:/

“marriage is a legal document that protects you, you’ve gotta decouple it in your brain from romance and amatonormativity” the fact that marriage is a legal document that protects and privileges you (that, might I add, generally isn’t valid without romance+sex) is LITERALLY amatonormativity. A legal status that privileges people in monogamous long-term romantic-sexual relationships IS AMATONORMATIVITY. That is *what it was coined to talk about.*

i bet it feels good as fuck to intend to do something and then actually do it

Eridians dont know about time relativity and people are NOT talking about it enough imagine sending a person on a dangerous mission like 70 years ago and when they finally come back and they look like they only aged 10 of those years and tell you "oh yeah time just works different there" when you have no concept of that that is INSANE rocky explaining radiation to eridian scientists (already insane concept) and going "oh yeah btw time works differently in space" "what" "time works differently in space. what we thought would be a 16 years trip was only a 4 year trip for me, the solarians call it something like time-depending-of-position-in-space, is pretty trippy" "....WHAT"

but can we TALK about the racialized subtext of "his wife has filled his house with chintz" linking together femininity, indian export goods, commercialism, and superficiality vs "to keep it real I fuck him on the floor" linking together masculinity, AAVE, authenticity, sexuality, and vulgarity? if our aim as critics of poetry is to reevaluate this text and arrive at a feminist interpretation then we must also consider the poem's vexed relationship to race so as to not be anti-black in our criticism of the piece's presentation of masculinized sexuality nor uncritically reproduce and elevate its image of orientalized femininity.

also, from looking at the original post (non-explicit gay sex photo but still a gay sex photo so you've been warned): there isn't even any chintz in the photo. the design elements in the room all look broadly western european with the exception of a tall ceramic vessel that may be decorated with a reproduction of a chinese ink painting. chintz is an indian textile pattern, you'll see it on dresses, bedspreads, wallpaper, tapestries, upholstery, etc., but nothing like that is in the image. to imply that the house's interior design is frivolous, artificial, and unusable, the poem utilizes "chintz" despite the obvious lack of chintz because "chintz," as a popular asian export good that went on to be imitated by european manufacturers, is considered kitsch, cheap, and womanly. and, though the angle partially obscures them, the two men in the photo both appear to be white, so the poem uses the AAVE phrase "keep it real" despite the lack of black people to invoke the perception of AAVE as raw, crass, and primal. in both cases, the racialized language is being ascribed to european/white subjects to impart the white subjects with different moral values.

"why do you keep calling things you find beautiful, inexplicable, and unsettling angels" i'm just doing what british wartime radar technicians did first

Evil wizard tasteful pin-up magazine but it's all photos of like, skinny old goths coyly fingering cursed amulets, long-bearded sorcerers doing the 'oopsie' pose as their corrosive destruction spell destroys enough of their own robes to show some skin, naked desiccated lich king positioning his staff of human skulls just so it leaves something to the imagination, dark knights in full armor just holding their soul-eating blades out in front of their codpieces, orc chieftain who did not understand the assignment and is posing with a monster he killed like one of those guys-with-fish photos. Or maybe he DID understand the assignment. Hmm.