In a piece for The New Inquiry from back in 2017, George Dust states that when queer people complain about there being a top shortage, what they really mean is ānobody is fucking me the way I want, and I have no agency in that.ā Alongside co-authors Billy-Ray Belcourt and Kay Gabriel, Dust suggests that many queer people align themselves with a passive or ābottomā position because they believe that role will absolve them of the guilt of really wanting things. They present themselves as what they believe to be the sexual party with zero power; the receiver, the accepter of action rather than its cause.
This position is drawn in contrast to the bottom-identified personās idea of a top: the one who approaches, the person with hungers and desires, the person who decides which sexual activities will happen and how intense they will get. The top, from this perspective, is the stronger, more capable, more dangerous person. Theyāre the only one who can ever be guilty of intruding or harming somebody else. This power is scary, but itās also compelling.
Dust calls this fantastical version of a top a ābruteā ā and they are the most cartoonish stereotype of what it means in society to be a man. Because itās a cartoonish stereotype, no human actually lives up to it ā and weād probably revile a person even if they could.
Though queer people know we are harmed by the gender binary and heteronormativity and all the social scripts those things force upon us, its biases are still embossed on our brains. Without meaning to, we reproduce tired gender stereotypes in our relationships. And so we see expressing a sexual want as masculine, and being masculine as being more capable of violence and coercive control, and thus bad. We see failing to communicate oneās desires openly as desirably feminine, as well as a sign of blamelessness and purity ā because on some level we still feel it is wrong to have desires.
But this entire worldview is a complete lie. Desire is not evil. Expressing attraction is not a violation. Failing to express oneself can be just as dangerous as not listening to someone elseās limits. Women can be abusive. Bottoms can sexually assault. No matter our gender, presentation, or sexual role, we are each capable of harm. And the only way to make a safe, mutually pleasurable sexual encounter happen is by going after it, actively, and communicating from a position of inner strength.
So how do you do that, if societyās been telling you all your life that youāre meant to date by acting like a deer passively snapping twigs in the woods, waiting for some hunter to hear you, and pursue you? (That really is dating advice that Evangelical Christian counselors give to women, if you can believe it).
By not fixating so much on what youāre doing or not doing to draw other people toward you, and instead thinking in terms of what you want and what you observe beyond yourself.
Has anyone noticed that the more irrationally fearful you are the less careful and intentional you become thus resulting in recklessness and a manifestation of those fears
iām freaking out why did they add the fucked up version of the flushed emoji. I thought i was going crazy when i scrolled past this. How did a discord emoji end up in the real emojis list i thought. I took a screenshot incase everything is gone tomorrow and this is a fever dream
they added horny flushed emoji. they added bigfoot. they added cartoon sex cloud. and the trombone. you can now illustrate a sexual encounter with a clown and a bigfoot in just emojis
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