#but also there seems to be greater gender equality than our modern world in a lot of ways & everyone is assumed bi by default

[synthient]

Book I just finished strikes perhaps the strangest compromise I've seen yet between speculative fiction should imagine worlds without real world opression vs speculative fiction shouldn't shy away from real world oppression, which is "what if sexism and homophobia were invented for the first time in the 1920s by the fantasy nazis"

[meirmakesstuff]

1/2 Hi Meir! I saw your answer on WWC, and since you mentioned you're professionals, I figured I'd ask directly: I'm writing a second world fantasy with a jewish coded people. I want to be clear in the coding but avoid the "if there's no egypt, how can there be passover?" so I called them Canaanites. I thought I was being clever by hinting in the naming that the whole region does exist, but I've since read that it might've been a slur in fact? Do you have any advice on this?

2/2 I did consider calling the group in question Jewish, but aside from how deeply Judaism is connected to the history of the Israelites, I haven't used any present-day real-world names for any other group, (I did use some historic names like Nubia). I feel like calling only one group of people by their currently used name would be othering rather than inclusive? Or am I overthinking this?

Okay so I want to start out with some disclaimers, first that although WWC recently reblogged an addition of mine to one of their posts, I am not affiliated with @writingwithcolor​, and second that the nature of trying to answer a question like this is “two Jews, three opinions,” so what I have to say about this is my own opinion(s) only. Last disclaimer: this is a hard question to address, so this answer is going to be long. Buckle up.

First, I would say that you’re right to not label the group in question “Jewish” (I’ll get to the exception eventually), and you’re also right in realizing that you should not call them “Canaanites.” In Jewish scripture, Canaanites are the people we fought against, not ourselves, so that wouldn’t feel like representation but like assigning our identity to someone else, which is a particular kind of historical violence Jews continue to experience today. I’ll get back to the specific question of naming in a moment, but because this is my blog and not WWC, and you asked me to speak to this as an educator, we’re going to take a detour into Jewish history and literary structure before we get back to the question you actually asked.

To my mind there are three main ways to have Jews in second-world fantasy and they are:

People who practice in ways similar to modern real-world Jews, despite having developed in a different universe,

People who practice in ways similar to ancient Hebrews, because the things that changed us to modern Jewish practice didn’t occur, and

People who practice in a way that shows how your world would influence the development of a people who started out practicing like ancient Hebrews and have developed according to the world they’re in. 

The first one is what we see in @shiraglassman​‘s Mangoverse series: there is no Egypt yet her characters hold a seder; the country coded Persian seems to bear no relation to their observance of Purim, and there is no indication of exile or diaspora in the fact that Jews exist in multiple countries and cultures, and speak multiple languages including Yiddish, a language that developed through a mixture of Hebrew and German. Her characters’ observance lines up approximately with contemporary Reform Jewish expectations, without the indication of there ever having been a different practice to branch off from. She ignores the entire question of how Jews in her universe became what they are, and her books are lyrical and sweet and allow us to imagine the confidence that could belong to a Jewish people who weren’t always afraid.

Shira is able to pull this off, frankly, because her books are not lore-heavy. I say this without disrespect--Shira often refers to them as “fluffy”--but because the deeper you get into the background of your world and its development, the trickier this is going to be to justify, unless you’re just going to just parallel every historical development in Jewish History, including exile and diaspora across the various nations of your world, including occasional near-equal treatment and frequent persecution, infused with a longing for a homeland lost, or a homeland recently re-established in the absolutely most disappointing of ways.

Without that loss of homeland or a Mangoverse-style handwaving, we have the second and third options. In the second option, you could show your Jewish-coded culture having never been exiled from its homeland, living divided into tribes each with their own territory, still practicing animal, grain, and oil sacrifice at a single central Temple at the center of their nation, overseen by a tribe that lacks territory of their own and being supported by the sacrifices offered by the populace.

If you’re going to do that, research it very carefully. A lot of information about this period is drawn from scriptural and post-scriptural sources or from archaeological record, but there’s also a lot of Christian nonsense out there assigning weird meanings and motivations to it, because the Christian Bible takes place during this period and they chose to cast our practices from this time as evil and corrupt in order to magnify the goodness of their main character. In any portrayal of a Jewish-coded people it’s important to avoid making them corrupt, greedy, bigoted, bloodthirsty, or stubbornly unwilling to see some kind of greater or kinder truth about the world, but especially if you go with this version. 

The last option, my favorite but possibly the hardest to do, is to imagine how the people in the second option would develop given the influences of the world they’re in. Do you know why Chanukah is referred to as a “minor” holiday? The major holidays are the ones for which the Torah specifies that we “do not work:” Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur, and the pilgrimage holidays of Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot. Chanukah developed as a holiday because the central temple, the one we made those pilgrimages to, was desecrated by the invading Assyrian Greeks and we drove them out and were able to re-establish the temple. That time. Eventually, the Temple was razed and we were scattered across the Roman Empire, developing the distinct Jewish cultures we see today. The Greeks and Romans aren’t a semi-mythologized ancient people, the way the Canaanites have been (though there’s increasing amounts of archaeology shedding light on what they actually might have been like), we have historical records about them, from them. The majority of modern Jewish practice developed from the ruins of our ancient practices later than the first century CE. In the timeline of Jewish identity, that’s modern.

The rabbinic period and the Temple period overlap somewhat, but we’re not getting into a full-scale history lesson here. Suffice it to say that it was following the loss of the sacrificial system at the central Temple that Judaism coalesced an identity around verbal prayer services offered at the times of day when we would previously have offered sacrifices, led each community by its own learned individual who became known as a rabbi. We continued to develop in relationship with the rest of the world, making steps toward gender equality in the 1970s and LGBT equality in the 2000s, shifting the meaning of holidays like Tu Bishvat to address climate change, debating rulings on whether one may drive a car on Shabbat for the sake of being with one’s community, and then pivoting to holding prayer services daily via Zoom.

The history of the Jews is the history of the world.  Our iconic Kol Nidrei prayer, the centerpiece of the holiest day of the year, that reduces us to tears every year at its first words, was composed in response to the Spanish Inquisition. The two commentators who inform our understanding of scripture--the ones we couldn’t discuss Torah without referencing even if we tried--wrote in the 11th and 12th centuries in France and Spain/Egypt. Jewish theology and practice schismed into Orthodox and Reform (and later many others) because that’s the kind of discussion people were into in the 19th century. Sephardim light Chanukah candles in an outdoor lamp while Ashkenazim light Chanukah candles in an indoor candelabrum because Sephardim developed their traditions in the Middle East and North Africa and the Ashkenazim developed our traditions in freezing Europe. There are works currently becoming codified into liturgy whose writers died in 2000 and 2011. 

So what are the historical events that would change how your Jewish-coded culture practices, if they don’t involve loss of homeland and cultural unity? What major events have affected your world? If there was an exile that precipitated an abandonment of the sacrificial system, was there a return to their land, or are they still scattered? Priority one for us historically has been maintaining our identity and priority two maintaining our practices, so what have they had to shift or create in order to keep being a distinct group? Is there a major worldwide event in your world? If so, how did this people cope?

If you do go this route, be careful not to fall into tropes of modern or historical antisemitism: don’t have your culture adopt a worldview that has their deity split into mlutiple identities (especially not three). Don’t have an oppressive government that doesn’t represent its people rise up to oppress outsiders within its borders (this is not the first time this has occurred in reality, but because the outside world reacts differently to this political phenomenon when it’s us than when it’s anyone else, it’s a portrayal that makes real-life Jews more vulnerable). And don’t portray the people as having developed into a dark and mysterious cult of ugly, law-citing men and beautiful tearstreaked women, but it doesn’t sound as if you were planning to go there.

So with all that said, it’s time to get back to the question of names. All the above information builds to this: how you name this culture depends on how you’ve handled their practice and identity. 

Part of why Shira Glassman’s handwaving of the question of how modern Jewish practice ended up in Perach works is that she never gives a name to the religion of her characters. Instead, she names the regions they come from. Perach, in particular, the country where most of the action takes place, translates to “Flower.” In this case, her Jewish-coded characters who come from Perach are Perachis, and characters from other places who are also Jewish are described as “they worship as Perachis do despite their different language” or something along those lines (forgive me, Shira, for half-remembering).

So that’s method one: find an attribute of your country that you’d like to highlight, translate it into actual Hebrew, and use that as your name.

Method two is the opposite: find a name that’s been used to identify our people or places (we’ve had a bunch), find out what it means or might mean in English, and then jiggle that around until it sounds right for your setting. You could end up with the nation of the Godfighters, or Children of Praise, The Wanderers (if they’re not localized in a homeland), The Passed-Over, Those From Across The River, or perhaps the people of the City of Peace.

Last, and possibly easiest, pick a physical attribute of their territory and just call them that in English. Are they from a mountainous region? Now they’re the Mountain People. Does their land have a big magical crater in the middle? Craterfolk. Ethereal floating forests of twinkling lights? It’s your world.

The second option is the only one that uses the name to overtly establish Jewish coding. The first option is something Jews might pick up on, especially if they speak Hebrew, but non-Jews would miss. The third avoids the question and puts the weight of conveying that you’re trying to code them as Jewish on their habits and actions.

There’s one other option that can work in certain types of second-world fantasy, and that’s a world that has developed from real-world individuals who went through some kind of portal. That seems to me the only situation in which using a real-world name like Jews, Hebrews, or Israelites would make sense. Jim Butcher does this with the Romans in the Codex Alera series, and Katharine Kerr does it with Celts in the Deverry cycle. That kind of thing has to be baked into the world-building, though, so it probably doesn’t help with this particular situation. 

This is a roundabout route to what I imagine you were hoping would be an easier answer. The tension you identified about how to incorporate Jewishness into a world that doesn’t have the same history is real, and was the topic of a discussion I recently held with a high school age group around issues of Jewish representation in the media they consume and hope to create. Good luck in your work of adding to the discussion.

[hunxi-guilai]

the only woman surviving the storyline of cql is the one who threw the towel/robe and said fuck you fuck this fuck everything. Like, literally every woman involved with the cultivation world dies apart from Mianmian who turns her back on it. I don't think it's consciously sexist -woman know your place, you have no right to power, etc- but I can't help thinking it. (I've probably been on tumblr for too long...) any thoughts?

ooooof... so this is a tough question, because the answer is yes and no and kinda-sorta all at once

do I think MDZS/CQL is consciously, deliberately sexist? No; in fact, I think it’s trying not to be -- female cultivators carry swords (even if we rarely, rarely see them use them), occupy positions of authority, can become formidable warriors in their own right, and seem to have a lot more autonomy than their feudal setting might suggest. At the very least we don’t have to deal with the machinations of an imperial harem, which is a part of worldbuilding I utterly detest in period dramas.

That being said, the fact there is such an overabundance of male characters also feels indicative of something. Are the stories of men just more interesting to tell? What role can female characters even occupy in a narrative space that is overwhelmingly dominated by male characters? How can female characters exist outside of their relationships to the central male characters? On some level, does the dearth of female characters in CQL carry an unspoken assumption of heroism as an inherently male trait? Why is it that the few heroic women we see are portrayed as the exceptions to the rule rather than equally respected participants in a greater, gender-neutral heroic tradition?

And we can talk about the death rate for female characters -- pretty much every female character introduced by name ends up dead by the end of the show, and the ones that survive are the ones who forswear society altogether (Baoshan-sanren, Luo Qingyang/Mianmian). We could gesture at Yu Ziyuan and yell loudly about how her death sends the message (intentionally or not!) that women who dare take violence into their own hands are punished by the narrative; we could point at Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing, and yell about how they were both fridged by the plot. Heck, even a major portion of Lan Yi’s character is “driven to prove herself in the face of the sexism leveled at her for being the first female Lan Sect leader.” Regardless of how ‘justified’ by the plot we think these deaths are, the problem here is gendered variant on the (highly problematic) trope of Bury Your Gays.

I don’t think CQL or MDZS are actively sexist, but I do believe that they were created in an environment that reflects the ongoing effects of a heroic and literary tradition that has been dominated by men. And this isn’t just limited to ancient China or modern period dramas; for better or for worse (what am I talking about, it’s only for the worse), we perceive martial heroism as a masculine trait. Just look at the gender ratios in The Iliad, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Just look at how many female poets we can name in all three thousand years of the Chinese literary tradition, and count how many male authors are listed as part of the Western canon. There is an imbalance in media and literature that we then absorb into our unconscious minds, that we have to consciously work to overturn, no matter how liberal or woke we think we are.

There are a lot of internalized assumptions of gender and gender roles that we all have, thanks-no-thanks to our societal upbringing, and what I think we’re seeing in MDZS/CQL is how those assumptions might spiral outwards into accidentally sexist messaging. Of course, I can’t speak for MXTX -- who knows, maybe she does actively hate all women and kills off all her female characters on purpose. But what I think is far more likely is that the female characters in MDZS/CQL fell victim to an unconscious and assumed prejudice in society for what roles women are allowed to play in stories.

[arcticdementor]

For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy.

Margaret Mead once said, “no matter how many communes anyone invents, the family always creeps back.” But today’s trajectory is not promising. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, family formation and birth rates were declining throughout much of the world, not just in most of the West and East Asia, but also in parts of South American and the Middle East.

The ongoing pandemic appears to be driving birth rates globally down even further, and the longer it lasts, the greater possibility that familial implosion will get far worse, and perhaps intractable. Brookings predicts that COVID will result in 300,000 to 500,000 fewer U.S. births in 2021. Marriage rates have dropped significantly to 35 year lows.

…

These predictions turned out to be vastly exaggerated, with a rapid decline in global hunger. The anticipated population explosion is morphing into something more like an implosion, with much of the world now facing population stagnation, and even contraction. As birth rates have dropped, the only thing holding up population figures in many places is longer lifespans, though recent data suggests these may be getting shorter again .

These trends can be felt in the United States, where the birthrate is sinking. U.S. population growth among the cohort aged between 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the 1980s to less than 5 percent in the last decade. This is particularly bad for the future of an economy dependent on new workers and consumers.

This demographic transition is even more marked in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and much of Europe, where finding younger workers is becoming a major problem for employers and could result in higher costs or increased movement of jobs to more fecund countries. As the employment base shrinks, some countries, such as Germany, have raised taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees.

Similar patterns can be seen in China. Expanding workforces like China’s—which grew by 380 million between 1980 and 2012—drove a world-shattering economic boom. Now, this resource is already in peril; birthrates have cratered to  historic lows. China’s working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years old) peaked in 2011 and is projected to drop 23 percent by 2050. This plunge will be exacerbated by the effects of the now discarded one-child policy, which led to the aborting of an estimated 37 million Chinese girls since it came into effect in 1980. By 2050, China is projected  to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, which would be one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history, and by 2050 will be roughly 20 percent higher than that of the U.S.

