Skip to main content

Fashion is Smashin

I have just created a new reddit: r/FashionIsSmashin. (No, it isn't misspelled and I didn't run out of space for letters. I want it to RHYME. Okay?)

I've had that name for a project in my head for more than two years. It dates to around the time I wrote a post elsewhere called An Ounce of Prevention. I did nothing with it at the time because I KNEW for a FACT someone was stealing ideas from me, there were people expecting me to WORK FOR FREE for them while they heaped abuse on me and etc, so I wrote up a very general blog post and left it at that.

I have a son who is Ace -- Asexual -- and likely on the ASD spectrum and he does not care about clothes or what YOU think of him, but I raised him, I like him, I accept him and I also know a lot about clothes, so he's very comfortable in his clothes and with himself and not because he's One Of The Beautiful People or anything like that.

And it's not like he never gets homophobic shit from people. He does. But I know for a fact it could be so much worse and he's good at de-escalating and part of that is he is not in agony over his own mother being unable to accept him or some shit, so there is no means to get your emotional hooks in him.

He just sees YOU as an asshole with personal problems. He's not all wrapped around the axle with some need to prove himself or find acceptance or whatever, so I'm very clear that public image can be a projection of the internalized hatred that some LGBTQ individuals carry.

It ends up being a case of "You can't get there from here" or "The key is in the safe." You need to feel acceptance to look better, you need to look better to get acceptance from someone else and you end up failing to find your way out of this trap someone tossed you into when you were a kid -- that someone like YOU is "too ugly" in some social or moral sense in their mind and that internalized "ugly" gets worn on your sleeve as a visual kind of ugly.

I don't know where I'm going with this. If I didn't have a serious medical condition and blah blah blah, I might ENJOY doing something with this in person similar to Creative Mornings, which meets once a month in person.

I do a lot online because I have a permanently compromised immune system and people can't breathe on me via internet, much less cough on me. How this does anything meaningful and substantive online, I do not know.

Some thoughts:

There are already LGBTQ fashion subs. For a time, I somewhat regularly read one or more of them. I never really felt welcome to try to be helpful there.

How best to position this? I don't know. When you create health clinics to get birth control into the hands of teens, they need to offer OTHER services so that going there doesn't de facto mark you as a "slut."

I don't really want this to be a "gay thing." I want this to be an INCLUSIVE thing that somehow serves the LGBTQ community.

Maybe I'm stupid and too idealistic.

Or maybe like my asexual son has said about me: If I tell you I can walk on water, I have a prototype water-walking set of boots in my fucking closet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anger Management

I was molested and raped as a child. I spent my teens and twenties filled with anger. My therapist once said something like "How did I know you were angry? Maybe it was the flames shooting out your ears." He wasn't actually talking about me. He was describing someone else. But he could have been talking about me. I took up role playing gaming in my teens and my first character was a Red Sonja-esque character with long red tresses. She was a fighter mage and she had issues. Gaming was good for me. I made a lot of friends and they were mostly male and they were protective of me. I began to put down my baggage. At some point, I retired that first character because she was so angry and toxic and I wasn't anymore. Playing her required me to put back on the mantel of so much baggage that I had worked hard to put down and it wasn't good for me to keep that alive. In my late twenties, me and my husband bought a house and it was about thirty minutes from the ...
Read more

Actionable Advice

I had a very private life. I tend to think first about what individuals can do. This post is reframing this blog as more explicitly political or about large scale social things. Goal One Remove all child molesters from positions of moral authority. If you are pro LGBTQ rights, I think the SINGLE most important thing you can work on is putting child molester priests (preachers, Rabbis, etc) in prison for their crimes. That's a previously published unsupported Opinion . Here's an attempt to support or explain that opinion. I don't know how well I say it, but I have a piece called Trauma and being LGBTQ  and it's probably not the only place I try to say that I believe that: 1. 2000 percent of humanity has BAGGAGE about sexual and gender stuff. 2. Simply BEING LGBTQ tends to trigger everyone you meet about their issues and then they take it out on you. Christianity trends extremely homophobic and the entire PLANET knows the Catholic Church has a POLICY of moving child moles...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another think

And another reason to not REALLY be enthused about continuing to write here: I'm very very very against trying to "cure" people of being gay, but I suspect that some people who think they are gay are really attracted to people who have enough of something in common with them and they just aren't finding it in members of the opposite sex. Some chick on probably Reddit remarked once that she was beginning to worry she liked bad guys and then realized all the bad guys in movies she liked were played by the same actor. She liked that actor in any role he played, bad guy or not. During my divorce, I was involved with a man fourteen years older than me and about the time I was thinking "This is a shit show and I'm NEVER getting with an older man again." I met a guy sixteen years older than me and we really hit it off. I have B.A.G.G.A.G.E about my tendency to like older men. It took me a long time to sort that and not feel like me liking older men somehow was ...
Post a Comment
Read more