This was exactly my reaction when, in 2015, a 15yo on Tumblr came and sent me a load of hate for being “an OMG ACTUAL ADULT” calling myself ‘queer’ and using ‘queer community’.
Like, how to put this. In Australia since the early 90s, ‘queer’ has been the accepted term to call that community. It’s a mainstream word. We say ‘queer theory’, ‘queer community’, ‘queer organisations’, etc. Another Australian who words for the government said it’s a perfectly acceptable term to use in policy documents and funding applications. Here, in Australia, queer hasn’t been a slur at any point in my life. The only Australians I’ve ever come across who think it’s a slur are people who spend too much time around American youths on social media.
I did a post about the international queer community, it got 5-7k notes (ish) and people from at least 10 other countries said ‘queer’ is not a slur in their country and it’s just the word that’s used for the queer community.
This is why it drives me nuts when a 15yo from South Carolina, USA assumes:
1) Her experience with ‘queer’ is the same as everybody else’s
2) A small number of people having a bad experience with ‘queer’ is an acceptable reason to deny and police usage by the entire wider international queer community
The short of it is that it’s not acceptable. Many older queer folks have used this word for decades – it’s been in common use since at least the 80s. In the past 3 years it’s become very fashionable (mostly only on Tumblr, but on pockets of social media elsewhere, too) to treat queer as this Big Bad Slur (forgetting that there are many other slurs and most of our language gets used as slurs at some point by various people) and to pop up on every fucking post that mentions queer like “UM EXCUSE ME IT’S FINE FOR YOU TO CALL YOURSELF QUEER BUT IT’S LITERAL ABUSE FOR YOU TO USE IT FOR OTHER PEOPLE LIKE AS AN UMBRELLA TERM AND YOU ARE A BAD PERSON!!!”
like. babe. I’ve never met you in my life. You live an entire world away from me and you can’t tell me what language I’m allowed to use for myself and my own community. If you don’t like the word, you have trauma associated with it or whatever, I accept that. I feel for you, I have trauma about some words, too. USE XKIT BLACKLIST. Your trauma is your problem, just like my trauma is my problem. Yes, really. Get counselling. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to change their identities and language because of your trauma. That’s not a lack of empathy from me, that’s a hard life lesson you need to learn about the world not revolving around you. I am not abusing anyone by using the language I’ve always used about my own community.
It’s not the end of your world, though. You’re not doomed to read ‘queer’ all over tumblr forever. There are many many many tools available for you to protect yourself and avoid triggers. You should be responsible for yourself and your experience online and protect yourself from seeing things that upset you.
“BUT I’M A MINOR!!”, you cry! okay, true. Get up from the computer, go directly to your parent or guardian, and let them know you’re not old enough to police your own internet usage and ask them to do it for you. It is not my responsibility to take care of you. It is no one else on Tumblr’s responsibility to take care of you. The internet is not just for kids. If you can’t take care of yourself, your parents need to help you do that.
The short of it is if you’re old enough to know the word ‘queer’ upsets you, you’re old enough to download xkit blacklist and add ‘queer’ to the blacklist words. If you’re not doing that, I have to assume you’re actually trying to pick fights with queer people and it’s more of a power struggle to you than anything about semantics.
“BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO USE XKIT! IT’S AN EASY CHANGE FOR YOU!” Dude, you’re asking me to change my whole identity. You’re asking me to change my lexicon for you. It’s not an easy or fair change for you to ask me to make. Xkit is a quick and easy solution for you (and now, you can use the tumblr innate tag blocks, too). If that’s too much for you to do, I have a feeling you’re just looking for a fight and not actually traumatised by ‘queer’.
NEVER. NEVER. Come onto a queer person’s post and start telling them anything about how to use their word. Queer folks get policed and oppressed enough by cishet folks. We don’t need people from our own community trying to police our language and language we’ve used for decades and continue to use in many countries and in many parts of the US.
There is absolutely no reason to derail posts being “””””””helpful”””””””” by repeatedly, constantly, aggressively spreading rhetoric that shames people for using language we have used for ourselves and our community for decades. Your problem with the word queer should not be my problem, so don’t make it my problem.
“BUT QUEER IS USED IN BAD WAYS BY BAD PEOPLE”
Look I’ve lived through being a teenager and I remember hearing the word “gay” to insult people left and right but I don’t see any of y’all insisting we can no longer use the word “gay” now
Queer is who we are. That’s OUR identity and OUR community.
