Recently reblogged a chain of of posts which started with OP poking fun at people who wanted a "positive vision of masculinity," as opposed to just being a good person in a non-gender-specific way.
OP goes exclusively by she/her pronouns and, iirc, has gotten quite irritated in the past by people casually referring to her as "dude" or "bro." Like, being treated as and perceived as a woman plainly matters to her.
I'm not reblogging because I don't want to start a beef with her specifically, and obviously it is not a crime to have pronouns or a gender, but this is a type of contradiction I've encountered many times, where people make fun of Gender Specific Thing and advocate for a world free of the taint of gendered associations but simultaneously get very prickly about being misgendered or perceived/treated in any gendered way that doesn't fit their own self-concept.
(Possibly she is just specifically contemptuous toward masculinity but I am trying not to make assumptions.)
Yeah I'd prefer a world where gender roles just don't matter that much but they plainly do, to many people, including many who claim they shouldn't matter.
if you click through to the blog of someone saying dumb stuff online you will always find a lot of esoteric pornography, but unfortunately you have to scroll past all the dumb stuff to find it
this was on one of the Anne Rice writing method reblogs and its so good but i know people will take it the wrong way and i want to post it here to preserve and honor it. because theyre right, her writing IS mid. i really really enjoy her work but she is not particularly good at it. and i think that is the most important aspect of conceptualizing of yourself as a creative producer that is performing non-alienated work: how "good" it turns out to be has nothing to do with 1. how much of it you will sell 2. how much people will enjoy it 3. how MANY people will enjoy it and finally 4. the effort you put into making it. developing skill and taste are DIFFERENT tasks from the actual production. let this inspire you
I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but I'd imagine if you're mid but very popular, you're more likely to get weird and defensive about stuff. Because oh no, what if people realize suddenly that I'm actually pretty mid?
Where if you're used to thinking "oh, I'm not great at this, but I'm having a good time and I hope you like this thing I made" or "yeah, I'm actually pretty good, because I've studied this/I have a specific Thing I'm especially good at that some people want/wev" you're less likely to feel vulnerable over it.
I Might Just Be Average is threatening when everyone wants to be Something.
(It is not, in fact, bad to be average at something. You are, in fact, allowed to do it anyway. People can and do like stuff that's mid! Just don't be like this about it.)
What makes a piece of art or writing "good" (beyond how popular it is) is also notoriously hard to define in any kind of objective way. You can point to certain specific qualities something has and put forth an argument but inevitably someone will disagree that it has those qualities and put forth a counterargument.
I don't care for Anne Rice but apparently her writing has some quality that makes a lot of people enjoy it but that I'm just not tuned into. If I knew how to duplicate that quality, I would be doing it.
Obviously Anne Rice is also from a different time and being successful is often about being in the right place at the right time and producing the specific thing that resonates with the cultural zeitgeist at that specific moment, but there are still going to be multiple people doing it, and what makes one person's work resonates while another's quietly dies is often quite mysterious.
If you say "this thing isn't actually good, it just happened to get popular" you're still left with the question of what made it get popular while comparable works which came out at the same time failed. And sometimes the answer might be something like "it was propped up by the system due to the the author having connections within the industry, which gave it the necessary boost to reach a wider audience while many comparable works never got the chance." Or it might be something like, "It just happened to match the really specific tastes and values of the editor who picked it up and then passionately advocated for it, giving it the necessary boost." But when it's not that, when the popularity arises from some intrinsic quality of the work itself, I think it's only fair to call that "good," even when you personally don't see the merit.
efforts towards a "positive vision of masculinity" or whatever are so funny because what these guys are trying to figure out is literally "what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girls™"
There's a thing where people hold different expectations about you because of your gender, and then you notice, and it makes you self-conscious.
For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.
I see this all the time, and... As much as people are against femininity I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about how funny it is that women want a version of good behavior that excludes those icky boys.
Obviously it is fine for boys to have women as role models and for girls to have men as role models. Like, yes, sure, in an ideal world gender wouldn't be a factor in this and people would just emulate those they admire.
But the nature of society complicates this because men and women are in fact treated differently. A girl who models her behavior after men she admires will run into problems because she is not viewed or treated the same as a man. A boy who models his behavior after women will run into similar issues. Hence the desire for gender-specific models of virtue.
The reason to have virtues in the first place is to do good things even when they cause you social problems. You don’t need virtues to tell you to do things that make people like you.
There's a limit to how much you can do in a vacuum. Doing good (and just living, in general) involves interacting with others, often in situations where you don't get to choose who you interact with, and so often requires people to like you, or at least to not find you actively off-putting to the point that they will avoid interacting with you.
