#challening social norms

[a-cosmic-elf]

I’ve seen people moaning about how Starfield is sexless, and it makes me wonder how many Bethesda games they’ve seen that feature visual sex. Sex you don’t just hear or read about in-game.

Sex has never played a front-and-centre role in most Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, so I’m not sure what some were expecting from Starfield. Mass Effect levels of sexy time, I guess, which is in my view unreasonable in this context.

Sex is there in the lore of Bethesda games, but never shoved in your face. It’s more cerebral than that. They give you the suggestion, and then you roleplay the rest if that’s your thing. And that is a breath of fresh air. Considering the world we live in, that’s something to be celebrated.

True RPGs must be careful to be as inclusive as impossible. I have found many allosexual folks expect sex to be there, as it is in most media we are exposed to, and they don’t give one thought to those who would prefer to go about their day without sex being ever-present.

In Starfield, the first time I landed in Neon, I adored it. Why? Because it’s the antithesis of what you would expect from a ‘pleasure city’ in the sci-fi genre.

It was almost like they were saying, ‘Hey, remember the dancers in Mass Effect? Yeah, let’s take the piss out of that. Let’s make a club without sexy female dancers shoving their asses and titties in your face. Let’s put dancers of all genders and sizes on this podium, fully clothed in the silliest outfits, and make them dance like Shepard. Let’s make it feel like a child’s birthday party on drugs.

For the record, I’m allosexual, but that kind of satarical social commentary will always be funny to me.

Well done, Bethesda. Thank you for constantly pushing back on the ‘sex sells’ marketing mantra and just saying ‘no. If you want sex on your Starfield journey, imagine it. We haven’t ruled it out, but it’s up to the player how far they take it in their heads.’

That’s what a Role Playing Game should be. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

#starfield #cosmic chats #bethesda #acespec #ace representation #allosexuality #social norms #challening social norms #game development #rpg #role playing games #thank you bethesda #supra et ultra

[causticsunshine]

The way Twitter gays jumped to hype up John Cena a cishet guy who wore a skirt for a comedy film he stares in and will most likely be the subject of the joke while also hating on and invalidating H whom they believe to be cishet because when he wears more feminine clothes it’s “appropriating” should be studied.

yk i wouldn’t be so apprehensive when a mass of internet gays are shown being supportive of (insert confirmed cishet / presented cishet public male figure wearing or doing something seen as traditionally femme-coded) if this kind of supposed widespread support weren’t actually so rampantly case specific.

(liiiiike besides everything with harry, how people constantly comment on how sam smith shouldn’t be wearing xyz revealing thing because of their body type—let’s give it up for fatphobia on top of the queer judgment woo!)

and i’ll fully admit that i have a bit of fucking beef with perpetually online queer people—like in the actual sense of the phrase; not people who’re just socially online a certain amount—especially the highly vocal variety who seem to see themselves as our esteemed communal speakers when all they do is write shitty hot takes on twitter and comment flood hate messages to other people they deem as not actually valid or for somehow doing queerness ‘wrong’ 🚬

like a lot of the people in this especially vocal group who come for harry and other people similar to him—yk, individuals freely and continually expressing themselves without the constraints of gender norms/binaryism limiting them…. like how dare they 🙄—actually end up preaching more regressive rhetoric aligned with harmfully close-minded groups they claim to be against simply by trying to step on and police who is and who isn’t allowed to identify a certain way, or who can and can’t wear something, all because of some bullshit reason like their body type, body shape, other things they may wear or have worn, how they identify to the public, etc.

their selective acceptance really is more harmful than it is helpful and when called out, they either don’t give a shit about that at all, or are fully delusional in thinking they’re truly helping weed out the ‘fakers’ who only use queer culture and aesthetics to come off as ‘interesting’ or whatever the hell it is they actually believe… idk because i can’t track what it is they wrongly call their ‘logic’ lmao

specifically in harry’s case, because he can never seem to catch a break from even his own fans, i really want to ask these Losers of Gatekeeping: okay, but bitch why ??

