leanan sidhe

Redditors crashed the website with donations over $25k and 0 wishes left. via /r/MadeMeSmile

Just to reiterate, because many Americans in my notes seem to think we’re having a bad time; we’re having an excellent time. This is extremely funny, and I hope Nicola Sturgeon is keeping track of it all and taking a shot every time someone resigns. I know people who’ve made resignations into a drinking game (a shot got a junior minister, two for a senior minister, and down it for a Cabinet minister). Everyone on fb is marking themselves as attending “Boris’ leaving do” with plenty of inside jokes about it being a work party and there’ll be cake. My phone keeps going off with joke texts from my family about the current chaos.

The Government:

But erm

So, the godawful EARN IT Act will end up letting pedos get off scott-free more often. I think that’s something we should tell our Senators about.

Cause like, even though it’s out of committee, there’s plenty of chances to kill it, from preventing it from going to a floor vote to making sure the house never touches it, and while it getting out of committee was expected, we can make sure it doesn’t go much farther.

And, as some activists have pointed out, putting it as free speech/privacy vs child welfare is playing the exact game the fundie assholes want us to play and how they pushed FOSTA-SESTA past.

So, if you want to have the best chance of killing EARN IT dead, tell your senators that it doesn’t even do the job it pretends to do, at all.

Tell them about this, tell them about what an unmitigated disaster FOSTA-SESTA was at doing what it pretended it was meant to do and how when this law fails like that it will put kids in danger, tell them about how the nation’s largest coalition of anti-trafficking orgs is against EARN IT, tell them about Senator Wyden’s proposed bill that does what EARN IT pretends to do except way better and without screwing over internet freedom, tell them stuff that kills the heart of The Big Lie pushing EARN IT and anti-free-speech and anti-sex-worker laws forward.

And hell, don’t just tell them, tho you can at the usual EFF and Fight For The Future links (Tho calling them is even better), boost this wherever you can!

You got a platform, on any other site? Or, even better, on any wider ranging media? Boost this to the heavens!

Color Palette Challenge #94 - Rán

Being an aromantic asexual is weird. We defy not one, not two, but three societal norms; heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, and amatonormativity. It gets even weirder when you’re indifferent (even favourable!) when it comes to sex and romance because you think your experience is universal, that everyone feels the way you do. It’s not feeling wrong and broken and out of place. It’s feeling normal, and then realizing that you aren’t.

Thinking (read: assuming) that you’re straight for most of your life and then finding out you’re not is weird. Mostly because once you realize you’re not straight, it dawns on you that you feel the same way about boys that you do about girls and non-binary people. And then you wonder if you’re pansexual because they’re attracted to all genders, and you have to be attracted to someone, right? And then that thought is immediately dismissed because you don’t feel attraction, at all. But it doesn’t stop you from contemplating every other sexuality and romantic orientation, because you’ve been taught that everyone wants sex and romance.

And then you remember: you like sex and romance in fiction. You like seeing your friends in happy, healthy, consenting relationships, and you’d always assumed that one day, you’d be in one too. But you’ve never pursued one. You never had more than a fleeting interest in boys, and lingering but still platonic affection for your female and non-binary friends. Those “crushes” that you had in elementary school? Maybe not crushes after all, because God knows you haven’t had one in nearly eight years. The most powerful feelings you’ve had for another person have been squishes so intense that you had to look back and question if it was actually romantic attraction (spoiler: it wasn’t).

And then there’s that epiphanic moment when things start to fall into place. Why you were always so vehement that soulmates could be platonic too. Why the idea of loving someone more than your best friend is incomprehensible (because romantic love is always shown as being more. Hello amatonormativity). Why when you ship fictional pairings, there are people you want to get together romantically, people you want to be friends so bad, and the ships that you like the most are the ones that could go either way. Why you desire emotional closeness and intimacy with the people in your life, but that had always been conflated with sex and romance so you wondered if what you wanted was more than friendship. Why you want to take the expression “more than friends”and burn it to the ground because there is no vocabulary for friendship that exceeds “best friend” without crossing over into romantic and/or sexual territory.

You realize that your ideal relationship isn’t necessarily romantic. It’s best friends who cohabitate and snuggle and hold hands and go on adventures to the library together. Kissing and sex? Well, that’s more of an afterthought. A “yeah, that’ll probably happen somewhere in there.” An assumption, because you’ve been taught that primary, monogamous relationships are always romantic and sexual. You reflect and see that there are very few things that you see and inherently romantic, and that there is a lot of cross-over between things you consider platonic, sensual, and romantic. A grey area that you can’t define.

Being an aromantic asexual is weird, because while I’ve always said that you don’t need romance and sex to be happy, I now realize that it applies to me too.

______________________

A young woman is imprisoned in a castle by a monstrously formed prince. The servants of the castle hope for them to fall in love, and when the spell is broken they assume their prayers have been answered. They are all surprised, but nonetheless pleased, when it is revealed to them that the young woman and prince are the truest of friends, and nothing more.

They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen, a woman who is incapable of loving. She is unmarried, she has no consorts, and she wishes for no partner. She is the wretched queen, the heartless queen. She must hate her daughter, for her daughter is beautiful, and women are incapable of liking another woman who’s prettier than themselves. It must be for this reason that the princess was sent away, not for how she was attacked by a man in the woods. They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen because she cannot love. The queen loves her daughter, and that is enough for them both.

There lives a prince who is forced to choose a bride at the ball. He meets many beautiful women, but find none which he loves. He spies one in a gorgeous gown and wonder in her eyes, and he dances with her all night long. The kingdom is sure he has found his bride. When the clock strikes midnight he tells her how he will never love a woman, or a man, in the way he is expected to. The beautiful woman smiles and tells him she expects nothing from him. The next morning the prince and the beautiful woman are missing, having run off together to see the world. They leave their shoes behind in their haste.