kalinas corner

Claims that Hamas militants used mass rape as strategy during the October 7 attacks spread before any serious verification had taken place, then migrated with extraordinary speed into the highest levels of Western diplomacy. Antony Blinken aired the mass rape allegations at the UN Security Council.

Those unverified and contested tales of Hamas perpetrating systemic sexual atrocities, laundered through a credulous press and trumpeted by the most powerful government on earth, became the emotional scaffolding for a putatively feminist genocide.

The New York Times piece "Screams Without Words" was key in this. Gaping holes were quickly exposed: The Intercept reported that the Times’s flagship podcast shelved a planned episode after the piece failed internal fact-checking; key claims were contradicted by the Times’s own subsequent reporting.

The New York Times has stood by "Screams Without Words" without addressing the discrepancies. Unproven allegations hardened into justifications – because the case for annihilating Gaza never actually rested on the quantity or quality of evidence, but on the colonial monopoly on credibility.

The contradiction – brandishing rape on the global stage as the signature crime of Palestinian men against Israeli women while legitimating it in parliament as a weapon against Palestinians – cannot be highlighted, especially not ostentatiously.

The obsessive framing of Palestinian men as rape-obsessed monsters is designed to shield Israel from criticism, and to distract from the barely hidden, monumental scale of Israeli sexual brutality – which does not pause while the narrative is being managed.

How should we understand this? Not just the rape itself, which armies have committed everywhere, but the celebration of it? In settler-colonial contexts, sexual violence is a governmental multi-tool. In Zionism, raping the precarious indigenous population does several material things at once. …

Rape invades and occupies corporeal territory. It terrorizes, and thereby disciplines, the underemployed Palestinian workforce. And even as it forces contact, it distances: it “others” its victims, inscribing the native-settler line on the body itself.

As the Palestinian feminist scholars Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif have argued: “The logic of sexual violence attempts to fragment Palestinian family and communal life, as it severs the connection to the Palestinian homeland.”

The pattern has never broken. In 2015 – nearly a decade before the current wave of the genocide – a study analyzing cases of prison abuse collected by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel concluded, in a peer-reviewed journal, that “sexual ill-treatment is systemic.”

A 2026 medical paper on 517 male Palestinian detainees echoes the study’s finding that one of the effects of raping men (specifically) is often a “vicarious” torture inflicted upon them and their families members via the humiliation of Palestinian masculinity, the symbolic shattering of its honor.

One measure of why the standard framework of “rape culture” fails: Much of this violence is nowadays carried out by women. Testifying in Geneva in 2025, the Palestinian feminist organizer Kifaya Khraim stated that “rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects inside genitals.”

A patriarchy-only account of rape cannot metabolize this fact. An account of rape as a technology of colonial rule absorbs it easily – which by no means precludes us from understanding these machineries, staffed by women as they often are, as themselves inextricable from patriarchal domination.

Sexual violence also boomerangs back into settler society – as colonial fascisms are wont to do – taking on a banal ubiquity within/among Israeli communities. An estimated 230 sexual assaults take place per day in Israel – 10% above the OECD average – w. a shockingly low relative rate of indictment.

Ha’aretz reported in 2011 that 61% of Israeli men do not regard forced sex with an acquaintance as rape, a view shared by 41% of Israeli women, according to that report. In 2020 [amid the Eilat scandal] Israel National News itself pointed to a newly emergent “rape culture” among the nation’s youth.

Permissive callousness with regard to rape in the context of occupation leeches back into domestic conduct, coloring Israelis’ treatment of their “own.” A recent poll by an Israeli think tank found that a majority of all Israelis oppose crim investigations into soldiers accused of abusing detainees.

This is what it looks like when a society has settled the question of who counts as rapeable – which is to say, who counts as human. It also makes clear who has protection from sexual violence under the law and who has the government backing to commit it.

