#Why would you support someone who publicly abuses women

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

Not liking a driver does not give you a free pass to bodyshame them, or to wish literal death and severe harm on them, or to be racist and/or xenophobic towards them. Not liking a team doesn't give you a right to do the above to those afflicted with the team either, or to be misogynistic towards the women involved with those teams. Not liking which team or driver someone supports, does not give you a right to do any of the above.

The drivers and the teams may never see the hate you spill but wait. We all know that they do;

Nicolas Latifi got such severe death threats he had to hire security

I'm not touching on the disgusting racist abuse faced by many of the drivers because there has been far too much to easily unpack but I do want to note that it got so bad last year that Alex for instance got such severe abuse last year his fans had to tell his family to go offline for a few days (not to forget the people who made up conspiracies about him and used his mother's past as a means to justify the abuse they were directing towards him).

I'll never forgot the amount of sexist hate directed at Hannah Schmitz, one of the few and one of the most recognizable women in the paddock who has lead red bulls strategy department the last couple of years, - because apparently women in motorsport are only valid if they're not under the red bull umbrella - which got so bad multiple of the drivers called it out publicly.

The multiple conspiracies created about and general racial discrimination faced by Yuki and Zhou which was and continues to be encouraged and spread by primarily the English speaking journalists and commentators

Let's not forget the sexist chants sung about Sophie Kumpen; Max's mother at Monza, or the literal death threats that were sent to his sister and young nephews.

The way some of you talk about Michael Schumacher, I don't have the words. The ski jokes has not once in the last decade been funny.

I could go on and on. I could literally do this all day.

Sure the drivers might never see it but that doesn't mean nobody will and we all see how conditional any form of your allyship is. "Racism is wrong unless it's about x, sexism is wrong unless it's about y, death threats are wrong unless it's about z, etc". Do better. You cannot claim the moral high ground, if you do any of the above, no matter how much higher you perceive yourself to be than the person you're directing the above towards.

As for death wishes or crash wishes, cop yourselves on to fuck. I would never wish what I've been through, what my family has been through, on my worst enemy, let alone some driver I'll probably never even meet. F1 is nowadays a safe enough sport but that has not always been the case and there is still no 100% guarantee of completely safety. The risk is still there even with all the advancements in safety. So many drivers have lost their lives or have had their lives altered forever as a result of a crash. Some of the drivers on the current grid are directly impacted or know those whose lives have been lost or altered because of a crash. Nearly everyone on that grid has a story. Some of you have their photos as your icons as you wish literal death and injury on their coworkers, their friends. They would be beyond disgusted by you. I can name far too many drivers who lost their lives in this sport, it shouldn't take naming them to make people realize that wishing for some to die like they did is a disgusting act. If it were to come true, would you celebrate? Would you cheer as the red flag came out? I don't think I want to know the answer, considering some of the things I've seen in the main tags over the last couple of years (see that one person who wanted to violently and literally stab and kill a driver or see that disgusting poll about which way would be best to literally kill another driver).

Don't start with but x did this or y fans did that, if they jumped off a cliff, would you? Why are you so eager to lower yourself to what you feel are their low standards or morals? And I don't blame a driver for the actions of someone who calls themselves a fan while doing anything that I've mentioned in this post, because they're not fans, they're people who use the driver they claim to back as a shield and as an excuse for their appalling behavior.

Also, if you have to say "I don't like driver x but I agree nobody deserves this type of abuse", get rid of everything before the but. You don't have to like someone to offer them basic respect or human decency.

[olderthannetfic]

I’m this anon who asked about radical feminist/trans debates. I appreciate your response and those of your commenters, particularly @elfwreck who described a long evolution of discourse that I’ve missed. I’ve not been intentionally dense…just a woman and working mother who’s been busy as hell for about the last 15 years and focused on getting through the day. I’ve always supported gay rights, never gave it a second thought. With my kids older and more time on my hands, I started exploring fanfic and have been drawn in. One thing led to another and I find myself down tumblr rabbit holes with women raising questions about girls sports and the dangers of HRT for teens and whether lesbians are allowed to not like dicks, with responses that generally amount to “die terf”. I start researching online and find academic papers and news articles, but find essentially a similar message to you and your commenters: “radical feminists are obviously wrong and not to be taken seriously”. No addressing the questions I’ve seen raised. I get the point—one side is indefensible and I missed the boat on seeing the discussion play out many years ago. I suppose I was looking for a short cut through social media which feels silly in retrospect. Regardless, the radical feminists are out there making intellectual arguments across social media on a range of topics, including men in general, misogyny, porn, prostitution. In all likelihood the post that first pulled me in to their viewpoints related to the imbalance between women and their husbands with respect to child raising, housework, and expressing anger over daily aggravations, which rang completely true to my personal experience and that of other women I know. Likely why I now find myself caught up in fanfic escapism. Anyhow, I’ll dig in deeper to academic literature on the intersection of women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights because I finding myself caring to know this history now.

--

It happens.

A lot of the roots of current feminist debate are in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80s. Those were about differing ideas around protecting women and the implications of pornography.

(TBH, part of how very old arguments are able to rear their ugly heads again is that this shit is old enough that the youth weren't born yet during those debates.)

While not about trans stuff per se, some of the ideas about embattled women whose territory is being encroached on link back to there. The "argument", to the extent that the anti-trans side has one, tends to be about defending women's spaces. Many of these arguments are coming from a place of genuine fear. (Maybe not realistic fear, but I believe them that they're traumatized and reacting accordingly.) Some, however, are malicious indoctrination.

There have been efforts (sometimes admitted to publicly, often not) to literally infiltrate young lefty spaces with this kind of rhetoric. It's the queer and female youth version of gamer boys getting indoctrinated by the alt right. So people on my blog have very limited patience for anything that gives this shit the time of day.

I don't think there's a particularly good shortcut since it's the culmination of decades of fighting.

But where I'd start would be by saying that a lot of the arguments sound good on the surface but boil down to "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" traps.

If someone on social media is still hung up on "But BDSM is abuse! A woman cannot meaningfully consent because [bullshit we fought about in the 80s]", we have nothing to say to each other.

The anti-kink and anti-trusting people when they say they consent attitudes tend to go hand-in-hand with suspicion of trans people and refusal to let people define their own identities.

Misogyny and unfair work distributions are absolutely real, but there's a certain "war on women" rhetoric that's about as legit as the "war on Christmas".

The "other" side agrees about a lot of the basics, like the fact that a lot of dudes really need to hold up their end of relationships better when both partners work and nobody should be solely in charge of the house.

But some feminist classic like the comic You should've asked is not on "The Feminist Side" as opposed to "The Trans Side". Regular feminism doesn't take issue with trans people. Lots of regular feminism accepts that women are kinky and horny and like impure things.

These feminist basics are often used as a strawman ("Our opponents disagree with this basic idea they clearly do not actually disagree with!") and as camouflage for much stupider ideas, like the notion that trans women would choose to be a demographic that gets murdered in bathrooms a lot. It's not cis women who are in danger from trans women! That's complete horseshit.

A lot of the talk of embattled lesbian space actually means "Oh no, some butches came out as trans men eventually, and we have to acknowledge bisexual women now".

--

Re the HRT thing... Yes, there are dangers to prescribing kids and teens hormones. A family should go into the process with a clear understanding of the effects on bone density and such. These risks can be managed the same as menopausal women manage bone density risks. These are not horrific and unknown problems: they're commonplace medical issues we've dealt with before in other contexts. They don't have to be a big deal unless a kid has some pre-existing bone disorder or something.

The part the transphobes don't tell you is that the biggest danger to trans teens is suicide.

Depending on which study you look at, something like 80% of trans youth have serious suicidal thoughts and maybe half make an actual attempt. Lots of teens have issues, but these rates are staggeringly higher than for cis peers, even cis gay peers who also tend to have higher rates than cis het teens.

Forcing someone to go through the body horror of the wrong puberty is... well... not great for their mental health. So a lot of medical professionals are understandably eager to treat kids and teens early because of the huge lasting mental toll. Taking hormones early can also result in an adult body that passes better. And perhaps people shouldn't have to pass as cis to be treated how they want to be treated, but we live in the real world.

Some people do start treatment and then regret it. That's reality. But it's a small percentage, and the issue is often that they're nonbinary and weren't presented with any options other than cis of their assigned sex at birth or transsexual in the 90s sense where you want the full top and bottom surgeries and you're still very binary. I know people who've detransitioned to a degree, but they're not like "Ah yes, I was 100% cis and a fool!" There was generally something going on, just something harder to pin down.

(In fact, most of the "evidence" of people regretting transition are from contexts where the only way to socially transition and get your government ID changed and so on was to do the full medical transition. The regretters would most likely have preferred something in the middle but were not allowed access to what they needed by punitive laws.)

A bunch of alarmist dickheads want to tell you that trans youth don't know their own minds and that everything will be safer and healthier if they just wait to get treatment. In most cases, this is completely untrue.

There used to be far more psychiatric roadblocks to getting physical medical treatment. What the haters want is for these to return. But they didn't deter trans people back then, and they're not going to now.

--

Re the dicks thing... People roll their eyes because it's such an old canard. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to like dicks. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to date trans women either.

But lots of trans women get bottom surgery and don't even have a penis. In any case, whether they get surgery or not, reducing them to a body part is the kind of bio-essentialist nonsense feminism normally strives to debunk.

These arguments boil down to "Have penis, will rape".

--

Re sports... Trans women don't end up being the issue. In practice, when there's a lot of scrutiny, what happens is that black cis women are seen as literally not female enough and racist shitheads demand that their hormone levels be tested and they be branded Not Female for testosterone levels or something.

Whatever this kind of regulation is intended to do, in practice, it establishes a correct way to be female, and that way is to have a body that conforms to a particular "feminine", white beauty standard.

The athletes who end up being attacked are sometimes intersex, which they may not even have known. Sometimes, they're just taller and stronger than other women. Often, they don't look normative enough to a bunch of creeps because they're too black.

The assholes cover it up with a good line of patter, but that's where this ends: treating black women like freaks.

--

The bottom line is that anti-trans supposed feminists try to pretend they speak for feminists in general and that there are two major sides locked in conflict.

In fact, they're fringe weirdos who've gained new prominence, particularly in the UK with the backing of JKR, and the rest of the feminists are over here going "This shit again? Jesus!"

