#sociology of heterosexuality

[heterorealism]

[rising-above-stars]

this did wonders on tiktok

this was also my final assignment for a sociology paper

[tamaharu]

its not all legally blonde of course - thats just the musical im interested in currently, as well as being an adaptation that brute forces the romance in. romance as a disarming effect can be seen across a bunch of different musicals. which like. cool! romance is fun to watch! it gets people in seats! but if you have a story that pushes against societal norms, but also heavily features romance, its very interesting to see where the distinction between love for a musical for its romance and love for a musical for its message lies. im talking about hadestown btw.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Do you have a list of good sex ed books to read?

BOY DO I

please bear in mind that some of these books are a little old (10+ years) by research standards now, and that even the newer ones are all flawed in some way. the thing about research on human beings, and especially research on something as nebulous and huge as sex, is that people are Always going to miss something or fail to account for every possible experience, and that's just something that we have to accept in good faith. I think all of these books have something interesting to say, but that doesn't mean any of them are the only book you'll ever need.

related to that: it's been A While since I've read some of these so sorry if anything in them has aged poorly (I don't THINK SO but like, I was not as discerning a reader when I was 19) but I am still including them as books that have been important to my personal journey as a sex educator.

additionally, a caveat that very few of these books are, like, instructional sex ed books in the sense of like "here's how the penis works, here's where the clit is, etc." those books exist and they're great but they're also not very interesting to me; my studies on sex are much more in the social aspect (shout out to my sociology degree) and the way people learn to think about sex and societal factors that shape those trends. these books reflect that. I would genuinely love to have the time to check out some 101 books to see how they fare, but alas - sex ed is not my day job and I don't have the time to dedicate to that, so it happens slowly when it happens at all. I've been meaning to read Dr. Gunter's Vagina Bible since it came out in 2019, for fucks sake.

and finally an acknowledgement that this is a fairly white list, which has as much to do with biases with academia and publishing as my own unchecked biases especially early in my academic career and the limitations of my university library.

ANYWAY here's some books about sex that have been influential/informative to me in one way or another:

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Michael Warner, 1999)

Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (Laura M. Carpenter, 2005)

Virgin: The Untouched History (Hanne Blank, 2007)

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s (Susan K. Freeman, 2008)

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Mary Roach, 2008)

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Revised Edition) (Susan Stryker, 2008)

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Jessica Valenti, 2009)

Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (Amy T. Schalet, 2011)

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Hanne Blank, 2012)

Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships (Meg-John Barker, 2013)

The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Realities (Rachel Hills, 2015)

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Tranform Your Sex Life (Emily Nagoski, 2015)

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (Jane Ward, 2015)

Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Jonathan Zimmerman, 2015)

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (Lisa Wade, 2017)

Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Hallie Lieberman, 2017)

Histories of the Transgender Child (Jules Gill-Peterson, 2018)

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen, 2020)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim Gallon, 2020)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister, 2020)

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

Black Women, Black Love: America's War on Africa American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart, 2020)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward, 2020)

Hurts So Good: The Science and Pleasure of Pain on Purpose (Leigh Cowart, 2021)

Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs (Ina Park, 2021)

The Right to Sex: Feminist in the Twenty-First Century (Amia Srinivasan, 2021)

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (Eric C. Wat, 2021)

Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Arielle Greenberg, 2023)

[genderkoolaid]

curious if you have any thoughts on the moral panic of “porn addiction”

this ask is 100% inspired by an argument im currently having in the notes of your post about booktok smut (someone gave me the link to a southern baptist lobbying group as proof that porn causes brain damage and i am just. in awe)

& I hope you know how much I value your efforts <3

In my first ever sociology class my teacher showed us a documentary on porn addiction. He was otherwise a cool guy, but leaned radical feminist and it really showed in that unit. The doc starts with a little white child playing on a playground, which was just absurdly emotionally manipulative to me. & throughout the documentary the "experts" were all people who financially benefited from the idea of porn addiction (sex therapists, book authors), they said blatantly incorrect information, and never once explained to the audience the controversy surrounding the term or showcase the opinions of sex workers or people engaged in BDSM and kink.

