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Exploring the Attraction to Submissive Partners in Masculine Men Across Sexual Orientations

Introduction

Understanding why masculine-identifying men are attracted to submissive partners across various sexual orientations involves dissecting complex psychological, social, and evolutionary aspects. This exploration seeks to unpack the myriad factors that contribute to this attraction, which can manifest in positive, neutral, and negative reasons. By scrutinizing the evidence from peer-reviewed research, I aim to shed light on the patterns and intricacies inherent in these relationships. This analysis is not meant to stereotype or generalize but rather to provide insight into the individual and societal forces at play. Considering straight, bisexual, pansexual, and gay masculinities, I delve into the multifaceted nature of attraction, examining how it aligns with broader themes of power dynamics, cultural influences, and personal preferences. This investigation is crucial in fostering a more nuanced understanding of masculine desires and the spectrum of submissive partner preferences.

Heterosexual male selection towards submissive

Research indicates that heterosexual men may seek out partners who are perceived as submissive for various reasons ranging from positive to neutral, and potentially negative.

Positive Reasons

Complementarity

Evidence suggests that heterosexual men often look for partners who complement their traits. This desire for balance in a relationship is supported by the findings of Buss and Shackelford (2008), who argue that individuals are generally drawn to partners who can provide a complementary dynamic, with some men showing a preference for submissive partners who align with their own assertive qualities.

Protector Role

The concept of the protector role is deeply embedded in evolutionary psychology. Snyder, Kirkpatrick, and Barrett (2008) highlight that this role may drive men's preferences for submissive partners, as it can activate their instinct to protect and provide, fulfilling an evolutionary predisposition.

Confidence in Leadership

Durkee and Goetz (2014) have explored how confidence in decision-making and leadership correlates with a preference for submissive partners. This dynamic can be seen as a positive expression of masculinity, especially when it is based on mutual consent and respect.

Neutral Reasons

Social Norms

Historically, social norms have placed men in dominant roles, which Eagly and Wood (1999) suggest could impact their preferences subconsciously. These societal expectations might shape personal preferences even if individuals do not actively endorse them.

Personal Preference

Attraction can be influenced by individual tastes, as Kenrick, Sadalla, Groth, and Trost (1990) observed. Some men might naturally gravitate towards submissive partners, independent of societal or psychological influences.

Mutual Satisfaction

The concept of mutual satisfaction in consensual power dynamics is supported by Baumeister and Vohs (2004), who argue that such dynamics can fulfill personal desires and contribute to a satisfying relationship for all parties involved.

Negative Reasons

Control Issues

Wetterneck et al. (2012) present the idea that a preference for submissive partners might be linked to control issues, where the underlying motivation is a desire for dominance and power, rather than mutual respect and partnership.

Insecurity

Insecurities may lead some men to prefer submissive partners as a way to assert dominance and assuage feelings of inadequacy. This is supported by the findings of Twenge and Campbell (2003), who discuss how insecurity can influence relationship dynamics.

Misogyny or Homophobia

Negative attitudes toward women or feminine individuals, such as misogyny and homophobia, can also play a role in partner preference. Pratto, Stallworth, and Sidanius (1997) showed that such attitudes might lead to preferences that are based on power and control rather than equality and mutual respect.

Bisexual and Pansexual Men selection towards submissive

Bisexual and pansexual have unique reasons to select towards submissiveness or desire it and according to research it’s about diverse expression, empowerment, compatibility, exploration cultural influences, power imbalance, stereotyping and validating

Positive Reasons

Diverse Expression

Bisexual and pansexual men may find fulfillment in the ability to express a spectrum of dynamics with partners of different genders, embracing the multiplicity of roles. Diamond's (2008) work illuminates this fluidity and diversity in sexual orientation, recognizing the inclusion of varying power dynamics as part of sexual preference.

Empowerment

The empowerment that comes from being able to gratify and guide submissive partners can be affirming for many masculine bisexual and pansexual men. Klesse (2006) explores this sense of empowerment within the context of diverse sexual identities and practices.

Compatibility

The draw to submissive partners among bisexual and pansexual men might also stem from a quest for compatibility, aligning with Peplau and Fingerhut's (2007) findings that individuals tend to seek partners whose power dynamic preferences complement their own.

Neutral Reasons

Exploration

For bisexual and pansexual men, the allure of submissive partners can involve exploration of different power dynamics and roles, a concept investigated by van Anders (2015) in her research on the breadth of sexual identities and expressions.

Cultural Influence

The impact of cultural narratives on romantic and sexual dynamics, particularly the glorification of dominant-submissive relationships, shapes the inclinations of bisexual and pansexual men. This is underscored by the media's role in molding and perpetuating relationship archetypes, as discussed by Ward (2003) in her critique of media portrayals of sexuality.

Personal Fulfillment

Engaging with submissive partners may also cater to personal longings or fantasies, which are independent of societal expectations or psychological frameworks. Weinberg, Williams, and Pryor (1994) delve into the complexities of personal fulfillment in sexual relationships.

Negative Reasons

Power Imbalance

A predilection for submissive partners can be rooted in a troubling desire for dominance, potentially leading to detrimental power imbalances. Barker (2013) cautions against power dynamics that eschew consent and mutual respect.

Stereotyping

Stereotypes about gender roles can inadvertently shape the preferences of bisexual and pansexual men, compelling them toward submissive partners based on these flawed archetypes. Herek's (2002) research delves into how stereotypes affect perceptions and expectations of sexual orientation.

Validation

The quest for validation of masculinity or sexual identity can drive some to seek out submissive partners. Anderson (2009) examines this dynamic, noting the potential harm when relationships are used as a platform for confirming personal identity through control.

Gay Men

For gay men in research it’s more about the fulfilling meaning of role compatibility, personal dynamics, trust and care, freedom from traditional gender roles, variance in preference, individual compatibility, validation of dominance, misogyny transference and internalized homophobia.

Positive Reasons

Personal Dynamics

Many gay men find a natural alignment with submissive partners that complements their own dynamic preferences. Research by Peplau, Spalding, Conley, and Veniegas (1999) illustrates the variety of relationship dynamics within the gay community. In their study on relationship dynamics within the gay community, Peplau, Spalding, Conley, and Veniegas (1999) shed light on the intricate patterns that characterize intimate partnerships, including the roles of dominance and submission. Their research highlights that many gay men have a tendency to pair up with partners whose submissive or dominant roles complement their own preferences, thereby creating a dynamic that suits both individuals' personalities and desires. Such arrangements are not unique to gay couples but are seen across various forms of relationships, suggesting that people naturally gravitate toward partners who balance their own traits and behaviors. This natural alignment may be influenced by a variety of factors, including personal satisfaction derived from fulfilling a particular role, social and cultural influences that shape one's understanding of and preference for certain relationship dynamics, and the psychological needs that such roles fulfill. Furthermore, the success of these relationships often hinges on effective communication and the ability to negotiate roles that align with each partner's expectations and comfort levels. The work of Peplau et al. (1999) importantly illustrates that the gay community is not monolithic in its approach to relationships and that there is a rich diversity of dynamics at play.

Role Compatibility

The compatibility of roles in relationships can be a driving force for attraction to submissive partners. This is discussed in the work of Harry and DeVall (1978), who explore the negotiations of roles in gay relationships. Roles are not about efficiency in use, but in purpose and sense of love and belonging. Seeing yourself fit, work well, have a part or even, predeterminely defined by culture.

It’s securing. When discussing the selection of a submissive partner in male relationships, especially in the context of the work by Harry and DeVall from 1978, it's important to consider the dynamics of role compatibility and the negotiation of these roles. A dominant male may be attracted to a submissive partner for several reasons.

Individuals often look for partners who complement their own characteristics. A dominant male might feel more comfortable and efficient in a relationship dynamic where his partner is submissive. This can lead to a sense of harmony in the relationship, where each person's role supports the other.

Cultural norms and societal expectations can shape preferences for relationship roles. These cultural scripts may predispose individuals to seek out partners who fit certain roles, such as submissive or dominant, that align with their own identity or societal norms.

As suggested by Harry and DeVall, a more cooperative or submissive partner may take on a larger share of the relational work, which includes efforts to maintain and nurture the relationship. A dominant partner might find this distribution of labor attractive because it allows them to feel cared for and supported.Selecting a submissive partner can also be related to the dominant individual's sense of belonging and identity within a relationship. A submissive partner may validate the dominant partner's identity and provide a relational environment in which they feel most authentic and comfortable. Relationships are a balance of power and control. A dominant male might prefer a submissive partner to streamline this balance, as predefined roles can clarify expectations and reduce potential conflicts over decision-making.

Trust and Care

For some gay men, engaging in a relationship with a submissive partner can be an expression of trust and care, fostering a protective and nurturing environment. This aspect is touched upon in the studies by Kurdek (2005), focusing on the dynamics of care and support in gay relationships. In the field of relationship dynamics, particularly among gay men, the work by Kurdek in 2005 provides an insightful analysis into the roles of care and support. When a gay man chooses a submissive partner, it can be seen as a gesture of trust and a commitment to creating a nurturing environment.

Provides me. With concrete contextual evidence of someone to trust and vulnerability. Selecting a submissive partner often hinges on the foundations of trust and the willingness to be vulnerable. They are presenting are visibly vulnerable and trust worthy. Such relationships are built on the understanding that each person will respect and care for the other, fostering a secure and supportive atmosphere.

Dominance in this context does not necessarily equate to control, but rather a responsibility towards the submissive partner's welfare. This protective instinct can be central to the development of a deep and enduring bond between the partners. Psychological ownership is seeing yourself in the person,controlling the persons, continuing in and or with that person. The stewardship to the union is first seeing how easily one looks to rape and dominant. The more cooperative one is also, the easier to control and smaller frames, and more cooperative behavior is “allowing”, and affirming to “direction or aim”, his aim. The terms dominant and submissive don't preclude the pursuit of equality within the relationship. Kurdek's findings suggest that a balanced exchange of emotional support and shared decision-making is common among gay couples, ensuring that both partners feel valued. The dynamics within a relationship, including those of dominance and submissiveness, can contribute significantly to the levels of emotional support the partners provide to one another and to their overall satisfaction with the relationship. When roles are accepted and appreciated, it leads to a more fulfilling partnership.

Kurdek's research indicates that gay relationships are just as nuanced as any other, with successful partnerships characterized by mutual respect, care, and support, regardless of the dominance and submissiveness that might be present.

Neutral Reasons

Freedom from Traditional Roles

In male same-sex relationships, the concept of "submissiveness" can be complex, as it is not dictated by traditional gender roles. Submissiveness may manifest in terms of sexual role preferences, where one partner may prefer a more receptive role, commonly referred to as "bottom" (Moskowitz & Hart, 2011). However, it is important to note that these roles can be dynamic and not indicative of overall relationship dynamics.

In the broader context of the relationship, submissiveness may also relate to personality traits or behaviors where one partner may be more accommodating or prefer that the other partner take the lead in decision-making (Peplau & Spalding, 2000). This dynamic is often negotiated and agreed upon by both partners and does not necessarily reflect the broader societal expectations of gendered submissiveness.

Moreover, the selection towards submissiveness in some male same-sex relationships could be due to a variety of factors, including individual preferences, compatibility, and the balance of power and affection within the relationship. It is essential to consider that these dynamics are as diverse as the individuals involved and are not representative of all male same-sex relationships (Peplau & Fingerhut, 2007).

Variety of Preferences

The gay community encompasses a wide range of preferences and attractions, including those to submissive partners, as highlighted by the research. Sexual and emotional variance within human populations, including preferences for certain personality traits such as submissiveness, can be understood as contributing to emotional and social diversity. When males select partners based on these traits, they might be fostering relationships that enhance their emotional well-being and social connectivity.

Firstly, the concept of conflict navigation implies that individuals who possess or prefer traits like submissiveness may avoid confrontations that could be detrimental to their social standing and physical well-being. By fostering relationships with submissive partners, individuals might reduce intra-group tension and violence, which in turn could lead to a more stable living environment. This stability is crucial for the survival and emotional health of the individuals within the group (Buss, 2016).

