briarrolfe - Tumblr blog

briarrolfe · 23 hours

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We can hear her excitedly showing her birthday guests her new record player 😭🙏❤️ Josie… you are going to be getting SO many records for your 80th birthday

Our 78 year old Italian neighbour Josie might not remember my name, and may never get my pronouns right, but the thing is: We Are Besties and I am totally obsessed with her. She blasts disco music 24 hours a day. She chain smokes. She is so obsessed with Vegemite that she cut a holiday visiting family back home short because she was seized by Cravings. She took her first ever selfie with me. She flirts with my fiancé. Once I had to rescue her from her finding a lizard in her toaster. She drinks her first coffee of the day at like 4 am. Recently she told me “if anyone tries to take you away from me… I will kill them” with total seriousness and I fully reciprocate it. She is a constant source of chaos in our lives. I would do anything for her and I love her with all my heart

#josieposting #she is. exquisite #we all need to befriend our elderly neighbours

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briarrolfe · 23 hours

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Winning the best neighbours of all time award because we got Josie a second-hand record player for her 79th birthday. We figured it would be nice if she could play the TWO HUGE BOXES of records that she hasn’t listened to in the twenty (??) years? since her old record player broke, but she is now blasting an Elvis record Charlie lent her at full volume. Queen amongst women

Our 78 year old Italian neighbour Josie might not remember my name, and may never get my pronouns right, but the thing is: We Are Besties and I am totally obsessed with her. She blasts disco music 24 hours a day. She chain smokes. She is so obsessed with Vegemite that she cut a holiday visiting family back home short because she was seized by Cravings. She took her first ever selfie with me. She flirts with my fiancé. Once I had to rescue her from her finding a lizard in her toaster. She drinks her first coffee of the day at like 4 am. Recently she told me “if anyone tries to take you away from me… I will kill them” with total seriousness and I fully reciprocate it. She is a constant source of chaos in our lives. I would do anything for her and I love her with all my heart

#josieposting #what I’m hoping is that we can introduce her also to Orville Peck

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briarrolfe · 4 days

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this guy gets it

#an Australian Twitter all timer. I will always hashtag lest we forget about this thread #no yanks on the thread!!

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briarrolfe · 5 days

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youre an olympic level hater. i respect it.

they asked me to represent my country in the sport of hating i said no. i hate my country

#about me!!

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briarrolfe · 6 days

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Don’t worry about it

#im just thinking about sewing envelopes into booklet spines For Fun… hahaha #zines #god it’s going to be a fucking art book. it’s not going to be a zine. it’s not a zine if you need to go to three different printers #two different printers??? maybe! three? we’re stretching it #field notes from the edge of reality

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briarrolfe · 7 days

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I should do blackout poetry from the book dune by frank herbert

#dune my duty

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briarrolfe · 7 days

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I will overtake the haters with my boundless intellectual enthusiasm and prescription amphetamines

#its true

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briarrolfe · 8 days

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I recommend comics as a career to anyone who feels that they don’t have enough photos of their hands in their camera roll

#the hashtag process #comics is hard tag #get your story straight

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briarrolfe · 10 days

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Filled with love for the world this morning because one of the local grandmas asked me to come by her house so she could give me sweets… housing prices have to come down in our suburb so we can stay near the grandmas

#josieposting

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briarrolfe · 13 days

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In the morning staff meeting the CEO asked how we could start using AI as an organisation, which is why I spent so much time today drawing a 2001 Nissan Pulsar while muttering "could an AI do this????" under my breath

#my art #2001 nissan pulsar #the man the myth the legend #it's for a document about climate change. that's why the vehicle is going for a swim if you were wondering. again. could an AI do this #day job art

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briarrolfe · 15 days

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I have redrawn this page probably six times now,

#the hashtag process #get your story straight #comics #high pitched wheezing

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briarrolfe · 15 days

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Big advocate for reading badly written but very sincere genre books as often as possible. If writers don’t recalibrate periodically with stories about creatures offensive to nature that were born in vats, diabolical machinations of evil wizards, physically improbable sex scenes with lots of throbbing etc etc, we forget that fiction is made up and that writing should be fun

#the hashtag process #writing advice #read worse books. for your health

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briarrolfe · 17 days

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btw! I was made aware that many people don't know that we're boycotting Eurovision this year, so.

we are boycotting Eurovision, as per BDS guidelines.

don't watch the stream, don't engage with the videos, don't post it about it on social media using hashtags that are going to trend.

#if you are still watching Eurovision this year we are enemies. that’s just how it is

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briarrolfe · 18 days

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I am REALLY interested in this cultural attitude, because I’m a queer who grew up in church who has taken a very long time to realise that I prefer to top. LET’S GOOOO!

Based off memes and internet culture around queer sexuality, it seemed like someone with my body type (skinny, white, has a vagina) and my level of confidence (none) was an automatic Twink Type, which meant my “true” gender was Assigned Bottom At Birth. If you find this hard to believe, maybe a quick glance at the search results for Bottom Bingo will demonstrate what I mean.

If you see enough stuff like this, you do kind of feel like you’ve entered another world. What are we doing here? Sometimes I enjoy editing top vs bottom bingo to refer to Bad Boys vs Church Girls instead. Bottoms love to pray and read their bibles.

