How Matt-Dave Writes started out as a 30 day blog challenge but it's now sort of become a place for me to rant and rave about the things I notice in the world. So while you're here, read a few pieces, leave me a comment or two, share it with your friends if you deem me worthy!
You can also find me on Wattpad! https://www.wattpad.com/user/mdstevens0612
Hey, my name is Matt-Dave Stevens. My goal is to make people laugh and maybe teach them a thing or two through my writing.
Anyway, I genuinely hope you have a good time here and feel free to engage with me in the comments and to share!
Full About Here:
https://howmattdavewrites.blogspot.co.za/p/about.html
My university has an LGBTQ society and one of the annual events is the Pride March across campus. It's booked before hand and while it is in part in protest, it's also about visibility and celebration. Admittedly I'm a a member only on paper since I'm usually too busy or tired for the events, but this one I didn't want to give a miss. So here's how that went.
I met up with my current girlfriend and we decided to get a few pieces of paraphernalia. Feeling empowered with glitter and rainbows, we went to the meet-up and, well, met up with people. Some new faces, some familiar ones, some familiar ones in fabulous make-up and a sea of unknowable faces.
The turnout was pretty big.
She and one of our new friends ended up helping more marchers with make up and we found ourselves a the back of the pack but it wasn't too bad. The march had started, there were a couple people with speakers to blare music but it actually wasn't that loud.
Which was one of the first things I experienced, a march isn't all like the TV montages with pop music edited in. At least ours wasn't. We had the distant chimes of a bluetooth speaker severely under-equipped for the load of people. The crowd kind of just drowned them out.
The second thing was that long marches in the sun take their toll.
Our route wasn't super hectic, we did a lap around the main inner portion of campus, but there are lots of bodies and there's lots of sun. Luckily girlfriend was also clever enough to stop for water beforehand. Even with that, you should probably be wearing shorts and a sleeveless and applying sun screen. You should also be prepared to meet your steps goal.
Third thing? Your voice will be gone.
Queer people love cheering. We're great at it. We love good moments. And each one gets a crowd wide cheer. On top of that, to compensate for the lack of music we kind of had a chant going. So add all that together plus shouting how cool things are at your girlfriend in the crowd and say goodbye.
The fourth thing is that glitter will get freaking everywhere. Why do we love glitter so much? I mean, I get why but still. This shiny and wonderful substance is almost worse than sea sand.
Finally, I figured out that this whole thing? It's fun. And validating. And makes you feel like a goddamn warrior. People will give you looks and people will stare but you keep your chin out high and sing that Lady Gaga you can barely hear as loud as you can and give each woooooooohhhh all you've got and your first pride will go great.
Also, hopefully you're going with someone as forward thinking as my girlfriend was.
I'm aware that I'm probably not going to earn a lot of non-secular friends and while I don't want to exclude anyone, as an ex-theist myself and queer person, sometimes I hear certain things my Christian peers say and I think to my self, wow, what a garbage thing to say to another human being.
In honour of that, here's something I recently had to say to someone that bears repeating.
Maybe you've grown up with some liberal values but you strongly believe that homosexuality is a sin. I don't know how you came to that conclusion. I don't care. And maybe you've found yourself saying in some comment thread, or to some passer-by, or in some casual conversation that even though you hate the sin, you don't hate the sinner.
Your worldview is garbage.
It is not for you to decide what is or is not a sin. If we are to be judged, it will not be by you.
Don't you ever tell me that who I love, my feelings of attraction, my identity is a sin. I could throw sentiments back at you; Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, remove the beam from your eye and then you can see how to remove the speck from mine, love thy neighbour et cetera, et cetera.
But I don't owe you any such diplomacy.
If there's a deity at the end of this short life of mine and he deems it a sin, he isn't worth worship, he isn't worth praise, he isn't worth acknowledgement. And if you follow such a god, you're a fool led by those who view their ignorance as a virtue.
Before you decide to open your damn mouth and tell me that my homosexual tendencies are sinful, you better have some damn good reasoning behind it. Unless you can tell me why it's so bad that I could love another man, that I could be intimate with another man, why it's so awful that two women can love and be intimate with one another, unless you can make me believe that I'm committing some world altering, pain causing action;
I want you stop.
