#the isolation they experience in a patriarchal society

[smute]

also that slogan on every poster "he's just ken" receiving a positive connotation after watching the film??? as in, he's not "and ken" but just ken?? something so simple but so effective

[amateuranatomymechanic]

i swear to god every time i see people saying “evil trans men minimizing trans women’s experiences with transmisogyny and specifically trans women of color/the inherent race of gender perception in the West” or “evil trans women are attempting to erase the struggles and experiences of misogyny trans men are experiencing” i want to like. shove the “pokemon porn isnt real problems” meme at them

[grimeclown]

But that's not entirely untrue it is clear that denji's extreme isolation is intended to be a hyperbolic form of the emotional neglect that so many young boys experience growing up in patriarchal society. Chainsaw Man is nothing if not a story about the horror of living in late capitalism. Denji is the way that he is because of the extreme neglect he faced as an orphan in abject poverty being subjected to dehumanization for his whole life. He had no freedom to go to school, have hobbies, make friends, or do anything but work and scrounge for food and porn out of the garbage. It only makes sense that sexuality is the only viable form of affection that clicks right in his head, because it's the only type he's ever been exposed to. And nobody has bothered to see this as a problem. As something that is sad. Because they choose to see him as a perverted teenage boy instead of as a victim of a society that has offered him no other form of connection to reach for.

[hadesoftheladies]

too many people view (uncritically, esp when it comes to feminism) separatism as this isolating, individualistic thing where people who don't want to participate just pack their bags and move to a far off country. that isn't what it is at all.

separatism is about re-centering the individuals of a certain community so as to strengthen the community. so that a community focuses its energy and resources on itself rather than on outsiders. it is, quite literally, about building and expanding community. it's not merely about escaping men or banning men, it is about relying on women, building a community of women, centering women, making it so that women are not dependent on men because women got them. you see how that's qualitatively different right?

like it's not so much about cutting off your father or brothers, but about spending deliberately more time fortifying your relationships with other women in your life. whether helping them out financially, donating books, giving advice, buying their stuff, giving energy.

when it comes to revolution of any kind, they die quickly without a strong sense and presence of community.

one of the biggest wrenches patriarchy has thrown into women's liberation is poisoning female community. consciousness-raising is difficult because every new generation of women is cut off from the one preceding it. younger girls are taught to resent women and view women with suspicion. they are male-centric in that they believe males will protect, love, provide for and cherish them only to have a rude awakening sooner or later.

bridging that disconnect is going to take practicing varying degrees of separatism. for sharing of knowledge between women and girls is hampered by male presence. you've all seen this happen. when a man or boy enters the picture, conversation between women is crippled. we start censoring ourselves.

censorship is a huge issue feminists face at every turn, and it's worse because we experience this censorship not just via government or public forums where men are in charge, but in our interpersonal relationships. and not just in our interpersonal relationships, but by our own selves. only female community brings out the honesty in us and gives us the courage to speak out and think freely. we all know this.

separatism is not only imperative to women's health, it is imperative to consciousness raising. it's not about living in a male free utopia but about centering women in all things so that women's community is strengthened and prepared to take on their oppressors and patriarchal society (and so that it survives retaliations). girls don't need to be totally isolated from males. they need to have predominantly female (not feminine) influence in their lives. they need to be in a place where they do not depend on males or cater to them. they need to be female-centric. learning female-philosophy and perpetuating authentic female culture.

that's separatism.

and the good news is that feminists are not the first oppressed group to employ separatism. black liberation movements employ this as well and are strengthened when they do. it's how they won some of their most vicious battles. lgb communities also utilize(d) separatism and it strengthened their communities. they had to de-center the narratives of their oppressors and rely on each other instead of begging their oppressors for scraps. they won because they gave themselves to each other as a community.

separatism works. over and over again. liberation takes time, but it has always needed separatism.

i just keep thinking about how communities can disrupt and change society, y'know? like how even in the throes of capitalistic/imperialist/white supremacist greed, small communities find a way to take care of each other financially and physically. culture predates economy, even while economy can beget culture or poison it. i love how small communities can just say "fuck you" to the presiding ruler and create within themselves micro-economies to keep each other alive. economy is just, after all, a social agreement/condition.

women are the ones who will liberate women. keep investing in that and it'll pay off.

