a silver platter.

(this post isn’t about self-insert as a coping mechanism btw this is specifically about boring mainstream writers who can’t get past the “power fantasy”  aspect of self-insert long enough to write an actually entertaining story.)

[bibliofiles-in-a-greenhouse]

Mad, Bad, & Dangerous to Know: A Review

Today I will be reviewing Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed. As always, there will be spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.

~~SPOILERS AHEAD~~

Khayyam Maquet should love her holiday with her studious parents in Paris. But instead she finds herself at a crossroads - her sometimes kind-of boyfriend is ghosting, she may have blown her chance of getting into her dream college, and all she wants is to go back home to Chicago to figure out her life. 

But things change when she meets Alexandre Dumas, a descendant of her favorite writer. On top of that she finds letters to a mysterious woman, who just might give Khayyam another chance. 

Meanwhile, centuries before, Leila is trying to hide her love from the pasha, and survive as she is ‘gifted’ a position of favor in said pasha’s harem. As Khayyam begins to trace the threads of Leila’s life, the lives of these two women will intertwine as both lives are changed forever. 

~~TIME FOR MY THOUGHTS~~

I’m rather sad to say that I didn’t like this book. It felt like a chore to read, and my issues with the characters and the plot only made it worse. 

For starters, this book was presented as a feminist and poc narrative, but both protagonists spend the majority of the book bending to the will of men, and not even nice, respectful men. Being a feminist and hating all men do not go hand in hand, but these characters, and Khayyam especially,  are at the beck and call of the men in this story, above their own autonomy. Leila is not much better, making strong, well-grounded decisions and suddenly throwing them all away for a man despite the fact that it might very well get her killed. 

Another thing that wrankles with me is that, from what I can tell, this book has some good poc representation, especially in that of the two leading ladies. But Khayyam makes me feel like she’s ‘not racist towards the french’ in the way that Emily in Paris is a love letter to France instead of a bunch of Americans taking a shit on French culture. Khayyam is such a cool intersection of cultures, race, and religion (she’s French, Indian, American, and Muslim), and I think it would have been really cool and interesting to take a look at how all of these intersecting identities affect Khayyam, regardless of where she is*. 

Instead she spends so much time confused over which boy she should pick (she calls them ‘problematic faves’ - more on that later), that the story (these two women centuries apart coming together) that I came here for comes second. 

Back to Khayyam’s ‘problematic faves’, or more accurately, her use of that term. It makes sense that a seventeen-year-old would speak like most of gen z, however, sometimes the volume of gen-z buzzwords in what Khayyam is saying reminds me of Riverdale, and not in a good way (side note: is anything involving Riverdale good? I mean seriously, would anyone ever say ‘I beg your misogynistic pardon?’ unironically?). 

For a complete change of subject, where were Khayyam’s parents? Their few appearances are only to further the plot progression (and by plot I mean what should be the subplot of which boy Khayyam is going to pick), despite the fact that their daughter breaks and enters on multiple occasions. They let said daughter run around Paris with a guy that they met once (and the only thing they know about him is that he’s related to Alexandre Dumas), and though I appreciate that they are giving their daughter more independence, I’m a little concerned that they didn’t seem to fear for Khayyam’s safety at all. 

The story has such a cool premise, but I feel like so much of it is spent mooning over different men (almost entirely on Khayyam’s part by this point, since Leila’s major paramour died) that it takes a back seat, and could be lost entirely without really affecting Khayyam’s journey at all. I don’t see a lot of character development in Khayyam, and she sort of comes across like ‘i’m not like other girls’ in the way that Bella from Twilight isn’t like other girls. 

Later in the story, in an effort to prove that she really is feminist, and she doesn’t need men at all, her two love interests are demonized (which is fair, both of them are flawed, but given the fairly positive view that the reader has gathered of them from the previous 200-ish pages, it’s kind of out of nowhere), but that doesn’t erase the fact that Khayyam has been pining for the both of them throughout the book. I also think that Khayyam could have been a lot less damaging with how she handled the situation. She didn’t try to communicate sensibly and instead hurls insults at them until they both leave (In the case of Zaid, it kind of makes sense, he was not good to Khayyam, but Alexandre’s feels a bit less justified). I understand that given that she is 17, she may not be the most mature person in the world, but I think her outburst is kind of sudden and poorly handled. 

She chooses herself, yes, but at the cost of some, if not glowing relationships, then half-decent ones. I feel like the book fell into the common pitfall of ‘romantic relationships are the be all and end all of teen life’ which is simply not true. 

Khayyam is so focused on being feminist and defying the patriarchy in the present that she forgets that the whole point of this was to discover Leila’s story, and take down the patriarchy by telling it. The whole point of Alexandre appearing at all (his connections to the Dumas family helping discover Leila) is thrown out of the window when Zaid shows up, just like it has been for the last few hundred pages. Khayyam, and by extension Leila, are jerked around by men, the patriarchy, despite Khayyam’s whole deal supposedly being defying said patriarchy. 

Khayyam reminds me of how white cishet male authors write feminists - spewing all the relevant rhetoric until a man comes along and ‘fixes’ it. I guess the only reason that i’m so bothered by it is because this is presented as a masterful feminist story, but all Khayyam really does is say feminist things while she is a doormat for the male characters. It doesn’t even feel like quality observations, because she spews all of this hate towards famous men - not entirely without reason - but she doesn’t acknowledge the cultural influence that these men had. She does not separate art from artist from gender. 

Nevermind that these men are helping the plot move forward, and without them there would likely be no plot at all. Khayyam’s main personality trait is supposedly being feminist and not needing men, yet she consistently bends to the will of men for the sake of the plot or drama, both of which are in such contrast with how the reader has expected Khayyam to be that they feel almost physically painfully out of place. 

In short, I think that this book had a really amazing plot idea and a lot of things going for it, but the way is was executed in contrast with my expectations based on the synopsis and the author’s note make me feel massively let down. The book has pitfalls that while not always massive, are commonplace enough and reoccurring enough that I couldn’t ignore them, and subsequently couldn’t find myself enjoying the book, no matter how hard I wanted to. 

- Marigold

*note: I know that the race, religion, and/or cultural identity of a character, especially a poc character, should not be their only personality trait. However with Khayyam, I feel like it is not addressed in any way at all, despite the fact that within the first few sentences of the book it is put in a position to be a focal point. I just feel as though her saying vague things like ‘that lady was kind of rude to me’ leaving the insinuation that she (the woman) is racist, or ‘it’s paris so i probably won’t get shot by a cop’ (which is a fair thing to say, I just think that if you’re going to mention that you might as well add something to make me invested in that idea with regards to the character personally. That didn’t happen, therefore it feels very abstract; since she’s not in America, where such a comment would be most relevant it falls flat) really leaves out the audience and makes it hard for them to relate or sympathize with Khayyam’s struggles against racism. It feels performative, obligatory and perfunctory when it would have been such an effective device to get readers invested in Khayyam’s life, regardless of whether she was in the US or not. There are no flashbacks to help ground the things that Khayyam references, so it’s far too easy to forget that she said them at all, and that in her hometown she has a very good reason to be concerned for her safety (in special regards to the cop thing).

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

[low-budget-korra]

The first text I made was over 2,000 words so I’ll try to summarize it.

First I'm going to talk about what I think is Bury Your Gays and poor writing of minorities.

For me, Bury your gays is when certain productions kill the lgbt character for the sake of shock value, often in the most stupid ways possible. A famous example of this was what happened to Lexa in the 100. When it feels like the character only died because he is gay.

And for me, poor writing for minorities (poc, lgbt, people with disabilities ...) can be characterized as:

1. Productions that want to portray the image of progressives and put a poc or lgbt character (which are the most common cases) without personality, unimportant, without development ... Character that are just there for decoration

2. When they even create an interesting character but soon create a reason to kill him to shock the audience. Kill them because they are poc.

And for me having a poc or lgbt character (since these are the boxes where I identify with) interesting, important ... this is the word: Important! whether it is important directly in the plot as a protagonist who carries the story or a supporting role with a good role on the story and a good development, it is much more significant than a character forced only for certain productions not to be accused of racism, sexism or lgbtphobia.

Of course, each case is different. I will now comment briefly on Atomic Blonde, The Last of Us part II and The Legend of Korra.

In Atomic Blonde we have the death of Delphine, a lgbt character who has generated some discussions about being a "bury your gays". I don't particularly agree because I believe that if she were a man or straight, she would die anyway. Since the protagonist's other love interest had died in the beginning and he was a heterosexual white man, and because the character of Delphine, despite being a spy, did not belong in that work or life style . Something even commented by herself. She was an inexperienced agent in the worst possible scenario to be one . But i now understand and why some people still think It was bury your gays.

In The Last of Us part II I saw many people complaining about the death of Jesse, Yara and how Lev was just a supporting character. The Last of Us part II .... a game that is not afraid to kill loved characters without any ceremony simply because in that world, one mistake can cost your life. Regardless of gender, sexuality, age, skin color ...

Jesse and Yara played Asian American characters and died. Mel, Joel, Owen ... were Caucasian, cishet characters who died too. None of them die because they are asian american or caucasian, they die cuz that world is fucking ruthless.

And about Lev not being important just because he is an supporting character... First that he is for Abby what Dina is for Ellie, both of them are extremely important support for the protagonists and Interesting characters with their own internal struggles and development. I think it is very unfair to throw this away with the argument like: "ah, but he is not the protagonist so it is not important"

And still about The Last of Us part II we are talking about a game and for those who do not know the gamer community is toxic, full of sexism, racism, lgbtphobia ... And the game developers had the balls for not only make two protagonists women outside the steryotype of femme fatalle or defenseless love interest(still very present in games) and one of them a lesbian, but also introducing an important trans character in a mainstream high-budget game.

