Well then, come on, which way? Up or Down?

“It’s okay if you thought you were over it but it hits you all over again.

It’s okay to fall apart even after you had it under control.

For example, you're using a public bathroom, and there's no toilet paper left for the toilet you're using. If someone was waiting outside and is about to use the toilet / stall you were just using, it's fair to warn them first "hey there's no toilet paper left in that one" so they can use a different toilet if they'd prefer (or maybe grab some paper towel from the sink first if they'd personally rather improvise like that).

Another example of this is in many places it's common for cars to flash their lights at oncoming cars if there's any sort of danger or obstacle in the road ahead, like a flooded road, or an accident, or rubble/debris in the road.

Or say you used to work somewhere, and the work environment was really toxic (verbally abusive boss, co-workers who are bullies, they repeatedly "accidentally" paid you less than they were supposed to even after you called them out on it, etc) and someone you know is going to apply working there or was just offered a job there, it's fair and considerate to warn them about your experiences.

Or maybe you took a class that was way harder than you thought it would be, and had a much higher rate of people who fail or drop the class than you anticipated, it would be fair to warn a friend and/or classmate who says they're going to take that class.

“Cenotaph.”

“What?”

“It’s only a gravestone if it marks the location of a body. A monument honouring someone whose body isn’t present is a cenotaph.”

“I’m… not sure that’s how it works if the body gets up and walks away on its own.“

“There’s precedent for gravestones being reclassified as cenotaphs if the body is later removed and reinterred elsewhere. There’s no rule that says the body itself can’t do the removing.“

“Okay, but the body very much is coming back. That’s kind of what we’re here to accomplish.”

“So it’s a temporary cenotaph.”

“And naturally our greatest concern here is avoiding semantic ambiguity.“

Fashion had a LOT to do with this propaganda. The pink/blue was enforced HEAVILY (it was vaguely there before from 1900s but no one could afford two sets of baby clothes for two babies, so everyone just bought white baby clothes and bleached them all, passing them down from kid to kid. 1950s was like nooo you must buy NEW baby clothes because that one you had was a girl and this is a boy. You’ll destroy his life if he wears pink!!! You can’t dress them the same!! Gender!! Capitalism!!! Buy, buy!!

Clothes became more restrictive and conformed. To mirror what was happening in society.

‘Traditional’ gender roles and expectations/norms, ideas of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ that so many people subscribe to as it’s been this way between men and women since the dawn of time’ bullshit? Mostly invented/reinvented in the 1950s for the lower classes. Remember that when people go on about ‘traditional’ gender.

It is no accident that the gender roles and race roles were all very tightly controlled and there was a wave of propaganda to ‘return to how things should be’, (or, make America or make Britain great again).

It is no accident that the racial tensions exploded in this era, and no accident that gender tensions exploded in this era.

White men came home to America, found that women were actually totally fine without them, and flipped the fuck out.

Black soldiers came home from America and saw that, no, not everywhere in the world treats them like they should all be slaves, and that yes, there are even some places in the world where they are not arrested for existing whilst Black. And they came home and demanded to not be treated like shit. And these fucking white men flipped the fuck out.

And white men came home to America, confronted by Black soldiers who had been sent to die on the same fields they had, and now their fucking wife won’t make them dinner and is talking about wanting her own bank account!! And a job‽

White men flipped the fuck out because all of the horrible propaganda of women being so much ‘weaker,’ Black people being so ‘inferior’— it was all unravelling. It was all proven untrue during the war, but that wouldn’t stop them from clinging to it anyway.

The fifties was a fucked up time. It was an era of white men having tantrums through massive waves of propaganda to try to climb back to the top of their pyramid, stomping on anyone who tried to make any movement away from their fucking feet.

A flood of propaganda on every level to try to make women small again (look at every sitcom and film in the 1950s. All of them return to the home, have children, get dinner for the husbands when they walk through the door. Wearing frilly pink dresses and high heels, ready to service their hard-working white husband as he walks through the door).

A flood of propaganda to on every level to either completely refuse to acknowledge people of colour from existing in film and TV, or to represent them as inferior, unintelligent, violent, sex-crazed monsters who are too unstable to be allowed to have rights and freedoms, and must be controlled by white men.

Don’t forget, there was also a MASSIVE war on ‘communism’ at the time— which often just meant ‘the same rules for everyone’ in American minds, and certainly no one was going to allow that. So if people of colour spoke out about poor treatment, they were automatically called communist and no one would listen anymore. If women complained their husbands were horrible tyrannical pieces of shit, ‘that’s communism! I won’t have that spoken in my house!!’

So massive movements to silence marginalised people (women, people of colour, and queer people, haven’t got on that cos I don’t have the energy right now but Christ was that bad for queers) was implemented and the moment someone did not parrot the propaganda, they were accused of communism and their lives were destroyed.

