Just Jumbling

Sideblog~

[squidong]

lesbian activities. reblog if you agree.

[jingerpi]

I never really wanted to get into this on here but I want to talk about it now so nobody can stop me.

honestly one of the worst things is that I knew. a lot of people talk about not knowing they were trans until xyz event where they realized and went through whatever hardships and then transitioned. people talk about repression and discovery and all these things. and those are all powerful and important experiences I don't see myself as above them in any way. but I knew.

I was never an egg, I was never in denial. when I was 3 years old I dreamed I was a princess. I know this because my family retells it as a funny story. I tried to wear my sister's clothes regularly, I asked people why there wasn't a word for the reverse of a tomboy, I put on makeup, I used she/her pronouns online since I first learned to read and write.

I don't bring this up to do this "I've always been a woman deep down, so you should listen to me as super valid Mr psychologist gatekeeper". my point is that it didn't matter.

I knew, and it didn't matter. it wasn't an issue of having to figure out who I was and then realizing that. it's that who I am was intentionally killed and locked away at every turn. it's not that I didn't realize I was a girl, it's that I wasn't allowed to be one. I was hurt and punished and sent to conversion therapy repeatedly. I can't "go back in time and tell my younger self to save her years of struggle". it wouldn't matter. it wouldn't change anything at all. the issue wasn't a lack of information. it's a lack of power. kids and trans kids especially are subject to so much abuse and we have no power to do anything about it. it is such a great tragedy beyond words. knowing what you want to do and wear and say and be, that you want this name and these pronouns and that cute dress, and being powerless to do anything about it anyway. forced to wear clothes picked out for you by a guardian, only able to use pre-approved nicknames online. only allowed to engage in these specific hobbies and have these specific friends. all of whom treat you like garbage. but it doesn't matter. it doesn't even matter if you know it's unjust, there's no way to do anything about it. it is perhaps the most powerless position anyone can be in. there is no level of knowledge or personal strength that will get you out of it. you just have to shut off until enough time passes for the law to deem you as worthy of being a person.

I think that's a big part of why I'm like this now, once you see that powerlessness, when you experience the depths of hopelessness and disenfranchisement, you can never unsee it. it does something to you

[jingerpi]

it's easier to think that I did something wrong. that if I were smarter or stronger or cleverer I could've figured it out. and that when I did get out of that place, that it was due to my strength. but the reality is it wasn't. none of it was my fault, and that's almost harder to handle. there's no amount of trial or belief or hope or self knowledge that can magically warp the world to be kind to you. when I got away it's because I was a legal adult. that's it, that's all that changed. the only thing holding me back that entire time

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

the most depressing quote from her diaries:

“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”

[vamptits]

just tried to combine the words Lestat and lesbian in my brain and you'll never guess what it came up with

[vamptits]

[parkchanwoohoo]

Sometimes I will complain about a particular behavior and someone will be like "Did you know this is a trauma response?"

I know? I don't care. There is no inherent contradiction between the way horrors will warp one's behavior and how that behavior is bullshit. The unfairness of trauma, the tragedy of it, is that suffering will only ever explain something you do but no amount of it will ever justify it. I feel like people, understandably to be clear, misjudge how easily and how commonly abuse victims become abusers. I don't care that someone was so severely beaten down by their circumstances that they've become incapable of having normal conversations with someone else without blowing up, themselves. You are abusing someone else now. I'm sorry for what happened to you in your past, you didn't deserve it. The person you're talking to doesn't deserve it either, doesn't deserve to have you become The Thing That Happened To Them.

