Nils ~ it / its

but they CHOSE to make the kens explicitly oppressed, and CHOSE to make that a central factor in the plot, and then tried to make the kens an allegory for cis men under patriarchy & toxic masculinity which makes no sense in the story THEY wrote. Ken's major problem was never patriarchy! it was the barbiarchy! its fucking absurd to try to use ken as a lesson on how men are hurt by patriarchy when the movie itself set up that Ken's problems started with Barbieland's social structure. Barbie is never expected to take any responsibility for anything that happened! they wanted both to have the ken/barbie dynamic be used for an explicitly feminist allegory about patriarchy but ALSO to have their silly wish fulfillment barbiarchy that is never challenged, which makes that entire part of the plot messy as hell. we are essentially expected to forget everything about how Barbieland functions and all the differences between Barbieland and the real world, in order for the Barbies and Kens to just be exactly the same as real life cis women and men. which made me as a viewer feel annoyed because they just completely threw out the worldbuilding for this universe in order to play out a VERY basic explanation of feminism.

the thing is, the Kens are actually quite similar to the cis women the movie was marketed towards (seeking wish fulfillment and catharsis by reversing the dynamics they are oppressed under, rather than taking a stance against oppression itself). the real life patriarchy is to the Kens what Barbieland is to the cis women in the audience; both are power fantasies, heavy on the fantasy. the Kens think patriarchy is mostly about horses and Barbieland is mostly about pink and dancing and girls nights. once you start to press deeper on either fantasy, it becomes clear how unsustainable these fantasies are for actually challenging oppression; they do not encourage the people fantasizing to develop a political consciousness, to think in terms of systems, to take a stance against oppression itself. but the movie decided to try to make this fantasy deep and feminist, which made it messy because actually trying to engage with the world they've built makes it clear how little they actually thought about what they were saying.

the only real feminist value present is "women shouldn't be treated badly" but not because people shouldn't be treated badly, and not because oppressed groups need to be protected, but just because there is something innate about women that makes it bad when they are treated badly. its shallow feminism not just in the sense that its not going deep into theory, but in that the movie's feminism (at least in these parts) feels primarily about emotionally appealing to white cis women and getting them to spend money and write thinkpieces on how good the movie (and by association, Mattel) is.

i know some people were genuinely affected by the big speech given at the end about how women are expected to be so many things at once. and like. if you needed the Barbie movie to verbalize that to you, i'm glad you had that. but 1) if we are in a place in society where people are getting their baby's first feminism from a movie whose feminism is pretty shallow and messy and corporate, that shouldn't lead us to celebrate the movie, it should be a kick in the pants, and 2) this movie does very little to actually encourage the viewer to develop a deeper understanding of feminism, to see the expectations put on women in the context of patriarchy as a system of power, anything. because this part of the film's feminism is so messy and mostly about selling the movie to white cis women, it doesn't really have a coherent message about patriarchy other than that its bad and women have it rough and that's not good. okay! that's not even really a feminist point, its almost pre-feminist; that women have it rough is the very starting point of developing a feminist political consciousness, it shouldn't be the big takeaway. and this came out in 2024, not 1946, so i get kind of annoyed when people act like a film making a more coherent and slightly deeper feminist point couldn't have possibly been made.

& again its a fucking shame because there IS genuinely moving story in the Barbie movie about how being human is very much defined by suffering but also by beauty, and the choice to embrace humanity and the suffering and inevitable death, because being human and being alive is worth it, and to send that message (which is broadly applicable to all people) through the lens of choosing to be a woman under patriarchy, because there is still beauty in that life. and again. no one fucking talks about it. the part of this movie that actually has some feminist meat on its bones gets ignored, while everyone (whether pro- or anti-feminist) fixated on the very thin, shallow parts of the movie's attempts at feminism. i just feel like its an example of how cultural / pop feminism gets propped up and promoted and discussed and centered What Feminism Is, when that form of feminism doesn't actually encourage critical political thinking about patriarchy and only encourages gender essentialism female nationalism and endless discourse that allows media companies to profit.

like "well POC are allowed to hate white people so women are allowed to hate men!" yeah and also, Malcom X himself realized he was wrong to disregard allyship with white people because coalition building between working class people of different races was actually quite important to overthrowing racial capitalism. plenty of feminists activists (particularly women of color, bisexuals, trans people, sex workers) have criticized feminism for separatism and gender essentialism and reluctance to form necessary coalitions across gender to meaningfully resist racist capitalist patriarchy.