[ardentpoop]

choose a side:

ancient judiciary organization that produces and retains the equivalent of magical nukes and brainwashes its powerful soldiers (who are also the nukes) into carrying out whatever atrocities are deemed necessary to “maintain order” without question. keeps the souls of humans who were lucky enough or crafty enough to tip or rig the scales of judgement in their favor trapped in little cells numbly reliving the same memories until the end of time. the memories and/or the general experience can be manipulated at will and if any of the souls exit their cells they are corralled back inside. and no, jack’s remodel doesn’t make it better.

ancient prison realm that functions primarily as a looming threat to the enemies of this story’s most powerful figures. everyone who ends up there, whether they’re deemed innocent or not, expects to have their humanity tortured out of them. home to legions of soldiers led by various ruthless tyrants.

network of heavily armed multigenerational vigilantes who have dedicated their lives to seeking out and killing anyone in their country whom they determine to be “monstrous.” they are trained to do whatever it takes to “finish the job” and avoid detection by standard cops. they develop specialty bullets and weapons for every common type of supernatural being, and because they consider themselves to be heroes, there is a level of “collateral damage” (victimization of innocents) that they convince each other is a necessary and acceptable part of the role. the psychological cost of maintaining this everyday violence bleeds into their social circles and tends to leave them isolated and angry; taking these feelings out on the people they’re hunting.

patriarchal secret society of arcane knowledge-seekers who can leverage their political power to destroy institutions they disapprove of and have a storied history of capturing and experimenting on beings with supernatural abilities. their goal is to exterminate the supernatural much more strategically and effectively than they believe their comparatively ragtag counterparts the hunters can, with the british chapter of this organization advancing so far as to be able to detect and murder a “monstrous” person within minutes of them setting foot in the country. they hoard their records and their weapons in underground military facilities that aren’t meant to be accessed by outsiders.

[bimboficationblues]

Do you picture family abolition resulting in *less* isolation? Because I think the reason most people find the idea scary is because it sounds like a recipe for increased isolation. Like it or not, many people's warmest relationships are with family members; yes, there are families for which this isn't the case, but they are dysfunctional families. I especially worry for certain people who have a hard time forming new relationships, like my brother whose only meaningful relationships are our mom and me due to his autism and PTSD. They are very happy and healthy relationships, without which he would be in a very bad place. I do not think he would have any friends without his family, like if he was raised in public daycares or whatever it would be in communism; many people analogous to him don't due to the absence of family. School (and the Marxist vision frankly sounds like turning society into a giant school - or factory as Lenin called it) was a place of loneliness and bullying for him, he always looked forward to coming home. So please explain why my worries are misplaced and family abolition would in fact result in less isolation.

Do you picture family abolition resulting in *less* isolation?

Yes, or I wouldn't endorse it.

Because I think the reason most people find the idea scary is because it sounds like a recipe for increased isolation.

I think this is maybe true in some cases, but it seems quite clear to me that many people find the idea scary because they think "family" is an entity ordained by god or nature and to challenge it is either folly or malice, or because it threatens certain kinds of class or gendered domination from which they benefit to various degrees.

Like it or not, many people's warmest relationships are with family members; yes, there are families for which this isn't the case, but they are dysfunctional families.

I don't think you can plausibly assert either of these things - the first clause is just vibes, the second is a lot more relevant than you're willing to admit. what does it say about "the family" if it so easily lends itself to "dysfunction"? I mean, I could go down a list of how many people I know experience isolation because of their families: are we to assume that this isolation doesn't count?

the family is a protection against isolation in the same way that like having a job is protection against being powerless in a money-society - that is to say, the family does not just produce warm, fulfilling relationships, but also engenders isolation both through its absence (disownment, the current foster care system, the experience of single parenthood) and its presence (the household acting as kind of a petty personal fiefdom "outside society" for the patriarch or parents to exert their will over others, repression, abuse, the gendered division of labor). it produces negative examples - the "dysfunctional family" in your parlance - as contrast against the positive ones; a form of threat.

Some people are happily married, and more power to them. and yet, I remain a marriage abolitionist, not because the idea of "two people decide to enter into a quasi-permanent commitment and have an expressive ceremony to celebrate" is somehow bad but because that interpersonal ideal is not actually what marriage represents in the here and now politically, socially, economically, or at least is not an adequate summary. likewise, "having kinship connections with people that are connected to you by either 'blood' or choice" is fine - but that isn't really what family represents under our current arrangements. we're not out here calling for the abolition of friendship, after all. the sociopolitical and economic prioritization and valorization of certain kinds of relationships - summarized under the heading of "familialism" or "the family" - at the expense of others, is a structural choice we make and it has significant faults. the family is a form of arbitrary political and economic power.

As always I'm pretty hesitant about trying to write recipes for the kitchens of the future, but at minimum I think the family abolitionist position is one of pluralism: as of right now, a fairly narrow understanding of family is given pride of place in law and society, and being willing to enter into that and conform to its expectations is a precondition of access to a variety of benefits that should either be available to all (instead of economically pressuring people into marriage/children/homeownership) or should not exist at all (arbitrary power over children, misogynist divisions of labor). It is broadly desirable to, at the very least, open the field for different forms of kinship (compare the concept of 'chosen family') for the many people that find this arrangement constraining or repressive. if your brother wants to have a relationship with you and your mom, that's awesome and I do not think most family abolitionists would endorse taking that choice away from him - but many people do not get this choice (or are repressed into being unable to make this choice) in a way that is bad for their well-being because of how we practice "family."

you could analogize to "gender abolition" where the annihilation of gender is fulfilled in allowing a thousand genders (or lack thereof) to bloom. (there's considerable debate as to whether gender is something that should cease to exist, or merely be transformed or opened to such a degree that it is no longer recognizable as such - I think the same question goes for "the family." but regardless I think it is fairly likely that we will continue to have a variety of kinship connections as well as various means of expressing oneself, but we need not elevate a particular way of doing either above all others.)