Secondly, the nurturing aspect suggests that individuals who exhibit traits associated with submissiveness often excel in caregiving roles. Caregiving is an important social role that contributes to the well-being of group members, particularly the young, elderly, or infirm. This nurturing behavior enhances social bonds and can create a supportive network that benefits all members of the community, thus promoting group continuity (De Waal, 2008).

Thirdly, behavioral diversity refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by individuals within a population. A diverse set of behaviors, including varying sexual and emotional preferences, contributes to a flexible and adaptable social structure. Behavioral diversity allows populations to respond to environmental challenges and social changes effectively, thereby supporting the community's resilience and long-term survival (Sapolsky, 2017).

In summary, the selection for variance in partner preferences, including traits like submissiveness, is a strategy that can enhance the survival and continuity of individuals and their communities. It does so by promoting conflict navigation, nurturing relationships, and behavioral diversity, each contributing to a more emotionally and socially integrated population.

Individual Compatibility

As with any relationship, individual compatibility is key, and for some gay men, this means being with a submissive partner. The studies by Gottman et al. (1998) emphasize the importance of compatibility in relationship satisfaction. Male same-sex relationships are characterized by unique dynamics that distinguish them from heterosexual relationships. One of the key features of these relationships is a tendency towards egalitarianism; one way is through “submissive” traits, even without predefined gender roles, partners often share responsibilities and decision-making more “fair” (Kurdek, 2005). Empathetic listening skills and mindfulness of communication style and patterns, is thinking of someone before making decision. That partner suspends their ego first. Sense of “fair” within male same-sex relationships may also differ, leading to complimentary and symmetrical styles of relationships, research suggesting that gay couples tend to utilize more effective conflict resolution strategies, they are are also both likely to be higher in “agrebleness”, a lot of where those submissive traits and characteristics are observes. Traits and characteristics like being by less belligerence and more expressions and receptive to and reciprocal of positive emotions compared to their heterosexual counterparts (Gottman et al., 2003). Additionally, due to historical marginalization, male same-sex couples often rely on extensive support networks that include chosen family and friends, which can be critical sources of emotional and social support (Weston, 1991).

Despite growing social acceptance, male same-sex couples continue to face external challenges such as discrimination and legal hurdles, which can exert stress on relationships. Nonetheless, these couples often exhibit resilience, like a couples they developing unique but strong coping mechanisms to navigate societal challenges, together (Meyer, 2003). Furthermore, discussions and practices surrounding non-monogamy tend to be more prevalent in male same-sex relationships, presenting a contrast to normative expectations of monogamy in heterosexual relationships (Hoff & Beougher, 2010).

Negative Reasons

Internalized Homophobia

Internalized homophobia can play a role in the preference for submissive partners, potentially reflecting unresolved issues with one's own sexuality or gender expression. Herek, Gillis, and Cogan (2009) discuss the impact of internalized homophobia on relationship choices.

Dominance as Validation

For some, a preference for submissive partners might be a way to validate their own sense of masculinity within a gay context, as discussed in the work of Taywaditep (2001). This can be harmful if it stems from societal pressures rather than genuine personal preference. In exploring the dynamics of dominance and validation within the gay community, we can consider the work of Taywaditep (2001), which delves into the complexities of sexual roles and personality traits such as agreeableness. The agreeableness domain, which encompasses traits like cooperativeness, empathy, and a tendency to avoid conflict, is often socially and sexually selected for, as it can promote harmonious social interactions.

The preference for submissive partners in some individuals might serve as a mechanism to reinforce their own dominant roles and thereby validate their sense of masculinity within a gay context. This form of validation can be seen as an adaptive social strategy that aligns with traditional gender norms and power hierarchies, even within non-heteronormative relationships. By selecting partners who exhibit submissive traits, individuals may affirm their own dominance, which can be gratifying and serve to elevate their social status within certain contexts.

However, this preference can become problematic if it is not a genuine personal desire but rather a response to external societal pressures that dictate certain expressions of masculinity and femininity. When individuals feel compelled to conform to these expectations, it can lead to psychological distress and strained relationships. The validation of one's masculinity through the dominance of another may perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to a cycle of social enforcement that devalues the natural diversity of personality and sexual expression.

Taywaditep's work highlights the importance of understanding sexual preferences and roles not only through the lens of individual desire but also in the context of larger societal influences. It is essential to consider the emotional well-being of all individuals in sexual and romantic dynamics and to promote a culture that respects and celebrates the full spectrum of masculine and feminine expressions.

Misogyny Transference

Misogyny can manifest in gay relationships when one partner prefers submissive partners as a reflection of societal misogyny, despite the absence of women in the relationship. This is explored in studies by Kimmel (1996), who analyzes the transference of societal attitudes into personal relationships. Kittiwut Jod Taywaditep's work that is commonly cited in discussions around submissiveness and internalized homophobia among gay men is his study titled "Marginalization Among the Marginalized." In this study, he explores the concept of "de-gaying" and internalized homophobia, where some gay men may distance themselves from stereotypically gay behaviors and appearances in an attempt to fit into mainstream heterosexual norms.

In his article, “Marginalization among the marginalized: Gay men's anti-effeminacy attitudes “ Taywaditep examines the phenomena of anti-effeminacy among gay men, discussing how societal expectations and internalized stigma can lead to the endorsement of traditionally masculine traits and the rejection of femininity. This can result in some gay men exhibiting submissiveness and other behaviors that conform to societal expectations, often at the expense of their own identity and self-esteem.

Taywaditep's work is significant in understanding the complexities of internalized homophobia and the ways in which societal attitudes concerning gender and sexuality can influence the behaviors and self-perceptions of individuals within the LGBTQ+ community. It sheds light on the pressures to conform to certain norms and the psychological impact of such pressures.

Conclusion

The attraction to submissive partners among masculine men across sexual orientations is influenced by a multitude of factors. Positive reasons can include complementarity, a desire for a protector role, confidence in leadership, diverse expression, empowerment, and role compatibility. Neutral reasons might involve social norms, cultural influence, exploration, personal fulfillment, and individual compatibility. However, negative reasons such as control issues, insecurity, misogyny, homophobia, power imbalance, stereotyping, internalized homophobia, and dominance as validation can also come into play.

Sexual compatibility is a crucial aspect of relationship satisfaction, as it encompasses the alignment of sexual desires, preferences, and the willingness of partners to engage with each other's needs. Pepper Schwartz, a prominent sociologist, has emphasized the importance of this compatibility in her research. She argues that a mismatch in sexual desires can lead to frustration and decreased relationship satisfaction. In her work, Schwartz has also highlighted the role of communication in navigating and enhancing sexual compatibility between partners. Her research provides a framework for understanding how sexual interests must be negotiated and met within relationships to ensure mutual fulfillment.

The psychological appeal of power dynamics, such as submission, in sexual attraction can be traced through various theories. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss has explored how evolutionary factors might influence sexual preferences, suggesting that certain traits, including submissiveness, could signal reproductive fitness or compatibility. Moreover, power dynamics in sexual relationships may be influenced by cultural and social norms, as discussed by social psychologists. Roy Baumeister's work on masochism, for instance, proposes that the desire for submission can be seen as an escape from self, providing a form of psychological relief from the pressures of identity and self-awareness. This body of research collectively sheds light on why submission might be a component of sexual desire for some men, highlighting the complex interplay between biology, psychology, and social influences.

Interpersonal Exchange Theories, such as Social Exchange Theory, can be used to explain relationship dynamics and the concept of individual compatibility. These theories posit that relationships are maintained through a cost-benefit analysis where each partner assesses the rewards and costs of being in the relationship. Compatibility, in this context, is seen as the degree to which partners can meet each other's needs and expectations while minimizing costs or conflicts. The theory suggests that individuals seek relationships that provide the greatest rewards with the least costs, which can include emotional, social, and sexual aspects of the relationship. Hence, compatibility becomes a balance of mutual satisfaction where the perceived benefits of the relationship outweigh any drawbacks.

References:

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#unpacking Submission to men #submisive and breedable #submisive sissy #subbmisive

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odinsblog · 3 years ago

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Hi, I've only started truly following American politics in the last 5 or 6 years, thanks to the orange turd, and I keep wondering: was the Republican Party always *like that*? This unreasonable and just outright brazen in their contempt for the common people? Was there a time when it was just right-leaning instead of lunatic? I'm European, so I can't really relate either way, but it boggles me how a party this insane could gather so many followers.

A couple of things here that you need to understand in order to understand today’s Republican Party. First and foremost, they have always been the party of white supremacy. At first, it was a more casual, covert, plausibly deniable kind of racism. But ever gradually, over time it has become a party of outright, “masks off,” in-your-face, racists. Which brings me to my second point: at every step in the devolution of the Republican Party, the next step has always been foreseeable. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, and from Newt Gingrich to Mitch McConnell, Republicans have gotten incrementally and progressively worse, and much more overtly racist. Which is why I always call bullshit! whenever someone says, “The GOP they knew was never like this before.” Republicans have always been that bad, and the current racist Republican de jour couldn’t have existed without the previous racist Republican de jour who paved the way for them. It’s a completely predictable devolution.

The GOP is a party of white supremacy, misogyny, Islamophobia, ableism, antisemitism, homophobia, and more. It’s like a one-stop-shopping mart for everything wrong in America.

And it’s almost a certainty that whoever comes after McConnell and Trump will be even worse.

Ofc, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the re-alignment of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (please see this link).

I suppose you could argue that when Black people made a mass exodus from the GOP back in the 1960s (because of Civil Rights), that that was probably when conservatives truly began their slide into the abject racism and lunacy we so clearly see today. And sure, if your only comparison is the GOP, then the Democrats might appear to be better, but they are not without their share of very significant problems either (for example). When we force the choice to be “better than Trump” or “better than Republicans,” we are setting ourselves up for failure. Anybody is better than Trump or Republicans, that sole, low bar qualifier does not mean that they are worthy or up to the job of governance.

Anyway, after all of that, Idk if I’m the very best person to ask here on tumblrdotcom. Sometimes my political hot takes are either too wide, but not deep enough, or too deep, but not broad enough. I encourage you to research this more if you want a more technical answer, perhaps from someone who studies politics far more than I do. As a Black man living in Amerikkka, I admit that sometimes (most of the time, actually ) it’s not all just academic to me. It’s deeply personal because the impacts on my life are very real.

The older I get, the more I feel like the craziness here is not only worldwide, but also (loosely?) coordinated. So finally, anon, I don’t want you to think that Europe is in any way exempt from the racism and lunacy that you’re observing here. It isn’t. If you don’t see it where you live, look more closely. I assure you, it’s there too.

#anon #ask #answered #politics #republicans

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fandomshatelgbtqpeople · 3 years ago

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One of the links you post, one of the mods, to a blogger about homophobia in say the Encanto fandoms I think said in one of their tags, that sometimes being against all forms of shipping in like a nerd bro sort of way can be queerphobic and misogynistic. I hadn’t thought of that

Yeah, we can talk about that some!

There was a post that circulated on tumblr years ago about how in general, women in fandom tend to engage in transformative ways whereas men in fandom tend to engage in knowledge collecting. So a male Star Wars fan might engage by memorizing all the different kinds of (star)ships and a female Star Wars fan would be more likely to get into shipping and write fanfiction. Now of course there are men who read and write fanfic and women who know everything there is to know about A-wings, but it holds true that when someone thinks of a shipper or a writer or a fan arts, they're picturing a woman. Data taken from AO3 readers bears that out.

Now, the main criticism I've seen about shipping is that it ignore critical analysis of the media. There's a lot of reasons that argument doesn't make sense. (People not engaging in critical analysis on tumblr doesn't mean they're not doing it at all, and many people come to tumblr specifically when they want to talk ships; Shipping as we know it today has been around for about 70 years; etc.) The main reason is that shippers often do engage with themes and character arcs, especially when they're also reading or writing fanfiction. A lot of critical analysis goes into writing metas and fanfic, even when they're about a ship. Certainly more than someone memorizing facts about a battle cruiser is. And yet it's shipping that gets criticized as being inherently frivolous. Because shipping is a "women's hobby" and shipping is about romance with is, as we all know (sarcasm), a frivolous, brain-rotting genre.