like, why (and how) are you so sold on harr’s shoddily-crafted cishet playboy narrative when he’s consistently contradicted that story for YEARS, that you use it as your primary evidence as to why he supposedly deserves so much harassment from people? or do you instead see him as a willfully closeted artist, and instead use that as cannon fodder for your constant criticisms because people who’re closeted in any way are just self-hating liars who shouldn’t receive understanding or empathy?

there’s just… so many things i want to ask them that has to do specifically with him (just to start) that come out to: okay, but why?

and regardless of the truth behind the john cena skirt and heels situation—and i shouldn’t be hopeful but i also don’t want to imagine that crossdressing jokes are an actual comedic thing in 2023, so fingers crossed it doesn’t become a jokingly misogynistic kind of bit—it really comes to show how selective acceptance and support seems to come from a rather large section of the online community, specifically the queer online community, and how this selective support and in turn toxic gatekeeping and judgment can so easily make the community a far more unsafe place than it should be.

and unfortunately, while it’s bad enough harry is so consistently the easy target for this malicious behavior, he isn’t the only victim of it and it makes me actually fucking fearful what these losers think of more everyday gender-challenging people, because i don’t think their criticisms are at all just contained to people in the public eye 😔

#overall i do not like it and if your acceptance and support of another queer person is limited because they’re fat or poc or because #to you they come off as too ‘masc’ to pull of ‘femme’ or vise versa…. anything like that…. i hope you ROT!! #this obv isn’t limited to queer people but in this conversation specifically i’m pointing it out amongst queer people to other queer people #anon #answered #alex talks #long post /

[thenewdeadseascrolls]

Judges 6: 28-32. "Baal's Socks."

Gideon, the Son of Joash, "The Hewer who has grasped the meaning of existence" exceeds his stage as a Jael, "the mountain goat who can do just about anything" and sacrifices it on the altar of Baal, the god on the ground. He destroys the Asherah pole, which is a bundle of all the paradigms we invent to keep us happy, none of which are named in the Torah. "No white after labor Day" is a silly example, as are all the rules of fashion, but we observe them anyway.

Other examples include those that persecute people for how they walk, dress, talk, fuck, marry, work or play, all the "social norms" that prevent knowledge of the Jewish Self are Asherahs and must be discarded. Asherah sticks create the power bases for Baals like the Republicans. So long as society agrees to use non-Jewish rules against the human race, Baals will have power and that is not good.

As the next passage says, the end of an altar to Baal is the beginning of a new kind of altar and there will be others after that.

Altars are used for sacrifices, which are aspects of the Self we know is not good for us, is not working, does not make us happy or is preventing us from moving on. So long as there is delusion about the Self, an altar is present. Once one attains to Ha Shem, no longer needs to make sacrifices to know onself, altars are no longer necessary.

As it says below, challening the might of the Asherah and its masters, the Baals is a necessary feat all Jews must perform. We covered beating the meat, has anything bad every happened as a result? What about accepting Jesus? Or eating pork or shellfish? Which aspects of life are enforced by others but have no ability to liberate the self from undue suffering?

Being Jewish is not a slog through a desert with a bitchy prophet and a menopausal mother in law kind of God. It is not suposed to be a struggle it is supposed to be an effort. Judaism is not a bravery test, it is not an endurance test. There are no mysteries about it that cannot be solved that cannot also be used to solve for the Self.

The moment a person is a hereditary or even an adopted Jew realizes the true purposes of the Torah and the Religion is called the Morning. Waking up in the morning is the same thing as dying the night before during the end of one's struggle to belong to anyone but oneself. More than any other kind of person, a Jew must be successful at this contest:

28 In the morning when the people of the town got up, there was Baal’s altar, demolished, with the Asherah pole beside it cut down and the second bull sacrificed on the newly built altar!

29 They asked each other, “Who did this?”

When they carefully investigated, they were told, “Gideon son of Joash did it.”