I can't like, convince you into recognizing that the family is not this neutral force, I can only tell you that you have constructed a particular shadow in your head (the communists are coming to take you away from your parents and siblings) that you are asking me to box on your behalf, which is not a very effective means of wrestling with a complex and thorny political question. I will also say, the questions in this vein almost always seem to assume that like, the only thing that we would seek to change is the family and would leave untouched the prevailing treatment of disability (which I don't think "families" handle especially well, your example notwithstanding!) or education. the family is kind of a nesting doll in the sense that confronting it also requires confronting how we value and treat education, romance, sex/sexuality, childrearing, birth, etc.

But like, at the root of it, I simply do not follow your reasoning: one of our issues with family is precisely that it is isolating (or rather bestows the power to isolate, the common critique of how CSA is perpetuated). I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that this means we want *more* isolation and would just abandon those who struggle - unless you are harboring the (erroneous) belief that because family is biological or socially ordained that it cannot hurt or isolate you, that because the relationship is "built in" (it isn't, really, people bail on family all the time in the current order), it is an automatically reliable source of stability for someone that has difficulty forming new relationships.

[horizon-verizon]

Someone was going to tell me that they tried to do a Tywien and marry Alicent (queen dowager) to Greyjoy (who is half her age) or was I supposed to watch the episode? 🤣 It's really sad that they trashed the actual plots of the book just to try to recycle stuff from got and fail

Yeah, I just recently watched episodes 6 & 7 without, ya know, and yeah that master of laws man I stay forgetting the name of suggested they marry her off to a Greyjoy. Another man I keep forgetting the name of. I giggled.

Anyway, yeah, it seems they couldn't help themselves copying, but i also think they rather liked how they didn't have to make the greens openly or even indirectly show they didn't care if the Greyjoy went r*ping against the lacks' territories for them/in their name and be a part of their council as master of ships, as Otto did in canon. In canon, too, there is no mention or record of them offering up the queen dowager Alicent either. So really the writers are going above and beyond to make sure their women are in denigrated positions. 🙄.

It wouldn't even have bothered me that much if not for all the other violences and denigrations against not just Alicent but other women that were not extant in the canon: Aemma's forced death; Rhea's death by Daemon; Rhaena-Nettles merge; Rhaena being recived so rudely (I still think that it was understanbale of show!Jeyne to be pissed abt the dragons bc there were expectations and she was lead, BUT it is clearly the show writers who made this a thing while they erased Jessamyne or put her off till later and erased the "woemn stick together" lines to isolate both Rhaena and Rhaenyra); etc. Why wouldn't it have bothered me? Because of all the women who would experience such partly their the consequences of their own actions, it would be Alicent who is also not a regnant or a princess of the blood, but a Queen Dowager/past Consort born into a highly patriarchal faith system/section of wider Westerosi society. Even Jeyne is able to use her father's designation as heir tor rule and get to decide more things for herself. Alicent is more at mercy of the men around her, even as she, too, have much prestige and court-power.

They can't seem to be bothered to understand the story they decided they'd "adapt".

[raisedbythetv89]

So this is like the beginnings of a thought so bare with me and it’s very important you don’t take this post literally because I’m not saying there is anything actually sketchy about Buffy and Giles’ relationship but rather the Slayer/Watcher dynamic the council wants there to be and how it mimics heterosexual marriages in A LOT of ways so bare with me!

Thinking about how The Council (said with so much disdain and loathing) is OBSESSED with the slayer being ALONE. THE ONE. No friends - no family - just a watcher and her. And how that dynamic mimics cis-het patriarchal relationships our society is shoving down our throats as “the ideal” (watcher/slayer obviously being without the romantic/sexual aspect but honestly so many of my relationships with men have ended up being them trying to control me and harness my power for their own gain which isn’t love so really how different is it??) but, society is always pushing women to pair off with a man and “settle down.” Aka become overburdened with so much responsibility taking care of others with no support system you have no time or energy for yourself or to do anything to change our patriarchal society.

But both in the Buffyverse and in the real world - a woman (slayer) being isolated with just a man (watcher) can lead to unnecessary harm or early death for her.

