#Radically soft

[radically-s0ft]

To my inner ableist

Pain isn't a virtue. Take the pain meds you have been prescribed. Pain isn't how you pay for still being alive. Living is.

[radjoy]

i have seen so many “hypergamy/it girl/soft life/luxury” posts about women not making decisions in a relationship and leaving it up to their bf phrased as “relaxing into your feminine energy” and since you all seem to be confused on the matter, i’m going to clear this up.

The reason that you find making decisions more mentally taxing than your bf seems to is not because you have some mystical feminine energy and he has some spooky masculine one that makes him a better leader. it’s because he isn’t considering consequences or evaluating risk/reward. simple as. you’re putting thought and intention into how you life your life, he’s coming from a place of fear and ego and???? idk maybe vibe and hoping everything comes up sunny side. you’d have equally valid luck just consulting a magic 8 ball for all your decisions.

men do not think things through. i work in an emergency room. all day every day: why are you missing a finger, sir? because there was something stuck in the lawnmower and he forgot that lawnmowers have blades. why do you look like ground beef, sir? he was going 104 in a 55 to show off his new sports car. why is there a miniature can of WD-40 up your ass, sir? you never get an explanation for those ones. women always think their boyfriend wouldn’t be the type that decides to shove something up his ass but let me tell you. let me tell youuuuuu. these men will surprise you. i have seen men from all walks of life decide to give it a whirl with something completely unsafe for anal penetration, then seem so confused to find themselves in the ER.

like 97% of penis amputations are from squamous cell carcinoma, an extremely slow-growing form of skin cancer that is usually completely easy to remove with a tiny little excision. so why on earth would we ever need to amputate? because MEN REFUSE BIOPSIES. men walk out AMA because they’re scared of the scalpel going near their junk and can’t pull it together. men will ignore a growing red crusted lesion on their junk for a full decade before giving into their wife’s begging and going to a doctor, who tells them they’re going to have to cut his dick off now.

are you hearing me? men will calmly make decisions that lead to them getting their dick cut off in ten years. do not let him lead you into dick cut off levels of credit card debt.

[shesmanic]

I'm crying again

[asthedeathoflight]

The reason I think the Bizzies being gender swapped works way better than having the Lizzies be gay is because it makes space in this musical for women to have sexual appetites and agency towards men in a way that's fairly rare in depictions of heterosexual relationships. For the Bizzies to seduce the Warriors by offering what they know the Warriors want and have the Warriors feel empowered to take it is imo more subversive than just like. The concept that women can be attracted to other women. Within the context of Warriors, because the text does address queerness in other places, I think it ends up being a more powerful statement to depict (some of) the Warriors as heterosexual women who have sexual agency than just being like. Well in a lesbian relationship someones gotta be the "guy" and tonight its gonna be the Warriors. Cowgirl is a heterosexual woman and she likes sex and the narrative never calls her a slut for that, and even when her sex drive gets her into trouble its still explicitly the fault of the person who tricked her, not her fault for wanting to get laid. When Rembrandt is listing the needs the Bizzies are offering to fulfill for the Warriors, she lists sex right up there with food. And thats something that I feel like doesnt often get talked about with heterosexual women especially in fiction. Theyre expected to be passive. The idea that the Warriors could need to get laid as badly as they need to eat and take a nap is just treated as like yeah duh. They've had a bad night. And that IS a revolutionary thing to put in a musical.

[ingravinoveritas]

Excerpts from a Digital Spy article with quotes from David's Single Father co-star Suranne Jones in 2010.

(With thanks to one of my followers who sent this in.)

[damgoodninja]

[taylor-swift-bracket]

I saw a YouTube short asking which one of these albums was going to win album of the year. I added Cowboy Carter to the list and was curious how you felt about these albums

[meyerlansky]

it's an ongoing thing that i probably won't dig too much into in anything textually, maybe in cruiseverse and even less likely but still maybe in summertime, but i do have thinkythoughts about how curt and bucky handle being queer in the framework of their catholicism

gale not on the discussion board here because, while he has angst about his queerness and especially what it means wrt his [and others'] masculinity, it is in no way religious and i maintain he is three bad days away from open atheism despite the HUGE social stigma against it at the time. abused kids tend not to be much for religion anyway.

