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cretaceousundead · 1 year

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Honestly what even is the point in pride month anymore when what used to be the LBTQA+ community is now literally just the oppression club for bullies?

Trans people aren’t welcome. Transphobia is so fucking accepted now, not only from conservatives but even liberals.

Bi people are on ‘thin ice’, as the saying goes. We’re seen as Queer Lite. Only valid if we’re in a same sex relationship, but then we get told we’re basically gay anyway. When someone comes out as bi, let’s say a celeb comes out as bi, their fans celebrate, but it never comes across like they’re genuinely happy that this person felt comfortable coming out, it’s more like they’re just happy the person isn’t straight, cause we all know the only people gays hate more than bi and trans people are cishet people. Gays celebrating a celeb they like coming out as bi has always felt more like a “oh thank GOD they’re not straight” rather than a “I’m so happy for them”.

Recently I’ve seen LGBwithouttheT trending on Twitter allot, but let’s be real if they succeeded in booting the trans people out they’d start trending LGwithouttheB next.

Growing up I saw the community, back then simply called the LGBT community, as simply a community of people who were anything other than straight or cis.

If lesbians and gays ever succeeded in claiming this so called ‘community’ for themselves they’d start fighting amongst each other as well over whose more oppressed. Obviously the general consensus would be that lesbians are more oppressed than gay guys because “US POOR OPPRESSED WOMYN!!”. So then the fighting would begin between lesbians and other lesbians.

White lesbians vs lesbians of colour. The lesbian of colour would be the winner of ‘most oppressed’.

Then it would be lesbian of colour with mental illnesses or trauma ve lesbians of colour without mental illnesses or trauma.

It will never fucking end.

When I was younger, before I even realised I was part of the community myself, I thought it was just a community for people who weren’t cis or straight at a time when those people often didn’t fit in with people who were cis and straight.

But now it’s the oppression club. It’s not about acceptance. It’s not about equality. It’s not about having a community to feel at home. It’s a “you must be THIS oppressed to ride this ride”.

The LGBTQA+ community barely exists anymore. There’s no sense of community anymore. There’s no kindness. There’s just hatred and bullying so honestly what’s the point in pride month? Why is it still a thing, what ‘pride’ are you people talking about? Because I don’t see anyone with anything to be prideful about anymore. Trans people are referring to as ‘things’ and ‘freaks of nature’. Bi people are either gays with internalised homophobia or straight people trying to be special. Gay guys are oppressing lesbians just by being male. White lesbians are oppressing lesbians of colour.

The whole point of the community was that at a time when we actually were hated or the very least not understood by cishet people, we needed a community of our own to feel at home in and safe.

But cishet people are not out biggest enemies anymore, most decent cishet people support us. I, as a bisexual woman, feel more comfortable around my cishet male friend than I did at the most recent pride parade I went to because I spent half the time there wondering how many of the people waving around rainbow flags spend their free time on the internet being transphobic and/or biphobic, whereas I know that my friend doesn’t care about my sexuality and loves me for me and supports me for who I am however I am.

Speaking of cishet people, I’m sick to death of being told by my own so called community that I simultaneously don’t belong here AND that y’all are the only people I can trust because cisheta are my enemy. When I reality the majority of the bigotry I’ve ever experienced has come from gay people not straight people.

It reminds me of radical feminists telling women that men are the ones we should be fearing while they simultaneously abuse us and bully us when we want female abusers acknowledged or when we even so much as say that we don’t hate men.

You use bigotry by cishets as a way to shield yourself from critisism for your own bigotry.

Where’s the fucking pride? Theres no pride. There’s just hatred. There’s no sense of community or belonging. The community doesn’t fucking exist anymore. So what’s the point in pride month. According to the self appointed leaders of the community, A.K.A the people who see themselves as the most oppressed, pretty much nobody actually belongs in the community. And if we don’t belong here then what’s the point in pride month? Who does pride month exist for?

#pride month #yes I’m tagging that #don’t care if this gets no notes or if it only gets hate by angry gays #I needed to get this out because you people are heinous #mine

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azurowle · 3 years

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so many of the posts in the political lesbian tag are. just. literally fuckin’ TERFs whining about political lesbians being a “white feminism thing” and how it shits on bisexual women and i just

oh my god

political lesbianism is literally a fuckin’ offshoot of radical feminism:

like, yeah! imagine that! considering how often “dismantle the patriarchy and liberate womyn” gets bastardized by assholes who reduce it to “womyn good man bad”, imagine my absolute shock that people would claim you can change your sexuality to ONLY love the “unproblematic” half of society!

(And yes this is absolutely Still A Thing.)

#political lesbianism #political lesbians #bullshit #oh my god

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eggplantusiv · 4 years

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Ugh, because my brain has made me contractually obligated to talk about this let’s get a few things straight. Firstly, for the uninitiated, this is about a post about a website or smthn called “bad apples” that tells you if a movie has someone in it who’s been accused (I use accused because sometimes the court decides they aren’t, but we should still not support them until it’s proved otherwise) of sexual assault. I commented on the post that the people who make it should add more info. Like if they support TERF ideologies or are antisemetic, I said this because Harry Potter was one of the listed movies that was a “fresh apple” (it’s rotten for other reasons, like how the books suck but whatever) . So now I’m being targetted by terfs because I “hate women” so first things first, let me tell you what I commented on it.

It says: “They should expand their horizons a bit to add antisemetism and terfs, because harry potter had no reason being branded as having “fresh apples”

This leads us into the first thing: I had never once said that rape is less than either of those things, though they seemed to hone in on my mention of TERFs, because gods forbid trans people have rights, amirite fellas

So apparently me saying they should add more, means that rape is less, not what i said but go off The first ask says “rapists r bad but gotta make sure we put them on the same level as women who express opinions men don’t like!!!” Let me make something clear lol, BEING A TERF ISN’T HAVING AN OPINION MEN DON’T LIKE!!! IT’S OPENLY HARMFUL TO A LOT OF PEOPLE I FUCKING CARE ABOUT, THIS SHIT AIN’T ABOUT ME, IT’S ABOUT MY FRIENDS. I don’t give 2 shits about what you say about me but let’s not defend the ideology that fucking tries to kill a lot of people because you can’t have 1 drop of fucking compassion. Next up in that same ask “are you serious??? this is why all males are a joke, you literally think women advocating for ourselves is as bad as sexual assault.” Okay can I just say that I never said that XD. Also, being a TERF isn’t “women advocating for themselves” because you openly reject Trans Women and NB folks because they “aren’t women” but hey, what do I know, I think women are stinky. Lastly on that first one is: “Gotta make sure men are protected and women are punished at all times huh incel”. Oh, I’m an incel now? You know that I’m gay, right, you know that if I was an incel I’d be mad at men, right? That’s what “Confirmed Bachelor” means, it’s in my bio. Whatever next ask ASK NUMBER 2!!! “misogynist loser thinks he knows feminism better than real women but what else is new?? get help freak” This one’s a real doozy, I especially like the “real women” part, surprised they aren’t saying something like “womyn” or “wombyn” but whatever. I’m not gonna try to dissuade the “misogynist” part, mainly because men are always just a bit misogynist by default because we live in a society yadda yadda. Anyway, at no point did I say I knew feminism better than anyone lol, and definitely not a woman, but hey, you aren’t women, you’re slime creatures so I probably do THE FINAL ASK!!!! “get a life don’t you have something better to do than threaten women for wrongthink on the internet incel” Firstly, no I don’t. Secondly, When did I threaten anyone. Thirdly, wrongthink isn’t a word, it’s two words, unless we’re doing a firetruck thing. And lastly: I’m fucking gay, if I was an incel I’d hate men for not fucking me, not women. Anyway, if you read through this, I’m open to criticism, please if I said something bad or yucky or whatever let me know, this is the only time I’m gonna post TERF anons, if you know how to make TERFs stop bothering me let me know, I might turn anon off, though if any of my nice sweet anons who I love and care very much so about don’t want me to I won’t. Also if there are any tags you want on this please tell me

#terfs choke and die challenge #tw terfs #tw transphobes #ask to tag #long post #gods help me #give me strength to not interact with terfs #the terfening

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horrible-monstrosity · 6 years

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Those last three episodes of Steven Universe: a mini-essay

JUST FUCK ME UP

kevin party, donner party, what's the differenfe

hey guys, remember when lion disappeared? i legitimatedly don't. he ran off with connie or something and even though lars is probably in mortal peril and lion's the only way to get to him... naw don't need him. even though now steven's all worried bout lion he didn't give a shit enough earlier to search for him just for lion's own sake. nothing matters.

the party sadie and co fucked off to in the last episode and the tit-ular kevin party are not one and the same. why not? because none of this matters. nothing fucking matters. just... some stuff happens and none of it ever fucking lines up or amounts to fucking anything. why is this show still airing?

Kevin thinking Steven's name is Clarence is the best if not only joke this show has produced in the last like twenty episodes. Or thirty. How long has this season been going for? How many episodes does this show have?...

kevin is allergic to dog but lion is still here ok. the joke is he think lion it dog but the fact he hasn't like broke out in hives should maybe tell him something?.......