& most people do not critically engage with the western construct of "religion" itself! people just take for granted this post-euro-enlightenment model of what religion means. which is where you get, at the worst, people criticizing "religion" who clearly genuinely do not know anything about any religion other than christianity (whatever kind they were raised with) & some vague half-facts about judaism and islam.

its also like. at the same time as (people living as) women have historically experienced religion as a tool of patriarchal control, it has equally been a feminized sphere of life. just in the western eurasian world, from the ancient mediterranean societies to medieval saints and nuns, people living as women have found personal existential autonomy and direction from their spiritual traditions, and cis men have viewed them negatively because of it. plato complained about how all the shrines in Athens were set up by women, but this was also a means for women to exist in the public sphere, to find meaning in their personal concerns and feelings and perception of the world, to connect with not just other women but also men and others who were similarly touched by these traditions. in late 19th-century southern Italy, facing the imperialist violence of the Risorgimento and brigandage wars, peasant women organized their communities in explicitly socialist and explicitly Catholic ways (from here):

A wave of popular unrest washed over Sicily at the close of the nineteenth century. In town after town, peasants mobilized labor strikes, occupied fields and piazzas, and looted government offices. While the island had a long history of revolt, this marked a new era of social protest. For the first time, women led the social movement and infused the struggle with their own mixture of socialism and spiritualism. The activity began in the autumn of 1892, in the towns surrounding Palermo, in the northwestern part of the island. In Monreale, women and children filled the central piazza shouting “Down with the municipal government! Long live the union!” After attacking and looting the offices of the city council, they marched toward Palermo crying “We are hungry!” waving banners with slogans connecting socialism to scripture. In Villafrati, Caterina Costanzo led a group of women wielding clubs to the fields where they threatened workers who had not joined the community in a general strike against the repressive local government. In Balestrate, thousands of women dressed in traditional clothes and also armed with clubs marched through the streets, demanding an end to government corruption. [...] In Piana dei Greci, thirty-six women were arrested after they occupied and then destroyed the municipal offices, throwing the furniture into the streets. [...] They celebrated the founding of the group as they would a religious festival, with music and food, and wove their political and spiritual ideologies together in their speeches. In the words of one woman, “We want everybody to work as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and their children. We should all be equal. . . . Jesus was a true socialist and he wanted precisely what we ask for, but the priests don’t discuss this.” [...]

the extreme patriarchy of the Catholic church still existed, and was still immensely harmful to many people. but existing alongside it was the lived Catholicism of peasant women whose fire for socialism was lit by their belief in God and Jesus and Mary. in all cases these people living as women could be depicted by as superstitious and irrational and driven by emotion and bodily sensation, not the proper logical rule-driven faith of the patriarchal state. which is another example of hyperobjectivity!

if youre unsure: i would Highly recommend researching a bit and guesstimating! only answer this poll if ur autistic (diagnosed or not). im not gonna do anything with this info im just pondering

1. Your body is not your own.

1a. Your body is a site for other’s desires.

If they want you to be beautiful, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they want you to be feminine, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they think you should reproduce, it is cruel of you to divest yourself of reproductive duties.

1b. Your body is owned by the state.

Reproductive laws that can affect cis women also affect you, but you cannot weigh in on them, because you are not a woman.

Anti-trans laws affect you, but you must not bring this up; you are never the “real” target, even when you are, because you are not “really” trans.

