“oh shit. i hope we didn’t do something bad” is sending me

World Heritage Post

this house is so fucking shaped dude

I like the yurt except for how someone would always be staring down at me at all times

this is also important for queer people who don't know anyone else there. let them bring their friend, even if the friend is cishet. many would rather not go at all, rather than go somewhere alone.

It is always better to let respectful cishets into our spaces than to try and police who is queer enough to be allowed.

Some of y'all really need to get comfortable fast with the idea that a healthy community generally contains peripheral members who aren't themselves in the community demographic, but are still socially part of that community.

Also, like, I realize this is currently Unpopular Opinion Material, but it honestly should be a freezing cold take: you can absolutely be cishet AND queer. Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Queerness works on so many more axes than just sexual orientation and birth-assigned gender congruency.

That's a cold take like when you get a hot pocket that is nuclear lava hot on the outside but as you keep biting in it turns out to be frozen in the center because both god and the microwave have abandoned this cause.

I swear to god words have to mean things.

If you include cisgendered-heterosexual people under the word "queer" then you're just using the word "queer" to mean strange/odd which is WHY it was used as a pejorative against LGBT people.

It just reaffirms the derogatory use of the word queer as in "freakish" and "abnormal."

Meanwhile the people who started the reclamation of the word queer were intentionally framing queer as not-straight.

Queers Read This! (1990) makes it very obvious being queer is antithetical to being a straight (cis) person.

There's an entire section railing against allowing straight people into queer spaces:

Why in the world do we let heteros into queer clubs? Who gives a fuck if they like us because we "really know how to party?" WE HAVE TO IN ORDER TO BLOW OFF THE STEAM THEY MAKE
US FEEL ALL THE TIME! They make out wherever they please, and take up too much room on the dance floor doing ostentatious couples dances. They wear their heterosexuality like a "Keep Out" sign, or like a deed of ownership. Why the fuck do we tolerate them when they invade our space like it's their right? Why do we let them shove heterosexuality --- a weapon their world wields against us --- right in our faces in the few public spots where we can be sexy with each other and not fear attack? It's time to stop letting the straight people make all the rules.

Let's start by posting this sign outside every queer club and bar:

RULES OF CONDUCT FOR STRAIGHT PEOPLE

1. Keep your display of affection (kissing, handholding, embracing) to a minimum. Your sexuality is unwanted and offensive to many here.

2. If you must slow dance, be as inconspicuous as possible.

3. Do not gawk or stare at lesbians or gay men, especially bull dykes or drag queens. We are not your entertainment.

4. If you cannot comfortably deal with someone of the same sex making a pass at you, get out.

5. Do not flaunt your heterosexuality. Be Discreet. Risk being mistaken for a lezzie or a homo.

6. If you feel these rules are unfair, go fight homophobia in straight clubs, or:

7. Go Fuck Yourself.

Or we could just postmodern ourselves into "well, it's fine, queer means cishet people too! Why? Because it means the weirdos and freaks!"

I just. I feel like something has gone wrong in reclaiming the word queer in any way that isn't about centering LGBTI/2s people & our activism, and which includes cishet people.

We can and should have welcoming spaces for allies as a code word and also for friends and family of LGBT folks! but we don't have to call cishet people queer. It's. Possible to do both of those things. It's cool and great to have peripheral community members of support!

But that doesn't mean cishets are queer.

I know you're not saying Queers Read This is a manifesto or something that should be followed to the letter, but those "Rules of conduct for straight people" sound almost exactly like rules a homophobic place would make for gay people. Like, if I walked into a gay bar with a plaque that listed those rules, I'd walk right out.

Have ….you considered there is a reason why there might be some similarities? As if those rules of conduct are illustrative of something they are trying to make a rhetorical point about when discussing the treatment of queer people in society, even to the point of marginalizing queer people in queer spaces? Are you engaging at all with why they suggested those rules and what the issue is that they are creating theoretical (not actual) rules to address?

Is there perhaps still a material difference in the impact of those rules because being cishet and being queer are in fact, different material and social realities?

“sound exactly like rules a homophobic place would make for gay people.”

