so glad i don't give a damn;

character posters + doodles.

1000 Picspams Challenge | #32 - Maleficent

Harry Potter characters posters: Hermione Granger

1000 Picspams Challenge | #168 - The Unforgivable Curses

Ginny Weasley & Pansy Parkinson - for anonymous 

“it’s just a movie,” we were assured, “and what’s wrong with being the girl next door?”

we were angry adolescents with no safe direction to lash out in. we were not allowed to be violent. those of us who turned to our playstation were embarrassed for it. many of us were bullied. many of us turned to fantasy. when we were older, we would ask, “why is there only one playable girl character in this whole game?”

“video games are art,” we were sneered at, “i’m sick of these fake gamer girls ruining our media.”

we were high school girls who were worried we weren’t being kissed fast enough, even at 15. we felt shame boil up around our ears when men leaned out of cars to sling slurs at us. we wanted to feel good about ourselves but were sent home for showing our shoulders. what were we telling people by being so in love with our bodies that we showed them off in any small way. when we were older, we would ask, “why does this advertisement for socks have a barely-18-year-old girl lying mostly-naked on a bed?” we saw our own 18-year-old self, who could barely kiss right and still trembled about sex.

“relax,” we were told, “if you don’t like it, don’t look. if you’re mad they’re selling you your clothes like this, just don’t buy from them.”

we turned into tired adults. we have our fires burnt out. we have explained and explained until our tongues turned numb why we deserve to be able to live without fear. we got sick of being teachers. any dent we made was quickly refilled. we were sick of trying to talk to people who would never change their minds about us. we were sick of it. and we still asked: “where am i? where are the people who look like me?”

i once was in a coffee shop sighing to a friend, “why don’t people get that not every girl has the same body or same metabolic system” and i was interrupted by a large man who has no idea how i eat or how much i weigh or how healthy i might be, and he loudly and briskly informed me, “Victoria’s Secret models have a more common body type than you think. If you’re so pissed about not being like the girls on tv, how about you change what you look like?” i had gone 6 days without eating. 

so we made it up. we gave barbie a cape and our spotted dog the ability to control the weather. we wrote barely-legible fanfiction about vampires who were also terribly in love with us - because we were perfect in this world, unlike the mess of what really was - we crafted entire sub-stories about how the main characters in our favorite universes were secretly girls in disguise. we made 17-year-old characters who would cut the throats of anyone who hurt them. we drew pictures of women in full, angry armor. we wrote bad poems about the girls we loved and the ones we were jealous of. we hurt ourselves often, were excellent at denying ourselves in the name of something. we only ate salad, we wouldn’t touch grease, we didn’t buy certain things, didn’t get dirty. we used things to fill the gaps. bath bombs. fussy boots. venti iced mocha half-caf.

we made it up. we flooded the market. we put up pictures of ourselves smiling, with messy hair and silly faces, with back fat, with smudged makeup. we made videos perfecting our lips. we made art of possible fashion - all with pockets. 

a few girls take selfies at a sports event. they are slandered across the news for it. 

can you imagine? can you imagine the selfishness? the audacity? the self-possession one must feel to take a picture of themselves where they control everything? 

when i was in high school i would have sworn up and down to you that i was straight. but straight girls picked up something about me, i think. i remember how they teasingly asked me if i was a lesbian, trying to figure out what was wrong with me before i could do it myself. i just remembered last night how i was shoved in a closet with another girl for “seven minutes in heaven.” i tried to believe that this wasn’t bullying and i wasn’t being singled out. and when i found the odd boy that i thought was like, passable physically, i would basically force myself to believe that i was in love with him, based on little to no personal relationship between us.

from then into college, i was repelled pretty much any time a guy showed attraction to me or came onto me physically, and i felt like that meant there was something wrong with me. why couldn’t i just relax and have sex with men like the other girls who were having feminist, empowering sex all the time? the thought that i was a lesbian didn’t pass my mind, because i thought that guys were “cute.” i could acknowledge their cuteness and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10, you know? but i couldn’t imagine myself in a sexual situation with them. i had no idea how i would deal with that. i didn’t even have any male friends, because i didn’t like talking to them.

i went on a date with a guy for the first time, and i was thrilled because a guy confirming that he actually liked me would mean i would be normal, and not a social outcast, you know? and on this date he sexually assaulted me. and i was upset because i felt like it was my fault, for not being normal. i thought that if i had just been like the other girls, i would have been fine with it. i would have been turned on.

i didn’t start to think i might like girls until i went on a date with a boy who i thought was exactly my “type.” he was sweet, he was talented and thoughtful, he looked like a short and nerdy version of joseph gordon-levitt, and he wanted to kiss me. i invited him back to my place, as you do. but then i realized that i didn’t want to kiss him. i didn’t even want him to touch me. and because he wasn’t a piece of shit, he didn’t.

i think on the morning he left, i started to look at girls a different way. i identified as bisexual for about half a year, because i figured, you know, i was still “attracted” to guys. but as i became more at peace with my attraction to women and explored it further… not only was the sexual attraction a lot more intense and noticeable than it had ever been for men, but my feelings about it were entirely different. i could picture myself being with a woman– just romantically, at first, but later i could have real sexual fantasies, about girls i knew, or about celebrities; i could picture what i wanted them to do to me, which was not something i ever could do with any man. 

after my initial realizing-my-sexuality crisis, which of course was terrifying, the idea of being a lesbian didn’t seem scary. it was freeing, and actually empowering. the idea of being with women exclusively had pretty much opened this whole other world to me. when i realized that i loved women, and i didn’t love men, it was like i finally knew myself.

and yet i wouldn’t be myself if all of these other things hadn’t happened to me. everything that happened to me is a part of my “lesbian narrative.” and i know this is true for many other lesbians, and, importantly, that there are many girls on tumblr who are where i was four years ago. four, five, six years ago, i had a tumblr. maybe if i had read narratives like these, with people talking about how difficult it can be to recognize sexual attraction to women in a society that teaches us that we all are attracted to men and men only, then maybe… i’m not saying i would have figured it out sooner, but maybe it would have planted that seed. or maybe i just would have gotten a sense of peace, that if it turned out i didn’t like dudes, then that was okay.

that, i believe, is the goal of posts like these; to reach out to younger women who are so inundated with compulsory heterosexuality, as we all are, and to encourage them to consider lesbianism as a possibility for themselves. (note the language, “you can be a lesbian.” not “you are,” but you could be. being a lesbian is not beyond the pale, even if you still *think* you feel attraction to men, is all that’s saying.)

and grilling each other about whether we’ve ever felt the tiniest sliver of attraction to men in our lives, particularly when many of us are never going to be able to figure out whether our fleeting, non-compelling flicker of interest in a dude is “compulsory” or “real” with any certainty… it doesn’t do anyone favors. it doesn’t lend extra legitimacy to lesbianism, i can tell you that. i can say with certainty that it does alienate young and otherwise questioning women from seeing lesbianism as a possibility (a lot of us talk exclusively about “young lesbians” in this context but we would do well to recall that there are many women who don’t realize their lesbianism until they’re in their forties). this applies especially, i believe, to women and girls who have suffered abuse or assault at the hands of men.

LOOK AT IT!