#vs how the world treats you based on actual gender

[earlyspringtranscendence]

i know this is FULLY the opposite of the point but i need a stuffed animal the exact size shape and most imptly weight of the meep bc im moping and having a meepsized stuffed animal would fix me

[lizzaneia-elizalde]

Don’t worry about the yanderes treating their daughters different vs sons request! That’s totally fine not to do it and it makes sense that it’d be answered as a gender neutral question. I’m glad you like my requests still with regards to questions about all your yanderes!

As a bit of a replacement question…(that you are under no obligation of answering; I don’t mind ever at all with your decisions on requests/asks, and you should never feel pressured by me or anyone else ever!)…what would be each yanderes’ dream date?

Yandere! Men and their dream date

AWW YOU'RE TOO SWEET! And I very much like this replacement request >:D

YAN! ARTIST

Of course, it's so obvious with Arlen. Painting dates! Anything that involves with you posing for him as he paints your visage, that would be a good date with him. Uh, you want to paint with him too? Sure, just pick up an extra canvas and brush, then pick what paint you want to use. As a change of scenery, it will be an outdoor type of date too, finding a space to paint the scenery, or each other.

YAN! DRAGON

He's not that much of a romantic man, but hey, he tries. So he transforms into his dragon form and fly you to the sky and wherever you want. Your personal uber will fly you to the ends of the world. Maybe find a new secret location where the both of you can just cuddle, talk, and destress from royal life.

YAN! THEATER ACTOR

Another obvious one. Being a theater actor, of course he's gonna love home dates! Wait, home dates? As much as Ignatius loves to be on the spotlight and also lives and breathes theater, the man needs a break sometimes. So, in an act of breaking down his walls, cuddling with you, cooking with you, or doing board games with you in the comfort of your home is very ideal to him.

YAN! BUTLER

Eh... Zero doesn't really have a life outside you, and doesn't really think for himself sometimes. And that meant the dates will be up to you. If you ask what dream date he wants to do, he'll probably answer based on what you want and pass it off as a coincidence. You have to really coax Zero to think more for himself.

YAN! SUGAR DADDY

Shopping dates. What? He's a greedy man. Of course he loves spending his money left and right and shower you with gifts and money. A good date will be spending a minimum of 100k dollars, a nice, expensive yet filling dinner, and maybe a passionate fuck afterwards. It is Rowan after all. You're his sugar baby, so do prepare to be spoiled rotten.

YAN! JOCK

Facade Damon would probably do the stereotypical "i'll teach you how to play [sport]!" type of date. Honestly, if you're not into sports, you would find this idea boring. But somehow, Damon made it fun and not annoying for you. Unveiled Damon would love just to have a date outside of the city where nobody that knows his himbo persona can see him. Maybe something comforting like pottery dates. But, both type of Damons would be up to an arcade date!

YAN! ASSASSIN

Azrael, being an assassin, probably did every type of dates one could think of for the different missions he took. So when you ask him, he would probably say something relaxing for once, which is a picnic date! Where he can just slump down, lie down on your lap, and relax. As long as it's just the both of you, he will consider it as a successful date.

YAN! EX-BOYFRIEND

Lee will forever regret hurting you, and breaking it off on that damned beach. So, his dream date will be a Beach date, where he will actually pay attention to you and shower you with the love you deserve. He will make it up to you.

YAN! COWBOY

How does a ride around the town sounds? Ooh, how about racing through the forest? Wait, you don't know how to ride a horse? Knoxx will teach you in a jiffy! Anything related to equestrian stuff will be Knoxx's dream date. Riding on the horse he gave you, and him on Red, and the both of you teasing each other while riding around will be the dream for him. And maybe you riding him too lol

YAN! EMO

If not Poetry dates, he will be down for Karaoke dates! He wants to hear you sing the song you love, and then Ashton will also sing the song he loves. Maybe a bit of a duet here and there, exchange of heated glances while serenading each other... Ashton will also probably spend like 50% of the date making out with you. Hey, don't blame him that you're just so irresistible.

YAN! WEREWOLF

Lyall would love to do camping dates! You, him, under the starry night sky. Cooking food over fire, feeding each other. Then Lyall will transform into his wolf and you would sleep on his fur inside a large tent. It's a night to remember for him if you would give him the chance.

YAN! EX-HUSBAND

Another tidbit from Inigo in the novel is that he actually owns a motorcycle back in his parents' mansion. So, as a throwback to the OG Inigo, this Inigo will love to do midnight motorcycle ride dates into the secret clearing he frequently visits when he was in highschool. It overlooks the city and it's a genuinely comforting place for the restless man. So, he would love to show you that place one day.

YAN! HOSPITAL CHAIRPERSON

Xavier would love to do a traditional movie date with you. The hospital work is already stressful enough, and being anxious about you is adding too much to his load. So, something simple and fun would relax Xavier. He will probably rent the whole theater just to make sure it's just you and him inside the theater. Or... He could just build a home theater. Yeah that's plausible.

YAN! VILLAIN

Eros would love to have a date with you where you both disguise as commoners and just roam around the capital. Eating streetfood, watching street performances... Especially if there is a festival going on, he would love to take you out to the square and dance with you freely, away from the eyes of the judging people. Just you and him.

YAN! POLITICIAN

What do we expect from the traditional man himself? Max would do a romantic dinner date with you. Something very fancy, maybe before the dinner, both of you would go into an opera, or a museum... Anything is fine for this man, as long as it's not too active.

YAN! MAFIA BOSS

Hades would want something fun, and something to keep his mind off the mafia bizz. So an out of the country date would be his go to. What? He's rich. He can afford that. Just, make sure he doesn't horde souvenirs... And stop him from making a plan to expand his territory... He already has enough.

[our-agabpunk-experience-2]

Hello! We've found a term, like honeybee transfem and coffeebean transmasc, but for transneutral.

www.tumblr.com/cringeandproudx3/774778975079776256/hi-tumblr-i-have-no-clue-how-coining-posts-work

Mintchocolate transneu! (From user "cringeandproudx3")

Just wanted to include it since it's a smaller term but fits perfectly into this.

Have a lovely day!

Honey (she/they/it) @honeyscottage

I’m going to be 100% honest, and I’m open to discussion. But I don’t really understand this term

In an ideal world, terms like “honeybee transfem” and “coffee bean transmasc” wouldn’t exist. They would just be “transfems” and “transmascs”. They exist because of attempts to push those people out of the main labels by defining transfem as “a trans person who was assigned male” and transmasc as “a trans person who was assigned female”. That isn’t saying that honeybee transfem/coffee bean transmasc are 100% synonymous with AFAB transfem/AMAB transmasc. Part of the reason the term was broadened was for AIAB/AXAB/UAB transfems and transmascs, and there are plenty of honeybee transfems who were assigned male and coffee bean transmascs who were assigned female. But using the term implies a fight against defining transfemininity and transmasculinity purely based on AGAB. As far as I know (and I could be wrong) there is no similar push to define transneutrality that way. No argument that your experience with transneutrality is only valid if a doctor said a specific thing when you were born.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t problems in the transneu community regarding the sex binary. We can talk about how asking “Are you TMA transneutral or TME transneutral?” is basically a progressive-sounding way of asking “Okay but like, what were you born as?” We can talk about the constant reinventing the wheel of the gender and sex binaries by sorting enbies into “masc-aligned” vs. “fem-aligned”, “masc presenting” vs. “fem-presenting”, usually without any input from the nonbinary person themselves (using masc enby to mean any nonbinary person with a beard regardless of whether they actually identify with masculinity) and treating them as categories that never overlap (the constant arguing that “fem-aligned enbies can be lesbians but masc aligned ones can’t!” that forgets that plenty of nonbinary people identify with both masculinity and femininity). Are these the problems that the mint chocolate transneu term is fighting against? Because they don’t exactly feel like the same kind of problems as the ones honeybee transfem/coffee bean transmasc aim to address.

I’m 100% open to discussion and to help myself understand.

[djinnandtea]

so I got some interest on this post where I tossed out that I wanted to talk more about monster romance and race and gender. it's been really nice to see a few folks are also wanting to hear/talk about it! I'm not prepared to say anything at length [eta: this turned out to be kind of a lie] with any certainty or research to back me up, but I thought I could post a rough outline of sorts of what I'd want to research and explore further, just as a starting point for myself but also a jumping off point if anyone else has any thoughts or resources.

