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pocket-size-cthulhu · 2 years

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Made a post on tweeter (that got a scary amount of attention - AHH) about how tomboy is a limited-edition gender only available in childhood.

There's been a lot of interesting discussion that's made me think and i want to unpack it more here.

(here's Kristen Stewart embodying an immaculate tomboy vibe. This is just to break up the wall of text I'm about to give you)

Obviously my experiences with gender and childhood etc aren't universal. I was called and proudly claimed the label "tomboy" for myself growing up. My parents didn't mind. I think they figured I'd grow out of it? But until i became pubescent, i can't recall any kind of bullying or abuse i endured because i spent my life cosplaying as a boy. (Note: everyone knew i was a girl, but crucially, i didn't really seem like a girl; i seemed like something else.) Key thing being, my gender presentation was nonthreatening. It was treated as kind of a normal, understandable, maybe a little quirky but totally fine thing for me to be into at that stage of my life, even in the eyes of my conservative, religious, homophobic/transphobic family.

Most of the comments on my tweet were people saying, basically, "you can still be a tomboy, it's just called x now" (lesbian, butch, masc, gnc, enby etc). It's not like I'm not aware that those things exist 😅 it's just, the understanding of tomboyishness as being natural, nonthreatening, sweet and normal goes out the door when you grow up and assume a queer identity. Now you're a Threat™ to Traditional Values and all that bs. The quality of innocence and natural-ness that comes with being a tomboy child is lost when you grow up.

Someone else hit the nail on the head when they said that masculinity and particularly boyish qualities in adult women are infantilized. A lot of transmasc/gnc/enby folks with masc-leaning presentations commented that their parents refused to recognize their identities and continued to refer to them as "tomboys" well into adulthood. Honestly i think that's a tool of infantilization. That says, "i think your identity is a phase you'll grow out of."

Personally, i generally miss the gender freedom i had during childhood. It's hard to say how exactly my gender difficulties and my internalized misogyny interact and influence one another. I found i could never quite become a boy in my childhood; i could roll around in the mud all week, but my mom would still put my ruffled socks and tiny red Mary Jane shoes on for church. But generally i got to live my life in a way that was determined by me. Relatively unfettered by society's definitions of what a girl can and can't do.

As an adult though, i feel that everywhere i go. It centers on my body. It's in the way I'm objectified for my shape, the way my shape is a topic of conversation among men and women. It's in the way i am infantilized for my playfulness, loudness, the way i do little dances or big stretches in the middle of meetings when everyone else is sitting still (that's the ADHD lol). It's in the way i am spoken to whether i am presenting very feminine or not very feminine at all. It's where people place responsibility and what they assume about me because of how i look and act and the fact that I'm married and most of all, the fact of the anatomy with which i was born, which informs so much of what people think of me for some bizarre reason.

I don't think that wanting to escape the downsides of femininity by being "not like other girls" is a worthy goal. And yet, i can't help the fact that i keep acting like i think it's possible. Is my aversion to femininity due to how i see it as having limited me throughout my life? Or does it go deeper?

When i was a kid, being "tomboy" was an "out" of many of the expectations of performed childhood femininity. It doesn't work like that anymore.

Anyway, being a girl/woman for this long has lent me a new understanding of what it means. I have so much respect for women. I'm honored to be among them. It still doesn't feel completely natural to be equated with womanhood though.

It's not like i want to be a man. I just want the blank slate men get. Their effortlessness. Walking out of the house with no prep and looking acceptable. The fact that a man's personality is something interesting about him (while a woman's is reduced to an archetype and assumed, and worse, assumed to be boring).

Trying to "opt-out" of womanhood by being tomboyish feels like a personal betrayal of feminist values to me. The goal should be for all women and gender minorities to be treated well, not just the ones who are masculine enough to distance themselves from femininity. (Anyway that strategy doesn't work.) And yet, and yet, and yet...

#tomboy #long post #sorry #ranting from tweeter #originally a tweet #genderqueer #womanhood #gender #ahh #ramblings #pick me girl vibes ugh #grown up tomboy

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4ishipit · 3 years

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Ok so, I'm gonna write all the trans codedness of Momoe character and how she was confirmed trans in the latest episode. I'm going to have to do this in parts as there is a 10 photo limit. So here is to Part 1!

Momoe was hinted at being trans, even before her first appearance, we see this in the anime's ending.

This is trans coded, why? Heres why: look at how lovingly she wants that jewellery! She obviously really wants some! We already knew all the characters would be girls, and their names, before all the character made their appearance. So a masc looking girl, who wants to wear jewellery and be feminine, Its very similar to a trans womens experience, and something alot of them feel. If they made her a GNC cis girl, or just overall butch, this would be kinda bad? And totally not the shows speed. As why have the one character who is braking the gender stereotype and conformity want to be feminine and conform to gender stereotypes? Its kinda backward thinking, and basically them saying "GNC girls want to be feminine deep down inside" which isn't true at all, and is problematic. And as I said, from a show all about mental health and people living their best lives and showing it to the world, it wouldn't be a good message to broadcast and not something they seem like they would do.

Then in epiosde 4 we finally meet her! Hello Momoe!

"Momotaro"? Well, in Japan adding "-taro" makes them more of a "boys" name. This is likely her dead name, and she changed it herself to "Momoe" her real name. Its kinda like say you had the name "Oliver" and changing it to "Olivia", which is a very trans thing to do. And is something Trans people do. Another way Momoe is trans coded.

Then we get this line from the egg-person:

"You have broad shoulders", keeping in mind, right now, she thinks momoe is a boy. She isn't saying for a girl you have broad shoulders, but she has broad shoulders overall. This isn't about clothing, and Momoe being a GNC cis girl, this is an actual comment of her body type, and apperntly she has broad shoulders. Momoe does respond to this by saying "not really".

Later when she is getting her next Egg the Accas talk to her and say this:

"There are other girls tackling Eggs" so this is the first dialogue where she's is confirmed to be a girl, as he says "other girls". So she is perceived as a guy, despite identifying as a girl, pretty trans coded if you ask me.

Here Momoe is getting misgendered. "This is a women-only car!"

*sniff* *sniff* do you smell that? *stiff* smells like a terf. This is such a terf ideology and is what they are know most for. This just a recoloured bathroom situation, as terfs don't like it when trans women are allowed in "women-only" spaces, most commonly public bathrooms, as they don't see trans women as women. So a Trans excultionist, excluding Momoe from entering a "Women-only space" hmmm, don't you thing that maybe, maybe this could mean Momoe is trans? Another dollar to the trans Momoe jar! Although Cis-Women have been affected by this and some terfs have attacked cis women like this for being GNC and/or looking masculine. Kinda hypocritical of them, as they like cis women being able to dress however masculine they want.

Confirming that the Wonder killer thinks Momoe is a boy: "Stupid man! If you want to ride, get it out"

"Get it out!"? Uh oh, oh nonononono

"I'll chop it off for you!" EWWWWWWW

"I have a right to ride this car, too!"

"That I'm a girl too!" This is the first time (of many) Momoe says she is a girl in the show. So this gives us the option of her being a cis girl, or a trans girl. And honestly, there is so much more evidence of her being trans than cis, and this isn't even 10 mins into the characters' screen time. She also doesn't deny she has a d*ck, why? Beacuse she is a trans girl! She could of said that she was bio female and have no issues at all, being GNC or not. But she is a girl, her private parts don't matter, all that matters is that she identifies as a girl, just like all the other girls/women. Just another way she is Trans coded.

You can read part 2 here! And part 3 here!

#wonder egg priority #momoe sawaki

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bao3bei4 · 3 years

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girlbosses, male wives, and other lesbian genders

a post about jing wei qing shang. but also mostly about another unrelated movie. spoiler-free.

for a lot of people, mulan 1998 is their definitive “ohhh i’m a chinese woman dressing as a man for contrived reasons and i get absolutely nooo erotic pleasure from this” movie.

however, because i am very special and unique, for me it’s the love eterne 1963. it’s the shaw brothers adaptation of butterfly lovers, the classic chinese folktale. here’s how i’d summarize the movie:

zhu yingtai, an aspiring scholar, convinces her parents to let her dress as a man to attend school. on the way there, she meets liang shanbo, another prospective student, and they become sworn brothers. they study together for three years, growing closer, until zhu yingtai returns home. liang shangbo accompanies her for the eighteen-li journey home while she hints she’s a woman, but he remains oblivious. by the time he learns her gender, her parents have engaged her to another man. he dies of grief, and while she mourns at his grave, it splits open, and she buries herself inside with him. two scraps of her torn outfit turn into butterflies and fly away.

it’s worth noting here that like. this movie is made in the huangmei opera style. so both zhu yingtai and liang shanbo are played by women (betty loh ti and ivy ling po respectively). because of this, basically every level of the film is preoccupied with gender: if we take zhu yingtai’s male performance as credible (as the characters in the movie do) the leads bond through male homoeroticism; the text is ultimately about a heterosexual romance; it is acted out by two women, in a performance that is difficult to mistake as heterosexual or even feminine; and the dialogue of the movie can’t help but remark on this.

basically it asks: what if lesbians could be gay both ways? wouldn’t that be based?

like opera was traditionally made by single gender casts, so roles tended to be genderless, in that the gender of the actor doesn’t determine the gender of the role they play. roles are instead typed into four categories: dan (fem), sheng (masc), chou (clown), and jing (painted face). it’s a sick gender quadinary. each of these roles has further subtypes that are represented through stylized patterns of singing, makeup, costuming, movement etc.

so in butterfly lovers, betty loh ti plays a dan, and ivy ling po plays a sheng. but because of the textual cross-gender play, you end up with a woman playing a woman playing a man who falls in love with a woman playing a man.

i’m going to make a brief digression here into talking about like.. acting theory. in the european tradition, you see it evolving out of early concerns (from stanislavski, brecht) about the fourth wall, and its permeability or lack thereof. in chinese opera tradition, the fourth wall didn’t ever really exist. and mei lanfang, the legendary fanchuan performer, claimed that his success wasn’t just due to his appearance, but rather, his mastery of some nonliteral feminine subjectivity.