30 The people of the town demanded of Joash, “Bring out your son. He must die, because he has broken down Baal’s altar and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.”

31 But Joash replied to the hostile crowd around him, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” 

32 So because Gideon broke down Baal’s altar, they gave him the name Jerub-Baal[f] "living inside Baal's sock" that day, saying, “Let Baal contend with him.”

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 28: In the morning when the people of the town got up, there was Baal’s altar, demolished. The Value in Gematria is 10972, י‎טזז‎ ‎, yahtzaz, "Yah will move to the Seventh."

The Second Bull is not enough, we need all Seven.

v. 29: Who did this? The Value in Gematria is 8239, חבגט‎ ‎, habagat, "the baguette."

=go out and learn.

Ha= counsel from God

Ba=comes

Gat=the vat

It is very likely we observe the Sacrament with wine and bread because the Gematria for "go out and learn" are the very same terms as "bread and wine." In fact, of this there is no doubt.

30. The people of the town demanded of Joash, "to see God." The Value in Gematria is 8241, חבדא "be sure to use Chabad."

31. He can defend himself. The Value in Gematria is 11422, יאדבב‎ , "kindly yadbab", "Kindly put your hand in your father's."

32. Living inside Baal's sock. During the Passover, one prepares to make an immediate departure from all the causes of delusion and oppression which always come from self-conscription to an Asherah Pole of Baal. There is no cause for freedom so long as a Jew remains conscribed to Baal, "one's husband."

Jewish men are supposed to be brothers during the Passover Seder not husbands. If one is packing one's husband's suitcase full of his socks, like a wife instead of following the Seder with one's brothers, the Seder is not achieved.

The Value in Gematria is 7007, זאֶפֶס‎אֶפֶס, zepesepes, "one tessellation". A tessellation or "surfacing" like tilework in a mosaic is the goal of Passover. The Law says there shall be no oppression on this planet. If some are free and others are oppressed, the Passover remains stuck in the gears of Midnight and we want to make it to the next day. This means the rules or socks that are keeping our feet from being free need to come off.

[makingstuffup]

Here’s an argument that we see from ace tumblr on a regular basis. It’s the argument that people not knowing about your identity or believing that it’s real is, in and of itself, a form of oppression (often phrased as “at least people know you exist”). This argument is being used in someone’s blog post to prove a certain point.

[T]here is one more term which I must define, namely that which I call "oppression by omission." By this, I don't simply mean the invisibility of minorities (either "invisibility" in the larger society, or as "invisibility" within minority spaces, such as this blog post about the invisibility of Native/Indigenous people in spaces for people of color). There are countless ways in which minorities of various kinds, and those positions of relatively less social power, are not taken into account, left out of decision-making processes that have an impact on them, etc. Oppression by omission is not "you are so marginalized we do not have to consider how this will impact you," although that plays a role in it. What I am mainly talking about here is the experience of minority groups about whom the master-narrative is "this group does not and cannot exist at all," and when one of the central ways by which oppression is occurring is through society's repeated (even ubiquitous) assertion that people like this do not and cannot exist, and that people who "claim" to be this way are mentally ill, frauds, or are otherwise incapable of accurately relating their own experiences. In some cases, anyone who even accepts the experiences of these people is considered deserving of ridicule. When oppression by omission is occurring, the people impacted by it are very unlikely to "come out" about their experiences, not because there are explicit statutes on the books about people like them, but because the social ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is immense. In subtle and not subtle ways, most of us are taught at an early age that there is something different, or scary, or not OK about our experiences. This ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is almost always also invisible to those who do not see these minorities in the first place. The invisibility begets invisibility; with few to no positive role-models, few to no positive and empowering stories to identify with, and relentless negative messaging (in some cases through spec fic), invisibility can become the only "safe" world we know, and we can be hesitant to challenge it. Oppression by omission can take place on a small scale or a large one, within the larger social framework or within minority spaces, alone or in conjunction with other forms of oppression. It is different from what is usually recognized as "oppression," the more overt and visible forms. But it is not without often profound impact on the people who are thus erased. There have been efforts aimed at challenging invisibility, even challening the oppression by omission, in certain communities. The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network has been doing this work for a decade, and recently a documentary has been made about asexuality and asexual people. Yes, asexuals face considerable oppression by omission: check out the lovely videos made by swankivy, such as here, where you can watch videos she made about her "Asexuality Top Ten." ("You can't really be asexual, you must be...")

