#don't even get me started on “feminist re-tellings”

[ghouljams]

I always get so interested by your discussions about the Greek Gods. I was always that kid more obsessed with dragons and monsters over gods and goddesses - like the whole "as a child you were either into the dragonology books, the egyptology books or the wizardology books - I was firmly in camp dragonolofy while my bestie was into egyptology.

I could probably name dozens of Greek monsters, but when it comes to the Gods and Goddesses? Nah, I'm pretty clueless, so I'm always very interested in everything you have to say about them. Every time I've seen something about them they all just seem to be complete assholes, so I could honestly care less about them, but your version of them that fleshes them out is honestly much more interesting.

I was absolutely obsessed with greek and norse mythology as a kid. Read every book of myths I could get my hands on because I loved the way the gods could be clearly wrong and experience semi-consequences (in norse myths at least, more greek gods never get punished for anything).

In college when I'd get really drunk at parties I would just start re-telling greek myths to people around me and slowly gathering a crowd. The human urge to listen to tell stories. People would come up to me and be ask if I was going to have a story time it was great. I loved telling norse myths because most people hadn't heard them before, but sometimes someone would ask about a greek god and it was like the floodgates being opened lol

I was actually really interested in "modern retellings" of greek myths the first part of 2024 and ended getting really frustrated because a lot of them feel like they'd be better served as original fiction than saying "oh no this is about hades and persephone" especially when so much of it actually does a really bad job re-imagining the gods and the story. I dnf-ed Neon Gods because it was pissing me off so bad. Like the political structure was more interesting than the "romance" and I was just... bored.

Anyway re-telling greek myths is one of my favorite things to do because they're so interesting to play with if you know the players and the story well.

[brilliantfantasticgeronimo]

thought to myself u know what. i havent watched falsettos enough. so here's a couple things i noticed in my latest impromptu rewatch (rewatch number 52th probably?? 67th?) + just some nice bits n parallel that are always Good (tm):

"he loves another" "i agree" with ("-man") going unsaid

the chess games following trina's song about stupid men and their little games

"that's the king. please protect him" That's marvin saying "please protect me. don't hurt me"

whizzer moves the pieces randomly in the revival but i like to imagine he's actually beating marvin at the game in the end... and the whole thing was him pretending to not know how to play, and that hurt marvin's ego more than anything

"now marvin, bend" as a sexy moment but later gets re-framed as a "unwillingness to change perspective" moment

"nothing is everything to me / except sex / and money" in that money whizzer is playing to marvin's insecurity that he's only sticking with marvin for his money- is so needlessly cruel (and thus such... delicious character writing lol)

"and he loves me so" that "so" at the end is sort of a "loves me so much" but also a dare. he loves me, so what can you even do about that?"

"ask me if i love him, it depends on the day"// "do i love him?… no"

"son with a brain, and nice bright mother" showing mendel is like marvin (+ many, many men) and wants a wife half just to do domestic labor for him (goes well with the "washing your laundry, washing your socks!" line)

"he loves his father" // "i love things i never had"

"im everything he wanted" here trina finally realizes how she was such a insecure woman for such a long time and why she could put up with so much / settle for so little ("love me for what i am, not what i try to be" etc)

i love that "what ive done to you is rotten" is the slap to trina, is not taking to jason about his sexuality, and is Also telling trina and jason he "never ever, wanted to love" them. triple treat of bad parenting lol (but our man gets there in the end #bless him)

"a man kid, you'll be kid, whatever your song" the kind of reversed coming out metaphor of it all. ugh. so good!! (also i always cry at this bit bc... i will never have this with my parents :) rip haha whoops)

"pretty boys are in demand" just a good line for the whole gay men dying everywhere + the 'dating frenzy' energy of the era

"im not a giant man" /"good" // "one day i hope to be / as mature as my son who is 12 and a half / and this tall… that's all i want to be, that's all"

"we'll spent BILLIONS of dollars" and then the actual thing plays the way it does

"making the most pathetical errors" as a metaphor for marvin's arc…. making constant errors in love but making a homerun at the end

"should i take this new promotion OR should i take this IBM job?" is an amazing, anti-corporate lyric that fits greatly w/ the most explicitly political (likely authorial) song in the musical that, imho, shouldn't have been cut in the revival. in hindsight tho i imagine the revival people felt very proud and """progressive""" when they made that cut lol is very much a typical liberal move: "cant have true emancipation or revolutions but u cant have some \~upward mobility in the job market xoxo". also on the same vein, cutting the line "i'll change my life, and hire a maid" from the og "and fire the maid" like it's this huge feminist moment lol ughhhh hh

(other line-cuts that frustrate me… "it's queer, mr. marvin", "i could use a little drink" and "i just bought a family" . i feel w/ all of these they tooks some "edge" of the OG characters and kind of attempted to make them "nicer". but it really just makes them a little flatter, a little less real) ( and also some scenes just plain make less sense (marvin's drink line leading to his outburst)

(but bc it's not All Bad sdklfj in fairness, i belie the whole "why don't we tell him, that we don't have the awnsers? (…) this is the start to his becoming a man" bit - is SUCH a great part for mendel, it goes so hard and from what i remember is not in the original falsettos? correct me if im wrong but if it was a new addition in the revival, imo it's a huge improvement to the scene flow… and dare i say, brings the whole climax together, and spells out The Aesop for people who hadn't gotten it by the end of Act 2) -"let me go, im not ashamed to have loved you" // "what's the matter trina, darling, why cant you let go?" -"feel all right for the rest of your life" The Message of the play implicit in it.. "even if it's cut short"

"you save lives, and i serve chicken fat / i can't fucking deal wit hthat" / "maybe is not dumb the way this whole thing ends / the food tastes really yummy!"

"it's about growing up, getting older, living on a lover's shoulder" /"but i confess, you grow up, you get old, you hate less"

"the ground shifting, the rules keeps changing" and it's when the set changes for the first time!!! (/eats all my walls)

"isn't it enough i love you every night?" "who?" // "we had trouble parking, just like on our second date" "i hyperventilate"

"good men never fail" // "but i can't help but feeling i've failed " proving once again those machista lessons marvin learned when young were wrong.... it's clear that him showing weakness at that moment to whizzer was The Right Thing To Do. and what the moment called for.

"the last little mountain ill climb" sound of music ref? maybe?

i only wanted to love and not be blamed " // "who would i blame my life on?"

[olderthannetfic]

Re: discourse about using outliers / the worst examples of a group to justify generalizations-- this is also a problem with the femslash wank asks

I'm one of those filthy f/f folks who actually does want to see more femslash relative to mascslash, but I'm not anti-fujo or a terf or telling ppl to change their own tastes. I'm proship / SALS and kinkmato and I think fujoshi are great; I appreciate their massive contribution to fandom culture including AO3's existence itself

But some ppl seem like they just hate f/f fandoms generally and want a reason to bitch about us? and I've felt super demoralized by it whenever I read your blog lately

Like the complaints about f/f being too wholesome and fluffy and that this is somehow bad?? tumblr is C O V E R E D with cutesey fluffy bubbly m/m art using That Artstyle we all know and nobody complains about it. But when sapphic art is like this suddenly its cause we're boring sexless puritans who dont know what pussy should look like? The huge amount of kinky weird depraved f/f thats out there gets totally erased and the wholesome stuff gets scapegoated as a symbol of regressiveness.

Or the constant lecturing to "JuSt CrEaTe It YoUrSeLf" as if nobody who says they want more f/f would actually be making it??? How do you KNOW they're not making it? Are you stalking the tumblr of every ao3 f/f author to make sure they never expressed the opinion you hate , and vice versa??

Yeah a few awful ppl have been super obnoxious, terfy, or puritanical bullies with how they talk about this topic. But when you constantly bring those people up to demonize talking about it at all it feels like you're creating a taboo around it because you want those annoying lesbian feminists to shut the fuck up. Cause how dare we, right? How dare we express desire for something in a way that reminds you patriarchy exists.

You won't even let us express that we're bitter or sad about feeling like a minority even amongst other queer women. You won't let us express simple jealousy without interpreting that jealousy in the most terfy antiship bad faith way possible!

I won't defend those who actually harass ppl or moralize over ships. I won't defend anti-fujos. But when you constantly lump me in with those people just because I looked at AO3 stats and went "Hmmm, it would be cool if this was more balanced :/" or whatever it feels like you just don't want me to say anything at all

--

Is this about me personally? Yes, I agree that topics that are repetitive start to feel like an attack.

But with regards to AO3 stats, this is my pet peeve, as you probably know if you read here often, and I'm unlikely to stop being angry about it.

AO3 is extremely unusual in the history of fandom for being a very big, very multifandom site that is not m/m-specific but where m/m outnumbers other things. There have been large-ish slash archives before. There have been and still are other large, multifandom archives, from FFN and Wattpad, which are in AO3's weight class, to medium size ones like MediaMiner. The spaces that aren't m/m-specific generally have f/m vastly outnumbering m/m. They also make it harder to get stats than AO3 does.

I don't have an issue with people looking at overall fandom stats and complaining that f/f has the short end of the stick when it comes to fanfic broadly. I do object to people pulling only AO3 stats and going "The one anomalous clubhouse that looks like this is the problem" and pointing at m/m.

It's the same problem you point out, just in another direction. After being told "Okay, but the amount of m/m..." constantly for years, people are fed up and never want to hear it again. Even if it's phrased nicely. Even if the person saying it is also hurting.

[balkanradfem]

Do you ever think about how sad and messed up it is to grow up in this world as a little girl who likes to read. Because you are a child, and you don't get that there's a difference in who writes the books, you read everything you like, you read the adventures and the fantasy and the mysteries and the traumatic stuff and if you're also very isolated and lonely, these books build your worldview. Because why wouldn't they? They're written by humans, so they have the attitudes, opinions, perceptions, morals and spirits of human beings in them, they're telling you what humans think and feel about things, how they go about situations, what they imagine, what they desire. What your role in all this is, or what it could potentially be.

But, since you are not capable of differentiating the material, and you just read what is available to you, you end up reading a lot of books written by m*n. You also have to go thru the required reading at school - 90% written by m*n. And so slowly, since young age, without even socializing or learning it thru interaction, you find yourself in a world shaped by minds who do not have empathy for women, especially not for little girls. You find yourself relating to the male protagonists, but you also find out that girls only play a passive role in their stories. You find that m*n problems are centered, made important, their suffering and violence critical points in the story, while women are cast aside as helpers, servants, givers, caretakers, and generally just exist in the background, not a thought given to what they are going thru.

You learn thru books written by m*n, that your experience is secondary. Even if you cast yourself as the adventuring, immensely important and struggling protagonist, even then the other women in your mind end up being just background characters, caregivers who do not need a thought spared for their suffering.

Books written by m*n, even for children, will trivialize female suffering to the point where they shape the child's mind into one that looks at the world from a male perspective. Where women either don't matter, or are capable only of giving and aiding, to be cast aside for more important matters, such as male aspirations for their own lives.

Thinking back, I understand why I felt myself unimportant and trivial in any social setting - I understood my role from the written word, and I knew adults found me trivial, secondary, only a background figure to someone else's adventure or mission. As much as I could fight it in my fantasies, and make myself the main character, it felt like a pipe dream, like something that was incredible self-indulged and selfish and would never translate to reality.

