PSA: Biphobia is not a coherent theory but a collection of disperse arguments meant to symbolically obliterate bisexuality in different contexts. The arguments change according to what sounds better, not what's consistent.
bidyke reblogged
u don't like kitty and puppy? ๐ meow? ๐ bark?
Beyond parody that conservatives see a study saying "perhaps we should provide animal companionship to college kids?" and immediately respond with "NOOO PUNISH THEM! HURT THEM! SLAP THEM!"
Their whole ideology is built on normalized cruelty to the point that having cats give college kids some semblance of companionship and affection seems like a radical act that they cannot abide. Like, jesus christ. If you saw a kid asking their parents for a pet and the parents said they should get a slap instead so they don't turn into a "beta", you would not think that's okay or normal. You'd probably recognize pretty quickly that that is abuse and you'd probably call CPS on those parents if you could.
The "I want to hurt people, especially vulnerable people" side of the political spectrum
Republicans claim to be tough on crime. But Republicans also balked at a study that showed that giving prisoners cats greatly reduced recidivism.
Republicans whined that prisoners were being rewarded, while ignoring that many of these men were given companionship and responsibility. According to one man in the study (and I'm paraphrasing), "I can't do anything bad to increase my sentence. I need to keep my nose clean so I can provide my cat with a good home. If I get arrested, they'll take him away and he not end up with a family who loves him." Prisoners were avoiding crimes for their cats, but Republicans considered cats a reward instead.
They want people to suffer.
Compare and contrast:
One is an example of how media platforms like PinkNews trivialize biphobia, and reinforce bisexual erasure.
The other is an example from Out Magazine of a respectful headline that supports our struggle and validates the message.
[Image: Two drawings on top of one another. The upper one shows two light-skinned hands holding a white pill bottle with the textย โHard to swallow pillsโ. The bottom one shows an open palm holding three round pills, while the other one is pointing a finer at them. Text:ย โSometimes women leave other women for men without it being a result of comphet, centering men, or buying into heteropatriarchy. You can heal from that pain without being biphobic.โ]
Yesterday in my (very cishet) sewing class, I heard about a woman who cancelled her wedding because she fell in love with another woman.
Here are some of the things I learned:
- It's a good thing that it happened now rather than later because her fiance would have had a miserable marriage life - this one is great because their solidarity automatically went to the man. Cishet solidarity trumps gender.
- It is impossible to be engaged to a man and also like women because the two "do not go together". It was later suggested that maybe she was "into both" because bisexual is a dirty word and we can't say it. It was ruled to be highly unlikely.
- It was assumed: a. She'd been lying to him for years, and b. That there was no way for a cishet man and a sapphic woman to have a relationship, much less marriage - this one really illustrates the narrow world of possibilities that cishets are trapped in. Kind of mind boggling.
- Everyone was incredibly scandalized and kept returning to it throughout the 4 hours of class, which again shows the very narrow boundaries and lack of imagination of cishet life.
I said absolutely nothing because hell if I'm going to get into a discussion of biphobia and toxic monogamy with a group of strangers (which they are, this is how the classes work). But I'm kind of amused at the irony of them having no idea who I was and what I write about.
Also I think she deserves congratulations.
All in all, a highly educational experience 0/13 would not recommend.
More statistical wonders from the land of bi erasure: I just checked the google news search, and in 2022 the word โbisexualโ was only mentioned 193,000 times in the press, compared to 33,300,000 for the word โgayโ (that's 0.5%).
Bis comprise 50% or more of the LGBT population.
Reseaching some stats on TV bi characters. A 2011 study by Stonewall UK showed that out of 126 hours, only 5 minutes and 9 seconds were devoted to depicting bisexual characters.
What happened since then, you ask? Seems like no one has bothered to check. This is bi erasure on a meta level.
(GLAAD's reports count characters, but don't specify screen time depicting bisexuality, so the data is really hard to rely on. They count Loki, for example, but his bisexuality is a literal blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment out of 10 hours. And he's not the only one.)
bidyke reblogged
muppethole-deactivated20240312
more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once
muppethole-deactivated20240312
for almost a year now i've been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort. i've been poring over what's available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word "fist" in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there's not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.
while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents' original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren't even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they're able to receive their words at all.
President and COO of MMA, a marketing trade association, explains to Elon why advertisers are leaving and itโs NOT activist pressure.
Oh, and then this happened:
You know things are messed up when established capitalist market protocol is the left marker of this fiasco.
Source: i.redd.it
bidyke reblogged
How to protect yourself during stampede
this isnโt the usual thing Iโd share on my stupid nerd blog, but this is SO important. I was nearly crushed in a crowd like this once. It was terrifying because you have NO control over the panicking mass of humans around you. you are just at the mercy of all this chaotic force. this is a real thing that can happen very suddenly! it did happen in the news recently! My situation was, the olympics was happening in my city, I was on my way home from school, and a crowd of people suddenly flooded into the street around me. in seconds it went from, busy-city-street-crowded, to, wtf I canโt even move crowded. I was so pressed against the backpack of the man in front of me, my feet lifted off the ground a moment. People were climbing lamp posts, signs, bus shelters, trees, everything to get up out of it. it was like the street became an ocean of people, and all the peopleโs survival instincts were making them dumber. everyone was yelling. no one knew how to solve it. police, fire fighters and medics saved us by breaking the locks on the inside of the mall we were trapped next to. a huge group flooded into the building, releasing a bit of the pressure on the people outside. I was in that group that got in.
