#concepts and understandings of gender actually makes me feel that bit more human which is also a thing I have never truly felt comfortable | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inkskinned · 6 months

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you have to be sexy but you have to be sexy in a way that's kind of bloody. you learn this early because you are wearing a ruffled skirt and the snow around your ankles kicks little sand particles against your calves. baby's first catcall. welcome to sexiness! welcome to the eyesore of your own body!

you have to be sexy like high heels. like sculpted eyebrows. like lean stomach and highly treated hair. you have to be sexy like youth is sexy, which means you have to be sexy like boxtox and plastic. a 30 year old can be sexy but she's not going to be bloody, and they like the bloodiness of it. a 30 year old is sexy when she is a whiskey glass and a wooden desk.

but you need to be sexy like an open mouth. you need to be sexy like a bitten apple. like plucked skin and white-knuckling the waxing kit.

so sex is a performance, not an enjoyment. for a while, you just assumed everyone else was also in on the joke - nobody actually likes sex that much, right? like, some men probably do, but why would you? it is like a gender - your gender is sexy. your gender is the performance of sex. you are thigh highs and garter belts. which, to be fair, do make you feel sexy.

part of what does make sex good is that you can tell that other people want you, which means the performance of sexiness is both bloody and wanted, which is good, which means you are winning at having a body. being wanted is the prize. being wanted is the thing you are searching for, not hope. you think you are looking for a soft grave in easy loam, but that is bloody but not sexy. to be sexy you must be bloody like a red open sign. bloody like a handprint. this will make you wanted.

any wanted or unwanted body is subject to supply and demand, which is to say that the more demand, the better you are valued. you must be highly demanded to be valued. this is stated in matter-of-fact by some men. sometimes it is a priest that says it, and sometimes it is a podcaster, and sometimes it is the 45th president of the united states of america.

(if you do not have any experience with being told your value, i want you to grab the nearest bird to you and i want you to crush it into a thin paste in your hand. spit into the center, and then hold your fingers closed tight around it for days and days, long after the rot has set in. feel bones itch inside of your fist. this is only a fraction of what it actually feels like, but it will suffice for a moment.)

good sex feels like you have earned their desperation. you have earned your own value. for a while you operated under the understanding that everyone knew about the power structure, even him. that their desire to take you - the violence of it - means that you must desire to be caught. little prince, guardian fox - you would rather have cut your own arm off. you liked the secret, cunning little voice you keep tucked into a box. you think you are fucking me. i am not even here right now. you are fucking what i conned you into perceiving. this is a painting, not a person. dominion over the body before all things.

so you bend your body like a wheat shaft and learn the steps so perfectly that it almost seems graceful. (if you do not have experience faking your own connection to your body and sexuality, cut each of your articles of clothing just a little bit incorrectly. pour fishbones into each of your meals. this way, you will experience the average noon on a tuesday.)

you have to be sexy like light spilled over a desk, but not desperate. not a noose. you can't be sexy like an electric guitar, you are the acoustic. you have to be on top of the bull but you can't have control over the animal.

okay, okay. the little rabbit of your heart went to sleep so long ago that winter has ravaged your concept of the human soul. there's something very-bad inside you, something that has taken over, a little fetid and rabid animal, angry and hurting and willing to bite first.

oh but even that's a pain that's sexy. open your mouth. be careful not to let the canines show.

#spilled ink #writeblr #warm up #the reason i tag warm up on so much is bc often i write them between me doing other things so im mostly telling myself to come back and edi #bc i rarely have time to check for typos lol #this is partially about compulsory heterosexuality btw #and why it took me so long to realize im a lesbian #i just assumed sex wasn't really supposed to be that good #been reading feminist lit and u can always tell

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pocketsizedquasar · 9 months

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thoughts about jon, gender, n hair

aka i've literally wanted to write a fic centered around this concept for like over two years but. well. anyway. i still might write the fic at some point but lord knows when that'll happen so in the meantime here are my jon jarchivist headcanons centered around hair and gender, ft. my personal flavor of jon: persian, w/ a white grandmother, n amab nonbinary transneutral/transfemme

⁃ jon's hair was always kept short as a kid. short hair was for boys, his grandmother had said, and besides, she didn't have the desire nor energy to learn how to care for his thick persian curls; the shorter they were, the less tangled and unruly, the better.

⁃ jon explored some more fem/gnc presentation in college, some of which included growing out his hair. he attributed it back then more to just the fact that he was exploring his queerness (in a bi and ace sense) in general & that he spent a lot of time around georgie (also transfemme), and didn't really think about the actual gender accompanying it -- he wasn't actively thinking much about his own gender. questioning and coming to terms with his sexuality was already a lot.

⁃ but he liked the way his hair looked and felt long. he liked the quiet rebellion of it. he liked the way georgie ran her fingers through it. he liked how many different ways it could be worn long -- in ponytails and buns and braids and just loose down his back. he doesn't remember much of his mom, but he's seen in pictures her long, dark, curly hair, just like his now, and he likes the reminder.

⁃ he keeps it long after college, though upon getting hired as a researcher at the magnus institute, he has a bit of a crisis over whether or not to cut it, re: standards of white cishetero "professionalism" and decorum and masculinity, all of which he's doing his best to perform. maybe even early on in his research days he cuts it a bit and decides it makes him feel so bad (for some inexplicable reason) that he decides to just leave it long, though tidy and brushed and straightened and pulled high up into a tight bun so it looks neat and out of the way and functionally short anyway.

⁃ similar thing happens when he gets promoted to archivist. i personally like him deciding not to cut it here because i like him being allowed to keep one (1) thing, though i def understand other hc's where he does cut it short for S1 / being the archivist. he's still very much keeping it pulled up in a tight bun and out of the way, and removes anything else remotely feminine about his appearance -- earrings, more fem clothing, nailpolish, etc.

⁃ i read mossy's @coulson-is-an-avenger "shopping for gender in a british wal-mart" fic like 2.5 years ago and i still love it so much and it's still canon to me basically re: he tries a skirt Once to work at the sort of peak sweet point where he's settled in enough to feel comfortable trying to wear a skirt but not yet paranoid enough about Prentiss. sasha talks w him about gender and femininity and stuff, though he's not quite ready to confront it yet.

⁃ then prentiss/season 2 hits and he regresses again hard into self-defense mode; the performative masculinity goes Harder. his hair is still long but it's messy; thick curls and flyaway strands frizzing about his sleep deprived and paranoid face.

⁃ by the time s3 rolls around, everything else in his life has gone to shit, so mostly he's just like "fuck it" re: his presentation in general, including his gender presentation. there's also a sense of just.. "this it the one thing in my life I have control over," so he sort of starts just wearing whatever. even if he's not really acknowledging the actual gender feelings to himself. but his hair and his clothes are One thing he can control about himself, one thing the watcher can't really take away from him. so with s3-s4 it's like. yeah he feels like he's becoming less and less human and yeah he's being kidnapped once a month and yeah the world is going to end but at least he can wear a goddamn skirt.

⁃ i do think there's also an element of it too where, there's obvious anxiety and concern about him being a visibly brown and trans/gnc person in fucking London of all places, but as time goes on i do think there's a bit of like. even if i face violence for this what does it matter. i hardly leave the archives anyways, and even then, would that really be anything? in the face of everything else that's happened?

⁃ in the safehouse jon and martin (who to me is a trans man btw) talk about gender a bunch and Jon realizes they want to try using both he and they pronouns and maybe jon decides they want to do some more feminine things, want to try wearing skirts and maybe painting their nails again and martin braids flowers into their hair and things are good

⁃ and then season 5 and the apocalypse hits.

⁃ for the first little while in the safehouse jon's hair is still long. but before they leave, he cuts it, for several reasons -- first like, if keeping it long and presenting femininely was partially about control for Jon, this is them letting Go of that, of what he perceives to have just been an Illusion control. yeah it might make them a bit dysphoric but so what, my body was never mine tobegin with.

⁃ and i think he's also doing it as a mental preparation for leaving the cabin, after jon and martin have had the initial talk about eventually leaving. long hair is a liability; hair can get pulled on and tugged on when being kidnapped and grabbed at; hair can be drenched in shampoo and twisted by plastic hands; hair can be tangled and snag on the walls of a coffin; it can be full of dirt days and days later; hair is a hassle and a hazard and an illusion of control and above all it was a comfort to jon and this is no longer a world where you can trust comfort, martin.

⁃ martin walks in on jon in the bathroom staring at themself in the mirror with a pair of scissors. they ask martin to cut it for them. (martin gets a haircut too, in a show at solidarity and some levity. also undercut martin rights)

⁃ anyway, Somewhere Else Jon wears flowy dresses and grows his hair long and leaves lipstick stains on martin's face when they kiss and hikes his skirts up above his knees when they work in the garden and their hair is long and dark and thick and curly and he likes it; likes the way it looks and feels, the way martin runs his fingers through it, the way it reminds him of his mother and the way it makes him smile at the person they see standing in the mirror.

