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thebibliosphere · 3 years

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So I'm currently unemployed because I got fired for taking too much sick leave (it was legally sketchy blah blah blah but in the end I just can't work and take care of myself and investigate my mystery health problems at the same time). So I've been spending more time writing!

I really admire your writing and loved Hunger Pangs. I'm looking forward to the poly elements developing and I'm wondering if you have any advice for writing about poly. I've made one of my projects a snarky take on "write what you know" ... Apparently what I know is southern gothic meets Pacific northwest gothic, chronic illness pandemic surrealism, and falling back-asswards into threesomes.

I know this is a very open-ended question and I don't expect an answer, I'm just curious about it if you have the energy. As a writer, trying to write honestly / realistically about polyamory/enm, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what's different about portraying monogamy or nonmonogamy in books, romance or erotica or otherwise.

I'm trying to read examples but it's hard to find examples that fit the niche I'm looking at. Excuse me if this question is nonsense, it's the cluster headaches.

I'm sorry to hear you've been dealing with all that and solidarity on the cluster headaches. But I'm glad you're finding an outlet through writing! And I hope you're happy with an open-ended ramble in response because oh boy, there's a lot I could talk about and I could probably do a better job of answering this sort of thing with more specific questions, but let's see where we end up.

There's definitely a big difference between writing polyamory/ENM (ethical non-monogamy) and what people often expect from monogamous love stories.

Just even from a purely sales and marketing standpoint, the moment you write anything polyamorous (or even just straight up LGBTQIA+ without the ENM) you're going to get considered closer to being erotica/obscene than hetero romances. It's an unfair bias, but it's one that exists in our society. But also the Amazon algorithm and their shitty, shitty human censors. Especially the ones that work the weekends. (Talking to you, Carlos 🖕.)

So not only do you start out hyper-aware that you're writing something that is highly stigmatized or fetishized (at least I'm hyper-aware) but that you are also writing for a niche market that is starving for positive content because the content that exists is either limited, not what they want, or is problematic in some fashion i.e. highly stigmatized or fetishy. And even then, the wants, desires, and expectations of the community you're writing for are complex and wildly varied and hard to fit into an easy formula.

When writing monogamous love stories, there is a set expectation that’s really hard to fuck up once you know it. X person meets Y. Attraction happens, followed by some sort of minor conflict/resolution. Other plot may happen. A greater catalyst involving personal growth for both parties (hopefully) happens. Follow the equation to its ultimate resolution and achieve Happily Ever After.

But writing ENM is... a lot more difficult, if only because of the pure scope of possibilities. You could try to follow the same equation and shove three (or more) people into it, but it rarely works well. Usually because if you’re doing it right, you won’t have enough room in a single character arc to allow for enough growth, and if ENM requires anything in abundance, it’s room to grow.

And this post is huge so I’m going to put the rest under a cut :)

There's also a common refrain in certain online polyam/ENM circles that triads and throuples are overrepresented in media and they may be right to some extent. Personally, I believe the issue isn't that triads and throuples are overrepresented, but that there is such minuscule positive rep of ethical non-monogamy in general, that the few tiny instances we have of triads in media make it seem like it's "everywhere" when in actuality, it's still quite rare and the media we do have often veers into Unicorn Hunter fetish porn. Which is its own problematic thing. And just to be clear, I’m not including this part to dissuade you from writing "falling back-asswards into threesomes." If anything, I need more of it and would hook it directly into my brain if I could. I'm just throwing it out there into the void in the hope that someone will take the thought and run with it, lol.

I’d love to see more polyfidelitous rep in fiction, just as much as I’d like to see more relationship anarchy too. More diversity in fiction is always good.

Another thing that differs in writing ENM romance vs conventional monogamy is the feeling like you need to justify yourself. There's a lot of pressure to be as healthy and non-problematic as possible because you are being held to a higher standard of criticism. Both from people from without the ENM communities, and from the people within. Granted, some people don't give a shit and just want to read some fantastic porn (valid) but there are those who will cheerfully read Fifty Shades of Bullshit and call it "spicy" and "romantic," then turn around and call the most tooth-rottingly-sweet-fluff about a queer platonic polycule heresy. That's just the way the world works.

(Pro-tip for author life in general: never read your own reviews; that way madness lies. I glimpsed one the other day that tagged Hunger Pangs as “ethical cheating” and just about had an aneurism.)

And while that feeling of needing to justify yourself comes from a valid place of being excluded from the table of socially accepted norms, it can also be to the detriment of both the story and the subject matter at hand. I've seen some authors bend so far over backward to avoid being problematic in their portrayal of ENM, they end up being problematic for entirely different reasons. Usually because they give such a skewed, rose-tinted perspective of how things work, it ends up coming off as well... a bit culty and obnoxious tbh.

“Look how enlightened we are, freed from the trappings of monogamy and jealousy! We’re all so honest and perfect and happy!”

Yeah, uhu, sure Jan. Except here’s the thing, not all jealousy is bad. How you act on it can be, but jealousy itself is an important tool in the junk drawer that is the range of human emotion. It can clue us in to when we’re feeling sad or neglected, which in turn means we should figure out why we’re feeling those things. Sometimes it’s because brains are just like that and anxiety is a thing. Other times it’s because our needs are actually being neglected and we are in an unhealthy situation we need to remedy. You gotta put the work in to figure it out. Which is the same as any style of relationship, whether it’s mono, polyam or whatever flavor of ENM you subscribe to* And sometimes you just gotta be messy, because that’s how humans are. Being afraid to show that mess makes it a dishonest portrayal, and it also robs you of some great cannon fodder for character development.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my current pet peeve in how certain writers take monogamous ideals and apply them to ENM, sometimes without even realizing it. The “Find the Right Person and Settle Down” trope.

Often, in this case, ENM or polyamory is treated as a phase. Something you mature out of with age or until you meet “The One(tm).” This is, of course, an attempt to follow the mono style formula expected in most romances. And while it might appeal to many readers, it’s uh, actually quite insulting.

To give an example, I am currently seeing this a lot in the Witcher fandom.

Fanon Netflix!Jaskier is everyone's favorite ethical slut until he meets Geralt then woops, wouldn’t you know, he just needed to find The One(tm). Suddenly, all his other sexual and romantic exploits or attractions mean nothing to him. Let's watch as he throws away a core aspect of his personality in favor of a man.

Yeah... that sure showed those societal norms...

If I were being generous, I’d say it’s a poor attempt at showing New Relationship Euphoria and how wrapped up people can become in new relationships. But honestly, it’s monogamous bias eking its way in to validate how special and unique the relationship is. Because sometimes people really can’t think of any other way to show how important and valid a relationship is without defining it in terms of exclusivity. Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ENM works for a lot of people and invalidates a lot of loving, serious and long-term relationships.

This is not to say that some polyam/poly-leaning people can't be happy in monogamous relationships! I am! (I consider myself ambiamorous. I'm happy with either monogamy or polyamory, it really just depends on the relationship(s) I’m in.) But I also don't regard my relationship with a mono partner as "settling down" or "growing up." It's just a choice I made to be with a person I love, and it's a valid one. Just like choosing to never close yourself off to multiple relationships is valid. And I wish more people realized that, or rather, I wish the people writing these things knew that :P

Anyway, I think I’ve rambled enough. I hope this collection of incoherent thoughts actually makes some sense and might be useful.

----

*A good resource book that doesn't pull any punches in this regard is Polysecure by Jessica Fern. It's a wonderfully insightful read that explores the messier side of consensual non-monogamy, especially with how it can be affected by trauma or inter-relationship conflicts. But it also shows how to take better steps toward healthy, ethical non-monogamy (a far better job than More Than Two**) and conflict resolution, making it a valuable resource both for someone who is a part of this relationship style***, but also for writers on the outside looking in who might have a very simple or misguided idea of what conflict within polyam/ENM relationships might look like, vs traditional monogamous ones.

** The author of More Than Two has been accused of multiple accounts of abuse within the polyamorous community, with many of his coauthors having spoken out about the gaslighting and emotional and psychological damage they experienced while in a relationship with him. A lot of their stories are documented here: https://www.itrippedonthepolystair.com/ (warning: it is not light material and deals with issues of abuse, gaslighting, and a whole other plethora of Yikes.) While some people still find More Than Two helpful reading, there are now, thankfully, much, much better resources out there.

*** Some people consider polyam/ENM to be part of their identity or orientation, while others view it as a relationship style.It largely depends on the individual.

#long post #writing #ethical non-monogamy #relationship styles #relationship models in fiction #also that kindle link is an affiliate link #because fuck giving amazon free recs

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happymetalgirl · 4 years

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Black Lives Matter (adapted from previous post)

I was finishing up my April albums post but I honestly couldn’t write about the albums I needed to without getting this out there first, and (as usual) it ended up being really long, so I separated it and made it its own post here.

I’m writing this part now at the beginning of June after an already tumultuous April and May, and now I’m just making myself sit down and do this because, well, honestly, it’s been pretty hard to justify spending my time writing about anything else with all all of what is going on right now. (I can’t wait to see what July throws at us.) But again, in all seriousness, I’m not looking for any pity or sympathy for my relatively mild circumstances at all because in all honesty, my assorted privileges have allowed my life to be pretty okay and proceed mostly uninterrupted in the midst of everything going on.

