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@crazedlesbianwizard

Morrigan Stride, 19, She/They

Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster's self as "Cookie Monster".

no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ

nalgenebottle-deactivated201706

*goes to Coachella in a white linen suit like an antebellum lawyer, sweating profusely and dabbing at my forehead with a handkerchief* now, I’m no fancy scientist, but would you folk know where a simple gentleman such as myself could obtain some acid? Now, I’m no big city lawyer, but could any of you fine youths point a country boy such as myself in the direction of some fucking acid?

easily a contender for post of the decade

Spent so long embroiled in transmasc Jesse Pinkman memes that I straight up forgot it wasn't canon. I keep periodically going "Wonder why no one talks about how one of the leads of one of the most renowned shows on American TV was a trans m-- oh shit, right"

Seinfeld AU where they're all court eunuchs in the Byzantine empire

Georgios: I'm telling you, you can't go on a date to the hippodrome, it always ends in a riot

Jerstinian: What's there to riot about? Red team wins, blue team wins, it's all just colours

Venetian Kramer: I finally figured out how I'm gonna pay all those crusaders off. foolproof plan. I'm gonna sack the city.

The thing is, I don't think most things (rightly) criticized as ecofascism are actually fascism. The main characteristics of fascism are authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, preoccupation with the military, and anxiety about corruption of culture and moral degeneration brought on by cultural "others."

Sentiments like "people using up resources is killing the planet, so we need to reduce the human population," while they WILL be co-opted by fascism, are not fascist themselves.

Colonialist? Absolutely. Genocidal? Ultimately yes. Bioessentialist and racist? Totally. An excellent companion to fascism? Certainly. Consider how indigenous people have been removed from their lands and denied the ability to use the animals and plants as they always have because conservation efforts by colonial governments wish to "protect" those lands from human influence. Consider how the population idea means the responsibility for climate change is placed on countries with the highest fertility rates, never mind that the countries using the most resources most have fertility rates at or below replacement. Consider how overconsumption is framed as a matter of personal choice, rather than a matter of companies with godlike power enforcing dependency on cars, restricting access to low-impact foods, and utilizing planned obsolescence.

But "humans are bad and nature is better with less humans" isn't fascism by itself, it's just anti-human and blaming the oppressed for their oppression.

Basically it's bad to hate "humans" as a species and it's a great companion to fascism because "humans are bad" can be enforced selectively against the members of the human species labeled "Least valuable"

The reason to make this post is: Someday, somebody will explain, correctly, why some of the attitudes labeled "ecofascism" are not fascism, and y'all need to be prepared so you don't say, "ah, I see, perhaps forced sterilization can be a good thing sometimes?" or something else repulsive.

The earth belongs to disabled people who need a lot of plastic medical equipment and women who wish to have large families and people who have hunted and fished sustainably like their ancestors since the beginning of memory and refugees and the displaced and the impoverished who cannot Buy Product that is supposedly "greener" and to every creature that is alive and will ever be alive. The earth belongs to the generation of our grandparents and the generation of our grandchildren. The living things are our family and they would miss us terribly (we are a keystone species). The Earth is our home.

What i'm saying is we have to start being openly and unapologetically pro-human. Our species is good. We are perhaps the most adaptable species that has ever evolved. We learn to understand ecological processes, shape ecosystems and guide evolution, any given group of humans will have a huge diversity of traits and qualities so that as social units, we can inhabit just about any specialized niche. We can anticipate the future long after we expect to be gone, shaping our actions for the sake of descendants we will never meet. I love humans! I love being a human! We are a keystone species!!!

@swmngpools The two questions I always have about this are the following:

  1. How did we come to the conclusion that we need 'fewer humans' and not 'change in the way resources are used'. The current system is WILDLY inefficient and wasteful. So many resources are being wasted/destroyed by consumerism, planned obsolescence, entire industries that are totally unnecessary and exist only for profit...that it just doesn't make sense in my head how we could be past the hard limit for a population Earth can support while squandering resources at a rate many times the amount needed to support its people.
  2. What can we possibly do to slow down population growth any faster than is already happening?

I'm exhausted right now so i'm not going to pull up links about it just at this moment...but fertility rates have already dropped to or below replacement in half the world. This is only going to keep dropping (ironically, abortion bans in the USA are helping, since at least where I live, there's been a huge rise in people deciding to be permanently sterilized).

The proposals i've seen are all like "we should empower women in impoverished countries and give them access to birth control..." and like first of all, who is "we", and second of all, we should have been caring about that the whole time...right?

Why don't they have access to birth control. What is already being done about this and by whom. If a formalized policy was created to "empower women" worldwide, what would this be and who would be carrying it out. I don't know what I'm saying it's just a little like saying, "All we need to do is simply, end poverty worldwide..."

There have already been efforts in recent history to reduce population within a country and they were Not, Broadly Speaking, Good (e.g. China's one-child policy).

Also, there are limits to how quickly a population can sustainably downsize. I know everyone clowns on the writings treating Japan's elderly like some kind of problem, but if the fertility rate drops to, say, 50% below replacement, that generation is going to be half as large as their parents' generation, and as their parents' generation grows old, most of them will WANT to retire and many eventually will no longer be able to live independently.

Obviously it should not be expected for children to provide 24/7 care to their elderly parents, but to even have the infrastructure to provide support and care to these people, there needs to be some number of younger able-bodied people working. IMO elder care is already a huge humanitarian crisis even here in the USA, where so many nursing homes are terrible and neglectful places.

Is there no possibility that we could simply divert some of the resources being used for funko pops, 34 types of oreos, billboards, junk mail, the lawn care industry, giant yachts, amazon alexas, printers that break irreversibly after using them 3 times, etc. into something better? The other day I tried to print a recipe and there were so many ads on the page that the print job initially was 27 pages long, with only two pages actually containing recipe. How much energy is being poured into advertising? Every day I think of it

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep

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Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.

Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:

Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?

I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.

Yeah my partner and I actually got engaged because in a boyfriend4boyfriend relationship it was getting too dangerous to browse tumblr. One of us was always getting pickled or being threatened by a tsunami or trapped in a narrative. It was really cutting into our quality time.

Yeah my partner and I actually got engaged because in a boyfriend4boyfriend relationship it was getting too dangerous to browse tumblr. One of us was always getting pickled or being threatened by a tsunami or trapped in a narrative. It was really cutting into our quality time.

you know how old scifi is. [quote that will haunt me for years and years] [quote that will haunt me for years and years] [quote t

a collection 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

(the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin)

(metaphase by vonda n. mcintyre)

(the dispossessed by ursula k le guin)

(the unfortunate fall by raphael carter)

(bone dance by emma bull)

(woman on the edge of time by marge piercy)

(babel-17 by samuel r. delany)

(woman on the edge of time by marge piercy)

(bone dance by emma bull)

(the telling by ursula k. le guin)

(metaphase by vonda n. mcintyre)

*correction the fourth book is called the fortunate fall. idk why i keep misspelling it as unfortunate 💀