keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

If you’re an adult, do the stuff you couldn’t as a kid.

Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.

I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.

I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”

I guess what I’m saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid - see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours - you can do when you’re an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.

this is the purest-realist shit ever

Happy Pride Month!

Faust the Crow loves you even more than she did the last 2 years!

happy pride month from your neighborhood gray!! I forget that asexuality has been severely misrepresented and that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is as a result so here is an overview of what asexuality is, what it’s not, and how acephobic is represented. there is so much more to asexuality than just this. I didn’t even mention the medicalization of asexuality! 

I highly rec scretspiderlady on Twitter because she writes a lot about the ace experience and has many comprehensive threads. I also rec Yasmin Benoit, a Black aroace lingerie model who is fighting misinformation about asexuality and shedding light on racism within the asexual community. if you’re interested in more resources feel free to dm me!

EDIT: I updated the slide that refers to asexuality as “aspec” to “acespec.” The term aspec refers to the a community as a whole – both asexuals and aromantics – while acespec refers to the asexual spectrum and arospec referes to the aromantic spectrum. You can see this mirrored in the terms acephobia (experienced by aces), arophobia (experienced by aros), and aphobia (experienced by both aces and aros). Thank you to those of you who tagged this post with their correction!

EDIT 2: now with a text-only option!

it's pride month so i just wanted to send my love and support to all asexuals here. it took me a few years to figure out that i am actually ace. those were confusing times, but now i'm finally at peace with this part of myself and i wish you all the same 🖤🩶🤍💜

A post that's not keeping with any "theme" but needs to be said, if you're here I appreciate you all, and everyone is welcome.

becoming an adult cheat sheet!

reblogging for whomever needs it

A Guide To Yellow StripeyThings

We have like ten carpenter bees hovering hysterically along our fifteen foot high wooden fence, trying to guard the little hole they’ve bored for their lady bee friend. She sits inside the hole snacking and watching Netflix while he hovers outside, freaking out and trying to chase off other male carpenter bees. I don’t know why they don’t drop dead of exhaustion.

Also, yellow jackets ARE complete assholes.

Writing fanfic as a non-US citizen like

In case anyone actually wants to know the answer: it’s the plot of Cars. The difference is literally the plot of Cars.

Highways are usually two-to-four (at the widest) lane roads that meander the US landscape. Think Route 66, dinosaur statues, mom-and-pop diners, southern gothic. There are state-level and national-level highways. Some run for a 100 miles, some, like US HWY-17, run most of the East Coast:

That red line is US HWY 17. If you follow it, you will go through tiny towns. You may hit stoplights. I kid you not, you will see spinning cows on poles. Businesses exist along highways that you are encouraged to pull over and visit. They were designed to let you see America.

Yeah.

Now, interstates were made in the 50s and were made to get people from Point A to Point B. These suckers range from four lanes to eight lanes around big cities. They cut through everything. If you want to get to a business, you have to take an exit ramp and detour. They are great for getting places fast. You can still have weird experiences on them, but usually at night, when your eyes start playing tricks on you. Or there are deer.

I-95 is a massive corridor that runs from the Florida Keys to the Canadian Border. You can see the difference just looking at the maps.

As far as writing goes:

If you want quirky character development inside the car, you’re looking for an interstate. The majority of Americans take interstates to go on road trips.

If you want mysterious and/or supernatural hijinks, you’re looking for a highway. They are weird, weird places, and they’re surprisingly easy to wind up on if you leave the interstate.

(Even in America, no one’s really sure what a freeway is. Just ignore it.)

Freeways exist in big cities where cars are more prominent than public transport, such as LA or Atlanta. You’ve year of liminal spaces? Freeways during rush hour are a physical manifestation of hell.

Awesome! Now what the hell is a turnpike?

If you find out, let me know. Maybe ask someone from New Jersey.

A turnpike is a highway with a toll. Turnpikes are special highways where you drive really fast and it’s usually linking big cities with each other and you keep going until you hit a toll booth.

They’re called “turnpikes” because in the olden days, there were pikes or barriers up and you had to pay the toll for them to be raised or turned to let you in.

