It’s great that dina finds herself appealing but given how loud and boastful becky is about herself and her relationship i don’t think it would’ve crossed her mind anyways even if dina was bi or had a brief fling with walky (well i think there was romantic attraction in one other universe? but we’re not counting those)
My suspicion is that it’s more of a “Don’t de-sexualise the Autistic person”. Given that the whole Dina/Becky thing started with Dina getting pissed at people infantalising her, I suspect there is still a significant part of her that demands people recognise her as an adult with romantic and sexual agency.
might be more overall? as opposed to exclusive. or also inclusive of nonbinary ppl who call themselves sapphic/lesbians? like i can imagine dina’s ace would make her being more demi leaning/willing to be in relationships after knowing/bonding with someone regardless of gender while becky’s exclusively only attracted to other women
but dina is officially ‘unconcerned’ i suppose
HueSatLight
I thought you meant lesbians wore more overalls.
deliverything
This may also be true.
Rose by Any Other Name
@gears:
Lesbian = a homosexual woman (of any type) ie – a female identifying person who is only into women
Sapphic = a female identifying person who is into women (but possibly other things as well)
As a bisexual but homoromantic woman who married a woman, I prefer the term Sapphic because it doesn’t erase my bisexuality while still indicating my preference for female partners such as my wife. That said, it isn’t as well known a term, so we still get called ‘lesbians’ sometimes.
lesbian is exclusively homosexual excluding men (sometimes also nonbinary amab people), sapphic is more inclusive to bi/pan/demi-sexual women
AlexanderHammil
that distinction always feels faintly terfy to me. like, both terms are references to sappho, the idea that one’s a gold star lesbian and the other isn’t is… mildly suspect.
I mean, if one is only into chicks and the other is sometimes into dudes too, I don’t see how that would necessarily be trans exclusive.
AlexanderHammil
Mrm. It comes more from the radfem side that the trans exclusionary side; the idea that sex between men and women is always abusive and exploitative, and that trans women are secretly men, and so cis women who sleep with trans men—or lesbians who sleep with gay men, or who have slept with cis straight men in the past—are being exploited and abused, and that talking about their own identification and sexual history somehow threatens the sexuality of lesbian terfs.
it’s also just historically inaccurate; lesbian was and is used to included women who sleep with women of all sexualities, not just women who do not and never have slept with men. insisting that it has an exclusionary definition rather than an inclusionary one is a common terf talking point, and gets invoked around arguments about trans men “stealing” butchness away from them.
What the hell are you talking about? ?? How do you twist your mind into such a complex knot? “I’m a lesbian” “I’m sapphic in general.” “Oh, so you’re being molested?” What?
Nymphie
I think you’re misreading Samuel’s explanation.
It’s not “lesbian only dates other lesbians while sapphic women also dates bi/pan/demi women”
It’s “while lesbians exclusively feel attraction to other women, sapphic is an umbrella term for all wlw”
So lesbians are still sapphic. So are bi women. And pan ones. And demi ones.
ktbear
You lost me at Mrm.
Drew Hargrave
…no.
Rose by Any Other Name
Yeah, I just refuse to acknowledge any TERF position because they’re all insane and hateful.
In fact, I’ll take it a step further. TERF lesbians aren’t real lesbians. I’m not even going to justify that statement because fuck TERFs.
Heavensrun
TERFs impose restrictions of labels on other people according to their own prejudices. This is about calling somebody what THEY want to be called. If a lesbian wanted to insist that bisexual people shouldn’t get to call themselves a lesbian, and must use the term sapphic, then sure, but if a bisexual person feels the term lesbian is too restrictive for them and they want to use the term sapphic for themselves, that’s their label to define.
Mturtle7
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
zee
Excuse me?????
No dude, no. Lesbian just means exclusive ATTRACTION to women. Sapphic means attraction to women with a potential +, eg I like women and I’m asexual and I don’t want to erase my asexual identity, or I like women and men and it’s erasure to call bi/pan women lesbians.That’s not good star. It’s not excluding lesbians who’ve had sex with men because they probably weren’t significantly attracted to them. This is a complete misunderstanding of terms on your part.
All I did was not take a few seconds to think of “sapphic”, and apparently this happens.
Awe well, back to coding a platformer about dinosaurs. Empress of Evolution needs power.