like i acknowledge how i handle curt is slightly anachronistic [though i can cite contemporary examples, don't come at me about it] in that i don't think he's ashamed of ANYTHING. careful, yes, aware it could get him hurt, yes. but he doesn't have a lot of internalized homophobia weighing him down by '43, thanks to growing up in an active queer hub in the 20s/30s AND my decision to make his family, mostly his mom, similarly slightly-anachronistically accepting—see the stuff in this post about mothers in midcentury america accepting their queer sons and encouraging other mothers to do the same. and i think that "toughened by adversity" is particularly relevant in delphia's case because on top of raising a fairly large family through the great depression, she lost an infant daughter AND her husband when all her kids were under ten years old. she did suffer the public humiliations of the depression in sending her sons to live with relatives to ease the burden of SAID fairly large, half-orphaned family. so she doesn't CARE if curt's gay, all that matters to her is that curt is—and all her kids are—alive and healthy and happy. [plus, in "practical" terms, curt has a brother, so if he's not gonna have kids rusty's around to do it, which is a safety net the other guys do not have.]

bucky, on the other hand, is 93% shame at all times. about everything. he covers it with being loud and brash and seeming unrepentant but. c'mon. look at him. he's got catholic guilt dripping off him. he does NOT have supportive family to lean back on and to insulate him from the general antipathy towards queerness in midcentury america—he doesn't even get letters from his mom or sisters in the stalag in canon. plus he has the added angst of like... he's bi, not gay, so he likes women like he's supposed to, does that not make his attraction to men something he just has to Resist, because that's what the devil does, puts shit in your path that you have to avoid to stay good or whatever. if he was exclusively attracted to men—like curt—it might bother him less because he wouldn't have a "choice." so he's got both internalized queerphobia in general and SPECIFICALLY internalized biphobia working against him.

[the other issue i have with thinking about this stuff is i was not raised catholic or even a little bit religious at all, so i don't have a firsthand perspective on rationalizing queerness with faith. i am just WINGING IT HERE.]

but, anyway, i feel like bucky's isolation from semi-normalized queerness just compounds the issue for his whole adolescence/early adulthood, and he lumps being attracted to men in with his other rule-breaking behaviors. he drinks, he gambles, he lusts, it's all getting him sent to hell anyway, so he acts like it doesn't bother him. but i think it DOES bother him, deep down. and i also think that being faced with curt/people like curt, who DON'T see their queerness as an obstacle to keeping their faith, who don't experience the guilt and shame over that as a fundamental aspect of who they are, is... tough for him? and this is why i don't think it'll come up textually in anything except cruiseverse, if that: bucky is not a talk-shit-out kind of guy, and quite frankly neither is curt. but i can't imagine that bucky at some point isn't like "...don't you struggle with it?" and curt's like "nah, if He wanted me to be different i'd be different."

and bucky just kinda has to chew on that for a bit. and this is where i think the gay vs bi tension comes in, because curt CAN be like "i tried to be straight, it didn't work, so god must not want me to be," whereas bucky COULD choose to be in a het-passing relationship, so does that make him worse??? and that's when curt stops trying that tack because it's doing more harm than good, which leads to it turning into "but HOW does it not bother you?" "it only bothers you 'cause you're letting it." cue another blue-screen for a week.

they can't even extrapolate out the concept of receiving unconditional love as one of god's children the way you do from your actual parents or whatever. because no one in bucky's life loves him unconditionally. why the hell would god?

[academicgangster]

A LOT of dudes think blowjobs are submissive by default because the giver gets on their knees, but the solution is simply to tie the receiver up securely and then do it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Less facetiously for a second, there's a big 'ooh I'm gonna pull your hair! I'm gonna facefuck you so hard you can't breathe!' aspect to a lot of guys' leering over blowjobs, and I think if someone does either of those things to you without discussing it beforehand you should bite their dick off.)

[userstuf]

★ RADICAL OPTIMISM (DUA LIPA's ALBUM) USERS ★

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• rdopitim

• frnexit

• illqsion

• wtdoing

fav/reblog if u save or use ♥︎ dont repost it

[softeehardee]

“it is an embodied material reality.”

Essentialism? Is this just essentialism?

Where does the essence of woman embody from? The large gamete? The XX chromosome? The pronunciation of the word Woman? The smell of their body? Do they whisper in your ear “you are woman,” like a whimsical deity from various body parts? (Which, aren’t as real as you think. We might be biological, but nothing is pure human. We all have microplastics. “Realness” is merely a state waiting to be categorized to something else. We all change cells over time. You are not you, you are constantly changing. So why be fooled into thinking there’s an essence of you? I refuse to think being pure is in anyway good. I will change my body to fit my consciousness. I will not accept something as is, I will sculpt and mold myself to fit the only thing I have: my body. Nothing can be destroyed, nor created; I am not destroying womanhood, nor am I creating a new woman; I am a TRANS Woman.

Please help me understand how being a woman is embodied MATERIAL reality, in this reality, where we all live inside a language. “Being female is being biologically female.” How does one magically know that exactly?

Yo, I’m just worried by what’s the end-game for me is?

I am more real than any religion. I exist. Sorry I’m not able to turn off my feelings of being a trans woman. I am not a soft man, I am a soft trans woman. I do not want to be a soft man, and I have every right over my body to perfect it into the image of my choosing.

But block me so we can never learn from each other. Love it. 🙃🙂🙃

[slipmams]

headers.

[jellyfishfem]

i hate Hate HATE that Billie was so fucking upfront and explicit and clear in Lunch about her attraction to a woman and all the media outlets are calling her/the song q*eer. it makes it look like her sexuality is some omnious cloud that includes all kind of people. shes not pansexual or omnisexual or just weird or whatever the q slur implies, that song is by a woman about a woman. sorry i just feel like they should clearly state that it’s a sapphic or wlw song. especially because of the fact that she doesnt dance around the topic, trying to be subtle.

[healing-better-faster-stronger]

You deserve love.

You deserve love you your worst days.

You deserve love when you don’t love yourself.

You don’t need to change yourself in order to be loved.

You deserve love because you are you.

[tracesofdevotion]

I was not made for this political world, though I do not know a world that is not political. I was not made for this political world with its endless newsfeed, its political memes, and endless scrolling. I was not made to take part in the political conversations going on in the world. Political tweets are often written by paid public relations managers. Political news feeds have an agenda. Political memes are sometimes created by Russian troll farms. Political conversations are often full of half-thought-out opinions.

There's a lot of anger in the political world. There's a lot of division. There's a lot of us-versus-them. And I don't want to be a part of it. I don't want to get caught up in the anger and division and us-versus-them. I'm not made for it.

[fuckmeyer]

Wiggins!) the bizarre thing about the vampire men in the cullen family all seem to be at least subconsciously what Smeyer wants Bella to have but can’t seem to get over her initial vision of what she saw in her drafts or whatever. It’s odd that every single one of the Cullen men are like strongly devoted (but mostly devoid of personality because it’s so Bella centric) but when you compare them to Edward they seem interesting in some ways. Like Narratively we’re supposed to have this threat that Edward is constantly holding back from killer her but I don’t feel like we see that. Conversely, Jasper is constantly the one who is suffering about human smells and is the more vampire-like. But he’s also a glorified lap dog. So it’s like ‘oh he’s a monster but he’ll never hurt me” (things Alice has said out loud. Man even psychics slip up. I swear her powers weren’t so accurate until Smeyer needed an excuse for plot reasons)

Emmett feels like when some women say they like waifish guys because they don’t want to seem like they’re vapid for liking “big dudes with muscles” so of course you pair Emmett with the “shallow blonde”

Carlisle, I swear only exists so Edward has someone to model but I would also argue that he’s proto-Edward before whatever reworking she had to do when writing Twilight for a YA audience and brought him back as a different character.

Yeah a rant

hello again bestie Wiglet! (note to self: learn Photoshop so i can shop Jacob's bad wig onto a pic of Piglet)

this is such an interesting take! thanks for sharing. i totally see what you're saying. in all the Cullen men we see both a blend of softness & devotion *and*, interestingly enough, a patchwork of patriarchal ideas of what a man "should" be. & this idea comes to the forefront with the depiction of the love interests

smeyer wants us to see Edward as the chivalric gentlemen from the Days of Yore. we see this in the opening doors, the cutsey little romance taglines ("you are my life now," "look after my heart; i've left it with you," "so the lion fell in love" etc), the knight saving the damsel in distress, the expensive tokens of his affection, etc.

at the same time, in both Edward & Jacob we see the crude traits of the Patriarchy Dreamboat kinda guy. if i had to sum it up, it's like the guy you see in 80s movies. "bad boy." "opposites attract." he's a jerk. he's a hunk. he's domineering. he's allowed to show emotion only & especially if that emotion is anger. he's persistent in his efforts to get the girl, going so far as to kiss her without her consent if it's For a Good Cause (Edward in New Moon post-Volterra, Jacob in Eclipse). he's a cool guy who's In Control 👉😎👉

perhaps that's why the Twilight saga appealed so such a large swath of women & girls. the women, who grew up with the notion that they could have the true love of their dreams so long as they submitted to the patriarchal social contract, saw the contract being fulfilled in Edward. (i.e., "you can be the king if you treat me like a princess.")

on the other hand, the 90s/00s girlies who grew up in the midst of a feminist revolution & who could see the glimmer of a dismantled patriarchy on the horizon were attracted to Edward for the flashes of radical feminist love they saw: the unapologetic expressions of emotion, the honesty of him sharing his vulnerabilities & weaknesses, Bella's ability to override Edward's will when necessary, etc.

sorry, i know this isn't really the crux of the rant you submitted, but it is extremely interesting to see these contradictions playing out in all the male characters of the saga. it's almost like smeyer is having this internal debate with herself without even realizing it...