Because you're not "hating the sin, not the sinner." You're telling me to my face that you believe my love is worth less then yours.
And as a queer person, when I'm told my love is less valuable, when I'm told I shouldn't have pride in my identity, when I'm told I'm not worth as much as my heterosexual counterparts?
So Alex Strangelove is a weird little movie. It's a marriage of Superbad and the last gay foreign film you saw and a lot like Superbad, it makes me think straight people should stop being in movies.
Basic plot rundown is that Alex and Claire are dating and Alex is super psyched to lose his virginity. But then Alex meets the sexy and sweet Elliot, who Alex develops feelings for, which throws a wrench in his plans to lose his virginity to Claire.
Okay so all the schlocky tropes of the teen "let's get laid and party" film are there, a kind of shitty protagonist with shitty friends, the cute quirky girlfriend, projectile vomit, awkward sex scenes, profesionally lit frat parties and copious amounts of substance abuse. What's also there is a coming out and of age story about a boy who meets another boy and falls in love.
So the first major problem is that Elliot is barely in the movie. Past the 40 minute mark we swop from Alex's conflicted feelings for both Elliot and Claire to how Alex just having these feelings is a problem, and Elliot doesn't show up again until the very end. The big climax happens in the sex scene (in that no one climaxes and this causes a falling out between Alex and Claire where he admits he has feelings for someone else) and then we have the Chekov's gun in a hallucinogenic frog and Alex admitting that he's gay.
To backtrack a little, right after a night out with Elliot, Alex comes home and lays out two cereal boxes. Then he picks out a third one and lays it down which is a cereal with elements of the first two, and the editing ruins what could have been a pretty clever visual metaphor by just spelling out Hetero, Bi and Gay.
So Alex goes along, up until that point, explicitly stating he's bi.
And this is where I found myself disappointed in the film. It wasn't brave enough to explore degrees of sexuality and the bisexual stepping stone narrative so vastly overpowers other, true bisexual experiences that it empowers the myth of bi men just being gay men not ready to come out yet, despite us making up a pretty large percentage of the LGBTQ community. The film also has some shitty attitudes towards trans and pansexual people, in that they're represented by goth outcasts and openly mocked by Del Gato without any challenge from the voice of the writers and lens for the audience, Alex. Del Gato also then gets the girl he's been shitty to the whole movie so yeah, let's reward that behaviour shall we.
And it's also a film with the audacity to ask "Isn't anyone just plain straight anymore?" with a mostly straight main cast.
It's not a good gay romance, it's also a mediocre Superbad, but the one thing the film does well is the pain of being in a heterosexual relationship and not feeling attraction towards your partner. The care it takes to show the leads painfully breaking apart as two people who clearly love each other, while one just isn't sexually attracted to the other person, is the biggest strength and draw of the film.
It's just too bad you have to sit through a shitty version of both Love, Simon and It's Kind Of A Funny Story to get to watch that.
So if you're into queer tourism, Alex Strangelove might be the film for you. If you want queer romance to have a little more queer in it, there are better, gayer films. The biggest criticism I can level is that for a queer romance movie, there's very little queer romance. Also Elliot can father my children and the fact that he's practically an afterthought makes this film so goddamn frustrating that someone needs to put together an Elliot only cut.
This was a hard one to decide on. Spilling your guts on the internet isn't always the best idea and I've overshared once or twice on this blog before. Everyone has secrets and although I doubt I have anything truly headline worthy, I do have stuff I'd rather not be out there for just anyone to read and I know stuff about other people I know they don't want aired. Striking that balance between releasing what's safe to release and creating content worth reading is a tough one, and it's a line that gets more delicate the more posts I put out there.
That said, here's something I don't tell a lot of people;
My first time sleeping with a boy was awful.
He was someone I'd met online and he was nice enough, and cute, but it was just... Bad. It was a bad experience. I wasn't anywhere near prepared to bottom and I feel like I kind of let him do more than I should have. I don't think he was anywhere near prepared to top. Truth be told I didn't really want it to go past hand stuff and when we were done I kinda just wanted him to leave.
