Queer, Self-Love, and Feminist Playlist

Love is Not a Sin by the Wild Ponies

Respect by Aretha Franklin

Who Says by Selena Gomez & The Scene

Same Love by Macklemore

Fight Like a Girl by Emilie Autumn (note that many of Emilie's songs, including this one, were based off her real-life experiences in a mental hospital. Also, as a neurodivergent woman, she doesn't have the systemic power to benefit from ableism. And many of her fans, myself included, are disabled. We aren't offended by her lyrics. So don't tell me the portrayal of mental hospitals in this video is ableist. And don't dare hate on Emilie for her clothing choices or having had an abortion either because misogyny really pisses me off.)

Gothic Lolita by Emilia Autumn (trigger warning for rape, victim blaming, and child molestation)

Thank God I'm Pretty by Emilie Autumn (trigger warning for sexual harassment, misogyny, and brief mention of suicide.)

Girl by Destiny's Child

The Gay Song (trigger warning for semi-reclaimed slurs)

Chica de Calendario by Kumbia Queers

Rebel Girl by Bikini Kil

Skyscraper by Demi Lovato

Uprising of Love by Melissa Etheridge

This other playlist of non-romantic love songs that someone made for Aromantic Awareness Week

Shake It Off by Taylor Swift

Fucking Perfect by P!nk
And that's it. I think it's a pretty good list, but I wish I'd found more disabled singers, as well as some trans women singers and some hijabi singers.


Also, Lady Gaga has now been removed from the list for transphobic and intersexphobic comments.

Everyday Feminism

I love this magazine, and it has some really great intersectional and feminist articles. So I'm reblogging them for Women's History Month.

Celebrating the Love between Queer Women of Color - in 25 Gorgeous Photos

Patricia Arquette's Heart is in the Right Place and We Still Need To Call Her In

How Misogyny Shows Up in the Queer Community

"Witch Hunt" by Arati Warrier

When Street Harassers Are the Only People Calling You Beautiful

Things Straight Women Should Stop Saying to Queer Women

"Brown Girl" by Yesika Salgado

Why Black Women with Dark Skin are Beautiful

"For Teenage Girls" by Clementine von Radics

Consent vs. Silence

"Word Choice" by Imani Cezanne

"Trigger" by Terisa Siagatonu

Rejected Princesses

I just love this Tumblr blog and it's great for Women's History Month. Yes, the author (a straight white man) is incredibly privileged, but he still seems to be an awesome feminist and ally to women. So, yep, read it because it's awesome.

Quotes on Womanhood by Women

Happy Women's History Month!

“It’s the fire in my eyes, 
And the flash of my teeth, 
The swing in my waist, 
And the joy in my feet. 
I’m a woman 
Phenomenally.” - Maya Angelou

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.” - Virginia Woolf

“I will never be scared to love me.
I am a force to be reckoned with.
I am beautiful.” - Alexandra Elle

“The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity” - Julia Serano

“The start of empowering women comes with acknowledgment of thought that every born child is equal irrespective of its sex. ” - Nikita Dudani

“For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.”  - Gloria Ng

“In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world." - Julia Serano

“A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.” - Anya Seton

“Even to me the issue of "stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest" sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.” - Brene Brown

“I want to be strong and empowered. I want to shock everybody.” - Vanessa Hudgens

“I'd rather be thought of as smart, capable, strong, and compassionate than beautiful. Those things all persist long after beauty fades.” - Cassandra Duffy

“Books make dangerous devils out of women.” - Yxta Maya Murray

“Like other women who sought equality, the amount of trouble I cause is inversely proportional to my physical size.” - Cassandra Duffy

“Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.” - Trisha Posner

“A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.” - Shannon Celebi

“The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.” - bell hooks

"I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior." - Audre Lorde

"Before I die, I will see our community [the queer community, but specifically trans women] given the respect we deserve. I'll be damned if I'm going to my grave without having the respect this community deserves. I want to go wherever I go with that in my soul and peacefully say I've finally overcome." - Sylvia Rivera

Badass Black Women

These beautiful, badass ladies have kicked some serious butt and took names while fighting oppressive systems of power and changing the world. They deserve recognition. Therefore, I'm reblogging these:

22 Badass Black Women Who are Leading Movements, Changing the World, And Generally Being Awesome

9 Badass Black Feminists and Their Books that Shook the World

100+ LGBTQ Black Women You Should Know

Sojourner Truth

Harriet Tubman

Ella Fitzgerald

Rosa Parks

Dear Allies...

