So like I was talking to my guy friend and the mention of thighs comes up,, so im tryna explain why I like thighs (in a not gay way) but I had to catch myself cuz like the reason I like thighs is cuz girls
I mean come on, who doesn’t love them soft squishy pillows
So it’s been three and a half months since surgery and it’s been really weird realizing oh, my aversion to having pictures taken was like 75% gender and only 25% personal body image bullshit whereas I always thought it the other way around
Anyway, it’s pride month so I took a selfie?? Without a shirt?? Because I’m allowed to do that now with regards to arbitrary internet censorship nonsense??
corporations trying to profit off of queer people by showing their support for only one month of the year is bad
and
it’s fun to watch conservatives get pissed that they can’t shop at target anymore because the big bad rainbows will corrupt their children :(
and
the existence of rainbow capitalism in the first place proves that society is now in a place where supporting queer people is the more profitable and thus more popular opinion and that means something
When will the media give us the hot mess butch with terrible vibes representation we deserve?
I need to be humbled and reminded I’m not less attracted to toxicity than my wlm sisters, I’m just sapphic and female villains and male villains tend to be given different styles.
I’ve “joked” before that I know that it’s Pride Month, because as soon as June 1 comes around, I suddenly get to see a wonderful flood of aphobic bullshit on my dash.
Sometimes the people who reblog this shit aren’t themselves exclusionists. At least I’d like to think they aren’t, given that they’re mutuals who follow me, but out of ignorance, they join in on mocking what they don’t understand.
My block button gets a nice workout during Pride.
Anyway, since I do think (hope) that some of the people reblogging this nonsense do so because they are genuinely clueless, I’m inspired to write this post.
–
It’s very common, during Pride and otherwise, to see people mock the idea of aspec identities. For example, “fraysexual”, in which people only experience sexual attraction to people they don’t know very well, for example, celebrities.
It’s very common to see otherwise well-meaning people mock this idea. “I’m attracted to Chris Hemsworth! Does this mean I’m suddenly LGBTQ?!”
I don’t want to attack their reading comprehension, of course, but they’re missing something obvious in that definition: the word “only”.
If you are a woman and you are attracted to Chris Hemsworth, then you’re probably straight. Or bi. But if you’re ONLY attracted to Chris Hemsworth and NO OTHER MEN in the world…then maybe something else is going on.
Lesbians will often talk about compulsory heterosexuality and that’s a thing that asexual people experience too. Society has an expectation of allo-straightness and it’s very hard to define a negative, so it’s very common for a young person to express attraction to a fantasy, someone safely out of reach. Most of us will never meet Chris Hemsworth in real life, certainly we’ll never get invited to have sex with him, so we don’t really have to parse through whether this is something we really want to do. And well, if we’re not interested in the real life men that we know, it’s probably because they just don’t measure up.
Now, I think lesbians have one advantage in this case that asexual people don’t have. And that’s that they do feel attraction to women. It’s suppressed, and it may take a lot of time to realize it, but it’s there. And once you feel the real thing, I think that it makes it easier to see the “attraction” to Chris Hemsworth for what it is.
Most asexual people don’t have a “real thing” to put the fantasy and cultural programming into perspective. It’s very hard to define a negative, and often you end up doing that by defining everything else around out. That blank space is what’s left.
And that’s why aspec identities exist: because society has a really complicated relationship with sexuality in general. A physical sex drive can complicate matters too. Because that’s a thing that most people have. Hormones and gonads and all that. And if you think growing up with all those impulses are confusing already, try it when you don’t have a sexual orientation to direct it.
So that’s, I think, where a lot of these identities come from. Identities like fraysexual and lithsexual (sexual attraction ONLY if it’s not reciprocated) sound weird to an outside observer, until you understand that the end goal is not to have sex! The end goal is to process what we’re feeling and not feeling and define it for ourselves.
As a young person, I didn’t know I was asexual. I thought there was something wrong with me. I’d grasp at straws and think to myself that I must be straight, because I liked slash fanfiction. Because I liked erotica. Clearly I just never really had the opportunity to have sex. I have very specific trait preferences.
And then the invitation came! From someone who was objectively very attractive. He* was beautiful, a live action and real life version of the characters I’d read about, amazingly smart, great sense of humor. I’d fantasized about them for a long time before this moment. (More accurately, I should say “They” as later, they came out as non-binary. At the time though, I’d believed them to be male, just as I’d believed myself to be female. People are complicated.)
The fantasy was real! There was no better time! And….all I could feel was a resounding “NO.” I liked them a lot. But…no. No. (They took the refusal with good grace, they were really great!) The aftermath was rough on me though, because I no longer could fool myself.
