#some women want other women to suffer to justify their suffering

[blackpilljesus]

Maturing is realising that women aren't that much better than maIes - they just lack power because when they have power they're also violent & abusive.

For example women who treat service workers like crap because they wont face consequences, women who pimp out their daughters to predators online, women who set up other women to be raped by moids, women who mock other victims of maIe violence + side with their abusers, racist women, female bosses that abuse their power to bully female subordinates, women that are physically violent to smaller women & girls, groups of women & girls ganging up to bully a woman or girl, those aunties (if you're a woc you'll know what I'm talking about) that wouldn't try that attitude to boys or white people, etc I'm sure y'all know.

There is no solidarity between women because women as a collective have no power. There's no interest to the average woman to defend another woman to the end because they dont see much benefit from it. Women are nicer to maIes even when they dont want to be not because women have endless empathy but because they lack power, if more women could physically rock moids shit they would do it.

Also, many women are sellouts and will be quick to throw other women under the bus for crumbs of power so you can't blindly trust women because they're women. They would be quiet on moids dirty laundry but a woman makes a small mistake and they become town crier.

Now i'm not exonerating moids of their evil but telling women (y'all) to look out because as it'll be more effort for women to fight against maIes, you will be a target if they perceive you as weak/easier to overpower. Usually when these topics are brought up it's a disingenuous attempt to pretend maIes are in danger because of women to detract from the conversation about maIe violence. However, as a woman it's important to be aware of how other women are threats especially if you're marginalised because if you try this feminist kumbaya shit in real life you're going to be burned. If other women sense weakness from you they will exploit it & you will be a target even if you dont provoke them. I dont care for a backstory overall for their actions; point is they are also a threat to be watched out for.

Also the fact that women turn their aggression to the powerless instead of those that generally hurt them should say it all. This is not an attack on women. The comparison is not between maIes & women behavior per se, it is about how women treat maIes & females. It's a hard pill to take down but it's essential for your survival to do so. This notion that of women being inherently good is something that gets exploited by sex traffickers (many of whom are women). Yes maIes are generally dangerous & in the end I'd rather physically take my chances dealing with an antagonistic woman than maIe but don't assume womens innocence either.

I stopped feeling bad for many women when I realised this. Women dont have better morals, women will gladly use others without a second thought to advance themselves, they'll happily punch down on others to secure what little status they have in society. They'll use the power they have to make other women & girls lives hell. I'm not saying women have to be overly empathetic, perfect or innocent to acknowledge how messed up misogyny is. In the end women are human too & most some humans suck. But it's misleading & dangerous pushing the narrative that women are these overly empathetic angels who do no wrong unless "influenced", when they are not that. Long story short, personally watch your backs and assess women on a case by case basis.

Edit: On the human side of things, this behaviour isn't just limited to women. Several marginalised people are this way including maIes which is something that made me stop caring about activism. Most people dont care about inequality, they care about being on top of the unequal hierarchy. There's a belief on the left that marginalised people = more moral and that's far from the truth. In nigeria people are usually harsh to their workers & poor people, at first I didn't understand why but when you're nice to them or help them out they see you as an idiot & screw you over with whatever advantage they have. This isn't to say don't help, but just be wary of others even if they seem less privileged.

[giritina]

Lately I've been dipping my toe into the mess that is transandrophobia discourse, and in the process I've been presented with one question in many forms:

"Do trans men experience misogyny?"

My initial answer was "these terms are all theoretical frameworks for a vast range of human experiences, why would you choose to frame your pre-transition experiences as that of a woman?" This makes sense to me, but clearly isn't satisfactory to many of the people sending me anons. As much as I might want to use my own life as a case study, I can't very well tell these people in my asks box "no, you've never experienced something that could be categorized as misogyny." Still, the question bothers me.

I think that's because the question obfuscates the actual debate. It's clear to me the question we are debating is not one of "experience" but "authority." That is:

"Do (binary) trans men understand what it's like to be a woman?"

My answer? No.

How can I justify that when we have, since birth, been raised as women? Well, because we also have, since birth, been trans men. If we cast aside the idea of transness as a modern social construct or anything other than an innate and biological reality, this has to be true. Even before you ever came out to yourself, you were transgender. Transphobia has dictated every moment of your life. Your idea of what "womanhood" is is not at all the same as a woman's, be it cis or trans. Why? Because a woman does not react to "being a woman" with the dysphoria, dissociation, and profound sense of wrongness that you do. [If you do not experience these things, a cis or trans woman, at the very least, does not identify as a binary trans man.] A woman sincerely identifies as a woman, and identity plays a pivotal role in how we absorb societal messaging.

Let's take homophobia as an example. While any queer person has probably experienced targeted episodes of bigotry, the majority of bigotry we experience must necessarily be broad and social. Boys learn to fear becoming a faggot as a group, but the boy who is a faggot will internalize those messages in a completely different way to the boys who only need learn to assert the heterosexual identity already inherent in them through violence. All of them are suffering to some extent, but their experiences are not at all equivalent. This is despite the fact that they've all absorbed the same message, maybe even at the same moment, through the same events. Still, we don't say that a straight boy knows what it is like to be a gay boy. Similarly, cis women do not know what it is like to be a trans man despite being fed the same transphobic messaging in a superficially identical context. It isn't a stretch to say the same can apply to misogyny.

Because I can't speak for you, I'll use myself as an example for a moment. I'll give my bonafides: I am a gender-nonconforming, T4T queer, white, binary trans man. I am on T, and I have recently come out to my family. I do not pass. My career as a comic writer is tied to my identity as a trans man. I can confidently say I have never been impacted by misogyny the same way as my friends who actually identify as women. This manifested early on as finding it easy to shrug off the messaging that I needed to be X or Y way to be a woman. In fact, most gender roles slid off my back expressly because breaking them gave me euphoria. I was punished in many ways for this, but being this sort of cis woman did help me somewhat. It's easy to be "one of the guys" in a social climbing sense if you really do feel more comfortable as a man. It also helped me disregard misogyny aimed at me or others because it seemed like an shallow form of bigotry. It was something you could shrug off, but it was important for building "unity" among women. I thought this must be the case for all women, that we all viewed misogyny as a sort of "surface level" bigotry. However, for whatever conditional status I gained in this role, there was a clear message that if I did "become" a man, every non-conformist trait about me would just become a grotesque and parodic masculinity.

That was the threat that was crushing me, destroying my identity and self esteem. That was what I knew intimately through systemic, verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. I could express my nonconformity as a cis woman, but if I took it so far as to transition to male? I would be a pathetic traitor, a social outcast. I truly believe that throughout my life people were able to see that I was not just a failed woman, but an emasculated man.

I do partly feel that the sticking point for many is the idea that the sexual abuse suffered by trans men is inherent to womanhood, and therefore inexplicable if trans men are men from birth. While this disregards the long history of sexual abuse of young boys, especially minority boys, I do see the emotional core. I'll offer that the sexual abuse I suffered was intrinsically linked to my emmasculation, my boyishness, despite the fact that I was not out to myself or anyone else. I believe many trans men have suffered being the proxy for cis women's desire for retribution against cis men, or for cis men and women's desire for an eternally nubile young boy. I also believe they have suffered corrective assault that attempts to push them back into womanhood, which in itself is an experience unique to transness rather than actual womanhood.

