Nefret Cat Hopped Up To Sprawl Very Adorably And Affectingly In My Lap (just, Of Course, As I'd Been

Preoccupied by the way polyamory is treated with hate. I've gotten hate for even approaching the subject in the past. There's so much violent rhetoric and ideation surrounding it, so much genuine bigotry and prejudice towards people who practice it. But if you mention that, you get met with dismissal. It's not a big deal. You're taking it too seriously. Who gives a shit. Get over yourself. It is something that people respect so little that they refuse to even see it as a legitimate identity. Even left-wing progressive types will make jokes tantamount to thrashing blue-haired SJW snowflakes when it comes to polyamory. They're gross. They're weird. They're always cringe. It's never the people you want to be poly. I would rather kill myself. You'd think simply changing the structure of a relationship wouldn't be a problem, but even the most ardent defenders of equality can begin to say some pretty awful shit. Problem is, fundamentally, it is not seen as legitimate. It's not seen as deserving respect. There's all this handwringing about how these relationships are doomed to fail in order to justify this kind of thought and speech. It's bizarre to watch unfold. Frankly, it's the same sentiment and a lot of the same jokes as those cracked about nonbinary people. We're at a point where we've firmly accepted that everyone has a right to do what they want within the structure of social norms, you can take any side you want and do it with whoever you want. But as soon as you step outside of those norms, as soon as you go beyond the boundaries of social convention to find what suits you personally, everybody becomes a bitter reactionary.

Maxfield Parrish, The Young King of the Black Isles, 1906. Reproduced as a frontispiece in Collier's: The National Weekly, vol. 39, no. 8, 1907, p. 8, and as a full-page illustration in The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909, between pp. 74 and 75.

The image above was sourced from the latter publication and has been straightened.

art by tracy walker; preorder here :)

get ready to see these guys on every envelope i ever mail until i die

[ID: Wiktionary screenshot that reads:

Etymology Borrowed from Spanish burrito, diminutive of burro (“donkey”), from burrico (“donkey”), from Latin burricus (“small horse”), from burrus (“red-brown”), from Ancient Greek πυρρός (purrhós, “flame-colored”), from πῦρ (pûr, “fire”).

/end ID]

this burrito is fire

A tiny oasis of spring

thinking back to the time i realized i'd been practicing such scrupulous politeness abt [bodily feature i actively wasn't attracted to] that my bff had come away with the impression that i was, like, very actively into it, which was like. wow, wild to be so deeply misunderstood—

however it turns out that after putting an enormous amount of energy into Accepting that feature, well, now sometimes i am actively into it, so like. guess i'm the one who was wrong about me after all!

the thing about this post is that, in my experience, people don't complain about so-called smith college problems (which was always itself an awfully snide coinage) because they don't understand that they're localized problems; they complain about smith college problems because said problems are cropping up like caltrops in a subcultural space to which they belong, and rendering it hostile to them.

and obviously one can come up with examples of this dynamic it's very easy to portray as ridiculous and entitled, like the first two in this reblog: 'support women who shave their legs and wear makeup every day' and 'let's hear it for masculine men.' absurd! but the thing is, it's also very easy to imagine the sort of subcultural toxicity that would produce complaints like that: criticism of compulsory femininity, while hella justified, can very easily tip over into an anti-femininity that's liable to leave a lot of femmes feeling as though they're being sneered at, because, well, they are! similarly, a lot of this website is sufficiently misandrist¹ that it leaves very little room for eg trans men looking to lean into a masculinity that broader society tried to deny them. and then there's this reblog of the smith college problems post, that rolls its eyes at bisexuals who object to other-gender attraction being framed as necessarily straight, and the first reply to the more recent post, that says snidely 'normalize not transitioning,' as if there weren't plenty of queer spaces in which sneering at 'bihets' and 'theyfabs' is a nastily common pastime.

i don't, personally, think it's an accident that all these examples affect groups who exist in a liminal space between hegemonic acceptance and outgroup acceptance, and in practice end up feeling alienated by both types of space. and personally, i think we can and should do better; i think we have to disarm broader societal inequality by working towards actual equality, for everyone, and firmly refusing to indulge this persistent, pernicious urge to revenge that wants, so very badly, to just tilt the social seesaw in the opposite direction…

⸻ ¹ no, misandry does not per se count as oppression. it does, however, combine with other axes of oppression like Blackness, transness, queerness, &c, in complex ways. it's also just tar pit behavior, imo, when indulged in with any serious frequency.

the problem with being fair-minded is that when something is hurting your feelings but it's something you've previously done yourself you kind of just have to be like. welp.

tfw a binary trans woman describes hrt as inherently feminizing because she finds that framing gender-affirming and you, a nonbinary person, are like, could we maybe not describe having breasts as an intrinsically "female configuration," actually?

sketchbook page of european badger