"You don't need to understand someone's identity in order to respect it" is often framed as a compromise with intolerance, like it's conceding that it's okay to think someone's gender is bullshit as long as you don't say that out loud, but frankly, I think it's more concerning if someone believes they can understand the full spectrum of human identity. Doing mental gymnastics to cram everybody's lived experience into a familiar analytic framework isn't what respect looks like.
I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!
There is a depth of feeling to this, a satirisation, almost, of the forms of art that feels intensely artistic. The way he trails off into the cracks, blurring the line between the man and the environment he’s a part of; it is really beautiful, honestly. The fact it’s made out of urine evokes Piss Christ, but it’s less angry, more whistful. It says something about randomness. About how we see our own forms in the greater entropy of the universe. I cannot emphasise enough how much this means to me.
Pride isn’t a “queer-friendly space”, pride IS queer space.
Kink doesn’t “belong” at pride, kink IS pride.
To say that these things are just-kind-of-also-included is such a diluted view of what these things actually are. These spaces have been mentally purified for so many people as things that are “also-okay-for-gays!”–
No!!
These spaces ARE OURS. Not just “friendly to us”. Not just “inclusive to us”. They ARE us. We don’t just “belong”… We’re the reason it exists in the first place!
These are some questions that I use myself and I thought I’d share them to see if they’re handy for anyone else!
Online autistic communities/advocates really seem to forget that it isn’t exclusively “uwu cute hyperfixation hehe stim break hand flap.”
You’re not advocating for autism if you don’t include the weird kids who have strange interests and are socially awkward, but not in the cute way. The ones people often describe as creepy, or call freaks.
Or the nonverbal special education students who groan and scream in the hallways at school while people in classrooms hold back laughter because for some reason they find it funny.
Or the violent aggressive autistic people who cause damage to themselves and everything around them at one minor inconvenience and will never live independently.
Or autistic adults with picture perfect families and lives, who do not relate to the autistic “culture” that’s now been portrayed online.
Or autistic people who don’t benefit from stim toys, who don’t look at it as a huge factor in their lives, who went through therapy to help them learn skills that they struggled with.
If you don’t advocate for the scary cases and symptoms, the weird autistic people, the incapable autistic people, you’re not advocating for autism. It’s a spectrum and it’s not going to be pretty sometimes. If you don’t acknowledge and include those cases, especially if you’re autistic yourself, can you really say you’re advocating for autism, or is it just yourself?
When you refer to the autistic community, you’re talking about them too. Remember that.
I agree this some pepole think i am funny in a bad way because i' cant cotrol my body and i have else freinds that gets call creepy and bullyed because them not do cute things and i think more respect autistic comunity
