(all authors listed in alphabetical order by last name)
Shira Glassman //@shiraglassman
RoAnna Silver //@thesylverlining
A version with the covers!
I'm humbled and honored to have my work linked in this post.
“Jews Control Everything” factoid actually just statistical error. The average Jew controls very little. Controls Everything Georg, who lives in New York and removes antiemetic bigots with a casual wave of his hand, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
It got funnier.
One small error: that's actually a very emetic bigot. I felt queasy.
It is indeed.
“Jews Control Everything” factoid actually just statistical error. The average Jew controls very little. Controls Everything Georg, who lives in New York and removes antiemetic bigots with a casual wave of his hand, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
It got funnier.
I DO know what it means!
(If that doesn't start at 5:46 just seek to there.)
She defines empathy as:
The attempt to understand the emotional experience of another person, which is often accompanied by a behavioral gesture.
Which is exactly what I'm saying I think it's hard to have a friendship without, and exactly what I think my mom is really bad at. She's so busy thinking about what SHE thinks and feels that when someone ELSE thinks and feels something she isn't expecting, it must be a lie, lack of self awareness on THEIR part (they really feel what she thinks they do, of course, they're just not admitting it), or something unacceptable she has to talk them out of.
Which is bad not because Neurotypical Or Bust, but because no one, typical or not (I'm not!), likes being told what they're feeling by some rando.
thatonemushroom but Fierce, have you considered that *paragraph after paragraph of quibbling*?
No, I haven't, I'm terrible, go away.
By which I mean yes I have, actually, but I still just want Quibbler to go away.
I DO know what it means!
(If that doesn't start at 5:46 just seek to there.)
She defines empathy as:
The attempt to understand the emotional experience of another person, which is often accompanied by a behavioral gesture.
Which is exactly what I'm saying I think it's hard to have a friendship without, and exactly what I think my mom is really bad at. She's so busy thinking about what SHE thinks and feels that when someone ELSE thinks and feels something she isn't expecting, it must be a lie, lack of self awareness on THEIR part (they really feel what she thinks they do, of course, they're just not admitting it), or something unacceptable she has to talk them out of.
Which is bad not because Neurotypical Or Bust, but because no one, typical or not (I'm not!), likes being told what they're feeling by some rando.
Oof, I know this happened a long-ass time ago, but condolences about what your ex did. But to be entirely fair about the tags in that screenshot, maybe the point is that consent is the absolute bare minimum for sex to be Not A Literal Crime. Obviously people (radfems, tradcons, etc.) can take the idea of "consent isn't enough" too far, but I do disagree with what discoursedrome called "an entirely rape-centred sexual ethics, in which every bad sex-related thing is rape and no sex-related thing is bad unless it’s rape."
Oh yeah, just really do not like “trauma can make things that are not normal seem sexy.” Like… maybe? But the mere fact that someone fantasizes about something linked to their trauma isn’t bad, nor is the mere fact they consented to it. One of the few things I enjoy bottoming to is knife play, and the reason I eroticize knives probably has to do with just how many scalpels have opened me up.
Just because those surgeries harmed me doesn’t mean the knife play did. I am not remotely interested in someone who might conflate the two using my words to opine unknowingly about “abnormal fantasies.”
Like, find a vanilla person to quote about that, I didn’t mean it that way.
i think sexual abuse is a lot more complicated than ppl want to admit and i’m going to use two (of the many) scenarios i’ve personally been in to talk abt it. it’s gonna get kind of explicit so just be warned.
so the first scenario is me and my high school boyfriend. we're both 15 and horny all the time, and the first time we have sex i didn't even know it was going to happen. we were messing around in my garage, and he just like. stuck it in. was losing my virginity bent over a tractor in the garage the way i wanted to lose my virginity? no. did he ask for my consent? no. but. i do not consider what happened to me to be rape or assault. it didn't upset me, it didn't cause me trauma, it really didn't affect me beyond "holy shit i lost my virginity."
the second scenario is something that happened frequently between me and my abusive ex boyfriend. i would be in the mood for sex, express that interest to him, he would reject me, so i would back off. then after a minute, he would start flirting with me and showing interest in having sex with me, so i'd start flirting back, and then he'd reject me again. and when i say reject, i don't just mean "i'm not in the mood" i mean "ew why are you being so clingy get off me" when moments before he'd been grabbing my ass. he would go through this cycle until he was satisfied that i felt shitty enough about myself that i'd let him do whatever he wanted. did i want to have sex? yes. did i consent to that sex? yes. but. i consider what happened to be sexual abuse because he explicitly needed me to feel like shit in order for him to enjoy the sex and in order for me to not question what happened during it because i would feel like i "wanted it."