I’ll start by disseminating any ambiguity on what I’ll be talking about in these paragraphs. As I write this in the midst of a respiratory virus pandemic, another epidemic (possibly pandemic) of racist police brutality that has always existed in a culture of unhinged toxic masculinity in the United States has exploded to unbelievable and disgusting levels against Black people and peaceful protesters, ironically in wake of protests against fucking police violence, all of which is only emboldened and encouraged by local and federal leadership that is showcasing its oppressive, totalitarian ambitions in its unprecedented attempted revocations of its citizens constitutional and human rights.

I’ll make the necessary side note that this increasingly oligarchical government subservient to the will of military and prison industry has already shown its complete disregard for human rights for decades upon decades now through its violation of human rights through offensive wars and sanctions against other countries and its dehumanization of the refugees and immigrants who its actions create.

If you haven’t already checked out of this from all the political correctness breaching your conservative bubble (good job not being that person), but you’re upset because tHiS iS sUpPoSeD tO bE a MuSiC bLoG, uh, you’re on the wrong website buddy, and the potential tipping point of a long-awaited revolution in the midst of an economic depression, a viral pandemic, and a dual crisis of grotesque police violence and evolutionary transformation of proto-fascism into fascist dictatorship is no time to go about business as usual.

BUT OKAY, ENOUGH INTRODUCTION AND ENOUGH ABOUT ME! The point of this is to spotlight what to do in the wake of all of this. First of all, I don’t have all the answers and my perspective is as limited as any person’s, so if you’re an expert on any of these matters or if you have insight from having experiences that I as a white cis male have not had, if anything I’m bringing up here could be better in any way, feel absolutely free (but not obligated) to let me know.

Okay, so lots of problems at hand. The big, all-encompassing one facing all of humanity of course is the ecological disruption caused by industrially driven human-catalyzed climate change, and the rot of everything crystallizing at this current moment feeds into exacerbating that catastrophe, the next wide-reaching issue being capitalism, whose prioritization of profit and short-term gains is incredibly ill-equipped to handle a slow emergency like climate change or a more acute emergency like a global pandemic. Here in the U.S. we have a federal government so infested with corporate corruption to maximize capital profits for the country’s most wealthy that they couldn’t even choose the obvious solution of pausing the economy and providing for its people for the duration of the pandemic in the interest of public health over the appallingly quick choice of protecting the financial interests of the corporate “donors” that help them hold their positions of power, at the risk of maybe closing the gap a tiny bit between the truly despicably wealthy and the growing number of hopelessly impoverished. So while the wealthy get protection of their assets from the slow-down of business (you know, ‘cause the pandemic), the people in most need of help because of that slow-down and plunged into spiking unemployment get shit from the people meant to represent them. And that’s just the corporate rot that rears its head as a result of a pandemic!

Even in “normal” times, capitalism in this country has built its foundation on slave labor and justifying the use of slavery through racism (even after it became illegal to outright own people as slaves). That cornerstone of free/cheap labor that this country’s economy is built on whose role was served by slavery was filled by outsourcing to countries with an easily exploitable lower class (whose conditions are often exacerbated by U.S. meddling on behalf of business interests) and prison labor made possible by mass incarceration that has targeted similarly vulnerable people and communities of color through strategic, racially profiled over-policing of minority communities trapped in poverty through historic systemic racism.

The study of that global climate change I mentioned earlier is referred to as a crisis study because there isn’t an unlimited time to do something about it, and the ever-changing conditions and pivotal events of the world effect what needs to be done to combat it (and what it is too late to do). This current crisis of police brutality is one of those types of critical moments, for climate change and social justice. Police brutality didn’t become an issue when George Floyd was murdered on May 25th 2020; it’s been an ugly facet of this multifactedly ugly country for a long time now, but its being brought to light has instigated an uprising the likes of which has not been seen in a long while, and with it, an especially insidious aggression toward it by the increasingly fascist government and its authoritarian figurehead (to the point of threatening institution of martial law and suspending first amendment rights and habeas corpus) that at this point serves only to maintain complacency for the benefit of the ruling class and to the detriment of the disproportionately non-white lower working class (treated as a slave class). Consequently this is a pivotal time that obligates widespread action and ceasing of silence from privileged people like me who have been able to get away with writing about music largely apolitically for years. This is a time when we either plunge unfathomably further into the depths of fascism at the hands of the ruling class and the silence of the less-effected or we consolidate in this moment of broad energizing to both enact substantive change on the critical issue of police brutality and set a precedent and build momentum to achieve justice for LGBTQIA+ folk, other racial minorities and marginalized groups, and make the critical changes need to avoid civilizational dissolution in the face of the imperative to mitigate our impact on global warming.

Speaking of that change and the actions that this moment implores of us all to contribute our energy to: the most immediately critical issue at our feet, to both save human lives from being taken unjustly at the hands of police brutality and to galvanize this revolution to be able to demand further justice and critical social transformation, is ending police brutality. Being an institution born out of rounding up escaped slaves and given the state-supported monopoly on violence that attracts largely those seeking to satiate sadism with the license to that monopolized violence, police culture is inherently toxic and not worth even preserving for the sake of transforming structurally. While abolishing the police is obviously too ambitious of an immediate goal, there are a lot of proposed steps to defunding and largely dismantling the police as a whole. The project Campaign Zero outlines and pushes for ten tangible reforms that would (some of which have recently been proposed in Colorado) decrease police violence, especially in the majority-Black communities that suffer from it the most. The “8 Can’t Wait” proposal that has been making rounds lately is part of Campaign Zero, and donations to these projects are of course, quite helpful and a good start for this blossoming movement. Furthermore, donations to local bail funds is especially important at this time with police making wanton arrests of peaceful protests (and also just random Black people not making any disruption) to support the people going out and protesting. Because this money of course gets siphoned into the courts, and then partially to law enforcement, it’s important to also direct funds to organizations where that money will not later be used against us, but again, keeping people able to protest is of utmost importance, since that it what is driving positive change in this moment.

Also helpful is direct support of the people on the frontlines of these protests. It is a time for privileged people to take action in solidarity and support, but not one for privileged groups to take over or “lead” the movement. Right now, this is about who is hurting the most and who is being oppressed the most, and right now that is Black people, by police, hence BLACK LIVES MATTER. Now is not a time for even underprivileged white people to use these protests’ likelihood of escalating to indulge in venting frustrations against the system by inciting police violence that puts Black people disproportionately in more danger in such situations. Now is the time to use that privilege of being less prone to racism police violence to whatever extent possible to protect the people of color protesting. And again, this isn’t about being white saviors or martyrs, this is about supporting people in the way they wish, so don’t listen to my advice over the insight and requests of what Black people and the Black community have. And by all means, fucking listen to them! Read from them! Engage in good-faith conversation with them (though don’t expect any individual Black person to give you a seminar on racism when there are ample resources that don’t demand someone devoting their precious time to you)! Learn where the limits of your perspective fail you! And for fuck’s sake, don’t just cherry pick the word of one token Black friend that happens to have some class privilege to conveniently discount the testimonies of other Black people!

Lastly, on a personal note to the metalheads that read this blog, I think this is a particularly important time for the metal community, not to center itself, but to bring itself alongside social justice in a more complete way than it has in the past. Former Opeth and current Soen drummer Martín López said last year in an interview published in Blabbermouth that the metal community is very behind the curve on sociopolitical issues, and the response to his saying that from the metal community that floods Blabbermouth comment sections basically just made the case for the exact point he was making. And it’s a shame because I think such a huge part of metal is about standing up to injustice as part of or in support of the oppressed, or at least such a huge part of the metal I gravitate toward is. Without sounding too spiritual or cheesy because I’m not a really spiritual person, I feel like when I see the injustice going on, I feel that spirit of metal in all of it on the side of the oppressed. I feel like all the grindcore and deathcore and thrash and death metal I’ve been binging lately is in the spirit of the protesters standing up to and, when they have to, fighting back against the unjustified aggression of the police, and looking back at old, certified classic albums like …And Justice for All, Toxicity, and Chaos A.D. and more recent albums like Machine Head’s The Blackening, and Thy Art Is Murder’s Human Target, and Venom Prison’s Samsara, it’s always been about standing up to this kind of bullshit. So I think if there ever was a time since Sabbath birthed it for metal to prove that it’s as important as it makes itself out to be and as important as it is to everyone who listens to it in such a way that they read an obscure blog about it, now is that time to show that it’s not just about being an angry white guy. Now is the time to make Martín López happy by proving him wrong.

Well, in typical Happymetalboy fashion, I can’t seem to make anything brief.

#racism #black lives matter #metal #heavy metal

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immaculate-benediction-batch · 6 years

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Queerbaiting and Why BBC Sherlock Isn't "Just a Show"

She gets a few things wrong, but no biggie. John beat the shit out of Sherlock in TLD...

McKinley Catherine Keener..

Okay, I'm so late to the party that the guests have gone home and all that remains is overturned furniture and a bunch of empty Solo cups. But the hosts haven't bothered to clean up the mess yet so my soapbox remains, here in the middle of the room.

To Moffat, Gatiss, and everyone else responsible for the Rise and Fall of the BBC Sherlock Empire: I've got quite a few bones to pick with you.

I watched Sherlock series 4 with the rest of the fandom, the exact second it aired. Because we're in the US, my roommate and I had to take extreme measures to ensure we would get to watch the premiere real time. I'm a Tunnelbear/livestream/backup livestream vet, so January 1st, 8th, and 15th were entire days devoted to streaming each new episode at 4 p.m. EST (and watching "Still Open All Hours" at 3:30, just to be safe). Sherlock fans get a new series only every three years, and everyone was so excited for series 4.

