trans 👏 people 👏 aren’t 👏 asking 👏 you 👏 to 👏 have 👏 sex 👏 with 👏 someone 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 want 👏 to 👏 they’re 👏 asking 👏 you 👏 to 👏 consider 👏 the 👏 way 👏 cis 👏 language 👏 about 👏 sexuality 👏 and 👏 gender 👏 is 👏 harmful 👏 to 👏 them 👏 and 👏 adjust 👏 accordingly 👏
trans 👏 people 👏 aren’t 👏 asking 👏 you 👏 to 👏 have 👏 sex 👏 with 👏 someone 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 want 👏 to 👏
How often my conversations about feminism have spiraled into requests for assault. I say, “Women don’t need men to defend them,” and am asked, “Can I punch you, then?” And I say, “Women belong in movies and video games and everything,” and I hear terrible things, unprintable slurs and demands for my assault, the threatening of a young woman to shut up: What they would do to silence me. The things they’d shove between my teeth. I say, “Men cannot threaten any woman they disagrees with,” and I’m told, “Women are just as cruel. Am I not supposed to respond in kind?” In my inbox today I have deleted sixteen messages asking for my life. When I say, “Your virginity only means what you want it to mean,” I’m asked, “If you believe in sexual freedom can I fuck you?” When I say “All it takes to be a woman is to want to be a woman,” I am asked, “So if I just say that I’m a woman, can I watch you in the shower?” As if women stand shadowy behind each other in our private moments. As if being woman means sexually assaulting each other.
Part of me – cynical, unwilling to be frightened, says that it might be a nice dose of reality. My shower where I am naked but my hair becomes streaky and thin, where my body sags, where my makeup smears. To witness a woman less than sexy, legs akimbo while shaving, pulling up flab thighs to reach the underside. Part of me dares them to punch me because I fight to win and am small but I’ll kill a man if he touches me. Once I dropped a U.S Marine. Part of me, hellfire and ice queen – says come on, then. You want a fight? Come fight me.
But more is scared. More timidly deletes messages, makes sure my name is hidden, doesn’t answer the endless antifeminist comments. The insertion of men and their opinion on simple things like “I teach children to ask before hugging.” When I close my eyes sometimes I wonder if they’re right and that scares me. How much am I going to change when my voice only echoes around me.
Why are you angry. Why are you angry. What do you think we are taking from you? If it’s not already equal why would equality frighten you.
The ancient art of being a woman and trying to get your voice heard: the gentle suggestion, the peaceful comment. The quiet listening to another opinion and the fact we must acknowledge it before we can continue. That I must educate, be sweet, be feminine in my feminism or else it’s “invalid.” I must present my declaration as a timid thing: “Women maybe should be part of more things.” And then the apologies: of course I don’t hate men, yes I like plenty of things with men in them, no I don’t think women are better. And then the explanations: women are people, here is the number of women in media, here is the number of dead women in media, here are the number of shows led by men. And then I brace for it. For the bullying.
Every time I speak it’s from a flinch. From “maybe this isn’t always the case but for me it is.” From please listen. From less demanding. God forbid I state factually that men are violent. If I speak about our fathers and brothers and the cycle of anger unfolding. God forbid I suggest that just once we should cut the bullshit and treat women well without pandering to men about how that helps them. What if I say “Men shouldn’t hit anyone. Hitting isn’t an answer.”
I’ll tell you what happens. The post was up for four seconds with three notes. The message I get is “If hitting isn’t allowed I’ll just go ahead and shove a gun down your throat.”
I hate that coming out is like, entirely for the sake of cis&straight people. We come about because they can’t stop assuming that everyone else is cis&straight, we come out because they can’t stop being homophobic and transphobic and assuming that we are comfortable hearing it, we come out because they keep asking about why we don’t have a boyfriend yet or monitoring which bathroom we use. And then there’s the fact that cis&straight people are so invested in us coming out. They tell us it’s lying and deceptive when LGBT folks don’t come out to the point that they tell other people for us, they tell us that they “already knew” or “could tell” and brag about their gaydar or else they praise us by pretending it’s a compliment that they “never would’ve guessed”, then they go on to call us “brave” and “strong” for doing something we never should’ve had to do in the first place. And then there’s the idea that we are the ones who should feel ashamed about it and be told that they “still love us” despite the fact that it’s their hatred and bigotry that we’ve had to deal with the entire time we’ve known them and not the other way around. Coming out is the only milestone they think we have because it’s the one that they play the biggest role in and the one that they necessitate and I absolutely hate that about coming out.
