#still love my white boy even if you end up as a cis het that only has queer vibes boy

[crizztelcb]

Sometimes i get so excited about adrien/chatnoir that i forget that if he was real he would be a white guy, a sweet and fun one though!

[riacte]

I’m going to put some thoughts about MCCP Pink Parrots under the cut (not all are positive, so if you don’t want me to be a party pooper please don’t read)

I know people (*cough* Twitter) have issues with this team because they’re all Cis Het White Males and one made a “lesbiophobic joke” five years ago or something. I agree that it’s probably better to “split the clout” to uplift other creators, especially with three (3) Clout People in the same team (unlike the infamous Pink8 which only had Two Clout People), but I understand why Scott made this decision.

This team feels almost specifically made to hype people up, and the combination will attract people to watch and donate, thus raising more money. While representation is good, I think money raised to practically help people > representation this time. Because this is a charity Pride stream, not just a Pride stream. Raising money is the focus here. Famous cishet white male allies can raise a lot of money. Money can help people. These are all facts whether you like it or not. And if you want to see more LGBTQA+ creators in MCC, support them. If you don’t like a certain creator, don’t watch their team. The end.

Don’t know too much about the other three, but I think Grian is good at hosting charity streams. I’ve watched his Love Tropics stream with Iskall (2019?), the first SOS Africa stream with Ren (2020), the MCC 9 stream (2020), and the second SOS Africa stream with Ren, Bdubs, and Scar (2021). Throughout the streams, Grian is consistently respectful and humble. He urges his viewers to donate by patiently talking about the cause in simple terms (since he knows a lot of kids watch him) but without being patronising. Grian also loves putting numbers into things people can measure (eg. How many hot meals can this sum of money buy, if everyone watching right now donated $1 we can reach our goal). Grian also knows his privilege and mentions he’s just a well off guy playing video games in a comfortable place. When Ren thanked him for supporting his fellow South Africans, Grian replied with “we’re all human”. So I believe Grian will spend a lot of his MCCP stream urging viewers to donate, reading out donations, appreciating donations, etc etc. Grian knows his influence and knows how to use it for good. Someone on Twitter mentioned Grian seemed like the type of person to skip this MCC to give more slots for other creators, and I agreed, but then Grian probably thought he could use his influence for good (considering he had MAJOR success for all his past charity streams).

So all in all, I do think this team can raise a lot of money for a good cause. I am okay with this team. But personally I still have some slight issues that probably don’t matter much, but I need to get them out because it’s been eating me alive. All of these so-called “issues” have to do with fanbases, not CCs. Just because I don’t like part of a CCs’ fanbase doesn’t mean I don’t like the CC.

1. This team will probably intensify the “Grian Is The Only Hermit” phenomenon.

A lot of famous CCs only seem to know Grian out of everybody in Hermitcraft (despite False being in every MCC since debut except the non canon ones). They are somewhat akin to the “Grian Only Hermitcraft Watchers”/ “Grumbo YouTube Stan Army”. There’s nothing wrong with knowing Grian only, or only watching Grian, but most of the times the gigantic population of “Grian Only Stans” will neglect Literally Every Other Hermit (except maybe Mumbo). Even when Grian teams with hermits. Hermitcraft fans are mostly used to this bullshit, and they just nicely try to introduce Grian Only Stans to other hermits (which works most of the time).

So to Techno and Wilbur’s fans (I assume Jimmy’s fans are quite familiar with Grian), they’ll go “omg Grian!! Builder!!! Hermitcrafter!!”. This will introduce a bunch of people to Grian/ Hermitcraft (which is great!) but it has a good chance of evolving into the good ole “Grian is the only hermit that matters” thing. Simply because of popularity.

I actually wanted False-Grian-Techno-Wilbur, because Techno and Wilbur actually know False. Techno of course acknowledged her in Dodgebolt, and False and Wilbur have a surprisingly long history of trolling/ annoying each other (from MCC5-9). Wilbur notably trolled Yellow8 and Blue9 by covering up the letters on their uniforms (both hermit teams WITHOUT GRIAN), and when Grian ignored Wilbur around MCC7 Battle Box, Wilbur chose to annoy False instead. False in return seems to notice Wilbur a tiny bit more than general MCC participants (another one she notices is Fundy), such as being amused/annoyed when he overtakes her in Ace Race and gleefully cheering when Wilbur falls.

False is probably the hermit/ hermit adjacent sans Mr Golden Boi Grian with the most “connections” to SBI, Techno and Wilbur know her (Techno forgot about her in MCC 11 but whatever), and she can deal with the three clout people. Which brings me to the next point.

2. Jimmy Solidarity my beloved…

Naturally, Jimmy has already been neglected because he’s the only one who doesn’t have a lot of “clout”. This is different from the last megaclout team Pink8, because Michael and Burren could “lack clout” together. This time, Jimmy doesn’t have anyone with a similar popularity with him. Red10 made me a little more concerned (viewers have pointed out he seems a little bit neglected by the rest of his teammates, especially during DB when they were shittalking Jimmy’s friends).

CCs wise, they will probably/ hopefully be nice and kind (I say hopefully because I cannot trust anyone from DSMP other than HBomb), everyone will get along, no one will be excluded, everyone is happy.

The toxic fans will probably be rabid towards Jimmy (by extension Grian) if they make even a slight mistake, which is why I’m worried about putting a small/medium sized creator with the BIG BIG creators. But, eh. Toxic people will be toxic no matter what. This isn’t an issue exclusive to Pink Parrots.

3. Clashing attitudes?

Hermits and their friends advocate arrow split. Techno does not. What will happen if this team gets to Dodgebolt? Previously, Grian has always been on “arrow split” teams and greatly enjoyed them. Scott has taken care to put people with similar attitudes together. Now what? I have hope that they’re all mature and can compromise, but eh. Grian is strongly against arrow funnelling and calls it not-gentlemanly. I feel Techno will probably let Grian have a few shots since this is a for fun MCC, but what if they get teamed again for some competitive MCC? They’ll probably work it out, but what might their fanbases think?

To conclude, big fanbases = big benefits + big problems. This is not exclusive to Pink Parrots. In fact, I think this is probably the best mix of builders and clout people for this scenario (I personally do not want to see False-Puffy or Ren-Dream). Techno and Wilbur’s fanbases are already the nicer part of the DSMP fanbase.

The most important part is raising money of course, and the silly “issues” I mentioned above don’t mean anything in comparison. Why care about online matters when the money can help people in the real world?

That being sad, I was just a tiny bit salty and I had to get this out. Nonetheless I’m happy about this team, will definitely be interesting (selfishly hope they don’t win because Twitter will be mad a team of cishets won). Anyways, if you’ve read up to here, thank you for reading my ramblings.

[doakaptan]

i think i finally get mad men and im not happy about it

Two weeks ago I started watching Mad Men for an assignment and accidentally became obsessed with a show that had no premise other than Don Draper bedding various women. 5 seasons in, I bought myself a mechanical keyboard just so that I can live the aesthetic of the show while writing this.

(I will write this post assuming you have read my first blog post about this show but you don’t have to worry about missing any info because the first blog post was me predicting an unpredictable show and cursing at characters)

So turns out, I did not really figure out anything by only watching the first seven episodes. No surprise there. But by diving deep into the first 2 seasons I realized that Mad Men is actually deeper than it lets on and the cheapening effect of its over-sexualized characters don’t really do a great job at hiding it. Actually after a while sex in the show is more symbolism than actual sex. It especially signifies a mental state that is special to Don and you actually start feeling sorry for him whenever a sex scene comes up. 

Well, Don Draper is a villain as well as the hero or to put it more accurately, a tragic hero and as the seasons progress you develop a love hate relationship with him. And if you binge watch 5 seasons and use all your spare time to think about it, you start relating to Don. Surprisingly Don had all the odds against him and lived an awful life without ever doing anything to prompt it. As I learned more about his life I actually started getting mad at the alternative reality of Mad Men because goddamn let the man breathe and be happy for once. 

At the start I was mad about him cheating on Betty with every single powerful women that looked his way and I am still mad, you can’t really excuse that, but as their relationship was revealed more and more I kind of started to understand why he preferred spending the nights somewhere else. Betty is incredibly hard to put up with and no offense but even I’m not sticking around for her character development. She is overbearing, childish, overall a pain in the ass. If I knew her in real life I would have thought that she was pampered too much and was unable to grow up and get a grip as a result. She has mommy issues though and I respect that. There are also moments that she shines and she especially prefers shining only after they get a divorce and when she knows she will get Don’s approval. Before I lose track and continue talk about Betty know that Don is always worse and let me wrap up his analysis. 

Don is, in my opinion, someone who experiences love by avoiding it. (A love avoidant may be the term but I am not really sure). He marries Betty because he falls in love too hard and starts avoiding her right after their marriage, he likes the artist woman too much so he leaves her to be with someone she is more compatible with, same thing with the most of the women he chases. I only realized how hard he avoids the people he likes during season 4 when he decides to marry his secretary (who mind you spend like 4 days with him in Los Angeles to take care of his children) rather than building a healthy relationship with Faye who was probably the best person he could have ended up with. This also relates back to his self-destructive tendencies. He never truly believes that he deserved anything so he makes sure that he ruins it.

He excessively drinks and smokes, cuts ties on a whim, cheats and only ever feels truly like himself while he’s with Anna (who dies later in the series). Anna is and was the friend he needed all along. Even in his stolen identity Anna was the only person who accepted him as who he is and didn’t leave his side even in his darkest times. The man literally went to Korea by himself to defend an area and came back with a stolen id and lots of trauma and adopted himself into the life of her (the wife of the person he stole his identity from) and made sure she lived a life full of love. He shines the most when he can be himself but his old identity is and probably will always be an enigma to him. 

I think he’s slowly starting to find his way and make up for his mistakes but since he is used to self-destructing his set backs get more and more brutal each time. I start relating to him at this point the most. Relapsing in situations like these is brutal and it always feels like it is the last time and for once, for Don, it is the last time. He starts writing to understand himself and starts doing things like, regularly going to swimming or getting into a healthy relationship with someone who will be with him and help him through his ups and downs. He relapses when he decides to marry his secretary and from then on his relapse will only get worse but I believe that he is getting somewhere…

I will update this post once and for all, when I finish the entire series but for now I weirdly have hope that everything will end well for Don. 

