#something something people realized rigid gender roles were toxic

[jessicas-pi]

OKAY LISTEN I'M STILL MAD SO I'M CHANNELING MY INNER EMILY TO SAY THIS:

Saying a female character is only three-dimensional if she has traditionally "masculine" characteristics without any "feminine" traits is just playing into the misogynistic idea that women are only "okay" if they're like men, and saying that fandom is stripping a female character of agency and reducing her to a love interest by portraying her with "soft" traits and giving her a romance(with a man) is just dumb, especially when no issue is made about fandom-izing a smart and strong male character into an incompetent "damsel/himbo/malewife."

[josiebelladonna]

you know, nevermind the problematic aspects of greendruidess’ behavior and writing for a second. really, nevermind the shameless copying thinly veiled as “inspo”, the slut-shaming, the misandry, the rigid toxic gender roles, the racial insensitivity, the unjust anger, all of that, for just one second.

after all this time, there’s one thing that i simply cannot get over with in her writing, and it’s the exact same drawback that fifty shades of grey suffered from.

think about the one shot that i posted yesterday, day 9 of kinktober, “diamonds and guns”. i don’t even have to look at it to tell you what happened: chuck and alex are driving home from their wedding in santa cruz and alex is a bit raw because he wanted to take a walk on the beach and chuck caught him and stopped him because they were newlyweds (i.e., do things as a couple). those feelings come into play when they get caught up in a car accident of sorts: a car ahead of them caught on fire and they swerved and spun out but didn’t hit anything, and alex realizes that that very easily could’ve been them. they get home to dublin and alex takes a bus to san jose to a little sex shop for a stripper pole, a couple of leather teddies, and some body glitter. he goes home, sets it all up, puts on his teddy and slings his pants down low. chuck walks in and the show gets started.

just out of morbid curiosity, i read her new one shot, “peter, peter, pumpkin eater” which just makes my skin crawl just writing out that title before my walk this morning and…

uh. um. something about… pumpkins? there’s a buggy à la the munsters or something like that? some corn, something about burning a corn maze down or some shit? a photoshoot with pumpkins… i think? idk i’m trying really hard here, you guys.

bro, i remember alex and krista’s conversation about pho in day one better than i remember the dialogue in this one shot here (hell, i remember the pho scene in fever better than i remember this)

i remember 31_4am’s james hetfield one shots as of recently better than this.

shit, i remember louder than love better—and do i ever. i remember chris and andi’s first meeting and also time after time in particular: i liked time after time, too, mainly because it’s a sci-fi story.

yeah, that’s undoubtedly the one thing i cannot get over with in her writing is…

i literally cannot remember anything about a chapter or a one shot that she’s written: in fact, i think i forgot it the very second it was done. i literally could not tell you what happened or at least the gist of it without going back and looking at it. 

(that was the problem i had initially when the whole thing started between me and her was she deleted the anthrax fics and reuploaded them before I had the chance to take screenshots: saw my own writing being read back to me and yet i couldn’t even remember it because of different context). and yes, fifty shades had the exact same problem for me: there were like two things i remember and they were in the movie rather than the book.

that’s… kinda sad, actually. seeing this girl get thousands upon thousands of reads on basically emptiness, such that an outsider like myself couldn’t even tell you what it’s about after the fact. and she uses the excuse that she’s “not an artist or a creative like [me]”, when that is such a cop out—see my whole thing from the other day, “if you’re a human being, creativity is innate to you.” it’s sad, it makes me sad. and it should make sense that i felt bad for even going off on her for a little bit. makes me even more sad when i know that a bunch of people are eating this shit up. it’s like eating empty calories: it doesn’t nourish you because… it’s dishonest. there’s no honesty, there’s no “guts”.��it’s played up as raunchy when it doesn’t even titillate a regular old schlub like myself on the outside who enjoys erotica and loves seeing new blood in the fic tags. her female leads are played up as “ballsy” and “tough” when marla, belinda, and zelda from fever could probably whump up on ‘em without even trying. it’s all played up with lots of build-up and no pay-off.

fewer things in life are as sad as a comedy that’s not funny or a horror movie that isn’t scary. well, i’d like to add to that list and say that fewer things in life are as sad as a fanfic that i can’t remember. it’s not her fault, though, it’s one of the hardest things to pull off, like there’s a reason why so many writers themselves—actual pros, people who have been writing for years—will say that writing is hard. hell, i’ll tell you this to day i die. so, really, it’s nobody’s fault.

the thing that is her fault, though? the fact that she’s made herself on a bullshit excuse and refuses to reach across the aisle, a problem that is far too common now, from my facebook feed to the talking heads i see on tv. there’s no realness and no one can agree to disagree if it saved them, and i see it in droves with her. maybe that’s why she’s so appealing to so many people: it’s something they’re all familiar with.

[mysticdragon3md3]

Re-watching Ranma 1/2 ep1-3 right now.

I had the sudden thought that maybe Akane would be dismissed in present day, as a "not like other girls" character. But I think that a lot of younger girls don't realize what it was like to live during a time when everyone and everything was telling you that if you weren't a "girly girl", or hyper fem, or this narrow list of stereotypes, then "you weren't a valid female". That could really give a girl a complex. It gave *me* a complex. When I was little, I became so shamefully anti-girly-girl, even before the trope "not like other girls" became a term. It took Ranma 1/2's Akane Tendo to teach me that it was okay to be any mixture of traits considered "male" or "female". She loved martial arts and wasn't boy-crazy, but wasn't afraid to wear dresses or want to play Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet". Like a lot of people, my first Shojo anime was Sailormoon, and if you're the type of girl who can't relate, at all, to revolving so much of your life around being boy-crazy, that got tiring fast. And made me feel invalidated as a female for not being a girly girl. Hell, even when I finally found some different anime with female protagonists, they were still primarily defined by being boy-crazy. Outside of being a demon hunter, Devil Hunter Yohko was primarily defined as preoccupied with her crushes, dates, and getting laid. And of course, the PG version of boy-crazy, all female characters being constantly preoccupied with romance or their love interest, was in every other anime/manga I could find at the time. ...Unless it was by Rumiko Takahashi. Mermaid Saga had a female protagonist with agency and no romance on her mind, without being primarily sexualized by other characters or for the audience. But before that, I found Ranma 1/2 and Akane Tendo. She really helped me feel validated as not fitting into the "girly girl" standard at the time, and as not fitting into even the "tomboy" stereotype at the time. I wasn't loud or into sports. So I felt I had to "prove my masculinity" by rejecting everything "feminine". But why should I feel insecure enough to reject "feminine" things? Akane wore skirts, took pride in her long hair---which anime repeatedly described as "a woman's treasure", right alongside a woman's face, as leverage to attain marriage partners. There was a lot of toxic feminine assumptions back then. But Akane made those "girly girl" things, just other aspects of my identity, instead of bowing to the limited, rigid list of what a girl was "supposed" to be, that I feared it was. She wasn't boy-crazy, but she did have a crush. She loved martial arts, but she still wanted to play Juliet. Her girly traits didn't take over her life, but she also didn't have any need to "prove" she wasn't "feminine". It was a real revelation for young me at the time, to meet Akane Tendo and see my first model of a girl who didn't have to be a girly-girl, NOR a complete (sports) tomboy, NOR a girl who did all the "boy" things while looking pretty/sexy. Maybe these days she'd be lumped in with the "not like other girls" trope, but to me, she did the exact opposite, by teaching me to not look down on my more "feminine" aspects, nor look down on girly girls by extension. Or rather, that I didn't have to work so hard to reject my "femininity". I could just be me...the way Akane did.

Also, right before re-watching ep1, I skimmed Takahashi's Wikipedia page, and it described Ranma 1/2 as "Following the late 1980s and early 1990s trend of shōnen martial arts manga, Ranma ½ features a gender-bending twist." I had forgotten that at that time, was the birth of the martial arts subgenre's domination of Shonen manga. lol That was the time when Dragonball turned into Dragonball Z; we got series like Yu Yu Hakusho; until eventually, all the Shonen manga got a "tournament arc" at some point. Thinking about Ranma 1/2 as in the same category as those more well-known martial arts Shonen manga, it's funny to see the contrast. All those other martial arts Shonen manga were so serious or so hyper-masculine...Meanwhile, Ranma 1/2 is over here, being an explicit comedy, forcing the chauvanist protagonist into a female body, giving the leading lady more to do than fretting over her leading man, and basing its martial arts style more on Jackie Chan than some "power fantasy" action movie. lol ^o^ (Sure, there were a lot of Shonen manga with a gutsy leading lady, but they were often reduced to just fretting over the male protaongist, or joining the fight only if they could be really sexy while doing it. Meanwhile, even in just these first 3 episodes of Ranma 1/2, Akane is challenging an antagonist to a duel, in order to defend the male protagonist, and she's challenging the male protagonist to a duel while proving she's serious enough to call out his "I can't go all-out against a girl". I'll never forget that manga chapter where Akane got sick of being that story arc's "damsel in distress", got up, used soley her brute strength to tear apart the rope tying her up, and jumped into the fight to help her would-be rescuers. lol)

Ah, Ranma 1/2 was a great time. ^_^

I mean, now it really bothers me how transphobic that the characters we're meant to like, can speak and act, but besides that, it was a series that really gave me something I needed at the time and apparently, I couldn't get anywhere else. Man, I'm glad we have far more choices these days in series that play with gender roles/expectations, but for the 1980s/1990s, Ranma 1/2 was a suitable starting point.

Re-watching today also reminded me how much I love comedy that involves "super serious people being melodramatic, then someone points out how stupid they are". lol They try to dress up their ridiculousness with lofty words and dramatic poetry in their speech! But no, they're still doing ridiculous things. ^o^! Especially with all these martial arts movie tropes! ^o^ I had forgotten that that was my favorite type of joke. It makes me laugh out loud, even now. LOL

[blackasteriia]

Super Duper Deep Character Questions

Send in a number and I’ll answer the following questions about my muse! Specify muse for multi-muses.

Death is an inevitable part of life. What is your character’s experience with death? Have they had someone close to them die? Have they ever killed someone? How did these events affect them? Have they been able to move on? What do they believe happens to people when they die? And why? How does your character feel about death? Do they feel at ease, or uncomfortable with the idea of dying?

Spirituality deals with the non-material realm and a character’s experience of it. Is spirituality important to them? Has your character had any spiritual, divine, or sacred experiences? How has this affected them? How do they feel about other people who talk about spirituality?  Is your character likely to share their spirituality with others, or do they keep it to themselves? What are their metaphysics? Do they have more abstract, or concrete conceptions of the world?

Religiousness is the ritual act of spirituality, it refers to devoutness and piety. Is your character religious? Are they part of a large, organized religion, or a smaller, more personal one? How do they express piety and devotion? is this important to them? Or do they do it out of obligation. When did they begin their habits and why? Is it something they were raised in or something they learned as they grew older?

The people who raise us influences our outcomes, for better or worse. Talk about your character’s biological parents. Does your character consider them to be good or bad parents? If your character was in-part or totally raised by, people other than their biological parents, talk about them too. Was this relationship good or bad? How has your character’s relationship to their guardians changed as they aged? How has it influenced them? Was it a foundation? Or something they regret? Have they been able to move on and grow from their guardians? Or are they close?

Our bodies are how we interact with the physical world and are critical to how we think of ourselves. Overall how do they think about their body? Does your character have a good relationship with their body? Do they see their body as apart of them, or as something they are disconnected from? Are they confident in their appearance? Do they take care of their body, either by proper nutrition, good sleep, or exercise? Do they consider themselves to be physically healthy? 

The mind includes our cognitions and thought processes. How does your character learn best? By listening? Reading? Or through doing? No one is truly rational, but do they consider themselves to use logic or emotion? Is your character contemplative or introspective? Or do they focus more on observation, and use of their senses to learn? Are there are peculiarities in their thought patterns? What sorts of intelligences do they excel in? I.e., book learning, music, social, mechanical, spatial, etc. 

Mental health is very important to our overall well-being. Has your character ever had challenges to their mental health? If so, what? How did they learn to cope with their symptoms? If they recovered, what factored into it? Have they ever received counseling, diagnosis, or treatment for their mental health? How was this experience, was it helpful?

Psychoactives are any substance that alters the mind-state, including but not limited to: coffee, alcohol, opioids, cocaine, nicotine, anti-depressants, and sedatives. Talk about your character’s relationship to psychoactives. Are they active users or do they avoid these substances? Why is that? Do they use legally or illegally? Is their use social or not? Have they ever struggled with addiction or withdrawal? Have there been people in their lives that use? What do they think of people who use? If the psychoactive is a medicine —prescribed or not— discuss their relationship to it.

