imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc
now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you’re playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.
now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.
it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.
There are an estimated 50 000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day. Without hospitals the chances of survival for mother and child drop drastically
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
israel’s policy of “shoot to maim” has become more common and evident during the Great March of Return, where 90% of the injuries were in the lower parts of the body which resulted in “a generation on crutches” in 2019. their monstrous tactics continue because no one held israel accountable for its crimes.
What makes this even funnier is if you’re a rich guy and do this the actual poker players will shower you with praise and stroke your ego (especially when you win hands through sheer variance) and say you’re great and to keep doing what you’re doing because they’re just siphoning money from you and want you to keep it up. Like, that’s the original definition of a “whale” in the gambling sense
It’s not ‘understanding something about risk that no one else does’ it’s 'is able to screw up constantly without facing any actual consequences, unlike every other player at the table.’
I do not have words for the utter misery seeing the second image brought me. Bad future shit holy fuck
Oh thank god 😮💨
Yeah no this is a whole trend on Christian Tiktok where people will show their (real/imagined) “glow-up” from an alt/emo/furry/trans to a “good Christian”
this is going to sound like such a little sibling ass take but i genuinely believe that being a little bit annoying is actually a greater sign of maturity and self awareness than being universally likeable and on good terms with everyone
if some people find me annoying and can’t stand me because of how i think and act then that means i’m a fully realized human being with my own personality and opinions and free will and not just a reflective surface for other people’s desires, which is in fact a good thing despite what people who want you to just be a reflection of their own opinions and desires will tell you, and why being considered “cringe” or whatever doesn’t bother me at all
also it’s really funny when you’re confident enough in yourself to know that people not liking you isn’t always a sign that you’re the problem. like there’s something undeniably hilarious about being aware your mere existence has the power to piss someone off and ruin their day and i recommend embracing it.
I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.
Finally confirming that Xbox is run by people that legit don’t know how games are made anymore.
“We fired them because they wanted to make games!”
“No you see, It would be expensive and take time to make games so we would rather fire them”
They could ask for a smaller scope but all they want is AAA, which is inherently expensive and takes a long time.
Literally the end game capitalism of having business people trying to run a company they know nothing about by using the strategies they were taught regardless if they apply or not to the industry they are in.
Beyond moronic.
FOR FUCKS SAKE
Literally in a fucking arms race to see who can become the first media company that doesn’t produce any goddamn media.
I made an Angel Generator last night! I’m currently working on a better one (and an eventual demon generator tbh) but I thought it’d be fun to share the old version! And also that I’d get a kick out of seeing peoples’ interpretations of their angels.
It assigns a body type, size and what its skin is made out of, among other things. Also (somewhat) custom palettes! I picked every fucking shade myself and painstakingly pasted their hexcodes into this thang. Enjoy!
Did a rough rendition of the guy I got for fun. I could elaborate on this design later but I have a lot to do this week lmao
imagine being such a shit person that elon musk tells you to get a hobby
i hope they both kill eachother in real life <3
The best outcome is that she tells him to fuck off, and he bans her in retaliation. Then all her follower terfs will go after him, and chaos will ensue.
ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.
“someone who really has pOCD would be disgusted and horrified at their intrusive thoughts” or maybe i’m in therapy & am going by the books, being radically ambivalent to my intrusive thoughts instead of wasting energy mentally washing my paws of sin. i’m not going to perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.
also like… something something, being afraid of healing because you’re afraid of letting go of the stability of misery, letting go of the narrative you made up to feel worthy of attention, letting go of your “sympathy cred,” this narrative has probably killed a few ppl.
AO3 IS IN TROUBLE IF CALIFORNIAN AGE VERIFICATION LAW PASSES
An upcoming Age verification bill centered in California will be voted on Monday– And as always,instead of actually protecting kids, it will lead to more online censorship and privacy risks, as it will force websites hosting to verify their users age by sending their ID, your browser history would be linked to it. if you live California, call your reps and tell them to oppose the bill AB3080 as it highly unconstitutional.
They also deem LGBT content harmful to minors, as well as mentions of weapons and tobacco, putting them on the same level as NSFW content.
Since AO3 headquarters reside in California, much like Reddit, Twitter,Discord and Youtube (and others) who knows how bad the effects would be. Instead of just effecting Californians (even then its concerning.) the effects would be US or even worldwide. VPNs wont help.