between those two scenarios, only one happened specifically without my consent. but that's not the scenario i consider to be assault. some might say the second situation was a negation of consent, and i think it absolutely can be. but for me and my own personal experience, i consider it to essentially be weaponizing the consent i did give, which is what made it so insidious. and i feel like people often want to project that violation of consent onto me regardless of how i actually describe the event because they conflate consent with healthy sex, so any unhealthy sex must be a violation of consent, and that's just not how it always works.
i feel like discussions around sexual assault tend to be so incredibly black and white, which makes sense because the people participating in them are traumatized! it's hard to have nuance when you're traumatized! but i think it's still important to have these conversations because there have been times where i was in spaces specifically for survivors and was told that what happened to me wasn't abuse because i consented, and it was "insensitive" to compare it to "actual rape" (which i also experienced from the same ex). in order to really heal, we need to be able to have these tough conversations, because i promise they're worth it.
This is a thing my abusive ex gf would do too. She'd say really explicit things about how sexy I was, and then when I was like "the bedroom's over that way~" she'd immediately stop and go "...Suddenly, I'm not in the mood. I don't know what's come over me, but I don't want to have sex right now."
And if I acted the least bit confused she'd say I was pressuring her, when I was literally just going "wait what I thought you were interested? of course we should not have sex now if you're not!"
I do not know what this was but I know it was extremely confusing and upsetting to me.
We ultimately ended up only having sex when and where she wanted it, including some things I wasn't sure about so... mm, yeah, maybe I DO know what that was about. :-/
Not naming usernames but… wow is this reblog’s tags NOT REMOTELY WHAT I MEANT.
Consent is an indication of healthy sex.
The issue is that consent can be vitiated by pressure in unhealthy relationships.
The pressured vanilla sex still horrifies me. The consensual kinky sex with the same person did not.
Please do not use my posts this way.
They didn’t ban Atraxa?
I mean, no Fable helps but yeah I guess I’m just stealing her effect or Norning then…
"queer theory" is literally entirely about how things are never binary, how they often exist in ways we don't expect, how there are things we don't yet understand and things we never will, and how all of that is important and good, actually!
in environmental science, we talk about "queer theory" as a lens that helps us break down arbitrary boundaries between things. what is natural? can human-made things be natural? is a log cabin natural? what about a beaver dam? why? should those things really be a binary?
in educational research, it's used to look at study results in new ways: you didn't get the results you thought you would, but what did you get? what does that say? does it need to be a "yes/no" answer, or is there more to it than that?
categories of art work the same way; "art" can mean "fine art", it can mean "visual arts", it can refer to any kind of art (music, dance, theater, writing, etc.). it can even refer to anything done skillfully; "the art of...". The term is fluid, the categories are flexible, and what fits where is not a binary.
"queer theory" is about broadening your perspective, welcoming complicated truths, and questioning binaries. it's about accepting non-understanding.
we have always, fundamentally, been about this. the room to identify, express yourself, and exist in ways that others do not understand, to defy binaries and contain contradictions, to deny adherence to the "rules" of any label, is intrinsic to queerness.
This is what being threatened by queerness is. Not wanting people to exist in between.
What has happened (and I agree Terfs Did It but I suspect it would have happened even without them) is we’ve normalized homosexuality in sufficiently progressive spaces.
Gay is just a way people are born, like being left handed.
But if that’s true, the people for whom being gay is in part or in whole about being gender in betweeners are doing the equivalent of trying to make being left handed creepy again.
Instead of these people understanding that… however normal or not it is to be gay, according to whoever…
…it’s also okay to be an in betweener.
Always has been.
We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Also, as we see with the rise of fascism, "gay is just one end of a binary, gay <--> straight, and it's normal to be at either" is conditional acceptance at best.
Achieving social change is... well, not easy, but doable. Keeping that social change is the hardest part.
The people who hate you for being cisgender gays who would never touch that weird trans shit because sex is real and modified bodies are actually really common if you think about it people playing God?
They're going to threaten you the same way they threaten us.
"It's an in betweener, get them!"
Stand with us. We're not the cruel ones. We want to keep you safe too.
