My gender sailed away @nonbinary-pirate - Tumblr Blog

part 3 of the 2023 version of this post: adult books!

part 1: middle grade books | part 2: young adult books

this is a very incomplete list, as these are only books I've read and enjoyed. not all books are going to be for all readers, so I'd recommend looking up synopses and content warnings. feel free to message me with any questions about specific representation!

list of books under the cut ⬇️

theirisianprincess

Everything out of this girl's mouth is gold

k1tty-wh1te

official-boob-posts

man what is this from

norondor

"So do you want to go out, or?" (jp) / "How do we relationship?" (en) -- actually really good college girls love manga

notahorseindisguise

the "came back wrong" trope except like... they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like "oh no... what have i done.... shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!" and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like "oh shes soooo weird" but shes just normal

mysticorset

Peer reviewed tags from @somanyofthekids

notahorseindisguise

NO its a JOKE and YOU DONT GET IT. ITS NOT THAT DEEP

hiveswap

While she was dead he put his memory of her on such a high pedestal that she could never live up to it alive

midnight-revolucion

alternatively‚ she came back perfectly fine but he thinks she came back wrong‚ because the tragic reality is that he never actually knew his wife

notahorseindisguise

im going INSANE thats MY POST.

tumbleweedtech

emintoomanyfandoms

Image ID/ Image one: Tags from @somanyofthekids, that read: "#she came back just regular #but his journey to resurrecting her changed him to such a degree that even his closest intimacies are now foreign to him #sorry dude"

Image two: Tags that read: "#the post came back perfectly fine but OP's convinced it came back wrong" /End ID

anarchopuppy

Here's uBlock Origin's official guide to bypassing youtube's anti-adblock popups, updated weekly. Please share widely. Don't reward google for their predatory anti-consumer bullshit

To summarize: 1. Get uBlock Origin and make sure it's updated to the latest version. 2. Click on the gear icon to get to the dashboard, go to "Filter lists", and make sure that "uBlock filters - Quick fixes" is up to date

Repeat those steps any time you get another popup (google and uBlock are having an arms race right now so it might stop working at any moment), and if you have any more problems, read the reddit thread for troubleshooting advice

elierlick

Way ahead of hir time. Hopefully, one day, everyone will have full autonomy over their bodies, making arguments restricting hormones a thing of the past. Get your copy here.

cantboi

Please know that if you can't afford a copy of this book, Leslie Feinberg wanted you to be able to read it somewhere for free so if you can, find a free copy by any means

elierlick

Feinberg actually inspired Trans Reads. From transreads.org:

In 2014, Leslie Feinberg published the 20th-anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues, one of the most influential works of transgender literature. The novel was a way for trans, gender nonconforming, and queer people to realize ourselves. It told us we aren’t alone. However, when the publisher went bankrupt, Leslie had to struggle to regain ownership over hir own novel.“I had to work to recover my rights to Stone Butch Blues. When the first publisher went into Chapter 11 court, I had to spend thousands of dollars of my wages on legal fees to recover the right to this novel… While very ill in Spring 2012, I recovered my rights again.”

You can read Transgender Warriors for free here and Stone Butch Blues here.

in-your-walls

Twin Peaks (1990-1991) / “The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness”, B.N. Harrison

beardedmrbean

Self Made Man

mylibertarianblog

Is this the one that went bowling and expected a bunch of sexist inapropriete coments but instead found a bunch of cool dudes that helped her get better at bowling and cheared for her.

beardedmrbean

One in the same, guys weren't even too terribly bummed to find out she was not a he iirc. She's their bowling buddy that's what mattered.

Trip to a strip club that didn't go the way she thought it would too I think. It's been probably 5+ years since I've read it but it's good stuff.

goat-yells-at-everything

And it should be acknowledged that she came out of this experiment with a crushing case of depression that, last I read, she's still in treatment fore. She has said that the world has failed men in so many ways that she couldn't even begin to explain.

She has said she is forever thankful for the men she met and befriended in this time. Not only are they still her friends but they've shown her a world she never knew existed and she's fighting to make a positive change for them.

Its funny how die hard feminists will start a project to prove that "men have it easier" and then have their worldview completely turned around. Nora went into this as a ride or die radfem and came out a men's rights advocate. Cassie Jay, director of The Red Pill documentary, went into her project as a ride or die radfem out to prove that mra's are all horrible disgusting monsters who hate women and ended up becoming an advocate for men's rights and good friends with many of the men and women she set out to hate.

You can't even say they went into these projects with open minds! They were SURE of what they would find in their journeys. They KNEW what was going to happen.

And then it didnt.

What they had, though, was integrity.

They went looking for a confirmation of their biases but when they didnt find that confirmation they accepted that, MAYBE, they were wrong. They didnt stop and insist this wasn't real and cling to their bias, they dug deeper and discovered the honest truth. They let the reality of what they were seeing with their own eyes replace the fiction of what they had always assumed.

That is incredible and should be rewarded.

