#THIS is what 101 feminism should be btw

[starlooove]

When ppl ask why traditional men and women don’t get together the answer is literally so simple. Like these kind of women are all about misogyny until the disrespect comes. And I’m talking true degradation and disrespect; as in they want the man to make all the choices till they realize it’s ALL the choices. They don’t want to think until they realize they don’t GET to. It’s the same reason when ppl ask why ppl like Pearl don’t shut the fuck up since it’s not traditional for women to speak. Their entire view of traditional relationships is Pinterest Boards, Incel tweets, and 40s propaganda posters.

Like it’s all ‘why can’t I just stay at home and cook for the kids’ ok but what happens when you want to go out on a fun trip and he says no. What happens when kid A is sick with X and kid Z is sick with Y and there’s a parent teacher conference for kids L-P and once ur done with all that u have to have food on the table? Like these women don’t think it through at all, which is part of the problem btw like that bimbo resurgence shit is just another excuse for y’all not to fucking think, and then when it’s 30 years down the line and they’re stuck in loveless marriages (because these men don’t love them. They think it’s love but when they tell you to shut the hell up about something you were interested in before them it starts to click) they blame the whole damn world and it’s so sick.

#this isn’t anything new or revolutionary like I’m just sick of seeing the same shit everywhere #it’s not feminism fighting against the trad life btw it’s most definitely capitalism 🙏🏾 #y’all (✋🏻) have to work bc we (🙏🏾) don’t do that for u anymore #anywayyys #it’s just so funny #like not funny haha #funny these people are so unserious #and it’s crazy how ppl get comfortable in their oppressions once the bank is affected #almost like that’s the point #sometimes I think we’re making so much progress and then it’s like. we’re back to chapter one #THIS is what 101 feminism should be btw #like idk not to bring up Barbie #but like THATS not even feminism 101 #I already said this but like any class 101 plants the seeds of what you’ll be discussing #racism 101 WILL mention capitalism #even in passing #for example #any kind of feminist who doesn’t even glance at it right off the bat? #Idcccc #whatever this got disjointed #I’m not fixing it tho tgtgigi

[cheesebearger]

the barbie movie was, dare i say it, bad. for the following reasons:

Barbieland, a land ostensibly powered by imagination, is surprisingly stagnate and oddly authoritative: Barbies that cease to "function" the way they "should" are "malfunctioning." They have to go and be "fixed." Main Character Barbie isn't "fixed" because something different is happening to her, but it's already been established that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to be and act in Barbieland that will socially Other you and repulse your peers ("Weird Barbie").

The movie seems to reaffirm reality as opposed to imagining something beyond the limited, oppressive systems we live under. The movie seems to want to say something about ideas, about the way imagination and ideas have real power over all of us, but then limits its own imaginative horizon. Barbieland is just as fundamentally incapable of change as reality. And that is just kind of a bummer, to me, personally. Not to mention the fact that if you're going to have your movie be about a literal mundus significans, it's almost antithetical to the very idea of signs and significations to have that world stagnate.

I actually think the Ken subplot is really narratively weak. Unfortunately, it's not really possible to make a cogent point about Patriarchy in a movie where the "patriarchs" are footing the bill for the film (and so it's not possible to actually criticize them) and where the Kens are reacting to what they lack as opposed to their own desires outpacing what they're entitled to by the social contract. Ken feels alienated because he is alienated; the movie's conclusion almost seems to convince Ken that he should simply accept that feeling rather than reach for more, like Main Character Barbie does. Ken doesn't really learn anything at all; and maybe that's the point. But I don't know if it was a point well made. Ultimately, the only Patriarchs we as the audience should want to see crushed are the Mattel execs, but they're redeemed through the narrative and are now rolling in money from this movie.

As a nonbinary TME lesbian, I actually felt rather alienated by this movie's portrayal of "womanhood." Throughout the entire movie, Main Character Barbie is constantly wondering about her worth, about what she should do. There are other Barbies who have jobs, but her job was to have a Perfect Day, Every Day. And at the end of the movie, you have this moment that seems to be leading up to Barbie going to a job interview. She's dressed nicely, in restrained colors and Birkenstocks, and approaches a counter and gives her name. I thought she was going to be there for a job interview - but no, her journey culminates in her going to the gynecologist. The thing which marks her as entering "real Womanhood" is to go and get a vagina check. And I don't like that, at all. It really seems to distill Barbie down to her genitals.