So the crux of this episode is, Kevin gives Steven this patriarchal man male romantic advice which basically amounts to "have a good time and don't be a sniveling soyball" and is entirely reasonable. But since this is Steven fucking Universe, it's clearly absolutely fucking terrible. I mean, maybe it's not the perfect solution for *this* particular situation, but why the fuck would he know that? Is he supposed to read Steven and Connie's fucking minds? Why does the feminist solution to problems so commonly require the male reading peoples' fucking minds? It's a perfectly fucking reasonable piece of general advice, and Kevin even seems to be at least the littlest bit actually concerned about Steven's love life issues beyond getting the cool quantum-tranny Stevonnie at his party... but no, he's gotta be wrong, because he's the designated small-time patriarchal oppressor and 84opposition to the gender revolution.

connie assumes that steven doesn't want to talk to her not because she's been bitching at him and been doing shit like accusing him of being friends with kevin leaving him to wonder what he's done wrong... but because he's friends with kevin, obviously. female accountability and logic at 0%

kevin doesn't know how to friends. are we supposed to hate him or feel sorry for him? ... never mind, both of those options are equally depressing with the way the show treats him.

connie likes steven's maximum soy pink polo shirt, because the way to get grils is to treat yourself like a defective woman who needs re-estrogenizing and soy yourself up. just fucking go cry at her and wear the soy clothes she bought you and drip snot upon her. bitches love snot and then even though steven said kevin had his heart broken and it looks like they have some sympathy for him connie goes "lol ofc he did" and he falls in the pool and they shit on him. fuck this gay earth the rebellion was a mistake homeworld did nothing wrong

So... what the fuck was the conflict here again? Seems like the only thing keeping Steven and Connie from making up was bad timing and mutual awkwardness. Did anyone learn anything from this, aside from Steven discovering he needs to get even more soyful if he wants to inject his gem cummies into a strong big-nosed short-haired minority female someday? Did any of this fucking matter?

Also, I've no idea if this is just fan conjecture or what, but apparently the "Sabina" (because yeah that's a name normal people hsve) who fucked Kevin up is actually the le mysterious pink-haired person mute lesbo who hit it off with Pearl forever ago and probably showed up again at some point in the last X episodes but I don't fucking remember it. You... you... how did you manage to make this even worse? So not only is Kevin terrible and wrong and evil for existing, and for hitting on hot five-gendered quasi-minority manchicks at parties, and for giving reasonable advice... he hit on a thicc pink turbo-lesbo and we're supposed to hate him for that, too. Just... how the fuck do I put this? It's like... stupid fucking cis straight normal fucking a white male, thinking this world is full of other normal people like yourself- the real Earth's population is 99% minority queer demigender faggosexuals, how dare you think you can get into a normal heterosexual relationship with a female of the species? He tried some normal human courtship instead of feminist-approved all-gendered-yet-female-oriented interactions fit only for mentally-deficient degenerate aliens, so he deserved to have his heart trampled on. She's a stryng fymyle fat womyn person, you fucking piece of shit, not some thing for you to treat like (an object/your property/an animal/whatever) by treating her like a normal human being. You're shit, normies are shit, and treating a transcendant gender-goddyss as equal to yourself is oppressive. Or... some fucking shit like that. fuck i don't know whatever

c'mon plot it's time to go the fuck back into space already!!! It occurs to me that Connie (probably, I don't fucking know) knew all this time Lars was trapped in spacedanger and Lion was the only thing Steven or anyone else on Earth could use to rescue him, but she decided to fuck off with him anyway. Because why? Because her selfish little emotional snit over Steven valuing her life is more important than Lars' own fucking life? Remind me, why are we supposed to like Connie again? Also why did Lion stay with her this entire time anyway? Usually he just fucks off and does whatever he wants. He never wandered back to Steven?

Connie immediately shows her ignorance and downplays the situation as a fun and funny adventure, steven and connie in space o ho ho! an attitude which hey you know might be conducive to PEOPLE THINKING YOU'RE NOT FUCKING FIT TO HANDLE YOURSELF IN SPACE AND THEY SHOULD LEAVE WITHOUT YOU TO PROTECT YOU... Pretty fucking retarded thing to say after all that bitching about... no, wait a minute, Connie never said anything about being treated like Steven's equal or being coddled, did she? I mean, she barely said anything about anything because this was an underdeveloped aborted fetus of an arc, but the entire crux of this disagreement really was just... #

god fluorite still creeps me the fuck out. She's basically some magna-tranny that's gone through eight different transitions of like three genders each and gained a new fat roll for each one. Is this supposed to make me like "diverse" people? Because it's not working. Every single second of her vocal drone grating across my eardrums makes me want ever more to perpetuate a holocaust against the legbutt people. Eugh. two children are all we need to save lars, don't bother bringing garnet or any of those other fucking main characters we have lying around or anything naw fuckit

On some level I almost enjoy how few fucks Lars has come to give, even doing shit like spouting the aesop he was just given as a kewl one-liner as he (kind of) trounces the bad guy... but still, it's all off-screen development that raises a lot of questions. Maybe it's just the change in environment and the lack of anyone to try and impress (the shitgems sure as hell aren't the cool kids) that's brought this out of him- that almost makes sense, but there's nothing indicating that's the case... or anything's the case, really. Maybe it's just some kind of tangential stockholm syndrome where I'm happy to see something actually fucking happening, I don't fucking know.

also how did they steal the ship? they """explain""" but... they really don't. They're just that good because take our word for it lars is really happy for those clean pants. how much did he shit himself over the past couple weeks

And then shit gets terrible again. Lars is more triggered over sadie than his own parents... because of fucking course he is. No, she wasn't worried sick, she was faffing around whining about having to do your work for you or having to work at all and then fucking quitting her job to go become a marxist rock guitarist. Hey, remember the purple cake incident? Lars was legitimately fucked up over his social anxiety and his inability to hang with the cool kids despite wanting so badly to do so, so Sadie just fucking around with them like it's nothing because she really is barely worried about his wellbeing... yeah, I think that shit's gonna fuck him up a little bit.

But no, Steven basically just... tells him to get the fuck over it. Because, like, he's not there so she can do whatever the fuck she wants, immediately. Fuck is this shit? Like all of five minutes into the episode Steven just starts fucking explaining this shitty twisted aesop to both Lars and the audience. Yeah man, you go die in space, your gf can immediately go do everything you ever angsted over with ease and I'll come rub it in your face and you should just fucking get over it because u totes love her that much, lol. *You* aren't entitled to your own emotions.

Oh and then Steven compares Sadie's faffing to Lars's fucking comandeering a space ship in order to keep himself alive. Because the woman's feelsies are equivalent to the man's fucking life. Guys, what the fuck am I watching?...

I think this is one of those... things... this show does, where it at first vaguely approaches something that would pass for a normal human cognitive outputting, but then turns, farts in your face like that sexy alien from Star Wars and flits off like Tinkerbell leaving you confused and asmellied. Where in an attempt to create an unthought new aesop never before cognizized by mankind it ends up with a bizarre twisted mess.

At the very least Steven maybe shoulda thought twice before bringing some of those photos. "Oh, look how well your abusive not-gf has been doing without you! Befriending everyone you ever wanted to befriend but couldn't because you need a fucking therapist! Yeah that'll make him feel better". Hey, remember when Steven was empathic, you guise? I mean that being thrown the fuck out was part of what defines this arc, but come on...

It also severely hurts the thing that it's played out so fast. Lars is #triggered by the photos, okay, but then Steven immediately gets on his case and REEEEEs at him for... trying to destroy Sadie's something or other, because I don;t fucking know feminism is the radical idea that a man's emotional freedom is so disgusting it'll destroy a pure beautiful deserving woman from a distance of a thousand light-years in a fucking instant- Calm your fucking tits, Steven Sugar, we're in the middle of fucking space, Lars has no way of destroying Sadie's whatever the fuck it was he was supposed to be destroying. Let him have his knee-jerk reaction. Also, all of a week or a month away from your best friend slash romantic interest is enough you should expect she's moved on from you completely. Okay.

... Hey, wait a minute, I thought Kevin Praty taught us that sniveling was the way to get all the pretty wymyn? What might have changed between then and now, a difference of one entire episode? ... No, really, I have no fucking clue. This time, the contradiction is so fucking incoherent I can't even turn it into "because Sugar and feminists like her place female emotions above all else". The only way I can see it is if shitting on certain types of males is equal to or higher than muh womans, as the Kevin Party incident was twisted specifically to work at Kevin's expense. ... It's funny how this runs completely opposite what I'd think most people would find healthy. If the person you're hurt over is nowhere fucking near you then get it out of your system, but don't go dumping all your emotional baggage on them at a fucking party. This show wants us to bottle up our emotions when there's no fucking reason to at all but mainline emotional diarrhea in the most inappropriate of situations. what is this shit?

lol the crew are made so fucking useless just by a single fucking photo phone just take it from him One of the shitgems calls Stevvie "friends"... plural. they aren't a singular "they". SOC JUS FAUX PAS

man i can;t believe stevonnie;s fucking dead to bad the show ended here guys i guess homeworld can just go take over the world now. it's better this way

This was apparently some sort of special event called "Stranded", but the stranding only lasts one episode. Oooooookay.

This one is entirely just a nitpick, but I find it so strangely interesting from a writing perspective that I just can't leave it out... The "everything is broken" joke is like three lines long and two lines two long. Stevonnie is like, man what's broken and we're shown the readout from the ship showing everything flashing red, okay... and then she's like, ohhh man wow look almost everything it broken?? who expect that ha ha. And then she says, at least the screen works... and that immediately gets broken. Ha haaaaa. I dunno bout you, but I woulda laughed more if they'd just cut it short- have Stevonnie see the screen and go "oh, everything" or even just "oh", in that high-pitched, slightly breathy tone of voice that says "well, shit". Then crash. Boom, short sweet and to the point and gives you like ten more seconds this episode to spend on the plot of the epi- oh wait

Stevonnie is stranded on spaceplanet because no communications, but... xei have magic. Just... shoot some magic fireworks or start a magic fire for smoke signals. Or a normal fire, even. If the problem is that random new green gem will also find you if you do this... actually mention that. Steven and Connie don't even seem to consider sending a physical signal of any kind, even though it should be an obvious idea.