Like many other marginalized people, I have had issues with prejudice. Not okay, but also not surprising.

What is kind of surprising is that the aggression I've faced from people who are privileged in ways that I am not sometimes comes from people who claim to respect the communities to which I belong or to be allies to us. I've seen a straight cis girl enter a safe space for queer youth and say that if we were offended by queerphobic jokes, that was our own fault and we should just choose not to listen. When I called out this fanfiction writer on their usage of an ableist slur, they proceeded to inform me that I, a neurodivergent person who has actually been called said slur, was being oversensitive, that I was attacking them, and that I had no right to call them ableist...because they don't think disabled people - and, regardless of what abled people might think, there are people who identify as disabled  - are a burden on society. Then there was Paula Deen's usage of the n-word (I'm white, but I was pissed off and rightfully so. I don't care what the guy was doing, and frankly I doubt she's even telling the truth about the circumstances - she's white and therefore she does not get to use the n-word. The fact that she does and has not apologized for this makes her racist. Period).

So! Let's get on with the post, shall we? 

1. You do not get a fucking cookie.

It seems like some allies assume that because they support a marginalized community, that community is somehow obligated to shower them with respect or make special allowances for them - what is known in the online activist community as 'ally cookies'. No one is going to give you an ally cookie and you don't deserve one. You aren't special for being a decent human being.

2. You do not get to decide if you are an ally.

Okay, it might seem rude to tell someone this, but when people disrespect me - and my quasi allies often have - I reserve the right to be rude. I reserve the right to judge. I reserve the right to tell people off, to use profanity to get a point across, and to be a pain in the ass. And I should do these things, because when people are being problematic, it needs to be made clear that their behavior is unacceptable. I will call them out and I won't really care if that bothers them. If they insistently disrespect my identity, dominate my safe spaces, and refuse to listen when I or others like me speak, I do not consider them my ally.

Privileged people, you do not get to decide if you are an ally. The community you are supporting does.

3. Be respectful when entering safe spaces.

I am a member of a few different Facebook groups dominated by people of color, and marketed towards people of color. The Official Black Poetry Cafe is one of my favorites, and I definitely recommend it to any people of color or allies to people of color who write poetry. Fantastic group, and very talented poets.

Now, it's okay that I, a white intersectional feminist, am in a poetry group dominated by black people (though it is open to all races) because I do not make assumptions about the other writers, because I am respectful, because I am careful not to dominate the discussion, because I acknowledge that I am privileged, because I respect that the group is their safe space and I am a guest, and because I know when to...

4. Shut up and listen.

This is yet another thing that many allies seem to have a problem with. It is something that I used to have a problem with.

 It's understandable; no one wants to acknowledge that they have the potential to systemically dehumanize, devalue, and demean a minority group. No one wants to be the bad guy. But that doesn't mean getting defensive when a marginalized person talks about the oppression they have experienced from a privileged community with which you identify is okay either. Just let them talk, let yourself be called out, and learn to apologize after being called out. Be sensitive to other people's experiences, admit that you don't know everything, and that just because something doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it never happens.

5. You are not part of the community.

This especially seems to be a problem with allies of the queer community. That girl I mentioned at the beginning of the post repeatedly insists that she is part of the queer community, despite being straight, cisgender, and dyadic. The reasoning is that she is an ally.

No. Just no. This girl is not queer. She is not part of the queer community. She is a (self-proclaimed) ally to the queer community, though because of her tendency to ignore her own privilege, consistently be defensive when called out, insist that we amend our statements (i.e. homophobes, not straight people), and to dominate conversations, I, as a queer person, do not consider her an ally. I will not consider her an ally until she apologizes for her behavior and makes an effort to not allow said behavior to continue.

Allies, when one of the marginalized people you support informs you that they don't consider you part of their community, don't get angry. Don't get defensive. The fact is, you aren't a part of their community, and it's incredibly appropriative and disrespectful to say that being an ally means that you are.

6. You are privileged. Acknowledge it.

Like I said, nobody wants to acknowledge their own privilege. Confronting the systemic power you have over other people, based on something as vital and integral as race or religion, and doing everything you possibly can to destroy that power isn't a comfy experience. It's not an easy one. But it's a necessary one, and unless you can do that, you're a bad ally.

The people you are supporting are going to call you out on your privilege and point out any bias you have because of said privilege. If you can't acknowledge that, you're just going to make people feel disrespected and ignored in their own safe spaces, and that's not okay. That's not being a good ally. So I'll offer up this article as a guide to all things privilege. Really, the entire site is just a fantastic guide in general.