And since I overstayed my welcome by going way over the word-limit I will speed run the thoughts I have about the other characters.

Betty, despite my comments earlier is actually misunderstood and deserves more than she gets. She truly loved Don and did everything in her power to make him happy. She even left her very successful modeling career to get married with him while SHE DESERVED BETTER THAN HIM. Her parenting is questionable but it can be overlooked because right now (in the middle of a global pandemic) we can all agree that being stuck with our family 24/7 is not ideal and we have been doing it for only a year while she has been doing it for more than a decade with more children adding up. LEAVE BETTY DRAPER/FRANCIS ALONE. 

(Also, watch the scene where she shoots at her neighbor’s pigeons because he threatened little Sally with killing her dog then talk to me about good parenting…)

Pete Campbell, turns out I really like him and his work ethic. I wish he ended up with Peggy but he is doing just fine with Trudy good for him. good. for. him. Thank god they didn’t follow up Trudy’s ‘old lover’, ‘the one that got away' plot line because it would probably be the thing I hated the most about watching this show. She is not an interesting character and she’ll never be. Good for Pete though, good for Pete. He never gets anything and I don’t know if he deserves getting it because we are not that exposed to him. But he is loyal to the ones he loves and even though his morals can get a bit questionable at times he is hardworking and will build up a great life as far as I’m concerned. (And if he doesn’t you can find me on ao3 re-writing his plot because I am no longer appreciating Pete-slander in this house).

Peggy. GOOD FOR HER GOOD FOR HER. LEAVE THAT DAMN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HANG OUT WITH WANNABE REALEST OF THE REALEST ARTISTS. Also love the gay girl she should have ended up with her instead of the wannabe artist who only talks about capitalism. Peggy’s job is capitalism their relationship don’t really make sense.

Joan… Joan deserved someone who treated her right but fell into the lap of a charming locker-room-mouthed jock, who tried to be a surgeon and failed then tried to be a psychiatrist and failed and finally got drafted for Vietnam (ngl I hope he dies there). Unpopular opinion she should have ended up with Roger because while I hate ‘the perfect girl fixes boy with problems’ trope I would have eat it up. I like them together and surprisingly they are good together. I think she is the only one smart enough to actually lead cis-het white men who think they own everything because they are men, within their company and she deserves more than she gets with the shit she deals with. 

On a last note, the topics Mad Men deals with sometimes can get a bit triggering or upsetting but I think it is worth a watch.

[arceneades]

Why I Love She-Ra (2018)

I watched She-Ra after my YouTube feed had been inundated with She-Ra for a couple of years. I just sort of wanted to know what it was all about. People were talking. I was curious.

I think the first time I felt like crying was during the theme song the first time I saw it.

“We’re Gonna Win In The End!”

This was a queer show. I knew that. And... well, I grew up in the 1980s. And people, we are winning. We are winning this fucking fight with the forces of fucking darkness, some of which were in my own mind and heart, and it has been a long god damn slog but we are winning.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked for a company that published a phone book (yes, a printed book, with phone numbers in it that you could call. It was a different time, okay?) that was targeted to the gay community. Specifically, it was a yellow page directory with advertisements for restaurants, and florists, and plumbers, and towing services, and any other business that you could think of that were paying money to let gay customers know that they would be treated like fucking human beings by that business.

That book doubled in size every year for 4 years. Because we were winning.

It took decades to go from the Defense of (straight) Marriage Act to nationwide acknowledgement of marriage rights. But we got there. Because we are winning. And I care about this fight.

So, yeah. I’m in. Let’s go. We’re gonna win in the end.

The feels did not stop. I cried during “Promise”. Well, I mean, of course I did, I’m not an inhuman monster. I cried during the battle of Bright Moon. I cried for Catra when Shadow Weaver left her, when she hurt her friends, when her pain and rage tore the world apart. She just kept breaking my heart. I wanted her to make just one good decision.

She did, of course, and I cried about that too. I knew what was coming with “Corridors” but it killed me anyway, Adora’s “no, no, no” just bruised my soul.

And “Save the Cat”? Adora’s righteous fury and the power of her love for Catra... again. Tears.

Maybe it was just 2020. Maybe my emotions were just close to the surface. I don’t know. I HURT for those kids. I wanted them to be okay. I still want them to be okay.

But I also felt seen. Seen in a way that... was different.

I was a middle aged, cis-gendered, straight white male. And this show was hitting me, and hitting me hard, and I didn’t know why. I was invested in this love story. I was invested in the war. I knew they were the same thing.

Not unusual, I suppose. I’m a Jane Austen fan. I like love stories. I like it when main characters get together. I’ve read Pride & Prejudice more than twice. But I don’t feel seen when I do.

Part of it was Catra. We all probably have some Catra in us. I might have more than most. It’s taken a long time to get some of my more extreme behaviors under control, although my rage and trauma tends to direct inward, not outward.

Part of it was Adora. I love characters that reflect fierce protectiveness, a part of us that wants to stand between the universe and the people we love and say “No, You can’t hurt them. You can’t have them. They. Are. Mine.”

But hey, you know, Tony Stark has that vibe in “Avengers: Endgame” and even dies to protect what he loves and while that speaks to me, I don’t feel... seen.

Tony Stark is played by Robert Downey Jr, an actor I grew up watching. Avengers is essentially built for me to watch. Literally, I am the target market, me and the kids I’m going to bring to the theater. I don’t feel seen. Marketed to, maybe. But not seen.

Which led me to wonder why a love story about two lesbians who are too young to drink, set in a world where it is not only okay to be a teenage lesbian but it isn’t even worth commenting on, meant so very much to me.

And thinking about that reminded me of something. Which is that when I was super into Second Life, a decade or so ago, I always used a female avatar. Always.

And it felt right. Perfectly right. And I had a lot of conversations with trans people who were also using female avatars because it helped them get along with their dysphoria. A feeling I don’t have. Of course.

I mean, sure. I prefer playing female avatars in games. That’s totally a cis-het thing to do, right? You know the joke, “If I’m going to be staring at an ass, it might as well be a nice ass.”

Okay, so maybe, just maybe, I did sort of decide that I wasn’t a man during that time. I wasn’t sleeping. I was depressed. I hated my job. Totally understandable. My friends straightened me out, shamed me out of that. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest way they could have approached that but I got shamed out of it, didn’t I? If I were actually trans, that wouldn’t happen. Right?

And I like being male. Well, I like the privileges that come with being male. I like having the upper body strength, and I find other men to be sufficiently terrifying that I wouldn’t want to... take off the armor. Not around them.

Yes, maybe, just maybe, I would prefer to have sex as a woman, given the option. That doesn’t make me trans, it just means that I really feel at home around lesbians and want to be a part of their world. Totally normal cis-het feelings there. It’s not like I would actually transform into a woman if I had a magic wand. I mean, not permanently. Not all the time. Just, you know, sometimes. When I wanted to take the armor off. Just when it felt safe.

Totally. Normal. Cis-Het. Feelings.

I mean, obviously I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t want to carry breasts around, for one thing. Looks uncomfortable. I like having just muscle up there instead, thank you very much. And I’m super comfortable with short hair and a beard. It’s a good look for me. I wouldn’t want to look different. I’m happy with my hormone mix. So, there you go. I’m a boy. 

So why don’t I want to be one?

This argument has been raging in my skull forever. Am I a boy? I’m not a girl. I like being able to grow a beard. I’m as Dad a Dad as any Dad on the face of the planet. I don’t want breasts. But... I sort of do want hips.

When I first started questioning my gender, as far as I knew, there were two options. And neither of them fit. Because what I am is non-binary. A fact I would not know if Noelle had not made SPOP, and I don’t know how I can possibly thank her enough for that.

And according to the kids on the enby lesbians server, I’m a non-binary lesbian, which explains the fact that I’m on my fifth Subaru, but doesn’t explain why I don’t currently share my life with a mixed breed Labrador.

I am queer. I felt seen watching She-Ra because I was seen. On Etheria, everyone would use my pronouns. On Etheria, my friends would have helped me through my gender crisis. On Etheria, even in a war, we love and accept each other for who we are. We see each other.

We’re not on Etheria. But I believe we’ll get there.

We’re gonna win in the end.

[adorpheus]

on fujoshi and fetishization

Lately, more and more, both here on tumblr and on other sites, I keep seeing people spew unfiltered hatred at fujoshi - that is, women who like mlm content such as gay fanfic and fanart featuring men with other men. And I don’t mean like a specific type of fujoshi, like the ones who are genuinely being weird about it, but just like a general hatred for girls (but especially straight identifying girls) who express love for gay romance.

I hate to break this to you all, but women (including straight women!) actually are allowed to like mlm fanfiction and fanart, even enthusiastically so. A woman simply expressing her love of gay fanfic, even if it is in kind of a cringey way or a way that you personally don’t like, is NOT automatically fetishization.

I’ve been on the receiving end of fetishization for my entire life, from a very young age, as many black and brown folx have, so I consider myself pretty well acquainted with how it works. Fetishization isn’t just like, being really into drawings of boys kissing, or whatever the fuck y’all are trying to imply on this god forsaken site. 

Fetishization is complicated imo, and can encompass a lot of things, such as (but not limited to):

1 - dehumanization, e.g. viewing a group of people as sexual objects who exist purely for entertainment purposes, rather than acknowledging them as actual people who deserve respect and rights

and

2 - projecting certain assumptions onto said people based on their race/sexuality/whatever is being fetishized. These assumptions are often, but not always, sexual in nature (like the idea that black people in general are more sexual than other races, etc etc etc).

I’m going to use myself as an example to illustrate my point. Please note this isn’t the best or most nuanced example, but it is the most simplistic. A white person finding me attractive and respectfully appreciating my black features as part of what makes me beautiful is not, on its own, fetishization. A white person finding me attractive solely or mostly because I’m a PoC is now in fetishization territory. Similarly, assuming I’m dominant because of my blackness (like saying “step on me mommy” and shit like that) is hella fetishistic. 