And then you bring queer fans into it. I can't say with authority that a larger proportion of queer fans are shippers than straight cis women, though data from AO3 suggests this is true of AO3 specifically. However, shipping has historically been a vital method of queer self-expression in fandoms. From my experience, most queer fandom communities revolve around ships, most queer fans gravitate towards media with ships they find compelling, and most homophobia directed towards queer fan communities have been over ships. Shipping is deeply important to queer fans and inextricable from queer fandom.

So yeah, I think all the hand-ringing about how shipping is destroying people's ability to engage in critical analysis, aside from not making sense, is tied up misogyny and queerphobia.

#mod k

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mithliya · 4 years ago

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Okay sorrh this is long I got a couple of receipts from sapphicdesi and don’t wanna send screenshots since I have social anxiety but the post genderistseku used was a bad one to call out sapphicdesi, but it doesn’t discredit all the hostile things she’s said about bisexual women

it’s nothing new, they all deeply hate lesbians. they refuse to admit they are homophobic oppressors and how homophobia and problemtic the bi community is. she has me blocked and so do many other of her deranged friends who have some osa victim complex / oppression fetish. they really act and speak like no other women experience misogyny.

(Bi women really aren’t it from an anon) they really aren’t. they’re the worst. rabid homophobic misogynistic narcs. who apparently spew the most racism here too. i’m gonna post all the asks / discussions i never did, they can keep harassing me. a bi tra or bi woman from radblr sent me such a racist yesterday i’m a post it when i wake up

(In response to an anon) but isn’t funny i’m called crazy and hateful for saying they aren’t oppressed nor victims for being into dick and men? im insane and evil for saying heterophobia isn’t real? and for being upset at how lesphobic and abusive they are? most bi women think lesbians need to be converted and raped by males. they are so deeply deeply narcissistic and fake feminists.

(In response to an anon talking about how they prefer straight normal friends above gender “queer” people) it’s also so fucked up because a lot of the gendies are actually heteros/bis. but you know bisexuals have always been homophobic and annoying. Even having no males and dick or threesomes w ur ugly bf in my bio im a lesbian, rejecting tras/tw got me banned on tinder bc of bis/trans/gendies. Always triggered white people.

(In response to an anon talking about a post where bi women claimed to like penis over vagina) oh my god ew no I never saw that can you link me? but that doesn’t surprise me at all, bi women don’t love women or respect women at all, only dick and treat lesbians like walking sex toys. they want us to be raped and used by dick so bad and then for themselves. straight women are more tolerable at this point, at least they aren’t pretending to like women. and it’s funny bi radfems think they’re any better or less homophobic. I’m so fucking sick of the homophobia everywhere, bisexual women hate lesbians/women so so fucking deeply I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with them, they’re fucking homophobic dick obsessed demons. of course lesbians to them are just their to lick their pussy and cuddle them, just for their boredom but real relationships and real sex? gotta be men and dick! and then they spew vile shit about lesbians all day long and how they love women more than us and are so gay. I hate them the same as trans males at this point. misogynistic homophobic demons who talk about dick like it’s water they’d die without. also if you’re an offended bi who’s gonna send me hate asks after this don’t bother just unfollow me and blog about how much you hate lesbians and how we oppress you for your love of men and dick.

bi women are fucking demons who don’t love women and hate women. especially lesbians who actually love women and only women. lmao apparently we’re not really lesbians if we don’t like straight men in dresses who fetishize us but they are lmao, like look at how they start listing their bs gender labels to showcase how they’re better for wanting to fuck everyone aka men w stupid labels. “all women” lmao het men in dresses ain’t women, trans “women” are evil lesbian fetishists and neither of you love women you’re homophobic creeps.

I just looked up bi on her account, there’s a lot lot more but I just used these since I don’t want this to be super long.

She doesn’t site things for most of(couldn’t find sources on her blog for any of these claims) this stuff and mainly uses her own experiences and others around her. I don’t doubt her experiences or her life exposure to hateful bisexuals but imo it doesn’t justify how hostile and hateful she’s being in return to bisexual. Im gonna cut it here since this s already long and I really already feel anxious about this

Sorry again for this

i agree genderistdeku should’ve used a different post if she wanted to illustrate a point and that her post choice was a bad one. to me it just came across as almost laughing at a lesbian for being abused by a bi woman. i understand that someone facing abuse at the hands of any type of minority doesn’t justify hating said minority, and i wholeheartedly agree there, but it just came across as malicious and like she’s laughing at sapphicdesi for what she experienced. i assume that wasn’t her goal or her intention, but that’s how it came across. based on the quotes you provided (i did not check to see their accuracy), there were clearly far better posts to choose from if her argument was that sapphicdesi is prejudiced against bi ppl.

for the first post you quoted, i agree the bi community is unfortunately deeply homophobic today. but i disagree bi ppl necessarily have an oppression fetish, many definitely are quite privileged and sheltered but many do in fact face a lot of shit for being bi. 2nd post, i think she has every right to criticise racism & homophobia, at the same time i think especially as woc & lesbians, we have to be very mindful about what we say and how we say it. i don’t think she genuinely hates bi women and i think she is simply hurt & traumatised, and to me it comes off like she’s very frustrated with the homophobia & other prejudices she sees spewed by many bi people. + im sure she’s very wary bc of what she experienced, and i can somewhat understand as i also faced abused at the hands of my ex who happens to be bi. but people don’t always know ur intentions from what u write on here and ppl often divorce your words from the context you wrote them in as well. for this reason i think we should be careful, and esp as woc we don’t get cut the same slack that others are.

for the rest, i get the vibe that she’s very frustrated by the homophobia she’s seen expressed on here and seemingly feels very betrayed by bi women. i don’t blame her bc i know many lesbians feel this way, and sometimes i feel frustrated and exhausted from the stuff i see on here too. or the homophobia i see irl. when it’s stuff online, sometimes i just log off and talk to someone who i can trust and know can understand me & where im coming from. i havent really properly talked about this before, but my previous relationship was with a bi woman (so was my relationship before that but that’s another story). and the entire time in our relationship, she’d tell me that one day she’ll leave me for a man. like she just… would straight up tell me that unprompted. she’d often ask me how id feel if she suddenly realised she was straight. and id usually say nothing or just say idk and she’d just keep pressing & asking until i eventually breakdown into tears. constantly telling me she wants a relationship thats “normal”, that her family will accept, that she wants to have a kid within the next year, that if she finds a man she likes she’ll leave me for him. another time some guy was hitting on one of us at a gay bar and she just… turns to me and makes out with me and then turns back to him, and gives him a look. idk why she did that or what her goal was but it made me deeply uncomfortable. but i said nothing bc i was scared of her and scared of losing her too. and on top of that she would physically, verbally, and most of all emotionally abuse me. this is stuff i kept to myself most of the time but at times people in my life would see how she was and beg me to leave her (and i refused and told them they simply didn’t understand). so speaking on a personal level, i get it. but i just tell myself that i don’t want to be anything like her, i don’t want to let how hateful she is change me. i make the conscious choice to be mindful and tell myself there’s many bi women (& men, tho idk many) out there who are completely decent and normal. who support gay people fully and truly. normal bi people. and im lucky to know a few, like my best friend who when she slept w a trans woman told me she thinks i won’t like it bc it’s like being w a man, or my bi cousin who’s 7 years younger than me yet came out at a younger age than me (she was 11 i think). they definitely exist and they are what prove me to everyday that shitty people are shitty independent of their sexuality. sorry for ranting but, yeah. i wish sapphicdesi well bc i can tell she’s hurting and i can empathise with what she’s going through. she and i talked about that before i believe and i know it’s really painful when someone you loved and trusted takes advantage of you and hurts you the way her ex hurt her. it also can really hurt when the women you expect to understand & support you most, are ones you see spewing homophobic rhetoric. i hope she heals from that. but ultimately people take our words at face value and won’t see that when she says “i hate bi women”, she doesn’t literally mean “i hate all bi women”. they’ll just take it literally without knowing where she’s coming from.

#i was gonna say it’s diff from saying i hate straight women but actually it isnt that different bc if u say that on radblr they’ll just take #it as u saying u hate women or smth. ppl on here rly only get it if u say i hate men. not even if u say i hate white ppl or anything else #anything else will have ppl assuming the worst even if what u mean is ‘im sick of dealing with homophobia from x group of ppl’#and also since bi women r a minority n marginalised it comes off differently #also sorry for taking a long time to reply i only finally got time now #anonymous

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22degreehalo · 3 years ago

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So, I keep thinking back to something lately, and I think it's finally time for me to get all those thoughts out on tumblr. Because this is about a matter that I think has actually influenced a lot about how I think and feel about modern day activism: about progressivism, about neurodivergence, and about antis, all wrapped up and intertwined.

This is the story of my history with /r/shitredditsays.

(CW for discussion of misogyny, racism etc., and of a possible past CSA.)

So, when I first ventured onto reddit in the early to mid 2010s, I felt both cautious and guilty. This was right in the swing of my progressive awakening and I wanted to shout about misogyny and homophobia and everything else from the rooftops. Joining a website known for its techie 'brogressives' (who were actually NOT left wing but actually very right wing but just with weed added in, I was vehement) felt a bit like a betrayal of my ideals. I can't remember exactly why I even joined, but for the first few months I did little on the site but check up on /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians.

(Oh - actually, I remember now: I was reading /r/thebluepill, a sub for mocking /r/theredpill, a sub for misogynistic pick-up artists. Basically the sorta topic that incels spawned out of, but I guess making fun of virgins was more fun than the actual wannabe rapists. :/)

And then there was /r/shitredditsays. It was such a relief to discover, and in a way I guess it mitigated my shame at being on reddit at all, because I full acknowledged that it was Bad and spent my time here discussing how it sucked and making fun of it! I could rest assured, now, that my actions were ~cleansed.~

Because that was the point of SRS: shpwing how terrible and unprogressive reddit was. The way it worked was that people would find terrible but highly upvoted (i.e. liked) comments, and post a link to SRS (as proof that it was real), with the title of that link being an exceptionally heinous quote from that comment with the number of upvotes in brackets next to it. As an example: "lol women can't do math. just give up already (+40)" That's just a made up comment but you get the idea.

Now I should mention briefly that the linking part already was enough to earn greater reddit's ire. There was a constant paranoia at the time about 'brigading' - people from one subreddit linking to another in order to encourage that sub's subscribera to go and downvote and/or leave nasty comments. Basically, the 'you set your followers after me' you see on tumblr, reddit style. Different subs (such as /r/subredditdrama) had rules in place to try and stop their own subscribers from doing that, but eventually most gave up as there wasn't a lot you could practically do.

But the reaction to SRS went beyond the already bitter anger reddit felt at the idea of any brigading. They fucking LOATHED SRS. The way the 'main' subreddits talked about it, you'd think it was run by McCarthy himself and anyone linked there inmediately went to jail. I felt a little nervous about admitting I liked SRS when I ventured out of my home subreddits, but secretly the hate was exhilarating and pretty funny. They would just get so angry about people quoting them!!

As for the people in SRS themselves, of course they were deeply snarky and cynical people. There were a lotta regulars who commented every day and were known for their particular kinds of jokes or memes. I was deeply intimidated, but - as was very common for me at the time - desperate for them to approve of me. I didn't comment often, but I had a little model of them in my head and was very scared about letting them down, and felt incredibly proud whenever I left a comment they liked.

However, from the beginning, there were things that more directly made me feel bad. They really liked to post 'kill all men' or 'kill all white people', precisely because it upset people, with of course the justification that it was just venting and not based in reality. I couldn't argue with that, but seeing all that talk of violence very clearly implicitly aimed at the specific reddit commenters quoted in those posts... it made me uncomfortable. I couldn't help imagine being in their shoes.

But that was ultimately a pretty tangential thing. There were two main subjects which formed the bulk of my conflict and eventual break with SRS, as mentioned above. First, I'll talk about the ableism.

