Incarnation Issues

not to keep harping on this but if you HATE shaving your body or any other part of your "beauty routine": stop doing it. just stop doing it, at least for a little while (maybe when you don't have a lot going on if that helps) and HONESTLY gauge how it makes you feel. is this feeling better or worse than the amount of time, stress, and money the routine takes? do YOU actually prefer how you looked before, or are you only worried about what others think? if you stopped doing the routine forever, could you find other ways to feel better about yourself with that energy?

when I was like 19 and the idea of not shaving my legs anymore first occurred to me (bc I had a Cool Progressive Boyfriend that Didn't Care) i just stopped and it was immediately like... a quantifiably large chunk of unnecessary anxiety just sloughed off my life forever. instantaneously I got rid a bunch of effort and stress I had been accepting as normal, and replaced it with more time to do what actually made me feel 'ready' in the morning, like hygiene, coffee, preparing for my activities etc.

and i DONT feel self conscious about body hair personally but even if I did, no amount of shame over hair could outweigh how much easier my life is. not just bc 'shaving annoying' or 'long showers' or whatever, but like. yeah I don't waste as much time getting ready anymore, and I also don't have to realize last minute before some leg-showing event that im unfit for display and have a whole self-esteem plummeting anxiety attack about whether I should rush it unsafely and risk being late, cut up, and stressed out before the event, or go With Hair and feel judged the whole time. i don't have to go through any of those emotions and when anyone does comment on my hair rudely, im in a much healthier place to deal with it and tell them to fuck off rather than validate THEIR fucked up standards by feeling bad.

once I realized I didn't give a shit and neither did anyone I cared about, it also gave me the freedom to cut out a bunch of other shit I was only doing (or Thinking I Should) bc it was what girls Have To Do to be presentable. fuck shaving fuck waxing fuck eyebrow shaping fuck concealer fuck multi step skincare fuck shapewear fuck lip fillers fuck contouring fuck teeth whitening fuck all of it, you do not need to change ANYTHING about how you look Every Single Day.

for those of you about to say "but I like being shaven/wearing makeup/literally pulling hair out of my face painfully every day etc etc etc":

have fun and mod your avatar all you want but for gods sake if you hate it and complain about how long it takes and all the stuff you "have" to buy or do just to "get ready" - you do not have to. you're not just having fun. you are not getting Ready, you are making your mood and experience worse for yourself, which is going to make you feel unready and unprepared for actually being yourself comfortably.

OBVIOUSLY if you enjoy doing these things, find them relaxing, or like what they do to your appearance, that is FINE. you know it's fine bc every single piece of mainstream media, advertisement, celebrity etc is reinforcing that it is not only fine, but *necessary* to be acceptable and normal in society.

less obviously but more importantly: many feminine people do not have the privilege of embracing this mindset due to safety, and the pressure I'm talking about is a lot more severe. if you need to do this shit in order to pass, prevent abuse, or otherwise keep yourself safe, keep at it but remember that it is not your fucking fault that they make you do this.

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back

additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you

useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)

Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.

DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).

Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.

edit: apparently tum "queerest place on the internet" blr hates disabled people so much that this post got automatically filtered. cool!

you motherfuckers better be lifting with your legs and not your back

Because I never knew what that really meant until my back already hurt:

[X]

Hurting your back isn’t always “ow, I lifted something really heavy and immediately felt a sharp pain,” sometimes it’s caused by the cumulative stress of straining it in tiny ways over a long period of time. Getting in the habit of good body mechanics makes a difference!

“average age of this site” no you should be doing this even when you’re young. Do it right from the beginning and you reduce problems later on.

#Not everything is about adults or aging Tumblr#Just because you’re experiencing it

yeah that too. smacks of the “you’re too young to be ill”. cancer kills infants. pain does not care about your age, but people act like it does.

Take it from a sheep farmer who throws around 100lb bales of alfalfa: nobody is doing enough planks at any age. Nobody is engaging their core enough. Learn good squat, deadlift, and farmer’s carry technique and that will cover 95% of what you need to do. Do planks and when you lift things pay attention to form and engage your abs. I’m 48 and the only person I know without back problems and everyone else has a desk job. It’s entirely because I’m religious about involving my abs in every. Single. Lift.

