Be The Gay You Want to See in the World

“They’re not smarter or faster they’re buying up others’ lifetimes to do their chores”

I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of “It is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?”

Exploitation isn’t in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.

I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they don’t like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.

When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasn’t paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.

I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and that’s how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasn’t what I had scheduled or paid for.

I’ve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. It’s the customers that can do a number on you.

imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.

What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)

When I hear "tumblr sexyman," I think of Cecil Night Vale being constantly depicted as a skinny white man instead of literally anything else. I think of the background character white men who get elevated over protagonists that are women, people of color, or otherwise not the white man power fantasy.

Cecil Night Vale, as previously mentioned.

Oncelercest, because if there aren't two skinny white men to ship, tumblr fandom will start shipping the skinny white man with himself.

Bill Cipher inexplicably being fanon'd as a white twink despite being a fucking triangle.

Everyone fawning over Marvel Loki while shoving every woman and Black person in the MCU aside.

The way nearly every single character in Hazbin Hotel has the same "tall and skinny" body type, along with all the criticisms Black audience members have made about the issues with Alastor's design.

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines – it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.” ― Robin Sloan

About two hours later I was permanently banned from r/MadeMeSmile for “self-promotion.”

I accepted that different communities have different rules.But then something even stranger happened.Soon afterward, a moderator from r/pics started going through my account. Not just the new post—many of my older painting posts disappeared as well. One after another. Then I was permanently banned there too.

Maybe it was the same moderator. Maybe it wasn’t. I honestly don’t know.

What surprised me wasn’t even the ban itself. It was realizing how much power individual moderators have over what millions of people are allowed to see. One decision can erase years of posts from a community and instantly cut off your ability to participate, even if those posts had been happily sitting there for months or years.I’m not saying moderators shouldn’t have rules. Communities need moderation.But it does make you wonder where the line is between protecting a community and allowing a single interpretation of the rules to completely reshape what people can share.

The funny part?

I wasn’t advertising anything in those posts. I wasn’t posting prices or asking anyone to buy anything. I was simply sharing my original paintings because I enjoy discussing art with strangers from around the world.

Anyway…

Here’s the painting that apparently caused all the trouble. 🎨

Grindr is a proximity-based hook-up app. You can put in your height and age and body type and race and aesthetic and when your last HIV test was. Not your star sign or any personality stuff.

And you can message anybody, and people frequently do, faceless bio-less profiles messaging faceless bio-less profiles. There is no matching system, there is no limitation on messaging people or demand of mutual attraction

It's like actual cruising or cottaging: it is not meant to replicate the speed dating experience or a match-making service. As an app, what it's trying to replicate is meeting eyes with a guy and then meeting him in the alley outside, or nudging your boot into the next bathroom stall to invite the guy in there to come into yours

that these women weren’t forced into this work

that these women are of age

that these women were treated properly on set

that these women are okay with it being released in the format it has been released(onto which website/etc)

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

(The Blue Castle, Chapter 45)

I have two somewhat contradictory observations about this last paragraph:

1) There is a cosmopolitanism to Valancy and Barney that I quite like. They went to the Chinese restaurant during their first months of “friendship” and now they will travel around the world, both East and West. They are the hip cosmopolitan modern couple in contrast with the narrow-minded and small and traditional Stirling clan. Valancy’s looks were racialized and she was speculated to be a changeling because of both her eyes and her modern ways too:

I like this thoroughline. If this book was published today a certain insufferable type of person would call it “woke propaganda”.

2) Of course there is still the sentiment of “home sweet home” in the very last line that somewhat contradicts the cosmopolitanism and the sense of adventure that came just before, but I think that sentiment isn’t at its core just about the natural beauty of Mistawis. It is mostly about the fact while theirs is a very happy ending, there will always be something special about those carefree few months they spent in their own little world. Now in their marriage they will have to deal with Stirlings and Doc. Redfern and money and babies and society. They will probably be happy, but there will be caveats and responsibilities of adulthood.

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.