…

Today’s demographic stagnation represents a throwback to earlier times. After the relative buoyant growth in Classical times, the Middle Ages also were a period of global demographic stagnation, caused by famine, pestilence, pervasive celibacy and poverty. Population growth soared with the rise of liberal capitalism in the Early Modern period, aided by changing attitudes toward motherhood, children, and families. Simon Schama describes the Netherlands, the fount of this transition, as a “Republic of Children” built around the nuclear family. The medieval obsession with the Virgin Mother and the unrealistic cherubim typical of Renaissance painting were replaced with domestic images characterized by “uncompromising earthiness.”

We now seem to be moving away from those values, and as in the Middle Ages, becoming less centered around the family. Serfs at least had religion and a sense of community; our societies have become increasingly lonely, with single men hit hardest and children, often without two parents or any siblings, and chained to social media, increasingly isolated around the world. In the U.S. since  1960, the percentage of people in the United States living alone has grown from about 12 percent to 28 percent. Even intimacy is on its way out, particularly among the young; the once swinging age groups now are suffering a “sex recession.”

The percentage of American women who are mothers is at its lowest point in over three decades. Intact families are rarer, and single living more common. In the United States, the rate of single parenthood has grown from 10 percent in 1960 to over 40 percent today. This is very bad news for society, particularly minorities, because intact families tend to have fewer problems relating to prison, school, or poverty.

This social collapse is going global. In Britain, 8 percent of households in 1970 were headed by a single parent; now, the rate is over 25 percent. The percentage of children born outside marriage has doubled over the past three decades, to 40 percent. In the Scandinavian countries, around 40 percent of the population lives alone.

…

In Japan, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40 percent of the whole population by 2040. Japan has a rising “misery index” of divorces, single motherhood, and spousal and child abuse—all of which accelerates the country’s disastrous demographic decline and deepens class division. More and more people are not only living alone but dying alone. There are estimated to be four thousand “lonely deaths” in Japan every week.

…

The disinclination to form families is often described as generational choice. But American millennial attitudes about family are not significantly different from prior generations, though perhaps with a greater emphasis on gender equality. Among American childless women under age 44, barely 6 percent are “voluntarily childless.” The vast majority of millennials want to get married and have children.

High housing prices, crowded living conditions, and financial pressures certainly account for much of this gap. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the urban centers that dominate the world’s economy and culture. Today many large cities are becoming childless demographic graveyards. Between  2011 and 2019, the number of babies born annually in Manhattan dropped by nearly 15 percent, while the decrease across the city was 9 percent. The nation’s premier urban center could see its infant population shrink by half in the next thirty years. The share of nonfamily households grew three times as fast in gentrifying neighborhoods as in the city overall. In the future, writes Steve LeVine in Axios, shifting local priorities “could write kids out of urban life for good.”

…

Nearly half a century ago, Daniel Bell saw a “new class” rising with values profoundly divergent from the traditional bourgeois norms of self-control, industriousness, and personal responsibility, which together form the essence of familialism. Instead, Bell envisioned a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, which could dissolve the foundations of middle-class culture.

Indeed, for some, particularly in Europe and North America, declining fecundity represents an ideal result, chosen by those who “give up having children to save the planet” in order to reduce the carbon impact of each additional human. The recipe for reducing family size fits with the widely promoted notion of de-growth which has strong support from the oligarchs and financiers associated with the World Economic Forum. The goal is no GDP growth, less consumption, smaller houses, less class mobility, policies likely to reduce birthrates.

Others, particularly feminists and gender activists, celebrate the decline of the family for more ideological reasons. The late feminist icon Betty Frieden once compared housewives to people marching voluntarily into “a concentration camp.” One recent New York Times article even linked women who choose to stay at home with “white supremacy.” Black Lives Matter, true to its quasi-Marxist ideology, has made clear its antipathy to the nuclear family, an attitude widely shared in the mainstream media as well.

The more conventional Marxists in China, for their part, see these post-familial attitudes as a threat to the country’s future. China’s Communist leaders, while officially genuflecting to Maoist ideology, now promote the filial piety central to both traditional folk religion and the Confucianism but long reviled by the founders of the People’s Republic. Once terrified by overpopulation, China’s leaders are seeking ways to raise childbearing and family formation into “socialist” values.

But it’s Japan which again epitomizes the shift in Asian attitudes. There, traditional values such as hard work, sacrifice, and loyalty are largely rejected by the new generation, the shinjinrui or “new race.” These younger Japanese, writes one sociologist, are “pioneering a new sort of high quality, low energy, low growth existence.” Maybe they don’t need much energy since nearly a third of Japanese adults entering their thirties have never had sex. This is not a good predictor for family formation.

…

To succeed, such initiatives have to go beyond cash payments and other incentives, as welcome as these may be. There also needs to be a concerted effort to build family-friendly housing— large apartments, townhomes, and single-family detached houses—that generally attract families with children. Rather than shoehorning forced density into already-dense metros, we can encourage the development of less expensive, family-friendly housing; the shift to the periphery accelerated by the pandemic could help reverse the rapid aging and demographic declines associated with densely packed cities. The rise of remote work—something widely embraced by parents—could boost families by allowing them to work at home or nearby.

These are not issues of right or left, but concern the future of our civilization, not just economically but spiritually. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, not hem them in. Some conservatives have placed similar emphasis on the family unit. The debate should be not the utility of supporting families, but how best to do it.

This is a choice we need to make. A woke utopia, where children and families are rare, upward mobility constrained, and society built around a collective welfare system, would create a society that rewards hedonism and personal self-absorption. There is nothing as binding in a society as the ties created by children, who give us reason to fight against an encroaching dystopia.

[dwellordream]

“The ideal relationship that young women in the postwar decade were hoping for was what historians have dubbed "companionate marriage." The term is usually used to describe a marital ideal that incorporates characteristics such as companionship, mutual affection, and respect between spouses. In the early twentieth century, this was certainly not a new notion. According to some historians, the idea that marriage should be based at least in part upon affection and mutuality has been a feature of Western beliefs ever since the Reformation. Yet in the early decades of the twentieth century the significance ascribed to emotional ties between spouses grew to unprecedented heights. 

Simultaneously, new ideas about the role of sexuality in marriage came to replace older ones, and popular understandings of what constituted proper behavior for husbands and wives began to shift. In that sense, the era witnessed the emergence of a new marital ideal, and among its key advocates was the generation of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s. At the core of these young women's marital ideals were trust, sharing, and companionship. Much like generations before them, they envisioned the ideal marriage as a partnership, but in contrast to their mothers and grandmothers they rejected gender difference and gender complementarity as the basis for this partnership. 

While they expected husbands and wives to fulfill gender-specific roles and responsibilities within marriage, they defined the ideal relationship as one of equal and fundamentally similar partners who shared a deep emotional intimacy. As one young woman noted six months before her wedding in 1920, "I would . . . only want to marry a man who sees me as his beloved, his companion and friend, a participant and advisor in all that life brings." 

Using similar language, another young woman expressed the same hopes for her marriage. "The thought of sitting with my dearest friend in our own home, enjoying each other's company, quietly pondering the events of the day—that is one of the things I look so much forward to," she confided in a letter to her sister a few months before her wedding in 1924. "I will want to hear everything that is on his mind. [I will want to be] his friend, his assistant, his fellow conspirator on our journey through life."

Further differentiating their beliefs from nineteenth-century notions of an ideal marriage was the emphasis young women placed on physical intimacy. If their parents' generation had shied away from displays of physical affection, young women denned the ideal relationship as one characterized by emotional expressiveness, romance, and affection. In the words of one "happily married young wife," "tenderness and caresses— those are the things that sustain a marriage." Never, she counseled other women, should they "be stingy with or embarrassed by your love."

By the 1920s, new sexual ideologies had also filtered into young women's consciousness. By then, references to Freudian psychology and the writing of European sexologists were common even in popular magazines, and Danish sex reformers had already for years insisted on the importance of sexual enjoyment for both spouses in marriage. Not surprisingly, young women therefore incorporated pleasurable sexual relations as a key component in their marital ideal. As one young wife argued in 1920, "Marital relations, the complete giving of oneself to the other" ought to be the foundation for "a deep and beautiful shared life."

According to another young woman, marital success depended on "physical passion, a deep, mutual longing toward complete intimacy and abandonment of oneself to the other." "If this [passion] is not present," she continued, "it is not advisable to enter into marriage since [sexual relations] otherwise easily will make the woman feel degraded, the man disappointed, and daily life together will start crumbling." By the late 1920s, the notion that sexual passion was essential to marital success had become so widely accepted that when the Copenhagen newspaper B.T. in 1930 invited its readers to submit their answers to the question "What makes a marriage happy?" the winning essay emphasized exactly this aspect. 

"It is important that the two [spouses] are erotically compatible," the prize winners "A. L. and wife" noted. "Otherwise," they added, "their happiness will collapse sooner or later." Understandably, the generation of women who had insisted on being pals with men before marriage also carried this ideal with them after their weddings. In contrast to older patterns of separate, gender-segregated work and leisure activities for husbands and wives, they conceived of the ideal marriage as one in which spouses led deeply intertwined lives, sharing not only bed and board but also free time, hobbies, and interests. 

"A husband and a wife should share with each other every aspect of their life . . . and in a good marriage they will naturally want to do so," "Mrs. Marie" declared in 1925. Other women agreed, arguing that a "good marriage is built on true friendship. Shared interests allow a husband and a wife to continue to be good friends. .. . It is therefore of vital importance for a marriage that spouses have good interests in common." In the course of the postwar decade, then, young women, bent on freer, more exciting lives than those of their mothers, came to conceive of the ideal marriage as an intimate, egalitarian, sexually pleasurable partnership between like-minded individuals sharing, and enjoying, their lives to the greatest extent possible. 

If women who came of age in the postwar decade were particularly enthusiastic in their embrace of this marital ideal, the ideal itself did not necessarily derive from within their circles. In the 1910 and 1920s popular writers, journalists, psychologists, sexologists, advice columnists, and marriage counselors across the Western world promoted this vision of an ideal marriage. In their eyes, the norms and values that had shaped nineteenth-century marriages had simply become obsolete. Not only did asceticism and self-control seem increasingly old-fashioned in an emerging consumer culture, but patriarchal authority also seemed to violate new, more modern sensibilities. 

The gradual decline of separate spheres and experiments with cross-gender camaraderie had made emotional distance between spouses inappropriate. And in the light of new knowledge about the human mind and the human body, the kind of sexual repression that supposedly characterized nineteenth- century marriages had become outdated. In the twentieth century, such behaviors no longer had their place, and like the Scandinavian legislators who passed the marriage reform bills, they believed it necessary that marriages be reformed if the institution was to survive. Up against older norms, they therefore championed intimacy, romance, and camaraderie as the true foundations for a happy marriage, and young women adopted many of their ideas from these sources.

Surely, some young men must have been as interested as their female peers in this new marital ideal, but if that were the case, it was not something to which its many advocates paid much attention. Instead, the vast majority of the experts who played such a crucial role in the conceptualization of the new ideal seemed to rely almost entirely on women to carry out their vision. With few exceptions, they directed their counsel toward wives—not husbands or even couples—implicitly delegating to women the responsibility for translating the new ideal into reality. In part, this reflected conventional expectations of women as patrons and regulators of emotional life. As one advice columnist explained, "It is, after all, a good wife who holds the key to family happiness."

But by focusing their attention on women, marriage reformers also acknowledged that wives had a particular interest in promoting change. While companionate marriage was supposed to promote greater satisfaction for both spouses, they were keenly aware that women had more at stake in this issue. As one marriage counselor astutely noted, "Because the husband will have to give up some of the privileges he has previously had in the home, he can in most cases not be expected to lead the effort." In many ways, young women and professional experts therefore depended upon each other in their efforts to reform marriage. 

Throughout the postwar decade, young women eagerly read their tracts and listened to their recommendations, and the woman who wrote to an advice columnist, "I have asked my husband to read your answers," was certainly not the only one who sought to take advantage of professional expertise. Experts, on the other hand, quickly realized that even husbands who professed an interest in freer, more egalitarian relationships did not necessarily feel the same urgency about realizing these ideals as the women they married, and wisely enough, they therefore turned their attention toward female audiences, commending them for their willingness to take on what one journalist solemnly called "this great new labor of love."

But despite such occasional praise, marriage reformers tended to be more critical than supportive of the women who shared their ideals. Having delegated to them the responsibility for creating new marital relationships, they quickly proceeded to translate that responsibility into a duty and obligation, and when marriages failed, they typically placed the blame on wives. As one marriage counselor lectured young brides, "A husband's love . . . is a fragile flower that must be tended by gentle hands. If all women owned such gentle hands, marriage would not be such an unstable enterprise."

Because of their alleged responsibility in this area, women were, for example, more and more frequently made to bear the brunt of criticism when husbands lost interest in their wives. As one 1923 headline in a women's magazine asked, "Whose Is the Fault? Doesn't the Reason for the Many Divorces Often Lie in Women's Lack of Ability to Renew Themselves?" Over and over again, experts identified wives' carelessness with their looks as a key source of marital problems. Describing the near demise of one marriage, one magazine columnist typically noted that "during her engagement [the wife was] always dressed up, and her hair was always waved and carefully set." 

After the wedding she "slackened off" and began to appear "at the breakfast table with greasy cold cream on her face, curlers in her hair and wearing slippers," inevitably alienating her husband's affections. Only because she mended her ways, insisted the writer, did the marriage survive. As a result, marriage manuals often included beauty advice, and beauty experts often presented themselves as substitute marriage counselors. In addition, women were repeatedly reminded to retain their appeal as partners in conversation. This entailed, experts argued, a general open mindedness and at least some knowledge of events outside the domestic sphere. 

"A woman might possess plenty of admirable qualities," one magazine cautioned, "but if she cannot talk about anything besides her household, if she does not read anything, and if she does not know anything beyond the grind of everyday life, then no intelligent man will be able to stand her in the long run."" When one young wife somewhat indignantly asked an advice columnist whether "a husband has the right to be disgruntled just because his wife is mostly preoccupied with housework," she should therefore have expected the lecture she was about to receive. 

"Your husband is right," the editor of the column answered her. Today, a wife's duty extends far beyond cooking, baking, and washing. Like her husband, she ought to be interested in all forms of cultural enrichment available to her. She should not just be a washboard, a broomstick, and a wooden ladle. It is her responsibility to be her husband's intellectual match, and she should be interested in those cultural aspects that give life depth and nourishment and provide material for conversations that move beyond ordinary everyday nonsense. .. . In the end, it is the latter that creates the foundation for good fellowship—for marriage itself.

