Moving Arguments

Here’s some more.

"Crisis pregnancy centers" are UNREGULATED organizations that present themselves like medical facilities and often offer medical advice and information, but they are staffed by volunteers many of whom are not medical professionals, typically funded by churches and pro-life orgs, and exist to convince people not to have abortions. They often give "patients" misinformation and lies about abortion, contraception, and pregnancy.

These organizations often take the place of legitimate medical facilities particularly in impoverished areas despite being essentially fake medical clinics that offer few services and that are not bound to ethical or sanitary guidelines of real clinics.

A "crisis pregnancy center" in Kentucky was recently in the news because a nurse who volunteered there found that trans-vaginal ultrasound probes were being sanitized using disinfectant that was both expired and totally ineffective against HPV, a common sexually transmitted infection, meaning the clinic could have given their clients STIs with their shitty unregulated sanitation practices.

My MOM visited one of these "centers" when she was pregnant with me (a planned and wanted pregnancy) because she didn't know it was fake and unregulated!

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

I’m gonna say this point blank— you’re a tar pit if you think this way

Your suffering does not make you special, you are not granted brand new permissions to be belligerent and cruel because you have been treated poorly, straight people aren’t an oppressed class, no, but they’re people who are entitled to the same amount of basic decency that you, yourself, are entitled to

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.