please talk about sex-averse allosexual people please remember that just because someone experiences sexual attraction does not mean they automatically want to engage in sexual activity

please don’t assume people are repulsed by sex if they aren’t comfortable with it there’s a lot more reasons than ‘it’s gross’ like severe gender/body dysphoria or past experiences or sensory/medical conditions or simply low libido 

it’s okay to not want to have sex it’s okay to have complicated feelings towards sex just because you experience sexual attraction does not mean you have to act on it 

“We’re taught to turn the other cheek—that being kind in the face of hostility is the better way to respond to conflict so love can overcome hate. According to psychologist Clifford N. Lazarus, writing for Psychology Today, that sort of reaction just teaches abusive people that their behavior is effective. Here’s why.

It all comes down to something called the “Law of Effect”, which refers to the way people interpret and understand the behavior of others. For example, if someone treats you poorly and you treat them kindly, the effect produced by their bad behavior is your affection. By being nice to mean people, you’re essentially creating a reward system for bad behavior.

This doesn’t mean you should devolve into a complete asshole anytime you encounter one, but it is important to remember that there is such thing as being too nice. When someone does something that bothers you, it’s important to take that immediate opportunity to tell them. Being kind is often just an excuse to avoid necessary conflict. You don’t have to be a jerk, but you do have to confront the situation or risk encouraging the bad behavior you’re seeking to prevent.”

Source

#more than relevant.

Hey, look, now we can all cite a good ol’ fashioned scientific study to prove to folks why responding to racism (and other -isms) with generosity and kindness is not the answer.

There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust—other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they’re not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What’s there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another.


People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

*me looking at a really nsfw drawing* i really like how they drew the hands

fun fact if you read your child’s personal logs or correspondence including their journal or texts then you are teaching them that

• you do not respect them
• you do not trust them
• they should not trust you
• no place is a safe place to express themselves without fear of judgment

*covers mouth and nose in selfie* ah yes now i’m beautiful 

You know what? It does a horrible disservice to people who make images - any artist, cartoonist, illustrator, etc - to blithely come to the defense of “free speech” as if we honestly believe that is what’s under attack because it diminishes the impact we have on cultural landscapes. What we make is not just innocuous silliness.

Those of us who make pictures are directly responsible for cultivating an environment that either challenges or reinforces institutional violence. We talk all the time about how representation matters, but suddenly criticizing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons for their racism, homophobia, and islamophobia is read as condoning the murders of the cartoonists? That’s basic false equivalence. Those images encourage those who consume them to think of their targets as less than human and that their destruction should be encouraged.

No. If we make images, we have the power to interact with and affect the popular imagination. The images produced by Charlie Hebdo and their ilk contribute to a culture that encourages people to believe that Muslims deserve the islamophobic violence that has been heightened since these attacks.

Of course they didn’t deserve to be murdered. Of course the murderers should be brought to justice. That’s a given. But that’s not the conversation we’re trying to have. Our right as cartoonists and artists to freely express as we work does not exonerate us from the fact that what we put out into the world has an impact wherever it finds itself.

You know those rooms in the hospitals with the glass windows where all the babies are kept? And there’s like a lot of babies in there? I wonder where all the babies I was in there with are today. All the other little babies who were born in the same hospital on the same day. I’d like to meet them

I’d like to fight every last one of them