Sadly, thats not how their work was received by their previous communities.

supersoftly

@goat-yells-at-everything Norah Vincent elected assisted suicide in 2022 unfortunately.

cock-holliday

I get what internet (often borderline or overt rad)feminists are trying to say with shit about how men never have to deal with x, but sooo many of the examples get shot to shit when you apply any other Man to the example than a cishet rich thin white guy.

“When have men ever had to worry about being killed for something they wore?” Black men. Gay men. Trans men.

“When have men ever been body shamed?” Fat men, balding men, disabled men.

“When have men ever had to worry about walking home at night?” Black men, gay men.

People reinvent “if men could get pregnant” over and over and when someone says “oh they do actually” it’s always viewed as hostile and not a potential intersection.

Like no, you do not have to coddle men, but men saying “hey I do know what it’s like actually” are not outright our enemy trying to center themselves, they are often extending a hand saying “hey I do get it too.”

cock-holliday

You get “men shouldn’t be part of feminist conversations” which, hm, and then you get “they should sort this out amongst themselves” but if it’s just men talking about feminism on their own then it’s an insulated boys club being misogynists so they couldn’t ever come to feminist conclusions, but if the group is led by a woman then she’s spending her emotional labor teaching them when the men should just learn it themselves but if they go do it themselves then they’re talking over women (who are not present, curious. MRAs much?) so they should have women present but don’t talk in the conversations because it doesn’t actually involve you and you could never relate to this, so frankly why are you even here? You should go talk to your boys about this by yourselves.

Like, if you think the most bland ass version of Men are so wholly irredeemable and inherently evil by virtue of either birth or identity, why are we even bothering with theory? The fight is over then! There is no hope for change, and things will always be bad forever!

How is this a revolutionary viewpoint?

Forget men of marginalized identities having overlap, the most privileged ass man is going to overlap with the rest of us, and it is as much in his interest to reject patriarchy as much as the rest of us, because unfortunately solidarity means “our struggles are connected” not “in order to be morally pure you must support my cause”, and so any man who sees his struggle as being linked with mine and strives to fight oppressive structures IS my ally because yes the fight involves him too

joshuadunshua

This has me thinking about Paulo Freire (& by extension, bell hooks) again. If you’ve (anyone) never heard of or perhaps heard of & just not read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I recommend reading at least chapter 1. It’s free online! It can get a little complicated if you’re not used to reading this kind of text, but his most important points are often spelled out rather plainly.

Here’s the excerpt I’m reminded of—

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.

Obliterate the idea that oppressors are not themselves dehumanized under systems of oppression. Freire makes this point over and over again.

(Another point he makes over and over again is that the oppressed, in addition to being oppressed, have also internalized the image of the oppressor in themselves, and see the image of their oppressor in their oppressed comrades. This causes both deep self-hatred and lateral aggression & violence.)

So yeah. We absolutely need to get the least oppressed people on our sides & in these conversations because they need us in order for them to be liberated and we need them in order for us to be liberated.

kahuna-burger

Just putting some thoughts down without reblogging from any specific post of the thread that inspired it...

When I became a mother, I knew that I didn't agree with the idea that parents own their children and have complete rights over them as such. But at the same time, I didn't think my son owned himself, because he was not mentally or emotionally competent to be autonomous and wouldn't be for some time.

What I decided, and continue to believe is that children are "owned" by their future adult selves and that as a parent I was in a position of stewardship over my son, on behalf of that future adult. (The term trustee would also work to some extent.) I had the power to make decisions for him, and even overruled his wishes on many (emotionally exhausting) occasions, but that power came from a place of responsibility, not privilege. And those decisions had to be made based on his interests as a future independent adult.

legsdemandias

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

legsdemandias

If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations.

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic).

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes.

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”.

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT.

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.

legsdemandias

Unlike Lolita, there’s not a lot of research about the impact of Fifty Shades of Grey.

If you believe that ~fiction affects reality~ and therefore the mere existence of a book that obviously romanticizes abuse would have had an exclusively bad impact on our culture...except it sparked a conversation about what abuse looks like, what respect looks like, what healthy sex looks like, what grooming looks like.

If you were on the internet in 2015 you definitely saw videos about cult behavior, saw posts about healthy bdsm, heard conversations about consent. A nasty book caused a positive impact. We opened our eyes and saw a gaping hole in our culture about consent and we started to talk about it.

Bad fiction, positive impact.

this-world-of-beautiful-monsters

Also Lolita is just, like, high-quality disturbing (and while fifty shades is far from that, it definitely gave the opportunities for important conversations).

legsdemandias

50sog is boring and poorly written. You'll get bored between the weird and uncomfortable parts. Lolita is a masterpiece and you will be irrevocably broken 50 pages in. You can't read it in one sitting. You'll have to put your head down every few chapters.

1968bullittmustang

I suspect Lolita had a similar affect on 50s and 60s kids, as Flowers in the Attic had on us 70s and 80s kids.

