#its not toxic masculinity to put entitlement behind you

[ooglywooglies]

yknow on some level i feel like i should have a little more sympathy for trans guys who are seeing this man hate discourse and getting weird male guilt about it and being like "oh god is it antifeminist to be a man, am i hurting women by transitioning??" bc literally i was there like a handful of months ago but NO, you literally JUST have to stop taking it seriously and personally. theres nothing wrong with BEING a man, like most cis men dont need to hear "men are not actually inherently evil" to believe it so you shouldnt either, but i suppose in some cases you may. when women (and anyone else) say shit like men suck/are bad/should die its exaggeration/exasperation/frustration, if you can internalize that poc saying "i hate white people" as something that doesnt have implications or intentions about you as a person then you can internalize the same lesson about manhood

this doesnt tend to apply to the usual suspects thats why i feel the need to make a post about it [that no one will read, idk this is my blog i can just yap if i want] its guys who see the discourse and go "oh i see [infamous tag] is antifeminist and i am a feminist so i will disagree with it but this makes me feel conflicted about my position as a boy" and im just going to be straight up that feeling is self pity and spite. no one who says "men bad" or talks about male privilege or the responsibility men (including you) have to be a good example and in some cases be excluded from certain spaces wants you to detransition, no one (who is trans/not transphobic) thinks you would be more valuable to society as a cis woman, your identity is not something that can be altered to make other people more comfortable, and if it could its not something you should consider.

[genderkoolaid]

So I came across this quote by Julia Serano, and I wanted to share my take on it:

“When you’re a trans woman you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody and if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you’re accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideas of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement. We trans women are made to teeter on this tightrope, not because we are transsexuals, but because we are women. This is the same double bind that forces teenage girls to negotiate their way between virgin and whore, that forces female politicians and business women to be aggressive without being seen as a bitch, and to be feminine enough not to emasculate their alpha male colleagues, without being so girly as to undermine their own authority.”

Now, I absolutely agree that this behavior is based in misogyny. The only thing I really disagree with is the idea that it doesn't have anything to do with being trans.

For one, trans men also are forced to walk this tightrope, if in the opposite direction. If a trans man is feminine, he's actually a girl, but if he's masculine, he's idolizing toxic masculinity. If a trans man is sweet and passive, he'll never be a real man, but if he's outspoken and demands to be heard, he's a raging misogynist wielding male privilege. Nonbinary people, too, have to walk the tightrope, with the added element of "too masc/fem and you aren't really nonbinary, too androgynous and you are suspicious and cringe and probably a pedophile". Reducing this tightrope down to just misogyny, in my opinion, obscures the way that other trans people besides trans women are also forced to walk this tightrope.

Additionally, while I understand why she compares it to things like the madonna/whore complex, I don't feel like it's exactly the same thing. If a cis woman (especially/specifically a white, straight-presenting one*) acts masculine or assertive, she'll certainly be called a bitch, a cunt, evil, unfeminine and ugly, all the misogynistic tricks in the book- but she'll never be called a misogynistic entitled male.

Cis women do not face the combined forces of misandry/misogyny/misandrogyny the way trans people do. Cis women do not have to fear being seen as male and therefore sexually predatory, naturally aggressive, and an oppressor to be taken down in the way that all trans people are. Cis women are seen as women, while trans people are seen as grotesquely occupying the space between genders. Cis women are punished for acting outside of the bounds of the class of woman, while trans people are punished for acting outside the bounds of binary gender. We fail to be proper women or proper men, and so anything we do is punishable because transness is seen as something which taints any gender it touches. Trans people are deviant women who need to be put in their place, and dangerous men who are a threat to patriarchal men, and androgynous freaks who threaten the very foundation of the gender binary and the patriarchy built upon it.

I don't wanna claim to know the true reasons behind why Serano comes to the conclusions she does, so this is just my own reading of this quote:

It feels like she is leaning heavily into the "its all misogyny" to make a point about how trans women face the same struggles cis women do, therefore they should be considered equally female and equally oppressed by misogyny as cis women. Transmisogyny is just another way to oppress women, as women, and therefore cis feminists should accept trans women as women.

And I don't blame her for that, if that was her motive. Especially considering that a lot of her writing was done during a time where radical feminists were intensely scrutinizing trans women's oppression & trans activism was even less well known or supported by mainstream feminism than it is now. But I do think that, in trying to align the experiences of trans women with the experiences of cis women, it has led to the thriving idea that trans men cannot experience equal levels of oppression, because they are men and therefore their experiences must be closer to that of cis men's.

It's not that the thing she's talking about isn't transmisogyny, or that she should've brought up trans men- I have no issues with her specifically talking about how this impacts trans women and how its based in transmisogyny. But I feel very strongly that the three-arm model of transphobia explained by @transunity is a far more accurate way of conceptualizing transphobia & all of its individual forms (transmisogyny, transandrophobia, exorsexism). It accepts that all trans people can be attacked from the position that they are men, or women, or both/neither.