⁃ and it's good. it's really good.

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queer-reader-07 · 3 months

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op could you elaborate on the she/her muriel thing. because i totally get what you mean but i find it so hard to articulate why... its just like. mmmmm. canon they/them character. but you wont respect their prns. but then again i enjoy when people get genderwierd w the ineffable spouses. would you respect my prns if you cant even respect a fictional character. is that the same thing. idk.

hi anon! i'll try best to elaborate, but apologies in advance if it comes off a bit... intense?

to give some context to my words:

i am nonbinary

i am afab

my pronouns are they/them

most everyone with the exception of close friends and people on the internet misgender me with she/her pronouns because they perceive me as a woman.

i think the root of it for me is that muriel has no experience interacting with earth, let alone humans, before they're sent down to be Inspector Constable. and because they have no experience with humans, they most definitely have very little context for the human construct that is gender. muriel's pronouns are they/them because those are the default gender neutral pronouns in english. muriel (like the other angels and demons) is referred to with they/them pronouns because, for all intents and purposes, they don't have gender.

whereas aziraphale and crowley (and even gabriel to a certain extent) have interfaced with humanity enough to have developed some level of understanding regarding gender, and possibly even an understanding of what they want their gender to be/be perceived as.

additionally, crowley and aziraphale play with gender in a way that feels very intentional to me.

crowley has canonically, in the show, presented femme. meta writers far more skilled than me have examined how, during the crucifixion scene, crowley is very obviously dressed more like the women in the background than the men. and it's not just in the historical flashbacks that we see crowley's genderfuckery. his modern look is comprised of a combination of femme and masc pieces. he wears a woman's cut waistcoat and his "11 years ago" look features women's sunglasses. all while inhabiting a decidedly man-shaped body.

i'm also just going to remind the audience that crowley outright denies being "a lad" in season 2. he straight up told us he's not A Dude.

aziraphale's genderfuckery is definitely less obvious and some might say debatable. that being said, i would make the argument that aziraphale's tendency to dress and present in a way that results in him being almost universally perceived as not only A Gay Man, but an effeminate gay man at that, is a quintessential example of gender as performance. and i do believe that aziraphale is making a very conscious and deliberate choice to present as a gay man. for fuck's sake he calls himself THE Southern Pansy, he knows what he's doing.

also, i know it didn't actually happen, but we almost got both of them presenting femme in the 60s so like. there's that too.

so, to me, it's ok to fuck around with crowley and aziraphale's genders in fanfic and art and the like because they do so canonically. the book makes it very clear that they are "man-shaped" but not necessarily men, ie they have chosen bodies that are perceived as being A Gender but that doesn't mean they technically are.

whereas muriel does not. muriel doesn't have a concept of gender because they haven't been on earth or around humans long enough to develop one. they are only ever referred to with gender neutral language. so it just feels really gross to me when people choose to she/her them. because to me it feels like saying "well this body that appears woman-shaped to me must mean they are a woman" which is a sentiment i, unfortunately, know all too well.

muriel is a character that is canonically referred to with they/them pronouns, on a major TV show on a major streaming platform no less. so it really fucking sucks to see people disregard that because they "can't remember to they/them muriel" or because they "seem like they use she/her."

to put it bluntly, every single argument i've ever read in favor of she/her-ing muriel has boiled down to "i just can't be bothered to remember they use they/them" and if you can't use a fictional characters pronouns correctly then i have zero faith you can use a real person's pronouns correctly. all i hear when i read those arguments is "i can't be fucked to do the bare minimum of gendering trans people correctly."

and lastly, i know it's genderfuckery when people she/her aziraphale and crowley because they're "man shaped" in the book and played by male actors in the show. but i don't have much faith that it's genderfuckery when people she/her muriel because i can almost guarentee it happens for no other reason than the fact that Quelin Sepulveda is a woman.

#wow that got long really fast #i hope this provided some amount of insight and wasn't too confusing #asks #my asks #answered asks #good omens #muriel #muriel good omens #kind of good omens meta

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p0th · 10 months

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ik im probably rlly late to the party but what is objectum, like is it a role play thing, is it a coping thing? I need someone to explain it to me like im 5 bc i genuinely just don't understand what it is lol

So the literal definition of being objectum is someone who's attracted to inanimate objects, whether that be platonic, romantic, sexual, or somethin else. However, looking at it with only its literal definition doesn't really account for the intricacies that such a label brings.

I just want to point out that while some people see objects as alive (the label for that being POSIC), others dont. Animism is also a similar term for where people percieve inanimate things as having souls. Personally, I dont see my object as alive, but do sometimes use gendered terms to describe them and feel comforted by their presence. People can also be objectum and be attracted to actual people too.

Being objectum is also more common in autistic people. Object personafication is a common trait seen in autism and other disorders and i can see how that can lead people to being objectum. Though I have never been formally diagnosed with anything, i am probably neurodivergent & maybe that has a part in me identifying as objectum idk!! Theres a study on autism in objectum ppl here if u want to glance over it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56449-0

For me, I started using the objectum label coincidentally around the time I started finally figuring out that i was aroace and not attracted to real people. I realized that the love I feel for my friends is equivalent to the love I feel for my hobbies and interests which was also the same love i felt towards certain objects. I drew this out cuz i think its a lil confusing how im saying it LOL. Theres also a thing called "conceptum" which is the attraction to concepts which I think i actually fall more into, but I just go by objectum because it is more general.

You know how people will swear they have this great relationship with nature? How they feel so so connected to plants and how they love watching the ocean and how they wish they could live outside forever because the forest is a part of their flesh and blood? How they feel more alive feeling the earths fresh air and how nature teaches them things they never even knew about themselves? okay, so, why is this normal to say but once u turn it around into something that’s an object it is insane talk!! I feel like there's this interesting dynamic where its okay to be super attached to nature but kinda weird to be super attached to inanimate things but i think i am rambling & getting off topic!!!

Personally, I dont really have objects that im attracted to in the same way I would be attracted to a human. It is very broad for me. Others though, have certain objects that they really like and thats fine. For me, going by that label just makes me comfortable even if i dont fit into the literal definition. I like computers in general, not just my own personal computer. Objectum for me is just another way to say that my love for inanimate things can be just as great as my love for animate things. Theres just so much complexity and nuance in it that it is hard to describe unless you've experienced it yourself.

As for it being a coping thing, I've heard some people say its a result of not being able to trust people due to past trauma, but i dont believe that's necessarily true for the majority of people and not too good to generalize. Ive grown up surronded by friends and in a loving environment and am able to maintain relationships with living people, but also use the label of objectum because it makes me comfortable.

I can very much see how someone can look at someone saying theyre attracted to objects and just cringe a little bit and thats okay LOL. At this point, I have been exposed to so many concepts -being online so much and surrounded by so many diverse people- that i just dont even pay it mind. But, I know a lot of people have literally never heard of this label before and are just weirded out by it. I think honestly people need to think about the limitless potential a relationship can be when in the hands of such a complex being as a human. At the end of the day though, it doesn't hurt anyone but its also okay to be a lil unsure of it as an outsider. Just be kind to others!!

Im sorry if this is a bit of word vomit, if u cant tell i got a lil too into it & my thoughts tend to be rlly scattered LOL. thank u 4 the ask & plz let me know if u need any clarity on anythin cuz i know i am very hard to follow at times !!!

#ok to reblog #ask #objectum #os/or #WHY DID I WRITE SO MUCH #i didnt proof read this either so plz ignore any mistakes ToT #just know everyones experience is different #also sorry if u have like. no background on this stuff i kinda just presumed u knew the basic idea </3 #also also i did not know what u meant by roleplay sorry!!!

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yanderes-galore · 2 years

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i gotchu boo, how about a romantic Yandere Rick with a s/o that adores his grandson morty? like ADORES him to the point where they become a parental figure to him, and rick gets all jealous over it and acts like a child (even tho it's his grandson 💀💀)

I love you for the Rick and Morty request 💜 Idk if you wanted this as a Short or a Concept so I just did my default. Again, vague what Rick it is but you can assume main Rick (C-137). Good food 👌

Yandere! Rick Sanchez jealous about Morty

Concept/Reaction

Pairing: Romantic

Possible Trigger Warnings: Gender-Neutral Darling, Jealousy, Manipulation, Clingy behavior, Forced relationship, Implied intimate thoughts, Implied drugs/alcohol, Gaslighting.

- This is actually feels really in character for him to me.

- Rick seems like the type to get upset when the person he adores doesn't listen to him and also doesn't pay attention to him.

- Especially in this situation.

- Let's be honest, most of the time, Rick is horrible to Morty.