I wish it had been different. I wish I had been introduced specifically and only to books written by women, for women. I wish I had found empathy for myself in those books. I wish I had found myself standing on high ground, equal ground, with other women, our desires centered, our lives translated into tales of epic importance - because that's what they are. I wish I had been born into a world where female perspective is available from the start, not after years of growing up and finding feminist literature and having to re-write my own role in my brain, from all of those years of reading male perspective as the default.

I don't think any little girl should be exposed to literature that shape her world as a place where she doesn't matter. I don't think books written by males and shaped by their worldview should be allowed into children's literature, or teenage or for young adults. Girls should not be learning from fiction that their most important value is empathy and understanding for male problems, and their second, to be desired and/or helpful to them, all while being treated as nothing but service and background noise until you're desired for something. We need to open books and find out that we matter too. That our lives can be the center of our existence, rather than being in the service of someone else's life.

[velvetvexations]

transemasculation: for when you think freud was right about penis envy but ONLY for dirty little trannies (but seriously what the fuck is with this term? who thought this was a good ide- oh, right, ASSHOLES!)

it's really funny because I would make jokes about how TRFs don't want transmascs to make their own language without sending it in for approval to the Transfem Council and now the famous self-identified transradfem is like "here you stupid little boys I made you a word to use if you want one so bad."

That transemasculation shit is the most obvious set up to just keep making fun tmascs because people generally think emasculation is a funny and harmless nonissue maybe even #feminism. Like whats the bet if we did start using it how they want us to people would just immediately start connecting it to our “toxic transmasculinity” to dismiss it / continue to paint us as whiny MRAs anyway ?

it's so fucking belittling

One of the most frustrating parts of when a trans fem posts transandrophobic stuff openly for the first time is how any disagreement harsher than silence gets taken as "men abusing women" and held up as proof that she was right to be wary of trans mascs all along, because look how quickly we will turn on a trans fem and attack her—any negative feelings she has over the incident are just more evidence that she is a victim under siege and right to feel this way.

the wounded gazelle gambit is very popular

The thing that bugs me about transmasc on this site who called themselves TME is that I never see them doing any actual activism for trans women, they specifically just talk down on other transmasc users. Like it comes off so fake-

that's Feminist in Bio men for you

Kinda crushed to see bee/movie/erotica post that? Like??? Yeah white trans people can hold power over me but what the fuck do you think you're doing calling my maness the same as whiteness. my maness cant be the same as whiteness because I am not fucking white. hellworld.

I'm very sorry they let you down, anon. <3

You can tell TRFs are terfs because they do the same thing that terfs do where they point to people who call them baeddels and say that their critics are calling them slurs, and then a few days later will self-identify as baeddels again

they complained so much that I very generously got people to almost entirely saying TRF instead and immediately they just go "TRF is a slur to silence me :("

"the nefarious genderqueers think they're so much more radical and valid than us while the whole queer community actually caters to them, we need more representation for Real Binary Transsexuals" is a recurring theme in Whipping Girl so no wonder it's a common refrain for the "read a singular book" crowd

they do as they are taught

i really like your sense of humour btw

Thank you!

anyways all this patricia taxxon stuff is kinda just making me more motivated to make autistic transmasc therian video essays.

as you should honestly

because i love answering questions not aimed at me, re: is cheating abuse no, but it's a dick move that can be a part of abuse. abuse in a relationship is, for the most part, long term and actively emotionally/physically harmful to at least one person. cheating can be a part of abuse (for example, the fact the abuser cheated in the past, can be held over the abusees (? idk if that's the right term) head.) but alone it isn't. i hooe this made sense. i woke up two minutes ago and have thoughts! i would love to hear yours, because peoples opinions differ a lot in subjects like this

I think I agree with that.

Tall fat hairy women <3

<3

WOOFWOOF... HELLO BEAUTIFUL

;)

I’ve seen a few of your anons discussing the proposal of ‘transemasculation’ to replace ‘transandrophobia’ but I’m not sure that anyone has shared this info yet: https://www.tumblr.com/weepingfireflies/770239720162738176/im-not-even-transmasc-or-transfem-but-the essentially, ‘transemasculation’ was coined years ago by a transmasc user alongside other terms for related and adjacent discrimination/bigotry/etc.; the user who is trying to speak over transmascs about our our terminology and experiences apparently didn’t even bother to do a cursory check that what she posited was actually a new concept

I think it's been brought up but that is very funny, in a cosmic sort of way.

"trans men are men first!" gender essentialism is going to ruin us all like yes you're quite right if you're born a man no matter what your life experiences are, you are inherently more likely to be self-absorbed assholes who hate women. absolutely. the only thing terfs are wrong about it who counts as a man and who counts as a woman yep 100% i see no issues with this clearly our Man Brains make us evil

it's like yeah people who identify as men clearly have skull shapes that show an inclination towards misogyny

i rly appreciate seeing someone else who uses similar referential terms b/c i'm bigender and i honestly really like calling myself a male manwoman. it just feels right in a way nothing else does

I'm glad!

[genericpuff]

A while back you made a post mentioning Down to Earth is trash and I would like to here your take on it. No pressure on it I just like hearing your opinion on things. FYI I hate Kade lol

I did, and I've been meaning to post about it, but I've been taking some extra time to re-read as much as I can so that I could better collect my thoughts :' )

Now I will mention, I have not caught up to the most recent episodes. Most of my thoughts here will reflect the earliest parts of the series, as I didn't end up sticking with this one. So please take my criticisms as someone who just never got into this series for various reasons, not as someone who was incredibly into the comic and fell off it (like I am with LO). I will try to judge it and review it fairly based on that context.

Most of my issues with Down to Earth don't stem nearly as deep as my issues with LO, Let's Play, or even Big Ethel Energy. Frankly, I think the comic is 'fine', but I don't think it's necessarily all that good either, and the amount of attention it gets from the platform lends to the fact that I really think its success is due to a lot of generated hype. This is one of the other comics on the platform that gets a LOT of priority advertising, not quite as egregious as LO, but still a lot.

The short answer: I think the comic is just overrated and pretty basic in terms of its storytelling and art, and I don't think it's necessarily a good "romance" comic for some of the same reasons I don't think LO or Let's Play are good romance comics. I think the only reason I don't get quite as mad at it as I do with LO or BEE or LP is because (as far as I can tell) it's not really advertising itself as some feminist progressive piece of work. It's sorta just "what you see is what you get", and what you get isn't really all that great (for reasons listed below) but at least it doesn't try to sound smarter than it is most of the time. Read it the same way you would watch a fluff anime.

Moving into my long answer, I will say some of the things that were initially appealing about it: the art is very colorful and cutesy, the comedy (for the most part) is inoffensive and simple, and the story is really easy to pick up and get into.

That said, I do think some of those praises are also part of its weaknesses.

While the art gets better over time, there are certain aspects of its stylization that still feel very "baby's first webcomic" to me. Which is great if you're someone who's into that style, but when I read it, it never really stops feeling like a Canvas comic, if you catch my drift. Nothing really sets it apart from the flood of Merryweather-esque fan service comics that are in the Canvas section.

And boy, is there a LOT of fanservice in this comic. I think the main plot point itself is fanservice in and of itself - cutesy anime alien girl crashes on earth, and winds up living with the depressed NEET-like guy, shenanigans ensue from how "inexperienced" she is due to her alien status. Everything from the circumstances of this character's plot to how she's drawn screams "this is for people who like to read about small titty girls with big asses being put into a situation where they have to rely on a man". The comic takes many opportunities to draw the FL, Zaida, as wide as possible (and of course, the ML Kade loves this trait about her, it's one of the first thing he notices aside from the fact that she speaks an alien language and can do weird alien things like telepathy and flying).

Thankfully this does get a little better in the later episodes, you can tell the creator was struggling with anatomy in places and then honed their skills, but there are still times it regresses back to the extremely-pinched-waist-mega-badonker-hips look.

Don't get me wrong, having a protagonist with wide hips like this is all fine and dandy, but there's a point where you can tell it's purely for fanservice and that's definitely what the comic wants you to know from the starting gun. She fits perfectly into that "born sexy yesterday" trope that so many romance FL's do (cough Persephone cough) while also having that "uwu I'm so inexperienced :(((" vibe that you get from characters like Sam in Let's Play. Shit, Kade pretty much starts sexualizing her before he even knows what her deal is as a person. Does he even know how old she is? Is "she" even a "she", do these aliens have different concepts of gender identity or even different types of reproductive organs than what you would find on Earth?

Look, I get it that I'm probably WAY overthinking it, you can write comics about characters from other dimensions and planets without having to get into the nitty gritty of whether or not they have periods, that's fine. But the real problem is the fact that her being from another planet seems to be used purely for creating an infantilized character with extra steps who's easily laughed at for not knowing things (don't even get me started on how "alien" could be replaced with "someone who doesn't speak English or have access to modern devices" in a lot of this comic, but I feel like that's way too deep of a criticism to be pinning on something that's literally designed to be a quirky fanservice fluff comic.)

Like, you want an alien girl who looks human but still acts reasonably like an alien - while even tackling subjects that come with being an "outsider" - without making her act like a literal baby? Starfire from Teen Titans.

(granted, the whole "smooching to transfer information" thing is definitely a little weird in hindsight, and there are definitely moments of fanservice, but that's about as weird as it gets lmao you don't see Starfire acting like a literal toddler, she is smart and capable, she just isn't from Earth, which is the whole point of her characterization being parallel to that of what foreigners experience ! She's not stupid or incapable of taking care of herself, she's just not accustomed to life on Earth!)

Like, this is in one of the newer episodes and I just-

(I suddenly have to throw up-)

It really dials the creep factor of this whole relationship dynamic to 100 when they drive home just how "babylike" she is through panels like this. It's not really her being unaware of customs around her, it's just her being written as babylike as possible with the fact that she's an alien being used as justification.

But it really makes you think about Kade's intentions when he goes straight to buying lingerie for the girl he just met who's been forced to stay with him in his home. He doesn't even really make efforts to help her get on her own feet, he just accepts this as his fate and goes "welp I guess I gotta make sure I don't get fired from my job" because now he has to support the baby girl that landed in his backyard. So Zaida ends up having no agency as a result. It just feels like a contrived situation meant to force an unaware, vulnerable girl into being taken care of by a guy who's, frankly, a creep.

And boy, Kade is actually kind of a creepy scumbag.

Kade makes for a really uninteresting and frankly pathetic character, he's just sort of a whiny man baby and you just know if Zaida was an earthling who had spent time on this planet longer than a few days, she probably wouldn't put up with this shit LOL Like, deadass he basically threatens to harm her within the first few episodes of the comic-

Like, this is after she's ruined his Playstation or w/e, and it's just like DAMN girl, this is a RED FLAG. But of course, she's an alien girl who's ignorant about everything, so it creates that power dynamic where he basically has full reign to take advantage of her at any time. Ladies, if a guy says you shouldn't trust him, take him at his word.

Zaida's characterization is also very inconsistent between her being an alien and her just being an "uwu baby girl". Often times it just makes the whole "alien" thing feel like it's only there to justify writing yet another "I'm babyyyy" romance. Sometimes she's WAY more privy to things than you'd expect her to be and then other times she's doing the dumbest shit for laughs.

