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#discourse – @rubynye on Tumblr
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A Star-Forged Ruby

@rubynye / rubynye.tumblr.com

Things found here and there. And probably some stuff I made too. Love, Rubynye.
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"You're just making up someone to be mad at"

This is a common comment on Tumblr, and I think it identifies a common process, but identifies it incorrectly. It's not that people are inventing someone out of lies and bullshit, but that they are arguing with the person in front of them as if that person were someone else from their past.

Let me give an example that I actually did.

[Read More]

In my past I have argued with people who insisted that rape is far less common than false rape accusations, that reports of rape are lies emerging from next morning regret, etc. Basically that rape is a concept made up by women because we are inherently liars. I took exception to this for what are hopefully obvious reasons. (We're not debating this here. This is an example, and I feel free to block.)

In a more recent discussion someone said that men are often falsely accused of rape. I got angry until in the course of the discussion they and others clarified that they were trying to talk about how men of color are disproportionately falsely accused of rape, but they were not trying to say that rape does not happen or that reports of it are just lies. For a bit I thought I was arguing with a person and a statement that I actually wasn't.

If they had told me "you're making up someone to be mad at" it would have come across to me as confirmation that they were accusing me of simply lying about my experiences and that they were doubting that I had ever been in such discussions before. I'm glad they did not use that phrase.

It's not that people should argue with a memory and give it the face of their opponent in the current discussion, but it is unhelpful to accuse people of lying about their experiences, instead of realizing that they may be reacting to the past as much or more than the present. I think it may make it easier to understand and learn from each other to remember this. Just a thought.

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i get that this is just a function of being on the media liker website where all discussions get rerouted to media liking but it is still really funny how often a post on here will be talking about some massive social issue people have been debating for literally hundreds of years and just casually drop the assertion that Fandom Has Ruined Your Morals like i really don't think the spirk fanfic is the reason people fantasise about retributive justice but alright

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reblogged
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rubynye

I would be so much more likely to agree with various essays about sociopolitics which are purportedly in support of men, if those essays didn’t remind me of the lectures I had to hear as a teenager, whose purpose was to excuse the sexual harassment and assaults inflicted by some of my classmates. With a side helping of “being silent about sexual assault is praxis.”

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I would be so much more likely to agree with various essays about sociopolitics which are purportedly in support of men, if those essays didn't remind me of the lectures I had to hear as a teenager, whose purpose was to excuse the sexual harassment and assaults inflicted by some of my classmates. With a side helping of "being silent about sexual assault is praxis."

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reblogged

Some of the fandom discourse on this website sounds like "I can't believe that FaceWearer, the show about the serial killer who tears out his victim's faces and wears them, would portray a relationship between a boss and his secretary, don't they know that power imbalances in relationships are fucked up :/"

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fluentisonus

just misread ‘can’t stand minions’ as ‘can’t stand minoans’ and spent 5 minutes pondering how much of a grudge you could really have against the population of bronze age crete

Why Minoans are problematic:

- jumped over bulls = animal cruelty

- only used Linear A, which has never been deciphered, so basically very inaccessible and history’s tallest paywall

- spent all their time building palaces

- disappeared mysteriously, thus avoiding any accountability for the aforementioned

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lemonsharks

This post was made by a mycenaean apologist

The entire Bronze Age Mediterranean is cancelled

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soulvomit

You’re one of the Sea People, aren’t you, @vigilantsycamore?

