#how to approach women

[wyyvoren]

forcibly stinking ur omega for his health!

[fluentisonus]

still chewing this one over so hopefully this makes sense but one very minor running thing I feel like we get w jean valjean is that without disliking women or even believing that they're in any way unequal to him he. hm. for the most part doesn't have much normal contact with adult women after his sister (and presumably none for the 19 years he was in prison) which means that. not that he doesn't understand women so much as i feel like idk. he makes the mistake of unconsciously assuming men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus style that he doesn't understand them (being aware of that lack of contact & under the impression women are fairly different to men), and because he's a guy who wants to understand things & is largely self taught (often from books) especially wrt social niceties, he ends up being very credulous, in that presumed lack of understanding, of commonly held beliefs & traditional, societally reinforced ideas of gender rolls & gender characteristics, and this sometimes ends up ultimately hurting women around him despite his genuine good intentions

like obviously firstly in montreuil-sur-mer where he wants the female workers to have "pure morals" and gives them a separate workroom to the men to "remain discreet" which I think he genuinely intended as a means of making it a good work environment for the workers -- women can have privacy & focus on work & nothing uncomfortable or untoward is being brought into the workplace etc -- but as we know this backfired horrendously because it essentially resulted in fantine being fired for having a child out of wedlock & everything she went through after. and given his reaction he doesn't seem to have ever considered this a potential effect of his rules -- like he doesn't seem to have understood how those sorts of rules end up ultimately punish the women involved more than anything

and the other main instance of course is with cosette and his assumption that essentially a woman has a father, & then she has a husband & having a husband no longer needs a father (this is strengthened a lot by his own feeling of his own taintedness -- it's not the main thing responsible for what happened by any means. but it's a part of it) & this assumption is incredibly hard on her!!! she obviously doesn't see it that way at all! but it never seems like it occurs to him not to think of it in that framework bc essentially society in general sees it that way

idk I guess what I find interesting abt this is that it's a big blind spot in a guy who's otherwise extremely willing to question social biases & generally likes to take people all on a level as just another sort of person like himself. again I think in his general behavior towards women interpersonally there's nothing bad & in fact there's a lot of genuine respect there & probably willingness to learn even (in fantine 's case), but it's like he just never worked out that these ideas about gender are about as true & helpful as ideas about class or criminality etc etc

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I know WWX has a traumatic past with dogs, but sometimes you see that the dogs just want his attention, and a part of me is unsure who to feel sorry for more. Who's more pitiable, the dejected dog, or WWX who jumps into LWJ's arms?

Ran the numbers, and it turns out they are both equally pathetic.

[idontmindifuforgetme]

choice feminism is not actual feminism and will do nothing to help push women out of the shackles we have been subjected to

No I understand this. It’s completely duplicitous to pretend that women choose things in vacuum, when in reality a lot of their decisions are influenced by the patriarchal system we were born into—makeup being a byproduct of it. I’m all for women going against the grain and existing in public without feeling the need to put makeup on.

There does need to be a push against rigid beauty standards, but putting a woman down for adhering to them just isn’t the way to me. It doesn’t mean I think every choice is inherently feminist and shouldn’t be questioned. It just means I’m mindful of not infringing on other women’s autonomy w my opinions. Besides, experiences w makeup are so different… one woman could just be wearing it bc she’s artsy and just likes the way it looks, whereas another could be wearing it bc she understands that it could help her up the corporate ladder. I wouldn’t dream of calling either of them anti feminist for doing it.

Is that ideal? No. Should it should be questioned, analyzed, changed for the better? Again, bc I don’t want my words to be twisted—yes, it should be. I was never trying to say it shouldn’t. All I was stating was that I don’t think policing women on whether or not they should wear makeup is the answer. I rly don’t. I’m not prepared to call a woman who wears makeup anti-feminist. I’m not prepared to shame a woman for wearing makeup or getting plastic surgery. I’m just not. That is not the same thing as promoting choice feminism. Like I know this isn’t the critical thinking website but being accused of being pro choice feminism for simply supporting other women being happy is crazy

[joseigamer]

Patalliro! is fascinating to me because of stuff like this. It's unapologetically gay - even within its anime which aired during primetime hours in 1982 - in a way that many later BL manga would never be, like the ones from the early 2000s which would never dare to call their characters actual homosexuals. Patalliro has actually aged quite well in this regard, there's something comforting about how campy it is.

[torchwood-99]

I don't think Lord of the Rings is a sexist book (as in that's too definitive, there's positives and negatives in its depiction of gender) or that the LOTR fandom is in entirety a sexist fandom. But I do think the fact that women take a significantly smaller amount of page time up attracts certain types of male fans, who appreciate that they don't have to read too much about women or give them much thought outside of them being rewards and love interests for the blokes.