Not that I knew that's what it was, at first. But more and more, I noticed a trend in SRS comments that left me feeling... uneasy. Like, they would very often post the stock joke "beep boop logical redditeur", making fun of the idea that redditors thought thought they were all so perfectly rational and Above emotion. Except they didn't just say this in response to posts claiming women were too emotional or whatever. Any post they thought was written too coldly or unsympathetically would garner that, even if I thought it might not have been intentional. Sometimes I could barely tell what they were even trying to accuse the redditors of but, well, SRS ate it up every time.

In one particularly vivid memory, they quoted a redditor asking why people feel so strongly about funerals when the person is already dead. This was actually a bad SRS example because after it was linked there, it was *heavily* downvoted in its home sub, and I don't think it's because it was brigaded. People fucking HATED this guy. And unfortunately for him, he (everyone assumed 'he') kept commenting. But, like...nothing he said was actually critical or mocking. In fact, as people told him more and more how insensitive and/or stupid he was, he kept replying back really earnestly, like he didn't understand but wanted them to explain. Which got him downvoted even more for 'playing dumb' or 'mocking them' or whatever. I felt more and more bad; even if he had done wrong (and he HAD left the original comment on a post about funerals, so I totally get why people found it tone-deaf) nothing made me feel like he'd actually intended to hurt anyone. I wasn't even sure he realised he was being hated.

But of course, SRS delighted in piling on even further. Finally, the ultimate Beep Boop Logical Redditeur! One person brought up the possibility that the guy was autistic, but only to complain about someone suggesting that in the linked thread: their brother was autistic, and he wasn't a raging asshole like this guy self-evidently was! They'd already decided he was an asshole, see, so no other argument could ever offer a non-asshole explanation for his behaviour. Instead, it was insulting to those people to suggest they'd be such assholes!

A bit of extra context: during this time I was still coming off of Star Trek fandom, where I'd felt a similar uneasiness about how harshly people would judge TOS/AOS era Vulcans. It felt almost discriminatory somehow... but Vulcans aren't even real, so that's stupid. I was only slowly putting the pieces together that it's because those Vulcan traits they judged so harshly were very much autistic traits.

So with all this being said, it's probably not a surprise that it was a bit of a revelation for me when someone mentioned on SRS that the subreddit had previously been overtly ableist. That is, that they had previously used to use 'autistic' as a commonplace insult for redditors. This was awkwardly admitted; I'd never before seen SRS admit that any part of it could be flawed, as the assumption was always that if you had a problem with their behaviour it must be because you're a whiny angry privileged man, and it was against the rules to ever claim the a post didn't belong in SRS. But apparently, SRS was (or had been) imperfect, until someone called them out and pointed out how bad it was for a supposedly progressive subreddit to be using autistic people as an insult. Even though SRS kept heaps of attempted call-outs posted publically, as the funniest posts on the sub, I never found this one.

But it was the first time I'd encountered the idea that progressives could be ableist, too. Before now, I'd thought it was only dumb right wing 4channers who would call people autistic as an insult. Now, I actually felt sorta like... maybe my earlier unease wasn't so ridiculous. And I idolised them all less.

But not little enough, or the next part would've gone down with way less struggle on my part. Because this is when anti-ism hit SRS.

I was a little startled by it at first, this judgement of dark fiction or kink or depictions of abuse, as it conflicted so heavily with what I'd learned from fanfiction communities ever since I was a young teenager. But I'd already had revelations about race and gender which I hadn't believed in when I was younger, so it felt like maybe this was the next step. I pushed past my discomfort, and told myself that they were right - just as they were correct it was bad to depict racism, it was bad to depict stories with age differences and the like.

But, some posts did start to feel sorta... silly? Reddit was still kinda childish, with a lot of teenagers on it, and a resulting penchant for shock humour. When that meant racist or homophobic jokes I agreed that they were bigoted. But a big stock joke was just, 'haha pedophilia :)' Like someone posts about a girlfriend and someone makes a joke about her being 12 or whatever and people laughed their heads off. Obviously just dumb edgy bullshit, right?

Well, SRS disagreed. They always had a mocking tone to them, but here, the gloves were off and they seemed so disproportionately angry. They sincerely claimed that all these jokes were deliberately crafted to destimgmatise pedophilia and that everyone who made a joke like that was a pedophile. I honestly just didn't know what to say. It wasn't...totally impossible. But most times, it felt like the joke was about how bad pedophilia was?? Like the intended response was 'FBI OPEN UP' for a reason. I totally agreed that these jokes were in bad taste and did not treat a serious subject with enough sensitivity. Maybe some of them even were trying to normalise pedophilia. But did they not think even some of them were just dumb 13 year olds who were overly comfortable with making jokes about dating 12 year olds because, I dunno, they were 13??

It sorta... just felt out of touch with reality. And that further pushed me away from believing in their judgement, although I still wished very much to be a good strong progressive who wasn't a baby and wouldn't flinch when they joked about wanting to murder me.

But the pedo fear just kept COMING. It soon felt like there was hardly anything else in the sub at all. Playing games with scantily clad teenagers made you a pedo. Having a younger partner made you a pedo. And all of it combined with this general diagust of 'nerd culture,' and did that tie in with their hatred of maybe-Autistic people above? Of course! They were obsessed with this image of the creepy nerd who loves pervy anime and hentai about little girls and how they all deserve to be violently tortured. All the violent comments I'd always been uncomfortable with got worse and worse, and I started feeling downright awful myself. I liked anime, some of which could be fanservicey sometimes. And I liked fanfiction about subjects they definitely would not approve of. I started to believe that I was really actually a bad person. I kept opening the subreddit every day because I felt I should, but it just made me feel awful every time. I'd always hyperempathetically felt that 'kill all ____' energy towards myself, but it had always seemed misdirected before. I was starting to worry that they would actually unironically feel that about me.

And then it happened. Something so awful, so callous, so incredibly dangerous that it overpowered my intense need for validation from them and let me swear off SRS forever.

It was about a post in /r/relationshipadvice, of course; those were infamous for stoking drama. In it a woman wrote, horrified and shaken,that she had come across a hidden text file in her husband's computer in which there was written a story. In that story, her husband, as a five year old, was molested by an older woman (if memory serves, his aunt). I can no longer remember if the story was explicitly set in the past or written as a hypothetical. But the people of RelationshipAdvice were surprisingly mature. They told her that it's not uncommon for trauma victims to work through their experiences through fiction, and that this does indeed look like what happened here.

And SRS was fucking. Livid.

He'd written about a child being molested, and that made him a pedophile - no questions, no if ands or buts. They were disgusted by the redditors of RelationshipAdvice for defending his behaviour, and claimed that anything they suggested about him having been abused was 'literally making up stories' to justify pedophilia. They all but demanded this woman give her husband up to the police immediately so he could rot in jail forever.

And I just. Couldn't defend that anymore.

This man had written about himself being abused, and they were seriously, with full moral righteousness, demanding that he be sent to prison as a sex offender? It was all just so bafflingly obtuse and cruel that I couldn't put up with it anymore.

I still felt awful for unsubscribing - I still felt like SRS must still hold some moral weight in my heart - but I was just so shocked and mystified and felt so helpless at everything they were saying that it wasn't difficult to do. In the time since, I only became more and more sure of it - like, yeah: that whole thing was really fucked up, right?

I don't know what happened to SRS after that. I rarely if ever heard the sub mentioned on reddit by this point, and they totally disappeared from relevance not long after. I think in the last five years I've heard one person even mention SRS.

I do think the shift to anti-ism split the subscriber base, but I think there were other reasons, too. When reddit started finally banning obvious hate groups like /r/fatpeople hate, it got harder to claim that the reddit admins themselves were right wingers. The rise of Donald Trump brought new tensions, but he was deeply controversial across reddit, and mocking his supporters was a job for /r/shitthedonaldsays. There was also /r/kotakuinaction, a sub for criticising gamergate, and mocking the old anti-SJW subreddit /r/tumblrinaction.

And, I think opinions in reddit generally just changed. I don't think it's as edgy as it used to be, and certainly not as overtly right wing at times. I'm not saying it never happens, and maybe I've just always had a biased viewpoint, but I feel like the general public perception within reddit really has shifted. Maybe it was the 2016 election that did that, actually - putting such right wing viewpoints so far into the public sphere that brogressives couldn't claim that racism or whatever wasn't a problem anymore.

But I think my experiences in SRS definitely caused some things to be associated together in my mind. To me, anti-ism too often stems from a fear and hatred of difference and different minds - there is one correct way and it's not possible to 'not know' or 'not inherently be' that way; anything unexpected is immediately denounced as a product of immorality. And it showed for me the ways that that particularly unforgiving and ruthless variety of activism can so easily hurt innocent parties more than anyone.

I wonder if it's still up. I sorta feel dumb for ever having trusted them so much. Maybe the real betrayal is how defensive I get of redditors acting autistic now, haha.

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1921designs · 4 years ago

Text

Smuggler

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“About hypocrisy. About lies. About misrepresentation. About that smuggler’s behavior to which you drive the uranist.”

—André Gide, Corydon, Fourth Dialogue

I REMEMBER MY first kiss with absolute clarity. I was reading on a black chaise longue, upholstered with shiny velour, and it was right after dinner, the hour of freedom before I was obliged to begin my homework. I was sixteen.

It must have been early autumn or late spring, because I know I was in school at the time, and the sun was still out. I was shocked and thrilled by it, and reading that passage, from a novel by Hermann Hesse, made the book feel intensely real, fusing Hesse’s imaginary world with the physical object I was holding in my hands. I looked down at it, and back at the words on the page, and then around the room, which was empty, and I felt a keen and deep sense of discovery and shame. Something new had entered my life, undetected by anyone else, delivered safely and surreptitiously to me alone. To borrow an idea from André Gide, I had become a smuggler.

It wasn’t, of course, the first kiss I had encountered in a book. But this was the first kiss between two boys, characters in Beneath the Wheel, a short, sad novel about a sensitive student who gains admission to an elite school but then fails, quickly and inexorably, after he becomes entwined in friendship with a reckless, poetic classmate. I was stunned by their encounter—which most readers, and almost certainly Hesse himself, would have assigned to that liminal stage of adolescence before boys turn definitively to heterosexual interests. For me, however, it was the first evidence that I wasn’t entirely alone in my own desires. It made my loneliness seem more present to me, more intelligible and tangible, and something that could be named. Even more shocking was the innocence with which Hesse presented it:

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

Certainly no adult I knew would have derived anything like joy from this little scene—far from it. Where I grew up, a decaying Rust Belt city in upstate New York, there was no tradition of schoolboy romance, at least none that had made it to my public high school, where the hierarchies were rigid, the social categories inviolable, the avenues for sexual expression strictly and collectively policed by adults and youth alike. These were the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when recent gains in visibility and political legitimacy for gay rights were being vigorously countered by a newly resurgent cultural conservatism. The adults in my world, had they witnessed two lonely young boys reach out to each other in passionate friendship, would have thrashed them before committing them to the counsel of religion or psychiatry.

But the discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary. If before I had read haphazardly, bouncing from adventure to history to novels and the classics, now I read with focus and determination. For the next five years, I sought to expand and open the tiny fissure that had been created by that kiss. Suddenly, after years of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the sexual world, my reading was finally spurred both by curiosity and Eros.

From an oppressive theological academy in southern Germany, where students struggled to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the rooftops of Paris during the final days of Adolf Hitler’s occupation, I sought in books the company of poets and scholars, hoodlums and thieves, tormented aristocrats bouncing around the spas and casinos of Europe, expat Americans slumming it in the City of Light, an introspective Roman emperor lamenting a lost boyfriend, and a middle-aged author at the height of his powers and the brink of exhaustion. These were the worlds, and the men, presented by Gide, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, to name only those whose writing has lingered with me. Some of these authors were linked by ties of friendship. Some of them were themselves more or less openly homosexual, others ambiguous or fluid in their desires, and others, by all evidence, bisexual or primarily heterosexual. It would be too much to say their work formed a canon of gay literature—but for those who sought such a canon, their work was about all one could find.