Also, just for the record, Hawaii does have interstates.

For everyone who didn’t want to know, expressways are a form of highway that connect both suburban areas and major interstates to a city They often have both an alphanumerical name and a colloquial name In Philly we have the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76)

Would like to add that highways and mainly interstates were made specifically so THE MILITARY could get from Point A to Point B. This combined with a post-WWII boost in the economy and car industry gave Americans the ability to tour the country on their own for the first time ever. A whole chunk of American culture was created by just expanding the road system.

Think about road systems and other systems of travel when worldbuilding!

All this being said, most East Coast US people will refer to all of these things interchangeably as “highways”/”the highway.”

Another note for non-USians trying to write a road trip story – if your characters would definitely be taking the interstate, but you want them on a highway in order for the supernatural shenanigans to start (or whatever), the solution is very simple: they hit a traffic jam. Could be due to construction, could be due to an accident, but traffic slows to a crawl and they say “there’s gotta be a way around this” and take the next exit. Then it turns out their cell phone has no coverage in that spot so they can’t just pull up a map, and VOILA. Into the Twilight Zone! One of the things about an interstate is that USUALLY, there’s an exit and an entrance right by each other, so you can exit, find a gas station or a place to grab lunch near the exit, then get right back on, but this is not always the case. Sometimes there’s an exit, but nowhere nearby to get back on.

I just want to add that there’s a slightly different vibe if you’re in the midwest. Because cities on the coasts are closer together, the interstate is just a super efficient point A to point B, city to city, no interruptions.

In the midwest, and I expect the southwest, to the interstate can get some real wonky vibes because YOU ARE ALONE. You are on one black strip of neverending road across hours and hours and hours of alone. You can drive very fast for a very long time and not see signs of another human being. Sometimes the alone-ness is added to by the sheer flatness of the land around you. You can see for forever and there’s nobody here. You sometimes see dead gas stations or billboards with only scraps of paper left on them.

You are in tornado ally and there is NOWHERE to hide if a blizzard or thunderstorm or twister comes for you. If it’s winter the snow is BLINDING.

It’s beautiful. But it’s horror is less small-town-gothic and more existential threat.

For clarity: the term freeway literally means it’s an interstate with no tolls. It’s free for every driver to use.

The West Coast of the US doesn’t have tolls on our interstates, but some of our big important bridges have tolls.

Seconding @leebrontide’s bit about interstates in the mid and southwest. I have Seen Things doing cross-country moves through the southwest and midwest. One experience that we refer to as “Silent Kansas” we literally went across the entire width of Kansas without seeing a single other vehicle, open gas station, or sign of life, while shrouded in a blanket-thick fog that dissipated essentially immediately upon crossing the border into Colorado. Or the time we were driving south on the I-17 in Arizona after midnight, and there was something following us for a full hour that was a pair of glowing lights that looked like headlights but, I swear it’s fucking true, was not another car. they disappeared in my rearview on a stretch with no exits just outside the Phoenix city limits, and to this day I have no idea wtf it was.

weird shit happens on interstates away from the coasts.

Highway: a high-speed and long-distance road, but without limited access. You will have occasional stop lights or stop signs, and you’ll go through small towns. Most likely place to see a cryptid. (also a generic term for all of these roads)

Expressway: a high speed road with limited access. There are no stop signs or lights. There are entrance and exit ramps. These usually cut through the landscape to a greater degree than highways.

Freeway: an expressway without tolls

Turnpike: an expressway with tolls. So called because they had a long stick (a pike) on a pivot that blocks the road until it is turned to let you through after paying the toll.

Interstate: a (usually particularly long) expressway built as part of the interstate system. Has a designation I-## (eg, I-95). There are also local expressways that are part of the interstate system that get a third digit (I-495). These generally connect Something™ to the larger two-digit interstate (so I-495 connects to I-95). 3-digit interstates are most often freeways. A two-digit interstate may be a freeway or a turnpike and will probably switch back and forth over its length.

