Clark Kent : Mr. Wayne, how do you feel about the Batman using one of your trashed satellites to create a base?
Bruce : I think he’s doing it to piss me off. I swear that guy has a grudge against me. He costs me millions of dollars in damage every year with all the fighting he does on private property, most of which in Gotham, I own. I mean, he has the audacity to go around leveling buildings with that miniature tank of his! And before you say anything, I’m positive he knows what I do and don’t own.
Clark Kent : Wow, that must be one hell of a grudge
Later
Batman, in the batmobile with Superman : If we drive through this building, we have a greater chance of catching the criminals before they reach their destination…
Batman : But if we go through alleyways and streets, it will cause less property damage…
Superman : Do you care?
Batman : lmao no *straight up drives through a building*
Honestly I’m 90% sure he targets his own properties bc he knows he has the money to rebuild it, probably even update it too.
Dick: “They’re on the corner of third and Arbon.”
Bruce: “You mean in front of Wayne Tech’s north-”
Babs: “Yeah! Wait- isn’t that where that outdated building without wheelchair access is?”
Bruce: *Silence*
Dick & Babs: “…”
Dick: “uh… B? You still-”
Bruce: *loud clashing destructive sounds as Bruce drives the Batmobile straight through it*
Dick & Babs: “…?!?!?”
Bruce: *in a complete monotone* “Oh no, now we have to renovate.”
I just finished babysitting my friend’s children, and she has most definitely mastered the no spanking/alternative discipline route. I always talk about taking it because I don’t believe in abusing children, but I’ve never personally seen it in action by a Black parent. Her children are 2 and 5 and they are the kindest, nicest toddlers I’ve ever met. They listen to her because she’s their mom and they automatically recognize she’s important and she gives them what they want (love and affection and rewards). In return they like to clean for her and give her artwork and cuddles all of the time.
To get them to listen to her, she makes sure to listen to them and what they’ve got to say instead of telling them to shut up all the time. The 5 year old asked her a few months ago why you can’t eat food that was on the floor after picking up food on the floor, and she explained it calmly and clearly. He asked 4 other questions after that and she answered all of them. He was satisfied and happy with the answers, and ever since he hasn’t done those things. She lets them gush and gush about Hot Wheels or Team Umizoomi and engages with them and counts with them and everything, so they never feel alone or neglected enough to not want to obey.
My friend lets them make mistakes by themselves on the rare chance they don’t listen so they can learn from them and let that be punishment enough. For example, the younger one we’ve been telling not to go near the dog cage because he doesn’t like dogs. He went near it a while ago, got his hand licked, freaked out, and hasn’t been anywhere near it since. The board on the wall that she uses has a column for each boy horizontally, and vertically are all the traits she wants them to have, like being nice, listening to her and their teachers, eating their food, cleaning up, having manners, etc. They get a sticker whenever they do it for the day, and they lose all their stickers when they break a habit. That’s enough punishment for them, so they don’t break it.
When they wake up, it’s cleanup time, or bedtime, she plays what she calls “musical habits”. She puts on a playlist of their favorite songs (it’s like 20-25 minutes) that make them feel motivated, and they should be finished getting ready or cleaning by the time the last song is over. If they’re not, they get a toy from their toy bin taken away or an Oreo from their snack bag taken out (aka eaten by her). But she hasn’t ever gotten to that because they always finish. They don’t even like hearing the consequences lol. And I just wanted to say I really enjoyed seeing good parenting by a Black woman that wasn’t abusive or harmful to the child’s development, it gave me inspiration and hope. Just had to talk about it somewhere.
THIS IS GOOD WHOLESOME PARENTING
This gives me hope. I’m gonna try to emulate this if I have kids
A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.
See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.
Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.
What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride – yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.
Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table – taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”
(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)
In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.
I’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.
It’s nice being
Tumblr Old and having some recollection of the self-identifiers we
used before this website. The slogans alone should tell you the
motivators behind using “queer” as opposed to other terms. There
was “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” There was “queer
rage”. There was “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.”
That last one especially shows rejection of any neat essentialist
boxes – go away with your binaries, your easy categorization, and
last but not least your respectability politics.
I’ve never seen “q
slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two
years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a
trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost
uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer”
with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are
almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that
it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any
other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically
correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of
history. Which is just not true.
So anyway, here are
some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any
other term:
1) Wide relevance.
Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.
2) Opacity. It can
be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it
can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t
fully covered by any of those categories!
3) Queer could,
therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I
can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that).
Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only
sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all
the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention
straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in
casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style
language.
And you know what,
of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the
abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is
catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the
community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace
it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default
descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy
with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve
come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and
sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside
from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.
I could go on about
how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb
people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who
especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete
one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something
the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under
good old respectability politics.
