#but maybe other women do feel femininity. what sort of fucking emotional is gender. my god this is so stupid

[raubtierfuetterung]

…

​but the thing is. I feel like many strange gendered people are actually just running away from the pressure of silly gender roles, weird stigma and prejudices that have been tied to their biological sex for some reason. Not that I care if people feel emotional connection with their genitalia, in fact: I do not want to know any details about this!

Still, I think there is a reason to talk about the sexes and sexism! Many women are discriminated against because of the body they have been born in(to), because of the wacky social status that comes with their biological sex.

The goal is to make someone’s genitalia irrelevant in almost all circumstances. And not invent yourself a new gender because you oh wonder oh wonder don’t fulfill all nonsensical “gender” clichés.

[scrawnytreedemon]

Shit I’ve Been Winding Up For A Long Time Now But Am Very Aware Will Probably Hold No Relevance Should I Actually Go Into This More--

This is about Bhunivelze.

I.

You know, when I was chilling out, on my bed, that evening on that half term in early June, deciding to check up on ClementJ64′s FF retrospective because-- Hey! It’s been awhile, I wonder if he’s got around to doing the final bit of the FFXIII saga --You know, I was there, chilling, just for a laff. Just a laff.

The rest of that week was spent spiralling into a hyperfixation I absolutely did not anticipate in any way, shape, or form, because the way they introduced that character was “wwhdhfjjhHJDFJKHKJHW H A T??”

That retrospective and a good amount of wiki-scrounging is all I have as a basis for this. This is not a coherent character analysis-- Though I might tag it as that for ease of access. This is not, by any means, the thoughts of someone deeply familiar with FFXIII on the whole beyond plot synopses and overarching themes.

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.

Reading the vast yet surface-deep lore on those wiki pages on my birthday while in a delirious state of mind was enough to make me somewhat nauseous.

Do you think I’m going to go through all of that in real time?

(Someday, someday.)

Ugh, I don’t know how to begin, but let us, I guess. I’d recommend you read this church-mime-demiurge’s FF Wiki page if you want the same level of base-knowledge I had, and maybe the aformentioned retrospective if you want the experience, because I don’t think I have the wherewithal to get into all of that from the bottom-up.

I am also, so, so fucking sorry for any remaining FFXIII fans in advance. There is like, a good chance I may be butchering the characterisation completely, so bear with me here.

With that... we begin?

Where do we even start with this guy?

How on earth to you begin to explain the absolute monolith you’ve constructed from crumbs of a Guy, some material no doubt spliced in from the Pale King, Sephiroth, y o u r  o w n  G o d  O C and other characters, and the mountains of religious trauma you carry around at all times that is probably the only reason you’ve been able to latch on as hard as you did?

I’m going to try.

What gets me, in summary, about Bhunivelze is how he’s a prime example of how love and concern can become deadly forces if in the wrong hands. His first acquainting with human emotion was by deceiving and possessing Hope, reverting his body to a teenage state, and planning to live among humanity through him. He sees human sorrow and suffering, and decides that, to End This(because it must be ended, you see) he’s going to destroy all the souls of the deceased that make up the Chaos that’s been eating this world for the past five-hundred years so they all forget and Are Happy. :).

Capital G God here hasn’t been present for the vast part of human history because he’s hidden himself away from Everything due to paranoia from killing his own mother and throwing her body into the Cosmic Basement, THEN creating the beings that would come to create humanity and OTHER beings because he didn’t have the keys to the cosmic basement. And also he believes death is a thing because she’d’ve somehow cursed all things to pass(including him) out of Spite.

Which explains why he’s so fucking averse to it and anything to do with it.

Bhunivelze, to put it lightly, is Shit at stepping into others’ shoes and Getting their experiences-- All the FalCie in FFXIII are, but him especially. It’s clear(again, in the f u c k i n g JP--) that he makes attempts to sympathise with them and does what he can to help, but it’s with such a loftiness and a complete inability to Understand why anyone would want grief, The Worst Fucking Experience In Existence, and even less why they’d be willing to Go Up Against Him And HisThe New Perfect World just for it-- And what would it matter, anyway, forgetting their loved ones. It’s not like you can grieve lost memories, right?

Right.

It reminds me of when at the end of the story of Job in the Bible, where, after putting this man through hell on earth, God rewards Job by giving him ten new children to make up for the ones that he lost. I. And that’s fucked! Nothing can replace the sheer uniqueness of each individual person you loved so dearly! But if you were a nigh-omnipotent deity high and mighty, with a cursory, almost mechanical knowledge on the functionings of the human psyche, that would seem adequete; enough.

Bhunivelze is doing that on a cosmic level.

I now want to get onto the romance: that being, his affections for Lightning. I don’t know how much I’m going to say, but it’ll probably be alot. It’s something that hits very close to home.

There is this... thing, within certain branches of Christianity, perhaps even in those of various Abrahamic faiths, where God’s love is posited to be the love-- The ultimate, most-fulfilling, all-encompassing love you could ever imagine --Because, well, he is love, so the story goes, and so often the best way to convey that is through the imagery of...

Marriage.

Giving up yourself so completely, to serve, to be the Bride; to be bound by him for all eternity; and for there to be no higher bliss than this.

This angle is pushed on young girls and women the most; from the mere parallels to the woman’s role in marriage, all the way down to downright-horrifying ultra-Evangelical purity pacts. With men, God is your dad, your best bud and confidant, your boss, your king, your this, your that, and the ‘marriage‘ as it were is relegated to a sort of half-thought; a metaphor.

For me, God was an attempt at all that, and my arranged groom.

(It was almost incestuous; was incestuous, that my own Divine Father would reach for my hand in marriage.)

Bhunivelze experiences Emotions™ for the first time through Hope, experiences Hope’s sheer overwhelming admiration for Lighting(whether there were any baby-crush feelings mixed in, I can’t say), and promptly falls into a nigh-romantic obsession with Lightning, deciding that she will be Etro(his all-but daughter)’s replacement, will be his Goddess of Death to-be-- He even calls her as such, before the final boss-battle--

...In the JP.

What happened in localisation, probably due to a number of factors, all the way back in early 2014, was that everything emotionally challenging about Bhunivelze was scraped off, like it was extra fat, and tossed aside, leaving us with the bland, clichéd shell of a foe-god we’ve seen time and time again. And I mean everything. I mean his very love for humanity; the fact his ploy was, in his eyes, to save them. Because if they’d left that all on, then it would raise the question of even if there was such a seemingly pure, all-knowing, loving being hell-bent on setting things “straight,“ would they truly be unquestionable? Would we have the right to fight for our humanity in the face of the Creator of the Universe?

To reject a love so personal?

That’s what gets me about FFXIII’s tackling of God, no matter how hackneyed and poorly-executed. It’s personal.

It’s from a feminine experience.

I know that terming is... vague, and problematic, but the way Christianity and much of the video game industry handle femininity itself is weird and problematic, so as it stands, I’ll have to simplify it. Apologies.

What sets FFXIII’s Let’s Kill God™ plot aside from most JRPG Let’s Kill God™ plots is that with our protagonist being a woman, and one who is very in touch with her femininity alongside her sheer strength; often, in these stories, God is reduced to Yet Another Foe, expected or unexpected, and you are tasked with taking him down unquestioningly for the Good of Mankind-- You will fight God, because you are right to, and you will go man-to-man-to-however-many-men you decide to bring along for the bloodbath.

And that just, doesn’t speak to me.

Even as an Extian.

Especially as an Extian. And an AFAB one with a deeply complicated experience with my gender, at that.

Leaving Christianity was painful. Questioning God was painful. Coming to terms with the fact that I had been mentally, emotionally, and spiritually traumatised under the guise of All-Encompassing Love was so, so fucking painful. I had been taught since I was five years old to devote myself to him, spent my life desperate to feel something, anything, to stay connected because I just, I never could Feel It on a deeper level, never could Give Up Myself, all I was, couldn’t Die A Spiritual Death And Be Reborn As His Eager Vessel, thus deeming myself to be worthless and a broken vessel for years and years on end... And for all that to have been... Nothing.

Lightning is hollowed out, the shards of her dead sister ripped from her in-stasis, leaving her emotionally numb for the majority of the game, Bhunivelze sweeps it under the rug, pretends he’ll perform a miracle and return Serah to life in exchange for her compliance, then sends her on her way to do his work, all the while knowing he’s going to pull said-rug from under her and elevate her such dizzying heights in the aftermath--

That he’ll deny her humanity.

Sand down all the rough edges that make her her, and polish her up afterwards, gild her as he is gilded, make her a Goddess.

And he’ll do it all because he loves her.

You can’t fight God like you can everything else. To fight It is the fight Existence Itself; FFXIII even conveys that by making Bhunivelze’s model part of the arena; it’s baked into the fabric of the game, no matter how minute.

While Lightning Returns is far from perfect in its execution of this concept, and that in itself makes me wince, not even taking into account the horribly botched excuse for a localisation Bhunivelze endured, it speaks to me more than anything else I’ve seen so far.

And it’s helped uncover some things within me. Helped me untangle them, just a little more.

So, yeah. I have alot of Thoughts on Bhunivelze, I want to share them, and I’m kinda really sad I have no one but my currently-absent friend Vee to share them with. I could get into alot more, like his very Fucked relationship with familial bonds, and how Lightning’s role as saviour so deeply parallels the overwhelming panic and never-ending guilt of Evangelical proselytisation, but I think I’ll leave those for another time.

In short, Bhunivelze is the epitome of Divine Love gone deeply wrong; on all fronts.

And if all of that isn’t enough to intrigue you, then, in Vee’s words, Lightning and Velze are literally canon endgame Sefikura lmaOOOOOOOOOOOOOO--

[whentherewerebicycles]

wow okay i am skipping the lingerie party lol and am instead going to just briefly jot down some thoughts before i go to sleep and wake up at 5 for my flight tomorrow morning. jesus christ i have ONE MILLION thoughts and feelings about this weekend. i want to preface this by saying that on the whole, it was a fine social experience! it was nowhere near as awkward or painful as i was expecting. or like, parts of it were painful, but it was 100% to do with my own complicated feelings about literally every part of this tradition and the wedding industry in general lol, and not anything to do with the people themselves. the other women were friendly and very welcoming, i made an event best friend who was wonderful company, and it was really fun to get to spend time with both my sister-in-law and her older sister, who was so charming and wonderful. i’m glad i came even though thinking about the $$ i spent on this trip makes me physically gag.

but okay i want to just record some THOUGHTS that maybe i will continue unpacking with some distance. i feel likeeeee okay here are my thoughts.

the social norms around femininity are just a fucking minefield and i feel like i really just gotta keep walking back the impulse to judge other women for the choices they make as they navigate around the manifold traps and snares and half-buried landmines that constitute the landscape of being a woman. like jesus christ. it’s so fucked up, it’s so fucked up, the received and socially enforced norms of femininity are just so fucked up. I think ALL THE FUCKING TIME of this margaret atwood poem i love so much, which was REALLY on my mind this weekend:

How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her?

I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I feel like the first bit was very much on my mind throughout the weekend, but those last three lines have come to the forefront over the course of this last day, as i have tried to do some Thinking about what i observed/experienced/felt this weekend. whether or not this is what it means in the context of the poem, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it, expresses something of my complex feelings: I don’t know that I can tell the truth about femininity because I don’t know that I can see it. i am both too close to it/still emotionally entangled in it and too far from it to know which parts of it are ‘real’ and which parts are just performance.

i feel like one thing that struck me this weekend, in ways that i don’t know if i’ve noticed as much before, was that so much of the things women say to each other or do in these social contexts is performative, and they know on some level it’s a performance, but we are all going through the motions of doing and saying the expected things anyway. that has not always been clear to me. i have spent so much of my own life as a woman thinking that other women perfectly, seamlessly, naturally embodied the norms of femininity, and i was the only one (or part of a group of only ones) who couldn’t remember my lines, or kept fumbling my cues, or felt so painfully, self-consciously aware that i was playing a role that i could never deliver a convincing performance. but this weekend, after the initial social panic had passed, i started trying to get out of my own head a little bit and look for things that disproved the very strong theory i had brought into the weekend. and of course then i started seeing more and more of the little moments where women say one thing and do another, or profess one belief/conviction but then the whole corpus of their lived experiences and choices contradicts that stated belief, or whatever. and also just like, moments of pathos, where someone i had judged harshly at the beginning of the weekend offhandedly revealed something about her past that really changed my perception of her, or at least made me think like, ah god, i have to have empathy for and with this person, because i think she might be a complex person just like me, with an intricate inner life that her performance partially reveals and partially occludes from view, and agh, it sucks to have to think of people as complicated instead of as safely two-dimensional & easy to dismiss, and the reason it sucks is because then it forces you to realize that you share more with this person than you’d like to admit, and that some of your wounds are the same, even if you dealt with those wounds (the wounds of girlhood, or rather the emotional wounds that our culture inflicts upon girls, which then become tangled up in complex and painful ways with the lived experience of girlhood itself) in really different ways.

but also ugh. we are all performing gender norms but there is just something that does not feel playful at all about embodying conventional femininity. i can’t think of a better way to phrase that right now but it’s like.. the performance isn’t fun. it doesn’t seem to be fun. i don’t know that anyone here was having fun doing it, even if they were having fun being with each other. but it was like doing the intensely gendered social rituals was like, the price of admission? like it was the toll we had to pay to be together spending time in the company of other women? i don’t know man but it fucking exhausts me. like i can push myself to stretch my genuine empathy and sense of solidarity with other women much further than my knee-jerk judgmental reaction, but i can’t ever get to a place where i find any of those social rituals anything other than fucking exhausting. they feel so fucking joyless. they feel like things that many women have internalized as ‘things we must do in order to have relationships with other women.’ (please do not even get me started on how exhausting heteronormativity is i think i could write an entire other essay on how women use these bachelorette party-type rituals to spend time with their closest female friends, but the whole event is still implicitly organized around men, and these women’s male partners are still positioned as the priority in their lives, and the whole event is framed as like, a last burst of intense closeness between women before the bride is delivered over to her husband. like i KNOW that this is not how women think of it but all the RHETORIC of the bachelorette party, the little events and rituals and games, the little comments everyone makes all fucking weekend, good fucking lord, my jaw is so TENSE.)

anyway god i just AGHHHH. idk sorry this is definitely not coherent at ALL because i’m tired and still need a bit more distance/time to process some of this. i guess here is one last thing i want to register before i sleep. i am in my 30s now and i am living a life that is so, so far removed from the social world i grew up in. marriage is not a norm among my friend group, almost all of my female friends are queer women, many women i know are not partnered and have no interest in being partnered, and the friends who are in heterosexual relationships tend to be in very gender-balanced relationships or slightly nontraditional relationships where it feels like both partners have engaged in conscious reflection about what they want their relationship to look/feel like. also i now date women, am out as a lesbian, and spend most of my time teaching/working with queer- and trans/nonbinary-identified kids.