These kinds of dynamics can absolutely occur within any relationship regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation because unlearning gender roles takes WORK but for the sake of the comparison between Slayer/Watcher and Wife/Husband I’ll be using women/men language

Many of us have lived the experience of your friends or you getting boyfriends or husbands and literally vanishing from the friend group (made even worse if the man is an abuser or controlling) essentially cutting us off from our community which makes it easier to mistreat and manipulate us. Thinking about the viral weaponized incompetence song on tik tok that literally was ending marriages and relationships and the demonization of “gossiping” which is ESSENTIAL to women’s safety as we have seen with private FB groups in different areas posting allll the details they can about men who they had terrible relationships or dates with and behaviors so other women can avoid the same pain or protect their safety. Community is essential. Just having “your man” can have a severe tax on your emotional and physical health (we know the stats that single women are happiest and single moms have less labor and more free time than married moms)

Buffy is always credited for lasting as long as she did because she rejected the idea of being isolated with just a watcher who according to the council, isn’t supposed to actually love and care for the slayer but remain impartial - thinking about the shit men get when they show they actually love/respect/care for their wives which seems unfortunately rare but when it does happen they get called simp and whipped (derogatory) by the patriarchy at large.

So yeah just noting the themes of women being isolated with just a man vs having a community impacting health and longevity in Buffy and how aptly that reflects our society in the US showing how the council literally represents the patriarchy and watchers are meant to be the “keepers” of these powerful young women which is exactly what the patriarchy wants our husbands to be and how harmful that framework is for us.

[tofumarinado]

i gotta say and that being raised as a boy in a patriarchal society is deeply traumatizing and dehumanizing.

my relationship with work that i modeled after my father is so toxic that i’m still working on it years into therapy. the notion that i’m only a meat slab meant to work and produce money and take on abuse from my bosses without showing any signs of distress or standing up for myself in any way has messed me up.

how patriarchy retroactively feeds the capitalist machine with alienated men incapable of feeling anything at all is insidious and disgusting.

i was sexually assaulted repeatedly but i did not register it as a SA because i could not model my experiences after any other man or boys i knew that spoke up about it. nobody spoke up.

i was always assumed to be sexually dominant, so sometimes i forced myself to have sex when i did not want to, out of fear. i mostly dissociated during sex.

and i ended up becoming a woman after all this, so now on top of that i have to reconcile the trauma of being denied my gender during all my life so that’s fun.

so yeah. men, i see you. it does not take a trans woman to acknowledge that boyhood can be a very traumatizing and isolating experience. it is messed up.

your suffering is valid, and you are allowed to feel shitty about how you were raised.

[donnapalude]

reading sam's experiences as recalling queer narratives is totally feasible to me, i just have some difficulty following when this view is applied by extending the analogy further than the text really allows. his othering within the family has some layers: he does feel different and isolated and john's rejection of intellectual pursuits recalls specific ideas about masculinity that can be found in working class contexts. but hunting is also often associated with marginalisation and incest: sam running away is partly an explicit attempt to reject this "freakyness", rejoin society, and obtain the ideal heterosexual exogamous relationship. the demon-blood marking him as corrupted and unclean can also track for a queer reading. at the same time, the show is not exactly making the case there's a fundamental part of him that's morally neutral, but misconstrued as evil. there's not even anything instrinsically monstrous in sam. he was randomly singled out by external actors to be fed an extrinsic substance generating abilities to be used for actual nefarious purposes. his foray into drinking more demon blood was not liberating self-acceptance. it was the culmination of a process of manipulation that made him believe he was inhuman to create a sense of commonality with ruby and other demons and convince him opposition by friends and family was just weakness and bigotry. and, like all the best lies, there was truth to it: dean and (especially) john do exhibit some aspects of a brutal black-and-white, us-versus-them mentality that is criticised at several stages by the show. but the overall framing is not a straight-forward, univocal parallel to homophobic or misogynistic oppression under patriarchal rule. which is to say, regardless of the debate we can have about the hurtfulness of specific behaviours, i have trouble identifying a systemic attempt to distort reality in order to subjugate sam. in this particular show, demons actually do have a plan to destroy humanity and sam consuming their blood does impact his decision-making and it does harm him. both sam and dean are aware of the first and know enough to at least envision the second and third. deciding to try trusting demons and exploring related powers is seen as understandable, but distrust is also not baseless prejudice. interpretations of the text that erase or severely minimise this element read to me like attempts to sanitise sam's otherness from any real negative characteristics in order to create a purer comparison to societal forms of oppression. which is not necessary! a text can accomodate several layers of meaning: sam's feelings of isolation and villainisation can resonate with queer experiences without amounting to exactly the same thing. a lot of spn works on a central theme of external forces imposing frameworks of meaning on sam and dean that they struggle to refuse or redefine, creating questions on the possibility to separate identity from those external influences. sam's issues with demon blood are about an extraneous contagion that forces on him an identity he ends up internalising to his detritment. sam's issues with john are even more complicated. there's a lot to be read into these settings, they offer many possible angles of interpretation, including queer ones. i think it's a shame to flatten them into one.

