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punisheddonjuan · 13 days

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So I forgot about/didn't get around to deleting one of the dating apps I had installed to see what the dating ecosystem was like after having been away for close to eight years and this morning I received a notification from said app. Said app poses a daily question for users to answer in a public thread. This was today's question:

Knowing that this would not be a positive experience but feeling compelled to look anyway, I steeled myself for the responses and dove in.

"Disabled man is bitter about the way society treats him, therefore he is a narcissist."

That's a lot of words to say "no, and the only reason people say yes is because they are trying to be woke, but everyone knows deep down that disabled people aren't desirable" also your name is Òdinn and you appear to live in the forests of Norway so there is a high chance that you're a Nazi.

This is such a typical response and I have no doubt in my mind that this guy would leave said hypothetical partner who became disabled in an accident, simply because the overwhelming majority of men will leave a disabled partner. Hell it's a very common r/relationshipadvice topic.

This response leaves me with many questions and no answers. Why would you need to change your perspective?

Jesus fucking Christ. I know this is supposed to be "a joke" but it's almost more hateful that way.

Way to throw in some weird "sexual market value" incel shit into the conversation there dude with "hot women can date rich men to escape lower economic divisions".

I guess points to this guy for honesty, but it still sucks.

I've not met a single disabled person ever, including myself, who prefers the term "differently abled". Not only does the feel patronizing and like it was workshopped by a cadre of guilt ridden HR managers, the language of that particular euphemism suggests, at its core, that a failure to thrive is more the result of personal failing than systemic barriers to employment, education, housing, or relationships. It's sprung from the same liberal eugenicist minds that gave us the phrase "the only real disability is not having a positive attitude".

Christ this is bleak.

Well at least I was reminded to delete the app.

You know, nine times out of ten, it's not worth it for a disabled person to try to date a non-disabled person. Your dating pool should really just be restricted to other disabled persons, and this is in many ways preferable, but because society wants you dead, there are structural barriers. Here in Canada you were already likely to lose your disability benefits should you get married, because supporting you should be the responsibility of your spouse (never mind that the disabled partner is at much greater risk of abuse and is now dependant on their abuser) and if you're both disabled, well you both risk losing your benefits. Two people pooling their meagre resources is considered gaming the system. Bleak.

It kind of makes you hate incels just a little more for co-opting a term coined by a mentally ill queer woman, who hit on a feeling a lot of people with structural barriers to relationships experience. There are a lot of people out there who are denied intimacy for long stretches of time or perhaps for the duration of their life for reasons rooted in the pervasive and systemic ableism throughout our culture and society. Reasons that are entirely outside of those persons' control. Instead the term is now the sole domain of broken men who blame their lack of partner on a "a few millimeters of bone" instead of their actual problem, being raging misogynist antisocial creeps who do things like shit on their laptops while livestreaming with other antisocial misogynist creeps. It's a shame it wasn't put to better use.

#blog #dating #disability

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serialreblogger · 4 years

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Hey! I'm thinking of reading Dracula, and knowing that's your eternal hyperfixation, I wanted to ask your thoughts, if you had any comments, suggestions, ect.

HEY WHY DIDN’T I SEE THIS SOONER I’M SO SORRY FRIEND

okay okay okay okay (...several people are typing...) SO

the first thing you should be aware of when reading Dracula is that it’s quite Victorian, so you might find it easier, especially on a first read, to get an annotated version (the Norton Critical Edition version is quite good) that puts footnotes in to explain all the outdated references to like, London penny-meat merchants and stuff. I would say it’s significantly easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but because it was written 200 years ago the difference in language means it’s not a simple read. (However, if you have absolutely any attraction to the Gothic aesthetic, Dracula is so very much worth the brainpower to slog through the rougher sentences. Like. “...the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.” The whole book is like that. A bit stilted to contemporary readers, but also breathtakingly spot-on in its Spooky Factor.)