"queer theory" is literally entirely about how things are never binary, how they often exist in ways we don't expect, how there are things we don't yet understand and things we never will, and how all of that is important and good, actually!
in environmental science, we talk about "queer theory" as a lens that helps us break down arbitrary boundaries between things. what is natural? can human-made things be natural? is a log cabin natural? what about a beaver dam? why? should those things really be a binary?
in educational research, it's used to look at study results in new ways: you didn't get the results you thought you would, but what did you get? what does that say? does it need to be a "yes/no" answer, or is there more to it than that?
categories of art work the same way; "art" can mean "fine art", it can mean "visual arts", it can refer to any kind of art (music, dance, theater, writing, etc.). it can even refer to anything done skillfully; "the art of...". The term is fluid, the categories are flexible, and what fits where is not a binary.
"queer theory" is about broadening your perspective, welcoming complicated truths, and questioning binaries. it's about accepting non-understanding.
we have always, fundamentally, been about this. the room to identify, express yourself, and exist in ways that others do not understand, to defy binaries and contain contradictions, to deny adherence to the "rules" of any label, is intrinsic to queerness.
This is what being threatened by queerness is. Not wanting people to exist in between.
What has happened (and I agree Terfs Did It but I suspect it would have happened even without them) is we’ve normalized homosexuality in sufficiently progressive spaces.
Gay is just a way people are born, like being left handed.
But if that’s true, the people for whom being gay is in part or in whole about being gender in betweeners are doing the equivalent of trying to make being left handed creepy again.
Instead of these people understanding that… however normal or not it is to be gay, according to whoever…
…it’s also okay to be an in betweener.
Always has been.
We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Starts off super upsetting but the way this random dude handles this guy is hilarious.
…I just got a spam that said “welcome you to view this” and that’s so transparently a terrible idea that part of me feels vaguely tempted.
I am now occupying my mind with cool things some mysterious stranger would welcome me to view. Portals to the Other Side. Mind warping Lovecraftian beasts. Prophecies of inevitable doom.
…In a horror movie I’d either be the first to die or the only one to reach out nonjudgmentally to the eldritch horror and save everyone.
You know, the more I think about my mom’s behavior, the more the thing Forbidden YouTube calls “vulnerable narcissism” makes sense to me as an explanation, whether or not there is such a thing above and beyond stuff this one person I am related to does.
That being that literally everything is bad to or for her. My dad got implants put in his mouth and now she struggles to hear him, but instead of “oh fuck, this is an unfortunate confluence of disabilities it’s “I can’t understand him! Fierce, can you understand him! It’s just SO UPSETTING THAT I CANT UNDERSTAND MY OWN HUSBAND clearly the guy doing the implants is a HORRIBLE RIP OFF. I tried to convince him NOT TO SEE THAT GUY but NO.”
Or worse, “WHY doesn’t he pronounce words CLEARLY,” knowing he had speech therapy. Which is just mean, and would be even if people with normal hearing struggled to understand him too. But we don’t. Or at least I don’t.
All this when he’s in the middle of a surgery procedure with stages so switching dentists is a bad idea unless he’s doing it wrong or something.
Like it’s unfair she’s hearing impaired, just like it’s unfair I have impaired mobility. But no one failed to put a curb cut in a useful place AT me. I Can be annoyed at whoever designed or built it, but I shouldn’t lament my plight in ways that make other people feel bad but can’t be solved. All I can do is decide if I want to walk around to find a cut or if I don’t.
On some level my attitude is my responsibility. I have to decide to deal, or to make a change.
Which is likely why The Forbidden YouTubes say not to try to convince your family member or partner to change. Because if they’re fundamentally convinced things are bad AT them, that’s a distortion that no one can undistort but them. By choice.
Which is a thing I did by choice when I decided to work on my own mental health. I tried very hard to ask myself what I could expect from other people and what I’d need to provide to them for our relationships to be positive, and thought really hard about how to get what I needed if I was asking too much.
It was kind of painful to withdraw when I still felt hurt, and it took a lot of getting used to. Now, though? “Hey Fierce, I feel for you but I’m overwhelmed myself/I need to go for dinner with friends/blah” “Oh okay, I’m gonna talk to another friend/play video games/exercise until im too exhausted to feel like shit. Thanks for listening.” And I still feel kinda bad but that’s not a betrayal. Friend left because Friend has own life. Which is just as scary and confusing as mine is.
When I see Tumblr saying that people just GET to not show empathy, or just GET to offer non reciprocal relationships, it really sounds to me like what’s being said is “you don’t have to bother trying not to hurt others, you poor baby.”
And I just… no. You get to think about whether someone’s demands are too much, sure. You get to decide the answer is yes.
But that may actually mean “the compassionate thing to do is cut this person off, because I’m unable to be the kind of partner or friend they need unless I become better at reciprocal relationships, which is hard for me.”
“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
❝ Your realms are diseased, and we are the only cure. ❞
@slyjinks none are immune to phyresis Norn Thirst
