purr [undecided]
also like i dont think those defending ella are saying THIS exactly: but this whole “small white rich 21 year old is a CHILD” thing is kinda grating given a 9 year old girl of color got cuffed in rochester and pepper sprayed by cops like that “theyre a kid” excuse only goes one way
absolutely not
-a queer black woman
people hate astrology because it isnt fucking real and its annoying when people try to pretend like it is, and even worse when they bring it up unprompted to everyone else. why would i, a black queer woman who has been beholden my entire life to my identities, seek to box myself into yet another determinative identity aka my StAR sIgN? if anything in my personal experience astrology seems to be yet another thing white queers and white women use to prove that they have any type of spice, something that usually fits right in with their life long quest to abstract themselves from the fact that they are just as white and just as rich
karen u are not a libra you are a gentrifier and your black neighbors would really wish youd stfu
yall wanna examine every single little star and what it means like its a 7th grade sleepover at the friend’s house who dont got an xbox, but dont even wanna examine racism and what your actually doing to cause it. if you want a new agey movement examining our personal relationships with each other, and to the greater world, fine. but do fucking racism first.
i saw white tenderqueers after george floyd’s murder talk about how it makes sense that he’d spark a whole new movement because he’s a libra and libra’s have the scales of justice in their sign. like…yall need to stop (if you dont believe simply type into twitter “george floyd libra” and youll see)
stop using my identities to excuse ur brain worms.
as far as im concerned theres nothing lana del rey isnt doing that these astrology white tumblr girls arent
maybe i am hyper sensitive and good at listening to others because im a pisces or maybe i just grew up black and extremely poor and learned that i have to be hyper intune with what people are saying in order to give myself a head start on potentially needing to protect myself. maybe the stars and the universe, and the implied sensicle moral arc of the world that somehow allows slavery and rape to happen (but definitely is right about brad liking you), will have something helpful to say about this.
wasnt it famous feminist philosopher marlyn frye who said that the biggest mistake men make (and what seperates them from women) if that they believe the universe is knowable? i guess now we know astrology and girlboss feminism go hand in hand
so i do think that reddit stem white dudes malign astrology in a way that evokes the normatively dismissive way they look at anything queer and feminine but when you consider that the thing they are dismissing is accurately being dismissed as stupid, its hard to really defend astrology IMO by virtue of the fact that those who take part in it are dismissed on a greater societal level.
yes women and queers historically have a specific way of seeing the “universe” that should be respected on its own, that feeds into astrology , but astrology itself is still so fundamentally dumb that it kinda supersedes that.
also astrology does not have its roots in queerness /feminity or even in the west…so its not even created in response out of queer or feminine struggle, it seems to be just something people picked up one day. (something can still be a showcasing of a marginalized person’s struggle if its adopted along the way but this is not whats happening here)
this kind of reminds me of how in the 20th century black americans created this collective black identity /view of the ancestors we descend from: egyptian kings and queens, who were all regal and hyper intelligent aka the whole “we was kings meme”. This identity was created due to the fact that black americans as a whole did not know where they came from/ didnt even have a last name reflecting their own lineage/ had been primarily characterized by their white owners rather than by themselves. In response, black americans created this BS egyptian identity of we was kings. But that doesnt mean that the identity they created wasnt BS. While i would think that white people who criticize that fake egyptian like identity are being a little too privileged to have a real take on the matter, this is not whats happening with the reddit stem bros when they take on astrology —something that is dumb enough on its own and not real and not tied to a similar cultural context
i think new agey movements that dont address material concerns/ pledge to do something about them can be escapsim for privileged people.
i also do think that queer and feminine ways of thinking are great, but sometimes have their own failings that should be pointed out, because while reddit bros are homophobic and sexist, there are those on the other side (SJWs) that run with certain theories/ways of being in an unquestioning way and on the virtue that it is a feminine or queer way of thinking that is really damaging. I.E. the tenderqueer phenomenon which is best described here: https://dollyrose.substack.com/p/the-cursed-privilege-of-the-tenderqueer?fbclid=IwAR1NIAM1n6BlGuQZ7BIlKCUKQ9b1QH8szCLkRwyRQDl53ih5cQnQ7xFiaYk
i think astrology really annoys me because even though it is enjoyed by a certain group of people, i also think it speaks to certain weird, privileged, filtered through and just plain toxic (lol buzz word) dynamic girls and gays inact on each other, sometimes under the banner of being queer or being a woman (kind of like how white gay men think being queer means being mean to everyone)
like the tenderqueer persona, astrology determines ways of being/ interpersonal reaction/ ways of processing information based on meaningless signifiers (astrology signs). queer and feminine community should be and has to be more genuine IMO///also queerness as a concept is about interacting within the material world and actively fighting against it (aka Queer as in fuck you) which does not seem to jive with astrology
For my viewing experience, I didn’t feel as though there was friction between the movie being a genre film and a racial critique film because i think what the director is trying to get at is that “Get Out” is a horror genre movie, like any other horror genre movie. the difference is that the horrible scary thing just happens to be white people/ racism rather than robots, aliens or godzilla, an interesting subversion of how white horror has historically had monsters who are poc/ marginalized people --particularly disabled people or monsters coded as being poc/marginalized
as a black woman who grew up on the internet its very clear that whenever people say im not attracted to x race, its almost always black people, particularly black women.