And yet, in retrospect, and after rereading many of those books more than thirty years later, I’m astonished by how sad, furtive, and destructive an image of sexuality they presented. Today we have an insipid idea of literature as selfdiscovery, and a reflexive conviction that young people—especially those struggling with identity or prejudice—need role models. But these books contained no role models at all, and they depicted self-discovery as a cataclysmic severance from society. The price of survival, for the self-aware homosexual, was a complete inversion of values, dislocation, wandering, and rebellion. One of the few traditions you were allowed to keep was misogyny. And most of the men represented in these books were not willing to pay the heavy price of rebellion and were, to appropriate Hesse’s phrase, ground beneath the wheel.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no Internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

The pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves. One of the two boys who kissed in that Hesse novel eventually came apart at the seams, lapsed into nervous exhaustion, and then one afternoon, after too much beer, he stumbled or willingly slid into a slow-moving river, where his body was found, like Ophelia’s, floating serenely and beautiful in the chilly waters. Hesse would blame poor Hans’s collapse on the severity of his education and a lamentable disconnection from nature, friendship, and congenial social structures. But surely that kiss, and that friendship with a wayward poet, had something to do with it. As Hans is broken to pieces, he remembers that kiss, a sign that at some level Hesse felt it must be punished.

Hans was relatively lucky, dispensed with chaste, poetic discretion, like the lover in a song cycle by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann. Other boys who found themselves enmeshed in the milieu of homoerotic desire were raped, bullied, or killed, or lapsed into madness, disease, or criminality. They were disposable or interchangeable, the objects of pederastic fixation or the instrumental playthings of adult characters going through aesthetic, moral, or existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest of futures: isolation, wandering, and a perverse form of aging in which the loss of youth is never compensated with wisdom.

One doesn’t expect novelists to give us happy endings. But looking back on many of the books I read during my age of smuggling, I’m profoundly disturbed by what I now recognize as their deeply entrenched homophobia. I wonder if it took a toll on me, if what seemed a process of self-liberation was inseparable from infection with the insecurities, evasions, and hypocrisy stamped into gay identity during the painful, formative decades of its nascence in the last century. I wonder how these books will survive, and in what form: historical documents, symptoms of an ugly era, cris de coeur of men (mostly men) who had made it only a few steps along the long road to true equality? Will we condescend to them, and treat their anguish with polite, clinical detachment? I hesitate to say that these books formed me, because that suggests too simplistic a connection between literature and character. But I can’t be the only gay man in middle age who now wonders if what seemed a gift at the time—the discovery of a literature of same-sex desire just respectable enough to circulate without suspicion—was in fact more toxic than a youth of that era could ever have anticipated.

Before the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to collapse the distinction between cities, suburbs, and everywhere else, books were the most reliable access to the larger world, and the only access to books was the bookstore or the library. The physical fact of a book was both a curse and a blessing. It made reading a potentially dangerous act if you were reading the wrong things, and of course one had to physically find and possess the book. But the mere fact of being a book, the fact that someone had published the words and they were circulating in the world, gave a book the presumption of respectability, especially if it was deemed “literature.” There were, of course, bad or dangerous books in the world—and self-appointed guardians who sought to suppress and destroy them—but decent people assumed that these were safely contained within universities.

I borrowed my copy of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel from the library, so I can’t be sure whether it contained any of the small clues that led to other like-minded books. At least one copy I have found in a used bookstore does have an invaluable signpost on the back cover: “Along with Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel, Emil Strauss’s Friend Death, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, all of which came out in the same period, it belongs to the genre of school novels.” Perhaps that’s what prompted me to read Musil’s far more complicated, beautifully written, and excruciating schoolboy saga. Hans, shy, studious, and trusting, led me to Törless, a bolder, meaner, more dangerous boy.

Other threads of connection came from the introductions, afterwords, footnotes, and the solicitations to buy other books found just inside the back cover. When I first started reading independently of classroom assignments and the usual boy’s diet of Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne—reading without guidance and with all the odd detours and byways of an autodidact—I devised a three-part test for choosing a new volume: first, a book had to have a black or orange spine, then the colors of Penguin Classics, which someone had assured me was a reliable brand; second, I had to be able to finish the book within a few days, lest I waste the opportunity of my weekly visit to the bookstore; and third, I had to be hooked by the narrative within one or two pages. That is certainly what led me, by chance, to Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, a rather slight and pretentious novel of incestuous infatuation, gender slippage, homoerotic desire, and surreal distortions of time and space. I knew nothing of Cocteau but was intrigued by one of his line drawings on the cover, which showed two androgynous teenagers, and a summary which assured it was about a boy named Paul, who worshipped a fellow student.

I still have that copy of Cocteau. In the back there was yet more treasure, a whole page devoted to advertising the novels of Gide (The Immoralist is described as “the story of man’s rebellion against social and sexual conformity”) and another to Genet (The Thief’s Journal is “a voyage of discovery beyond all moral laws; the expression of a philosophy of perverted vice, the working out of an aesthetic degradation”). These little précis were themselves a guide to the coded language—“illicit, corruption, hedonism”—that often, though not infallibly, led to other enticing books. And yet one might follow these little broken twigs and crushed leaves only to end up in the frustrating world of mere decadence, Wagnerian salons, undirected voluptuousness, the enervating eccentricities of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the chaste, coy allusions to vice in Wilde.

Finally, there were a handful of narratives that had successfully transitioned into open and public respectability, even if always slightly tainted by scandal. If the local theater company still performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who could fault a boy for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Conveniently, a 1982 Bantam Classics edition contained both, and also the play Salomé. Wilde’s novel was a skein of brilliant banter stretched over a rather silly, Gothic tale, and the hiding-in-plain-sight of its homoeroticism was deeply unfulfilling. Even then, too scared to openly acknowledge my own feelings, I found Wilde’s obfuscations embarrassing. More powerful than anything in the highly contrived and overwrought games of Dorian was a passing moment in Salomé when the Page of Herodias obliquely confesses his love for the Young Syrian, who has committed suicide in disgust at Salomé’s licentious display. “He has killed himself,” the boy laments, “the man who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and earrings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself.” It was these moments that slipped through, sudden intimations of honest feeling, which made plowing through Wilde’s self-indulgence worth the effort.

Then there was the most holy and terrifying of all the publicly respectable representations of homosexual desire, Mann’s Death in Venice, which might even be found in one’s parents’ library, the danger of its sexuality safely ossified inside the imposing façade of its reputation. A boy who read Death in Venice wasn’t slavering over a beautiful Polish adolescent in a sailor’s suit, he was climbing a mountain of sorts, proving his devotion to culture.

But a boy who read Death in Venicewas receiving a very strange moral and sentimental education. Great love was somehow linked to intellectual crisis, a symptom of mental exhaustion. It was entirely inward and unrequited, and it was likely triggered by some dislocation of the self from familiar surroundings, to travel, new sights and smells, and hot climates. It was unsettling and isolating, and drove one to humiliating vanities and abject voyeurism. Like so much of what one found in Wilde (perfumed and swaddled in cant), Gide (transplanted to the colonial realms of North Africa, where bourgeois morality was suspended), or Genet (floating freely in the postwar wreckage and flotsam of values, ideals, and norms), Death in Venice also required a young reader to locate himself somewhere on the inexorable axis of pederastic desire.

In retrospect I understand that this fixation on older men who suddenly have their worlds shattered by the brilliant beauty of a young man or adolescent was an intentional, even ironic repurposing of the classical approbation of Platonic pederasty. It allowed the “uranist”—to use the pejorative Victorian term for a homosexual—to broach, tentatively and under the cover of a venerable and respected literary tradition, the broader subject of same-sex desire. While for some, especially Gide, pederasty was the ideal, for others it may have been a gateway to discussing desire among men of relatively equal age and status, what we now think of as being gay. But as an eighteen-year-old reader, I had no interest in being on the receiving end of the attentions of older men; and as a middle-aged man, no interest in children.

The dynamics of the pederastic dyad—like so many narratives of colonialism —also meant that in most cases the boy was silent, seemingly without an intellectual or moral life. He was pure object, pure receptivity, unprotesting, perfect and perfectly silent in his beauty. When Benjamin Britten composed his last opera, based on Mann’s novella, the youth is portrayed by a dancer, voiceless in a world of singing, present only as an ideal body moving in space. In Gide’s Immoralist, the boys of Algeria (and Italy and France) are interchangeable, lost in the torrents of monologue from the narrator, Michel, who wants us to believe that they are mere instruments in his long, agonizing process of self-discovery and liberation. In Genet’s Funeral Rites, a frequently pornographic novel of sexual violence among the partisans and collaborators of Paris during the liberation, the narrator/author even attempts to make a virtue of the interchangeability of his young objects of desire: “The characters in my books all resemble each other,” he says. He’s right, and he amplifies their sameness by suppressing or eliding their personalities, dropping identifying names or pronouns as he shifts between their individual stories, often reducing them to anonymous body parts.

By reducing boys and young men to ciphers, the narrative space becomes open for untrammeled displays of solipsism, narcissism, self-pity, and of course self-justification. These books, written over a period of decades, by authors of vastly different temperaments and sexualities, are surprisingly alike in this claustrophobia of desire and subjugation of the other. Indeed, the psychological violence done to the male object of desire is often worse in authors who didn’t manifest any particular personal interest in same-sex desire. For example, in Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless, a gentle and slightly effeminate boy named Basini becomes a tool for the social, intellectual, and emotional advancement of three classmates who are all, presumably, destined to get married and lead entirely heterosexual lives. One student uses Basini to learn how to exercise power and manipulate people in preparation for a life of public accomplishment; another tortures him to test his confused spiritual theories, a stew of supposedly Eastern mysticism; and Törless turns to him, and turns on him, simply to feel something, to sense his presence and power in the world, to add to the stockroom of his mind and soul.

We are led to believe that this last form of manipulation is, in its effect on poor Basini, the cruelest. Later in the book, when Musil offers us the classic irony of the bildungsroman—the guarantee that everything that has happened was just a phase, a way station on the path of authorial evolution—he explains why Törless “never felt remorse” for what he did to Basini:

For the only real interest [that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” like the older Törless] feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting[,] the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the thin scarlet thread of our blood —the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.

The conquest of beautiful boys, whether a hallowed tradition of all-male schools or the vestigial remnant of classical poetry, is simply another way to add to one’s fund of poetic and emotional knowledge, like going to the symphony. Today we might be blunter: to refine his aesthetic sensibility, Törless participated in the rape, torture, humiliation, and emotional abuse of a gay kid.

And he did it in a confined space. It is a recurring theme (and perhaps cliché) of many of these novels that homoerotic desire must be bounded within narrow spaces, dark rooms, private attics, as if the breach in conventional morality opened by same-sex desire demands careful, diligent, and architectural containment. The boys who beat and sodomize Basini do it in a secret space in the attic above their prep school. Throughout much of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, two siblings inhabit a darkly enchanted room, bickering and berating each other as they attempt to displace unrequited or forbidden desires onto acceptable alternatives. Cocteau helpfully gives us a sketch of this room—a few wispy lines that suggest something that Henri Matisse might have painted—with two beds, parallel to each other, as if in a hospital ward. Sickness, of course, is ever-present throughout almost all of these novels as well: the cholera that kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the tuberculosis which Michel overcomes and to which his hapless wife succumbs in The Immoralist, and the pallor, ennui, listlessness, and fevers of Cocteau. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a later, more deeply ambivalent contribution to this canon of illness and enclosure, takes its name from the cramped, cluttered chambre de bonne that contains this desire, with the narrator keenly aware that if what happens there—a passionate relationship between a young American man in Paris and his Italian boyfriend— escapes that space, the world of possibilities for gay men would explode. But floods of booze, perhaps alcoholism, and an almost suicidal emotional frailty haunt this space, too.

Often it is the author’s relation to these dark spaces that gives us our only reliable sense of how he envisioned the historical trajectory of being gay. In Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth into the larger world of adult desires. The lines are fluid, but there is a possibility of connection between the perfervid world of contained sexuality and the larger universe of sanctioned desires. In Baldwin, the young Italian proposes the two men keep their room as a space apart, a refuge for secret assignations, even as his American lover prepares to reunite with his fiancée and return to a life of normative sexuality. They could continue their relationship privately, on the side, a quiet compromise between two sexual realms. But Musil’s attic, essentially a torture chamber, is a much more desperate space, a permanent ghetto for illicit desire.