I had other, much better experiences with men but this one has always bothered me a little. I think the lines of consent were blurred and it's hard for me to process it to this day. I don't think it's sexual assault as much as it was just two inexperienced boys trying to connect but failing, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been.
What I think does matter is that it's been a landmark year for the #MeToo movement and maybe microstories like mine matter. When you're experimenting and young, I think beyond being safe, you need to be safe. Choose your partners carefully. Be conscious of dangers when meeting sexual partners online because even you could be sexually assaulted by someone who looks innocuous from their Grindr picture. So be aware.
Heavier than most things I post but yeah, there's my confession, give me my Hail Mary's, father. I'm bad t outros. Respect the Geneva Conventions.
Steven Universe didn't come into my life at a particularly difficult point. I wasn't looking for a new show to watch, I wasn't in a particularly difficult state of mind, I wasn't in one of the many dark periods of my life. In fact, I hadn't heard much about the show until I saw JelloApocalypse's video. While that entertained me, I was still resistant. The eventual tipping point was when my sister showed me the clip of Garnet singing Stronger Than You, and I made up my mind to give Steven Universe a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months later.
I was sitting in an exam I was underprepared for, supremely stressed for, and sleep deprived for. It was open book, so I had all my notes scattered on the desk in front of me, along with the question paper, but then I had a panic attack. Being who I am and dealing with the problems I deal with, this cascaded and triggered a couple of lingering suicidal thoughts, and it was a blow to my self-esteem that would usually take a long time to recover from. I was on the verge of sobbing in the exam venue and I can't tell you how awful and embarrassing that felt.
But something magical happened. I closed my eyes, still struggling to breath a little, and in my head I started singing Here Comes A Thought.
Here comes a thought that might alarm me What someone said, and how it harmed me Something I did that failed to be charming Things that I said are suddenly swarming And oh, I'm losing sight I'm losing touch All these little things seem to matter so much That they confuse me That I might lose me
And things started to be a little more okay. I knew the situation I was in was at the very least partly my fault. I hadn't prepared enough, I didn't sleep enough, I didn't manage my time well enough. The heartache I felt for letting myself down was sincerely unbearable. Nevertheless, I persisted.
Take a moment, remind myself To take a moment to find myself Take a moment to ask myself If this is how I fall apart
This part of the song never fails to well up a little dread in me. Being asked to be introspective and assess the damage, to take a moment and instead of dissociating like I usually would, to find me in all this mess. To ask myself, if this is this how I fall apart?
But it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay I've got nothing, got nothing, got nothing, got nothing to fear I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And it was just a thought, just a thought, just a thought, just a thought It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay We can watch, we can watch, we can watch, we can watch them go by From here, from here, from here.
This is not how I fall apart. I am not lost in all the chaos, I am right here. I might have done something less than charming, and all these little worries might swarm and try overwhelm me. But I have nothing to fear.
The suicidal thoughts? That's all they are. Just thoughts. And thoughts pass. They might come back, but they pass. They might pass like a kidney stone, but they will pass.
The repetition of the words "It's okay" is what makes this part of the chorus have such a punch. Whenever you're comforting someone else, you have to try convince them that no matter the issue, it's not the end of the world. No matter how large their mistake, it is going to be okay. And in my mind, singing this to myself, and saying this to myself, makes the difference between a long period of dissociation and apathy, and a recovery.
And this little coping mechanism, this tool on my belt for when life does eventually get hard, came from a show about talking space rocks who solve most of their problems in song.
Steven Universe is a show that means the world to me. It has characters I connected with, songs that struck a chord with me, stories that made me laugh and cry, and little details that fill me with glee. My favourite microcosm of the show comes from Season 1 Episode 2, where Steven and his dad are bringing the light canon to the gems. Steven puts on his dad's CD, and while Greg feels sort of like his work wasn't all that great or important, Steven treats his dad's music like it's the most amazing thing in the world. A real and sincere reverence for something Greg has done, which might be small and insignificant to the world at large.