so like, the world i live in now is just so different from the world i grew up in. and sometimes it is easy for me to kind of downplay the intensity of my own gender distress as a teen and young adult, or to sort of - act like it was a phase in my life that had much more to do with me than with the social environment i lived in. i don’t mean ‘phase’ in a dismissive ‘those feelings weren’t real’ kind way, but more like, ‘oh that was just part of the normal growing pains of figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be as an adult - everybody pretty much goes through some version of that.’ it’s true that everyone DOES go through some version of that, as just like, part of the process of individuation in that age range. but also like. idk man. being back in this environment - straight white women from the midwest and south, all engaging in the rituals of heterosexual white femininity - was just so intense and so MUCH, and it brought back a flood of feelings and visceral memories that i feel like i will need to spend some time sorting through over the next few weeks. like, what i experienced back then really WAS gender distress, and it was so, so distressing. i spent the years from age 11ish to 24ish existing with this constant lowgrade baseline feeling of wanting to claw my own fucking skin off because my own gendered body felt like such a prison, and i sometimes felt like i literally wanted to destroy my own body because i could not yet conceive of an alternative to inhabiting that body or playing the role that had been handed down to me. until i started reading queer memoirs and inhaling lesbian media and (especially) reading about queer femme identities, i literally did not have an image or any kind of felt sense of what another way of inhabiting my own body might look/feel like. i literally could not imagine it!!!

and that is why the distress feels so distressing, and becomes internalized in such violent ways, i think. because it’s the blind, mindless panic of a trapped and wounded animal. except that you lack any real understanding of the larger social forces at work, or any language with which to describe or conceptualize what social norms are or how they’re enforced. so in your mind, the only thing you can see wounding you is your own gendered body, or the way that gendered body is socially 'read’ by others. and that is why you want to claw your own fucking skin off, just literally dig your nails into your own flesh and claw it the fuck off. because you can’t see a norm, but you can see your gendered body, and you can see the ways that it causes other people to react to you, or treat you, or hold you to a certain set of expectations, and so in your mind you are like: this must be destroyed. in your mind you are like, the only way out is to get out of this fucking body, but that’s impossible, surely, you can’t get out of your own body, so you have to settle for starving it and self-harming it and ruthlessly punishing it in a thousand terrible ways, because you might not be able to leave your girl’s body behind, but you can make it suffer and pay for what it’s done to you. 

i am old enough now, and have spent enough time thinking and writing about those feelings, to identify them when they arise again, and to get the necessary distance from them so that i can say, what i want to destroy are the norms themselves, and the distress they cause, and not the body that has done nothing to me but be me. so i am not quite as sucked under as i used to be. but i think that there is something about the violence and intensity of those feelings that i forget sometimes, or misremember with age and distance. it’s easy to be a little bit patronizing to my younger self (or by extension to my younger students sometimes), because i now live in a social world that is largely arranged in ways that minimize rather than intensify or amplify gender distress. but when you have no choice in how to arrange your life, and no language with which to understand what is happening to you or what you are experiencing, and no frame of reference to help you understand that this is a period in your life and not forever, and no models you can look to in order to discover alternative ways of inhabiting your body or arranging your life... my god, that’s quite different from being an adult with a wide range of experiences and with much greater autonomy over your own body and life. anyway idk i need to keep thinking but now i must go to bed and try to sleep five hours before the plane.

[vivithefolle]

What are your favourite fanfic tropes/aus for romione?

(I’m gonna try to make my way through old asks I received AGES ago and never answered because I’m a procrastinating lump. Here’s betting I’m going to give up and play videogames all day instead.)

Oh my god, so many.

Okay so as a rule of thumb as long as it’s nice to Ron I’ll read it. I’ll read anything. I have been known to read Ron/Draco and even sacrificed my dignity and everything I stand for as a human being by reading some Ron/Snape stuff. Yes. I was THAT desperate. This is how low I’m willing to go because of sheer love for Ron.

Which means that when a fic will go “oh poor Hermione, poor Hermione who is waiting for Ron to grow up because She can see one day he could be worth it but for now he’s all dumb-dumb and inferior and doesn’t deserve Her perfection :(”, I will be judging. Judging very hard. I may not leave a comment but rest assured, my thoughts are loud enough for me. This is 2010s mentality. This is “haha I’m so like Hermione, not like other girls who throw themselves at boys, I’m so special and girl powery :)” Horribly Bad Feminism. Fuck that. We’re doing better now.

Speaking of doing better. Recently I read something about how Ron is, paraphrased, “the brute of the Trio”, spun in a positive way since he uses his strength to protect them but, but, still... please no? Just no! Just eff no with these takes about how Ron is a hypermasculine dudebro M For Manly™! No, no, fucking no! Just because he’s the Sulfur to Hermione’s Mercury and Sulfur represents the masculine component to Mercury’s feminine one, DOESN’T MEAN Ron is “the brute”! (”the” brute... seriously... who’s the more brutish one, the one who punches a racist in the face or the one who uses a torture curse as retribution for spitting on his fave teacher?)

The way I see him, Ron is a balance, a blend of feminine and masculine qualities intertwined close together. I LOVE that he can swear like a sailor but can only say “scarlet woman” or “cow” when it comes to insulting a woman. Some will probably see it as “hurr durr he sexist he doesnt think women can take it!!!!!!! >8C” but given that those are probably also the peeps who say “HE CALLE D HERMOANI A NIGHTMURRR!!!!!!! DDDDD8″ I’m gonna venture the idea that we don’t care about those folks’ biased, sexist opinions.

Where was I going with this... oh yes! Ok, so Ron can swear like a sailor yet couldn’t insult a girl to save his life. He’s strong physically but most of all he’s strong mentally (to put up with the way his friends treat him for years speaks a lot of his mental fortitude... and to top it off he comes back for more to boot! I’m not sure if that’s more mental fortitude or straight-up masochism though.) When he succeeds at things he gets a bit attention-whoreish but at the same time, you can see that when he’s being complimented he’s all unsure of himself and blushy and shy and you just, dude you can’t handle positive attention because you don’t know how to react to it I don’t know whether that’s adorable or the saddest thing I’ve seen in my life? He’s insecure but he’s always the first to cheer on Harry and Hermione when they’re doing something great, which speaks VOLUMES of Ron’s selflessness and of his actual character: to quote @peetamaellark​, Ron doesn’t think “Harry is great, therefore he sucks and I hate him”, he thinks “Harry is great, therefore I suck and I hate me”. THIS is Ron. THIS is why Ron will lash out, not because he hates Harry, but because internally he hates himself and you can’t keep that sort of feeling bottled up for too long before... you got it, you explode.

I. Want. More. Fics where Hermione isn’t this ~oh dear~ Victorian damsel in distress who cries and Ron is the Big Strong Man who holds her with one arm and is stony-faced and goes “I’ll protect you”, please no that was old before it existed, let us have nice, realistic depictions of Ron and Hermione please.

Like, Hermione is more than capable of kicking butt herself. She IS absolutely nervous and scared and cries easily and that’s a vulnerability we NEED, but the fact that she can be super scared and crying but still hex her opponent into oblivion? THAT’s good, THAT’s excellent. It’s a very important message for girls, I think. “You can cry, you can be sensitive, you can be emotional, AND you can still kick butt”. And as important as that message is for girls, it’s also a very important message to give boys, because boys are socialized to “never cry” and that’s super unhealthy. I love Ron’s admiration of Hermione. I love the way Ron hesitates, the way he can be cautious when he needs to as much as he can be reckless and impulsive. I love how he shows himself to be a big softie and a sweet soul. I don’t think that makes him an “emasculated doormat” (to quote a guest I once saw on FFN), on the contrary it makes him an even better man in my eyes. You know why I love the locket scene so much? Because Ron’s tears aren’t ridiculed. Ron gets to cry about the terrible ordeal he’s been put through, and while Harry “pretends he can’t see Ron cry” because it’s more comfortable for him personally, he doesn’t try to tell Ron to “man up” or anything. His reassurance is pretty lousy but he lets Ron cry, he lets his friend be upset, and he doesn’t try to invalidate Ron’s pain. (ok, the “I thought you knew” is kiiiiinda on the way there, but it stops at that and I’m grateful for it).

I like. Seeing Ron distressed. I like seeing Ron upset and be allowed to be upset. I like to see Ron’s pain treated with respect. So when Ron is having a shit day I like to see him get a cuddle. I like seeing Ron go through horrible ordeals and break down and for his breakdown to be properly acknowledged and not turned into insensitive comic relief (ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LATTER HALF OF THE SILVER DOE????). I mean seriously, just imagine GOF, Harry sitting in the hospital wing after Cedric’s death, Molly Weasley gives him a hug and it’s all very sad and angsty. And now picture Ginny running into the room screaming “HARRY JAMES POTTER” and punching him over and over and saying “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER MAN, PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER” then after two pages of Harry “explaining” himself to Ginny she goes away saying “aight but if you do that shit again you’ll have to answer to me” then Harry’s friends are like “damn she’s spunky huh?” and Harry laughs and everyone laughs and this is how the book ends? How would it be funny? How would it be appropriate? How would it feel like “romance”? When Ron returns in The Silver Doe, he’s been psychologically tortured (”tortured” is the actual word JKR uses, please), we don’t need him to be hurting outside as well.

I want more accountability for Hermione. More “uh hey Hermione maybe don’t do that”. More “hey Hermione you know you think of yourself as a good person buuuut yeah actually if all good persons were like you I’d be very afraid”. More “Hermione please for the love of God educate yourself”. More “Hermione sweetie I love you, but you can’t actually learn everything from books”. CHARACTER. DEVELOPMENT. PLEASE. Don’t be afraid to punch Hermione down and tear her apart the way the best Ron fics maim and torture our poor boy. Just because Rowling treated Hermione with kiddy princess gloves doesn’t mean you have to mimic her.

So when Hermione does a genuinely shitty thing let her own up to it. When Ron is a victim let him be upset and angry, even if Hermione is the one treating him badly. Just because he loves her doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to be disappointed in her or that she’s entitled to his immediate forgiveness. Give Ron and Hermione equal consideration. If you’re brushing off Hermione’s actions but condemning Ron for the slightest mistake, I am sure to hate it.

Okay, uh, so, those aren’t really tropes. Those are more just, guidelines I presume.

Oh, yeah, a trope that annoys me! Ron saying “you’re mine”, “my Hermione” and stuff, and Hermione just swoons and says “yours” and shiz. Ok, once in a while, why not. Once in a while. BUTT. I WANT HERMIONE TO SAY IT TOO. “Mine”, “my Ron!” and Ron swoons and says “yours, absolutely yours”. DO IT YOU COWARDS. FUCKING TAKE THOSE GENDER ROLES AND PUNCH’EM IN THE FACE.

Oh, right, while we’re on the subject of gender roles! Dad!Ron is everything. SingleParent!Ron is mwaaah. Stay-at-home-Dad!Ron is ALKZLDSJDLQSKLFJ <3. AnimalLover!Ron is HHHHNNNGG. Remember, the small gestures, the tiniest, softest acts Ron does (helping Harry get dressed when his arm is deboned, giving Dobby his brand-new sweater, praising Ginny, Luna and Neville when they escaped Umbridge), those are often those unremarkable, unmistakeably kind and sweet actions that tell us who Ron really is at his core: not a guy who’d want power at all costs, not a guy who’d give it all for ambition, not a guy who sees people as possessions, but someone kind who wants to make others happy.

Ok, I was also asked for AUs, so, uh, pretty much every AU is game as long as Ron gets treated with respect? I mean I don’t really care for Mafia!AUs or such but if you can find a way to fit good Romione then go for it I guess. Royalty AU, yeah why not but I often see Ron being made a prince while Hermione is a poor wee servant girl and like. Uuum, we’re talking about the same characters here? Hermione the highly educated girl who keeps on walking over everyone’s toes and loudly talking about how things should be done and is definitely Nouveau Riche, Ron who is a country boy who lives on a farm and is lost in the constant shuffle of his brothers, you think she should be the peasant and he should be the royal? Whaddafack? Oh, and all the “Hermione is a Muggle, Ron is a wizard” AUs that start this way BUTT! Suddenly... Hermione... turns out... to be (wait for it!)... A WITCH! And a super powerful super talented very good one too!!!... yeah ok, yawn. It’s quite scary, actually, how often I’ve seen that plotline, but in the rare cases when it’s Muggle!Ron and Witch!Hermione, Ron never ever EVER (I mean, seriously, NEVER EVER) turns out to have been a wizard, not even a mediocre one, all along. No, when Ron is made a Muggle for the sake of AU he stays a Muggle. But when Hermione is made a Muggle she has to turn out TO HAVE BEEN A WITCH ALL ALONG OMYGAH. I can count on one hand the number of Mugglemione/Wizardron fics that actually stick to their Mugglemione premise till the end - and usually they’re one-shots. (Also I don’t mean “Ron mistakes Hermione for a Muggle because he meets her in the Muggle world and assumes he must hide his magic from her, oh wait she was actually a witch!” fics, I mean genuinely “Hermione has been raised a Muggle her whole life, never had weird things happen to her her whole life ever, then Ron comes in and is a wizard and he does magic and Hermione wonders what it’d be like to be a witch and oh surprise! Don’t worry Hermione, you won’t have to feel not-special or mundane for long, here comes the plot contrivance to tell you you really were in fact the specialest of them all!!” fics.) Fairytale!AU is cool. Very good. But honestly I like to see them swapped around. Ron cursed by a nasty fae to be a Beast and Hermione stumbling upon him? Neat, especially if you don’t go the boring route of “oh let’s just rehash the Disney/the original book with different names and call it a day”. But Hermione cursed by an asshole fae for, let’s say, not sharing books, turning into a Beast, and Ron stumbling upon her as she’s trying to survive in the woods (and not doing a very good job of it)? Yes, brava, chief’s kiss. Rapunzel AU where Hermione’s bushy hair turns into the most impractical, most suffocating improvised ladder ever for Ron? Hilarious. Rapunzel AU where Ron has A GIANT EFFING PONYTAIL OF THE GODS and is screaming “ow ow ow” as Hermione makes her way up to his window cringing and saying “sorry! sorry! sorry! (damn his hair smells good)” on every step? Equally hilarious. Go! Be creative! Please I beg of you

Creature!fics! Oh my god there’s not enough of those, at least that aren’t focused on a bullshit pairing! Soulmate AUs! Give me everything! I’ll even take A/B/O if you insist on making it Romione! That’s how far I’ve fallen from human decency I’ll take anything just give me some good Ron content please I beg of you (Ah and to those that are going to say “Alpha Ron Omega Hermione :)))” well yes, but actually no. “Beta Ron Beta Hermione”? “Beta Ron Alpha Hermione”? “Omega Ron Alpha Hermione”??? HELL YEAH NOW WE’RE TALKIN)

Oh dear god I’m still not finished and I haven’t gone through everything someone stop me.

AND NOW BE CAREFUL CHILDREN, BELOW WILL BE SMUT.

