Spoooooky

"I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses.

Because I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.

More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”

Another says “I do the misandry stuff because it’s an easy way to earn queer cred points, but when I think about it it makes me uncomfortable.”

Another: “It’s a coping habit I’m not proud of. If I agree ‘girls rule boys drool’ it makes me feel more like a girl."

Then Graeber shared another story from the group - once there was a member of the group who got on everyone’s nerves by asking the hunters for all of their best cuts of meat every time they returned with their haul. So one day the hunters invited him along on a seal hunting trip and then abandoned him on a raft in the Arctic ocean to die of exposure.

Social ostracism has existed before capitalism and it will outlive capitalism. Sometimes capitalism has even gone against social ostracism, like the famous example of the Sears and Roebuck magazine - the massive company could offer uniform products with uniform prices, which was a godsend for rural Black people because they could finally buy things for once in their lives without ludicrous markups from the local shopkeepers in their community!

- using gen AI or chat gpt

- blaming everything bad about society on men

- not getting vaccines to own the libs

- sending money to scammers pretending to be from gaza

- bashing people who use ozempic with guidance from their doctors

- hating lonely men for being lonely

- demonizing Jewish people and people who live in Israel

- blaming vaccines for autism

- purposely making myself look ugly (according to my own personal tastes) in order to trigger conservative men

i see people trying to hype them up too by showing off really impressive practical effects for the time, and sure, that's nice. but I unironically love seeing very obvious foam boulders bounce off people, and wooden swords clash, and bright flashes of light from "laser guns"... and it is so much better than 90% of shit today, and you know why?

key fucking difference: they inhabit it. everyone on screen is putting their entire soul into it. and I think people forget that tv is at its very essence theater, you tune in and suspend your disbelief, and you are always aware you are watching a story. if you go to a play and see someone stabbed with a very obvious fake knife, it doesn't fucking matter, does it?

because everyone's forgot that you're not there to see how good of a real-looking fake knife somebody can make, you're there to see people who can make you believe in the emotional truth of a story.

xena warrior princess is superior to every single marvel movie that has ever been made for the key fact that i can watch two actors struggling in "quicksand" which is very obviously just dirt that they were buried in up to their chests, but they are SCREAMING, wailing, crying: they are selling it and I am there for them ---

Shearing (2021)

Artist: Mari Inoue