I guess I'll start with gender first. I'm new to the romance genre generally, but I don't think it's a surprise that the genre has always been dominated by discourse around who reads romance and the kind of gender dynamics presented in a lot of conventional romance books (which are generally heterosexual/heteronormative in a lot of problematic ways). I'm thinking of the harlequin romances my mom and grandma used to read, but also of the discussions around colleen hoover's work and then the dark romance sub-genre too.

this means that there's the obvi discussion to be had about content vs. context. who is writing the romance, what informs their writing, what messaging comes through via choices made by the author, as well as by the context the author is writing in. I'm sure if you've been reading romance--even fanfic--for a while, you're well versed in some of these conversations, even if just in a casual way.

after considering romance on a macro level, I think you'd then have to look at some of those more micro sub-genres. where are gender norms accentuated and exaggerated, and to what end? why is dark romance a thing, why do (usually) straight white women want to fantasize about being in that kind of relationship? what's the purpose being met? (this is all asked non-judgmentally, btw, as I also enjoy dark romance.)

and maybe there are folks who would dislike my comparing of monster romance to dark romance, but I do think the two are related, especially based on a lot of posts I've seen since joining this corner of tumblr. I think there's a lot of interest in exploring ideas around control and dominance that dark romance and monster romance provide contained space for. if you watched my YouTube video, I touch on this a little bit more at the end as well.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot re: gender (like all the stories being told about lgbtq+ MCs), but this is just some initial thoughts at the fore of my brain.

as for race...........well. lol.

there's the very surface level question around what percentage of monster romance FMCs are white. I genuinely don't have this answer, and I know there are a lot of nonwhite FMCs too! but I'd be really curious to know the actual numbers here. why? well, bc diversity matters. but also because of the decades long narratives around white women as victims of men of color, and how that narrative has been used to weaponize whiteness and demonize blackness specifically, and non-whiteness more generally.

I am def not saying that all monster MMCs = depictions of non-whiteness, I'm just thinking about the connections between equating non-white people/bodies with monstrosity. I'm thinking of the historical framing of non-white people and communities as sub-human, as savages, as beastly. inhumane. monsters have kinda always been a metaphor for the other, including the non-white other, and I think it'd be naive of us to assume that vestiges of that brand of racism (which is still alive and well) never inform the ways creators engage with monster romance and monsterfucking, consciously AND unconsciously.

I'm also thinking about orientalism. I'm thinking of the exotification and classification of the east. the way westerners invaded the eastern world and began treating the people there like specimens. I'm thinking about how othering and abjecting and exotifying a culture or community or person can create a power-informed version of sexualizing that culture or community or person. like, othering/abjecting/exotifying can lead to creating a perverted sort of desiring. I have a special interest here because I'm arab, so this stuff feels particularly personal, but yeah. it makes my wheels turn.

there's also a dehumanizing element of turning an othered body into a piece of sexual meat. I'm thinking about the way monsters in these books are always excessive, the way their penises are always massive. we can't pretend that doesn't seem a little familiar to the degrading ways white people have also discussed black bodies, too. like. I'm not saying wanting our monsters to have big dicks is racist, I'm just saying there are some aspects of the genre that I think deserve to be ~unpacked~ and considered in a wider context that takes this kind of stuff into account. not as a confirmed given, but as an avenue worth approaching with curiosity, if only to point out the ways in which it's NOT a product of racism/anti-blackness.

obvi this post is not backed up at present with a single source because I'm just thinking out loud based on stuff I've read previously over the years that I definitely would need to revisit, so I totally get if you read this and think I'm being ridiculous. but if you saw my first post and were kinda wondering what I had in mind when making it, this is it.

[iatrophilosophos]

I do think there's a dynamic that's a problem with popular/online queer theory *generally*, arguably most with tme non binary people but sumn to watch for across the board, where discourse and theory building primarily centers around early transition/early out experiences.

There's a lot going on that's good to talk about and understand when you first come out, *and* it's an inherently transitory life period of at most a few years that IMPACTS, but does not DICTATE peoples long term life experiences and desires. It feels like the people who are centered to speak the loudest on Queer Experience as a whole are often relatively privileged on other axies and crafting a worldview based on a chaotic disrupted time that is VALUABLE AND WORTH CARING ABOUT, and also should not be taken as an expectation of how stuff will be forever and ever as people grow, change, self define their social circles, drop into more comfortable alternatove lifeways, and so on. I think this dynamic also pairs badly with ageism against older queer people--even in circles that are less purist about how it's so scary and predatory to mix generations you see a lot of shitting on people who may think about gender and society differently than the current newgen terms and politics, *not just because they came out in a different time*, but because their analysis is shaped by years or decades of existing in the world as a queer adult.

I think u can see this pretty clearly with the transandrophobia crowd and the "the more arcane my gender labels are the more radical I am" crowd of mostly-TMEs. Transandro bros seem afaict to be split between men in their mid 20s thru early 30s, who have been out for a while and do not really enjoy being treated like A Dude in society and blame women for it, with varying amounts of actually attempting to build theory about older trans experiences vs. acting like their coming out story is retained as a permanent condition when it materially isnt; and younger men and boys who are genuinely struggling with the major disruption of coming out and being trans... and blame women for it, again with the view that their current experiences are a permanent condition and not a transitional period. The arcane gender labels = cooler and more oppressed(?) Crowd seems almost unilaterally young or early into gender exploration. I have so much time for people breaking into the joissaince of self-determination and a lot less time when people confuse that process with any kind of structural theory.

This is twee but like. Yall remember that "the moon has phases, it's still the moon" post? I think it's kinda like that. It matters to value and understand those phases and it's silly as fuck and plainly innacurate to build a star map on the assumption it'll stay in one phase in one place--and that map definitely won't help you navigate.

[aikoiya]

Link 1/2 Thoughts

I just saw something for a Link 1/2 au &, honestly, it was pretty interesting as a concept. And, if that were it, then I'd actually be interested for basically the same reason that Ranma 1/2 was interesting.

However, it was listed as "translink."

Now, my issue with this is that, considering the idea that this au was based on Ranma 1/2, then if this au follows, Link wouldn't actually be trans in it. So, calling it as such is misleading.

For one, the curse of Jusenkyo actually physically turned Ranma into an actual biological girl. I'm assuming, with a natural, working womb, correct chromosomes, & everything. Which is very, very different from being trans because the most recognized meaning is not identifying or not being comfortable with the sex you were born into &, in many cases, going out of one's way to appear more like the sex you wish you were.

Ranma was perfectly comfortable with being a guy & Link seems to be a biologically identifying male & unopposed to crossdressing, at most, specifically when it's convenient or he deems it necessary. Which, crossdressing itself has little to do with how one identifies.

Ranma very specifically wasn't happy with being turned into a girl. Which also wasn't the sex he was born into. If anything, you'd think that modern fans would be on the warpath about how Ranma should have gender dysphoria from being turned into a girl. (Which, we all know that he wasn't. That boy was far more traumatized from everything else Genma put him through than that. If anything, he seemed to more so be annoyed with it.)

So, unless the Link in this au was specifically a born man who identified as a woman or a born woman who identified as a man, then even if he's turned into the opposite sex, he still wouldn't actually be trans.

Either way, the reason why the idea of Ranma 1/2 & Link 1/2 is an interesting one is how it plays with things that are hard to play with in a world where the general assumption is that men & women are the "exact same" in all but name & body-shape. (Which sometimes feels like the overall belief of those who support the trans movement blindly & without question.)

Someone put into a situation where they have to learn about the perspective of the opposite sex. The chemical & hormone changes that also change how you think, feel, & react to things. The highlighting & examination of the very real differences between men & women, not just according to how society treats them, but also biologically, mentally, & emotionally. Specifically, examining them both in a way that doesn't treat either as bad or less than, just different. Not to mention, how both have their benefits depending on the situation.

However, that doesn't mean that Link being trans & going through this sort of thing couldn't be interesting in its own way.

It can, actually. You just have to focus on the right things. Specifically, if you go the route of expectation vs reality. The "I wasn't expecting it to be like this" factor. Basically, the grass is always greener phenomenon. The realization that being the other sex isn't the fix-all that Link may have believed it would be.

Maybe he starts out being ecstatic with the change, but as time passes, he realizes that there are things about being a woman he either hadn't realized or hadn't thought completely through. For instance, the fact that he wouldn't have nearly as much upper body strength when he's a woman. Yet how this is made up for by the greater strength that he'd be in possession of in his lower body &, especially, his core. Not to mention, having to learn a new way to fight when in the body of one based around this redistribution of strength. One likely focused more on long ranged weaponry such as bows or magic. (Who knows, maybe magic comes more easily to women?)

Or agility, flexibility, & viciousness at close range. Perhaps Link starts using 2 short swords instead of one or dual-wields daggers? A style that focuses on rapid identification of weaknesses & relentless exploitation of said weaknesses with absolute ruthlessness. Because the longer a woman is in a fight, the more likely she'll lose. Not to mention womanhood's own monthly "curse of the blood moon" & the pain that comes with it. The being underestimated thing (though, that one can sometimes be a blessing & even quite useful in the right situation). The way that men will generally instinctively react to shield & protect a woman. Or even as simple as women just seeing a larger variety of colors than men. (Which may come as a surprise! I imagine that Zelda would find this fact interesting.)