Some say rules are made to be broken, and others still couldn’t make themselves jaywalk. How does your character relate to authority? Are they law abiding or do they skirt the boundaries of legality? Do they consider rules to be a necessary parts of society? Or merely, red-tape that gets in the way? Is it important to them that they contribute to their society? To them, what is a ‘good-person’ or a ‘bad-person?’ Do they agree with the typical social definitions of these terms? If not, why? Where do they think they fall on the spectrum? If at all? 

Creativity is how we express ourselves to the world and other people. How does your character show their more creative side? Is it through the arts, like painting, drawing, wood-work, music or writing? Or something less typically thought of as ‘creative,’ like science or engineering? What influences their creative process? Have they ever experienced burn-out? And if so, how did they overcome it? Are they avid in the consumption of other art and creative works? What are their preferences?

Sexuality is a facet of human expression that can take many forms and expression. Does your character feel sexual attraction? If so, to who? Is this feeling strong or weak? Do they have any particular type of person that they’re attracted to? How do they usually act on these feelings? Are they experienced or inexperienced in this domain in their lives? How do they view their own sexuality? With pride or with shame? What influenced this viewpoint?

Romantic attraction is the desire to have a romantic relationship with another person. Does your character experience romantic attraction? If so, who is this feeling directed to? Is it strong or weak? What does it take for your character to develop a romantic attraction to someone? Do they have a type? Do they have much experience with romantic relationships? Talk about your character’s romantic relationships, or lack therein. Is romance important to them or something they could do without?

Gender is the cultural and social constructs that define the range between masculinity and femininity. How rigid is your character’s gender roles? Does your character agree with their assigned gender at birth? If not, does this affect how they perceive their body (i.e. do they suffer from dysphoria)? How do they present their gender? Is this presentation important to them, or could they not care less?

Platonic relationships are no less intimate than romantic relationships.  How does your muse feel about their platonic relationships? Do they have many friends, or just a few? Do they make friends easily?  Talk about some of the platonic relationships your character has had that are important to them. How did these relationships develop and how do they define your muse?

Love languages are loose definitions of how we express and reciprocate love, both platonic and romantic. How does your character prefer to express that they love someone? Do they use their words, time, gifts, service, or touch? How does your character prefer to receive affirmations of love?

Style is one way a person can express themselves. What unique ways does your character use to say something about who they are? Is their appearance important to them? If it is important, is it something they do for the benefit of others or themselves? Why is this? If it is not important, why do they not care? How else do they express their style? Be it through music, art, vehicles, home, or other means? Do they have any particular tastes?

Parenthood is a significant event in many people’s lives. Does your character have any children? Be they biological or adopted. If so, talk about them and your character’s relationship to them. Is this relationship healthy and good, or broken? Does your character want anymore children? How do they hope their relationship will change with their children as they grow? If your character doesn’t have kids, do they want any? If they don’t, discuss their feelings on the matter. If they do, talk about their reasons and their plans.

Most people have jobs, or will end up with one, at some point. Talk about your character’s job, or their aspirations for one. Are they working in a role that they like, or are they doing it for the ‘money?’ How did they have to train to get this job? Is this a career for them or something they’re doing just to get by? Or if they are in training, what are their hopes for their future job? If they don’t have a job, do they want one? If your character is too young to have a job, talk about their plans for the future.  Is their dream clear to them or do they not know what they want to do? Do they feel nervous or excited about it?

Home is where the heart is, or so they say. Talk about where your character grew-up, was it just one place or many places? Was their home(s) somewhere that they remember fondly, or is it just bitter memories? How has their home changed as they aged? Does your character have a strong sense of home, a place where they ‘live,’ or are they more transient? Are their any people who they associate with their home? Does your character want to have a home, or are they happy living on the road?

Not all relationships are healthy, or are even good for us. Has your character ever had any unhealthy, toxic, or abusive relationships? How did your character know the other person in the relationship? If and when did your character realize that this relationship was unhealthy? Was the toxicity mutual, or one-sided? What sort of behaviors, from one, or both parties, defined this unhealthy relationship? Has your character been able to move on from this relationship, or are they still ‘stuck’ in it? If they are past the relationship —or writing from a perspective where they are past it— talk about how your character reflects on it. Is there regret? A sense of satisfaction? Or have they not allowed it to affect them? Could they or would they make amends, if possible?

Write your own! Dig into my muse and ask them the hard questions!

[explorebynicolasburri]

We Are Not Next - Empowering Women To Fight Back

1 in 3 women globally experience violence or rape during their lives. In South Africa, every 4 hours a woman is murdered and every hour, 4 women are raped. Since the Corona pandemic has forced countries to implement lockdowns, domestic violence and gender-based violence cases have risen around 30 percent globally - and these are only the reported ones.

The war on women’s and girls’ bodies is a pandemic itself - and there has never been a more crucial time to rise: We will not get used to this. We are not next. We will Fight Back.

“Don’t take any pictures out of the windows when driving”, Nicole warns us before we get in the car. We lock the doors, close the windows. It’s as if we’re entering a different world, behind the curtain of the majestic mountains surrounding Cape Town. Here lie the Cape Flats, where most of Cape Town’s Townships lie. During Apartheid blacks and colored people were expelled into this area, onto land that was never inhabited before and infrastructure was close to inexistent, onto soil that brought meager harvest. Today, Cape Town’s Townships remain the home of a quarter of South Africa’s population. The landscape changes quickly: the further away from the mountains we drive, the more litter lies on the streets, housing becomes poorer and life seems different. It’s the life of mostly black and colored people. It’s a life where gangs roam the streets and violence is part of day-to-day reality.

The room is full, chats and giggles fill the air of a school hall in Lavender Hill, one of the Township in the Cape Flats. Women and girls from different organizations based in the area are gathered here today to practice self-defense, to practice how to defend their bodies and lives against violent abusers.

The looks in the women’s faces are fierce, while they listen to strong words: “We are not next. Every woman in South Africa needs to be able to protect herself. Her body and her children's bodies. Because no one is going to do it for us. We, the women and the good men that are working along our sides, will do what needs to be done so we can protect ourselves.” Lucinda Evans, the South African Coordinator of the One Billion Rising - Movement rises her fist to the sky, all women join in, and in a choir, they shout, determination and courage lying in their voices: “WE ARE NOT NEXT.”

Nicole is the founder of Fight Back. The Non-Profit Organization provides self-defense classes to women and girls in violent communities. We meet her at her home before we drive to Lavender Hill, where she and her team will be hosting the self-defense workshop. She greets us warmly and talks with confidence and clarity: “You can break an ankle or an elbow and get it fixed. Rape either ends the life of a woman or leaves scars that never heal. I’m not saying a rape victim is a lost person, but they should never even come to the point of having to go through this.” Nicole says further that there is no time to wait for the government to take measures and for the police forces to be better resourced. “We have to do something right now that is going to empower women to change the outcome of that situation - and with the self-defense we teach we can help women change the outcome of a violent situation. We can ensure that they can stop it from turning into rape or murder or aggravated assault - and from these women becoming just another statistic.”

In September, a case of femicide shook South Africa: UCT student Uyinene was raped and killed in a post-office, just around the corner of her home. It shook so much that on the 4th of September 2019, a crowd of ten thousand women and men protested in Cape Town alone. This murder was the tip of the ice-berg. Colorful signs were held up high to the blue sky screaming “Enough is enough”. I asked Nicole, who helped organize the protest, what she feels has changed since the protests: “The solidarity has definitely increased. And it’s wonderful to see women come together on this issue. And also, men have realized the role they play in it. I think one of the greatest things that came out of the gatherings in front of parliament was, that men started calling each other out - they realized that they as men have a responsibility to call other men out for abusive language and actions. I think there has been a big shift in focus on that regard… And when it comes to women: I have never seen a movement the way it has happened now. It created an incredible space for people to come together.”

This solidarity and respect for each other as women was overwhelming when we stepped into the School Hall in Lavender Hill. Women of all sizes and backgrounds came together and felt empowered when they saw that they had the power to change to outcome of a violent situation. There was rage in their voices when they talked about the war against their bodies. There was more bravery and hope than rage. Hope that together women would be stronger. Hope that things can change and that - more than anything - they now had a chance for change to implement.

To experience the importance of NGO’s like Fight Back, Lucinda’s finishing speech says it all:

“It took me 4 months to find Fight Back. Firstly, because we can’t afford the fees of normal self-defense providers. Secondly, because people ask: “Why do you want to teach these women self-defense when your communities are already so violent?”. And thirdly, because people are generally scared to drive into Lavender Hill. But things happen for a reason, and this is why we are here today.”

“The solution starts with ME(N)”, a poster read at the protest in front of parliament. Reasons for gender-based violence are as complex as South Africa’s history is. Societal and cultural aspects play a role: Patriarchalism. Violence. Poverty. But nothing should ever be complex enough to avoid giving a shot at changing it.

“I think the single most important thing - which is a project that Fight Back SA is going to start working on this year - is we urgently need to implement positive masculinity classes in schools for boys and consent classes”, says Nicole. “It’s sad that we have to look at it along gender lines, but in the majority of the cases the offences are being committed by men. And often-time the South African police services don’t have the tools they need to gather the evidence from women who report these crimes, which means these men end up not being prosecuted. So, we need to start educating our young men, our boys, on consent and positive masculinity.”

Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africans president, gave a speech on the same day the protests happened. He condemned the violent actions and said that gender-based violence is not a problem of women, but one of men. Only words, no action - that’s the judgement a lot of protesters brought towards Ramaphosas speech. With the Corona Pandemic being the top problem to tackle, everything seems on hold, while the violence is raging more than ever. Fight Back, together with other organizations like the Helen Suzman Foundation are working on introducing a school curriculum to eradicate toxic masculinity and harmful gender stereotypes. This curriculum is aimed to become a national compulsory part of the school curriculum.

Lee-Anne Germanos for the Helen Suzman Foundation finishes a newly published article on gender-based violence in times of Corona with the following words:

“Gender based violence is potentially as indiscriminate and contagious a virus as COVID-19. Like the global effort being made to combat and defeat the COVID-19 pandemic, the same effort and commitment is required to defeat gender-based violence, which is a pandemic that has been around for much longer.”

It’s time to leave the school Hall. We get in the car, we lock the doors. Before we leave Lavender Hill behind us, and seek the safety of our privileged comfort in the city close to the mountains, I take one more look around, as we pass people walking, laughing, running in the streets, the rigid housing-blocks in the background, little shack-shops decorating the grey of the streets. As different as our lives may be, they aren’t all that different. We women hold our communities together, and we must stand together now and always. The violence women face - mostly in poor communities - is a challenge of our time and we will fight it, together. Feeling the spirit in the school Hall made me wander in my mind in awe. I am proud of being a woman and even more proud of standing with women. We shall rise and we shall Fight Back. 

Article for Injection Mag 

Written by Michelle Becht

Photos By Nicolas Burri

[femvulvaphile]

let’s break that weird shit down, then

“We’ve been here since the beginning. I know your hate group, your little Nazi sub-sect, has this lie you like to spread that we suddenly spring into being from whole cloth in the 1970s, but that fighting all through history? WE’VE. BEEN THERE. FOR ALL OF IT.” cool but that’s literally not what I said. transwomen’s and women’s fights are inherently different. Sex-based oppression doesn’t DIRECTLY affect transwomen: you will never be shunned for menstruating, you will never be afraid of having your prepubescent vulva mutilated for the sick pleasure of a men five times your age, you will never be afraid of being impregnated against your will, or of miscarriage of a wanted child, or of all the pregnancy and birth complications who are still killing women all over the world. you will never know what it’s like to have men catcall and grope you when you’re nine years old just because your boobs already began to grow.   

"The demonization of trans women is a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of human history and it is one that you have helped re-surge into the modern world.” that’s bullshit. the “demonization” you’re talking about can refer to one of two things: either the conservative view that transwomen are “deviant men” (which I definitely agree is shitty), or the radical feminist view that transwomen retain their male socialization and so, as a group, can represent danger to women (which is backed up by research, btw, and the amount of “receipts” in the form of news reports of transwomen hurting and murdering cis women AND in the unending threats and harassment that radfems receive online and irl).

"The idea of ASAB and tying it to gender in some inviolate and unchangeable way is something colonizing white people brought to this country, and others they invaded.” cool but that’s bullshit? pretty much every culture on earth has a history of identifying biological sex and applying sociological roles to them. that’s not a white invention, that’s not the fruit of colonialism. the concept of “gender” as behaviors and roles based on reproductive function has existed for as long as people have existed. some cultures have stricter rules about them, others are more loose. some cultures refuse to acknowledge non-conforming people as their “original gender”, and then you have things like two-spirit or hijras.