That is, until the series 4 actually aired.

To say it was a letdown would be insulting to letdowns everywhere. The first episode ("The Six Thatchers") had some pretty unexpected, pretty out of character moments (like John literally beating Sherlock to a pulp) but it was acceptable because hey, that's only a third of the whole season. Surely they'll make up for it in the next two episodes, right?

Episode two ("The Lying Detective") was pretty solid. I'm not going to complain about a whole 90 minutes featuring a creepy villain, beautiful production, interesting premise, and great acting. Everyone was much more in character—relative to "The Six Thatchers," that is—but there was still a ways to go before this season rose to the quality of the previous three.

Any "quality" episode two brought to series 4, episode three ("The Final Problem") ruined completely. The episode was so poorly written, scripted, and acted, the entire fandom (myself included) believed it was a prank and the true episode three was out there, still waiting to be released.

Some fans still think that. I've pretty much abandoned hope. At this point I don't even know if the existence of a secret episode matters, because Moffat and Gatiss have let the current last episode sit as official for far too long.

Of all the godawful things that went wrong in Sherlock series 4, the most infuriating is how they completely "no homo"-ed the relationship they had built between Sherlock and John, despite much of it being very not "no homo." That, my friends, is called queerbaiting—one of the worst and most offensive things a creator can do to the LGBTQIA+ community. It offers them a voice then retracts it. It dangles representation in their face and says bite, then pulls away before they can catch it.

So yeah, series 4 made (still makes, apparently) a lot of people pretty angry with the show and the showrunners. And naturally, backlash against it has led to backlash against the backlash. The most frequent argument is that “it’s just a show” and we're all mad because our “ship isn’t canon."

If only it was that simple. The problem here is that the piss-poor writing and horrible queerbaiting of series 4 had detrimental effects beyond the scope of the show itself.

It may be just a show, but it’s a show that gave us a community. It’s a show we put a lot of faith in because it was so good for so long. It’s a show we enjoyed the same way you enjoy hanging out with a friend. And when that friend turns their back on you and starts going back on everything they’ve ever said, you’re going to mourn the death of the person you thought they were and the relationship you two shared.

And give me a break, we’ve dealt with non-canon ships before. That’s why we have fanfic and fanart and headcanons and AUs. This frustration, this outrage, is not about that at all. It’s about the obvious (obvious) queerbaiting, the possibility of representation—of something we deserve, because no one else has created a show with so much potential to have characters naturally be gay, not in a way that’s forced or makes the entire show about them being gay—that was completely rejected.

It’s about Mark Gatiss, an openly gay man, abandoning an entire group of people he should instead be protecting. It’s about every interview when a cast member called it “television history." It's about every other lie, exaggeration, and half-truth they made us believe.

It’s about taking a really wonderful love story (and above that, just a really wonderful story) and screwing it up after six years of beautiful and intelligent writing. It’s about how the hell do you expect us to be proud or happy about all the shots you threw away.

So no, it’s not "just a TV show,” and it’s not about our ship. It’s about something we (not as a fandom but as a collective group of people) deserve and were denied.

Seven months later, I am still mourning the death of the show I thought BBC Sherlock was. I came into the fandom straight after series 1 hit Netflix, so it's been a part of my life since 2011. I gave them those five years happily because I saw them telling a story so many people have gotten wrong, and I thought they were finally going to get it right.

From day zero, Moffat and Gatiss started working towards an endgame Arthur Conan Doyle never could have pursued. Not many people outside of the fandom have seen the unaired pilot, a 60-minute rough draft of the first official episode. It's jokingly called the "gay pilot" for a reason: It laid the groundwork for every lie to come.

In the unaired pilot's most memorable scene, Sherlock is on the top of a building searching for the missing suitcase. He's hyper-focused, paying no attention to the moon behind him or his long coat swaying in the wind. On the sidewalk below, John looks up at the man he met mere hours ago as if he's the most extraordinary thing in the world.

http://mckinleykeener.com/blog/2017/8/9/queerbaiting-and-why-bbc-sherlock-isnt-just-a-show

#sherlock #john watson #bbc #mofftiss #steven moffat #mark gatiss #queerbaiting #benedict cumberbatch #martin freeman

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christopherokamoto · 7 years

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"My dearest gays and lesbians —

I’ve loved you since before I even knew you. From a young age, I was drawn to your transgressive sexuality and gender expression, your courage to be yourselves in the face of oppression, your fabulous rainbows and your sensible shoes.

I’ve marched in your parades, joined and organized protests for your rights, volunteered with your local groups and worked for your most prominent national organization.

I’ve loved you fiercely and advocated for you tirelessly. But I’ve finally accepted the fact that you will never love me back because I’m a bisexual woman, and you have shown me time and again that you are not here for me or my community, despite the numerous disparities we face in comparison to you and the non-LGBTQ community.

You have shown me time and again that you are not here for me or my community.

When I was a newly out baby bi, I co-founded the first ever LGBT student organization at my Southern Baptist university with this beautiful and charming lesbian classmate with whom I fell madly and angstily in love. She was the first of many who told me I should just “choose” to be a lesbian.

Then there was the time I was at a drag show and the performer came up to me and asked me why I was at a gay bar. I said “I’m bisexual” into her microphone, and she cackled wildly and said, “Oh honey, we all know that’s just a stop on the way to gay town.”

In grad school, a “straight” female friend repeatedly called me greedy and suggested I was promiscuous whenever I mentioned my bisexuality, even though we slept together several times. But she wasn’t gay, and apparently bisexuality wasn’t a valid option.

Then there were the countless times one of you told me my identity wasn’t real, was just a phase, or that I wasn’t committed to the cause because I could choose to pass as straight.

There were the countless times one of you told me my identity wasn’t real.

Too many times, I thought you might be right, that my identity was something strange, that maybe I was fooling myself about my lifetime of attraction to people across the gender spectrum. And I sincerely thought if I just kept fighting for you, for all of us, that I would prove myself worthy of your love and acceptance.

Then I took a two-year fellowship working at the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights nonprofit. I knew going in that, like any large movement organization, they had a rocky past with both trans and bi communities, and a tendency toward centrist politics. But I thought maybe I could effect change from within. What a silly, naive bisexual I was.

By far, the most pervasive biphobia I have ever experienced was during my two years working at the Human Rights Campaign. When I started in 2014, the Human Rights Campaign website didn’t have a single bi-specific resource, much less a topics page about one of the four identities it claimed to represent.

The staff who identified as bisexual were rarely empowered or allowed to do bi-specific programmatic work, if they were even out to their gay and lesbian colleagues.

I met bi community leaders, and tried desperately to heal the deep rifts and end the organization’s longstanding neglect. I believed HRC could do better for a group that constituted half of the LGBTQ community.

In my two-year tenure, with the support and feedback of a small crew of wonderful coworkers, I created the content for a bisexual page on the HRC website, wrote three of the five publications for the page and edited a fourth, all co-branded with national bi advocacy organizations, wrote nearly all of the bi-related blog content and op-eds, organized an employee resource group for bi, queer, pansexual and fluid (bi+) coworkers, worked with the diversity staff to bring in bi community leaders to do trainings, developed and conducted my own bi community cultural competency trainings for board members, staff, and volunteers and coordinated all of HRC’s programming for Bisexual Awareness Week.

When bi community leader Robyn Ochs came to do a training with HRC staff, a cis white gay man who directed the organization’s entire field operation said, “You know, I just never think about bisexual people.” No shit you don’t.

Six months have passed since I left HRC, and it seems that a handful of blog and social media posts during Bisexual Awareness Week last September is the only thing the organization could muster in my absence. Half of my out bi+ coworkers (love y’all!) have left and the others don’t have positions that allow them to do the kind of work I was able to do.

It seems clear that what started with one angry bisexual attempting to effect change from within also ended when that same angry bisexual left.

To be fair, HRC isn’t by any means the only national LGBTQ organization with this problem. Several national groups have a habit of using “gay and transgender” as shorthand for the LGBTQ community, completely erasing us. Although a few of our national LGBTQ organizations have openly bi+ staff who are doing amazing bi-specific advocacy, our numbers are dwindling and virtually no one else is doing bi work in these organizations except for those few brave souls.

To put it bluntly, when bisexual people aren’t around to advocate for ourselves and push for change from within, that work simply doesn’t get done, because the vast majority of y’all lesbians and gay men don’t give a shit about us. And yet, we still fight for you and with you.

When Amber Heard got the shit beat out of her by Johnny Depp and the media blamed her bisexuality, you were silent. When right-wing weirdos launched a public attack on a native bi+ leader who spoke at a White House event, more silence. When gay icon Boy George went on a blatantly biphobic Twitter rant, still nothing.

In the words of esteemed and dedicated bi+ leader Faith Cheltenham, former president of BiNet USA and a personal mentor:

Until bisexuals stop being the unmentionables of the LGBTQIA community we will continue to be the punching bags of both gay and straight, with respite nowhere to be found. If bisexuals believe there are circles of influence that they are systematically prevented from accessing to their detriment, they believe correctly.

Until bisexuals find equitable representations of their organizations in litigator roundtables, national and state policy roundtables, legal policy teams, national and state transgender policy roundtables, rapid response communications groups or faith working groups, we should protest our exclusion.

