Day 1 | Failing
"If you ever find me, I hope you let me know"
Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
Misplaced Lens Cap

if i look back, i am lost

izzy's playlists!

ellievsbear
Mike Driver

⁂
wallacepolsom
No title available
DEAR READER
taylor price
Cosimo Galluzzi

JBB: An Artblog!

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
occasionally subtle
art blog(derogatory)

tannertan36
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
seen from Brazil
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seen from China

seen from North Macedonia
seen from Canada

seen from United States
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seen from Japan
seen from Brazil
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seen from India

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seen from T1
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@pyckionion
Day 1 | Failing
"If you ever find me, I hope you let me know"
pluribus and pgsm sharing a female protagonist who has to smile like an idiot as the most upsetting things happen to them or else their anger destroys the world. 😃!
you know i love these shots where the directors and/or rika mustve been like "now let's do a take where ami looks even more obsessed with usagi. ok perfff"
waking up old instrument skills from 2 yrs ago like wow...........1.5 yrs of serious practice does mean something
The term “erkek öldürmek” (Kurdish “kuştina zilam”, meaning “killing the man”, in the sense of “killing dominant masculinity”) was coined by Abdullah Öcalan in 1996 in a conversation with Mahir Sayın, a journalist from the Turkish left. Dominant masculinity is not a biological fact, but a historical social construction that must be analyzed down to the depths of individual and social experience and history and overcome in the sense of a free shared life. The problem is not “masculinity” per se, but the dominant masculinity of patriarchy. On this basis, Öcalan formulates the sentence: “Killing the man is the basic principle of socialism. It is about killing power, one-sided domination and inequality, about killing intolerance. It is even about killing fascism, dictatorship and despotism. This concept can be defined so broadly.” Simone de Beauvoir wrote the famous sentence in the mid-twentieth century: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Öcalan, for his part, emphasizes the patriarchal construction of masculinity, as well as the hope for change: “You are born a man of hegemonic civilization, but you can become a free man.” [...] According to Öcalan, however, it is of great importance not to leave gender identities to patriarchal definitions, but to emphasize the necessity and possibility of setting out to become free women and men. This re-definition of gender is not only discussed theoretically in the freedom movement, but is also developed and lived in practice in life together. The basis for this is research into the historical, social and biological reality of the sexes. Being a woman and being a man is to be liberated from its patriarchal aspects and redefined in its true diversity.
from "On beautiful men and love for the women’s revolution: Abdullah Öcalan's perspectives on killing dominant masculinity" by Lena Wilderbach of Jineolojî Centre Brussels (translated to English from German)
see other quotes from this article here
What do you mean about Kiki? I’ve always just heard it to talk about parties
different kiki! for some reason queer people just love this word.
"kiki" was a term used in mid 20th century US queer communities to refer to a queer woman who wasn't a butch or a femme. it was meant as a derogatory term. wiktionary has a list of cited quotes featuring the term:
"For example, Faderman views butches, femmes, and kikis as roles imitative of heterosexual models and not part of primary, unique lesbian sociosexual identities. […] In the 1950s and 1960s, this sexual identity is complicated by the flourishing of butch and femme roles, as well as […] . For their part, butches and femmes found these women “kiki” – neither butch nor femme, women who didn't know what they really wanted, women who were giving in to society's expectations regarding dress or behavior. […]"
Wiktionary has a quote from Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America but its kind of weirdly cut, so here's a longer version:
When a young woman entered the subculture in the 1950s she was immediately intitiated into the meaning and importance of the roles, since understanding them was the sine qua non of being a lesbian within that group. While some women saw themselves as falling naturally into one role or the other, even those who did not were urged to chose a role by other lesbians, or sometimes their own observations forced them to conclude that a choice was necessary. Being neither butch nor femme was not an option if one wanted to be part of the young or working-class lesbian subculture. Those who refused to choose learned quickly that they were unwelcome. In some areas the issue was very emotional. Shirley, who lived in Buffalo, New York, in the years after World War II, remembers being in a working-class bar and admitting to a group of lesbians there that she thought of herself as neither butch nor femme: “They argued with me for a long time and when they couldn’t convince me I had to be one or the other, they threatened to take me outside and beat me up.” Although the issue seldom led to violence, butches and femmes were often adamant about rejecting what they called the “confused” behavior of “kiki” women, those who would not choose a role. One New England woman remembers: "We used to have parties and play games like charades. The butches would be on one side and the femmes would be on the other. There was one couple who’d have to flip a coin to decide who was going to be on what side, and we used to think