Beneath the golden Balm

✨🏳️‍🌈🌈 Star Trek Pride🌈🏳️‍🌈✨

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

Man ranting on the internet about the Superbowl halftime show or complaining that something is "woke"? Hobbyless Behaviour. Girls mocking another girl for not looking right? Hobbyless Behaviour. Mindless vandalism? Hobbyless Behaviour.

The upshot of this is that he winds up getting way more done than you were expecting - “Ah, Commander. Back in one piece, I see. How did the coronation go?”

“The Low King has publicly advocated for the rights of trolls and female dwarfs, the guards of Bonk have restructured into a proper watch force, the power of the werewolf clans has been divided, and we have an excellent trade deal on fat with Uberwald.”

“…Commander?”

“Sir?”

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺

Did you know there's a gap in my baseboards? I sure didn't!

Fortunately she's easy to lure out, because hers is the greed described in the bible. She knows her name but the problem is that verbal recall is never, ever going to be as valuable as a warm, humid hole (because ofc the dishwasher was going when this happened), so I had to lure her gluttonous ass out with a reptilink.

humans are the moms

compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants

cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing

word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills

"Easy. You know how most civilized species lay eggs, and even the ones that don't will have young ones able to move around and fend for themselves within the day?"

"Yeah, obviously."

"Human newborns can't even lift their own heads. They require the full-time attention of as many adults as possible to make sure they survive to a self-sufficient age, much less adulthood."

"Whaaaaat. How long does that take?"

"Many years. And their planet has long years."

"What!"

"Yes. So their parenting instincts are overclocked for a reason. And sometimes that spills over onto other species. ...And by 'sometimes,' I mean all the dang time."

"Uh huh."

"So keep them away from the dangerous fauna, especially the little ones, and be prepared for them to get emotionally attached to the occasional inanimate object. Oh! And if you need to get their attention in a loud room, play a recording of one of their young making a distress sound. They hate that, and will want it to stop immediately."

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!

Edit: my notes are full of murder. I love you all

Edit: to clarify about the poison, you can use poison if you actually know how to identify it, I'm saying you can't just go "Poison!" with no knowledge about poison. Buying it probably means they know that poison and you're caught. Your personal knowledge when you read this post is all you have.

Another point of clarity: You went through all that trouble to have a baby without modern medicine so you could get the sweet house after your husband died. That's why you can't be caught. No disappearing.

Edit again: Air embolisms are going on a high shelf because the syringe won't be invented for 350 years. Prove to me that you could make one from scratch, lol

As a rule of thumb, if you have to dig it up it's a crime, but if you can just yoink it then it's a-okay.

I...

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.