Also, everyone will use most of these terms wrong most of the time! You can call any of them a highway and no one will bat an eye. You could call a turnpike a freeway and people will literally not notice. If you call anything an expressway you’ll sound like a nerd or a politician. We usually only say interstate to differentiate it from some other similar road. But if you call something a turnpike that doesn’t have turnpike in its name, even if it is a toll road, people will look at you funny.

Additionally, sometimes “turnpikes” are called “tollways.” Like the Tristate around Chicago.

If your partner feels threatened when you want alone time: RUN.

welp

thats creepy

This applies to you boys too- if your girlfriend won’t let you hang out with your friends, RUN

No matter what gender you or your partner are, if they refuse to let you spend any time with your friends that’s a big sign of danger.

GUESS WHAT MY EX BELIEVED 🙃🙃🙃

Last time I reblogged this I lost ten followers, someone I liked blocked me, and I got hate mail in my inbox for several days.  Let’s see what happens this time.

Abuse begins with insecurity

My ex wouldn’t even accept a ride from my friend who offered to drive us home in the pouring Orlando rain and instead forced us to walk 12 minutes in the rain, soaking my only pair of work shoes and giving me a cold. FUCKING RED FLAGS

Me: doot doot doot doot *reblogs this* doot doot doot *reblogs this again* doot-

If you gotta worry about a girl’s night then either your S/O isn’t trustworthy and you know it, or you’re paranoid and controlling, and in either case then you shouldn’t be in that relationship. 

Also, this still applies with platonic friends, too. Possessiveness and emotional abuse don’t have to include a romantic or sexual component.

Woof yes. Great example: I booked a spontaneous girl’s trip last weekend to visit my best friend. Asked my husband if he cared if I went (we’re in the process of moving and he was taking finals for law school so very stressed out) and he was like “you should have fun, you don’t have to ask me.” I also paid for it myself bc I’m an independent woman (who happens to pay for ALL of our bills while he’s in school). People lose themselves in relationships. It’s easy to hide behind the familiarity of a partner and not take time for yourself. But when someone says you can’t do something? Nah fuck that. There’s nothing I can’t do (except run or sing lmfao), but there’s plenty of stuff I won’t do. I won’t fucking stand for a man who tells me who I can or can’t see.

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but intrusive thoughts are basically your brain’s (sometimes very upsetting) way of saying “If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock would that be fucked up or what?”

I’ve personally found that adding the “would that be fucked or what?” part in myself really helps put the more disturbing thoughts we sometimes get into perspective. Helps me say “yeah thar sure would be fucked up” and move on with my day.

It’s not a secret desire, it’s not something that only occurs to you because you’re a bad person. It’s just your brain deciding to process the fact that it knows an uncomfortable thing exists in the world by feeding it to you in an absurd “what if” with you as the main character.

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

Want to learn something new in 2023??

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

Quenya (LOTR fantasy elf language)

Reblogging to remind myself that retirement is the perfect time for some of these!

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

Last thing to blog for the day then I need to pretend to be productive.  Little Miss has multiplication she’s still struggling with. Anyway - I was promoted at work and asked to fix the injury and accident problem in a particular warehouse.  I was “the safety guy” and I was really really good at my job. When I went in I had to find out “why are these folks having more injuries per 100,000 hours than the rest of our facilities” and so I dug in.  This facility was having 2 - 3 injuries reported A DAY.   Was it the people? Nope, same hiring pool as others.  Hours? Nope, almost every station has the same hours.  Lets check the training for our new hires.  Let me see their training packs.  “Uhh... let me find them”  Excuse me? You should be training them you should have them here with you.  Okay, what are the four options for loading a package?  “ummm....”  DUDE you’re supposed to be training these folks and you don’t know.  Who trained you?  “I never loaded before”  Okay fine, who trained you how to be a trainer.  “no one” ...  See where this is going?  So now all of a sudden I’m holding training classes for the top-level management team all the way down to the front-line supervisors to make sure THEY know the job that they’re supposed to be teaching to others.  We broke it all down to the very basics and slowly, day by day.  But you know what?  The first few months, reported on job injuries went up because we raised the awareness and stopped management team from hiding the injuries and just giving a couple days off.  We’re reporting them, recording them, getting treatment and care where needed.   Then we went a week with no injuries.   Then a month Darn broke out streak.  Why? What happened, where was the breakdown? Another week. A month WE MADE IT  A YEAR  Then another six months Then I got promoted again and replicated this across the country and that original operation went nearly 3 years without an injury.   So start at the very beginning if you’re having trouble with something or having trouble teaching someone something.  If they want to write, they have to be able to hold the pencil.  

