#but like as a social construct/group yeah I hate men

[avatar-state-kate]

This used to be the feminist website and now every third post is, a man was nice to me once so misogyny isn’t real and it’s really harmful actually that you’re mean to men :(

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

i have left

hey everyone this will probably be the last thing i post on this blog albeit im keeping it up for resources.

im eternally grateful for how this community has helped me through prostitution and everything, i have amazing mutuals and i have learned so much 💜

but it has become toxic. many of yall cant handle disagreement and default to being as condescending and obnoxious as possible. one of us calling out a post is not enough, we have to dog pile everyone with a slightly shitty opinion. some of yall have severely lost the plot if you ever had it in the first place. not everything is that serious, especially when it comes to online drama.

im sick of it. so many engage in the same bullshit we accuse online trans activists of. this is an echo chamber. so many just mindlessly parrot slogans and arguments. what im very sick of is seeing single tweets or posts by a nobody, usually anonymous, being spread as receipts and shit. you know how annoying it is when everything a self proclaimed terf somewhere on social media says is taken by trans activists at face value and representative of the community when theyre not even radical feminist, just transphobic? yeah. yet a lot of yall do the same by saving and sharing „receipts“ where some random person who claims theyre trans (or not even) says some fucked up or out of pocket shit. you will always find people like that online, from any politicial „camp“ or ideological alignment!

a lot of yall seem to think that debate is about winning and not like, having an exchange of arguments and let the audience come to their own conclusion

and i just dont hate trans people. in fact i feel kinship to any female or homosexual trans person, anyone except heterosexual males. many of yall dont even realise how male centered you are when you more or less equal the trans community to heterosexual men who have a fetish for humiliation and forced feminisation or whatever. who exist and are an issue and i do wish the trans community at large would distance themselves from those men, but its not all there is to it. yes i agree that we need to protect vulnerable young people, girls and especially lesbians and gay boys, from being pushed into transitioning, i think the age of consent should be put at 21 or something, but we have to acknowledge and consider that there are people who have already transitioned and will transition in the future and i just dont understand how you cant have any empathy for them. no matter what you think about transition, many trans people ARE vulnerable and marginalised. plus consider how many detransitioned women are in this community yet yall talk about trans people as mutilated and shit its gross. in the end we can only try to establish structures that keep people from self harming, but an adult of sound mind has the right to do so anyways, including plastic surgery and trans surgeries. and i want to keep my arms open to them; but a lot of rhetoric around it spread on here will only alienate them further.

right now im saving all my essays in notes so its out of my mind. i have missed the community a lot so maybe i will return at some point but i have also been feeling better since i stopped being on radblr. i miss the rare valuable input and thoughts by other women but overall i have felt unaligned with how things have been handled on here. it has been mostly negative instead of constructive and pragmatic. ive had the impression some of yall enjoy the „being in the in-group“ community aspect more than actually being here for feminist exchange. lack of nuance, lack of empathy, lack of reason. it pains me but i have more and more come to understand why people just block us without engaging on general suspicion because ive also come to be annoyed with some of yall engaging with posts - and im on „your side“.

anyways im doing okay, im going to drug counselling regularly now and am trying to establish a stable life for those of you who inquired, and i hope anyone reading this is self reflected enough to know whether this applies to her or not. bye

[johannestevans]

had a Great experience the other day where i was at a trans event and started talking to this woman who was also Jewish, and so we were talking about like, Jewish movies and gender roles in different Jewish and Ashkenazi spaces and antisemitism and like, broader philosophical concepts and it was genuinely really nice

and at some point this other girl came over and mentioned wanting to be a cop, and when she was resolutely shut down by everyone else in the social circle, she started dropping "fun facts" about hitler's regime

such as that "hitler didn't really hate jews, his second in command, himmler, did, and he led the whole thing. hitler was just the face of it" and then at some point said something like "you know, people say even churchill was kind of racist"

and i was like. "yeah. churchill did multiple genocides and also hated jewish people."

and she replied, "yeah. makes you think that no one's actually good, doesn't it?"

and i went, "no. that's a very cowardly position to take, i would posit, by someone too lazy or too spineless to make an effort to be "good", as you say."

and that shut her up for a bit

and then the conversation moved on a bit more, and got onto the topic of israel, and she said something vaguely to the effect of like. jewish voices where she - to her credit, i do believe unintentionally - implied that a Jewish group were Zionist when they weren't, they were just Jewish

and i corrected her, and she went "well, yeah. Israelis aren't real Jews anyway"

and i said, "can you tell me what you mean by that?"

and she said, "well, like. loads of jews oppose israel actually being and having a state, right? like that's part of the scripture, and has been for ages. and loads of israelis are just americans and they're just racist"

and so then i like. explained that yes, when it came to the formation of israel, many Jews opposed it because jews aren't meant to have their own state until after the coming of the messiah, and also that yes, a lot of criticism of israel should rightly be made as to the way it's colonial in its nature and its desire to form a white jewish ethnostate

eugenics have always been part of the israeli mentality, not merely in wanting to be like, broadly white, but also in the ideology around israelis being "super Jews", and a large part of this came as israel tried to establish itself as a more positive territory worldwide through the '60s when it was pushing itself as a tourist destination

many orientalist tropes were taken on, the positive ones, israeli women being presented as desirable and exotic, israeli men as strong and lethal; the focus on the IDF and krav maga and the depiction of palestinians and other arabs as monsters they're triumphing over, the push to define israelis as having a "middle easten" identity when the choice was made to take over palestine over various other locations around the world, in part to legitimise the israeli identity by establishing it as a literal homecoming, and attempting to redefine Jews coming to israel as a return to their indigenous roots

but to say that by virtue of being israelis no israeli jew is a "real jew" is a pretty thorny area, because "jewish" has always been a religion and an ethnicity, and a complexedly policed and examined one. israeli jews will often claim that non-israeli jews or particularly anti-Zionist jews aren't real jews, and that kind of attitude of attempting to delegitimise the other group's identity rather than grappling with the actual harms of their politics or identities is not like. valuable

and then i was telling her a little bit about the history of like. not only the constructed israeli identity, but also forms of racism within the jewish communities - pushing forward modern hebrew whilst pushing back yiddish, ladino, and other jewish languages, because languages associated with poverty, the shtetl, the shoah, or with being too brown or too foreign, undercut the "super jew" idea, even without getting into israeli treatment of ethiopian jews and other Black and darker skinned jews

and i was just like. i don't care that you're bored, i don't care that this is more complicated than you cared for, bc like. attitudes that end up dismissing all jews as supporting the state of israel and therefore evil, or like. atttiudes where you end up really racialising and getting into ethnic condemnations of jews without understanding the history or implications of what you're saying are a large thing of what makes leftist and queer spaces feel so unsafe for jewish people across the board

and i was then like. "do you understand that the modern state of israel has always wanted people to believe that nowhere but a state run by jews is safe for the jewish people? that when you make even leftist and anti-zionist jews feel unsafe in leftist spaces, that's what some israelis want, in the hopes that that lonely experience of antisemitism will be harmful enough to have them go to zionist spaces instead?"

and she really did seem to have a moment of. oh.

because like. fucking yeah, babe. obviously.

but it's just so exhausting bc i went from some really fun and exciting conversations about jewish cinema and antisemitism on the screen and like. jewish gender and gender roles and how they relate to diff experiences of being racialised or pushed into an underclass

and then i had to pivot into giving some ABCs of not talking like a fucking nazi to some goyische 4channers

and i know that being pushed out of a space like this is likely to radicalise the nazi cop girl more, that it's better for her to be in a trans space and be told some of her opinions are shitty and harmful than to be like, excluded and then made to seek out even more racist spaces to exist in, but it's just like. shit. it's just really shit

like it's great to care about your leftist politics but sometimes your reading needs to be more than like. your specific hyperfixation/special interest anarchist who took part in fucking pogroms

[thatweirdtranny]

responding to your recent #transandrophobia post: yeah. it’s almost like radfems have been invading the community since the 1970s and before and the only way trans women can feel safe to discuss transmisogyny is to assimilate into the radfem status quo. transmascs do it too when they talk about afab socialization. all trying to paint cis women as the most oppressed gender and trans people’s oppression as just a fraction of what cis women experience. where trans women get the social consequences of womanhood and trans men get the biological consequences. this is wrong. really the narrow definition of womanhood and manhood is equally the problem as sexism is, so radical feminism and its adjacent movements will never completely and respectfully define trans experiences. arguably, transandrophobia is so much less terfy and more accurate of a term than afab socialization but gets more backlash because of radical feminism. trans women see transmascs trying to assimilate into radfeminism and approximate themselves to cis women and that rightfully upsets them, so they try to assimilate into radfeminism even harder too. both artificially constructed “sides” would be better off abandoning radical feminism completely. doesn’t mean people can’t hate men on a personal level, but making that your politics will always have consequence.

my take is basically: we need to root out all forms of radical feminism (whether exclusive or inclusive of different groups of trans people) from our communities and spaces and i definitely think there are plenty of trans people of all genders falling hook line and sinker for radical feminism, but that the creation of terms like transandrophobia and transmisogyny and exorsexism are critical to combating all forms of radical feminism and transphobia

i think hating men is a core part of being a radfem, and it’s the easiest radfem dog whistle to spot. it’s a huge component of transmisogyny AND transandrophobia. therefore, hating men and the bs justification for hating all men needs to be stamped out. make there be social consequences for it. you can’t claim to want gender based liberation if you paint all men as inherently enemies and all women as perpetual victims.

most of all though my take is we need widespread solidarity between all groups of trans people. it frustrates me to no end that a vocal group of trans people (of all genders!) have such a problem with transmascs creating terminology for our oppression and discussing our experiences, instead of leaning into solidarity. we could all be united but instead we have the current climate of discourse that seems to repeat itself every couple years. that’s why i like the term transunity — it reframes the discussion to be around radical solidarity and discourages infighting between different groups of trans people.