It also makes sense that this model comes from the transunity movement, because it prioritizes shared experience & solidarity between all trans people rather than shared experience & solidarity between trans people and cis people who share their gender. Not that that is intrinsically bad, because it isn't- but I feel that Serano's model of transmisogyny, in rejecting the idea of "trans" as a class of its own, negatively impacts other trans people and especially trans men by forcing them to be seen only in relation to their cis counterparts, and not as trans people first and foremost.

*Edited to specify white/straight womanhood

[ilikekidsshows]

You know regarding personal enjoyment interfering with collective enjoyment, the Danganronpa franchise tried to critique this toxic aspect of fandom culture, but the point flew over the fans' heads. While anon won't spoil specific details, the ending of Danganronpa V3 (third game in the franchise) was one long criticism of the fans' entitlement and creepy tendency to wish certain characters dead. But the fans reacted badly and "lashed out" against the ending, which ironically proved its point.

I generally don't think media should be used as an author mouthpiece. The thing about satire is that it only works on people who are looking for it. To people who believe in the values being satirized, the work just seems to enforce them. Case in point: the division of the Fight Club fanbase. Some realize it's a critique on toxic masculinity, people who idolize toxic masculinity just noncritically think it's a cool movie.

If you mask your message, there's a large chance it will be misinterpreted. If you feel the need to hide your message to begin with, how strongly do you stand behind it? And if your piece of media is actively preaching to your audience, what makes it different from propaganda? Are you more justified for making propaganda if the values you're advocating or criticising are considered worthy of such to begin with, and what change can you make by conforming to the majority opinion? How about the opposite, what change can you bring about by having your piece of media lecture its audience on what they're doing wrong?

An attempt to stealth-insult a fandom that is interpreting a piece of fiction in a misaimed way to begin with is doomed to end in failure, because then the fans will simply misinterpret that too. Sometimes a piece of media feels like a game of tug-o-war between the creator(s) and the fandom. I was so scared of 'Animaestro' for this reason, but, fortunately, it turned out that Astruc was simply using himself as a stand-in for "generic director dude" in a story that was about how you can't be too entitled to praise just because you made something people liked, especially if a lot of other people contributed too, and that people expressing their enjoyment of something you made is a form of praise by itself. It also acknowledged that getting recognition for your work is still nice, addressing both sides of the matter as valid. Of course, a lot of the fandom just saw the "self insert" and immediately thought Astruc was using the episode to whine about not getting enough attention. If "fans" want to misinterpret something, they will find a way.

I do believe that sometimes you need to spell out the central message of your work if you're concerned with people misrepresenting it, to avoid the people engaging in bad faith arguments spreading misinformation about your work. However, I also don't like to see writers delivering take-thats to entitled fans. Putting something like that into your official piece of media, assuming future fans engaging with your work will care about you putting misguided fans in their place when you first made it, is pretty entitled on the creators' part. I'm not really interested in the personal lives of content creators, so I don't read their social media posts either.

[metaphorewhore25]

Beach Rats (2017) & Why We Need More Movies Like It

There is a general underlying paradigm in society that “men do the looking and women are to be looked at” and Beach Rats (2017) is a movie that challenges that from its very first shot. The movie opens with an 18-something teenager taking mirror selfies in a dirty basement mirror. The camera pans over his very masculine features – his biceps, armpit hair, nipples, and the rest of his torso.

I was sold to the movie right there. Hardly do I see movies with such a focus on the male form. I have watched Eliza Hittman’s ‘It Felt Like Love’ (2013) which does the same thing from a teenage girl’s point of view but Beach Rats simply does it more and does it better.

I know that Beach Rats is a gay movie and hence the camera captures the perspective of a boy, not a girl, and hence may not exactly be called ‘The Female Gaze’ but it is written and directed by a cishet woman and frankly, I believe even that is a start when it comes to subverting the male gaze, flipping the camera and putting men at the centre, making them subjects of visual pleasure.

What Beach Rats does extremely well is this: It makes the audience uncomfortable.

And that is precisely why I loved it. In mainstream movies when the lead actresses are introduced by butt-to-lips-to-head shots, it doesn’t really make us uncomfortable anymore because it has become the norm. We’ve just accepted girls being captured in this way. We may even accept young, underage girls portrayed in a sexualized manner but focusing on men’s butts and forearms is sure to make us rethink what we are seeing on screen. Long idle shots of Frankie, the protagonist and his friends shirtless by the beach playing handball or just swimming, their chiselled dude-bro bodies taking up the majority of the screen is something we are quite unused to.

Even the scenes where Frankie is in his room and browsing a gay cam site on the internet makes us feel uncomfortable because we are simply more exposed to women doing these things like posing and pouting. It was quite fresh to see the white man become the one being looked at. It almost felt like revenge to me, like “You see this is how it feels to be constantly scrutinized or unnecessarily sexualized!”

I feel that we need to get more comfortable with the idea of male bodies presented on screen just as we are with female bodies.