If you don’t live in California, please talk about this,tag your friends and urge others to take actions, make posts and tweets using the hashtags AB3080 and NoOnAB3080
AO3 IS IN TROUBLE IF CALIFORNIAN AGE VERIFICATION LAW PASSES
An upcoming Age verification bill centered in California will be voted on Monday– And as always,instead of actually protecting kids, it will lead to more online censorship and privacy risks, as it will force websites hosting to verify their users age by sending their ID, your browser history would be linked to it. if you live California, call your reps and tell them to oppose the bill AB3080 as it highly unconstitutional.
They also deem LGBT content harmful to minors, as well as mentions of weapons and tobacco, putting them on the same level as NSFW content.
Since AO3 headquarters reside in California, much like Reddit, Twitter,Discord and Youtube (and others) who knows how bad the effects would be. Instead of just effecting Californians (even then its concerning.) the effects would be US or even worldwide. VPNs wont help.
If you don’t live in California, please talk about this,tag your friends and urge others to take actions, make posts and tweets using the hashtags AB3080 and NoOnAB3080
Thinking about when CG was used exactly one time in the entirety of spongebobs pre-movie 3 season run
Like, they could’ve easily just had him instantaneously burst through the wall and get roughly the same joke across, but the fact the writers wanted him to slowly push through the wall like that SO BADLY that they went out of their way to implement the cg effect to do so is so fucking funny to me fndmmsmsms
never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.
find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.
talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore
picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else
if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.
… 8|
That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.
Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining
This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.
Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes
Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”
Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”
When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?
And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking
This is so important
That self-aggrandizing technique is no joke.
I replaced “I’m stupid” with “I’m a God damn genius.” “Move over newton” “another masterpiece”
I replaced “gross/ disgusting” with “sexy/attractive” “the hight of elegance”
I replaced “I suck/ that sucked/ this is bad” with “fantastic”, “a lovely time”, “ swell/jolly good”
Replace every negative with a positive. Say it so sarcastically. Make it complicated make it entertaining have fun with it.
It will stop your self deprecating and build confidence. And people are more easygoing around you.
Orientation of letters doesn’t matter. Letters can share a wall with each other (rather than be positioned really close to each other like in the example). Punctuation can be derived from circles and lines.
The mainstream LGBTQIA movement is becoming increasingly puritanical. In my eyes, this is a subconsciousness effort by queer people to fight for our rights by appeasing the cis-het overlords. Basically we are trying to get them to give us rights by acting just like them.
In reality however, we aren’t like them and we really shouldn’t be. The sexual status quo is fundamentally harmful and objectively flawed. Furthermore, appeasing one’s oppressors never works, it just makes the oppressors more powerful.
No amount of sexual stuff a child or teenager could see at pride would, even if we assume it’s not ideal, come close to what it does to you to grow up seeing airbrushed models selling everything with sex and having all the humanity edited out of sexual things and the sexuality edited out of all things human, including mainstream porn. I would rather a 14y/o spend their free time in a kink dungeon than in front of a billboard, because when you see and learn sexuality through actual people you see that it’s not different from other forms of human connection and interaction. And being around kink in a context where you can walk up the the people and talk to them will teach you actual boundaries and consent. Something that our culture sorely lacks.
This is such a bad-faith argument that I don’t even know where to start, @disabledstemstudent. But… let’s treat it like it’s in good faith and you’ve just got some shit to unpack.
Let’s start out with this: no one is fucking in public at Pride. Pride isn’t the Folsom Street Fair, which I often see it compared to, and all of the “look at this man getting fisted in public” or whatever comes from Folsom and is presented as taking place at Pride. It’s technically true that Folsom is a Pride event, because it’s a Leather Pride event, but you aren’t going to stumble across someone fucking in public at Folsom. You have to deliberately enter the closed-off area where Folsom takes place, so if you’re seeing fucking in public at Pride, you’re either at Folsom and that’s on you, or someone is doing something they shouldn’t be. We’ll come back to that second idea in a minute, but for now, let’s reiterate:
No one is fucking in public at Pride.
So what are we really talking about, here? What’s the real bugaboo that people are discussing?
Two things: public nudity and “leather/fetish/kink clothing”.