the second thing you should be aware of is that Dracula is extremely gay, but in a Tormented Victorian Closeted way. There’s a part where Jonathan climbs out a window that just. It’s uh. The descriptions are very,, metaphorical-sounding. Again, the whole book is like that, and sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes (lookin at Lucy’s whole thing) it’s significantly more unsettling if you pay attention to the weirdly sexy descriptions of how the protagonists interact with the vampires, but I think that’s part of what I find so fascinating about Dracula--it’s unsettling and strange and the pieces don’t fit together clearly, and I still don’t know quite what to make of it, but all the same the feeling of what Stoker’s saying comes through quite clearly. There’s a reason why so many Dracula adaptations have this narrative of a protagonist falling in forbidden love with the tormented Vampyre, yknow? There’s something so unmistakeably sympathetic about the character of Dracula, even when the narrative of the story goes out of its way to establish that he has no redeeming qualities or even proper personhood, that he’s just a monster. Because there’s something about the story (even without getting into the whole “Mina and Jon murked their boss” thing) that makes a reader wonder if that’s really the whole truth. If there isn’t something tragic about Dracula. If there isn’t something in him, if not of goodness, then at least of sorrow, instead of only fear.

Anyway I digress but I think we all knew that was gonna happen; point is: Jonathan and Dracula definitely had sex, Mina and Lucy were definitely in love, Seward’s got something weird goin on with the old professor (and also he’s just very weird, full stop. sir. sir please stop experimenting on your asylum inmates. sir i know this is victorian england but please Do Not), and Quincey, well, Quincey is an American cowboy with a bowie knife, and I think that’s all we really need to know.

ok and! the third thing you should be aware of is The Racism. Imperialist Britain, yo. Bram Stoker was Irish so like, it isn’t half as bad as some other authors of his time period (Rudyard Kipling anyone), but the racism is real and I don’t wanna gloss over that. The g**sy slur is used with abandon for a huge assortment of people groups, there’s a tacit as well as overt acceptance of the idea that West is superior to East, and because the educational system where I grew up is a joke and I can only learn things if I accidentally fall down the wikipedia hole of researching the insect genus hemiptera, i genuinely still don’t know how accurate the extensive history of Romania recounted in the first third of the book actually is. Oh also casual and blatant anti-blackness is verbalized by a character at least once. I’m pretty sure the racism has a metaphorical place in the framework of Dracula’s storytelling, but I couldn’t tell you what it is because I am not going to bother putting myself in the mindset of a racist white Victorian man. This is the mindset I am trying to unlearn. So: read with caution, critical thinking, and the double knowledge that even as the narrators are meant to be unreliable, so too is the author himself.

Finally, regarding interpretation: so personally I’m running with the opinion that Dracula is, at least partly, a metaphor for Stoker’s own queerness and internal conflict re: being queer, being closeted, and watching the torture his friend Wilde went through when the wealthy father of Wilde’s lover set out to ruin his life for daring to love his son. Whether this is true or not (I think it’s true, but hey, that’s analysis, baby), you can’t understand Dracula without knowing the social context for it (as with all literature--the author isn’t dead, not if you want to know what they were saying), and the social context for it is:

- Stoker was friends with Wilde, growing only closer after Wilde was outed

- Wilde was outed, as I said, because the father of his lover was wealthy and powerful and full of the most virulent kind of hatred. This is especially interesting because of how many rich, powerful parents just straight up die in Dracula and leave the main characters with no legal issues and a ridiculous amount of money, which is the diametrical opposite of what happened to Wilde

- Stoker idolized his mentor Henry Irving. Irving was a paradigm of unconventional relationships and self-built family, in a world where divorcees and children born out of wedlock were things to be whispered about in scandalized tones, not people to love and embrace. Irving was also famous for thriving off of manipulating those close to him and pitting friends against each other. Given the painstakingly vivid description Stoker provides for his titular vampire and how closely it matches Irving’s own appearance and demeanor, Irving was widely understood even at the time of writing to be the chief inspiration for the character of Dracula

- the book is dedicated to Stoker’s close friend, Hall Caine, a fellow writer whose stories centered around love triangles and accumulation of sins which threaten to ruin everything, only to be redeemed by the simple act of human goodness

- Stoker was Irish, but not Catholic (he was a Protestant of the Church of Ireland, a division of the Anglican Church). This may come as a surprise when you read the book and see All The Catholicism, Just Everywhere. Religion is actually a key theme in Dracula--most of the main characters start out your typical Good Victorian Anglican Skeptics, and need to learn through a trial-by-fire to trust in the rituals and relics of the Catholic Church to save them from Dracula’s evilness. Which is interesting. Because not only do these characters start off as dismissive towards these “superstitions” (in the same way they dismiss the “superstitions” of the peasant class on the outskirts of Dracula’s domain), but the narrative telling us “these superstitions are actually true!” cannot be trusted, when you know the author’s own beliefs.