they were the craziest people." Another New England woman recalls that “kiki” also referred to two butches or two femmes who were lovers. They often had to “sneak it,” she says, because of the hostility of those who were committed to roles. Membership in her group demanded that one select a partner who was heterogenderal, that is, who took the opposite role, at least in appearance: “If I wasn’t going to choose that, I couldn’t be in a gay bar. I couldn’t be with gay people.” In New York kiki lesbians were also called “bluffs”—the word being not only a combination of “butch” and “fluff” (another term for femme) but also an indication of how such women were regarded in that community. Even in Greenwich Village, which in the 1920s had been a melting pot of all manner of straight and gay people, the pressure to make a selection and to stick to it had become very stringent. One denizen of the Village says that already by the 1940s one was expected to be either butch or femme. “Those who did not conform were contemptuously referred to as people who didn’t know their minds.” Such strict role divisions continued throughout the 1960s in much of the bar subculture, even during the era of “unisex” among heterosexuals; they are testimony to the essentially conservative nature of a minority group as it attempts to create legitimacy for itself by fabricating traditions and rules. One woman, who is 5’ 10” and of stocky build, remembers going to a lesbian bar in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1967, that had two restrooms. “I stood in line for a couple of minutes and then the girl in front of me said, ‘You have to get out of here. This is the femme line.’ She pointed to the signs on the rest room doors. One was marked ‘butch’ and the other was marked ‘femme.’”
I just wish we would be more honest about the history of butch/femme. As I said in that post, I think the radfem hatred for the terms wasn't great, but people talk about these terms as if they are holy labels descended from heaven which could never possibly be anything but queerly liberatory, & I feel like a lot of people enjoy larping as 50s butches and femmes without ever reflecting on the actual culture these terms came from and the real problems that were present, and still are today.
I say this as a person for whom butch identity was a vital part of my self-understanding and self-acceptance growing up and today. But I know damn well I would've been kiki as fuck in the 50s, in multiple ways. I know plenty of the butch and femme ancestors people idolize would've seen me and many others as freaks for not doing gender and sexuality "right," and there are clearly still plenty of issues in the modern queer community with exclusionism and exorsexism (and the behavior quoted above is, fundamentally, exorsexist). Maybe this is just a chip on my shoulder personally but I've been for years frustrated with the modern queer community's relationship with butch and femme as identities & them being treated as like, too pure to ever question and in constant need of policing to avoid being tainted.
#so this is the historical precedent for why people freak the fuck out over me calling myself futch#huh
oh yeah, if you've ever heard someone lecture about how futch isn't a REAL identity because it doesn't have the Rich Profound Revolutionary Queer History of butch/femme, it's just this bullshit repackaged as far as i'm concerned.
actually, continuing on that quote from above, the author talks about how many people in these lesbian communities honestly did not really care about being butch/femme and were just doing what they needed to in order to exist in the community:
The roles were also undercut by the fact that although most young lesbians went along with them, they actually had little intrinsic meaning for many of them. The roles might be merely the rules of the game that you followed if you wanted to be one of the players—or as J.C., who was a Texas “butch,” phrased it, “I looked around and thought, if that’s the way you get to belong, I need to do it as good as they did, so I made myself remember to open car doors and light cigarettes and all of that.” Because they were to some only roles, they were reversible under certain circumstances. One might be a butch in one relationship and a femme in another, depending on how willing one was to accommodate a partner’s preferences. The roles could even change in the course of an evening, as Ann tells it: "Once I went to an L.A. bar to meet this butch, and I was dressed femme. But she wasn’t there so I decided to go to another bar. On my way, in the car, I changed to butch. Butches had a lot more opportunities in the bars and I just wanted to meet another woman." To such women appropriate role behavior was simply a nod of acknowledgment in the direction of subculture propriety that indicated that one knew the rules and belonged. Sometimes there were complex factors operating in the choice of a butch or a femme identity. Surely some women selected one or the other not because of peer group pressure, but because that felt sexually most natural to them. [...] Roles were in a sense the path of least resistence within the communities of young and working class lesbians. They provided the subculture with a conformity and a security that answered longings that mirrored those of heterosexual America, in which all members of the subculture had been raised.
it should be noted that the butch/femme framework was deeply classed & middle- and upper-class queer women seemed particularly averse to the idea of presenting as masculine, even though there were some wealthier queer women who openly presented as masculine. their arguments were often not based around the way this subculture would treat femmes who loved femmes, butches who loved butches, or those who didn't want to play either role, but rather their own personal distaste for working-class culture, blatant queerness without attempts at assimilation, and anxiety over whether or not queer "female" masculinity was purely the result of lesbophobia & heteronormativity. not all women considered "kiki" were middle or upper class, but those queer women were far more likely to (for a variety of reasons) reject the roles, while working-class queer women often had to choose between playing the role or not having a community.
