#so is it patriarchy deeming men the “generic main character” or is it me not being cis?

[amayikes]

I never really experienced "do I wanna fuck him or do I wanna BE him" before and now you know what, I really can't tell.

[feral-cockroach]

okay i saw sth on pinterest ab Lolita (the book) and it rly annoyd me so i msgd my husband about it and he had the same lack of understanding of the book and it drove me nutty so imnputtng it here aswell. copied from my messages to my husband bc i convey my thoughts better in a conversational text manner. asterisks for emphasis as opposed to italics. open to good-faith conversations if i have gotten anything wrong or if someone disagrees, i am very open to having my perspectives challenged *in good faith, and by people who have read the book or engaged with the media in some direct way*. i know the book itself can be a LOT to engage with so if you have read it, listened to it, or watched videos on it i am open to good faith discussions. if your only engagement has been one of the movies please do not engage, as the movies have taken and deeply bastardized the message of the book, as have the redesigned covers.

biases i feel necessary to mention: i am a CSA survivor. i have been abused by a paedophile. i have survived CSA. i am autistic which may affect my understanding and my own ability to engage with literacy.

it is the book written by *someone condemning paedophilia* from the *perspective of an unreliable narrator* and the *narrator* NOT the *author* is a paedophile and it was *written* to show how *easy it is* for people to be *manipulated* by paedophiles and the like and how *easy is is* to fall into the ideas of victim-blaming and how *the patriarchy* will *intentionally portray women and ESPEICALLY young girls* as *evil, seductive, creatures* and *men* as *helpless victims to young girls and women* and its *never* the *mans fault* its the *fault of the young girl*

*the author wrote it to actively condemn paedophilia and to CALL OUT paedophilia and the patriarchy and how EASY it is for people to fall into the victim-blaming mindset*

because when you take out the context of "this is why it was written, it was intentionally written so that you DO NOT trust the narrator, this is a satirization of paedophile and rape culture" , you're left with "satire is inherently an endorsement of whatever awful thing it is satirizing and sociopolitical commentary means nothing"

and then you end up in a culture of black and white thinking

which is not to say that people (namely men) havent taken the book and removed all of that context and then turned the main character into a *hero* or someone to *look up to*, but that is why keeping that context is so important . removing that context in either direction, either to condemn the author or to idolise the paedophile, leads to the general public having a completely warped understanding of a story they have not read, which leads to uninformed opinons and leads then to an even bigger lack of media literacy, which leads to an uneducated public and an uneducated public that cannot critically engage with media deemed "problematic" and cannot engage in "problematic" media within the context it was produced is a public that is easy to manipulate, easy to control, and easier still to weaponise against each other/public enemies

i dont even fucking like the book. i ve read it and its not my favourite. i dont like it it makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. but the whole point of it *is* to make the audience deeply uncomfortable. its supposed to make you uncomfortable because its fucking weird and its creepy and youre supposed to examine that discomfort and figure out what about it is making you uncomfortable, and then take that into your real life to engage critically with things that you previously were comfortable with , so that you can determine if these things are actually things that belong in modern society, or *are you being manipulated again, like you were by the main character of the book*

media literacy and the ability to critically engage with media is so so so so so important and people today (and i do literally mean people today - people in our generations and younger) simply refuse to, which is a different symptom of the same problem. anti intellectialism is a massive , growing and genuine problem. and the inability to engage critically and the lack of media literacy is the same thing we see when your grandma gets messages from scammers and then falls for it and wires her entire retirement fund to some guy in korea because he definitely wants to come over to the usa and marry her. she doesnt engage critically with what is presented, and she doesnt have the necessary technological literacy to understand taht people will just fucking lie and scam you online. its that, but now it is in younger generations, and it is a result of political propaganda, and again , symptom of a much bigger problem, but one that pisses me off and concerns me alot

[avelera]

On Criticsm, Deserved and Undeserved, of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”

This latest tragic Amtrak derailment has me thinking about, of all things, the book “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. In part because, in that book, the increase of train derailments was a sign of the nation’s crumble into communism due to the theft and control by low-achieving but powerful thieves in government and the brain drain of John Galt’s movement. 