What do you think the context of this is? What point is the author trying to make? Take a guess before you read the rest.

This comes from the blog critpsitheory, which aims to combat the oppression of people with psychic powers. The entries date from 2011 to 2013.

It has a long list of bingo cards, a list of how to evaluate media for anti-psi bias, a list of common microaggressions against psi, and more. This is the post the quote came from, and the author goes on to say:

The concept of oppression by omission is also helpful for understanding the invisibility faced by more esoteric minorities, such as Otherkin, therians, psi/sang vampyres, or even what it's like to be part of a multiple system. To some degree, transgender people also face oppression by omission, such as "genderqueer people do not exist," "transmen are really butch lesbians who took it too far," or "trans women are all cross-dressers who want to colonize women's identities and bodies." Bisexual/pansexual people also face it. The list goes on. Now all of these experiences (and many more) are very different, and very diverse within each category. The only parallel I am drawing is that in each instance, the social master-narrative is, at least at times, one of "non-existence," and so each and every time someone tries to come forward with a counter-narrative and express his/her/hir experience of the world, for whatever reason, he/she/ze has to deal with that master-narrative in some way. It might be because someone else is shutting them down or putting them down. It might be because they have to couch their experience in other terms in order to get through someone's filters. It might be because they have to, in some sense, "test out" all the people they talk to about this aspect of their lives to see if they can accept it. It might be that they choose never to tell others, because they know that telling others is fundamentally emotionally, socially or even physically unsafe. (See this video, for example.) What does psi omission look like? It really takes many forms. It can be that psi experiences are omitted from the biographies of famous people, even when these people wrote extensively about their experiences -- such as Mark Twain (for example here, and the several articles linked here) or Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It can be the dearth, or even total lack, of non-sensationlistic non-fiction produced about the subject. It can be discourse or study that focuses exclusively on whether or not the "claims" are "real," with little to no attention paid to the narratives of the people living with these experiences (except when the purpose is sensationalism, or the entertainment of non-psi people). It exists in the lack of realistic characters, with experiences like ours, present in "realistic fiction" on television, in books and movies, etc. -- characters who are full people (not two dimensional plot devices), characters whose role in the story is not to "do psi things" every week (or simply to be scary, or to stand there and look sexy), characters who exhibit self-determination, characters who can serve as positive role-models. It exists in the complete lack of serious support groups (in the US, anyway) for young people trying to understand their experiences in a world that denies, stigmatizes and ridicules them. It exists in "othering" language and the use of us as rhetorical sarcasm (which I will cover in more depth on this blog).

Now, whatever your personal beliefs on the existence of psychic powers, I hope we can all agree that people with psychic powers are not an oppressed group. The author lists bi and trans people as also suffering from this “oppression by omission,” and I hope we can all agree that bi and trans people actually are oppressed.

What does this tell us? It tells us that this argument is a bad one, and can be used to “prove” the oppression of any identity whatsoever as long as it’s less well known.

This blog came out of the heady days of roughly 2009-2012, when some sectors of the internet collectively discovered social justice in the aftermath of RaceFail. In the naive enthusiasm of those days, many people started creating privilege checklists, bingo cards, etc. for every identity they could possibly think of that faced societal stigma or invisibility or was not considered the norm. 

There was one popular social justice blogger at that time who argued that being able to not drive drunk was a privilege, not being a necrophiliac was a privilege, and not being attracted to your siblings was a privilege similar to straight privilege. This blogger also endorsed monosexual privilege and binary privilege (the word “allosexual” hadn’t been invented yet, but I believe she also endorsed “sexual privilege”). (I’m not going to name her because she no longer endorses those ideas as far as I know.)

