#is very easy to read as the kind of misogynistic writing where you hurt the female character in an almost masturbatory way

[autistictaylorhebert]

i can turn anything into wildbow hating psychoanalysis

[septembersghost]

I really appreciate your writings about Elvis, because they cheer me up when things are bad. You’re such a great writer and make so many great points that most people don’t want to hear. I haven’t been productive this year unfortunately so I’ve been online a lot and I fear being into Elvis has been very damaging for my mental health. It’s been more than a year of reading comments about what an abusive groomer racist appropriator he was and I don’t think I can take it anymore. I’ll never deny the joy his work has brought me but sometimes I wonder if its better to take a step back from all things Elvis :/

*hugs hugs hugs* thank you so much, this means a lot to me and i'm happy if anything i've shared has helped through everything.

here's what i can advise, as someone who VERY much understands being less productive and online a lot and maybe then relying a little too much on fandom - you never have to justify the things you love that are enriching your life and bringing you joy, but you are also always entitled to step back from them if that begins to hurt you. fandom is supposed to be fun! it's NOT supposed to take a toll on your mental health. the fandom i initially came back to tumblr to participate in was doing that to me, just wrecking my mental state and stressing me out on a loop, constantly putting horrible posts in my face (and this is a fictional case, but seeing someone you love, character or artist, wrongfully called an abuser and a monster and vilified to an insane degree when it isn't at all a true depiction is intensely difficult to read and to navigate). and my solution was to loosen my attachment to it and get some distance, it was the only way to alleviate it. you have to take care of and prioritize yourself. i promise you that if he could give you guidance here, E would say the same thing. he wouldn't want you being hurt on his behalf, that's not what he was here to do!

i don't know where you're seeing this stuff (idk where any of y'all read this garbage 😭 i'd say stay away from forums or threads or comment sections where you know it's likely to happen). also be confident in the truth and the reality and facts we have, because they DO outweigh those hateful comments and hearsay. it's like the accusations of racism make my blood boil because it's horribly untrue, but it's also so easy to research and learn about and refute that i know the people who say that are uninformed and don't care. i've shared a lot debunking that specifically because of that wealth of information and testimony about his character. the nastier comments about priscilla and his romantic relationships, it's just...it's salacious and invasive, *not* to discuss it in general because it affected him and was a part of his life, but the way in which it's handled tends to cross lines. and while i may disagree with aspects of decisions he made myself, it is not my business and not my right to demonize their private life. i don't understand the obsession with this, if i'm being honest. how is THIS a focal point of how someone is defined? i see iconic male musicians with a ton of stans online who really WERE documented racists, abusers, misogynists, pursued groupies (elvis did not), and they NEVER get this kind of villification. i'm not saying it's wrong to enjoy their music either, but it's crazy how this discussion dominates him in such an unfair way. ask yourself why this takes such a hold of people with elvis where it doesn't with others, because there are societal factors at work, along with decades of misperception and intentional detraction. then take whatever matters most and touches and resonates with you, from him, from his music, and let yourself carry that with you. nobody else is owed that. it's sacred to you alone.

if you can, redirect your attention to something new, whatever that may be, and rest and refresh your mind. you don't deserve to be stressed or suffering over this. sometimes, getting distance can help you hold onto that joy in a more centered and healthier way. sending you love, and please remember my askbox is always open if you want to talk or if you need a little light 💖

[withtheoldstars]

hi! i just finished reading high infidelity by you and it was incredible. i say this bcs i’m someone that avoids the cheating trope since it can sometimes be triggering for me to read. but lately that trope (in jegulus fics) has been calling to me lately for some reason. months ago i would never have been able to read your fic, i know for sure i would’ve been hurt. but now i’m very much glad i did bcs it’s so angsty and i’ve been invested in the drama, mess, and taboo of it all. i’m so baffled on how it even happened. like the only times i’ve ever enjoyed and rooted for cheating is when a female character does it to a man, since i support their wrongs but i couldn’t give less of a fuck about a cis man. 😅

also i’m sorry for all the hate you got. i was reading your a/n’s and you mentioned how ppl sent hate and called you misogynistic. i can’t imagine missing out on reading this fic. i’m so glad you and other ppl are writing what they want despite criticism. you writers are doing amazing work out here. i’m very grateful as a fanfic reader!

hi! thank you so much for your kind words 🥹

i totally get where you're coming from and i'm glad you gave my fic a chance and enjoyed it! it's definitely a messy and taboo subject. tbh i also had the same feeling myself!!! it's super easy for me to not be able to read a cheating fic because of the triggers!!!

and thank you for your support! there were some annoying people right when i first started the fic, but rn all the support, like yours, has been amazing

i believe that we need to write about beautiful things but also about awful gut-wrenching things you know hahaha your encouragement really makes a difference 🖤

thanks again for reaching out and for being such an amazing reader! ✨

[inu-jiru]

Damn Jazz Back At It Again With The Helluva Boss Rambles

Back on my bullshit again with another post now that I’ve mellowed out from the shock of how shit that episode was lol

I wish mobile made it easier to add the “Keep Reading” tab but it’s fine 

I’ve seen so many people go around being like “o it’s ok if Stella’s generic and not given more personality like everyone else because women can be bad didn’t you know that something something Amber Herd” and apparently anyone who thinks otherwise is just a Vivziepop hater who thinks she’s a misogynist (love the strawman shit mmm so juicy). And while evil for evil’s sake can be fun and cool in something like Sleeping Beauty (aka an adaptation of a fairy tale that’s already a story of “good vs evil”), why would you expect me to be chill with that in a show where the demons are, for the most part, more than just evil demons? If Stella was some minor, one-off character like that asshole imp guy at Loo Loo Land, that’d be one thing, but she’s not. She’s one of the main antagonists. This isn’t a “good vs. evil” story where you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing, Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel are supposed to be more than that. I’d be just as confused if Valentino or Vox, for every second of screentime they had, were doing nothing but going “haha rape haha prostitution haha tv is so cool” for 25 minutes and that’s it. But I digress.

I’m writing this because I was suddenly reminded of a character that’s basically what Stella could’ve been: Flowey. Flowey is just as volatile and agressive as Stella is, attacking you, killing you, and possibly having done countless genocide runs in the past with his own ability to RESET. Then, we get his backstory and find out who he used to be and why he’s the way he is. He’s an unfeeling sociopathic child. He was created with absolutely no way of feeling empathy because he has no SOUL. The child that he used to be is angry, longing for his past and his old friend, and was put into this situation for reasons that weren’t even his fault. Flowey is also a victim, but that doesn’t mean he can’t also be evil or do hurtful things. Whether or not you choose to show him pity or mercy is up to the player, but the fact that he’s that complex enough to warrant that choice is just part of Undertale’s writing. Hell, even Toriel is a better Stella than what Stella is in “canon”. I personally don’t like Toriel, but she does have depth to her (until the end where she just waltzes in and takes over the situation and no one does a thing to stop her because it’s Toriel and I guess everyone’s just chill with the traitorous queen coming in and acting like she’s in charge). Toriel comes in acting all sweet and nice, but is very clingy and definitely has issues with guilt and a black-and-white morality to justify her own actions. She’s not simply “ah, my child have some pie and we’ll be a family my child” 24/7. She’s a spiteful bitch, a hypocrite, and runs away from her problems. Again, this is because Undertale’s writing is (for the most part) consistent with giving it’s characters more depth underneath the memes and quotable dialogue.

Now, why am I writing all this about Undertale? Because it and HB/HH are on similar levels of writing. They both try to show more than just what’s at face value. Charlie is nice and sweet but will throw hands and has self-doubts, Alastor is everyone’s nightmare, but according to the comics, he does crave genuine interaction and is much nicer towards women (aside from Vaggie but my theory is that it’s because she’s not as feminine as Charlie or the Sheep Woman and far less easy to charm). So if Alastor, a mass murderer and cannibal who is more than likely going to do everything he can to mess with the Hotel’s success for his own entertainment, can have elements of good in him, then why the fuck can’t Stella? Oh, I know why, because Alastor isn’t interfering with the “romance”. I already didn’t like Stolitz before but Season 2 has nuked any chance of making me change my mind. This whole “romance” is being pushed so hard that it’s tainting the writing with retcons and things that just make no sense. Why would Octavia say “you ruined it” to Stolas in episode 2 if Stella was apparently just mean and nasty the whole time and Stolas was just soooo innocent? Why does the Ozzie’s song frame it like Stella and Octavia are victims of Stolas fucking up if Stella was always secretly the evil one and not Stolas? Why is Stolas ashamed if he was so proudly yelling about his divorce in front of her friends? Why is Goetia divorce a thing if the Goetia family looks down on it and sets up arranged marriages? Why the fuck is Stella just around and eating at the dinner table like they’re married if she can’t stand Stolas? Why is she ranting about Stolas being a cheater on the phone, if they’re separated and if she just doesn’t care about anything but money? And why the dickshit would Stella, someone who everyone is so fucking sure is only in it for her image, just blabbing about how shit her marriage is if that would just make her look like a loser who’s settling for trash? It makes no fucking sense unless it’s all just some poorly done retcon of earlier events. Hell, the pilot is supposedly non-canon, and yet a scene of it pops up in the new episode, so I can’t even be sure what’s true or not.

Sigh, but I guess at the end of the day, I saw this coming. They’re trying so hard to push Stolitz that the writing has to suffer for it. I’m not even sure I want to continue the series, if it’s just gonna become some genetic telenovela where everyone is so evil unless they wanna help Stolas in some way because he’s “such a victim”. I never wanted to have to write something like this and I sure as shit never foresaw myself reblogging critical content, but it is the way it is, I guess. But, that’s what rewrites and AUs are for, and I’ll be working on mine.

Anyway, that’s it for now unless I find something else to ramble about. Later.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[lastsonlost]

After the first episode of "The Mandalorian," the Disney Plus series in the Star Wars universe that became the top streaming hit of 2019, aired on the platform, some Twitter users expressed frustration at how few women spoke, and how few female characters there were in general.

Some of those who tweeted, including well-known feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, were met with dogpiling and waves of harassment across social media platforms. 

The harassment largely stemmed from anti-feminist Star Wars fan accounts who rounded up and highlighted tweets under the pretense that those complaining were "outraged" social justice warriors trying to tear down a successful Star Wars franchise.

The harassment is just the latest instance of feminist fandom voices being shut down online.

Anita Sarkeesian is no stranger to online harassment,

YEA SHES VERY GOOD AT MAKING THEM.

 being one of the central figures in Gamergate, the online harassment campaign that resulted in her receiving numerous death and rape threats, along with bomb and shooting threats at her events. But even she was surprised at the amount of vitriol her tweet about "The Mandalorian" received.

After watching the first episode of the Star Wars series for Disney Plus, Sarkeesian tweeted asking if she was just tired, or if there wasn't "a single female speaking character in the first episode."

She was exhausted, Sarkeesian told Insider — missing the one scene where a woman spoke and making a typo in her tweet. In the replies, Sarkeesian corrected herself. Then she went to bed. In the morning, the tweet had more than 3,000 replies. It currently has close to 7,000.

"Maybe you should switch to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills... I'm sure you'll find much to relate to there...." one top reply read.

"No wonder you're so tired. They say you should stretch before making such reaches, especially at your age," said another, with more than 1,400 likes of its own.

It's an example of dogpiling, a type of online harassment where, on Twitter, someone's replies outnumber likes and retweets, and are mostly filled with repetitive, hurtful comments.

"It's ironic. Women, especially feminists, get accused of being emotional and angry and all of these things when all we said was 'Hey, I noticed this thing. And it's kind of a problem, and I think it's really bad for our society,'" Sarkeesian told Insider. "If they didn't reply to it, my tweet would have just been gone. They made it a much bigger deal."

Sarkeesian is the most prominent figure facing dogpiling and harassment in response to her criticism of the series, but she's not the only one.

