יולי 2017

To Anyone who Thinks They're Falling Behind in Life (and aren’t good/creative/ect. enough)

niuniente:

“You don’t need more motivation. You don’t need to be inspired to action. You don’t need to read any more lists and posts about how you’re not doing enough.

But, honestly, here’s the thing that nobody really talks about when it comes to success and motivation and willpower and goals and productivity and all those little buzzwords that have come into popularity: you are as you are until you’re not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into action in the timing that is best. That’s just how it happens.

And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we’re there.

You’re not a robot. You can’t just conjure up motivation when you don’t have it. Sometimes you’re going through something. Sometimes life has happened. Life! Remember life? Yeah, it teaches you things and sometimes makes you go the long way around for your biggest lessons.

You don’t get to control everything. You can wake up at 5 a.m. every day until you’re tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don’t want to come to fruition, they won’t. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it’s not the time, it’s just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.

Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you haven’t met the inspiration for your main character yet. Sometimes you need two more years of life experience before you can make your masterpiece into something that will feel real and true and raw to other people. Sometimes you’re not falling in love because whatever you need to know about yourself is only knowable through solitude. Sometimes you haven’t met your next collaborator. Sometimes your sadness encircles you because, one day, it will be the opus upon which you build your life. We all know this: Our experience cannot always be manipulated. Yet, we don’t act as though we know this truth. We try so hard to manipulate and control our lives, to make creativity into a game to win, to shortcut success because others say they have, to process emotions and uncertainty as if these are linear journeys.

You don’t get to game the system of your life. You just don’t. You don’t get to control every outcome and aspect as a way to never give in to the uncertainty and unpredictability of something that’s beyond what you understand. It’s the basis of presence: to show up as you are in this moment and let that be enough. Yet, we don’t act in a way that supports this lifestyle. We fill every minute with productivity tools and read 30-point lists on how to better drive out natural, human impulse. We often forget that we are as we are until we’re not. We are the same until we’re changed. We can move that a bit further by putting into place healthy habits and to show up to our lives in a way that fosters growth, but we can’t game timing. Timing is the one thing that we often forget to surrender to.

Things are dark until they’re not. Most of our unhappiness stems from the belief that our lives should be different than they are. We believe we have control — and our self-loathing and self-hatred comes from this idea that we should be able to change our circumstances, that we should be richer or hotter or better or happier. While self-responsibility is empowering, it can often lead to this resentment and bitterness that none of us need to be holding within us. We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen—and to not feel so directly and vulnerably tied to outcomes. Opportunities often don’t show up in the way we think they will.

You don’t need more motivation or inspiration to create the life you want. You need less shame around the idea that you’re not doing your best. You need to stop listening to people who are in vastly different life circumstances and life stages than you tell you that you’re just not doing or being enough. You need to let timing do what it needs to do. You need to see lessons where you see barriers. You need to understand that what’s right now becomes inspiration later. You need to see that wherever you are now is what becomes your identity later. 

Sometimes we’re not yet the people we need to be in order to contain the desires we have. Sometimes we have to let ourselves evolve into the place where we can allow what we want to transpire. Let’s just say that whatever you want, you want it enough. So much so that you’re making yourself miserable in order to achieve it. What about chilling out? Maybe your motivation isn’t the problem, but that you keep pushing a boulder up a mountain that only grows in size the more you push.

There’s a magic beyond us that works in ways we can’t understand. We can’t game it. We can’t 10-point list it. We can’t control it. We have to just let it be, to take a fucking step back for a moment, stop beating ourselves up into oblivion, and to let the cogs turn as they will. One day, this moment will make sense. Trust that. Give yourself permission to trust that.”
 
