sandswirls - Tumblr blog

[sandswirls]

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

[sandswirls]

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

[sandswirls]

crazy that in the 1970s they were like, "fine, women can play sports. but because they're innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less 😊". And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis

[sandswirls]

i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father 

[sandswirls]

Dark Magician but he’s serving cunt

[sandswirls]

american leftists seem extremely focused on anti imperialism (good) but rarely- if at all- discuss decolonization in their own fucking country, despite acknowledging that it is a settler colonial state.

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It’s practically 2014 and you guys still don’t know how to google if an article is real or not before giving it 100,000 notes

[sandswirls]

I get my media recommendations the old fashioned way: by watching someone I follow on here go on an unhinged reblog spree of media related content until I eventually decide to go "alright, what's all this then"

[sandswirls]

1/3 OUTFIT SWAPS RENDERED YAHOOO

[sandswirls]

[sandswirls]

young artist posting your work online, heed my warning. im holding your face so gently in my hands, you have to stop caring about numbers right now and start caring about making the weirdest and most self-indulgent art you possibly can

[sandswirls]

What are they pondering about?

[sandswirls]

i watched one (1) video on how to draw hands that changed my life forever. like. i can suddenly draw hands again

these were all drawn without reference btw. i can just. Understand Hands now (for the most part, im sure theres definitely inaccuracies). im a little baffled

[sandswirls]

Please do not contribute to the demonization of Palestinian boys and men by erasing them from your pro-Palestinian posts. Innocent civilians have been killed and others have survived and have to endure survivor's guilt and an indescribable amount of grief and fear. That includes men, women, and children. Palestinian men and boys are innocent too. They've been humiliated, subjected to sexual violence at the hands of the occupation, had to carry the remains of their loved ones, and a lot of them have been killed during carpet bombings or by Israeli snipers.

Please do not exclude them!

[sandswirls]

[sandswirls]

people love it when lesbians are some guy until those lesbians are actually some guy.

people love lesbian masculinity, lesbians who use he/him and lesbians who are just some guy, and lesbians who call themselves boys and men and guys and dudes, and lesbians who are indistinguishable from men until they come too close to actually being men.

people love it when you blur the lines between gender, but they don't want you to blur it too much, otherwise you're not a real lesbian and you're invading lesbian spaces. if you blur the lines too much, flirt with the concept of being a man too much then you might as well be committing a hate crime because you explored gender in the wrong direction.

accepting that gender is a spectrum includes acknowledging that yeah, that spectrum includes lesbian gender, and yes, sometimes lesbian gender overlaps with being an actual honest to god guy. this is not something that will change, so i recommend making peace with it.

[sandswirls]

I do wish that “oppositional sexism” was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that “men” and “women” are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it’s a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It’s also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren’t performing it to their satisfaction.

It’s a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can’t understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that “If I’m not a real man/woman, they won’t love me anymore.”

One common “progressive” form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the “divine feminine”, that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It’s meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There’s a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You’ll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn’t believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It’s especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don’t overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it’s a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.