Do you think a homophobic place would follow “don’t flaunt your homosexuality” with “if you have a problem with this, go fight straight phobia in gay bars or go fuck yourself?”

I’m just curious if you’re actually engaging with what is being said here or if you’re just seeing “similar language” and not thinking about it any further because you’re not going past being mad or uncomfortable about it the way it’s delivered.

I’m not saying we should implement this exact practice IRL, but I am concerned that people don’t understand the points being made here and why.

your life should not be a museum

Also the theoretical archaeology or decorative arts museum centuries from now wants to study objects as they were USED. The wear and tear is important information about those objects, society, and the people who owned them!!!! We'd want that context ANYWAYS.

Well, actually, (I’m sorry, couldn’t resist) if the point is to know how things were used, then it is historically and culturally important to recognize that we currently live in an era where people treat possessions as assets to be hoarded and preserved until they can be sold later at a profit.

Future historians will recognize this as one of the perversities of late stage capitalism - houses that are only purchased to be flipped and not to be lived in, decorated in bland, neutral tones that are suited to no one’s and therefore everyone’s tastes, dolls that stay unopened in their original boxes, glassware that stays in a curio cabinet, etc.

Nothing is made to be reused. Everything is either secreted away in a dragon’s hoard or disposable.

To be very blunt, you're describing multiple different things, some of which are use cases, and plenty of which existed well before capitalism did.

1. People have always treated possessions as assets.

2. Given that I studied decorative art history, I am also happy to say that collecting for the sake of display is hardly new behavior either. It's just not something most people are rich enough to realize has been happening for a good long while. What is somewhat more new is having people who aren't upper middle class or wealthy participating in collecting possessions purely for display. I'm not even fully convinced I would say this behavior is entirely tied to capitalism in specific. — Anyways the point being is that display is a form of use, if we're being technical. Collecting is also a use. Most collectors, however, historically at least enjoyed the presence of their collection, and took care of it. Yes, this kind of decorative display would be analyzed as something different from using something more proactively. Like, sure! Collector's barbie dolls in their original boxes are not the same material study as a barbie doll which has been played with by a child. That does tell us something different! Unused glasses in a curio cabinet do the same, but the conclusions that can be made about actually go beyond just "late stage capitalism." Because it's also possible that someone traveled around the world and bought beautiful glass pieces as souvenirs to display and communicate something about their travels and they prefer to use regular drinking cups or whatever. Beautiful porcelain pieces on display were not always used as anything other than display, but that was true well before capitalism existed. Hell, the entire existence of specifically made funerary objects is "stuff the dead person obviously couldn't actually use."

3. Obtaining assets or investments that you believe will accrue value over time also isn't unique to capitalism. A farmer doesn't keep cows because they want to look at cows. They keep cows in order to use the labor, milk, or meat to generate some kind of returned value. Also, heirloom possessions often gain value over time in unpredictable ways. Gold prices, for example, fluctuate in ways the people of the past couldn't possibly accurately predict. Not to mention, previous generations treating finer quality possessions with attentive care is how those things last, and there is also value in things that hold up over time with use. If anything, the problem is we have stopped proactively learning skills to maintain our nice old things, and our new cheap things are more readily replaced when worn down by use — not that there's been an attitude change re: obtaining possessions to grow assets.

4. House flipping is a use case which is also...something that would be observed. Also people don't usually intentionally buy a house, flip it, and then have no plan to do anything with it. The point of flipping something is, as you've mentioned, to gain profits by selling or renting out the property with an added value. This is demonstrably a use case. If the flipper fails to do this, then it's an example of a failed attempt to grow their assets with profit, not just a hoarding of assets. There's no point in flipping a property whose only value you're going to benefit from is the land.

5. (Western) Homes have typically always been constructed with no particular color palette in mind. It's an added expense, and the occupants are the ones who set about decorating it. You either simply dealt with the natural materials of the construction as the way your house looked, or you had the money or time to change it. Women were called homemakers for a reason, because unless you inherited an existing home you were the one responsible for making the interior design from scratch. And let's be very clear: decorating a home to suit an individual's tastes and to incorporate specific trends relies on capitalism just as much as flipping it and leaving the slate blank for the future buyer. Shelter magazines like House & Garden (1901) literally began with/was later bought by conde nast for the purpose of helping new money gilded age women decorate their new and empty homes.

