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nohshinwoos · 5 years

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survey results 🥳

so a few days ago i did a follower survey and now i’ve gathered the results so it’s time for some stats 📊

some general info

this survey was made just for fun and there might be mistakes in it.

i can’t do math, so i apologise for that in advance.

216 people participated in this survey.

answers were submitted between august 17th and august 21st via google forms.

some questions allowed for participants to choose more than one answer, which means the total might be more than 100% on those questions.

the number of people who chose each answer are in brackets.

if i get asks about this everything will be tagged “fp survey 2019” so if it gets annoying just blacklist it!

the results (with some comments from me) are under the cut!

about you

what’s your age?

32.4% (70) 14-17

27.8% (60) 18-20

21.3% (46) 21-23

9.7% (21) 24-26

4.2% (9) 13 or under

3.2% (7) 27-30

1.4% (3) 31 or over

* i’m so old hhhh 😳

what do you identify as?

70.8% (153) female

20.4% (44) formless blob

6% (13) male

2.8% (6) other

* i didn’t wanna exclude anyone, which is why i chose to have an “other” option to allow people to express whatever they feel comfortable with identifying as.

sexuality

37% (80) bisexual

19.9% (43) lesbian

17.1% (37) asexual/anything on the ace spectrum

13% (28) i don’t use labels

10.6% (23) pansexual

9.7% (20) other

out of which:

4.7% (10) queer**

6.9% (15) heterosexual

3.7% (8) gay

* as this was a question where people could choose multiple options, the total percentage is more than 100%.

** queer wasn’t originally an option in the survey, but i added it in the results as there were so many that wrote it when choosing “other” as an option.

what’s your zodiac sign?

13% (28) pisces

12% (26) taurus

10.6% (23) sagittarius

10.2% (22) scorpio

9.3% (20) capricorn

7.9% (17) aquarius

7.4% (16) libra

6.9% (15) leo

6.5% (14) gemini

6% (13) virgo

5.6% (12) aries

4.6% (10) cancer

* shoutout to all my fellow pisces! i was actually surprised that so many of you who took this are pisces, didn’t expect that.

where are you from?

44.9% (97) united states

22.2% (48) other countries/unable to count

8.3% (18) canada

5.6% (12) united kingdom

4.6% (10) australia

4.2% (9) germany

3.2% (7) sweden

3.2% (7) finland

1.9% (4) russia

1.9% (4) ireland

* these are just the top 9 countries from the survey. if you wanna know a number for a specific country, feel free to ask me!

** oh and a shoutout to my fellow swedes! (i wanted to write something in swedish here but i didn’t know what sdkshjgkl)

dan & phil

do you watch dan & phil?

97.2% (210) yes

1.9% (4) used to but not anymore

0.5% (1) who?

0.5% (1) other

0% (0) no

* i don’t know why i had an other option for this question, but it was fun reading this one person’s rant about how the last question (”dannie or phillie :)”) of this part scared them. love you, you’re valid!

when did you start watching them?

25% (54) 2015-2016

24.5% (53) 2013-2014

24.5% (53) 2017-2018

16.7% (36) 2011-2012

5.6% (12) 2019

2.8% (6) 2009-2010

0.9% (2) 2009 or before

0% (0) i don’t watch them

do you think they are together?

90.7% (196) yes

8.8% (19) i don’t know

0.5% (1) i used to but not anymore

0% (0) no

dannie or phillie :)

59.3% (128) dannie

40.7% (88) phillie

* shoutout to all my fellow dannies!

about me and my blog

when did you start following me?

51.4% (111) 2019

35.6% (77) 2018

13% (28) 2017 or before

* it’s wild that some of you have been following me since 2017 or before - wow! and thank you! i feel like you have seen a lot sdhjsfjkl

how did you find me?

37% (80) honestly no idea

31.9% (69) from someone else’s blog

27.3% (59) saw your gifs/edits

14.4% (31) tumblr recommended

2.8% (6) read a fic of yours

2.5% (5) other

0.5% (1) from a friend

* as this was a question where people could choose multiple options, the total percentage is more than 100%.

fav content of mine?

75.9% (164) gifs

26.4% (57) edits

13.4% (29) icons

17.6% (38) fics

40.3% (87) text posts

3.5% (7) other

* as this was a question where people could choose multiple options, the total percentage is more than 100%.