[just-doing-lesbian-things]

I headcannon Avatar Korra as a lesbian

Ik the fandom largely recognizes her as bi, and idt the creators knew about comphet so they probs didn't even know they could make her a lesbian after everything with Mako, but her romantic journey feels ridiculously similar to my experience as a lesbian who dealt with deeply rooted comphet (compulsory heterosexuality) and I want to explain why and how this character means to much to me in this respect

(Don't come for me; it's a f***ing headcannon and I acknowledge that it's not anything more than that)

Background: Comphet

So comphet is ultimately borne from a lack of representation. When you're a little kid in a society that only allows heterosexual-passing love stories to exist (and queer rep is made through a hetero lens), you often don't even realize that you can feel same-sex love and attraction; that it's even an option. So when you do feel those feelings you chalk it up to something else.

It technically affects everyone, but it disproportionally affects lesbians (which is why many lesbians get up in arms about other groups of people using the term to describe non-lesbian experiences) because when this happens in a patriarchal society--one that centers men and men's stories--being a girl/woman who doesn't like men is astoundingly difficult to wrap your brain around because everything is pushing you at men.

It can be even harder to wrap your brain around than being asexual (note: i say can be), because at least with pure asexuality you aren't attracted to anyone, whereas lesbians not only don't feel the "right" feelings for men, they feel them towards other women. And as women themselves who (1) may never have truly wanted to receive those feelings from men but (2) have been raised to expect that sort of attention from only men, getting over that those feelings are okay to feel for women (that it's not inherently predatory as men's attraction to women is made out to be and can really feel like when you're not attracted to men at all) It's a clusterfuck basket of feelings to sort through. And this leads to a lot of tension as you struggle against your own self-expectations in multiple areas.

Why I See Korra As A Lesbian:

1. What we know about her upbringing.

The Avatarverse is queerphobic. We learn about that in the comics when Korra tells her parents about her relationship with Asami, and from her later conversation with Kya. Same-sex relationships are taboo in the Avatar world, a topic of conversation best not shared, and best experienced on the DL so right away we have a representation issue. And

We learn pretty early in Korra's story that she's been isolated from peers her whole life. She's spent her whole life training at the compound and Naga is her only friend. This level of isolation means her only experiences of romantic relationships are going to be from witnessing her parents, coupled White Lotus members/guards/etc, and what she hears from mainstream stories--which again, as we learned from the comics, were likely not queer as queer relationships are taboo.

We don't see the same level of outright misogyny from Korra's era like we saw from Aang's era, but the centering of men was still there baked into the familial gender roles and expectations--meaning the centering of men in women's lives was probably-definitely also there.

All of those points together means that Korra's upbringing most likely gave her a heterosexual expectation for herself and lends itself to a situation where a young lesbian would definitely have some comphet to work through.

2. Her relationship with Mako.

Often, lesbians dealing with comphet will "choose" guys to have crushes on based on their perceived social value (often it's the mainstream safe option or "the underdog") and sometimes lesbians know they're choosing this guy, and sometimes it's more subconscious, often experienced getting oddly obsessive only to discover they're not into him once he reciprocates or the relationship is established ("getting a boyfriend has been achieved. societal validation unlocked. but wait, why don't I like the reality of having a boyfriend?").

That "oh she likes him" music played for Korra after Mako pulled impressive stuff at the Pro Bending arena and was waving to the crowd. And like, yes, people can become more attractive based on their actions and achievements, but a lesbian under comphet would definitely see Mako prove himself to be an impressive guy (loved by an entire cheering audience) and go "I choose that one." I myself used to scan a room, pick the most conventionally attractive guy, and go "i want that one to like me" and then genuinely thought I liked him. This behavior is not about actual attraction, it's about a subconscious understanding of social dynamics and what you need to be valuable to a community--emphasis on the subconscious.

She gets pretty obsessive about him, which makes total sense if he's her first crush and she's been isolated her whole life, but also lines up with the comphet lesbian.

That line in her confession, too, "I really like you and I think we were meant for each other." Like, girl, what soulmate romance novels have you been reading between training sessions?? And this doesn't mean she couldn't have actually been attracted to Mako, but it does mean she really built him up in her head (and what she should expect from a chosen guy).

Then they get together, and you know how long that lasted for? Like, two episodes. This was where I started to think she never actually liked Mako. Immediately Korra starts picking fights with him and then quickly physically separates herself from him. And she does this to him almost every time they're in a scene together after they start dating. Meanwhile, Mako was just being a relatively supportive, attentive boyfriend so clearly her own feelings were the trigger. This wasn't a problem of personalities clashing, it really seemed like Korra didn't like the reality of being in a relationship with Mako.