- Morty probably likes the fact you don't treat him like human garbage or yell names at him.

- Which means you'll be seeing Morty more often even when Rick wants to see you... alone.

- This means Rick is not only upset because you get along so much better with Morty, but Morty even sides with you all the time which means less time to pull him on adventures.

- Yeah, Rick is going to pitch a fit.

- It's great you get along with Morty as it goes along with Rick's future plans with you...

- But the plan was not to have Morty pull you further from him.

- He's envious when he sees you with Morty.

- Morty looks so happy with you and you're smiling when you do anything with him.

- It's like he's being left out of the bond between you.

- Expect while you're chatting with Morty, listening to how his day went, Rick bursts in to draw attention to himself.

- "I was really struggling with this today..."

- "Oh?"

- "HEYYY, (Y/N), got this reallyyy cool thing to show you, away from Morty, in the garage- Just us two, y'know?"

- "What?"

- "Rick, what's going on?"

- "None of your business, Morty. Anyways, (Y/N) let's go."

- It's petty and childish but Rick would have a little bit of a grudge against Morty.

- All the while Rick is trying to get you to pay attention to him more.

- He wants more private time, more outings, more you.

- For once, he doesn't want to be around Morty.

- Something you found suspicious as he's usually always around Morty, for reasons both good and bad.

- "Rick, you usually always bring Morty with you, why is it just us?"

- "Look, what if I just don't want him around for once? Also, isn't it obvious? Think about it. WHY would I want you and me to be alone?"

- "... Rick-"

- "Do I need to play a mixtape in this ship that's filled with songs that talk about what I want with you or do you get it?"

- "No... no, I get it-"

- "Great, that makes things easier."

- One way or another Rick is going to get his point across.

- He's tired of waiting for you to understand the signs.

- You and him can both take care of Morty if you agree to date him.

- Trust him, it'll be fun.

- He knows how to have a good time, guaranteed.

- With him, you can forget all your worries.

- You can forget Morty telling you about Rick's obvious red flags.

- He's loaded with all sorts of substances to make you see stars.

- Plus, think of how Morty will feel!

- You seem to like him a lot, anyways.

- Won't he be happier if you made Rick happy?

- He may even be more lenient on Morty if you accept.

- Yes, you heard that right, Rick would also use how you feel about Morty against you.

- What Morty says about red flags is true, it's already obvious when Rick coaxes you into a relationship with him.

- In fact, Morty may even feel a bit bad that Rick roped you into this.

- He's somewhat happy he sees you more often, even if it is for a horrible reason-

- Now Rick doesn't need to worry about being jealous over anyone.

- If you push him he'll just rush things and force you into a relationship faster.

- To keep away the inevitable a bit longer, give him attention once in awhile.

- You'll atleast have a bit more time before you have to deal with Rick's stronger affections that way.

#yandere rick and morty #yandere rick sanchez

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aibidil · 1 year

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On neurodivergence and romance

Been thinking about neurodivergence and romance. Like, romance as a concept, not dating or anything like that.

A few years ago, I had this bizarre moment where I started asking everyone what they thought romance was, because I just didn't understand. (For context, I've been with my partner since we were teenagers. 😂) Everyone could tell me what romance wasn't, but no one could seem to tell me what it was? Like, it's not buying flowers and chocolates. Ok. But then what is it? How is sexual romance different than having a friend whom you also fuck, I asked them? (They definitely think it’s different than friend+fucking.) So, like… am I aro? But that couldn't be!—how could I be aro and in committed monogamy for two decades?!

But what I'm thinking now is that this is really less about my romantic status or sexuality labels and more about my (and my partner's) neurodivergence. It's about the fact that we never seem to want to do anything the "typical" way, and that extends to our relationship. One of the hallmarks of the neurodivergent brain is that we don't accept societal norms/rules at face value, but rather, we have to go back to first principles and decide whether it all makes sense. This is why we (as a group) don't follow rules that don't make sense—notably, including rules about gender and sexuality. The gender binary is a fucking con, and if you are a person who is going to interrogate gender and not simply accept whatever society says about it, of course you'll come to the conclusion that it's all bullshit. (Check out Unmasking Autism by Devon Price on this point, he has a fab explanation.)

And I think it's the same with romance, for me. I'm not sure I'll ever understand what romance is, but I'm also confident that that isn't due to any problem or lack in my relationship with my partner. And maybe for me, sexual romance is just "wanting a committed relationship with a friend whom you also fuck." And sure, it seems like that's not true for everyone, but it seems that way for us? And that’s ok.

The other interesting thing is that I think this actually serves me well when writing romance, which is bizarre. You’d think that I, a person who literally cannot come up with any way to define romance, would suck at writing it. But in reality, I think romance in fiction is often so neurotypical that it becomes unavoidably cliched and ends up lacking any feeling of reality or human authenticity. But because I, on the other hand, have no idea what romance is, I can’t really write cliched romance. Instead, I end up focusing on the workings of the relationship, with no thought to what “romance” “should” look like.

And actually, I think that’s what happens in my real life, too. Somehow I have no idea what romance is and don’t care about it at all, but the end result of it is that I have a fulfilling romantic relationship?! …. The irony?!

The other bit that strikes me as fascinating is that neurotypical people irl are always telling me how lovely my relationship is and how perfect my partner is, but my reaction to these comments is basically…confusion. Because I know that my relationship, though it seems that way to them from the outside, would seem hugely lacking to them if they saw it from the inside. Because in my relationship, neither of us ever does anything that romantic partners “should” do. So I find myself trying to argue against people, trying to convince them that my relationship is worse than they think, because of this deep sense that they don’t understand what they’re talking about. But I don’t actually think my relationship is shit, I just know they would think it’s shit if they saw it in its entirety. So my interpretation of the situation (again with the irony), is that they are jealous of my relationship, even though they would actively prevent themselves from pursuing a relationship like mine because it lacks so many neurotypical markers of relationship happiness.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I suppose it might be to validate any neurodivergent (lack of) experience of romance, and maybe (if I’m feeling bold) to claim that us neurodivergents are the only ones in a position to offer any insight into what romance is and isn’t, or who can push society toward healthier views of romantic love. 💜

#romance #neurodivergence #rambling thoughts on sexuality and gender

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stumblngrumbl · 2 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/nansheonearth/745424724512899072 In regards to your reply on this post, my understanding of it is that gender is a real thing, but all gender is is the societal expectations placed upon you according to your sex. Gender can influence behavior, but it's entirely a social construct. The way TRAs define gender (like their belief that your soul or brain has a gender) is garbage but it'd be a stretch to say that gender as an observable construct isn't real. I'm only throwing in my two cents to maybe make the questionnaire a bit clearer for you and others. I hope you have a good day (and also no pressure to respond)!

sure it's real, like the role of a matchmaker was in the old village was a thing, but not everyone cares about matchmakers and just because someone says they're a matchmaker doesn't make them authorized to make matches or whatever

as you said it's a construct - a conceptual construct, not something physical; it's a purely made-up thing and has no existence whatsoever beyond the immediate culture, and even within that culture there would be many who disregard the role entirely

note that things that we make up can definitely appear real. i have a dollar bill in my wallet; the dollar bill is undeniably real - and in this society i'm able to trade these pieces of money for definitely real stuff like spaghetti squash. must be real, right?

no. money is completely made up; go to a different period of time ahead try to explain what money is to people and chances are they'll just shake their head at you; money is something from our time and unlike water or tomatoes it only has meaning if there are people who believe it does

just like gender.

sex exists, whether you've got a society or not. if you happened to be dropped on a island paradise as a young child all by yourself, whatever you grew up into wouldn't be influenced by a society and you'd never say "i feel like a woman!" or "i'm so strong i must be a man!" - you'd have no concept of gender, there's just you. however, you'd have a sex, whichever it was, regardless of whether or not you knew it (and being there with no knowledge of other humans, you probably wouldn't know, unless you observed other animals and made comparisons).

by saying that "gender influences behavior", you're saying "a socially constructed role influences the behavior of people who take part in that social role" and yeah, no shit, but it's because they've effectively chosen to act according to society's rules for that role -- it's a tautology. it doesn't mean that they intrinsically have that behavior - gendered behavior is entirely at the whim of the culture in which that gender exists.

are you strong and war-like? protector of the weak? probably a woman (assuming you're from the land of the amazons), female. oh. you're from somewhere else? then you've got the role of whoever it is that does that. wears a dress? everyone wears dresses! (isn't this still the bronze age?)

if i see someone being protective, that's not an indication to me of what their gender is. are they earning money for a family? cool. doesn't make them "the man of the house". those things are completely bullshit and observing their behavior won't tell me more than "in this particular society chances are that this person identifies with this role [gender]".

most likely i'm preaching to the choir here so i'll shut up

this is the main question that i didn't like

no doubt how someone perceives their role (and thus their gender, presumably) will influence how they interact with the world. but, that's precisely because gender is a set of rules for how a person interacts with the world. it's really a useless question - unless you don't understand what gender actually is.