as such the whole preference conversation (especially one that hinges on disingenously declaring “preference” as disliking blondes and disingeniously compares that dislike to disliking black people --without mentioning that there’s a preference against black people ofc!) is a dogwhistle for me for unexamined white supremacy.
its always been very dehumanizing to experience but then i remember that im hotter than all of you
solidarity with my asian men, who are often also on the end of the “im not attracted to x race schitk”.
coming from a place of constant dehumanization makes it hard for me to understand the fetishization complaint from other races / race and gender combos deemed as attractive but im still trying to learn about it, and get past my knee jerk “you are lucky to be considered as hot for being a latina even if it is dehumanizing when every single kid’s adolescence in america seems to based on deeming black women as ugly ghetto monkeys” response.
any way if anyone still carries that whole “black women are ugly” nazi ass rhetoric, they definitely reveal themselves to be racist or 14 years old and racist
as always based on some of these comments, chapo.chat is able to pull obscure marxist theory out of its ass and talk about it ad nauseum but cant handle basic desirability politics
btw although im not attracted to x people almost always implicates black women, it also always implicates fat black women, and fat people in general. Attraction isnt as inate and as fixed and as apolitical as you think. One easy and proven way to decolonize your desires is to read fat liberation theory, disability justice work and pro black literature (with a specific emphasis on womanism and queer black literature)
i believe while its not everything, a huge reason why our culture went from paris hilton to meghan thee stallion as a beauty ideal is due to a constant push over the last 15 years to at least have SOME type of diverse bodies in media // our society’s relationship to fatness is changing before our eyes and part of that is due to changing what we see every day (this isnt a dumb ass representation matters comment, or a comment meant to ignore the work many fat, disability, pro black etc activists have done to change this/ also this isnt to ignore the work capitalists such as the kardashians have put into to commodify their culturally appropriative bodies)
(my fave way to observe a very clear changing beauty standard is to watch buffy season 1 and then buffy season 2. literally sarah michelle geller’s body changes to get even tinier in season 2, reflecting what we can assume to be alot of interpersonal pressure and/or aging, but also the fact that society was coming into the early 2000s which praised skinniness rather than the relatively curvy 90s aesthetic)
like half the hot people wouldnt even be considered hot because theyre bigger than the standard of the early 2000s. Obviously a new beauty standard isnt good, and we should be pushing for body neutrality, but fat people are being seen more at least and as a result im willing to bet everyone is a little more into fucking fat people now (not that fat people arent hot in the first place / and not that fat people being seen as attractive is the main goal for fat liberation, especially when discrimination towards fat people usually shakes out in life threatening ways such as barred access to medical care -----you know, more important things)
any way i think the clear political, racial, class, gender expression etc implications of attractiveness is why ive always been personally fascinated by incels despite them being horrible and women hating. (I guess im more interested in involuntary celibacy from the perspective of the disabled woman feminist who first coined it). its like even the crazy kids calling people slurs on chat roulette understand that diserability politics exists (even though they have no political understanding of it) so its very weird to me when self proclaimed leftists act as if beauty isnt political
speaking of stranger things, i never really saw much of the show beyond a few episodes but i absolutely absolutely hate the trope of the main boy meeting a ~girl from out of this world~~ whose feminity becomes apparent when she Wears a dress and then nerd boy realizes he’s liked her the whole time. not entirely sure stranger things played this so on the nose but i saw the scene where eleven wears a dress and the boys are like OMGWOW and i had to dip. suburban boyhood centric shit is so played out
after the 2000s im so tired of watching the seemingly charming idyllic nostalgic setting of teenage boys obsessing over girls with each other and dealing with purberty in suburbia. as a woman from the city ive always been like what do yall want me to do with this. why am i able to know so intimately what the white male suburban experience was like from 1970-the present even though ive never had it