Teaser for my submission to the Gummy Guts 2 art book, being put together and sold by ayceeart on twitter! You can see the full version in the book when it’s available!
I was made aware of a callout post about me by a friend of mine. Here’s all I have to say on the matter.
TW for mentions of abuse, self harm, and transphobia
A large portion of the post is spent accusing me of fetishising gay men for drawing male characters kissing, or previously reblogging porn of men / male characters. This is done on the basis that I am not allowed to do such things because, I quote, “ Even if she is nb/agender, she still refers to herself with she/her pronouns. She/her is a feminine set of third-person singular personal pronouns connoting being female. This is basic English. So yes, Cuteosphere is a woman at least to some extent. Even if Cuteosphere wasn’t a woman to any degree, and purely non binary, they are not a man or male to any degree (as he/him pronouns are not present at all they are not genderfluid either). Thus, Cuteo can still be very much be guilty of fetishization of homosexual and trans men.”
This paragraph comes straight after a quote from me about how I do not identify as a woman. It is outright denial of my identity to try to paint me as the Squealing Yaoi Fangirl that the writer desperately wishes me to be. For someone who spends a lot of the callout post using their own identity to justify judging mine, you’d think they would be above outright denying mine, but I guess that’s expecting a lot from people who make these sorts of posts.
(And for the record, the she/her pronouns are smaller in the screenshot you posted because I only include them for other people’s comfort. If I were more confident I’d request people only refer to me as they/them (and occasionally he/him), but I’m not. And I have no obligation to explain this further to someone who has no interest in respecting my identity.)
On a related note, if you’re going to call me out for “fetishising trans men”, probably don’t do it in the same post as praising someone who admits they make money drawing a character who is a trans “hooker” (their choice of wording). I guess I’m supposed to be a hypocrite for drawing a male-identifying character happy and pregnant while also not liking someone’s edgy porn (as if they’re even comparable) but it’s such a massive reach it’s incredible.
Holy shit, the post outright SHOWS that said person has edited my art into nazism and racist slurs, but the most the post maker has to say about that is;
“I do agree that sqrlyjack’s vandilism to the artwork is very childish and offensive. It is extremely and blatantly racist filled nazi and white supremacist imagery. Of course there is no way I can defend that in any way. However, it is also very obvious bait to rile Cuteo up. Anyone with common sense can see that. The purpose of the vandilisim was pretty clearly to elicit attention from Cuteo and get an angered reply - it quite clearly succeeded. Cuteo gave Sqrly exactly what they wanted. If Cuteo wanted to do the mature and smart thing, she would’ve ignored it, because eventually Sqrly would’ve got bored after failing to grab her attention through it.”
So let me get this straight. In the SAME POST as taking me to task for drawing a cartoon saying she hates all boys, or drawing a male-identifying character being casual while pregnant, the post creator EXCUSES editing someone’s work into ACTUAL HATE SPEECH because “oh, it was just trolling! Not like this, this is REALLY bad and wrong!”
Speaking of reaches, if you’re going to accuse me of making NSFW MLP fanart, you should probably have better examples than 1 piece of nsfw art of a character that isn’t even a pony (I have no idea why they were uploaded to a mlp image gallery) and a drawing of the cast of payday as ponies standing around. Oh, and a video of me using a mlp toy to fire miniature dildos through the air?? Good god
And let’s not skip over the casual dismissal of how my mental illness affects my day to day life;
“ Also ‘poor health issues’? Honey, your mental illnesses don’t excuse shitty work ethic to such an extent. People waited 2 - 4 years for their shirts. The shirts they paid a pretty decent amount of money for. Cuteo evidently didn’t even bother with customers that complained until she was called out twice for shitty work ethic. Listen, I myself have been diagnosed with Asperger’s and an anxiety disorder, I also come from a low income household, BUT, you don’t see me avoiding responsibility and making people wait unreasonably long times for things they’ve been promised (especially when money is involved).”
Goodness yes, I definitely see how your own illness plays in to- oh no wait, it’s just another instance of you using your identity to try to justify policing mine, only this time it’s to try to make my illness seem unreasonable rather than to tell me I’m Really A Woman Actually. How nice of you. Again.
Oh! and while we’re at it, how about the dismissal of my own self-destructive tendencies in an attempt to, once again, use yourself as an example of how a Good and Nice survivor acts; “Let me tell you, as a person who has actually self harmed before by cutting and picking at my skin until it bleeds, seeing a glorification of it is absolutely disgusting. Once again, trivialising very serious things for the sake of fetishization. Gross.”