Champ, this post was made in 2017.

We don't talk enough about how the Post-Shower Drying Off segment sucks

Don't get to be the shower's nice wet, have to be stupid wet, can't do anything yet cause you're dripping and naked, your hair is a mess, it's big sucks

taking terf rhetoric at face value and concluding their thing is Hating Men is roughly as complacent as deciding 'wow, these neonazis have a real strong opposition to bankers'

These are smocking patterns. If you stitch these patterns into flat fabric and then pull the threads to gather the fabric, it will produce these patterns on the finished fabric. Smocking manipulates flat fabric into three dimensions.

The beautiful fabric that looked like dragon scales on costumes in the tv show Game of Thrones were produced by smocking, by sewing a particular pattern into the fabric and then pulling those threads just the right amount to gather the fabric into that pattern.

I don’t think people with tits should have to wear a bra at all to be considered decent in public. I think we should go back to bra burning. There is no such thing as a comfortable bra no matter how well it fits. And it’s bullshit that they exist as an undergarment at all. And it’s misogynist to have the expectation that titties have to be up high and restrained and not just free under your shirt. This is not a shitpost. I think bras are ontologically evil.

To be an obnoxious pedant about this: You shouldn't have to wear one. But not wearing one should be optional either.

My girlfriend wears two bras most of the time, a sports bra and a normal one, so she can move comfortably in public. Running still requires her to hold her tits so they don't hurt, not wearing a bra would extend that to basically everything she does. She wears a bra even at night because it's too uncomfortable not to.

People with very different needs than yours exist, I'm sorry to say.

Fair. Push come to shove, I am actually 100% pro-choice here. I've had friends with back issues as well.

And honestly, personally, sports bras are a weird sort of gender affirming for me. I'd be sad to never wear one again.

I assume OP is mostly just being hyperbolic and all three of us are in agreement, but I'll concede that "ontologically evil" does introduce some doubt...

I don’t think people with tits should have to wear a bra at all to be considered decent in public. I think we should go back to bra burning. There is no such thing as a comfortable bra no matter how well it fits. And it’s bullshit that they exist as an undergarment at all. And it’s misogynist to have the expectation that titties have to be up high and restrained and not just free under your shirt. This is not a shitpost. I think bras are ontologically evil.

Robert Wun | Haute Couture Fall Winter 2024/2025 (x)

@another-normal-anomaly

The transformation would not be permanent; you could always revise or reverse it later. If you would prefer to experience multiple forms across different categories, just choose the one that appeals to you most right now.

“Form” can include both your physical shape and the structure of your mind, how you experience the world, your sense of self, etc. I assume what people would prefer along the physical axis broadly with what they would prefer along the mental one, but if that’s not true for you, pick the option that describes whichever axis is more salient to your preferences.

Some of the ambiguity in the responses available is intentional; interpret them as the spirit moves you.

there’s some stuff I think is cool but wouldn’t want to actually maintain. given this I might want tentacle-oid stuff instead of hair and a nonhuman skin color with some nice markings? congrats to everyone with decorative feathers but I’m not doing that. nor do I want a wingspan large enough for someone with a human size brain to fly.

This is a difficult position for me to take seriously. You are using this term, "theyfab", which is (as far as I can tell) openly intended to be an insult for a specific sex+gender combination. It's natural that people will take offense at that. Of course, if they're expressing this offense by being sexist or transphobic back at you, that's not ok. But this post engages in a rhetorical slight of hand by presenting "maintain composure" and "be transphobic" as the only two options, rather than the (in fact reasonable) third option of "call out the needless offensive behavior for what it is".

I'm not hugely hung up on the words people use. E.g., I don't have an inherent problem with a word like "bitch", even though it's theoretically a gendered insult. It can be used in joking ways, playful ways, harmless ways, etc. Words themselves are not the issue. But if someone were to call a women "a bitch" with the clear intent to insult her for her gender, I would think that was straightforwardly bad. And that seems to be exactly what's going on with "theyfab"; it's a word that gets used straightforwardly to insult people for their gender. It's just needless. Worth noting also that I've never seen a post that used "theyfab" in any conceptually load-bearing way, it's always just peppered in for the purpose of, as far as I can tell, being insulting.