I grew up in a conservative household so naturally I was introduced to this book. It is, in essence, a near-future sci-fi novel which meant I could both read something mildly interesting and something my father approved of me reading, so it was a win-win. I ended up reading it twice in my lifetime, though both times I skipped the 60 page speech at the end in favor of getting back to the character drama. It wasn’t until adulthood that I came to understand how reviled the book was by the Left and it was a little after that when I understood why, and began to see the book’s flaws. 

It’s been on my mind on and off for awhile to compile my thoughts on that book, because I actually feel that while much of the criticism for it is valid, and I will address that too, there are some places where the vitriol of the criticism feels... well, rather sexist. For a young woman, there actually were some valid lessons I took away from the book which I see constantly ignored, usually by people who have not read it. By contrast, I find it darkly amusing at best and offensive at worst how many people who claim to love and live that book, especially in the right wing, are precisely what the book was preaching against, something they would know if they had actually read it, or had spent even a millisecond of their time on self reflection. There are also elements of the book I will touch on briefly which make the book’s overall application to real life--as so many conservatives have-- utterly ludicrous, because the book itself doesn’t interact with real life, and yet they still use it to justify their world view. This is the more common criticism of the novel, but I’d still like to add my spin on it without the usual venom it receives because of the critic’s loathing of the book’s “fandom”, rather than its content. 

I don’t expect many people to read this essay. Most people in my audience have not read Atlas Shrugged, and if they’ve even heard of it their ideas tend to be fixed whether or not they’ve read it based on their political upbringing. I was in a strange place of being completely politically uninvolved when I first read it (at age 14) and somewhat in the middle politically when I read it again years later. It’s also an 1,000 page long book, which is why I think both its promoters and its critics will often pay lip service to having read it, when they’re really only parroting another’s analysis (and that analysis inevitably leaves out huge swathes of the book’s content in order to promote a certain agenda and reading). 

First, I’d like to mention the good in this book, only because it is the aspect I see most ignored by both sides. Atlas Shrugged actually has a strong feminist message, which the Left tends to ignore in favor of criticizing its overall hyper-capitalist message, and which the Right tends to ignore because they don’t want to think about the fact that Ayn Rand was also pro-abortion, anti-religion, and called Ronald Reagan a communist. She at one point wanted to have a “good” priest be one of the POV characters in the novel, but ultimately found that she could not find a single spin on the character that would actually fit her world view. I’m very glad she didn’t, as I think it would have only poured gasoline on the fire of the current right wing theocracy. 

But back to its feminist message, in which we’re going to need to invoke death-of-the-author and let the text read for itself. Given Rand’s own dislike of the Feminist movement, I find it ironic how much she embodied it. Another side-effect of growing up in a conservative household was assumptions around gender roles. Even while growing up in a relatively non-religious household, and encouraged in my studies, there was just as much pervasive patriarchy as anywhere else. Certain feminine roles were assumed. This included endless selflessness as a virtue on the part of women. 

Dagny Taggart is the unquestioned main character of Atlas Shrugged. While other male characters like Hank Rearden, Francisco D’Anconia, and John Galt may make appearances, its always comes back to Dagny’s journey. This alone does not seem to get mentioned very often by either side. This central novel of conservative thinking is by a woman and about a woman, with the men in it as supporting characters. This alone of course does not excuse a book, but Dagny’s journey is also about freeing women from the shackles of the utter self-destruction by selflessness that the world demands of them to this day. One more reason Ayn Rand would be horrified to see what the small men of the right wing have used her novel to justify-- namely, the legal infringement of any kind onto the personal life of an adult or on the relationship between consenting adults.