If I kept my male feelings, even just a trace, it will betray my true self; then how can I compete for the audience’s affection for feminine beauty and guile?

i’m not going to argue that there’s like, an essence to being a woman because i’m not a fucking idiot. but there’s something to be said for the idea that the gendered interplay between the audience’s perception of the actor, the actor’s perception of themself, and the character they play is a massive part of the appeal of fanchuan performance.

this is echoed by david hwang’s m. butterfly, in which gallimard memorably says, “i’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. everything else—simply falls short.” btw sorry for having the type of brain disease where i constantly reference chinese crossdressing related media. you already know why i have it.

anyway. parallel to that (but far less morally detestably), jin jiang argues “young male impersonators in yue opera embody women’s ideal men—elegant, graceful, capable, caring, gentle, and loyal.” so, trivially, 1) the eroticism embodied by fanchuan performers is distinctly different from their “straight” counterparts, and perhaps less trivially 2) it’s way better.

back to the love eterne for a bit. one of the many reasons it’s lodged itself into my psyche is because there’s something more interesting at play than just all that. normally in opera, to compensate for any perceived residual femininity in the sheng, the dan camps it up even further. so this is how zhu yingtai first appears, this bratty femme pastiche of womanhood. yet within a couple minutes she’s dressed as a man, which she’ll stay as for the bulk of the movie. they do however make compromises with the makeup--more gently lifted eyebrows than the steep angles of the sheng opera beat, and an improbably masculine smoky eye.

that’s right. they performed girlbossification on her.

i don’t want to suggest that she’s straightforwardly feminine. i could write an entire other thing on her relationship to masculinity. instead i want to highlight the erotic interplay not just between the “girl” and the “boss” but also between her and her counterpart: the male wife.

liang shanbo is ostensibly straightforwardly male, but his relationship with zhu yingtai isn’t gay in the ahaha what if i was into my bro way-- it’s a what if i was into my bro and i was his wife way.

that’s right. they performed force fem on a cis woman-man. like when zhu yingtai tells him he can’t watch over her as she recovers from an illness because “boys and girls can’t sleep together,” liang shanbo asks “are you implying that I’m a girl?”

there’s a lot of shit like this that builds up over the course of the movie. it all culminates in that final 18 mile journey. along the way, zhu yingtai compares them to a pair of mandarin ducks, one male & one female. liang shanbo sputters “i am a man inside out-- you shouldn’t--” before graciously conceding, “you may compare me to a woman.”

this is like. a simple punchline. but it’s incredible. it’s true! liang shanbo isn’t a man inside out in that he’s a man and only a man, but rather that he’s a man seen inside first, built for desiring, by a woman & for a woman. as a perpetual object, he becomes a more believable woman than zhu yingtai. and at least in his view, it seems more likely that he could be a woman than her. but beyond that, his permissive tone reads as a kind of wanting in itself--recast, if she wants, “for you, i’ll be a woman.”

obviously this is a classic lesbian mood. who among us has not seen “no gender only lesbian” posts. and speaking of classic lesbians, you might ask. did you just tiresomely reinvent butches and femmes but with a more annoying name? yes. no. okay. well.

first, like butch/femme dynamics have both historical specificity and a classed character such that it’s not rlly that appropriate to impose them on the love eterne. and i guess more importantly, i wanna talk about stuff that isn’t real.

we fight all day about people who confuse performance with performativity, (i use we lightly here. for instance, i go outside every day so i don’t care about discourse) but what if we actually wanted to talk about the former for once? something specifically, whether we choose or are forced into it, that we pretend to be?

anyway. what the hell does all that have to do with jing wei qing shang. i’m going to start by first making the argument that there’s no such thing as a naturally occurring girlboss. i think, honestly, she’s a product of capitalism (“boss” should be the tipoff here) but because both of these stories are set in ambiguously historical china, i’m going to say, instead that she’s a product of uhhh primitive accumulation.

semantics so that i can be canon compliant with marxism aside, if girlbosses are made not born, can you choose to be a girlboss? sheryl sandberg says yes. i don’t disagree, i guess, but i will say: stop glamorizing it! humans only become girlbosses when they’re greatly distressed.

you become a girlboss when you have no other choice not to be one. when your wants are too great to be a woman, when the things you want are not things that women should want-- whether that’s something that really no one should want, like being a ceo, or whether that’s just something like loving a woman (or, as it is quite often, both) -- you have to become something else.

another important part of being a girlboss is that other people are not. your excesses mean that not only do you lose something in the process, but your bosshood comes at the expense of others. the girlboss necessitates a girlworker, or so to speak.

now we’re getting to jwqs. i’m assuming that you haven’t read jwqs, because most people haven’t. that was me until like four days ago. in broad strokes, the novel is about a woman, qiyan agula, who was raised as a prince, and her quest for revenge against the kingdom who slaughtered her people. of course, this involves marrying one of the princesses of that kingdom. it’s all very exciting (lesbian).

what’s striking about jwqs is that both of them seem to fit the girlboss paradigm, in vaguely similar ways. qi yan (agula’s assumed name) seems to follow the lineage of zhu yingtai, who pretends to be a man to achieve her goals. she’s forced to give up much in the process, and also sacrifices a, uh, lot of innocent people. similarly, nangong jingnu, the princess, is inherently a girlboss because royalty sucks. but also, qi yan girlbossifies her over the course of their relationship.

but i wouldn’t say jwqs is girlboss4girlboss. there’s something a little more complicated happening. qi yan isn’t zhu yingtai in that she’s a dan pretending to be a sheng. it seems more like that she was a sheng all along. it’s something that the women of the novel return to often: qi yan seems to be better than a man.

for instance, nangong sunu, jingnu’s older sister, reflects on this.

Nangong Sunu had seen many foolishly loving women who sacrificed everything for the sake of their husbands, but there were rarely any men who would do the same for them.

(...)

Thinking it through, Nangong Sunu felt that Qi Yan was truly becoming more interesting. She intended to observe discreetly for a while, to verify if such a man truly existed in this world. (ch 221)

and i forgot to write down the citation for this, but nangong jingnu also seems to argue that not only is qi yan prettier than a man, but she also seems to be prettier than a woman. (it’s the bit where she’s watching qi yan sleep. help me out here.)

moreover, the way qi yan relates to nangong jingnu is suggestive. jingnu brings out the elements of wanting to be a woman in her. it’s jingnu’s body that makes her wonder what she would look like if she was more feminine. it’s jingnu’s happiness that she resents, wishing that her people could have that as well. it’s her desire for jingnu that makes her a woman.

(another important distinction i suppose--while one person can’t be both a butch and a femme, because the girlboss and the male wife are things we pretend to be until we embody them / them us -- there’s greater slippage between the two.)

anyway, the girlboss/male wife dynamic is reversed wrt who’s actually dressing as a different gender. that suggests an inversion in the implications we see from the love eterne, if we are to take the love eterne as the paradigmatic girlboss text. which i do, for no reason in particular.

so then, is qi yan pretending to be a man? under the opera framework, we’re forced to say no. she’s not pretending to be a man any more so than liang shanbo (as acted by ivy ling po) was. but that, of course, feels incorrect, just looking at the text. is she, then, pretending to be a sheng? i’d strongly say no. the things that others see in her, they authentically see; and she does authentically feel the same things as liang shanbo wrt femininity.

so it has to be the opera framework that jwqs is subverting then. if qi yan kept some trace of her once-womanhood, if qi yan reveals her true self, and yet she still can compete for the audience’s affection-- jwqs’s inversion of the opera framework seems to argue instead that it��s that true self that allows you to compete. it’s being masc that lets you be a desirable woman; it’s being feminine that lets you be a desirable man.

there’s an increased gender ambivalence to jwqs, which make sense, i guess, seeing as it’s not meant to be a het story the way that the love eterne was. for instance, nangong jingnu crossdresses to go out in public, and qi yan remarks that jingnu’s disguise fooled her on their first meeting. when qi yan and jingnu go out in public, both disguised as men, they’re repeatedly perceived as a gay male couple. there’s freedom in that: they could be gay women only privately, they could be straight officially, but they could be anonymously gay publicly.

so it’s through the gay male pretense that they can be gay women; it’s through the qi yan pretense that agula can love women; it’s the qi yan caring husband persona that coaxes jingnu in caring for qi yan in return-- jwqs, more precisely, argues that you can’t be a woman if you’re going to love them, and even less so if you’re going to be loved by one.

this is perhaps well-trodden ground for anyone who has read wittig & certainly many people who haven’t. but it’s the layer of pretense that for me complicates these two narratives.

i think it’s a relatable feeling: wanting something anticipating getting something, or wanting something for yourself anticipating knowing that you already had it. that is, desire in itself being constitutive of that reality.

or less abstractly, knowing that you’d want to be a lesbian if you could, knowing that you’d want not to be a woman if you could-- anticipating any realization of either.

the dramatic excesses & wants of the girlboss, i think, are a decent literary stand in for being a lesbian.

i wanna note here that this is rlly just based on my experience being a transmisogyny exempt nonbinary diaspora lesbian lol. it’s fun & cathartic to overread this history & place myself in the accidental implications.

i don’t think most of the things i say are literally true. and i don’t want to overstep & say any of this can be generalized. please lmk if something here doesn’t read right! ok kisses bye

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manifestoonmoralmanlove · 3 years

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What will be in my bag? Pre-ordered Manga. Straight and Lez edition.

Here’s a list of English-released manga I’ve currently got on pre-order, and manga series I ordered before but won’t be continuing with the series.

As a note: Some of these titles have been released but I have not received them yet due to a issues with covid backlog effected how things are released. I personally find that if you pre-order it tends to get you manga quicker. It seems there is more pressure to keep up with the new release schedule than chip away at the backlog.

I’m starting with the stuff I’ve already read some of and confirmed enjoyment, then stuff I’m shooting in the dark for, and finally series I have tried recently and have discontinued.

Heteros

My Androgynous Boyfriend

Story & Art by: Tamekou Publisher: Seven Seas

It is rare for straight shit to end up in my library but My Androgynous boyfriend is an exception that will surprise no-one since it’s pretty queer adjacent. This story is mostly a couple being lovey-dovey between jokes about sexuality and gender but (so far) isn’t problematic at all. The female lead is quite enjoyable as she’s well-balanced and has agency throughout. There’s even ace representation! It’s very low-stakes, wholesome, and sweet so far. (Volume 3 is set to release in November.)

