#maybe this is a little 'husband bad' but i do feel like cis men don't get it a lot of times

[notsocheezy]

Brain Curd #171

Brain Curds are lightly edited flash fiction - practically first drafts - posted daily (haven't missed one yet!) and sometimes written with the express intention of being terrible… but, you know, in an endearing way. Please like and reblog if you enjoy - the notes keep me going!

Leah slammed the door behind her and plopped onto the couch face-first. Hunter could hear her sobbing from the other room.

He knocked on the door jamb. “Hey… bad day at work?”

She cried harder, not even lifting her head.

This was exactly the sort of situation he’d feared. Hunter thought back to the conversation he and Leah had early on in their relationship…

“I almost never date guys, but… I like you.”

He blushed. “Aww, thanks! I guess I’m one of the good ones, ha ha.”

“With girls, you know, in a long term relationship… what I’m trying to say is, there’s something most men have that most women don’t, so after a month I’d always make a point of us picking out a strap-on together.”

Hunter nodded. “One of the many benefits of dating me is that I’ve got the part built right in. Yep.”

“Right, but what people don’t consider is that men are missing something women have, too. And it’s a lot harder to substitute.”

“I never really thought about it. Is that a dealbreaker?”

“No, not at all. Actually…” She leaned in close and whispered. “I’ve found a website where we can order it.”

Hunter laughed nervously. “I sure hope it works!”

The continued sound of crying brought Hunter back to the present moment, and now he really hoped it would work. He ran to the bedroom and opened the sock drawer of his dresser. There it was: his very own strap-on compassion.

He attached it and turned it on. Immediately, his belly hurt and he craved chocolate.

He returned to Leah, who was now upright on the couch, still crying. He sat next to her and hugged her. Her nails dug into his back.

“Oh, honey… I know, honey, I know…”

[olderthannetfic]

Re: “So, the world expects women to have and raise kids while men are expected to have little involvement or interest in their kids’ lives (paraphrased)”

Yes, that’s what it’s always been, specifically because men want it to that way. Studies show that women typically raise and socialize their children from infancy, men statistically have little interest in being active fathers, children are usually closer to their maternal relatives, children usually stay with their mothers after divorce or separation for the prior reasons but when men contest custody they usually win. And in cases where men have custody of their children, studies also show the kids are raised by the father’s mother or other female relative. Interestingly, studies also show that men usually only const custody of their kids because of a fear of paying child support.

Maybe it’s because previous anon is a trans man, so he’s had experience being socialized in both binaries, but anon doesn’t have to feel bad about the plight of fathers. They’re perfectly fine with the state of marriage and child rearing because it culturally and socially benefits them more than women. The (cis) men are just fine, don’t worry lol 🤷🏽‍♀️

--

(same anon talking about childrearing, (cis)straight relationships, and the priveleges of men) And of course in a patriarchal society men are encouraged to be husbands but not fathers. Men in relationships, especially marriage, statistically live longer and have more benefits than single men. Women actually receive fewer social benefits from marriage than men (on average). Again, the (cis) men are very happy with this setup. They're fine.

IDK about that. I think plenty of cis men are not fine with the current state of affairs, but they're not always prepared for the practical realities of changing things, both all the little social things they were never taught and the career penalties they'll incur.

It's the same deal as with chores and supporting a partner: a ton of cis men want to be an equal and to make a female partner's life easier. But lacking the experience of just how much fucking work basic household management is, they end up feeling like they're being imposed upon when they're actually doing like 5% of the work, and they feel like they're being asked to be mind readers when they fail to notice things many female partners have been socialized to pick up on instantly.

Yes, my lived experience is that the majority of cis men are selfish dicks who need a boot up the ass, but I don't think the problem is coming from bad intent in most cases. I, a cis woman, was also woefully unprepared to run a household when I first got out of school, and it was entirely from being raised too upper middle class by parents who were too busy to teach me basic adult skills that weren't about career or school. Many guys start even further behind.

I'm not saying we should let deadbeat dads off the hook, but a lot of cis dudes do actually want to participate but don't get how hard it's going to be or how much they're going to have to give up.