** didn’t know ppl liked my text posts that much but thank u! and shoutout to the one person who said “memes” sjdkskfjkgl

*** also seeing 38 (!!) ppl say fics really boosts my confidence in writing, which is very much needed for me rn, so thank u!!

anything you wanna say about me as a person/my blog 😳

this was an open question, where people could write whatever they want about me and my blog.

there were quite a few answers and i’m not sure if i should publish them or how i even would in that case, but just know i’ve read them all and cried (good tears, i promise) and i really do appreciate every single one of you so much.

will try to remember all your kind words on days when i need to cheer up and i will save them and look back at them if i ever need motivation for anything 💖

anything else? suggestions? or if you wanna reveal who you are that’s okay too

this question was another open one as well. some chose to reveal themselves, while some just said something nice.

notes for myself

in a potential future survey i’ll have less of the “other” option, as it can be hard to group some answers together.

for a potential future survey i will definitely phrase the questions a bit differently and maybe add other questions for a more precise result.

i just generally feel like i learnt a lot - both about who my followers are and also what they think of me. it was very interesting to go through and reflect on!

i’ve only ever done one survey for an essay in school, so making a “not so serious one” was fun and i think i learnt a lot from that aspect as well. might be useful in the future, who knows!

#mel talks #fp survey 2019 #honestly i have no idea what i'm doing skjdjhjkg #i love statistics but i didn't think i'd need to do math for this but i had to and i hate math ://////#sorry this took a few days my brain hated me so i both got distracted and have just felt like shit #but i'm a bit better now dw #why am i nervous about publishing this? idk but yeah here it is

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d2myg · 5 years

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50 questions tag

tagged by @rysiowate thank u darling!

1. What takes up too much of your time? my hyperfixations and constantly updating all my online accounts and personas

2. What makes your day better? when i feel like ive accomplished something in a day; also, getting to go to bed after a long day

3. What’s the best thing to happen to you today? i made really good tofu fried rice

4. What fictional place would you like to go to? the shire. just wanna live in a tiny hobbit house and eat and read

5. Are you good at giving advice? depends what it is about. and also, im better at getting my points across via text, so im useless at advice irl

6. Do you have any mental illness? anxiety and depression, im pretty i have some kind of executive dysfunction and maybe dependent personality disorder, but these two are just my assumptions. who knows really im broke and too anxious to go a therapist to get diagnosed lmao

7. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? no thank god it sounds terrifying

8. What musician inspired you the most? even though i’m not an active stan anymore i’m gonna say bts because they’re the artists i’ve stanned the longest for and grew most attached to. i think they helped me develop as a person and they’ve been there for me in tough times. but also queen, because in freddie mercury i found a queer icon and role model which is very important for me

9. Have you ever fallen in love? i thought i was in love once but looking back, maybe not

10. What’s your dream date? i think this dream date business is bullshit. as long as im with the person i like, we could be doing literally anything and id still be like yeah this is a good day. like running errands or going grocery shopping or just lying in bed.

11. What do others notice about you?

idk probably my self-deprecating humour. also i if im wearing makeup that almost always gets commented on so i guess that

12. What is an annoying habit you have? just one? lmao uhhh when im super anxious about something i just shut off and like i cant function until that thing is resolved. my brain is just like ok anxiety time lets lay in bed and cry and nap for the rest of the day. also when im not in the mood to reply to someone’s text i will literally go days without replying not bc i forgot but bc i just.. yeah

13. Do you still talk to your first love? sometimes i check up on her (on her social media) but no we havent talked for almost a year since it ended. but then, was she really my first love. idk.

14. How many exes do you have? one

15. How many songs are in your playlist? i have multiple playlists and i also follow a lot of playlists; all together there must be at least 1k

16. What instruments can you play? acoustic guitar

17. What do you have the most pictures of? travelling, i have folders of pictures since last year that i havent edited yet

18. Where would you like to go before you die? hm. everywhere i havent been yet. id really like to go to canada, also like everywhere in asia

19. What is your zodiac? scorpio

20. Do you relate to it? idk i dont really read horoscopes and idk the like scorpio personality traits or whatever

21. What is happiness to you? being content with myself and what im doing.

22. Are you going through anything right now? final assignments of the semester :)

23. What’s the worst decision you ever made? getting too attached to some people.

24. What’s your favorite store? record stores are so cool. also there’s this store in brighton that sells prints of stuff like ghibli on tshirts and tote bags. not my favourite, but i like it. i dont think i have a favourite.

