Main: twilightstarr-zinnia. Sideblog for serious political and queer stuff. Expect discussion about sexuality and kinks. American, white, adult, genderfluid maverique, greyromantic greysexual, they/them. Romance/sex nuanced. Dom leaning switch. Polyamorous/relationship anarchist. Pro RACK. Thoughts ≠ morality.
Every time I have to use a non-UK plug socket I feel sorry for it. It's just a little guy. So weak and flimsy. I want to get back to my strong butch wife.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"
this is a trans blog. if you come on here to tell me that male and female aren't genders despite them constantly being used that way, not lastly to misgender trans people, i'm blocking you. stop trying to find a woke excuse to misgender trans people.
the weirdest part about asexuality to me was finding out that people want to do a sex with someone in specific. that its not just a general "i want to have sex" i thought that's how it worked and it was because of social convention and convenience that people did it with a partner. i also didn't understand why it was seen as unfathomable to do it with a family member, because to me it just felt like peeing or something bodily kinda gross you just have to take care of sometimes. i didn't understand that people had a Want to do it with certain people and that this attraction was why they chose to do it. i thought everyone experienced that time of the month where your body just gets weird and people chose a close person or partner to do it as like, a convenience i guess. When i found out that people choose to do it for other reasons than libido it just did not make sense.
Same with romance tbh, i thought people chose a crush as like, the most convenient or close person to go after as a partner. i thought the "crush" thing was either an exaggeration or you just noticing "yeah, this person is cool enough to form a bond"
can you be maverique and also identify with binary genders ? i think im maverique but i also identity some with binary genders and idk if that makes me able to identify as maverique
yes, you can be multigender maverique + binary gender(s), in between maverique and (a) binary gender(s), a mix of maverique and (a) binary gender(s) etc.
while maverique in definition was coined as separate from binary genders, that's not how it works in practice for many who are multigender or similar.
male and female are also considered to be mutually exclusive by most people, yet people who are both very much exist.
The thing is I am very fascinated by gender and sexuality and fetishes and the intersection of all of these things but I can never talk about this IRL even in an academic way without everyone thinking I'm The horrible sex pervert
Honestly I do it anyway and almost always people end up going "oh, I've never been able to talk about it but here, look, I'm also a horrible sexual pervert this is so refreshing"
being anti-amatonormativity in a romance centered world is like watching half the people you know put all their eggs in one basket and then drop the basket and all their eggs break and they’re crying and swearing they’re never gonna do that again and then a month later they have all new eggs in a new basket and they tell you the problem was they didn’t have a strong enough basket or fresh enough eggs and then they drop the fucking basket again.
at some point i'm gonna have to write up a whole post about how "consent" (in a sexual context but also broadly) is a concept that stems from legal theory and is, as with most things, a social construct. okay whoops i did it here
an important social construct nonetheless! but like a lot of things about how we conceptualize consent, and the flaws therewithin, i feel come from treating consent as like. some vague form of social magic, and not a concept we made up and have been actively re-making up, and also that trying to take a legal concept and use it as the sole framework to analyze messy human relationships is always going to be problematic.
like. part of the reason the difference between rape and sex in ancient greek/roman myths are so blurry is because (people classed as) women could not consent, legally, because they could not be legal actors* at all. sex and gender and patriarchy are all ultimately about property and wealth. in order to get a wife who will take care of your household and provide you with heirs, you need to get permission from some daughter's father to make her your wife and have sex with her. if you have sex with her without permission, that is rape - because the term "rape" comes from a Latin term which literally just means seizing something by force, stealing something**
at the same time, people did have a sense that the woman in question could have opinions on the sex she was involved in and be more or less a willing participant, and that matter a variable degree depending on the situation. but "rape" was never supposed to be about the harm of violating a person's bodily autonomy, it was about legally regulating the violation of property and punishing those who broke that law. which also meant a woman could be "raped" when she was having willing sex with a person of her choosing, because it wasn't of her father's choosing. and this also means that "person choosing to be a slutty slut whore and cheat on her husband" and "person being forced to have sex against her will" are two situations that might be categorized the same way, making victim-blaming VERY common and easy.
what feminism did was say hey, (people classed as) women can be independent legal actors, and legally you need the person you are having sex with's permission to have sex with them, because they own and represent themself, legally. the sexual damage was re-conceived as coming not from the economic or spiritual or social damage to a father's reputation or a family's honor but the harm done to the victim themself. that change was genuinely vital! it is EXTREMELY important that "rape" stopped being about anyone's permission but the person actually involved in the sexual encounter.