[blood-choke]

maybe I'm really stupid and partially asleep, but even though mc is a cis woman they keep talking as if she suffered a lot because of... it? like if she suffered the same as someone trans, am I missing something? ​is it purely because of the way she dresses? like telling V "you know I'm not a man right" like what lol how could she not know? and H talking about her own life experiences and saying mc must know how she feels... hm idk if she does she's white. ANYWAY I LOVE IT SO MUCH MUAH :*

you're right, there's not a lot of variation between cis or trans mcs at the moment. to be honest, i don't consider the cis mc "cis" anyways, she's butch. either way, both versions of her dressed and passed as a man previously, and she still presents very masculine & may be mistaken as a man.

obviously, it's not the same as if she were a trans woman, but to the random bigot in the bathroom, it doesn't make a difference.

with mc's memory gone, she has complicated feelings about her gender; she knows that she spent a lot of time as a man working blue collar jobs, and that from what little information she's managed to pry from Valentina or piece together on her own, she knows that she seemed to have accepted it and even liked it right before her entombment. but now she doesn't have to do that anymore, and she's not sure what that means for her when a lot of her identity was wrapped up in this kind of drag king-esque performance.

this is also the same for the trans mc, though with the added anxiety of being trans. i didn't change the conversation between mcs because i honestly didn't feel it was necessary; the player knows how their character feels & can decide precisely where the mc's fear is truly coming from - if it's because she's trans & butch or if it's just because she's butch.

when she has that conversation with Valentina, it's not that she thinks Valentina is being literally transphobic or anything like that. when they look at the painting of her and Valentina, and when Valentina calls her "husband," she's afraid that because she's butch/trans, and because she used to pretend to literally be a man, then Valentina is afraid of her and potentially sees her truly as a man, and more specifically, as Standard.

there are plenty of people (including lgbt people) that treat butches like this. something i've mentioned a few times here is the term "heteropatriarchal" which is typically applied to butches and butch/femme relationships. basically people equate butches to straight men enforcing the patriarchy because they're choosing to "emulate" them. there are a lot of lesbians that hate butches & treat them like shit because they're considered the "bad" lesbians. there are a lot of people that are critical of butch/femme because they think it's "heteronormative" because, again, they think butch = man and femme = woman. and all of this is doubly so for transfem butches.

with Hana, she is trans, so after the mc gets screamed at in the bathroom, that's what she's talking about. before that, when they have the first conversation in the car, Hana should actually always tell a white mc that she can't understand. after the bathroom, Hana will only confide that she's trans with an mc that has a high enough relationship with her, and with white mcs she should say something about this being "the one curse that we do share" but otherwise she should make it explicitly clear that the mc (and Valentina for that matter) can't understand her experience.

[alarajrogers]

Tumblr doesn't seem to understand how weird its population is.

This is the social media site for queer and neurodivergent people. It never advertised itself as such, but, well, here it is. People here are more left-leaning, more likely to be some variety of queer, some variety of ND, and more likely to be participatory fans of media (like, fan artists, as opposed to people who just watch the stuff) than on damn near any other site. It probably has fewer cis men than any other site. It is not representative of the Internet, let alone the world.

Autistic people are more likely to have a social presence on the Internet because it is easier for us to interact with people in mostly textual format than in real time in person, where we have to read other people's body language and correctly produce our own. So on the Internet in general, you're gonna see more autistic people proportionately; the allistics are more likely to have active RL social lives.

So now Tumblr, the site with maybe the strongest or at least second strongest autistic population of all social media sites (reddit might be the strongest, though I feel like you're much more likely to be talking about your autism and how it affects you on Tumblr), when autistic people were already over-represented on social media in the first place, has people who think that autism has been de-stigmatized.

No. It has not.

I'd tell you to get off your computer and interact with some real people, but I can't do that because I have no social life, so why would you be able to? Instead I want you to consider the math. A place where a very high proportion of the population is both autistic, and radicalized about being autistic -- keenly aware of how society treats them for being autistic, sharing stories about how annoying NT people are, looking at the world through the lens of "and this is anti-autistic ableist bullshit, and so is this, and so is this other thing".

How could we be anything other than a place where autism is destigmatized?

But how could that possibly relate to the rest of the world and how it behaves?

I mean, you get a group of people together who have something in common, and in the real world that something is looked down on, so they have reason to look to each other for validation... you can get what looks like destigmatization of anything. Incel groups probably destigmatize rape. If you've seen or read Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the behavior of the serial killers at the convention? The only reason that doesn't happen in real life is that it's too hard for serial killers to safely find each other. A lot of what's going on that's bad in society today is because a lot of racists got together, realized they were all racist, and backed each other up in destigmatizing racism within their ranks.

Autism has no stigma on Tumblr and we joke about taking extra vaccines to get extra autistic because it's stigmatized in real life. Gay people joke about how they cannot possibly gay any harder than they are gaying because they are looked down on in real life for being gay.

Tbh I'm not convinced anxiety and depression are fully destigmatized either, though we're no longer in the place we were when Tipper Gore had to actively hide her depression to avoid tanking her husband's political career. But there are companies out there that make all of their money by convincing parents and schools to let them abuse little autistic kids to teach them how to pretend to be normal and make them pretend it all the time. Don't talk about autism being destigmatized in real life as long as ABA is legal.

Don’t tell me any of u guys actually think autism is a “destigmatized disorder”