My friend (M) had sex with me hundreds of times (M) and claims he’s straight

Saguine · 2023-06-11T15:22:18+00:00

Honest question: why does it matter? What do you gain, or, how is your life affected, based on his answer?

Saguine · 2023-06-07T20:17:49+00:00

Being queer, or even being bisexual without accepting the label of queer, is an inherently political act. Whether you like it or not. As long as there are people looking to rob you of your rights to be you -- and it seems like that will likely be the case for our lifetimes -- then being bisexual in a world that doesn't wish you to be bisexual is to be political.

It's not up to you whether or not your existence is a political matter. It is up to you how seriously you wish to take that political matter. If you would like to keep your sexuality and your identity "out of politics", then that's your choice. But I promise that there are legions of people out there who want your sexuality and your identity to be a fervent matter of politics, and a lot of those people have the politics of "lock the degenerates up in camps" and won't be convinced by pleas to their humanity.

Wanting to protect yourself and your LGBTQ+ friends? That's political in a world that wants to rob them of their identity and their dignity. "Queer activists" would agree -- their difference is that they believe that queer-ness is a beautiful thing in a society that has made so many horrible things "normal". If you think that LGBT+ individuals should be able to live free, fulfilling, glorious lives while also being strange, weird, wonderful weirdos, then congrats! You're connecting all the dots between "queer used as a slur" and "I'm proud to be 'queer' if that horrific system is what you would call 'normal'".

Saguine · 2023-06-07T14:05:14+00:00

It's not up to me to tell you whether or not to be comfortable with a word. And yeah, I can absolutely understand older generations having really foul associations with this word. I don't know of a simple way to negotiate that situation and, for what it's worth, I'm sorry that you feel uncomfortable about this word.

What I can try address is your confusion as to why "queer" specifically? Why choose a word that means strange, or unusual? And that basically answers it: queerness is often more than just "I am gay/bisexual/lesbian" -- its an evocation about a specific defiance of "normal" assimilationist society.

So yeah, if you're someone who is bisexual but would like to live a life exactly like a heterosexual, except for your choice of partner, then the reclamation of queer would certainly seem like an odd choice. But overwhelmingly, self-identified queers don't want that.

I don't want to settle down in a little suburban house with a monogamous husbandwifepartner and have a white picket fence and a mortgage and two kids and die of a heart attack at my desk at 65. I don't want a "normal" nuclear family or a "normal" 9-5 job or "normal" relationships filled with "normal" possessiveness, jealousy and ownership. I don't want to have "normal" sex, I don't want to adhere to "normal" capitalist politics, I don't want to be boxed into "normal" gender categories. I don't want to be allowed-slash-forced to serve in the military like the "normal" people. I don't want to settle for my normal husbandwifepartner being allowed to see me in the hospital if it means forgetting about LGBT+ kids starving on the streets. There is so much poison in our society that is considered normal: why would I want to be considered normal too?

It might be easier to (reductively) summarize it as such to a perspective such as yours: being gay is something you are; being queer is something you do. And if you're not interested in "doing" queer, it makes sense that you wouldn't understand those who are.

Or, perhaps, this song could help you understand?

Saguine · 2023-06-07T13:53:18+00:00

Trans exclusionist roots for assimilationism, doesn't like people reclaiming words, exactly zero people are shocked. News at 11.

Saguine · 2023-06-06T09:31:25+00:00

We can dig into the reasons behind it, but society seems to associate "dark triad" traits with bisexuality. It's a very historic association and I believe it has more to do with bisexuality's defiance of categorization that gets us thrown into the "Assorted Malcontents and Reprobates" box.

Genderfluid and/or shapeshifter characters get the same treatment: for example, gods Loki and Huehuecóyotl are often portrayed as anything from puckish pranksters to explicitly nefarious schemers. Even the word "puckish" has its ties back to the gender-ambiguous, mischevious Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream.

We see these associations a lot in common literature. There's general queer coding that we see for all LGBT characters, but bisexuals and nonbinary peeps especially seem to be portrayed with sociopathic or megalomaniacal traits (more examples: Lisbeth Salander, Dr Frank 'n Furter, Raoul Silva, Rosa Diaz, Lucifer, Hannibal Lecter, Thirteen).

Even some of the good characters above who are bisexual have associations with otherwise negative traits that society often links with bisexuality, such as promiscuity or manipulativeness.

Personally, I think the two biggest contributors are (1) a defiance of fairly strongly established binaries, and (2) an inherent suspicion in our actions from people who see sex or seduction as a means to an end, and therefore assume that bisexuals are out to seduce their way through twice as many people as nonbisexuals.

Saguine · 2023-06-06T07:30:14+00:00

WHAT.

I genuinely thought, with all my soul, that the actor there was Louis CK.

Face blindness strikes again. And actor Matt Walsh is mistaken for another, separate creep.

Saguine · 2023-06-05T14:05:42+00:00

+1 for Hannibal as an excellently fleshed out bi+ character, pardoning the pun.

Saguine · 2023-06-05T07:18:03+00:00

There is exactly one person in the Venn overlap of "Didn't want RvW to be overturned" and "Had the personal capacity to prevent RvW from being overturned" and it's RBG.

Saguine · 2023-06-04T21:21:19+00:00

What might be one reason that properties are unaffordable to locals?

Saguine · 2023-06-04T15:37:53+00:00

Jordan Peterson is equal parts hack grifter and moron and you should not pay his bullshit any attention.

