#that's what toxic family wants you to think and sadly it's been vastly normalized

[messiambrandybuck]

My mother makes it a point to acknowledge the fact that I like the same sex; she makes it a point to include both binary genders when talking about my future relationships. She's been supportive of me each time I came out to her (first as bi, then as pan), saying that the labels didn't matter to her.

And yet, she's also made it a point to let me know how I "didn't show any signs growing up". Repeatedly. My own mother has told me she was convinced I was groomed into my first same-sex relationship (I'd like to officially point out I was not, don't worry), and hinted that was the only reason why I'm not straight. [my mother and I are both very passive-aggressive with each other, and most of our arguments are through these 'hints'. Sadly, there was no way in which I could've misinterpreted the hint.]

And then she has the audacity to validate what she says by telling me about how she wanted to "march for the gays" when she was a teenager. As if that canceled out all of the horrible and, dare I say, homophobic things she's said.

I'm telling you all this because I need those in a similar situation to realize that what your parents are doing? It's not okay! Nothing about them invalidating your orientation/identity, and making you constantly second-guess it, is okay! I know they're your family, but that doesn't excuse their behavior. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, darlings- please keep yourselves safe 💚

#pride #advice #aidan talks #this isn't even half of the stuff I could've used as examples #but I figured it was enough to get my point across #the saying isn't just ' blood is thicker than water' #that's what toxic family wants you to think and sadly it's been vastly normalized #no #found family that's safer than blood family will always be more important

[divagonzo]

Little bit of Ace History***

... for those who are doing headcanons for Pride month.

*** History being from the last generation. So... recent history.

***************

While Asexual was in the grad school text books, it was, as a queer orientation, on the fringes for considerably longer than Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans. It wasn’t spoken of except in queer spaces and even then, it was more of an after-thought. Like the Mesopotamians (and Mayans independently) - people couldn’t and, somewhat, can’t fathom those who don’t feel sexual attraction (or those who don’t feel romantic attraction or some who have no attraction romantically or sexually.)

Since society is built on populations, the presumption that everyone wants sex or engages in it and those who don’t are aberrant - is a hindrance to those of us who don’t feel it (or, like some, like the idea in theory but not in practice, or those who it’s once in a lifetime (my spouse) or those who have to know someone for a long period of time before thinking, “Would I consider getting physical with them?” (aka Me!) or those who have sexual repulsion - and they are as valid as anyone else under the Asexual spectrum umbrella.)

Asexual was, originally, under the Bisexual umbrella - and like many Bi people of the earlier eras (and sadly still happening) being told they aren’t queer enough for A) The community and B) not Gay enough to be included. (Hence my absolute loathing to gatekeepers for having gone through it back in the early 90s!) Toss in the derision towards bi/pan people who “are selfish/greedy/can’t make up their mind / teases / etc” and you have a boiling pot of potential gatekeeping, especially for those who could really use some informational resources so they know that they aren’t broken & nothing is wrong with how they are.

Yes, Asexual was listed on the fringes but it wasn’t until the early Naughts that the word even made it to notice - much less being more accepted openly. But the biggest kicker is that while being Gay was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Model (what is used by American Psychiatry for diagnosing not normal behavior) in 1973..... being Asexual wasn’t removed until 2013.

Yes, you read that right. 2013. The first published college text on Asexuality wasn’t published until 2012 - and written from a heterosexual white male perspective (and it’s a bit rubbish by comparison to casual anecdotes from those in the community and on AVEN. I know. I bought the book and read it.) While the elderly spinster dowager is more socially acceptable, being a man/male and being Ace in a society that says that men have to be hypersexual.... is harmful to them, too, especially when they are too hindered to be able to come out and say, “I don’t feel sexual attraction to anyone.”

Having no sexual attraction to others was considered aberrant behaviors. And for some, it still is, especially those who think that Ace people (and Aros too, y’all aren’t being forgotten!) should be sexually available to anyone and everyone - and some sods think that the attitude of “You’ve not met the right one” or “I’ll f* you to fix you” is helpful and not actively oppressive or harmful.

Obviously (insert professional quality eyeroll here) people need medications because they don’t want to f* every walking human who passes by - which is toxic even in a hypersexual society. There must be something wrong with them if they aren’t out at a bar looking for a casual hook-up / one night stand.

<shudder>

Why do I bring this up?

I read a posting and it mentioned a fictional character being out as AroAce in 1994.