People with and without large Twitter followings, some who are verified and many who are not, have found themselves overwhelmed with anti-feminist replies and messages across platforms after tweeting about how few women are in "The Mandalorian."

Specifically, in the first episode, there's one female character wearing a mask who speaks, and two female characters total, along with a few women spotted as extras in the background of shots. More female characters are expected to play larger roles in future episodes.

"Even if you want to give the show the benefit of the doubt and say there's some big, wild justification that's going to come around in episode 7, it feels wrong that the vast majority of this world is populated by men or male-identified characters," Sarkeesian said.

Star Wars fans have a history of harassing women online when faced with criticism

Online harassment in the Star Wars fandom, particularly of women, is nothing new. Actresses like Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran of the latest Disney-owned Star Wars trilogy have recently talked about the negative aspects of the Star Wars community.

Ridley, who stars in the newest Star Wars trilogy as Rey, "cut off" her Facebook and Instagram accounts "like a Skywalker limb" due to harassment, and Tran faced racist and misogynistic harassment after appearing as the first woman of color in a leading role in the Star Wars franchise.

"It wasn't their words, it's that I started to believe them," Tran wrote for The New York Times after deleting her Instagram posts in 2018. "Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories."

In the case of "The Mandalorian," almost anyone who tweets about the show from a feminist perspective is at risk of being targeted, because Star Wars fan accounts are rounding up tweets that criticize things like the amount of time it took for a woman to speak in the first episode.

One account rounded up 33 of these tweets with the caption "SJW's are outraged over the 'lack of female characters' in the first 2 episodes of The Mandalorian. A show with 3 female characters. Feminists only care about counting the number of minutes women are on screen in Star Wars."

Insider spoke with two people whose tweets were featured in the round-up, who said their tweets were mischaracterized, inspiring a wave of online hate.

Both of the people who spoke with Insider said they liked "The Mandalorian" and will continue watching it, but wanted to point out that it could be better in terms of female representation.

One woman who spoke to Insider anonymously, because she is trying to distance her name from the situation, says the harassment began several days after she posted her initial tweet about a lack of women in the first episode.

After receiving anti-feminist replies on Twitter, she also started getting harassed across platforms, in part because other anti-feminist Star Wars accounts picked up screenshots of her tweet after it was first included in the round-up and distributed to an even wider audience, including on Instagram.

One person even left a violent message for her in the email submission form on her professional website. It reads "People like you don't deserve a f---ing opinion, but at least I'm glad you can voice it. Doesn't prevent me from calling you f---ing r-----ed for spouting your misandry. HOW DOES IT F---ING FEEL C---? I hope you expire and never have children."

"I had to put everything on private, for my own mental health," she told Insider. "I just had to shut down my profile. I will never, ever, ever tweet about Star Wars again. And I love baby Yoda so much. But I can't. They won. Life's too short for me to fight this fight."

Even after setting her accounts to private, she was inundated by hundreds of follow requests on Twitter, along with DMs sent to her private Instagram.

Those who tweeted about female representation in 'The Mandalorian' stand by their words, despite the harassment

The person who tweeted the round-up of critics didn't want to share any identifying information with Insider, but did stand behind the tweet, and said they didn't participate in or encourage harassment, but the reach of the account became clear once Insider asked for comment in the replies. Within a few hours, a video had been uploaded about this article (which had not been written yet) to YouTube from a channel with more than 130,000 subscribers.

The video in question has been viewed more than 33,000 times and highlights the mentality in at least one corner of the Star Wars fandom that is male-dominated and is aggressive toward diverse media representation.

"What SJWs do is as soon as this kind of thing happens, they identify [the Twitter account that posted the round-up] as hostile to their narrative [...] I would call them left-wing garbage," the voiceover of YouTuber ComicArtistPro Secrets says in the video. "They are going to come in and write an article smearing [the Twitter account], 'Don't you dare shine a light on these cockroaches in such an effective way ever again,'" The YouTuber mocked, referring to the feminist critics as the "cockroaches" in the situation.

"This is a strategy that these sorts of anti-progressive, very regressive cyber mobs have used for years," Sarkeesian said. "They try to use social justice language against us when we try to bring these issues up but it's so transparent and so obvious what they're trying to do, by undermining our point. It's very bad faith."

Writer and programmer David Ely, a male who's tweet was included in the roundup, told Insider that his replies were pretty tame in comparison to Sarkeesian and the other woman Insider spoke to, although he did receive one unspecified death threat from an account that he blocked.

"Part of the response seems to come from a belief that Star Wars needn't be political. That it be pure entertainment," Ely told Insider. "Star Wars is a made-up universe. If gender inequality exists there, it's either on purpose, or because the creator's biases meant they didn't notice it. Either way, that's political."

Sarkeesian also stood by her original point that "The Mandalorian" should have more female characters, and said a lot of the negative response was because there's so much pushback from people who have historically been over-represented on the screen, and are hostile to the changing expectations for diverse characters that represent the diverse Star Wars fanbase.

"We are so accustomed to male-dominated narratives that it's easy to not even notice glaring omissions," she said. "Unlike if the entire cast had been women, I suspect everyone would have immediately noticed that regardless of what one's opinion would be on that casting choice."

MAYBE ITS NOT FOR YOU ANITA....

[hecohansen31]

Terrible Thing

A/N: So before you start with this fanfiction you shall know a few thing, first of all: this is my first time writing a (MichaelXReader) story, so I am still trying to find my style, so suggestions are very much appreciated if you have some, although I would prefer if they were worded nicely and with kindness.

Also to this entire mess: English is not my first language, so if you see anything that isn’t right, I am sorry, I am trying to do better and learn from mistakes.

Final disclaimer and then I will finally leave you to the story: this is an AU to the original content, in which the Hawthorne boys are staying over at Robinchaux (for you know... educational purposes...) so that is all and I will take my leave and leave you to enjoy this little piece...

SUMMARY: Boys will be boys, but then girls shall be girls and take their revenge and when one specific warlock we all know decides to do prank another witch... well he is about to learn that a scorned woman is the most dangerous beast of them all (Also, little suggestions: if you want to feel the full extense of this...listen meanwhile reading to “Terrible Things” by AG & Brad Gordon).

WORDS: 3,6 

WARNING: There is no sex, but there is a bit foreplay and dirty talk, alongside a good amount of nudity so... you better read this in your room, alone... 

“BOYS WILL BE BOYS”

… then girls will be girls…

She honestly couldn’t believe that she was now standing in front of a mirror, letting Myrtle handle a pair of scissors near her hair, since a big piece of chewing gum was stuck in there, since Michael Langdon had thought it would be a fun way to use it to get her to finally cut her long mane.

And although she had never been a girl to cry for her hair (not something to be ashamed really, but she thought that in the end “they would have grown out”) she was honestly pissed for the prank which ended badly for her and would soon end badly for Michael.

Myrtle would have to lock down every weapon, and maybe put a few spells of protection on Michael, meanwhile he stayed over at Robinchaux.

-… all done, sweet thing! – chirped the red-haired witch, who lovingly patted her shoulder to sign that they were done and that she had to get her lovely ass off her chair.

And finally (Y/N) met the mirror, watching a (Y/N) with shorter hair, a sight she better gets used to.

-Thank you, Myrtle, you saved my face and Langdon from being burned alive- she mumbled, passing a hand through the hair both to caress the newfound softness and make sure it was her hair, still, although she seemed a stranger in the mirror.

-If it had been Madison, I would be worried about him being burned alive, with you…- and Myrtle lowered to speak next to her ear -… I expect something more, my little witch-.

And they smirked heavily at their newest reflections.

She had never been one to approve the “boys will be boys” thing, since not only it was misogynistic and completely wrong, but it was something that was applied at every age of boy, no matter if they were younglings or full grown-up men.

But what bothered her even more was the “he keeps on pulling your braid, because he likes you” mentality, because men needed to learn better ways to talk to women, without hurting them or making them feel inferior just for the sake of their own insecurity.

So, she had to teach Michael a lesson, one that would gently tell him not to fuck with her… or there would be consequences.

The plan wasn’t that easy to conjure: if Michael Langdon could be an arrogant student, but he was no fool and any invite or try for seduction would probably let him smell the danger of the situation, but not if he was intoxicated in the fumes of alcohol and he thought his prey was in the same condition.

She brushed her hair, letting Zoe help her curl it (she was too scared to burn her ears) meanwhile she searched Madison’s wardrobe for a “fuck-me” dress, knowing she wouldn’t mind, mostly if she never knew it was her who took it, settling on one that, although it was a bit prudish for Madison it was perfect for her, since Michael would be pretty aware if she walked in with a dress fit with a slit and a huge show of cleavage.

She went for a sheer bodycon dress with lace inserts, but conservative cuts on both her legs and her cleavage, reserving all the fun in the backside of the dress, showing a huge and deep “v” cleavage, although with a jacket nothing was shown, but with no hair to cover it it was very evident, highlighting her silhouette.

She had added a bit of make-up, but the center of it had been the bold red lip (“Outlaw” by “Kat Von D”, her favorite one).

And when she was ready, she decked herself in the elegant coat she owned, hoping it might seem expensive enough for the club Hawthorne had visited since they had started staying over at Robinchaux, a gentlemen’s club, whatever that meant.

She honestly didn’t think it was a stripper club or anything related, since the guys didn’t come home smelling of shitty perfumes and still pursued the girls as if they were the only in the world, alongside the fact that teachers weren’t asked to accompany them.

And when she entered it she was surprised by the elegant atmosphere and the waiter asked to take her coat, smiling sweetly but also clearly wondering what the heck was a girl doing here, mostly a clothed woman, since the ones that were there were pretty undressed, serving the men with only lingerie, elegant lingerie.

She should have thought also about that (but at least her panties and bra were matching).

-Looking for someone? – asked the confused waiter and she looked around till she found the trademark blonde curls.

-Found him, now if you excuse me…- she tried to walk seductively in the pumps she wore (stolen from Madison, although she thought that maybe her high-heeled boots would have worked better) feeling his gaze settle on her, but she gave him no mind, looking instead at the table behind theirs, and then faking surprise at the Hawthorne boys who called her name, meanwhile he just kept on his gaze on her body.

“Oh, guys… I didn’t see you there” she joked, meanwhile a few guys on the other side of Michael moved in order for her to move in with them, immediately the guy closest to her wrapped an hand around here shoulder and she fought the impulse to throw it off.

“We come here each night, (Y/N)” mumbled Michael, but she gave it not too much thought, faking of not having heard nothing, meanwhile those famous women in lingerie asked her what she would like to drink.

“What about tequila shots?” the quickest way to get drunk and the funniest way.

“Only if you let us do body shots” commented another Hawthorne boys, and she giggled to masquerade the embarrassment.

“Sorry, guys, but my dress is too expensive but who wants a dance after I am done with the shots?”.

Everyone raised their hands, probably already thinking about their own fantasy of her, naked and at their mercy.

Had they known that she had actually thought this a bit too much, already pushing protection spells on herself and her body, shielding her from any attack of drugs or magic and being a straight up better mage than anyone in Hawthorne, except Michael, she knew they would work.

She only started dancing with Michael after her fifth shots (thanks to the spell she wasn’t getting intoxicated but her liver would kill her for all the amount of alcohol) and her fifth dance partner, everybody had somehow groped her just to feel his hand immediately burn (sorry guys you know how this protection spells are…).

He looked at her benevolently like a teacher with a child, and she played dumb when he asked what she was doing here.

“Just looking for fun, Michael” and then she had hooked her fingers in his bow (they had come in their uniforms and she honestly didn’t understand how all the waitress couldn’t laugh at it, but she guessed they were paid enough just to smile and follow the clients orders , did a female version of this even exist?) “You, boys, are not the only on who can enjoy a night out”.

And she turned around, ignoring him, but keeping her body on his, meanwhile she left a hand go through her hair, as if to show him “his work of art”: no chewing gum anymore and a few inches less.

She also knew she was showing him her slender neck, clearly a perfect place where anybody could place kisses, and he took the hint swiftly.

