Unpopular opinion: straight people using “partner” to refer to their SO actually helps normalize the term so that lgbt folx can use it without automatically outing themselves to strangers. It also helps other straight ppl get comfortable with the fact that strangers aren’t entitled to information about other people’s gender or sexuality.
Give op their hard-earned notes
Tbh I hear “partner” and assume gay, I didn’t know straights used it. Very fair point, OP
I hear ‘partner’ and think ‘gay’ too. A girl at work used it for months and I just went with it. When she would say ‘he’ I even thought maybe he was trans*. Anyways, someone using partner makes me more comfortable and I came out to her. She was just an intelligent straight girl that liked the term and was knowledgeable in human sexuality so definitely someone I should have felt comfortable coming out too. It’s a good sign of a straight person uses it IMO.
As a mental health clinician, this is actually my blanket term when discussing any romantic relationship. I agree it normalizes it, but I also think it’s a relatively safe term to use to describe most romantic relationships without making any assumptions about the person’s orientation or identity. I also use the word “partnered” when describing a monogamous relationship status.
The term “partner” also removes the implied hierarchy of boyfriend/girlfriend vs husband/wife. This is relevant both to non-monogamous people, and unmarried individuals for whom the importance of their relationship isn’t dictated by its legal status.
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
the thing i’m going to miss most, honestly, isn’t the porn, but the fact that people felt free to express themselves here, to vent, to complain, to celebrate. no other social media site has that.
and i think that part of it is because tumblr managed to really remain as close to outside of “real life” as possible. your parents aren’t on here. the people you see in real life aren’t on here. it was truly a space that was able to exist for you.
the people you followed and who followed you did so not because they felt some personal obligation (in the way facebook and twitter can feel), but because they liked what was being posted. they liked you being you, or at least being your tumblr persona.
and, perhaps more importantly, we all existed as a username. what appears next to your posts was nothing more than an avatar and that. real names were not only not required, but also discouraged, because you wouldn’t see them.
all of these things combined really created such a weirdly unique experience. and i’m really going to miss it
to expand on this a little, and bring in some thoughts brought on by some other reactions i’ve seen
tumblr was (and is, at least for now) very much a part of the Old Internet, the internet of the early 2000s, where you had a space to be weird and experiment and play around however you want. the internet that was really exemplified by geocities, a free-for-all smorgasbord of things that each publisher found interesting and felt like sharing.
i think it’s fair to compare the change of the internet to gentrification. we very much started with this wild west, no-mans-land that was inhabited by outcasts and artists who went by pseudonyms. as time went on that became less and less the case. now almost every site has a real name policy, and literally everyone is on the internet.
tumblr managed to stay weird until recently. tumblr managed to keep the oddballs hidden, to let people inhabit whatever persona they wanted, and to create and discard them as they pleased. and that’s something very special. something that “normal” society doesn’t have.
if you go on twitter, you’re expected to go as yourself, and while you can create numerous profiles, changing between them is difficult, and twitter will do its damndest to make sure you find people you know in real life. same with instagram. facebook is even more “real life”. and there’s a consequence to that. all the baggage that exists in real life exists with those sites.
on twitter the most popular posts are by celebrities, by names you’ve heard of in passing. on tumblr the most popular post is literally some shitpost by a random user.
facebook, and all the other “real name” people, talk about how that keeps people authentic, how it makes people act better, how it’s a “meritocracy”. they all exist in an ignorant privileged white boy bubble. without a real identity attached to an idea you don’t know what the person behind it looks like, you don’t know the life they live, and because of that your unconscious biases can’t come in to play (okay yes they can because we have biases around word usage, but less so than around skin color). the real “meritocracy” is the one where everyone is at a level playing field. and that was, to an extent, the old web (ignoring access to resources and limited internet access for a second if you will).
kicking off nsfw content and “female presenting nipples” is just another step of that old web disappearing, and the gates of capitalist, oppressive society going up again. and that’s what’s sad.
the last hold out of the old neighborhood is being torn down for condos.
This is a really poignant analysis. Thank you for sharing. 😔
[ Für vier Pfund kommt man von Edinburgh nach Portobello ans Meer. Ich glaube, das war einer der schönsten Tage auf der Studienfahrt. Wir haben uns alle gegen Arthur’s Seat entschieden und sind am Meer spazieren gegangen. Es schien als wäre jeder ein bisschen in seinen eigenen Gedanken verloren. Ich denke man lernt Menschen noch einmal ganz anders kennen, wenn sie an einem Ort sind, den sie lieben und es war so schön, auf das Meer zu zu laufen, jemand sagt: man riecht das Meer schon und alle versuchen den Duft aufzunehmen und strecken ihre Nasen in die Luft und wenn man den Geruch einfängt lächelt man und dann ist da auf einmal dieses Leuchten in den Augen, wenn der Wind mit den Haaren spielt und man das Gefühl hat das Meerwasser auf der Zungenspitze zu schmecken und wenn man dann, mit Menschen, die man mag am Strand entlangwandert und Fusspuren im Sand hinterlässt und lacht und sogar ein Stück rennt, weil es so wunderbar ist, dann ist das Glück ]
