#ALSO gender roles gross

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Walking Practice

weird scifi horror novella

follows an alien who crash-landed on earth years ago, and spends their days hooking up with people to then eat them & gain enough strength to make it through the day

explores existing outside of the binary norm and being seen as other, deep loneliness, and desire for connection

meandering narration, interesting formatting, illustrations

[aropride]

it sort of feels like people think they're ending misogyny/transmisogyny by ignoring transmasc problems or being a dick to trans men but that's just... not how it works. we can't fight transphobia without fighting transphobia against trans men and erasing or even being actively transphobic towards trans men is doing absolutely nothing for the fight against transmisogyny and is also actively harmful

[apostate-in-an-alcove]

I think something that really irks me about the whole "feminine energy and masculine energy" garbage that gets peddled on TikTok and other platforms is the fact that there's this constant implication that a woman being masculine is a serious error in her that needs to be fixed. Masculine women aren't broken and in need of a supposed masculine man to push them back into their femininity; their masculinity (whatever that means and looks like to them) is a feature of them that doesn't need to be repaired because they were never in error to begin with.

[marginal-notes]

Okay, so. No one needs to hear me out on this. I’m just saying. One day I’m going to crack and heave out all my biting commentary about Naruto gender and clan and lineage politics through the lens of an always-a-different-sex Kakashi fic or outline, and it’s just going to… exist… out there.

No one else gets changed, it’s just Kakashi, and it’s going to be a nightmare from start to finish that’s definitely also heavily tinged by my personal perspective on being agender aro ace.

[starsnhiseyes]

I spent 2 hours doing a pedicure on myself last night can we not do this can we not do the trans guys are dirty little rat boys some of us consider hygiene & cleanliness a priority come on man

[vampire-nyx]

Honestly I’m really happy for people (transmascs in mind but everyone applicable is included) that really hated pink as a kid and then grew to love it as an adult because they embraced their idea of femininity and actually really liked the color, just avoided it due to it’s societal connotations

however, I do find it a little weird and offputting that among certain people, this narrative is growing of “haha, transmascs will always come back to loving pink and being fem” even including the implication that if you don’t, it’s Solely internalized misogyny and you must be still going through a phase. That logic just seems.. familiar to me if you see what I mean

[ghostienonbibi]

The fact that Persona 4 was such a big interest of mine (and still holds a certain place in my heart) but between the writing of the game itself, creeps in the fanbase when I first joined, and ppl talking over LGBT people because they can't understand there can be multiple interpretations of themes/sometimes the way its portrayed itself is problematic I have a hard time engaging with it anymore. Idk it makes me sad.

[alonelysketchbook]

Girls with body hair especially pit hair are holy. This is the TRUTH!!!

[inkskinned]

the thing is that they're so fascinated by sex, they love sex, they can't imagine a world without sex - they need sex to sell things, they need sex to be part of their personality, they need sex to prove their power - but they hate sex. they are disgusted by it.

sex is the only thing that holds their attention, and it is also the thing that can never be discussed directly.

you can't tell a child the normal names for parts of their body, that's sexual in nature, because the body isn't a body, it's a vessel of sex. it doesn't matter that it's been proven in studies (over and over) that kids need to know the names of their genitals; that they internalize sexual shame at a very young age and know it's 'dirty' to have a body; that it overwhelmingly protects children for them to have the correct words to communicate with. what matters is that they're sexual organs. what matters is that it freaks them out to think about kids having body parts - which only exist in the context of sex.

it's gross to talk about a period or how to check for cancer in a testicle or breast. that is nasty, illicit. there will be no pain meds for harsh medical procedures, just because they feature a cervix.

but they will put out an ad of you scantily-clad. you will sell their cars for them, because you have abs, a body. you will drip sex. you will ooze it, like a goo. like you were put on this planet to secrete wealth into their open palms.

they will hit you with that same palm. it will be disgusting that you like leather or leashes, but they will put their movie characters in leather and latex. it will be wrong of you to want sexual freedom, but they will mark their success in the number of people they bed.