On the day I began drafting this essay, defenders of the genocide were posting detailed rape wishes against Hannah Einbinder and Greta Thunberg. Eight months later, I find myself confronted with headlines such as “11 Harrowing Video Testimonies From Westerners Tortured and Raped by Israel.”

These threats (you know the ones: "go to Gaza," et cetera…) are not only the ambient misogyny of public life; they also carry geopolitical freight, expressions of a tradition in which rape functions as territorial assertion.

In the worldview of many Zionists, it is no contradiction to threaten rape in the name of gender equality and as a contribution to a global women’s war on rape. It is no contradiction to wish queerphobic Islamist murder or executions on queer activists for Palestine in the name of LGBTQ+ values.

It is somehow no contradiction to desire anti-Zionist feminists to share the hell-world inflicted upon Gazans in the name of feminism, predicting that our anticolonialism will be raped out of us (in reality, we have tended to receive warm welcomes from Palestinians, but rapes from the Israeli army).

The more I looked into the history and present of Zionism, the more it struck me: it is all about raping against rape.

Good Haro @ goodharo.bsky.social You either weren’t alive in the 90s-00s or weren’t interacting with normal people in a way that tipped them off to your interest in anime if you sincerely think there was never any negative sentiment toward it in the US at the time. The image of all anime as degenerate pornography was very pervasive.

👁️🍄🪸 @ bloomfilters.plus this is frankly still the overall dominant anglosphere view of anime to this day outside of battle shounen stuff and ghibli films, even. do not ask any gen x'er / older millennial who isnt part of the scene what they think of anime worst mistake of ur life.

it's like pulling teeth to get someone to touch something like kamiina botan which is more inoffensive than heartstopper.

in general this culture has both a kind of late imperial anxiety over and scoffing disdain for anything influenced by japanese acg stuff which today also includes works that come out of korea, china, and southeast asia.

something i've noticed recently too is the way this anglosphere anxiety over acg has morphed with anglosphere anxieties over queerness and transness (ppl blaming battle shounen+BL for transmasculinity, ppl blaming CGDCT+genderswap+GL for transfemininity, etc).

specter @ out of the blender @ specterthieving.bsky.social yeah people blaming BL for transmasculinity has been a thing for about as long as there has been any western awareness of "yaoi" at all 🥲.

the anti-anime theory of autoandrophilia ("male-attracted trans men are all actually homophobic straight women who were brainwashed by yaoi and think they can pretend to be men to trick real gay men into fulfilling their fetish") is another extremely pervasive thing that sounds completely ridiculous.

👁️🍄🪸 @ bloomfilters.plus and just totally evil lol 🥲.

specter @ out of the blender @ specterthieving.bsky.social it is really just deeply fucking vile and so hard to get people to take seriously

especially because trying to have any kind of discussion about transphobia gets met with "okay but we SHOULD be critical of fujoshi fetishizing gay men though".

👁️🍄🪸 @ bloomfilters.plus one day we can talk about how ppl deploy the term "fetishizing" as this kind of magic thing to explain away the subject as merely a perverted deviant rather than investigating and studying what the "fetish" form even entails in the first place and what that could tell us about sexuality.

dv9l☯️@commissions open! @ dv9l.bsky.social also, whats missing in this conversation is simply the average japanese person's view on anime. not every japanese person is an anime otaku, which is a subculture on its own. even the avg jp person don't think too highly of anime because they see it just as cartoons (which it is).

👁️🍄🪸 @ bloomfilters.plus yeah totally, it is niche in japan as well. it's why something like hdwr or tsukutabe getting a GL drama is more celebratory because it better fits the demographics of people who might resonate with work like that. i think it's ironically something that has more of a life as an external cultural product elsewhere (in particular sea + china + latam come to mind) than anything of comparable scope within the country proper.

i can't speak for everything but at least in my subculture of a subculture, it's become an Extremely Common Refrain lately that the queer women who are making GL manga often have been turning somewhat more to the international audiences for support due to low domestic readership lol.

the wolfen milfs @ papaveri.bsky.social speaking from europe: it's very niche everywhere, so i assume authors use english and are more outreaching to international audience because you need to tap into several countries to get the same numbers bl for example does. it seems to be healthy big in korea tho!