I took my father to see Rogue One today. I’ve wanted to take him for a while. I wanted my Mexican father, with his thick Mexican accent, to experience what it was like to see a hero in a blockbuster film, speak the way he does. And although I wasn’t sure if it was going to resonate with him, I took him anyway. When Diego Luna’s character came on screen and started speaking, my dad nudged me and said, “he has a heavy accent.” I was like, “Yup.” When the film was over and we were walking to the car, he turns to me and says, “did you notice that he had an accent?” And I said, “Yeah dad, just like yours.” Then my dad asked me if the film had made a lot of money. I told him it was the second highest grossing film of 2016 despite it only being out for 18 days in 2016 (since new year just came around). He then asked me if people liked the film, I told him that it had a huge following online and great reviews. He then asked me why Diego Luna hadn’t changed his accent and I told him that Diego has openly talked about keeping his accent and how proud he is of it. And my dad was silent for a while and then he said, “And he was a main character.” And I said, “He was.” And my dad was so happy. As we drove home he started telling me about other Mexican actors that he thinks should be in movies in America. Representation matters.
Hello Guys! A lot of you have been asking for my dad’s reaction, and here he is. He was off to work this morning when I snagged him…
a new law is about to be passed in Saudi Arabia that will allow the government to execute people for coming out or being openly gay online.
ignoring the fact that this is literally something out of some kind of dystopian novel, in the interests of safety i’ve emptied out my face tag and may temporarily deactivate or password protect this blog.
please reblog this and get the word out, and if you pray, please pray for me and my fellow Saudi LGBTQ+/MOGAI family.
ALSO, for those who need it [x]. its a post on erasing all traces of yourself from the interwebs.
this is not something to read and keep to yourself. please spread this around. may Allah keep everyone safe.
What the hell
People, this stuff is serious and seriously wrong. I do hope that you are able to survive this send it to a safe space.
I don’t wanna hear any public mourning for the death of Carrie Fisher by JJ Abrams, George Lucas, or any other SW director unless it also involves an unequivocal apology for the fatphobic, misogynistic abuse that they subjected her and her body to, and a commitment to never again demand dangerous weight loss from an actress
Oop, JJ Abrams calls her death “an unfair thing”! Yes, it’s unfair… kinda like the fact that you required a woman in her late 50s to starve herself down to ¾ of her natural body weight in order to be hired back as Leia in The Force Awakens. Kinda like not letting mentally ill, middle-aged, average-sized women see themselves accurately represented by an actress who never wanted to compromise her mental or physical health for work, but who had to because you wouldn’t cast her otherwise. Kinda like how the fatphobia in Hollywood buttresses a multi-billion dollar diet industry for no other reason than to generate disgusting amounts of profit. Carrie Fisher’s death is unfair, but not to you.
Oh boy, I um… never expected this to get like 1000x more notes than my average ranty post. To be clear, I don’t think Abrams sat down with Carrie and said “Lose weight or we get another Leia.” But she was heavily pressured to lose 35 pounds (a LOT for someone her height) for TFA, and she famously joked that they only wanted to hire ¾ of her. She was sent to a weight loss camp before the original trilogy and pressured into losing ever more weight for the part (you can bet she would’ve been replaced if she’d refused). Carrie had some internalized fatphobia as well, and she was a realist about the industry. She worried she’d look “stupid” at her normal weight in TFA, and she might certainly have gotten fatphobic backlash, but no one was taking that chance.
Carrie was at the very least coerced by directors like Abrams and Lucas to engage in rapid, on-demand, significant weight loss, and those cycles of weight loss are quite damaging to the heart – in fact, weight cycling can increase risk of heart failure by up to 3.5x. At her age and with her history, Carrie’s body was less resilient and the weight loss for TFA was particularly dangerous. But it was dangerous when she was younger, too. Lucas, Abrams et al could have said she was fine as she was, that she was perfectly capable of acting the part at any size. They had that power. But instead they made it clear that it was her thinness and not just her acting they wanted, she knew those were the terms, and her body paid the price.
