No Surface All Feeling

Hello! It's been a while.

I'm dreadful at writing blog posts. I have a weird tendency to lose patience with myself (aka "oh my god why do I bother trying to put this into writing when I could just write a very casual thread on my private Twitter account and it'd be sooo much faster and I want the immediate feedback of my friends interacting with it anyway" syndrome) which means I may have a lot of unpublished half-written drafts for blog posts that then gather dust because I lost interest/patience/etc with whatever it was I'm writing about.

As someone who's always felt a little uncomfortable with the 'essay' format, I usually find myself frustrated at my strange lack of ability to get to a nice and clean Conclusion. Something that ties everything together. That's the other advantage of stream-of-consciousness social media thread formatting: you don't necessarily need to arrive to a neat end-point. There is a certain freedom to the format of the thread, that you can always slap a direct addendum to it if you so desired: the new thoughts you write are in direct conversation (literally!) with your previous thoughts. A real marvel of modern technology.

But Twitter is dead to me now, and with it my access to unfiltered private rambling. I just can't justify contributing to the cultural weight, even in such insignificant and private ways, of a fascist billionaire who's currently taking over the US government in possibly the most cringe and annoying coup ever known to man. Anyway, Twitter alternatives are either VERY public by design (no private accounts on Bluesky for now, maybe forever?), OR frustratingly hard to set up (I'd absolutely start a Mastodon instance if it was easier to do and I didn't have to pay money for it that I do not have), OR specific cases of not wanting to join some stranger's niche fandom-oriented Mastodon instance because I'm not that committed to being a gatecrasher with opinions. Lol.

Which brings us to Dreamwidth, again. It's weird because I don't necessarily have an active audience on here, or any other fandom platform these days because I'm wildly inconsistent in how I post (gone are the days of COVID lockdown posting when I had endless time to write very opinionated posts about TF2 characters!) and people simply forget you exist when you don't post regularly. Not that I can blame them, really.

So yeah. Could it be... could it be that we're so back?

Anyway, I really need to make notes for Things I Want To Write About... for now, I'll start here:

• It turns out I have this big draft for a guide to writing Aussie accents in fanfics, specifically about Sniper TF2. I could finish this? Maybe it'd be useful to someone sometime in the future?
• I want to write about my favourite ship dynamics, and my love for non-standard relationships (i.e. dynamics that aren't just They Have A Crush On Each Other Then They Start Dating, although I wouldn't necessarily say that is the most popular format for ships depending on where you go). I love one-sided pining, I love broken-up relationships, I love friends-with-benefits-but-it's-complicated...
• Some vague rambling about making fanart/writing fanfic in the social media age... I see people apologising for NOT posting regularly enough so often... I do it too! And I don't think it's very good for all of us! Aaahhh! lol

I don't know how consistent I will be with these posts. Again, I'm shit at these things, forgive me if I never end up delivering any of the above Post Ideas. I've got a busy life outside of fandom and over the years the fandom stuff has just taken a backseat. Life goes on, etc.

But it doesn't hurt to try!

Last night I was reading a series of tweets by film critics Jessica Ritchey and Matt Zoller Seitz (who I look up to a lot!). I could really repost the entire thread by Ritchey but for the sake of brevity, here's an excerpt:

Neoliberalism always needs to justify things for profit. "Why is this here? This doesn't serve the plot." Neoliberalism is terrified of pleasure for pleasure's sake. The idea that you have a sex scene because it's hot. Because you have a right to pleasure.

And here's this from Zoller Seitz:

People have been taught to “consume” things that are given to them immediately and often that were produced under exploitative circumstances — and they also hate the artist who made them for calling them art and insisting they have intrinsic value apart from being “property.”

It got me thinking a lot about sex negativity in media fueling consumerism, and as Ritchey says in her thread, how this "culture-wide phobia of sex which in turn is becoming a useful vector for the increasing spread of fascism".

Much like a lot of fairly reasonable takes on culture online, this one received plenty of whataboutist replies, which drives me crazy.

I often think about the current trend in mainstream media where "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" as a symptom of capitalism and more specifically consumerist neoliberalism: the infantilisation of the audience.

( 1. Capitalism and audience infantilisation )

( 2. Sex positivity )

( 3. Sex negativity )

Conclusion

What I want to end on with this... fairly lengthy post, is this:

• Sex is normal. Not having sex is also normal.
• Queer love and sex is especially beautiful, because we live in a world where everyone tries to pretend it doesn't exist.
• Any pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake (whether sexual or not!) is a wonderful expression of human nature at its most affirming, inherently anti-capitalist and anti-fascist.

People, especially queer people who want to make art about sex, or even just talk openly about it, are rightfully frustrated at the current climate in which they're accused of the most horrid shit for even mentioning sex, or their frustration with the current climate! And it sucks that some of the negativity comes from within the queer community!

If you think that the expression of this frustration on is somehow "shaming" or not inclusive enough of asexuals or normie queers or whatever... I think you need to examine a little closer what it is you're actually ashamed of or uncomfortable with, and ask yourself why you resent queer people who enjoy sex.

We live in an age where people are more and more afraid and ashamed of sex. A lot of people pushing for this shift hold a lot of power, and their first scapegoat will always be the people they see as deviating from the norms they were uncritically conditioned in. That's queer people, obviously including asexuals. Whether you like sex or not doesn't matter to them, we're all freaks anyway.

There is always time to unlearn capitalist, cis-heteronormative conditioning.

There is always time to examine your own biases and understanding them.

There is always time to realise that someone's genuine joy, pleasure, and love is not an attack on you but something to be celebrated, even if it's not a type of joy, pleasure, and love you personally practice.

Finally, there is always time to engage with art in earnest. Stop using marketing words like "content" and "consuming media" and you're already halfway there.

And then, I swear, it gets so much better.