Obviously, married women were not encouraged to expand their minds because of the gratification they might find in this, but because of the pleasure it would bring their husbands. In the blunt words of one columnist, "[A] wife should be interested in the world outside the home if she wants her husband to be interested in her." Simultaneously, wives were encouraged to tone down their own problems and concerns. Specifically, they should never talk about housekeeping. "Meet him with a bright smile and a loving welcome," one marriage counselor suggested. "Do not immediately launch into a detailed description of all your worries and calamities." 

Adding to this general advice, another writer explained that "when a husband goes out frequently, it is because he is bored to death of listening to an endless monologue about the butcher and the baker and the grocer and the high prices on everything and about the children who always fight etc. in one never-ending gray monotony. No men like to listen to all that. . . . The wise wife therefore keeps her worries and troubles to herself." Obviously, if wives were to engage their husbands in the kind of intimate conversation they were longing for it would be on terms set by men. Only if they adopted interests and issues deriving from men's world and experiences could they with some justification expect their cooperation. 

Popular magazines, marriage manuals, and advice columns soon added yet another requirement to the list of criteria for being an attractive wife. From the mid-1920s, they began to bring up the issue of marital sexuality, reminding women of the importance of being active and interested sexual partners for their husbands. In itself, this emphasis on sexual pleasure in marriage was not entirely new. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, sexuality had generally been presented as a positive feature of marriage for both spouses. What was remarkable about the postwar discourse on marital sexuality was the change in tone. 

Prior to the 1920s, marriage and sex manuals had been aimed at men, typically giving them advice about how best to initiate young wives into marital sexuality without alienating their affection or crushing their desires. In the course of the 1920s, advice givers shifted their focus from men to women, admonishing wives not to neglect their sexual duties. From the mid-1920s, women were repeatedly reminded of their obligation to retain their spouses' erotic interest or suffer the consequences. If a husband fell in love with another woman, "saving his affection and politeness for her and taking his bad temper out on his wife," it was, one expert warned, most likely "because [the wife] no longer dresses up to please him."

A modern wife should, others claimed, "also be a mistress" and "at all times seek to captivate her husband." "Never be cold, indifferent or unwilling to give yourself to your husband if you want to preserve his love," one advice columnist warned. "It will alienate [him] and only bring unhappiness into your home." By the end of the decade, wives were not only expected to engage in marital sexuality with pleasure, but had in fact been accorded the responsibility for maintaining an erotic atmosphere within the home and providing sexual fulfillment for their husbands. In the course of the 1920s, experts of all kinds thus heaped a dizzying array of new duties and responsibilities on married women.”

- Birgitte Soland, “From Pragmatic Unions to Romantic Partnerships?” in Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

[lilflowerpot]

I have a question about Galra parenting! I know in previous posts, you've talked in length, about colonies who's job is to raise Galra children, and that their parents, if soldiers, request to be put on planet, as a form of guard. If so, who raises Galra children, since they are mostly raised in group? Is there an assigned nanny of sorts? What qualifies a care taker to be put on a planet such as that? Is there a more maternal subcategory of Galra that is known to fill the position? Part 1

(cont.) Would the caregiver have any children of their own? Human society tells us that females make better caregivers. Is that true for Galra? Followup question what would a misdeed as a child be? What would be considered misbehavior? As a human getting into fights would warrant punishment but for Galra this isn't the case. And what would an appropriate punishment be? For humans, unfortunately, spanking is commonplace. Is this the same/similar to Galra? Ignore me if you've covered this before.

-

The Galra are very much a collectivist culture in that the needs of the Empire as a whole are prioritised over the needs of the individual, and so the practice of communal child-rearing has long-since been considered the norm because it’s always made sense for the community to look after their young as a whole rather than expect individuals to do so while simultaneously juggling full time employment. It’s also both physically and mentally beneficial for young Galra to be surrounded by other kits as opposed to suffering isolation, but as Galra genetics are aggressive to the point of limited fertility (dual-foetus pregnancies being virtually unheard of, as one typically absorbs the other), having more than one sibling is relatively uncommon and more than two a rare occurrence indeed, so by the time a second conception occurs the first child might have been alone for many decaphoebs: ergo, nursery colonies are the obvious solution, allowing young Galra to socialise regularly with a large group of peers.

Your average Nursery Colony might have 40,000 children (all Imperial citizens but not necessarily all Galra), an equal if not greater number of parents doubling as educators, and a handful of specialists (likely a hundred or less) who are there in leadership roles as the most educated in the Empire: these are the Dayak [i] [ii], scholars held in the highest regard as they possess a deep knowledge of many subjects.

Galra parents may apply for a position upon any given nursery colony alongside their child/children providing their trade will benefit the community there rather than solely drain its resources (and the Galra abhor idleness, it goes against their entire culture as a very physical people, so this is not usually a problem): this includes soldiers, yes, but also agricultural workers, engineers, scientists, artists, and scholars most of all. Imperial children are provided the best of all things, and chief among these is a top-tier education as they are the future of the Empire. Rather than having designated “teachers” the Galra believe in a hands-on approach to cultivating their youngest minds (kinetic learning is generally the most effective method for rambunctious little kitlings who would riot if kept at a desk from dawn til dusk) and so they’ll have people of all professions on-planet for the express purpose of allowing the children to really experience the world rather than just hear about it second-hand. They express an interest in science? Let’s go and see the new shuttles being built! Art? Well there’ll be no understanding how sunlight plays on water if you haven't witnessed it for yourself! Agriculture? This is how we plow the fields and moderate the ph of the soil to produce only the finest food for the Empire! History? The druids have kept archives dating back millennia, and many of the recent ones take the form of AI, so why not ask your questions of Empress Zetian herself? 

In humans, the whole “women are better caregivers” thing is a distortion of the fact that way back when humans were a hunter-gatherer people, men were sent out to do the actual hunting & gathering while women stayed back to care for the young. Why, you ask? Not, as many people seem to believe, because the females of our species are predisposed to be weaker than the males, but rather because they are more valuable on a biological bases. In terms of ensuring the longevity of a clan’s bloodline, one woman could realistically carry no more than one pregnancy per year, whereas one man could impregnate any number of women: this means that if all the clan’s men went out hunting, and only one returned, the group would replenish and survive, if the reverse occurred, they would almost certainly die out. Ergo, that lingering belief is a product of misogyny, because there is no reason that being biologically one sex or another should make you a better/worse caregiver in modern society.

...Which is a long-winded way of saying that no, the Galra firmly believe that the best caregivers are the most educated and naturally nurturing, which has absolutely nothing to do with sex or gender or anything other than an individual’s personality.

As for misbehaviour, it’s less about the physical act of fighting and more about the way in which the child conducts themselves (once again linking back to the Galra code of honourable conduct): sparring against a playmate or even brawling in a group? Good! Acting with your peers to victimise one child and/or not allowing the individual you are sparring with to yield? Absolutely not. While corporal punishment is used within the military - lashings for acts of insubordination or misconduct, typically - it is not done so outside of that, and never against children. As I’ve said, they’re considered to be far too precious, and additionally where an adult Galra has the mental capacity to understand that X action results in Y punishment, and will therefore know why they are being subjected to physical repercussions, for children this is not always the case and considered quite uniquely cruel because of it. When a kit misbehaves, they would instead be subjected to a sort of "time out” (the worse / more frequent their misconduct, the longer they would be kept separate from their peers) and as the Galra are incredibly social creatures, this threat of isolation is typically an ample deterrent.

[woman-loving]

(Early feminist and socialist efforts in Japan: excerpt from A History of Japan, 2nd ed., by Conrad Totman, 2005)

On the surface of the land, meanwhile, the burgeoning textile industry was heavily staffed by the teenage daughters of hard-pressed rural families, the girls commonly being lured to mill work by recruiters who misrepresented both wage arrangements and workplace conditions. One angry young silk worker wrote in 1888:

“Silk thread manufacturers, using contracts as a shield, treat us abominably. They think we are like slaves, like dirt. We think the silk-thread bosses are vipers, are our bitter enemies.”[8]

As factory lighting was installed during the eighties, thread mills became notorious for their long hours and use of child labor. One elderly woman, recalling her years as a girl in the silk mills during the nineties, wrote:

“In the lamplit factory we worked from morning darkness to about ten o'clock at night. By the time we had finished work we could hardly stand on our feet.”

Unsurprisingly the workers protested occasionally and absconded frequently, the majority breaking contract and fleeing their jobs within six months of recruitment. They did so, moreover, despite "barbed wire, high walls, guarantee deposits, and company regulations," and despite the hardship that doing so might cause their families, whose ability to repay debts often depended on daughterly income.[9]

ACTIVIST WOMEN

In Japan, as elsewhere, industrialization generated pollution, gave rise to urban labor problems, complicated rural life, and in due course radically diminished village influence on society at large. At the same time, however, it was broadening the general public's intellectual vistas, creating new career alternatives, and to an unprecedented degree institutionalizing the separation of household and work place. These trends affected women as well as men, and as a result questions about their roles and rights began to acquire greater visibility than in the past, foreshadowing an even more heightened presence in later years.

When architects of the Meiji state undertook to define social and political roles in the years around 1890, it will be recalled, they utilized principles and practices of both indigenous and alien provenance to forge a centralized, paternalistic regime that would, they hoped, build a rich and strong Japan, a "modern" society, a Great Power. How best to situate women in this new order was a question that evoked much comment. Some men and women advocated expanded roles for women, especially during the 1870s when everything seemed in flux. Kishida Toshiko, the daughter of an established Kyoto merchant, was well versed in progressive European thought, and she became one of the day's most eloquent proponents of women's rights. She spoke widely and effectively on behalf of education and opportunity for women, declaring in 1883, at age twenty:

“Equality, independence, respect, and a monogamous relationship are the hallmarks of relationships between men and women in a civilized society.”[19]

A handful of men echoed this view, but as national affairs stabilized during the later 1880s, a counter-argument came to prevail, one that reflected the growing separateness of home and work place and that was grounded in both foreign and domestic precedents. It defined woman's proper role as that of responsible operative of the household, dedicated homemaker, "good wife; wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo).

In 1899, when the Education Ministry was prodding prefectural authorities to establish more high schools for women, a Ministry official explained the government's reasoning this way:

“Since the family is the root of the nation, it is the vocation of women who become housewives to be good wives and wise mothers, and girls' high schools are necessary to provide appropriate education enabling girls from middle- and upper-middle-class families to carry out this vocation.”

Viewing the proper role of women in these terms, Meiji leaders encouraged them to pursue appropriate education. They also argued, however, that women should be excluded from politics lest such involvement endanger their morals, conduce to social disorder, and compromise their role as wife and mother. Accordingly Article 5 of the Police Security Regulations of 1890, reaffirmed in 1900, barred women from joining political organizations, participating in political meetings, voting, or standing for office.

This official posture failed to satisfy the growing number of women who wished to pursue other careers or expand their range of life choices.[20] Nor did it address social issues that affected women in general, notably concubinage, prostitution, and male drunkenness, but also harsh conditions of the working poor, such as those in the textile mills. Indeed, the situation of the working poor seems to have been as far beyond the mental horizon of the Meiji elite as of elites elsewhere. Worst of all, perhaps, were the lives of the earlier-mentioned women coal miners. Recalled one observer:

“The life of the female coal-miner was appalling. Returning black and grimy from a day's work in the pits with their husbands, they immediately had to start preparing meals. In those days there were no nursery facilities, so infants were placed in the care of others. Mothers returned from the mines to nurse their babies. Men would return from their work to bathe and sit back and relax, displaying their tattoos and drinking sake. This was the accepted behaviour of these lowly people, and no man would be found helping with what were designated as women's tasks. If a woman so much as protested, she would be beaten.”[21]

Precisely because mining was a dirty and dangerous occupation, however, mine operators had to pay wages that substantially exceeded those of surface jobs as a way to attract and retain workers. For women as well as men, the lure of better pay sufficed. Indeed, a few years later, when government reformers enacted legislation to prohibit women from working in the pits for reasons of public health, some women severely resented their exclusion from jobs that paid much better than what they could earn above ground.[22]

These women miners generally were mature and married. Younger, single rural girls commonly took jobs in the textile mills and as domestic servants, while poor urban women and girls held a wide range of jobs: as "lowgrade factory workers, used paper and junk collectors, . .. peddlers, papermakers, . . . fishmongers, and vegetable-sellers," working as day laborers, and engaging in "cart-pushing and itinerant tea-picking.”23

These working poor were nearly as invisible to activist women as they were to male leaders. Even among the women of privilege, moreover, differing needs, priorities, and interests led to the pursuit of differing agendas. In consequence it was exceedingly difficult for activists to form a united front and promote a shared program for change in women's circumstances.

One of those who confronted most thoughtfully the dilemma of a fragmented female populace was Fukuda Hideko of Okayama samurai ancestry. An admirer of Kishida, she spent some years as radical political activist and prison inmate before settling down to a life devoted to teaching and feminist socialist activism. In 1907 Fukuda established a magazine, Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), as a vehicle of feminist-socialist thought and information. In the editorial that launched her new venture, she declared,

“as far as women are concerned, virtually everything is coercive and oppressive, making it imperative that we women rise up and forcefully develop our own social movement.”[24]

Recognizing with particular clarity the social basis of the divisions that prevented women from developing a united front, she frequently pointed out that women labored under both gender and class discrimination. For that reason, she argued in another essay the same year, women should support socialism:

“While socialism prevents the exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, it also stops the arrogance of the male class against women. It gets rid of the rich and poor classes, and removes sexual discrimination.”[25]

In hopes of appealing to the broadest spectrum of women, Fukuda chose as a major goal of Sekai Fujin the repeal of the above-noted Article 5. But even that focus failed to elicit a unified women's movement. Harassed by authorities and unsympathetic to the sorts of paternalistic governmental measures that many less fortunate women welcomed, Fukuda was unable to build a broad movement. A few years later the women's movement drifted into desuetude in the wake of a plot to assassinate the emperor (noted below), in which the young and angry journalist-turned-anarchist Kanno Suga became deeply involved at the price of her life.

Not all women activists were so firmly opposed to the established order. For some the new influences sweeping across Meiji Japan seemed to offer rich opportunity, even as wife and mother. That view was evident in the journal Jogaku zasshi (Women's Education Magazine), which appeared in 526 issues during 1885-1904, until it failed financially.[26]

A number of women founded girls' schools where they instructed students in values and subjects that could accommodate the "good wife; wise mother" vision even while promoting a broader sense of women's possibilities (see figure 14.1). Most famously, in 1901 Tsuda Ume founded the Women's English School (Joshi Eigaku Juku), which grew into today's Tsuda Women's University. She urged her students not only to be ladylike but also to pursue practical schooling in marketable skills. As she observed in a speech of 1915, "Economic independence is the one thing that can save a woman from an unsuitable or distasteful marriage urged on her by relatives."[27] Educators such as she gave encouragement to the growing number of young women who pursued the study of medicine, training them to be licensed as nurses and after 1912 as doctors. And even larger numbers were trained as school teachers, especially for women's schools.

