Pessimism-central - Just A Touch Of Pessimism

The true enemies to lovers

Don't let this die! This is the full scene in Spanish, confirming that Dean says "y yo a ti" after Cas's romantic "te amo."

Taken from here: https://twitter.com/knjbabygirl/status/1331485318458056704?s=21

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heller, diana heller on Twitter

“HERE IS THE SCENE IN SPANISH A BIT MORE EXTENDED AHHHH https://t.co/VKL6wRYcHv”

I'm so frickfracking tired, i don't do any homework, I watch the deadlines as they hurtle past me at top speeds as I relax and read fanfiction on my phone. I am basically nocturnal at this point. There are so many tabs open in both my phone and my brain. I need to sleep but every waking day just feels like a a giant nap.

yeah I’m a nonpracticing woman. I was raised female but I don’t really believe anymore yknow?

VIKTOR MOTHERFUCKING HARGREEVES!!! WE SUPPORT ELLIOT AND VIKTOR IN THIS HOUSE AND IF ANYONE TALKS SHIT THEYRE GONNA GET HIT AS LONG AS ELLIOT IS COMFORTABLE NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!!!

it’s like I DO want to be feminine in the way a man is feminine. if I’m performing feminity I don’t want it to be read as an inherent reflection of my gender and who I am. I don’t want someone to call me ma’am or be called a girl. like. it’s drag. only it can’t be drag for me, because it’s not actually subverting anything, is it? so I’m in this spot where I either cannot allow myself any femininity or I do and accept the consequences of perception. my wearing eyeliner isn’t a subversion, a quiet rebellion, it’s perceived as fulfilling an expectation. somehow I can never be masc enough to be percieved as I want to be, so any introduction of femininity feels like a defeat. and yet sometimes I want to wear the pretty things that are still in my closet! or play around with makeup. but it isn’t a young boy getting into his mother’s vanity and heels, it’s growing up into the fulfillment of the wants of the mother and the rest of society as a blank whole.

In South America, after Cas says "I love you", Dean says "and I you, Cas".

If the reciprocation was in the original script and the CW cut it off cause they decided to go with that shitty ending, this is the proof. They forgot to tell their homophobic plans to SouthAmerican countries.

Fuck off homophobic CWUSA. We win.

People who aren’t at fault for attacks against queer rights:

Trans women

Nonbinary people

Asexuals

Aromantics

Pansexuals

Catgender people

Stargender people

People with conflicting gender labels

People that use it/it’s pronouns

People that use noun/nounself pronouns

People that use no pronouns

Cis people using “different” pronouns

People who are at fault for attacks against queer rights:

The politicians attacking queer rights

The white supremacists attacking queer rights

The conservative crowds attacking queer rights

The transphobes attacking queer rights

The homophobes attacking queer rights

The only people at fault for attacks on queer rights are the people attacking queer rights. Don’t blame your community for having their rights taken away alongside you.

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

[“Many gay people will say that their families are “fine.” But when you ask for details, this means, basically, that the gay person has not been completely excluded from family events. Or that their partner, if they have one, is allowed in the house. Very few experience their personhood, lives, and feelings to be actively understood as equal to the heterosexual family members. Often parents or siblings keep the person’s homosexuality secret from others, or euphemize it. They vote for politicians who hurt gay people; they contribute to religious organizations that humiliate gay people; they patronize cultural products that depict gay people as pathological. They speak and act in ways that reinforce the idea of gay people as “special interest.” In many ways the message is clear that the gay person is not fully human. But because many gay people know others who have been more severely punished by their family’s prejudices, they look on their own continued compromised inclusion to be miraculously positive and a product of their own correct behavior.”]

sarah schulman, ties that bind: familial homophobia and its consequences