And then Stevenconnie just... finds a random alien species? And casually eats it? This... this just raises so many questions... Throughout the entire run of this show up until this date, the only alien species we've seen has been the gems. The center of the entire show, something that's been continually developed (if not consistently, coherently or well)- there's a decent amount of thought put into how these lifeforms that're completely unlike anything on Earth function, both in biology and society, with some degree of interplay between the two. The show was kept focused on the effects of Rose's rebellion and events related to it, and we avoided all the extra thought, logic and possible scientific plot holes that would be brought into existence by trying to create and balance multiple forms if alien life from multiple different origins. But now they just... dumped this stuff on in there? Because why

This is at once the first new alien species we've seen since the very beginning of the show, the first organic species, the first animalistic/non-sentient species, and the first found in it's alien habitat... and not only are a fucking bunch of them all introduced at once, they're thrown in casually and Stevonnie fucking eats most of them. What the fuck? There's no thought put into these things either, they're just a bunch of wacky squacky animals mainly comprised of random Earth animal parts. There's no logic to how they work, why they exist, how they evolved like this, they're just... wacky funny animals for no reason. Fuck you. After the series up until this point has focused on developing one species with an entirely different biology, history and culture from humans, with all of those things to at least some degree influencing or connected to each other, seeing these critters introduced just at random with no logic or context is incredibly jarring. This was such a fucking bad idea...

Also Stevonne eats the fucking fruits and animals and drinks the water because all planets just have human-compatible food species and good old motherfucking H2O I guess

stevonnie has more stubble than steven ever did because i hate life and i hate everything. this is disgusting. It's even distributed weirdly; instead of being on ziouir's chin it spreads up either side of zoidrgh's face and actually on to the cheeks. And we just have to see it's fugly little cheekstubble for the entire fucking rest of the episode. gagh

And then we get to this... really weird dream sequence where some really weird writing decisions are made. It starts off in Connie's house with Connie's mom... uh, rising up out of the carpeting, but Stevonnie identifies them as "my house" and "my mom". Stevonnie is both Steven and Connie, but given we're used to Steven being the main character and usual viewpoint throughout the entire series this comes off as though it's Steven saying this is "his house/mom". But, you know, they're not. And for any fan who's not devoted enough to commit to memory which character's household interior this is, it's misleading until Connie's mom shows up and then confusing after that. Why the fuck did the writers decide to write the scene like this? Why not have Stevonnie go "my, uh, your, uh, Connie's house" or some shit? Or just remove this part entirely because it gets really weird when the mom starts talking about EXTERMINATING ORGANIC LIFE and setvonnie notices nothing. Then the mom turns into this... weird brownwashed minority fusion version of YD with a big ol' jellyglob of Conmom's hair slapped onto the back of her head. What is this shit? if you're going to make it a meaningful dream you can't just do random shit like that. stop mixing messages. Just... stop. why did they choose to do this, and with Conmom specifically? If it's supposed to imply PD and YD's relationship is like Connie and her mom's... well first of all, that doesn;t fucking work because PD is nothing like Connie at all. But ignoring that, if it's supposed to imply YD is some sort of a parental figure to PD... why Connie's mom? She's not particularly important, and we don;t know her all that well. If it's not a comparison to her specifically and it's just that she parent... why Connie;s mom? Of all the parental figures in the show, because... I don't know, this is dumb fuck this

Though once that shit stops I actually almost like this dream sequence. Having our main character taking the place of PD in the dream, reliving her memories, it not being clear we "are" PD and that Stevonnie is acting out this memory rather than acting under xfer own will until we get to the mirror scene, where Stevonnie punches the reflection of PD while their own appearance remains the same... that's pretty fucking nice. This might also be a manifestation of that Stockholm syndrome I mentioned earlier, though. PD wants things and is frustrated with her current situation. She tries to get what she wants by bitching at someone else to give it to her, sure, but the way she storms off on her own and punches the mirror implies she wants to change things, there's just something holding her back. She has a trajectory. Apparently the fnadom hates her for being a brat, but I almost like her. ..... bets are open on how long it takes for the writers to completely fuck this up.

and then steven and connie just go home and who fucking cares nothing mattersfuck this show

... It seems the fandom has latched on to PD being an off-color because she's small (because height is a color what the fuck is that term why is it that). Like the rich family that hides their embarrassing retarded offspring in the basement, I guess. (i still crackship lars with kevin by the way)

#steven pooniverse #anti steven universe

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precious-flower-child · 7 years

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Welcome to Tumblr! (A Satire Project) (Don't take this seriously)

Welcome to Tumblr! (Typos are intentional for the project, emphasizing how uneducated many posters on the website are.)

Amy: Hiii! So welcome to Tumblr. You’ve probably heard of Tumblr before now if you’re reading this on your dashboard, but, if you stumbled across this some other way, welcome. This is a safe place of acceptance for everyone here!

Random Tumblr User: Yeah, everyone is equal here, it doesn’t matter to me what you are! I love you all!

Amy: Also, skin color, gender, or sexuality don’t matter here at all!

Random Tumblr User: Are you saying that I don’t matter bcause I identify as a PoC? I’m Triggered!

Amy: No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m sorry if I-

Random Tumblr User: Get off of here you disgusting, misogynistic, straight, white, NEO-NAZI!!1!ONE!! cis-male scum!

Amy: For one, I’m a teenage girl. For another thing, what patriarchy are you referring to?

Random Tumblr User: O-M-G you poor soul! You’re so blind to the blatantly obvious patriarchy i our society. This is why we need feminism! Internalized oppression is running rampant in this disgusting, oppressive, FASCIST COUNTRY!

Amy: Yes...because we totally need feminism because of our extremely patriarchal society. Y’know, where women can vote, and where the wage gap is shrinking and was made illegal in the 60’s.

Random Tumblr User: Exactly! The male patriarchy forces all women down, is the reason why there’s the wage gap, and why the men are so privilaged. They’re all rapists, wife-beaters, and anti-feminists. They should all be killed!

Amy: Since when was that what feminism really is? Not all men are like that-

Random Tumblr User: Don’t give me that ‘Not all men...’ excuse! For your information-

Amy: This post was originally meant to welcome people to Tumblr, not make them feel attacked.

Random Tumblr User: Honestly, I feel so attacked rn like leave me alone. It’s not my fault that I’m digi-gender and identify as digital things like mp3 files on Mondays and pgh files on Wednesdays because I spend my entire life on Tumblr with my wolf otherkin demi-girl significant other all the way in England. Stop triggering me! GAWD CHECK YOUR PRIVILAGES BEFORE BEING SUCH A-

Amy: Okay, I’m leaving this alone now. Welcome to Tumblr! Such a great place! Gods, why am I still on here?

Okay, attempt number two! Let’s hope it’s not as soul-crushingly idiotic.

Rabid Tumblrposter #87: I’m so sick of disgusting, vile, CIS-HETERO MEN in GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOMS!!1!!ONE!!

N: Isn’t the point of gender-neutral bathrooms having anyone allowed in? Kinda, y’know. Sexist, I guess.

Rabid Poster: No! It’s just for womyn and other genders! (btw i don’t use the “e” in words like womyn because it has “men” in it and that just promotes the patriarchy!!! #bless #virtue) you’re just a sexist misogynist!!!

N: How? I just pointed out the flaws of complaining about men in gender neutral bathrooms. They’re allowed there.

Rabid Poster: You arguing against you being a misogynist just CONFIRMS that you’re a misogynist!!

N: Okay. You’re a pedophile who hates people of color.

Rabid Poster: no i’m not! how DARE YOU! I’m a spacekin womyn who defies whitey by identifying as a native American!

N: “Denying being ___ just CONFIRMS that you’re ____!” Checkmate.

Rabid Poster: Your point is invalid because as a straight white cis-male you benefit from the oppressive system made by your disgusting kind that affects everyone’s life every day and puts everyone down!!

N: What? I.. That’s not how it works.

Rabid Poster: Shut up, your wrong! You can’t argue bcuz of this.

N: This has to be a parody of some sort. Please. DEAR GOD PLEASE.

Rabid Poster: GOD?!!! BY BRINGING UP YOUR EVIL FAITH THAT’S DONE ONLY WRONG YOU’VE OFFENDED EVERYONE WHO FOLLOWS ANOTHER FAITH.

N: Jesus, chill out.

Rabid Poster: JESUS?!!! YOU DID IT AGAIN!!1!! Chill?! Chill, like cold? Like ice? Or ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the US that deports immigrants? DO YOU HATE BEAUTIFUL BRAVE HISPANIC PEOPLE TOO?!!!!

N: I’m out of here. I think I’ve lost enough brain cells from this stupidity.

Rabid Poster: You IDIOT! Terms like “stupid” and “moron” are ABLEIST because THEY’RE SHAMING PEOPLE FOR NOT BEING “INTELLIGENT,” WHICH IS YET ANOTHER FALSE IDEA PROPAGATED BY WHITE CIS-MEN ALONG WITH “OBESITY BEING UNHEALTHY” AND “BIOLOGICAL SEX BEING DIFFERENT FROM GENDER FOR VITAL MEDICAL REASONS”! DIE!

Another Rabid Poster (#94): hello, sweetie???????? You said HISPANIC instead of LATINX, discluding non-binary people and latin americans of non-hispanic descent, like the Portuguese. YOU’RE ONE OF THEM, YOU UNINTELLIGENT SWINE! GET OFF THIS SITE! I’m liTERaLly SHAKING!

Okay, logging off for good. Take this as a warning, people of the Web.

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b0rnwr0ng · 7 years

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I’m posting here the statement I made on behalf of Re-Sisters that’s being read on Women’s Liberation Radio News.

My name is Max Robinson and I’m a member of Re-Sisters, an organization for detransitioned and re-identified womyn, as well as female-born trans people. Re-Sisters formed to build solidarity between these populations and to fight for female liberation, particularly when the battle at hand will be better fought when armed with our perspectives.