Among noted women of the day, the one who enjoyed the most success was Okumura Ioko, daughter of a Buddhist priest in Kyushu. An energetic participant in Restoration politics, she became a firm supporter of Meiji continental expansion, traveled about Northeast Asia, and in 1901 established the Patriotic Women's Society. Its main functions were to assist troops departing for war, aid those families of soldiers that were experiencing hardship, and console the bereaved. Because Okumura's organization so clearly contributed to government policy, she quickly won the backing of leaders and her organization grew with striking rapidity, counting 465,000 members by 1905 and a million or more by World War I, with branches in villages throughout the realm.

[...]

SOCIALIST INTELLECTUALS

One factor that spurred officials and pundits to counsel lowered expectations for the young, to favor movements such as Okumura' s Patriotic Women's Society, and to attempt to outflank or suppress the efforts of feminists, labor unionists, and other critics of the newly established Meiji order was their awareness of the growing attention intellectuals were giving to social problems and tensions of the day. During the 1890s some observers began to think about society's problems in terms of the recently articulated Marxist and other socialist analyses that they encountered through study abroad and the discussion of imported texts. In 1901 a group in Tokyo formed the Social Democratic Party, declaring as their goal:

“to abolish the gap between rich and poor and secure a victory for pacificism in the world by means of genuine socialism and democracy.”[31]

The newly formed government of Prime Minister Katsura Tarō responded to the group's manifesto by promptly seizing all copies of the document and ordering the party disbanded. The Minister of the Interior, who ordered the party's dissolution, explained the issue this way:

“Other countries all have their hands full with the socialist party and are doing their best to suppress it. We in Japan must likewise devote all our efforts to suppressing it.”[32]

That response notwithstanding, the handful of intellectuals who comprised this initial socialist movement continued their peaceful proselytizing over the next several years, and in early 1906 the government allowed them to form a new political party. During 1906-7, however, after wartime boom and patriotic zeal had given way to industrial slump and political anger, the country was racked by strikes and labor disputes involving both mine and surface workers. That turmoil, together with socialist editorializing (and especially socialist criticism of government action in suppressing the labor protest at Ashio), led to the new party's disbandment. By then Kōtoku Shūsui, a journalist, socialist party participant, and critic of the Ashio mine operation, was also denouncing the harsh government policy in Korea. He called for more radical revolutionary action at home, even as he and others were having run-ins with the police. Moreover, some of his associates were mounting a rhetorical attack on the imperial institution itself.

These developments led government leaders to see the socialists as a dangerous threat to their new constitutional order. Employing much the same "preventive" logic as in 1901, Prime Minister Katsura argued in 1908:

“Although socialists at the moment are said to constitute little more than a thin thread of smoke, if we overlook this thread of smoke, it will someday develop the force of a wildfire, and then it would be too late for anything but regrets.”[33]

Therefore, he argued, their meetings and publications must be controlled and their growth stymied. The government cracked down, using tight surveillence, jailings, suppression of the socialist press, and severe constraints on speakers.

Nevertheless, underground socialist activity continued. In the spring of 1910 authorities discovered a plot to mount a bomb attack against the emperor, presumably as part of an attempt at violent revolution that was inspired by recent anarchist actions in Russia. Viewed by the government and press as an utterly heinous crime - and as an opportunity to squelch socialism - that incident led to the arrest, trial, and eventual conviction and execution of Kōtoku, along with Kanno and ten others, on the charge of high treason.34

The government took other steps, as well, to forestall dissident activity. It moved to consolidate its control of Korea by replacing the existing Korean administration with a Japanese governor-generalship. At home it established a special police force, the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (Tokkō or Special Higher Police), to watch for "dangerous thought." And, as noted above, it gave formal approval to the creation of a locally-based, nationwide army reserve system. That reserve, its leaders hoped, would assure that the army's ideals of imperial loyalism, durable social order, and diligent national service came to pervade community life, thereby eliminating the threats of sedition, selfishness, and sloth.

The government employed carrots as well as sticks, most notably the aforementioned Factory Act of 1911. With those acts of repression and concession the socialist movement became inactive, not reviving until the Russian Revolution brought it a new surge of hope.

[incarnateirony]

*Pulls a post out of another post like a magic trick*

So anyway I wrote a longassed general meta while boxing up the LGBT discussion until the end, because frankly, there are elements worth focusing on beyond that -- but at the end I did leave a note and, frankly, as I don’t know who all will read that far after the meta, it feels worth putting into the general air.

I thank 15.07 for the display of performative absurdity. It’s not the first episode to rip open and expose fandom’s dirty underbelly and intersectional marginalization forces wearing an LGBT Activism Suit -- 14.03 also did so loudly by Bobo (eg read: “The Problem with Dreamhunter” [A post that points out what people will accept for canonization when there isn't a rival ship or excessive projection of antis specific to a ship which is *SPOILER ALERT* nowhere near what everyone pretends is needed when they want to argue just to argue and some intersectional WLW vs MLM issues]) -- but it was the first to approach it directly with Dean, much less so textually.

The ridiculous redefinition of words, of “what *I* think canon means” whipped completely out of fandom generated buzz and no dictionary on the face of the planet -- the demands, and the active erasure of existing LGBT text because it wasn’t *visible enough* -- really does show a seedy side of fandom that wears a nice Representation Warrior dress sometimes, but betrays a series of issues:

Most points boil down to “I won’t acknowledge any text unless it is loud enough to argue down any idiot I ever meet”, putting the focus not on representative resonance and value of quality of text, but on personal vindication for raw argumentation. A world where trolls and their personal agendas have actually taken *greater importance* to people than the representative text, and is an absolutely abysmal motivation or bottom line for any discussion and yes, if you recoiled and feel ashamed or called out about that, rather than patching over your pride and doubling down, maybe skim the reblog tags bisexual people have left on my several dozen posts about the damages of them being actively deleted is doing.

If you care about representation, you’ll think about that. Even if it’s not the loudly visible version of representation you *want*, it is what it is, and well--it is. Pretty simply. There is no perfect fantasy world where everybody understands and wants the thing you do. And I’m not just talking about LGBT rep. I’m talking about the people you pretend to need to argue gay canon with still being absolutely flummoxed by canon itself, like them saying “family don’t end with blood” and “found family” are “fanon concepts”. The same people that pretend there’s a fair canon reading that Sam and Dean never cared about Castiel in any capacity or wilder, the people who pretend it’s a fanon idea that he ever did. People that are confused where demons go when they die. People that rebuke literally many-times textualized non-gay things just to suit their personal agenda. And shockingly, they have a personal agenda about the gay content too.  

I’m talking about Rowling having straight characters married with kids and then not actually owning their canonicity beyond the fourth wall. I’m talking about straight pairings like mulder and scully that got no romo’ed around even after they kissed and got pregnant and the whole nine, because bawww that’s not what the show is about so *allow me to build elaborate theories that make no sense and pretend they have standing in canon equal to the straightforward read*. 

Cuz that’s where we’re at right now. Our fandom is just particularly bonky, and has been allowed to go so far off the edge of the map and away from center GA-resonant discussion that the bog standard antis have literally come up with body-mutilating necrophilia as an answer to avoid the gay, and somehow... *shruuuuug?* people act like these people not only are of equal worth but like... deserve... any consideration long term? Or that it these people have any bearing on GA discussion which I literally have two years of stat based blogging to disbar even if TVG calling it like they see it is a nice GA flagpost? But we’ll whip up a GA that exists in no known modern metric and throw up what we think the GA thinks, instead of reading major news publications and *reading* what the GA thinks.

 Which is when we lean into the next point on MOTIVATION.

So ask at what point arguing with tinhats beat out your actual interest in representation and LGBT rights and media issues. Ask at what point you surrendered your focus on feeling resonant with a character that has been textually acknowledged, and traded that for implying you suddenly can’t relate to the character until he performs [X] exact function, exactly how you want, and when you want. Hell, I have even gotten an anon that literally said they would have acknowledged it if SPN had given them what they want when they wanted-- so basically, too late, not enough.

That’s not how text works. Whether the text came ten years ago or now, the text is the text. Your personal fulfillment aside, text is text. And I highly urge people to stop demanding tokenism above demographic-targeted representative types (eg bisexual, raised in the 80s in a patriarchal/power/grit based society and its own associated dogmas, fairly masculine identity, and so on) or demanding characters perform as if they were from another demographic (be it age or gender) because that’s your demographic.

Once you start removing elements of the represented demographics (LGBT, male, age, origin, etc) and wanting it to perform by way of *your* demographic’s behaviors or base line needs/wants, that’s when we’ve left representation. That’s when we’re demanding tokenization. And when you’re demanding tokenization to win internet fights with people who don’t even believe what they say, you have long left the representation wheelhouse. That’s what we call troll wars.

Do not let LGBT media representation be kidnapped into troll wars. Do not let content be degraded or removed just to engage in troll wars. And if you want to engage in troll wars, and you value the arguments more than the discussion *of* representation intersectional issues, and methods, and all around it -- then just... stop. Stop saying you want representation. Don’t.

As always, you’re free to want more visible text, but unsatisfactory text is still text, and what is unsatisfactory to you may be perfectly welcome representation to the target demographic.

The fact that if we scoured this whole digital fandom we may pull like 2 active people that match Dean’s demographic, with most in hiding and needing to be lured from the shadows *coughBencough* -- usually avoiding the fandom *BECAUSE* they get buried, and avalanched when they say, “no he’s good representation for me.” So the fact that be they LGBT but women, or male but not LGBT, or LGBT male but two generations separated from Dean -- the fact that this is the communal voice box discussing this while essentially ironically talking over an LGBT creator?

That’s bad.

And yeah, y’all are doing it.

Bobo is a middle aged LGBT male, who has written sociopolitical commentary about how to get queer media representation platform via moderate incrementalization  *long before he ever came on SPN*, and yet nobody cares about his voice or his take. They’re mad he doesn’t give them enough material to *argue* with, without considering, perhaps, he doesn’t want to be argued for from the angles fandom insists on vying after. Instead, these voices that are not part of the central target demographic that people say they want representation for? They yell queerbait -- because... well -- because most of you want to win arguments that like 95% of the time, the people you’re wasting your breath and kilobits on don’t even believe what they’re saying. But the argument -- that’s what matters. Not the LGBT male creator. Not his sociopolitical voice. Not the LGBT text in the show. The argument.

And that?

That there’s a problem.

While about 20 people decided to hashtag #spnqueerbaits after last episode of all episodes, I sat, fingers splayed over my face, trying to keep myself from staring in mortification and secondhand embarrassment at the screen with my only consolation that many of them by their style and dialogue on their profiles seemed very young, and probably haven’t thought of any of the above, much less being predisposed to “getting it” for another 5 or 10 years. But like. Y i k e s.

Thankfully this being the final season it’s unlikely to do the significant damage that was done on a similar path 6 years ago, and I can only hope it tapers off.

[ruoyeming]

My Top Ten Anime, a chaotic list

This was so hecking difficult, I’m gonna have to do some ‘honourable mentions’ for ones I can’t bring myself to leave out. This list is based entirely on my personal feelings, not an objective assessment of what are logically the best anime. There also may be mild spoilers at points because I can’t control myself. Doing this in quarantine cause I looove ranting about things I like.

10) Attack On Titan

This was the first anime I ever watched, and it blew my mind a bit tbh. The music is iconic, and the animation is great as well. It might have been a bit harrowing for my first experience with anime, but I absolutely loved the story. It’s set in a world where titans (man eating giants) have driven the dregs of humanity to live within giant stone walls. There’s a group of humans trying to research titans, kill them, and protect humanity, and the main character decides to join them after a titan breaks through one of the walls and his mother is eaten. It’s one of those where you think you know everything and suddenly the world gets turned upside down by a new discovery. All the puzzle pieces start fitting together the longer you watch, and you find out that everything going on is much bigger than what it originally seemed (government conspiracy time lads). The plot twists are unpredictable (for me at least) and devastating, and the emotion this series evokes is awesome - you can FEEL the sheer desperation of the characters, their rage and despair as they fight again and again against a seemingly unending enemy. Despite almost every battle being a suicide mission and despite too many losses, the characters keep going out of the human need to survive and protect. 

10/10 for brutality and gore, but also theme of hope.

9) Naruto

A founding father of anime. Surprisingly not one of the first I watched, in fact it took me a few years to start. It’s set in a feudal Japan where ninjas are the defenders and servers of the people, and different villages have different ninja styles. Naruto is a young boy with a dangerous spirit sealed inside him which has caused him to be shunned by society (even though it’s not his fault??), and he wants to become a ninja. First off I’m a sucker for the Naruto archetype: dumbass, cocky, obnoxious, but kind and loyal too. Years of solitude and ostracisation as a child mean that Naruto desperately wants people to acknowledge him, and he intends to become the Hokage to prove himself. There’s a huge range of characters and villains, all with cool ninjutsus and different philosophies. Friendship, power, and determination are some of the main themes and it makes me so proud to see my son *COUGH* Naruto progressing and learning from his mistakes. It IS a long boi though and I haven’t even finished Shippuden yet, but I think Naruto captures the essence of shounen anime and is a great underdog story. Manga is lit too. 

10/10 for cool battles and great characters.

8) Psycho Pass

One of the earlier anime I watched, and it became an instant favourite for the way it makes you question morality. It’s set in a kinda dystopian future Japan, where a technology called the Sibyl System checks people’s mental state and determines their ‘crime coefficient’ - how likely they are to commit a crime. The main character is a young woman who joins the police and begins to realise that blindly following this system is perhaps not the best way to go about things. For example, they have special guns that automatically kill people whose crime coefficients are over a certain level, but she soon proves that you can easily lower someone’s coefficient by talking them down and negotiating instead of killing them off immediately. It’s got great drama, great government conspiracy, compelling villains, and some really badass characters. It pushes the question of what is right or wrong, and how far technology should go when it comes to justice. 

10/10 for sociological debate and horror elements.

7) One Punch Man

OPM is an anime that stands out for me, partially for mocking the tropes of battle anime, and partially for the uniqueness of the main character’s predicament. It’s set in Japan where heroes and villains exist, and the protagonist is a man called Saitama who gained superstrength after doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and a 10K run every day. However he’s become so strong that he can defeat every enemy with a single punch. Nothing is a challenge for him anymore so he becomes depressed and unfulfilled; he’s still a good man who helps people, but he feels he’s missing something from his life. A cyborg called Genos makes Saitama his master, determined to learn his ways and they become friends. It’s one of the first anime that made me laugh out loud; it’s funny and entertaining, but also shows us that power is not equal to happiness. 

10/10 for moral lessons and good jokes.

