Latest Posts by shadyglitterbeliever - Page 5

a gentle fact about this world is that people will want to help you. a cruel fact about it is that you do have to put on your big boy pants and open their contact on your phone and say some human words to ask them for it

Workin' Girls

The thing is, I really don’t think Workin’ Girls really was just a shameless gender swap. It seems to genuinely be the better version of the story. Like, the way Hidgens changed the character names and pronouns (and added “but-for-girls” onto the end of every “football”) while preserving everything else took Workin’ Boys from a bad show with an admittedly great score to a hilarious and pointedly satirical work about the devaluation of femininity in the workplace and financial industry. The Workin’ Girls succeed in business because they behave like stereotypically masculine men. They are women making their way through life (as much as they’d rather just be on their football-but-for-girls field), and their whole big song about what it takes to do so is steeped in phrases that are historically male-aligned (of course, not all men have balls and some or all of the Workin' Girls could actually have balls! We don't know!). Hidgens accidentally created a comedic masterpiece about the plight of women in the workplace and, in a breathtakingly in-character move, simply failed to realize it.

(EDIT AND UPDATE: Yes, and as @yakitori-queen just said in the replies, not to mention all the great gender fuckery!)

English added by me :)

women must learn about technology

one of the most common gender-limited roles across the world is the making of musical instruments. in the majority of cultures, men make musical instruments. flutes are almost exclusively made by men.

this may seem like a weird little curio - i certainly thought it was - until you read more. in many cultures, instruments are played by the people who make them. if women don't have the knowledge to make instruments, then they can't play the instrument, because instruments may not be made as gifts. instruments become gendered. men resent women entering on their space and refuse to share technical knowledge with them on how to play or make the instrument. women are limited to singing (if that) or simple instruments that they can make. there are very few instruments that "only" women are allowed to play/make.

in its extreme form, this results in taboo musical instruments (usually flutes for some reason) that women may not see or hear on pain of death.

"so what", i hear you say. "what do musical instruments have to do with anything?" well, it shows that one of the most common ways to limit women and raise up men is to prevent or discourage women from having technical knowledge.

even in our allegedly """superior""" western cultures, music production and engineering is almost entirely male-dominated. ask women in production and sound engineering, and you'll find that they face not just benign sexism/prejudice but downright hostility.

men become associated with technology. technology from tekhnos - art or craft. women become associated with spiritualism, the immaterial, the unprovable and ineffable ("we are reclaiming our feminine power through astrology!") or alternatively the body, the base, the mundane, the maintenance work, using machines and technology that they did not create.

knowledge is power. men have historically guarded certain kinds of knowledge/power from women. today, too many men continue this gatekeeping. "don't worry your pretty little head about how a car works, missy." too many women are happy to let them, afraid to challenge their learned helplessness. "I'm a passenger princess! i'm too dumb to know how a washing machine works!" (and i even see feminists say things like "thank god a butch woman was here to help me change my tires." why associate technological knowledge with a certain gender presentation?)

learning about technology can be scary. it's complicated and there's a large body of material to challenge. many of us have been conditioned into learned helplessness, and it's easier and more immediately rewarding to ask someone else to take care of our technological issues for us. there's the issue of stereotype threat where we're afraid to fail and confirm negative stereotypes of women. but if we're serious about empowerment, we must remember knowledge is power. women who know about carpentry don't need to rely on men. women who know how to fix their car can intelligently converse with male mechanics. knowledge is the thing they can't take away from you, you carry it with you where you go, and you can share it with other women. you don't need to learn about every field of technology - pick one that piques your interest (electronics? electricity? carpentry? HVAC? auto mechanics?) and begin reading about it. do beginner diy stuff. over time, you'll gain confidence and useful skills. then help fellow women.

Selina Kyle would dump his ass in minutes..

"I would kill for you. I would die for you" would you take a break for me? Would you sit down and rest? For a day, a week, a year? Would you let others take care of your needs for me? Would you let yourself be held for me? By me?

I came up with a new saying:

"You wouldn't bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven."

It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn't enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you're also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.

Scenes in TGWDLM that have been altered forever in my head.

Hey I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you need longer than a minute to recover from doing your gym reps, your workout is too hard for you. If you need to take time to wheeze and catch your breath while sitting on the equipment before you're capable of standing up and walking off from it, you need to cut back. Do fewer reps, use lighter weights, just do less of it altogether. It's a machine, not your damn death bed. Stop hogging up the equipment and go die somewhere else.