Okay I don’t know if it qualifies as a trope, but. But. A more realistic depiction of Ron is usually what I’m after. All those fanfics that have Ron be “the sexy experienced one ;)))” ravishing “naive virginal Hermione ;))” is just UGH. We spent all the 2000-2010 period having fics like this, mind adding a bit of EQUALITY to the mix???

It’s just... I hate it okay? So many fics read like they’re just projection, writers who are essentially making Ron their big strong sex toy stud who's so attentive and sweet and cherishing, and so it does indirectly ends up as "servant Ron is so devoted to his goddess Hermione, providing pleasure to her while she doesn’t have to lift a finger”. The Dom!SexGod!Ron thing honestly depresses me... Since it's Ron taking care of Hermione, AGAIN. Like, he spends his WHOLE LIFE doing that already. Can we give him a break for once?

In the endI feel that it's less "Romione smut" and more "self-inserting into Hermione smut". In "real" Romione smut I think Ron and Hermione would switch roles according to what they feel like. And honestly I ALWAYS picture Ron being super nervous during Dom stuff, like he spanks her once then immediately he goes "oh my god are you okay?? did that hurt, do you want to stop?", things like that. I cannot imagine it happening any other way. XD Ron is just... too caring, too sensitive to do stuff like hard BDSM and that kind of thing in my opinion. He’s too much of a caretaker. I understand if it’s your kink and you’re perfectly free to project and write the fic you want, I’m not the fun police, but it’s just... I don’t think that’s really what Ron would be like. I just want MORE realistic Ron.

Also I’m trying really really hard to not point fingers here but WHY is it that it’s always “Ron growled” while it’s always “Hermione whimpered” or “Hermione moaned”? Like... you know it’s okay for a man to moan or whimper in pleasure too, right?  You know Ron isn’t 110% muscles and testosterone? You know Hermione is allowed to be fierce too? Hermione can 100% “growl” and be dominant and pin Ron to the wall and reduce him to a puddle of goo if you’re brave enough?

(Honestly how sexy would Ron think that is? The woman he loves is half his size yet can pin him down and ravish him. DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG RON HAS WANTED TO BE RAVISHED AND CHERISHED DO YOU KNOW HE’S BEEN WANTING THIS ALL HIS LIFE)

Oooo-kay, so that’s... mostly it, I reckon. Oh also Ron has a gigantic penisraise kink (and a great penis too, but mostly a praise kink). That’s canon and that’s all.

[gayregis]

Hi! I've followed your blog for a while and love your individual takes. Can you do a succinct character study of Milva? I'm thinking of writing with her soon. (Bonus points if you could hypothesise how she'd intereact with other witchers of Kaer Morhen).

i have awakened

to me, milva represents the dichotomy and conflict between vulnerability and strength. she’s an inversion / subversion of the “action girl” trope - the girl in a group of guys who is just as badass as any of them... (more information on the trope here and here). the trope of the action girl is also intended to be sexy and conform to the expectations of the viewer, still feminine in appearance or having a “glow up” moment where she discovers femininity and is happy with it.

milva stops all of this bullshit in its tracks in manyw ays. primarily, she is not perfect and infalliably strong. instead of being capable in everything with no real depth or difficulty, she actually struggles immensely and has many self-percieved flaws and insecurities. just because she’s a badass in combat doesn’t mean she doesn’t have emotions. she berates herself, particularly in baptism of fire, multiple times for being illiterate / uneducated / “simple”, as well as a woman. throughout baptism of fire (the only book of the series where she actually got any development, let’s be honest) she is faced with her insecurities extensively. 

milva was raised in a very traditional sodden peasantry upbringing, from which she was taught lessons about how men and women are expected to and “should” act. she rebelled from this, seeking ways in which she could not conform to the expectations of womanhood - she prides herself on her strength, which is her skill at archery. when she is reduced to her gender, she becomes indignant and volatile as she should: we can see this possibly best demonstrated when she punched cloggy for his misogynistic demands to her, and gave him a concussion with one punch. she reacted in this way not only because his views were bigotedm but because she has spent her entire life saying, “i’m not what people expect of a woman, i’m not!”

thus goes that when she had to reveal her pregnancy to the group, she was ashamed of herself and very insecure. she had spent much effort rebelling from “traditional feminine roles”, but now was restricted to exactly that - pregancy, which is a role of a “traditional woman” in her cultural gender norms. as she says to geralt, she compares herself now to a chicken, instead of a red kite (a “milva” in elder speech, and “milvus milvus” in real life scientific terminology). she took the name red kite because it’s a bird of prey, it’s ferocious! it kills without looking back... and she felt then that she “got herself stuck” in a situation where she was expected to care and nurture - the complete opposite of what she has based her identity around. this is the dichotomy of maria, her birth name, and milva, her chosen name. when she reveals her pregnancy to geralt, she refers to herself resentfully as “a millstone, a typical bloody woman!” because she resents herself for being now tied to the social expectations of womanhood through her pregnancy.

additionally, her pregnancy showed that she can be swayed by social pressures, or was at once swayed - instead of laughing in the face of traditional femininity, she felt pressured to act as the she-elf in the scoia’tel squad did, she was socially pressured into having sex with a man. her pregnancy is a result of her exposing herself to a traditional feminine role (which she didn’t enjoy, but now still has the consequences of).

she likely felt too guilty to abort the pregnancy because childbearing and rearing is an expectation traditionally placed upon women.

she continued to travel with geralt after she found out that his quest was to save his daughter, because her logic was that if she would lose her own child because she did not want to carry the pregnancy to term, she could at least endavour to save geralt’s child - it would be “a life for a life,” rather than just having an abortion on her own and “losing a child” without ‘making it up somehow’ (again, conservative ideas, because that’s how she was raised and precisely what she is trying to outgrow in her character development).

(this excerpt is from another ask i answered about milva’s pregnancy)

what her development is, is accepting that she can simply exist as herself outside of the confines of social pressures. she has to ask herself what SHE wants, not what other people want or expect from her. instead of trying to rebel from what her traditional society wants from a woman, or trying to follow the needs of a man (geralt), she has to do what she wants for herself. for example, in tower of the swallow, she cuts her virgin’s plait because “she’s not a virgin, nor a widow.” this can be seen as her growing away from the expectations of a virgin, being open about the fact that she is no longer a virgin, but still conforming to the societal standards which surround them.

milva’s other subversions of the action girl trope come from being independently masculine (instead of “i learned it from my brother”) ... she learned archery from her father, but he died when she was young, so she didn’t receive mentorship far into her childhood. another way she subverts her trope is that the action girl usually is fanservice-y and is thus pretty much a “sexy lamp”: i.e., a sexual object (”if you can take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp “). she comes off as a real person with deep emotions, so that rules out being a lamp. additionally, she is sexy as in she is attractive, but she is not meant to be a romantic interest for geralt or any of the other male characters. she does not wear feminine clothing ever (refused to get into a dress in lady of the lake), she wears men’s clothing which is remarked upon several times. 

milva also is independent out of survival. when her father died and her mother remarried, her stepfather abused her, and her mother did not stand up for her. in self-defense, she beat her stepfather to death and ran away from home. she’s been mostly along since then, hunting alone, though she collaborates heavily with the dryads of brokilon and scoia’tel commandos. she has a difficult time trusting others to have her best at heart, because no one has ever looked out for her besides herself.

other (obvious, but important to state) character traits include:

directness. why say three dozen words, when three will do? she doesn’t beat around the bush and will say the truth without mincing words or making pleasantries.

short temper, and impulsiveness. her exhausted gaze became that of a wolf. don’t fuck with her. sometimes she says or does things she regrets immediately after.

maturity. she is not above apology and admitting her faults and weaknesses. unlike geralt in baptism of fire, she is willing to accept the company of comrades once they have gained her trust.

moments of clarity? sometimes, she can just say exactly what is going on, in a very sort of meta way. such as in baptism of fire when she says that to her it seems that everyone who comes into contact with ciri dies.

action, not words! as opposed to characters like regis, she doesn’t spend her time philosophizing or thinking too much about things. if something needs to be done, she gets it done immediately without overthinking the options. she’s good on her feet this way, but finds discussions about ‘what could be and why things are’ confusing.

in regards to how she would interact with the other wolf witchers:

i think she would try to fit in with them as much as possible, maybe feeling a need to get validation and respect from them as they’re capable fighters and men, she would want to be seen as their equal and afraid that they wouldn’t see her as such. but they are cool guys, so i think they would like and respect her. if geralt was around, i think she would be in even better spirits, and she’d have good humor probably (razzing geralt about being a handful, how’d you grow up with this guy, has he always been like this hahaha...). it also depends on who else is in the scene but that’s how i think she’d interact with them. she’s similar to geralt in many ways (strong but very insecure) so i think they’d appreciate her. she would probably see them like the brothers she never had.

[potatopossums]

Just a weird observation from today:

I love attention. I mean, I'm sure everyone does to a certain degree, or in a certain way. Everyone has their favorite sort of attention that makes them feel special or fulfilled, or whatever it does. And that doesn't have to really mean anything about them. Attention is just attention, positive, negative, or neutral.

I'm getting some attention at work. Here and there, not overwhelmingly so. I'd say objectively, it's positive attention. How do I feel about it personally? I'm not totally sure. I'd say I'm neutral, but it is a bit strange, and on the edge of potentially being a bit uncomfortable.

I'm nonbinary, specifically agender. Before starting this job, I thought my genderlessness was kind of obvious. I mean, people mistake me for a boy sometimes, I'm out to basically everyone on all social media, and it's not like I dress feminine. But apparently, plenty of people at my work code me as female. It bothers me a bit because that's not really what I'm going for, but I usually go about my job with little to no fuss. Misgendering doesn't always come up, and when it does, I usually just try to shrug it off. I'm not very confrontational, although I wish my workplace made room for pronouns to be a regular inquiry upon hire.

Still, being perceived as female makes me... uh... nervous.

I was perceived as female for a vast majority of my life. The fruits of that perception are not always sweet. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with being female, and it's not femaleness that causes or invites poor behavior from others (particularly men). But femaleness tends to be a state onto which onlookers project a great many things. (Gender as a whole is very much like this.)

I don't like to be pigeonholed. I don't like even the potentiality of being pigeonholed. Sure, maybe if I was a bit more confrontational (or merely honest) about how I felt, I wouldn't suffer as much from other people's opinions of me. I do have some say in this equation.

But as someone who is not only sexually queer but a questioning aromantic, I really don't know how to approach men who perceive me as female, and due to that assumption, they then are overly friendly with me and might potentially be wanting to view me romantically.

I hope it's obvious how much of a mixed bag this is. And, I hope it's clear why I'm having trouble categorizing it.

Like, male romantic attention was, for a long time, positive to me. As I've talked about on previous posts, I didn't have a lot of emotional safety or support growing up, and I turned to the one thing society deemed infallible: romantic love. I wanted to fill a void, and I thought this was the way.

Now, I don't feel that way. I'm cultivating better relationships with friends and family. Sure, romance is exciting (mainly in fiction, not so much in real life). I'm even here for some minor "flirting" irl all day, especially with women and afabs.

But men... are more complicated than that.

Sure, the attention feels nice. I mean, belonging, being wanted—those only make sense for me and my insecurities and my past. Of course that would feel at least initially good.

But then, when I realize that a man has shifted from "unnamed coworker" to "acquaintance with similar interests who also knows my name now," a feeling is born within me, and that feeling is "I hate this."

Yes, I want to talk about breath of the wild and video games and shit. Yes, I want to hang out casually potentially. Yes, I want to be friends if we happen to get along well.

But no, I do not want you to get feelings for me. I find that suffocating.

I know in real life I would deal with it better if it happened, most likely. My anxiety is making this bigger than it is. But the mere thought just has me so dysphoric and avoidant. I seriously hope that no man sees me this way. Because it doesn't matter how nice you are, how lovely and attractive and whatever you are. I will not be romantically involved with a man, I won't be monogamous, and I won't be perceived as a woman.

I literally "flirt" just to goof around and joke with people. It's a form of intimacy that I don't really relate to romance, even though it's what I used to think romance was! I literally don't want a romantic relationship from anyone, amab or afab. Queerplatonic relationships? Hell yeah. I'll hold your hand and call you babe and cuddle. But we are not dating.

All this was a very long way to beg the universe to not let any of the men in my life start catching fucking feelings for me. Please don't. I'm flattered and charmed, but I won't date you.

[bi-dazai]

honestly i think i have a weird anger or cultural confusion where other gay and trans ppl are like much happier and comfortable to come out and shit and be open, but I've always had an extremely complicated relationship with it because it's always made me feel so isolated and lonely, even with other gay ppl around. and younger ppl especially will like go around coming out so frequently and meanwhile if I'm going to even tell you that I'm attracted to women I have to trust you 110% and that isn't something that comes easy.

I'm terrified of like. Wearing even rainbow goddamn socks because I'm scared shitless of getting bullied, or harassed, or even assaulted. Which is ironic considering I try to be quite fashionable in public but with being openly bi (let alone being openly TRANS) it's a complete no-no.

Like I think as much as I love being bi and nb at the same time I still despise it, I still think it's ruined my life. I have gender dysphoria about my chest whereas if I was cis I would be so happy with how feminine my body is. My first ever relationship with another girl at the moment being cut short by abusive homophobia fucked me up in innumerous ways, leading me to like...severe issues with the way i feel about sex and emotional attachment and touch.

And ofc there's the homophobia, like at this moment I'm probably leaning towards getting a fuckbuddy or smth over tinder but like a romantic relationship with another person is terrifying, like I'm insanely private w relationships even w men, I won't let us hold hands if I think too many people might see bc i have this stupid complex

There's more and more but my relationship with being Out is one where it's something that I simultaneously desire and despise, being Out is one of the most terrifying concepts I can think of and to me having someone refer to me as "they" and not as a woman is simply not as important as being safe, as not living in even more fear of assault.

And then all around me ppl my age (although usually younger) are all coming out to anyone and everyone like it's just casual, saying their pronouns like it's nothing. And first it's disbelief and shock because holy fuck, has everyone gone fucking mad?? Are we all so fucking stupid that we just forget the everloving fear homophobia strikes into you?? And then it's the jealousy, that these people have this comfortable relationship with their own gay/transness and enough trust to actually open up and tell a room full of strangers "please call me they not she". It's disappointment and anger in myself that almost 7 years after forcing myself to whisper "I'm bisexual" to the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night and then cry my eyes out because it felt like I'd been cursed, and probably over a decade since I'd started having sexual feelings about all genders, and an entire lifetime of having feelings for men women and others, after so long I'm still just a coward who sits and hates it all, who fears it all.

But then recently I've come to the realisation that the way I realised I was gay was a way that's kind of...dying out. That being the mostly offline way.

Don't take this the wrong way but I've found a lot of people go online and find this overwhelming amount of support and representation for gay and trans identity. You can argue validly this statement, but the context I use this in is comparing it to like. 2013. People were way less online. Being an online celebrity was a novelty.

At school there were dyke, faggot, tranny, etc, thrown around as if they were confetti. Jokes about "lesbos" and "lesbihonest" humiliated any girl who was too close to another girl. I grew up not just in Brisbane Queensland but in a town that was connected to the mainland only by two bridges - a landbridge and a humanmade bridge. The school was overwhelmingly anglo. Overwhelmingly right wing.

