it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
#my mom’s a historian#does a lot of research#one of the main takeaways from the census data of literally every US census since the beginning#is that the nuclear family has never been the actual norm#nobody really ever lived like that#and a lot don’t now#and it’s clearly artificial and not ideal for most people#every household in the census had at least a grandma#usually a cousin#some rando#someone living in the house who wasn’t mom or dad or kid#always someone#usually several someones#some uncles etc.#unmarried aunties#that sort of person#but often unrelated friends#we’ve never really lived alone#that’s not how families work#that’s not how humans work
tags by @bomberqueen17
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
It’s also super a capitalism thing.
With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.
The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.
Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.
this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity
It’s what us polyamorous people are talking about too. If anyone was wondering why there’s such a cultural push to demand compulsory monogamy from everyone and treat polyamorous people as disgusting predators, it’s because capitalists really don’t like the idea of six people who all love each other living together. People are stronger in groups, and notably we also spend less. A group of six living together is only buying one house, one blender, one set of tools, etc etc etc. Capitalism demands we all be straight cis allo and monogamous because a household of two adults pumping out kids is by far the household buying the most shit for the fewest working people.
Live with your friends. Live with your family. Live with ten people and don’t fuck any of them. Live with ten people and fuck all of them. The nuclear family is a capitalist scam.
Fully losing it at this facebook screenshot. 22 inches of green and 1.5 of carrot.
did we learn nothing
attention to all dashcon attendees
someone urinated into the ballpit while it was empty and posted it in the tag
stay out of the ballpit
certified iconic post
ashleysolsen asked:
are mrs spink and forcible a lesbian couple?
neil-gaiman answered:
Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. They are a couple, yes.
As Stephin Merritt had them sing, in the 2009 musical
“I am Miss Spink–” “And I am Miss Forcible–”
“Elderly thespians fallen from grace–”
“We never married so we’re undivorceable–”
“Tripping on clippings all over the place.”
So, this is page 18 of a recent printing of the Italian translation of Coraline (actually the second page of the actual book, after the Preface).
The underlined part says, literally, “both I and my sister Forcible were famous actresses, in our time.”
I read Coraline in English way back when and had always assumed they were a couple. I just came across this translation today at my parents’ and was taken aback, thinking I probably got it wrong at the time.
So I checked the English text and GUESS WHAT. I didn’t get it wrong. The original sentence reads, “both myself and Miss Forcible were famous actresses, in our time.” The translator decided Miss Spink and Miss Forcible must be sisters and, to this end, added a word that wasn’t there.
As a literary translator, queer person, and Neil Gaiman fan, I could write much (MUCH) more about this but honestly? I haven’t felt this furious in a long time, and I wouldn’t be too eloquent, I guess.
Honestly the best bit about this whole answer-storm is it's reminded me to talk to my agent about the Italian edition.
I know we’re all sharing our favorite grimace shake memes so I gotta show you guys this one
