Fuck Yeah Alternative Pride

Why misogyny won

After leaked audio showed Donald Trump bragging in 2005 that he can “grab [women] by the pussy” and kiss them without consent because he’s “a star,” Trump’s campaign seemed done for.

Many Republicans withdrew their endorsements in disgust, and those who didn’t faced intense pressure to follow suit. Trump’s poll numbers plummeted — and kept plummeting after women started coming forward to allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them.

But then, the free fall stopped. Media attention turned back to Hillary Clinton’s emails with a little over a week to go before the election. A new accusation against Trump from a former Miss Finland, and a newly surfaced video that showed Trump grabbing and kissing a former Miss Universe after humiliating her onstage in front of thousands, barely caused a ripple.

And then Americans elected an alleged sexual predator to be their president. They chose a man who has now been accused of sexual assault by 15 women — a man who has promised to sue all of those women in the first 100 days of his presidency — to be the next leader of the free world.

How did this happen?

No one factor can fully explain Trump’s victory. America’s out-of-control political polarization means that many people would vote for Trump no matter what he did, just because he had “Republican” next to his name on the ballot. Trump’s strong support among whites demonstrates how racial resentment played into his victory. His dominance in rural areas suggests a deep anxiety over not just economic security, but the loss of an entire way of life. And the role of voters who support authoritarianism can’t be ignored.

At the same time, the role of hostility toward women hasn’t been discussed nearly enough. The more “hostile sexist” attitudes voters held, according to research by political scientists Carly Wayne, Nicholas Valentino, and Marzia Oceno, the more likely they were to vote for Trump. Hostility to women predicted voters’ support for Trump just as strongly as racial resentment, and even more strongly than affinity for authoritarianism.

Does this mean that almost half of Americans hate women? Not quite.

What it does mean is something both subtler and more disturbing. It means that our society only values women under certain narrow conditions. It means that for many voters, Trump’s toxic masculinity was a deep part of his appeal.

It means that misogyny is alive and well in the United States, and that it probably helped Trump win.

The theory of sexism that helps explain Trumpism

To understand how sexism played into Trump’s victory, first you have to understand that there are two basic types of sexism — “hostile” and “benevolent” — and how they work together.

If you have some “hostile” sexist attitudes, you might mistrust women’s motives and see gender relations as a zero-sum battle between male and female dominance. You might agree with statements like, “Many women get a kick out of teasing men by seeming sexually available and then refusing male advances,” or “Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.”

If you have some “benevolent” sexist attitudes, you might endorse positive — but still patronizing — stereotypes of women. You might agree with statements like, “Women should be cherished and protected by men,” or “Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility.”

In the context of Trump, a benevolent sexist might hear the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape and say that he’s horrified because he has a daughter — which suggests that his first instinct is to paternalistically shield his female relatives from harm, rather than to see sexual assault as an objective moral horror no matter who you’re related to.

Meanwhile, a hostile sexist would claim the benevolent sexist is overreacting — that the tape doesn’t actually describe sexual assault, just normal male sexual aggression.

These attitudes might seem diametrically opposed to one another. But they’re actually two sides of the same coin, Peter Glick, professor of psychology and social sciences at Lawrence University, told Vox. People can hold both of these sexist views at the same time, and they very often do.

“It’s how men can wear ‘Trump That Bitch’ T-shirts at a Trump rally, and then go home and say, ‘I love my wife and daughter,’” Glick said.

Trump expresses both hostile and benevolent attitudes toward women all the time. When he likes a woman, he praises her in a patronizing way (usually focusing on her physical beauty). When he doesn’t, he viciously insults her.

Benevolent sexism is the carrot, Glick explained, and hostile sexism is the stick. If you’re a “good” woman who meets expected gender norms — who has warm feminine charms, who maintains strict beauty standards, whose ambitions are focused on home and hearth — you will be rewarded with affection, protection, and praise. But step outside those norms, and you risk being labeled as one of the “bad” girls who are abused and scorned only because they deserve it.

It’s a tidy little cycle. Benevolent sexism is supposed to protect women from hostile sexism, and hostile sexism is supposed to keep women in line with the ideals of benevolent sexism.