but this is where we get to the problem i mentioned above. consent in this legal context can be much more black and white (although not completely) because the ultimate goal of considering consent at all is figuring out if a law was broken and what to do about that. when it comes to interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical context, things get a whole lot messier.
this is where you get issues like the "enthusiastic consent" model. it seems like a very good idea to define sex around not just willingness but desire, but then you have situations where people are insisting that sex workers are being raped because their sex isn't "enthusiastic" because of the economic factor. which creates a situation where everyone involved in a sexual encounter is saying "yes, i am willing to do xyz with you under these conditions," but a third party finds this problematic. which, you might notice, is VERY similar to the exact situation we were in before that feminist approach to consent, where what a person can choose to do with their body depends on what some other, unrelated but "more knowledgeable" party feels they should be allowed to do. and with that considered, i must ask if "consent" really should be doing the work of weighing desire and emotion and the immense complexity of how that relates to our choices.
similarly, i do not think adults should have sex with children! i think that is not good. but ultimately "legal minors cannot consent to sex with adults" is a legal construct. the law does not recognize sex an adult has with a person under 18 as consensual because that is how our legal framework currently seeks to prevent children from sexual harm from adults, by saying "this class of people is not legally capable of consenting." that doesn't necessarily make it the best way to accomplish that goal, but it is how the current framework goes about it. that can be true without claiming that "minors can't consent because their innocent underdeveloped brains are incapable of having genuine sexual desire and seeking it with an adult" because that just isn't true! and it can diminish the subjective experience of many young people with sex and sex work and deprive them of the ability to understand their own desires, what it feels like to be taken advantage of, what choices they made and why, etc. and can serve to alienate survivors who do not narrate their experiences with sex as a minor in the "appropriate" way. all because the legal inability to consent is conflated with a biological inability to desire or will.
ultimately right now my opinion is that we should try to distinguish between consent and will and desire and allow for shades of grey and multi-dimensionality in our sex lives and moral frameworks. i think someone who does sex work because they are in poverty and disabled and can't get another job should be allowed to explore and express that experience on their own terms, navigating the questions of what they chose and what they didn't and what "choice" actually means for them and what they need and want and how we as a society should react to them having been in that situation, without having people, unrelated to any of the actual sex had, try to do Morality Math to decide whether or not it was "consensual" or "not." we make up the law to help structure our society and our legal frameworks should not be the basis or the extent of our moral frameworks.
*nuance here, i'm talking very generally about a lot of different times and places to make a point, actually laws on people's ability to participate legally when classed as women varied even just in ancient mediterranean europe! however even when people classed as women had more legal autonomy, it was still under an androcentric system where their legal autonomy was subordinate and (cis)male authority was default over the women in their lives was socially default and legally supported
**also want to mention that there's also nuance re: "women as property." yes people classed as women were (and are) treated as property, but also a lot of the time, as i understand it, the legal position of these people was actually more akin to "you are a person who is not a slave (and thus not someone's property) BUT you are legally incompetent and so cannot represent yourself or act legally on your own. which is the situation of both children and people classed as women throughout history. so like, its not always "you are legally property" as much as people being in the socioeconomic role of property while being legally seen as not necessarily "property" but incompetent and under the control of another person.
It's also an issue for acespec people who choose to have sex for different reasons than allosexuals typically do, and for neurodivergent people who may not be able to express enthusiasm in a way that looks correct to others.
What I hate most about queerplatonic relationship discussions/arguments is the complete unwillingness from some people to admit that QPRs entail aspects that are absolutely not found in common friendships. People will literally go to their graves insisting that it is totally normalized in society for friends to live together forever, share finances, raise children, base all major life decisions on each other. Like…. genuinely in what fucking universe are you living in lmfao
When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.
There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.
I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?
There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.
I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.
The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."
But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.
In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)
When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)
I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.
It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?
Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.
I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.
I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.
Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.
And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."
People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.
Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality
Like. Look. Listen. I have taught introductory quantum physics at a university level, and I need you all to incorporate this into your trans advocacy: There are situations where you need to make a decision to prioritize being comprehensible to your target audience above being The Most Unassailably Correct.
Teaching a toddler to wash hands because yucky when the Ethics Understander crashes through the roof. "STOP RIGHT THERE," the Ethics Understander shouts at me. "The disgust response is not a legitimate substitute for a considered value judgment, and in fact, weaponizing disgust instead of grounding those judgments in a more rigorous framework is fundamental to reactionary rhetoric!"
The toddler looks at me. "You are a fascist, auntie. I have seen the light and will now go eat chewing gum from the pavement, unless you can educate me on a rigorous framework on the microbiology of pavement chewing gum this very instant."
the grim reality for a lot of nonbinary people is that their options are closet themselves and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large or be out and proud and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large
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