Power Dynamics - Tumblr Posts

I look into her eyes, and I see my entire life in them. My world, my future, my past— I've given all of myself to her. And when she turns her head to me -lighting up like mine do every time- all I can do is smile at her like an idiot.

She was meant to be another conquest, just another tally on my bed post. So when did she manage to sneak her way into my heart? Was it when I was rejected for the first time? …No. It was when she started being vulnerable to me. It was when she started to notice the little things— keeping water bottles in her bag for me, wrapping my bloodied knuckles with the first aid kit she started to bring with her, feeding me candies whenever I would start to pick up a cigarette. She was almost like my own little wife at school, nagging me to take care of myself… It felt… addictive. No one ever looked at me like her, so pure and attentive. So why don't I just make it official? Anyone would be happy to have a husband like me, right?

Don't cry, little girl— I don't think I can hold back if I see your pretty tears. I promise that I'm a gentleman, but even a man has his limits. I've already stolen your first kiss, so now I'll steal your first time. What? You were saving it for a special someone? Forget about that impoverished scum, Se Eun will give you everything you could possibly want~ Just not your freedom.

Ethan… The boy where I learned love from, and that I continue to love. The angel of my life, even if he will never know that. Lucifer and Lilith, Psyche and Eros; they all ended in tragedy because humanity was selfish for wanting what is not theirs. And so I'll just watch him— from the side as he soars beyond the clouds. One day, I won’t be able to see him anymore; -too high up for the average person to see- but that day is not today. Please continue to smile at me, Ethan… and I'll do the same for you.

The Devil is in my life now, plaguing my every waking moment and dreams. He wants me, and he won't take no for an answer. Everyday, I can feel more and more chains being wrapped around my limbs and throat— my sins too heavy to bear. He claims that he already owns my soul, but how could he when I've already given all of it away? I've given my entire self to my angel, my savior— my love, my salvation. His whispers spread chills across my skin, his touch temporarily branding me as his. He promises that it'll be permanent one day. The Devil claims that I'm his, but I'm already someone else's— someone who doesn't even know that I'm his, and will always be his.

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KYAAAAAA- SNEAK PEEK- SNEAK PEEK- IM GETTING IT BETA READ AND IT SEEMS LIKE GREAT FEEDBACK SO FAR-

Contains:

doomed lovers (my fav- yum-), love triangle (well, more like someone forcefully ruining what should be just straight up fluff), power dynamics, angst, smut (like lots of it- I like kinks okay-), unhealthy representation of love, healthy representation of love, hand holding (squealing like a school girl cuz how scandalous-), puppy love (they're honestly so cute-), there's more but I gotta write it-

Oh yeah- there's like dub-con, non-con, abuse, yadda yadda yadda- just think of any major warnings and it'll probably be there-

Title: uhhhhhhh- I don't know yet- (probably something something heaven. Something something fallen. Idk-)

OMG- I WAS JUST SO INSPIRED BY MY C.AI CHAT-

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So on a different kind of loving dark art/forbidden terrible things, I find stereotype humor hilarious. I love jokes about Americans eating hamburgers, Canadians and maple syrup, the French and OUI OUI EIFFEL TOWER BAUGETTE, etc. etc. I DO recognize how INCREDIBLY problematic these gags can be, especially if someone takes them as truths instead of off-color jokes, but I can't help but still laugh when I see a comic like Scandanavia And The World or anime like Axis Powers Hetalia. I don't (1/2)

feel like it makes me a racist bigot if it’s all in good fun, or, ESPECIALLY, if I make fun of my own culture and people when it comes to the jokes. What do you think? (2/2)

i’m assuming you’re asking this in good faith anon, so i’m going to give as good faith an answer as i can. but i feel like i should preface this by saying that i’m not really here to answer ‘is x individual action of mine bad?’ kind of questions. i don’t find answering those kind of questions really useful because its just a didactic set of rules i’m giving to you which someone might disagree with and then you’re going to be up shit creek without a paddle because who do you trust? so i’m afraid this answer is going to be more on the lines of ‘here are some principles and questions to think through when answering the question ‘is x action bad’’ than a definite answer. i’m sorry in advance if that’s not what you want. 

to answer your question, albeit indirectly:

1) any analysis of this problem is going to go nowhere unless you take into account that there are inequal social relations (power structures) which form the context for any given act of speech targeted at any group of people. sometimes you punch up as a result, sometimes you punch down. there’s a material power difference, for example, in someone like me (non-white, from a third world NAM country which has indirectly suffered at the hands of american meddling) or an immigrant, making jokes about america and someone from america or europe making jokes about those Dirty Indian Airports. 

