Mostly Void.

my take on the "can trans men be lesbians?" thing is that i would never ever comment on a stranger's identity and i would never tell someone i don't know what they can or can't do but also like. come on. if you're explicitly choosing to be a man you can get mad when women don't want to date you.

if you're going into a space where there are women explicitly saying "I do not want men involved in my romance" and you are actively identifying as a man you cannot get upset when they don't want to date you or are uncomfortable with you being there

i also deeply empathize with every trans femme lesbian who has had to watch her existence debated and been seen as a pervert for loving women see most of the lesbian community go "oh yeah you have a vagina, you have the Unbreakable Woman Bond that means we are connected forever" and get a little frustrated about that

Also: do you think a cis man could be a lesbian without identifying as a woman? if not, and you think trans men can, i think you're just speaking from bioesstentialism and maybe don't really think trans men are fully men in the way cis men are

i'm remembering that trans man/lesbian i knew who was mad the girl he was seeing ID'd as straight its like damn maybe you don't really see yourself as a man.

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

if you see criticism of racism within your community as criticism of the community as a whole then you have a racist community. sorry.

[ID: a photo of an elderly couple. Orpheus is holding a lyre in one hand and holding Eurydice's hand with the other. he is not looking at her. end ID]

like I think it is good and important to be able to criticise porn and erotica for the relationship to the political environment/context of creation etc, but I think that’s not too different from criticising any other art on these grounds. how is the erotica speaking to conventions of the genre? what is the author trying to tell you in what they hold up as attractive? what might the author be saying that they’re not necessarily aware that they’re saying? how does the narrative relate to other dominant cultural narratives? these are all valuable questions to ask and can be answered in nuanced ways that do not involve kink-shaming & do not involve calling people degenerate perverts. yknow.

something I read the other day had a storyline that involved a woman being kidnapped by foreign “disgusting perverts” (<- not supposed to be sexy) so that she could then be rescued by an army general (<- sexy) who had to fuck her as part of the rescue. now it’s no bother to me if someone else gets their rocks off to that, power to them. that said, we can criticise the framing of Woman Ending Up In Sex Trafficking Requires An Army Man To Fuck Her To Safety in the same way we would criticise similar framing in non-erotic contexts. how is this serving the image of the benevolent military? how is it feeding into the white woman’s fear of the other? what is being held up as ‘perverted’ in its juxtaposition to ‘sexy’? etc etc. this was bad erotica but it was also pro-military propaganda and that does mean something

Ultimately we should treat sexual media the same way we treat non-sexual media. We don't want to put everything that has sex in a box labeled 'ew' and never talk about it. But we also don't want to put them in a special box that can never be criticized because oh non that's anti-sex! The real destigmatization comes from treating it like any other media, and that includes say, hey, this is a bit shit innit

like I think it is good and important to be able to criticise porn and erotica for the relationship to the political environment/context of creation etc, but I think that’s not too different from criticising any other art on these grounds. how is the erotica speaking to conventions of the genre? what is the author trying to tell you in what they hold up as attractive? what might the author be saying that they’re not necessarily aware that they’re saying? how does the narrative relate to other dominant cultural narratives? these are all valuable questions to ask and can be answered in nuanced ways that do not involve kink-shaming & do not involve calling people degenerate perverts. yknow.

something I read the other day had a storyline that involved a woman being kidnapped by foreign “disgusting perverts” (<- not supposed to be sexy) so that she could then be rescued by an army general (<- sexy) who had to fuck her as part of the rescue. now it’s no bother to me if someone else gets their rocks off to that, power to them. that said, we can criticise the framing of Woman Ending Up In Sex Trafficking Requires An Army Man To Fuck Her To Safety in the same way we would criticise similar framing in non-erotic contexts. how is this serving the image of the benevolent military? how is it feeding into the white woman’s fear of the other? what is being held up as ‘perverted’ in its juxtaposition to ‘sexy’? etc etc. this was bad erotica but it was also pro-military propaganda and that does mean something

never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"

i think telling trans men they're not men in a way that counts is heinously transphobic actually. all these people are obviously transmisogynists as well but atp i'm marking them red for their good old fashioned transphobia too

i've fought cis people who were dear to me for saying shit like this, why should i tolerate it from shitty dudes who, adding insult to injury, aren't just saying it because they're parroting the transphobic background noise of the world rn but to actively deny they benefit from transmisogyny??? fuck all the way off. i'm so tired of people on my asks telling me i should give more grace to ""my community"". these people are not my community and if i could i'd spit on every one of their faces until i died from dehydration

This is a good idea!

A woman not shaving or wearing a dress or wearing makeup or wearing femme clothes or having styled or long hair or caring how she looks or using a masc name or whatever else is actually a neutral thing and not a sign of her being depressed or giving up or being sad or whatever

irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers

Isn’t it weird how the school uniforms of underaged girls in Japan have been so sexualized as to become ubiquitous and uncontroversial in many circles? Isn’t it weird how for many people on this app the sexiest thing they can imagine is a young woman or girl wearing the uniform of an elementary or middle schooler? But it’s treated as if it’s somehow different because they’re Japanese, in line with a long history of Americans using Japan as fertile ground for consequence-free sex crimes since WWII

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

i think we should talk about degendering more as a very real form of transphobia. you should not be calling a trans woman "they" when she's explained her pronouns to you. you should not be calling her a "person" instead of a woman. she's not too gnc, she's not too androgynous, you're not "confused" about her identity, you're degendering her. I fear we've gotten to a point we've forgotten the very basics of this movement is "trans women are women" and "trans men are men", and not just "trans people are someone who's pronouns you have to memorize so you don't offend them." you see her as a man in a dress and it pisses me off