I can’t ‘police’ the grief of powerful Hollywood directors; they’re bazillionaires who don’t read my obscure tumblr blog. But I feel it’s in the spirit of Carrie to call the bullshit like we see it.
In addition to supporting the health of their stars, I would have *loved* to see TFA with Mark and Carrie at their natural, heavier, middle-aged weights. Fatter Luke and plumper Leia. That would have been simply amazing.
I hate when straight people talk about how we “should never assume anyone is gay!!” based on appearance/mannerism/behaviour/anything
But they never talk about how assuming everyone is straight is harming people!!!
Not letting us talk about gay aesthetics and traditions and culture is just another way to silence and isolate us 🙂
It’s so disingenuous, too. Like…I know I look gay, okay? I get called out and harassed by strangers all the time over my appearance. And I do most of it on purpose! This isn’t some high school movie ugly duckling narrative; lesbians aren’t awkward wallflowers wishing desperately that they could look like straight girls, if only they’d ever learned how. As if we could escape being taught! I’m a grown adult and I choose to look this way.
If you really don’t think there’s anything wrong with being gay, why do you think it’s the polite thing to pretend you don’t see it, especially since it’s how I wish to be seen?
This is such a good post, my god. Sometimes I feel so guilty for recognizing other queer folks by picking up the signals – aka, “assuming based on stereotypes” – but the reality is that most of us who do have those signs and signals are intentionally coding to find each other and be ourselves visibly and loudly.
i’m now seeing posts that are basically accusing therapists of being the same as ““““neurotypicals”””” who tell you that doing yoga will cure your depression
and it’s fucking killing me because ??? the idea of being annoyed by people telling you that stuff is because those people honestly think that doing yoga and “looking on the bright side” will magically cure your depression, because they can’t imagine happiness not coming as easily to someone else as it does to them. the idea isn’t that getting exercise and practicing positive thinking are useless ways to treat depression. but that’s what i’m seeing a lot of now and i just want to say…. i got some fucking bad news, cause that is the treatment for depression.
therapists telling you to get good nutrition and exercise are not the same as your yoga-instructor aunt on facebook posting pictures of the sunrise and wondering how anyone can be depressed when the world is so wonderful!!! thats not just an anti-recovery attitude, it’s an anti-treatment attitude, and it’s unbelievably ignorant.
there’s sort of this interesting circular form to dealing with mental illness, where you start in a place of “i just need to think positively and push myself out of this ditch” and then you move to step 2, which is “depression is a real and very serious illness and it’s not my fault that i’m tired all the time, stop telling me to just “think positive” all the time.”
But then there’s step three, which is where you size up your situation and say “look, i understand how serious my illness is, and i’m no longer blaming myself for it. And it sucks, and I don’t “deserve” this, and I didn’t bring it on myself. But regardless of how unfair it is, the truth is that I’m the only one who can actually do anything about it.” And so in a lot of ways, you end up with parallel ways of thinking as before, but this time you’re coming from a completely different source of understanding. People who don’t know anything about mental illness say “depression is a choice.” People who are fed up with being depressed and realize that wallowing in the comforting embrace of self-pity is useful to erase guilt, but ultimately won’t help them lead a better life say, “recovery is a choice.”
The first group means that if you’re depressed, you can just magically decide not to be depressed. The second group means that depression is a crushing weight on your back determined to make your life as miserable (and as short) as possible, and that you didn’t do anything to cause it, but that ultimately you have the choice of giving up and accepting being depressed for the rest of your life, or you have the option of making an effort to improve your quality of life. Similar statements, totally different meanings.
But I think a lot of people are sort of seduced by the comfort of giving up, and with the good intention of creating communities of understanding and non-judgement between mentally ill people, social media has unwittingly created communities of mentally ill people encouraging each other to give up. To just accept that this is the way their lives are, and there’s no possibility of getting better. And that’s how it’s gotten to the point of people dismissing actual mental health professionals as being no different than some ignorant person who doesn’t know the first thing about psychology and thinks an avocado smoothie will solve all your problems.