TL;DR: You can’t
just take away a term that many, many people in the
community have been actively using for decades before your latest
iteration of SGA discourse and expect no meaning to be lost or
broken.
@outderon
I think, in part, the notion of “queer is a slur” comes from the comparative rarity of encountering it as far as younger people are concerned. Which, of course, makes it sound much more punchy on occasions when it is used. But you’re absolutely right about all of this.
queer is a slur. this isn’t up for debate. the whole point of queer nation and groups like it was that the word queer has a history of violence, and that’s why they chose it. it was meant to shock. it was meant to turn cishets’ weapons against them – but the word is still a weapon, and people who aren’t comfortable with it shouldn’t have it applied to them
yes, queer was central to anti-assimilationist groups like queer nation and act up, and yes, fighting against respectability politics is really important. but like, none of this negates queer’s history. its recent history was empowerment and reclamation in the late 80s/early 90s, but before that it was exclusively a slur, and it’s still used (particularly by and against older people) to dehumanise lgbt+ people.
there’s nothing wrong with using it as a self-identification (provided you’re not cishet), but using it as an umbrella term is shit because it forces a slur onto people who aren’t necessarily comfortable with it. for so many lgbt+ people the word is primarily associated with violence and hatred, and I shouldn’t need to say that referring to people by a slur without their permission is just downright terrible
Okay, I have several huge problems with this.
Who exactly made you the Grand Arbiter of our language? Why do you get to tell people who were in the community before you were born that they can no longer use their language?
Can you tell me another term that can be used in informal day-to-day speech that has never been a slur? Can you show me an “umbrella” term that hasn’t been used by people telling half the community they’re “not gay enough” or “too extreme” or otherwise not worthy of being One Of Us? (In informal speech, I hear a lot of reversion to “gay” or “gay and lesbian;” hopefully I don’t have to explain what’s wrong here?) Can you show me a term that I can use to include all of us, as a person whose disability includes memory issues that make it very difficult to keep track of the ever-increasing alphabet soup?
A large part of this post is a response to people telling others who are self-identifying as queer “um sweaty :)))) that’s a slur :)))” – the same people who made “LGBT” into a warning sign – coming to tell us that we can’t use that word either, in any capacity.
You say “was” like anti-assimilationism is a footnote in a dusty history volume – to someone who is pushing back against assimilationism and the very real harm it is doing to a lot of the community.
“queer as an umbrella term is ahistorical” Oh, my sweet summer child. The first use of “queer” by people in the community as a broad descriptor was a century ago. The first use of it in the sense that I’m using it here – as a deliberately radical (both “radical politics” and “radically inclusive”) umbrella term applied to the whole community – predates the last major battle of the “who’s queer enough to count?” war and the use of LGBT, let alone the rest of the alphabet soup. I can show you formal scholarly articles about as old as you are that uncontroversially use it. Has it ever been used by the entire community to refer to the entire community? No. But neither has anything else that even pretends to include us all, and it definitely does have a storied history.
I wrote that post in response to a movement I’ve seen a fair amount of lately – the use of “queer is a slur” against people who are using it in a sense it’s had for over a quarter of a century in a deliberate bid to silence those of us who are hurt by supercessionist, assimilationist policies and tactics.
You want ahistorical? There are a lot of people right now trying to redefine the boundaries of the “LGBT” community to exclude folks who have been there all along, and to silence the voices of anybody who isn’t gay enough for their liking.
You know what else is still used as a slur? Gay. Yet somehow, it’s completely uncontroversial. When people talk about how gay they are* or “gay rights” or “gay marriage,” nobody bats an eye. Nobody gives them the “um sweaty, that’s a slur” speech. Even if they’re straight.
Active slurs are apparently perfectly fine for straight people to use to discuss things that affect all of us. So you’ll pardon me for being extremely fucking skeptical of the singling out of this term, one that sees extremely strong usage by the segments of the community keep being marginalized within the community, as unacceptable or a step too far. I’ve heard “That’s a step too far” way too many times from “LGBT” people and organizations – usually when I, as a trans person, ask them to fight for my rights too, or when I, as a bi person, ask for a face and a voice and maybe some resources.
The only thing that makes “queer” unacceptable where “gay” is uncontroversial is who’s using it.
Am I going to call specific, individual people queer? Not unless I’ve seen them actively claim it. Am I going to talk about the queer community, queer issues, queer rights? Hell yes I am – because the community that wants me as a member, the community I want to be a member of, is queer.
“Queer is a slur” is doing damage to me. Queer community, queer politics, and being queer are liberating me.
I went looking for this post because no less than 4 posts about “the q slur” have come across my dash today.
@wetwareproblem says it much more articulately above than I could, but what I will say is this: I’m so over people telling me the word I choose to identify with is so offensive it should never even be typed.
I’m queer. I have been part of the queer community for almost twenty years. My identity is not a slur.
Kids.
Queers don’t let queers tell falsehoods about the word queer.
