#literally no awareness of their privilege

[thebreakfastgenie]

I don't think this binary does active harm, I think this binary is a way of describing a system (patriarchy) that does active harm. It's not a perfect way of describing it, but there isn't really a perfect way. That used to bother me a lot more but then I got grad school brained and learned that conceptual models are just that, models, so even good ones will be imperfect and that's not that big a deal as long as you acknowledge limitations of the model.

I know it's deeply unsatisfying but the answer literally is "it depends." Tumblr went really hard on "men do not experience sexism/misogyny" about ten years ago and I understand why, because MRAs constantly pop up to insist the world hates men. But the reality is more complicated, and we never really got past patriarchy 101 on tumblr. When you're talking about these dynamics, most of the time perception matters much more than real identity, because the issue is with how society treats you. Of course trans men who don't pass experience misogyny, and all trans men experience misogyny pre-transition. I think trans men are in a uniquely frustrating and hard to define place in patriarchy, but misaimed misogyny is not unprecedented. Gender non-conforming cis men can experience misogyny too, along with homophobia, whether they're actually gay or not. "Passing" exists in other contexts besides gender and the same dynamic plays out. Inclusion in any privileged class may be conditional and the definitions of any privileged class may change over time. The definition of "white" in an American context has changed several times in the history of the United States. A lot of Jewish people of European descent don't easily fit into a white/not white binary, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about race and the system of white supremacy in society.

Models like this are really for describing systems of power, which means they don't work nearly as well at the individual level. The point is not a flowchart to determine if you are a man or not and sort you into the correct category. There are situations where people will be sorted according to gender, of course, and those are necessary because of inequities created by patriarchy. I think the solution to that problem is just to be okay with exceptions. The human experience is too vast and beautiful to conform to any system. But we can say, okay, the purpose of this space is safety for people most impacted by systemic misogyny, and make decisions that way. Trans men may find their identity as men is more relevant in some contexts and their experiences with misogyny are more relevant in others. Again, the root of this problem is the patriarchy itself.

I'm curious about how this distinction could possibly be used to exclude people from the queer community. I'm not aware of any systemic denial that queer men exist, so being defined as a man or not should not affect a person's inclusion in the queer community.

There is no way of combatting patriarchy without defining the class of people it benefits. That class is men.

"you're either a man or a non-man" good lord you people just keep reinventing the binary over and over and over again, you are obsessed. let go already

[velvetvexations]

i hate it so much when self-identified TMEs say that they experience male privilege for being a trans man and that transandrobros are lying about not experiencing it or just too stupid to understand what male privilege is. and like. i would personally consider myself to be a trans man who benefits from male privilege (i.e. being perceived as male in social settings, i still do not have access to systemic male privilege), but i still have the self-awareness to know that i'm very lucky in the regard that i pass 100% and i also have the ability to Listen To Other People to know that not everyone is just like me. just because i feel like i experience some forms of male privilege does not mean every transmasc has access to the same privilege because that depends on 1) your identity as a man being taken seriously and 2) not letting anybody know you are a Tranny. i swear some people think male privilege is stored in the he/him pronouns

they do literally believe that yes

[vizthedatum]

And once again… white men

[avadmortain]

vanessa’s mugshots <33

[cosmicdorito]

"hozier my cottagecore lesbian bog man" shut the fuck up

[dreamyintersexouppy]

"omg don't hate yourself, this is self harm, just take a compliment" i'm glad you live in a magical world where no kind cis person can turn into agent smith but stop making that my problem

[zevranunderstander]

living and being born in a western country, especially as a white person is so infuriating. like. you're privileged and you can get everything you want at a store and all that but like, so many of the things you can buy are direct results of genocides and massive exploitations and labor rights abuses, and you can't even do anything about it. no one even really tells you about this most of the time. everyone here has a phone and it's just kind of accepted that black children die in some mines *somewhere in africa* for this, but that doesn't stop anyone from buying a fucking phone each year

and trying to bring this up always shows how comfortable everyone is exploiting the global south, because then it's always 'well, me not doing this won't change anything so why should I stop? everyone else is doing it too!', and the deeper you dig the more you realise that really any action you take makes the life quality of everyone in the global south so much worse

and if you advocate for climate change action, or go vegan, or stop buying plastic, or try to only buy fair trade, your impact obviously is only very marginally doing anything, but your interaction with the fact that western civilization is built entirely on exploitation makes everyone around you so fucking uncomfortable, that they need to turn you into the laughing stock for being such a hippie or whatever, when it should be our basic fucking responsibility to try not to be complicit in systems of systemic exploitation if we can, and people who are so comfortable in their luxury fucking laugh at people for protesting climate action and call them delusional while people in India die of heat strokes en masse

and this is just my personal take, but I hate (hate!) the sentiment on here that's like 'well it's all corporations fault, *they* need to change, we need regulations', which isn't wrong, but it's literally not gonna happen without pressure being applied. corporations only care about the profit margin and if that means burning everything on the planet alive so be it, and government regulations are slow and usually even slower because of relentless lobbying, they aren't gonna do anything if their user base is comfortable with their exploitation.