As a creator, you always hope that the things you make end up impacting someone. That someone appreciates what you've done and the time, effort and heart you put into it. No one sees the entirety of the race you ran, most just get to see you when you finish, and to them, all that matters was whether you did well or not. To see sincere appreciation for your every centimeter of ground you traversed, even if the result was mediocre, is a powerful thing.
As an LGBTQ person, being openly bisexual can often feel like a really big and important part of you gets treated as a thing to ignore or hide or dart around. It's not often that you get to see queer people be unashamedly queer and be genuinely unphased by people who would see us undone.
Seeing Garnet be an unashamed fusion in a world where we're told to stop holding our partner's hands in public, in a world where even the slightest representation gets labeled SJW propaganda, where life as a queer person can just be really fucking hard... Seeing Garnet being so happy and unashamed, even as Peridot tells her how she doesn't need to be a fusion in public, or always be a fusion, is everything.
The cast of Steven Universe is predominantly female. While gems don't really have sex, most are female presenting. Their feminine coding and use of she/her/her pronouns imply female gendering. And that's huge. My favourite little detail is how Stevonnie is always referred to as they/them/their.
I've never been much good at describing how or why Steven Universe ended up being so impactful. The show has its shortcomings and trying to explain to people why it's so worth persisting through is genuinely tough. Segments other people find intolerable I still get enjoyment out of.
How do you explain to someone that something is just worth their time? How do you ask someone to take on faith that this silly little kids show is a mature exploration of character and gender? How do you tell someone that this cartoon explores war crimes and the complexity of how even the most beloved and genuine people can still do hurtful and horrible things? How do I say that I cried with Steven when he heard his mom's voice for the first time? How do I explain the way the show tackles someone escaping the cycle of an abusive relationship? Or how one can love a person who never reciprocated that love long after they're gone?
Steven Universe means a lot to me. Steven Universe means a lot. I fell in love with the show and it taught me a bit about how to love myself. It gave me a way to cope with some of my shortcomings, and hammered into me that my mistakes are fleeting and that I should forgive myself when I mess up. It put a couple songs in my heart and I'm always a little more chipper for it.
Steven Universe means a lot to me. And I might have ended up a less functional person had I not watched it. Maybe it won't mean that much to you, but I do hope you get to watch it, and I hope it instills at least some small bit of the warmth it instilled in me.
"Gender is like the twin towers. There used to be two of them, but now it's a really sensitive topic."
~Meme that showed up on my Facebook feed
I admit I laughed when I first read that little nugget of wisdom. Gender seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the last few years or so and we still haven't found much of a productive way around talking about the issue. Adding to the confusion is the lack of proper differentiation between gender and sex, and the conflation of the two by the layman's definition.
Transgender rights are also one of the core focuses of the modern LGBTQ+ movement but much like gays and lesbians, the fight for equality has been an uphill one for trans people. Trans people also make up an even smaller portion of the population than cisgender gays, lesbians or bisexuals, and thus even within the movement had their fights lose priority to whatever was the more pressing matter, something I've been guilty of in the past. It reminds us that activism isn't perfect.
But if we want to learn, we have to make the choice to educate ourselves. So let's do just that.
For the sake of thoroughness, I want to do a quick recap on the current state of things. Historically, gender and sex have been conflated and used interchangeably. Within that definition of gender, it was and still is widely accepted that there are only two genders corresponding to two biological sexes; male and female. This is what's known as the gender binary; you are either one gender or the other. There is no state in between.
A common way to view gender is by the XY Sex Determination system. Your DNA carries a pair of sex chromosomes which define your biological sex, either a pair of X chromosomes (resulting in XX chromosomes, or homogametic sex) which would make you female, or a pair that includes an X and a Y chromosome (resulting in XY chromosomes, or heterogametic sex) which would make you male.
Another way to view gender (and this is the weakest in my opinion) is by primary sex characteristics, or as the few folks who actually view it this way, by whether or not ya'll got a penis or a vagina.
You can live your whole life by these definitions. Hell, you can meet transgender people and fit them within the gender binary just fine, because humans are pretty good at putting things that are vaguely alike into neat little boxes.
Real life, however, is much more complex.
