Modernity has failed us

let's give it a minute before we admit that we're through

The first step to loving yourself is to be patient with yourself. Healing takes time. You didn't get to where you are overnight and you're not going to heal overnight. It's okay to have bad days, it's okay to make mistakes. What's important is that you forgive yourself, learn from your mistakes, and keep moving forward.

Another important step is to surround yourself with people who love and support you. These people should make you feel good about yourself, not make you feel worse. If you're constantly around people who are putting you down, it's going to be very difficult to love yourself. Find people who will build you up and make you feel good about yourself.

Finally, you need to learn to accept yourself for who you are. This means accepting your flaws and imperfections. We are all human and we all have imperfections. What's important is that we learn to love ourselves in spite of our flaws.

Notably, this slogan does not call for straight people to accept queerness per se, nor does it claim that all queer people deserve to be treated with respect. Rather, it implies that there are “respectable” people and “disreputable” ones, and that the “we” in “we’re just like you” deserve to be in the former category.

Of course, in a society where many people are deemed “disreputable” because of their race, class, disability, or other traits, these appeals to respectability failed many multiply marginalized queer people. Furthermore, queer subpopulations who were viewed as particularly “disreputable” at the time—such as bisexual and transgender people—were often explicitly excluded from the movement over concerns that we might “hold back” the progress of gay and lesbian people. In other words, respectability politics always leaves behind the most marginalized, as well as the most sexualized, segments of any minority group. For these reasons, many contemporary queer activists are opposed to recycling this strategy.

“Contagiousness politics” is a term of my own making, and it refers to attempts to placate the dominant majority’s fears that they might become “infected” or “contaminated” by a particular marginalized group. For LGBTQIA+ people, such fears have typically centered on the assumption that straight people can be “turned queer” via interacting with us. Perhaps the most effective contagiousness-politics slogan of the gay rights movement was “we’re born that way.” There have been extensive debates about this slogan, with some queer people expressing concerns that “born that way” suggests that we must suffer from some kind of “birth defect.” Others are concerned that the phrase implies that no one would willingly choose to be queer, and/or that it erases some individuals’ experiences with shifts in identity or gender/sexual fluidity. While I agree that the slogan fails to capture many intricacies regarding how queer people come to be, I believe its effectiveness lies largely in its ability to allay straight people’s fears of contagiousness. After all, if people are “born queer,” then that means that straight people can’t “catch” it from us.

There is another gay rights–era message that has received considerably less attention but seems to have served a similar purpose. Namely, lesbians and gay men would often assure straight people that they were not sexually interested in them. They would point out that gay men are attracted to other gay men, and lesbians to other lesbians, and they meet one another in queer-specific settings, such as gay bars or m4m/f4f dating sites. These messages seemed designed to convince straight people that they need not “panic” about being “seduced” by a queer person.

While the notion that queer and straight people inhabit entirely separate dating pools may hold true for exclusively lesbian and gay people, it doesn’t necessarily apply to other gender and sexual minorities. Bisexuals are attracted to people across multiple genders, trans and intersex people vary in our sexual orientations, and so on. In fact, this “separate dating pools” message insinuates that it would be a bad thing if a queer person were to take an interest in a straight person, or vice versa. Such flawed messaging helped to create the apparent paradox that we now find ourselves in, where the straight majority openly accepts people who are in same-sex relationships, while simultaneously harboring fears of “sexual deception” and being “contaminated” by queerness themselves.”]

What have you learned about writing from the novels and stories that you read? Whether you love them or hate them, there’s a lot you can learn just from reading books! Today, the folks at Reese’s Book Club have shared some tips to help you read like a writer:

While there are a hundred different books offering specific writing advice from writers, critics, and educators, there is one universal truth accepted by all: to become a great writer, you have to be a great reader. This doesn’t mean reading acclaimed literature or finishing the Man Booker List each year. Instead, it means reading with a critical eye and learning from every book you pick up.

Every book has something to teach you, whether you liked it or not. Below are six areas where we teach you how to read your TBR like a writer.

1. Study the POV

Point of View, or POV, is a crucial part of every story, changing the way the reader connects with the story. First POV tends to bring the reader in by sitting them in the heads of the main characters while third POV offers a more holistic scope of the story.

Questions to Ask: How do different POVs build tension and drive drama? Which characters and I’m sympathizing with most and why? How does the story use POV to tell us more about the world of the novel?

Required Reading: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Linguistics is the science and study of languages. How we speak. How language evolves. How culture affects our language. How it doesn't affect our language.

Linguistics is the curiosity of why you do that thing with words, rather than correcting you based on "rules" that don't really exist anyway. Linguistics is the crooked questioning eyebrow when you said something in a way I've never heard before! Where did you grow up, who did you learn that word from, where did they grow up, did you watch any international television shows by chance?

Linguistics is a love letter to languages. It's a science, don't get me wrong. It's a study, careful and precise, and wildly whimsical all at the same time. Because much like any science dedicated to the living, it is curious for what is actually happening, not in controlling the reactions or measured responses. No, please tell me how you really feel! Please talk to me in the way you really speak! Does that change in writing? Does that affect your studies?

“is that what people think it is? i like sex with candles?”

“i like sex with sandals.”