The fact that none of them can take their attraction to women seriously and just assume they have to be with with men (who are horrible partners) but they get all their emotional support from the women in their lives omg it reminds me of this thing on sex and the city
“What’s on display most often in Sex and the City is a kind of same-sex eroticism whose job is to perform the sensitive caring labor necessary for keeping the dream of the heterosexual good life intact. The phone calls, the late nights, the affectionate nicknames—they pour themselves into each other’s lives. It’s a curious thing that heterosexuality, doesn’t actually work without 24/7 technical support. It is a curiouser thing that, thanks in part to Sex and the City itself, teams of women across America are convinced to provide this technical support for free. Maybe there’s some kind of feedback loop at work here: heterosexuality forbids you from being a dyke, then makes you gay for your girlfriends. I’m hardly convinced that any of our protagonists actually like men; what they do seem to like is liking men, because empirically speaking, liking men translates, almost all of the time, into being with women: touching their hair, rubbing their shoulders, sharing their feelings.”
I can’t believe I’m being clocked by a post about Vanderpump Rules…
@theocseason4 has an interesting theory. Here’s an alternative! Lesbian porn, for the most part, isn’t as extreme (read:visibly aggressive on women) as het porn. Lesbian porn focuses on women being sexually pleased; women cumming. It’s quite possible that’s where the actual appeal is - seeing someone who looks like you expressing their sexuality and being satisfied instead of abused vs. the women themselves. Like, two women saying they can’t get off to watching a man and a woman fucking is not them saying the act itself doesn’t turn them on. And considering how many straight women often see us queer women as an escape from male partners who “don’t have a woman’s touch”, it’s very likely that same faulty logic is projected on their porn choices. And that doesn’t even factor in how society constantly forces women, regardless of sexuality, to see women as sexual objects!
As for SATC excerpt, let’s be honest - none of the leads were queer. None. Granted Sam was open to non-het sexuality, it was solely because her character was the “sexual” one. A “I’ll do anything once; twice if I like it!” attitude doesn’t make someone her queer lol. I digress. Saying the SATC friendships were “same-sex eroticism“ because the characters were emotionally supportive is not only a ridiculous self-drag but homophobic. Why? Because it’s basically the “wlw couples are just girl bffs who have sex” rhetoric reworded. NO BUENO! Also, did the author of that nonsense forget SATC was created and written by a gay man??? That’s very important to note because it shows in the show! And by that I mean SATC’s depictions of het relationships were based on the sensationalized experiences of a middle-class white woman then exaggerated further via gender stereotypes. Ofc it was the worse™ lol! Not to mention, the show prioritized the ladies’ friendship because that was the point of the show!!! It wasn’t some accident that outs how “gay” straight women are for their friends - the rep was on purpose because some straight women are genuinely good friends to their friends lol!!!
So yeah, I’m always here for pointing out how heteronormativity messes with our understanding of human sexuality and our personal sexual expression. On the other hand, sometimes a straight is just a straight and that’s okay lol.
Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).
Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.
You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.
I was already disgusted just reading about this but looking at the side-by-side comparison of the real speech and the rewrite really brought it home.
See the two versions of her first line below:
Actually if you read the whole story behind it, Sojourner allowed for the translation because she wanted Black women of the south who didn’t speak in *respectability* based English dialect to understand her and relate to her and feel the feminist cause applied to them. Sojourner Truth actively made decisions to be depicted in certain lights for political purposes, such as the way she chose to pose in pictures and what pictures she allowed in the press. Everything this Black feminist did served a purpose, and y’all have to stop giving White people so much power and stop reiterating respectability politics in the process.Â
You could’ve left that last part off of you were really trying for be helpful instead of coming across as condescending! No one is giving white people power by feeling lied to about the speech. With regards to your “respectability politics” comment, my concerns stemmed from 1) historical linguistic accuracy considering I’m looking to tell the RIGHT truth when speaking on this person 2) a WHITE woman imposing her stereotypes of Blackness and Black womanhood and quite literally rewriting her story and words. I wouldn’t have cared if that’s actually the way ST spoke, if the transcription was accurate. I’m smart enough not to subscribe to the whole “Black people must speak well to be respected”. That was never what this post was about.
With that being said, I’ve not yet come across the “whole story” you mention that includes the fact that ST was involved in the rewrite. I’ll be sure to do some digging and correct if needed. Thanks for your comment and you’re welcome to continue offering suggestions.
It doesn’t make sense that Truth supported that other translation of her speech so that Black women from the South would understand her. The vast majority of them wouldn’t have even been literate so how would changing how her speech was printed help them?
Clearly, this was a political maneuver to comfort white women abolitionists. This translation was also I’m sure heavily influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the most widely read book during this time after the Bible).
Stowe created caricatures of enslaved African Americans that were truth in the minds of Northern whites so this other white lady probably thought the speech would be better received by whites if it parroted the writing style of Stowe.
Please feel free to add on if you know any more! The booktube community seriously lacks when it comes to wlw literature.
Onyx Pages is a cool wlw booktuber with an awesome channel that centers Afrofuturism, Black writers, and queer rep in books! She not only reviews books but also cover sci-fi and book cons plus interviews authors. Quality content!
Side note:Perpetualpages is NB. They don’t fall under “wlw youtubers” though I agree their channel is awesome!
theres been so many bot waves on this godforsaken site. erica and her video games, how does my theme look, bitcoin wallet bastard, I’m almost nostalgic for the days I could open my inbox and see a fan mail in shitty font begging me to check out totally-not-malware.gov
bots these days have no honor. no panache. no flair. not even a semblance of effort. “come fuck my ass babie” fuck your own damn ass you no talent having piece of shit. go code a trojan for your grandmas decade-old court stenographer chain email.
My favorite I’ve ever gotten actually predates Tumblr and was sent to me by email like twenty years ago. I wish I’d remembered to save it. It was from a purported US Marine who claimed to have been part of a squad clearing out one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces after the Gulf War. In one room they had found three crates—the email was very specific about the crates—one contained hundreds of millions of dollars in US currency, the second had a “tactical nuclear warhead” and the third was packed full of cocaine. They buried the crates in the desert and now needed my help to get them out of Iraq.
so did you ever get some of that cocaine/nuclear warheads?
