#literally it’s just ‘do you view sex with respect or do you still internalize that it’s shameful and humiliating’

[beefbroganoff]

The idea of ‘I would never sexualize my friends’ is really weird to me bc in this mindset where you would never so much as THINK a sexual thought about a stranger, much less someone you ALREADY ENJOY THE COMPANY OF!!!! how do you think you will ever grow into a consensual sexual relationship??? Being friends is like step 1 of caring enough to want to put your dick and/or hole in or around someone? It’s like reverse friendzone theory or something

[stressfulsloth]

In regards to your post “and now I'm. Just thinking about the loneliness that is SO pervasive through Elysium.”…

I have one thing to offer, or perhaps nitpick if you’d prefer it that way.

I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say the Sunday Friend isn’t a real friend. The Smoker On The Balcony believes him to be a real friend, even if he isn’t going to be there come Monday morn. But isn’t that enough? A friend on Sunday is still a friend, even if it makes waking up Monday all the worse.

Perhaps I’m biased though! Now that I think about it, most of my friends would fit the description. “Fair weather friend” feels to cold, but “sunday friend” is good enough.

And of course none of this is to say your post is at all wrong. It’s lovely and true. I just felt the need to quarrel publicly with that little detail.

To conclude, since I really just did not make myself very clear here; you are utterly correct to include the Sunday Friend in a post about loneliness but I take slight issue with saying he’s not a real friend. And so I wrote you a very long ask. And now as I reach it’s end I’m realising this was a very silly undertaking. But I’ve come this far so I’m going to grow a pair and hit “ask”.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope it isn’t too desperately obnoxious.

Peace out ✌️

Ahh man I'm sorry anon but I'm going to have to disagree with you pretty strongly here 😅 tbh I was a little too easy on him in the original post. It's not necessarily the temporary nature of their acquaintance that makes the Sunday Friend's friendship questionable on its own, although it doesn't help.

The Sunday Friend is quite literally not a friend. "Friend" in his title is a euphemism; he's not coming to visit the Smoker because he's his friend. He's coming to visit the smoker to do a bit of poverty tourism, to admire the crumbling place that his beliefs have helped to destroy, and a bit of heavily implied sex tourism too. A "first world" tourist, a bureaucrat from the international government, visiting one of the most impoverished districts of Revachol to spend his nights with a student. He's not the Smoker's friend, he's a client. They're using 'friend' as a stand-in for his actual role, which is a) as a part of the moralist bureaucratic system repressing the revolution and keeping the city as a whole trapped in a laissez faire purgatory easily exploited by foreign capitalists and ultraliberals, while still maintaining a friendly respectable face, and b) as the Smoker's customer, exploiting the poverty of Martinaise's residents to get what he wants for cheap and using the easy mobility that his money and status give him. Imo he's intended narratively as a parallel for the moralist coalition government; he views from a distance, focused on money and *ze price stabilité* but entirely divorced from the poverty and consequence of his work. Happy to dip his toe in and make use of exploitable populations in Revachol, but always ready to leave too. When asked how he became 'friends' with the smoker, his response is literally to describe the coalition occupying Revachol.

He knows so little about the Smoker beyond him being there to study art, but what kind? "Perhaps graphic design? Printmaking? Who knows?" As to your point about the Smoker thinking he's a real friend, the Smoker is under no illusions about who the Sunday Friend is. An injection of money. Someone with power, someone with the mobility afforded to him by ownership of a non-Revacholian passport, someone content to watch the place decay and do nothing but indulge himself in pet projects and worry about bureaucracy. Someone with the freedom to leave when things get bad; a freedom that is narratively only assigned to a rare few extremely bourgeois characters. Dora, on her flight to Mirova, Joyce and her boat, Trant and his academic travels, and the Sunday Friend who will be out of Martinaise like a shot the moment things start to kick off despite being a part of the overarching structure that is responsible for Revachol's subjugation and rising political tensions. The Sunday Friend will use the Smoker's labour, use the vulnerability of Revachol's precarious situation to his advantage, then once it becomes too precarious or he gets bored, he'll withdraw. In answer to your question, no, I don't think that's enough. Again I probably oversimplified in my last post but the loneliness all throughout DE is not just an emotional state but a political one. Alienation is a major theme. As is the impossibility of building community in the face of capitalism relentlessly subsuming anything in its path, in the face of shallow relationships dictated by the need for survival. The Sunday Friend embodies that concept perfectly. He is exquisitely shallow in conversation, a perfect moralist who at all times strives to remain impartial and distant.

Anyway. Tldr; my point is that the relationship between the Smoker and the Sunday Friend is far more transactional, and far more exploitative, than you seem to believe. "Friend" is not being used literally but euphemistically. A 'fairweather friend' is better than none, sure, but that's entirely inapplicable to this situation. Sorry for the long post and I hope it's not too rambling- I'm surviving on very little sleep right now but I hope it clears up for you a bit why I referred to the Sunday friend in that way initially.

[wyrmzier]

1, 2 for as many as you want, and bonus 6 and 18 if you're up for it :))

1. What's your oc's gender identity? What's their relationship to their gender?

Ceall would be considered a trans man. He identifies simply in canon as a man. Ceall, I think, has a complex relationship with gender and a bit of internalized misogyny. In his world, women have more rights and are more respected. However, Ceall is the product of the old ways of thinking about women. His own strenuous relationship with his mother strained his view on womanhood, especially as he was raised mostly by his grandfather and uncle to be a warrior.

I think Ceall was also afraid of what happened to his mother happening to him. I'm not implying in anyway that Ceall's internal conflict with womanhood is what made him trans. I think no matter what he'd figure out he was a boy. He just has an honest fear, and been looked down upon by adults in his life when he was a "woman" which pushed him to transition earlier. No matter what womanhood never felt right.

Ceall I imagine was a little shit head about this until he became a soldier surprisingly and the death of his grandfather. Ceall I think learns to respect women as he gets into his 20s and interacts with them more and with his grandfather not whispering in his ear, but moreso I think he just doesn't respect himself. His views and ideas get challenged a lot with his daughter Fiadh and his sisters. Ceall also needs to examine his view of manhood too but I digress.

2. What's your oc's orientation? (Romantic/sexual/platonic alterous ect) Do they have opinions about it?

I'll go with Ceall again :3. Ceall I think in modern terms would be considered bisexual. In text he speaks often of the women he's slept with, there's an old soldier he supposedly has history with, and his love interest is a prince. Ceall often feels like he HAS to marry a woman (in his world same sex marriage doesn't exist), so he's avoided it for a long time especially as he can't actually have children which is another thing he's expected to have, but being in the Otherworld now he can marry who he wants (but still with the expectation to have children).

Ceall has no real opinions on his sexuality. He's not even the hugest fan of sex. Ceall usually has sex so he can feel in control, especially as his life feels out of control. So to him, it doesn't matter who he sleeps with. Ceall has not "dated" anyone because that would imply he may wish to marry them, up until Ódhran.

(Sketch of Ceall by @rennybu )

6. How does your oc feel about labels? Theirs, or in general?

I'm gonna go with Karma for this one. Karma identities as aroace. She LOVES being aroace and has no shame in it. Karma generally is a person that exists without shame. Karma grew up with a loving found family of sex workers and was very educated and at 18 was allowed to even work at the clubs as a waiter. Karma has seen it all and not one thing has sparked her interest. Which in Karma's mind means she's free forever! Her parents had a very unhappy marriage, and marriage felt very forced on her too. But Karma is happy by herself with her beloved cat and her found family.

For labels in general I feel like Karma is watching her friends have existential crisis about their sexuality and she's playing beyblade in the corner

18. Do you prefer to give your ocs specific labels, or keep it unspecified? Why? If applicable, do you change their labels depending on circumstance?

Hm! I think a bit of both. Usually I know what my ocs label would be in a modern setting in my head, but I usually don't apply them in canon since most of my ocs wouldn't have those words or labels. Like I usually have Zipporah in canon describe himself as a man born in the wrong body, or if he were to speak in his mother tongue of Hebrew he may refer to himself as a *zachar* or *androgynos*.

For the "why", why do I give specific labels in my head? I literally can't not do that, my brain doesn't allow any "unknowns" especially if it can easily be known. Zipporah doesn't identity with his birth gender so in a modern setting he'd be considered trans. Why deny the label if you just already know it?

For changing labels, sure, if the need arises, they change irl all the time.

[butch-reidentified]

i know it’s none of my business, but if you mind sharing, why did you get top surgery? i haven’t heard of any woman who has gotten it for reasons further than being transgender (or medical ones)

I dont mind; it's just a bit complex and hard to communicate. I've found that whenever I try to on here, people end up misinterpreting a lot of it. I'm willing to try tho, esp since I've previously talked about it only in specific contexts and not just discussed all the reasons.

I had a few reasons, and part of it was medical (primarily bc of constant painful cysts), and I did have what I think may be a version of "sex dysphoria" (tho I'm not 100% bc other ppl describe sex dysphoria so differently & I didn't have body image issues or care how I looked to others or in the mirror) where my breasts felt (felt as in a literal physical sensation) like a prosthesis that I was wearing all the time. I had genuinely gorgeous, ideal-by-societal-standards breasts, and I actually quite liked them aesthetically. but they got in the way a lot and caused all the usual issues that large breasts do, so I was gonna get a reduction regardless. I was kinda like, why not go all the way and then I won't have to deal with cysts or that odd sensation I mentioned? I think it kind of comes down to that + the fact I knew I'd enjoy being a butch woman with a flat chest.

but then I also kind of got this sense of amusement from the idea of removing from existence a pair of breasts that sooo many people who saw them called flawless, just because they were "too perfect for this world to have." that's now the reason I give men who ask me about it, bc the reactions are honestly priceless.

I did a whole ton of research, including a lot of exploring stories of women who regretted doing this for the pupose of checking my motivations for pursuing it, my external and internal contexts around it, and my thought process and actual process I had designed for myself to complete before "clearing" myself to go forward with it - the idea being if any of those were a match with anything I read in a regret testimony, I would not move forward. I did therapy as well, specifically not affirming and with the woman who was my therapist after surviving the Pulse shooting in 2016, who I trust and respect deeply and who is not particularly on board with trans stuff or the new brand of "feminism." And I waited over 4 years from when I first thought about it to do all the above, and so it wouldn't be at all impulsive as I'd had a lot of time to dig deep, analyze, try other options, and really think hard about it/how I'd feel. And so I'd be old enough that my prefrontal cortex was more or less done cooking 😅

I'm not really sure either way if I would do it now if I still had them, but that's only bc I'm informed about the cosmetic surgery industry now in ways I wasn't then, and as a result, I'm opposed to giving that industry my money. But it would still be a tough call if I'm honest. I really like the way my chest is now. I'm quite happy with it and find it much more convenient in several ways, so I couldn't honestly say I have any regrets about it.

I truly had zero desire to be viewed as a man or "nonbinary" and went a bit overboard making sure people knew that for a while after my surgery. My misandry runs too deep to ever not love being a woman, no matter what the world is like, if I'm honest. I am so madly in love with womanhood and sisterhood and being a lesbian and female solidarity and devoting my life, body and "soul," to women's liberation. It's my cardinal raison d'être. And I do think there's some good can be done by an extremely gnc woman with no breasts who's loud and proud about being a woman.

[ugly-anarchist]

I know you're probably going to respond really immaturely to this so my expectations are low but.

I just want to say that people ARE in fact killed over romance. Some countries like Pakistan and India have strict social norms surrounding romance (and yes they frown upon even the most typical non-interfaith cishet romantic couple you can think of). They prioritise arranged marriage and while the situation is changing a bit, lots of people have and still do face violence such as honor killings, being forced into marriage, being married as literal children, etc.

Due to the fear and hatred around romance these societies have created in order to control people. Im south asian myself and my country does this about romance. Its not always so easy for people everywhere to engage in romance without facing abuse or violence. In talking about the things you do on this blog, please don't ignore the reality of people other than yourself. Just because where YOU live people only face that over sex, doesn't mean that its the same everywhere in every single culture.

And by the way, Im aromantic as well and I have to say that treating something neutral (that can be harmful or beneficial or neutral depending on how someones romance is) as inherently harmful is a dick move even if no society in the whole entire world held these views.

You are allowed to hate romance and not want anything to do with it. I think that experience is great and should always be supported. I hope romance repulsed people are able to avoid romance and have ppl respect their boundaries. The only problem comes when anyone, because I really don't think ONLY romance repulsed people do this from my experience, decides to act like romance is *inherently* immoral and harmful.

That ideology can and will harm people. Just like how being sex negative wouldn't suddenly become ok if the world happened to be completely sex positive and never sex negative in any way.

"I know you're going to respond immaturely" is a really great way to start an ask and definitely paints you as the more "mature" and "reasonable" one anon /s

It's almost like... I never actually said that romance was inherently bad and that actually what I said was that how romance is depicted in most English speaking countries there's an underlying implication of ownership that's really toxic

It's almost like I never said what you're claiming I said and you're putting words in my mouth in order to completely ignore my original point

Yes of course anon my justified anger and sass make me immature because you're clearly just trying to show me how wrong I am for saying *checks notes* things I literally never said. Round of applause because clearly you're the sole beacon of hope in this otherwise bleak world that I've created by saying "acting like you own your romantic partner is bad"

But please, keep ignoring my original point because it clearly makes you very uncomfortable that people criticize the way romance is expected to be performed in society. Whatever makes you feel better. Don't unpack that clearly deep-seated internalized amatonormativity that keeps steering you away from critical thought, I'm the bad guy for, again, things I never said.

[juneviews]

Hello! I have an anon controversial train of thoughts, in case you're still doing those.

I want to preface this by saying I mean no disrespect to anyone, it's pure curiosity. Provided everyone is a willing participant, they are taken care of and paid properly, no one is forced to do anything, and everyone's boundaries are respected and all that, how would you feel about any of the bl/ql couples doing actual nc scenes? Or like separate sexy videos, just for fun. Do you think any would be down to do it? I think the fandom would be very devided into "hate it or love it" if that ever happened, people would either consider them confirmations that their favorite imaginary couples are real, or hate them for giving the fans (who have nothing better to than project onto famous people) false hope, and queerbaiting, even if it was prefaced it's not real and shot just for fun, as a side project. Maybe in characters as extra episode for their series? Something like LITA special episode, but more. The key point is that if *the actors* were willing to do this, I don't mean it as another forced fanservice act from thier companies. I don't really know where this came from, I think with the increasing amount of bl/ql pairs who seem genuinely comfortable with each other, and not just dead fish-kissing, I was curious if any of them would be interested in doing anything like that (and earning some extra cash in the process). Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if something similar was to take place soon (though probably less explicit and consensual), some "special perks for top spender at X company" or something, or already taking place (very non consensual, cough War Of Y cough).

Alright, it got all over the place, but it's been circling in my head for a few days now, and I wanted to let it out. Feel free to not reply, I know it's a lot, but you wanted controversial anons so I thought of you. Thank you kindly for your time if you finished it.

hi, so that's an interesting question, one that I can only give my opinion on even though who knows what will happen bc it depends on the actors & directors. I also wanna say that I'm a bit clueness about bl news bc I now try to stay in my own bubble of wholesome & worth it shows, so for example I didn't watch lita or war of y & didn't know there had been any issues with them. now though, I think if we're talking about having sex for real on screen, that's a practice that's always been used in movies more than in series as an artistic practice & I think that would also be the case in thailand. also, while bl shows are allowed to be more sexual than their straight counterparts bc they don't contain women (gotta love sexism lol), I think people forget that thailand is still a conservative country, therefore any show that ends up on tv channels such as gmm25 or one31 go through censors, which would NEVER accept nudity or explicit sex. even though streaming platforms are very present in thailand, I have yet to see a bl show not also be shown on tv, but some very violent & explicit straight dramas like the revenge & remember 15 were made exclusive to wetv & viu, which affected their international viewing especially. moreover, in a world where bl is such a different industry compared to literally any other in the world, full of fanservice & toxic fans, I don't think most established thai actors would be willing to go through it. maybe show some ass at most but that would be it. that being said, a newbie who's comfortable in his body & wants quick fame? I definitely see that happen, though I think the controversy it would cause in thailand might be too much to handle for now. soooo... maybe? personally I don't see it happening any time soon though. seeing how a lot of the sex scenes in bl are already very convincing, idk why they would take the risk to get their show pulled off the air and alienate half of the fandom for that, when fake sex is already very popular. one day, though, it'll definitely happen.

xxx

[fktonofwhatnow]

The Rhys/Tamlin 180 in ACOMAF makes me mad! Like there’s wasted potential there, even if Rhys is endgame. The concept of after the happily ever after is actually pretty cool. There’s real potential in looking at how Tamlin and Feyre deal with the trauma of Amarantha. Having two people realized they’re not right together while still respecting each other is a more adult take than “surprise, Tamlin sux now”, and allows for Feyre to actually make real choices and grow. What's your ACOMAF rewrite?

