there's our catastrophe

i don’t give a fuck about how you fuck: or, your hot ass mess is not my revolution

miswritten:

your poly is only politicaly relevant to me if…

• you center respect and love for women and femmes in how you do relationships.
• you understand and care about how your actions in relationships are directly connected to the well being of your communities. (y’all know that this shit breaks up friendships and communities all the time.)
• you are aware of and work to resist heterosexist and patriarchal notions of love that are grounded in ideas of capitalist property ownership, misogyny, and racism.
• you respect any and all of your partners.
• you do not pit your partners, hookups, or love interests against each other by being shady and shitty about communication — especially if you are masculine-identified and your partners, hookups, and love interests are women and femmes. *of course, when this happens, it’s “unintentional,” right? but when misogyny structures how we understand and do relationships in such concrete ways, you need to fucking fight as hard as you can to actually BE intentional. being unintentional in the way of, “oh it just happened,” or, “but i didn’t do anything wrong,” when what is naturalized is being careless about the relationships between women and femmes, then not having intentions or thoughts around all that is a problem.
• you understand the importance of (and work to center) the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs and boundaries of yourself and your partners.
• you understand how each of your relationships impacts all of the other ones. and you understand that the way you carry yourself in one relationship will show up in your other relationships.
• you do not dismiss your partners’ jealousies, insecurities, or negative feelings as just them being “jealous” or “too emotional” or “not really getting it.” you don’t blame or shame people for their emotions.
• you accept full accountability for your actions when you are hurtful, unintentional, or careless in your interactions with others.
• you do not dismiss others’ concerns about you being possibly disrespectful or misogynistic as them not being radical or sex-positive enough.
• you understand that having the space/freedom to love and fuck however you please does NOT mean that you are operating in a vacuum. you understand that everything you do has consequences - and act with care.
• you understand that poly is not about having the freedom to do whatever the fuck you want to. you understand that poly is about having the freedom to pursue your needs and desires openly without shame, and to hold yourself to being intentional and responsible. especially because those needs or desires are about OTHER PEOPLE and OTHER PEOPLE’S BODIES.
• you get that you are not entitled to the guarantee that everything you do/want will be okay with all your partners or your communities, esp when your actions will impact them and when people are always operating from different contexts, traumas, desires, needs. (aka, you don’t do disrespectful shit and expect your partners or friends not to respond just because you didn’t mean to hurt anybody.)
• you understand the importance of informed consent — meaning, if there are things that are going on that might even possibly make someone reconsider cuddling with you, having sex with you, or being intimate with you, then you need to be open about them.
• you don’t take consent for granted. ever.
• you know how to set, talk about, and respect boundaries.
• you don’t use your “poly” status to be emotionally neglectful and/or abusive to your partners.
• you don’t treat people like they are expendable, disposable, or otherwise meaningless, even if it’s a quick fuck or a fling.
• you communicate openly and honestly without withholding important information, especially when it’s hard.

the desire to love/fuck lots of people at the same time is not something inherently radical or meaningful. people have always wanted to love/fuck multiple people, whether or not that’s been in accountable ways. basically, if people are side-eying you about how you do poly/relationships it’s not always because they’re just colonized sex negative tools of the state or some shit lol.

(and thanks disorientd, seafoamknife, & lowendtheory for talking/thinking through a lot of this with me. all love. ♥)

guys bragging about how much they love to eat pussy is the new guys bragging about how hard they can fuck you

god’s gift to women, aren’t you all

Vanilla Privilege:

autumn-and-eve:

• When the ice cream man comes, I can assume he will have my desired flavor of ice cream
• McDonald’s carries my desired flavor of ice cream
• If I go to a supermarket, I can assume that my desired flavor of ice cream will be present
• Everyone knows about my desired flavor of ice cream
• If I watch an ad for ice cream, I can be sure my desired flavor will be represented

(via closet-direction)

mistakeshavebeenmade asked: Hey. Can I just point out that people who identify as lithosexual are by definition not asexual, because they experience "normal" sexual attraction? I agree that it's an absurd, unnecessary, possibly offensive (I can't speak to that, since the link you provide provides no sources for it's claims about the word's origin, but I'm willing to take your word for it) term, but hating on aces because of it is a bit illogical.

I don’t really appreciate the ~”IF IT REALLY IS AS YOU HAVE CLAIMED” because look, it’s not my stupid website, it’s some aromantic thing.  it’s not my problem if they can’t source their claims correctly and don’t realise how bad they’re making themselves look, it doesn’t mean I’m being slanderous.  

anyway, the point is, you are correct!  but this is kind of my beef.  “Lithosexuality” is defined by its users as part of the asexual spectrum despite being really normal and not significantly different to many/most people’s experience of sexuality at some point in their lives and not even really stigmatised. This is also true of a number of other identities associated with the asexual spectrum, notably the much more popular identifier of demisexual.  I can’t think of anyone I know who has not at some point gone months or years without sex despite it being available to them, because they were busy or working through some shit or just not feeling it or being really choosy or waiting to fall in love.  like, hello my life. 

I’ve even seen people who identify as flat-out asexual redefine stuff like masturbation, non-genitally focused romantic physical intimacy, intensely desiring sex, or just plain having physically gratifying sex, as “non-sexual”, generally because it wasn’t a simple case of seeing a hot bod and having an instant and unambiguous physical response, which, again, is nothing like how most people experience sexual response, but is how most asexuals talk about the rest of us. 

what it all boils down to is that there are a lot of really weird and offensive ideas about what non-asexual sexual/romantic lives are like floating around in the aceosphere, a lot of people shoring up their asexual or asexual-spectrum identity by constructing a vision of how other people experience sex that is just completely reductive and offensive and most importantly inaccurate.  I don’t doubt that people who rarely or never experience sexual attraction or desire exist and obviously there is nothing wrong with that, it might even be useful to have a label for it.  but I have actually never seen an example of asexual activism that wasn’t super offensive and flat-out wrong about other people’s sexuality so I am, at this point, pretty comfortable with “hating on aces”.

if you are Not Like This then cool, don’t talk to me about it, go talk to the asexuals who are and make them expand their point of view a bit and hopefully leave me alone. 

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