However, I am aware that “Revenge” is not what women in the industry are going for, or should go for. Unlike the Male Gaze, the Female Gaze is much trickier to define. Simply objectifying men back will not do. We don’t want to revert the power structure, but rather deconstruct it.

Alina Gufran from The Swaddle says “While the act of objectifying a man through the eyes of a woman remains revolutionary, it ultimately lends itself to a very “male” idea of what the female gaze should be.” When women are handed over the cameras and the pens and the main roles, the product is often not just an objectification of men but rather a humane and emotional portrayal of both men and women as people.

Although, I would personally say that after years of having seen myself and the media around me through men’s perspectives, it is fun sometimes to objectify men and get back at the system.

I believe Beach Rats takes that extra step, by not only sexualizing men like some feminist revenge fantasy but also showing the audience vulnerability, emotions and honest intimacy. The camera zooms in on Frankie’s face a lot. He is often dreamy, confused or just melancholic. In the course of the movie his father, suffering from cancer passes away, he witnesses his younger sister getting intimate with a boy her age and his friends, although given hardly any dialogues are a key influence in his life as he often forced to fit in with them and arrange drugs for them which he steals from his father’s medicine cabinet. His friends are toxic and not at all empathetic as he often proclaims “These are not my friends” as a joke with an element of truth. All this while he is navigating personal conflict regarding his sexuality and suppressing his true self with his friends and family because he cannot fathom how they would understand.

During daylight hours, Frankie has to keep up appearances by maintaining a girlfriend but during the nighttime, he often goes on a website for gay men in Brooklyn and meets up with older men for one-night stands that are often fulfilling, but often also leave him confused.

The film is definitely voyeuristic but it also has its non-sexual intimate moments. There’s a scene where Frankie has to go masturbate before joining his girlfriend in bed because he can’t maintain erections in her presence. In moments like this, we can see his vulnerability as he tries to laugh it off or gets frustrated at his body quite often telling him something else.

My favourite scene I would say is when he decides for the first time to meet up with an older, more experienced man from the website and the camera shoots him preparing for the rendezvous in a very vulnerable and intimate way. Frankie is shown lifting weights to perhaps tone his muscles, trimming his pubic hair with a scissor and taking a shower and giving himself a thorough wash. I believe shots like this, give the character a very human feel and helps the audience relate to his insecurities and struggles that lie behind the muscular façade.

Admittedly, Frankie’s friends are only two-dimensional characters and used as props for plot development and often fall into the cliché dude-bro stereotypes. They are perhaps used only to flex their shapely bodies and contribute to Frankie’s inner conflict. They are not people, they are just cishet men in the movie. They are the ones we may call purely “objectified”.

The sexual politics are at one point even explicitly stated in the film’s dialogue when Frankie asks Simone (his girlfriend) if two men making out is hot. Simone says that two girls making out is no big deal and is obviously hot but two men making out is just gay. Reading into the subtext, the word “gay” here is used in the derogatory sense.

Of course, neither should be seen as “hot”. Homosexuality is supposed to exist in its own place, having an identity of its own and shouldn’t be co-opted by and for heterosexuals for their pleasure or entertainment.

But, due to the infiltration of the male gaze in popular media and a society that entitles men and suppresses female voices; women bear the burden of being unfairly sexualized. This same patriarchy socializes young boys and girls to view themselves a certain way, boys are taught not to be emotional and affectionate and are thus also disadvantaged by the patriarchy. I’m talking about things like “boys don’t cry” or “two guys don’t hold hands”.  The movie shows the reflections of these through Frankie’s toxic masculine friends and sometimes even Simone.

Frankie feels like he’d never be accepted into the mainstream of society because of the same sexual politics that exist in the world and that Hittman is trying to deconstruct. It is perhaps due to the fact that Frankie cannot come out that the film is shot mostly in the dark and in dingy places.

Beach Rats is a fine example of a movie that shows us a strong, conspicuous alternative to the male gaze. It does one thing very well and it is depicting male bodies in a casual, real, vulnerable, sexy and overt way and we need more of that. We need more male body presence on the screen because we as a culture of people are so oblivious to it. It’s always “Ass or Tits?”, “Pear-shaped or Hourglass-shaped” and “Skinny or Thick” and all these labels that apply only to women’s bodies to an extent where we perhaps don’t even feel like male bodies are something to be gazed at in the first place.

“Men look for looks and women look for personality”. How often have you heard this? I am not trying to defy the evolutionary explanations which may explain things to some extent. But we as this highly intelligent species cannot be completely bound by merely evolutionary instincts. While The Female Gaze does incorporate emotions and intimacy, I liked how Beach Rats balanced out the emotional and the purely carnal.  I am not saying we need more male bodies on screen in simply a sexual way. I want to see male bodies even in very mundane non-sexual ways just because I feel it needs to be normalized. Normalize focusing on the man’s body too in heterosexual romance films perhaps. Beach Rats was quite a refreshing watch despite its dark colour pallet because I was quite frankly amused to see what happens when the camera is reversed and allowed to linger on manly features. Perhaps through this, we may reach the ultimate goal of both men and women moving fluidly between the subject and object of mutual desire.