they will crow that it's inappropriate for children so there will be no lessons on how to properly apply a condom, even to teens. it's teaching them the wrong things. no lessons on the diversity of sexual organ growth, none on how to obtain consent properly, none on how to recognize when you feel unsafe in your body. if you are a teenager, you have probably already been sexualized at some point in your life. you will have seen someone also-your-age who is splashed across a tv screen or a magazine or married to someone three times your age. you will watch people pull their hair into pigtails so they look like you. so that they can be sexy because of youth. one of the most common pornography searches involves newly-18 young women. girls. the words "barely legal," a hiss of glass sand over your skin.

barely legal. there are bills in place that will not allow people to feel safe in their own bodies. there are people working so hard to punish any person for having sex in a way that isn't god-fearing and submissive. heteronormative. the sex has to be at their feet, on your knees, your eyes wet. when was the first time you saw another person crying in pornography and thought - okay but for real. she looks super unhappy. later, when you are unhappy, you will close your eyes and ignore the feeling and act the role you have been taught to keep playing. they will punish the sex workers, remove the places they can practice their trade safely. they will then make casual jokes about how they sexually harass their nanny.

and they love sex but they hate that you're having sex. you need to have their ornamental, perfunctory, dispassionate sex. so you can't kiss your girlfriend in the bible belt because it is gross to have sex with someone of the same gender. so you can't get your tubes tied in new england because you might change your mind. so you can't admit you were sexually assaulted because real men don't get hurt, you should be grateful. you cannot handle your own body, you cannot handle the risks involved, let other people decide that for you. you aren't ready yet.

but they need you to have sex because you need to have kids. at 15, you are old enough to parent. you are not old enough to hear the word fuck too many times on television.

they are horrified by sex and they never stop talking about it, thinking about it, making everything unnecessarily preverted. the saying - a thief thinks everyone steals. they stand up at their podiums and they look out at the crowd and they sign a bill into place that makes sexwork even more unsafe and they stand up and smile and sign a bill that makes gender-affirming care illegal and they get up and they shrug their shoulders and write don't say gay and they get up, and they make the world about sex, but this horrible, plastic vision of it that they have. this wretched, emotionless thing that holds so much weight it's staggering. they put their whole spine behind it and they push and they say it's normal!

this horrible world they live in. disgusted and also obsessed.

[gaphic]

ok this post got me thinking - and this isn't really a criticism, bc the point it's making still stands - I don't think this description is quite accurate. if teens were allowed to figure out their heterosexuality they'd be getting het sex ed, not no sex ed.

in this context, 'heterosexuality' ISN'T a sexuality. it's a gender role. it's not about pleasure/desire/attraction, in fact, those things are considered deviant even within heterosexuality. a man moaning during sex or wanting his nipples played with is 'gay' even if it's with a cis woman. a woman expressing any SHRED of sexual availability is shameful even if it's for cis men.

sexuality is still dirty for cishet people. men and women aren't even supposed to like eachother! have you noticed that? that the more a person elevates heterosexuality, the more they tend to hate the opposite sex? how the most homophobic men also seem fundamentally grossed out by women? how the most homophobic women seem to view men as animals?

conservatives do not think women should be attracted to men or vice versa. they think that having a husband and bearing him children is what makes you a woman and having and impregnating a wife is what makes you a man, and THAT'S what teens are allowed to do. you will never be allowed to be sexual, but you are never too young to perform gender roles.

[feminist-furby-freak]

“Passing” as a concept is bs but this is especially true for non-binary. You’re asking everyone else to pretend that we can’t tell what sex you are and to be up to date on gender trends so we can accurately guess how you want us to perceive you. Like is [some hypothetical male] wearing an ugly dress and lipstick in a trying to be a woman way or a trying to be non-binary way. We know we’re supposed to pretend he’s not a man but we also have to guess if we’re supposed to tell if he’s just badly dressing up as a woman or is deliberately being some other third thing.

Many trans identifying females only perform androgyny in ways that cater to the male gaze. Sure they’ll have a stylish short haircut and wear flannels but they almost always remove their body hair and continue to wear makeup in a “lighter” style. Unlike mean hairy butch dykes, who they would never look like (gross) they “reject gender” without meaningfully challenging gendered roles. They seek to position themselves as “not women” while safely obeying the most sacred rules of presenting as a woman. By adopting new pronouns or a new label they can justify fulfilling the tomboy, girl next door, effortless beauty male fantasy. A woman who rejects the patriarchal beauty standards without rejecting her identity as a woman is infinitely more transgressive than a woman who takes no meaningful actions and invents a new label to reframe her conformity as deviance. It’s just lazy.