Lesbians and gay men, this angry bisexual is tired of being your afterthought. I’m exhausted by showing up for you, time and again, with no reciprocity. I’m tired of facing more biphobia from organizations that claim to represent bi+ people than I do in the straight cis world.

Lesbians and gay men, this angry bisexual is tired of being your afterthought.

I’m tired of trying to prove that I’m worthy of your love while you seem to forget or deny that I exist.

Bisexual people are tired of being told that our voices, our needs, our lives are a distraction from the “real” issues, when we constitute half of what you claim as your LGBT community.

And more than anything, I am tired of watching my fellow bi+ advocates — beautiful, talented and resilient people — burn out, break down, get fired for standing our ground and take our own lives because you make it so fucking hard for us to feel safe and affirmed.

Even after 15 years of being out, my voice still shakes sometimes when I say the word “bisexual” aloud to one of you, and I get a little jolt of adrenaline, bracing for the snarky comment, the rolled eyes, the dismissal of my existence.

I’m exhausted by showing up for you, time and again, with no reciprocity.

Let me be clear about what is at stake here, lesbians and gays. Bisexual people are literally dying because of your neglect, erasure and exclusion. We are sicker, both physically and mentally, than you are because more of us are closeted from our communities and our healthcare providers.

Our youth face more bullying and harassment and higher risk of suicide than their gay and lesbian peers do, and we all have less social support.

Sixty-one percent of bisexual women such as myself will be raped, beaten or stalked by our intimate partners — and as Heard’s experience shows, our identities will likely be blamed for our own abuse. For the numerous bi+ community members who are also transgender, disabled and/or people of color, these staggering disparities are compounded.

I watched HRC make its own bed in 2016, once again ignoring the voices of the LGBTQ community’s most marginalized members, and dumping its resources into mind bogglingly ill-conceived endorsements, most notably the political campaign of a candidate who waited until the last possible moment to “evolve” on marriage equality (sorry that job didn’t pan out for you, Chad).

I knew the time was coming when bisexuals, queers, transgender people, people of color, undocumented and other marginalized groups within the LGBTQ community would be asked to once again push aside our needs, close ranks with white cis gays and lesbians, and overlook our differences — you know, for the sake of preserving marriage equality.

And sure enough, here we are, fighting for scraps from a table at which we have never been welcome, and once again being told that our needs — our very survival — don’t warrant attention, visibility, funding or resources.

As the LGBTQ community faces an uncertain future under Donald Trump’s presidency, I’m giving up on you, gays and lesbians. I don’t love you the same way anymore. You broke my heart too many times. I will no longer fight for the liberation of people who actively perpetuate my community’s oppression.

I’m too busy just trying to survive."

#monosexism #monosexists #biphobia #biphobes #regs #long post

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book-of-torments-blog · 6 years

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However more interesting and perhaps more pressing subjects present themselves as deserving of a more detailed discussion (the likes of which this blog purports to host), this fanatical obsession some have in regards to ‘pronouns’ and their supposed ideal usage in so-called progressive and politically correct circles bothers me to such an extent that I am forced to dwell on it a while.

Those of us begrudgingly associated with the ‘LGBTQIA+’ disaster of a monolith are well acquainted with the trend of seeing people who are not, in fact, gay or lesbian intrude upon our spaces, our debates, our lives, and co-opt our cause in their favour – that is how, indeed, a simple, already much too ambitious acronym transfigured itself into the aforementioned mess of ‘LGBTQIA+’ and its varieties, like the equally preposterous ‘MOGAI’ or ‘QUILTBAG’ denominations one sometimes stumbles upon while browsing Tumblr. It is a mystery that some will still refer themselves to ‘the gay community’ when it has been completely overrun by self-proclaimed ‘queers’, whose interests have no common points with those of actual homosexual people. Already when the ‘community’ was only about gay men and lesbian women there were issues of principles and priorities – and the deference was always to homosexual men’s needs, as one would expect in a misogynist society, for the link of oppression on the basis of sexuality (or any other, in that case) is evidently not enough to unite men and women under the same flag. Our sex is a barrier that, it seems, cannot be overcome. So if there was already a divide between homosexual men and women in the same movement, it is no wonder that the addition of ‘other sexualities’ and ‘genders’ as well as completely unrelated groups such as polyamorous straight people would only serve to fragment and confuse the movement and its objectives even further.

Compared to the larger implications of this entire process of decay, the pronoun mania seems relatively harmless, but the insistence upon modifying and bending language to the sole benefit of all these non-homosexuals over that of actual homosexuals has quite the impact on our lives. It is detrimental to homosexuals, women, and, most markedly, the intersection of these two groups: homosexual women.

It is also a problem that walks hand-in-hand with a whole bunch of other matters. The very denomination ‘queer’ serves as hindrance to female and gay needs and interests, as it erases the differences between sets of people who have very little in common to create the idea of homogeneity where there is none. A collectivity defined by non-definition is perhaps functional and cute in purely abstract debate to those who take pleasure in speaking of what does not exist for the purpose of pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, but it serves for nothing in the real world. Rather, it serves to weaken the cohesion and limit the scope of political action the group in question could propose itself to pursue. The discussion of the emergence of ‘queer’ as an ‘umbrella term’ encompassing homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders and all other groups deeming themselves ‘gay enough’ (or, worse, ‘gayer than’!) to belong as well as the effects it has merits an essay of its own. For now, suffice it to say that the manipulation of language done within a self-identified ‘LGBT’ community by those who are neither gay or lesbian – and with the naive support of gays and lesbians – is destructive and antagonistic to the very ideals that inspired the creation of a ‘community’ in the first place. It is destructive and it is divisive. How many hours have been spent in argument about the ‘validity’ of asexuals or demisexuals or straights who are ‘queering sex’, how much anonymous hatred spewed, how many women threatened for their views when we could have been focusing on securing better lives for gays and lesbians?

For something that sells itself off as extremely homogeneous to the point of believing a single word can translate the experiences of a fuckload of different people, the ‘queer community’ is also extremely invested in promulgating an infinity of micro-identities to those who fashion themselves its members. It presents the paradox of one word meant to represent gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and the never-ending list of made-up sexualities as well as a plethora of imagined words allotted to each, both as an identifier of sexuality as well as of ‘gender’. Basically, a collection of (as has already been pointed out in some posts circulating the Tumblr-verse) socially-stunted narcissists with self-esteem issues wanting to belong to something that will make them look ‘cool’ and important when they themselves have no characteristics of their own to stick out from the bunch. Even negative attention counts as attention, of course, so the sheer absurdity of their project isn’t a problem – rather, even if people mock them, they’ll get the attention they so crave.

It takes a very sad and bland or very disillusioned and confused person to actually believe that being called ‘xe/xir’ is an inalienable human right or related to radical revolutionary praxis in any way.

Let us suppose, for a second, that a microcosm of, say, forty students in a higher education classroom decides to state their ‘preferred pronouns’ so that their teacher and colleagues can refer to them as they would like – in third person, meaning, when these students aren’t even a part of a given conversation since it’s uncommon to refer to someone in the third person if they are standing right in front of you. Suppose a nice portion of them goes by fantasy pronouns, these ugly products of fancy that have no foundation on any kind of grammar. Suppose the same teacher has another seven classes to teach, containing around forty other students each and the same percentage of individuals who go by completely unique, fabricated pronouns. Do people deem themselves really this important to want to hang a teacher who might slip up and call the tall and bearded, deep-voiced and nut-scratching queer aplatonic pansexual wolf-kin student a ‘he’ instead of ‘furself’, or – and I recoil just to imagine it –, ‘she’?

Our brains do not, unfortunately, possess unlimited storing space. Memorising the ‘preferred pronouns’ of a handful of people who want to be seen as freakish (as if gay people haven’t been insulted with ‘queer’ precisely because considered ‘freakish’ by society at large…) simply isn’t as important as, well, anything else one might think of, really.

But this very appellation proves absurd from the start: preferred pronouns? Will we start ‘preferring’ verbs and definite articles next?

Grammar isn’t fashion, it is not a style one chooses or ‘un-chooses’ according to one’s mood on a given day. As much as we can and must debate normative grammar, there are certain structures that must be there and used in certain ways to render someone’s speech intelligible to others. Pronouns, as other classes of words, serve a specific function within sentences. Personal (I, she, he...), possessive (mine, hers, his…), and reflexive pronouns (myself, herself, himself…) have a purpose in avoiding repetition and clarifying one’s speech. They work and we understand one another because language is a code, a system we share, whose elements and knowledge we have in common as a community of speakers – of English, in this particular case; I will touch upon some other languages soon. Even if separated by social class or levels of formal education, we can still understand one another because the language we share is the same. We are free to choose the vocabulary we like and express ourselves as we like, for language is an extremely productive tool as can be seen by the variety of ways one can say roughly the same thing using different words and constructions, ranging from the most banal, day-to-day kind of discourse to the most extraordinary, surprising poetic one. That much we choose.

