Transcript:

college students are being punished for standing with palestine. let's take a look at what else they've been punished for protesting.

in 1960, four Black university students in north carolina sat down at a lunch counter, where they were denied service because they were Black. they returned to the counter each day, eventually joined by hundreds more Black and white students, refusing to leave until they were served. 45 students were arrested for "trespassing."

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

in 1964, several thousand students gathered in sproul hall at berkeley university to protest the punishment and censorship of students who distributed information about civil rights on campus. the cops arrested 800 students.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

in 1968, protests broke out at columbia university after students discovered the school was conducting U.S. weapons research for the vietnam war. after a week of protests, the school mobilized the police against its students, leading to 700 brutal arrests and injuries.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

in 1969, students at harvard university gathered to protest the school's connection to the vietnam war and its ROTC presence on campus. the school sent the police after its students, who were then maced and beaten.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

during the first week of may in 1970, thousands of students at kent state university gathered on campus to protest president nixon's invasion of cambodia. the ohio governor called the students "the worst type of people that we harbor in america" and sent in the national guard. when the protesters refused to disperse, the guardsmen opened fire, murdering four students.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

during the 1970s and 80s, students at universities across the globe gathered to protest their schools' investments in south african apartheid — a racial segregation system that made non-white south africans second-class citizens. cops were regularly deployed to mace and arrest students.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

in 2011, students at the university of california, davis staged a nonviolent protest against economic and social inequality and the influence of corporations on politics. when they refused to leave, a university officer pepper sprayed them.

whose side would you be on if you had been there? whose side are you on now? why is it easy to support every cause except the current one?

why has every war been bad except the current one?

why has every protest movement been admirable and bravely disobedient except the current one?

End transcript.

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body paintings by Karen Turner

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

something you said has been on my mind for a while - "kink is not inherently sexual". good faith! I don't understand that at all, could you explain it a bit?

This post is educational, hooray! Extensive discussion of kink under the cut. Nothing explicitly sexual is described in detail.

Please note that in this post, I use the terms top and Dom/me interchangeably. This is because I personally identify as a "top" and not a Dom. Some communities draw sharp lines between these two terms, and it's useful to make sure that you're using the same definition as other people when you're talking. Some people use "top" solely to refer to the giving or penetrative partner, which is not synonymous with the dominant partner. Topping subs, power bottoms, and all other permutations exist. I just use that term for myself because I don't like being called a Dom. It sounds like a guy's name to me, I don't like it.

When I text my wife in every morning, "Please bring me my coffee," and she answers, "Yes, Sir!" is that sexual? I'm surely not feeling sexual when I'm barely awake. When I hold my other wife's hand when she's having a depressive fit and tell her, "Daddy's got you, it's okay," that's kink, but it's not sexual. In that moment, neither of us feel particularly sexy, and we're surely not engaging in sex, but it's kink that - forgive the pun - binds us more strongly together.

One of my girls wears a 24/7 collar that I locked in place. (She can ask me at any point to take it off, or she can take it off herself if she wants to, but she chooses this.) That's kink. It's also... a necklace. That's not any more inherently sexual than her wedding ring, though it - for us - certainly symbolizes part of our relationship that happens to sometimes include sex, exactly the same as a wedding ring.

There are a lot of types of kink that don't include sexual contact in any way or which might include sexual contact but don't need to. One of my friends is a sex-repulsed ace bootblack. They literally take care of the boots of tops, usually at play parties. For them, this act of service and submission allows them to go into a particular headspace that's very fulfilling for them. They are explicitly serving the people whose boots they clean and polish. The Dom/mes receive that service and not only get really great-looking boots out of the deal but also get the feeling of power from having someone eager to take care of them and serve them. For some of us, that kind of service allows us access to a feeling of power that can be hard to access in our daily life, and that feels really good.

Sometimes, it can feel good in a sexy way, and sometimes it feels good in a "makes lizard brain feel powerful but not sexy" way. Neither one is inherently better or worse or more or less kinky than the other.

Sometimes, people who like being whipped like it because the line between pain and pleasure is like a wave on the ocean, and they want to surf it. Sometimes, that involves mashing squishy bits together, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, it's just about riding that endorphin wave and then having someone take care of you afterwards.

Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots and fucked. Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots because that process requires a lot of trust and is an intimate ritual that takes a lot of time. Sometimes, it's both. Sometimes, people want to tie up others because it's a beautiful work of art, because that ritual of binding is a ritual and accesses something sacred for them. Sometimes, they want to be tied up because it's playtime, and that's fun for them! Sometimes, they want to be tied up because when they're tied up, they are 0% in control, and they want to just surrender control to someone whom they can trust.

Some people want to go into sub space - that headspace I talked about earlier - because in their everyday life, they have a lot of responsibilities and stress, and going into that space where nobody can ask anything from them, where they have no responsibility to make any decisions at all, is a relief to them. That might involve squishy bits, or it might not. Some people like going into that sub space because being someone's Good Boy, Sweet Girl, or Good Pup is gender-affirming for them. A friend of mine only feels really safe when he's got his pup hood on, because that means he's With Master, who will protect him.

Some people get gender affirmation out of being in control, being someone's Daddy or Mistress, Sir or Boss. It allows them to access a power that helps them to square their shoulders and take on the world.

All of this entirely skips over the fact that a person's primary sexual organ is between their ears, and some people do get sexual fulfillment out of kink even when no genitalia are involved at all, but I cannot stress enough that the reasons that people enter into the multitude of kink situations in the world are as varied as the people involved. People gain access to comfort, to feelings of stability and order and control over their lives, to gender affirmation, to endorphins that are or aren't sexual in nature, to release from responsibility, to ritual and intimacy, to the ability to provide for others and take care of others in a way that their outside lives may or may not permit. For that matter, they may simply gain access to a paycheck, and that's fine, too. That's no more or less "selling your body" than when I used to run my ass off for 13+ hours a day at my retail job, and I guarantee they're making way, way better money.

The fact that so many people see kink as only and purely sexual means they're missing out on so much of what kink can offer, and narrowing down the experiences of others to this tiny little sliver of what actually exists. Yes, it can be sexual, but it doesn't have to be. The reasons that people engage in kink are as varied as the reasons that people engage in any other kind of interaction, and the fulfillment they get from it is as varied, too.

one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

holy fucking fuck your body is absurd

may i share with you the best video on the internet

锁骨

far too old to care about fandom opinions i am an adult with a *sees a take* hm. never mind actually. i am in fact so blessed to have a huge brain and correct inconsequential opinions on fictional characters. there but for the grace of god go i

happy lesbian visibility week. remember that, even in countries were femicide is acknowledged, lesbophobic hate crimes are lumped in with barely a word of note. remember that most people shy away from the word lesbian as if it's a dirty thing, and that it's not interchangeable with the sanitized term of the week. remember that lesbianism is not "restrictive", and that realizing you aren't attracted to men in a world that tells you that is not a possibility is more freeing than you could ever imagine. remember that transness isn't anthetical to lesbianism, but an integral part of it. remember that we're not the mean girl cardboard cutouts that exist in your head but people with varied life experiences and backgrounds just like you. remember to love lesbians even when we're the mean hairy man-hating dykes you hear so much about. remember that our relationships are more than soft kissing hand-holding lukewarmth and deserve to be taken seriously in all their depth. remember that we don't exist for anyone's pleasure but our own. remember that we exist even when you think we don't, or wish we didn't. remember that we'll continue to exist, everywhere, always.

Hc that any Cybertronian with a car, truck, or ship alt mode can voluntarily beep or honk in robot mode

And that some of them with really loud ones would sneak up on others from behind and HONK to spook em

Just thinking about what if Ratchet needs to get the attention of the entire room and goes WEEWOOWEEWOOWEEWOO

“if you’re working a full time job you should be able to afford to live on your own and have access to food and transportation” gonna be real with you brother. everyone deserves this. Not just people working 40 hrs a week

To put it very bluntly.

You will always make a better impact helping people who need it than trying to hurt people you think deserve it.

The first time - the FIRST time - that Silver says “my men” and not “THE men” is to the man who ruined his leg. “Where are his keys? And has he seen them since he took me away from MY men?” Losing my MIIIIIIIND

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

I asked one of my (male) friends to stop using the phrase “man up” and he has been using “fortify” for the past two weeks instead and it’s just a little thing but honestly it makes a difference

and tbh it’s also pretty funny when I start to deflate in the library and he leans over and goes “FORTIFY”