[morsobaby]

Dysphoric trans girls who put a ton of effort into their presentation and non dysphoric trans girls who just exist in whatever style they already were. Both are equally valid n deserve love and respect. Neither is gross nor the "wrong" way to be a woman.

Trans girls who are dysphoric but unable to present how they want? Due to safety or sensory or health problems? Due to any reason? Super valid and deserving respect and also I'm sorry girl I wish you strength in that.

Trans girls who aren't dysphoric but feel pressured to conform to gender roles and put too much effort into their appearance just so they're accepted or respected? I'm so sorry girl you deserve better. You're super valid and you're enough of a woman already as is

[paarthursass]

I'm sorry I'm sorry I keep seeing that post that goes "Xander spent years complaining about being powerless and then never took a self defense class" and it pisses me off. Soooo much. Bcs it is such a bad faith reading of Xander as a character and also a gross oversimplification that also misses the entire point of his character.

The brunt of Xander's "complaining" about being powerless happens in the first 3 seasons, and is highlighted particularly in the Zeppo which is about Xander coming to terms with being "the normal one" of the group. He accepts that his role will never be the one in the spotlight, he is the side character to people like Buffy and Willow and he accepts this. While he might make occasional jabs and jokes about being powerless throughout the rest of the show (season 4 in particular we see him floundering with his role, but in season 4 all of the Scoobies are adrift with where they belong, so this is not a Xander-exclusive issue here, that's the point of the season) he seems to settle fairly comfortably into his role. He gets a normal job. He becomes the guy who cleans up Buffy's house when she breaks things fighting demons. We see him further reaffirm his acceptance of this in Potential, when he comforts Dawn (after realizing she isn't a Potential Slayer like she thought, and therefor not "special") by confiding in her his own insecurities with being "the normal one" and then reassuring her that she doesn't need powers to be special. Xander doesn't need powers to be special. He knows his place in the group (affirmed in season 4, where he takes on the role of "the Heart" in the spell to defeat Adam).

And, dare I say it, him learning self defense to the point of being a fighter on par with someone like Riley would completely miss the point of his character. Buffy as a show loves to flip gender roles, and Xander is no exception to this. Xander takes on the stereotypical feminine role in the group dynamic: as stated before, he's "the Heart." He provides emotional support to Willow and Buffy. He's often the one staying home to watch over Dawn, he's the one who cleans up and repairs Buffy's house when it gets wrecked. As the show progresses he increasingly takes on the role of the caretaker and the homemaker. He's also often the damsel, requiring saving by Buffy. He saves Willow with the power of love. Xander "taking a self defense class" - or rather, becoming a 'fighter' like the post implies he should have done, would have run completely counteractive to the point (and subversion) of his character.

Yes, I understand why people have knee-jerk negative reactions to Xander. A lot of his comments haven't aged well, and particularly in the early seasons his treatment of Buffy and Willow isn't great. But he learns. He grows. He does, at some point, stop being an emotionally stunted 17 year old and grows up. I won't act like his character progression is perfect, and there are definitely plenty of Xander moments where I'm incapable of rooting for him, but to claim he "spent 7 years complaining about being powerless and never took a self defense class" is such a bad faith misrepresentation of who he is as a character, and where he stands in the story.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

CW: misgendering

tl;dr: I'm intentionally misgendering my classmates purely to fuck with my dad's gender biases.

Story:

My dad refuses to accept they/them pronouns and queerness as a concept, so when i talk about they/them friends, my dad will "assign" them a new he/she pronoun based on... their names and his boomer vibes, I guess. He's also got wildly misogynistic/patriarchal views, and clings so hard to his little gender role binary that one of his daughters saying "oh that's a nice car" is enough to set him off into a tantrum about "trucks are for boys" and he will knock rapidly on the door if my brother starts singing to his music because "it's gay". I have no familial love/care for him, but he is still a fixture in my family's home that I have to tolerate. Gross and full of shit, like the cat's litter pan, honestly.