- Jamie Warron

sunilght:

im really sorry to have to make this post & ask for this, but i dont really have any options left

im a bisexual & chronically mentally ill college student struggling to make rent. i was hired by my current job at the end of april, but due to paperwork processing, they didn’t actually start me until the end of june. i haven’t paid june or july rent, and august is quickly coming up, and while i’m desperately hoping to take care of june w my next paycheck (i currently only have $300 in my account when each month is 750 + utilities), my lease is supposed to end in august, so being this late at this point is extremely bad.

in addition, i have a dog and cat, both which serve as my psychiatrist-prescribed emotional support animals, and they have fleas and are miserable, with my dog losing hair and showing signs of getting sick, and my cat’s 10 years old and not doing great with them either!

so, i’m asking for you guys to please, please help me out if you can! and if you can’t, please share this and try to get it to more people. my family has always struggled with money & rent so they aren’t able to help me at this point, or else I would have gone to them first, & i owe my ex 350+ from needing his help this past summer (and we had a bad break up after the money got that high, so i’m also anxious about paying him back)

my paypal link is paypal.me/doqpaws! i’d be happy to exchange services for this, either in the form of drawings (i’m working on my digital art, found under the “my art” tag or “doodles” tag), writing (poetry or fanfiction, tagged “poetry” and “fanfiction”), editing any writing you may have (i’m an english major going into my senior year, so experienced!), or even pictures of me in lingerie (but i’m very very strongly trying to stay away from sex work because of personal bad experiences)

again, i’m so sorry to ask this, but it’s hit a point where i really need this help

100-lbs-of-salt:

yungmethuselah:

Don’t talk shit about people’s teeth. Seriously.

Speaking as a major dental hygiene enthusiast…

Great-looking teeth come from two things: luck and money (which is also a function of luck).

• Dental procedures tend to be very, very expensive, and are almost never covered by insurance.
  
• Healthy teeth aren’t necessarily big, straight or bright white. Depending on what someone’s natural teeth are like, achieving that look may require a significant downgrade in their dental health; unnecessary crowns and veneers cause damage.
• Do not underestimate genetics’ role in determining teeth’s appearance, or how prone teeth are to problems. Genes and early development, i.e. things people get zero control over, can outweigh all else.
• A wide range of chronic conditions impact oral health and teeth’s appearance, too, and may contraindicate various types of work or raise procedures’ cost even more.
  
• Finally, for many people and many reasons, celebrity-looking teeth just aren’t a priority (even when they’re attainable; some people might want, y’know, a new car instead).

Regardless, don’t be an asshole. Not even very attractive teeth look good on those.

I’ve NEVER seen a post like this and I’m thrilled TBH because I’m very insecure about my teeth and there is literally one reason they are not nice and that is money so I’m literally down for teeth positivity

blindrapture:

vikingcarrot:

rapacityinblue:

kaciart:

rocket-sith:

francisperfectionbonnefoy:

vulgarweed:

hiddenlacuna:

fluffmugger:

madmaudlingoes:

tygermama:

every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’

You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).

Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.

(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)

ding ding ding ding.

Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content.  Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it.   Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.

If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency,  then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.

The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is - so who gets to decide?

You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?

Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?

The world is complex and there are no easy answers.

The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.

Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.

Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.

The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. 

Preach it loud and hard!

I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”

The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic - victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.

And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.

The mentality is one and the same - “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.  

And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.

This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.

Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib. 

The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.

Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.

Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced. 

This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.

At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest. 

But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ. 

LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”

Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.

And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!

FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.

So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter. 

It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.

Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.

So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities. 

In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.

Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.

It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.

That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.

As one of the users who got banhammered and was a member of ol’ pornish_pixies, I can add that it’s true there was a lot of content on that community that fandom now will dogpile you for even considering; incest, extreme abuse, non-con, underage stuff of various kinds and extremities, huuuge unhealthy age gaps. All that stuff. It’s not that that content didn’t exist at all - it did. 

The difference was that we accepted that all-important fact that fiction is not and should not be reality and did not define our beliefs on what is acceptable or ‘sexy’ in real-life, and we policed our own content experience. So long as warnings were given for all that ‘horrifying’ dark, abusive content, people just shrugged, decided it wasn’t for them, and moved on.

