Cheshirecathidingonacliff - The Moon Is Smiling, So I’ll Smile Too.

I love hearing about research done into lgbtqi+ of the distant past. Especially a romantic stuff like me! Makes me feel like I’m not crazy, you know?

you gonna bac up your claim that cisgender straight people who lack sexual attraction have always been queer? or is speaking out your ass all you can do

Sure! Let’s go! I’m always up to stretch both my lgbt history muscles. Sorry if it took awhile but I am passionate about this stuff and wanted to do some good writing and find some really great sources for you! 😊

In 1869 a humanitarian and journalist named Karl-Maria Kertbeny published pamphlets to oppose the sodomy law in Prussia. In these pamphlet he is widely regarded as beginning the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in the academic mainstream; though, it is likely these were lgbt terms used long before that time. In this same pamphlet advocating explicitly for gay rights, Kertbeny refers to those who engage only in masturbation and not in sex with others as seperate from straight people, coining an entirely different term: “monosexual.” Now, this term is outdated and widely used the m-spec sub community to refer to straight, gay, and lesbian folks lacking multi-gender attraction, but he states very explicitly in all his work that this term is meant to refer to people we would now understand to be asexual.

A little later, in the 1890’s we have sexologist, founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and an openly gay man himself, Magnus Hirschfeld. He published his work “Sappho and Sokrates”: a pamphlet he wrote with the task of explaining the lgbt community to straight people. He makes multiple references to and defences of what he called “anesthesia sexuals.” Again, an outdated term, but as you can see, both gay advocates and straight allies referenced us as being part of the community like it was nothing.

Meanwhile, we have the lovely Emma Trosse, an academic peer to Hirschfeld. She discussed gay rights—especially the rights of lesbians and non-binary people—very openly and wrote multiple papers on the subject. But at her heart, Trosse was a researcher, and so her most famous work, naturally, was an indepth study of what she referred to as “counter-sexualities” as stand in for what we now know as the broader lgbt community. In this work she coins the phrase Asensuality, stating “the author has the courage to admit to this category” officially coming out in her own study! Damn lady! We love her. The Schwules Museum (literally the Gay Museum), a famous German LGBTQ+ museum dedicated to collections focusing on the history of lgbt research, features her work prominently. She also holds the distinction of having been banned as a “degenerate” author in Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and Russia for that very work. On top of that, she was the first woman on record to have a treatise in defense of lgbt people and our community published in 1895, even before her colleague Hirschfeld had his first works published.

As you can see 19th century Germany was a hub of lgbt theory, research, and activism still studied by lgbt historians today. It is widely credited as being a period of time that brought our history into print and the mainstream. And ace people, as I noted before, have been involved both in mention and in activism from the beginning according to both prominent allies, gay folks, and ace folks who were scholars during this period.

But, now lets move over with a bigger hop to the sexual revolution in America; which mirrored the German one in many ways! This is the period of time a lot of people, especially americans, think of as the start of our mainstream history—which as you can see a very americancentric idea, but I digress. Even here we have asexuals represented among the community by diverse members of the community.

You’ve probably heard of the Asexual Manifesto, written by Lisa Orlando and published by the New York Radical Feminists. A very important document to ace-spec people, it defines us as a sexuality seperate and distinct from straight; but you aren’t interested in what we have to say about ourselves and our experiences so lets move on to other lgbt people validating us.

Kinsey—himself an m-spec or multisexual person—recognized us in his research, which he picked up from at the point our lovely Hirschfeld left off, basically. This was later expanded on by Michael D Storm, author of Theories of Sexual Orientation. He reimagined the Kinsey Scale as a two dimensional map, which became the beginnings of the modern Kinsey Scale used in the lgbt community today. He posited it was better able to distinguish asexuals from m-spec people as it defined them less based on sexual preferences, or lack their of, based in gender (which would put both sexualities squarely in the centre of the 1D scale), and more on their self described experiences of attraction. So that’s right, you read correctly; the latest rendition of the Kinsey Scale was created in response to a piece that was published after Kinsey’s original studies specifically to better include asexuals who were already featured in the study and scale.

Then we move to the “The Sexually Oppressed.” Published in 1977, it was a book that did exactly what it set out to do: describe people who were oppressed by heteronormative society and their struggles. It was published by social worker, Harvey L. Gochros and featured the work of Myra T. Johnson in a piece describing the way in which mainstream culture affected asexual women specifically, and how straight feminists often shamed and gatekept them from liberating movements, while straight men continued to be an omnipresent threat via corrective assault and forced institutionalization. It was actually a text book in my college, very good read—goes into the ableism present in sexual oppression as well. I highly recommend it.

Also, just as a bonus, I’ve included an extra link below to “On the Racialization of Asexuality” by Ianna Hawkins Owen. She goes into depths about how the allosexual vs asexual discourse we see starting in America in the 70's—which has turned into the modern global “ace discourse” of today—started with nationalist discussions that have their roots in white supremacy, the white construction of binary womanhood, and chattel slavery. An offering from my university days.

Anyways, I hope you and any other lovely readers who come across this enjoy and educate yourselves a bit. Knowledge is power!

