the real horseshoe theory is how both MRA podcast guys and TERFS will insist upon calling women 'females' and thertefore constantly sound like a 1950s alien invader with a head made of two bike lights sticking otu of a bundle of tinfoil
Favorite thing about renaissance faires is that they have fuck all to to with the renaissance. This thang is not about historical anything this is about dressing up like a fairy and watching a joust
i know a lot of people dont like bugs but they are animals. theyre just as essential as the rabbits and foxes and deer and bears. they all play an important role keeping the ecosystem in order. they pollinate and hunt and get hunted. theyre a part of a balance. their purpose on earth isnt just to be an inconvenience to you personally. bugs dont care about you. i asked them about it and they said they never even heard of you
God sweet disposition is such a good song
I love this vibe
Why do people think the laws of man and nature don’t apply in beach bathrooms? What is it about beach bathrooms that makes people enter the heart of darkness and decide that toilet paper can go anywhere?
we’re literally floating on a tiny planet in fucking space why are we surrounded by hatred and misery. why can’t everyone just calm the fuck down and lay on some grass. the sun is a GIANT BURNING ORB why does money exist. fuck everything
if you’re not into some dumb embarrassing shit you’re not living your truth
‘if you’re a trans guy why are you wearing a bra’ listen my dude, unsure if you know but the day I came out as trans my breasts didn’t immediately retract into my body. they continue to exist. and wearing a binder - no matter how well it fits - for hours on end day in day out becomes unbelievably uncomfortable. wearing a bra as a trans guy doesn’t make you a Bad Trans™. can we stop putting expectations on trans people to perform to the Good Trans Person Standards and being terrible to them when they don’t. other words, can people mind their own fuckin business when it comes to other people’s bodies and what they do with them lmfao
this goes for giving trans women shit for not shaving too. there are a hundred and one reasons why someone may choose not to shave or not be able to. people empower cis women for not shaving (which is perfectly fine and great) and in the same breathe shame a trans woman for not choosing to shave. don’t force a higher standard of presentation onto trans people, especially when those presentations are rooted in stale expectations of gender.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
me: marvel is just following the ugly boring blockbuster format with films that are greyer than my grandma’s hair fuck them i don’t need a single shitty superhero movie ever again in my life-
taika waititi:
mall of america: we’re gonna have black santa
trump supporters:
starbucks: we’re gonna say happy holidays
trump supporters:
hamilton: mike pence please look out for us and be careful
trump supporters:
kellogs: we don’t want our ads on a bigoted news site
trump supporters:
the rest of america: hillary won the popular vote
trump supporters:
