the courage of stars

there's an old anne rice interview circulating on twitter rn that i remember reading ages ago where she makes a pretty salient point about how submissive men who have bdsm fantasies etc will go to a sex worker and basically order the ala carte version of their fantasy to be performed in real life but women don't really have that same option and certainly not at the same point of availability so they read her horny books instead. and honestly that argument has been in the back of my mind every time people get on their high horses about the popularity of booktok romantasy novels or heated rivalry or whatever the "women are horny and we're upset about that" cultural property du jour is ever since. women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.

“women, especially straight women have so few outlets” so what exactly do you think lesbians have? like why does it always come back to straight women???

literally where are all these outlets for lesbian sexuality the op lives around

i'm literally a lesbian and while i've explained this several times, my point in this framing is that i do not have the same fears for my safety when engaging in NSA sex and hookup culture that straight women en masse have to contend with. if i want to meet a woman off an app and hook up after some basic vetting, i can be reasonably certain that if we're not vibing or the chemistry is off, i can leave safely and nothing bad will happen to me. i don't have to tell 6 people where i'm going and set up a bunch of check-ins and code words for my personal safety. straight women do. i have a reasonable spread of outlets for my sexuality as a dyke in a major east coast city but more importantly, i *do* feel luckier and better-off in this regard when compared to straight women who have to take far greater measures to ensure their personal safety and it takes away nothing from me to admit this. i'm a gay woman who has empathy for women who don't have the option to just withdraw from interacting with men while still getting their sexual and romantic needs met, cope and seethe about it i guess

it really is incredible how fast heroin chic came back as soon as a new ‘magic’ weight loss medicine hit the market huh

I am curious how the celebrity drive for thinness ROCKETED past the point that literally anyone thinks is appealing. it’s not surprising to me that fatphobia would resurge and fat celebrities would thin out (both literally and figuratively) but thin celebrities becoming absolutely skeletal is. weird. isn’t it? why? what pressure is acting on them?

honestly one of my favorite things about fanfic is when you can see the canon influences come out in really subtle ways. like a canon line thats mentioned once as a throwaway is suddenly the entire premise for a fic or it influences the characterization or something. its just so cool to see how people weave their ideas around a source material, especially if its not a detail i'd thought about before

A lot of leftist men who thought backlash against feminism had changed things enough that they didn’t have to pretend to care about any of the horrible things Platner has done to women (and for whom part of the appeal was likely the thought of sticking it to “dem hr lady woke scold politics”) frantically deleting posts today and beginning an intense campaign of “we’re all trying to find who did this” gaslighting. I hope they all continue to be confronted with the receipts we have of all the disgusting things they’ve said and done throughout this mess for the rest of their miserable lives and careers.

i genuinely don’t know how to explain to some of you that the USA isn’t the Source Of All Evil in the world in a way that you’d actually understand it