It’s National Adopt a Cat Month… remember, Chris Colfer did it. You should do it, too!
Speaking as the “After Elton guy” who is, in fact, a woman, you have to understand something. There is a difference between individual cruelty and systemic discrimination and oppression.
Yes, someone can be cruel to you just because they’re an asshole. But it remains an individual act, without the power of an entire culture behind it. (Although I’d argue when men terrorize women, it does, in fact, have the power of an entire culture behind it. I can’t tell from your description the gender of the person who bullied you, though.)
When I’m assaulted, bullied, denied equality or a job, because I’m a lesbian, it’s a particular kind of hatred, one powered by decades of entrenched heterosexual privilege and power, with the force of law, religion, and tradition behind it. When someone calls me a dyke while slamming my head into a windshield (which did happen to me), it doesn’t hurt more physically than if they hadn’t called me a dyke, but it does carry a warning, a message of terror, that the physical act alone doesn’t carry.
In other words, the whole point of calling me a dyke is to send a message to me and other lesbians that we should stay home or cease to exist. It’s a form of terrorism. Systemic terrorism. Heterosexual privilege reinforcement.
I don’t think anyone should have bullied you, and I would have defended you if I’d known. But being bulled for sexual or gender non-conformity is not the same as being bullied because someone is mean or wants your lunch money, even though both are wrong. They mean different things.
Finn is a straight white man. He has lived his entire life with straight white male privilege. He doesn’t get to decide that a lesbian of color is not living her life in a way he feels is sufficiently “out.” That’s not his call to make.
Like Finn, as a straight women, you also don’t get to say what is and isn’t offensive to a lesbian. We are the ones who decide that. That doesn’t mean I “don’t like straight people.” I don’t dislike people for some random biochemical status over which none of us has any control. I’m simply pointing out that as long as people slam my head into windshields while calling me a dyke, my experience of the world will be different from that of a straight woman, even when we share many other experiences — including being women in a man’s world.
I’d also point out that you said you hate me. I’m not a fictional character. I’m a real person. Perhaps it never occurred to you that I’d see it, but I did. And while I’m perfectly fine with people disagreeing with me — if I wasn’t, I’d need to cancel my Internet — I find being hated extremely unpleasant. Especially since you acknowledged you knew you were being offensive.
I like a lot of people was bullied in high school. I was bullied by one person and person only. This person went after me by telling my friends through facebook msn (back in the day) lies about me they also made sure they made my high school life a living hell. Needless to say I blocked them off…
I’d like this more if the dog knew how to spell “affect,” but I suppose one should be impressed that the dog can write at all.
i’M CRYING BECAUSE BRADSAHW
(via lifeinvirtualreality)
Box? What box?
Thanks, Klaine fandom, for raising all this money for Project Angel Food, and getting the cut “Box Scene” out there… I wrote about it today for AfterElton:
Blaine liked it, but it seems Fox just wouldn’t let him put a ring on it.
That’s what Glee’s Klaine fans have assumed ever since a scene where Blaine gives Kurt a box containing a ring he’d made out of gum wrappers was cut from the Season 3 Christmas episode — a chop job so surprising my recap of the episode was entitled “No Box.”
Of course, scenes get cut all the time. The official word at the time was that the scene was cut for length, and we all know that losing one of the three scenes where Finn and Rachel go around and around about what he’s going to give her for the holiday would have been a tragedy of Titanic proportions.
But all things considered, the absence of the scene did seem a little suspicious. And it definitely left viewers curious. What did they say to each other in the scene? What did it mean to them as a couple?
Fortunately, the intrepid Klaine fandom managed to get the answers to those questions while raising thousands of dollars for an AIDS charity at the same time.
Now that Glee is on hiatus, suddenly my dash is 80 percent Harry Potter. Is that the summer break default on Tumblr?
Is there even one person on Tumblr who would blame me if I refused to recap this episode and pretended it didn’t happen?
Shannon: You know, you and me, we’re badasses. Nobody thinks anything hurts us, but it does.
(via shighola)