6) Tanaka-kun is Always Listless

The only slice of life anime on this list and not very well known, however it has a special place in my heart. The main character Tanaka is a boy who dozes off constantly and acts exhausted when awake; he loves expending as little energy as possible. His best friend Ohta looks out for him and essentially makes sure he doesn’t get lost/ be late/die on a daily basis, including carrying him when he just falls asleep sometimes. Although Tanaka seems uncaring, it’s shown that friendship isn’t a bother to him, and he realises that he actually relies on his friends despite saying he likes being left in peace. His friends all have great personalities, my personal faves are a tough gangster girl who’s rude to everyone EXCEPT her adorable loli girlfriend, and a popular girl who’s trying too hard to fit in and starts to become more herself after befriending Tanaka. All the characters share one brain cell, and it’s genuinely a funny anime - I’ve burst out laughing watching it a few times. Also Tanaka and Ohta are extremely shippable if you want to go down that route; it’s said several times in the series that they’re like an old married couple. 

10/10 for wholesomeness and comedy.

5) Ouran High School Host Club

Another lighthearted show, probably the anime that’s made me laugh the most out of any. It’s set at an academy for rich-as-heck kids, and there’s a ‘Host Club’ where all the girls go to drink tea with a group of handsome boys. There’s the cunning Kyouka, prankster identical twins Hikaru and Kaoru, stoic Mori, adorable Honey, and princely but obnoxious Tamaki. Haruhi, a working-class scholarship student who is mistaken for a boy, accidentally breaks a precious vase and is forced by the host club to join them to pay off her debt. The group of boys realise fairly quickly that haruhi is a girl, but she becomes a popular host amongst the girls (LOVE the secret lesbian vibes) so they keep up the charade. I think I have a weakness for groups that share one brain cell because aside from Kyouka, they’re all idiots. I also love how flexible the show is with ideas of gender and sexuality despite being a slightly older anime. The daily antics of the host club combined with their personalities is a recipe for comedy, and they’re all lovable in their own ways. 

10/10 for characters, drama, and comedy; it’s well-paced too.

4) Bungou Stray Dogs

Set in an alternate modern Japan where some people have secret abilities that can be activated, this anime became an obsession when I first watched it. The cast of characters is amazing and the villains are awesome too. Atsushi is an orphan who discovers he can turn into a powerful tiger, and is hired by the Armed Detective Agency, a small organisation of powerful individuals who fight crime. NEED I SAY ANY MORE?? Many of the main characters share names with famous Japanese authors such as Osamu Dazai and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa which is really cool and something that might add to the story more if I had an understanding of Japanese literature. Anyways the main character Atsushi is kind of a wimp at first (understandably because the world of ability-users is actually terrifying), but he learns to stand up for himself and use his ability to save people. The show’s mixing of dark and comedic tones is perfect to me; one moment a character is off his head on mushrooms and the next Atsushi’s leg is brutally sliced off in a back alley fight (it regenerates later no worries). The plot is really cool and full of intrigue, and eventually you get the whole ‘Usually we’re sworn enemies but we’re forced to become allies in the face of a greater evil’ thing and it’s great! Turns out our main guy and our main bad guy are actually a pretty powerful and efficient team, hoho?? 

10/10 for supernatural detectives being super cool.

3) Yuri!!! on Ice

Y’all already know what’s going on. Ice skating, emotional breakthroughs, gay shit, HIT ME WITH IT. The story follows Yuri Katsuki, an insecure figure skater trying to regain his confidence, and his self-appointed coach Viktor Nikiforov. Viktor is enthusiastic in helping Yuri train, and Yuri has been a big fan of Viktor since his childhood *throws pillow across the room*. Yuri becomes determined to, quote, “surpass Viktor’s wildest imagination”, and they end up agreeing - through a series of convoluted events - to get married if Yuri wins gold at the olympics (I think it’s the olympics??). Either fuckin way this series has angst, humour, cuteness, and god DAMN did I get invested. When Yuri was doing his free skate my own heart was beating harder than it did when I finished a 10K. Love the vibes and also it’s the closest to full healthy gay representation that I’ve seen in anime for a while. Not much more I can say, but do I really need to say more???

10/10 for GAY and MY HEART

2) Kimetsu No Yaiba (Demon Slayer)

Ok this one’s kind of a cheat cause I’ve read the manga as well which is way ahead of the anime, but FUCC. It takes place in the Taisho Era in Japan (begins 1912), where Demons exist who eat people. Tanjiro Kamado’s family is killed by a demon one night and his sister Nezuko is turned into a demon - but it is soon discovered she’s different to other demons, and can restrain herself. Tanjiro joins the Demon Slayer Corps to try and track down a cure for his sister, while proving that demons are not inherently evil. I LOVE Tanjiro as a main character because he values kindness over everything else, not forgiving demons for their sins but recognising they are tormented creatures, trying to give them peace before they die. All demons were once human - a fact that only Tanjiro seems to remember when fighting them. He’s patient, gentle, and determined - hotheaded and brash sometimes, but he has this vibe that just makes people become his friend/respect him even if they don’t intend to. He befriends two other slayers - Inosuke, an absolutely feral Best Boy who was raised by wild boars, and Zenitsu, a cowardly but ultimately loyal guy. This trio works really well together and Tanjiro is a great protagonist. Don’t even get me STARTED on the music and animation. Impeccable. Kamado Tanjiro No Uta makes me cry every time I hear it, and the water/fire effects used to show the metaphorical way the swords move like the elements takes my breath away.

10/10 for morals, music and animation.

1) Mob Psycho 100

Where the fuck do I start here. This anime is so unique in its style, story, and characters that I think it will always be my favourite. It follows Shigeo Kageyama (nicknamed Mob cause that’s what they call extras and background characters in Japan), a plain boy with incredible psychic powers that explode when his emotions are too high. Over time he’s learned to suppress his emotions, causing him to become socially inept and emotionally withdrawn. His (fake) psychic ‘master’, Reigen, uses him to make money exorcising spirits, making Mob believe that it’s for ‘training’. Mob appears naive at times, but he is so simply kind to people that it makes my heart hurt. Unlike many of the egomaniac psychics that Mob comes across, he recognises that without powers, he is just an ordinary boy. Mob’s greatest power isn’t his OP psychic abilities, but his power to show people they can change, that he can change. He forgives (and eventually befriends) people who have tried to kill him. Redemption and empathy are big themes here and they’re done really well.

The other characters are so well rounded and are also given time to grow, including Reigen - at first he’s a seemingly manipulative sleazebag, but later you see that he is a genuinely good man who has taught Mob many lessons and helped him grow up. This is a core message - Mob’s ability to change is due to support from his friends, not purely his own desire - people need other people!

This is also one of the true rarities in anime where the second season is absolutely just as good (if not better!) than the first one. The music is unique to the show, the ops for both seasons get me litty, the animation is incredible, the jokes are great and although it’s not all about big-ass fights, when we do get a big-ass fight it’s so fucking cool. The fight sequences are beautifully animated and visually stunning. MP100 makes me laugh, cry like an actual baby, and want to become a better person. Idk I could literally write pages on it like the big nerd I am but that’s all I’ll do for now.

10/10 for literally everything.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Given : about a boy who joins a band which helps him work through his trauma. Lovely healthy gay representation and themes of healing.

Samurai Champloo : ragtag trio consisting of two samurai - one lowkey feral and does breakdancing, the other lofty and withdrawn - and a bold young girl. Themes of friendship and journeys. I simp for the lofty samurai.

Cowboy Bebop: jazzy music, bounty hunters in space, 90s anime WHAT MORE COULD U WANT. Yet another group of characters that share a single brain cell. Love it.

[pocketvenuslux]

My highest femme fragrances

Femininity is a social construction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of perfumes where woods are marketed to men and florals to women. I used to resist the idea of ascribing gender to any fragrance because it all seemed so arbitrary. I do believe that anyone who enjoys a perfume should wear it regardless of who it’s being marketed too. Having said that, I’ve started to appreciate the use of scent in the artifice of signifying gender, so without further ado, here are six feminine fragrances that signal to me the heights of high femme presentation.

Femme by Rochas

Starting off with the most obvious choice, Femme is an aptly named fruity chypre. Opens with a brazen hit of cumin and unfurls sensuously into plush florals under which pulse rich musks. Originally conceived by Edmond Roudnitska, Femme was updated in 1989 by Olivier Cresp who introduced the cumin I find so attractive about the formula.

Parfum de Thérèse by Frédéric Malle

Another Roudnitska composition, released posthumously in 2000. Here we have a more reserved, elegant version femininity. Instead of Femme’s forward sensuousness, the unusual limpid melon and cucumber notes of this floral scent present an air of emotional distance. Ahead of its time, the scent wears as both unique and timeless.

Myths Woman by Amouage

One of my favourites of this house, Myths Woman is a chilly affair, evoking a sense of hardships endured and dried tears. Pitiless and world-weary, Myths Woman suffers no fools. There is a tactile dampness to its green and floral notes that do not suggest dewy blooms, but rather, moisture on stones. Although it was released in 2016 and has a modern sheerness to it, it also possesses a vintage, complex, almost chypre-esque character. A unique, challenging and dangerously beautiful scent by nose, Nathalie Lorson. [edit: I blanked out and assumed the nose for this was Christopher Chong when of course, he was the Artistic Director of the house.]

Le Sillage Blanc by Dusita

Between Dusita’s Blanc and Piguet’s Bandit why did I settle on Blanc? Although I love Bandit, there’s something very offputting about its drydown, an unsubtle, unctuous tuberose paired with a butch leather that steers the fragrance away from savage beauty toward outright disgust. Bandit was composed by a woman, Germaine Cellier, but it recalls to mind the patriarchal idea of a woman’s leaky, hysterical body as monstrous or grotesque or, from a woman's point of view, her need to be on the offense to protect herself against male violence. Blanc on the other hand, takes the opening of Bandit with its bitter galbanum bite and smoke and supports it with florals, resins and a touch of leather. There’s something marvelously self-contained and chic about Blanc. We women live with our powerful bodies everyday. We wake up in them and go about our business, subjects of our own narratives. With Blanc, Pissara Umavijani reappropriates a classic leather chypre in a way that is to me, the ultimate in chic femininity.

Fracas by Piguet

Fracas is the other legendary scent by Germaine Cellier. Originally released in 1948, I’ve only smelled a much later reformulation that I’m sure isn’t quite as bold as the original. Nevertheless, it remains the tuberose by which all other tuberose perfumes are measured against. Like Bandit, Fracas has a reputation for being heady, narcotic, fleshy, even intimidating. But unlike Bandit, I find there is also a kindness to it.

Salome by Papillon Perfumery

I made sure to include female noses on this list because the first three two perfumes, composed by a man, present a gender normative vision of femininity with none of the requisite high femme queering irony. While Salome isn’t an ironic take, it does in its own way, slay. With the greater inclusion of women in the fragrance industry, women are creating scents that defy the desire to be an innocent lollipop Lolita or an Amazon sexpot. It’s like having the world wake up to the fact that women may not be all that interested in being a Victoria’s Secret Angel. Like Japanese Lolitas taking feminine cuteness to its logical overkill extreme, Liz Moore of Papillon outdoes all the 80s orientalist visions of the femme fatale seductress with Salome, a fragrance that has become legendary for its filth, its animalistic aggression only equaled by its beauty. Salome daringly out-cumins Femme, its lusty musks perfectly balanced with stunning rose and jasmine. One of my first full bottle purchases!

[buzzdixonwriter]

Colonialism

You back into things sometimes.

One of my many guilty pleasures is old school pulp, which I first encountered with the Doc Savage reprints in the 1960s, then old anthologies, then back issues at conventions, and now thanks to the Internet, an almost limitless supply.

And to be utterly frankly, a lot of the appeal lays in the campiness of the covers and interior art -- brass plated damsels fighting alien monsters, bare chested heroes combatting insidious hordes, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

Once past age 12, I never took these covers or the covers of modern pulps such as James Bond, Mike Hammer, or Modesty Blaise seriously; they were just good, campy fun.

While my main focus remained on the sci-fi pulps, I also kept an eye on crime and mystery pulps, war stories, and what are sometimes called “sweaties”, i.e., men’s adventure magazines.

Despite the differences in the titles and genres, certain themes seemed to pop up again and again.

Scantily clad ladies, typically in some form of distress, though on occasion dishing out as good if not better than they got.

Well, the pulps that drew my attention were the pups made for a primarily male audience (though even in the 1930s and 40s there were large numbers of female readers and writers in the sci-fi genre).  Small wonder I was drawn to certain types of eye candy; I had been culturally programmed that way.

That’s a topic well worthy of a post or two on its own, so I’m putting gender issues / the patriarchy / the male gaze aside for the moment.

What I’m more interested in focusing on is the second most popular characters to appear on the covers (and in the stories as well).

The Other.

The Other comes in all shapes / sizes / ethnicities.  Tall and short, scrawny and beefy, light or dark, you name it, they’ve got a flavor for you.

“Injuns” and aliens, Mongols and mafiosi, Africans and anarchists.

Whoever they were ”they ain’t us!”

Certain types of stories lend themselves easily to depicting the villainous Other.

Westerns, where irate natives can always be counted on to launch an attack.

War stories, where the hero (with or without an army to help him) battles countless numbers of enemies en masse.

Adventure stories, where the hero intrudes in some other culture and shows them the error of their ways.

Detective stories, where the Other might be a single sinister mastermind but still represents an existentialist threat.

And my beloved sci-fi stories?

Why, we fans told ourselves our stories were better than that!  We didn’t wallow in old world bigotry, demonizing blacks and browns and other non-whites because of their skins.

Oh, no:  We demonized green skinned aliens.

Now I know some of you are sputtering “But-but-but you wrote for GI Joe!”

Boy howdy, are you correct.

And boy howdy, did we ever exploit the Other with that show.

I never got a chance to do it, but I pitched -- and had Hasbro accept -- a story that would have been about the way I envisioned Cobra to have formed and been organized, and would focus on what motivated them.

They were pretty simplistic greedheads in the original series, but I felt the rank and file needed to be fighting for a purpose, something higher to spire to that mere dominance and wealth.

I never got to do “The Most Dangerous Man In The World” but I was trying to break out of the mold. 

For the most part, our stories fit right into the old trope of The Other.

Ours were mostly about the evil Other trying to do something nefarious against our innocent guys, but there’s an obverse narrative other stories follow, in which our guys go inflict themselves on The Other until our guys either come away with a treasure (rightfully belonging to The Other but, hey, they really don’t deserve it so we’re entitled to take it from them), or hammer The Other into submission so they will become good ersatz copies of us (only not so uppity as to demand equal rights or respect or protection under law).

These are all earmarks of a very Western (in the sense of Europe and America…with Australia and New Zealand thrown in) sin:  Colonialism.

Now, before going further let’s get out terms straight.

There’s all sorts of different forms of colonialism, and some of them can be totally benign -- say a small group of merchants and traders from one country travel to a foreign land and set up a community there where they deal honorably and fairly with the native population.