Posted originally on: https://rishikapandit.com/2021/06/08/beach-rats-why-we-need-more-movies-like-it/ 

[asterekmess]

Scott McCall is the poster boy for entitlement, misogyny and toxic masculinity. Remember when he demanded that Allison goes out with her stalker (Matt) and then yelled at her in the middle of a crowded club because she had the audacity to trust her own father to save Jackson instead of obeying him? Or when Scott pinned Allison against her bedroom’s door and humiliated her just to prove how ‘weak’ and ‘fragile’ she was and because “If I’m scared shitless, then you should be scared shitless too”?

I told my friend Mads a long time ago that with every new fic I put out, my urge to become, if not popular, then just understood as an anti-scott blog got stronger. I mean, it’s not like I want my blog to just be about hating Scoot, but I didn’t really want people to come in and follow me thinking I was a Scott fan, because it would be disingenuous.

I think I got my wish? Either one person has a lot of feelings (which I’m all for) or a bunch of v angry anti-scott people have swarmed over me like hummingbirds on sugar water. It’s a really interesting experience!

Anyway, back to your ask. So, I don’t like Scott, and admittedly sometimes I’m a little extra bitter/hateful than others, but I do try to be accurate in my dislikes of him (usually), so I’ll go through what you said one at a time and try to decipher (from my v faulty memory, so apologies if there are mistakes) if I agree with each statement.

Since some people have requested the Read More thing so they can scroll easier.

Scott is: Entitled. Off the cuff, I would agree. I’ve mentioned before how frustrating it was to see the show attempt to portray him as a poor kid, when he’s nowhere near that. I’ve also seen posts before that explore how Scott doesn’t carry a ‘poor kid’ mentality at all (they probably did it better than me, and it was probably Athenadark who did the analyzing). Growing up, I didn’t consciously know I was poor. Not as in ‘i had everything I needed’ but as in “i assumed all kids grew up occasionally eating a single can of pears for dinner or had to return groceries from the car because their parent’s card was declined and they were out of food stamps or wore a pair of tennis shoes until they were literally taped together with packing tape because we couldn’t afford new ones.” I grew up in a poor town, on the poor side of that town, so there wasn’t a lot that showed me it was possible to live differently. Being poor gives you a specific mentality, and when I finally met kids who were ‘middle class’ I was blown away by the differences. I say all this because Scott is very clearly a middle class kid.

Yes, he has an after school job. Who tf didn’t? That doesn’t automatically make you poor? Even my rich friend got a summer job because she wanted to buy band merch and her parents wouldn’t let her. But have you seen his room? It’s a wreck. We get the scene of him digging under his bed trying to find his phone, and I honestly was kinda disgusted. (I also grew up in a hellhole hoarder house, so clutter fucks me up) It’s not just the messiness though. It’s finding out that his mom is the one doing the laundry. Melissa “One shift won’t break us completely” McCall still cleans her son’s room and does his laundry and sews his clothes even though she’s supposed to be working herself to death at the hospital. Oh, and he’s sixteen years old, so he should be able to do his own fucking laundry? it’s one thing if his stuff ends up there while she’s doing laundry, but apparently she goes out of her way to do his clothes regularly enough that she has no qualms about going in his room to clean? Scott works at a VET’s office and has for long enough that he can put a cast on a dog and feels confident giving it painkillers in the right dosage. And he can’t sew a line of stitches in his clothes? He’s got an ensuite bathroom. His room is clearly the master bedroom. He doesn’t make his mom dinner to bring her, he picks up chinese. And there’s the house itself and its size, etc. Of the two of them, i would’ve expected Stiles to have the messy room. He’s adhd, I know how hard it is to keep a room clean with that kind of headspace. But no, his is really clean most of the time, even his desk, unless he’s researching something specific. I mention Stiles because it’s the comparison of the two that makes Scott’s own messiness stand out. Hell, literally no other bedroom we’re shown is messy in the slightest. Allison’s, Lydia’s, Jackson’s, none of them. (I don’t remember Liam’s room, if we saw it) He feels entitled enough to take up extra space and add extra work to his mother’s stress level (which, listen, I’m not saying being not-poor makes you entitled. I’m saying that the show makes the claim Scott IS poor and he Still does these things. THAT is the entitled part.)