So, allies, just follow the guide and...and it is really late right now, and I need sleep. Until next time.

In Which I Totally Pwn a Sizeist, Misogynistic Writer

As I'm sure many of you know, I have a profile on the fandom website, fanfiction.net. I was scrolling through the Fairly Oddparents fanfiction archive when I found this writer.

As a nonbinary person, I'm reluctant to gender this person, whose identity I don't know. However, problematic language like "I like fat chubby female bellys" and their fetishization of lesbians and fat women indicates to me that they are a straight, cisgender, thin male.

In any case, this person seems incredibly ignorant and upholds discriminatory tendencies and misogyny in their writing, which I simply can not accept. So I called them out on it here. Look for my screen name, powerofthepen123, and that one really long review.

Of course, I can't make claims like "fetishization of lesbians and fat women" without proper evidence.

1. They write gay pairings, but with only femslash. There are no gay male pairings under the screen name Squishy Belly Lover (to be fair, I haven't written any major gay male pairings either, but I have included ace representation and made the relationship between my Firelight OCs, Aiya Singh and Blue Murphy, romantic and healthy and freaking not abusive or manipulative. I made it somewhat like a real relationship that would appeal to real teen lesbians, drawing upon the qualities that I look for in potential girlfriends as well as the experiences and stories I've heard from other young women-loving women). In their stories that include femslash, the characters seem to have little to nothing in common, to have no or very little sexual chemistry in the canon, or both.

2. The "romance" in these pairings, if you can call it romance when they're not really doing anything to make the women realistically develop a relatable romantic relationship, seems to consist mostly of the two lesbian characters going out to all-you-can-eat buffets while one character raids the whole thing and the other watches, almost drooling with lust as her girlfriend gains weight. The fat woman is somehow fine with this fetishization; realistically this is at least plausible because there's a myth in queer subculture that cis lesbians are unable to uphold the patriarchy, so it might not occur to these fat lesbians to call out their thin, cis girlfriends on the objectification they are perpetrating. However, this objectification is not portrayed realistically, and the potential opportunity to educate readers about misogyny in the lesbian community seems to fly right over Squishy Belly Lover's head.

3. The lesbian sex in SBL's stories seems like it came from fetishistic lesbian porn. As a sex-positive feminist, I support sex workers and that includes porn stars, but so much of pornography (excluding gay male) is marketed toward straight men. That includes lesbian porn, which seems to be more about performing for men than realistic sexual enjoyment for actual lesbians. Most lesbians I've talked to that have watched and/or read porn find lesbian porn unenjoyable. 

I've read lesbian romance that included sex scenes, and was often left feeling like said sex wasn't truly intended to cater to my desires. Of course, as a transgender fat person, I have issues with my body even though I'm trying to improve my relationship with it. But, body issues aside, I do know what I want in sex, and the heterosexism invading lesbian porn isn't it.

I'm a lesbian and I'm proud of being one. There are a lot of great things about being a queer woman (as I mentioned in the post where I came out as genderfluid, woman is one of the labels I identify with), but fetishization by straight men isn't one of them. If you'd like to read about how porn can be more feminist, check out this article.

4. When describing the appearance of the fat women in his stories, Squishy Belly Lover rarely goes beyond aspects of their appearances related to their weight. They make it clear in their profile that they find bigger women sexually attractive, but it's a fine line between having a preference and fetishizing a marginalized group of people (i.e. the harassment APIA, Native American, and Latina women face from straight white men). Judging by Squishy's stories, they don't seem to realize that this is fetishization, let alone that said fetishization is problematic.

I don't want to be desexualized for being fat, but I will also not tolerate benevolent sizeism. I am a human being and I deserve to be valued and seen as beautiful, just as anyone else does. Not despite my fatness. Not because of my fatness. But with, and regardless of, my fatness. I am a fat queer woman and I am beautiful. I am valued and valuable, though certain people - including Squishy Belly Lover - might not treat people like me that way.

5. Squishy Belly Lover presumes to understand the experiences of fat women and lesbians - clearly, they haven't actually talked to any fat women or lesbians about this. Their work practically reeks of thin privilege and male privilege, another thing that leads me to believe they are a thin, cis male. They are not a woman. They are not fat. They are not gay. If they are going to write stories about fat, gay women - and they should, because fat gay women deserve to be written about - they need to be sensitive and listen to the experiences of actual fat, gay women in order to write these stories respectfully.



Media inclusivity is important. So is using a privileged voice responsibly. It is up to us, as privileged writers, to do so.