It's possible to recognize that a lot of conventions are pretty arbitrary and artificial while still understanding that they're a social reality you need to contend with in some form or another. Even when you choose to defy them, it's still useful to be aware of the specific ways in which you're defying them, because it helps you predict how others are going to react.
efforts towards a "positive vision of masculinity" or whatever are so funny because what these guys are trying to figure out is literally "what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girls™"
There's a thing where people hold different expectations about you because of your gender, and then you notice, and it makes you self-conscious.
For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.
I see this all the time, and... As much as people are against femininity I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about how funny it is that women want a version of good behavior that excludes those icky boys.
Obviously it is fine for boys to have women as role models and for girls to have men as role models. Like, yes, sure, in an ideal world gender wouldn't be a factor in this and people would just emulate those they admire.
But the nature of society complicates this because men and women are in fact treated differently. A girl who models her behavior after men she admires will run into problems because she is not viewed or treated the same as a man. A boy who models his behavior after women will run into similar issues. Hence the desire for gender-specific models of virtue.
Hi, my name is James Webbony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Space Telescope and I am a telescope in space (that's how I got my name) and I have a five-layer aluminum-coated Kapton sunshield protecting my instruments and gold-coated hexagonal primary mirror segments like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Lady Gaga (AN: if you don't know who she is, get the hell out of here!). I'm not related to the Hubble Space Telescope, but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm an infrared telescope but I am much larger than Spitzer. I have 18 primary mirror segments. I also study exoplanets, and I go to a telescope school in L2 where I'm in orbit (I was launched in 2021). I can see distant galaxies (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly gold. I love space, and I take all my photos there. For example, today I was taking a photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is about 500 million light years away. I was using my NIRcam, NIRspec, MIRI, and FGS-NIRISS. I was walking outside L2. It was around 1 million miles away from Earth and there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I unfolded my primary mirrors at them.
I have seen like three or four posts lately to the effect of "sometimes people will say a politically charged thing that isn't true and if you correct them on it you're being a dick because they're just saying things recreationally" which like. It's annoying for me also when I want to respond to a post to say "falsehoods aren't true", it makes me feel like a dick but. crucially. Falsehoods aren't true!
It would be one thing if you actually believed what you say e.g. that family farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture but if someone shows up saying that most large farms are still family owned and you respond "well yes but I meant the abstract concept of a responsibly run family farm not the literal family farms that exist, why are you so mad I'm just a little guy and it's my birthday" you're also being a dick!
It's wild how many people seem to think that winning a revolution would somehow be easier than winning an election.
This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"
And it's like. I'd be less annoyed about what are obviously people who are hurt and frustrated lashing out if they didn't act like I was a fucking fascist for saying "I don't think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually"
Starting to think all the backlash to the idea of the trolley problem is just people trying to hide the fact that, deep down, they know they would be too scared to pull the lever.
I suppose one of the advantages I've gained from having been in the military is that I went from a suspicion I would have the conviction to make those kinds of calls, an absolute certainty that I do have it. I've held lives in my hands, but thankfully I rose to my training and my convictions. I chose the best of the options I had available to me at the time.
There is nothing shameful about being too afraid of making the decision, in my view. But yeah, it's cowardice to project your anxiety by claiming the philosophical quandary itself is meaningless.
No reason to wonder. A ton of people openly bragged about how morally pure they were for not pulling the lever in 2024. They just hate it when you contextualize it like that and insist they were taking a third option to sound less terrible when their actions are 1:1 compared to the thought experiment.
If anything, the reason I reject it is because I consider the thought experiment ITSELF to be cowardly.
All human lives are worth the same amount, and any LOSS of human life is as large a tragedy as any other amount of lost human life. You aren't doing a GOOD thing by condemning one person to die to save four more, you're not even doing a BETTER thing. It might be the more valuable thing in a coldly utilitarian point of view, but from my moral stance death is death. You don't get to compare and contrast your way out of that.
People hate the trolley problem because it is inherent to the problem that choosing not to act is an active choice. That's why they reject the problem itself rather than making an argument for choosing to not pull the lever. They aren't afraid to pull the lever- they're afraid to admit that their priority is keeping their own hands clean.
I mean, my objection to the trolley problem is its applicability. In the real world you don't know who is on what track, and everyone is lying to you all the time about the subject.