Damn YALL ARE SPOILING ME WITH THE TAMLIN ASKS ☺️☺️ thank youuu for the ask @havenfable

THIS IS AGREAT POINT TOO WAIT WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT ALLOWING FEYRE TO ACTUALLY MAKE REAL DECISIONS !! YOUR BRAIN !! you guys are spectacular eat a cookie you have earned it 

Ok my thoughts are not quite coherent rn so I’ll try to make sense. I’ve tried writing this like 4 times and every time it just doesn’t work so bear with me here thank you I love you ok here we go. 

Ok I’m gonna start by saying that there is something to be said about Feyre as the narrator and her being an “unreliable” narrator of sorts. The story is about her, told from her perspective. I don’t expect her to have objective views of what happens around her. one thing I found interesting was that she said in conversations with people that she knew Tamlin was struggling, but when we would be listening to her internal monologue, when she thought of him it was mostly to blame him for not knowing she was struggling. (or if he did know, he didn't do anything about it) So like, same thing with the whole thing with Rhysand's mom and sister, we don't know what Tamlin thinks or feels about the situation because he doesn't talk about it and Feyre never asks. (But oh DAMN Sarah should not have given me room to speculate.) Like, UTM broke Feyre right, she tells us that much. Why are we not allowed to believe that it destroyed Tamlin too.

Here we are again, just like with Rhysand's family. I don't blame Feyre for literally needing help, and I do blame Tamlin for not helping her, but to a degree. I hated how the whole situation was handled like Tamlin was shit for not trying to help Feyre (even tho he was, just not in the way she needed), but then Feyre literally not lifting a single finger to try to help Tamlin is ok because he's a man and he can just suck it up and take it. ???? No ? That's not how we handle trauma? Like, my homeboy is fighting a losing battle against this shit and he's the one who's gotta fix everything for Feyre?

But like you said, just a tiny little bit of helpful communication would have done wonders. How about a lil, "hey you ok?" ???? LETS TALK ABOUT IT! Let's talk about how we're falling out of love, let's talk about what Tamlin experienced under the mountain, let's talk about what Feyre experienced under the mountain, let's talk about how maybe we were never good for each other and how we move on with our lives from that! POTENTIAL !! LETS HAVE THEM GROW "Surprise! Tamlin sucks now!" bitch how. Literally how. How did this happen. How did we get here. Tell me. I want to know SJm. Stop being a coward and tell me. You know what, I'll do it for you.

Damn this is about to be super duper long I'm so sorry. 

Alrighty guys once again, I love Tamlin with my whole chest, but I do put a hefty chunk of this on him. From what SJm tells us about Tamlin, he is a fearful individual. His responses to fear are either to freeze or to explode. Both extremes hurt people around him. His actions hurt people, and his lack of action hurts people. Also, for as often as he says the word sorry, he doesn't really show any signs of change or improvement. While I understand that yes , changing your behavior is hard, especially if you're not getting help and don't know how, Tamlin still could have tried a little more, pushed just a little harder, and yes, he could have been better.

But Tamlin is scared. He's scared of things outside of his control, he's scared of change, he's scared of people he loves leaving him or getting hurt. I'm willing to bet he's scared of himself, and rightfully so. He lashes out and it only ever hurts people. I can't believe he's blind to it. When he destroys the study, he's clearly afraid he hurt Feyre.

(i think I’m gonna do my acomaf rewrite headcanons in a different post, every time I try to write them here it doesn’t flow oooof lemme know if thats something you want ahahah I could talk about this shit forever) 

And like, being subject to someone else's fear is stifling. I don't blame Feyre for getting the hell out of there.

BUT AT THE SAME TIME, I know I've said this before: in my opinion, Tamlin has the best depiction of trauma in the whole fucking series. PTSD is a bitch and Tamlin is losing to it. The thing I loathed about acomaf/the beginning of Acowar is how Tamlin isn't given help and then treated like an absolute asshole for it. SJm could have done so much if she had Tamlin learn to ask for help. We can't all just have a Rhysand who knows every thought we have. Sometimes we have to ask for help, as much as we don't want to. That would have done wonders for Tamlin's character arc. And I think that he should have leaned heavily on Lucien for that.

Now look, Lucien deserves a lifetime of free chiropractor visits to relieve the soreness from carrying the entire series solely by himself on his own back. If I'm the one to pay for that for him, so be it. I would do anything for this man.

Lucien deserved so much better than to be bulldozed by the narrative. I refuse to believe that he would let Tamlin use him as a doormat. Lucien deserved to tell Tamlin off on his behavior ok. Lucien deserved a fucking backbone that he had all of acotar and then SJm decided that he was the character who got to suffer for the decisions of every other characters so they didn't have to. Stupid. (At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Rhysand's cum from having sky sex with Feyre fell directly on Luciens face. That's how much SJm likes pummelling him)

Lucien deserves to be strong and tough and emotionally available, especially for Tamlin. I don't think he deserves to be abused by his best friend. I've read fics that make Tamlin like this jackass who's not sad at all that Amarantha forced him to whip his best friend. Are you fucking kidding me. I feel like if Tamlin was going to cling like hell to someone through all of the shit before, during and after UTM, it should be lucien. But no SJm needs us to know Tamlin is a bad guy now. He hurts everyone with no remorse!!! What a villain!!! That was a sin.

Acomaf deserved to be two people talking about how maybe this relationship wasn't going to work out. This book deserved to be Tamlin getting up the courage to as Lucien for help. This book deserved to be Lucien always telling Tamlin that he would be there for him and us getting to watch the two of them overcoming their hardships together. This book deserved to be Feyre choosing her own path, choosing her own family, choosing to live her life as she wanted.

But nah. Rhysand's got a fat cock and uhhh y'all need to like it more than y'all like Tamlin's dick. Also Rhysand is a feminsisist. So suck it.

(If this book was really about giving Feyre a choice, SJm would let her make actual decisions that actually impacted herself and the story instead of just having Rhysand give her two extremes with one of them being obviously the right choice and then tell her whatever she wanted to do was her choice. Feminism.)

Did any of that make any sense. Any at all. No? Yeah I didn't think so anyways I've spent like a week on this I'm tired and I wanted to get it out there. Acomaf was a mess but at least it wasn't Acowar hahahahaha

[badass-at-fandoming]

I've read some of your tags that you wanted to redo the Vampire The Masquerade lore so that it's not so grimdark bleak all the time. What sort of ideas are floating in your head?

OOF, you be diggingggggg. I post a lot of nonsense. 😂🥰 

I’m going to be That ™️ Brujah ™️ Bitch ™️  here and say my main goal would be to make Vampire: the Masquerade not just disapproving of players being racist, homophobic, ableist etc, but have the lore be actively hostile to it. Grimedark stories are not for me, but some people like them. I’d want to erase elements that make tabletop campaigns needlessly harmful to the players and Storyteller. As a white woman, I think my biggest goal with re-tooling the lore would be to hire black, indigenous, and other people of color to re-tool it.

For example, the Gehenna Crusade in the Middle East. My God, those v5 lore bits were painful to read and I’m not even Asian or Muslim. I’d hire a group of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan--heck, Iranian, Israeli, and Palestinian writers would be amazing--to formulate the undead view on the atrocity that is the War on Terror. I thought Night Road touched on a interesting point with the concentration camp and Catholic hospital chapter: the horrors humanity creates are far, far worse than any Elder could do. Humans are set to destroy the world, more so than any magical creature. The question is not “will bad things happen?” so much as “how will I react to the bad things around me?”

Other ideas:

Moving the v5 section on content warnings and respectful playing to the front of the book. Read about how every fascist character MUST die or be reformed. That’s literally a rule.

A more careful analysis/explanation of NPC motivation. Let there be specific reasons Kindred do to not band together. It’s not arbitrary Backstabby Disease. There’s a reason why such-and-such hates so-and-so. “Power” is too nebulous a motivation and used too often to pit Kindred against each other. What type of power do they want and why? If they got it, what would they do with it? What is preventing 90% of Kindred getting along and hosting Neftlix parties, is what I’m saying.

handing over the Ravnos lore to writers and game devs who are Roma and/or Travelers, and putting in huge ass, lime green letters that “If you have the Ravnos be Roma or Travelers, you are playing the game incorrectly!” Because, my goodest dudes, I am le tired. Even though the Ravnos have been soft-revamped a couple times now, fans are still using their super harmful origin.

More environmentalism and combating climate change, with crossover to Werewolf: the Apocalypse. This ties in with the “humans are causing an apocalypse better than vampires ever do/did” theme.

In general, more of the different magic species interacting. They all inhabit one world, one globe! They all have a vested interest in protecting the earth!

It’s been beaten to death on here, but divorcing the concept of liking sex and/or having sex etc with the Humanity mechanic

In general, just let the vampires be sexy

Hire indigenous writers to write their own vampires (if that’s the term they’d want to use) for their tribe. The whole narrative that the Americas were empty of supernatural beings is like. No.

Shift to a more international focus with the “By Night” books. The USA, unfortunately, exists, and I think we’ve heard enough about it. What about By Night books set in South America? Written by indigenous folks there? And other folks of color? I’d love Cassandra Khaw and a team of Chinese writers to be hired to re-do the Kuei-jin, and for the many, many talented African fantasy writers to re-do the Laibon. Lagos by Night anyone?

Give the Anarch cause more specificity. You’re telling me that the Anarchs don’t have a constitution? In the year of our Lord 2021??? No Bill of Rights? No judicial system? No social programs or schools?? No democracy?? Like!!!! Have them keep up with the progressiveness of the time we’re living in. It’s been proven over and over and over that true anarchy is not sustainable.

This turned into more of a “what would I do with v5″ sort of thing, but here we are. If you wanted to ask about a specific tag or post, let me know. Thanks for the ask!

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

it wasn’t power i coveted; it was acceptance.

Titans 3.06

y’know, i was just thinking the other day that 1.06/1.07 and 2.06/2.07 were the best episodes of their respective seasons, so i have great hopes going in to this one. fingers crossed!

as always, typing this up as i see the episode.

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. oh! um... that was a Cold Open, all right. *nudges* get it? cold? because it’s snowing? and two people got murdered in cold blood? eh?

... oh, i’ve just started.

1.5. i wonder if “i want to be sipping pina coladas on a beach with you” is the new “i’m just one day away from retiring.” i was so on edge after that--i kept expecting that car to explode. even so, the way they died wasn’t an anticlimax: brutal, and quick. 

1.75. so i’m assuming that’s the titular lady vic! this show better bring up why this doll was important or why these two cops needed to be killed, and not leave it to the ether like jericho’s little mindscape jaunt in 2.08 (i’m still dying to know what that was about???)

2.

i love how deliberately unappealing wayne manor is. 

(sorry for the pic quality. i don’t have hbo max! ssshhh.)

2.3. i love the many references to “home” and “our house” when they’ve been here for less than a week and saw one of their friends get blown into pieces. i mean, i unironically love it: home is where family is, after all!

2.5. i’d like to say that kom is playing some sort of long game here, especially given the build-up we had last season and some of the more niggling details this season: why did kom choose now to use her bond to lure kory when she’s been on earth for months? why did justin call kory now, just around the time that she started getting kom’s visions? and what about kom’s ability to exactly imitate other people? hmmm.

2.75. the reason i wrote i’d like to say is that i’ve made the mistake of assuming plot complexity where there is none; i was so invested in the jason todd orchestrated his own death theory for instance, when it turns out that oops! ra’s al ghul just happened to leave a little lazarus puddle in gotham, and oh yeah! scarecrow just happens to have a network of henchmen working for him on the outside and a fully functional laboratory and a weapons cache fit for a new supervillain in the basement of the high security psychiatric unit/prison that he’s in! 

(no i’m not bitter, why do you ask)

2.8. iiiii don’t know what to say about the implications of sex slavery being a thing on tamaran, so i’m not going to say anything at all. for now.

3. gotham, six years ago... wasn’t it five years before s2 that jericho died and the titans disbanded? and when was the flashback from 1.06 where dick let zucco die? i think it was after the events of 2.08: jericho? i can’t seem to find any transcripts or reliable information online, so i’m going to have to rewatch 1.06 at some point. 

(i love the old-fashioned batman music in this heist scene)

3.5. “security is a joke... it’s my way of keeping my dad on his toes”. what you’re an ethical thief now, like an ethical hacker? i don’t think that excuse is going to sell, barbara, on the day you do encounter a decent security system and your father is forced to arrest you.

(then again, gotham’s security is piss-poor. did you know that you could just walk into arkham asylum without any official clearance, ply one of its most dangerous inhabitants with contraband, and said inmate could get away with having an entire laboratory and weapons cache--NO I’M NOT GOING TO LET THIS GO)

3.8 so that flashback between dick and barbara was really cute! and also illuminating:

a) dick sounds so light, so... um. look. i have some apologies to tender to mr thwaites, because while i’ve always thought he does a fine job as dick grayson, i’ve never been terribly fond of his cadence as he delivers dialogue. it’s often monotonous, i thought, but then again, he’s usually delivering exposition or dealing with one soul-crushing crisis or the other. so i was pleasantly surprised to hear dick sound so carefree and alive in his conversation with barbara, laughing frequently, his emotions so bare and bubbling to the surface. it’s really a fantastic contrast to the traumatised and world-weary dick grayson that we see now, even more so than the costume department just bunging a backwards-baseball cap on mr thwaites’ head and hoping that will convince us of his relative youth. 

b) and god, when he wakes up from that memory, all alone in his bed, bleeding from bullet holes in his shoulder (bullet holes that are--in a somewhat convoluted way--barbara’s fault)? yikes. it’s great. you have my apologies, mr thwaites!

c) can you imagine dick just... crawling back to wayne manor, trying not to be seen by anybody, shedding his suit and just... collapsing onto his bed without even tending to his wound? the sheer emotional and physical exhaustion of it? 

d) it’s so interesting to see how barbara and dick approach the idea of legacy--a big theme on the show!--in this flashback. barbara is the one bucking the idea that she should follow in her father’s footsteps, while dick seems pretty content with the batman-and-robin setup, and even tries to get barbara to join their team (robin-girl. pfffft). obviously after this several traumatic things happen wherein dick ends up questioning and then resenting his role as robin, his relationship with batman or even returning as a vigilante at all. and barbara... ends up replacing her father as commissioner. it’s tragic, really. 

e) the dynamic between dick and barbara in the flashback reminds me of how it was between dick and donna in 1.08 and even between kory and dick in early s1. it’s like having an older, strong-willed woman by his side means he gives over the steering wheel for a while and lets himself... unspool, a little bit. it’s kinda endearing.

also:

*pinches his cheeks*

3. you know, we talk about dick and Eldest Daughter Syndrome, and that’s definitely valid, but here gar seems to me the embodiment of it, with all the emotional gardening and firefighting that he’s expected to do. he’s kind of the guy expected to keep his shit together and take care of everyone else while they are falling completely to pieces, unable to carve out time to process his own trauma. he’s also picked up dick’s and kory’s tendencies to bottle up their struggles and shun appearing vulnerable, and he’s struggling in the shadow of both dick and kory undergoing acute crises, his best friend (and frequent confidante) on the other side of the world, and seeing hank die, utterly helpless to stop it. 

i’m glad that he got a chance to tell dick even a smidgeon of what he really feels, and i hope this is at least a semblance of a wake up call for dick to actually sit down and work with the people he repeatedly calls family.

3.5. it’s heartening to see that dick immediately makes it his priority to go talk to gar. but don’t blow off kory in the process, man!

4. i’m really loving this dynamic between kom and conner--i get the idea that both of them consider each other as Unknowns, alien two times over. but conner’s only ever known the titans, who embrace being different, and kom’s only ever known... well. 

anyway, kory is Really Stressed, and honestly? #relatable. 

when you’re forced to bring an estranged family member to hang out with your friends...

4.5. i love that the titans are spending so much time in the kitchen. a real family!

5. jonathan crane is a creep and i absolutely cannot stand him.

5.25. how did he get a whole lab setup (in the basement of a hospital...?) with a bunch of whitecoats to work for him? how did he just waltz into the viewing room of an operation theatre when he’s one of the most wanted men in gotham right now? why is jason wandering around maskless when--presumably--as the adopted son of the most famous person in gotham he’d be a tad more recognisable than your average joe?

why do i expect this show to answer anything anymore?

5.5. that’s not necessarily a criticism, mind; i’ve said since season 1 that titans is very comics-like in this aspect, all about the Aesthetic and the splash-page splendour rather than the niggling unimportant details of how or when the characters got to said location. like. the camera gliding over the operation being set-up, lady vic bursting in and doing her murder dance (imagine the luck of the poor intern who chose this day and this surgery to assist) and jason, shocked and slack-jawed, framed by blood.

5.75. it’s a sobering reminder for jason that, though he chose this path in order to gain control over a world that seemed like it was rapidly spinning out of his grip, he’s only succeeded in handing over even more control to a man with an agenda that is very clearly not aligned with his own. he’s in too far to stop now, though.