But while benevolent sexism may put women on a pedestal, Glick said, it’s a very narrow pedestal that’s easy to fall off of. This is the whole reason that our age-old “Madonna versus whore” dichotomy exists in the first place: If women can be separated into good girls and bad, and only bad girls get punished, it justifies male dominance and absolves men of blame for treating women unfairly.

And it’s why Trump, despite the long list of sexist words and deeds to his name, can insist that “nobody respects women more” than he does — and why some people, including women, actually believe him.

Why many women might have voted for Trump despite, or even because of, his sexism

Glick worked with Princeton University’s Susan Fiske to develop a groundbreaking assessment of hostile and benevolent sexism. (And of how those two attitudes combine, Voltron-like, to form the cognitively dissonant state of “ambivalent sexism.”)

Glick’s and Fiske’s work, along with two decades of social science research that has used and expanded on it, tells us a lot about why sexist bias against women is still so pervasive.

And it tells us why women themselves often buy into these ideas, too.

Male dominance actually requires a pretty delicate balance, Glick said. If men want to maintain the control over women they’ve enjoyed for thousands of years, and continue their species, and satisfy their desires for heterosexual love and companionship, they can’t just use brute force. They need women to actually like them and not resent their dominance.

And so a compromise emerged — or at least a “protection racket,” as Glick calls it, like when the Mafioso tells the businessman he’d hate to see his nice shop burn down, so why don’t they make a deal.

The basic agreement is that as long as women cater to men’s needs, men will protect and cherish women in return. If women have few good options for independent success, this is a pretty good deal — which explains why in more overtly sexist societies where women have fewer opportunities, cross-national studies show that women endorse benevolent sexism at even higher rates than men do.

This may also help explain why Trump maintained high levels of support among white women voters who don’t have a college degree — a group Trump won 62 percent to 34, and a group whose career opportunities are probably more limited. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton totally reversed 2012’s partisan gender gap among college-educated white women. (A demographic Clinton won by 51 to 45 percent, and Romney won 52 to 46 against Obama.)

But the most powerful gendered element of Trump’s campaign may actually lie in his fear-mongering.

“Trump’s strategy was to ramp up anxiety about a dark, dangerous world,” Glick said. “When women are under threat, their benevolent sexism scores go up.”

Specifically, he said, showing women survey data about men’s hostile sexism makes women more likely to endorse benevolent sexism out of psychological self-defense. It may be ironic to turn to men for protection from male hostility, but it’s how the cycle works.

This also helps explain why so many women hold sexist biases against women, Glick said. If women themselves enforce gender norms and punish deviants, it reinforces the social order that guarantees them protection. And it separates them from the “bad” women who are deemed unworthy of that protection.

But that protection can still come with a cost, Glick said — which is also where sexist stereotypes about men factor in. The idea that men have to be providers and protectors, Glick said, goes hand in hand with the “boys will be boys” attitude that’s often used to excuse men’s bad behavior.

“Men are bad but bold. That’s the stereotype,” Glick said. “He’s not a very good protector if he can’t beat up on other men.”

Glick said that Trump’s more positive masculine traits — boldness, change, willingness to defy tradition — may be seen as inextricably linked with his more negative ones, like his boorishness and cruelty. Trump may not be a nice guy, the thinking goes, and we may not like some of the things he says. But that just comes with the territory if you want a strong male leader.

You hear this rationale a lot from women who still supported Trump after the “pussy” tape leaked and more sexual assault allegations came out. They don’t like it, but they find ways to excuse it. “I do find the words offensive, but that’s locker room talk. That’s the boys club,” Michelle Werntz, a Trump supporter, told CNN.

Some of these excuses minimize sexual assault, or even endorse it. “Groping is a healthy thing to do,” Trump supporter Jane Biddick told the Cut. “When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? It’s a good thing.”

Comments like these are reminders of another dark truth research has revealed about benevolent sexism: its strong role in our culture’s tendency to blame victims of sexual assault. The higher a person scores on measures of benevolent sexism, the more likely that person is to blame women who are victims of acquaintance rape (as opposed to rape by a stranger), or victims who behaved in less than “ideal” ways before a rape (like cheating on their husband, or passively rather than actively resisting their attacker).

