the duality of writing about an event and at the same time wanting to bite everyone else writing about the same event in pop history books and sensationalizing news articles that only exist for clicks/money/clout

Question. Is dumbification and bimbofication a kink or fetish? I'm new to this and I'm seeing this in a lot younger writers in K-pop, so I'm confused. I didn't know that female writers are into this, I know guys are, but why? Can someone explain the hype for it? Great story as always.

It is!

Bimboficafion doubles as both a kink and a lifestyle though. Think the Clermont Twins. As someone who is partially into it, I can tell you that it comes from a place of reclaiming what was originally a derogatory term for women who just look or like looking a certain way. Let's be honest, when the average person sees a woman with a buxom figure and wearing certain things, the thoughts they associate with her aren't going to be the best. They're going to think she's dumb or airheaded or a slut when in actuality, none of those things could be true. Even in my fic, the reader only had sex with one other guy before she slept with Rafe.

It's basically about the desire to look as doll like or bimbo-esque as possibly because you enjoy it. No different than any other trend or "core". Some girls enjoy looking like bratz dolls and wearing short skirts and having big hair or whatever, and at the end of the day, assumptions shouldn't be made about them just for how they enjoy dressing.

As for the kink parts of it, the mindset is similar to that of ddlg (the sexual side because age regression and ddlg isn't inherently sexual!). Some people want to relinquish control and basically allow someone else to be the decision maker or be "smarter" than them. It is a kink for some people to be treated like an object or sex doll and only exist to cater to your partner. It could be because they're unfortunately treated like that irl and giving consent gives them some semblance of control over it or because they're not and it allows them to exist in a space where they can explore an otherwise traumatizing thing safely. Some people like the idea of only existing to be used for their body and the dumbification ties into degradation and humiliation. Those are popular fetishes too. Being treated like little to nothing and being humiliated and laughed at and talked down to.

There can be plenty of reasons for it but I think the most popular is the relinquishing of control and decision making as well as a way to cope with how they are probably actually treated outside of a kink setting. It's upsetting to be talked down to and treated like an idiot because of how you may look or dress and giving someone actual consent to do that can be therapeutic. Not to mention it's therapeutic for people who are probably always taking charge in their everyday life. I'm one of those people where I'm the dominant one of my friend group and I find myself having to defend myself to people a lot and constantly being forced to take control and it can be a nice reprieve to let go and just let myself be "dumb" and let someone else do it for a change.

I hope this explains it all well and anyone else is free to add on with other perspectives!

The goddess Mayahuel, depicted in the Codex Magliabechiano, 16th century © Bridgeman Images.

Everything you thought you knew about the Aztecs is wrong. Or, as Camilla Townsend more tactfully puts it at the start of her wonderful new book: ‘The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made.’

The picture to which Townsend refers is perhaps best symbolised for British readers by the image on the cover of the original Angry Aztecs volume in Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series (1997): a cartoon depicts an Aztec warrior holding a fresh human heart, saying ‘His heart was in the right place’ (covers of other editions show variations on this theme, save for a 2014 edition depicting a rat in Aztec warrior garb). The joke works because the association of the Aztecs with the practice of human sacrifice runs deep and wide: most people who know only one thing about the Aztecs know that they are famous for sacrificing people to their gods; and those who are more familiar with the Aztecs – including those who, for example, teach in schools or universities – tend to think of Aztec culture as one in which bloodthirsty rituals and exotic superstitions played central roles.

In recent decades, a growing number of scholars have pointed out the many ways and reasons why and how that perception is distorted, if not plain wrong. The Aztecs, it turns out, were no more bloodthirsty or savage than anybody else in the world – including the early modern Europeans who systematically demonised them. Their culture was part of a civilisation (that of the Nahuas of central Mexico) that was as sophisticated and accomplished as that of those Europeans who sought to destroy it.

But fighting negative stereotypes and replacing them with something less prejudicial, less sensationalist, more multifaceted and more accurate has proved to be an uphill battle. Franciscan friars in the 16th century, along with other Catholic priests and chroniclers, created a portrait of Aztec religion, politics and social practices that was designed to justify the often-violent imposition of Spanish colonisation and forced conversion to Christianity. That portrait took root and flourished for centuries. The era of the global triumph of European empires was fertile ground for derogatory views of ‘barbarian’ societies swept aside by civilisation’s progress. When new fields of study and new evidence on the Aztec past emerged – archaeological discoveries from beneath Mexico City, for example, or unpublished manuscripts written in Nahuatl in the early colonial period – they tended to be deployed to confirm, or at best modify, that deep-rooted stereotype, not upend it.

What has changed? As Townsend explains in an appendix to Fifth Sun, not until the 21st century was there a convergence of scholars with a profound grasp of colonial-era Nahuatl, a willingness to challenge the well-established portrait of the Aztecs on which generations of scholars had built their careers and a readily available body of sources written in the early colonial decades by the descendants of the Aztecs (mostly in Nahuatl). Townsend makes particular use of a genre of documentation called xiuhpohualli by its Nahua writers. Literally meaning ‘yearly account’, such sources were more like community histories. Townsend presented the xiuhpohualli in greater detail in an earlier book, Annals of Native America (2016), so here they stand as the largely invisible foundation to her reconstruction of Aztec history. But, significantly, they allow her to present the Aztec past through a skilful synthesis of Nahua memories and traditions. From start to finish – even after Spaniards appear on the scene – the perspective is Aztec-centric to an unprecedented degree.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the two centuries that straddled the Spanish invasion that began in 1519. Its narrative thus takes off in the 1420s, as the Mexica rulers forge the alliance of city-states that we call the Aztec Empire. The story’s basic elements are common to human history and are therefore broadly familiar: the leaders of a marginalised town turn the tables on the neighbours who have dominated them, generating a momentum of expansion that within a generation or so turns that town into the capital city of a diverse empire. Such a tale can be gripping and, in Townsend’s hands, it is certainly that.

