there's our catastrophe

I can’t personally get into “feminist oversharing” because incitement to discourse.

in all seriousness, when I think about “oversharing” between women I think about being in my early teens and making up appropriate crushes so I would have something to talk about.  because otherwise I would be shut out, because we had to trade vulnerabilities, but what actually scared me — the fact that I didn’t understand and couldn’t conclusively label my sexuality — was both too much of a secret to share and paradoxically might not even be understood as me showing vulnerability.  and I think about how “appropriate” meant so much more than even just a dude, it meant masculine, it meant not significantly shorter than me, it meant exclusively heterosexual, and actually, it meant white.  it was understood that that was the acceptable range of dudes I could have a crush on.  and I think about how that shaped my understanding of my sexuality for many years and it took me a long time to realise that I had other options that were better.  like, “sharing” does not just uncover what is there, sometimes it constructs things, and sometimes those things are not great. 

it wasn’t a “mean girls” situation or anything, girls weren’t out to manipulate or hurt each other, and everyone was dealing with this stuff, a number of us turned out years later to have radically different sexualities than we really talked about then.  and there were also a lot of times that I was able to talk through shit that was really helpful to me, that I never would’ve been able to discuss if there was a clear boundary of Appropriateness — I’m so thankful that I grew up in an environment when it wasn’t really necessary to constantly be on my guard about who knew about my mental health issues, for example. but when girls talk about only wanting to hang out with the guys I think this is mostly what they are talking about, freedom from the injunction to overshare, freedom from disclosure. 

I also have mixed feelings about venting and confessional writing and it all comes down to the same thing: emotional sharing needs to be understood as not just freedom but sometimes an expectation or demand or constitutive force. 

k so I know everyone and their dog has had a whinge about the ridiculous sexuality labels of tumblr but squaresome found a particularly depressing one the other night, “lithosexual”, which apparently means “experiences sexual attraction but is not interested in acting on it”. 

it’s just — if you must transform every kind of sexual behaviour into a specific identity, there is already a word for that, “celibate”.  “busy” would do, though.  possibly, given the age of a lot of people using this label, simply “not ready to have sex yet”. 

anyway I’m super annoyed because I was all like “lol what does that even mean, you like rocks, lol” and then annoyed at myself for being so juvenile, and then I researched the matter and found out that it is, in fact, derived from “stone” as in stone butch and then I got way more annoyed than I was to begin with.  this is a huge mischaracterisation of stone sexualities and it’s really appropriative and gross.  it’s staggeringly heterocentric, not to mention misogynist, to think that an orientation that’s basically about a) being a lesbian and b) having strong boundaries about where you can be touched is in any way analogous to celibacy. 

anyway, just one more data point for the “asexuals and fellow travellers are homophobic assholes who think that lesbian sex is not real and that all non-asexuals are hungry for all kinds of sex all the time” files

opendrawer:

“legitimate criticism of feminism: promotion of political lesbianism”

because having sex with men is integral for the liberation of women

dunno about the identity of the OP but can I make a general observation stemming from this that people who aren’t queer women need to stop talking about how horrible and insulting political lesbianism is?  because it seems to happen a lot and they always completely fail to get the subtleties of the intersections of identity, politics, and desire. 

like anything could ever be non-“political” anyway but whatever

(Source: ihaveabsolutelynoidea)