5.9. i have a lot more thoughts about jason! saving it up for the end of this recap, though.

6. more kitchen time! i better see dick do some cooking soon...

(”our kitchen”! it still delights me! kitchens are So Important)

6.25. so much of dick’s issues have revolved around his relationship with bruce, so it’s completely understandable that in the wake of a huge crisis where bruce literally asks dick to replace him and be a “better” him, dick would default to all the worst things he learned from the man. and i’m glad kory’s having none of it, but come on, guys. the woman’s literally fetched her fratricidal sister out of a hole in the ground with no idea what said sister is going to do next and experiencing a burgeoning sense of guilt far, far beyond her history with the titans, and dick’s too far into his autocolonoscopy that he can’t see that she needs help.

6.5. “he services your urges”--well, as far as we know, kory is the last person he had sex with...

7. “i hope [gar] isn’t angry with me...” SIR! i thought you’d already spoken to him! smh, as the kids say. kory wouldn’t be needing to reassure you if you just took the effort to build two way emotional relationships with the rest of the team. @superohclair​ was taking about dick’s relatively low emotional intelligence? i agree.

7.5. “i got my own problems [...] you and barbara? fix it.” YOU TELL HIM, KORY

8. man i really like this weird, sad tension between dick and barbara--this sense that both of them are approaching the other based on how they remember them and are ultimately disappointed by the truth. barbara thought she could trust dick to... well, be a better batman, but dick has not only failed at that in her eyes, but repeatedly undermined her while exploiting the authority that she gave him. in dick’s eyes, this is nothing like the barbara that he knew, rebellious and ready to do whatever it takes to find something. 

like. this show sometimes really hits me in the chest about the ways it shows kids grow into adults and into caretakers, and the way it’s stop-start, the ways nothing can happen at all for a long time and then it’s Crisis Central all at once and there’s no space to breathe. the weird sort of sadness that comes with nostalgia. 

8.5. oracle name drop! i agree with barbara, any system that can just randomly tap into gotham phonelines is a monster.

8.7. (i don’t know if it’s my imagination, but is dick holding himself... differently in this episode? like that wound is definitely bothering him, and he’s running on fumes)

9. man, that was a really sweet scene between kom and conner. “feeling alien in your own world”... “not quite here nor there”

honestly this team runs on conner and gar’s faith in their value as a family, and it’s a sign of conner’s generous heart that he extends that opportunity to blackfire. this arc of maturation for him, where he’s now able to consciously choose which parts of himself he can use to do the thing he wants to so--save people--has been so fulfilling to recognise. this baby’s grown with the titans! and what he’s learnt is that people can get fucked up, but the titans is a place where they can be fucked up, and grow.

MY MAN CONNER

10. oh man i’m drinking in the gar-dick interaction in this episode like i’m three days into the desert and it’s the only source of water for miles around!

a) gar is absolutely not dealing with dick’s bullshit this episode and I LOVE IT. it’s such a far cry from the man who was idolising dick/robin back in s1 and expecting him to solve all their problems. dick is fallible, dick is fucked up, but he Tries His Best and that’s ok.

b) dick, huffing and puffing through that vent, unable to put any pressure on his left shoulder, trying to have a heart to heart with gar... fuck i love this asshole. 

c) bruce took in a kid who was suffering... “and made him into a weapon”. well. i absolutely agree with dick that it was bruce who put these kids into these horrible situations with him and they came away with a bucketload of trauma to add to the one that they already had. but we know that bruce was really trying with jason, and at the end of s2, dick was coming to acknowledge that bruce had offered him something that wasn’t just darkness. jason’s death and bruce’s reaction to that shattered that fragile progress.

d) “gotham got to me too.” i feel more sympathetic towards dick running off on his own than most, and it’s not just because i’m an unapologetic stan.  we’ve seen before that dick... devolves when overwhelmed, and he lashes out and makes ill thought out decisions and just Does Not Deal. it happened after hearing the news that deathstroke had returned in s2, and it didn’t help that everyone around him was reeling at the news, either. this time, however, he has his salvation in his family, and despite some stupid decisions like running off and kidnapping supervillains without telling his team, he’s been really on the ball this season. thinking clearly and logically, holding it together and working on a plan, thinking two steps ahead of the villains... yes.

e) gar needing to believe that jason isn’t beyond redemption... there’s a lot of blood on his hands, too, from when he was manipulated by cadmus last season. it makes sense why he’d relate to jason’s predicament, and i hope dick picked up on that.

f) my head just added a plaintive ow after dick jumped feet first into the storage room

i need, crave gifs of this scene!

11. *sits on hands* i’m going to talk more about red hood, i promise!

12. more gar and dick! is it my birthday??!!

(actually, according to the tamil calendar, it is my birthday! my “star” birthday)

12.5. excellent. dick using some implausible training that bruce taught him to solve a mystery? passing some of that knowledge onto gar? that proud smile when he sees gar perfectly execute moves that he taught him? MY HEART IS EXPLODING

13. aw, i love flashback!dick and barbara, they’re so cute <3

13.25. why does it not surprise me that the way he proposes a relationship to barbara is by saying “we make sense”? this guy can deduce exactly who was present where and what weapon they were holding from a garbled audio recording but other times he’s utterly clueless, and that’s a consistent character beat right from s1

13.5. so.... that’s why lady vic has it out for... barbara....? i don’t get it. it’s flimsy. but hey! the fun thing about titans is that i don’t have to get it. the payoff has nothing to do with the plot.

14. i can’t believe that barbara fell for that, but at least that wheelchair fight looked awesome, so.

15. oh yeah, i forgot that red hood bullied the mob into helping him and scarecrow... at least that explains the whitecoats and the elaborate set-up.

15.5. honestly i love how this dynamic between kory and kom is developing, though i wish more of the team would pay attention to it. time to call justin, i think!

16. i wonder what happened after that second flashback where barbara got hurt during that heist. did she give up on doing any more (maybe jim caught her)? was it because dick was called away by bruce and then the titans and got caught up in his own issues? maybe barbara froze him out because she wasn’t looking for the relationship that he was looking for? maybe the idea of doing that with someone turning into batman-lite was just... unappealing? scary?

whatever it is, it doesn’t look like dick ever processed the end of that relationship. it’s very intriguing to see where their dynamic goes next.

17. so.... what, did vic deliver some fear toxin to barbara? i... what?

17.5. and i TOLD YOU that they would never explain that doll or why vic attacked those two cops at the beginning! oh, titans. never change. 

18. did jason just randomly have tim’s restaurant burgled? god, i’m feeling a bit nauseous... are they going to kill tim’s father?

18.25. i feel like the rest of the season is going to wrestle with jason’s culpability in the horrible stuff he’s doing and i’m already seeing that prospect divide fans. on one hand, his story is taking a lot of oxygen away from other equally interesting story arcs, and he’s done some truly awful things, like indiscriminate murder, threatening to kill children, blowing up hank, and potentially killing tim’s parents. 

there’s something to be said for the kind of hold that crane has over him, and the so-called ‘anti-fear’ drug that he keeps plying jason with--he’s alone, drugged almost constantly (to the level of dependence), fresh from the trauma of being bludgeoned to death. he hasn’t conquered fear; he’s ruled by it. on the other hand, given that he’s the one character on the show given an obvious and identifiable ‘mental illness’ arc (maaaaybe dick too), one can argue that it’s irresponsible to show this progress into such violence: jason was vulnerable because he was struggling, and that left him vulnerable, but it took only a push before he became a fucking serial killer.

but that could mean we underestimate the degree of that vulnerability, and the mechanics of this universe where he fell into the clutches of the one supervillain perfectly designed to exploit that vulnerability. that helpless spiral into further and further self-destruction is all too real. it’s valuable to know that someone who has sunk that low can still seek help--actual help--and get it. 

18.5. i don’t know. it’s not a question i’m going to resolve at the end of an overlong recap at 1 in the morning. i don’t believe it’s even a question that titans can resolve. but i am interested in where they’re going next with jason.

19. this episode was genuinely great! i’m pumped for the rest of the season!

[pynkhues]

.... any succession fic recs? 👀

Yes!! I haven't read a lot for it yet, but some of the stuff I've read has been staggeringly good. I'm generally more into gen fic in this particular fandom, but have enjoyed some Stewy x Kendall, Gerri x Roman and Naomi x Tabitha too.

A few recs under the cut!

“I wanted to get out. From under all this. Take the money and run.”

Kendall tells Stewy even though he knows he’ll never get it, not like Naomi does. He’ll never understand the crush of it, the heart-stopping head-fucking fear of failing a tyrant. Kendall’s been ignoring the shape of it for a long time, putting pieces of it together in the back of his mind in total darkness like a blindfolded man. It doesn’t matter that one day his dad will die. It doesn’t matter about the money or the hostile takeover or the stolen files or any of it. There’s no running. Kendall’s Logan Roy lives inside his head.

Stewy laughs. Stewy laughs for a long time.

“There is no out, Ken, what the fuck are you talking about? You were born this and you’ll die this. You are what you are, and what you are is a fucking Roy.”

Kendall hates him, for a moment. Lightning-strike furious. What the fuck does he know about any of it, about his dad’s swinging dinner plate-sized hands, about getting 24% name recognition in reliable international polling, about puking every time you think about a car swerving off the road in the rain. About finding out that you can do something unthinkably, unimaginably terrible, and it doesn’t matter to anyone you know but you. There’s a scar on his arm that no one else who hasn’t already been told how it got there can ever know about, and he’s sick of it, and it’s not fair. He hates Stewy for a moment because Stewy’s right.

“I wanted to do the right thing, Stewy, for once in my fucking life.”

Stewy laughs again, more briefly, and the predator flash of his eyes in the neon of the motel sign is a torture all its own.

‘There is no right and wrong, Ken. How the fuck do you not know that yet? Not for people like you. Like us. There’s shit you get caught doing and there’s shit you don’t.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You really, really fucking don’t,” says Ken, and fuck, there it is. The road less travelled, that only he has ever driven on. The path he’s down where Stewy can’t follow. That place beyond Stewy Hosseini where he never thought he could go.

“You’re not telling me something, and when I find out what that is, and I will find out what it is, Kendall, don’t you think I won’t, so I am warning you that when I do find out I am going to be righteously fucking pissed,” says Stewy, and if Kendall thought those were a predator’s eyes before—

“Yeah, you will,” says Kendall, because he knows exactly how perceptive Stewy is. Exactly how weak he is. Exactly, precisely what both of them are.

And treat this night like it’ll happen again by postcardmystery. 8k words. Kendall x Stewy. Post s2. (CW: internalised homophobia, some homophobic language)

I tried to pick a shorter excerpt, but I literally couldn’t, this fic is so. good. The voices are pitch perfect, and it’s got this incredible build to it overall that goes back and forth between time and point of views and just rips your heart out. The premise itself is pretty simple – after the press conference at the end of 2.10, Kendall calls Stewy, and they drive through rural America while Kendall has a breakdown, and it’s just - - unspeakably good. I love it so so so much, I have no words.

r/roysucks Connor’s gf just posted on Instagram (instagram.com) submitted two months ago by webbedscrum_2279 23 comments share save hide report

[–] DM_ME_SAMESMAIL 40 points two months ago I too like to escape to my yacht in the Mediterranean when my family and I are on trial for covering up rape and murder. permalink embed save report reply

AITA for accusing my father of multiple crimes on his own news station? By amleth 3k words. Gen fic. Post s2.

And now for something completely different – epistolary fic which is just reddit news threads of the Roy family drama. I love an epistolary fic and this is just totally charming, and made me laugh a lot out loud.

“You’re quiet,” she observes. “That’s a first.”

“Yeah, well, the Turks beat it out of me. Gave you a run for their money.” He waggles his eyebrows. “So what is this? Whips and chains? Are we doing the whole boat-sex thing? I heard Shiv and Tom are looking for a third —“

Gerri finds what she’s looking for: a black leather binder. She drops it on the bed and begins paging through it, and Roman cranes his neck enough to recognize that it’s just full of documents, not like, dick pics. “I’ve given some thought to what you proposed a few weeks ago, and I agree that we should make things official in some way,” she says, and he blinks.

“Uh,” he says. “Which — what part of it?”

“Take a look.”

Gerri closes the folio and hands it over. It’s deceptively heavy, and the print on these pages is way too fucking fine, he thinks, paging through it. “Is this some kind of, like, Fifty Shades of Roy sex contract? Because it’s not that I’m not into it, but I think there’s a strong argument for going paperless —”

“Strictly speaking, this isn’t legally binding,” Gerri says. “Just something I threw together with regard to our business arrangement going forward. But with no respect to the family — the past few weeks have really illustrated that no one should take anyone at their word right now. Give me a little more than your word.”

Evacuation strategies for a yacht on fire by devourthemoon. 11k words. Gerri x Roman. Post s2. Explicit.

After the events of s2, Roman and Gerri fake being married as a professional alliance, only, y’know, maybe it’s not so fake. This fic is just so, so much fun, and messy in the best possible way. The author nails all the character voices, and the sex scenes are just the right amount of hot and ridiculous, and I just love it all a lot too.

Kendall estimates it will take an hour for the first articles to go up. Some rapid-fire blog without oversight—the New York Post, maybe, or wherever those Vaulter hippies have skulked off to—will slap a catchy headline on it and report his words verbatim. Give or take a gif of his face when he switches to script number two. New York Times, Washington Post, AP, those fuckers take longer. They like to bleed the story like Middle Ages plague doctors for its marrow, fact-check and add context and analysis and as many backlinks as their servers can handle. Still, a couple of hours, and his face will be plastered on every major news outlet. His voice will play over the nightly talk shows. He’ll trend on Twitter. A few more days, and he’ll be the star of analysis segments, podcasts, weekly briefings. Maybe, fuck it, maybe he’ll trend on Twitter again.

It’s been years since Kendall read Shakespeare. But that shit sticks with you, gets under your skin and emerges when you least expect it, like eczema or Keynesian economics. He knows how the media will spin this. Kendall Roy Attacks CEO Logan for Years of Corruption. Prodigal Son Disrupts Family Legacy to Restore Credibility. That’s how Hamlet ends, right? And Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, even Titus fucking Andronicus. The spilled blood sinks into the ground, the seedlings sprout forth from the soil, and a new castle is built on the bones. Order out of chaos, or at least close enough an approximation that the tabloids will buy it.

Legacy for profit by owlinaminor Post-2.10. Kendall Roy. Kendall through Shakespeare analogies – just - - ooooof. It's a beautiful, lyrical character study that weaves through Roy family history and teases at a future none of them are even sure they want. It's gorgeous writing.

For the next few days Shiv would have to keep the pressure on Kira like an open wound because there were other women, victims that Nate’s people were going to find one by one as soon as that phone call disconnected. Mo was her father’s friend, good friend, for a long, long time. Nate and Gil, Sandy and Stewy, too many sharks in the water and the share price probably dipped to a new low but she would never check a stock ticker. Her husband’s nerves fraying at the edges on national television. She had promised a woman she’d never met before that she would kill roughly one third of the top male executives of her family’s company. Her company.

The last look Rhea gave her before she shut the car door was concern close to fear—no longer the same woman who heard their pitch in the safe room, who laughed with her at Argestes. Rhea had only looked into the abyss; she got cold feet and she didn’t even know what it’s like to grow up in it.

Her family’s company is hers, will be hers. Even from a whale fall, new life would spring.

Feed his flesh to wayward daughters by reogulus. 2k words. Shiv Roy. Set during 2.09.

This entire fic is set around Shiv bribing Kira not to testify, and god, it is so good. It’s bleak and rough, and really hones in on the complex ground Shiv walks as a character. It's another brilliant study of what it takes to be a Roy, and the way they make the awful choices in order to fulfill this legacy that they don't even know they want.

Kendall sets down his fork. “So. Tell me. Is it everything you wanted? Is it what you thought it would be?”

Roman stills. He never does that. He’s constantly a menace in motion, slouching and fidgeting, worse even than Kendall at his amphetamine peak. “What? The view from the tippy-tippy-top?”

“His regard.” Kendall wipes his mouth with the edge of the white cloth napkin. It comes away pink from the steak. “Dad. He’s all yours now.”

Roman still hasn’t moved. Finally, he lurches, like corroded machinery come uncertainly to life. “Yeah, man. It’s fucking tight as hell. I love every beautiful daddy and me moment I was a good enough little boy to earn.” He snorts. “Fuck you.” His face goes curiously slack then, like something Kendall’s own face would do. An intermission in the performance, an energy cut. Something genuine finding its way to the surface. “Why don’t you tell me. When you got everything you wanted, how the fuck did that make you feel?”

Nauseous, is the first word that springs to mind. Sick. Scared. I’ve never had everything I wanted, there’s that. I’ve never once had a single fucking thing I wanted. There’s that, too.