S.R.
Well, “I’m into women, and also into nonbinary people but only if they have ovaries” isn’t… great. It fits into a general tendency that some people have to treat nonbinary people, particularly nonbinary AFAB people, as Womon Lyte instead of a separate gender. And defining attraction around what genitals someone has is a TERF thing.
(Note that attraction and preferences can be different, i.e. you might have someone who finds all genders attractive, but only likes to have sex with partners who have vaginas, regardless of the gender of said partners. “I prefer to have sex with people who have vaginas” is different from “I’m attracted to women, and to nonbinary people who I consider basically women”. One is entirely reasonable, one is someone who needs to reexamine how they see nonbinary people.)
The Oracle
This is why I don’t express attraction to anybody. It’s a fucking minefield.
ThomasQuinn
I think the whole trend of trying to label and pigeon-hole everything to the smallest detail is decidedly unproductive and unhealthy. Far better to simply recognize that people are all unique, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.
BarerMender
I think you’re right. Also, I’m not making room in my memory for this discussion. Too nit-picky for me.
Rats. A person in the Internet told me no. Now I have to delete my Gender dot Fandom dot com wiki.
The Oracle
If you don’t want it anymore, I’ll take it.
Heavensrun
Sure, but also if someone likes a term to describe themselves, use that term.
The Oracle
Now you’re just defending TERFs somehow, I’m sure.
Kelibath
Here’s the problem: without detailed labels for the human experience, the power differential flows by default to the majority of any axis/trait, and those disadvantaged have no power to call it out.
So it’s all very well to WANT to “just let people be people”… but if you want that, in the world we actually live in, with its systemic oppression and pre-prepared prejudice, people need to be able to use labels so they can point out when their type of human is being oppressed and mistreated.
ThomasQuinn
My point is that pigeon-holing 1) creates an in-group/out-group dynamic and 2) gives the illusion of discrete categories for what is, by all serious research and the stated experience of countless people, a (range of) continuum(s).
thejeff
You’re not wrong in a way, though Kelibath also isn’t wrong that labels can also be used to defend oppressed groups.
But, in this case, “sapphic” is a more generic term that clearly applies to Dina, while “lesbian” is a more discrete term that arguably does not. Just because lesbian is a more familiar term, doesn’t mean sapphic is an attempt to pigeon-hole anyone.
Heavensrun
Nah, bro, this isn’t it. Not even a little.
Snail
I believe the issue is not with the word “sapphic”, but with a definition of lesbian that specifically names and excludes “nonbinary AMAB people”.
Sapphic generally means “likes girls”. Lesbian historically also meant “likes girls”, and is still used that way, but is now commonly used to mean “likes girls *exclusively*”. Whether you want to call yourself sapphic, lesbian, or both is a personal choice. But when you start defining *either* term according to a person’s AGAB, *that* is TERFy, because it implies that someone’s AGAB is their “real” gender for purposes of defining sexual attraction. In particular, specifying nonbinary AMAB people as “not girls” in an “attracted to girls exclusively” definition implies that you think AFAB nonbinary people are still girls.
If you’re attracted to nonbinary people (whose gender does not include “girl” in some fashion), regardless of their AGAB, you’re attracted to people who are not girls. What you choose to *do* with that fact is up to you, but it is a fact.
(As a personal aside: I’m AFAB nonbinary. I’ve been on T for five years, and I’ve had top surgery. I find the ability to grow a full beard now absolutely delightful, even if I don’t always want one. I promise you would not look at me on the street and go “ah, yes, that is An Woman What Is Attractive To Lesbeans”.)
AlexanderHammil
Yes, this, exactly. sapphic is a perfectly fine term, with a long history. it’s the attempt to redefine “lesbian” to exclude bisexual women and nonbinary or trans lesbians that’s a bit dodgy. That redefinition to exclude is the terfy part.
AK
Why is all our language for this stuff so relative? It’s always felt bonkers to me that we lump all this stuff under one umbrella and then changing the terms we use for it based on the gender of the person feeling things rather than outlining it like a set of spectrums.
You can be attracted to some set of genitals and bodies.
You can be attracted to some set of gender presentations.
You can be attracted to a personality such that the above two are irrelevant.
