I have 99 fucks to give to a good home

Transmasc: I am transmasc actually

People: Oh thank God you're not a woman. Here's the hormones, here's your birth certificate control, here's your male privilege, here's your male clothes and you'll be immediately accepted into male spaces with no problem! You're so much better than those vile women.

How it generally happens:

Transmasc: I am a man

Future you will thank you for not pinning your ability to enjoy and get any sense of achievement on having the base energy levels of a teenager.

based on poll results and the number of votes received, rather than cutting submissions off after a certain number, I'm just going to leave them open for one week. that means you can submit as many as your heart desires. consider it an apology for not being able to run the second tournament for so long. once I see how many submissions we have at the end, I'll decide how many polls per week we'll start with.

as a reminder, the previous submitted contestants WILL be included. you can find a lit of them, as well as the link to the submission form, on the pinned post.

(I'm also extremely liberal about what is considered a furry for the purposes of this poll; it's just for fun and games, so follow your heart. Xenomorph was a popular contestant during the first tournament, for example)

And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.

He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.

Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.

People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.

That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!

You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.

Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.

Translation: Parents aren’t making the conscious effort to help their children develop necessary skills and letting iPads raise them.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

However, the idea of what a man can be has not expanded in the same way. Every man has to be stoic, loud, take up space, and never show weakness. Allowing men to be sensitive, emotional, soft, pretty, and feminine used to be one of the goals of feminism. After all, how are we supposed to see ourselves as truly equal if we still have such strict rules guiding gendered behavior?

Recently, I have seen feminism (trans exclusionary and trans inclusive) solidifying those strict rules of manhood instead of breaking them down. The idea that all men are agressive, stubborn, and will physically overpower you has been parroted so many times, it almost feels like fact. It is forcing —not the men themselves— but the idea of men into the role of the evil wrongdoer. The ways in which terfs have used this image to harm trans women are myriad and obvious.

It used to be common knowledge that feminism also ought to benefit men in this way. If the sexes were truly equal, then men could act feminine, and women could act masculine without social repercussions. This breakdown of gender roles is a good thing! It is freeing for all of us to remove the arbitrary rules guiding gendered behavior.

I can’t remember the exact wording, but there was a post charting archetype of the ‘swole grifter’ - the only thing that successful, conventional, heterosexual men have been permitted to be - which is so much more restrictive than any mainstream historical model of masculinity.

Like, don’t get me wrong, Victorian society had hellishly restrictive gender roles (and class came in to it as well)- but it had a diversity of masculinities which one could inhabit, and many things which were seen as ideally masculine were things that much of modern masculinity views with suspicion. (Eg, being family focused, being devout in non muscular-Christianity ways, the stereotype of the scholar, or of the eccentric, the focus on various types of devotion).

None of those things are inherently masculine, ofc, but they were acceptable masculinities of the day, and often involved things which out culturally dominant masculinity derides - like gentleness, care projected outwards, fussiness, the following of unprofitable pursuits which don’t bring prestige, platonic physical and emotional intimacy, etc etc.

And what gets me is that while there has been some pushback against this narrowing, and while men *can* express themselves more widely than at any time hitherto, there is a… defensiveness about it, where one rejects, rebels against, seeks to redefine masculinity through those actions in a way that situates that which is being reacted against as more real and permanent.

Which is simply not true.

Throughout history, men have worn flower crowns and cried in public and told their friends they loved them (and absolutely *would* have done glitter beards if they’d had the glitter) and not only were these acceptable reactions to/dismantlings of extant masculinities, they were seen as manly.

Flower crowns were the garlands which people wore for various ceremonious and social occasions, crying was (at times and in places) seen as evidence of finely tuned feeling and morals - the knights of chivalric fiction sob constantly - and the swearing of love between two manly men is one of the staples of pre-20th century fiction. None of this stuff used to be disruptive to hegemonic masculinity! The idea that is is betrays a really deep sickness in our current conception of what it is to be a man.

And I’m not saying that the answer is to redefine a bunch of stuff that’s currently coded as “feminine” back to being “masculine,” but I also don’t think it’s very helpful to define them as feminine and say, “it’s okay for men to do feminine things”.

However, the idea of what a man can be has not expanded in the same way. Every man has to be stoic, loud, take up space, and never show weakness. Allowing men to be sensitive, emotional, soft, pretty, and feminine used to be one of the goals of feminism. After all, how are we supposed to see ourselves as truly equal if we still have such strict rules guiding gendered behavior?

Recently, I have seen feminism (trans exclusionary and trans inclusive) solidifying those strict rules of manhood instead of breaking them down. The idea that all men are agressive, stubborn, and will physically overpower you has been parroted so many times, it almost feels like fact. It is forcing —not the men themselves— but the idea of men into the role of the evil wrongdoer. The ways in which terfs have used this image to harm trans women are myriad and obvious.

It used to be common knowledge that feminism also ought to benefit men in this way. If the sexes were truly equal, then men could act feminine, and women could act masculine without social repercussions. This breakdown of gender roles is a good thing! It is freeing for all of us to remove the arbitrary rules guiding gendered behavior.