In the end Mako takes it on that he's just not equipped to handle being the support-partner to the Avatar and Korra agrees that they're better off as friends, I even seem to remember her being the one to verbalize that they made better friends than gf/bf all after she worked so hard to convince him to be with her. And why I ask you? Possibly because as soon as she had the boyfriend, she realized she didn't actually want a boyfriend. Emphasis on the boy.

She took like zero social cues from him: He says he's confused, she jumps in and kisses him. He's uncomfortable with her grabbing his arm, she tells him to play along (translation: "suck it up, this is happening"). And then there was that scene where she kissed him out of nowhere in the locker room. (And Korra picks up on social cues from everyone else, so it's not an autism thing or something.) This is actually behavior you'll see frequently from people who are more into the idea of a person than the actual person. Liking an actual person requires acknowledging their personhood (not just how great they are), and Korra does way less of that than she does of deciding how things with Mako can or should go all, the way up to their mutual decision to just be friends. And lesbians under comphet? Yeah, liking the idea of a guy is the closest they usually get to actually liking a guy.

I don't doubt that Korra doesn't care for Mako, later seasons definitely proved that time and time again, but: a lesbian under comphet could very easily mistake that care for different feelings and lead to a relationship like what Korra had with Mako.

3. Her Intro to Bolin

It's such a small thing, but that first moment she has with him in the gym, the way she bristles at his "implication" that they were "together" screams bby lesbian to me. Because I did this. Often times I was looking out for such implications. And I've been a bby lesbian so I would know (technically still am).

4. Apart from her intense and then very short-lived feelings for Mako, we never see her express interest in a guy again.

And four seasons does not translate to a lifetime of examples, but several guys are shown to express interest in Korra over those four seasons (I'm including Prince Wu hitting on her in their first encounters) and meanwhile we only see Korra interested in two people: a guy and a gal. And one of them, I think, can be really well explained by comphet.

5. What Her Relationship with Asami Tells Us

The way Korra acted toward Asami when she had feelings for her was completely different from the way she expressed her feelings for Mako. And, like, yes, she's been through at least two seasons of trauma since she first thought she liked Mako so she's changed, and this was a show on Nickelodeon so they wanted the queer to be as subtle/nonexistent as possible, but still:

The way Korra acts while liking Asami is c o m p l e t e l y different from how she acted when she was in her Mako phase.

Even after they get together in the comics, the way Korra expresses her interest in Asami is still completely different from her interest in Mako. Her interest in Mako was obsessive and forceful and after they got together it was very platonically comfortable in small moments before she consistently turned combative. Her interest in Asami was receptive and emotional, and then when they got together it was secure, protective, and fierce. And I'm not saying bisexuals can't experience this difference between two partners of different genders, but as a lesbian who dealt with comphet and then started dating the actual correct gender for her sexuality, her relationship with Mako screams of forcing something she thought she wanted. Especially when compared to her relationship with Asami.

In Conclusion

Arguments could be made for ace umbrella rep in Korra, and certainly the fandom's consensus is that she's bisexual rep, but I wanted to express a different possibility; one that never gets fully explored in media.

In the end: she's a cartoon character, so any aspect of her personhood is completely dependent on her creators (like what stan lee said about people who ask him which superhero would win in a fight, the answer is "whoever I want to win.") and while I super doubt the creators knew they could go this route to explain Korra (meaning it's probably not in the cards for actual cannon) I still hold this headcannon dear to me because I see so much of my own (misguided) romantic history reflected in it.

Thanks for reading.

[haggishlyhagging]

In retrospect I think that, had I not had my doubts born of my own personal experience about the likelihood of Mary Wollstonecraft bursting forth from nowhere as a solitary (and not very attractive) figure, I would probably have accepted the (patriarchal) portrayal of Mary Wollstonecraft as the first. I would probably have dated women's protest from the end of the eighteenth century and would not have come to believe - as I now do - that while ever there has been male power there has been female resistance. I might even have constructed an argument based on the concept of progress, from the first passionate stirrings of Mary Wollstonecraft, to the beginnings of a 'movement' fifty years later, to the demand for suffrage, the gaining of the vote - and somehow fitted in the current feminist revival. It was partly because I decided to find out who said what before Mary Wollstonecraft that I have reached my current conclusions - that as far back as we can go we find evidence of women's protest against male power, and evidence of male power being used to eradicate it from the record.

When one begins to appreciate what Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, 'Sophia', Catherine Macaulay and Olympe de Gouges said (and I must apologise for the omission of Helen Maria Williams who proved to be a little too elusive), the notion of progress becomes meaningless. 'Coming and going' 'appearing and disappearing', beginning anew virtually every fifty years and sometimes not attaining comparable insights to those who have gone before but who remain unknown, does not resemble progress. It does, however, constitute women's tradition.

