"Men Aren't Better Than Women: Both Genders Are Inferior To Me" is a 1991 book by Dr. Ivo Robotnik (better known for other work). Though its primary purpose is clearly to stroke the author's own ego, it is generally regarded as a comprehensive, well-constructed, and accessible work of contemporary feminist theory, and is still commonly-cited to this day.
Most of the critical complaints have been about the tone; in a review from 2005, Professor Victoria of Spagonia University said, "The constant self-aggrandizement undercuts the idea that its subject ought to be taken seriously. Also, wasn't the 'feminist' line from the Sonic Heroes manual a mistranslation of 'womanizer'?"
In 2026, Dr. Robotnik released a new edition updated for the preceding 35 years of developments in feminism, with the subtitle changed from "Both Genders" to "All Genders."
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
i feel like a lot of fandoms pride themselves on being gayer than the source material but have they considered being less racist and less misogynistic than the source material as well . could be revolutionary
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
Lately I've been struggling a lot with.... I guess the technical term might be "survivor's guilt."
As you probably know, I'm a disabled trans woman. Society hath decided that I am completely unemployable. Depending on who you ask, that might be due to my physical inability to stay standing for more than a few minutes, my laundry list of mental afflictions, the inherent perversion of existing while transfeminine, or just my unfriendly personality. There are many women like me... and yet I find myself one of the lucky ones.
Because I get to be self-employed. Fate has granted me the ability to survive through the creation of online content.
Over the past 6 years, I've spent practically every waking moment building a career out of my online presence. Using everything I knew, I turned myself into an internet personality. Squeezing every bit of blood from the stone, so I might escape the threat of becoming homeless and/or starving.
And I fucking did it.
Year by year, I started attracting attention, I started making money, I moved out of my dad's place, and eventually I got out of student debt. In the meantime, I used the support and the resources I had to transition. For the foreseeable future, I pretty much have it made. And somehow I still manage to fucking hate myself.
Because what about everybody else?
Why are my friends struggling to make ends meet, while I get to sit at home and make let's plays? Why are they working two-to-four jobs while I'm spending my afternoons on guitar lessons? Why are they squatting in abandoned buildings or living with their parents while I get to have a studio apartment all to myself? Why are my friends still struggling with dysphoria every day despite having been out much longer than me, and why was I able to not only access HRT and bottom surgery, but why was it covered by my insurance, and why did I get huge tits and a perfect pussy?
Why is it all so fucking unfair?
And how do I make it right?
Do I throw money at them until the guilt goes away? Do I offer them a place in my home? Do I share my medication with them? I'd fucking love to. But all of these would compromise the personal stability I worked so hard to get. There's no way I could get my work done if I had other people living here, there's no way I could pay my bills if I gave all my money away, and there's no way I could maintain my health if I didn't keep all the meds for myself. So I can't.
But why does my stability go before theirs? Why should I get to escape the crab bucket? My life is not worth more than anyone else's.
I have it made, and I *still* hate my life.
They all deserve to have it at LEAST as good as I do.
I've been trying to get more involved with the local trans scene, to better understand the problems we face and what I can do. But all I keep learning is that I got lucky. I got lucky that my parents never kicked me out on the street. I got lucky that I've never been assaulted. I'm lucky that I'm fuckable. I'm lucky that I managed to maintain my autonomy. I'm a lucky, privileged, sheltered little piece of shit. I like to think of myself as an underdog, but there's always an under-er dog. I walk in there every week knowing I'm the luckiest piece of shit in the whole building.
And so, lately, to alleviate my guilt, I've been throwing money at gofundmes, ko-fis, indie projects, local activism... When a friend needs help I'm quick to offer anything I can. But I can't give everything. And fuck, do I wish I could. I wish I could give it all. Make it fair. Because I don't honestly think I deserve any of it.
But if I fuck myself over too hard, I lose it all, and then I can't help anybody. If I don't hold on to some of this money, the one-woman business that puts food on my table goes belly up.
I have to be selfish, so I can be generous later.
And that fucking sucks.
It fucking fucking sucks.
But not as bad as it sucks to be them. So I have to. So I can do what I can.
Getting into Of The Devil is crazy because people will sell it to you on the premise of “It’s toxic yuri Death Note!” And the you check it out and it’s some of the most dense and engaging cyberpunk fiction to be written in the last decade and also it’s like if Death Note was written by someone who doesn’t hate women.
Some quick research suggests that only Scots English still uses "gat" as the simple past tense of "to get", with the form surviving in other English dialects only in the archaic "begat" (i.e., the simple past tense of the likewise archaic "to beget"), and I feel like we need to fix that.
Local Man after opening Pandora's Box of Non-Standard English Verb Forms:
"He choosed his path, clomb this hill to die on, torned off the chains of prescriptive grammar and drunked from this newfound power; but later he had understanden that he had letten himself grow mad with power, he had shutten the voice of reason advising him against this foolery, he had putten himself on this path of chaos and destruction, setten himself on this one way street, standen on top of a mountain of hubris, forgetten wisdom, and for his trouble had getten only the means of his own downfall"
[all of those are attested by the way, this isn't just me making stuff up at random]
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