We talked about Flowers in the Attic all the time - in the morning on the bus, at recess, etc. And in talking about it we found out that some of our peers were in similar circumstances (thankfully not as horrifying). A few kids ended up moving in with their grandparents and a couple of adults even ended up going to jail.

Not a single one of us believed any of that would have happened without that book. Those kids would more than likely have kept suffering for years if not for life.

I personally hated the book and never even finished the first one let alone read any of the sequels, but as a well cared for and fairly carefree kid, it opened my eyes to real life in a way I'd never understood before.

I was probably in 5th or 6th grade when I read it because I remember reading Forever by Judy Blume at the same time. (another book that is often banned). I never stopped trusting the adults around me, but I finally understood that not all adults were trustworthy. I know even now it shaped how I view and approach the world around me. Because it also showed me that the more I read, the more I learned about the world, and the less I could be fooled by idiots, assholes, and evil.

While I do believe there are books that have questionable value, can promote harmful doctrines, should have warnings, or possibly research restrictions in some very rare cases, I do not believe any book should be banned. Because the moment you start, people lose knowledge and understanding. And then at what point do you stop? And who gets to decide? History is full of victors that got to decide for the oppressed exactly what they were "allowed" to read, and it's also why so much history and knowledge was lost.

Don't want to read Mein Kampf? Yeah, me neither. So just don't take a class that makes it required reading. But scholars still need to read it, so that the sins of our history are not so easily repeated.

legsdemandias

Again when we talk about ~bad~ fiction we need to also talk about approach and discussion. IMHO 50SoG is ~bad~ fiction, but we talk about it and it creates a purpose for that bad fiction. Those who enjoy it can enjoy the sloppy, twisted romance, so long as we, at the very least, occasionally say “yeah cg is a gross dude? i’d fuck him (he’s not real)”

autolenaphilia

Misandry is not real

Apparently some of the transmisandry/androphobia people have evolved into believing in just plain old misandry now.

Which is such an absurd concept, because we live in a patriarchy. Misandry is the idea that men are oppressed for being men. And the problem with that is that they are not. Not that men can't be oppressed, but they are oppressed for other reasons.

For fuck's sake. I realize not everyone has had my experiences of listening to men talk while they believe i'm one of them while actually listening with critical distance and being secretly horrified. But come on.

cw for discussions of rape, because i have to explain some things.

The father joking about shooting his daughter's boyfriends is a jokey expression of ownership over his daughter. It's the old misogynist idea that daughters are the property of their fathers until they get married and become property of their husbands. And fathers are still often a bit uncomfortable with their daughters exercising autonomy in who they choose to date and marry. The dad wants her to only marry a man he approves of. And that sentiment is expressed in a joke.

And like men are worried over other men being predatory and raping "their" women, but it's again an expression of ownership over women. Misogynist men view women as a resource men compete over. And are offended by rape only when it's committed by other men and they view it as essentially theft. Like until the 1960s rape was defined legally as only happening outside of marriage (and these laws took decades to change, these legal reforms just started in the 60s). Husbands could force sex from their wives as much as they want. The worry was solely about men raping women who belonged to other men. Due to white supremacy, this is often expressed in fears of black men raping white women, who are seen as belonging to white men.

And you can see this in how narratives of rape are still focused on the "stranger danger". The weirdo in a ski mask hiding in the bushes. Despite rape being way more often committed by boyfriends and husbands. The weirdo hiding in the bushes is a way of externalizing the problem of rape upon men coded autistic or mentally ill, which is ableism not misandry.

And the threat is not seen as exclusively coming from other men. Cis lesbians are still seen as women, and a part of lesbophobia is them being accused of being sexual predators against other women. That's not misandry. The fear over sapphic trans women raping cis women is just a particularly virulent form of that. It's particularly bad because sapphic trans women live at the intersection of misogyny, transphobia and lesbophobia.

Masculinity is full of fears about women being threatened by rape. But this is not a concern about men having sex with women without consent in general. If a man are seen as the rightful owner of a woman he can rape her as much as he wants. So it's not about misandry about men as a group. It's about other men violating that ownership, and the men who are bad in these narratives are viewed as such because of things like race.

These other negative stereotypes that men supposedly believe about themselves, queer people like me and the transmasc writing the post i quoted might view them as solely negative. And we do that for good reason. But I don't think that's how the men who internalize these ideas about masculinity sees them. Instead they are viewed as positives.

Their anger and aggression is righteous, men need it to defend family and nation against aggressors. The "stupidity" is seen in anti-intellectual terms as a clear focus on the facts and common sense as opposed to ivory tower academic theorizing that have lost contact with reality (such as gender studies and queer theory). Conservative Masculine men often have a fascistoid contempt for weakness (i wish harald ofstad was translated to english), so having little empathy for suffering is seen as good. Empathizing with women, trans people or immigrants is seen as making you vulnerable to manipulation from them. The narrative of the trans woman asking to be seen as a woman and be let into women's bathrooms to commit rape is a good example of this kind of anti-empathy narrative. There is similar rhetoric about immigrants.

