*Screaming*

BREATHE OF FRESH AIR!!! An article about abuse that isn’t ableist!! Read this if you want to understand why “narcissistic abuse” is not real, only abuse is. And that people with NPD and other disorders are not inherently abusive.

Also I'm sorry but. Not seeing NPD as abusive is kind of... The bare minimum???? Positivity has to actually go beyond seeing us as neutral. I do think this is better than ableism but honestly we deserve better than our 'positivity' just being when people/media merely dont see us as abusers.

Well yeah… I tagged “NPD positivity” cause this was A positive thing not like this is the be all and end all of positivity. If you think I should remove it please let me know.

terfs be like i’m joining the fight against restrictive gender roles on the side of the restrictive gender roles

i just watched a tik tok about someone getting a lobotomy tattoo as a psych student and some people were saying that it was insensitive, which if she’s going to be interacting with patients in her career then i agree with it. like just imagine meeting a new therapist and you see lobotomy tools on their arm? that would make me uncomfortable. but others were saying that the memes and jokes were insensitive too. and how getting a lobotomy as a white women is also insensitive bc lobotomies mostly affected black and gay people

i get their point, bc the misconception of lobotomies being used only on white housewives can be a dangerous one that lends itself to white feminism

but also i just dont think it’s wrong to joke/getting a tattoo of it i guess? i don’t know but i am really curious to how the anti psychiatry people on here think about it

Anti psych person here, and here’s my opinion (I’m assuming that your question of what anti psych people here think was not rhetorical)

I saw the video of a person showing off their tattoo. That’s it. I know nothing else about them as a person. I don’t know why they got the tattoo. I don’t know their own personal reasons for getting it. All I saw was the tattoo.

Then everyone and their mothers were all going on about the history of lobotomies and calling this random person they don’t know ableist and racist… because the person in question had a tattoo they didn’t like.

Now, it’s perfectly okay and reasonable to be uncomfortable with someone’s tattoo, what’s not ok is asserting that your personal discomfort equates with a moral and social justice issue. Some people within marginalized groups aren’t ok with reclamation of certain words or symbols and that’s ok! No one has to be comfortable with everything! But no one should be dictating what others are comfortable with.

What I’m also annoyed with, is that people seem to be assuming a lot about this person like that they’re white, a woman, able bodied. They’re not necessarily any of those things. They’re light skinned, have breasts, and can stand upright but none of that means that they are an able white woman.

So people seemed to be mad that a “able, white woman” got this tattoo. People were saying that black and severely disabled people were given lobotomies more than white women. (Which I don’t disagree with). So the underlying argument here is that white women aren’t allowed to have this tattoo because they weren’t “as oppressed/affected” as other people. Which I don’t agree with. I hate the argument of “others have it worse, so you can’t talk even though you’re still affected”

So what I’m thinking is, would people be less mad if a black disabled person had this tattoo? Like what exactly are they mad about? No one seemed to be talking about the concept of the tattoo itself just who had it.

And even if people said they didn’t like the concept itself, not just who had it, it brings me back to the idea of “different tastes for different people” (to put it simply).

TLDR: Maybe don’t mercilessly judge people you don’t know. Also, live and let live even if it makes you uncomfortable.

(Cue the long line of people going to call me ableist and racist just because I’m not willing to tear a stranger apart.)

Earlier today we shared our theory as to why proship accounts were being terminated and why these terminations were not being reversed as false/mistaken.

Our theory was that tumblr was actually enforcing the rules outlined in it's TOS change from November 2022, which appeared to be banning all depictions of underage characters in fictional text and artwork, as well as adult characters who are too short/chubby/cute etc.

As of now, this theory has been confirmed as true.

Fictional images and text about underage characters or characters who "appear" to be underage (no criteria or metric given) are no longer welcome on tumblr and are an offense receiving account termination.

This was confirmed by @proship-writing-prompts-archive who shared this screenshot regarding account termination.

Likewise it appears that victims discussing their experiences of child sexual abuse are no longer welcome on tumblr either. This info was shared by @xxlovelynovaxx and is also the likely reason for our own recent termination.

Tumblr is now officially a fiction and art hostile site. Please remember to treat it as such. If you think your content may fall under tumblr's new prohibition, please make sure to only post it at AO3, Pixiv, Inkbunny or Aethy and link to that account on your tumblr.