Debunking most of these are pretty easy. I'm s firm advocate for dropping the gender binary, but many people might not feel that way. If you're still with me, and if you're one of the people on the fence, maybe I can say a couple things that'll make you rethink your position.
First, let me debunk all both previously mentioned forms of gender binary;
Through the XY Sex Determination System we know that men are born with XY chromosomes where as females are born with XX chromosomes. However, there are several documented cases of babies born with XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. Those affected produce less testosterone and develop smaller testes. XYY Syndrome which affects a small percentage of men, symptoms can include becoming taller. In the past, men with XYY syndrome were referred to as "super males". Turner Syndrom, in women, occurs when one of the two X chromosomes is missing.
As you can see, there are people who don't adhere to conventional chromosomal pairings that are still referred to as men or women. Chromosomes are the determinators of biological sex, but by that definition, sex can vary wildly through different chromosomal pairings.
Next is primary sex characteristics. This one is a lot easier to debunk because it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude that some people can be born without or with an excess of primary sex characteristics.
This is where intersex people come into play.
Intersex people are born with any variation of sex characteristics, which can also include a chromosomal pairing that isn't XY or XX. Intersex people can also develop genitalia that fits somewhere in between male and female genitalia.
If one wanted to, one could describe intersex people as the third gender. The gender that is neither male, or female, but is either somewhere in between or both. Once upon a time, we used the word hermaphrodite, but this has become stigmatized and can be misleading. As of writing, the preferred term is intersex when referring to humans. For animals, however, the word hermaphrodite is still mostly used.
Because we observe hermaphroditic qualities in animals. Mostly invertebrate such as worms or slugs exhibit hermaphroditic qualities. And there are several species of hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually (talk about being told to go f*ck yourself).
I think it's telling how complex gender is since all I've so far done is shown that biological sex is complex and that one can be born perfectly healthy but not perfectly fit any definition of male or female. But biological sex is only part of the equation since one's biological sex can be incongruent with one's gender.
Basically, when your biological sex and your gender identity are incongruent, you would be transgender.
Gender is also more of an umbrella term encompassing one's gender expression and one's gender identity. These two may seem the same but they're fundamentally different concepts.
Gender identity is your own personal experience of gender. Your gender identity can correlate with your biological sex or it can be incongruent. But gender identity is internal. It's how you feel on the inside.
When your gender identity is incongruent with your biological sex, you can sometimes experience what's known as gender dysphoria. While it affects most transgender people, being transgender does not immediately equate to having gender dysphoria. Some transgender folk can live their entire lives without ever feeling it. Gender dysphoria is also much like depression, in that it can be a mood or state of being, but it can also be a diagnosable mental illness.
Gender expression is the final term on the list. This is the one I think people are least familiar with. Gender expression is how we outwardly express our gender. How we physically manifest our inner gender identity. From clothing to pronouns to hair to voice to the way we stand. It's any way we outwardly express what we feel. What we do, how we do it, how we look, and how feminine or masculine we present any part of ourselves.
Your gender expression, however, can run entirely incongruent to your gender identity.
That's an out there concept, isn't it? But think of it this way. Transgender people who are closeted for any reason have to present themselves as cisgender. They have to express themselves in a way that does not correlate with their gender identity, but rather their biological sex. Some may choose to simply not express extreme versions of said gender identity. These would be your demigirls or demiboys. Sometimes you can express an incongruent gender just for the fun of it. We basically built the entire drag subculture around incongruent gender expression.
And if you've made it all the way here, I want to present my case. If your Sex, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression can all be incongruent, then by doing some simple math, we have at least 3 (male, female, other) times 3 (Sex, Identity, Expression) different types of people! 9 different combinations of people! That's weird and cool and great! Humans are diverse things and we can be born with not a goddamn thing wrong with us and come out so different.
Why not express that through our language?
I've avoided using the term Gender Spectrum. The term has a lot of stigma attached, but honestly, it's what describes us. We exist on a spectrum. And no position on it makes you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you different. And if you were born a boy who identifies as a boy and expresses himself like a boy, like I do, then... Well, I suppose it makes no damn difference, doesn't it? Sure, maybe it might mean someday I'll have to tick a few more boxes while filling out census forms but really, you're unaffected by it.