One of the photos quoted is outright a photo of my own self harm. That’s a lot to dismiss as “trivializing”. Would it have been less trivialised if I’d edited the photo into nazism and racial slurs?
Finally, I’m going to talk about the trawling of my old nsfw blog and art because I’m so tired of this. I don’t know why you and others like you seem to think that literally years old screencaps justify harassing and stalking me to this day but whatever, I guess this is where we’re at. This is something I genuinely struggle to talk about, so please try not to use it as a springboard to use your own identity / issues to police mine again.
A few years ago, I became friends with two people who I looked up to immensely. I viewed them as somewhat inspirational; they displayed mentally ill traits like mine (self destructive, weird interests, fascination with grotesque imagery, weird sense of humour) but two things made them different from me; they were physically attractive, and they were popular. I was absolutely smitten.
I’ve done this a lot throughout my life - probably the BPD, at least partially - I tend to mimic people I look up to. In this case that mimicry came in the form of exaggerating my own sexuality. See, these two people were very “sex positive”; they were of the mindset that sexual quirks were something that were completely removed from someone’s morals and actions. As an abuse and trauma survivor who 1. is sex repulsed (but has struggled to overcome it in vain) and 2. struggles to feel good without being physically harmed, this was a dangerously reassuring sentiment. Suddenly I wasn’t broken or a monster - it was just a fetish! I just had a fetish for self mutilation, or being hurt. And why stop there? Maybe my idealization of dominant people was a fetish too. Maybe the urges I’ve had to self harm since I was a small child were a fetish. Maybe the fact that I lay awake at night feeling like my insides were hollow and full of wriggling parasites was a fetish. I’d been introduced to a “get out of being broken by trauma free” card. What a relief! So I said and did a lot of idiotic shit. I created imagery to experiment with how it would make myself and others feel. I played up to these people I looked up to because I saw myself as a pathetic, broken loser and I felt that maybe I could be like them - broken, but still appealing.
Of course, as you can expect (or as you know, if you’ve made an educated guess as to who I’m referring to), both of these people turned out to be sexual abusers. The news genuinely made me so ill I retreated from social interaction for a while. I was repulsed - in an effort to be free of something that had dictated my mind and body for almost my entire life, I had been manipulated by it again. People may have noticed that at this time, my more sexual jokes died down a lot to the point of eventually almost vanishing. It’s not a coincidence; it had been performative, and I had no use for it once I realized that it was not only useless, but me buying into abuser rhetoric. For a while I completely forgot that my other blog existed - until I was made aware that people who were angry at me for having Opinions had started to rake through it for Dirt on me. It was a nauseating, intrusive feeling; as ridiculous as it sounds, I felt like these people had broken into my real house. (And yes, I have had my house broken into before, so don’t accuse me of “making light of” how traumatic that is).
I’ll be honest; I don’t expect the person who made the post will read this and feel any genuine sympathy. If anything I’m sure they’ll scoff and say this is a pathetic attempt by me to make myself the “victim” or something. Hell, they outright quote my stalkers in their post multiple times, so I don’t have to be clairvoyant to know this is going on deaf ears. But I don’t really care? The reason I’m finally being open about this is because I want you to know what you are doing when you throw these things in my face as examples of my current behavior. I want you - you who spent your post pretending to have some sort of flimsy moral high ground while invalidating any aspect of my identity you could pin down - to know what you are doing when you bring these things up. And I want you to own it. And more than that, I want nobody else to do what I did.
Now please, for goodness’ sake, move on and get a hobby.
My excuse is that it’s pride month, so here are some comics that are retelling actual conversations we’ve had recently. The UK heatwave means lots of hanging around in underwear eating cola flavor ice lollies.
I was originally going to post this as two separate images (to make it clearer they’re two separate comics) but tumblr’s way of handling images is to jpeg compress everything to hell so never mind
Character design sketches for CMYK, a colour-coded animal sentai team (and also one of their foes). Been doing lots of ink doodling while my computer gets fixed.
More Gin & Tonic; practicing Tonic’s body language and brainstorming other escaped lab rat characters (with personalities and designs based on their scientific usage)
janainaart
areudirty
origamiaround
gummygunk
prguitarman
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline