#and it’s bc they don’t think women can oppress bc misogyny is the main/worst oppression to them

[heterophobicdyke]

one thing to know about me is that i have absolutely no empathy for women who know they’re genuinely attracted to men (including in their past) and yet call themselves a lesbian

[piratemadi]

please make your critical post of supernatural those are literally the only posts about supernatural i care about, especially since i side eye the heck out of the many people who give supernatural a pass because they ship two boring white dudes (dean and castiel) PLEASE

omg ok nobody make fun of me for posting an earnest criticism of this show i enjoy critical analysis and being a hater

i think most of why this show sucks has already been covered pretty thoroughly but these r the main things abt it that piss ME off.

the racism runs so SO deep. supernatural is supposed to be an exploration of americana thru horror (and i’ll give them that. like the idea of deconstructing america and all its fallacies thru horror is genius and in competent hands it would be absolutely incredible. but anyway) but it only really scrapes the surface of what is inherently horrific about americana! something like that is supposed to be an INTERROGATION of monstrosity and how america (and western society more broadly) creates monsters out of human beings and how white christian morals are established as the ONLY acceptable morals and how anyone who falls outside of those norms (non christian, non white, lgbt, people with substance use disorders, prisoners, the poor, indigenous people/cultures etc) are monsterized, so to speak, because of an oppressive and unloving colonial society. like u cannot have a horror narrative abt monsters attacking family values and white suburban life without invoking some very old and racist conventions! but instead of subverting that supernatural just reinforces it! it consistently fails to make any kind of real statement because the most demonized parts of society are the people who are also treated the WORST in canon! native american beliefs are stolen and turned into stupid bogeymen without the show ever featuring a native character or seriously grappling with the inherent violence of america as a colonial state, black men are consistently portrayed as angry and evil while black women are treated like shit (dean’s happy ending at the end of s5 is with a white woman he fucked one time instead of with the black woman who he was in love with??), impoverished people are mostly ignored and when they’re not theyre monsters (theres one episode centered around a poor rural family that commits murder and cannibalism. no supernatural stuff or monsters. just poor people. thats the scare).

theres this consistent fixation on preserving american suburbia, on saving “normal” (read: white middle class) people and it sets up this dynamic of like. the “real world” is the white middle class and then there’s hunters including our mains who defend that “real world” against monsters and demons, which is just Everything Else. and the writers PRETEND to struggle w the question of monsters and what makes one but they just toss it around without ever actually committing to answering that question with compassion or narrative coherency. they have multiple episodes about characters who were raised human, who want to be human, but have to be killed because of an inherent evil nature. there’s a plot in the early seasons about how one of the main characters has demonic powers, and instead of saying that doesnt make him inherently bad and he’s allowed to fully access all parts of himself without being fundamentally evil, they consistently frame intrinsically neutral traits as inherently evil specifically because they go against a christian ideal of morality! and eventually he learns to suppress these powers and that’s that!

and then it establishes christianity as the guiding principle of america, not in a way of like “american culture and history is deeply steeped in white supremacist protestantism that has led to incredibly fucked up views on god and love and morality and thats what we have to deal with as people who live here”, but in a way of like “the christian god is real and he’s a white guy who fucking hates you.” which like. Ok. they bastardize and trivialize any religions that arent christian while building the entire series on christianity. Ok. like i guess its possible to write stories about white christianity without implying that every other religion is full of shit but supernatural did not do that on any level

its also just. really poorly written. i genuinely loved the first season i thought it was really well paced and that the characters were introduced really well like the first season is a GOOD horror story in terms of family as horror and the inherent terror of americana. but the pacing and the character development started tripping up in s2. by s3 they started raising the stakes Exponentially which honestly is such a kiss of death for good fiction like every season mounting a bigger badder antagonist than the last one is the surest way to kill a story bc it means the earlier entries in that story become basically meaningless in the face of the new bad guy. u dont need to raise the stakes to write a good story! a well written story abt the horror and drama of a close knit and unhealthy family caught up in something they don’t really understand isn’t Less emotionally resonant than, like, having to stop the world from ending, because at the end of the day its Fiction and none of it matters beyond what u can make the audience really Feel. im not gonna feel sorrow if 7 billion fake little people die. i didnt cry when the death star blew up whatever planet it blew up. what DOES make me feel sorrow is a few truly well written characters whose relationships are complicated and tragic and whose motivations i can understand and whose inner lives i can imagine. raising the stakes destroys a good story and thats exactly what happened to supernatural (not that the racism and misogyny and american protestant moralizing wasn’t killing it already)

also, the misogyny makes the female characters basically impossible to watch. like not a single person on that show is a good actor (except sterling k brown love u king u were the best actor that show ever saw) but they didnt even give any of the women anything to work with. its literally so cringey to watch any woman onscreen except maybe like. bela talbot and she was treated like utter shit.

