sqbr: pretty purple pi (Default)
Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 10:11 am
MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing by Cory Doctorow made some interesting points about how many conservative and conspiratorial beliefs mirror progressive and accurate ones.

But I think it uses too much of a dichotomy of progressive vs conservative, when I've seen so many people who sincerely pursue the "good" version of each attitude also fall into the "mirror" version.
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (Default)
Sunday, January 5th, 2025 01:46 pm
I really liked this article:

TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism In which A Man has an Opinion about Feminism, with Mixed Results.

It's about how a lot of "trans inclusive" cis feminists are terrible about trans masc people in ways which ultimately stem from transphobia and hurt all trans people. It's not perfect, but does capture that specific problem well.

I think the tight focus is overall a good thing but there's a few places the argument would have benefited from more mentions of the connection to broader issues with sexism/transphobia etc. Also I disagreed with some parts.

Some further thoughts:
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sqbr: A giant eyeball with tentacles (tii)
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024 09:08 am
Inspired by this post from a gnc woman who keeps having people insist on using they/them for her.

If your "inclusive" approach to gender consistently misgenders certain types of cis people, it's not actually inclusive. "Respect everyone's stated gender identity" is the very lowest bar you need to clear! If you can't manage that, wtf are you even doing. If you think cis people's feelings literally don't matter at all then (a) That sucks don't do that and (b) do you really think you're not ALSO misgendering certain types of trans people? Cos I bet you are! Go sit in the corner and rethink your concept of gender until you can manage a basic standard of decency and respect for all gender identities.

This includes anyone who, say, "compliments" any straight cis men they like by saying they must actually be closeted trans lesbians. If he says he's a man you treat him like a man! If your definition of man is so narrow that "treating someone like a man" is incompatible with like/respect etc, that's a problem with you! Even if someone you thought was a closeted trans women does actually come out as one, that doesn't change the fact that you should have treated her as a man while she identified as one.

There's nothing wrong with thinking someone is giving off Trans Vibes. Privately saying to a friend "I wouldn't be surprised if X came out" is fine. If you're close enough, approaching them to check in and offer to change what pronouns you use is fine. But acting like you're qualified to ignore their stated gender is never ok. Even if they are closeted, you just outed them!

"Respect everyone's stated gender identity" is the very lowest bar you need to clear.

(And of course this all applies to respecting stated sexuality as well. Yes I am looking at you, people who think it's ok to publicly insist that someone is 'secretly gay')
sqbr: A giant eyeball with tentacles (tii)
Tuesday, December 5th, 2023 09:22 am
Ok I don't know if this has already been done better elsewhere, and it's more of an intellectual exercise than a serious call for new language.

But I've been thinking about how it would be useful to have a way to signify that when I, for example, describe myself as "a man" I mean it in the context of being genderfluid, having a gender which includes "man" but is not defined by or limited to it, and which is just as much "woman" and "other" in the same way. I am not a "man" in the same way that a binary trans man or cis man is a "man", where man is the entirety of their gender identity to the exclusion of "woman" etc.

So it's like... I'm a man&, and also a woman& and other&. (I would use man+ etc but have a vague memory of seeing that used for something else. Google just got confused when I checked, though)
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Sunday, November 19th, 2023 11:32 am
I keep writing out responses to posts on tumblr, making them a draft while I think about it, then never posting anything. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post this stuff to dreamwidth instead.

From this tumblr post:

the ideas that “libido and attraction can be separate and for many aces they are”, “aces who have and enjoy sex are still ace” and “aces who do not have sex and don’t want to shouldn’t be pressured” and “you should accept aces regardless of their sexual behavior” can and should coexist


ok this is a bit of a half-formed thought but it just occurred to me to compare this to my experiences when I identified as a wlw, and some general thoughts I've been having about how people treat bisexuality as "gay mixed with straight" rather than it's own experience.
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Sunday, April 4th, 2021 10:09 am
I've decided to go through my tumblr drafts, which are full of posts I felt too nervous to post publicly in case I got reblogged into Discourse, and see which are worth posting here. In most cases I feel like I didn't quite capture my full thoughts on the matter, but sometimes you gotta let yourself be a bit incoherent to flail towards understanding.

So, let's begin with a post about men writing f/f! *starts out intending some mild edits for clarity, ends up doubling the length*

The original post:
People comparing men’s fetishization of lesbians to slash fandom is always so funny like imagine a world where large amounts of men did get extremely emotionally invested in potential romantic relationships between fictional women


I keep seeing posts like this and...that is a thing that exists? As a group they tend to have the same male gazey sexism issues as male het shippers, but they still very much care about the romances.
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (Default)
Friday, June 26th, 2020 05:11 pm
This started as a response to a tumblr post about "multiple creators having to publicly out themselves or reveal past traumas in order to get fans to stop yelling at them for representing a certain minority/concept in fiction" which I felt was being too simplistic.