[i-fucking-hate-radqueers]

hi! i have a question about trans race stuff. (I'm gonna preface this with i am not pro or anti trace, i want all the info before i say anything on it.) so the main argument I'm seeing is that a privileged person can't transition into a group that is not privileged. but I see the same argument with trans women. women were historically raped, beaten, ect way more than men, and trans women are fine. (i am pro trans women obviously.) is there something I'm missing? you seem like a pretty reasonable person and i haven't yet found a comprehensive moral/philosophical guide on anti t-race. so idk. I'm wondering what makes trans women different. trans-abled people are different imo because they're directly saying "I want to transition into a group that is only categorized by their suffering." whereas trans race and trans women aren't directly doing that. idk

(AGAIN, NEUTRAL TRANS-RACE, AND PRO-TRANS WOMEN.)

Okay so! I can't speak much as a white boy but I am trans. I do absolutely see your POV. It's just like... gender isn't real, it's a social construct. Race is a lot more convoluted than that, I see a lot of people saying it is and some that it's not, idk.

The main blight is as you said "transitioning" from a privileged status into non-privileged. I've seen a few people say POC who are transrace to white often are that because of racism and wanting to not be hated. I feel like white -> POC is definitely rooted from internalized racism and often fetishisation of other cultures and races (take "transjapanese" transition tips just being "bow a lot" and say "ahh!" or "transblack" is "say the n word to give yourself euphoria!" (I havent seen any shit on transblack but transjapanese ive seen both of those examples))

I'm tired so just,, yeah. If anybody else would like to add on please do. Any other questions are welcome ^^;

[bugbastard]

This . . . Ended up longer than I intended, sorry about that, it's a topic I have a lot of feelings on as the son of an 80s-90s brand second wave feminist who mercifully managed to not fall down the "radfem to terf pipeline" by virtue of actually knowing some trans women.

It's so weird to me that people act like this is new. The "hateful feminazi strawman that incels made up", to quote someone from the notes, has always been a real, fairly prominent, and widely accepted minority of feminists. It's just that there's no way in hell that it will ever meaningfully impact cishet white men as a demographic, so, before the community collectively realised how much damage their rhetoric could do to *other* demographics, there wasn't much "need" to criticize it.

Like, I remember running into TERFS a solid 10 years before the wider progressive left suddenly pretended they'd come out of nowhere over night. You didn't have to dig deep to find them, they were shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the rest of the online femininst community. It'd be like 9 posts about cis men, 1 post about "men", by which they meant trans women, and because transphobia was more widely accepted, and hey, at least it was in a misguided attempt to criticize men, people largely looked the other way. TERF ideology is almost interchangeable with the bioesentialist feminism of the 90s that gave us "gender is a social construct" (as in, the gender "woman" IS the set of oppressions women labour under, and they are foisted upon women purely on the basis of their anatomy -- AKA there is no internal sense of gender, and gender IS externally enforced oppression and nothing more -- so weird that people say this like it's pro trans these days).

And you didn't even have to look deep to find the anti man sentiments? Like, noone was hiding it, it was everywhere, sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes serious, and, to be fair, it's legitimately hard to blame anyone for for as long as those criticisms stay aimed at cishet white men, because like, yeah, ofc you're gonna be pissed and get a little bit hyperbolic with it, and lowkey kinda mean it. For as much as "feminism is for men too" was a line, at the same time, "yes all men" was a standard response to "not all men". "Not all men" is a deeply disingenuous line, wilfully misinterpreting men as a social class and some men as individuals to be a criticism of every specific man, individually. And people responded with basically"yeah actually that. I AM criticizing every man individually". And I could keep going; there are so many examples that don't sound like a big deal, and are ultimately so much less of a big deal than what they're opposing, but nonetheless betray undercurrents within popular feminist thought.

Like, incel, MRA, whatever ideologies are toxic and ultimately founded on misogyny and entitlement, but their stereotypes of feminists didn't come out of nowhere, just blown out of proportion. If someone's been criticizing a group, and you've been going "nah those criticisms aren't legit", but then you find out that there are people saying and doing all the things you've been saying "nobody says that" about, the reasonable conclusion is probably that those people existed all along, "worst person I know made a good point"-style, rather than "wow, some people decided to be walking stereotypes".

But, that's kinda been the MO for dealing with this criticism the whole time. "Nobody says that" > "Okay, some people say that, but not many" > "Okay, a lot of people say that, but they aren't really feminists because feminism is about gender equality, and hating men kinda runs counter to that" > "Oh, but, no, if course they're still welcome in feminist spaces."

And of course, criticizing *that* too loudly would historically get YOU excluded from feminist spaces, so you really just learn to keep your mouth shut.

i am not being needlessly alarmist when i say that popular feminism has become extremely radfem-esque and that the normalisation of negative stereotypes towards men needs to be resisted. like. i clearly remember when feminists were derided as "man-hating feminazis" and the main counter-argument to that went something like "we don't hate men, feminism is for everyone, patriarchy harms men too and our goal is to dismantle that oppressive system, this will benefit everyone including men, men can and should be feminists because feminism is a movement for gender equality"

in fact the major rebuttal to men forming "men's rights" movements was always that the issues these groups identified were the negative impacts of the patriarchy on men. they didn't need a separate group because feminism was for everyone and feminist thought and theorising already accounted for the ways patriarchy harms men. which is true! many of the societal issues faced by men stem from white supremacist patriarchy and restrictive gender roles and traditionally feminism has given thought and time to those issues. feminism is for everyone and it is concerned with men's struggles under patriarchy alongside women's.

but somewhere in the last few decades that attitude fell by the wayside and now popular online feminism is this radfem-flavored "all men are bad forever" thing. now mocking, belittling, or hating men is #feminist #praxis. it's feminist to make jokes about #killallmen. it's feminist to view masculinity as inherently bad and dangerous. it's feminist to talk about the men in your life like they're animals who need to be house trained, or emotionally stunted children who need to be babied and distracted.

it's this idea of flipping patriarchy on its head and saying that actually women are the Superior Gender, women deserve to run the world and make all the decisions, and actually it's men who are the Inferior Gender who can't be trusted or left unsupervised.

these attitudes will always have the most severe negative impact on marginalised men. i don't know how we got here but it's past time we circled back around to "feminism is for everyone".

[animentality]

Yeah gender is fake. I am glad people are starting to realize.

Now please start connecting the dots and see that gender is a set of rules made to keep women and girls small and subservient. Please work w radfems to tear it down. No child should ever be told they are playing with a “girl/boy” toy again

I don't get terfs though. I don't.

I know you probably are one, bc you've been stalking my blog for weeks.

How could you claim to be a feminist then uphold this idea that biology matters more than anything else?

Insist that men trying to be women are demeaning themselves in the process?

Or that they must be doing it for amoral reasons?

Isn't that just ragging on feminism too?

Biology is not destiny. Feminism broken down to its roots should destroy the idea that sex and gender are so fundamental to who we are.

You should be able to break that boundary. It's so bizarre how terfs have embraced this patriarchal idea of gender to enforce this idea that women are women and men are men.

A woman is whatever you want it to be.

A tomboy, a butch lesbian, a high femme, a she/they enby, a trans woman.

Femininity is a construct that can be remade however we see fit.

Why the fuck is it so hard for terfs to be accepting?

Why the fuck is it so wrong for a "man" to want to be a woman or a "woman" to want to be a man?

Why isn't that fluidity allowed?? What is your problem with it???

I can't imagine why a terf would think any trans woman is somehow evil without them just being a fucking bigot.

You don't know every single trans person.

You also don't know every single "man" either.

Too many of them think trans women are just men trying to steal their experiences or are predators in the making.

Those man hating ideas are precisely why you're a fucking laughing stock.

You really want to kill all men because they're all rapists and dogs that need controlling?

Please. Congrats on not understanding how the world works. And never meeting another human fucking being.

And upholding yet another sexist idea that men are just violent lustful sinners who don't want anything else in the world but to fuck you.

That's horrible.

Misogyny is horrible too of course. But it's a snake eating itself, trying to go the opposite way and say well all men-

All people are different, you pathetic shrivelling worm.

All people live by social systems we taught each other, but they could be changed if we wanted.

And that change starts from the ground up.

You fucking terfs have been ragging on me for weeks and sending me angry anons.

First off ive been here for 9 years, almost 10.

You don't scare or upset me. I'm used to anon hate.

Secondly, I'm not a fucking freak like you. I'm perpetually online but unlike you, I choose to give people the benefit of the doubt.

My mom raised me to try and feel compassion for everyone, even people who are different than me. To try and understand the suffering of others. To live in another person's shoes and appreciate a pain other than my own.

You are never going to convince me to hate any group of people based entirely on stereotypes and fiery rhetoric constructed by fucking fascists.

You'll never convince me to hurt a minority with a high suicide rate and the likehood to never make it past 30.

A minority which started the whole fucking LGBT movement.

I identify as nonbinary but I feel a kindred spirit with trans people because I've spent my whole life uncomfortable with certain pronouns too.

It was such a relief finding friends willing to call me by the right name.

The right pronouns.

I know what it's like to feel just a little of that disconnect. That discomfort.

Feeling like your insides don't match your outsides and that society is calling you the wrong thing, every day. And wishing it were different. Kinder. More accepting.

And even if I fucking didn't understand that.

You'll never turn me as cruel as you.

You fucking terf rats.

I've rambled too long so I'll just leave you the most essential message of this ramble, eloquently put, by Hozier.

[pumpkinov]

Where the Dust Settles

You can read Chap. 1 here and Chap. 2 here

Portia Collins, the sole survivor of Vault 111 has lost more than most. With the Institute defeated, she sets her sights to the next big jobs - unification of the Commonwealth wastelands and the large warship docked at the Boston Airport. More work for the General of the Minutemen, who is finding herself increasingly alone as her companions move on with their lives. John Hancock, the Ghoul Mayor of Goodneighbour is struggling to find his footing in the new political climate of the Commonwealth, and is finding a surprisingly vocal supporter in his local Minuteman General.

Chapter 3. Do you wanna come over, and kill some time?

Portia meets with an adoring audience, Hancock gets high. They walk home together.

Portia’s headache was back, and this one was a ripper.

She briefly considered decapitation, and settled for a stimpak. Two and a half years in the wasteland, and this was still the grossest part.

Well, maybe not the grossest, but she still hated it. She poked the needle through the delicate skin of her elbow and decompressed the vial, feeling the weird cold sensation of something entering her bloodstream. She’d left Preston, Nick and Piper at the Dugout Inn and headed straight home. Not that she spent much time here anymore, but Home Plate was hers and she could relax here, at least a little.

