After the first installment of The Fool’s Journey, a bunch of you wanted recommendations for tarot decks and/or books to get for Tarot School and for, like, life in general. So here’s a quick Tarot School extra with a few suggestions!
“In Autostraddle, I expect a performance of complexity from a publication covering issues that are not saccharine. I do not know how to accept my values reflected in a voice I do not recognize as my own. I don’t expect the voice of the subaltern to sound like a cheerleader. You no longer have to be straight to be square.”
You know, sometimes life as a lady who loves ladies isn’t cake and sometimes I need a break. That rhymed motherfucker, is my life a lie now? Does my desire for fluff that centers my experience as a queer person negate my interest in totes serious media? Is this an asinine question that was asked and answered back in the fucking Cretaceous? I get to have both and happily Autostraddle provides both. This is why we’re BFF.
When linguistic specificity is so essential to normalizing and dignifying those identities that Autostraddle claims to include (by giving transpeople, queens, and butches the same voice and respect as, say, straight women), its casual treatment of language undermines its own important work.
Okay first of all, you don’t get to criticize Autostraddle’s “casual treatment of language’ while subjecting our identities to your casual ignorance. You need to put a space between ‘trans’ and ‘people’ because being trans is an aspect of a person’s humanity not the sum total of it. Queen is a term most commonly found in boy on boy culture, not girl on girl culture. This shit is basic, and the only undermining being done here is of your own argument. If you cannot be arsed enough to acquaint yourself with the goddamn minimum maybe you shouldn’t be throwing stones at this house you don’t own and didn’t build.
Oh, and this ‘linguistic vapidity’ business? How the fuck else does anyone normalize ‘nontraditional’ gender identities without incorporating them into their everyday speech? If I am seeking to legitimize and demystify an aspect of my identity I’m not going to approach it as something super fucking formal. My life is not a black tie event. I grant myself legitimacy when I share how my identity functions with the rest of the world clearly and in my own words. Autostraddle does the hard work of normalizing the specificities of queer life by presenting them along side NORMAL THINGS.
For the record, it isn’t Autostraddle’s job to normalize shit. Autostraddle’s job is to speak to the queer lady community in all it’s glorious complexity with honesty and sensitivity. It’s not always successful because no one ever is, but what the site does consistently succeed at is learning from its mistakes.
That doesn’t seem to be enough to elevate their content to ‘super academic legitimate hamburger’ status tho. What Autostraddle is failing to do is provide ‘edgy’ queer outreach to a whatever-wave straight feminist with a boner for academic condescension and an ax to grind about bourgie accessibility. Diane Clarke’s main objection seems to be that Autostraddle looks so *gasp* normal!
I do not know how to accept my values reflected in a voice I do not recognize as my own. I don’t expect the voice of the subaltern to sound like a cheerleader.
Diana Clark doesn’t get to tell me that I’m just so over right now because I belong to a club she presumes would have her. Sorry, but you can’t sit with us. Do we get our authenticity back now? I don’t know if you know Diana, but it’s not every day that my identity is celebrated. If Autostraddle’s upbeat attitude is cheering anyone on it’s me and thank god because I need it. It is made painfully clear to me everyday how much of a freak straight culture considers me to be.
I am a masc-of-center person assigned female at birth who frequently falls in love with people who identify as ladies. If that description sounded tortured that’s because it is. Lots of us are still hashing this shit out for ourselves and sites like Autostraddle help with the heavy lifting by giving us a space to do so without sacrificing our right to levity and cheer.
I used to frequent super heavy places like feministe. I respect their site and what they do, but their content is simply too unrelenting for me to keep up with while maintaining my mental health. I need the niceness, the cheeriness and the light touch Autostraddle so frequently employs because my life is already super dark. Needing these things doesn’t make me a bad queer or a bad feminist.
A website that makes money off of silly stuff isn’t news. A straight writer who attacks one of the few independent media outlets run by and for queer women in an effort to grapple with her own internalized misogyny is the real story.
There’s something troubling in consumer advocacy, beyond turning struggles into fashion statements. At some level, the commodification of activism on Autostraddle is a way to transmute difficult truths into digestible, feminized products—as containable and limited as Cosmopolitan’s ideal woman.