Now to be fair, she DOESN'T put up with his shit here, but the fact that the writing for Zaida is inconsistent makes scenes like Kade being a creep being more about the creator realizing they're leaning too hard into her being vulnerable to abuse and so they quickly have Zaida combat it with some strange amount of awareness despite the fact she's only been living with him for a few days... but not enough awareness to maybe realize this isn't a good living situation. Like, again, she may be able to speak English, but that doesn't mean she's fully aware of what Earthlings are like, so she's suddenly really smart about what it means to be taken advantage of by a human man even though everywhere else in the comic she's written like a toddler.

And of course, like many of these webtoons tend to do, they don't linger on the implications of this scene too long, so they quickly turn it into a punchline to ease the tension. Audience comfort restored.

And that brings us to the comedy. The "jokes" in this comic basically boil down to, "haha, the alien girl doesn't know how to take care of herself on Earth!" , which frankly, I think is just a very thin veil for infantilization. I mean, really, the fact that she's an alien doesn't even really matter in the world of this comic, it takes a while for the comic to even really give us a glimpse of what her life was like off Earth so most of the comic is just typical slice of life cutesy moments you'd find in literally any shoujo or romance webtoon. You could switch out the fact that she's an alien with her being from another dimension, or turn it into an isekai where she was the female character in Kade's favorite video game who suddenly got zapped into the real world, and it would make fundamentally zero difference.

They even sorta lampshade this fact but swiftly move on from it.

There's nothing really that makes her an "alien" in any unique or consequential way, she's just a carbon copy anime girl with pointy ears who could be replaced with any other trope from other romance subgenres like this. She can eat human food just fine, dress in human clothes, and as long as she wears a hat over her ears, she's literally indistinguishable from the humans around her.

I will add as well that there are a lot of little ways they hint towards the implied dynamic between these two, at least in the beginning. The whole "second rule: obey" bit, while passed off immediately after as a joke, feels like it was inserted there JUST to create that imbalanced power dynamic that so many "romance" webtoons rely on, similarly to LO and Let's Play. The fact that he corrects himself from this just feels like, again, lampshading.

And again, after this we do see Kade legitimately acting like a creep and he DOESN'T DO ANYTHING to help Zaida get her footing beyond paying for her room and board and telling her to mind her vocabulary, so this seems more like him trying to create a situation that's beneficial to him where he's effectively trapped this girl into relying on him.

They even lampshade this as well so that leads me to believe they're fully aware of this dynamic and how creepy it is, so they try and play it off as a "haha so funny" joke to ease the tension or create suspension of disbelief.

When it comes to the actual execution of punchlines, again, 90% of the jokes in this comic are "haha alien girl so stupid!"

(I will admit this scene did make me laugh, but it's telling that it was the only one that stood out to me for that because every other joke in this series is very mid and resorts to the same type of "haha she's a stupid alien girl" punchlines.)

(omg mental illness! so funny! /s)

If you really want comedy written around aliens describing human things in weird ways, then just go read Strange Planet. They're actually aliens and they're consistently funny through much smarter writing that doesn't rely purely on "lmao they're stupid because they're not from here". If anything the aliens in Strange Planet are way more welcoming and endearing to the concept of being a fish out of water than simply making them stupid for a punchline.

(i swear to christ, "crisscross flop disc" and "prohibit anxiety" are lines that have lived in my head rent free for like 3 years now, it never gets old and THAT'S how you know it's a good joke LMAO)

And the story, as mentioned, is easy to get into, but ultimately that winds up meaning it's not really all that well done. Like, it's fine! It's a cute comic to read if you're into this sort of thing, there are a lot of sweet little moments that feel good to read between Kade and Zaida, but ultimately because of the focus on the fluff, that's all it ends up feeling like - weekly doses of fluff. Even when it tries to have some semblance of plot, it's quickly undercut by fanservice. So it's just kinda boring and vapid.

Case in point, one of Kade's observations of Zaida is that she apparently looks "just like his ex girlfriend" who he still clearly hasn't gotten over, but we don't actually see even a hint of what his ex-girlfriend looks like until MULTIPLE episodes later after the "sparks" have already started being formed between him and Zaida.

Um... she doesn't really look like Zaida at all aside from them both being generic anime girls, but okay lol by that logic the girl he served at the store in Episode 7 also looks like Zaida.

So it kinda makes the whole relationship feel superficial, like he's only interested in her because she vaguely reminds him of his ex, and it's taking so long to get through any amount of plot through all the fluff that I can't be sure if they ever actually address this. I'd like to think they do eventually, though from what I've heard of the later episodes after his ex-girlfriend makes an appearance, it seems more like they go the LO route of making the two relationship "choices" just be complete opposites where one is actually sweet to the ML and the other is abusive JUST to make the sweet FL seem like the "better option". IDK, obviously my criticism of this is lukewarm because I haven't kept up on this comic in ages, but I have the sneaking suspicion the whole ex-girlfriend-the-ML-can't-get-over plotline isn't gonna be used for his development, just to further propel him and Zaida into a relationship - and by extension, manufactured drama to make their relationship more "interesting".

Overall, I don't think Down to Earth is anywhere near as egregious as Let's Play and LO, but it's definitely cut from the same cloth, and that's why it frustrates me to see it - alongside LO and Big Ethel Energy - being marketed as "new voices in romance".

(also real talk, it's so disingenuous for them to include LO in this "new voices in romance comics" panel when it's been around for so many years that everyone and their grandma who uses WT knows about the comic, if they aren't reading LO by now they REALLY don't want to. It's not "new", if anything it's one of the oldest ongoing webtoons on the platform and it REALLY needs to end already lmao)

Far be it from me to gatekeep an entire genre, but this brand of romance comic isn't really "romance". It's vapid fluff loaded up with egregious fanservice that's meant to give you a hit of dopamine every week, while never lingering on serious scenes for too long because they don't want you to realize just how imbalanced the relationship is between the two main characters. It's not quite as concerning as LO or Let's Play, but it does have a vibe that's really uncomfortable when you start to feel it. So having comics like these held up as the "golden standard" of romance is just... it's really telling as to what WT's priorities are and how unhealthy "romance" has become in mainstream media.

And if I can get a little "old man yelling at cloud" for a second, I miss when romance was sweet and soft and earnest and heartfelt. I think the only mainstream and successful romance webcomic (and it's not even an Originals!) that I've seen in the last several years that isn't loaded up with these problematic tropes is Heartstopper. Heartstopper is sweet and soft and earnest and heartfelt. Heartstopper is way more of a pillar for a healthy romance than what any of these "new voices in romance comics" can provide. It literally couldn't function as an Originals series because the definition of a WT romance comic would undercut the actual point of Heartstopper.

These unhealthy standards and dynamics that we've set in the romance genre have been so pervasive for years now and I really just wish they'd go away.

y'know what, this whole essay is really just a promo post for Heartstopper now, go read it-

[aishabellasbigblogofeverything]

No, but can we talk about how, despite allegedly being a "feminist" movie, Barbie 2023 actually mocks the idea of a female fantasy and Barbie being an inspirational role model for young girls?

It's so upsetting that not enough people bring this up, even the other haters of Barbie, but it needs to be addressed. Barbie was meant to provide an empowering fantasy for young girls. A lot of people have differing opinions on whether Barbie is feminist or not and what she represents. But at the end of the day, Barbie was designed to give girls a role model to see themselves in, to show them that they could pursue any career, that they can be the heroines of their own story, and reach their fullest potential. She was meant to tell girls that anything is possible. And the movie not only shits all over that, it makes that feminist message out to be something unrealistic and bad, and even worse, portrays it as something that oppresses men and makes THEM victims, because everything needs to be about men. And it's fucking disgusting. Allow me to explain how.

(spoilers for the Barbie movie below...I mean, if you even care, lol.)

We start out at the beginning of the movie with an introduction to the magical world of Barbieland that our well-known and universally familiar dolls live in. Barbieland is a feminist utopia, one that many women would be eager to live in. Women have all the power, are well-respected, can and do pursue any career, and support and uplift each other rather than tear each other down over their differences(aside from Weird Barbie, who they do apologize to in the end). They are happy and free in their female-empowering land, they don't fear the leers and catcalls from men as they walk down the streets, they dance together happily late at night, and they are confident in their bodies. There is diversity in the Barbieland. There is a plus-sized Barbie, a transfem Barbie, a wheelchair Barbie, and plenty of Barbies of color. The President of Barbieland is a Black woman. And none of these differences hold the Barbies back from being able to have power and they are not treated any differently from the other Barbies.

Femininity isn't seen as a weakness. Neither is expressing emotion, and in fact the fat Barbie even has a miniature speech about how she can balance her emotion with her logic and this makes her a smarter person, which the other Barbies support. It's a world where women are empowered and have unlimited potential to achieve their dreams and live freely without fear of their oppressors. Stereotypical Barbie isn't even afraid to reject Beach Ken's advances, she doesn't fear being stalked, raped, or killed by him for saying no. She just turns him down, and not only that, but she turns him down in favor of having girls' night, showing that in this world, girls support each other and value their female friendships over heterosexual relationships with guys(I'll touch on this point again later). I don't know about you, but that sure as hell does sound like a world that I dream of living in. Minus the fact that all the food and drinks are fake.

But the story doesn't frame this matriarchy as empowering, like they should. It portrays it instead as something ridiculous and far-fetched, something that the audience is meant to laugh at rather than support, which becomes more blatant as the movie progresses.

And then we get to the "real" world. Where men instead rule over women in a patriarchy, and we see Barbie experience misogyny for the first time. And this was the moment I started fully hating the movie, and realized it for the sloppy, anti-feminist mess that it is. The first part of the movie set in Barbieland was campy and fun and happy and feel-good, providing the exact type of feel that Barbie brings. But the moment she steps into the real world, everything becomes sad and hopeless and cynical.

And I get that the patriarchy does exist and women are oppressed by it every day, but the way the movie executed this was really overexaggerated and cringeworthy. They made it seem as if women are constantly and completely powerless in every aspect of life, like seriously they didn't even show ANY women in positions of power and the only women we did see with jobs besides a female doctor, were Gloria who works an office job at Mattel and Ruth who is already dead and is for all extents and purposes relegated to the fucking kitchen. They made the world out to be a complete and total dystopia where women aren't capable of achieving anything and the only two women of importance who are from the real world are Sasha and her mother Gloria, the former is portrayed as bitter, cynical, and constantly angry, the latter is portrayed as stressed-out, depressed, and somewhat suicidal with her thoughts about death. Is this all that the Barbie movie thinks that women can achieve in our world? Being miserable and frustrated with no hope of achieving our dreams and desires? With no power or satisfaction in our day to day lives? Is this all that this shithole movie thinks that women can amount to?

And the worst part is how Barbie is derided and mocked for thinking that she has provided a female role model for women and girls. The start of the movie mocks Barbie for thinking that it solved all women's problems and completely advanced women's rights/feminism, even though Barbie/Mattel has never claimed that. Yes, she was meant to be a role model. But she was never portrayed as the be-all, end-all of feminism. Even people who look up to Barbie and were encouraged by her aren't naive enough to think that a twelve-inch tall plastic doll is enough to smash the patriarchy. The movie makes this up solely so they can tear down Barbie for something that it never claimed to do in the first place. When our main Barbie leaves to go to the real world, the other Barbies encourage her(as Barbies tend to do) by saying that they bet all the women in the real world will thank her for giving them rights. Which is obviously meant to be an overexaggerated and satirical jab at Barbie once again, for thinking that it has created feminism or whatever, and that sexism is over solely thanks to the Barbie franchise. Cute. Too bad no version of the Barbie brand has ever claimed that in the first place. Again, it's a ridiculous and false claim that only exists to further unnecessarily jab at Barbie and propel this backwards-thinking message.