Likewise remember that these new rules apply equally to all members of the site, and that if you see fancops discussing child sexual abuse, or sexualizing characters who are under age those posts may (and should) be fairly reported.

Oh good god…

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.

In my personal experience on tumblr, every time someone makes a personal post about how they love the term queer and will never give up using it, there’s always someone who says that they themselves do not want to be called a slur and hate seeing that word everywhere.

Even when people point out the long history of queer and political lesbian exclusionist, there are still lesbians in the notes who swear up and down they are not terfs but that queer is a slur to them and they don’t want to be called it.

Way to miss the entire point?

People are literally giving you the history of this term. Saying that if you don’t want to be called that that’s okay but don’t tell other people who identify as queer that they can’t use the term themselves.

At this point I just block every single lesbian who claims to know the history of queer but still says that it’s a slur. Not going to bother arguing with undercover terfs.

Whenever I complain about the things I had to deal with in the teen psych ward I was in people will come back with some argument about why it was good for me. Like yeah sure, if they had allowed me plastic knives I probably would have used them to hurt myself. I used the fucking golf pencils to hurt myself. But that's not the point. The point is fucking autonomy are you paying attention. Why are you "leftist" until the rights in question are Crazy People's. How are you "bodily autonomy is the most important thing over everything!" and "incarceration is inhumane abolish all prisons even for so-called dangerous people!" but then also somehow believe mentally ill people should be forced into hospitals and onto medications because they don't know what's best for them like these aren't contradictory. Also yeah tell me more about how being denied access to music or creative outlets or nature was for my own good and I just don't realize because my brain can't be trusted over yours

"It's not like it was traumatizing" Ok, here, next time you find yourself having the worst few years of your life, and you're really really struggling, go to a hospital and don't leave that building until you're told you're allowed, which you have no idea when is going to happen. The closest thing to nature in this building are the plastic plants. You cannot see the sky or sunlight from your room because your room's window is facing a wall and has a grate over it but comparing it to prison is nonsensical. You are also not allowed to listen to music, or make art, or see your friends. You are not allowed to engage in your hobbies. You are not allowed to wear your own clothes. You have all technology taken away and again you can't go outside so you cannot access entertainment. And as a bonus you are forced to take a pill every night that doesn't do anything but if you refuse to take it you get your time extended and then have to take it anyway. Reminder that this is all in a sterile hospital setting and also the whole time you're being told it's helping and you just can't see it because you're confused. See how much it really helps your mental state.

"But I'm not severely mentally ill so it's different" See therein lies the problem huh? You, maybe you're depressed or you have anxiety or you don't but in your head you have subconsciously separated the bad mentally disabled people from you. You are convinced that our experience, what's going on behind our eyes, is so foreign, so inconceivably alien to you that we may as well not be sapient with lives and perceptions of our own. It's black and white for you. We don't experience existence the way you do. We may as well not be people.

happy pan visibility day y’all!

💖 pansexuality is not biphobic or transphobic

💛 pansexual people are amazing

💙 pansexuality is beautiful and natural

panphobes/terfs/exclus DNI

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1397326678318190593

Let’s break down this claim!

In this thread, I’m going to demonstrate how I would take a claim like this and break down its underlying assumptions and conclusions to see if it still holds under scrutiny. Let’s practice thinking philosophically together!

Proposal: “Adult sexuality can only ethically be performed or shown with the consent of all involved.”

Supporting argument: “People, regardless of age, do not consent to seeing public sexual displays, therefore such displays are unethical.”

Conclusion: “Because not everyone’s consent is obtained at public Pride events, kink and other expressions of sexuality are unethical at public Pride events.”

Okay, so now that we’ve clarified what this claim is, on the surface, saying, we can break it down further. First, we need to investigate what “the expression of adult sexuality,” and what “kink” is.

“The expression of adult sexuality” and “kink” as it turns out, are not at all specific terms, which is why claims like this begin on incredibly shaky ground. Kissing could be seen as such an expression, so could even an exchange of flirty looks.

We could take any number of practices as “sexual displays.” Would getting dressed up in a non-kink outfit (we’ll delve into how that is not a specific term but we’ll use it for now) be considered such a display if one did it with the intention of finding someone to hook up with?

Generally, a sexual display is defined as anything one does with the intention of attracting another. Are people who go on dates in public places putting on sexual displays that this violate the consent of all those around them?