#asks #pardon my rambling response

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nom-central · 8 months

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(Incoming rambling, sorry if it's a lot, this just made me think a bit, perhaps a bit to much, but still. If you don't feel like reading all this, i understand.)

Maybe it's just me being me, but i don't really see Cerise and Ocras' relationship as being sinful, if anything i think she'd get extra points for trying to help someone out who knows and admits their mistakes.

To me gluttony is when it deprives other people of what they need, not because someone likes to eat a bit extra or enjoy a snack or collect things they enjoy such as books or collectables.

While greed is when one's own financial growth depends on keeping other people impoverished and suffering and all that.

(I could go on, but i think i covered the 2 important ones.)

So by all accounts, Ocras seems he might be on his way to become a risen demon at the very least, while Cerise is probably being a bit of an egdelord (or whatever the angel equivilant of a young adult who hasn't left their angsty teenage years behind yet) right now while the other angels are just shaking their heads and thinking she's a silly goose but a good goose.

the funny thing is about sins is that they can be interpreted in a variety of different ways! to me, greed and gluttony are two things that tend to lend to each other while still being their own things, and Ocras as a demon tends to embody both (gluttony in excessive indulgence of food in a more traditional sense, greed in continuing to consume despite having more than enough for himself, to where it deprives others)

it's cool to hear other people's takes, though! i know this ask wasn't quite asking, but i enjoy having the opportunity to talk about the setting these two in particular come from! you see, the concept of "risen demons/fallen angels" does not exist and its more of an analogue i use than an actual thing.

"demons" aren't what we consider demons in the traditional sense and neither are angels. demons are just beings born from powerful human emotions and aren't inherently evil/sinful, they just embody our feelings and feed off of them. they're meant to be the more magical other half of humans, and in fact coexisted with humans until the seraphim arrived in the world. ocras was just born from someone who had a particularly gluttonous nature, but they weren't "bad" and neither is he, as you can see!

the seraphim are celestial beings that are purely rational and logical, both beyond gender and (what they believe to be) error. they dislike demons who exist purely from emotions and are capable of damaging them as their polar opposites. seraphim seek to "purify" humanity because they're inherently emotional beings, and not in line with how the universe is meant to be and operate in their eyes. they're here to correct that and make all things pure and orderly...which isn't a good thing. the concept of sin is a way of them justifying their acts.

Cerise is a little black sheep for actually leaving their people behind and choosing to love the world they're meant to destroy, so other seraphim view their acts as "sinful and impure" to condemn them to other seraphs and try to manipulate Cerise into returning home.

#answered #anonymous #Ocras #Cerise #loredump #long post #sorry for the huge post! my headworld is massive and i thought itd be helpful to explain how it works #i always thought angels vs demons could use a bit of spice and well here it is #angels are the bad guys if they had a concept for it. theyre operating under a power higher than themselves #demons arent bad but have the capacity to be #theyre largely bitter over what the seraphim did

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kkgore · 1 year

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Book Review for: In the Lives of Puppets

By: TJ Klune

Setting

This book takes place in a world of robots. We are introduced first to Giovanni, who has built himself a tree-house settlement deep in the woods, and there he lives with two other robots, Nurse Ratchet and Rambo, and his human son Victor. The fairytale-esque opening gives us a good overview of a world where humans are both rare and facing some sort of persecution, and a sense of the threat that the wider world may pose to this family. I found the setting instantly legible and explicable. It had a logic to it that made it both exciting and yet pleasantly predictable. That logic was coherent throughout the novel, and so there was never any moment where I felt like I truly did not understand this world or where it was taking me, and as such I was eager to carry on with the journey.

Plot

The plot takes liberally from the most prominent plot points of the Pinocchio story, as well as some seasoning from Shelly’s Frankenstein. The plot follows a fairly typical hero’s journey model, with a couple of twists which are in no way obtuse and more a revelation of a building suspicion than an actual twist. On the whole I really enjoyed how Klune managed to hit all the major allegories with Pinocchio, although some seemed a bit on the nose. The Monstro-Whale/Terrible Dogfish-Dirigible analogy was there but felt more wedged in than placed with consideration, unlike the tension within Victor, who at various times takes on the role of both Geppetto and Pinocchio, Victor Frankenstein and his Creation in ways that are skilfully woven into the plot of his journey.

My main problem with the plot is that it follows a trend in storytelling where the Hero makes large, world changing decisions on the behalf of whole nations or races and then… dips. Just leaves, and we get no more than a few lines where he hopes that the revolution has turned out well but no actual insight into what this post-revolutionary world is going to look like or how it is going to be built. There is some thematic justification to this decision in this book, it parallels decisions Vic’s father made at the beginning of the tale, but I still find it somewhat unsatisfying that in a book about how everyone deserves to be fixed in the end we only really care about two specific people being fixed and everyone else is on their own.

World Building

The world building in this novel is done organically and in a way that consistently adds to the feelings of foreboding that Klune skilfully builds throughout the novel. Klune is also very good at using his worldbuilding as an opportunity to draw parallels with, and make commentary on, our current culture. The Coachman, who runs a Museum of Human Curio’s and Curiosities, tells the Hero and his companions of the ancient human tradition of gender reveals. His utter misinterpretation of both the form and the function of gender reveal parties is a wonderful way not only to make a commentary on how history gets distorted by the victors in a conflict, but also to expose the artifice that lies in the gender reveal party as a concept.

The worldbuilding in this novel was not necessarily new, we have seen similar worlds in many sci-fi films and books such as Robots (2005) but the whimsy and charm with which it is built makes this an inviting world to spend time in.

The worldbuilding also felt purposeful, particularly when done through conversation between the characters. As we learned more about the world, we also learned more about the main thesis of the book; that everyone deserves a chance of redemption. Again, it’s not so much that Klune does anything new with the worldbuilding, but that he uses the worldbuilding as a way to talk very directly about the morality of the story, and to engage in meaningful meditation on the nature of humanity and forgiveness and individuality and so on.

Characters

The characters are the real highlight of this book. It is incredibly character driven, and it is delightful how Klune treats each character with a tenderness and empathy that is deeply compassionate towards their flaws without ever excusing them. All of the robots can be read as representative of some form of disability or neuroatypicality, and Victor is quite clearly meant to be understood as autistic. I felt this worked well, particularly as an overarching analogy for how disability is context dependant and how often the experience of disability is more to do with how society lacks accommodations necessary for a life fully lived, than it is to do with the material fact of the disability itself. I also think this worked well as a way to explore how individuals can work to maintain healthy relationship despite conflicting needs.

The dynamic between Nurse Ratched and Rambo reminds me a lot of the dynamic between Scamper and Brian in Igor (2008), and I found the way they both bounced off of each other delightful. They were a wonderful example of a relationship that is fully accepting of the other, warts and all. The fierce loyalty between these two and Victor was a strong theme throughout the novel, which worked well as a supporting thesis for the main themes of forgiveness and redemption. Ratched was well placed as a nurse droid to explain concepts like asexuality in a dispassionate manner.

That said, I did find towards the end that Ratched and Rambo’s continual conjecture of the nature of the relationship between Vic, who is canonically both asexual and somewhat sex repulsed, and Hap to become more and more uncomfortable as it became clear that this aspect of their behaviour was never going to fully be addressed. I had hoped that there would be some sort of commentary on the intrusive and voyeuristic nature of looking at real relationships through the lens of “shipping” but we didn’t really get any thing in regard to a resolution of the conflict there.

Hap is an interesting take on the Creature from Frankenstein. It is lovely to see what might have happened if the Modern Prometheus had been met with love and admiration rather than fear and shame. I really appreciate that Hap is allowed to still be a generally grumpy person, right through to the end of the novel, and that this is seen as a character expression, rather than a character flaw.

Vic and Hap have a very tender relationship, which is a joy to watch develop.

Vic himself is a thoroughly enjoyable hero to read. He grapples with deep emotional and ethical questions which are hard to resolve, without ever tipping over into either self-pitying or self-aggrandising. His reactions feel very natural and his motivations and insights are intelligent.

The supporting cast of Gio, Vic’s father, The Coachman and The Blue Fairy are all well drawn characters whose conversations with Vic offer some very poignant and insightful meditations on the main themes of this book. The only somewhat disappointing character was the Coachman, who’s motivational 180 was a bit too convenient and just bugged me for a few chapters after it happened.

Prose

The actual prose of this book is delightful. It flows incredibly well; it’s well paced and it was easy get into a groove of reading it. The only point where I was fully thrown out of the text was early on when there was mention of a “camming device” with no explanation of what that was. I don’t think this is a particularly ubiquitous piece of climbing equipment outside of the climbing enthusiast’s world and so could probably do with some explanation.