One of the inherent issues with the Trolly Problem is framing. (there are others, like people acting smug over choosing the 'right' answer, which is also what people are doing when saying 'you'd be scared to pull the lever' but that's not what I wanna go in depth on)
If you asked someone 'would you be willing to kill one person to save five others' they would have to parse out the moral complexity. Who's being saved? who's going to die? The Trolly problem sets you in a minor situation where you have little if any time to make that decision and no way to gain any other information. It's a fast moving vehicle on a track and if you had the time to make a choice and think about it you'd have the time to swap the track and then rescue the one person who's at risk!
So the real answer is that most people would be stuck going 'Wait what are you talking about?' miss the window to pull the lever and five people would die! Because time sensitive question!
There's more. There's a LOT more, but again. Just wanted to focus on one point.
The discourse around the character of Jax, from The Amazing Digital Circus, is fascinating to me, in that both sides of it feel hypocritical and disingenuous in certain ways.
Spoilers for the entire show.
For those unfamiliar, Jax is a (now more-or-less canonically confirmed) deeply closeted transfem who spends basically the entire show presenting and being perceived as a cis man. Jax is also abusive, emotionally and occasionally physically, and generally bullies female characters the hardest due to having a specific contempt for femininity and associating it with weakness, which is also a big part of Jax's self-hatred, since Jax secretly identifies with femininity. In the finale, Jax "abstracts," which is kinda-sorta the digital version of suicide.
It is not hard to see why a character like this would be a discourse bomb. Presenting trans people as abusive is always going to be controversial, and presenting trans women as abusive and specifically as Unsafe For Women is especially thorny because a lot of transphobic rhetoric leans into the idea that trans women are Unsafe For Women and therefore should be kept out of women's spaces. Jax seems like an implicit confirmation of this idea. Jax is what transphobes believe all trans women are like.
But many (though certainly not all) trans viewers of the show find Jax to be a relatable and complex character, one who represents a cautionary tale and an actual type of self-hating trans person, even though it may not be comfortable to admit this. Gooseworx, the show's creator, is also a trans woman who has described Jax as her "self-insert," one who represents a dark path that she could have gone down.
So you have people saying "Jax is a transphobic stereotype which represents Gooseworx's internalized transphobia and misogyny" and other people saying, "Jax is important representation and you just can't handle any trans character who isn't designed to sell a nonthreatening and sanitized version of transness to a cis audience." And of course, this is heightened by the fact that we are living in a time when there is a lot of heightened visibility of transgender issues as well as heightened fear and hostility toward trans people.
I tend to lean toward the second view, because I believe that fiction is the arena where you are allowed to be dark and messy and problematic and we need outlets for that. There are lots of calls for complex and non-sanitized rep, but if you follow that up with, "but nothing that might promote a harmful stereotype or be used against the group!" then you are asking for something contradictory. Real people do frequently have traits that may not be convenient for a political narrative. Some trans people are mentally ill in ways that make them toxic or destructive, and this is not always easily fixed by the people around them being more validating and accepting. Lots of other characters are validating and accepting toward Jax, and she slaps away every outstretched hand due to her past traumas, which she has not disclosed to the others.
(Obviously, there are cis people like this as well. Perhaps the objections to Jax wouldn't be as strong if there were also cis female abusers who actually got screen time. A few are mentioned, specifically Ragatha and Jax's mothers, but they are not actual characters in the narrative. And the show's only other on-screen abuser, Caine, is a male-presenting but basically genderless AI who eventually redeems himself. Jax does not.)
Ultimately, I do think Jax represents something uncomfortable but real that deserves to be explored in fiction, and the people accusing Gooseworx of transphobia just don't want to deal with that messiness...a messiness that is, for her, coming out of a deeply personal and vulnerable place.
But I started this post by referring to hypocrisy on the other side as well, and...yeah, there is plenty of it. As soon as "trans Jax" was canonically confirmed, basically every criticism of Jax's character, including anger toward her abusive actions, was reframed as "transphobia." Her trans pain is constantly brought up as an excuse or a mitigating factor. Her suffering is implied to be worse than that of the other characters (most of whom also have plentiful trauma, mental illness and abuse in their backgrounds). The conversation is pulled away from the bad choices Jax made and toward obsessively spotlighting and dissecting any perceived hypocrisy or double standard in how other people (characters or viewers) judge her or talk about her and how it must be motivated by transphobia. Which also just rings hollow given that Jax was broadly perceived as a cis man until the finale, and many casual viewers who didn't pick up on the hints still perceive her as a cis man and judge her through that lens. Like, if you are actually highlighting biases in audience reaction here, you're highlighting biases against cis men!