"Whether you realize it or not, and…let’s be honest, you probably do, your actions, your hate group, is just a laser-guided subsection of what fascism and white supremacy stands for.” wtf tho. fascists and white supremacists and nazi want a “pure” world without “lesser” groups, like black people, jewish people, homosexuals, gnc people. how is female-only radical feminism the same? are you aware that plenty of radical feminists are woc themselves, and even jewish? are you aware that the vast majority of people you’d call “terfs” aren’t even american, or english speakers? we literally just want men to stop fucking murdering us.

“Without colonization, without white supremacy, your argument, your constant, hammering on “male” as if to conjure some demon from the word, would mean nothing.” male violence has been a reality in human history. it’s not a theory, it’s not up to debate. it’s a fact. you know it is, according to your original post talking about men posing the most danger to transwomen. women all over the world are victims of men. it doesn’t change whether we talk about it, or use the words male, men, amab.

"I don’t mean that in the rhetorical sense, I mean literally, your words would not have a cogent basis without that.” again, bullshit. male violence is everywhere, in every culture, in every part of the world, regardless of how much contact with europen colonization the culture has had. japanese men are violent, russian men are violent, french men are violent, english men are violent, american men are violent, cuban men are violent, argentinian men are violent, brazilian men are violent. nazis didn’t invent misogyny.

“How fucking dare you invoke my dead sisters, how fucking dare you bring up that most of us getting murdered are PoC, while peddling Nazi approved propaganda.” uh. it’s “nazi approved propaganda” to say that women face violence from men and therefore need safe spaces from them? and I brought up the groups that murdered transwomen belong to because YOUR GROUP likes using them, using your so-called dead sisters, as argument points, as proof that a white middle class educated men with a dress and lipstick is somehow more oppressed than any woman on earth.

“Meanwhile, asshole,” oh cool name calling when I wrote a relatively calm and non-offensive post. “I was talking about SHARED SPACES. LGBT focused communities, the ones you are perpetually try to focus trans lesbians out of because you view us as the worst of what you already consider the worst.” yeah, maybe we wouldn’t need to do that if “lesbian” transwomen could stop demanding so much from women, or if they’d stop claiming protagonism when they don’t even experience SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, which historically has been, you know, the entire defining poing for “lgbt” people.

“You didn’t even notice it, did you? You were just launching into Pre-Written Terf Rhetoric #5 without so much as reading what I actually. Fucking. Said.” dude, you’re calling me a nazi literally just because I said women deserve female-only spaces and transwomen should create their own safe spaces away from men instead of demanding entry and protection from women.

"Your insistence that we’re “straight men” only serves to try and push us out of those communities as well." you have more in common with straight men than with lesbians, tho. you don’t experience same-sex attraction, you’re not female, you can impregnate a female lesbian (depending on transition specifics, but let’s be honest: the big problem is the transwomen who claim “there’s no need to need to transition bc my dick is a woman’s dick”), if you’re not “passing” you don’t need to fear homophobic violence from strangers.

“Jesus fuck, like did you even notice that was the fucking point? Like your shoving us aside as non-women is already fucked up but that wasn’t even the point of this particular post.” the point of your post was vilifying women who question the notion that “transwomen are exactly the same as women”. the point of your post was putting the blame on women, “terfs”, for what men do.

"The idea that men view us as also men is so beyond laughable I can’t even properly convey it.” they view you as “DEFECTIVE” men. they definitely don’t view you as women. men are violent towards you as a result of toxic masculinity - a non-conforming male is a threat to their notion of rigid male-female roles. the violence towards you is closer in motivation to the violence towards gay men, rather than the one towards women.

"But I’m just going to say: You don’t live our lives. You don’t live our experiences.” yes. just like you don’t live the lives of women. which is exactly why I said transwomen do deserve safe spaces, but not by invading female-only safe spaces.

"If you don’t know how wrong you are it’s because you’re incapable of treating our words as anything but the words of the target of your hate and thus discarded.” you’re lumping me in with nazis (I’m a latina gender-non-conforming lesbian, I’d be raped and killed by actual nazis faster than you could type “op is a terf”), refusing to actually ACKNOWLEDGE the things I said, bringing up way more arguments than the ones on your original post, and then blaming me for not being able to read your mind.

“The power you hold is that you have been aligning yourself with right-wing christian groups,” bullshit. again: women can’t even get men to stop raping us. how exactly do you think we have any power, any voice, over THE most misogynistic men on the planet?

"the power you hold is that your ilk has been speaking to audiences wherever they can find them in academia for decades,” again, bullshit. women have been in academia for, like, two years, in comparison to how long men have been dominating every public and private space.

"the power you hold is that you went into the communities that might have helped us stay alive and sowed false accusations to turn others against us,” b u l l s h i t. YOU came into OUT communities demanding we treat you as equals, when we are observably NOT equals. sex-based oppression doesn’t affect transwomen the same way it does women. men’s violence is distinctly different based on your sex.

"the power you hold is in helping, insidiously, to uphold the institutional biases that keep us marginalized, alone, and dying.” the same can be said of modern trans rights activists, tho. you’re all contributing to the strengthening of gender as a hierarchy - and not because you need to conform to survive. no, your original message (the one we can still hear from drag queens and transvestites from stonewall, for instance, that your kind likes to claim as “transwomen”) has been corrupted to the point where people look at a feminine gay boy and tell him he must be trans, he must transition, he must be a woman because he likes makeup and is attracted to men. your kind tells parents of vulnerable children that their little boys and girls will KILL THEMSELVES if they don’t take hormones as soon as possible. your group tells lesbians they need to suck dick to be proper lesbians. your group supports (and breeds) more murderers, rapists, and pedophiles than radical feminism could. your group tells women of color, lesbians, survivors of all sorts of male violence, that they’re the problem. you tell us we’re even worse than men. you tell us to die, you threaten us with rape, with baseball bats. you punch sixty year old women who dare take a picture of people trying to silence women. you rape and murder a twelve year old girl. you rape and forcibly impregnate a female trans person, and then brag about it. you support rapists and pedophiles being housed in women’s prison because of their “gender feels”. 

you tell women to shut up about their own experiences. you tell women they’re not the “right kind” of women. you tell women they’re not woman “enough”. you tell them to sacirfice themselves for yet another male.

“And yes, before you even start, I’m blocking you. I don’t debate Nazis or Nazi bootlicks.” still nowhere near being a nazi, but alright.

bonus:

“also do they just have a terf blog name generator somewhere, i swear all terf blogs read like a bunch of synonyms for vagina and spellings of rad and possibly a wolf reference or phile or fetishist, all put in a random name generator” that’s hilarious to men because I literally saved this url after I seeing an asshole claim that lesbians aren’t allowed to call themselves lesbians if they don’t suck dick, and that they’re actually vagina fetishists. the person used -phile on something, I can’t recall what, and I immediately thought “hmm, yes. I love vulvas. I’m a vulvaphile. A female vulvaphile.” 

[belovedblabber]

On Fury Road and the value of non-threatening male heroes

So I’ve been re-watching Fury Road and something struck me;

Tom Hardy’s Max is just really non-threatening. Now, that’s weird on a surface level because in story he’s presented as very dangerous. But here’s the thing about the kind of men we’re used to seeing in action movie; They are threatening in their masculinity.

The capitol A Action hero is a fixture in our cultural awareness. Almost without fail this hero is a man (if you have a woman in the role of action hero, it’s almost always proceeded by her gender. She can’t just be the action hero, she is very clearly cast as a FEMALE action hero.) So our male Action hero  is a badass. He’s dangerous, he’s brooding, he’s tough as nails. Sometimes he’s sarcastic and witty, sometimes he’s a moody stud. Point is, despite cultural changes that we see with our Action heroes as different pop culture trends change the flavoring, these men are all pretty much cut from the same mold. And here’s the thing about your typical Action hero; They have this underlying current of threatening masculinity. To put it bluntly, your typical Action hero is really all about cock. They’re intimidating to both their male peers and the women who are cast opposite them. They are toxic masculinity distilled onto our screens.

Now, in recent years we’ve been seeing more varity in our Action heroes. More emotion. Of course, there have always been exceptions (Luke Skywalker is one of the most note worthy male heroes to break this mold, and I think it’s worth noting that he’s often called whiny. Hell, when I was a little kid I loved him, but as a young teenager I thought he was lame. Now I realize that this might well have been because he wasn’t acting like your typical male hero. Maybe that scared me on some level) Anyway, let’s get back to Hardy’s Max. In story he  starts out as frightening, but he is never threatening in the way of your usual Action hero. He’s feral, dangerous, and unpredictable at the start of our story, but he doesn’t have any of that toxic masculinity.  So, we have a mad Max who is dangerous, and seems mad, as it were.  But there’s none of that hyper male Action hero posturing.

Hardy’s Max is a flawed man whose past has almost driven him past the point of no return. To the other characters in the movies he initially seems to be  feral (they don’t have the benefit of hearing his inner thoughts) Max is a frightening, but he’s not a masculine he-man. In fact, the characters in the movie who fall close to what we’re used to seeing in Action heroes are the warboys and their leader. The culture espoused by Immortan Joe is hyper masculine and toxic. The young men who idolize him seem like extreme versions of what we’re used to with our heroes. They’re brainwashed into a society built on toxic masculinity and objectification, and the heroes of the story are the ones fighting against this idea. Interestingly, Furiosa has a lot of traits of your traditional Action hero, but it’s coupled with compassion and self reflection, not because she’s a woman, but because  she’s  a person. Like Max, she is fighting to regain her humanity through helping a group of young women fight for their freedom from a world of toxic masculinity.

So, again back to Max himself. As the movie goes on he regains his sense of self. A big theme int he movie is the objectification and commodification of human life. We see this with Immortan Joe’s ‘wives” as well as with the brainwashed warboys and the use living humans as ‘bloodbags’ and ‘milkers’ Max starts the movie literally strapped to the hood of a car as a hood ornament/living blood bag.  Max is reluctant to help Furiosa and the ‘wives’ at first, but we see him change in a brief period of time. He  regains his humanity through helping others and coming to terms with his own demons. Hardy’s Max is dangerous, but he’s also vulnerable, undeniably so. We see his fear, we see what haunts him, and we see him struggle to survive, and then struggle to come to terms with his past in order to help others have a future. This sets him apart from Mel Gibson’s Max, and in my opinion makes him the better of the two. By the time Max starts really showing his human side, we see a man who is compassionate and half broken, a man who relearns himself by helping others.

Another notable aspect of Max is his relationship with Furiosa. Usually when your typical Action hero is paired with a STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN in a movie, there’s this ongoing dynamic of ‘but you’re a girlllllll’ There isn’t respect, because the heroes of the story are acting out the deeply felt internalized misogyny of our own society. They can’t interact as equals because in our cultural minds they are inherently unequal. They are defined by their rigid gender rules, and they act this out like they’re children on a playground crying about cooties. And of course, there’s usually the sexual element, with the heroes constantly griping at/disrespecting one another while it’s played off as repressed attraction all along.Fury Road never once does this. Max and Furiosa are two flawed and broken people trying to survive. There isn’t a split second where Max stops to wonder how a GIRL can be so tough. Once they’re established as allies, they immediately move into a working relationship built on mutual respect and trust. Two scenes come to mind. Firstly, the initial canyon chase when Max first shows himself as an ally. There’s one notable moment where Furiosa is standing up out of the roof and Max hands her a gun. That doesn’t seem important, but there’s something about that gesture that’s very c cinematically important. It shows us that they’re a team now, and it shows us that they trust each other. The second notable scene is the “Don’t breathe” moment in the night bog. Max has previously seen that Furiosa is a good shot. He knows that she is the one to trust with this task, so he hands her the gun and lets her use him as a rifle stand. It’s a moment with no dialogue that speaks volumes.

All of this goes to Max as a nonthreatening hero. He never objectifies, disrespects, or distrusts his counterpart. He’s never an alpha male. He’s part of a story that he doesn’t need to dominate with his manly male maleness. Hardy’s Max is a dangerous, vulnerable, and quietly compassionate man who gives respect and trust where it’s due. He has no need to parade and prove his masculinity. In fact, the people doing that are the villains, and isn’t that telling?

[sage-nebula]

Pokemon XYZ or blue exorcist please!

Someone else asked for Blue Exorcist, so I’m going to go ahead and do Pokémon XY(&Z). I’m also assuming you mean the anime here, but if not and you meant the games, feel free to send that in, haha.

But as for the anime … oh buddy.