And then when she gets to the human world she is mocked even more. Sasha and her friends laugh at her when she claims to be Barbie and asks them to thank you for inspiring them, and then when she says she loves and wants to help women, Sasha aggressively informs her that EVERYONE hates women. This movie actually has a pretty nihilistic view of womanhood, when you think about it. The Barbie world is portrayed as an empowering world where women can achieve anything that they set their minds to, and aren't held back by sexism, causing them to have full power, reflecting the female fantasy that Barbie was always supposed to represent. But that's just a fantasy land, and is portrayed as cheesy and superficial. When Barbie gets to the real world, she is confronted with the supposed "reality" of being a woman, and comes to realize that it's not actually about empowerment and being smart and capable after all, but about suffering and never having your voice respected, and never having any power and freedom but instead losing your idealism and optimism as you age, causing her to break down in tears upon realizing how stressful it is to be a woman and that she never actually empowered them like she hoped. Seriously, whose idea was it to make Barbie constantly crying and miserable and incapable of doing anything on her own? Is this the Barbie I know? No, it's a pathetic, nonsensical knockoff. I'm telling you, they were TRYING to tear Barbie down.

This is especially true when Gloria gives her entire speech to Barbie about how contradictory and painful being a woman is, ending it with "not only are you doing everything wrong, but also, everything is your fault!" Come on! What is this? It's such a painful and harsh message to try to send through BARBIE of all things, that the essence of being a woman is just pain, pain, pain and guess what else? More pain! How being a woman sucks because all you do is get hated by everyone and treated as an object worthy of scorn and ridicule. It's just so unnecessarily cruel, how they violently ripped away any feminist empowerment Barbie was meant to possess in favor of forcing her into a depressive world where women have no rights or value, and had the nerve to portray this as "realistic", because obviously more negative automatically means more realistic, right?

Rather than provide a middle ground where women face hardships and adversity but are still capable of rising above their struggles and finding the strength within them to make their voices heard and get what they want in society, they opt instead for a stupid false dichotomy: the world is either a stupid frivolous Amazon utopia wrapped in pink and glitter with girl power up the wazoo or a bleak, heartless, and grey dystopia where nothing good ever happens to a woman and only men can do anything important. And it portrays the second one as clearly more realistic and the "better" option. Which, in doing so, sends the message that a world where women rule and are respected and have power and are encouraged to have ambition and pursue any goal they want in life...is unrealistic and impossible, if not outright deserving of scorn. It's so miserable and aggravating. When Barbie said "the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy" I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes. THAT'S how badly the movie annoyed me with its nihilistic and negative preaching. I watched the movie in two days and when I stopped watching it on the first day I felt such a frustrated, hollow feeling in my stomach. I felt so unsatisfied. Like, is this it? Is this all I can dream of having as a woman? All that praise this shitty capitalist crapfest received for being so feminist and eye-opening, ultimately led up to this? For real? So disappointing.

But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is when the movie introduces the KENdom, aka, when Ken brings about the patriarchy...and if the movie hadn't already been hot stinkin' ASS, this is when it would've REALLY started to drag, and where it REALLY reinforces the idea that women can never have any actual power and authority and must instead constantly suffer under the patriarchal status quo.

Ken comes back to Barbieland and introduces the other Kens and Barbies to the patriarchy and horses(ig no one told him that horses are a matriarchal animal, but whatevs), and within hours, revamps the world into a patriarchal hell, just like the real world(except it's portrayed as very childish and simplistic because the witers don't actually take the patriarchy seriously and think it's just "boys think girls have cooties".). And the other dolls instantly buy into it? First of all, am I really expected to believe that the Barbies, who have been established as champions of strength, power and dominance, and who have always ruled the Barbie world, would instantly and easily give in to Ken's brainwashing and allow all of their power to be ripped out of their hands, becoming the happy devoted sexy slaves of the Kens? You think they would casually be like "I for one, welcome our new male overlords!" and let the Kens have all the power? Am I really supposed to accept that shit? And am I also supposed to accept that the other Kens in Kenland, including the Asian one who competes with the white Ken over Barbie, would easily leap at the chance to oppress their female counterparts, rather than laugh at Ken for being silly and tell him to sit his ass down somewhere? Really? Don't piss me off.

The only way you could accept this series of unfortunate events as plausible is if you accept the fact that we're supposed to laugh at Barbieland for being a girl power feminist matriarchy in the first place. If we're meant to laugh at the women for being in power and at this imagined society for being so gynocentric and girl-positive, then of COURSE we're meant to laugh at them for getting their power ripped away that easily, as women could never hold power for so long realistically! Eventually the men would realize their true potential and make society work in favor of them! It's natural and inevitable! The Barbie movie said so!!! And so we watch as the intended "humorous" scenes go on and on, of the men happily running around, flaunting their muscles, and chugging down beers like it's going out of style, while the women happily submit to this newfound male authority, massaging men's feet and serving them drinks. Because obviously a matriarchy could never last long, women are so weak and fragile that any sense of power that they think they possess could easily be ripped away from them within a moment's notice. Peak feminism, everybody.

But it's cool, because eventually the Barbies prove me wrong. They DO get their power back, and establish their rights again. But how do they do it? Do they stage a coup and violently and angrily fight the Kens? Do they march for their rights, as real life feminists have done? Do they balance logic and emotion, as fat Barbie praised herself for doing in the beginning of the movie, and reason with the Kens that oppressing the Barbies is not the right thing to do? No, no, they...put on sexy skimpy outfits and pretend to be dumb bimbos so as to lull the Kens into a false sense of security and think that THEY are in control. And later on they let the Kens sing to them a song about how they want to control women, before turning them against each other by pretending to be in love with different Kens than the ones they were originally listening to. Are you kidding me? This is supposed to be a feminist revolution! But instead of actually using their genuine power to put the men back in their place, they instead use their feminine wiles and dumb themselves down so that the men can feel strong. It is literally leaning into the sexist trope that the only weapon women have, especially against men, is their sexuality, and that this is the only way that women can get their way. Despite this going against EVERYTHING that Barbie stands for! She is supposed to be a strong, smart, and capable woman who can do it all and look glamorous while doing it! She is NOT supposed to be a fucking femme fatale, vamp, or sex object!

So not only do they have their matriarchy easily ripped away from them, but they also are forced to abandon their actual female empowerment and instead conform to the patriarchal status quo to get ahead. By using their bodies, stroking men's egos, and allowing men to mansplain to them. Because the only weapons women are capable of using are the ones men gave us. Because women are just bodies. And this is portrayed as a GOOD thing. Seriously, two of the Barbies even high five each other as they trade Kens at the fireplace, as if to say, "go girl, you are doing it!" Like, seriously, are we supposed to see this as a girlboss moment? Because I sure don't. It's giving "weaponized femininity". It's giving "eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man". It's giving "men are visual creatures." It's giving "kill me with a chainsaw right fucking now because I'm done with this shit." Oh, and don't even get me STARTED on how the Kens have a violent manly war, while the women only get to flutter their eyelashes and use their sex appeal. Because men are strong, women are pretty. Of course.

And then the worst part in the entire movie, the part that really infuriated me and let me know that this movie was the antithesis of feminism, arrives...the Barbies get their matriarchy back and are in power again, and everybody cheers and is happy, except for Beach Ken, who runs away to go sulk. And then...Barbie...fucking apologizes to him. She apologizes to him for casting him aside and making him feel unwanted and unvalued, and even says outright, "not every night has to be a girl's night." Why the fuck, movie? Do you remember earlier in this post when I mentioned how Barbie blows off Ken to hang out with her female friends, because it's girls' night, and female friends matter more than a guy? Sisters before misters, and all that jazz? Well, fuck that. Near the end of the movie, Barbie ends up apologizing to Ken for having a girl's night all the time, as if she was a bad person for not seeing how much she owed him and not hanging out with him all the time when she simply didn't want to. Here we have a woman apologizing for putting her girl friends over a man. The man doesn't apologize for making women his and his brethren's personal slaves. The woman apologizes for making him feel the need to go there by not catering to him, by being too focused on herself to the point where she ignores him, by being so empowered and strong that she makes him feel overshadowed, dare I say, emasculated, and thus need to reassert his fragile, threatened masculinity.

Because this isn't a feminist movie, not really. This is an MRA movie. This is a movie that, rather than focus specifically on the women and their problems, brushes their problems under the rug so as to remind the audience that "men matter too" "men have issues too" "men also suffer under the patriarchy!" And other such claptrap. I don't understand why the fuck cishet Reddit incels/conservatives/right-wingers/other such reactionary groups hate this movie and think that it's anti-men when actually it is pro-men and aligns fucking PERFECTLY with their bullshit line of thinking. That feminism oppresses and victimizes men, that men are the REAL victims of sexism/oppression, that women being granted rights is ultimately more harmful to MEN, that women need to be nicer to and pacify men and apologize for having too much power, that we all need to be quiet and listen to MEN and their experiences more. And I FUCKING HATE that. MEN have been listened to ENOUGH. And I am SICK of being forced to include them and their viewpoints more. How about instead of centering the Kens, we focus more on the Barbies and exploring THEIR issues, and using THEM as templates to convey issues about misogyny? Instead of focusing on Ken and his issues and his unrequited love for Barbie??? Instead, it was made all about the Kens and how oppressed they feel because the women are at the top of the hierarchy, to the point where THEY got the fun little dance number near the climax, RATHER than the actual fucking BARBIES that this movie was NAMED after. Because last time I checked, this WAS the BARBIE movie. NOT THE KEN MOVIE!!!

Oh, and don't even get me STARTED on that shitty ass parallel the movie tries to pull between the Barbieland matriarchy and the real world patriarchy. The movie tries to make the claim that the Barbies being dominant and the most powerful in the Barbie world is just the same as men being dominant and the most powerful in the real world, because the Barbies oppressed Kens just like men oppress women in our world. It also tries to raise the point that the Kens felt insecure and overshadowed by the Barbies and were treated as second-class citizens, thus they installed the Kendom. AND I FUCKING HATE THAT comparison for two reasons. The first is that the Barbies never oppressed the Kens or treated them as inferior in any way. They were simply more important because...it's the BARBIE company. Not the KEN company. Barbies are toys meant to be sold to little girls to inspire THEM. So of course the women are going to be the ones in charge! Why is that such a bad thing?

And the second reason is because I haaaaate the dumb fucking trope of "matriarchy bad because woman oppressing man is just as bad as man oppressing woman!" that this movie and countless, endless other pieces of media also try to push. Like, do you know why female-dominated societies(particularly utopias/positively portrayed ones) are so often represented in media??? Because the world we live in is so heavily male-dominated in almost every society and culture, and has been this way for centuries!!! Sure, there are and have been a few matriarchal cultures in society, but they are few and far between. The overwhelming majority of the world is run by men! Sad but true! And this allegedly feminist movie is for real gonna sit down and tell me "okay, but we can't allow ourselves to dream of a world where women are the ones with positions of power and men are not the privileged ones"? Hell no, fuck that. This movie is giving multiple people, both men and women alike, the opportunity to argue that sexism against men is "just as bad".