I'll note quickly that many, many trans men cannot relate to the idea of feeling confident and above it all when it comes to womanhood. Many of you probably tried desperately to conform, working every moment to convince yourself you were a woman and to perfectly inhabit that identity. I definitely experienced this as well (though for me it was specifically attempting to conform to butchness) but I can concede many of you experienced it more than I did. I still believe that this desperate play-acting is also not equivalent to true womanhood. It is a uniquely transgender experience, one that shares much more in common with trans women desperately attempting to conform to manhood than with true womanhood.

One key theme running through the above paragraphs is the idea that "womanhood" is synonymous with "suffering." A trans man must know what it is like to be a woman because he suffers like one. It should be noted that actual womanhood is not a long stretch of suffering. It often involves joy, euphoria, sisterhood, a general love and happiness at being a woman. It wasn't until I admitted to myself I had never been a woman that I was able to see how the women in my life were not women out of obligation, but because they simply were. The idea that you are a woman because you suffer is more alligned with radfem theory than any reality of womanhood.

When I admitted my identity to myself I was truly faced with the ways that my ability to stand up to misogyny did not equate to being anti-misogynist. I was giddy to finally be able to admit to being a man, and suddenly all that messaging that "slid off my back" was a useful tool in my arsenal. Much like cis gay men feel compelled to assert their disgust for vaginas and women after a life of being compelled towards heterosexuality, I felt disgust and aversion to discussions of womanhood as an identity. I didn't even want to engage with female fictional characters. I viewed other people's sincere expressions of their own womanhood as a coded dismissal of my identity. Like many people before and after, I made women into the rhetorical device that had oppressed me. Not patriarchy, not transphobia, but womanhood and women broadly. It wasn't explicit bigotry, but the effects were the same. I had to unlearn this with the help of my bigender partner, who felt unsettled and hurt by the way I could so easily turn "woman" into nothing but a theoretical category which represented my personal suffering.

This brings me to another point: I sometimes receive messages from nonbinary trans mascs telling me that it's absurd to think they don't understand womanhood and identify with misogyny in a deeper way. I would agree that, if you sincerely identify in some capacity as a woman, you are surely impacted by misogyny in a way I am not. However, why are you coming to the defense of binary trans men like me? Less charitably, why are you projecting a female identity on us? Perhaps my experience frustrates you so deeply because we simply do not have the same experience at all. Perhaps we are not all that united by our agab, by our supposed female socialization.

So, no. I do not believe that binary trans men know what it's like to be women. I don't believe we are authorities on womanhood. I do not believe that when a trans woman endeavors to talk about transmisogyny, your counterargument about your own experiences of misogyny is useful. I ESPECIALLY do not believe that it is in any way valid to say that you are less misogynist, less prone to being misogynist, or-- god forbid-- INCAPABLE of misogyny because you were raised as a girl. I also don't believe your misogyny is equivalent to that of a woman's internalized misogyny in form or impact.

For as much as many in this movement downplay privilege as merely "conditional," those conditions do exist. They do place you firmly in the context of the rest of the world. Zoom out and look at the history of oppressed men, and you'll find the same reactionary movement repeated over and over. Attacking the women in your community for not being soft enough, nice enough, patient enough, rather than fighting the powers that be. Why do I believe your identity is more alligned with cis manhood than any form of womanhood? Because this song and dance has been done a hundred times before by men of every stripe. Transphobia is real, and your life experience has been uniquely defined by it since birth. This is a thing to rally around, to fight against, but you all have fallen for a (trans)misogynistic phantasm in your efforts at self-actualization. You are not the first, and you will not be the last. Get out of this pipeline before it's too late.

[etz-ashashiyot]

Okay today in: Things I never thought I'd have to explain to alleged leftists

There is literally never an excuse for rape. There just isn't.

Like torture, it is a crime with absolutely no valid purpose whatsoever; it is simply a way to cause extreme suffering to another human being. Rape is effectively a type of torture, especially when paired with physical abuse or other sadistic acts.

With most other kinds of violence (not all) there are at least some circumstances that might (regrettably) call for them. Hitting someone? Injuring them? Even killing them? In a life or death scenario, you might have to defend yourself or someone else, even to the death.

But rape and torture require a lot more intentionality and are never necessary. Torture is known to produce bad information. And rape? Well, rape is specifically and only a way to humiliate and dominate someone. There are no circumstances under which rape is the correct answer.

No personal trauma, no collective trauma, no cause — nothing is a valid justification for rape.

Worse — rape is often not even intended as a punishment for the person (most commonly a woman or girl) being raped, but actually as a proxy to wound the men in their lives, the fathers, the husbands, the brothers, the sons who aren't able to protect "their" women.

Not only does this line of thinking reject the pain of the actual survivor in favor of her relatives, but it actually totally dehumanizes her and reduces her to an object that the rapist has damaged to get back at the man he actually wants to hurt.

Justifying rape as a tool for any reason whatsoever makes you a cesspool, I don't care what your internal justification is.

[genderkoolaid]

Just saw a post on my dash claiming you're a terf psyop because some terf on Twitter has the same username as you. I just wanted to warn you in case you haven't seen it yourself. You two having the same name is the only evidence given in the post. Nothing else. And I frankly don't believe it for a second. But other people are spreading this and seem to be accepting it as the truth. And I think it's messed up, and I'm worried about you. You don't have to respond to this at all btw; I just wouldn't have felt right about seeing this and not telling you.

Well this is wild lmao. I'm presuming both of these are talking about the same person.

—

—

Obviously that is not me. Mostly because I am not in fact a TERF (or from the UK). I chose "genderkoolaid" to be ironic because transphobes use that phrase.

But also because, if I was a TERF psyop, why in the world would I use the same URL for both my secret evil psyop account and my blatant TERF account?

She seems to have developed an entire conspiracy theory around transandrophobia in which she starts with the idea that everyone who talks about it is a secret TERF, and works backwards to twist anything anyone ever says into being proof of her conspiracy:

—

^ Her pinned post is... something!

Anyone can find the worst posts in the transandrophobia tag and use it as proof the whole thing is transmisognistic, because obviously transmisogyny remains a widespread problem and no space or group is exempt. But she doesn't even use those, really. Any post that talks about how transmascs suffer from misogyny, or just suffer in general, is apparently saying trans men are women and should detransition.

It's wild that she seems to understand that radical feminism relies on this man bad/woman good binary, AND that TERFs target trans men for conversion therapy, but does not seem to understand that... this is not that?

It's only somewhat included in the first screenshot, but the third image in that trio is an image with Joan of Arc which many of you have probably seen:

... which does nothing but contrast claims about masculinity with a person whose murder was justified because of their invalid masculinity. But of course, by masculinity we must REALLY mean... cis womanhood! That makes sense!

She also apparently believes that me describing myself as FTMTX is code for me being a detransitioner:

—

Like, this is genuinely just conspiracism & exorsexism. She seems one step away from claiming TMRAs are all Satanists kidnapping children.

To give her credit for one thing, though: She tags these as "broeddels" which, while useless as a term, is a very good pun.

Don't harass this person, primarily because harassment is bad but also because it seems like she is not in the best space and is obsessing over this as a result.

& if you want to actually support trans women, consider raising awareness of Rue, a Black teenage trans girl who recently survived a stabbing in Houston.

[sayruq]

NAHLA AL-ARIAN HAS been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives. “You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.” The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City. Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them. “Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.” Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza. “I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.” Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren. A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.” Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to. The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism. The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more. In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence. For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.

“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.” That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said. “He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.” Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.