god. you know that expression dont fall in love with potential? i dont do that w people i do it w fiction. i came off black sails and the untamed and frankenstein and i watched the first couple seasons of supernatural with my friend and it was like...there was so much room for it to SAY something about monsters and how society creates them thru violence and how deeply horrific american protestantism is. like theres so many questions and concepts that it brought up that it never actually SAID something about. shithole of wasted potential. and yeah dean and castiel is stupid there i said it

[imanes]

Hey Imane! Have you talked about the Shadow and Bone trilogy in any of your videos? I was about to start it but if you don't like it... I'm hesitant lmao I trust your taste! So yeah I just wanted to know if you've talked about why you don't like them, have a good night 🧡

hey babe! yes i did talk about it in my first ever wrap up so i’m not making a whole lot of sense and i’m even more long-winded than usual LMAO i wouldn’t recommend watching this video. i also touch upon it in my video about popular books that i hate, idk what i said about it but you don’t have to watch it either i’ll give you a run down here:

alina is somewhat irritating. she’s not the worst main character i’ve ever encountered but she doesn’t exactly elicit any type of positive reaction from me either. she’s a bit of a dumbass truly

she’s shunned and marginalised for REALLY stupid reasons in the book. basically she’s treated like shit by everyone at the beginning of the story because she’s “average looking”. she’s “PLAIN”. that is such a flimsy premise like if you want to make your main character oppressed and side-lined please pick smt that makes sense. in the TV show they made her half-asian to give a lot more sense to her marginalisation 

stupid love triangle

mal (main love interest) is a douchebag, subcategory: stealthy asshole. he was alina’s best friend bc they’re both orphan and they both enlisted in the army but he never had any romantic inclination towards alina, although she was pining for him. when she goes away due to reason and becomes “prettier” due to STUPID and CONVENIENT reasons, he’s like “oh hmm hi you’re the love of my life”. so yeah i think their relationship tastes like stale bread

the other part of the love triangle is the darkling. i have very ambivalent feelings about  him bc on the one hand... that’s a spoiler so i won’t go into detail but on the other hand he is the ONLY character that is written in a compelling way. he’s the only reason this trilogy is somewhat interesting imo.

the other character that isn’t bland and annoying is nikolai and he only appears in book two. book two is such a second book btw like nothing interesting happens. and guess what? the stupid love triangle is extended to a criminally nonsensical love square bc of course everybody wants a piece of alina. after two books i still don’t get what kind of mojo she has bc she is a dull and mediocre character but i wish i exuded the same energy

haven’t read book three yet bc i love myself. this book is titled ruin and rising and i’m pretty sure this is an omen bc i can feel that it’ll ruin my mood and make my blood pressure rise.

so much internalised misogyny. i could have tolerated all of the above if there were other women in this story that weren’t acting like complete assholes. in particular, a character named zoya comes to mind when i think of how flat and charicatural the secundary characters are in this story. i read these books 10 months ago and the characters aggravated me so much that i still remember their names now even though i read 60 books in the meantime. 

with all of that being said i encourage you to read the first book bc i understand that my reasons are probably slightly idiosyncratic and people usually have a higher tolerance than me for annoying main characters and excruciating love triangles/squares/hexagons/dodecadons. i thought that book 1 showcased potential and my hopes were swiftly destroyed after book 2 but now that i have more experience with mediocre trilogies usually the least bad ones are the third so even i don’t know where i stand with this trilogy anymore lmao. it’s a fan favorite for a lot of people so honestly... take everything i said with a grain of salt!

[gayagendaofficial]

Wait, what’s gay lingo? Like, what does twink, bear, etc. mean?

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!

