FtmLeatherPup

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.

At the age of 19 Anakin Skywalker was married and a general in a galaxy wide war and was considered to be one of the most powerful Jedi in history 

At the age of 19 Leia Organa was a senator in the imperial senate as well as a leader and spy for the Rebellion

At the age of 19 Luke was making vroom vroom noises with his toy planes 

On June 20, 1975, an American Lawyer by the name of Robert Rines took these photos of what he thinks could be the Loch Ness Monster. On the left is an image of what looks to be a possible plesiosaur-like creature. The other is what Rines claims to be a “gargoyle-like head”. 

If you’re not looking for a relationship, tell the person you’re seeing.

If you’re thinking of ghosting someone, tell them.

If you can’t handle meeting up with someone after all, tell them.

If you’re terrible at responding to messages, tell people.

If you prefer talking in person to texting, tell people. 

If you’re seeing several people at the same time, tell them.

If you’re looking for sex rather than dating, tell the person you’re seeing.

On this World Mental Health Day I’m grateful for no longer having bad thoughts take over my mind when I look in the mirror.

It’s sometimes hard to remember what my mental health was like and how it impacted so negatively on my day to day life.

Note to purple states