However, it's life changing for someone else.
Having a set of words to describe your experience is like learning how to spell your own name. For someone, this is a tool to describe their everyday experience, a way to normalize how they feel. That's important.
I think there's sect of people who believe that kids online are making up genders to feel special, usually the same people who use the phrase "I identify as an attack helicopter" because it'll make stranger on the internet laugh or something. And I think it's that kind of person who really needs to ask themselves what would even be so wrong about that?
Making up words for things is how language evolves. A word for where you personally fit into the gender expression that might describe a different experience from someone else is important, because it might also describe the experience of another person. Imagine we got mad at music genres for inventing new subgenres (actually wait, we do do that. Anyone remember when the metal community lost their collective shit over metalcore made by teenagers who stood a little too wide, and then the glorious meme that was crabcore was born into this world?)
We don't lose our minds every time there's a new film genre, or videogame genre, or music genre. Why are we so mad at new people genders?
Either way you slice it, science doesn't support the gender binary, the human experience doesn't support the gender binary and why on earth would you want it to? The weirder and wackier we come out the box, the better. Humans aren't factory assembled, and diversity is great.
So let's all just be excellent to each other, okay?
Here's a great video with Emily who is an intersex person herself.
Recently a friend of mine and I got into a conversation about asexuality and whether or not aces can be included within the LGBTQ "circle" (although the short answer I suppose is yes if we expand it to LGBTQA+ but I don't like short answers). While going through my thought process I think I realised that I don't know if I feel like I have any real knowledge or preparedness about the topic and well... It's hard to make an informed opinion on anything without... You know. Being informed. So that's what I'm going to do today and hopefully it's as fun for you as it is for me, let's get to discovering!
Asexuality is defined by the lack of explicitly sexual attractions to a person of any gender but does is not limited to a lack of sexual drive or a lack of romantic feelings towards any gender. For example a person might be asexual but may categorise themselves as hetero-, homo- or biromantic. One can also be aromantic, which just means romantic feelings aren't the primary drive for attractions, and I think this is something that's either less common or just less spoken of. Aromantics can be hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan- or asexual, Aromantics just don't have romantic feelings towards any gender. While these distinctions are helpful, one can dumb asexuality down to two categories, those being aromantic asexuality and romantic asexuality.
There's a misconception that asexuals can't engage in any sexual activity, such as masturbation or kissing. In such cases, it's usually asexuals who are aroused by the physical stimulus, and not by sexual attraction to any person. Kissing feels good, masturbation feels good, and I think it's important to remember that one can be aroused by physical stimulation alone. Which, I know, is probably weird to anyone who's never tried jerking off without pornography or a mental highlight reel but yeah. Physical sensation is sometimes all you need. Some asexuals even engage in sex if needs be, although there's usually no sexual attraction to the person they're sleeping with. And I mean, straight people often sleep with people they have no attraction to just to get off so like, I don't get why that's so hard. Anyway, not all aces do engage in sexual activities, and not all aces don't. But yeah.
That's a thing. That some people do. You gon' hafta remember dat.
This is also not to be confused with demisexuality, which is the lack of explicitly sexual attraction to either gender without an explicit emotional or romantic connection. Demisexuals can also be hetero-, homo- or biromantic, but sexual attraction is just not the primary drive, sometimes there's simply no sexual attraction to anyone except the person the demisexual has that emotional connection with. I think by definition a demisexual cannot be aromantic or asexual, but people often confuse the two. The same can be said about demisexuals and masturbating or any other physically stimulating activity.
It's a lot to take in. It's probably confusing to anyone who isn't really all that present in LGBTQ+ circles. But if you need to think about it a little more, here's a fun activity you can do right now! It's called the purple-red scale. Try find out where you lie! I'm a proud E2 myself, although somedays I'm a little more E3. E2.5? Hahahaha.