Before I get into actually defining these terms, I’d like to write about a few things:

So this is probably in reference to this post I made. Not to explain the joke to death, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. I wanted to make fun of how people who aren’t mlm think they know what mlm terms like “twink” and “bear” mean and how they blatantly use them incorrectly everywhere, because they think they’re funny (bc gay men are a joke, right? //sarcasm), or because it makes them look “woke”. It’s an idea I had for the longest time when I saw something a str8 woman wrote about Zac Efron being a twink, in the present. Like yes, Zac Efron was a twink, past tense, but he is absolutely not a twink anymore (if you can even call a str8 man a twink). And she also implied that being a twink is something you can’t outgrow, which is laughable, because it’s kind of a meme among gay men that being a twink is something you grow out of whether you like it or not.

This mostly seems to be a problem among cishet women, since cishet men tend to be too concerned with their “masculinity” to touch gay culture. But since this is tumblr and virtually none of you are cishet, a lot of the times I’ve seen people misuse these terms on this site were LGBT+ people who weren’t themselves mlm. In those cases, the reasons seem more that these people are just misinformed, and they use these terms because mlm use these terms, and we share a community. Part of it comes from the fact that wlw might see the terms “twink” and “bear” as analogous to “femme” and “butch” respectively, which is not true in the slightest (Butch and femme are their own complex thing. What they actually have in common with twink and bear is that few outside their communities actually know what they mean lol).  Another reason might be that other LGBT people see mlm using these terms sarcastically and think they’re being used in earnest; if an actual gay man calls a bodybuilder a twink, he’s probably being sarcastic, and also probably trying to insult him (which is a whole can of worms I’ll open up in a bit).

I’m gonna try to define what “twink”, “bear”, and a couple of other terms actually mean, as well as give a little bit of context to how they’re used and controversy surrounding these identities within gay spaces, partially based on my experience as a gay man and partially based on casual research. I’m just one gay man, and I’m not an expert in queer studies or anything, so take from that what you will. I hope this will be useful to mlm who are just discovering their identities and exploring their sexuality/gender, who are new to the community, and I also hope to inform our siblings elsewhere in the LGBT community. This info could also be useful to cishet allies, although please be mindful of your intentions in using these terms.

Anywho, lets get to the definitions:

A twink is a young, smooth, slim mlm. The definition here is generally seen as being pretty strict on those 3 criteria, although “twink” is sometimes used for older mlm who are skinny and don’t have much body hair. Those last two criteria are the most important, because there are other categories for mlm that fit one of the criteria; an otter is essentially twink + bodyhair, and there’s a whole host of other words for other body types.

The definition of “bear” is a little more flexible than “twink”, although it generally comes down to the inverses of those same 3 criteria. The most important of these is the bodyhair requirement; any definition you find of bear includes something about being hairy. Almost as important as bodyhair is body type, although “bear” covers a slightly larger range than twink in that regard. Usually, “bear” indicates that someone is large or plus-sized, although it can also sometimes be used to describe someone who is muscular in the sense that they are beefy (if you can see a 6 pack, he’s probably not a bear). It’s also sometimes associated with being slightly older, but that’s not nearly as important, and “bear” can refer to any age. The term “cub” refers to mlm with the same body type as a bear, but who are smooth and young.

Now, let’s get into some misconceptions/controversies surrounding these terms. The first of these is that twink and bear are the only two options, and that all mlm fall into one of these two categories, or that other terms are simply variations on those two main terms. This misconception is really only one held by people who aren’t mlm themselves (or are, but are only just learning the terminology). These terms are extremely specific, and the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of mlm don’t fit into either of these categories. And that’s ok! There are a ton of other words mlm use to describe themselves. I’ve already mentioned “otter” and “cub”; there’s also “jock”, which refers to muscular mlm; “wolf”, which also refers to muscular mlm, but specifically hairy ones (with a bit of overlap with the “beefier bears” I mentioned earlier); the relatively new term “twunk” which you may know from this video as “a combination twink and hunk”; and many many more. In addition, all of these categories are really just physical descriptions of your body, and don’t have any bearing on anything else. You don’t need to fit into any of them.

That being said, there are a number of stereotypes associated with these terms, and it is important to address them.

Our next misconception is one that’s as common among mlm as as it is among everyone else: that twinks are by definition fem, and bears are by definition masc. “Masc” and “fem”, short for masculine and feminine respectively, come with their own host of problems, and that is a can of worms that I am not going to open up right now. This post is long enough as it is. If you want the sparknotes version of the controversy surrounding the masc-fem dichotomy, it basically boils down to misogyny, transphobia, and internalized homophobia. But back to twinks and bears: I would like to assume that it’s obvious that your body type or bodyhair has absolutely no impact  on your personal presentation of gender. There are plenty of fem bears and masc twinks. But unfortunately, most people don’t seem to get this. And this super important, because the gendered way we think of these terms affects everything else I’ll be talking about in the remainder of this post.