I realised I was bi with minimal help from Tumblr. I realised I was bi because I fell, hard, for my best friend. And then she liked me back, and our relationship was amazing. But the school found out. We held hands under the table, we found a quiet moment to kiss and everyone pointed and stared. We made out in the shadow of a building and turned to find twenty people watching gawkeyed, pointing, fascinated.

The entire time her mum was abusive, and massively homophobic. She blamed me for turning her daughter gay. She forced us multiple times to break up at the threat of violence. Eventually we did. We never talked about it. Our friendship never returned like it used to. It was awkward, tinged with sadness, regret, yearning and young love cut short.

It was traumatic, to say the least.

Tumblr in 2014, despite the cringe screenshots, wasn't actually mostly about LGBT positivity or whatever. I first saw the term bisexual on, if you can believe me, a quotev story in 2011 about a cheerleader and an emo girl who get together in a secret relationship. You were either gay or straight, or you had an exception. Bisexual felt right, though, for me, felt accurate, was accurate.

It was years of confusion and secrecy and guilt, peeks at other girls in the changing room that I couldn't help and I didn't understand why. Then it was months and months of anger and frustration at myself that I was feeling this way and confused about myself, and then when I said those words it felt like I was being torn apart. It felt like my life had fallen apart. I cried every goddamn night, I felt awful all the time.

At school the kids noticed. They noticed before I started dating my friend, they noticed the way I looked at her and they interrogated me about it. I'd claim up and down I had a crush on another boy - true perhaps, but it was a passing interest - and then they said they told him and analysed how I reacted. And then the interrogations continued for months because the gay girl was entertainment for them. Around me, as I walked between classes, had lunch, walked home, dyke dyke dyke faggot hahaha.

And then the relationship happened and then leelah alcorn happened and I learned what a trans person is. And sometime when I was fifteen I saw nonbinary begin to pop up, terms like genderfluid and nonbinary and they rang true like bisexual did, but the last time I went down a rabbit hole like that it ended in trauma, and another person got hurt. I didn't throw homophobia at her, but I felt and still feel responsible for it. I didn't turn her gay, but I made it obvious. I don't quite know how to say it.

I knew I was nonbinary, deep down. One day I decided to add that to my tumblr bio. Nobody gave a shit, just like nobody gave a shit when I said I was bi. But that was because I wasn't open about it even online. I couldn't talk about that stuff or I'd curse myself.

Time went on, I got more comfortable, collected fresh new traumas. My brother came out as trans. Around me, friends came out as gay and trans. But they kept coming out. They didn't stop at close friends and trusted family, they told teachers, their entire class. I didn't understand. Why the fuck would you put yourself at risk like that?? And I still don't. I said it was jealousy and anger at myself before, and maybe it is still a little bit, but now, it's just concern.

As I said, the way I realised I was gay is the rather old fashioned way - offline, through trauma, and almost entirely unenjoyable and traumatic. A lot of kids still go through that for sure. But the ones I see telling everyone over that they're gay or trans are, in my experience, not those ones. As the internet began to become more of a general use thing and less of a "only recluse weirdos" space, the online LGBT safe space began to expand into an audience bigger than before. Online, you were safe. Nobody knew your name, you were behind a screen. Homophobia was veiled, you could just delete a hateful anon, could just log off. You could put up your pronouns and people would use them because, well, ppl didn't really have any other identifier someone might use for your gender. So this positive uplifting atmosphere spawned for the most part. And instead of learning through confusion and rare chance encounters with random words and crying into the sink every night that you're gay, you much easier come across this content that tells you indepth what this is and that it's okay. And you think, well wow, that's me, and then...you know, I guess. Not denying there's some of the classic self hatred etc but...you have this safe space online to fall back on, and I cannot emphasise how much that has pushed the acceptance and widespread knowledge of lgbt people in the past 5 years. I didn't exactly have that space, and my realisation was through mostly real life channels, which were swamped at all sides by homophobia, at worst, abusive, at kindest, it would treat you like a sideshow attraction.

Being someone who arguably isn't old enough to brush this difference away with being an "older gay" but still having had a gay experience quite different to the majority in my generation (applying this to area as well) I have to say I'm confronted with this comfortableness other days have a lot and it's always jarring. I think also that while it's important and I'm happy that "younger" gays and transes have at least one good support network/space to fall back onto online, I do think it creates this kind of...dangerous other side, especially for those who go to schools that are LGBT positive and have families who are also friendly to that sort of stuff. I find that young gay teens are totally unprepared and unhardened for the fact that most people you run into in real life despise your guts for existing as who you are. And while we can make as many soppy gay narratives as possible about being honest about who you are and losing shame, we need to face the fact and teach young lgbt kids that being Out isn't just something you do as a ritual in being gay or trans, it's a brave thing and it's completely optional. And furthermore, most importantly, it's insanely dangerous.

I don't think that teenage, raw fear of the consequences of even the very concept of being Out has ever left me. Perhaps I have to thank the homophobic 14 yr olds who swamped me in slurs and trauma, because it's given me a survival sense that's kept me closeted so far you'd never get in.

But occasionally I'm tempted, particularly with my transness which I am only out to perhaps 3 people about, to venture into the world of telling people about yourself. I started a new uni semester and in a tutorial, the teacher handed out cards. We were to use it as a placard to write our names on it so the teacher would learn our names over the next few classes. And, if we chose...our pronouns.

I stared at that card for what felt like a million years. This has always been an ordeal. People don't know how to pronounce my name, even though it's a rather simple one. But pronouns? I'd never really told anyone those. Online, yes, and once when I was asked by a friend i was brave enough to say "any will do" but this - this wasn't the curated safe online space, this wasn't a one-time phrase to a friend. This was an open, permanent thing that would sit below me every class, declaring me to 18 other people. I wrote down "NATALYA", then beneath "she/". And then I stared some more. I felt like I was going to die. I felt like I was the biggest fool, because before I could stop myself I wrote "she/they". No "he", not yet. But...it was there.

At the end of the class the teacher collected the placards. I wanted to run back screaming, wanted to ask her for a new card so I could be safe again. But I didn't because I would look like a freak and a coward.

I still think it's stupid. I still think I've put some petty gesture that no one will ever respect (if they can call you she they won't ever call you they) above my own safety. The thing that really struck me was that it didn't feel good. The reason I wrote it like that, I believe in hindsight, is that I was curious what those other kids feel like, because it must feel good to declare that you're a tr*nny d*ke in front of the entire class, good enough to beat the stomach-lurching dread that precedes such an action. But it didn't. It just felt like an unnecessary risk. And it made me feel worse, like there was a target on the back of my head.

I think I could talk about this forever, about how so many kids believe coming out is this thing you're required to do to be a good gay, but it's not. It's stupid stupid reckless, and in my case it ends with you getting fucked over.

But Ive written for ages and gotten prosaic halfway through so I'm gonna shut up. Basically why the fuck do you guys come out to everyone like please stay safe instead of this it isn't worth it.

[apollos-celticswan]

June is coming up, and with it Pride Month. I have an interesting relationship with Pride Month and with parades and being “out”. For me, while I was out as queer since thirteen, I always felt like I didn’t fit. I didn’t know how to slide into the labels of the queer community. It took me a very long time to understand why.

I wanted to share with you the journey of a Trans person, who didn’t understand what being Transgender meant until they were twenty-three. I want to share with you my story, because its taken me a long time to get here.

When I was a teen, there were only three labels acknowledge in the queer vocabulary. Growing up in the 2000’s was a different sort of time for queer kids. You were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. I didn’t really know about being Transgender. I knew sometimes men dressed as women and that “wasn’t acceptable”. Gender diversity didn’t exist. There was no spectrum, just broken kids and kids bold enough to identify as cis-queer.

I was seven when I realized I liked girls. I was eight when I realized I didn’t really “fit” in what other “girls” should or wanted to be doing. I spent a lot early childhood going through the motions of what other people wanted from me. I mimicked what “girls were supposed to be like”. It was short lived because middle school essentially was my slingshot into coming out to myself as “gay”. I stopped being ashamed of liking girls and embraced it.

But…when people asked if I was a lesbian, I didn’t really know what to say. At thirteen, I didn’t think of myself as a girl who liked girls. I couldn’t figure that out. So I ignored it.

Queue anxiety disorder which kicked in when I was about thirteen at full force. OCD tendencies. A desperate need for control. Paranoia. Self-hatred. Body hatred. I wouldn’t eat because I could control that. I hated my hair. I grew it long to “feel pretty”. I wore make-up to “feel pretty”. 2008 was the most turbulent year for this downward spiral.

Inside I felt like I was dying, and I literally didn’t understand why.

I felt like I was always wearing a costume.

And then I discovered cosplay. Specifically, cosplaying boys. The world fucking EXPLODED. I still didn’t understand why it felt so good every time I put on the button-down and vest. Why seeing my flat chest bound down brought me such unexplainable joy, but I loved it. I loved seeing myself in the mirror strong and confident and yes. I was finally pretty. I was pretty and I was HAPPY.

But only in cosplay.

Dating relationships got complicated. I dated a LOT, and hurt a lot of people because I didn’t understand what sort of relationship I was supposed to have. I wasn’t a girl in a lesbian relationship. I didn’t know how to vocalize that. It was just anxious, awkward emotions.

I started hurting myself. As punishment for hurting people around me. As punishment for being different.

The thought crossed my mind. “What if I am transgender” when I was fifteen. The fear silenced me in petrified terror, not to be touched for years.

Senior year, I don’t really know what happened, but even though I wouldn’t have the words for “transition” yet, this is when I truly started. I chopped my hair off, and stopped living as a boy in costumes. I changed my wardrobe, switching to all masculine clothes.

I didn’t know I was transgender. But I knew that this felt RIGHT. I bound every day with sports bras, not knowing the word “bind” outside of cosplay. I just knew flat felt right. So I did it.

When I got to college, I spent a lot of time working on my mental illness and trauma. It wouldn’t be until 2013 that I would realize that my gender identity was not only something I needed to understand, but that if I didn’t, I would likely loose the love of my life, who had no idea what to do with my turbulent moods, dangerous self-hatred, and toxic internalized fears. It was a constant battle to understand what was going on in my head. Why didn’t I want to be touched? Why didn’t I want to be seen naked? Why was I only comfortable being intimate when I was dressed in cosplay as a male character?

I was twenty-three the first time I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. I spiraled in rejection. I was afraid. I was afraid my parents would hate me. I was afraid of losing my mom. I was afraid of losing my sisters. I was so scared of everything I cut myself off from everyone and everything, living in brutal denial. I didn’t tell anyone but my now Wife.

I bounced in and out of hyper femininity to prove to myself I was “normal”. Forcing myself to fit into stereotypes to find belonging and not disappoint the people around me.

I was diagnosed again at twenty-four…and twenty-five…and twenty-six.

Sometimes I go back and I look at my pictures from over the years, and I wish I could go back then and give him a hug. I can see my transition journey, even though I wouldn’t come out until twenty-six. I can see the little differences. The confidence in my smile in the photos where I am presenting masculine are such a contrast to the shy, awkward smiles and discomfort of my feminine presenting photos. I see the strength and change in my pictures post coming out as Transgender. Even in my genderfluid moments and love of make-up, the change is massive, and powerful.

I wanted to share my journey in a summary because its important. You can be transgender and until you have the vocabulary it is so hard to vocalize to others why it is you are struggling. I can look at that boy in those photos now and say “no wonder you were confused!!”. I can look at those pained photos and go back to those moments and understand why I was so sad and why I hated myself so crippling much.

I am still afraid. I’m afraid of losing parents, of losing siblings and friends. I’m afraid of losing my rights and I’m afraid for my safety. I worry about our child being treated differently. I’m afraid of how our relationship is going to be different from other children and their cis-gender parents.

But that fear pales in comparison to the confidence, joy, and self-love I have found in come out. I KNOW I will be a good parent, because I am being my best self and living my truth. I know I will be strong because I have been through so much to come to the place I am.

So to all you little queer babies out there are various stages of coming out, you can do it.

Sometimes it’ll take a long time. Maybe almost two decades, but you’ll get there, and it’s the most beautiful view when you do. Loving yourself allows you to love others. Trusting yourself allows you to trust others. Live your truth, and its okay to be scared.

I am out. I am proud, and for the first time in my life I am celebrating pride out, proud and knowing exactly who I am.

Its an amazing feeling.

[pentanguine]

22) What is your sexual and romantic orientations? Are they affected by your gender?

Ah, the million dollar question.

Honestly, short answer, I have no idea. And maybe I’ll never have any idea! Maybe my sexuality and/or my understanding of it will shift every few years as I learn new words and ways of being, or as I have different life experiences. Maybe I’ll never settle down and “figure it out,” because there is no a priori sexuality living inside me like the solution to a puzzle, there’s just complex human feelings overlapping clumsily with a rigid society. Sexuality is totally made up, not because the feelings aren’t real but because the way we taxonomize those feelings is so particular to time and place, and I’m particularly bad at fitting into the structure of the time and place where I live! I’m attracted to people of many different genders, to different extents and in different ways across time, but mostly I seem to be into women, and I am not a woman or a man. This experience is well-nigh impossible to shoehorn into the schematic of modern Western sexual orientation.

I’ve had so many epiphanies about sexuality, and at the time, each one felt like a lightbulb going off and something finally settling inside me. But all of those experiences have shifted over time, and they’ll probably keep on shifting. First I thought I was bi, and then I realized that the thought of being a woman with a boyfriend made me feel bleak, so I jettisoned the idea of a boyfriend and called myself gay; then I realized that I was still attracted to men even if I didn’t want to date them and I read a lot of think-pieces on sexual fluidity; then I realized I was genderqueer and leaned way too hard into being a lesbian to justify my attraction to women (because if I wasn’t a lesbian, it would be Bad!); and then last year I decided I felt much more comfortable calling myself bi and just giving my sexuality the space to sprawl out and make itself at home, even if I do have a preference.

And my actual sexuality changes, too! The more I stop pressuring myself to be a neat little lesbian who was Born This Way, the more comfortable I feel acknowledging that my formative experiences with attraction in middle school involved guys, and not girls. It’s not just that I was oblivious (although I was also that), I was just into guys more often and more strongly, which is the same way I feel about women now. And yeah, it is really, really weird to have your sexuality do a 180 like that! It’s not like it happened overnight, but it does lead to this feeling of disjointedness with my past self, like I jumped through some kind of parallel universe portal and emerged in an alternate sexuality timeline. In retrospect, I guess the best way to describe what I was was a girlfag: I thought of myself as a girl, even if I wasn’t one, but I wanted other boys to think I was a boy, and I liked guys who were pretty and effeminate and possibly gay, because if they were gay that made them “better” to be attracted to. The first narrative for this is that I’m a straight girl who fetishizes gay men; the second narrative for this is that I’m a lesbian who has crushes on feminine, unattainable boys as a proxy for girls; the third narrative is that I’m trans and gay and so duh, I like queer guys.