The transplanted merchants are a “colony” in the strictest sense of the term, but they coexist peacefully in a symbiotic relationship with the host culture and both sides benefit, neither at the expense of the other.

Oh, would that they could all be like that…

Another form of colonialism -- and one we Americans are overly familiar with even though there are all sorts of variants on this basic idea -- is the kind where one culture invades the territory of another and immediately begins operating in a deliberately disruptive nature to the native population.

They seek to enslave & exploit or, failing that, expel or eradicate the natives through any means possible.

It’s the story of Columbus and the conquistadors and the pilgrims and the frontiersmen and the pioneers and the forty-niners and the cowboys and the robber barons.

It’s the story where different groups are deliberately kept separate from one another by the power structure in place, for fear they will band together and usurp said power structure (unless, of course, they band together to kelp make one of ours their leader, and build a grand new empire just for him).

It’s the story where our guys never need make a serious attempt to understand the point of view of The Other, because they are just strawmen to mow down, sexy lamps to take home.

I think my taste in sci-fi and modern pulp writing in general started to change around the mid-1970s.

Being in the army quickly cleared me of a lot of preconceptions I had about what our military did and how they did it.

The easy-peasy moral conflicts of spy novels and international thrillers seem rather thin and phony compared to the real life complexities of national and global politics.

Long before John Wick I was decrying a type of story I referred to as “You killed my dog so you must die.”  Some bad guy (typically The Other) does a bad thing and so the good guy (one of ours -- yea!) must punish him.

Make him hurt.

Make him whimper

Make him crawl.

Make him suffer.

The real world ain’t like that.

Fu Machu falls to Ho Chi Minh.

As entertaining as the fantasy of humiliating and annihilating our enemies may be…we gotta come to terms with them, we gotta learn to live with them.

That’s why my favorite sci-fi stories now are less about conflict and more about comprehension.

It’s better to understand than to stand over.

. . .

The colonial style of storytelling as the dominant form of story telling is fairly recent, dating only from the end of the medieval period in Europe and the rise of the so-called age of exploration.

This is not to say colonial story telling didn’t exist before them -- look at what Caesar wrote, or check out Joshua and Judges in the Old Testament -- but prior to the colonial age it wasn’t the dominant form of storytelling.

Most ancient stories involve characters who, regardless of political or social standing, recognize one another as human beings.

And when gods or monsters appear, they are usually symbols of far greater / larger forces & fates, not beasts to be subdued or slain.

Medieval literature is filled with glorious combat and conflict, but again, it’s the conflict of equals and for motives and rationales that can easily be understood.

It was only when the European nations began deliberately invading and conquering / dominating foreign lands that colonialism became the dominant form of storytelling.

It had to:  How else could a culture justify its swinish behavior against fellow human beings?

Even to this day, much (if not most) popular fiction reflects the values of colonialism.

Heroes rarely change.

Cultures even less.

We’ve kept The Other at arms length with popular fiction and media, sometimes cleverly hiding it, sometimes cleverly justifying it, but we’ve had this underlying current for hundreds of years.

Ultimately, it hasn’t served us well.  

It traps us in simplistic good vs evil / us vs them narratives that fail to take into account the complex nature of human society and relationships.

It gives us pat answers instead of probing questions.

It is zero sum storytelling: The pie is only so big, there can’t be more, and if the hero doesn’t get it all, he loses.  (John D. MacDonald summed up this philosophy in the title of one of his books:  The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything.)

It’s possible to break out of that mind set -- The Venture Brothers animated series brilliant manages to combine old school pulp tropes with a very modern, very perceptive deconstruction of the form -- but as posted elsewhere, imitation is the sincerity form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness, so while I certainly applaud The Venture Brothers I don’t want to encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

Because they won’t.

They’ll pretend they will, but they’ll veer off course and back into the old Colonialism mindset.

We need to break out, break free.

Here in the U.S. it’s African-American History Month.

The African-American experience is far from the Colonialism that marks most white / Western / Christian storytelling (and by storytelling I include history and journalism as well as fiction; in fact, anything and everything that tells a narrative).

It’s a good time to open our eyes, to see the world around us not afresh, but for the first time.

Remove the blinders. 

I said sometimes you back into things.

Getting a clearer view of the world I’m in didn’t come from a straightforward examination.

It came from a counter-intuitive place, it found its way back to the beginning not by accepting what others said was the true narrative, but by following individual threads.

It came from Buck Rogers and the Beat Generation and Scrooge McDuck and the sexual revolution and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance and the civil rights era and Dangerous Visions and the Jesus Movement and Catch-22 and the Merry Pranksters.

It came from old friends, some of whom inspired me, some of whom disappointed me, and yet the disappointments probably led to a deeper, more penetrating insight into the nature of the problem.

This Colonialism era must come to a close.

It can no longer sustain itself, not in the world we inhabit today.

It requires a new breed of storytellers -- writers and artists and poets and journalists who can offer 

It’s not a world that puts up barriers by race or gender, ethnicity or orientation, ability or age.

There’s ample opportunity for open minds.

All it asks of us is a new soul.

  © Buzz Dixon

[vsag23]

Venus in Scorpio. Mars in Libra.

Are these two planets in “detriment?”

What do you mean “detriment?”

Misusing their power, weakening their energies through negativity, trying to be who they are not?

Us modern folk hate this kind of psychologically invasive vocabulary. But Planets—teachers of soul lessons—do best offering certain courses, and not others, where the message just isn’t getting through. Rather than Scorpionic paranoia, shadow-processing, and control, the goddess Venus would rather be a harmonious diplomat, a pleasant partner in love with both her senses and her beloved. And rather than throwing his energy into a million relationships and uncertain directions in choosing not your own adventure, but everyone else’s distracted, parallel universe plotlines, Warrior Mars would be on his own quest, doing his thing rising to the top of society or riding the wild and primal machine of his beast wherever it lead.

Even though the God and Goddess are in ‘detriment’ during this Saturday’s New Moon at 26 Scorpio, whose sabian symbol speaks to the dangerous, but voluptuous potential between the Masculine, the Feminine, and the 50 Shades of Grey between: A MILITARY BAND MARCHES NOISILY ON THROUGH THE CITY STREETS

Enraptured, what clamor will you use now to reveal and ravage your soul contracts?

God Mars occupies Goddess Venus’ sign of rulership Libra, and Venus travels Mars’ sign of rulership, Scorpio. We call this unique alignment “mutual reception,” and it means the planets reinforce each other and blend their themes together, sharing a common goal, a unified purpose, which seem to be question gender, identity, and the medicine weapon we call sexuality.

Will the God and Goddess rescue each other now, or will they sabotage attempts at transcending duality, or will they collapses together as they make love, only to rise and grind again into that greater understanding?

Mars in Libra: Why didn’t you text me back? I mean especially after the way you kissed me – that wasn’t a surface, ‘let me get to know you’ kiss, that was a kiss you wished you would have said yes to in another lifetime, in hindsight, end of life review, because a different life, a deeper love, a meaning, would have erupted into being.

Venus in Scorpio: You don’t have to be so dramatic.

Mars in Libra: Dramatic?!! I prefer being romantic, but you love that sort of underworld drama queen thing, creating stories about me before you even think to ask a question, I’m a make-believe-image inside your projection. And How many Arrows have you unleashed into my breath – what I “should have our could have been?”

Venus in Scorpio: How many Hooks have you used to shape me into your manipulation? I can’t just wear some mask of happy-go-lucky couple when we’re working shit out!

Mars in Libra: And what about all those Suckers you used to feed off me?! You’ve grown in so much influence and power because of connecting with my friends!

Venus in Scorpio: You’re right, I have. I forget to express my gratitude for that.

Mars in Libra: Because you’re so busy being suspicious. We can’t even go out and have a chill time because there’s always some hidden layer, some crime investigation you have to make into your mission.

Venus in Scorpio: Look, you wanted the open relationship. I did not sign up for that.

Mars in Libra: You did. You wanted us to do the handfasting for 6 months, even though you knew you wanted a monogamous relationship, and I wanted freedom to appreciate whatever love blossomed in my presence.

Venus in Scorpio: You handfasted because you wanted to make promises you ‘thought’ you could keep, and I handfasted because I let you sleep in my bed. Again. And Again.

Mars in Libra: Between your legs

Venus in Scorpio: Into my head.

Mars in Libra: We’re talking about the Heart here.

Venus in Scorpio: We’re talking about why it’s ok for you to have so many lovers, and how, somehow, that does not take away from the depth of our connection, and our possibilities to really make some impact in the world together. We’re so much stronger together than on our own, but then you’re flirting over here, or on this trip over there, and making this excuse over there, but as long as it all ‘looks good,’ to everyone, then that’s enough.

Mars in Libra: I’m really attracted to the genius and beauty of many different people.

Venus in Scorpio: That sounds nice. Can’t you just make a decision, about anything, like choosing to be just with me?

Mars in Libra: I’m choosing to be in this conversation, although I feel like you’re setting a trap for me.

Venus in Scorpio: You don’t have to get upset.

Mars in Libra: “I’m not getting upset! I’m trying to keep the peace around here! Why do we have to process everything all the time? Can’t we just have fun and enjoy sharing our companionship without so much drama?

Venus in Scorpio: I’m feeling harassed. I told you when Jupiter was in Scorpio, all these ego-inflated jerks in politics and Hollywood, like Harvey Weinstein, were going to be exposed, all the skeletons come out of the closet. There’s no more hiding and no more shame now. And I’m also going to stand up for my rights as a woman!

Mars in Libra: Yeah, but you don’t know what’s like to be constantly intimidated by every woman I approach

Venus in Scorpio: You don’t know what it’s like growing up being a woman? All the ways we have to hide our beauty to prevent attention we don’t want, while every media bombards us with more ways to look younger and sexier and ‘get the guy.’ Try traveling as a single woman in India and see what it feels like to be prey in the eyes of another. Try to be a female athlete in a man’s sport, or CFO in a world of corporate suits who make you feel like any slight mistake you make will be scrutinized by microscope and threaten any position of power you may have thought you had.

Mars in Libra: I really hear you. Don’t you feel that I support you?

Venus in Scorpio: You can’t just strip down the soul to all its naked vulnerability with everyone. I feel like you’re afraid, so I can’t trust, but you wanted to rush. Didn’t we talk about being twin flames, didn’t you say I was “the One?”

Mars in Libra: Maybe it’s just a quicksand dance to speak of ‘twin flames?’ There’s so much expectation in that.

Venus in Scorpio: Is every label a limitation or does it give us a structure to build our foundation?

Mars in Libra: I feel I’m supposed to be some version of “masculinity” that makes you feel so ‘feminine,’ when you don’t even know what that means. I’m not ‘macho enough,’ or muscular enough, or protective/providing enough? You can’t say you want all these things and then you want some gender equality. Why don’t you protect me, curl me into your womb, your bedtime spoon? Gender and sexual preference are both so hyper-conditioned growing up, from the clothes were given in the crib to the toys under the Christmas Tree to the sports we are or are not pushed to play. I’m sick of just being the product of my parent’s and my society’s conditioning. Couldn’t we just give our kids all the options without pushing our own agendas and our dystopian dreams?

Venus in Scorpio: I know. I’ve often thought that the most intense transformation we could have on this planet is to reinstate sexual rites of passage, like so many indigenous cultures have. Most of our screwed up relationship dynamics are because we get almost zero education on how to love and how to make love.

Mars in Libra: And our first sexual experiences are drunk or under pressure to be liked, and they lack any sacredness or real intentional heart-connection. The only education we get is about STD’s and its all fear based.

Mars in Libra: Could it be that: sexual harassment and predatory behavior comes form a lack of integration of one’s masculine and feminine….being able to experience the balance of that…so an Image an Ideal is projected outside of oneself, and then behavior towards that becomes distorted, becuz it’s the unprocessed feminine, the aenima in the man, or the unintegrated masculine in the woman, the aenima?

Venus in Scorpio: I wonder how much of this harassment of women would stop if more men would just allow themselves to be penetrated.

Mars in Libra: You mean….physically, down there…?

Venus in Scorpio: Of course. All men need a spicy dose of Kali right up their ass about now. Why haven’t we done that yet? You say you’re so open, but what are you afraid of? Didn’t you once tell me you gotta lose control to find freedom? Does it mean you’re gay if you like anal sex? No, it means you like a particular sensual experience.

Mars in Libra: I get what you’re saying. I mean the problem with Gender, Sexuality, all of it is that every label we put on it limits our freedom to just experience. It’s why I always hated the term “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” so loaded with 6 trillion different meanings. Just be what we are, and if there’s someone else in the mix, then we better learn how to communicate transparently what our agreements are, and to be direct with our desires and our boundaries.

Venus in Scorpio: Easier said than done. It’s more complex when you start sharing resources with another, whether that’s finances, home, or bodily fluids.

Mars in Libra: I’m not co-dependent. I’m interdependent.

Venus in Scorpio: Yes, right. But I do often wonder about 20 years, 50 years from now…Will we look back at the Binary of Gender as a kind of dinosaur experience? A remnant of 20th century humans that lingered far too long into the 21st century?

Mars in Libra: I mean with wild revolutionary, surprise surprise innovative mad scientist Uranus in Taurus for the next 8 years, we’ll live so virtually that we can ‘wear’ whatever kind of body we want…including the opposite sex, both sexes, new hybrid sexes, animal bodies, mythical creatures….and we’ll be able to have these simulated lovemaking experiences through Virtual Reality – these already exist.

Venus in Scorpio: Mars, let’s stop all this process. Shut up and Kiss me

Mars in Libra: What took you so long, goddess? Just let me in. All the way. In.

source: https://findyourpowerplaces.com

[meditationadvise]

The History and Modern Application of Yoga

To some individuals, words 'Yoga' is something they assume to be an international kind of 'yogurt', perhaps a German variation of Yoplait. 'Yoga', however, is not food for one's appetite, however instead sustenance for the mind, body, as well as spirit. Modernly, lots of people might think of yoga exercise as just a fad, however they couldn't be additionally from the fact: yoga if a way of living that has actually been used for hundreds of years by numerous people, and also it comes to be ever before a lot more popular day after day.

True, there is a dichotomy in the area. To some yoga exercise is an excellent stretch, to some a type of workout, as well as to others, it is a spiritual technique. The face of the matter is that it could be made use of for any of those objectives, as its history is deeply rooted in spirituality, however also in physical health and wellness. One great instance is just how yoga exercise can instruct a person just how to breathe appropriately, as not understanding ways to breathe appropriately makes it near difficult to manage specific presents, or asanas, which are different angles one holds their body at for long term periods of time.

The Origination of Yoga

There are some concerns in life that may never ever be completely addressed, like "which came initially, the chicken or the egg?" Or, where does yoga exercise stem from? Fortunately, scholars have the ability to lose a bit of light on the history of yoga greater than the chicken dilemma.