That being said, theres definitely a difference between how fetishization works in real life with real people, and how it shows up in fandom. 

Fetishization manifests in many different ways in fandom, but most commonly on the mlm side of things, I personally see it appear as conservative (or centrist) women who love the idea of two men together, but don’t actually like gay people, and don’t necessarily think LGBT+ people deserve rights (or “special treatment” as its sometimes dog whistled). These women view queer men as sexual objects for entertainment rather than an actual group of people who deserve to be protected from systemic oppression. I’ve noticed that they often don’t even think of the men they “ship” together as actually being gay, and may even express disgust at the idea of a character in an mlm ship being headcanon’d gay. In case its not obvious, this is pretty much exactly the same way a lot of cishet men fetishize lesbians (they see “lesbian” as a porn category, rather than like, what actual LGBT people think of when we read the word lesbian). There’s a pretty popular viral tweet thread going around where someone explains seeing this trend of conservative women who like mlm stuff, and I have also personally witnessed this phenomenon myself in more than one fandom. 

The funny thing is, maybe its just me buuuut.... The place I see this particular kind of fetishization happen most is not in the anime/BL fandom, from which the term fujoshi originates - I actually see these type of women way way more in western fandom spaces like Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Hannibal. I can’t stress this enough, there’s a shocking amount of people who are like, straight up trump supporters in these fandoms. If you want to experience it, try joining a Hannigram or Destiel group on facebook and you will probably encounter one eventually especially if you happen to be living through a major historical event. Like these women probably wouldn’t even be considered “fujoshi”, because that term doesn’t really apply to them given they aren’t in the BL/anime fandom, yet they’re the ones I personally see actually doing the most harm.

Of course this isn’t the ONLY kind of fetishizing woman in the mlm/BL world, there are other ways fetishization shows up, but this is the most toxic kind that I see.

A girl just being really into BL or whatever may be “cringe” to you, or she may be expressing her love for BL in a “cringey” way, but a straight woman really enjoying BL is not, on its own, somehow inherently fetishization. Yes, sometimes teenage girls act kind of cringe about how much they like BL and that might be annoying to you, but its not necessarily ~problematic~. 

That being said, IT NEEDS BE REMARKED that a lot of the “fujoshi” that you all hate so deeply, are actually closeted trans men or nonbinary people who haven’t yet come to terms with their gender identity, or are otherwise just NOT cishet. I know because I was one of these closeted people for years, and I honestly think tumblr and the cultural obsession around purity is one of the many reasons I was closeted so deeply for so long. STORYTIME LOL!!! In my early adolescence, I was a sort of proto “fujoshi”. I identified as a bi girl who was mostly attracted to men, or as most (biphobic) people called it, “practically straight”. I wrote and read “slash” fanfic and looked at as well as drew my own fanart. We didn’t use the term fujoshi back then, but that’s definitely how I could have been described. I was obsessed with yaoi, BL, whatever you want to call it, to a cringe-inducing degree. I really struggled to relate to most het romances, so when I first discovered yaoi fanfics (as we called them at the time), I fell in love and felt like I finally found the type of romance content that was made for me. I didn’t know exactly why, I just knew it hit different. LGBT+ fanart and fanfiction brought me an immense amount of joy, and I didn’t really think too hard about why.

At some point, in my early 20s, after reading lots of discourse™ here on tumblr and other places like twitter, I started to get the sinking feeling that my passion for gay fanfiction was ~problematic~. I had always felt a sense of guilt for being into mlm content, because literally anyone who found out I liked BL (especially the men I dated) shamed me for liking it all the fucking time (which btw is literally just homophobic, like can we talk about that?). In addition to THAT bullshit, now I’m seeing posts telling me that girls who like BL are cringey gross fetishists who inspire rage and should go die? 

Let me tell you, I internalized the fuck out of messages like this. I desperately wanted to avoid being ~problematic~. At the time, I thought being problematic was like the worst thing you could be. I was terrified of being “cancelled”, before canceling was even really a thing. I thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m gross for liking this stuff? I should stop.” I beat myself up over this. I wanted so badly to be accepted, and to be deemed a Good Person by the internet and society at large.

I tried to shape up and become a good ally (lmfao). I stopped writing fanfic and deleted all the ones I was working on at the time. I made a concerted effort to assimilate into cishet culture, including trying to indulge myself more deeply in the few fandoms I could find that had het content I did enjoy (Buffy, True Blood, Pretty Little Liars, etc). I would occasionally look at BL/fanfic/etc in private, but then I would repress my interest in it and not look for a while. Instead I would look at women in straight relationships, and create extremely heterosexual Couple Goals pinterest boards, and try to figure out how I could become more like these women, so I, too, could be loved someday. 

This cycle of repression lasted like eight years. Throughout it all, I was performing womanhood to the best of my ability and trying to become a woman that was worthy of being in a relationship. I went in and out of several “straight” relationships, wondering why they didn’t make me feel the way reading fanfic did. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why straight intimacy didn’t work for me. I just didn’t enjoy it. I always preferred looking at or making gay fanfiction/fanart over actual intimacy with men in real life. 

Eventually, I stumbled upon a trans coming out video that someone I was following posted online, my egg started to crack, and to make an extremely long story short, after like 3 years of introspection and many gender panic attacks that I still experience to this day, I realized that I’m uh... MAYBE... NOT CIS..!? :|

I truly believe if I had just been ALLOWED TO LIKE GAY STUFF WITHOUT BEING SHAMED FOR IT, I probably would have realized I was trans way way sooner. Because for me, indulging in my love of gay romance and writing gay fanfic wasn’t me being a weirdo fetishist, it was actually me exploring my own gender identity. It is what helped me come to terms with being a nonbinary trans boy.

Not everyone realizes they are trans at age 2 or whatever the fuck. Sometimes you have to go through a cringey fujoshi phase and multiple existential crises to realize how fucking gay you are AND THATS FINE.

And one more thing - can we just be real here? 

A lot of anti-fujoshi sentiment is literally just misogyny. omg please realize this. Its “women aren’t allowed to enjoy things” but, like... with gay fanfics. Some of the anti-fujoshi posts I see come across my dash are clearly ppl projecting a caricature they invented in their head of a demonic fujoshi fetishist onto any woman who expresses what they consider to be a little too much enthusiasm for gay content and then using their perception of that individual as an excuse to justify their disdain for any women, especially straight women, ‘invading’ their ~oh so exclusive~ queer fandom spaces.

 god get over yrselfs this is gatekeeping by another name

idk why i spent so long writing this no one is even going to read it, does anyone even still use this site

*EDIT: HOLY SHIT WHEN DOING RESEARCH FOR THIS POST I FOUND OUT THAT Y-GALLERY IS BACK OMG!!! 

[hidethenotes]

Why I’m Deeply Concerned about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and You Should Be Too

Let me Preface this by acknowledging Dune has yet to be released so it may very well be that many if not all of my concerns and frustrations will prove unfounded. Furthermore Dune was a novel published in 1965 by an extremely homophobic*, cis-gendered and heterosexual white man so I am by no means arguing deviations shouldn’t be made from the original text. They absolutely should especially because the series themes about human complexity and questioning authority seem depressingly timeless and deserve repeating. 

However- in the original novel the Fremen were explicitly based on the Bedouin cultures of North Africa and MENA inspired elements permeate all aspects of the culture in Dune, both Fremen and Outsider. Yet despite two adaptions (three if you count SyFy’s adaptions of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune) none have cast MENA performers or tapped anyone of MENA origin to work behind the scenes (Denis Villeneuve’s adaption included). 

This current adaption has instead chosen to cast almost exclusively Black actors as the Fremen. I say ‘almost’ because Stilgar, one of the Fremen leaders in the book is played by the white Javier Bardem.

While there is some potential narrative justification for the Fremen being Black as it’s mentioned in the book the Fremen are descended from a slave race and the term Fremen is actually derived from ‘Free men’ after several of these former slaves escaped into the desert. 

Fremen tradition says they were slaves. . . for nine generations. -Terminology of the Imperium, Dune

Though that potential justification is weakened since Javier Bardem is again white. It also doesn’t help that Paul Atreides (played by the equally white Timothée Chalamet)  is poised to also take on a leadership role both secular and religious amongst the Fremen as a long awaited warrior prophet and messiah.

MENA actors make up less than one percent of current television roles and have equally small presense on the big screen. When they are shown they usually only given stereotypical roles and rarely make any kind of headway in genre films like science fiction and fantasy. It’s a depressing lack of inclusion of people who are quite literally the inspiration for the novel. 

Which brings me to the character of Liet-Kynes who’s casting I am most disturbed by. (Spoiler Warning for the 55 year old book from here on out). In the book Liet-Kynes is a half-Fremen man who acts as not only a leader amongst the Fremen but is also able to pass largely undetected in non-Fremen society because of his mixed heritage. Something he uses to protect his people from a largely hostile ruling class but as a man of science remains deeply skeptical of his peoples’ prophesies surrounding Paul Atreides’ messianic potential. (With good reason it turns out as those ‘prophecies’ were largely planted by the outsider Bene Gesserit Sisterhood for their own ends) While he’s initially won over by Paul and his father Duke Leto’s charisma he later comes to regret giving them his allegiances realizing as he dies the danger a messiah like Paul poses to the Fremen culture’s integrity. 

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than to fall into the hands of a Hero. . . Dune, Chapter 22

Frank Herbert even has Liet’s body circled by hawks who are the traditional emblem of the Atreides to hammer the point home that the Atreides will be feasting themselves on the vulnerable Fremen. 

To put it bluntly Liet’s narrative purpose is to die leaving no room for the Fremen or the larger Dune universe the chance to escape the chaos Paul’s messianic destiny will bring. And Denis Villeneuve has chosen to cast Sharon Duncan-Brewster a Black woman in this role. Assuming Liet-Kynes’ character follows a similar narrative arc as presented in the original novel we are going to be presented with a Black woman who comes to believe a white boy is her long awaited messiah and then be disposed of.