There's a lot of desire by people who use the term to dress it up as something else, but all these justifications seem pretty silly and post hoc to me. And, look, I'm not actually getting on anyone's case for being insulting. A lot of people who use this term are trans women, who have gone through at lot of injustice and are rightly angry about it. And when a person is angry they might use insulting language, that's a reality of the human condition. I don't judge anyone for that. But that makes it merely understandable, not per se justified. It's not something that should be defended in and of itself.

It feels like the early 2010s again in that some people seem to have decided "It's alright to be transphobic and prop up transmed ideas about illegitimate NBs who aren't trying hard enough because I'm trans and also more oppressed".

Like, this is how people who call others "theyfab" sound to me. This is what they remind me of.

It's like calling someone a "transtrender" to me.

See also: “If a white person gets mad at you for saying shitty stuff about white people, it proves they’re racist against you, because non-racist white people understand you say shitty stuff about them to cope.”

where the fuck did the phrase ‘fits like a glove’ come from. ive never worn a glove that fit perfectly in my entire life.

ah. i see. el problema es el capitalismo.

Took me 3 seconds to find a website where you can get custom alpaca-lined leather gloves made for $200. My guess is this is comparatively cheaper for the average person compared to the cost of tailored gloves in the past. Why do people complain about this stuff and blame it on le capitalism instead of just going out and buying tailored clothing? You can do that, you know. You just prefer the cheap stuff.

Just took a tour around the Palace of Versailles. People actually used to live in this house and now we live in cramped studio apartments. It's enraging what capitalism has stolen from us

So I've seen this floating around a lot and I think it's relevant to note that in fact, poor people in the past did have custom-tailored clothes, sometimes even made for them from scratch. (There was also a lot of tailoring and altering clothes passed down from other family members or from richer folks to servants and second hand sellers.)

It's just that they also owned like 1-2 outfits total, because this was the only way to get clothes and it was still expensive (usually in hours of labour rather than money; the clothes would be made or adjusted by members of your own household typically.) this isn't available to most people today because the ready availability of cheap off-the-rack clothing has resulted in a world where most women are not skilled professional tailors by modern standards.

Another thing accounting for the excellent proverbial fit is that as aforementioned you have one pair of gloves, and they are likely to be leather or wool. If you wear leather garments a lot and take care of them, they actually mold themselves to your shape over time. Skilfully hand-knitted wool is stretchy, and molds itself to your shape that way.

I was curious so I went to put some very rough numbers on this.

Bret Devereaux quotes a study by J.S. Lee in The Medieval Clothier estimating about 42 hours to spin and weave a yard of cloth in the 14th century. (This doesn't count the time producing the fiber on farms, or the sewing.) A modern men's suit takes somewhere between 3 and 4 yards of cloth. So producing that outfit would have taken something like 150 hours of work in the 14th century.

I had real trouble finding the data I wanted for the current US. I wanted median hourly wages, but I could only find average hourly wages (about 35 USD/hour) and median weekly wages (appears to be about 1150 USD/week, which works out to a little less than 30 USD/hour.) To be lazy we'll say 30 USD/hour. I also found 25th percentile usually weekly earnings, which is about 800 USD/week or about 20/hour.

So with the amount of labor it would have taken to produce a suit in the 14th century, the median full-time worker makes something like 4500 and the 25th percentile worker makes something like 3000.

A Savile Row bespoke suit costs a little over six thousand dollars. Which is more, but Savile Row is the absolute top end of this. When I got my dance tailsuit made (admittedly ten years ago), it was about 1500. I googled for a NY bespoke tailor, and the first hit says full suits start at 2500. This roundup I found via Reddit has a collection of bespoke shops in NYC starting with suits around 2000. (I picked NYC because I expect them to have some of the highest-end stuff in the US.)

So a US median wage earner can probably get about two bespoke suits made for the amount of labor that would have gone into making the cloth for that much suiting in the 14th century. And the modern one is going to have nicer cloth and higher-quality tailoring than I'd expect that person to have; yes, most women had serious tailoring skills but probably not "high-end bespoke shop" skill, in the same way most women could cook but weren't the equivalent of a modern Michelin-starred chef. But of course most people don't want to spend ten percent of their annual income on clothes, and we have other options now.