(I put quotes around the latter because what we normally refer to as “fetish clothing” is only a very narrow segment of what people wear for kink purposes, but I’ll get back to that, too.)
What is it that people are really objecting to, here? “I don’t want to see almost naked people in public. I don’t want to see clothing which I consider to be sexual signaling. Someone wearing a pup mask in public is engaging in a public scene and I don’t consent to being part of that.”
All of this hinges on the concepts of 1) consent and 2) how queer sexuality is viewed as opposed to cishetallo sexuality. So let’s start peeling all of that apart.
So let’s first talk about Folsom vs Pride. Folsom Street Fair in SF is literally what the ‘this should be in an 18+ space’ crowd is advocating for! This IS that space!
But people are (deliberately in many cases, ignorantly in others) conflating Leather Pride, in September, with the Pride which sprung from the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March organized by Brenda Howard, among others. That March, a continuation of the East Coast Homophile Organization’s 4th of July Marches started in Philly in 1965, gave birth to Pride Month.
Folsom, by contrast, began as a protest in San Francisco against gentrification of a historically gay neighborhood, and was specifically a queer/Leather pushback against people trying to re-closet the queer community during the AIDS crisis. San Francisco was specifically using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to close bathhouses and regulate bars, which started in 1984, so it’s not a surprise that the first Folsom Street Fair took place that year.
Both were protests against the ways in which white cishetalloperikyriarchy has tried to crush our community over the decades, but they are independent events with independent origins. They should not be conflated; if nothing else, it’s a disservice to our history.
However. Pride is not, and never has been, a family-friendly event; this protestation that it should be is rooted in protoTERF & white cis-gay sanitation attempts & ignores the history of the event itself. Pride was begun by kinksters, including Brenda Howard, famously quoted as saying, “Bi, Poly, Switch - I’m not greedy, I know what I want.” She was a Jewish disabled leather-community sex worker, & that identity is emblematic of the people who founded Pride in the first place.
This ‘santization/cishet-friendliness’ of Pride completely plows over & astroterfs (not a typo) its roots:
All of the central figures in Stonewall were not cis, or gender-conforming, and Stonewall itself? Owned by the Mafia, since only they would bankroll gay bars at the time. (In fact, the rename of it was an attempt to keep the Mafia from having ‘ownership’ since they owned Stonewall - there were concerns that the Mafia would say ‘this is our event, you’re using the name of our bar.’ A far cry from Wells Fargo & Merck sponsorships, that.)
A scant few years later, in 1973, people were booing one of the activists from Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, because the TERF-and-cis-LG pushback had already begun. The cis white LG’s were beginning their calls for respectability. This is the famous ‘Y'all Better Quiet Down’ speech. People who were NOT at Stonewall were already trying to sanitize Pride, & there’s video from a radfem screaming at Sylvia and misgendering her. I will not name said radfem, may her name be obliterated.
Pride has ALWAYS included Leather and has ALWAYS included Kinksters because it was founded by them and this sanitization started as soon as the Comfortable felt like they could take Pride from the Most Afflicted and those who had been there. Like, the group Sylvia and Marsha founded was called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, run by trans sex workers for trans sex workers. This was NEVER the neat-and-tidy acceptable-to-straights corporate-friendly bullshit that people seem to think it is/should be now.
So now we’ve established that this event sprung from the “unrespectable queers” because the respectable ones had been doing the organizing before then and had resisted joining with the unrespectable queers, the kinksters and the leather daddies, because they didn’t want to be seen as “like that,” but when Pride became successful and actually got somewhere, they sure were happy to swoop on in and literally tell Sylvia and Marsha “you can’t march with us because you’re not respectable and you would drag us down.” (They showed up and walked in front of the parade.)
Well, so what? Why does it matter if they wanted to exclude trans sex workers who weren’t respectable in appearance, amirite? If the Respectable Gays wanted to swoop on in and take from the Unrespectable Queers what the latter built?
Well, aside from the fact that what they did and tried to do was shitty? Because the whole thing started because of sumptuary laws. Pride literally springs from cishetallos deciding what clothing is “acceptable” for queers to wear in public based not on how much of their body is covered but upon the perceived queerness of their clothing.