When the legislation talks about “protecting” your fertility, you should feel lucky to be safeguarded from yourself.

- - -

2. Your experiences are not your own.

Your childhood does not exist. You cannot claim girlhood if you are a man, and you cannot claim boyhood if you did not grow up within it, and no other visions of childhood may exist. Your history, however you define it, is fundamentally incompatible with who you are.

Forms of sexism which are aimed at women, by a binary logic, cannot be aimed at men or mascs. If your experiences contradict this, either you are invalidating your identity, or you are appropriating womanhood.

It is your duty to blithely dissociate yourself from any trauma patriarchy may have inflicted on you. Men cannot be affected by these things even if it happens to them personally. A “real” man must be stoic and uncaring.

- - -

3. You are a “default” body.

You are to be assumed affluent, perisex, binary, and passing, with no legal or situational barriers to medical or social transition, and no reproductive concerns to speak of — unless your nonconformity can be used to dismiss you.

You are assumed to be able-bodied, sane of mind, white, and thin — unless your mental health or appearance is good for mockery.

You are to be treated as essentially cismasculine. Being treated as if you are cis is a compliment, even when it is erasing your lived experiences, and even if it is known and true that transfems have their own unique struggles from cis women too.

- - -

4. You are an “aberrant” body.

4a. Your body is a site of fascination. You (are presumed to) have a gestative capacity, and a fun extra hole. These traits are relevant when others assess your attractiveness and their kinks. They are not relevant in the context of your health. You’re a submissive little bottom, right?

(Your body is something to conquer and claim. This may be done to emphasize your femininity, deny your androgyny, or defang your masculinity.)

4b. Your body is a site of disgust. Any steps you may take to masculinize yourself are “ruining” your “female” features, regardless of any joy you personally take from the changes, and regardless of if you engage with medical transition or not.

(You are killing the woman you are supposed to be. Stand trial.)

4c. Your body is too unattractive to be sexually violenced. It doesn’t happen. When it does, you have anatomical privilege, because you are (presumed to be) in possession of a vulva, and victims with those are of course always believed. But it doesn’t happen, because you are essentially a cis man, and of course men don't get raped.

(It is not possible to be targeted for this violence because you are transmasculine. It is always misaimed violence, intended for someone else. Apologize to her for taking up her space.)

4d. Your body is a proxy for other’s ideas about activism. Womanhood is good, and manhood is bad, and things in-between are uncomfortable and hard to classify; therefore, a detransition back to cisfemininity would be a preferable state of being, wouldn’t it?

(Your transition is at odds with good feminism.)

4e. Your body is a joke. Men don’t menstruate. Men don’t gestate. Men don’t lactate. Men can't have breasts. If the suggestion sends people into hysterics, you must take it lying down.

(Remember; comedy is subversion, and you are an “abberant” body.)

4f. Your body is a hypothetical and not a lived reality. If men could menstruate or gestate, that would fix patriarchy. It would not result in men being denied at the door of the gynecology office, surely.

(To entertain your existence is a rhetorical inconvenience.)

4g. Your body is a source of put-down. You are a cunt, a pussy, a fembrained bitchmoid — and it isn’t sexist to refer to you as such, because you are a man. Your disinclination to be reduced to bioessentialist biogotry is simply proof that your masculinity is fragile. It is not proper for you to object to it, even when it is the same rhetoric spewed by patriarchy itself, and even if it would be equally galling to say to a woman, cis or trans.

(Have you not considered that your trans body is privileged under cis patriarchy?)

4h. Passing is universal to all transmasculine bodies and all life situations. Closeted, clocky, queer, or femme trans men and mascs cannot exist, and are not subjected to the same violence as women or other queer men. Legal gender markers don’t matter. Medical access isn’t a concern. People from your past cannot possibly be vindictive enough to out you, because queer or not, you have male privilege.

(Have you considered that you simply aren’t trying hard enough to pass?)

