The Mask of Shame: When Liberation Is Just Rebranded Submission
Let’s speak honestly
This society runs on shame
It runs on masking
It runs on performance
& even in queer spaces—especially in queer spaces—that hasn’t changed
What they call freedom is often just better branding for the same sickness
We’re still dressing ourselves in shame
Still building identities from patriarchal parts
Still reconstructing ourselves from the only materials this system ever offered
External approval
Social legibility
Visual coherence
Market-ready individuality
Even pleasure
Even arousal
Even the body’s natural erotic intelligence
Has been colonized
Take the masculinization of erectile tissue
Medical texts celebrate the penis
They map it
Name it
Study it
But the clitoris?
Still a question mark for most of society
Still shame-ridden
Still treated as irrelevant
Unless it becomes a facsimile of something masculine enough to be reclassified as a dick. The only object worthy of penetration (sigh, so sad)
We were never meant to develop female pleasure
We were never taught to claim our own arousal
Because control doesn’t thrive in bodies that know themselves
& it’s not just straight society that enforces this
Queer spaces do it too
They replicate the same codes
Just re-skinned
See the femme lesbian who doesn’t want to be seen as patriarchally feminine
But dresses in a way that demands to be read
Seen
Validated
Desired within a framework that still centers the male gaze no matter what they says
There is no way to reconstruct a novel system out of the rubble of a self-replicating cancer within our psyche
Each step in Sephora, the femme is emeshed in complicity with the current consumer model
It doesn’t matter how you name it
If you build your sense of self from the outside in
Buying your identity each klarna payment at a time
Buying the latest mass marketed designs
You are still inside the system
You cannot decorate a mask & call it liberation
The desire to be seen is not inherently wrong
But when it’s shaped by a legacy of shame
When it’s carved out of ancestral trauma and social conditioning
When it demands external visual recognition in order to feel real
It is not sovereignty
It is survival
We’re not here to blame anyone for adapting
For trying to find love
For trying to be seen
God knows we all want to be witnessed without disappearing
But let’s not lie to ourselves
What most of us are doing is not breaking free
It is adapting to captivity
Rebranding the box
Coloring the cage
This queer movement, for all its promise, has become a market identity
A style
A package
Another algorithmically approved aesthetic
& people like me?
People who see it
Who reject it
Who still want love but can’t pretend anymore?
We are pushed to the edge
We are told to pick a side
Fem or masc
Top or bottom
Be visibly legible or risk being invisible
& if you go too far in either direction
You’ll get reassigned
A new gender
A new sex
Because you’ve followed the binary rules well enough to earn your new classification
& somehow
They still call this queerness
But I’m not playing
I don’t want to perform a version of masculinity to be worthy of desire
I don’t want to adopt an identity just to find someone brave enough to drop theirs
I don’t want to mask
I want to feel
I don’t want to be seen
I want to be felt
There is a difference
So no
I won’t become more masc to earn touch
I won’t be more femme to soften the edges of my truth
I won’t rearrange my shape to meet the market’s desire
I am done reconstructing myself from the wreckage of patriarchal design
True sovereignty isn’t visual
It’s visceral
It comes from within
And it doesn’t ask permission to exist
For those who feel stuck between labels
For those who keep trying to find home in a movement that keeps moving the goalposts
For those whose love has been eclipsed by someone else’s demand to be seen
We’re done with the mask
We’re done with the shame
Sov4Sov
Let’s build from the inside out
Not the market in