I’ve done a lot of speaking and writing about being a woman who stopped my ftm transition and re-claimed myself as a lesbian. Right-wing Christians have often moved to co-opt my experiences, and those of many other women like me, trying to utilize us against our own interests and the interests of females as a class. Having my words taken out of context and used by the right led me to understand a lot about the dynamics at play when fundamentalists decide to “include” radical feminists in their platforms. They wouldn’t do that unless they knew that ultimately, the supposed “alliance” would serve their patriarchal order.

I could list many examples of hard-right-wingers utilizing the words of detransitioned women—for one, Michelle Cretella, formerly a Board member of NARTH, the foremost anti-gay “conversion therapy” organization in the US; and current president of the American College of Pediatricians, an activist group of conservative physicians against gay and lesbian parenting. Cretella recently wrote a glowing endorsement of feminist anthology “Female Erasure,” specifically mentioning all the detransitioned women’s narratives. Was this a heartwarming moment of female solidarity across political lines? No, Cretella blatantly lied about our essays, utilizing the idea of us for her own agenda. Conversion therapy advocates believe that being gay or lesbian is linked to childhood gender role confusion. They believe a wholesome Christian family—a Gender Correct Father and a Gender Correct Mother—prevents children from being gay or lesbian. Their issue with pediatric transition is that they believe it’s against God’s plan—that it makes permanent the “role confusion” of homosexuality, which should instead be “straightened out.” They think women like us are potentially useful as pitiable rhetorical objects. Or that we can be “perfected” into stereotype-conforming heterosexual women.

Most women who stop ftm transition are lesbians; many of us have no intention of leading stereotype-driven lives; many of us will continue to live socially passing as men whether we want to or not; and all of us want the best possible lives for our friends and loved ones who still live as transmen. Nothing that hurts gays, lesbians, and transmen is going to be acceptable to us. We don’t welcome someone like Cretella to use our words against us.

But this is one example in a larger trend. The Federalist put a reporter, Stella Morabito, on the “gender identity” beat. The Alliance Defending Freedom started funding a group calling itself Women’s Liberation Front. The Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion titled "Biology Isn’t Bigotry: Why Sex Matters in the Age of Gender Identity." The power differences between these “allies” ought to tell us a lot. Why is the powerhouse think tank that helped elect Trump hosting radical feminists on a panel?

Who hosts the events? Who publishes the articles, or airs the news segment? Who's got the money in their hands? Usually, it's not radical feminists. Conservatives have demonstrated time and again that they are capable of extremely effective strategizing.

Their current strategy relies on exploiting the inherent weakness in LGBT “inclusion” practices which fail to differentiate between the needs of lesbians, gay men, transmen, transwomen, and other queer-identified people. By fighting against what they call "SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws”—which is any legislation impacting any member of these obviously distinct and internally diverse groups, the right utilizes legitimate feminist resistance against the excesses of “gender identity” against the entire range of lesbian, gay, and trans people, as well as women overall.

A feminist response would need to hold some nuance—defending lesbian, gay, and transgender housing and employment rights against the likes of the Heritage Foundation, for example, while also resisting laws which would render sex a meaningless category. A feminist response must be a real alternative, rather than throw weight behind either “side” when neither side represents the interests of females as a class—that is, all females, whether lesbian, straight, transgender-identifying, or other.

There is a difference between laws that allow gender-nonconforming people—trans-identified or not—to participate fully in society, versus laws that entitle someone with a penis to housing in a women’s shelter based on a stated “identity.” A feminist response needs to account for this discrepancy. There’s nothing feminist about allying with those who want to make discrimination against transgender, lesbian, and gay people as legal as possible.

When women are used to promote conservative values against our will, we have even less control over how they choose to represent our beliefs and experiences. Co-optation, whether consensual or not, undermines the goal of female liberation.

Under the cut I’m going to longer, unedited version.

My name is Max Robinson and I wrote this statement addressing collaboration with conservatives on behalf of Re-Sisters, an organization for detransitioned and reidentified womyn, as well as female born trans people, formed to protect the interests of this population.

Inclusion of radical feminists on conservative platforms would not happen unless the beliefs they are being allowed to espouse by explicitly heterosexual authorities are not any kind of threat to the conservative church or patriarchal family unit. Who hosts the events? Who publishes the article, or airs the news segment? Who's got the money in their hands? Usually, it's not radical feminists. I'm going to address several contemporary instances of conservatives utilizing radical feminists to promote their own positions.

Conservatives have demonstrated time and time again that they are capable of extremely effective strategizing. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that helped to get Trump elected and has supported him in many ways since he took office.

This same organization also invited the well-respected lesbian activist Miriam Ben-Shalom, among others, to a panel discussion titled "Biology Isn’t Bigotry: Why Sex Matters in the Age of Gender Identity". The moderator of this panel, Ryan T. Anderson, has numerous pieces published on the Heritage Foundation website opposing same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and anti-discrimination laws protecting all types of LGBT individuals. In these articles, Ryan often makes no distinction between gay men, lesbian women, and transgender people, using the term "SOGI laws" (sexual orientation and gender identity) to describe any legislation impacting any member of these obviously distinct and internally diverse groups.

In the same articles, Ryan consistently fails to differentiate between laws that protect transgender (and gay or lesbian) people's rights to housing, employment, or the ability to charge bias-motivated assaults or murders as hate crimes, at no cost to the rights of women in general, versus those that entitle someone with a penis to access spaces like a female-exclusive spa on the basis of verbally stated identity. By participating in alliances like this, radical feminists are lending their support to a movement with the goal of keeping actual discrimination (including bias-motivated assaults or murders!) against transgender, lesbian, and gay people as legal as possible. Who was served by this coalition, and who was used?

This is not sitting next to the missionary's son in the lunchroom, or bringing muffins to your Republican neighbor when her husband is sick. Personal relationships are distinct from political alliances. Ryan might be an awesome guy to talk to in the grocery store line, but he is paid to produce material undermining the rights of LGBT people to have families and access housing and employment without fear of mistreatment based exclusively on their orientation or history of transition. Beyond simply being anti-lesbian, the belief that the "natural family" consists of one man, one woman, and their offspring is directly in opposition to the foundational beliefs held by radical feminists.

An example even more pertinent to the members of Re-Sisters is the inclusion of Dr Michella Cretella in the feminist anthology Female Erasure. Here, a feminist did create and control the platform, but chose to include a conservative woman. Dr Cretella is the current president of the American College of Pediatricians, an activist group of conservative physicians founded in opposition to the American Academy of Pediatrics' support for same-sex adoption. She served for years on the board of directors for NARTH (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality), now rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice. The sole purpose of this organization is to justify and promote reparative therapy, an abusively anti-gay practice.

Three members of Re-Sisters (Crash, Devorah, and Max) were also included in this anthology. We were not aware of Dr Cretella's involvement until after publication. Cretella's endorsement of Female Erasure includes specific references to the works of the Re-Sister members who contributed: "de-transitioned women view their transgender experience as having been pressured into chemically and surgically impersonating a man in order to role play a heterosexual relationship with another biological woman."

Not only did none of us ever experience our transitions in the way she describes, none of us indicated this in our contributions to Female Erasure, either. This blatant lie about our lives and work serves the agendas of both the American College of Pediatricians and the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice much more effectively than the nuances expressed in our actual contributions, however. Anti-gay religious groups frequently describe homosexuality as stemming from "gender role confusion", a formulation which implies that our deviant behavior can be corrected through reparative therapy. Flattening our unique experiences with transition in this way promotes her consistently expressed belief that homosexuality can and should be fixed whenever possible.

She later describes a "transgender tsunami" and "transgender tyranny", but never differentiates between transgender men and women, or identifies men as the benefactors of misogyny. This does not serve women, and it certainly does not serve lesbian women, and/or women with a history of transition. Casting transgender people as a homogeneous pack of enemies is a conservative invention that lends itself readily to the misogynistic and homophobic basis of the conservative gripe with transition.

Another quote from Cretella's endorsement: "However, the greatest gift I received from Ruth's invitation to be a part of Female Erasure was the opportunity to have civil and heartfelt conversations with fellow women regarding topics over which we sharply disagree: abortion, homosexuality in children, and same-sex marriage and parenting. Together we discovered that while we may never fully agree on these topics, we are more alike than we are different."

Yes, we may all bleed red, but upholding the father-controlled family unit at the cost of stripping rights from anyone who fails to perfectly recreate patriarchal structures in their homes is in direct opposition to radical feminist values. Cretella minimizes the importance of female reproductive autonomy, gay and lesbian children's right to grow up in peace, marriage equality, and parental rights for lesbian and gay people with children. By choosing to work with women like Cretella, radical feminists support the conservative devaluation of female life.

Further evidence of right wing eagerness to co-opt the narratives of detransitioned women in particular is seen in this article published on the Illinois Family Institute's website, whose "statement on the family" reads "We deny that “family” includes two or more persons of the same or opposite sex who live together outside the institution of marriage whether for convenience or homosexuality or romance or experimentation or otherwise." Three members of Re-Sisters are quoted in IFI's article (Cari, Carey, and Crash). None were asked for permission, and none would have given their permission if asked. The single woman IFI chose to include (before/after) photos of, however, is the only one of the three who is heterosexual and relatively gender-conforming in appearance. Although Cari and Crash are lesbians and all three of these women acknowledge that many detransitioned women are lesbians, there is no mention of lesbianism in the IFI article. Their experiences and viewpoints were sanitized in order to oppose what IFI terms "science-denying sexuality dogma", a phrase which conflates homophobia with the critical thought these women applied regarding the role transition played in their own lives.

