A Black Smudge

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internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing

date of origin: 13th of april, 2015.

happy 10 year anniversary!

Laura Benson

actual dream blunt rotation

Karl J. Kuerner (b. 1957) - The Light Within

acrylic on panel

only just remembered the conversation I had with the person who said they couldn’t read anything written by a lesbian because they were a bisexual and it would be seen as infiltrating a space that wasn’t intended for them and wasting resources that weren’t theirs to use and they were terrified of getting in Trouble.

Reading the tags I'm seeing a lot of comments like "wow moral scrupulosity" "moral OCD the likes you cannot even fathom" "if you think like this you are mentally ill and need help" "oh BROTHER"

and it's mindblowing to me because if you have been in "lesbian spaces" for the last 6-10 years this is not an irrational conclusion to draw at all.

This is a dampened and tame version of what trans and bisexual exclusionary lesbians have been screaming from the rooftops. If your experience as a young bisexual wlw is mostly internet-based, this is not just an opinion that is present in queer spaces but an opinion that has been dominant (and largely completely unchallenged) in queer spaces for a long time at this point.

A bisexual wlw coming away with the impression that their existence is inherently intruding on Lesbianism and they must bow down and submit to the Pure and Good Capital-L Lesbians isn't online cringe or mental illness, it's the logical endpoint of allowing TERFS to be the loudest lesbian voices for over an entire decade.

Before you roll your eyes at the "cringe" moral scrupulosity, try being angry at the people who demand that level of moral scrupulosity out of anyone who is different from themself and think about why you continually accommodate that demand with your nonchalance instead of meaningfully opposing it at its source

it’s funny you mention that because in the original conversation, the person I was speaking with was the recipient of targeted bullying, not some delusional snowflake who needs to go outside and “touch grass.”

it was in 2018-19 and the culture on here was one of scarcity and fear and enforced purity standards, just as it still is. The bullying was virulent and it was everywhere and it cleaved exactly to white woman protectionist narratives that decreed any blurring of the lines as anathema. a bisexual who stepped out of her intended place would bring death and violation to the lesbians around her and needed to be stopped.

@emiel-surreal's tags

Moral scrupulosity develops due to constant exposure to an environment that positions it as the healthy and correct manner of functioning & one that will genuinely make the accusations the person the OP is speaking of was afraid of receiving. We cannot build a world which constantly tells people they are horrible and irredeemable for "intruding" on spaces, taking up resources they haven't earned or don't deserve, and expect everyone who is the recipient of a "callout" to respond with total deference and apology and THANK the caller-outer for the abuse regardless of the validity of the accusation, and then mock people for thinking that moral scrupulously type behavior is what is wanted by that community.

Every moral scrupulosity problem I have is one I picked up from things I saw real people say to other real people. The reason I'm constantly afraid I don't deserve or have any right to consider myself part of the queer community as a 5th dimensionally gendered but female-presented NB and grey asexual is because I have spent years reading people telling me that people with those exact qualities DON'T belong or deserve to take up space. People who develop moral scrupulosity don't just cook it up from nowhere. It is from messages we actually see and take in. OCD is OCD and as someone who has it it is most certainly a mental illness but you can't spend years saying "YOU THEYFABS ARE FAKE QUEER AND DON'T BELONG IN QUEER SPACES BECAUSE YOU'RE TAKING UP RESOURCES THAT AREN'T YOURS" and then immediately turn around and say "OMFG YOU THINK YOU'RE GONNA TAKE UP SPACE YOU DON'T DESERVE? LMFAO YOU'RE SO SICK AND MENTALLY ILL WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU." where do you think people get it?

    Flowers blooming time lapse

those crazy round snowball ones are dahlias, which are AMAZING.

Something you start to notice growing up and living as a, let's say, not conventionally attractive woman, is how much feminist rhetoric, especially the kind that gets really popular and commercial, is from the viewpoint of pretty women. And I'm not saying anything that's being said is wrong per se, but it feels very specific to their experiences, and carries the vibe that they haven't really devoted much thought to what it's like existing as a not-pretty woman. Which ultimately makes it feel pretty alienating?

