hiddenlookingglass

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.

Marie Kondo, gently over my shoulder: why is a pair of pants you find unwearable still in your dresser drawer

me: oh shit that’s right!! The dresser is for clothes that under some circumstance I might conceivably wear!!

Marie Kondo, beaming proudly: Yes, that’s correct!! These pants must have been your favorites. How wonderful that they were so comfortable and practical that you wore them out. But now since they no longer function as pants, you should move them from the drawer where you keep your functioning pants!

me: Yes thanks I got it they’re in the fabric basket now

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

let people love you

accept help

do the hard thing and do it scared

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

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.

Me before I came out, when I did pageants and modeling.

This was me the day of my junior prom. The dress weighed around 20 lbs, was the first one I tried on, and my makeup was done by someone who still thought brown lip liner looked good on white people. I spent the entire day being photographed and generally hating how I looked and wishing I could figure out why, when everything was technically perfect.

Came out in 2016, here's nine years of transformation (in reverse order, sorry)

Turns out I'm neither a Normal Guy nor a woman, but a much weirder type of faggy masc thing.

In my lifestyle lolita egg era. Somehow getting to dress like a princess gave me the will to get up in the morning

granted being a big ol goth doesn't really fit the bill of "socially acceptable heterosexual femininity" but i was HYPER feminine when i was closeted, especially in the years between when i FIRST tried to come out (age 16 - around the time of those first photos) and when i actually made the jump (age 19 - about a year after the last photo)

you can tell in that second to last photo i literally got a tattoo that said "MAD GIRL" which was an exercise in many things, including abstract self-harm, a visual reminder that i had given up on myself, and wildly underestimating the number of dudes who would misread it as BAD GIRL and take that as a cue to say gross shit to me while i was at work

anyway never kill yourself

haha yeah 🫣

consciously dipped my toes into the gender fuckery pool at around 15/16 but I was pentecostal at the time and well. took them out real quick

i tried very very hard to be “femme” for a LONG time but during covid lockdowns I didn’t have to perform for anyone and I slowly started to let it all go and now I’m a silly little man 😌

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