Overall, the movie is shot through with threads of gender essentialism that I found out of place. I think many of the problems of this movie come from trying to create a film that fulfilled all the desires of those making the movie (needs to cater to children and adults, but also needs to be okay'd by Mattel) and it led to a kind of messy ideological narrative. I don't know Gerwig, but I do think we all need to think a little more critically about how she portrayed womanhood in Barbie, and how that portrayal actually confirms and validates many patriarchal ideas. The opposite of patriarchy is not, btw, a "matriarchy." Patriarchy isn't just "man in charge" and that portrayal of patriarchy is acceptable in a Feminism 101 course at best. Patriarchy is one form of the assemblage we call Capitalism/Imperialism, which seeks to privilege not just "men" as a general category, but White, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian men. All people are judged in relation to their adherence to the standard of the Overdetermined, White Western Man as described by Sylvia Wynter. "Woman" as a category is judged lesser in relation to that Overdetermined Man, but there are degrees of judgment and social alienation. White Women, for example, will always be perceived as more "human" to the Overdetermined Western Man than, say, an Asian Man. This is because for the Overdetermined Man, race and purity of race is critical. So it's weird for the Kens, who are kind of diverse racially honestly, to be our group of "Patriarchs" to overcome, when the hypnotically white, Patriarchal Mattel board is right there.

Which leads to my last point: The movie is very obviously longform advertising for Mattel. The company had to approve the film, and its portrayal of their company; Gerwig would not have received permission to use Barbie otherwise. This movie cannot say anything worthwhile about Patriarchy because it was made by the Patriarchy. It was approved by the Patriarchs. Because it will make money. And it did. And it did so by privileging, in a really not-so-subtle way, a biologically essentialist perspective of womanhood.

#barbie #barbie movie #this movie was just disappointing for me

[bookofmirth]

Can you please elaborate why it is considered problematic that SJM wrote that elain is uncomfortable around lucien? You mentioned in a previous response that it was not a good move for her to write elain being uncomfortable by a disabled POC but I’m not quite sure why that is a problem because she is not uncomfortable because of his disability or race- her discomfort has nothing to do with that.

Also, racism is not an issue in prythian the way it is in real life. You have high lords such as helion and tarquin (among others) that are explicitly POC and there has never been mention of any hostility towards them because of the color of their skin. The only discrimination I can recall is between high and lesser fae which is classist not racist.

I’m just confused why it is considered ableist or racist when SJM decided to write how elain is uncomfortable around lucien when it has nothing to do with his skin color or disability.

On another note- would it have been racist if amarantha (a known rapist) was written as a WOC rather than white? I’m just trying to understand your point of view and I’m a little lost. To me, acotar is a diverse world with characters of all races and some are good, some are evil but pretty much every character has done something morally grey at at least one point in the series. And none of that is not specific to one race vs another. There are white characters that are good, morally grey and downright evil. And the same can be said for other races.

I appreciate any further elaboration you can supply!

Hello! I will try my best. I don't mind answering questions like this! I recognize that I have had a lot of education about these topics and I have learned A Lot from Black women on Twitter over the years. I hope to share it in a way that is useful. I can maybe make a reading list if anyone is interested, but people should definitely ask around so that it's not getting filtered through just one person (aka me).

So the whole thing with talking about race in the fandom is that race does not function the same way in the acotar world as it does in ours. You are correct about that. You may have seen my post that attempted to break down various ways that characters access privilege in Prythian? Either way, yes. It is not a one-to-one correspondence with our world and the book world.

However, there are issues within the acotar world that mirror issues in ours, and the way that fans engage with those issues can reveal underlying prejudices. I mentioned in this post that we don't have to intend to do these things. (Also, intent versus impact is like diversity, inclusivity, and equity training 101. It's one of the first, and most important things you will learn. Even if you didn't mean to harm someone, they still feel hurt, and it's important to acknowledge that.)

The issue with the way people talk about Lucien - and I mentioned in another post that this is perhaps just as much on Sarah for creating this scenario as it is on the fandom for hopping on that horse and riding - is that there is a history of white women being painted as the victims of Black men specifically.

I'm going to put the rest of this under the cut because I want to show you some examples.

I hope that I don't have to explain why this is disgusting. There is a real-life example of this ^^^ if you google Emmett Till and read his story. This is by far not the only example of a white woman claiming that a Black man (or boy, in his case) was harassing her in some way, and often, that has resulted in lynching.

These are clearly older examples, and also really good examples of how people of color can be dehumanized, but these problems persist. The methods are just more subtle. More recently, it could result in police brutality. When that women called the police on a Black man in NYC last summer, it played into the long history of a woman claiming that she was being threatened or victimized by a Black man. As @gimme-mor explained in her post, the concept of white womanhood is often used as a way to uphold racism and white supremacy because it shows people of color as being violent threats, giving white men (and white women) a reason to retain their privilege.

You're probably wondering now what the fuckity fuck this has to do with Acotar and Lucien. I am getting there!

