#gender roles and stereotypes

[its-poojagupta-shree]

India, a land of rich traditions and diverse cultures, has long been bound by rigid gender roles and stereotypes. For centuries, these societal norms have shaped the lives of individuals, restricting their choices and limiting their potential. However, in recent years, there has been a growing movement towards breaking these stereotypes and shattering gender roles in Indian society. This blog explores the evolving landscape of gender roles and stereotypes in India and highlights the importance of challenging these notions to create a more inclusive and equitable society.

[redditreceipts]

how liberal men think they can help women's rights:

how men can actually help women's rights:

source

[profeminist]

__________________

"If submission were natural to women, there wouldn’t be thousands of sermons everyday reminding women to submit because nature doesn’t need reminders to run its course. These reminders exist because indoctrination depends on constant reinforcement to keep harmful ideologies alive."

Source: Ụlọma

------------------------

Culture disguising itself as nature -- the oldest trick in the book

[sarafangirlart]

Bitches be like “This straight relationship is so queer coded!!!” And they literally just like each other and treat each other as equals.

[chlorinatedpopsicle]

Recently, there's been a popular post on radblr discussing how women aren't allowed to have fun like men are, and how men get applauded for doing stupid shit while women get mocked.

I just stumbled upon an example of this in the wild.

Someone on r/stupidfood posted a vid of this woman who filled a fanny pack with spaghetti and ate it while skydiving. It was funny. She was clearly just being silly for silliness' sake.

Not only was the post tag calling her "stupid", the comments were like 95% making fun of her, calling her an idiot, criticizing her skydiving etiquette, saying the spaghetti looked gross, and just generally bitching about anything and everything.

I was SO GLAD to see these people in the comments pointing out how weird that is:

They're absolutely right. If it were a guy doing this, people would just think it's funny!!! People would be in the comments calling him a legend and a mad lad.

Filthy Frank could eat ravioli out of his shirt pocket as a stupid joke, and people could understand that he was doing a deliberately stupid thing as a funny bit. But when a woman does something similar, it must just be because she's stupid and annoying and probably trying too hard to be quirky. Fuck off.

[intersexfairy]

people are discriminated against - sometimes violently - for their sex traits. but not in whatever fucked up and bigotted way radfems mean that. sex and gender are different things, despite people acting as otherwise.

and there is no set of privileged sex traits. it's all dependent on what traits an individual has/doesn't have, how they identify/express themselves, and how they're perceived. any one of those things being "off" can lead to discrimination in relation to sex traits.

so as a trans intersex person, i sincerely wish this is what "sex based discrimination" referred to. it's something anyone can experience, and it's not fucking fair the phrase is taken on by bigots pretending to be fighting for women's rights.

[hard--headed--woman]

ok i get the "making fun of men's interests the way they make fun of women's all the time" and "criticizing men for the stupid things they do especially since no one never does it" thing but at some point, some of you need to realize that by doing that you reinforce gender roles and mock women with "masculine" interests too. "omggg the fact that men love fighting sports and video games about war just proves that they're soooo stupid and naturally violent" there are women who enjoy fighting sports and video games about war too. "omggg men like action movies, shonen animes and rap music, they're so boring and violent" there are women who enjoy action movies, shonen animes and rap music too. as a woman with "masculine" interests, i hate when i see feminists who are supposed to be against gender roles say things like this. you just reinforce the idea that there are things for men and things for women, and encourage women to keep liking only "feminine" stuff. yes, you do it by saying that stuff traditionnally "for women" is better than stuff traditionnally "for men" unlike society who does the opposite but still, it's dumb and serves no purpose for women. you can defend "feminine" interests that men make fun of all the time and mock men who acts stupid in front of their sport game without doing bullshit like this. when you do, you just make "masculine" women feel bad 🤷🏽‍♀️

and don't tell me that it never happens, because the reason why i wrote this is because i have seen at least 3-4 posts like this in the past two weeks so while it's not a big issue on this side of tumblr, it's still something i wanted to criticize

[nemfrog]

The baker's triumph. Better homes and gardens. May 1947. Ad detail.

Internet Archive

[biteofboredom]

Stop telling trans people they're being sexist/perpetuating gender stereotypes when they mourn not having typical experiences of the gender they identify with.

I want a group of guy friends to consider me 'one of the boys', a dad who calls me 'son' and watches the grand prix with me, a brother who I could play football with in the park.

I wish I was raised doing sports and with action figures and comic books rather than socialised with toy kitchens and dresses and pushed to thrive only in academics.