Collaboration with conservatives regarding issues of gender identity is intrinsically incompatible with radical feminist values. When it is willing, we are choosing to water down our beliefs substantially in order to be tools of anti-woman, anti-gay organizations. Making this choice demonstrates to other women that accessing illusions of power through patriarchal authorities is no less feminist than autonomous organization. When women are used to promote conservative values against our will, we have even less control over how they choose to represent our beliefs and experiences. Co-option, whether consensual or not, undermines the goals of the feminist movement.

Thank you.

Where you can find works of the women mentioned in the statement: Max Robinson (youtube) (wordpress) (art collective) Cari Stella (youtube) / (tumblr) Redress Alert (tumblr) Crash (youtube) (tumblr)

This statement will be posted to my wordpress as soon as I gain access to the the account. Having some technical difficulties!

#detransition #radical feminism #radfem #female erasure

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femslashrevolution · 7 years

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On the personal as normal; on the normal as political

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. Your bush is super hot, my lover said. I’m blushing, I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s Easter, with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist."

But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of normalcy, as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways.

What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked.

I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.

And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered.

Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.

Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I have also written a lot about this, as well.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex involving women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting them to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard.

I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not.

The $64,000 question: do I agree with this?

Are electrons particles, or waves?

I mean, let’s get this out of the way: if writing about women is political, then writing about men is political, too. Masculinity is constructed as the default flavor of humanity in our society, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear critical examination, nor does it mean that the actions of men aren’t informed by their socialization, or that everyone’s perceptions of men aren’t informed by power structures. Nor does it mean that men are immune from the toxic effects of life in a heteronormative patriarchy. If we as writers experience a focus on men to be a relaxing break from the stifling responsibility of depicting oppression, that is (a) pretty understandable, since that’s the myth of the (white cis hetero) male experience that’s sold to us from birth, but also (b) probably in need of some interrogation, since it doesn’t actually reflect anyone’s lived reality. Not even the lived reality of dude-bros who roll their eyes at the words “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”; and ESPECIALLY not the lived reality of queer men, who are, let’s remember, real people with a real history and a real present of active oppression due to their orientation.

As to the question of queer women: was I right or wrong, in my fandom-naïve days, to assume that writing sex and relationships among women is essentially the same as writing those things among men?

Yes. That is, I think I was right, and also wrong.

In a 1995 essay, Paula Rust enumerates many of the widely divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible interpretations of the oft-quoted second-wave feminist slogan “The personal is political”:

The personal reflects the political status quo (with the implication that the personal should be examined to provide insight into the political); the personal serves the political status quo; one can make personal choices in response to or protest against the political status quo; one’s personal life influences one’s personal politics or determines the limits of one’s understanding of the political status quo; the personal is a personal political statement; personal choices can influence the political status quo; one’s personal choices reveal or reflect one’s personal politics; one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s personal politics; personal life and personal politics are indistinguishable; personal life and personal politics are unrelated.

If we adapt Rust’s terminology slightly to accommodate the act of reading and writing fiction, so that “the personal” becomes something more like “individualized character depictions,” then I think this passage becomes a useful tool in breaking down how we think about reading and writing women versus how we think about reading and writing men. It seems to me that often, when we are reading and writing about men (especially cis white men who are canonically assumed to be straight even if they fuck in fanfic), our attitudes tend to hang out in the spectrum ranging from, on the more nuanced end, “choices about individualized character depictions can be made in response to or protest against the status quo” to, on the less nuanced end, “individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated.” Since straight white men are the default, depicting them doesn’t feel primarily political. It feels normal. Things that happen to straight white male characters seem not to carry the burdensome weight of responsibility and representation that plagues female characters, especially queer female characters or female characters of color. The unspoken logic here posits that the things that happen to men, just happen! The traits men have are just traits! Men can be evaluated as individuals, because there is nothing to distract from that individuality. No matter that whiteness/straightness/maleness is not actually nothing, only an invisible something; and never mind that the completeness of the divorce between individualized character depictions and greater political realities is to a large extent illusory. The fact remains that that’s often the in-the-moment experience of reading and writing about male characters: they can exist as individuals, because their maleness is the norm.

By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from “individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo” to “individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.” It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire.

OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this.

Please let that sink in. No character can do this. No character is so well-written that she is going to transcend the Oppression Soup in which we all swim; and even if she did, she would not be enough transform the landscape of queer female representation into an egalitarian wonderland. We can stop hitching our wagons to that star because it’s not going to happen. Good news! We are not failures because we fall short of this demonstrably impossible metric! Similarly: my friends and I can install low-flow shower heads in every bathroom in every apartment we move into, from now until our deaths, but we are still not going to offset the effect of Nestlé extracting 36 million gallons of water per year from our national forests to bottle and sell at a profit. Or again: my personal choice to make my own clothes, though potentially politically meaningful to me as an individual, is never going to counteract the coercive power of a global fashion industry that earns $3 trillion a year peddling the lie that women who are larger than a size 10, or who don’t have expendable income to keep up with the latest trends, are not employable, fuckable, or worth taking seriously. This is not to say that making my own clothes can’t be politically meaningful for me personally. Nor is it to say that I am incapable of meaningful political action: I can help to take on these oppressive and exploitative industries via mass organizing: public actions, legal challenges, legislative lobbying, investigative exposés, mass boycotts. But there is absolutely nothing that I alone can do, with my body or my apartment or my novel, that will dismantle these power structures.

For one thing, this is not how institutional oppression works. Yes, the ramifications of oppressive power structures can manifest in intimate details of one’s life, and it does well to be conscious of that. But the causality doesn’t work in reverse: identifying and purging artefacts of oppression from the intimate details of one’s life, while potentially personally meaningful or satisfying, won’t meaningfully reduce the overall strength of the originating oppressive power structures in society at large. I cannot take down the fashion industry by making my own clothes. I cannot save the world from Nestlé by installing low-flow shower heads. I cannot dismantle sexism and heteronormativity by writing a queer female character who carries perfectly on her shoulders the representation of every oppression she suffers, and perfectly represents my personal authorial politics—or, indeed, by writing a host of such characters, and sharing them with a few thousand people on the internet. This needs to stop being the expectation, or even the ideal. To hold the queer female character to such a standard is to make of her even more of an unattainable exception to human existence than she already is: for none of us can stand in for All Women, or All Queers, or All Queer Women; and none of us should be asked to do so.

For another thing, this is not how fiction works. Fiction doesn’t convince through intellectual perfection. Fiction convinces through building empathy and voluntary identification in readers for characters who may or may not be wildly different from them, and may or may not be placed in radically different situations than they have ever found themselves in, but whom they the readers, on some basic human level, nonetheless recognize. Crafting an individual character who inspires that kind of gut-level recognition is difficult if the author is assembling them primarily as anti-oppression talisman rather than a flawed and complicit individual; or if the author is undermining the voluntary nature of the reader’s identification by making the character, Ayn Rand-style, a prostelytizing mouthpiece for the author’s own philosophy. I think this is part of what people mean, when they object that writing women, or queer women, or women of color, feels “too political”: the strictures of talisman-creation undermine the ability to foster empathy for a real-seeming individual. But this is not a problem with writing queer women! It’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations we’ve placed on ourselves around doing so.

I mean, for my money, the way to craft characters who do inspire this gut-level sense of recognition is to draw on one’s own experiences—one’s own passions and one’s own struggles—while also refraining from providing neat and tidy solutions to which real people (and hence characters in the moment) do not have access. People are messy; we have to be able to let our characters be messy. To paraphrase John Waters, who surely knows whereof he speaks: we have to let our characters make US uncomfortable. We have to let them make us feel queasy and ambivalent sometimes, just as we sometimes make ourselves feel that way. We have to let ourselves discover things through the journey of writing and reading that we did not know when we started out.

Does this mean there is no point in research, no point in educating ourselves about over-used tropes and the history and current reality of queer representation, no point in critiquing media that perpetuates these tropes? Of course it doesn’t mean that. The goal—my goal, anyway—is to write characters who ring true to life, who come off as real people, with real struggles. And in order to do that, a writer needs to be familiar with the toxic and un-lifelike nonsense that gets endlessly recycled in media. It’s helpful to know, for example, that the “lesbian dies, goes mad, or returns to the heterosexual fold at novel’s end” trope was originally imposed on lesbian pulp writers as a condition of publication if they wanted to avoid obscenity charges: here is an example that’s, VERY clearly, not an artefact of lesbian reality but an artificial and homophobic narrative imposed from without. I think it’s valid to make the point that maybe, in this year of our apocalypse 2017, we have reached a point where this narrative should be largely avoided.

But you know: there are a lot of artificial and homophobic narratives. And there are even more narratives that, while not intrinsically artificial or homophobic, have so often been twisted that way as to be forever tainted by suspicion and pain. And that suspicion and pain twist back into real lived experience in ways that can be complicated and unpredictable. If our culture is a house, then so many of its walls are built of tainted narratives, and so many of its other walls are built up against those tainted walls, that it’s very difficult to dismantle the structure, or determine what’s sound and what’s not. As a real-life queer woman, I have never met an anti-oppression talisman, but I have met plenty of queer women who have made me uncomfortable—myself at the top of my own list. Though I squirm at the “lesbian goes crazy” novel ending, I have known many queer women, myself included, who struggle with mental illness (as well as many who don’t). Though I have noped out of media for egregious and self-serving use of the “lesbian was just waiting for the right man” trope, I myself am a near-lesbian who once fell in love with a man, and I know others who have done the same (as well as many who haven’t). Though I share the frustration over the assumption that bisexual characters are universally flighty and commitment-averse, I also know several flighty and promiscuous bisexuals (and many bisexuals who are neither, and many flighty and promiscuous straight folks). Though I cringe a little at depictions of alcoholism and drug abuse in queer female culture, I am myself a queer woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In a cringe-y catch-22, I am deeply uncomfortable with both the demonization of the working-class butch/femme subculture by the middle and upper classes of lesbian society AND ALSO with the degree of forcibly normative gender expectations I personally have encountered in butch/femme environments… so I decided to go ahead and write a whole novel about that, despite the fact that I might avoid someone else’s treatment of the same subject matter.