Like yeah, it sucks that you get treated like a doll and are expected to just shut up and look pretty, that shouldn't happen. I'm sorry to hear that. Girls like me are expected to just shut up and.... end of sentence. Disappear, preferably. You don't hear a lot of girl power songs referencing that on the radio.

It just feels weird to watch music videos about how women are treated like shit and deserve better and 99% of the women in the video are still like, very pretty and dolled up. And then there's maybe one dolled up fat girl or one kinda butch girl (never a fat butch girl let's not go crazy) thrown in for decoration.

Like watching the Barbie movie was wild because while it was very clearly a feminist movie, and did in fact have a couple not classically beautiful women peppered in, all the talking points still revolved around the problems thin pretty women encounter with very little consideration for how not being beautiful tends to intensify a lot of these problems, not dodge them.

And it's VERY hard to point this out and talk about it without having internalized misogyny pinned to your vest like you're in the Go Fuck Yourself Girlscouts.

see this would be a reasonable take if people who make taboo art weren't having these conversations literally all the time

I understand why people often say things along the lines of "academic folk who admire Tolkien do so for his ideas/themes and work with setting and ambition, not for the style or quality of his prose." But also ... lmao, speak for yourself. LOTR would be 1000x poorer without Tolkien's personal prose style as well as the (frequently complex) interplay between the language and style of epic poetry and emphatically novelistic prose.

I think Tolkien is (at least in English) a better prose writer than a poet, but his prose is also very poetic when it's not deliberately anti-poetic. A lot of the language just seems very beautiful and effective to me in a way that doesn't diminish verisimilitude or immersion or the ultimate purpose of the novel, and IMO that's something very few people are good at.

He's not alone in it by any means. But there's a committed, unembarrassed richness to his default style that I just don't encounter that often in English of that kind, and which I think is very impressive. It doesn't always work, but I think it usually does, and both can illuminate character in really intriguing ways (take a look at which characters can shift between these registers and which mostly don't or can't—it's interesting!) and can just linger with you as powerful, effective language.

It is no secret that I hate the Fanny/Henry pairing, bc like...

How can you read that book, and how Henry acts, and the distress it causes Fanny while we're in her head the whole way through...

And want her to be wrong? And want her to be the one to have to admit she was wrong?

No! Terrible, awful ending. Henry Crawford is not a good person. He's not, like, evil. But he's selfish and self-centred and thinks he deserves Fanny because he's rich and charming and made the bare minimum effort to seem like a better person. I fully buy into the idea that he likes her because he likes a challenge, and that if finally faced with what she like every day (shy and retiring and quiet and uncomfortable around loads of ppl) he'd start to resent her sharpish.

This is a book about selfishness and selfish people, and even in this cast, he's near the top of the most selfish, the most careless with the feelings of others. At the centre is Fanny, who is maligned and mistreated, but despite all is selfless and good, though she struggles with jealousy and negative thoughts and feelings.

It's a book about how she - poor and dependent and not especially well educated or taken care of by her relatives - knows her own mind and deserves to be treated as a rational, intelligent person.

It is literally crucial to her arc and the arc of the story that she's right about Crawford!

closeups of my needlefelted fursuit head! She is merino wool over upholstery foam. I really wanted to achieve a “handmade doll” look with her while keeping the general head shape super realistic so she always reads as a cat. The big ribbon hides where she sits on my shoulders and the illusion is pretty good! I am excited to be her many more times.

thinking again about vampirism as disability

what if you slept all day and woke at night, lonely and frustrated. what if you couldn't go to social events, or even mundane public spaces like stores. what if you couldn't see the sun. what if you couldn't go to the pool, or the beach, or the creek. what if you couldn't eat what everyone else is eating. what if you couldn't eat at all. what if your basic needs came at the cost of your loved ones' quality of life. what if you became agitated, confused, maybe even violent if your needs weren't met. what if people blamed your behavior on demons, or worse, your own inherent evil. what if people saw you as a threat to your own community. what if the default response to your suffering was either indifference or violence. what if people thought you were better off dead, that you no longer count as human, that they're doing you a favor by letting you disappear. what if people assumed you must somehow deserve all of this. what about that.

OP loves to wear lolita all day (cr无聊的人类类）

Cnetizens

Dreamy mood in the paintings by Henri Le Sidaner (French, 1862-1939)