And fandom was not controlled by a bunch of screaming, hyper-sensitive teenagers trying to win brownie points in the Baby’s First Social Justice race. It was controlled by adults who knew that writing about a couple of 15 year olds fucking in their house dorm or Snape/Harry while Harry was still a teen did not define or influence their opinion of people who do that in real life, nor was there any of this contemporary nonsense about that fiction ‘affecting reality’ with clearly fake stories of adults using fanfiction and fanart to groom teens who obviously already knew better into ‘believing’ that such relationships are normal and acceptable in real life.

That nonsense was not entertained or tolerated by the community. The fact it is now is a crying shame.

Well. There are equally complex histories behind the “nonsense” spread by social justice communities, and it feels about as arbitrary as the history behind leaving disclaimers on fics, but the point is the writers and the readers of fics clearly have separate histories and have not actually had to figure out how to coexist yet.

“Every model is wrong, but some are useful”

heartofaquamarine:

The title of this post comes from the statistician George Box, and discusses how the mathematical models we use to analyse and predict the world cannot, by their nature as an understandable simplification, provide an exact model of the world. That is to say, they are “wrong”. However, the errors can be small enough that we can use the models to make predictions that hold up in real life, such as how much weight a bridge can carry. That’s where the “useful” part comes in. A good example of this is the ideal gas law. No actual gas follows this law, but under certain conditions, their behaviour is close enough that it doesn’t matter.

An important thing to understand is you can have multiple models to describe the same thing. There are a vast array of different climate models, for instance, and while they broadly agree with each other there are important differences in the details. Some of these are due to limitations on computing power and time available, some are focused on certain aspects such as aerosol production, and some are simply using a new method of modelling the world. When we are dealing with subjects as complex as human sexuality or the climate, we need to simplify them somewhat to allow us to grasp, if not the whole concept, as much of it as we can. All of these models will lose some important details, hence why they are all wrong, but some retain enough of the information that we can use them to understand the world.

Quite a few other statisticians have issues with this aphorism, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about gender and sexuality, and how we think about them. A common comment, when we look back at history and retroactively apply certain traits and sexualities to them, is that they wouldn’t have chosen those terms because their internal models are entirely different. Parts of Greece and Rome, for instance, are said to have defined the roles in male-male sexual encounters in terms of who is being penetrated and who is doing the penetration. Nowadays we would define both partners as homosexual, but they used a different model to understand their interactions than we do now. Different people at different times, different places and in different circumstances will use different models Someone using a different model of sexuality and gender to you is not inherently bad, or a judgement on you. I say not inherently because there are absolutely models that fail that include various points. I’m going to use asexuality here as an example because that’s my own experiences, but I think the general points could be modified slightly and applied to most sexualities.

Incomplete models, that is, ones that cannot handle the idea of someone not being attracted to anyone, fall into two catagories. The first is the “innocently” incomplete model; it is not that the person disbelieves in asexuality, but rather the idea that there is a gap in their empirical model of reality just hasn’t occurred to them. Contrast this to what we might call the “active” incompleteness model, where the model actively denies the existence of asexuality. I’ve encountered both of these kinds of incomplete model, as I suspect a lot of people have, and while the models are superficially similar how they react to the addition of an asexual person, or at least a person who claims they are asexual like myself. I put the “claims to be” part in there not as a way of throwing suspicion onto myself, but rather to acknowledge that people will claim I am lying or mistaken, that it is not possible to not be attracted to someone (you can insert “attracted to your own gender”, “attracted to more than one gender” or any other phrase you like there). Both models are wrong in the same way but the second model has a built in mechanism to avoid expanding the model to take into account an aspect of reality it had been lacking.

The other thing about models is that, once you get beyond a certain point, adding more detail doesn’t help unless you are using a model for a particular purpose that takes that detail into account. The various terms and models of sexuality that we classify as being on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrums are important if you are in a situation that requires the distinction to be made. Usually this means you are, or are interacting with, someone under that umbrella or wish to compare the model to your own experiences to see if you might be under that umbrella yourself. For most people most of the time, adding this detail just adds more mental computing power, and it is enough to acknowledge that, yes, you might need to increase the resolution on your model when dealing with that particular area, just like a meteorologist looking at one particular region will increase that resolution, but for now your model is wrong, but useful in that it acknowledges the existence of the asexual spectrum.