But if I tell anyone that I get told I'm being misogynist. And I get it, gender roles & stereotypes are a problem, but that doesn't change the feelings and experiences that trans people have had or missed out on.

Not having these typical 'boy' experiences as a kid makes me feel separate from other guys. It forces me to stand out as different because I can't relate to them, and that is a painful feeling. Don't make it an invalid one too.

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[sebaztianlovesgeek]

Why I don't like the trans woman Vil headcanon

You probably saw my repost of another person talking about this but I wanted to rant about it by myself so here we go.

Before you start calling me transphobic, I'm not angry BECAUSE he's being headcanoned as trans (I actually headcanon him as trans myself, but as a trans man) and at the end of the day he's just a fictional character and it doesn't really matter so do whatever the hell you want.

That being said, a huge part of Vil's characters is not liking gender roles/stereotypes

This scene with him and Epel speaks for itself:

Why is this a problem? Well the main reason I'm seeing a lot of people headcanon him as a trans woman is because he is feminine-

My reaction:

Ah yes because feminine men totally cannot exist! They HAVE to be a trans woman! Same with tomboys they have to be trans men! Oh my god-

I want to clarify I'm not blaming trans people for this, in fact I've seen mainly trans people in the twst wonderland fandom call this out and mainly non trans people headcanon Vil as a trans woman.

To be fair, a lot of trans people started out as masculine "women" or feminine "men" before they realised they were trans, but that doesn't mean ALL feminine and masculine men and women are trans (or at least not transitioning to be the opposite gender I have met plenty of masculine trans women and feminine trans men)

Like the post I reposted said, if Vil truly WERE a trans woman, s/he'd probably be a tomboy, because a huge part of Vil's character IS 👏🏻BREAKING 👏🏻GENDER 👏🏻ROLES!

A lot of the trans male friends I have who also like Twisted Wonderland look up to Vil, because they want to break male gender roles and pass enough to be seen as a feminine guy and not a woman (what I mean by that is when trans men are feminine and like wearing dresses and stuff they are often a bit too afraid to do it due to social dysphoria and being misgendered so they usually wait until they begin passing more to wear/do more feminine things, its sad)

So when said trans male friends see the other twisted wonderland say Vil HAS TO BE A WOMAN just because he's feminine it makes them upset, they think they aren't "trans enough" and that to be a "true man" they must conform to male gender roles so they can be "trans enough"

The same goes with female characters who are masculine, trans women who are tomboys could be happy that a woman in media they watch is more masculine like them, but when people start headcanoning said woman as a trans man, it could make the trans women upset

I'm not saying headcanoning certain characters as trans is a bad thing, do whatever the hell you want, I'm not the type to get angry over fictional fun, I scoff at people wishing death upon proshippers because yeah its gross but at the end of the day its just fiction and the person behind it are often just a weird pre teen, I barely even make "call out posts" about these types of fandom stuff but subjects like being transgender often hit home for me because I have many trans friends and a few trans relatives whom I worry about because I know dysphoria can often make people think unhealthy and suicidal thoughts, so I'm just concerned about the harm certain headcanons could cause

[redditreceipts]

one of the most obviously paradoxical beauty standards is how women are expected to have a lot of hair and no hair at the same time. The same genetics that make it possible for Indian women to have very long, thick and shiny hair and perfect eyelashes and eyebrows, make them grow visible hair over their lips and on their legs. women who don't have that much hair on their body will also not be very hairy on their head, it's just logically impossible. And I've thought about that for a long time, until I understood: It's literally designed to be that way. you will never be enough the way you were born. you will always feel inferior and you will always pay to modify your body so you look like the impossible combination of full hair and no hair at the same time.

[profeminist]

“Can we all agree that cooking & cleaning is a basic life skill and not a gender role??????” 

- @unknwns0ul (page deactivated)

[lovrbooy]

really messy trash twins high school comic ... back when she was sweet dee and he was . well

[chlorinatedpopsicle]

Thinkin' about how I was gifted one of those toy makeup sets when I was like 7-8 years old. I looked up "toy makeup playset" to try to find one similar to what I had.

Is it not viscerally disturbing that girls are marketed toys that perpetuate beauty industry propaganda when they're barely out of diapers? We're conditioned from day one to associate girlhood with cosmetics/makeup.

And yet, so many girls still want to pretend that their decision to wear makeup is definitely an empowering personal choice and not at all influenced by outside factors. :(

[san-marzano]

what are some of the worstest takes youve ever seen come out of the twst fandom i wanna see whats going on