the thing about some men is that they want you to remember, at all times, that you are underneath them. that with one word or look or "joke", you will stay beneath them. that even "exceptions" to the rule are not true exceptions - the commonly cited statistic that one in eight men believe they could win against serena williams.
women's gymnastics is often not seen as real gymnastics. whatever the fuck non-euclidian horrors rhythmic gymnasts are capable of, it's often tamped down as being not a sport. some of the most dominant athletes in the world are women. nobody watches women's soccer. despite years of dancing and being built like a fucking brick, men always assume they're faster and stronger than i am. you wouldn't like what happens when they are incorrect. once while drunk at a guy's house i won a held-plank challenge by a solid minute. the party was over after that - he became exceedingly violent.
what i mean is that you can be perfect, and they still think you're ... lacking, somehow. i hope you understand i'm trying to express a neutral statement when i say: taylor swift was the possibly the most patriarchy-palatable, straight-down-the-line woman we could churn out. she is white, conventionally attractive, usually pretty mild in personality. say what you will about her (and you should, she's a billionaire, she can handle it), but a few things seem to be true about her: 1. she can write a damn catchy song, and 2. the eras tour truly was a massive commercial success and was also genuinely an impressive feat of human athleticism and performance.
i don't know if she deserves the title of "woman of the year," i'm not debating that in this post. what i am saying is that she was named Woman of The Year, and then an untalented man got onstage at the golden globes and made fun of her for attending her boyfriend's football games. what i am saying is that this woman altered local economies - and her dating life is still being made into a "harmless" punchline. the camera panned, greedy, over to her downing a full glass of champagne. congratulations taylor! you are woman of the year! but you are a woman. even her.
fuck, man. write better material.
a guy gets onstage at a college graduation and despite the fact like half the crowd is made up of women, he spends a significant proportion of it warning these people - who spent possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars on their education - that they were lied to. that the "real" meaning of femininity is motherhood. that they shouldn't rest on the laurels of that education-they-paid-for but instead throw it away to kneel at a man's heel. imagine that. sweating in your godawful polyester gown (that you also had to pay for!), fresh out of 4 years of pushing yourself ever-harder: and some guy you've never met - who knows nothing about you - he reminds you this "win" is a pyrrhic one at best. you really shouldn't consider yourself that extraordinary. you're still a woman, even after years of study.
god forbid you are not a pretty woman, but if you are pretty, you must be dumb. god forbid you are not ablebodied or white or cis or straight or good at swallowing. you must be beneath a man, or else they are not a man. the equation for masculinity seems to just be: that which is not a woman or womanly (god forbid). anything "feminine" is thereby anathema. to engage in "feminine" things such as therapy, getting a hug from a friend, or crying - it is giving up ones manhood. therefore women need to be put in their place to ensure that masculinity is protected.
this is something i have struggled to explain to terfs - they are not doing the work of feminism, but rather the patriarchy. by asserting that women and men must be (on some secret level) oppositional and in conflict, they also assume that being a woman is akin to being another species. but bigotry does not stem from observational truths or clarity - that is what makes it bigotry. there was nothing in my childhood that made me fundamentally different from my brother. we are treated differently nonetheless. to assert there is some biological drive that enforces my gender role is to assert that women have a gendered role. men do not see women as equal to them not because of biological reality - but instead because the core tenant of the patriarchy is that women aren't full, realized people.
we are told from a very young age to excuse misbehavior as a single man's choice - not all men. it is not all men, just that one guy. all women are gold-digging bitches who belong in the kitchen - but if a man is mean, bigoted, or violent to you, it's just that particular guy, and that means nothing about men-as-a-whole. it is only one guy who got mad when you gently rejected him. it is only one guy who warns her this trophy is heavy, are you sure you can hold it? it is only one guy who smashes her face into the cake. it is only one guy talking into a mic about hating our bodily autonomy.
i have just found that they often wait until the moment we actually seem to be upstaging them. you sit in a meeting where you're presenting your own findings and he says get me a coffee? or you run to the end of the marathon and are about to finish first and he pushes your kids out in front of you. you win the chess game and they make some comment akin to well, you're ugly away. we can be the billionaire and get the dream life and finally fucking do it and yet! still! they have this strange, visceral urge to say well actually, if you think you're so great -
it's not one just one guy. it's one in eight.
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PART 4!!
01 02 03 04 05 06
I stg I'm kicking yall in the shins one last time, we're ALMOST done with the angst!
Let me tell you I had this finished(!) twice(!), but no, I had to go back and change it lmao
In my first go the fight scene was much more rough, it was hard for me to draw from the beginning, I'm not really good at this sort of thing. So I took a little break from the comic and when I got back to drawing the last two panels (static ch close ups) they turned out so GOOD and CRISP! I just had to go back and redraw the previous ones. Didn't change the composition back then, just made the drawings less sketchy and fixed minor mistakes. This panel in particular went through bigger fixes, I couldn't get the pose right:
I emphasized the arch in Zoro's back so it's more clear he's hunched over, the head is lower, and the hand on his stomach wasn't looking good, so I switched its direction and I feel it looks more natural now. The whole pose is shifted to the side now, whereas in the previous ones it was more straight up, but I wasn't conveying perspective well.
So after that I had it all exported, loaded into drafts and as I scroll it on my phone I'm like... There should be one more panel where Zoro's getting kicked : | Imma need to change it AGAIN.......
It just didn't flow well. I work on the comic in chunks so I haven't put these panels together before, I always saw them side by side in my main file.
I just didn't like how you go from Zoro getting kicked to him being thrown, it just felt disjointed to me.
So first I looked through the three sole volumes of BNHA that I have at home to maybe understand drawing fight scenes just a little bit better. That's how I got to the new version of Zoro getting kicked so there's more lines showing movement etc. but most importantly you have the kick and Zoro's reaction separate. So now Zoro's face has a bigger closeup, you can see his open eye.
In the previous version it was more distant, the closeup wasn't as big and you couldn't see his expression well. With just the side view you could only see he's in pain but nothing more than that,whereas when you have a full view of his face you can get much more from that. You see where he's looking, you know he's looking at Sanji when he kicks him in the guts.
I guess that's why, in the first version, I was trying to still show his face where he's being thrown off of Sanji bcs I felt the side profile wasn't doing it's job, but at the same time it felt off, like there was less force in the kick bcs his head wasn't following the movement idk. Also he was def too big in the frame. So now Zoro's smaller to emphasize the perspective more, the head is down, the right arm is more to the side and there's more lines, the flame is more aggressive now and bursts into the sides when it comes in contact with Zoro's body to show the impact. I know they could be better still, but this is the best I can do right now and I'm happy with the result!! I'm glad I kept pushing it! These poses were VERY confusing to draw lol
Alsooo, it would make more sense if Sanji threw Zoro in the other direction, over his head like in karate/judo, but I wanted to keep my directions consistent. I had to have Sanji standing back to the carriage, so he doesn't notice the spear being thrown and Zoro facing the carriage so he can get hit from the front, right after he gets up. It's like..... did he not see it? Did he get hit on purpose? You decide lmao
Though I'm probably too rigid with my 'camera', in BNHA you see the action from any and every direction, i guess it adds to the dynamism of it all, also there's just many MANY more panels in manga lmao
Judge giving me major "isn't there somebody you forgot to ask" vibes at the end there lmao I hope you forgot he's even there and this comes as a surprise!
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love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.
love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.
love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.
love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.
maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.
recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.
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