I don't waste time debating their "intellectual" arguments on social media for the same reason I don't debate eugenics-preaching racists or fundie religious nuts.

Hence the lack of good resources on "both sides".

[peachymilkandcream]

Fraud | Part 15 | Yandere All Might x Hero!Reader

(A/N: Hope you enjoy and comment to be added to the taglist!)

WARNINGS: noncon, dubcon, manipulation, domestic abuse, yandere themes, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, stockholm syndrome, graphic depictions of violence, mind breaking, misogyny, power imbalance, age difference, cheating, forced orgasm, suicide, etc.

==============================================

All Might's fourth victim had what he would call a perfect life, family, kids, a husband who made decent money as a pro, the white picket fence dream. In fact, so much so that she wasn't the one he was originally after. She was not a pro nor pretended to be one, however her husband had focused all of his efforts on investigating All Might himself. He said publicly many times that he believed the women All Might associated with went missing for a reason. That there had to be more to the story after all.

At first, All Might had tried to be civil, not wanting a whole scandal and backlash if he could just calmly explain to him that there's no need for an investigation and everything would be fine if he just quietly left well enough alone. Toshinori fully believed that if he could convince or even bribe one of his accusers that there was nothing to see here, that all would go away and he could get back to his normal life.

But when he met with said pro for a conversation, it turned ugly rather quickly.

"I'm sorry All Might but I can't do that."

"What do you mean? C'mon now, we can come to an agreement can't we? Something where everyone's happy?"

"I'll be happy when you've been exposed for the crimes you've committed against these innocent women."

"Accusing me without any proof is a pretty bold thing to do."

"Proof? I have plenty, how many women get involved with you and end up dying, disappearing, or killing themselves. Each one is the same, you and I both know there's a pattern there."

"You're jumping to conclusions based on coincidence. I was cleared as a suspect in all of those cases years ago."

"And why is that? As the Number One hero, I'm sure you have connections, if not a substantial amount of funds to buy your way out of trouble."

"I don't appreciate what you're insinuating. I am a hero, the Symbol of Peace and Justice, why would I go against the very thing I strive to uphold?"

"To use it as a cover to do whatever the hell you want. You're above suspicion because of what you do and your work, while innocent women left and right lose everything by just coming near you."

His teeth grit in anger, he could kill the man right this moment. But that would be too suspicious, people would start to question why someone investigating All Might would disappear except if it meant that All Might was guilty.

"Very well, dig if you must, but you won't find anything, I assure you."

"We'll see about that."

===============================================

"Find him."

"Excuse me?"

"Find out everything about him, I want to ruin his life. Make him regret he'd ever been born."

"And what am I looking for exactly?"

"His family, friends, a path of opening. Hateful social media posts, nudes, cheating scandals, illegal purchases, gambling, addiction, something! Anything that would discredit him!"

Nighteye sighs, tapping away at the computer, all of the Symbol of Peace's messes were his job to clean up, and it was getting exhausting. However that is what he signed up for in the past, might as well keep his position as All Might's only sidekick for a little while longer.

===============================================

All Might had approached the young wife and mother with the appearance of simple help. From what Nighteye had said she was a stay at home wife since her husband made enough to support her and their children quite comfortably. However that meant that he was gone throughout the day and the day to day care of the home and children rested upon her shoulders. And what would be a better time than to help a poor woman carrying heavy groceries? He was a hero after all.

They started talking, as she was in awe that such an accomplished and acclaimed hero would help her of all people do such a lowly task. To which he naturally assured her that no job was too small if it meant helping those in need. It seemed like his charms with women hadn't gone away, even after all these years. Women still found him the most fantastical man on the planet, all because of this inherited power of his.

Simple chatting turned into venting on her end, when he asked what her husband did she began to pour out how stressed and lonely she had been since he dedicated himself to his current case. She willingly offered up the details of how far his research had come and how he had less than what he let on. In order to find more he had often been away from home, neglecting his wife and family to pursue this goal of bringing All Might to justice. A cause, she believed, to be ridiculous since Toshinori had been nothing but an angel to her.

As always, he listened, never saying a word to sway her thinking, except that he understood and felt sorry for her. Throwing in lines about how much he wished to be married but had to wait since it was not in the cards. How if he was married, he would treat his wife like she were the only thing in life that mattered. The city could be burning but if his wife needed him he'd be there.

The fool melted.

And she was lonely. Riding him until her legs gave out, but still begging for more. It was like she hadn't been touched in years, and all she needed was him. To which he was always happy to be of help.

There was something about fucking the wife of your current enemy that just brought him so much satisfaction. This man had pushed and pushed to get All Might to slip up, but in pushing so hard he allowed a crack in his family unit, which All Might snuck in and took what was left over. And from the look on her face when he filled her, she was never going back to her old life.

===============================================

The spite she had toward her husband for leaving her in that house by herself led her to telling All Might exactly where he had stored all of his evidence in his case against the Symbol of Peace. Telling him to take it so that finally her husband would come back to her.

Naturally he had to agree to such a desperate woman.

Although the destroying of the evidence didn't stop, she still made regular visits to see him, needing that hole of affection filled somewhere. And if it was All Might, all the better.

===============================================

Eventually she told her husband of her affair, but made sure not to mention who it was with when All Might had sworn her not to do so. All of his evidence had already been taken from him, his life's work meaningless, and now his wife was leaving with his children.

All because he tried to cross the Number One hero.

That was the last All Might or anyone had heard of him, and eventually Toshinori got tired of the constant pestering from her to meet her kids and take over a fatherly role so he killed each one of them, from her, down to the youngest. Never to be seen of again, and no questions were asked since the husband believed they had moved hours away to be with her lover. There was no investigation, nothing. They had just disappeared and were forgotten about. Even by All Might.

Especially when he met her.

Taglist:

@toomuchdabi

@i-love-mommy-wanda

[amaria-the-soup]

This ask is made in good faith, I need to emphasize that because many people are extremely hostile about it.

“Your thoughts become your actions”

You said this in reply to someone, and I have such genuine concern for you if you have such little self control and lack of authority over yourself that all of your thoughts become actions. Like- I fear for every person you interact with on a day to day basis and I’m sorry for how lonely you must be living like that. /gen

That being said your experience is not universal, the vast majority of people can parse what should happen irl vs what should stay in fiction, that’s why goreporn horror and gratuitously violent action movies are so popular and rape kink is the most common kink among women. It’s fiction.

Expecting and encouraging people to be ashamed of themselves for the fiction they consume is just repackaged purity culture and the right reactionary thinking that continues to plague the world and is the root of all systemic issues.

Ultimately, that shame that you’re trying to push will only backfire. Because kink very often has roots in trauma and, in general, absuers aren’t the ones reading fanfic on the internet. They in the world, abusing people. So by trying to shame consumers of immoral fiction you’re only harming victims and innocents.

Especially because (and this is not an accusation because I realize it can read like one) shame is very often used by abusers to manipulate their victims. “Well you *like* what I’m doing, so you’re disgusting and if you leave I’ll tell everyone.” Whether the victim does or does not like it is irrelevant, the threat is real and shame is what makes it real.

By encouraging shame you’re only enabling actual irl abusers. You’re enthusiastically giving them the means to further trap their victims.

If you’re really, genuinely worried, look into how you can help the victims irl. There might be nothing you can do, and that’s fine. But vauge posting on the internet does nothing but harm.

I really hope you have a good day, and once again this ask is in good faith and I’m willing to have a conversation with you as two mature adults. If you don’t want to reply publicly you’re welcome to dm me. /gen

I understand what you’re saying but I sincerely hope you do realize that any thought is an option to an action. God said “what man thinks man shall do.” I do my best to keep myself in check. Thanks for the concern, but I’m just fine.

However, I am not talking about rape kink or violence. I believe that I have stated that I like those things too. It’s just part of my nature. I don’t want those things to happen to me, I know it’s bad, but the thought can be exciting. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about incest. The act of sex with another family member. I am talking about the act of being with someone who you know and who you are supposed to love and support but never romantically. People who encourage, support, ask about, or write about these acts are disgusting and vile. They take the time to actively engage in the thoughts of having sex with a daughter, a son, or siblings. Even grandparents or aunts and uncles.

These thoughts are vile and disgusting. I genuinely had to take over twelve hours after receiving this ask to respond to it. Because to me, it sounds like you are actively seeking to defend the people who would put their hands on someone they have witnessed grow up and know about.

This is not about the issue of rape kink. Blood play. Bondage. This is not the same thing as someone who has actually been through trauma. This is about a grown person using their power over their siblings and their children to have body gratification.

I’m sorry if that confused you. I’m sorry if you feel like I have attacked you in some way. But I am NOT discussing anything about kinks. I am discussing incest.

[allamericansbitch]

can you elaborate on the brittany thing idk much about her so i’m so intrigued to know

sure! this is long, welcome to my ted talk.

so brittany has been an influencer for a while, and has always been very loud about how it's important to use her platform and to speak about important things like politics or anything involving inequality/bigotry/etc., in her own words on her own podcast 'if you have a platform why would you not use it'.

more recently, people noticed she hadn't said anything about palestine at all, people started to call her out and were very disappointed in her (especially after making such a big deal about using your platform for good, a bit hypocritical- i think you can see where this is going). someone on her close friends on Instagram ended up leaking something she posted to her close friends story where she said it was 'dystopian' she should be speaking about the middle east and a bunch of other wild shit. people got pissed but moved on, and then didnt speak up until that whole celebrity block party thing happened and she was losing a bunch of followers. so the comparison to taylor starts with making a big deal about how you're an activist to then not speak on anything important and when you do, it's only when it affects you and you barely do anything.

another similarity is what happening rn (tw: SA for this part) there's a really famous influencer she's friends with and has made plenty of content with, been vocal about being a huge fan of, etc. recently it's come to light that he knowingly had sex with a minor, she was 17 and he was 25, was told beforehand that she was only 17 and he still went through with the assault. it's made huge news and everyone is talking about it, and people were wondering if his friends/fellow content creators that have associated themselves with him were gonna condemn his actions or just ignore it. brittany decided to post something on her instagram stories that said something along the lines of 'if these things are proven to be true' and other very dismissive things that reak of not supporting the victim. brittany has always spoken about believing in women and supporting women in general, but only until someone she's close with is the issue. classic white feminsim, and i dont think i have to make the connection to taylor for you. and it also just reminds of how taylor is still very much publicly friends with multiple abusers, abuse apologists etc.

the last note is the fanbases are eerily similar in terms of hypocrisy, lack of morals and critical thinking, blindly defending their fav, adopting white feminism and using it to victimize her, etc. it's wild. a bunch of fans are basically crying misogyny saying ''it's just classic misogyny that brittany, the women, is getting more hate than the man who actually assaulted somebody', and they way they just made that up to make her a victim is crazy. no one is hating brittany more than cody, cody is getting news article written about him by respected publications and popular commentary channels are making videos calling him out... brittany is just an off-branch of that to another topic/issue. but any criticism is met with the weaponization of feminism in order to protect a fav i guess!