Feels like this person is attracted to x body and genital types regardless of gender presentation and this person is attracted to y gender presentation regardless of body and genital types both get termed similarly under the same framework, causing a lot of confusion. And then the words you use change again if the person feeling the attraction turns out to be trans at some point. Like why does you transitioning change the language everyone uses for your attraction when that hasn’t actually changed?
I dunno man, the language seems so arbitrary I don’t really get the point of gate keeping any of it or trying to get too detailed in describing what it means. If you’re a non-binary person attracted to non-binary people with female genitals and you want to call yourself a lesbian just do it. If you’re a woman and happy to date any configuration of person but happen to be in a relationship with a woman right now and want to call yourself a lesbian, just do it. For any of this stuff to be worth trying to gatekeep it would have to mean anything clear and specific in the first place and it just doesn’t. It’s all way wigglier than the internet discourse broadly wants to look at it as being. It’s all for anyone who it resonates with, and it’s more generally agreed upon set of themes than anything else.
AlexaSpuds
I never heard or seen anyone say that the term lesbian excludes amab non binary people, it can exclude some, but that’s based on personal attraction and not whether or not the person is an amab enby
keep your terf projections to yourself
Kelibath
Unfortunately many of us here have seen it constantly, especially being flung at people on trans twitter – or transX, if you will, which I certainly won’t
Sweeping the very real threat TERFs pose under the rug unfortunately doesn’t actually help combat its spread through the rest of the populace. Lesbian SHOULD work the way you say, but some gatekeep trans women out of it.
thejeff
I’m not in the scene, so this might by ignorant, but why would lesbian include non-binary people?
If lesbians are women attracted to women, do enbies consider themselves women? I guess it’s a spectrum, so some may find themselves close enough to the women end to fit under lesbian?
I guess the weirdness is that “lesbian” as a category assumes that gender is binary, so non-binary people kind of break the categorization.
Lesbian doesn’t mean women exclusively attracted to women. That definition was imposed externally and has never described lesbianism as defined in the community. Bi is historically a kind of lesbian and was used that way.
The findamental issue here is people who learned first that “lesbian means women exclusively attracted to women” refusing to be educated….and radfems who push that line as a political point.
deliverything
What I’m getting from this discussion (with the caveat that, being aroace, I inherently struggle with understanding this stuff) is that some people use the term “lesbian” to refer to women (and maybe AFAB enbies) who are attracted to other women and AFAB enbies, but not men or AMAB enbies, meaning they’re implicitly regarding AFAB enbies as distinctly more woman-like than AMAB enbies.
Kelibath
This. They’re thus erasing the nonbinary identities involved while doing so. Reducing an entire spectrum of different gender identities and presentations back to an effective binary again, of “people who I assume are safe” and “people I assume are dangerous”, based either on AGAB for biological essentialists or on gender presentation for those who are open to the idea of transition but still unaware of the true diversities involved. Assuming anyone presenting even mildly femme is on the female side of a thin dividing line by default. When the spectrum of gender – like most spectra – is more of a three or four dimensional combination of a bunch of different axes and people can be anywhere, multiply often, along them or even move fluidly between different points over time.
Unrelated to anything but recently, apropos of nothing I looked up to see that the male equivalent of “Sapphic” is “Achillean” and I wanna hear that used way more, it sounds rad as hell.
Schpoonman
I once saw someone freak out on the writer of Hades in the SGG Discord because “Achilles wasn’t gay, he was in love with a woman.” I’m for more usage of “Achillean”.
thejeff
It’s a little weird to me. I don’t think there’s any particular such tradition attached to Achilles. It’s certainly not the first thing I think of hearing term.
ThomasQuinn
You mean aside from the Illiad, the only ‘original’ source for Achilles, where his most significant, and explicitly sexual and romantic, attachment is to Ajax? His all-consuming passion for Ajax is literally the thing that drives him back to the fight, to battle Hector in revenge for Ajax’ killing, the one thing Achilles has been known for for centuries?
I have to wonder though; Dorothy’s having a psychotic break, she’s been known to watch a show called “Dexter and Monkey Master”… is this how Head Alien is finally going to show up in DoA?
Proxiehunter
Despite her line here while Dorothy is suffering burnout and depression she is currently showing no evidence of a psychotic break.
Daibhid C
Yeah, I feel like “psychotic break” here is just how someone with burnout and depression would interprete their burnout and depression. I spent weeks convinced my brain was fundamentally broken and couldn’t do anything, before learning no, I had anxiety issues and a problem with numbers and that was about it.
Like how spending a whole weekend not doing the hundred and one tasks she assigned herself makes her “a former honors student”.
Daibhid C
(And this is where someone points me to a past strip that clearly shows her grades are slipping.)
Leorale
She also might just not know quite what a psychotic break is, and thinks it’s sort for “psychological breakdown”.
Azhrei Vep
Or she thinks this situation is so weird that her perception of reality has slipped.
… Or she thinks the situation is weird enough to warrant a little internally joking (but maybe slightly worried it’s not) at the fragility of her mental state.
HueSatLight
Her psychotic break is that she thinks she’s not the future president, and just an ordinary 19 year old.
Nono
She said her grades were slipping all around, but that was a strip from several (in-comic) months ago. Before the kidnapping, even before she had broken up with Walky.
She’s had time to course correct, and I think if she hadn’t, she would have stressed herself out by now.
374 thoughts on “Scold”
Ana Chronistic
“Senpai notice me… I don’t want you or anything, just I’d rather not be left out”
Lumino
She said please.
Harmony
She did. I recognize you, Dina-Senpai!
Decidedly Orthogonal
Dina’s got it going on! Rec’onize! ?
Heavensrun
Grav checks out.
GholaHalleck
Your advances would be unwanted, but your lusting is appreciated.
Steamweed
The human condition, efficiently and simply put!
quark
lets be real here, dinas the only person in this room whos got it all together. dorothy walky and amber should be taking NOTES
Angel
It’s great that dina finds herself appealing but given how loud and boastful becky is about herself and her relationship i don’t think it would’ve crossed her mind anyways even if dina was bi or had a brief fling with walky (well i think there was romantic attraction in one other universe? but we’re not counting those)
Librain
My suspicion is that it’s more of a “Don’t de-sexualise the Autistic person”. Given that the whole Dina/Becky thing started with Dina getting pissed at people infantalising her, I suspect there is still a significant part of her that demands people recognise her as an adult with romantic and sexual agency.
NGPZ
Yes Dina!!! Lure her in with your Lesbian Dinosaur Empress Powers!!! ?? ✌️?
*plays “Danger” from Sailor Moon Soundtrack CD*
Dana
Sapphic might be more accurate than lesbian.
gears
Please explain the distinction.
Angel
might be more overall? as opposed to exclusive. or also inclusive of nonbinary ppl who call themselves sapphic/lesbians? like i can imagine dina’s ace would make her being more demi leaning/willing to be in relationships after knowing/bonding with someone regardless of gender while becky’s exclusively only attracted to other women
but dina is officially ‘unconcerned’ i suppose
HueSatLight
I thought you meant lesbians wore more overalls.
deliverything
This may also be true.
Rose by Any Other Name
@gears:
Lesbian = a homosexual woman (of any type) ie – a female identifying person who is only into women
Sapphic = a female identifying person who is into women (but possibly other things as well)
As a bisexual but homoromantic woman who married a woman, I prefer the term Sapphic because it doesn’t erase my bisexuality while still indicating my preference for female partners such as my wife. That said, it isn’t as well known a term, so we still get called ‘lesbians’ sometimes.
BarerMender
Please enlighten me on the difference.
Samniel
lesbian is exclusively homosexual excluding men (sometimes also nonbinary amab people), sapphic is more inclusive to bi/pan/demi-sexual women
AlexanderHammil
that distinction always feels faintly terfy to me. like, both terms are references to sappho, the idea that one’s a gold star lesbian and the other isn’t is… mildly suspect.
Taffy
I mean, if one is only into chicks and the other is sometimes into dudes too, I don’t see how that would necessarily be trans exclusive.
AlexanderHammil
Mrm. It comes more from the radfem side that the trans exclusionary side; the idea that sex between men and women is always abusive and exploitative, and that trans women are secretly men, and so cis women who sleep with trans men—or lesbians who sleep with gay men, or who have slept with cis straight men in the past—are being exploited and abused, and that talking about their own identification and sexual history somehow threatens the sexuality of lesbian terfs.
it’s also just historically inaccurate; lesbian was and is used to included women who sleep with women of all sexualities, not just women who do not and never have slept with men. insisting that it has an exclusionary definition rather than an inclusionary one is a common terf talking point, and gets invoked around arguments about trans men “stealing” butchness away from them.
Taffy
What the hell are you talking about? ?? How do you twist your mind into such a complex knot? “I’m a lesbian” “I’m sapphic in general.” “Oh, so you’re being molested?” What?
Nymphie
I think you’re misreading Samuel’s explanation.
It’s not “lesbian only dates other lesbians while sapphic women also dates bi/pan/demi women”
It’s “while lesbians exclusively feel attraction to other women, sapphic is an umbrella term for all wlw”
So lesbians are still sapphic. So are bi women. And pan ones. And demi ones.
ktbear
You lost me at Mrm.
Drew Hargrave
…no.
Rose by Any Other Name
Yeah, I just refuse to acknowledge any TERF position because they’re all insane and hateful.
In fact, I’ll take it a step further. TERF lesbians aren’t real lesbians. I’m not even going to justify that statement because fuck TERFs.
Heavensrun
TERFs impose restrictions of labels on other people according to their own prejudices. This is about calling somebody what THEY want to be called. If a lesbian wanted to insist that bisexual people shouldn’t get to call themselves a lesbian, and must use the term sapphic, then sure, but if a bisexual person feels the term lesbian is too restrictive for them and they want to use the term sapphic for themselves, that’s their label to define.
Mturtle7
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
zee
Excuse me?????
No dude, no. Lesbian just means exclusive ATTRACTION to women. Sapphic means attraction to women with a potential +, eg I like women and I’m asexual and I don’t want to erase my asexual identity, or I like women and men and it’s erasure to call bi/pan women lesbians.That’s not good star. It’s not excluding lesbians who’ve had sex with men because they probably weren’t significantly attracted to them. This is a complete misunderstanding of terms on your part.
NGPZ
Heh, this is what I get for not using “sapphic”, huh?
To be clear I know the term, it just didn’t come to my mind when I wrote the comment
anyway DAAAAAMN CHILL BRUH
Taffy
I feel like I need some sort of visual aid to understand this whole thing, honestly.
NGPZ
All I did was not take a few seconds to think of “sapphic”, and apparently this happens.
Awe well, back to coding a platformer about dinosaurs. Empress of Evolution needs power.
S.R.
Well, “I’m into women, and also into nonbinary people but only if they have ovaries” isn’t… great. It fits into a general tendency that some people have to treat nonbinary people, particularly nonbinary AFAB people, as Womon Lyte instead of a separate gender. And defining attraction around what genitals someone has is a TERF thing.
(Note that attraction and preferences can be different, i.e. you might have someone who finds all genders attractive, but only likes to have sex with partners who have vaginas, regardless of the gender of said partners. “I prefer to have sex with people who have vaginas” is different from “I’m attracted to women, and to nonbinary people who I consider basically women”. One is entirely reasonable, one is someone who needs to reexamine how they see nonbinary people.)
The Oracle
This is why I don’t express attraction to anybody. It’s a fucking minefield.
ThomasQuinn
I think the whole trend of trying to label and pigeon-hole everything to the smallest detail is decidedly unproductive and unhealthy. Far better to simply recognize that people are all unique, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.
BarerMender
I think you’re right. Also, I’m not making room in my memory for this discussion. Too nit-picky for me.
Concolor44
Yes.
Thank you.
What you said.
Taffy
Life is fucking boring, let me edit my painstakingly specific wiki dedicated to real human beings’ sexualities.
AlexaSpuds
no
Taffy
Rats. A person in the Internet told me no. Now I have to delete my Gender dot Fandom dot com wiki.
The Oracle
If you don’t want it anymore, I’ll take it.
Heavensrun
Sure, but also if someone likes a term to describe themselves, use that term.
The Oracle
Now you’re just defending TERFs somehow, I’m sure.
Kelibath
Here’s the problem: without detailed labels for the human experience, the power differential flows by default to the majority of any axis/trait, and those disadvantaged have no power to call it out.
So it’s all very well to WANT to “just let people be people”… but if you want that, in the world we actually live in, with its systemic oppression and pre-prepared prejudice, people need to be able to use labels so they can point out when their type of human is being oppressed and mistreated.
ThomasQuinn
My point is that pigeon-holing 1) creates an in-group/out-group dynamic and 2) gives the illusion of discrete categories for what is, by all serious research and the stated experience of countless people, a (range of) continuum(s).
thejeff
You’re not wrong in a way, though Kelibath also isn’t wrong that labels can also be used to defend oppressed groups.
But, in this case, “sapphic” is a more generic term that clearly applies to Dina, while “lesbian” is a more discrete term that arguably does not. Just because lesbian is a more familiar term, doesn’t mean sapphic is an attempt to pigeon-hole anyone.
Heavensrun
Nah, bro, this isn’t it. Not even a little.
Snail
I believe the issue is not with the word “sapphic”, but with a definition of lesbian that specifically names and excludes “nonbinary AMAB people”.
Sapphic generally means “likes girls”. Lesbian historically also meant “likes girls”, and is still used that way, but is now commonly used to mean “likes girls *exclusively*”. Whether you want to call yourself sapphic, lesbian, or both is a personal choice. But when you start defining *either* term according to a person’s AGAB, *that* is TERFy, because it implies that someone’s AGAB is their “real” gender for purposes of defining sexual attraction. In particular, specifying nonbinary AMAB people as “not girls” in an “attracted to girls exclusively” definition implies that you think AFAB nonbinary people are still girls.
If you’re attracted to nonbinary people (whose gender does not include “girl” in some fashion), regardless of their AGAB, you’re attracted to people who are not girls. What you choose to *do* with that fact is up to you, but it is a fact.
(As a personal aside: I’m AFAB nonbinary. I’ve been on T for five years, and I’ve had top surgery. I find the ability to grow a full beard now absolutely delightful, even if I don’t always want one. I promise you would not look at me on the street and go “ah, yes, that is An Woman What Is Attractive To Lesbeans”.)
AlexanderHammil
Yes, this, exactly. sapphic is a perfectly fine term, with a long history. it’s the attempt to redefine “lesbian” to exclude bisexual women and nonbinary or trans lesbians that’s a bit dodgy. That redefinition to exclude is the terfy part.
AK
Why is all our language for this stuff so relative? It’s always felt bonkers to me that we lump all this stuff under one umbrella and then changing the terms we use for it based on the gender of the person feeling things rather than outlining it like a set of spectrums.
You can be attracted to some set of genitals and bodies.
You can be attracted to some set of gender presentations.
You can be attracted to a personality such that the above two are irrelevant.
Feels like this person is attracted to x body and genital types regardless of gender presentation and this person is attracted to y gender presentation regardless of body and genital types both get termed similarly under the same framework, causing a lot of confusion. And then the words you use change again if the person feeling the attraction turns out to be trans at some point. Like why does you transitioning change the language everyone uses for your attraction when that hasn’t actually changed?
I dunno man, the language seems so arbitrary I don’t really get the point of gate keeping any of it or trying to get too detailed in describing what it means. If you’re a non-binary person attracted to non-binary people with female genitals and you want to call yourself a lesbian just do it. If you’re a woman and happy to date any configuration of person but happen to be in a relationship with a woman right now and want to call yourself a lesbian, just do it. For any of this stuff to be worth trying to gatekeep it would have to mean anything clear and specific in the first place and it just doesn’t. It’s all way wigglier than the internet discourse broadly wants to look at it as being. It’s all for anyone who it resonates with, and it’s more generally agreed upon set of themes than anything else.
AlexaSpuds
I never heard or seen anyone say that the term lesbian excludes amab non binary people, it can exclude some, but that’s based on personal attraction and not whether or not the person is an amab enby
keep your terf projections to yourself
Kelibath
Unfortunately many of us here have seen it constantly, especially being flung at people on trans twitter – or transX, if you will, which I certainly won’t
Sweeping the very real threat TERFs pose under the rug unfortunately doesn’t actually help combat its spread through the rest of the populace. Lesbian SHOULD work the way you say, but some gatekeep trans women out of it.
thejeff
I’m not in the scene, so this might by ignorant, but why would lesbian include non-binary people?
If lesbians are women attracted to women, do enbies consider themselves women? I guess it’s a spectrum, so some may find themselves close enough to the women end to fit under lesbian?
I guess the weirdness is that “lesbian” as a category assumes that gender is binary, so non-binary people kind of break the categorization.
mneme
You’ve got it backwards.
Lesbian doesn’t mean women exclusively attracted to women. That definition was imposed externally and has never described lesbianism as defined in the community. Bi is historically a kind of lesbian and was used that way.
The findamental issue here is people who learned first that “lesbian means women exclusively attracted to women” refusing to be educated….and radfems who push that line as a political point.
deliverything
What I’m getting from this discussion (with the caveat that, being aroace, I inherently struggle with understanding this stuff) is that some people use the term “lesbian” to refer to women (and maybe AFAB enbies) who are attracted to other women and AFAB enbies, but not men or AMAB enbies, meaning they’re implicitly regarding AFAB enbies as distinctly more woman-like than AMAB enbies.
Kelibath
This. They’re thus erasing the nonbinary identities involved while doing so. Reducing an entire spectrum of different gender identities and presentations back to an effective binary again, of “people who I assume are safe” and “people I assume are dangerous”, based either on AGAB for biological essentialists or on gender presentation for those who are open to the idea of transition but still unaware of the true diversities involved. Assuming anyone presenting even mildly femme is on the female side of a thin dividing line by default. When the spectrum of gender – like most spectra – is more of a three or four dimensional combination of a bunch of different axes and people can be anywhere, multiply often, along them or even move fluidly between different points over time.
Ophidiophile
Sapphic is more poetic?
Mark
You beat me to it.
Yotomoe
Unrelated to anything but recently, apropos of nothing I looked up to see that the male equivalent of “Sapphic” is “Achillean” and I wanna hear that used way more, it sounds rad as hell.
Schpoonman
I once saw someone freak out on the writer of Hades in the SGG Discord because “Achilles wasn’t gay, he was in love with a woman.” I’m for more usage of “Achillean”.
thejeff
It’s a little weird to me. I don’t think there’s any particular such tradition attached to Achilles. It’s certainly not the first thing I think of hearing term.
ThomasQuinn
You mean aside from the Illiad, the only ‘original’ source for Achilles, where his most significant, and explicitly sexual and romantic, attachment is to Ajax? His all-consuming passion for Ajax is literally the thing that drives him back to the fight, to battle Hector in revenge for Ajax’ killing, the one thing Achilles has been known for for centuries?
Joe Moose
I really wish they used this theme more in the later seasons.
Mturtle7
*begins humming the TMNT theme* Lesbian Dinosaur Empress Power…
Allen Alberti
This is now my most favorite strip of this whole ginormous series.
Nono
I think… Dorothy is… handling this well?
Thag Simmons
Dorothy could easily be handling this a lot worse, at least
Durandal_1707
For now.
I have to wonder though; Dorothy’s having a psychotic break, she’s been known to watch a show called “Dexter and Monkey Master”… is this how Head Alien is finally going to show up in DoA?
Proxiehunter
Despite her line here while Dorothy is suffering burnout and depression she is currently showing no evidence of a psychotic break.
Daibhid C
Yeah, I feel like “psychotic break” here is just how someone with burnout and depression would interprete their burnout and depression. I spent weeks convinced my brain was fundamentally broken and couldn’t do anything, before learning no, I had anxiety issues and a problem with numbers and that was about it.
Like how spending a whole weekend not doing the hundred and one tasks she assigned herself makes her “a former honors student”.
Daibhid C
(And this is where someone points me to a past strip that clearly shows her grades are slipping.)
Leorale
She also might just not know quite what a psychotic break is, and thinks it’s sort for “psychological breakdown”.
Azhrei Vep
Or she thinks this situation is so weird that her perception of reality has slipped.
… Or she thinks the situation is weird enough to warrant a little internally joking (but maybe slightly worried it’s not) at the fragility of her mental state.
HueSatLight
Her psychotic break is that she thinks she’s not the future president, and just an ordinary 19 year old.
Nono
She said her grades were slipping all around, but that was a strip from several (in-comic) months ago. Before the kidnapping, even before she had broken up with Walky.
She’s had time to course correct, and I think if she hadn’t, she would have stressed herself out by now.