People, until recently the only image we had of women in games was that of a busty model running around, made purely to please male players, good and important black, asian and lgbt characters was really rare or just didnt exist at all.

And today we have characters like Ellie, Lev, Kassandra (AC Odyssey), Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield who were reimagined more humanely in the remakes of Resident Evil, Lara Croft herself in the 2013 Tomb Raider remake, Max and Chloe(Life is Strange), Lee and Clementine(TWD from telltale), Marcus (Detroit Become Humam ), Connor (AC3) ... I know, there is still a long way to go until we have achieved the equality and representativeness that we want in the world of games but we are advancing. They may be a baby step but they still are steps forward. We should continue to support this initiatives and demand better representation.

Now about The Legend of Korra ... Reading the comments in the post i get the feeling that people were much more angry with Bryke for being cishet than with questions related to the narrative.

It bothers me the fact that it seems that whoever made the posts (originally from twitter) did not watch avatar or simply watched without paying attention. It was NEVER about Korra needed suffering but about finding Meaning in suffering. And yes, they are two different things.

When in the end Korra is talking to Tenzin, about understand the why she had to go through all that , for them be abble to be more compassionate of others. That shit is real. When you have a panic attack , for exemple, you become more abble to help someone who also suffers from that. Or when some people lose someone for a disease or acident and choose to become a doctor to help others, wanting no other person had to go through that pain... In this case, the person didnt have to lose someone to be a doctor but maybe after saw all the fight that the doctors put in to save someone and the pain of losing someone may have made the person spend the rest of his life saving people. Get It?

And in Avatar, both TLA and TLOK, people have suffer.

Aang: Cast aside by his friends when people discover he was the Avatar. Runaway and lose all of his people. Had to see the devastation for himself and find the bones of his friend and possible father figure. Almost die a few times. For many years had the weight of been the last of his people. And in a part of the journey, lost Appa.

Sokka and Katara: Lost their mother. Their dad leave to fight and possible die in the war. Sokka was only a teen when he was the man responsable for his tribe. Katara had the weight of being the only waterbender of her tribe and be the only one that could calm Aang once he was in Avatar State.

Toph: as a blind kid, her parents think of her as someone unable to do anything. Had to choose between save Appa or save the others in some point of their journey

Zuko: When i start with him?

Azula: oh Boy...

Iroh: Lose is only son. Had to see his brother burn Zuko's face. And Zuko betrayed him, kind of, in the end of book2.

Asami: Her mom was murdered , maybe even in front of her. Her dad was a evil genius. She probably suffered with Korra in those 3 years.

Mako and Bolin: They grow up as orphans on the streets...

I could go on and on, dude, even the cabbage man had suffer from losing his cabbages over and over.

But all of the sudden, Korra now had to have plot armor or else Bryke is wrong and are terrible people.

Everybody loves to talk about how perfect Zuko's arc and development is. Zuko, who was one of the characters who most have suffered in the show. But for him all was necessary, had meaning, perfect storytelling and structure but with Korra.... "She cant suffer cuz she is brown"

And its not like Bryke was making something up outta nowhere just to torture the character. All she face it was a consequence direct or indirect of her actions and actions of other people.

Amon and the Equalists? Aang didnt kill Yakone nor put him in prison for life, just took his bending. Yakone was a terrible father, and one of the reason Amon hate bending (even himself been a waterbender) so much to the point of him do what he did. The same to Tarrlok. He turn his sons into monsters. And the triads only help them, because they use their bending to rob the non benders.

Vaatu? Look up The Beginning epsodes because this one is more complex.

Unalaq? Look, the worst villain of Avatar. But he took advantage of things that happen as consequences of the ending of book1

Zaheer? Direct consequence of that happen in the finale of book 2.

Kuvira? Direct consequence of things that happen in book 3

Again, i could go on and on and go deeper on all that. But this is already getting to big.

But what pissed me off most is ... Look im years in this fandom. As a Brazilian i saw and read stuff from the fandom here in my country and the fandom here in Tumblr. And in those years i read so much about how Korra journey help people overcome their struggles with ptsd, anxiety, depression...myself included. How much Korra was important to lesbians and bissexuals girls, especially girls of color.

And them we have those few people throw shit on all this and "cancel" you for not agree with them...

The Legend of Korra ended 2014, 6 years ago and still is so loved, so important to so many people, for the most diverse reasons.

For a cishet, Bryke did a amazing job creating this amazingly beautiful universe. With the most diverse inspirations, coming from places that are forgotten on western media. But i guess its easier criticize, and cancel them and the show than do what they did.

I know that sometimes we just wanted a scape from our difficult reality but seriously, if you Just want a movie/tv show/book...100% happy, rainbow and sunshine with no suffering at all, stick with the fanfics because even romcons sometimes have their among of "i you make you cry and suffer" kind of shit.

Suffer is present in our life and what a lot of movies/tv shows/games/books...try to do is bring our struggles and our suffering into them. Why? Its easier have simpathy for characters who look like us, characters who had been through the same stuff as us.

Is so difficult talk those things in another language. I always feel like i didnt express myself right. And im really sorry if i offended anyone, it wasnt my intention.

[mr-kamiyama]

I saw a post about "unicorn chasers" (chasers who are typically cishet couples chasing bi women together) and I went to add a bit on, but it turned into a whole big thing.

So, instead, a whole post on dating sites for bi, ace, Asian people, particularly 30-50:

Yeah, this is a big thing with straight married couples. (EDIT: "This" refers to couples chasing bi women to sexually use to somehow save a failing marriage, it makes as much sense as it sounds like) And it only targets women. So I peacefully avoided it, but bi women in that age range get this constantly from what I hear. Chasers come in all types. In addition to any other cishet men's creepy and sometimes even violent sexual cold messages. And if you're another fetishised demograph (Asian, trans woman) tack that on.

Before I started undoing my amatonormative programming, became to even enjoy living by myself (which I think was a bit part of it all), etc., I spent some of my 30s on a dating app. Fat mixed part-Asian biromantic (well, bi-greyro, but I didn't realise that, either, and just said I wasn't interested in One Night Stands, which apparently many say but not all mean it's just wh*rephobia) asexual (though I didn't quite realise that either) trans male. (Mind that even the bi part is considered a minus for men, just like the Asian and trans, which are all subject to chasers in women, because the bigotries against those three have the same gender-based leper or sex toy dichotomy)

If you were looking for men on dating sites, it was 98% cisgays, hardly any ALPOC. Mostly white, occasionally Black. (No real MENA, etc presence, either. Native likely not there because residential schools literally killed almost all in my age range. I think I was the only actual Buddhist. No Jewish people, either. Actually everyone I saw was some type of Christian or Agnostic/Atheist. Didn't quite make sense for my area, I was in Los Angeles then)

I was 100% treated as a leper except I had this nice chat spanning two days with a Filipino guy over classic literature... and then he vanished randomly. I've had it suggested that that might've been a fake identity and they might've been a young person trying to work their feelings out or something. Which, well, if so, then I guess I'm glad I'm ace. (As in, allosexuals would've probably gotten explicit over two days of messaging) So that might be a thing, too.

But otherwise, total leper. Which is more peaceful than being spammed constantly by chasers, but both are 100% about bigotry against you.

Women period have bad times on these sites (I will say at least OkCupid provides a "hide me from straight people" option, but chasers of bi people, well, not escaped that way, and racist chasers come in all orientations), but especially of one or more fetishised demographs are generally treated abhorrently. See the term "fetish dispenser"

And ignore how a site sells itself. Everything I've experienced and heard (I've heard a lot from women of multiple orientations and some from other trans men) is that dating site users are overwhelmingly of the Tinder/Grinder mindset regardless of what site, i.e. this doesn't work well for aces. And you will see tonnes of cis men with pictures but all their profile says is "lives across the country, but I'll be in your town for three days, message me to find out more" and that's it even if there's no character limit on profile because Joe CisSchmo tends to think he's Axl Rose or something and everyone wants him.

There is one out there that has more trans people. I can't remember its name, but it seems to summarise well as "Trans Tinder," meaning focus on pics and also age group. Which was too young for me, so I can't even remember its name because I bounced pretty quickly. Not looking for a "Hey Ninteen." I require working knowledge of how dials on TVs and magnetic tape players are used. If rollerskates weren't trendy and four-wheeled when you were a kid, too young for me. I do not understand or want to understand the "ooh, barely legal uwu" mindset, nor do I want to.

(Of course, the more I learn about arospec and myself, the more I wonder how alloromaticism works. Does that come from looks, too?)

Frankly, if you're bi (or Asian, a/o trans or frankly anything not cismono) dating sites are not always a great experience. And the more either chased or reviled oppressed classes you are, the harder it gets one way or another. And if you're aspec, it's like everyone around you expects you to be able to dance a pumpkin, you can't actually work the way everyone else around is. A lot like being ace and expecting going to a bar to pick someone up to work. Even though sites may promote themselves as aimed at people looking for serious or long term. Which is probably just more wh*rephobia. (At least, I think I'm using that word right and I'm censoring it because I think it's a slur? I'm not 100% sure, but I'm trying, here)

The only site this wholly excludes is OurTime, as I don't know anyone in that age bracket who isn't either taken or done. But they do advertise really hard on Fox News, so I'd be pretty wary.