[c-is-for-circinate]

It feels like there's this narrative that fandom keeps wanting to explore, with Steve Harrington, about this very specific type of martyrdom where self-sacrifice is an expression of a lack of self-worth. And, like, yes, write the narrative that's meaningful to you, and yes ok Steve does admittedly get beaten up a lot, but -- legitimately I do not think this narrative is actually Steve's story.

Like, without gendering things too much, there is something in the Steve fanon that I keep seeing that's so reflective of the specific kind of sacrifice and societal pressures exerted on girls, specifically -- this story of 'you make yourself worthy and worthwhile by carving pieces out of yourself', of believing that you must always give and never receive to justify the space you take up in the world. Yes, boys can experience this same pressure (and obviously trans and nb people of all genders run into it as well! sometimes a lot!), but especially in the mid-1980s cultural context where Stranger Things takes place, it's just...really not likely to be a dominant narrative for Steve to be operating under? It doesn't even really match the Steve we see on screen -- who is happy to make sacrifices for the sake of others, yeah, when needed, but who's not particularly kind or giving unless somebody asks first.

And Steve does get hurt a lot on other people's behalf! And this is a problem! It's just a completely different problem than the one fandom keeps writing.

Steve, and I'm going to say this forever, is a story about toxic masculinity, which the show may or may not even know it's writing. The archetypes influencing Steve's character as it shows up on the screen (and the stories and messages that Steve would actually be surrounded by in his actual life) are not deconstructions of suffering heroes who never should have had to fight in the first place and were destroyed by it. That's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. Steve's not Buffy. Steve's cultural context is Indiana Jones.

Steve is The Guy! And part of being The Guy is that you're expected to take the hits -- not because Steve is less important than the women-and-children he's supposed to protect, but because, the story says, he will get less hurt. Why should Steve get in between Billy and Lucas? Because Steve is an eighteen-year-old athlete and Lucas is in middle school, and of the two of them, Steve actually stands a chance. (And yes, Steve got badly hurt there, and Max had to save him -- but if Lucas, if Max had taken that beating they would not have been running through those tunnels later.) Was somebody else better-qualified to dive down to the uncertain bottom of a cold lake in the middle of the night? Steve doesn't list his credentials there as a way of justifying some ideal of martyrdom; he is literally the most likely person on the boat not to drown.

And make no mistake: when Steve's pulled into the Upside-Down, he survives the bats long enough for backup to get there. Realistic or not, he's apparently tough enough that he's physically capable of hiking barefoot through hell without much slowing down. Steve is the tank for the same reason as any tank: because he literally has been shown to have the most hit points in the group. You cannot honestly engage with Steve in this context without dealing with the fact that he's right.

AND THIS IS A PROBLEM! This is still a problem! But it's not the same problem that fandom seems to expect. It's not an expression of caretaking or the need for self-sacrifice; it's not an issue with Steve valuing himself less. It's an issue of toxic masculinity so ingrained that Steve doesn't even recognize he's suffering from it, because one of the tenets of toxic masculinity is that Big Strong Guys don't suffer. It's just a concussion, it's fine, he'll walk it off. It's not that Steve thinks he deserves to get hurt, or even that he's less deserving of safety than the others. It's that absolutely nothing in his cultural context allows him to admit that he can be hurt in a significant way.

There's still so much tension that can be gotten out of this situation, I swear. There's so much that can be explored in writing! Hell, the show itself is deconstructing some of this trope, believe it or not, by giving us a Steve who absolutely can take all the hits thrown his direction but still doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with his life. It turns out that doing his job as The Guy is only mildly helpful in horror movie situations (mostly by buying time for smarter, squishier people to do the damage from behind him), and somewhere a little worse than useless in everyday life.

But Steve does not go out of his way to self-sacrifice, he really doesn't. He just does his job. He's The Guy. Of course he's not going to let a kid or a girl or some scared skinny nerd who just learned about monsters yesterday take the hits. Of course Steve's got this.

[seirei-bh]

Jason Mendal headcanons

I wrote these headcanons for fun, however, keep in mind that there is only a few episodes of MCL NG out by now, so I may be wrong about some ideas due to later revelations. (I've also added some NSFW headcanons under the cut!)

-He loves luxury restaurants, especially Italian food, and everything expensive and exotic that is the specialty of five-star chefs.

-He has a limousine and a driver, but he only uses them on special occasions, since he prefers to drive his own car.

-If he were an animal he'd identify with a panther, a wolf or a shark

-He likes to listen to jazz.

-He made an anonymous Twitter account that he uses to insult Devemenentiel members (later Thomas found it and hacked it to permanently ban it, lol)

-He usually wears cologne, his favorites are “Sauvage” by Dior, and “Eros” by Versace (obviously very expensive and brand name)

-He doesn't feel close to his family. Most of them are unbearable to him, with a few exceptions.

-He tends to think that stable romantic relationships are a waste of time. Most of his romantic relationships in the past didn't last very long, almost all of his former lovers complained that "he was married with his job" or that "he was a self-centered asshole". He never had enough time for them and he got bored of them because they were not intelligent or interesting enough to him (something that changes with newsucrette/Ysaline)

-He likes women with self-confidence, who know what they want and are capable of challenging him.

-His poliosis was a consecuence of his Waardenburg syndrome. That syndrome also causes on him to suffers from partial deafness and has vision problems. However, he hides all this by using a very discreet hearing aid and contact lenses. Almost no one knows this except a few people very close to him, Jason hides these problems from the people at his company and any competitors to avoid look weak.

-He's afraid of one day becoming completely deaf, so he learned to read lips and sign language.

-He doesn't want to have children, partly because he doesn't have time to raise them, but mostly because he fears they could inherit the physical problems he has, like a partial or complete deafness.

-Since he was little he was always very good at maths.

-Jason pretends he was always popular, but he was quite nerdy at school, something that he decided to change later in high school and college, he went from being the nerd boy who other made fun of to being the popular boy who insulted and bullied the others.

-During his childhood and teenage years he used to dye his hair so that other children would not mess with him, but as an adult he learned to leave his natural white streaks with self-confidence and to see them as an attractive and unique feature.

-He likes the beach, the pool and going on a yacht. He hates mountains and nature.

-He likes to go to the theater and museums. He knows a lot about the life and work of artists, but he doesn't know as much about art itself, although he pretends he does.

-He has the philosophy of “the end justifies the means” and also that money does give happiness, or at least it can help buy it.

-As a child he learned to play the piano, but as an adult he has thrown away most of his former hobbies from his little free time, because he no longer has time for any of that.

-He got that tattoo on his arm because he lost a big bet once, but since Jason never talks about his defeats, when someone asks him, he says that he got that tattoo just because he wanted to and without any reason or meaning beyond the aesthetic.

-Devon was one of the few true pals Jason really respected and appreciated in the past, before “something” happened between them and they became enemies. Each of them has a different version about what really happened in mind, so that hostility due to differences in povs became increasingly stronger as the years went by. (Probably in this case it is Jason who is not right, but he is too proud to admit that he was wrong.)

-He felt attracted to newsucrette/Ysaline from the first moment he saw her. At first it was just desire and he wanted to manipulate her, but over time that feeling grew stronger and turned into love. Something that he also tried to ignore and deceive himself, denying it until he realized about the truth. He knew that maybe she would hate him, that maybe he would hurt her, that everything could end very badly, but still he couldn't resist to try it.

NSFW headcanons

-He loves bondage, specially tying your hands with his tie.

-He enjoys giving you orders in bed and see you obeying them, but also he enjoys secretly even more when you're a "bad girl" and refuse to do what he orders.