There were bloggers, some of them trolls but not all (and plenty of earnest people reblogged and supported the trolls’ ideas), who endorsed the ideas of “transethnic” and “transabled” oppression, which meant that people who identified as a different ethnicity than they were, or who identified as having a disability that they did not have, were oppressed. 

Take a look at this list of personal privileges and oppressions, and “some of the oppressions and systems that kyriarchy is composed of.” (Warning: the author admits to committing sexual abuse.) I think this person was later revealed to be a troll, but they were satirizing a very real and common way of thinking.

The word “queerplatonic” came out of that time, and is representative of the ideas of that time.

“Privilege Denying X” was a popular meme at that time, and in response to the ace discourse - which was going on then and has never stopped - someone created the blog “Privilege Denying Asexuals,” which responds to ace tumblr’s rhetoric with many of the same arguments we are still using. (It’s an interesting exercise to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.)

In roughly 2013, tumblr slowly began changing courses to say that not all forms of societal stigma, discrimination, and lack of visibility were actually examples of a privilege/oppression dynamic. Materialist analysis slowly began gaining the upper hand, and now you’d be hard pressed to find someone on tumblr who thought that drunk drivers, necrophiliacs, “transabled” people, goths, furries, “vampyres,” people with dyed green hair, etc. are oppressed. In most cases where groups like this are concerned, it is no longer common for people to equate the forms of discrimination and invisibility described in this psi post to oppression.

Ace discourse is simply one of the last holdouts of this kind of rhetoric. 

I do not mean to say that asexuals are like drunk drivers in that they are harmful, or like “psychic vampyres” in that the experiences they describe don’t exist. Some of the groups that people claimed were oppressed then are real, some are not; some face real difficulty in society that should be respected, some do not; some are not inherently harmful to others, and some are. People who don’t experience sexual attraction are real, often do face difficulty, and their lack of sexual attraction is harmless to others, but that does not make them an oppressed group, and it certainly doesn’t make them oppressed under homophobia and transphobia, the systems of oppression that the LGBT coalition exists to fight.

#ace discourse

[90spictureperfect]

To explain is not to feel

My vision about a lot of modern life problems is sometimes very narrow, altough I always do my best not to be too simplistic, too shallow. I always try to go into the depth, to find the core issue, to analyze.. 

I fail to understand whatever it is that makes me pissed, because I try very hard to explain it, with facts, with mental connections, with symbols, but not with personal experience, because it feels too scarry.

Experience in and of itself can be dull, if I automatically damper its feeling. Even my quest for knowledge needs me to let go of my quest for knowledge.

A lot of what I really want and need is hardly anything more than the desire to fully live. And to live with joy.

Self confidence and positivity seem mandatory nowayads. They are social norms, pillars of every succesful relationship, even antidotes for depression.

I knew  I never really had them. They were severely underdeveloped. 

Probably because a lot of times I didn’t need them. Whatever success I experienced, I would consider it just came my way, and felt joy, and never tought about it again. Whatever good thing I experienced, I just assumed it was meant to happen to me and I just enjoyed it.

But later on, negative and painful things started to happen and I started to question my abilities, my value, my importance, my destiny. It is safe to say this brought me a huge amount of pain, because I felt lost at the outset.

I didn’t know how to trust myself because I never needed to trust myself for anything, my life just happened, and it was nice for a while. I didn’t know how to value myself because I’ve always felt valued and loved, most of the time.

But that scenario started to backfire, more often than not. When I had to deal with adversity in life, I felt absolutely powerless, defenceless.

 I started to look around for points of reference. And I saw people very different than I was. They were resilient, they were proud, they were expecting the best, they were holding on to whatever positive thing they could create or obtain, they were succesful or at least they seemed happy. Whatever tragedy happened, they were out there, facing it, fighting it, learning another skill, trusting their hearts, looking out for their loved ones, eating good, being loud and so on.

