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re previous reblog i do have a very distinct memory of being a kid who was already familiar with sex and the details of various sex acts (had access to wikipedia, among many other things, because sex is conceptually ambient in society) and being, like, deeply deeply distressed at reading the new yorker magazine short stories my parents had lying around & accordingly realizing that, while fiction did depict sex explicitly often enough that i could find several examples, its picture of sex was hauntingly grim compared to my nonfiction resources. and i definitely remember trying to sort out, without totally having the internal vocabulary for it, whether that was because that really is how people subjectively experience sex or if it was because there was some kind of code where it was low-status and not sufficiently The New Yorker to depict sex as being. good.

even at the time i think i thought it was probably the latter, because i could e.g. find the wikipedia article about oral sex (arrived at bc started from reading about andy warhol if you're curious. you know, because for some reason he's one of the canonical artists we give children picture books about-- again, sex is intrinsically a part of information about the world! people will find out about it!), and it was pretty clear from the tone of the article that this is a neutral recreational activity people do on purpose.

but the representation of sex i could incidentally/trivially access in fiction, before i hit age 10 or so and figured out fanfic existed and also accidentally found some romance novels, was:

a sex scene in a comedy movie in which the only thing visualized was a view of the face and upper chest of the male lead during penetrative sex, intended to be comedically unattractive and unpleasant (i was removed from the room halfway through this scene, because i was 6)

a new yorker short story about a teenage girl being sexually assaulted while trying to access cigarettes

a new yorker short story about a miserable disaffected housewife describing her husband's actions during sex in a detached-to-repelled defamiliarizing way and in particular deliberately centering disgust at the concept of nipple stimulation

2-3 other stories in a similar range of tones between the above, before i eventually gave up on reading new yorker short stories because they all made me feel bad

and, like, it's not that i think we should be distributing romance novels about the thrilling sexy adventures of romanticized 1930s new york immigrants to young children, but, i mean, maybe i think that, it certainly was a positive experience for me. and at minimum i'm really immensely grateful to wikipedia and also nature documentaries incidentally featuring various animals mating, for managing to convey the idea that sex is a normal experience one has on purpose in moderate amounts of detail even though at the time i was learning this i was younger than people think the age is at which it's valuable to try to describe this to children

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some words you can only spell on autopilot. once you stop to think about it you've already lost the fight

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Xena & Gabrielle | Xena: Warrior Princess

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Life sim set in a fantasy small town whose economy has gone to shit because it's one of those open world console RPG settings that got retooled to be more fast-travel-centric a couple patches back and the town is located in one of those kinda fillery bits of countryside that everybody skips over these days.

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The biggest secret I discovered about writing, and you can see the quality jump between early Curse Words and late Curse Words/TTOU based almost entirely on this, is that you can just go to the next thing. Very early on I used to be all "ok but we have to properly bridge and pace things, we can't jump from the important classroom scene to the important beach scene" yes you can. If nothing interesting or relevant is happening between those two things you can just say "ten minutes later, at the beach" and keep going. If the bridge between them is boring you, it's also gonna bore the audience, and you don't have to write it. You can jump straight to the next interesting or important part and so long as you don't actually jump over any important parts it's fine. The audience wants to get straight to the next thing too.

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I was a very precocious and hyperverbal toddler and asked the “where do babies come from?” extremely young so when I was almost three I randomly slammed my fork down and demanded to know how babies get into their mommies’ bellies in the first place.

fortunately they make books for teaching your insatiably curious wannabe zoologist toddler about sexual reproduction so by the time I was in preschool I was able to explain to my classmates that bugs stuck together because they were mating and that a similar process had happened between their parents to make them and that it was all a part of the biological cycle of life and death. I would explain this even to much older children who I heard asking what mating animals and insects were doing or sharing incorrect pregnancy information.

so like you can try to shelter your kids all you want but there is a nonzero chance that a hyperverbal autistic toddler will just fucking randomly walk up to them and explain that semen can fertilize an egg cell after insertion of the penis into the vagina, creating an embryo, and that ultimately they and everyone they know are subject to mortality and will inevitably die.

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I think 50 shades of grey did so much damage to BDSM writing in fic and like not because I think fic writers were taking inspiration from it, but we did get a lot of detailed explanatory posts about all the different ways in which those guys were Doing It Wrong, which is not in and of itself a bad thing but since then everybody got so hung up on making sure everybody in their fics was nothing like 50 shades of grey and actually demonstrates that yes I do understand the principles of safe sane and consensual and the traffic light system and safewording and aftercare and checking in that now everybody fucks like a 101 handbook and I think we've only just recently started to recover from it. love me a dynamic where it's two repressed freak idiots who accidentally invent BDSM all on their own and have to come up with the strangest most deeply harmful ways of navigating that situation

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its honestly bananas to me that so many on this website seem to assume that someone's tumblr output is an accurate reflection of their real life priorities and activism and all of their beliefs in order of how hard they believe them. like. idk about you guys but i'm reblogging things that i want to reblog not keeping a minute by minute record of my deepest held beliefs. for one thing my deepest held beliefs are mostly not about star wars

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it’s necessary to fight back against adult content bans obviously because it leads to queer bans, but also, you cannot forget that we must fight back against these bans because adults have the right to make and enjoy adult content. no credit card company has the right to censor what we look at. yes, this includes the “problematic kinks” and stuff you think is gross and bad. just as we deserve to be openly queer online, we deserve to enjoy adult content without fear of total censorship, and it’s absurd how few places there are to do that online nowadays

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I need more authors who write historical queer romance books. It is the only thing I want to read

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okay i need to see something

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starts talking about my emotional state with 2 degrees of abstraction instead of 7 and the sniper across the street who i pay to keep me in line fires a warning shot thru my little hoop earring

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Casablanca (1942) // Dir. Michael Curtiz

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You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit

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the human mind is prone to catastrophizing when left unoccupied. And that’s why it’s important to always have a little Blorbo to rotate in your head. It acts as a protective charm of sorts to redirect your imagination away from harmful spirals

thoughts without Blorbo: oh my god I was so cringe in seventh grade why did I do that

thoughts with Blorbo: I haven’t considered the interactions with bleebus; I must rectify this immediately