Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.
Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.
There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.
i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.
I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case
You were cursed to be slightly below average in every way. Less than a centimetre below the average height, one less finger than the average amount (10), etc.
surely the average amount of fingers is a bit below 10 anyway?
You would be able to have as many bones as most people, due to how pregnant people skew that average. You may even have more bones than normal people depending on how exactly the curse works.
so slightly below average selfishness, and selflessness...
does someone have to measure a thing before the curse kicks in? does this cursed person become a scientist to adjust there own existance by specifically measuring things to cause them to be true... and how much bias is allowed in the stats... since we all know about spiders george...
Okay. All of this is going under a cut because it talks in details about some traumatizing medical stuff, and about feelings and concepts closely related to sexual assault.
If you are a doctor or nurse or work in the medical field at all, I do recommend that you read it, because I desperately wish there was awareness among care providers that experiences like mine even exist.
What I'm getting to with all my posts about The Fear is this:
I realized while journaling yesterday that my "medical fear" is essentially about sexual violation.
What I'm saying is that I have no idea if I ever actually experienced this, but whenever I went to the doctor as a child, I had this anticipation that "something bad" might happen that had to do with being forced to undress and having my genitals and/or anus touched.
I felt certainty that this was a thing doctors do, and that it was eventually going to happen to me, as far back as I can remember.
This certainty was almost...subconscious? Like, the exact nature of the Dread was something I couldn't fully think in my head, and I believe part of that was related to some sort of shame or "forbidden-ness" related to "private parts."
Not all of the medical fear was a fear of being touched in sexual parts of my body. My fear of needles became very severe after I had multiple negative experiences in mid-childhood, probably most importantly non-consensually having blood drawn at age 8 and at age 15. (In both incidents, I was crying and saying "no," and they did it anyway.)
But even in the case of my anxiety about needles, the fear was of having something done to my body forcibly.
It's weird because I've known implicitly the entire time what the nature of the fear was. Like, no new information has emerged in my mind, it's all stuff that was there the entire damn time.
Since, to the best of my knowledge, I have never been sexually abused, I didn't allow myself to identify my feelings as "feelings related to sexual violation."
But recently, I have been getting better at exploring my feelings and observing how "safe" and "unsafe" feel in my body. When I feel that sense of "something bad" lurking or creeping in my mind, I have been able to simply observe it in a way I never could before.
There is a central part of my fear that I struggle to handle and talk about. Contact with it is like being electrocuted: something horrible surges through my body that I cannot control. It is absolutely unreasonable: the terror of a cornered chimp about to rip your face off. This part of the fear is fundamentally "about" violation.
I know that a lot of the fear I felt as a child was connected to sexual violation. Completely independent of anything that "happened" to me, I know that this is what I felt. At the core of almost all of my panic-attack-inducing fears as a child (mostly that I was dying or had some kind of illness) was a fear of going to a doctor/hospital. And a VERY significant part of my fear of going to a doctor/hospital was the knowledge that doctors and nurses will touch and/or stick things in your anus or genitals.
It occurred to me for the first time yesterday that being hauntingly concerned about this as an 8 year old may not be a universal experience.
This part is weird, and I don't know how weird it actually is, but it feels weird: When I was much younger, like 3-5, I was intensely fixated on the fact that doctors touch your "private parts." I remember that made drawings of this and I acted it out in play. Later when I was 6, I had this story I made up and I remember having this vivid image in my head of how my "villain" would kill people by injecting poison into their genitals in his evil lab.
This is probably an instance of "kids being weird", but the fact that the topic became so existentially haunting later in life makes me feel weird about it.
Later when I was 15, I googled what a pelvic exam involved because I was having troubles with my period and my mom said I might have to get one.
...I still have so much violent anger about this topic, it makes me want to Harm People.
The whole procedure seemed intentionally designed to cause as much suffering as possible, and the article I read was incredibly condescending about potential anxiety and kept saying things like "just try to relax, it'll be over soon," which...makes me want to vomit even thinking about it even now. Ew. The article also made it sound as though you were not allowed to refuse a pelvic exam. It also said that the doctor would stick their fingers up your ass??
I really can't talk about it very much, but it basically told me "you are going to be raped, over and over again, forever."
I also knew it would be excruciatingly painful, because even putting in a tampon was excruciatingly painful for me, and I could not imagine a scenario where a doctor would stop doing something to me because it hurt.
Like. I don't think I was capable of comparing it to rape in my head, because I had always had this awareness that "doctors are allowed to do this to you," but I understood it to be rape on a visceral level. That was literally what it was to me, because I don't think I'd had a single consensual medical experience at that point.