Interim leadership by arbitrarily 2k words. Roman + Kendall. Post s2.

I love Roman and Kendall scenes generally, but this one which features Kendall and Roman meeting for the first time a few months after the press conference in 2.10 is just a bit magic. The push pull dynamic that's just inherent to them mixed with the genuine affection and brotherly love is really special, and arbitrarily embraces both in equal measure. It's a great little fic.

There are lots more of course, and I'd also recommend checking out other works by these authors, but I hope this is a good place to start! :-)

[thedeadflag]

I’m so confused! I know it’s not your responsibility to educate me but in your post bringing awareness to the negative aspects of g!p fanfic you say

“Why do these g!p characters rarely if ever involve experiences reflective of trans/intersex women? Why are they so utterly cis and perisex-washed? Why do nearly all writers have zero idea that tucking is a thing? “

Doesn’t that answer your original question? The reason they don’t reflect those groups of ppl is bc g!p isn’t trying to represent those groups of people or else it WOULD be transphobic to limit them to one specific fetish right? it just refers to a canonically female character with the addition of a penis (I don’t argue the name “g!p” should be changed bc that’s a no brainer why that could be offensive). But the fanfic in general, how could it be harmful? I’ve noticed in my time reading it as a non binary person it’s given me great gender euphoria reading a reader insert where reader has a penis while being a femme representing person just bc that’s a reflection of my personal experience. I don’t see anywhere where g!p fanfic ever references or tries to emulate the experiences of trans or intersex people so how could it be offensive?

Sorry this is way too long I’m just very confused

I'm going to try and lay this out as politely as I can. It's after 3:30 in the morning here, so this could be a bit disjointed and rambling. More under the cut:

In real life, ~99.999999% of women with penises are trans women. Which puts us in a tricky situation of (A) being the only women with penises around for media involving women with penises to reflect back on, and (B) being in the lovely position of precious few people actually having had meaningful real life exposure to trans women, meaning (C.) all those stigmas and all that misinformation are going to purely affect us and it’s going to be uncritically gobbled up by the masses, since they don’t have any meaningful information to fill in the blanks with instead.

When we peer into the depths of femslash fandoms and see all these folks who aren't trans women writing about women with penises, and using cis women’s bodies as platforms for these penises, it’s the simplest thing.

I mean, some of those folks might actually be struggling and confused about why they’re into it, what the real appeal is, why they get off on it, why they might have some feelings about wanting a penis of their own…

…but from our vantage point, it’s really easy to gauge 99.99% of the time. We can generally see valid, legitimate yearning to have a penis pretty damn easily in a piece of art/writing, and we can also see when people who create this media are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization.

And 99.9% of the time, the creators are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization, and see trans women’s bodies as a perfect vehicle to tap into that, generally due to deeply held cissexist views that link us and our bodies and genitals directly to cis men, to maleness. As if penises are rooted in maleness and masculinity (which is absolutely not true).

And I have sympathy for NB folks (certainly TME ones who have reached out to me in the past about this) who might be struggling with that, but just because they’re non-binary, it doesn’t mean they get to appropriate our bodies and reproduce transmisogyny and trans fetishization in their attempts at feeling better. Shit doesn't work like that.

Because again, the only women with penises in this world, essentially, are trans women. Meaning any woman with a penis in media is a trans woman, implicitly or explicitly. Meaning that when people who aren’t us want to write us, intent doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the writer’s fantasy, it’s still going to attach a variety of messages directly onto us.

And more often than not, due to cissexism, those messages are linking us to maleness, to toxic masculinity, etc..

While I do want to believe they're a fairly small minority, a lot of NB folks in fandom spaces like g!p characters in part because they see penises as male and the rest of the body as female and think that duality is interesting and would be comfortable, and is a nice balance of “both worlds” or a nice position “between male and female”, but that’s a wholly cissexist, transmisogynistic view to have, and it’s one that absolutely cannot be supported without directing sexual violence against trans women and invalidating our entire existence. Certainly not all NB folks into g!p like it for that reason, but holy shit a fair bit of them do and it’s weird and wrong and fetishistic.

g!p emerged from the idea that women can't have penises, and drew on the transmisogyny and cissexism of tr*nny porn to structure that frame of desire and the core patterns and trends within these works. It's always been trans women's bodies being used as a vehicle, whether or not the writers of these fics are explicitly aware of it, because the trope itself still holds true to its original patterns and cissexism. It's not the name that's the problem, it's the content; changing the name would be a surface level change that wouldn't affect anything.

g!p objectifies women with penises (trans women). A woman with a penis is more than just a woman with a penis, but the use of the term and trope is literally to (A) remind people that women don't have penises, otherwise the g!p term wouldn't be needed if people actually accepted women with penises as women, and that (B) this is a story centered on a scenario where there's a woman with a penis, with key focus on that genitalia specifically. it's the drawing point, it's the lure, it's what everything is centered on. It is a means for folks to write lesbian sex while also writing about penis in vagina and getting off to it. It's also no surprise that the penises so clearly emulate cis men's penises in these works, that is by design.

As I’ve said many times before, if you’re only writing trans women’s bodies to showcase cis men’s penises, you’re not respecting the womanhood of trans women, and this ultimately has nothing inherent to do with penis-owning women, it has to do with (cis) men and their penises, because trans women are just being used as a vehicle to emulate them. When NB folks do the same thing, and imagining themselves as those g!p characters, they are ultimately embodying cis men, their maleness, and often toxic masculinity, in a way that feels safe and distanced enough for them, a shell that they often code as cisnormative due to their own unprocessed cissexism.

And trans women don’t deserve that.

You seem caught in the idea that if something doesn't directly perfectly reflect trans women, that it can't be linked to us., which ignores the long long history of media being used to misrepresent marginalized peoples and cast us in insulting, dehumanizing lights. You show a lack of understanding of the g!p trope and the long history of its usage across a few other names, even if the content and patterns remained the same. It shows a lack of understanding of tr*nny porn and transmisogynistic stigmas, which the trope draws heavily from.

I think we can all recognize that most 'lesbian' prn that's made does not represent actual lesbians, it's overwhelmingly catered to the male gaze. We can also recognize that this category of porn has led to a lot of harassment towards lesbians from cis men who at the very least want to believe lesbians are just like they are in the porn he watches, that lesbians just need the right man. Lesbians are being used as a vehicle for a fantasy that was created externally to them, and doesn't represent their realities.

It's the same kind of situation here. The way g!p fics play out overwhelmingly doesn't reflect trans women's realities, but they are inherently linked to us regardless, as we're the vehicles for those fantasies, as unrealistic and harmful as they may be.

g!p characters are built in our fetishized image that’s based on a deeply cissexist misunderstanding of us, of the gender binary, and of bodies in general.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough g!p fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep, but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was ultimately fetishistic, even if there was an undercurrent of sympathy and a lack of following certain common g!p patterns there that differentiated it from the norm.

If g!p fics were at all about reducing dysphoria or finding euphoria, then it wouldn’t be explicitly tied up in the performance of very specific sex acts, very specific forms of misogyny and toxic masculinity, very specific forms of sexual violence and exertion of sexual power, etc.

But it is.

So the notion that creating g!p fics helps NB folks? Nope. It CAN certainly prevent/delay those folks from facing a whole boatload of shit they’ve internalized, and coddle them at the expense of trans women.

Because if it was really about bodies and dysphoria/euphoria, there would be a considerable push (allying with out own) to end our fetishization and to represent us in and out of sexual contexts with accuracy, respect, and care. Because they wouldn’t care what sex acts were performed and what smut beats were hit, they’d just want to see someone with a body like their ideal being loved, being sexual, connecting, being authentic, etc. Which very much is not the case in the overwhelming majority of g!p fics. That's what we want, and it's not what g!p writers want, it's nothing they give a shit about.

Like, a ways back I started doing random pulls of g!p fics from various fandoms and assessing them for certain elements to provide some quantitative clarity. I started on The 100 here, and did OuaT here. Never finished the 100 one since the results leveled out and stayed pretty consistent as the sample size grew, so I didn't really see the point in continuing any further after about 140 fics when the data wasn't really changing much at all.

Lastly, media influences people. I've read countless posts and comments from people who use fanfiction as a sex ed guide, in essence. Which is ridiculous, but I also know sex ed curricula often isn't very accurate or extensive in a lot of areas, so people take what they can get. Representation in media can be powerful, and when it overwhelmingly misrepresents people, that's also powerful. Just because fandom is a bit smaller than televised media, it doesn't make that impact any lesser, certainly not for those whose primary media intake is within fandom.

Virtually all trans representation in f/f fanfiction is misrepresentative of us. That has a cost in how people understand us, how people react to us, and how people treat us. Not just online, but in physical spaces, and in intimate settings.

I invite you to read that post you referenced again, or perhaps this longer one which is a response to a trans guy who seemed to feel something similar to you with this trope.

All I can do is lay it out there and try to explain this. It's up to you how you handle this. All I know is whenever there's a big surge in g!p in a fandom, trans women generally leave it en masse, because it's a very clear and consistent message that we're not valued, respected, and that people value getting off on us over finding community with us.

[erectionsandtea]

Wow, this post is probably going to end up being a bad idea, because I am currently in the state of exhaustion that is telling me that this post is a good idea, lol

I'm p sure this will be pointless and unnecessary, though

The following post is an analysis, not of any ship or fandom specifically, but about me in relation to a certain ship in a certain fandom (Byler, ST). It's just a something to let my followers know a little bit more about me, and why I think the way I do, why I talk the way I do, in relation to the ship, and why I might try to avoid certain posts (theories, analyses, "proof" type things).

If you start to read this, please finish before interacting with me. I don't want anyone to take anything I write out of context.

Now, I don't know if this should be considered an anti-Byler post, because I'm not saying that I don't ship it...I guess it could be perceived that way, but it's not how I intend it to be. Bylers proceed with caution, as some of this may not be what you want to hear.

Also, I have been called out (for lack of better phrasing) for a possible trigger of calling a gay couple "just best friends" (Byler). The person who told me, said it was because they themselves had personally been in a situation exactly like that before. While I do not personally, fully know what that must be like (not having been in that situation myself, as I recall...), I CAN try to understand, and try to be more sensitive about that subject. So, I guess a trigger warning for...apparently internalized homophobia of calling a gay couple "just best friends" ???

I want to start by saying that I do not view Byler as canon (yet). That doesn't mean I don't think it can become canon, it doesn't mean that I don't ship it at all, because I do (to both of those).

Back when I initially didn't ship Byler at all, it was mostly because Mileven got in the way, lol, but the SECONDARY reason was that I saw a lot of myself and my friendships in them.

Yes, I was one of those people who thought that two same-sex people can be just friends (and I still am, but not specifically with Byler anymore).

I act the same way with my best friends, and I feel I would react the same way Mike did, if what happened to Will happened to one of my bffs. Basically, nothing about Byler specifically stood out to me as "gay". It just looked like a regular very-close friendship to me.

I was in drama and choir in high school. We changed in front of people, I had one friend who would grab my boobs on a daily basis, just because she could (it spawned from a running joke about how big my boobs are, in comparison to my tiny body). I've even seen some of my friends completely nude (and they have seen me). We've held hands. And while most, if not all of us, were somewhere on the rainbow spectrum (as I like to call it), all the things we did, we just did as friends and being friendly. Being queer wasn't exactly a big part of it.

Now, I'm not saying that all drama and choir kids will be the exact same as me. That's just how I ended up, and I think that's why I just see things differently (not saying I'm special by any means, everyone is different).

Anyway, Byler just didn't strike me as gay for each other. I AM of the opinion that Will is absolutely gay, lol, and I think Mike is definitely not straight (although I really don't see hard evidence for either, but I want it to be true). And I think there is absolutely potential for Byler, AND a likelihood for them to become canon.

I have read some Byler theories, and a lot of them make sense, and some pretty good points. Like how Mike keeps staring at Will's lips. On the one hand, I've done that to my friends, when I'm just staring off into space and happen to be looking at their lips, or their boobs, or whatever.

On the other hand, Mike was clearly not staring off into space, lol, he was focused.

But while the analyses and theories do make a lot of sense, that is just how I'm seeing them for now - theories, and analyses (which can neither be wrong nor right, usually). Until we get some hard, concrete proof, which, by my definition, is going to come either straight from the writer's/creator's mouths, or will show up in ST4, I do not consider anything I see from those theories as real proof or evidence.

I also know that it has been pointed out that the Duffers have put in certain details or, for ex., been very selective with certain music choices, or cinematography choices, etc. I totally see that. But you know, sometimes things in a book, movie, or show weren't meant to happen in the first place, and are just coincidences that we, the fans, take and just roll with (like the lip staring thing, for instance). I'm not necessarily saying that I believe everything the theories say are just coincidences (because I don't believe that at all, for some things), I'm just saying there are possibilities.

Another part of why I try to avoid analyses is honestly because I think they make so much sense, and the Mileven shipper in me wants Mileven to stay canon, but the analyses make so much sense that that shipper is afraid they might be right, lol. But that really doesn't have anything to do with this analysis.

I guess the point of this post is just to say that, I should be allowed to think that two same-sex people can be just friends, without being slandered and labeled as homophobic

(Because if you honestly think I am homophobic, I will link you to my Reddie fanfiction and all the other gay ships I ship which probably outnumber the straight ones, lol, I will refer you to my bisexual best friends and my bisexual father, I will even show you photos of myself marching in Pride parades. Plus, I will remind you that I am not at all straight myself.)

because not all same-sex relationships are gay, just like not all opposite-sex relationships are romantic.

THIS IS COMING FROM A BYLER SHIPPER. Just because I do not view them as canon right now doesn't mean that I don't think they will ever become canon. If they do become canon, the Byler shipper in me will be very happy! If they don't, that shipper in me will wish they had. Viewpoints can change. I guess it just takes more to persuade me. I like Byler, I just like Mileven a little bit more. That literally doesn't mean anything. It's nothing more than a preference.

So like, I guess I'm sorry that my life/my upbringing/my relationships and friendships have made me see things differently ?? I'm sorry that I didn't pick up on the same subtext as all of you ???

I'm probably coming off as a rude-ass bitch, but you were bound to find that out about me eventually.

P.S. I know that some of the homophobia comments are directed at shippers who are, very possibly, homophobic. But those comments do not apply to all of us, and we shouldn't be grouped up together just because we have ONE similar opinion (which isn't even based on the same reasoning).

I guess, if you can't accept and respect my opinion that, canonically, Byler is CURRENTLY just best friends (even though I do want them to be more), until we get proof from the source, we might not get along. I am willing to discuss the possibility, and even look at some theories occasionally, on why they might end up canon/together. But until then, it's only speculation to me, and I would appreciate it if I were not attacked for this (although I'm sure they will be).

I do not go around looking for people/posts just so I can tell them they are wrong, I respect everyone's opinion. I hope that the same can be done for me.

Thank you. <3

P.P.S. if this makes any of my Byler followers want to unfollow me, I understand (I will miss you, though)

[theshedding]

Lil Nas X: Country Music, Christianity & Reclaiming HELL

I don’t typically bother myself to follow what Lil Nas X is doing from day to day, or even month to month but I do know that his “Old Town Road” hit became one of the biggest selling/streamed records in Country Music Business history (by a Black Country & Queer artist). “Black” is key because for 75+ years Country music has unsuspiciously evolved into a solidly White-identified genre (despite mixed and Indian & Black roots). Regrettably, Country music is also widely known for anti-black, misogynoir, reliably homophobic (Trans isn’t really a conversation yet), Christian and Hard Right sentiments on the political spectrum. Some other day I will venture into more; there is a whole analysis dying to be done on this exclusive practice in the music industry with its implications on ‘access’ to equity and opportunity for both Black/POC’s and Whites artists/songwriters alike. More commentary on this rigid homogeneous field is needed and how it prohibits certain talent(s) for the sake of perpetuating homogeneity (e.g. “social determinants” of diversity & viable artistic careers). I’ll refrain from discussing that fully here, though suffice it to say that for those reasons X’s “Old Town Road” was monumental and vindicating. 

As for Lil Nas X, I’m not particularly a big fan of his music; but I see him, what he’s doing, his impact on music + culture and I celebrate him using these moments to affirm his Black, Queer self, and lifting up others. Believe it or not, even in the 2020′s, being “out” in the music business is still a costly choice. As an artist it remains much easier to just “play straight”. And despite appearances, the business (particularly Country) has been dragged kicking and screaming into developing, promoting and advancing openly-affirming LGBTQ 🏳️‍🌈 artists in the board room or on-stage. Though things are ‘better’ we have not yet arrived at a place of equity or opportunity for queer artists; for the road of music biz history is littered with stunted careers, bodies and limitations on artists who had no option but to follow conventional ways, fail or never be heard of in the first place. With few exceptions, record labels, radio and press/media have successfully used fear, intimidation, innuendo and coercion to dilute, downplay or erase any hint of queer identity from its performers. This was true even for obvious talents like Little Richard.

