@bisousss / bisousss.tumblr.com
My coping mechanism for S2 apparently? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t draw a single line for about half a year, coming back to work with a portrait of Aziraphale was so inspiring and comforting, he had such an angelic aura in that precise frame from ep.2 that I couldn’t restrain myself from painting him (…and adding a non-existent earring as per usual, I know, I’m weak)
..Shuldad the Bihite anyone?
I’m just here to provide some Bildad content nobody asked for 🐐
The Difference Between “Hello” and “Goodbye”
— by Fabian Perez
The Addams Family (1991) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld
MARGOT ROBBIE 'Barbie' photocall in London (July 12, 2023)
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:
Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?
I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.
Nick described masculinity as an 'accusation' - "I'm often accused of masculinity. And, you know, I was born looking like this and I sound like this. You know, I did not cultivate [this]. I don't go to the gym. I'm not chasing masculinity. And so it's always seemed a little strange to me as a mincing theater artist to be accused of being manly. I am pretty handy at splitting firewood or changing a tire, but so are the women in my family. And so I use it as an opportunity to encourage people to try and loosen their ideas about genderizing everything. I know ladies that are great woodworkers and I know men that make an amazing quiche and everything across every spectrum in between.” (source) And this is his reaction to "having his man card revoked"
He is free now!
also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world
like maybe it comes across as mealy-mouthed and corny to people steeped in online cynicism but just to be clear, this is the country that wouldn’t eat french fries after 9/11 so we renamed them “freedom fries” and everyone was suddenly cool again. americans are not, by and large, super sophisticated about this stuff
okay, so, as a followup…. basically, i joined this “christians against trump” fb group for a work research project in 2017 and just ended up never leaving, bc it turned out to be such a great experiment in just… observing and listening and talking to people and figuring out the language that works! so like, as a basic glossary for talking to the well-meaning anti-trump moderate dems in your life about progressive policies:
the point is, as with all the rest of this, that there are a lot of people out there who are alienated by the language (because there has been a billion-dollar media propaganda machine working overtime to make the language as alienating as possible) but not by the content of the argument. the right is SO good at messaging to its base by speaking their language, dog whistles and all. but because the democratic party is a coalition of moderates and liberals and leftists, you really have to be strategic about your messaging in a way that the right doesn’t. frankly, that’s why joe biden won - he made those same broad appeals to morality and civility and unity and prosperity that people want to hear.
i realize that everyone feels that if you have the moral high ground, you shouldn’t have to put in work to persuade people because they should automatically grasp that you’re right, but like i said above, this is america, and it doesn’t work like that. we need to talk to people, not in buzzwords or in highly stigmatized language that risks turning them off immediately, but in language that already means something to them. if you want to persuade people you have to actually make things sound appealing to them, whether that means evoking warm and fuzzy mental images or appealing to their principles and moral convictions and religious beliefs or just doing your best to sound like the adults in the room. you gotta do this stuff to build a majority instead of just a plurality within this party, because that’s just what we need to win.
If you want to see this side of the argument in action: witness Dan Price on Fox News reframing Universal Basic Income as “taking money out of the government and putting it in the hands of everyday Americans,” which is just. *chef’s kiss* Speaking as someone raised by and around conservatives, they will eat that shit UP.
I think a big moral in all of this is that you can’t expect the VAST majority of Americans to be educated or knowledgeable about these kinds of issues. I don’t even mean that as a dig, just a reality. Most people, living their lives, working their jobs, do NOT use the internet for activism. They don’t read about these issues in detail. They don’t really understand WHAT those little phrases mean or WHY they should want them. Which means IF you want to be an activist and you if you want to get those people on board- you gotta get on their level and EXPLAIN it to them without the slogans. Which is work, and you are not obligated to spend your time doing it, or doing it all the time, or doing it with radicalized Trumpers who aren’t here in good faith; but it is THE work, ya know?
See also: Republicans have mastered this in the opposite direction. They take something Democrats or liberals want, reduce it to a Scary Soundbite, and done, now people hate it.
See: critical race theory
Critical race theory is actually a law school level class about how legal systems can disadvantage people of color in the United States. It’s been around for forty years.
Republicans have conflated it with “indoctrinating children to think being white is bad and hating America.” Moral panic ensues.
The Affordable Care Act becomes “Government takeover of Healthcare.” Etc etc etc
People need to be meet where they’re at with accessible language that understands the audience or else you’ll lose them
My mother is in favor of “universal healthcare” but against “socialized medicine.” The language used for these things really matters
You might say „it’s diluting our values”, but I don’t think so. It’s making our values more accessible. It is framing our beliefs in a way that more people can get behind.
That’s not a bad thing. That’s how representative democracy should work. Anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t talk/work/vote for someone that doesn’t 100% align with your values is selling you lies. Broad coalitions is how stuff gets done.
It also benefits you because you allow nuanced conversation. You aren’t right about everything. The world and the big issues in it are complicated.
Also all of the above issues are complicated and very facts dependent. Taxing the rich. The US Tax Code is insane. Of course it’s complicated. Because there are just so many different ways different things get taxed. Defunding the police / reinvesting in communities is going to look different in every community.
I know this post is about moderates, but I think a lot of leftist/left-leaning people underestimate how much they have in common with the average Republican. Education costs? Infrastructure? Cost of living? Medical debt? All these problems don’t stop just because you’re a Republican. Even the hot button issues like gun control. Something I didn’t know is that one legitimate use for automatic weapons is hunting because some animals run away when you shoot them, others run towards you. Then you need to protect yourself.
If you want a masterclass in how to turn people into single issue voters. Look no further than the NRA. They have done a marvelous job convincing a lot of people that their right to own a gun is fundamentally tied to who they are. This wasn’t the case 100 years ago. This doesn’t make these people dumb. It just makes them well-marketed to, which we all are. Here is a great Monkey Cage article about it.
