The real reason it’s a fucking travesty Peter Parker is “straight” is that he would have a fucking field day making gay jokes. Imagine Spiderman wit mixed with millennial gay humour. He’d be unstoppable
[Criminal, or Steve. Or someone] give it to me straight. Why is some kid swinging around and beating up people in Queens?
[Peter] Firstofall, nothingI dois straight.
[Villain punches him]
[Peter] this is homophobia.
[Someone. Probably Tony] he said nothing about gay people, though?
[Peter] but he hit me. So again. Homophobia.
[Tony] you could not have picked a worse time to come out of the closet.
[Peter] bold of you to assume I was ever in the closet to begin with. I’ve been giving off Chaotic Twink Energy my whole damn life.
Aunt may: so why can’t you get your driver’s license again??
Peter: I’m???? Gay????
The spider on his chest is purple not Black so that his suit is red, purple, and blue.
I see a lot of progressive young people get angry when propaganda for perspectives they agree with is debunked. Back in 2016 I had a lot of people accuse me of supporting Trump because I pointed out that the photo of his parents wearing Klan robes was photoshopped. Obviously I didn’t support Trump, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s best to base your opinions about the world on things that are true and not things that are lies.
It’s important to remember that every single political and social movement produces artificial propaganda. Even the most pure and righteous cause will have supporters creating fake bullshit or manipulating to inspire pathos and conform to a convenient narrative. Try not to fall for it. Many absolutely outrageous claims turn out to be true, while many others turn out to be fabrications designed to sway opinions or undermine the credibility of a movement by introducing seductive fictions. Critical thinking is good. Suspicion is not a sin. The fact that something “feels” true is not real supporting evidence.
well ya duh society shames speech patterns associated with young women
“Speech fillers” are just a human’s way of saying “wait a sec I’m thinking”. It means we think more before we speak, always trying to find the right way to say it. Every language has them. And people shouldn’t be annoyed by it, ever.
Fun fact: even Deaf people and ASL users have a “filler” and depends on the person. Sometimes it’s almost like a wave, other times it’s wiggling fingers.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
One of my favourite historical phenomena is technology that’s based on a totally off-the-wall theory about how the world works, but ends up being sort of effective because it’s close enough. Like those old-timey plague doctor masks, whose enormous beaks are an enclosed breathing apparatus stuffed full of dried aromatic herbs on the theory that disease is communicated by the odour of decay – which is completely wrong, of course, but the masks ended up being reasonable effective at their purpose anyway because it turns out that sticking a big wad of dried plant matter in front of your airway is a pretty effective way to avoid inhaling aerosolised bodily fluids.
My favorite is the fact that scurvy was cured, and then un-cured because a bunch of perfectly sensible and intelligent people didn’t know what a vitamin was.
tl;dr this woman was hearing creepy phantom nursery rhymes every night and it turned out to be a local industrial building’s alarm system, being triggered by spiders on the motion detectors
which is all well and good but “we investigated the creepy nursery rhymes, and it turns out it’s spiders” is one hell of a true statement
why is your alarm system a creepy child singing about an old man’s death
england ur messed up
now that i have read the article: i revise my opinion, england ur clever af. it’s a theft deterrent system. it’s intended to creep the ever living fuck out of anyone sneaking onto the business park grounds after hours.
unfortunately, they had their motion detector set so that spiders walking across the lenses set it off.
no word on whether the spiders found the singing creepy.
Forget Valjean being buried alive, forget Marius banging his head agains a tree for two hours, forget everything because the absolute highlight of the brick is when Victor Hugo says that lizards are pocket crocodiles
backup from Tumblr 