(And aside from the having wanted to be a female part, most of what I listed, would still be 100% viable in a situation where Link isn't trans & has simply been turned into a woman or put under a curse that can switch him back & forth exactly like Ranma had been.)

Or, in the case of Link being born a woman, then the expectations & pressures put upon men. Not just from other men but also from women. This belief from women that men need to be both warrior & poet or many get squicked out. "Be strong & masculine, but also open up to me & show your emotions more, but don't cry despite what I literally just said, because that gives me the ick." (Which is odd, because one the one hand, modern women demonize stoicism, but then turn around & tell men not to cry because gross?) Like, it seems to be something that you have to thread the needle on. Also, the odd new expectation, & possibly even instinct, to protect women & children at all costs. The regular "just suck it up" or "toughen up" message they get. The not being coddled or treated like a priority. Remember, "women & children first." Which logically means, "men last." I've heard it said quite often that men are expected to prove themselves & are only accepted if for what they can provide. Meanwhile, in most situations, women are just accepted because women. So, maybe explore the consequences of that? In a lot of ways, men are replaceable. Especially when considering that, strictly speaking, they aren't exactly necessary beyond conception. Does a decent father's presence in a child's life increase the likelihood that the child will turn out more well-adjusted as an individual? Yes, but they aren't needed for the child to survive beyond conception. But women? Women are necessary, at least until the child is born. Or the way that people will generally be much nicer to women. This means that turning into a man may result in absolute shock as Link is suddenly confronted with being treated without kid gloves. As well as the realization that just because men don't show their emotions as readily as women doesn't automatically mean that they are unfeeling, cold-hearted brutes. Just that they keep those feelings close to their chest, which is something they seem to do as a self-defensive measure. And considering what we know of Wild Link, then I suspect that even a Wild born female would be able to commiserate with a lot of men on this fact & may even result in a deeper appreciation for them.

What would especially be damning for a Link who was born a woman would be experiencing Gerudo culture from the perspective of a male. Especially considering Wabbin's experience in TotK & Link's experience as the one who basically facilitated he & Perda's relationship.

Like, seriously. Ya'll should look up Norah Vincent. Especially her work, "Self-Made Man." It's a real eye opener.

Anyway, perhaps his dysphoria persists even in the body he'd thought he'd wanted, thus causing him to have to learn to accept himself as he is or be miserable forever. Thereby giving him a newfound appreciation for being a man. Or woman. Whichever way he was born here.

Think about it this way. If this was a case of female brain in male body like some people assume nowadays, wouldn't being turned into the opposite sex just result in male brain in female body or vice versa? Thus resulting in the same exact problem, just in reverse?

Also, keep in mind that specifically in this situation, I very much doubt that Link would've had access to hormone injections. So, just suddenly having such a drastic hormonal shift in where he hadn't had the chance to acclimate to the change in a gradual manner, should theoretically cause a lot of heavy adjusting. I'm talking major hormonal, mental, & emotional whiplash here.

Not to mention having to get used to the new center of gravity. The fact that clothes don't fit quite right anymore.

Just a big ol' mess.

LoZ Wild Masterlist

[beast-of-mosss]

Feel free to infodump at me about Viveras Lavellan (or Deshan) I love to hear about blorbos and I mean this genuinely

Hkkanejwjeiwjwj, I'll give you a rundown on Viveras and his relationship with Deshan! Although, I'm in a Dragon Age Server where it's mostly just people talking about their blorbos and being nerds- so,,,definitely hit me up if you're interested!!!!! :D!!!!

I'm so sorry for this long ass post as well as my sleepy brain writing. I'm mentally ill.

I'm a bit tired, but I'll try to form thoughts for you.

Anyway! So, we're gonna focus on Viveras Lavellan. He's still being developed due to my brain worms hyperfocusing on Deshan, but he's definitely more developed compared to Ren Trevelyan. These are just the run down of him, there's a lot more information about him on the discord.

Viveras Lavellan is a mage, and is the Clan's First. He's 19 years old and is 11 years younger than Deshan. When I was first developing him, he was kinda my shitpost voice piece for a lot of the dehumanization that the Inquistior (Deshan) faces/also anger at the disrespect of the Dalish by the Inner Circle. He also does,,,like elfroot weed and is lowkey an menace to society but only when Deshan is around.

He's a gender non-confirming, and he does like to wear dresses. He has an interest in fashion design which he picked up from an elder in the Clan. He's confident in his looks, and can act like a smug cat at times.

And just like most creators do, the Lavellan siblings' parents are dead- but Viveras was told by Deshan that they were abandoned. I have a wip scene of that, I'll link the little wip/teaser here:

Here's him in a dress!!

He's actually pretty aloof, and tends to daydream a lot, but he's quick witted. He's a lot more easier to read than Deshan.

He does show up at Skyhold, much to Deshan's horror, and is a bad influence to Cole. He tends to be passive-aggressive towards the Inner Circle, he does warm up to some of them. A lot of things are still wip with him, but I do know some more based concepts with him.

Where Deshan is the sun, Viveras is the moon. They both kinda foil each other (sweet lies vs. blunt truth, direct anger vs. Indirect anger, etc).

There's a shitpost/canon scene where it's the Judgement scene, and it's all serious and the criminal is Viveras and hes high off his mind. He snuck in, got some soilders to do elfroot weed with him, and somehow passed out on the roof of the barn. It's quiet, Josephine is reading off his crimes. Then all of the sudden "Keeper Deshanna is gonna fucking kill you!" And queue a chase scene and screaming.

Another shitpost/canon scene is Viveras, Sera, and Cole doing elfroot weed and Cole accidentally inhales it?? Or smth. Disappears for a week, only to show up in the fucking roof.

Viveras and Deshan relationship is tense and toxic. And it's Deshan fault. Deshan lies to Viveras, thinking rhat it's better to give him comfort than truth. They care so much for Viveras, and they want him to live a safe and healthy life. They don't want to lose him, so they lie and hide themselves from him. Thinking that it would protect him from the world and from themselves. Overprotective of him, and in a way-treating him like a child. And it's hard for Viveras, and although the Clan is his family, he does really want to have Deshan's approval and wants to be taken seriously by them. He wants to be let in, and he had tried many times before-but he gets shut down or shut out by Deshan.

He's hurt by them, and not knowing how to deal with that-he acts reckless. Putting himself at risk more just to gain that attention from Deshan.

He dabbles in blood magic, and instead of wielding a staff like any other mage-he wields the Blade of Tidarion.

They do eventually have a heart to heart, and do mend their relationship, but after Trepasser-Deshan's character growth takes a step back and they went back to bad habits. And once again, Viveras was pushed out and alone.

And he hardened his heart and turned his back on them, returning to his clan and helping the Clan in Wycome.

I do have a scene that I want to write where Deshan, once they finally pulled themselves together, tried to reach out-but is rejected by Viveras. Deshan only leaving him with a letter and a messenging crystal. They do this to let him know that they will always be there for him if he wants them to be? My brain is going foggy atm, but I want to leave a hopeful ending to their sibling relationship.

Here's his wip playlist;

[thaethiira]

I played a Cleric of Asmodeus and went hard in on the Lawful part of Lawful Evil and my cleric was out here just asking every monster in the Murderdungeon if they needed legal representation and if they had a contract, were they taken care of here, etc. This went on until Strahd got so furious/horny about it that he pre-emptively ended the whole situation and decided this cleric had proven himself worthy enough to marry Strahd (I had no idea that was the point of the murdermaze until then, which was VERY funny).

This spiralled into a whole retooling of the concept of good and evil (my DM is Jewish and I'm pagan, neither of us really believe in good and evil as absolutes or passive states; but we both do believe in the Lawful/Chaotic dichotomy). We peeled back all the layers in a really fun discussion and decided it really just means Selfish/Selfless, which are both fairly functional values for cultures to have.

And then we went to Menzoberranzan and introduced the matriarchal Drow to the matriarchal Hobbits and made a whole meta statement about how it's not that matriarchy is bad, and it's not that matriarchy can never become abusive.

But that's not baked into the books at all, you have to come at the books from like an English Literature Class type of analysis angle and put them in their context--like these articles do--and then rip apart the things you don't like and put your own things in place, just really take to heart that you're supposed to treat the books more like guidelines than actual rules--which the books actually tell you to do and I took that to heart immediately.

This doesn't erase that gaming is inherently very much just Shoot Em Up Cowboys & Indians with extra layers and palette swaps. However, D&D is also make-believe, and my make-believe has never been Shoot Em Up in any sense of the term. Am I playing D&D "correctly"? Probably not. I don't care. D&D says you can play D&D however you want, and I've tried a bunch of other supposedly more flexible games, like BESM or TFOS or GURPS, and I still prefer D&D.

