Bag Of Question Marks

Fair warning I don't often tag because I mostly blog on mobile :)

[trans-masked]

Very very obnoxious to me when a transandrophobe says “trans men have it better because they’re just seen as butches” in what universe are butches treated well???

[httpsawesome]

it is. sincerely really weird that 2016 nostalgia is a trend. like i knew this day would come but not for specifically 2016. the meme that year was about how this was the worst year ever for most people

[yaoiblackmold]

I don't have time for sex, I'm too busy running a blog that only 11 or 12 people care about

[bakwaaas]

so much of the mental health and wellness advice people give relies on privilege. for example a girl I know said ‘I don’t ever let a job stress me out, I quit straight away I’m not letting them mistreat me’ and that’s great but some people literally have no savings, no family support and no safety net which is why they can’t do that. being poor or otherwise socially disadvantaged is inherently stressful and depressing and people rarely acknowledge this. you cannot self love and mindfulness your way out of the literal physical reality you live in

[nick-nellson]

Barbie (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig

[voyaging-too]

I want to make a post about how hard it is to properly understand what's going on in another country, and how easy it is to misunderstand news coming out of another country, but it's hard to do without sounding either condescending or naive, so I'll start with personal examples and work my way up to it.

Once I saw a world map showing which countries have ever had female heads of state, and which ones were always lead by men. And Hungary was coloured in as having had a female head of state and first I wondered if it was a mistake, then I wondered if they meant the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empress Maria fucking Theresa, then I remembered that Hungary did actually have a female president between 2022-2024. It's just that the president of Hungary had been a ceremonial role for decades. Political leadership is in the hands of the prime minister and his cabinet, the president at best provides some symbolic moral leadership, but mostly they're just window dressing. Katalin Novák, our sole female head of state, never did anything but smile in photographs, and then she was discarded the moment Orbán needed someone disposable to scapegoat for one of scandals. Hungary has never had a woman in a democratically elected head-of-state leadership position, but if you don't know that, you might look at the map and assume our society is far more progressive than it actually is.

And this isn't new. The Hungarian State Socialist system really prided itself on social mobility, and despite them being a dictatorship serving their Soviet overlords, I'll admit that they did facilitate social mobility for women and for the working class. But real social mobility is slow and boring, it takes years if not decades to see the results of poor children going to school and poor adults going to night school. But the party wanted big showy immediate results, so they just picked people and put them in nominal positions of power, mostly for show. Look, there's young female factory workers in our parliament! Yep, because you picked them up and put them there, with like two months of "political training." They are backbenchers who do literally nothing, and the parliament itself does next to nothing. But an outsider who had no context, and operated under the assumption that actual political decision-making took place in the Parliament of State Socialist Hungary, might have assumed that there was far greater social mobility than actually was the case.

The thing I'm working towards is: always be wary and skeptical of a country's self-presentation. Even if there's no lie there, you might be lacking a crucial piece of context. There's such-and-such diversity in the parliament: okay, does the parliament have actual power or is it at best an advisory committee? The citizens get all these benefits: okay, who gets to be a citizen, is there perchance a wretched underclass of non-citizens? There's social security: does it apply to everyone or only to employed taxpayers? There's socialised healthcare: is it functional or is it just a barn where we put poor people to die? People have such-and-such rights protected by such-and-such laws: are they enforced or are people consistently denied rights that they are nominally supposed to have? (The legal situation of Roma people in Hungary is not that bad, the problem is their actual situation, which is in large part due to nobody enforcing the laws about segregation being illegal.)

[derovalfnolem]

[rocatex-deactivated20260317]

this feels like dragging around a mummified corpse thats dressed as a clown

[anti-des]

[nerdnations97]

Thank you for your service Ken

[bsaka7]

excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy

[sartorialadventure]

[jenniferrpovey]

The time this woman is taking to educate is much appreciated!

[funeral--pyre]

'Cause people tend to not get the memo: People acting strangely in public is not a danger to you. Pacing, talking to themselves or something you can't see, laughing to themselves, stimming, twitching, ticcing, making "weird" noises--it doesn't fucking matter. They're not your personal freak show, they're not broken, they're not a murderer and they're definitely not going to be fucking helped by you calling the authorities or anyone else on em. These actions alone are not indicative of danger to you, as a random person on the street. Shut the fuck up and move on, leave disabled people alone.

[starlit-meadow]

i miss when subscriptions didnt really exist and you could just pay one time to buy an app or some software, and then just.. have it. without ads. without recurring costs. without more paywalls. it was just yours forever.

[catchymemes]

[indigosfindings]

ads with fake close buttons where if you try to click close you just click the ad are vile. people who make them should be locked in a room with only fake doors & windows

[butchscientist]

my hot take for today: there are no facial features or facial shapes women can have that make them less suited to having short hair. we just live in a society which values women based on how well they fit into standards of white, thin, cis feminine beauty; the more women visibly don't fulfil those criteria, the less leeway they are given to deviate from femininity.

we don't say that having chubby cheeks or a round face or a big nose is a reason a man shouldn't cut his hair short; why should it be different for women?

[velvetvexations]

"Even cis men?" is the obvious response to my stance that practically anyone can be lesbians, and to answer with another question: are any cis men actually doing that to begin with? I mean, unironically, not as a joke? Because I don't think they are. Generally cis men aren't not going to sincerely identify with the term the way cis women and trans people will. Cis men essentially self-regulate themselves out of the definition without anyone needing to make that definition have concrete limits.

Whether it's WLW, transmascs who drove through Dykeville to get where they are now, or anyone else, you should assume someone calling themselves a lesbian has a good reason for doing so.

[cock-holliday]

The only “cis men” i knew to use the label are the ones who lamented “i wish i could be a lesbian but unfortunately im a cis man” approximately a month before Realizing something about themselves and I will always ALWAYS maintain that being gentle about what that could mean for them is the right answer and not “omg you’re trying to prey on lesbians”

The two types of people to “jokingly” identify as a label:

1. Asshole trying to be edgy. If youre mad they double down, if you go ok ill call you that, they freak out and distance themselves from the label

2. Someone trying to figure themselves out

In both scenarios, using what they insist they are brings out the best outcome, and assuming someone is a 1 when they are a 2 and being hostile will only (shockingly) make it harder for them to come to terms with their identity

[sylas-dove]

and of course, i've said this before, but: if a cis man genuinely identifies with the label "lesbian" and is NOT joking about it, who cares? if someone feels like their attraction to women is queer even if they are ostensibly cisgender, that's none of my business and it's weird that people think it's theirs. what happened to the era of not asking people invasive questions about their gender, genitals, and sexuality?

[paniknatari]

Additionally- cis is a spectrum just as much as the rest of it. A cis guy could be like (imagine a pinched fingers emoji here) this close to being nonbinary such that the distinction is meaningless. A cis guy could be bigender about it, or agender about it, and still consider themselves cis enough to count. A cis guy could be a system, with girls in it. A cis guy could have an unusual romantic attraction, or particular sexual preferences or something, that fall more in line with lesbians than anything else. A cis guy can be drag queen for drag queen or something, and tbh that's not *not* lesbian imo.

[catasters]