That's my first and second-hand experience of dating sites.

[longformautie]

Addressing sexism of autistic men

CW: gender-based violence, including murder and rape

I. Introduction

This post has been coming for a long time. And I mean a LONG time. My thoughts on this topic have been evolving constantly. They will probably evolve even after I post this. I am still learning and welcome feedback.

I was prompted to write this post during the pre-coronavirus Before Times, when I saw that the popular Facebook page Humans Of New York had profiled an autistic man who had become a pickup artist. For context, pickup artists are a group of straight men who will cynically do whatever it takes to get them laid, which of course means blatantly ignoring the needs of the women they interact with, and who share strategies with one another. The autistic man in the photo post talked about how before he was a pickup artist he was hopeless with women, and now he was getting girls - getting laid, even. He said he knew it was manipulative, but that it was only fair - after all, it’s not like anyone had ever sympathized with him for his social difficulties. I was curious about what people had to say in the comments section; turns out, I wasn’t satisfied by any of the takes I found.

The takes I didn’t like can be broken down into two categories. Category number one were formulations like “poor him, he just wants to be accepted.” I’m not even a little bit sympathetic to this take and will only be spending a moment on it. Suffice it to say, it’s hard to take these people at their word that they care about the autism struggle when they don’t show up in droves to the banners of the neurodiversity movement with this level of enthusiasm. Rather, we are part of a culture that likes to sympathize with toxic men. If the man wasn’t autistic, they’d find some other excuse, but since he is, in defending him they can also activate the ableist notion that autistic people are incapable of respecting boundaries. I choose the word “incapable” because if your position is that autistic people sometimes don’t know better than to violate a boundary, the logical conclusion is simply that someone should teach them. To sincerely and enthusiastically take up this kind of “poor autistic guy doesn’t know any better” rhetoric, you have to presume complete incompetence of autistic people and that we’ll never learn, so that when a straight autistic man does a violating thing to a woman, they can shrug their shoulders and say, “well, I guess nothing can be done about this.” This attitude is sexism and ableism couched in a delusion of sympathy.

Category number two of takes, I like lots better but still am not quite satisfied with, and can be roughly summarized: “This isn’t caused by autism, it’s caused by being an asshole.” While I agree that being an asshole is the main ingredient in this cocktail, I don’t think the autism should be dismissed as an irrelevant detail. I think there is a sexism problem specific to autistic men that needs to be separately talked about and addressed. I intend to do so in this post, without assigning blame either to the autism or to the women being abused.

I want to note in advance that this post will be cishet-centric, not because I think straight experiences are universal, partly because the behavior of cishet men is what’s at task here, but mostly because I have no idea how these issues affect LGBTQIA communities. If anyone is able and willing offer insight or resources on that topic, I’d love to hear from you.

I. Autistic men

Having experienced it firsthand, I can say for sure that autistic loneliness is a vicious cycle. By loneliness, I mean a lack of any social connection, not just a lack of romantic or sexual partners. Autism makes social interaction more difficult, which makes it harder to find friends, but, crucially, not having friends also makes social interaction more difficult. More people to interact with means more practice with social interaction; it also means more assistance from comparatively clued-in people who care about us. This vicious cycle can also manifest with respect to a subset of people. For example, an autistic child who only socially interacts with adults may have trouble forming connections with peers. For the purpose of this discussion, I want to focus on the problems this presents for autistic boys who want to interact with girls in their age group.

The scarcity of cross-gender social interaction during childhood need not be framed as a uniquely autistic experience. Societal forces sort us by gender from an incredibly early age, so the vast majority of our social connections in childhood are with people of the same gender. Furthermore, especially during and after adolescence, boys and men are discouraged from being emotionally close with one another. Thus, the norms of masculinity isolate us almost totally from peers of all genders. Our social connections with men must be superficial; our social connections with women must be non-platonic. For those of us who crave the emotional intimacy that our same-gender friendships lack, a romantic relationship is the only socially acceptable opportunity to forming a deep, loving bond with someone close to our own age.

Enter autism (again). Dating, when we hit adolescence, is wholly new to us, and we have been given no opportunity to adjust ourselves to its social norms. Autism makes this a particular challenge, as do gender roles in dating. Since men are supposed to initiate and women are supposed to merely give subtle hints (if not be straight-out “hard to get”), straight autistic men face both the pressure of leaping into an arena that intimidates us, and the bewilderment of not knowing whether it’s working. If I had a crush on you in high school, I probably kept it a secret; if you had a crush on me, I probably didn’t notice.

Worth noting here that none of the things I’ve listed are evidence against autistic men’s actual attractiveness or appeal to women. We are facing access barriers that accumulate over the course of our lives until we finally figure out how to start ripping them down, and when we do, we quite often do get to have romantic and sexual relationships. But the prevailing narrative about autism and other disabilities is that they’re unsexy, and a lot of autistic men buy into that. I myself thought I was one of those autistic men who’d never date or have sex until experience taught me otherwise.

Knowing all this, we can see why a lot of autistic men might feel both that they need a relationship to be happy, and that they cannot possibly have one. This makes us prime targets for recruitment, because the sense of personal injury at being deprived of sexual experiences for reasons beyond one’s control is as indispensable an ingredient in the various movements of the “manosphere” as the sexism itself. It’s not that autistic men are any more or any less sexist than regular men, but that the sexists among us already feel exactly the way these communities require them to feel: deeply aggrieved, and deeply desperate. Pickup artistry both validates this sense of personal injury, and sells itself as the solution: a set of simple, logical rules that, when followed, will grant success. But it misses the uncomfortable truth that while everyone deserves to receive love, no particular person is obliged to give it. This is a deeply frustrating contradiction with no easy solution, but the solution certainly is not to cynically manipulate women into doing the thing you want.

III. Allistic women

I never was a pickup artist, but that doesn’t mean I never harbored a grievance against women for my loneliness. After all, I thought, wouldn’t my perpetual singleness end if women were more direct and assertive? As such, I worry that other people who read this may end up pinning the responsibility for autistic loneliness onto individual women too. The previous section hints at why that’s wrong, but I also want to take the time to explain why it’s deeply unfair.

My autism and masculinity were first brought into conjunction (or was it conflict?) in my mind in my freshman year of college. One of my new Facebook friends shared a Tumblr blog called “Straight White Boys Texting” which was a collection of screenshots of unwanted straight white boy texts, running the gamut from simple inability to take a hint to bona fide “what color is your thong” garbage. I felt pretty attacked, partly because I wasn’t yet used to seeing myself as part of a “straight white boys” collective that people didn’t like, and partly because what I saw was a bunch of guys missing social cues and taking things literally, just as a younger me would have done. I felt like I needed to say something - and boy, was that a bad decision. I said something about how the women in the screenshots needed to be more direct, and got instant (and deserved) backlash both for focusing on the least important problem in the interactions and for placing responsibility for a male behavior problem squarely back onto women.

At the time, I didn’t have a coherent framework for understanding sexism. Since then, I’ve learned that giving a direct no can occasionally get women killed, and most often at least gets them yelled at and insulted. Giving a yes also comes with its own risks - the risk of rape, in (unfortunately-not-actually-so-)extreme cases where that inch of “yes” results in guys taking a mile, but also the more pervasive risk of being socially stigmatized as slutty or promiscuous. It’s often the most women can get away with to be subtle (rather than completely silent) about all of their wants and needs, so that a discerning man who actually cares will know what those wants and needs are and respect them.

This puts those of us who have trouble with reading subtle signals in a difficult position if we inadvertently cross a boundary, but that’s not a problem women can reasonably be expected to solve. If a man crosses a woman’s boundaries because he simply doesn’t respect them, he wants to make it look like it’s an accident so that he will be forgiven. “But Aaron,” you might say, “didn’t you just say that the right thing to do in those situations is to teach people the right behavior, not ignore it?” Yes, that’s true. But that assumes the continuation of a conversation that a woman might feel safer just skipping; if a man is making her feel uncomfortable, she’s probably not inclined to continue to converse with him in order to establish whether his intentions were good or bad. When we impose the burden of freeing males from loneliness onto women, we are asking them to continue to interact with frightening men at their own peril.

Ironically enough, some of these frightening men are the autistic pickup artists from part 1. This means that pickup artists, far from “solving” the problems with dating they feel aggrieved by, are actually making it more difficult for everyone except themselves by giving women one more reason to be scared and cynical, and men who slip up one more type of monster to be mistaken for.

IV. Autistic women

At first glance, it seems like there’s a choice to be made here, between supporting autistic men who want to be valued as potential romantic and sexual partners and supporting allistic women who just want to be safe. But what I’m realizing more and more is that when there seems to be a conflict between the needs of two marginalized groups, the right choice is generally to avoid picking a side and instead find ways to support both groups. This works well, not only because both groups get what they want, but because if a side must be chosen, the people at the intersection of the two groups will lose both ways.

Autistic women bear the brunt of every part of this mess, as described in detail by Kassiane Asasumasu on her blog, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking (see  the links later in this paragraph). Because autistic men fear ableism from neurotypical women, we tend to believe that autistic women are the only partners who will accept us for who we are. As a result, autistic women report being swarmed at autism meetup groups by men looking for a girlfriend, and those men who struggle with independent living are more than willing to escape that by leaning on the patriarchal expectation that the woman does all the chores, even when she is an autistic woman who struggles with the exact same tasks. This means autistic women actually interact with sexist autistic men the most, and not only are they subject to the same toxic shit that allistic women have to deal with, but they’re also expected to “understand” these men and thus endlessly tolerate their (supposedly inevitable) shitty behavior.