[transdimensional-void]

i know the writers of bridgerton want me to shake my head at the actions of characters like marina, penelope, lady featherington, and cressida, but this society is so shitty to women i’m just like cheering them on in their deviancy.

like, marina, you scam that bridgerton boy and secure yourself and your children a future. no one else in this shitty society is on your side (except my fave, lady featherington, the only worthwhile parent in the entire series <3) so you might as well go big!

speaking of lady featherington, she was literally the only one trying to help marina find a workable solution for her situation. (until daphne shows up with the obvious solution that apparently no one else had enough brain cells to think of). her insane plots to keep the family afloat keep working! like she scammed the entire legal system to let her husband’s title pass through the female line! love every moment she’s on screen, plus her flirtation with cousin jack was one of the few compelling romances this show has managed to cobble together.

why does the show act like cressida is some sort of villain when she’s one of the biggest victims of this society’s shiftiness toward women? like i can understand why penelope has a hard time getting along with her when she’s been regularly and needlessly cruel to her, but the way eloise uses and then just abandons her is far crueler than anything cressida’s ever done. and the stunt she pulled this season in a desperate attempt to escape an abusive and controlling father trying to force her into either an abusive and controlling marriage or an abusive living situation with her aunt? we’re supposed to condemn her for that? and no one cared that she just got shipped off to the abusive aunt at the end? oh my god please someone save cressida!!

and then there’s the show having penelope and the people around her keep claiming that she’s done a lot of harm through her writing, yet no one can ever seem to give specific examples of this? the only credible example is publicly exposing marina, which is actually the worst thing she’s done. but in her defense, she DID attempt to tell colin in private and he totally brushed her off! her worst mistake was putting colin’s needs ahead of marina’s, so i would like to see her apologize to marina now that her identity is revealed (not that they’ll ever give us that lol. they do NOT care about marina).

but other than that, literally what harm did any of her writing do to anyone? eloise got ostracized? no, actually, she ended up with more friends in society than ever, which she HATED, so she dropped all of them of her own free will. colin felt a little bad? because whistledown said he’d changed? which he literally agreed with when apologizing to pen for what he’d said about her the previous season? she wrote about what the other bridgertons were up to in their social lives? things that weren’t even being done in secret? and which were true? wow! so harmful!

anyway, i support every woman in bridgerton, even eloise, who can’t help the fact that she’s been written as an mra’s version of a feminist. i hope she cucks every one of her brothers 🙏🏽

[wednesdaysviolet]

Why I left the Wyler Fandom:

1. Racism: the way people have discussed Wednesday/Tyler as a ship honestly is reflective of internalized racism not to mention one work in the tag having a title with severely racialized connotations. Someone came in my ao3 inbox accusing Wednesday of moving “too fast” with Tyler— fyi, accusing women and girls of color of being “fast” to mature sexually or romantically is a tired and blatantly racist talking point. I also reached out to an author on here privately with sources about their racist fic title and they promptly ignored it and never changed it. 💀

2. Plaigiarism: when it was one time it was one too many. now that it’s happened again I honestly can’t even wrap my head around it. I confronted the author directly about properly giving credit and they told me that giving credit was equivalent to promoting said work they used as a template. This is nonsensical. Not to mention while this discussion was still up and while the author still had their indirect, disrespectful attack on the original author in their authors notes, people were supporting said plagiarized work publicly. Does no one value artistic integrity???? I’ve considered orphaning my works in leaving the fandom but decided against it specifically because I don’t trust anyone to not use my works as their “blank canvas” and claim the foundational elements of the story as their own. FYI you cannot put “this author accepts constructive criticism” on your work and then delete said constructive criticism. Lmfao.

3. Including non-con as a fictional ship and staying silent about a literal sexual predator being in the cast. I mean, do I have anything more to say about this? Zero care concern empathy consideration whatsoever for sexual violence survivors. No denouncement of Percy Hynes White whatsoever. Xavier still being included left and right in stories. EW!!! That guy belongs in PRISON!

4. Zero loyalty to anyone even people that you consider “friends”: people I once considered my friends using my personal triggers against me and featuring them in their work with no trigger or content warning 🚩🚩 people supporting works that were plagiarized from their “friends” works 🚩🚩

6. General Clique-y Behavior and the creation of vapid Echo Chambers: full grown adults acting like they’re high school, referring to being proven wrong on things as “drama”. This is not a soap opera, this is real life and real people are getting hurt by your actions but it doesn’t seem like anyone actually cares.

7. Erasure of Tyler’s History of Abuse: Tyler is very explicitly groomed/abused in Wednesday and while changing aspects of the storyline within an AU are totally okay and within the author’s right, there are still people who write for Wyler claiming they don’t trust Tyler and his intentions. There are also people whose works feature Tyler himself as an abuser/rapist/groomer.

8. The frequently used excuse aka myth that fiction is fiction and incapable of causing harm in real life: this is widely debated in academia but the general consensus since the mid-80’s has been that for darker themes like suicide, murder, sexual violence etc there should be a sense of liability in what gets published and in the hands of young people especially. The British Journal of Social Psychology published in 2011 scientific research that violent fictional written word was in fact relational to readers’ actions and beliefs in real life.

Believe it or not as human beings we have a responsibility to be decent to other human beings. It’s clear that when you act in favor of truth, integrity and social justice it will get you ostracized. So I’m out :)

I’m grateful that I’ve been able to maintain anonymity throughout my time in this fandom and have not let any of this affect my real life. Compartmentalizing has allowed me to move forward whereas a few years ago this kind of situation would have driven me off a cliff. <3

[synonymouswithanonymous]

his mom's comment

Mrs A's comment: actual words/actual translation.

charlotte_hoegh Knæk og bræk kæreste Johanne ❤️ 18 September 2024 17:50:23

charlotte_hoegh Break/crack and break girlfriend Johanne ❤️ 18 September 2024 17:50:23

Not sure if this is an expression/colloquial phrase, but it seems to be an expression of support! 💚💚💚💚💚 his mom seems like a nice lady too. Decided to put this here bc someone has already decided to mistranslate her on purpose (maybe they think it's funny to change the words?).

Wait is this the Danish version of "break a leg"? 💚💕

Edited to add, nope it was just another way to dig at JM and also continue to call his mother names for publicly supporting/liking his GF.

Maybe she doesn't get all gushy for her child on his instagram, who is a boy, bc he would feel uncomfortable with her posting mom support on all his projects. If that happened he'd not only be called "creepy" but a "mama's boy" oh WAIT!!!!! he's already been called that many times.

He's said his mom is his biggest fan, his words, we don't know what she says in private either to celebrate his successes. Maybe they talk on the phone or visit? His sister and dad don't comment either (or someone would have said by now surely). We don't know if the times he's screamed and shouted at his mom (his words) were over projects etc. Or not. To continuously just lie and try to make everything anyone does seem bad bc she, his mother, likes his GF publicly is not just ridiculous but also really immature. I mean at least they're not calling her vile names this time, but to paint his mom as a pushy bad person, over liking his GF? That's just ridiculous. Especially since before she showed support haters were "so sure" his mother wouldn't like her and how she's great and knows her son so well. Lol then she shows support and boom a total 180 and his mom is characterized as a pushy ass kissing woman who wants to live vicariously through JM (still no source for when she supposedly said she wanted to be a singer/actor).

Why is it always the women being torn down? Over every little thing? And no one has ever given a valid reason other than their self reflecting "gut feelings" about the woman who is dating their celeb crush, to claim she's a bad, manipulative person (some even claiming she's abusive). Lol there wasn't any "art theft" lol unless GIFS are also art theft? She's always been lovely, funny and supportive. And she seems to genuinely care about her friends, family and AHA. I just don't understand where the nasty hate comes from (literally attacking even her nipple color and calling her "fat, ugly"). It's as always, imo, absolutely ridiculous to hate on someone you don't know in real life, attack all her friends/his friends, her mom, his mom, and call them all crazy ass kissing leeches who are all pushy and manipulative people and the haters (specifically less than 6 people dedicated to their hate) are the only ones who see it bc AHA is "dumb and blind." Without understanding that these people actually know her in real life, unlike all of us. And it's also disrespectful to not only JM and his mom, but him as well, like he isn't living up to the standards they imagined for him or behaving how they imagined he would behave. To be openly repetitive......that is ridiculous. But also it's just silly to act this way over a celeb crush or his GF. IMO.

[riverdamien]

The Brave Never Die!

"Sloughing Toward Galilee!

"The Brave Never Die!"

"The brave die never, though they sleep in the dust, their courage nerves a thousand men and women!" Minot J. Savage.

"Never Allow Yourself to Be Made A  Victim, Accept  No One's Definition Of Your Life; define yourself." Harvey Fierstein.

"It is Revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist."  Laverne Cox

---------------------------------------------------------

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition:

Mark 10: 17-27

The Rich Man

17 As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 20 He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” 21 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money[a] to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22 When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

23 Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is[b] to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 They were greatly astounded and said to one another,[c] “Then who can be saved?” 27 Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

================================

Twenty years ago I was an interim pastor of a local church, and wanted to lead a new Bible study on non-violence; a parishioner, who had served in Vietnam sat down and opened the book that was chosen, and began screaming at me, really screaming and upset, for he had been wounded in Vietnam, this study was questioning who he was and what he did in his life.

Inadvertently my brainstorm of sharing a different approach to the Bible had violated this gentleman to his very core; the one thing a pastor never intentionally does. I asked his forgiveness, put the Bible study away, and never used it publicly again.

In the same manner, several years later I attended a meeting wearing clericals, and a woman minister started screaming and crying because the black clericals represented patriarchy and sexual abuse; since I have worn clericals and only colored ones.

