starting a campaign called #justsayfag where if you see someone use the word twink as a slightly derogatory synonym to 'gay man' you should tell them to just replace twink with fag instead. gets the point across better

so like ignoring the part abt the silly reasons to hate zak bc as ive said before i find that valid and funny, imagine missing the point so bad....

'Ultimately we weren't getting the results that we needed and we're a year-and-a-half into this,' Brown told Fox Motorsport host Jess Yates at the Bathurst 1000. 'We've all tried extremely hard, we love Daniel, he's great to work with and continues to be great to work with. 'But we're in the results business and the results weren't coming and we felt we tried everything. 'We don't really know why it didn't click, it's kind of nobody's fault. We gave it our best. He gave it his best ... we just kind of ran out of things to try.' (...) 'But my job, along with Andreas (Seidl), is to make the tough decisions and because we didn't really see progress happening, it was like, 'Well I think we just need to make a change for both of our sakes and hopefully get him in the situation where he can be competitive again and in a Formula One car wherever he ends up racing', but (it's been) a huge disappointment.' 

i genuinely dont understand how this stuff is 'doing daniel dirty' and 'painting daniel as totally incompetent'?? like as a ceo obvs he doesnt have the specificity in his language that an engineer would have but this quote is pretty much what he says almost every time - we really did try our best, we know daniel tried his best, but there's something going on between daniel and the car and we know it's not productive or pleasant for either us or him to keep trying to make this happen. and he also usually adds stuff like how hes still a big fan of daniel or 'has a soft spot' for him or about how monza was obvs zak's first (and only) win at mclaren. which - how is all that not reasonable?

like genuine question - do u think if daniel was still at mclaren in 2023 would he have been so seriously considered by red bull as a possible replacement for checo (knock on wood)? and a bit more meanspirited of a question - considering the fact that in 2021 and 2022 mclaren only barely missed out on 3rd and 4th in the wcc respectively, do you think if daniel was still at mclaren in 2023 that mclaren would've reached 4th ahead of aston? i think its just so clearly for the best for both parties and i think i can afford to say that especially now w the retrospective knowledge that its not in fact daniels f1 doom and he DOES get back on the grid very soon after being dropped

anyways if any of u talk about twinks in the tags of my posts again ur getting blocked jsyk this is my last warning. #justsayfag

Trigger warning for homophobia and hate. For your last ask….I also think there is a huge difference in where and when you grew up with how it comes to how you perceive these types of coded words. I grew up in the 80s and 90s in rural America when children in my elementary school played a playground game called “Smear the Queer” and said you would go to hell for being gay. I remember the death of Mathew Shepard at the hands of hateful people crying gay panic and being told if you were gay you would die from AIDS and that HIV was Gods punishment. I remember hearing the word queer and twink and faggot being said with hate and derision. I remember being told twink was short for “twinkee” because a twink was “young, dumb, and full of cum”. I remember a limp wrist gesture being a deadly insult to the boys in my school. It took me many many many years to even admit to myself I was gay. I still don’t talk about myself or my partner with the people I work with cause even now I just feel like you never know who is hateful. I can’t imagine someone openly yelling out a gay slur in the street anymore, but I can imagine not getting a promotion at work. I feel very disconnected from the current generation and their use of gay coded language which my whole childhood was used with such hurt. It’s like homophobia went from what I experienced in my youth of being open and in you face to being all these coded cutesy terms. It sure feels like all the same insinuations are all still there just coded differently. Or maybe I’m just old and out of touch and letting my experiences color how I see things now. It’s even hard for me today to accept the reclamation of the word queer by the lgbtq+ community so I know my experience color my perception of thing.

no i think ur absolutely right. its not that ur old and out of touch, i think its that the younger generation is naive and overly comfortable. i have not had an experience nearly as intense as you in my childhood but i think growing up in quite a heavily homophobic country like romania and then moving to the uk was still quite a big culture shock to me. i kind of had the idea as a teen that romania as a whole is a homophobic culture and the west just isn't to that level (mostly out of jealousy for the things i was seeing on the internet lmao) and that perception deffo changed since ive been living here. essentially what i realised was that (especially) men were almost as shitty to women and gay people in the uk as they were back home, just way more covertly, because they knew how to say all the right things. so the only consequence of this for me personally was just that in the uk i am more likely to be negatively surprised by someone who i thought was chill, whereas in romania i was more likely to b positively surprised by someone who seemed like theyd have a horrible reaction to me coming out. but as far as i can tell british people themselves dont clock this at all, and a lot of them will just assume that if theres no overt discrimination happening then theres no discrimination at all. which is kinda scary from my pov but again, like u, idk whether to feel like im just reacting to my own circumstances and projecting