We are in something of a long needed cultural reckoning. Where we have been forced to acknowledge how constantly we have treated not only Black people but Black women as disposable. So in addition to the deliberate lack of MENA cast in any roles let alone Fremen I find this particular change not only tone-deaf but down right despicable. Even worse the film will be including the characters Jamis and Harah. Jamis is a man who Paul kills early into his introduction to Fremen society and who’s widowed wife Harah then tries to seduce to secure her own life but that of her two orphaned children. Which smacks of a multitude of racial stereotypes. 

As a queer fan of the books who frequently enjoys dragging Frank Herbert for his authorial inconsistencies and eccentricities (he had a recurring obcession with athletically built red heads with oval shaped faces and wide generous mouths) I am all for radically altering the books’ text. But I am not seeing that with this adaption. Instead it feels like a poorly thought out attempt at diversity as conceived by three white, cis-het white men and I for one will not be watching. 

Foot Notes and Sources Cited

* Bruce's homosexuality was had never been accepted by my father, and they had never reached full rapprochement. Still, when my brother came to Seatle he broke into tears while riding in the backseat of my car. Penny and Jan consoled him. My brother told me later that he didn't cry from love, because he didn't feel he loved the man. He said he cried from what he had never experienced in the relationship between his father. I missed almost everything," Bruce said. "I never saw the good side he showed you. He wasn't there fore me." He went on to say that he couldn't watch movies or television programs having to do with father-son relationships, because they upset him so much. I told him that Dad loved him, that he spoke of him often and fondly, and that he just didn't know how to show it. I reminded Bruce of all the ways he emulated our father, and of the many interests they shared . . . electronics, computers, science fiction, photography, flamenco guitar . . . and I asked if that could possible mean that he loved Dad after all. My brother fell silent.  -Brian Herbert, Dreamer of Dune

Ramos, Dino-Ray. “Study Shows Bleak Middle Eastern & North African Representation, Reinforced Stereotypes On Primetime TV.” Deadline, Deadline, 10 Sept. 2018, deadline.com/2018/09/middle-eastern-north-african-representation-primetime-tv-mena-quantico-blacklist-tyrant-diversity-1202458101/.

Ramos, Dino-Ray. “'Dune' Trailer: Denis Villeneuve & Cast Talk How Adaptation Of Sci-Fi Classic Will Engulf Audiences On An Epic Scale.” Deadline, 9 Sept. 2020, deadline.com/video/dune-trailer-denis-villeneuve-timothee-chalamet-rebecca-ferguson-oscar-isaac-warner-brothers-sci-fi/. 

Coleman, Itané O. Http://Www.ncurproceedings.org/Ojs/Index.php/NCUR2017/Index, 2017, www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2017/article/view/2246. 

HERBERT, FRANK. DUNE. ACE Books, 1965. 

Herbert, Brian. Dreamer of Dune: the Biography of Frank Herbert. Tor, 2004. 

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[queerlytical]

Unpacking my aversion to cis-het men - 08/12/2020

This is going to be a long one.  One I’m quite nervous about posting about even when I’m here anonymously!

Will probably refer to cis-het men as men/guys generally in this post btw. & the ex I refer to here is a guy I was with for 5 years which was an emotionally abusive relationship. 

I’ve recently started to challenge my feelings towards cis-het men.  Accepting that I have the judgement that all men are basically weak minded by not challenging society as it is (and therefore accepting of all the oppression), and are desperately affected by toxic masculinity.  

A small part of my brain knows that’s not true.  I have a couple of cis-het male friends who I love and are clearly not like that.  But when I think “what would be the problem if I ended up with a man in the future?” the other part of my brain immediately shuts the idea down like “why would you do such a thing?! you only like women, end of story”.  Thinking that the guys  who are open minded and unpacking their own priveleges/opinions etc. are so few and far between there is probably none left out there for me to meet.  

So I decided to challenge this notion.  And perhaps there is some underlying internal homophobia conflicting with these thoughts at the same time like “if I just gave men a chance.” or “it would be so much easier to just find a guy who is interested in me” (there is a lot underlying that quote tho - not that many wlw in my area, my personal feelings towards myself as to how cis-het men perceive me).

Along with challenging this notion, I have basically been craving to be dominated and penetrated in the bedroom, with no particular strings attached.  The people I’ve slept with this year weren’t great experiences and I just wanted someone to push me around and top me.  I know there are women who would gladly do that but the women I tend to date haven’t been like that and I’ve always been more of the top than the bottom.  I have never entertained a guy for sex where I have decided for myself that this is what’s going to happen, I’ve always been pursuaded into it (I didn’t learn about consent until the last couple of years, clearly). I wanted to feel that control.  I wanted to be the one to say, I’ve decided this this time.  And to see, how I would actually feel given that this was something I wanted and not sort of forced onto me.

I changed my Bumble search to include “everyone”.  Note that I had also ran out of women in my search radius by this stage so it was just men coming up now.  It was interesting.  I noticed that there are a lot of guy profiles that are basically the same - “where can you be found after work? the gym” or “what do you quote too much from? the office, US”.  Literally after swiping for about 10 minutes I could have written the exact same profile as like 40% of these profiles I was now faced with.  

I obviously ended up swiping left for the majority of guy profiles.  I paid more attention to the men who had kind eyes, nice smiles, beards (I love a beard strangely enough), and anything interesting in their profile.  I struggled to swipe right on white men in particular. I think this makes sense due to:

 my ex being white and racist (and I have a tendency to want to get as far as possible from this particular ex), 

a close friend who was my only white cis-het friend who then turned out to be a racist tory

my dad who is white, racist and homophobic (not terribly but enough to make me uncomfortable to discuss anything with him).  

Plus the general consensus that white cis-het men are the most priveleged in society and they can never understand someone like me, right?  Let alone have done any of the unpacking and learning about their own privilege..  

I matched with a few guys and had brief conversations with them before getting overwhelmed about messaging people on dating apps (happens whenever I can’t keep on top of messaging like more than one person at a time).  There were some okay chats, nothing overly flirty.  Some voicenotes which freaked me out a little, not 100% sure why hearing men’s voices so early after speaking to someone online scares me, but it’s probably because I’m not as comfortable sending voicenotes myself.  

There was a lot of me saying to myself “what am I doing?! LOLOLOL”

I’m going to talk about one of the guys in particular now.  We’ll call him Z.  Z’s profile was very minimal, basically just said “ask if you want to know more”.  But he had a nice face, lovely smile, and his first picture even looked quite feminine in the face - he has super long eyelashes and due to the lockdown hair he was wearing a hairband.  He’s Asian (Sikh) like my two closest friends.  I have spoken to him more than any of the other matches from Bumble.  We don’t really talk much of substance.  I told him I’m “basically a lesbian” quite early on  and he told me he’d been healing from a long relationship and was now “ready to have some fun”.  He didn’t seem particularly phased that I was into women, didn’t say anything cringey like “don’t worry, I’ll turn you” (which is what I used to get when I was younger).  This pushed the conversations in a direction where it was kind of agreed that this was all a bit of fun - flirty, sexual.  

My first experience with a guy being interested me back in high school eventually turned into a FWB situation so this type of relationship I am used to and basically expect from men..  I’m not particularly bother by this atm but might unpack this some more at some point.   

Anyway, as me and Z are just having some fun, I’ve not been vulnerable or told him much about things I care about - I don’t even think he knows my full name. It has actually been a breath of fresh air when I’ve been with people who are too intense for me throughout my dating life.  He is very much the kind of person I would never usually interact with too- likes and plays football, hangs with a group of “lads”.  I don’t think we have anything in common yet we still manage to chat (albeit with gaps of many hours in between some messages).

What did interest me about Z quite early on in our conversations is that he never said the word “girls”, always “women”.  I pointed this out to him and he confirmed he did that on purpose because he wouldn’t want to be referred to as a “boy” and that women deserve the same language used when referencing grown ass women.  This sticks in my mind as it definitely broke down one of my mental barriers around men not being able to understand “what’s the big deal”.  I think that’s probably why I’ve managed to speak to him for as long as we have.  Later on he also mentioned that people “can’t be fat shaming” which surprised me even more.  (Does my brain think cis-het men live under a rock or something?!).

We’ve been speaking 3 weeks at this stage.  We agreed to meet this weekend.  We ended up delaying it from Sunday to last night (Monday) because he was tired from a busy weekend and “wanted to give me the full experience”.  Surprisingly this didn’t make me super cringe.  I think I was probably more relieved to delay it another day as I was pretty nervous about how it would go, my head overthinking like - what if we have nothing to talk about? what if he comes all this way and I change my mind (as I am of course allowed to)? what if he’s a catfish and hurts me? etc. etc.  I don’t overthink this much when I date women.

So he was on his way.  I was running in circles getting ready like “WHAT AM I DOING?!!!”.  I had some rum to take the edge off and played the piano anxiously while he was on the way as something to take my mind off thinking about what was about to happen.

He arrived.  He was who he said he was.  He was the person who was in his pictures.  He was slightly slimmer than I expected but that was just the angles that his pictures were taken in.  It wasn’t awkward.  I poured us a drink and we sat on the sofa and chatted for a couple of hours.  He talked a lot, I hardly got a word in edgeways.  I didn’t mind as it put me at ease that there was no awkward silences. 

We finished our drinks.  I hadn’t left the heating on in my lounge so it had gotten quite cold..  I got closer to him.  Then we kissed.  It was nice.  I love kissing anyone who’s a good kisser no matter their gender. The excitement of the whole situation turned me on and we took it to my bedroom.

I struggled to look at him naked although when I did, I didn’t feel strange like I thought I would.  Obviously there is nothing wrong with the male form, I just haven’t seen a dude naked in my bedroom for years and when I was younger I used to tell myself I had phallophobia..  The sex was pretty much what I was looking for.  He didn’t bring a condom though which didn’t annoy me loads in the moment, despite him saying “I prefer without but ok” to which I replied “I don’t know where you’ve been” *eye roll*.  I thankfully had my own condoms (my stash usually for making dental dams, yno) but after I was kind of thinking to myself like “who the fuck goes to have casual sex with someone and doesn’t bring a condom when they have a penis?!”. I didn’t even let my ex bare-back me let alone some random dude.  

