What the fuck did I just do

LET'S DO THE FORK IN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL

LET'S DO THE FORK IN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

The framing here is of a binary between industrial, transgressive, nudity-free erotica and profit-oriented studio pornography; when most of the porn being made today sits entirely between those two axes. Sex workers who are making the shit studios would never do, the ones who are doing it for rent, and yeah even ones who are making lame boring shit. That's "regular porn". Those are the people who fucking lost to tumblr porn ban. Brazzers didn't lose a dime.

I think unless we are able to express our bodies without shame or censorship, you're not actually challenging anything. Videos of machine eating paint cans isn't transgressive, it's allowed. Tumblr and it's shareholders are perfectly happy for you to get off to goop because that's not what stops their advertisers from pulling out.

I don't think adding "we need regular porn" to posts is funny. it's annoying and uncreative. But more importantly I think it's completely wrong in the idea that the bizarre and sensual only develops in (or as a consequence of) an absence of other outlets. In fact I'd argue its worse. We were almost on the cusp of recognising that pornography isn't defined by big studios, I remember it! and then tumblr annihilated anything but them from their ecosystem. And look at the culture here since then, its dry, puritanical, and utterly hostile. We've been set back almost 10 years of gross, esoteric weird fucking porn. Or at the very least, it wasn't and isn't happening here.

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

Happy pride month~! Hope you enjoy my Prince Link and Hero Sidon AU~ (yes the bite happens on my Patreon hehe)