But women should be allowed to dream of our matriarchy. We should be allowed to fantasize about a world where we are in charge. We should be allowed to dream about a world where we are protected, respected, and catered to, and can live freely and without fear and oppression, without being told to "think of the men." It doesn't mean that men should be abused, mistreated, or oppressed just like women are and have been. But then again, the Barbies didn't even do that either, like I said. This movie, in its shallow attempts to "critique" the matriarchy(lol) ends up reinforcing exactly why the two aren't comparable in the first place. When the Barbies were in charge, they didn't oppress the Kens or treat them as second-class citizens. They simply lived their lives, going about their day and having fun while pursuing awesome careers.

The Kens, on the other hand, actively oppressed Barbies when they were in charge. The second they were given power, they leaped at the chance to treat Barbies like garbage, the same way that they somehow believed that they had always been treated. They treated the Barbies worse than the Barbies ever actually treated them, to be quite honest. They were the real oppressors, not Barbies. It ironically enough sends the accidental message that the world actually IS better off with women in charge. Can you really blame the Barbies for taking their matriarchy back again(I certainly was happy when they did!)? But no. Instead, the movie expects us to sympathize with the Kens, after everything they've done, and tries to portray the idea of a matriarchy as "just as bad" as a patriarchy. And if that's not an EXCELLENT example of a false equivalence, then man, I don't know what is. Don't even get me started on the audacious slap in the face that was "the Kens will one day have as much power as women do in the real world." As if women got rights and seats in high office because they asked the men kindly? Barf.

And then at the end of the movie, Barbie of course leaves the false, silly matriarchal utopia to live as a boring ass regular human in the "real" world. She no longer gets to live in a world where she is fully liberated and empowered and not relegated to a lesser human being with lower status. She now must live in the "real" world, the hopeless, bleak, and oppressing real world where she will be faced with relentless misogyny and looked down upon by men and society. The movie could have had her form a bridge between the Barbie world and the human world, trying to mend the problems in both worlds while still staying true to who she is at her core. But instead, she is forced to say goodbye to her past life, abandon all her female friends and her old home, in favor of living in a world where she is denigrated to a second-class status in society. Because the female empowerment Barbieland trumped? Is a lie. Nothing short of a sweet, comforting lie designed to shield girls from the bleak and cynical realities that womanhood actually entails. Real womanhood is adorned with thorns at every corner.

But it's all right, because at least she gets to see the gynecologist! That's her ultimate ending. Not actually improving life for others and herself and making the world a more equitable place for women with the help of the other Barbies, as well as Gloria and Sasha. It's going to the gynecologist. Because having a vagina makes you a woman. Yay! Some people have tried to reclaim this as a trans metaphor, but I highly doubt a movie as shallow and lacking in intersectionality as this was aiming for anything near close to that. And it's a crying shame that this is what the movie thinks is an empowering and satisfying ending to Barbie's arc. How pitiful, sad, and pathetic.

It's such a shame, as well, because the Barbie movie could have actually had genuine critiques of the patriarchy and how it affects women without making everything out to be pessimistic and dreary, and without trying to center the Kens and coddle their male fragility. It could have discussed beauty standards and the expectations to always be conventionally attractive and perfectly presentable to a tee for women(something that Barbie has oft been criticized for, and with good reason, and has also been brought up in the movie too, but of course got dropped and barely mentioned again). It could have tackled gender norms and compulsory femininity, and showed Barbies who subvert or have complex/unique relationships with femininity(esp women of color and queer Barbies, who have different relationships to femininity than white and/or cishet women), even include some masculine/tomboyish/butch Barbies who aren't portrayed by the narrative as the butt of the joke. It could have used Weird Barbie to portray both of these messages and given her a more complex arc and concrete role in the narrative besides being just a comic relief character who gets called ugly all the time(by both other Barbies and herself, which is just sad, self-deprecation much?) and then at the end of the movie gets an apology thrown at her by President Barbie(and also, who was she before she became Weird Barbie? The movie doesn't say, and that is such a let-down, that we never get to know who she was before.).

They could have showed lesbian and sapphic and aroace Barbies, whose characters could be used to challenge amato/heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. They could have explored what Barbie meant for women of color, trans women, fat women, disabled women, and mayyybe not? Cast a conventionally attractive white cis thin blonde woman as the main/regular Barbie? Especially if they were going to make that joke about how a woman who looks like that shouldn't be casted for a character who cries that she's ugly(which raises unfortunate implications as to what type of woman would be correct to cast in that role...but like every other genuine aspect of feminism in this movie, it gets forgotten about and erased as soon as it's brought up.) But they didn't do any of that. Because this is a white "feminist" movie written by a white woman and created in partnership with a capitalist company for one specific purpose: To sell toys.

Which wouldn't be as much of a problem if they didn't try to slap a feminist message on top of that, and then fail at delivering their message, hard, so hard in fact that they sideways-shuffle all the way into (trans)misogyny. For all the hype this movie gained(from the same people who will then turn around and silence genuine critique of the movie's shallow portrayal of feminism with "it's not that deep, it's just comedy, you shouldn't have expected Barbie to ACTUALLY be introspective and profound despite everyone claiming that it was!"), the actual contents therein gave us NOTHING to chew on. Just an empty parody of feminism that was more about the Kens than the actual Barbies, and portrayed suffering in silence and manipulating men with your looks as the ultimate pinnacle of womanhood.

I can't say I'm surprised. I'm just disappointed.

[femconstellation]

3 and 7?

3 - trans-identified females

Most ‘queer’ friends I’ve had have identified as trans as some point. An ex friend of mine is a TiF and she’s on testosterone and everything. I kind of started questioning the trans identity because of her. She was a victim of CSA and dealt with PCOS. She was taller than the average woman. I knew her before her transition, and she still had issues, but she seemed a lot happier. And then I told her was being trans was after I commented on two of our friends identifying as trans, and she instantly declared she was trans at that moment. Within months, she was going by he/him and a new name and a new look and everything. I supported her. We grew apart after I called her out for cheating on her partner and blablabla. When we got closer again, I realized her ‘gender dysphoria’ was just genuine hatred of her body. Most discussions of her dysphoria had to do with her PCOS or her sexual trauma. She had previously identified as a lesbian as well (she now identifies as pan, but she almost exclusively dates ‘trans men’ and never ‘cis men’ so lol). She refused to shower for weeks on end. Her hair was fried from constantly dyeing her hair. She’d send photos of her in underwear unwarranted to vent about her dysphoria. We worked at the same fast food place for a bit, and my manager had to pull me aside to tell me that my friend’s BO was so bad that we were getting complaints. And when I tried to talk to her, she went behind my back telling people I wasn’t understanding of her dysphoria. In general, she is an attention seeker. In 2016 when I met her, she did the 2016-esque version of emo attention seeking — harming herself in front of others, texting friends to say she was killing herself when she was fine and happy at church or somewhere, posting vent lyrics and then leaving people on read when they worried. In 2020, she began identifying as whatever was quirky — a pagan witch, a nonbinary boy, a pansexual, an autistic adhd tourettes haver, etc etc etc. Now she has fucked herself up so bad after pretending to be physically disabled (and i don't claim that lightly!!) that she actually is disabled now. And this is a lot of info about her, but she is one of the prime examples of a TIF in my head.

Of course, she hangs out in a crowd of TIFs now. I also dated a TIF, although she now doesn’t call herself trans and didn’t call herself trans when she first dated. I came out as a lesbian while dating her. She then went through a revolving door of identities, and when I couldn’t keep up with her instagram bio that changed weekly, she would tell her followers how bad of a girlfriend I was and then when I asked her what I did wrong, she would tell me nothing was wrong and she didn’t know why people were attacking me. When she finally settled on ‘nonbinary trans man’ as her identity, I struggled to re-identify as bisexual because I WASNT attracted to men, but I WAS attracted to her. And even though nothing about her changed but her pronouns, I was expected to redefine my whole identity. So I called myself bisexual again for a few months, but when we broke up, I returned to calling myself a lesbian. And then had multiple people tell me I was clearly transphobic if I can call myself a lesbian right after dating a trans man.

7 - Libfems

Honestly, I don’t have any specific experiences with libfems, but I argue with them quite a bit on here and TikTok. They’re so completely selfish with their ‘feminism is about choice’ spiel despite their choices harming women. They throw the phrase ‘white feminism’ around when I have not seen more white feminists than in libfem spaces. Most are, arguably, hetero-attracted women who like to throw on microlabels to seem more queer and then debate with lesbians on our identities and issues. They defend transwomen because they’re so wrapped up in male centric culture that a male identifying as a woman is more important than a lesbian in lesbian spaces.

[tilbageidanmark]

MOVIES I WATCHED THIS WEEK (#197)

"How did she get forgotten?"

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018) was one of the best documentaries I saw last year. And because I focus more and more on women-directed movies, I had to watch it again. What a unique, fascinating pioneer she was, and how much did her amazing achievements change the world. Narrated by (another prodigy) Jodie Foster. Like ‘The Méliès Mystery’ biography, these two are a must-see for any serious film lover. Even in re-view, the story moved me greatly. 10/10. ♻️.

Extra: Another film essay about the same topic, FILMS DIRECTED BY WOMEN IN THE SILENT ERA (2013) tells of some of the 80 women who directed 850+ movies between 1896 to 1927 (but not too well). [*Female Directors*]

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"Do you think we can go for a walk with a lobster...?"

THE WHEELCHAIR (1960) is my second bizarre black comedy by Marco Ferreri (after 'La Grande Bouffe'). A different kind of an anarchistic story about a 70-year-old Spanish man who's determined to buy a mobility scooter, a motorized wheelchair, like many of his invalid acquaintances, while his tyrannical family would rather commit him to an insane asylum, for spending their inheritance. It's just so wild and so fresh. The copy I saw was extra-crisp, and included the dark ending which Franco's censure board forced deleting. (Screenshot Above).

The trailer.

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2 WITH BRITISH CHILD ACTRESS PAMELA FRANKLIN:

🍿 “For those who like that sort of thing that is the sort of things they like…”

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969) sparkled because of Maggie Smith's spectacular acting. But her frustrated spinster, an uppity teacher at an all-girl boarding school in 1930's Edinburgh was such a confusing character; Stuck-up and prissy, fascistic and manipulative, eventually she loses your sympathy. She is a strong, independent feminist, but also a fascist follower of Mussolini and Franco [But not Hitler - that would have been a politically-incorrect step too far]. And when the sex undercurrents start boiling over the surface, and the teachers start sleeping with each other and with their teenager girls, things get grotesquely complicated.

🍿 (Extra: A sketch from S8E10 of the CAROL BURNETT SHOW, where newly-famous movie star Maggie Smith comes to visit the home of her old collage friends. I never watched any television with laugh tracks, and I'm not going to start now). 1/10.

🍿 THE INNOCENTS (1961), a Gothic ghost story of a governess caring for two children at a remote country estate. Based on a Henry James novella, with a script co-written by Truman Capote, it's a formal British Victorian Gentry fantasy about inexplicable "possession". 11 year old Pamela Franklin gave a wonderful performance as the little haunted girl, but the whole premise of this glorious upper-class supernatural world, and Deborah Kerr's always 'proper' and sexually-repressed personality, were not for me. 2/10.

