SHARPEN YOUR TEETH

I watched the Zootopia movies and it's very bizarre to me how each movie tried to come off as progressive and loving while also having some fucked up overall takeaway. Like the first movie really wants to say "racism is wrong" while reinforcing racism. We at numerous points are made to laugh at stereotypes and "slur" jokes like these things arent themselves part of the bigoted system the narrative wants to reject. But worst of all is by the end the story never rejects the "predators (the stand in for racial minorities) are historically savage and violent, they're just reformed now." Like, the specific use of the word savage. And I know that people are gonna be like, "they're predator animals!! They eat prey!!! It's not that deep" but it is that deep cuz the story itself drew up the metaphor, I didn't. Yes the end verifies they didn't "biologically revert to their savage ways" but that still implies they were savage to begin with. That's bad.

I watched the Zootopia movies and it's very bizarre to me how each movie tried to come off as progressive and loving while also having some fucked up overall takeaway. Like the first movie really wants to say "racism is wrong" while reinforcing racism. We at numerous points are made to laugh at stereotypes and "slur" jokes like these things arent themselves part of the bigoted system the narrative wants to reject. But worst of all is by the end the story never rejects the "predators (the stand in for racial minorities) are historically savage and violent, they're just reformed now." Like, the specific use of the word savage. And I know that people are gonna be like, "they're predator animals!! They eat prey!!! It's not that deep" but it is that deep cuz the story itself drew up the metaphor, I didn't. Yes the end verifies they didn't "biologically revert to their savage ways" but that still implies they were savage to begin with. That's bad.

right wing handwringing over birth rates has always unsubtly been a combination of wanting more white babies/wanting control over women, so it's bothersome that the popular response to that is just pointing out the cost of living. "we Would be having more kids if you guys made some positive changes to society" and such. pronatalist sentiment is becoming so much more explicit that I don't think many self-styled progressives are ready to reconcile with the fact that many women simply do not want to have children. we already see how women are demonized for refusing to undertake the thankless burdens of their mother and grandmother's generations lol, I can't imagine how full abdication from child rearing will come across to some people.

I think this rhetoric also ignores that the right wing want the inverse for Black and brown people - this logic of “raise living standards and we’ll have more kids” is a white perspective that ignores white supremacist medical violence, forced abortions, forced sterilisation, mass deportations, mass incarceration, police murder, imperial aggression, and forced removal of children from families as institutional programs of population control (Canadian residential schools, for example, were built for this exact purpose).

TME people mad about shit that's not worth being mad over: "Stop calling Kurt Cobaine she! That's gross! That's bad! That's evil! That's based in pure speculation!"

block:

Imagine, if you will, two trans women naked on a dirty mattress. It’s on the floor of a room as barren as a rotting womb, concrete floors and fluorescent lights split by spackle drywall barriers. One’s hand is tangled in the other’s hair and they kiss, one exhales and breathes smoke into the lungs of the other, and the one is riding the other, their bodies moving in perfect unison, their pupils dilated from marijuana and raw, unadulterated lust, and they are not prude and proper, they are lascivious and vulgar.

There's an interaction I had online a little while ago that I think about a lot. I shared (in a fairly "woke" space) that recent-ish meta study that showed that while we don't have a lot of actual usable data on the subject, everything we currently have on transfem athletes gives us no real reason to think they have an athletic advantage. and people were not happy with this. One person immediately went in talking about a time a professional men's soccer team beat a professional women's soccer team by a large margin. And this was generally accepted and supported; no one but me seemed able to notice how irrelevant that was. No one cared that in a conversation about transfems on estrogen they pulled out an isolated instance of cisgender men competing against cisgender women. No one cared that they ignored everything about the study I shared and instead just said "no amount of estrogen can account for that athletic difference" and backing that claim up with absolutely nothing. No one cared they said, and I quote, "[in high level athletics] trans women are a threat to cis women." They admitted to cherrypicking, saying that they could find as many examples of men beating women as they wanted. And this was considered (through the democracy of up/downvotes) to be better evidence and citation than the specific metanalysis I shared that covered 50+ studies.

There's an interaction I had online a little while ago that I think about a lot. I shared (in a fairly "woke" space) that recent-ish meta study that showed that while we don't have a lot of actual usable data on the subject, everything we currently have on transfem athletes gives us no real reason to think they have an athletic advantage. and people were not happy with this. One person immediately went in talking about a time a professional men's soccer team beat a professional women's soccer team by a large margin. And this was generally accepted and supported; no one but me seemed able to notice how irrelevant that was. No one cared that in a conversation about transfems on estrogen they pulled out an isolated instance of cisgender men competing against cisgender women. No one cared that they ignored everything about the study I shared and instead just said "no amount of estrogen can account for that athletic difference" and backing that claim up with absolutely nothing. No one cared they said, and I quote, "[in high level athletics] trans women are a threat to cis women." They admitted to cherrypicking, saying that they could find as many examples of men beating women as they wanted. And this was considered (through the democracy of up/downvotes) to be better evidence and citation than the specific metanalysis I shared that covered 50+ studies.

To clarify for those who don't know, "free the nipple" isn't about going braless, it's about going topless

the discourse on shaving and wearing makeup is starting again so i'll say one of the more subtle and consistent ways tme ppl have consistently fucked with me is by saying i'm not progressive for wanting to learn makeup and shave my legs lol

cis women are not on the hook for normalizing unshaven legs or bare faces because their performances of femininity are thought of as natural and innate. they go unremarked upon

part of this comes from the idea that trans women are somehow immune to misogynistic standards. people seem to think that we won't face any consequence for not performing patriarchal standards of femininity, unlike ~real~ women, who are under ~real~ pressure to do these things. so the responsibility falls on us to normalize these things, because we are supposedly in the best position to do so

Priorities

Start disappointing people and not backing out of it when they are upset, reject feeling ashamed of everything including of yourself, start saying No to things you do not want to do not just things you're scared of, do more of those things you're scared of but wish you could do, make your own plans and execute them, decide to do or not do something without basing it on who will Dislike it.

FUCKIN YURTLE THE TURTLE IS DEAD YALL