Because of this historical context, there are many slurs and stereotypes used against POC that on the surface, seem innocent. However, they have a deep, dark history of oppression and violence. It's not about the "one time" that someone said one racist thing, but generational trauma. I can't speak to what this is like as a lived experience, and so I would really appreciate anyone who does want to add on!!!

For example, just to take us away from acotar for a minute, there is a problematic, sexist and often racist trope in which characters get fridged. This is a term used to refer to the way that women, women of color, or characters of color (this could include queer and disabled people as well) are killed off to further a white person's story. This happens SO OFTEN. Nehemia was killed in ToG to motivate Aelin. Sorscha was killed in HoF to hurt Dorian. In a multitude of super hero and action movies, the wife or girlfriend of the main character is killed off in order to provide either pain or motivation to the white male hero.

Individually, these events are whatever. Taken as a whole, though... it shows a trend that the girlfriend of the hero is disposable. It shows that people who are not white, straight, able-bodied males are worthless, and only function to further someone else’s plot.

So that's what is sort-of happening here. After a long, long history of white women positioning themselves (or being positioned) as the innocent victims of brutish, violent, barely-even-human men of color, there are some disturbing parallels when people try to say that Elain is a shrinking violet next to Lucien's insistent attentions.

The context is everything. It's not about this one event, but that there is a history in the real world of this trope playing out over and over, and it has even been an explicit tactic used to perpetuate white supremacy.

This context influences the way that we interact with one another in fandom. The point of that post was not to critique the acotar series itself, but to expose some problematic aspects of the fandom.

I am not going to speak for anyone else, but I think that the original intent of pointing out this parallel between Elain/Lucien and white feminism was not that we want people to stop saying that Elain feels this, or Elain feels that, or Lucien is doing this or that, etc. The reason why this has been mentioned in the past is because there are some very uncomfortable, violent historical precedents set, and while people may not realize that those exist, they may be unintentionally furthering that stereotype.

There were many, many other points made in that post that I think bear repeating and further attention. I hope that this made sense. It's hard to condense literal centuries of racism like this, and of course I am only talking about the context in the U.S. I'm sure it's different elsewhere.

The main takeaway from that post, though, is that it wasn't about the world itself. It was about the way that the fandom engages with the world, and how they utilize some problematic tools to do so. Critiquing the world itself is a completely different issue, which... I will sorta touch on now!

One last point, since you brought up Amarantha and the potential of her being a WOC and a rapist - it could be viewed as problematic and racist, due to the oversexualization of Black women in particular (again, the context throughout history supports this). However, that would not be a fandom problem! That would be an sjm problem.

BTW - I do have serious problems with the way that Illyrians are portrayed in acotar, again because of the history of POC being portrayed as uncivilized, brutish, violent, and... that word that means someone isn't religious. I am getting tired and forgot the word. When sjm says that Illyrians are that way, and when she emphasizes the fact that they are a race... yikes. It's not racist of us to point that out, but it was highly questionable that she created them to be that way in the first place.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense, please! To anyone reading this to the end, first off RIP! But also let me know if I've gotten something wrong or if you see something differently.

#acotar #acosf #acotar fandom #cw racism #cw racist images #ask #anon

[homestuckisautistic]

Lanque...why?

I wanna start off by saying three (3) things. 

1. I am feeling much better now.

2. A few months ago, back in July maybe, I had a dream that I was still in high school (yikes!) and I had just moved to a new school (double yikes!) and Lanque went there for some reason and he was also the only troll there. Anyway he was very nice but all his friends called him “fingers in his ass Lanque.” Not kidding about this dream btw! Anyway I just wanna say r.i.p. to that perception of Lanque.

3. I wanna give a shout out to Diemen “I love putting drugs on my wiener” Xicali

This is gonna be an incredibly long post so I’m putting the rest under a cut. 

So where do I even fucking begin. 

I’ll start with Lanque’s life as a character, not his life within the canon of Hiveswap. 

As we all know, Lanque’s design was leaked long before his official appearance in the trollcall. A lot of people thought he was a butch lesbian mostly because of his resemblance to Sailor Uranus who was a lesbian in the original Japanese dub of Sailor Moon and apparently he looked like a character from Utena but idk anything about Utena. 

As we all know after Lanque’s official debut he was revealed to be a transgender man by infamous incest-shipping shithead Cohen Edenfield, (and one other person who idk anything about so I’m leaving them out of this) who also wrote Hiveswap and may I remind everyone that Dammek and Xefros’ relationship was marketed as wholesome and sincerely friendly and later it was revealed to be abusive. All I’m saying is that there’s a pattern here! 

Need I also remind everyone* that after Cohen revealed that he shipped incest it provoked a trauma episode in someone who was formerly a big name homestuck blogger on here and they had to leave the site for months for their own safety. Shit like this does affect people, it’s almost 2019 and we should all have the mind to think about how our words and actions affect others.