Stonewall began because cops were enforcing vice laws targeting trans and gnc people. At the time, it was illegal to wear more than 2 items of clothing associated w/‘the wrong gender,’ so a trans woman wearing bra, panties, and a skirt was illegally dressed. So they were literally raiding bars, getting people’s IDs, and comparing their junk to their clothes and deciding who was illegally and immorally dressed.
Let that one sink in for a minute, in context. I wonder why Pride had so much emphasis on kinky queers & trans queers & GNC queers being out loud & Proud in whatever the fuck they wanted to wear on this ONE DAY when they were all together & physically more people than the police could stop. (Not that Pride wasn’t a permitted march from the first - it was - and it was a protest, not a party.)
And now that we’ve established that Pride, the protest March, not the street fair for corporations, is and always has been by and for the leather daddies and the Dykes on Bikes, the revolutionary contingent who got into fights with cops over the right to wear the clothes they wanted to wear – and had been doing so for years, by the way, Stonewall was just the first well documented violent conflict between cops acting on repressive vice laws which targeted femme queens in specific and the people they were oppressing with the weight of the law…
… let’s actually talk about consent.
Those vice laws were based on consent. The idea that the general public didn’t consent to seeing trans women in public. The idea that the general public got to have a say on whether or not they consented to seeing trans people in public was the whole basis of those laws. I don’t consent to seeing you queers and recognizing you as queer.
But it’s different! The anti-kink-at-Pride crowd cries. This is explicitly sexual clothing!
First of all, no. It’s not. Kink is not inherently sexual.
Second of all, even if kink is inherently sexual, even if what you object to is clothing which signals sexually to other people, why is this particular clothing which signals sexually to other people what you object to? Why is it this?
Why aren’t you objecting to cishet women in plunging necklines or wearing tiny bikinis to the beach? Why aren’t you protesting billboards where m/f couples in almost nothing, or sometimes totally nothing, literally have their tongues down each other’s throats?
Is it because this clothing is indicative of what you think of as deviant sexuality?
I’m willing to bet it is, and if that’s the case, then there’s an awful lot to unpack there about who and what has a deviant sexuality and why we hypersexualize and condemn queer displays of sexuality, especially QTPOC sexuality.
(There is a lot of very racialized bias in this conversation but that is not mine to unpack – I just need to stop and say YES THIS EXISTS, because boy it sure does.)
Why exactly do we think queer sexuality displays require MORE consent than the hypersaturated cishet sexuality surrounding us like a dank BUYTHISNOW miasma every time we turn on a TV/walk out the door?
The answer is internalized homophobia & transphobia. That’s yours to unpack, and it is not the job of a random stranger to change their behavior because you see queer sexuality as inherently more sexual or aggressive, nor is it their job to regulate their clothing according to the possible sexual trauma or sexual orientation of others.
The idea of consent in sexuality and discussed in BDSM/Leather communities centers around the idea that someone should not do something to you without your consent. It’s a good concept! I like it! It’s correct that it is a cornerstone of BDSM and it SHOULD BE.
But, and this is really important, so I need you to read this several times and really sit with it:
The idea that someone simply wearing a pup mask in public is doing something to you while a woman in a thong bikini is not requires you to be examining the world through the homophobic lenses which society smacks on all of our eyes.
Read it again. Think about it. Be okay with the fact that this fact makes you uncomfortable and resistant to recognizing it. Be okay with your discomfort so you can actually unpack that.
The idea that you need to consent to seeing a leather daddy in a harness, but skinny cishet white girls at clubs aren’tdoing something to you by wearing bondage pants & harnesses (which they do, all the time, & no one blinks) comes from internalized homophobia and transphobia.
The way that we view queer sexual signaling no more overt than what cishet people do constantly and base entire economic systems around as doing something to us in a way that requires us to consent to even seeing it is based in homophobia and transphobia.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant my school administrators in the 90s fired a gay teacher because kids might see her at school events with her partner.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant that the administrators first barred the only lesbian couple at my school from holding hands & kissing each other goodbye in the halls and then barred the straight couples from doing so too when rightful claims of discrimination flared.
And? All of this argument requires us to think of Pride as a singular event with no variations, striations, separate areas, etc. This is clearly not the case. If you look at the slate of events for any major city’s Pride events, there are very clearly multiple different events across multiple days for most of them. If you want to create a PG-13 event, or attend one, most places have those!