(Note: I’m particularly speaking of artists in this regard, not so much the hairstylists, make-up artists, PA’s, etc.)

_____

Which is why...in regard to Lil Nas X, whether you like, hate or love his music, the young brother is a trailblazer. His very existence protests (at least) decades of inequity, oppression and erasure. X aptly critiques a Neo-Christian Fascist Heteropatriarchy; not just in American society but throughout the Music Business and with Black people. That is no small deal. His unapologetic outness holds a mirror up to Christianity at-large, as an institution, theology and practice. The problem is they just don’t like what they see in that mirror.

In actuality, “Call Me By Your Name”, Lil Nas X’s new video, is a twist on classic mythology and religious memes that are less reprehensible or vulgar than the Biblical narratives most of us grew up on vís-a-vís indoctrinating smiles of Sunday school teachers and family prior to the “age of reason”. Think about the narratives blithely describing Satan’s friendly wager with God regarding Job (42:1-6); the horrific “prophecies” in St. John’s Book of Revelation (i.e. skies will rain fire, angels will spit swords, mankind will be forced to retreat into caves for shelter, and we will be harassed by at least three terrifying dragons and beasts. Angels will sound seven trumpets of warning, and later on, seven plagues will be dumped on the world), or Jesus’s own clarifying words of violent intent in Matthew (re: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” 10:34). Whether literal or metaphor, these age old stories pale in comparison to a three minute allegorical rap video. Conservatives: say what you will, I’m pretty confident X doesn’t take himself as seriously as “The true and living God” from the book of Job.

A little known fact as it is, people have debunked the story and evolution of Satan and already offered compelling research showing [he] is more of a literary device than an actual entity or “spirit” (Spoiler: In the Bible, Satan does not take shape as an actual “bad” person until the New Testament). In fact, modern Christianity’s impression of the “Devil” is shaped by conflating Hellenized mythology with a literary tradition rooted in Dante’s Inferno and accompanying spooks and superstitions going back thousands of years. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Scientologist, Atheist or Agnostic, we’ve spent a lifetime with these predominant icons and clichés. (Resource: Prof. Bart D. Erhman, “Heaven & Hell”).

So Here’s THE PROBLEM: The current level of fear and outrage is: 

(1) Unjust, imposing and irrational. 

(2) Disproportionate when taken into account a lifetime of harmful Christian propaganda, anti-gay preaching and political advocacy.

(3) Historically inaccurate concerning the existence of “Hell” and who should be scared of going there. 

Think I’m overreacting? 

Examples: 

Institutionalized Homophobia (rhetoric + policy)

Anti-Gay Ministers In Life And Death: Bishop Eddie Long And Rev. Bernice King

Black, gay and Christian, Marylanders struggle with Conflicts

Harlem pastor: 'Obama has released the homo demons on the black man'

Joel Olsteen: Homosexuality is “Not God’s Best”

Bishop Brandon Porter: Gays “Perverted & Lost...The Church of God in Christ Convocation appears like a ‘coming out party’ for members of the gay community.”

Kim Burrell: “That perverted homosexual spirit is a spirit of delusion & confusion and has deceived many men & women, and it has caused a strain on the body of Christ”

Falwell Suggests Gays to Blame for 9-11 Attacks

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

Pope Francis: Gay People Not Welcome in Clergy

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

The Pope and Gay People: Nothing’s Changed

The Catholic church silently lobbied against a suicide prevention hotline in the US because it included LGBT resources

Mormon church prohibits Children of LGBT parents to be baptized

Catholic Charity Ends Adoptions Rather Than Place Kid With Same-Sex Couple

I Was a Religious Zealot That Hurt People-Coming Out as Gay: A Former Conversion Therapy Leader Is Apologizing to the LGBTQ Community

The above short list chronicles a consistent, literal, demonization of LGBTQ people, contempt for their gender presentation, objectification of their bodies/sexuality and a coordinated pollution of media and culture over the last 50+ years by clergy since integration and Civil Rights legislation. Basically terrorism. Popes, Bishops, Pastors, Evangelists, Politicians, Television hosts, US Presidents, Camp Leaders, Teachers, Singers & Entertainers, Coaches, Athletes and Christians of all types all around the world have confused and confounded these issues, suppressed dissent, and confidently lied about LGBT people-including fellow Queer Christians with impunity for generations (i.e. “thou shall not bear false witness against they neighbor” Ex. 23:1-3). Christian majority viewpoints about “laws” and “nature” have run the table in discussions about LGBTQ people in society-so much that we collectively must first consider their religious views in all discussions and the specter of Christian approval -at best or Christian condescension -at worst. That is Christian (and straight) privilege. People are tired of this undue deference to religious opinions. 

That is what is so deliciously bothersome about Lil Nas X being loud, proud and “in your face” about his sexuality. If for just a moment, he not only disrupts the American hetero-patriarchy but specifically the Black hetero-patriarchy, the so-called “Black Church Industrial Complex”, Neo-Christian Fascism and a mostly uneducated (and/or miseducated) public concerning Ancient Near East and European history, superstitions-and (by extension) White Supremacy. To round up: people are losing their minds because the victim decided to speak out against his victimizer. 

Additionally, on some level I believe people are mad at him being just twenty years old, out and FREE as a self-assured, affirming & affirmed QUEER Black male entertainer with money and fame in the PRIME of his life. We’ve never, or rarely, seen that before in a Black man in the music business and popular culture. But that’s just too bad for them. With my own eyes I’ve watched straight people, friends, Christians, enjoy their sexuality from their elementary youth to adolescence, up and through college and later marriages, often times independently of their spouses (repeatedly). Meanwhile Queer/Gay/SGL/LGBTQ people are expected to put their lives on hold while the ‘blessed’ straight people run around exploring premarital/post-marital/extra-marital sex, love and affection, unbound & un-convicted by their “sin” or God...only to proudly rebrand themselves later in life as a good, moral “wholesome Christian” via the ‘sacred’ institution of marriage with no questions asked. 

Inequality defined.

For Lil Nas X, everything about the society we've created for him in the last 100+ years (re: links above) has explicitly been designed for his life not to be his own. According to these and other Christians (see above), his identity is essentially supposed to be an endless rat fuck of internal confusion, suicide-ideation, depression, long-suffering, faux masculinity, heterosexism, groveling towards heaven, respectability politics, failed prayer and supplication to a heteronormative earthly and celestial hierarchy unbothered in affording LGBT people like him a healthy, sane human development. It’s almost as if the Conservative establishment (Black included) needs Lil Nas X to be like others before him: “private”, mysteriously single, suicidal, suspiciously straight or worse, dead of HIV/AIDS ...anything but driving down the street enjoying his youth as a Black Queer artist and man. So they mad about that?

Well those days are over.  

-Rogiérs is a writer, international recording artist, performer and indie label manager with 25+ years in the music industry. He also directs Black Nonbelievers of DC, a non-profit org affiliated with the AHA supporting Black skeptics, Atheists, Agnostics & Humanists. He holds a B.A. in Music Business & Mgmt and a M.A. in Global Entertainment & Music Business from Berklee College of Music and Berklee Valencia, Spain. www.FibbyMusic.net Twitter/IG: @Rogiers1

[nieladasdenani]

The daylight’s fading slowly (but time with you is standing still)

So, months later I finally was able to finish the prompt @mooooonshine gave me: The Corrs - Breathless + Summer Vibes. I hope it holds to your expectations, as it was erased twice accidentally! I love the Corrs, actually, so maybe that helped keep trying. You can also read this in AO3, if you rather.

Lena Luthor hates the beach.

She's aware that it's an unpopular opinion. And it's not just because standing in the shore of vast expanses of water trigger some trauma. It's not to be edgy either. Lena can actually appreciate the gentle breeze coming from the ocean, the calming sound of the waves. But she's not a fan of the Sun burning her skin, unless she's cocooned under a palm tree wearing a giant hat and shawl. Or the intense heat that makes the sand stick to her skin. Or the noise of too many people having too much fun, everyone trying to impose their respective playlists.

And yet, here she is. Dragged by her traitorous best friends with a flimsy excuse of getting back out there, Lena. So, it's been a while since she's last had casual sex. But less time since she had sex, though. She just ended a two-year relationship, and it's in no hurry to get back out there. Jack is still a dear friend, and it was her who ended things, it's not that she's opposed to casual sex, or one-night-stands, it's a matter of respect for the relationship they had.

"It's been a month, Lena. I think you mourned your kill long enough." Andrea's deadpan comment reaches Lena's internal ramblings, as if her friend could read her mind. She supposed she can, after all those years of friendship. Which is also why Lena glares at her openly and without remorse.

"No. Don't start, you two. We're here to have some fun, and enjoying a lovely day at the beach. We deserve a break!" Sam's always been the soft one out of the three of them. "It's also a good opportunity to meet new people!" Now Sam's throwing an unfairly sweet, hopeful smile at Lena, which in turn make her frown harder.

"Et tu, Brute?"

"Now, there's no need to be so dramatic, Lena. I'm not saying you have to, we're here to have a good time as friends, and if it happens, then, great!" Sam has the audacity to grin, and Lena is appalled to find herself softening in the face of her friends' love. Lena's not about to show this, though. Especially not when Andrea is smirking smugly at her, as if she knows she's won.

"Why are you smiling as if you enjoy spending time at a packed beach?" Lena fires at Andrea, who shrugs:

"I like it just fine. More so when I can eye such delicious, half naked snacks." She says this while pointedly looking in the general direction of a very tall, very handsome dark skinned man, who's smiling at a much shorter but equally gorgeous dark haired woman. Lena's about to point out how the pair seem to be a couple to Andrea, when Sam can't contain her enthusiasm any longer and explodes with an expressive:

"Who wants to get in the water!?"

Neither Lena, nor Andrea startle at the exuberant proposition, they both acknowledge it, however, with a decline. Though, Andrea promises to join her in a future immersion. The rejection doesn't affect Sam in the slightest, who skips the short distance that separates her from the ocean and dives head-first into the water, disappearing from view.

The attention of the remaining pair is grabbed by loud exclamations of joy coming from a group of people that are settled a short distance from them, only to discover that tall and handsome and short and gorgeous are part of the neighbors, and the actual reason they are whooping. Lena imagines it's because they come bearing alcohol and snacks.

"It seems like your snack is already taken." If she's going to have to get through this by force, Lena might as well be annoying, perhaps it will deter her friends from future abductions to the beach.

"Are you not familiar with concept of eye candy?"

"All I'm saying is, if you're going to fantasize about a handsome man, but it turns out he has a gorgeous girlfriend, and they're displaying it so publicly it must dampen the illusion somehow." Lena shrugs, not willing to let it go.

"You said that like it's a problem. All I hear is: handsome man and gorgeous woman. I'm sure you can also appreciate this combo." Andrea directs an arched brow at her, and Lena sighs in defeat, because she sure as hell can appreciate it.

"You're incorrigible." Lena huffs out with a laugh.

"Hey, guys!" They hear Sam, and turn in time to see her waving them from near the edge where sand meets water. Her smile impossibly large as droplets drip from every inch of her. Lena instinctively waves back with a small smile, but then freezes, because right behind her friend there's a goddess.

"Oh, no." She can't help the murmur that escapes her. It's a miracle that she recovers enough, despite Andrea's pointed, mocking, laugh. Just in time for Sam and her new friend to reach them.

"This is Kara!" Sam wears a smile that would be predatory when directed at Lena if it was in anyone else's face, specially Andrea's. "We were talking, and she's inviting us to join her and her friends to spend the day here at the beach!"

"Oh, isn't that wonderful, Lena?" And sometimes, Lena truly wonders why she allowed a friendship with Andrea to bloom after they fucked in college.

"Yes, so gracious." The growl is directed at her friends, but the moment she circles back to look at Kara, Lena finds herself smiling genuinely. Not only because the girl is ridiculously beautiful and fit, but because she's sporting one of the most charismatic smiles Lena has ever been hit with in her life.

"Hi! Sam said you guys were here to have a break from life, and so are we. So I figured we could just join forces and have a good time?" She's chipper, which should be enough to save Lena from this situation, because Lena Luthor hates the beach and Lena Luthor doesn't do chipper. And yet...

"That'd be wonderful, thank you, Kara. Are you sure it won't be a problem with the rest of your group?" Lena finds herself saying.

"Oh! Not at all! They're all very friendly and welcoming. Like I told Sam, it's really not a problem."

"Lovely. I'm Andrea, by the way. This is Lena. It seems as if our dear Sam has forgotten her manners."

"Right! Sorry!" She sounds anything but. "Anyway, shall we?" She's practically jumping with excitement and hurries to carry as much of their things as she physically can. Kara then jumps in to help, despite Lena's protests.

"No, it's no problem." And god, that smile is a weapon.

Turns out they fit right into the group, mostly because said group is outstandingly welcoming, at least after some awkward introductions that served to confirm that tall and handsome (James) and short and gorgeous (Lucy) are, indeed, a couple. Lena tries to send a smug smirk Andrea's way, but her friend looks, if anything more pleased. Incorrigible.

Kara doesn't leave Lena's side, not even when she looks like she's physically ill at the prospect of not getting into the water when most of the group decides to dip together. Andrea included, which almost makes Lena openly balk at her. Kara keeps stealing glances at the friends loudly enjoying the water, so much so that even Lena is close to feel like she wants to join them, too.

"You should go. I promise I'll be here when you come back." Lena teases. Satisfied when a light blush covers Kara's lovely face. 

"Are you sure?"

"Of course! You look like you're about to turn green with envy." Lena appreciates Kara's laugh, like she's always been free to express it, and she finds herself wanting to hear it more. A lot more. Odd.

"Ok! I'll be right back! Have fun, don't let Alex scare you, she's actually a softy." And with that Kara bolts to the water as if she'll turn to sand if she's not wet promptly... Ok, maybe not the best analogy, now Lena feels like she needs to dip in cold water. Ah, Alex. The big sister. Right. She has been friendly enough, but she keeps giving Lena the side eye and Lena's afraid she may receive a shovel talk she's not sure if she's ready to face. Lena faces her with a solid, confident stare, she's a Luthor, after all.

"So," Alex starts, "how are the labs at Luthor Corp? You're awful far from Metropolis." She never leaves her stare from Lena's face, not even when she sips at her drink. Which is a problem, because even if Lena recovers well, she's sure Alex didn't miss how much her question startled her. 

"Hm, are you keeping tabs on me? What is it, agent, special agent?" Lena remembers Kara gushing about her sister's accomplishments when she introduced them, FBI.

"Doctor Danvers is fine." She says. Smug. Lena squints at her. "I'm something of a scientist myself."

"Ah, that's what Kara meant when she said you were like Scully, then." And, surprisingly, they share a fond huff of a laugh over it. So maybe there's still hope.

"Yes. I like to keep up with the latest and greatest of the scientific community as much as I can. And that seems to lately involve Luthor Corp more often than not." Oddly, Lena sees the thinly veiled compliment, she tries not to blush.

"Well, it's a passion of mine. The lab, that is." Alex hums, but adds nothing, just keeps her gaze on Lena. And are moment like these when she's grateful for Lilian, she would be squirming if it weren't for her mother. They share a few more charged stares. Then Alex sighs and drops her eyes for a moment.

"Just don't play with her, all right?" Oh, wait what? Oh, no. She thinks... No!

"We're moving the company to National City!" What? What is she doing' why is she revealing secret information to a literal stranger? "We're changing the name, too. To L-Corp." Oh my god, someone please shut her up! Now! Oh she's dead. And Alex looks completely baffled, she even takes a couple of tries to speak.

"I...Oh. Oh, ok. That's, that's great."

"You can't tell anyone, though." She's not begging, just clarifying. "Please." An afterthought.

"Sure, no problem."

"I wouldn't. I wouldn't play with her." And here Alex sends her a searching look, no doubt looking for flaws. She doesn't seem to find any, because there aren't, and because she shrugs, finally.

"All right. That's all I ask. She's a big girl, she can take care of herself. But If you break her heart I'll make you regret it."

Lilian is going to kill her. Why is she revealing corporate secrets like this? For fear of the sister of a girl she finds cute (ok, glorious)? What the fuck? Since when does she panics like this? Why does she even care to make clear to Alex she's not playing with Kara? Oh Lilian is definitely murdering her now, no matter she's the only child she has left, now that Lex went crazy. So she probably shouldn't be making fun of her brother's very serious mental illness, but she's in self-destruct mode, apparently. Oh, forget Lilian killing her! Sam and Andrea are going to mock her relentlessly. Wait, they don't have to find out! None of them. Oh, good.

"What's wrong with you?" Andrea's usually unimpressed drawl has a tint of concern. And Lena is so caught off guard by the return of the rest of the group form the water that she gapes a little. Which only makes Andrea's frown deepen.

"Nothing. What's wrong with you?" Great. Excellent comeback. Andi's eyebrows almost touch her hairline.

"What did you do?"