“mickey i am fed up wit your bullshit devil magic”
These shorts really are the best thing to have happened to Mickey’s character in ages.
you say this without acknowledging this was about taking goofy to see ‘potato land’ which he assumed was an amusement park (which was really a welcome to idaho sign) and his lifelong dream, so they have to BUILD a potato themed amusement park before goofy woke up from a nap
there was an entire episode (season one, episode one) where mickey and donald were denied service at a takeout restaurant because mickey has no shirt and donald has no pants so to get food they have to combine outfits, leaving one of them naked in a bush
or that they had an episode addressing goofy being a dog, and entering him in a dog show pluto was supposed to be in because he injured pluto rendering him unable to enter
and that on the command ‘beg’ he says ‘please take me back, i can change, she meant nothing to me’
I had the song from this one stuck in my head for like, a week
(cough, yes this is my way of saying this youtube channel has most, if not all of them, watch them they’re great, cough)
Seriously you need to watch them. They are hilarious. There’s one called Wish Upon a Coin which is probably my favorite. It parodies Snow White to an extent.
to me, one of the weirdest things about our economy right now is the credential inflation
like my dad got a job as a mechanic when he graduated high school, and he was employed with a high school diploma to a full time job with a union, and had health insurance and benefits.
at this point, I have graduated from high school, have a Bachelor’s degree, have a Master’s Degree, have two years of experience working in my field, and am a due paying member of multiple professional organizations. And that qualifies me to compete in a two-stage interview process for a part time job that offers no health care.
This is what decades of stripping the working class of their rights looks like.
Anyway, the word fujoshi has no business being thrown around in discourse that isn’t about BL anime and manga. It is not a sexuality or a gender identity. It does not mean ‘transtrenders’ or mlm trans men or afab people who use mogai identities. It means a female (or female-aligned) fan of BL anime and manga, which is a specific subgenre of romance that focuses on m/m relationships, typically highlighting the emotions between characters and often using a heavily shoujo-inspired art style.
So a girl that fetishises gay people.
Nope. A female or female-aligned fan of BL. It doesn’t describe how someone treats real life gay people.
Lmao mate, I used to be a fujo. I know the community
I interact with fujoshi every day. I identify as a fujin (gender neutral BL fan). I get my information on BL history from gay men who speak Japanese and I’m learning the language myself to better interact with the Japanese BL community on sites like Pixiv. I’m active in two BL servers. You know what I see there? Fans being positive and kind to one another, and respectful of other people’s identities. There are gay men, gay women, and nonbinary people of all orientations brought together by a common interest in BL, not some kind of shared objectification. I’m not an expert on the subgenre or its fans, but do you really want to claim that you have more experience with fujoshi than me? Do you know what a Japanese word means better than my Japanese-speaking friends?
I probably shouldn’t be wasting my time arguing with someone who has terf in their url, but it’s just such a simple point to make. That’s the definition of the word. It doesn’t belong in discourse that has nothing to do with BL anime and manga.
Yeah yeah
Keep being delusional
“Fujin”
I don’t think gender effects whether something is or isn’t fetishization?
> Fujin
> Gender neutral
OP probably won’t even understand why that’s so funny. You know fujoshi is a derogatory term that means “rotten woman” right?
The reason why people continue to use it in a derogatory manner for heterosexual women who call themselves “gay trans boys” is because most of them are obsessively into BL and yaoi and take their cues from it. Which is absolutely unrealistic fetishization of gay male relationships written by women for women. In a very conservative country that still isn’t very progressive about gay people. And has zero to do with gay culture. The stuff actually aimed at gay men in Japan is quite different.
So to illustrate my point:
Aimed at, and typically authored by, straight women:
Aimed at, and typically authored by, gay men:
Can you spot the difference?
Written by a man:
I’d list female geicomi mangaka, but that information is very difficult to find in English, along with really anything about geicomi. You picked Gengoroh Tagame, who is pretty much the one name that gets thrown around on English language sites. @rottenboysclub if you’re not too busy, can you help out please? I really don’t know much about geicomi.
Geicomi (what the west calls bara) is mostly pornography, plain and simple. It very commonly involves BDSM and other kinks. Tagame’s work in particular has been described as “S&M theatre” by a gay Japanese media critic. His manga almost exclusively feature stories about rape and assault. So not the perfect representation you were looking for.
And yeah, I know what fujoshi means. There’s also fudanshi, which means a male BL fan or ‘rotten boy’. It’s a reclaimed insult originally used by misogynists to condemn women for enjoying sexually explicit media. Also, it’s a pun.
I’d say more, but I have a plane to catch. Suffice to say, there are plenty of queer female, nonbinary, and queer male BL mangaka, although many mangaka choose not to discuss stuff like that publicly.
The funniest thing to me about the whole TERFs trying to co-opt the
word fujoshi and use it against gay trans men with a ‘fetishization’
slant is that it doesn’t make any sense in Japan.
‘Gender-critical’
thinking doesn’t exist in Japanese feminism because this type of
radical feminism just doesn’t mesh with Japanese culture at all, and is
considered anti-gay. ((There are some ‘sex-critical’ Japanese feminists,
but the vast majority aren’t because there’s already severe censorship
over female sexuality so most, like artist Megumi Igarashi, are fighting
for freedom of expression – seriously, just look it up about her arrest
over “obscene materials”.))