I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful and I even think it’s well-intentioned – and that’s the problem. Earnestly, with good intentions, kids half my age are railing about queer being a slur and claiming to know the gay history that I personally lived (not to mention the gay history that precedes me).
We had queer studies courses in our universities. There are books on queer art, cinema, and history. You know how I know queer isn’t a slur?
Because we never had fag studies.
Sorry, that was harsh, right? Well, that’s the nature of a slur. It retains a hard edge, even if you take ownership of it. You can’t use it in respectful institutions such as academia. A straight person cannot utter it – even in solidarity – without sounding as if they’ve crossed a boundary.
The attempts to change history here are not without purpose. Changing the language is an effort made by people with ill-will for the LGBT community (particularly against the T, but also the B – which doesn’t bode well for those letters in the extended acronym). Fewer umbrella terms means people getting pushed out from under the umbrella.
Please guys, ask yourselves who benefits from this division (hint: people that do not want us to unify). Don’t fight against queer, a word that by its nature includes more vulnerable members of the community, people whose identity is less easily defined.
Also, I’m just as angry as @audreyimpossible is, for some reason it’s coming out of me way softer than it is inside of me. But this queer is very tired of infighting. I’ve been here for a while and I can tell when we’re being manipulated.
I either didn’t see or didn’t remember this addition until it popped up in my notes again, but thank you so much. This is an extremely solid, well-made point.
This shit is why I get straight people at work telling me I can’t describe myself as queer.
I never heard queer as a slur. You know what word did get thrown around a lot as the Big Insult when I was growing up?
Gay.
Everything bad was “gay” and everything gay was bad. “That’s gay” was a tiny cut, and it was dozens of tiny cuts per day, and after time, no matter how outwardly proud I was of myself, those cuts took a toll. Those cuts wore me down.
The queer community built me back up in a way the gay community did not. I’m not gonna get into that now. But queer was the first time I felt like people truly had my back, without question or conditions. Queer healed me. Queer is a lifeline for me. As wetwareproblem said above, “Queer is a slur” is doing damage to me.
So if we have to say q-slur, you have to say g-slur.
I’m not joking. If queer is needs censoring because you’ve heard it used negatively against you, then gay needs censoring too because it’s been used negatively against other people. Are you gonna do that? Are you gonna start saying you’re going to the g-slur bar? Are you gonna start talking about g-slur rights? Your g-slur friends? I don’t think you are. I don’t think you should.
So let go of q-slur. Recognize that this is bigger than you and your childhood trauma, because honey, we all got it. There’s not an LGBT and/or queer person alive who doesn’t have baggage, and you prioritizing yours is harmful to everyone else, especially because, as was stated many times above, the people who use queer are often the more vulnerable members of the gender and sexual minorities.
It’s just so frustrating because this division between gay/lesbians and the rest of us is literally by design of the religious right (and TERFs, who are often indistinguishable in their goals). It’s like you’ve got a playbook written by evangelicals on how to destroy everything we’ve built, and you’re doing it step by step. I’m willing to work with the mainstream LGBT community, but are y’all willing to do the same? Can you stop sweeping us into the dark corners so you can make your community look more appealing to the people who want to destroy us all? It starts with saying the word, the word we use, the word that we chose and the word that chose us.
Queer.
imagine if any of y’all had like, real problems
Me, a disabled mentally ill homeless Jewish trans woman who has been part of this community for well over two decades: Maybe don’t call my identity a slur. Some ignorant fuck: Imagine if you had real problems. #q slur
Why you gotta go so far out of your way to be an asshole?
I firmly believe that not only should we raise the minimum wage, but we should also create a maximum wage. There is no reason in which an orthopedic surgeon, which is the highest paying doctor will make an average of $464,500 a year, while the top 10 CEOs earn well over $33 BILLION a year. If we even so much as cap their earning potential at $1 billion, which is more money than anyone should really need to live a happy fulfilling lifestyle, then it would force them to put that money toward the company or be punished. This means giving their employees better health insurance, giving them more vacations, better wages, paying for their college or their children’s education, creating more jobs, and improving the functionality of their companies. Perhaps even force them to invest in the communities they are serving.
For those of you who are still skeptical… let me put it this way… the highest earning CEO “earned” $156,077,912 in 2014.
Let’s boil this down. There’s about 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say that he works 40 hours a week. So a total of 2,080 hours a year. That’s $75,037 an hour. The median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is $50,502 per year. He’s earning 1.5 times the amount per hour than the average household makes in a year. That disparity is absurd.
To put that even further into perspective, the average NEUROLOGIST earns $219,000 a year according to a 2014 statistic. Every single one of the CEOs on the 100 highest paid CEOs earn at least 93 TIMES the amount that a NEUROLOGIST makes.
Something needs to change. People shouldn’t be starving for the sake of someone else’s greed.
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 