But yeah it was designed by... well, Boys, for lack of a better term (I'm sure there's a better term but I don't know of one); and Boy!Make-Believe is very Us Vs Them Fight, very Winners And Losers, very Competitive and One-Upmanship. But I didn't grow up with that kind of make-believe, because I was a Montessori kid, and a Girl, and we don't do War/Competition in Montessori like... at all. We do Cooperative/Peace, and Explore, and Exchange Information, and also sometimes Fairy Tale Horror type shit. But it's all talking and scavenger hunting and sometimes making things. So that's what I assume D&D will be too, and luckily my DM is finally on the same page as me about it.

Again, I know "boy/girl" is a very imperfect term, but I did not grow up in a perfectly gender equal trans-inclusive world, and those are terms based on the observations I had as a kid, being around groups of boys vs groups of girls in my community.

Anyway, it's a very good thing to analyse and contextualise where everything you play with came from, now that you are a grown person capable of doing that. It's important to do everything you do on purpose, with knowledge of its implications. And make-believe is basically FOR learning context and ethics and complicated social concepts like that!

But I encourage everyone to really examine the alignment system and use it as a springboard for discussion. What does Good mean? What does Evil mean? What is Law? What is Chaos? What does it mean for a culture to be aligned in a way? How does that look like for individuals of that culture? What is the legacy of the book presenting things like this?

Also, if you play White Wolf, this is even MORE critical, as White Wolf is even WORSE about the bigotry than literally any other game I've ever encountered. I actually have a fucking chart of all the bigotry in Vampire and am having to basically completely rewrite the book so that I can run a game that doesn't harm literally everyone at the table including myself. Stay safe out there, horror media has SO MUCH bigotry compared to straight up fantasy. Not that fantasy has none but like... whoo boy.

Putting all tabletop players into a college level ethics class and forcing them to turn in a paper on moral philosophy before buying a new book

[imposterogers]

hello, I don't know how serious you were when you said "someone needs to psychoanalyse Harry Osbourn" but ask and ye shall recieve? I am running on 4h of sleep, and just write my penultimate final so, like, this isn't the most consise or detailed but it does answer every rhetorical(?) question you posed. I'm explaining all the psych stuff assuming you don't have any orientation to the bullshit I'm about to spew, and I'm adding in links wherever explaining this will take too long so.... this is going to be a little pretty long.

Now, ideally psychoanalysis would be done via multiple hour long session (like nearly 20+) where the client just talks about their past memories, childhood, how they feel right now and what they think. Occasionally we throw in a dream or two, to see what their unconscious desires are. Essentially it’s very talk based, and in person is obviously the best. Since Harry is (a) fictional, and (b) not giving me enough screen time in the movie to just use the words he says, I'm not treating Harry like a client. Instead I'm just taking what we know about him and applying psychodynamic theories to him and treat him like a case study.

Now, I'm not actually sure how serious you were about the Psychoanalysing

We’re beginning with two main theories, 1. Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development: where the exploration of sexuality, formation of gender, it’s influences on self and the desires of a person are formed. 2. Erickson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development: which tells us what social needs were met, what weren’t, and how that influences personality/behaviour.

Note: Because it’s Freud and the late 1890s, sex and gender are the same and only the binary exists. Thus, this theory doesn’t look at gender, sexuality and is VERY outdated. These explanations are only used for heteronormativity, and homosexuality is considered a perversion from norm (which I’ll go into)

#1: Infancy to Toddler-hood:

My guess, due to Norman being abusive, cold, distant and uses money/luxury gifts to show his affection (if any), shit hits the fan from Stage 1 of the Psychosocial Stages: Trust vs Mistrust (0-Toddler age). At this stage it’s super important for a child to be around their primary care givers. Not having a primary care giver (parent, grand parent, nanny — someone who’s there with the child forming a deeply intimate bond) leave children with a sense of mistrust in the world. It make’s them prone to insecurity, and give the child unhealthy patterns of attachment, generally making them very “hope-less” (as in they are more likely to feel hopeless, isolated and alone and not just like... pathetic).

Assuming Emily Osborn died like a year after Harry was born, it's been somewhat implied she died due to post-pregnancy complications, Harry didn't have his mom around during the v imp phase. Norman is said to have really loved her and there’s a chance that after her death, Norman blamed Harry and treated him terribly. Either way, this means Harry grew up without the necessary bond post age 1, which has fundamentally fucked him and his perception of the world. Pair with this the entitelement that comes with wealth, and it's just truly too much.

#2: Toddler-hood to Childhood:

Now I’m going to the phallic stage (ages 3-5, toddler to child). This is from the psychosexual development, Freud’s theory. (Note: not the same theory as mentioned in the previous point). The middle stages in both theories are somewhat irrelevant to explain why Harry’s so.. that, but I can elaborate if you need it??

During the phallic stage, the idea is that the (cis)male child struggles with the Oedipus complex. He develops an attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, but is threatened by the parent of the same sex and thus begins to imitate the same sex parent to win the opposite sex parents affection.

So the son is attracted to the mother, but is threatened by the father (this specific fear in men is called castration anxiety for boys). Thus they imitate their father and his behaviour, hoping to receive affection from women who are like his mom. This obviously can influence the way he treats women.

Freud says neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality are innate, they are instead how we resolve our phallic stage — heterosexual is normal way to resolve it, and homosexual is to deviate from the norm. Now homosexuality could be a fixation of this stage — not resolving the conflict with his father and being heterosexual, will make him gay.

But I think he’s bi, so Harry associates with his father the way Freud expects children to, thus making him attracted to women as per normal (and also, this is why he identitfes as male, and doesn't have gender confusion). But he has unresolved his issues with Norman and wants his fathers affection and love. Both his parents are equally unattainable to him, one is dead the other is distant. Thus, Harry has to deviate from the norm on an unconscious level, and wants his fathers approval which he will get via the same resolution. This just means he loves and seeks approval from both men and women, which just like... makes him bi???? (keep in mind, sexuality and gender spectrum is the biggest limitation to Freud's theory

#3: Childhood

I’m skipping to the inferiority vs industry stage (ages 6-11) in the psychosocial stages where the child learns to either be industrious — confident, social, ambitious; or feels inferior.

I think Harry became industrious, he was taught to be strong and be the ruthlessly aggressive bully, and was also doing that because it was what got him his dad’s approval. He unlearns it, but it is also his nature, in a more innate way.

This stage in the psychosocial theory, starts right where the phallic stage in psychosexual ends. So, I’m guessing that Harry resolves his sexuality crisis via Freud, but his social needs of love, belonging and care are still up in the air, which he resolves via Erickson’s. This appeases his base consciousness, he has two problems, they are solved. It doesn’t matter if it’s healthy or not, he is literally 10. He does what worked for him, and associates with his fathers way again making him the confident bully that we see him as.

So now we come to Peter... what’s up with that?

Peter is smart like his father. His need for his fathers love is thus projected here. There’s a sort of transference, his need for approval from dad is not only found in Peter, but like Peter actually genuinely loves him too. Emily, his mother, no idea what she’s like but let’s she loved him unconditionally, and he probably felt safe around her — Peter evokes those same feelings in Harry. Thus, his means of resolving his gender and sexuality crisis during the phallic stage is coming back to bite him in the ass, via Peter. He’s like the mix between what he needed socially, love and acceptance; with what he desires, approval from his father who is a smart man

Why does he treat MJ like that? Because that’s how Norman shows love and affection to a person. Norman just spoilt this boy with his riches, and didn’t show an ounce of love or affection, and thus Harry assumes spoiling MJ is how he can show that he loves her.

Why is he dating MJ, the girl his best friend loves. Remember that bit about attraction to the opposite sex parent, so you associating with the same sex to win affection? Well. He’s doing that… but wrong. He is associate himself with what the object of his affection (Peter) is attracted to (MJ), in hopes that he will become like said object of attraction (like MJ), thus winning over (because Peter will now want him). I am not claiming that Harry is normal, or ok. I’m just saying, this is how you can explain it.

Why take Peter out on these not-dates? Same logic as point 2, it’s how he shows affection.

Why does Harry ask Peter to go hit on MJ? Denial. The defence mechanism of denial specifically

I can go on, but I will stop. PS. Also, you’re right. Not only is Harry in love, he subconsciously desires Peter? Like on a carnal level.

harry osborn has been psychoanalyzed

[radicalcoffeeclub]

"What can you achieve as a female lifter? There seem to be only 2 camps. The general public thinks a woman that touches a loaded barbell will wake up the next day as the SheHulk.

People with a bit more understanding of exercise physiology realize that this is obviously nonsense. One look around you in the average gym makes it clear that getting seriously big is difficult even for men. The statistic that women have ~15 times less testosterone than men is often quoted to explain that as a woman, you can’t grow much muscle anyway. So the common recommendation in today’s fitness circles is that women should train like men and should expect not to see much muscle growth.