She moaned at the sensation of his cold lips against it (he had been eating the ice in his drink) and he could feel it by the way she arched, and was focused on getting more out of her, scraping with just the right amount his teeth on her skin.

For a moment, she thought it was honestly the best sensation she had ever felt, but then she thought that it might have been more satisfying seeing her revenge all work out perfectly.

So, she turned around, letting the hair fall back to her neck, before showing them away from her face with a quick gesture of her neck.

“Didn’t think that somebody as distinguished as you might join us here?” and he placed his hand on her hips, getting a curious glance from her “I thought you were lost when I saw you walking here, missed the bus for the library?”.

He wasn’t totally convinced of her seduction, clearly a bit distrusting of the entire pin-up look, meanwhile she thought what might convince him.

“And when are you going to push out the broom in your ass?” she replied, keeping the charm on and falling back in her previous persona  (the bitchy and tough witch, fighting with Michael for the spotlight) which took him by surprise, but then she slipped again in the glam and shy girl of the night “… you are always wound up so tight”.

And she proceeded to reach his shoulder, rubbing them slowly, maintaining eye-contact with him, before moving to lean forward, clearly aiming at his lips but then ultimately going for his ear.

“A good fuck would help you” and then they were in his room, suddenly.

They had danced for a long time at the club, till he had seemed enough satisfied of the teasing and after she had drowned two other drinks, giggling at how he had swiftly and magically transported them in his room after a few too many times she had accidently grinded against his hard length which was pushed against her ass.

And she faked not noticing it, taking in his elegant guest room, which he didn’t share with anyone (a fact which had annoyed her from the start; witches didn’t have single rooms, but he got one… why? Just because he was so special?).

And she was honestly surprised by how elegant and definitely not messy it was but he didn’t seem to care about it as he pushed her against the door, knocking a little picture of the wall, but being enough nice to shield her head from the impact with his arm, before attacking her neck, which she exposed to him, meanwhile she moved her hands in his hair, messing them and feeling a kind of satisfaction knowing he took so much time to get them ready just for them to be smashed away from the hand of a “snobbish and with no taste for fashion whatsoever” witch (his words not hers).

Then their lips met, for the first time in the entire night, and she honestly forgot for a moment what the plan was, lost in the softness of Michael’s lips and the way he elegantly moved next to her, with a calmness that she wouldn’t have thought belonged to him, as if he was kissing him reverently and shyly, asking for constant consent.

And then he let her breath again, again focusing on her neck, with a lot of attention to try to mark her, till she pushed him even farther from her.

“Sweetie, no marks, or people will start wondering” she honestly didn’t want marks on her neck to ruin her plan, but also she would have literally given her soul to feel Michael’s lips on every inch of her.

She wasn’t attracted to him, it was just a reaction of her body, she tried to reason with her body, hoping it was not too lost on lust.

“Let them wonder” and he made a move to duck her hands and go back to his artwork, stopped this time by magic.

“I think it is stupid and animalistic, but if you want… you can leave them under my clothes” and she slowly unzipped the lateral zip of the dress, before letting it flow on the floor, standing in only her underwear, looking at him straight in the eyes and hoping no nervousness was being shown.

And then he was again at her, groping at her bra and trying to unclasp it, something she thought was very natural and easy, but it seemed impossible for him, making her release a laugh sweetly.

“Let me” and she reached out, unclasping it swiftly, but keeping the cups in place with her arms “Am I your first girl?”.

This would explain his hesitation, the way he looked for her approval as a little puppy and finally why he had to puff his feathers so so much.

And maybe that made sense, but he still needed to be taught a lesson in respect.

“…yes” it was a whisper, but she made sure to hear it, smiling at him and cupping his cheek in order to make him meet her eyes “You are not my first time, I have had… other experiences… with boys”.

It should have been no surprise, since he attended Hawthorne, but this was a precious knowledge, alongside an interesting show of faith in her, giving her more and more information on him, since he was always so cockily reserved.

“You like boys?” she asked, more out of curiosity than intention to use it against him.

“Yes, I do” he replied, meanwhile he caressed sweetly her arms, almost as with a scared animal “I like girls too, and I like you”.

She almost broke into a laugh, realizing how the real the theory of “the boy that pulls on the girl’s braid is in love with her” right now, and although she honestly hated it, she was a little swept away by Michael’s sudden sweetness.

But it took her exact five minutes before she remembered he was the manipulator, the one who had made witches cry with just evil glares, the one who had dared Cordelia and fought her with every fiber of being after she had been so kind to him, and lately (although stupidly) the one who had stuck chewing gum in her hair.

“Oh, you are so sweet” and she managed to change the subject letting her bra fall down.

They had moved to the bed, leaving a trace of their clothes, but they were still in their underwear and Michael had dared a “so am I your first man?” when he had seen her struggle with hhis uniform and she had straight up ripped his shirt.

“My first man from Hawthorne, don’t get cocky” she had replied, before pushing him on his bed, and watching the way he elegantly tumbled down, and settling in his lap.

And they had moved from there, grinding and changing their position, keeping on with the kisses and the marks (she honestly hoped not to be naked near Zoe, in the immediate future, but she was also very happy and proud of the one she had left on his collarbone, making him moan to oblivion) but not daring to go further and with the knowledge she was his first girl, she understood his need to be calm.

But she needed to speed up things.

She moved a bit away, to reach out and Michael didn’t care, continuing to kiss her shoulder, before falling down on her chest, continuing his path, meanwhile she blindly reached out, till her hands reached something, Michael’s jacket.

And then she held it up.

-I can’t believe you want to cover me up, after all your struggle! – he made fun of her, moving his hands to her legs, moving up to her clothed core.

-It’s just to cover your eyes, boy wonder- she replied, moving down him, meeting his lips halfway, meanwhile she adjusted his jacket over her his eyes, securing it with a swift knot but making sure he wouldn’t move.

He tried to resist, clearly surprised by her sudden kinkiness, alongside the fact that it might not help that it was their first time and they didn’t trust each other that much, but she slowly purred in his ear, meanwhile with one hand he pushed him back and the other reached for her boxers, and he stopped any futile resistance.

-Indulge my kink, boy wonder, just for a few minutes, if you are not into it, tell me and I will stop- and she continued the probing with her other hand, before sneaking it inside and hearing him gasp, meanwhile his cheeks started blushing -… but your body is not capable of lying, I am pretty sure you are enjoying it-.

-I will use the blindfold with you as soon as I get out of it- he threatened her, but didn’t put any resistance anymore, meanwhile she leaned down to kiss him as a reward.

-Of course, Michael- and then she turned back to admire him, Michael Langdon at her mercy what a wonderful sight.

If she had decided to keep up on her original plan she would have turned back and snapped a picture, but because of Michael’s inexperience and sweet confession she decided to avoid (also because she felt possessive of that sight, what the heck was happening to her).

She grabbed him in her hand and hoped that whatever porn had taught her would work, because in literary fiction they didn’t teach you how to do an handjob.

She started slowly more exploring than actually doing the act, but he seemed to appreciate the slow exploration, hissing as soon as her nails entered the game, but not out of pain.

When she felt courageous enough, she ended up actually starting to pump it, setting up a slow rhythm again and waiting for the telltale signs that she was doing good, meaning his quickening breathe and the low moan, trying to form words out of thin air.

“Please, please, faster…” and she picked up rhythm for a few minutes before going back to her slow one, letting him feel the way his manhood slipped on each of the rings on her hands, making him exhale a little moan, before turning up the rhythm and mixing them in order to make him so lost on the pleasure and trying to guess her rhythm that he didn’t hear her utter anything, not even the little enchantments with which she cast oh him and a copy of her, made through thin air but still concrete enough to give Michael the sensation of a human being, just a bit less talking than (Y/N).

But she straight up hoped he would not care, so lost in the throes of passion.

And then she enchanted her feet not to make a sound as soon as she lifted her dress and put it on, to hide the marks, and all her things and after that she deleted her presence from the room, avoiding making her presence known through magical traces or perfume ones.

And then she straight up exited, the door not even making some kind of noise, thank to magic, and moving to her room, but not to sleep and take a shower, enjoying the thought that Michael Landgon was getting off to a non-existent copy of her, but that wouldn’t be revenge… enough.

She left her dress in her room, to Zoe very much confused look, but she just replied with a “don’t ask” and swiftly moved to the bathroom to push off the make up and the dress, erasing the perfume she had been wearing that night, before wearing her usual plain white nightgown (it was ugly but also vintage and comfy, and she didn’t need to seduce anyone anymore).

She then walked out of the stairs, knowing that in the library there was someone she needed for the final part of the plan.

-Mrs Moore? – she called out, seeing the warlock teacher, who immediately raise his head annoyingly -… very sorry to bother you, but I am pretty sure that Langdon is having someone over-.

Which was against the rules, since this was a school and dormitory needed to be a place of peace and study (and yeah she knew that all the girls had boys over, and some even had each other, but since the warlocks had been over they had tried this in order not to have random hook-ups at breakfast).

-How do you know? – he asked, clearly annoyed by the entire situation and not exactly happy to leave his books.

But he had a chance to get Michael Langdon in trouble, if what she said was true.

-I was coming back from the kitchen for a glass of water and I heard strange noises, like… you know…- and she did her best “little naïve virgin” expression -… sex noises…-.

And he just nodded at her, before getting up and walking past her, and she honestly wanted to follow him just to see him watch Michael thrust himself in thin air, in what John Henry would have thought was a wet dream, a very kinky wet dream.

But she couldn’t or it would confirm the story Michael would give John Henry to justify himself, she was still satisfied with the sudden:

“WHAT THE HELL LANGDON!”

Followed by the…

“WHAT THE HELL, PROFESSOR MOORE?!”

Maybe next time he would think before angering her.

Scorned women were the most dangerous creatures in the universe, after all.

[pikapeppa]

Online Dating: A Tale in Six Parts

A couple years ago, I wrote a personal essay for a book project for a friend of a friend. The project leader ultimately rejected my piece because it wasn’t academic enough, to which my response was as follows:

I then promptly forgot about it. But now I’m deciding to publish it here, because why not. So here you go: an autobiographical tale of Pikapeppa’s experiences with online dating. (Please note: this is MY personal experience with online dating as a cis straight woman, and is not meant to be representative of anyone else’s experience but mine, since I can’t knowledgeably comment on that.)

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Online Dating: A Tale in Six Parts

Online dating has been widely vilified, especially since so many cis-heterosexual women have such gross experiences with it: unsolicited dick pics, misogynistic insults when you don’t respond immediately, seemingly nice guys who either “ghost” or suddenly become perverts in the blink of a notification.

I’m here to tell a happier story of online dating, and how it restored my faith in my social skills, my confidence in myself - and how I learned a thing or two about relationships along the way.

Part I: Intro

I’m a shy girl.

Let’s be specific. I consider myself an introvert, or an ambivert at a stretch. I have an extremely hard time talking to strangers; I loathe small talk. At parties, my quietness has a direct inverse relationship with the size of the crowd I’m in: the more people there are, the less I say, until I might as well be a piece of furniture in the corner if the party is a big one. I’m most comfortable in small groups of four people max (including myself), and even then, I get uncomfortable if I’m the centre of attention for too long. I generally prefer to listen than to talk. My ideal weekend includes one entire day for recharging at home with just Netflix and my cat for company.

In January 2012, I moved to Montreal for grad school. When I got there, I knew nobody. I’d moved to Montreal wanting a change, as I’d lived in Toronto my whole life. But somehow in my excitement to move, I’d forgotten that a) I had no friends in Montreal and b) I hate talking to strangers and I hate small talk: the two necessary evils of Making Friends. I spent a solid six months by myself, exploring the city in solitude or hanging out in my apartment with my cat, increasingly hating myself for the fact that I had been living in this city for almost a year and still had no friends except for some casual acquaintances whom I’d met at a mingling party for new grad students. I have some embarrassingly angsty journal entries whining about how there must be something wrong with me, because what kind of person can’t make a single friend in six months of living in a new city? I can’t fully express my gratitude that one of my labmates, who was finishing her Master’s degree at the time, took pity on me and invited me out for drinks, eventually becoming my first good friend in Montreal and introducing me to many other amazing women friends.

