Black people inspire me everyday, the world gives us shit and we take it and turn it in to something beautiful.
Yooooooooooooo!!! I will be using! Lit!
Support my bro Stef and Noirbnb. For real. Not even saying that because he’s my homie. That’s a legit business and it’s for us!
FYI: They changed the name to Innclusive.
…If this post is gonna continue floating around and people really wanna support them, they should know that most likely they will not find noirbnb but they definitely WILL find Innclusive.
I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.
Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.
I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?
THREE.
For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.
This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?
I have formed a few theories.
1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.
2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.
3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.
4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.
5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
I literally just signed up on the website and bras go higher than DDD and undies go up to 3XL so yeah guys it’s more inclusive than VS, the article is inaccurate
Hey everyone, I just wanted to say that for my capstone in my undergrad, our class ran an ad campaign for VS. So, of course, we got to talk to a ton of executives for the company. One of our goals for them was to figure out how to make VS appeal more to the younger generation. The girls in my class (which was about 98% of my class) immediately jumped on the “body inclusivity” train. Why not start hiring plus-size models to be angels? Why not start including bigger sizes?
The executives immediately took it off the table. Their words were “We are interested in selling the fantasy of the supermodel” in layman’s terms that equates to “no fat chicks” and we spent the rest of the meeting with the ladies in my class (myself, included) questioning the executives and essentially jumping down their throats.
Victoria’s Secret is not interested in body inclusivity. They don’t care about appealing to a wider audience, despite their failing sales. They’re seriously a bunch of older, out of touch people who don’t understand that times are changing and they will very soon get left behind. We gave them facts, statistics, and survey results that we collected that PROVED that people aren’t interested in VS anymore and that’s exactly why. But they don’t care about that. They don’t care about improving their own image. They just don’t care about their own consumer base.
I hope somebody besides me reads this. Because I want more people to know what narrow minded scumbags the executives at Victoria’s Secret are.
HIGHER THAN DDD YOU SAY? ME AND GIRLS ARE ACCEPTED!!
“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 