Expecting the entirety of Pride to be kid-safe is ahistorical, treats adults like children, and requires you to smack them homophobic glasses right back on your eyeballs and insist that the Bad Queers go back into the closet.
And, of course, this all ties into the “pedophile” and “groomer” bullshit which has sprung back up like fucking mushrooms. Oh, those bad nasty queers who are … wearing leather pants in public and going bare-chested and wearing a face mask and a leash! Oh no! They’re making things unsafe for our children by wearing clothing less revealing than the average beach!
But it’s bad clothing because it’s queer clothing and queer sexuality is, in this mindset, inherently threatening and doing something to you. So engaging with this argument supports that shit, and honestly… it’s fucking obscene.
Using this argument against queer adults who are literally just there enjoying the company of other queer adults is fucking violence. This argument and its root implications are the accusations which got (and still get) queers evicted, fired, and beaten to death.
So, IN CONCLUSION:
How dare you come to an event founded by kinksters and swarm around them like the other animals clamoring at the Little Red Hen for the bread she baked?
How dare you look at the leather daddies who survived AIDS and say “we climbed on your back to where we are now, where big corporations see the dollar signs in the queer community rather than condemning us to literally die in the streets, now go away, because you’re unsightly and we don’t wanna see you anymore?”
How dare you engage this in an environment where they’re literally trying to make social transition for minors illegal. What is social transition? Clothing. So now we’re back to “wearing the ‘wrong gender’s’ clothing” is the crime they’re trying to make a Thing again in Florida.
How dare you and everyone making this shit-ass argument year after year look at Dykes on Bikes who nursed and buried their dying friends when no one else would and say “mmm, you’re a pedophile actually because you want to go topless in the sun and show off the tattoos that you got in defiance of a world that didn’t want you to live, and ride through the street with your lover’s arms around you for one day, pretending this world still doesn’t want you dead?”
How dare you wield the very important language of consent like a fucking scythe against your fellow queers?
That is a tool, not a fucking weapon.
Do not use it to attack our history, this event that your elders made for you.
Strangers on the street are not responsible for your sexual trauma, and if your trauma is so bad that you can’t walk around in public and see people wearing sexually-signaling clothing, then I commend you to mental health care and wish you the best of luck, because that’s almost all the clothing that people wear, in one form or another.
It still isn’t the responsibility of adults wearing clothing they are otherwise permitted to wear to change that clothing because you don’t like the messaging it sends about who they fuck and how they fuck. A leather harness and a slinky black dress both convey that information, so why is only one of those things objectionable?
But Spider! What if I’m walking down the street at New York Pride and a dude has his dick out and is getting a blowjob right there in the street!
Well, buddy, then that’s bad regardless of whether the dude in question is wearing leather pants or a polo shirt and khakis, but…
… why did you only picture one of those two images when you read that sentence? Why did you immediately conjure up a specific image in your mind, and why wasn’t it a dude in jeans and a t-shirt? Trust me, the gays in polo shirts and khakis fuck just as much as the ones in mesh shirts and latex dick slings.
Yeah. That shit is yours to unpack and deal with, not other people’s to cater to.
Let’s just get ahead of the discourse this year by reiterating this: the fascists are already fucking coming for us, don’t give them any help.
Your issues with people wearing clothing is your problem, not theirs.
The mainstream LGBTQIA movement is becoming increasingly puritanical. In my eyes, this is a subconsciousness effort by queer people to fight for our rights by appeasing the cis-het overlords. Basically we are trying to get them to give us rights by acting just like them.
In reality however, we aren’t like them and we really shouldn’t be. The sexual status quo is fundamentally harmful and objectively flawed. Furthermore, appeasing one’s oppressors never works, it just makes the oppressors more powerful.
No amount of sexual stuff a child or teenager could see at pride would, even if we assume it’s not ideal, come close to what it does to you to grow up seeing airbrushed models selling everything with sex and having all the humanity edited out of sexual things and the sexuality edited out of all things human, including mainstream porn. I would rather a 14y/o spend their free time in a kink dungeon than in front of a billboard, because when you see and learn sexuality through actual people you see that it’s not different from other forms of human connection and interaction. And being around kink in a context where you can walk up the the people and talk to them will teach you actual boundaries and consent. Something that our culture sorely lacks.