For a young woman who had every corner of the world telling her that the greatest thing in life is to grow into a role of self-sacrifice, be it for the man in her life, or for children, or that being a caretaker was the most noble role she could ever hope to achieve even at the expense of any personal dreams, Dagny Taggart was a role model. She was a railway executive who had climbed her way up through the ranks from childhood to adulthood, spending long hours and working hard because it was what she wanted to do. This wasn’t a traditionally feminine industry either. Unlike Sex in the City, which was popular at the time I was re-reading the novel, I remember pointing out that even in such a female-centric show which was deemed progressive in how it showcased working women, they were still largely in roles deemed acceptable for modern women. Fashion, PR, art, and even certain practices of law wouldn’t cause even the most raging chauvinist to necessarily bat an eyelash if it’s where a woman ends up (before she meets her man and settles down to raise a family). But Dagny had no interest in a family, she took lovers as interested her without even a flicker of shame, did not sacrifice herself or her happiness for them and actively rejected those who asked her to give up what she loved for them. But most inspiring of all, she worked in railways, because she loved it and she couldn’t imagine any other life. 

What Ayn Rand had to say to women about denying selflessness and self-sacrifice in favor of personal and career self-actualization seems to be the one element no one wants to talk about. She gave a role model for young women interested in working, and more than most literature to this day, gave a role model for if they wanted to work outside traditionally feminine fields. She told them not to sacrifice themselves for the men or the families in their lives just because it was expected of them. She told them they could and should take lovers without shame, without sacrificing themselves just because some man wants to turn them into their personal domestic slave. She gave a roadmap for denying those men so you could live your own life. I find the Left curiously silent on this point, I can only assume as I said above because they haven’t actually read the book. The Right is silent on this point too, though I imagine for different reasons, like their male dominance and the number of them that seem to curiously think Rearden or Galt (who barely appears in the novel) are the main characters. 

That, however, is where my praise of the novel ends. I think as a woman in a man’s world, Ayn Rand had the authority to speak as a professional, a writer, a refugee, and an intellectual on the topic of Dagny. She could provide that role model for other women. Her knowledge of economics and markets, however, leaves something to be desired despite the fact the so-called economy obsessed right wing would put her worldview on a pedestal. 

I called Atlas Shrugged a sci-fi novel for a reason. That it is not shelved as one is unfortunate. In a sci-fi novel if you ignore sweeping aspects of the real world in favor of making your point or creating your alternate world, the reader generally understands that and the world and author don’t generally try to pretend that is is actually realistic and representative beyond its key points. For some baffling reason, conservatives think that the economy in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has even a passing acquaintance with reality, and that it could somehow be mapped onto reality. As I said above, I think that Ayn Rand has some profound things to say to young, unattached women looking to establish themselves in the world. I’m not sure what she has to say to everyone else.

The world of Atlas Shrugged cannot possibly represent the real world because it doesn’t actually contain major elements of the real world which are key to its own worldview of a hyper capitalist society. All the industries represented are commodities and utilities, such as copper and steel, transportation and energy. There are little to no references to structural cultural barriers. Indeed, culture in general is limited and only to prove the point. I cannot speak to all industries but the most damning absences from the narrative to me are the absence of marketing, the global economy, and of children.

I may not work in a commodities or utilities, but I have worked in marketing. Ayn Rand dreams of a world where the best product wins, unless an unfair government is putting its finger on the scale. And that might be true, again if we were only talking about commodities and utilities. But there is no mention of consumer products. There is no mention of how the sophistry of marketing and advertising can be used to make the lesser product seem the better one. There’s no mention of how humans may be convinced through lies and half-truths as to which product is higher quality. There’s little mention of food quality control, or the fact that it’s all well and good to say the market will prevent people from putting out poison products, but that doesn’t really help to boycott a company in the future if your baby just died from spoiled milk. She does not at all reference that successful titans of industry can become successful and stay successful by selling sub-par products that bury the higher quality products through cheaper production costs.

This is a huge oversight when you try to apply her world to ours. And it’s not like she couldn’t have known this, already products like Edison’s diamond-tip gramophone with its superior sound had been buried by cheaper-made models with the help of marketing. But the fact she doesn’t address it is fine as a sci-fi author, it’s not fine when right wing thinkers take her word as gospel. 