This is all to say that my experience with porn addiction has been that its often discussed by earnest people with genuine concerns, but the way it is conceptualized and understood is shaped by anti-sex bias & whorephobia. It capitalizes on fears of sex outside monogamous heterosexual vanilla marriage as an intoxicating poison equivalent to alcohol, but causing moral instead of physical illness. When there are real problems related to someone's interaction with porn, the blame is misdirected because of that anti-sex bias. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the people most invested in the idea of porn addiction are conservative Christians (and red-pill types who are also anti-masturbation. Imagine being a misogynist and stigmatizing jerking it? Sad!)

Pornography Use and Psychological Science: A Call for Consideration (article)

What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research? (book)

[ipso-faculty]

Today's rabbithole: the origins of "dyadic" as opposite of intersex/h-word

TLDR: "dyadic" seems to come from 1970s radical feminism and seems to have entered intersex vocabulary via gender studies. This implies it is NOT a term coined from within the intersex community.

I've been reading Cripping Intersex since it's this month's pick for @intersexbookclub (and it's not too late for you to pick it up yourself! 💜). One thing that caught my attention is Orr spends a bunch of time presenting the origins of "endosex" and "perisex" as disputed for whether these terms were coined by intersex people or not.

Orr does this because they clearly prefer "dyadic" and are trying to justify why they're talking about "compulsory dyadism" rather than "compulsory endonormativity/perinormativity" etc. 🤨

Interestingly enough, Orr makes absolutely zero attempt in the book to find an origin for the word "dyadic". 🧐 Orr also never questions whether the term "dyadic" actually came from the intersex community. 🧐 So..... rabbit hole time!

Before I get into what I found on dyadic, I wanna quickly fact check Orr on the origin of endosex. Best as I can tell, the term was first used in German in 2000 by Heike Bödeker. Bödeker is controversial for supporting autogynephilia 😬, but I've never seen anybody doubt Bödeker having mixed gonadal dysgenesis. If anybody knows of an older use of endosex, please send it my way! But as far as I can tell, "endosex" was coined by an intersex person.

Okay, onto the origin of dyadic. Orr presents this word as though its only detractors come from its implication there is a sex binary, even though as @intersex-ionality discusses here there are other reasons people don't like it. One reason is that the term is considered to originate from outside the intersex community.

Orr never questions the origins of dyadic. But intersex-ionality's post got me wondering if I could track down an textual origin.

So I went to Google Scholar, searched for "dyad" or "dyadic" plus "intersex" or the h-word and kept changing the time period increasingly far back in time. (Initially I just used intersex until I remembered the h-word slur would be more common in older articles 😬.)

I went into this thinking maybe dyadic would be related to how in early intersex studies literature like Critical Intersex (2009) you can see authors trying out terms like "dimorphic" and "dimorphous" that reference sexual dimorphism. (Neither "dyadic" nor "endosex" show up in the book.)

But the earliest works by intersex scholars that invoke dyadic tend to use it in a way that implies to me it has its own origin - e.g. Malatino (2010) talks about "at one pole, the dyad of the dimorphic heterosexual couple and, at the other, the hermaphroditic body" and "the heteronormative promised land of proper dyadic, dimorphic sex" which gives me the impression dyadic has a more sociological origin rather than the biology origin of dimorphic.

This 2010 gender studies article by Mandy Merck that talks about the intersex rights movement was my first solid lead. Merck draws a direct connection between the intersex rights movement and the 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. 😯

In the book, Firestone explicitly talks about the "male-female dyad". This book had a fairly big impact when it came out. Firestone was a big-name second-wave radical feminist. And as Merck puts it: "[Firestone's] aim is to release women and men from the culturally gendered[5] dyad of the “subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fantastic” and the “objective, logical, extroverted, realistic”[6] into a society undivided by genital differences. This she calls “integration.”" (emphasis mine)

Pushing the search terms to before the 00s, I found I there were some 1980s botanists kinda using "dyad" as an opposite to "hermaphrodite" (example). I don't know how standard this was though, and with Google Scholar it is important to remember that digitization becomes less common the further back you go. 🤷‍♀️

Judith Butler used "dyadic" in a 1985 article about Foucault's Herculine Barbin.

The Butler article got me searching for more generally - "dyad" or "dyadic" plus "sex-roles male female". I found lots of results using dyadic to talk about female/male sex roles from the 1970s.... and a rather sudden paucity of such articles in the 1960s. 🤔

When I restricted the search to anything before 1970, I get results from symbolic interactionist sociology. I.e. the sociology use of "dyadic" (i.e. any social interaction happening between a pair of individuals).