The very concept of individualizing one's home is also capitalistic in its own right:

First issue of House Beautiful, 1896.

Choice quote:

In these times, when good things can be had for so little, moderate circumstances are no excuse for hopeless looking dwellings.

Not to mention, while specific wall colors and treatments have always gone in and out of fashion, "simple neutrals" or "natural" looks have been lauded for some time.

House & Garden 1915 —

Walls (of the living room) should ordinarily be plain and low in tone...

They also recommend: paneling, wood panels that are stained, tinted plaster in grey or putty, or neutral toned textured wall paper.

Elsewhere, sure, there are huge damask wallpapers and articles titled "creating personality in bedrooms," which is an article that only really exists if it didn't have any personality to start with.

SO YOU ADMIT THAT THE EXAMPLES I CITED ARE, IN FACT, USE CASES. Your initial response implies that an item with more wear and tear is more archaeologically/anthropologically valuable than an item without wear and tear. That implication is the particular conceit my response was challenging.

I am merely pointing out that knowing how items are *not* used is just as important as knowing how they are used.

The specific use cases I cite are not random outliers I pulled out of a hat as your 2nd response insultingly implies. They are examples of large scale statistical trends I’ve seen described in the news.

If the point of your enthusiastic infodump is to argue that people never really change and capitalism has had no effect on how humans treat their possessions, you are wrong. Significant economic shifts do in fact created significant cultural shifts in how the average person treats their possessions and their attitudes towards ownership just as it changes what type of possessions the average person has access to.

https://helpfulprofessor.com/mcdonaldization-examples

Consider: nowhere did I say MORE valuable, just that these institutions would, in fact, also collect items that showed use, and would consider the record of that use to actually be a value unto itself.

Because it is.

I know this, because I have worked in an archaeology museum, and while we had plenty of beautiful, rarely used objects, the vast majority of the collection I worked with was literally excavated from trash pits.

Anyways you have created a strawman argument here which is a bit silly. I never said MORE VALUABLE than “unused” (if something has a material functional purpose or is a consumable item, but these qualities aren’t engaged with). I said we would want to study objects as they were used (however that is), and that wear and tear also counts as important information about people, objects, and society.

The idea is that treating your current life as a museum is silly because the hypothetical future museum has just as much reason to obtain and study heavily “used” things and as they do items without much use.

> if the point of your infodump

Well, good thing that wasn’t my point, or even what I said! ✌🏻

I studied trade related decorative art history for like, six years, and have been a curatorial assistant in an archaeology museum before. I do, in fact, understand that economic shifts relate to how people engage with things.

I’m glad you read some ABC news or whatever, but the beige-ification stealth wealth thing isn’t unique to something we could call “late stage capitalism” in specific. I know this because I’ve read Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime,” and he wrote that in 1910, which cannot be argued to be a period of late-stage capitalism, given that that’s also a golden age for industrialism. Contemporary minimalism and stealth wealth and beige moms are not fully divorced from the ideas found in Ornament and Crime — they’re more like the evolutions of the impact of these older schools of thought over time and given the current economic climate.

The regardless this whole discussion is besides the actual point I am making, which is that a hypothetical future archeology museum has every reason to value the wear and tear on items as a source of information and no guilt should be had in using nice things.

your life should not be a museum

Also the theoretical archaeology or decorative arts museum centuries from now wants to study objects as they were USED. The wear and tear is important information about those objects, society, and the people who owned them!!!! We'd want that context ANYWAYS.

Well, actually, (I’m sorry, couldn’t resist) if the point is to know how things were used, then it is historically and culturally important to recognize that we currently live in an era where people treat possessions as assets to be hoarded and preserved until they can be sold later at a profit.