Atlas Shrugged also shares with many post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories the total absence of a wider world. Just as we asked in The Hunger Games why isn’t anyone intervening in the fallen U.S., where did everyone go, we’re wondering in Atlas Shrugged why no one is making cheaper products for import, even if it’s by slave labor. The case within the novel is that the whole world, the entire world has fallen back into the Dark Ages because of communism, with only the U.S. hanging by a thread. At the very least it’s western hemisphere-centric, with the only other action we actually see taking place in South America when Francisco D’Anconia’s mines get nationalized (and he murders people in retribution, let’s not forget that). 

But just as Rand doesn’t talk about marketing, she also doesn’t really talk about the availability of natural resources, or any kind of impact on the environment. Resources in her world are essentially infinite, if one is only a strong enough personality to go find them. There is no long-term damage that we can see. There are no toxic chemicals to be spilled and poison local communities. That’s because there are, in essence, no communities at all. Cities just sort of exist as a capitalist function, as do countries, there is no pooling of knowledge and resources for any other successful purpose than personal financial achievement. It ignores an endless amount of actual history (which is barely mentioned in her world), or anthropology, or the natural world, or sociology, which are usually only brought up in order to be dismissed.

But I think the most glaring and purposeful absence in her books are children. It’s because that’s where her world breaks down entirely. As a childless unmarried intellectual, Ayn Rand didn’t move in many circles where children were central. It allowed her to write a book where children and infants are occasionally glimpsed in order to make a point about poisoning the next generation, but the actual work of childrearing goes largely ignored. It may be one more reason that the men of the right wing don’t even see how much these books don’t work in the real world, because they’re still allowed to sit outside that process and treat their ability to do so as a personal achievement rather than a privilege.

None of the men or women in Ayn Rand’s book worry about the capitalist market poisoning their children. They don’t have to worry about maternal leave, or sexism towards pregnant women. They don’t have to take the time out of their day for pre or post natal care, or take their kids to school, or take a day off from work when their children are sick. As said above, there are no communities in her world. Presumably, everyone makes enough to have a nanny to tend their children, but how does the nanny make enough? Rand is silent on these points. And I must assume she knows what she’s doing, because she knew that to show the natural “communism” of the family unit would be to water down her message.

And let me reiterate, as a sci-fi author it’s fine if you don’t show every aspect of the real world if it would water down the point your sci-fi novel is trying to achieve. I can’t help but notice that Rand is fairly unique in the criticism she receives for not creating an exhaustively complete alternate universe, that there are flaws in her argument when you show that the world of Atlas Shrugged is not rigorously functional. Asimov, Rodenberry, and Heinlein don’t get nearly as much flack. (I can’t help but notice the gender of these writers, and I think the Left needs to be a little more self-reflective of why Rand is allowed to be gleefully torn down with such vitriol, whereas many male writers on the same topic are given respectful consideration.) But then again, those male writers are shelved under sci-fi, whereas Rand is one of those rare “lucky” sci-fi writers who was graduated from that “lower” genre to the vaults of literature because we arbitrarily decided her book is important enough to belong there. Despite the fact it literally contains magical machines, sonic bombs, futuristic metals, and a post-apocalyptic global wasteland that wouldn’t be out of place in any number of zombie apocalypses.

I could go on to discuss the fact that many right wing thinkers in government more closely match the jowly, spoiled, ignorant villains of her book than they do the titans of industry that are her protagonists. Someday I’ll put together a proper analysis along with sources and a more recent re-read pointing out just how many of the people who thump Atlas Shrugged as if it were their Bible fit exactly into the archetype Rand was denouncing, while they in turn denounce those who fit her vision. But that’s not Rand’s fault, that’s her fandom’s fault. 

The more important lesson is, people can’t continue to treat the sci-fi world of Atlas Shrugged as some sort of model for the real world, any more than they should do so with Asimov’s Foundation, or Herbert’s Dune. Those were contemporary sci-fi works talking about their own time periods. For goodness sake, Ayn Rand doesn’t even predict America’s trucking or aviation dependency, the fact that the world takes place in what can only be termed locomotive-punk should alone disqualify it as a model. But I do think we are unfair to her about the topics that she was qualified to pontificate on, and for that I give credit to the whole rambling, sprawling, pseudo-researched mess for giving me Dagny Taggart, the first an only unapologetic female titan of a male-dominated industry main character I’ve seen to this day.

