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crazy how much your life can improve if you just Move Somewhere Else

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child: daddy when I grow up I want to be just like you

dad: you’re just copying me to get successful and I’m gonna slay your career, you copycat flop little bitch

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Them Eat Crab.

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i like your blog, tumblr mutual. you will be buried in my pyramid when i die

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someone found a dollar this morning

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Television without people: Twin Peaks  (Episodes 1-3) (1990, David Lynch, Duwayne Dunham, Tina Rathborne, dir.)

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Yeah running water is cool but uuh. You do know that if you use it to pour enough water into a container you can put your head in it and drown and DIE??? Yeah this is crazy and evil and sad. What if a kid does that. This is why I propose the idea to make it so people pay 200000$ every time they use the sink!!! This is because no child has that much money so they are physically unable to harm themselves <3 Wdym this is insane and we shouldn't be paying 200000$ just to get a glass of water. There are no ulterior motives. No it's not about taking your money. This is for child safety. Don't you want children to be safe??? You evil sicko freak. What's wrong with you for thinking this is wrong and won't work.

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yeah actually we removed the big bad wolf from the little red riding hood story because portraying violence against minors is really messed up. yeah. yeah also the wolf narrative was really predatory and had had some icky grooming vibes and a fable meant for literal children shouldn’t have implied p*do shit and grape so now little red riding hood goes into the woods and nothing happens and she goes to grandma’s house. don’t worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow to wolves implicitly because we told them to and children should always do as their told. just like little red riding hood does now.

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Who designs the doll?

In Ways of Seeing John Berger offers the distinction for masculinity and femininity in patriarchal culture that "men act and women apppear". I think many people balk or scoff at seemingly simplistic descriptions of what gender is or what it means, but of any "men are x and women are y" definitions of the social roles of gender in our society, this is the best I've encountered which I come back to again and again. Here is the full passage:

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large andcredible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual — but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always toward a power which he exercises on others. By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste — indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura. To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everythin she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part οἱ a woman’s self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman’s presence regulates what is and is not ‘permissible’ within her presence. Every one of her actions — whatever its direct purpose or motivation — is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake. One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

A woman's "aura" as Berger puts it, is made up of a vast array of decisions made for her, about her, by men or made by her based on how she has been educated about the world - implicitly also based on decisions by men. Men are punished by patriarchy for trying to appear and to be valued for appearing, admonished as too feminine or insufficiently masculine, whereas women are punished for trying to act, to have their actions valued and their opinions considered - to not be treated like property.

This distinction that Berger made comes up for me throughout modern transphobic provocations and harassments - they can't really be called discourses when one side is performatively goading the audience of the discussion towards disgust-based reactionary ideas and nothing the other side says matters. For example "what is a woman?" is a coded question. The real discourse it is engaging asks the question "what is a woman for?"

Trans women are multiply marginalised - a fact missed by gender discourses quite often. Under the model of intersectionality, transmisogyny exists at the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, while also possessing its own unique features. Many people miss this because the intersections stack gender upon gender rather than two different types of oppression. Many people think that trans women face transphobia but not misogyny, let alone that their intersection produces something altogether more and worse. A core feature of transmisogyny is that trans women are treated in blatantly misogynist ways given license by the idea that they are men. This is an idea the transmisogynist does not truly believe, because to say "trans women are not women" is not to truly state that trans women are men, it is to say "trans women are not human".

A cognitive dissonance maintained in the patriarchal mind devalues the personhood of women creating a kind of human animal that is not a person. Human, but not person. The tranny, of course, is not human. The hierarchy of gender in patriarchy I've picked up from Talia Bhatt's essay "The Third Sex" is the hierarchy of person, brood mare, freak. Along similar lines I've said for some time that I think the space that the tranny, the faggot, the feminine "man" exists in, the space created when boys get derogatorily called "girls" by their peers is much like Fanon's "zone of non-being" - this is where the bottom falls out of your humanity.

Transmisogyny shows us the depths of intense hatred that people hold for women both when we are seen by misogynists as a type of woman it is socially acceptable to treat poorly, an outlet for their strongest feelings of hatred against women, and when progressives find themselves embracing our transmasculine siblings, their work and their thoughts but not us. Many feminist spaces that explicity rally against TERFism are technically inclusive, but have little or no transfem participation, not because trans women are not feminists but because trans inclusive feminists often don't know how to truly combat transmisogyny in their environment. Trans women, in the cisnormative imagination "men choosing to be women" go straight into that zone of non-being, the freak category, because we move DOWN the patriarchal gender hierarchy. This breaks people's brains because they think that the "affirming" "validating" way to treat trans women is how women are usually treated by patriarchal society, that is of course until we behave in ways that they don't like - this breaks the implicit deal "act like a woman and get treated like a woman"

If we use Berger's distinction, we can construct a phenomenology of transmisogyny which I center around the question "who designs the doll?" The trans woman's aura is made up of a vast array of decisions, but for the transmisogynist observer, these decisions are taken to be decisions taken cynically by a malicious male mind - a disguise. To see a trans woman's feminine presence and presentation, her "aura" as constituting decisions made by people around her and indicative of her education about the world (implicitly also decisions made for her by men) is to liberate her from transmisogyny into the sunlit uplands of regular misogynistic propertarian existence. Therefore for trans women self-determination becomes a sickening double-bind, a catch-22. If we get to decide who we are and how we present, it is because we are constructing a presentation with which to deceive, if we don't it is because we are following all the misogynistic tropes of what a woman is "supposed to" look, act, sound, think and be like.

In reality, trans women are products of their surroundings, of social forces that teach them they must perform femininity to an acceptable standard and as a result be taken into the care of others the same way that cis women are. However a trans woman's presence is not assumed to be produced by others, by external forces. The question is "who designs the doll" and the answer is the thing inside the doll.

This question "who designs the doll?" points at both why and how transmisogyny uses the accusation of maleness to perpetuate misogyny against trans women. When a trans woman acts in a way that someone else doesn't like, the issue taken is not with her action but with her essential character. Here it is vital to understand that ideology permeates not in stated beliefs but in the unstated and assumed and is demonstrated in behaviour. When someone doesn't like what a trans woman does, if they believed she was a man in complete earnest they would respond to her how they respond to men. Her actions themselves could be evaluated or condemned. Instead they are angry that she has acted at all, since she agreed never to act, she swore off acting in order to be allowed to be a less-than-person, a human animal. Even for many trans inclusive feminists, who have updated the beliefs that they act on from the patriarchal default, it is often the case not that they have reinterpreted the category of woman but moved cis women up the hierarchy into the category of men, preserving the category of woman for the people who want so badly to be accepted as women.

It should not in theory be hard to be treated as both a woman and a person but here we are, our oppression is gender stacked upon gender and most people are only ready to go one round with their feminism.

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some loser: humans are innately selfish creatures

my psych book:

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Where's my Breakfast?

Oil on Panel 30x30 cm

Artist: Daniel Arthur

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Has science gone too far

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We've got 99 problems and a surprising number of them can be boiled down to "The existence of billionaires is incompatible with democracy"

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the thing that bothers me with 7 deadly sin based characters is when they cant decide if they embody the sin by suffering from it or by drawing it out of others. ie. if your gluttony demon is a guy who loves eating then your lust demon should be a gooner sex pest. and if your lust demon is a seductive girlboss then your gluttony demon should be a 5 star chef. does this make sense.