Very first order of business here is to fix Alan’s ending, because I hate, hate, hate everything that happened with him post-episode 44 to the point where I feel actual anxiety in my gut every time I so much as think about it, much less actually see screencaps or gifsets of it. (Well, okay—that scene where Sycamore tries to encourage Alan to dance despite the fact that Alan clearly doesn’t want to, only for Bonnie to drag Sycamore off a couple seconds later despite how startled and reluctant he is, while Alan grins at Sycamore getting a taste of his own medicine there—that was super cute. But everything else? Everything else was garbage, and I’m wiling to sacrifice those seconds of cuteness if it means getting rid of all the other trash.) While the abusive situation that gave me C-PTSD that I’m still grappling with to this day lasted a lot longer for me than Alan’s lasted for him, his situation also came with so many more severe incidental traumas, so I feel it evens out in terms of relatability for me. With that said, the fact that he was given no time to deal with them—the fact that we see in XYZ044 that he’s feeling and sounds suicidal enough to worry Ash to the point where Ash basically gives him a “promise me you’ll battle me again at some vague, undefined point in the future, which means you have to be alive and well enough to do it” offer and that Alan refers to this as Ash saving him, all to just completely sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened two episodes later so they can toss him out on a journey again (despite, you know, the fact that Professor Sycamore said that with the way Lumiose City was Alan was needed there in episode 44 and Alan was so happy he practically started crying while smiling when he heard that), sickens me.So! Before I get into anything else, the first thing that’s changing is that. Alan is staying at the lab—his home—at the end of the series, in order to rest and recuperate. He no longer has the Mega Ring (and Lizardon no longer has that godawful collar), but the Key Stone and Charizardite X were kept and Sycamore has them fashioned into a matching set of pendants: a half-sun for Lizardon, and a half-moon for Alan. But even though they have those back, they’re still staying at the lab for the time being, with no definite plans for the future. Right now, Alan is just focusing on recuperating—or rather, Sycamore is focusing on Alan recuperating, while Alan is focusing on helping out around the lab. You know how he is. In his mind, he’ll rest when he’s dead. (Which Sycamore would like to be very many decades from now, rather than at some point before his sixteenth/seventeenth birthday, but that requires getting Alan to actually rest and take care of himself, and sometimes that can be a struggle.) So he has no definite plans, but before Ash leaves he does reaffirm that they’ll battle again someday, and whatever he does will work toward that. Ash is pretty happy to hear it.Manon, meanwhile, returns to her own journey. She’s reluctant at first; we see throughout TSME and the main series that Manon has little to no real confidence in herself as a trainer, shown both in how she never actually has a single battle on-screen aside from when she captures Fla-chan (which Alan helped her with and might as well have never happened anyway since Fla-chan was never seen after that moment)—and no, TSME 3 does not count, because Manon did not command Hari-san. He acted independently in order to defend both Manon and Alan. Her lack of confidence is also highlighted in TSME 4, when she tells Alan that if he’s with her then she and Hari-san can grow stronger, and he tells her (truthfully!) that she needs to stop relying on him all the time. So Manon is reluctant to go on her own, but Alan encourages her, tells her that he knows she can do it, and as an added bonus invites her to pick a Kanto starter to take with her. She chooses bulbasaur, and he gives her a cryptic message about how he might have something special for her should she ever manage to evolve her bulbasaur all the way to the venusaur stage. Manon gets excited and pesters him about whether or not it’s a Key Stone/Mega Stone (“Will I be able to mega evolve?!” - “It’s your pokémon that mega evolves, not you—” - “I know that, jeez! Just answer the question!!”), but he refuses to tell her. Just smiles and playfully shoos her on her way. She’s still nervous—scared, even—but she and Hari-san (and her new bulbasaur Fushi-kun) go on their journey to build confidence in themselves and each other.So that’s number one—the biggest one, but a very, very important one. As for others?

The Showcases have got to go. They do. They just do. They’re bathed in idol culture, which is extremely toxic and harmful, and honestly I wouldn’t be as bothered by the Showcases if they weren’t female-only, but the fact that this is The Girl Activity (whereas Contests, for instance, were always co-ed) bothers me, particularly since there isn’t any battling involved, but there is a lot of dancing and cooking, et cetera. It feels like a rigid enforcing of gender roles on top of being steeped in idol culture, and I don’t like that. It needs to go.That said? The Pokémon anime actually did introduce the concept of idols way back in the OS—specifically in the Pokémon Chronicles special episodes—and it was far less of an issue then. Pokémon Idols in the OS took the form of trainers like Marina (who was based on Kris from the games), and while the actual job description is somewhat vague, from the way Marina made it seem the goal of a Pokémon Idol is to be as entertaining as possible while battling. It is, essentially, to be a performance artist as well as a battler. So for instance, whenever Marina would battle she and her pokémon had choreographed entrance moves whenever she released them from their pokéballs. She also insisted to Jimmy (who was based on Gold from the games) that she wanted to “turn her battles into performances” in order to make people happy. And you know what? She did! Marina participated in the Johto League/Silver Conference, as well as a Grand Festival, but she was also shown modeling the Pokétch on a magazine cover and has had her face on t-shirts. She has become a star/idol, while at the same time working as a trainer skilled enough to participate in the Johto League/Silver Conference, and a coordinator skilled enough to participate in a Grand Festival.This is relevant, because if they really wanted to capitalize on the popularity of idol culture/idol anime such as Love Live!, the PokéAni writing staff could have worked in something similar for Serena. Rather than inventing Showcases the way they did (and removing the battling aspect completely), they could have instead set up something such as a Kalosian Idol Search, which hosted special battle competitions around Kalos in order to search for the next idol a la Marina. Perhaps these are similar to, but not the same as, Gyms, in which the objective is both to win a series of battles, but also turn those battles into performances in order to win the favor of the public (so, sort of like Contests, but not wholly the same). This could be co-ed as well, meaning that Tierno could participate in an attempt to be an idol, which would be perfect for him given that he loves to dance (and likes to incorporate dancing into battles, which is right in line with what Marina liked to do back in the OS). This way, Serena could be an active battler while still pursuing a goal that doesn’t mirror Ash’s badge quest, and yet isn’t so rigidly “this is for girls, and girls don’t battle,” which is the vibe much of the XY&Z saga gave me. Something like that (albeit a bit more refined, as this is a rough idea) would be far better than the Showcases were. (More entertaining to watch, too, imo.)

And speaking on Serena some more, we’re not going to have her hero worshiping/hero crushing on Ash for the entire series, because to be quite honest that created far more problems than it solved. It’s fine to have them meet in childhood (even though bby!Ash in the flashbacks do not at all resemble OS!Ash, which they should have—and that would need to be remedied, too), and it’s fine to have her remember that meeting and still hold a childhood crush on him—but he should have changed a lot since then. She should have, too. And we should have—we needed to have a moment early on where Serena realizes that he’s not just the amazing and courageous hero that she remembers, that he’s a human being with flaws, and maybe that bursts her bubble a bit, maybe she’s disappointed and put-out that this isn’t exactly like a fairy tale …… but then she gets to know him, as a person, flaws and all. Sometimes they quarrel, sometimes she’s less than impressed with him, but othertimes she is impressed with him, other times she sees that he makes her laugh or that, even if he’s not some amazing hero, he’s a guy she likes …… and, if we must go down the romance route, feelings develop from there.What made Ash/Misty so great in the OS was that Misty wasn’t introduced with the idea of, “This is Ash’s love interest.” Instead, their friendship was first and foremost what was developed, and the romance—which was canonically there from both sides, even in the JP version—developed naturally over time. They are most definitely best friends with crushes. If the anime writers wanted to write a romance arc with Ash and Serena, okay, that’s fine—go for it! But in that case, focus on developing them as friends first. Have the crush grow naturally. Don’t create Serena with the express purpose of having her fawn over Ash (which, yes—a recent interview revealed that the reason why this was written in was because a writer wanted to “see the series from the eyes of a female companion who admired Satoshi” which is just … no). Instead, even if she has a crush on him at first, have her get to know him—actually get to know him this time, not meet once and then separate for years on end, but know him as a person—and have her develop feelings for who he is now, not who she has idealized him to be. (And don’t have him be perfect all the time, either! Let him get mad! Frustrated! Selfish! Petty! Let him be feisty!) And likewise, have Ash develop a special and concentrated friendship with Serena, rather than just cute shippy moments here or there. Show us that he actually feels something for her beyond friendship. Show us before the very end where you just have his eyes sparkle after she kisses him, because you know what? His eyes sparkled the same way when Rowlet cuddled up to him in the Sun/Moon anime. Different animation style, sure, but I’m js. That’s not enough. And if the writers have to tell us later on “oh yeah, it’s meant to imply Ash and Serena are a couple later,” that’s not good writing. You guys can do better than this. Prove it.… So, um, yeah, I’d fix that. I’d change that ship from “girl meets boy when they are 5, develops a crush on him, and continues crushing through to the end as she works to be worthy of him” to “girl meets boy when they are 5, develops a crush on him, realizes when they are 10 that he’s not the Ideal Hero she built him up to be, befriends him as a person, realizes she’s developing new and stronger feelings for him now that she actually knows and sees him as a person, and he comes to see her as one of his closest friends and confidants, and their relationship is much more believable and stronger as a result.” That’s definitely a change I would make if the romance angle needs to be kept. (Which I don’t think it needs to be, but you know, in the interest of fairness, I’m just saying I could have done it better. Js.)

I can’t believe I forgot about this until point four, but rework Bond Phenomenon ffs. First of all, we’re no longer giving it to Greninja (or at least not limiting it to Greninja). That was stupid pandering meant to push Greninja’s popularity, and I’m not having it. If any one of Ash’s pokémon is getting it, it’s Pikachu, particularly since “but Pikachu isn’t fully evolved!1!1″ doesn’t matter because Bond Phenomenon is not mega evolution, and therefore the same rules don’t apply. The entire point of Bond Phenomenon was to avoid giving Ash a mega evolution for whatever asinine reason the anime team had, and if that’s the case, then there is no reason not to give the special love-powered super form to the partner and platonic soul mate that Ash has had since day one, particularly since Ash’s bond with Greninja was so poorly developed and not believable in the least bit. So if Ash is still getting Bond Phenomenon for whatever reason, it’s going to Pikachu, and that’s final.Second, although I know there are many people who would hate this, sorry I’m not sorry, but I felt that there was plenty of foreshadowing that made it seem as if Alan and Lizardon would be tapping into that in the finale of the Flare Arc, perhaps following a scene where they tossed off the Mega Ring and collar right in Lysandre’s face and tapped into Bond Phenomenon afterward, given that they have “a bond that overcomes reason” (Alan’s words, TSME 1) / “a bond that surpasses its limits” (Malva’s words, TSME 4). So on top of giving Bond Phenomenon to Ash and Pikachu and making it clear that it’s not exclusive to that (which, conveniently, Sycamore’s explanation in XYZ036 did plainly enough by saying it’s rare but there are several recorded instances throughout history!), we’d perhaps tap into it here as well, albeit only on a Lvl 1 or 2 scale, and one that probably knocks them both out at the end of the battle due to the physical toll it would take on them.Or, if not that? Then ditch Bond Phenomenon altogether and just give Ash a goddamn mega evolution, particularly in the form of ‘Zard Y. I’d be very happy with that as well, especially since Ash wearing his Key Stone attached to his hat would be adorable (and a nod to Red, whom the anime team specifically said they pulled from when putting together Ash’s XY design, most notably with the sideburns). Either way, Ash-Greninja is getting the boot for sure. Gtfo, froggo. No one wants you here.

Last (but certainly not least), I wanted a real confrontation between Lysandre and Sycamore over what Lysandre did to Alan—the lies, the manipulation, the abuse. We see in TSME 4 that Sycamore gives Lysandre a cold reception when first meeting him, and I really, really wanted Sycamore to go save his son, or at least confront Lysandre over it. So I definitely would have worked that in there, as well as more focus on Sycamore and Alan’s father-son bond in general. We needed more of that. More childhood flashbacks, perhaps (imagine flashbacks showing little five-year-old Alan, fdsfdsafda), some more heart-to-hearts near the end, perhaps … things like that. So, an actual confrontation between Lysandre and Sycamore, and more focus on Sycamore and Alan’s father-son bond, yesssss.

There is a lot more that I would change, I feel, but these are major ones. And this is super long/a lot as it is, so … that should tell you how many feelings I have over it, haha.

[recentanimenews]

How Utena Helped Me Understand My Queerness

As a queer person (and the word “queer” means so many different things for me), I can call upon any number of childhood moments where my understanding of the gender binary were constantly challenged. When I played Power Rangers with my friends, I always wanted to be the Pink Ranger. The breadwinner of my family is my hard-working mother. My favorite manga growing up were shojo and magical girl stories. These days, it’s easy for me to say I was always the way I am now, but for the longest time, I never had a reference point to help me define my conflicts over my queer expressions. Utena Tenjou was one such anime character who contributed a lot to that end.

As the titular protagonist of Revolutionary Girl Utena celebrates her birthday on December 29, I write this as a tribute to Utena. Her own experience with toxic masculinity and restrictive gender roles helped inform my own, and I consider her one of my major influences on my ongoing queer journey up there with Steven Universe and Bayonetta.