- - -

5. If you are inadequately masculine, pre-transition, nonbinary, or bi-gendered, you cannot “really” be a man.

Remember; you are a lost little girl when you need to be talked down to.

Remember; manhood and womanhood are diametric opposites, exclusive states of being.

Remember; poverty is not an excuse.

- - -

6. If you are inadequately feminine or too masculine, you cannot “really” be queer.

Remember; you are a “default” body.

Remember; you are essentially cis.

- - -

7. If you are too assertive or too unwilling to serve as a punching bag, you cannot “really” be a feminist.

Remember; men cannot be feminists.

Remember; men cannot need feminism.

Remember; your masculinity is most readily acknowledged when it provides a rhetorical threat.

- - -

8. If you really insist on your masculinity, then it must be in service to others. You owe them labor, defense, money, and deference.

You are not owed equality or reciprocity, because men are responsible for patriarchy. You are on the hook for the patriarch’s debt, and you are presumed to share his wallet.

(A man is a protector and a provider. I thought you wanted to be a man?)

- - -

9. Your interest in your own autonomy is indistinguishable from power-grabbing.

Your self-determination and self-advocacy aligns you with patriarchal interests, or is a sign that you are too battered by patriarchy to self-determine in the first place. Someone else must decide these things for you. Someone else must speculate on your motives. You do not get to speak for yourself.

- - -

10. Your inclusion and representation is not important.

10a. When you notice your absence from culture, art, and storytelling, others ask; why do you not simply project your experiences onto cis men? Remember, you are a default body. Surely you are different from other queer people who need direct representation.

(When you try to do that, you are classically fembrained and illiterate for thinking a given character could have transmasculine subtext or themes.)

Projecting onto cis women is akin to killing them.

Why are you not satisfied with mpreg fanfic?

10b. When you make your own art and stories, you are playing with dolls. It is unimportant, juvenile, and easily dismissed much in the way that people discuss teenage girls who act as culture-makers.

(If transmasculinity is not present in the world of art, it must be because it has no artistic merit.)

- - -

11. Your erasure is proof that you have nothing to offer.

The muffling of violence done to you or your brothers is proof that no violence occurs in the first place.

The muffling of you or your brother’s contributions is proof that none of you contributed in the first place.

The removal of your brothers from the historical narrative is proof that they didn’t exist, or that they never stood in solidarity with other feminists and queers.

Silence is proof that you need not speak.

- - -

12. Denying any danger that you may be in is affirmative to your masculinity, because men cannot be harmed.

There are no statistics that say otherwise if we never read them.

There are no patterns of abuse if we never speak of them.

There are no dead if they are recorded as femicides.

There are no victims if we do not speak their names.

- - -

Acephobia is written off by acephobes as non-existent or, at most, online bullying, unlike homophobia which involves REAL harm -> asexuals & allies point out examples of how acephobia can be undeniably harmful and targeted at asexuals, such as someone being raped in an attempt to correct their asexuality -> instead of acknowledging that acephobia does involve serious real-world harm, discoursers switch to "well ACTUALLY corrective rape only applies to lesbians, so asexuals are lesbophobic for insisting they can experience it!"

Anyways, the HRW also has said in this report:

Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality. While the focus on “corrective rape” draws attention to an important aspect of the problem, it also detracts from the larger set of issues fueling violence and discrimination against lesbians and transgender men. A narrow focus on “corrective rape” can give the mistaken impression that only “butch lesbians” are subject to sexual assault, or that rape is the only issue of concern, or that sexual assault faced by a lesbian is qualitatively different from and more serious than sexual assault against a person who is not identified as a lesbian. Local and international campaigns have condemned the practice and state responses have also focused on so-called “corrective rape.”

[PT: Personal Identity MOGAI Ask Game].