--

[A Tangent]

Also, you know what, it’s very important to me to not be a lesbian. Because I’m not. We can’t all be lesbians! And that’s ok!

I am not a man and I am mostly attracted to women and I have a very complicated relationship with my infrequent attraction to men, but that does not inherently mean that I am a lesbian struggling with comp het. Maybe I really am a bi person with a preference. Maybe I really am a genderqueer person with no affiliation or alignment or whatever the fuck to womanhood. Maybe my interest in men is so complicated by my own transmasculine gender that I can’t really access it. Maybe my experiences don’t need to be twisted to fit a Good and Proper Lesbian Narrative wherein I realize that Men Are Bad and Women Are Good and I’m not really attracted to the Bad People, and I’m absolutely willing to reduce myself to being Basically A Good Person so that the Good and Loving Light of Lesbianism will shine down upon me.

Look, lesbians are great. Lesbian is a word with so much political power, so much potential for self-definition and self-realization, and so much more fluidity than people give it credit for. It’s a beautiful word and sometimes I wish I were a lesbian. But I’m not, because I choose not to be. I will be mistaken for a lesbian for the rest of my life. The specifics of my queerness will never be legible to other people, because people will see me at my most visibly queer and think “she is a lesbian,” and they will see me with my hypothetical girlfriend and think “those women are lesbians.” And so while lesbian is a word that could fit me under its umbrella if I so chose, I don’t so choose, because it’s not the most accurate or fulfilling word for my queerness, and I will be lesbian until proven otherwise for the rest of my life. And so, when given the chance amongst friends and fellow queers, I want to prove otherwise.

--

I’m also ace, which I see as the queer umbrella that covers all of my sexuality and gender under its scope. My feelings on how, exactly, I’m a-spec have shifted wildly between “gray-asexual,” “demisexual?,” and “totally ace” over the years, often multiple times within the same freaking week. Trying to pin down what sexual attraction even is when it’s something you rarely or never experience, and when it’s also something that you approach through a totally different lens than most people, is an exercise in futility. Words like “hot” or “turned on” or just “sex” don’t even make sense to me; I know broadly what other people mean when they say them, but when I try to find corollaries in my own experiences, I either come up empty-handed or with something that’s like a distorted reflection seen through fog.

I’m not aromantic, but the older I get the less I feel like romantic attraction applies to me, so at this point I’d consider myself sort of philosophically aromantic. I know I’m not actually aro, but the kind of attraction that I feel, while very normative (fluttering hearts; swooping stomachs; improbable daydreams; a desire to impress), also has nothing whatsoever to do with emotions or relationships. My body finds other people cute, and my brain tends to agree, but those feelings don’t lead to desire. They don’t go anywhere. Appreciating the experience of being attracted to someone almost never leads me to want anything from that attraction. I don’t know what that is (maybe it’s shyness or insecurity, or maybe it is some kind of queerness), but I do know that I don’t want to push through it and force myself to go through those rituals just because other people tell me I should want to. 

I guess a lot of the disconnect for me comes from calling that type of physical attraction romantic, when for me it has nothing whatsoever to do with sweeping romantic emotions or intimate relationships. I’d be tempted to call the attraction aesthetic, except I think that’s what I feel for forests and my friend Jonesy’s fashion choices (visual appreciation with no real attraction), and I doubt it’s alterous attraction because the symptoms seem so commonplace and archetypical. So I assume I do feel what most people, bafflingly, call romantic attraction, and the romance part is just a miss for me because I’m delightfully perverse or something. I just don’t understand why “person I find attractive” and “person I want to be intimate partners with” and “person I want to have sex with” and “person I want to cohabit with” all has to be the same person. The whole narrative of romance just doesn’t make sense to me.

--

Good god, this got long.

To finally end up at the second part of the question: My genderqueerness is very closely intertwined with my sexuality, to the point where I wish we still had words like “invert” that combined the two and saw them as mutually constitutive rather than at constant odds with one another. Basically, I see myself as being fundamentally bi, but gay both ways: I’m similar-to-although-not-the-same-as women when I’m attracted to a woman, and similar-to-although-not-the-same-as men when I’m attracted to a man. (When I have a crush on a nonbinary person, I’m just really t4t.) At the moment, attraction to women is the most salient aspect of my sexuality, which is often fraught, because I’m a lot more adamant about Not Being a Woman than I am about not being a man. But I’m still gay for women, and I think I come from a long lineage of people with similar experiences (Vernon Lee, Radclyffe Hall, Leslie Feinberg, Rae Spoon, etc). Speaking of Rae Spoon, I think it’s very easy to assume that you’re not into men when you spend so much time being/trying not to be jealous of them. But I’ve learned that it’s possible for something to be both. Maybe when I love men hypothetically but find it difficult to translate into reality, that’s not because “ew, men bad,” that’s because “DANGER, gender bad.” Maybe (radically! shockingly!) I am actually bisexual and I have crushes on people of various different genders, and none of that negates my attraction to anyone else.

So in summary, I guess I’m just queer, with a side of bi (*gestures expansively*) and ace (*shrugs blankly*).

[serenagaywaterford]

What is tender culture????

tender culture is all this cottagecore, domesticity, uwu crap that is particularly prevalent in lesbian/wlw circles. like i’m all for fluff and thinking positively but tender culture seems to reduce loving women to a set of stereotypical “feminine” soft and gentle traits. like here’s an example:

“we are in a toasty log cabin in the woods. it’s cold and we snuggle under this homemade quilt with our cat and quietly sip hot chocolate as the snowflakes gently fall against the reddening leaves outside. but we’re safe and warm and loved.”

it’s that sort of shit.

like i said, it’s not bad. it’s just that it’s EVERYWHERE. hell, i follow that lesbian domesticity blog myself tbh (altho i does grate on my nerves that it’s constantly about tender culture and never about sex. and really it is nothing like my relationship with my wife but hey. it’s about her and her wife, not universal experiences. her blog her rules). tender culture as a whole seems to idealise relationships (cos i’m sure it exists in bi and het circles too) as these sweet, cutesy, soft things that are always perfect and everyone is just gentle and calm and utterly loving all the time.

and there’s never any fucking. there’s never any indication that women are sexual beings and sex is an integral part of relationships. (don’t anybody fight me on this. it’s true and you know it.) there’s never any indication that people argue, or tease, or fight, or get turned on. hell, most of the time there’s never even any indication that people PLAY and joke even. it’s ALL like “uwu i barely touch your hand and feel the stars align and we are soft and perfect and fall asleep in your arms.” BARF.

i think, tbh, that’s the issue i have with it being SO prevalent in lesbian online culture. we’ve been told FOREVER that lesbian sex either doesn’t exist, isn’t real sex, is gross, doesn’t really count OR alternately is this fetishistic OTT porn thing for men to jerk off to. we’ve been taught to be ashamed and keep our SEXUALITY to ourselves. the tender culture thing makes being lesbian palatable to the masses because it’s so non-threatening.

and to separate it from lesbian culture specifically, we AS WOMEN have been taught since birth to shut up about sex. we’ve been shamed into silence about female masturbation and female arousal and female orgasm and female desire. like so many of us grow up without learning about our own bodies. a woman knowing her own body is a threat. a woman seeking her own pleasure is a threat. basically a woman talking about sex is a threat. 

and even besides sex, we’ve been socialised to be calm, gentle, nice, accommodating, nurturing, kind, and so so soft. we’re not allowed to be hungry, funny, angry, emotional, mean, have boundaries, be wild and dirty and feral. we’re not allowed to scream and fight unless we’re one of “those” type of women as if all women don’t want to just fucking scream sometimes. 

sometimes women just need to get themselves off too. i just find it very… dangerous to ONLY see that non-threatening tender side of things because it upholds patriarchal behavioural gender norms to such a crazy degree.

so all this “tender culture” crap that basically denies this side of female existence by its silence bothers me. which is why i like to reblog posts critical about tender culture sometimes, alongside tender culture posts which i do like also. we need reminders that there is NOTHING wrong with masturbation, sexual arousal, sexual pleasure, fucking (not just ~making love~), and being a woman while doing it. there’s nothing weird or wrong about being angry and upset and playful and horny and wild. i would just really like to see more content like that. 

there is an argument that women/lesbians have been so overly sexualised by men that it’s a direct response to that pure sexual objectification. like, hey, women have feelings and care, and especially lesbians are romantic and loving too. not just sex objects shoving dildos in each other while wearing high heels. i can see some validity in that reaction. but to me, there is just too much and it starts to seem like that ALL lesbians want is hand holding and a pretty garden and cats in some idyllic cottage somewhere. it seems to have flipped too far the other way into a cliched “perfect woman” under patriarchy non-threat stereotype.

i also recognise that the moment a woman starts talking about sex, especially lesbians, it easily gets co-opted and appropriated by perverts and fetishists and pornsick men (and women). it’s hard to just talk about our experiences without it being viewed a specific way by outsiders. it’s either hyper-sexualised or hypo-sexualised by someone else. there is always gonna be some sick fuck with his dick in his hand ready to go or some conservative prick screaming bloody murder about morals as soon as we try to discuss our own experiences. but i don’t think that means we should shut up about everything sexual or dirty or “nasty” about our reality as women out of fear of these scrotal cumsacks.

it’s all about balance, really.

and being willing to get up and yell: GET OUT. THIS ISN’T FOR YOU. when you see them infiltrate something for us. you see a man make a lewd comment, call him out. make him uncomfortable. take back what we have from them.

like i said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with tender culture. i just think it needs to be balanced with actual reality. there’s nothing wrong with romantic daydreams and just wanting someone to love you gently, and to cherish you and your relationship. and especially when the world is so insane, it’s fine to want something calm and gentle. but real relationships are not JUST that one thing. and i think tender culture gives a false sense of reality as to what normal adult relationships are like. i’ve been told here on my blog that even talking about sex with my wife is TMI (it’s not), talking about masturbation is TMI (it’s not), and even worse that me arguing with my wife and getting pissed off at her is something to be so terrified of (it’s not) that i should “get somewhere safe”. no. i should work it out and communicate. not run away every time things aren’t fluffy and calm and tender. that’s so unhealthy. and that’s what i feel being inundated with tender culture does. it gives a warped idea about what a healthy relationship is.

like no. tender culture denies this not so nice reality of human relationships, especially when you live together. like yes, of course we have the beautiful, romantic, tender side too. but people argue. people can fucking hate each other sometimes when they’re stressed out or frustrated and it comes out in arguments. and there is a scale. there’s a point when it becomes unhealthy and toxic but i think it’s equally unhealthy to never argue and force yourself to push any feelings you have down in order to maintain some idealized genteel version of a relationship that you’ve been bombarded with online as what you SHOULD have. 

and this goes for joking around and playfulness too. sometimes when i joke with my wife and call her a bitch or she says “rude” things to me, people are like “OH MY GOD!” but… i mean, that’s just us? it’s joking. (we sometimes do it purposely in front of people to laugh at their reactions cos we are both assholes.) we play with each other a lot. she’s an incessant tease. she calls me an idiot. i literally tell her i’m gonna punch her in the face when she’s teasing me. do i mean it? of course not. we roughhouse and wrestle and playfight even (not sexually jsyk. just simply playing which is SO LOST in this society. we don’t do any bdsm bullshit). it’s a type of physical expression that doesn’t hurt anybody and requires a certain level of connection and trust too. the fact i can tackle her onto the sofa and she squeals and grapples me back is HEALTHY. adults can play too. it’s like that post i made a while back when i talked about how my wife shoved her fingers in me when i was bending over unaware and laughed about it ...and was told it was TMI. like um ...we are physically intimate and playful and it’s not a BAD THING. and i’ll share it cos honestly? if you don’t have that level of intimacy and trust and fun, i personally think there may be something wrong. (if it crosses personal boundaries for you, that’s something else. but she knows it doesn’t bother me.) on my blog i will talk about my relationship with my wife in ALL its glory, bad, good, fun, horny, loving cos it is a fully-rounded relationship and adults don’t experience just one thing.

i fucking love sex with women and i was denied it for so long i’m not about to shut up about it now. i love fucking and the female body in all its wet, messy, soft, beautiful glory. i love being in love finally and properly and i won’t shut up about that either. i won’t be shamed to be quiet about my body or my sex life or my relationship that ISN’T perfect. (like i’m literally going to kill her if says to me one more time that 80s music is the best music lmao like she’s gonna kill me if i leave one more dirty bowl beside the sofa for the stupid idiot dogs to get at). 

to some people, i guess reality doesn’t matter. they only want the daydreams and fantasies, or they only live in a soft cloud world. that’s up to them. maybe that’s what they need in their lives. and that is fine. for a while but it isn’t real life and it’s not what you should strive for. it SHOULD be part of what you strive for however. you should have someone who cherishes you and cares and loves and respects.

i just don’t think tender culture should be as overwhelming as it is. it sets standards that i don’t think are realistic. let’s talk about sex or arguing or any range of human relationship issues too. don’t get rid of tender culture, at all. keep it. cherish it. let it give you hope and positivity and ease loneliness and isolation. healthy, loving, respectful fantasies are important af. but don’t act like a puritanical dunce when a woman talks about sex or hunger or anger as well.

i mean i’m not asking for sexually explicit content and i’d never go into intense detail about my own life (that’s what fanfic is for lmao) but a little recognition that women aren’t just domestic soft cliches. that’s all.

i don’t see any of that in tender culture. it’s all soft uwu feathery kisses and soothing fingers brushing along a forearm. blah… sometimes you need to get fucked. sometimes you need to laugh. sometimes even you need to argue.

wow ok

sorry anon

you asked me what tender culture was and i went off on a rant about why i hate it lol. i’m sorry. you asked such a simple question and i word vommed all over it.