-Praise kink (both give and receive)

-He absolutely adores when you claw your nails on his back, so he has more excuses to call you “kitten.”

-Also when you grab him by his tie to drag him to the bedroom and passionately tear off his clothes.

-His favorite place is in his house, although it can be in bed, against the wall or on a table.

-Too excited by the idea of f*king you in Goldreamz's office, on his desk table sometime.

-He almost always prefers to be the dominant one, but also loves when you fight for dominance and you get to be the queen in his bed who is able to doms him.

-He loves to tempt you beforehand, whispering sexy and dirty things in your ear, kissing you on the neck and caressing you softly and subtly, until you can't take yourself anymore.

-Hard. Savage. Passionate. Sometimes very fast for all the sexual tension you two can't handle, sometimes unbearably slow on purpose because he wants to hear you beg for more and praise him how good he is and how much you want him.

-You two always end on a bed after an argument. He's turned on by how beautiful you look when you're angry and how you fight back fierly. Sometimes he makes you angry on purpose because how much he enjoys the moment and what comes later.

-He loves when you tell him that you hate him. That turns him on too even more.

-Skilled with his fingers and proud of it *wink*

-Proud of his own body. Yeah, his size too.

-He loves to kiss your neck, caress your legs and grab your thighs and butt.

-He loves looking at you. His gaze is especially intense and challenging when you're riding him, and he likes to hear you gasp as he watches your beautiful face and body.

-Sometimes is a competition between the two to see who shows better skills in bed and how much you both can last (how many hours and poses). He'll give you his best sexy smirk and won't stop f*king you until you beg him, but you would never beg your enemy... right?

Extra! A few nsfw sweet headcanons too:

-If he notices that you feel too uncomfortable and nervous, he makes humorous comments to break the ice and make you laugh.

-Although he likes BDSM, he will always ask you if you feel comfortable or not with it and will stop if you ask him to do so.

-He's not very used to aftercare, but he knows that you need them, so he tries to give it to you. Plus, he likes it when you rest your head on his torso, close to his heart, and he thinks you look gorgeous while you sleep.

[plaidos]

Would u be open to a dm asking for advice on a complicated irl instance of transmisogyny? Long story short, I’m trying to navigate a strain on two friendships - one friend is friends with an afab nb who posted a harshly worded callout about a local white trans fem after she seems to have caused harm to them and other non-white (afab?) queers n women, the other friends are trans fem and casual friends with the girl who was called out. My trans fem friends see this situation as being built on overstated harm and the response as employing transmisogynist rhetoric, my other friend assures me there is a legitimate pattern of harm and believes the response to be justified because of that. I’m white and tme, and having a hard time wrapping my head around the pain caused in either direction - I don’t want to downplay harm / coercion especially when there seems to be a racial pattern at play, and I don’t want to dismiss transmisogyny or act like the power dynamic btwn tme / trans fem doesn’t also underly all this. I’m scared of losing friends but I know it’s a possibility - if I do, I want to do so because I came to a conclusion I can honestly stand by. Damn sorry that’s so long winded, it’s been eating at me - touchy subject so no need to respond but didn’t wanna dump something even lengthier in ur dm’s under some assumption u would be ok with it

i’m inclined to agree with your transfem friends — accusations of racism should be taken seriously, and the accusations might even be true, but a callout post is not “an accusation of racism” — it’s a callout post; it’s a public exile of trans women from online spaces with an acceptable excuse. it would not be acceptable to run another demographic off of this website & demand her friends cut her off due to subjective hearsay being treated as gospel whenever a trans woman can suffer. Transfeminists have talked at great length at how callout posts are a form of acceptable social violence towards trans women. Hell, from the way you’re describing her friends’ reactions it doesn’t even sound like they think this girl didn’t do anything wrong — an “overstatement of harm” absolutely fits the M.O. of TME folks unpersoning a trans woman.

My opinion of this is whatever this trans girl did, a callout post is a totally unacceptable way to platform those grievances, and it seems like it is intentionally being leveraged specifically to cut this girl off from her friends and community. I’d side against the person comfortable being judge jury and executioner of any trans woman who sleights them — even if this girl is the scummiest racist, this TME person is not the moral arbiter of who can share community with her

anyway, i guarantee you that there is another pattern at play with this TME person who thinks callout posts are an acceptable way to unperson one. I would be willing to bet money that they have made other similar callout posts about specifically other trans women. I mean, it practically always is, right? 😭

[blueskittlesart]

pleeease give a review for infinity nikki ive been thinking about downloading it but i dont know if i have the space and if its worth it to clear some up for it !!!

as someone who spent HOURS on flash-based dollmakers as a kid, i absolutely love it. the gameplay hits somewhere between dressup game and open-world RPG, in that there's a large botw-like open map to explore, but the express purpose of exploring it is to unlock new clothes for your character. The exploration itself feels very calm and cozy most of the time, with the emphasis being on small collection tasks like fishing, bug-catching, and foraging. again, all of this is specifically to craft new outfits for nikki which you can both coordinate with no limitations to wear in the open world and use in scored styling contests with npcs, some of which reward you with game currency and some of which help you progress the story quests. the only place where i feel the gameplay truly suffers is in combat. you have one attack, and it's a ranged shooter, but there's no aim-assist whatsoever, and the mobile joystick isn't NEARLY sensitive enough to justify this. aiming in combat is one of the most difficult parts of the game, and nikki can only take 5 hits before she dies and has to respawn, making combat decently frustrating. However, there are very few places where combat is strictly necessary in-game, and both of the boss battles i've done so far had hitboxes large enough that it wasn't an issue; it's really in the open world against hordes of smaller enemies that the lack of targeting becomes really frustrating. other than that, though, the controls are fairly well-designed and intuitive, especially if you've played similar games before.

The clothes themselves are the star of the show, of course. I've yet to see a single clothing item in the game that I don't want. there's a good mix of fancy intricate outfit pieces and basics to obtain early-on, and without even touching the gacha you can coordinate some really cute outfits via in-universe boutiques and quests that reward you with clothes. Even the very obviously themed ability outfit sets that you craft early on almost always have a few pieces that are easy to mix and match with, so there's a TON of styling potential even for free players! As for the gacha, it's actually one of the more generous games i've played in terms of rewards and pity systems. My one complaint so far is that the 5-star gacha outfits especially seem to be very accessory-heavy, meaning it's possible to pull shoes, multiple necklaces, gloves, socks, and hairpieces before ever pulling the dress they're very obviously designed around. there is a pity mechanic to prevent this, but it requires you to pull a few too many times before your guarantee imo.