My Excitement Level: The gentle about to sink into a bubble bath variety

Yuri/Lesbian

Even Though We’re Adults

Story & Art by: Takako Shimura Publisher: Seven Seas

Takako is also the creator of Sweet Blue Flowers and Wandering son. I have dipped by toe in to both those series. I overall find their writing kinda meandering and tepid (might just be me) but technically pretty solid. I am hopeful for this series since it features adults....if the title didn’t make it obvious. I was intrigued by the one character being married but the man finding out about the affair quickly and reacting more realistically and interestingly than the average male love interest in a Yuri. I also found myself relating at bit to Akari’s angst about being unlucky with relationships with women. I also do enjoy the artwork! This one is the most likely of my followed series to be dropped at some point. (Volume 2 of this manga was set to release in June this year.)

My Excitement Level: Cautious Optimism

For more click the jump!

Kase-san and Yamada

Story & Art by: Hiromi Takashima Publisher: Seven Seas

This is a series I keep going back to. While it is the very typical low-stakes bubbly, cutesy School age Yuri...it is a very good version of that. Just warm bubble bath vibes. (Volume 7 is set to release in February of next year. I think it was originally supposed to be released this May but was bumped back.)

My Excitement Level: The gentle about to sink into a bubble bath variety

NOW ONTO THE SERIES I HAVEN’T READ BUT I’M TAKING A CHANCE ON!

Adachi and Shimaura

Art: Moke Yuzuhara Story: Hitoma Iruma Publisher: Yen Press

This, as I understand it, is a slow-burn romance about two delinquent girls. I have heard good things about the novel and the anime series! However I prefer manga to novels and don’t have a funimation account so I went to snag it in manga form. (Volume 1 was set to release in February this year and 2 in September)

My Excitement Level: Cautious Optimism

The Girl I want is so handsome!

Story & Art by:Yuama Publisher: Seven Seas

The premise is a young lady has a crush on a handsome older girl who’s oblivious to her advances. When she tries to confess she instead gets roped into being the club manager of the basketball team that her crush is a part of. So it feels like it may end up cycling through 2 jokes and be so deep in the stereotypical manga bullshit you can easily-predict its beats volumes in advance. HOWEVER that is also a premise that is similar to Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun which is legitimately a hilarious series. Also I fucking love butch/stud/masc-presenting women/AFAB people. So I’m willing to risk “The same Anime bullshit” for good jokes and a cute lezzy romance with a beautiful butch. (Volume 1 is set to release of December of this year.)

My Excitement Level: Pretty nervous actually. I hope it works out!

Monologue Woven for You

Story & Art by: Syu Yasaka Publisher: Seven Seas

A woman gives up on a career in theater gets tangled in a relationship with a woman passionately pursuing theater. Since it is set between college age women, and appears to be about more personal and mature themes I am interested. (Volume 1 I BELIEVE is supposed to be released in February of next year.)

My Excitement Level: Cautious Optimism

Mizuno and Chayama (No page yet so far as I can tell.)

Story & Art by: Yuhta Nishio Publisher: Yen Press

Two daughters of feuding families meet in secret. This is by the same author of After Hours. I read a bit of After Hours and found it fine but boring since it seemed without conflict. Conflict doesn’t seem to be in short supply with a story like this! While I enjoy the sugary-sweet high school lesbian romances...those are not in short-supply. So I am always hungry for something darker, meatier, more mature. (Volume 1 is set to release next February)

My Excitement Level: Cautious Optimism

5 Seconds Before The Witch Falls In Love

Story & Art by: Zeniko Sumiya Publisher: Seven Seas

It appears to be a playful fantasy about a Witch and Witch-hunter who’s antagonism turns romantic. This may end up one note and stupid...but I’m always hear for queer romances set in high-fantasy and I haven’t read a Yuri where rivals turns to lovers. (Volume 1 is set to release next February)

My Excitement Level: Low-key

Catch These Hands! (No page yet so far as I can tell.)

Story & Art by: Murata Publisher: Yen Press

A former delinquent runs into her high school rival. After losing a fight to her she agrees to her terms...her terms being to go out on a date with her. I mean the title alone makes me want to pick it up! It may run afoul of bad anime humor, but I’m hoping with the fact that it’s full of gay adult delinquents that it’ll be a little different. (Volume 1 is set to release next February)

My Excitement Level: Medium-key

Series I have discontinued:

I’m in love with the Villainess

Art by: Aonoshimo Story by: Inori Publisher: Seven Seas

A woman gets reborn into her favorite Otome game but she wants to romance the villiain! I had heard a ton of great things about the novel but I picked up the manga version. (If the novel is totally different I can’t speak to it.) For me, the writing is ham-handed, the jokes flop 90% of the time, and the fact the lead’s only personality trait seems to be ~obsessed with a bully~ really dampens this title. Her advances are so aggressive and unwanted I honestly started feeling bad for a spoiled rich bully. I will say it’s saving grace is the fact that the lead is masochistically into the villainess’ tsundere abusiveness. For me I hate tsundere romances if framed like, “I like you DESPITE your insults.” It is only tolerable if it’s instead, “I like you cause you tell it like it is. I’m a dirty little pig. Please step on this bad little piggy!”

Our Teachers are Dating

Story & Art by: Pikachi Ohi Publisher: Seven Seas

Well one reason I stopped the series is that cover you see up there. The sex in this series is fade to black but FOR SOME REASON the 3rd cover has them both butt naked. But on a less superficial note, the story is about two teachers who start dating. And while cute at points, I was just underwhelmed. I think a part of it, is the fact that this behaves like a stereotypical high school romance...and while set in a high school...these are grown ass women not 15 year olds. So I have less patience with the, “Gosh when will I get to kiss my girlfriend?” bullshit. I mean, I would hesitate to call it bad...but it’s just not a good version of it’s brand of bullshit.

Breath of Flowers

Story & Art by: Caly Publisher: Tokyopop

Absolute train-wreck, this is hands down the worst Yuri I have ever bought. The story is nonsensical and all over the place. There is a love rival who’s trying to break the two of them up so she can get with Gwyn...but then switches mid-gear to put in a lot of effort to bring them together intentionally...but she also still wants to hook up with Gwyn...it’s very ???????????? The main conflict of Gwyn is hiding their gender so they can play basketball on the boy’s team (not well explained) is built up hugely and resolved with a hand flick. There is a melodramatic moment where a school nurse says more or less, “GIVE IT UP YOU’LL NEVER BE A BOY!” And it’s like “OH SHIT! The fact that Gwyn is on the basketball team is cause he’s a transboy trying to live life as a boy! Oh gosh it makes so much more sense now!” But the author seems to not even know that trans people exist cause the story bumbles along as if that scene never happened. The closest we get is at the end Gwyn is like, “Look I’m learning to do make-up on myself to make you happy lawl!” Which is I GUESS supposed to be, “NO NO DON’T WORRY ALL OF GWYN’S GENDER STUFF WAS JUST THERE TO MAKE THE MAIN CHARACTER SEXUALLY CONFUSED WHEN SHE DISCOVERS GWYN’S TRUE GENDER! HER TRUE GENDER IS 100% CIS WOMAN CAUSE SHE DID MAKE-UP ONCE! IT’S FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!” Like whaaaaaaaaat? And it ends on a very random scene which doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the story. Ugh just very bad do not interact!

A White Rose in Bloom

Story & Art by: Asumiko Nakamura Publisher: Seven Seas

At an all girls catholic school a young woman falls for a mysterious foreign student. I grabbed this cause it’s gay and I overall like Asumiko Nakamura’s work (she also does Doukyusei, double mints, and others.) However I was just not grabbed with this title. I just felt like I wasn’t getting what was making the MC pants on head obsessed with Steph. Also the lead’s mother tells her that she’s getting divorced and therefore will no longer have money to pay for the university and she’s framed like a super bad person for this. Like I get why the MC (a teenager) would think that something like that is THE END OF THE WORLD! But I remember them really framing the mom like a selfish bitch for this...when like...it’s well established that her mom and dad’s relationship has been toxic for YEARS and that they TRIED SO HARD to fix it. OH WELL! This might be good but it just didn’t grab me in the 1st volume.

I’ll make a post on the BL titles later! Take care and Stay Rotten!

#preorder #my androgynous boyfriend #kase-san and yamada #even though we're adults #Adachi and Shimaura #the girl I want is so handsome #white rose in bloom #our teachers are dating #breath of flowers #catch these hands #I'm in love with the villainess #Mizuno and Chayama #monologue woven for you #5 seconds before the witch falls in love

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lightdancer1 · 2 years

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And as far as Azula's specific journey

She invariably knows she *is* a lesbian (even if the Fire Nation due to not speaking Greek doesn't have the exact term) from when she's very young and sees girls the way other people see boys. And from not being able to fit in as neatly into the hyper-femme expectations for Fire Nation nobles and not even really trying. This creates a grim paradox where when her main influences as a kid are men in one way or another they don't really see anything too wrong with this in some ways as she reads to them with a more masc presentation in a way....and they're studiously pretending that she's just fitting in with the boys, nothing 'odd' here, no sir (mostly).

Where those influences are women with standard Fire Nation expectations it becomes much more jarring more swiftly and it works very poorly for everyone involved.

From that initial knowledge she has the first moment where it goes from something she tries to hide (because internalized misogyny and homophobia), to something she can't hide (whenever she meets Suki in any given AU is when the gay panic tends to hit like a sledgehammer) to something she learns to ultimately accept and finds her own peace with (and invariably ends up with a wife and doesn't care a damn what the world she grew up in thinks).

In any given story or AU she may be anywhere on this path, with the first AU's Azula entirely aware she's gay but she's a bit busy trying not to be squashed by cosmic horrors that are fighting their own war on her world, and fully intending to play the Professor Armitage to their Whateley Brothers. Even there there are more than a few allusions to it and when the postwar setting is reached she goes down a path that is less telescoped and more 'now that she can relax she can actually learn about herself as a person with far less fear about everything.'