I was 19 before I even learned that consent in a medical setting was a THING. I thought that once you go into a doctor's office, they can do whatever they want to you unless you manage to cry/struggle/argue/fawn your way out of it.
I know a lot of this sounds fucked up, and it is, but I honestly thought it was all normal and everyone else was just better at getting used to it than I was.
I'm not posting this to try to get some kind of confirmation that something fucked up happened to me, though. It's mostly just...I'm just processing it.
I keep thinking about how I didn't have the ability to describe what I was feeling. I didn't know objectively how "bad" it was, and I was an anxious kid, and kids are normally scared of the doctor, right...?...and I was more scared than usual, so I had "anxiety," so I had to train myself to ignore fear and replace all my negative thoughts with positive ones, and my fear was of something objectively Good (doctors) which meant it was a "phobia" and "irrational," and I felt like...I was bad. I felt like not being able to "overcome my fear" and "do it scared" meant I was bad.
It's just like, at what point does bodily autonomy become something that matters? I don't know what I'm trying to say. My experience is definitionally Not Traumatic according to the mainstream psychiatric thinking. It's "anxiety." Articles online that purported to help me, wrote me off as "embarrassed" or "nervous" when I was feeling this gaping pit of annihilating dread that seemed to peel me open and turn me inside out.
And I felt RAGE, violent violent rage. Because even though I had never been raped, the certainty that rape, or something very like rape, would happen to me in the future, had had a profound effect on how I experienced the world.
And I felt guilt. I felt that if I got cancer or something, it would be a punishment for not being able to "get over it" and go to the doctor. It would be my fault. I mean, health PSA's and articles and stuff would even frame it in that way, like it would be Your Fault if you didn't get screened and got cancer, because you were Weak and a Whiny Baby
there was an ad campaign a while back telling men to "man up" and get screened for testicular cancer and it bothered the hell out of me. that's just an example
As a child, I couldn't connect my feelings to sexuality; I didn't even know what sex was, and I was embarrassed talking about "private parts," and I knew that Everyone Has to Go To The Doctor and You Just Have To Get Over It.
Do it scared. Everyone has to. You have to push through the fear sometimes. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it.
have you examined whether/how much the knowing/believing for as Long as you can remember/since before the age of eight, that Medical professionals would inflict a rape-like experience upon you, has to do with that Meme/Trope of "pre-adolescent children roleplaying Medical exams WITH EACH OTHER as a Form of sexual Exploration"?
I don't think I was even familiar with or knew about the concept of "playing doctor" when I was a kid. I'm almost certain that this belief or feeling comes from either actual experience with medical environments, or possibly overhearing or seeing something about a physically invasive medical exam and assuming/internalizing that it would happen to me.
Someone else told me that doctors never actually touched their genitals until they were an adult in the context of reproductive health screenings. When I heard that, I felt or thought or "knew" that this was not true of me, though I don't remember.
The feeling of "knowing" is very hard to examine, because it was like I couldn't really explicitly think about it. In some ways it was so pervasive and inherent to my understanding that I couldn't think about it.
Like, I "knew" that doctors inflicted a "rape-like experience" on you, and there was a very strong sense that this would inevitably happen. When I was particularly young, like maybe 7 or 8, I think that every time I went to the doctor and this didn't happen, I felt like it had been skipped or I had been "spared" it for some reason, and there was a sense of buildup or increase of the dread, because if it didn't happen THIS time, surely it would have to happen soon...?
But it was very vague in my head. It just had something to do with undressing and private parts.
This isn't normal, right?
I also knew that the kinds of procedures doctors performed on you got much worse as you got older, and the full possibilities of things a doctor would do to you was like...pretty much infinitely bad?
I remember this sense that there were levels of bodily violation that a doctor could inflict on you that were literally beyond my ability to imagine. Like, I knew that there were more medical procedures in the world than I could imagine, and I knew that I didn't know what they involved, and it made sense that I didn't know because they were too awful to even think about.
As a kid, I basically just forced the idea of becoming an adult out of my head. As a young teenager, when I could actually think about it (Which was not often) I decided that once I became an adult, all my feelings of fear would magically disappear, because I was an Adult Now. The prospect of medical procedures has deeply haunted my ability to comprehend a future for myself.
I'm gonna say, probably not normal, but also I think not irrational either.
I'm gonna talk about some intense mental health stuff that is related to my own childhood trauma + experience of racism, ableism, and misogyny so its going under the read more. take care of yourselves all
So I get really violent intrusive thoughts and I have had these since i was 10 or 11. This is both thoughts of being harmed and of harming in return. I get viscerally detailed imagined scenarios especially about men trying to rape me, and about beating/scrstching/biting/pushing people down stairs, that kind of thing. It can accompany anger or just be kind of random.