"Everything ok?" Kara's sweet voice carries a hint of menace, and both Lena and Andrea turn to see her in such a defensive pose it's kind of uncanny to associate it with the sunshine girl they've met. It's actually kind of hot.

"I don't know. But she looks terribly guilty." Andrea, who seems to be a little impressed herself, says while pointing her accusing finger at Lena.

"Oh! Are you ok?" And she's back to being sweet, sitting back down next to Lena and scooting closer in case she wants to share a secret... again.

"Yes. Yes, of course."

The situation is gathering the attention of everyone, and Lena is sure that she's heading towards a panic attack. But her rescue comes from the least expected place: Alex.

"It's fine. She's just trying to reconcile the fact that I'm FBI and a scientist that knows science."

Lena sends a grateful smile Alex's way, because that seemed to be enough of an explanation for everyone else. Everyone else, except Andrea, of course. Lena does her best to ignore her, which is honestly not that hard with Kara so close to her giving her all of her attention, or the years of practice Lena has in the matter of ignoring Andrea. Also because Andres has her own source of distraction, in the form of James and Lucy. The day goes by in a whirlwind of fun, Lena's loathed to admit. Until Kara's stomach actually growls.

"Yep," Alex says, "that sounds about right. How about we order some actual food before hungry hungry hippo here resorts to cannibalism?" Kara's pouting, but she's also not offering any sort of dispute either. Something Lena shouldn't find adorable, and yet...

Somehow night crawls on them, and Lena is surprised to find that she's not drunk, despite having been drinking since they joined Kara's group. Actually, now that she thinks of it, none of them are. It's probably because Kara was making sure they were all drinking water and eating regularly, the whole time. She feels a little shift in her heart.

It looks like the spell will be broken when Sam regretfully announces that she needs to pick up Ruby from her dad's place. Andrea and Lena start to get ready to go with her, but Sam adamantly refuses them, ordering them to stay and enjoy the rest of the night. That she's just going to pick up her daughter and head home anyway. They insists, even Alex offers to be the one going with Sam, which strikes Lena as odd (doesn't Alex have a girlfriend?). But Sam, for her sweet disposition is really good at being a mom and having a mom voice.

"The only thing is that you two are going to need to find a way get back. I trust our new friends to take care of that?" James is the first to scramble to placate Sam that they'll make sure Lena and Andrea get home safe.

After Sam left night was quick to fall and they group started to retire for the day. Alex received a call from her girlfriend, Brainy and Nia left for Nia’s roommate’s birthday party, Winn had “mysterious date” his friends were teasing him about the whole time.

To Lena’s utter surprise, Andrea ended up leaving with James and Lucy, sporting the smuggest of smirks. This left Lena in the sole company of one Kara Danvers. Lena is actually surprised of how good her day at the beach was, she had fun, she feels like she did make new friends, not acquaintances, but actual friends. She also learned a lot about Kara, who has no reservations in wearing her heart for all to see. Which in Lena’s life is refreshing. It’s why she can tell the blonde is nervous when she says:

“I, I could walk you?” She doesn’t word it as a question but her voice does this thing that makes it sound like one. It’s endearing. It’s disarming.

“I’d like that.” And Lena’s nervous, too. She’s just better at hiding it. She’s nervous because she really wants to fuck Kara tonight. But she truly doesn’t want Kara to be a one-night-stand, or something even more ridiculous, like a summer love. But, god, she really wants to make love to this absurdly beautiful girl. And the walk is lovely, the air is a little cooler, but mild enough they can stay in their beach clothes, it gets lovelier when Kara spots her favorite ice cream stand open and insists she introduces Lena to:

“The best ice cream ever, you’ll see.”

“I’m sure.” She is, because she’s starting to believe everything with Kara is going to be delightful, Lena’s never been more charmed in her life.

Kara ends up buying a monstrosity that’s like a sample of every flavor available in one giant cup. Lena voices her concern about the amount of ice cream, and how she doubts they’ll be able to finish it. And Kara looks at her with a genuinely offended expression. Admittedly, the ice cream is delicious, and surprisingly, Kara does manage to finish the whole thing by the time they reach the hotel Lena’s staying in while her new apartment is done. They both look at the entrance like it has personally offended them.

“Well, this is me.”

“Yeah. Uh… Would you… I know you’re an important scientist and are probably super busy, but, do you think we could see each other again?”

“I’d love that.” Lena’s sure she’s never sported a bigger smile on her face. “Here, let me add you to my contacts, and I’ll text you so you have my number as well.”

“Yes, yeah. That’s awesome!” They exchange numbers like giddy teens, but still linger just outside the door.

“Would you like to come up?”

“Oh, you have no idea. I really, really do. But I want you in my life for as long as I can have you, you know? I mean, I want to do this right.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, if… if that’s what you also want, of course!”

“What I want is you, naked, in my bed.”

“Oh… Rao…” Kara’s so red, it’d be concerning if it wasn’t so adorable. “I really want that, too. I do. But, will that mean like a one night thing? What are you proposing, exactly?” Lena is so surprise for a moment, about the openness of Kara’s feelings, that it’s taken the wrong way. “I’m not, like, trying to pressure you into anything! Please, don’t freak out! It’s just, I like you so much, I really would like to maybe try and see if we work? Together? Like, as a couple? I know we just met… What I mean is, I’d like to know where we stand.”

“Kara,” because Lena doesn’t ever want to be the reason Kara looks this distressed again. “I’d love to explore the possibility of a romantic relationship with you. I know what you mean, you want to go step by step. I appreciate that. I just really wanted to have my way with you tonight.” Lena teases. And suddenly, Kara’s whole body language changes, she gains some confidence at Lena’s confirmation of affection.

“Well, I’ll make it worth the wait.” And oh, Lena is going to hold her to that.

They’re close enough to each other there’s no way to tell who initiates the kiss, it’s probably both of them, honestly. It’s soft, but so full of promise, Lena suddenly has no problem with doing the thing right, doing it their way, at their pace. She has a feeling this is all going to be worth it.

As a matter of fact, she’ll be right. She and Kara would go to start a relationship that’d be the best either of them ever experienced. They complement each other nicely, when Kara is impatient, Lena steps up, and when is Lena the one rushing things, is Kara who grounds her. It’ll start with regular coffee dates, then dinner dates, then lunch dates at Lena’s office. Game nights, movie nights. It’ll be like watching a flower bloom. And yes, the wait for the love making part will absolutely be worth the wait.

[comrade-meow]

Tom Farr in an excellent article on Medium presents in-depth the central arguments around prostitution decriminalisation, unionisation, and its conceptualisation as work, specifically from a socialist perspective

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic facing numerous countries across the world is undoubtedly a dire time for anyone who in some way depends on a job to provide for their family and keep a roof over their heads. It is not controversial to say that the UK economy and society more broadly has been shaken to its core by the crisis currently facing us, and many have — rightly it should be said — used the situation to highlight just how deeply the past ten years of austerity-driven capitalism in Britain has failed the most vulnerable in our society.

Even before considering the resource shortfall that currently faces us, those who place themselves somewhere on the political Left have not faltered in vocalising their displeasure with the Government’s Ahabian pursuit of ‘balancing the books’ and their slicing away of the perceived State largesse of ‘the last Labour Government’. For all his many faults, it cannot be said that Jeremy Corbyn did not galvanise disenfranchised millenials who had grown tired of the grotesque excesses of capitalism not being shared more equally amongst different generations and demographics.

But this is not a critique of the successes — or more accurately, the failures — of Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing policies. Rather, it is a critique of the rank hypocrisy that has riddled the Left, both in Britain and across the world — particularly those on the Left who consider themselves to be in any way “socialist” — when it comes to advocating for the actual redistribution of social power and wealth in the context of women within prostitution, which has been placed under a microscope in respect of the disastrous consequences Covid-19 is having on them.

Some background for those who may not be au fait with the UK’s response to this crisis: Covid-19 has presented an almost intractable problem for a Government that has built a reputation on wanting to shrink the State even in the face of thousands of deaths resulting from welfare cuts, lack of healthcare provision, and homelessness. When faced with the consequences of inaction — although a more cynical person may suggest it was the prospect of international shaming as opposed to the fundamental value of protecting its citizens’ lives — the Government were minded to finally get their invisible hand well and truly stuck in to the market.

On turned the money tap — Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £330 billion stimulus package to prevent financial disaster, and the State were going to support the economy with an ‘unprecedented intervention’. While analysing the criticism of the Government only doing this when faced with the most dire circumstances is a different story for a different time, suffice to say there are many of us who view the renewed investment after so many years of brutal austerity as akin to closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. It’s the bare minimum, and it should have been done sooner. So this in some ways is a Pyrrhic victory for the Left, in that it has been proven the State can step in to support the most vulnerable in society — albeit the threshold for when the State should ‘step in’ is a fundamental point of contention — but it has come at a great cost.

But this has left a lingering question: if these same Leftist and socialist groups have been so keen to reduce poverty, exploitation, and power inequality, then why have they spent recent years advocating for the continued purchase and sale of women as commodities within the marketplace of sexual exploitation? It should be noted, this reference to women as commodities is not just emotive language used to create a misconstrued narrative. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is used as a precise term which will demonstrate that prostitution is not the sale of labour power as is often claimed by sex trade apologists, but is in fact the sale of women specifically as commodities within the capitalist mode of production.

The Workers’ Revolution is here!

Of course, advocating for the legalisation and/or decriminalisation of prostitution is not something confined to the modern Left or alleged socialists. However, in recent years the idea that ‘sex work is work’ has gathered pace in much of the mainstream media, with many supposedly progressive outlets not giving equal column inches to opposing viewpoints of what is still clearly a contested issue.

It has become the party line (sometimes literally) to never falter from the idea that either any kind of analysis of prostitution as exploitative is regressive or prudish; or, alternatively but closely linked, prostitution is not any more inherently exploitative than any other type of work under capitalism. That is to say, all labour under capitalism is exploitative, but prostitution should not be put on any kind of pedestal as being particularly exploitative, and should be reconceptualised — both legally and intellectually — as work, thus providing the “workers” (prostituted women) with the protection afforded to other types of employment. Or so the argument goes, anyway.

Deviating from this is “whorephobic” and warrants the label of SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist), irrespective of whether you are actually a radical feminist, or “exclude sex workers”.

That’s enough internet for one day

Indeed, many of these same “SWERFs” are survivors of prostitution themselves, or are activists who have spent their lives working alongside and platforming the voices of women who have survived prostitution, which highlights just how jejune this particular slur is.

Stepping outside of the context of Covid-19 for a (lengthy) moment, the crux of this issue is not that Leftist sex trade apologists are somehow forming this opinion in a vacuum — as mentioned, there is myriad press coverage talking about the supposed benefits of allowing unhindered sexual access to the inside of a woman’s body — rather, this ideology is wrong on two fronts: prostitution should not be considered work in theoretical terms, and the reality of prostitution apologism proves it does not work in practice irrespective of whether it is considered “work” or not.

This argument is particularly egregious in its current form as advanced by Twitter socialists/Marxists/”I’m literally a communist(s)” (delete according to relevant Twitter bio) where on the one hand, there have been campaigns and protests to end the relentless free market capitalism that has gutted our society and left little protection for the most vulnerable amongst us; on the other, there has been an indefatigable crusade to glorify and expand a literal marketplace of human bodies there to provide sexual gratification for what is almost always a man.

Seize the means of production? I guess?

As Julie Bindel, author of The Pimping of Prostitution and campaigner against male violence against women tells me:

The sex trade, and prostitution specifically, is the starkest example imaginable of Leftist hypocrisy. Whilst genuine socialists or even soft centrists have a critique of uber capitalism, many will stop short at condemning poor and otherwise vulnerable women and girls having their bodies mined by rich exploiters for their own greedy and selfish benefit. Prostitution represents the interface between the worst excesses of patriarchy and capitalism.

Dealing with the first issue, on whether “sex work” can or should be considered “work”. The argument is formulated on the premise that by refusing to recognise “sex work” as “work” (or to put it another way, labour), then it prevents those within prostitution from receiving the protections afforded to recognised workers within the capitalist mode of production.

Discussions regarding socialist conceptions of work is a complicated issue, and one which has been debated for many years, but it is necessary to analyse this very carefully to put to rest the claim that “sex work is work”.

The first stop on this carousel of misery has to be the question: “what do you mean by sex work?” The phrase “sex work” has become so ubiquitous as to be totally meaningless. Everybody from the woman enslaved by a pimp, to the student who sells pictures of her body parts online with zero physical contact with the purchaser (which, by the way, is not devoid of risk or damaging consequences), to the “high-class escort”, to the strip club performer and all in-between are concertina’d down into a monolith of “sex worker”.

This renders the very real concrete differences between the reality of these situations as totally meaningless, and is indicative of the lumping together of vast swathes of women who have completely different relationships to this alleged work. (To preface, this section will borrow heavily from this superb Struggle Sessions essay, which is highly recommended.)

Take for instance the woman who performs in a strip club. Common “progressive” parlance would dictate that this woman is a sex worker. But this fundamentally misunderstands the concept of work, and the proletarian relation to it within the capitalist mode of production.

The majority of women that work in strip clubs in the UK are self-employed, which immediately distinguishes them from the proletarian who is exploited by a capitalist owner for their labour power, with the goal of extracting surplus value (which would ultimately result in profit). These individuals would be paid a wage for their labour power; the strip performer is not. The same goes for people who “cam”, and any other situation in which somebody earns money for a sexual performance after a third party takes a hosting cut.

Further, these performative types of “sex work” differentiate themselves from prostitution by their very nature. You can tell that even in common understanding, stripping and prostitution are not the same thing because strip clubs go to great lengths to make sex and sexual contact “against the rules” (not that this means prostitution does not occur within strip clubs, of course). While ironically the common thread between the above and non-pimp related prostitution is that none of them constitute work, they are still very much differentiated by the nature of what each circumstance entails.

These situations do not constitute work in the sense that these people are exploited by a capitalist employer as wage labourers, yet somehow they all constitute a monolithic grouping of “sex worker”. These women have been egregiously grouped together under the umbrella of “(sex) worker” by so-called socialists because, and this is the crux of the issue, they do something for money. This is not what is meant by a socialist conception of work.

Further to this, the condensing of all who do something for money that has the common thread of “sexuality” running through it ignores the very distinct class-differences within prostitution specifically. For example, the women who are controlled by pimps — which in the United States for example make up the majority of women in prostitution — are in no way workers. As the above Struggle Sessions essay points out, pimp-controlled prostitution is more akin to slavery than anything else. The woman is both controlled and effectively owned by the pimp, who oversees every aspect of her existence. The idea of applying “workers’ rights” to a woman who is literally owned by a man who profits off repeatedly selling her body is as grotesque as it is laughably bourgeois. Would these pimp-owned women band together to negotiate better terms of their enslavement? Would they negotiate a contract that stipulates when and where the prolific physical violence and abuse they experience can take place?

The same goes for the “high-class escort”. As with the strip performer and the cam performer, there is no “worker exploitation” occurring here as a socialist would understand the term worker (although of course, exploitation is occurring along sex-class lines). In fact, Marx himself stated that for worker exploitation to occur, the following social relation had to occur: firstly, the individual had to be free from any kind of slave-owner or employer (check); and secondly, they had to be “free” from any other means of subsistence, thus being “hurled as free and unattached proletarians on the labour-market”. This second requirement certainly does not apply to situations where a woman can allegedly pick and chose which high-paying contracts she might become party to.

The individual is not being paid a wage for her labour-power, with the capitalist receiving the surplus value. The relationship does not resemble anything akin to a capitalist exploiting a worker for their labour-power, as no capital is invested. It is simply the transfer of revenue from one party to another.

Suffice to say, sex trade apologists ignore this inconvenient stratification, and condense both ends of the spectrum — with the non-pimp owned women in the middle — down into one amorphous “sex worker movement”. By blurring the conception of worker to mean “doing something for money”, this necessarily then includes anybody else who might “do something for money” within the wider sex trade, resulting in a totally ambiguous collective consisting of pimps, brothel owners, porn producers, and strip club owners.

And what of the aforementioned women who are neither pimp-controlled or engaging in sexual performance?

This is where we can get down to the nuts and bolts of the issue. It has become a progressive flavour of the week to draw analogies between the “Wages for Housework” movement of the 70s, advocated for by Marxist-Feminists such as Silvia Federici et al, and prostitution. Advocates of this position draw parallels between those women who contribute to the reproduction of the proletariat labour-force within the contexts of marriage and household work by virtue of their unpaid labour in the home. This is including, but not limited to, cooking, cleaning, care work, and most importantly here, sex.