This is such a bad-faith argument that I don’t even know where to start, @disabledstemstudent. But… let’s treat it like it’s in good faith and you’ve just got some shit to unpack.
Let’s start out with this: no one is fucking in public at Pride. Pride isn’t the Folsom Street Fair, which I often see it compared to, and all of the “look at this man getting fisted in public” or whatever comes from Folsom and is presented as taking place at Pride. It’s technically true that Folsom is a Pride event, because it’s a Leather Pride event, but you aren’t going to stumble across someone fucking in public at Folsom. You have to deliberately enter the closed-off area where Folsom takes place, so if you’re seeing fucking in public at Pride, you’re either at Folsom and that’s on you, or someone is doing something they shouldn’t be. We’ll come back to that second idea in a minute, but for now, let’s reiterate:
No one is fucking in public at Pride.
So what are we really talking about, here? What’s the real bugaboo that people are discussing?
Two things: public nudity and “leather/fetish/kink clothing”.
(I put quotes around the latter because what we normally refer to as “fetish clothing” is only a very narrow segment of what people wear for kink purposes, but I’ll get back to that, too.)
What is it that people are really objecting to, here? “I don’t want to see almost naked people in public. I don’t want to see clothing which I consider to be sexual signaling. Someone wearing a pup mask in public is engaging in a public scene and I don’t consent to being part of that.”
All of this hinges on the concepts of 1) consent and 2) how queer sexuality is viewed as opposed to cishetallo sexuality. So let’s start peeling all of that apart.
So let’s first talk about Folsom vs Pride. Folsom Street Fair in SF is literally what the ‘this should be in an 18+ space’ crowd is advocating for! This IS that space!
But people are (deliberately in many cases, ignorantly in others) conflating Leather Pride, in September, with the Pride which sprung from the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March organized by Brenda Howard, among others. That March, a continuation of the East Coast Homophile Organization’s 4th of July Marches started in Philly in 1965, gave birth to Pride Month.
Folsom, by contrast, began as a protest in San Francisco against gentrification of a historically gay neighborhood, and was specifically a queer/Leather pushback against people trying to re-closet the queer community during the AIDS crisis. San Francisco was specifically using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to close bathhouses and regulate bars, which started in 1984, so it’s not a surprise that the first Folsom Street Fair took place that year.
Both were protests against the ways in which white cishetalloperikyriarchy has tried to crush our community over the decades, but they are independent events with independent origins. They should not be conflated; if nothing else, it’s a disservice to our history.
However. Pride is not, and never has been, a family-friendly event; this protestation that it should be is rooted in protoTERF & white cis-gay sanitation attempts & ignores the history of the event itself. Pride was begun by kinksters, including Brenda Howard, famously quoted as saying, “Bi, Poly, Switch - I’m not greedy, I know what I want.” She was a Jewish disabled leather-community sex worker, & that identity is emblematic of the people who founded Pride in the first place.
This ‘santization/cishet-friendliness’ of Pride completely plows over & astroterfs (not a typo) its roots:
All of the central figures in Stonewall were not cis, or gender-conforming, and Stonewall itself? Owned by the Mafia, since only they would bankroll gay bars at the time. (In fact, the rename of it was an attempt to keep the Mafia from having ‘ownership’ since they owned Stonewall - there were concerns that the Mafia would say ‘this is our event, you’re using the name of our bar.’ A far cry from Wells Fargo & Merck sponsorships, that.)
A scant few years later, in 1973, people were booing one of the activists from Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, because the TERF-and-cis-LG pushback had already begun. The cis white LG’s were beginning their calls for respectability. This is the famous ‘Y'all Better Quiet Down’ speech. People who were NOT at Stonewall were already trying to sanitize Pride, & there’s video from a radfem screaming at Sylvia and misgendering her. I will not name said radfem, may her name be obliterated.
Pride has ALWAYS included Leather and has ALWAYS included Kinksters because it was founded by them and this sanitization started as soon as the Comfortable felt like they could take Pride from the Most Afflicted and those who had been there. Like, the group Sylvia and Marsha founded was called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, run by trans sex workers for trans sex workers. This was NEVER the neat-and-tidy acceptable-to-straights corporate-friendly bullshit that people seem to think it is/should be now.
