Based on some of the anons I'm receiving, I just want to clarify that pastimperfection is not me. I have no idea who they are. In fact, I blocked them months ago.
if a trans man needs to hide the fact that he's trans in order to access any form of male privilege, i simply do not believe that is real privilege. i will, and never will, accept that the closet is a privilege. any queer person can go into the closet to access "privilege," and it's dumb when you all try to argue that bs too. are you not tired of making the exact same arguments about recycled queer groups every 5-10 years? nothing is ever new except the New Queer Enemy really IS privileged and evil this time, we promise!
Speaking of recycled arguments, you are recycling a TERF argument here: TERFs insist that trans women don't really experience misogyny, only the stigma that attaches to gender nonconforming (trans) people. According to them, there is no such thing as a trans man or trans woman, only male and female and obedient and disobedient.
if a trans man needs to hide the fact that he's trans in order to access any form of male privilege, i simply do not believe that is real privilege. i will, and never will, accept that the closet is a privilege. any queer person can go into the closet to access "privilege," and it's dumb when you all try to argue that bs too. are you not tired of making the exact same arguments about recycled queer groups every 5-10 years? nothing is ever new except the New Queer Enemy really IS privileged and evil this time, we promise!
That assertion isn't true, though. It isn't true that trans men can only access male privilege by being completely stealth. Trans men (and transmasculine nonbinary people) report receiving male privilege even in contexts where their trans status is known. In fact, nonbinary people report receiving better treatment when their gender presentation causes people to mistake them for binary trans men. So by your own logic, you should acknowledge that trans men do actually experience male privilege.
This is Nellie Small, known in the first half of the 20th-century as one of Australiaâs best jazz singers, but barely recognised today.
Nellie performing in male dress, sporting a wardrobe of at least a dozen tailored suits, ranging from bright crimson to pure white. From the late 1920s, Nellie lived with her manager Edith Meggitt, and Edithâs family. The two women were extremely close, and Nellie was considered a part of the family.
Check out our podcast if you want to learn more about Nellie!
We're back! Today's episode is on the Australian singer and male impersonator, Nellie Small. Join us to hear about the experiences of people
why is ut always "being fat puts pressure on ur joints" but never "being skinny makes u more vulnerable to joint/bone injury" like lets be real im not playing this game with u where u get to pretend u know anything about medicine much less my personal case . u are going to have things happen to u and ur body no matter what size u are and pretending fat people are somehow the only people who can possibly sustain weight related injuries PISSES ME OFF . be fucking serious
Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms â a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer âmay be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.
Taylor makes bagged greens, salad kits, chopped salads, the works. Keep avoiding supermarket greens, but keep an especially close eye out for this brand/supplier. The above list of grocers and fast food chains is NOT exhaustive, so please continue getting lettuce and other raw produce taken off your burgers, sandwiches, etc.
free use is kind of a funny kink bc it relies on the idea that everybody wants to touch you and have sex with you but what if they don't. what if you tell everybody at the party you're free use but they all ignore you and mind their own business
also we should absolutely question the show's choice to remove gabrielle, magnus and marius' overt antiblackness from the tvl book when the writers got armand out here acting like he's auditioning for kkk grand wizard. clearly the show isn't shying away from depicting antiblack violence considering the treatment of black characters in the past two episodes, so the refusal to depict gabriella, marius and magnus as the white supremacists they were in the source material, is a blatant tell- the writers are protective of their white characters, even the antagonists, and don't want them to seem "too" evil (which tracks for white and nonblack liberals acting like being called racist is worse than being racist.) and this clearly isn't a concern they have when it comes to the characters of color- armand has for 2 seasons now enacted forms of explicit violence inflicted on enslaved black people- louis and claudia's cut ankle tendons, the entire public humiliation of the trial, claudia's burning, louis' head on a spike, coercing him into a performance of self-debasement and contrition and branding his body- and claudia calls her black father a slave in a bioessentialist, derogatory context and expresses a level of internalized antiblackness she was never even hinted at feeling when she was alive. in both scenes, the narrative is much harsher on louis than on lestat and the nonblack writers go into extreme detail in their antiblack dialogue and racialized, borderline pornographic depiction of louis' torture. but gabriella is portrayed shallowly complimenting louis' beauty when realistically she would be calling him slurs when talking about him to lestat, magnus' "master race" aspirations and fixation on white supremacist beauty standards for how he chose his victim pool and "heir" aren't addressed, and marius' racial politics ("rotten boy", the whitewashed portrait of armand- we know he's racist, the show just hasn't acknowledged it and intentionally excluded the parts of tvl where he expresses that racism when talking to lestat) remain an elephant in the room. and ofc the way the writers are tryna be like "see lestat isn't racist, black people love him" in-universe through characters like merrick and paul (lol. lmao even) and tryna overwrite or dance around every textual example of lestat's antiblackness is so transparent in its clumsiness.
Was talking to a coworker today who explained that her grandfather was like Snow White âbut Californian. And an old man.â in that the creatures of the forest would follow him around and presumably duet with him.
âWhen he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.â
âAww. They were checking on him!â I said, like a normal person. Internally, I thought âMaybe you could do the thing you do with dead pets, where you show them to the living pets so the living pet understands theyâre gone. But I guess if you did that to a bunch of scavenging species, theyâd be like âWell, thatâs very sad but he IS food now.â So what youâd need, for human sensibilities, is some sort of transparent corpse barrier. Like a see-through coffin oh thatâs what the dwarves were doing! Youâve stopped paying attention to this conversation about the loss of a beloved family member you gotta phase back in.â
once i was in the TSA line for a flight and it was SO LONG that TSA decided to just drop all the security protocols. leave everything in the suitcase including electronics. keep your shoes on. don't go through the fancy 360 scanner, just the metal detector. get out of here. and i was like ohhhh so you admit this is all just your stupid community theatre production that you've made me be a part of for all this time and it doesn't actually mean anything real. okayyyyy
I really donât want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkisâ âkeep Tolkien whiteâ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isnât seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienâs âI hate apartheidâ valedictorian address being used as a âcounterâ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itâs only ever the âI hate apartheidâ line thatâs shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isnât exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going âomg we relateâ and expressing what is a very, very mild âsegregation is not greatâ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around âwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?â in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneâs own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist itâs anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck⌠and then getting really Pikachu-meme âbut theyâre misreading itâ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with âI donât see colourâ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely donât have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iâm not surprised by Serkisâ comment. I donât really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy âI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setâ âI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleâ Serkisâ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesnât exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response âfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letâs see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationâ. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. Theyâre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donât have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, itâs always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had âa few racist elementsâ but ânothing like the racism of todayâ. Of course itâs nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnât writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very âget thee gone from my gateâ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkienâs own thoughts on military atrocity is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkienâs âproblematic elementsâ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway âBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron⌠itâs the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidentalâ, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible⌠casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge âscandalâ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politicsâ˘ď¸, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didnât want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesnât need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkienâs few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And itâs just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they donât realy say about most other âcanonicalâ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic âloveâ? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in NĂşmenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and weâll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkienâs world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We donât need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting âkeep the Shire whiteâ Serkis soundbites and âhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!â news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal.
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