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KEANU REEVES X 2:

🍿 First watch: The classic dystopian fairy tale THE MATRIX, which went on to spawn a $3 billion sci-fi franchise. There were plenty of visual flourishes, and original special effects in it [The 'digital rain' code, slow-motion 'bullet time', the Kung-fu wire photography, jumping from building to building, the stylized action scenes], but I hated it from the very beginning, and for the life of me, couldn't understand how this ever become a Thing: The fortune-cookie pseudo-philosophy, the faux mysticism and cyberpunk "camp" aesthetics are just not for me. Once you don't accept that the "Red Pill / Blue Pill" metaphor is a legitimate thought experiment which is worth taking seriously, the rest of the mambo-jumbo nerd-bubble becomes just a stupid teenage game. Yes, we are all slaves, living in a virtual reality simulation, but this is not a Plato's Cave allegory. Not even 'Blade Runner'... 2/10. [*Female Directors*]

🍿 ANYONE CAN QUANTUM (2016), a self-congratulatory trifle narrated by Keanu. Another speculative science-fiction piece in which Paul Rudd plays Quantum Chess with Steven Hawking. Silly. 1/10.

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FELA KUTI, LIVE AT GLASTONBURY, a 1984 concert film of the legendary Afro-beat musician, political activist and band leader. He was an improvising innovator genius, somewhere between Frank Zappa and Miles Davis. The concert included only 2 of his very long songs, some of his own fantastic drumming, and lengthy dancing-twerking by some of his 27 wives. But it wasn't his best music or performance. Also, the YouTube copy was of poor quality: I hope that in 3-4 years we'll be able to re-watch it on a highly-upgraded A.I. version.

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BILLY WILDER DIRECTS X 2:

🍿 WHAT WOULD BILLY WILDER DO?, a new 'Every Frame A Picture' video essay. A return to the original old style of Tony Zhou & Taylor Ramos!

🍿 ... But Wilder's 'comedy' STALAG 17 (1953) didn't age well, for me. A POW Camp that is run like a German Bed & Breakfast, and where the chummy Nazis treat their prisoners in a courteous and friendly manner, was too irritating and far-fetched. The only redeeming quality was lead actor William Holden. Otto Preminger played a buffoonish Nazi officer. 2/10.

(In Israel of the 1950s–1960s, "Stalag" was a generic term for pornographic material with a theme of sadistic sexual activity between female SS officers and prisoners of war. I read a couple when I was 10-12.)

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THE HANGOVER, the terrific comedy about the antics of the four members of the 'Wolfpack', each with his distinct and well-defined personality. A perfect script and dialogue, so dumb and so funny. It's clearly about 'Acceleration', where each new step drives the story higher into more outrageous & absurd levels. Again, it's hard to imagine that such harmless throwaway foolery grossed $1.4 billion! 9/10. Re-watch. ♻️.

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MILK X 2:

🍿 According to IMDb, there are over 100 movies (mostly shorts though) that are titled 'MILK', not counting many TV-episodes. Why is that?

MILK (2020), a vegetarian German short with the most disgusting soundtrack, which asks the question: What would happen if people were to be used in the same way as dairy cows?

🍿 MILK, my third by British Andrea Arnold, her debut short from 1998. A story of a woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby, and doesn't know what to do with her sorrow. [*Female Directors*]

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2 MORE FROM ERIC KISSACK:

🍿 'The Gunfighter' was one of the best short films about invisible voices in the Old Wild West. His new THE MOVE is somehow similar in that there's a science fiction kink to the physical reality, which cannot be explained. But while Amanda Crew (Monica Hall from 'Silicon Valley') is still cute as a button, the boyfriend who moves with her into their new apartment with 'the portal' is just an irritating dude.

🍿 WEREWOLVES (2014) also reminds me of 'The Gunfighter'. Obviously, some of the same people, arguments, inner logic. Who's the Werewolf?

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A BUNCH OF SHORTS:

🍿 RELAX WITH GEORGE CLOONEY AT THE END OF A MOVIE: Michael Clayton dreams of 'The Descendants' watching 'March of the Penguins'. Can be used for a chill session.

🍿 THE PROCESS OF MAKING A CELLO is a 27 minutes of wordless zen: Watching a Japanese master craftsman hand-build a cello in the course of 6 months. Perfect for another chilling out evening.

🍿 HOW IN THE WORLD ISN'T THIS FILM A CLASSIC? is the latest from 'Moviewise', an intellectual essayist with an indefinable accent. I've seen a bunch of his videos before, as well as the subject of this terrific analyses, John Farrow's stylish 1948 'The big clock'. A great introduction to both film and reviewer. 9/10.

🍿 The 'Script Sleuth' analyses some SCREENWRITING TIPS IN 'GOODFELLAS': Character, The Story World, Dramatic Irony, Narration, Humanity and Consequences.

🍿 TO YOUR HEALTH was a cute animated PSA, commissioned by the Michigan State Board Of Alcoholism in 1956. Cheers!

🍿 THE LANGUAGE OF FACES (1961), my first film by humanist John Korty, the man who inspired Coppola and Lucas to move their studios to Northern California. It's a visual anti-nuclear essay about pacifism, which was sponsored by a Quaker group. It describes a vigil that 1,000 cold-war protesters held, standing in silent for two days in front of the Pentagon.

🍿 THE HISTORY OF THE PINK PANTHER FILMS - Should i watch 'The return of the pink panther'? or 'A shot in the dark'?

🍿 THE QUEEN'S MONASTERY (1988) is a British fairy tale using watercolor animation. [*Female Director*]

🍿 I was interested to find movies based on Jorge Luis Borges stories, but the 1971 Italian THE MINOTAUR MASK wasn't it. A man with a plastic King Kong mask pondering his existence in badly-lit cellars and uttering philosophical platitudes was experimentally silly.

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(ALL MY FILM REVIEWS - HERE).

[boomstab-papa]

Oh absolutely, giving misogynists captive girlfriends/wives isn't going to fix anything. Being a little more misogynist to try to appease misogynists won't work.

But "giving any credence" is such an interesting phrase to use here, because it's so ambiguous and also accusatory. What does "giving credence" mean? Who has been doing it? What have they been advocating for? Who, for example, has been saying leftists should be more misogynist, and how?

I'm not alone in this confusion, either, there are several comments on the tweet who are equally perplexed.

The fact is that the left DOES NEED a better approach to people who are feeling lost, angry, and scared.

Alt-right "self-help" authors and programs are hugely popular. These predators target lost, scared, and angry people. They're cults, really. And no matter how much the left discusses things like "can we stop parroting bioessentialist bullshit because hey, men aren't destined to be misogynistic assholes"... these alt-right cultists don't ever even have to TALK TO a leftist to repeatedly hear "leftists hate you for being born white/male/rich/etc". I really can't get over how Rush Limbaugh popularized the term "feminiazi" and told an entire generation that feminists were angry man-haters when they literally are not. But that's exactly how the grift works!! I should know, I grew up in exactly this Rush Limbaugh kind of house!!

"Don't blame the hyper-wealthy for ruining the economy, blame women and foreigners for taking all the jobs! Don't blame the ruined economy when nobody wants to have kids anymore, blame the women! Don't blame patriarchy and all the misogyny it taught you when women avoid your misogynist ass, blame the women! Remember, the feminazis hate you!!"

So what to do?

On an interpersonal level, sometimes it can be really easy. This is a comment made to Innuendo Studios's video "How to Radicalize A Normie" on this exact topic (which I highly recommend watching).

"Hey, ex-alt-right member here. First, really like this series. I feel like you’re validating the radicalization that me and my male friends experienced. Putting it into words and showing us how we got tricked, exposing the magician and their tricks. Second, I vot out not through argument and discussion but actually through feelings. I was very edgy and would use the n-word in jokes all the time. My male friends would not call me out on it. But a female friend of mine said it made her uncomfortable and that she didn’t appreciate these jokes when we played fortnite together. That shook me to my core as I cared for my friend and that’s how my deradicaliztion started. Just wanted to add in this personal story, keep up the great work :)"

If this is someone you know, tell them their behavior is not cool.

THIS GOES DOUBLE FOR THE MEN READING THIS. Misogynists are more likely to listen to you than they are to listen to women!! If someone is being a shithead in your vicinity, consider: are you gonna let it slide? Or are you maybe, possibly, going to be the one thing that yanks them out of a hatespiral and prompts them to re-examine their hateful worldview? Tell them "hey not cool".

This might not work the first time. This might not work at all for some people. But if the situation is relatively safe, then it's worth trying.

And this does not mean that you personally are responsible for "centering men in your conversations" or "marginalized people putting in even more emotional labor" or "if a man is misogynist it's because you failed him" what the fuck ever like I've seen in this discourse. Come the fuck on.

It means you can probably try saying something to somebody you know. And if it doesn't work? You can say you tried.

On a policy level, we have more work to do. It shouldn't come as a surprise to any leftist that the current economic and political system in the USA exists to separate and exploit people. I think we all agree it really sucks to live in a system like this. Your average reactionary misogynist also thinks the system sucks, but as explained above, they've been trained to place the blame on some convenient scapegoats instead. Immigrants. Women. Queer people. Muslims. Anybody who's not white. Et cetera. "Government needs to get out of the way of smart people and then Elon Musk will build a utopia for The Faithful (which includes me) on Mars" or some shit.

These people need to hear that their anger is justified, but that their blame is misplaced. They need policies that will hold the responsible parties accountable. They need policies that won't leave them impoverished and isolated and exhausted after working a 40+ hour work week. They need to realize the system isn't sorting people into "the worthy rich" and "the unworthy poor", rather, that it's exploiting everyone except the wealth-owning class. They need to realize it's their politicians' biggest campaign donors that are doing this to them.

The Democratic Party needs to actually talk about this. I'll be dangerously pithy here: the Democratic Party needs to sound more like Bernie Fucking Sanders. Politicians need to oppose health insurance companies and get Medicare For All going. Politicians need to stop voting to give the military two fucking billion dollars every single day and fund free college and trade schools. Politicians need to tell business interests to fuck off and get a livable minimum wage AND a universal basic income passed, which will severely undercut employers' ability to exploit and isolate us.

And we need Citizens United repealed. Badly. I'm not trying to imply the problem is only with Republicans' campaign donors, because Democrats' biggest campaign donors are also often the same people exploiting us. But look at how Democrats did a tiny little bit of pro-union and anti-trust work these past 4 years and they screamed bloody fucking murder. If Democrats are relying on these people's money to get them elected, I think it's going to be really hard to get policies passed that will actually make USAmericans safer and happier (ie. address Republicans' economic fears that they keep blaming on various scapegoats).

Although with Republicans controlling the entire Federal government for the next two years minimum, this feels more distant than ever.

That's what we need to be taking seriously. If you don't give any credence to the fears and insecurities underlying the horrifying reactionary politics, you're not actually addressing anything. If you can't admit that capitalism fucks all of us over and makes all of us miserable and looking for a remedy, are you even a leftist?