Each version of the Fire Nation and the Royal Family has their own approaches and understandings of things, as well as the meaning or enforcing of the Sozin Laws (and ending the prohibition on this is one of the few forms that Ursa does *not* end up doing with the Sozin Laws and figuring out Azula might be gay is one of the big reasons why she doesn't and why things really start to snowball into an avalanche).

In all AUs outside the Royal Palace the Sozin Laws vary but the general attitude is 'those Caldera people are weird and good luck enforcing what I do in my bedroom fuck you very much'. Mostly. Some opportunists are there and some bigots feel empowered by the laws to make everyone else's life miserable, and even the people who are tolerant tend to have an easier time dealing with queer people who are less flamboyantly so....while in every AU she shows up in Hoelun is the Butch with the capital B and quite proud of it.

#atla aus #azula #azula as queer #lesbian azula

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ticklepinions · 3 years

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The bad? The way woman are extremely sexualized and when you say you don't want nothing to do with underwear tickling you get mistreated, the fact that if you type tickling gif you will see only 5 or so gifs containing boys, the fact that it's not a single bit inclusive and that it's hard to see black, non binary, butches, and it will be mostly skinny girls... Thus leading to a lot of creeps thinking they CAN sexualize woman and it's normal in this community, the fact that m|m it's not so comum and w|w are mostly sexualized and fetishizes

Another factor i want to mention as the bad is the amount of people who become obsessed with tickling and you can't see them no longer as a person, because all they talk about is tickling, and they no longer see you as a person, they see you as a lee or let or switch, trying to intrusively tickle talk without seeing any boundaries, you get completely detached from reality vibes from this kind of person because you can't imagine talking to someone that is like that in real life... Sorryyy for ginormus texts i just ugh these are just things that i always wanted to say but I've always been scared of talking about it and recieving negative criticism

To the first part:

Yes. Absolutely. I find it sad like I said in another post. There needs to be more sfw representation of tickles. There needs to be more body types and people of different identities and ethnicities.

Women and feminine aligning people are unfortunately very sexualized in our society. And it's funny cause you don't think homophobia would get looped into being one of the factors as to why it's still being upheld today. There are double standards with w|w compared to m|m. With m|m I've seen people be labeled as the usual "that's gay/sus" and I'm like uh what does sexuality have to do with tickling?? In a nsfw context sure, I get it. But sfw? You don't have to enjoy/tolerate being touched by another person because of their identity, however when you start being disrespectful you're crossing the line. If you are a masc identifying person and like being tickled by only masc identifying people that's more than valid. It does not change your sexuality, thats up to you. The minute its w|w cis straight guys go bonkers. It's so "hot" and "sexy", maybe fetishizing it isn't their intent but I feel like that's whats happening. And this leads to the second part you mentioned.

People see others as nothing more than an object for their pleasure. It is gross. It's sad. Because often they don't realize it. Despite people trying ti say hey, that's kinda creepy, they just can't see the error of their ways. My thing is, I get we are in this community and we all have one common liking of tickles. And for some it's hard picking topics that don't seen mundane so as a fail-safe they go straight for tickle talk. And it's frustrating because the receiver (depending on the person) feels like wow am I just a lee/ler/switch to them. And it sucks. Does no one want to get to know the real me? Like you just like that I'm ticklish and that's it? Lame. I love friendship. No scratch that. I love familyship. I love getting to remind people that I love them. I love creating my own group where I feel like I belong and they the same. When you get to truly know the person first, it's just so much more fun. The banter, the inside jokes, it's amazing. You literally can meet your new best friends here. And guess what? Tickle talk CAN happen but most times you're sending memes to each other, or pictures of fluffy cows. Don't you want that? Rather than a *tickles your [REDACTED]*? To each their own but just my opinion.

Anyway my brain doesn't work linearly. So back to the first point. Women deserve better. Period. Black women and other women of colour deserve better. Trans women deserve better. Women who are thin and women who have chub deserve better. Women should be allowed to post pictures without being sexualised. Without having to be afraid that if they post themselves they'd get creepy dms. Dont get me started on d!ck pics. Before this gets too long, I hear you and I'm here for you if you ever need. Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it. This is a safe space for your thoughts.

#ticklepinion #asks #long post #serious post #the good the bad and the ugly

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notquiteaghost · 5 years

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there isn't enough nonbinary jon sims content, here is... well i started writing this as headcanons but this is really a not!fic about nonbinary jon sims. it’s 3′300 words

it contains: nonbinary trans masc autistic jon, jongeorgie, lesbian georgie, trans guy martin & tim, trans woman sasha, team archives trans solidarity, and not-insignificant amount of internalised transphobia and references to misgendering & general cis people bullshit

(also ftr i am heavily basing jon's experiences here as a nonbinary autistic person on my own experiences as a nonbinary autistic person) (this is like 80% projection) (what else is fandom for!)

also on AO3 if you prefer your 3k of bullet points to have better spacing

tiny baby [jon] who knows she isn't very good at being a girl but doesn't have the words to articulate why

her grandmother thinks kids clothes should be durable and practical so even tho jon is not a kid who climbs trees or plays football, her wardrobe is exclusively straight jeans & 'boys' t-shirts & large jumpers

she keeps her hair roughly shoulder length because that's the length it's always been but strangers still 'mistake' her for a boy a lot. this makes her feel a way she again hasn't got the words for

when she starts secondary school she continues to dress 'masc', never starts wearing makeup, never gets any interest in dating, generally fills out the checklist for everyone else assuming she's a lesbian

she knows she's definitely not a straight girl, so she shrugs and decides sure, she's a lesbian. it's a moot point, mostly, seeing as even if she did have any interest in dating she's the only gay person her age she knows

but she does get involved in some community support stuff – she spends a lot of time in the library as a teenager, and one of the librarians is a lesbian who takes jon under her wing a bit

coffee mornings and book clubs and things like that. sixteen year old jon and a dozen queer women all in their late twenties at the youngest. they joke a lot how often they forget jon isn't also a thirty-something

(this is that autism feel of having no interest in your peers but getting on great with adults)

and then she goes to uni, and then she meets georgie

georgie is a Very Out lesbian. she goes to clubs, she's heavily involved in the lgbt society, she has a rainbow flag hanging in her bedroom window. yknow.

jon likes her a lot, and still isn't really sure if it's romantic or not, but assumes that's more due to being gay than anything else

(no one has told jon about asexuality yet)

so when, one night when they're meant to be studying in georgie's room but instead are mostly drinking shit cheap wine and complaining about their professors, georgie looks at jon with this soft look on her face and asks to kiss her, jon says yes

and then they date

they're both living in one of those massive student houses with a thousand bedrooms crammed everywhere and only a kitchen for a communal space. georgie has lived there since coming back to finish first year, and jon moved in halfway through second year after a somewhat disastrous flatmate situation

so after they graduate, moving in together seems like the natural progression of things even tho they’ve only been dating for two months

jon is still, when asked, identifying as a lesbian and using she/her, but is also still dressing what other people now call butch. she always feels kind of weird about that term, but again, just chalks it up to the mess of complicated feelings being a gnc lesbian does genuinely involve

and then, finally, jon meets some actual trans people

jon has, circumstantially, known trans people. thanks to georgie, jon goes to a lot of lgbt soc things, and is passingly familiar with most of the lgbt people on their campus

but there’s a big difference between nodding at someone when you see them in the library and having an actual, proper conversation about gender

so, jon goes to a lot of social events because georgie does. without georgie, jon would probably not leave the house except to go to work and to the library (jon is not doing postgrad. jon’s library habits do not particularly reflect this)

mostly at these events, jon sits in the corner and reads, and only talks to other quiet antisocial people, while georgie circles back periodically to report on her social butterfly escapades

and at one, one of the other quiet antisocial people is a trans guy

he’s called harry, and he asks about the book jon is reading, and after they’ve been talking a while he says, “sorry, you probably get this a lot, but what pronouns do you use?”

jon just blinks at him and says “what”

“well, i’m trans, so i’m always really cautious about assuming,” harry says, easily, and this does not answer the question jon was asking

jon.exe has crashed

she(?) eventually says, “uh. she? i’ve never– she”

and harry, who has spent the last forty minutes discussing dante with jon and is already sure they’re going to be friends, says “want the trans 101? you’re making a face like you need it”

three hours later georgie finally reappears with the intent to actually interrupt (she’s drifted past periodically, but jon was always deep in conversation with harry, so she left them alone) and get going, and jon gets harry’s email address and is then very quiet as they walk arm-in-arm back to their house

just as they turn onto their street, jon says, “i, ah. i think i might be trans?”

georgie, who has for the past couple months been having something of a crisis after realising she definitely loves jon but she isn’t in love and she can’t figure out why, says “oh thank god”

jon, very bemused, “that wasn’t the reaction i was expecting”

“i think we should break up,” georgie replies, and jon stops walking. they’re four feet from their front door, but it’s late, no one’s about, so georgie decides sure, they can have this conversation in the street

“you– because i’m trans?”

“i love you, i really do,” georgie steps closer, takes jon’s hands in hers, “but i’m not in love with you. and it was driving me crazy trying to figure out why, but if you’re not a girl–”

“i can’t tell if i should be offended by this or not,” jon says, somewhat dazed, “i’ve been trans for an hour, georgie, i don’t know if this is transphobic yet”

georgie laughs, and presses a kiss to jon’s cheek, and says “it’s nearly midnight, we both have work tomorrow, let’s table this for later. we can look up names and what word i should use when i complain to other people how you always leave your shoes in the middle of the floor when we aren’t both on the verge of passing out”

and that sounds reasonable, so jon nods, and kisses georgie on the mouth, and then they go inside

the next day jon stops by the library on the way home from work and checks out almost every baby names book they have. georgie comes home and he’s sat at the kitchen table making a spreadsheet

“you don’t have to make it this complicated, you know,” she says, hooking her chin over his shoulder to read what he’s already got. the spreadsheet has a lot of columns.