The pattern here is hopefully obvious: even drawing from the pool of my own personal lived stories, many verge on or overlap with narratives that are often toxic in their execution. So what are we to do? Does all this add up to a wash, a free pass for the continuation of any tired and harmful trope imaginable? No. It adds up to a call for a nuanced and subjective calculus around analyzing works of art: an acknowledgement that some versions of Narrative X or Character Y will spark that sense of recognition or that shock of injury for audience members, and others won’t, and others will for some audience members but not for others, and all of that is valid to talk about. And it also adds up to a call for writers of queer female characters—especially those of us who are queer and/or female ourselves—to allow ourselves the freedom to write individualized queer women who, though they may not body forth our personal politics, make us familiarly uncomfortable. Characters with whom we are intimate.

Characters with whom we feel at home.

Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them. But more intensely, and more specifically, I would argue that where queer female characters are concerned we need to work toward an attitude that—however partially and strategically—begins to uncouple “individual character representation” from “personal authorial politics,” and does so with the express goal of allowing these characters normality. Weird, inconsistent, flawed, complicated, mundane normality. We need to let go of the intimidating and paralyzing attitude that queerness and femaleness raise the political stakes in such a way that mundane fuckups, either on the part of the author or the character, are no longer allowed.

To extend the analogies from earlier: if we have the water pressure to support it, we should install low-flow showerheads, not because we can thereby compensate for the evils of Nestlé, but to save on our water bills. And if we have the time and inclination we might make our own clothes, not because it will magically deliver us from the perils of the beauty industry, because it it a mode of self-expression that is also personally empowering. And if we can, we should write and read complex, flawed queer female characters, and support others who write and read them, because to do so enables us—real-life queer women, and people who know real-life queer women, and even people who might be intimidated or repulsed by real-life queer women—to feel that real-life queer women, in all their flawed and problematic glory, are more human; more at home; more recognized. Closer to the range of the normal.

None of these things is going to save the world, and we don’t need them to. They are important and life-sustaining anyway.

(The author can be found online as havingbeenbreathedout on Tumblr and breathedout on AO3. She can be found offline on the wide open beaches and labyrinthine interstates of sunny southern California, where she lives the social-justice nonprofit life and also enjoys Bloomsbury history, kissing girls, poolside cocktails, early-morning yoga, and crying about fiction with her live-in editor/BFF/queerplatonic life partner fizzygins.)

#havingbeenbreathedout #I Am Femslash #Type: Meta #Femslash February 2017 #Femslash February #submission

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raychjackson · 7 years

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Hey I was just wondering what replacing the e in women with y meant to you? I've only ever seen it spelt that way in association with terf support, but I looked over your blog a bit and I can't imagine you being a terf? Thanks for your time have a lovely day:)

First thank for this question. Because of your question I researched what you possibly were referring to. I honest to god didn’t know people see “womyn” as transphobic or connected into a non-inclusive festival from 2015. Until this question “womyn” was bc I didn’t want to spell out m-e-n in my own identity. Could you message me off anon. I really want to learn from you. Also if I offended anyone with “womyn” I’m sorry. What other terms can I use?

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rebellocal · 4 years

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Divine Womyn Interview Series with Heaven Boudy

Heaven Boudy aka Flowa is straightening crowns one post at a time. As she was here to chat with us about her evolutionary brand FLOWA WIT POWA Podcast & blog site full of daily motivation and what it means to be a young black woman in this decade.

Teh Jai’lyn:

Heyyyy Heaven! We’re absolutely proud of your growing brand & how dedicated you seem to be with your podcast. For those who don’t know you as well introduce yourself and your brand.

Heaven Boudy:

Thanks! My name is Heaven Boudy aka Flowa. I’m an international business student at Dillard University. I’m a creative, motivator, and I love anything pertaining to self-care. I love making people feel good and look their best. I am the founder of Flowawitpowa, a brand that uplifts, styles, and empowers both old and young adults.

Teh Jai’lyn:

You seem to have a very soft aesthetic (as we would say) but how would you describe it?

Heaven Boudy:

I think I would describe it as soft as well. I went with a softer look for my brand because I knew my content would get heavy or be a lot sometimes. I know that colors have an effect on moods and energy so I wanted to keep it minimal and soft.

Teh Jai’lyn:

Your topics of discussions on your podcast are very touching & personal, where do you pull the motivation & the willing to become somewhat vulnerable with your target audience?

Heaven Boudy:

I think it comes from it being my purpose to do it. It’s because I know how much we need help in this life and I’ve run across people who don’t have good or any mental or spiritual help. I figure if I go through it someone else has or might need help to get through it. People need the honesty to live a good life and in this age of social media, it’s hard to find authenticity.

Teh Jai’lyn:

always thought your Instagram & twitter name was so cool “Flowawitpowa” for those who don’t know, explain how that name came about and the idea to inspire the staple name for your brand/podcast The Flowa Petals podcast?

Heaven Boudy:

Flowawitpowa began as a stage name a couple of years ago when I started writing poetry. I believed I was beautiful, elegant, and soft. However, I was still powerful and bold in who I was and that birthed “Flowawitpowa”. I spelled it like Flowa and not flower because I never pronounce the “er” in flower. Spelling it as Flowa was just my New Orleans twist to it. I believe it’s my God-given purpose to spread love and power to everyone. This led me to start a podcast, blog, and youtube channel. Flowapetals is just another piece to Flowa as petals are to a flower. I’m giving you pieces to your flowa that help you to be beautiful and whole.

Teh Jai’lyn:

As a young woman in today’s society, what do black beauty, today’s lifestyles and the challenges that are thrown to us black Womyn mean to you?

Heaven Boudy:

Unfortunately, it just means to me that we have to fight harder, be smarter, and move intentionally with our moves in life. I never like to look at it as anything more than what it is because you can never stop a focused black woman. When she is walking in her purpose with God, she can catch those curveballs with one hand. We have to keep our blinders on so we don’t fall into society’s way of being. Also, just as fast as you think you can’t fall in is as fast as it can happen. Black women have to be extra intentional and specific about the spaces they want. It’s sad we have to work overtime sometimes but it’s completely worth it to make way for another black girl.

Teh Jai’lyn:

With your overall brand how do you wish to display beauty, lifestyle choices & personal challenges to other young black women & how do you want them to view these topics?

Heaven Boudy:

I want to present it to them in the easiest way possible. I want every young black woman to read or listen to what I say and leave thinking “OH! I can do that” If they come to me unsure of themselves they leave sure of themselves and their capabilities. I want them to view it as doable and view themselves as worthy of the work to be a woman. I want them to view these topics as important.

Teh Jai’lyn:

As an H.B.C.U. student at Dillard University, how do you manage time for yourself, school work & your brand? (As multitaskers...It always seems to me as if I’m leading three different lives would you say the same?)

Heaven Boudy:

YES. YES. YES. I am leading multiple lives but I manage my time by integrating them. I do school work but I listen to the music that motivates my content creation. Then, I put myself on a hard schedule but I don’t add time because I realized your day doesn't always go as planned. It’s been more effective for me to just create a to-do list by parts of the day. For example, my morning is for meditating, reading, and organizing my day. Also, I write them on sticky notes which have been a big help. I organize my sticky notes by category like “flowa”, “school”, and “self”. I just give myself a hard stopping time at 8 pm or sometimes as early as sundown when I can.

Teh Jai’lyn:

I always love to ask these questions.... feels like I’m somewhat picking the brain of the person I’m interviewing but... if you could give advice to yourself at age 16 what would it be? Also, what advice would you give to another young woman who is timidly attempting to go after her dreams?

Heaven Boudy:

GIRL, it is okay! You should definitely slow down and be more patient. Be more present. Don’t be fooled by the looks of things, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. Give yourself time and be patient with yourself and stop being so critical. Fall in love with yourself and don’t waste time trying to make people like you. I know you think it’s hard but it gets harder but just do your best to make things easier later. Lastly, your decisions now can affect you later. Don’t think that one little decision won’t matter because it will in some shape or form.

#Vintage #Interview #WomensHistoryMonth #DivineWomyn #FlowaWitPowa #Podcast

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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A Barrage of Buffy

Because I am a great big geek, one of my personal goals is to read all of the novels inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the second in a series of posts collecting relatively short reviews of these books. All of the following are set during the show’s third season.

Obsidian Fate by Diana G. Gallagher In 1520, a Spaniard conveying stolen Aztec treasure to a secret hiding place was killed by a mudslide while holding a particular obsidian mirror. Now, his remains have been found in an archaeological dig in Sunnydale. It turns out that the mirror contains the essence of the Aztec god of night, Tezcatlipoca, who quickly makes a graduate student working on the dig his High Priestess and adopts a jaguar form to prowl around and do some chomps. The gang must prevent his brainwashed followers from offering enough human sacrifices to empower Tezcatlipoca to banish the sun forever.

There were definitely things I liked about Obsidian Fate. I liked that Buffy is worrying about her friends leaving for distant universities and colleges and trying to figure out what she herself is going to do. I liked that Angel has begun to think about moving away to let Buffy live her life. I liked that Giles is still grieving Jenny. A lot of the characterization and dialogue was good—especially Oz, which is pretty difficult to do. Surprisingly, Kendra and Faith both get a mention, though the latter is nowhere to be seen (and this is all set before she goes bad). No Wesley at all. It’s also really neat that the Mayor and Mr. Trick are facilitating Tezcatlipoca’s rise!

