Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
All jokes aside about Prince being the shade King. Do you know what he did for music? His defiance of hyper masculinity and what a Black man was supposed to look and sound like? Prince is a legend.I don’t want to see any light skin men be like memes, I don’t want to see any “can still pull your bitch” jokes. This is a serious moment for one of the greatest entertainers to ever live and breathe. Purple Rain, When Doves Cry, Wanna Be Your Lover, Black Sweat and countless other hits. Your immortality is your music. Farewell Prince Rogers Nelson.
At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.
At age 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer.
At age 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.
At age 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.
At age 28, Wayne Coyne ( from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook.
At age 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.
At age 30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.
At age 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs.
Julia Child released her first cookbook at age 39, and got her own cooking show at age 51.
Vera Wang failed to make the Olympic figure skating team, didn’t get the Editor-in-Chief position at Vogue, and designed her first dress at age 40.
Stan Lee didn’t release his first big comic book until he was 40.
Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting at age 42.
Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get his first movie role until he was 46.
Morgan Freeman landed his first movie role at age 52.
Kathryn Bigelow only reached international success when she made The Hurt Locker at age 57.
Grandma Moses didn’t begin her painting career until age 76.
Louise Bourgeois didn’t become a famous artist until she was 78.
Whatever your dream is, it is not too late to achieve it. You aren’t a failure because you haven’t found fame and fortune by the age of 21. Hell, it’s okay if you don’t even know what your dream is yet. Even if you’re flipping burgers, waiting tables or answering phones today, you never know where you’ll end up tomorrow.
All women, including very thin women, have lower bellies that go out slightly instead of in because THERE ARE ORGANS THERE, and that is photoshopped out of models as though having organs shaping the female body is somehow a flaw??
Butts, bellies, and breasts look different when the body is bent in different positions, because skin and fat move, and gravity is a thing. Strange to know that women are humans, hm?
you know what, fuck it, I’m going to reblog this twice because I have a story to tell.
Almost two years ago I was approached by a man at a bar. He was very handsome— tall, with great cheek bones and the kind of eyes that crinkle at the corners with every smile. That man asked to buy me and my friends a drink.
Not wanting to give him the wrong idea, we turned him down. None of us were single, and we’d all had experiences where men have expected things from us after providing seemingly generous acts of charity.
That man spent the rest of the night harassing us. He followed us around the bar, dumped a beer over my friend’s head when she confronted him, made lewd comments about my ass when I walked passed to go to the bathroom. We tried to tell the bar staff what was happening, but with the room being so crowded, by the time we managed to locate the bouncer, he’d disappeared into a throng of people.
That man approached us when we were on our way to our car. He was verbally aggressive, throwing slurs at us and stepping into our personal space. When I pushed him away, he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me down. When my friend tried to call the police, he slammed her head into a wall.
We were lucky that after that, he panicked an ran away. It could have been much, much worse.
Bottom line? Fuck you if you think all women want is attention from attractive men. Fuck you for eternity.
Attention from an attractive man didn’t give me an ego boost. It gave me a fucking black eye.
“Attention from an attractive man didn’t give me an ego boost. It gave me a fucking black eye.”
I’m not ace myself, so I’m coming at the whole acephobia thing from an outsider’s perspective, and as such, it’s not my place to speak to the experience of those on the receiving end of it.
However, as a bisexual dude, I can observe that many of the arguments that are employed to establish that ace folks have no place in the queer community are strikingly similar - indeed, at times practically word-for-word identical - to the arguments that were for many years (and in some circles still are) employed to establish that bisexual folks have no place in the queer community.
It’s enough to make a guy suspicious on general principle, you know?
I’ve gotten a few messages asking for (well, in some cases more “demanding”) elaboration, so: here are a few of the primary areas in which I’ve observed that arguments against bi inclusion and arguments against ace inclusion tend to exhibit significant overlap. There may well be others - these are simply the ones I’ve run into most frequently.
The Passing Argument
It has been argued that bisexual folks don’t have any grounds to complain about discrimination and violence suffered in relation to their orientation, because a bisexual person is able to pass as straight simply by choosing partners of the appropriate gender. Therefore, any discrimination and violence that a bisexual person does experience must be construed as voluntarily undertaken, since they could have passed, and freely chose not to.
This argument is similarly applied to ace folks via the assertion that being ace poses no particular barrier to seeking a partner of a socially acceptable gender, so any failure to do so must likewise be construed as voluntary.
The Performativity Argument
It has been argued that bisexual folks ought to be excluded from queer communities because sexual orientation is purely performative; i.e., being gay is defined in terms of currently having a sexual partner of the same gender. A bisexual person who has a partner of a different gender is functionally indistinguishable from a straight person, and must therefore be regarded as straight. Conversely, a bisexual person whose current partner is of the same gender must nonetheless be regarded with suspicion, because they could “turn straight” at any time simply by leaving that partner.
This argument is similarly applied to ace folks via the assertion that their orientation has no discernible performative component; an ace person is functionally indistinguishable from a straight person who simply isn’t involved in a sexual relationship at that particular moment, so ace folks must therefore be regarded as straight by default.
(An astute reader may notice that the passing argument dovetails neatly into the performativity argument: those who choose not to seek partners of a socially acceptable gender may be dismissed because any violence and discrimination they experience is a consequence of their voluntary failure to pass, while those who do seek such partners are performatively straight and therefore to be shunned. It’s a neat little system.)
The Mistaken Identity Argument
It has been argued that, while bisexual folks may suffer discrimination and physical and sexual violence, they’re not targeted by such acts because they’re bisexual. Any discrimination and violence a bisexual person suffers in relation to their orientation is suffered because they were mistaken for a gay person. Any effort on their part to discuss such experiences is therefore to be regarded as appropriative, in spite of the fact that they personally experienced it. In short, a bisexual person’s own experience of violence and discrimination doesn’t truly “belong” to them: it “belongs” to the purely hypothetical gay person their persecutors allegedly mistook them for.
This argument is applied to ace folks practically verbatim - no particular adaptation is necessary.
I have nothing to add except my gratitude for this