But pronouns? Will a trend of relative pronouns arise as well? The running ‘whom’st’ve’-type jokes are amusing, but just because some kids on the internet are fooling around with them doesn’t mean they can change the structure of the language at will, nor do they intend to. No one takes this seriously, apart, perhaps, from curious linguists investigating the creativity and possibility of this kind of construction, but no one will advocate for this to be included in a grammar book, for instance. Maybe in some good many years, if the meme catches on and becomes a part of popular vernacular, sure, though perhaps unlikely seeing as language tends to simplify itself for the sake of practicality rather than the other way around. We could talk about language change (I will avoid the term ‘evolution’ so as to not provide further fuel to the fire of linguistic debate…) throughout the years, but let us do so returning to the topic at hand.

The word ‘preferred’ already indicates that this is a very conscious imposition on the part of those who claim ‘their’ pronouns (as if someone could own a particular set of words...). It marks a desire for forced linguistic change and, while languages do change constantly, they also do remain, charmingly, constant. These aren’t concepts I’ll be able to explain to the uninitiated in the associated theories in one paragraph, but one is invited to consult the work of Ferdinand de Saussure for an introduction to linguistic problems and study, specifically his Cours de Linguistique Générale.

Nevertheless, let us resume some aspects thus: language is a system exterior to the individual but one which encompasses them; it is social and it exists in a specific linguistic community as a human creation. Its conception is ‘random’ inasmuch as there is nothing in a given object’s ‘essence’ that determines it must be called this or that. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t even have multiple languages to begin with, for all of them would call a house ‘house’ instead of ‘casa’, ‘maison’, ‘ дом ’ and so on. So, to those who say that language is all made-up and that fantasy pronouns should be acceptable on these grounds, I raise you this: yes, language is made-up, but not by you or I. Try speaking to someone using only words you have invented, paying no mind to the syntactic and semantic structures of your native language. You won’t get far.

An individual or a group of individuals do not have what it takes to transform with willpower alone what has been crystallised in centuries of a language’s existence – linguistic changes cannot be imposed by someone, they happen as the speakers of a language develop their communication. There is a dislocation in the relationship between the signifier and its signified, but that dislocation cannot be forced; language adapts as needed by its users, not as desired by a cluster of them.

(Side-notes: 1. language mutability is a much more complex phenomenon than this essay can hope to convey in a few lines and linguistic science is still taking its turns with it. I would suggest the interested reader seek out Saussure to get an initial grip on linguistics and to follow up her research by trying to access articles on the matter being published today, if the academic language does not prove too daunting; 2. the inclusion of feminine forms in grammars that do not supposedly accept them is another debate entirely that warrants another discussion altogether. The case with French, lately, is an interesting case for study, if one can keep from trying to comprehend the French situation with Anglo-Saxon eyes and sensibilities.)

Besides, to fashion oneself a creator of words to be adopted by a large number of people, one must truly regard oneself as brilliant as, say, the likes of William Shakespeare, as he gave his particular contributions to what we understand as the English language today. I am sorry to say so, but a fifteen year-old furry on Tumblr is probably as far from Shakespearian genius as religion from spirituality – or Pluto from the Sun, if I must make myself clear and unambiguous to those with religious tendencies.

Not to mention the fact that, for something as powerful as the proponents of ‘identity’ as something sacred claim it to be, it stands on very shaky ground if the mere use of a pronoun unequal to their expectations poses any sort of challenge to this certain ‘identity’. Maybe these ‘inherent’ and ‘essential’ gender identities aren’t as sturdy as they are being called after all, if they are incapable of withstanding such harmless and easy contest. If your ‘identity’ starts with words rather than apprehensible reality, then it is clearly not as stable or natural as you would like it to be.

Since we’ve touched on the question of signifier and signified and how linguistic change implies a change in the relation between the two, what this pronoun craze (and the inextricably attached to it gender-mania) does is not that; the idea of creating pronouns as well as genders to go along with them does not shift the relation, but implode it. It ruptures significance as it completely disfigures whatever lines are set – lines which have a purpose, for delimitation begets identification, which, in turn, allows for action. If that sounds cryptic, allow me to break it down: delimitation and proper description of a given phenomenon (say, of the oppression of women, for instance) permits the identification of its root causes and, most importantly, its agents (therefore, the oppression of women is classified as a by-product of a heterosexist, misogynistic patriarchy which is enacted and supported by men, for it is males who benefit from the suffering and subjugation of females), so that those who take the brunt of it can organise and fight back with appropriate targets in mind instead of hazy, abstract enemies. A movement must have a target for its actions if it desires to succeed. Remove the necessary lingo that allows for analysis, criticism and discussion in search of a viable course of action/solution and you may well neutralize the group’s impetus for justice and their probabilities of success. Pretend men are women and all of a sudden the patriarchy is created by women and they are their own enemies -- the rhetoric possibilities of perversion are endless.

If the explanation still isn’t clear enough, one can imagine a chessboard in which the pieces retain their original values but are all disguised as pawns. One may go around wasting time and take all of them down one by one, in hopes of taking the king, if one is so inclined to the effort, of course. But a serious chess player knows that the end goal of chess isn’t to take all pieces, but to checkmate the king. The former might even come about as a consequence in trying to secure the latter, but, usually, one attempts to minimise effort and save time.

Speaking of effort, apart from demanding superhuman amounts of it on the part of those willing to indulge and use heaven knows how many different sets of nonsensical ‘pronouns’ for each person of their acquaintance, this little game of creating genders and pronouns and throwing fits if they are misused does make pawns out of all pieces, but in appearance only. It enshrouds information; it hides people responsible for certain things they should be held accountable for but are not – ‘queer’ serves to disappear the lines between actual homosexuals (gays and lesbians) as well as ‘quirky’ bisexuals or straight people, establishing a false equivalence of individuals within the group. This serves as an instrument to guilt those in disagreement as if they were ‘working against their own interests’, as if they were ‘traitors’ to the group. This is how lesbians have been denounced as the bogeyman of the ‘queer community’ – firstly, lumped in together with these ‘queers’ against our will, then shunned for daring not to agree with them, considered traitors of a cause that wasn’t ours to begin with and which actively antagonises us.

The mechanism behind pronouns and gender identity, however, has overarching consequences: it gives criminal men the perfect excuse to enter female restrooms where they can assault women; it gives them the perfect excuse to beg to be sent to women’s prisons, where they will be closest to the very portion of the population they terrorise. It skewers statistical data, which ceases to be a reliable source for analysis because, all of a sudden, female-committed crime starts to spike in areas that have always been the dominion of male perpetrators. Anyone paying attention will know that women aren’t magically acting as violent as men, they aren’t raping and murdering people in male rates or with the same amount of male cruelty; these numbers are a reflection of men masquerading as women, since this sham of personal, ethereal, holy identities – the motor for pronoun-fixation – has been warmly embraced by the mainstream without a single instance of questioning and in record amounts of time.

Television shows are still afraid to say the word LESBIAN out loud, but will showcase their ‘queer’ and/or ‘trans’ characters without fear of censoring, if not in earnest hopes of being labelled progressive and awarded for it.

Yes, of course words are very much tied to how we perceive reality, but messing them up in the cause of something as stupidly and unsatisfactorily defined as ‘gender’ is in the mouths of its own champions serves no purpose other than to soothe megalomaniacal cretins and antisocial, manipulative teenagers; to further confuse young gay girls and boys already devoid of proper guidance; and to terminate all useful terminology and, consequently, praxis relating to female and homosexual struggles. Meddling with one’s discourse does not induce some sort of alchemical miracle that transforms material reality into whatever someone wishes it could be – my repeating over and over that I am rich (or that I ‘identify as rich’, to use the preferred construction) does not, in fact, have the slightest effect of increasing the value of my withering bank account in so much as a dime.

It’s hot air.

The problem lies with the consequences, as mentioned, on us all, since these linguistic atrocities and resulting social practices are being officially accepted and implemented by mass media and governments alike.

Moreover, cohesive groups exist prior to the language used to describe them. Women are biologically female and form a cohesive unit because of it despite the push for reducing women to lipstick and stilettos; gays are gays and form a cohesive unit by means of their exclusive attraction to individuals of the same sex, despite the push to redefine sexuality in terms of nebulous and volatile ‘gender’. Even if the words we use and need do end up swallowed and wholly co-opted by the trans/queer crowd and their allies, the concreteness of these groups will not cease to be, nor will their oppression, but it will be a lot harder to talk about it and for us to find one another to build actual community so we can fight back. Our best interests, as lesbians especially, are obviously not at the heart of those peddling trans/queer politics.

Politics which, ironically, claim themselves progressive – anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic (or ‘LGBTphobic’ as I’ve been elsewhere forced to read), the list goes on (to include, many times, a comical idea of being anti-capitalism when queer/trans ideology is intimately linked with consumerism – performativity demands products to showcase it; it demands reification of the self and that comes with buying these or those items to heighten the image of one’s self as a consumable good – but that is another essay entirely). Those who ‘identify with’ this world-view go so far as to say that women and lesbians (their being actual feminists or radical ones at that completely disregarded for the ‘TERF’ acronym to be freely tossed around) who so much as question them, let alone fight back, are colonialist, racist, Eurocentric, yada yada yada bigots. Because, apparently, the categories of female/male are western creations imposed on native peoples to control them… For some reason, whereas categories of masculine/feminine are essential, spiritual and totally-not-artificially-constructed or socially imposed so as to create a hierarchy of the sexes… Or, another ‘argument’ found between the defenders of ‘gender identity’, everything is deemed as socially constructed, but delusions are somehow considered more real than flesh and bones just because they say so.

The flaws in logic and in their overall rhetoric would be hilarious, if they didn’t bring about such negative consequences along with giving any sensible and thinking human being a headache.

