Clay / Rain

Obviously there are many things to dislike about adulthood but as someone who grew up in an abusive household for whom adulthood offered the only chance at an escape, it's incredibly important to me that i romanticize adulthood whenever possible because i know there are kids and teenagers like me out there who are seeing nothing but complaints about rent and taxes and the loneliness of living on your own and i know they're going to internalize all of that and assume it means that adulthood won't offer them the freedom and safety they've been dreaming of. So while i never want to minimize the difficulties of being an adult, i also want to highlight how incredibly nice it can be to finally have ownership of your life and your body and your time and money and food and everything else in a way that you never had before. You can choose when you wake up! You can choose what you have for breakfast! You can choose when to go to sleep or if you want to (inadvisably) stay up all night watching tv in the living room! In the living room! You can choose what to watch! These are little things, but they are worth taking pleasure in, and they are worth looking forward to.

Oh. Man. I'm in my 40s now, but can STILL remember the first apartment I lived in alone. The first week, I had nothing. NOTHING. I slept on the floor wrapped up in curtains, until a friend came to visit and was like "welp. This ain't keepin' on" and gave me a folding bed and a couple of blankets. There were part of it that were just... not fun. You know what I did, though? I made cookies. Because I wanted them, and nobody could keep me from using the kitchen. I got a cat, because nobody could tell me "no". I took long, hot bubble baths because the bathroom - and the bathtub - were MINE and nobody else's. I turned MY music up and danced around MY living room all day (but was aware of the family with children downstairs, so shut down the one person party before it got too late). I bought a cast-off couch for cheap and had friends help me bring it in, and sat on MY couch and sewed. And crocheted. And started to teach myself to knit. The only one there to tell me "no" was the kitten, and she loved playing with the yarn. There were things about it that were exceptionally hard. I was a pregnant single waitress truly struggling to pay bills and put food on the table. But that's not what stuck. What stayed with me, and what was important, was those little things that made being an adult worthwhile.

You will get out and you will get free and it still rains, sometimes, but you get to decide whether to stay in or put up your umbrella or just let it pour down your face while you stomp puddles. You get to choose. It's not paradise, but it is, in the end, yours, which is such a relief. And all the things they say about the best of life being free - that's true. You will have happiness of your own making.

this made me cry, so i have to share it. i can’t tell you how much of this feels like it was about my childhood.

“Some nights, always alone, I go out in stolen makeup and women’s clothes with an ID I found in a lost wallet. I never feel more male than on these nights”

this has been fucking me up for a minute

there is too much that i want to quote here and not enough to convince you that this will be one of, if not the, most important pieces you will read this year.

“I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the gowns.”

Everybody should mandatorily have to read this article before they claim to be an ally to trans women.

I read this thing and most of what I saw was evidence of massive abuse by feminists.

Probably before the author was able to intellectualize it at all, it had been made clear to them that girls were acceptable and admirable and that boys were potential men and that men are evil.

That’s how it was in my house growing up and I can tell you with great certainty that the feminist message of female moral superiority is incredibly corrosive to a developing male identity.

This is by design, and while I understand that most feminist mothers believe they are fighting back against “patriarchal socialization” what they are really doing is creating people with crippling identity crises and emotional damage.

Then the author grew up and made feminist friends who kept the pressure on so that a recovery would be unlikely.

Disgusting abuse of social power on the part of the Feminist movement.

My favorite people are (and will remain for my whole life) girls — my teachers, my mom’s friends, my classmates. I don’t like to play with boys. Boys are generally dumb and they have boogers in their noses.

I hate the idea of having to spend all of my time with other boys. Boys are immature. Boys are hypersexual. Boys are violent.

I meet boys who also have terrible secrets. I meet boys who agree with me that it is terrible to be a boy, although they don’t seem to mean it in the same way that I do. We are not proud to be boys, but we have fun with each other.

One of the boys, from Korea, gets circumcised at sixteen because the girl who asks him to the Sadie-Hawkins dance makes fun of his uncut penis.

I write my thesis on the friendship and sexuality of American males and its representation in television & film. One piece of feedback is “I am so sick of boys writing about boys.”

One of the boys from boarding school, who began to shower with me late at night, who told me through gritted teeth that he was too skinny and too fat, throws himself in front of a train.

I am told that masculinity exists in opposition to femininity and that it is unequivocally toxic.

In the classroom I timidly, carefully disagree. And I know what it looks like.My professor rolls her eyes. The rest of the class are ciswomen. There are disgusted laughs. The good qualities I’m talking about are actually femininity, several explain.

Down cascade the gleeful tweets from ciswomen about how women are more beautiful than men — how graceful the female body is, how utilitarian the male. How awesome boobs are. How bad boys’ taste in clothing is. How incompetent they are emotionally. How they’re too weak to handle childbirth and periods. Neckbeards are the scourge of the internet. They wax disgusted about “dad bods.” SCUM rhetoric is revived with inconsistent levels of irony. The meme gospel says penises are just shitty clitorises.

In the nineties, cis women were uncomfortable with an animated paperclip because it was “male-looking”.

I also know some people who are very self-conscious about their neck hairs and can’t do much about them. I wonder if there are ways to criticize people based on their character without impugning the hairs that come out of them. She says I am mansplaining. She says I am Not-All-Men-ing. She also says I couldn’t possibly understand the standards of beauty imposed upon women.

She is furious. She tells me I am a straight cis male and I need to shut up and listen.

Another time I joke about an author who I think is not a great author. I am told that I don’t get to joke about that author, because they are an author with many female fans—their work is coded as a feminine interest.

And I hear my proudly misandrist-identifying cisfemale friends making fun of bald men as if it were a shortcoming or decision of the men themselves. Bald men make them think of television pedophiles. Bald men remind them of self-indulgent authors and desperate improvisers. I see men on the train losing their hair, their youth, their options, and I feel for them. It’s not funny. It’s a dysmorphic nightmare for anyone. I don’t bother mentioning that I find the jokes unnecessary and insensitive. I know what the girls will say.

I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.

More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”

Another says “I do the misandry stuff because it’s an easy way to earn queer cred points, but when I think about it it makes me uncomfortable.”

Another: “It’s a coping habit I’m not proud of. If I agree ‘girls rule boys drool’ it makes me feel more like a girl.”

Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.

reading this essay feels like driving in the knife already buried between my ribs

hold me close, make me feel like i’m real

[ based off of this fic (cw for disassociation) ]

OK so ya may as well have the full thing, I hope tumblr doesn’t fry the quality of these

i mean