In the months and years to come I would serve young and old homeless veterans as the one on Haight in the photo above; be in a Veterans PTSD group struggling with my issues, and assure each one of my thankfulness for their service. I remember a cousin and uncle who were veterans of World War II and Vietnam, both suffered silently from depression, and I would suggest PTSD through the years.

I do not believe in war, I do not believe in violence, but we live in a broken world, and like Mark Twain:  "Patriotism Is Supporting Your Country All the Time, And Only Your Government When It Deserves It! Mark Twain. We live in a "dirty rotten system", and my support is through caring for people who are disabled, homeless, and severely crippled.

There was a time early in my ministry when I was going through the process of being a military chaplain, but came to my senses when I admitted my being queer to myself. I could not stay in the closet! And we in our country are still struggling with letting queers in the military, especially transgenders!

In our election campaign season and on Memorial and Veteran's Day our politicians promise to eliminate homelessness among veterans on the street, and yet year after year I see the same people living in tents, unable to get their foot in the door. Several are disabled in wheelchairs, and all struggle with PTSD and other forms of mental illness, and yet they are homeless.

June is Pride Month! LGTBTQ'S celebrate they're being a presence in the world! But beneath the celebratory mood, real fear exists in parts of our country and the world. Homophobia is still alive and well in our religious institutions, government and social institutions, and our population! You should hear the comments I receive on my blog and through my email, most are telling me what a sinner I am, and what the Holy Scripture says about my way of life! My sister, a fundamentalist, will not talk to me, and canceled a meeting with me when I was back in Southeast Missouri to "clean the church," rather than to hang out with this sinner!

And so on this Memorial Day, we celebrate living veterans, queer veterans, and the deceased giving their lives for us, we celebrate their sacrifice and dedication. This Memorial Day I will take out the veterans on Polk and Haight for a meal, give them thanks for their service, and end the day by walking through the Presidio cemetery in prayer and thanksgiving!

This  June we celebrate "Pride Month", and are declaring to all who want to condemn and dehumanize LGBTQ individuals we are proud to be who we are, children of God!

We can talk about political parties, and

politicians, in their harm or no harm to individuals, but in reality, change comes only through each one of us looking at ourselves, and seeing every human being simply as a child of God, deserving of love and care without regard to sexual orientation, race, creed, and color. Change begins with you and me, and I invite you to join me in donating to the Wounded Warrier Project:

Wounded Warrior Project, P.O. Box 758516, Topeka, Kansas 66675-8516

 Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

============================

Dr. River Damien Sims, sfw, D.Min., D.S.T.

Post Office Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

www.temenos.org

paypal.com

415-305-2124

Dr. River Sims, D.Min., D.S.T.

Director

Certificate in Drug and Alcohol Addiction

Certificate in Spiritual Direction

Certificate In Religious Trauma

(30th Anniversary Celebration!)

October 5, 2024

5:00 p.m.

Victor's Pizza

(Where Bought Youth First Pizza!)

Prayer of St. Brendan!

"Help me to journey beyond the familiar

and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You. Christ of the mysteries I trust in You to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in Your hands.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,

and somehow, make my obedience count for You"

------------------------------------------------

(Temenos and Dr. River seek to remain accessible to everyone. We do not endorse particular causes, political parties, or candidates, or take part in public controversies, whether religious, political or social--Our pastoral ministry is to everyone!

[scentedchildnacho]

Uhm he wanted to know about the motorized bikes if they do it for its inexpense so I said no....their like 600 dollars and up ....i thought they just hate women and enjoy that women died of poverty and deprivation so they could do unsafe awful things

Their capitalist platoons or mai lai incidents they just really hate women....and get into things like Turkish nationalism

Mother God is gone to work with even the illiterate so these types of things back fire mother God would care about the illiterate workers though

The mother God though loves you and wanted you though

It is women counter cultural or other differences would perceive different legislations but iw it is about how much it all hates women

Its women who would treaty the issue uhm places like peets coffee knows they cannot bring bisexual or alternate genders there

Because all gender restrooms finally really batter and kill the bitch

The white light alien knows she was suppose to stop turning down non profit ideas if she was going to public alternate gender activity

No you have to let them go back to private practice women don't have to die supporting every gender

Its for women only to talk about cellulite and work outs so they publicly burn the models and men know their not allowed at those clubs or they wife kill

Well it's men and optical illusion...men know they need transgender stripping ideas and stalk around ass displays like playmates

Its butt and it's only for women to think about these secularisms....we are all of river asylums so

She has to finally do something creepy to the men or its Jesus she isn't dressed to go out and your burning her cannibal

The men stop caring if their perceived as slaughtering playmates so that's why she starts ordering razor wire

Well I suspect it is all just a skam and I will have been really severely psychologically abused but it's just to keep making war money in the mid east and it's just irrational and I don't want to

Anyway mafiaites if they want to hate and blame women illiterate workers become police and he sets up systems of self abuse for them till they learn when they don't hate women a lot of that stops for them

If she wants to prove herself and largely only care about a male domestic abuser....she can buy a high powered bike and scare herself to death get ate up with dogs and hit with cars

Or he is bisexual and he does more choose masculine presences in areas I don't ask pronouns so if he is going to keep stealing things from homeless women like a health club pass to regularly shower he can give it to someone who puts a large tattoo on him....

It's been my experience of California that spa services are taken as very rude requests.....and to not go unless films like the women are correct....if I'm actually from a wealth group that didn't share well with the lady christian who is my masseuse or retailor otherwise it's all into rape punishment.....and as poor and homeless it just gives their practice felonies and im.not sure they arent doing factual things

So I think his tattoo did really hurt and the lotion care applications did give him melanoma or carposi sarcoma like acne

Then they have to put the french cosmetics on it

Dugas is a politic?......

Anyway I just said to him at the time about the bikes that I think they are domestically abused and have never gone through recovery processes to protect themselves because the person who bought the motorized bike claims she is homeless

She can't do anything normal to protect herself like grab a place to stay for a month or purchase her car in advance

She has enough to join a women's military group and may only spend it on getting hit in traffick

So I think they call themselves mental peers and steal it off my program because they can't do anything with it but hurt themselves if it's my programs

Uhm their weird and their told stealing that much off homeless programs will cause COVID clinics so they start slowly getting placed in nightmares out of song of the cell their around indigenous people and appear fooled by the charm and they report people not giving them their developments and this is what it turns them into

I was white and I often report people for turning me into a crowd to klannish watch these executions and see if I can be merciful.....

They create KKK with those types of rejecting of common law ideas then complain when whites are like well you really raped my ass so I know that I don't understand you so I didn't show up at your emergency because you told me my emergency was just a character defect to beat

That's me about what the subtle alliance is in California....if white development and renewal is rejected I get turned into a cannibalistic vampire if indigenous peoples developments and renewals are rejected they get turned into cannibalistic Africans it's that's its that bad sympathy is mostly for just how violent they can make people feel....

They do need to just fly confederate flags then and only do business with their country

She....nya reyes wanted to be a woman and was whipped in all sorts of ways to forcibly serve military duty as a man.....so I think She....figures out he and kind of keeps the kids too

Slaves slave like characters had to grow up in and figure out these post modern counter cultures so

[aizenat]

Not you saying there's nothing about you being negative when you search your name as if posts about you dismissing male victims of abuse just to support a problematic white woman and other users calling you out pls 💀

Listen, this was really fun for a while, but you're making me have to be serious, which obviously isn't fun. So let me read you a bit.

First off, you're lying. Your "posts about you dismissing male victims of abuse" claim isn't a thing at all. The closest thing to a call out post re: me that you'll be able to find in my tag is someone putting me on a block list with random people and ZERO explanation of why. On top of that, that very person has a reputation of making random blocklists for people, and putting them on there despite them being generally left-leaning social liberals who would agree with them on anything. Searching that person's url will bring that up in two seconds. These posts you're pretending to say exist literally don't.

I also know you're lying because never have I ever on my page "dismissed male victims of abuse." If you're trying to reference how I speak out against how Amber Heard was publicly harassed by her abusive ex-husband last year, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, you're trying to defend a loser drunk who has a long history of preying on young and vulnerable women/girls, as well as abuse and violence, who literally texted his friend how he wanted to violently murder her for giggles. I've seen abuse victims deal with that trauma in a lot of ways, and never have I seen one do something like that. Seen plenty of abusers do that, though.

Whether or not Amber Heard is "problematic," it doesn't mean she is incapable of being a victim of abuse and/or misogyny. Implying her being "problematic" immediately means she can't be a victim of these things plays into the perfect victim mindset that literally kills women because, remember, a perfect victim is a dead victim. If a cop racially profiled Kanye West tomorrow and shot and killed him, we would still be upset over the racism of that action despite Kanye being...like that. Someone can hold disgusting views and you can still be disgusted with the way they are oppressed. If Amber not being a perfect victim means she can't be a victim of abuse to you, then that really shows how immature and unintelligent you are. Someone can harbor disgusting views and still be part of a marginalized identity and be a victim to being marginalized. The only way you can say that's not the case is if you believe women are not oppressed. And if we can't even agree on that, then please leave my page because I don't deal with anti-feminists in any capacity.

And to my last point, I really want you to think long and hard about why you decided to take this here over a tag on a fucking gifset. I didn't add to the post, I didn't find the man (whoever he is) to harass him, I didn't go on twitter or online sites where he'd likely see these comments to say this; it was just a random thought I had and wanted to share. The man obviously had work done, at least botox. That's just straight facts. If that annoyed you, a simple unfollow or block would do. If you wanted to send one "hey, that was shitty of you" ask on your way out, then fine.

But you spent all day basically going through my blog looking for things to criticize. You talked about wanting to see what I looked like, obviously so you mock me. You're in my inbox lying about what is being said about me in order to make it seem like I'm some monster. I'm just a random person on tumblr, the least influential social media site, shitposting in my spare time. That's it. There was no reason to take this to this point.

And this is what I mean about the way kpoppies make this not fun. I couldn't reblog something and add something cheeky in the tags without being harassed? All of this over "#idk who this man is but his plastic surgery is very distracting and ugly looking#you get work done then wanna load up on Botox why?" Really? I said a man's botox looked ugly and that warrants you trying to make me look like some horrible person who hates abuse victims or something? Does that even make sense? "Oh, this person dunked on my bias' botox: SHE MUST HATE AND DISMISS ABUSE VICTIMS!"

