I love that moment at the beginning of DAI where you leave the dungeon and step into the sunshine only to learn that your character is wearing neon makeup
Solas sitting down there in the dungeon with you for three days, bored out of his mind, just caking on the blush
*says ‘I’m so fucking sick of this pandemic shit’ in a distinctly vaccinated, pro mask, pro lockdown, pro taking all the necessary safety measures way*
*says ‘I’m so fucking sick of this pandemic shit’ in a distinctly anti-capitalist 'break the patents on all the vaccines’ way*
man. remember early in the pandemic, shortly into the telework phase, when a lot of women started vocalizing “wow, i didnt realize just how much time, energy, and even money i was wasting on dolling myself up for work every damn morning, until i didn’t have to do it anymore. i don’t think i’ll go back to doing that when we return to the office? i won’t be a slob or anything, of course, i’m just not going to go out of my way to look pretty at work" and then,
so many people proceeded to lose every last crumb of their shit about it, writing the most asinine crybaby articles ever where they were just. utterly horrified by the possibility that more and more women might become comfortable looking natural/plain and completely opting out of the expectation to look as appealing as possible at all times, even when all they’re doing is spending all day in a cubicle. that was bonkers. lmao.
some ladies were like “during lockdown, i saw myself in the mirror without makeup much more often, and got used to it, so now i don’t feel as anxious for others to see me without makeup on either. i’m comfortable with the face i have, it’s fine just the way it is”
and some absolute dork ass losers heard this and went “truly, this is the death of femininity”
TERFS who think they’re welcome on my posts: you’re not. the freedom to reject conventional beauty standards should apply to and be shared with trans women as well, moreso, in fact, because trans women are literally held to an even harsher, stricter standard when it comes to rando third parties feeling entitled to meticulous over-performance from them - demanding they put every last possible ounce of resource and effort into altering their appearance just to be seen as acceptable, demanding they “prove” their validity through excessive glamour, to ensure they are not “faking” - and the consequences for a trans woman if she does not flawlessly comply with these demands can be so dire as to be lethal for her.
That should not be the reality these women have to endure! That is a horrifying injustice, and anybody who not only lacks compassion for that, but promotes the ideologies that enable it, is not welcome here. I will not debate with you on the matter. Get lost.
I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
I really dislike how women in period movies are made up according to modern beauty trends. Im tired of seeing Roman women with perfect eyeliner and Marie Antoinettes with peachy blush. I’m sick of contoured Cleopatras and 1920s flappers with 21st century lipstick.
Its not just about historical accuracy, it’s a matter of female class consciousness. If the women in these movies were made up according to the trends of previous epochs, it would really throw the fleeting (and frankly grotesque) nature of make up and beauty trends into the spotlight. Renaissance women with plucked foreheads, Elizabethan women with glaze-like egg whites smeared on their faces, Japanese women with blackened teeth, Aztec women with ochre on their skin to make it look yellow…
From our 21st century pov, these things sound disgusting - not to say completely ridiculous. With the hindsight of a couple centuries, it’s easy to point out how grotesque these trends were. How grotesque women had to look. And we might think that our standards are better, but this will be us in a couple of centuries too! How will people in 200 years think of our make up trends? How will they perceive our contoured faces, our hairstyles, etc? I don’t think they’ll be fawning over pouty looks and structured eyebrows.
Making women up according to our modern trends in period pieces airbrushes the past and prevents us from realizing not only how ridiculous previous trends were but also how ridiculous our modern ones are. This isn’t just about historical accuracy, it’s about women realizing the many forms misogyny has been taking throughout time, and not being fooled by its current shape.
we need to have more of a conversation about how cis women contribute to toxic masculinity tbh
Okay here’s a little more nuance:
First of all, yes, men also perpetuate toxic masculinity. Yes, people of all genders are harmed by toxic masculinity.
But so often I see toxic masculinity framed as an issue created and perpetrated solely by men. I’ve even seen a couple people claim that men can’t complain about how toxic masculinity affects them because “you do this to yourselves”.
Cis women are just as involved in enforcing gender roles as cis men are.