Avocado smoothie people are coming from the first perspective, that being depressed is a free choice that you can easily opt out of. Therapists are coming from the second perspective, where mental illness is a horrible reality, but given that you’re seeing them, a provider of mental health treatment, of fucking course they’re going to give you advice on how to treat your mental illness! Your therapist isn’t going to sit around and say “yeah man that sucks, haha look at this funny meme about how much you want to kill yourself.” Your therapist is going to give you recommendations of activities and habits that will help you recover. And they understand that these activities are not easy!!! They get that!!! The reason they’re there is to help you introduce these activities and ways of thinking into your life!!! Otherwise they’d just hand you a pamphlet and walk out!!!
But you can’t access that kind of help – the kind where you say “getting out of the house is a real problem for me, I never have the energy to get out of bed” and your therapist says “okay let’s figure out how to break this down into small steps, we’ll set a small goal for this week, and next time we meet you can tell me if it worked out, and if it did then we can figure out what the next goal will be, and if not then we can figure out why it didn’t work and try a different approach” – if you immediately dismiss any mention of recovery as “neurotypical bullshit.”
Anyways please please please take your healthcare seriously, get treatment, and realize that giving up and normalizing your depression/anxiety/etc as something that will never ever get better (yes, even if it’s a chronic condition that you’ll never fully cure, you still need to treat it) is not okay. Try to get good nutrition. Try to get sunshine and exercise. Try to be social. Making an effort to do things that will help you is not the same as thinking mental illness is a switch you can easily flip. Getting treatment is not the same thing as pretending your mental illness doesn’t exist or isn’t serious. On the contrary, getting treatment is taking your mental illness seriously. I’m not saying you should never make a joke or reblog a fucking meme or anything, I’m saying don’t use social media as your mental health care provider. Social media can be a way to vent, but venting is not the same thing as recovering.
Honestly it can take a very long time to get to that “step 3″ perspective but it’s a vital step.
THIS.
I’ve got my boyfriend calling me at 8am every weekday morning to get me out of bed so that I *get out of bed*. I then tell him when I’ve gotten to the gym.
We have worked this out between us, consensually, because I can’t fucking make myself do it. Because depression. But when I get up and go to the gym, suddenly my days get way, way more functional. I eat real food, I run errands, I cook- instead of laying on the couch feeling like my diaphragm got nailed to the floor. (They don’t all necessarily happen every day, but they become at least theoretically feasible.) This isn’t part 1, it’s part 3. Because dammit, I am fucking sick of this shit. I don’t deserve it and it’s a real issue- and for me, having someone to basically hotwire me because my starter is broken is how we’re gonna get a routine that takes minimal spoons to run.
Sometimes depression is cureable. Sometimes it’s just treatable. But dissing treatment because “gah neurotypicals” is shooting yourself in the foot.
Sometimes self-care is baths and Netflix and junk food and Tumblr. And sometimes self-care is an arranged phone call at 8am.
I want to add that I am finally at step 3 and it took 8 years to get here. My mindset was in denial, refusing that recovery is possible. It is especially hard to believe on days that nothing seems to help.
I am glad I am finally in step 3 and it isn’t necessarily easier. I have slump back into another week of depression, avoiding exercise and isolating myself. Which is why I use the people who care about me to push me to do these small activities.
My sister will tell me to get up, stop me from unhealthy OCD tendencies I have that are persuaded by my depression. If it weren’t for a little push, I would be stuck at step 2. Seeing a therapist was my own decision because at one point, after a terrible slump of months of depression, I got sick and tired.
I want a recovery so it takes time to get here but if you aren’t the one making the decision, you won’t ever realize that depression isn’t “cured” but can at least be put to the side and manageable.
Step 3 is the longest step and may be what you do for the rest of your lives. There are going to be days where you break a routine and suddenly you’re lost again and step back a phase. And it’s terrible because immediately thoughts flood in that I failed, that I’m never going to get better.
But no, fuck that, you have to remember that days were getting better when you tried. It is your decision to take the chance of something better and of course you feel negative and unmotivated to get here because your depression is holding you back.
No more of this “therapists act just like neurotypicals” because if you know your psychology, you know none of these things are lies because your therapist KNOW this is hard and are going to accomdate to what YOU think suits you. My therapist always reminds me that these session are a two people job between me and her. If I’m not honest with her, I’m not doing myself any good.
Seek help. Make an effort. Don’t downplay therapists as a bad guy. And try to make an effort finding the right therapist for you because maybe one doesn’t sit with you right. But don’t dismiss it. You can try to make life a little bearable and you will be grateful for it.
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