I can trace the advent of these things to when I lived with my father, who was physically and emotionally abusive to every woman in his life but especially me. But I also dont know exactly when they started, or what specific incidents triggered it. And it got way worse and less specific to individual abusers as time went on, when I moved in with my (emotionally abusive) aunt, and became more sexual in nature as well.
As an adult, I think there's a big combination of factors. Not just the specific and frequent violation of bodily autonomy that is being beaten by your parent, and having that mostly seen as normal and even moral. But also that I developed a lot of dissociative mechanisms, and I specifically would forget the details of anything kind of stressful after it happened, leaving many holes in my memory of being a child/teen. After I had my first rape dream, I was very scared that I had secretly been sexually abused and just didn't remember it. Me and my therapist concluded probably not, but I've had persistent nightmares since I was 12 and I think even the rape dreams are in some way a manifestation of that violation of autonomy.
As well, growing up a brown girl in majority white communities, I was taught to fear rape. when i lived with my maternal grandmother and with my aunt, both of them so deeply feared the outside world that I was usually banned from going to friends' houses, having sleepovers, or even in the case of being 9 and with my grandma, playing anywhere she couldnt see me from the window. Close your legs when you sit, act like a lady, get good grades, and never ever get remotely close enough to anyone, even people who seem nice, where they could hurt you, because they will. There was also a big racial component so I was discouraged especially from having any friends who were Black which was also a whole thing, and did not make all this shit easier in the years i went to a majority Black high school.
One time i went to the library with a friend to help her with math homework in grade nine. I texted my aunt "hey im gonna be at the library with my friend for a bit" and I thought that was that. She's a Black girl, which shouldn not have been relevant. But when i came home two hours later than usual, my aunt yelled at me about how I have to ask her permission and i cant just tell her where im going to be, and for the next week convinced me this friend was using me for homework help and didnt actually like me.
So i think all this paranoia and the rigorous instruction on how to assimilate into white girlhood manifested also as sexually intrusive thoughts, and me developing my own sense of paranoia. when i was no longer afraid my father was hiding in every pickup truck with dark windows or following me around corners, he was replaced in my mind by a nebulous rapist, who could be any man, anywhere. I wrote a poem about this feeling recently, titled Ego Dystonic Intrusive Thoughts. The poem tells the fictional story of a racist man who tries to sexually assault me. What follows is a vivid descriptoon of me beating him to death with my metal cane. When I read it at an open mic, many women came to me after and told me they connected deeply with it. it was then i realized what that was: A revenge fantasy, one where I take back control over a violent situation. My intrusive thoughts are just a kind of clumsy unconscious attempt at teaching me how to protect myself.
I think there's something to be said about how many girls + trans kids who are told they are girls are raised to fear and prepare for rape and sex. this I think combined with the broader oppression of minors in society can make for a really potent cocktail of fear. Bodyminds produce anxiety, triggers, intrusive thoughts, trauma symptoms, etc. to protect us. I think the systemic causes of these things and of many mental health conditions (BDP and OCD come to mind) are underexamined.
Spacey, i think it's really possible that your experience is with real trauma, just the trauma of being taught the violent norms of gendered, disability based, and age based oppression. Girls in our culture are often positioned as passive objects that just receive experiences and exist to be victimized. Disabled kids are often positioned as passive recievers of universally good and helpful medical care, and them not consenting to this is positioned as irrational and stubborn 'refusal' to be overriden by caring professionals and parents. Kids can absorb these idea and develop ways to cope with the implications. Which might be an intense fear of doctors. You dont have to be abused to have trauma, and I think in some ways we all have trauma from the oppressive systems we live in.
To people who feel like you're not allowed to claim trauma as a term: label yourself in a way that feels right to you. But also, as someone who was abused as a kid and experienced many other acute and chronic traumatic things, you're fine and I give you permission. (obvs i dont represent everyone with childhood trauma, but an expansive definition of trauma to me is more compassionate to all survivors.)
So. Not normal in that most people maybe dont experience that. But also normal in that like, your bodymind is perhaps responding rationally to conditions of oppression and normalized violence against young people, disabled people, and people who are gendered by the medical system as "female".