Because it’s happened to us on a trek, if you see abandoned clothes, stop and search for anyone nearby. Late-stage hypotherima causes a thing called paradoxical undressing where the person feels too hot and starts taking their clothes off.

for a little bit of an order for this if it isn’t obvious: Take any wet clothes off (including sweaty clothes!! underlayers can become soaked with sweat while working in the cold and lead to hypothermia later) BEFORE you wrap the person in warm dry blankets/clothing. 

Also I cannot stress the ‘do not rub’ thing enough. If you have a frozen steak, let it thaw a little bit and then give it a good rub. Take a peek at it via a hand lens. You’ll see tons of little cuts/gashes. That’s from the ice crystals cutting into the flesh. NEVER rub the skin of a hypothermia/extreme cold exposed person to warm them up unless you want the same damn thing happening to their flesh.

Don’t warm the extremities (hands/feet) too quickly. Not only would it be extremely painful, but the vessels in said extremities opening too quickly can lead to shock (part of the direct heat issue).

This deserves another reblog

Throwback to all these Jesus comics I drew in 2012…

Good post OP

Good post, OP, and if you ever decide to do another may I please suggest “NOT IN HEBREW IT DOESN’T” as a punchline? So much of the Old Testament is HORRIFICALLY translated from the Tanakh, it drives me batty.

WAIT WAIT WHAT DOES IT SAY?????? I NEED TO LIKE,, DESTROY MI MUM FOR BEING REALLY HOMOPHOBIC

Okay, so, strictly speaking, the infamous Leviticus 18:22 does say “forbidden.” Here’s the thing:

Apparently tumblr mobile doesn’t want to show @prismatic-bell ’s long and in-depth essay, so here’s the screenshots, because it still shows up on mobile browsers:

Much appreciated.

I love when scholarship and history debunks bullshit

…I sadly have more bullshit to report.

“removed for violating guidelines”, EVERY screenshot.

…goddamnit

Let’s try this again

I am horrified that @prismatic-bell keeps getting censored + this info is gold.

Many thanks, @pulmonary-poultry. This isn’t the only Jewish post of mine that’s mysteriously stopped showing up in searches and/or vanished from my blog entirely, but it is the one I get the most requests to repost, so this saves me from having to rewrite the whole damned essay. @the-invisible-self, thanks for bringing it to my attention that someone was able to preserve the post!

what the FUCK??? WHICH community guidelines would an analysis of the Old Testament violate??

unless tumblr staff is just removing images that get reported a bunch of times

Never not gonna reblog

@prismatic-bell RESPECT 💜

kids remind me, often, of the things i've taught myself out of.

i have a big dog. he looks like a deer. he is taller than most young children. while we were on a trail the other day, a boy coming our direction saw us and froze. he took a step back and said: "i'm feeling nervous. your - your dog is kind of big."

goblin and i both stopped walking immediately. "he is kind of a big dog," i admitted. "he's called a greyhound. they are gentle but they are pretty tall, which is kind of scary, you're right. their legs are so long because they are made for running fast. i am sorry we scared you. would you like us to stand still while you move past us, or would you feel more safe in your body if we move and you stay still?'

"oh. i didn't know that about - greyhounds. i think i ... i want to stay still," he said. at this point, his adult had caught up to us. "i'm nervous about the dog," he told her, "so i'm - i'm gonna stay still." she didn't argue. she didn't make fun of him. she just smiled at him and at me and held his hand while goblin and i, with as wide of a berth as we could make, crept our way through.

behind us, i heard him exhale a deep breath and kind of laugh - "he was really big, huh? she said it's because greyhounds have to go fast."

"he was big," she said. "i understand why that could have made you a little scared."

