"why are people suddenly saying kink isn't always sexual" hello! you seem to have picked up on something that is actually de facto considered true in IRL kink scenes and often trotted out as one of the basic foundational truths of kink in educational contexts (i.e. beginners' workshops, it'll be in guides for first-timers at dungeons, etc). come take my hand and let me introduce you to the vast and wonderful world of IRL kink.

"kink," contrary to what a lot of internet-only kinksters seem to think, is not referencing your relationship to a concept--it's referencing the concept itself. for example, "bondage" in this context is not referring to "being turned on by tying someone up/being tied up," it's referring to the concept of being tied up/tying someone up itself. this is one of the most common kinks you'll see people playing with in entirely nonsexual contexts--most rope groups have at least a handful of players who are asexual or entirely sex-repulsed, for example. at a lot of rope play sessions, sexual activity will be banned entirely & you'll generally be expected to not show signs of sexual arousal while in that space. because it's not the space for that--sexual play parties are their own thing.

so what makes something a kink vs. a "normal" interest, if it's not a sexual aspect? mostly social stigma. the group of interests considered "kinks" have developed a shared umbrella due to a shared societal pathologization of those interests in similar ways, and one of the ways that pathology manifests is by considering those interests fundamentally sexual. there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a sexual dimension to your kink, to be clear--but society sees sex as inherently disgusting, and sexualization is frequently weaponized to pathologize all kinds of people.

portraying interest in domination/submission as inherently sexual, for example, means those explicitly navigating consensual d/s play are relegated to the realm of "the bedroom" and signifiers of their relationship (i.e. a collar) are considered "obscene" and not fit to exist in public--even when equivalent signifiers of vanilla lifestyles are allowed and not considered obscene, i.e. a wedding ring. if you portray an interest in roleplaying as a dog as inherently sexual, it means anyone roleplaying as a dog in public is subjecting the public to nasty, perverted sex, it can be classified as obscene, you can arrest people for barking and wearing leashes even if they are deriving zero sexual pleasure from it whatsoever and are not exposing themselves or harassing anyone.

why are most kinks expressed sexually to some degree, or have a sexual dimension to them? because sexually active adults tend to enjoy sex. i don't know how else to explain this, genuinely. if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal and sexual attraction, then you will often be aroused by your interests in a sexual context.

like, i am really into fandom. i love a lot of different things about fandom. one of the things i love about fandom is that it's horny; i'm a big enthusiast of smut, horny cosplay, et cetera and so on. but that doesn't mean that i don't like fandom in completely non-horny contexts, or that my interest in fandom is always sexual and can never be separated from sex. just because i cosplay erotically doesn't mean that i don't also cosplay in other contexts entirely. cosplay turns me on, and i also love cosplaying at conventions and for entirely non-horny reasons.

kink is the same. sometimes the exact same person is both turned on by petplay and interested in it nonsexually. this is actually like... really common, it's not even just "sometimes," i would say it applies to the vast majority of IRL kinksters active in my local scene, and i would hazard a guess that this isn't a major outlier, it's fairly common in scenes across the world. but if you can understand "i like cosplaying, and sometimes i'll cosplay at a convention, and sometimes i'll cosplay for sex, and sometimes i'll cosplay for fun alone in my room, and sometimes i'll cosplay to jack off, and sometimes i'll cosplay for money, and none of these are The Only Reason I Like Cosplay, and sometimes when i cosplay i will do it in a way that only includes some of these reasons and not the others at all," it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same reasoning to kink.

anyway, trying to relegate "kink" to only and solely refer to "this set of stigmatized interests and relationship dynamics, but only in reference to sex specifically" is closing the barn door after the horses are gone. sorry y'all but the kink community developed in response to medical pathologization and severe social stigma. there's no post-hoc way to turn it into an ontological classification of some form--kink is messy and abstract as a category because it isn't a category based in, like, scientific observation or ontological meanings of words. it's a category based in "we think these people are freaks and we need a diagnosis for their freakishness" lol. the forcible sexualization of every aspect of kink is part of the initial classification of this loose social realm as "fetish" and/or "paraphilia." sex is not evil or scary or bad but equally the structures doing the pathologization do consider sex to be evil and that's not something you can just ignore when discussing how sex is utilized rhetorically in these discussions.

reblogging this times one million

it’s sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

And he was so astonished he didn’t even argue he just turned around and left 💀🙏🏻 it was like he suddenly became self aware

One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, she’s the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, “Well, I’M not walking six miles, Michael! I’ll meet you back at the car!” and sits right back down!!!!