🔍 - How did you discover your identity? Are you still struggling with certain parts of it? Which ones do you have figured out and which ones are still a mystery to you? 🏷️ - What is your preferred way for people to refer to you or about you? How does it differ between strangers and close ones? 🎨 - From the identity labels that have flags, which of them have your favorite flags and/or color schemes? Do you find that the way a flag looks (if the label has one to begin with) impacts how you approach the label? 🧸 - Which of your labels brings you the most comfort? Why that one? 👽 - What do you believe is the most unique about your identity? Have you found anyone else identifying in similar way to you? Whether yes or no, how does it make you feel that there are more/no people whose identity works like yours? 🍰 - What kind of attractions do you experience, if any? Outside of romantic and sexual one, what do you wish people understood better about the attraction you feel? 🌊 - Does your identity fluctuate in any way? If so, how and with what intensity? How do you approach and adapt to those? 🐉 - Are you a term collector and/or hoarder? How do you organize and/or keep track of your labels? ✨ - What is something "small" or "unusual" (according to you) that brings you immense identity euphoria? 🦋 - How does your identity "evolved" over the course of your life? Are there any labels you used to identity with, but don't any longer? 🧱 - What is the most frustrating misconception people had about your identity and/or labels you identify with? How do you handle people misunderstanding you and how you identify? 🪞 - Do you feel how you present yourself externally matches your actual identity? How so or why not? 🧩 - Have you ever had a moment regarding your identity where it "clicked" into place? Tell us about it!

Dedicated to @genderaverse!

But we can't expect them to look exactly like spaces that do require a purchase but without the part where you spend money.

Generally speaking, a space can't be free-as-in-beer AND gatekept.

Magical Pride flags time!!

I wanted to draw the autism pride flag too, since... I mean, my me

Are there other recognised disability flags? I'd love to draw more. :]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56143249-tumblr-porn

Now if you’re wondering why I felt the sudden need to dredge up this post from 2022, it’s because of a couple other posts I won’t go into now that reminded me of it.

This post is a prime example of how casually and insidiously we can re-write history. When the OP made this post so many people in the notes nodded along, acting as though it were an obvious, incontrovertible truth that Tumblr in the late aughts/early ‘10s was a wholesome safe space for children, and it was therefore normal and natural in the tumblr culture of that time to treat adults as unwelcome interlopers.

But that’s not an obvious, incontrovertible truth.

It’s a complete rewriting of history.

It’s a brazen, boldfaced lie.

Or it would be, if I thought OP were lying intentionally. But actually I don’t thing they were. I think this might actually be how OP (mis)remembers tumblr. OP painted a pastel colored soft focus filter over their childhood memories without even realizing that’s what they were doing. And it’s fine if the way you like to remember something is different from the way it actually happened. But it stops being fine when you start using your fabricated whitewashed sanitized memories as “evidence” when crafting an argument, thinking no one will bother to fact check you.

I’m bothering.

And john green was clearly trying to connect with the teens here, because they were the intended audience of his fucking novels. he didn’t come here to hang out with adult sex workers

Also to be clear people back then did argue that Green was wrong for being in a space for teenagers, but they didn’t mean tumblr, they meant him being a YA author with a fanbase of teenagers, and they used that as evidence of his nonexistent pedophilia as well as the fact that there’s a laughably non-explicit sex scene in The Fault in Our Stars. The nerdfighter fandom has always been populated by teens because John Green is a YA author and he and his brother intentionally kept their content all ages, that’s also what they meant by youth spaces, their own fan space which they weren’t even involved in to an abnormal or unhealthy degree.

(If anyone is curious the evidence against Thomas Sanders was that he once accidentally shared some slightly sexualized fan art of him—something he did I believe on a separate 18+ account with other fans on the condition that they’re adults, which I think is perfectly fine, creators shouldn’t have to pick either 100% kid friendly or 100% 18+ for their content—because the fan in question did not tell him their age and once he found out it was a minor he took the art down and blocked that person, which is all that can really be expected, and also that he did outreach with his former highschool to help the drama students learn about acting and creating videos. One is an unfortunate mistake and the other is just a good thing he did?? But both were used to drum up pedophilia accusations which again, were cover for the true reason people hated him, he didn’t hate ace and aro people.)