For here’s the clincher: all this talk of ‘inclusivity’ and progress spewing from trans/queer activists is done in English. Yes, the very language that has infiltrated most corners of the known world given the colonising efforts of the British throughout history and, more recently and perhaps successfully, due to the grip on mainstream media and consciousness exercised by the United States of America. We are made to witness English speakers (native and not so!) throw tantrums when someone does not recognize the ‘validity’ of or fails to utilise something like ‘ey/eirs’ pronouns. So the discourse is constructed in a way that uses certain cultures as props (‘In X culture, there is a third gender!!!’) but at the same time derides all these non-English speaking peoples for their incapability of using a broken, and, let’s face it, horrendous English. It isn’t even a Eurocentric view (something these ‘activists’ say themselves vehemently against, to the point of blindly embracing and defending, say, the tenets of certain non-Western religious ideologies only to spite so-called Western sensibilities…), it’s a decidedly Anglo-Saxon view they espouse. ‘Queer theory’ is born in English-speaking academia and these vulgar branches of it spread amongst English-speakers who think it viable and useful to change the entire structure of the English language to amuse them when they can’t even differentiate ‘your’ from ‘you’re’ in written media a lot of the time.

See, there are, to mention but one kind, Romance languages in Europe and outside of it and these languages (the likes of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian…) are gendered. They use grammatical genders because this is how they developed throughout the ages from their Latin roots. It’s an essential part of their mechanisms; not because Romance languages are somehow bigoted and want all trans people to die terribly in a fire, but because these languages have existed for much longer than the ideology and social practices that the trans/queer crowd defend.

In these languages, one cannot do what some of these individuals do in English, using a third person plural to signify a single, individual person (the idea that ‘they’ is a neutral pronoun). It is utterly impossible to make any sense of it in a Romance language, added to the fact that these tongues separate third person plurals into feminine and masculine forms (elles/ils in French; elas/eles in Portuguese, etc.). To attempt something of the sort would be to incur in an egregious error in using these languages and native speakers of them do not and shall not recognize these strategies as proper or practical in any way.

English is not a parameter to which other languages compare or should strive to emulate at all. ‘They’ is impossible to carry on as a ‘neutral’ pronoun in translation, so one can only imagine how obtuse it would be to try and find equivalents to ‘ze’, ‘xe’, ‘ey’ in Spanish or Italian, to speak of only two… Those writers today who include ‘nonbinary’ characters who are referred to in the story by these unorthodox pronouns, in the name of ‘inclusion’, are automatically excluding the rest of the non-English speaking world from reading it, unless they consent to having these anomalies translated into proper pronouns that reflect the target language of a possible translation of their story.

There has been pressure from self-proclaimed leftist circles to write certain words in the vein of ‘Latinx’, ‘elx’, ‘el@’ in some countries as a way to approach this concept of ‘gender neutrality’ in human language, but none of these hideous little chimeras are pronounceable. Of course, as is to be expected, those of us who recognize this difficulty in the popularisation of these forms and who refuse to partake in the collective illusion that new genders and pronouns can effectively better the world are shouted down, ostracised, and likened to right-wing sympathisers. In refusing to let our speech be contaminated by ludicrous ideas originated in other countries and languages, in other social configurations (for, needless to say, the social and material reality of an American academic making a living out of ‘queering’ literature at Berkeley is far different than that of a low class Brazilian selling fruits on the street – in fact, that American academic is already very much removed from the reality of an average American of lower income as well), we are accused of being intolerant.

So, by refusing to let ourselves be colonised by American theories, we’re being intolerant… Of whom? Sexual minorities? How can a lesbian, of all people, be charged with the crime of effacing the existence of a trans/queer person? What power does a single lesbian hold in the midst of society, what influence does she have when she is forced to express her discontent with the path both feminist and gay movements have followed by means of an anonymous blog on the internet for fear of violent reprisal? What power does she wield when all of mainstream media supports and sells trans/queer ideology hourly? How does she, in not bending to the whim of some narcissist who calls himself her equal or even more oppressed than she is, cause any violence to this person just by calling him ‘he’? How can she be accused of racism by not acknowledging a concept born and bred within the halls of North American institutions of higher education she, most of the time, can’t even dream of entering?

Identity politics are invariably tied to the language and culture that birthed them. Transplanting this train-wreck to other countries isn’t educating prejudiced whites or liberating the poor, uneducated little third-world citizens of their ignorance, it’s imposing a foreign and quite nonsensical world-view on us all. That seems much more akin to imperialism than the fact of not accepting this same ideology being forced upon us.

This world-view they want us all to adopt (in whose benefit, again?) is rooted on a very simplistic and mistaken understanding of the systems that govern society as we know it, a world-view founded upon the columns of misogyny, homophobia, neo-liberal lies and jargon meant to obfuscate its true meaning and intentions.

How naive must one be to believe that changing some pronouns around and creating a whole slew of ‘genders’ based on aesthetics and stereotypical behaviour can change the world in any way?

Or rather, how can one allow oneself to be seduced by the idea and think that whatever changes it does cause can ever be for the better? Activism is reduced to a joke, a game of scrabble, feeble discussions on the internet which are soon forgotten. Worse still, activism is done in the name of those who need it the least: men. What benefit does this zealous concern with pronouns create for actual marginalised people? What can women, homosexuals, people of colour, the poor all gain from this?

It certainly is not liberation. That does not come in the form of new shackles, as colourful and covered in glitter as they may be.

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happymetalgirl · 4 years

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April 2020

WELL! I have been gone awhile, very busy, and look what happens when I slow down writing about metal: the world starts to fucking fall apart. But no, in all seriousness. I’m writing this part now at the beginning of June after an already tumultuous April and May, and now I’m just making myself sit down and do this because, well, honestly, it’s been pretty hard to justify spending my time writing about music with all the fuck shit going on right now. (I can’t wait to see what July throws at us.) But again, in all seriousness, I’m not looking for any pity or sympathy for my relatively mild circumstances at all because in all honesty, my white privilege has allowed my life to be pretty okay and proceed mostly uninterrupted in the midst of everything going on.

I’m probably going to repost this part in its own post, but I feel like I have to get this out of the way before I write any more about music. I’ll start by disseminating any ambiguity on what I’ll be talking about in these paragraphs that I am intentionally bolding.

As I write this in the midst of a fucking respiratory virus pandemic, another epidemic (possibly pandemic) of racist police brutality that has always existed in a culture of unhinged toxic masculinity in my increasingly embarrassing country has exploded to unbelievable and disgusting levels against Black people and peaceful protesters in the United States, ironically in wake of protests against fucking police violence, all of which is only emboldened and encouraged by local and federal leadership that is showcasing its oppressive, totalitarian ambitions in its unprecedented attempted revocations of its citizens constitutional and human rights.

BUT HOLY SHIT, ENOUGH INTRODUCTION AND ENOUGH ABOUT ME! The point of this is to spotlight what to do in the wake of all of this. First of all, I don’t have all the answers and my perspective is as limited as any person’s, so if you’re an expert on any of these matters or if you have insight from having experiences that I as a white cis male have not had, if anything I’m bringing up here could be better in any way, feel absolutely free (but not obligated) to let me know.

Also helpful is direct support of the people on the frontlines of these protests. It is a time for privileged people to take action in solidarity and support, but not one for privileged groups to take over or “lead” the movement. Right now, this is about who is hurting the most and who is being oppressed the most, and right now that is Black people, by police, hence BLACK LIVES MATTER. Now is not a time for even underprivileged white people to use these protests’ likelihood of escalating to indulge in venting frustrations against the system by inciting police violence that puts Black people disproportionately in more danger in such situations. Now is the time to use that privilege of being less prone to racism police violence to whatever extent possible to protect the people of color protesting. And again, this isn’t about being white saviors or martyrs, this is about supporting people in the way they wish, so don’t listen to my advice over the insight and requests of what Black people and the Black community have. And by all means, fucking listen to them! Read from them! Engage in good-faith conversation with them (though don’t expect any individual Black person to give you a seminar on racism, there are ample resources that don’t demand someone devoting their precious time to you)! Learn where the limits of your perspective fail you! And for fuck’s sake, don’t just cherry pick the word of one token Black friend that happens to have some class privilege to conveniently discount the testimonies of other Black people!

Lastly, on a personal note to the metalheads that read this blog, I think this is a particularly important time for the metal community, not to center itself, but to bring itself alongside social justice in a more complete way than it has in the past. Former Opeth and current Soen drummer Martín López said last year in an interview published in Blabbermouth that the metal community is very behind the curve on sociopolitical issues, and the response to his saying that from the metal community that floods Blabbermouth comment sections basically just made the case for the exact point he was making. And it’s a shame because I think such a huge part of metal is about standing up to injustice as part of or in support of the oppressed, or at least such a huge part of the metal I gravitate toward is. Without sounding too spiritual or cheesy because I’m not a really spiritual person, I feel like when I see the injustice going on, I feel that spirit of metal in all of it on the side of the oppressed. I feel like all the grindcore and deathcore and thrash and death metal I’ve been binging lately is in the spirit of the protesters standing up to and, when they have to, fighting back against the unjustified aggression of the police, and looking back at old, certified classic albums like ...And Justice for All, Toxicity, and Chaos A.D. and more recent albums like Machine Head’s The Blackening, and Thy Art Is Murder’s Human Target, and Venom Prison’s Samsara, it’s always been about standing up to this kind of bullshit. So I think if there ever was a time since Sabbath birthed it for metal to prove that it’s as important as it makes itself out to be and as important as it is to everyone who listens to it in such a way that they read an obscure blog about it, now is that time to show that it’s not just about being an angry white guy. Now is the time to make Martín López happy by proving him wrong.