[carlyraejepsans]

for real WHERE does the idea that [utdr humans] are nongendered so that "you can project on them" come from. their literal character arcs are about NOT being a blank slate to be filled in by the audience

i think i understand the assumption on some level for undertale, because there is a very intentional effort to make you identify with the "player character" in order to make your choices feel like your own (the beating heart of undertale's metanarrative lies in giving you an alternative path to violence against its enemies after all, and whether you're still willing to persue it for your own selfish reasons. YOUR agency is crucial).

of course, the cardinal plot twist of the main ending sweeps the rug from under your feet on that in every way, and frisk's individuality becomes, in turn, a tool to further UT's OTHER main theme: completionism as a form of diegetic violence within the story. replaying the game would steal frisk's life and happy ending from them for our own perverse sentimentality, emotionally forcing our hand away from the reset button.

i think their neutrality absolutely aids in that immersion. but also, there's this weird attitude by (mostly) cis fans where it being functional within the story makes it... somehow "editable" and "up to the player" as well? which is gross and shows their ass on how they approach gender neutrality in general lol.

but also like. there's plenty of neutral, non PCharacters in undertale and deltarune. even when undertale was just an earthbound fangame and the player immersion metanarrative was completely absent, toby still described frisk as a "young, androgynous person". sometimes characters are just neutral by design. it's not that hard to understand lol.

anyone who makes this argument for kris deltarune is braindead. nothing else to say about it.

[theyautjaarchivist]

Some Yautja OC x Human memes

[tenderperversion-moved]

(kicking a hornets nest) i think i would like chappell roan much more if it didnt feel like her attraction to women comes from disillusionment and dissatisfaction with men.

[sunscall]

dennis saying "we spend every waking minute together [with charlie and frank], it'll be good for us to keep our distance" as an excuse to not share a table with them during his monthly dinner with mac... as if he and mac aren't the ones who ACTUALLY see each other 24/7 since not only do they work together, but they also literally live together too. incredible.

[corpsentry]

there’s something so epic about hetero chinese period dramas and i think one part of it is that there is absolutely nowhere in the narrative i could exist.

lately i’ve been on a western media detox— i’ve cleaned english language music out of my playlists and have never been able to stomach western dramas anyway, so that part is easy— which might seem funny, because if i’m in singapore and i hate it and i won’t touch american music then what’s left? the answer is the false binarism of chinese period dramas, at least for me. the badly written ones are misogynistic and stupid and the better ones are less of those things, but regardless the world that emerges is clean-cut and easy to parse. there’s someone to root for and someone to hate. there’s a girl and a boy. there’s the comedy and the drama, the sheer thick drama, the music that signals to you precisely how to feel before the scene even starts going

try to jam a fifth culture transnational transgender they/them with 2 mental illness and 1 autoimmune disease into this world and it simply doesn’t work. and that’s kinda epic lolzers! it’s like watching high fantasy, or super hardcore sci-if. it both represents a simulacrum of the real world and is so far from the reality you know that you understand it as a hypothetical universe, one that disincludes you on principle. i exclude myself from the story and in doing so fangfei from moyuyunjian’s steely gaze becomes all the more important. i give so many shits and laugh and yell and spectate. but i am safe from the eyes of its inhabitants. if i entered the story it would break. so i sit outside of it, clapping by myself

in other news, we gave up on mysterious lotus casebook 16 episodes in. there are many character archetypes in these shows that i can no longer stand; the salacious sexy seductive supervillain lady is not necessarily one of them but the way they did miss ‘this man didn’t even Look at me when all men fall at my knees so i hated him’ ‘no one is allowed to steal buttchin from me’ jiao was way up there. surely a woman can have multiple personality traits and yet you would think from this drama that that is not at all true. and the strange harem that grew around li lianhua despite his absolute loser attitude— like i get it, he’s the gintoki of this show, that’s hot, but the way the women who were into him were written made me want to Eat Horse. it bothered me that di feisheng and lianhua’s homo as fuck dynamic was so intriguing and them + fang duobing was a winning trio but all the women in the show were written like complete fucking ass, and one of the big antagonists being a woman, the stakes throughout were not only lost to me but also Pissed Me Off. also, that case about the corpse flowers dragged on forever and all my pocky wilted