Eventually I got into my social stride in Montreal. I had friends; I was satisfyingly busy with my graduate work; and I continued to enjoy relaxing with my cat. (I could write a whole chapter devoted to my mental/emotional well-being and my cat, but let’s save that for another time, shall we?) But as my thesis was wrapping up and I started having more free time, I realized that I was ready to add to my social life. I was ready - gasp! - to pursue a romantic relationship.

This was September 2012. By then, I’d been single for about two years, and largely happy without a partner. But aside from being busy with my thesis, there was another significant reason I had not dated anyone in Montreal: I didn’t know how to meet men.

Part II: The foray into online dating

Traditionally, people meet their partners through work, through common interests, or by bumping into them in bars. I wouldn’t be meeting anyone at work because my master’s degree focused on a topic dominated by female academics, so essentially all of my colleagues were women. My interests involved typically homebody activities like movies, reading, and cooking. And my carefully cultivated Resting Bitch Face usually deterred men in bars from approaching me (as well as my pixie haircut, which I purposely got in order to weed out the kind of shallow male who “only likes girls with long hair”.) The graduate community at McGill often had mingling or speed dating events; however, see above regarding my quietness in crowds and hatred of small talk. Long story short, the traditional ways of meeting men were out.

This is where online dating came into the mix. For me, it was a logical and practical choice. I’ve never been interested in casual flings, so I figured that online dating, especially from a paid website, would have a larger number of men who were looking for something more serious. Importantly, online profiles would also provide information about interests and sense of humour, which - praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster! - would mean that small talk could be avoided, since we could talk about common interests. And there was a final reason that online dating appealed to me: I wanted to meet someone whose occupation was NOT at all similar to mine.

Now, this might be a kind of unusual criteria to express for one’s mate. After all, there is a reason that many people meet their partners at work or engaging in common interests: these things provide a common ground for conversation and for connecting. But as much as I enjoyed research and had aspirations to eventually work in healthcare, I didn’t want to date someone who did those things. After all, I had moved to Montreal looking for something new, dammit! I wanted to broaden my horizons. I wanted a partner who could be my Aladdin and show me a Whole New World.

And thus my online dating adventure began.

Part III: The adventure begins

Everyone has different experiences with online dating. I will say this: I found it really fun and interesting. Importantly, it helped me realize that my social skills, in fact, were not total crap. Within two weeks, I’d gone on dates with a handful of nice, normal-seeming men from a variety of professions. Each time, I went home pleased that I’d had a pleasant, functional conversation with a stranger, without the situation devolving into awkward silence due to my inability to talk like a normal human.

The dating experience was also an important confidence booster. When you’ve been single for two years without any hint of interest from the opposite sex, it’s easy to start thinking you’re deficient in some way. With a handful of successful dates under my belt, I was finally starting to believe that my singledom really was circumstance and not social ineptitude. It also reminded me of something else I’d forgotten during the moping self-pity of my first six months in Montreal: given the right circumstances, I actually enjoy flirting. Dates were actually kind of the perfect social situation for me: one-on-one conversation with a person who you already have things in common with, and with whom you can practice your witty repartee? After two weeks, I felt renewed, confident, and like I had choices - a lot of choices.

Part IV: Disaster strikes (in the most inconsequential first-world-problems kind of way)

Another important role that online dating had in my life was that it led to my first experience of being hurt in a relationship. Here is how it happened: I met a guy with whom I had “chemistry”. Ah, yes, chemistry: that vague, indefinable concept that, in my case, really just meant I had met a guy I was really attracted to. We went on two really fun dates, and then spent a weekend together - and I, being naive, thought I had found my next boyfriend. But a few dates later, he suddenly (and apologetically and politely) said he didn’t think we should see each other anymore.

I was frankly crushed. I’d been incredibly lucky in that by the age of twenty-something, I’d never been dumped or rejected romantically… so this experience of rejection hit me hard. I cried. I drank three beers (a lot for me!) and watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with much maudlin relish. I blasted happy music to drown out my angsty thoughts, and I pow-wowed with my best friends to analyze and re-analyze everything he had said and done. And I was crushed anew when I went on the dating site again to see that he was still active. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to date; it was that he didn’t want to date me. And that really hurt.

Part IV: Wisdom

Ultimately, I’m thankful I was rejected, because I learned a lot of important lessons:

Don’t be tricked by “chemistry”! Rom-coms tell us that chemistry is the most important thing. It’s not. At all. “Chemistry” just means “immediate sexual attraction”. This is not a wise thing on which to base an entire relationship.

Rom-coms also teach us that a guy who doesn’t want a relationship will eventually come around if you are charming enough. This is not true.

Just because someone treats you nicely, doesn’t mean they want the same thing in a relationship as you. Listening to what your date is telling you - i.e. “I don’t know if I want a serious relationship” (yep, the guy who dumped me literally said this on our second date) - is very important.

Many newly single men just don’t know how to be alone, so they start online dating even if they aren’t ready for a new relationship… and they may not realize they don’t want a new relationship until after they’ve started one. The lesson here: be up-front about your relationship expectations/goals and candidly ask your dates about theirs.

Most importantly of all, I learned firsthand what it feels like for someone you want to not want you back. My taste of rejection was the briefest, most inconsequential taste - a week-long fling, compared to committed relationships or divorces. But it was enough to foster a stronger empathy for the pain of rejection and heartbreak, and I feel that this alone was absolutely worth it.

This list of lessons may sound skeptical or discouraging. But I actually found my new knowledge to be incredibly comforting. I now had a set of rules that I could use to better play the dating game - and this time, I was sure I would succeed. Armed with my newfound dating wisdom, I ventured into the world of online dating again, with a different site (a fresh start!) and a cautiously optimistic outlook.

Part V: The Artist

My second attempt at online dating, like the first, was fun. As before, I dated many nice, polite men and had pleasant, interesting conversations. And then I met The Artist.

My first date with The Artist, as I called him in those early days, was as pleasant as any first date I’d gone on. But he had this huge, uninhibited smile, and his laugh was larger-than-life and more enthusiastic than any laugh I’d heard in my life. On our second date, I told him openly that I was dating many people, but that he was my favourite so far. He smiled and nodded agreeably. On our third date, he kissed me… and without either of us saying so, we both knew our online dating careers were at an end. More than six years later, The Artist and I are engaged and living happily with our Playstation, our cat, and some gently wilting plants.

Yes, I just summarized my relationship in a single paragraph. But my goal here isn’t to wax poetic about my fiancé. It’s to point out that without online dating, I would never met him. He works in a completely different profession from mine, and at the time that we met, he lived and worked in different neighbourhoods from me. Our social circles would never have overlapped. But online dating brought us together in more subtle ways as well. My positive experiences in early dates gave me the confidence to continue dating after I got rejected. My experience of rejection led me to try a different dating website - the site that he was on. And the lessons I learned from being rejected led me to a wiser, more open approach to dating and relationships in general - an approach that The Artist appreciated. Given this analysis, I would argue that online dating doesn’t deserve the credit for my relationship, but it does deserve the credit for pushing me out of my comfort zone and giving me experiences that helped me develop into the emotionally mature, pragmatic, and confident woman who eventually captivated a similarly mature and pragmatic man.

Part VI: Conclusions and caveats

My biggest caveat is that I used online websites with paid memberships. As I mentioned earlier, I figured that people who are paying are more likely to be looking for a serious relationship, since paying requires commitment, whereas unpaid sites would have more people who were dabbling or “just curious”. I never used Tinder or Bumble, where online dating is like a game. A friend also recently suggested that I may have had such an easy time with online dating because, in her words (NOT MINE), I am “a babe”. But if you take anything away from this essay, let it be this: online dating is not all bad or all good. Like old-fashioned dating, it’s a complex phenomenon that takes on the biases and colours that you bring into it. And like old-fashioned dating, it can provide new experiences that will let you learn things about yourself - and about love, and life in general - that you didn’t know.

Don’t let online dating define your love life. Let it be a tool to learn about yourself, and maybe, like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[cxncordia]

So, am I still in hiatus?

Sorta.

First of all, what happened?

Last night, on the gay smut server, I gave a “gossip” about a topic that came up: it was something I have heard from another friend regarding the topic. And from there on invoked a discussion about social issues in media. My big problem with these discussions of social issues in media is that they tend to turn into a “woke metric” to see which shows deserve more laurels for being more “woke”. After the discussion happened and I was online again, I mentioned my opinion. Sarcastically, sure, but an honest opinion nonetheless. Somebody else mentioned how what I said had nothing to do with the topic and then I elaborated again on it. I stood by my point on a second paragraph, mentioning that things needed to be looked at in context. I didn’t want to keep on discussing, so I went ahead and deleted those messages because, there was no real reason for them to be kept there.

After this discussion I went to get a haircut, but I noticed I could not reach one but two of the indie roleplaying servers I was inside. I thought it was an error, but still asked a friend about it.

Turns out that I was banned. 

When I came back from my haircut my friend sent me screenshots of the discussion that happened. Not only was I banned, but I was made out an exhibition and there were some other people adding in very nasty things and unfounded actions that supposedly I did. 

I was mad, so for that very reason I came back here, put everything on hiatus and took a step off. I was very close to delete because this is the last straw on a series of times that this shit happened.

But after taking a moment, reading a few books that I have on this kind of situation and taking a moment to myself, I decided that no, I was not going to take a hiatus. One, I like writing and this is something that is inherently me. Two, I have friends in here that I like to keep on touch with and people that were interested in my well being. Three, there’s a lot to be said here and I will use this space to say it.

---

I admit discussions like this aren’t that uncommon in the server and I usually have strong opinions about them. I have also differing opinions at times and I mention them. I admit not having always the best words or sometimes being very sarcastic. Maybe something gets lost in the translation when I’m not being sarcastic? (Because I think a lot of people forget that English IS my second language) Maybe it’s my way of being? It’s not the first time I’ve been called “abrasive” or “combative”. 

But it’s also something that I admit I like about being me. As a gay man growing up in a hyper macho family, inside a city that kills people for less than pennies and in a country that still repaints white over rainbow walk lines on the roads during Pride, being combative is the only way of being. Letting someone walking over you is just not an option. And while I admit this is not an excuse, there is also a lot of misjudgement here. You’re also forgetting that I come from a generation that did not have any rights whatsoever and that could not do what many can do now. Gays in my time were a plot twist, a side note, or a thing you translated as “cousins”. So yes, I’m combative. 

The server is also forgetting that many times this combative behavior has helped me and them. Or how many times my response came out of provocation. Once when dealing with a horrible troll that was taking screenshots out of our server, creating unnecessary drama and targeting another rper. And another time when I went to the admin asking him to remove a very aggressive roleplayer in the past (who took everything literally and made every single discussion about them). The first time I had to close the server because I was not going to have someone like that. The second time I was told by the admin that they were onto “doing something.” I don’t know if they did or not, but the rper left on their own hand.

Same thing when I was the admin of the server: I had to be there, settle a bunch of discussions and arguments directly with the individuals starting them, from having to face the “selfie leak” (where people were posting their nudes) and the “actor leaks” (where people were posting actors leaks) as well as facing some racist and misogynistic roleplayers. To do all that, I needed that “combative” spirit in order to get down to the bottom of things and set things on their right place for the good of everyone. So yeah, my combative behavior has helped me and has, to a degree, helped the server. 

I will admit that I’m aggressive. But I will also admit that I’m not stupid or rigid. When conversing with others and expressing their needs I’m the first one to adjust to their needs as best as I can. And that when being told that I need to correct something, I can do it (as long as within my limits, of course). And when admitting mistakes, I’m also the first one to do it. (Hence the reason to this post). That said: I think I was unjustly banned. I was not given a direct warning and I was blindsided. But I will not go down the rabbit hole of “conspiracy”, it this is true then to each their own.