I instantly felt disconnected, I felt I could never be like them, I felt that was a shoe that didn’t fit me. I tried to do what they did, but the results, however positive, could never stick with me and shape my self confidence. The work was too challening, I couldn’t understand, I never felt self-confident, in reality, I merely felt happy, but I didn’t feel I could depend on my actions, I could protect myself and trust myself, I always felt like mostly everything I did was somehow against me, on a deeper level. 

But I wanted what they had, so badly. When I was done with wanting what they possesed (beauty, skills, money, social status), I decided I wanted what they displayed: resilience, power, and above all: trust and faith. 

I thought I did trust and I had faith as well, but I was never really challenged to feel them deeply.

A lot of years, self confidence was a huge struggle, like trying to put on a dress which fits, apparently, but in reality it’s too tight, doesn’t give you ease of motion. All the mantras, the “love yourself” quotes, the positivity, they felt dull, they didn’t feel mine. Positivity made me feel good but I couldn’t actively sustain it on my own, I could only think and think and think and think until exhaustion.

Obviously, I felt trapped in a cage of my own creation. How could I survive in a world where I could’nt help but experience hurt, pain, and difficulties? 

How could I go on, and even hope for a better future? It was obvious for me that self confidence was not a choice, since I couldn;t sustain it, and it seemed to require huge amounts of mental work and reflection.

And then, when I was deeply struggling to find a way, I felt trust, because I felt way too tired to feel anything else. I trusted my decisions. A few days later, I found myself genuinely expecting a good outcome, with no doubt about it. Why?

Because I was exhausted. Mentally and emotionally I couldn’t process the information, and I was forced to really try something new for a change.

It dawned on me, how could these people be like this all the time. They weren’t deliberately choosing this over pessimism and distrust, they simply chose what felt good. It feels good to trust yourself, it feels good to act decisevely and expect a good outcome. It even feels good to feel in your heart that there’s hope, particularly when there’s no concrete evidence of it.

This behaviour, this attitude, felt like a huge enigma for me, It seemed easier to pour concrete 15 hours in a row, than this. I though it was a something extremly complicated, a combination of pshysical traits, mental traits, life experiences, blue blood, intelligence, activity, spitituality. 

In actuality, the feeling of it alters my way of being. It feels divine.

People practice it because success feels dull without it, life feels dull without it. People in loving relationships practice it not because there isn’t real love there , but because they know and understand how the human mind, and life itself will always present challenges.

 I always chose to believe that self confidence is a trick, some kind of magic somebody does to replace actual skills or actual value. I was really goofy and I feel like I needed a good hug, and I still do. 

Life is not always easy, or beautiful, and even if it is, some of us are not born with the inertia of good feelings. Some of us become isolated, impenetrable, sad angry, because this is how it feels to be alive sometimes.

Very few of us dare to create our customized self confidence, our customized positivity, which does not feel tacky, but instead feels like it belongs with us, and makes us enjoy a good challenge and even have hope that a huge pain will eventually reveal something precious. 

We feel isolated because we don’t seem to posses the boldness, richness, and focus of other people, and we cry, our soul cries. But we’re only people, after all, and we don’t always know the way. But sometimes we can feel it, sometimes somebody else shows it to us. Sometimes we understand. Sometimes we understand, looking around and paying attention, that self confidence, love, and positivity are only designed to look and seem so out of reach, are only designed look like weapons of mass destruction . Self confidence is not kyrptonite for humility. 

Self confidence is humility itself, it’s kryptonite for pain and depression. But it never kills that internal struggle, because it’s not supposed to.Self confidence saves lifes, helps others, creates magic out of nothing, creates hope out of misery.Trust and faith understands limitations and humbly ignores them. Trust and faith and self confidence give birth to light where there’s only darkness. 

There are so many things that happen without planning, without much thought, without much sense. We happen to ourselves a lot of times, and when we do, it helps to feel alive, to feel like ourselves, whatever we might be.