“it’s my name,” he retorts, and she hums agreeably, then points to ‘jonathan’, which has relatively few ticks in any pro columns (god, this nerd), and says, “isn’t that your grandfather’s name?”

it is. he doesn’t talk about his grandfather a lot – doesn’t talk about his family a lot full stop, but she knows, even though he died when jon was still a toddler, the stories his grandmother told had a significant impact

“my parents didn’t name me after anyone,” jon says, quietly

georgie nods. she doesn’t say they’re not here now to offer an opinion, because that’s far harsher than jon deserves to hear, and it’s not like she ever needs to remind him of it either. he’s definitely already beating himself up for taking so long to come to this realisation there’s no one left around to tell him how they’d have reacted

“i think it suits you,” she says instead, and jon nods, and then she moves away to make a pot of tea and some pasta (it’s technically jon’s night to cook, but she was anticipating coming home to find him already hyperfocused beyond the point of no return)

a week later, jon looks up from the spreadsheet to where georgie is curled up on the sofa reading and says “ugh, fine, you win, you were right”

(georgie hadn’t pressed her point any further, jon is just like that)

“jon?” she asks, and he makes an exasperated noise and nods, then closes his laptop dramatically and stands. most of his spine pops when he stretches

“this calls for celebration” georgie says, also standing, “franco’s or monsoon?”

“franco’s. i’m going to eat a pizza the size of a car”

so then jon is actually going by jon, and using he/him, and isn’t dating georgie anymore but is still living with her and spending most of his time with her and factoring her into all his major decisions

he talks to harry, and other (binary) trans people, and reads a lot of blogs, and after a few months gets a referral to charing cross gic

by the time he starts at the magnus institute, he’s had top surgery and has been on T for years, and passes as cis completely, and he doesn’t know how to articulate it but this is. bothering him.

he’s not exactly… he likes being stealth, he doesn’t need to flaunt his personal life. he can understand the impulse, but he doesn’t share it. his feelings about gender and romance are no one’s business but his own

but. everyone assuming he was a girl itched – being miss simms, georgie’s girlfriend, she, it felt like wearing a coarse knitted jumper. it was exhausting

and, for a while, everyone assuming he was a man was a relief. it didn’t make his skin crawl, it didn’t make him want to scream, it was nice. it felt good.

it didn’t feel right. but it didn’t feel bad, either, and jon has never been gendered in a way that felt right. he thought that was just part of being trans

except. he moves to london, and he starts at the magnus institute, and he wears shirts and slacks, and the long skirts and patterned dresses some of his colleagues wear keep catching his eye the way men in three-piece suits used to, and that terrifies him

he was lucky, in a way, having no family left to care when he transitioned – if anyone reacted negatively, he could just cut them out of his life, and his social circle was already queer enough that was hardly necessary

but that doesn’t mean he escaped internalising a whole swathe of shit about what being trans should mean and how he should act and what he should want and if he wants to wear skirts then is he even a man? was he making it up all along after all?

naturally, he deals with this by ignoring it. he’s a man, men don’t wear skirts, he doesn’t wear skirts, that’s that.

he manages to keep that up until he’s made head archivist, and he’s given three assistants who are all also trans

(he doesn’t know if elias did it on purpose. elias knows he’s trans, of course, because he’s never bothered to get the name on his diploma changed, but the way elias reacted lead jon to assume elias may also be trans. and if that’s true, then selecting only trans people for the archives staff feels like a kindness more than anything)

and, the thing about them all being trans, is even if jon and martin are both rather fond of being stealth, and sasha and tim aren’t used to being out at work, and none of them are exactly friends, they’re the only people who ever come in the archives, so the archives very quickly becomes the Safe Trans Zone

they all vent a lot about cis people. sasha will walk in and the first words out her mouth will be “the next person to ask me if i’d had the surgery is getting their own surgery when i cut their tongues out”, and tim will make a commiserating noise and offer her the pack of donuts martin brought in

so when, on one of the rare afternoons when jon leaves his office to lean against tim’s desk and brainstorm organisational system ideas, martin walks back from the break room upstairs with a scowl and says, bitterly, as he sits back down, “oh so when cis guys wear nail polish it’s inspiring and breaking down gender roles but when i wear nail polish, jenny from HR gets to side eye me and ask if that means i changed my mind, because surely i’m the one who’ll do that and not all the men who didn’t have to do hours of therapy to establish they are definitely, one hundred percent for sure a guy!”

tim and sasha both make the standard commiseration noises, and sasha says something about the supervisor at her last job trying to say it wasn’t appropriate for her to wear trousers, and jon stops listening and runs away moves back to his office

he hadn’t noticed martin is wearing nail polish, is the thing. or, he had noticed it, but he hadn’t thought about it, and now he’s thinking about it. he’s thinking about it a lot

martin had– martin is a guy. martin is definitely a guy, if something of a feminine-leaning gay guy, the kind of feminine-leaning no one ever questions in cis guys, and it hadn’t occurred to jon to question martin, either, even though he’s trans, and. and.

he’s still circling round a revelation he can’t quite make himself have an hour or so later, when martin sticks his head round the door

“you, uh. you alright?” martin asks, incredibly tentatively. it says a lot, jon thinks, about how nice martin is, that he’s asking even though there’s a 90% chance jon will tell him to fuck off “you kind of disappeared abruptly, earlier. i didn’t upset you, did i?”

jon stares at him for a long moment, then says, “can i see your nail polish?”

“oh!” martin’s cheeks flush, just slightly, as he steps inside the office and lets the door shut behind him “uh, yeah, of course. it’s a little chipped, now, but, yeah”

martin’s nail polish is a light, pastel blue. it’s neat, and even, though his nails aren’t that long, and jon thinks he remembers martin saying something about mostly painting his nails to try and get himself to stop biting them. jon’s never really gone for nail polish, but it’s. nice.

“it’s, uh. it’s a good colour, on you,” he says awkwardly. martin flushes even more

“oh, um, thanks? did– are you alright?”

if jon was a different kind of person, this is where he’d open up to martin, and this would be the beginning of them becoming actual friends

jon is jon, though, so he just shoves all his emotions back in the box they escaped from, nods, and says “i didn’t sleep that well, is all. not really up to socialising”

(an aside about s1 jonmartin dynamic: jon is very good at shittalking martin when martin isn’t around, but in the face of martin’s genuine care and concern, he defaults back to a far more friendlier tone than he’s aiming for. he knows, on a level, that he and martin could be good friends if he ever got his shit together, but that is something else he’s currently repressing. he doesn’t need friends! he isn’t desperate for social contact at all! what’s loneliness!)

martin says “ah, okay, i’ll just– i’ll leave you alone, then”, and then jon makes himself focus on work, and then when he gets home he opens the group chat he’s still, thankfully, in with the trans people who got him through his first gender crisis and sends ‘help i don’t know if i’m a guy after all’

three people immediately send back a link to nonbinary.org

and that’s the rest of jon’s evening

he reads through every article. he reads several articles multiple times. he opens several new tabs, and gets a notepad to make a list of books, and eventually remembers to reply in the group chat

a week later, he bites the bullet and writes an email to georgie

nothing long, just, they still tell each other about big life events

and then, another couple weeks after that, when martin brings him tea, he says, “ah, martin, could i– do you have a moment?”

“of course,” martin says, and lets the door swing closed again, “what do you need?”

“i, ah. this isn’t very professional, so, you don’t– you are perfectly welcome to say no, of course, but i. um. would you– come clothes shopping with me?”

(ideally, jon would have asked georgie, but as much as he loves her (still), they haven’t talked properly in years, and she is cis. the best cis person he knows, but still a cis person. and he’d just, rather have a trans person, for emotional support, and no one in the group chat lives particularly nearby anymore) (or, well, some of them are, but when he asked they all told him to get over himself and ask one of his ‘lovely’ coworkers)

(why does he ask martin and not sasha?) (well, dear reader, he is nursing the beginnings of a crush) (not that he knows it. but that’s absolutely what’s happening here. martin is sweet and lovely and jon definitely finds him annoying and overbearing. yes. nothing else. no other emotions.) (his chest feels all weird when martin smiles because he doesn’t like him. that always happens around people he dislikes.)

“oh!” martin says, surprised. “uh, yes, of course, is– is there an event or something…?”

jon takes a moment to stare at the wall above martin’s head before he makes himself say, “i. am non-binary, and i need– different clothes.”

“oh, god, have we been–”

“no, no, this is a, a very recent development. he is still fine,” jon says, quickly, then pauses, then adds, more haltingly, “i think. i might, if – they, as well, maybe? just, to see”

“of course. d’you want me to tell tim and sasha?”

martin, jon thinks, is maybe not all that bad “yes, please”

“cool,” martin smiles, “i’m free this weekend? for shopping?”

“this saturday would be good, yes”

and then jon and martin go shopping! it’s probably not that successful of a shopping trip, because it takes jon like four shops before they admit what exactly it is they’re looking for, but they go to several charity shops and have fun trying to one-up each other with the most ridiculous/inexplicable item of clothing, and at the end of the day jon has three skirts (a knee-length black a-line skirt, a full-length black skirt, and a full-length black skirt patterned with red flowers), two necklaces, and a skater dress they probably can’t get away with wearing to work, but they really liked the way the skirt moved when they spun

other things that happen include lunch at a cafe where the staff definitely think they’re on a date and only martin notices and also martin is dying, both of them only managing to walk past a secondhand bookshop twice before they cave and go inside, and then emerge half an hour later both holding three books (two poetry anthologies and a sci fi novel; a psychology book and two history books), and martin somehow talking jon into trying on skinny jeans and then, again, leaving this mortal coil

jon doesn’t buy the skinny jeans, which is for the best really

the first time jon wears one of the skirts to work, sasha does a victory lap around the archives because “hell yes skirts are so much more comfortable, and now you swish! tim you should get a skirt. skirts for archives uniform”

and jon is still a prickly antisocial bastard but now he’s an outly nonbinary prickly antisocial bastard, and sometimes they walk into the archives at 2PM smelling of tobacco and holding a bottle of vodka, and then the archives staff all do shots and dramatic readings of the most ridiculous fake statements, because sometimes that’s how you cope with cis people, and that’s! valid!

#the magnus archives #jonathan sims #georgie barker #martin blackwood #jongeorgie #yelling at clouds #fic tag #draw jon sims in skirts. thank you.

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pubefest2020 · 5 years

Text

Let’s get ready to writeeeeeee!!!

