#were a tomboy

[butcharium]

I am happy that I grew up as a kid with another tomboy (now also grown into a butch lesbian) three years above me in school, with whom I also had extracurriculars. I am biased bc I had such a persistent crush on her but in our extracurricular she was really one if the cool kids but also at school I saw that she was popular and really well liked. Looking back I think she's an important reason why I grew up with a lot less neurosis around being a tomboy/butch than what I otherwise could. Like yes I was a loner nerd at school with no friends and I was generally excluded from social gatherings by classmates, and being a tomboy did make me feel alienated from the other girls, but she was well liked, so I never had to think that being a tomboy then butch in and of itself would be a barrier between myself and connecting with other people. And luckily as I've grown up I've found this to be true.

Seeing and knowing older butches is so important, and I really wish I had (then and also now) a butch adult around me, but having that three years older tomboy was also enough to leave such a huge positive impact on me and my developement.

[sasoxichomoshi]

when i heard about the tuvan throat singing i had to

hunter inspired by mongolian clothing style (or at least from what i could find about on the internet)

close up cause i love my brush

[black-queen-rising]

The people taking this dialogue as a legitimate “character flaw” or literally just at face value at all and not as a continuation of the blatant disrespect the writers have not just towards Rhaenyra as the heir of twenty years, but towards anything that could even vaguely be construed as “women’s work”, is the most perfect encapsulation of just how entrenched misogyny is into the very heart of our pop culture and how the popularization of fantasy has managed to worsen our societal view of soft power by painting it as not only weak, but frivolously feminine, unimportant, and a waste of time.

Since the beginning of the show the writers have almost exclusively portrayed Rhaenyra as disinterested if not opposed to her role as heir, as a politician, and a woman in power broadly all against the original canon and all glaringly, not to make her look worse or better or likable or incompetent (they do all those things, almost every episode, with however they need her to affect the plot in that given moment because they’re incapable of having the characters drive it organically) because it’s not truly about her at all. It’s simply because they cannot fathom a story where a woman is politically adept and as a result either 1. evil or 2. boring, and that is fundamentally because once again they are so biased and against portraying anything that could even vaguely be construed as women’s work or at all “feminine-coded” in an even neutral-but-interesting way they do for (stereotypically) masculine-coded activities like sword fighting, horse back riding, dragon riding, hunting, archery, not to mention just the concept of the political conversations that drive these stories, let alone an actually positive way.

They have taken a story that at its core was always an indictment of structural misogyny and how it will literally cause societies to tear themselves apart over nothing. But because they decided at the outset they wouldn’t and couldn’t portray the structural part of said misogyny without scaring away their intended audience, and decided instead to base this all around ultimately meaningless ~team discourse~ (because literally everyone meeting their downfall as a result of the consequences of systemic misogyny is the point) their alternate path has been to over-exaggerate and ultimately turn to spectacle every single woman involved’s individual suffering at the expense of everything else about their characters. It doesn’t matter if that was the intent or not the principle result of this adaptation has been the continual disempowerment and degradation of women and their agency combined with an almost impressively voyeuristic portrayal of their suffering.

The women in this show are not allowed to have interests or hobbies unless it’s to serve to make them seem “bad” in someway, whether that be the discomfort around Helaena’s bugs, the total lack of any positive representation of Alicent’s religiosity, or how the women dragon riders are broadly painted as aggressive, violent, and unnatural. I don’t even have specific examples to list from the other “team” because in order to be portrayed as “likable” to the general audience the women of Team Black are barely allowed to have personalities, let alone distinguishing interests or characterizing hobbies. The agency and autonomy they have been stripped of, collectively, from both historical precedent and actual ASoIaF, is almost entirely in their refusal to allow women’s work to be portrayed positively. There are no balls, no sewing circles, no garden parties, no trappings of power and contests of will in the jewels and gowns Rhaenyra must now loathe to be (their deeply narrow and biased view of) “likable”, there are no female mentorships, and no female friendships, and at every chance they have had to portray these things at both a societal and personal level they have chosen to veer away and instead reinforce their suffering. They have removed women’s avenues and halls of power from this story, while making it very clear there are no others that exist in this world, and they cannot participate in the men’s; if they could this story wouldn’t exist. So we are left with a group of people who are supposedly driving this story, who this story is supposedly about, but they are internally and externally isolated, largely removed from the public eye, angry or distressed to be there on the rare occasions they’re present, disempowered, stripped of personal agency and will, and we’re still told they have power. But if we search for it the only logical conclusion is that any power which does not center on how much suffering they have been through, or how much more they may be dealt, is not only gone, it was never there in the first place.

