#RACHEL STUDY.

[vitalphenomena]

SECOND GENERATION — FEATURED ON @vitalphenomena — READ MORE HERE template credit.

[sleepytownzzz]

emergency contact 📞

[bobastudy]

april 7th, 2024.

tomorrow marks my last ever week of undergraduate classes and it is so so bittersweet. :,)

[evelina-maar]

Why, of course I watch The Mummy 1999 for the plot!

[genericpuff]

hell yeah babyyyy now we're getting somewhere let's goooo-

art study of Rachel Smythe's The Doctor Foxglove Show era art ! Once I realized a lot of her older Foxglove pieces were done with traditional ink and watercolor, I got to tracking down some watercolor brushes that would work, wound up settling on the DAUB brush set and I wasn't disappointed, these things do a great job of emulating watercolor and other textures in Clip Studio. Funnily enough a lot of the shading was done with an oil pastel brush if you can believe that 👀 IDK if any of these studies will necessarily be reflected in Rekindled but it was still fun to do !

[vitalphenomena]

@meansfriendship // @freekzout asked for: 5, 9 and 14 for your choice!

What was the moment your muse first realised (or began to realise) their gender roles didn't match up with who they were or wanted to be? // alex 

Alex grew up in a household that was very open about gender non-conformity and very loose in its adherence to gender roles. Ezra often cooks, cleans, takes care of the children in a more nurturing way; Spirit worked hard, long hours while the babies were very young; Ezra themselves expresses their gender uniquely and confidently.��

I think Alex and Theo were raised in a way that didn’t really assign them a gender identity or require strict adherence to gender roles. I think Alex has fallen into their own picked and chosen blend of masculine and feminine traits while being fully supported by both of their parents from a very young age. 

Talk about a key moment in your muse's journey towards becoming their more ideal self. // rachel 

Rachel, quite frankly, was too busy for many years to consider something so elevated on their hierarchy of needs as gender. 

So I think one of the first times they confronted their own gender non-conformity was as an older teenager watching their new parents — Mackenzie, Cass, and JM — interact. Cass occasionally presents in a more masculine manner and is always referred to in gender neutral terms by their partners (as is JM obviously). 

I think Rachel entering the workforce and developing crushes are also key moments that they begin to realize they’re not strictly feminine / a cis woman. 

Did your muse experience a grieving process at the beginning of realising their identity, or was the revelation wholly positive and affirming for them? // gabriela 

Gabriela transitioned at a tumultuous time in any young individual’s life. SHe was a young tween/teenager. I think she was more concerned with mourning her childhood as a whole than mourning any sort of boyhood or masculinity. I wouldn’t call it positive and affirming, but I would call it relieving her for to begin transitioning. 

Gabriela’s parents — whether I’m talking about her mother Jenny (who Gabriela relates to very little except when it comes to womanhood) or her father Cain — have presented little obstacles when it came to her transition to girlhood/womanhood, which also made the experience less full of resistance and strife in her immediate circle. 

Having grown up in a relatively progressive/leftist part of New York, her larger circle was also affirming and uplifting — either behind her back or to her face. This also helped. 

[theythemonade]

give Regina George a shotgun I'm just tryna see smth

[star-anise]

So I've been watching this series of videos where a research-focused psychologist goes through Jordan Peterson's work to see which of his ideas and arguments are based on solid empirical evidence. I love it, even though she does mistakenly say his background is in counselling psychology (my field) when he's actually a clinical psychologist.

Anyway, that's got me thinking about Jordan Peterson, and how his response to criticism is, "People have been after me for a long time because I’ve been speaking to disaffected young men — what a terrible thing to do, that is. [...] I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.”

So, here's my theory: Young men of the 21st century have grown up in a culture that is specifically hostile and punitive towards them. However, I think that while girls and women can participate in this culture, it is as much or more the work of boys and men. And I think that the problem with Peterson is that he's not particularly good at helping his audience escape the maze they are trapped in--and he's absolutely opposed to any attempt to dismantle a maze that is actually of fairly recent manufacture.

Case in point: The metrosexual.

The word "metrosexual" was coined in 1994 by Mark Simpson, a gay writer whose settings seem to be perpetually fixed at "critique the shit out of it".

"Metrosexual" describes heterosexual men who might be mistaken as gay, because they are interested in things very common among gay men, including: Caring about whether they're attractive; caring about how their hair is cut and what products they use in it; caring about what clothes they wear; working out to make their bodies look better; frequenting nightclubs. To be "metrosexual" was, in some people's opinions, to be a "man-boy" searching for his "inner girl".