Sunday is when the author signups open, so time to get your engines fired up! The prompt list is here, but I saw tumblr being an asshole and not opening it the other day, so I’m going to paste below the cut. Take a look, pick your top five, and get ready to kill us all on Sunday (I’ll send out prompt assignments on 11/11). If you have a friend who wants to write, please encourage them! We’re talking small here: 2k to 8k. Knock that drabble off your to-do list!

Prompt list under the cut:

Shameless PWP where Harry is too busy with work to keep up with his normal trimming and person B insists that they have sex anyway. Turns out that his full bush (including butt pubes) gives him the strongest musky smell and person B can’t get enough of it. Rimming perhaps?

Harry is shooting for some artsy magazine that has him doing a lot of tasteful partial nudity. At one point he’s almost completely nude and jokingly wants to do some shots that focus on his bush. Person B (probably the photographer) is obsessed and encourages it and they end up with lots of close ups on his thick bush and his fingers in it/pulling it/emphasis on rings and nail polish in this situation

Harry has found an appreciation for being tied down and having person B pull on his pubes; especially those on his mons pubis, but everywhere else too.

Something centred on lesbian Harry’s thoughts about how her grooming habits have changed over the years since no longer feeling the pressures of being in a girlband in her early adult life. Can be either solo or with Person B

Harry + person B, gentle caretaker Dom shaving sub Harry

Harry + person B, rough oral with a lot of focus on nose in pubes?

Harry + Person A + Person B, one holding Harry and being all gentle and sweet, the other shaving Harry’s legs for him. Bonus for bondage and a D/s flair, but I’m not married to that part.

Armpits are gross, right? Smelly and hairy and weird. So why is it that Harry is fixated on B’s? (armpit kink!)

Girl Direction: Harry worships her hirsute girlfriend’s chest, nipple, and belly hair.

B makes a bet with Harry that Harry won’t be able to go the whole summer without shaving. It turns out Harry likes it much more than ever expected.

Trans masculine Harry is excited by all the changes he and his boyfriend (also trans/GNC and on T) are going through, but growing body hair is his surprise fave.

Girl Direction: Her newfound exercise habit means that Harry is seeing a lot more women naked, and she’s starting to feel self-conscious about her pubic hair. B reminds her what’s so great about it.

Girl Direction: Harry is an aesthetician who spends all day long removing body hair and giving skin care treatments. In her fantasies, she’s making women hairier instead of taking it away.

Girl Direction: There’s something about an angry dyke with hairy armpits that makes B wet. Enter Harry, tits out, armpits bushy, and absolutely flirting with B. It shouldn’t make B think about burying her face in Harry’s side, but it really does.

Alien! Harry is still trying to adapt to all the strange things about the human form he’s taken, but body hair is the thing he finds most fascinating of all.

ABO where alphas and omegas get extra hairy when they’ve met a suitable mate. It’s the first time this has happened for Harry or B and they’re really turned on by it.

MPreg: As Harry gets more pregnant, his treasure trail expands and thickens right along with his growing belly.

ABO: Omega Harry would bathe in Alpha B’s sweat if it were possible. Since it’s not, Harry settles on burying themselves in all the most scent-concentrated places of B’s, right among B’s armpit and pubic hair.

Girl Direction: Harry is a proper southern belle whose mother taught her to shave her legs at an early age. As an adult, she’s kept up the practice, but when she meets and falls for B, B’s hairy legs might change that.

GayABO: Alpha Harry isn’t supposed to like the smell of other alphas, but with a rut coming up all they want is for their significant other, alpha B, to let their pubes and pit hair grow so their scent intensifies too.

GayABO: Omega/Omega: Harry loves what slick does to their omega partner’s pubic and leg hair.

Harry is insecure about his lack of chest hair. person b makes him feel better

Armpit licking fetish. Either harry has one or person B has one. I just want some armpits getting licked.

Harry needs help having his ass shaved for some reason (swim team? Photo shoot?) and he enlists person b and it turns into rimming

Harry has a Forced feminization fetish, so body hair shaving/waxing and then cross dressing please

Harry has a fetish for guys with facial hair/beards eating his ass and making him raw. Maybe the story revolves around person B wanting to shave and harry being sad? And then smut!

Harry likes having his pubes pulled out/pubic hair torture. Person b is freaked out but also supportive and eventually gets into it

Girl direction! Harry has a bush fetish and loves to go down on natural girls/smell them

After harry comes out as a lesbian she decided to stop shaving and her bff person b also does it in solidarity and she realizes she’s really turned on by it, wants to lick her gal pals hairy pits etc

Harry is a femme lesbian who shaves everything and her partner is a butch lesbian who loves watching the ritual of it, then smooth leg worship sex ensues!!!

Harry’s insecure about her hairy legs at summer camp because she forgot her razor but luckily her hot lesbian cabin mate helps her feel better in more ways than one

Girl direction panty fetish fic that centers around wearing lace panties with pubes escaping the sides, panty sniffing, too tight thongs, sweaty/post work out sex. Harry is submissive, person b is a femdom.

Girl harry joins the gucci gay commune and starts to let all her hair grow out, finds a home with her new found family, falls for the girl wearing the cat mask. Lots of hairy pussy eating and nipple sucking please

harry gets a tattoo on his pubic bone and has to shave his pubes and is very sad about it

all of harry’s friends are talking about having to shave their beards except for him, who barely has any facial hair at all. feeling left out, he decides to shave his pubes, because at least he actually grows hair there.

harry isn’t really allowed to mess around with his hair during the height of 1d, growing it out is the most he can get away with. but he really wants to, so he just starts to colour his pubic hair different colours instead, shaves it into funny shapes, etc

trans girl harry is finally comfortable enough to start presenting as female in public, loves to wear dresses, make-up, and high-heeled boots, but with that comes the general expectation to shave or wax your legs, armpits, and pubes. she struggles with that decision because she actually loves body hair and feels comfortable with it and doesn’t really want to remove it.

Person B suggests that Harry waxes his ass and/or balls and Harry complies. Once they actually do it Harry is overwhelmed by the pain and super turned on by it.

Harry loves Person B’s body hair and pubes, he especially loves it when he is completely clean shaven himself (maybe even being shaved by Person B?) and Person B keeps pointing out their difference in body hair.

Harry comes home from the gym hot and sweaty and person B finds him irresistible. Sex ensues including hairy pit worship and strong sweaty pube focus.

Person B can’t resist the urge to ejaculate in Harry’s bush and proceeds to touch/lick/pull/ etc.

Harry loves to see his wispy chest hair peek through a floral lace top, his hairy legs adorned in knee high socks, his light stubble contrasted with some pink lipstick. Only Person B gets to see his pubic hair spill out the sides of a silk panty and they’re just as obsessed.

Canon compliant NB Harry wants to wax/shave his (or her or their) pubes and underarms and legs for the first time but is anxious about both Person B’s and their fans’/ the public’s reaction. Ft… gender exploration, insecurity, body worship, praise kink. Also maybe focus on Harry’s thought process/emotions before during and after?

something centered around sub lesbian harry feeling insecure abt her body hair and pubes and person b reassuring/ praising her (basically lesbian praise kink and body worship)

GirlDirection 70s/80s pornstar AU: Harry + Person A oral with emphasis on those 70s style bushes. Bonus for feathered hair and bad 70s porn tropes! Maybe a Person B too?

Harry loses a game at a party and is punished by having his legs waxed in the bathroom. It’s painful and he never wants to do it again, but he can’t deny he loves the way his legs feel and wants the stranger he’d been eyeing all night to feel them too. Thigh fucking would be nice

Harry is pregnant and the hormones make him hairier than he’s ever been and he doesn’t know what to think. Person B might be obsessed. Pubes/chest/armpits/etc.

Highly detailed wank fic where Harry plays with himself and loves his bush and hairy balls (and foreskin 🤷🏼‍♀️)

Being on tour is stressful. Harry finds the act of shaving his legs in a dark hotel room with a bunch of candles lit oddly relaxing. Getting off afterward while scratching up his smooth thighs is just a bonus.

Girl direction fic where Harry usually shaves her pubes but let them grow after ending things with her last partner. She meets person B on a night out and they go home to hook up, but Harry remembers she hasn’t shaved and gets really self-conscious, until person B assures her they’re into it

Person A is trans masc and recently started T, and they’ve just started growing stubble on their face and are really excited about it. Person B worships it and experiences beard burn while getting eaten out

Girl! Harry is a model doing a photo shoot that involves posing with flowers in her bush - maybe she hooks up with the photographer, or maybe just admires the way it looks herself?

Girl direction where Harry is attempting to shave her pubes in the bathroom but is having trouble, so she nervously calls her roommate/best friend in to help and there is a lot of sexual tension that leads to Harry getting eaten out for the first time and the two of them admitting their feelings for each other

50s/60s/70s Girl Direction AU where normally pasty Harry spends a summer in LA and gets super tan. Her girlfriend comes to visit and is obsessed with the way Harry’s tan lines look against her full bush. Maybe they take pictures?

canon compliant xf era Harry has never been as close to another boy as he is to Louis. He’s fascinated by their differences in their bodies especially body hair wise

Girl Direction: Harry and Person B are both not into shaving very often, if at all. Harry (or person B) have only ever been with people who are clean shaven. Together they decide to explore the hairy side to being a lesbian, maybe rubbing?

I’m struggling with a less severe form of trichotillomania, a disorder where you have the urge to pull out your hair and I’d love to see a fic about it. Person A struggles with trichotillomania (in which way and which intensity is up to you). Person B is trying to help them recover (in which way and how successful that is is up to you, they could help them find professional help) and expresses love for person A’s body hair.

No pairing, just Harry. Harry has been letting his body hair grow, and he likes the sensation of it against his fingers. When masturbating he accidentally gets his rings caught in his pubes and realises that he loves the pain.

Harry casually lets his grooming habits slip a bit. Maybe he’s busy and doesn’t think it’s too big of a difference. Person B notices but doesn’t mind so it never really gets brought up. One day Harry is taking nudes and suddenly realizes what a difference it is and maybe he’s obsessed with it.