So looks like dyadic as a sex role thing entered the academic lexicon in the early 70s. Which lines up pretty damn well with The Dialectic of Sex coming out in 1970. 👍️ And indeed, many of the 70s uses of "dyadic" explicitly cite Firestone.

I'm guessing Firestone was probably influenced by the interactionist term. Lots of sociologists were talking about dyadic relationships and/or interactions such as teacher-student, parent-child, husband-wife, etc. In this context, it's not surprising that Firestone would pick dyad as a term to talk about male-female sex roles and interactions.

Other than the 1980s botany articles I didn't actually find much from the pre-2000 biology world, and no leads from the medical literature. This doesn't mean "dyadic" wasn't being used by physicans, just that it isn't showing up in my searches on Google Scholar.

I'm coming out of this with the impression that Merck's got it right to be connecting the intersex-related use of dyadic as originating from the writing of Shulamith Firestone. If anybody knows of competing evidence for an origin, *please* do send it my way as I'd be super interested. But in the absence of other evidence, I'd tentatively say that the term dyadic came out of second wave radical feminism and *not* the intersex community.

[retrieve-the-kraken]

Now that it’s been a year since the finale of Young Royals, I’m gonna post another one of my “I don’t know if someone has already said this, but” hypothesis/essays, although this one is a little shorter… (maybe).

Hypothesis: Wille is in the Aro and/or Ace Spectrum. 💚🤍🩶🖤 💜🤍🩶🖤 🧡💛🤍🩵💙

Sure, I might be saying this because I myself am in the aroace spectrum, and already I relate to other aspects of Wille (particularly having major anxiety, due to others’ expectations, not being able to meet them, etc.) so why not this one, right? But it’s precisely because I’m aroace, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading about being aroace (as any person who realized their sexual identity in their adulthood would do), that I feel like I know enough about it now to propose this hypothesis. I’m not just pulling this out of nowhere, nope. I’ve literally been thinking about this since season fucking one (i know, that’s a long time).

Hear me out.

I know we don’t get enough instances of what Wille was like before he met Simon, so we haven’t seen enough of Wille before he became smitten with the boy who sang defiantly in church, but from the beginning of the show, and all throughout, there seems to be no indication that Wille has ever looked at anyone the way he looks at Simon. No crushes, no boyfriends/girlfriends, no rumors, no prior romance rumors/sex scandals, nothing that might even indicate that he has any kind of preference. That is until he meets Simon, of course.

(I don’t know about other aroaces, but for me, besides not having the language when I was young, I just think it’s a little harder to realize you’re aroace. From both a scientific and sociological standpoint, I would propose that finding out you’re aroace, and maybe also bisexual and pansexual, is slightly harder than finding out you’re some of the other sexualities. I second-guessed myself for years, thinking that maybe I “just hadn’t met the right person yet” and all that stuff. Because it’s slightly harder to confirm the absence of something.)

(Asexuality is not an absence of sexuality, to be clear, it’s an absence of attraction. Same for aromanticism.)

But as it happens with most aroace people, the people around them assume them to be allosexual/alloromantic, even heterosexual/heteroromantic, at least until proved otherwise (and sometimes not even then).

And maybe the people around Wille would do the same with him. Even if there hadn’t been, as far as we know, any indication that he was or wasn’t. Until they’re ALL proven wrong.

I would propose that not even Wille knew. I don’t know about other aces, but I was immersed enough in the allonormativity around me, that I didn’t even have to convince myself that I was just like everyone else. I just assumed it. When I didn’t feel like kissing or dating anyone or having sex with anyone around the age of 16, I just subconsciously assumed that it was because I just hadn’t met anyone that I was interested in, that I was a late bloomer, etc. It only caught my attention when I was an adult and I continued to not feel that urge…

So maybe if Wille hadn’t met Simon when he did, he might have convinced himself that he just hadn’t met someone he was interested in, or maybe he would have convinced himself that he could have something with Felice, or someone else that was deemed appropriate for him. Just like he tries (unsuccessfully) to hook up with Felice to see if he would feel something for someone else, or for the opposite sex. (Well, if that isn’t the plot of Alice Oseman’s “Loveless”…) Even if Wille does seem to be getting into it, before they get interrupted… But there’s also a difference between attraction, sexual desire and libido that this ace in particular knows all too well by now. There are many, MANY ways to be arospec and/or acespec.

