Sieveplayer - Sieve's

"Demo man is not a real man, he is only a man in spirit"

If you're writing a story and a voice in your head says 'maybe this is too much fucked up mad science, you should dial back the fucked up mad science', that is the devil talking.

not caring if people think you're stupid is a life hack. recognising that you are kind of stupid is an even bigger life hack. we build entire societies to take care of each other bc we're all kind of stupid. it's fine.

rb if you’ve heard of/read watership down im trying to see something. it was such a big part of my childhood and still lives in my heart

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.

look i agree with the wider point here but can y’all stop recommending people NK Jemisin as a SFF author when she contributed to a the harassment campaign of a transfeminine author who ended up detransitioning because of the harassment.

Yeah cringe culture is dead but you know who are actually genuinely really fucking embarrassing?

Neurotypical parents of autistic people who are shit at dealing with autistic people. Like they don't even have the self-awareness to be embarrassed about it, they'll just openly casually admit "yeah I have no idea why my child consistently keeps having the same reaction when I keep doing these same actions lol" like they don't know the definition of insanity or the idea that hurting people is bad.

Like ok learning the ropes of how autistic people work and function is probably strange and confusing to an nt person who has never encountered people on the spectrum, but how do you raise one without learning jack fucking shit??? And then admit that you're just as shit at it today as the day they were born. How do you have 20 years of experience in something and less skills than someone competent could learn in 20 days.

If there's one fucking group of people who can make me physically cringe when they talk, it's those people making cheery small talk about how they never bothered to learn how to not hurt their own child.

Reading about Habsburg emperors makes me laugh like nothing else

This is Ferdinand I The Benevolent. I am dying

Russian exorcisms be like