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can't believe it's been April for 5 days and none of you seasonal poetry obsessives have reblogged the wasteland

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We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go "there and back again,"and "there" is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life--of a sort, for a while.

--Ursula K. LeGuin

#combine harvesters brings to mind wish fulfillment fiction which was in part the original goal in creating a commercial fantasy genre #and with it getting balder and balder now that we have isekais with identical medieval europes existing to be factories of willing women #i don't think imagination is really required after all #not wrestling

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This is a post begging you to read this awesome speculative fiction book I just finished, The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It challenges a leftist reader to think about: group parenting without true family abolition; gender under total mechanized reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy; societal organization by consensus; and whether or not surveillance can make us freer. If you are insane and trans and spent a little too long doomering over second wave feminist texts, this is especially for you. Oh, and everyone has multiple bodies, meaning they can experience multiple plot events in different locations simultaneously. Very few concepts from our world survive, and there's a whole vocabulary list and history in the back if you don't like figuring stuff out on your own. I think my favorite of these comes at the end when it's revealed how they've only just begun reinventing the concept of fiction. Two erotic shippable queer pairings as well, if that's what you're looking for. Please read it!

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Hadi Rahnaward: 'Fragile Balance' (2023) rug sculpture created with matches

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I do so enjoy finding lesbian easter eggs in Jodie Foster's early filmography. This is from Carny (1980), which I would not recommend outside of this scene.

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I found an extremely dope disability survival guide for those who are homebound, bedbound, in need of disability accommodations, or would otherwise like resources for how to manage your life as a disabled person. (Link is safe)

It has some great articles and resources and while written by people with ME/CFS, it keeps all disabilities in mind. A lot of it is specific to the USA but even if you're from somewhere else, there are many guides that can still help you. Some really good ones are:

How to live a great disabled life- A guide full of resources to make your life easier and probably the best place to start (including links to some of the below resources). Everything from applying for good quality affordable housing to getting free transportation, affordable medication, how to get enough food stamps, how to get a free phone that doesn't suck, how to find housemates and caregivers, how to be homebound, support groups and Facebook pages (including for specific illnesses), how to help with social change from home, and so many more.

Turning a "no" into a "yes"- A guide on what to say when denied for disability aid/accommodations of many types, particularly over the phone. "Never take no for an answer over the phone. If you have not been turned down in writing, you have not been turned down. Period."

How to be poor in America- A very expansive and helpful guide including things from a directory to find your nearest food bank to resources for getting free home modifications, how to get cheap or free eye and dental care, extremely cheap internet, and financial assistance with vet bills

How to be homebound- This is pretty helpful even if you're not homebound. It includes guides on how to save spoons, getting free and low cost transportation, disability resources in your area, home meals, how to have fun/keep busy while in bed, and a severe bedbound activity master list which includes a link to an audio version of the list on Soundcloud

Master List of Disability Accommodation Letters For Housing- Guides on how to request accommodations and housing as well as your rights, laws, and prewritten sample letters to help you get whatever you need. Includes information on how to request additional bedrooms, stop evictions, request meetings via phone, mail, and email if you can't in person, what you can do if a request is denied, and many other helpful guides

Special Laws to Help Domestic Violence Survivors (Vouchers & Low Income Housing)- Protections, laws, and housing rights for survivors of DV (any gender), and how to get support and protection under the VAWA laws to help you and/or loved ones receive housing and assistance

Dealing With Debt & Disability- Information to assist with debt including student loans, medical debt, how to deal with debt collectors as well as an article with a step by step guide that helped the author cut her overwhelming medical bills by 80%!

There are so many more articles, guides, and tools here that have helped a lot of people. And there are a lot of rights, resources, and protections that people don't know they have and guides that can help you manage your life as a disabled person regardless of income, energy levels, and other factors.

Please boost!

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watercolors by trans artist tuesday smilie

#not wrestling #god this gorgeous

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I think one thing that's hard for people to grapple with is it's impossible to eliminate all abusive individuals from any given society. Of course certain systems encourage and make it easier to achieve, but there is no perfect world in which no one is abusive, so prevention of abuse shouldn't be punitive measures but rather creation of an environment in which abuse is hard to get away with--an environment more focused on community support than individualistic isolation of families. The fact that there are horrifying child torture cases that occurred in average suburban homes by neighbors who suspected nothing just because they haven't even talked to or acknowledged the people living right fucking next to them is crazy.

#not wrestling #you're not actually against abuse if you don't believe in family abolition

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This mentality of “if you post online it can be seen by anyone so you’re basically asking for it if you get harassed” is taken for granted as somehow sensible, but I think it’s actually pretty alarming! There has never been another time in history when misspeaking, being too earnest or autistic or “ugly” or “annoying” or etc etc could get you attacked continuously, en masse, by people all over the world. Now we’ve just accepted it as the natural order. Questioning this is seen as naive and illogical, but participating in the punishment of anyone deemed to have transgressed (whether you even actually have evidence of wrongdoing or not) isn’t. It should be alarming how quickly people slot themselves into the roles of arbiter and punisher as if there are zero ethical implications

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AboutMe.jpeg

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Hey. Large chest people that want it to be smaller and flatter. I have a tip for you.

I am a trans man. I have an h cup chest. That is not a typo, not a brag, and not an invitation to sexually harass me. This means I have about 4 pounds of breast. This means that binders do not work for me. There’s not enough structure in the compression to keep that much weight in place.

I wore a sports bra under my binder, for a time- it kept things in place, and the binder flattened. This isn’t really safe and I recommend against it. It also never actually got me looking masc- I tended to look like I had between a c or b cup. TransTape I discarded too- it’s just not sturdy enough.

Enter Enell. Specifically, the Enell Sport High Impact Bra.

I want you to look at the construction of that sports bra. It clasps in the front. This flattens the chest. And since it’s a sports bra designed for busty people, it LOCKS everything in place. When I wear my Enell sports bra, I do not bounce. It also gets me looking like I have an a cup at worst- and at best, when I layer, I actually look masc.

Admittedly, they’re not cheap. That one’s 66$. But I’ve tried even custom binders, and they don’t work as well as Enell. I was actually contemplating a custom built corset before I found Enell. Enell is also much, much safer than layering compression, since it is being used as intended (sort of). As a bonus, you can actually exercise in it- it’s a sports bra!

I will note that they use their own sizing system, so you will have to measure yourself.

Happy binding!

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Nihonbashi: Goldfish Bowl (2020)

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Women Watching Stars, Ōta Chōu, 1936

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#this is art #not wrestling

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I combed Literary Hub for lesbian essays yesterday. I found:

An excerpt from a book about a lesbian dancer obsessed with Ancient Greece, who used it and specifically Sappho to try to reimagine more liberatory gender relations. They were fucking in their women's college dorm rooms.

An essay about looking for evidence of lesbian identity in writers, which reminded me a lot of the lesbian fandom circles I'm in today. It's less about being able to find definitive evidence and more about using their words to learn how to express yourself and seeking your reflection in them.

The good news that famous poet Mary Oliver wrote lots of erotic poetry about her wife, using the same beautiful nature metaphors that we see in her most famous poems-- and that those poems, like Wild Geese, have their own queer sensibility of radical self-acceptance.

The tale of a doomed romance between two women in straight marriages is told in the margins of an abandoned copy of The Price of Salt, while the married author of this piece discovers she herself has suppressed desires for women that may never be realized.

#lesbian #not wrestling