[socjuswiz]

Masculinity, anime, and gender dysphoria

An analysis of media-induced transgender identification

Depicted: Rui Ninomiya. Actually just a cross-dressing boy but I wanted to use his image because it’s cute and fitting.

Anyone who spends a lot of time with the transgender debate will notice sooner or later that there are a ton of young trans-identifying males who are into anime, using anime girls for their social media avatars, sharing memes related to cute anime girls, and so on. We don’t have statistic or anything to confirm it (would be a strange thing to research), but the correlation seems beyond coincidence, and in this article I will put forth a theory on the dynamics behind the phenomenon, as someone who spent 5+ years in the anime community of 4chan, and developed a very mild form of gender dysphoria and autogynephilia during the same time.

Indeed, it’s a regular occurrence that people from the “Anime & Manga” board of 4chan visit the LGBT board and ask, explicitly: could it be that anime made me trans? Here’s a good example of a thread with many people admitting there being a connection:

https://archived.moe/lgbt/thread/7538520/

Their theories vary of course, and those convinced by gender identity ideology frame it as merely “discovering” themselves to be trans after getting into anime, as they don’t believe one can develop the conditions that lead to trans identification. They believe one can only be born trans.

Depicted: A formerly “cis” 4chan user talking about how he began identifying with an anime girl

To properly understand the phenomenon, or at least my theory of it, one needs to begin with an analysis of boys’ socialization into masculinity.

Masculinity

The stereotyping of humans in accordance with their sex begins before birth.

Yes, before birth.

I’ll update this article if I manage to find the study again, but basically, scientists observed how parents react when the unborn baby kicks, and found that, if the parents know the baby to be male, they are more likely to ascribe the kicking to the fact that the child is male and therefore assumed to be more physically active by nature.

Another study found that adults stereotype infants with accordance to the pitch of their cries. Low-pitched cries are attributed to boys whereas high-pitched cries are attributed to girls. When the sex of the infant is known, the pitch is assumed to signify how feminine or masculine the child is. When a male infant cries with a high pitch, it’s assumed to have a more serious cause than when a female infant does so, because female infants are assumed to cry with a high pitch anyway.

I’m giving these examples not to argue that kids begin to be affected by sex stereotypes starting before or soon after birth. I’m not an expert on neurological development, but would assume that babies that young don’t have the capacity to process how others treat them beyond a very basic level. My point is, rather, that by the time a child’s mind is developed enough to respond to such stereotyping treatment, the stereotyping is already happening. We spend not even the earliest phases of our mental development in an environment free of sex stereotypes. Our consciousness is born into a sex stereotyping environment, and grows within it starting from day zero.

For stages later than infancy, I’m not sure if there’s scientific evidence, but I would assume that my claims here are relatively uncontroversial: watch how parents, perhaps men in particular, interact with boys who even just begin to walk and talk, and you are likely to notice that expectations of masculinity are already there. Vaguely, the boy will be taught to be loud, active, self-asserting, to be king. If he is meek, passive, gentle, or otherwise “feminine” or “effeminate,” the boy will be met with disapproval or disappointment. Toy preferences will be policed: no, you don’t want to play with the pony with the glittering mane or the Barbie doll with the pretty hair and dress, those are for girls. Clothing is policed: only girls wear cute, pink, frilly dresses and skirts, or t-shirts with pretty kittens or princesses or whatever on them…

Now, I’m not trying to give a gendered upbringing 101 lesson. Especially for people well versed in feminist theory, all this stuff is basic. Instead, I want to draw attention to a very particular aspect of masculine upbringing, which ties into our topic.

A large part of masculine socialization is dependent on the killing of positive emotions that are deemed feminine, and the prevention of many ways of thinking and behaving that simply make a person feel wholesome, because they are simultaneously deemed to be girly.