Recently out queer girl! Harry has a history of dating men who shame her for the slightest trace of body hair. Person B is the first girl she’s dated, and Harry keeps herself completely hairless at first because of old habits. It comes up in conversation one day and Person B reassures Harry that it’s ok to let her hair grow if she wants, so she does just that, and Person B shows her exactly how much she loves it.

Person B loves running her hands over girl!Harry’s soft back and tummy hair. Harry thinks they are grossed out by this at first and gets insecure, but quickly realizes that they find it sexy on her

Person B (a work colleague) one day mistakes Harry for a woman from behind because of his long hair and is quite embarrassed about it. Harry assures Person B he’s not offended and casually slips that it excites him a bit when people make this mistake. Afterward, Harry’s innocent comment becomes more and more sexually charged in Person B’s fantasies and Person B decides to be an adult and do something about it. Luckily, Harry’s just as horny.

Harry wants to dress as a mermaid for Halloween , and decides to wax in preparation (for his custom-made shell bra top and shimmery sequined tail) (any pairing)

Person B is on the set of the Lights Up mv enjoying how wet and hairy Harry is and he can’t wait for them to wrap up filming so he can ravish him

Harry and person B try full suspension bondage for the first time, but realise maybe they should have shaved harry’s pubes first as they keep getting caught in the rope. Not to worry, turns out harry enjoys the feeling more than they could have anticipated

Girl Direction or standard - Asexual Harry starts dating person B, who is completely accepting of Harry being ace. Together they go on a journey together to explore different forms of intimacy. The thing Harry likes best is when person B spends times stroking and appreciating her/his bush and pit hair because it feels nice and she/he feels safe knowing that person B won’t take it any further. Person B finds it deeply erotica and together they work out ways for person B to feel sexually satisfied without Harry feeling uncomfortable/bored

harry and person b 69-ing with lots of focus on them smelling/touching/licking/biting/pulling/appreciating each other’s pubes

Sub Person B worshipping dom Harry’s pubes. Maybe including face sitting?

Anything about body hair turning gray with age! Could be just Harry’s, or with a Person B, girl (woman) direction, whatever you want.

Harry is turned into a werewolf and notices that he’s suddenly growing more body hair than he used to, even when it’s not a full moon

Girl Direction: Harry watches Person B curse someone out for making a comment about her unshaved legs and pits, and immediately falls in love and has to show Person B’s body hair her appreciation

Girl Direction: Harry and Person B go on a road trip in a hippie van and decide to forego shaving in order to get the real hippie experience. By the end of the trip, they’re super into it.

Harry is a mermaid with pubes! Maybe human Person B is surprised but intrigued by it?

Harry has a gay epiphany when he can’t stop staring at other guys’ body hair at the gym - in the showers, or in the locker room, or when they’re all sweaty and gross from working out..

Person A and B loving and appreciating Harry’s body hair during a threesome!

Harry and Person B often help each other shave or wax or trim their body hair, purely for practical reasons, of course. It’s totally platonic. Until it isn’t.

Harry is a professional hockey player who’s been hooking up with his tream captain for months. Who knew the stench of an after game lockerroom could be a such turn on? (body worship, hairy/sweaty men, smelling kink)

#pubefest2020 #author signups coming!!

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thelastspeecher · 5 years

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I remember you mentioning Emily gets together with Carla McCorkle's daughter. Sorry I forgot her name. What is Carla's daughter like depending on the au she's set in?

I believe I named her Sam.

Sam McCorkle’s “default” job is a florist. Unless the AU is one where her being a florist wouldn’t make sense because of how the AU is set up (like the MerGucket AU), you can assume that is her job. She owns her own flower shop, called “Flower Girl”. That’s how Emily and Sam meet. Emily goes to this flower shop to buy some flowers for something and chats up the pretty woman working there. Luckily, she’s a bit better with women than her father, and charms Sam pretty fast. Or Sam inherited her mother’s fondness for the Pines nose. Or both.

Sam’s your classic gardener/florist. Wearing worn, stained jeans and covered in dirt half the time, her hair tied back in a ponytail to keep it out of her face. She’s surprisingly soft-spoken (at least, surprising compared to the fanon Carla interpretation of “spunky and sassy”), and doesn’t like to get into fights. I wouldn’t call her a doormat, but she definitely lets things slide that most of my OCs wouldn’t. She tries to keep the peace.

Given that Emily inherited her parents’ fighting spirits, you’d think she and Sam wouldn’t get along. But as a couple, they help each other grow. Emily learns to think before she leaps, and Sam learns to stick up for herself and others, rather than try to pacify someone she doesn’t agree with.

There is one thing that Sam does that is what makes Emily fall completely head over heels for her: she talks to her plants. Not like, talking to herself while gardening (which Emily has seen her ma do). No, she names each plant, asks it how it’s doing, compliments it, and reminds it of what she needs it for. That’s what puts the nail in the coffin for Emily. It’s so damn cute and endearing.

When Sam and Emily have been dating long enough that Emily will hang out at her flower shop during her spare time, Sam worries that she’ll have to explain how plants work to her. If only to keep Emily from accidentally putting a sun-loving plant in the shade. But to her surprise, Emily actually fixes a couple things around the shop, seemingly without thinking about it. Sam asks, and Emily explains that her grandparents have a farm that her ma and dad worked on, and then her parents started up their own garden when they got their own place. And she and her siblings were expected to help with the garden, as well as the farm when they visited her grandparents. So she knows about plants. She could honestly take them or leave them, but her skills with plants give Sam some heart eyes.

Anyways Sam and Emily are an adorable lesbian couple, one of them round and short and always ready to fight/burn something, and the other average height and thin and covered in dirt and plant bits. Neither of them are full butch nor full femme, but somewhere in the middle.

Emily and Sam have one biological son (since Emily’s trans) and one adopted son. Their biological son is named Bassil (like the herb but also like the instrument) Stanley Pines, and their adopted son is Lucas Aspen Pines, about four years younger than Bassil. Bassil ends up looking a lot like his Grandma Angie somehow (eh genetics are weird and Emily looks a lot like Angie, so I can get away with that), but with Sam’s button nose. Lucas is a fiery redhead with hair as curly as Shirley Temple’s. They’re both adorable and spoiled rotten by their grandparents.

Looking through my list of AUs, and honestly, there aren’t many that stick out to me as requiring Sam’s background to change much. Of those that I think might, here are my thoughts:

MerGucket AU - I said this when I introduced the concept of Emily’s girlfriend Sam, but I’ll say it here again. Emily becomes a pirate, and her first mate is Sam. They’re the terror of the high seas.

Various superhero-type AUs - Sam has very, very limited chlorokinesis (the ability to control plants). The most she can do is make a few flowers bloom or more leaves grow or sprout a couple seeds in fertile soil. But what she can do is enough to make her flower shop a real hit. When Emily tells her family about her girlfriend, her chlorokinetic Grampie Gucket and Aunt Violynn are very interested. Emily doesn’t tell Sam that she is a superhero (well, sort of a cross between hero and villain; a hero with villainous inclinations and who doesn’t care about committing fraud here and there). Instead, Sam finds out when Emily confesses it while talking in her sleep.

Mystery Moms AUs - Carla McCorkle doesn’t really feature in those AUs as a past lover of fem!Stan, aka Stana (unless @agent-jaselin thinks that Stana and Carla - or masc!Carla - may have dated in the past). But at the very least, Carla McCorkle is someone that Stana knows. And Stana feels a bit weird about Emily dating Carla’s daughter. But other than that, nothing really needs to change, I don’t think.

Big Sis AU - Ooh boy. Maybe- maybe Sam isn’t Carla’s daughter in that AU? Because Molly is Carla’s daughter in that AU, and Molly and Emily are half-siblings. So there’d be weirdness all around if Molly’s younger half-sister was dating her other younger half-sister. Sam is the daughter of…maybe one of Angie’s childhood friends? Maybe Sam would be Leighanne’s daughter in that AU? @agent-jaselin, if you’d like to weigh in, that would be cool.

Phoenix Enchantment AU - I honestly have no frickin’ clue how things change for Sam in that AU. But things probably are different.

Angiewolf/Werepire Stangie AUs - Gonna shamelessly rip off the amazing fic “Raising Stakes” in which Stan is a vampire, and have Carla be a vampire hunter. A vampire hunter that raised a daughter who also hunts supernatural critters. Since I’m a bit of a sap for star-crossed romances, I’ll have Sam be a werewolf hunter. So she’s a werewolf hunter who eventually gets a werewolf girlfriend and it’s all very dramatic and this ask is getting really long so I won’t ramble more about how I think it could go.

Spy AU - In the Spy AU, Carla works for an enemy organization, so I could see her raising her daughter to also work for that organization and oh hell yeah, another star-crossed romance! Sam and Emily cross paths while on a mission at the some location, and it involves dancing because of course it does, and Emily and Sam dance and flirt and then Sam slips away and Emily finds out the girl lady she danced with works for the baddies. They start up a covert romance similar to Stangie’s in the Superhero/villain AU, where they just sorta throw fights against each other. Eventually, they both stop being spies and settle down and Emily becomes a professional boxer while Sam runs her flower shop and every now and then they have to fight off people from “the old days”.

Royalty AUs - SAM IS A DUCHESS. I don’t know what she’s a duchess of, or why Carla McCorkle’s daughter is royalty when Carla isn’t (Carla and Stan still dated in royalty AUs). But she’s a duchess. And Emily courts her and it’s all v v cute.

Uhhh…I think…that’s about it? If I’ve missed something or some AU, or you want more elaboration on a part of what I’ve just rambled, send me another ask.

#I put a line in the middle of the ask bc I wanted some sort of separation somewhere bc it was getting LOOOOOONG #Emily Pines #Sam McCorkle #oh shit what would their ship name be #anyways I hope you enjoyed this rambling lmao #ask #vulpixen #(akdsjfnas Sam being a florist and Molly being a botanist probably means in AUs where Molly is Emily's big sister #Molly approves of her younger sister's girlfriend whole-heartedly)

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thesapphicsociety · 3 years

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Do you think romance, pursuer/pursued, masculine/feminine gender roles etc are healthy in same sex relationships - or is it a heteronormativity-LARP? Should we be looking for other ways to connect as women?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with it if two women enjoy more traditional masc/femme roles in their relationships and it's fully consensual, but it's best if they don't feel constrained by it - i.e. they can go outside those roles if they ever want or need to. I don't think it's healthy if one or both people get upset because the other person isn't conforming to their specific role well enough.

