Mostly Void.

hey girl! huh? oh, no no no, I'm not misgendering you, I use girl in a gender neutral way. I call everybody girl! anybody can be a girl, it doesn't really mean woman, ya know? hey look I don't know why you're being so difficult about this, I said it's gender neutral. I'm not transphobic! I'm trans myself and my trans guy friend doesn't have a problem with it when I call him girl. ok look I'm done arguing with you I'm just going to block you.

i find it so interesting how people act like "critically examining a piece of media" is the opposite of "enjoying that piece of media." rip to you but i actually find it really enjoyable and compelling to dissect and think through the art i engage with

trying to fight against the sexualization of women by sexualizing men doesn't work. when people make mods for video games where they turn the women into bimbos is because they have genuinely lust for them, but when people make mods to give cloud strife a tramp stamp is because they think it's funny. dungeon meshi senshi panty shots aren't fan service, they're jokes. they're trying to make a joke about how funny it is that they are showing this man's panties

worst is that putting a traditional macho hero in bikinis and giving them things that are traditionally associated with women isn't just a joke, it's a transmisogynistic joke. you're pointing at cloud strife with a tramp stamp and laughing at how funny it is that a man has one of these

it's generally good to be nice to people & not treat them with hostility sure but a lot of the time when white men who got radicalized into the alt right talk about "hostility on the left" what they really mean is "women & poc not prefacing every complaint about men &/or white people with 'not you tho you're one of the good ones'" & like respectfully if you take every complaint from marginalized people about their oppressors as a personal attack that's kind of a you problem

Everyone is so weird about people who cry easily. Fellas, is it evil and manipulative to *checks notes* have an involuntary stress response?

I had to get used to this with my wife. She has parents that were very supportive of her emotional well-being as a kid, and thus cries easily because she was never shamed for it.

Don’t shame people for showing their emotions. I get it, I do: my instinct when someone cries is to freak out because a) in my family the only way you were allowed to cry was if you were Really Badly Hurt, so seeing someone else cry sets off alarms in my head and b) my other instinct is to stop her from crying before Someone Else Sees, because they’ll be angry and mock her for it. But that’s my shit! I gotta deal with that! Her crying is lovely and wonderful because it means she feels safe enough in the world and with me to express those emotions.

(ALSO: if you are like me and just Can’t Fucking Cry, even when you’re really upset, you gotta find other ways to communicate that to someone who is used to crying. Because like, they’re used to people crying as an indicator of upset, and if they don’t see that, they’re maybe not gonna know that you are! I’ve gotten in the habit of saying aloud, “if I could cry, I would be crying right now.”)

I'm sure others have made the point by now but also: being calm and respectful about someone crying is also the perfect counterspell to performative/manipulative crying anyway.

If someone is in the middle of an argument and they start crying as an involuntary stress response, they'll probably be pretty relieved to be respectfully asked, "Do you need a moment to collect yourself?"

If they were seeking a fawn-response or an "automatic argument end/win," they're not getting it, but in a respectful way they'd have to really work to feel victimized about.

And if the truth is (as is so common) somewhere in between, it gives them a chance to step back sort their shit out--which is not a gift offered by either "I gotta make them stop crying (fawn version)" or "I gotta make them stop crying (angry version)"

And if they're like me they may say "no I'm actually mostly fine just ignore it if you can my body just FUCKING DOES THIS I am literally more upset that I'm crying than by the argument".

Now if you can't, like if the crying fucks up your hindbrain too much you can also go "hey can we take a minute and reregulate because I'm having a hard time with the crying" and that's also valid.

(And sometimes you may be the response I'm crying because I'm really FUCKING upset! and it may be important to take that on board...but it's still best/fair to then go "okay we need to take a minute to regulate and then we can talk about this.")

Now, granted: all of this assumes that you're acting in good faith, you know? Which requires some self-honesty, because the other side of things can be "I react badly to people crying because it forces me to be aware that I have the power to seriously distress other people and may have done so and now have to deal with interpersonal consequences." If you're used to being in relationships where everyone represses stuff then it may be very, very confronting to realize that you absolutely can cause people distress and that is a real thing.

"Do you need a moment to collect yourself?" can be as harshly, manipulatively cruel (and coercive) as anything else, if that's how you mean it. If what you actually mean is "how fucking dare you be upset, stop making me see that you're upset right now", if you're acting in bad faith, it will also be an escalation of conflict/etc.

So as with all conflict it's a really good idea to assess and know your own motivations and be honest with yourself (and be prepared to sometimes discover that, in the moment, out of stress, you're being a dick/trying to just control the situation so you "win", rather than actually . . . solving whatever's the problem).