Part of the cultural attitude around sexuality and gender meant that because I looked the way I did and had been sorted into my new Twink Bottom social role, I was also not allowed to want to become more masculine. I’ve been on testosterone for five years this June, but until I realised I’d been (yet again) trying to perform gender role I didn’t like, I hadn’t actually ever asked myself if I’d like to be considered a man. I’d gone: well, I’m not a woman, but with a body like mine, I will never be able to be a man. Part of the problem about the way that bottoms are discussed is that they’re expected to construct themselves to be non-threatening in order to be desirable to penetrative partners… much like women.

(My gender feelings are currently kind of a question-mark, all the more complicated because my workplace sucks to have been out in, so I’ve stopped using they/them at work for safety and job security. )

An article I often reference about these ideas is this section from Top or Bottom: How do we desire? (Emphasis and some paragraph breaks are mine, to increase tumblr-font readability).

GEORGE DUST: To answer the original question: no, there is not a top shortage. I think I'd first offer a more psychological read on the "top shortage" non-phenomenon, or the phenomenon of talking about it.

If I talk about a "top shortage" what I am saying is "nobody is fucking me the way I want, and I have no agency in that.” It's overwriting a perhaps real situation of unmet need with a false narrative of scarcity. I think what is going on is that people have illusions and uncalibrated expectations about the frequency and ease of casual sex for other queers, how much negotiation and take-it-as-it-comes there really is.

I frequently hear this language from people who are very inexperienced, who use this language to establish distinction for themselves: as worldly, as passive and innocent, as having conquered hang-ups, as having a disciplined body, as having a longer sweep of historical consciousness, etc. As long as it's all talk, bottoming is positioned as a virtuous sexuality, though things of course get messier when it gets real. But commonly this is a way for people with no cruising culture and no cruising skills to assert a conditionally virtuous sexuality in public. As for *where* this sexuality is positioned as virtuous, things get interesting.

To get a start on that problem, I’ll suggest that top/bottom mirrors the animal/human distinction, that it's a gradient of dehumanization. The top isn’t afforded innocence or subjectivity. The top is the brute. In this dynamic, one would expect to look for tops down the ladder from you on already-existing gradients of dehumanization, whether that means class, blackness, sleaze, or pariah status.

But when I see it this way I think that everybody must experience a top shortage because no one can really conceive of topping within their social order or being topped by someone from it, you have to look down a link or two on the great chain of being in order to find a sufficiently charged interaction. So this might play out as a feeling that there is a shortage among men I consider human, all of whom consider me inhuman and are therefore looking to be topped by me. That's a standoff. But the gradient of coarseness or animality seems key to understanding where people are stuck. This is a hideous lens, but I think this is the lens people are seeing through.

Ultimately, I think queers who complain about a top shortage are usually people who’ve written themselves into social roles that exclude the kind of sex they want and who refuse their agency in doing so. Or they’re trying to wheel and deal about it, to have their desires met without making changes in their own lives or accepting the compromise of social position that would come from immersion in a world where people actually fuck.

…

It’s not a top shortage, it’s a brute shortage. This is the dynamic people are crying out for. And maybe that helps explain why this supposed shortage seems to be a completely white phenomenon.

There’s a lot of other potential positions to have on the idea of Bottoming Is Morally Superior (many of which are in the rest of the article, including some very juicy Marxist reads) but the other one I think about a lot is The New Topping Book (2003) by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. The authors’ very liberating perspective is that being a top (they use the word interchangeably with being dominant) is just a set of skills that anyone can learn if they’re motivated (and supported) to learn. What most people consider “being a top” is just leadership skills plus knowing a couple handy knots! Just like gender or like leadership skills, it’s not something encoded into anyone at birth.

Anyway, Easton and Hardy write that if you think there’s a top shortage, it’s because you need to become a better bottom. Like, I am not kidding. They say git gud. Because if topping can be learned, then bottoming is also a set of skills that isn’t encoded in anyone at birth and that anyone can learn and improve at. Yes, they did also write a book called The New Bottoming Book.

All this to say that topping is very fun, and I highly recommend the experience of desiring violently.

I theorize the reason "bottoms" appear more prevalent than "tops" on these types of spaces is that it is simply easier to be funny about being a bottom than about being a top without sounding like a sex offender

"uuuuu 🥺 pls cock me aaaaaaaa *runs into wall like Wile E Coyote running into his own tunnel painting*" easy as shit comedy

"I want to put my DICK in someone" whoa dude calm down, take it easy

#nonspecific horny text #this is kind of a research blog style post but I think it should go on main?#writing essays on tumblr dot com

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briarrolfe · 20 days

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Booking myself mental health days on the days that my workplace is doing the trans inclusion training I’ve been asking for for five years was the best decision of my entire life

#my job… it’s not good lmao

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briarrolfe · 20 days

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this stupid dream I had

#nobody does it like pseu. or her dreams apparently!!!#comics

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briarrolfe · 21 days

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PICTURE HIM!!!!!

picture this in your minds eye, really go on and imagine it clearly... on a clothesline up in the air between two buildings in an old european city a little man, no more than 2, 3 inches high, is walking across it like a tightrope using a teaspoon as a balancing pole and saying "hee hee hoo hoo" a lot.

#my aphantasia..#it’s cured now

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