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runcibility
This tweet has been retweeted over 1,000 times & liked over 6,000 times, & I want to address publicly what I got completely wrong while tweeting it.
[Referenced tweet: “My new kink is legitimately asking men who want sex with no ‘strings’ courtship or commitment why they don’t just hire sex workers, & watching them explode with anger”]
That tweet was meant to be a snarky recap of a conversation I had with a male homie who was seeking advice about a woman he’s been seeing who requires “too much attention” from him. She wants regular communication and dates. He wants easy connection and sex.
The tweet was not a reaction to my own personal dating frustrations. I told the homie that if he wants to treat sex as a transaction/service, he should pay for it and hire a sex worker.
He was offended because (whether he wanted to admit it or not) he believes that he’s above being involved with sex workers. We talked about my belief that (ethical) sex work is legitimate work and should be legalized.
We also talked about how men like him desire intimacy and connection, but have no clue how to reciprocate it equally. And how the desire to receive intimacy and connection without the intention of returning is manipulative and toxic.
Of course, when I tweeted the OP, I wasn’t thinking deeply about my word choices. I was just chuckling @ that exchange with my friend & thought I’d maybe make someone else chuckle too. What I did unintentionally was devalue sex workers. Here’s how I did that & why it was wrong.
I punched down with that tweet. Period. Sex workers are vulnerable to all kinds of violence and my suggestion that toxic men who manipulate and coerce women should be handed over to sex workers only pushes more violence towards them- whether that was intentional or not.
Because my tweet wasn’t a response to my own dating experiences, I didn’t stop to think that I was implying I deserve a certain kind of care that other people (namely sex workers) don’t, when I tweeted it. But that’s absolutely how the tweet could be read. And I’m wrong asf.
I tapped into the frustrations that many women feel as they try to date and partner. Coercion and manipulation in dating absolutely should be addressed. I didn’t have to dehumanize sex workers to introduce that conversation.
Until that tweet went viral, I thought I was an advocate for sex work and sex workers. Clearly, that’s not the case and I have a lot of work to do.
I appreciate the critiques I’ve seen that have called me out to do better and help me accountable for my own toxicity.

Why the FUCK does she have to give a giant Ted talk disclaimer to a post that was very obvious?

I’m guessing because they want to illustrate how bad things don’t just come out of a vacuum, and how even when we’re striving to push our friends, acquaintances, and loved ones to do better it doesn’t mean we’re somehow armored up against doing wrong.

Sometimes people will provide a lot of context in an apology as a way to gain sympathy, but I don’t see that here. I see someone showing the context of how, through good intentions, they absolutely fucked up.

Which is important in conveying a genuine apology that shows you want to do better, and to help others do better. You can apologize for hurting someone, but how can the person who was hurt know that you won’t do it again, if you yourself don’t show that you understand not just that you harmed someone, but how you got to that place?

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skadisprawl

Also, intentionally or not, she’s giving a very good example of how easy it is for someone to take a nuanced irl situation and turn it into a quippy joke for social media - and how doing so can feed into systemic power imbalances.

It’s really important for people to see the “truth” behind social media, whether that’s in showing the pre-photoshop version of a photo, or in describing the real convo that led to a joke tweet. It gives us context to understand what the background might be to the next tweet we see, and also helps people remember that social media is a heavily curated, often intentionally misleading, funhouse mirror reflecting reality.

Plus it’s just a really good example of how you can think you’re “woke” but realize that you still have work to do. It’s a teachable moment, and kudos to her for using it as a platform to both improve herself and educate others.

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reblogged

Looking at the notes on that fantasy world war crime post and I gotta say, for a site teeming with self-described anarchists, it’s concerning how many people here think “criminal” means “evil” and anyone who isn’t a criminal must be good.

If you see something that says “a criminal is someone who commits a crime, and something can be a crime in one time/place and not in another,” and your response is “so rape/murder/genocide isn’t evil if it’s not against the law???”, you really need to ask yourself why you saw the word ‘criminal’ and immediately translated it as ‘evil’, and conversely, that something law-abiding isn’t evil. Do you honestly base your moral code on whatever legislation your government is currently using?

Do we need to start posting that quote about how slavery and rounding up people in the Holocaust were legal again?

And getting either group to safety made you a criminal.