Even those among these books that were self-consciously written to advance the cause of gay men, to make their anguish more comprehensible to a reflexively hostile straight audience, leave almost no room—no space—for many openly gay readers. The parallels with colonial discourse are troubling: the colonized “other,” the homosexual making his appeal to straight society, must in turn pass on the violence and colonize and suppress yet weaker or more marginal figures on the spectrum of sexuality. Thus in the last of Gide’s daring dialogues in defense of homosexuality, first published piecemeal, then together commercially as Corydon in 1924—a tedious book full of pseudoscience and speculative extensions of Darwinian theory—the narrator contemptuously dismisses the unmanly homosexual: “If you please, we’ll leave the inverts aside for now. The trouble is that ill-informed people confuse them with normal homosexuals. And you understand, I hope, what I mean by ‘inverts.’ After all, heterosexuality too includes certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed.”

Along with the effeminate, the old and the aging are also beneath contempt. The casual scorn in Mann’s novella for an older man whom Aschenbach encounters on his passage to Venice is almost as horrifying as the sexual abuse and mental torture of young Basini in Musil’s novel. Among gay men, Mann’s painted clown is one of the most unsettling figures in literature, a “young-old man” whom Mann calls a “repulsive sight.” He apes the manners and dress of youth but has false teeth and bad makeup, luridly colored clothing, and a rakish hat, and is desperately trying to run with a younger crowd of men: “He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.” Mann’s writing rises to a suspiciously incandescent brilliance in his descriptions of this supposedly loathsome figure. For reasons entirely unnecessary to the plot or development of his central characters, Baldwin resurrects Mann’s grotesquerie, in a phantasmagorical scene that describes an encounter between his young

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame.

This is the future to which the narrator—and by extension the reader if he is a gay man—is condemned. Unless, of course, he succumbs to disease or addiction. At best there is a retreat from society, perhaps to someplace where the economic differential between the Western pederast and the colonized boy makes an endless string of anonymous liaisons economically feasible. Violent death is the worst of the escapes. Not content with merely parodying older gay men, Baldwin must also murder them. In a scene that does gratuitous violence to the basic voice and continuity of the book, the narrator imagines in intimate detail events he has not actually witnessed: the murder of a flamboyant bar owner who sexually harasses and extorts the young Giovanni (by this point betrayed, abandoned, and reduced to what is, in effect, prostitution). The murder happens behind closed doors, safely contained in a room filled with “silks, colors, perfumes.”

If I remember with absolute clarity the first same-sex kiss I encountered in literature, I don’t remember very well when my interest in specifically homoerotic narrative began to wane. But again, thanks to the physicality of the book, I have an archaeology more reliable than memory. As a young reader, I was in the habit of writing the date when I finished a book on the inside front cover, and so I know that sometime shortly before I turned twenty-one, my passion for dark tales of unrequited desire, sexual manipulation, and destructive Nietzschean paroxysms of self-transcendence peaked, then flagged. That was also the same time that I came out to friends and family, which was prompted by the complete loss of hope that a long and unrequited love for a classmate might be returned. Logic suggests that these events were related, that the collapse of romantic illusions and the subsequent initiation of an actual erotic life with real, living people dulled the allure of Wilde, Gide, Mann, and the other authors who were loosely in their various orbits.

were loosely in their various orbits.

It happened this way: For several years I had been drawn to a young man who seemed to me curiously like Hans from Hesse’s novel. Physically, at least, they were alike: “Deep-set, uneasy eyes glowed dimly in his handsome and delicate face; fine wrinkles, signs of troubled thinking, twitched on his forehead, and his thin, emaciated arms and hands hung at his side with the weary gracefulness reminiscent of a figure by Botticelli.” But in every other way my beloved was an invention. I projected onto him an elaborate but entirely imaginary psychology, which I now suspect was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the books I had been reading. He was sad, silent, and doomed, like Hans, but also cold, remote, and severe, like Törless, cruelly beautiful like all the interchangeable sailors and hoodlums in Genet, but also intellectual, suffering, and mystically connected to dark truths from which I was excluded. When I recklessly confessed my love to him—how long I had nurtured it and how complex, beautiful, and poetic it was—he responded not with anger or disgust but impatience: “You can’t put all this on me.”

He was right. It took me only a few days to realize it intellectually, a few weeks to begin accepting it emotionally, and a few years not to feel fear and shame in his presence. He had recognized in an instant that what I had felt for years, rather like Swann for Odette, had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t even love, properly speaking. I can’t claim that it was all clear to me at the time, that I was conscious of any connection between what I had read and the excruciating dead end of my own fantasy life. I make these connections in retrospect. But the realization that I would never be with him because he didn’t in fact exist—not in the way I imagined him—must have soured me on the literature of longing, torment, and convoluted desire. And the challenge and excitement of negotiating a genuine erotic life rendered so much of what I had found in these books painfully dated and irrelevant.

I want to be rigorously honest about my feelings for this literature, whether it distorted my sense of self and even, perhaps, corrupted my imagination. The safe thing to say is that I can’t possibly find an answer to that, not simply because memory is unreliable, but because we never know whether books implant things in us or merely confirm what is already there. In Young Törless, Musil proposes the idea that the great literature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and William Shakespeare is essentially a transitional crutch for young minds, a mental prosthesis or substitute identity during the formlessness of adolescence: “These associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance.”

It’s important to divorce the question of how these books may have influenced me from the malicious accusations of corruption that have dogged gay fiction from the beginning. In the course of our reading lives, we will devour dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crude, scabrous, violent books, with no discernible impact on our moral constitution. And homosexual writers certainly didn’t invent the general connection between sexuality and illness, or the thin line between passion and violence, or sadism and masochism, or the sexual exploitation of the young or defenseless. And the mere mention of same-sex desire is still seen in too many places around the world today as inherently destructive to young minds. Gide’s Corydon decried the illogic of this a century ago: “And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some other influence (and you argue in the same way for an entire nation, an entire people); it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.”

And I want to register an important caveat about the literature of same-sex desire: it is not limited to the books I read, the authors I encountered, or the tropes that now seem to me so sad and destructive. In 1928, E. M. Forster wrote a short story called “Arthur Snatchfold” that wasn’t published until 1972, two years after the author’s death. In it, an older man, Sir Richard Conway, respectable in all ways, visits the country estate of a business acquaintance, where he has a quick, early-morning sexual encounter with a young deliveryman in a field near the house. Later, as Sir Richard chats with his host at their club in London, he learns that the liaison was seen by a policeman, the young man was arrested, and the authorities sent him to prison. To his great relief, Sir Richard also learns that he himself is safe from discovery, that the “other man” was never identified, and despite great pressure on the working-class man to incriminate his upper-class partner, he refused to do so.

“He [the deliveryman] was instantly removed from the court and as he went he shouted back at us—you’ll never credit this—that if he and the old grandfather didn’t mind it why should anyone else,” says Sir Richard’s host, fatuously indignant about the whole affair. Sir Richard, ashamed and sad but trapped in the armor of his social position, does the only thing he can: “Taking a notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it.” It isn’t a great story, but it is an important moment in the evolution of an idea of loyalty and honor within the emerging category of homosexual identity. I didn’t

discover it until years after it might have done me some good.

Forster’s story is exceptional because only one man is punished, and he is given a voice—and a final, clear, unequivocal protest against the injustice. The other man escapes, but into shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. And yet it is the escapee who takes up the pen and begins to write. We might say of Sir Richard what we often say of our parents as we come to peace with them: he did the best he could. And for all the internalized homophobia of the authors I began reading more than thirty years ago, I would say the same thing. They did the best they could. They certainly did far more than privately inscribe a name in a book. I can’t honestly say that I would have had even Sir Richard’s limited courage in 1928.

But Forster’s story, which he didn’t dare publish while he was alive, is the exception, not the rule. It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of samesex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition but also a catalogue of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired. Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and all the rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

TIM KREIDER

2 notes · View notes

firelxdykatara · 5 years ago

Note

Literally what? It makes perfect sense for Sozin to outlaw homosexuality. He wanted a war. He needed an army. He heralded the fire nation as the master race. That’s textbook “homosexuality is bad because we need to do whatever we can to make as many perfect fire nation babies as we can.” The fire nation as a whole, sure, doesn’t make much sense. Sozin specifically, abso-fucking-lutely he’d be the supremacist straights only because reproduction vital guy.

It only ‘makes perfect sense’ if you ascribe to the very childish system of morality that spawned it: well, he’s definitely evil. @araeph explained it quite well in this post, which I’m assuming you didn’t read, despite the fact that I linked it in the comment to which you are referring. I’ll quote the relevant bits, though:

The easiest, cheapest way to discuss morality in media is to gather all of the “evil” traits on one side of a conflict, all of the “good” traits on the other, and then assign people “good” or “evil” status while not allowing any overlap. We can give a bit of a pass to children’s cartoons (although they, too, have become more complex in recent years) because children are still in the earliest stages of learning right from wrong. But Legend of Korra is intended for an older audience than A:TLA, while being infinitely more childish in its morality.

Also below, an excerpt from a post defending Bryke’s portrayal of LGBT issues:

and there is Sozin banning same sex relationship which again doesn’t contradict the source material, and Sozin being evil isn’t anything new,

Here is the premise both these arguments are working from: that because person A believes in wrong idea B, that that person must also believe in wrong idea C, D, and E, all the way down the alphabet. Because they’re Definitely Evil. But that’s not the way it works at all, and Sozin himself is a prime example.

People with discriminatory beliefs always have a system for them, a rationale that they use to justify their worldviews and fit them into a larger belief structure. There is a method to the madness; if there weren’t, hatred would be much easier to conquer because dismantling it wouldn’t require undermining other deeply held beliefs, with which it’s often intertwined. Sozin’s madness was an extension and expansion of his idea that the Fire Nation is superior to all other nations, and that he alone is the guardian of that superiority. Every evil action he takes stems from those premises:

Colonizing the Earth Kingdom. In Sozin’s mind, the Fire Nation experiencing an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity equaled a mandate to restructure all other nations so that they would be as “great” as the Fire Nation.

Challenging Avatar Roku in the palace. In “The Avatar and the Firelord,” Sozin flatly states that Roku’s allegiance should be to Sozin first, and everyone else second. After all, if the Fire Nation is the greatest country in the world, anything that might challenge that belief—such as the equality and balance between four nations—is a threat and must be eradicated. In a similar vein:

Leaving Avatar Roku to die after helping him fight the volcano. The volcano was a threat to Sozin’s homeland, and so when Sozin and Roku battled it together, they were working as two Fire Nation citizens. However, as soon as Roku’s premature demise left an opening to begin Sozin’s conquest, the Firelord couldn’t see past his own vision of a perfect world, in which he and his country dominated everything.

Hunting the dragons. Sozin’s aggressive world conquest required that the general philosophy behind firebending be changed and all traces of the old ways be extinguished. Humans could be bought or frightened into suppressing the “fire is life” belief, but that wouldn’t work on the dragons. Thus, in his mind it became necessary to wipe out all traces of the dragons, and therefore, the true meaning of fire.

There is nothing in Sozin’s worldview that suggests he would invent, from whole-cloth, without it existing before in his nation, institutionalized homophobia--not unless you subscribe to the ‘well, he’s definitely evil’ mode of thought, which LoK does, but which AtLA approached with considerably more nuance:

Toph: It’s like these people are born bad. Aang: No, that’s wrong. I don’t think that was the point of what Roku showed me at all. Sokka: Then what was the point? Aang: Roku was just as much Fire Nation as Sozin was, right? If anything, their story proves anyone’s capable of great good and great evil.

And, at the end of the day, it all comes back to my personal problem with that entire storyline (nevermind the fact that Korra had nothing to say about Sozin except a petulant ‘that guy was the worst’, as if this was new information and she didn’t already know that he had orchestrated the Air Nomad genocide): the fact that it was completely unnecessary.