V. Solutions

Fortunately, the choice between female safety and autistic desirability is not a choice we have to make, but the solutions are not as simple as members of one or the other group simply choosing to behave differently. Rather, they require the collective participation of all kinds of people.

Addressing autistic male sexism necessarily means addressing sexism. It means respecting when women say no, rather than making it an unpleasant experience they might fear to repeat. It means teaching consent in special education classrooms, so that no one can claim in good faith that an autistic boy who crosses a boundary simply doesn’t know better. It means teaching girls, as they grow into women, that they are under no obligation to tolerate sexist behavior out of sympathy for the sexist man.

But addressing sexism also means supporting boys and men as they escape the confines of conventional masculinity. It means enabling and encouraging them to have close friends of all genders. It means reminding them that they don’t need a woman, any more than a woman needs a man.

In addition to addressing sexism, we need to address the ableism that prevents autistic people from accessing not just dating but emotional closeness of all kinds. We need to stimulate autistic people’s peer relationships at all stages of life. We cannot do this if special ed teachers continue to view us as broken allistic people rather than whole autistic people, nor can we do it if they view us as incomplete adults rather than entire children. If an autistic boy is unable to learn about condoms because it offends the sensibilities of the teacher, or if he is unable to learn how to talk like a teenager because his parents would like him to learn to speak like an adult, then that autistic boy is being deprived both of autonomy and of the opportunity to learn.

Furthermore, we need to teach allistic children how to interact with their autistic peers. Autistic people need no additional incentive to learn how to interact with the societal majority who control their access to jobs, housing, healthcare, education, political representation, and much more. Allistic people can, however, choose not to bother learning how to support and include us and face almost no social consequences beyond not getting to see my cool maps. Rather than alleviating this unequal distribution of incentives, adults generally exacerbate it by focusing only on the social development of autistic children with respect to interactions with allistic people, but not on the social development of allistic children towards being able to interact with autistic people. This is because the prevailing view regarding autism is still that our modes of moving through the world are incorrect and defective, whereas allistic modes of social interaction are viewed as normal and valid even when they exclude others.

The problem of autistic male sexism is hairy and complicated, but if we take the above steps, we can solve it without further stigmatizing autism, and without victim-blaming women. We don’t have to leave anyone behind in this conversation. Rather, by fighting both for autism acceptance and consent culture, we can produce a more just world where everyone gets the love and respect that they deserve.

[bigtittyhimmler-blog]

Who Goes Nazi? Brooklyn Edition

If you’re anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people don’t think you’re one of “those” random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you “work in content,” and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you can’t even hate them for the ways in which they’re different to you, because there aren’t any. But fear not! There’s one thing you’ve got that nobody else does: you know that you’re definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.

But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like “Dove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.” But also don’t imagine, because that’s exactly what’s happening.

 This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Let’s look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)

 Mr A isn’t actually in your group DM, and you’ve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally can’t stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and he’s already a Nazi. He doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his mother’s basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesn’t get laid, but in a different way to the way you don’t get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A won’t shut up about the superiority of a “free silver” bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the “gold shills” in a way that doesn’t really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesn’t really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, he’s talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and he’s at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone you’ve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.

 Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like “so how is everyone’s day today” with a smiley emoji, and when you’re talking to him you get this airless feeling like you’re about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party you’re afraid that he’s going to blurt out that he loves you, but you can’t keep your distance too much because he’s so clearly autistic, and you don’t want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didn’t understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly he’s a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and it’s ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, he’d definitely do it.

 Ms C is one of those women who doesn’t like other women, and you know this about her because you can’t fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff that’s really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. You’ve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesn’t need to consider the harm this does to others, just because she’s “funny” and “an artist.” She’s the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and she’d throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. She’d definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and you’re thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once you’re certain she’s a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.

 Ms D’s boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you can’t stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says she’s a socialist but doesn’t devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means she’s just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), she’d be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You can’t imagine yourself actually hitting her but it’d definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?

 Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RT’s and now he’s moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writers’ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasn’t even been greenlit yet, but you’re already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once he’s back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you won’t say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way he’ll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.

 Mr F probably thinks he’s better than you. He’s a union organizer. So are you (you added “#Unionize” to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who aren’t in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with “the real workers,” who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because you’re not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it you’re certain he doesn’t acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. He’s trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and that’s what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.

 Ms G (me) will never go Nazi, because she is beautiful and kind and pure, and has all the good opinions instead of the bad ones. Because of this she’s allowed to do things that other people can’t do. She can totally fail to understand what having an authoritarian personality actually means, and construct a version of the Who Goes Nazi? essay in which the people who go Nazi are just people who are already right wing, having confused politics with personality, probably because she herself has no personality other than her politics. She can minimize, ignore, or even encourage the infliction of actual suffering when it happens to the wrong kind of people. She can write that “nothing that terrible has really happened” since the publication of Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, even though Mark Fisher himself is mysteriously not around to appreciate that fact. She can do some shit with threatening to leak an unedited draft that I don’t even want to go into. She knows that the Nazis don’t come promising hatred but promising to be your friend, but it’s ok because she doesn’t really have any friends, just mufos. She’s doing great. She’s building a better, kinder world. She will never, ever be the Nazis.

[leatherbookmarking]

honestly it feels like recently im just making personal post after personal post oh well

2000s me whose mom was angry at her for writing comments on internet websites and signing them with my given name (doesn’t matter that it’s one of the most popular names in the country) would be HORRIFIED

anyway i just made a discovery and i GOTTA share.

context: i've seen ppl calling wq a lesbian/obvious lesbian, and i was confused until i realized shipping female characters in cql is a bit like shipping nhs/jc or lxc/jc for me = "oh, that's a thing?" followed by "oh well i'm not actively into it, perhaps it's because the actors are just hot, moving along"

so then: "ok, so people are seeing wq as gay because they, too, are gay. fair enough" --> "gay people see things and point at them, saying This Is Gay Also" --> "wait, but i've never...?"

in fact i have, but that's because in my... mid-teens? i dipped into the queer-as-in-fuck-you side of tumblr, and then kept on going progressively deeper, resulting in me, 15, being 100% convinced that gay=good while het=bad, all men are evil, all white people are inherently racist, all cishet people are inherently homophobic/transphobic, all men are sexist, etc, etc. i have been brainwashed by a mass that didn't even interact with me, just existed, and i kept on thinking "oh, that's cool" and Adapting, no matter how radical the people i admired were. actually it ended not that bad, i've only been catfished once and it was in anime fandom, so.

and it worked, despite the fact that in my family, no one tormented me about behaving like a Lady or finding a boyfriend. and yes, because of my mother's music taste i quickly learned to ignore my father's dumb comments about unmanly men (everyone in my family's comments about everything, really) and school-wise, i was awkward, weird and liked anime, so i had little friends and found hashtag solace in internet since early primary school. hobby-wise, anime, manga, the jazz. but essentially: 1. i was very into RETRIBUTION despite not experiencing that much of sexism/etcetc myself, 2. i thought internet-loudly queer people were cool, so i tried being internet-loudly queer too.

so: if we allow ourselves to assume that youth-and-not-youth points at things and says "gay" due to a/ being gay, and b/ out of sheer spite to family, surroundings, and The World that seems to think everyone is het always

THEN.......?

until Fairly Recently, ever since mid-teenage years i've been firmly convinced i am a 100% lesbian (with one miserable "maybe i'm bi...? i can try dating this boy...? oh no. ah. no. no thank. bye" incident), and it was less about actually desiring women and more about i'm a lesbian. i just am. how can i not be a lesbian, men are... bad! i can't be straight, straight people are... bad!

and now that i have given up began to wonder in a more chill manner, it's like. well, of course i would like to tentatively dabble into "characters not being 100% gay". i mean, technically i wouldn't need to question my whole ass sexuality for that, but what i've been trying to say is that it's fucking hilarious how the majority of people rebelled against omnipresent heteronormativity, and i rebel...led? rebel now? by having quiet thoughts and doing my thing in my corner? unclear. against omnipresent (for me) "everything is gay and the norms are inverted", by thinking very quietly "okay, but what if not all female characters were dommes, pegging men until they cry?", or "okay, but what if this female character was in a relationship with a male character, and they were (!) sometimes having regular boring penetrative sex?".

teenage me would be disgusted with the audacity, current me doesn't really care, plus It Is Still Just Fiction and i am but a shrimp in the ocean of fandom, so.

conclusion: i still don’t fucking know, y’all.

addendum: i Can and Do read stuff where women Are dommes and sexually annihilate men, as well as “this male character, but as the subbiest whiniest bottom imaginable”, but not like, permanently. i just don’t really vibe with assigning characters sexual positions 4ever&always.

[xxmisty]

Funny how someone who made fart fetish porn thinks he has a right to badmouth men

Oh boy, anon, you’ve really overpacked this suitcase, haven’t you??

Look, let’s just start by pointing out that there’s a contradiction between you having respect for my pronouns and yet an apparent prejudice against sex workers. I just don’t get that. Thank you for being more respectful than most and actually using male pronouns here, I think the rest of your message is seriously betraying the kind of person you are. Build on the good. You’re already head and shoulders above most people I know in that respect.