25. What’s your opinion on abortion? im pro-choice. i dont think it should be a debate.

26. Do you keep a bucket list? no

27. Do you have a favorite album? sheer heart attack by queen, that shit slaps

28. What do you want for your birthday? honestly not to be shallow but some coins so i can buy myself some stuff ive been wanting to buy but didnt wanna spend money on

29. What are most people’s first impression of you? idk probably that im a bitch or that im intimidating. before i open my mouth to talk. one of my best friends told me they were scared of me when we first met.

30. What age do you seem according to most people? idk i mean no one really questions my age tbh. when i was younger people thought i was older lmao cause i seemed mature or whatever

31. Where do you keep your phone while you’re sleeping? usually on my bed bc i sleep with earphones

32. What word do you say the most? uuuh……. like. when i talk i say like after every 3rd words its annoying

33. What’s the oldest age you would date? 5-6 years probably

34. What’s the youngest age you would date? ½ years max

35. What job/career do most people say would suit you? i dont talk about my career ambitions with anyone lmao it makes me anxious. my mom says i could do personal couching or psychotherapy or whatever.

36. What’s your favorite music genre? classic rock

37. If you could live in any country in the world, where would it be? sweden sounds really nice. hong kong or singapore also

38. What is your current favorite song? hm. the iron man 3 credits soundtrack. slaps. suffragette city by culture club also

39. How long have you had this blog for? uuh i remade very recently

40. What are you excited for? goin home for the summer. also rocketman and spiderman far from home. also!!! i might be going to the rocketman red carpet so

41. Are you a better talker or listener? listener. i dont really like talking about deep stuff

42. What is the last productive thing you did? did some uni work today. actually, did a lot of uni work today

43. What do you want for christmas? go to budapest with my mom weve been planning that

44. What class do you get the best grades in? my best subject in high school was english and in college it was probably psychology

45. On a scale of 1-10, how are you feeling right now? idk 5/6

46. What can you see yourself doing in ten years?

dude i dont even know what ill be doing next year after my ba course ok

47. When did you get your first heartbreak? i dont think i really had one. when i broke up w my gf, its been shit for a while and i just accepted that it wasnt gonna work so it didnt really like hurt

48. What age do you want to get married? marriage is overrated and expensive next

49. What career did you want to have as a child? i wanted to be a vet also but so much med school. ew.

50. What do you crave right now? to dye my hair bc im stressed insert this is fine meme

i also tag @hamkis also @crownedbabes also @funkysapphic, @milmercurios, @freddie-jupiter, @piscesyub, @cactustattoo, @tonyrights

#anyone else can do this to just say i tagged u!#and those i tagged u dont gotta do it #eli.txt #tag game #long post

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posiden1912 · 6 years

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All of the lovecore questions!

Oh my! This is so unexpected!!! A follower interacted with me!!! 💖 I’d die for u op

1.) what’s your sexuality? - Pansexual

2.) are you dating someone right now? - Gods i wish! super single rn

3.) would you consider yourself a hopeless romantic? - oh yea, 100%. I was once super into this girl and she sid she would only have her first dance to this very specific song, and well, the thing is that i loved her and just really really really wanted to dance with her. So i conspired with a close friend for her to play the song at her quince, and it worked. I got to dance with her and it was super magical even though it didnt pan out for us!

4.) what comes to your mind when you think of love? - hm.. im not entirely sure how to answer this cuz my mind springs to alot, so im gonna say words, and then colors. Love is trust, and intimacy. Its that time on valentine’s day when your heart wells because you locked eyes with your crush for a second too long. Love is powerful, and inherently magical. It can soothe the anxious, frazzle the calm, make us feel safe, and vulnerable all at the same time. Passionate love between romantic partners is a blazing inferno of reds and yellows and orange. It’s hot and sometimes painful; it’s sooteing and potent. You could burn away to nothing, or shrink to calmer fire. Love between friends and long time lovers is green and blue respectively, or sometimes combined. It’s healing, long lasting, like ice to a wound and a blanket over the cold. It’s whatever you both need. Its adaptable, and true, healthy for everyone involved. Everyone could use and give a little love and compassion. The world would probably be a better place if people kept this in mind.

5.) what’s your type? (body + personality wise

6.) flowers or hearts?- flowers, hearts sound like such a gory gift.

7.) red or pink?- por que no los dos???

8.) do you prefer pastels or dark colors?- por que no los dos??? why not combine them??? open your heart you cowards

9.) scented lotion or perfume?- honestly neither? but probably perfume. I like my lotion unscented!