The main criticism of the prose I would give is that Klune has a habit of introducing motifs he then doesn’t really do anything with. For example, the Authority (the robot overlords) use the symbol of the cat and the fox, which is immediately identifiable as an allusion towards the Disney cartoon but doesn’t do anything beyond being that allusion. It gives no deeper insight into the Authority and if one were not aware of the Disney cartoon then there would be no clear reason why this symbol is being emphasised repeatedly. When he does use symbolism, like the motif of the clockwork heart that works its way throughout this novel, he does it spectacularly well. There is a richness to his use of symbolism that is so enchanting that it is even more disappointing when there is then such empty symbolism alongside it.

Finally, I would add that the first part of the novel could do with a few paragraph breaks. I did not find the long run-on nature of the opening to be particularly ADHD friendly and that was the only part of the book where I regularly found myself going back to reread a passage to make sure I had the right of it.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it engaging and charming and thoroughly enjoyed the dialectical explorations of personhood, forgiveness, redemption and friendship. I found the meditations on these themes insightful and inspiring and had more than one flash of insight into my own WIP as a result of reading this.

That said I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending. This may be a personal thing as a bit of a policy wonk, but I really would have appreciated even just a little more about how society was going to move forward after the hero’s completed their quest. That is not to say that the ending was not beautiful, it was a wonderfully understated and tender way to end the story, but I could not help but be distracted by thoughts of all the others whose lives were impacted and the uncertainty of their fate.

I would recommend this book to those who enjoy imaginative retellings of classic literature, as well as anyone who enjoys somewhat whimsical sci fi settings. I think this would be a marvellous book for a 14–16-year-old, although it does have some strong language and sexual references that not all parents will be happy with, and it is the sort of book a weird little 12-year-old who already reads beyond their reading level (like me) and hides copies of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere under their bed (like I did) would absolutely devour and obsess over for years to come.

#book reviews #reviewing is an art #In the Lives of Puppets #TJ Klune #4 out of 5 stars #writeblr #creative writing #writing #fiction writing #writer community #writer things

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stinkylittleanon · 2 years

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Hello fren could you maybe do hcs for the 12' maincast reacting to a friend coming out as genderfluid?

-🐚anon (I'm probably gonna be back lol, ur very big brained)

I THINK YOU MEAN THE TMNT 2012 MAIN CAST, RIGHT?? IF I GET THIS WRONG THEN PLEASE TELL ME! I'll do the turtles! ALSO I'VE NEVER BEEN CALLED BIG BRAINED, IT FEELS ODD SINCE I ALWAYS CALL MYSELF PEA BRAINED LMAO -------- I'm gonna start with Raph, he's the first turtle I decided to try and research </3 I might take 2012 off my list, I didn't realize how much I forgot about it! --------- Raph!! - He'd be confused at first. What did that mean? - You'd have to explain it to him! ... Repeatedly. Again, again, again. He can't just seem to get a hang of it at first! - Raph ends up getting frustrated with himself (and you a bit) because he can't understanding it - Until you explain it in the DUMBEST way possible! - Then he semi understands! - You seem scared, though, so he'd gently place a hand on your shoulder and smile at you. "While I don't ENTIRELY understand... I'm no jerk- kinda. I accept you for who you are. Heh, I mean- Look at me! I'm a turtle! Who am I to judge?" - AND IT'S??? ODDLY COMFORTING?? - He'll get the hang of it eventually! Just tell him what you're feelin' that day or if you prefer anything and he'll do his best! Just remind him if he messes up! - He'll... Kinda understand better after a month or two! Leo!! - He's also confused at first, but he's way more calm about it and understands it faster. - Leo... Compares it to something he's seen in his show- I'd imagine there's some character in there that's doesn't really follow gender! - Yeah it's not the most flattering thing to say, but he's supportive! - "Thank you for trusting me with this... I promise, I'll do my best to remember. I accept you." - He gets stuff after a week or two, he's a fast learner! - Leo isn't afraid to correct others, he definitely helps Raph remember to use your pronouns and stuff! - If you change anything about your appearance? He notices first! "Oh, hey! Your hair!" - The second worst at understanding, Raph's the last Donnie!! - Donnie understands immediately... Immediately after asking a ton of questions. - He knows what being transgender is! He knows the genderfluid label, he just wants to understand how YOU experience it! - After you open up and explain how you experience your gender and stuff, he'd open up and explain how he feels about his... He might be trans! Donnie just needs to learn more! - You can go to him about gender dysphoria if you experience it (not all trans people have dysphoria!), he's always open to help! - "Thank you for trusting me with this, (Y/n)... I'm always here for you, ok?" - If he ever builds you something? He'd paint a lil' pride flag on it for ya (if you're comfortable with that! He'd ask first!) - Donnie would slip up once or twice but he'd get the hang of things quickly! He's also not afraid to correct people, even if it's some villain they're about to fight! - "You're weak, (dead_name)-" "Uh! Actually, it's (Y/n)!" "O-Oh-... *coughcough*... You're weak, (Y/n)..." Mikey!! - You'd have to explain what it is to Mikey at first, but he'd immediately get it! - There's quite a lot of lgbt things in comics, even old ones, so he'd seen the concept before! - He'd simply ask about the stuff you prefer before looking at you like you're the most important person! - "You're so cool! I wanna be like you one day!" - He really looks up to you and he's so happy that you told him! - You're so strong! In so many ways! He knows how humans can be awful, he's experienced it before... So you've gotta be so strong to be so open about your identity! - If you're still closeted socially then don't worry! He's got your back! - Aggressively compliments you when you need it, using certain terms and all that to make you feel more valid! Which you already are! I tried my best to not force anything onto the label! People experience these things differently so I left it more vague so you guys can comfortably read! >:]

#tmnt #tmnt 2012 #2012 tmnt #tmnt headcanons #2012 tmnt headcanons #lgbt #lgbt headcanons #genderfluid #genderfluid headcanons #2012 raph #2012 leo #2012 donnie #2012 mikey #SUPPORTIVE BOYS!!

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mcrmadness · 2 years

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I have always been more or less of an outsider and an outcast, but some days I really hate it how every aspect of me just seems to strenghten that even more. Somehow I ended up with the identities that make me different and to not fit in with the others in such "marginalized" groups.

I am:

Neurodivergent: so I ever really fit in my peers of which majority were neurotypicals. Back then (late 90s to mid 2000s) there just were no words for this, so I was just Weird and Different, and bullied for that.

Agender: I don't relate to the term "trans". My gender simply does not exist, so there's nothing about it to fix either. Which means I don't relate to trans memes, and I don't relate to gender memes (unless it's another agender making the meme), and I don't understand gender envy because I simply don't feel it.

Asexual and aromantic: so I don't really fit in lgbt+ places. The rainbow flag does not repsent me because it's still so strongly associated with gay people, as well as allosexual (and alloromantic) lgbt+ people, and I'm neither gay nor straight, nor allo. So I don't feel like using the rainbow flag, because it would give the wrong impression of me to people. I, also, do not feel connected with individual flags either, so I've never used the ace/aro/aroace flags.

Loveless aro: I don't connect with any post talking about love or about loving humans. I simply don't love humans. I don't know wha that feels like. I can care deeply about people and animals and things, but it's not the same. It does not mean the same as what "loviing" means to so many. However, I do think I love objects and concepts and ideas. Just not any specific living creature.

Sex-repulsed and romance-repulsed: so at least I fall under the stereotypes of an aroace... but at what cost.

Because of all this above, mainly the aspec aspects (lol you see what I did there), I don't fit in fandom spaces. People go nuts when they see their favorite celebrity, and I don't understand why. That's just a human being? Why are y'all going nuts over a human being? Or why are y'all so keen on seeing skin? Or men in dresses/skirts? What's so special about that? Reblogging posts about my favorite celebrities is almost impossible because of all that commentary added that I cannot relate to because I don't understand what is it so special about that that it causes people to act such ways.

Finding fanfiction is impossible because I don't read mature content. Finding audience for my fanfiction is difficult because I don't write mature content. I am wondering if other aspec people face this same problem, and this is actually why I started writing this post in the first place. My fandom is already very small and the number of fanfics has only two digits in it, so it's not like finding a needle in a haystack, cos the haystack is almost nonexistent but also there is no needle to find.