Rewind to the first season: when Wille becomes coy talking to his brother about his “crush”, and Erik teases him, it doesn’t seem to me like this is something that has happened before. Erik assumes that there has to be a crush involved, because obviously Wille is acting different. Skipping on a chance to come home? To stay at the school that he clearly hates?? To “study”??? Something’s fishy (get it? Fishy. Like Simon’s fish. Haha.)

But also the way Erik tells Wille to enjoy it before people decide to have an opinion on it, makes me think that this hasn’t happened yet. That this advice has not been handed down to his little brother before.

Meanwhile, as we see in season 2 with the girls gossiping at the cafe, they’re talking about the video and Wille and Simon, and then they turn to the topic of Erik’s love life, mentioning the OnlyFans model, and such. I would assume that, if Wille had been with someone, anyone, prior to Simon, that someone would be talking about it. But the only gossip that anyone has on Wille is with Simon. Everyone is talking about them, but the shock doesn’t only come from the fact that they got caught on video, also from the fact that Simon is a boy, his ethnicity and his social status.

That’s not to say that Wille could not have had a crush or even a relationship prior to Simon. Maybe he did, maybe we just didn’t get to see it, or hear anything about it. But judging from the way that he reacted when he first hears and then sees Simon, the way he latches on to him, the way he wants to be with him all the time, and so on and so forth… he’s never experienced that before. This is the first time. He’s inexperienced, but earnest. And so is Simon. But they work. They’re it for each other. Wille has found his person, no need to examine his sexuality further. He just wanted to be loved, to be with the person he loved, and escape all expectations thrust upon him.

Happy ending.

I lied. This turned out just as long as other posts. Could be even longer, but I’m tired…

In conclusion: maybe Wille could be grayromantic/graysexual, or even demiromantic/demisexual. Or maybe he’s just Simonromantic/Simonsexual. Whatever he is, he remains unlabelled. He could be so many things. I just decided to explore the possibility that he is this one thing, and I think I could make a pretty good case for it.

I would love to hear other opinions on this, fun facts, things that I might have missed, questions, etc. Don’t be rude in the comments, though. Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

💚🤍🩶🖤 💜🤍🩶🖤 🧡💛🤍🩵💙

[heterorealism]

(via (50) Pinterest)

[animefeminist]

Hagio Moto’s Marginal and BL manga as feminist fabulation

Content Warning: Discussions of sexual assault and gendered violence

Major Spoilers for Marginal

Hagio Moto—a key manga artist of the year 24 group shoujo renaissance—is famous for her comics exploring gender and sexuality (The Poe Clan, The Heart of Thomas), and her often mystical, mind-expanding sci-fi (Otherworld Barbara), as well as works that do both (They Were Eleven, A, A’). Marginal, released from 1985-1987, is an example of this overlap. Set on a Dune-like desert world in which all women have died out, and all babies are born to a mysterious religious figure known as “Mother,” Marginal explores what gender relations might look like in a world with no women.  Here, Hagio follows in a long sci-fi tradition of feminist novels and short stories like Suziki Izumi’s “Onna to onna no yononaka” (A World of Women and Women, 1977), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and Kurahashi Yumiko’s Amanon koku ōkanki  (Records of a Voyage to Amanon, 1986), which use a fantastical premise conduct speculative sociological experiments into other ways gender could be done. Marginal is very much worth the read alongside these texts, as a work of feminist fabulation which uses emergent “boy’s love” tropes to talk about heterosexual relationships, as much as to fantasize about homosexual ones. 

Read it at Anime Feminist!

[gatheringbones]

[“For many participants who engaged in “Critical Cis-ness,” there was a connection to their own lived experiences and an active interrogation of self that led to their refusal to force trans women to live according to the whims of cisgender people. Alyx, for example, stated that she respected if someone did not want to immediately tell her they are trans. In response, I asked her, “What makes you respect that decision?” Alyx explained:

I grew up in [a predominantly White, wealthy, conservative city in Georgia,] and it’s not exactly like the most welcoming place, so like I super understand if you don’t wanna like put that out there immediately. That could be dangerous for some people. Um so it’s, yeah, it’s someone’s own personal decision.