As for whether or not aces or demis should are included in LGBTQ+ and our spaces are also their spaces, I had mixed opinions on it at first. My initial reaction was, maybe not. But upon further reflection, I think they're unequivocally part of the LGBTQ+ family. Aces and Demis are, like us, othered. They face erasure too. Look at Riverdale, that had no qualms erasing Jughead's asexuality, an almost inseparable part of Jughead's character which was recently canonised in the 2015 reboot (although, let's face it, Juggie always acted like an ace and we all pretty much assumed it even before it was "canonised"). Aces are also affected by issues of same sex marriage, as homo- or biromantics may want to marry for the insurance benefits, or because they're in love and want to spend the rest of their lives with someone. They're also stigmatised. They're also suffer from heteronormativity.
I think the day the LGBTQ+ stops adding the othered to the family is the day we lose what's so special about us, All the little us-es. Plenty of aces and demis, if not all of them, fought for us, and we should be fighting for them. Our rights are their rights, and their rights are ours. Our stigma is theirs, and their stigma is ours. They suffer as we suffer. And ignoring that isn't what being LGBTQ+ is about.
Trust me, I know. I'd kill for sexuality to be simpler. It's unfortunately just human to be uber complex. We aren't simple. Our sexuality isn't simple. And why would you want it to be? It's kind of what's great about us.
But otherwise, just remember, it's only as complicated as you make it. And even if you don't "get it", acceptance and love is what's going to make it easier. That's a universal truth in life.
We're all better off if we treat each other excellently.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that slut-shaming has to end. It's pointless, its tasteless, its offensive and has no real place in society today. It holds us back and prevents us from progressing as people, and slut-shaming stigmatizes sex and makes people self-conscious about something that in reality just isn't that big of a deal.
If you've never encountered the term before, here's a loose definition. Slut-shaming is the act of shaming, ridiculing or otherwise stigmatizing a person for having had many sexual encounters in the past, or being currently involved with several sexual partners, and extends to things even as trivial as dressing or acting provocatively. It's a little more nuanced than that, but it can range from anything from calling a woman slutty for wearing daisy dukes, or for actually just describing someone as slutty, loose, easy, whoreish, cheap or anything to that effect. Another unnerving common slut-shaming practice is to shame couples or people who have sex out of wed-lock.
If we have to go into the politics of it all, sluts-shaming is usually more of a problem in conservative circles, but every so often it rears its head in liberal circles. It's not really accurate to say it's a conservative or right-wing problem, because its symptomatic of another much larger problem, which is that its only recently that we've become more sex-positive as a society, and its largely only younger people who are very sex-positive. I was lucky to be raised in a house where sex wasn't treated like a taboo thing. My parents would often openly talk about it and joke around about sex and sexuality, and I think that very normalization is what made me the sex-positive person I am today.
On the opposite side of things, there might be some prude-shaming happening somewhere in some circles, and I've definitely seen in come up in a film or two, and I don't really want to dismiss it as something that doesn't exist but it is something that definitely happens much more infrequently. I still don't condone shaming anyone for the amount of sex they do or do not have, or how modestly or immodestly anyone dresses or acts, it's a deplorable act. There is no "right" amount of sex to be having.
And I think the blatant way we shame each other about the amount of sex we have is why we all need to be more sex-positive.
It's really hard for me to define exactly what makes any person sex-positive, but by sex-positivity, I don't mean actively having sex or seeking it out. Sex-positivity is about normalizing sex, openly talking about sex, viewing sex as a positive thing and not stigmatizing or demonizing sex. It's encouraging exploration of ones sexual identity and allowing for the growth of one's sexuality, but also not forcing anything. I want to make the very clear distinction that being sex-positive isn't about blindly advocating for anyone to have more sex, but that sex-positivity is about having a positive attitude towards sex.
The unfortunate truth is that not being sex-positive only creates issues. It isn't the 1800s anymore, and we aren't puritanical creatures by nature. We derive pleasure from sex, we have the ability to have sex for reasons other than pro-creation or the often toted "intimacy" that we're told to wait until our wedding night for, and honestly, sex is just kind of great (I do also advocate safe sex, please, do practice safe sex, and don't take unnecessary risks). But the thing is, when we limit sex to just being about procreation or intimacy with a married partner, we do some really harmful things, such as:
Turning sex into something shameful, rather than personal.