10.) what color(s) do you associate with love?- Hey!!! we already did this!! so this is why my teachers told me to read my questions first!! But tl;dr, red, blue, and green

11.) what animal(s) do you associate with love?- not sure! never thought about it. maybe hamsters. Fragile and cute, but will absolutely fuck your shit up my dude. (i’ve had 20 hamsters, do not @ me fuckers)

12.) how do you know when you’re crushing on someone?- i think about them alot and just want to be near them.

13.) how do you know when you’re in love?- i want space from them occasionally, but always want to come back.

14.) have you been in love?- oh yea lmao. it was intense! 10/10 would do again even tho my heart hurts!

15.) favorite romcom trope?- no idea! maybe like,, when the girl and or guy realizes theyre in love with eachother.

16.) what’s your favorite aesthetic other than lovecore?- the ocean

17.) favorite romantic movie?- um,,, that’s a personal question :/ (XD)((i only did that cuz idk how to use emojis with my laptop lmao.))

18.) ideal date?- its just us alone somewhere, even if it’s a crowded place. We talk and are so involved with eachother that we just don’t even notice how deep we are falling for eachother. We talk for hours and it feels like seconds, and we just want more time. maybe go to a book store after whatever we were doing.

19.) what would you give your partner for a romantic gift?- depends on the person

20.) what would you want to receive from a partner as a romantic gift?- depends on the person, probably something kinky

21.) why do you like lovecore?- honestly ive no idea what lovecore is.

22.) what do you think love is? like, how would you explain the concept- already did this!!!!!

23.) do you believe in love at first sight? no, love is slow kindled. I believe in lust, crush, and infatuation at first sight though.

24.) have you ever crushed on a friend?- almost exclusively! XD

25.) have you ever crushed on a stranger?- definitely.

26.) celebrity crush? Aubrey plaza 100%

27.) do you have a crush on any fictional characters? yes XD

28.) matte or shiny? depends on how im feeling!

29.) bright or dull colors? depends on how im feeling, and the context!!!

30.) do you have a favorite lovecore blog? if so, what is it?- mine

31.) favorite love song?- as i lay me down by sophie b hawkins, there’s others, but i cant think of them i can link my spotify if you’d like

32.)

33.) do your best heart spam!! (ex. 💗🏳️‍🌈💗💓💓💝🍓💝💫✨💫💞💝💗⭐️💘💓💗💞♥️)- my friends can attest that my heart spam is legendary, and this post is already long enough!

send in any other love/lovecore associates asks as well~! i love you all!!!

ps. honestly “por que no los dos” is why im pansexual lmao but more like “por que no todo!” XD

I’m a transgirl out here looking for love, if youre a gal please messs=age me lmao, if youre a guy submit your application, you’ll hear back in 5-7 business days :)

(if youre agender or gender queer, pls message me! need some trans friends!!)

welp im late for uni! bye everyone :)

#love #hopeless romantic #pansexual #panromantic #transgirl #please love me!!!#lovecore

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th3h0unds0fl0v3 · 3 years

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II. The Janitor

This past July, I saw fireflies for the first time in as long as I could remember. I stood barefoot atop my mother’s wooden deck, marveling at the way the phosphorescent insects lit up the otherwise ordinary backyard of the house where I spent my adolescence. I explained to my mom how we didn’t have these up North, in New England, and how I almost forgot entirely of their existence.

Looking back at this now, I realize that the syntax of this observation explained how I had naturally sectioned off my life. “We didn’t have these up North,” I recalled, as if from a distant memory from a place that no longer exists. While, grammatically, it would have made more sense for me to say, “we don’t have these up North,” I had already resigned myself to that fact that I was referencing a place that I would never occupy as home again. The New-England-Where-Fireflies-Don’t-Exist phase of my life had ended; All of the addresses that I occupied, nine of them to be exact, had been temporary homes, placeholders, dreamy little cubicles, that allowed me to work my way through my shit before returning to the backyard in which I stand now.

Last July I had just turned 26, and I still held these two conflicting views of myself before I left home at 18. In one sense, I couldn’t wait to be older. I wanted to grow up as quickly as possible—I wanted to bypass all of that hard and confusing stuff associated with being a young queer person. During my high school years, when I worked as a camp counselor, I would look at these young parents with their young children with envy. They were filled with light and hope, their bodies still taut and strong, faces without wrinkles or spots, and their movements quick and without hesitation. They presumably had good jobs, owned their homes, and drove cars that they’d be able to fix should something go wrong. I assumed their lives were comfortable, but not lavish or out of my frame of reference. They had gone through the period of life that I was wading through and came out in-tact. When I was this age, I really had no interest in going through, or figuring out, any of what I’m going through now.