The story is ridiculous in a good way. It kind of reads like a 2000s-era barbie movie to me right now, in the best way possible. there's an amazingly predictable sexy villain, cute little flying creatures that follow you around, and every conflict is, of course, solved via clothes in one way or another. My absolute favorite thing about the writing, though, is how blatantly earnest it all is. at no point does the game poke fun at its own wacky concept or even attempt to make some self-aware joke about it to the player--it plays everything completely straight, and in this aspect it almost feels MORE self-aware. it knows that the kind of person who wants to play a dressup rpg is also the kind of person who does not, under any circumstances whatsoever, want to be questioned or made fun of for their love of fashion or their engagement with that game. It very much feels like the devs know that they're working with primarily girls and young women and a subject matter that those girls and young women are often looked down upon or made fun of for seriously engaging with, and so it promises to engage EXTRA-seriously to make up for that. (side note: there's one point in a story quest where, when asked to make a wish, nikki wishes that all girls never get cramps again. that was when i knew this was a game that knew its audience.) If I wanted to nitpick, i might say that every quest so far has sort of felt like an increasingly ridiculous trading sequence--you learn what you need to do very early on, but you'll always spend several hours of gameplay encountering obstacles and doing other smaller tasks to circumvent those obstacles so you can reach your original goal. this might annoy me more if the game was trying to market itself as a serious RPG, but it seems very self-aware to me, and despite how i'm describing it none of the quests ive played have actually FELT tedious. I think the fact that it's such a wild concept to begin with gives the writers a bit of leeway in how they handle the story quests, and because I as the player am aware i'm playing a dressup game I don't really expect quests to immediately get to the point and let me fight something. I will say that there are certain things that aren't super intuitive especially if you aren't a seasoned gacha rpg player, particularly the features relating to advancing your skills and the styling points of your clothing. though the game does technically explain what you need to do, it doesn't explain the RELEVANCE of the feature, just that it exists, so I had to lose multiple styling contests before I realized i could upgrade my clothing to get higher scores.

The final thing I'll talk about is performance. I'm playing the game on my iphone 13, and the performance is.... not great, i'm ngl. Off the bat, if you play the game on a mobile device, you're going to be getting a HEAVILY scaled-down version of the terrain graphics. all of those screenshots you see online of beautiful terrain full of flowers and particle effects are from ps5s or custom pcs. truthfully, the mobile app looks like a game from 2012 and it will still turn your phone into an incinerator. I've also encountered multiple graphics bugs, some during pivotal scenes, and I get consistent lags when playing for longer than a few hours, likely due to the strain on my phone's hardware. it's also an INSANE battery drain, so i only play when my phone is plugged in. All that being said, the game has been out for less than a week, so visual bugs are inevitable, and the developers have stated that mobile optimization is a priority, so hopefully we'll at the very least no longer have to overheat our devices to play it soon. Also worth noting, from what I've seen the rendering of the CLOTHING doesn't suffer AT ALL on mobile devices. presumably they sacrificed terrain rendering to allow for such beautiful texturing on the clothing itself, which, given that the clothing is the main focus of the game, I can't fault them for. Basically, if you're going to try to run an unreal engine game on your iphone, be aware that it will run like an unreal engine game on an iphone. and prepare yourself to have to let your device cool down every few hours.

tldr: i love the game so far. i'm really excited to keep playing and see where the story goes, and I think they should make more games for girls <3

[stillunusual]

The word "Nazi" has a specific meaning to normal people, but to vatniks and tankies it has five basic meanings…. "anybody I don't like" "anybody who disagrees with me" "anybody who's a citizen of a country that Russia wants to invade" "anybody who opposed or simply didn't want to live in one of the tyrannical regimes I simp for" "anybody who was oppressed or killed by one of my favourite mass murderers" EDITED TO ADD: a tankie clown reblogged this post and made some typically asinine comments, so I thought I'd elaborate a little bit…. Tankie clown: @well1x is either referring to the fact that a lot of the "deaths under communism" listed in "the black book of communism" (which gives us the 10 million number or whatever) are quite literally Nazis in WWII, or they're referring to the fact that the only people who have been made to deliberately suffer under communism have been literal Nazis and fascists (generally speaking)

Joining the tankie cult requires you to live in a delusional clown world and believe in a shit ton of made up (and often contradictory) nonsense that requires a considerable repertoire of mental gymnastics (and lies) to maintain….

@well1x is literally trying to claim that all victims of communism are "nazis and facists" (sic), which - back in the real world - is a very obvious lie. It's also a blatant example of victim blaming. For example, most of the millions of men, women and children who were robbed, raped, imprisoned, sent to the gulags, tortured, starved to death, executed or ethnically cleansed by Stalin's henchmen were not Nazis or fascists, and many were innocent of any crime. The vast majority of the population in Stalin's Soviet Union also had to put up with crippling poverty and backwardness, the brutal suppression of their religious and community life and the total lack of freedom.

Based on his comment, I doubt if the tankie clown has ever read "the black book of communism" and I'm also not sure why he mentions this book in particular, when there are thousands of others that thoroughly document the numerous crimes of the regimes tankies insist on being the useful idiots for, and I think it's safe to assume that he hasn't read any of those books either (in fact, I doubt if he's ever read any book whatsoever)…. Tankie clown: Karina then shows an image of (presumably) some kids in the Ukraine famine. This is completely unrelated though because this famine was not manufactured by the USSR as say the Irish famine was by the English. Can't really attribute natural disaster to "muh communism"

Again - a typical genocide-denying tankie lie.

Tankies generally start by saying that the holodomor was Nazi propaganda, and when you debunk that they claim it was just a natural disaster, and when that doesn't work they make up some bullshit about how millions of farmers who barely had enough to live on were wealthy kulaks who burned crops and slaughtered cattle (and therefore deserved to die). And when you point out that the red army actually broke into their homes and confiscated all their grain, every cow or chicken or any other food they had, and that the Soviet authorities blacklisted villages, sometimes purely for containing relatives of Ukrainian independence fighters, and prevented the villagers from leaving, shot them for even collecting ears of grain from the fields, and watched them starve to death - tankies will just deny it, or laugh, or pretend that millions of holodomor victims were all rich landlords (and therefore deserved to die) etc etc….

I've also never seen English people pretending that the Irish famine never happened, or claiming that the victims deserved it, or that it was a good thing, or that Britain should re-conquer Ireland. On the other hand, it's difficult not to notice Stalin's smooth-brained groupies swarming all over social media every day denying or justifying the holodomor and other crimes of Russia and the USSR, and hoping that Russia not only re-conquers Ukraine but also Finland, the Baltics, Poland and other countries it has invaded and occupied in the past.

There's no point trying to reason with tankies using facts, logic or common sense - and appealing to their sense of decency while they're simping for their favourite mass murderers is a complete waste of time. Tankie clown: Karina then says @well1x is defending imperialism(???), defending ethnic cleansing (which …what??), dreaming about labour camps and mass shootings (for Nazis yes plz), and does not do any praxis (based on?).

Yep - most tankie clowns claim to be communists while simultaneously embracing Russian fascism, supporting the imperialism of Russia’s mega-rich ruling class, mindlessly repeating the Kremlin's propaganda and cheerleading their war crimes. These morons seem to have no idea that the Russian Federation is an empire made up of many conquered states that Russia invaded, occupied and colonised in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, or that Russia's war against Ukraine is a brutal attempt to reassert control over one of its former colonies. Russia's history of imperialism is at least as bad as that of any western country - and they're still doing it in the 21st century.

And I have seen countless examples of tankies speaking openly of wanting to mass murder their ideological enemies (or people they don't like) - because they also delude themselves into believing that if their revolutionary dreams ever came true, they'd be the ones doing the arresting and killing, despite the fact that in a real revolution they'd be about as much use as a fart in a spacesuit. They also have no idea how their small dick energy is somehow going to bring capitalism to its knees, which they'd inevitably end up crying about if it ever actually happened in reality.

Most of them are complete losers who spend the majority of their time sitting in their bedrooms huffing their own farts while reading tankie fan fiction online. Tankie clowns also claim to be against western imperialism and capitalism, despite living comfortable lives in western capitalist countries and owing everything they have to capitalism, including the freedom to use their capitalist smartphones or laptops to post anti-capitalist tantrums on social media platforms owned by western capitalists (thus helping these western capitalists to maximise their profits).

This is generally the sum total of a typical tankie's - ahem - "revolutionary" activity.

