#...and that this is the IDEAL for cishet patriarchal structures...

[uncanny-tranny]

Amatonormativity has destroyed so many people's understanding and acceptance of themselves, and it's heartbreaking.

Yes, it is normal to be in your 20s, 30s, or older and not have lost your virginity, had a first kiss, or a partner. It is normal to say that you aren't ready for those things, too! It is normal if your life doesn't follow the "college graduate -> engagement -> buying a home -> 2.5 kids and a dog" trajectory that so many people have idealized.

So many people associate maturity with losing your virginity, or having a first kiss, or a serious relationship, and I think that's a dangerous association. Maturity isn't gained through those things, and you don't have to have those experiences to be considered "mature" or "grown." It is not a bad thing to go at your pace. Nobody else can live your life but you. If you end up having those experiences, that's great! But it should be done because you want to experience them, not because you feel "broken" and "immature" without them.

[aliusfrater]

i actually value headcanoning cishet sam as existing within queer spaces. like having mostly queer friends at stanford or connecting more intimately with canonically queer characters. just as much as i do actual queer sam hcs because the way i interpret queer allegories in relation to sam is how his masculinity doesn't fit perfectly into the ideal idea of masculinity or the performance of it within both the patriarchy that supernatural is written under and how i interpret a patriarch structure allegory of supernatural (as well as how supernatural very closely relates masculinity to hunting). along with the metaphorical liminality of his character & his monstrosity. like his masculinity and humanity (as well as how he diverges from both) exists but is nuanced enough to push him between roles. and while that itself is pretty queer, i think acknowledging his cisgendered-ness and heterosexuality as existing, but being constantly questioned enough for him to fit better into queer society as a cishet guy is genuinely a really fun concept to me. plus it breaks down existing ideas of cishet-ness

kind of like how i don't really hc dean as anything but bone straight because the performance of masculinity in the way he does it is moreso a cishet issue than a queer one

[killjoypat]

Why do conservatives always feel the need to argue feminist media is crypto-conservative?

Ross Douthat’s conservative reading of Barbie interprets sexual awakening as “reproductive destiny”. In "Why Barbie and Ken Need Each Other" (a wily choice of words that alludes to coalition building when actually perpetuating misogynistic ideals), Douthat concludes his article with, “In the movie they made, ‘Barbie and Ken’ is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that ‘and’ into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.” 

This idea that any interest a woman has with her gynecology and sexuality must revolve around a desire for reproduction is age-old patriarchal propaganda that subjugates women to the reproductive economy and denies them sexual liberation. Considering Douthat’s anti-abortion history, this reading becomes particularly dark. This reading of Barbie is also incredibly heteronormative and subscribes to the confines of gender binary. Ascribing happiness to reproduction and heteronormative marriage weaponizes joy. Douthat’s argument is irredeemably rooted in the idea that women would and should be happy providing uncompensated reproductive labor in a gender dynamic and societal structure that neither appreciates nor releases her from this work. 

Of course, there are complexities and nuances to motherhood, especially the relationship between mother and daughter, which Barbie as a film explores (though I'd argue should be a larger focus of the movie). But the idea that as women become mothers they are expected to leave behind their childhood and imagination is a large critique the film makes, which Douthat ignores. Barbie isn't driving women towards motherhood, it's recognizing and celebrating a specific relationship between women (that of mother and daughter) and within the feminine experience.

The female experience is riddled with demands of what to do with your body, from being slut-shamed to being told you have “only this many good years left” to "achieve" marriage and motherhood, that the female body has failed if it has not satisfied a man and provided a child. It is so disappointing to see that a feminist narrative precisely denying the need for women to exist relative to men ends up being co-opted by a pro-lifer insisting the film is crypto-conservative. 

I am so tired of patriarchy trying to frame what is more often than not an exploitative system designed against women as the key to our happiness. 

I am so tired of cishet white men at the height of privilege trying to sell us marriage and motherhood.

For more resources on weaponized happiness and the logical flaws of framing anti-abortion as a morality argument, I recommend reading Sara Ahmed and Judith Jarvis Thompson's works!