She sat in her arm chair, waiting for the Stimpak to work. It didn’t take long, the headache was already less crushing than it had been before. There was a stack of paperwork upstairs on the desk that she needed to look over before the final meeting tomorrow. And oh Jesus Christ what was she going to do about fucking Hancock.

He was right, of course he was right. She just hated being put on the spot like that.

And there was no way she could skip on the socialization of the night - the General of the Minutemen summons you to walk the dangerous roads between your settlement and Diamond City, and doesn’t even bother to speak to you?

She sunk a little lower into her battered chair, allowing herself a moment to scrunch her face up. She could have a cry later, maybe, as a treat. But right now, there was work to be done. Portia put her shoes on, grabbed her coat and her scarf, flicked off the lights and stepped into the market of Diamond City. It was snowing again, lightly for now. It lay across the ground, shimmering under the string lights running off the roofs in the square. She breathed in the noodle smell wafting in the air, and for a moment she felt a little lighter.

She was greeted at the door of the Dugout Inn by Nick, who was smoking out the front.

“Hey there kid,” his yellow eyes burned bright against the darkness creeping in from the corners of the old park. “How’d it go today?”

Portia sighed, and dug around in her pockets for a cigarette, “It went pretty good.”

“Is that so?” the old synth looked over at her, she could hear the faintest of whirr’s as his eyes focused on her. “Heard John had something to say at the end. He dropped past my office earlier.”

“Oh. Yeah, he did.” Portia lit her cigarette and inhaled, staring up at the sky. The snow was starting to land in her hair. “He’s right.”

Nick nodded slowly. “He is. But folks around here, they like their town the way it is. It seems pretty unlikely anything will change.”

She chewed on her lip a little, rolling her cigarette between her fingers. “Yeah, I tend to agree with you.”

“Most smart folks do.” Nick agreed.

“You knew him when he was a kid, right?” Portia asked suddenly, “What’s the Mayor’s deal?”

“John?” the detective seemed to deliberate for a moment.

“Yeah, is he all bark and no bite?”

More whirring, as mechanisms hidden under the plastic pulled Nick’s mouth into a smile. “Oh no, he bites. But under all that bark and all that bite, he’s a bleeding heart.”

Portia rolled her eyes, and Nick laughed.

Inside was even busier than the Third Rail had been last night. It was hazy inside, steam rising off everyone’s clothes dampened by the falling snow. The coat rack near the door was overburdened, but Portia had no choice but to dump her coat and scarf on top of the pile, it was a million degrees with all these bodies and the fire going. People reached out to her as she passed, she fixed a smile on her face as she desperately looked for a familiar face. But no Preston, no Piper. She almost reached the bar before being cornered by a woman, a trader from The Murkwater Construction Site to the south. There was a Minuteman checkpoint nearby, and they had helped defend the settlement from a supermutant raid a few weeks earlier. She grabbed Portia’s arm, desperate to tell her how her men had defended the farms, how they had saved this woman’s home.

“That’s the Commonwealth Minuteman ideal, to be ready at a minute’s notice,” Portia gritted her teeth, subtly trying to pull her arm out of the woman’s grip but it was a vice. Then came the wash of shame and guilt - this woman just wanted to tell her how much she appreciated the work Portia and her group had accomplished. And all she, Portia, the fucking General wanted to do was get away. It took her fifteen minutes before she was finally released - after which another family wanted to pass on their thanks for the Minutemen’s work protecting Oberland Station. A man touched her shoulder; he wanted to tell her that his son had died defending the Minuteman checkpoint near the entrance to the Glowing Sea, and how proud he was that his son had died doing something so honorable.

By the time Portia’s hands collided with Vadim’s bar, she was emotionally wrent. Vadim placed a glass of whiskey down on the bar for her, stopped and considered for a moment, then left the bottle. Portia stared at it for a moment - tempting, really. But she made the responsible decision, and knocked back the glass instead. She turned to face the room, leaning her back against the bar. There was a flash of red in the corner, and her eyes chased it without really thinking. There was something so distinctive about the mayor. He wasn’t particularly tall, or muscular, but his presence filled a room. He moved with his shoulders - they were broad for his frame, emphasized by the ridiculous frock coat he wore everywhere. He swiveled around, almost if her gaze had summoned him. He looked over, and winked. A wicked smile spread across his face, and he turned back to say his goodbyes to his captive audience, two women with drinks in their hands and fire in their eyes; before making his way towards Portia.

She watched him approach, feeling the heat creep through her stomach as he made his way through the crowded bar. Interesting response, best ignored. There was no time for nonsense like this. She wrapped her hands around the whiskey bottle Vadim had left on the bar and moved away, spotting Piper near the door. Was she avoiding him? Maybe.

Another few hours of greeting people, of being seen, and Portia was finally free. Preston had appeared, and eventually shooed her out the door, bundled in her coat and scarf, hands still wrapped around her untouched whiskey bottle.

“You look like you need a sleep, it’s fine, I can handle this!”

“I need a fucking coma.” Portia replied to him after he’d closed the door to the inn. She leant her forehead against the wooden door for a moment, before turning around and almost screaming.

“Mayor, do I need to make you wear a bell?”

He grinned, “Are you trying to collar me now?”

He was sitting on the stone wall, a cigarette between his lips and a jet canister in his hands. The snow had stopped, but the air was bitingly cold. Portia briefly considered her options, before heaving herself up to sit next to him. She nestled the whiskey bottle between her thighs as he handed her the jet. She turned it over in her hands, glancing around. There was no one else around, and she raised it to her lips and took a quick breath in.

There was the sound of rushing blood in her ears, and everything fell away for a moment. All she could feel was the freezing cold of the stone under her ass, which was steadily going numb.

It only lasted a moment, bit by bit the rest of the world returned. She opened her eyes to the sound of Hancock laughing, almost a growl in his throat. “What?�� She asked blearily, pushing the little plastic container back into his hands.

“I’ve never seen someone look like they needed a jet hit as badly as you did when you walked out.” He chuckled, inhaling his cigarette deeply.

Portia hummed a little, the afterglow of the jet slowly working it’s way out of her system. “I fucking miss weed, man.”

“Weed?”

“Cannabis, it was a plant, you dried and smoked it.”

“Oh right, yeah I’ve heard of that.”

Portia sighed. “I smoked a lot of weed back in the day. I can’t believe that fucking scorpions survived the end of the world, but no more pot.”

Hancock slid the jet canister back into his coat, blowing a stream of cigarette smoke into the night sky. “If you’re looking for other things, I have enough daytripper to help you avoid reality until next week.”

Portia chuckled, and shook her head, “Mayor, not all of us can function on jet fumes and mentat dust.”

He grinned at her, “Heh, yeah it’s a skill I’ve spent years honing. I didn’t pick our General as a habitual drug user.”

Portia smiled a little thinly, “You all seem to forget before I went into the deep freeze I had a whole life, you know?” Hancock slid his hand back into his coat, this time producing a cigarette, which Portia took. “Is your coat the nuclear wasteland version of Mary Poppin’s bag?”

“None of that made any sense.”

“It’s an old story, she flew around on an umbrella and put kids up the chimney. It’s, uh, unimportant.” She saw his expression and laughed a little. “I’ve seen you pull a fucking shotgun out of the coat, how do you keep so much stuff in it?”

His eyes flashed again, “You’ll have to get me out of it, General.” He leant over and lit her cigarette, before returning the lighter to the bottomless coat, and sliding off the wall. He held his hand out, steadying Portia as she dropped down to the ground with him. They moved down the street, their breath and cigarette smoke rising in front of them.

“I hadn’t planned on my punch at the entirety of Diamond City,” Hancock said casually. “I was just thinkin’ and I just … said it.”

“Makes sense.” Portia was focused on her boots shuffling through the snow, “I should have realised dragging you back here was gunna stir some feelings up.”

He laughed, low and deep. “Sure stirred something up.”

Portia felt her stomach spike again, and frowned at herself. She lifted her chin and aimed for a professional tone, trying to shake the intimacy out of the moment. “What are you hoping to achieve, Mayor?” She noticed they were walking close enough for their arms to brush against each other; she took a slight step away from him. If Hancock noticed her abrupt shift in energy, he didn’t react.

“Honestly, General? I don’t know. I don’t expect them to go back on what they voted for all those years ago. But I also can’t resist reminding them of who they’re fucking with.” He stared straight ahead, and Portia found herself staring at his face in profile.

High cheekbones, the faint outline of lips still left in the scars of exposed muscle on his face, his dark eyes shone in an otherworldly way. There was a twitch in his set jaw.

When he had greeted her in Goodneighbour two years ago, she’d found his face confronting, upsetting; a constant reminder that she was in a completely different world. Now his face was almost comforting.

They’d reached the front door of Home Plate now, Portia turning the whiskey bottle over in her hands. Hancock glanced at her, the wheels in his head turning.

“Is this … is this your house?”

“Yeah.” Portia was distracted, digging her keys out of her coat pocket and unlocking her front door. Then the penny dropped, as she pushed her front door open and she felt the warmth behind her shift forward slightly. She spun around barring the door with her arm. “No, no absolutely not!”

He was grinning across at her now, leaning an elbow against her door frame. “One drink?”

“In my house? No way.”

He pulled an expression of mock hurt, “Don’t you trust me?”

His body was inches from her, the warmth radiating through the layers of her clothes. “In general? Sure - in my home? Nope. You’ll never leave.” Shit

“Is that a threat or a promise, General?” He grinned slowly, before shifting his weight off the wall and standing up straight again. “Fine, one drink, in the freezing night air?”

Portia stared at him for a moment, he stared back. He was always fucking smiling. Sometimes she couldn’t tell if he was flirting with her, or mocking her. He was still close to her, she could smell him. Smoke, and something heavier. Patchouli, maybe? Or something close to it. She rolled her eyes, and let her arm drop.

“I am going to regret this, aren’t I?”

He followed her through her doorway, reaching his arm out to close her front door behind them. “General, I am nothing but a gentleman.”

She stared over her shoulder at him, “If I catch you in my underwear drawer, I’ll break your arm.”

His laugh drifted out the door, before it snapped closed.