Because gender identity and sexuality are
so linked in Japanese culture, and there was never a wide-scale
seperatist movement in Japan like there was in the west (because why
would there be? Japan is a collectivist society, it doesn’t make sense)
セクマイ stick together. The slurs that exist to degrade gay men and women
in Japan? They’re actually slurs referring to people with traits
associated with gender dysphoria. So if you’re a trans man (of any
sexuality) or a cis lesbian? You’re called オナベ, therefore you’re セクマイ.
If you’re a cis gay man or a trans woman (of any sexuality)? Called オカマ,
therefore セクマイ. Nonbinary? well, Xジェンダー is セクマイ of course, same with
intersex/間性. And セクマイ can’t be おコゲ, because of course オナベ and オカマ hang out together, they’re all pots and pans! So this cannot be “fetishization.”
And
if that’s not enough, many fujoshi are lesbians. The original term for fujoshi was “yurizoku”
(lily tribe), which came
from a gay men’s magazine column (“yurizoku no heya” / “Lily Tribe’s
room”) in the 70s/80s and referred to their female readers. (originally
published in the November 1976 edition of “Barazoku”) Because so many of
these female readers were lesbian or bisexual, the shortened term
“yuri” eventually came to mean fxf relationships in manga and novels.
Even today, many Japanese people will associate fujoshi with lesbians
(see: My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, or the many characters, like Chizuru Honshou from Bleach who is an out and proud lesbian and fujoshi).
That’s why the Japanese arguments against fujoshi you see are either misogynistic or lesbophobic, and mostly from straight men.
Also, speaking of Barazoku (Japanese’s oldest and longest running gay men’s magazine), the editor and chief of the magazine and author of the book Men Who Fall in Love with Men, Ryuu Susumu, is actually a big fan of BL, having a paid subscription to the very first BL magazine, June, all the way through its publication (1978-2004), starting from the very first issue, and is very pro-fujoshi.
In addition
to wlw, there are also many gay men that work in and contribute to the
BL industry, and it’s actually closely linked to the male-marketed geicomi (gay
manga) industry, with many artists doing both. You posted work from Gengoroh Tagame, who has done work like Virtus, which he wrote for a mostly female-assumed audience (published in BL-leaning magazines and crossover magazines like Nikutaiha) and he’s not the only gay man that does this. Tsukasa Matsuzaki is another geicomi artist that writes for BL magazines and anthologies. So does Shoutaroh Kojima, Takeshi Matsu, Gai Mizuki, Kansuke Yoshida and D-Raw2.
There are also many women that draw exclusively geicomi, and Tagame has talked about enjoying working with them in various interviews.
Drawn by female artist Inaki Matsumoto
Some men that write primarily BL (and not geicomi) include Yukio Yanagisawa, Hirotaka Kisaragi, Aoi Kujou, Tohru Kousaka, Kazuki Minamoto, Hitoyo Shinozaki and Mito Togo.
And yes, as explained above, Okane ga Nai is written / illustrated by two men.
Really the only difference between BL and geicomi is that geicomi tends to be
more hardcore and pornographic, whereas BL tends to be more softcore and
romantic. BL and geicomi are simply marketing groups for mxm comics. The entire reason why BL is
marketed to women in the first place is because romance of any kind –
mxm, mxf or fxf – was traditionally only considered appealing to women, and
pornography and erotica was traditionally only considered appealing to men. So mxm with more story was marketed as BL, and mxm with more sex and hardcore situations was marketed as geicomi. And the two markets tend to overlap more and more nowadays, that it’s probably time we made a new term to describe all the different kinds of mxm comics.
((Also Midori Suzukino has only ever drawn one BL manga from what I can see, and their gender isn’t listed, so they could actually be male for all we know))
TLDR; The “fetishization” that supposedly comes from ‘straight women’ (very often neither straight nor women) writing these comics is a complete non-issue in Japan, and the entire idea of “We’re trying to protect the Japanese gays from the evil fujoshis” reeks of western savior complex to me ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
Your newest reminder that most of the howling against ‘fujoshi’ / policing of what erotic content women are allowed to consume is spearheaded and spread like a bad smell by radfems. All of the supposedly well-meaning allies of gay men are actively participating in the spread of radfem nonsense and the furthering of radfem goals.
My new meds make my skin throw a fit. It’s not terribly bad, just a few things here and there, but it’s bumming me out because I’ve never really had too many run-ins with acne.
My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.
And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know? I tried to tell her that my skin was sick because of the new medicine, but she was having none of it. She didn’t think they were any different than all of my literal, actual freckles, despite my efforts to delicately tell her otherwise.
Kids are weird.
The more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.
Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”
When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.
And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.
I don’t know. I guess talking to little kids just reminds me that all of this superficial shit we worry about really is 100% made up.
sky's stuff 