Anyway, I did it.  Consensual sex was better than any sex I had with my ex (not surprising).  He didn’t make me climax but it felt good (sex isn’t goal orientated for me but I know it was for him, as I assume it is with most men).  We held each other and chatted naked for a while after.  I think he wanted round 2 but I’m not sure I could have handled it.  He left relatively promptly after and I felt.. content.

I think I got what I wanted out of the experience.  It definitely boosted my confidence.  I’m not sure if I’ll see him again yet.  I definitely still feel very queer and mostly into women, I missed boobs a lot (like what do het-women hold onto?).

Part of me is like “okay next step is to see what it would be like to go on a romantic date with a guy” - something I have never ever done.  I don’t think I’ve been interested in it in the past (since growing up that is).  I can’t even imagine what it would be like because I would probably just treat them as my friend and have no clue how to flirt (if I even wanted to flirt).  But there are many conflicting thoughts about dating men romantically - what if it’s a success?  I’d end up feeling disowned by my new queer friends or judged by them, or what if I hurt someone?  how will dating guys impact how I feel about my own queerness??  I just settled back into my queer identity and now it feels I’m going backwards again.

I am definitely enjoying this new side to me that doesn’t take dating seriously and being comfortable that I don’t want a relationship right now and that’s okay!  I am continually learning about myself and trying to breakdown my own barriers so I can be my most true authentic self.  I’m having fun, and doing what’s best for me.  Which is a complete u-turn on the person I was less than a few years ago who just wanted to please everyone and was so depressed and burnt out doing so.

[coolgirlofrp]

A Guide To Making Your Roleplay More Diverse 

I suppose I should warn you right now that I’m writing this guide off the coattails of a kind of pissy mood (but writing this helped me get it out in a positive way) so I may use some colorful terminology and shits while I get this sorted out. I pride myself on being honest so I just thought you should know. Also, I’ve never written a guide for anything before so like please bear with me here. To explain a bit if you don’t know me, hi my name is Ellie I’m a cis (not het) abled white girl who used to be just like y’all (aka the ones this damn guide is for). I didn’t really consider the consequences of not putting effort into making my roleplay diverse. 

And I don’t just mean those Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Chung muses that manage to get peppered in amongst the sea of young white cis characters. (sidenote I love them both and still want to see them, just not only them) I too once thought “I can’t force people to write a [diverse] muse.” But guess what? I’m here to tell you that while you are 100% right that you can’t force people to write a [diverse] character if they don’t want to, YOU 100% have the ability to make sure your roleplay isn’t geared toward those people but rather the people who *GASP* do want to write characters of color, transgender muses, older muses, body diverse, and/or disabled muses.

If you’re creating/adminning a roleplay it’s your job to let people know that fostering a diverse cast of characters is a top priority. It should ALWAYS be a top priority. If that’s something that is low on the totem pole for you (and you just don’t really care) then you really need to sit down and think about exactly why you don’t care about diversity. And it’s not just because this is supposed to be a “fun activity”, it’s because you think lesser of diverse people and don’t think they deserve to be represented as much as your young cis white fav does. And let’s be real, that’s something you need to adjust deep inside of you and can’t be fixed by this guide. 

But if you actually care about helping promote diversity and want to learn how to better gear your roleplay towards the people who will write these diverse muses then please read on. Because as long as you truly want to do better and actually try, then you’re a winner. I feel like I’m always saying this but at the end of the day we’re all human and we all make mistakes and sometimes we don’t do as well as we’d like, but what matters is our will to do better. You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t even have to aim for that bullseye you just gotta fire the damn arrow in the first place and keep trying until you at least hit the target. And then keep trying some more. 

Anyways, let’s get to it.   

STEP #1: Be a freaking leader. 

If you’re going to admin a roleplay you can’t be passive (or worse passive-aggressive). And that means you can’t be the kind of person who just wants to be everyone’s friend and not lay down some laws and make sure people stick to them. It’s just a recipe for disaster. And if you are that kind of person and you still want to create/admin a roleplay then you absolutely need a co-admin who can be a fucking Lion. Because as much as we all want the elusive perfect drama-free roleplay...it’s never gonna happen. And when a mun comes to you with a problem, it is literally your job to fix it. And that’s not gonna work out too well if you’re the type of person who prefers to ignore a problem until it goes away. So either learn how to step up and be a real leader or pass the torch to someone who does. 

STEP #2: So lead by example. 

Basically, it’s your job to create the kind of environment where diverse characters and faceclaims are welcome. if you’re creating a skeleton roleplay where you designate faceclaims or even make faceclaim suggestions then you better damn well make sure you make more characters of color than you do white. Because it’s just statistics people. There are more people of color than there are white people in this world, and it just makes sense. If you’re an OC roleplay make sure you use a lot of faceclaims of color in your most wanted/suggested faceclaims. If you’re a mixture of both skeleton and OC and you have some plot-prominent skeletons make sure a good bit of those important characters are characters of color. 

Then, you can work on gender diversity. Always try to make sure your M/F/NB ratio isn’t hugely out of proportion. (E.G. 26 Females, 18 Males, and 2 Nonbinary). And that brings me to “gender bans”. Oh boi. If you’re using a gender ban to “even out” the ratio between male and female characters while completely ignoring the fact that you only have 1 nonbinary character in play...oh buddy. That’s fucked up. You’re basically telling people that female and male characters are more important. Don’t do that. Simple. Also simple? Making sure to have some binary transgender characters too among those male and female muses because they’re just as important as all the others. They deserve love. GIVE THEM LOVE. If it’s a skeleton roleplay try to make most of your characters’ gender and pronouns “up to player” but also make some skeletons that are at least semi-set (and by that I mean make some of those skeletons specifically nonbinary or transgender).

Next, let’s talk about disabled characters. Obviously, they’re important too. I mean it should be just that simple, right? But sometimes it’s difficult to find that kind of representation in roleplays and it’s usually because most people are a little bit scared to attempt it. Which makes sense. You should never try to write a character who you don’t understand...but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage people to step out of their comfort zones and learn. I suggest having a resource side blog where not only can you reblog gif/icon resources for the muses but also character guides, masterlists, and just various resources on how to develop and write different and diverse characters (disabled muses absolutely included). This will help so much, and not just with potentially disabled characters but all characters. It will help your muns see that you’re truly interested in seeing diverse muses played correctly and respectfully. 

Lastly and most importantly: make sure your own characters are each diverse in some way. Whether it’s their ethnicity or race or their gender or their age or a disability. When you play a diverse muse, you are more likely to get the kind of applicants who love playing and playing with diverse muses. But always, always, do it respectfully and do your research if you don’t have first-hand experience with something about your muse’s ethnicity/race, gender, or their disability. 

STEP #3: Make some rules and stick to them. 

You gotta set some ground rules so people know you mean business. Make sure people understand that you want your roleplay to be diverse and people will flock to it. I promise you. This idea that there aren’t a lot of people out there playing diverse characters is a crock of shit. They’re out there!  They just don’t have a lot of options for roleplays because people like us have a hard time joining roleplays where it’s 90% young cis skinny white characters all with the same “sarcastic” attitude and bland personality. Also, this step ties into both the previous steps. You gotta be a leader and you gotta be willing to lead by example when you make these kinds of rules. Because, at the end of the day, if you don’t, it can do more harm than good. If you’re not sure where to start with rules, I have a couple that you can use that I personally believe will definitely put your roleplay on the path to being a wonderfully diverse group: 

If your mun’s first muse is a white character their second muse must be a character of color. This also applies to the third and fourth characters. If a mun has four characters and only of them is a character of color, there’s something wrong with that because it’s not even realistic. Sorry, not sorry. 

If your mun has two cis gendered characters and is going to apply for a third muse then that third muse must be a transgender character (binary or nonbinary). If your worry here is people playing the character as trans without doing the research just to get their third muse, then that’s where your leadership skills come in and you lay down the law. Don’t let them get away with it just because you’re worried about “drama”. Do the right thing. 99% of the time the people you’re gonna attract are the opposite of that kind of person so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue anyway.

STEP #4: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, ask questions, and continue to learn. 

I touched on this at the tail end of my little beginning part but I just want to reiterate that it’s okay to make mistakes. What’s not okay is ignoring those mistakes and pretending they never happened. Or worse pretending to understand your mistakes and promise to fix them when you’re really just trying to keep it from becoming “drama”. Make mistakes and when people call you out, don’t get defensive. Ask questions. Ask for help. Do the research. LEARN. That’s all any of us are doing anyway. None of us have the complete answers, certainly not me. I’m sure there are things I’m fucking up in this very guide, but the moral is to just keep trying to do it (whatever it is) better. TTFN. <3

[star-anise]

do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”.  It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women. 

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women.  And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Five Feet Apart

Have you the seen the movie about dying teens in love? No, not that one. This one, Five Feet Apart, about Stella (Hayley Lu Richardson) and Will (Cole Sprouse), two star-crossed 17-year-olds who both have cystic fibrosis and a burning desire to touch each other but they can’t due to the risk of contracting each other’s deadly germs. It’s like Romeo and Juliet but with phlegm. The title refers to the minimum safe distance they have to stay apart from each other (minus 1 ft for love). So will this doomed love story ensure this new genre of sick-lit is here to stay or is it destined to die just like these teens? Well...

If this is the standard, I think this microgenre is on life support already. I’d say this is simply a rip-off of The Fault in Our Stars, but that feels unfair. This almost feels like a rip-off of a rip-off, a dollar store version of the US version of an internationally renowned Italian art film, and as such I will be spoiling some plot points in this review so back out now if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing. Though there are a few strong performances from Richardson and her best friend Poe (Moises Arias), the world the film builds just feels too contrived to be convincing.

Some thoughts:

One of the only upsides I can see from this #chronicillness life is the overabundance of the comfiest looking sweaters I’ve ever seen. I’m obsessed with every sweater in this film. People shouldn’t have to be sick to be this comfortable in public.