So now we’ve established that this event sprung from the “unrespectable queers” because the respectable ones had been doing the organizing before then and had resisted joining with the unrespectable queers, the kinksters and the leather daddies, because they didn’t want to be seen as “like that,” but when Pride became successful and actually got somewhere, they sure were happy to swoop on in and literally tell Sylvia and Marsha “you can’t march with us because you’re not respectable and you would drag us down.” (They showed up and walked in front of the parade.)
Well, so what? Why does it matter if they wanted to exclude trans sex workers who weren’t respectable in appearance, amirite? If the Respectable Gays wanted to swoop on in and take from the Unrespectable Queers what the latter built?
Well, aside from the fact that what they did and tried to do was shitty? Because the whole thing started because of sumptuary laws. Pride literally springs from cishetallos deciding what clothing is “acceptable” for queers to wear in public based not on how much of their body is covered but upon the perceived queerness of their clothing.
Stonewall began because cops were enforcing vice laws targeting trans and gnc people. At the time, it was illegal to wear more than 2 items of clothing associated w/‘the wrong gender,’ so a trans woman wearing bra, panties, and a skirt was illegally dressed. So they were literally raiding bars, getting people’s IDs, and comparing their junk to their clothes and deciding who was illegally and immorally dressed.
Let that one sink in for a minute, in context. I wonder why Pride had so much emphasis on kinky queers & trans queers & GNC queers being out loud & Proud in whatever the fuck they wanted to wear on this ONE DAY when they were all together & physically more people than the police could stop. (Not that Pride wasn’t a permitted march from the first - it was - and it was a protest, not a party.)
And now that we’ve established that Pride, the protest March, not the street fair for corporations, is and always has been by and for the leather daddies and the Dykes on Bikes, the revolutionary contingent who got into fights with cops over the right to wear the clothes they wanted to wear – and had been doing so for years, by the way, Stonewall was just the first well documented violent conflict between cops acting on repressive vice laws which targeted femme queens in specific and the people they were oppressing with the weight of the law…
… let’s actually talk about consent.
Those vice laws were based on consent. The idea that the general public didn’t consent to seeing trans women in public. The idea that the general public got to have a say on whether or not they consented to seeing trans people in public was the whole basis of those laws. I don’t consent to seeing you queers and recognizing you as queer.
But it’s different! The anti-kink-at-Pride crowd cries. This is explicitly sexual clothing!
First of all, no. It’s not. Kink is not inherently sexual.
Second of all, even if kink is inherently sexual, even if what you object to is clothing which signals sexually to other people, why is this particular clothing which signals sexually to other people what you object to? Why is it this?
Why aren’t you objecting to cishet women in plunging necklines or wearing tiny bikinis to the beach? Why aren’t you protesting billboards where m/f couples in almost nothing, or sometimes totally nothing, literally have their tongues down each other’s throats?
Is it because this clothing is indicative of what you think of as deviant sexuality?
I’m willing to bet it is, and if that’s the case, then there’s an awful lot to unpack there about who and what has a deviant sexuality and why we hypersexualize and condemn queer displays of sexuality, especially QTPOC sexuality.
(There is a lot of very racialized bias in this conversation but that is not mine to unpack – I just need to stop and say YES THIS EXISTS, because boy it sure does.)
Why exactly do we think queer sexuality displays require MORE consent than the hypersaturated cishet sexuality surrounding us like a dank BUYTHISNOW miasma every time we turn on a TV/walk out the door?
The answer is internalized homophobia & transphobia. That’s yours to unpack, and it is not the job of a random stranger to change their behavior because you see queer sexuality as inherently more sexual or aggressive, nor is it their job to regulate their clothing according to the possible sexual trauma or sexual orientation of others.
The idea of consent in sexuality and discussed in BDSM/Leather communities centers around the idea that someone should not do something to you without your consent. It’s a good concept! I like it! It’s correct that it is a cornerstone of BDSM and it SHOULD BE.
But, and this is really important, so I need you to read this several times and really sit with it:
The idea that someone simply wearing a pup mask in public is doing something to you while a woman in a thong bikini is not requires you to be examining the world through the homophobic lenses which society smacks on all of our eyes.
Read it again. Think about it. Be okay with the fact that this fact makes you uncomfortable and resistant to recognizing it. Be okay with your discomfort so you can actually unpack that.