On the other hand, I didn’t want any of that. I didn’t want to have a family or own a home. I didn’t want to have a car or a job that would require childcare until 6 or 7 o’clock at night. I didn’t want to know what would come next, I just wanted to go out into the world and experience things and figure out what came next as the previous thing came to an end.

I wrote on Tumblr about how I loved the idea of working as a janitor at nights in some mundane place in the middle of nowhere, leading a life where I didn’t have to be responsible to anyone but myself where I had all the free time in the world to spend my time with books and my own words.

Clearly, I had given a little too much credence to the Catcher-in-the-Rye-I-Hate-Other-People-type-books that struck a chord with me at the time being a closeted, affected gay kid growing up in a place that felt way too small and homogenous for all of the energy that I fancied myself composed. I look back on this and laugh at what that would have actually looked like; it never would have worked out for I hate going to bed late (assuming this janitor had a late shift), I have always longed to live in a big city, and despite being relatively athletic in the most practical sense, I am not good at manual labor.

At the point in college when I had to decide on a major and a potential career path, I would, mostly subconsciously, compromise these two possibilities. “What’s practical is logical” paired with a little bit of the “What the hell, who cares?”, a lesson irreversibly burned into my brain after spending probably two years of my life listening to Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U.

But as I continued on towards my graduation, I realized (more and more) that so many people that I went to college with were actually there for the very utilitarian purpose of becoming a specific professional role in society. Here I was, trying to experience whatever I could, learn about as many things as I could, and maybe gain some marketable job skills in the process, while others had marked out their ten-year pathway towards a six-figure salary in corporate public relations. This sort of scared the shit out of me, and as my graduation date came closer, I began to slowly lose the spirit of inquiry and expression that I had ignited during sophomore year.

I was shocked and confused by the funnel that so many of my friends and classmates, who I figured to be more illustrious and unconventional in their imaginings of what a life could be, jumped directly into corporate-type jobs. I watched, with awe and confusion, as the gender and sexuality activist stopped dying his hair and moved to San Francisco to work for Google. Other friends that spent almost all of their free time acting or singing or working on films quickly shifted their energies and focused into getting a consulting (?) job (something I still do not fully understand). I felt somewhat stunned by this; it seemed almost like everyone had attended a meeting that this was what you were supposed to do and I totally forgot to go.

After witnessing this and graduating, I also decided that, at 21-years old, I should probably “get my shit together” a.k.a., stop going out and spending money on beer and burritos. I should spend all of my time being productive and taking good care of myself. In short, I fell right back into making no room for myself to have balance or nuance or to realistically enjoy my life. I was, once again, wound so tight during this time, that I doled out almost no kindness for myself, punishing myself with perfection, again.

Everything I did was for the purpose of optimizing my productivity, my health, absorbing knowledge from the in-vogue non-fiction book of the month to talk about at parties, and, once again, letting everyone know how much I had it together. I looked at some pictures of myself from college, dressed in face paint after an Of Montreal concert where I danced with my shirt off and thought about how much fun I used to have, how there was a point in my life where I was almost creative and “free-spirited”, but I had missed that opportunity, and going back to that fledgling person was impossible.

Of course, removing the neatly defined semesters and credit-hours and degree tracking software and adding in my revitalized perfectionism and competition and some new vague financial goals (building a retirement account? Getting out of debt! Fast! Grad school?), I began to try to ignore my truest desires and, instead, jump into that pipeline I saw towards the end of college.

This exercise led to a series of jobs and moves, ranging from dull to disastrous. First, I worked as a researcher at a cancer hospital under the supervision of a flaky and abusive-by-product-of-her-flakiness thoracic oncologist who told me I had trouble paying attention to details when she would make a mistake. Then, a fellowship working for a public health department in a conservative part of California during the lead up to the 2016 Presidential Election. When that didn’t work out due to a combination of loneliness and having absolutely no money, I moved back to the East Coast where I drove Lyft, watched dogs, and hosted at a restaurant known for their Jazz brunches, while I tried to get myself another “get your shit together job”. Through that circuitous path, I ended up getting a job working in housing advocacy, which I loved for so many reasons, but still felt outside of what I was looking for.