Sexual assault is the ultimate expression of hostile sexism. But the protection racket of benevolent sexism gives women a lot of incentive to either forgive men for it, or blame women.

I get the intention behind lunarian/solarian, but every time you say someone can identify as something because of their gender - and not only presentation - the terms end up being used to talk about gender.

I’m not ~maybe somewhat of a girl~ (lunarian). I’m also not naive enough to say I’m not related to the binary at all (stellarian), not when we are mainly talking about what I pass as. PPW describes more what I am, which is, a person who passes as a woman, regardless of what I want, and regardless of what I’m okay to give up to not be seen as a woman.

I mean, if you are comfortable saying you are lunarian/solarian/stellarian/any combination of those, suit yourself. But can we have terminology that is less… uncomfortable?

For clarification, these are meant to talk about situations where people experience something because they are perceived as something, even if they are not. (x)

I get the intention behind lunarian/solarian, but every time you say someone can identify as something because of their gender - and not only presentation - the terms end up being used to talk about gender.

I’m not ~maybe somewhat of a girl~ (lunarian). I’m also not naive enough to say I’m not related to the binary at all (stellarian), not when we are mainly talking about what I pass as. PPW describes more what I am, which is, a person who passes as a woman, regardless of what I want, and regardless of what I’m okay to give up to not be seen as a woman.

I mean, if you are comfortable saying you are lunarian/solarian/stellarian/any combination of those, suit yourself. But can we have terminology that is less… uncomfortable?

For clarification, these are meant to talk about situations where people experience something because they are perceived as something, even if they are not. (x)

I get the intention behind lunarian/solarian, but every time you say someone can identify as something because of their gender - and not only presentation - the terms end up being used to talk about gender.

I’m not ~maybe somewhat of a girl~ (lunarian). I’m also not naive enough to say I’m not related to the binary at all (stellarian), not when we are mainly talking about what I pass as. PPW describes more what I am, which is, a person who passes as a woman, regardless of what I want, and regardless of what I’m okay to give up to not be seen as a woman.

I mean, if you are comfortable saying you are lunarian/solarian/stellarian/any combination of those, suit yourself. But can we have terminology that is less… uncomfortable?

Lunarian/solarian were, in my understanding, created to be ways to say “I have experiences similar to those of a [binary gender] because of how I’m perceived in public”.

Because, you know, AFAB/AMAB are not coherent categories (unlike some people think), and male-aligned/female-aligned imply “it’s okay if you treat this person as basically that binary gender” for a lot of people.

However, the descriptions of those words talk about “identity or experience”, which make people treat those as identity-related only, such as in here.

While it’s good to have words for “genders that have to do with either masculinity or maleness/femininity or femaleness”, those words shouldn’t be the same as the ones for “I always pass as a [binary gender], but I don’t necessarily have anything to do with that gender”, because those are two entirely different things.

Even using terms like Lunarian-Stellarian or Solarian-Lunarian doesn’t really help, because you’ll still have to clarify if you are talking about what you pass as or if you are just describing your gender.

Besides:

This was the intended purpose of terms such as “male aligned” and “female aligned.” To identify strong overlaps in external pressures and experiences, or to identify overlaps in personal identity with the experiences of another gender.

and, from here:

If you want to only be one, I’m afraid that’s a very personal decision that only you can make: you’ll have to decide whether your rejection of gender normativity or your experiences of being perceived as a woman under gender normativity are a more primary part of your identity.

Idk if I’m misunderstanding something, but it looks like binary alignment was originally meant to either say you see your gender identity as close to another, or to say you pass as a certain gender. But then, it was corrupted to mean either seeing your gender identity as close to another or that you can be treated as basically that gender.

I’ve gotten a couple of requests since Intersex Awareness Day to put together a list of intersex bloggers who, unlike some people I could name, are not REGs, ableists, racists, etc and so forth.

If you would like to be on this list, please let me know either on this post, or via ask/message/etc.

I know being publicly intersex can be kind of a Fiasco, so I’m avoiding listing the people I do know already until I get their full permission.