[vitamincummies83]

Online feminist spaces can feel stagnant due to their lack of real world activism. While digital platforms allow for the spread of ideas, many feminists feel that true change requires physical organizing and collective action. The disconnect between online discourse and real world mobilization highlights the need for feminists to move beyond theory and into practice.Capitalism's exploitation of girls's beauty standards is evident in the endless products and procedures marketed as tools of empowermenst. Feminists argue that these products actually reinforce harmful standards, keeping girls And don't fool yourself, the longer you keep your veil on, the harder the expectations will be. You may only need to cover now, but in some time, they will ask you why are your toes showing and why are you not hiding your hands behind the veil too, and why are you even outside your house? You should be home, protecting your family's honor, you're disgracing your family, go home. Radical feminist critiques of gender focus on how it reinforces traditional power dynamics. Rather than seeing gender as a neutral expression of identity, radical feminists argue that it has been historically used to maintain male dominance. By challenging these systems of power, feminists seek to dismantle the social constructs that limit both females's and mens's freedoms. makeup and breast augtransstation, high heels and false eyelashes aren t "gender affirming "care " ", they re a product of capitalism that targets females, designed to make you feel ugly without them and become reliant on the industry. Online feminist spaces can feel stagnant due to their lack of real world activism. While digital platforms allow for the spread of ideas, many feminists feel that true change requires physical organizing and collective action. The disconnect between online discourse and real world mobilization highlights the need for feminists to move beyond theory and into practice.Capitalism's exploitation of girls's beauty standards is evident in the endless products and procedures marketed as tools of empowermenst. Feminists argue that these products actually reinforce harmful standards, keeping girls Radical feminist critiques of gender focus on how it reinforces traditional power dynamics. Rather than seeing gender as a neutral expression of identity, radical feminists argue that it has been historically used to maintain male dominance. By challenging these systems of power, feminists seek to dismantle the social constructs that limit both females's and mens's freedoms. makeup and breast augtransstation, high heels and false eyelashes aren t "gender affirming "care " ", they re a product of capitalism that targets females, designed to make you feel ugly without them and become reliant on the industry. Acting like these girls didn't get their ideas from you. They were listening when you were telling them how you should start your retinol treattransst as young as you can. They were listening when you told them 30 step routine is a game changer. They were looking at you, at girls on the billboards, magazine covers and in the TV shows with perfect skin, perfect eyeshadows, perfect hair and realised they should do the same, they should start as young as they can or it would be too late. erf:In the end, men was just another flongy boy. me:well thats just skrinky. erf: The way perfect cell gargles in my butthole makes me think its blorpulous. me:

[faint-kitten]

Thinking about Artists from the 00's

I never share someone's discord stuff without permission. I don't think it's ethical to screen shot and potentially blow people up without their permission.

But found this in a discord I was reading and it had me thinking. The last Eminem Album I remember listening to was almost 15 years ago, and it had a song called Medicine Ball, in which Eminem made fun of Christopher Reeves for being disabled, and had a lot of really stupid lyrics like this. Pretty much anything he's done post I'd say Marshal Mathers LP has been cheap, lyrical miracle bs that was this degree of nonsense. And part of me doesn't wonder if he's just doing it to cash a check every few years. But it got me thinking (as it often does) about 20 years ago.

Eminem's been stupid for years. Not an excuse, but like…one of the things I notice about stars that blew up in the 00's is a lot of them were edgelords that seemed or people thought were fighting the establishment by saying it like it is. This is (keep in mind the same era that produced Chappelle, jeff dunham, ralphie may, and Dane Cook who, is kinda better? But he mostly just yelled a lot)

But in reality a lot of them were no different than adolescent teens yelling poop real loud because you're not supposed to and acting like it's strength. The problem is a lot of us grew out of that, like, as a whole fucking culture we moved on. What's interesting, is TikTok and twitter's younger generation tends to re-discover Eminem every once in a while and just re "cancel" him every few months.

Moving away from just Eminem:

A lot of these people sort of never moved with the times, and now resent the fact that the jokes/songs/movies that made them money aren't in vogue anymore, and as a result get angry that what worked what made them money doesn't fly anymore. They then start crying "woke" and "canceled" and it's just…times changed, our understanding of these things changed, and it's old men going "well this USED to work I dunno how to be any other way."

And it's interesting to think about. Imagine waking up one day to find out your livelihood isn't in vogue anymore, but it's all you know, it's all you've ever been good at, and you still need fucking money. And a lot of them aren't necessarily gone. Or stopped. They make good money because a lot have pivoted their careers to "Remember how you used to be able to say this 20 years ago?" and appealing to the sort of people who feel like them. Not needing to tell jokes, just needing to get mad at the things their audience is mad they can't say or don't understand. And that's always kind of been around. I remember an extremely unfunny book my mother had about a Politically Correct Christmas story when I was 15. It had terms like "womvn" because I guess a sect of 'feminists' at the time didn't like the word "men"? Or something? And the author got weird or stupid about it? And that book came out in 1995. Nerds have always been like this. Going all the way back to white people saying "oh you can't call them that anymore *eyeroll*" before I was even born. The 90's had this weird era of "attitude" that got embarressing as they tried to push that in the 2000's and a lot of artists and comedians who made it big back then, just never left.

But anyway. Not that he cares what I think. But it's whatever. He's an old dork and I don't think he's culturally relevent enough to anyone for this shit to matter. He was a class clown as a kid, he was a class clown as a rapper, he's still trying to be a class clown in his old age. I don't think this is one that needs the wrath of the gods. I think it's just a buffoon that needs to be ignored.

[earlgraytay]

@ceanothusspinosis asked me to explain how internet community harassment is spiritual abuse. long post is long, caveat lector, hit J to skip, you know the drill.

first, we need to define some terms. spiritual abuse is a specific form of emotional abuse that most often happens in religious communities and/or cults. it's a colloquial term, so there's no official definition of it.

the best definition of spiritual abuse I can find is that it's emotional abuse that uses your spiritual beliefs to make you comply.

the classic examples of spiritual abuse are things like "a cult leader demands you give them your stuff/sex/personal information because God Wants You To", "your religion demands that you pray the gay away", and "the members of your religion shun or harass you if you break the religion's rules."

the thing that's uniquely damaging about spiritual abuse, beyond the usual consequences of emotional abuse, is that a spiritual abuser re-defines your most deeply-held beliefs specifically to hurt you. if you want to, say, be a Good Christian, a spiritual abuser will tell you that being a Good Christian means giving up your freedom of choice, your sense of right and wrong, your right to your own thoughts, your consent, your personal possessions, and sometimes even your body. You have to choose- do you accept your abuser's definition (and let yourself be hurt), or do you reject it (and thus reject what you're being told are your most deeply held beliefs)?

this can get even nastier when an entire community is abusive, or when you don't share the same beliefs as the spiritual abuser. you are under an intense amount of pressure to change your beliefs into a more convenient shape, one that makes you easier to control. if you don't change your beliefs, they hurt you. if you don't let someone else define what's important to you, how you think, how you act? they hurt you. with every tool they have and with everything that matters most to you. over. and over. and over again. your only choices are to give in or leave your community. and both feel like dying.

change your beliefs, the spiritual abuser says, or you are Bad, and we must hurt you.

the really shitty thing about spiritual abuse is that it's not actually about any given belief, it's about control. it's about making sure the individual never questions the leader or the community. it's about keeping everyone in line. it's about giving the community a safety valve- somewhere to put all their rage at having to live up to an abusive religion, a target that they can hurt with malevolent glee. it will never end, because an abuser will never be satisfied with the amount of control they have over you.

you will always be asked to twist the things you believe into a shape that makes you easier to control, always asked to find some new thing that you're not allowed to enjoy, always told to hate a new group of people. it won't end unless you leave. and if you leave, there's the threat that they'll hurt you even if you never speak to them again, because you're Forever Bad Now.

...ideological internet harassment, especially intracommunity harassment, works on the same goddamn principle.

let me give you an example. say you're a trans-positive feminist. you post something on twitter that's trans-positive. a TERF mob finds you and starts harassing you- arguing with you while constantly moving the goalposts, insulting you in every way imaginable, and maybe even sending you death threats. they'll accuse you of being an anti-feminist or a libfem; they'll tell you you're not really a feminist at all.

if you're a feminist, obviously, this is extremely distressing. for a lot of us Extremely Online Folks, our belief in justice and equality is way more important than any religious beliefs we might hold. you're being told that you're bad at living up to your most fundamental beliefs, by a huge group of people. and if you don't immediately apologize and go full TERF, they threaten to never stop.

there is an implicit ultimatum with TERF harassment: change your most deeply held beliefs, or you are Bad, and we must hurt you.

if you don't change your beliefs, they hurt you. if you don't let someone else define what's important to you, how you think, how you act? they hurt you. with every tool they have and with everything that matters most to you. over. and over. and over again. even once the great mass of the group has found a new target, you'll still get some shit from the most fanatical haters. until you publically grovel or log off, they will keep hurting you.

and the more I think about it, the more I see the same pattern in just about every kind of intracommunity internet harassment. change your most deeply-held beliefs, or you are an acceptable punching bag. let us define what's important to you, or you're Bad and we'll punish you. and it's never about a specific belief- it's about control. it's about making sure that anyone who steps a little bit away from their specific microcommunity's consensus gets Punished. there's that same malevolent glee to it, that same pressure-release that lets a toxic community keep being toxic without turning that anger inward. and there's that same never-ending cycle of harassment, of some new Problematic thing that you have to hate, of someone who's the main character of twitter Forever Bad Now and Must Be Hurt.

you see it in queer communities. you see it in feminist and ~alpha male~ communities. you see it with TERFs and trans folks, antishippers and proshippers, tankies and anarchists. this kind of ideology-focused spiritual abuse is fucking everywhere, and if there's any overlap between a community you're in and someone who has any difference in strongly-held beliefs? you might fall victim to it.

the reason I've been thinking about it is that, as An Internet Creative Person, I'm real likely to fall prey to this kind of harassment. if you ask for any kind of visibility, you make yourself a target. if you're part of any kind of ~community~ - and on the internet, "being visibly trans" counts- you make yourself a target.

...I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to avoid this kind of harassment. there are stories I've floated around writing that I've just avoided writing, because they will make people Mad At Me. fuck, I'm scared to write anything with a transmasc protagonist, much less one who isn't Traditionally Heroic. because i will get harassed for it. i'm scared about talking about the game i'm doing freelance work for, because some of the costume designs are.... Problematique. i spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep people on the internet from being mad at me.

you can't negotiate with spiritual abusers. there is nothing you can do to make them not be mad at you. they do not care what you're actually doing or why you're doing it. they want control; they want a pressure release. you're just a means to an end.

and like, i knew this intellectually before. but framing it as spiritual abuse really drove it home for me, y'know? it's not just ~bullying~, it's not just ~being problematic~. it's a system of abuse i've seen before. i know how to deal with it- the only way to deal with it is Not Giving A Fuck What They Think Anymore and ignoring every word they say.

[ladyalienist]

So what happened yesterday is that I posted a rant about fatphobia in radical feminist spaces. And today I woke up finding some notes, some I had already seen yesterday but I didn't bother to reply, which I deeply regret.

Yes because I would like to offer a shoutout to that one single person who reblogged it with a series of tags that proved the point, but sadly some hours later she changed her mind and erased the tags, thus forbidding me to offer her the attention she clearly deserved. I managed to take one look at them and they were along the lines of "you're a lazy and not feminist dipshit", so luckily the concept of such a profound insight has not gotten entirely lost, even if the poetics of the wording has. Food for thought, my ladies, food for thought!

However, another reply I managed to save:

@september-morning-butch I hope you don't mind me making another post to reply to your insight, which I indeed found fascinating.

See... I find it fascinating that you automatically assumed I never once in my life spoke to a sporty person.