Reducing each other into things to be owned, like little children claiming presents that only they can open and no one else can.
Using intangible and relatively inconsequential concepts such as virginity as a measure of any person's objective character quality
Defining sex in such a way that it can only mean penetrative penal/vaginal sex, rather than as the complicated and broad conversation that sex really is
Reserving intimacy only for those married, which for many people in the world, simply isn't a reality, such as gay couples who live in countries where marriage isn't legal, or widows who don't want to remarry, or anyone who has sex that is intimate that isn't married!
Sex-positivity is also what allows for empathy with sex workers, men and women who are the least protected from sexual crimes. The unfortunate reality is that sex-workers endure slut-shaming from their friends, families, strangers and even their own clients. Sex workers are also very much at risk of experiencing sexual violence, and due to sex work being criminalized in most countries, they are also unable to report sex crimes committed against them and are sometimes unjustly arrested when they are in fact the victims. And without any sex-positivity, as a person, it becomes exponentially harder to empathize with sex workers.
Sex positivity is important. It is so, so important. I can't stress that enough. I can't argue it enough. I think it's one of the most humane qualities a person can have, even if one doesn't personally agree with having a lot of sex or numerous sexual partners.
And I think, as humans, we can sometimes very much lack humanity.
James Gunn recently stated that there may already be LGBT characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which is certainly true if we include the well-recieved Netflix series, as Jessica Jones features Lesbian lawyer Jeri Hogarth and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features inhuman Joey Gutierrez.
But as for the films in the MCU, over its 14 film run starting with Iron Man in 2008, there haven't been any gay characters. Hot off the blink-and-you'll-miss-it gay 'moments' in 2017's Beauty And The Beast and 2017's Power Rangers, the comments by Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn are unnervingly non-committal and honestly felt a lot like queer-baiting. But seeing as it's 20-freaking-17, the MCU has been going since 2008, you have to wonder if there isn't something a little more sinister at hand.
Which, there kind of is.
The unfortunate issue with the MCU being so damn popular is that a large source of that popularity and income is from foreign markets. And not every country is as liberal as North America when it comes to depictions of LGBTQ characters on television. Some countries can straight up ban films for depictions of same-sex romances, transgender characters or advocacy of LGBTQ rights. Two such countries are Russia and China.
China especially has strict censorship laws, which we can see from when popular Chinese drama Addicted was pulled from being streamed on Chinese websites, and how the country had banned 2016's hilarious and well received Deadpool from theatres. Now, this isn't to say that China is inherently a homophobic country but China's strict censorship from its government creates a roadblock on the path to diversifying the MCUs hero roster. Sure, known gay characters like Iceman or Daken might be hard because of licensing issues, but heroes such as Spiderwoman (Jessica Drew), Wiccan, Hulkling are all fair game, were it not for censorship in foreign markets.
Russia is another such a country. Going back to Beauty And The Beast's gay moment, the film came under scrutiny (although was luckily not banned) over Lefou's feelings for Gaston by Russian officials due to Russia's "Gay Propaganda Law", as it has come to be known. The legislation was passed with the intent to prohibit spreading "gay propaganda" to minors (ah yes, because films will brainwash your child into sucking dick. Stay classy, Putin). While it may not have prohibited, this obviously creates concerns among filmmakers. Film studios are for-profit businesses aiming to maximise on returns and gay characters are now a risk to their financial well-being due to foreign market censorship. The conversation is also hard to get off the ground when comment sections frequently get dominated by straight white men loudly screaming that "no one cares" or that they've had enough of this "gay romance crap".
While film makers probably are trying to create more diverse casts and stories, they're unfortunately restricted by marketing politics.
Despite what James says, no, there are likely no secretly gay characters in the films of the MCU. And until foreign countries decide to play ball with LGBTQ representation, there likely won't be, because its costing film makers money.
But then again, for a multi-billion dollar film franchise, you'd think the financial loss might from time to time be worth the hit in order to show solidarity with the LGBTQ.
Then again, film makers could also just not give a fuck about us and merely pursue diversity when it helps sell films.