This was a fantasy world, and while inspired by many real world cultures, it was not beholden to real world history the way historical fiction would be. There was no need to inject institutionalized homophobia where there was no hint of its existence before in the entire franchise. Evidently, it was too much to ask that this one fantasy world exist where people like me were never persecuted for their sexuality. And it absolutely does not sit right with me that a couple of straight men shoved that ham-fistedly into the story they were telling with their newly revealed bisexual lead.

And it doesn’t even make sense that the Fire Nation--the nation with women in the armed forces, and a distinct lack of evident misogyny, particularly when contrasted with the anvils dropping all over the place in the Northern Water Tribe--was the one with homophobic attitudes (and not just attitudes, but actively pulling people from their homes for the crime of Being Gay), and not, say, the Water Tribes:

But you know where homophobia would most likely gain traction? In the Water Tribes. Sexism and homophobia often go hand in hand, and in a culture where men reign supreme and gender roles are fixed, it would make sense for Korra and Asami’s romance to be a threat to the perceived natural order. But you see, the Water Tribe are the “good guys”, so they can’t be discriminatory, right?

#atla #atla comics critical #anyway no it absolutely does not make sense for sozin to have created institutionalized homophobia out of thin air #especially not considering his on-screen relationship with roku #thank you and good day #Anonymous #asked

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incandescent-eden · 5 years ago

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STORY MASTERLIST

A (not so) comprehensive list of all the things I write about, all of which are subject to change at any given time because I do a lot of refactoring!

LOOOOONG POST INCOMING I write... a LOT, and I have... MANY projects :) Feel free to ask me about any of them! :)

With love <3 Continue reading below the cutoff if you want to know the basic rundown of my worlds and works!

ANGELVERSE:

This universe encompasses all of the angels and demons I like to focus on. Works in the angelverse will likely be about Faraday (formerly known as Efrem), a demon lieutenant, Ezekiel, a young angel, the archangel Uriel, or angel Raguel / angel Sophia (their stories are intertwined).

The main concept I have on Angelverse surrounds Faraday, who has grown into himself as a demon and made something of himself. He finds it impossible to shake who he was before. The question comes up during an important meeting between Heaven and Hell of whether he is truly Faraday or Efrem, his own self that he has shakily become, or the self he inherited from being his father’s son. There’s also brotherly angst between Faraday and Ezekiel, who refuses to let go of the past. (If you look at my old works tagged ‘ezekiel,’ you’ll see Ezekiel used to be a part of Faraday/his ‘ideal’ self, which is why new Ezekiel, separate from Faraday, reads so differently.)

The Raguel and Sophia stories are also closely linked to characters Andromeda and possibly Zachariah. Andromeda’s father runs a cult and has captured an angel in his attic. When Andromeda finds the angel (Sophia), her otherwise “normal” life is thrown into disarray as she starts unraveling threads about her father’s actions as a cult leader. If Zachariah is to be a part of it, he would be living with Andromeda’s family, having run away from his past.

Prominent characters in Angelverse include: Faraday, Uriel, Ezekiel, Stena, Michael, Ramiel, Raguel, Sophia, Zachariah, Ambriel, Ruhiel, Gabriel, Raphael, Luci, Bee, Sasha, Saoirse, and Heather. With the exception of Sophia, all names ending with “el” are angels, while the rest are demons. Also, I say prominent, but like half of these characters are from a bygone era (2018 when I first created them).

TW/CW for heavy religious (Christian) imagery, emotional abuse, violence, transphobia mentions and cult talk. Additional content warning because I tend to write angels as LGBT, but I recognize that some people are not comfortable with this affiliation with Christianity.

LUXTRURA (NOTE: LUXTRURA IS ON PERMANENT HIATUS):

Luxtrura is the name of a fictional country in ye olde European fantasy style, and I haven’t thought of a title for the WIP yet, so I mainly tag it ‘luxtrura’ or ‘luxtruran trio.’ This WIP is a fantasy / dystopian / political intrigue about an uprising in the kingdom of Luxtrura run by an inexperienced king and corrupt nobles all vying for the crown.

Luxtrura (at the current moment) follows the life of His Majesty Devron Fharren, the Eighth Fharren King, who inherited the crown by kingdom decrees at the age of 21. Unlike most kings, Devron has only had seven years of proper royal tutelage on statecraft, having only been named heir to the throne when he was 14. He soon finds he has inherited a kingdom that has been deeply wounded, that his people hate him, and that he has few allies among his own country’s nobles, his friends, and neighboring royalty. Revolution is brewing, and he has a choice to make: to claim his birthright or to help his people.

Prominent characters include: Devron Fharren, Eden Barison, Mili Starr, Plumeria Rwalke, Lilia Tao, Rassaya Tao, Andrea (a mysterious stranger who gives only her first name), Jakob Fiyre, Cordelia Fiyre, Liseline Fiyre, Sonja, and Orange and Rouse (the dragons).

TW/CW for violence, sexual assault mentions, transphobia mentions, political talk, blatant classism, and death.

GLOWING EYES:

A “what-if” scenario where Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray had met and become friends and also Frankenstein wasn’t a man and was named Viola and was not a pleb weakling like Victor. Also Dorian Gray is fat because I said so.

This story reimagines the Frankenstein and Dorian Gray cast as students in their final year of the prestigious University of Ingolstadt, with Frankenstein having returned from a year off during which she was suspended for [redacted] reasons. The vibe we’re going for is dark academia, but I don’t think they ever actually do any learning?

Prominent characters include: Viola Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Elizabeth Lavenza, Henry Clerval, Basil Hallward, Deukalion, and special shoutout to Justine Moritz and Sibyl Vane because I didn’t want to put them in, but they definitely deserved better in the source material.

TW/CW for death, violence, toxic/obsessive relationships, grave-robbing, body part mentions (eyes, limbs, etc), and mentions of the Devil. Basically, if it was a concerning part of either the Frankenstein or Dorian Gray stories, it will still be concerning.

Fun fact, there is a Glowing Eyes playlist that I am NOT too ashamed to share with the public! :D

HELEN OF LEGEND:

A retelling of the Helen of Sparta story that explores Helen’s thoughts and motivations. Who was the woman behind the face that launched a thousand ships? And did she ever even want those ships to be launched? (Spoiler alert: the answer is no.)

Helen of Legend gets pretty heavy handed because I get really mad about people lauding the Greeks as the end all be all of culture, and I’m still really mad about how people dress Millie Bobby Brown up like she’s 25-40, so make of that what you will.

On the bright side, Helen of Legend is a sapphic retelling!

Prominent characters include: Helen, Leda, Menelaus, Clytemnestra, Penelope, Theseus, Aphrodite, Paris, Cassandra, Hector, and Hecuba.

TW/CW for misogyny, implied past sexual assault, sexual assault mentions, mentions of spousal and emotional abuse, people being generally creepy about bodies, people being creepy toward children (Theseus), cities burning, subtle classism, and death.

OF DANCERS AND DREAMERS:

A musical about Anne-Marie, a non-binary Vietnamese lesbian born into a wealthy family, and Jules, a Tunisian baker’s daughter who is working her way into the Paris ballet. Anne-Marie wants to be a designer, but their mother, Mme Trinh, has other plans. The year is 1884, and it was hard for the Trinh family, as immigrants, to establish their foothold in society, and Mme Trinh will not have her child throw away the family’s hard work. One day, while at the ballet, Anne-Marie becomes smitten with Jules, a ballerina with the most dazzling smile. They find solace in sharing their passions with one another and become friends, each eventually realizing they have fallen for the other in a time that is unfriendly to both of them.

Prominent characters include: Anne-Marie, Jules, Victor, Mme Trinh, and Amandine.

TW/CW for subtle homophobia, classism, mental illness, and parental guilt tripping/emotional toxicity.

THE LYRE EFFECT:

A play about life after death, and what it means to live and love. This play follows Patroclus upon his death, desperate to return to Achilles. He meets the reluctant Eurydice, embittered by decades alone in limbo halfway between life and death. Together, they almost throw someone off a boat (is it really murder if they’re already dead?) and have a chance to tell their stories, stepping out from the shadows of their more famous lovers.

I took a lot of liberties with this, so Orpheus is a woman (wlw OrphEurydice), and I would like for both Achilles and Patroclus to be played by trans men, and for all of the characters to be played by non-white actors.

Prominent characters include: Patroclus, Eurydice, Achilles, Orpheus, Apollo, Hades, Charon

TW/CW for talk about death

SPEED ROUND (OR: THINGS I WRITE ABOUT THAT AREN’T AS AMBITIOUS JUST YET/AT THE CURRENT MOMENT):

Here Lies Forever - a story focusing around two young people, Medb Flaherty and Virgil Sutherland, growing up at an orphanage amid war, abandonment, and sickness. Medb is a blind writer who dreams of traveling the world with Virgil, her best friend since their teen years, but when the war strikes too close to home, Virgil leaves Medb and their peaceful student life behind to join the army. Unwilling to let go, and recognizing the pain Virgil is in, Medb takes it upon herself to save Virgil, the both of them haunted by the ghosts of their pasts.

On the Corner of Maple Street - short stories about the lives of Sarah and Evangeline together, two lesbian women who met when Sarah was 28 and Evangeline was 31. Sarah was a toy maker and Evangeline was an actress. They have a son named Oliver, who’s now in his forties, and they’re grandmas to all the neighborhood children. They live on the corner of Maple Street :)

Partager Un Reve - short stories, often romantic, about two circus performers, Alyona Ledbedeva (who does aerial silks) and Li Mey Ri (an acrobat). They’re cute together, there’s not really much to say here.

Claire - there’s a really old novelette floating around on my account and you can find it if you search Claire, but like it’s OLD. An 18th century French lady who contracted TB and died but was brought back by a necromancer named Cecil (Cecil is the character of my friend @sinnabon-cosplay !) and is now immortal. Fun times with Claire and Anthony usually involve lamenting the fact that they’re stuck as teenagers.

Miscellaneous - miscellaneous demon and monster characters like Alexander, Felicity (both vampires), Sparrow (succubus/Heather’s youngest sister), Zephyr (fae, husband of Spar), Lycan (she’s... a werewolf), and so on. Not really connected to a plot

Performing Possumhood - uh this was a play I wrote with my friend @holdingonmyheartlikeahandgrenade for a 24 hour play festival, it’s about a guy named Thomas who becomes herald for a kingdom and then on his first day of work, the king dies, and his son becomes king, except the new king??? is a possum???? and like no one does anything about it, so Thomas just feels like he’s going insane, poor guy (also everyone else is named Thomas except the king, whose name is His Majesty King Parthur Pencildragon of Alpacalot)

Nordic questing team - I’ve literally written nothing for these fools, but I’m tempted to make it into a dnd campaign! The characters I have are Val (short for Valnotte) (she’s a nokke), Hanne (human poison seller who wears an eyepatch just because), Fur (short for Bjorgolfur, he’s a werewolf who left his pack because he was too good at being alpha wolf but he didn’t want to be alpha, he wanted to press flowers and have a cute little cottage by a cliffside with a pretty garden damn it), and Bo (full name: Boscobel Blue, he’s a cow boy. Literally. He has cow ears and a big septum piercing and a tail. Also he’s a shepherd. His sheep are carnivorous :))) Make of that what you will)

Alice x Secret Garden - another play but where Alice Liddell and Mary Lennox are 18 years old and find themselves in Wonderland, after Mary is jaded from the end of WW1 and is frustrated at her friend Dickon’s marriage proposal, and Alice runs away, trying to retain her childhood as best she can

Retellings - I do myth and fairy tale and folk retellings! :) You can search ‘Tithonia’ for my sleeping beauty retelling, and I wrote Orpheus and Eurydice a while back. Still working my way through Icarus :’) Also ‘Mermaids Can’t See’ is a retelling of the classic mermaid story but written as a ??? field guide? journal entry? notes about mermaids?

If there’s a work you want specifically about a character, I always tag characters, and I also will tag character introductions and pictures/references of them as “beanpuff char[]”!