The natural muscular potential of women

There is truth to this, but the causality runs in the opposite direction. Before I explain this, let’s first look at how the natural muscular potential of women compares to that of men. Percentage wise, how much muscle can a woman build compared to a man? Does it scale with testosterone so that women can build only ~7% as much muscle as men? Is it about half?

It’s 100%. Women gain the same percentage of muscle mass as men during strength training. In fact, women gain as much size and sometimes more strength than men [2]. The only difference is the starting point. Men start off with more muscle mass and more strength, but the relative increase in muscle size is the same between men and women.

Research on protein metabolism comes to the same conclusion. Women build just as much muscle protein after training and after meals as men. In fact, one study found that given the same level of muscle mass, women have a higher rate of muscle protein synthesis than men.

Women vs. men in elite sports

If you think this is all just silly theory from labcoats studying beginners, consider this. Elite, natural female athletes have 85% as much muscle as elite male athletes. The studied sports included Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting. The 15% difference can easily be explained by 3 factors.

Women have a genetically higher body fat percentage. Women have ~12% essential body fat to regulate their hormones compared to just ~3% fat in men. And you know, boobs.

People have lower expectations of women, even most women themselves underestimate what they can achieve physically compared to men. In a famous study, simply telling people they were on steroids increased their strength gains by 321%. These were advanced trainees already benching and squatting over 300 pounds (137 kg) before taking the fake steroids. Moreover, the androgenic-anabolic steroid protocol in question was just 70 mg of Dianabol per week. Giving that same dosage of actual Dianabol to advanced trainees improves strength by only a few percent. So what do you think it does to women when you tell them they have 15 times less testosterone?

There are more men in sports, so at the elite level, the selection to get to the top level is stronger. Elite male athletes are likely the best the male race has to offer. For women there may be more potential world record holders that will never know it because they don’t try.

What about testosterone?

Within an individual, more testosterone means more muscle mass. There is little doubt about that. Between genders, however, the relation becomes much weaker. In their study of elite athletes, Healy et al. concluded that “The difference in lean body mass is sufficient to account for the observed differences in strength and aerobic performance seen between the sexes without the need to hypothesize that performance is in any way determined by the differences in testosterone levels.”

How can this be? Testosterone functions differently in men and women, as I explained in my BioSignature review. In animals we have a good understanding of why testosterone is not needed for muscle development in women. It seems growth factors like IGF-1 and growth hormone take over the anabolic role that testosterone has in men. Growth factors are more important for strength and muscle mass in women than in men. Since women have just as much IGF-1 as men and women produce ~3 times as much growth hormone as men, this explains in part why having less testosterone does not limit how much muscle they can build. To make matters more complex, the sex hormones and growth factors interact and all these hormones also interact with your genes.

In short, saying women have less potential to build muscle mass because they don’t have as much testosterone as men is shortsighted.

The other sex hormone

Not only is testosterone not the great savior, estrogen is not the bad guy. Most people, even women, shun estrogen as the evil hormone that makes you bloated and does all sorts of negative things. Although it’s rarely described what exactly the negative effects of estrogen are, most people agree nonetheless that’s it’s bad for your body composition. This is complete nonsense. In my article on hormones and fat loss I explained the positive effects estrogen has on abdominal fat storage, but estrogen does many more awesome things.

Estrogen aids in muscle repair.

Estrogen is anti-catabolic and prevents muscle loss.

Estrogen protects your joints, bones and tendons from injury.

Estrogen does not make you fat. On the contrary, estrogen increases your metabolism.

These aren’t a few obscure and irrelevant findings I’m dragging up to support my point. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated the anabolic effects of estrogen. Estrogen is also crucial for your health, but that’s another topic. In short, estrogen’s bad reputation is based on nothing more than the poor intuition that if testosterone is anabolic, estrogen must be catabolic.

Why women aren’t living up to their potential

Women have the same relative natural muscular potential as men. They even have several advantages over men. So why don’t we see more muscular women?

Women are underrepresented in sports and in the gym. Even at the Olympic level there are fewer female participants. It is even true in science. There are over 50% fewer female participants in scientific studies than men.

Even if women go to the gym, most of them spend their time on the treadmill or playing with pink dumbbells.

We don’t have the same expectations of women. If a man benches a lot, that’s taken as a sign of social dominance. If a woman benches a lot, she’s seen as a freak, people get worried and men feel their pride sting and shrivel. I’ve heard from many of the women I train they’re approached in the gym ‘not too lift that heavy’ when they bench more than a plate.

Many women use contraceptives that harm their strength training progression. Many birth control pills impair muscle growth by decreasing androgen activity, lowering growth factor levels and increasing cortisol levels. It is primarily the progestin content of the contraceptive that’s harmful, because this competes with testosterone for the androgen receptor.

Lastly, the women that do actually train seriously in spite of the stigma often train like men, which doesn’t align with their physiological strengths. Since women produce much more estrogen than men, this gives them several advantages over men in the gym. Women don’t fatigue as much as men and women recover faster after training. There are many more important gender differences in metabolism, anatomy, neurology and physiology: see this article a full review of why and how women should not train like men.

Conclusion

It’s time we stop treating women like second rate men. Women have just as much relative potential for muscle growth as men. It’s up to them if they want to fulfill that potential. If they do, they should realize they’re not men and train to their strengths.

[nothorses]

This thread on Twitter (also give @Azure_Husky a follow!!)

Linked Article Transcript below

Content warnings for transphobia against transmasculine people, including violence and harassment It's easy to say that transmasculine people get male privilege and face less oppression than many other trans people, but only if you don't actually listen https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/9/1877651/-There-is-a-hidden-epidemic-of-violence-against-transmasculine-people

I hear pretty constantly from transmasculine people about the violence they face from cis people and the erasure, condescension, and "suck it up, you're the oppressor now" attitudes they get from other trans people. 

We are failing the transmasculine parts of our communities. We are failing our brothers and masculine siblings. We need to get better at listening to transmasculine people's concerns and working together rather than fostering hierarchies of oppression within transness 

Once transness is involved, shit gets complicated. Simple responses of "misandry doesn't exist because men have the power" assume transmasculine people have access to the same privileges as average cis men when frequently they don't. 

One of the saddest things about being someone who talks about this is that i regularly get transmasculine people giving heartfelt thanks for the smallest mentions of their needs & concerns bc they're so used to transfeminine people ignoring their existence or being antagonistic 

We need to do better. I refuse for some of us trans people to base our fights for equality and justice by stepping on the needs of other trans people. 

I see transfeminine people I care about and respect who will sometimes share "let's make a world without men" type things and like I have had these feelings too, I struggle under misogyny and have a bunch of bad experiences with (cis, especially but not exclusively) men. *and*- 

- i've seen too many of my transmasculine siblings' hurt as they are constantly lumped into "just as bad as cis men" baskets (which I also have feelings about but is a larger topic I think) & have heard from too many transmasculine people who have spent years in denial bc of this 

I've heard from too many transmasculine people who have put off transitioning, tried to avoid accepting their gender, because they internalized the constant stream of this shit. And I love trans people too fucking much to keep letting it go. 

I get that for many of our communities there can be some incredible trauma around masculinity, either because it was enforced on us against our will or due to violence and/or sexual assault. And i don't debate the validity of that trauma. 

And also we can't extrapolate our trauma into "this segment of trans people, by virtue of their gender, is worth less (or worthless)". 

I mean if we want to dig into it, a lot of us transfeminine people get attacked by transphobes under the auspices of trauma regarding specific genitals or gender expressions or body types. And most of us can agree that their trauma doesn't mean they get to denigrate us. 

Honestly I'm tired. And also I acknowledge that my tiredness about this cannot be even a mild fraction of the exhaustion of the trans people targeted and erased by this must be. 

So I'm calling on y'all and asking you to please do better by *all* trans people. I get the joy and relief in venting about men. I do. We live in a misogynistic society and a lot of us suffer under the hands of a specific gender and sometimes we need an outlet. 

But at the very least please be aware of when your venting is in a public space where it *is* going to harm and affect others, and specifically other trans people (since I don't have the spoons to get into a larger discussion about cis men currently) 

Know that every time we make vent-jokes (or not jokes) about how everyone who is masculine is worthless to us, we are directly damaging other trans people, and possibly painfully forcing some to deny themselves or stay closeted because who would want to become The Enemy, right? 

And I feel like I *have* to keep talking about this because if transmasc people stick up for themselves, I see how often they get shot down as just another "not all men" concern troll or like they're trying to talk over feminine people 

Hell I've seen threads where a transmasc person starts the thread to talk about transmasc issues and *still* people have declared it derailing or speaking over others. How do we address their oppression if they aren't allowed to discuss it anywhere? 