The expression on his face when he was told that he couldn’t get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationship…….

i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and he’s like “hey. you know what this is” i was like “nah sorry” (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some rando’s pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with “heh. you must not read many books”

i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: “heh. you must not want this beer.” thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm “please please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorry” believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed

gotta love people immediately backpedaling when they realise that there are Consequences To Being Mean

credit to @icarusxxrising 🖤🖤🖤

Hey, that's my artwork!

(No I'm not mad I'm not credited, this art is free for everyone to use! I love seeing it in the wild, no pun intended)

Here's the colored (original) version ! It was originally made for a quick sticker :]

I'm losing my fucking mind. Gay people on tiktok are trying to make "gang signs" for all the letters of the acronym and it's the cringiest thing I've ever seen in my life. Fellow white gays please we have already fucked up enough please stop digging our hole deeper I'm begging you

You are just the gay version of those white suburban boys shouting the n word along to childish gambino

totally normal and not deranged thing to say

For those who didnt realize it wasn't just a blanket statement, but actually made sense

i wish this didnt suddenly become about diagnosis right at the end. the real solution is to trust and respect children, regardless of neurotype. neurotypical kids also dont deserve to be neglected

Yeah, fully agree. The idea 'the only way a child expressing pain can be taken seriously is if the medical system confirms that they're in pain' is really bleak actually.

This is fatphobia, btw. In case none of you could fucking see what's right in front of you.

Also average tumblr user does not know what a chaser is (hint: it isn't when you are attracted to trans women)

Chasers are people who will actively go after vulnerable groups of people to sexually exploit.

In the case of chasers who go after transfems, they are looking for transfems who are emotionally vulnerable and crave validation so they can manipulate them. At best they will treat transfems in seemingly nice ways (to fuck us). At worst they will treat us like a disposable sex object who should shut the fuck up when not in use. They disregard boundaries, they project transmisogynistic tropes onto the transfems they prey on, they exoticise transfems and will generally treat us like shit with just enough validation to keep them in the relationship.

Ultimately, a chaser is never even someone who is genuinely just attracted to transfems. Chasers mainly just see trans women as easy prey or as whatever fantasy they have from shitty porn and not as people.

Chaser is not a "haha funny meme word". It's a term for a type of predators and bigots.

#question: does this have some overlap with the kind of white older guy who dates like poor southeast asian women? YES.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

lol some absolute dogshit in the notes

"stop being poor" is not an opinion I thought I would ever see voiced so openly

This shall not live in the tags

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

[a progress pride flag, but the chevron where the black and brown stripes, the transgender flag, and the intersex flag go, has been replaced with tumblr's notice of "removed content "This con"This content has been removed for violating Tumblr's Community Guidelines."]

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.

Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.

I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.

When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.

Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.

They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".

There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.

Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.

Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"

The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.

The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur

There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".

Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.

^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.

Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.

And these same people to this day are pretending like it's absurd to make that conncection.

This is why I block everyone with any variation of "discourse" in their URL on sight. Aphobes made "discourse" blogs specifically for the purpose of harassing aspec people, so that their main blog was kept nice and clean and none of their followers had to see them telling people to kill themselves because they didn't want to date anyone.

I very vividly remember a post from what I thought was a nice person, that read something along the lines of, "It's important to tell kids it's okay to be gay, but it's pedophilic to tell kids it's okay to be ace".

These people literally fucking thought that being ace meant you were a pedophile, because it meant you were sexualizing all other orientations, and therefore telling kids they could be aspec meant you were sexualizing kids.

Every single fucking argument these people leveled against aspec people was not only blatantly recycled homophobia, absurd ammounts of it relied entirely upon ableism and racism, because these people were pretending that only white people were aspec, and the identity was, and I fucking quote, "A white supremacist's wet dream". They literally went around saying that everyone who was aspec was white, completely speaking over the black and brown people who were proudly aspec whose existance proved that what they were claiming was absolute bullshit.

These aphobes would claim to support all other LGBT people, especially trans people...unless the aspec person they were targeting was trans. Then not being a transphobe flew out the fucking window. Aphobes would claim that if you were trans and ace, that meant you weren't really trans, you were just pretending to be so you could invade the LGBT community.

Aphobes equated ace and aro identities as all "asexy cringiness" but they attacked both communities with equal viciousness, just under the same words.

This is why I block blogs with any variaiton of the word "discourse" in their url on sight. This is why whenever I see a new blog I want to follow, or get a new follower, I search the word "ace" and "aro" along with "trans" and "nonbinary" and "pan" and whatever other specific fucking keywords apply at the moment.

And the worst part is?

The aphobes who spent years harassing and attacking and traumatizing aspec people on this site are still here, with friends and tons of followers, like nothing ever happened. They'll claim they're no longer "terminally online" about aspec identities, mocking themselves for "caring too much" instead of actually doing anything to make amends for the literal hate crimes they committed. They'll fucking downplay and make light of the Literal Hate Crimes they spent years committing because now it's no longer socially acceptable to stalk and sexually harass people over being aspec.