(spanish publishers treat yuri like complete garbage and are very open about it… except one inprint managed by trans people, and one very big, international publisher that sells in latin america).

Rika Klassen @ rikaklassen.northsky.social Remember how Showcase picked up a catalogue of a bunch of European LGBTQ+ films in the '90s without realizing, but then they were so broke they had no choice but to air it? And for lot of us Canadian teens, it was the only time we got to see ourselves?

specter @ out of the blender @ specterthieving.bsky.social the thing about ao3 ships list as well is that that has just never been where yuri fandom has been and every year of this just reinforces that divide.

with the extremely active and communicative scanlation scene and support and discussion around original yuri work and BIGGEST VN JAM OF ALL TIME-producing indie game scene it feels like there's a not insignificant "well f/f fans read stuff with actual lesbians in it" factor.

and actually like. valuing it as art and being inspired to seek out and create more original art and not "getting a wildly successful m/m series breaking into the mainstream and treating ao3 like a self-replenishing tap of More Of It to the point of A/I generating it".

wifewolf @ rimahadley.bsky.social the vn jam also emphasizes how much f/f fans make original work over just fanworks.

specter @ out of the blender @ specterthieving.bsky.social yeah i know for myself i feel less driven to fanfic and especially fanfic of the sort that is "popular" on ao3 for f/f when it's like. well i can just go on dynasty or watch any of the recent anime i haven't checked out yet or start on that backlog of 470+ toxic yuri jam games or…

themboy insomniac @ riotliturgist.bsky.social "subject matter expert woman should be GRATEFUL that a man ever so magnanimously helped her sell her books and should NOT criticize his work!"

hey there's a thought: her OWN intellectual and expert labor sold her book, which would not exist if she hadn't braved reactionary outrage & abuse to do it.

first of all, she repeatedly celebrated, both in the review and in paratextual material (online etc) that the film brings more attention to the classics and specifically mentioned people reading her own translation. she IS grateful, you're just made she's not grateful ENOUGH (to shut up).

another double standard only applied to women, by the way: writing a translation, or doing any kind of academic work, permanently forfeits your right to ever have critical opinions about white men's perspectives on those subjects, bc what if one day "he helped sell your books you ungrateful bitch".

i'm actually genuinely shocked to see ostensible progressives unironically saying shit like "she shouldn't shit on something that helped sell her books." one of her criticisms was "making a movie about a man feeling guilty for war crimes filmed partly on occupied land is not good"

"WOW! UNGRATEFUL"

everyone: why are there no sex scenes in movies?

emily wilson: why are there no sex scenes in this movie about notoriously horny guys?

everyone: "NOT LIKE THAT!!!! you should be GRATEFUL to him, without HIS accomplishments your mere 'intellectual labor on a grand scale' wouldn't be SELLINGGGG!!!!"

i feel confident guessing that plenty of male classicists have the same or harsher opinions. academics love--& this will shock you--their fields of study, & they often have strong opinions about lay interpretations. but a male classicist wld NEVER be told to shut up & be grateful for the book sales.

user one: honestly wonder if she thinks her vision of the perfect movie adaptation could possibly get made, and if so by whom.

user 2: she wanted an alienating, Robert Eggers style movie that stayed true to the ethics and mores of bronze age Greece.

Excerpt from Emily Wilson's review:

Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material, providing what Harold Bloom called ‘strong misreadings’ of their ancestors. The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp – reconsider the poem’s structure, narrative and values. In theory, Nolan seems to understand the assignment and its hazards. His first feature film, Following (1998), was a powerful black and white thriller about the fascination and dangers of tracking strangers through space and time. The hunter is more likely to become the hunted, Following suggests, if…

themboy insomniac @ riotliturgist.bsky.social first of all: no that's me, I wanted that. i think that shit would go hard and i think you're a big dork who needs to be weaned off superhero movies.

dr wilson on the other hand was so clear, so repeatedly, that she did not want that. you just literally didn't read it, or you're lying.