Alyx “came out” in middle school, and her first non-cisgender, man partner was an individual who “came out” to her as a trans man in the middle of their relationship. After “coming out,” she experienced overt and covert heterosexism from adults in her school, and her experiences of discrimination led her to understand why people would not want to be out as LGBTQ.

Another participant, Cookie, utilized her sociological imagination to understand why a trans woman would not want to tell her that she is trans. When I asked Cookie how she would react if she dated or slept with a woman who later “came out” to her as trans, she answered:

I wouldn't really be mad because I understand. From her standpoint, how scary something like that might be, um, just because of how, you know, people may have responded to her in the past, or fear of how people might respond, or the fear of losing me as a friend, as a partner, whatever. So, I would be like, “Damn,” but like, it wouldn't change anything. Like we wouldn't stop talking, like I wouldn't stop talking to her because she neglected to tell me until late or wouldn’t stop talking to her because it, that was the reality of the situation. Like I get it, like people go through their own stuff. People, you know, heal and grow and learn in their own ways. And I would be a bullshit ass person to just, ‘cause I’m sure there’s things that I probably might not tell her ‘til sometime down the road. You know?

Cookie understood the reality of a cissexist world that socializes trans women to be hyper-vigilant regarding to whom and when they “out” themselves if at all. Cookie shifted the emotional labor off the trans woman regarding “outing” herself and onto cis partners to process potential feelings of disappointment on their own. Further, Cookie highlighted the time it takes for individuals to share various pieces of themselves. Rather than viewing trans women not “outing” themselves as deceptive or dishonest, she normalized it by comparing trans women’s decisions to any other mundane decision when dating.

While Cookie’s response was a longer, more introspective answer, most participants who engaged in Critical Cis-ness answered questions regarding trans women “outing” themselves succinctly and nonchalantly. I asked Peaches, “Do you care whether a woman tells you right away or not that she’s trans?” Peaches said, “No, I think that should be someone’s option when they’re ready to tell you, they can tell you . . . I don’t think I would be upset because if she identifies as woman, then she’s a woman at the end of the day.” Peaches did not have to consider her response, nor did she figure herself into the equation. Instead, she like other participants in this category centered trans women and displayed forethought regarding the lived experiences of trans women.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[cognitohazardous]

its interesting to watch poly v monogamous discourse proliferate to the point that straight (derogatory) has become monogamous (derogatory). like i saw a post saying "monogamous people must be stopped" with a screenshot about some woman getting a gift from her husband saying "im sorry if you dont feel secure in our relationship my heart is yours" after looking thru his phone and was thinking about how, a few years ago, that wouldve said "the straights need to be stopped".

I saw another post about fears regarding the loyalty of one's partner inherently stemming from biphobia, which i would argue is entirely untrue, though maybe i simply misinterpreted the post because that's quite a bold claim to have gotten >5k notes.

i havent considered the broader topic much and havent actually seen much genuine discussion about monogamy and also i don't concern myself with sexual sociology but it seems that monogamy is becoming shunned as an antiquated/traditionalist relationship structure. My initial reaction is that this feels a bit unfair and pointlessly divisive. I know monogamy is the long-predominant western relationship structure so it's recognized as being tied to heterosexuality, but to diminish gay/bi monogamy is counter-productive when it comes to liberating intimacy. It seems that a lot of poly people view monogamy as inherently possessive and jealous, though that is not true. Of course there is much to be said about monogamous people's misconceptions about polygamy, but that's another soapbox that I am not equipped to stand on.

My view is that monogamy is a very personal preference and oaths of loyalty should be respected as individual choices rather than outright castigated. this comes with combating abusive and possessive relationships and loyalty-related insecurities, though these are not by any means issues intrinsic to monogamy.

This also comes with the normalization of polygamy, though. Both of these are personal preferences that should be readily available to those wanting to pursue them and both of them come with the potential for specific forms of unhealthy relationships.

I think my overall point is that I worry about polygamous people falling into misplaced criticisms which would lead to arbitrary conflict. And again, there is much to be said about the other side of the coin but i'll leave that to someone else so that I can read it. This is not a topic with which I engage much at all but I wanted to think aloud in the hopes that I can learn from any opposing viewpoints presented.