Like, hello? It's just kpop. It's a billion dollar industry that fuels overworking, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, depression and anxiety, capitalism and consumerism, racism, and misogyny. It doesn't need your defending. And if you decided you didn't like me just for insulting him, that's fine too. You don't need to do that thing where you try to make me "problematic" (I'm not lol) so you can justify it; it's okay to just not like people sometimes. My feelings are not hurt. You are not the first to dislike me, nor will you be the last.

I get that it's the internet and it's easy to not consider the problematic thinking and action patterns that you're engaging in, but when you find yourself rabidly going through someone's page to find "dirt," making up lies about people talking about/calling them out, and sending out hate messages after hate messages, then it's time to log off and take a step back. If you believe yourself to be a good person, and I'm sure you do, then now is a time for self reflection. Be a little self aware. Is this what good people who wish to spread positivity do? Do they send hate anons to strangers all over someone wanting to be a hater for a minute?

So I'm going to turn off anonymous messaging and put you in a bit of a time out so you can calm down and think about how inappropriate you're being. I don't take abuse lightly as I am very familiar with it, and so I will not tolerate you trying to use it as a gotcha all over a fucking gifset of a few kpop idols. One day, I hope you remember your actions today and cringe at how ridiculous you were being. And I really hope you're currently at an age where you'd be able to laugh and think "what a dumb child I was."

[cyarskj1899]

KELLY ROWLAND CHRIS BROWN DESERVES GRACE, FORGIVENESS

Exclusive

11/22/2022 12:20 AM PT

Kelly Rowland says it's beyond time for the public to treat Chris Brown the same as anyone else who royally screws up -- and, yes, she believes that includes forgiving him for beating Rihanna.

We got the 'Destiny's Child' singer in WeHo Monday and asked about her American Music Awards moment -- when she scolded a booing crowd pissed about Chris' win, and then sang his praises.

Check out KR's remarks to our photog, 'cause they're pretty powerful. She says everyone is worthy of second chances, and that we all need a dose of humility ... especially amid our own transgressions. Essentially, it's the Golden Rule she's advocating for here.

Kelly also suggests folks oughta bask in the good, rather than fervently looking to cast stones at every turn -- especially when related to events almost 14 years old, like Chris' Rihanna incident.

In the end, Kelly thinks we all come up short at one point or another -- and we all deserve to start over again.

As she notes, that's what makes us human.

Sent from my iPhone

nah f this!

I'm so fucking tired of people asking US to forgive abusers. Giving grace to the abusers is why it took over a combined fifty years for bill Cosby, r Kelly, Harvey wienstiein among others to pay for their crimes against women and in some cases men. Meanwhile it takes public outrage and attention to make everyone support people like Megan thee stallion or Johnny depp who y’all don’t show grace to because one their abuser is y’alls fave and two with Johnny depp he’s a man who was abused and y’all think that men could never be abuse victims

if his victims do that that’s fine and if they don’t that’s okay as well but that doesn’t mean that we should, I could never forgive anyone who has done what Chris brown did, more than once. Forgiveness is like respect, it’s one thing to ask for it it’s another thing to earn it . If someone abused me or my family it’s my choice to forgive them or not and even if I do don’t expect me to sip tea and sing some kumebya songs with them

If I speak I will breathe fire because she has pissed me off today! Sometimes I wish I was famous so I could publicly tell other famous people

“If you don’t shut the fuck up…”

“This is a bad take”.

“Be quiet, Tiffany!”

Or go “Man, WHAT!?”

I was born to be a hater.

Just be the “Oh, BROTHER, this guy STINKS!”

When niggas do or say something dumb.

“I think the woman beater who continues to terrorize women and who would probably throw me through the wall if I breathed wrong deserves forgiveness”. IF YOUN DON’T GET YO GYATDAMN PICK ME SELF OUT OF MY FACE! Seriously. What the fquck ??? WHAT THE EVER LOVING FQUCK ??? What is the disconnect?? Are you fucking okay!? Are you fqucking serious!?! I hate you fquckers!!! Everyone is entitled to their (stupid ass!!) opinion and I get that but seriously…I’m trying to understand but I just can’t. Maybe I’m refusing. You know? Yeah, I am. Fuck that. It’s insane.

Anyone who still supports that is insane. Eat my ass. suck it! I don’t care. Don’t piss me off. You can go to hell for heaven’s sake

if I was Kelly The correct answer is NO! FUCK THEM! How dare you ask me whenever or not we should forgive anyone who has abuse multiple women and hadn’t shown genuine remorse about it? I can’t defend it. I will never defend it. Who is that we, are we speaking the language of France 🇫🇷 because there is no “we” and never will be I don’t care if it’s not tolerant bc I don’t have to be tolerant of anything I don’t wanna be, especially that. Like what?? Do you even hear yourselves!? It’s my choice to nevverrrr forgive that woman beater just like it’s his choice to be a woman beater. If he wants forgiveness he can take it up with God and repent for his sins and sincerely do so. I’m not God.

with people like him and anyone who defends him it’s not when they go low we go high like Michelle Obama, it’s when they go low we go to the Dante’s inferno with them

I don’t care what anyone says, FUCK THEM. The grace period is over!

FUCK FORGIVING THEM AND FUCK KELLY FOR EVEN THINKING THAT SHOULD BE AN OPTION

She just another black folk that proven that we can’t save everyone

[tressasinterlude]

𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐓 #𝟑: Female Public Figures Dating Men with Questionable Views That Contradict Their Image & Alleged Politics

𝗗𝗜𝗦𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗥: These rant blog posts are really just reflective of my thoughts at the time that I make them and are posted here because I need an outlet to release all of this shit I have going on my busy ass mind. That’s it and that’s all. Now let’s get into it..

This rant was greatly inspired by none other than Ms. Robyn Rihanna “Tell Your Faves To Pull Up [in regards to social injustices directly affecting black people]” Fenty and her openly colorist boyfriend, A$AP Rocky. Aside from the fact that Rihanna tends to slip under the radar and is never held accountable for her problematic ways due to her conventional beauty (i.e. Her heavy usage of anti-Asian slurs, particularly targeted towards Chris Brown’s ex gf, Karrueche), it’s very alarming that a woman who has an entire makeup brand with a campaign based around the inclusivity of ALL black women is publicly flaunting a beau who once said that DSBW do not look good with red lipstick.

And yes, I’m very much aware that Rakim said this tasteless comment over 8 years ago but from the looks of it, not much has really changed with him. Don’t @ me about it neither because I don’t care.

Also peep how he compares a hypothetical darkskinned woman to a man (Wesley Snipes) while trying to explain how his antiblackness isn’t wrong because he said something about white women as well. Gaslighting at its finest. Don’t you just love it! 😀

Furthermore, you would think that somebody of Rihanna’s level of stature would know not to associate themselves with someone as messy as A$AP Rocky but... Stupid is what stupid does, I guess! I can’t even begin to place the blame on him anymore because he’s revealed his true colors and we all have made the deliberate choice to either accept it or don’t and have discontinued all support for him. Unfortunately, misogynoir is never the dealbreaker for most people and the hatred for [dark-skinned] black women is so engrained in society that it’s frowned upon when we publicly speak out against it. Very ass backwards if you ask me but that’s society for you. Now, enough about that. Let’s focus back on Ms. Vita La Coco.

As a woman who claims to be a girl’s girl and is always presenting herself to be someone who is the epitome of a pro-black feminist bad ass, it just makes her alleged activism come off so disingenuous when she’s also laying down with the same man that actively attacks the demographic she’s supposed to be standing in solidarity with. It’s “Black Lives Matter” on the IG posts but your vagina is getting moist for a man who openly stated he doesn’t relate to what goes on in Ferguson because he lives in Soho & Beverly Hills. Ferguson being the exact place where a 17-year-old black boy’s lifeless corpse laid on the hot concrete for FOUR hours after he was murdered by a police officer. He couldn’t 'relate' to the fate of so many black men, women, and children who are murdered or seriously injured from state-sanctioned violence because they’re poor and he is not or so he thought.

But then again, what can I really expect from a woman who identified as being “biracial” until as recent as roughly 6 years ago? What can I really expect from a woman who called Rachel Dolezal a ‘hero’ for cosplaying as a black woman? I’d be lying if I said my expectations for her were high in this regard because sis has always shown us she was lacking in this department. And just for the record, this is not a personal attack on Rihanna at all for the die-hard Navy stans in the back. I admire her latest fashions and bop my head to her music just like the next person but she’s getting the side-eye from me on this one.

Trust and believe me though, she’s not the only woman who I can call out for being a hypocrite. Of course not! This stone can be cast at a few others. So without further ado, why don’t we bring Ms. Kehlani Parrish to the front of the congregation? Prior to Kehlani’s recent declaration of identifying as a lesbian, her last public relationship with a man was with YG. Yes, the same YG who felt it was necessary to say him & Nipsey had ‘pretty light-skinned’ daughters to raise in the middle of his deceased friend’s memorial. By the way, Nipsey’s daughter is not even light (or at least not in my book anyways.) She’s a very deep caramel tone just like her father which makes what he said even more moronic. Yes, the same YG who thought it was clever idea to use slavery as an aesthetic for a music video to a diss track about 6ix9ine. And yes, also the same YG who has derogatory lyrics targeted at bisexual women. Just to end up sweating the red carpets with one. I swear the jokes just continue to write themselves.

This raises the question once more; How high of a pedestal can I really put a multiracial woman who has a song titled ‘N*ggas’ and when received backlash for the song in question, she used the ultimate ‘I’m mixed’ copout while not having a visibly black parent in sight?

It’s also kind of suspicious to me that many were not privy to Kehlani’s secret romance with Victoria Monét (pictured bottom right) until Victoria did an interview with Gay Times revealing she fell in love with a girl but they subsequently broke up because Victoria had a boyfriend and that girl was pregnant in a polyamorous relationship. Fans began to speculate because both Victoria & Kehlani previously candidly spoke about their sexual orientations, Kehlani had just had Adeya and they both were seemingly close. Their short-lived fling would later be confirmed when Victoria released the song ‘Touch Me’ on her last project and Kehlani hopped on the remix. Meanwhile, Kehlani’s relationship with Shaina (pictured bottom left) was very overt and all over her Instagram feed from my recollection. And as you can see, Shaina looks absolutely nothing like Victoria. They look like the complete opposite of eachother in every aspect which is kind of alarming(?) to say the least because why is it that the women she proudly claims as her partners tend to have a very racially ambiguous look such as herself but her ‘sneaky links’ on the other hand are undoubtedly black women? Again, it could just be me jumping conclusions. You know, I’m kinda good for that however something tells me I’m not. Y’all be the judge of the material though.