There is a persistent narrative within the fandom (and specifically among Jax fans) that viewers "turned against" Jax once she was revealed as transfem. As someone who's been observing the fandom for a while, I find this narrative utterly unconvincing. I've encountered a lot of people who hated Jax from the beginning and didn't change their opinion once her gender was revealed, and I've encountered a lot of people who were generally sympathetic toward Jax from the beginning and, again, didn't change their moral evaluation after. Sure, some fans were disappointed by the reveal because they're androphiles who are horny for Male Jax and find her less sexy as a woman, but that's a different can of worms. I have not encountered a single individual who was initially a Jax sympathizer and then started judging Jax's abusive actions more harshly after the finale. Not saying these individuals don't exist, but they are not common.
Tldr version: Jax is, I think, a character who deserves to exist, who brings something to the table, who speaks to a particular thing within the human experience that some people recognize. It is also not inherently transphobic to criticize the way the narrative handles Jax, or to hate Jax.
FWIW, use of "performance enhancing drugs" such as steroidsbis supposedly an open secret in American Special Operations forces, where physical abilities are particularly important. There's even been conversation (from people who aren't political leadership) about a process to "responsibly" do this officially.
My understanding is that a lot of men in the USA do have "normal but historically actually really low" testosterone, and which seems like a real public health issue, but it's become a whole Thing for deeply concerning manosphere types who are very attached to a particular form of macho BS.
I have full confidence that Hegseth will act on this in the stupidest possible way.
normal: losing touch with reality whilst focusing incredibly hard on something
not normal: losing touch with reality when not otherwise engaged with something else. losing touch with reality to the extent that you can’t go about your daily tasks
normal: feeling numb after hearing some big news (positive or negative)
not normal: feeling numb most (or all) of the time
normal: feeling floaty or foggy after an exhausting day or week
not normal: feeling floaty or foggy for seemingly no reason, or when you’re otherwise not exhausted
normal: after reading a book or watching a film, it takes you a while to get your brain plugged back into the real world
not normal: you feel unplugged from reality even without having engaged with media intensely
normal: you daydream to pass the time, or when you have nothing else to do
not normal: you daydream as a way of escaping from reality, and it gets in the way of your daily tasks
(these are all on a spectrum! everyone experiences dissociation, but the key is that it becomes irregular when it gets in the way of you being able to do what you need to do)
Wanted to leave this as a comment: the definition of a psychological disorder is ALWAYS characterized by distress. If it doesn't involve [dysfunctional] distress, then it tends to be treated as healthy.
Dissociating due to exhaustion or stress is not distressing because it's not dysfunctional; the nervous system is protecting itself from harm in an appropriate manner. Dissociation that happens in order to protect the brain from non-existent threats, stressors, or misinterpreting 'tired' as 'running for your life' is distressing because it IS dysfunctional. The difference is important to acknowledge.
I love this post. I once said, “I’m not sure dissociation is always bad,” and the person I said it to looked at me like I had three heads.
I have PTSD. I am very aware of the bad kind and how it works. I was trying to think about and articulate whether the ways my brain tried to protect itself had any upside.
I still think they did. I am extremely calm at the dentist, for example, because I know how to dissociate at will.
if i could give one piece of advice to newly transitioning trans men, it's that it's 100% possible to find a community of people (including women!) who don't treat you as a threat, and the people trying to convince you otherwise are not your friends
You wouldn't think "don't treat people like shit because of their gender/sex, don't lump people into a hivemind because of their gender/sex and make generalizations about them" would be such hard pills to swallow in trans communities.
the trouble is with intellectual self-minimization is that there's an incentive for it -- never make any claims that anyone could take issue with and you'll never need to defend them and you'll never need to face-off against power-knowledge. Then again, I am seeing now how self-minimization could also be a more selfish way to protect beliefs that you worry deep down could be refuted by others in a way that you may find convincing. If you're attached to these positions and you're also attached to the identity of being someone with epistemic rigor, then you might avoid bringing these beliefs up in front of other people you trust and who you see as a justified epistemic authority for fear of having them confronted. For fear of either -- being forced to defend them -- even if you have a defense ready there's a social cost there, there's an emotional cost there -- but there's also an epistemic risk of being convinced that certain beliefs aren't justified. and being forced to abandon a position you're attached to, or forced to feel the ego-dystonic awareness that you're not as rigorous and ironclad as you saw yourself to be. and that others can see it too. I think, partly, I hold on to the notion of being a person who cares deeply about epistemic rigor because I hold positions that if seen at low resolution in bad faith could mark me as being part of a camp I don't actually want to associate with.
I also think that chains of logic built to defend positions from attacks (which are themselves motivated in various ways) are markedly different than the chains of logic one actually takes to arrive at a position, which is different again than the chains of logic you might present to teach people in an intelligent way. the pedagogic justification is different from the defensive justification is different than the immanent justification.
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