Monogamy also felt safe, during this time. First with my college boyfriend, who I met through friends and, despite being someone I definitely fell in love with, the first person I really had sex with, we couldn’t quite figure out how to integrate our lives without one of us sacrificing something essential. When that didn’t work, I almost immediately met my most-recent ex, who I would have a two-and-a-half year long, on-again off-again relationship with, as both of us traversed the country and planet doing internships and fellowships while trying to find our way.

When my first relationship didn’t work out, I was devastated. It felt like we obviously should have been able to make it work, and I genuinely thought we were going to move in together and eventually get married until we had that conversation and realized that all of our issues would probably get so much worse if we moved in together and that we would never get married.

When the second relationship ended, I was simultaneously juggling relief and heartbreak. I had been liberated from something that neither one of us could figure out how to end, but I hated how easily he seemed to walk away from everything. One of the last times I saw him, I went to a dinner party at his mother’s apartment where, over the course of the evening, it became very clear that all of his relatives knew we were breaking up as he planned to move to a new city, despite the fact that we hadn’t yet had an extensive conversation about ending our relationship.

That night I left the party and cried in the rain listening to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy on repeat, working through everything I had been through with that person, and all of the choices I had made since graduating college, all of which had exhausted me. I felt exhausted because I had been swimming upstream for almost five years, against the currents of my actual desires, my actual inclinations, my actual identity, while in service of ideas that I couldn’t fit in, relationships that did not suit me, all while feeling a sense of invented competition against my college classmates.

After this boyfriend and I split up, I felt a Sea Change starting in my life. It felt like I had been cracked open, that I could step out again, from the confines I had created, and allow the verve that I had imagined my life containing, back into my life, to a degree where it wasn’t just visible to people that I interact with, but within me in a way that I realized it.

This was September 2018, and outside of ending this relationship, a couple other things happened that accounted for this change. For one, in June of that year, I had turned 25, which is around the age that the human brain is pretty much set with development. Perhaps it was the result of ending a bad relationship, but I felt more confident and smart and interesting and generally more stable as the summer waxed on.

I had spent the last year working with a therapist who combined cognitive-behavioral therapy with techniques such as breath-work to help me understand that my present-day self reacts to my present-day life with wisdom and messages from every experience of my life, and all the people I was throughout those events. This process helped me to stop beating myself up for being nervous and anxious, and instead listen to these neuroses and listen to them earnestly.

Perhaps, one of the more significant factors came from the fact that two of my closest friends, one of which being my roommate, had moved away over the course of the summer, causing my social scene to shift. I was really sad to see my friends leave the city that we shared for the entirety of our friendships, but I was also really excited to explore new connections with those around me. It felt like a moment where I could say a big Thank You to my college years, and the messy and exhausting years after, and introduce myself as someone new, someone stepping outside of the snakeskin containing all the expectations and dreams and goals fed to me by other people, by bigger systems.

I knew that I needed to leave my little New England life eventually, but when I returned to Boston from a week-long trip to visit my family and friends in the Tri-State Area, I put my bag down in my bedroom and felt really sad at the prospect of leaving Boston, leaving this apartment.

I was almost relieved when the recruiter who was interviewing me for a job in New York suddenly stopped responding to my emails. My family and friends in New York and New Jersey expressed their frustration with the fact that I was literally ghosted from a job that I spent at least five hours, and a Megabus ticket, interviewing for, a job that would have given me a reason to move back home. I pantomimed being as upset as they were, but in actuality, I was excited. I felt so ambivalent about Boston; the city once felt boundless with possibility, but at this point in time it felt constricting and dully depressing. And yet, I had so many gorgeous memories associated with the city, I knew it so intimately, I loved my apartment and all of the green space that surrounded it. And from a 30,000 foot view, above this ambivalence, I felt like I still needed to get something out of my system while still living in Boston.

I told myself that I would spend the next year indulging whatever desires I had, in a quest to take care of myself in ways that transcended the drone of health and wellness propagated by Instagram culture and the boutique cycling studios that wouldn’t stop emailing me. And then, by the time this year was over, I would find a way to move to New York, refreshed and more fully formed, ready to lead a life that felt even better.

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lodelss · 5 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.

This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”

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This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”

The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.

Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.

As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”

The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”

***

When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.

“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”

Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”

Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.

In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.

“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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lodelss · 5 years

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The Queer Generation Gap

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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