Requirements:

Must identify as intersex

Must believe that queer/mogai/lgbtqia+ people include anyone whose sex, gender or orientation are persecuted by cisheteronormativity and it’s sub-systems (eg exorsexism, monosexism)

Must not be an exclusionist gatekeeper: no “aphobes” no TERFs, no truscum, etc

If you’re marginalized in other ways that you also talk about with any regularity, please feel free to mention them as well, since I will try to breakdown the rec list to include disabled intersex people, intersex POC, FA intersex people, and so forth. You are also welcome to disclose your intersex variation, if you like. But all this stuff is optional.

You don’t need to disclose anything to me at all, other than “I identify as intersex, and I would like to be listed as an intersex tumblr user in an upcoming post.” That’s more than enough.

Note that you do not have to identify as queer/mogai/lgbt+. Even if you self identify as a Straight intersex person, I still want your voice, as long as you aren’t exclusionist about it.

I get the intention behind lunarian/solarian, but every time you say someone can identify as something because of their gender - and not only presentation - the terms end up being used to talk about gender.

I’m not ~maybe somewhat of a girl~ (lunarian). I’m also not naive enough to say I’m not related to the binary at all (stellarian), not when we are mainly talking about what I pass as. PPW describes more what I am, which is, a person who passes as a woman, regardless of what I want, and regardless of what I’m okay to give up to not be seen as a woman.

I mean, if you are comfortable saying you are lunarian/solarian/stellarian/any combination of those, suit yourself. But can we have terminology that is less… uncomfortable?

Lunarian/solarian were, in my understanding, created to be ways to say “I have experiences similar to those of a [binary gender] because of how I’m perceived in public”.

Because, you know, AFAB/AMAB are not coherent categories (unlike some people think), and male-aligned/female-aligned imply “it’s okay if you treat this person as basically that binary gender” for a lot of people.

However, the descriptions of those words talk about “identity or experience”, which make people treat those as identity-related only, such as in here.

While it’s good to have words for “genders that have to do with either masculinity or maleness/femininity or femaleness”, those words shouldn’t be the same as the ones for “I always pass as a [binary gender], but I don’t necessarily have anything to do with that gender”, because those are two entirely different things.

Even using terms like Lunarian-Stellarian or Solarian-Lunarian doesn’t really help, because you’ll still have to clarify if you are talking about what you pass as or if you are just describing your gender.

SEX WORKERS ONLY FORUM

Community forum for sex workers, run by sex workers!

SexWorkersOnly is designed to be a community space for all sex workers. We hope that it will be a space that will grow and evolve with our individual needs, but primarily will act as a friendly community dedicated to skill-sharing and supporting each other.

Who? Our fledgling community already has members from a range of fields including fssws, clip creators and porn performers, fetish models, proDom(me)s, cam models, and sugarbabies. We hope in the future to have an even wider representation of sex workers within our community!

How does it work? There is a public and a private section (examples of both are above). 

The public section is visible to all guests/visitors and contains instructions for signing up, but also will serve as a place to put reference material. Many visitors may be sex workers seeking resources or information, so we have decided to make this information as easily accessible as we can by placing it in the public section. 

The private section is only visible to members who have had their accounts activated and then verified as belonging to a genuine sex worker. At the moment it contains an Administration section, a News & Media section, a General Discussion board, and a Sex Work Discussion board. We anticipate that more sections will be added to meet demand as the forum grows.

How do I get verified? For privacy reasons, you must be verified before receiving access to the private parts of the forum. You must be a sex worker (fssw, porn performer, cam model, dancer, etc) to be verified. The steps are below:

Send an email to chimaeragray(at)gmail(dot)com

Introduce yourself, and include as much information as you can about the work you do. If you have a website, social media presence, or backpage ad to share that’d be awesome, but don’t be put off from getting in touch if you don’t have a work internet presence! Say hi, introduce yourself! Be straight with me!

Wait! If your application is successful, I will approve your request and you will receive access to the private forums.

Go forth and get involved with your SW community! 

What if someone who isn’t a sex worker gets in? Because many sex workers (particularly fssw) do not have online presence, I admit that I am having to use my intuition a lot. I can tell you that I try to do as much background checking as I can, but I am sure that a few people will fall through the cracks. However, in my experience, it is more likely I will catch them as they register during my background checks. As the community grows I will liaise with our members to continue bettering our vetting processes. If we discover an impostor in our midst, they will be promptly removed.