Basically: people should be able to write about their own experience without having to out themselves. Enforcing a narrow idea of who is 'allowed' to write certain stories (or assuming that only privileged people would even want to) hurts everyone.

But I also think criticism should be allowed to sometimes bring up the privilege of creators/actors etc, even when there's a chance they may be in the closet. We just need to be more careful about how we do it.

And I didn't like the implication that there should never be any backlash or concern over this sort of thing.
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sqbr: A giant eyeball with tentacles (tii)
Tuesday, May 12th, 2020 06:32 pm
Reading this post by a non-binary person about allegorical vs literal representation got me thinking about my own complex feelings about various characters that either are or feel non-binary, and I was curious to poke at my preferences and compare notes with other non binary folk.
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sqbr: Nepeta from Homestuck looking grumpy in front of the f/f parts of her shipping wall (grumpy)
Friday, May 8th, 2020 11:48 am
[tumblr.com profile] liz-squids posted about found family on tumblr (which may require being logged in, sorry) and I had some rambly thoughts. A lot of this stuff is things I've said before, and I feel like I haven't quite articulated my point, but so it goes.
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sqbr: WV stands proudly as mayor (homestuck)
Tuesday, February 4th, 2020 08:27 am
You can’t put themes of fealty and anti-imperialism in the same narrative box is a really interesting post, discussing the problem in the context of the Vorkosigan saga but generally worth reading.

If you wanted to put them together, and somehow do both of them justice, I think you’d have two choices:

- Positively-presented fealty angle with the Barrayarans (or at least the Vor Barrayarans) but realistically and narratively terrible actions vis-a-vis the Komarrans and the proles. Which is to say, you have created a subset of the Feudal Fantasy register within a larger picture of Realistic Ack. Many, many people will be lovely to those they consider worthy (or Us), and awful to those they consider not (or Them), so this isn’t a stretch at all. You could re-write VS canon into this mold without too much trouble, I think, but you’d need a lot more narrative criticism of the MCs than you get from LMB.

- Fealty angle where the colonized/vassal desperately wants that relationship to actually work as advertised, perhaps to the point of willful blindness, but, of course, it doesn’t. This is Realistic Ack register all the way down, and probably chock full of whump and angst. This is maybe what I was trying to do with Duv, but I’m not sure I can actually manage it.

- I don’t think you can do anti-imperialism in the Feudal Fantasy register at all (since part of the premise is that feudalism, and by extension imperialism, aren’t inherently bad), but I’m open to ideas.


One other approach I’ve enjoyed is Fealty is Fatally Flawed But Tragically Beautiful, set during the inevitable collapse of feudalism, and not saying that collapse shouldn’t happen, but still wallowing in the appeal of what feudalism remains. So vassals still feel that delicious fealty, but the actual power imbalance is in the process of disappearing. You can show how even the Nice Feudal Lords screw up, but since their power is waning it’s easier to forgive them for it, and there’s no way to fall into the Vorkosigan Saga trap of just giving the Nice Feudal Lords all the power and calling that utopia.

EDIT: Ok it has been pointed out to me that this is EXACTLY as romanticising, it's just a SAD romance. FINE.
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Tuesday, November 5th, 2019 11:12 am
Someone on tumblr linked to a screenshot of this tweet by [twitter.com profile] TheAgeofShoddy (warning for an image of a rape joke cartoon downthread) :
“The personal is political” is another way of saying that “the personal” does not really exist in those terms; it is rather public property, contested ground over which the righteous alone have special claim, and to which the individual is no more than a tactical object.


The context turned out to be pegging, lol, hooray for linking sources. But I have some vague rambly thoughts on the original tweet sans context.

My first reaction was “Ok that’s how it’s often used now, but that’s not what it meant originally”. I looked up the history to remind myself and yeah: it was about widening ‘civil rights’ to include ‘personal’ stuff like reproductive freedom and safety from domestic abuse etc. This was very important and necessary work!

On the other hand...the phrase was created by second wave feminists, who did tend towards “If you don’t live a virtuously Political Life you are a traitor to the Cause”. And that is how the phrase is often used these days, though definitely not always.