I was trying to work out what could have come across as badmouthing men and I found that two posts about Captain Marvel had come out of my queue. So that’s it. Anon, i’m not badmouthing men. But I will call out toxic masculinity where I see it, and there was a whole lot of it around the launch of that movie. Toxic masculinity hurts everyone, no matter who you are. It’s the kind of attitude that makes men feel they have to behave a certain way or they can’t be true men. As a trans guy that went a long way toward being terrified of coming out, and still goes a long way to not being accepted. It is also a master force behind the kind of behaviour that has left women vulnerable, scared and abused throughout history. I’ve been on both sides of that. I’ve had men roll down their car windows and cat-call me from the age of 14 upward. When I was 13 I took a term of piano lessons and quit because the piano tutor kept holding my hands and asking me if I ‘painted my nails red when I went out at weekends’. I’ve had parts of my body groped and touched in public because someone was drunk, being egged on by their mates or just thought it was their right to do it. I’ve had a z-list celebrity slide his hand into my crotch blaming ‘the train’ with a huge grin on his face. I spent twenty years blaming myself for being sexually assaulted by my cousin’s husband because I was wearing a dress the night I met him. No, not all men are like this, but if you’re offended by someone discussing it then perhaps there’s a reason why. Maybe you see a little of that in yourself.

I’ll reblog posts about captain marvel until my fingers are sore because Brie Larson took so much abuse in the run up to its launch, most of it from a subsection of the population. And i’m not blindly backing it as a marvel fan, nor as a perceived ‘man hater’ - I didn’t think it looked that good from the trailers, but boy was I wrong. I still think the trailers were pretty bad and did the movie a huge disservice. The point is, I waited until I watched the movie to make up my own mind. Brie Larson spoke up on the press tour about how she was sick of looking out and seeing nothing but white men, and a whole lot of those white men took that very deliberately in the wrong way. She spoke of wanting diversity. She didn’t want to look out there and see no white, male faces, she just wanted to see a mix of them with POC and female faces too. You’d have to be extremely over sensitive to take that in any sense other than the one she’d intended it.

People flooded Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews, days before the movie even came out. They hadn’t seen it, they just wanted to try to make sure that they stopped as many potential viewers from seeing it as they could. And that's why it’s so important to people who aren’t of that small subsection of the population to share the movie’s success. I’m so damn proud of Brie, and of everyone involved in the movie, and of everyone who has stood up for Captain Marvel when in doing so they’ve also opened themselves up to abuse.

The truth is, the world has been run by straight, white, cis men for countless years and that’s starting to change. The world is becoming a richer place for that. We need to hear all kinds of voices, especially as the world grows smaller. Anon, the world has changed more in the last twenty years than it had in centuries before it. But that means the truth is going to hurt sometimes.

I’m white, and i’m learning more about what that means from people of colour who share their experiences, their stories and their views. I understand a little better every day that it isn’t enough just to not be an actively racist asshole and that I need to use my privilege to speak up when I see it happening to others. I need to open my ears and listen to people from different countries, of different colours, of different religions, and hear about the struggles they face every day that i’ll never truly understand as someone born into a white family, in an area where there were very few people of colour as I grew up. I want to learn. I want to listen. I hope that the more POC speak out, the more that we can learn as people who haven’t faced the same prejudice. I’ll still never know what it’s like to walk in those shoes but i’ll be a little more mindful every day of what needs to change and how I can help.

It’s a similar thing existing in a predominantly cishet world. Something I realised recently is that, as much as I know it can take years, decades, sometimes a lifetime to really discover who you are, the cold hard fact is that when I was five years old I knew I wanted to marry a woman and call myself John but it’s taken decades to reverse the programming that a predominantly cishet world tried to write into me. We’re getting there, little by little. The world is changing, but a big part of that is from having the courage to find our voices and share our experiences as people of a gender and/or sexuality not defined as cis and heterosexual. I think trans folk have a unique point of view when it comes to gender wars since we’ve seen both sides of the coin to some degree. I’m just as scared of toxic femininity as I am of toxic masculinity. Both are dangerous and destructive, and they hurt everybody. It’s time they began to die and allowed people to be themselves without a gender-approved bar they have to reach to be a ‘real man/woman’.

Lastly, anon, I would really like you to rethink the way you view sex workers because most that i’ve met along the way have been the kindest, most genuine, most open individuals who work harder than you’ll ever know. Making fetish videos put food on the table, a roof over our heads and bought our boat when we were faced with being homeless. My health wouldn’t allow me to work a job outside the home any more and I wanted to make a living as best as I could. I feel like you would be just as critical if I lived by benefits alone. Plus making videos was a very important step in my own life. It helped me to love a part of myself that i’d always resented and felt ashamed of, and gave me confidence to appear in front of the camera which I could never have imagined some years ago. Plus I made a few wonderful friends that way.

Anon, you have a good heart, enough to not misgender me. I can’t and won’t apologise for reblogging posts that talk about subjects that affect me personally. This is, after all, my blog, and it’s important for people to see how many others have been affected by the same issues. It helps when you don’t feel so alone. If there’s something that triggers you about those posts then perhaps there’s something you recognise in it. This is a really good time to identify what that is and to work out why it upsets you so much. We can all learn to be better people, and listening to our discomfort is a good first step.

[alongcamepolyblog]

I'm a queer woman, whose dated mostly cishet dudes my life. After coming out, I've dated a few girls (even having a few non-monogamous relationships) but I'm finding myself falling for a cishet monogamous dude that I *surprise* am reeeeeeally into. Am I a bad queer for having these feelings, and am I an even worse person for being confused on where I lie on the monogamous/non-monogamous spectrum?

Oh, honey. The very short and very firm answers I have for you, for both of your questions, are no, and no, not at all. 

It’s Pride month, and there are lots of things floating about about queerness. Equinox has a horrible joke of an ad campaign about the ABCs of LGBTQ+, and they kick off the video with “ally” (gag me) – erasing asexuals from the queer community completely – and then lumping in kink and S&M as if those things are inherently queer, or all queers are kinky. This is the entirety of my reaction to that:

NYC Pride is supposedly going to be televised this year, because everyone wants to get in on queerness as spectacle. But the problem with marginalized identities being perceived through the lens of a dominant [read: white supremacist, cissexist, heteronormative, patriarchal] narrative (i.e., white cishets with money who like glitter and dislike the history that is the Stonewall Riots being led by Black and Latina trans women) is that the dominant narrative fucks us up. From adolescence (or even earlier if you’re Black or POC), and continuously. 

What I’m getting from you letter is mostly that you don’t feel queer enough. “Not queer enough” is just another version of “not enough” and, in my experience, at the root of every “not enough” – especially for someone who lives within one or more marginalized identities – is how we’re not shaping up to some distant, inauthentic ideal (which is *always* seen through the lens of whiteness).

What does “queer enough” look like, to you? Take a moment and really think about it. What are the narratives that you’re bringing to “queer enough” that have you stuck in the position of feeling like you’re falling short?

I’m also a queer woman who for a long time dated mostly cishet dudes all my life, and when I was stewing in my ‘not enough’ feelings, they usually had to do with my femmeness, and how I was worried about being read. (This is called internalized femmephobia.) My response was to cut off all my hair (and then, ridiculously, have a lot of feelings about being read as too butch/“too gay”; read: “too much.” We truly cannot win.) I got a tattoo of a Sailor Jerry mermaid rocking a pixie cut and reading a book with her boobs out to telegraph to the world that I LIKE GIRLS. I later got an undercut, a septum piercing; all markings of things that I thought would make me more “visibly queer.” (And maybe it did, but now I’m also Brooklyn-adjacent, so I look pretty much like everyone else. Oh well.) 

But here’s the thing with visibility that I think is important to note: My bbqueer striving to be “visibly queer” was a privilege, even as it was causing me anxiety and feelings of not enough-ness; trans folks, and BIPOC folks, queer and straight, struggle with hypervisibility in ways that my light skinned, cisgender ass generally does not, and it is important to me to state that plainly.

Did any of the things I did to establish my queer chick street cred actually make me any queerer? No. You know what does make me queer? 

The fact that I’ve always felt a little odd my whole life, and it wasn’t until I found my queerness that some part of that began to ease. My intense relationships with female friends that crashed and burned in startling ways, which I now realized were warped and stuck in a pressure-cooker by the queerness that I didn’t have words for, since I was raised so steeped in Catholicism and heteronormativity. The fact that I’ve had to fight to recognize my queerness; the fact that my parents made me stop watching Xena for “the violence” when I have a sneaking suspicion I probably was made to stop watching it for the gayness (and I don’t say that to criticize my parents at all – I don’t even think that was something that consciously registered for them; that is part of my queerness too). The fact that my dad tried to make me stop watching Buffy when Willow came out as gay – he TRIED lol – and I literally told him over my dead body. The fact that Willow came out as gay and it still took me an additional ten years to realize that I’m bisexual, bc lol, where are all the bi girls on TV??? Where are the bi girls who look like me? (Here’s one.)

I understand your angst, though. As queer women, we’re so often told that our sexuality is contingent on who we’re with. My doctors have treated me that way – when I have male partners, I’m straight, and when I have female partners, I’m gay. When I come out about being non-monogamous, I’m pretty sure all they see is a neon-sign over my head that, depending on the doctor, reads “HIGH RISK” at best, and “SLUT” at worst. These are messages that we have to deal with every day. It is so, so rare to find a place and a community that validates who you are, exactly as you are.

And the queer community isn’t exempt from that, either! I had a girlfriend who identified as a lesbian who had a problem with me having sex with dudes. I had a girlfriend who identified as poly who hated the idea of me having other partners, so she asked me to be in a closed triad with her and her husband – and then the two of them, jointly, decided to dump me, in part because seeing him with me scared the crap out of her. 