[nothorses]

hello! this is a story of sorts i don't need advice for once lmao i just thought you would be able to share in my frustration and disgruntled amusement

i'm a trans boy and i live in pakistan, and, as you may be aware, we have a significant problem in terms of women's rights and safety. one of the latest and most prominent women's rights movements here is the aurat march (aurat directly translates to woman, although it has more,,, biology focused connotations as well, etymologically speaking, which is something that the movement's opposition has a lot of issues with 🙄). this is essentially an annual citywide protest where feminists and feminist allies come together and march through certain areas of the city and chant slogans etc. there's usually a theme - this year it's 'women's health issues' - and a charter of demands.

around a year ago i really wanted to be a part of all this. but I've recently come to realize that it's actually a very superficial gesture. the march itself is mostly carried out by relatively privileged, upper middle class people from urban areas. the demands are never met, because this is an appeal to the people of the nation rather than the government (even though the demands require change in legislature). at most, it provides a communal space for a select group, and raises awareness to an extent. the value of this shouldn't be downplayed, but there is an ironic trend of people who think that the aurat march is the epitome of feminism that pakistan needs and simply refuse to hear anything otherwise.

i reposted a twitter thread on my social media; the thread was talking about how, essentially, the march cannot achieve anything more than some benefits for women in urban, already privileged circles; how a lot of it has been weaponized against women (you'll find a lot of articles about this if you look up "aurat march pakistan" or the phrase "mera jism meri marzi pakistan"); how we need to reform this approach or start anew if we want to bring about actual change.

sounds reasonable yeah? it is a perfectly valid criticism, not undermining the importance of the movement but explaining how it should be improved upon.

except it was written by a cis man.

when i reposted it, i reposted along with the accompanying tweet that actually brought it onto my feed: "stay out of women's business nobody asked for your stupid opinion", by a woman. in my own repost, i wrote something about how liberal feminists cannot handle when a man has valid constructive criticism.

and cue SO many other people who i don't even talk to anymore deciding to slander me behind my back for "hating on feminism". ironically, one of these people was a cis man who i cut off because he tried explaining to me why saying kill all men is a good and harmless thing. when THAT conversation happened, he was completely at a loss for words when he found out i was trans, after arguing with me about it for over an hour. side note: i think it's very telling that he thought he could explain a "feminist slogan" to me when he thought i was a cis girl, but then went totally quiet when it turned out my arguments had credibility especially because of my trans identity.

anyway. it's very disappointing to learn how many people around me lack basic critical thinking skills.

love you! hope you're doing well. in the process of writing this i've realized i would love to speak more about feminism in pakistan, so if you'd like hearing about that, please say so!

Wow, yeah, that is a great (and extremely frustrating) example of how liberal, mainstream feminism tends to be geared toward performative activism and arbitrary “rules” that are sort of just... echoes of more nuanced feminist theory.

It reminds me a lot of America’s ��Women’s Marches”, which iconically features the pink “pussy hat” (pink knitted beanie with cat ears) because like... lol. The bio-essentialism and surface-level, performative, white-centric and middle/upper class-centric feminism is just so strong. 

I would love to hear more about feminism in Pakistan! Thank you for sharing this story! I hope you’re doing well, too. 💙

[woman-loving]

Bears Mailing List

Selection from The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture, edited by Les Wright, 1997. These passages were the only ones in the book to mention bisexuality, so I wanted to share them.

Gay males choosing to call themselves bears quickly generated lively discussion of the question “what is a bear?” interpreting the various aspects of their totem to fit individual natures. Qualities possessed in common were seen to be a predilection for cuddling and being cuddled, the frequent wearing of beards or mustaches (often extremely fully by mainstream standards), frank rejoicing and pride in possession of body hair, a stocky or heavily built physical frame, and a willingness to explore the inclusionary possibilities of an alternate male identity. This process was hastened through the construction of such communication channels as the Bearcave BBS (a computer bulletin board) in New York City and the world-spanning BML (Bears Mailing List), first created in 1988 by Steve Dyer and Brian Gollum and later resurrected in 1994 by Henry Mensch and Roger Klorese. Its introductory message to all new members states that “this is a list devoted to the care, feeding and appreciation of ursine men ... directed to all gay and bisexual men who are bears, arctophiles, or both.” By 1995, subscribers to the list numbered some fifteen hundred worldwide, which had become known as the “cyberden,” with regular posts appearing under such noms de pelt as ChubbyCub, SFGrizzly, Youngbear, NewDCCub, The Hidden Paw, and Captain Wolf. A review of the board archives reveals much discussion on bear identity, with most subscribers gratified to find a group of men where their hirsute qualities were not only accepted but prized. The forum has also served to stimulate and distribute an emerging ursine literature, ranging from a series of poems on “Bear Soup” to the public joint creation in 1995 of a new species of a traditional Japanese genre, “bearku.” Perhaps the most baroque affirmation of ursine being was in a poem (written as a burlesque of a well-known Gilbert and Sullivan aria) which begins “I am the very model of a merry hairy fairy bear.”

-- Robert B Marks Ridinger, “Bearaphernalia: An Exercise in Social Definition”

Les Wright: Let’s start at the beginning: What’s your name and what are you doing here?

Steve Dyer: My name is Steve Dyer and I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in Boston all my life. You could say that I am a member of the bear community and have done some things which some members of the bear community think are interesting or helpful.

LW: Have you lived other places where you’ve been involved with the bear community?

SD: I’ve always lived in Boston, although the Bears Mailing List had its start on Gay Pride Day in 1988 in San Francisco.

LW: How did the BML start? What was its inception?

SD: As you might know, there is a discussion group called soc.motss, for the discussion of gay issues by gay people and those interested in gay issues. It’s been around since 1983. We had a gathering of folks there, about a hundred people, who had been talking to each other for the previous five years. This coincided with the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. That’s where I met Brian Gollum, who was the other original editor of the Bears Mailing List. He was there with friends of friends to attend the soc.motss convention. Sometimes we call it the motss com. Anyway, Brian is also large, bearded, and bearish.

LW: And currently bald. He shaved his head.

SD: He and I were chatting, “wouldn’t it be great to have a forum for men like us, for other bears?” BEAR magazine was in issue one, two, or three. (It was very early on.) The whole cultural awareness of this phenomenon was just beginning to get going. We though having a mailing list on the Internet would be a fun thing to do, having no idea at the time how popular it would become. There’s where it started. [...]

LW: We’ve been talking about the BML. What is in the BML? What actually gets discussed?

SD: Well, it’s sort of funny. You might ask, how much can you say about hairy men? And the answer, as we have found out, is “quite a bit.” You essentially say the same thing over and over again.

But it might be useful to give some background. “What is a bear?” A bear might be a large, hairy man, but maybe not. Maybe just a bearded man, or maybe a bearded man with a lot of hair. It’s some sort of approach around an archetype, and this archetype--maybe not so much in the 1970s but in recent years--has been a devalued archetype. That is to say, if you buy most gay magazines these days, you tend to find thin, young, hairless men, sort of the Ganymede archetype. Men who don't look that way have always felt excluded, and frustrated, because very often these men, or men who like men like that, can’t find cultural manifestations of the archetypes they like. Everyone looks like a twenty-three-year-old who looks seventeen. The Bears Mailing List is for men who want to discuss what they like with others who like the same things. That’s a universal human desire.

What’s on the Bears Mailing List? Frequently you have introductions. People may have just joined, or may have been reading for several months, and want to “come out” electronically and say, “Here I am, this is who I am, what I’m interested in. This is what I look like. Write to me, if you’re interested.” These introductions really aren’t personal ads, they’ve never been intended on our part to be personal ads, although they might have the effect of a personal ad. In fact, they’re much richer than personal ads. You have as much space to write about yourself as you like. You don’t have to write in four-letter abbreviations. You have a chance to say more about yourself to people. It doesn’t necessarily have to have a sexual animus to it, though some people are obviously looking for life-mates or sex partners, or both. That’s one class of things that is discussed.

Another one is, “Hey, did you see the bear in ‘movie X’ or ‘TV show Y?’ Isn’t he hot? Woof, woof!” And other people will offer their own comments. What else is discussed on there? Life stories, people’s experiences growing up gay, perhaps gay and heavy. And then there’s being gay and being married, which doesn’t seem like such a bear topic, but there was a period several years ago when several of these incredibly hot-looking, hairy, bearded men, who happened to be married, would discover the Bears Mailing List by accident, join, and their participation would be the catalyst toward their coming out more fully, perhaps, opening up to their wives, perhaps the marriage would break up or disintegrate, or perhaps it wouldn’t. There are all sorts of flavors, issues of being married, how to deal with being gay in the context of marriage. For a while I thought we should call it the MBL instead of the BML--the Married Bears List. You’d be surprised how many married men there are, people who are still married, who participate. A lot of bisexual men who may be married but are still interested. So, we have gone off on topics like that, the experience of growing up heavy and the experience of isolation, or feeling devalued, as a result of that. A lot of it is a forum for self-esteem (Oh, I hate the term; I certainly appreciate the concept) a forum for validation. It’s nice to hang around with other people who like what you like and who reinforce that. So, yeah, I don’t know how many issues we had published when I stopped last year, maybe about six hundred, maybe more, in the space of about seven years.

LW: I don’t remember exactly the numbering, since now it is BML 2, the numbering has started over, and we are now approaching 350.

SD: Anyone who sees [this interview] should realize that BML Number 2 started about four months after I gave it up and started off with a completely new subscriber base. They sent messages out to the old list, saying that if you want to resubscribe this is how you do it.

LW: There were a lot of people talking back and forth, saying, “Oh my God, is this the end of the BML?” There was a lot of serious concern that it wouldn’t be revived.

SD: It was simply a matter of someone having the right resources, like Roger Klorese, who runs a machine called QueerNet out of his own pocket, and someone like Henry Mensch who had the interest and time (he was an old BML subscriber) who manages the group. In the first six months we have already logged in two-thirds of the total number of articles of the entire first volume, so things have gone way, way up. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Interview by Les Wright (May 31, 1995), “The Original Bears Mailing List: An Interview with Steve Dyer” 

[eccentricpine]

line by line analysis of Half-Elves in Dungeons and Dragons 5e by a mixed person

Preemptive: Do not respond to this about how you, individually, don’t use this at your table or how you homebrew this. I’m interested in discussing the text; not how you transform it.