We were trapped in the mall awhile. Because the olympics was on, they had big screens in a few sitting areas of the mall that would normally be showing the games. but now the coverage was focused on this crowd surge. They showed a helicopter shot of the building we were now in, totally surrounded by colorful dots. a solid mass of humans with no space between.ย I know someone was partially trampled and needed medics, because I saw that, but i donโt know the statistics on who else was hurt, hopefully no one killed! I donโt know if these methods can definitely save you, but they might give you a better chance. so watch and share!
Sharing to my own stupid nerd blog for the same reason, this is SO IMPORTANT. Human crushes are one of the most unexpected ways to die. People go out to a show or a sports game, and make it there, but they never come back. Other strategies include staying away from large obstacles (like fences) that you could get crushed against, and doing your best to stay above the crowd. Try to climb onto something if you can.
And also โ not to get nitpicky with deadly tragedies, but theyโre called โhuman crushes,โ not โstampedes.โ Itโs an important difference in description and also in respect. The deaths usually happen because the victims are pinned together in a tight space, they canโt breathe (as in the video) and they suffocate. โStampedeโ doesnโt convey what actually happened to those people. The crush that happened in Seoul recently wasnโt because people โstampeded,โ it was because they couldnโt move at all and they suffocated. But calling it a โstampede,โ youโd think it was the people themselves that ran over each other, like wild animals. Itโs disrespectful and untrue.
Horrifyingly, the victims of many human crushes have been blamed for their own deaths, which are usually purely accidental or due to criminal mismanagement from authorities. If youโre in a mental place to read about tragedies and police corruption, check out the Hillsborough Disaster, in which 97 people died due to the incompetence of the police, who then blamed everything on the victims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster
bidyke reblogged
like to charge reblog to make airbnb die faster
bidyke reblogged
Everything Everywhere All At Once 2022 โข dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
bidyke reblogged
In the continuing story of "genius" Elon Musk taking over Twitter and then possibly fucking up entirely, apparently you have to give at least 60 days notice of mass layoffs by federal and state law in California, and shockingly enough, Musk didn't do that when he bought to company and planned to start mass layoffs within a week.
bidyke reblogged
Twitter is a literal cesspit but at least you get to see Stephen King tell elon musk to fuck off causing musk to beg Stephen King for $8
Followed by the funniest self own Iโve seen in a while
bidyke reblogged
Welcome twitter users fleeing the absolute cesspool that twitter is going to become as Musk gets his way with his awful ideas! Things are better here, and hey, if you're an old user coming back, they've actually improved shit!
Here's a list of important notes for tumblr usage:
- Don't censor words, particularly trigger warnings. Tumblr has a very functional blacklist (found in your settings) that can filter by post content and/or tags. But the word needs to actually be present for the filter to work. Censoring words like r*pe is actively harmful to people attempting to avoid those topics.
- Use tags liberally, you have as many as you want, but don't tag unrelated shit. You'll get reported for spam really fast if you do.
- Set an avatar and reblog things, otherwise you look like a bot.
- You are not obligated to have your real name anywhere in your blog/bio/etc. Most people here use handles.
- You can turn your ask box & anons on or off if you are experiencing any kind of harassment. You can also turn off replies on your posts, and turn off reblogs if you need to.
- Tumblr has keyboard shortcuts on desktop. You can find them listed under the blog/account menu. Go learn them, they make life so much easier.
- Reblog things. Seriously. Also set your dash in chronological order. You can maintain several blogs if need be, but reblogging things is normal, expected, and how you pass along stuff you enjoy.
- The majority of people aren't reading your card/dni/blog bio before they reblog stuff. Posts get passed around and the OP often isn't the focal point of the post. Learn to live with it.
- Fic writers: you have unlimited words, do not post fics as images.
- Reblogs with comments/tags are encouraged. It's not like twitter's QRTs. The OP will see everything there. Know that before you comment.
- You have a queue. This means you can set posts up ahead of time to run while you're busy. You can also completely ignore this and just spam your follows whenever you're online. Both are very commonplace
- It's not weird to go through someone's blog and reblog old posts. That's actually very normal. If you add /chrono to the end of a tumblr page then you can view all the posts in chronological order to make this easier.
- "Spam" liking and reblogging isn't a thing that is a problem. This is invented by people I do not understand. If someone claims this is a problem, they can learn how to turn off or manage their notifications.
- The only form of promotional posts that tumblr has is "blaze". There is no ad targeting or any kind of invasions of privacy with blaze. You just get subjected to w/e someone wants to show you. If you want to give tumblr some money to help the company keep going and providing an alternative to twitter, it's not a bad way to do it. You can make people look at cat photos.
- Also, we have fun colors here. Plus actual formatting ability. Use it!
- People lie on here for fun. Don't accept everything you see at face value, check the reblogs/replies or google something if you're skeptical! Critical thinking is good!
- Above all else, be chill, use your block button if you need to, and have fun.