Our world is imperfect, and our communities reflect that. It takes strength and resilience and the deepest, fiercest love for who you know yourself to be to fight that. It can be exhausting, and sometimes we don’t always win these battles with “not enough,” because our society is not structured to encourage or even allow us to love ourselves. And I’m sorry for that, and I am sending you all of my love, not just because it’s June and it’s Pride month, but always, because you deserve so much better than this.

With regard to where you stand on the spectrum of monogamy and non-monogamy – fuck that scale. You are where you are, and how you do relationships is your business, and your partner(s)’ business, and anyone on the outside looking in can go fuck themselves. Maybe you’re feeling more monogamous right now – cool. Maybe you’re just super deep in New Relationship Energy with this exciting new person – that’s also fine! Either of these things or neither of them can be true, or one of them can be true sometimes, or they can both be true at least half the time, and the only thing that means is that’s where you are at right now, and where you are right now in your dating life is not a comment on how ‘good’ of a queer you are. You don’t have to be good. You just have to be yourself.The most important thing I ever learned about queerness was last summer at the LAMBDA Writers Workshop. My teacher was Benjamin Alire Saenz, and the first thing he asked us to do was to write about what scared us most in the world. I wrote about not being enough – not queer enough, not Latina enough, not good enough at non-monogamy, not enough of a writer. Not enough, not enough, not enough. He said to us, “Queer is an identity that is entirely self-defined” – and your ability to do that, to be who you are, all of who you are, and say fuck you to the cishets who want queerness to look the way they want to consume it, and a similar buzz off to the queers who would suggest your queerness is not queer enough because of who you’re with – is not only an act of resistance, but also the best gift you could give yourself, and a gift you have always deserved.

Happy Pride, love.

[adaemoniee]

Gender is so fucking difficult. I’m nonbinary/agender with genderfluid tendencies, meaning that I am mostly gender neutral but sometimes feel more masculine/feminine or more comfortable presenting masculine/feminine. I myself feel like I’m more of a masculine than feminine person but I feel more connected to women/women presenting people most of the time. I definitely see myself as a sapphic person, which somehow doesn’t fit with that either. I accept the binary that I’m placed in by others and understand it as well as the fact that others don’t understand my experience. I do experience gender dysphoria, however at the same time I’m comfortable with how I’m perceived by others as long as my attention isn’t directed onto it.

So yeah. I get that my gender identity is hard to understand for others because I don’t even understand it myself.

The reason why is pretty easily explainable. We all grew up in a society thinking in binaries and their matching labels.

The labels are important. They always are and we have them for everything in life. Because they always convey a complex construct and make it easier to think and talk about the construct. (think about the labels “ocean” and “lake” - we know both are masses of water populated by fish. One is salty and covers a huge part of the globe though while the other is pretty small and we can drink of it if it’s clean. Also the fish in both are vastly different, as well as the plants. And we know all that by just using the labels. Imagine how difficult I’d be if we didn’t have them, even more because we couldn’t even use the other labels like “fish” and “plants” to describe it…)

The problem is thinking and learning about gender as a binary construct. And it’s one of the most basic and powerful constructs we have. It’s in everything we do, it’s probably even the first category we sort a person into most of the time.

And because we use it on a daily basis, it becomes ingrained in our thinking. It becomes hard to think outside of these boxes, to create new ones which will definitely end up sharing traits with the existing once while also differing from them. All of these categories need subcategories. For example, the category “nonbinary” isn’t enough. You need subcategories to know that nonbinary people can still completely present as their binary gender, as something in between (probs the ppl you stare at and can’t tell if they’re “male” or “female” when you automatically apply the binary construct) or as more of/completely the opposite gender. And it doesn’t even stop there.

Basically, rethinking gender is important. If you learn from the beginning that gender isn’t a black-and-white topic, you start of with more boxes to begin with. If children know from the beginning that trans, nonbinary, agender, etc. people exist, they will slowly stop dividing between male and female and they’ll have it a lot easier to find out who they really are. Which would improve many of their lives.

And who knows, if the change happens fast enough, people like me might be able to figure out where they fit in. But even if it doesn’t, it’s still worth it.

At the same time though, we shouldn’t disregard the fact that binary labels have a lot of benefits (as long as you fit in or don’t notice that you don’t). For example, we can set clear rules and expectations for people. We can know what they might like and be good at, or who they might probably like (cissexism and heteronormativity, yay). It makes our lives easier at many times (not so much for us non cishets, but if you’re cishet in a cishet environment… Or at least don’t know a lot of non-cishet-people…). So it’s hard to put aside these constructs. Even more because they’re also connected to so many traditions that many people think of as worth keeping. Which is one of the biggest obstacles. Gender as a binary construct is like an easy guideline for so many things - sexual and romantic interest, favorite colors, the toys you gift a child, what type of perfume/shampoo/etc. you expect a person to use, which clothes they should wear, their hobbies, their strengths and weaknesses, their role in society and career choices,… And for many people, life would be so much harder without these guidelines.

My conclusion: Gender is difficult. I don’t expect you to understand my identity because even I don’t. I don’t even expect you to stop trying to understand me/my behavior through those binary labels because, as you can see at the top, I do, too. It’s also alright if you can’t believe me. I don’t expect that either.

I just expect you to respect my identity. You can ignore it if you wish to, but it’d be important to me that you at least listen to what I’m saying and don’t discredit my point of view as irrational/mentally ill/bullshit/ etc. Same goes for sexualities. (You can apply all above mentioned examples to sexuality and sexual/romantic orientations as well). Thank you.

[oathkeptroxas]

Hi girl! Have you received acephobic hate,or is it "just" shit happening on Tumblr in general? 😒

Hey!

I haven’t received any on tumblr directly. I tend to be cautious with who I follow, and tend to unfollow people who post things that are upsetting and hateful. Up until this point I’ve managed to avoid online drama, because in general I simply reblog a couple of informative or positive ace posts and that’s it.

I’m not out in real life. So no one knows that I identify as ace (or bi, but that’s a newer thing for me that i’m still figuring out), even so people who have known me personally have noticed my lack of interest in pursuring people and my lack of participation in sex-centric conversations.

I was at the pub with a group of friends once and my friend Charlotte was talking about how difficult it has been for her to find a girlfriend and asked if I knew anyone I could set her up with, she’s a really fun, confident and forward person who’s comfortable with herself and she made a quip about wondering if she’d ever lose her virginity, which then spiralled into a sex topic within our group. And my cousin had recently come out as gay and was becoming a lot more comfortable sharing his sexual experiences within the group so the conversation was something that everyone was engaged in and it was really animated and positive, one of the straight girls in the group had previously tried anal so her and my cousin and another gay male friend were jokingly “swapping notes”, just being drunk friends mostly and joking around.

I listened intently but I didn’t want to participate personally because it’s not something that I’m comfortable with. I’m sex-indifferent. So i am not averse to sex and have had sexual encounters in the past. But sometimes it just gets a little too much and makes me uncomfortable and i’m not open to sharing my personal life like that.

So when they noticed my lack of participation Charlotte asked if I was okay and like….before I could respond my cousin just jumped in “Jodie doesn’t need sex like the rest of us.” And then pretty much continued speaking like I wasn’t even there and said it in such a way that it made me feel fucking worthless, like I was defective and less than they were and I wasn’t worth participating in their conversations. It literally ruined my mood for the whole night. And he didn’t even know I identify as ace.

My sister is nasty. She was a bully in school, she’s a proud self-proclaimed “bitch” and she fights dirty. She says things she KNOWS will hurt you, just to get a reaction. The word fat was literally banned from our house when we were kids because she’d call me it so often. Despite the fact I’m one size above national British average and me and my sister now SHARE clothes. She used that against me because she knew it fucked me up. To be honest, most of my self harm and self hatred probably stems from that, nothing triggers me like the word fat does.

And once she was bragging about how much sex she’s had and how her tampon fell out ‘cause she’s so lose? And 1) she’s my little sister I do not wanna know. 2) the vagina is a muscle that contracts back after childbirth, self-lubricates and loosens when aroused, and tampons come in different sizes and women have different set vaginas? Sex has very very little to do with it.

So, anyway, i just suggested that maybe the wrong size tampon had been brought (she came on abruptly in public and ran to a store toilet whilst my mum bought her tampons - and my mum has poor eyesight and can’t read without glasses and its very likely she picked up the first she could find without trying to read the box).

Anyway, after making that suggestion my sister got like? Irrationally pissed? As if I was like? Calling her a liar or whatever? And started screaming about how “JUST BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS YOU! YOU’LL UNDERSTAND ONE DAY IF SOMEONE ACTUALLY WANTS YOU” and basically implied/assumed that my seeming lack of relationship/seeking out sexual encounters was because people didnt want me and i’m fat and undesirable, basically. My sister regularly makes fun of people who are celibate. We watch shows where people have abstained for personal or religious or political reasons and my sister scoffs and belittles and acts like these people are lesser. There’s no way I can tell her I’m ace.

Everytime I go to a house party people want to play Never Have I Ever, which literally makes me so uncomfortable I can’t breathe. And they all try to pressure me into it anyway and I often end up drinking alone in another room so they can play. Luckily, over the last year my friend Jack (who usually hosts the parties) has been dating this great guy James. And James doesn’t like the game either, he’s just a bit more private than the others and doesn’t know Jack’s friends well enough for them to know those things about him, and he thinks the game’s a little tacky. So me and him just go for a smoke and gossip while they play.

But i feel like i’m suffocating under this all the time. Looking for “plausible”/socially acceptable reasons for not wanting/thinking the way my friends do.