Then there’s his relationship with Stiles. “Yeah, but I had you before.” When talking about the good and bad things in his life, he doesn’t even think to mention Stiles as one of the good things. He says he has nothing, just like before. Stiles isn’t even on his radar, even though they’re looking right at each other. Yet we know that Stiles is basically Scott’s only friend. As someone else with very few friends, I can’t imagine saying to my best friend’s face that I have nothing and no one. Let alone if that friend had been keeping me from dying and teaching me how to be a fucking werewolf for months on end. When do we see him worry about Stiles being human and stuck in the middle of all this? Especially in earlier seasons, we never see him say anything like “maybe you should hang back cus’ you’ll get hurt.” Like, we know that Stiles would do it anyway. And we’d get pissed if Scott told Stiles he wasn’t allowed to help because he was human, but that’s because Scott doesn’t get to tell Stiles what to do. We know Stiles finds ways to protect himself when he has to, but Scott never even asks. He never hints at “I’m worried about you and please know I wont’ be mad if you stay away from the fight.” Even Derek shoves Stiles behind him when the kanima shows up. There’s the thing where he warns them ‘if something goes wrong call for me.” But he explicity says that worry is for Allison, even though she has some method of self-defense. Stiles has nothing. Scott never cares enough to think “Maybe we shouldn’t bring him to the rave where there’s gonna be a vicious killing machine that has already tried to attack him once.” One word from Peter “vulnerable” and Scott stalks Allison (and forces Stiles to help him) for a week. But Stiles gets trapped in a pool for hours, scared out of his mind, and Scott never so much as seems to get clingy? He just assumes Stiles will be fine. He feels entitled to Stiles’ help and assistance, without putting any thought into Stiles’ safety. He asks “is it illegal?” not “Will you get in trouble?” He looks at Stiles when he says “I can’t protect anyone” But when was he trying to protect STILES?  Then there’s the part where while he’s ‘under the influence of the wolfsbane whistle’ (A plot point I fucking hate) he drags Stiles down with him and includes him in being nothing. Being no one. He assumes that if he was nothing before the bite, then Stiles must’ve been nothing also. And since Stiles didn’t get bitten, it also implies that Stiles is still nothing. He’s just hanging on Scott’s wolfy coattails. That’s an incredibly entitled viewpoint to have.

Admittedly, we do see some more humble moments with Allison, especially at the beginning of their relationship, where he says “I just wanna make sure I get my second chance” he’s not assuming he’ll get it. Go scott! (I’m not the hugest fan of him asking her out after he’s clearly just done her a massive favor and is keeping her from getting in trouble for hitting a dog, and she’s wearing his SHIRT and she can’t really say no without looking absolutely horrible, but she seemed pretty into him, so I’ll let it go) But once they’re together? I know that most best friends share secrets and private stuff with each other...but Scott tells Stiles so much about his sex life with Allison that Stiles is actually pissed off and kind of disgusted by it. Stiles. Who is supposed to be sex obsessed. Even he thinks that it’s just way too much information. I can’t imagine Allison would be comfortable with Stiles knowing that much about her in bed. (But at the same time, we see Scott tell Stiles that he never wants any more info on Stiles in bed than Stiles’ vague innuendo abt wet dreams, and then he still feels entitled to tell Stiles whatever he wants about him and Allison and won’t listen when Stiles asks him to stop.) When he asks Allison to go out with someone else, there’s so much that makes me both sad and angry. She is confused and scared, and has clearly committed really hard to Scott (enough to go against everything her family wants) and he tells her to go on a date with someone else. Not just that, but to kiss someone else. To kiss Matt, specifically, whom he knows Stiles thinks is really fucking creepy (though, we need to acknowledge that no one knew Matt was stalking Allison.) And she tries to show him that he’s asking for something really fucking weird and uncomfortable. “Kiss him? You mean, like really kiss him?” And even then, he doesn’t think anything is weird about telling his girlfriend (and they are clearly v monogamous. We see how insanely possessive he is of her, losing his shit when she’s just introduced to other guys Lydia knows, after only one date that he bailed from) to kiss someone else, but not kiss them the way she kisses him. He doesn’t ask for any info about the date, doesn’t ask if Allison’s uncomfortable. He just says “Do it.” and expects her to obey. He feel entitled to controlling who she’s with and what she does, without asking her if she’s okay with it. Because I haven’t seen later seasons in a long time, I usually try to stick to the earlier stuff so I’m less likely to say something stupid, but I do remember him scaring her in her bedroom. There’s a lot about that scene to unpack, but in the case of Allison specifically, we see that he still feels entitled to touch her. They are not friends right now. She has not given any hint that she wants to get back together (except asking to talk to him in ep.1). He should not feel like it is in any way okay to touch her at all, let alone hold her still with super strength. But he does. In his mind. She’s Allison, so why wouldn’t he able to touch her?

