Its litterally plot relevant how much sex he has, he fathers a civilization, its disgusting, and is evocative of coercive types of rape common in young western boys who dont sufficiently meet the macho ideals or appear to be attracted to women
and beyond this, western culture has a history of engaging in the sexual abuse of young boys via paederasty, often glorified by those today as an icon of ancient homosexuality
I see that "learned helplessness" is the hot new psychological term getting wildly misused. the phrase you're looking for is "weaponized incompetence," babes
weaponized incompetence is when your partner does chores shitty on purpose so that you stop asking them to do chores. learned helplessness is when you've experienced so much trauma that you've developed the mindset that you can't meaningfully change your situation and have become accordingly passive.
if your partner is exhibiting learned helplessness they aren't manipulating you, they're displaying a trauma response.
The thing about the way people talk about the "cognitive effects" of AI use on this website is that 9 times out of 10 the way they do it leaves me thinking "damn friend you were *really* itching for a largely uncontroversial way of calling people 'retarded' huh"
rn I can't find the screenshot I took, but the other day I saw someone (who as far as I could tell had never even mentioned using AI for anything) say they didn't understand something only for another person to reply with something like "this is what you get when you're unable to read anything without getting chatgpt to summarize for you" and like sorry but at that point what would have been the actual difference between that and just calling them the fucking slur?
The post in question wasn't even about AI at all, nor did person A mention using AI anywhere, so it's clear person B is just bringing it up out of nowhere as one of their go-to ways of insulting people's intelligence. Which like. When you get down to the underlying implications I don't think trying to insult someone's intelligence by invoking the idea of them having an atrophied brain from using too much chatgpt is meaningfully less ableist than doing so by invoking the idea of them having a developmental disorder.
what cognitive decline are you talking about 😭 are we talking about literacy (please define what you mean if you use that term)? Are we talking about analytical ability (please define what you mean if you use that term)? Are we talking about comprehension of abstract ideas and concepts (please define what you mean if you use that term)? Are we talking about socialising (please define what you mean if you use that term)? Do you even know what you mean when you say cognitive decline? What does “rely on” mean in this context? Is someone relying on a tool or program inherently bad? If not, what criteria should we use to determine if that reliance is “good” or “bad”? What does “good” and “bad” mean within this criteria? If we determine this case to be “bad,” what should be done with the person relying on the tool, and how do we determine what should be done with them?
And more importantly, assuming this is 100% correct - so what if that is true? Did post-industrial societies experience collective cognitive decline once the vast majority of people lost the skills to weave their own clothing, grow their own food, etc? When the calculator was invented, did we experience collective cognitive decline by losing the ability to do long division and memorise multiplication tables? When auto-correct and grammar checking programs become ubiquitous, did everyone collectively get worse at grammar and spelling? Like, in many of those cases, using the collective definitions of cognitive decline of the day, probably! Is that bad? Is that morally wrong? Is that evil? What are the societal stakes of the problem you’re pointing out?
what a wild fucking thing to say about fucking "femboy" art emphasizing a characters penis to show they are "biologically male" even with obvious signs of feminizing hrt.
is it fucking "bioessentialism" to look at art that clearly eroticizes puffy nipples and limp small penis on a character who will be referred to with feminine terms while being categorized as ultimately male and saying the character is obviously a fucking trans woman?
personally i think the real bioessentialism with regards to this kind of art is how the penis is used as an indication of unchangeable maleness no matter how much evidence the character is on estrogen or how much the character is portrayed enjoying being referred to with female terms. but what do i fucking know. i havent considered the feelings of men enough i guess
is tumblr forcing transandrophobia posts to everyone's blog or is it just mine? i'm here for posts about communism and hatsune miku. and the 3 artists i followed when i made this account. i've never had to block anyone on tumblr and in the past 2 days i've blocked so many accounts bc they're just entire accounts dedicated to "transandrophobia" or harassing an individual trans woman they don't like. what the fuck is going on lol cuz it's not exactly making me ever want to open this piece of shit app again.