Cishet women often police the gender expression of their boyfriends, as well as any other man they consider a potential boyfriend. I used to know a straight girl who would constantly say things like, “Yeah, he’s cute, but he’s a little fruity. I need a MAN, you know?”
(this is also incredibly homophobic, even though she claimed to be an ally)
I’ve even heard straight women say they’re no longer attracted to a guy once they’ve seen him cry, or show pain, or express any emotion besides anger.
Feel free to add on to this post! I’m sure there are things I’ve missed.
Before I came out, my mum would say a lot of toxically masculine things. Like only ever talk about men in a negative light, equating masculinity to *only* being toxic. Therefore anything she said about men would have this hatred of men but at the same time, reaffirming toxic traits as what she thought made men, men.
Closeted me was very upset by all of this, but sometimes she’d police my expression based on a hypothetical cishet man’s opinion. “Shave or no man will ever like you” - putting my wants and needs beneath this hypothetical cishet man (when I’m a gay trans man myself) and the toxic masculine expectation that people who present as ‘women’ should be shaved and that real masculine men date feminine women. It’s also super homophobic to say that gay men who don’t date women (shaved or not) are not masculine enough. This whole ordeal was immensely misgendering to me and transphobic and very misogynistic on my mums part. I am a man, but I imagine many mothers also say this to their cis children
Toxic masculinity is a tool to control people under patriarchy. And women can wield that tool against others just as horribly as cishet men.
Yeah, that’s very true. It is possible to be a victim of something and to also perpetuate it. I wrote smth on this before but I’m tired. Maybe I’ll look it up in the morning.
There was quite a good bell hooks bit in The Will To Change about how mothers can take out their anger at adult men who’ve wronged them (and patriarchy as a system) on their sons, and/or demand emotional comfort from their sons beyond what’s appropriate for a child to give a parent (this often happens to daughters, too). Which causes the son to develop the sense that he’s been wronged by women for being a man — because he has! — and then this grows into an adult hatred of women. I thought it was a really refreshing look at how age and family are part of the cycles that toxic masculinity is embedded in, and how all participants are victims as well as perpetrators.
Bell Hooks, one of my favorite feminists of all time, wrote about how patriarchy and toxic gender roles are more complex than the “man vs woman” narrative that we see in modern feminism. In her article “Understanding Patriarchy” (https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf), she explains how men and women are responsible for holding up patriarchy, that mothers are especially responsible for instilling patriarchal thinking in their children, and men have every aspect of their lives shaped and morphed by living under patriarchy and many don’t notice. Your gender and sex don’t determine if you are on the side of “oppressor” or “oppressed” under patriarchy, that aspect of you only decides how the patriarchy is going to hurt you and in what ways you’ll be encouraged to perpetuate it as you live your life. Everyone is put into a position of harm by the patriarchy, and those who conform to its standards are encouraged to perpetuate the system however is considered “appropriate” for their assigned gender role.
I was introduced to Hook’s work last quarter in my Multicultural Studies class, and it was right around the time that I also began to become interested in building up the concept of transandrophobia. I truly believe that without this reading, I wouldn’t have been so quick to side with my fellow transmascs in trying to create theory and language around our own experiences of oppression. While I disagree with most people on the definitions of transmisogyny and transandrophobia (That’s a different can of worms I might get into when I’m not chronically low on spoons), Hooks’ work has been completely fundamental toward my understanding of gender-based oppression and personal dismantling of gender-essentialist thinking. I believe that people within the community naturally leaning toward her theory is going to greatly advance everything that we’re working for. The brighter days are close.
Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences. I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death. I often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics. Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles.
These ideas have been buried and practically erased from modern feminism because of the severe gender essentialist thinking that plagues any conversation surrounding struggles relating to gender-based oppression. We can’t dismantle patriarchy, sexism, toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, transphobia, exorsexism, transmisogny, transandrophobia, intersexism, gender essentialism, or any other kind of gender-based oppression if we aren’t willing to acknowledge the full picture. We cannot win without being intersectional.
Bell Hooks passed on December 15, 2021. Her presence will be missed and her contribution to intersectional feminism and activism is invaluable. I wish people like her were the face of modern feminist thinking, because things would be a lot better that way.