(Bram Stoker is not saying what his characters are saying. This is the first and most important rule to remember, if you want to figure out Dracula.)

- The second-most famous character in the novel, after Dracula himself, is Van Helsing, whose first name is Abraham. Note that “Bram” is a declension of Abraham. What does this mean? I legitimately have no idea. But it’d be a weird coincidence, right? Like what even is the thought process there? “Oh, yeah, what should I name this character that comes in, makes overtly homoerotic statements willy nilly, and encourages everyone to throw rationality out the window and stake some vampires using the Eucharist? hmmmm how about ‘Me’”

ok wait FINAL final note: you legitimately do not have to care about any of this. I love Dracula because it has gay vibes and I love trying to figure it out, like an archaeologist sifting through sentence structure to find fragments that match the patterns I already know from historical research; but that’s not why you should love Dracula. The book itself is just straight up fun to read. Like I said, Stoker absolutely nails the exact vibe of spookiness that I love, the eerieness and elegance and vague but vivid fear of a full moon crossed by clouds at midnight. The characters are intriguing, especially Quincey gosh I love Quincey Morris but they’re very,, sweet? if i can say that about people i, personally, suspect of murder? They come together and protect each other against the terrible threat that is Dracula, and you don’t get that half as often as I’d like in horror media. I don’t even know if Dracula could qualify as “horror” proper, because it’s not about the squeamish creeping discomfort that “horror” is meant to evoke, it’s not the appeal of staring at a train wreck--it’s not horrifying. It’s eerie. It’s Gothic. It has spires and vampires and found family and cowboys, and to be honest, I don’t know what could be better than that.

#dracula #linden writes an essay #linden's originals #THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ASK FRIEND I WILL ALWAYS WANT TO INFODUMP ABOUT DRACULA #ask linden

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worryinglyinnocent · 7 years

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Fic: Questions

I had a prompt from @white-throated-packrat quite a while ago for an SGU fic in which Camille became a sort of mother and mentor figure to the queer community on Destiny, and I left it alone for a long while as I wanted to do it justice. It turned into more of a character introspective than a fic, but I hope you like it nonetheless.

Rated: G

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Questions

If there's one thing that Camille has realised as an openly homosexual woman, it's that the questions will never end. The very fact of being lesbian seems to open itself up to all kinds of questions, from the innocent to the offensive. She knows that until the world changes, she's likely never to be free of these questions. Even in changing times, with increased visibility of various minority groups, she's still going to get asked questions about her sexual orientation. Sometimes these questions come from a place of genuine ignorance, because education has not moved on anywhere near as quickly as the times around them have. In these cases, Camille tries to be patient, not to chastise people for the things they do not yet know, and to educate as best she can. If they still don't see things in a reasonable light or see that their words could be better chosen, then that's on them, not her. Sometimes the questions come from a place of malice, where it's clear that the person speaking to her is looking for a fight and looking for a rise. She doesn't give them the satisfaction of knowing that they've got under her skin. She hurts and bleeds just as much as the next person, but she feels that her armour must be thicker, stronger, and she cannot sink to their level of petty, hurtful words. She ignores the hatred and the bigotry directed towards her and holds her head high, and she cries to Sharon when she gets home to the safe space that they have created for themselves. It's draining sometimes, but she's lived through it for a long time and she will keep living through it.

Then sometimes, there are the questions that are a plea for help or advice, however nervous they might be and however veiled in other layers of questions they might be asked. These questions, Camille will always answer. In her position in human resources, she has come across these questions increasingly frequently, and she always strives to do as much as she can for these people. If they are coming to her, she reasons, then they probably don't have anywhere else to go.

Camille's never had a huge desire to be a mother, but with these people - of all ages and genders - who are coming to her for advice, she does feel a certain protectiveness, like the mother hen watching over her chicks, and it's something that stays with her for a long time.

Her first experience of it comes on Icarus, really. A young sergeant approaches her with a certain degree of unsureness not usually displayed by the military. But part of Camille's job is to set people at ease, so she smiles and asks open questions as she thinks she knows what this particular consultation is really about. And little by little, she draws out what really underlies their problem. By the end of their discussion, the sergeant is smiling, and Camille feels a definite sense of pride and community in having been able to share her own experience and provide the reassurance and support that is needed. The next time she visits earth, she tells Sharon about it. Mentioning no names, of course, HR confidentiality, but the sense of protectiveness remains with her and she's already formulating ideas in her mind, more structured ways in which she can help once she gets back to earth on a permanent basis. Putting resources in place so that people can access what they need instead of feeling that they have to hunt her down and ask her furtively.