What information do I put on my profile when I register? Do I have to tell you my gender? We know many trans and non-binary people are concerned about compulsory gender disclosure, and often cissexist gender options, and we made the decision to remove gender from forum profiles. We hope this will make the community more inclusive for our members!

Apart from that, you can input your birthday, location, website, occupation, and your social media usernames. You can fill in as much or as little as you like! 

if some of these already have things coined for them, i apologize. some of these are silly (but still able to be used) or very highly specific to my own experiences, but as long as you read the notes at the end of them you can use them!

(Inspired by this post: http://demideerling.tumblr.com/post/152180011855/princeofthewildthings-queenstaci)

So lately it’s seemed like lots of people call some things nonbinary, when they really are very binary, just not conventional to general societies idea of it.

Which is fine, some nonbinary identities involve that, but it’s a problem to me when people act like that’s *all* being nonbinary is. Which is why, if it’s not a thing yet, I’ve decided to call those sort of things “midbinary.”

Being nonbinary isn’t *just* like being a spork instead of a spoon or fork. That’s just “in the middle” of the binary of forks and spoons. Hence, midbinary. For things that could be on a sliding scale of male to female. Anything between male and female, the gender binary, is midbinary.

I would add more examples but it’s late and I was going to go back to bed.

It’s not a binary gender. But it’s also not completely severed from the binary. It can be explained in terms of how it’s similar and different from the gender binary.

I like the idea of midbinary because it seems like a lot of the time, when people talk about nb as a group, they are talking only about people they can think of as “binary-aligned” in some way.

I think the problem people might be having with it is that it leads to the possible implication that “midbinary” would then mean “less nonbinary”, and could very easily cause some gatekeeping of “nonbinary” as a term and identity.

@jemthecrystalgem clearly intends this to be something only used in the context of needing to differentiate genders that do reference the binary from those that don’t, but it’s very easy for something like that to be misused by people who don’t have as good intentions. It can also feel really uncomfortable and invalidating for people who would then be qualified as “midbinary”, because it could imply distance between them and “nonbinary”. I know from my own experiences with this “”””ace discourse””” bullshit how sickening that can feel.

So, I think it might help if we actually added two terms; one to describe nonbinary genders that reference the binary (midbinary), and one to describe nonbinary genders that don’t. It’d prevent the possible misconception that “midbinary” is somehow any less binary, keep both terms more clearly under the “nonbinary” umbrella, and stop any implications of elitism and gatekeeping in the nonbinary community.

I just don’t know what that word would be. I want to keep clear of implying that either is any more/less nonbinary, while also covering the fact that it clearly doesn’t reference the binary on any level.

This may be my super-a-spec bias, but I kind of like the idea of using a-spec terminology here, and adopting the term “abinary” for genders totally unrelated to the binary. But idk, I don’t coin a lot of terms, and I’m not really sure where to start.

“vague” has been used to describe gender that is affected by neurodivergence. my idea: why not use it for attraction to?

vague could be used as a suffix, in place of the attraction type, or as a prefix to an orientation, for example:

polyvague-experiencing neurodivergence-based attraction to multiple genders

What is sapiosexual? I always thought that means “attracted to girls” and now i’m confused why being attracted to girls is ableist but maybe i’m mixing up the terms, can you please explain?

Sapiosexual is a term used to describe experiencing attraction towards intelligence/people who are intelligent.

This is an ableist, classist, and racist term because the idea of “intelligence” in itself is a construct steeped in ableism, classism, and racism. 

Not everyone gets exposure or access to the same knowledge and not everyone thinks the same way and not everyone learns or knows the same things, and the idea of “intelligence” places more value on certain types of knowledge and certain ways of thinking over others and deems them “better”. 

And as a neurodivergent, two ways neurodevelopmentally disabled person, people who consider themselves “attracted to intelligence” can heck off. 

(If clarification is needed, please ask another mod because Mod Ange doesn’t think she can put her thoughts into words any better than she did here.)

definition: the only thing defining your gender is your kintype

(this gender is otherkin specific)

a catch-all term for individuals who’s [sic] gender is closely related to their kintype (x)