And the thing about how men should either die in war or work hard to provide for their family. These things are seen as positive by mainstream society, men are glorified as heroes for doing them. And such work is glorified in a way that women's work is not. Like i'm a leftist and thus critical both of militarism and capitalist ideology about work, but those are the problem, not some mythical misandry.

Outside of some feminist spaces, (cis) men being masculine is seen as a good thing. And those deemed men by society are punished for not fulfilling them. Feminists see those same stereotypes as being bad. Masculinity does limit men, but it also is an expression of power in a patriarchy. It gives them a license to do horrible things towards women. Not just women of course, masculinity also legitimatizes violence against non-binary people, and even other men as masculinity plays a huge part in homophobia but also racism.

(gods, considering the rhetoric i've seen sometimes, I, a proud trans woman, will probably be accused of being a terf for writing this, which is basic feminist analysis. LIke people have no idea of what radfem ideology actually means, and confuse like basic feminist analysis with radfem appropriation of that analysis. Like the actual problems with radfem ideology like bioessentialism, transmisogyny and swerfery seem to not be part of some people's terf spotting radar. )

Speaking of transmisogyny, this is what made me really angry with this post, because it's personal.

I don't know how to put this gently, but saying that transmisogyny is actually due to hatred of men is actually really transmisogynistic. This is not the only post on the interwebs that do this, not by far, but it's galling everytime.

This is not even the worst of it, because at least it partially attributes our oppression to misogyny.

But this kind of rhetoric is still misgendering trans women. It defines us in the discussion of our oppression through the misgendering rhetoric of transmisogynists. It claims to oppose transmisogyny as it furthers it, gives weight to its rhetoric.

It takes transmisogynist claims at face value. Like the basic claim of terf rhetoric is that "We are just concerned about men hurting women, and trans women are men, so they have to kept from female spaces." And these posts just accepts the idea that this kind of thing is aimed at men, except its clearly not, because men aren't hurt by this in the slightest, trans women are. Men aren't seen as infiltrating women's spaces to rape them, trans women are. Men aren't excluded from public spaces by things like bathrooms bans, trans women are.

When you can't go to the bathroom safely, you are efffectively excluded or at least strongly limited from going out in public.

The problem is that it imagines transmisogyny as solely consisting of iinterpersonal interactions and hateful rhetoric instead of a system of structural oppression that turns transfems into a discriminated and oppressed underclass in all patriarchal societies.

And transfems is an underclass that don't have their own oppression in common with cis men, as this "transmisogyny is actually misandry" ideaimplies, but in fact are oppressed by them.

It's basically a claim that doesn't believe trans women are women, but gender non-conforming men. It's basically saying If trans women don't pass as cis, and are therefore misgendered as men, that means we are oppressed as men. It thus furthers the inherent transmisogyny in that misgendering. It ignores our womanhood to discuss our being oppressed as men. It's absurd since cis men aren't at all oppressed like we are.

Again, men can be oppressed, but they aren't oppressed for being men and trans women definitely aren't oppressed for being men. A meaningful solidarity in fighting oppression between some trans women and some men can be grounded in other forms of oppression that affect members of both groups like racism or ableism or transphobia, but there is no single oppression of misandry that unites them.

Cis men are just not treated like trans women are. Misgendering us as men is not giving us the male privilege they have. That kind of misgendering rhetoric is a way to hurt us with words instead of some honest description of the the violence that is being enacted upon us.

I'm not saying that gender non-conforming men (and homophobia against gay men is strongly related to that) aren't oppressed. But they are not oppressed for being men, they are oppressed for their gender non-conformity. And the hatred and disgust against men for being feminine is strongly related to misogyny, because being feminine or womanlike is seen as bad or lesser.

That's because misogyny is a fundamental part of how a patriarchal society operates. Misandry is not real.

hermannsprecursors

Poll??? Open ended hetagame poll???

Hey guys! So I'm currently writing a series of video essays meant to be a retrospective on Hetalia and its fandom, and the first video is about Hetagames. I intend on playing and reviewing 10+ popular Hetagames, and I want a general consensus on what you guys think the most popular/influential hetagames are! Thanks in advance!

mseirtaku

I'm sure you'll get a fair few Hetagame developers chiming in with some of the same hetagames I'll be suggesting, but I figure I'd put down as much as I can think of off the top of my head!

[ 'The Classics' ]

HetaOni by Tomoyoshi

RomaHeta by Tomoyoshi

Dreamtalia by Kyokoon64

Escape from Siberia by Miryuha

HetaHospital by Atomic-Crayon

Imaginary Nightmare by KingDespair

Hetalia Islands by Jezzica95

Hetapocalypse by Schwer-von-Begriff

These next Hetagames aren't as old as The Classics, but they're still pretty iconic within the Hetagame community.