The common thread that links the location of housework as work (albeit unpaid work) and prostitution as unrecognised work can be found in the Marxist-Feminist analysis of marriage. To quote Federici at length:

It was understood — and the feminist movement has analysed it — that men always sell themselves, or try to sell themselves, in the wage labour market. We also sell ourselves in the marriage market. For many women, getting married is an economic solution, because the division of labour has been organised in such a way that it is much more difficult for women to get access to wage jobs. So, many women marry not because they want to, but as an economic solution for their lives. And you have sex because that is part of your job. We performed this deconstruction of sexuality, of the family, of the relationship between men and women, and we said that marriage is prostitution. In many cases, you can have a good relationship with your husband, but it doesn’t matter. The reality is that the way the state has constructed marriage has forced women to rely on marriage for survival and therefore, to offer sex in exchange for subsistence. The state has put us into the situation of prostitution.

So we have insisted that there is a continuity between the housewife who at night, after washing dishes and the floor, has to open her legs and have sex, whether she wants it or not, whether she’s tired or not — and many women have been beaten up because they refuse sex — and the woman who sells sex on the street. One sells it to one man and another sells it to many men, but there is a continuity between the two.

This, to put it bluntly, is a rather cavalier parallel. Many people would be mystified at the analogy drawn between marriage and prostitution, and argue along the lines of “they’re obviously not the same thing!”, but this misses the point. Federici is right when she states that marriage has, certainly historically and to a greater or lesser degree currently, forced women into a situation where economic dependence necessitates marriage and all that comes with it (in other words, sex). So the parallels between marriage — where the woman “sells it to one man” — and the prostituted woman who “sells it to many men” appear to make economic sense.

This, coupled with the other aspects of marriage — all of the unpaid domestic labour, the cooking, the cleaning, the care work — result in what has been conceptualised in Marxist terms as the reproduction of the work force. By doing all these things, the woman literally reproduces new labourers — and also current labourers who could not face the new working day without this care work — which circuitously results in further extraction of surplus value as the labour force is expanded by the introduction of new workers, and the capitalist can lower wages, thus increasing their profit margins.

Without delving into an analysis of whether wages for housework is a “good” or “bad” thing, the point of the argument is, as Federici states:

“…to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the’ opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it…”

It would seem then that by recognising prostitution as this type of unpaid and unrecognised labour, similar to the woman who “sells herself to one man” within marriage, that the demand for it to be recognised as work is one in which would instigate a new class-recognition amongst women as part of the labour force.

However, and with great respect to Federici who is a tremendous theorist and academic, this seems to gloss over the fundamental relationship between the existence of marriage — and importantly, monogamy — as an institution, and the system of prostitution. To quote Friedrich Engels in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the States:

“We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.

Thus, it is argued here that the system of marriage and the system of prostitution are necessary, but inverse, correlates. To parse that in a slightly less dry manner: they depend on each other to exist, but at polar opposites of the same conceptual spectrum. To quote Engels again:

monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society

Marriage and prostitution developed hand in hand because it allowed men to act on their non-monogamous impulses by cheating on their wives with a woman who was not his wife. This sounds tautological, but the distinction between the wife and the prostituted woman is absolutely fundamental to understanding why marriage and housework as “labour” is not the same thing as prostitution as “labour”.

The man visits the prostituted woman precisely because she is not his wife. He can utilise her body for sexual relief without any concern for reproduction, or emotional and financial investment (beyond the immediate payment). There is nothing in the relationship between the married man and the prostituted woman that resembles the relationship of marriage as it would be understood in worker terms. Nothing is produced or reproduced in prostitution, and that is entirely the point. Domestic housework and sex may well be reconceptualised as work (although that is not without its problems), as it contributes to the literal reproduction of the labour-pool for the exploitative capitalist; prostitution does not.

This is clear to see in modern day Women’s Strikes— where women take to the streets to highlight that without their unrecognised domestic work, the world would likely grind to a halt. Can the same be said for prostitution as a system of so-called work? It would appear not. It should be noted as well, this is absolutely not a callous analysis of the women within prostitution, or a suggestion that the women should just be “done away with”, it is an analysis of the absolute misery of the system itself. Just as socialists do not hate the workers within capitalism, this analysis does not reflect on the women trapped within prostitution. It is an analysis of a system of brutal and violent oppression and exploitation. To suggest otherwise is to distract attention away from the capitalist in the worker-exploitation dynamic, and from the male punter in the prostitution dynamic.

A separate but related theory that drives the reconceptualisation of prostitution as work is that the women involved are selling their labour-power, and not their bodies. This argument is a rebuttal to the idea that prostitution is effectively akin to slavery, with men purchasing the bodies of women for sexual access. Sex trade apologists obfuscate this issue by claiming that “sex work” is akin to any other “service” work, where the worker provides a service such as waiting tables in a restaurant, and it is the labour-power that produces that service that is being sold.

This sleight of hand remarkably ignores the fundamental basis of what actually happens in prostitution, in that men are purchasing sexual access to the human body specifically because the human body in question is available to do that. Other types of labour do not require this specificity. A company that employs a plumber does not do so on the basis of whether (s)he has a large penis/breasts, or whether their hair colour is the right shade, or whether they fulfill a racist stereotype/fantasy. As long as they can sell their labour-power to undertake plumbing work, this usually suffices. The same cannot be said for prostitution, despite the fact that in a theoretical sense, almost all people would have the physical means to actually “do” prostitution (ie, functioning genitals).

On a fundamental level, men discriminate on the basis of the physical body in front of them — they do not just want sex with anybody, they want sex with that particular woman (or to a lesser extent, the man). The women are segregated and advertised on the basis of their breast size, or weight, or race.

If prostitution truly were just the sale of labour-power as a commodity in the production of sexual gratification as a service, punters would not discriminate between different women, but this is patently not the reality of the system of prostitution. For example, research of punters across five different countries showed that more than 50% had a preference for women that they perceived to be between the ages of 18–25.

Further to this, and yet another example of the fundamentally abhorrent nature of prostitution, race is also a central factor in punters’ decision making, and further highlights the intense class stratification that occurs within prostitution.

In the first instance, research in the US found that African-American women earned the least comparatively to their white counterparts (who earned the most) within escort-prostitution. At SPACE International’s Women of Colour Against the Sex Trade event held in London in 2019, women from across the globe shared their experience of racism within prostitution. Ne’cole Daniels, an African-American sex trade survivor who works with at-risk women and girls in California told the audience:

“The sex trade is built on racism. Black women are paid less [than their white counterparts], and treated even worse.”

Further, many of these same women are not only economically exploited as a result of systemic racism, but it propagates and entrenches racism on the part of punters who seek out women based on their race and ethnicity to act out racist fetishes. When quizzed on his “preference” for different women, one punter in Amsterdam stated:

“The black girls are pretty much down for anything, and the Eastern girls are eager to please. You learn who’s good at giving blowjobs, and who to avoid. [Being with colored girls] is exotic in its way.

This vile attitude is capitalised on by ruthless pimps, with one stating:

“The girls who work here are good at what they do, but [racial preferences and stereotypes] help get clients through the door. How do you say in real estate? It’s a buyer’s market.”

In the study mentioned previously that examined punter attitudes in five countries, racial stratification also played out there, with darker-skinned women being placed at the bottom of the conceptual pile in terms of earnings. A punter in Barcelona was quoted as saying:

If I had to choose, the dark ones would be bottom of my list. I’m not racist, but with black women, you see them on the lowest scale of prostitution. I have nothing against them, but sexually, they don’t interest me. (40-year-old white Spanish male)

This discrimination also plays out in the opposite manner, with punters specifically seeking out women of colour. For example, a 29-year-old white British man living in Spain who specifically sought out African street-based workers when he paid for sex described them as more liable to be ‘drug addicted, unclean and uneducated’. He then said:

I think for me, because I’ve got very nice middle class parents and been brought up in a very nice middle class way, sleeping with a prostitute for me isn’t just sleeping with a prostitute. It’s about like damnation towards society, you see what I mean? It’s like sort of damnation towards everything you feel about yourself as well. So it’s almost like wanting to damn yourself. So it doesn’t even matter what the prostitute’s like.

But, to quote O’Connell Davidson, the author of the above research: ‘It does matter to him — the prostitute needs to belong to a group that is popularly regarded as worthless, dirty and dangerous in order to serve as a medium of damnation.’

Even if prostitution occurred along the same economic-class exploitation lines, where a capitalist exploited the individuals to amass surplus value, it would still not be considered work like any other due to the fact it is a very specific, sexualised body being sold. Even the restaurant server who is hired by the misogynist owner because of her good looks and her alleged willingness to sexualise the service provision through the use of her physical body — for example, by flirting with customers — differentiates itself from prostitution in that it is still productive labour, allowing the owner to extract surplus value by exploiting the server’s labour power, regardless of the fact it may be analogous with prostitution in that both punter and owner have an interest in what type of physical body is “providing the service”.

Running parallel to this, in a study by Eileen McLeod of punters and the women they use, McLeod found that:

nearly all the men I interviewed complained about the emotional coldness and mercenary approach of many prostitutes they had contact with

This self-distancing employed by the women is not only a testament to the specifically degrading and exploitative nature of prostitution itself, but the fact the men complained about this is further proof that those who purchase the women’s bodies wish to be recognised as their owner for the period of time for which they have paid for. They desire acknowledgement, and the psychological presence of the woman, to reinforce their mastery of the woman’s body. If the man was simply interested in sexual relief, he would masturbate, or buy a “sex doll” to imitate — albeit poorly — the physical process of having sex. But he doesn’t. He wishes to purchase the real woman’s body, to engage in a transaction that can only ever exist within the context of prostitution.

This is a key point — if we recall the previous discussion regarding prostitution as a transfer of revenue from one party to another, and not the investment of capital for surplus value — this economic relationship is true for many service provisions, which Marx summed up as encompassing ‘(from) whore to pope’. In other words, all those individuals who are not paid from capital, but as individual service providers with no surplus value extracted.

But prostitution differentiates itself here too. Services such as woodcutting or portering — to use examples from Marx’s Grundrisse — ‘vanish upon consumption’. They are their own commodity. Proponents of the “sex work is work” line attempt to subsume prostitution under the umbrella of labour by stating that sex is the service-commodity produced. But sex cannot be meaningfully separated from the body in prostitution. For the greedy capitalist, he would soon rather utilise a workforce of machines in a relentless desire to extract the most surplus value for the least cost to himself.

Conversely, if we look at the sex-trade-equivalent in the form of sex dolls or robots, they are advertised as being ‘lifelike’.

Thanks, I hate it!

The ultimate goal for anything that isn’t a human body within the sex trade is for it to imitate the human body, as without it the relationship between punter and woman would simply not be the same. While it is true that the punter does not simply want a body to do “anything” (he specifically wants it for sex), the converse is also true: he does not simply want sex from anything. Thus, prostitution is necessarily dependent upon the human body being the object purchased.

Beyond the theories of labour power and employment status, it is actually quite difficult to conceive how prostitution would even function as a typical employee/employer relationship, and this once again reinforces the idea that prostitution is not, at its root, considered to be a situation (or “job”) like any other, even by those who advocate for its inclusion in the labour market.

For example, in 2002 Germany introduced the Prostitution Act 2002, which sought to bring prostitution under pre-existing labour frameworks, with the goal of legitimising the trade to encourage payment of taxes and employee protections. In what was undoubtedly feeble lip-service by the German Government towards the concept of “bodily autonomy”, they included in the legislation the prohibition of brothel owners to demand that a specific sexual service was performed. As O’Connell Davidson points out, this is totally unlike any other “employment contract”, with one brothel owner stating:

The employer’s right to give instructions to employees is limited. What do I do if she says: so, I am not going up to the room with the next three guests? What then? Do I still have to pay her? Can I throw her out?

In this example of course, prostitution would be formulated in precisely the way that any kind of socialist analysis of proletarian work requires it to be, in that an exploitative brothel owner pays a wage to the woman, and then the owner can extract surplus value from her labour. But in what appears to be a consistent trend amongst sex trade apologists and “sex positive” Twitter activists, myopic contradiction is the name of the game, and that is now no longer the type of “employment” that they’re talking about.

This is clear to see in the work of the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, who demand that:

sex work is recognised as gainful employment, [and that] sex workers have access to social insurance which gives the right to unemployment and sickness benefits, pensions and health care’

This does not appear to be objectionable on the face of things, but when read with the following paragraph the entire reconfiguration of prostitution as work collapses:

The fact that sex becomes work does not remove our right to have control over who we have sex with or the sexual services we provide or the condition under which we provide those services. We demand the right to say no to any client or any service requested. Managers must not be allowed to determine the services we provide or the conditions under which we provide them — whether we are employees or ‘self-employed’.

These demands are certainly not enjoyed by other wage-labourers within the capitalist mode of production. Other service providers — such as those within the catering industry — may be able to refuse to serve drunk clientele for example, but they cannot simply restrict access to certain meals on the menu as and when they choose. Nor can they pick and choose which customers to serve based on a personal preference.

Thus, prostitution cannot be meaningfully separated from the sale of the body and is implicitly not viewed as “any other type of labour”, as these protections would theoretically allow the woman to refuse to engage in an act which she does not wish to engage in, with a person whom she does not wish to engage in it with, and certainly the ICRSWE recognise this. Simply put, the differentiation in how “worker protections” meaningfully apply to prostitution necessarily demonstrate that it is like no other “work”, and could not be conceived of as such.

It is also worth briefly considering how exactly tangible “worker rights” might play out within the context of prostitution, to understand fully the impossibility of categorising this as work within the pre-existing labour market. Almost all physical labour jobs have some form of worker protection in terms of health and safety regulations, protective equipment and the like (not that this stops morally bankrupt capitalists from ignoring these and working their labour force to death anyway…). How exactly would this work within prostitution? In this piece, Juno Mac and Molly Smith argue that by reconfiguring prostitution so that it is subsumed into the labour market, it would allow:

…people who sell sex (to) access labor law and other kinds of protection afforded on legal job sites.

What “protection” would actually apply here? In other professions, workers are afforded protection from bodily fluids and potential exposure to disease, for example. Would the women in prostitution be entitled to wear full hazmat suits to prevent the spread of disease and exposure to potentially hazardous substances? This, of course, would not happen as that would change the fundamental nature of prostitution itself.

Further, it is interesting that some proponents of this position do not recognise the hypocrisy in deriding Nordic Model or abolitionist advocates for our supposed “reliance on the corrupt police state” to enforce sanctions against punters, when that is exactly what would happen when a punter reneges on his end of the “contract” by refusing to wear a condom, or by brutally beating and raping the woman in front of him. This is not to say that criticisms of reliance on the police, who are the enforcers of the bourgeois State, are without merit — but it cannot be one rule for the police in one argument, and another rule in the alternative.

The same article quotes ‘sex worker Nickie Roberts’, who in the 1980s stated:

Working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most degrading and exploitative work I ever did in my life. I think there should be another word for the kind of work working class people do; something to differentiate it from the work middle class people do; the ones who have careers. All I can think of is drudgery. It’s rotten and hopeless; not even half a life.

Why should I have to put up with a middle class feminist asking me why I didn’t ‘do anything — scrub toilets, even?’ than become a stripper? What’s so liberating about cleaning up other people’s shit?

Indeed, what is so “liberating” about cleaning up other people’s shit? But this rather flippant comment about “degrading and exploitative work” betrays just how oppositional to worker-class solidarity this attitude is. In fact, many out-and-out Marxists such as Alexandra Kollontai in her work Prostitution and Ways of Fighting it went as far as to describe it as ‘labour desertion’. There is an undercurrent of disdain for the working class, where the acknowledgement that the work undertaken by the proletariat is actually not “liberating” at all, and anything else is preferable. This is a perfectly understandable position for the “meritocracy capitalist” to take — ‘life is a rat race, why shouldn’t I succeed’ — but it certainly isn’t a socialist position.

The theory is one thing, but what about the practice? As will be shown, any attempt by alleged socialists to try to reconceptualise prostitution as a workers’ rights issue is destined to fail in that regard as well. For a system that is in direct contravention of various international human rights law obligations whether or not you are examining the issue through a socialist lens, the answer for sex trade apologists to the question “what is the best way to legislate prostitution” apparently lies in decriminalising the whole endeavour, thus allowing the supposed workers to “unionise” and seek worker recognition that way.

This is a frankly ridiculous notion, and to quote the Struggle Sessions essay once again:

Being under the control of a pimp prevents a prostitute from all independent activity and independent thinking. The woman chained by the pimp cannot be organized into a trade union. A union of prostitutes who through some unknown force have ceased to be enthralled to pimps, due to the inevitable emergence of leadership and people who professionally manage such a union, will inevitably just generate its own, internal pimps. This is true because if the union bureaucracy is not completely ineffective (that is, if the union actually exists and functions), they would find themselves enforcing payment from reneging johns, securing housing in times of income shortage, bribing or negotiating with police, and sustaining their professional organizers with dues: they would in essence be pimps with a more charitable subsidiary.

