So Awkward It's Funny

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

link to PDF

The onus of the blame for heteronormativity in contemporary publishing and media often falls upon bisexual women. I'm thinking of that God awful YouTube video by that Lavender Menace person who started speaking of how sapphic literature these days is so normative (I personally agree) before veering way™ off course to spew vitriol about how this was because every popular sapphic book nowadays is bisexual and not performing the acceptable model of lesbianism or sapphic desire.

When films like Bound get talked about in terms of being a lesbian classic, nobody mentions the fact that Corky, the butch from the film demonstrates biphobic (and by extension lesbiphobic) feelings towards Violet, the femme, and considers her to be "lying" for the male gaze and performing queerness. The film ends positively, with Corky overcoming her biases and acknowledging that Violet is just as queer as she is. It's irrelevant if Violet is bisexual or a closeted lesbian (I lean towards the latter with reference to her character), what's relevant is the policing of certain kinds of identities as being "less" queer and the refusal to accept or show empathy towards bisexual women, as we are considered beings incapable of authentic self presentation or autonomous desire. Instead, we are all just a gaslit hivemind of people operating under comp het.

Bisexual women cannot have peace when it comes to representation; people took that one sentence about Poison Ivy wildly out of context, retconned decades of her representation as a bisexual icon in popular culture in love with another bisexual woman and then gaslit bisexual folks for being "annoying" about it on social media. When Love Lies Bleeding released, on Twitter, bisexual women were told to stfu because this is a film about "REAL butch4butch dykes" (and then you see the film made by a bisexual director and the muscle mommy you love to gatekeep is a) not a butch and b) an open and proud bisexual).

Villanelle, who was openly bisexual in the Killing Eve books, was retconned by fandom into a man hating lesbian and that apparently made her more authentically queer than Eve, who remained bisexual in both TV and source material. Of course, it is easier to see the more "visibly queer" Villanelle as a lesbian, while Eve, whose relationships centre men more, and who has to have her eyes opened by the sexy assassin hunting her down, can be bisexual.

I find this a really weird pattern. The whole subgenre of "bisexual woman having a reckoning and leaving her husband for a lesbian" is corny at best and poorly equates bisexuality with heteronormativity at worst, especially because the same formula is almost never applied to show a bi woman leaving her husband for another bi woman, or a lesbian leaving behind a comp het marriage or having a mid-life awakening in popular sapphic tradpub literature; the closest to this I can find is the novel Cash Delgado is Living the Dream (2024) by Taylor Kay Mejia.

It's silly, and vapid and frankly very condescending to assume that every bisexual women in popular media is actually a lesbian facing comphet. You need to unshackle your points from separatist biphobic rhetoric on social media, even if it is dressed in shallow feminist terminology. It's literally okay to let a film or book be bisexual, and I can promise you it doesn't make the narrative less queer or feminist or subversive.

I know some nasty people will be rbing this post and talking about how bisexuals are the privileged white people of the lgbtq community etc etc, and honestly I don't know how to articulate about this issue without coming off bitter, so here is an essay by Carmen Maria Machado, whose writing on bisexuality, queerness in horror/dark fiction and on sapphic literature & culture in general I highly recommend:

the reason that she made these videos was in response to a story about her dog bunny using the buttons, which I believe is the one that made her internet famous, it got her articles and interviews with by a few publications.

the story goes that the dog pressed the button for "mad", she asked "why mad?", dog pressed "ouch", she asked "where is your ouch?" and the dog pressed "stranger" and "paw". she then examined the dog's paw, and found a foxtail in it (a plant thing that is painful).

from this, she concluded that the dog was using the buttons to tell her there was a foreign object, or stranger, in its paw. she of course felt that this was an amazing use of limited language skills, hence the interviews and articles. these two videos were almost certainly made in response to the backlash of saying that the dog doesn't know what those words mean, since those are two of the words she used.

so first thing here, I checked her channel, and she did not make a similar video about how she taught bunny the word "stranger". (nor one about "paw" but I think we can accept that one makes easy sense)

but to play along for a moment, let's assume that bunny was taught that "stranger" means "person she hasn't met before" and maybe "food you haven't tried before" or similar concepts.

the idea that bunny was then able to use that concept metaphorically to mean "a thing that's not supposed to be there" would be ASTONISHING. an unbelievable leap in language capability that we wouldn't expect from a human preschooler. unbelievable being the key word here.

and that's what she's selling her audience on. that's the part that this op is rightfully angry with. the top comment on that happy and mad video is talking about how they love that bunny coined the phrase "play poop" to mean fart. again, that's absurd!! understanding those two words separately makes plenty of sense, but insisting the dog is creating coherent phrases when they press buttons in sequence is ridiculous. just because they are very intelligent creatures does not mean they think in words like you and I do.

I'm sorry but it is pseudoscience.

I'm getting pretty much all of this from two youtube videos talking about the topics so I'll link them below if you're interested. the first is all about the dogs pressing buttons things specifically, and the other is more about the history of humans trying to teach apes sign language and explains why that also didn't work.

one person cannot create scientific consensus. especially with a study that hasn't even been completed, let alone peer-reviewed, published, and repeated.

maybe his study will be completed and go through all those steps and change scientific understanding of language and animals forever. but I don't hold out much hope, since it's extremely irresponsible of him to have just hopped on camera to say "I'm a scientist and I believe this stuff is real!" without anything to actually back that up, and now this video is topping search results on youtube about this topic, from presumably being shared by people like you, auntbibby, that want so badly for this stuff to be real. I understand. but there's no proof there.

it's only Federico Rossano! here's his name in the youtube video description:

and I just came to my MIL's place where she has some NYT magazines and this cover caught my eye:

the article has the very same story I mentioned above about "mad, ouch, stranger, paw"

they even deflect criticism here with "people online can be mean" (as opposed to "some people online are very naive") and end the paragraph with "what's not to believe?" (some scientific rigor would be nice. has anyone ever successfully gotten a dog to repeat what they just "said" on the buttons? that would be a good start)

and on the next page, whose name do we see?

that's right, it's the one and only, Federico Rossano of UC San Diego!

one and only because he's the only scientist supporting this!

I know this topic is not that serious, and I'm sorry for dragging it up... but this is how consensus is manufactured. if you see in multiple places that "scientists" are looking into the idea that dogs can talk, you'll start to kind of believe it.

unless you happen to notice it's only the one scientist and it's the same one every time.