He also feels entitled to his leadership. We need to make clear that Scott doesn’t do the leadership stuff. He just happens to be the person in the friend group who’s a werewolf. Stiles and Jackson are the ones who go and set Peter on fire after they can’t get ahold of Scott (WHO IS NOW WITH DEREK, and THEREFORE HAS HIS PHONE). (You’re telling me Scott could’ve done the howl thing at any time to find Derek, and he just left him there for a week?) (Also, yes, I know Stiles was also not involved in helping find Derek until Peter made him. I’m annoyed at him too.) What is leadership-worthy about leaving a tortured man on a grate with electric wires plugged into his side and shackles on his wrists until he agrees to help you kill his own uncle (Oh, also, I have Peter feelings and have salty thoughts about the plot of s1, if anyone’s interested)? But let’s say Scott’s leadership comes in Season 2, not at the end of S1. But when exactly does he earn it? When he tells a teenage girl he doesn’t care about the humiliation and pain that led her to taking a bite that would cure her lifelong illness and give her a friend group that she didn’t have to be afraid of or bullied by? When he called a boy who looked him in the eyes and begged for him to keep his wolf secret “Bloodthirsty”? When he dismissed Boyd’s want for the bite, which was a way for him to make friends and feel like he belonged somewhere, as ridiculous? When he damaged Boyd’s workplace in a way that would almost certainly get Boyd in trouble? (You think smashing a massive crater into the middle of the ice rink with his fist didn’t get Boyd yelled at or maybe even fired?) When Boyd asked to talk to him on the field, and Scott attacked without rhyme or reason? When he let Erica sit and seize while he fussed over Allison? “This doesn’t Feel right” really Scott? You know, I think Erica, who’s having a fucking seizure in the next aisle, would agree! Hurry the fuck up! Oh my god, I went so off track. I have more thoughts on all that though, if anyone’s curious. Anyway. Scott doesn’t do anything that actually entails being a leader. His one job in the rave, he passes off to Isaac so that he can go call Gerard, because he’s currently working with the villain behind everyone’s back. The whole thing with Allison telling her parents and the plan with Derek getting messed up? Yeah, that was Scott’s fault for not telling her. Hell, for not telling GERARD. He, what he expected her to read his mind? Scott knew Allison was telling her parents about Jackson! She said she would tell them after he broke out of the van! The entire fuckup is his fault. But he still shouts at her and blames her and says she should’ve ‘trusted’ him. He passes all the guilt onto her and leaves her there on the verge of tears. He’s entitled to her obedience and he’s entitled to shaming her and scolding her like a child when she doesn’t do what he wants.

So, yeah, I think Scott’s entitled.

Scott is: Misogynistic. This one...I’m not so sure? Scott has a lot of bad qualities, a lot of behavior that’s incredibly toxic and manipulative, but I can honestly say that I can’t think of a single time when his reasoning for not letting/not thinking someone is capable of doing something is because they’re female?

There’s a lot to be said about the manipulative way that he speaks to and interacts with his girlfriends, but that doesn’t stem from misogyny, from what I can see. It stems from everything else. From his self-obsession, from his moral code, from his honest belief that he deserves obedience and complete candor from those closest to him. He does this to everyone, not just the women. It’s just easier to see it with the women because we’re primed to look for it. (I’m making the assumption here that you are female/feminine presenting, anon, since I know that the vast majority of the fandom is, but if I’m wrong, my apologies) Wow, though I’d have more to say on this bit, but I don’t.

Scott is: Toxicly Masculine. I’m not sure where I lay on this idea. Teen Wolf does have a lot of general instances of toxic masculinity, and Scott does exhibit some of them, but again, part of those behaviors can be found in women as well.

I know that it regularly pissed me off how often they reduced men to sex machines. *Scott and Allison are making out on Allison’s bed* Scott: “I don’t wanna make you do anything you don’t wanna do.” Allison: “I’m not doing anything I don’t wanna do. Are you?” Scott (incredulous): “Are you seriously asking me that question?”

*Stiles and Heather are talking about having sex at the party* Heather: “I mean, would you be okay with that?” Stiles (gently mocking): “Would I be okay with that? Yes, yes, I believe so.” They go out of their way to completely negate the possibility that a guy wouldn’t be into sex, even making the concept of asking for a man’s consent sound silly. This becomes even more toxic when Stiles complains about Malia leaving marks on him, hurting him during sex, and he gets teased for it. No one considers it a problem that Malia is scratching him. He’s expected to be appreciative of it/like it.

There’s the possessiveness, yes. Scott does some really fucked up, possessive things. Like freaking on Allison when Lydia introduces her to other guys, or getting angry from the sidelines just because Jackson is talking to Allison, not even flirting with her. Or running off to attack Jackson AND Allison (because there’s no proof he was only going after Jackson, and he’s only ever been able to follow allison’s scent across town, so he couldn’t have specifically been looking for Jackson) after she broke up with him. Throwing Isaac into a wall for liking Allison, even though they’ve been broken up for FOUR MONTHS. I can’t think of any more at the moment. But it’s a lot. BUT. We also see possessive behavior from Malia (yeah, she was an actual coyote for years, but she’s still a woman.) and similar amounts of aggression throughout the seasons from most of the shifters, implying that the habit is born from the werewolf/shifter thing, and not specifically Scott being toxicly masculine. (It’s still not good, but it’s not technically toxic masculinity.)

Aggression I think we can all agree is a shifter-wide phenomenon.

So, yeah, there’s instances that come across this way, and there’s also evidence that some of it is werewolf related, not scott related. I’m torn.

