it began with locs…
cw: rape apologism …so i just had lunch with someone who is essentially a random woman who chased me down at a train station last week because she admired my locs and wanted me to start locs for her. had this woman not been a black woman, had she not been an older black woman, had she not been literally beaming from ear to ear just looking at my locs, so earnest about wanting to start locs herself and having nowhere to turn– had it not been for all those things AND had we not been in Japan, i wouldn’t have given this lady the time of day. especially since she made me miss my train. but she was and we are and so there i was, meeting this over zealous woman at a cafe for lunch because #AfroHairSolidarityInAsia✊? if only the conversation had steered clear of politics, things would have been fine. i…
bitter.
never not going to be bitter about having been essentially told to ‘shut up’ and ‘stay in my lane’ repeatedly by aro aces because i ‘already have enough [media] representation’, all based on them deciding for me that i’m an (allo)ro ace. let’s not forget the added irony that i am in fact not (allo)ro– the very premise of their claims which were subsequently used to fuel an inquisition against (allo)ro people in general, be they ace or not– but more importantly, i was being told this specifically over a show that is ripe with homophobic tropes, erases one of its lead characters’ bisexuality in addition to another lead character’s asexuality– all while simultaneously perpetrating biphobia; a show that also lacks a single non-binary character and in fact only has a couple of black characters because they were inserted into it as tokens. yeah, never going to not be bitter about that.
that feel when
self-proclaimed allies look to you for guidance on how they can be a better ally while consciously or not expecting their hand to be held or their fragile feelings to be spared along the way; simultaneously oblivious every time they trample all over your feelings, perpetrating the very thing they claim to be against because they’re so focused on the elephant in the room that they pay no mind to their own everyday microaggressions.
Starbucks wifi censorship
so i’m at Starbucks using Starbuck’s free wifi while i work on stuff, as usual, when i randomly go on Tumblr and see the name of a familiar website, Black Lesbian Love Lab, being recommended to me. i didn’t know they were on Tumblr, so i clicked on the recommendation to check it out and was brought to the above page telling me that i’m unable to access @blacklesbianlovelab because of stipulations in the wifi service’s terms of use? wtf? i’m immediately reminded of the fiasco not that long ago when Tumblr marked the entire #lesbian tag NSFW, which i thought they’d fixed but? at the very least this seems like a remnant of that? although the wifi service itself is also involved, i can still access the BLLL website without issue and the content of the Tumblr blog by no means warrants it being treated like a porn blog. again,…