But a lot of the time the person crying is actually not trying to manipulate you they're just . . . having a reaction, and one they have minimal control over; and if you also approach the situation in good faith, and with an open mind about, "ok how are we going to solve this", it'll have a lot better outcomes than otherwise.

"what that mouth do" gnaw and chew and munch and nibble and chomp and bite u

also eat insane amounts of pasta

the worst person you could think of should also never get executed by the state btw

now more than ever I think it's important for people to remember that puberty blockers *were* the compromise position.

if you start from a position that trans people should have equal rights in society, then it becomes obvious that all the faux concern about "irreversible changes" is utter bs, because puberty itself is irreversible, and these people want all trans people to be forced to go through the wrong one

the people calling for our healthcare to be banned don't give a single solitary fuck about the "irreversible changes" that they want every single trans person to be forcibly subjected to

i can't take the majority of posters on this site seriously. everything is "terfy" but nothing is racist. everyone is a misandrist if you put men dni in your bio but no one is capable of misogyny. every kink under the sun is perfectly harmless and are never tinged by our white supremacist and patriarchal society, but if you try and have a genuine discussion about abuse in bdsm/kink spaces you're an "anti" and on the same level as homophobic fascists. everyone wants to apparently help palestine but no one wants to threaten biden with witholding their vote. yall are so unserious it makes my head spin

putting "q slur" on a post makes you a terf but if you try and discuss transmisogyny coming out of trans men's and tme nonbinary spaces you're a big meanie who's a transandrophobe. be . real

"its okay to be a feminine man" is just "confused little girl" for transfems

The other implication of "its okay to be a feminine man" is that its more okay to be a feminine man than a trans woman. To be clear it is not actually that they are okay with feminine men, and this is a unknowing admittance there is a social heirarchy of available gender expressions with trans woman on the bottom.

the idea that women are inferior to men is like a metaphysical quality of knowledge. it’s not treated as a fact it’s basically equivalent to mythology, outside of the realm of contestation. like you don’t even need to personally hold hatred in your heart for women to participate in this mythology. the world is simply structured around venerating men. which doesn’t mean the world always produces enjoyable or pleasant outcomes for men, and the punishments for not living up to the image of Man is deeply violent, but the fact remains that they are the protagonists of reality (and reality is sometimes not fun). so when men complain about “the left” (by which they mean liberals) being mean to them, and even if we grant that a group of ‘man-hating’ feminists really did say a bunch of rude shit to them about being a dumb lazy man or whatever, they are simply encountering a single group of people who contest the mythology that women are subhuman and come away from that experience completely horrified. do these feminists not realise that I’m the main character of the universe? why am I not being given a prize for gracing them with my presence? this is why the right is so welcoming to people like me. and if you ever point out this behaviour you are told to check your misandry

it's kind of like glaringly obvious when someone just does not see trans women as eligible to be attracted to and honestly there's nothing more patronizing than someone basically being like "oh i'll go to bat for trans women but i draw the line at being intimate with them"

[...]

11 November 2024

i know we talk about the infantilization of trans men a lot (which, to be clear, IS a big problem, one that I've personally dealt with many times) but i don't think we talk enough about the reverse, calling a teenage trans girl a "woman" and treating her like she's an adult despite being like 15. I've seen this happen so many times and it's so fucking gross

yeah that’s 100% in-line with a common strain of transmisogynistic thinking: that trans femininity is “more adult” and “more sexual” than cis femininity OR trans masculinity. This thinking gets applied to trans women and girls of every age, from 10 year old trans girls being treated like sexual predators by the pearl-clutching parents of their classmates, to adult trans women being legislated out of public life bc we are deemed “inappropriate for children” by Republican politicians. Even in “progressive” spaces, trans girls are often held to standards of maturity above those common for their age. (And adhering to those standards does benefit you. Because, you know, Or Else there’s social consequences.)

You never age out of this line of thinking being applied to us. (Though reaching adulthood as a trans woman conveys a lot of material and intangible benefits. Hang in there, kids.)

“male loneliness epidemic” and “friendzoning” are similar concepts to me in that the conditions they describe are literally experienced by everyone at some point in their lives but when its men its some sort of profound injustice that needs to be rectified by checks notes giving them unfettered access to the public good that is Women

also the former "epidemic" being taken up in pop discourse explicitly or implicitly as a pathological consequence of feminism having "gone too far" instead of actually doing the work to connect social isolation to existing material conditions....no no don't worry about it just default to blaming women for men's sadness and dissatisfaction bc otherwise you'd have to confront capitalism and misogyny and white supremacy etc. etc. and nobody wants to do that so. its somehow very aggravating and boring at the same time. whenever i see think-pieces that follow this script i instantly fall into a furious slumber