As a character, though, she didn’t start out that way. In fact, her entire worldview was centered around a very black-and-white concept of gender. Or in this case, blue-and-pink. It was her whole journey—tragic and surreal and cathartic as it was—that I was able to empathize with. Utena’s evolution beyond her preconceived notions of society became something of a cautionary tale for me and my voyage beyond the gender binary.

  Utena’s story began after a seemingly-gallant prince saved her from a life of despair. When tragedy befell her at a young age, Utena had nearly resigned herself to darkness and isolation. It wasn’t until her prince came along and showed light at the end of the tunnel. From that point forward, she sought to become a prince herself.

While attending high school, she became a popular tomboy who proudly wore her princely demeanor, quite literally. She was known for preferring boys’ school uniforms as opposed to the girls’ and often bested many of the male students at sports. When it came time for her to fight the Student Council over Anthy the Rose Bride, she took on the role of a prince defending a helpless and innocent damsel.

As the title suggests, Utena sought a form of social revolution with her masculine expression. She refused to let her gender limit herself in both school life and as she fought for Anthy’s hand in marriage and did her best to shake up gender norms. I was initially inspired by her efforts to present her masculinity, but when I look back on it now, that mindset was almost self-defeating. 

She rejected any notion of traditional femininity while also heavily conforming to displays of traditional masculinity. At a certain point when she loses the will to continue her fight, she resigned herself to wearing a girl’s school uniform and trying to act more feminine and delicate. This is almost as if taking on "feminine traits" was supposed to be a form of punishment. She both subverted and reinforced the gender binary and lived her whole life under this paradox. 

Much like Utena, my own expression was also restricted by these guidelines. Growing up, I had no grasp of what was “for boys” or “for girls.” I wasn’t born with any particular notion on how to gender my behavior. I only learned about the gender binary through the lens of how other people structured their lives by it. 

  Being assigned male at birth, the world provided me with the recipe on how to act like a boy I tried desperately to fit into it. It became easy for me to feign masculinity and adjust my personality among my cisgendered friends. But I could feel my femininity trying to ooze out. I felt it through my favorite anime and choice of role models and the crushes I had and this growing desperation I felt to reject the manlihood I could feel infesting me. It would be a while until I realized how harmful this was to my emotional health, but Utena helped me along the path of revolution.

Utena went through a similar struggle throughout her battles for the Rose Bride. What began as a story of her, the gallant prince charged with protecting the helpless damsel, was deconstructed into something much more sinister as she dug herself further and further into the throes of toxic masculinity. 

She eventually started interacting with Akio Ohtori, Anthy’s brother as well as an incarnation of the prince who had saved her. And from that point on, Utena’s principles on gender were constantly challenged to the point where she had to question everything she thought she knew about the world and even herself. 

Her prince was nothing more than a manipulative abuser who sought power for himself. Anthy, while still a damsel in distress in her own right, was capable of cold-hearted cruelty as she remained in the thrall of her brother. And Utena’s efforts to embody a gallant prince were nothing more than her own roundabout way of allowing patriarchal standards to control her life as she continually fell into Akio’s clutches.

Eventually, Utena made a sacrifice that helped her accept the world for what it was and allowed her to achieve some small form of revolution. She fought until her last breath to save Anthy, disregarding all notions of princely duty or the expectations of a maiden. Though she disappeared in the process, her final efforts had touched Anthy’s heart and allowed her to leave her brother behind as she left to answer Utena’s love and find her once more.

As strange as Utena’s journey was, it contains a rather simple message that has since resonated with me: the gender binary is simply a construct and affixing yourself to it is poisonous. There is no right or wrong way to present your gender identity, but the necessity to draw that distinct line between how to be feminine or masculine is a strict and narrow-minded concept that all but destroyed Utena's life. 

Utena helped me realize how I prefer to present more feminine. Whether it's through my cosplay or the clothes I wear every day or the way I speak, my femininity is vital to who I am as a person. I long for the day when I’m able to appear as girlish as I please and have people question the very nature of gender expression. But even when I feel as far from content with my gender identity as possible, Utena's story taught me that my queerness doesn’t change. My being trans and being femme is a constant, and even at my lowest points, she reminds me that I’m always as queer as I should be. 

When I first watched Utena, I thought I wanted to be her. I viewed her as someone who challenged gender norms and shattered expectations. But as I saw her grow and change, I learned that that wasn’t the whole truth. Defining her whole life between being either a prince or a damsel was her downfall, and it wasn’t until those final moments that she realized that being herself was more important than fulfilling an idyllic yet flawed patriarchal fantasy. 

In Adolescence of Utena, she does achieve a more fulfilling catharsis. After winning the right to marry the Rose Bride, she rejects the marriage entirely. Her only wish was to live freely with the girl she loved, and she fights tooth and nail and race car to achieve it with Anthy. True to the title, Utena more readily overcame her adolescence and rigid gender structures to come out and love both Anthy and herself more openly.     

As for me? I suppose even in my mid-20s, I’m still in that same proverbial adolescence that Utena went through. This is still a world where people still adhere to that rigid binary and leave little wiggle room for people to safely explore themselves. And I still have plenty of days when I don’t feel nearly as queer or as trans as I want to be. 

But Utena Tenjou’s story gave me so much guidance at a time when I really needed it. I learned alongside her that we have no obligation to fit into anyone’s molds but our own. As a queer person, I choose to be feminine and how I achieve that is up to me. Once upon a time, I would’ve called Utena Tenjou a role model. That isn’t the case anymore. More truthfully, we were kindred spirits who were, and still are, desperate for revolution within ourselves. So to celebrate Utena's birthday, I'll keep trying to revolutionize my own world. Happy birthday, Utena!

What's your take on Utena's tumultous coming-of-age? What's your favorite Utena moment? Comment below and let us know!

----

Carlos is a freelance features writer for Crunchyroll. Their favorite genres range from magical girls to over-the-top robot action, yet their favorite characters are always the obscure ones. Check out some of their satirical work on The Hard Times.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[gyrlversion]

10 Pictures That Will Redefine Your Expectations Of Gender

Soraya Zaman

“Caden is a beautiful and spiritual soul. He has an amazing calm way about him that shouldn’t be mistaken for shyness.”

Soraya Zaman is an Australian-born photographer whose work often highlights concepts surrounding gender and sexuality. As a queer nonbinary person who identifies with the pronouns they/them, Zaman’s work carries an added vitality and a deeply personal connection to their subjects and their subject’s stories.

Zaman’s new book, American Boys, is a collection of portraits capturing a state of flux — not just in terms of gender, but in lifestyle, location, and mentality. Zaman spoke with BuzzFeed News about their journey to produce this book and the importance of visibility among the gender nonbinary community today.

Soraya Zaman

“Aodhán identifies as a trans man and also as ‘Two Spirit’ within the Native American culture and comes from the Cherokee. He taught me that before colonization, there were no labels for gender-nonconforming indigenous people.”

How would you describe your book American Boys?

American Boys is a portrait series of 29 transmasculine individuals from big cities to small towns across the USA captured at distinct stages of their transition. Each series is accompanied by first-person accounts from conversations we had together.

These images show a glimpse into everyone’s life at a specific moment in time. Capturing their personality, their honesty, beauty, vulnerability, strength, and so on. They are affirmative images of everyone, and it is work that informs and expands upon understandings of gender identity outside of the binary and is real and validating.

American Boys looks to challenge people’s own perceptions of traditional binary gender roles.

Where did the portrait series begin for you, and when did you feel it was complete?

This project began back in the summer of 2016. At the time, I was looking to explore expressions of transmasculinity, as it was something personal to me and my own feelings and journey of gender identity. It didn’t take me long to realize that honoring and sharing stories, and validating and centering everyone I met and photographed in an affirmative way, was really important, especially in the now-changing political climate. There isn’t a lot of transmasculine representation in the media, and I wanted to create something that took these important narratives out of online spaces and put them into something more permanent.

Honestly, I don’t think this series is complete! The transmasculine community is rich, diverse, and deep — 29 people cannot adequately represent any community. There is definitely more to say and share, and I’m looking to do a second book.

Soraya Zaman

“Chella is an artist, writer, storyteller, and role model to many in the trans, nonbinary, and queer community. He’s also deaf, but in no way does this slow Chella down.”

How did you meet your subjects?

I discovered everyone in this project through Instagram. I mostly sorted out people who were using their online platform to express what was happening in their lives in an interesting way. To me, they were natural storytellers with a willingness to share for good or bad. That resonated with me.

I reached out over DM to see if they were interested. It was also important for me to feature transmasculine lives all over the country and to not just represent people who live in New York and LA and other places typically thought of as queer hubs. There is an extra level of bravery required to live and exist as a trans person in smaller towns where community and safety can be harder to find.

How important do you believe nonbinary representation is in the media?

For so long, we’ve all just been fed the same cisgender, heteronormative view of the world. When I was a kid, there was nothing in the media that reflected back to me how I see myself. The binary gender roles that have been constructed by the Western world confine us in a way that doesn’t leave any room for nuance or complexity. These rigid binary ideologies of what is expected are dangerous, oppressive, and toxic to trans and nonbinary people.

Soraya Zaman

“Lazarus laughed with me about having basically been every letter in ‘LGBTQ’ and now just wants to be identified as a unicorn.”

We are asked to fit into a box that ultimately can never contain our multitudes. It’s really only recently that we have begun to see queer, trans, and nonbinary people represented in a way that doesn’t feel tokenistic. So this work is personal to me because it forms part of the current conversation on expanding gender expectations and is contributing in a positive way. It allows people to be seen and feel proud of who they are, something that was missing for me in my youth.

What do you hope people will take away from these images?

The project is an intentional call to the nostalgic, internalized idea of American boyhood and the notion that masculinity belongs exclusively to cis men.

I hope that it helps people unpack the belief that gender identity must align with one’s sex assigned at birth and move away from these restrictive categories of gender. It’s also about an affirmative centering of transmasculine identity. I hope that people take the time to not only look at the images but also read the personal accounts. If people can’t “see” themselves in any of the images, then perhaps they can find a shared experience in some of the stories.

I want people to know that they are not alone in their journey. We are all in this together forging unique identities and the best possible lives for ourselves all across the country and globe, and there is power in that. Hopefully it helps move us all closer to a culture that welcomes, validates, and provides safety for all identities.

Soraya Zaman

“Russel is kind and sweet. He has a gentle way about him, although he told me that he hasn’t always been this way. Feeling dysphoria used to make him an emotional wreck, angry at the world, and he would get triggered by small things and lash out. There was a point though where he just kind of found more peace and got focused on bringing in positive things and how far he’s come, rather than thinking about how he maybe wasn’t where he wanted to be yet.”

Soraya Zaman

“Rufio! What an amazing bundle of body-building-bear–like brilliance! Rufio is so full of life and spirit. He’s also a staunch feminist, especially with his experience of white male privilege that came with passing.”

Soraya Zaman

“Elijah is a kind and compassionate quiet achiever. He grew up in South Texas in a Christian Baptist family. When he finally came out to his mother, she knew that their family might attack him with scripture claiming that being transgender is against God’s will. So they both studied the Bible and found verses to debunk what they might throw at him.”

Soraya Zaman

“When I met Justin, he was at a number of beginnings. He was beginning his life after top surgery, which he had one week earlier, and was about to start college. Justin was excited to leave his school days behind where he lived under the radar, quiet, and kept to himself, which really isn’t Justin at all. He’s actually very funny and well-spoken, self-confident, and embracing leadership roles both as a member of the Quaker community and at the LGBTQ center in Richmond, where he established a trans people of color group.”

Soraya Zaman

“Emmett is a transgender Mormon and a self-proclaimed rebel in his own way. Emmett has had to reconcile his faith in the Lord with his gender identity, and the road has not been easy.”

Soraya Zaman

“When I hung out with Jaimie, who btw is an incredible musician, he spoke to me about his experience with back-handed compliments. People saying to him, ‘Wow, you’re so hot…for a trans guy! Even I’d have sex with you!’ — like he should be especially honored these people find him attractive.”

To pick up your copy of American Boys, visit daylightbooks.org.

Click here for more photo stories from BuzzFeed News.

The post 10 Pictures That Will Redefine Your Expectations Of Gender appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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[rebelwheelssoapbox]

Pretty vs. Visually Interesting: Thoughts On Gender, Beauty and Disability

(TW: The following article discusses oppression, gender, ableism, body image struggles & verbal abuse.) As an artist and photographer, I am drawn to people who look visually interesting versus someone who just looks pretty. To be clear, one can be visually interesting and attractive. Attractive is a very subjective thing that can vary and although one’s idea of attractive might be influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by what society deems as pretty, it does not need to conform to such rigid ideas to qualify as beautiful. Yet as a woman, I am aware of the great lengths society goes to remind me that I should strive for pretty. For although it is 2018, in ways we are very much stuck in the highly rigid and toxic gender roles, where a man's worth is defined by his ability to earn money and thus be a “good provider” for his family and a woman's worth is defined by her ability to attract a man via her ability to conform to the societal idea's of beauty (aka: pretty).