"should lesbians really get off scot free and not ever have to examine anything about their desires for other women?! should they never be called out again for thinking a woman is sexy?!?!??" literally yes. at the very fucking least

ok well im going to build a good future for myself whether i like it or not

my son who i hate

the male gaze distorts reality

started watching movies again (just don't like movies really) and one thing that surprised me was how the male gaze isn't just about staring at hot naked ladies, but how it distorts reality. the male gaze creates 'people' and 'situations' that simply don't exist.

the biggest example to me is the femme fatale. the devious woman using her sexuality as a weapon. whether the trope is a blonde bimbo bubblingly bouncing her boobs, or a sophisticated older brunette casually letting the strap fall off her shoulder and threatening to reveal her bust, they are different incarnations of the same concept. the women are knowingly using the sexual desire of men against them.

i watched a particularly egregious example where a group of women were sent to seduce a group of men, hanging off their shoulders, caressing their chests, with the promise of further sex if they came to another room. the true purpose was to humiliate them by getting them to disrobe in front of other people.

when i was a kid watching these scenes, i was convinced that this was a real thing women did - there were women out there who knowingly used their sexual appeal to get men to do things they otherwise wouldn't. it had to be such a recurrent trope for a reason, right? it even shows up in movies for children - remember the hot pink pegasus seducing hercules's pegasus?

but as an adult, i find myself confused watching these scenes. i've never seen anything like this happen. i've never met someone who says they do things like this. it's one thing to be flirty and dress in a sexually attractive way to get free drinks, but it's quite another to be so sexually forward to 'deceive' and 'trap' men. not to mention, it's... dangerous. if the man even believes he's being deceived, he can turn violent. it's a foolish move.

maybe the only real life example I can think of is honeypots. but honeypots are actual spies, trained by governments, and spies are selected to have less empathy than the average human being. do we really think that among untrained women there are so many seductresses with the skill of trained spies?

"what about sex workers/prostitutes?" while the honeypot spy is employed by a government agency, prostitutes are paid by the very people they are "seducing." prostitutes have to put on an act - they need to pretend to be the sexually active and perpetually horny woman men both want and fear. but most prostitutes are not like this; they are in it because they need money fast, not because they think fucking strange men for pay is a sexy and desirable career path (fun fact - read the diary of madam pompadour, the most famous courtesan and the embodiment of aristocratic seductress, and you will find she actually did not like having sex with the king and dreaded it. not even our real life courtesans can live up to our fantasies.)

the entire idea of a woman using her sexuality against men is simply a male fantasy - and the flipside is that it's a male anxiety, too.

men wish that women would approach them and find them desirable and initiate sexual intercourse with them, without the men having to do any of the work. there's nothing inherently wrong with fantasizing that a hot person finds you so special and hot that they want to have sex with you right away. men and women of all sexual orientations entertain these secret fantasies.

but then, there's the fear - "what if these hot women are actually only pretending to be interested in me, to get something from me? and i'm too horny to think straight and i actually give it to them?!" and that is the male anxiety, that for a moment, they actually end up losing the upper hand. despite the fact that such a situation is actually pretty rare in real life (I asked several male friends if they had personally or second-hand encountered such a situation in real life, and none could say they had), it is a common trope in fiction. it is especially lascivious in film, where the seduction before the fall can be portrayed in softcore porny ways.

"this is a foolish idea, everyone knows fiction and reality are separate." well, we know they are separate, but do you know which parts? if you don't already know the facts of the situation beforehand, how can you tell when fiction is lying to you and when it's drawing from reality? do you think the young, sexually inexperienced kids watching disney's hercules know that 'seductresses' aren't a common threat when we watch this scene? or will they learn and think "ok, a thing that happens in grownup life is that hot ladies seduce men, and you gotta watch out for them!" what basis does a child or even a teenager have to know this is false? especially when this is a common trope?