so to bring this back to what u said anon, i too am just naturally suspicious of stuff that seems inocuous in current western pop culture, which is why i too am so weirdly bothered by this new 'mctwink' thing and the greater trend that the portmanteau is a part of. even in terms of the reclaiming of 'queer', which is such a hotly debated topic that its become associated with a lot of other lgbt in-fighting, having been on the internet and in academic spaces enough to witness the sanitisation of the word 'queer' has been quite jarring if im being honest. in an academic space to me it feels like a euphemism with the same vibe as 'differently abled' instead of disabled and 'fluffy / huggable' instead of fat, where the word is said by cishet ppl not out of a genuine care for the community its meant to represent but rather out of a fear of accidentally saying smth wrong by calling the thing what it is (in this case, gay). people are still so goddamn afraid of the word gay in super progressive english humanities academia and its actually quite funny like thats the ONE word no one minds u using but bc YOU have ur own biases to unpack u think its a bad word, ykwim? anyways. this is a lot of digressions

i think there is a point where we have to accept that language changes. im very anti prescriptivist in that i think we should embrace linguistic evolutions and neologisms and all that bc like at the end of the day we don't make the rules, the zeitgeist does. and i worry that holding on to certain meanings and connotations of words after the words kind of stop carrying them is dangerously close to ppl who insist on using slurs or derogatory language because 'when i was young it didnt used to be an insult'. like i used to treat the usage of 'queer' exclusively as derogatory because of its history but at some point i had to look within myself and accept that the ppl whose classes im taking and whose books im reading are NOT using the word as a slur so i should not assume that to be their intent. which ik is a hard pill to swallow - especially hard for someone like u, anon, who also has trauma surrounding those words. idk i think the lgbt & academic communities shouldve been a lot kinder in that specific transition but whats done is done now i guess

so yeah. now we reach the silly little fandom squabble that's really only a tiny fraction of this bigger cultural issue. but as discussed before i DO think people are using these new tiktok terms as well as the repopularisation of the word twink in a secretly kind of derogatory way, maybe even subconsciously. and i do think straight but maybe not entirely masculine people like lando and oscar are somehow the target of that homophobia, but they r not the victim of it. there just is a sort of fetishisation and derision that happens in the process of calling them twinks that has subtle but real repercussions in the wider cultural environment. and to real gay ppl. 🥴 fun stuff

and re: this i think again this is a complicated distinction to make. mostly because this website rly does host the lgbt community in the way that a tiktok algorithm thinking ur gay and shoving other random gay ppl in ur face just doesnt. but bc of the fact that this is a curated community AND bc of the relative decay of tumblr, we tend to think that our community is disconnected from the most, when time and time again 2 or 3 years later the discourse on this website ends up rehashed on more popular social media to varying degrees of bastardisation. so yes obviously part of the thin line ur talking abt is stuff like the idea of lando or oscar actually seeing the things ppl call them, but at the same time it's not like we get away scot free with doing whatever. in the way that in 2019 f1 shipping and rpf were an isolated niche thing and now the formula 1 twitter account is tweeting on main about 'lestappen' even using that specific portmanteau. see what i mean? which is y im complaining on here abt the twinklaren situation, even though on twitter it doesn't seem nearly as prevalent, because i know it's gonna catch up at some point

I feel the exact same way when I see people use “girly pop” or “babygirl” or the 💅 emoji when what the really are insinuating is f*g. I see it wayyyy to often on other social media sites. Especially about Lando. Yes sometimes it’s meant lovingly, or endearingly, but more often then not it’s used in a mean way.