Anyways, block foulserpent, then known as snakegay. Do not let these fucking people get away with this shit and pretend it never happened.

Edit: Oh and how the fuck could I forget all their ableism towards autistic people???? These fuckers were claiming that "aspec" was a shortened version of "autistic spectrum" and that you were ableist if you used it to refer to the "disgustingly pedophilic fake identity" of being aspec.

Even though literally too many gods damned people to count, including me and my twin and literally too mnay people to count, who were aspec, who used the term aspec, were also literally autistic and told these people over and over again that that's literally not true, stop fucking speaking for autistic people (because, to be crystal fucking clear, no one making this aphobic claim was autistic. It was literally just allistic people infantilizing us and not only speaking for us, but beating us down when we contradicted them!).

Literally the most ableist fucking post I've ever seen on this site that claimed to support autistic people was written by an ableist as shit fucking aphobe who was. Gods even just remembering this fucking post is so fucking infuriating. Everything about it was so fucking infantilizing and ableist. They claimed that aspec people using the term aspec was, and I paraphrase from memory, "trapping autistic people in your posts like nets, unable to understand why everyone is hating on them".

Like. Literally. So much of this fucking hate spree was ableist it's fucking absurd. Allistic people really just fucking hate autistic people and try to use us as a bludgeon //against ourselves// whenever they think they can get away with it. And let's not forget that if you were openly autistic and proud to be aspec, they'd then come in and claim you were faking being autistic (the same way they'd claim you were faking being black or brown or trans or gay) to invade the community and "steal resources from real LGBT people".

And again. Cannot stress enough how these people screamed and cried about how the word queer is a slur and always has been and always will be, then immediately turned around to hurl the word kweer AS A SLUR. With no fucking irony. Literally using a slur they claim to hate as a slur and thinking they're the good guys. I guess they thought changing the spelling would make it okay for them to /literally use it as a slur/??? they literally just made it into a slur again and used it as such and then acted like they were the heroes for...calling queer people slurs that are apparenly unforgivable >.>

And lets not forget that these people regularly flooded aspec tags with gore and porn despite their own claims that only "misguided children" were identifying as asexual or aromantic...

Go through the notes of this post if you want to learn about the hellscape this was. There are so many people sharing their experiences.

There has been a lot that has struck me about this thread, especially as someone who has been active in this conversation since 2011. But I reblogged this post last week

And two days later, I got a note directly from my personal blog that from my activity preview seems to have been from someone unfamiliar with this entire sphere of discourse.

I saw the note the day after they left it, and there were so many "this really happened?"-style comments that I couldn't easily find their note in my activity.

This has gone from normal, to unheard-of, and back to normal again, at least insofar as young aces coming into our community don't know what we all fought through to make a space for you to feel safe in.

If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to reach out--I've been here since 2007, and I'm glad to fill you in on what I've seen. If not, that's okay too--but please know that a lot of us have bled and hurt and died so that "ace" is something you can put in your bio without fear. I don't begrudge you that; you're the reason I did it. But there was a fight, and this post points to some of the pieces of what that fight looked like.

I started to realize I was ace during this time and fuck was it rough. I had to spend years unpacking internalized aphobia just to come to terms with my identity.

And like I remeber this one post that went around that in retrospect I pray wasn't true, where someone was talking about how they were the president of their college's lgbt+ support club and one day someone who was a cis heteroromantic asexual showed up and they had to pull them outside and tell them they weren't queer and weren't welcome at the club. And like god that post fucking haunts me. Can you imagine being that cruel? The OP was fully painting themselves as a wise community leader who was correcting this misguided straight person and people were fucking patting them on the back for it and talking about how they were so proud of OP for protecting the real queer people from straights like that who want to invade our spaces and steal our resources.

I really, really hope that post was fake because I have spent so much time thinking about that ace person and worrying about them, wishing I could find them and tell them that OP was wrong and cruel and they belonged in that group.

And god forbid you HC a character as ace, that shit was a one way ticket to getting harassed and labeled a homophobe. And that shit hasn't even completely gone away, it wasn't that long ago that people in the MP100 fandom were just being openly and unapologetically aphobic because they didn't like ace Reigen HCs.

I also remember at least one prominent queer youtuber legit saying in a video that they didn't think there was anything queer about being asexual. That shit hurt because I really looked up to that creator, and tbf they have changed, but like that was just par for the course back then. You never knew if another queer person was safe or if they were going to turn out to think ace and aro people were special snowflakes who just wanted to pretend they were queer for funsies and thus should be unpersoned.