Some of those roles could be impractical in F/F dynamics though - for example, if a feminine woman always expects a more butch/masc leaning woman to pursue her she may be disappointed. Especially because it's a lot harder to know for sure if a more femme lesbian is actually into women or not, unless you meet her on a dating app or somewhere where she makes it super obvious she is into women.

There's also the issue that how someone dresses and the aesthetic they like doesn't necessarily reflect their personality. Sometimes it does, and you have the stereotypical butch woman who loves more masc-coded/practical/outdoorsy hobbies. But plenty of butch presenting women also have interests or personality traits that are considered "feminine" by cultural standards (e.g. into the arts, crafts, fashion or spiritual pursuits).

Not to mention expectations in the bedroom... butch women aren't necessarily more likely to be dominant in bed or willing to be a "top". They might not always want to initiate sex or intimate activities like kissing. So while it's not unhealthy for someone to want more traditional "roles" it may not always be realistic or easy to find.

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queernuck · 6 years

Text

Preference: A Postface

After seeing myself mentioned in regard to a genuinely reprehensible course of action, a way of looking at the self and at the relationship of trans women to other women that was being pushed by violent misogynists on reddit and being reappropriated in earnest by certain radical feminists, I feel it necessary to discuss in affirmation, not only for myself but for others, for other trans women, the way in which our experience stands as a sort of becoming-woman, is included in part of how trans women are not mirroring structures of womanhood but in fact, are part of the structuring of “womanhood” as a state within certain relations of producing-production.

One can ask how a fundamental reversal, binary series of recognitions of different sorts, that may present themselves in Derridean terms, recognition as woman versus as man, can fundamentally be the same kind of violent act. However, this requires an essentialism of the body, of the sexed body as productive force, as a singularity of marking, that accepts the structure of gendered exchange in-itself, the sort of turn that many radical feminists themselves make: recognition of a woman as such is different from what is constituted by the supposed recognition of maleness in a trans woman, is a sort of act that implies the masculine as a sort of marker of unilateral privilege rather than one found in assemblage with other structures. The recognition of subjectivity for gay men is a possible means of describing this: the feminine man, the campy image of a certain sort of gay man, a more effeminate and flamboyant idea of a gay man’s subjectivity, is rightfully understood as commanding a certain homophobic response specifically because this subjectivity is coupled with an assumed response, a structured understanding. However, the opposition, the top to the bottom, the “masc” subjectivity, is additionally alienated and moreover is understood in light of a sort of ideal being subverted, a kind of supposition of masculine gay men as entryism or part of a gay domino theory, an insidious trick intended to lure in straight men by implying that gay subjectivity is not defined by a unilateral expression of the gendered body. The commonality of this sort of identity (often described as “butch”) with that of butch women is important and notable, and moreover is marked by the assumption of an absent satisfaction, a kind of desire for the fulfilment of sexual meeting and shared subjectivity with a man that is imagined as “fixing” a butch woman. The violent, sexualized means through which butch women are imagined, the idea of the “tomboy” as a phase or as part of a show put on for masculine desire, as an expression of certain acceptable desires that border on the homoerotic, the expression of a shared libidinal pooling in male spaces and the matching of that to the figuration of a certain sort of woman, is all part of the sexualization of the butch woman, the gendering-act that occurs in order to bring her into accordance with heterosexuality.

The recognition of a trans woman as a man is thus of a similar sort to the recognition of woman as woman, is coupled with the recognition of transness, is a measure of disparity such that one finds the trans woman as a subject of violence, her recognition as trans is not one of privileging except in the most vulgar of analyses, ones that would ultimately turn themselves toward the same violent concept of womanhood. The notion that a man would pretend to be a trans woman in order to rape a woman, to effectively create a situation in which the expectation of sex is placed upon a woman (a situation that indeed represents rape) is ignoring that men have no problem with openly and vocally justifying rape even when it is named as such. Rape is horrifying, except insofar as it is delineated as something other than rape, is considered as justified or excusable, is known under another name. This leads to the series of acts that soften, ignore, excuse rape, the notion that only certain actions, certain overt and delineated and intentional acts are ones of rape. It requires a sort of reversal of certain arguments around rape: the idea that statutory rape, as a specific violence that is found around intentionally cultivated disparities in rape, is insufficient to qualify as rape because the same disparity of age can be found in legal relationships, rather than questioning if the legal relationships at hand too represent rape and the same sort of violence, if a process of grooming is only notable if it is sexualized immediately rather than after a certain constructed passage into adulthood. So, a man pretending to be a trans woman in order to pressure a woman into sex would absolutely be a rapist, as would using the structure of trans womanhood as a means of making one a possible subject of lesbian desire. The aforementioned possibility of rape as realized specifically in disparity, in measures of violent tension, is necessary as a descriptive elaboration upon the rape being forwarded as an acceptable act, being justified, by men of a certain ideological position. However, noting that it is as men, as positioned as-such in a specific already disparate relationship that this position is itself realized is necessary to understand the vast difference between these men and trans women. Rather than acknowledging the complicated subjectivities of trans women, a totalization of trans subjectivity as that of a man accepting the violence he will commit in linking together certain flows of libidinal violence, reactionary notions around trans women cultivate the same sort of ideological positioning as a word like "trap" does, in at once acknowledging violence in an act and ignoring the prevalence with which it is directed against trans women. The act of doubt, the way in which a positioning of the phallus at a measure of remove from trans women that can only be realized in violent response. That there are multiple ways of discussing trans women as subjects, as poised to manipulate and deceive, is unsurprising and moreover is in part resultant from a sort of fascist convergence on trans women as ideological structures. Furthermore, that trans women are focused upon by a certain phallic ideology that positions them as objects of progressive libidinal desire is worth noting if only to speak against a different position regarding trans women. The notion of “genital preference” and the socially constructed sphere of attraction, its contingency and the widely malleable character it takes on, is something that has been noted in order to point out the way that trans women are so often only understood as fetish, as aberration, as part of dehumanizing us. To simplify what trans women seek to sexual satisfaction, to a specifically male concept of libidinal expression, is to simplify the very structures at hand, the incredibly high stakes for trans women involved in any discussion of our womanhood.

The reduction of trans women to genitals, the singular intensity of the imagined trans woman’s phallus, similar to the Lacanian-qua-Butlerian idea of the lesbian phallus (conceptual structures that, for some trans lesbians, intermingle) is part of creating an immediate and visceral repulsion that then sets the tone for further realizations of the body and its potentiality, the possibilities of the body: the denial that relations determined by the phallus are realized through violence by men is able to be spoken, to be placed upon the bodies of trans women, and then again realized once the targeting of trans women for violent action is agreed upon and accepted. It is in this singularity, this act of switching, where trans women are excluded from any possible being described by the structure of womanhood, that converging and vital critiques of becoming-woman as a social process are excluded from realization. It is by sexing the body through a collapse of the body to genitals as a singularity of intensity, genitals turned into an ontological determination beyond all others, through a language that assumes trans women as behaving like these men, as rapists, as having a subjectivity that is determined by a desire to rape rather than the violent and lifelong process of victimization that trans women are faced with, that their subjectivities are refused.

Entering into a structuralist critique of this, using the structural boundaries at hand in order to accept and realize that which is necessarily held in a given position and the binary machines that sustain it, leads to the realization that a great deal of the ideology around trans women is in creating a sort of idea of what trans women are, why they accept becoming-women and what becoming-woman must mean for them, starting from a position where womanhood is not only undesirable, but unthinkable so long as one has a certain sort of sexed body. It begins with the means in which transmisogynist and homophobic ideologies converge from early delineations of “proper” childhood conduct, and continues as the undesirability of trans women is used to mark them as undeserving of life itself. Trans women are categorized as outside of the potential expression of desire, and thus any affirmation of them is simply affirmation of the turn toward fetishization necessary to make trans women temporarily acceptable subjects. It is in collapsing trans women to a single means of recognition that the predominant justification process for transmisogynist violence is affirmed, that trans women are denied the most vital forms of recognition and community, that trans women are left to die. That some trans women discuss themselves in a way that includes undesirability as something suffered, something difficult, is not surprising, as it feeds into the realization of just how deeply fetishized trans women are. However, it does not stand as the primary means through which trans women are realized as alienated subjects, subjects made legible through the dual structures of womanhood and transness.

These men do not care about trans women, they do not care about lesbians, they simply care about justifying their rapist ideologies to themselves through fascist turns of ideology. Adopting this, allowing them to determine what sorts of bodies trans women can have, allowing fascist ideology to determine the demarcations of both bodies and possible-bodies, under the guise of protecting women from rapists, is allowing for structures that harm all women to be constructed and redoubled simply because the harm is more apparent to trans women. The structure discussed is not the personal, singular expression of a relationship to the genitals of others, but rather a structural relationship to the phallic relations of an assumed sexed body that is developed as a projection of the ideology constructed within this language. It makes a meaningful and restorative discussion on the ways in which trans women and lesbians and trans lesbians and all other sorts of women are fetishized impossible because it presents itself most immediately as the singular realization of women as merely constituted by their fetishization.

Emphatically, trans women must affirm that, as a way of discussing larger structures of sexual expression and often-traumatic experience, languages of genital preference are at the very least a passable means of describing one’s own desire and that arguing against an individual experience in this is at best useless and at worst indicative of an entitlement that is found in all sorts of disparate sexual relationships, that is realized as a pressure which indeed expresses itself through rape when realized. The individual is unimportant in this discussion. Rather, discussing it to highlight that the development of a singular focus on genitals is part of how trans women and other women converge in experience, are understood in relation to the ideology of the rapist, of women as subjects approachable through rape, to make more clear that trans women must be affirmed as woman in discussing this commonality, is the primary concern. Discussing this in relation to the gendering of violence, the homophobia that informs and characterizes transmisogyny and the converse statement, the assemblages of violence shared in these subjectivities, is instead where one must concentrate one’s efforts.

#rape///#genitals///#transmisogyny///

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