Any Sort Of Sex Positivity Message That Refers To Its Readers As “dearest Perverts” Is Invariably

Asexy Video Project

Hey Everyone! To celebrate Asexual Awareness Week, the team at Queer Sounds want to create a video for our song Asexy.  BUT We would like your help. We want to put together a video with real asexual spectrum people holding up the lyrics to the song.  If you would be interested in helping us make this video, please send an email to queersounds@gmail.com with ‘Asexy Awareness Song’ as the subject we’ll assign you a section of the lyrics to write up signs for and film. You then go off and do it, upload it to YouTube as an unlisted video, submit the video to us here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mgzlhDmeIYeGY2x2EInl5nSqM7jYnFLqJmWUrJZCT-w/viewform?c=0&w=1  and we’ll take care of the rest. Submission of videos closes on the 22nd of October 2014, so make sure to send them to us by then.  Interested? There’s some more detailed instructions and guidelines regarding how to make your video in the linked video. Good luck! [EDIT: Have no idea what this video will look like? Well wonder no more! Here’s Masque with a rough demonstration of the kind of thing we’d like you to do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRd-NO7Tr9Q ]

You are cordially invited to Save NBC's Hannibal

Hi all,

I have created a petition encouraging NBC to pick up Hannibal for a second season! http://tinyurl.com/d3trcah

If you need more Hannibal (or just more Will in his tighty whities), please sign and share!

Hi everyone!!! This is an art supplies giveaway for me reaching an amount of followers I said I’d do a giveaway at!

Here are the things you’ll be getting, as you can see from the photo!

6” by 10” Sketchbook for both wet and dry media

A bottle of ink, you pick the color, I’ll order it from a specific site

A fountain pen that comes with the ink from the same site

11 colors of Cotman Winsor & Newton watercolors

3 brushes

A drawing of a subject of your choice to go on the first page! You might want to check my art out if you’re unfamiliar with me to see what types of things I usually do

And that’s that.  I don’t use any of those watercolor tubes anymore, as I’ve replaced them each with higher quality tubes, so I thought: why not give them away?  And I like the fountain pen I’ve been using so much that I think I’d like someone else to try it, too.  I’ve also replaced the three brushes I’ve included here, so I don’t need those, either.  And a drawing for good measure.

Here are the rules! Please follow these:

No giveaway blogs.  I want more people to actually see this and have a chance at getting something; a lot of artists don’t have a lot of money…

Reblogs enter you, and a Like helps.  You can’t just like - but you can do both to double your chances of just reblogging (if it falls on someone who liked it, I’ll check to see if they reblogged it)

I’ll be checking the blog that wins to see if you’re an active blog.

You gotta use these after they arrive! I obviously can’t enforce this, but I want to see people not being timid! Make art! That’s what these are for.  I know a thing that stops a lot of people is being scared they’ll mess up and waste expensive supplies… but if this is a gift, that shouldn’t matter!

This ends on May 24th. If I send an ask and you don’t respond within 2 days, I’ll ask the next person, and so on.

I will ship anywhere. I’ll pay the shipping.

I think that’s everything.  Have fun!!! Good luck!

Reblog this and I'll send your URL to BC

I’m filling a notebook with the URLs of the Cumber Collective to send with the Relax the Real Project. Reblog and I will include yours!

Happy Valentines Day from Buff!

Scrapbook #3: C.L.A.N. (Click for full-size image.)

Other entries in this series: 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2 1

What to do when you're not the hero any more

From Star Wars to Mad Max, a new, more diverse kind of storytelling went mainstream this year - and the backlash shows how much it matters.

The rage that white men have been expressing, loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to one race or one gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page - that rage is petty. It is aware of its own pettiness. Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, it becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.

Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it’d be so much easier to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the Stone age.

Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world.

The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry. It’s a fundamental challenge to a worldview that’s been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white Western men at the centre of every story is the same part that legitimises racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and brown boy to identify and empathise with white male heroes is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else’s shoes.

Read more

Dear LGBT community members who don’t think asexuality should be allowed “in”:

I’m biologically female, and I’m not attracted to men. Society told me I was supposed to be, but it never happened, and I spent years of my life feeling broken and wrong. The other option presented to me when I was young was being attracted to women. I watched girls closely, trying to figure it out, but that wasn’t working for me, either. Wanting to be sexually close to another person just baffled me. I swore everyone else was making those feelings up. But they weren’t, and I got older, I realized that and it sunk in that I was just one big weirdo. I was in college when I learned the word for it, and had a breakdown of panic and relief. I can’t begin to put into words how it felt to discover I wasn’t broken–that I was a part of a group of people who felt in their hearts and souls the way I did.