it's not that i didn't believe trans women when they talked about how hostile tumblr is to their existence, but i just never came across any of the harassment myself. even if i was scrolling through the fyp, it was still posts mostly relevant to my interests. now i'm seeing the constant stream of VIOLENT transmisogyny—ppl just praying with all their energy for trans women to die horrific deaths. knowing this was in trans women's feeds and often targeted against themselves or their friends... it's just so so so thoroughly disgusting. it makes my blood boil and it makes me sick. it's just genuinely heartbreaking and it must be so tiring and painful to experience on the daily. knowing that even if you spend an entire day blocking 200+ accounts, there will be more the next day and they might target You with all their vitriolic hatred because you made a joke about sex in 2018 on a blog you deleted.
is tumblr forcing transandrophobia posts to everyone's blog or is it just mine? i'm here for posts about communism and hatsune miku. and the 3 artists i followed when i made this account. i've never had to block anyone on tumblr and in the past 2 days i've blocked so many accounts bc they're just entire accounts dedicated to "transandrophobia" or harassing an individual trans woman they don't like. what the fuck is going on lol cuz it's not exactly making me ever want to open this piece of shit app again.
Things that will never make me think less of someone: Enjoying media, entertainment, or aesthetics with ideologically reactionary elements
Things that will IMMEDIATELY make me think less of someone: Insisting that the ideologically reactionary media, entertainment, or aesthetics they enjoy are actually Le Hecking Epic Wholesome Leftist Praxis
To draw upon a semi-recent Discourse topic, if you encounter a claim along the lines that, idk, for example, the imagery and cultural idea of Knights as it exists in pop culture is entrenched with a long history of islamophonia (due to how much of this cultural imaginary comes directly from the narrative of the Crusades) and your response is "I still think knight imagery is cool, I don't enjoy things based on how ideologically correct they are" I'll respect you infinitely more than if your response was "Actually liking knights is leftist because there's nothing more leftist than protecting those weaker than you"
"I don't engage with this thing to have my politics parroted back at me" will always be 1000x more graceful and productive than trying to argue that everything you like is Fundamentally Leftist, Actually.
Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.
First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components.
I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.
So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.
So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:
(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)
The brain 🧠 - this is where identity is ‘stored’ in the human body. Identity is a thing inside you that arises from your thoughts, the ‘contents’ of your brain. If I were being really uncharitable towards these diagrams, they argue that gender identity is the delusion of how you see yourself that doesn’t interact with/reflect the rest of your body or person. I can “identify as a man” while every other gendered component of myself “is a woman.” Which like, I don't “identify” as a man, I am a man lol. More charitably, I think it’s trying to communicate the fact that trans people discover that their gender identity is in conflict with the rest of themselves, and seek to address this conflict through various forms of transition.
Even taking the charitable view, I think this is still deeply problematic. Just using my own experience, I did not ‘discover’ my gender identity in my head, I discovered it socially - dissociating during sex, friction in romantic relationships, problems with family members, difficulty socialising, being ostracised by peers, forcible assignment of femininity by my parents and especially my mother, and so on. Placing gender identity in the brain visually argues that gender identity can be discovered/thought of in isolation to the social world, because it is a symptom that comes out of a discrete organ, the brain (this is the transmedicalist view of transgenderism - gender identity is a mental illness that needs to be medically treated). This is where the visual tradition of anatomical diagrams works against these gender diagrams, reinforcing the biological view of gender despite the attempts to challenge it.
The heart ❤️ - Now this one is a bit more abstracted and ‘apolitical,’ because the diagrams all use the heart symbol ❤️ as opposed to the anatomical heart 🫀, but I think my criticism still stands, because it is part of the anatomical metaphor of the diagram. I don’t think you can extricate the fairly inoffensive visual association of heart = attraction from the rest of the diagram. The heart is the organ that stores sexuality and attraction, just like the brain is the organ that stores identity, and this sexuality/attraction can be isolated and identified from the rest of yourself. It is just as internal and divorced from the social world as identity is. It’s also bizarrely disaggregated in the unicorn and bear diagrams as physical and emotional attraction lol? What does emotional attraction even mean. I became emotionally ‘attracted’ to all my friends after getting close to them even though I’m not physically attracted to most of them, so I guess I’m demi-pan-emotional? This feels like a more minor nitpick, but it’s part of this containerisation of gendered traits, the idea that you can neatly divide emotional and physical attraction. They are ‘separate symptoms’ of the heart.