[image of a cisgender appearing man and woman on their wedding day in their wedding attire].

This of course, is toxic for many reasons: for one, it portrays marriage, monogamy and having kids as something that is right for everyone, when it is not. It's also based on a very hetero-normative standard, when there are other equally valid sexual orientations. It falsely suggests there are only two sexes and two genders, and lastly that one's gender (a man-made concept that says that one's appearance and behavior is based on what's in your pants) is determined at birth by one's sex (which is just not the case) But I digress. The idea of pretty (at least in regard to women) is a rigid standard of beauty that typically favors whiteness, cisgender appearance, sexy – but for the sake of the male gaze, slim over fat (or fat in “acceptable areas” like the chest and ass), and certainly bodies that are not visibly disabled. And thus is also highly toxic because it's not something that everyone can achieve.

[a model looks towards her right]

And if a woman's worth is supposedly determined by her ability to conform to pretty, (which of course is not actually true, but that's what is promoted in our society), then cue all kinds of internal struggles between who a person is (how they appear and how they feel) and who they think they ought to be if they are to be accepted, loveable and good enough. If they are to be of worth.

Though not my only identity, as a visibly disabled woman, society makes it pretty clear that I can not be pretty. According to society, disability (when visible) can not be pretty, as our bodies do not conform to the able bodied standard. In fact, the more visible my disability, the more backlash I get. This is not to say that disabled people can not be beautiful, because we are. We're just not pretty – but we don't need to be.

In fact, as an artist and photographer who favors imperfection in their subject, I strive to look visually interesting over pretty. This is a conscious choice. I wear my disability identity as a badge of pride using hashtags like Disabled AF #represent, and thus taking the power back.

[image description: a circle design with a purple, blue, purple, yellow and then orange border. It's circles within circles. The main fill of the circle however is red. The text is yellow "Disability Pride is not about loving your symptoms 24/7. It's about rejecting the idea that they make you inferior. #disabledAF #represent " ]

When I think of pretty, I think of boring and being boxed in. When I think of visually interesting, I think of subversive and freedom.

But I didn't always feel this way. When I was a little kid, I used to love going through various fashion magazines. I liked looking at all the women, with their gaze and shiny red lips. I am sure it was partially because I was queer (bi) but didn’t yet realize it, but also because that whole world just looked so exciting and glamorous to me. Around the age of 10, I decided I too wanted to be a model, so my mom drove me to a local modeling agency where a grown woman, looked at my belly with disdain and said “You'll have to lose that.” 

[a photo of a model from the 80′s with blonde feathered hair, and eyes that are looking at the camera]

It was the first time I became aware of my body in regard to worth. Up to that point, I never looked at my body in the mirror and thought I am this or that. It was just a body. It helped me play outside and I covered it with clothes, but it was never good or bad. It just was. But in that moment, it became clear that the lack of flatness of my stomach was bad.

There were other factors  (I grew up in a volatile household where I was called things like stupid bitch, fat, ugly, and often I was not physically safe) but I think it's safe to say that the experience at the modeling agency, was one reason why I developed a really toxic relationship with food and weight, often starving myself till 3pm, overeating and then exercising. I also desperately wanted a boyfriend in my teenage years because I was not conscious of how family and society had influenced my idea of worth. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting a partner nor a loving relationship, but it is toxic when you feel you need a partner to show to the world, look how of worth I am for I was able to attract someone who is willing to date me. In time, and especially as I was exposed to third wave feminism & the riot grrl scene in the 90's (which yes can be problematic, but in this case was helpful), did I start to reject this quest to look pretty. Did I start to view pretty as this concept of beauty that celebrate the few and oppressed the many.

[a photo of Bikini Kill, a band from the Riot Grrl era]

In fact, in time, the more visible my disability became (as it was invisible enough in my youth, where most people didn’t think of me as disabled, just clumsy), in time the more I celebrated the beauty of imperfection. The beauty of visually interesting over pretty. I realized society is going to gawk at me regardless if I dress in all beige or wear loud colors. They are going to stare whether I dance or not (literally & symbolically), so I might as well just dance (spoons willing and if my heart so desired.)

By this time, I had also cut ties with many people in my family who were not capable/willing to treat me right – the way I deserve to be treated and also became better friends with food, eating when i was hungry and no longer depriving myself, nor equating my worth with my weight.

[a photo me in Betty, my motorized wheelchair wearing black combat boots]

Not to suggest that I always have my shit together, because I don't (and that’s okay. Does anyone actually have their shit together all the time?), but for the most part this is where I was at.

And it really wasn't until recently (2018), when I decided that I would start taking selfies, that the toxic influence of pretty came knocking on my door. Yes, I am late to the party. Honestly, I had nothing against selfies. It just never really occurred to my brain that I should take them. But being a YouTuber and noticing that fellow content creators post selfies of themselves on social media, I thought I too would give it a go.

Could I take a solid photo of myself? I thought it would be interesting to challenge myself artistically, since I am normally not the subject of my work. And since I am way more comfortable behind the camera then in front of it when it comes to photography, let's see what happens when we challenge ourselves on that level. But the more I took photos of myself, the more the focus was on me and my face, the more old demons came back to haunt me.

And while I do think that when people from marginalized demographics (such as the disability community) take & post selfies, that this can be an act of protest and can be used to create much needed representation, I started to become aware how certain selfies got more likes, shares and thus validation than others.

When I posted a selfie and no one responded, I started to feel self conscious and wondered, is it me? Is it the photo of my face that is somehow not enough? (Is it not pretty?) My past started to creep up on me again as I started to view my physical appearance with a super critical eye, noticing anything that looked “out of place.” Noticing the contrast between the selfies with the “perfect” makeup, “perfect” angle and “perfect” lighting (who got tons of shares & likes) versus mine who had none of those things. Even if I wanted to, I didn't have the spoons (energy) to put that kind of effort into a selfie and it started to mess with me.

[an artsy selfie with a blue tint and I am looking towards the right]

It wasn't until I started to take more artsy selfies, did I realize this is how I am comfortable being seen. It wasn’t till I took a more creative approach, did I start to care less how many people liked it, if people liked the photo, because I liked the photo, and that was enough. Only then did I start to re-embrace the way I look and celebrate the imperfection.

It was during hour 3 of the expedition, that I saw it... the elusive green diamond! #DaDaDaaaaaaaaaaaa #NerdySelfie [photo of my face with my mouth covered by a tie die scarf. reflected in my black rimmed nerdy glasses, is a green diamond (a reflection from the computer but shhhhh] So while I may subversively explore ideas of pretty in the future, for that is the freedom of doing visually interesting, I do not foresee me and pretty spending time together any time soon and that is a beautiful thing.

[a B&W photo of me wearing my black rimmed nerdy glasses and grinning ]

[aion-rsa]

Ngozi Ukazu Interview: Check, Please and Beyond

https://ift.tt/2piKv9F

We talked to the creator web comic Check, Please about fandom, adaptation, and what's next...

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Interview

Culture

Kayti Burt

Check Please

Sep 18, 2018

Ngozi Ukazu

Internet Culture

First Second Books

Check, Please — an endlessly delightful web comic about hockey, baking, and bros — is one of the most enthusiastic internet fandoms out there, and one that is only poised to grow. Previously, the comic has mainly been available to read on the internet, but the first hardcover volume of the Check, Please hits stores today.

#Check, Please!: #Hockey will cover Bitty's first two years at the fictional Samwell University. Here's the official synopsis:

Eric Bittle may be a former junior figure skating champion, vlogger extraordinaire, and very talented amateur pâtissier, but being a freshman on the Samwell University hockey team is a whole new challenge. It is nothing like co-ed club hockey back in Georgia! First of all? There’s checking (anything that hinders the player with posession of the puck, ranging from a stick check all the way to a physical sweep). And then, there is Jack—his very attractive but moody captain.

A collection of the first half, freshmen and sophmore year, of the megapopular webcomic series of the same name, Check, Please!: #Hockey is the first book of a hilarious and stirring two-volume coming-of-age story about hockey, bros, and trying to find yourself during the best four years of your life. This book ncludes updated art and a hilarious, curated selection of Bitty's beloved tweets.

Den of Geek talked to Ukazu last year about why she thinks Check, Please is so popular, whether she ever dream-casts an on-screen adaptation of the comic, and what is next for the talented storyteller/artist...

Den of Geek: Can you give a brief synopsis of what Check, Please is about for people who have yet to dive into the wonderful world of Check, Please?

Ngozi Ukazu: Check, Please is the story of Eric "Bitty" Bittle, a former figure skater who starts his freshman year as a member of Samwell University's men's ice hockey team.

Bitty is a vlogger who shares recipes on pie making, is several inches shorter than most of his teammates, and is deathly afraid of checking — which is when you get hit on the ice. It's also a story about Bitty falling in love with Jack Zimmermann, the team's stoic captain who has fallen from grace.

A lot of the narratives we have that challenge patriarchy/toxic masculinity focus on how it affects women and girls, but Check, Please is one of the few stories that seems to do the same by imagining a different, better future for men and boys outside of rigid gender roles and "norms." Why do you think it’s important to tell stories like this? Was this one of the driving forces in creating Check, Please? 

In the beginning, Check, Please was simply a palate cleanser after I spent my senior semester at Yale writing a screenplay called Hardy.

Hardy followed a giant, super bro-y enforcer-type hockey player who falls in love with his best friend and struggles with internalized homophobia. With all of the newfound hockey knowledge I gained from researching, I still wanted to tell a story set in the world of hockey, but a bit more hopeful and silly.

While Hardy had a bittersweet ending, Check, Please is a story where Bitty has little victories each year. Maybe it wasn't a completely conscious effort, but we need more stories about critiquing the rigidity of gender norms that don't involve characters succumbing to these norms in tragedy.

It seems like you have a good idea of where the Check, Please story is going. How much of the Check, Please narrative is planned and how much surprises you? Have there been any major changes to your planned story along the way?

I planned out the major arcs of the comic before I had finished the first semester of "Year One." Still, characters can surprise me with their dialogue and sometimes jokes develop right as I'm drawing a page.

When I'm coming up with new characters like incoming freshmen or Jack's NHL team, I have vague ideas for that coalesce a year or so before the characters actually appear. Overall, the story has been hitting all of the major plot points that I drafted out.

You began creating Check, Please when you yourself were in school, getting your Masters. I think of the early 20s as such a transformative time. Has your perspective of Check, Please changed over the course of you writing/drawing it as you have changed/learned/grown?

Check, Please continues to be this love letter to the magic of friendship in undergrad, the excitement of college hockey, and how it feels to get a liberal arts education in the Northeast. It's a bit of a time capsule of my time at Yale.

As I've grown, my perspective on hockey culture at large has changed. Whiteness and masculinity are really unrelenting driving forces of that culture, and while Samwell hockey remains continuously progressive, the NHL and hockey has only changed a little since I first discovered the sport.

As someone who supports you on Patreon, I know how impressively prolific you are. What does your creation schedule/routine look like?

First of all, thank you so much! Comics and the blog posts that follow them take weeks to complete and, in between this main content, I'm usually sketching, working on books and merchandise, or writing for other projects.

I spend my mornings answering emails and running comic and non-comic errands, while I spend my afternoons and evenings drawing and writing. I usually wake up and go to sleep fairly early!

Do you think Kickstarter/Patreon model is where much of smaller-scale creation is heading? Do you think it’s possible to be a full-time creator working directly from fan support?

I'm a firm believer in creators pursuing their passions full-time, if they have free content and a large enough audience. Models like Kickstarter & Patreon are allowing niche and under-served audiences to directly support content that they can't get in bookstores or see on TV.

What has surprised you most about the response to Check, Please?

This is a story about really goofy bros and a boy who loves to bake pies. I had no idea it could also be a story that would make people cry, help people form new friendships, or [something] parents read with their teens.

Why do you think this story has come to mean so much to so many people?

Check, Please is a story about an uncertain, but sweet kid who enters a potentially threatening environment—and survives.

People want happy stories. They crave hope. And all of the goofiness and friendship and weird rules that these boys create as part of the culture of Samwell start to make the Samwell men's hockey team and the Haus feel a bit like Hogwarts.

Congratulations on the two-volume publishing deal! How did that happen — did you approach First Second Books or did they approach you? Are you nervous at all about Check, Please going out into the wider world after having spent so long in Internet Land?