To be metrosexual was, in some ways, to be called someone who looked gay.

The term didn't really catch on until the early 2000s, when media became briefly obsessed with talking about which celebrities were "metrosexual" or not. In that era of hotly divided opinions over the acceptability of homosexuality and queerness, it was implicitly asking, "Who looks gay? Is he gay? Tell me, fellow broadcaster: How gay does this guy look to you?"

(They got to have their cake and eat it too. A liberal audience, desperate to gather as many LGBTQ+ people and allies as possible in their race for 50% acceptance of gay marriage, cherished any signs that people with social clout might be on their side. And a conservative one, watching the same discussion, would heartily enjoy seeing a rogues' gallery of degenerate Hollywood types paraded before them, their every effeminacy pointed out in loving detail.)

Which of course got us: The Retrosexual!

When everybody's helpfully compiling lists of all the things a man can do that look gay or unmanly, dudes who don't want to get the shit kicked out of them by homophobes know all the things not to do!

Therefore, being "manly" became strictly defined by what was off-limits. To be a Real Man meant you shouldn't care about whether you're attractive, or what soap you use, or how your hair is styled. You shouldn't enjoy dancing or get too enthusiastic about music. A Real Man cares about sports and beer and being on top! Dominant!! A WINNER!!!

And, so like, here's a secret: In Anglophone culture, we are very affected by the Puritan legacy that says pleasure is inherently sinful. Vanity and pride--caring about how you look and whether you're attractive--are literal gateways to the Devil. Gluttony, and therefore seeking pleasure at all, is another such. And in Puritan religious theology, women are inherently more sinful. Yes, it goes back to Adam and Eve, and how Eve was tempted into sin first. Long story short, things associated with women became associated with sinfulness, and sinfulness became associated with effeminacy. And for centuries, you haven't even needed to be religious to drink these attitudes from the groundwater.

Okay, that's not the secret, this is the secret: Pleasure is not inherently sinful.

And liking how you look and feeling attractive and paying attention to your sensuality and your emotional life and connecting with art in a real and vulnerable way can feel really good, if you're able to handle it well.

Being raised to be a Real Man in a world where masculinity is perceived to be actively under threat is so uniquely painful, I believe, because every attempt to define yourself as "not gay" means denying yourself one of life's pleasures, and telling yourself you never even wanted it in the first place.

And then those desperate to be Real Men found a way to take some of those things back in what is surely the most painful context possible: They are allowed strictly as tools of your heterosexuality and masculine need for dominance. You are allowed to care about grooming and dancing, etc, purely as a strategy in playing a game called "Getting Girls", where you either score or you don't, where not scoring means you're worthless and unlovable, and scoring is often... strangely unfulfilling and certainly not enough to fill the aching void inside of you.

The mistake both Peterson and his fanbase make is that they get to this point, and then think: The reason I feel so empty inside is... I just haven't gotten enough girls!

Maybe some guys get out of the maze by finding a woman who is allowed to care about things like affection and love and dancing and looking nice, and their connection with her lets them express all the other parts of their souls that didn't fit in the Real Man box, but can come out in roles like Boyfriend or Father.

But humans aren't telepathic, so relationships can only "fix" you so much as you're willing to do the work of nurturing your own soul in a safe environment, so for a lot of men the maze never ends, and sometimes they don't even get the fleeting joys of relationships or sex, since they're so fucked up about them!

At this point, I as a queer woman am like, "Solution's obvious! Dismantle the maze."

And Peterson, who has worked his whole life to achieve the status of Best Maze-Runner in All of Christendom, is clinging to it like, "NO! DOWN, YOU DARK CHAOTIC MOTHER! THIS MAZE GIVES MY LIFE MEANING! THIS MAZE CONNECTS ME TO MY FOREFATHERS! I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THIS MAZE!"

At which point, like... what can you do but just leave him there?

At least he's not in my area of specialization. The world would be too unkind if I had to deal with him in any professional capacity. I wish Clinical Psychology all their continued joy of him.

[minimuii]

Lil blade runner study 👁️👁️

[porcelainvino]

the hurt locker episodes as j.c. leyendecker’s “christ with sainted knights”

happy (late) 9 year anniversary to the hurt locker, part two <3

[hysteriawillnotsuccumb]

Lighting studiesss ☺️ + gay wip (IGNORE HOW FUCKED UP THE SECOND FACE LOOKS LMFAO)