I try not to compare my AO3 stats to others', but it's really difficult. And it makes me sad sometimes. Mainly because I've gotten the impression that so many people in fandoms treat fanfiction as a way to just find explicit smut to read. Bit like how maybe back in the day, before fanfiction, people would read and write books (about original characters maybe). And as someone who does not write mature content, I feel like when people see that G or T rating there, they don't even give the text a change. I'm not sure if people are there to read stories/hopefully well written text or just to read smut. I mean, there is nothing wrong in either, I'm not saying that there would be. I'm only saying that it makes me, an aroace with sex-repulsion, feel myself so lonely when I write something that means so much to me and then people see it's G or T and don't even want to take a look at it because there's no smut. It could also be just my age, but I've figured I enjoy reading and care about well writen text actually more than the actual plot or events (as long as it's not smut, cos that just is not my thing anymore).

And it also makes me sad that there ARE so well written stories out there but I can't read them because they go into smut so quickly and there's nothing left for me to read because I prefer to skip those scenes from fanfics. So basically I understand that it's probably the same the other way around: G or T is just not their cup of tea. And that's valid. But do they ever even give those a chance? I often try to give a chance for everything, which is why I know well written text exist, and it's a bummer I can't read those because of my preferences.

I also should never ever read other fanfics' comments because, idk, seeing people commenting about those and often focusing on how the smut was written... yeah, just makes me feel like my work is waste of time. Or maybe not waste of time, it's never waste of time to me, but posting them might be waste of time, if reading them is not really anyone's cup of tea. Especially now when I have started to back away from even fluff. I used to love writing fluff, because no one was writing nice fluff without smut, so I had to write it myself. But lately I have been writing fluff so much that it has lost its magic. It's boring now. I have gone through every possible scenario and can't come up with new ones that would be exciting anymore. Everything is just repeating itself. I'm kiss-repulsed, so I have never enjoyed writing or mentioning the kisses, but they still were a big part of the fluff I wanted to read about, so I included those. But now they also feel pointless. I don't like how they feel like the peak of a scene every time. It's not. There are other important things too than to always end a scene with two people kissing, I don't like it being the climax of a scene anymore. I'm more into the emotional intimacy now, but I'm afraid people are even less into reading my fanfics if I stop writing even that physical fluff.

I wish I had OCs to write about. That way it could be a G as I just want and people could read and rate it without expectations. But I don't know what I should write about. Nothing interests me, you know? What I said there about me nowadays valuing the text over the events and content, this also applies to my own writing. I LOVE writing, but in order to do that, I must write about something interesting to me, but I can't come up with any kind of interesting plot or character I would be INTERESTED in writing about. I always play with ideas of a story but I feel like everything has veen invented already and it could accidentally turn into a knock-off I did not even realize would be copying something. The worst case scenario would be to invent something and have someone else tell you you're plagiarising something, you have never even heard of before, but people would not believe you because people are so keen on lying anyway. (Or then I'm just traumatized by that case when I was 10 and drew a comic book character and someone claimed I had copied it from a comic I had never even heard of, and she did not believe me when I said I don't even KNOW what that comic is. She was convinced I was just lying to her.)

I don't know. Maybe I should try actual brain storming. Writing down and doodling stuff in case it would open some loot boxes in my brain I did not even know about. Even an OC comic would be great, or something that was a combination of these two...

#mcrmadness' deep thoughts #asexual #aromantic #aroace #aspec #long post

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grison-in-space · 3 years

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In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

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gendercensus · 3 years

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On fae/faer pronouns and cultural appropriation

HOW IT STARTED

I had a handful, a very small handful but more than two, responses in the Gender Census feedback box telling me that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative. The reasons didn’t always agree, and the culture that was being appropriated wasn’t always the same, but here’s a selection of quotes:

“Fae pronouns are cultural appropriation and are harmful to use“ - UK, age 11-15

“I’m not a person who practices pagan holidays but, my understanding is that pronouns like fae/faeself are harmful because the fae are real to pagans and is like using Jesus/jesuself as pronouns“ - UK, age 11-15

“I know you've probably heard this a million times, so has everyone on the internet, but the ''mere existence''of the fae pronoun feels really uncomfortable for some of us. I'm personally not against neopronouns like xe/xim, er/em and the like, I am a pagan but apart from the, imo most important, reasoning of that pronoun being immensely disrespectful, I worry as an nb about people who banalize the usage of pronouns ''for fun'', and I'm quoting what some people have told me.“ - Spain, 16-20

“I don't agree with fae/deity pronouns just from a pagan perspective it's very disrespectful to the cultures they come from. Like Fae are a legit thing in many cultures and they hate with a fiery passion mortal humans calling themselves Fae to the point of harming/cursing the people who do it“ - USA, age 16-20

“only celtic people can use far/ faers otherwise it’s cultural appropriation, many celts have said this and told me this“ - USA, age 16-20

So that’s:

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❌ Someone who definitely isn’t pagan.

✅ Someone who is pagan.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

So, just to disclose some bias up-front, I am English so I’m not Celtic, but I do live in Wales so I am surrounded by Celts. The bit of Wales that I live in is so beautiful in such a way that when my French friend came to visit me she described it as féerique - like an enchanting, magical land, literally “fairylike” or thereabouts. Coincidentally I have also considered myself mostly pagan for over half of my life, and I can’t definitively claim whether or not the Fae are “part of paganism” because paganism is so diverse and pick’n’mix that it just doesn’t work that way.

To me the idea that fae/faer pronouns would be offensive or culturally appropriative sounds absurd. But also, I am powered by curiosity, and have been wrong enough times in my life that I wanted to approach this in a neutral way with an open mind. Perhaps what I find out can be helpful to some people.

So since we only have information from one person who is definitely directly affected by any cultural appropriation that may be happening, the first thing I wanted to do was get some information from ideally a large number of people who are in the cultures being appropriated, and see what they think.

WHAT I DID

First of all I put some polls up on Twitter and Mastodon. [Edit: Note that this post has been updated with results from closed polls.]

I specified that I wanted to hear from nonbinary Celts and pagans, just so that the voters would be familiar with fae/faer pronouns. I asked the questions in a neutral way, i.e. “How do you feel about...” with “good/neutral/bad” answer options, instead of something more leading like “Is this a load of rubbish?” or “are you super offended?” with “yes/no” options. I provided a “see results” option, so that the poll results wouldn’t be skewed as much by random people clicking any old answer to see the results. And I invited voters to express their opinions in replies.

Question #1: Nonbinary people of Celtic descent (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany), how do you feel about non-Celtic people using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

Question #2: Nonbinary pagans, how do you feel about non-pagans using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

The Twitter polls got over 1,100 responses each, and the Mastodon polls got over 140 responses each. With a little bit of spreadsheetery I removed the “N/A” responses to reverse engineer the number of people voting for each option, combined those numbers, and recalculated percentages.

Obviously this approach is not in the least scientific, but thankfully the results were unambiguous enough and the samples were big enough that I feel comfortable drawing conclusions.

Celts on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-Celts (561 voters):

It's good - 42.5%

No strong feelings/other - 44.0%

It's bad - 13.5%

Pagans on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-pagans (468 voters):

It's good - 47.2%

No strong feelings/other - 39.5%

It's bad - 13.3%

Here’s how that looks as a graph:

The limitations of polls on these platforms means that we have no way to distinguish between people who have more complicated views (”other”) and people who have “no strong feelings”, so we can’t really draw conclusions there. If we stick to just the pure positive and pure negative:

Celts were over three times as likely to feel positive about non-Celts using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

Pagans were over three and a half times as likely to feel positive about non-pagans using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

So Celts and pagans are way more likely to feel actively good about someone’s fae/faer pronouns, even when that person is not a Celt/pagan. That’s some strong evidence against the idea that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative, right there.

CORRECTIONS

To be clear, I haven’t done any research about the roots of fae/faer or the origins of the Fae and related beings, but my goal here was to get a sense of what Celts and pagans think and feel, rather than what an historian or anthropologist would say.

On the anti side, here were the replies that suggested fae/faer either is or might be inappropriate:

“I only worry that not everyone understands the origin of the word outside of modernized ideas of fairies.“ - pagan

“As a vaguely spiritual Whatever (Ireland), I think a mortal using "fae" as a pronoun/to refer to themselves is asking for a malicious and inventive fairy curse (on them, their families and possibly anyone in their vicinity, going by the traditions). I have not heard of this term before, so this is an immediate reaction from no background bar my cultural knowledge of sidhe/fae/term as culturally appropriate. My general approach is people can identify themselves as they want.“ - Celtic

So we’ve got a pagan who’s wary that people who use fae/faer (and people in general) might not have a fully fleshed out idea of the Fae. And we’ve got a Celt who doesn’t mind people using fae/faer personally, but based on what they know of the Fae they wouldn’t be surprised if the Fae got mad about it. No outright opposition, but a little concern.

There were not a lot of replies on the pro side, but not because people weren’t into it, judging by the votes. There were a lot of “it’s more complicated than that” replies, many of which repeated others, so quotes won’t really work. Here’s a summary of the Celtic bits:

“Fae” is not a Celtic word, and Celts don’t use it. It is French, or Anglo-French.