In suggesting that Mary Wollstonecraft was not alone, and that she had foremothers, I do not want to devalue her 'originality' or minimise her contribution - that has been done systematically and enthusiastically by the masters - but I do want to suggest that she is one of many (and there will be countless more that my 'diggings have not unearthed) and that it has been in patriarchal interest to silence and conceal such women. I do want to suggest that we should be suspicious of the treatment of women as lone figures, for it is by such a process that they become isolated from their sex, that they are classified as an aberration and of little or no relevance to women, that they are made vulnerable while the contributions of women around them are made invisible. I do want to suggest that when we know that for centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today, and that men have been interrupting them, we do feel confident, we do feel inspired to emulate some of those women we have reclaimed. It is because such knowledge of women of the past - and there have been hundreds of them - is empowering for women that every effort has been made to make it disappear in a patriarchal society where power is perceived as the prerogative of men.

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[omegawizardposting]

There's a specific subset of trans women (radfems) who claim that being raised as a man was far more traumatic than being raised as a woman, and therefore trans women are more traumatized and oppressed than trans men.

They will then turn around and say that trans men have privilege because we are men, and living as women in a patriarchal society is more traumatic than living as a man.

So which is it? Was I traumatized as a little girl in a patriarchal society or not? As a man who is not out of the closet IRL and therefore lives as a woman, do I still have male privilege, or am I disprivileged because I'm societally viewed as a woman? Or is that actually a privilege, even if I'm treated as a "broken" or "defective" woman? Even if I've faced violence, isolation, and misgendering in my life?

Maybe, just maybe, all this gender stuff is a little more complex that "woman oppressed, man oppressor". Maybe it's especially complex for trans folk, who often exist in society's eyes as neither men nor women, as inherently wrong. (Not that not being a man or a woman is wrong, but transphobes sure think it is.) Maybe it's even more complex for intersex folks, who are always left out of these conversations. Maybe we should be focused on what we have in common instead of the minute differences in our experiences.

[omnic]

i've seen so much retrained, rebranded bioessentialism bullshit on my feed, both tumblr and twitter. and quite frankly, i've had enough. i've blocked several mutuals i previously thought fondly of over this. some of y'all are teetering close, too close, to radfem and terf ideologies and don't realise it. lumping the entirety of men (both cisgender men and transgender men alike) under the lens of "evil" and "wholly incapable of sympathising with the plights of women (cis and trans) under the compress of patriarchal society" is, quite frankly, troubling to see.

like, i get it, to a minor degree. i used to frivolously throw around disdain of the entirety of men, especially for the years following the assaults in my early 20s. my cptsd compounded this. but i eventually realised how counterproductive this was, not only to my own self-esteem, but to fostering friendships and also existing in the world without looking over my shoulder every 2 minutes. my paranoia got out of hand, and would proceed to irreparably damage many relationships of mine.

bad things still happen. i understand this. sometimes vigilance is not a luxury but a necessity. i understand this. people do what they need to survive, both physically and psychologically. but people need to learn to extend basic sympathies and empathies beyond their own circle. this goes for any gender, you need to be able to see past your own nose and own experience; isolation from diversity can kill emotional comprehension of other groups outside your own and make other groups appear alien and inscrutable. we need to be able to coexist, lest anger flare within us all; we will be unable to curb the flames of ire until it's too late.

before anyone comes a-knocking on my inbox like. are you saying we should have to accommodate men at every turn? no, i'm not saying that. men, especially cisgender and heterosexual men but this extends to all, need to work extensively on unlearning the toxicity and misogyny that seeps deep in their upbringing and, often, their contemporary lives. unlearning patriarchal imprints will benefit not only women but men as well. internalised misogyny is also a thing, and thus, plenty of women need to work on unravelling that as well.

but what i am saying is there is a growing vocal movement of people who're lumping all men together and stripping them of their humanity, sealing them as unreasonable and malevolent by virtue of their masculinity. i don't think y'all know dehumanisation is always a weapon. it isn't cute, it isn't logical; dehumanisation will always work against us, and has been deployed on larger levels historically to disseminate violence.

tl;dr i swear basic compassion between groups is good and healthy, y'all.

[f1ghtsoftly]

It can be so frustrating imo to explain to people who haven’t seen it for themselves What Is Wrong With Q**r Politics until they see it themselves.

I think a large part of it is because the paradigm is still “accepting gnc people vs ostracizing them”. To most of them there was no “before” to go back to. They never had access to the lgbt friendly spaces that did really exist in the 1990s and 2000s which, were not perfect, but generally you could count on a critical mass of people to be cool with men dressing like women and women dressing like men. To not pressure anyone to medicalize and to use pronouns with fluidity and context to express the realities of LGBTQ experiences not the rigidity of trans identities.