The chromosomes 🧬 - probably the easiest one to critique, and imo is the most egregious. Even mainstream pro-trans critiques of sex, which heavily rely on medical authority as the basis of their critique, argue that chromosomes are not “what sex is.” As I laid out above, sex is an assemblage of things that are ideologically bundled together for the purposes of enforcing a set of social systems, such as patriarchy and cissexualism. Using chromosomes to represent sex is an argument that sex is an immutable facet of the body that cannot be changed - even if you take HRT, have surgery, change all of your sex markers on your documents, and live your life as your gender, your sex hasn’t changed because you didn’t “change” your chromosomes. You will always be a biological male or female. Sex, these diagrams argue, is a biological essence, and ‘biological’ is a stand-in for immutable, mutually exclusive, and unalterable.
The other insidious part of this is that the chromosomes replace genitals in the diagram - you can’t show a penis or vagina to your audience, that’s icky and gross, so you use chromosomes instead. It’s the only place on the anatomical diagram where the organ is replaced by a non-organ, and the absence of genital organs only draws attention to the ‘genitality’ (to use Butler’s term) of chromosomes as a stand-in for sex. It is straightforwardly a transphobic and intersexist depiction of sex. The associated graph with it is even worse, placing “intersex” in between “male” and “female,” as if intersex is an undifferentiated amalgam of male/female sexual traits. It upholds the idea that intersex people are just sexually fucked up and have the “wrong” parts of M/F sex combined together, which again, can’t be altered. Which is ridiculous and contrary to reality! One of the core bases of intersexism is that doctors are very much invested in changing the sex of intersex infants, children, and adults through forced surgery and hormones to ‘correct’ a pathological incongruence of sex to either an acceptable ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex. This is what I meant earlier when I said this diagram might attempt to challenge was gender is, but not sex. It partitions sex off from gender as the stable immutable part of the body, which gender is then overlaid “on top of” (Butler also critiques this view in Bodies That Matter), which is, again, a transphobic and transmedicalist view of sex and gender. These diagrams beat you over the head with this point - the gender expression component is a dotted line traced over the body of the unicorn/bear/ginderbread. It is segmented and ephemeral in contrast to the solid lines of the body. Crucially, gender expression never touches their bodies. Gender expression is a thing that can be removed or changed, revealing the true biological essence of the body, which remains intact beneath its facade.
My more minor grievances are that these diagrams are visually ugly and infantilising. It is the queer equivalent of telling children to call a vagina a hoo-ha and a penis a ding-dong. I hate how infantilised and cutesy mainstream queer art and branding is. I’m an adult, I’m not a fucking unicorn or bear or “gingerbread person,” use plain visual language in your educational guides for the love of god. Trans minors also deserve proper representation and education that isn’t this quirky horseshit. The amount of abstraction going on in these diagrams, coupled with the ugly-ass cutesy aesthetic, obfuscates what is trying to be communicated and ends up (imo) being a poor educational tool, even setting aside the many, many ideological problems with them.
So I think these diagrams are deeply transphobic. They represent “components” of gender by assigning them to various organs, which re-inscribes gender as biological. They are also really ugly
Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.
this is the funniest possible reply. because even in the hypothetical scenario where "this misogynistic thing also has an equivalent opposite that negatively affects trans men", trans women aren't even the focus.
its so funny when we point to examples of how everything in society, from history to literature to employment to art to representation, is so man centric. and even when misogynists try to do the "nuh uh, the opposite is true" they can't even envision a matriarchy where trans women get any representation at all.
and it's so telling. because i dont know what possibility is worse. that even in their hypothetical matriarchy situation, they dont see trans women as deserving of respect enough to get anything more than pity representation.
or in their minds, they don't actually see trans women as women.
actually, idk what i expect from this account. literally half of the posts consist solely of talking over trans women with such classic hits like "what about ME?!?!" and "you stupid feminists need to focus more on men!"
and the other half is posts complaining about made up concepts like androphobia and misandry.
i have to assume this is a really transphobic self hating terf adjacent trans guy. like why else would this person talk like someone who watches andrew tate, but still have "afab" in bio?