I was a sporty person. Some posts earlier I wrote about the sports I've tried and sometimes kept on doing for years, and since I am human and I live in a society, I also have had interaction with fitness enthusiasts, coaches and casual sporty human beings. Most of my friends hit the gym on the regular or practice some other kind of physical activity. When I have spare time I, too, do so.

Maybe I should have asked more expert sporty people. Like this man, for instance. Or this woman. Or, why not, this guy. The list goes on, and on, and on: maybe not every sport enthusiast will tell me the same things.

I find it also fascinating that you assume I do not know the criteria for a diet to be actually working. Do you by any chance think that fat people do not ever try to go on diets, or that I, personally, did never try? Because I did.

And now I will share with you what usually happens when Average Jane, who just needs to keep off those 10 kilos and then she's fine, goes on a diet-and-gym-new-lifestyle:

Average Jane decides to go to a nutritionist, who will (usually) tell her to cut all processed foods, all sugars and most carbs and invest on proteins. She then will subscribe to the gym and receive her personalized (which is usually just a standard one but let's not become too pedantic) programme. She starts the next day, full of good intentions. At first she's enthusiastic: she's finally losing those ugly ugly fat rolls! She will be in shape! Her lifestyle will be healthy and good, no more food guilt! Then, usually after a month or two, she starts noticing that the weight loss is slowing down and she's stabilizing somewhere that's not her ideal weight. Let's say she wants to weigh 50 kilos: she weighs 55 and can't seem to go under. At the same time, gym is getting increasingly tiring and she's starting to crave sugar and carbs, she dreams of full plates at night, every waking moment is spent in food obsessing. At some point she'll either understand that she needs to restrict more, and then more, and then more, in order to keep those rolls off herself, and I don't know how to tell you that this is usually called an eating disorder, or she'll give up and order takeaway one evening, gulp it down, immediately feel better, and in a year she'll have all of her previous fat back on, plus some more in most cases. Two months after she decides that after all it wasn't that bad, and goes back to the nutritionist and to the gym and the cycle restarts. This is called yo-yo dieting and it's far, far more dangerous for health than just staying fat and eating balanced meals.

Now, am I being catastrophic? A little. But I'm not making this up, I'm paraphrasing words from at least one trainer who bragged about her own weight loss journey and how she had spent the last few years never enjoying a social gathering because she cannot deviate from her diet in any way. Not so different from what you told me, but she was totally bragging about... being miserable during celebrations. How is this in any way good for her?

Does this mean "go get stuffed on McDonald's"? Absolutely not. Following a healthy lifestyle and a good diet and exercise regimen is essential! And it's true that sometimes lifestyle changes can and will do wonders for your body! You could cut off McDonald's for anticapitalistic/antispecistic reasons and realize you're losing weight, and that's amazing! However, that's not how most people work and I don't know how to tell you that being constantly hungry because "that's my new lifestyle and I need to keep the weight down" is not healthy in the slightest!

You were unlucky, living with an ugly disorder that requires loads of attention. I understand this and I fully see where you're coming from. Making eating choices that are good for our health sometimes is a hard path that requires willpower, and I am not saying that it doesn't do wonders and that your life quality doesn't improve a lot when you manage it.

But framing the "not working-ness" of dieting as a matter of willpower and basically saying that the only reason they don't is that fat people are not enthusiastic enough about their health... is again re-framing that you think fatness=laziness and moral failure.

So thank you for expressing your point of view in an articulated way instead of just hurling insults, but my point still stands.

[aikainkauna]

Romanticism-bashing=femininity-bashing

Is it just me who finds the criticism of so-called “purple prose” inherently sexist in far too many ways?

Because bad writing is bad writing, but when you start criticising something because it has romanticism, beauty, emotion and “frills,” and start condemning poetic language in and of itself as a crime, that reads like a classic criticism of something based on the ideas of what’s straightforwardly masculine or not. These are the exact things a gruff macho guy would point to in another guy and call “faggy.”

Honestly. I’ve just seen a definition of purple prose as “prose that draws attention to itself instead of the plot,” and if that isn’t a classic fucking masculine prose/feminine prose divide I don’t know what is. Language is a beautiful and wonderful thing, so why not create lush clusters of it, like complex bouquets; why not string beautiful word-images together like pearls? Because the unfortunate implication there is that only plot and only straightforward “see-Spot-run” prose are good, and lingering on descriptions of visuals and emotions is bad. Don’t you dare pause to dwell on the colour of someone’s shirt or how that summer day made you feel! Oh, wait, why does the latter strike me as *exactly* the way women tend to see the world? So lingering on costume porn or descriptions of someone’s looks is “bad writing,” but endless boring descriptions of characters moving from place A to B is great literature? You know?

(Note that as usual, I don’t discuss “male” or “female” in an essentialist sense, but as the combination of gendered socialisation and the results of our brains marinating in certain types of sex hormones, things none of us are free from). Neurologically speaking, women tend to pay more attention to things like clothes and hairstyles and draw psychological implications from them, thinking in multilateral ways about things, whereas it’s already a cliche that straight guys can’t tell if a woman’s done something with her hair and are prone to tunnel vision: just focusing on the one thing. And it’s fanboys that first start pointing out plot/factual/scientific inconsistencies in a story and slam it for that, whereas fangirls tend to make a beeline for the characterisations and character interactions and emotional responses, and judge a story on the basis of that. (Again, there are, obviously, exceptions to this in places–I’ve got neurological characteristics typed “masculine” by some–but I’m talking very broadly and generally. This is basic neurology/sociology.)

And when it’s fangirls internalising this “emotional/descriptive/poetic frills are bad” approach–especially the grumpy old generation I am myself on the tail end of–that really bothers me. It was those exceptions–the women who wrote like guys–who first betaed some of my stories and told me to cut out even fairly ordinary descriptions I found pleasant and just beautiful to my eyes/sense of language, because apparently that was bogging the story down. Whereas I wanted to linger, like a lover lingers. Fair enough; I was still starting out as a writer and some of my older stories *are* terribly purple in the sense that some of the metaphors were just cliched and corny and sort of tacked on, but that is the sort of writing that is fair to criticise, I think. Twilight is bad writing because it’s full of that kind of inconsistent, tacked-on and pointless lingering that doesn’t flow well, and doesn’t even make sense at times. But–and this is a crucial but–it’s *not* the fact that someone’s got alabaster skin or even sparkles, but how you *handle* the alabaster skin and sparkles.

I’ve seen some perfectly normal, ordinary, true-ringing female emotional experiences also described as “weepy” or “co-dependent” and the stories therefore held up as signs of bad writing as well, and that ties into this, too–but in a different sort of way. Honestly, when it’s women bashing women for being women, and wanting to impose masculine ways of seeing the world onto women’s writing (or expecting women should only write about strong, feminist paragons and not–like with Lana Del Rey bashers–not allowing women to tell true stories of women who’ve behaved in the exact damn way gendered socialisation pushes them into acting), then we’ve got a problem.

It’s perfectly possible to write–and in fact, read and enjoy–utterly beautiful prose where the language itself is a major part of the experience, a pleasure in and of itself. I’ve just been reading Robert Hichens again (a wonderful exception to the “blokey” prose stereotype, but then he *was* gay and therefore probably neurologically disposed in a more genderfluid way) and he can absolutely *intoxicate* me with his prose; he can make my head swim. Thanks to that, I’m cheerfully willing to forgive him for not throwing complex plots at me, because I don’t even *care* about plots when I have interesting characters to read about. He writes realistic women and really understands them, without a drop of misogyny, and I’m absolutely slack-jawed about the awesomeness of that in a Victorian writer–that is a huge asset to his prose, again nothing to do with plot but real, human characterisation. Yeah, I am still bothered by most of his novels having abrupt and bleh and anticlimactic endings, but you know what? If the journey that’s taken me there has given me absolutely wonderful pleasure in the form of truly beautiful visions and descriptions and spiritual insights, and characters I can really feel for and feel with, I’m *fine* with that.

TL;DR If you like sparse, masculine prose, that’s *fine.* Just don’t impose it on others as the standard by which fiction should be judged. And whenever you want to apply the term “trash” or “guilty pleasure” to something romantic, something with heavy descriptions of someone’s looks, or something that’s just beautiful, ask yourself whether you’re doing the exact same thing a macho dudebro would do in scolding another guy for being “faggy.” Are you making value-based judgements that set things traditionally considered as feminine (human relationships, care, emotions, costume, makeup, tenderness, emotion-based descriptions of experiences, anything that’d be advantageous in partner-seeking/raising a family) below those things considered masculine (emotionlessness, straightforwardness, linearity, frilllessness, toughness, sparseness, mechanical descriptions, anything that’d be advantageous to a hunter or a soldier) in your judgements of prose? That’s a gold standard for spotting internalised sexism right there. 

Ideally, we should have room for all of these human expressions. But bashing one in favour of another is not conducive to a world with literature that serves a variety of tastes and speaks to *all kinds* of human experiences. I write poetic and rambly and spiritual and romantic and erotic fiction with long descriptions of things I find pleasurable and beautiful, with words and sentence structures I find pleasurable and beautiful, because that’s how I experience the world and because that’s what I want to read. And if you, like me, have been told that’s somehow lesser, I want to reassure you that that’s rubbish, and that someone out there will always love that kind of writing–if you yourself do, that’s an example of an existing audience right there. I believed the haters for far too long a time, but wished I’d had someone tell me that earlier, and had someone point out the difference between poetic writing and bad writing to me. Instead of having to find out for myself that actually, there is such a thing as good, beautiful, romantic prose–and that it’s not only an “okay” thing to write and read, but also a *wonderful* thing to write and read.

Dark and stormy nights are *awesome.*

[cahel-elijad]

You know what doesn't make sense? People thinking you're smart when you know you're not. You're as dumb as they come but with some notion of literature and geography that's all. I grew up in a family that used to brag with others about my grades and my nose always in a book but then at home me being "school smart" was a problem I can't even explain how or why but reading was a problem, a good grade was a problem, my mother wanted a kid who loved God not one who translated Latin and shit (and no one is good at Latin so I was avarage at that), not one who had questions. My mother was always so surprised of how little I could understand simple things like God loves you and women need a husband when I was spending so much time learning biology and maths like that was easy but accepting simple rules wasn't. Anyways doesn't matter you grow up and teacher tell you you've got potential like it's something special about you not something we all have, you grow up and people don't want to talk to you 'cause they can't keep up with all the info you' re sharing so they call you feminist like it's a bad word, just because you're a girl with opinions not because you actually are a feminist who believes in equality and wants to destroy patriarchy. Stuff like that. So you go to uni and get your degree, crying and puking in the bathroom before every exam and people compliment you like it's something big not something you just wanted to get over with and had to do in order to get a job. So you start working and as soon as you have an opinion you're a rebel and a communist and friends with the gay. And people don't really want to talk to you, they just want to hear as little as possible and then tell you that you could eat the world alive if you only had the right ideas, the right ideas not being a feminist and on the side of poor, immigrants, refugees and queer people. So people keep telling you you're smart but not using your brain right and you know they just mean you have a degree and read basic literature so you could be a doctor why are you a simple employee? So people keep telling you you have a great brain and wtf are you doing serving tables when you speak German and wrote a thesis about Cesare Pavese? People like telling you how bright you are only for you to see for yourself how dark it is inside your mind. You were the good kid with the highest grades and the endless chances what are you doing here?