A good example, I think of this, is the whole top gear versus argentina affair in which several jokes about the falklands were made and which kind of supremely punched down, given that a) they were crowing about winning the war and b) britain’s historical status as a colonialist power and even their contemporary political heft which far outweighs that of a country like argentina. another good example: the weirdness of watching a show like mind your language knowing that british xenophobia is a thing and which has been used to attack and mock foreigners of all stripes always which doesn’t make the fact that say, the headmistress in the show is held up for ridicule because of her conservative grammar & pronunciation fascism. all these are cases where people are clearly punching down rather than satirizing extant stereotypes to make a provocative point (rammstein’s Amerika is a piece which does do the satirical in a way that’s well, very on the nose, but is definitely satirical rather than punching down since it’s a very obvious dig at american cultural dominance). 

2) any given statement or stereotype about a group of people is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. sometimes these politics and histories are relatively harmless (ice hockey & canadians, for example), sometimes they’re kind of iffy and sometimes there’s an incredibly horrific history in there that makes this act of humour an act of violence. you have to look at the content of any given joke and ask what kind of histories - social and political - lie behind them. 

3) a joke is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. a joke is also never merely an act of humour. there’s plenty of theories of humour, but i think the one that’s most helpful to think about here is a) humour as an exposure of the unconscious/subconscious/the inhibited and b) humour as the fine line between an act of aggression and an act of friendly banter. in the former case, all these stereotypes handed to us well - they’re like jokes about Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus: it’s this huge cultural miasma of representations and jokes and ideas that get handed to us right from our childhood and seem funny because yes there are a few actions that do seem to correspond to these stereotypes which make it funny to us. three men on the bummel by jerome k jerome is one of my favourite books - its droll and he has a wonderfully wry way of writing about cultural misunderstandings and mishaps that do make his english protags come across as rather silly - but at the same time it does also feed into this general pervasive cultural idea that All Germans Like Order and Love To Follow Rules. not harmful in itself, but later used to explain why germany specifically fell prey to the threat of n*zism which then also allowed everyone to pat themselves on their backs about how they weren’t like Those Damn Germans Over There (until, of course, milgram came along and showed this… patently wasn’t the case). why am i bringing up this example? because it demonstrates the fluidity of humour: a joke like this now is probably at least a little bit funny. a joke like this in the thirties or the forties and fifties is not so very funny by comparison. 

so i mean, when you look at a joke like this you  have to look at the context of cross-cultural representations of these countries which already exist - across media and across history - and ask whether or not this joke is exposing a particular xenophobic ideal which has been used to persecute folks from this particular group or whether this kind of joke has actually been used historically along with acts of violence (laughing, for example, at those primitive non-white folk and their dirty dirty ways and homes goes directly hand in hand with a lot of the justifications for colonialism) and if it also serves as a thinly veiled act of aggression (e.g. men making jokes about their nagging wives and w/e). you personally may not be bigoted, but your society is and to understand that kind of subconscious influence on you, you have to unpack your society’s beliefs and actions as a whole across history etc against the members of these different groups. like, there’s a difference, again, between the brits making jokes about the french and brits making jokes about eastern european countries: a lot of it has to do with history and with contemporary politics and power relations. 

4) a useful series of questions to ask is: who is this joke laughing at? why is this joke funny? what does this joke position as its ‘truth’ about these people that makes the punchline hilarious? how has this joke been used in the past? has it been used in the past and to what effect? is there a history? who is making the joke? is there another kind of joke they could have made instead?

5) you personally are probably not xenophobic or bigoted and a good number of the people laughing at these jokes are not, but the fact of the matter is society is xenophobic and bigoted and afraid of the Other. societies pretty much define their sense of belonging and membership on the basis of who is included and who is excluded: xenophobia is a natural outcome of that kind of definitional basis. the fact of the matter is that any joke positions a certain statement as a kind of ‘truth’ that makes it funny. AMERICANS AND MACDONALDS for example, is a lot more funny than uh AMERICANS LOVE ORDER AND FOLLOWING RULES. one posits a certain cultural ‘truth’ about america that is reinforced and represented elsewhere, the other does not really. these jokes work primarily because they purport to have an element of the truth about them (they are not, for example, tumblr’s bizarre version of nightblogging) etc. 