The vast majority of tankie clowns wouldn't dream of ever giving up the comforts of capitalism to move to one of the authoritarian shitholes they stupidly simp for, because then they might not be able to play their favourite capitalist video games anymore….

It's also a fact that Russia and the USSR have ethnically cleansed millions of people. Tankie clown: OP takes this insane train all the way to the station, and says @well1x is talking about anyone they don't like which… no. They're talking about the traditional Nazis.

No - they're falsely claiming that all victims of communism are Nazis and fascists. Learn to read…. Tankie clown: But also let's break this down. Who does OP think is being called a Nazi? "anyone I don't like" I mean I don't like Nazis, but I don't think everyone I don't like is one lmao. Funny tho, dude throws around the word tankie until it has no meaning.

In my experience, if you disagree with tankies about anything, they will pretty soon call you a fascist or a Nazi. It's they who throw around words like "fascist" and "Nazi" until they have no meaning (and most of them hilariously claim to be opposed to fascism while simultaneously supporting it - if it happens to be Russian). Tankie clown: - "anyone who disagrees with me" if you disagree that all human beings deserve to live a dignified life regardless of race/sex/gender identity/sexual orientation/age/disability/whatever then yeah you probably are a Nazi

Straw man. See above….

It's also amusing to observe the doublethink of somebody who apparently believes that "all human beings deserve to live a dignified life" while simultaneously thinking that when his favourite mass murderers oppressed and/or killed huge numbers of people it was perfectly OK…. Tankie clown: - "anyone who's a citizen of a country that Russia wants to invade" why the fuck are we talking about Russia? Believe it or not OP, USSR does not stand for "United Soviet States of Russia" lmaoooo

We're talking about Russia because most tankie clowns support Russian imperialism and mindlessly parrot the Kremlin's propaganda about how Russia's latest invasion of Ukraine is some sort of special de-nazification operation (see above). Tankies are generally so ignorant, gullible and stupid that they will literally believe anything the Kremlin tells them…. Tankie clown: - "anyone opposed or simply didn't want to live in one of the tyrannical regimes I simp for" tyrannical regimes lmao. These were only "tyrannical regimes" for people who actually were in fact Nazis.

Again - this is the kind of reality-denying nonsense I'd expect to hear from a tankie clown. One thing that really appalls people in the central and eastern European countries that experienced the reality of being occupied by the USSR and/or Russia, is the staggering ignorance and stupidity of western useful idiots who have no idea what it was actually like, and are not only dumb enough to join the tankie cult, but insist on westsplaining to the victims and their descendants about how the horrors they and their families suffered (usually for doing literally nothing) either didn't happen ("cuz the CIA made it all up") or claiming that they somehow deserved it ("cuz they were all Nazis/fascists/kulaks/slave owners").

Back in the real world, these were tyrannical regimes for tens of millions of ordinary people who had done nothing to deserve being subjected to tyranny…. Tankie clown: - "anyone who was oppressed or killed by one of my favourite mass murderers" yeah basically that's what I've been saying.

Thanks for proving my point….

And please note that smoking weed on your mum's sofa isn't actually going to bring the world revolution closer.

That was just a joke…. 🤣😂

[blackpilljesus]

Nowadays whenever women bring up how maIes will rape & kill us all if women stopped associating with them en masse, instead of bringing up the usual about how maIes are already doing this I simply say to them that in that case they can feel free to stay & engage with the maIes (given it's so dangerous for us all to leave right?). They're typically taken aback because ofc they dont want to be left behind with the moids. One thing I realised is that for women to love & live with maIes slightly relatively safer, there has to be other women scapegoated to (the bad) maIes.

Women that want to mate & reproduce with maIes cant just pick out the good ones and filter out the rest as an idle maIe is a dangerous one so if they want to get involved with maIes (or have to be around them) these women need scapegoats and this is where other women come in. The thing is when most women are sacrificing other women at some point they end up being another womans sacrifice. This leads to a lot of women suprised when they receive treatment they typically hear about other women receiving bc they do not expect it to be them. This is why discussion of not associating with maIes en masse scares these women because they dont want a solution to maIe violence that doesn't involve a life with maIes and many of these women are willing to sacrifice other women to save themselves.

Tbh I get that it's about survival & they're looking out for themselves but at the same time so are other women. Realise all of this made me look at women differently & not have much empathy or sympathy for them anymore bc a lot of women do not care until it happens to them. Many women believe they're above the evil maIes do until it blows up in their face, then they expect help & sympathy from the women they fucked over (or were willing to fuck over). Hillary crowder (as with many other trad women), anti choice women who get abortions, etc.

I've spoken about this concept of sacrifice a few times but this is why many women are okay with prostitution, especially a lot of wives out there. These women would rather their husbands use another woman for their sexual degeneracy instead of them. All of this clicked for me when I saw how women would talk about kiIIing themselves (& have done so) in situations where they're faced with being around unfamiliar maIes due to societal collapse or are forced to be around maIes who dont have access to other women so this isn't a case of "women don't know".

If these women truly believed most maIes were good or even 'safe' (until crossed) then it would be a good thing that women are removing themselves from the dating pool - less competition. But deep down they know most maIes are abusive and they need other women to be their fodder as they cozy with their nigels (or want to justify their suffering by wanting other women to suffer too).

Another reason why these women tend to be taken aback when I tell them to keep engaging w/ moids if it's so dangerous not to is because if it's not a thing where you're in the line of fire, it's being there to pick up the pieces when it goes wrong with their nigels. For example the whole "we need to prioritise mothers & women who partner with maIes" bs, they'll twist it into a female empowerment thing when they only care about themselves and just use other women. Like no wonder they get mad when other women wanna walk away, they wont have other women to clean up the mess their nigels make.

Now I'm not saying that refusing to associate with maIes means there's no chance of abuse occuring but even if it was straightforward to walk away from moids & not look back, many women would be against that for reasons I've mentioned above.

I'm no expert in female intrasexual competition but one thing I've realised is that women aren't just competing for the "good" maIes, they're also competing to not end up with the bad ones which they all know are a majority.

While maIe retaliation it's a valid concern to have, most of the women I've seen insistent on this "we can't leave or maIes will hurt us!1!" narrative as a way to dissuade other women are either new to this or women who partner with or are looking to partner with moids, in this case it's just a damn excuse to clip your own wings.

If you think I'm bullshitting just tell women who say the aforementioned that they can feel free to keep associating w/ maIes romantically + sexually then & watch as they start fumbling over what to say & try to make you out to be the bad guy for not being this "women supporting women" feminist. These women are just using women, besides last thing we need is fucking flakes given what's at stake here. These flakes will sell women out at the slightest hurdle.

Women are willing to take risks being around & dating maIes so I'll be damned if someone tries fearmongering me to associate with maIes or else face risks. True power to living the romance & reproduction free lifestyle is realising you don't need other women to be on board before you start and live it.