"the original is not 'historically authentic.' it's drawing on many centuries of pre-existing traditions, it's an amalgam. the idea that it has to be authentic is ridiculous" - emily wilson

nolan bros: "she just wanted a 1:1 historically accurate aLiEnAtInG recreation of bronze age greece".

~

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social here's a fun lil exercise for cis people: how many articles would a publication have to print calling for your extermination before you would expect people who care about you to stop giving them money? and how would you feel if their excuse for still supporting them is some fuckass crossword puzzle?

👁️🍄🪸 @bloomfilters.plus i do not expect this of people.

many people still hold on to the idea that one must expect things of other people such as basic decency and respect. we are far past that point.

~

mattie lubchansky @mattielubchansky.com really loving all the protests against and support for trans women happening in and around the WNBA, a league that has never had a trans woman play in it. we’re just THAT interesting to talk about! for everyone! how fun!!!!

👁️🍄🪸 @bloomfilters.plus it's honestly pretty fun being the enemy of humanity.

like, you're not beholden to "humanity", so you can do radically anti-humanist things, such as change your body how you wish, sympathize with animals, historicize the movement of human institutions, and solidarity by mode of conscious will rather than nationalistic or familial obligation. it's neat.

Jul 25, 2026

👁️🍄🪸 @bloomfilters.plus the regime sees itself as engaged in a continuous strategic conflict against "humanity" in the name of the liberation of all sentient beings, of course.

Jun 28, 2025

👁️🍄🪸 @bloomfilters.plus the truth of negotiating womanhood is that all women find that they are sometimes at least a little nonbinary with it at least somewhere or sometime in their life.

it isn't "nonbinary ppl are just women", which is Wrong -- nonbinary ppl are nonbinary. it's that "nonbinary ppl generally do experience misogyny (can be woman-ized) against their will" (a social process) & crucially "a lot of women are kinda nonbinary" (the infinite desire of the undefined void).

a lot of writing on transfeminine third genders talks about how they "self conceptualize" as between women and nonbinary. the challenge to this is that under this frame of measurement/analysis this is also pretty true for historical cis women. simply because nonbinary subjectivity is contra cisness.

the Point is that "the default/foundation" is not cisness or "biological/assigned sex" (whatever that means) towards which nonbinariness simply "regresses back towards". this gets it backward. nonbinary subjectivity is idiolectic, & it is the social force of the imposition of cisness one deals with.

"what about guys" here's Patriarchy's Trick: what is a man-to-be who is ambivalent towards or turns away from the heterosexuality, cisness, and misogyny that underpin maintaining Man-hood? why a not a "full man" but a fag, of course, that shadow space between "the boy" and "the woman".

~

Aug 6, 2026

👁️🍄🪸 @bloomfilters.plus I'm always telling oomfs lots and lots of women (cis and trans) are extremely often at least a little bit nonbinary (by way of the negotiation of womanhood) and the main distinctions are to what degree you have a desire to rearticulate or detach from "woman".

some might not even care to name it as distinct (it's All just being a woman for u. nothing to call nonbinary), for others it's like yeah complete detachment but sometimes the communicative layer for the wider world is the woman mask sometimes. and then a lot In Between.

for me the she and the they work together or push against each other to act as each others' bounds of articulation (in the girlthey, the girl is the expanding limit of the they and the they is the expanding limit of the girl)

but not every nonbinary person is a "little bit woman" [this is a crucial difference! P -> Q does not imply Q -> P] although every nonbinary person does tend to have to deal with misogyny in a misogynistic and patriarchal society in some way or another.