[ 'The Well-Known' ]

England's Disappearance by Maggy-Neworld

Lincantropo by Itou Itsuki

HetaFire by LeanneVlogzFilmz

Home by angel-of-britannia

HetaGeist by Atomic-Crayon

Hetalia Floral Orchestra by Dream-thunder

HetaFear by Atomic-Crayon

Project Espanya by Quasi-Harkness

HetaOrigin: Redraw the World

Now, these games are more recent, but these are what I would consider to be the modern classics. Hetagames has come a long way since then!

[ 'Modern Classics' ]

48 Hours by BlueLobsters

HetaIpseity by Lilica

Mnemophobia by Asahi

My Friends Invited Me To Go Camping But My Only Experience Is Reading Guidebooks by DeathSquadOfficial

Shadowtalia by Rvi (Russia-Vi)

And because I love promoting my friends' stuff, a list of recommendations:

[ Eir's Favourite Games ]

The Lion's Path by Hebigami-Okami

Child's Garden by DeathSquadOfficial

Monochromes by Resoyani

Freedom by MapleSweater

Hungary? Like, I'm Hungry? by Resoyani

Judge, Jury and Executioner by BlueLobsters

Late For A Very Important Date by FandomDrowning

Hetà by Acquazzone (Tbh, I like ironically lol)

Naturally... I can't possibly list every Hetagame in existence, nor do you have to play all of them. I wish I could give exposure to every single Hetagame dev out there! But yeah, these are my 2 cents to this post, and I hope it was helpful enough~

spacelazarwolf

Is it cringe to be into trans men but not cis men? I’m a transfem and I don’t know if this is fetishistic but I’m just always feeling unsafe around cis men in a way trans men never made me feel. I feel guilty about it and don’t know how to explain it outside of that.

nah i think it’s valid. there are gonna be some ppl who will be weird abt it bc they’re obsessed with insisting that trans men are indistinguishable from cis men but that’s just simply not true. we’re different from cis men, so dating us will be a different experience, and that’s okay. it’s okay to want that different experience, especially as a fellow trans person. as long as you just treat them like a human being and don’t make weird comments about their genitals, which i’m sure won’t be a problem, then you’re all good. live ur t4t dreams.

spacelazarwolf

and like. i kinda have weird feelings abt fetishization bc like ok.

i hooked up with a queer person who used all the right language and did all the right things, but then they told me they only date ppl who were afab, regardless of gender. they’ll fuck ppl who were amab but they won’t date them, only afab ppl. the further we got into the convo, it became clear that the reason they only wanted to date ppl who were afab is bc we are more likely to have been socialized to take on the brunt of the domestic and emotional labor in relationships. that hookup ended up lasting over an hour bc they kept interrupting sex to complain about their ex wife. by the end i was practically shoving them out the door because i was so uncomfortable.

the guy i’m hooking up with right now is very cis and found me through the ftm tag on grindr, so he was specifically looking for trans guys. he told me he’s into trans guys because he likes sleeping with masculine people, mostly men, but he also likes the way vaginas feel. could that be seen as fetishistic? sure. does it feel that way to me when we have sex? nope. he uses gender affirming language without even being asked, he tells me he’s super into my body and gets excited when he notices that i’ve grown more hair or had a t dick growth spurt. he likes my body because it’s trans, and i’m perfectly okay with that.

i felt so much more fetishized by the queer person who was actively seeking out afab ppl to take advantage of essentially patriarchal trauma than i ever have by the guy who just likes trans pussy. so i feel like we just really need to have a conversation about what it actually means to fetishize someone because it very much feels like it’s just become “thinks trans ppl are hot” and i hate that literally other trans ppl are scared of finding other trans ppl hot for fear of fetishizing. trans ppl are fucking hot! our trans bodies are hot! it’s okay to be sexually attracted to trans bodies!

hazel2468

THIS. This this this, a thousand times this.

I personally think that a lot of people have decided that "being attractive to something non-normative" = "fetishizing" which... Is just blatantly not true. But it's how you end up with people who think that someone who is explicitly (and perhaps only) attracted to trans/genderqueer bodies is an evil fetishizer instead of, you know. Someone who likes that kind of body. Same vein of thinking as people who think that those who are attracted to fat people are all chubby chasers with a fat/feeding fetish instead of just people who find fat bodies attractive.

Like imo? There is no fucking difference between saying "Oh yeah, I really like guy pussy" and "I really like big dick and muscles." It's just what you like, and I hate that when someone expresses that they like something that is seen as "not normal"- not a straight, cis, white, abled, thin body, people act like it's a fetish or it's objectifying. Because what that says, at least to me as a fat genderqueer transmasc, is that being attracted to me as I am is inherently not normal and not good. And that is a fucking SHITTY message to send.

The problem with trans chasers and chubby chasers and "fetishizers" (and honestly, people really need to like, read up on what a fetish is because I'm sick of seeing it used as some bad thing all the time, it's not) is that they treat people as not whole people. Whether, as in the example above, they take advantage of actual or perceived trauma and behavior associated with one's assigned gender, or as a personal example, they're only interested in sleeping with you because they've "never fucked a fat chick and hear that you girls give awesome head". People who do that shit see the people they go after as experiences or novelties, or as something exotic. A sex object that they can use.