“Fae” can refer to any number of stories/legends from a wide variety of cultures in Europe, not one cohesive concept.

There are many legends about fairy-like beings in Celtic mythologies, and there are many, many different names for them.

The Celts are not a monolith, they’re a broad selection of cultures with various languages and various mythologies.

And the pagan bits:

Paganism is not closed or exclusive in any way. It might actually be more open than anything else, as “pagan” is a sort of umbrella term for non-mainstream religions in some contexts. A closed culture would be a prerequisite for something to be considered “appropriated” from paganism.

From my own experience, pagans may or may not believe in the Fae, and within that group believers may or may not consider the Fae to be sacred and/or worthy of great respect. (I’ve certainly never met a pagan who worshipped the Fae, though I don’t doubt that some do.)

And then we get into the accusations. 🍿

“this issue wasn’t started by Celtic groups or by people who know much about Celtic fae. It was started primarily by anti-neopronoun exclusionist pagans on TikTok.“

“[I’m] literally Scottish [...] and it’s not appropriative in the least and honestly to suggest as such is massively invalidating towards actual acts of cultural appropriation and is therefore racist. Feel like if this was actually brought up it was either by some people who seriously got their wires crossed or people who are just concern trolling and trying to make fun of both neo-pronouns and of the concept of cultural appropriation and stir the pot in the process.“

“It wouldn't be the first time bigots falsly claim “it's appropriative from X marginalized group" to harass people they don't like, like they did with aspec people when they claimed "aspec" was stolen from autistic language (which was false, as many autistics said)“

“It's been a discussion in pagan circles recently ... People were very quick to use the discussion as an excuse to shit on nonbinary people.“

“I think it would be apropos to note that the word "faerie/fairy" has been a synonym for various queer identities for decades, too. The Radical Faeries are a good example.“ (So if anyone has the right to [re]claim it...)

A little healthy skepticism is often wise in online LGBTQ+ “discourse”, and some of these people are making some very strong claims, for which I’d love to see some evidence/sources/context. Some of it certainly sounds plausible.

HOW DID IT START?

I had a look on Twitter and the earliest claim I can find that fae/faer pronouns are cultural appropriation is from 18th February 2020, almost exactly one year ago today. Again, tweets are not the best medium for this, there was very little in the way of nuance or context. If anyone can find an older claim from Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else online, please do send it my way.

I have no idea how to navigate TikTok because I’m a nonbinosaur. (I’m 34.) I did find some videos of teens and young adults apparently earnestly asserting that they were Celtic or pagan and the use of fae/faer pronouns was offensive, but the videos were very brief and provided nothing in the way of nuance or context. For example:

This one from October 2020 with 29k ❤️s, by someone who I assume is USian based on the word “mom”?

This one from December 2020, that says “I am pagan and i find it rather disrespectful. It’s like using god/godr or jesus/jesusr.” That’s probably what inspired the feedback box comment above that refers to hypothetical jesus/jesusr pronouns.

If anyone is able to find a particularly old or influential TikTok video about fae/faer pronouns being appropriative I’d really appreciate it, especially if it’s from a different age group or from not-the-USA, to give us a feel for how universal this is.

For context, fae pronouns were mentioned in the very first Gender Census back in May 2013, though you’ll have to take my word for it as the individual responses are not currently public. The word “fae” was mentioned in the pronoun question’s “other” textbox, and no other forms in the set were entered so we have no way of knowing for sure what that person’s full pronoun set actually is. This means the set may have been around for longer. The Nonbinary Wiki says that the pronoun set was created in October 2013, as “fae/vaer”, later than the first entry in the Gender Census, so I’ll be editing that wiki page later! If anyone has any examples of fae/faer pronouns in use before 2013 I would also be very interested to see that.

IN SUMMARY

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, as the Twitter polls are not super scientific and they only surveyed a selection of Celts and pagans within a few degrees of separation of the Gender Census Twitter and Mastodon accounts, but I can certainly report on what I found.

For a more conclusive result, we’d need to take into account various demographics such as age, culture, location, religion, race/heritage, etc.

As far as I can tell based on fairly small samples of over 400 people per group, a minority of about 13% of Celtic and/or pagan people felt that use of fae/faer pronouns is appropriative.

A much higher number of people per group felt positive about people who are not Celts or pagans using fae/faer pronouns. The predominant view was:

It can’t be cultural appropriation from Celtic cultures because fairy-like beings are not unique to Celtic cultures and Celtic cultures don’t call them Fae.

It can’t be cultural appropriation from pagan cultures because paganism is not “closed” or exclusive in any way, it’s too broad and open.

If your experience of your gender(s) or lack thereof isn’t described or encompassed by the gender binary of “male OR female”, please do click here to take the Gender Census 2021 - it’s international and it closes no earlier than 10th March 2021!

#fae/faer #pronouns #neopronouns #cultural appropriation

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stellarskylark · 2 years

Text

Hiya so I'm just gonna toss a little article out into the void bc why the hell not this is my blog.

Magick for Skeptics

I've been an agnostic for a little under a year now. I really love the ideological freedom that I have now, but I have also really felt the lack of a spiritual practice. So, I've been exploring atheopaganism. Atheopaganism (at least the version defined by Mark Green) is exactly what it sounds like - I hold a scientific materialist view of the world, but also practice religious rituals for the mental health benefits. I wanted to talk a little bit about how I view magick through a skeptical lens.

Embrace the Placebo

Knowing about a cognitive bias does not stop it from working. Even knowing that you are currently being affected by a cognitive bias does not stop it from working.

Not only do you have to recognize that you're being affected by a cognitive bias, you have to actively correct your thinking against it. In cases like propaganda, or the recency bias, or confirmation bias, this is a huge inconvenience.

But with the placebo effect, we can exploit this.

Consider the following scenario: You want to start working out. But after years of trying and failing to adopt the habit, with more than a little internalized fatphobia mixed in, the mere thought of exercising fills you with dread, guilt, and shame. You fully understand this at a rational level. But that alone does not make the feelings go away.

This is the ideal situation to exploit the placebo effect through a magickal working. If we want to alter our feelings or perceptions, all we need to do is devise some kind of ritual that feels like it should help. That will be enough to trigger the placebo effect - and because You Are Not Immune to Propaganda, it will work even if you don't really believe in it! Here is a ritual I devised for the exact purpose described above.

Remember that we're dealing entirely with feelings, attitudes, and states of mind here. The placebo effect won't cure cancer or anything, obviously. But it is extremely powerful as a therapeutic measure! The deeper, more primal parts of you that respond best to physical, tangible action. Think of this as a way for you, a conscious thinking human, to tell the lizard part of your brain what's what.

(You might notice the names of a few of my invented deities in there - having them as symbolic, metaphorical entities is super useful for me. I might go into more detail about that in another post!)

Written in the Stars

Mr. Rogers once said that "anything mentionable is manageable, and anything human is mentionable." Or, to paraphrase, "being able to talk about a thing gives you power over it." So, if you want more control over yourself and your life, you want a practice that helps you talk about them. Enter divination.

Divination, for me, is about introspection. Take tarot, for instance. In a tarot reading, you randomly assign symbols and concepts to different aspects of your life, and then find a way to make sense of that random spread. This forces you to introspect. Here's a reading that I took in the days leading up to coming out to my parents:

The spread here is Situation | Action | Outcome. My interpretation was that the inverted Ace of Cups showed how my gender dysphoria had been draining all the life out of me for years. The Action card, the Eight of Swords, showed how this situation had been caused by my inability to realize I was trans. And the Outcome card, the Nine of Swords, was a reminder that if I didn't change something, nothing would get better for me.

When I felt anxious and scared about coming out to my parents, looking back on this reading reminded me why I needed to do it, which gave me the strength to go through with it. Anything mentionable is manageable.

I'll also briefly mention that astrology can work the same way for a lot of people. Your natal chart is like a big, complicated tarot spread for your entire life. (And there are actually astrological correspondences built into the most common tarot systems as well!)

Sources and Further Reading

Definitely check out the Placebo Magick podcast, linked below - it was my source for developing an anti-procrastination spell, and it also introduced me to the uses of astrology as divination.

Also, if you want to learn more about atheopaganism, here is Mark Green's blog on the topic.

Also, the app I currently use for tarot is Labyrinthos, if anyone's wondering where that screenshot came from.

#witchblr #pagan #atheopagan #agnostic #atheism #magick #placebo #Spotify

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thisknightisbi · 3 years

Text

for #spnprideweek day 1: coming out + flags

↳ summary: cas tells sam a secret that he hasn’t (really) told anybody else. surprisingly, sam has one too. PRIDE series | gen, sam & cas | word count: 1.7k

[READ ON AO3]

Sam’s grimacing a little at the grease from the fries on Cas’ plate. Cas would usually make a comment, here, about Sam keeping his eyes on his own paper, or that it isn’t nearly as bad as the veggie burger sitting on his plate at Sam’s behest. This is the recompense, Cas wants to say, but his mouth is dry and no words are coming out even if he wants them to.

