Life's The Illusion, Love Is The Dream @libertineangel - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
Life's The Illusion, Love Is The Dream
@libertineangel
Jimmy (or Jay if you prefer, unless it's because you can't comprehend a transfem with a masc name), any pronouns if we're mutuals but otherwise she/they, born '97, more in pinned
Long-overdue blog tidying, new pinned post to follow on from my bio:
Autistic communist of Ukrainian Jewish descent, from London, nonbinary transfem lesbian
No specific theme so mostly just general shit, political shit and special interest stuff (music, various games but mostly strategy & RPGs, Star Wars, martial arts, motorsport)
Here's a directory of my OCs, writing etc. (the link is broken again in-app, for browsers it's libertineangel.tumblr.com/writing)
Here's the Principles of Communism, edited for 21st century clarity
Here's a short, comprehensive guide on how to pirate things online
Here's a very quick simple guide on how to steal audio
I look like this, for the curious
My Discogs profile, mutuals are welcome to ask for any CD rips! Also, my LastFM!
Mutuals can ask for my NSFW sideblog if they want (other followers can shoot your shot too I guess but no guarantees)
being a trans woman of color is incredible because "progressive" tme people will invoke my life and experiences to talk down to my white sisters as if they're uplifting me but when i try to speak with my own voice they pretend i dont exist
Oh wait my parents both have shows on the weekends but [bassist] ain't going with my mum 'cause he's got a baby due next week and doesn't wanna be on the other side of the country that close to the mark so the bass amp's still gonna be in the cabin, maybe I can finally actually show you all what my bass sounds like plugged in, hopefully I'll get the tab for Stranger finished in the next few days 'cause it'd be a great demo
My dad's said the amp actually sounds amazing with a guitar through it too, maybe I'll try that for myself as well
Accidentally stumbled across the bassline for the verses in Stranger On The Town and thought "oh sweet, and nobody's written a tab, let's go" but forgot the entire back half of the song is a totally different structure and it's more complex and the bass is way down in the mix and fucking hell I'm so tired and still have another minute of song left but dammit my parents have just gone to bed
Jesse shouldâve haunted the narrative much more than he did. He was a childhood friend to Xander, just like Willow. He was the guy Xander was willing to risk his life for in the second episode. He was the guy Xander was told was no longer his friend, just a monster wearing his face. He was the guy Xander saw explode into dust on the point of his stake.
How about instead of making Xanderâs hate of Angel about romantic jealousy, make it about Jesse. How come you told me to kill my best friend but you keep Angel around, despite barely knowing him, because you think heâs cute? How come you told me to kill my best friend but you, slayer of vampires, can fall in love with one? How come you told me to kill my best friend but you hesitate to kill Angel who has murdered hundreds, not to mention people we care about? How come you told me to kill my best friend but allowed Angel to feed on you, thus putting your own life at risk for the sake of a monster? How come you told me to kill my best friend, but were willing to chain up Angel and work to rehabilitate him?
Like Xander as a character could keep bad humor as his coping mechanism and still be an idiot about girls, but make him remember Jesse. Make him want to kill vampires more than any other monster because his death had to have been for a reason. Make his hatred of Spike because a self-professed âBig Badâ got more of a chance than his best friend. Make his attraction to monsters because heâs always looking to see if any of them have any humanity. Make him remember Jesse, his best friend.
Wish I were an actually good lead guitar player but I feel like my fingers just don't work that way, I just can't move fast and smooth enough for it
Like I can play various Mick Jones bits sure but it never feels or sounds as easy & natural as it should, Billie Joe Armstrong was doing shit on 39/Smooth I couldn't possibly pull off and he was seventeen years old
Open up the Criterion Channel puppy. Thatâs right. The one mommy pays $10.99 A Month for. Good little faggots want to watch The Battle of Algiers and Battleship Potemkin with me. Do you want to be a good little doggie and watch La Chinoise? Yes Mommy knows these films are on the Internet Archive but she wants to watch them on her smart tv. Please stop complaining we havenât watched a movie in weeks and Mommyâs Letterboxd fucking sucks. Puppy donât you dare open up Balatro oh my god.