Thank you for sharing all of this. Its a completely different experience but in some way I relate to a lot of it. And I totally agree that oftentimes mental illness (or what is labeled as such) is caused by chronic stressors and dysfunctional things in our society that aren't questioned.
the problem with trauma, is that your brain prioritizes survival over recording. so if you had trauma, there is likely no memory of it to recover. SO - you should proceed as if you have trauma, because the recovery, care, kindness, and understanding - the kindness you crave and the validation that your fear is reasonable, those are all true no matter if there was or was not an actual trauma event.
one of the hardest things about recovery from abuse and trauma as a child is that there is often no way to know what the real situation is. so give yourself permission to act as if it was as bad as it affected you.
also avoid trauma olympics, your experiences caused you trauma, even if it may not have caused another trauma, and even if others may have "had it worse". you are dealing with the truama response - which means it was trauma.
Even if I didnât have a solid plan, in the back of my head, I always assumed Iâd kill myself.
Now Iâm an adult and people my age have their lives in order and Iâm stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and Iâm so far behind.
New addition two years later. Iâm still going strong!
Iâm getting married. Iâm still in that loving relationship.
Iâve learned that thereâs no real timeline. Itâs okay. And while it sucks that I lost time, thereâs still so much for me to experience and enjoy.
I got married last month! My dog is laying on me snoring. Iâve learned to have healthy friendships and relationships. Iâve learned that Iâm not alone and that even when things are hard, Iâm going to be okay.
This showed up in my notes again. And here we are. 2026.
Iâve been married a little over two years. I just got home from friendships that feel like home and family. My husband and I have our own place. I have a full ass book ready to be published.
I donât know. Iâm still in a good place and I canât believe how far Iâve come from my original post.
dumping thoughts here about The Bucky but I keep thinking to myself that one of the major contributors to the continued mishandling of his character in the MCU is because the russos and everyone following in their footsteps fundamentally don't understand that they presented us in the winter soldier with a rape scene. and you know what scene I'm talking about. the scene. there's no sex, but spiritually, effectively, narratively, that's what it is. and if it were actually treated like that I think we would have a very different progression with Bucky's character. more empathy for him as a victim instead of focus on him as a killer. less time spent proving he's human and more time letting him mourn the life he lost. less emphasis on what specifically happened while he was the winter soldier and more emphasis on the fact that he consented to none of it. I fear they didn't even notice what they created.
then there's also the possibility they understood the parallels to sexual abuse (and even implications of them) they were doing with Bucky and simply still chose to victim blame him (like they did with Natasha's infertility, among other things), like people in real life all too often do with sexual assault victims. I almost can't decide which option makes me madder.
I've said this before: Bucky is such a good portrayal of an abuse victim because he activates so many people's instincts to victim-blame. That's how you know he's got The Juice.
I keep returning in my head to that quote i read when i was reading academic books about torture, which i desperately need to track down again so I can cite it properly, that was like "all torture is rape and all rape is torture."
but the Vault scene is so striking and evocative of that connection because of how it communicates that Bucky is powerless. It shows us first that he's physically capable of attacking, and then shows him meekly accepting it when Pierce slaps him in the face, letting the scientists manhandle him, cooperating with his torturers even though we can see the terror heaving and shivering through his body.
and also, the flashback sequence, and the SCARS, and the choice to have Bucky half-dressed in this scene to begin with. I've said this before also but it's really palpable how Bucky as the Soldier is A Body rather than A Person. At the beginning he's having a flashback about his captors literally reconstructing his body. there's a lot to say here about human hands being symbolic of humanity, and how the part of the flashback sequence showing his mismatched hands is showing that he has a hybrid identity as human and machine, and
wait I just realized that Zola's voice referring to him as the Fist of Hydra while showing his metal fist is visually and metaphorically characterizing him as The Fist...defining him entirely by the part of him that THEY created and surgically attached to him...it's SYNECDOCHE thats so cool
anyways and I talk about this with several other Bucky Lore Scholars in my incredibly insanely long analysis post thats somewhere in here, but the failure of the MCU to understand what they were doing with The Vault Scene, and with Bucky, and with CA:TWS, comes from a failure to understand and acknowledge what torture is. It's a profound, devastating violation of the victim's body and mind, and in the scene we get shown the violation piece by piece: his body taken from him, his choices taken from him, and finally his thoughts themselves taken from him. Wipe him and start over.
and later in the MCU, he is blamed. The blame falls on him as a body and not as a person: his body did those things, it doesn't matter that his body completely, utterly did not belong to him. It is a kind of denial on the level of the narrative itself that this level of violation COULD happen, that a person's mind could be taken away from them and they could still be a person, that Bucky could have "let" this happen to him and still have been a "hero."