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lostsometime

i think it’s the Purity Culture War again.  as opposed to considering the words “war criminal” to denote a specific class of criminal acts, these people are using the descriptor “war criminal” to indicate Badness because we, on the whole, agree that war criminals are generally Bad People.  they don’t actually care what the words “war crime” actually mean, the literal semantic meaning of words is pointless, the only thing that matters is how those words make you feel, and they feel like “war criminal” is synonymous with “bad person.”  so if you point out that this person is actually not a war criminal, they hear it as you saying “they’re not actually a bad person,” because the meaning of “war criminal” and the meaning of “bad person” have become conflated.

see also: saying something is “romanticizing” or “glorifying” a bad thing, when it’s really just depicting it.  calling someone a TERF for having generally bad opinions unrelated to Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminism.  calling people pedophiles for, i dunno, literally any of the reasons people have gotten called pedophiles on here, like “shipping adults with an age difference,” “depicting size kink between two adults,” and “talking about how teenagers experience sexual attraction.”  calling things “triggering” when they really just mean “squicky.” and so on and so forth.

explaining to them that they’re using the words wrong doesn’t work, because the whole point is to use words that have a powerful emotional weight, regardless of what they actually mean.  there is no objective difference between true things and false things, there is only that which feels true and that which feels false.

I don’t know how anybody expects to have productive discussions about anything if they can’t agree that words like ‘crime’ have specific meanings. No wonder people are so bad at social activism on this site, they’ve made it impossible to communicate anything more than vague feelings of outrage.

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reblogged
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oak23

I hope im not just a blog you follow but also the only person with 100% correct opinions about the little mermaid

Dish those opinions, let's hear it

My biggest issue is the absolute ice cold take of "Ariel gave up her life/voice for a boy" when the film repeatedly shows Ariel was preyed upon by Ursula. She was exploited and stalked by the literal antagonist of the film into making a really bad decision, especially when Ursula knew Ariel was at her most emotional and the least unable to reach out to her support network.

And the deal Ariel made was meant to be an impossible task that she was tricked into taking AND STILL Ariel was smart enough to almost achieve it if Ursula wasn't playing dirty and directly interfering in with it all.

Ariel was absolutely a victim of manipulation and circumstance, and people who use this as an irredeemable flaw in her character act like they got big brain energy when their brains are smooth as fuck.

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dollsahoy

(not to mention she was 16)

Also?

URSULA is the one who says Ariel’s doing it all for the guy.

According to Ariel herself, what she wants is:

—to be where the people are

—to see dancing and walking

—to ask her questions about the human world and get answers

—to not live in the ocean

—to be part of the human world

—to explore the human world

WHERE DOES ERIC COME INTO ANY OF THIS?!

She wants to see a world she isn’t able to see! She wants to have adventures, not a boyfriend! What the hell!

I would argue that she was totally fine with the boyfriend, but Ursula was the one who forced it to be a priority.

AND ANOTHER THING

Her first impression of him is a dude who is both attractive, capable, and willing to jump back on to a burning ship to save his dog.

Later, dude climbs aboard a SHIPWRECK that's caught in a WHIRLPOOL so that he can RAM IT into a 150-foot-tall MAGIC SEA MONSTER in order to save her.

It's not like girl was settling.

Ariel is a field anthropologist. That she happened to fall in love with a member of the culture she was studying isn't exactly a problem.

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reblogged

On the subject of kink at Pride

Even non-sexual kink requires consent, right?

Is...that's a thing, right? R.A.C.K.? S.S.C.?

And last I checked, minors can't really safely consent to a lot of even sex-adjacent stuff?

Just...I've seen people ridiculing "think of the children" but like...LGBTQ+ minors already have fewer options than adults when it comes to queer-friendly spaces (lots of gay bars...not so many gay cafes, to say nothing of kink-specific clubs) so while I get that a lot of those people fought hard to not have to hide, with more kids coming to terms with their identities and wanting to participate, I think it would be...kinder, let's say, to have the big public events still accessible in that way. Have Pride kink events sure, but separated at least a bit from stuff like the parades?