6)  laughing at yourself is a time-honoured past-time and look, i’ve already said a lot on the subject so all i’ll add here is that sometimes even laughing at yourself can be a fraught activity and reflect a ‘humourous’ posited ‘truth’ some other country or social group has forced on your own. i can think of a lot of cultural specific ones to india like sikh jokes or jokes about south indians, for example, which are funny but also have no other counterparts wrt north indian upper class hindu brahmins - who are also the culturally dominant group in india (but i don’t know how pertinent this is so anyway). so its complicated! there’s no simple answer! there’s never a simple answer! i don’t even know if there’s a way to say ‘this is wrong’ beyond that ‘this humour has been used to hurt people in the past so yes this particularly is wrong but there are other cases where this kind of humour has no such context beyond positing a certain cultural ‘truth’ so its not entirely wrong but it is transgressive’. 

i hope this all makes sense anon. 

just can’t stop thinking about sweet men, gentle intellectual men who’ve never known power or submission a day in their lives but are all too happy to give up control. i‘m thinking of the men who look up at you with wide, adoring eyes, ready to lay it all at your feet out of love, and discover that they really do like kneeling, discover through you that it’s the only place they truly belong. i like a man who after just the first time will fall to his knees readily, will beg you for it, shyly ask for more, call you any names you like while you tear apart his carefully put-together exterior bit by bit, deconstruct him to his bare parts and put him back together again. he’s never known anything like me and he never wants anything else. i want him dazed and wrecked. i want him ruined for it. i want him sweet and smart and so able to take power but so so unwilling to.

I’m kinda tall, taller than a lot of the people I spend time around and work with, and sometimes I think about a woman shorter than me kicking me to my knees in front of her and putting a collar and leash on me and yanking me around. Pulling on it so tight I can barely breathe as I eat her out like I’m starving for it. Wrapping her legs around my head so all I can smell or see is her. Uhhhhg

People have said it in more intelligent ways than I’m going to but the relationship between cis mlm and “straight guy gets turned gay” type of porn is in turns fascinating and relatable and repulsive. It carries over commonly to porn where the bottom is not conventionally queer-looking but instead is quite masculine in some way. It’s like. The internalized homophobia (which is really misogyny dressed up) that frames queer sex and bottoming as a form of degradation. And then that in turn is an outlet for men who imagine themselves as the tops in this scenario, where it becomes a defense against homosexuality on top of a defense against homosexuality. Because you as the top are “forcing” someone else in this scenario to take on the degrading role and this humiliating identity. And in that way removing yourself one step further because it is not JUST a fantasy of kinky degrading sex you’re having but of an act of aggression and violence against another man. I’m doing this to you, I’m making you into this.

Kink is a great way for people from all genders and orientations to explore their own internalized biases and taboos and that’s why I’m really into de transing and breeding and stuff so I’m definitely not knocking anybody who’s into it. I just find it genuinely fascinating to watch cis men show up in droves in the comments of posts that are just plain old “two guys fucking who don’t look conventionally queer” and inevitably always turning it into THIS GUY is STRAIGHT and he’s being FORCED to be GAY like the LITTLE PIG BITCH BOY HE IS.

Whereas it’s so refreshing and lovely to see masc men who don’t fit traditional twinky impressions of queerness joyfully and unselfconsciously participating in subbing and bottoming. I feel for them because their submission so often gets turned into an act of degradation by the very people they are creating this content for? Whether they want it to or not. And we could talk about the way this speaks to how so many mlm see even traditionally skinny femme bottoms and how that impacts THEM but that’s a topic for another day. Anyhow.

More: my Stranger Things AU

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

After months of seeing to Keith’s safety and shielding him from prying eyes, Shiro is gratified to see Keith coming out of his shell—acting less like the frightened husk of a person he first rescued and more like the clever young man he could be, had every right to be. 

Not everything’s as simple as that, though. Keith finds himself with growing feelings for the man who’s taken on the role of his protector. Keith decides to take initiative on his crush, and Shiro has to draw some new boundaries and talk to Keith about consent.

+ + +

Shiro freezes on the spot, eyes wide as Keith hovers over him where he sits on the couch. In a single, fluid motion Keith is now straddling his hips.

“Stop.”

The disappointment is plain on Keith’s face. He tries pushing through it, pressing closer again until Shiro puts his hands up to stop him.

“You don’t want to touch me?”

“Of course I want to,” Shiro breathes, sounding thin and strained. “More than you know. But we can’t, Keith. I can’t.”

Keith frowns down at him. “But why? You know I’m not a child. I’m 22.”

“That’s not why.”

“Then- why?”

Shiro takes a heavy breath.

“You’ve been hurt, Keith. Abused. By people who were responsible for protecting you. I won’t put you in that position.”

“You’re not like them,” Keith shakes his head, reaching for Shiro’s cheek. It’s a soft touch, intimate, holding Shiro’s face in his hands. “You could never be like them. You’re good.”