So as a transfeminine person I've got allyship privilege here where I may be condemned as having internalized misogyny or being an assimilationist or something but at least I can't be seen as just another dude talking over women

(i use the binary language there thoughtfully bc a lot of these Us vs Them dichotomies tend to erase nonbinary people or pretend that all nonbinary people are centre or feminine of centre on the gender spectrum) 

Just. Do better. Please. Like. Just listen to transmasculine people with an open heart for a bit and hear the intense transphobia and discrimination they also face and consider the impact of your words on them. 

It sucks to see people who are generally caring and thoughtful about many types of oppression just.. Let it all go when a chance to lump transmasc people in with The Enemy comes up. 

Addendum: I've had a couple people express concern that I'm saying that transfeminine people shouldn't address when they are facing transmisogyny from transmasculine people and I hope that it is clear that isn't what I am saying at all. 

Transmasculine people can be transmisogynistic, absolutely! I've had experiences with that too. What this thread is about is the fact that for *some* people, transmasculine people as a whole are considered less marginalized by dint of their masculinity and it isn't that simple. 

So saying broad statements about transmasculine people isn't "punching up". Its horizontal violence if it's coming from other trans people or can be punching down if it's coming from cis people. That is what this thread is meant to address. 

By all means we should be discussing and addressing transmisogyny. But transmasculine people discussing the specifics of their own concerns isn't in and of itself transmisogyny. We do no one any favours by trying to silence that. 

This thread isn't about transfeminine people never speaking ill of transmasculine people or vice versa. Its about calling-in a specific subset of transfeminine communities for treating transmasculine people as a whole as disposable and The Enemy.

[freddiekluger]

Why Cap Being Internally Closeted Is Not Only Possible, But Valid Representation 

i wrote this to a lot of mitski and onsind, so you can’t blame me for any feelings that bleed through

now i don’t know if it actually exists, but i’ve heard of there being a lot of discourse surrounding the captains story arc regarding his sexuality- i believe the general gist is that having a queer character that remains closeted to themselves is either unrealistic or ‘bad’ representation, and as someone who really treasures the captain and relates to his story so far a lot, i thought i might break this down a bit. 

i’ve divded up every complaint i’ve heard about this into four main questions which i’ll be covering below the ‘keep reading’, because this is gonna be pretty comprehensive. full disclaimer i reference my experiences as an ex-evangelical non binary butch lesbian a couple times, and i spent a year studying repression and the psychological impacts of high demand sexual ethics for my graduating sociology paper, so this is coming with some background to it i swear

the big questions:

can you EVEN be gay and not know it????

but isn't this just ANOTHER coming out arc, and aren't we supposed to be moving beyond those?

but if cap can't have a relationship with a man because he's a ghost, what's the point?

since cap's dead, isn't this technically bury your gays, and isn't that bad? 

1. "but is it really possible to not know? Isn't that bad representation?"

short answer: no and no.

before i get into the validity of the captain's ignorance about his own orientation as 21st century rep, let's break down how the hell the captain can be so clearly attracted to men and still not even consider the possibility that he might be gay, as brought to you by someone who literally experienced this shit.

the captain's particular situation is both a direct result of the lack of information around human sexuality he would have had (aka clear messaging that it's actually possible for him to be attracted to men. i don't mean acceptable or allowed, i mean physically capable of happening- the idea that orientations other than heterosexual exist and are available to him, a man), and a subconscious survival mechanism. the environment in which he lives is outright hostile to gay people, while the military man identity he has constructed for himself doesn't allow for any form of deviation from societal norms, let alone one so base level and major. as a result of this killer combo of information and environment, instincts take over and the mind does it's best to repress the ‘deviant’ feelings until a. one of these two things changes, or b. the act of repression becomes so destructive and/or exhuasting that it becomes impossible to maintain. the key to maintaining a long-term state of repression of desire is diverting that energy elsewhere, and a high-demand group such as the military is the perfect place for the captain to do this (this technqiue is frequented by religions and extremist ideologies worldwide, but that’s not really what we’re here to focus on). 

while the brain is actively repressing ‘deviant’ feelings (aka gay shit), this doesn't mean you don't experience the feelings at all. when performed as a subconscious act of survival, the aim of repression is to minimise/transform the feelings into a state where they can no longer cause immediate danger, and something as big as sexual/romantic orientation is going to keep popping up, but as long as the individual in question never understands what they’re feeling, they’ll be able to continue relatively undisturbed. you know how in heist movies, the leader of the group will only tell each team member part of the plan so they can’t screw things up for everyone else if they get caught? it’s kind of like that.

this is how the captain appears to have operated in life AND in death, and it’s a relatively common experience for lgbtq people who’ve grown up in similar circumstances (aka with a lack of information and in an unfriendly-to-hostile environment), and accounts for how some people can even go on to get married and have children before realising that they’re gay and/or trans. 

personally, while i can now identify what were strong homo crushes all the way back to childhood, at the time i genuinely had no idea. there was the underlying sense that i probably shouldn't tell people how attached i was to these girls because i would seem weird, and that my feelings were stronger than the ones other people used to describe friendships, but like-like them in the way that other girls like-liked boys? no way! actually scratch that, it wasn't even a no way, because i had no idea that i even could. i even had my own havers, at least in terms of the emotional hold and devotion she got from me, except she treated me way less well than cap’s beau. snatches of the existence of lgbt people made it through the cone of silence, i definitely heard the words gay and lesbian, but my levels of informations mirrored those that the captain would have had: virtually none, beyond the idea that these words exist, some people are them, and that's not something that we support or think is okay, so let's just not speak about it. despite only attending religious schools for the first couple years of primary, until i got my own technology and social media accounts to explore lgbtq content on my own- option a out of the two catalysts for change- the possibility of me being gay was not at all on my radar. don’t even get me started on how long it took me to explore butchness and my overall gender, two things which now feel glaringly obvious. 

when shit starts to break down, you can also make the conscious choice to repress which can delay the eventual smashing down of the mental closet door for a time (essentially when the closet door starts to open, you just say ‘no thanks’ and shut it again by pointedly Not Thinking About It). in the abscence of identifying yourself by your attractions, it becomes quite common to identify with a lack- in my case, this meant becoming proud of how sensible and not boy crazy i was, and in the captain’s case, this means becoming proud of how sensible and not sensuous/wild (aka woman crazy) he was, identifying with his LACK of desire for women and partying (which, even in the 40s, involved the expectation of opposite sex romances and hook ups). i’m not saying that’s the only reason he’s a rule follower, but i think the contrast between About Last Night and Perfect Day pretty much support this. (the captain getting on his high horse about general party antics that he inherently felt excluded from because of underlying awareness of his difference & his tendency to project his regimented expectations of himself onto others, vs. joining in the reception party, awareness of how the environment supports difference in the form of clare and sam, and relaxing his own rules by dancing with men- the captain doesn’t mind a party when feels like he has a place there.)

so the captain was operating in a high demand, highly regulated environment (primarily the military, but also early 20th century England itself), with regimented roles, rules, and expectations. working on the assumption that he wouldn't have had out/disclosing lgbt friends, he would have had little to no exposure to lgbt identities, and what information he did receive would have been hushed and negatively geared. while my world started to open up when i started high school was allowed to have my own phone + instagram account, resulting in me realising something wasn't quite 'right' within a few years (making me a relatively early realiser compared to those who don't come out to themselves until adulthood), in life the captain never had that experience. he didn't receive the information he needed, his environment didn't grow less hostile. with the near-exception of havers related heartbreak, his well disciplined and lifelong method of repression never became destructive/exhaustive enough to permanently override the danger signals in his mind and allow him to put his feelings into words. neither of the most common catalysts for change happened for him, so he continued as usual, even after his death.