Much the same for “kink.” Kink is generally defined as engaging in non-conventional sexual behaviors or having non-conventional sexual interests.

Uh oh… we’ve just hit a huge snag…. what is “conventional?”

“Conventional” is another word for a range of “normality” within a culture or subculture. It’s, essentially, what most people are doing. In this case, kink, then, is outside of what “most people” are into.

This is where it gets even messier, folks, and it’s not looking like it’s going to clear up anytime soon. What is “conventional” is not only incredibly context dependent, but tends to vary depending on who’s doing the defining!

For many straight and cis people, queerness itself is outside of normality, no matter how much it’s expressed. So, by those terms, the entirety of Pride could be considered a kink.

Even if we narrow our scope and look only at queer subculture norms, good luck finding a solid definition of “conventional” sexuality at all 😂

Even if we skip over that conundrum of defining exactly what kink is and approach it as it’s often used, we still don’t clear up any issues, because there are literally so many kinks!

Try and look up how many different clothing fetishes there are, for starters. It’s not all leather, you know. There’s fetishes for certain materials (fur, wool, cashmere), certain outfits (uniforms, suits), and far more.

So really, it doesn’t seem that this claim has a problem with all kink, does it? If it did, none of us would ever be able to leave our homes! Even more so if we include all sexual displays!

Instead, it seems that this claim really has a problem with expressions of kink that can be explicitly and immediately recognized as relating to kink. Leather and BDSM wear, most likely.

Then we have to ask, are those forms of wear more acceptable if someone just wears them because… they like the way they look? What if I had NO sexual association to leather-wear, but I just liked how it looked on me as an outfit and chose to wear it? Is that still not allowed?

If it isn’t, why not? Is it because it shows so much skin? Why don’t you have the same issue with someone in shorts and a crop top that covers the same area? Or is it because someone else could see it as sexual? Sounds like my shorts and crop top friend might still be out of luck too.

We’ve taken a lot of time with the clothing and kink bit of this argument, and we could go even longer, but I’d like to move on to the argument about consent, as it’s the point on which this whole argument stands.

First, we need to think about this standard of sex is not even the remotest option for many people in the world. There are many situations in which multiple families live in a few rooms. Is ethical sex and sexuality a privilege only those who can afford total solitude can access?

Second, we need to investigate the heavy lifting the word “consent” does in a claim like this. Here, consent shakes its standard usage “permission for something to be done to one/agreement to do something” and expands to “permission to let others do something.”

An example for this distinction: it’s my claim that bodies are not inherently sexual. I have no problem with someone being nude in public. However, if someone in a trench coat came up and flashed me, that would be a violation of my consent because it’s a targeted action at me.

So, at what point do consenting adults need to ask the permission of all those around them to do something together/wear something? What is the basis for such a claim that getting such permission is an ethical mandate? What are its limits? Is it consistently applied?

We’ll find, in asking these questions, that the answers are applied incredibly specifically to… sexuality considered to be “deviant.” You don’t have to throw away all your clothes someone has a kink over, nor your shorts and crop top that shows just as much skin.

A shirtless guy can absolutely still jog down the street, a beachgoer can still wear a bikini, you can still go flirt at a festival, even if any or all of those things are meant to attract someone to then have sex with.

It boils down to the reality that the specific person making this claim has certain things about “kink” that make them uncomfortable, and are seeking to expand that discomfort into a far-reaching ethical claim, breaking down “consent” into something nonsensical in the process.

If we can’t find the limits of an ethical claim, if it can’t be applied consistently, if it has exceptions that fit in well with general cultural expectations of “normality,” we have to question and challenge it as a meaningful ethical claim.

We have to ask “who gets to set the standards for what is conventional, or not?” “Why are deviations from constructed ‘normality’ seen as unacceptable, repugnant, and an assault on those who witness it?” “Are these standards something new? Or a repacking of the same old values?”

We have to investigate the historical context of these assumptions and the claims that follow them. In this case, it is on a massive backdrop of a history in which sexuality itself is seen as base and shameful, and queer sexuality most of all.

We especially have to ask: who does this serve? Who are we protecting, really? Are we really holding consent as sacred? Or are we using the language of consent as a means to continue to do what we’ve always done: police the bodies of those we see as Other?