P.S. I could not find “The Sexually Oppressed” available online for some reason (but mind you, I am very bad at computers) so I linked a website that should show you the nearest library in your area that carries it. It’s a very popular social work read.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/Asexual-Manifesto-Lisa-Orlando.pdf

https://books.google.ca/books?id=XbgTAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT113&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://books.google.ca/books?id=IH2GCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA122&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.worldcat.org/title/sexually-oppressed/oclc/925168401&referer=brief_results

Eric is the “Percy Jackson” of his universe. Change my mind

i love prince eric.  from the little mermaid.  he’s hilarious.  because he seems like one of the most mild-mannered and unassuming princes in the disney canon, but he is also one of the few to actively kill the bad guy.   most disney villains die by consequence of the final battle but are not directly killed by the hero/heroine.  most of them fall to their deaths or cause their own demise, and sometimes the hero is indirectly responsible because they’ll launch them into that direction or something, but they still don’t bring knife to heart directly.  

but then a couple do.  and prince eric is my fave out of those few because up until the final act, he is the most chill motherfucker u ever seen.  like he is quick to spring to action during the storm scene n stuff, but otherwise?  he’s really quiet n sensitive and runs along the beach playing the flute for his big shaggy dog n he smiles like a lil nerd and gets all cute around ariel and he’s so sweet n everything.

AND THEN IN THE FINAL BATTLE THAT MOTHERFUCKER STRAIGHT UP DRIVES A SHIP THROUGH URSULA LIKE WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!  NO WONDER NO ONE IS TRYIN TO LAY SIEGE TO HIS KINGDOM!!  ALL THE NEIGHBOURS ARE LIKE “HOLY SHIT DON’T GO THERE! PRINCE ERIC IS A BEAST!  HE’LL STRAIGHT UP DRIVE A BOAT THROUGH YOUR BITCH!”

i love him

NO

This is a message from past Cheshire.

GO TF TO SLEEEP.

That is all.

Listen guys, this important. I need gifs of Taemins tiny hands being tiny. I need SeRaToNiN STAT.

This one's from the Twitter suggestion pile! https://twitter.com/aurabeth/status/1399538324088496132

These little blurbs are giving me so much motivation. I love it.

House I’m working now has a cat. I was not told there would be a cat. More updates to follow.

A good squishy.

Suction cup boi

(via)

The moon is so metal. Like, the moon crashed into us and shore off a good chunk and that lump became a beautiful goddess that inspires poetry and art worldwide. Like, a really fem biker who just really likes to wear white.

I love your blog and your space asks but please pray tell what's the moon boom that jumpingjacktrash mentioned?

have you ever looked up into the night sky and wondered, why the moon is?

well, you're not alone! scientists and learnéd scholars across the ages have been baffled by our celestial neighbor.

WHY, is our Moon so proportionally fucking huge? (it's more than a quarter the size of the Earth! that's COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE AND BLOWS EVERY OTHER MOON IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM OUT OF THE METAPHORICAL WATER)

WHY, is the Moon made up of much of the same materials as the Earth?

and WHY, is Earth's magnetic field so massively overpowered that it can shield the surface from interstellar and solar radiation, allowing life to develop and paving the way for you to even ask these questions in the first place? (that one might not sound related, but I promise you it is so just bear with me)

well, it all comes down to the Theia Impact Hypothesis, or, OPERATION MOON BOOM.

in this fair solar system we lay our scene, four and a half billion years ago.

here, we focus on the third planet from the sun, which is, surprisingly, NOT Earth.

not yet.

no, this unnamed rocky world is slightly smaller than Venus, and is formed of mostly-molten rock that's still settling into itself as our nascent solar system sorts itself out.

ENTER STAGE LEFT, THEIA.

Theia is a rocky planetoid about the size of Mars, on a wild and unstable orbit around the Sun that regularly brings it within spitting distance of our unnamed third rock! and today, it will get A Bit Too Close.

the two planets slam into each other with wild disregard for road safety, disintegrating their outer layers into a massive debris field that will take hundreds of millions of years to settle and fusing their planetary cores together into a single rough oblong of molten iron! BAM! WHAPPO!

but settle the debris does, as gravity takes a gentle but firm hold of this huge mess and gradually reshapes it into two familiar faces...

ENTER STAGE RIGHT: EARTH AND MOON.

that's right, you're standing on top of the alchemically-fused corpses of, not one, but TWO planets right now! our newly-reborn Earth and its singular orbiting satellite are formed from the same debris field and share a lot of similar material. and because the Moon was Made, and not a domesticated planetoid that wandered too close and got trapped in the orbit of a larger body, it's just ludicrously HUGE compared to its partner.

and getting back to that magnetic field thing, the whole reason Earth Can Have Big Field Pls is because Theia dumped so much extra iron into the Core that it generates a MUCH more powerful field than our neighboring planets, even the ones that are just slightly smaller than Earth!

the only reason that life can exist at all is because Theia took one for the team and reshaped the solar system.

so the next time you look up into the celestial dome and spot our closest neighbor, raise a salute to Theia, gone but not forgotten.

I was once again reminded why I need to pay more attention to tags when my favorite character was killed in chapter two. I wasn’t ready for a direct bullet to the head, dude. Not cool.

Photo: screenshot of ao3 tags Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death.