Last summer I was telling my mom that my classmate "Alex" (they/them) was being given an opportunity at the university I had also applied for and my dad piped up that "MEN just have a natural talent in maths" and "obviously HE is qualified and deserves HIS position". I had this little spike of anger (I'm a cis woman, and he thinks maths is a "masculine field"), and I impulsively told him "actually ALEXANDRA is a woman but you're absolutely right that SHE deserves it!" Immediately he tried to backtrack and spluttered about the only reason "she" got the job was "affirmative action" then just got real quiet and didn't interrupt again which was LOVELY.

Since then, I've been referring to ALL my friends and classmates (cis, trans/nb, and unknown) with gender neutral nicknames or initials and they/them pronouns until my dad says something with a gross gender bias, then "correcting" him to the opposite pronoun which makes him immediately splutter and exit the conversation. Sometimes it'll even be the same person in a different story, and I'll change up the pronouns on him again because he doesn't care enough to remember who my friends are lmao. He's questioned it exactly once, and I told him I have a lot of friends in university with similar names and he probably mixed two of them up.

My two younger siblings who are still in high school have also picked up on what I'm doing, and started doing similar things to him of their own volition. (My brother has turned all of his friends into one lump amalgamation of "the friend" and will not clarify which specific friend he is talking about until after dad has answered him.)

I have not told anyone at university that I'm doing this and have not asked permission to do so beforehand. I feel that it's better for them to not know because it's like the warning on movies that the story or characters may resemble my classmates, but it's ultimately a fictional story I'm telling just to fuck with my dad, and there is like a 11% chance of any of them ever meeting my dad.

So, Am I The Asshole for misgendering my classmates when talking to my dad, and not telling them I'm doing so?

What are these acronyms?

[femsolid]

About the media in which male always get to talk more, can you give the source of that, especially when talking about books? I've been looking for this for my final school paper but couldn't even find something about the bechdel test used for literature.

Disney films may focus on female characters, but when it comes down to statistics, these women barely speak. Thats’s right, there are some Disney films with as much as 2% female dialogue.

Media also distinguish between males and females in a more subtle way: importance. ‘Children scanning the list of titles of what have been designated as the very best children’s books are bound to receive the impression that girls are not very important because no one has bothered to write books about them. The content of the books rarely dispels this impression’, remarked Lenore Weitzman and colleagues in their classic review of Caldecott winners, nearly a third of which had no female characters at all. And of course there are characters, and then there are main characters. The Dr. Seuss books are rightly classics, adored by children and a joy of rediscovery for parents. Yet as Lamb and Brown observe, in all the forty-two books he wrote, not one has a female lead in its central story. The power of the media to dish up a stripped-down, concentrated version of cultural values enables it to represent the higher status of males in this uncomfortably blunt fashion. Even in contemporary picture books, researchers find that this is a habit that dies hard, with writers and illustrators still less inclined to feature female characters. For example, the most recent analysis of the Caldecott winners and runners-up, together with 155 best-selling children’s books around the same time, found that males, overall, were featured nearly twice as often as females in title roles, and they appeared in about 50 percent more pictures. Nor does the use of gender-ambiguous animals or characters in books help to increase female numbers. This is because mothers almost always label gender-neutral characters in picture books as male. If it doesn’t look like a female, it’s male. I’ve tried labelling neutral animals and characters as female when reading to my children – it feels extremely unnatural, as you will discover if you try for yourself. (The reason is probably that we have a tendency to think of people or creatures as male unless otherwise indicated. In other words, as has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.) As within the pages of books, females tend to be underrepresented on TV and computer screens, and to miss out on central roles in advertisements and even cereal boxes. A recent survey of 19,664 children’s programmes in twenty-four countries found that only 32 percent of main characters are female. (This drops to an even more dismal 13 percent when it comes to nonhuman creatures like animals, monsters and robots.) And, a survey of the 101 top-grossing Grated movies from 1990 to 2005 found that less than a third of the speaking roles go to females, with no signs of improvement over time. As the Web site of the Geena Davis Institute, which sponsored the research, asks, ‘What message does this send to young children?’

- Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

[tanadrin]

Imagine one day a new social trend starts spreading. It’s something unbelievably dumb. Not harmful per de, but truly silly to believe. Let’s say, I dunno, healing crystals start going mainstream. Everybody’s talking about their crystals. It becomes impolite to criticize people who believe in healing crystals. They become a big part of people’s personalities, and people on TV start talking about them, and one day years down the line politicians are debating funding for crystal-based medicine. And through it all you are sitting there going, what the fuck is happening. I thought we were all on the same page on this. You want to get along and be friendly and open minded but you cannot pretend to believe in healing crystals, this is nonsense, and when the topic comes up you refuse to lie about it. This eventually starts to have social consequences—they’re that popular!—but what can you do? You cannot pretend a lump of quartz can cure the flu or whatever. It’s just all so unbearably embarrassing.

I think what the centrist/liberal/center-left reactionary turn driven by culture war stuff feels like. And I think the key emotion is probably cringe. Not hate, not fear, though those emotions may reinforce the turn. I think in a lot of cases people who imagine themselves pretty open minded and flexible have as part of their worldview something they thought was bedrock social consensus—on the level of “healing crystals are silly woo”—so bedrock maybe that it didn’t even need to be a conceptual boundary they actually policed in their minds.

For instance, when she started her anti-trans turn, JK Rowling made a big show of not being really anti trans, just arguing that Some People Had Gone Too Far. She wasn’t a frothing religious reactionary, after all. And I believe that’s probably true! I think Rowling probably did have a mental model of sex and gender with a little bit of give in it—of the “we can humor the odd weirdo” type. But as the discussion of trans rights in the UK got more serious over her lifetime, trans people went from “the odd weirdo” to “a recognized minority,” and eventually this ran against a bedrock belief that on some level men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. To act otherwise was just too embarrassing. And she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in the name of political correctness.

Other people whose brains have been eaten by the anti-woke mind virus (as @eightyonekilograms calls it) have something going of the contrarian in them, who enjoys yelling “up yours, woke moralists!” or w/e. Im thinking of ppl like Glenn Greenwald here, or Dave Chapelle, people who seem not to feel alive except when people are mad at them. That’s a separate but interesting dynamic. And there are people like Graham Linehan who become totally unhinged through this process of auto-radicalization, moths drawn ever closer to a particular source of validation within their chosen reactionary subcommunity, until they are truly parodies of themselves. That is also an important dynamic, but it’s one that only takes hold after the initial turn has begun.

I think the role of that feeling of cringe, that refusal to entertain an idea because it is too embarrassing (even if it does actually have a decent body of research behind it, unlike crystals) is important to think about, because I am interested in how to get people over it. I know that feeling has affected my own thinking over my lifetime. I wasn’t raised particularly conservative, but I had to learn not to cringe at a lot of feminist thought before I could appreciate it and learn from it. I explicitly didn’t have that cringe when it came to gay people for whatever reason, so it never entered my mind that it might be a problem. I remember being surprised to learn when I was very young that some boys wanted to marry other boys, but my response was “huh. Go figure.” Because for whatever reason I had not picked up that this was something I was supposed to be grossed out by. A general doctrine of empathy, of trying to understand people on their own terms, can help forestall some of this stuff, but it’s not foolproof in either direction—I don’t want to believe crystals have healing powers if it becomes socially popular to do so, just because it is socially popular to do so! And if they do, I don’t want to not believe they do just because it is socially unpopular!

(Obviously the crystals thing is not a one to one metaphor for the trans thing, so don’t read too much into that. Maybe astrology would have been a better analogy. Also I’m not talking just about people whose reactionary turn is predicated on trans issues—I think this dynamic applies to everything from gay rights to the Tridentine Mass. But trans issues are a handy example bc, as the adage goes, somebody posts once about trans people and they never post anything normal again. I think the classic rapid-onset trans derangement syndrome is closely tied to the fact that gender norms are a really deep element of many people’s social-consensus-based worldview, and so challenged to that worldview are felt as really cringe.)

I’m curious if other people who grew more liberal in their thinking over time had a similar experience of having to overcome what was basically a feeling of embarrassment at certain ideas.