Whereas someone who is just into trans bodies, fat bodies... They just like those bodies. And they will treat you as a whole person. You're not a sexual toy to them- you're a person that they think is hot, that they want to sleep with. They care about you and your body and what you need. Again, it's no different than someone who dates people with brown eyes or cool dyed hair because they find those things attractive. It's just "this is what I look for physically in a partner".

teratocybernetics

'#i genuinely really like this post#because it is always difficult for me to acknowledge that i do have preferences due to this sort of thing#are they strong ones? no. but just the fact that they exist doesn't meant that i'm fetishizing something!!#however my brain and american purity culture are both mean' will smith gesturing meme goes here

invertprivileges

Wealthy, stay-at-home moms are a cultural lightning rod for anxieties about wealth and privilege.

The point is not that we should feel sorry for women with a personal chef and a house in the Hamptons. Rather, my goal is to illuminate who gets to be both wealthy and morally worthy in our society. In the modern-day US, our concept of meritocracy is inherently gendered. This means that women bear the brunt of negative judgments about wealth—and raises questions about what women “deserve,” and on what basis, that cut across social class.

…

Not bringing in money left some of these women feeling vulnerable. A parenting expert told me, of the wealthy stay-at-home moms she worked with, “They feel so guilty that they’re wasting their degrees… They feel so ‘less than.’”

Helen (a pseudonym, like all other names in this piece), who had been an investment banker and had left her career reluctantly, told me, “[I’m] well-educated. I had a career. You know, where is all that now?” She said she sometimes felt like she was “working for” her husband. She added, “There are power dynamics, where he’s the breadwinner now, and I’m really not. And yet, I do so many things for the family that you can’t put a number on it.” Her unpaid labor is hard to measure, and therefore hard to appreciate.

Bridget worked part-time, bringing in much less money than her husband did. She said he gave her “a hard time” about spending but felt free to buy what he wanted. She put this dilemma succinctly, saying, said, “I can’t make enough money to impact our life. And how am I ever going to make enough money to deserve something, if I don’t just say I worked for this and I made this money?’” By bringing in the money, men often get the power to decide how it is spent. Equally important, they also get the right to feel like they “deserve” what they have.

The other reason wealthy stay-at-home mothers are vilified is that they are imagined to be excessive and self-indulgent consumers, in a world where over-the-top consumption is often seen as a moral failing. Women, more associated with consumers in general, bear the brunt of this kind of judgment, especially when they are thought to be spending only on themselves.

…

Stephanie prided herself on being an attentive mother, making Halloween costumes for her son and baking “beautifully decorated” cookies for his school. She also explained in detail the stresses of managing their home in Manhattan and their weekend home, saying, “I’m the one that deals with all of it.” But, she said, her husband “thinks that I’m, you know, eating bon bons all day. It’s hard.” He also hassled her about spending too much, though she protested that she bought clothes at Target and cut her own hair and nails, while he splurged on expensive meals for his friends.

When the roles were reversed, women did not exert the same judgment over their husbands’ spending. The women I interviewed who earned more than their husbands, or who brought the bulk of the money into the household through inheritance, described this state of affairs as threatening to their husbands. Rather than control their husbands’ expenditures, they went out of their way to make men feel like they were contributing too, by letting them control the family’s investments or by legally turning over some sum of money to them. So the power dynamic here is about masculinity—not just about who brings home more of the bacon.

i feel like reading this article is a good way to test whether or not you have fully accepted that misogyny does not get canceled out by anything, including obscene wealth

plain-flavoured-english

“Not bringing in money left some of these women feeling vulnerable.” I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention the most obvious issue with being dependent on your husband for money: how hard it is as a “wealthy” woman to leave your husband when none of your “wealth” actually belongs to you. I put “wealthy” in quotes because of course these women aren’t actually wealthy in their own right; they’re married to wealthy men, which is very different. These women have nothing of their own, which is a very scary place to be in – living in luxury while knowing that none of it is yours and it could all be taken away at any minute.

I’m speaking from experience as someone who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood where the domestic violence shelters were full of battered women every night, most of whom would go back to their rich husbands in the morning because they were scared what would happen to them and their kids if they left. These men had the best lawyers and could take everything in a divorce, including the kids (a doubly scary option for a mother if your husband is abusive).

Money is power. When your husband is also your employer (as in, he supports you financially in exchange for which you provide domestic/emotional/childcare labor), that means he has the power to dictate what you do “on company time”, so to speak (which, since a marriage has no contract, no predetermined salary, and no fixed hours, is all the time). Many a man believes he has a right to dictate how his wife spends “his” money, including how she spends her free time, where she goes, what she wears, who she socializes with, how she raises “his” kids, and so on, because he’s paying for all of it. And the difficult thing is, so do we, because even without the misogyny we as a capitalist culture are deeply invested in the idea that paying for something gives you certain “rights” over the thing you’re paying for, and that naturally the person who “contributes” more should have a bigger say in how things get done.

gamebird

Lotta nuance here.

onethirdofimpossible

Hello friends, there's a dogwhistle I've seen used a couple times on tumblr that I want to discuss.

