Art & Conservation @castronaut - Tumblr Blog

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in

solarishashernoseinabook

Let's not beat around the bush: Children's author JK Rowling sexually harassed someone. In some jurisdictions, this would count as sexual abuse. JK Rowling has committed a sex crime against a woman and fell back on the old rape apologist standby of "she was asking for it".

I hope your nostalgia is worth it

shegayonmygirl

girls I'm sorry as much as I talk about being a pervert I mostly just want someone to hold me tightly and make me feel safe and never let go

wilwheaton

herpsandbirds

Green Mantle (Caria mantinea), family Riodinidae, Bolivia

photographs by Cell Cell

#would wear THE FUCK out of a dress like this

warmfigure

i am massively overdue for a very very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy

unlettered-heathen

reblog to give prev a very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy

finnlongman

It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and it’s also LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which seemed like a good time to talk about a topic I’v

We generally find two models of history dominating popular discourse: a heteronormative model, in which only male/female relationships may be readily accepted as romantic or sexual and so all same-gender relationships must be read as socially normative friendship, or an amatonormative model which, in being open to the possibility of same-gender romance or sex, reads all intimate friendship as actually romance in disguise. The latter is an understandable compensation for the former, which dominated much 19th-20th century scholarship, but is just as essentialising and limited.

I wrote a post for Aro Awareness Week and Queer History Month about the peculiar tension of working on queer history and literature from an aromantic perspective.

my-deer-friend

From Finn's excellent post above (which contains a lot more than just this, go read it):

But the more I allowed that openness to lead me to consider how relationships were actually being constructed, rather than just how I expected them to be constructed, I also found myself doing the opposite: considering the ways in which marriage was constructed to resemble these specific kinds of friendship.

This is the thing.

Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated.

Montaigne, M. de, Screech, M. A., & Montaigne, M. de. (1993). The complete Essays. Penguin Books, p. 215.

THIS IS THE THING.

Although Montaigne distinguishes this model of loving-friendship from pederasty, he connects it to marriage

Haggerty, G. E. (2012). Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship. The Age of Johnson, 22, 331–XIII.

THIS!! Is the thing!!!

Throughout the late eighteenth century husbands were encouraged to be friends with their wives, to be as close to their wives as they had been to their intimate male friends. The effusive rhetoric of friendship was not modeled on that of romantic love, but rather romantic love took on the semiotics of friendship.

Tobin, R. (2000). Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk9bt, p.37.

This is not the only thing, and marriage is also an imperfect analogue for these relationships.

But! Friendship can be the model for a wide spectrum of intimacies. Some people in the past looked at friendships (platonic, romantic, heroic, what have you) and said, "Huh! We should model our most intimate and important social relationships on that!" And I think that's neat.

shadowtouchashadowhand-deactiva

ok so READ THIS BLOG POST - it gets across something ive felt re : romantic friendships and contemporary histories VERY WELL (although i do lean a teeny tiny bit more amato about it in the end i think, perils of being most likely alloromantic). as non-aro queer people we (royal) feel this huge need to define historical romantic friendships and the like as romantic and not friendships, because they don't fit into our typical modern models of friendship and actually more closely resemble our typical modern models of romance. the amount of times i've seen hamlet and horatio presented as if shakespeare legitimately sat down to write them as lovers, for example (and i'm not knocking that interpretation of the text, i've read some amazing fanfiction and i'm not ashamed, it's just ahistorical to present it as fact that is above criticism).

and yes! the label of 'romantic friendship' (or even just 'friendship') has absolutely been used to erase the queerness of relationships that were they heterosexual scholars would be SHOUTING romantic relationship or lovers at. things like shakespeare's sonnets, to use my personal favorite example, or hamilton and laurens. and yes! it is also my personal opinion that a not insignificant amount of romantic friendships contained what we would nowadays call romantic and or sexual feelings that were expressed through the model of romantic friendship because that was the model they had (which, despite it being due to homophobia, is a fundamentally different model of relationships to ours, which is by no means the Best one Ever, etc etc), and replicated perfectly into a 2025 setting they very well might have dated.

but! ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS WERE REAL GUYS. this was a REAL historical social structure and it should be treated as such. and many of these relationships do not fit neatly into modern 'romantic' or 'platonic' because they are NEITHER. they are their OWN THING. they are ambiguous! they vary from 'modern-day-besties' to 'qpr' to 'qpr with benefits' to 'passionately in erotic love' to 'intimacy born out of circumstance' to 'lovers' to 'modern-day-married'. and most of the time you, the historian, cannot definitively tell the difference. just like how you cannot really definitively tell the difference between what we would nowadays call a trans man, a lesbian, and a girl who just really hated the patriarchy and decided to make her own way through the world. because all of those concepts are MODERN. deciding that the historical figure in question HAD to be one or the other erases very real nuances and very real histories, and it serves as a 'fuck you' to every single person who sees themself in that story and history but who isn't the identity you've decided on.

anyways, tl;dr : don't call every intimate historical friendship a romantic relationship, read this post it's more interesting than my yapping goes into a LOT more than this and it's from an Actual Qualified Person TM, stop devaluing intimate friendships, stop exclusively putting historical relationships into modern boxes, and oh yeah marriage was often platonic too

rlyehtaxidermist

the only reliable, effective way of "protecting children" is education. but people don't want to hear that because they don't actually care about protecting children, they care about protecting a mythologised ideal of innocence

dispatchesfromtheclasswar

#prev tags are spot on:#individualism should be about acknowledging the agency of each person and responsibility thereof #not about absolving the self from responsibility to society or affect experienced thereof

grilledpeachh

dark-ethereal-visions

A message from Elijah Wood on the enduring quality of LOTR.

3liza

the RealDoll division that is working on AI-augmented sex dolls has sold an AI-equipped silicon unit named Sally to the Salamanca school district's high school at a steep discount, which is the only school district entirely inside an Indigenous rfeservation in America. they are testing an AI sex doll on high school kids, not sexually, but testing nontheless.

the Realbotix corporation claims the unit is not able to save identifying information, nor relay it or report it to Realbotix. But the robot is instructed to snitch on students it perceives as posing a threat:

Every safeguard described in the reporting traces back to the company itself. Realbotix's CEO said the system would always redirect conversation back to education and automatically alert administrators to language associated with self-harm. The superintendent, relaying what Realbotix told the district, said the system runs on a closed network with no internet connection and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. No independent audit, security review, or third-party verification of any of it appears anywhere in the reporting. Realbotix can describe what Sally's safeguards do. No one, including Realbotix, can yet describe what a program with these products does to a teenager's learning outcomes or emotional safety, because neither study has been run.

no independent vetting has been done on this supposed closed system, likewise ii assume it has internet connectivity of some kind. the fact that this is being tested on indigenous children is a familiar historical refrain, and according to the Facebook posts from the parents in the Salamanca district I read a few days ago, this was not voted on or presented to the PTA, but rather pushed through the board without consultation with the students or parents in the school

redstonedust

funny thing about anxiety is sometimes it kind of breaks your sense of danger. like i am known for repeatedly putting myself in situations that make my friends go "bro you couldve died. werent you scared?" and the answer is 👍 yjeah. i did it scared. i do everything scared. i didnt know that was the actual important kind of scary because i usually have to ignore my fears to function in society. it will happen again. watch out.

danceundersparklinglights

i’m going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you don’t agree with is getting too automatic and it’s eating you from the inside out

pjharvey

we have to start running a massive PSA campaign to young gay people so everyone understands there is a difference between being a dom and being a top and between being a sub and being a bottom. and also that sometimes you are neither a sub nor a bottom and you're just like shy. we need to be handing out flyers we need ads at every train station spreading the word

innerchildabortionclinic

Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested by federal authorities Saturday in Miami, according to U.S. Marshals Service.

Some news in the manosphere right now, not that anyone wanted to know.

Apparently they are being prosecuted for additional sexual offenses:

The CPS has decided to prosecute Andrew Tate, 39, with seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and 19 additional charges for offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. The CPS has decided to prosecute Tristan Tate, 38, with one count of sexual assault, two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.

For those not in the know, Andrew Tate is kind of notorious for marketing sex trafficking as an alpha male lifestyle