[grindskull]

Shit that fucks me up #1 - Toxic Masculinity and being a “man”

Gotta have some way to organize my random thoughts here. I’m going with the obvious thing - Shit that fucks me up (STFMU). This is about me and my experiences. It is not my intention to discredit or question other human experiences. Sharing in the hopes of connecting with others who may have feel similar in their own skin. There are things here that others may define as triggers so read at your own risk (rape, abuse, and this fucking world). ---

Here is me being vulnerable.  I am putting myself out there by discussing masculinity and how I often do not identify with the larger concept of “being a man” in any positive way. You can call it toxic masculinity if you prefer. It’s acceptable shorthand for something that is just as nuanced and difficult to wade through as anything gender related.  I read this article on The Atlantic yesterday and there were some things that really resonated with me and my experience as a man/male (he/his/him). You can read it here (sorry there is a pay wall if you read more than 4 articles a month) but I will also be quoting some of the article below.  If you have time to read the article I’ll wait. It’s a bit long (many articles on The Atlantic are) and kind of academic at times. It’s okay if you don’t agree with everything in the article. Just read it.  Done? Okay let me set the stage a bit for how this shit fucks me up. ---

I’m male. I have always identified as a male/boy/man in my life. Unfortunately my experience with other males/boys/men has been mostly negative. It started at an early age when I had a hard time connecting with other boys my age. I was not interested in typical “male” interests like sports, violence, competition, and achievement. I had few (usually 1 or 2) friends at any one time and they typically had some kind of unhealthy power dynamic over me where I was subservient to my “friend” in some way.  I have some thoughts on reasons why this happened. The short version is I lived in poverty (often extreme) and I was searching for help and support in order to survive. At home I had abuse (mental, physical, verbal), drugs, addiction, and neglect. It was not a safe place to be so I did whatever I could to not be there. It was not unusual for me to eat maybe one meal during the day (typically what I could get from others at school or their home). Winter was the worst as we often did not have heat. Some of my “friends” used this as a way to hold power over me and make demands of my personality, time, and attention. Imagine finding yourself in this situation - you have to actively work to not be yourself in order to appease others for your very survival. Of course as a youth I didn’t identify it this way - my “friends” were just bossy or demanding. All of my male role models were basically assholes who did not give a fuck about anyone except themselves. This was a huge part of the 80′s zeitgeist in popular culture at the time as well. In some ways nothing has really changed. “... when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).“ Under this common definition of “masculinity” I do not see myself. I am loyal, honest, caring, and sweet (to those I love). I love my body though I am non-athletic and have been most of my life. I am an attentive and talented lover but I have had very few sexual partners in my life and never saw them as moments of “conquest”. I was dirt poor most of my life but now live comfortably in my own home with my long term partner. So while not “wealthy” it is far beyond anything I could have imagined I would have in my life as a boy. Stoicism I have down. That one was easy. For me it’s just a nice way of saying “I have completely disconnected from my emotions and not having feelings or emotions is the best way to be a man”. I believed that for a very long time - it’s only in the past 2-3 years I have begun the work of breaking that down and reconnecting with my own emotions. It’s all tied up in trauma, depression, and anxiety so it takes a bit of fucking work but it’s very much worth it. If you are a man/male who thinks it is normal to not have emotions (or that emotions make you feminine/weak) please listen to me - THAT IS BULLSHIT. YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO HAVE EMOTIONS.

“... young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity. One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative.“

Emotions are not weakness. You are not weak for having them, feeling them, or connecting with them. There is great strength in connecting with yourself and understanding your emotions. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They are delusional at best and actively trying to harm you at worst.

“While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.”

---

How did we get here!? Have men always been this way? What about the good ole masculinity of ye olden times? It was a simple time where men were men right? A man’s man? “According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.”

Take a minute to read that and really take it in. Like many things in the US (and the world) the effects of industrialization and war shaped our current version of accepted masculinity. More specifically the leaders of this country (and leaders in other countries) used their positions of power to strengthen men and this new masculinity in our institutions. Then we were taught that this was the “right way” to “be a man”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyper-rationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.“

Here we have the core of what I experience as a man when it comes to the current socially accepted version of masculinity and why it fucks me up. I don’t identify with any of this shit! It does not feed me. It does not make me feel fulfilled and happy. It doesn’t make the world better for anyone it simply dehumanizes us all. 

“In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to linger on anger. As for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex. Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.“

I’m not going to get into the topic of my own father (that’s another post in this series for sure) too deeply but I will say I completely identify with these ideas. Emotional distance, only expressing anger, telling me having emotions was weak. This was reinforced societal norms throughout my youth through today. Don’t talk about your problems or feelings. Ball them up inside. Wall yourself off from the world. Connections = weakness that others will exploit. You must control every situation and hold power over others. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

---

So when did I wake up? When did I start to see through this shit in some way? When my younger sister was born. It was really obvious to me that she was treated in a different way and expectations of her as a girl/woman were not the same as the expectations others had for me. Mostly I just saw the negatives in this. It took me time (and lots of communication and experiences with my partner and others) to recognize the root of this was more fucked up socialization. 

“Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.”

Read this carefully. Nobody is responsible for your emotional well being but you. If you are a male/man this is especially true - females/women are not responsible for managing your emotions and your reliance on them to take care of this is a form of abuse. They are not responsible for your emotions. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN EMOTIONS.

It can be really hard to see this. It was a blind spot for me for way too long. Don’t let it be one for you. Connecting with and taking responsibility for your emotions is one of the biggest things you can do to improve yourself as a human being. If you are sad you can cry. If you are happy you can laugh. You have a wide range of emotions and they don’t all lead to frustration or anger.

“As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permission to weep, I didn’t initially understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it.“

---

Okay so putting aside all of the reinforcement we get from our parents and institutions and our lack of emotional vulnerability why do we all buy into this dumb shit? Who convinced us all this is what masculinity is? And why do we listen?

“What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.”

Sounds familiar right guys? Don’t kid yourself. This is what being a man looks like in almost all situations in which we feel “safe” to express our self right? You are either with us or against us. Anything different or anyone questioning this behavior must be “othered” as they are clearly not “on the team”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

This was my entire experience as a youth. As someone who did not fit into this group (nor wanted to) I was immediately “othered” and deemed a “pussy” or “fag” or “homo” or “weirdo”. My friend group reflected this - mostly others who also were “not on the team” like women, gays and lesbians, and men who also did not identify with this version of masculinity. Which just made it easier to group us all together and identify us as the enemy. 

“Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.” Without the ability to connect with and express my emotions I often reacted in anger. I started fights. I got violent (with words and writing mostly). I returned this “othering” and treated them all as the enemy. I had other reasons for this (being abused by men as a boy) but at the crux of the issue I had no trust for men. This helped me connect with women and my gay friends as they also experienced this distrust in similar (and different) ways. 

Years later I found myself in a job where I managed a group of men (100 or more at any time) working as a team (video game industry) and totally unable to connect with any of them as a human let alone a man. It was at this time that I realized this was a problem beyond my own experiences and when I started to understand my own participation in this system. 

I tried to question things as they came up. I tried to hear my teammates and help them navigate this murky sea of masculinity to find their own place in it. Most people didn’t want to participate. They learned to keep their mouth shut if I was within earshot of their typical “bro talk”. They learned to act differently around me so as not to incur my wrath (using my anger and position of power to punish them for being sexist, racist, or intolerant). I felt powerful and I tricked myself into thinking I was making a difference. I was wrong. 

---

“Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’ ” she said. “Just normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

It wasn’t long before my “making a difference” spread into our hiring, training, and management of the team. I brought in women who wanted to work in the game industry. I tried to shut down any of the bro culture bullshit that came up and used it as an opportunity to teach other men why it was fucked up. It worked for some (maybe 5-6 people out of hundreds) but the majority either quit or tried to get me fired. Most did not change their behavior in any way. 

The women said they knew what they were getting into. I don’t believe they knew what it was like to actually be in the middle of the situation. I assume women in the military probably have a lot of experience like this. In short - it’s fucking toxic and disgusting. Like other males/men they too have to fall in line and “become one of the boys” or risk being antagonized and ostracized for being “different”. It’s Lord of the Flies. It’s fucking mob mentality. It’s masculinity at it’s absolute worst. And this was in a “progressive” creative city working for a small company with a woman CEO. Men simply don’t give a fuck and it’s almost always easier to go with the flow. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

My first experience with a trans individual in a work setting occurred was while I was managing this team. One of our long term employees made the transition and I had to watch how they were treated by the “bros’. Jokes were made, memes were shared, snickering and fucked up behavior was rampant. I had to talk to, discipline, and fire many individuals. These were men I thought were “on the team” and working to be good examples of masculinity. I should have known that was just part of the act - their way of surviving and showing subservience to me as a man in a position of power over them. My trust was further eroded in masculinity. 

Putting yourself over others is not power. It is dehumanization and it stems from hate. We can be different without being better or worse than someone else regardless of who they are. Not everything has to be a competition. It took me way too long to undo the damage done to me by these ideal of toxic masculinity. You can do it too - you just have to start today. 

---

Beyond the negative effects this version of masculinity has on us as males/men it also fucks up our interaction with women and sexual partners and it’s certainly done so to me. I’m actively working on unfucking my fucking and aware that many of my heterosexual ideals of sex stem from the same shit I have been actively fighting against most of my life. Connecting emotionally with your sexual partner takes things to a completely different level.

“It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.”  

This is the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the term “rape culture”. As men we are taught that to be masculine is to claim “wins” in sexual conquest. Sex is property and we can collect it. Even if it’s with our long term partners or spouses. Ever tried talking to men about this? Ever questioned others on how it’s fucked up? You probably heard about how it’s all in jest. Just a joke! I’m just joking!  “When called out, boys typically claim that they thought they were just being “funny.” And in a way that makes sense—when left unexamined, such “humor” may seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood. Little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little cred among their peers. But, as can happen with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age 10, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at 16, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped,” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at 18, scrawl the names of his hookups on a wall in his all-male dorm, as part of a year-long competition to see who can “pull” the most. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done one or another of these things.”

Let me be clear in case you are confused. This shit isn’t funny. Laughing at other people’s misfortune is a long standing human tradition yes - and it still dehumanizes everyone involved. That doesn’t make me laugh but maybe you are still amused? Why?

“At the most disturbing end of the continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment or assault. To cite just one example, a boy from Steubenville, Ohio, was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a couple of high-school football players. “She is so raped,” he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “It isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!”

The classic toxic masculinity force field present in my life has been the “just joking” phrase with the ultimate no consequence phrase “it’s hilarious!”. Say something you don’t want to manage the consequences for? Just a joke! People still question you or your morals after saying some heinous shit? No.. it’s cool... it’s hilarious! You just gotta laugh! FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Hilarious” is another way, under the pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a haven, offering distance when something is inappropriate, confusing, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something defies boys’ ethics. It allows them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as unmasculine—and makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. 

I feel like I may have already gone too far into this dark hole of shit that fucks me up around toxic masculinity. I hope I didn’t lose you. I hope you have questions and thoughts about how this impacts your life. Perhaps ways that you make a change today to fight against this bullshit. You may be asking yourself “what can we do!?” At the end of the day its up to males/men to change this culture. It’s not about self-hate or self-abuse. We gotta name this and own it. We need more men to step up and say ‘It doesn’t have to be like this”. Our collective mental health requires us to be more flexible and connected to ourselves and emotions. We need to find ways to deal with our anger, frustration, and desires in ways that don’t hurt ourselves and others. We need to teach ourselves (especially youth) that it isn’t enough to only talk about things we shouldn’t (and hopefully won’t) do. 

If this shit fucks you too you can do something about it. Start with yourself. Question these things when they come up. And not only when you feel “safe” to do so. Do it consistently in ways that are non-confrontational (they will probably lead to confrontations with most men anyway - sorry). Be okay with not always “winning’ in these situations. You’ll be surprised who you might connect with in the process. Hopefully one of those people will be yourself. 

[tiergan-vashir]

What about a cis woman who has androgynous features and hates it and herself for it? I'd give anything for a more feminine face and not look so flat chested. Is this dysphoria too? Do you have any resources for this sort of problem? It seems silly, but when I see trans women having things like facial feminization surgery or going on hormones and getting breasts that are nice, I wonder if a cis woman who experiences the same pain over her androgynous features is in the same boat..

Aww, anon. I’m so sorry to hear that you’re struggling this way. I wouldn’t say this is gender dysphoria as gender dysphoria is involves a persistent sense of unease and conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.  You are a cis woman who identifies as a woman, but wishes she looked more feminine, which is very different.

I would assess how strong your feelings are and if it’s extremely severe, to the point that your distress causes you to be highly preoccupied with it and it is impacting your school, work, home, etc or and you find yourself hiding away, I would consult a therapist. You may have body dysmorphic disorder.If it’s not quite THAT extreme, the I would say that what you’re feeling and struggling with is still totally valid and far, far more common amongst folks than you might think.  Whether you realise it or not, as a woman you are bombarded all the time with powerful systemic, societal pressures to look, dress, and behave in a certain manner every day - and all of that can really destroy how people feel about themselves.

Shoving the rest of this under a cut for length.

Let me just tell you right now - my breasts are fuckin’ tiny.  I know I literally just asked for advice on binders a few days ago, but I’m an A cup at best. Probably smaller.  The slight, itty-bitty ‘cup’ shape on my flimsy bralettes probably give these non-existent knockers more shape than they really have.  Even though I’m buying binders and what not, on a lazy day, I could honestly just slap some pasties on these nip-nops and call it good. They’re that small.

This is amazing and awesome now that I’m busily trying to minimize their existence as much as possible.  I consider myself genderqueer/genderfluid so some days I’ll be crushed over the fact that I can’t be this tall, jacked, majestic Tiergan-shaped dude, while other days I’ll be fine and dandy with looking like a woman, while MOST days I just want to be the purest manifestation of Gender Confusion Inducement™ in other people.  Me wanting binders over my itty-bitty nublet tiddies is just me wanting to go that extra mile to be flat as a fuckin’ wall.

But when I thought I was a cis woman? I felt crushingly ashamed by them.  

Back then, I didn’t really like myself or how I looked. I didn’t like looking at myself in the mirror. I HATED looking at myself in pictures. I rarely took selfies, because I thought I was not very attractive.  I thought I was bland and ugly looking.  Society had told me again and again that attractive women looked a certain way, were shaped a certain way, dressed a certain way, etc, and that clearly my unhappiness was based upon the fact that I did not conform to that mold.I thought to be happy and to feel better about myself, I had to double down on the womanliness and become more conventionally attractive. So I’d buy things like massive push-up bras that never felt good, comfortable, and I hated in a desperate attempt to conform. I’d buy these really specific types of shirts and clothes that I didn’t like at all, but thought was what was ‘pretty’ for women. I’d fumble through learning make-up, not because I was interested in the colors, the expression, the creativity, and accentuating my features the way I wanted, but because that’s just what adult women were supposed to do.  I’d buy certain shoes I didn’t really even like, but knew pretty women were supposed to like and wear.

I was trying so damn hard to fit the mold and in the end, it only made me feel worse.  I felt like I was wearing this awkward, uncomfortable shell. People would tell me I was pretty, but I didn’t feel happier. I just felt more miserable, because all this extra emotional and physical labour I was putting into myself just to fit this arbitrary bullshit notion of what an ideal pretty lady was supposed to be like was EXHAUSTING and I didn’t even really like how I looked. I didn’t want to do it all every. single. day of my life.

Realising I was nonbinary was absolutely liberating for me, because I thought  “Well… if I’m not a cis woman and none of the old ‘rules’ matter anymore, …what does handsomeness or beauty actually mean to me?” 

And for the first time in my entire adult life, I defined for myself what beauty and handsomeness truly meant for me.  It was wonderful and liberating.  The first thing I realised was that I didn’t really give a fuck about how big my boobs are. Society did. And BOY HOWDY it was GREAT not giving a flying fuck about that anymore.  I still keep a few bras around for costuming/cosplay purposes, but you could not catch me fucking dead in one otherwise.

I used to hate make-up and find it to be this long, cumbersome chore that I would lose interest in doing every day, but once I got to sit and experiment on how I personally actually wanted it to look on my face - I fucking loved it. I like experimenting with colors and want to play with more. It appeals to the artist in me to play on a canvas even if that canvas is my face.