Fellow neurodivergents especially, please listen-- towards the end of this post I describe how some in our community have been using it without knowing what it means.

A fairly common antisemitic dogwhistle used amongst alt-right circles on the internet is being a "noticer," "noticing patterns," "pattern noticer," etc. I've seen this from a couple Tumblr blogs I follow reblogging memes and such that use this term but don't provide any context about what sorts of "things" they may be noticing.

Here's the meme that I saw a blog I'm following reblog last night.

Seems pretty harmless, right? It's a meme with a cute cat.

In alt-right circles, what they are referring to "noticing" is the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world/"noticing" evidence of an imagined globalist (read: Jewish) world order/etc. If you see a meme that uses terms like "noticing patterns" that doesn't elaborate what those supposed patterns are-- just leaves you to fill in the blank yourself-- take a look at the types of things OP might be posting. The alt-right has an idea that it's forbidden to talk about who might be behind the "conspiracies" they talk about (again, the target is frequently Jewish people) so lack of context is often a red flag.

I sent the blog who reblogged this an ask informing them that the meme was a dogwhistle. If you see someone reblog something like this, check what they've been posting. If this seems like an isolated incident, the person probably reblogged it not knowing what the term actually meant. That's why dogwhistles are so effective-- to the average person they look harmless if you don't know what to watch out for!

Let's take a look at how alt-righters use this term.

Here's an alt-right definition of it from Urban Dictionary.

Oh boy, this one gets a bigotry bingo for all the dogwhistles used here. If I miss any, feel free to comment. Here are the ones I found:

-Noseticing: Noticing plus nose, based on the stereotype for Jewish people to have large noses.

-"those who cannot be named"/skirting around saying Jew: again the idea that it's forbidden to talk about who they think is behind their conspiracy theories.

-"world events and agendas": idea that Jewish people have a Globalist agenda etc etc

-Degeneracy: Nazi term to describe the behaviors/people they find undesirable.

-Early life: refers to the section in a person's Wikipedia page. If a person was brought up Jewish, it'll usually say so there.

-Oy vey: a Jewish exclamation of exasperation that Nazis have unfortunately co-opted when talking about Jewish people.

Here's probably the most obviously antisemitic meme I found.

The title and first bullet point include the "noticer" term. This meme also talks about a "group" who controls wealth. Who might the poster be referring to here?

Here's a Twitter account with many similar alt-right terms. Explicitly identifies as a Nazi and ethno-nationalist, etc etc.

A couple other pages. I clicked on them to see if I could find any more examples but the first seemed pretty blank and the second... Well, I don't have a twitter so I couldn't view.

Let's unpack these a little. The first one has "13 outta 52," a statistic used among white supremacists to depict Black people (especially African-Americans) as "savage": 13 referring to the percentage of America that is Black and 52 referring to the alleged percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by Black people. "109 countries" refers to the idea that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 countries during history. (Which isn't entirely true. Some "countries" in this count are actually cities, regions, etc.) Some white supremacists may use the number 110 instead to suggest that it should happen again.

The second one has a blurb alleging a global sterilization effort and concerns of fertility. This is likely in connection to pro-natalism for white people. If Nazis want a so-called "Aryan nation," they're going to want white people to populate it, and so they encourage white people to have babies for their cause. Nazi Germany employed this tactic as well, even awarding "Aryan" German women who had four or more children for their contributions to the Nazi cause.

The reason why I'm emphasizing that context matters is that some neurodivergent people have seen this and co-opted it into neurodivergent circles. As a person who is Jewish and autistic, this is pretty alarming to me. I'll show a couple examples from Tumblr:

And

I've left out the URLs of the OPs because I want to give the benefit of the doubt-- they both explicitly refer to being a "pattern noticer" in terms of neurodivergence. And it's easy to see why introducing this term to ND folks would be an easy way to get a dogwhistle passed off as harmless! Since autistic people often have analytical minds, we often make connections that others might not be able to see. But unfortunately, using terms like this only makes it much easier for antisemites to fly under the radar.

Stay safe and let's keep Tumblr free of this shit.

animentality

libraford

I’m saying this from a place of genuine care: if you are seeing ghosts or shadows or having nightmares… and sageing, eggshells, Crystal’s, and psychics arent cutting it..

Please.. please… check for things like gas leaks, water damage, vermin. I’m not saying your house isnt haunted, I’m just saying that carbon monoxide poisoning looks a LOT like being haunted.

libraford

I know that, you know that, but when it looks like supernatural things you look to supernatural solutions and you might not be thinking clearly.