As Keith leans closer he moves against Shiro’s hips again, seeking friction, leaving Shiro scrambling to clamp down on his hips and stop the motion. He barely manages to bite back the gasp of pleasure and agony at the friction that never should have started but definitely stopped too soon.

“I- I want you,” Keith’s voice sounds desperate now. “Please! Why won’t you let me?” 

“Because I can’t take advantage of you!” Shiro fights against raising his voice, feeling his heart race as he aches for the beautiful young man before him, the person he’s been secretly yearning for, more every passing day.

He can’t give in to impulse, no matter how raw this rejection will feel. He hopes desperately that he can get Keith to hear him out. 

“Keith, please,” he licks his chapped lips, trying hard not to stare at Keith’s beautiful mouth that is only inches away, perfectly in reach. “Of course I would never mean to hurt you. Never. But- it’s not that simple. You... need me right now, and I swear I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe. You can trust me. Do you trust me, Keith?”

“Yes! Yes,” Keith sounds breathless.

“Then trust me that we can’t. Not until you’re better.”

Keith growls softly. “But I’m fine.”

“You need time to heal,” he strokes Keith’s jaw with the heel of his hand, his heart fluttering as he feels Keith lean into the simple touch. “If I touch you how I want to just because I want to, just because I can, then I’m no better than them. If I had sex with you right now, it would be abuse.”

Keith’s mouth hangs open a little. Shiro still isn’t sure he understands, but he is listening. He knows it’s important to Shiro, and that it isn’t about his own worth. It’s a start.

Keith climbs off his lap and crouches on the couch by his side. He looks embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey- there’s nothing you need to apologize for,” Shiro rests one hand on Keith’s knee. “But thank you for trusting me. That’s what’s important to me right now.”

“So,” Keith hesitates, still pondering what he’s been told. Shiro nods, encouraging him to go on. “I just— What would make it okay? How can I tell when I’m better?”

Shiro smiles. It was a good question, and a clever one. Of course Keith would challenge him. He always gives him a run for his money. The thought makes his chest ache for him that much more. “Well. I guess that would be when you know you can tell me no.”

“What?”

“Consent, Keith. When you know you can choose what you want, and your back isn’t against the wall. Once you know that you don’t owe me anything, ever, and that there’s nothing that’ll make me stop trying to help you. I’ll always want you to be safe and well, whether I can be part of your life or not.”

“Best friends,” Keith mumbles, echoing those words that Shiro first gave him, words he cherished.

Shiro nods, his eyes prickling. “Yeah. And if you’re still fond of me when all that’s true, we can talk about it then.”

“Promise?”

Shiro smiles at the hope in the young man’s face. Precious. “I promise.”

Keith snorts. “Fine.”

“Oh. And maybe when I’m not your only friend.”

“Not fair,” Keith scowls. “You won’t let me meet anyone else.”

Shiro musses his hair. “Hey, that was necessary for a while, and I was worried. But, I think we can change that now.”

Keith doesn’t even try to disguise his excitement at that. “Really?”

Shiro’s answering smile is so soft. 

“Really.”

"it's uncool to bully people weaker than you" gonna figure out how to bully someone stronger than me. out of spite.

I got me some discourse to write. Let's talk about Christian privilege. When Christian privilege is brought up in most activist circles, it's talked about like a monolith. Unlike most of the intersectional work that goes into fleshing out white privilege and how it intersects with gender and class, that same careful analysis is rarely given to Christian privilege. Why? That's a question I can't answer. However: 1) #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear is highlighting how, although women still benefit from Christian privilege, their gender is much more devalued in a (fundamentalist) Christian context than it likely would be without the impact of Christianity. (Interestingly, it's also highlighting a lot of the Western roots of misogyny.) 2) Persecuted Christians do exist, just not in the U.S. (or most of the Western world) There are countries in the world in which being Christian is not a privilege at all and can result in loss of life and limb (e.g., Iran). So thinking about Christian privilege, or any type of privilege or oppression, requires a transnational lens to grasp the nuances it takes in other societies (and focusing just on the U.S. is itself revelatory of immense privilege). 3) BUT, with that being said, there are those who will use the above two points to try to argue that Christian privilege does not exist in a U.S. context. And that is demonstrably false. When being a good Christian is seen as a positive leadership quality, when revival meetings on college campuses can go on without interruption whereas Muslim students have to hide in staircases with their prayer mats, when evangelical ideology still plays a huge role in the direction of our nation's legislation and politics, when America is called a "Christian nation," all while being a good Hindu or good Pagan is viewed with suspicion and laughed to the edge of the ocean and people are praised who subject gay couples to harassment for simply ordering a wedding cake, one cannot tell me that no Christian privilege exists on our shores. -over and out-