And Thomas Sanders basically had his entire internet presence nuked just for saying he thought ace and aro people were queer. Siding with aspecs was legit social suicide back then.

This shit also absolutely went hand in hand with transmedicalism, biphobia, and basically any movement that sought to separate queer people. TERFs have openly admitted that ace discourse was a recruitment tactic, because once they got you to believe one group of queer people was the enemy it was much easier to convince you to hate others. Aspec exclusionism and biphobia were the gateway ideologies, and tbh in some places they still are, that's why it's so important to recognize that TERF rhetoric is more than just hating trans people, they are smart enough when recruiting other queer people to not start with the transphobia.

And god the ace/aro exclusionist stuff really did go right into biphobic monosexual discourse(you can't use monosexual it lumps queer people in with straight people and besides biphobia isn't real it's just misdirected homophobia) those arguments were just copy + pasted from aspec discourse, and then transmedicalism and on and on to the next group. It's always the same arguments, the only thing that changes is the target. This is why anyone who EVER uses the argument that a certain type of bigotry is just a different type that's been misdirected is instantly sus to me. It's always an exclusionist dogwhistle used to try to deny whatever queer person is the enemy of the week a seat at the table.

But yeah, I try not to fault people who got swept up but changed and have put in the work, but it is still heartbreaking to think about how much aspec culture has just been completely lost because of that shit. We had solidarity and symbols and communities, and we've had to start over because half of us are too traumatized to bring back cake and dragons and the black/white rings and the rest just don't know because there's no one left to teach them. And it also sucks to see hateful stuff that was born out of that era still get passed around because the context is gone. It's just...beyond tragic. It really is.

What's distressing, but also important to understand, about JK Rowling hitting the "Denying trans people were targeted in the Holocaust" point is that it's kind of the last stop before she just goes full alt-right weirdo.

Joanne is denying the Holocaust (if a group was targeted, denying they were targeted is Holocaust denial) and that's going to lead to pushback from historians and experts. But Joanne is too deep in to believe what anyone who disagrees with her says, so she's just going to dismiss what those historians and experts tell her. And once she's disbelieving them about that one thing, well it's just a tiny step to start disbelieving them about other things.

This isn't by accident either, transphobic circles are swarming with far right agitators, ready to use hatred of trans people as an in to recruit people into their causes. They have handbooks for this sort of thing and they are, unfortunately, good at it. I suspect Joanne will be spouting coded versions of Great Replacement stuff by the end of the summer.

This is not a plea to try and pull Joanne out. She's too deep in, and even if she wasn't, she's already demonstrated an inability to examine her own prejudices, an unwillingness to hear criticism and a weakness to flattery. She is perfect recruitment bait for people who know what they're doing, and my impression is she's surrounded herself with people like that.

No, this is to understand two things: First is to use her as an example, to understand how a well meaning liberal can chase their own prejudices down a very dark rabbit hole. We are none of us immune to propaganda and even if we can't change what's happened to her, we can at least use it to protect ourselves.

And second is to understand that one of the main reasons you can't pull Joanne out of the transphobic pipeline is cause she is the pipeline now. She is the transphobic banner bearer now, she is funneling money and attention to these groups, she is their most famous celebrity and she is helping recruit people. Being able to show people how far she's gone, how deep into the right wing rabbit hole she's going, is important to help other people who still think she just "Had some concerns" know where her path leads.

btw part of what's at stake in accepting that the family form is inherently unjust & harmful to children is, you don't have to have endured an anomalous degree of violence, coercion, or abuse in order to have been traumatised by your family & your childhood. it is an inherently violent & terrifying situation to be completely at the mercy of people who have total material and financial control over you. it is inherently violent that they have the legal right eg to hit you or deprive you of privacy, whether or not they personally exercise these rights. all of this also applies to the other most obvious population made vulnerable by the family form, the elderly

I think this take will really help give a lot of people the freedom to examine any pain from their childhood they never felt their parents "deserved" to be taken to account for. It ultimately is not all that much about them or their actions as people. It's about the power structure that makes it impossible for a young person to ever feel that their life is their own.

Add SCHOOLS to that list of inherently violent & terrifying situations completely at the mercy of people who have total material control over you.

Schools aren't just violent when the teacher hits children or participates in bullying. Schools are violent because every moment of your day, down to your physical autonomy to use the bathroom, is controlled by someone else and no matter how that makes you feel, you can not leave.

& personally I'm not quick to call that experience traumatized, because that describes a specific set of high-stress-responses that I do not have from either my family or my school. But experiencing a total lack of autonomy for so long is definitely shit to process and shit that has been normalized to the point where you are primed to tolerate a whole lot of violation and lack of autonomy in your adult life as well, and that's the point.