BUT, and here’s where we come to why this is actually great representation, arrival of mike and Alison represents the opening up of new world. for the first time, the captain is actively made aware of the fact that his environment is no longer hostile, and better than that, it’s affirming. he’s also getting access to positively geared information about lgbtq people and identities, so option a of the two catalysts for change is absolutely present, and resoundingly positive. 

the captain’s arc is also relatively unique as it acknowledges the oppressive nature of his environment, but actually focuses on the internal consequences, and the way that systems like those that the captain lived in succeed because they turn us into our own oppressors. for whatever reason, we repress ourseslves, and often can’t help it, and i find that the significance of the journey to overcome that is often overlooked in more mainstream queer media. perhaps it’s just not very cinematic, or it remains too confronting for cishet audiences, but ghosts manages to touch on it with a lovely amount of humour and hope. Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader is another favourite piece of queer media for the same reasons.

not only does it show this, but as the captain continues to get gayer and lean into some of his less conventional traits (like an interest in fashion and the wedding planning), it shows lgbt people who have been or are going through this that there CAN be a positive outcome. it takes a lot to unlearn all the things that have painted you as wrong, especially when a massive institution is desperate to continue doing so, but you can do it, you can be happy, and it's never too late. (i've been meaning to say that last point for ages for ages, but a mutual beat me to it here)

2. not just another coming out arc

i absolutely support the demand for queer stories that don’t center around coming out (it’s like shrodinger’s queer: if you’re not coming out on screen, do you really even exist?), but i don’t align with the criticisms that the captain should already be out. for the reasons mentioned above, the captain’s particular story is fairly different to the ‘young white teenager who mostly knows gay is fine, it’s just everyone else that’s got the problem, but have a unremarkably straight sounding soundtrack, a trauma porn romance, and a cishet saviour’ that we keep seeing. the captain’s ongoing journey with his sexuality emphasises the overaching theme of the show: recovering from trauma and humanity’s endless capacity for growth, and i think that’s worth showing over and over again until it stops being true.

additionally, while the captain’s journey regarding his gayness is a big part of his character and story, ghosts makes it clear that it’s not the ONLY part, and being gay is far from his ONLY characteristic or dramatic/comedic engine. the fact that i’m even having to congratulate ghosts for doing that really shows how much film and television is struggling huh.

while all queer media is, and should be, subject to criticism, i think if it helps even one person then it absolutely deserves to exist, and i can say i’ve found the captain’s journey to be the lgbt story i’ve found that’s closest to my own, which says a lot considering he’s a dead world war 2 soldier who hangs out with other ghosts including a slutty Tory, a georgian noblewoman, and a literal caveman. 

3. if captain gay, why he no have boyfriend???? 

another complaint that’s been circulating is that since the captain doesn’t, and likely won’t, have a boyfriend, that makes him Bad Representation because it follows the sad single gay trope. i kind of get the logic from this one, and a lot of it is up to personal interpretation, but part of me really enjoys the fact that the captain’s journey towards accepting himself is separated from having a relationship.

coming out is often paired with having romantic/sexual relationships (either as the reason or reward for doing so). my own struggle with repression didn't end the second that came out, and i still struggle with letting myself develop & acknowledge romantic feelings as a result of actively shutting them (and most other feelings in general) down for years, and statistics show that lgbtq youth in particular tend not to live out their 'teen years' until their twenties. by not giving cap a relationship straight away, ghosts separates the act of claiming identity and sexual orientation from finding a partner (two things which are, more often than not, separate), and also provides some very nice validation to folks who have yet to have the relationship they want, especially when lots of mainstream queer media is now jumping on the cishet media bandwagon of acting as if every person loses their virginity and has a life defining relationship at sixteen. it’s essentially a continuation of the earlier theme of “it’s never too late”, and who’s to say the captain won’t get a gay bear ghost boyfriend to go haunt nazis with??? people die all the time, it could happen.

(also, i think him and julian will have definitely shagged at least once. it was a low moment for both of them and they refuse to speak of it.)

lots of asexual/ace spectrum fans have come out to say how much they’ve loved being able to headcanon cap as ace, and while that’s not a headcanon i personally have, i think it’s brilliant that ace fans feel seen by his character- we’re all in this soup together babey (and sorry for cursing everyone still reading this with that cap/julian headcanon. i’m just a vessel)

4. “okay, but cap’s a GHOST- doesn’t that make this Bury Your Gays?”

this is a bit of a complex one, but i’m going to say no as a result of the following break down.

Bury Your Gays (BYG), aka the trope where lgbtq characters are consistently killed off (and often with a heavy dose of trauma, while cishet characters survive) is probably one of my least favourite lgbt media tropes. BYG has two main points:

1. the lgbt character is killed, thus removing them from story entirely- hence the use of the phrase ‘killed OFF’ (killed off of the show/film)

2. the character’s death reinforces the perception that lgbtq people’s lives must end in tragedy, instead of being long and fulfilling, or are inherently less valuable. bonus points if the character is killed in a hate crime or confesses same-gender love right before they die (that one implies that queer love genuinely has no future!)

not every death of an lgbtq character is bury your gays, and i personally feel that the captain is an example of an lgbt death that isn’t. 

first of all, while the captain is dead, so are the vast majority of characters in ghosts. the premise of the show means that death is not the end of the line for its characters- for most of them, it’s the only reason we get to see them on screen at all. as such, the captain being dead doesn’t remove him from the story, so point one is irrelevant.

at the time of posting, we don’t know how or why the captain died, but we've had nothing to suggest his death was in any way related to his latent sexuality, so his mysterious death doesn’t actively play into the supposedly inherent tragedy of queer lives, nor the supposedly lesser value. that’s as of right now- since we don’t know the circumstances of his death it’s a little tough to analyse properly. while the captain’s life absolutely features missed opportunities and it’s fair share of tragedy, hope and growth (which seems to be the theme of this post) abounds in equal measure. the captain may not be alive, but we DO get to see him growing and having a relatively happy existence, that for the most part seems to be getting even better as he learns to open up and be himself unapologetically- that doesn’t feel like BYG to me.

while writng this, it’s just occured to me that death really is a second chance for most of the ghosts, especially with the introduction of alison. from mary learning to read, to thomas finding modern music, they’ve all been given the chance explore things they never could have while they were alive, and hopefully grow enough to one day be sucked off move on.

in conclusion,

i love the captain very much and i hope his arc lives up to the standards it’s set so far. i don’t know where to put this in this post, but i’d alo like to say i LOVE how in Perfect Day, the captain wasn’t used as an educational experienced for fanny at all. i am very tired of people expecting me to be the walking talking homophobe educator and rehabilitator, so the fact that it’s alison and the other ghosts that call fanny out while the captain just gets to have fun with the wedding organisation made me very happy.

here’s a few other cap posts that i’ve done:

the captain’s arc if adam and the film crew stayed

a possible cap coming out 

the captain backstory headcanon

if you’ve read this far,

thank you!

also check out @alex-ghosts-corner , this post inspired me very much to write this

[fanonical]

I really don’t see how JK Rowling is a terf. I mean, acknowledging that biological sex exists doesn’t invalidate trans people. In fact it completely validates them, as their experience and journey as trans people is based on the fact that they identify as different than their biological sex. (1/2)

Also, I think it’s completely fair to point out that biological women and trans women have different experiences. Sure there are a lot of parallels, but you can’t deny that growing up as a biological girl is different than growing up as a biological boy (and trans girl obviously). I would be happy to get a reply and discuss. (2/2)

answering this on the off chance it’s asked in good faith (which it definitely isn’t)

1. the word is “cis” not biological. there is no such thing as “biological womanhood”

2. if you agree there are usually somewhat notable differences between people with XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes (which trans people overwhelmingly believe, as well) then why would you think that believing sex = male/female (and a fundamental part of the whole world’s existence) would validate us? based on your opinions suggested here, there’s some obvious cognitive dissonance — you say trans people are valid but sex is real and somewhat immutable, but that trans people “identify” as another sex — if sex is immutable then how can trans people “identify” as another? you’re spouting literal terf rhetoric. the sex binary doesn’t help trans people at all.

3. trans people believe in “sex” we just overwhelmingly believe it is different to how Rowling and other terfs assert it to be. this belief is backed up by actual biologists who study sex. it isn’t fourth grade science class any more, buddy

4. being trans has very little to do with one’s sex but rather our assigned gender — which is different.

5. suggesting there is “one true biological femalehood” that all cis women experience that trans women growing up being perceived as boys/men don’t experience is not only transphobic, it’s completely ignorant of the multitude of experiences of womanhood. womanhood is perceived and treated differently in different cultures around the world; rich white women are going to have vastly different experiences with poor black women in womanhood; straight women and lesbians (see: Butch and Femme gender identities); even women from England vs women from the States. implying womanhood has ONE defining trait that makes trans women unable to experience it suggests these aren’t the major factors of womanhood — variables that change based on culture and surrounding. it’s pseudosociological nonsense.

6. even if everything else you were saying were true, Rowling has likened trans women using women’s bathrooms as “foxes pretending to be chickens to get in the henhouse” and said, downright, that trans people do not experience bigotry or oppression. she has also called for rights to be stripped from trans minors. she is a transphobe. she is openly transphobic. she follows terfs; she is followed by terfs; she associates herself with terfs.

any more asks akin to this will not be given the same benefit of the doubt and will be instantly blocked.

[daisyachain]

Since a few other anons have asked to hear your Ao no Flag opinions, I thought I'd ask as well. What do you think of Shingo and Kensuke?

Hahaha loaded question! Actually you've got great timing, the published translation really switched me around on them

First up, I'm still not sure how to read The Confrontation. First time (in a blur), I read it as Kensuke eavesdrops on Touma and Mami -> Touma admits his crush -> Kensuke barges in and beats up Touma -> Shingo joins in -> Touma responds and wins -> Shingo and Kensuke tell Taichi it's not their responsibility to like Touma and they're entitled to be homophobic about him.