these terms can be meaningful and part of a rich history and important for people today, and also be part of a long history of queer people paradoxically trying to break away from cis-hetero society yet compulsively recreating its dynamics under our control, leading us to recreate the very same conditions of exclusion, stereotyping, exorsexism, and oppositional sexism that were built to harm us in the first place. butch/femme can be meaningful terms without us treating them like sacred rites. we truly do not need to gaf this much about policing the boundaries of these terms; we are just clinging to some of the worst parts of our community's inheritance.
tl;dr futch (or kiki / fluff if people wanna use those terms) is just as valid a queer identity as butch or femme & frankly if queerness means anything politically to anyone, we are obligated to be a little irreverent about these labels. take pride in being butch/femme if the label matters to you! but also humble yourself and remind yourself that these are just some gender constructs we made up & there's valid reasons to criticize them. if Ann from that quote can swap back and forth between butch and femme on a whim, if your queer ancestors were just flipping a coin to decide who would be what because their local community was obsessed with enforcing a new queer gender binary, then i think you should be allowed to call yourself futch as much as you want.
a few people have brought up that humans seem to really like putting people in boxes. & while there is truth to that, i would like us to reflect further on that idea a bit!
humans do like categories and labels, because we survive through abstract symbolic thinking and culture-making. but when we attribute this behavior just to human nature, we can unintentionally reify patriarchal culture.
i'd like to highlight this paragraph from the above quotes:
Roles were in a sense the path of least resistence within the communities of young and working class lesbians. They provided the subculture with a conformity and a security that answered longings that mirrored those of heterosexual America, in which all members of the subculture had been raised.
this attitude of "you HAVE to be butch OR femme" did not come purely from a human desire to create categories and labels and enforce them. it came from a culture where social relationships were already expected to be measured and controlled through binary gender role performance, and conformity to these roles is read as pro-social while deviation is read as anti-social. it may seem strange that queer people would act this way, but it takes a lot more than fucking other women to give people a whole new understanding of society and culture and identity. especially when you are being actively hunted and in a state of low-moderate-high stress constantly.
humans like categories and labels, yes, but there is a lot of range in how we can approach categories and labels. it is fully possible for us to understand the boxes we draw as constructed, blurry, imperfect, and adaptable. that we do not already understand the boxes we draw for ourselves that way is not the result of pure human nature, it is the result of living in a civilizational model that actively benefits from hegemony and rigid social constructs that enforce hierarchy and division.
it is important to highlight this as otherwise, "humans love boxes" can very easily obscure our own ability to change how we culturally relate to labels and social constructs, and makes homophobia, transphobia, racism, etc. appear inevitable. humans DO love boxes and we likely always will; the fact that we tear each other apart for engaging with boxes in certain ways is not something we should attribute to human nature alone!
weki meki videos
neighbor baby whose favorite word is "hi!" just had a "HEYYY~" back-and-forth with an adult
people really watching “shows”… 🙄 society is spectacle enough
i get when sound engineers say headphones take away from the listening experience in that the sound doesn't get to interact with the space you're in. but does anyone experience really frightening auditory illusions like so
when i had a psychoacoustics classmate who played their final project Just this kind of roomverb for the class. the world is so diverse
it's not fair i want to easily play in all 12 keys and have 8 registers and have the accordion be the weight of a feather
i get when sound engineers say headphones take away from the listening experience in that the sound doesn't get to interact with the space you're in. but does anyone experience really frightening auditory illusions like so
Queen Nehellenia
on the body's ability to absorb violence as a metric of male masculinity
experiencing the "no kind of power inherently has a moral value/enough of women+girls being depicted as not being in control of their own powers" and "let girls fulfill their feminine roles!!" plots at the same time is a little jarring. like i get the idea that mako is using Duty as an excuse to deprive herself of hitting landmarks (that others have already conditioned her to believe she's too "weird" to participate in) that r made standard to how a young person should enjoy life. but the scene of motoki and the kid was so sinister man she's 14.
they're making an argument for self-determination and her choices are saving the world and being a womb. ok girl
🧡🪐 ?
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.