on sexual abuse and the direction of imperatives

Hi, folks. If you don’t mind, let’s sit down and have a talk.  An actual, honest talk, if you will.

This is a post about the target audience of imperative grammar (i.e. command words) in the context of talking about abuse in relationships. It’s also a post about making moral-grounds proclamations about sexual violence. It’s also a post about the internalized obligation to have sex. It’s also a post about that thing that we usually call victim-blaming. It may even be a post about rape culture in the guise of fighting rape culture? And, basically, yelling at abuse victims to stop getting abused.

it happened again

Mermaid friend was making a comparison between me and someone else, and so she gestured to them and said “small gay” and then gestured to me and said “small…” and then just trailed off.  So I asked something like, “What?  You couldn’t decide on a noun?  Ace can be a noun,” and she said, “No, I just don’t know how you feel about being referred to as a gay.”

…I don’t know how to explain to her that “how I feel about it” is mainly this strong sense of you’ll get in trouble.

What I actually said, for the record, was something along the lines of “the real gay people wouldn’t like that.”

🍂

I just saw someone use “chemophobia” now.  Bury me.

💢

Been disappointed to see more joining onto the “-phobia” bandwagon with (spreading?) use of “aphobia” and “acephobia,” trading on an equivalency between a phobia and an evil ideology.  Really not keen on that.  Instead of saying “aphobic” or “acephobic,” it’s easy enough to just say anti-ace.

If you need a noun, there are lots of nouns that can be applicable.  Anti-ace prejudice, anti-ace bigotry, anti-ace harassment, anti-ace vilification, anti-ace abuse, anti-ace violence.

For hetero-focused things, you can specify anti-ace heteronormativity.

There’s also compulsory sexuality and sex-normativity as decent terms.

And I’m not sure why “acemisogyny” isn’t already a thing.

Lots of options!  Lots of ways to get at the idea of ace-targeting wrongness and harm without resorting to “-phobia.”  I know it’s just to follow an established pattern — and my beef is with the entire pattern, too, but I’m just addressing one of the groups I’m part of here.

Can we please agree to put this one on the shelf?

?

Reddit informs me that “outrage culture” is apparently a term that some people are using, with enough popularity to be in the name of a subreddit, whatever much that’s worth.

You’d think my main question would be “why is this specific page in my referrers when there’s not a link to my blog anywhere on this specific page” but actually, the main thing I’m wondering is… if there’s a subreddit dedicated to “outrage culture” — does that mean someone is having a strongly negative reaction to outrage culture?

for the language nerds and gender nerds

(I know there are at least… two of you)

words for anti-ace aggression

Hey.  Word people.  I need help with words.

I’m looking for something I can use as a label for hostility-specifically-targeting-aces, as a subset of heterosexism and compulsory sexuality.  Some folks use “acephobia” for this, but I don’t like using phobia suffixes for ideologies.  So, my tentative alternative…

misonullism, taking the same prefix as “misogyny” and applying to to the prefix “nulli-,” meaning no/none.  Something like “misacey” might be more intuitive in terms of components but sounds and looks… weird… and I can’t just use the “a” prefix by itself.

All I want to know is if you foresee any issues, besides potential vagueness or broad reinterpretations.  I’m just intending it for my own use on this blog, really, and thought I’d ask y’all first in case I’m overlooking something else I should consider.

more Bible stuff

THIS IS GLORIOUS.

I WAS JUST THINKING EARLIER TODAY ABOUT HOW THE WORD “SIN” IS LITERALLY JUST THE CHRISTIAN NOUN FORM OF “PROBLEMATIC” AND THEN I FIND THIS ON HEZEKIAH’S BLOG AND THIS IS THE SECOND BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO ME ALL DAY.

imagine

Designation

In pre-Meiji Japan there existed no concept of religion as a general phenomenon, of which there would be variants like Christianity, Buddhism, and Shintō.  People spoke of having faith (shinkō) in particular kami and Buddhas, but no word existed to designate a separate sphere of life that could be called “religious,” as opposed to the rest of one’s existence.

Helen Hardacre, Shintō and The State 1868-1988, p.18

Although I only got to read a few chapters, this is one of the passages that stood out to me.