Fashion as a whole became a wild new experience. I stopped thinking about what I felt pressured to buy because it would make me look a certain way and what I really, really wanted.  I made a pinterest board of fashion goals and pinned every single thing I could find that I liked - regardless of whether it was a man, woman, or theater major dressed up in costume wearing it so I could identify what I actually wanted.  I dyed my hair pink, but got it cut in a more masculine manner and I fucking love the way I look now.

You might be thinking “Yeah, ok, Tiergan, that’s great and all, but I’m not nonbinary.”

But the funny thing I realised was that even though embracing that I am nonbinary led me to this understanding that I could take back my own power and define for myself what attractiveness truly means for me - this was a thing I could have done at any point in my life if I hadn’t been so buried in all those signals from society on what beauty was supposed to be.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you “just accept ur natural self! Don’t change a thing! Body positivity!!!!!” Because: 1) I know when you’re in a place of feeling super down on yourself, that shit doesn’t help at all and just feels extremely inauthentic. 2) I changed A LOT about myself until I was happy with my appearance. I just didn’t change it in the ways that I previously thought I was ‘supposed’ to.

So instead what I’ll say is that if you’re willing and able, I would set aside an hour or two each week to clear your mind, dig deep, and try to visualize a universe in which nothing anyone else thinks about your appearance matters anymore, because YOU are God.  You have a blank slate.  

There is no pressure to look a certain way to be considered beautiful, because you’re God. You decide what is beautiful..  No one in this universe gives a fuck if you have big tiddies, little tiddes, medium tiddies or any kind of tiddy, because right now the universe is a blank slate and all tiddies are created equal in a blank slate.  No one in this universe cares whether or not you have the perfect heart-shaped feminine face or not, because you’ve not told anyone yet what is considered attractive.  You are the decider of beautiful things.

Now imagine that you, as God of this World, descend down to hang with the mortals.  You can’t really change your body without going back to your old weirdo universe back on Earth, but what you can change is your clothes, your hair, your make-up, etc.  Knowing that this universe is yours and you get to decide what beautiful is for yourself, what would you change?  

Remember, you’re God in this universe you’ve made - so you don’t have to impress fucking anybody.  Anyone who says shit to you gets smited or yeet into the sun.  As a god, you get to wear what makes you feel powerful, majestic, and appropriately godlike - what does that clothing look like?  Can you imagine it?  If it’s hard, maybe pull up pinterest and surf around for your god-clothes.  Would you get stylish sneakers or thigh high boots?  Would you get a lady’s power-suit or a lolita dress?  Would you get some neat unique godly jewelry? (If yes, I recommend Etsy. That site is gonna destroy my fuckin’ destory my wallet.)

What’s your make-up like?  Is it tough to imagine?  Pull up another pinterest. Use it to find your god-makeup.  And hey - are you putting this make-up on because it makes you feel GOOD and POWERFUL like the goddess you are, or to impress the mortals? Because again - you’re god. You don’t have to impress jack shit. This make up is for YOU and what makes you feel GOOD and POWERFUL and GODLIKE.

Do you still care about having bigger boobs? (Did you know a fuckload of actual supermodels and Hollywood actresses have small tiddies? So even in THIS universe, you don’t need big boobs to be beautiful!)  Do you still feel unhappy that your face is kind of androgynous according to the dumbasses back in the vastly inferior universe you originally came from?  Or do things in your universe where you’re god feel pretty great?  I hope so, because gods don’t really have time to worry about the funky assumptions of mere mortals. You’re too busy being fabulous and doing godlike shit.

Hope this sort of helps!

[thatfeministkilljoy]

if feminism includes mens’ rights why is it not ok to use the term egalitarian?

I’m gonna assume this is actually asked in good faith so get ready for a pretty long (and rambley, I gotta go to work soon) answer.

So Feminism is, what it sounds like. It’s the liberation of women, it’s women’s rights. Women are the oppressed class when it comes to gendered oppression, and men are the oppressive class (This is obviously a very simplified way of looking at it that doesn’t even BEGIN to cover things like non binary genders or what or why the fuck “gender” in the first place, but I feel like it serves as an okay starting point.)

BUT despite many, many men’s fears, nothing about feminism is “against” men. And in fact, feminism is far better for men than toxic masculinity is- something feminism actively fights against.

So anything that comes near the “men shouldn’t cry” “men have to be strong and tough all the time” etc etc, comes from toxic masculinity. Which feminists hate. Because uh, in addition to just being bad for men, toxic masculinity is where a lot of male violence against women stems from. Think about WHY it’s bad to do things deemed “feminine” or “for girls”, it’s because of misogyny. If women and “girly” things weren’t looked down upon, doing things deemed “girly” would not be seen as a bad thing.

So a lot of it goes like that. These concepts that are hurting men are actually hurting women to, potentially worse. (While yes, toxic masculinity hurts men in that they feel forced to stuff down any emotion, avoid appearing weak, etc etc, it hurts women in that when it manifests as violence, we are quite often on the other end of that violence. Same goes for sexism as a whole. While it hurts men for “girly” things to be off limits, it hurts women for anything associated with us to be considered “less than.”) So yeah. Feminism fights that, and thus, does a lot for “men’s rights.” Because feminism is not gonna pick and choose and avoid doing things that will help men, because, why would we?

When you see instances of male victims of abuse online, you’ll often see other men being the ones mocking them, while, generally speaking, feminists trying to help. (this of course is not cut and dry, there certainly are men who wouldn’t be shitty about something like that, and of course there are shitty feminists who would be, but I’m speaking very generally) Again, this is because rape culture and abuse are things feminism is very concerned with fixing.

Feminism is about making things better and achieving justice, and of course that’s gonna result in good things happening for men.

The problem with labels like “egalitarian” popping up, is first of all, a lot of the time they’re in direct response to labels like “feminist.” Which is a problem because if seeing people say “I fight for women’s rights” brings up the feeling that, well, we can’t say that that’s putting women first- then that looks a little sexist. Going back to the top of this response, women are the oppressed class when it comes to the men/women thing. “Rights for women” isn’t saying “take away rights from men” and behaving as though it does is counterproductive to say the least. That alone doesn’t seem like a huge problem but, you’ll find that the majority of the people calling themselves this really do take that mind set, and any mention of women’s rights will be met with “well what about men?” Which is never a way to have a productive conversation, but also reframes the conversation from “This is hurting women what can we do?” to “why can’t men be the focus all of the time?” Which… hurts women. 

So when I see people calling themselves I assume they’re more reactionary than any sort of actual activist. And maybe if that hadn’t already been the case, it could have become a word actually meaning someone who cared about equity and equality.

But then, that there is another problem. There is a HUGE difference between “equity and justice” and “equality.” And equality is,,,, just not as good.

Here’s an image that kind of tells you the difference in an easier to understand way than my rambling.

When you so much believe in “equality” and treating everyone exactly the same, you actually do nothing to tear down oppressive systems and are more likely to uphold them in the spirit of “not giving anyone “special treatment.”” We’ve had systems of oppression in place for centuries, treating everyone exactly the same ignores that and refuses to acknowledge the actual problem in favour of appearing to be neutral.

Anyway, that was messy as hell so anyone is free to add onto this. 

[trickshottantrum]

So, for Pride Month, I figure it’s time for self evaluation...

I never expressed myself growing up. I had an alcoholic father who was transphobic/homophobic and would verbally and emotionally abuse me. He’d ridicule all my efforts at new hairstyles, new clothes, etc. I was homeschooled, as well, so I wasn’t influenced by other kids and I sort of just remained looking plain because I knew that if I tried to go past that, I’d just be met with mockery that’d make me feel self-conscious. Sure, that’s nothing worth avoiding the opportunity to explore yourself, but try telling that to an awkward, self conscious, and lower middle class teenager with little to no self esteem/confidence. 

I liked a lot of feminine clothes, makeup, and gestures growing up. All my role models were female including my mom, my aunt, and friends such as @toytowns who I’ve known for pretty much a decade. The more I got older, the more I saw how much society designated you to a specific criteria based on the sex you were born with. We as a culture created a very elaborate blueprint that was mass marketed since the early modern era. Blue is for boys, pink is for girls, dolls are for girls, baseball is for boys. It doesn’t stop there, because that sense of elaborate gender designation follows through with everyone until the very end.

I used to be told that I should “have more balls” and to be be more like my cousins. Forr basically my entire adolescence, I fretted on being the opposite of what I was called. I tried so hard to be a “man”, when in reality, what I was trying to do was be a strong type of individual who could get back up after I was knocked down, yet because of social engineering, I viewed that as being a “man”.

I lost out on being a teenager who loved themself and excelled in expressing how they felt inside, instead being a teenager who blindly pursued being someone that several authority figures expected them to be. There’s so many men out there who ended up following that path regardless too. You have so many men engaging in dick-measuring contests and imposing themselves on people because they feel that is the “manly thing to do.” Which is to say, not all men think this way, but enough men in the world think this way that it’s become a culture to which the media and corporate industries can even monopolize on their insecurities and social complexes.

So, last year of June, after idolizing so many women and realizing how much I was tired of trying to be a “man”, I came to my senses that I, too, wanted to be a woman. I spent about a year coming to terms with it, realizing how messed up my childhood and adolescence was, and feeling happy because of who I wanted to be now. Except I recently came to the conclusion that I don’t want surgery. Not only am I slightly fearful of the result, but I realize the way I feel has little to do with my body.

I experience social and mind dysphoria more than I do with my body. My mind is at odds with my identity and people see this. I feel like shit whenever people call me “sir” or “bro” or lump me in with “the guys” because a guy is who I’m not, speaking in terms of identity and personality. And truth be told, a woman is not entirely who I am either, as much as I’ve idolized them. People are going to tell me and everyone else that a biology book trumps the way we identify, and yes, I’m sure every nonbinary person realizes who they are biologically.

But when we establish the term “nonbinary”, we’re talking about who we are as a static and as a soul. We’re referring to the fact of how we exert ourselves to the world, not in one box, male or female, but both. We feel so comfortable and so loving of ourselves just floating around outside either boxes. But so many people are gonna say “You’re a fucking moron, what’s in your pants makes you who are, sorry” because when they hear nonbinary people say they’re neither or both male/female, they hear “my genitalia and hormone structure has been invalidated due to my feelings and I’m biologically unisex!”

Well, sure, biologically, I’ll give you the fact that it defines my sex, but my biology does not define who I am when I socialize or when I engage in productivity or how I express my emotions. And honestly, I just want to be absolutely done with how I’m supposed to exist because certain individuals want to justify their prejudices that in turn justifies their insecurities. The hilarious thing is so many people, including models, scientists, engineers, and celebrities, have contributed much more to the world than the masses who defy them being “nonbinary”.

So, to wrap things up, yes, I know what I am biologically. But that’s where it will always stay, within the properties of biology. You can’t go against your nature either, however, and my nature is being a rebel and a defiant. Society influenced by alt-right politics wants nonbinary people to wrap everything up and start following social/gender norms based on their biology, but they continue to defy that ideology. So I, as a defiant, feel right at home in the nonbinary spectrum. 

I love being a combination of both male and female characteristics. I’m just an individual who wants to be a they and a them. I just want to exist without being put into a box as much as possible because I’m free-spirited. I love being androgynous, wearing clothes and makeup. I idolized so many women in eyeliner and lipstick who radiated with bold and feminine charm, strength, and intelligence.

Unfortunately, sometimes I think about how I don’t want vanity to define me, “clothes don’t make the individual” being a motto and all, but even if it’s cheap dollar store makeup and thrift shop clothes, as long as I get to express myself as just an individual of both male and female characteristics, I’m happy. Maybe someday I’ll even do so well at it, that I just might make a full transition into womanhood. But for now, just an individual is who I am.

[i-want-to-be-manhandled]

more trans ramblings (tramblings?) - to T or not to T, that is the question

so i’m writing this so i have some thoughts to show my therapist next week instead of scouring my brain for them but im posting it on the internet instead of keeping it in a word document or some shit cause i need some of y’all to relate and i’m already way too personal on here anyways. and also at this point this is my personal blog too, i’ve given up entirely on keeping it just for video games. tl;dr: please tell me i am not the only one with stupid amounts of doubt going against the stupid amounts of evidence that i am very transgender. 

tw: long post, doubts, testosterone/hrt effects discussed in detail, (don’t read this if you know me irl and haven’t personally talked with me about being trans? otherwise go ahead), nsfw cause we’re talking about genitals but mostly towards the end of the second to last paragraph (i’ll strike the nsfw stuff), mention of rape but no discussion of it happening, lemme know if i missed anything

so as my last transpost said im very excited for my hysto that im nowhere near getting but im flip-flopping as to whether or not i want to go on t. i know i can get it fairly quickly if i decide i do want it. there’s a trans health clinic in walking distance from where i am moving in 23 days, i have 3 therapists who will write me a letter of recommendation for testosterone, and my mother even found me the trans health clinic so she’ll try to find me somewhere else to go if they don’t take me in for some reason. (having a supportive mom is great i don’t miss her crying about how hard it is to have a trans kid in january and february.) and i’ve looked thoroughly at the effects of testosterone and have sorted them into pros, neutrals, and cons. (posting it here again mostly bc i need to do it but i also need some of yall to relate and/or validate me and/or answer my weird questions)

pros:

voice drop. im so tired of having a squeaky voice which is exacerbated by me always being anxious, and my sister has a deeper voice than me and always tries to sing ridiculously low parts to stretch it for some reason which makes me feel insecure. and apparently my voice is “always squeaky” according to my dad and like? shit man i pass until i talk that’s just the tea. 

i dont even care if i have a super deep voice, i actually think i’d rather be a solid tenor because that’s the vocal range of most of my favorite songs, but i want to sound like a man when i talk and not an 8 year old girl

side note apparently a lot of trans guys have male “internal voices” but mine just sounds like how i sound when i talk because i’m a very literal person and that’s why it took me forever to figure out i was trans and not having a male internal voice makes me dysphoric sometimes and even doubt that i’m trans at all... that’s dumb af i know it’s just my literal personality type not me actually being a girl

more muscle. i dont work out as it is right now but if i knew i’d see results the way i want them then i probably would. also im getting ripped during the school year anyways bc i walk everywhere with a 15-20 pound backpack strapped to me so i’m at least gonna look semi muscular which is what i want anyways. please give me strength quite literally i can barely lift bro

bottom growth. ik it’s still not going to be ~enough~ or whatever but i’d have... something? that would be nice. 

side note would packers start to be uncomfortable with something there bc i wonder about that sometimes. not that mine is super uncomfortable now or anything (i just haven’t figured out how to make it sit right) but i wonder about that

NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS

if im one of those guys whose periods dont stop on t i am actually going to perform a hysto on myself

fat shifting from hips, thighs and butt to my stomach. i don’t care if i have stomach chub or not, but i DO care that my hips are Like That and my things are Really Girly and i have a fucking Girl Butt TM like please just let me Not Have These Problems

having a more angular face. doesn’t happen to everyone per se but because of my facial structure as it is and also what my dad looked like when he was my age, i probably will get this change. i have actively wished for this since i was 13 and didn’t even know dysphoria was a word. hopefully it makes my lips a little thinner too or at least more masculine.