The first time we meet Will, my notes just say “Wow this guy sucks” and “I have never been less impressed by a teenage boy.” I’m not 100% sure my opinion on him turned around that much by the end of the film. He never feels anything beyond a poorly sketched bad boy, revealed to have a soft gooey marshmallow interior when he falls in love. I am at least happy that their relationship grows and develops over weeks (and with nothing much to do in a hospital they spend a lot of time together), but he never feels that fleshed-out or real to me.

One thing I really appreciate in movies is when the filmmakers figure out nifty ways to drop a ton of exposition on the audience without it feeling like clunky exposition. Will checking out Stella’s YouTube page was a pretty clever way to do a huge info dump in an elegant way.

Parminder Nagra, aka my teen crush from Bend It Like Beckham, is playing a doctor now? Be still my heart!

I do love that Stella developed an app. Fuck yeah, women in STEM. 

Am I the only one who has a problem with how many HIPAA violations there are in movies now? Like, we are playing SUPER fast and loose with informed consent, no regard for patient privacy, disclosing information to other patients...is this hospital being run by animals? Is a horse loose in the hospital?

Barb (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) is an underserved character and her perspective is a valuable one. I appreciate that she speaks up and showcases her sense of responsibility and advocacy for her patients. It’s not just patients who experience terminal illness, and Barb is right to not let them forget that - until she is just completely fine with helping in grand romantic gestures for the ‘gram. Kind of disappointed with the evolution of Barb from “the voice of reason” to “the power of love conquers all” but maybe that’s just because I’m old and bitter and on the side of the parents in teen movies now. 

For being about teens in love, they’re not very funny. Love is funny and silly, even when it’s life or death stakes! Stella’s message high on painkillers post-surgery is by far the funniest part of the movie.

My biggest complaint by far is that Hayley Lu Richardson is luminous and full of dazzling energy on her own and Cole Sprouse has the screen presence of a limp piece of asparagus with an emo dye job. I just feel no connection between them at all, honestly, and I am on board with the story! I am bought in! And just...nothin’.

Oh and huge fucking shocker the gay best friend (Arias) is the one who dies and gets to be the poster child of tragedy porn so we can not only enjoy a Bury Your Gays moment but also not interfere with the heterosexual romance!

For example, this sexy poolside romp late at night in the hospital for their first date should feel like the swooniest most romantic thing and all I can think is “hospitals have cameras. Security guards are watching you awkwardly caress her body with a pool cue right now, or they will later.” And this slow undress doesn’t feel seductive or alluring, it feels so uncomfortable to me. Related: I am 100% sure you can’t go around hospitals popping balloons willy nilly. You guys, I don’t know how this entire romance inspires such cynicism in me when I am, by nature, the sappiest of saps! 

That being said, in this week’s Did I Cry? The answer is yes, yes I did, when she was in surgeery and when he made his dumb speech at the end which I actually fucking hated? Like all of the words were so stupid? But the feeling was right, so that was a very confusing and disconcerting way to feel. 

I will say - I appreciate a mainstream film like this presenting bodies that are sick, scarred, and chronically ill as desirable and sexy. Even if those bodies belong to conventionally attractive cis het white people, it feels like a step towards some more inclusive representation that I know is much needed. 

Also, I get the whole “taking a stand regarding my life and my health care decisions” thing regarding the lung transplant or whatever but I don’t care what your circumstances are or how invincible you feel DON’T FUCK AROUND ON ICE. 

It’s possible the root of the issues I had stem simply from a stumbling, bumbling transition from book to film. Like, from a narrative standpoint, I appreciate the symmetry - the drowning, the mouth-to-mouth, the tangled relationship between life and death - but I think it’s one of those things that works much better in book form rather than in a film. It all just feels so fake, so contrived, so OBVIOUS. When I think of some of the truly charming teen romances that have come out in the last few years, like Love, Simon or To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, I just know that there is still magic left in the genre, and it doesn’t have to feel this forced. If you’re already a fan of this story, I’m sure the film version will deliver what you want but if not...you’re probably ok staying five feet away from this one.

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

[girlonfilmmovies]

Welcome to Friend Island: "Love Island US Season 3" and the Gaping Sores of America

So I foolishly thought that in the new year of 2021, the world would be in a better place than it was the previous year. After all, we were coming out of the "worst" of the most horrifying pandemic of the past century, a middling presidency that at that point served only a wealth of TV soundbites and less actual damage to the political system, and we were looking forward to a brighter future and a return to what some hoped would be "normal". The past was the past, and this was going to be a new moment.

Oh how naïve we all were.

As of this writing Covid-19 cases are hitting staggering new highs in the southern US, with Florida (of course) somehow hitting a record amount despite vaccines being easily available in the country for months. The death rates are at almost the same as last year. The middling disaster of the 45th president had one more trick up its sleeve, a firebomb brewing for dozens of years that went off in one of the most embarrassing fiascos of American political history. Misinformation has already implanted itself so thoroughly among half the country that people would rather die than admit they were wrong; the spread of such chaos being happily spat out through the algorithms of corporations only intent on raking in dollar signs. All the potential benefits that could have come from this once-in-a-lifetime moment are being briskly swept away: offices demanding their employees come back, no respect given to science and healthcare workers, the country's clearly weak infrastructure forced right back into action as if we didn't just see its gaping holes. The earth is dying and the people who actually have the resources do something about it instead have kickstarted a capitalist space race.

2021 has gone to show that old, toxic habits die hard.

Sigh.

Yeah, I watched Love Island again.

Despite my... let's say mixed feelings regarding last year's shitshow, I couldn't help but admit that it was the closest thing that I've had to appointment viewing TV that I've had in a long time. In an era of streaming and DVR boxes, it's a bit of an actual feat to get someone who works a fulltime job (especially one with erratic scheduling) to go out of their way to watch something the second it premieres. Love Island brings the family together, so they can engage in our favorite pastime: pointing and laughing at young, dumb, fame hungry cis-hets.

Plus, the second season had offered a fascinating glance at how to contend with a pandemic while also trying to stage a typical dumb reality show. The tropical island villa was swapped for a luxurious hotel rooftop in Las Vegas -- a literal ivory tower of ignorant hedonism looking down upon a plagued nation. You could feel the sexual tension of the hot, hyper-sexual adults forced without physical contact for months finally allowed to relieve themselves the only way they know how: toxic relationships. It was trying so hard to be an oasis in a desert yearning for frivolous content, but the façade was clearly visible to the point of satire. It was a wonderful thing to experience firsthand as what I originally thought as merely me dipping my toes into the genre.

Season 2 was the show that we deserved at the time, a funhouse mirror reflecting all the callous stupidity that had led us to this moment in world history. It attempted to offer a happy ending, a look towards the future: a black couple finally winning a reality show, a first for such a mainstream program (both of them actually kind of turned out to suck, but shhhh...).

It also allowed America to completely break the hearts of people while watching them fall apart live on TV. It was cruel, it was stupid, but most of all, it was fun as hell.

Season 3 is not about torturing the competitors. It's about torturing us.

In all fairness, there were a couple of lovely positive developments for the series this season. While still struggling with racial diversity a little bit, as evidenced by them casting only one very specific kind of black man like five times, strides are being taken elsewhere in the lane of body diversity. Alana makes her debut as literally the first woman on this show who isn't a size 0-2, looking absolutely gorgeous in every single shot.

The almost aggressively heteronormative nature of the show is slowly being shaken by a more openly queer cast than previously expected -- multiple bisexual/pansexual contestants participated, even though there wasn't any overtly queer romance shown (also almost all of them were women, with them describing their sexualities being confined to streaming exclusive episodes, which isn't... great). It's certainly a step in the right direction for a show that unceremoniously shuffled off the only queer member of the Season 2 cast overnight once the internet found his gay porn shoot. Ironically, they also ended up booting off the most openly queer member of this cast too, the purple haired proudly pansexual TikTok-er Leslie, but for the more legal reason of smuggling weed into the villa.

It's not terribly surprising that both Alana and Leslie garnered a lot of positive attention both inside and outside of the villa -- they stand out so much against the otherwise predictable casting that we've come to expect from this show and white American media in general. Alana is a woman with actual curves who looks stunningly gorgeous in comparison to the monotonous supermodel figures of everyone else. Leslie almost falls into a stereotype from the way she appears: dyed purple hair, tattooed all over, obviously queer, vaping weed constantly, exuding the kind of chaotic yet weirdly fun energy that only a former stripper can. Yet she obviously grabbed the attention of the contestants because while people like her abound in real life, in the fantasy land of reality TV she's an absolute rarity, a far cry from the sanitized beauty pageant-esque standards that they seem to pluck girls from. The men are still dumb, bland, boneheaded idiots in this show, but by offering some actual variety, they get to actually pursue people they aren't "traditionally" supposed to, while an outsider audience member like me gets to see women like herself be offered up for titillation in the same way "conventionally attractive" women are.

It's kind of cool, even if it is just playing into the icky sexualization of everyone, but hey...progress?

In an odd "two steps forward, one step back" kind of situation, the show has somewhat dialed down the outrageously toxic relationships of last year into a more relatively subdued level of toxicity. Gaslighting/cheating is at least kept to a relative low in this season compared to the nightmare that was last year, although this year's ratio depends on how much of that corresponds with sexy Columbian boy Will's obviously flimsy grasp of the intricacies of the English language. He continued to be plagued by the cliquey-ness of the cast until the very end but his genuinely sweet couple with Kyra still did enough to sneak into the final two.

The actual main problem this year was an almost unbearably long love triangle between Cash, Trina, and Cinco that refused to solve itself for nearly a month. Cash and Cinco perennially kept flip-flopping in their feelings for each other, bouncing between failed partnerships despite so obviously being into each other. Trina ended up roped in as Cinco's partner for a while, a constant victim of his own lack of courage to make up his damn mind. Cash, freshly single and in horny jail (aka Casa Amor), coupled up with the handsome and mysterious Charlie.