And it's hard because part of this is that, obviously, on some level, you are aware of what you're doing and you hate yourself so much that any attempt at introspection is like touching a hot stove. The brain recoils from it. Some kindness is necessary. But how much patience can someone realistically be able to extend to someone who is repeating the abuse patterns they experienced? How patient were you to your abusers? Did that ever lead them to change? At some point the primary difference becomes not whether you can be coaxed into believing you're capable of being better (and I do think this IS necessary) but whether you can continue to stand looking at yourself without trying, and I do think that the unfairness of having had something horrible happen to you only for you to become not noble not kind not strong but just as horrible is so godawful that a lot of people just find it more comfortable to not look at themselves at all

And I can empathize with that and also, critically, not particularly care. The past was awful. You can't change it. The present is awful and changeable at once and it's really the only thing I care about

[heedra]

really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core

[troublepunk-ldn]

me as a teenager: man it sucks to have no privacy or autonomy but i guess its for a good reason. when i turn 18 i will realise how young i was and understand why they did all that.

me as an adult: teenagers are an oppressed class, their abuse is normalised and systemic and they need to start killing people

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

Me, finishing my cocktail: “Man, I should make that post. Really kick the hornet’s nest.”

Pip: “You should. Drinky post time!”

Me: “It’s gonna make people really mad.”

Pip: “Time to hurt some 🎶feeeeeeeliiiiiings🎵~!”

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

They gotta stop aging Robin up I swear to god. He’s like fully an adult man half the time and it fucking sucks. Make him recognizably a child or don’t bother including him at all. “But it makes people uncomfortable” yeah dude! Because it is! You’re never going to make it okay so make it interesting! Make it mean something! Like Robin is fully just a grooming story. I don’t mean sexually but it’s a narrative about a man convincing himself that his relationship with a kid is so special and unique that the normal boundaries between child and adult can be suspended, that the child’s circumstances and capabilities and needs are so extraordinary that they are rendered a kind of un-child, and that the scale of their eagerness and want counts as consent. Robin’s already traumatized, so what is there to lose?

Everyone wants Batman to be morally complicated so they make him a huge douchebag for no reason but flinch away from the actual parts of his character that are really troubling. The “is it wrong to have Robin?” question is always brought up and then neatly solved in a way that absolves Batman. But like. One of Batman’s most consistent character traits is that he’s able to convince himself of anything no matter how stupid.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

Batman is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-powerful Sherlock Holmes character piloted by the ghost of a lonely child. He’s a genius who uses his intelligence to justify acting upon the emotional impulses of an 8 year old with horrific trauma and unmet needs. He uses children for his own emotional gratification and convinces himself that, while it might not be right, it’s not wrong enough to stop doing it.

And, well, many such cases!

Honestly I think the cognitive dissonance of like a 9 a year old Robin does so much more to establish Bruce as a psychologically complicated and morally gray character than any amount of the pointless assholery people just keep piling on to his personality.

[changelingrain]

#Batman is a grown man who is so desperate to believe that what he went through as a child was survivable #that he will go through multiple sidekicks the way people go through outdoor cats. #he loves his family so much and he cannot understand that he allows them access to more danger than they ever would have been in otherwise. #he is a metaphor for the positive ways trauma can encourage people to help others #but also for the ways people will project on others and try to live vicariously through them! #batman is trying to exert control over childhood as a concept! he is making child soldiers to prove he could have done more than he did! #and over and over again the universe tries to tell him that he can’t. and so he gets another sidekick. #because surely THIS time the small traumatized child will have the strength and will and power of an adult. #and then Bruce can finally sleep easy knowing if he’d only been a stronger boy he could have saved his parents.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

is your robin post for all robins or specifically the first robin? if you have more nuance for the different robins i would love to hear it 👀

in response to this

Oh all Robins yeah. There’s a different justification for each one and in a way the more rock-solid and defensible they get the more egregious it becomes imho. “He was going to do it on his own” “he was headed down a hopeless path to crime and needed the structure and discipline of Robin” “he was literally asking for it” “making him Robin is the only way to keep him from becoming a supervillain”. Every time there is a new justification for why a billionaire with every resource can only help a child by entering into a dangerous and bizarre kind of relationship with him that is repeatedly shown to be profoundly psychologically damaging (…for the kids).

