There was a Guy in my class this semester who kept using the word ontologically wrong and one day my professor finally broke and said “Ontologically can be a tricky word to use so don’t feel like you have to” and then the guy stopped showing up for classes entirely

even when proportion is less of an issue, pre-pubescent and older minors have physical differences taken into consideration - different organ processes, skin issues, lack of strength, and different sleep and nutritional needs.

further, design for the elderly is massive - fragility, muscle weakness, lack of dexterity etc.

all this but still, medical, safety, and health equipment and advice for women is just designed for “small men”. next to no consideration is given to the differences between women and men unless it directly involves reproductive organs.

you may think many of the above are obvious differences, but are women having breasts not also an obvious difference? because regardless, in car design and CPR dummies, breasts are entirely forgotten about. teaching CPR for children is absolutely standard, but for women (50% of the population, mind you) is rare. children have special seats in the car, or may not be allowed in the front seat for safety reasons, but seat belts aren’t designed with women’s breasts in mind, resulting in women dying in more car accidents.

as a child, i was told endlessly that i needed more sleep than adults. I was never told that adult women need more sleep than men. i was told endlessly how children need extra calcium and vitamin D. I was never told women need nearly twice the iron intake as men.

she's notable in that she actually has an active fandom as a serious (non-booktok dark romance) author. and, unfortunately, it is the worst possible fandom. entirely armchair revolutionaries, internet lefties whose primary concern in life is virtue signalling on tiktok. to judge her merely by her fans wouldn't be fair, and also she does cultivate them. she frames herself, in her public image, as a kind of second-coming of postcolonial lit, which she is not. i also found yellowface to be intensely reductive, misogynistic, and mean-spirited. and this is coming from someone who makes criticizing white womanhood a hobby.

relatedly, kuang's fixation on white men betrays some of her intentions. as someone who also loves BWC, i understand her frustration with 1. her own desires and how they're inextricably tied to white supremacy and 2. her jealousy over how white women will always be most desirable to white men, no matter how mediocre said women are (and how they steal everything from nonwhite women in order to enhance their own desirability). but kuang is gorgeous. her charm and her good looks are a major factor in her rise as a literary superstar (and in this way she reminds me of zadie smith during the white teeth era). so her constant pummeling of other women in her work does come across as punching down from a woman as wealthy and beautiful and famous as she is, to some.

some of my informal thoughts can be found in this tag, but in the interest of not posting an entire chapter of my dissertation on tumblr, I will simply direct you to the ominously silent exits of Eurydice in Antigone, Deianira in the Trachiniae, and Jocasta in Oedipus to their respective suicides; the silence of Tecmessa in the latter portion of Ajax when she is played by a non-speaking performer since all three speaking actors are otherwise occupied; and the complete muteness of Iole in the Trachiniae and Philomela in the lost tragedy Tereus. anyway here's a bibliography: