i saw in one of your posts from around a week ago you said “cishet/square masculinity”. I haven’t heard of square masculinity before and couldn’t find another mention of it on your blog (tumblr search function is broken though so idk). could you explain what that term means?
its a term me and @gay-otlc made up as an opposite to “queer”!
Historically “straight” (slang for normal) was the opposite of queer (slang for weird), but that came from a time where the boundary between sexuality and gender wasn’t as recognized & as a result, “straight” became synonymous with heterosexuality. Using “straight” to mean non-queer now can be alienating to folks like transhets, who may feel attached to the word straight while also being queer. Lots of people use “cishet” but that only addresses two aspects of non-queerness, and if you add in more it just gets clunkier to say.
In the same way that queer is an umbrella term that describes someone/something that deviates from the norm of gender/sex/sexuality, square is someone/something that is the norm.“Square” is another term that was used to mean normal, which is why it was chosen. S also wrote a cool post somewhere about how a square is made of four straight lines, which shows how being part of the norm comes from being cis+het+allo+perisex.
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