Future historians will recognize this as one of the perversities of late stage capitalism - houses that are only purchased to be flipped and not to be lived in, decorated in bland, neutral tones that are suited to no one’s and therefore everyone’s tastes, dolls that stay unopened in their original boxes, glassware that stays in a curio cabinet, etc.

Nothing is made to be reused. Everything is either secreted away in a dragon’s hoard or disposable.

To be very blunt, you’re describing multiple different things, some of which are use cases, and plenty of which existed well before capitalism did.

1. People have always treated possessions as assets.

2. Given that I studied decorative art history, I am also happy to say that collecting for the sake of display is hardly new behavior either. It’s just not something most people are rich enough to realize has been happening for a good long while. What is somewhat more new is having people who aren’t upper middle class or wealthy participating in collecting possessions purely for display. I’m not even fully convinced I would say this behavior is entirely tied to capitalism in specific. — Anyways the point being is that display is a form of use, if we’re being technical. Collecting is also a use. Most collectors, however, historically at least enjoyed the presence of their collection, and took care of it. Yes, this kind of decorative display would be analyzed as something different from using something more proactively. Like, sure! Collector’s barbie dolls in their original boxes are not the same material study as a barbie doll which has been played with by a child. That does tell us something different! Unused glasses in a curio cabinet do the same, but the conclusions that can be made about actually go beyond just “late stage capitalism.” Because it’s also possible that someone traveled around the world and bought beautiful glass pieces as souvenirs to display and communicate something about their travels and they prefer to use regular drinking cups or whatever. Beautiful porcelain pieces on display were not always used as anything other than display, but that was true well before capitalism existed. Hell, the entire existence of specifically made funerary objects is “stuff the dead person obviously couldn’t actually use.”

3. Obtaining assets or investments that you believe will accrue value over time also isn’t unique to capitalism. A farmer doesn’t keep cows because they want to look at cows. They keep cows in order to use the labor, milk, or meat to generate some kind of returned value. Also, heirloom possessions often gain value over time in unpredictable ways. Gold prices, for example, fluctuate in ways the people of the past couldn’t possibly accurately predict. Not to mention, previous generations treating finer quality possessions with attentive care is how those things last, and there is also value in things that hold up over time with use. If anything, the problem is we have stopped proactively learning skills to maintain our nice old things, and our new cheap things are more readily replaced when worn down by use — not that there’s been an attitude change re: obtaining possessions to grow assets.

4. House flipping is a use case which is also…something that would be observed. Also people don’t usually intentionally buy a house, flip it, and then have no plan to do anything with it. The point of flipping something is, as you’ve mentioned, to gain profits by selling or renting out the property with an added value. This is demonstrably a use case. If the flipper fails to do this, then it’s an example of a failed attempt to grow their assets with profit, not just a hoarding of assets. There’s no point in flipping a property whose only value you’re going to benefit from is the land.

5. (Western) Homes have typically always been constructed with no particular color palette in mind. It’s an added expense, and the occupants are the ones who set about decorating it. You either simply dealt with the natural materials of the construction as the way your house looked, or you had the money or time to change it. Women were called homemakers for a reason, because unless you inherited an existing home you were the one responsible for making the interior design from scratch. And let’s be very clear: decorating a home to suit an individual’s tastes and to incorporate specific trends relies on capitalism just as much as flipping it and leaving the slate blank for the future buyer. Shelter magazines like House & Garden (1901) literally began with/was later bought by conde nast for the purpose of helping new money gilded age women decorate their new and empty homes.

The very concept of individualizing one’s home is also capitalistic in its own right:

First issue of House Beautiful, 1896.

Choice quote:

In these times, when good things can be had for so little, moderate circumstances are no excuse for hopeless looking dwellings.

Not to mention, while specific wall colors and treatments have always gone in and out of fashion, “simple neutrals” or “natural” looks have been lauded for some time.

House & Garden 1915 —

Walls (of the living room) should ordinarily be plain and low in tone…

They also recommend: paneling, wood panels that are stained, tinted plaster in grey or putty, or neutral toned textured wall paper.

Elsewhere, sure, there are huge damask wallpapers and articles titled “creating personality in bedrooms,” which is an article that only really exists if it didn’t have any personality to start with.