[ganondoodle]

saw a few posts talking about ganondorf and while i dont want to uh .. risk having to argue with strangers ... i cant shut up entirely (you know me)

(in my opinion that is probably missing alot or just not as well read as a lot of others since i really just say what i feel instead of knowing what im talking about-)

its kinda hard to really talk about him bc hes so .... steeped into tired old stereotypes and harmful tropes with intentionally so little else, if anything, that you almost always end up playing into them if you just take what canon tells you (and alot of people love defending it too :/ )

to what degree is it really his character and what is literally just some things that were decided he does to make it clear hes the one note evil guy, to justify whatever horror is done to him and overshadow/bury what anyone else has done, to not think about maybe he had a point bc look how much bad stuff he does! if you made him fight for the freedom/sovereignity of his own people against an oppressive hyrule he would be in the right- so ACTUALLY he opresses them violently and selfishly even WORSE and then wants to murder everyone tm that dont bow to him bc thats what evil people do! and hyrule is justified in taking them over in turn bc their rule wont opress them :)

its like a game of trying to one up whatever hyrule did with something more bad tm bc otherwise it gets hard to justify killing him over and over

im not saying hes not allowed to be prideful, selfish or violent of whatever, but you gotta know that all of that IS one of those ways that is supposed to make it clear how evil tm the desert guy is; it doesnt matter what hyrule has done bc look! ganondorf is so much worse! and im sure hyrule had their reasons :)

hes never actually allowed to interact with his own people, hes isolated/alienated from them and their culture constantly, hes their king yet he .... violently takes over "free" gerudo villages (what? what for?? what does "free" even mean? they werent following him? their king?? were they .. allied with hyrule, who are good tm, which means they were living in paradise aka "free"? (bc they are good ones tm bc they rejected their evil one in a hundred year man king ruling violently over only women .. *cough*)), yet hes never seen fighting alongside his own people (the most is them .. silently serving him in what, one scene??) and then he drops them the second he has evil MONSTERS to fight for him instead and orders them to kill every living thing or something bc thats obviously evil, he doesnt even care about his own people! how evil! why would he do that? idk, hes the sole, selfish violent evil man opressing his own people, who are all women! that what they do! and WE need to free them from HIM (and they should be thankful to us for it and try to attone for ever having birthed him in the first place) (or he is the reason tm why they suffered/were wiped out and he is literally the sole survivor of his people, bc he doesnt care about ANYONE but himself)

i dont mean he has to be a goody two shoes character (you can be an ass and still do good/be in the right btw) bc more often than not what that actually means is being allied with hyrule bc those are the designated good guys and being on their side makes you automatically good (eugh) but do you rly want to just ... play along with all the propaganda?

imo, aside from being obviously racist, thats also so boring? does selfish, violent evil man king with no people (bc hes not part of them or fighting for them, hes always presented as the worse oppressor) and nothing else to him that only wants to murder bc ... idk evil? sound interesting to you? (to the point that the ONLY time we were shown literally any sort of vunerabillity, end of ww, that theres people trying to argue he was trying to to manipulate you even there?? what for? why? are you trying to reject literally the one glimpse we are allowed into his perspective qoq)

why do alot of people reject the idea so much to consider he actually cared about them, how maybe that prideful and selfish look is just a facade, or even a fabrication? violence that had to be met with violence, not for any sort of selfish reasons, but for his people and was met with a fight he could not win yet kept fighting on, perhaps losing himself more and more in the process, or a lie told so often that it became reality, if someone has nothign left to lose, if all was taken from them, maybe even blamed on them, why not play into what you where made out to be, you cant convince them otherwise anyway its the reason hes never shown to have done a single nice thing, never seen non angry/smug smiling, how he has no one at his side unless he forced them, how he is not allowed to be human even a little bit, never shown being anything but a boring ass trope personified, hes less a character and more a big bundle of racist tropes that fights you at the end (sorry) while looking epic so trying to meaningfully analyze him just by what we are told and shown in canon will always fall kinda flat or end up playing righ into every shitty trope

that is my opinion :I

[marzipanandminutiae]

today's Historical WTF of the Morning:

in 1840, a group of Comanche rode into San Antonio for a peace meeting with white colonists. they had brought back 14-year-old Matilda Lockhart, previously kidnapped in a raid, to be ransomed back to her family. the girl's ransom was paid, Colonel Hugh McLeod interviewed her and remarked on her intelligence, her aunt Catherine attested to her release in a letter to a relative, having earlier written that she heard the captives were being "kindly treated" and writing nothing in her later account to contradict this, and that was the end of her part in the story

(which ended in a "fight" with 35 of the 65 Comanche in the party being killed including 2 children, and 29 being taken prisoner. seven Texians died as well, and while later claims held that the attack on the Comanche was justified because they seemed insufficiently trustworthy in their promise to return more prisoners, the actual situation in the Council House that day remains unclear)

in 1895, Mary Maverick- who, by the account of her own diary on that day, had been at home when fighting broke out at the meeting -claimed she had been the one to tend Lockhart, and that the girl had been gang-raped showed extensive signs of torture including her nose being burned off

something that. um.

I think would have come up in contemporary reports? maybe? that's pretty conspicuous and people would have noticed? especially her aunt, since that is decidedly not being Kindly Treated?

there was a news article from 1840 in Houston claiming that Lockhart had been burned and beaten, and that her hair had been torn out, but no mention of facial disfigurement is made. and again, contemporary sources from people who definitely 100% saw her when she was released don't mention ANY outward signs of abuse AT ALL. I found a description of her release from 1884 that doesn't mention the nose-burning, either- it seems like that was only introduced to the narrative in the 1890s "memoir"

like, look. I'm not saying no white person taken captive by Native Americans was ever mistreated. they're human beings, and human beings can do terrible things to other people regardless of demographic group, or macro-level oppression. some Native people did terrible things to other Native people long before Europeans got here, and it's dehumanizing to treat them like magical perfect fantasy elves or whatever. and it's possible Matilda Lockhart had injuries covered by her clothing, or later revealed abuse she suffered that didn't show marks, and that got dramatized into her missing nose or hair

but. I don't know. it's just galling that not only was this girl who went through, at minimum, the trauma of being taken prisoner as a child was reduced to a symbol in a much larger conflict, but also we once again have the employment of Someone Abused A White Woman/Girl So Whatever We Do To This Entire Demographic Group Is Justified narrative

(which is, as always, employed by people who don't give an actual shit about the lives of the women they use to justify racism. unless Lockhart had lived to be like 80, she'd still never have had franchise or- and even then, STILL not full human rights in her own country. and the people who wanted to use her as a symbol to justify racism probably would have fought tooth and nail to keep her from getting them)

[femsolid]

Had a little exchange with a client that started fine, she was sorry to see me go because I'm quitting my job. I thanked her and said I enjoyed working for her too, but the work was causing me health issues and was not doable with my disabilities. I said I was starting a new job right away, a desk job which will be a nice rest for me. And then she said "oh I understand, I too realized that health is really important and need to be protected when I had children. It's such hard work, you need to be physically prepared. Do you have children?" And I said no. The usual awkward silence happened. My concerns for my own health and comfort suddenly appearing selfish and unjustified. She said "oh well, you still have time, how old are you?" They always say that because they think I'm 25 or something. I said "I'm 34." Another awkward silence. "Well uh, you never know, you'll probably want to have children someday and you'll need all the preparation you can get right?" Why? Why can't a woman prioritise her health for the sake of it? Why does it have to be in anticipation of mandatory motherhood, the great martyrdom? Feels like being prepared for a ritual sacrifice. Rest, eat, be beautiful and adorned before they chop your head off. In some culture they literally force-feed the bride to fatten her up before the wedding. They'll make foie gras out of you. Made me think of that post saying the most feminist thing a woman can do is refuse to suffer. I'm quitting because I refuse to suffer any longer. The end goal is not to be better at suffering later on. It's not to suffer at all. And somehow they'll make you feel selfish for it.