Thank you! After the success of the Kickstarter, a number of publishers realized that Check, Please had potential to do well with a wider audience. But when First Second reached out, they were hands-down the most enthusiastic publisher with a team of authentic and thoughtful Check, Please fans. Check, Please is a story that started on the Internet, but I'm excited for people who don't normally peruse blogs to read it and discover the story!

Right now, there is a fair amount of tension between creators and their fans. I see you as a creator who respects her fans and has a healthy, conversational relationship with the fandom. Why do you think so many creators seem to have a problem with this? Do you have any advice for creators who struggle to connect with their fans?

I love the Check, Please fandom! And for whatever reason, readers in the fandom seem to enjoy the interactions they experience in Check, Please. The healthy relationship I have with the fandom took a lot of time to learn and did have its growing pains!

My biggest advice for creators is to leave fandom alone. Appreciate it, but don't try to control it. Similarly, readers should understand that headcanons might never be canon and the story and characters belong to the creator. End of story. The relationship starts to deteriorate when one party tries to control the other.

Would you be interested in seeing Check, Please adapted for the screen? (Because I would!) What does your dream scenario look like — i.e. TV series vs. film vs. web series? Do you ever think about dream casting?

Oh boy, it'd be so hard to do a live-action show. Is it possible cast anybody (a) with a butt as big as the fictional Jack Zimmermann's who (b) can also act? In a dream scenario, all of the actors would know how to skate, the actor who played Bitty would have a perfect Georgia accent, and it would feel more like an HBO comedy with pockets of drama.

But what about this—Check, Please as a radio show?

Have you been working on any other projects lately? 

I'm working on a script for a softball story to be drawn by my pal Madeline Rupert. It's a story about a girl who goes to art school, loses her scholarship, and has to get her school's softball team to win one game of softball in order to get an athletic scholarship.

This story involves a ton of musings on art school, financial aid, and a different approach to telling a story about sports.

For so many people, Check, Please is the story that makes them happy. What are you a fan of right now?

Other than the NBA and podcasts like The Read, Bodega Boys, and My Brother, My Brother, and Me, I haven't been able to sink my teeth into any TV show or movie in a while.

But for a random list... I'm a big fan of Insecure, Spider-Man: Homecoming, anything Kevin Wada draws, Frank Ocean, and a ton of other podcasts. I guess a lot of my energy goes into creating things for other people to fan nowadays!

Check, Please!: #Hockey is now available for purchase.

Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek. Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt.

from Books https://ift.tt/2MJI3SJ

[eichy815]

I Don’t ‘Consent’ to This Narrative

Almost one month ago, I authored a Morpheus magazine op-ed entitled “#MeToo: Oh, But Not You.”  In this piece, I argued how male survivors of sexual abuse, harassment, assault, and rape shouldn’t be excluded from the #MeToo discussion.  Although, statistically and numerically speaking, there will be a higher number of women sharing their stories, as survivors – if we aren’t so hesitant to allow male survivors to speak out within the context of #MeToo, it will only enhance the discussion on how to dissolve the patriarchy and rid our society of toxic masculinity.  

ON-EDIT (two days after the original publication of this 12/27/17 blog piece) – Relationship coach Harris O’Malley just authored an op-ed for The Good Men Project entitled “Be Proud of Being a Man.”  In it, he makes the argument that part of redefining masculinity is to reassess how we view maleness (at the social level) in relation to one's purpose, community, and service.

However, fashion blogger Andrew Spena had previously epitomized a distinct strand of misandry that has reared its ugly head – and been perpetuated by a shrill minority of the population – as everyone tries to make sense of public discourse due to the fallout of the #MeToo dialogue.  As I discussed in my “#MeToo: Oh, But Not You” editorial, this invective is being inflicted upon males “as a group”...including those of us males who are members of the LGBT community.

Proving my point, in his mid-October editorial entitled “Men, Please Hold Your ‘Well, actuallys’ in the Wake of #MeToo,” Spena squawks:

I’m certainly not the first person to call out cis queer men on the Internet for this, and sadly, I won’t need to be the last.  Queer cis men, before you see a chance to jump on a trending hashtag, take a second to think about who’s steering this narrative and what they’re trying to say.  Ask yourself if this is your story to tell or your moment to sit back and thank the people who are sharing their stories.  (Hint: If you have to ask, it’s almost always time for you to sit back and listen.)

That’s what #MeToo is all about: hearing and believing women.  It’s about amplifying voices who’ve been ignored.  If you haven’t done a great job so far, now’s a great day to start.

I could go hog-wild on a diatribe breaking down Spena’s numerous fallacies while eviscerating his warped worldview.  But I feel that I have already done so, at great length, refuting other voices amongst Spena’s like-minded ilk in my “#MeToo: Oh, But Not You” manifesto from November.

Instead, I want to take a different approach.  During the week of December 18, ABC’s Good Morning America did a journalistic series entitled “Raising Good Men.”  This three-day series of news segments took a look at the process of redefining masculinity.  While it explored some healthy concepts in terms of raising future generations of boys with better values than many of their predecessors, it also (unfortunately) harbored traces of a neofeminist, neoliberal, misandrist, heterosexist framework – albeit a fairly subtle one.  My social commentary today will discuss why and how that is harmful.

The first segment of “Raising Good Men” focused on young boys ranging from the ages of seven through ten.  These boys were residents of the Houston area, having participated in the local Boys & Girls Club’s “Passport to Manhood” program.

To start off the segment, the Houston-era boys were asked their opinions about girls...including how girls should be treated.  Some of the boys’ answers were mature (e.g. one respondent citing fair treatment based on gender/race) – valuing the concepts of respect, manners, personal space, listening, behaving, and asking for consent.  Some of the role models who these boys named from their own daily lives included teachers, coaches, or barbers (in addition to fathers or other male family members).

But, to my chagrin, many of the boys’ answers were steeped in an outdated worldview of “chivalry” based on traditional gender roles.  They gave examples such as “buying flowers” (for females in their lives) or “opening doors” for women.  One kid named Cooper mentioned how he had specifically been taught to open the door for his mother and sister.  When asked by moderator T.J. Holmes what the terms “Be a man!” or “Man up!” meant to them, these boys indicated that it conveyed how they were expected to act strong and tough.  Holmes may have been operating the interview from a place of subconscious heterosexism and gynocentrism, as he neglected to ask the Houston boys any real questions about how they relate to (or show affection for) their male peers.

Dr. Dave Anderson of The Child Mind Institute had been observing their interview from behind-the-scenes.  Anderson emphasized how the concepts of respect, empathy, and consent need to be GENDER-INCLUSIVE...not just applying to boys, but applying to anybody.  He also said that positive modeling behavior needs to remain gender-neutral; we have to stop conditioning our boys to believe that girls are “frail,” which also means we need a more diverse social message.  Such messages should include the age-appropriate teaching of consent.

I will simply concur with Dr. Anderson’s statements, here – while also citing my editorial pieces entitled “Redefining Masculinity in the Modern Era” and “Chivalry: A One-Way Street?”, from December 2013 and May 2014, respectively.

The second segment profiled older teenaged boys ranging from the ages of twelve through sixteen.  This group of older boys was from the Denver area, and ABC News moderator Paula Faris asked them a number of questions as to how they interact with peers upon having entered puberty.

One striking difference I observed between the younger boys from Houston versus the older boys from Denver was how the Denver boys gave much more thoughtful responses.  For example, when Faris asked them how they show affection to girls (and notice how she never even entertained the possibility that any of them might be homosexual or bisexual), they mentioned holding hands while walking together to Panera (a popular neighborhood hangout near their school).  They also specified the need to create dialogue, such as asking, “Are you okay with it?” or “Does it feel good to you?”

Then, when Faris asked them what the phrase “Be a man!” means to them, this group of boys spoke (rather forlornly) about the social expectations of acting emotionless as a sign of “maturity.”  They universally expressed how they felt afraid to show their emotions publicly, but they often wished that they could.

Dr. Stephanie Dowd (observing from behind-the-scenes, the way Dr. Anderson had been, the previous day) says that it’s “rigid” and “dangerous” to use these traits as barometers of masculinity.  She cites concepts such as “mutual respect,” “compromise,” and “genuine caring” as new emphases that could transform “toxic masculinity” into “healthy masculinity.”

Perhaps the most compelling difference that I’d noticed, comparing the Houston boys vis-a-vis the Denver boys, was that most of the language used by these adolescents from Denver was gender-neutral (in the context of this discussion).  Some of their parents (who had also been secretly listening in, from the next room) even admitted that they had begun to realize how they’d been sometimes sending the wrong message to their teenaged sons.  After the fact, Faris told her ABC News peers (via their in-studio dialogue on that morning’s broadcast) how she was extremely impressed with this group of young dudes from Denver.

The final segment featured a group of young men, aged 18 through 22, who resided in various parts of New York City.  This segment was moderated by Deborah Roberts.

When prompted by Roberts to name some of the words they associate with “healthy masculinity,” they invoked concepts such as “Love,” “Humble,” “Respectful,” “Value,” and “Responsible.”  Building on that, these young men expressed that they want to take positive examples that they see in older men...and then become better versions of what they see.

Then, when pressed by Roberts as to whether they’re reluctant to speak up in an all-male environment where there is “locker room talk” objectifying females, one of the New York dudes admitted that, if someone tries to speak out against such “locker room talk” that he may find to be distasteful, the rest of the group can tend to gang up against that one moral naysayer.  In her post-production commentary, Roberts explained how this is the age when alcohol consumption can become a gateway to sexual assault.

These young men from NYC unanimously responded that it is important to step in when you see any type of assault happening...even if it’s your own buddies who are doing it.  One member of this NYC-based focus group, additionally, specified the importance of checking in with your own friends to make sure they’re okay, beforehand, as an approach of crisis prevention.

However, in her narration, Roberts phrased it as the need to “...step into situations with women when they feel something is abusive or unfair.”  This, unfortunately, is a narrative that inherently deemphasizes the necessity of males stepping in to come to the aid of their male peers who are being assaulted or harassed (regardless of whether such abuse is sexual, behavioral, or social in nature).

Also, according to one of the college-aged participants:

The onus and responsibility is on men to make a change and to address these issues even when it seems like it may be socially-uncomfortable to do it at that time.

This worldview is subliminally repressive and sexist.  It assumes that males are predisposed to violence and disrespect (vis-a-vis females).  It posits that boys and men are automatically heterosexual (and/or sexually-voracious) until proven otherwise.  It implies blanket culpability on the part of male survivors while not imposing any such social expectations on female survivors.  And it misappropriates the existence of male privilege as a pretext for minimizing any abusive actions that females may inflict upon males (or upon other females).

Another participant in this NYC-based focus group likened reverence for women to treating a girlfriend or wife the way one would treat his mother.  Some of the participants had started an NYU chapter of a social activism group entitled MARS (Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault).  One of them vocalized how males can’t just sit on the sidelines – we need to be a proactive part of the conversation.  #MeToo, he says, isn’t supposed to be just about women calling out men; it’s also about men joining in to change things.

Roberts also acknowledged that ABC’s news division intends to create news segments on “Raising Good Women”...as well as discussing these issues with coed focus groups.  When the NYC students’ parents (who had also been listening in, behind-the-scenes) joined their sons after the segment had concluded, the parents all reiterated to Roberts that they wanted their sons to learn from their own past mistakes.

But what kind of mistakes are we poised to make, in the future?  If males are going to be a proactive part of the #MeToo dialogue, it can’t be solely at the whims of those who bask in their anger to bring others down while pushing myopic personal agendas.  As actress Minnie Driver sneered, earlier this month, in response to actor Matt Damon’s contention that there is a spectrum of different types of abuse, harassment, and assault:

I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse.  A man cannot do that.  No one can.  It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not...How about: it’s all fucking wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalize or judge what is worse and what is not.  Let women do the speaking up right now.  The time right now is for men just to listen and not have an opinion about it for once...

There is not a woman I know, myself included, who has not experienced verbal abuse and sexual epithets their whole fucking life, right up to being manhandled and having my career threatened several times by men I wouldn’t sleep with...In the same stereotypical way that we see women being supportive of men in their endeavors, I feel that’s what women need of men in this moment.  They need men to lean on and not question.  Men can rally and they can support, but I don’t think its appropriate, per se, for men to have an opinion about how women should be metabolizing abuse.  Ever.

The poison in Driver's words and sentiments is self-evident.  While I agree with Driver that we shouldn't be "ranking" the oppression and abuse that people endure, she is ultimately doing exactly what she accuses powerful men of doing -- creating an exclusionary binary where her moral compass apparently gets to establish the terms under which everyone else can participate.  This is especially jarring in light of how Driver's own ABC family comedy, Speechless, is one whose writing team glorifies the outlandish terrorizing and shaming of "wimpy" males (most notably through the other characters' unapologetic abuse of the Ray DiMeo character, which is normally played off for laughs at the adolescent male character's expense).