Accompanying the inability to speak is the twisting feeling in his gut that won’t even allow him to pick up the burger. The smell is too much, too, and Cas hates to admit it but it’s probably the grease, so he sits back a little against the peeling seat of the booth to calm his nerves.

It’s just Sam. He can do this. It’s only that this is the first time he’s telling anyone, and that definitely ups the stakes a little.

Well, that’s somewhat of a lie. Cas had told the nice woman at the grocery store check out last week when he’d seen her little pin on her work uniform and asked where he could get one.

He hadn’t actually bought one, of course, but Cas eyed the small bin full of brightly colored pins on the way out, convincing himself it was stupid to get back in line again for something so small and inexpensive. Still, he’d thought about it on the drive back to the Bunker, and that night in his bed, and the full week following, up until now.

Now, Sam was looking at him with concern, and wiping his mouth in that way that means he’s about to get serious.

“Is everything alright?” he asks, pointedly looking down at Cas’ loaded plate. He’d barely taken a bite, except for a few nibbles of his admittedly greasy fries. And it was weird because since becoming human, Cas' appetite had grown considerably, much to Dean's delight.

And—Dean. That's what this was all about, wasn't it? Sure, it was more than just Dean, it was all the humans that had made Cas' body ache like it hadn't before, had made him think of what it means to be in this vessel—his body—and be attracted to other...humans.

It was odd. In hindsight, things in Heaven had been so much easier in this regard. Cas had spent most of his life clueless to the capabilities of human attraction, and then he met Dean and it all came crashing down around him. Only then, Cas was ignoring it. He was facing the other way, because though he felt human, he wasn't. Not really.

But everything is different now.

Cas clears his throat.

"Well," he starts, "no. I am feeling what I believe you’d call...anxiety. My stomach hurts, I find I'm unable to eat, a-and my hands are—"

"Cas," Sam interrupts. Shaking. Cas' hands are shaking.

Sam's fully set his fork and knife down now, hands clasped together on the edge of the table. "Talk to me."

Cas licks his dry lips.

"It’s not...it isn’t a big deal, really,” and yet Cas can feel his heart hammering in his chest. He sucks in a breath. “But I’m, uh. I wanted to tell you that...I like men.”

Sam’s expression doesn’t change, but he blinks at Cas once from across the table.

“Okay.”

Cas raises an eyebrow, pulse slowing down a little with his next exhale. “Okay?”

Maybe it was that simple, and Cas was worrying over nothing. It’s just...this feels like it should be bigger. Earth-shattering. Like Sam should either hug him or tell him he never wants to speak to Cas again.

Instead, he just shrugs, picks up his fork and pushes bits of his salad around his plate.

But then Cas’ gaze moves to Sam’s face and...Sam’s frowning. Cas feels his heart thumping hard again, waiting for the ball to drop. It feels a little like when Dean sat him down to “talk,” right after he lost his powers, and, well. Cas knew how that had ended. He braces himself for the worst, schools his features to something more neutral.

“I’m,” Sam clears his throat, “I’m sorry you got nervous over all of that. I-I get that coming out is...” he laughs, “usually a bigger deal, but. You don’t have to worry with me, you know? I get it.”

That makes Cas pause. “You...do?”

Now Sam’s looking at him, eyes a little wide, but he works his jaw and gets the words out. “Yeah. Uh... well I guess now’s a good a time as any to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

The fork is set back down again. The bell over the diner door jingles.

“In college...you know about Jess,” Sam says, jogging Cas’ memory. He knows, so he nods and Sam continues, “Well we uh. We actually met in a Gender Studies class. I thought, ‘pff, easy A,’ but it was actually way more complex than I originally thought, so she kind of...tutored me.” Cas raises an eyebrow, and Sam rolls his eyes.

“Actually tutored me. Whatever. Point is, I learned a lot—‘cause she was a great teacher—and...not just about the class, but about myself, too.”

Cas nods slowly, beginning to catch Sam’s drift. “Okay...”

Despite his tone, Sam’s posture stiffens a little, like he’s uncomfortable, or not really used to this type of conversation. Cas does his best to relax into his seat to ease him, unfolding his arms.

“What I’m saying is,” Sam shrugs, “I’m...not...cis. Like, I don’t....I’m not um, a guy, I guess. Well, sort of. I’m non-binary.”

Cas is silent for a second, mulling it over in his head. Eventually it becomes long enough for Sam to say, “Uh...you know what? You can forget it, man—”

“No!” Cas says, almost knocking over his plate in the process. The silverware clatters as it falls onto the table, and Sam flinches a little. “I was just thinking...I want to apologize if anything I’ve said about your gender has ever made you uncomfortable, or if you—”

Sam’s out-facing palm makes Cas stutter to a stop. There’s a weird guilt settling in the pit of his stomach, and the anxiety that he’d thought was gone is back full force again. Cas tears off a piece of his napkin.

“Cas, dude. Calm down,” Sam laughs. He takes a deep breath, and Cas follows his lead. They breathe in and out together for a beat, and when Cas feels fairly calmer, Sam pushes both of their plates aside.

“There’s no need to apologize for something you couldn’t have known about,” he starts, shaking his head a little, “and you haven’t done anything wrong, either. I still use he and him pronouns, and sometimes they and them. And besides, it’s not like I go around telling people. Especially with, uh, the way I was raised...I’ve been hesitant, you know? It was great in college, people were really supportive when I told them. But then when I started hunting again...I don’t know.

“My dad...uh. I tried telling him, once. Didn’t go too well, so I didn’t try it again. I think that’s why Dean...” he shakes his head, frowning down at the table again. “It wasn’t easy, growing up the way we did. You could probably understand that.”

Cas nods. Under the table, his napkin is shredded into bits.

“I do. I think, in a way, I also understand being trans.” Sam jerks their head up, intrigued.

“Angels...we don’t experience gender the same way humans do. In fact, the concept is entirely nonexistent in Heaven. So, when we take vessels...”

“You’re essentially defining yourself,” Sam says in awe. It makes Cas smile to see them back in their element, leaning forward a little to listen better. “I never thought about it that way, not really.”

Cas shrugs. “I’m not sure all of my siblings did, either. Many chose according to which vessel would best suit them and their form. That was definitely a factor in me choosing Jimmy, but I also found the thought of looking like a human man...greatly appealing.”

Sam’s nodding now, gaze darting to different parts of the table. Cas knows that means they’re mentally crafting an essay right about now, or thinking of what books in the Bunker might further help in their research about it.

“Wow,” he says, “that’s—I mean. Wow, Cas. Thanks for telling me that. And uh, the other thing.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

There’s a comfortable silence between them now, and Cas takes it as an opportunity to sip from his slightly-melted iced tea.

“So,” Sam starts again slowly, “have you told Dean?”

Cas sucks in another deep breath, and Sam nods. “Yeah,” he says, “me neither.”

It surprises Cas a little that Sam hasn’t told him, and he expresses that with an inquiring eyebrow.

Sam purses his lips and dodges the unspoken question. “Dean’s not a bad guy. You probably know that better than anyone except me. You know he’d still love you if you told him.”

Cas’ heart pounds at the mention of the word. When Sam notices, he feels his ears begin to heat with a blush.

“Oh,” Sam smiles, “that. I figured. For a while now, but I didn’t wanna say anything.”

Cas tries to will away the heat on his face. He doesn’t say anything, so Sam leaves it be.

The waitress gives them a worried look when she brings the check, eyeing their barely touched plates. They both smile apologetically, insisting that their food was “great” when she whisks it away.

On their way back home, Cas asks if Sam can stop at the store. They don’t ask anything more than, “we need groceries that bad?” and Cas dips inside. He knows this is just like any other grocery run—going in and out as quick as possible with the things they need—yet his heart hammers all the same when he stops in front of the bin near the door. The same employee from last week is working on lane six, and he’s sure to check out at that one with his goods. She gives him a knowing smile.

Cas flops into the passenger seat, a little out of breath.

“That was fast,” Sam starts to say, before noticing Cas’ lack of grocery bags. “Dude. What d’you buy, air?”

Instead, Cas brandishes two brightly colored pins. Sam tentatively takes the yellow, white, purple, and black one, eyes wide.

“For me?” they ask.

Cas smiles, running his thumb over the rainbow one in his hand.

“For both of us,” he says.

[@spnprideweek]

#b*gen #bookshelf #spnprideweek #sam and cas #rambleoncas writing #roc original #my post #theedorksinlove #userdainty #klinejack #usershey #creativecaviar #userpris #usersully #spnclownpals #hope it was okay to tag!!

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