I don’t consider myself lithsexual or fraysexual because in my case, the attraction wasn’t so much to the person as to the fantasy of being straight. But people come in all variations, and we can only really define ourselves.
Ultimately, aspec identities aren’t about you unless they apply to you. But for us, they can be a literal lifesaver. I spent a long time thinking I was broken. Why could I feel a sexual response when reading erotica but not want to have sex?! Obviously I can’t be asexual if I feel SOMETHING, right?
And then, and then, at the age of thirty or so, I stumbled across the concept of autochorissexuality. The idea of a disconnect between self and sexual desire. And I realized, wait. There I am. You can’t imagine the sense of relief.
THAT’s why these identities exist. It doesn’t MATTER if you understand them. It doesn’t MATTER if you think they’re valid. They’re for US, not you. And it costs exactly 0 dollars to shut the fuck up about something that has nothing to do with you.
DEAD. ASS. same situation here mate! though with mine it ended up with me dissociating through every subsequent attempt until i was like you know what im going to stick with single-player the payout is not worth the dissociation and crying breakdowns
as a note tho, i tend to lean more towards using “aegosexual” nowadays because autochorissexual originated as the psychiatric diagnosis for our identity. not as a “you should id as that instead” more like “there’s also this word to describe what we’re feeling if you like that better!”
i mean peoples’ eyes tend to glaze over no matter which one i tell them so it doesnt much matter and i’ll often flip between the two but yeah
(as a note for anyone still unsure what autochoris/aego is, it’s basically removing yourself from the equation – you experience attraction so long as you are not involved. it’s different from voyeurism in that even voyeurism relies on your knowledge and presence in the situation, while autochorissexuality/aegosexuality is more like attraction to fictional characters/celebrities with the knowledge that There Is Literally No Way You Would Actually Be Involved either because the person doesn’t know you exist (ex. real-life celebrities) or because the person you’re attracted to doesn’t exist. alternately just think of it as only experiencing attraction while not being perceived or being one with the void or something but it’s not a kink/fetish i promise)
(i know it sounds weirdly specific but let me tell you the day i realized there were other people who would go horny on main over a pretty anime boy but don’t want anything to do with multiplayer mode was the day i stopped feeling completely fucking broken)
“homophobes and transphobes think lgbtq identities are exclusively about sex, so kinky or sexual lgbtq people shouldn’t be allowed to be visible because that reinforces that association in peoples’ minds” is no different from “lets shame feminine, flamboyant queens because they’re playing into harmful stereotypes”
if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: oppression does not run on logic. whatever justification someone has in their brain for oppressing someone is a lie. we know this because the excuse can change at any time to suit the oppressor’s needs, but the oppression stays the same. misogyny is misogyny regardless of whether you think women cursed the world by eating the apple in the garden of eden or that their hormones make it harder for them to understand math. it is an excuse, not an actual reason, because there is no actual reason. it’s illogic all the way down.
oppressors don’t oppress you for something you do, they oppress you for something you are. trying to alter your behavior to appease them is always going to be pointless. it is a game where the goalposts are made up and the points don’t matter because at the end of the day, homophobes don’t hate you because you’re too queer or the wrong kind of queer, they hate you if you’re queer at all.
seriously I had some little TikTok teenybopper burst out laughing on my tour because I said that a historical figure was “most likely what we’d now call gay”
like
listen
you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but
until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community
I mean, you know, as long as that’s okay with you. Bestie.
idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+
mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.
idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+
mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.
the word “queer” being used by someone who uses that word to describe their own experience of love and their cherished community should not ever sound the same to you as it does coming out of the mouth of a homophobe. acting like these two types of people are the same is unbelievably cruel
^^^
Adding on once again: there is no word for our experiences that has not been used as a slur and isn’t *still* used as a slur.
My mother never said fag but she sure could say “gay” in a way that made it clear that was what she meant
“Homosexual” in the mouth of a Southern Republican US Senator is more vile than “faggot” in the mouth of a 50-year-old gay man from Seattle, where they made an attempt at one point to reclaim the word. (Unlike queer, it didn’t really work.)
Hell. “Those people” in the mouth of a homophobic mom to a closeted gay teen is probably fouler than either of those.
Just chiming in here from over on the disability side of things, where we can testify that it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, your terminology will get used as a slur by people who don’t want you to exist because you fuck up their ideas of how the world should be. So, call yourself whatever you want, and don’t yield to the people who don’t care what you’re called, because your greatest crime is existing in the first place. They’re never going to have a polite word for you anyway.