Now we need to discuss how bizarre Charlie as a cast member. Not only is he the only member who is, looks, and acts like an actual adult, but he also seems to show no adherence to the rules of reality TV: he's very relaxed and unassuming, seems genuinely uninterested in the "game" aspects of the show, and only perks up during rare moments of actual romantic potential. He's a fascinating spanner to throw into the machine of Love Island, and once Cinco was eliminated in the competition, Charlie had to sit there while Cash only continued to openly and aggressively pine for a man who isn't even her current partner. Proving once again to be an anomaly in the cast, he actually decided to do something about this: he unceremoniously dumped fan favorite Cash like a sack of bricks, sending her home while hooking up with the previously mentioned Alana. This smart decision was met derisively by viewers, despite him being the only person there who actually acted like a fucking adult for once. Ironically, this got him and Alana into the finals, where they finished in last place with the same trademark lack of enthusiasm that we've come to expect from him.

I suppose now we need to uncork the problem of the season and by extension the franchise as a whole. You might have read that previous situation and thought, "gee, a fan favorite got tossed aside while a guy that everyone hated ended up making it into the final four? That seems weird."

But by that point it really wasn't at all.

See, the problem with the voting is that you don't usually get to pick who goes; the audience only gets to pick who to prevent getting kicked. At that point, the audience control is out of our hands and now into the contestants', and if there's one thing we all learned in high school it's that cliques are very much a thing. The contestants seemed dead set on booting anybody who was new the second they had the chance, so many potentially exciting people were so quickly thrown out. Instead of the exciting potential we could have seen, we got a love triangle sucking anyone nearby into doom, with everyone else being a relatively stable couple or part of the Jeremy/Korey wishy-washy railway. Casa Amor was an absolute bust, with people making half-assed couplings despite still being in love with somebody else (it speaks a lot to the weakness of the Casa Amor men that Olivia literally preferred to come back single than with any of those planks of wood).

Part of the problem did rely on factors that nobody could control at all though. "Romance novel come to life" Slade seemed like a threat with his rugged handsomeness, twangy accent, and classic southern charm, but had to quickly leave due to ambiguous family troubles. Similarly, the nearly perfect Josh and Shannon, who seemed like an obvious shoo-in winner by virtue of being probably the only actual relationship on the show, had to depart in the middle of the night due to the tragic death of Josh's sister. Aforementioned chaotic pansexual Leslie was unceremoniously removed in the middle of the night once they had realized that her classic vape pen was actually full of weed, an especially tragic circumstance considering she basically had Cinco wrapped around her finger and was about to bring that love triangle crashing down (also tragic because she has gone on record saying that she was fully crushing on Genny while they were both in there, robbing us of any potential of a queer couple).

But part of the pain as always has to do with how the producers control everything no matter what: what we see, what we hear, who gets the villain edit and who gets the hero edit. It's why they seem to play Jeremy as dumb hot surfer bro instead of the actual funny and charming guy he is. It's why Trina was treated as a bitch and Cash as a woeful victim despite the roles more often than not lining up the other way around. And most embarrassingly, it's how the biggest joke couple of the show ended up winning it all.

Now, look at this picture right here: the poses, the awkward hand holding, the very strange smiles between those two. No, this is not a picture of two teenagers going to prom together who just met only five minutes ago and are taking pictures on their parents' front lawn; these two are the winners of season 3, the supposedly "strongest" couple on the show. This is Olivia and Korey.

Korey is a charming boyish sweetheart by way of an absolute fucking dumbass. He's sort of like last year's beloved and wonderfully stupid Carrington: a very sweet and nice teenager who seems to have "13 Going on 30"-ed his way into an adult body. He's childish in a way that's very cute and friendly but also woefully unattractive to anyone who's an adult. Just like Carrington, he notched up a staggering amount of dates with pretty much every single beautiful woman that came into the villa, all seemingly very interested in him. Carrington, for as dumb and childish as he is, could bag anyone because he was outrageously confident too. Korey on the other hand seems incapable of making any decision, following any girl who pays him the time of day like a little puppy, constantly looking up to her with his big puppy dog eyes. It's very telling that for all the dates he had, almost none of them actually went anywhere because it's just not that appealing to anyone. If you're looking to win, he's not someone who can scheme and play the game. If you're looking for love, he's not going to cut it because he can't seem to even understand the concept of romance. If you're looking for a friend, he's probably the best damn one you'll get in that villa -- but as constantly established by everyone, this show isn't called Friend Island.

Olivia is a bit of a thornier subject. She habitually couples up with people that you can kind of tell she's not at all into. She started the first half relatively unassuming and not particularly interested in the men that she was supposedly attracted to. But you could basically see her panties drop when Slade walked in, ready for him to pull her up into the saddle and ride away into the sunset. But his sudden departure only left her more empty, desperately grasping onto whatever random attraction she could. She went off to Casa Amor single and had the gall to come back without coupling up with any of them (although once again, they really dropped the ball with the men compared to the stunning Casa Amor women). And somehow in the midst of all this wishy washy mess, she finally settled on the one single man who she hadn't coupled up with and supposedly suddenly had feelings for: lonely, little Korey.

As a watcher of two seasons of this shit, I've seen a lot of fake relationships, but this one is just ridiculous. The chemistry is really nonexistent; she seems more annoyed or at best partially amused whenever he tries to say anything genuinely sweet to her. She reacts like how you would when a little kid tries to tell you they have a crush on you, an adult: you just kind of go, "aw, cute, thank you!" and walk away chuckling. It's genuinely comedic in how tragic it is, a boy who thinks he's finally found someone when all she's found is a trip to the bank.

And what did the editors do? They tried their very best to sell this as genuine, as actual romance. We know what romance is -- we basically saw it with Shannon and Josh, and to a lesser extent Will and Kyra. And yet they whipped out that expert level edit to say, "wow, look at these two lovebirds, huh?" It's ridiculous, especially since only in the final episode did they suddenly remember that Jeremy and the stunning Bailey (aka the combination of Gal Godot and Ashley Judd circa-2001) were an actual couple and even they looked more real than the winning couple.

Love Island is, if nothing else, a reflection of America.

It's an outdated tradition desperately grasping to what's left of the typical western idea of romance. No matter how many beauty pageant contestants they pick, men like women who aren't size 2s, or with natural hair/skin, or with family-friendly occupations. Women are probably tired of the big muscle bound hunks they usually put on here, the nearly identical men that they seem to cast every single season who have all the looks but zero of the confidence or personality.

It's an example of how our choices are an illusion, how our influence can be easily overwritten by those in charge. Votes that don't matter when they change the rules on the fly, ripping out the actual choice of the people in favor of letting them decide what stays and what goes.

It's a testament that even in the face of a viral pandemic that's quickly turning into part two, as the lives of millions are being further destroyed across the world, there will always be some asshole who has more than you and looks better than you, vacationing on a tropical island stolen from its people, ignorant of everything else that's happening around them.

Love Island hates everyone. It hates it's contestants. It hates the viewers. It hates change. It hates me.

But I do still kind of love it.

[theseventhhex]

Downtown Boys Interview

Downtown Boys

Photo by Farrah Skeiky

Downtown Boys use their ferocious energy and powerhouse live shows to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queer-phobia, capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our minds, eyes and hearts. The Providence, RI band’s third album, ‘Cost of Living’, is at once incendiary, cathartic, and fun, melding the band’s revolutionary ideals with boundless energy. The position of Downtown Boys has been clear since they started storming through basements and DIY spaces with their radically-minded, indefatigable rock music: they are here to topple the white-cis-het hegemony and draft a new history… We talk to Joey L DeFrancesco about recording in anxious times, Solange and men’s room mirrors…

TSH: Talk us through your intentions in wanting to discover a different type of space with the latest album ’Cost of Living’...

Joey: Well, at heart, the album is definitely a rock and punk record. We didn’t want to be too overdramatic musically, but we definitely wanted to expand our palette overall. It gets boring sticking with the same sort of sounds, so artistically we were just looking to add new colours. We just wanted more mid-tempo songs and kind of realised that we didn’t have to play everything at a million miles per-hour.

TSH: This was achieved via using keyboards and guitars to replace the saxophone in carrying the melodies, unlike your previous album...

Joey: Yeah, it was intentional in making it so the melodies in our music could be carried by different instruments like the keyboard and guitar. I think I just wanted the instrumentation to be more accessible for myself too. I kind of got sick of the saxophone carrying each melody, besides applying the keyboard and guitar allows for a different listening experience. I feel using both instruments can help listeners to pay attention for longer too, instead of having a blaring horn so high in the mix like the last record.

TSH: The album was recorded during a very tense time in the US. What was the dynamic like in the studio?

Joey: Well, we wrote the record before Trump was elected. Most of it was written in 2015, but even then there was a lot happening politically. When it came to recording the songs there was certainly a high level of anxiety, because by then Trump had been inaugurated. There were protests happening at airports regarding the Muslim ban and we were locked in the studio. As you can imagine, everything felt anxious because there were quite a few other notable issues coming to the surface from a political standpoint too. The studio dynamic was mostly tense and anxious. It was difficult to focus knowing that so much fear and anxiety was manifesting. Everything felt so debilitating.

TSH: Would you agree that the lyrics are more nuanced alongside a wider spectrum of emotions?

Joey: Yeah, absolutely. I write most of the music and Victoria will do most of the lyrics - but in the end we’ll go back and forth with it all. But yeah, we certainly had more thoughtful and stern lyrical content to consider. I guess being alive right now and dealing with the current global situation there are a lot of nuances to do with survival on a day-to-day basis and trying to keep up. It was inevitable that these factors would make their way into our lyrical content.

TSH: Tell us more about getting ‘A Wall’ to sound just right...

Joey: That song took a while to finish and went through a few versions before we settled on what’s on the record. I initially had the verses and intro to it, but the chorus wasn’t quite there. We kept bringing it to practise for weeks and trying new choruses, until we settled on the simplest one of them all. It was just too overblown at first so we settled on the simple two chords on the chorus, which was most effective.

TSH: Does ‘Violent Complicity’ take you back to specific memories in time?

Joey: Yeah, it’s very much a track that reminds me of a certain time and a bunch of different emotions. I also really like how we can perform that song live in a bunch of different ways and with different structures. It’s actually one of oldest songs on the record and the most worked on. I guess it encompasses feelings and ideas spanning a long time, since it took about a year to put it together.

TSH: When you perform live, you get to release a lot of tension and bond with the audience. Is being onstage your happy place?