I’m not the first to point this out. Andrea Dworkin talked about it as well if I remember correctly. (I probably picked it up from her.) The brilliant bell hooks explains the same thing the following way, as I’ve found just recently:

Depicted: bell hooks

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. -- bell hooks

To elaborate: the boy has to be loud and active, so he can’t relax. He has to assert himself, which means conflict and stress. He can’t be too gentle — even to the things he loves — because he’s not some kind of faggot now, is he? It becomes worse when boys begin to ridicule, ostracize, bully each other based on perceived effeminacy. It becomes really soul-breaking at that point. Sure, masculine socialization means learning to be the oppressor under patriarchy, but for the individual boy, especially the one who has no natural predisposition to the characteristics expected of masculinity, who instead is soft and gentle by nature, the role he is expected to play is his doom.

For many, the result is massive repression. Repress all the positive emotions. Even if you’re not very active, never just relax and enjoy the calm; sulk around with a grim face instead. If you dare to feel light-hearted joy in the first place: don’t dare expressing it with a heartfelt laugh, because laughing is for when you’re victorious over your rival whom you’ve just dominated — otherwise it’s a frivolous girly expression. Gentle touches and caresses are for girls and faggots, so you don’t let anyone touch you. If you can’t be the glorious masculine hero, you become the emotionless robot, the gloomy depressed kid who’s indifferent to pretty much anything, because then at least he’s not girly.

This more or less describes most of my childhood, adolescent, and young adult years, and currently I have to watch the same thing happening to a younger brother, who has a lot of softness inside of him just like me.

Of course, repression never fully works. The boy is left with a deeply seated longing for all those “feminine”-deemed feelings. A longing for enjoying life again. For being allowed to enjoy life, even.

And now, enter the anime subculture.

Cute Girls Doing Cute Things

Depicted: Yuyushiki main characters being cute

This is literally a genre of anime. Frequently abbreviated CGDCT.

Famous examples: Azumanga Daioh, K-On!, YuruYuri, A Channel, Hidamari Sketch, Non Non Biyori, Yuyushiki, Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka, Yama no Susume, and the list goes on. These are all just off the top of my head.

Officially, their genre tends to be listed as comedy and “slice of life.” Slice of life is sometimes also called iyashikei — a Japanese word meaning literally “healing.”

Depicted: Miyako from Hidamari Sketch. One of the overall best anime in history, to be quite honest.

Generally, all the main characters are female. Male characters tend to be rare, sometimes entirely absent from the series. The context is oftentimes a girls’ high-school or something similar.

And all the characters are ultra-feminine blobs of cuteness who tend to express their utter joy in life in the most cheerful and dramatic ways possible, or at least represent various stereotypes of femininity that exist in Japanese culture. They showcase purified, sterilized, highly idealized versions of femininity.

So this is like My Little Pony and “bronies” then, right? Adult men creating a subculture around cartoons made for young girls?

Well, not quite. These anime are made for men. The official target demographic is more often than not “seinen,” meaning adolescent boys and young men, sometimes older men even. Which is also why the female characters are frequently covertly or overtly sexualized. (I won’t even get into the whole pedophilic aspect of it.)

The Japanese seem to have learned to turn the repressed femininity of young men into profit.

By the way, said representation of female characters is not unique to CGDCT. Romantic comedies, action anime, and really any genre of anime frequently contain female characters of the same nature. One doesn’t need to indulge in die-hard CGDCT subculture to be bathed in this representation of joyful hyper-femininity.

Depicted: Inari with the divine foxes. One of my all-time favorite characters. Maximum cute, maximum healing.

For the repressed lonely boy, getting into such anime is first of all a way to indulge in the joys of femininity in a way he himself finds acceptable. It may not be entirely socially acceptable for young men to watch “girly” anime, but the male-dominated subculture around them, and the knowledge that the anime are “officially” made for young men, provides sufficient self-justification to overcome the internal fear of indulging in the “girly.” Moreover, the female characters are not only adored, but frequently also sexualized, which provides further masculinity-conformant justification.

Eventually, since the anime girl represents all those repressed emotions in the purest, most concentrated way possible, and as the boy indulges more and more in the media, he is overcome with the desire of becoming like her. A strong identification with the cute anime girl forms. He finally admits he always wanted to be soft and gentle like her, carefree and cheerful like her, enjoy life in its fullest without the heavy chains of masculinity, like her.