Do we really want a definition of consent this wide? How would such a definition be used? With some reflection and study we can see that it’s already been used: “I’m fine with the gays so long as they don’t throw it in my face.” “If my kid sees gays in public they’ll be corrupted.”

There is SO much more to say but I hope I’ve said enough to be helpful. Not just in breaking this one claim down, but showing the practice of breaking claims down in general. It’s a vital skill I want to help people cultivate! If y’all like this, I’ll do it again in the future!

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1397604631363026947

I’d also like to add that going through this inquiry does not mean that you will then automatically become comfortable with “kink” at Pride/anywhere else or that you’re fucked up if you aren’t.

What it does mean is that you can now investigate why it makes you uncomfortable!

Once we realize that what we thought was a broader ethical claim is really a statement about ourselves (rather than kink gear being unethical in public, it’s a matter of you as an individual being uncomfortable with kink gear), whole new realms of reflection open up to us!

We can ask: why does kink gear make me uncomfortable? Why am I not uncomfortable about other outfits that show a similar amount of skin? Or why am I uncomfortable with skin showing in general? What is it about X expression of sexuality that bothers me? Where did that come from?

We can reflect on our own past, our broader historical context, our personal associations, media depictions, political rhetoric, and more to find answers to these questions. And the wonderful thing is that this is how rich and nuanced analyses are born!

For example, certain expressions of sexuality make ME uncomfortable! But I’ve learned over time to understand that that feeling is about me not about others doing something wrong. It’s about my past and my trauma and the fucked up shit poured into my head at a young age.

And understanding that has also allowed me to sit with the discomfort, or make the decision to remove myself from the situation I’m in, rather than deciding that my discomfort needs to dictate what everyone else is doing/can do with their bodies.

There are many issues where there IS a substantial ethical claim to be made as well: where it’s not just about individual discomfort but a larger structure of harm. By doing honest reflection and analysis like these, we can learn to differentiate which is which!

Look, I get it. I used to be firmly in the camp of "you're not a top, you're 15" too. But we really need to accept the fact people under 18 have sex. And more than that, people under 18 have and participate in kinks.

And I see a lot of pro kink people spouting anti sex propaganda about this kind of stuff. If we don't educate people, that doesn't stop them from participating in kink. Whether you like it or not, underage people can and will participate in kink.

And I don't think the best course of action is trying to block them from every kink space.

Should they be interacting and engaging with adults in that way? No, I don't think so.

But at the same time, they need education and resources just as much as anyone else. Even adults need those things in kink, younger and more inexperienced people need them even more.

What blocking every single source of kink from minors does is create minors participating in unsafe kink.

something I want to say: it makes me furious how people talk about psych ward patients that fight back in any way when they're restrained and institutionalized. this is literally a normal human reaction. they're categorized as violent and dangerous as if this is inherently some sort of mental health issue rather than a person logically not wanting to be handled like that and forced into a terrifying situation where they have no agency. the pathologizing of negative reactions to abusive authority figures is why this is considered acceptable, and why so many people leave places supposedly meant to save their lives in an even worse mental state.

We love and miss you Sivi 💔

Also I just wanna say I’ve become pretty chill over time, but if you decide to confine me with a strait jacket and put me in room depriving my sense for hours on end I’m gonna beat your ass, bitch! “Your violent and dangerous” my ass!

What?…

I was just saying that I agree with the post, and that if a mental hospital were to confine me I would beat them up :)

Yeah but who’s Sivi?

OP

Oh ok… 👍🏻

something I want to say: it makes me furious how people talk about psych ward patients that fight back in any way when they're restrained and institutionalized. this is literally a normal human reaction. they're categorized as violent and dangerous as if this is inherently some sort of mental health issue rather than a person logically not wanting to be handled like that and forced into a terrifying situation where they have no agency. the pathologizing of negative reactions to abusive authority figures is why this is considered acceptable, and why so many people leave places supposedly meant to save their lives in an even worse mental state.

We love and miss you Sivi 💔

Also I just wanna say I’ve become pretty chill over time, but if you decide to confine me with a strait jacket and put me in room depriving my sense for hours on end I’m gonna beat your ass, bitch! “Your violent and dangerous” my ass!

What?…

I was just saying that I agree with the post, and that if a mental hospital were to confine me I would beat them up :)

Yeah but who’s Sivi?