Discussion welcome. I realize my view on this does not have the widest perspective.

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ryuutchi

If you’ve come to Pride, knowing there’s dudes in kink gear hanging out and having fun in kink gear, you HAVE CONSENTED. You revoke consent by leaving the space. No one is forcing anyone to be in the Pride space that contains those things, as any Pride big enough that adults are blogging down in leather with other adults ALSO will have picnics, movie showings, art shows, lectures, story times and dozens of other events where you know no one will be horrifically sexy in your line of sight,

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naryrising

OP, I think you should think long and hard about what you consider "sex-adjacent", and then take the broadest possible interpretation of it. And then realize that people who are actively working to divide and destroy the queer community are going to seize that broad interpretation if you give them an inch.

So maybe you say, well, wearing a bondage harness is sex-adjacent (it's not - lots of bondage involves no sex or nudity at all - but okay.) Wearing a collar is sex-adjacent (again, it's not - it might denote a particular type of relationship dynamic, but that relationship might have nothing sexual about it. Or it might just be something the person finds aesthetically appealing.) Maybe wearing a fursuit is sex-adjacent (is it only sex-adjacent if it's at Pride, or what if it's at a sci-fi convention?) Maybe dressing in leather is sex-adjacent (again, is it just sex-adjacent if it's at Pride, or what about at a motorcycle convention?)

What about drag? Maybe you, if you are a generally reasonable person (and I am trying to give you the benefit of the doubt on that), might waver there. Maybe drag isn't inherently sexual to you - but some people will absolutely interpret it as sexual or kink-related, and are already actively lumping it in with "things inappropriate for children to see." What about other types of visible gender non-conformity? What about wearing skimpy or form-fitting or revealing clothing? I mean, would people really do that if they weren't trying to look sexually attractive to other people? What about people with piercings in places other than their ears or nose? Like, why would you have a tongue piercing or nipple piercings if it wasn't sexual? What about t-shirts with slogans on them or people holding signs that talk about sex in some way, or use crude terms? A child could read that!

I also ask you to think about whether you're applying certain standards unevenly. Are you equally concerned about children at Mardi Gras, which often has public nudity (flashing tits in exchange for beads) as a component, but is not solely and expressly queer? Are you concerned about children seeing sexual content if their parents decide to take them to a PG-13 rated movie? Is that your decision to make on behalf of those parents?

You need to realize that "no kink at Pride" people are aiming to get a wedge in the door to progress to "nothing that offends the mainstream at Pride" or even just "no Pride at all if those deviants can't behave properly in public." This is not idle speculation, this is active observation of what has happened in the past and what Pride was specifically organized to fight against.

People going to Pride parades consent to seeing the type of things that you see at Pride parades. Parents who take their children to Pride (of which I am one) are making the same type of choice as parents who take their kids to a PG-13 rated movie. They are consenting on their behalf to see things that might include nudity, sexual content, crude language, etc. and they, as parents, are putting themselves in the role of answering any questions their kid might have about what they see. People who don't want to see those things can go to other events - because the idea that the only options are "huge flamboyant kinky pride parade" or "nothing" is false. As others before me said, if your local queer community is big and active enough to have the huge flamboyant parade, I 100% guarantee it also has other options available for queer youth and people who might not participate in huge parades for any number of reasons (noise sensitivity, introversion, mobility issues, etc.)

Finally - why is it that people who have these "concerns" always only show up to yell about it online in June? If they care so extremely strongly about how Pride operates, where are they the rest of the year when people are putting the work into organizing events and fundraising and booking facilities? Planning Pride events takes a huge amount of energy and effort and goes on year-round. If it's so important to them, why aren't they turning out at those planning meetings and getting involved in helping build the kind of community they want? Why aren't they saying "I wish there were more kid-friendly events during Pride, or more resources for queer teens year-round, so how about I help organize that?"