#writeblr #reevie rambles #masterlist #wip masterlist #beanpuff char[]

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lozbotwfanart · 6 years ago

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Hi! Thanks for your explanation! It makes me feel better that none of the other races were under the Hylian monarchy and that they maintained their own sovereignty. The bowing to Zelda was a small clip at the way beginning when King Rhoam explains what happened to Link on the great plateau. But I agree that it's more likely they did that as a sign of respect rather towards Zelda.

Oh yeah! No problem! Now that's just my interpretation of the storyline, someone could see something very different.

I think that when you have a story that has a "chosen race", it's very easy to go into some nasty implications. The zelda series walks a very fine line, and I think it stumbles sometimes.

The series skirts a lot danger by having fantasy races like the Zora, Gorons and Rito, but their more human races like the Gerudo and the Sheikah gets tricky to manage. Especially with the series being mostly founded on white European chivalry/knight errant tales.

I'm not saying that Breath of the Wild does not show favoritism to the Hylian race, because it clearly does, but I think the way the story is framed, it's a lot more egalitarian between all parties. Let's face it, the game does not give us a whole heck of a lot of lore and history, what we see in the memories and how the NPCs treat each other is pretty much all we have. So any information given ends up being important and given a lot of weight. Like with a bow, what does that really mean to the characters? We can't say for sure without asking the creators specifically what they meant. But in the context we are given, my interpretation would be "its just respectful".

I know it's a little depressing for some people when games are scrutinized for racism/misogyny/homophobia/transphobia, but I just want to remind you all that you can enjoy something and still acknowledge its faults. To see its faults means you're engaging deeply with something. Nothing is perfect, and just because something is problematic doesn't mean you yourself are a bad person.

#asks #my posts #jinkernoodle

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paintedgraybeard · 7 years ago

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What the heck are threshold concepts and why do they matter???

Howdy! Y’all ever hear about threshold concepts?? no?? that’s okay, let’s learn!

First, what even are they and why do they matter? The book Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, is where I first really learned about this jazz. You should read it too if you want more info after this post.

Now let's talk about them! There are five of 'em and they’re pretty neat. To begin, we’ve got Transformative! This concept is about how writing changes the way you think and view the world. Which is true. We read to learn and write to share, communicating all sorts of rad stuff. We write for people to read, meaning we create our audiences as well as our text. You can’t have readers if you don’t share! SHARE! (concept 1.2 for those interested) Your voice is important and interesting! Your words change the world! Isn’t that cool!?

Next is Irreversible. Nothing you say or write publically can be unsaid. Which means you need to think about what impact your words will have. Some of us are better at this than others. (personally, i recommend being kind and accepting of people and writing for everyone to enjoy. I'm only intolerant of intolerance) What we write is a representation of ourselves and the world we live in, from thoughts to emotions and events(concept 2.1, friendos). You gotta make sure you’ re sharing what you want to share and how you want it to come across.

Integrative is number 3, and it’s all about how writing is a way to understand and learn. Everything you write will be informed by your prior experience(3.3) and it’s linked to your identity. Every writer is different because we’ve all lived different lives. Writing is deeply personal and dependant on the individual writer’s experiences.

Concept 4 is that writing is Bounded. This kinda ties into the last one. There is always more to learn(4.0). Authors are limited in their knowledge and ability and are often told to write what they know for this reason. To get better, they practice, revise, edit, and are constantly learning. This also means that you can increase what you know through reading/speaking/doing and the like, therefore giving you more to write about! Also, good encouragement to get out there and try new things! Travel, try cooking something new, study a new topic, read a new book series, work on what you’ve been writing, etc.

The last one is... Troublesome. No, really!!! People resist learning if the ideas shared with them are not compatible with their own. Writing is a social and cognitive act(5.0), so it makes sense that in a social situation with many people, not all will agree with each other fully. It’s unfortunate, especially when it comes to big topics, like global warming or misogyny or homophobia. Instead of trying to understand, people trap themselves in incorrectness by thinking about what they think about, but that is not real cognition, real learning (5.2). That’s a person convincing themselves that they are correct, even when they’re not by having mental conversations with themselves.

Anyway, these are the writing threshold concepts! I hope you learned something. I know I did! If there is anything you don’t understand or think is incorrect, let me know! Let’s learn together! Let’s hope tumblr doesn’t completely end, right? haha. oh well.

Later, skaters!

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groundramon · 7 years ago

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I don’t really know how to word this without immediately knowing that tumblr could accuse me of a fuckton of different buzzwords, but I’m going to try to anyways - and hopefully if any hyper-woke people find me, they’ll tell me how I should better word myself in the future instead of immediately calling me an abuse apologist or some shit.

But anyways, here’s a hot take - people of minority groups can be abusers. Sometimes, they can abuse people for their minority status. Sometimes, people lie about sexual assault. Sometimes, people use their mental health or identity or race or whatever as an excuse for being a despicable human being. How do I know? Because I’ve had it happen to me, over and over and over.

I am: a trans, LGBT+, mentally disabled + ill, DFAB person. I am also: a white, able-bodied fuckboy who lives in California, one of the most progressive states in the country, even in its conservative areas. I am on both sides of the spectrum, and the times when I see minority statuses being abused are usually from the groups that I’m a minority of.

For example, I was harassed (and arguably sexually abused, however because I couldn’t find those comments that could’ve made him face legal consequences for all he’s done, I struggle to say that this is the case - additionally, I was never his target, just my art) by an autistic man online when I was younger. It’s the reason why I can’t interact with the HT/TY/D fandom and why I won’t be seeing the third movie (keep in mind this happened right before the second movie, and I went to see that one because it legitimately interested me - this one seems heterosexual AND reminds me of my abuser’s dragon OC, which he guilt tripped me into drawing for him as his form of porn). He ruined an entire franchise for me because he harassed me so badly. He guilt tripped me in about how hard it was being autistic (and threw in some comments about how teens think they have it “so hard with their anxiety and depression” when “they really have no idea”, to a teenager struggling with identifying anxiety and depression - i didn’t believe that bullcrap but I did fall for his autism sob story) and convinced me to do art trades with him which were just redraws of my own stuff, and he’d repeatedly spam me and yell at me and guilt trip me to finish his work if I so much as read his note without responding. He drained my motivation for DeviantArt along with my love of a franchise. This man was also a serial harasser/spammer, he did this to MANY people, including other minors. I wasn’t a specific target - honestly, I think I was pretty low on his priority list, considering he only tried to come back a few times. The kicker? I’m pretty sure I’m autistic, even though I had no idea back then. At least, I sure do have a lot of symptoms of autism now that I look back.

Not good enough for you? Okay. How about the fact that a relative of mine tried to convince my aunt that she (my aunt, not the relative) was sexually abused by my paternal grandfather as a child, sending my aunt into a mental breakdown because she couldn’t remember anything like that and had no idea? My aunt is the weak link in our family, she’s adopted and felt othered for it, and lived away from the rest of our family for a long time. She recently started getting involved and just happened to be attacked by a known financial and mental abuser in our extended family right when she started getting back involved. I’m thankful that my dad and my uncles were able to help her get a better picture of her father. Keep in mind that I don’t have a positive image of my paternal grandfather, because he smoked and gave my dad + uncle health problems due to it - and I personally consider that an accidental form of child abuse, in a way. But he was NOT a fucking incestual pedophile. It infuriated me to hear that, despite never meeting him, and having a negative overall impression of him.

How about another? My step-step-grandmother (long story) has accused my deceased uncle of being a money-hungry monster and stealing all of her rightful money after his father/her husband died. We’re in a court case to get the inheritance we deserve from her now, but she only ever brought this up AFTER he passed away. When informed about his dead, she bitched about how he made her loose money, and how she was struggling despite using up all of my mom’s inheritance (from her step-father AND her mother). Because you know, that’s what you do when someone dies. My uncle was the only uncle on my mom’s side to make it to my birthdays, his family gave my mom and I a place to stay when we ended up stranded down south due to a bad head injury my dad got (also long story) and we didn’t have time to make it back home and we didn’t want to just leave my dad there. My uncle was probably the nicest, kindest family member I had. His funeral was the first funeral I went to, and there were TONS of people. He was a Christian man who lived by true Christian values, and plenty of people testified this at his funeral. People I’d never even met before. This old woman accused him of stealing her money (where did it go?? his wife is fucking broke now that he’s gone!), never caring enough to visit her, ect. This old woman, who never even responded to my birthday invitations let alone came, who never made any attempt to make a mutual outreach to us. She expected us to do all the work, and when we decided it wasn’t worth her ignoring and rejecting, we stopped. And then she accused us of abandoning her. This is an old woman, but she’s still an evil person - or an evil person who is now just a shell of evil, unable to even remember a time when she didn’t believe these lies that she told herself.

And don’t get me started on how this applies to ace discourse. Heaven forbid I compare the ace/aro experience to another LGBT experience! It’s only okay if I compare it to the straight experience (which i do btw, because i KNOW we benefit from homophobia unless we’re also sga) even though it has 99% more in common with the LGBP experience than the straight experience. This isn’t an inclusionist vs exclusionist thing - this is just COMPARISONS. It’s like saying murkrow looks like a crow - like yeah, no shit sherlock!! doesn’t mean murkrow is just the same as a real life fucking crow!!! And god, haven forbid you talk about real aphobia and how it affects real aspec people. Immediately every allo in the area will jump on you about how that’s just misogyny and rape culture and blah blah blah. Then what about when it happens to men? What about when it happens to nonbinary people? What about when it has literally nothing to do with gender or being forced to have sex, and is just a constant feeling of being othered and excluded? Forgotten and not believed? Constantly doubted that your experience is real? And then to be told that the very bigotry you suffered was just a part of a bigger issue, instead of specifically about a part of your identity....bullshit. There IS overlap in certain social issues. Race affects how homophobia and transphobia affects a person deeply. Same with misogyny and race. So of course there’s overlap. But to say that aphobia doesn’t exist, I’m sorry - I don’t say this lightly, but that’s unconscious gaslighting. (there is no better term than that - believe me, I looked. My point is that I don’t believe it’s intentional, but LGBP people, trans or not - you NEED to stop doing this. You ARE unconciously gaslighting aces and aros. This is not anecdotal, there are statistics and you refuse to believe them, despite pointing at just as credible statistics to prove your own points. You say we can’t use anecdotal evidence, but then go on to use it yourself. Intentional or not, you need to quit it.)

I really don’t want to talk about how race and this stuff intertwine because I really don’t have any experience with that as a white person. All I know is that groups of POC can be bigoted towards other groups of POC, and they can even be bigoted towards people of their own race.

Which leads me to the most important part of this post: The fact that minorities can abuse majority groups, even if its on the basis of their minority group, does NOT mean that minority groups are not oppressed.

Just because a few women lie about being raped, doesn’t mean that all women who say they were raped are lying. Just because an autistic person abused me, doesn’t mean that all autistic/mentally disabled people and mentally ill people are scary. Just because aphobia is real doesn’t mean that non-SGA aces and aros don’t benefit from homophobia to a certain degree. Just because homophobia kills doesn’t mean that aphobia isn’t just as real. Just because the LGBT community has a habit of gaslighting victims of aphobia doesn’t mean that the LGBT community oppresses the aspec community. Just because POC can discriminate against or even hold systemic power over another POC doesn’t mean that they aren’t both oppressed by white people.

Abuse is not oppression. Oppression is a repeated, prolonged offense of cruel and unjust control. None of my anecdotals “prove” that oppression for these groups isn’t real. Because I’m part of these groups, and it’s my opinion that it IS real. But my anecdotals are also still valid. It is not problematic to point out when someone uses their minority status to abuse and manipulate others. It is not problematic to call bigoted, cruel mentally disabled people problematic for being manipulative and abusive. Their disability is not an excuse. Their identity is not an excuse. Their experience may be a reason, but not an excuse. But neither is your experience. Let people talk about their individual experiences AND the wider issues of oppression as a whole. They don’t have to be opposite faces of the same coin, and it’s sad that we act like they do.

#stormy speaks #also i would just like to point out that ive never been abused by a person of color for their minority but i have by like every other group #just wanted to point that out incase anyone missed it #just. just sayin! just sayin @ racists!

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