The combative behavior is only half the problem and that’s on me, I will admit it. But there is also another half of the problem that needs to be addressed.

The other part is the fact that some people just don’t have the skills to call someone up on their “problematic” behavior and instead gang up together and come from behind. The other part of the problem resides in people preferring to adjust others to their experience than to take control of their own comfort (I admit that blocking someone up in discord is difficult because you only see big blocks of text, but hey, you still have control over your experience).

The other part of the problem definitely lays on the fact that the admin didn’t warn me directly at all before the ban came. The times it was done indirectly were so subtle I did not notice and that there was no reason to have been made a show after the ban. (Because also, the server is forgetting the times they “teased” me for being “old” or liking certain things. How they were aggressive and I punched back in retaliation. Are they banning these players on “lack of respect and rudeness” too?)

So with this in mind, some things need to be done:

I apologize to anyone who had a hard time because of my opinions. I admit not seeing how my words could be aggressive and how my behavior probably hurt you. On that, I acknowledge my actions and I’m sorry for hurting you. Know that it was not personal and when it was, it was probably taken privately. That said I still believe that you should do what’s best for you and take matters into creating your own positive experience (like blocking someone you don’t wanna read). I admit that it may be difficult on a place like a public discord server, and for that I apologize as well.

I apologize to anyone who was scared or that I ignored last night. I am sorry, you deserved better. I had no mind to respond to you so that’s why I was evasive. I hope you can find in yourselves to understand where I was coming from and why I did evade you.

Thirdly I apologize to Alex, the main admin of the gay server. I do not believe you did right. I do not believe you did correctly and that I was unjustly banned, but I will give you that it was better for you this way. You avoided any confrontation and any aggression by not facing me or warning me directly, so I can’t blame you for doing what you did. I apologize to you for releasing the content of our conversations. I don’t think I released anything private, but still, that was petty AF of me. At this moment, I still think this was unjust, but maybe in a month or a year I will not even look back at this opinion or give it as much weight as I’m giving it now. So for now, this “hollow” apology is probably the best I can come up with. 

That said, I am a firm believer of making my own experience as comfortable as it is for me, so:

I am now fully private, which means that I’m not taking threads from anyone that I don’t know or haven’t talked through in the past few months. I am sorry, but I don’t want to be open at this moment. 

I am taking it slow. Very slow. So I am making a slow comeback. It’s not fair to those that played with me and had no bearings in the server matter, so that’s why I’m returning. But I’m gonna go as easy as I can. 

There’s a big chance that I’m restricting myself from playing with anyone associated with that server. I know that this is my pettiness again. So, I’m going to put on hold the threads of the people that I know are in the server and ask myself of this rule in a week to see how I feel. 

I am not exposing my opinion on tons of matters and it’s very likely that I will unfollow those blogs that I know do a lot of these commentaries. I’m also unfollowing rpers who do tons of OOC posts. My problem is that I’m a very reactive individual that when reading something that is BS or simply doesn’t sit right with me, I will speak up. I realize that yeah, not everybody wants to read my opinion, but also that there’s a lot of misinformed people that I enjoy correcting. So, for both of our sakes I am doing something there.

So, lesson learned?

It’s too early to call it that. And it’s too early to call an epiphany. But know that I will keep my truth as best as I can and I will focus on cherish the people that do love me and support me.

[patheticphallacy]

This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up.

Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away. He was only 50 years old. I won’t go into details because of how personal it is, but he was in hospital a majority of the month before he passed. I’ve taken a year suspension from University for the time being.

It has been a really difficult time for myself and my family. I’ve turned a lot to books and blogging to offer a way to occupy my mind which is why so many things still seem to be coming out, but I cannot say that this will hold up after the funeral.

As I schedule so many posts, a lot of what came out this month has been written since around mid August and I did not find the time to stop the University posts before they were released. I won’t be deleting them.

I hope you’ll all understand.

THINGS I’VE READ

    An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley– My sister gave me her copy she used for her GCSE’s. Such a great play with revelation after revelation, left me on the edge of my seat. While I knew the core plot twist, I didn’t predict that ending. 

Mob Psycho 100 Volume 1 by One– This was kind of meh. It’s one of my best friend’s favourites, so I’ll carry it on eventually, but I don’t really feel the urge to pick volume two up just yet. I will say I like how the anime tackles the same events in a different order to save major revelations for backstory– that was really interesting to pick up on. 

I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn– I really didn’t like this! Lacklustre and very cliched, feel like it doesn’t really offer anything other than annoying ending and characters who go through absolutely no development at all. 

Kissing Tolstoy by Penny Reid– An OK romance that actually has discussions surrounding reading and books that don’t feel forced. I found this easy to read even though I’ve never read any Russian Lit, and I actually want to read it more now. Like that it discusses age gaps and issues of the power dynamic too. 

    Seven Tears at High Tide by C.B. Lee– Finally finished this one, and it only took me 3 months. A very cute and heartwarming story about a boy who makes a wish and falls in love with a Selkie. Does get ridiculous at the end, I must say, but I was happy with the payoff. 

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill– Katie O’Neill creates such amazing narratives that have wonderful messages about society and being true to yourself and your wishes, pursuing something that you love and encouraging others to do the same. 

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin– How can I ever trust a single man or old person after this book? Tell me. 

Please Undo This Hurt by Seth Dickinson– Don’t really rate this short story. It bored me and I hated the main characters, not even in a good way. Just perpetuates the ‘I can save you from your mental illness’ narrative that is dull and overdone by this point. 

    My Hero Academia Volume 20 by Kohei Horikoshi– Gentle Criminal and La Brava was so boring, the School Festival arc was fabulous, and Endeavor finally got his ass kicked! Yay! 

Aphrodite Made Me Do It by Trista Mateer– I have a review of this coming out soon for National Poetry Day in the UK, but if you don’t want to wait, I have a review here!

The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca– I read this after watching the trailer for Antlers, and I thought it was pretty neat! Very thrilling, although I’m bothered by changes being made in the film that I feel could detract from having Julia as one of the main characters in the film. 

I Am Not Your Final Girl by Claire C. Holland– A collection of poetry centring around fictional women from horror films, exploring their empowerment and agency in a genre and a wider culture and society that seems willing to beat them down until they break. 

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink– I have a review of this linked later this post! Full of body horror and emotional trauma, this is a really solid read great for fans of the podcast and Welcome to Night Vale. 

    In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant– I love this terrible cover! Keep an eye out for my review of this, it’s coming out soon. 

The World’s Greatest First Love Volume 1 by Shungiku Nakamura– The publishing elements and the main character were GREAT, but there is prevalent sexual assault in this that is never addressed and is incredibly insensitive in its treatment, so I don’t recommend this manga. 

Dead Voices by Katherine Arden– I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Small Spaces, but it’s still really freaky and a great middle grade read. I love that Coco gets her own POV in this, too, and that it doesn’t take stereotypical routes with some of its plotlines. 

No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg– This is a collection of speeches Greta Thunberg has made addressing climate change, as well as her own position as an advocate for the cause. Moving and a must read, in my opinion. It’s only £3 in Waterstones at the moment for anyone who wants to pick it up!

    Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury– A fascinating collection of essays written by Bradbury about his writing process and some of the more popular works he’s published. I honestly felt really inspired and motivated after reading this, I highly recommend it especially for creative writers, but just be warned it is very oriented around the white male experience.

Heartstopper Volume 2 by Alice Oseman– I adore Heartstopper and I love this second volume. Great progression in the relationship between Nick and Charlie, and we’re getting to see more outside of their relationship and into their friendships and family dynamics, too. I still love Tori Spring!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle– Finally got a hold of the MASSIVE audiobook where Stephen Fry narrates all the Holmes stories, and it honestly made the experience so much more enjoyable. I think Doyle’s skill lies more in shorter fiction than longer fiction, I think there’s less opportunity for… not useless, per se, just unneeded waffling. 

Giant Days Volume 9 and 10 by John Allison– These two volumes take place around the tailend of the girl’s second years and follows their accommodation location, the progression (and breakdown) of relationships, and them finally making it to third year intact. I honestly can’t believe there’s only three or four volumes left in this series, its been a constant companion for me since 2016 when I first started and I really don’t want to let it go. 

  No Touching At All and Even So, I Will Love You Tenderly by Kou Yoneda– Of the ‘older’ manga I’ve read that focus on the relationships between two men, these two are definitely in the ‘recommend’ pile. Other than the beautiful names for the volumes and the artwork being really pretty, I really enjoyed the developing relationships and the conversations had about workplace homophobia and ostracization in Japan, although that wasn’t the main focus. They do include some questionable attitudes towards identification of sexuality– two characters in both volumes are probably bisexual or on that spectrum, but are referred to as straight more than once for liking women and only the man they enter the relationship with. It’s complicated, but nothing in either volumes ever feels targeted or hateful, just lacking education on the nuances of sexuality. 

Articles

I found this article about Friends great as it breaks down issues I’ve had with the show for years. I don’t have a lot of attachment to it, honestly, I mostly just put it on in the background, but I think I’ll stop now. I’ve always found the handling of gender and sexuality damaging in Friends, as well as the overwhelming fatphobia.

I really enjoyed looking through this list The Guardian did of the 100 best books of the 21st century. I don’t know why, I’m just a big fan of lists!

Before reading this article, I can honestly tell you I knew nothing about Susan Sontag beyond her name. It’s deconstructing her queerness and how her aversion to accepting her own sexuality ultimately ruled a lot of the work she produced in her life.

God, this article was fascinating. I can’t even tell you what it’s about, really, other than that it’s an interview with Christeene, a punk drag artist who is just really cool, honestly. There are some buttholes for anyone who… wants to avoid butts? Or reading this at work?

There was a massive conversation in August that carried into September regarding the rise in men adopting pseudonyms to get their thriller novels published. This Atlantic article particularly captured the issues I have with men who do this, who are almost trying to fool an audience of women who trust women writers to not approach the suffering of women through a misogynistic lens, as is so common in modern society.

An older article by The New Inquiry, Coming out of the Coffin offers an insight into the fraught relationship between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. A really interesting read, I’m just sad I discovered it 7 years after its release!

THINGS I WATCHED

I don’t do music sections on these wrap ups anymore, so I’ll put this here: the GRAACE cover of ‘Complicated’ by Avril Lavigne completely transforms the song and adds such an amazing depth to it

I decided to binge watch Fleabag and it’s most definitely the best decision I’ve made all year. Fleabag follows the titular woman as she navigates her life as a thirty year old woman whose entire life is in flux, and has been since the death of her mother. There’s a lot I could say about this show, honestly. What really stood out to me was how much I could relate specifically to the emotions Fleabag and her older sister Claire feel in relation to each other, and their grief. Seeing them still come back together even after such a significant loss, their dependency, really gives me strength to get through what I’m experiencing at the moment, so Fleabag has been something I can relate to and look at as hope for a future where I can begin to wrap my head around the terrible things going on around me.

THINGS I POSTED

August Wrap Up

TTT: Books Outside My Comfort Zone

50 Bookish Questions Tag

Music I Enjoyed This Summer

Connie’s Personal 101 Guide For Personal Survival of University

Bookshelf Tour Part 3: TBR & More Manga/Comics

Book Review: I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn

TTT: Books on my Fall TBR

Book Review: Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink

Bookshelf Tour Part 4: CDs&DVDs

If you liked this post, consider buying me a coffee? Ko-Fi. 

Goodreads|Twitter|Instagram|Letterboxd

September Wrap Up This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up. Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away.

[un-tide]

Rupi Kaur Taught Me DIY

(TW for mentions of sexual assault.)