And one last thing, it's the awkward pause everytime I say I don't have kids. A lot of women try to bond with other women not by talking about common interests, opinions, hobbies, it's just "do you have kids?" and the expectant "yes" which prompts the following script "how many? What age? Boy or girl? Which school?" And on and on. And you can understand why, their kids are central to their lives and it's a sacrifice they expect, even wish to share with other women. So when the answer is no they don't know what to say next. They say nothing. I used to justify myself "no, I never wanted it for some reason, I'm fine with them I've worked with children, I just never wanted to have any." Now I just say "no :)" and it's a conversation killer.

[dootznbootz]

Big oof guys Odysseus wasn't a cheater he was a victim you soggy feminist retelling enjoying fries. and I don't get them changing that so that "women who have been cheated on by their husbands can relate and know they're valid for being sad" because let's be honest if he was a women y'all would've been treating his situation appropriately. Feminism is about men and women being equal, and do you know how many women (and men) could relate to Odysseus's situation? He wasn't a good person (neither was anyone in Greek myth) but stop making him out to be the bad guy. It's not only insulting to his character, mythology fans but also victims. It can be insulting to male victims for this being erased and treated so lightly. And for female victims who know what that feels like and are (rightfully) disgusted when this sort of behavior gets excused.

And for those of you saying "But he had a choice with Circe!!" Um... not really? He slept with her to save his friends, his brothers. Let's put it this way "Let's say your best friend was being held captive, and the only way to save them would be to sleep with the guy who's holding them hostage. Cheating would imply there was a betrayal of trust between partners, this wasn't done out of maliciousness. This was done to ensure the safety of an innocent person/people who you care about deeply. Any good lover would understand there's a huge lack of choice in a situation like that. Again, if the gender roles were reversed y'all wouldn't have been saying this crap.

If men and women are so equal, a men getting sexually assaulted and used holds just as much weight as a woman. This isn't feminism, this is sexism towards men. And no, it's not justified because "that's what the Greeks did", it's not okay just because you lable it as petty payback/revenge. What happened to be better than your oppressor? As if you were the one's in ancient Greece who had to deal with these things. You are not in a friend group with every woman in history just because you had to deal with "scummy men".

And even if you are a victim, how can you be immature and gross to KNOW what that feels like yet still not care/be ignorant towards one suffering and easily erase it. And just because they were the same gender as people who were asses and creeps towards you or people who happen to be the same gender as you.

Tumblr never fails to disappoint me 😔 I have no doubt in my mind Penelope would beat up all these people victim blaming her husband

"you soggy feminist retelling enjoying fries."

Dear Anon, I love this phrase so much. Thank you for sharing it with me.

Sorry this took a while to get to. <3 I just answered quite a few heavy asks recently and I wanted to give a lil break in general :) You also wrote it all out very well already so I didn't really know how much I have to add or say without sounding like a broken record!

And yeah, like, he's not a good person. Nobody really is, especially by modern standards. But that doesn't mean what happened to him didn't happen. Or that people should diminish it.

I mean, I'm very very sure that Homer even shows Odysseus' PTSD from it all in the Odyssey. How he's so adamant about Nausica's maids NOT helping him bathe, despite that being the custom/culture of the time. Like Idk what other reason he would have to not ask for help, being "older" wasn't something that would've been too outta the norm, he was still exhausted from nearly drowning to death, etc. BUT this is RIGHT after he just escaped Calypso. Gives huge PTSD reaction to me.

ngl, I find it really disappointing in a way that this ancient text feels more respectful of victims and their trauma than more modern books lol. A lot of Modern shit feels like trauma porn ;~;

And you're absolutely right with Penelope. She loves her like-minded fool. She would not blame him. I honestly think she'd be the one to reassure him often because he'd probably feel guilt and/or just...need some comfort from everything.

I really hate the whole "He expected her to be faithful when he was not." Because guess what? He canonically was. He had no concubines officially listed ANYWHERE. People can take vague statements if they want but that's just it. Vague statements. All other "interactions" were against his will and/or it was coercion to save his friends. All under duress regardless.

Like in general, there is so much more potential in writing about about a character trying to help her incredibly traumatized lover. Seeing him as he is still and loving him. Him finally feeling safe again, LEARNING to feel safe again. After finally having clawed his way back into the arms he never wanted to leave in the first place, he can LIVE again. There's something incredibly beautiful in that.

I mean as you said, I find Odysseus very relatable in a lot of ways. His story is really beautiful in the whole "You've been through Hell, You've done some horrible things, but despite all that, you can achieve peace again. You can LIVE again." It's a really hopeful story in a way. And I really love that.

[hyperlexichypatia]

Since I've seen a few lists of "Conservative, right-wing, and/or borderline fascist ideas that get unquestioningly passed around leftist, liberal, and progressive spaces," I thought I'd add my own:

The amount of personal freedom or bodily autonomy someone has is inversely proportional to the amount of material support they receive from others/society/government. It is somehow "hypocritical" to advocate both material support for all and bodily autonomy for all.

Straight men want sex. Straight women do not want sex. Women want romance, commitment, monogamy, and marriage. If a man has sex with a woman without giving her these things, he is in some way harming, "preying on," or "taking advantage" of her. If a woman agrees to such an arrangement, she must be led astray, traumatized, or suffering from low self-esteem.

Someone's sexual desires or patterns of attraction are a large and important component of their overall morality as a person. Sexual desires and patterns of attraction, even if never acted upon, can mean that someone is an Intrinsically Bad Person.

People are marginalized for being smarter than other people. This is a real problem that has to be addressed.

Identities like nationalities, cultures, ethnicities, and religions are fixed and absolute, with firm, defined boundaries between them. Ferreting out people who transgress or "fake" these identities is important, necessary, and a good use of time and resources.

Cultural groups should generally remain separate and clearly distinct from one another. Cross-cultural influence (anything from loanwords to intermarriage to migration) is, by default, Generally Bad.

Religion is primarily a matter of external social identification by others, not a matter of choice, personal belief, or self-identification. Someone might choose to reject their family's religion or embrace a different one, but this is inherently inauthentic, play-acting, appropriation, or the result of manipulation. People are always "really" or "rightfully" the religion they were assigned at birth.

There is some sort of connection between health and morality. Whether it's "Being virtuous will keep you healthy" or "Being sick is a moral failing" or "Doing things that endanger your health is morally wrong" or "Medical doctors are moral authorities."

Having to do a lot of manual labor to survive is good for people. Virtuous people enjoy it.

The world would be a better place if production of food and other necessities were radically decentralized and de-mechanized, resulting in a lot more people having to do a lot more manual labor to survive. Economies of scale and labor-saving technology are bad. "Growing your own food" is possible, desirable, and virtuous.

There was a time in human history when life was good for everyone and there were no problems. Any inconvenient questions about problems that may have existed back then are just propaganda.

There are Intrinsically Bad People whose Intrinsic Badness can in some way be detected or measured through some kind of scientific, medical, and/or spiritual assessment -- whether it's "He has bad vibes" or "She's a diagnosed malignant narcissist sociopath" or "They're possessed by demons."

Violence is good and justified when dealing with Intrinsically Bad People, and if you disagree, you must be saying that Intrinsically Bad People and the Intrinsically Bad Things We All Know They Intrinsically Do are somehow good, which maybe means that you're also an Intrinsically Bad Person.

These are specifically right-wing ideas that have found new homes and new coats of paint in leftist, progressive, and liberal circles. I'm not even listing things that are just universal across the political spectrum, like "eugenics is good" or "children are property." Just the specifically reappropriated fascism and ethnonationalism reframed as "the people's" authoritarian homestead culture.