Well, in typical Happymetalboy fashion, I can’t seem to make anything brief. So, with that said, let’s talk about the metal music that came out in the good ol’ days of April 2020. Wow.

Well, April was a pretty big month. Lots of albums coming out, the whole music industry still the throes of the pandemic, it’s a damn shame we got what might be the best album I’ve ever reviewed on this blog in the midst of all this soul-crushing stagnance and financial despair in the music world. I mean, I’m certainly very glad to be getting such a great album among other great albums at a time when music is definitely helping me to keep going as well. It just sucks knowing these artists aren’t going to be able to tour in celebration of their great artistic achievements, and the first one on this list definitely deserves to celebrate.

Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin Kynsi

I already reviewed the Finnish band’s fifth full-length in great detail, which I highly suggest checking out because I wrote a lot about that album and I wrote it quite enthusiastically. It feels weird in a way to make the rest of the albums on this list follow my recount of an album that I already detailed in great length to be one of the best albums I have heard in years, quite possibly the best album I’ve reviewed in this blog’s existence, but I have to make sure that it doesn’t get lost at the end of this undoubtedly long-ass post. Anyway, Oranssi Pazuzu have fucking outdone themselves on this one and in many ways, black metal in general. The band have been building their synthy, psychedelic sound for over a decade now, but Mestarin Kynsi is the crystallization of everything the band has been working toward, which I think last year’s Waste of Space Orchestra collaboration played a big part in catalyzing. The album is so immersive and in so many ways feels like it has a soul of its own, made possible by the band’s absolute chemistry and dedication to ego-lessly channeling this album’s transcendent ethos as a team rather than elevating themselves individually, and what they conjure on here is such a leap up from their already heady psychedelic black metal and out of this fucking world. Mestarin Kynsi is the kind of terrifying, yet transfixing light that pulls you in even as you know of its malevolence, because it is just too goddamn beautiful and compelling to resist. The score should be such a big deal, but I know that any time this kind of score is thrown out there it prompts all sorts of distracting question regarding the flaws of the album, but I stand by my original score. I love this album, and I don’t see anything about it that makes me think it’s any less.

10/10

Okay, now on to the unfortunate rest of April’s releases that had to follow this up.

Testament - Titans of Creation

Testament rode a pretty vibrant comeback wave with Chuck Billy’s beating cancer on 2008’s The Formation of Damnation and 2012’s Dark Roots of the Earth, but that hot steak came to an end on the rather droll effort they put out in 2016, Brotherhood of the Snake. Back when concerts were a thing, I caught them when they opened up for the rest of the stacked lineup of Slayer’s farewell tour; they put on a great show, and I was reminded of what made them, still, such a prominent force in thrash, hopeful for a rejuvenation on whatever record came next. And as much as I wish I liked this new album of theirs more, I just can’t get into it all that much for so many of the same reasons I couldn’t get into its predecessor. I’d say it has much brighter moments, but it suffers from much of the same recycling of thrash compositional tropes (with not enough elaboration) that Brotherhood of the Snake did. It’s the kind of album that at first listen will seem flavorful and engaging, but it loses it pretty quickly like a snack that isn’t that filling or easy to keep eating due to it’s overwhelming taste, despite its empty calories.

5/10

Abysmal Dawn - Phylogenesis

After six years during which I had thought they might have disbanded or been dropped from Relapse Records, Abysmal Dawn return from the shadows on Season of Mist with the tight, concise brand of modestly technical modern death metal that made them such a sell in the first place on their fifth record, Phylogenesis. Not deviating at all from what they know they do well, Abysmal Dawn stick to a direct death metal attack with no bells and whistles, relying on their speed and agility to guide them, and their strengths serve them well as they manage to highlight what makes death metal so appealing at its core.

8/10

WVRM - Colony Collapse

While not listening to Oranssi Pazuzu or straight-up depressive shit, I have had a massive hankering for filthy grindcore that has been graciously satiated in part by WVRM’s Colony Collapse. Airing heavily on the hardcore side of the genre, incorporating some slower slamming grooves and deep, dirty gutteral vocals into their otherwise true-to-the-genre grindcore, WVRM do indeed put forth a more intense slab of grindcore than your usual twenty-something minute LP, which is made possible largely by the dynamic that they inject with their willingness to incorporate so much tasty, hardcore riffage and nasty sludge.

7/10

Red - Declaration

After what I’ve now come to see as their worst album, 2017′s Gone, Red immediately bounce back onto the positive trajectory that Of Beauty and Rage set them on and back to the symphonic 2000′s alternative metal that they built their early reputation on, with their shortest, possibly most direct album to date, comprised of just ten tight tracks that focus their cathartic brand of alternative metal into surprisingly dense packages that undoubtedly include some of the best of the band’s whole career, like “All for You”, “The Evening Hate”, and the especially cathartic “The War We Made”. I can only hope every band that has stumbled so hard lately can pick themselves back up as quickly and convincingly as Red has on their aptly named seventh LP here.

8/10

August Burns Red - Guardians

I have to say, despite being a pretty standard slab of melodic 2010’s metalcore, this album has kind of grown on me a bit in the past few weeks of listening to it. The album shows that the band are doing well to keep an eye on what’s going on in metalcore, stylistically spanning old and new pretty well. And while we sometimes get cheesy Hot Topic melodicism on songs like “Lighthouse”, other tracks encapsulate old and new in the space of a single song with respectable tact. The track “Defender” for example features two metalcore breakdowns, the first of which is generic as fuck from the 2000’s, but the second is distinctly more creative and forward-thinking, showing that the band are aware of the genre’s evolution and their trajectory alongside it. I also have to point out the highlight “Dismembered Memory” is in the track list with its emotive, Gothenburg-style guitar melody mixed with some distinct Architects-inspired vocal melodies. The closing track, “Three Fountains”, also ends the album on a strong note with its powerful melodic vocals in particular. Again, most of this project is pretty unsurprising metalcore, but the band at least shows some sense of awareness of how to progress their sound, and the strength of the highlights here makes the album worth at least checking out to find them.

6/10

Benighted - Obscene Repressed

While it is a well-performed, well-produced offering, Obscene Repressed is little more than a competent modern horror/brutal death metal album whose campiness in its shots for grotesqueness and creepiness can actually end up working against it. It’s a fun enough death metal album for while it’s on with some impressive flashes of percussion in particular, but it’s memorable mostly for its goofy moments and much less for its songwriting.

6/10

Aborted - La Grande Mascarade

Well, three more songs of relentless modern brutal death metal from Aborted is surely hard to get worked up about, and that goes in the positive and negative direction. On the EP’s three tracks, the band basically just goes through the motions in a way that makes me question what the point of putting these tracks out on this EP as opposed to keeping them for the next album (and potentially grooming them further) was. I mean, I can’t complain too much, the band are solid on these cuts in all the ways we come to expect them to be, but what makes these songs unfit for the next album or really demands they be released on this EP?

6/10

Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts V: Together & Ghosts VI: Locusts

I don’t want to knock Nine Inch Nails’ more ambient works, as I do think Trent Reznor has proven he has the chops to thrive in dark ambiance, but I just couldn’t get too excited about this watered down three hours worth of dark ambiance that he put out this year. It certainly works on the baseline level that all dark ambient music operates on an generally seeks to achieve, but it really doesn’t go above and beyond anywhere and it just kind of settles for the passing grade. At the most charitable, both are the kinds of ambient albums that exist solely to provide an eerie, droning sonic background with a few notable shifts coming from song to song, but that’s not enough to get me excited for either of them.

5/10 & 6/10

The Black Dahlia Murder - Verminous

I have to say, I’ve kind of softened in my earlier perception The Black Dahlia Murder being overrated, and Verminous is an album that really helps their case. Its name is pretty apt for the band’s blackened style of melodeath in general, but the dynamic between their delicious melodic side and their muscularly heavy side on Verminous is quite possibly at its most comprehensively displayed. I know that the band’s fans don’t really see them as having any misses in their catalog, though there seems to be some consistent favoritism toward Nocturnal, but I would wager that Verminous has captured their composition at its most advanced and their sound its most savory.

8/10

MASTER BOOT RECORD - Floppy Disk Overdrive

I’ve not been keeping up too closely with the prolific MASTER BOOT RECORD project, but I do regret missing and not covering the dynamic Internet Protocol EP that was released last year. Floppy Disk Overdrive, aptly named, is a bit more of the usual overload of synthetically instrumental, chiptune-seasoned death metal that keeps me from getting too excited about new MASTER BOOT RECORD releases. Once again, the focus is on solid production of the instruments and minor tricks with the sonic aesthetic, but composition again seems to fall by the wayside, and there isn’t enough intriguing stylistic diversity to make up for it.