The idea that you need to consent to seeing a leather daddy in a harness, but skinny cishet white girls at clubs aren’tdoing something to you by wearing bondage pants & harnesses (which they do, all the time, & no one blinks) comes from internalized homophobia and transphobia.
The way that we view queer sexual signaling no more overt than what cishet people do constantly and base entire economic systems around as doing something to us in a way that requires us to consent to even seeing it is based in homophobia and transphobia.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant my school administrators in the 90s fired a gay teacher because kids might see her at school events with her partner.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant that the administrators first barred the only lesbian couple at my school from holding hands & kissing each other goodbye in the halls and then barred the straight couples from doing so too when rightful claims of discrimination flared.
And? All of this argument requires us to think of Pride as a singular event with no variations, striations, separate areas, etc. This is clearly not the case. If you look at the slate of events for any major city’s Pride events, there are very clearly multiple different events across multiple days for most of them. If you want to create a PG-13 event, or attend one, most places have those!
Expecting the entirety of Pride to be kid-safe is ahistorical, treats adults like children, and requires you to smack them homophobic glasses right back on your eyeballs and insist that the Bad Queers go back into the closet.
And, of course, this all ties into the “pedophile” and “groomer” bullshit which has sprung back up like fucking mushrooms. Oh, those bad nasty queers who are … wearing leather pants in public and going bare-chested and wearing a face mask and a leash! Oh no! They’re making things unsafe for our children by wearing clothing less revealing than the average beach!
But it’s bad clothing because it’s queer clothing and queer sexuality is, in this mindset, inherently threatening and doing something to you. So engaging with this argument supports that shit, and honestly… it’s fucking obscene.
Using this argument against queer adults who are literally just there enjoying the company of other queer adults is fucking violence. This argument and its root implications are the accusations which got (and still get) queers evicted, fired, and beaten to death.
So, IN CONCLUSION:
How dare you come to an event founded by kinksters and swarm around them like the other animals clamoring at the Little Red Hen for the bread she baked?
How dare you look at the leather daddies who survived AIDS and say “we climbed on your back to where we are now, where big corporations see the dollar signs in the queer community rather than condemning us to literally die in the streets, now go away, because you’re unsightly and we don’t wanna see you anymore?”
How dare you engage this in an environment where they’re literally trying to make social transition for minors illegal. What is social transition? Clothing. So now we’re back to “wearing the ‘wrong gender’s’ clothing” is the crime they’re trying to make a Thing again in Florida.
How dare you and everyone making this shit-ass argument year after year look at Dykes on Bikes who nursed and buried their dying friends when no one else would and say “mmm, you’re a pedophile actually because you want to go topless in the sun and show off the tattoos that you got in defiance of a world that didn’t want you to live, and ride through the street with your lover’s arms around you for one day, pretending this world still doesn’t want you dead?”
How dare you wield the very important language of consent like a fucking scythe against your fellow queers?
That is a tool, not a fucking weapon.
Do not use it to attack our history, this event that your elders made for you.
Strangers on the street are not responsible for your sexual trauma, and if your trauma is so bad that you can’t walk around in public and see people wearing sexually-signaling clothing, then I commend you to mental health care and wish you the best of luck, because that’s almost all the clothing that people wear, in one form or another.
It still isn’t the responsibility of adults wearing clothing they are otherwise permitted to wear to change that clothing because you don’t like the messaging it sends about who they fuck and how they fuck. A leather harness and a slinky black dress both convey that information, so why is only one of those things objectionable?
But Spider! What if I’m walking down the street at New York Pride and a dude has his dick out and is getting a blowjob right there in the street!
Well, buddy, then that’s bad regardless of whether the dude in question is wearing leather pants or a polo shirt and khakis, but…
… why did you only picture one of those two images when you read that sentence? Why did you immediately conjure up a specific image in your mind, and why wasn’t it a dude in jeans and a t-shirt? Trust me, the gays in polo shirts and khakis fuck just as much as the ones in mesh shirts and latex dick slings.
Yeah. That shit is yours to unpack and deal with, not other people’s to cater to.
Let’s just get ahead of the discourse this year by reiterating this: the fascists are already fucking coming for us, don’t give them any help.
Your issues with people wearing clothing is your problem, not theirs.
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