My next point, which is really and observation based on my experience in the gay community, is that bear as a term seems to be much less… loaded. However, being a twink myself, there might be a gap in my personal experience, so any bears feel free to correct me. However, from what I’ve seen, “bear” isn’t really used as an insult in the way “twink” is. Which is a bit of a miracle, considering how prevalent fat-shaming is in the gay community. From what I’ve seen, bear isn’t a term that’s forced on you, it’s a term that bears choose for themselves, almost always in a positive way. It’s a term associated with body positivity, and bear communities seem to be much less toxic than the gay community as a whole. Even when it’s used to describe someone else, it’s always a neutral statement of fact. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used as an insult, or even sarcastically. The worst I’ve seen of it is that it’s used as a porn category, which contributes to the fetishization of fat people; but then again, twink and jock are also porn categories, so it would be weird for bear not to be. This isn’t to suggest that bears are treated better than anyone else in the gay community, if anything they’re treated worse; just that the word “bear” itself has neutral to positive connotations. (Again, any bears correct me on this if you’ve seen it used negatively!)

Twink, on the other hand, is absolutely used as an insult, and frequently. And while this may sometimes be harmless, more often than not it’s really problematic. If you’re plus-sized and you use twink as an insult in the same vein that Nicki Minaj said “fuck the skinny bitches”, that’s completely fine. Twinks are seen as being desirable (if they behave a certain way; more on that later), so effectively it’s punching up instead of punching down. However, a good 95% of the time that “twink” is used as an insult, it really comes from one of the many stereotypes that all essentially boil down to the idea that twinks are fem. And the idea that being fem is inherently bad and insult worthy is, once again, rooted in misogyny, transphobia, and internalized homophobia. 

This association between twinks and femininity also has a lot of scary implications on the beauty standards twinks are held to. I’ve noticed that twinks fill a niche in the gay community that is similar to the role cis women are supposed to fill in western culture as large, and that we’re only seen as sexually valuable if we perform the same behaviors and meet the same beauty standards that are typically reserved for women. We’re bottoms by default, submissive both in and out of the bedroom (yes I actually am a sub bottom, but that’s beside the point). We’re supposed to maintain a completely smooth, hairless appearance; a shaved ass is the bare minimum of hygiene. I once met a guy on grindr who demanded that I be completely hairless everywhere beneath my eyelashes, and while that’s a bit extreme, he was by no means an outlier. Just today I talked to a guy who wanted me hairless between my neck and knees. We’re often seen as vapid and stupid, and infantilization of twinks is rampant (some guys put way too much emphasis on the young part of the definition). And, to cap it all off, there’s the racism! Who’d’a thunk that all forms of oppression are connected? (sarcasm). Twinks can of course be any race, but the ones you’ll see men on grindr going after the most are white or light-skinned Asian twinks. Combine that with stereotypes of Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern men as dominant and aggressive, and you have a whole slew of white supremacist ideas painted over with a thin coat of gay porn.  (mlm of color who’d like to add or correct me on anything, please do so!)

I’ll end this already long post with a comparatively brief discussion on who these terms apply to. Basically, if you’re an mlm and you fit the definition of “twink” or “bear”, congratulations! You’re a twink/bear! “Can bi men use these terms?” Of course! “What about trans men?” Are you attracted to men and male-aligned people? Then of course! That last one might be controversial to some cis gays, and to that I say fuck right off. However, it does get a bit muddier with trans women and transfem nonbinary people and the word twink. Trans women are absolutely not mlm, but many of them have been a part of mlm communities for a long time, often before they even realized they were trans, and some may be reluctant to give up the word twink (I haven’t seen this for bear, although again, lmk if you’ve seen evidence to the contrary). And on top of that, a lot of cis men looking to have sex with trans women conflate trans women and cis twinks. Because remember what I said about twinks filling the niche of women? It’s often a niche they share with trans women, except trans women have it even worse, because they are actually women. My two cents is, if a trans woman wants to refer to herself as a twink, she’s more than welcome to. Just don’t go around calling trans women “twinks” unless they specifically say you can; it’s a gendered term, you are misgendering them, and, once again, you can fuck right off. (trans women also please comment if you want!)

Well, anon, I bet you weren’t expecting a post this long. At least I hope y’all learned something! Be gay do crimes!