But Camille never makes it back to earth on a permanent basis. At least, it doesn't look like she's going to. On one of her visits home with the stones, awkward in an unfamiliar body, she shares her disappointment with Sharon that her nebulous plans will likely never come into fruition. The IOA and Stargate Command have far more important things to spend their time, money and energy on than helping the LGBT community within their own organisations. To be fair, when surviving on Destiny is sometimes an hourly challenge, it's not something that's at the forefront of Camille's mind most of the time. But it's always there below the surface, that protectiveness. Naturally sexual orientation isn't something that's recorded in personnel files, but it's something that comes out over time as the stranded survivors get to know each other a little better. People miss their loved ones; the distance and uncertainty prove too much for some relationships, and new ones are formed on board their home. And just like on Icarus, Camille finds that she is the person that her queer brothers and sisters come to first for advice and help, even if she is not ordinarily part of their friendship group. There's a new group forming, a community within a community with Camille as its unofficial leader. It's a position she never intended to hold, but it's one that she doesn't mind now that it's fallen into her lap. Just like before, she feels protective of these little chicks, but more than that. She wants to help them build confidence in their own identities so that they can spread their wings with ease. She loves to help them, but what a beautiful world it would be where she doesn't have to because the prejudices that cause that need have been broken down.

That is one thing that can be said for living in such a small and isolated community all the time. With everyone in such close quarters being forced to get along all the time, perceptions can change and people can soften. The sense of friendship will grow over time, and so will acceptance. Their microcosmic society is in no way perfect and there will always be conflict with so many strong personalities clashing over what seems like every single decision, but it's a good starting point. And then, purely by accident, they get the chance to start their own society. There on Novus, they start completely from scratch. It is hard. Very hard. This is perhaps the hardest thing that they have ever done between them, because this is it, there is nothing else that they can do except live. The sense of community that was created on the ship becomes ever stronger because they are truly on their own now with no help from the outside world.

And now more than ever, relationships form, and new generations are born.

Despite their small community and their closeness to each other, Camille finds that she still, even years down the line, receives those questions, those veiled pleas for help. They no longer come from her own generation now, but from the ones that come after her. Everyone knows her as the matriarch of their community, single and solitary, having accepted the loss of the love of her life and having no desire to move on and find another one. It was a done deal long ago for her, and she's content to remain alone. Not lonely; she's never lonely in their little community. But she doesn't feel the need to pair up again, like it seems that everyone else is doing. But although she comes to be seen as the matriarch of their society in general, she is even more of a mother figure to the growing queer community. Sons and daughters come to her with their problems, because even though Camille knows that their own parents would be perfectly accepting of them - they have all lived together and got to know each other well enough by now for her to be sure of that - it is still sometimes easier to get advice from someone who knows, someone who is a member of that community themselves.

Camille can't answer every question, because she can only speak from her own experience. She has no tailored advice for the asexual people, the non-binary people. But she understands their fears and their confusions and their questions, and she can provide them with the compassion and the listening ear that they need in that moment, even if she cannot provide help. And sometimes, that's really all they need. And for the cases that she can't help, she helps them to help themselves as best they can. There are no other resources available for them, she can't send them to someone else who could perhaps help them better with more relevant experiences. But she enlists the help of the members of her own generation, and together they create a framework that will hold and grow. Camille no longer feels worried about what will happen to her community once she is no longer a part of it. There is structure and resilience now, the way it should be, and the lessons and advice that she has always given to her little chicks will not die with her, they will continue to thrive and help others. A legacy of the very best kind, she feels.

On Destiny, Camille reviews the videos that her other self made on Novus, and listens to herself talking about the people she has become so passionately protective of. For a long time she can't speak, she just sits there staring at the paused video, thinking about everything that she's heard. For someone who never intended to become a mother, she has ended up with so many people looking to her for advice, and she really couldn't be happier about it.

She smiles and shuts down the video, leaving to go about her daily tasks, determined that she will still keep answering questions for her little chicks for as long as she possibly can.

#SGU Fic #Camille Wray #white-throated-packrat

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