I’m not a luddite, I don’t long to go back to the AIDs crisis or a time when same sex public affection could illicit a beating, but a nice thing about being marginalized is that we were not marketed to, there were no influencers with thousands of followers trying to sell us on medicalization. Nobody believed that acceptance came at the cost of our health and our finances and that living a radical, gender fucked life is entirely compatible with homosexuality (and encouraged). Marginalization forced us to see a radical reality, not a shackled one.

It is so fucking telling how much this movement serves the needs of capital. Not only does transitioning destroy LG visibility, but it’s wildly expensive. It’s so easy for niave/immoral actors to cash in on a demographic that is in general isolated/ low in confidence and our gender system ensures that gay people will always be marginalized. We can’t overthrow gender under capitalism because the unpaid labor of mothers is too valuable.

Until we destroy the social system of patriarchy, gays and lesbians will always pose a “problem”. We are unproductive, ill fitting cogs in a machine that says only boys are one way and only girls are another and this is the only natural way. Not only does patriarchy keep women poor, weak and working 24/7 it also directs men’s rage towards women but it needs to be shoved in everyone’s faces 24/7 to hold. Oppressing 50% of a population is hard work.

Patriarchal propaganda is intense and pervasive. It has to be in order to work. This propaganda says the state of affairs is natural. That women like their position. That men are naturally agressive. That this is just the way things are. And it’s *that* propaganda that fucks gay people the hardest. The kind that says women oriented sexuality is innately agressive, so lesbians must share the fantasies of straight men. The kind that says anything associated with women is fair game for violence and exploitation, leaving men who preform for male attention exposed to male violence. The kind that says men must prove their power over women always, leading men to see lesbian masculinity as a direct threat. Plus all the ways gays and lesbians are made to feel uncomfortable, ostracized and left out from gendered social forms and rituals.

And rather than fix the actual problem, it works best for our system to allow predatory doctors to cash in on that. And activist groups can promote the shit out of it with minimal social backlash and without having to actually change how our system works. It doesn’t threaten the beauty industry or the entertainment industry or the plastic surgery industry because unlike women’s rights, unlike a radical restructuring of our society, it conforms with ideas about gender already popular in American culture. That gender is natural and “women” are naturally self sacrificing and submissive.

And reflecting back, it really just proves how revolutionary the idea that one’s natural body, personality and sexuality is more than good enough really was. Self acceptance has been so totally destroyed by the the weird neoliberal/wellness/moralism paradigm that it now means to become an image that has been sold to you, rather than to allow yourself to just fucking *be*.

Gayness, homosexuality, lesbianism, has been colonized in mainstream culture. It’s been turned into a mockery of itself (and jesus christ honestly it looks like it, the queers have NO DRIP). To be not a call to return to our truest selves and to see love not through the eyes of production and resources but through real feeling but a cruel endorsement of capital’s need to force us to conform, consume and constrict ourselves.

And I just hate the idea of literal decades of activism, people’s ENTIRE lives work, of lives destroyed by the AIDS crisis, by psychiatric hospitals, by poverty and addiction. Of all of that suffering and that work and that courage to fight through all of that just being mangled before our eyes.

There is no reform that will last. We have to take this all the way home.

[twi-liight]

https://www.tumblr.com/twi-liight/727649211264499712/hi-bestie-okay-sits-down-and-folds-hands-under?source=share

Okay, first of all I hope you're having a wonderful day and I wanna apologize for bringing this up again but I just read it and I have a lot to say about it, sorry for my terrible English as well, it's not my first language.

Now... what in the actual fuck?? I am a 19 year old trans man who was fucking harassed and bullied by lots of feminists. I support feminism 100% but, unfortunately, I have only had the misfortune of finding people like this person invalidating and even sexual harassing me.

"Astarion's storyline. Something that is so inherently a female experience in a very patriarchal society twisted around and manipulated in a twink boy's story feels like the men are stealing something from us" Wtf?? Again?? So they're basically saying that sexual abuse is a thing that only woman can experience?? I can't understand how a woman that's studying is so insensitive and disrespectful to people. If you have so little sensitivity to say that this type of shit only happens to women and make the TRAUMA of a PERSON, regardless of their gender, mean so little to you, I'm really glad you don't have the majority of people agreeing with you.

Not to mention that apparently she doesn't know shit about psychology haha. I hope she learns a little and stop being locked in a bubble of stupid ideas🫂🫂

I feel disappointed in this type of attitudes and thoughts, really but well

Again, I'm sorry for this, I just wanted to vent a bit. Hope you have a wonderful day, love your blog and your writing 🫶

No need to apologize; I think it's important to point out misconceptions that people have. Because you're right, it is disappointing. Feminism has isolated a lot of people due to a very loud minority in its population actively trying to leave out male-identifying individuals. Sexual abuse and trauma are complex and painful, and I think writing about a male-identifying character going through that abuse and having to confront it, heal, and live his life is important. I'm sure anon just doesn't like Astarion and didn't know how to admit it without justifying their shit-ass take. I hope you're having a good day, too <3