Later MCU portrays him aesthetically as kind of a "darker" and greyer, more rugged and less "clean" looking character. He's not a "hero" anymore. He is sullied by what happened to him. He has to "atone."
Then there's the whole thing of characters giving and taking away his arm at their whim, reinforcing the whole "his body doesn't belong to him, no, literally it doesn't belong to him" thing. I think like in terms of imagery and symbolism (from what I've bothered to see; I avoid later MCU for my own sanity) it is giving a consistent message, it's just a god awful one.
I could keep going. I need to sleep at some point. Thanks for sending this, I would like to see more "dumping thoughts here about The Bucky" in my inbox
when I was in training to support victims of Sexual Assault for a phone hotline, the thing that was talked about in that training was that the actual sex was never the point, it was the taking of control, the show of power, the way in which the attacker could render the victim unable to resist. Additionally, it didn't matter if the "way" that the victim was rendered unable was physical, mental, social, economic - what mattered was that the victim had to do what the attacker wanted. some of the specific information we were given was that it was common for attackers to be unable to actually perform the sex act, but that the assault was no less horrible, traumatic, or real if they failed to complete.
Bucky as a character is going through exactly what so many victims go through - the assumption and even the belief that they must have deserved it, on some level. The victim blaming exists as a coping mechanism for others, if the non-victim can point to the thing that the victim did "wrong" than they can continue in the belief that they are safe from that fate. if they can convince themselves that Bucky somehow wanted this, then they can convince themselves that they would have somehow acted differently, some way that would save them from that same fate. By shifting the blame to the victim, they pretend that they have control of the chance of it happening to themselves. "I'm not a victim like them - I would have..." is a power fantasy designed to preserve the idea of control.
anyway - I love reading your bucky thoughts, even if I've never seen winter soldier.
the more time you spend in active recovery from any given self destructive behavior or addiction the more you understand the common conception of the "relapse" as defined by a broken "streak" to be, like, so bad for one's own well-being that it would be funny if it weren't resulting in just a lot of misery and death
I told my girlfriend to think of quitting vaping as training her endurance by seeing how long she can run before she gets tired, then doing it again and hoping to go further next time. She said it really helped her.
whenever I confess to people that i feel like I am just roleplaying as a normal person they're always like noooo you don't strike me as someone who's roleplaying as a normal person at all!!! :) and every time internally im like well yes that's because I am excellent at it
i like to think about a post-canon (au?) future where gregor goes to college in NYC (predictably his mother Freaks Out, but she lets him go bc he got some really good scholarships) and itâs kind of the best option theyâve got. So gregor is in NYC. and he just occasionally goes to the underland to fuck around. heâs not the warrior anymore, he killed the warrior. so he just goes down there to like. eat dinner when the dining hall sounds bad. or to see ripred, luxa, and howard. sometimes he goes to luxaâs meetings with her and the council bitches but really, they canât even do anything bc luxa is actually queen and she wants him there. and heâs always able to leave whenever he wants.
gregor in the meetings with his hood on, socks and slides, slouched with his laptop on the stone table like if he were in lecture. his ass is NOT listening.
Asking Aurora and Luxa for a lift to Ares' cave and Greg pulling out his phone, "This is for you Ares" and plays Dragula by Rob Zombie
Underland tattoos- its free for the warrior
Gregor showing Luxa ramen upgrade hacks
Luxa filming a tiktok saying she has been recently been diagnosed with Alexandria's Genesis
gregor finding a cd player and giving luxa cds (some thrifted, some he burned himself with songs she might like- what would be her mix??)
howard gotta free pen collection like luxa has a free sticker collection
greg has an anime night and someone becomes a fan of the art style with a free notebook, misc pencils, and the unlimited printing for art inspo at gregor's college
all roaches come up to gregor in college, do a little spin as a hello, and then leave. because greg always rescues or stops people from killing the roaches, his roommates tease him. next evening they find roaches doing geometric dances on the way to class and gregor pretends he's controlling them just to fuck with them. roachgod gregor
a similar thing happens with rats but during dead week. someone calls him the rightful king of new york city
guys. Guys please you're allowed to say big boy words. please we cannot keep just rolling with the sanitization of every space on the internet ok. you're allowed to say suicide. you're allowed to say porn. they're not bad words, they're just words.
also by ''censoring'' the words with silly spellings you're actually making it much harder for people to filter out. please just say Sex you don't have to call it woohoo like it's the fucking sims. i promise the Word Police aren't going to arrest you
Holy hell. He has amazing technique AND he didnât just transcribe the piece to piano, he essentially composed classical music (and honestly some neo-classical, lol) based on the melody. Plus, he kind of looks like Freddie.