Now all those numbers are specific to the time period. If you roll back to the classical world cloth production took like 2-3 times as long, but if you roll forward to the 1800s it took much less time and was much cheaper. (I picked that time period because it seemed relevant to the conversation and also I found numbers for it without having to look very hard.)

Untrue! What the modern professionals have an edge in is largely equipment. High-end bespoke shop tailors don't have the hand-sewing prowess of the average Victorian woman (or so it has been opined, based on surviving examples of ordinary hand-sewing clothing).

This probably would be reflected in more time taken to assemble the suit, however. Modern high-end tailors do have a lot nicer equipment, although they don't actually use a ridiculous amount of stuff. A bunch of different wooden pressing tools, but those could be made back then. A good electric steam iron saves ungodly amounts of time reheating the damn thing. And scissors that stay sharp and are nicer than anything anyone had pre-19th century.

Oh, and the sewing machine. Machine stitches are very, very good for holding two pieces of fabric together. Yes, high end tailors now will finish everything by hand, but they basically universally use the machine for holding things together. It's at least an order of magnitude faster. Yes, it will plausibly be slightly weaker than backstitching that whole thing, for comparable backstitch lengths, or at least slightly more likely to unravel. But you generally don't do that because it would take forever.

Some of these things were more available to "average Victorian woman" of course. They also actually did have access to machine-woven cloth of a far, far higher average quality than homespun stuff.

And in the 1400s some of the cloth itself would be woven in such a way that it was already semi-tailored so there was less waste, so maybe some minor time savings there?

People talk about how there was incredibly fine handspun and hand-woven cloth in the past, but that also took way more effort and time, with the good fibers and the careful weaving. So with Victorian industrial weaving you got lower than high-end but higher than median fabric quality. In general, "homespun" was never a term to indicate high-quality. Gandhi famously encouraged Indians to use homespun instead of British cloth. This was a huge sacrifice in time and quality, because the stuff they were wearing was scratcher.

The materials in a Saville Row suit are going to be far softer than anything available to anyone but the quite wealthy (good suiting fabric is maybe $30-40/yard, so we're talking 4 hours of labor for something your average peasant could never produce, not even in 150 hours of labor).

In general, I can see average hand tailoring stuff to be superficially higher quality because the fabric assembly part is going to be comparatively faster than making the damn cloth. And if your whole life and training was hand stitching, you're going to be faster than the average bespoke tailor (who spends a lot of time hand stitching and won't be exactly slow). But as a result, your peasant tailor will have very slightly higher quality stitches in clothing that is still not even close to as nice as you would get from your $2000 bespoke New York suit. Your average noble would not have this due to material availability. (Your average king might).

The quality of tools has an absolutely massive force multiplying effect here.

Absolutely, the quality of tools and also the ability to work during dedicated time in a dedicated space makes a big difference.

To be clear, what I'm talking about with Victorian women is the quality of the sewing, not the fabric, which as you suggest wouldn't have been made at home then (but which would have at earlier time). And yes, the fabric mostly wouldn't be as nice as high-end fabric today, but would on many metrics have been nicer than the fabric that poor people wear today, because we just hadn't invented fabric that cheap yet, and even if we had, it wouldn't have made sense to use it because of how much work went into constructing a garment - literally not worth investing that time into fabric that's going to disintegrate in a few years.

Yes, hand-stitching can be stronger, but what was most prized about it was that the stitches could be smaller, creating seams that are almost impossible to see or feel. Even after sewing machines became commonplace, Victorian women advised one another to hand-sew underwear and especially baby clothes, and study of surviving garments vindicates their belief that they could do more precise and delicate work than even sewing machines developed far later are capable of.

One popular bit of anti-trans rhetoric is that trans identity is specifically pushed on GNC kids - which worryingly often carries with it a chaser of "surely left in isolation, these children would be happy as they are, because it's not like anyone's ever the target of abuse for being GNC". I can never help but picture this being said with the same desperate, hunched-over rictus grin Ricky Gervais adopts when he's telling his joke.

Our friends on the right, oddly, come closest to honesty on the subject. They'll whine about "where did all the tomboys (who we want to have sex with) go?" but won't even pretend to view feminine men with anything other than revulsion.