I don’t enjoy Rhaenyra’s quasi domestic abuse any more than Alicent’s visceral sexual shame and I don’t enjoy the infantilization of Helaena’s character any more than the erasure of Rhaena’s and it is deeply concerning how many people look at these decisions, and nod their heads and say “yes, this is realistic, and not only is it realistic it’s, GOOD, because without horrific psychological and physical abuse and ultimately a complete reduction to every female character as peace loving victims of powerful men’s cruel machinations we could never even SEE how misogyny is so damaging.” And the mindset that drives people to claim that those of us who call out how this is, the definition of benevolent misogyny and say we’re crazy, that we can’t see the complexity, that actually we’re the ones somehow falling back into sexist tropes, or asking for a black and white story when instead the black and white has simply become an insultingly reductive view of evil men versus helpless women and when all else fails, accusing us of wanting a boring story because it’s either not focused on gratuitous individual female suffering, or is focused on the kind of political power every single featured female character on both sides of this conflict wielded in the original book instead of evil man conversations and eviler man dragon-battles, is at its heart why we have come to a place in pop culture where one of its most marquee properties displays and embodies these problems so glaringly in the fucking first place.

[citadelrock]

Ultra-Rare Aesthetics - Part 6/?

Lyla Park - Life Is Strange 2 "Jinx? I'm your lucky charm, bitch."

[my-chemical-rot]

Person who isn’t a trans man or butch lesbian or anything adjacent: no you see when girls* act masculine they’re actually socially rewarded for it because masculinity is always favored no matter what for everyone all the time and girls* are never punished for behaving or presenting in gender nonconforming ways! nobody ever has ever had a problem with girls* being masculine!

[huandamonia]

My main takeaway from the My Adventures with Superman discourse is that we need to stop calling every girl with short hair a tomboy.

[yeetlegay]

Thought about rule 63 Payurain and my knees nearly gave out

[ghostzzy]

idk since i made that post earlier i've just been thinking about all the ways adults were weird and shitty to me because i was gender-nonconforming as a kid. because i MIGHT grow up to be a lesbian or, worse, transgender. and how much it sucked to figure out my identity under those conditions -- where every adult i'd ever met had already figured out What I Was and hated me for it, and i had no idea. idk it's just sad. i'm sorry baby izzy went through that.

[envolvenuances]

as the masculine woman who wasn't allowed to use the girl's bathroom in school and to this day have straight women prefer to stand than sit next to me at the bus or question if it's "appropriate" to have me in school staff teaching teenagers. the only "gaslighting" in this is the pretense that it is either a new phenomena or increasing because of The Trans Question being divisive in current gringo politics. when it's classic lesbophobia that always existed and honestly if you ask me things have been improving. but then I do feel like transphobia itself is a restriction of homo/lesbophobia against the mostly visibly gender non conforming of us.

[batri-jopa]

So I am mostly attracted

aestheticly to guys who fuck masculinity

and mentally to girls who fuck feminity

also I am AroAce

and life is freaking beautiful❤️🌈

[butcharium]

A distant relative my age let on that when we were young teens she thought I seemed really cool bc i looked like a skater - girl that's when I tried to be feminine

[watermelinoe]

my niece once got upset w my dad bc he wouldn't buy her some overpriced drunk elephant skincare product. she was freaked out about getting wrinkles. at age eight. i wish her mom had never bought her that damn smartphone

[every-jiraiya]

[wokeuplaughing]

I miss that brief point during the 2010s when Girl Power was about how girls and boys and men and women weren't all that different because it was like immediately lost once conservatives started their intense fearmongering campaigns against trans people lmao

[milimeters-morales]

goddd thinking of transfem miles dressing in very baggy clothes and hanging out with tomboys and butches during school (“weird” kids gotta stick together) and just feeling so connected with them because most of them understand when she finally opens up (and it’s not something she’s really open about at school) about dressing like a boy/girl but not feeling any sort of way about it gender wise because they do similar stuff…. aughh queer kids and just kids who are deemed “other” for simple fashion styles sticking together im gonna bawl my eyes out yessiree . kenneth please show up in the spider-men comic coming out in march i NEED you back.

[penisbutterjellytime]

Monster High hot take they should’ve made that catgirl more butch, none of the redesigns of her ever get close to being as good as the original