Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Me, a romantic Romantic: gives my beloved the skull of my enemy with roses in the eye sockets
There’s nothing romantic about selfishness. Give your beloved the skull of THEIR enemy with roses in the eye sockets and a tender and poetic love letter
You’re right. I’m a fool. Can it be both our enemies skulls to show that I can care for them and fulfill my own goals as well?
true romance means you probably share at least one enemy with your chosen, so just use one of those
I WANT TO KNOW THE STORY BEHIND THIS. I HONESTLY THOUGHT THEY WERE LOVERS.
Okay, okay, so short version:
Joker seduced Harley while he was in Arkham and she was his psychologist. He did so by manipulating sessions to make him seem pitiable.
Harley broke Joker out. Joker was originally going to kill her then, but fans had latched onto Harley Quinn’s new look and she was a fan favorite (mind you as I recall, she was originally introduced in BTAS, and then transferred to the comics later). So she ended up surviving his first murder attempt.
He decided that although annoying she could still be useful (since she’s actually brilliant, and at this point somewhat codependent). This leads to a string of horrific abuses and murder attempts. Including (in the TV show alone) throwing her through a window that is at *least* three stories up, choking her, beating her with a hammer, threatening her with one of his gag guns (which, depending on the gun, may or may not kill her in various ways), and attempting to get hyenas to eat her.
In the comics, it includes starving her, chaining her to a wall in a sewer on top of corpses of “failed Harleys,” poisoning her, leaving her in burning buildings, pushing her into the line of police fire, gaslighting her basically every time he fails to kill her, and the list goes on. When she becomes pregnant with her and Joker’s kid, she leaves for nine months, to her sister’s place, and gives birth there. She doesn’t tell Joker about the kid (and goes out of her way to prevent Joker from finding out). She tells Canary that it’s because Mr. J would be too busy for a kid, but if you pay attention to Harley’s behavior throughout the comic, the clear subtext is “My kid would end up dead or worse if Joker knew about her.”
Additionally, post break up, she notes he was abusive, says it wasn’t love, it was manipulation, and frequently describes it as the worst part of her life.
I’m no expert but I remember one more thing… she said he never noticed she was gone for those 9 months.
THANK YOU FOR CLEARING THIS UP.
This is why couples are creepy as fuck for dressing up as Harley and the joker and why people are especially fucked up for thinking the relationship they had in suicide squad was “goals”
Every once in a blue moon moon, tumblr produces a gem.
NOW I know who the fuck is moon moon
WAIT HOLY SHIT IM FIERCE RAIN.
MY NAME IS LLUVIA
IM WHEEZING
This is really what the internet is for. Without Nazis and Russian trolls effing things up, we are left with the pure celebration of humanity that is Moon Moon.
It’s true. The genitalia aren’t skeletal muscle, they’re entirely smooth muscle and glands, which means they’re not under voluntary control. They belong to the autonomic nervous system. They’re not even as closely tied to the limbic system (emotions) as they are to reflex arcs (physical stimulus causing a rapid and involuntary response). So shut up about “tHeY eNjOyEd It” already.
(While I tried to include the most helpful resources I could here (i.e., resources that lend themselves to one-on-one communication, individual reading, etc.), there are plenty of other great resources, including regional resources, listed in these links. Some of the resources are specific to men and others aren’t, but they are all helpful for male survivors.)
**Male Survivor (regional, international, and online resources)
Im so tired of hearing the word “accommodation” when talking about disabilities
Same goes w the word “benefits” its just so insufferable since its obvious these words are used in place of “necessity” because sugarcoating how badly our needs are makes it easier to tell us no.
Its also because our necessities arent seen as necessary since theyre not considered necessities to the abled bodied.
For examples, SSI money is called disability benefits, despite that fact it isnt beneficial, and could mean life or death to a disabled person who doesnt get it, and is literally the only way to get the medications and care we need to live, its a necessity but the legal, “correct” term our government has given it is benefits.
When i asked-i dont even know how many times, to how many people- why its called that, they all said its because the government is giving disabled people free money, so its like a benefit.
And of course, like i said before, if the world sees our necessities-like say, needing money we cant otherwise get due to our disability and ableism- itll be so much easier and sound so much more humane to call it benefits when theyre taking it away from us/refusing to give it to us.
Colleges, schools, and general places call it accommodations, for the same reason, because the word implies that theyre doing something that would help us alot, but isnt exactly necessary, so them refusing to do so isnt exactly taking away a right from us.
It also allows abled people to feed into the “special treatment” idea, because they see the government giving us the ability to live in an abled world as a “benefit” so its only natural that they should get it too.
Same goes with accommodation, the reason why every abled person brings up that one time a disabled kid cut them in line, or how one kid was allowed out of gym class or an assignment, because society has taught them that these are not something we have to do, that they are not a necessity, that it is something we are given out of privilege.
I dont really know where im going with this, but its so frustrating to see such blatant ableism, and how these words have bad ableist actions easier to push off.
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
I’m a Cisgender, straight, white dude. I’m the most protected class on the planet. I’m not sharing this because I have anything of value to add to it, but because, as a Cisgender, straight white dude who wants to be the best ally he can, I was a little embarrassed to admit that I’d never thought about these issues, because they don’t affect me. But they affect people I want to support and empower, so it’s important to me that I know these things. Maybe some of my fellow Cisgender, straight, white dudes (and ladies) will read this and learn, like I did, something we didn’t know five minutes ago.
