My dad was talking about the news and he mentioned that Florida tried to ban cousin marriages but the bill failed. As… I don’t know… a symbol of how much more backwards Florida is than our state. As if there weren’t a bunch of better examples of Florida legislators being assholes.

I was like, how do I say “I literally could not care less if two cousins get married. I mean, if the situation is abusive, that’s obviously bad. But then prosecute the abuse, not the cousin marriage. Now if you want to talk about Florida laws that are bad, then let’s actually talk about Florida laws that are bad.”

I kind of awkwardly changed the subject. Which I sort of regret. But I didn’t want… I don’t know.

Y'know, I've been looking for an opportunity to go off about this and I didn't want to use anybody's cousin-related (rimshot) personal disclosure as a platform for it, but this seems like just the occasion. Just a heads up that I'm going to use the term incest and not consang because I'm talking about the legal construct and social taboo, not the earnest attraction and love itself.

Nothing, to me, displays the socially constructed nature of the incest social taboo like the way cousin relationships have gone from honestly fairly typical to very nearly as forbidden as sibling and parent/child relations in less than a century, most of which within my lifetime. Like, I'm not that old, and yeah, cousin relations got a bit of side-eye when I was young, but that side eye was hardly universal and not drenched in the amount of taboo and (slowly, increasingly) criminalization that they are now.

But on that criminalization, like, it's only on a very, very few jurisdictions that it's being made illegal. I found it particularly funny when the UK "no simulated incest porn" law started getting floated how like any people opposed to it would repeatedly get the response of "you definitely wanna hook up with your cousin"; cousin marriage is fully legal and not legally considered incest in the UK in the first place!

But, I hear you. It's a hard thing to even gently push back against when enough people will treat any pushback as a) an admission of being "into incest" and b) often enough evidence of being a groomer/creep/rapist/someone just not to be trusted. Even if the person you're talking with probably won't react that way, the fear can still be real. I try to push back because I'm pretty secure in myself, but also like I did it scared and nervous enough times that now I'm able to be chill presenting my arguments.

If you want a guide for future conversation, I usually start with something like:

"that seems like a silly thing to ban"

And when they give various reasons for why it should be banned:

"that's eugenics talk" (and besides, it takes many generations of only first cousins for genetic "issues" to build up, and about one or two of people not making kids with cousins to get back to "baseline", of they really want to get into it)

"that's abuse, and we have plenty of law for abuse"

"/that's gross/ isn't exactly sound ground to build law or even just ethically condemn people on. That's how we get stuff like transphobia, and a lot of racism, and a lot of misogyny."

Anyway, that's certainly not to push you to say something if you're nervous, just if having a guide helps you to be less nervous and say what you want to say then there it is for you.

im a genderless person and most of my celeb crushes would be considered "femgaze" so i hated the term from the start. it made me dysphoric. but i couldnt call it out because people accused me of misogyny but honestly femgaze is such an exorsexist word and i hate it.

a lot of women are too normal about sexually harassing men or being creepy to them, just because they think theyre little innocent girls who cant do anything wrong. oh the self infantilization. the term female gaze is just as bad as male gaze, like come on it ignores the fact that gay men and lesbians exist. what about those who are attracted to men or women but arent men or women themselves, like me? my attraction does not need a fucking exorsexist term like that and i despise anyone who uses those dogshit words. again anyone who uses those terms turned out to be exorsexist and hated on me for being agender

Yea it's a bit weird to hear those terms nowadays considering how much progress the queer community has made with dismantling heteronormativity.

Honestly, I think "female gaze" is not only exorsexist, but also kinda misogynistic. Like, technically anything can be "female gaze" or "male gaze" if you want it too. It's honestly a lot like the terms "the feminine / masculine urge" too. Why do we gender everything? I understand calling something feminine if it personally makes you feel fem, but why generalize it as being the same for everyone else? It's just weird.

would it be healthy? no, absolutely not, but for the majority of people, the point of shipping is to explore dynamics they find interesting or dramatic.

say as much as you want about jimcurly being "problematic" or "immoral," but they were the only characters with documented history together. however unbalanced their power was, they were friends, and close ones at that. imo, it's only natural that people would want to explore how their relationship would function on a deeper, more emotionally involved level.

if shipping was just about pure fluff, love, and healing, the only viable romantic ship in this fandom would be Anya and Daisuke, and i'm pretty sure a majority of folks view them as having a friendly, almost sibling-like relationship rather than a romantic one – though, if some folks do ship them, it's not my place to judge. shrugging and scrolling takes way less time and effort than getting upset about it.

i also find it really distasteful that the majority of the fandom seems to attack, harass, and actively outcast people who ship jimcurly, or really any ship involving jimmy, especially when Wrong Organ themselves have said that this fandom should not be a space for that kind of behavior.

you're absolutely allowed not to like something, don't get me wrong. we all have things we find distasteful, even hurtful, but the amount of targeted harassment and disgusting behavior over shipping that i've seen in this fandom – and most modern fandom spaces, really – is absolutely appalling.

TLDR: grown ass man squints in disbelief at modern fandom spaces

I still wish I was in Raiden's situation so I'd get to meet him and fight him and prove to him that I'm a suitable mate wait who wrote that-

Enemies to fuck buddies in my mind. Maybe not even "buddies" in the usual sense.