âA Damon Albarn story⊠where do you begin? OK, weâre in a Parisian boĂźte. This is when weâre playing with Bobby Womack, weâre doing LâAlbum de la Semaine on French TV. Iâm talking to him in this club, itâs quite late and itâs quite quiet, and Damon suddenly just dematerialises. Heâs gone. Where is he? âI look round and heâs on the dancefloor, which is empty. I wander over to see what heâs doing. And they were playing The The, This Is The Day, which is quite an unusual song to hear in a club. âBut this is one of Damonâs favourite songs of all time. And when he hears it, he sprints to the dancefloor, and starts dancing â on an empty dancefloor. He was completely free, untethered. âAnd the female DJ sees this. I watch her do a double-take â âthatâs Damon Albarnâ. So she abandons her post â which is not on for a DJ â and joins him on the dancefloor, and starts having the time of her life.â
â Richard Russellâs life in 19 totemic tracks, The Face (31 March 2020)
Something I've been thinking about but struggling to find good phrasing for about systemic transmisogyny in Britain is how the law now calls it rape by deception for trans people to engage in any kind of sex act without explicitly and clearly coming out, except the law still defines rape specifically as penetration with a penis and ascribes higher sentences to it than anything else it classes as sexual assault
Like this new legal guidance is horrific for all trans people but the existing long-criticised misogynistic ranking of the severity of forms of assault means there is a higher tier of crime that (on the whole) TME trans people physically cannot be charged with but transfems can
a. Everyone, regardless of gender (embodied or assigned) is taught misogyny and must actively unlearn it.
b. Men â all men â are structurally incentivized towards misogyny. Men who want to be feminists must actively fight the societal forces that push them towards misogyny.
a lot of those lesbian spaces full of only TME lesbians are super racist btw ask me how i know. these are ppl who are absolutely drunk on having privilege while denying its existence. when trans women are in their spaces, they get dumped on and treated like shit; in the absence of trans women, they will instead turn their aggression towards the racialized women (especially black women) in the space.
I need us all to emphasize just how deeply intermingled transmisogyny and racism (esp antiblackness!!!) are. because I promise you, scratch the average transmisogynist and a racist bleeds.
as someone who was and is still deeply affected by actual purity culture i need fandom bloggers to stop using âpurity cultureâ as shorthand for whatever drama theyâve concocted around shipping
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and â90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the âculture of fatherhoodâ has changed more than fathersâ actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothersâ expectations and reality to âa largely successful male resistance.â This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women â who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting â by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel theyâre getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to womenâs labor. Men resist because it is in their âinterest to do so,â write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, âGender and Families.â By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing âa separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.â
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: âThe expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. Iâve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when youâre not being asked âŠâ he trailed off, and then said: âI have justifications. Itâs a cop-out.â
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and itâs clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that donât lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work âbecause theyâre expected to.â The men âcome into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.â
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didnât seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isnât âmaternal gatekeeping,â the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: âItâs important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that theyâre not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.â
The dad in Vermont explained: âI do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kidsâ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and Iâm happy to do it, but if youâre going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.â
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: âMy husband is a participatory and willing partner. Heâs not traditional in terms of âI donât change diapers.â But his attention is limited.â She added, âI canât trust him to do anything, to actually remember.â
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting werenât important enough to remember: âI just donât think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.â
Finally, some men blamed their wivesâ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. âShe wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I donât keep lists. I think thereâs a belief that if sheâs not going to do it, then it wonât get done.â (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: âWe fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.â)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: âIt has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.â
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. âHe notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,â she said. âHow much convincing of the other person can you do?â
All this comes at a cost to womenâs well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities âas unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,â one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings â and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than womenâs. Itâs up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