Flint squinted into the setting sun. He thought he saw the figure of a man striding up the path. [...]

This intro describes a half-elf from an outsider’s perspective, and mostly focuses on what he looks like.

...an elvish grace [...] yet the man’s body had the thickness and tight muscles of a human.

It’s reiterated over and over how this stranger has qualities that are exclusively inherent to either elves or humans. No muscular elves, no graceful humans.

Walking in two worlds but truly belonging to neither,

I hate how mixed people don’t get to belong in this narrative. Yeah, it feels alienating to have things that set you apart from both your parents’ cultures, but society has methods of isolating every individual. I believe that I belong in both places my parents are from in some manner, no matter whether or not it feels like those places want me.

half-elves combine what some say are the best qualities of their elf and human parents: human curiosity, inventiveness, and ambition tempered by the refined senses, love of nature, and artistic tastes of the elves.

Literally none of this is inherent. While it is accurate in terms of “real people talk about mixed kids like this,” but I would love not to be reminded of the guy who hated immigrants that I met at a youth hostel once, who pretty much said this stuff to me about my heritage.

Some half-elves live among humans, set apart by their emotional and physical differences, watching friends and loved ones age while time barely touches them. Others live with the elves, growing restless as they reach adulthood in the timeless elven realms, while their peers continue to live as children.

Finally at the magical differences here that is actually more interesting to me, since, yeah, this stuff would be alienating to have to deal with. And yeah, if you grow up in an area that’s overwhelmingly one thing, it’s easy to feel like you’re the Only One of your kind and feel alone.

Many half-elves, unable to fit into either society, choose lives of solitary wandering or join with other misfits and outcasts in the adventuring life.

Ah, but we’re back at the “half-elves” don’t get to belong. See, society is constructed in a way where almost everyone can talk about how they’ve felt alienated. I was the only [ethnicity] among the 1800 other kids at school, repressed gay, and a massive nerd and I still made friends and generally felt like I belonged. Yeah, I wasn’t popular. No, I wasn’t bullied.

Of Two Worlds To humans, half-elves look like elves, and to elves, they look human.

This is kind of my experience in the way where “you’re defined by the ways you differ from the society around you.” But also frustrating in the ways they are emphasizing,”You will always be seen as an outsider.” And not accounting for the vast range in experiences, such as the circumstances where I’m seen as not.

In height, they’re on par with both parents, though they’re neither as slender as elves nor as broad as humans. They range from under 5 feet to about 6 feet tall, and from 100 to 180 pounds, with men only slightly taller and heavier than women. Half-elf men do have facial hair, and sometimes grow beards to mask their elven ancestry. Half-elven coloration and features lie somewhere between their human and elf parents, and thus show a variety even more pronounced than that found among either race. They tend to have the eyes of their elven parents.

This stuff is pretty boring, other than establishing that phenotypes mix. But it is something that they’re writing in the possibility of having fun elven eyes. (Looks like this is for the Darkvision trait, which is, fine.)

Diplomats or Wanderers Half-elves have no lands of their own

Now this is some bullshit. The concept that, if you’re not 100% one race, you don’t get to belong, that you lose claim to the land if you’re mixed. This is such a garbage concept that seems to imply that if your ancestors are from different places you don’t have a motherland. Which, somehow again, is a sentiment expressed to me by a different guy at a different youth hostel. But this time, this text isn’t framed as a “some say” but as a truth of the world.

Like, in reality, being mixed means there’s so many places I could call home, so many places where my family lives. My cousin straight up has dual citizenship.

though they are welcome in human cities and somewhat less welcome in elven forests.

Ah, xenophobic elves. I don’t like the way that elves are positioned as foreigners and then acting like humans are so much more accepting and progressive. Like, even the terminology of “half-elf” places humans as the default other half. But also this reads a little like, “Oh, don’t leave this human city, you don’t know how good you have it here, nowhere else will accept you like we do.”

In large cities in regions where elves and humans interact often, half-elves are sometimes numerous enough to form small communities of their own. They enjoy the company of other half-elves, the only people who truly understand what it is to live between these two worlds.

This one’s weird. Like yeah, people with similar experiences tend to group, but, the idea of only grouping with other people who are mixed in the exact same way? Why? They would absolutely have a lot in common with half-orcs, and with human communities in elven cities/elf communities in human cities, and like, with every other person who’s been asked, “Where are you from? Oh. Where are your parents from?” 

So, absolutely no mention of communities of immigrants in cities.

In most parts of the world, though, half-elves are uncommon enough that one might live for years without meeting another.

To Be Fair, I’ve not actually met someone who is mixed in precisely the way I am, before. It is harder for me, though, because neither parent is native to the country they’re from.

Some half-elves prefer to avoid company altogether, wandering the wilds as trappers, foresters, hunters, or adventurers and visiting civilization only rarely.

Setting up that half-elf ranger build. But this also is really sad.

Others, in contrast, throw themselves into the thick of society, putting their charisma and social skills to great use in diplomatic roles or as swindlers.

“Social roles” Okay, yeah. “swindlers.” That’s a turn. Setting up for the Rogue build but like, sucks that we’re right back to “half-elves can’t be trusted.”

Half-Elf Names Half-elves use either human or elven naming conventions. As if to emphasize that they don’t really fit in to either society, half-elves raised among humans are often given elven names, and those raised among elves often take human names.

This one baffles me. I know so many people, myself included, who have multiple names that they use in different contexts. Why wouldn’t their parents give them a name that would protect them, or, having a practice where half-elves have both a human and an elven name? Like, sure, this is a scenario that exists but it’s hard to believe that it’s the most common one.

Excellent Ambassadors Many half-elves learn at an early age to get along with everyone, defusing hostility and finding common ground.

Oof. This sounds awful. Trying to appease everyone around you sounds like a protective mechanism.

As a race, they have elven grace without elven aloofness and human energy without human boorishness.

Back to the stereotypes. Why are half-elves treated as a separate race here?

They often make excellent ambassadors and go-betweens (except between elves and humans, since each side suspects the half-elf of favoring the other).

Love to immediately undercut the “excellent ambassadors” bit with “but treated as untrustworthy by their people.”

Half-Elf Traits

Frankly, there’s not much in this section that I can say that I haven’t already said in this post, so I’m not gonna go through this part.

In Summary:

keeps emphasizing how half-elves don’t belong anywhere

half-elves are often seen as untrustworthy (+ “swindlers”)

got reminded of two different racist people i’ve met

[antiterf]

my gender dysphoria does this thing where I could do stereotypically "feminine" stuff (like I love painting my nails, and I'm just learning how to cook and it's great, and I also enjoy sewing like I even took classes at one point) and be chill with it but then I'll sit down or some shit and my brain would be like "but would a MAN sit like that??" (1/?)

So yeah, basically the terf logic that trans people (especially afab trans people) are trans because they hate the gender roles and expectations associated with their agab is pure bullshit. I mean, it's almost like trans people are all individuals who - just like cis people - enjoy different things or something. Like when people say "gender is a social construct" they're talking about gender roles which are stupid (I'm not saying people who do follow them are stupid but in general) (2/3)

because honestly, a heck lot of trans people (especially non-binary trans people) don't give a shit about gender roles. I'd even say that (most) trans folks understand better than anyone that gender roles and stereotypes are just really fucking stupid (3/3)

No but I get it with the sitting like “but Can I have my legs crossed???? Am I taking up enough space??? Am I outing myself by sitting in this chair???”

It’s kind of like, voiced gender roles like “you can’t do that, you’re a boy!” are straight to your face but that’s different than wanting to fit in with your peers of the same gender. With your hobbies and stuff it’s fine, that’s you and you alone. When it comes to fitting in the group as a whole though, men aren’t typically told

At the same time while having that thought process, I like to do more art and have been getting into embroidery. I’m majoring in psychology, a women prominent field, I don’t care.

But you’re right, a lot of trans people learn it’s fucking stupid and know that gender roles are. We just know that conforming to them will get the cis to fucking listen to us. Upon coming out I’ve heard way too many stories of trans people with accepting friends and family, but at the same time, they’re forced into an extreme of another set of gender roles. I know that when that hit me, I had full evidence to say to myself “wow, this is dumb as fuck” and continued to tell others that it’s dumb as fuck.

So yeah no terf logic is definitely bullshit.

[ex-terfs]

I’m curious about how you were introduced to trans exclusionary ideology, and when you realized how toxic it truly is. I’m genuinely curious.

Hello! Sorry for the hiatus.So this is my story & long rant post.I've been among TERFs/Radfems (AKA the Conservative side of "feminism") since 2015. In mid-2016 — with the dangers of having Trump as President — I started getting critical of everything going on in the community, deleted older posts, & stopped reblogging "trans-critical" stuff. In 2017 — after seeing TERFs celebrating that the 'Everyday Feminism' site was facing a financial crisis & after paying more attention at what our "enemies" were trying to say — I unfollowed all the bullies, & eventually started to despise seeing "trans-critical" stuff. Their hatred towards the "big scary Libfems" is what made me rethink my priorities.

Many parts of their ideology had peculiarly attracted my attention back in 2015. As a GNC person who celebrates gender nonconformity, their gender abolition theories seemed very interesting (& I later found out how bigoted they are towards GNC men & GNC people with different identities/pronouns). When I was a sex-repulsed person, their porn-critical & sex-negative theories also seemed very interesting to me (I later found out how bigoted they are towards sex-repulsed people — upholding heteronormativity & saying things like "Haha, nobody loves you", "If you're a man/bisexual/lesbian, you must perform oral sex on your gf"; but still, I'm NO longer in the sex-negative/SWERF community). People sending them death threats was also one of the reasons why I had joined their movement.

It always begins like this. Step 1: you begin exploring anti-kink/anti-porn stuff; Step 2: you begin exploring anti-"MOGAI" stuff; Final step: you turn into a transphobe. That's how I got into this mess.

Second-wave theories originally had a critical focus on the social construction of gender & sexuality, monogamy, submission/masochism, natalism, the family structure, the fear of nonconformity, emotional/economic dependency, religion, & violence.As a feminist, yeah, I still agree with most of these analyses. I love reading academic books. But there was something different about terf/radfem tumblr. & this is all I've noticed over the years.

TERFs treat their word like holy truth.