But oh man, so many descriptions of temples and stones and boulders and pillars. It’s very tedious. Also, one of their fellow students has become temporary host to part of Tezcatlipoca’s essence and plans to sexually assault Willow prior to sacrificing her. Nobody, besides Oz, seems to be quite as pissed off about this as they should be. Lastly, a subplot about how one of Buffy’s prophetic dreams showed Angel’s demise offers zero suspense. Still, their reunion on the final page does produce a genuinely cute moment.

Is this one worth a read? Eh, it could be worse.

Power of Persuasion by Elizabeth Massie This was a bit of a clunker, I’m afraid. The awkward teen daughter of a culinarily disinclined restaurant owner grows fed up with catering to her incompetent father’s whims and, by chanting supplications whilst surrounded by random items from the restaurant’s pantry, somehow successfully summons a Greek goddess and her two muse daughters to help her change things. They proceed to compel a lot of female students (including Willow) to join their “womyn power” crusade, which mostly involves campaigning for girls to have the right to try out for the vacancies on boys’ teams that arise when male athletes keep turning up dead.

Many of these Buffy media tie-in novels have similarly mediocre plots, but are usually made more tolerable by the author having the ability to capture how characters speak and interact. Not so much here, unfortunately. I appreciated that with Willow, Giles, and Xander falling under the sway of the villains and Angel out of town, Buffy had to rely on Cordelia and Oz to help her. But, while Cordelia’s scenes were fine, much of Oz’s dialogue and demeanor seemed wrong to me. Also, some weird abilities are ascribed to vampires, like one scene where a struggling vamp leaves scorch marks where her heels have dug into the earth.

I suppose the best praise I can muster is, “It’s pretty lame, but at least it’s short.”

Prime Evil by Diana G. Gallagher Seldom have I read a book so starkly divided between enjoyable parts and excruciating parts!

Set after “Doppelgangland,” the plot of Prime Evil involves a witch attuned to “primal magick” who was first born 19,000 years ago and who keeps being reincarnated and gathering sacrificial followers in an attempt to access “the source.” Her current identity is Crystal Gordon, a new history teacher at Sunnydale High, and her latest crop of doomed devotees is composed entirely of students. Obviously, it’s the Scooby Gang’s job to stop her.

First, the good. Most of the scenes with the main characters are fun, with dialogue that I could easily hear in the actors’ voices. Anya and Joyce have significant roles, and there was notable awkwardness between the latter and Giles. Although this was presumably the result of their dalliance in “Band Candy,” I liked that the explanation wasn’t explicitly stated. I thought it was interesting that Crystal tempts Willow to join her disciples by promising a cure for Oz, and I did have to snicker at a scene in which Angel, for the sake of expedience in getting to safety, has to sling Xander over his shoulder.

The bad, however, cannot be denied. There are many tedious flashbacks to Crystal’s past incarnations and these quickly became literally groan-inducing. In addition, the theoretically climactic magical battle at the end is full of prose like “The great source-river of wild magick coursed in violent abandon through the orbits of comets so ancient and distant they had never been warmed by the sun” and succeeded only in making me profoundly sleepy.

In summation… zzz.

Resurrecting Ravana by Ray Garton A rash of cattle mutilations has the Scooby Gang suspecting hellhound activity, but when several people turn up eaten, after each has spontaneously killed their dearest friend, it’s clear something else is up. There’s more of a mystery here than these books generally offer, with a plot that features Hindu gods, an elderly collector of magical artifacts, his lonely granddaughter, and a certain statue that can resurrect a deity who will reward one richly for this service (and whose minions will kill everyone else).

Along the way, a new guidance counselor of Indian descent is introduced (replacing the guy who got killed in “Beauty and the Beasts”). At first, I thought this was going to be another one of those “Willow falls under the sway of a new female staff/faculty member who is secretly evil” storylines, but, refreshingly, that did not turn out to be the case. Willow just talks to her about problems with her relationship with Buffy, which come to a head in a couple of full-on brawls in the library. It takes a really long time for anyone to put together that their situation parallels the murders/devourings happening elsewhere in town, but it does lead to a nice final moment for the book.

Characterization is spotty. Pretty much each character has a moment that feels especially right as well as one that feels especially wrong. Xander and Cordelia’s bickering is even nastier than usual, and it’s never outright said that they’re being affected by the same creatures who manipulated Buffy and Willow. That said, I did enjoy all of Buffy’s interactions with her mother, particularly a late-night trip to Denny’s. All in all, Resurrecting Ravana wasn’t bad!

Return to Chaos by Craig Shaw Gardner Return to Chaos is a bit different from most of the other Buffy tie-in books I’ve read. Instead of a new big villain coming to town, the plot is mostly about some new allies coming to town. A quartet of Druids, specifically, consisting of an older guy named George and his three nephews, one of whom develops feelings for Buffy. George wants to enlists the Slayer’s help in performing a spell on the Hellmouth that will supposedly prevent bad things from crossing over, but he’s really vague about his plans, and it soon becomes evident that he isn’t in his right mind. The nephews genuinely are allies, though, which is kind of refreshing.

This book was written in 1998, and it seems that the author was not privy to much that was going to happen in season three. A couple of vague references are made to Angel coming back, and about Buffy trying to move on romantically, but Xander and Cordelia are still very much together as a couple. That would put this somewhere between “Beauty and the Beasts” (episode four) and “Lover’s Walk” (episode eight), except that it is very clearly spring and we know that “Amends” (episode ten) is Christmas. Oopsies. There are a couple of other small errors, too, concerning Buffy’s eye color and Giles’ glasses.

This is another book in which there’s more of Oz than I’d been expecting. Some of his scenes and thoughts are okay, and I appreciated that the author wrote a teensy bit about Oz’s family, but at other times he just seems far too verbose. (This, combined with the errors mentioned above, makes me wonder just how familiar the author was with these characters.) Cordelia has a subplot of her own, as well, in which she falls under the thrall of a former rival turned vampire. The Druids recognize that the vampire is using a “mastery” spell, which is likened to the power Drusilla exhibited when she was able to kill Kendra so easily. I thought that was kind of neat.

In the end, despite some flaws, it turned out to be pretty decent.

Revenant by Mel Odom In 1853, 35 Chinese laborers were killed in a mine cave-in on a site owned by some of Sunnydale’s forefathers. The incident was covered up and families were unable to provide their loved ones with a proper burial. Now, the unquiet spirits of those men want vengeance on the owners’ descendants and have managed to communicate with the troubled brother of one of Willow’s friends, who enlists her help. Honestly, this plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but there’s a rich importer involved (who’s receiving help from the mayor) and chanting and statues and dragons and warehouses what go boom and demons that turn into goop.

Sometimes, Odom has a bit of trouble with characterization—Oz’s dialogue often doesn’t feel quite right, and sometimes Buffy comes off as vapid, like an early scene where she’s worried about her hair while Willow is running for her life—but other scenes are spot-on. I particularly liked a moment where Giles is forced to hotwire a truck (“I was not always a good boy”) and the final scene wherein Xander attempts to parlay his latest romantic disappointment into Buffy’s half of a Twinkie they’re sharing. Odom also incorporates and elaborates on some of the issues characters are worrying about at this point in the show: Buffy ponders her future with Angel, Xander dreads being left behind after graduation, and Cordelia seeks to avoid trouble at home by helping with research. The action scenes are easy to envision, as well.

Unlike most other books set during this season, the brief Xander/Willow fling and its fallout are acknowledged. Like the others, neither Faith nor Wesley is mentioned, and the former’s absence is particularly glaring, given the evident difficulty of the big battle. Still, Revenant ended up being a pleasant surprise.

By: Michelle Smith

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Harvey Weinstein and the Death of 'Liberal' America

Weinstein is a goner. Everyone knows it. It would be a great surprise if the man stands trial. The weird thing is, we all knew about Hollywood. Hell, the exact behavior of Weinstein and people like him is a trope so well engrained in our culture that porn movies that riff on the behavior rack up millions of views.

Editor's Note: This piece was originally published on my now permanently banned Medium.com account on October 13, 2017. It was read over 100,000 times on that site. It is still accurate in my opinion, so I have republished it here. Strange how yet again we hear of an FBI investigation beginning, but never ending. ~A.S

As ever, hypocrisy underpins everything. Berated from the podium of award ceremonies, we, the plebs, the cattle, the consumers, we are instructed. Don’t be sexist. Don’t be racist. Black lives matter. The liberal elites are better than you. Much better. We are rich, you are not. We know what is best, and if you disagree with our agenda, who cares. We are gods.

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They look down on our petty behavior and sneer, and turn their eyes aside when their friends behave in ways that truly are deplorable.

That is the attitude that allowed Weinstein to bugger his way through busloads of wannabe starlets. The glitterati Cosa Nostra has a vow of silence that protects them all. I’ll keep your secrets, you keep mine, and the gravy train keeps running. The cattle buy their tickets to see the movies we make, and who cares about a few broken women along the way.

As Actress Sophie Dix said:

“I was very, very vocal about it at the time. I didn’t want to own it. I wanted people to take it away from me. But I was met with a wall of silence. People who were involved in the film were great, my friends and my family were amazing and very compassionate, but people in the industry didn’t want to know about it, they didn’t want to hear.”

They didn’t want to hear. Rose McGowan was right to call out Ben Affleck. Oh, well done Ben; you told Weinstein to stop. Guess what? You weren’t convincing, and then it turns out that, at best, you’re a sleaze yourself. He said he’s saddened and angry about Harvey. Yeah, Ben. Us too.

Now that the FBI is involved, who else is in line to be toppled by the sizable domino of Weinstein?

Meryl Streep

Meryl is a national treasure, a confidant of Harvey Weinstein, and outspoken figurehead of the industry. If there’s a progressive cause, she’s there to lend a voice. Such a darling, she will happily slather on orange facepaint and a suit to impersonate Donald Trump and sing, at the top of her lungs:

“Problem now with society, we’re all hung up on propriety … She can sample my Measure for Measure.”

