order in the court!!!

There’s nothing new about the consideration of male superheroes as icons of masculinity. Superman representing the pinnacle of wholesome, idealised masculine power, or The Hulk as an allegory for the angry, repressed male id. And these types of masculinity are not innate or inevitable. Masculinity, like all gender roles is a socially constructed performance.

But performative masculinity has a tension to it that performative femininity does not, because performing itself is seen as innately unmasculine. You cannot learn to be a real man, you are or you are not. You can’t make one or learn to be one. Because our story about masculinity is that it just is. It is an ur state of being. The most natural way for a human to be.

Steve Rogers came out of a bottle.

And Steve Rogers’s weapon is a shield. Steve does not attack, he defends. Steve Rogers is the only Avenger who does not thrust forward with a phallic weapon. From Loki’s staff to Clint’s arrows, Black Widow (who pairs so well with Steve because she is a phallic woman) has guns, Tony essentially is a giant penis (sorry, friends, that’s all I see), and of course no one would even pretend that Thor’s hammer isn’t Thor’s penis.

But Steve has a shield. And a shield isn’t particularly feminine. It is not a cup or a sheath or a hole. It is just anti-phallic.

And that is Steve. the non-phallic man. Because you can’t make a man in a machine. Only a strange kind of monster.

I think that’s why I resonated with him.

Another character I resonate with is T'Challa, who’s also not my gender, so I couldn’t put a finger on it at first.

I think T'Challa is one of the few male combat heroes in the MCU to hardly ever use something like a gun. Even his female guards have more penetrative weapons (I’ll avoid saying ‘masculine’, due to the connotations)

His claws are penetrative in a way, but… he fights in a skin tight suit, twirling acrobatically in the air and landing in a way that we can see his body in almost sensual ways. His new nanotech suit literally rips his clothes apart.

The only times he uses a spear is as a ceremonial weapon, but he still wins the fight by…. choking his opponent with his thighs. He asks some privacy before he stands, half dressed in the cold mountain air before the leader of the Jabari who he had earlier choked with his thighs. He smiles as he invites him to battle.

His first conversation with his male friend (W'Kabi) is about his love life. His scenes with other men are emotionally charged.

He himself, gets emotional. And disoriented because of it. He freezes when he sees his attractive ex. He loses his composure when Zuri is killed.

Wakanda is a healthy place for gender roles. He looks up to feminine figures, and even worships a goddess. { The only thing that seems to be contentious in Wakandan society is age (when M'Baku calls T'Challa a 'boy’ and Shuri and 'child’ to discredit them, the representatives of tribes being the elders, and Shuri explicitly acknowledging the lack of value given to prodigies, in BPWF) }

This is a man, but in historically female tropes. But unlike Steve, he’s dignified in those tropes. He’s the version of masculinity that’s comfortable in the way he just is. He accepts his mistakes, and where he had been violent, he tries to nurture.

The only time he gets sniped for being a cat themed superhero is by Americans. Sam Wilson and Everett Ross. And while I love Sam’s 'so you like cats?’, it occurred to me that cats are often associated with femininity in the West. Ironic of the Falcon to say this: but he may have not considered the gritty bird of prey to be something worth being teased about. So T'Challa explains what the suit means, in one of the few times he ever has to defend his strength and validity.

But he still doesn’t care. Western values of masculine superheroes are not relevant to him because he’s the King of an uncolonized nation. He’s fine with smiling at Ross and ignoring the snide remarks about Wakanda’s lack of relevance, because he knows Wakanda’s worth as well as his own.

Even if he was to somehow read this very essay, he wouldn’t react much to my interpretation. He’s the type to know in his heart the difference between how we see him vs how he sees himself.

Steve might cry if he read yours. Because it matters way too much to him. Because the way the world saw him was sometimes the only thing he could define himself with.

“I can do this all day” Steve spits blood out and raggedly affirms his own strength because noone believes in it. He knows he may not survive war, but he never admits it to Bucky that he wants to prove something.

There’s nothing new about the consideration of male superheroes as icons of masculinity. Superman representing the pinnacle of wholesome, idealised masculine power, or The Hulk as an allegory for the angry, repressed male id. And these types of masculinity are not innate or inevitable. Masculinity, like all gender roles is a socially constructed performance.

But performative masculinity has a tension to it that performative femininity does not, because performing itself is seen as innately unmasculine. You cannot learn to be a real man, you are or you are not. You can’t make one or learn to be one. Because our story about masculinity is that it just is. It is an ur state of being. The most natural way for a human to be.

Steve Rogers came out of a bottle.

And Steve Rogers’s weapon is a shield. Steve does not attack, he defends. Steve Rogers is the only Avenger who does not thrust forward with a phallic weapon. From Loki’s staff to Clint’s arrows, Black Widow (who pairs so well with Steve because she is a phallic woman) has guns, Tony essentially is a giant penis (sorry, friends, that’s all I see), and of course no one would even pretend that Thor’s hammer isn’t Thor’s penis.

But Steve has a shield. And a shield isn’t particularly feminine. It is not a cup or a sheath or a hole. It is just anti-phallic.

And that is Steve. the non-phallic man. Because you can’t make a man in a machine. Only a strange kind of monster.

0 dubai chocolate ingested

0 labubus bought

not all hybrid animals are unhealthy, it's kind of a roll of the dice on how genetics interact with each other.

in fact, hybridization in general is turning out to be more foundational to evolution then we thought! closely related species are just stealing each other's genes all the time, turns out.

hybridization events are MUCH more common then we thought, and result in the swapping back and forth of species-specific genes, which then drives evolution in different directions for both species with the introduction of these new genes! these events are called "gene flow".

modern humans specifically are a really good example of this, actually- humans with ancestral roots in Europe and Western Asia have a TON of traits that were lifted directly from our sister species, Neanderthals, after a whole slew of gene flow events!

some of these genes are believed to be responsible for hair texture, viral immune response, metabolism, and heightened sense of smell.

and on the Eastern side of Asia, the same is true of Denisovans, another modern human sister species!

these genes provided cold and altitude tolerance, among other benefits.

basically what I'm getting at here is that we now know that the tree of life is more like a series of streams flowing back and forth into each other to reinforce evolutionary pathways, all due to closely related species looking at each other and wiggling their eyebrows suggestively.

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3