People also accused Green of being weird about women for writing Paper Towns because there’s a girl who’s a manic pixie dream girl so obviously he’s a misogynist….but the book was directly and explicitly deconstructing and critiquing the manic pixie dream girl trope and the way men often see the women they’re attracted to as objects and not people—like I can point to the exact passage in the book that is just Green looking at the audience and saying “women are people and you don’t own someone because you like them” I have it highlighted—so anyone claiming that the book was the opposite just can’t read but even then, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t true, it could be used to paint him as a monster so it’s fine to lie about something as blatantly false as this.

The only real valid criticism I ever saw was that The Fault in Our Stars was antisemitic for the bits about the Anne Frank house, which I agree with, but that was heavily drowned out by the pedo stuff so not only did this movement nearly destroy a man over fucking nothing, it prevented a genuine criticism of his writing from being brought up and addressed. It was unfair to Green, who should be made aware of this and be given a chance to apologize and make it right in any way he can, and to his jewish fans, who deserved to talk about how they were harmed and have that harm addressed, but it all got ruined by a bunch of bigots being assholes for no reason.

Also this was ableist harassment on top of it all, John Green has never been secretive about his struggles with OCD and accusing a man with FUCKING OCD of being a pedophile when you know you’re lying is horrific ableist violence. That’s part of the reason he left and as someone with OCD I genuinely think people chose this to attack him with because they knew it would do the most harm to him professionally and mentally. It was extremely ableist and as far as I’m concerned the only person who should be able to make jokes about what happened is him. Everyone else should stop treating this situation like there was anything even remotely funny about it because there wasn’t, it’s not funny to harass a mentally ill man and YA author with false accusations of pedophilia, that could have legit ruined his career and life. I’m glad it didn’t.

So anyway, aside from the one extremely valid complaint that got ignored, the real reason people suddenly hated John Green was that he was an ally to aro and ace people and back then being an ally was a social death sentence, especially on tumblr. The reason no one remembers this is because former ace/aro exclusionists have done a marvelous job of convincing everyone that “ace discourse” wasn’t a big deal and didn’t really hurt anyone, especially not anyone irl, but that’s a blatant and bold-faced lie designed to protect them from the consequences of their actions and further erase ace and aro people and our suffering. We do not deserve to be remembered, and everything done to us and our allies was just dumb teenagers being silly and not a coordinated campaign of queerphobic violence designed to completely eradicate the existence of ace and aro people and anyone who supported us, and thus no one who took part in that coordinated campaign deserves to be held responsible for what they did.

TL;DR The cock monolog was the culmination of an attempt to destroy a man’s entire career for the crime of being a good ally and saying things that are true like ace and aro people are valid. I don’t even think he said they were queer I think he just said they were valid and he welcomes ace and aro fans, but even that was too much. The idea that it was just teens being teens is untrue, plenty of adults were joining in, tumblr has never been a space only for teenagers, and that wasn’t even the reason people were harassing him, it was because he was a good ally, and on top of all of that a genuine issue never got addressed because people cared more about destroying him than they did actual marginalized people.

Not every instance of someone talking about their religious beliefs or experiences is proselytizing or trying to convert you. Sometimes people just like to talk about things that are an important part of their lives.

Not every case of a child being involved in religious practices is abusive indoctrination. Plenty of people are perfectly capable of raising their children to understand their religious beliefs and practices without forcing that child to stay in their organization, and many religious traditions have specific rituals for childhood that are important to them.

Not every person who's grown up in a religious community has religious trauma, and not every person who decides to leave their religion does so for traumatic reasons.

People do in fact convert TO religions! Religious to atheist is not the only process that exists <3

No religion on earth is completely monolithic. Religious communities are made up of individuals, each of whom will have their own unique approach to their beliefs, their own places they make exceptions, their own political beliefs either separate from or integrated with their religious ones. To know someone's religious affiliation is to know only that, you can't tell everything else about a person from that.