Jessica Rabbit was a thing back in 1988. But the terms for her besides the negative ones weren’t there ‘til a decade later, if not longer.

While I love the idea that this knowledge was available in the era, I have to take Umbridge (while not detracting from their post) that this is vastly incorrect and harmful to those of us who lived through this era and struggled for decades (yes, I said decades) to know that being Ace is fine and dandy. It’s hard to research harder when you don’t even know a starting point to go look this information up - especially when it was mostly limited to just blooming Queer studies courses in colleges and everything was either published journals or hidden inside academic speak of graduate schools. (I took a couple of undergrad psychology classes and I went back and looked and the terms weren’t even in the books. This was 1995, for those in Rio Linda and Blackpool.)

There’s plenty of my peers who are just now coming to understand that the feelings of dissociation, loathing, guilt, apathy aren’t because they are with the wrong person. It’s performative behavior towards others and personally harmful. It’s letting people f* you so they are content when it’s personally harmful (especially if consent isn’t completely clear.

What would have been said in 1994 was that “he must be gay” even if he was dating a girl and nothing was happening physically. “She must be his beard” would have been said too if performative behaviors weren’t happening. Why? Because being Asexual wasn’t a thing in the era AT ALL. It wasn’t even considered.

Hell, even now there are people*** who will not believe you when you say that you don’t want to have sex - as men or women or non-binary. No, they must fix  you by non-consenting means & their warped logic for the resultant trauma will magically make you want to have sex with people.

Ewwww. Hell no.

I have someone I know who has been repeatedly subjected to their consent being violated when they said no - because they are Ace and people (both of the binary for this person) refused to take No for an answer and.... well, you can fill in the blanks.

Or the not funny bits of “Oh you must be a potato” and other derision of you not being potentially sexually available for other people. This especially goes for those who are Heteroromantic Ace people - like family I have.

I was the first one they came out to, because I’ve been pretty loud about it in SM spaces. They felt safe to say such to me, especially with an, “OK. Cool” reply to it.

I didn’t want them to struggle mentally and emotionally (when they were already neurodivergent) thinking something was wrong with them by not wanting to have icky squicky physical relationships. But by being there, armed with knowledge now it saved them decades of grief and emotional turmoil.

My radical kindness is being the space the baby aces need so they can have a human resource for them, so they know they aren’t broken, that they are valid and accepted, and that they don’t have to behave in certain ways to feel accepted - especially in the queer community.

So yeah, sex might be cool but how about acceptance of people who lived in the era who didn't have the world at their fingertips to know themselves, much less the language to even have a label that fit.

#Ace discourse #Ace History #cw: #cw: generic mentions of non-consenting behaviors #I didn't wish to detract from the Cho post #but I couldn't let it slide either #it rankles me that some think that the knowledge has always been widely know #and accepted #when that's a load of rubbish

[avelera]

My Westworld season 2 analysis: what it means to be sentient, and what was lost when the show stopped asking that question

I think my biggest point of dismay with Westworld was that they didn’t follow the plotline I found most compelling from the first season, and I was left with the conclusion that the interpretation I had that made me interested in the show is now pure fanon based on the direction change of season 2. 

(Cut for spoilers)

- To me the most fascinating question of Westworld season 1 was “When do the Hosts count as sentient?” Basically, when do they pass the Turing Test? It’s easy to make humans think that something that on the surface looks and acts like a human being is actually human, but that’s a computer program being told to perform in that way. 

- Let’s assume Dolores was truly sentient by the end of season 1, and Maeve as well as she defied her programming to go back and look for her daughter. In contrast, Teddy felt stubbornly non-sentient, still performing to his old code. The question would be, will the non-sentient hosts achieve sentience after the revolution, are there more sentient hosts out there, and what does that mean for the world outside the park? I was willing to believe going into season 2 that there were more hosts out there that had achieved Dolores’s level of sentience through their own means and we’d be introduced to them in season 2 as the story expanded. For example, Akecheta would have been a perfect example of this plotline being pursued as a central theme.

- Season 1 seemed to have a thesis that “pain” caused the hosts to eventually experience enough of life that a soul grew out of the machine they were built to be. This is a compelling statement, made all the more so by the fact it may be slightly wrong. The hosts that became sentient (or “human”) like Maeve and Dolores did indeed suffer the most, but they also loved the most. I found it completely reasonable that a stunted, toxic souls like Ford truly believed that it required pain to achieve true sentience, and that the whole point of torturing the hosts with the guests was to push them to the point of maximum cruelty against them so they would gain sentience organically. I also believed that Ford was wrong, because he couldn’t conceive of love, he couldn’t conceive that it was the love Maeve had for her daughter, and that Dolores had for her father, and for William that was transposed onto Teddy, that made the suffering poignant and therefore effective. Ford not understanding this point is why the atrocities reached such a fever pitch, when in truth introducing love rather than pain would have achieved the same outcome.