Joey: I think performing is definitely our favourite part about being a band. We love playing live and connecting with people. Our first goal as a band was to have 20 minutes of songs so we could play live! Even now, this type of attitude still defines us in many ways. To play live and have fans in various countries appreciate the music is very rewarding for us.

TSH: You had a show recently cancelled in Ireland because of a hurricane...

Joey: Yeah, I totally didn’t expect that. However, we actually did get to explore more than we normally do because of the cancellation. We had a day off and just wandered around which was nice in a sense, but it was unfortunate that we didn’t get to play there.

TSH: With Downtown Boys you get to confront so many realities head on and the overriding assumption is that you can improve your way of life, as well as bring to light issues that need to be tackled...

Joey: Yeah, I think that’s kind of where the band is coming from right now. We’re not just angry and pissed off and believing that change is hard to achieve. We definitely feel we can use our platform to bring light to issues that require attention. We don’t want to fall into nihilism and hopelessness and not even be motivated to make music, even though it gets hard. When we're able to do it, it’s all coming out of a belief that we can have some sort of positive impact, however small it may be. It’s all you can do with whatever job you’re doing - believe that you can somehow make changes for the better - that’s what propels us.

TSH: I understand recently your wallet got stolen, however, on the same day Solange came to one of your shows - so it kind of balanced out for you. Was this a bittersweet day for you?

Joey: Haha! You’re getting deep now! Yeah, I guess it was. I never saw her at the show personally because we were onstage, but everyone at the back was saying that Solange indeed came to our show in New Orleans. It was a pretty surreal day. So my wallet got stolen, which is not a fun thing to happen on tour. I was constantly on the phone to the bank trying to get my debit card mailed to different addresses too. It was just a nightmare to not have an ID on tour, but I made it through in the end.

TSH: Also, it really bothers you that 60% of the time venues with men’s rooms don’t have mirrors in them, this is something you want fixed…

Joey: Ha! Yeah, so I do drag performing as another side project and I always like to get ready and look the part. Very often I end up playing these punk bars and I’m trying to do makeup to present myself in the right way, but the men’s rooms have no space, let alone any mirrors. I end up using my phone or the female restroom to get a mirror. They really should have them available since it’s a pretty easy thing to do. To me, the implication in not having mirrors says it’s not for men to do themselves up, so I hope this changes in the near future.

TSH: What brings about most happiness when you guys are on tour?

Joey: I really feel happy when someone goes out of their way to see us and has some sort of connection with our music - that makes me feel really humbled. Also, it can be stressful to tour so we do stupid stuff and come up with silly games and in-jokes to keep ourselves entertained. Humour always helps.

TSH: As a band, not a single value has been compromised - is this the type of stance that you want to maintain and hold on to?

Joey: I guess so. Also, I think we just want to reach more people, as well as wanting a small compensation for doing this full time. I think artists should be compensated accordingly - it’s only fair. And yes, you’re right; we don’t feel like we need to compromise, since we know what we need to do as workers right now. We’re lucky that we can say what we want to and that we are not commanded to express and present ourselves in certain ways. We’ve remained true to our original vision and we’ve taken every opportunity we’ve had and tried to maximise it in terms of the message that we can put out there.

Downtown Boys - “Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas)”

Cost of Living

[glompcat]

As someone who knows a lot of Russian refugees, people who fled that place (going to both the US and to Israel) because they were Jewish and/or queer and honestly deeply feared for their lives living there.... I am growing increasingly concerned by attitudes by some on the left that we must push back against criticisms of Russia, because for some reason these fears are being painted as by and large baseless and problematic (what??). 

Honestly and truly all I hear from Russian folks I know is an endless amount of pure fear and hate towards the systems there and especially other Russian people, who they always point out have deeply held prejudices against jews and queers.

My grandmother’s family left Russia a long time ago. I am not entirely sure of the story, sometimes my great-grandmother is described as being born on the way to the US, other times she was a girl in Russia, my mom doesn’t seem clear on it herself. But I know why my family had to go, pogroms. Everyone knows there were major mass murders of Jews all over Russia in the 1800s, where towns were burned down and people were beat to death or set aflame. That was why so many Jews immigrated here from there in the mid to late 1800s as well as the 1900s, as this wave of violence carried on for decades on end. My family left then, leaving because staying in Russia literally meant death. 

Even beyond that, I majored in east european history in undergrad, and because my advisor’s speciality was Russia her courses always focused very heavily on the region. I also got a MA in Jewish culture after that. I know the history of what happened to Jews in Russia. 

The centuries of systematic rape, of boys being kidnapped as children and how they were not allowed to return home until they were in their 70s. Literally there was a special draft law saying Jewish men had to serve in a special army unit that they HAD to go to as prepubescent boys and could not return home from until they were old. The hope was that if they took our men away long enough not only would it would be impossible for any new children to be born, but that the boys could have the Jewishness trained out of them. We rallied then. Young women marrying elderly men and having children, old men returning home to study talmud and torah as had been denied to them, parents hiding children under furniture or floors when the military came to town to avoid the draft and ensure we had some youth still with us.

That the cossacks reveled in raping Jewish women, so much so that in Ashkenazi communities it is a very common  “joke” to point at any Jew with super white passing features and say things like “you know what the cossacks did there.” I was hearing and making those comments as early as elementary school, it is still deeply ingrained in us to recognize and remember that the Russians tried to rape the Jewishness out of us.

I know about the gulags, how Jews were targeted for them in ways no other group was, how Soviet Jews lived in constant fear.

One of my closest friends @captain-janegay, tells me all sorts of nightmare horror stories about what it meant for them, growing up as a Jew in Moscow. Of how things changed when their family got to the US, and of the lasting impact and damage Russia’s antisemitism has left on their family. They said btw if anyone wants to hear about what it was like, please feel free to talk to them. To quote them directly “If people want to know what living in Russia is like for Jews, they can ask me. I talk about it all the time partially because people have a hard time believing that this type of shit is still happening. Also I love oversharing.”

I hold all of this and then see.... gentile cis het Russians reacting to people critiquing their politics. I remember in undergrad in a class on modern Russian history my professor making a joke about Putin, this was in the spring of 2008, and a Russian woman in the class standing up and shouting at her at length in Russian before storming out of the room and slamming the door. She was acting as a translator for a Russian student whose English was not actually all that bad, but he could afford to hire a translator to really help him during lectures and class discussions to get the nuances of things so he did. As she stormed off he just started to laugh and spoke to our teacher for a bit in Russian, darkly laughing with her all the while. The teacher having to explain then to the class that the translator seemed to think that critiquing Putin in any way was wrong and she would not be in the room for it. What had happened became the lesson; the actual focus for our first day talking about Putin was what had happened in that exchange and what it meant. I think about that a lot.

I think of the people I have worked directly with, as a social worker, who are right now desperately trying to get the US to approve of them as refugees. Because as gay people from Russia they fear what it would mean to be deported back there.

There are a lot of really legit and real reasons to deeply fear the way Russia is currently shaping the US, and I see people now pushing against that and saying it is wrong to view Russia in this way and...

I know that I am someone who would never be allowed to live their life in Russia. I know this from the bottom of my queer ass Jewish heart. I also know I can not speak as a Russian in any way shape or form as after all, I am of course only a quarter Russian, the rest of my family was from what is now Ukraine or what is now Poland... but still... my fear of Russia isn’t a “problematic” invention of a lack of familiarity or knowledge? It is precisely because of what I have seen. What I have heard from friends who have lived there while being queer or being Jewish or even being both. And from what those folks tell me? Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck is it terrifying.

[boo-ee]

Tumblr rant eventhough nobody cares!

This is pretty much just a rant about communities/people on Tumblr

Don't take it personal, if you disagree I would love to listen to your point of you (but please be polite)

I'm keeping the explainantions short (I don't want to write a while paragraph on each point) but if you want to know more just ask and I could go into detail

⚠️Warning: This are all MY opinions and also mention of rape, mentally illnesses⚠️

And also sorry for any mistakes(grammar/writing) I'm not a native English-speaker

Let's go:

1) All those mini-sexualities-things do more harm than good and should not be encouraged, especially towards teenagers. I understand that people think this might help others to understand and accept themselves quicker, but from what I've seen and experienced it does the complete opposite. They confuse people, scare them even because they feel like they have to put all those labels on themself to "fit in" and hinder many people to find themself, especially teenagers/young adults. Teens barely have any sexual attraction, they are still children ffs!

2) If you're cis and a het but label yourself as asexual, you're not a part of the LGBT community. If you are for exampe trans and literally anything other than hetero and consider yourself asexual, then yes, you are LGBT but not for your asexuality but for your other labels. You can still say you're ace of course but you're just not a Lgbt person since you never will have to go through the discrimination we have to face on a daily.

3) White women destroyed feminism. As a white woman myself, I can say, we fucked up (again). Most of us want equality for all people no matter the race, Sexuality, religion or what not, but there are always those stupid people with their big mouths who ruin it for everyone. How many times do we see white women thinking they're doing something for feminism by doing the most stupid and useless (often even aggressive) things which, in the end hurts people more. Drawing with your period blood does nothing for feminism and just paints us as these crazy bitches who don't know what they're doing

4) White people should stop getting angry for POC. Oh boy how many times have I seen white people getting angry at something/someone because THEY think it will affect/ trigger POC, even if no-one cares. I'm all for supporting and protecting any POC but maybe some of you need to tone it down and actually LISTEN to them about THEIR problems instead of making assumptions.

5) Stop ignoring abuse towards men! I've seen it so many times where men get abused by their partner/a complete stranger and speak up about but in the end get shushed and/or seen as the guilty one/abuser because "Men can't be abused". The numbers of rape jokes towards men in media is SICKENING. Nobody deserves to be abused no matter who they are.

6) Stop. Diagnosing. Yourself. With. Mental. Illnesses. Over the past few years it became a "trend" to be depressed, have anxiety/OCD or any other mental illness and people started to self-diagnose and also worshipping it. Stop. Just stop. Making those llnesses seem cute and quirky is just disgusting. If you want to know if you are mentally ill go to a doctor.

This will be all for now, it's getting late and my braincell can't think of any more things to say