I Just Think, women deserve better in these damn stories. make them slutty as hell, sure, but make them other things too and i mean this in the most generous sense. slutty and proud. slutty and weird. slutty and oblivious. literally anything at all so they don’t come out cardboard flat from all angles. this is why i have a personal vendetta against the ditzy clueless female protagonist as well because if everything stems from the fact that she doesn’t know shit it’s like please someone Please tell her shit i’m on my hands and knees begging. give her more to chew on she’s dying of boredom over there

this is why i liked the so called antagonist of blossoms in adversity best (spoilers ahead). he was cruel as hell to huazhi and gu yanxi’s only parental figure. he was paranoid and selfish and lonely and craved a son’s love from the one person he couldn’t hold onto. in the end he is pushed further and further by huazhi, who won’t give in, to isolate yanxi from the people he loves and to lash out at those people as a way of punishing yanxi. and when he dies it’s because of his own distrust, his own negligent parenting, his absent cruelty from decades of insomnia and lack of faith in his people. but he cries for yanxi, and there’s something so human about that. to think of evil not as a first principle but rather an adjective for a verb that is set in motion by other events. to be honest, i haven’t seen such thoughtful writing in any chinese period drama before or after that and i strongly suspect i will never see such writing again in this genre but man, it was so fucking good (spoilers end).

in the meantime, i’ve dragged my mother to moyuyunjian/the double for the return casting of liu xiening and wang xingyue who are Eating so hard. they’ve got wang xingyue done up with the sluttiest makeup and liu xiening is breaking my heart with her pout and her Sassy Mean constitution and this is a revenge story, yes, but it’s a double revenge story. it’s a grief story. and fangfei is carrying more on her shoulders than lingbuyi imo, and doing so with much more grace too. her step mom’s a dick but she’s a smart, 5d chess playing dick who wears hot shades of green so i’m personally interested enough to keep watching (something lotus casebook DID NOT accomplish with their epic female antagonist…. mein gotte). and the princess too. unhinged as hell but god, so charismatic. and beautiful, with scary big eyes and the sweetest head tilt. fun fun fun! that’s fun character writing right there. the comedy might be too straightforward for my tastes but everything else is kind of hot and sexy And after the coming of age ceremony when jiangli appeared amidst the flowers i felt my throat close up even though we saw her for all of one (1) episode). i was like yes. they got me alright. i Care now

really that’s all that matters isn’t it. we want stories about people we care for. we want to give a shit. why else would we listen to the stories of other people. we are looking for us and the people we love in them

oh also moyuyunjian soundtrack goes hard as hell i love a little three step waltz. here’s a pic from the ‘gym’ for ur time. guten night

[rriverrunning]

i just reached theon's first pov chapter and was really interested by his narration style. like, even more than an unreliable narrator who the reader is meant to mistrust, he almost reads as a foolish narrator who the reader is meant to look down upon a bit, because he is so obviously mistaken and we know better.

(acok theon i)

this really reminds me of a lot of sansa's early thoughts of becoming joffrey's queen:

(agot sansa i)

and while obviously these streams of thought come from very different places -- sansa is (for all she knows at the time) correct, as she's betrothed to the king, while theon's aspirations are a lot less based in reality -- they do share this arc of using fantasies to deal with unpleasant realties, until the reality becomes too unpleasant to justify or romanticize any longer.

and i think (knowing what happened to sansa & vaguely knowing what happens to theon) this is a really interesting aspect of their stories to compare and contrast, the theme of disillusionment and disappointment with somewhere they believe they belong.

at the end of agot, we see sansa longing for winterfell after her father's death, once she's learned that king's landing and court life are not all that she dreamed they'd be.

(agot sansa vi)

which makes me wonder if (or likely when) theon will do the same: how long will it take for his cold experiences with his family, estrangement from his former home, and subsequent bad experiences to make him long for winterfell or the starks.

this isn't a crazy deep analysis, like i know that "you don't truly appreciate what you have until it's gone" and "all that glitters is not gold" are really common themes, but i think that the sequence of these stories is really interesting. just after sansa has been faced with the horrors of king's landing, theon arrives at pyke bright eyed with fantastic expectations of grandeur. and since we've just witnessed sansa's journey, the reader is primed to expect the worst for theon's future too (the tone of his chapter also contributes to this). very interested to see where these arcs go!

[oldbookshop]

i'll get flamed for saying this around here but idk i think it's weird to ask actors how much they enjoyed kissing each other 💀

[fem-lit]

Ryan, Barbara. “BEYOND EMBARRASSMENT: FEMINISM AND ADULT HETEROSEXUAL LOVE.” The Centennial Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 1993, pp. 471–86.

JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23739489.