"yeah. next time i - next time do you think i could maybe ask to touch him? when - i mean, next time, maybe, if i'm not nervous."

later, going to a work event, in the big city, i stood outside, trembling. my social anxiety as a caught bird in my chest. i took a deep breath and turned to my coworker. she's not even really my friend yet. i told her: "i feel nervous about this. i am not used to meeting new people, ever since covid."

she laughed, but not in a mean way. she said she was nervous too. she reached her hand out and held mine, and we both took another deep breath and walked in like that, interlinked. a few people asked us - together? - and i told the truth: i feel nervous, and she's helping. over and over i watched people relax too, admitting i feel really kind of shy lately actually, thank you for saying that.

the next time i go to an event, and i feel a little scared, i ask right away: wanna hold hands? this feels a little dangerous. i hesitate less. i don't hide it as much. i watch for other people who are also nervous and say - it's kinda hard, huh?

i know, logically, i'm not good at asking for help. but i am also not good at noticing when i need help. i've trained myself out of asking completely, but i've also trained myself to never accept my own fears or excuses. i have trained myself to tamp down every anxiety and just-push-through. i don't know what i'm protecting myself from - just that i never think to admit it to anyone.

but every person on earth occasionally needs comfort. every person on earth occasionally needs connection. many of us were taught independence is the same thing as never needing anything.

each of us should have had an adult who heard - i feel nervous and held our hand and asked us how we could be helped to feel safe. no judgement, and no chiding. many of us did not. many of us were punished for the ways that we seemed "weak".

but here is something: i am an adult now. and i get nervous a lot, actually. and if you are an adult and you are feeling a little nervous - come talk to me. we can hold hands and figure out what will help us feel safe in our bodies. and maybe, next time, if we're brave, we can pet the dog that's passing.

EY ITS FINALS SEASON!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR EXAMS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR ESSAYS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR PRESENTATIONS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR FINAL PROJECTS!

GOOD LUCK!!! YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR!!

and a gentle reminder to take breaks, and get a snack and some water. Don’t forget to take a moment to breathe.

and if you can, try to do something nice for yourself after its all over. No matter how it turns out, you struggled and you survived so you deserve something nice :)

Michaelsthulhu

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Man. Sometimes you just feel your brain resonate like a tuning fork. Like I definitely wanna talk Making Weird Things with that guy.

The end is what got me

Mike is one of the great metal artists of our day

For more information and to support the WGA please:

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

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.

Being an activist demands that you kill the part of you that cringes. If you want to make the world safer for LGBTQ+ people, you cannot let normal “straight” society set the limits of acceptable speech and behaviour.

Because if the best, most respectable queers in all creation went out and had calm collected discussion that never pushed straight cis people into areas of discomfort, never inspired disrespect or derision, we would still be back in the 1950s, where yes homosexuality was a crime but that shouldn’t be an issue unless you FLAUNT it in PUBLIC. Don’t hold your life partner’s hand where other people can’t see it, and you won’t go to jail! See? Gay rights!

Each of us in the LGBTQ+ world are going to make straight cis people uncomfortable in a million different ways. This has always been true. And the only way we can move forward is to assert our rights in defiance of that discomfort.

Arguments against gay marriage I heard 20 years ago included bangers like, “When I see gay men kissing, I want to vomit. It grosses me out.” That was it! That was considered a decisive argument that stood on its own! “I think it’s cringe” was a major reason given to deny us basic civil liberties!

And honestly, “calling yourself queer is cringe” just sets people up for a lifetime of false hopes and self-blame, because it makes them think there is a level of respectable enough you can achieve to be “one of the good ones” and safe from bigotry. And that’s just not true. You don’t actually have control over how bigoted somebody else is!

Also… Shocked pikachu face. People think being queer is bad, actually? No fucking way! Here was us self-identified queers being blissfully ignorant of the fact that there are queerphobes out there who will treat us with contempt and derision! This is entirely new information we are hearing now for the very first time! Thanks for that advice, Ms. Radfem Lady! No fucking shit!

At its base, “queer is cringe” is just a mask off moment. What people generally mean by it is, “If you’re queer, I will treat you with contempt and derision, and then blame you for my own actions as if I wasn’t treating people like shit long before I ever met you.”