idk maybe it's just me but if you are comfortable explaining to a mother of some child that just died in some mining accident in africa, that yeah, you produced more plastic waste in a week than any of them do in half a year, and yeah, you bought two phones in two years, and yeah, you love shopping on shein and going to primark, and yeah, you eat cashews imported from the southern hemisphere that are produced on slave labour and that use massive amounts of water for one fruit, but really none of these things are your fault because it's not you who needs to change its the corporations, and I don't think you're entirely wrong, but like, I won't just sit in fucking Omelas paradise and enjoy a comfortable life on the blood of the other half of the world population just because I got lucky and was born in as a white person in Europe.

[inkybinkyboink]

semi-vent/semi-headcanon but making specifically a police officer the narrator (lockstock) was kind of crazy and perfect because like. they have the ego to be narrators. does that even make sense? you could argue that it's because he's in the middle between the rich and the poor because he's part of the law, but that's not true because cops are intrinsically harmful and biased. in a way, lockstock is an unreliable narrator. he's still violent to the poor when he's not narrating. he still kills bobby. from a story-telling point of view, this doesnt matter because to the audience he's more of a narrator than he is a cop, but from the point of view of the poor people, officer lockstock kills one of their own. i feel like there's a joke there that lockstock doesn't actually protect the city because he's too busy narrating, and when he does, he's just as violent as barrel.

[cypheragent]

visit a rez populated by struggling native communities and tell me one more time that everyone living in this country benefits from imperialism

[unsurebazookacore]

my mom very awkwardly coming into my room and handing me my freshly folded laundry telling me "you should be happy in life" 30 minutes after i finished a full mental breakdown in front of her because she said she's not paying for college unless I get into a top 30 university

[vulpinesaint]

truly you have to participate in the compliment economy. random compliments are so rare but it's not because you don't deserve them! our discomfort with engaging with other people makes it so that only some people take the initiative to give compliments in the first place, and that's really only if there's something standout about the person they're complimenting. it doesn't have to be that way. get comfortable with telling people that you like their clothes or their hair or that they have nice eyes or a good smile or a pretty laugh or that you admire the way they carry themself or like their music taste or just that you think they're nice or smart or cool. put a little delight out into the world! once you've done that, it opens up similar dialogues bit by bit... and as a secret special bonus, when you tell someone something nice, they're often very happy to have a chance to tell you something nice in return :)

[grishaverse-chaos]

shit I remembered this too late to add to the post I was replying to, but: people (and by "people" I mean darkl!ng stans and nikolai antis) will call nikolai an example of the White Saviour trope, and they're kind of half right in that he is a SUBVERSION of the trope

so yes, he's initially presented as that archetype - a member of the majority group, who sympathises with the minority group and uses his institutional power to improve the lives of that group

(of course, this is subverted right off the bat because he is CONSTANTLY offering to share his institutional power with Grisha: proposing to Alina, creating the Triumvirate, even the Nolniki to an extent)

but the trope is FULLY subverted at the end of RoW, when he literally addresses the question of whether he is the right person to "save" Ravka, and decides to literally GIVE all his institutional power to a Suli Grisha woman (Zoya)

[tomurakii]

I truly apologise but I've never found a character more irritating than Ruby Rocks. It is severely impacting my ability to watch a crown of candy because this bratty literally-the-embodiment-of-the-status-quo bitter bastard child won't stop sulking and being shitty to the only good surviving member of this royal bloodline (Saccharina).

The immediate Rocks family in general is so unsympathetic, I'm sorry but if you want me to feel bad over your personal growth journey you can't ALSO be a monarch who has absolute power over an entire nation-state. If you had literally the best education of everyone in your country and you're still an idiot I don't know what to tell you except that you're a resource hoarding pig who has not earned an iota of the power or luxury you have. They have SERVANTS and all they do is complain about going to class or doing their job. Hey if it sucks so bad demolish the state and redistribute your wealth <3 you won't <3

[creetchure]

Cool you're in America, you get to use DCUI to legally read your comics online have you considered: couldn't be me.

[sifutoph]

need us to stop being a silly little guy for one second and acknowledge that t0ph is rude and it isn't some funny trait. it's a flaw. its a reaction, sure, because her whole life she'd needed to play the part of being the obedient little girl and her rudeness is a result of wanting to affirm her independence and probs as a legitimate way to exercise her confidence and/or to go about her establishing boundaries or things she didn't like, but it's still a huge flaw.

[foxmulderautism]

they need to hook me up to some kind of device that will send a high voltage electric shock through my body every time i open twitter and compare myself to people who quite literally are able to work full time on writing/publishing short fiction