A really good example of this is the romantic/sexual attraction divide. This is a really important distinction in the ace community, between romantic asexuals and aromantic asexuals, and it is also useful for people outside of it (for example, there are bisexuals who are only romantically attracted to one gender), but is useless if your romantic and your sexual attractions line up. It can even muddy the waters by introducing an alleyway that might not lead you to a helpful option. That being said, the mere fact that such a model is not useful to everyone does not make it useless, merely that we need to shift our discussions about such models from “this is how the world works” to “here are mental tools to help understand the world and your place in it, and here are some possible limitations to them”.

I think gender is even more complicated to model than sexuality just because frankly I think the boundaries we have set on our concept of gender are incredibly fuzzy. The less well defined something is, the more difficult it is to model accurately, and we are really bad at defining gender. I think the three main models are as follows: biological gender, which states that someone’s gender is predetermined by their biology, usually chromosomes or genitals, social gender, in which gender is defined by the range of social expectations allowed with in it, and individual gender, in which gender is a property of each individual, that must be defined by each individual and social gender dynamics grow out of these definitions and their statistical distribution. Notably I have listed this in increasing order of immediate complexity. Biological gender claims to be less an explanatory model and more an empirical observation; these are the two types of people. I’m not fond of it for a couple of reasons. Firstly it doesn’t actually position the information in a new or useful way; it is merely a description of biological factors, and the distribution curves for what it tries to predict are large enough and include enough other factors that breaking it down this way doesn’t add anything. Secondly, it fails to account for intersex and non-binary people. The two ways it handles these are either to ignore them as edge cases, which works up until you need to include them as part of the model, or to outright deny their existence, which again, reduces the model’s effectiveness at describing reality. To make matters worse for this mode, it isn’t actually a particularly useful model day to day; when choosing what pronouns to apply to someone (a process that in itself is a conceptual model; there are languages with only one, non-gendered third person pronoun), you don’t ask for a karyotype test result or compared genitalia, but rather make the assumption from visible signifiers which don’t inherently match the biological sex.

The second one, social gender can be useful in examining social mechanisms and constructs, but in doing so creates a lot more edge cases. Now it isn’t just intersex and non-binary people that must be accounted for, but gender non-confirming people who, by definition, are edge cases in the model. The social model of gender becomes particularly dangerous, rather than simply incomplete to an alarming degree, when it becomes prescriptive instead of descriptive. To paraphrase a certain first century carpenter “The model was made for the people, the people were not made for the model”.

The final model, the individual model, essentially simply increases the resolution as high as it can go, and relies on people’s internal definition of gender. Full disclosure; I am agendered, so I don’t actually understand what it means to have a particular gender, but some people I know have very clear internal definitions. Some of these are based on physical sex or social norms; I think there’s quite a few cisgendered people who lack an internal definition like myself, but don’t have a reason to use a definition other than the biological one. We could call this being cis by default. Other definitions of gender are highly idiosyncratic, and to be honest I think this is inevitable just because, like I said above, the initial parameters that we are trying to model are really badly defined. What do we mean by gender? What weighting do we put onto different aspects of it? And that’s before we get into the question of working out the mechanisms that give rise to it; untangling biological and social influences is difficult enough given we can’t isolate and raise babies in a controlled lab because ethics is a thing and is important. As such, I think the best way to proceed is to find your own model, but acknowledge that it is not universal and accept other people’s own models of their gender. It’s unsatisfying, but at this point, what else can we do?

royalsuggestion:

royalsuggestion:

royalsuggestion:

Fat girls and fat boys are honestly worth so much more than y'all give em credit for

Fat transgirls and fat transboys are absolutely included in this!! Nonbinary people too!!!

Hey could you maybe reblog this part of post