Newsflash queers, in order for our media to be truly legit we need to defeat capitalism first. Lesbian separatism is the new Pilates! No wait, I mean down with Pilates because it’s part of racist capitalist patriarchy! I mean kyriarchy. I mean fuck Autostraddle for trying to live in a world where capitalism exists without carting themselves off to the new Trans and Bi inclusive Lesbian compound where barefooted dykes spin their own yarn and manufacture artisan Q-tips.
Does Autostraddle routinely publish articles written in the *ahem* millennial vernacular? Fucking duh. Does modulating one’s tone in order to make difficult and weighty topics accessible inherently inauthentic and or trivializing? Fucking no. Did Diana Clarke dedicate her debut article on The Baffler to tone policing? Fucking yes. By publishing this article, did The Baffler engage in the same lucrative clickbait tactics that this article accuses Autostraddle of doing? Who’s to say? Lol, j/k. Yes, obvs yes.
tl;dr Autostraddle is not a perfect media outlet. It has fucked up and fucked up royally in the past. While it has made marked progress incorporating a larger variety of voices in the articles it features, Autostraddle’s core editorial staff is still predominantly white and cis. There are a lot of real reasons to criticize Autostraddle, Diana Clarke chose to ignore all of them and engage in dumb as fuck tone policing, instead.
I wasn’t going to say anything else about this Autostraddle clusterfuck, but holy shit nerdsery…. Perfect commentary is PERFECT. I bolded the last part cuz it was so perfect.
You’ve got a CSA box full of vegetables and you want to be the kind of person who prepares and consumes all of those vegetables, but sometimes that’s challenging. Here are 19 recipes to use up some of the weirdest vegetables at the bottom of your box!
An installment of BPM: Booze Paired with Music. A brief exposé on artists, popular or obscure, to suit your need for beats. Along with it, a little treat to make for yourself while you bask in the sound of glory and a drink well done. As a former DJ, violinist, aca-bopper, and hip-hop dancer, I try to bring you as much variety in artists and commentary as I can. Listen on!
“A teaching programme for women who want to spread the Dodson word was introduced this year. “Women tell me they worry their fantasies aren’t feminist enough. I tell them: ‘Honey, the dirtier…
This one’s for you, people with dead moms and moms or mom-type figures that Hallmark doesn’t make cards about and stores don’t make promotions for:
My mom died seven years ago, and this time of year is always daunting. It’s always felt lonely when I’ve been surrounded by people casually (sometimes resentfully) talking about what they’re doing for their moms. It’s also grating when businesses take the two weeks before Mother’s Day to berate the general public to buy stuff to show your mom you care. But even though it sometimes feels like it, I know I’m not the only one who experiences this, which is why I was so thrilled to find Mamas Day last year.
Eurovision results are in: Austria’s Conchita Wurst wins!
“This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. You know who you are… we are unstoppable.”
For the unacquainted, Eurovision is a yearly celebration of pop, camp and sometimes confusion, and this year’s in particular was slated to be a “hotbed of sodomy” because of Wurst’s participation. Wurst was a clear crowd favourite going in, but – surprise! – some people in Russia and Belarus petitioned to have her performance cut from their national broadcasts.
"Sad cloud" and "naked Christmas tree" did not make the list. You’re welcome, makers of anti-depressant commercials!
Like the author, I’m doing fine right now but this is just too relate-able and I have also been addicted to my autostraddle lately, so I figured I may as well share a part of the reason why. Hopefully if you have experienced anything similar you will find some weird sense of comfort in this list. 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 19, 23!
I actually love Werewolves of London because my best friend from high school used “I saw a Werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vicks and his hair was perfect” as her senior quote and it felt like a big secret only we knew about. I particularly love Werewolves of London because it has no deeper meaning. It’s just about werewolves hanging out in London.
Welcome to the 18th and 19th recaps of the fifth season of Glee, a show about a bunch of teens and their dogs hunting out mysteries in their super cool van.
"There’s also, I believe, this assumption that all trans people, especially trans women, hate our bodies and are oddly and perhaps dysfunctionally disconnected from our physical forms. That plays into this idea seen in so many dramatic Hollywood shock reveals that trans bodies are inherently horrifying.
"But here’s the deal: I both like and am my body. I am a girl, ergo I have a girl’s body. It’s neat."