TERFs use Right-wing "sources" to back up their transphobic & sex-negative arguments (& often associate themselves with conservative groups).

TERFs claim that all men are "biologically/physically the same".

TERFs contradict themselves all the time: claim that sex-repulsed AroAces are "usual straights", mock people who just want to remain single, & at the same time still say that if you don't want to have sex with men, then "you're a lesbian"; they say that people don't owe you sex, & at the same time say it's "not okay" for men to sexually reject a woman for "bad reasons".

TERFs claim that lesbians who are anti-TERF or who don't believe in the "born-this-way" theory are "fake lesbians".

TERFs are against the idea of removing your secondary sexual characteristics; & if an AMAB person doesn't like their "secondary sexual characteristics", then they must be a "delusional fetishist" (srsly I identify as a woman, but I still wish I could remove my uterus & have a breast reduction surgery; & it's not for sexist reasons! Shocking, I know!).

TERFs claim that men can't be raped/abused by women (not all TERFs believe this, but I still see them quietly following the ones who do).

TERFs have definitely never read a book with a different perspective/purpose, yet they will act like total experts on any subject (TERFs act like they're experts on Postmodernism & Queer Theory, but they have no idea what these theories are actually about. These theories are both very complex & don't have only one definition! Shocking, I know!).

TERFs will assume you're a trans woman if you don't disclose you're actually AFAB (& they could still have doubts).

TERFs are very manipulative & use brainwashing tactics. If you're AFAB & anti-TERF, they will say it's because of your "internalized misogyny" & will try to guilt-trip you. Because how dare someone has a different opinion! If you're AFAB & proudly calls yourself 'genderfluid' or 'non-binary', TERFs will get offended.

TERFs claim that asexuality only exists "because of the prevalence of porn" (Aces & sex-repulsed people would still be here even if porn didn't exist! Shocking, I know!).

TERFs claim that men who call themselves 'feminist' are "all predators".

TERFs would rather include transphobic men in their spaces than "those evil libfems" (those women are enemies).

TERFs claim that radical feminism is the "only true feminism", & that all second-wave feminists were "radfems".

TERFs claim that GNC men are "fetishizing" femininity (but according to TERF logic, masculine men are not fetishizing masculinity).

TERFs are extremely bigoted towards sex workers, polyamorous people, people who don't want commitment, people who are sexually experimenting or who are promiscuous (which is also one of the reasons why I left the sex-negative community; their views on sex/lust/love are similar to the Christian conservative perspective).

I can definitely assure you I still very well remember most of their URLs & blog content. There are many TERFs who hide behind aesthetic blogs, & use subtle TERF language & comforting rhetoric — which you might not even notice if you don't know much about their specific type of language & tactics (e.g. complaining about the "neoliberal postmodern identities" & about people "erasing females"). This type of TERF also may follow a bunch of (trans-inclusive) anti-'MOGAI' & anti-kink blogs. If you're trans-inclusive & TERFs follow you, it's likely because your blog content doesn't make them uncomfortable.

Their blatant transphobia is absurd & paranoiac, & they don't hide it. Anyone who disagrees with them gets called a "handmaiden", "lesbophobe", "male", "genderist", "liberal", "libfem", "special snowflake" (I no longer consider myself a radical leftist, but I don't consider myself a centrist either). TERFs call trans women as a group "fetishists", "delusional", "mentally ill", "sociopaths", "narcissists", "pedophiles", "necrophiles", "incels", "genderfucks" + slurs like "tr*nny", "troon", "tr0n", "transes". They say that the trans movement is "coercing children to transition" & "forcing lesbians to have sex with penis". It's pure fear-mongering. Their views on trans men are also contradictory — there are times they claim that trans men are "straight girls who are trans just bc they read fanfiction & watch gay porn", & there are times they claim that trans men are "brainwashed butch lesbians" (Pick a side!).

I live in a very religious Latin American country. The majority of the population here is not educated on gender/sexuality issues. I got the chance of educating myself better only after I've learned English. And then some terfs had the gall to say "academic fields such as Gender & LGBT Studies & philosophy are oppressive & pretentious". In a country like mine with a dark history of military dictatorships, censorship & anti-intellectualism, being leftist means protecting the social sciences in education & freedom of the press.

So yes, I left the terf community bc unlike them, I think for myself & I hate bullying (i was in fact heavily bullied for years in school, & only bullying victims know how it truly feels like). My terf blog is now inactive; I had 1000+ followers. I'm a very quiet person irl & online; I was never vocal about my real opinions bc I don't like getting into heated discussions & I didn't want to be featured on that gross radfem-gossip blog.I was very transphobic back then. & now it's quite possible terfs will say to me "You were never one of us". I followed & liked their blogs, just like they followed mine. I was loyal & obedient. Now not anymore.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Controversial as it may be these days, I actually support and defend people's right to have racist, sexist, or whatever phobic thoughts as long as they don't try to hurt anyone. Just having these views don't hurt anyone but yourself. Unfortunately too many do try to impose on the ones they dislike. But for the ones that keep to themselves, I many not like your views, but I will fight to the death for you to have them cause this is America. Snowflakes may not like this but oh well.

Yeah, the quote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” has always been a liberal mantra that has separated the United States from the rest of the world, up until now. Now with the bizarre invented crimes of “Islamophobia” and “transphobia,” and getting fired, banned and de-platformed over a joke, free speech is facing one hell of a test. What we can and can’t say is today regulated based on what part of the intersectional order we fall under. Choosing who you vote for, what you believe in and what hat you wear outside will decide whether or not you’re allowed to speak and whether you are subjected to assault and rabid mob outrage, all in the name of social harmony and justice of course... Such demonstrations express an ideology that has been growing in the academy but has only recently entered the cultural mainstream after their orthodoxy was challenged.

From the 1960s, the academic left began adding third-wave feminism, LGBT theory, the consolidation of post-colonialism, and “privilege theory,” which surfaced in the 1990s. Its greatest claims should be familiar to most of us by now, gender is socially constructed rather than based in biology, the West is uniquely despicable, racial identity rather than individual action determines guilt and responsibility and capitalism is evil. Each divides the world into oppressors and oppressed: whites versus “persons of color,” men versus women, “cisgender” versus queer, etc. To a large degree, it is a Marxist divide, but with race and gender in the place of class. Anything that strays from the script must be shut down at all costs.

An average college student at most state and leading private universities will witness displays targeting Israel, warnings of an ominous “rape culture,” and complaints of “white privilege.” Students report PTSD and require therapy dogs and Play-Doh to soothe their feelings after hearing something they don’t like. Activist students and faculty alike regularly argue that “hate speech” is the same as violence and it’s not unusual to see professors alongside their screaming hoard of students and antifa stopping conservative speakers from speaking, claiming the mere presence of an apostate is dangerous. 

Because of this sense of group victimhood, students feel justified in attempting to shut down the free exchange of ideas or retreating to safe spaces, as certain ideas could not only further harm the oppressed, but may potentially strip them of their victim status. Their unfamiliarity with operating in an environment of intellectual disagreement also makes these “social justice warriors” perceive contrary opinions as assaults on their intellectual security. The traditional rules of public discourse therefore do not apply to them. Their cause is too morally important. To allow dissenting opinion is to allow oppression itself.

A large number of college students believe that violence and shouting over a speaker is acceptable methods to prevent people from saying things. Over half of U.S. college students believe screaming over the top of a speaker to shut them down is acceptable, and one in five believe it’s acceptable to use violence to shut the speaker up, according to a national survey of students in 49 states. Today’s college students are tomorrow’s attorneys, teachers, policymakers, and judges. If a large fraction of college students believe incorrectly that offensive speech is unprotected by the First Amendment, that view will be at the center of all the decisions they make once they’re in positions of authority.

Silencing speech creates more chaos than peace. Those who dissent will resort to other means to speak out. They will protest, they will move to the other extreme or they will vote for the most outspoken leader they can find. In response, those who sought to dominate the conversation will do even more to end it, pumping out fake news, vilifying free speech advocates and refusing to present opposing views. So much of the polarization and division afflicting society today is a direct result of restricting speech. When figures in the media block certain ideas, they actually do more to validate and preserve these ideas than remove them. They validate them by granting them enough weight to merit oppressive action and preserve them by keeping them from being debunked.

Therefore, it should surprise no one that the left, which has taken to opposing free speech, has grown more extreme. Idiotic ideas like socialism meet little opposition because free market capitalism allows for winners and losers and is thus hateful. Even comedy has disappeared, as comedians only feel safe obsessing over Trump and white people. By contrast, free speech advocates, although frequently characterized as evil nationalists and unapologetic bigots, maintains integrity by its insistence on freedom. Many different positions find discussion among conservatives which allows for better policy and more constructive dialogue. Even though this dedication to free speech allows alt-right nuts to run their mouths, the strict dedication to reason and reality keeps them to the fringes. Compare it to the other side where the most far-left ideas and figures are mainstream.

It’s one thing to protest a speaker whose stance we find appalling, it’s another to work to block them from being able to speak at all. It’s one thing to choose to walk away from a discussion, it’s another to try to silence another’s voice entirely. When we choose the latter routes, we are one step closer to becoming the exact authoritarians Trump is accused of being. Free speech rights in the United States are still stronger and better protected than anywhere else in the world but we should still be closely aware of these growing attempts to weaken them. As we watch the English being arrested over insensitive tweets, Scots being sentenced and fined for memes and Norwegians imprisoned for "hate speech,” we're getting a glimpse of how fast and easy free speech can be removed and criminalized even in the most liberal democracies like ours. 

[ohnomybreadsticks]

First prompt from my little celebration is finished, for Anon who wanted “Gavin realises he's been hanging out with the wrong crowd of android haters. He doesn't dislike androids but to fit in with the crowd he went along with it. Now, he wants to apologise to Nines and make amends.”

Wednesdays were for drinking with the guys. They had been since Gavin’s academy days, to the point where weeks when he couldn’t attend felt weird and uneven. His colleagues at work may have been surprised to learn that Gavin had such a long-standing social circle, but he was a surprisingly social guy. Well, with the right sort of people. The group he had fallen into at the academy was full of men who didn’t tiptoe around issues. If they had something to say, they said it loudly, and Gavin appreciated that sort of brash attitude. It was easy, speaking his mind in this crowd, and God knew he had very little ability to filter his thoughts or his actions. Arriving at the shitty dive they had been going to for years, he was greeted with pats on the back and a beer was pressed into his waiting hand.