Despite the dramatic changes that resulted from the Spanish invasion, Townsend is able to maintain an Aztec-centric (or, after the fall of the Aztec Empire, Nahua-centric) perspective into the 17th century. Considering that even her most important source documents – such as the xiuhpohualli – were written alphabetically by Christians, some with partial Spanish ancestry, that is no small accomplishment. The final 80 pages of Fifth Sun offer one of the best descriptions of the first century of Mexico’s colonial period I have ever read. In fact, this is the best book on the Aztecs yet written, full stop.

That is not just because of its focus on the Aztec perspective and not just because Nahua history is presented through Nahua sources and in terms that are sensitive and sensible to indigenous culture. Townsend has not set out to pen an Aztec apologia. She shies away from polemical defences of Aztec practices and from romanticising the individual Nahuas who play central roles in her telling of their history –although, to be fair, she comes close to an intellectual romance with Nahua women surviving the conquest wars (such as Moctezuma’s daughter, Tecuichpotzin, and Cortés’ interpreter, Malintzin) and with some of the xiuhpohualli authors.

Rather, the value of Fifth Sun lies in how it rescues Aztecs and Nahuas from centuries of colonialist caricature and renders them human again – fully human, with flaws, people capable of brutal violence but also of deep love, who also savoured ‘a good laugh, just as we do’. We are so ‘accustomed to being afraid of the Aztecs, even to being repulsed by them’, that it has never occurred to us that we might simply identify with them. With this book, that can change.

Is the word “trap” a transphobic slur?

Most of the time whenever there’s a character in Anime who cross-dresses, or you find out this female character “turned out to be a boy” (in quotes because this is also problematic), western people use the word “trap” to describe them, and it’s often said as a funny harmless joke, most likely without knowledge of what using this term really means. This is my take as a trans person on the subject.

Let us start at the concept of a “trap”, why would you call a character who looks like a female but has male genitalia a trap? Why are they a trap? Well, obviously what this means is that you were tricked and, surprise! This person was not what you expected, but it’s not just that, and to understand a bit better, we’ll look at how this term first appeared. The origins of the word come from the old Star Wars meme “It’s a trap!”, which was then used as a slang term referring to a character whose gender was ambiguous, this was mainly done in 4chan (you shouldn’t expect good things if they originated in 4chan), and quickly enough, it created a discussion about whether liking a “trap” would make you homosexual, which in itself is homophobic as the goal of this argument is to prove your heterosexuality at all costs. So, going back to the meaning of “trap”, given that it has this debate associated with it, the surprise element is not just that, a surprise, but also a bad surprise, since apparently now you are gay for liking this person, whose private parts aren’t those of a cisgender woman, and being gay is bad (if it weren’t, why the debate in the first place? Who cares?).

Some people think that it’s ridiculous to think that “trap” is a transphobic slur, as it’s either a harmless joke or, given its origins, not referring to trans people in particular but only characters who specifically are male disguising as women who trick other men into relationships (sexual or not). There’s even some trans women who liked to identify as a “trap” as it meant that they passed as cis-women (the so called “passing”) because they could trick people into thinking they effectively were cis-women. The problem with this, is that no matter your intentions or who you are referring to, the word itself has a derogatory connotation and many issues associated with it.

First, there’s obviously something wrong in saying a person is a trap. Would you like to be called a trap? In this case, it refers to gender, but imagine it was about something else, like your physical appearance or your personality. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be called a trap because someone expected you to be a certain way and when you were not, it is treated as a bad surprise. But the problem here is even bigger, because in the case of gender, you could get killed, in fact there’s even something known as “trans panic defense” in some countries and/or states which legitimizes violence against trans people when the victim’s gender identity is to blame for the aggressor’s violent reaction, which could even include murder. Lastly, this idea of a “trap” also implies that the gender of said person is not valid, as the actual organs matter most when it comes to identifying their gender, if said “trap” is a trans person.

Secondly, in Japan there’s a big difference between crossdressing (which was done in traditional theater performances, and therefore is more accepted) and being transgender (not so accepted…), but for the western audience whose culture is vastly different, the term “trap” can refer to a crossdresser, a trans person, or anything in between. Therefore, using this word to refer to certain characters I believe is belittling the representation in some cases, like when good trans characters are portrayed and some people just keep joking about them being “traps”, and representation is something really important in a country like Japan where being trans is not widely accepted.

Another problem related to the idea of a “trap” is the fetishization of trans women, even if the term is not referring directly to them, some people make a connection between these concepts and would say that in real life, a trans woman would be close to what a “trap” is in fiction (I repeat, this is because “trap” refers to gender, and adding the misinformation about trans issues, it ends up with both concepts being often mixed up).

To summarize, the debate on whether saying “trap” is offensive to the trans community is not new, and I understand that some people defend the term by saying that they do not refer to trans people when they say “trap”, but even if that were the case, the fact is that if you find funny or embarrassing that someone was tricked by a person hiding their gender, and/or if you think it’s a joke when a person dresses as the opposite sex, it’s something that inevitably extrapolates to trans issues, I personally find it awkward when people use the term because more often than not, it just means that they don’t know a thing about what trans people have to go through, in my personal case these types of narratives really affected me when I was young, because I didn’t want to be a laughing matter, be thought as insane or seen as a joke. If you really, really want to use the term, first ask yourself why, then please be clear of this distinction about what type of person you are talking about and just don’t use it as a derogatory term.  

-Felix Fuentes