The method of yoga exercise stems from the Eastern hemisphere of our globe, likely from a human being called the Indus-Sarasvati which existed in Northern India over 5,000 years back. On the planet's earliest existing texts, the Gear Veda, what we know as yoga was exercised as a spiritual routine. It was a method to get in touch with knowledge, awareness, as well as realization of God. The Rig Veda is created in ancient Sanskrit, and was assumed to have been passed on solely by word of mouth for ages. In modern times, it would be as if the only means a person can access "The New Testament" was to hear it as well as memorize it, and after that pass it on verbally to the following inquiring mind.

The Modern Application of Yoga

Over the course of centuries Yoga developed from just being the practice of comprehending the world, to understanding oneself, to including the physical poses incorporated in Hatha yoga exercise, which is now exactly what is popularly adhered to in yoga exercise studios everywhere. Yoga is additionally a form of reflection, similar to chanting rules in silence or the act of doing the very same action constantly. Like faith, there are lots of kinds of Yoga exercise, as well as various kinds match different people or functions, but can all be equally fulfilling.

Yoga is widely beautiful. No matter how old you are, exactly how strong or flexible, whether you're male woman or totally confused about your gender identification, yoga exercise understands no race or culture. Yoga exercise is for any person interested. The method of Yoga began in the East, it has actually developed among the west as well, a lot like reflection or different medicine. All over the globe there are "infant Yoga" courses, where toddlers discover all the trendy methods they could bend.

This is essential as children mature, due to the fact that exercising Yoga significantly improves an individual's variety of movement. This is just how I initially pertained to practice Yoga exercise. As I matured I had numerous injuries to my knees. Dislocations, hyper flections, torn ligaments and so on. As a means to extend my legs, I started doing reduced impact yoga exercise. It came naturally to me due to the fact that as I took a look at the various poses I understood that I 'd been doing "Yoga positions" my whole life yet I just assumed it was comfortable to rest particular ways. When I started presenting and holding the poses purposefully, I found that it was rather a work out, and also has because ended up being a staple of exercising for me. A number of months back, I had reconstructive surgery on my left knee, and practicing yoga has assisted my recovery immensely.

Though holding one of your hands in the air, and holding your various other arm out to the side as one leg has its foot touching the various other's knee while standing could not seem extremely soothing, being a tree has its advantages, such as recognizing exactly what peacefulness really feels like.

The Real Benefit of Yoga

As we've found out, yoga exercise is made use of for several reasons as well as has actually progressed over time. Apart from extending sore muscle mass, it could construct new muscular tissues that could be ignored during workout. My favored part about yoga exercise is the included adaptability I've gained (due to the fact that who does not like a flexible charming companion?). If you have not given yoga a shot at altering your overview on life, ask yourself: why not? When all is claimed and done, what've you got to lose by raising your flexibility, examining the endurance of your muscle mass, and strengthening any type of areas of your body that you might find "troublesome"? Seem like doing yoga is a win-win activity.

This piece was contributed by Benjamin Johnson, a beginning yoga exercise pupil and also author.

[rfidblocking]

What defines radical feminism as opposed to other forms of feminism, and why should people who espouse it be blocked? If you have a link to an explanation at the top of your page or something I'd appreciate just a link, as I browse Tumblr mobile and can't see it. Sincerely asking, btw. I've seen terms used in varying ways and the categories of feminist thought seem blurry to me.

Classes of feminism are not very sharply defined. Any feminist can espouse ideas influenced by radical feminism, and vice versa. Indeed, intersectional feminism is a reaction to and evolution of radical feminism.

Feminism in the Western world is roughly sorted into four “waves.” Non-western feminism addresses different cultural needs than western feminism and does not necessarily follow these patterns. It emphatically does not follow this timeline.

What we consider first wave feminism arose from upper class white women in the late 19th century. The suffragette movement, reduction of hysteria diagnoses, etc were “first wave” actions. By far, the first wave was the wave of respectability. In a world where women were property, being seen as human was already a large task.

The methodology used to achieve this “humanization” was very much focused on improving the state of the uppermost class of women, with vague notions of “coming back for the rest” later. Or not at all.

Nevertheless, first wave feminism- what we might today call “white feminism”- was the foundation upon which later western feminist ideologies were built. It is also where the first strides towards legal equality for women (voting rights, inheritance law, etc) came from.

The second wave of feminism arose in the 1960s, alongside other major protest cultures. Modern radical feminism generally considers itself to be “second wave.” Where the first wave focused on basic legal rights of personhood, the second wave focused on social limitations and domestic rights, as well as examining the specific struggles and consequences of being a woman in a man-centered society. 

This included things such as attempting to abolish dress codes that required excessive levels of modesty or infringed on the freedom of expression of women. It also included successes such as no-fault divorce, domestic abuse studies and shelters, title IX sports and education protections, etc.

It also included and fostered an enormous amount of hatred towards men. The second-wave was the wave of militancy and separatism. There was a persistent belief that if men could be eliminated from the lives of women, women would magically become utopian creatures.

This fostering of separatist attitudes also exacerbated a lot of what we would now call intersectional issues: any woman who disagreed with the party line was clearly just hypnotized by the patriarchy, and needed to be forced to agree with the party.

This led to ignoring a lot of very valid concerns from a great many women. Such as:

+ Ssecond wave feminism’s separatist attitude seeking in many cases to separate women from their sons and other beloved male family members,

+ The hatred of women who were assigned male at birth,

+ The hatred of women who worked with or for men, especially those who worked in sex,

+ Hatred for sexuality involving men,

+ Hatred for sexuality  between women,

+ Hatred for women of color,

+ Hatred for religions and religious women involved in anything other than Christian derived mother-goddess paganism,

And so on.

These are problems that still exist in today’s “radical feminists” who seek to recreate, or never left, the second wave. Indeed, while transgender status prior to the rise of second wave feminism’s influence in the US was hardly a cakewalk, it was second wave feminists, with their hatred of all things “male” who exacerbated tensions, or entirely created new ones, and created many of the most horrifying aspects of transphobia that we see today.

The third wave of feminism rose in the late 80s and early 90s.

Taking inspiration from the many, many, many women who were attacked and hated by second wave policies, the third wave of feminism, today called, “intersectional feminism,” sought to examine just what it was that caused women who weren’t in the ruling class of feminist momvements throughout history to experience a combination of patriarchal misogyny and hegemonic racism/queerphobia/classism that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Many Black and queer feminist scholars were especially active and especially well regarded during this time period. The expansion of queer theory and racial equality efforts in academia and certain public sectors including child education in the third wave time period was also a prominent influence on third wave feminism.

One especially important aspect of third wave feminism was individualism. The belief that there is no “one right way” to be a woman, and that womanhood is necessarily influenced by the individual’s other identities, as well as their internal truths. This is what led to many feminine subcultures: feminine academics, feminine punks, feminine queers.

Unfortunately, one draw back of the third wave’s strong focus on individualism was that it lacked the cohesive force of early waves. Organization of large scale protest and revolution is very difficult when no one can entirely agree on what is being fought for.

Another critical factor of the third wave, and the defining point between third and fourth wave feminism, is that the third wave existed before the spread of internet access and internet culture. This contributed to the communication problems and scale problems third wave feminists experienced.

The fourth wave of feminism is where we currently exist today.

In effect, it is the third wave, but with broadly accessible systems of communication and organization. Intersectionality 2.0, as it were.

Information overload is common in fourth wave spaces. While everyonenow knows what conflicting access needs are, at least, there is little experience in satisfactorily dealing with them.

Because so much of fourth wave feminism is “talking the talk” rather than “walking the walk,” it gives the impression of being a toothless cacophony of young modern feminists screaming at each other incoherently. Because everyone has a platform, it is difficult for leaders to emerge who are not falling back on earlier, more “cohesive” waves: the first and second.

On the other hand, when everyone has at least the potential to have a voice, then people who have existed in silence for generations finally get to speak: people with multiple stacking intersections of marginalization. People who lack the access to historic methods of learning feminist theory can now get a firm foundation in gender equality without needing to pay for 4 years at a liberal arts college. People who are too weird, too queer, to black or brown or disabled or fat or traumatized to participate in the historical forums of feminism can participate in the fourth wave, due to its strong online presence.

With easy, omnipresent recording and data collection methodologies, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to deny the existence of misogyny. With easy, omnipresent communication platforms, this data can be spread to people it could reach before. People who are trapped in controlled environments of abuse, people who are too poor or disabled or anything else to escape the small town hyper-conservative bubble they were born into.

The fourth wave has been “in progress” for between 6 and 10 years, depending on who you talk to. Currently, it doesn’t have a catchy name, but if I were going to give it one, I might call it “accessible feminism.” The barriers to entry have never been lower.

And yet, it has its many problems, too.

No social movement is perfect, because the people involved in it are not perfect. And each wave of feminism overlaps with and influences those that came before and after it.

But, given the choice, I would say each subsequent wave of feminism has been “better” than those before it, and I would also say that no wave of feminism was as openly and violently hostile as second wave feminism and the radical feminists who still espouse it. That it was more effective than the first wave is a point in its favour, but little else is.

That many modern radical feminists seek to undo the leaps and bounds we have made in the decades since radical feminism fell out of favour as the dominant feminist ideology is somewhere between regressive and openly horrifying.

So, I suppose that wasn’t necessarily as helpful as it could have been, in terms of specifically identifying radical feminist ideology today.

But with any luck, it has given you enough of a foundation upon which to build your own research in the future.

XOXOX

💮 Yazminx 💮 

PS: The title of our blog is a pun. You should only block people who you, personally, feel should be blocked. If you want to use our work as a guideline, then by all means do so. However, we are not operating any kind of blocklist here.

[recalculatingthegenderwar]

Feminist academic reminds us mainstream feminism really does just hate men

The Washington Post recently published an editorial entitled “Why can’t we hate men?” It is a short and illuminating look at the psyche of a modern feminist academic. In her editorial, Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danita Walters “names the problem”, a term feminists use when they get tired of dancing around how evil all men are and just decide to come out and say it. In these moments, the pseudo-academic smokescreens of “patriarchy” start to fall away and feminists reveal themselves as naked bigots.

Anti-male bigotry is mainstream feminism.

Although the article’s quality tempts you to think otherwise, Walters isn’t some random blogger:

“Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, is the editor of the gender studies journal Signs.” [link to her bio added]

I’m surprising no one by pointing out that while women’s studies or gender studies could be a legitimate academic discipline, it is really only feminist indoctrination in practice. The Northern University Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program website states:

“We advance knowledge through interdisciplinary research, innovative pedagogies, and collaboration with other institutions, inspiring new generations of gender and sexuality scholars and feminist leaders committed to social justice. We strive to be a globally recognized model of excellence in gender, sexuality, and feminist scholarship.” [emphasis added]

Walters is neither a nobody nor a fringe radical. She is a feminist professor teaching feminism at a prestigious university, running a feminist academic center and a feminist academic journal. She stands at the zenith of mainstream feminism.

This also makes it laughable when Walters claims “[t]he world has little place for feminist anger.” I won’t rehash the mind-bogglingly examples of feminist power and influence I’ve written about. I’ll just point out that Walters is one of many for whom “feminist anger” is a viable career. This is like Bill Gates telling us, “People really never much had of a place for that whole computer thing.”

The problem with naming the problem

In my past articles, I explained how Patriarchy theory is the core narrative of feminism. Patriarchy theory claims that women (and sometimes to a lesser extent men) are being oppressed by men as a class. Since men are considered to have absolute power over the world, even problems seemingly unrelated to gender (war, economic issues, environmental issues, etc) are the fault of men as a class. Individual male misdeeds are attributed to the entire male class even if most men would find those misdeeds repugnant. Positive male contributions are forgotten. Indeed, Walters blames men for a “milienia of woe”. Because God knows humanity was so much better off a millenia ago. Things have really gone to shit since a man invented Penicillin.

Meanwhile female misdeeds are seen as rarities, ignored or blamed on male influence. Under feminism, women must be angels and men must be devils.

Men as a class are referred to as the Patriarchy. This obfuscates and dehumanizes feminist bigotry toward men. Feminists portray themselves as fighting a system rather than people. This is useful for public relations and seducing new recruits. It is unclear whether feminists are just lying to the public or also to themselves. I honestly think it’s a bit of both.

As feminists become more indoctrinated, they get tired of dancing around the problem. They feel like they are doctors who aren’t allowed to properly diagnose a disease that is ravaging the world. Sit in the feminist pot long enough and you will eventually boil over. That is what we are seeing with Walters:

“Seen in this indisputably true context, it seems logical to hate men. I can’t lie, I’ve always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown, for naming the problem in no uncertain terms. I’ve rankled at the “but we don’t hate men” protestations of generations of would-be feminists and found the “men are not the problem, this system is” obfuscation too precious by half”

Notice Walters is not only framing men (not “Patriarchy”, but men) as the “the problem”, but challenging the feminist credentials of all “would-be feminists” who don’t openly hate men. Walters believes hating men is essential to being a feminist.

Walters justification for hating half of humanity

So what is the “indisputably true context” in which “it seems logical” to hate half of the entire human species based on a biological trait they have no control over? What is Walkers indisputably justification for hating over 3.5 billion people across the world with diverse backgrounds, identities and beliefs simply because they were born a certain way? You would think an academic would have a rock solid argument to advocate such widespread hate. You would be wrong:

“It’s not that Eric Schneiderman (the now-former New York attorney general accused of abuse by multiple women) pushed me over the edge. My edge has been crossed for a long time, before President Trump, before Harvey Weinstein, before “mansplaining” and “incels.” Before live-streaming sexual assaults and red pill men’s groups and rape camps as a tool of war and the deadening banality of male prerogative.” [included original links from article]

These aren’t arguments. They aren’t even coherent sound bites. Walters is just ranting. We don’t even know if Schneiderman is actually guilty of anything yet. Yeah, Weinstein is a jerk. He doesn’t represent all men.

Yeah, 2 incels went on a killing spree (killing both women and men) in the last 5 years. However, incels aren’t inherently violent. They aren’t always saints, but they aren’t a terrorist movement. There appears to be no evidence that either killer colluded with the wider incel community. Frankly, a lot of the reporting on the supposedly “dangerous” incel movement seems like fear-mongering/feminist propaganda. More importantly, incels are a fringe movement that most men want nothing to do with. Most men don’t even know what an "incel" is.

The only items with even a little meat are claims of live-streaming sexual assault and rape camps. How common are these things? Who are the victims? The perpetrators? Walker doesn’t tell us. We get no information about live-streaming sexual assaults. Her link on rape camps takes you to a 18 year old article about the trial of Serbian soldiers who sexually enslaved Muslim women during the Kosovo conflict. This is tragic, but is it grounds to hate all men? Again, the article is about their criminal trial in the Hague. Strange how the rape of women is globally condemned in our universal patriarchal rape culture.