Last but not least, I’d like to touch on Ms. Raven Tracy very briefly. I was very weary about even including in this segment and if I should just put her in a entirely separate blog post with other women who openly date abusers despite their checkered past (alongside Nicki Minaj & her r*pist murderer of a husband, India Love & Sheck Wes etc.) being this particular blog post was based around the theme of lightskinned/mixed women dating men with extremely problematic views about DSBW. Raven obviously isn’t lightskinned or mixed however I refused to ignore how contradictory her [former] relationship with an alleged (I used this word very loosely and mainly for legality purposes.) serial r*pist while promoting a brand that is all about feminism & body positivity. This also traces back to A$AP Rocky by default being that Ian Connor is his very close friend and he came to Connor’s defense when several women came forward detailing accounts of Connor allegedly s*xually assaulting them. (I wish I could place the actual video of what A$AP Rocky said verbatim but Tumblr only allows one video per blog post. 🙄)

Back in June of this year, Ian & Raven had a back & forth on Twitter after Ian tweeted about Raven “fucking everybody” behind his back. I can only assume that he was alluding to Tori Brixx posting a video of her ex, Rich the Kid & Raven kissing on her story. Disgusted is not even the word to describe my feeling when she admitted she stuck by Ian despite of his many allegations of s*xual abuse because she loved him and her being a empath causes her to want to help everybody. Imagine aiding and abetting a predator and even paying for his bail & legal fees just to turn around and expect sympathy because this same individual cheated on you and exploited you all over Twitter for the public to see. The same man that you would get back with not even a WEEK after the fact & turn off your IG comments because it isn’t our “business” after making it our business...

That being said, I just genuinely want to know: Why do these women completely go against what they stand for in regards to these men? Maybe it was never genuine from jump street and if that’s the case, why jump on the bandwagon of performative activism? Is it because it’s profitable right now? Is it because disrespecting black women is not an immediate death sentence to your careers and more often than not actually helps you advance even further? I guess that’s the billion dollar question that’ll never truly be answered. I just want the world to stop using black women as their stepping stool to get to where they need to go and then discarding of us when we’re no longer beneficial. Support us all the way or don’t support us at all. We deal with enough disrespect as is so we’d appreciate if y’all would stop straddling the fence and partake in your misogynoir out loud if that’s what you choose to do. We have no use for fake allyship and quite frankly, it’s doing more harm for us than good. Please and thank you!

Sincerely,

- 𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂 𝙴𝙳𝙶𝙰𝚁 𝙰𝙻𝙻𝙴𝙽 𝙷𝙾𝙴. 💋

[livlingula]

warning: negative rant post ahead (literally just me ranting my thoughts) 

(if u want to rant in my asks, anon asks are always on and i would love talking through stuff with you) 

first off: the setup. the whole thing to start was messed up, kaceytron brought in a bunch of her friends, her sister, and her chat into a “debate” who were obviously heavily biased towards her and ever towards the start were obviously not going to listen. they had no moderation, let dream get talked over, twisted his words, dictated the flow of conversation, and ignored the actual issues. dream joined to explain stans pov and why they were upset. 

second: the actual problems. they didn’t even THINK to invite poc and lgtbtqa+ (besides her one token friend) people to speak and instead had a bunch of white people....defending a white straight woman. they kept avoiding the root cause of these groups upset, fans didnt do this to cancel her groups did this because they were hurt by her usage of slurs and how she claimed to be advocating for all lgbtqa+ people. they spent the whole time arguing about dream using his private v main (gun violence tw) and if he supports gun violence or not. 

third: dumping trauma on someone. they literally dumped a bunch of trauma, ran, gaslight him into saying random shit, shoved words into his mouth and then went “yeah we barely disagreed about anything” dream has publicly talked about how he’s been in an emotionally abusive relationship and then they go on to just gaslight him into a corner. like i genuinely cannot believe that this 30 year old woman thought, yeah this is a great idea, lets back this 21 year old new cc into talking about his sexuality by trauma dumping. like i genuinely cannot believe i just watched a grow ass woman and her friends basically try and out one of my comfort people on front of 25k people??? and then ignored the fact that her chat was mocking his stutter and asking for people to rephrase things????

fourth: qbaiting. these straight women then proceeded to call dream out for qbaiting. QUEERBAITING IS A MARKETING TACTIC USED FOR FICTION. it is literally used by companies or authors to keep their gay audience interested while not turning off homophobes. dream and george have stated MULTIPLE times that george is straight and have no plans to date. not only did they link dream and george having a naturally flirty friendship to one of their friends getting run over by a tractor in high school, they forced dream to talk about his sexuality. 

(also it’s just very strange that people never call out george for qbaiting and its always dream...when george has openly said he’s straight...something to think about for everyone...) 

DREAM HAS SAID HE DOESN’T WANT HIS SEXUALITY TALKED ABOUT. HE IS UNDISCLOSED AND DOESNT OWE ANYONE ANYTHING. do they not understand how shitty they were to push him into a corner where he could either be accused of qbaiting or telling 25k people live his sexuality. they were all for helping the lgbtqa+ community but then the second someone doesn’t want to disclose they feel forced to. do they even understand how traumatic that can be for someone??

fifth: now that dream has left the call she’s comparing him to trump, making fun of his stuttering, saying he acts different off camera, and is trying to get her fans to mass report his discord. i Am Going to Lose it

tldr: kaceytron apologized for nothing, and she and her friends tried to back dream into a corners about literally every issue under the sun while ignoring all the shit they’re doing, and now are mocking him once he’s left the call. take care of yourselves and my asks are always open

[army-of-mai-lovers]

in which I get progressively angrier at the various tropes of atla fandom misogyny

tbh I think it would serve all of us to have a larger conversation about the specific ways misogyny manifests in this fandom, because I’ve seen a lot of people who characterize themselves as feminists, many of whom are women themselves, discuss the female characters of atla/lok in misogynistic ways, and people don’t talk about it enough. 

disclaimer before I start: I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person who is semi-closeted and thus often read as a woman. I’m speaking to things that I’ve seen that have made me uncomfy, but if any women (esp women existing along other axes of oppression, e.g. trans women, women of color, disabled women, etc) want to add onto this post, please do!

“This female character is a total badass but I’m not even a little bit interested in exploring her as a human being.” 

I’ve seen a lot of people say of various female characters in atla/lok, “I love her! She’s such a badass!” now, this statement on its own isn’t misogynistic, but it represents a pretty pervasive form of misogyny that I’ve seen leveled in large part toward the canon female love interests of one or both of the members of a popular gay ship (*cough* zukka *cough*) I’m going to use Suki as an example of this because I see it with her most often, but it can honestly be applied to nearly every female character in atla/lok. Basically, people will say that they stan Suki, but when it comes time to engage with her as an actual character, they refuse to do it. I’ve seen meta after meta about Zuko’s redemption arc, but I so rarely see people engage with Suki on any level beyond “look at this cool fight scene!” and yeah, I love a cool Suki fight scene as much as anybody else, but I’m also interested in meta and headcanons and fics about who she is as a person, when she isn’t an accessory to Sokka’s development or doing something cool. of course, the material for this kind of engagement with Suki is scant considering she doesn’t have a canon backstory (yet) (don’t let me down Faith Erin Hicks counting on you girl) but with the way I’ve seen people in this fandom expand upon canon to flesh out male characters, I know y’all have it in you to do more with Suki, and with all the female characters, than you currently do. frankly, the most engagement I’ve seen with Suki in mainstream fandom is justifying either zukki (which again, is characterizing her in relation to male characters, one of whom she barely interacts with in canon) or one of the Suki wlw pairings. which brings me to--

“I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!” 

now, I will admit, two of my favorite atla ships are yueki and mailee, and so I totally understand being interested in these characters’ dynamics, even if, as is the case with yueki, they’ve never interacted canonically. however, it becomes a problem for me when these ships are always in the background of a zukka fic. at some point, it becomes obvious that you like this ship because it gets either Zuko or Sokka’s female love interests out of the way, not because you actually think the characters would mesh well together. It’s bad form to dislike a female character because she gets in the way of your gay ship, so instead, you find another girl to pair her off with and call it a day. to be clear, I’m not saying that everybody who ships either mailee or yueki (or tysuki or maisuki or yumai or whatever other wlw rarepair involving Zuko or Sokka’s canon love interests) is nefariously trying to sideline a female character while acting publicly as if she’s is one of their faves--far from it--but it is noteworthy to me how difficult it is to find content that centers wlw ships, while it’s incredibly easy to find content that centers zukka in which mailee and/or yueki plays a background role. 

also, notice how little traction wlw Katara ships gain in this fandom. when’s the last time you saw yuetara on your dash? there’s no reason for wlw Katara ships to gain traction in a fandom that is so focused on Zuko and Sokka getting together, bc she doesn’t present an immediate obstacle to that goal (at least, not an obstacle that can be overcome by pairing her up with a woman). if you are primarily interested in Zuko and Sokka’s relationship, and your queer readings of other female characters are motivated by a desire to get them out of the way for zukka, then Katara’s canon m/f relationship isn’t a threat to you, and thus, there’s no reason to read her as potentially queer. Or even, really, to think about her at all. 

