Without naming names there is a discourse I am hesitant to step into for many reasons, but I have a bit of knowledge to bring to the table, and a perspective,and a lot of frustration

The issue: a visible trans woman published an article re:erotic experiences in multiplayer games

So, this woman has been vocal about her right to be vocal about sex and sexual expression, and I agree, she should have that. I don’t think it’s wrong to post about your sexual desires or experiences on Twitter, or to write about them in most contexts. I agree trans ppl get hit

Here’s the thing: she’s not stupid. I currently have her blocked, up from muted, not out of personal animosity but because her viewpoints are frequently frustrating to me and I didn’t need that in my life. Truly, no animosity.

Anyway I used to see her RTed enough to know she’s smart and had to have known that the article would produce massive backlash. Sometimes you gotta publish an article that provokes massive backlash, you gotta speak truth to power, but I question that this article is that

Moreover,want to emphasize that the fault here above all lies with the editor who approved the piece, who was willing to subject a columnist to inevitable harassment (whether or not that columnist felt she was okay with that)and a community to the backlash as well, all for clicks

here’s the substance of what I have to say: the article discusses-hypothetically, apparently, rather than in actual practice, but I don’t think this matters since the idea is that it would be something someone could or should do - involving other players unknowingly in sex stuff>

This is an inevitable possibility in multiplayer gaming, I could be playing PUBG and someone could be getting off on shooting me, I would never know. It seems like it’d be *uncommon* - the author of this piece picked a different Battle Royale title that seems unsexual too - but.

It probably does happen. And we shouldn’t surveil or arrest people if they do that and no one knows and look I’m getting into arguing about the ethics of what the article talked about and I don’t want to be bogged down in that

I think the author’s premise is flawed more deeply

So, I’ve already asserted my “sex positive” credentials. In the past I’ve acknowledged having been interested in bondage and D/s activities. I don’t usually talk about my sexuality in the having-sex sense these days largely bc it’s just not my thing anymore. But.

I’m mentioning this because I don’t want my friends who do talk more about sexuality, who make sexual art, who practice sexualities that are marginalized, to feel like I’m not in favor of that. However, there’s something that gets mixed up with sex positivity I think ppl miss

This is really hard to talk about bc it can easily be thrown back at me as playing respectability politics or saying certain things are okay and others not (when all the things are okay) or saying it’s okay for trans women to face disproportionate harassment for talking about sex

But this is really a thing that is not specific to trans women, may have its *roots* in queer culture of the past but has been filtered through academia, and is endemic in the writings of the specific author of this gaming piece:

Queer theory’s idea of sexuality (as in sex)’s intrinsicness to queer experience. The author of this piece has espoused this viewpoint before, talking about how public expressions of sexuality are important to protect bc they protect queerness itself.

This is… not quite right.

Or rather - and keep in mind, this is coming from graduate level study of queer theory, and having read a lot of this - this is coming from a society-level oppressive conflation of sex-having with sexuality, which led to a queer community acceptance of same, and now backlash

So, the most common way this comes up is in discourses around pride parades, and kids attending pride parades, and what it’s acceptable for them to see. Currently the LGBT/queer community is basically split on this.

Everyone in the community pretty much thinks it should be ok for kids to come to pride parades, some people think displays of public sexuality in the sense of people having sex or doing kink things should be hidden or removed to keep kids “safe,” others vehemently oppose this

The “remove sex-having and kink from pride parades” faction includes a lot of Gen Z who are involved with purity-type stuff, and I am not with them. I don’t have a clean solution for pride parades, but I do think that it’s important to understand the pitfalls of the counterpoint

Specifically: the counterpoint goes as follows.

“Since at least the Nazis, anti-queer forces have tried to regulate queer existence by defining everything we do as sexual, for instance by defining trans people dressing as their gender as sexual or fetishistic and thus obscene”

This is COMPLETELY TRUE and it’s why I’m not particularly in favor of messing with the status quo of Pride parades.

An even more subtle example is how earlier in this thread I said I don’t discuss my “sexuality” much, but in fact I talk about being lesbian all the time.

Anti-queer forces in society DO want to “morally mandate us all out of existence” and they will construe everyday things we do as sexual to do that. See also: using bathrooms.

But.But but but but but.

We are intelligent human beings and not computers. It’s absolutely worthwhile to point out that heterosexual couples not only do things that indicate they would like to fck each other and plan to do so in public, they also put things that are basically D/s in wedding vows.AND YET

The jump from that point to “and so there is no context where discussion of or conducting of sex acts is inappropriate, and we should definitely print this think piece about how playing online multiplayer combat games is inherently erotic, and saying so is anti-queer” is…a jump

this is about academic queer theory, which really enjoys (I use that term unironically, there’s a lot of talk in academic queer texts about joy and pleasure in making up weird theories) leaping from “cishets think everything we do is sexual” to “everything we do is sexual”

The author of the thinkpiece that caused all of this (and again, I blame her editor much more than her) is steeped in academic queer theory lingo. And frankly, as someone who used to live and breathe that stuff, it's just wrong.

Not everything we do is sexual. This isn't a plea for "protecting innocence." In fact, while I brought up the "kids at pride parades" issue, none of this for me has anything to do with children. I'm not a child, haven't been for a long time, not a parent either. This is about us.

Us. LGBT or queer adults. Not everything we do is sexual. The cishets are wrong to make that conflation. That doesn't make us doing sexual things shameful any more than it does when cishets do it(and I feel like trans ppl, many of whom were sexual pre-transition, should get this)

The thing I keep circling around that I want you to take from this thread is that there is this idea in queer theory that everything for *everyone* is fundamentally sexual in some way, at least if it involves interacting with other people.

That's how you get to "playing a battle royale game about defeating the digital avatars of people from around the world, is actually, an erotic thing". That's absurd, but it's something a lot of famous academics would stand behind.

And that's how people get the idea that we need to have a discussion of what if you connected a vibrator to your controller while trying to destroy people's virtual avatars, because really, isn't that what you're metaphorically doi -

No. It isn't. That's just a bad idea. Stop.

Connecting the vibrator is a bad idea but so is the idea that it's inherently sexual to play a video game (unless the game is, like, Catherine or some other dating sim or otome, in which case, ok yeah fair. Or if you're getting married in FFXIV. Edge cases.)

If you spend enough time with queer theory you will repeatedly hear the discussion of, like "the erotics of fishing" or "the erotic energy of origami" or whatever and, just like... ok, fetishes exist and are real and valid but most people aren't being sexual w these things.

And there's a final sleight of hand that makes this messy, which is that for a lot of queer theorists "erotic" has been separated entirely from actual sex, they can talk about how something is erotic but never actually think about genitalia while doing it, or being turned on

Like I think they're going back to translations of "eros" and using it to mean very different things, a lot of them derived from the fcked up sexual culture that Plato and Socrates were in, and coming up with abstractions. But this article writer took things literally.

Anyway no one should dogpile or harass the author in question, I am disappointed that we have to deal with this flak as a community from bad faith actors but I do acknowledge they would have attacked anyway.

I mainly just want y'all to understand that queer theory uses "erotic" in a very weird way that's not literal, that's also probably wrong, and this article and the author's previous controversial article both literalize metaphors that should stay metaphors.

None of that means I want to ban consenting adults from whatever or that I want a moral panic. I just think most people don't even know where this author is coming from; I do, I think she's using terms wrong, I also think the basic premise is wrong.

I know I'm gonna regret this thread