Wow, sure seems like she knows exactly what she’s talking about here. Donald Trump must be a bad guy, after all, this is Meryl Streep. She would know.

“I didn’t know about these other offenses: I did not know about his financial settlements with actresses and colleagues; I did not know about his having meetings in his hotel room, his bathroom, or other inappropriate, coercive acts,” she said. “And If everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.”

Isn’t that precious. The mainstream media, who have chased conservative scandals with the perspicacity of a coke-crazed Glenn Close character, would surely have reported on such widespread abuse.

So Meryl is off the hook. No one would believe that someone whose career rose in parallel with Weinstein’s could possibly have heard what literally everyone else knew to be true.

Ben & Matt & George & Quentin & Brad & Leonardo &….

Ugh. White supremacy hand signals too.

Here’s what is confusing me, Mr Affleck; I wonder if you could help me out. So, when Brad tells Harvey to back off Gwyneth, and when Ben tells Harvey to knock it off, but it keeps going for decades- what’s up with that? Was it just because Harvey and his peccadillos kept you rolling in cash? Is that why you prostituted your morals?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you convinced yourselves at the time that you tried. The feminists claim that they don’t need no man, and you guys are of course ready to back up anything so long as you don’t have to actually act. Act, as in, take action. Not the act that you snakes have been putting on for 20 years or more, pretending that your industry isn’t riddled with criminals.

Here’s the thing. Any man in the real world, we see some guy assaulting women- he’s toast. Or at least he should be. Imagine this- ten men know about a sex offender living on their street. They watch as he creeps on the local girls. They don’t report it, they don’t kick his teeth in; a couple of them say, hey- that’s not cool please stop.

The sex offender pays them off and carries on.

What would you think of these men? Are they heroes? Great actors, philanthropists and role models? No.They are spineless worms. It’s not PC to say anymore but one of the roles of man in human society has always been to protect women from danger, which mostly comes from other men. Have we just decided to say f-ck it? Is that the price of equality?

Would you stand by while women are abused? Would someone being rich and powerful prevent you from beating the hell out of them if they assaulted your daughter? I would like to think not. I think any man worth a damn would drag Harvey Weinstein through hell for half of that.

So, why is Hollywood so divorced from reality that men stand by as girls young enough to be their daughters are abused by men old enough to be grandfathers? It boggles the mind. How corrupt. The hypocrisy stinks.

Let us all remind ourselves never to give another cent to Hollywood. These movie stars are either cowards, complicit or literally the dumbest people on Earth.

youtube

That’s a lot of movie stars scrambling to overturn American democracy to prevent the will of the people being recognized. I do hope none of them knew about Harvey. That would be unfortunate.

The Clintons & The Obamas

This should be open and shut. Hillary says she was sick and appalled when she found out. I’m sure she was, but I don’t think that Hillary found out with the rest of us about her donor Harvey Weinstein.

Are we to believe that a former President and a former Secretary of State not once was told about Weinstein? Do these people not vet their supporters before reciprocating the support?

Of course they do.

A man comes up to you and gives you a cheque for $100,000. He says he believes in your cause. He asks for nothing, but you thank him in public and say he is great. You later discover that man is a criminal, and not just a petty thief, his crimes are an open secret.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Barack Obama was ready to send his daughter to intern for Weinstein this year. Are we to believe that the Secret Service conducted no vetting prior? This is the daughter of a president.

But that, of course, is the problem. These girls that Weinstein abused were not presidents daughters. They were just girls who wanted to be famous. So, Barack, Hillary, Bill, Michelle. In my view, you all took money from Weinstein. You all had access to the most powerful information gathering network on the planet.

But, you knew nothing, of course. Sickening. Saddened. Someone else’s problem. Someone else’s daughter.

Good luck, FBI.

Maybe it is a vain hope that the FBI is going to do a serious job on Hollyweird.I don’t see how just picking at the threads of this case and applying some rudimentary common sense can result in anything but the utter destruction of the industry as we know it.

But, of course, money talks and bullshit walks. With so much filthy lucre paving the streets, Hollywood elites will remain so.

Plausible deniability, omerta, I never knew, it was a rumor and I hoped it was wrong, by the way, I’m a feminist, #TheResistance.

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The liberal elite is utterly hypocritical. We’re all hypocrites. It is human nature to be hypocritical. What makes us feel sick though, is when hypocrites monetize their hypocrisy. From an ivory tower, we are told about how bigoted we are for not being progressives. The cloistered demi-gods spit on you for being working class and voting in your own interests. Donald Trump is a sex criminal, they cry. No evidence is ever provided, but you are a bad person for supporting him.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, they know. They all know about Harvey.

The hand-wringing will be long and drawn out, as Hollywood and CNN examine all of us for their crimes. It must be toxic masculinity, or whiteness, or some such. The Oscars will dedicate 2018 to female directors and producers, ideally, Womyn-of-Color and the fireworks will be bright.

Ben and Matt and Leo and Brad will be there, and they will applaud. So will Hillary and Bill and Barack and Michelle. And here we are, the plebians, told that we are morally inferior. Ethically compromised. The deplorables.

We should always remember that those who make character judgments about their opponents based on nothing are usually guilty of that flaw themselves. The liberal elite has accused Donald Trump of being the worst kind of sex offender for over a year. Now we see that the snake pit is not at Trump Tower at all. It never was. The whole charade played out on sound stages on the Miramax Studio lot.

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justthinkingtheblog-blog · 6 years

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Just Thinking #41 - “My Prayer”

Dear Whoever of Whatever,

Thank you for all you do - or don’t do. Thank you for your grace and providence; for putting me through whatever you deem necessary, the “seasons” of my life which are not good or bad but “thinking makes it so” (to quote your disciple Shakespeare.)

Thank you for making me aware that thinking makes it so and that what happens is neither “good” or “bad” but a story I put on top of it. Thus, I can embrace what your other buddy, Kahlil Gibran once said: “Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And [watch] with serenity through the winters of your grief.”

Thank you for gifting me entrance to the big pachinko game of life through which I drop like a silver ball between metal posts, seemingly bopping this way and that but always heading toward the jackpot.

Let me see what you do each day as wondrous - even if it’s raining.

Let me look at the stars each night, NOT receiving what Emerson cautioned as their “admonishing smile” but realizing that these envoys of beauty come out EVERY night, not once in a thousand nights which would make them seem all the more resplendent.

Give me the awareness and reason to remember that life is like my annual five day stay at The Mirage Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for Kentucky Derby weekend. I.e. when you get there you think you have forever and kind of don’t appreciate day 2 and day 3 and then you realize you’re leaving tomorrow and love day 4 but it is tinged with bittersweetness because you forgot to love day 2 and 3.

Let me love day 2 and day 3 on day 2 and day 3 and let this prayer serve as a reminder.

Thank you for your sublime sense of humor and interconnectedness. Truly “the best course of a ship IS a thousand zig-zag tacks.” (I am quoting from Emerson. He was the bomb.) Thank you for making Emerson or his parents or their parents or their parents.

Let me not pass by the smile of a child like a flower on the side of the road without stopping to smell it (not the child, but the smile.) Children smell nasty sometimes.

Let me appreciate things like ice cream, crackerjacks (okay, not literally - they get stuck in my teeth but you know what I mean.) Let me appreciate the people who come into my life like so many 777′s over Newark Liberty Airport - easy to think they are just airplanes and forget the contents inside.

Let me appreciate airline meals. That one I need help on. Let me appreciate each day as a day and not be consumed by the thoughts of the ego. Let me remember that past and future are thought forms and the world is truly a blank canvas, delivered by yours truly in that cool white van that says “If the van’s a rockin’, don’t come a hockin’.”

Let me not be attached to outcomes but rather to THY will. It’s gonna be done anyway, so I why should I get all verklempt? Let me not be upset about the traffic jam but realize it’s saving me from the accident. Let me not be upset that you sent that oak tree to fall on my car (bastard - I mean God, sorry) but realize that I fell in love at the Toyota dealership as a result.

Let me appreciate those rare truffles in life’s box of Gumptian chocolates, ala love, hate, fear, hope, despair, loneliness, togetherness, sublimity, beauty, ugliness (same as beauty), rocks, trees, roads, people who wear neon. These are the colors in your creative palette.

Let me appreciate this day, o Lord, like a movie that has a beginning middle and end - not like some endless moment, even though it is. Let me be thankful for this human birth even though being a cow seems even cooler. Specifically a dairy cow.

Give me the acument to divine your will - or at least shut my mouth long enough to hear it - and when I hear, to try to listen. And if I don’t listen and I’m an idiot, which is very possible, please don’t let me fall off a bridge (again.) I know that wasn’t your felt, BTW.

Let me not be that dude in the river who has like 10 people come to try and save him and he says “No, I’m waiting for God” and then I die and I get to talk to you for 5 minutes in your office and you say “Dude, I sent 10 people to try to help you.” Please don’t let me be that guy.

Please let me only eat homemade sweets and stick to that dictum, because processed sugar/high fructose corn syrup is highly addictive, Dog (do you mind if I call you that?) along with opiates, peanut butter, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.

Okay, I gotta go and and make dinner now. Thank you God for food (and Bourbon), but not TOO MUCH because I don’t want to get fat and have my blood pressure go up, etc...because then I won’t be able to do any of the other things we talked about.

What is it you want me to do anyway? Please let me know sometime. My email is [email protected] but you can call me in on my cell. Except during Ancient Aliens. I love that show. And Antiques Roadshow. That is good too. BTW, I will let you know how it goes at The General Store. Oh Dog, please let a couple people who read this buy something from me so I can eat. I will give them a link at the end. Thanks Dude, you are the man/womyn.

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#god #prayer #religion #spirituality #dog

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