Last year, I wrote a short essay on why I hate Rupi Kaur. Not just why I hate her work, but why I hate her as a writer. Maybe even as a person. I had never (and still haven’t) met this woman, which should have been my first clue that there was something underlying these emotions that probably wasn’t fair to her. But I was comfortable in my hate, even more so when I could articulate everything that was wrong with her in a way that was logical and academic and had nothing to do with me—so much so that I was unable to see that my disdain for this woman did, in fact, have almost everything to do with me.

Growing up as a young girl whose first love was books, I found myself torn between worlds. On my top shelf, I kept some of my favorite series—Percy Jackson, Pendragon, Artemis Fowl. These were books my parents approved of, holding imaginative, fantastical worlds and morals of bravery and friendship. Under my bed were my other favorites—the ones my parents didn’t approve of—The Clique and The Princess Diaries. These kinds of stories were adventurous in a way that was relatable to me, with the struggles of teenage friendship and the perils of mean girls, but they did skip over many of the lessons I got from my more “gender-neutral” books, and they did not have fantastical or imaginative worlds unless they came with a borderline-abusive romance.

Early on, I learned another kind of lesson: as a woman, I will constantly have to choose between books that tell stories that are inspiring and creative, and books that tell stories about people like me.  

When I first heard about a young, South Asian, feminist, second-generation immigrant woman who wrote openly about her identity and her story, it was if my childhood prayers had been answered. It seemed too good to be true—I am also a young, South Asian, feminist, second-generation immigrant woman. If I was ever going to find a poet I could relate to, Rupi Kaur was it. Finally, there was poetry being written by people like me for people like me, and I didn’t have to choose between quality and relatability anymore. Imagine, then, how it felt to open up one of her most famous books and read this: “how is it so easy for you/ to be kind to people he asked / milk and honey dripped from my lips as i answered / cause people have not /been kind to me.”

I was dumbfounded. Surely I had picked up the wrong book. This was a book of 2014’s 25 saddest tweets, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Milk and Honey was somewhere else. Where was the symbolism? The wordplay? The rhyme or meter? Even the line breaks had no apparent significance. And above those basic elements of poetry—where was the deeper meaning? It’s a sad conversation, but one that, rather than sitting in a book of supposed poetry, would fit better on a teenager’s Tumblr post, or somewhere else you could read it very quickly, frown a little, and move on. And I did just that.

I returned the book to the stack of fifty just like it, and from Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey I re-learned that same lesson I learned as a child: good books do not tell your story. Move on.

I won’t pretend that my knowledge of poetry comes from more a few college classes, but if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that understanding a poem takes time. Poems hold secrets—alternate meanings and obscure allusions—that you can only discover when you read them again and again. Their meanings can be argued and refuted using symbols and allusions to books written one-hundred years earlier and a comma placed here instead of there. Sure, over-embellished poetry sometimes does hide more than it reveals, especially to the young or less educated reader, but Rupi Kaur’s work strips an idea of all layers beneath its surface.

Some call Kaur’s style accessible, but I call bullshit. Accessibility is about delivering complex concepts while breaking the barriers that typically surround them, whether those barriers be based on education, class, gender, sexuality, or race. Tossing a sad thought you had in the shower to a young audience does not break barriers to feminist or survivor literature of any kind.

On a personal level, I do hold some empathy for Kaur. Her poems attempt to address difficult topics like heartbreak and abuse, and I imagine she has been through some trauma that many women are familiar with, myself included. The meaning of the poem I read in the bookstore was not lost on me: sometimes people are kind because they are already acquainted with cruelty. But simply stating something true or shocking does not make it well-crafted, and it certainly does not make it poetry. Much of Kaur’s success comes from stating the obvious in the most plain way possible, taking a complicated idea and hollowing it out into a pretty painted shell.

To put it simply, Kaur’s work is shallow. It seems to lack effort as much as it does depth, and despite her education, it displays little mastery of imagery or symbolism or poetic style. It is less poetry than it is bite-size food-for-thought possibly conceived in a trendy hipster cafe and posted on Instagram as the caption for an aesthetically pleasing but disappointingly grimace-inducing over-sweet cup of milk and honey. Kaur touches the surface of ideas before shying away like a cat from water, and in doing so fails to teach her audience of young women and girls—many of whom might have fallen in love with poetry had they not been alienated by mainstream misogynistic and white-centric classics—how to analyze and write complex ideas that are pivotal to their recovery, their self-esteem, and their survival.

If my school had taught more female-friendly literature when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have begun to hate reading. The books we read that actually included women were traumatic at worst and voyeuristic at best, and my teachers seemed oblivious, perhaps simply starstruck by the stubbornly unwavering fame and brilliance of the classics. Nevermind that 1984 featured a protagonist with a burning desire to rape the book’s only notable female character. Nevermind that the sexual liberalism in Brave New World had my elderly, white, male substitute teaching us that the World State was—despite its female citizens’ complete lack of reproductive autonomy and a suspicious absence of female Alphas—a feminist society. Nevermind that The Handmaid’s Tale, despite actually being a feminist novel, depicts a misogynistic hellscape a little too realistic for comfort. 

The older I grew, the more it seemed that very few of the classics were written with women in mind, and almost none of them seemed to be written for women’s benefit, education, or—god forbid—enjoyment.

Disappointed by the classics, I returned to popular fiction as a teenager, desperate for a story with a protagonist I could relate to, or at the very least did not want to strangle every time they opened their mouth. At my local flea market, which I frequented every first Saturday of the month, I had come across a well-stocked used-book stall. While making my way through The Princess Diaries series dollar by dollar, I stumbled upon a book that I can only imagine was placed in flea market stall that day by the Devil himself just so he could have a laugh: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I won’t give away any spoilers, but I’ll give you one guess what happens halfway through. I am not ashamed to say I stopped reading anything other than The Princess Diaries for some time.

I wish I could say my high school experience was unique. There is a profound need for contemporary literature and poetry that not only does not alienate women, but caters to us specifically. We deserve to read books that do not hurt us more than we already are hurting, that address our trauma but don’t weaponize it against us. We deserve to witness other women powerfully and passionately explore and understand our shared experiences and shared pain. We deserve to learn how to explore these ideas for ourselves. The feminist subjects of Rupi Kaur’s poetry deserve nuance, because the more precisely we are able to articulate our experiences and ideas and traumas, the more understood they—and we—become. Much like I was as a young child, the girls devouring Rupi Kaur’s work are still scrambling for crumbs. She had the opportunity to feed a generation of girls starved for poetry free of white men’s hunger, and she didn’t.

Kaur, at first, seemed to me to be nothing new in a world of successful yet seemingly talentless women who continuously fail and profit off of the next generation of starving girls (the Kardashian-Jenner clan comes to mind). But only on my own journey to becoming a writer did I come to understand that Rupi Kaur might be different, that she might actually be trying very hard--that she might be hiding something. As a reader, I never understood that a fact that I am painfully aware of now: writing makes you vulnerable. The more I wrote, the more I began to realize that what I perceived as lack of depth was, perhaps, a terribly relatable inability to be open.

It’s what I hate the most about writing—displaying yourself to the world when your childhood scrapes are still scabbing over and everyone is certain to see under your skin. I’ve never been good at being vulnerable, which makes me a reluctant writer on a good day and a liar on the rest. People do weird things when they’re afraid, like write mediocre poetry or channel all their anger at the world towards someone they’ve never met. I could not do, or at least have not yet done, what I ask of Rupi Kaur. What would I tell her, I imagine, if I ever met her? I could deflect: “Hey Rupi, your poetry about your suffering needs some work.” Or I could be honest: “Please, Rupi, tell my story for me.”

Because isn’t that what I always wanted: a story just like mine, read to me like a mother would read to her child at bedtime, a story about people like me that teaches me I’m not alone. I had waited for representation so long that when it finally arrived, it felt like a betrayal when it fell so far short. I don’t hate Rupi Kaur because her work is bad—I hate her because her work is bad and there are almost no other options. I hate her because she is my generation’s standard for how to write stories like hers and mine, and it does not do them justice. I hate her because I wanted her to do what I didn’t yet have the courage to do myself.

Maybe I’m projecting; maybe Rupi Kaur is exactly as shallow as her poetry suggests and no amount of openness will make it better. It doesn’t change that I expected someone else to be the writer of my story simply because we have a lot in common. I wasn’t fair to Rupi Kaur when I wrote my 300-word-long-rant about theintolerable injusticeshe was inflicting on young women and girls—which I posted, and I’m aware of the irony, on Tumblr and Instagram. I placed the burden of my vulnerability on her shoulders.

I stand by my criticisms of Rupi Kaur, but I also owe her some gratitude, because she taught me another lesson: I can’t rely on other people to tell my story, or stories about people like me. I can’t rely on other people to fill a void in literature or poetry or to fix any other problem I insist needs solving.

If you want something done right, or even done at all, sometimes you just have to do it yourself, even if—especially if—that means opening up about experiences you’d rather keep hidden. If Rupi Kaur is any indication, the bar for young women’s contemporary poetry and literature is evidently on the floor, which, on the bright side, means that any woman who has the courage to openly, honestly, and vulnerably tell her own story—even if she gets ripped to shreds by mean girls like me—will still be doing all of us a favor.

[jaeheekangisimportant]

1/4 As someone who went from walking into the secret endings thinking that the Rika hate was just classic sexism to really, really disliking her, I can assure you that a lot of the Rika hate... actually DOES come from people apologizing/excusing her actions. I know it's easy to chalk it up and say "no one defends her actions" but the victim blaming against V, equating an abuse victim (Saeran) to his abuser, and outright denying Rika's actions (like blinding V) is actually a /VERY/ real issue.

2/4 Espsecially when you have popular blogs brush off hating Rika for her atriciously abusive actions as just “ignorance on mental illness” and trivializing abuse victims who latch onto characters like Saeran and V because of shared trauma as just “jealous fangirls”. I’m not saying that V and Saeran did nothing wrong but at the end of the day, they are Rika’s abuse victims no matter how you slice it. So people are obviously going to be able to empathize with them more.

¾ It’s important to note that, despite male villains usually being more well recieved, this type of trivilizing treatment is treatment that people who despise abusive male characters actually don’t recieve. Because like… you obviously can’t be accused of being a sexist, jealous fangirl if you hate a male villain. Rika isn’t a bad villain at all; however the huge back lash she recieves isn’t simply because she’s female character in a fandom of Straight GirlsTM but rather because she’s a

4/4 very realistic portrayal (far more realistic than most male villains tbh) of an abuser in a fandom where people can easily use her gender as an excuse to wave off the hatred as just “misogyny” rather than an instinctual reaction to seeing a character who walks, talks, and acts like a real life abuser. There’s nothing wrong with liking Rika, but I think some perspective is necessary before just throwing your hands up in the air and going like “she’s a woman and we only like hot men. the end”.