veins becoming more prominent. i have this one pic of me where it looks like i have Guy Arms and i just wanna look like that all the time ya know

lookin like a dude and passing? that counts right

neutrals:

facial hair. i know a lot of trans guys want this but i’ve never wanted one. i just want a jawline to cut a bitch tbh i’m never having more than stubble except the beard imma wear to my high school reunion

body hair. this is more of a pro-neutral ig bc i want it on my arms and legs but would prefer not to have a lot on my chest and stomach. fortunately i dont think my dad has a whole lot but i’m a pretty hairy afab person as it is i just dont wanna be a werewolf lmao

hair loss at temples. i just don’t care about my hairline enough for this to really bother me. maybe i will when it happens but *shrug*

scents of sweat/bo/urine changing? idk i feel like it will be weird, maybe gross if it turns out bad but honestly i don’t really care what i smell like as long as i don’t smell like a dumpster fire? i shower it’s fine lmao

rougher skin? i dont know if i’d like having rougher skin but i also dont like being an uwu soft boi so

acne. nobody wants it but like... i already have stress-acne right now and don’t really give a shit because i hate how my face looks anyways. not that i want a fuckton of acne because nobody does but im not gonna cry myself to sleep over it ya feel? it’s an annoyance but not really a con

cons:

increase in sex drive. not to be nsfw but masturbating is a chore as it is. it hasn’t been fun since i realized i had crippling bottom dysphoria and even then i can’t get off unless i’m completely distracted from my body (either through porn or being too tired to care). also i have like a 2% chance of ever having a partner so i really dont wanna have to deal with having the sex drive of a 12 year old boy when im 19, single, depressed, and dysphoric. im not even asexual but this is the worst con

emotional changes. yall know at this point i dont have the best temper, and i dont want t to exacerbate that. now, some of my friends have said that t has made them much calmer and actually less irritable, but the rest of my friends said t makes them angry. i have poor anger management and i know it. i don’t need it made worse. it’ll fuck my life up for real

increase in appetite. listen i have gastritis, ibs and acid reflux i cannot afford to be needing to eat more than i currently do

so as yall can see i have a fair number of all 3: 8 pros, 6 neutrals, and 3 cons. and what’s more, all of the cons are things that don’t have anything to do with my appearance (which my therapist and i noticed during our session a couple weeks ago and really made me think i should go on t). so then the answer should be clear: i should go on t, right? deal with having a fucked high sex drive and be pissed off because of it but finally be able to see my reflection in the mirror. so it should be obvious. what the hell am i waiting for?

the main reason i’m hesitant is i’m afraid i’ll want to detransition. even though i KNOW it rarely happens and the women who do thought they were trans because of unaddressed traumas relating to being female or have a personality disorder. i have neither of those things: the only female-related trauma i have is being slut shamed by my mom for wearing tank tops and any shirt that wasn’t a crew neck and one guy saying he’d rape me in 9th grade because he thought rape and sex were the same thing (for his sake i hope he’s grown the fuck up!! i’m not traumatized from this i just made my teacher not let him sit next to me in class and told him to stop talking to me. sadly this is the most sexual attention i’ve ever gotten), and the only mental illnesses i have are depression and anxiety (unless we’re counting dysphoria, which i definitely have). i also sometimes feel like i discovered it too late: i didn’t say “i’m not a girl” until i was 14, refused to explore my gender until i was 17, and didn’t fully accept i was trans until i was 18. and other dumb shit: i never tried to pee standing up so im not really trans even though i didn’t know what a penis was until i was like 9, ive caught myself twice recently wishing for longer hair which made me feel feminine and gross and dysphoric (even though i know hair length =/= gender??), and im not in danger of suicide if i don’t get testosterone and top surgery RiGhT nOw. the prospect of me detransitioning isn’t likely, when you look at all the facts, but the prospect makes me anxious because everything makes me anxious. i am the poster boy for anxiety. and yes, i know i would have said that even when i accepted that i was technically the poster girl but i would have said poster boy anyways because it was “gender neutral” and didn’t rub me the wrong way like poster girl would have. same reason i insisted on being a dude instead of dudette and only described myself with words that didn’t have a female equivalent in french class even if it wasn’t true. so what the hell am i waiting for.

like i know i shouldn’t be doubting at this point because it’s so, so obvious that i’m trans. just because i didn’t try to pee standing up when i was little or ask why i didn’t have a penis doesn’t mean i’m not a guy. i logically know this. like when i was 11 and i insisted to myself i had a male brain but knew i shouldn’t say that out loud because that was weird and i wanted to be a normal girl who didn’t have a weird male brain, and when i was 7 and at my friend sarah’s house and her room was super pink and girly and i literally thought the sentence “is this what i’m supposed to be like?” and when i was 14 and cut my hair into the Typical Queer Girl Pixie Cut and my hair was just??? gone like i wanted it to be when i was 9 and ended up with a bowl cut instead, and instead of looking in the mirror and thinking i looked like an owl when i was 9 i smiled at how “androgynous” (masculine) i looked, and when i was 11 and only hung out with boys at summer camp and they treated me like one of them and the girls were really mean to me but it was the best summer i’d ever had, and when i was 15 and my friend chris joked that i was the “guy” in my lesbian relationship and i was so fucking happy, and when i was 15 and starving myself because i loved my “angular” figure and jaw,  and when i was 16 and wearing a dress to winter formal because my ex met me in one and i wanted to be cute for him but i picked the dress that looked like a suit because it looked very “queer” (masculine), and when i was 14 and literally went “hmmm im gonna bind my chest just because i wanna know what it would look like” and it made me so euphoric and i knew in that instant i wasn’t a girl but repressed it for 3+ years because dealing with it would just be too hard, and when i was 11 and knew it was going to be my last day going to school without a bra on and just being so ashamed even though i wanted breasts so i’d be a normal girl, and when i was 16 and wearing that backwards snapback all the time and my friend said it was what tops did and i was so happy that nobody would consider me a bottom or whatever stupid shit because i couldn’t imagine myself being penetrated ever in my cisgender gay life, and when i was 16-17 and scouring the lesbian section of pornhub for pov/strap-on videos bc i wanted to know what it would look like to fuck a girl with a dick without watching straight porn because i’m 100% a gay female because the word lesbian is too girly im not a trans guy or anything haha, and when i was 14-and-onwards wondering why it felt so empty between my legs and why it felt like i was supposed to have a dick lmao im totally a girl though haha, and when i was 15 and had to google how to masturbate bc i couldn’t figure it out naturally and still felt like i was doing it wrong, and when i was 15 and looked at my vagina in the pocket mirror i got from selling like 30 boxes of girl scout cookies in 2007 and my first thought was “that is not my body,” and when i was 16 and actually very upset that i couldn’t ejaculate when i orgasmed. trans who? what the fucking hell am i waiting for

seriously. i was 7 and looking at my 2nd grade yearbook photo thinking “that doesn’t look like me,” and i was 13 and looking in the mirror saying “that doesn’t look like me,” and i went through all of my adolescence waiting for “puberty to turn me into a girl” and then i was 17 and done with puberty and crying because my body was still wrong. i can’t believe how hard i tried throughout my whole adolescence to be some facet of “normal girl” so i wouldn’t get bullied and be dateless forever and thinking “puberty hasn’t turned me into a girl yet” and not stopping to think about what i was if i wasn’t a girl until puberty was done, i realized it wasn’t going to happen, and it was too damn late for me. now i’m 19 and don’t leave the house without either a binder or a sports bra/baggy layers combo and i’d wear my packer everywhere if i could figure out how to get it to sit right (and also get it past my parents lmao).  like if anyone else rattled off that list of trans shit i wouldn’t question them for a second. but because it’s me and i’m like “what if i’m transwashing my memories? what if i’m gaslighting myself?” i’m still not on testosterone and please validate me. tell me other trans people doubt themselves, no matter how obvious it is that they’re trans. tell me it’s okay to doubt hrt, even though you know it will be so much more likely to help you. tell me it’s okay to be afraid of detransitioning, even though it’s okay if i DO decide to detransition and it’s so unlikely anyways considering all the evidence of Me Not Being A Fucking Girl.

if you read this all the way to the end here’s an awkward hug and some brain bleach im not even drunk or high i can’t even blame substances for this behavior 

[ais-n]

i'm not sure if you've answered this before but what are your personal feelings towards vivienne? at the beginning i hated her but towards the end i grew to appreciate her characterisation, her evolution as a character, and what can i say i'm a sucker for bitchy female characters!!

Man, I love her! She’s one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written. I know she’s super controversial and most people HAAAAAATE her, and I can completely understand why because first of all, she’s pretty much the worst mother on the planet lol And I can totally understand why people who like Boyd or want to protect him are pissed at her. There’s very good reason. Plus secondly, she doesn’t even attempt to be nice to pretty much anyone. She’s logical almost to the point of ruthlessness. There are many reasons for people to not be a fan of her, but she knows that and she still is who she is because that’s who she is. And, as I get into, that’s one of the things I like about her.

One reason I love her is probably because she’s so different from me and I find that to be fun and freeing to write. The thing I like is that she basically kicks a lot of gender stereotypes in the balls. She isn’t the soft and loving mother who constantly self-sacrifices for her kids; she’s much more interested in her career than anything. She actually didn’t even ever want kids at all. As a woman who also does not like nor want kids, I know people give you CONSTANT shit for that, like you’re only as worthy as your uterus, and frankly that pisses me off a lot. So to be able to explore those frustrations in a character who gives no shits about upsetting other people is kind of fun, since I would typically not say the things she would right to peoples’ faces lol

Also, she’s in a male-dominated profession but didn’t let anything make her compromise her personal morals. I mean, her moral scale is quite a bit different from most people lol But she’s very honorable, in a lot of ways - the problem is just that her viewpoint is so skewed from the norm that her morality doesn’t really match others, and so when she honors that morality it’s also her sometimes seeming super fucked up to others. 

One of the things I love the most about her is she really doesn’t care what other people think. I mean, she’s weird about looking presentable, as we have seen in her talking shit to Boyd when like a hair is out of place. I made the Queen Vivienne comic years ago for a reason:

((MORE BEHIND CUT BECAUSE I RAMBLED LIKE WHOA))

(You can read the rest of it/ the whole thing here if you want)

It was a joke but it was based on an exaggeration of her reality. However, despite her being so focused on that, she is otherwise completely uncaring in other directions. She doesn’t care if people think she’s a heinous bitch no matter what she says or does, because to her that’s unimportant noise. She cares about doing what is best for the long term, and what makes sense to her.

There’s a level of confidence she has that I don’t think I could ever achieve, and I appreciate having that in a female character when so often women are taught to be polite and hesitant and submissive and all these “feminine” qualities instead.

Because she is this way, what I find fascinating about writing her is that she’s actually almost too good at achieving her goals. She doesn’t bother to do any PR for herself, she just focuses on that for her job and her company. Because of that, all her life, people (other characters, I mean, not readers) don’t realize or recognize the things she does that are actually really helpful or good. (Things like her being the reason Hsin’s collar was removed and he was able to leave the Agency compound unaccompanied, and the box being destroyed, and him being given psychological help more consistently)

To her, it isn’t important. But to others, it could be relevant information.

There’s a scene in Julian Files that references this –

... 

Wait… what??? I thought I had released this chapter forever ago…. did I never? wtf I can’t find it posted online.

UGH. Ok well. hmm. That kind of fucks up me excerpting it because you need context… but the book wasn’t at that point chronologically yet so I hadn’t posted it….

UGGGGHHHHH

Maybe I’ll release it as a standalone chapter. Would you be interested? Basically, it’s a scene that shows that side of Vivienne; her doing something good but refusing to let anyone give her credit for it. She comments about her reasons for why she’s so focused on outward appearance in that scene too, I realized when I tracked down the chapter to figure out if it was online.

Anyway I threw myself off by discovering that chapter isn’t online so now I forgot the other reasons I like her. But I will say one other thing I like is that she is very good at planning and executing those plans. She is super good at being aware of what’s happening and as a result she can usually maneuver through and around difficult situations without taking direct damage. I also like that although her logical side can seem ruthless at times, it also means she is able and willing to change her mind or reevaluate things with new information. Which means she has a chance for character development at any given time.

Also, she tried to stop the cycle of abuse in the generations of her family which I appreciate, but she wasn’t very successful because too much shit went down at once and it twisted her view of everything and she grew to hate Boyd. But if you go back to her childhood, she had a good one when she was with her parents and her maternal grandmother, but when they were all taken from her at a young age, she grew up from then on with a really bitter grandmother who said and did a lot of shit that was damaging. It’s possible Vivienne would have been the same without that influence, but I don’t think so. I think she would have remained a bit softer, less guarded, and a bit more emotionally daring - because her mother, father, and maternal grandmother, were all very free-spirited, loving people. But her paternal grandmother, who ultimately raised her after she was orphaned, was pretty much the exact opposite. There’s definitely a fair amount of her coldness that came from growing up around that grandmother. And I say Vivienne at least tried to stop the cycle of abuse because although Vivienne was always very distant from Boyd and was verbally/mentally abusive at times, she didn’t physically hurt him like her grandmother did her. Vivienne’s grandma was verbally and mentally abusive, as well as physically. For example, she used to drown Vivienne in the bathtub until Viv could make it through without showing any emotion on her face. Only then would she be allowed up to gasp for air. Things like that. 

So, although from Boyd’s perspective Vivienne was a shit mother who caused him a lot of pain and who also abandoned him when he needed her most - from Vivienne’s perspective, she knew after all those years she couldn’t be a good mother, or really any sort of mother at all. She left Boyd alone because she couldn’t deal with him, but also because the small part of her that was motherly toward him wanted to give him his best chance. And she knew she would only make it worse if she was around him. She was trying to do him a favor by walking away. Whether or not that actually was a kindness remains to be seen. After all, someone shouldn’t get accolades just for not physically harming their child, since that should be a given. Especially if that person harmed that child in other ways. Her not doing worse things doesn’t make her a good person - it just means she wasn’t, generally, malicious in her ways.

In other words, some actions of Vivienne’s that seem really heartless from the outside (like walking away from your young child who recently lost his father and just wants to be loved), can actually have intentions and reasons that are much different from her perspective. They may even be really good ones. But you’d never know it, because she will never tell you. And even if you find it out, she will likely dismiss it as unimportant.

Because to her, seeking the approval of others is the stupidest waste of time. If people are going to judge you, she figures, then they aren’t worth your time anyway. Use that for better efforts instead.

I have no idea if any of this makes any sense.... I’m having one of those days where I’m suddenly exhausted and falling asleep at the keyboard so here’s to hoping so a cohesive post lol 

I guess the tl;dr to this is I totally get why people don’t like her, but maybe because I know what she’s thinking and what she’s done (both good and bad), I like her a lot.