[nereidyke]

hey! I’ve just recently accepted (aka connected all the dots) the fact that I’m a femme but I wanted to get some other femmes takes on how they identify with it to help me better understand it. What are some of the most important aspects of ur identity and what resources/books would u recommend for someone with less knowledge? 💕💕

yes ofc! i won't claim to be the arbiter of knowledge on this topic, but my femme identity wasn't something i had considered until i started dating my butch 3 years ago. for me, femme is dichotomized by my relationship to butches, ie a mutual respect and protection not found within heterosexuality. this is going to be a little long because there is much to say on this topic, apologies in advance (i like writing about and studying gender).

femininity in itself is a system that is naturalized to the convention of woman, sociologically speaking, and is indeed a form of gender conformity for people who identify with or are perceived as women (ofc this varies when accounting for the nuances of transfeminity and race, but generally speaking femininity as a construct is falsely attributed to "woman"). so in a sense, the gender conformity, as in historical accounts of butchness and femmeness, is itself the protection that i offer to my butch. it allows my butch access to a social system that he, as a masculine person perceived by society to be a woman, would not otherwise have access to.

i mostly read radical feminist texts, and to understand the system of femininity, the naturalization of gender as a construct, and the place that lesbianism has in a heterosexual society, i would recommend reading lesbian second wave author monique wittig. the category of sex and one is not born a woman are two essays by her that i recommend to everyone because they explain heterosexuality and how it constructed the conventions of "man" and "woman" around itself and embedded that into the fabric of western society well.

speaking personally, existing as a femme with my butch is comforting because i am allowed to explore femininity in a context removed from heterosexuality, removed from men. femininity is a performance, and when i perform it for my butch it feels right. i don't claim that my "version" of femininity is really entirely different from a heterosexual woman's or a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man, but the performance of it works in opposition to male ownership over my body. i am performing it for a lesbian, a butch, not a man, and that is what makes being femme fundamentally different from women performing femininity for men.

it all comes down to that performance, and specifically who the audience of that performance is. again, at the end of the day, i am gender conforming because women are expected to be feminine in their actions, appearance, and choices, but that gender conformity is a privilege i use as a protection for my butch and other butches i am friends with. i struggled with femininity when i was younger, i never performed womanhood to the degree that i was meant to due to the fact that i am a lesbian (and if you read one is not born a woman she goes into excellent detail on the inherent degendering of lesbians), and that is something that informs my choices and the femininity that i perform.

being degendered by heterosexual patriarchy, and choosing to conform to some of its expectations while rebelling through the act of being a lesbian and through performing femininity for a masculine figure who is not a man is the most important aspect of the femme identity to me. it almost in a sense adds insult to injury for heterosexual expectations. as i said before, femme is dichotomized by butch and the protection offered to butches through gender conformity that they don't have access to, so another really important part of my identity as a femme is how i can use that identity to help and protect butches.

i hope this helped!! like i said i'm not as much of an expert in femme writing (because honestly i've struggled to find my own resources) but i do recommend reading feminist texts first and foremost, because understanding the lesbian gender category in general is paramount understanding how femininity functions sociologically, and how adhering to it is a privilege not offered to certain members of the lesbian community.

[sinimake]

MK1 is such a bizarre experience bc on one hand some characters have benefited a lot from the "universe reset" (Baraka, Reptile, even arguably Shao who is less than a muahahaha conquer villain but someone who actually seems to care about his realm?). Others kind of raise interesting questions, like Shang Tsung : is he doomed to be bad or can he be good for a change? (In the story he choses to become a snake-oil salesman before joining the imperial family + there is an Union of Light Shang Tsung so him being good is a thing that could happen).

But then, instead of using that full reset NRS just leaves some things the same? Like. It's a reset. In 2023/2023. That was the perfect moment for implementing some (maybe not lots) changes. Perhaps starting making Johnny canonically bi? Just a small ripple towards a bigger change? Instead of getting stuck in same old ways?

YOW EXACTLY

Things i loved about Mk1 change:

Mileena and Kitana sibling relationship

Rain's character design

Tanya and Mileena!!!!

Sindel being badass empress and outworld thriving in peace under her reign

Baraka and Syzoth on the good side!!