“So Gav, how’s life with the plastic prick? You still keepin’ it in its place?”

Oh yeah, another reason Gavin had stuck with this group for so long was that they all shared his views on androids. And, like anything, they shared his views rather vocally. Up until the revolution, this particular bar had been sporting the tell-tale signage reminding patrons not to bring their property with them into the establishment. It had been taken down, of course, but this wasn’t exactly the kind of place that androids were likely to feel welcome in, anyways. Which suited the patrons who had come back after the evacuation just fine.

“Oh yeah, yeah, damn thing still follows me around, but I don’t take any shit.” Gavin replied with a laugh, shooting Monty an easy grin. They had always talked like this, the words practically fell off his tongue, even before the alcohol had a chance to loosen it. With the topic brought up, more of the men around the table began to complain about androids they had to deal with in their career or private life. Tony’s daughter had joined the protests for android rights, Frank’s office was flooding with new hires still ‘fresh off the assembly line’ as he put it, and Carter worked city planning for the area around New Jericho.

The same sentiment echoed back and forth across the table, each man bemoaning his fate of having to deal with the ‘damn plastics’. They’d never be people, it just wasn’t right that good jobs were being taken away from hardworking Americans, they couldn’t really be trusted anyways… Frank got so worked up he slammed his glass down on the bar and startled Gavin, growling out something about not voting for any more presidents who would be pushed around by fakes like this. And the circle agreed, all nodding sagely and shooting each other looks as if to revel in the confirmation.

Gavin wondered suddenly when this weird tightness in his chest had started. He was nursing his beer and drifting off into thought as the familiar reassuring words washed over him. Yeah, he was better than those fuckin’ plastics. His old gripes about being replaced at work by ‘something that can’t even feel’ would have been welcomed at this point. But…why did the words seem to stick in his throat? Briefly, he wondered if that heartburn his doctor was always warning him about had crept up suddenly. Taking another swig of his beer in the hopes that that would make things clearer (it never did), Gavin considered when the use of the word ‘it’ to describe androids had started to make him want to itch out of his own skin.

Maybe it was when Nines first approached Gavin for help, LED whirring nervously as he admitted his pre-construction software maybe wasn’t as helpful as a good old ‘gut instinct’ on this case. Or maybe he had lost his taste for it while watching Nines carefully smooth the useless stress blanket around the shoulders of a shaking android, still disoriented from the beating they had gotten while trying to, god who remembered any more, walk in the park of something. Gavin had always accused Nines of being an unfeeling robot, but in that moment he had been able to show more human kindness to the victim of a senseless crime than Gavin would ever have been able to.

A sudden good-natured jab in the ribs brought Gavin back to himself. He glanced over and found the table watching him expectantly. When he didn’t reply, Tony repeated himself, “I said, your folks over at the DPD are holding the line, right? Making sure these things don’t get out of control?” The easy answer, which would usually have been burning up his throat to spit off his lips, just wouldn’t come to his mind. Instead Gavin simply raised his glass and said dully “Just doing my job.” The other men chuckled and took that however they wanted, as the evening sauntered on.

The tightness in his chest didn’t fade for the next few days, and Gavin found himself unsettled and off-balance at work. Every time he looked at Nines, he wondered what his partner thought of him. Certainly nothing good, given their rocky relationship at the beginning of working together. And yet…he still brought Gavin coffee in the afternoons when he clearly wasn’t feeling well, and walked out to his car in the evenings when their shifts ended at the same time. Not the actions of someone who hated their partner outright on a basic fundamental level.

Was that even how Gavin felt any more? Thinking about it now, maybe ‘saying whatever you wanted, and saying it loudly’, wasn’t how you went about making things any better. Not to mention, the things his drinking buddies always had to say were inevitably negative in some way. Gavin wasn’t one for introspection and personal growth, but even he had to admit that they couldn’t just keep going forward the same way they always had after what Jericho had done. After what they had all seen.

It was a Wednesday morning when Gavin found himself nervously leaning on Nines’ desk, waiting for him to arrive. The android was always punctual, and 8:15 found him stepping briskly up to his workstation. Gavin’s presence seemed to throw him off, a surprised look flashing over his face for just a moment before he adjusted. “Can I help you, detective? I don’t believe our first briefing is any earlier than ten.��� Gavin shook his head, using what was left of his mustered courage to stick his hand out, offering it for a shake.

“I never introduced myself. Properly.” Gavin muttered, thankful for once that Nines’ hearing was insanely sensitive, “You deserved better than a bunch of slurs when you first joined up here.” Nines stared at him curiously, just for a moment, before reaching out and taking the extended hand. His grip was firm and his skin was warm, just like anyone else. “Gavin Reed. I’m your new partner.” Gavin said, aware that this was possibly the cheesiest thing he had ever done. He just had to hope that Nines wouldn’t hate him even more than he already should.

Instead, much to Gavin’s relief, a tiny hint of a smile spread across Nines’ lips. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detective Reed. I’m RK900, but you can call me Nines.” There was a pause, then in a softer voice he added “I would like it very much if you called me Nines.” Gavin let out a deep breath, shooting Nines an apologetic look he knew wasn’t enough to make up for all the toaster and tin can jokes. But it was a start. So was asking “Can I…take you out for a drink or whatever tonight? To celebrate the new partnership and all.”

“But today is a Wednesday.” Nines countered, confusion now wrinkling his brow, “I was led to believe you have a standing engagement tonight.”

Gavin simply shrugged, admitting “I think I’m going to have a lot more free time on Wednesday evenings from now on.”

The smile on Nines’ face growing slightly wider finally lifted some of that tension in Gavin’s chest. He could work with this. He could get better.

------

And there you have it Anon! I hope you enjoyed it, it was a fun prompt! Thank you for requesting it <3

[thesilverheroineproject]

By Haley Thurston

What are women afraid of? Why do women matter? How are women useful? Do these questions have gender-specific answers?

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says that a hero is “someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” He goes on to distinguish between physical heroes, those who do deeds, and spiritual heroes, those who “[have] learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”

This is a grand and beautiful model. And especially when we just leave it at “someone who has achieved something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience,” it works very well for a hero of any gender. But when Campbell gets into the specifics of what counts or is celebrated as an unusual achievement, or how that achievement goes about getting done, I start thinking “well those are pretty unambiguously good achievements, but they’re also pretty male.”

That’s because there’s another element to heroism, which is where it interacts with social values, and gives us a mythology about what we should care about achieving. If we tell stories that laud a person for being unusually sacrificial, then we’re communicating that selflessness is a value of our community. Even when a story isn’t explicitly or intentionally communicating information about what is socially and morally good, we can retro-engineer a lot from the text to determine what its underlying values are.

While stories in general can be about any number of things beyond telling the reader what kind of person they should be (thank goodness), it’s important to remember that the genre of hero stories really is fundamentally about what makes a remarkable and laudable human. Even when a character is simply coded as a protagonist, hero stories have primed us to expect, justified or not, to learn something about what it means to be a good human from that character. So while I don’t want to go down some alarmist road that ends with “exposing children to Harry Potter means they will become Satanists,” and as obvious to the point of pedantic this might sound, the whole point of heroes is that we admire and emulate them, and it’s worth talking about what the consequences of being told we should emulate some trait actually are.

So to bring this back to the Heroine’s Journey, if we look at something like the Odyssey, we have two different kinds of heroes: Odysseus and Penelope. Odysseus is a pretty Campbellian hero. He leaves home, he does deeds, and returns home, having earned some kind of mantle of authority. Penelope, on the other hand, is left at home with the challenge of figuring out what to do with herself. She waits for Odysseus and she fends off a series of suitors. In the story itself she isn’t as perfectly virtuous as she’s made out to be by various pro-chastity ideologues. But she does, nonetheless, “achieve something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience” if you care about achieving fidelity. But this is a very different kind of heroism.

The Heroine’s Journey is about learning to suffer, endure, and be subjected to indignity while maintaining grace, composure, and patience. While most heroic stories involve some element of perseverance and strength of will, what makes Heroine’s Journey stories different is that a heroine’s perseverance is tested not to see whether she can persevere to achieve a separate goal, but rather simply to see if she can persevere, period. When you lay it out like that, it’s pretty hard to see the Heroine’s Journey as fundamentally heroic, to which I say: well yeah.

I suppose I’m interested in the Heroine’s Journey because I’m interested in the cognitive dissonances women experience; what creates them, what the consequences of them are, and what to do about them. In Heroine’s Journey stories, for example, women are told that their entire social role and contribution to society is contingent on them being really really good at being graceful martyrs. Yet at the same time, women are told that being a martyr is a weak thing to be; ie, the opposite of heroism. And even without being told that, most women can figure out in their heads that the Heroine’s Journey 1) doesn’t feel good and 2) is flawed heroism.

So the story of the Heroine’s Journey, the meta-Heroine’s Journey, if you will, is the story of being told a dissonant truth, and then attempting to disentangle it. In order to chart that story, we need to look at both the original, traditional Heroine’s Journey and then the modern Heroine’s Journey, troubled in its own way, that developed as a result of grappling with the traditional one.

The traditional Heroine’s Journey goes something like this:

The heroine is yet undeveloped. She may be wild and undignified, she may be mild and unremarkable, or she may be seemingly already virtuous.

Her worth is threatened. That is, her ability to persevere is threatened. The threat may be an assault on her virtue, an undignified circumstance, or random misfortune.

She endures, gracefully. She suffers, but her dignity isn’t undermined. If anything, her dignity is antifragile, she becomes more dignified the more she suffers.  Her perseverance then makes her previously undefined nature snap into place. Her dignity gives her strength.

Thankfully, it’s not 1850 anymore. The modern Heroine’s Journey is more like:

The heroine is yet undeveloped. She is often highly confused about where virtue is located.

Her dignity, composure and grace, ie, her worth in the “traditional” sense are threatened. Additionally, and perversely, her ability to defend traditional worth is tested.

She proves her value by either transcending or invalidating the test (“fuck it, this is a bad metric”) — or by transcending/invalidating the test, but stillpassing it (“having it all”). The modern Heroine’s Journey is about defining one’s worth anew.