And a belief in “female gender identity” begins to form.

I have to go on a slight digression at this point.

I don’t have a straightforward explanation of why this identification also leads to the development of autogynephilia — why the boy begins desiring to be sexually passive and submissive, even becoming “pseudo bisexual” in Blanchard’s terms, when he is originally heterosexual. Sure, masculinity very strictly forbids sexual submission (especially submission to other men), so if there were a natural desire for submission then those feelings would be repressed along with the others, but why would an average straight boy have feelings of sexual submission in the first place? (I doubt that any person naturally has such feelings.)

I suppose it has something to do with seeing such sexually submissive performance as part of the whole package of glamorized femininity. Perhaps, frequent consumption of pornography, in which women are portrayed behaving sexually submissive and enjoying it, causes the boys to subconsciously associate sexual submission with pleasure, and after the floodgates of femininity are opened, this also surfaces. Indeed, many people seem to have an autogynephilic fetish that is more strictly sexual in nature, and that in turn has often been theorized (by the men who have the fetish) to be related to porn consumption. So possibly we’re dealing with an interaction between two distinct psychological processes: a porn-induced subconscious association between behaving sexually submissive and receiving sexual pleasure, leading to the development of a latent autogynephilic fetish, which then surfaces through the embracing of total femininity when repressed feelings explode through identification with cute anime girls who are able to enjoy life.

Perhaps a little far-fetched, but it’s the best I’ve got for now to explain how autogynephilic fetishism ties into the theory of repressed positive/feminine feelings.

Let us go back to feminine identification and gender dysphoria though.

The boy who had repressed positive, life-affirming emotions his whole life has finally found salvation through his cute anime girls who show him how to live life to its fullest. How to be a cheerful person radiating all kinds of love and joy. It’s not merely a superficial attachment. It can be experienced as a very deep, sincere feeling, which finally pulls him out of a life-long depression.

This is why the boy begins to feel not just regular discomfort with his body, which he finds ugly according to conventional beauty norms; rather, the mere maleness of his body starts to feel like a profound contradiction with what he finally finds within himself. The boy still being brainwashed by masculine ideology, the body causes extreme cognitive dissonance and distress, because it’s connected in his mind with the polar opposite of his newly found true and inner self. If I’m a cute, soft, cheerful girl on the inside, he thinks, how could I possibly have a manly body like this? How creepy, disgusting, and plain ridiculous would I look behaving like the cute girl that I am on the inside, when I’m going through all the motions with this male body?

So there you get gender dysphoria. Your whole life you’ve been taught that you’re supposed not to be like the feminine girls and instead a masculine boy, which you subconsciously hated, perhaps to the point of suicidality, and now you’ve finally discovered, and fully embraced, that you’re “really” a feminine girl, but the male body is still there and ruining everything. It’s reminding people that you’re actually male — no, it’s making them think that you’re male. So you jump around between trying to modify (maybe even mutilate) your body into a more feminine shape, and yelling at people that just because you have a male body, doesn’t mean that you’re not really a girl.

It’s a miserable state to be in, and I don’t wish it on anyone.

Not to excuse any of the misogyny coming from guys like this. Women didn’t do this to them, and women aren’t responsible for fixing the issue.

Depicted: Transgender male on 4chan expressing violent hatred for his female psychiatrist, attached with an image of an angry anime girl. For some reason, he thinks serious gender dysphoria precludes the possibility of having an autogynephilic aspect to the condition.

As a final remark, let me add that anime with cute girls in them is just one possible way in which repressed femininity can explode. Representations of glamorized femininity exist in a lot of media and around us, so for any individual young man, the gateway to gender dysphoria may be something entirely different, and may occur in various stages of life. I suspect that the story I’m telling here applies not only to anime-obsessed transgender males, but to many more of them. Possibly, the same general phenomenon explains the dysphoria of many younger boys as well, and not just adolescents.

One way or another, we must abolish gender if we want to fight this issue. Until then, expect to see more young men who hate their body to the point of desiring medical intervention, and who enter an existential crisis if you even just suggest to them that they are perhaps not literally a girl.