Further:

In the case of prostitutes without pimps (who are not being pimped upon the point of being organized), who basically take contracts independently and have full access to their own income…For them the formation of a union is impossible. After all, a “union” of those who own their own means of production (lumpen or not) is actually called a cartel. Furthermore, the existence of a cartel gives impulse to the hiring of a general staff — plus, the stratification of prostitution would allow the cartel to employ other prostitutes under its protection — this again is a return to pimping.

The unionisation of prostitution is, in the bluntest terms, a total sham that benefits pimps and traffickers. There are numerous examples of this, including The Red Thread in The Netherlands, an organisation which proclaimed to represent “sex workers” despite only having 100 members (the Netherlands has an estimated prostitution population of 25,000), and never having fought a court case on behalf of one of their “workers” to improve their “working conditions” despite the absolute disaster that is prostitution in the Netherlands; or the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) in Cambodia, which when the women within prostitution were asked of the supposed benefits of the WNU’s work, a WNU representative responded for them by stating that the organisation will help to purchase a coffin for the women when they die. This truly is the socialist revolution we have all been waiting for!

Perhaps most importantly, we can turn our attention to New Zealand, where the sex trade apologist’s utopia is in full swing — including blanket decriminalisation and a quasi-union in the form of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective — to see how this actually plays out on the ground.

The NZPC themselves represent the abject failure of the bourgeois experiment that is prostitution decriminalisation, replete with the corruption and cloak-and-dagger tactics you would expect from a capitalist conglomerate, and not an alleged workers’ rights organisation. As Janice Raymond analyses here, quoting a sex trade survivor and writer named Chelsea who has had first hand experience with the organisation:

The NZPC has skewed its own research data to deceive the public that decriminalisation has resulted in greater safety for women in New Zealand.

Not only that, but due to the new moniker of “work” being applied to prostitution, the very issues that these workers’ rights were meant to prevent — such as not having to engage with a client against their will — have not only remained present, but have been reformulated as “exploitative worker conditions”. This, rather unsurprisingly, has been coupled with the exploitation tactics of greedy pimps and punters, resulting in a situation where:

‘…brothel owners were allowed to offer sex buyers an “all-inclusive” deal, a set payment that permitted them to do anything they wanted to women with no-holds barred. The women couldn’t refuse to perform any activity requested, or determine their own prices.’

The “refusing any activity requested” as you may recall was one of the main “worker demands”of the ICRSWE, which clearly is not actually feasible in practice. This once again proves the inseparable nature of prostitution from the body, in that actually doing prostitution requires the giving of the body to a client, regardless of whether they want to or not. Only now, the quasi-union that is literally dependent upon the continuance of prostitution for its existence euphemistically glosses over the rampant male violence against women — for example, it describes human trafficking as a “working holiday” — in a self-serving attempt to weave their own success story narrative.

The NZPC are also major players when it comes to law and policy reviews of how decriminalisation is playing out, and they occupy three of the eleven seats on the Prostitution Law Review Committee, per s43(2)(g) Prostitution Reform Act 2002. Why then, if the NZPC have the best interests of prostituted women at heart, are they signing off on research that lies about the number of women within prostitution since decriminalisation was introduced in 2002?

On page 13 of the report, the PLRC state:

The Committee endorses the findings of the CSOM that the enactment of the PRA has had little impact on the numbers of people working in the sex industry.

Then later in Section 8, paying particular attention to Auckland:

Research undertaken by the CSOM in February and March 2006 found 253 street-based sex workers in New Zealand…In Auckland 106 street workers…in Wellington 47 street workers…and in Christchurch 100 were recorded. Between June and October 2007, CSOM carried out another estimation of street-based sex workers…In Christchurch 121 street-based workers were counted and in Wellington 44 street-based sex workers were counted. In Auckland, 230 street workers were known to be working.

Further evidence of the PLRC’s intentional obfuscation and outright lying in the report can be found in this article by Samantha Berg, but suffice to say, if the NZPC really did have their “workers’” best interests at heart, then as an organisation that makes up nearly one-third of the PLRC they shouldn’t be endorsing fallacious research.

All of the above does not even take into account that prostitution under decriminalisation has thrived in New Zealand, with nearly 1000 brothel applications being submitted between 2004–2011, resulting in a growth of the exploiter-class, which has made the lives of the women within prostitution considerably worse. As sex trade survivor and co-founder of Wahine Toa Rising Ally-Marie Diamond tells me:

Decriminalisation hasn’t improved the situation in New Zealand. We have seen men become more entitled and demanding in terms of what they expect from women in the sex trade and what they feel they are entitled to because ‘they pay for it’. This has become more apparent since COVID-19 with many men ignoring health and safety warnings.

Women in the sex trade who are assaulted, raped, or attacked very rarely go to police. Young people, especially those of Māori or Pacific Island cultures are being pimped on the streets, and are being trafficked in licensed brothels. Overseas students visiting NZ on student visas and tourist visas are also at extremely high risk. Full Decriminalisation does not protect them. Trafficking is a huge issue in New Zealand, and yet the Government seems to turn a blind eye.

There are no government strategies in place to help women exit. Regardless of the law, exit services are imperative. Support must be there for all women and young people. Bella Te Pania, a Maori woman, tried multiple times to exit, but there was no support for her — she was the fifth sex worker murdered in Christchurch since decriminalisation. One life lost is one too many. Where was her protection, her rights under “Full Decrim”?

And this, rather circuitously I admit, brings us back to the impact of Covid-19 on prostitution. In the context of Covid-19 specifically, and as Renee Gerlich meticulously explains here, upon the introduction of Coronavirus lockdown measures, the NZPC had this to say:

COVID-19 INFORMATION: INSTRUCTIONS TO STOP PHYSICAL CONTACT SEX WORK BY MIDNIGHT WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 2020

NZPC recognises that sex work is work and is the main form of income for a number of people.

However, with New Zealand going to a Level 4 alert, sex workers are asked to comply with the requirement to stay at home during the four-week period of isolation indicated by the Government. Only those in essential services will be permitted to work. Sex work is not classed among the essential services (doctors, pharmacists, police, ambulance, fire, vets, food production, and supermarkets).

Therefore NZPC wants all sex workers to comply with the four-week closure.

Failure to comply could result in officials arriving at your place of work to enforce compliance.”

The fact that the onus to simply “stay at home” has shifted onto the shoulders of those within prostitution demonstrates a borderline criminally negligent ignorance of the fact that many of these women cannot simply just ‘comply with a four-week closure’ — as recognised by the NZPC themselves — but also fails to protect the very women they are supposedly there to help. As Gerlich points out, the fact that the NZPC are threatening enforcement measures against these women demonstrates that they certainly do not have their best interests at heart, and are far removed from any kind of workers’ union that socialists would otherwise hold in such high esteem. And while a recent article in The Guardian espoused the apparently-innumerable benefits afforded to women within prostitution since decriminalisation — such as “migrant sex wokers being able to move from town to town” (excuse me while my eyes roll out of my head at “migrant sex worker”) — as Michelle Mara dissects here, that too is a smokescreen.

The decriminalisation of prostitution represents the worst excesses of capitalism, and relentlessly commodifies women down into objects until they are perceived to have no further value, and then discarded. While New Zealand is a microcosm of a specific legal approach, analogies of this ruthless free-marketeerism can be drawn with the pornography industry. After all, that is an industry that in effect has been decriminalised along similar industrial lines to prostitution. Performers have allegedly been afforded “workers’ rights” upon legal recognition of their status as “workers”, but this has done little to stop the conveyor belt of human misery that is pornography in the 21st Century, with performers reporting things such as:

It was the most degrading, embarrassing, horrible thing ever. I had to shoot an interactive DVD, which takes hours and hours of shooting time, with a 104 degree fever! I was crying and wanted to leave but my agent wouldn’t let me, he said he couldn’t let me flake on it. I also did a scene where I was put with male talent that was on my ‘no list’. I wanted to please them so I did it. He stepped on my head […] I freaked out and started bawling; they stopped filming and sent me home with reduced pay since they got some shot but not the whole scene.

And:

I got the shit kicked out of me… most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad… I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. They kept filming. [I asked them to turn the camera off] and they kept going.

As pornography has become more ubiquitous, it has become more violent, and in purely economic terms, the market has functioned exactly as it does with decriminalisation. Performers are earning less and less due to absolute market saturation of both performers and content, and the same can be said for prostitution. As New Zealand sex trade survivors Michelle Mara and Rae Story state regarding prostitution post-decriminalisation:

After decrim there were fees for everything and no mercy

and:

Beyond that, the competition (sometimes as many as 50 women a night) was incredibly intense. Because many of the johns were regulars at the brothel, the longer you worked there, the harder it was to induce their fickle attention. If the women did not successfully cultivate “regulars” (which they did by giving the johns everything they wanted), it was not always easy to make money in the long-term. Johns want the newest, youngest girls.

As the restrictions on this market of human bodies have been untethered, it follows the exact same trajectory as any other free market. By leaving the market of prostitution to its own devices, ruthless pimps, traffickers, and punters exploit the economic vulnerability of these women to ensure they pay as little as they can, while extracting as much as they can, whether that be profit in the case of the pimp, or violent, abusive sex in the case of the punter.

This is what makes the apologist attitude of so-called socialists so disgraceful. In the light of Covid-19, all of us on the Left — socialist, Marxist, and otherwise — have recognised that the most vulnerable in society will need the most protection while economic disaster looms overhead. We want to see those who need it most lifted out of the vile free-market capitalist state of misery that has been imposed on them for decades.

By advocating for the idea that prostitution should be decriminalised, these people are condemning vast swathes of women to the very thing they seek to abolish in other social contexts. Prostitution represents the nexus of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, where women’s bodies are commodified into products on the free-market, ready for purchase by men.

To return briefly to the Mac and Smith essay, entitled Sex Is Not the Problem with Sex Work (the implication presumably being that the problem is work), with all due respect, surely the problem lies with both? It is one thing to erroneously elevate prostitution to another form of work within capitalism, and to locate the issue as one of labour; but to simultaneously reject that sex-class inequality is not one of the underlying driving factors of prostitution is to lack any class-analysis at all. It focuses purely on the economic, and does not delve into the sex-class inequality the drives patriarchy as it currently exists.

In her seminal work The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone expounds the idea that the root of female oppression is due to the biological supremacy of men over women as childbearers, and examines the idea that sex was utilised as a tool of oppression to subordinate women. She goes further even than Marx and Engels in analysing how female subjugation occurs. As she states in the introduction of the book:

It would be a mistake to attempt to explain the oppression of women according to this strictly economic interpretation. The class analysis is a beautiful piece of work, but limited: although correct in a linear sense, it does not go deep enough. There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate in its own right.

She goes on to state:

Unlike economic class, sex-class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal. Although…this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system — the domination of one group by another — the reproductive functions of these differences did.

This idea that certainly extends to prostitution, which of course still exists within the paradigm of patriarchal supremacy (as well as capitalism, and white supremacy); men’s control of women through sex. Although as has already been explained, prostitution is not reproductive in the same way that male domination over women as a class is predicated upon, it is still, at its root, a domination based on sex.

To ignore or refute this in an effort to defend the system of prostitution suggests that it somehow exists entirely separately and above those same paradigms. Presumably the fact that prostitution is overwhelmingly made up of women; who are economically impoverished; and that women of colour are at disproportionate risk of even further exploitation is all a coincidence?

As Andrea Dworkin said in the 1980s: ‘Only when women’s bodies are being sold for profit do Leftists claim to cherish the free market.’ This quote rings as true today as it did almost forty years ago. If Leftists and self-styled socialists truly want to embrace an emancipatory and radical politics, it is time they stop excusing the grotesque free market sexual exploitation of women across the globe. An authentic Leftist position should hold that these women should be aided and supported to exit the system of prostitution financially, emotionally, and practically, while of course removing criminal sanctions against them, not instead doubling down on this exploitation. The absolute rotten and despairing hypocrisy of these alleged socialists and Lefitsts has been all but driven home in the Covid-19 crisis, which has locked hundreds if not thousands of women into further destitution, oppressively crushed within the market of human bodies that apparently should be relentlessly expanded and ideologically engendered.

This does not resemble anything remotely like a Leftist, progressive, or socialist position, and the hypocrisy must be exposed and objected to at every opportunity. It is time to abolish the vile sex trade once and for all.

Special thanks to Julie Bindel and Ally-Marie Diamond for speaking with me for this article. Ally-Marie is co-founder of Wahine Toa Rising: “an organisation which acts as a voice for vulnerable, exploited women and children in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, who are overrepresented in the sex trade. Like us, they deserve to know they are WORTHY, VALUED, HEARD, SEEN, and LOVED”

https://facebook.com/WahineToaRisingAotearoa/…

Twitter:@WahineToaRising

Many thanks also to SPACE INTL, Feminist Current, and Nordic Model Now who platform the voices of women — specifically in this case Ne’Cole Daniels, Michelle Mara and Rae Story — who have survived and exited the sex trade, and without whom much of this article could not have been written.

[sapphos-darlings]

I've heard a dozen times "Lesbians! You are not creepy or predatory by being attracted to women! You're nothing like straight men!" But like... how? How is it actually, qualitatively different?

Hello, Anon! This is a good question. I do believe we should absolutely explore and explain more than just throw around slogans, because it’s not the slogan but the thinking behind it that’s the thing that actually educates and heals us.

“Lesbians are predatory” is a false statement that’s founded on two presumptions: 1: Heterosexual men prey on women, and lesbians are attracted to women too, so they are just like straight men, and 2: Homosexuality is a dangerous perversion. All this is sprickled with plenty of misogyny targeting women who, according to patriarchy, should be a) submissive and passive in our sexuality, b) available to men and c) subservient to men as wives and mothers and so forth. Lesbians are an antithesis to all of that, thus going against the status quo. (This is also what makes lesbophobia a distinct form of oppression from just homophobia: it’s an intersection of misogyny and homophobia.)

Exploring the points in order: Heterosexual men are the group that commits the vast majority of sexual offences, but not because they are attracted to women, but because they grow up as men in a patriarchal culture that teaches them that women are inferior, that men are sexually entitled and aggressive, and their ideas of sex come from porn. Abuse is a problem of values, and unfortunately there are way too many chances for boys literally anywhere to learn that they can do whatever they want to women, that there are no concequences to their actions, and that it’s the normal thing to do. For more on this, look up our friends “rape culture” and “institutionalized misogyny”.

Lesbians get lumped under this because we are attracted to women, and because accepting things like the existence of sexual orientation and gender non-conformative behavior have been pretty much unheard of for very long.

But lesbians are not men. The biggest, toughest, butchest butch is still a woman. She moves through this world while a woman and has never had any part on those things that are targeted and taught to boys and men.

Sliding to the point 2., we are not heterosexual either. Homosexuality has long been painted as a wrong, deviant thing to do and classified as a mental illness, even a crime. There are all sorts of false narratives attached to it, like “they will turn you gay too!” and “watch out for those perverts!”, and this “predatory lesbian” stereotype is a part of those. As a marginalized group we don’t enjoy the entitlement and power that enables or encourages sexually predatory behavior.

We can also internalize these messages. We don’t grow up like heterosexuals do, learning that our sexual orientation is normal and celebrated and healthy, so it’s a very common thing for lesbians and just same-sex attracted people in general to feel ashamed and afraid of our own sexuality, or to believe that we might hurt people with it. This is of course false: We love and desire just like heterosexual people do. We live our happiest lives when we get to express ourselves like is natural to us, we have families and long-term partners whom we love, our sex isn’t harmful, and we don’t hurt anyone by living and loving.

So to conclude: Lesbianism (female homosexuality) is often painted as predatory and dangerous because women who don’t want men go against the patriarchal status quo and disapprove misogynistic beliefs about women, thus we are dangerous. We disrupt the power dynamic and go against social norms as women, and thus we have been long feared and punished.

Homosexuality has been historically misunderstood and feared as well, and it has been drenched with fear about corruption and sexual deviancy. Because we grow up surrounded by those messages, we often internalize them.

So women and homosexual people are groups of vulnerable people, and as a part of both groups, lesbians get double the trouble. We are a vulnerable group but painted as dangerous so that punishing and marginalizing us becomes justified for groups that hold real power in society.

This isn’t of course to suggest that women, gay people or lesbians can’t act predatory. This reply is an explanation based on institutional structures, social trends and stereotypes. One on one, in person, anyone can do just about anything. Anyone can become an abuser or a sexual predator, and it’s always wrong. You don’t ever have to endure or accept any inapproriate, scary or threatening behavior from anyone no matter who they are, or who you are. If something makes you uncomfortable, tell them to stop. You can always say no, and it always deserves to be respected.

I hope this explanation shed some light on the matter and will help you forward, Anon. I encourage you to think it over and do some research of your own to build your own views and opinions instead of just accepting mine at face value. I’m not going to pretend that this is the only way other lesbians have experienced this or the only thought process behind the argument against it, so even though I won’t debate anyone on this blog or reblog discourse even on our own posts, I do encourage conversation and different experiences and takes from our followers.

Have a nice day, Anon!

- Lavender