and even if its used lovingly it most likely carries an undertone of condescension. idk i had a very illuminating conversation two days ago w these two very straight guys id watched quali with, who said they didn't realise the limp wrist meme / the word 'zesty' / babygirl and girlypop were derogatory gay stereotypes, they thought it was 'how girls talk' or imitating women rather than imitating feminine gay men. and i find it soooo funny that when cultural artefacts that are meant to b subversive in the gay community spill over into straight culture, the cishets rly do just turn it back into good ol' gender stereotypes. thats why lando's whole astrology bit for HIM is a casually misogynistic imitation of astrology girls (complete with the pitched up voice), but to tiktok it ended up reading as 'fruity' or 'zesty' or whatever other stupid fucking euphemistic adjective they use to skirt imaginary censors that don't actually exist.

and its funny bc lando is actually so straight-man-ish from his obsession w the world's most boring rich boy sport to his bragging abt sexual exploits on stream to the bluntness / refusal to couch his words & soften the blow in interviews that in women generally doesn't survive past teenhood. but bc hes generally slender and baby-faced (even with that atrocious chandler-bing-in-alternate-reality-episodes goatee) ppl will still code him as feminine on social media / tiktok / fanart / fics especially. idk as someone who like among other things has drawn lando as a girl or in dresses i also personally have a bit of a complicated relationship with the idea of a feminine lando, but it definitely isnt helped by the thoughtlessness with which people in fandom spaces, and also on the internet in general, and also in real life treat these new incognito homophobia cultural trends

lmao i had to unfollow a mclaren moot because they took the "twink" thing to an extreme and were pointing out how he's just oscar's little twink and would always be fragile and small instead of big and strong and fit like "broadscar" and i really just had to. 🤦‍♀️ fit? FIT? lando was the only driver not on the brink of fainting after qatar, not everything in f1 is about how "broad" and "muscular" you seem. i wanted to give the benefit of doubt at first but when the fetishizing gay relationships turned into pushing these bodyshaming stereotypes onto a literal professional athlete i was out.

i mean its so wild bc half of them seem to give the twink descriptor to both drivers and half specifically pin it on lando because hes smaller than oscar & make it into a whole Dynamic of lando being sooo toppable or whatever. which just shows that there isnt actually any weight to 'twinklaren' at all and it rly is meaningless, bc surely if it was clear cut and obvious these differences wouldnt exist ykwim? like its just about what serves their fandom purpose in that moment

idk i think as much as the term broadscar is unfortunately quite funny to me, f1 fandom discussions abt weight and bodies r kind of bound to become problematic (real sense not 2014 tumblr sense) bc of the requirements of the sport. the way lewis has said that hes not allowed to bulk up because it would make his weight balance too lopsided (as a side note u guys do not know how ready i am for post retirement bicep BEAST lewis hamilton. the only way im gonna survive him retiring) etc like its not just about appearance for them.

in terms of how lando is fit like ur 100% right - stuff like qatar shows that he (and jon) has been doing his due diligence w preparing for these conditions. u can also just see in that last quadrant video how hes obviously very physically fit and ready for the season. its just that bodies have natural differences between them - oscar is genetically taller, lando is genetically more flexible; oscar is naturally broader around his arms, lando is naturally broader around his back, etc. and its not necessarily an issue to point these things out or even joke about them (when ppl say daniel's got birthing hips it still makes me laugh and its been years since i first heard it) but at some point it does start to show a fundamental misunderstanding of what f1 drivers do. like do i need to pull up the real sweat im a high performance athlete clip or what

so thats on the body stuff. re: the twink stuff i think the reason it rubs me, you, many ppl wrong even before we consciously realise it is like. a twink is a type - not just a body type, a *type*. in the gay male* community, you identify yourself as a twink (or bear, otter, etc) because some people are particularly attracted to twinks, bc they have a type. then obviously because the gay community is way more than just sexual attraction & has a lot of cultural capital, the term twink gained connotations and cultural history etc and grew past that. but the origins are still very much in gay male* attraction. so now that the term has become accessible to ppl who arent in that community, and therefore arent *participating*, identifying someone by their physical characteristics (and maybe implied penetrative sex preference) no longer has the subtext of appeal, but of derision. because no longer is it implied that everyone involved is a gay man*, which means calling someone a twink also implicitly calls them gay. and i think 'twink' specifically gained traction compared to other types also bc of its association w femininity in one's physical appearance - which, again, ur just derogatorily calling someone feminine and gay. even if, say, ur a member of the lgbt community who isn't a gay man*, it still carries the subtext - like anon u completely correctly identified the condescending undertones of whoever ur talking about. which is why i say we should just bring back fag #justsayfag