“Katara’s here but she’s not actually going to do anything, because deep down, I’m not interested in her as a person.” 

the show has an enormous amount of textual evidence to support the claim that Sokka and Katara are integral parts of each other’s lives. so, she typically makes some kind of appearance in zukka content. sometimes, her presence in the story is as an actual character with layers and nuance, someone whom Sokka cares about and who cares about Sokka in return, but also has her own life and goals outside of her brother (or other male characters, for that matter.) sometimes, however, she’s just there because halfway through writing the author remembered that Sokka actually has a sister who’s a huge part of the show they’re writing fanfiction for, and then they proceed to show her having a meetcute with Aang or helping Sokka through an emotional problem, without expressing wants or desires outside of those characters. I’m honestly really surprised that I haven’t seen more people calling out the fact that so much of Katara’s personality in fanon revolves around her connections to men? she’s Aang’s girlfriend, she’s Sokka’s sister, she’s Zuko’s bestie. never mind that in canon she spends an enormous amount of time fighting against (anachronistic, Westernized) sexism to establish herself as a person in her own right, outside of these connections. and that in canon she has such interesting complex relationships with other female characters (e.g. Toph, Kanna, Hama, Korra if you want to write lok content) or that there are a plethora of characters with whom she could have interesting relationships with in fanon (Mai, Suki, Ty Lee, Yue, Smellerbee, and if you want to write lok content, Kya II, Lin, Asami, Senna, etc). to me, the lack of fandom material exploring Katara’s relationships with other women or with herself speak to a profound indifference to Katara as a character. I’m not saying you have to like Katara or include her in everything you write, but I am asking you to consider why you don’t find her interesting outside of her relationships with men.

“I hate Katara because she talks about her mother dying too often.” 

this is something I’ve seen addressed by people far more qualified than I to address it, but I want to mention it here in part because when I asked people which fandom tropes they wanted me to talk about, this came up often, but also because I find it really disgusting that this is a thing that needs to be addressed at all. Y’all see a little girl who watched her mother be killed by the forces of an imperialist nation and say that she talks about it too much??? That is a formational, foundational event in a child’s life. Of course she’s going to talk about it. I’ve seen people say that she doesn’t talk about it that often, or that she only talks about it to connect with other victims of fn imperialism e.g. Jet and Haru, but frankly, she could speak about it every episode for no plot-significant reason whatsoever and I would still be angry to see people say she talks about it too much. And before you even bring up the Sokka comparison, people deal with grief in different ways. Sokka  repressed a lot of his grief/channeled it into being the “man” of his village because he knew that they would come for Katara next if he gave them the opportunity. he probably would talk about his mother more if a) he didn’t feel massive guilt at not being able to remember what she looked like, and b) he was allowed to be a child processing the loss of his mother instead of having to become a tiny adult when Hakoda had to leave to help fight the fn. And this gets into an intersection with fandom racism, in that white fans (esp white American fans) are incapable of relating to the structural trauma that both Sokka and Katara experience and thus can’t see the ways in which structural trauma colors every single aspect of both of their characters, leading them to flatten nuance and to have some really bad takes. And you know what, speaking of bad fandom takes--   

“Shitting on Mai because she gets in the way of my favorite Zuko ship is actually totally okay because she’s ~abusive~” 

y’all WHAT. 

ok listen, I get not liking maiko. I didn’t like it when I first got into fandom, and later I realized that while bryke cannot write romance to save their lives, fans who like maiko sure can, so I changed my tune. but if you still don’t like it, that’s fine. no skin off my back. 

what IS skin off my back is taking instances in which Mai had justified anger toward Zuko, and turning it into “Mai abused Zuko.” do you not realize how ridiculous you sound? this is another thing where I get so angry about it that I don’t know how useful my analysis is actually going to be, but I’ll do my best. numerous people have noted how analysis of Mai and Zuko’s breakup in “The Beach” or Mai being justifiably angry with him at Boiling Rock or her asking for FUCKING FRUIT in “Nightmares and Daydreams” that says that all of these events were her trying to gain control over him is....ahhh...lacking in reading comprehension, but I’d like to go a step further and talk about why y’all are so intent on taking down a girl who doesn’t show emotion in normative ways. obviously, there’s a “Zuko can do no wrong” aspect to Mai criticism (which is super weird considering how his whole arc is about how he can do lots of wrong and he has to atone for the wrong that he’s done--but that’s a separate post.) But I also see slandering Mai for not expressing her emotions normatively and not putting up with Zuko’s shit and slandering Katara for “talking about her mother too often” as two sides of the same coin. In both cases, a female character expresses emotions that make you, the viewer, uncomfortable, and so instead of attempting to understand where those emotions may have come from and why they might be manifesting the way they are, y’all just throw the whole character away. this is another instance of people in the fandom being fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the female characters of atla in a real way, except instead of shallowly “stanning” Mai, y’all hate her. so we get to this point where female characters are flattened into one of two things: perfect queens who can do no wrong, or bitches. and that’s not who they are. that’s not who anyone is. but while we as a fandom are pretty good at understanding b1 Zuko’s actions as layered and multifaceted even though he’s essentially an asshole then, few are willing to lend the same grace to any female character, least of all Mai. 

and what’s funny is sometimes this trope will intersect with “I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”, so you’ll have someone actively calling Mai toxic/problematic/abusive, and at the same time ship her with Ty Lee? make it make sense! but then again, maybe that’s happening because y’all are fundamentally disinterested in Ty Lee as a character too. 

“I love Ty Lee so much that I’m going to treat her like an infantilized hypersexual airhead!” 

there are so many things happening in y’alls characterization of Ty Lee that I struggled to synthesize it into one quippy section header. on one hand, you have the hypersexualization, and on the other hand, you have the infantilization, which just makes the hypersexualization that much worse. 

(of course, sexualizing or hypersexualizing ANY atla character is really not the move, considering that these are child characters in a children’s show, but then again, that’s a separate post.) 

now, I understand how, from a very, very surface reading of the text, you could come to the conclusion that Ty Lee is an uncomplicated bimbo. if you grew up on Western media the way I did, you’ll know that Ty Lee has a lot of the character traits we associate with bimbos: the form-fitting pink crop top, the general conventional attractiveness, the ditzy dialogue. but if you think about it for more than three seconds, you’ll understand that Ty Lee has spent her whole life walking a tightrope, trying to please Azula and the rest of the royal family while also staying true to herself. Ty Lee and Azula’s relationship is a really complex and interesting topic that I don’t really have time to explore at the moment given how long this post is, but I’d argue that Ty Lee’s constant, vocal  adulation is at least partially a product of learning to survive at court at an early age. Like Mai, she has been forced to regulate her emotions as a member of fn nobility, but unlike Mai, she also has six sisters who look exactly like her, so she has a motivation to be more peppy and more affectionate to stand out. 

fandom does not do the work to understand Ty Lee. as is a theme with this post, fandom is actively disinterested in investigating female characters beyond a very surface level reading of them. Thus, fandom takes Ty Lee’s surface level qualities--her love of the color pink, her revealing standard outfit, and the fact that once she found a boy attractive and also once a lot of boys found her attractive--and they stretch this into “Ty Lee is basically Karen Smith from Mean Girls.” thus, Ty Lee is painted as a bimbo, or more specifically, as not smart, uncritically adoring of Azula (did y’all forget all the non-zukka bits of Boiling Rock?), and attractive to the point of hypersexualization. I saw somebody make a post that was like “I wish mailee was more popular but I’m also glad it isn’t because otherwise people would write it as Mai having to put up with her dumb gf” and honestly I have to agree!! this is one instance in which I’m glad that fandom doesn’t discuss one of my favorite characters that often because I hate the fanon interpretation of Ty Lee, I think it’s rooted in misogyny (particularly misogyny against East Asian women, which often takes the form of fetishizing them and viewing them only through a Western white male gaze)  

(side note: here at army-of-mai-lovers, we stan bimbos. bimbos are fucking awesome. I personally don’t read Ty Lee as a bimbo, but if that’s you, that’s fucking awesome. keep doing what you’re doing, queen <3 or king or monarch, it’s 2021, anyone can be a bimbo, bitches <3)

“Toph can and will destroy everyone here with her bare hands because she’s a meathead who likes to murder people and that’s it!”  

Toph is, and always has been, one of my favorite ATLA characters. My very first fic in fandom was about her, and she appears prominently in a lot of my other work as well. One thing that I am always struck by with Toph is how big a heart she has. She’s independent, yes, snarky, yes, but she cares about people--even the family that forced her to make herself smaller because they didn’t believe that their blind daughter could be powerful and strong. Her storyline is powerful and emotionally resonant, her bending is cool precisely because it’s based in a “wait and listen” approach instead of just smashing things indiscriminately, she’s great disabled rep, and overall one of the best characters in the show. 

And in fandom, she gets flattened into “snarky murder child.” 

So where does this come from? Well, as we all know, Toph was originally conceived of as a male character, and retained a lot of androgyny (or as the kids call it, Gender) when she was rewritten as a female character. There are a lot of cultural ideas about androgynous/butch women being violent, and people in fandom seem to connect that larger cultural narrative with some of Toph’s more violent moments in the show to create the meathead murder child trope, erasing her canon emotionality, softness, heart, and femininity in the process. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t write or characterize Toph as being violent or snarky at all ever, because yeah, Toph definitely did do Earth Rumbles a lot before joining the gaang, and yeah, Toph is definitely a sarcastic person who makes fun of her friends a lot. What I am saying is that people take these traits, sans the emotional logic, marry them to their conception of androgynous/butch women as violent/unemotional/uncaring, and thus create a caricature of Toph that is not at all up to snuff. When I see Toph as a side character in a fic (because yeah, Toph never gets to be a main character, because why would a fandom obsessed with one male character in particular ever make Toph a protagonist in her own right?) she’s making fun of people, killing people, pranking people, etc, etc. She’s never talking to people about her emotions, or palling around with her found family, or showing that she cares about her friends. Everything about her relationship with her parents, her disability, her relationship to Gender, and her love of her friends is shoved aside to focus on a version of Toph that is mean and uncaring because people have gotten it into their heads that androgynous/butch women are mean and uncaring. 

again, we see a female character who does not emote normatively or in a way that makes you, the viewer, comfortable, and so you warp her character until she’s completely unrecognizable and flat. and for what? 