A traditional Heroine’s Journey looks like the women from Les Miserables: the rejected Eponine, the destitute Fantine. Cosette never seems like much of a hero, but she certainly starts out from rags. The Victorian era was probably the height of the Heroine’s Journey, and you can see it in things like Dracula. As many horror stories would go on to mimic, two women, Mina and Lucy, are tested with seduction, but only the former resists and therefore gets to survive for her trouble. Jane Austen’s women teeter on the edge between the traditional and modern journey, each tasked with seeing through the cads and settling on the moral, pragmatic partner. Once you know this narrative, you see it in all kinds of romance stories: the triumphant woman is the one who rises above (or outsmarts) the men who would degrade her.

The modern heroine looks like Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, a movie that pulls indignity rugs out from under its protagonist for two hours. She lost her business! Her ego is dependent on a guy who makes her hate herself! Her friend has a new best friend, one who’s richer, prettier and thinner! The movie is not so much critical as lovingly satirical towards female preoccupation with indignity, coming to the conclusion “indignity is bad, but not so bad in the end.” The modern heroine also looks like Sylvia Plath, who has both become a symbol of female suffering (trite, traditional), and of an interpreter of suffering that is female in a human sense. She is a symbol, in other words, of not wearing suffering easily, or of having suffering that is serious and legitimate. The modern Heroine’s Journey has no better description than Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which describes contemporary women as “post-wounded.” The post-wounded woman is one who is never suffering in the present, but is instead always contextualizing and nervously proving ownership over that suffering. Jamison’s piece is one of the best (and perhaps only) articulations of the Heroine’s Journey, and I will continue to refer to it.

How did we get from the traditional to the modern? And where do we go afterwards?

You could argue, perhaps, that maybe there was a time in which Heroine’s Journey values were once constructive. Say, stability and self-sacrifice are good for childrearing; female work frees up men to be creative/accomplished; it’s to an oppressive group’s advantage to feed the oppressed group a heroic narrative about grunt work, shame, and putting up with crap.

But regardless of why, precisely, Heroine’s Journey values became socially useful, it’s clear that they became less useful over time. Increasing wealth, public health, safety and opportunity meant that whatever division-of-labor benefits enforced gender roles might have had, both women and men could suddenly not participate in various “duties” and they and human civilization would still survive. Such upheaval necessitates a series of grappling questions.

1. “Does this quality I’m told is good actually contribute to human flourishing?”

Stage one is destructive. It tends to involve a certain amount of hatred, either directed inward, or directed by one against another. Stage one amounts to smashing a social value, and smashing is usually crude. Smashing is like a person pacing back and forth and muttering “This thing is WRONG. I don’t know quite what it IS or what it MEANS but I know that it is WRONG.”

In practice, stage one is mostly torture porn. I’m thinking about Andy Kaufmann’s tape Andy and His Grandmother, which (as described in a Grantland article) made an art form of ribbing women. His questions sound almost earnestly direct, but because women are unaccustomed to responding to such directness, and he knows it (or else he wouldn’t make comedy of it) there is something disingenuously torturous about them as well.

Though I’ll say more in a second about why horror is actually one of the best genres for women, the reason that people can look askance at that idea, is because a lot of the time, for a long time, anti-female-composure stories have been for the amusement of people (largely men) who want to punish women. Take a hot girl, who thinks she’s hot shit, and put her through hell–that will teach you to be hot!!! Horror is catharsis, and it makes some sense to me that it would be a realm of catharsis, however essentially misogynistic, for sexual rejection and desire. When I described this piece to a friend, he replied: “So isn’t like 90% of porn the Heroine’s Journey then?” Well…perhaps so. If the graceful negotiation of composure and things that threaten composure is the essence of female value, and fetishes originate in the secret and taboo, then well, of course the destruction of female composure would become deeply, repeatedly fetishized.

The potentially brutal treatment of women in stories is also complicated by the idea that the way men become symbols for corrupt authority, women become symbols for corrupt social values and contracts. When you smash one of them in a story, often enough that’s what you’re symbolically smashing. But I think it would be disingenuous to say that all virulence directed at female characters is simply thematically motivated.

So that’s two kinds of composure-destruction by men. But you’ll notice that early female comedians got their start by challenging femininity too, people like Lucille Ball (who juxtaposed the ideals of homemaking with relentless physical and situational indignity) and Joan Rivers, people that were willing to look ridiculous and self-deprecating (“A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she’s a tramp.”).  That’s because comedy comes from the same place as horror, that place of essential fears and need for catharsis. Was there any other place for female comedy to go? Lucille Ball took a lovingly destructive angle, one that’s maybe more stage three (below) than one. As for Joan Rivers, I don’t know if she ever liked being a woman much, but she was good at hating herself for it. And laughing, more importantly, at the ridiculousness of that hatred. This strain in female comedy has stuck around: think of Liz Lemon under a blanket eating cheese or Amy Schumer’s “I’m a sad slut” schtick.

2. “If it doesn’t, or if I could better contribute in another way, then do I care about having status in a hierarchy that says it does?” (“Do I really care about human flourishing?”)

Female comedy verges into stage two. Stage two is conflict. Stage two stories aren’t made by people that want to punish women/society, they’re composure stories made (usually) by women and for women in order to grapple, rather, with the fear of punishment. Imagine our muttering person suddenly standing up and shouting “I DON’T care about the hierarchy. I’ll do what I LIKE.” Defiance. And then imagine them becoming fearful. “Doing what I like has the best chance of making everyone happy right? So why do I feel miserable? Wasn’t misery the trope I was trying to destroy?”

Bridesmaids (which had the honor of newly convincing us that women can be funny), again, is this. Girls traffics in it as well, as Leslie Jamison describes:

“These days we have a TV show called Girls, about young women who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-​pity structures their lives. ‘You’re a big, ugly wound!’ one yells. The other yells back: ‘No, you’re the wound!’ And so they volley, back and forth: You’re the wound; no, you’re the wound. They know women like to claim monopolies on woundedness, and they call each other out on it.”

Girls, both the characters and the writing itself, are stabbing at being crass, at being superficially elegant, and at being “transcendent,” and seeing what will stick. Girls gets at that intersection of feeling a duty to exorcise fears of being gross, but still wanting to be liked and wanted, and also thinking both of those are such small and unimportant goals in the end.

Caroline Knapp’s famous anorexia memoir Appetites uses the framework of disordered eating to discuss the female relationship to pleasure, denial, and suffering in general. Knapp sums up the twisted heroism of self-denial early on: “Other women might struggle with hunger; I could transcend it”; as in, become more than human in the classic Campbell-ian sense. Because glorifying suffering is seen as poisonous, having control over that suffering feels good, even though it also creates further suffering. Appetites represents how women struggle just before they realize they must “man up.” Writes Jamison: “We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them.”

People like Beyonce because she is a fantasy of stage two being resolved. Her persona is a fantasy of being sexual/human/regal and yet she feels beyond “having it all” even though she does, in fact, have it all. That’s because Beyonce is charismatic and that is how charismatic people make you feel (liked and okay!), but it is significant that the thing she makes you feel okay about is this modern quandary. You feel permission to partake in the resolution her persona offers. You don’t feel competitive with Beyonce.

Stage two is also where intersectionality becomes thematically salient. The dilemmas of the Heroine’s Journey universalize fairly well, but people (including women) participate in more than one social hierarchy at any given time. It might be hard to justify suffering for the sake of itself, but suffering for the sake of justiceis pretty much the easiest thing to justify there is. The details of one woman’s dilemma will not be the same as another’s; her suffering has different origins and flavors.

3. “If I do care about human flourishing, and I’m going the wrong way about it, then what do I do about that?”

So what do post-Heroine’s Journey stories look like? Stage three is constructive. As Jamison asks “How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship?” There have been many many stories about women throughout the history of stories that have been much more complex than the Heroine’s Journey, stories where female agency and/or grossness aren’t questioned (I think about classic female “trickster” stories like Scheherazade)…yet as Jamison’s piece and Appetites and all the works I’ve referenced so far demonstrate, somehow the Heroine’s Journey’s values still seem to underlie the choices of women constantly. What this means is that if a story with and about women and heroism doesn’t somehow admit the fear of loss of composure or come to grips with it or feel some way about it, I sometimes wonder if it’s about women at all. Moreover, that task in the third stage of the modern Heroine’s Journey, the task of defining worth, is huge and fascinating. And it is under-utilized.

In a great interview on Playing D&D with Porn Stars, Sarah Horrocks explains why, perhaps unexpectedly, the horror genre is actually one of the greatest genres for female heroism.

“S: Getting pushed to your limits, to the point of hysteria, but still surviving—that you’ve taken this huge weight of the world on you, and like Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’re covered in blood and screaming and laughing—but you’ve somehow come out on top.  I don’t think other genres allow women to be strong, tough, and vulnerable in this way. And I mean there’s just way more movies in the horror genre where the perspective is that of a woman’s.  The slasher flick is not through the killer’s point of view after all, it’s through the woman’s.”

In other words, there’s no room for composure in horror movies. Which means that in them, a female character has the opportunity to be immediately exempt from having to prove that she is some conventional version of dignified in order to be heroic, and is instead forced to admit what she’s made of when that’s stripped away and no one’s looking.

One of the reasons I adore Lyra’s heroic journey in His Dark Materials, is that in spite of it being a very Campbell-style story (mysterious origins, a call to adventure, ad nauseum), Lyra’s girl-ness remains inherent throughout. One of the main arcs of the book begins with her being suspicious of femininity and only trusting male figureheads, and concludes with her accepting that she values wisdom, that the acquisition of wisdom is slow and difficult and that the unflashy female wisdom-seekers she once derided have things to teach her. We don’t want our heroes to be blandly competent, we want them to exist in the same world of difficulty that we exist in, so that they may give us a map for dealing with it. Lyra doesn’t do the Heroine’s Journey, exactly, but perhaps more importantly: she resolves it.

Understanding the Heroine’s Journey is not a replacement for or an improvement on the general writing prescription to “just write women like people.” It’s a hopefully helpful explanation, rather, of one (very important, complex) element of female people-hood. If you want to talk about how a person grapples with their society, look to the cognitive dissonance produced by what society tells them is heroic.

Thanks to Gabriel Duquette for his help in developing some of the ideas in this piece.