Kenshi's yakuza past

Geras and Liu Kang's friendship! Liu Kang actually treating Geras as his equal 🥺 and Geras being so loyal to him 😫😭

Shang Tsung's zitsy behavior

Lin Kuei brothers 🥺

What i hate:

Hanzo being a kid and essentially everything about him being handed to Kuai Liang

Kung Lao being the second best again

Raiden and Kitana romance

Mileena and Tanya having the barest screen time

Controversial opinionated rant down below

I hated that they essentially just switched Liu Kang and Raiden's places. I started MK1 right after MK11 that i was furious to see Raiden chosen as the champion (IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MY BOY KUNG LAO LET HIM SHINE ISTG) and then flirting with Kitana with Liu Kang's exact line (I hope we meet again under different circumstances)??? Tf??

I understand that some plot elements are too good to change but character romances? Don't replace one side of the pairing, then try to serve it to the audience again! Reboot should give us more variety of character designs, stories, dynamics, and relationships. Give us the genderbent, queer, poc characters BC YOU'RE NOT EVEN SACRIFICING ANYTHING when we literally have infinite alternative timelines you can recall classics from. For example, we have our human Raiden and old man titan Raiden. We can do variety. I wanna see female Fujin, i wanna see Scorpion Harumi and fighter Suchin, i want actual deserved queer representation in Kung Jin, and i. wanna. see. canon Johnshi!

My hypothesis is that NRS is gonna bring in mk children through dimensional travel so that they don't need to age up our current characters. I'm saying this to push my point further that we don't need to repeat romance plotlines (dont come at me. I have bais just as you have bais for ur fav old pairings)

Listen, i loved Sonya and Johnny in previous games, her and Cassie were a huge part of Johnny's character arc, but since Johnny is already maturing by the end of mk1, i don't see a point in Cageblade anymore (very controversial but it's my blog so i will yap as much as i want) We are not erasing anything by possibly making Johnny queer. Johnny and Sonya can be married in different timeline and Cassie is still their child. If anything, we are enriching the character, expanding the universe. Really, I don't wanna buy the exact same game story in different graphics. I don't want to see Suchin die again just to serve Kenshi and Takeda's dynamic.

And don't even get me started again on heteronormality of the game. We have 6 realms that have diverse variety of biological and sociological configurations AND YOU'RE TELLING ME THEY ARE ALL HETEROSEXUAL?? NRS is a fucking pussy for not having enough queer representation. They think they can give us vague "blink, you will miss it" moments and move on. There are so many high selling good games with good lgbtq characters. Literal 2023's the game of the year, BG3 is so fucking gay that it's off to space and you're telling me that NRS is just going 🥺👉👈 but our fans 🥺👉👈

Anyways, NRS can eat shit and Johnshi for the president 🤘

[velvetvexations]

People seem to think socialization necessarily means something about an individual but imo it's more meant to be group focussed or related to how people are viewed. Like if a child is assumed to be a boy because of bioessentialsm, they're going to be pressured to be masculine and heterosexual regardless of their actual identity or response to these forces. And the same for children assumed to be girls. That means nothing about the individuals gender or anything. I wouldn't even necessarily call that male/female socialization, but it's not wrong to acknowledge that we exist within a system that does it's darndest to force everyone to conform to expectations based on "biology".

Slightly unrelated but there's this idea that gendered socialization is limited to a binary and not intersectional. Like actualizing socializing forces demonstrates that not only is it not necessary broadly applicable, but it is also highly influenced by other factors such as race class, location, etc. socialization, imo, is more about were there certain social pressures to look and act a certain way that are then responded to or internalized depending on various factors not "boys are told to be mean so everyone who was raised as an assumed boy is mean and bad"

Like terfs use a fucked up definition of socialization to harm trans people, often to frame transfems as harmful in a way that sounds scientific enough if you don't know about actual sociology, but that doesn't mean we should respond "actually this entire framework for viewing cultural forces is entirely garbage because it can be misinterpreted in a harmful manner"

As always :nothing is a purely black and white binary. Individual experiences will always vary within a group, and categorically denying someone can experience something will always end up alienating part of the group you're trying to protect instead of helping. Transfeminism is not helped by forcing trans women to toe the line of the right way to be trans women in order to be accepted no matter who that comes from

it just sucks that I was talking about how TRFs would interpret that kinna thing and it happened within the day

[evenmyhivemindisempty]

what would the boyds be like in college??

