Ally > Recent Status Updates

Psyche's quest ends when, at last, Cupid declares his devotion to her, and Jupiter grants the two permission to marry, so long as Cupid promises to fire his arrows at any disinterested woman Jupiter desires.

[what a horrifying metaphor for assimilationism]

But the best known moment in the life of Orpheus has nothing to do with his song. It’s just a man deciding he would rather see his beloved than any future the gods could promise.

While Bow-wow has never been sexualized, then, he does come very close to sexuality.

[this queen sleeps with their childhood stuffed animal and their guy of the night simultaneously... I was feeling very distant from this narrator who is somehow further separated from material reality by their aversion to metaphor, but this detail totally charmed me]

I've been getting bored with metaphors anyway. I've decided that I don't like them because one thing is never another thing and it's a lie to say something is anything but itself. It's ontologically and physically impossible. In fact not even apple and apple can be each other. So the gay mens' sexual walking tour of Manhattan has this additional challenge.

The mother possum had made that crawl when she was young, too, and then made whatever possum life that followed, which I'm sure wasn't easy. Is this what it takes to live sometimes? Digging into a pouch, tossing, rummaging, tossing, and running? Leaving what you love three feet apart? Our own nature can pull us so easily to a horror like this. To throwing to the ground as we flee who we were.

...I was beginning to navigate some of that desire for Simon, which was a quality of loss, as I understand all desire, or rather all the desire I have known. That my want for another body arrived first, with the knowledge that it could not be. Maybe this is what binds the family of men together. The desire for the top and the lack of a top. A torque of specificity and hope.

I'm still uncertain whether these are the experiences I had hoped to find, just as I can't tell whether I am conforming to fill a shape, or drawing its boundaries.

"Since you will soon be dead, I may as well tell you everything."

[hahahahaha yep this queen went to supervillain school]

[spoiler] was sweet gao and lotus tea. She was moonlight and new snow. I laughed a little, and she did too. My heart soared, and I kissed her back. Nobody had ever taught me how. I just did. Maybe it was only natural, an act every girl in Tensha was born knowing how to do.

[this book had up to this point not thrown me any curveballs but I DID NOT EXPECT DOOMED LESBIANISM]

"The ancient poets* say that when we look at the same moon as the ones we love, our hearts are connected through heaven, no matter how far away we are."

[*James Ingram and Linda Ronstadt, "Somewhere Out There"]

He was... is... brilliant. That is no exaggeration [...] Terren was exceptional. We did not know it for a long time. "My brother is the cleverest," Maro kept telling us, but none of us believed him. How could we, when the prince spoke little, hid often.

[not *super* psyched about a sadistic autistic-coded prince in a world of amoral faggoty eunuchs, despite knowing a bunch of people who fit the brief in real life]

[yikes the wooden-ness of Eric Yang, the male narrator, is intolerable]

I met him shortly after I came to the palace, after having been castrated at the age of six.

[WHY THE HELL IS THIS BEING NARRATED IN FIRST PERSON SEXY BASSO PROFUNDO!? horrifying casting.]

Meanwhile, Willard’s/Frank’s politics were self-described as Christian socialism, a pointedly anticommunist ideology that did not treat class conflict as central (the aim was rather to bring workers and capitalists together in cooperation).

[This is wildly wrong on Christian socialism generally & Willard's views specifically. They're perhaps anticommunist in that they don't explicitly advocate violent revolution?]

[weird to bring up Emma Goldman as a counterexample to the racism of Frances Willard and other temperance activists, but not bring up Goldman's racist beef w/Lucy Parsons & insistence that a class analysis should subsume a racial one.]

They clung fast to the idea that some kinds of sex were inherently criminal.

[This is in the context of criticizing women organizing against (well-documented, not imaginary) forced prostitution of children. It follows passages which are critical of efforts to create / raise an age of consent, and which characterize temperance as blaming booze to avoid blaming men.]

The Page Act was the very first law limiting who could come and inhabit the settler-colonial republic.

[I think this is incorrect - the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798 also limited immigration. Parts were expired / repealed a few years later but the Alien Enemies Act is still law.]

[this is kinda unhinged - first of all, transatlantic slave trade is criminalized in the US in 1808 but chattel slavery continues there until 1865 (in Brazil the corresponding dates are 1826 & 1888). Second "unmaking the world in which slavery is possible" is not a coherent, realizable policy goal. No 19th c. abolitionist I've read speaks in those terms - they all want the laws to change.]

I can think of few words so misused as the word abolition. Contrary to what is often implied, the criminalization of the trans-atlantic slave trade, and therefore of chattel slavery by Western nations in the 19th century, did not by itself realize the goal of unmaking the society that had enslaved - that could enslave - human beings. Yet the latter is what abolition requires.

[I think we're elevating minor figures again in order to create a straw man feminism -- here Belgian Congo genocide apologist May French-Sheldon, who, while while she may have leveraged contemporary conversation about women for publicity, doesn't seem to have a connection to feminist organizing (aside mayyyyybe from speaking @ women's colleges, which isn't much of a signal of feminism pre-WWII).]

[SBA & ECS were non-awesome in many ways, I like to think I would have been on the side of Lucy Stone & Frances Harper, but understanding this history requires the context of how quickly Black men turned against equal rights after 14A/15A & that their social & legal position was superior to white women for a time. Even DuBois, who defended women's suffrage to other Black men, thought women shouldn't work.]

[the split in the women's movement post-14A/15A is something I've studied in depth before & these takes are way off - accurate take that ECS deployed racism, but SBA is a more complex case; wildly downplays Douglass's sexism & betrayal of universal suffrage; equates the early use of the word "eugenics" with scientific racism/Darwinism when for many, early on, it was synonymous with today's "public health".]

...how terrible all the words were for body parts and how fast you used them up. Rod, manliness, womanliness, soft mounds, staff, nub, pleasure bud, stiff peaks. [...] Sugar stick, cranny hunter, fornicating engine, plugtail? [...] Cat heads or Cupid's kettledrums for breasts. [...] tuzzy muzzy, dumb glutton, crinkum crankum, venerable monosyllable...

[this book is so full of joy]

Lucky people found the work they were meant to do. Unlucky people found love.

"Did you know that once your grandmother sent me a link to a ridiculous piece of fan fiction about Barry Manilow Potter? He grew up and became a pop star and got together with Ron at the Copa Cabana, like the song, only with a happy ending and much weirder Voldemort. Her name was Vola. She was a noseless showgirl."

[I LOVE THIS BOOK]

"Oh my, do we have an *individual* here?... Hold on to that, honey."

[how exactly we get the flamboyantly gay stylist in a world where people are murdered for sex outside marriage is unclear to me]

"America. I'm supposed to be providing for you. It's humiliating for me to come here and have you do all this for me [feed me some pastries]... I'm not some charity case, America. I'm a man. I'm supposed to be a provider."

[if this isn't an act to free up America to go after Maxon, this guy is *such* a dud, ugh.]

[I shouldn't think too hard about dystop-YA worldbuilding but how on earth does the artist & performer class end up below the professional & educated classes? What changes about human nature that an art career stops being the most highly-valued luxury good for the elite?]

Hostile encounters between state and citizen are routinely preceded by the expression "Put your hands where I can see them!" We count on pockets even in despair, as when Virginia Woolf, before she waded into the fast-running River Ouse, weighed down her pockets with river stones to ensure her drowning.

[WTactualF is this passage - I hate academic humor & its abstraction of death & suffering as impossibly far away]