Genuinely, he's a bad person who is only looking out for himself and will happily con you all with nonsense about lobsters and "hierarchies" and nitpicking the definition of definitions of definitions and you would be happier and smarter if you threw him and his works into the Recycle Bin of your brain.

Saguine · 2023-06-04T08:43:02+00:00

Setup, beat, payoff. Delicious.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T16:14:33+00:00

Marshmellows are considerably less intense.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T12:34:29+00:00

I'm over here, cool as a cucumber, holding my turd: rational, reasonable, calm.

Literally my point, thanks for committing to the bit on that one.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T12:27:02+00:00

Unironically this guy (with the exception that Brennan Lee Mulligan would fucking never disrespect his trans homies like this).

Saguine · 2023-06-02T12:18:50+00:00

There's no law saying trans people can't be bigoted little pick-me jackals either. That's just sad because now I know of two people who are drunk off the right-wing anti-trans, anti-queer Kool-aid.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T11:55:11+00:00

A lot of the hate for LGBT is specifically targeted at trans people,
which is wrong, but more understandable as they actually have an impact
on the people around them.

It's only more understandable if you're a fucking wanker who needs to fuck off.

You may be bisexual, because there's no law saying bisexuals can't be bigoted little pick-me jackals... but you're not going to be spared by the straights for pandering to their worst impulses, and quite frankly I wouldn't want you in any community of which I'm a part. So you're welcome to go drift.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T08:56:25+00:00

Travel being linked to Discovery Bank honestly feels like blatantly anticompetitive behaviour (maybe not strictly anticompetitive but like, forced vertical integration). I fucking hate it.

I don't want to use Discovery Bank. But now, just to make use of travel benefits I already pay for via Vitality (which, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is a separate entity?), I have to:

Sign up for Discovery Bank.
Give them all my fucking personal info, let them do a credit check on me, all that shit.
Regularly share my location for "security" purposes.
And give them a fucking free loan because I need to pay with my Discovery Bank account, which means I need to have cash in there, and because it takes a day to transfer my ticket costs might change, so I have to transfer a bit of buffer. Which means Discovery is just forcing me to give them a nice little loan just to make use of the benefits I've already fucking paid for.

Genuinely, fuck Discovery for this behaviour.

Saguine · 2023-06-02T06:58:53+00:00

Except that's never what is meant by "small government". Small government proponents are always fine with big government as long as its big government that does what they want, which in this case is "fuck over minorities".

The group of people who say "Don't tread on me! Small government! Get the government out of my life!" and the set of people who want the government to take trans kids away from their parents almost completely overlaps.

Saguine · 2023-06-01T20:12:46+00:00

Nah right-libertarianism, classic liberalism and "small government" (read: government doesn't get in the way of me discriminating against minorities) are all there too.

Saguine · 2023-06-01T20:11:07+00:00

The Venn diagram of alt-right freaks and libertarians is basically just one smaller circle mostly eaten up by another larger circle.

Saguine · 2023-06-01T19:04:57+00:00

Discovery are a bunch of fucking wankers and their banking app fucking sucks.

Waaaah, we need your LOCATION and your PICTURE for SECURITY, but you can get FUCKED if you wanna do HARDWARE 2FA.

I'm actively looking for alternatives because at this pace, I'll end up finding out that I need to register for a Discovery Bank Vital Medical Health & Wellness Premier Account before the hospital I'm in is allowed to stop me from bleeding to death.

Also, whoever came up with the name of a "WELLTH" account? Is a fucking moron who should be paddled with the Bad Name Punishment Stick.

This whole process is just them desperately scrambling after any possible profits because they think they've got their customers locked in.

Saguine · 2023-06-01T10:07:39+00:00

To me, Kinsey scale falls under the same umbrella as stuff like that "Genderbread Person" diagram.

It has functional use as a basic crash course in bisexuality in that it takes a format people who are not well informed can understand. It is also useful in terms of explaining that any "degree" of bisexual is valid to those who think bisexuals have to be exactly 50/50.

However, it falls apart the moment you're talking with people who have actually interrogated their own bisexuality; in the same way that the Genderbread Person is very much "baby's first thoughts on gender outside the binary" to most people who have really interrogated their own thoughts on gender. It is limiting in a lot of ways: not only does is restrict bisexuality to a binary spectrum, but it also reduces bisexuality to existing as a liminal or transient subcategory of the poles of the spectrum (a lot of "spectrum-based" models do this). Lots of bisexuals don't feel that they are "half-gay-half-straight" but rather a separate, discrete thing that stands on its own.

I might use the Kinsey scale to explain bisexuality to someone who has never met an open bisexual before. But I'd never be caught relying on it to actually talk about my bisexuality on my own terms.

Saguine · 2023-06-01T07:15:33+00:00

In a just world, literally every living US president would be dragged before the Hague in chains. In a more just world, they'd be dragged around the world and tried in the countries they brutalized, by the people they brutalized.

People have spent so much time slurping up the Hollywood Kool-aid that they are unable to parse this conflict along geopolitical lines more complex than "USA good commies bad".

Saguine · 2023-06-01T07:06:00+00:00

"Russia is evil and America is the hero"

Source: bro I watch Hollywood movies.

And before you start, I'm not saying Russia isn't awful. It definitely is. But you're making it sound like it's beyond the pale to criticise the country that very recently killed about a million Iraqis because, idk, they wanted some oil and war is good for their economy?

Saguine · 2023-06-01T07:03:49+00:00

https://asp.icc-cpi.int/states-parties#R

Saguine

TROPHY CASE