[messrsrarchives]

Thoughts on this TikTok?? I agree with what their saying but I do also feel there is a lack of female centred content in this fandom

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZS6U3otrs/

the way i knewww what video it was gonna be before opening it

valid points !!! mhm yah. i have a massive yap about this sitting in my drafts that i'm too scared to post but like,,, yeah. there is a lack of female-centered content compared to the men! absolutely, but it's very much a two-way street.

a lot of people who complain about the lack of content do nothing to add to it, and instead put their energy into bashing mlm ships or content. it's very much,,,, if you have the time to make a caurosel post on tiktok about how much you hate jegulus, you had the time to make one about jily headcanons that you like and encourage more. or to go to the comments of a fic that you liked and encourage and compliment the author, or to comment on videos that you do like etc etc etc - boost the content you want to see, don't bash the content you don't want to see.

and it definitely falls into a kind of spiral on tiktok. 100% because a lot of people there are posting for traction so they'll rec or reference the fics that everyone knows so that more people like it. and the algorithm thrives off of hate more than positivity so if you're looking for traction (ew) then it makes "more sense" to be hateful (though i can't imagine you're having much fun in fandom, i.e "whats a [character] headcanon that you hate?" videos rather than asking what people like)

butttt my fyp is always full of female-centric content because i engage with it. there's a lot of accounts centered around them, a lot of cosplayers etc etc. even then! if someone is overly negative about about a ship in my comments i'll toss them recs for another one. or if they're yelling in my comments about the fact i post jegulus, i'll chuck over the @'s of some of my mutuals that focus on jily and it does nothing to quench their anger actually because they're angry for the sake of being angry.

so like,,,, valid points! i think the lack of female-centric content in fandom is something to talk about, absolutely! i literally put together the femininomenon fest for that reason

BUTTTT i think a good proportion of those that bring it up in comment sections etc aren't actually fostering that discussion, if anything they're putting people off of it. if you want to see a change in fandom you need to be the change and not wait for those "above" you to start it (i.e the bit in the video about no big female centric fics - fandom is an individual experience for your own exploration, and if you're waiting for a "big" fic to encourage you to engage with something??? hm). another issue is that people don't search for fics anymore, which ties into that tiktok spiral above, but they wait for them to be recommended to them. which,,, nothing wrong with that! but if you're harping on about not seeing something and then doing nothing to find it? it's not going to come on a silver platter. and by "be he change" i don't mean bang out a 600k fic, nor do i mean by a fandom-wide change, but you can change your lil corner of it. you can search for the content you want to find, you can post your headcanons and ships, post your lil ideas, comment on fics you enjoy, encourageeee people to engage.

i mean the fact you have to search rather than have it handed over/open tiktok to a video? yeah, there's a discussion to be had, absolutely! and people have had this discussion numerous times, but if you're viewing fandom as a big trickle-down thing where you rely on others for what you enjoy, then there hasn't been some big change because very few of those complaining are actually *doing* anything (even just going to ao3 and searching like the good ol' days, just waiting for a viral tiktok to recommend some to them) - the conversation is had, there's a female centric fest once a year, there's female-centric accounts, there's people talking about it constantly but very few can hear them over the sound of themselves yelling in comments.

i hope this has come across okay! i'm not denying a lack of content, absolutely not. but instead of blowing up comments i put together a lil fest, or i open ao3, or i yap to my friends about headcanons etc etc.

because whilst i agree it's a fandom wide discussion, if you're waiting for the wider fandom to catch on, no change will ever happen because fandom isn't run by five people sitting on thrones that tell everyone what to do, it's just a massive group of loser producing what they want to produce or engaging in what they want to engage with.

soooo i think this video isn't intended as a "there's no lack of content!" kind of thing (based on the interactions me n op have had, they're a nice person) but more as a critique on how when people complain and you offer them solutions or a guiding hand to find what they want, they still complain because they don't actually *want* to engage with it, they just want to argue - which ofc isn't everyone! i'm generalising a lot here but that's the people this video is referring to. so yeah. i dont think greta is denying that fact, but i do think they raise v valid points on how it's like yelling into a void sometimes

[himblebo]

In Act 2 of Lempicka when Tamara and Rafaela enter Le Monocle for the first time they look around at all the women together and Rafaela says “a room full of nothing but US” and Tamara says “let’s never leave” and guys I just went to a lesbian bar for the first time (okay it’s actually a deli but they turn it into a lesbian bar at night) and GUYS? That is the safest I have ever felt out drinking and dancing and I felt so natural and I was surrounded by other queer women and that’s. That’s the first actual queer space I’ve been to in YEARS and especially post-pandemic. And I’m feeling such an overwhelming mix of emotions right now because I didn’t realize how isolated I felt from the queer community in my day to day life (ie not online). I just. God.

Dedicated queer spaces are so important. Lesbian bars are so important. This is the only one I’ve been to but I’m VERY aware that these days there are fewer and fewer of them but I just. I didn’t know how badly this kind of place and experience and connection to community was missing from my life until I suddenly had it tonight.