And every time the narrative bends over backwards to assure us that Bruce never actually makes the wrong decision. That he’s never actually being selfish. That Robins just sort of happen to him as an act of God that has little to with Bruce’s wants. That these boys really are just that special, their circumstances are that exceptional, that Robin really is the best option for them. And every time they get hurt or die or are tragically, profoundly warped by their proximity to Batman, well…? We flirt with the notion of remorse and regret for a while. Then it’s time for a new boy (it’s different this time! I promise! Unavoidable!).

Don’t get me wrong—I love the Robins. I think they are the best part of the Batman story and don’t want them to be eliminated. I understand that they are wish fulfillment/power fantasies for children and that 90 year old ongoing comics can’t actually come to meaningful, lasting character resolutions. But we’ve been telling serious standalone “adult” Batman stories for fully half that time and I don’t think we’ve ever properly grappled with Robin. The elements are all there. It comes up, a little bit, here and there, but only so that it can be summarily dismissed.

And it’s hard, you know—it’s difficult to tell a story about grooming because people can’t or won’t recognize it unless there is literal molestation happening. But if there IS literal molestation, well, now, the story is lurid! Provocative! Edgy—too edgy! The sexual act eclipses the emotional reality and flattens character motivations and dynamics into something familiar and cliché. Something safely true crime that disinvites empathy. I don’t think Bruce is a pedophile but I don’t think a pedophile Bruce Wayne would look any different. The nature of the exploitation would differ, obviously, but the dynamics and rationale and downstream effects would be basically the same.

(I haven’t counted Steph here even though she’s my favorite Robin because Batman was so over the top indefensibly, cartoonishly, intentionally evil about her that it makes his character really boring and everybody hated it lol. I would retcon that storyline and revisit Steph-as-Robin with more nuance.)

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

It is kind of crazy how often Batman stories raise the question of “is Robin ethical?” and ultimately come to the conclusion that Robin isn’t really a child. His trauma and experiences have transformed him into something else, something that looks like a child but isn’t, or only is sometimes. It’s no longer necessary or even possible to treat him as though he is a real child. Some fundamental essence of purity has been lost; further trauma and harm may heaped on the Un-Child indefinitely.

Obviously Robin is about punching clowns and telepathic gorillas, so whatever. But it betrays certain attitudes about children that are really pervasive in our culture—that children are definitionally innocent, and that innocence is a product they produce and perform for adult consumption. If that innocence is lost, damaged, or imperfect, their value is lessened and the need to protect them becomes a need to protect other children from the contamination they might spread. The Un-Child becomes a sort of contagion, a threat to the harvest, who is conditionally allowed access to childhood if they can convincingly pretend at innocence.

[miraclemaya]

the thing is that misogyny is actually gender affirming for men and fundamentally always will as long as men and women are considered to be real categories

[girlnephew]

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

Children are born into a state of implicit debt.

Good parents forgive this debt. Bad parents expect it to be repaid, one way or another. The accepted currencies are varied and cryptic and might be mostly innocuous or they might be horrifically criminal.

Many families don’t realize that there is a debt until the child defaults on it somehow. That could be for any reason—the child simply fails to deliver on the parental investment by not adequately being the child they paid for.

“Inspiration porn” is a disability term, but I’m using it here because it’s appropriately provocative, and because the state of being a child is functionally a disability. A child who fails to be life-affirming and inspirational and to perform heartwarming innocence is breaking a contract, and adults are no longer obligated to uphold their own end and nurture the child. A child is a resource from which inspiration porn can be mined, or it is a kind of brood parasite.

[64mpg]

lowkey my childhood home was a saw trap

[strawhatsufi]

"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.

[strawhatsufi]

It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.

[strawhatsufi]

You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.

[starryeyed-stars]

[Start ID: tumblr tags that read "#ohhh fuck that's a really good way of lookking at it #it forces the relative nature of it all to the forefront #it *makes* the listener pay attention to the fact that their context isn't THE context #and removes the assumption of Default]

[parkchanwoohoo]

[omtai]

scone butch... The person for all your pastry and lesbian needs

[yournewfriendshouse]

I hate making scones but am an absolute slut for them so this is a partner I’m now seeking ardently. I will be your clotted cream princess