Beans?

strips women of creativity and agency in our presentation, which has been a very basic human thing for as long as humans have existed, and is not always a 1:1 correlation with practicality regardless of gender

positions women as powerless victims who meekly accept every attempt to oppress us without pushing back (eg why would we have worn corset-like garments for 500 years if they were torture devices? do you really think we're that stupid?)

ignores the role of some women in oppressing other women, be that along macro axes of privilege and oppression like class, race, gender conformity, etc. or just internalized misogyny or megalomania or whatever

ignores the ways in which some fashions that seem to fall in line with societal expectations for women nowadays were actually rebellious/liberating/hated by the patriarchy/etc. in their historical context

often fundamentally positions feminine presentations as Less than or inherently Bad, when some people of other genders may also want to embrace them as a form of gender nonconformity

like. for example. YOU may not want to wear the New Look and YOU are not coming out of WWII rationing and psychologically craving bounty and ornamentation after years of scarcity- and militarism seeping into every aspect of your life. and SOME women at the time were indeed like "fuck that; I've loved working in an aircraft factory and I don't want to trade in my coveralls for a poofy skirt!"

and of course there's broader historical meaning behind fashions that should be explored from multiple angles!

It could be any kind of struggle; not knowing a basic skill, having financial issues, a medical problem, an accident, doing something poorly, having a crime committed against me.

Every time, I would hear that nasty 'See, you can't take care of yourself. We told you so. You should have stayed in your place. We told you this would happen if you left.' I would become overwhelmed with shame of being a bad human and proving them right. Even if I never went back, the humiliation would sit with me and I would consider whatever happened to me, completely my fault.

This happened because abusers connect inevitable life struggles with their right to control the victims; it just isn't connected. Their twisted logic says, if you escape and then fail at being perfect, it's a proof you never should have gone. If an accident or crime happens to you, it means you're stupid just as we suspected and also somehow means you now deserve to have your agency taken away from you and be tortured forever.

People have accidents every day, they mess up, do things poorly, they struggle, and get sick, and they deal with crimes. And nobody says to them 'this is proof you should go back to being tortured' because that's nonsense! If those people have good family, what they hear instead is 'Oh my god, are you okay. How can we help you. It's not your fault. You'll get through this. It can happen to anyone.'

Nothing is taken away! Nothing is threatened. Their agency and their life remain theirs, despite the accidents, or mistakes, or struggles. Getting trapped and controlled is not a logical consequence to struggle! It isn't done to anyone else, so why are we the only ones singled out and told that anything short of perfection means pain and control.

The answer is abusers. They changed the rules for us. They decided every mistake or accident should be used to strenghten their hold on us. They created this twisted world where we can't do anything without getting punished. And for what. Because it makes them feel good and gives them power over us. Disgusting. Being a toy in their world is more important to them than us having agency and freedom to learn and navigate the world on our own.

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!