I’m having a conversation with a pagan mom right now who thinks that dark forces are after her, so she’s tried all the things that she knows… which apparently is not checking the hvac system for leaks.

libraford

Shes mad at me because I suggested getting an inspection because shes lived in the house for 14 years and she’s always seen things like this and it’s just gotten worse since she took over the house. Shes seeing entities, things are moving on their own, doors open and close on their own, people are being touched and scratched. ‘Mold and gas dont do that!’

Drafty house. Uneven floors. Pressure changes.

Toxic mold syndrome can mimic depression and anxiety, cause listlessness. Guess what extreme anxiety can do. It can mess with your head. It can mess with your memory.

If you have scratches on you and you dont know where they came from, see a doctor. See a doctor. I dont know why you wont see a doctor. They can tell you if it comes from an animal. They can tell you if you’re suffering from a mold allergy. They can tell you if you’re experiencing side effects of gas exposure.

I wholeheartedly believe in ghosts. Absolutley not debating that ghosts and spirits and whatever you think you’re seeing. I am posting this in a pagan facebook group. I 100% believe in ghosts.

I also believe in carbon monoxide.

Please check for gas leaks in your home. Please check for mold. Please check for critters. Like girl I believe you but please check these things.

libraford

She… got mad and deleted the post.

This is why we need to stress, and I mean really stress, that mundane explanations are just as important as superstitious ones, and why I genuinely worry about our echo chambers.

Yes, I know we all want to believe that the feelings of dread may be coming from an evil presence in the room, but also certain hvac systems hum at a frequency that causes confusion and anxiety.

Yes it seems reasonable that your doors open and close on their own because granmas ghost is still hanging around. But please consider that the foundation of your house might be shifting.

Yes, you might feel a sense that something bad is going to happen, but that can also be generalized anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder.

And being in a circle that refuses to accept that mundane explanations for supernatural problems feeds and triggers delusions. The pagan/witchcraft community is extremely neuro diverse, and these delusions can trigger spirals and put people in very… very bad places.

Please accept mundane explanations.

You are not ‘crazy’ for seeing ghosts and your house is not dirty for needing an inspection.

If you get an inspection and it comes back clean, you can feel smug about being right. If you dont get an inspection and you’re wrong you and your children could get sick and die.

Y'all I’m tired.

nudityandnerdery

This is relevant to something else I saw online today from Greg from How to Drink:

With a lot of things in the brain, we don’t have another person’s perspectives to know what’s usually experienced- this is why I know a lot of us have had the, “Wait, that’s an ADHD symptom?” moment. It’s never bad to check out your experiences with a doctor.

cosmicpaladintaka

as a person with fucked up funny visual/neurological stuff like visual snow and palinopsia (I probably need to get it checked out) yeah this stuff is not normal. Kid me thought my vision was so good that I could see individual molecules but naaaah it’s astigmatism and difficult to diagnose/mostly inconsequential funny stuff with my brain

zhooniyaa-waagosh

Additionally: physical conditions can also cause emotional responses. One of the most common but least talked about symptoms of severe illnesses (including anaphylaxis and conditions affecting your heart and blood) is a sense of impending doom.

That’s something I see people describe feeling in a lot of spaces, both religious spaces and ones dedicated to neurodivergency, and it can absolutely be a sign that you’re experiencing allergic reactions or that you have a serious condition that your body is desperately trying to warn you about.

theconcealedweapon

Science and supernatural forces are not incompatible with each other. Believing in supernatural forces does not mean you should reject science.

robotslenderman

There is a very famous Reddit post that illustrates this perfectly, although the supernatural was never suspected:

A reply:

OP updated from in the hospital:

This post is basically in the Reddit hall of fame now. Always check for mundane explanations. Always.

rubykgrant

(knew somebody who insisted their house was haunted and refused to do anything “normal” about the clearly dangerous moldy spot in their bathroom. I finally suggested- “How do you know that isn’t just the way an evil ghost is messing with you? How do you know it isn’t literally causing the mold to grow, as a way to cause you harm in the living world?” so they finally called somebody, who took care of the evil ghost mold, and their breathing improved. even if you 100% believe in something spiritual or supernatural, sometimes you need to deal with the problem in a mundane way that genuinely works)

madfishmonger

In the Wayback I recall a website made by a psychiatrist who had been dealing with people who believed they’d been abducted by aliens. The site was designed written in the same style as a believer site, but it suggested going to the doctor to have alien implants or government trackers removed, or to a therapist, etc, basically on the angle of getting documentation and proof of your abduction or alien interference. Of course this also gets you in front of a doctor who can see if there are more mundane explanations for it and hopefully get you help if something really did happen. Sometimes you have to approach people on their level with compassion and understanding.

Many of us still operate under the belief that was have conscious control of our minds and thoughts all the time, we don’t realize how easily outside forces like chemicals, molds, gasses, etc or internal forces like brain injury, hormones, or undiagnosed disorders can affect us. Accepting we can lose control of our minds for reasons we can’t control is a good step toward accepting help.

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