Ahmed's Promise of Happiness I recommend starting w chapter 2 if you don't have time to read the whole book

TW: mention of rape (pg 80, ch. 2)

Thompson's A Defense of Abortion

You might also be interested in where do WOC stand w Barbie's white feminism?

[genderkoolaid]

#💯#but also as a queer i find the equating of male gaze [negative] to mean anything straight men find sexy is extremely uncomfortable#straight men's sexual attraction is not inherently predatory#yes i understand that this post is about policing how women present and i dont want to derail that which is why this is in the tags#but i think its also important to mention that theres nothing inherently wrong with being attractive to straight men#so much discourse around this treats straight male attraction as a nuisance at best or outright predatory#and as someone whose sexuality is also often tarred as inherently predatory id like to say fuck that noise#being attractive to straight men isnt wrong and feeling attraction as a straight man isnt wrong either#the male gaze is a concept referring to an artistic framing based on cultural norms#it has nothing to do with individual presentation or attraction

no lets talk about this

if "male gaze" was to be applied to real people's perspectives, it would be more correct to say male gazes. the reason we say the male gaze, singular, is because media constructs a hypothetical heterosexual cis man for us to identify with. its saying "THIS is our audience and THIS is what that audience should like," & it has a reciprocal relationship with the audience where it reinforces oppressive ways of thinking & understanding the world, while those ways of thinking also make it successful. the male in the male gaze is a caricature of whatever the ideal patriarchal male is, whatever will benefit the patriarchy the most.

saying real life women can "appeal" or "reject" the male gaze turns them into a character, it brings that specter of the Hypothetical CisHet (White) Man that media constructs into our everyday lives and asks us how we are relating to this nonexistent narrator. instead of focusing on patriarchal beauty standards & how they objectify people (in this case women), we individualize the issue to The Male, who then becomes every man.

which is how this gets dehumanizing for men, too. because it turns every man into The Male Who Is Gazing, and assumes that the problem is located within the desire of men itself, instead of being part of a larger structure which merely uses trends in attractiveness to support its control. it gives undue power to the minds of individual men, and places far too much emphasis on "good" vs "bad sexuality," on the part of men and women alike.

the male gaze would still be harmful even if a piece of media showed a fat woman, a dark-skinned woman, a woman with body hair, a butch woman, a woman with no makeup, a woman with stretch marks, etc. if the woman is being treated like an object. patriarchal beauty standards inform what the male gaze tells cishet men they should want & how women should look and behave, but the fundamental role is saying that the appropriate way for us- all of us- to look at women is as objects. while the male gaze is generally sexually-based, a woman can be treated entirely unsexually and still be objectified. like, a maternal character who exists entirely to serve a dominant cishet son main character- we are told to view her as an object of comfort, but still an object. (and thats not even getting into how queerness & transness are looked at, or how "unattractive" women are treated by media)

who does it benefit to not only say the male gaze is inherently sexual, but also apply this to real-world dynamics and individualize it? making it so every woman is "on screen," and her actions dictate whether the "film" of her life is appealing to the male gaze- which is embodied by every man around her, and whether or not they are aroused or repulsed by her? and to, then, either say that whatever a man finds attractive in a woman is bad, or that men having the "wrong" attraction makes the "film" of the woman's- or the man's- life problematic.

there is such a thing as women being pressured to dress how a male partner wants them to dress, and there is such a thing as women being pressured to fulfill patriarchal beauty standards which tell them "guys find [x] attractive and you should do this for them," and that is pushed through media! but thats not The Male Gaze and also, trying to adapt the male gaze to real life is just a tool for sex-negative radfeminism to once again push the idea of "feminist action = obsessing over whether or not you are appealing to individual male opinions" rather than focusing on what is best for you above all else, because you are an active subject and not an object representing Feminism (which. yes radfems say they want women to have autonomy and be subjects... but only if they are Doing Feminism Right, otherwise theyre brainwashed and Wrong and need to be told what to do For Their Own Good...)

do we need to put "the male gaze" up on a shelf until tiktokkers learn what the fuck that actually means

[alongcamepolyblog]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Pride, love.