5/10

Caustic Wound - Death Posture

More delicious, nasty grindcore to ravage my ears with in between listens to Oranssi Pazuzu and Okkervil River. The debut album by the Seattle-based supergroup of sorts is as pummeling as I would expect given the pedigree of the members involved. Death Posture is nasty, gutteral, and relentless in all the ways anyone could want their grindcore to be. The monstrously bellowing growls in particular make me feel like I’m listening to Primitive Man playing grindcore (which is a good thing). While I have been in quite the grindcore binge lately, Death Posture is more than just your standard, straight-line-through grindcore record, taking an old-school death metal knack for dynamic accents, tasty isolated bass lines, bursts of speed, bursts of thickened walls of sound, and wailing solos. It sounds sort of like if Morbid Angel was directing Primitive Man’s deathgrind adventure, also a good thing. I definitely love this one, probably my favorite grindcore album so far this year.

8/10

Khemmis - Doomed Heavy Metal

While we (if not just I) eagerly await the Colorado act’s forthcoming Nuclear Blast debut (and follow-up to 2018′s perfect Desolation), the band offers a little compilation EP to hold us over until then. Of the six tracks, only the first is new material (and it’s a cover song), two are songs from previous non-album releases, and the other three are live tracks. The band’s cover of Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” transposes the iconic keyboard part onto guitar in classic Khemmis fashion, and the vocal and guitar harmonies give the already inspiring song a new sense of melancholic triumph that I have come to love so much from Khemmis. It’s definitely worth checking out for the fresh take it offers to the Dio classic. As for the rest of the EP, the one-off single “Empty Throne” feels rather B-side-level by the band’s lofty standards, as does their odd, but enjoyable melodic doom rendition of the folk tune “A Conversation with Death”. The sampling of live cuts gets one great song from each of the band’s previous LPs, and the band sounds pretty true to their studio form for the most part, the vocals on “Bloodletting” being noticeably rough though.

Compilation in the Dark/10

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1

The second album from Nergal’s folky satanic rock side project comes with a pretty star-studded line-up, and honestly it’s a pretty fun time and I don’t have many complaints about the concise, catchy tunes that Nergal and company are churning out. “Run with the Devil” is a brilliantly composed opener, “Burning Churches” is a catchy-as-fuck pub-type tune, and guests Ihsahn, Corey Taylor, and especially Matt Heafy showcase the versatility of their vocal styles on their respective features. It’s more a fun heresy-laden time explicitly not overthought than the usual heady blackened death metal that Behemoth pedals.

7/10

Medico Peste - ב :The Black Bile

Taking very apparent cues from black metal’s (and experimental metal’s) more esoteric figures like Deathspell Omega and even Tool, Medico Peste comes through with an at least very aesthetically intriguing listen, even if some of the compositions run kind of long without enough in the way of substantive musical ideas to last quite as long as they’re intended to. While the influences the band wears on their sleeve are at least quite respectably sonically pervasive, it can get occasionally uncanny. The main riff of “All Too Human” sounds like it could have come straight from the Ænema recording sessions, and “Numinous Catastrophe” even sounds like it pulls from Oranssi Pazuzu. But despite the influences on its sleeves, ב :The Black Bile is unique and diverse enough as a whole to sustain an exciting listen and one that I have enjoyed returning to.

7/10

Omega Infinity - Solar Spectre

I had not heard of Omega Infinity until this album, and out of the gate it really sounded like some cliché ambient black metal, but as the album unfolds, it really does reveal itself to be so much more than that. Hard to capture in a single word, the cosmos-themed album definitely captures the wide, chilling vastness of space through instrumental and compositional techniques that provide a fittingly alien, but not explicitly sci-fi, twist on the usual elements of ambient black metal, and it works wonderfully.

8/10

Black Curse - Endless Wound

I heard a good bit of hype over this project, but I’m honestly having a hard time hearing what’s supposed to be such a big deal. We’ve got some solid performances and the occasional compositional flash of brilliance, but for the most part, Endless Wound is very standard blackened death metal with meek ambitions. Like don’t get me wrong, it’s not awful, and I don’t hate it. It just doesn’t depart nearly enough from the beaten, and crowded, path or really stand above the crowd on that path enough to get me excited. I kind of wish the band would delve more into the slower, sludgier, more savory sections of they dip their toes in, like that of “Enraptured by Decay” and the more eccentric takes on black metal dark ritualism on “Seared Eyes”. But until they really commit more to things they can do to get their head above the death metal crowd, it’s going to be hard to get excited about another Black Curse project in the near future.

5/10

Vermicide Violence - The Praxis of Prophylaxis

It was only a matter of time until the pandemic delivered unto us an at least partially coronavirus-themed medical deathcore album, which I am of course not complaining about the obnoxious, ridiculous prospect of. There is a lot of silly, gimmicky deathcore (and metal in general) out there that is pretty superficial, but also plenty that makes a lot of great use of whatever gimmick it’s applying. In this case, the natural grotesquery (if that’s a word) of medical practice does give Vermicide Violence just that little bit of extra tangibility and realness to the nasty deathcore they’re pedaling. From breakdown lines of “vaccinate your fucking kids” and “you only hear once so just buy fucking plugs” (a twist on Suicide Silence’s “You Only Live Once”) to songs about asthmatic asphyxiation, coronavirus infection, West Nile virus, and breast cancer, it’s at the very least somewhat lyrically fresh and fun for any medical metalheads to have a good time nerding out with.

6/10

Vatican Falling - WAR

So I found out about Vatican Falling through the deathcoredads meme page, don’t judge me, but I’m glad I did, because this album, WAR, is some deliciously disgusting deathcore with lots of different flavors. They’re not exactly pushing any boundaries for the genre, but WAR certainly does branch out into melodic territory more boldly and successfully than your average deathcore album, and with good results. It has its low points where some of the experimentation doesn’t work, like the annoyingly repetitive clean vocal sample on the title track, but for the most part, the band’s use of more tangible, cleaner melodies goes over well and supplements the music nicely with a sense of raised stakes. If anything, I wish they did more in that vein because the band’s deathcore grooves at the core aren’t as above average on their own. That being said, songs like “King of Vermin” and “Kill All Humans” show that the band can really raise their game at the base deathcore front and outcompete their contemporaries if they need to.

6/10

Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still

Stare into Death and Be Still is the sixth album from sonically ambitious New Zealanders, Ulcerate. Continuing to push their brand of atmospheric, blackened technical death metal to further reaches of the unknown, guitarist Michael Hoggard’s fluid, multi-faceted melodic work continues to play a pivotal role in steering the atmospheric tone of the album, while Jamie Saint Merat’s impressive following of the music’s odd time signature shifts boosts the album’s energy with tasteful technicality while simultaneously not being too obnoxiously flashy and showcasing some flavorful technical drumming chops. The guitar work takes on so many different shapes and styles, but probably most often reminds me of the winding angularity of Portal with the primal humanness and ritual catharsis of later/current Behemoth, with some more ambient detours taken here and there that hearken to Isis and even more doom-oriented projects like Bell Witch. The swirling together of influences here is so seamless and immersive, and honestly some of Ulcerate’s best. This is not to discount Paul Kelland’s contributions of emotively harmonious bass lines and consistently bestial, yet also somehow soulful, death metal bellowing to the album’s sound; I think his contributions in particular are what help this album feel meaningful and human and not just like some soulless piece of experimental art with a little too much of its head up its ass. For an hour, this album feels like listening to the best aspects of several different styles of cutting-edge death metal, black metal, and doom metal rolled into one masterful super-album that still manages to strike a dreadful chord all its own. Yeah, this is a pretty damn great album.

9/10

Katatonia - City Burials

Honestly, the vast majority of this album feels like Katatonia going through the motions and just playing it safe, never really committing to any really bold performance or composition moves, just coasting off The Fall of Hearts. It certainly passes by the usual Katatonia rubric, but it certainly won’t be going down as one of the band’s most revered.

5/10

Trivium - What the Dead Men Say

I somehow missed out on the entire first half of this album being released as singles, but I sure caught all the hype surrounding the band’s ninth album leading up to its release and all the preemptive praise it was receiving, and I’m kind of glad I got to experience it as a whole without the experience of the singles because I feel like I can honestly soberly assess it and say that it’s definitely not the masterpiece it’s being hyped up to be. The band definitely have found their groove in the various melodic, proggy, thrashy alternative metal styles they play, but this album really just feels like the band are just feeling themselves, in the sense that they’re kind of playing it safe, but bold enough with what they know they do well to kind of mask that. The band’s ninth album is pretty noticeably a continuation of their eighth, The Sin and the Sentence, which had some of Trivium’s most potent alternative metalcore bangers to date, but also some of their most confusingly tepid compositions on the other side of their spectrum. What the Dead Men Say kind of just maintains the band’s trajectory on their previous album and narrows that range from high to low. The low points, like “Bleed into Me” and (to a lesser extent) “The Catastrophist”, aren’t as low, but the high points aren’t as high, and I don’t think I’ll be returning to the better parts of this album, like “The Defiant”, “Amongst the Shadows and the Stones”, and “Sickness Unto You” as much as I will the plethora of highlights from The Sin and the Sentence. Overall, it kind of just feels like Trivium coasting a bit, but the band is genuinely at that level of evolution in their sound where they have made a lot of gradual refinements over time to get here but haven’t just repeated themselves, so they can kind of get away with it. Even if it’s not my favorite Trivium album, it’s sure a hell of a lot better than anything Trapt has ever released.

7/10

#Oranssi Pazuzu #Trivium #Ulcerate #Red #Katatonia #August Burns Red #Omega Infinity #Khemmis #Caustic Wound #Abysmal Dawn #WVRM

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