I can’t pursue the guy I like who’s interested in me because I overheard him drunkenly telling his friend how he hasn’t had sex in 3 years and I’ve been panicking ever since because I don’t know if that’s something I can give him and I fear I’m not desirable without it - or worse case scenario, he tries to force himself on me to “prove” that I just “haven’t met the right person/had the right experience yet”.

I just feel like I’m choking on this thing all the time because I know if I told anyone they’d never take my word for it, they’d assume something happened to “make me this way”. They’d say I was a “late bloomer”. And my homophobic parents and possibly some of my friends wouldn’t believe I’m ace but would think i’m just gay and in denial. And i know a lot of gay people have previously identified as ace because they were dealing with internalized homophobia and maybe it was easier to accept they felt no attraction than it was to realize they felt the “wrong” kind by society’s standards. But that’s not the fault of ace people. It’s the fault of a toxic society that hates everything that isn’t the cis straight white default that it has the rest of us turning on each other. It’s also common for gay people to initially identify as bi because they’re dealing with internalized homophobia and think bi is easier because they can retain the illusion that they still also feel the “right” kind of attraction. But bisexuals arent to blame for that anymore than ace/aros are.

And i hate that people say they support aces as long as theyre not cishet and it’s like???? I’m bi so i’m not het but what those people are basically saying is “i accept part of your identity”……that’s not supporting me. That’s just gonna fuck up my mental/emtional state even further. And if someone is aro/ace its literally impossible for them to be het? If they experience no romantic or sexual attraction then they feel none of those things for the “opposite” sex, and cannot be het. So calling them that is insulting and invalidating their identity.

And i don’t understand the whole “we accept and welcome actual cis and straight identifying allies who wish to support our cause but aces can choke”? I get that allies are important because closeted lgbt youth can attend events under the guise of “ally” BUT ally and closeted are not synonymous, because if they became so it wouldnt be a cover at all.

[freakflagbyiana]

Unglamourous & Nonbinary

I grew up a cosplayer. Glamour and aesthetics as an art form have always been my happy place. But this strange pandemic era has found me exploring the absence of glamour, shadow glamour, the Unglamourous.

I would never wish to take someone else’s joy from them. I totally understand why people were dressing up for their one outing to get groceries or even just for themselves at home. I used to do that in the Before Times. Now I’m exploring a different way... the “down and dirty” way, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés (author of Women who Run with the Wolves) calls it.

To me, it feels like hibernation. It feels like saving my energy for all the glamour I’ll need “when this is over” and “when we can go out again” - which seems to be starting nowish.

Some of it relates to the concept of your “ghost outfit” - the outfit that you die in is the one you wear forever as a ghost - as many of us feeling like wraiths endlessly wandering the hallways of our own Bly Manor. Except mine is a two bedroom apartment and my ghost outfit is my favorite pajamas (like Annie Sawyer). Siri, play Every Day Is Exactly The Same by Nine Inch Nails. Some of it is the anthesis of the Magical Girl trope.

One of the reasons I loved Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah in Labyrinth is her “ghost outfit” is practical. Consisting of a loose fitting shirt, jeans, and sensible FLAT shoes. She doesn’t look like a princess except for the costume at the beginning (in Drag) and the ballroom scene (the male projection of what she should look like).

But I also carry a deep fondness in my heart for Sailor Uranus. All of the Sailor Scouts are “female” supposedly but this one pushes the boundary of binary...

the language of gender

My friend Angeliska and I have been in this reinvention journey into the non-binary. When they told me about their egg cracking, mine did too. It turns out, our femininity was mainly performative, drag, and it took removing the audience to see how deep that ran into our core beings.

"Please try to refrain from addressing me directly in messages as “Hey lady!” or “Hey woman!” or “Hey girl!” or “Hey mama!” because it makes me feel uncomfortable and itchy. I’m still figuring all this (my gender identity) out, because none of these were options I really knew were available for me, until fairly recently. Even the words/descriptors that are close enough for me, aren’t really quite right yet. One of the most important things that I’m learning is that I don’t owe anyone justification, or explanations. I don’t owe anyone androgyny. And that’s still hard for me - because I spent my entire life being told that I owed everyone a certain, very constrictive, very boring version of femininity. "  -- Angeliska Polacheck

I too feel itchy when people say those things to me. The color pink sends me into a gender dysphoria induced rage. Someone put pink in my hair recently (long story for another blog) and I could not even live with it for 24 hours.

On TikTok, there’s something called a Themlin. Femlin but non-binary. A Femlin, lady-gremlin, is a gal who would be part of the (sassy, woke, feminist) Bimbo movement but is kinda too dirty... A bimbo but make it grunge. It’s a lot, I know, but that’s the shortest way to explain it.

I’m leaning into this Themlin concept. A few months ago I was surprised to find I like jogger pants now. I realized when I wear them with a Henley tank it gives me a gender euphoria from wanting to be Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when I was little. Side note: this tiktok explains why this character was my childhood nonbinary icon. I’m also reverting to wearing bike shorts, something I did a lot as a kid. Basically rediscovering how I dressed when I was a feral woodland “tomboy” child who was definitely definitely nonbinary but did not yet have language for it.

I have my clients to thank for this language. Over the last 3.5 years of owning my own salon, I have watched a few clients blossom as they realize they are trans or nonbinary and progress into their gender identity with gender-affirming clothes or hairstyles. The more I validated them, the more I realized I was validating myself, too.

While concept of my being nonbinary isn’t new, the awareness and language around it is new. For me personally, I did not realize that this also falls under the Transgender category umbrella.

performative feminity

My once bestie of 20 years, although more androgynous when we initially became friends, developed into a High Femme in our 20s and 30s. When we went out I often femmed up to be her counterpart because we liked wearing loosely corresponding outfits. I was always more goth, but in femme drag. It took me longer than her to get ready. When our relationship ended, I realized how much I was changing my aesthetic to meet her halfway, how much money I wasted on clothes I didn’t even feel comfortable in. I took longer to get ready because my gender-dysphoria was making me “itchy”.

Like many Drag performers, the first time I presented as another gender was Halloween, as Wayne Campbell. No one at the party recognized me “without makeup” and I found that concerning, as I knew it didn’t reflect how I thought of myself. I wore that costume all weekend and it was the first time in my life I could get ready in 15 minutes. I also felt more relaxed, less afraid, walking the streets late at night while presenting masculine.

In 2020-2021, taking a break from the glamourous beautician life has made me realize how much of my performative femininity was due to my career, too. There’s this unspoken rule that female-bodied people in the beauty industry have to be “beautiful” and “beautiful” equates to femme, makeup, hair done, etc. It used to take me 2 hours to get put together for work everyday. But a male stylist can throw on jeans and a tshirt and no makeup and be ready for work in 15 minutes. Fuck that, I want that to be acceptable for anyone. Glamour should always be a choice. It should be a treat, not the baseline by which you are considered professional. There are certainly successful female-bodied stylists who aren’t made-up and femme but it’s swimming upstream, not the status quo.

When I first started out, I had black hair just over my shoulders and nothing was shaved (I have a lot of hair so usually some is undercut). It was the hottest summer on record and I had a 2 hour bus journey to get to work every day so I was standing outside a lot. I didn’t want my hair to get sweaty so I wore it in Wednesday Addams braids as a protective hairstyle. My employer pulled me aside and told me I couldn’t do that every day. I didn’t argue, but to this day I still don’t understand why that isn’t professional. From then on I would have to wash my hair every day (because of the sweat) and would leave the house with clean, flat ironed hair that was doused in dry shampoo as a preventative measure. But it would become dirty by the time I got to work, because standing outside waiting for the bus adds sweat and literal road dirt being kicked up by the street. My hair didn’t grow any longer because it kept breaking off. (Shortly after that I quit shampoo and started using a cowash)

It’s so much work that cishet men don’t even consider doing. Part of the way patriarchy keeps female-bodied people under the boot is by keeping us at a deficit of Time & Money. By simply being born in a female body, our existence costs more money. We have to pay for menstruation products, birth control, makeup, hair and other grooming maintenance. We are operating with fewer free hours in the day... many of us with families do the majority of child-rearing, showing up to work without makeup is considered unprofessional so we spend time doing that, sometimes we hang out at venue for longer so that a friend can leave with us, because our safety is constantly threatened simply by being outside while “female”.

Side note, I would be fine with the makeup requirement at work thing, if men had to do it too.. Make Men Wear Eyeliner Again. Requirements for EVERYBODY, or nobody. But to be considered worthy and valuable part of society, female-bodied people have to groom for hours, remove all of our body hair, do the majority of emotional labor in relationships if we’re dating men, are EXPECTED to want and enjoy children.

If you don’t do these things, you are considered invalid. Your value is defined by your beauty as an object, while remaining silent, and ability to bear and raise children. All of this leaves us too poor, distracted, and tired to REVOLT!

So in 2020, I decided I’m done. I’m dropping all the femininity that I learned as a form of daily drag directly connected to my value, and starting over at the base level. This will help me decide what aspects of outer femininity I truly choose to participate in. Of course, I am only talking about Femininity here since I am an AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) person. But the same goes for Masculinity. The value of AMAB people should not rely solely on their ability to embody things traditionally considered Masculine. Toxic Masculinity is an entirely different discussion, however it deserves an honorable mention here since I’m talking about performative gender.

moving forward

The Zoom culture of the pandemic has helped others drop performative gender already. I know people who don’t wear bras for work anymore because they Work From Home. It’s beautiful to see people awaken to their true priorities, what makes them contented and what is an unnecessary drain of their energy.

