alice @wormwitched - Tumblr Blog

Let me settle the 'is it fetishism and is it bad?' debate once and for all:

Being attracted to any kind of body is normal. Fat bodies. Trans bodies. Disabled bodies. All normal. Being extra attracted to a specific kind of body is normal too. Totally normal to have a type.

Not unlearning the societal stigma attached to those kinds of bodies, the people who inhabit those bodies, and the people who fuck them, to the point where you do any of the following:

Only want to date/fuck the person in secret.

Reduce the person to the feature that you desire and ignore the rest of who they are as a person.

Expect the person to be a walking porn fantasy instead of a real person with their own sexual preferences and boundaries.

Would no longer love the person if the stigmatized aspect of their body changed.

Consider yourself superior to the person, think the person should be 'grateful' that you love their body, etc.

See the person as a temporary adventure while planning to eventually settle down with someone whose body isn't stigmatized.

Is bad and harmful and you shouldn't be dating anyone until you've worked on your shit, because this makes you a very terrible partner. This doesn't mean you are a bad person with bad-fetishist-desires who can only desire people badly, it means you need to unlearn societal stigma so you can be a better partner to the people you desire.

Thank you for coming to me ted talk.

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.