Then came the process of coming out. My friends were a mixed bag, but friends you can pick and choose from if they aren’t supportive.The vast majority of my friends were cool about it, even if they didn’t quite understand. There were assholes, and one suggested “showing me” I was wrong (creepy creepy creepy), but mostly my friends were neutral to positive.

After some select friends, I came out to my family.

My parents told me I was wrong.

It was like being run over by a truck. To this day, I can’t talk about my asexuality around those I love most. It caused one of the only serious arguments I’ve ever had with my parents (I love them and they’re wonderful about 99.9% of the things in my life, but this is one place they weren’t). I was told I just had to find the “right person”, and I would change. That I was too young to understand my feelings (I was in my 20s) towards boys. That I shouldn’t put labels on myself that would make men not want to date me. Because god forbid men not find me attractive! Because clearly, from my conversation with them, what I wanted most of all was to find a man who wanted to get in my pants! Yeah!

Yeah.

It’s not really their fault. We live in a world where happiness is defined as falling in love, getting married, etc. Not wanting another person in your life as your “other half” is an alien concept. Media is flooded with messages of heterosexual normalcy, and now in very small pockets (hopefully growing, because it should! <3), a homosexual option for partnered normalcy. It’s shoved in our faces CONSTANTLY. Our society and government have even set things up to benefit couples financially. Which is fun now that I’m in my 30s and trying to save up for a future family, all by myself. And thankfully, even though they still avoid the word, over a decade later my parents do seem on board with the fact that I’m not pursuing relationships and are supportive of my life choices to save for a family by myself.

Listen. I am by no means saying that I am oppressed as a person the way people attracted to same-gendered people are. I’m not saying I’m oppressed the way the trans community is. I’m not saying any of that. But I AM dealing with a world where who I am is just not “okay”. Where who I am is wrong, where who I am needs to be fixed. Or, in many cases (most cases), where who I am DOES NOT EXIST. I don’t belong in the heterosexual world. I’m an outsider to it. But I’m also an outsider to any world that involves sex and attraction. And as a youth, I had NO WORD to use to describe who I was!

So when asexuals advocate for asexual inclusion in the LGBT community, it’s not because we want to weirdly steal thunder from anyone in your community, or because we want false pity for oppression we haven’t faced the way you have. It’s because we don’t want others to have to grow up the way we did.

We don’t want the world to continue not knowing about our existence. We want asexuality recognized publicly–both so asexuals can learn about themselves in an honest way, and so non-aces see us as legitimate humans. The LGBT world seemed like the natural place for us to go to to ask for inclusion. The place where others might understand what it’s like to grow up in a heterosexual world, as someone who is not. It’s who I first turned to when I discovered the word for myself, only to find immediate pain, rejection, and even mockery. I was horrified.

But I didn’t give up. I couldn’t give up. In 2005, I was in college and gave a talk at my university’s LGBT club. They had never heard of asexuality before, despite being part of a huge liberal university. It was the scariest thing I’d ever done in my life. I had to introduce the concept, and represent the entire community. And then answer a barrage of questions. Personal, personal questions, about my body, my life experiences, everything. And at the end, there was a long period silence. Until one brave person said:

“Wow. You have gone through the same things as us. You said you had some pamphlets about it? Can we put them in our office? People need to know about this. I can’t imagine growing up not knowing about homosexuality. As scary as it was for me, at least I had a word for it.”

I broke down crying and gave them all the pamphlets I had ordered. Many of them started crying, too. We became a blubbering mess in that meeting room. In that moment, I thought I had found a community who understood after all.

Did I? I suppose that’s up to you. But please, take some of this into consideration before you say that asexuals shouldn’t have a letter in your acronym, or should make their “own, separate” community. We’re unknown and invisible in so many ways, but nevertheless hurting in ways I think many of you can sympathize with and understand. It’s not that we’re attracted to the “wrong” sex or gender. It’s that we’re not attracted to the “right” one. And holy crap, the world just isn’t super friendly or understanding to people like that. Like us.

Thank you.