Okay, I actually think there are a lot of really good points in here and I do agree with most of it, there are also a few things I would contend with, and also some things I’d like to discuss in more depth now that I have an excuse to, but before I do that I have two things to say that I think are very important for everyone, including myself, to keep in mind

There are a lot of layers to any discourse, and I can’t cover every angle of every discourse all the time. I do try to be fair and objective and not totally one-sided but I also want to be clear and honest about what my position is and I also try to stick to whatever has been brought up in the asks I get. If somebody sends me an ask that’s like “hey V fucked up and I wish people acknowledged that”, well then, that’s what I’m going to talk about and there’s not always a lot of room for me to give attention to the other side

It’s impossible for everyone to have interacted with every single member of a fandom and ultimately no one will have the exact same experience with a fandom. I can only talk about fandom issues through the lens of my experience and what I have seen and been exposed to, and that won’t necessarily be universal

The rest is going under a read more because this got unexpectedly rambly and I’m truly sorry for that. I’m also sorry that it’s so unorganized I kind of started with a solid idea of what I wanted to say but then every time I thought of some new thing I kind of just went with it

So, about Rika. Whenever people have brought up misogyny in relation to her, I have always tried to be careful to say that I don’t think Rika hate is always inherently misogynistic but that I do think that some anti-Rika sentiments are rooted in it. I probably could have made that more clear and I apologize if there was any confusion. I have frequently said that there are totally valid reasons to hate Rika which is why I try not to go after Rika haters too much. When I see people hating Rika for the simple fact that she’s important to the other characters, or when I see people using very gendered language to insult her, that’s the kind of stuff that I think can reasonably be criticized for misogyny. But like, obviously there are perfectly good reasons to hate Rika so I don’t take issue with hating her in itself, and I have tried to say that as often as possible. I don’t think it hurts to examine where Rika hate comes from and, more importantly, how it actually manifests (I’ll come back to this in a minute). I do agree that brushing off all Rika hate as just internalized misogyny is wrong and counterproductive and very trivializing, which is why I try not to fall back on that argument. But I also don’t think that misogyny is entirely irrelevant to the Discourse about her. I think that “Rika hate isn’t inherently misogynistic” and “a lot of people would treat Rika differently if she were male” are ideas that can coexist

As for what you said about people defending Rika, this relates to Point Number Two I made up there. Most of the people in the MysMe fandom that I still follow these days are Rika fans, and honestly I have never seen any of them try to say that Rika did nothing wrong. I don’t doubt that people have done that, and I also am glad that I’ve never seen people like that, or at least if I have it was rare enough that it wasn’t a significant problem for me and I could just forget it. I think I’ve made it clear enough that I think Rika did very wrong. I have consistently called her a villain, I have repeatedly said that I think she deserves punishment for her crimes, I have referred to both Saeran and V as victims of her abuse (and I’ll get to them soon too). Even if I do like Rika and consider her a tragic and sympathetic character, I am really not okay with people pretending Rika didn’t commit any of the crimes or abuse that she did. I didn’t talk about it because I haven’t seen it, but if I’m wrong and people are doing that then all I can say is YIKES @ those people and please don’t assume I’m one of them

The subject of mental illness is one that the fandom really handles terribly and honestly the game handles it pretty badly too. I’m very mentally ill myself and I actually recognize a lot of my symptoms and issues in Rika (violent intrusive thoughts, the feeling that there’s just something inherently wrong and bad in me and I’m only ever faking being good, paranoid and dramatic/emotional outbursts that even I know aren’tproportionate to the situation, self-harming, self-sabotage and suicidal ideation), so I was inclined to sympathize with Rika. It’s also why I was so viscerally disgusted by the way V talked about her mental illness. Having said all of that, I really don’t like people blaming a character’s abusive actions on mental illness, as if mentally ill people can’t help being bad and violent. Like, I know a lot people probably think they’re sympathizing with us, but you realize that exact same sentiment is used to demonize us, right? You’re not helping anyone by saying that mental illness is an excuse for bad behavior

People really need to learn that there is a difference between an explanation and an excuse. My anxiety flaring up might explain why I’m so irritable sometimes, but it doesn’t excuse me from snapping at well-meaning people. My depression getting really bad might explain why I isolate myself for weeks and sometimes months on end, but it doesn’t excuse me from completely shutting out and ignoring my friends and family who really just want to know why I haven’t spoken to them in so long. Mental illness can make me act out in a lot of ways that are bad for me and for other people, but I would never try to use it as an excuse and I would never want people to use it as excuse for me either. There are still very real consequences to my acting out, I still need to apologize and make up for them, and I still need to try my best to correct that kind of behavior no matter how easy it can be to fall into (and I do try, and I have gotten much better)

Rika’s mental illness and backstory does explain a lot of her behavior. It explains it, it doesn’t excuse it. She’s still very much accountable for her shitty actions. I do think that Rika could have been a very different person if she had gotten proper and intensive help with her mental health, and I wish she had gotten it. I don’t think she’s completely one-dimensionally evil and I do think that, at the very least, she had the potential to be a good person. I do think that she’s partially a victim of her circumstances. But, I also think that arguing about what a character could have been like under different circumstances is pretty moot and that’s why it’s another argument I try not to fall back on. It doesn’t really matter what characters could have been like. What matters is what they are actually are like and Rika is. Well. Rika

I think that there is a lot to criticize about the way Rika is written in the game, mostly having to do with the fact that she perpetuates the Depraved Bisexual trope, or that portraying a mentally ill character as villainous is always going to come with some issues, or the extremely frustrating fact that aside from Jaehee there are no female characters in the game that we’re really meant to like. I kind of wish we could discuss the game’s actual writing issues more because uuum there’s a lot of really bad and messed up stuff in here actually

Also, when I say things about how I think Rika hate is out of hand, it actually doesn’t have much to do with how people react to Rika as a character. It has more to do with people harassing Rika cosplayers at cons, leaving rude and aggressive comments on Rika fan art, attacking her fans even after they’ve made it clear that they only like Rika as a character/villain. That’s more the kind of stuff I’m thinking of when I say that Rika hate can be unnecessarily vicious, when it extends to actual real people who are mostly just minding their own business and trying to have fun with a character they like. I understand that Rika is controversial and for good reason, but come on guys, it’s not hard to have basic decency toward each other

Okay now let’s finally get to V and Saeran. I’ve never denied that they are victims of Rika’s abuse so let’s get that straight right away. I’ve also been careful to avoid equating their actions with Rika’s. I know I have repeatedly said that Rika has done worse things than both of them. And I do deeply sympathize V and Saeran. Almost everything I’ve ever said about Saeran has included a sentence that started with something like “I love Saeran and I sympathize with him but”. And yes I do in fact sympathize with V and I have mentioned this before, but since I’m also pretty harsh on V a lot of the time I suppose that point can get buried.

As a sidenote - and I’m not accusing you of doing this, anon, it’s just something I do want to address - I really don’t like it when people assume that someone must have no experience with abuse or trauma just because they may feel differently about something. Abuse and trauma are heavy subjects and of course people want to make sure you actually know what you’re talking about if you’re going to be talking about it, but like, no one should be required to disclose their personal abuse/trauma history just to prove that they’re qualified to have an opinion. I just… we really should be more careful about things like that

Back to V and Saeran (I’m really sorry I’m all over the place and I’m probably making less sense as I go), even if I do sympathize with them a lot, and even if I can relate to Saeran on a deeply personal level that I don’t much like to share with people, I don’t think it’s right to completely dismiss their wrongdoings. It’s possible for characters to be victims as well as victimizers and I would consider V, Saeran and Rika to be both those things, though obviously to vastly different degrees. 

Just because I understand and sympathize with V doesn’t mean I think it’s okay that he enabled Rika’s unhealthy behaviors, romanticized her mental illness, treated her like his art piece rather than as a person, and remained silent and complicit in her crimes. 

Just because I understand and sympathize with Saeran, doesn’t mean I think it’s okay that he attempts to kidnap MC, threatens violence against both her and Seven multiple times, and actually does shoot V. And I was actually being generous there by only counting things that he did in Seven’s route and the secret endings, aka the canon stuff that ultimately matters most. If I was going to count all the shit he pulls in other routes (blinding Yoosung in one eye, as an example), in bad endings (sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, murder, as examples), in Another Story and in his own damn route (kidnapping, sexually harassing MC and almost crossing the line to sexual assault, keeping her locked up and being verbally abusive with her), it would be asking me to excuse a lot more. I do both sympathize and empathize with Saeran! I really do! He’s one of my favorite characters ever and he means a lot to me, I can’t even begin to tell you how much!! But a lot of his antics are still inexcusable!!

And again we have to go back to my point about people’s fandom experiences being different from each other’s. I haven’t seen enough Rika defenders for it to be an issue for me, personally, but do you know what I have seen a lot of? And I mean, a lot of? People talking about how hot it would be if Saeran abused and/or raped them, people saying that they would be perfectly happy to let V treat them exactly how he treated Rika, people insisting that anyone who even tries to say that something V did was Not Good are terrible people, or that liking Rika at all in any capacity or even just showingneutrality toward her makes you a terrible person. That was the kind of stuff I saw a lot of back when I was really involved in fandom and that was the kind of stuff that made my experience in the fandom so deeply unpleasant. So, when I talk about fandom issues, that’s the kind of stuff that comes up for me, because those were the issues that I had. Maybe you’re lucky and you missed a lot of the shit I saw. Maybe I’m lucky for missing a lot of the shit people are spewing in defense of Rika. And maybe reducing it to an issue of “Straight Girls only care about hot guys” is not exactly right or fair of me, but… well, Straight Girls who only care about hot guys have been a significant source of annoyance for me in this fandom so when I’m feeling particularly salty they become a very easy target for it. Again, not saying that’s right or fair of me

More often than not what I’m trying to do with V and Rika discourse is get people to realize that the situation was not as black and white as they make it seem. Rika was not one-dimensionally evil and V was not wholly good, that’s all I ever want to get across about those two. And what I’m trying to do with Saeran discourse is… okay honestly I don’t even know what I’m trying to do here I actually wish I could just stay out of Saeran discourse entirely but if it comes up I guess I’ll talk about it. I am extremely uncomfortable with many of the more popular fandom interpretations of Saeran but he’s also too important to me for it to sour my opinion of him (since Ray’s route has come out it’s been a pretty close call tho let me tell you and I swear if this fandom ever does make me stop liking Saeran I’ll never forgive them). I really want nothing more than to stay out Saeran discourse but lately it keeps finding me. I’m honestly kind of tired of discourse-ing about V and Rika on theseblogs because at this point I’m running out of new things to say about eitherof them and I think I’ve already made my thoughts and feelings sufficientlyclear in numerous posts, I’m not sure what else I can do. But again, if people bring it up, I’ll usually be willing to talk about it. 

I don’t really care if people hate Rika, and I don’t really care if people love V, I only wish people wouldn’t oversimplify either character and I wish people were more open to accepting that their situation was a complex one where, even if one of them (Rika) is undeniably guiltier, neither person was 100% innocent

[therealdragonnerdagain]

I recently read this thread where lesbian women talk about how they think bisexual women don't take them seriously.

They think bi/pan women are just using them for sex, and when it's time to settle down, we're all going to go find a man.

This is viewed a kind of "privilege," the ability to confirm into heteronormativity, to have a socially accepted partner, and "blend in" with a "straight" family.

I don't see that as a privilege, though. And no matter how many people write articles about it, I never will.

Yes, I am bi/pan and I am a woman.

I don't play games with people and I would never string someone along just for sex while pretending to want a LTR because men have done that to me, and I know it's fucking shitty.

There is nothing I would like more in the world than to have a serious relationship with a woman. The fact that there's this prevalent fear that I'm just out for sex, confused, or “really” straight means that it's quite likely I won't have that.

Every dating website I go to, women ignore me because I'm bisexual. Because of their fears and prejudices.

"Just date another bisexual."

Well, there aren't that many of us. Just as there aren't that many lesbians. But there are a shitload of straight men. Guess who I'll likely wind up dating?

Do you know how hard it is as a bisexual woman to find a queer woman willing to date you? Seriously date you? Fucking hard.

Compile that with the fact most men see us as a ticket to a threesome or as promiscuous or easy, and you don't have to wonder why bi/pan usually wind up alone: no one takes us seriously.

Either that, or we wind up with men, because men are not likely to reject us.

In the years that I spent writing sex stories for people online, I have come to realize that people seem to think dick is superior and that no one who has ever been with a man can ever really want a woman.

I remember getting really pissed at some male fans who asserted that "lesbian sex" wasn't "real sex" because there was no dick invovled. I thought it was sexism that was just coming from gay men, but now I see it's something everyone seems to believe, even insecure lesbians.

It simply isn't true. Women haunt my fucking dreams. They aren't better or worse than men, they just are. But our society worships dick, so there's this privelent fear that anyone who doesn't have a dick will never be enough for a bi woman or a bi man.

I would give anything to have an actual girlfriend to love and be loyal to for many happy years. Because of our dick-obsessed, toxically masculine society, I will likely never have that.