The lesson here is that life is too short to be living it for other people. I learned this a long time ago when I was a babygoth, but now it translates to gender norms and conscious acts of dismantling the white supremacist patriarchy.

We all have work to do. Something I am working on myself is deprogramming using the term “Dude” in a gender-neutral way. It’s really difficult for those of us who grew up in the 80s-90s. But the thing that changed my mind is when someone said something like “if it was truly gender-neutral then a hetero man would have no problem saying ‘I slept with this hot dude last night’ ” ...touché. Something important to remember is cisgender people don’t get to tell the trans community what words are acceptable for people to use in reference to them. Using new pronouns for someone can be difficult because personally my mouth speaks before my brain fully processes awareness of it all... Like Tourette’s, you don’t mean anything by it but that doesn't negate the impact it has on other people. However, I know from experience on both sides of the situation that if you use the wrong pronoun and correct yourself, indicating that you are aware of the person’s gender identity and are making an effort, it shows you respect them. And that’s all we want. That’s the part that makes us feel seen, even when you make a mistake.

I wanted to end on an esoteric note. In this post, my friend Jonah Welch muses on the NonBinary space being the “Alchemical Point” as in - the point of Transformation between two stationary states. They call it the Divine Androgyny. This is a microsummary, please go read the whole post and follow for more. It’s a really good thing to think about if this blog resonated with you and you’re feeling called to this journey too.

Visibility is important, I want to thank everyone who helped me on this journey myself. There are so many of us out now (including 80% of Gen Z it seems) thanks to the global internet community coming together. It feels like the tide is actually turning and people are starting to get it... including a greater understanding of us ourselves. This is your gentle reminder to love yourself and your Divine Androgyny.

the fun stuff

Here is my “gaylist” I listen to during Pride month and throughout the rest of the summer. Below are links for those curious to explore further.

Helpful Links:

Ally resources for cis people

Transgender Teen Survival Guide

The Genderbread Person

Trans Rosary Circle

Jeffery Marsh for everyday motivation & education

book: Jeffery Marsh - How to be You

Alok V Menon for everyday inspiration

Alok: How Fashion Designed the Gender Binary

TTSG Trans resources masterpost

Gender Expression ≠ Gender Identity

The Truth about Sailor Uranus

Singular “They” is correct English

GC2B, personal favorite chest binders!

I’m not your guy, Dude. Why language really does matter

Thanks for reading. I hope you felt included and seen. Happy exploring & Happy Pride Month!

[anautisticdragon-blog]

Apologies From an Autist

Okay, deep breath.

This isn't telling you to take one, I just need to before I begin getting into this. It's how I write. So I'm the one doing that rather than suggesting it. I just have a lot of ground to cover, and I'm not certain that anyone will ever read this.

Sometimes I get lost in my own pain. This was true with Atypical, which just served to remind me of the callous, ignoble, and sheer disregard for autistic people that those who aren't on the spectrum can sometimes have. I think that those who I see both enjoying and supporting something as barren of ethics as Atypical though are those fortunate enough to have never experienced the myriad and diverse forms of prejudice that anyone who isn't fortunate enough to be 'normal' experiences far more frequently than they should have to.

Here's the thing, though: I don't hate you if you're neurotypical. I try to make that clear. At least I feel I've always tried to. I understand that minority ethnicities, women, gay people, and anyone who isn't 'normal' is just as likely to be targeted as I am. That's a truth that we can't avoid, really. It's a cultural mainstay of the world we live in.

What makes this worse is the kinds of truly unscrupulous individuals who push for a 'default state,' who actually craft this visage of normality? I get that some people are scared to speak out against being a part of this 'default state' because they're afraid of becoming a target. If a person racked with guilt over this sees me placing unreasonable amounts of blame on them? That might push them over the edge. I couldn't stand to have that on my conscience, you know?

So if you're a target, or if you're scared? I don't blame you. I just blame the kind of people who just genuinely enjoy being 'normal,' who lean into it as though it were some superior way of being. And I don't even hate them, I just hate the concept of 'normal' or a 'default state' in and of itself. And it's fair, I think, to judge them for loving and living it. Blissfully ignorant of their privilege.

We should all be united, frankly. Not against any person or group, I don't think, but against the very concept of 'normal,' against 'typical,' against the 'default state.' Even medical science is beginning to realise (and it's about time) that studies which are performed from the perspective of a 'normal' actually existing are tainted.

You see, 'normal' is (and I'm sorry, but it is) white, cishet, healthy, and neuronormative/neurotypical. I don't think that can really be contested. It's just that these are the people with the numbers and power to push their own existence as a 'default state,' which makes life more miserable for everyone who isn't one of them. That's what privilege is, you understand. Yes? I hope so.

The very definition of privilege is "I am normal, I exist as part of the default state. By right of birth I'm entitled to more, to better. For that to happen there has to be those who're inferior to me, also by right of birth. I have what they don't."

And hey, guess what? There's a lot of us who aren't 'normal,' who aren't the 'default state.' And what I see is that there's absolutely no reason that any of us should be enemies. We've all been hurt enough by prejudice, fear-mongering, and hatred to the point where each and every one of us should be in a position to be able to empathise with others like us. We should be able to understand that accepting differences is vital.

It's logical, really. Why is the world the way it is? Those stricken with the 'default state' can't accept diversity or difference, it's beyond their capacity. That's not really their fault. I see it as a sickness, in many ways. I think that's a good way to put it. I think a person can be ill with normalcy.

I think the constructs of 'normal,' of the 'default state,' in and of themself are actually just another form of mental illness. It's just one that isn't recognised because so many people actually have that illness in the first place.

Consider this, too: If a person is tribal, needlessly binary, if they consider themselves as 'superior' and all those outside of themselves as 'inferior?' Is that healthy? Do you think that's good mental health?

The Alt-Right is simply an extreme version of what people who're privileged by being 'normal' have felt for the longest time. That those filthy savages who're lesser than them need to be put in their place. Why do you think Trump got into power in the United States? Those stricken with this mental illness wanted to make America 'normal' again.

Too many sub-humans, you know? Just too many blacks, too many gays, too many women with power. Gotta make it 'normal' again.

So this apology needs to be made. If I've ever hurt you with the use of NT or neurotypical? I'm sorry. I am trying to get away from that. It's just that NTs inflicted with the sickness of 'normality' are those who've hurt me the most.

Thing is? Just because you're an NT doesn't mean you're 'normal,' and it doesn't mean that you're not every bit as much a target as I am. What I will say is that -- as I've learned -- we need to stop hating fellow targets as that just fuels the strength of this sickness. We need to actually try to support one another, we need to be there.

I don't know if there's anything I can ever do for you. I doubt there is, much. I'm just another voice in the crowd, really. I don't exactly have much power. I'm happy to speak out, though. I just want this hatred between any of us who've been targeted for not being a part of the 'default state' to end.

I've spoken about this before, but... I've seen gays hating trans people for making their life as a gay person more difficult. The gay person aspires to be 'normal' by being a straight gay. It's a sickness, though, why embrace it? Similarly, I've seen trans people attack transspecies people for making their attempts at being 'normal' more difficult. Again, why are you fuelling a sickness?

We need to actually stand together on this. Just so long as anyone isn't making another person or being suffer, I think we should all stand together. Is a person with transspecies making anyone suffer by having a bodily dysmorphic disorder? Is a trans person making any gay people really suffer by having very much the same?

You're being hurt by the viral influence of that which is 'normal,' that which is the 'default state.' You shouldn't want to be normal. To be normal is to be sick. Very, very sick.

I know this is 'pulling a Godwin' but sometimes it's a useful tool. Frankly, I think it's just people who're made uncomfortable by how truthful it can be who're bothered by this. I think it's completely fair, though. As I've said so many times... If the shoe fits? So, here's the thing: Hitler thought of himself as extremely 'normal,' the 'default state' human, superior and pure. Was he sick?

Are the Alt-Right sick? Are Neo-Nazis sick? There's one thread that connects all of these groups, every one of them is just an extreme incarnation of those who seem themselves as 'normal.'

And like I said, this has infected medicine and scientific studies. If all of the participants are white, male, straight, mentally healthy, and middle- to upper-class due to certain biases, then that's going to slant any kind of effort to find any baseline in humanity.

"Oh, your black brain isn't like a normal white man's brain. Hmm... Let's fix that with drugs!"

And that's the reality we live in. Many researchers are having to face this uncomfortable truth, that our entire medical history is effed up thanks to the cognitive biases of 'normal.' I think that if we really did pathologise 'normal,' we'd all be better off.

And that's what anyone who's ever been a target of this should do. Don't attack the person, or the group, or even hate people. Just consider the sheer pathology of 'normal' and what it drives these genuinely sick people to do.

So this is my conclusion: 'Normal' is a disease. It's one of the most deadly we've ever encountered, it's the most widespread form of utter psychosis we've ever known. It's virulent and terrible, it ruins lives.

No one should actually want to be 'normal' or of the aforementioned 'default state.' That implies a certain Borg-like homogeneity and forsaking one's individualism to become a part of some sort of hive of like minds. That's horrible. So I do judge those who just give into this sickness, because it's incredibly easy to see how harmful it is.

It's harmful to themself, it's harmful to everyone else. It's harmful to anyone they'll ultimately make a target out of.

So if you're neurotypical, and you're a target of this, and I've ever hurt you? I'm sorry. I mean that, I really do.

It's about time we figured this all out, don't you think?