it’s nice seeing other people starting to open their eyes to what i’ve been saying for a while in that the current use and proliferation of the term “gooning” is an outright tool of fascism
the second “gooning” stopped referring to a specific sexual practice and started to be used as a replacement for “masturbation” we needed to kill it immediately and sadly we didn’t
if you call someone a “masturbator” in a derisive way you sound like a fucking mormon but suddenly you switch to calling them a “gooner” and you’ve created a way to express the same puritanical beliefs around masturbation that is not only palatable to the average person but the attached underlying implications of the term make people way more susceptible to adopting those beliefs themselves
leftists need to fucking stop using the term “gooner” right fucking now
demonizing human sexuality and treating masturbation and sexual activity as deviant and disgusting are straight up fascist tools and it’s startling how successful this aspect of it has been the last few years
I can’t speak for all academic institutions, but at least the ones I’m familiar with in Canada, AI usage is considered a form of academic dishonesty (which goes on your record if you’re ‘found out’ to have used it). Because you can’t prove AI usage the way you can usually prove plagiarism, most professors have told me when grading papers that if a paper gives off “AI vibes” (direct quote) to report it to them. As of right now, AI detection is purely discretionary based on the person marking the assignments, because tools for detecting AI usage are laughably unreliable. So, in addition to punishing students who don’t speak English as a first language, if you want to racially profile students for having “surprisingly good grammar” or sounding “too smart” you can now easily report them to the department for doing academic dishonesty 👍
whenever people talk about “the modern literacy crisis” I have an immediate contrarian reaction to dismiss it. and I’ll even grant that it’s true that fewer people read books now compared to 20-30 years ago (which is not what literacy exclusively describes, but again, setting that aside), like I’m just going to accept that premise because it’s kind of irrelevant to my issues with the discourse around it, because the issue I have is the insane moral weight people place on the concept of literacy. I see it used as a word that is interchangeable with intelligence + critical capacity + culture + maturity + moral worth. it’s not a technical term that describes one’s ability to comprehend text, it’s a mystical measurement of one’s value. the claim that fewer people read books compared to some point in the past (an empirical claim that can be proven true or false) is separate from the claim that society is experiencing collective intellectual death (an analytic claim), but the latter is always either implied or outright stated when the former is brought up in discussion.
and to be clear about my own position, I think it’s a public good that everyone has the ability to read (I’m using “literacy” in the technical, expansive sense), in the same way that it’s a public good for everyone to know first aid or how to swim. I think a society where everyone can read is a better and more just society than a society that can’t. It gives you access to forms of empowerment that would otherwise be unavailable to you - legally, politically, socially, financially, artistically, etc. it’s actually difficult to list all the ways literacy gives you the ability to enrich your life, because reading is so fundamental to every aspect of modern life.
but I don’t see people talking about literacy rates in terms of a public good. instead it’s always about reading books exclusively, because books are holy objects with the ability to transmit virtue to whoever reads them, irrespective of their actual contents - unless we’re talking about booktok romantasy or fanfiction, in which case it’s degenerate slop that degrades the mind. those are evil books one should not touch, because they reduce one’s chances of getting into heaven. and you can tell this is the framework of discourse, because the moral weight placed on “literacy” gets imported into phrases like “media literacy,” ie, one’s ability to accept the virtue transmitted by media. media illiteracy is someone rejecting god’s words on the page or on the screen - a form of societal heresy committed daily by mass amounts of individuals.
this is, maybe ironically, an anti-intellectual relationship to literature and non-fiction texts. books become fungible fetish objects that are either good or bad, depending on whatever twitter and your english professor tells you is worthy of value. like personally I think fewer people reading wuthering heights is not even a top 10,000 problem we need to solve right now, but if that is an issue weighing heavily on your heart, and you believe that books can transmit revelation and spiritual enrichment if you open your soul to them, I would encourage you to read books that describe things like “social processes” and “structural violence” and “inequality,” because I suspect this issue is downstream of some other stuff going on in the world right now and can’t be resolved by telling people online that they’re degenerate babies for not reading the odyssey
origamiaround
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
vaporwave
baratheonpilled