Here's the thing, tho. I actually had this very conversation with my mum about a month ago. Talked about the tv shows in the 1950s with the perfect housewife, the post-war attacks on gender, sexuality and race roles, the invention of the "feminine" and "masculine" within contemporary society, all of it.

We talked for a good hour about all of this. I walked her through all the propaganda she saw as a child, all the tv shows she watched, the music, the films, the fashion, all of it. Gave her examples to everything she watched.

My mum is a boomer. She was born late 1950s, so she grew up with 1950s tv -- and 1960s. And 60s, whilst there was occasionally a push to escape *some* of these nauseating tropes, still largely followed the same patterns.

She watched American '60s sitcoms like Bewitched. What's the plot of Bewitched? A powerful woman who can do anything marries a mortal. This woman can go hiking on mars if she wants to. The mortal insists she do everything expected of her "wife" and "woman" role-- the mortal way. Clean my house-- but no, don't twitch your nose to clean it in 3 seconds, scrub this fucking house top to bottom, and hand-cook my dinner (again, instead of 3 minutes, spend 3 hours making and cleaning it all up.) Like, not only do you have to do all these chores or you're a failure as a wife and woman, but it ONLY counts if you fucking suffer. And you can ONLY use your powers when it is convenient to me, a man-- such as helping me thrive in my career with all the men in the office

Who's the villain in this show? The witch's mum (played by an iconic lesbian from Old Hollywood, Agnes Moorehead, by the way) who tells her daughter 'you are better than this. Your husband is a piece of shit, just fucking leave him and do whatever you want. He's a controlling, manipulative sadistic piece of shit who just wants a maid and a mother. Fuck this guy. And if you're really going to stay with him, stop making yourself less by being with him. You're a powerful woman who can do anything. Fine, you want to keep the house, make him dinner? Whatever. Twitch your nose, get it done, and spend the rest of your day doing literally anything else.'

The MUM is the villain in that show. She is repeatedly shown as such. For telling her daughter that her husband is diminishing her, that her daughter is capable of anything and is more powerful than her fucking loser husband, and that she does NOT have to allow her husband to make her SMALLER than she really is (and he is). In effect, Endora is the villain for raising her daughter to believe that she can be a man's equal, that her powers should not be hidden or rejected, and that she does not have to keep shrinking just because her fucking loser husband is demanding more space.

The villain is the feminist, lads. The villain is the mum who tells her daughter when she is being abused by a fucking piece of shit.

And don't even get me started on Jeannie in I Dream Of Jeannie where a woman with the power to do fucking ANYTHING (like, breathe in space, whatever) runs around calling a man 'master' in sexualised fantasised "Arab" clothes (and occasionally people in brown-face).

My mother had NO FUCKING CLUE how much propaganda was being placed on her as a boomer. Once I explained this stuff she said it felt like her head was exploding. But she NEVER ONCE THOUGHT ABOUT IT. No one ever once said to her 'hey wait...' Ever.

Now, I'm desperately in love with Elizabeth Montgomery, who plays Samantha the witch, and as a feral Xennial/Millennial who was raised by television, I was very aware of all of this propaganda that I was watching. And I still just was desperately in love with Elizabeth Mongomery, and lived for the moments that her mum was proved right.

But I don't think that was the norm. I've always been very attuned to tv-- that's literally why I got a phd in it, I can see more to tv than a lot of people. but I don't think that is the norm, and I have been made very aware by neurotypical people that this is NOT how the vast majority people watch television. They don't see the propaganda or the constructions behind it all.

So I don't think it's just the 90s, 00s and 20s kids who need to know this shit. I think EVERY ONE has been controlled with this shit, and we all need to know this.

Especially because, historically, boomers and silent generations are the ones who tend to vote most conservatively (tho I suspect because we are in The Worst Timeline, there are a lot of younger people who need to see this, too because they are drifting farther and farther right into really scary areas).

So many of them, like my mum, had no idea they were even being manipulated into thinking this way, and behaving this way.

So yeah, signal boost cos kids need to know that these absurd boundaries that have been set by cis-het white Christian people (especially white men) for what marginalised people outside of these categories are allowed to do, allowed to be? Yes. We should signal boost this, encourage younger generations to think about this. Yeah, we should make sure the 90s and 00s generations know this.

But the Silent Generations who orchestrated these boundaries because THEY were so offended and traumatised and FRIGHTENED by women, people of colour and queers having any place besides under their shoe? They created all this propaganda to try to get these marginalised groups back under their shoe. They were the ones who inflated the pink/blue, created the racist, sexist, homophobic, neurotypical bullshit propaganda? THEY are the fucking villains and deserve to be recognised as such.

My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.

And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."

One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.

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