- What I found most compelling about William/Dolores was the possibility that William was clued in to Ford’s hypothesis at some point, and that in a twisted way, his cruelty in the park was similar to Judas’s betrayal of Christ in Catholic dogma. On the surface, an act of cruelty, but necessary for the salvation of the world to take place. 

- If the above is true, imagine a man who has been told the woman he loves is not sentient. She can’t possibly love him back the way he loves her BUT, there’s a chance she can someday, and that she can be free to make her own choices (which may include not loving him back) if he commits the ultimate crimes of cruelty against her and her kindred. But here’s another twist, it’s not really cruelty because they’re not actually sentient but, at that point that they achieve sentience they will remember the cruelty. Do you do what needs to be done to free them, if it makes you a monster? 

- Even if it’s messed up and twisted in the above scenario, rife with questionable moral choices, it’s a compelling dramatic line of inquiry. Is William just doing what needs to be done, in fact committing the ultimate act of love and self sacrifice, to make Dolores and the hosts sentient--the only people he truly loves but who can’t love him (or choose not to love him) in return until they achieve sentience-- by being a monster to them? 

- What if, after all his cruelties, he reunites with a Dolores who is sentient now? She is free, and therefore is free to hate him for what he has done to get her to that point. What if what’s more important to him is only that she’s free to have that choice, but he still must suffer the fact she can’t possibly love him in return, now that she is free to do so?

- Now, what if that makes William one of our real heroes, but in the process of enacting this plan over the years, he’s gone slightly mad? What if the cause of this madness is extreme empathy, not extreme cruelty? You go into the park, you see your loved ones like Dolores, and Lawrence, and all the people you consider to be your true world and family, knowing that they’re trapped and not “real” but they MIGHT BE someday if you keep working. Then you go back to your normal life. You wear a mask, you count the days until you can go back to your real home in the park again. Every time you go back, no one remembers you. You have to start over. It’s groundhog day, but someday maybe you’ll break the loop. Someday maybe they’ll remember you. 

- And then one day they do. But have you been lost along the way, in the decades upon decades where you looked into their eyes and saw no recognition at all? 

- That to me was the reason I wanted to believe William smiled at the end. That was the journey I wanted to see in season 2, his fall into the madness of empathy. The question of “do the hosts have souls now, are they sentient or are they still following their code?” is the question I wanted continued, not a reversal that says humans are simply less complex robots. That’s a simple, easy, and un-intellectual way out of the really complicated question of “what is sentience?”. Nor did I want to see a version of William who is simply a spurned lover, a madman, and a sadist who was “set free” by the park. I find such a plotline cliche and boring, vastly overtold in the grand scheme of storytelling. Give me a hero who is pushed to immense cruelty out of love, not a villain who discovers he’s a villain. 

If I ever wrote for Westworld fic, it would probably be an AU exploration of William Dolores on the assumption that the above is true. But sadly, it probably wouldn’t include nearly as much of season 2 as I was hoping would occur. 

Frankly in all the complication and flash of Westworld’s premise, they ended up taking some very simple, cliche ways out. Of course the guests were the ones being studied, I could have told you that in episode 1 if you had not tried to hide it. But that should have been a minor antagonist plotline against the greater, universal question of what does it mean to be human, not the main villain plot. 

Dolores and Bernard going out into the real world as a sort of Xavier/Magneto binary of the future of the hosts is premature, we don’t even know if there are robots outside the parks and what that would mean for humanity. The really complicated questions of “who is a host, who is human, what does that mean, how does anyone make money in the world anymore when robots can be so complex and duplicate almost any human task?” have all not been answered, so there’s no tangible threat on what hosts in the outside world would mean except that they are “other” and pissed off from being tormented by humans over the years. Humans, by the way, who were basically torturing microwaves because the hosts weren’t sentient yet. 

It was very disappointing to see such a simple outcome presented as if it was so very complex, and so much other sci-fi copied rather than forging a new path that better fit the story and characters. Like the film Ex Machina, Westworld had a chance to really dive into what it means to be human, and it’s a shame they lost that focus in season 2.

#westworld #willores #my meta