i think popular media culture is poisoned in the following ways:

For those worried about the crew having to do a whole job just for one person, flight staff only get paid for time they're in the air; if he'd cancelled, they wouldn't have gotten paid for zip.

So in other words, he gave them an easy day where they can spend most of it on break, and also airplane staff should unionize.

Also the plane likely has to get to NC somehow so you might as well have fun with it

Left: Composer Leonard Bernstein. Right: Bradley Cooper and the world's worst fake nose playing Leonard Bernstein in the upcoming movie Maestro.

like holy fuck this is actual anti-semitism literally all you had to do was hire a Jewish actor. ONE JEWISH ACTOR, HOLLYWOOD, IT'S NOT THAT HARD.

Bradley Cooper is the Ron DeSantis of desperate to win an Oscar. the harder he tried, the more I hate him.

omfg

A reminder of what Bradley Cooper's nose actually looks like when compared to Leonard Bernstein's:

Literally zero reason a fake nose was needed. This is bullshit. And it's Cooper's "passion project" okay. This is very important to note. This is a project he considers utterly necessary to his artistic endeavors, and he not only didn't cast a Jew to play Bernstein, he's wearing a fucking Halloween costume nose.

Please don't forget, Bradley Cooper pretty much stole the exclusive rights to the Bernstein biopic from Jake Gyllenhaal - a Jewish man - who has said he's been wanting to tell this story for twenty fucking years.

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

This is important and should have more notes.

I’m ngl: how do we know these women were cishet?

Because I, a white queer trans man/acearoagender triple threat, may never have even known that I was queer or trans if I was an adult in the 1960’s. I would have probably been a housewife who had no idea why life felt *off* and unfulfilling, and possibly even resentful of the Black trans women leading the fight for free love without knowing why I felt that way.

many people in slash fandom today know that they’re some flavor of queer. But maybe most of those people would have lacked the language for who or what they were in a time before the internet made this information more easily accessible.

Basically: we can’t assume that housewives writing slash were straight and cis just because they were housewives It’s entirely possible they were closeted, quietly nonbinary, etc.

(Unless there’s information on this I’m not aware of documenting their orientations/gender identities? It’s possible/likely)

Gay cowboy posting

Govert Bidloo (12 March 1649 – 30 March 1713) at the National Library of Medicine.

I decided to look up the name of the artist to hopefully see more of his works and ohhh my G*d. I was not mentally prepared for what I found. These are not drawings. These are copper plate engravings made by artist Gérard de Lairesse. They’re from Anatomia humani corporis, published by dutch physician and anatomist Govert Bidloo. There are 105 engraved plates in total, with some likely made by designer and engraver Abraham Blooteling, as well as some likely made by the brothers Pieter and Philipp van Gunst, both engravers as well. The figures are all displayed with everyday realism, with many reflecting far more compassion for the subject than is usual for art made with the primary purpose of being scientific.

Someone engraved these. These were carved into a plate and then printed. These are prints. All of the letters here had to be mirrored on the plate itself. The shading and attention to detail here are simply incredible.

sometimes instead of a horrid little monk, divine visions of lesbians dance in my head dispensing wisdom

Eroticism is simply one of the basic modes of human expression and the fact that it terrifies people who have built their lives out of repression and self denial is only more reason to make erotic art. They will not stop with their own lives, they want to punish anyone who doesn’t conform to the same standards of cruelty they heap on themselves. But of course it will not work. It has never worked before. Even under the most adverse conditions beauty has always found ways of flourishing. We refuse to hide or live in shame and fear. We will make beautiful that which they find repulsive. 

Ok , but what abt ace pepole ?

This kind of post always seems to forget that asexual pepole exist ...

Please don't try to pull that. "Pro-eroticism is anti-ace" is tired and bad ace discourse. Ace adults are adults. We know how to avoid things we don't like. Asexuals simply aren't clamoring for an extinction of erotic art or eroticism. Also the post said it was "one of the basic modes of human expression" not "THE basic mode and everyone's required to participate". Nobody's forcing you to engage with it. If you don't like it, then you're free to avoid it. Go engage with other art. The post didn't forget.

The post said "Stop trying to censor erotic art just because someone else doesn't like it. It won't work."

Signed, An Ace

Did you know that Eddie Redmayne wrote his thesis on International Klein Blue because even though he is colorblind? It's not because he can't see the color, it's because he can see it differently than everyone else.

Aces can and do experience the beauty in erotic art. We just don't experience it the same way Allos do.

Lines of movement, displays of skill in a medium, unique and interesting ways to portray the body...there are many, many ways to appreciate a piece of art that do not involve the sexual reaction the piece was perhaps intended to invoke. Being ace does not prevent us from seeing and enjoying the same thing Allos do. Just changes the way we do it.

James Zamora - Cake Aisle, 2023

some of my favorite lotr bts pictures

@szyszkasosnowa​

As bad as you think discourse on here is, rest assured that there is internal drama on terf Tumblr that would make your eyes melt.

Every six months some big "lesbian separatist" blog turns out to be happily married to a straight man.

I think it's important to let guys be gender non conforming without telling them they're a girl, cause actually misgendering people is still shit even when you are pro trans. "You're a girl, an egg waiting to crack, and that's ok" how about you are a boy and a man and it's still ok if you want to do something that doesn't align with traditional ideals of your gender. You can still be he/him in a skirt and makeup.

How Horror Helps With Processing Grief and Trauma, S.F. Whitaker

Ironic how the “love is the basis of everything” ppl are some of the most hateful assholes I’ve met on this site lol

Unknown, Fritware tile panel, painted in blue, turquoise, and moss green under a transparent glaze. Turkey, Iznik; c. 1540

PSA: *Beware* AI-generated fungi guudebooks!!

…Not a phrase I imagined myself typing today. But, via @heyMAKWA on Twitter:

“i'm not going to link any of them here, for a variety of reasons, but please be aware of what is probably the deadliest AI scam i've ever heard of:

“plant and fungi foraging guide books. the authors are invented, their credentials are invented, and their species IDs will kill you”

…So please be careful if you run across anything of this kind.

NOOOOO

Its butch appreciation day appreciate ur local butch <3

I wasnt kidding btw

THIS POST INCLUDES TRANSFEM BUTCHES AND WAS MADE BY A TRANSMASC BUTCH LESBIAN. TERF LOSERS FUCK OFF