So now I’m pondering whether that’s inevitable: if any attempt to politicise the personal in order to liberate will always turn into an excuse to further criticise the downtrodden for not being Political Enough in every last facet of their lives.
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sqbr: Nepeta from Homestuck looking grumpy in front of the f/f parts of her shipping wall (grumpy)
Thursday, July 25th, 2019 04:31 pm
Someone I follow linked Policing and woobiefication: two sides of the same coin by [personal profile] ljwrites and it's one of those posts where I started out nodding, then had some quibbles, and then the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. So to avoid ranting at [personal profile] ljwrites or the person I follow, here is a long and largely unnecesary argument under a nice cut you can scroll by.
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (Default)
Friday, January 25th, 2019 04:34 pm
Inspired by this post about aging:
I think seeing people in their 20´s and 30´s as “old” is pretty unhealthy... Let people enjoy being young adults, stop making teenagers anxious that their life ends the minute they hit twenty, or adults feel like they can’t have fun anymore.


Yeah, like...there are changes that tend to happen as you get older, and power dynamics to be aware of. But there isn’t this clear line between Being Young and Being Old, where you become a Grownup with the same tastes and needs (or lack thereof) as All Other Grownups.

The world is controlled by grownups...but by conventionally minded, privileged grownups.

The progression we're taught to expect is that young people get along with each other, but not with adults. And then they grow up into conventional adults and enjoy a world designed for and controlled by people like them.

But to the extent that this narrative applies at all, it's only to conventional, privileged people who fit comfortably into mainstream society.

An unconventional young person finds the world frustrating on two levels: the grownups in charge don’t understand or accept them, but neither do most people their own age. Such a young person finds pressure to be “normal” doubly crushing: not only do they find conventional grownup roles impossible, they also can’t fit into “proper” roles for people their age. The only way to find happiness is to accept themselves and find other like-minded misfits.

And such a young person doesn’t suddenly become a conventional adult who is happy to fit entirely into the mainstream. It often gets easier once they get older, partly because the world is designed for grownups (if not ones like us) but partly because we generally have more ability to control our own lives and avoid, say, toxic parents or stifling social environments. Forcing ourselves to be Normal is just as impossible and soul-destroying for misfit adults as it is for misfit teens.

Saying that unconventional grownups are pathetic and predatory, or even just boring, is damaging to us and to the young people who will grow into us. They need to see that they have a future, that they can become adults and still hold onto who they are, and what they need. Yeah, being unconventional or even disprivileged doesn’t make the power dynamics between older and younger people go away, and that’s something we need to be careful of, but being older doesn’t make all the other distinctions go away either.

Signed, a 39 year old queer, disabled, nerdy weirdo who hasn’t stopped being all those other things just because I’m pushing 40.
sqbr: (up and down)
Thursday, November 1st, 2018 01:19 pm
Inspired by a pervocracy post:

“I’m not attracted to X, so I won’t date them”: okay then, you go ahead and do that

“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that people who are X hear and validate this statement and give me their official permission to not be attracted to them”: please no

“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that the entire world hear and validate this statement and declare X objectively unattractive”: you can stop now

...[I think there’s] a lot of people who never internalized that they can make choices about their sexuality.

I see this a lot when I get asks saying “men should do [very specific behavior] in relationships with women,” where it’s obvious the asker just wants her boyfriend to do that behavior but has no tools for expressing that. The universal, objective rules of society may be up for debate, but the fact that such rules exist is not.


My thoughts, including sexual trauma discussion.
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Saturday, October 13th, 2018 05:08 pm
Inspired by this essay about the misremembering of Captain Kirk, I had some extra thoughts on tumblr and then I had some EXTRA extra thoughts and decided it was probably time for a proper post.
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sqbr: Nepeta from Homestuck looking grumpy in front of the f/f parts of her shipping wall (grumpy)
Friday, October 12th, 2018 05:07 pm
There are a bunch of ways the word "wholesome" is used but I have yet to encounter one that doesn't infuriate me.
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Sunday, October 7th, 2018 01:21 pm
Inspired by a broader conversation I had yesterday with [personal profile] moonvoice and the blog of the original translator of Hakuoki into English who turned out to be a somewhat bro-ish straight dude who made the game "more accessible" by making the protagonist Chizuru less passive and submissive.
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sqbr: A giant eyeball with tentacles (tii)
Saturday, January 27th, 2018 12:37 pm
I've seen an uptick lately in people using "gay" as a catchall for lgb or even lgbt. See for example this post (the gif is the Dean from Community dressed as the devil with a chainsaw saying "GAY MARRIAGE").

It irritates me, but every catchall term irritates someone, so I'm not sure if what I have is a genuine issue with the term or just a matter of personal taste. So I'm going to poke at it!
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (Default)
Tuesday, December 12th, 2017 11:00 am
What started out as a short reply to this very good post about tumblr focussing too narrowly on identity.

(Also, I know some people find it annoying when I use "oppression" in this kind of context but I don't know of a better term that works neatly)

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