"women are sexually available and active - and deceitful" is a harmful trope. when you read about the ancient greeks stereotyping that women are lustful, they don't mean it in an "aww shucks, these girls just love having sex!" kinda way, they mean it in a "women are unfaithful and will use any means to get dick, including taking advantage of their hotness" way (this is why 'whore' is the ultimate insult for women). because if this trope were real, then it would be dangerous, wouldn't it? honeypot spies are dangerous for this reason. luckily for us, it is not real, but the male anxiety surrounding it continues. the male desire/anxiety around it informs porn tropes about 'punished sluts'. it informs incel tropes about the 'cock carousel'.

and this is what i mean when i say the male gaze distorts reality. it fabricates, out of whole cloth, a person that does not exist in any meaningful way - a woman who seduces men while demanding no emotional involvement, who is eager and willing at all times, who can turn the very desire for her existence against those men to get what she wants. she is not repulsed by or afraid of the men she pretends to be attracted to. before, we had to content ourselves with art and novels glorifying this false woman, but film allows her to exist in flesh and blood. cast a real woman, have her speak words and move her body in ways dictated by a man, and suddenly she appears much more real. grow up with enough of these, and even women writers can start to think these "seductresses" are real people. she can try to reclaim her and turn her into a badass boss babe, or she can condemn her as immoral and pathetic, but the deception is complete - the argument is no longer about whether this woman exists (she does not), but about whether she is justified in her ways. the female writer does not realize she was nursed on the male gaze for years, and it will take serious seeing with her own eyes to realize what is the real world and what is male fantasies and fears.

i honestly think toddlers with ipads are one of the most pressing issues facing US society today lol. our children are being made neurotic, distracted, and addicted to screens before they’ve even learned to speak. this will have devastating longterm consequences on their ability to develop normal social skills and learn new information. it feels like these tech companies and their financial backers are trying to create an underclass of people whose experience of life will be almost entirely online. they’re setting our future generations up to be unskilled, anti-social, and intellectually stunted

*thinks of something really sad*

ehhehehehehe

oh wow . they're about to make lgbtq+ "movement" fully illegal in russia and the supreme court is to consider it today

This is the deeply homophobic + transphobic autocracy that tankies worship so much 😒

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The Russian Justice Ministry on Friday said it has filed a lawsuit with the nation’s Supreme Court to outlaw the LGBTQ+ “international public movement” as extremist, the latest crippling blow against the already beleaguered LGBTQ+ community in the increasingly conservative country.

The crackdown, which began a decade ago, slowly but surely chipped away at LGBTQ+ rights. In 2013, the Kremlin adopted the first legislation restricting LGBTQ+ rights, known as the “gay propaganda” law, banning any non-critical public depiction of “nontraditional sexual relations” among minors. In 2020, Putin pushed through a constitutional reform to extend his rule by two more terms that also outlawed same-sex marriage.

In 2022, after sending troops into Ukraine, the Kremlin ramped up its rhetoric about protecting “traditional values” from what it called the West’s “degrading” influence, in what rights advocates saw as an attempt to legitimize the war in Ukraine. That same year, the authorities adopted a law banning propaganda of “nontraditional sexual relations” among adults, too, effectively outlawing any public endorsement of LGBTQ+ people.

Another law passed this year prohibited gender transitioning procedures and gender-affirming care for trans people. The legislation prohibited any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person,” as well as changing one’s gender in official documents and public records. It also amended Russia’s Family Code by listing gender change as a reason to annul a marriage and adding those “who had changed gender” to a list of people who can’t become foster or adoptive parents.

“Do we really want to have here, in our country, in Russia, ‘Parent No. 1, No. 2, No. 3’ instead of ‘mom’ and ‘dad?’” Putin said in September 2022 at a ceremony to formalize Moscow’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions. “Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed in our schools from the primary grades?”

(continue reading)

so, today we, russian queers, may become "extremists" by decision of russian supreme court and thus our existence will be silenced and erased. any queer activism will be impossible for us. I don't know what to do anymore. I was heartbroken when they passed the laws about "gay propaganda" and transgender people, now I'm just numb. I don't want to escape. I just want to live safely in my own country.

please hear us.

underrated feminist analysis

from here

I love you people who show kindness because "it's what you're supposed to do". I love you people who show kindess because they like being thanked. I love you people who show kindness because it makes them feel good. I love you people who show kindness because they were shown kindness first. I love you people who show kindness for "selfish" reasons. I love you people who show kindness for the "wrong" reasons. I love you people who show kindness in a body that rejects the very notion. Your kindness is not any lesser because of its motivations. The good you added to the world is just as valuable as someone doing it for the "right" reasons. Your effort is seen. Your effort is valued.

girlssss

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