Second time, idk if it was the translation or I was just paying more attention, I read it as Kensuke eavesdrops -> Touma admits his crush -> Kensuke barges in, grabs Touma by the collar and asks Touma aggressively if he's being serious -> Touma says 'bite me' and starts beating up Kensuke, who then fights back -> Mami tries to break them up, Touma throws her to the ground -> bystander Shingo then joins in on Kensuke's side -> Shingo and Kensuke feel bad about it after, Shingo calls Touma to apologize -> Shingo and Kensuke call Taichi to apologize to him for starting the fight and the rumour mill -> Kensuke goes to Touma's house to apologize

Based off of Reading #2, I do actually find them interesting! Not as good people per se, but a sort of benign neutral.

Kensuke

Kensuke isn't purposefully malicious, but he's so willfully ignorant and impulsive that it amounts to malice. He confronts his feelings honestly...by yelling at Mami and Touma in public and forcing them to react in the worst situation. Even if he didn't ever intend to hurt Touma (heavily implied by The Big Bad Awkward Convo), he didn't show it and didn't try to de-escalate when Touma started swinging. He doesn't hate Touma or Mami, but he hates that Touma and Mami violate gender roles. He doesn't know what to do with that and instead of trying to understand it, he just hurts them and hurts others.

Towards the end he gets some modicum of self-awareness, he says he realizes his childhood abuse isn't a reason to be homophobic, but he acts on his emotions first and talks later and that is a bad thing in the world of Blue Flag. I'd argue he isn't 'right' and he isn't supposed to be 'right,' the reason he's written sympathetically is to show that his inability to think first ends up hurting people he cares about badly, that he's not malicious and that he does harm anyway--that your intentions aren't an excuse.

What is interesting is that Kensuke, who chased Mami down for a terrible and insincere apology a few days/weeks earlier, actually hunts down and apologizes to both Taichi and Touma. It's possible that overhearing Mami's description of him changes his perspective enough to fix his behaviour towards her as well, but it's not directly addressed. The only time in the series he actually shows compassion and consideration, it's towards Touma.

Another thing that changed my mind was looking at how Touma treats the matter. He doesn't hesitate to lay the punishment on Kensuke, but afterward he doesn't seem to hold a grudge or even be upset about it. He just says something along the lines of "oh he'll come around, he's pretty simple." This is 100% just guessing, but this makes it seem like Touma and Kensuke's fight wasn't Kensuke trying to gaybash Touma or Touma assuming he would, but Touma recognizing that he'd been outed by Kensuke and choosing to send a message that he wasn't going to be an easy target. But I have no idea!! Pls send in your opinions if you have any

Shingo

Like Kensuke, totally different character depending on if you read Kensuke vs Touma as Kensuke hatecriming Touma (unlikely, given that Touma punched first and given what both characters say about it after) or as Touma sending a message in the simplest way possible. First interpretation, he's a sleazy faux liberal who won't be overtly homophobic but will kick a guy when he's down. Second, he is Just A Dude.

Up until The Confrontation, Shingo seems to be an easygoing flake who is a good friend to Mami but otherwise unremarkable. Shingo only gets involved in the fight when Touma hurts Mami, apologizes to Touma soon after, and apologizes to Taichi as well for hurting Touma during the course of the fight.

What pissed me off about his character was his straight-out-of-Fox-News "both sides" speech at Shouko. First time, it just read like him justifying Kensuke's homophobia. Second time, less so. The reason Shouko and Saya are involved is that Shingo and Kensuke want to talk to Taichi, but they can't go to school. They're not supposed to be there for the conversation, they just stick around because they want to get their say in and they disapprove (rightfully) of Kensuke screwing over Touma as well as Mami.

Again, this is just me interpreting an ambiguous scene! But on reflection, it reads as if Shingo is just trying to get them to shut up or leave so that the three boys can talk privately, before Kensuke has to talk about his abuse...which he does anyway because he's socially inept and doesn't know how to navigate any situation gracefully. Rather than him saying 'Kensuke was justified in attacking Touma, you guys just don't understand', it comes across as him saying 'Kensuke is trying to communicate and apologize properly for the first time in his life, and you guys aren't getting it'

So, Shingo is a bit of a jerk but he treats both Touma and Taichi fairly and he doesn't seem to be homophobic.

but anyway what do you think Anon??? One interpretation is as good as the next!

[ellevandersneed]

also none of this is to suggest that I can go up to any trans person and say like "ok I don't have to respect your gender identity because it's all just like, an idea," because again, ideas are very helpful; people in general really like using ideas to navigate themselves and the world around them and as such there's no reason to suggest that someone *isn't* something just because you believe that your idea of reality is more legitimate than theirs. My idea of reality is that if someone tells me they are a woman or a man then I will believe them; what I can actually determine from material conditions is how someone is treated based on their identity as say transfem, and how that plays into the idea of what womanhood materially means - in the sense that, while ideas come from the human mind, humans and human policy both political and social, influence reality, because humans help create the conditions of their own reality and the reality of others, for example: settler colonialism and imperialism developing the taxonomy of and continually deepening the psychological divide between the colonizer and the colonized, and attributing material conditions (light skin vs dark skin, and even the concept of "light and dark" being inherently different) to said taxonomy so that individuals can be identified by their material features and arranged into the taxonomy of colonizer vs. colonized with these material features being used to reinforce the "legitimacy" of the taxonomy. In the case of gender, this could be a matter of applying material (and often socially determined to be private(!)) conditions such as genitalia, voice register, facial hair, body fat distribution to a gender taxonomy. "You have x,y,z features therefore you are a or b gender."

There is also a general awareness of the artificiality of social conditioning as being distinct from material reality, which is how you get transmisogynist rhetoric around "male socialization" in the sense that individuals are coercively assigned male at birth and are groomed from birth to fit into the category of "male" and this is supposed to either lock the individual out of ever "being a woman" or it exists as a means of treating any transfem as a lesser woman who does not have a sort of divine right of protection from misogyny by virtue of having been "born into it." This fails on a number of levels, and I'm still working on understanding the various the avenues in which it fails (other people have almost definitely written on this before and most certainly better than I have), but one thing for sure is that there exists NO homogenous male upbringing - two coercively-assigned-male individuals in a single family unit can have vastly different relationships to masculinity because people have unique experiences with others, society, and life itself. There can be overlap in experience, but no true homogeneity, nothing truly one-to-one. This generalization itself seems to be able to identify the power of ideas but fails because it is a generalization, an artificial taxonomic idea created by human minds in order to organize experiences into gendered categories of "male" and "female," and, because human experiences are so varied, it has to intentionally erase nuance and bend various human experiences towards the taxonomic idea in order to justify said taxonomic idea, in the same way that the "biological gender" taxonomic idea seeks to erase biological nuance and bend biological features towards a binary. An example of the former is the erasure of closeted transfems experiences with and relationship to masculinity in order to create an artificial homogenous "male socialization;" in the case of the latter, with "biological gender" taxonomy, it seeks to erase say, intersex lived experiences and biological variation in order to reinforce a strict "biological gender" binary. Not to "third gender" intersex people, as many comfortably identify as men or woman, from my understanding, but in the sense that nonconsensual surgeries to "fix" intersex people are commonplace for the purpose of reinforcing a gender binary drawn on biological lines. To return to the main point, "male socialization" is the idea that camab people are coerced to fulfill/grow into the idea of "manhood," whereas the truth is that transmisogynists who adhere to the concept of "male socialization" are attempting to coerce the literal personal histories of transfems on the whole in order to fulfill the idea of male socialization. It's the understanding that humans and their material reality are affected by ideas that are separate from material reality but also that stuff like "male socialization" is the secret kind of idea that IS material reality, where "male socialization" as a concept has about as much legitimacy as other ideas like phrenology or auras, things that do not materially exist but the belief in them as concepts can have real world consequences.

Does this make sense?

My general reading on the whole "materialism doesn't work for trans people because trans identity is an idea and biology is material" or however the fuck the argument goes is that the basic premise that certain biological characteristics can be assigned to either male or female categories is that "male" and "female" are themselves an artificial taxonomy - an idea - and ideas do not emerge independent of human thought. Ideas are very useful, and they are how we navigate our lives, how we understand ourselves and each other, right - like I'll make the potentially bold claim that your average person will process the information of the world around them in terms of ideas and presumptions, not strictly in the idea that there is a god but in terms of pure ideology - concepts of right and wrong, benign or dangerous, what is worthy of nuance and what is obvious and can be succinctly explained. That shit is all ideas, an interpretation of material reality. Gender in any sense is the same. Again, this isn't to discount anyones trans identity - but that cisgender presumptions are not more legitimate than trans identity, and any claims towards "material reality" to suggest otherwise are just the ravings of an idealist.

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

…

Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

…

What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

…

Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

…

The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.