I’ve seen a bunch of people in the notes concerned (like I was) of comparisons of members of the lgbt to dogs: but upon visiting their website I was reassured that they monitor a variety of content, including (but not limited to):
THIS IS A GOOD SITE
I just wanna reblog this here and point out that this is actually a site I use a lot.
Im not one of those who get like overly upset by passing of dogs in movies, but growing up in a family where we had to put down a lot of dogs ourselves that we loved very dearly, it does break the immersion for me, which ruin movies.
anyway here’s your reminder that lgbt muslims exist and islamophobia shouldnt be tolerated within lgbt communities!
shout out to lgbt muslims living in places where our identities are still criminalised.
btw i encourage everyone especially non muslim lgbt ppl to reblog this. if you see islamophobia within the community, you should help us instead of telling us our religion is ‘horrible’
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
Not sure how true the bit about the reasons behind Lolita are. I’ve never read it as it squicks me. However, someone else noticed the type of website op mentions exists and I wanted to make sure the link was included with the post:
Aly Raisman’s speech at the 2018 ESPY awards after the Arthur Ashe Courage Award was presented to the hundreds of survivors who were abused by former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University team doctor.
I have a lot of guilt and shame about my participation in fandom. I tell myself that I ought to have outgrown this kind of external obsession by my age. I tell myself that it’s not healthy to spend so much time in imaginary worlds. I tell myself that I should be more responsible in how I use my time, how I spend my money, where I put my energy. I look in the mirror and admit that I am using imaginary people and imaginary places and my attachment to them to avoid the problems of real life.
But here’s the thing: the world is a fucking dumpster fire. Every hour I spend writing Arthur and Eames smut is an hour in which I am not paralyzed with panic over the sexual abuses inflicted by real-world men. Every minute I spend re-reading and deconstructing the way Ngozi builds queerness in Check, Please! is one I don’t spend so angry I could throw up over the threats to queer people in the real world. Every night I spend appreciating the incredible OCs of color writers create in the fanfic I like to read is one I don’t spend in despair over this administration’s institutionalized and accepted racism. The longer I consider the potential of the Avengers to save the world from the dark forces of Hydra, the less time I have to lay awake and worry about the way my country’s president is destroying all of our international relationships.
I couldn’t live with myself right now if I didn’t spend a large chunk of my time and energy and money on the real-world fight. Things are simply too bad–I cannot stand by and watch without at least trying to do something. But if that was all I focused on, I would end up hurting myself. (Believe me, I know this, because in the final few months before the 2016 election and the first half of 2017, it WAS all I focused on.) I would end up so anxious and depressed that I would need far heavier duty coping mechanisms (not to mention drugs) than the ones I use now. Maybe there are people who can sustain a full-time commitment to changing the world, without needing to hide from it a bunch of the time, but I’m not one of them. So it’s better, I think, to accept that one of the things my participation in fandom gives me is an outlet, a way to focus completely on something that, in the end, I KNOW will be OK. Doing it all the time would be unhealthy, and my real-world relationships would suffer, but doing it a lot, right now, when things are so bad? It’s part of what keeps me sane.
Everyone has their thing. For some people it’s sports, or bird watching, or collecting things, or whatever. People need hobbies and interests to help them wind down from all the stress and real life crap. For us it just happens to be fandom. But I think fandom has such a negative stereotype and negative connotation that it ends up having an effect on us. We feel stupid or guilty for something that should be completely normal. It only becomes a problem if it’s keeping you from your real world responsibilities.
And those negative stereotypes and negative connotations have a lot to do with the fact that fandoms are women dominated spaces. Men tend to engage with media they admire by learning everything about the original, where woman tend to engage by creating fan content. My dad has a huge Batman stuff colection and that’s something he can joke about with his friends. He’s never made to feel any lesser for that, and people see that as something cool about him and give him batman related gifts all the time to help out. I have male friends who love Game of Thrones and know all the minor details and spend hours of their life speculating about it. But they never experience this shame and it’s socially acceptable for them to talk to people about their hobbies. But if I tell people about my inception blog or fanfiction they low key pity me and it has a lot to do with fandom being women dominated spaces and us internalizing the idea that anything mostly enjoyed by women is embarassing and wrong. I refuse to do that.
According to people who were able to reach me anonymously before I closed the anon asks (I do have a self-preservation instinct) I absolutely shouldn’t be near fandom AT MY AGE!!!!!
What should I do? Knitting and “taking my grandchildren to the park”. Well I don’t enjoy taking any children (never wanted to have my own, hence no handy grandchildren to drag around) to the park and/or knitting nearly as much as I do enjoy Inception and YOI, you ageist fucks. I’m not ashamed of it in the slightest, except yes, I should better control the time I spend online in general. Other than that – do what you love ladies, anyone who would “low-key pity you” can have a good hard look at themselves and their own interests (beer? watching porn? online shopping for designer handbags? online celebrities hating? bashing other moms? going to white power rallies?) and shut the fuck up.
Obviously what’s happening to these kids is horrific but should we really be calling them concentrating camps though? What do Jewish people think about this?
Hello, Mexican here. They are fucking modern day concentration camps. Children, even infants, are being ripped from their homes, forced into overcrowded abandoned Walmart’s, with only 2 hours a day of outside time. This is no way for children to live. There is a mural on the wall of Trump with the quote, “Sometimes by losing the battle you find a way to win the war.” Do you know what people call shit like that? Propaganda. You can fuck all the way off. I cannot fucking believe you chose to fucking nitpick how this humanitarian problem is discussed because you’re uncomfortable with the horrors happening right before our eyes and would rather call it “problematic.” I can’t fucking stand gringos for bullshit like this.
Hi, Jew here! They are concentration camps and any Jew worth their history will tell you that. The Trump murals, the “we’re just going to take your baby for a bath”, the photos of confiscated rosary beads, the older children taking care of younger children they have no relation to because there are no parents around.
We see this shit and it sends chills up our spines because that was the kind of shit gentiles ignored because it wasn’t “that bad”. It wasn’t “that bad” when they were just confiscating our wedding rings and throwing them into a pile because we were “prisoners”, because it wasn’t “that bad” when they were separating children from their mothers to put them into a separate barracks, because it wasn’t “that bad” when little kids were having to flee through Kindertransport without their parents.
This also isn’t the first time this has been done in America. The Japanese were held in concentration camps here during WWII. And what’s happening now sounds strikingly similar to that as well. A concentration camp is literally just a place where you concentrate a certain group of people against their will.
The term “safe space” originates in LGBT communities and designates a place where homophobia isn’t tolerated.
The argument usually goes that safe spaces keep people from encountering ideas they disagree with, that they have an infantilizing and silencing effect.
I respond that when gay people are so sheltered that they have no idea what homophobia is, well, then I’ll admit that maybe things have gone a bit too far.
In the meantime, gay people not experiencing enough homophobia is not really striking me as a pressing social issue.
Steel Phoenix Studios 