Now I’m not trans so I’m not gonna speak too much on this but personally I don’t think they intended for Lanque to be trans but rather what happened was they seen that the transmale community latched onto him and confirmed him as trans because of that. After all the friendsims have been taking cues from the fans (Galora becoming canon is a major example along with Amisia and Chahut being friends). It feels like a mean spirited trick and I can only imagine how shitty it felt for transgender men and boys who were hoping Lanque would be an actually decent person.

Onto the “good” route. 

I don’t even consider this route to be Lanque’s route. It’s a sequel to Lynera’s route. I don’t mind this because I’m always happy to see Lynera but wow I wish I had seen her under better circumstances. 

I’ve seen some people saying that the flower crown Lanque is wholly different from the Lanque from the other two routes but I disagree. It’s well known that abusive people often seem very charming and kind at first. In general, if someone is too charming, too kind, and seems too good to be true then they probably are.

The whole reason Lynera asks MSPA reader to go with her to the party is because she’s scared of Lanque. She fucking admits it to his face in a fit of anxiety. Which is to say that Lanque is an asshole in all three endings, we just see it to varying degrees. Also Lanque’s poem sucks.

As far as the other two endings, what can I possibly say? What can I fucking possibly say? Honestly, what can I say? I’m speechless at what happened. As soon as Lanque called Lynera a bitch tears welled up in my eyes and I only halfway succeeded at holding them back. When men call women bitches it comes from such a vitriolic place and even though the friendsims have no voice acting I could practically hear the hatred in Lanque’s voice. 

There’s really nothing else to say about those two endings.

It’s interesting to note that much of the dialogue in Lanque’s route is very tongue in cheek and breaks the fourth wall (”What about you? Oh I’m not real” “I mean I’ve had feelings for a girl before so it’d be really problematic if I liked a boy now.”) 

And the reason I bring this up is because of that last quote. Literally what the fuck. What was the point of that. Best case scenario is that everyone ignores it and moves on but because I’m typing this right now we all know that’s not the case. Literally all this line is going to do is promote tension between lesbians and bisexual women. It feels very intentional and very much like a jab at how lesbians and bi women seemingly can’t get along. It’s insidious. If someone thinks of Lynera as bi then that’s cool I honestly don’t care but her interactions with Lanque shouldn’t be used to justify that. Here’s why.

1. She outright admits she’s SCARED of him. She admits this in a fit of anxiety where she accidentally reveals her true feelings. IF she did have a crush on Lanque she wouldn’t have said “and I’m scared of you” she would’ve said “and I secretly have a crush on you and I’m scared of looking stupid in front of you.”

Also it’s literally feminism 101 to listen to people when they express disinterest. It’s also feminism 101 to not call people sluts as shorthand for “provocatively dressed” or “scantily clad” but that happens in this route too so whatever.

2. When Lanque starts coming onto Lynera the reader states that they think she’s not into it. Yes you can be flustered around a crush but that should mean that you have butterflies in your stomach and are scared of making a fool of yourself in front of them not that you are literally fucking scared. 

So, how could Lanque have been better?

Hear me out. In his original trollcall card, it says he “still has a livechurnal” (read: livejournal). So they could have made him super behind the times technology wise. Maybe they could’ve shown him having a busted old computer that still runs Windows XP because hey, it still works. Maybe his main pastime is playing minesweeper or virtual solitaire. Maybe he doesn’t even have a smartphone. The plot of his route could’ve been that his old computer finally breaks and he has to get a new one. Also, have him talk a bit about being trans and hire a trans sensitivity reader to make sure everything makes sense and isn’t offensive. 

Also, there is literally no reason for Lanque to be so shitty. The reason why Vriska and even Gamzee to an extent are beloved characters is because they have a motive to o horrible things. Vriska was groomed to be a child soldier and Gamzee was a victim of child neglect. Lanque has none of this.

I’m also very worried for Wanshi and I hope she never finds out how terrible Lanque can be. 

Also, fun fact: apparently Livejournal is very popular in Russia. According to Wikipedia, Livejournal is the largest social media site on the Russian speaking portion of the internet, and half of Livejournal’s userbase is from Russia. The more you know!

 If you’ve read this far then I want to say thanks. I also want to provide a link to “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft. It’s a fantastic book that has helped me understand why my dad is the way he is and if you’re dealing with or have dealt with abuse in the past this book will almost certainly help you. It mainly focuses on abusive men and intimate partner violence but the information this book provides can be applied to nearly every abusive person. Here’s the free pdf: https://www.docdroid.net/py03/why-does-he-do-that.pdf

I’ll be writing a post about the Soleils tomorrow,

- Mod Jessica

#mod rei-mary #not tagging this with anything else because of discourse #i dont wanna get wrapped up in drama sorry