Anyway, again, I’ve talked way too much. If there are moments from later in the show that I’m missing that specifically prove/disprove these points, I’d love to know about it and check it out! I feel you Anon, Scott is infuriating and you’re in good company. <3

[jennaschererwrites]

‘Douglas’ Goes Deep Inside the Mind of Hannah Gadsby | Rolling Stone

All stand-up is curated confession, a chance for the person behind the mic to spill their guts but still shape their own narrative — to both tell the audience a story but also let us know how we should be thinking about it. We appreciate great comedians for their humor, of course, but also for their mastery. Like mentalists or con artists, stand-ups know how to pull our strings, how to put us at ease or discomfit us.

No one has had more occasion in recent years to think about the structure of stand-up than Hannah Gadsby. The Australian comic made waves in 2018 when Netflix released Nanette, a special in which she publicly processed her trauma about instances of sexism, assault, and homophobia she’d experienced in her life, all while deconstructing and questioning the format of joke-telling as a way to tell stories about ourselves.

Nanette earned Gadsby both admirers and haters in droves, as any thoughtful and provocative piece of media will in this age of instant public reaction. She went from being a comedian mostly familiar in her native Australia to an international household name, known as a woman who either revolutionized or took an ax to the art form. So it’s only natural that she opens her follow-up special, Douglas, by discussing how this new set will inevitably live in the shadow of her last one.

“If you’re here because of Nanette… why?” she asks her Los Angeles audience early on in Douglas. “What the fuck are you expecting from this show? Because, I’m sorry, if it’s more trauma, I am fresh out. Had I known how wildly popular trauma was going to be in the context of comedy, I might have budgeted my shit a bit better.”

Though nothing since (Douglas included) has quite gone to the places Nanette took us, other innovative stand-ups have been messing with the format in interesting ways since 2018. Gary Gulman experimented with documentary as a means of circling the topic of his depression in The Great Depresh; Jenny Slate meta-critically dissected her own fears about public performance in Stage Fright; Julio Torres utilized tiny objects and a mini conveyer belt to discuss his identity in My Favorite Shapes; and Lil Rel Howery related the story of his uncle’s funeral in a high school gym in Live in Crenshaw. As the diversity of comedians whose work makes its way to the TV-watching public broadens and more stand-up specials get released each year, so too does the format stretch and evolve to accommodate a wider range of both stories and tellings.

Douglas is in many ways a more traditional special, what Gadsby jokingly calls “my difficult second album, that is also my tenth.” But like its predecessor, Douglas is interested in pulling back the lid to see the structure of stand-up; the comic spends the first 15 minutes offering an outline of what we should expect, including “a lecture,” “the joke section” and “a gentle and very good-natured needling of the patriarchy.” (It’s not gentle; more on that later.)

But what might appear at first glance as a list of spoilers is actually Gadsby’s roundabout way of offering insight into how her brain works. Because where Nanette was about the comic unpacking old baggage, Douglas is about a more recent revelation in Gadsby’s life: her diagnosis with autism. Douglas is Gadsby’s attempt to acclimate the audience to her own inner weather system, inviting us into her thought processes and teaching us her own language of personal associations. (She memorably describes a time in school when a lesson on prepositions devolved into a young Gadsby very seriously asking her teacher to explain how a penguin could be related to a box.)

If you’re already a Gadsby fan, odds are you’re very much here for her brand of puzzle-box comedy, the kind that laughs at its own deconstruction. As in Nanette, Gadsby takes aspects of herself that are left of perceived center — her queerness, her femaleness, and, in this case, her neurodiversity — and invites viewers to realign their perspectives. “I’m not here to collect your pity,” she says. “I’m here to disrupt your confidence.”

If this all sounds a little heady for a stand-up special, don’t worry — Douglas is also very funny. Named after Gadsby’s dog but also for a pouch located between the rectum and the uterus in the female reproductive system (don’t worry about it), Douglas covers everything from an awkward interaction at the dog park to Renaissance art to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A portion of the set in which she tears antivaxxers a new one — and points out that there are probably a sizable number of them in her audience, overlapping as it does with “rich, white, entitled women” — hits in a powerful way in this time when certain people are refusing to wear masks in public in the middle of a pandemic.

Gadsby also devotes plenty of time to eviscerating that cause of so much collective grief, and the font from which most of her haters spring: the patriarchy. Just like in the real world, toxic masculinity lingers in the wings of Douglas: men telling women to smile, the male gaze in art, men (quite literally) asserting their dominance over women’s uteruses. If your reaction to this topic is that you’re tired of hearing about it, Gadsby would shoot back that she’s tired of living with it.

Gadsby spent much of Nanette questioning her own career-long reliance on self-deprecating humor. In Douglas, she lets us in on the way her mind works not to mock or undermine herself, but to revel in the way she, as an autistic person, experiences the world. “There is beauty in the way I think,” she says near the end of the set.