Steve Murphy: Steve takes college very seriously! He’s working a national security major, with a criminal justice minor (should’ve minored in Spanish, alas), and beyond the occasional low-key hangout with beer or weed, he really isn’t looking to party, and he’s certainly not trying to fuck around. His roommate, Javi, might have something to say about that…

Donald Pierce: Pierce is absolutely in college only because of an unexpected full-ride scholarship, and he throws himself into his mechanical engineering program headfirst. He’s having so much fun in classes and in the lab, the only time his roommate sees him is when he staggers in at 3AM after losing track of time in the pneumatics lab. He’s talkative but not terribly social, and his professors either adore him or think he’s a massive pain in the ass.

Cap Hatfield: Cap gets into an environmental science program, and has a really good time! He’s not as climate focused as some of the other students, but he’s really into nature preservation and he also loves the field trips they take to analyze soil samples or check out the local fish hatchery. Despite his major, most of Cap’s friends are actually in the fine arts program - he’s always had a knack for finding those types of groups!

Clement Mansell: He absolutely thinks he’s gonna be a music major, but he flunks out of music theory and drives all his vocal coaches insane. He kind of accidentally stumbles into art history, but once he’s there, he’s in love. He’s so hooked by the course material, and the summer trip to Rome some of his classmates and professors take is the best experience of his life. It’s genuinely impressive he’s able to balance his major with the intense amount of partying he’s doing too.

The Corinthian: First off, Corinthian joins a frat. I’m sorry, but he does. He wants to be surrounded by horny young men 24/7. Keep in mind - not all frats are created equal! There are some that are less compulsively heterosexual… although let’s be real, Corinthian is sososo into the weird psychosexual hazing/initiation rituals they do during pledging. (For any non-American followers, this stuff is not a Hollywood myth - it really does happen, and it’s genuinely kinky as hell.) For his major, Corinthian gets into an anthropology program. He loves studying humanity and culture in all its forms!

Eli Klaber: He takes psychology because he correctly assumes it’s the easy major (I can say this, I coasted through my own psych major, 10/10 would recommend), but he’s so invested in the Psychology of Gender elective he takes that he actually ends up doing a whole gender studies minor.

Danny Maguire: His dad pushes him towards a business degree, which he loathes, but endures because his dad’s paying for university, plus his ritzy off-campus apartment. He ends up getting really into film studies though - it’s not enough for a second major, but he ends with a minor in it.

Vic Owen: He starts off with something like sociology, because he thinks it’ll be easy, but when he discovers his college actually offers an equine studies major, oh boy, he’s switching gears so damn fast. He spends his weekends working in the barns, and for some extra pocket cash he sells off Ritalin and Addy to his classmates.

Ty Shaw: He comes in on a football scholarship, and doesn’t really have to try, but he wants to make the most of it, and ends up going into a history major because he just finds it wildly compelling. He starts off with American history, ’cause it just feels like the thing to do, but pretty quickly starts to gravitate outwards. By the end, he’s got a degree in Asian studies. He’s a total partier too, and he goes through so many boyfriends and girlfriends. Some of their sexy amateur pornos are still on Reddit to this day!

Quinn McKenna: Math major, ROTC.

[djuvlipen]

With the end of Pride Month and Romani Heritage Month approaching, I recommend every radical feminist to read Dzuvljarke

“Džuvljarke (*Ȝuvlӑrke) – is a term from the Roma language (Romani) and used among Roma living in Serbia. Together with its Serbian-influenced suffix, it is used to refer to a lesbian, a woman emotionally and sexually oriented towards women. This term usually implies a negative connotation, particularly within the heteronormative patriarchal Serbian and Romani social matrix.”

“The aim of this paper is to ensure that when lesbian existence is discussed, the conversation opens a path leading to the empowerment of these women, who are, at the moment nameless and invisible and remain objects of shame and victims of multiple forms of violence and discrimination.” (European Roma Rights Centre)

"Vera Kurtić is a radical feminist and a Romani woman. She is an activist and one of the coordinators of Women Space, an organization based in Niš, Serbia and one of is a founding member of the Romani Women Network of Serbia that gathers organizations and groups from across the country into a joint and unified force directed to enhance the position of Romani women. Also, she is a one of the founders of informal international Roma LGBT Network. She studied sociology and communications, the main fields of her interest are intersectionality of different discrimination based on gender, sex, race, class and sexual orientation, as well as representation of marginalized social group in media and public space. Vera is the founder of Campaign Month of Roma women activism, author of Džuvljarke- lesbian existence of Roma women, the first study on Roma women of different sexual orientation than heterosexual." (source)

It's available for free here: x