They aren't doing that, they are just yelling about it online, which should be a big fucking clue that what they want isn't really "more queer-friendly spaces for kids", but to sway public opinion (back) into thinking "Pride is just a bunch of perverts." They are trying to exercise control and sanitization over a community that is big, diverse, and non-normative. They are actively working to divide and destroy the queer community. And conceding even a single inch to them is a very dangerous precedent.

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gawayne

broke: jedi are cold disconnected space monks

woke: jedi are hippie sluts with no sense of modesty who just like to fuck with the wider galaxy 

this reads like in-universe shitposting where you’re gonna get

reblog from twilekgirlinhumanworld: “but for real tho they sluts literally just watched a jedi make out with high priestess on a balcony and now we all have the day off lmao”

reblog from vintage-speeder-aesthetic: “um yeah this just gave me severe psychic damage because the only jedi i know about is that ancient little green dude who apparently saved my grandparent’s neighbor’s best-friend one time so my parents have to point him out whenever they’re are on the news so thanks i hate this.”

reblog from lothcatskysong: “the robes are for easy access”

reblog from rodirodian: “jedi are literally armed unregulated enforcers of a corrupt government and if you want fetishize them to make yourself feel like you’re not living in a dystopia honestly that’s valid have a good day”

reblog from notadroid77: “ok so i just called a jedi outreach center and asked if jedi could be sluts or if that was illegal and there was a long pause and they sighed and said ‘is this about a shirtless nautolan? or an auburn haired human?’ and then i panicked and closed the commlink because i didn’t think i was talking to a real person so can confirm there are at least two jedi sluts and also unrelated does anyone have any suggestions for changing your identity so jedi can’t track you down”

reblog from mandomilkmaid: “wait there are jedi outreach centers”

reblog from mrsnailracing: “average jedi sleeps with 1000 beings a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average jedi sleeps with 0 beings per year. Red head human, who lives in pleasure palace & sleeps with over 10,000 beings per day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”

reblog from fylk-moooons: “you know these are real people right? like these are actual sentient beings from an actual religious order that you’re talking about like they’re bad holofilm characters?”

reblog from princesssenatornerfherder: “@fylk-moooons thank you. ^this”

reblog from i-was-a-spaceship-once: “alrighty no one’s going to believe this but i SWEAR i live on coruscant and sometimes this one kiffar jedi stops in my shop (not telling you what shop because holonet creeps sorry) and he’s got a sense of humor and i finally worked up the courage to casually say ‘oh haha i learned abut jedi outreach centers in the weirdest way’ and he was like ‘oh really how?’ and i don’t know! i decided to risk it all!

and i showed him the thread and he burst out laughing, like there was a jedi laugh crying in my shop, people were staring, i was relieved at first but started getting nervous. eventually he stopped and LEGIT, swear to all the karking gods, this is what he told me: 

‘op is woke and also right, but some are really committed to the modest vibe because it’s unfortunately necessary for them to be treated seriously in the workplace. also if my friends didn’t want people to talk about them like bad holofilm characters then they shouldn’t act like bad holofilm characters so it’s fine. please tell um, ‘notadroid’ and ‘mrsnailracing’ that they just made my whole YEAR. also you can tell everyone that official jedi doctrine teaches that all sluts should be treated with respect and dignity, jedi or not.’ 

and then he left and i’m still shaken and i don’t know if i want to be him or kriff him but i feel more optimistic about my chances of the second then i ever have in my life so thank you everyone great thread.”

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It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol

Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s. 

So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem. 

BUT! Let’s look closer! 

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.

So it’s not actually a song about rape - in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.

remember loves: context is everything. and personal opinion matters. If you still find this song to be a problem, that’s fine. But please don’t make it into something it’s not because it’s been stripped of cultural context.

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vorked

This is actually really interesting. I’ve never known a lot of the background to this song.

Making its annual rounds

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