Also, the three groups of male students (Houston, Denver, NYC) interviewed by ABC News were simply sample focus groups.  The differences in their perspectives could partially be attributed to geography – seeing how Texans would be likelier to teach traditionalism to their youth, Coloradoans would tend to be more balanced and moderate, and New Yorkers would be more prone to accepting a doctrine of “female exceptionalism.”

And, although I have survived many traumatic instances of sexual harassment, assault, abuse, and intimidation throughout my own life, #MeToo has also impelled me to reflect on how I could have taken more proactive steps, myself, to stand up for others who were being harassed or abused – even when I wasn’t the direct target.

While I personally have been privileged enough to have never found myself in a situation (as a bystander) where I had to intervene in a rape, a fight, or a sexual assault – I also know, firsthand, what it feels like when I have been targeted and no one in proximity will step in to back me up.  So, with this knowledge, I try to reflect on whether I can recall any examples of this occurring in the past.  I’m sure there may have been several of which I just haven’t retained the memories (or didn’t notice it happening, at the time).  It reminds me that I need to be consciously on the lookout for these instances, in the future.

But there is one very vivid incident that happened, where I was neither the aggressor nor the target, but #ILetItHappen nonetheless.  This might seem like an anecdotal example, but I keep it in mind as an example of my past inaction...so that I can hopefully find a way to intervene or diffuse any similar type of situation in the future.

One year, while I was in college, a bunch of us were waiting in line for the cafeteria to open for dinner.  I was there by myself, so everyone else who was in line around me was a complete stranger to me...but, nonetheless, what happened next was absolutely disgusting.

Two guys in front of me proceeded to spend at least five minutes making snide and derogatory comments about the cosmetic “ugliness” of the cafeteria employee (a middle-aged woman named Ruth) who was waiting to open the doors for us and who was tasked with swiping our cards.  Even after she’d opened the doors and was getting the register prepared, they still proceeded to make those comments – clearly WITHIN EARSHOT of Ruth.

I look back on that and wonder, “Why didn’t I say anything to them?”  Especially once the doors had opened?  Why didn’t I tell them off to their faces?  Why didn’t I tell Ruth not to pay them any mind?  Why didn’t I loudly say my piece...and then storm out of there to make a point (or, better yet, go get the manager)?  Probably a number of reasons:  worrying about my own physical safety (although in hindsight, I realize they probably wouldn’t have physically attacked me), worried about making a scene and getting in trouble myself, worried about subsequent repercussions against me, self-consciousness about my own looks that made me just want to “blend in,” etc.

But I do know this:   if it happened today, and I was a witness to it, I would definitely say something.  I would absolutely “make a scene” on Ruth’s behalf (assuming she was the same victim in a contemporary scenario)...because that’s the type of thing I would want someone to do for me, if I was the victim.  

One missing link that seems to be left out of this entire conversation is how we can cultivate healthier friendships and bonds-of-brotherhood between boys – that they bring with them into adulthood as they become men.  This was a question underlying Remaking Manhood co-author Marc Greene's fantastic February 2015 op-ed for The Good Men Project, entitled "Why Do We Murder the Beautiful Friendships of Boys?"

So rather, than go on another rant, I will pose these questions to everyone insofar as how the #MeToo dialogue continues from here:

*****************************************

What value is there in silencing male survivors who have endured rape, sexual assault, sexually-driven harassment, or bullying throughout our lives?

Should the #MeToo discussion extend to women beginning to self-examine how they themselves may have acted sexually-oppressive toward men throughout their lives?

Piggybacking off of the previous question:  should women be encouraged to stand up for other women if they observe female-on-female violence/harassment occurring?

Regardless of your sex or gender identity:  how many times in your life have YOU stood idly by and been an enabler of #ILetItHappen?  How many times didn’t you speak up for someone (or intervene, on their behalf) if you witnessed them being sexually assaulted, harassed, or degraded?

Are there ever occasions where – by speaking up and/or intervening – you might be putting YOUR OWN physical safety at risk, amid the crossfire between aggressor and victim?  Why should there necessarily be a greater onus on males to take this potential risk (to our physical well-being) as opposed to females doing so?

What role does perpetuating traditionalist gender roles play when creating environments that enable the types of assault and abuse that the #MeToo movement seeks to confront?  How does the targeting of transgender people stem from this dynamic?

If we do indeed subscribe to the nonsensical Minnie Driver doctrine of "Men should just listen and not have an opinion" – at what point are males going to be allowed to reenter the discussion?  And who, specifically, gets to decide those terms?

If our focus shouldn’t be to “rank” survivors’ traumatic experiences against one another (and, instead, recognize every woman’s past trauma as its own distinct truth), then shouldn’t we be showing equal respect and deference to the traumatic experiences of male survivors?

*****************************************

Although my sentiments toward redefining masculinity haven’t changed, I am grateful to the #MeToo movement for motivating my need to engage in personal introspection.  The value in this will be how I can use that knowledge to protect and defend others – female and male, alike – whenever I encounter them being exploited or preyed upon within the context of my daily life.

I will speak out on every facet of this epidemic.  We need to broaden the discussion to protect boys (who are minors, legally) and LGBT people.  We need to start taking it seriously when we encounter domestic violence cases where a victim happens to be male.  We need to crack down on same-sex abuse regardless of sexual orientations of any parties who are involved.  And we need to find ways to prevent CONSENSUAL forms of positive bodily-contact between friends (e.g. hugging, kissing, sports-based camaraderie, locker room horseplay, faux-flirting) from becoming stigmatized. 

Many of my critics might sneer that I’m laying out all of these terms in a very “Eichy-centric” way.  Yes, my life is “Eichy-centric”...because it’s MY LIFE.  But I’m the one who has to live my life – and I want to live in a world where friends, acquaintances, and strangers feel reasonably comfortably around me.  I will continue to fight for this type of world, for as long as I breathe.

If you object to that, you’re going to have to put a bullet in my head.

[caveartfair]

Portia Munson On the “Stuff” That Defines Femininity

Installation view of The Garden, 1996. Photo courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that clothiers decided to color-code baby girls and boys in pink and blue. In the decades prior, parents began to dress their infants in pastel colors, but not those one might expect; pink, seen as a color of strength, was often chosen for boys, while it was common for a baby with blue eyes, regardless of sex, to wear complementary hues of blue. The tradition of boys in blue, girls in pink temporarily went out of fashion during the Women’s Liberation Movement, though it resurged in full force in the ’80s.

In the mid-’90s, when artist Portia Munson had her first child, she was already steeped in the significance of pink, and questioning its relation to gender and beauty. One day she photographed her infant son dressed in pink with a pink blanket and toys, and again in blue. “I saved all of that stuff because I thought ‘well, maybe one day I’ll have a girl.’ And then, five years later, my daughter was born and I did the same exact photographs, set up the same way.”

She would later show all four photographs together, collapsing the colors’ associations with gender and subverting the arbitrary tradition altogether. Two decades later, as the rigid mores of gender remain equally problematic, Munson’s works are fresh as ever. At an all-too-timely moment, the artist is resurfacing older works and debuting new ones in a show at P.P.O.W Gallery, fiercely reasserting her commitment to feminism and addressing the objectification of women head-on.

Portrait of Portia Munson, courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery.

The resonance of Munson’s work in the present was affirmed this past October at Frieze Week. The centerpiece of P.P.O.W’s feminist-focused stand at Frieze London, her Pink Project: Table (1994/2016), a surface covered in a taxonomy of discarded pink plastic objects—combs, mirrors, heart-shaped boxes, dildos, deodorants—was lauded widely, dominating column inches, Instagram feeds, and cocktail conversations. It’s a prime example of the artist’s deft ability to harness the trappings of femininity that have so long defined and confined women, in service of a sharp, at times dark, critique.

“I was always really attracted to and loved the color pink, but I think I wanted to know what it was about,” she explains. “When I got to art school, and later, I was thinking, well what is it about this color? Why am I attracted to it? It can’t just be that it symbolizes passive prettiness.” She went on to expound the color’s force, and to capitalize on the way it has been used to categorize women.

“It was kind of amazing, after twenty-something years, that it felt so fresh,” Munson says of the reception for the piece at Frieze, a revival of a work first made in 1994. “People were definitely really into it the first time it was shown, but the first time maybe it was almost scarier,” she offers. “I feel like the meaning shifted a little, from being read entirely in terms of gender—it is a very strong gender piece—to including the idea of plastic, consumerism, and commodities. I think it has a kind of double hit now.” Indeed, the series has led Munson to approach the plastic objects for their toxicity, their carcinogenic properties, and their destruction to ocean life.

Installation view of Her Coffin, 2016. Photo courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery.

On the eve of her new show’s opening, we stand in the gallery’s first room in front of a new iteration of the project, Her Coffin (2016), a glass case filled with pink plastic objects arranged according to an ombre spectrum of deep fuchsia to pale rose. With these works she’s now interested in “imagining an end to plastic,” a future where we look back on plastic as we do with lead now. Her Coffin is meant to be a sort of time capsule; Munson was thinking about the pink ribbon products that proliferate for breast cancer awareness each October, and the irony that many of those objects are made from or packaged within carcinogenic plastic. She’s planning a future work that will be similar in format, though with blue plastic objects, that she’ll title Contents of a Whale’s Belly.

When Munson began “The Pink Project” in 1994, though, the environmental effects of plastic were not a widespread concern. The series was born from a collection of objects she had amassed as subjects for still-life paintings. “The collection itself started to take up a lot of space, and I realized, oh, that’s actually a work too,” she recalls. Presented in thoughtful, orderly rows and arrangements, these works appeal not only for their organization, but also their scale—thousands of manmade objects that together speak to the ubiquity of feminine ideals and expectations.

This same scale and organization, though applied to flowers, is fully present in the show’s crowning jewel, The Garden (1996). A work that Munson considers one of her greatest, it debuted in New York’s Yoshii Gallery in 1996, and in the time since has been restaged a handful of times, though not in New York again until now. The work is a bedroom, wildly overflowing with fake plastic flowers, plush bunnies, and floral-printed everything; the faint synthetic smell of flowery air freshener wafts through the space, while a soft soundtrack hums, resembling the tinny tunes of a music box with a ballerina swirling inside of it. The ceiling is a luminous tent of floral-printed vintage dresses sewn together. A rabbit sculpture made from fake flowers perches on a table, blending into its abundant surroundings.

Installation view of The Garden, 1996. Photo courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery.

The room, which is roped off with stanchions like a period room at the Met, overwhelms with information, as well as with a sense of nostalgia—a connecting thread throughout Munson’s work, which ferments well over time. “I was blown away by how trendy and expensive some of these dresses are now,” Munson says, gesturing to the frocks hanging above, which she had originally sourced from thrift shops. “Now the work has maybe a heavier nostalgic feeling than when I first did it, which seems different,” she explains. “What I was really thinking about was being associated with flowers as a woman… if you wanted to be really pretty, you’d wear flowers and flower scents.”

A bed nearly covered with stuffed rabbits and a glass-framed case crammed with similar dolls in the installation function as superfluous signifiers of fertility. Yet this celebration of a feminine world is also a memorial to it—funeral arrangements of bursting bouquets. “It’s all artificial; it’s female, pretty, flowery, but also dead. So it’s kind of both about life and death at the same time,” Munson says.

And while The Garden emits a spectacularly engrossing energy, it’s Functional Women (2016) that takes the objectification of women to task most directly. The work is the product of some five years of collecting objects that portray the female body, some of which also feature in small oil paintings on the walls. “I love the readymade—things that are just out there,” Munson reflects, “and I think a lot of my work is about editing, collecting, and choosing.”

Installation views of Functional Women, 2016. Photos courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery.

In this case, she has collected ceramic figurines of busty ladies, cups with boobs, miniature high-heeled boots, manicured hands meant to hold rings. “I’m pointing things out through stuff that our culture is consuming.” The objects are arranged on a chest of drawers in such a way that it evokes the female form as a whole—a cluster of eccentric, at times offensive, objects that portray the ideal woman.

I ask for Munson’s impressions of being a feminist artist now, at a moment when long-overlooked female artists are being given due attention, and young women are proud to identify as feminist. “[Feminist] was almost more of a dirty word for a while there,” she acknowledges as we take a seat among The Garden’s explosion of artificial flowers. “I’ve been really noticing that, reading about it and seeing it on Instagram, there’s so much pride and strength in it now.”

I point to her Functional Women work, the first objects visitors will see as they enter the show, as representing an urgent statement to be making now. “Now, with this whole new administration coming in, it’s so important, right?” she replies. “It’s almost more important than ever for women to be putting that kind of power and energy out there, to really critique our roles and perceptions and expectations.”

—Casey Lesser

from Artsy News