Because I am bi, the only women who ever show an interest in me are married or have partners. They see me a sex object, something they can use to spice up their married life, someone who could never be loyal to them anyway, someone who will eventualy leave for a man.

After a man manipulated me into sex and then dumped two years ago, I decided to stop dating men because the odds of meeting a misogynist -- thanks to the patriarchy -- is very high.

Now I'm finding that lesbians don't date people like me, because the odds of finding a loyal bi/pan woman -- thanks to pratriarchial pressures for women to marry "straight" -- is not very high.

The end result is that the patriarchy hurts everyone.

I spend all my time looking for women, who want nothing to do with me because they had painful experiences with bi women, while I am looking for them in the first place because I had painful experiences with straight men.

The end result is that lesbians will only date lesbians and bisexual women will end up with men.

I will most likely end up alone, though. I can't see how that's a benefit to me.

Sure, I have the “privilege” of marrying a man and starting a family without all the hassle lesbians go through just to have kids that aren't snatched away from them, but I have no interest in having children and only want a life partner.

In the end, I’ll be alone because of some fucking stereotypes.

How is any of this a privilege for me?

[julystorms]

People are allowed to be misognistic to fictional characters. They're not real. And anyway most of the aot fandom is female.

sure i mean gOSH who am i to tell you to stop being an inherently horrible person when it comes to fictional characters??? it's not hurting anyone right?? i guess it's totally okay to be homophobic to fictional characters, too, since they're not real. and racist. it's not like the written word is read by real live actual people, right?? it's not like everyone writing misogynistic/homophobic/racist shit would hurt anyone's feelings or persuade people into believing it's okay and normal, right? gosh and there certainly wouldn't be a domino effect that keeps women/not-straight people/PoC from having the same basic rights as White Men for hundreds of years!! inconceivable! hahahha!!!

so yeah, i guess people ARE allowed to be misogynistic to fictional characters. and hey, this is a gosh darn SHOCKER here: they're allowed to be misgynistic to REAL PEOPLE too. like who's gonna stop them? what laws? to address your "wah snk fandom is mostly women" comment: most women have some kind of internalized misogyny lurking in them, and sometimes it ain't hidin' so very deep. gee, i wonder where they got it from? i mean shit when you grow up surrounded on all sides by misogyny, racism, and homophobia, it's easy to believe that these things are normal. and it's hard as hell to recognize it in adulthood, let alone cast it off again. so hey anon hey hey quick question here:

why partake in adding to it?

why would you want to encourage and perpetuate that kind of shit??? because the characters are fictional?

yeah, seems like nothing more than an excuse to me, too.

[thedeadflag]

Do you find it problematic for a NB writer to write a NB character who likes to use a packer or realistic strap-on sometimes when they're feeling more inline with the masculine side of gender, but not identifying as a trans man? And to not use it at other times when they're feeling more inline with the feminine side or no side at all? I'm sorry for asking you to educate me, I know it's not your job, but I'm not exactly sure where to start and would like to be safe rather than sorry.

Thiiiiiiiis is a little complex. I want to first say that I’m not going to tell a non-binary person how to write a non-binary character.

However, there can be some important things to keep in mind. I’m going to link to past posts and maybe copy and paste snippets from other posts because I just got back from work, I’m exhausted, and I really don’t have the energy to full on answer this in completion without copying a bunch of stuff I’ve already said.

To open with (CW: just about any horrible thing tied to gender and sexuality and cissexism and transmisogyny), read these posts as easy screeners. I hope they won’t be relevant to you, but it’s important to provide that commentary just in case.

Now, onto snippets

From this post:

There’s a pretty big difference between, say, a trans man considering his dildo and/or packers to be his penis and going about his day to day and engaging in his romantic/sexual relationships (100% valid), … and a cis wlw who considers a dildo attached to a woman to be a penis solely so she can use it as a vehicle to tap into her baggage tied to maleness, male sexual violence, toxic masculinity, etc.

In the former case, it’s considered that guy’s genitalia, flat out. No problems there. It’s what feels natural and comfortable.

In the latter case, it’s only considered genitalia as a means to get off on various taboos and norms related to their unprocessed feelings and thoughts, generally regarding cis heterosexual men. And even when attached to a woman, it’s STILL considered male genitalia in all practicality. Not female genitalia. Not actual genitalia. Still a tool, a vehicle, to achieve a goal.

Which…isn’t anything I consider valid or legitimate acknowledgement of those prosthesis as actual genitalia.

From this post: 

My experience is that outside of trans men (who still can make missteps, for sure, but seem less prone to), cis hetero women and non-men NB afab folks have a pattern of conflating the strap-ons they use in their lives with elements of patriarchal constructs, like toxic masculinity, sexist power dynamics, misogyny, cissexism, compulsory het, etc. and whether they’re just messed up in some bad feminism, or are early on in processing their baggage, those associations are not harmless, and they do work to oppress trans women and amab NB women-aligned folks. It’s people with less potent and material relationships with cissexism that tend to miss the boat here.

Basically, to quote softtrade, “If you automatically associate penises w masculinity and power then what the fuck are you doing”

Because people who do that are only going to continue to cause harm, and if that’s the sort of expression their identity revolves around, they need to get fixed, because that’s bad shit. That’s like cis men thinking they have to get laid to be men, and buying into rape culture to do it and embody manhood. Like, it’s really incredibly clear how bad this sort of shit is.

No one’s saying anyone can’t express masculinity. But if someone’s expression of masculinity revolves around reproducing cissexism, misogyny, toxic masculinity, transmisogyny, etc. in order to “embody masculinity/maleness” then they need serious help, because that sort of thing makes them a very dangerous person. Better to help people unlearn harmful elements of systems of oppression, and lead them to positive elements of what they’re after (in this case, masculinity…because not all masculinity is toxic, obviously)

From this post: 

And like, just standard dildo use in fic makes it much easier to stomach when the sort of toxic masculine cissexist language gets used, because it’s not directly being framed around trans women’s bodies. Like, folks using dildos to enact their “dubcon” rough, demeaning, misogynistic sex is…whatever, really, there’s generally enough separation there unless the author goes out of their way to describe the dildo as if it were in all practicality a penis. I don’t think it’s appropriate to call a strap-on a cock, or a dick, or whatever. I don’t think people can do that while claiming strap-ons and penises are inherently different things. But that’s a lesser issue.  

When it’s g!p/m!c/etc.…that plays on already existing stigmas of trans women as sexual predators, as violent rapists, as actually men/male and inherently more masculine (which is how those characters get passed off as when using language so distinctly tied to toxic male sexuality and male sexual abuse). Like, that’s when consequences come around and hit us square in the chest again and again. When it’s just a dildo, those messages are largely contained. When it’s g!p or anything similar enough to tie trans women to the act, those messages play out and tie to us. There’s a reason why when so many folks think about sex with a penis-owning trans woman, they jump to thoughts about sex with a cis man, and those kind of fics help reproduce that response.

My experience is that outside of trans men (who still can make missteps, for sure, but seem less prone to), cis hetero women and non-men NB afab folks have a pattern of conflating fictional penises, trans women’s penises, and the strap-ons they use in their lives, with elements of patriarchal constructs, like toxic masculinity, sexist power dynamics, misogyny, cissexism, compulsory het, etc. and whether they’re just messed up in some bad feminism, or are early on in processing their baggage, those associations are not harmless, and they do work to oppress trans women and amab NB women-aligned folks. It’s people with less potent and material relationships with cissexism that tend to miss the boat here.

I could probably pull more past quotes of mine, but that should give you an idea of how certain approaches are good, and others are harmful, and this is the case whether we’re dealing with fictional characters or real human beings. Of course, no one can exert the necessary power to stop people from reproducing cissexism and transmisogyny, but it doesn’t hurt to make folks aware of the ways they do so in hopes they might learn to think about certain things in different ways. 

[thatlevi]

World Kindness Day

Today is officially World Kindness Day. The story goes that World Kindness Day came out of something called the Small Kindness Movement in Japan, which was founded in 1963 after the president of Tokyo University, Seiji Kaya, was mugged in public and nobody helped him.

I don’t know if the start of the Small Kindness Movement was truly as linear as someone with power was hurt and worked to make change. To be honest, I don’t want to dig into the story too much for fear that it wont hold up, because I really like that story. I like that idea that beautiful things come out of challenging experiences. And I love a brain that starts with “someone has hurt or wronged me” and ends up with “I want to make everyone’s experience of the world a better one.” I’m working to have my brain function that way all the time.

I adore kindness. If you ask me to list my core values, kindness will be one of the first words out of my mouth. I believe that kindness is a practice, a way of thinking and a way of being one can strive for without necessarily fully achieving, much like some make a spiritual practice out of searching for nirvana or one-ness. Of course, I got myself very worked up by the idea of deeply contributing to World Kindness Day. World Kindness Day is something I can take up so wholeheartedly that it will become my version of that religious holiday that people who don’t practice that religion think is very minor but the folks who live in that religious practice know it is actually the most significant holiday they’ll experience each year. It should be my day!

And yet, today I didn’t seek out opportunities to express or provide kindness for other people. I wasn’t overtly rude. I didn’t make sure someone missed the elevator, cut someone off in traffic or push down a small child and steal her lollipop. I just went about my day. What I decided was that I would attempt to be kind to myself by not feeling incredibly pressure to make as much kindness happen as I possibly could. Because it turns out one reason I’ve grown to be so focused on kindness and become an advocate for the power of kindness is that I am frequently very unkind towards myself.

Okay, here comes some talking about myself that I’m worried is self-indulgent but think perhaps could be helpful for others to read. I also think it will be helpful for me to write. But know as you read this that I’m full of doubt that writing this is about anything other than serving my ego.

This past October, there was a concerted movement by countless incredible women to call out widespread misogynistic behavior, rape culture and toxic masculinity (essentially the patriarchy) by sharing stories using the hashtag #MeToo. [Quick writer’s note: “Me Too” was coined and put into motion in 2007 by activist Tarana Burke. She’s amazing, look her up!] It was and continues to be moving, painful, beautiful, enraging and so many other things that words can’t really capture. I will never know what it’s like to be a women or be perceived as a women in this country.

Amidst all the moving and upsetting stories being shared by people I’ve known for years and people I’ve never met someone shared a story that mentioned me. Being someone who is often filled with anxiety and constantly wondering if I’ve done or said the wrong thing, I spent at least some time wondering if I had given anyone even a small-scale #MeToo experience. Here’s a good time to point out how frequent men re-center themselves in any story to make it all about ourselves. It’s obnoxious, I’m working on it. So I didn’t want to be mentioned amidst these rolling stories of trauma. And yet…

This woman I went to high school with shared this story on Facebook about a moment when she was escaping a situation where a man was being inappropriately aggressive. She said that three of her classmates created a physical barrier that allowed her to feel and be safe. And then she named me and two other classmates as the guys who protected her. I don’t remember this moment. I may not have been fully aware of what was happening at the time. But I was truly touched to read this story.

I read this story to my wife and told her I was proud to read this about my younger self but also a little surprised. My wife told me she wasn’t surprised at all. She said I’m a good person now and it’s not a surprise that I was a good person then. And then I got teary eyed. Because I realized I don’t think of myself as a good person. I think of myself as someone who is constantly trying to grow and be a good person, but never actually getting there. And yet, here was evidence I couldn’t deny accompanied by the words of the woman I trust above all others.

In the past few weeks I’ve thought about this moment often. I’m starting to accept that I’m actually a good person. Which is actually kind of great because I’ve been working with my therapist on the idea that I’m worthwhile as a person regardless of how productive I am on a particular day or whether or not I’ve accomplished something of merit. Realizing I may be a good person and that I’ve probably been one for a long time helps shift the negative beliefs I’ve long wrestled with about myself.

So, for World Kindness Day, I decided to take it easy on myself by not proving to myself that I was worthwhile by doing things for other people. I’m not sure if it was selfish or selfless or just a needed break. But it was a nice day that also left me looking forward to finding more ways to bring kindness to others. Because that really does bring me joy.