“Pretty much everywhere in the world, this is true: Women experience sexual violence, and the threat of that violence permeates our choices big and small. In addition, male violence is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault but plagues us in the form of terrorism and mass gun violence.”

Walters provides no links or no citations here. Statements like this are largely meaningless without some effort to establish scope. “Pretty much everywhere in the world women experience” synethesia and gout. Female violence “is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault.“ These are also both equally true statements.

Similarly, Walters gives us no actual data about men’s role in terrorism or mass gun violence. I’m still willing to consider men might be overrepresented in terrorism and mass gun violence. However, does this mean I should hate women because women commit the majority of infanticide? What? I can’t because only a minority of women commit infanticide and most women find infanticide abhorrent? Feminists say I should be sensitive about possible psychological or social issues that motivate female child-killers? Really?

What about women being the majority of human traffickers? Should I hate all women now?

Surprise! It's the wage gap.

Walters eventually gets something that sort of resembles an actual argument:

“Women are underrepresented in higher-wage jobs, local and federal government, business, educational leadership, etc.; wage inequality continues to permeate every economy and almost every industry; women continue to provide far higher rates of unpaid labor in the home (e.g., child care, elder care, care for disabled individuals, housework and food provision); women have less access to education, particularly at the higher levels; women have lower rates of property ownership.“ [original links included]

Basically you should hate men because…wage gap - the dead horse feminists keep thinking will win the Kentucky Derby. The wage gap is generally found to be the result of women’s choices in the labor market, not sex discrimination. The same goes for unpaid labor. Walters’ own source explains that women often do more unpaid labor because their husbands often do more paid labor.

Walters claim about education holds a bit more water. Her linked source is a recently published academic report on girl’s worldwide school enrollment. I haven’t had a chance to read through it detail, but it seems to take a much more nuanced view of than Walters would have you believe. First, there are only significantly unequal primary and secondary school enrollment rates in very poor countries and/or war torn countries. The report doesn’t seem to blame girls lack of education enrollment simply on patriarchal oppression, but mentions issues such as the greater costs on families and greater concern for girls’ safety.

It is unclear what Walters means by “higher levels” of education. The report says very little about post-secondary education. It doesn’t seem to have any statistics on global post-secondary enrollment. One of the few things it does point out is that U.S. colleges have a higher female enrollment than male enrollment (page 18).

Walters never offers hard evidence all of these supposed inequalities she lists are due largely to widespread to sex discrimination against women by men. In fact, she doesn’t even directly make this claim. She only strongly infers it.

Walters Advocates Violence?

“So, in this moment, here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men? For all the power of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the women’s marches, only a relatively few men have been called to task, and I’ve yet to see a mass wave of prosecutions or even serious recognition of wrongdoing. On the contrary, cries of “witch hunt” and the plotted resurrection of celebrity offenders came quick on the heels of the outcry over endemic sexual harassment and violence. But we’re not supposed to hate them because . . . #NotAllMen. I love Michelle Obama as much as the next woman, but when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts.” [originally links included; emphasis added]

Now we are getting into SCUM manifesto territory. The pivotal plot point in Thelma and Louise is one of the protagonists shoots a man to death. I’m less familiar with Foxy Brown, but it sounds like the female protagonist also commits violence against men. It’s hard to not to see this as a thinly veiled call to violence.

This fits with the general cowardice of Walters’ editorial. While it’s clear she hates men and it’s clear she wants us to hate them too, notice she never explicitly writes, “I hate man and you should hate men too”. She is simply stating “”it seems logical to hate men” and that women have every “right to hate” men. She isn’t literally telling anyone to actually hate men.

I’m not sure what legal, professional or ethical bullet she thinks is dodging by so thinly obscuring her obvious intentions.

Feminist Julie Bindel is a monster, but at least she had the decency to just come out and say she wants to put men in concentration camps.

Why was this written?

It isn’t well written. It isn’t thoughtful. It likely won’t improve the public opinion of feminism. Why would Walters write this? Why would the Washington Post print it? What purpose does it serve?

Firstly, Walters wrote it because she is a bigot who wants to spread her bigotry.

Secondly, the Washington Post produces feminist propaganda. I don’t know exactly why, but they do. They concocted a new bogus 1-in-5 college rape statistic after the CSA study finally fell from grace. They further scrambled to save the feminist college rape panic in the face of government data showing incredibly low rape rates on campuses. They tried to whip up #MeToo frenzy by creating a bogus work place harassment study that completely ignored male victims.

Finally, I hypothesis the main goal is to bring Democratic voters to the polls for the midterm election. Look how Walters ends her editorial:

“So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.“

Since Trump took office in the United States, SJW groups and left-leaning media outlets have formed an indistinguishable mass of outrage to keep the anti-Trump fires burning for the midterm elections. This is why the National Organization for Women is making tweets about immigration and the 2nd amendment. This is why the Women’s March really wasn’t about women, but about left-wing talking points and hating Trump.

Take a look at this sentence again:

“Pledge to vote for feminist women only.” [emphasis added]

Remember feminism isn’t for women. Feminism is for feminism.

[unicorn-incorporated]

On Gender in ABOs

It’s so interesting thinking about gender in ABO works.

Note:  ABOs have a lot of variety.  I’ve tried to make this pretty generic, but you may not agree with everything I have to say.  That’s just how ABO is; sorry.  This is basically just one universe of ABO

The formula you tend to see in ABO is a small fraction of the population is classified as Alpha or Omega and most people are just betas.  At least 60% of the population are Betas in fics that I’ve read.  So, I’ll talk about Betas first.

Betas.

If a beta shows up in an ABO it’s usually the Omega MC camouflaging as a NPC type character; a police officer, mother, clerk etc, so few explore what it means to be a Beta, so most of this is mine.

I imagine Betas, being the majority for a biological reason have drives unique to them, just like a Alpha’s urge to conquer and have kids, or an Omega’s drive to keep home, take care of kids, and protect their families.  I imagine Betas having a draw to steady, salaryman style work.  Any ambition they have to climb the corporate ladder comes from themselves, not their biology.  

Beta’s biology does not press them to mate or exact major changes in the world around them, but to work and keep society stable.  Personalities of Betas often vary greatly and therefor temperaments and wants of course, but in a world where there is so much biological, primal drive it only makes sense for Betas to have their own drives.

I see Omegas and Alphas having biological drive to seek out physical touch, companionship and cuddling, whereas Betas feel no need to touch each other (but still might find touch comforting.  It depends.)  I see Betas feeling anxiety when unemployed, even if said Betas is lazy and does not want to work.  I see Alphas as biologically inclined to be managers and CEOs, but a Beta happy to work as a functionary or a badass engineer underneath an Alpha supervisor without much thought of climbing up.  

Alphas and Omegas feel the need to procreate and have lots of children, because their children are usually unusually healthy.  Betas may feel desires to have children and start families just like any other person.  But while the typical Omega is siring their 5th child a Beta couple is sending their only one off to college.  I see Betas as just as sexually adventurous as Alpha/Omega couples, even more so considering they’re not often locked into the power imbalance of those relationships.

They are the workers, the majority, the keepers of the world.  They are much more important than Omegas and Alphas in a lot of ways, because they’re the ones that do everything.  There’s got to be a reason there are so many of them compared to Alphas and Omegas.  

Yet, there’s often a huge imbalance of Alphas in power, not just to Omegas but to especially to Betas when compared to the world’s actual populous.  Alphas are often biologically natural leaders and more aggressive so they often end up in positions of authority.  This means a minority of people may end up as a far majority in seats of government.  What does this mean for most of the population who are not Alphas?  How does being an Alpha effect their priorities?

Alphas

The ratio of Alpha to Omega (to Beta) is different in every story, but I find in apocalyptic worlds (that are fascinating all in their own, but not what I’m talking about.) the ratio is about equal.  I’ve seem 60:20:20, 80:15:10 90:5:5, etc etc, and these ratios can change the world an incredible amount.  In any case, Alphas are a minority, and are the gender on top of the food chain.

What are Alphas, other than the second most likely to be the protagonist of your ABO fic?  Well, in most stories Alphas are characterized by their bigger frames, greater physical strength, aggression, and desire to mate and give their Omega lots of children.  In many fics Alphas go through periodic ruts similar to an Omega’s heat, or have a chance if they get really into the sex to go into a rut state.  My Alphas also are generally very territorial and possessive, and not just over their Omegas.  Other variations will die without Omega partners, which I love, but will not include in the Alphas I am mostly talking about.

Alphas in works are portrayed as very primal, especially when it comes to sex.  The smell of an Omega’s heat may make them lose control, they prowl instead of walk, and are generally the apex predator.  A large part of the Alpha cultural identity is that they are aggressive badasses.  Think an extreme version of our culture’s masculinity.  Alphas are often portrayed as either masterminds or...  Not so bright.  It is generally seen as normal Alpha behavior to think with your dick...  Or something else, depending on how you portray your female Alphas.

This doesn’t mean that all Alphas are or are expected to be super aggressive all the time.  Alphas often have care taking instincts along with their regular taking instincts.  In the ABO’s I write this is something that is shown in the closed door of a nest, however, and it would be weird to see an Alpha do these things outside of the mating.  Alphas have the power in the world and generally can move mountains by looking at them, but they actually have the smallest amount of freedom to have the different personalities they inevitably have.  

Alphas have biological drives that make up a lot more of their cultural visage than the Betas I mentioned earlier.  As mentioned before, Alphas want to mate. They are virile and want to bear as many happy healthy little children as possible, as fast as possible.  Alphas also feel the biological need to be at the top, whether it be of their high school clique or the government.  They often don’t get on well with other Alphas because of this.  If an Alpha does not feel the need to be dominant over others it is seen as being submissive, which is generally a humiliating and dangerous thing to be seen as if you are an Alpha.

Before I continue on to what Alpha’s uneven power dynamic with the entire world can mean, I’m going to talk about Alphas gender expectations and it’s parallels to toxic masculinity.  Fun!

Many of the traits associated with ‘Alpha’, be it a male or female Alpha, are the exact same traits you’ll find labeled as ‘toxic’ forms of masculinity.  In ABOs it is expected for an Alpha to own and mate their Omega and an Omega mate publicly disagreeing with an Alpha could be an awful humiliation for Alphas.  The slightest sign of backing down is seen as a sign of submission to other Alphas, and Alphas who show ‘Omega’ traits (as there’s a lot more judgement by secondary gender here than male or female) could find themselves ganged up on by other Alphas either psychologically or physically.  It’s really a fine line here, at least in the way I’ve read things; be nice to your Omega, that’s a good thing as long as it’s still your Omega, but make sure you’re strong and dominant or you’re not any good as an Alpha.”  With the internet, a single mistake could ruin your life.  So remember Alphas, be a strong, proud, sexual being, and don’t forget to be dominant!  

Once an Alpha gets on top they generally will want to stay there.  This explains why Alphas are so disproportionate in government and other leadership positions.  So what does this mean for the rest of our fantasy world?  Though I am not a master in political sciences or gender studies, I do have a few thoughts.

One; Alphas care for Alphas first and foremost, and Betas second.  Alphas because of their bias as being an Alpha, Betas because they are the voter base. Two; There is often a fair amount of discourse and heated debate in congresses and parliament between Alphas, of which Betas are often left out of and Omegas are forced from if they try to speak within it.  These debates usually are resolved between the present Alphas, however, and it does not necessarily end in calling of all partizans! Three; Alphas, because of their biological drive to mate (and be the dominant partner to Omegas) often screw Omegas over when it comes to things like ‘Human rights.’  Omegas often have to fight tooth and nail to get recognition for even small things.  You’ll see countless fics where Omegas are forced to mate at a certain age, are not allowed to hold positions of power, or are even subjected to slavery and it’s all good and legal, nothing to see here ^-^’  Not all worlds are like this, and many set in modern day will have Omega rights start to reflect woman’s rights here in our non-fictional universe, but it’s probably time to talk about Omegas and how much it usually sucks to be one.

Omega

Yes, here we are!  The gender most likely to be a protagonist.  Beautiful boys who self lubricate and can bear children--It’s a dream!  Alright; lets say you’re an Omega.  Here’s what you have to look forward to!

(Tw for rape. )

So, you’re an Omega in World One.  You wake up and realize it’s your 16th birthday and you will have to choose a mate today.  You don’t really want to choose a mate; you’ve been hoping to avoid this.  Luckily, you are the protagonist!  You get away from the old ugly Alpha before he bites you, and go on an adventure, and meet another Omega!

Unfortunately, you are the only one who is the protagonist.  Everyone else gets forced into an arranged marriage and probably raped if they’re not a fan of their chosen husband.

So, you’re an Omega in World Two.  You live a pretty normal life, though being an Omega makes life considerably harder.  You have to fend off Alpha advances constantly and most of your omega friends are not in healthy relationships.  Luckily, you are the protagonist!  You find the perfect Alpha and life is going great actually and this was a cute smutty romance story.

As you happily hold your stomach, your best friend cries alone in her bedroom, because her mate that’s meant to love and cherish her sees her as an object, and a useless one since she hasn’t even gotten pregnant, and that means she is terribly damaged in the eyes of society and he’s just going to try again and again until it catches.

So, you’re an Omega in World Three.  You’ve managed to live as a Beta all your life, and you’ve been found out.  An agency has taken you away where you will be forced to bear children.  Luckily you are--Wait.  Not even being the protagonist will save you from this one.  Sorry!  You’re screwed.

But really; what’s with all the rape and objectification of Omegas?  I have read fics with all of those premises and enjoyed them, but god damn there is a lot of rape culture with Omegas.  It makes sense considering biology and how these societies work, but holy fucking shit.

(End TW)

So lets say we remove the rape culture from the story.  What now?  Well, first off, lets talk about what an Omega actually is.  Like we did for the other ones before going on dark tangents.

The Omega is the third gender of an ABO.  They are super fertile, generally naturally submissive.  More often than not a male will be portrayed as the Omega character shown, but it could just as well be a girl.  Omegas usually have lots of issues being treated as equal members of society; there’s a lot of parallels to woman’s liberation I’m pretty sure but I haven’t done enough research on that to draw proper parallels.

There are biological reasons for why Omegas have less opportunities and rights.  I’d argue that Omegas should not be in the military.  Omegas might be just as capable as an Alpha to be combat effective, but in the end their heat is a ticking time bomb (especially if suppressants or unstable or even taken orally.  It could be a major liability.)  Other things like government or commerce however; Omegas are not impaired for that.  

Omegas are obviously, from the perspective of the reader, people.  However, it is common in fiction to see Omegas being seen as objects, things that can be possessed and owned.

I’ve seen Omegas and the injustices done towards them explored the most in actual ABOs, so I’m a little less inclined to talk in length about it here.

Anyways, these are just my opinions and only a small corner of ABO.

Depending on how much time I have I might do one on LGBT+ issues in Omegaverse worlds, but that just delves farther into head canon and this is long enough.