It’s likely Douglas will earn Gadsby as many hate-tweeting detractors as her last special did, if only for the fact that a woman getting up onstage to talk unapologetically about herself still makes a portion of the population very uncomfortable. But if Nanette was a dirge, Douglas is ultimately a celebration. So, in the words of Gadsby, “If that’s not your thing, leave. I’ve given you plenty of warning. Just go. Off you pop, man-flakes.”

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Feminists not to stop saying they're for gender equality if they're going to constantly demonize and dehumanizes men. Men deal with just as much issues as women. Imagine a guy going through some fucked up shit and he's constantly told he's privileged and doesn't have issues. Why is this so hard for feminists to understand?

Feminists themselves say that they are a movement for gender equality without batting an eye. To them it is such a normal and simple thing that they can’t believe they have to explain themselves. But here’s the problem: action speaks louder than words.

The plain truth is that feminism is not a movement for equality. Feminism is about maximizing women’s power at the expense of men. Feminists want special treatment just by crying victim, privileges without responsibility, advantages just for being a female, government protection and funding, and for men to be put in their place. Simply put, they want a world that revolves around them. 

The reason this lie of ‘equality’ is repeated over and over again by them is because no one would accept their real ideology at its face value. Feminism had to be sugar-coated with the ideals of liberation, freedom, and equality so that the general public would swallow it. Behind closed doors or for those feminists who are honest, it’s all about projecting women as victims and men as the enemy who can only be allies through either crushing the “patriarchy” or reprogramming the toxic minds of males.

Feminism helps boys too, says feminism. Because telling boys they have a unjustly, harmful privilege they need to recognize and apologize for, toxic masculinity, rape tendencies that need to be taught out of them, their gender is to blame for all the world’s atrocities, they can’t be trusted around females, everything about them from the way they talk (mansplaining) to the way they look (male gaze) to the way they sit (manspreading) is wrong and from the moment they are born they begin oppressing helpless women, is helping boys so much. 

They are obsessed with these male “issues” because they can justify their demands for boys to be rewired and reeducated with feminist ideas and values, to take away and change their natural behavior so they become less boisterous and less of a threat and challenge to women in the new feminist utopia. Through feminist theories and sloppy research, they have turned men into potential rapists, women as perpetual victims and especially within US schools, they have turned boyhood into a disease.

In November last year, The Times reported on a programme in schools in which two women, one a former sex crime prosecutor, “re-programme teenage boys’ sexual manners so they are fit for a feminist world”. According to the report, they start the class by asserting that “misogyny is on the rise”, before going on to “describe real-life sex crimes that have happened to teenagers in this area with brutal accuracy”. The article concludes - approvingly - that by the end of the session, the boys are “scarred for life”. 

Novelist and feminist icon Doris Lessing made a shocking assessment of what she had seen while visiting a school classroom. She told the Edinburgh Book Festival, “I was in a class of nine and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

In context of the chasm between boys’ and girls’ educational attainment and a rising male suicide rate that is now nearly four times that of women’s, why are schools deciding that when it comes to talking about gender, what boys need most is an extra dose of guilt and shame? Since when was it acceptable to impose ideology on school children?

The Great Men Value Women project, frames its mission as about helping young men, but it’s also driven by the belief that young men need to be re-educated as feminists - not just for their own good, but for women’s too. On the section of their website listing the organisation’s values, their final point simply states: “Feminism: This says it all”, with a link to a video of TED X talk entitled: “We Should All Be Feminists”.

Really? Who says so? Again, since when was it acceptable to impose ideology on anyone? And for that matter, would we ever dare to suggest school girls ought to be taught that Great Women Value Men?

By all means, let’s teach children about healthy relationships, but that’s not really what these campaigns are about. Instead there is an overwhelming emphasis on imposing an ideological worldview that first and foremost sees young men as potential abusers and perpetrators, while routinely ignoring and minimising the very real threat of violence, both physical and sexual, that boys and young men face themselves.

You’d never know it from the feminist rhetoric, but a man - and particularly a young man - is around twice as likely to be a victim of violent crime as a woman. And it’s not just street violence either. A 2009 NSPCC report into domestic violence in teenage relationships, showed teenage boys suffer comparable rates of violence from their girlfriends as do teenage girls from their boyfriends.

In the same year another report, this time by Childline, found that of the children who called to report sexual abuse, more than a third of them are boys. The charity also found boys were more likely to say they had been sexually abused by a woman. So imagine what it must it be like as a young man who has been beaten or sexually abused, most likely by a woman, to then be forced to attend a workshop that tells him that simply because he’s a young man, he should hang his head in shame as a potential abuser?

And the indoctrination doesn’t stop when a boy leaves school, it continues when he gets to university too - the “Good Lad” workshops for example are in fact a spin-off from compulsory consent classes for new male students that are now springing up across universities. If young males express any view that contradicted feminist orthodoxy, they are shouted at and publicly humiliated and their motives routinely come under immediate suspicion simply on account of their gender. What impact must all this be having on boys and young men, who are themselves at one of the most vulnerable stages of their lives? 

But sure feminists, keep telling us how it’s all about equality and helping boys too.