Azula

no, I didn’t come up with a snappy name for this section, mainly because fanon interpretations of Azula and my own feelings toward the character are...complicated. I know there were some people who wanted me to write about Azula and the intersection of misogyny and ableism in fanon interpretations of her character, but I don’t think I can deliver on that because I personally am in a period of transition with how I see Azula. that is to say, while I still like her and believe that she can be redeemed, there is a lot of merit to disliking her. the whole point of this post is that the female characters of ATLA are complex people whom the fandom flattens into stereotypes that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or dislike for reasons that don’t make sense. Azula, however, is a different case. the rise of Azula defenders and Azula stans has led to this sentiment that Azula is a 14 y/o abuse victim who shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions. it seems to me that people are reacting to a long, horrible legacy of male ATLA fans armchair diagnosing Azula with various personality disorders (and suggesting that people with those personality disorders are inherently monstrous and unlovable which ahhhh....yikes) and then saying that those personality disorders make her unlovable, which is quite obviously bad. and hey, I get loving a character that everyone else hates and maybe getting so swept up in that love that you forget that your fave is complicated and has made some unsavory choices. it sucks that fanon takes these well-written, complex villains/antiheroes and turns them into monsters with no critical thought whatsoever. but the attitude among Azula stans that her redemption shouldn’t be hard, that her being a child excuses all of the bad things that she’s done, that she is owed redemption....all of that rubs me the wrong way. I might make another post about this in the future that discusses this in more depth, but as it stands now: while I understand that there is a legacy of misogynistic, ableist, unnuanced takes on Azula, the backlash to that does not take into account the people she hurt or the fact that in ATLA she does not make the choice to pursue redemption. and yes, Zuko had help in making that choice that Azula didn’t, and yes, Azula is a victim of abuse, but in a show about children who have gone through untold horrors and still work to better the lives of the people around them, that is not enough for me to uncritically stan her. 

Conclusion    

misogyny in this fandom runs rampant. while there are some tropes of fandom misogyny that are well-documented and have been debunked numerous times, there are other, subtler forms of misogyny that as far as I know have gone completely unchecked. 

what I find so interesting about misogyny in atla fandom is that it’s clear that it’s perpetrated by people who are aware of fandom misogyny who are actively trying not to be misogynistic. when I first joined atla fandom last summer, memes about how zukka fandom was better than every other fandom because they didn’t hate the female characters who got in the way of their gay ship were extremely prevalent, and there was this sense that *this* fandom was going to model respectful, fun, feminist online fandom. not all of the topes I’ve outlined are exclusive to or even largely utilized in zukka fandom, but a lot of them are. I’ve been in and out of fandom since I was eleven years old, and most of the fandom spaces I’ve been in have been majority-female, and all of them have been incredibly misogynistic. and I always want to know why. why, in these communities created in large part by women, in large part for women, does misogyny run wild? what I realize now is that there’s never going to be a one-size fits all answer to that question. what’s true for 1D fandom on Wattpad in 2012 is absolutely not true for atla fandom on tumblr in 2021. the answers that I’ve cobbled together for previous fandoms don’t work here. 

so, why is atla fandom like this? why did the dream of a feminist fandom almost entirely focused on the romantic relationship between two male characters fall apart? honestly, I think the notion that zukka fandom ever was this way was horrifically ignorant to begin with. from my very first moment in the fandom, I was seeing racism, widespread sexualization of minors, and yes, misogyny. these aspects of the fandom weren’t talked about as much as the crocverse or other, much more fun aspects. further, atla (specifically zukka) fandom misogyny often doesn’t look like the fandom misogyny we’ve become familiar with from like, Sherlock fandom or what have you. for the most part, people don’t actively hate Suki, they just “stan” without actually caring about her. they hate Mai because they believe in treating male victims of abuse equally. they’re not characterizing Toph poorly, they’re writing her as a “strong woman.” in short, people are misogynistic, and then invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of feminist theory to shield themselves from accusations of misogyny. it’s not unlike the way some people will invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of critical race theory to shield themselves from accusations of racism, or how they’ll talk about “freedom of speech” and “the suppression of women’s sexuality” to justify sexualizing minors. the performance of feminism and antiracism is what’s important, not the actual practice. 

if you’ve made it this far, first off, hi, thanks so much for reading, I know this was a lot. second, I would seriously encourage you to be aware of these fandom tropes and to call them out when you see them. elevate the voices of fans who do the work of bringing the female characters of atla to life. invest in the wlw ships in this fandom. drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic (please, drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic). read some yuetara. let’s all be honest about where we are now, and try to do better in the future. I believe in us. 

[yasminbenoit]

“A Romantic Partner Won’t Complete Me, Because I Was Born Complete”: How Identifying As Asexual & Aromantic Brought Me True Freedom & Happiness | Yasmin Benoit for British Vogue

There is a phase in our lives where everyone seems asexual and almost everyone seems aromantic. It wasn't until puberty kicked in that platonic relationships seemed to take a backseat. My peers stopped wanting to play together and started wanting to 'date' each other. That was when I started to realise that there was something different about me. I didn’t seem to be experiencing the same urges as those I was around. I chose to go to an all girls school in the hopes that – in the absence of boys – everyone would stop caring about sex and dating. It actually had the opposite effect. There was a sense of deprivation in the air and the heightened desire to project their sexuality onto anything and everything.  

Therefore, my lack of interest became even more obvious, and it became a not-so-fun game to work out the source of what should be troubling me, but hadn’t been until that point. Having a sexual orientation isn’t just natural, it’s essential. It’s part of being a fully-functional human being. And to be romantically love and be loved by another is the ultimate goal. It’s part of being normal, which made me both abnormal and puzzling. When your asexual, people think there’s something wrong with your body. When you’re aromantic, they think there’s something wrong with your soul. Even for a teenage girl who internalised all of Disney Channel’s “be yourself” messages, it’s never nice to have people publicly debate your supposed physical and psychological flaws.  

My nickname in school was “hollow and emotionless.” I was a joker with a decent amount of friends, but I was lacking something crucial, the kind of love that really mattered and the kind of lust that made life exciting...so I was practically Lord Voldemort with braids. I sat through the regular DIY sexuality tests, having my peers show me graphic sexual imagery, have very sexual conversations in my presence, and ask me inappropriately intimate questions to gauge how far gone I truly was. These tests lead to the development of theories, most centred around me having some kind of mental problem. After a while, you start to wonder if everyone knows something you don’t.

When they said that I must have been molested as a child and “broken” by the trauma, I wondered if I had somehow forgotten about sexual abuse that actually hadn’t happened. I looked at some of my own relatives with suspicion, the same people who would later ask me if I didn’t experience sexual attraction because I was a pedophile. It was suggested that I was “suffering” from my “issues” because I was socially anxious and insecure. The suggestion that my ‘issue’ was pathological stayed with me for a long time, but not as much as the widely accepted theory that I was mentally slow. Unfortunately, that one stuck. I was referred to as “stupid” and I started to believe that was the case. It would impact my experience in education for the next eight years, long after I realised that there was a word for what I was.

Asexual.

I first heard the word during one of the near-daily sexuality tests that I was subjected to. I was asked if I was gay, to which I said that I wasn’t interested in anybody like that – men or women. At fifteen, I was asked, “Maybe you’re asexual or something?” but it wasn’t quite a lightbulb moment. How could it be when I had never heard the word outside of biology class? After an evening of Google searching, I realised that there were many people with my exact same experience, complete strangers whose stories sounded so strangely similar to mine. I also stumbled across the word ‘aromantic,’ but at the time, I didn’t understand the need for it. "Wouldn't all asexual people be aromantic? A romantic relationship without sex is just friendship with rules,” I thought.

Either way, my discoveries showed me that I wasn’t alone, but that only half helpful. I now had an identity that no one had heard of or understood. Most didn’t believe that being asexual or aromantic was a real thing, and I doubted it to. I had been taught to after years of armchair pathologisation. If asexuality was real, why did no one tell you that being sexually attracted to nobody was an option? What if it was just an internet identity made up to comfort people with all of the issues that had been attributed to me? I didn’t have to go far down the rabbit hole to realise that asexuality, like many non-heteronormative identities, had been medicalised. What I had experienced as just the tip of the iceberg. As someone who hadn’t been prescribed drugs I didn’t need or subjected to unnecessary hormone tests, I was one of the lucky ones.

My activism would be my gateway to the community. Despite being the ugly friend at school, I ended up becoming a model while in university. I decided to use the platform I had gained through my career to raise awareness for asexuality and aromanticism. It gave me the opportunity to encounter a range of asexual and aromantic offline, it was then that I learned the significance of having an aromantic identity. There are many asexual people who still feel romantic attraction, as well as aromantic people who still feel sexual attraction. They have their own range of experiences, their own culture, their own flag, and like the asexual community, I was relieved to see that they are just normal people. These intersecting communities are not stereotypes. They weren’t just thirteen year old, pink haired kids making up identities on Tumblr to feel special. They were parents, lawyers, academics, husbands, girlfriends, artists, black, white, young, old, with differing feelings towards the many complex elements of sexuality and intimacy. Most importantly, they were happy.

I am proud to be part of both, and I know that while being asexual and aromantic, I am a complete person and I can live a perfectly fulfilling life. Since meeting members of my communities, I’ve become more open about my identities in real life, and a reaction I’m often met with is sympathy. “You must feel like you’re missing out,” “I can’t imagine being like that,” “It must be hard for your family,” “Do you worry no one will want you?” “How do you handle being so lonely?” “You’re so brave and strong,” “What will you do with your life now?” Even in 2021, a woman who isn’t romantically loved or sexually desired by their “special someone” is perceived as being afflicted with some kind of life-limiting condition.  

Asexuality doesn't make undesirable or unable to desire others. It is a unique experience of sexuality, not a deprivation from it. Even if it was, there is so much more to life than what turns us on and what we do about it. Romantic love is just one form of love, neither superior nor inferior to any other. Being aromantic doesn't mean that you can't love or be loved, it does not mean you are void of other emotions or capabilities. I am not lonely with my friends, family, co-workers and supporters. I feel confident not when someone wants to date me but when I meet my goals and form worthwhile connections with others. My success isn't determined by whether someone will want to marry me someday. What we want out of life is our decision alone, our sources of happiness should not be defined by our ever-changing, culturally relative social standards. The love of a romantic partner won't complete me because I was born complete. Feeling sexual attraction to others won't liberate me because my liberation is not dependent on other people.

Valentine's Day is on the horizon. It's an occasion that amps up the focus on (and the pressure to achieve) a very specific type of love and sexual expression, one that is actually alienating for people inside and outside of the asexual community. During a pandemic where many relationships have been strained, tested, formed or distanced, it's important to keep the diversity of romantic and sexual feelings in mind. Many expect me to feel annoyed or lonely during this time of year, but I actually feel empowered and excited by the way sex, romance and love are discussed more deeply around this time. These conversations are constantly expanding to become more inclusive for everyone, and that's what we need to see all year round.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/asexuality-and-aromanticism