ew s*x

Different from the Others/Anders als die Andern (1919, dir. Richard Oswald)

Life is hard when your boyfriend becomes a dark lord and thinks it’s all your fault.

“A Special Self”

by Momo Black

this was my final project for a history course I took this past semester. I had no idea how physically tiring (and painful!) making a comic with 100% traditional art was (cutting screentones! not easy!), but I’m very happy to have had the chance to make it.

a note: 同志社, Dōshisha, is the name of the university. In Chinese, though, 同志 has the connotation of “gay (person), homosexual”

Lala is a term similar to the English “lesbian”

The dialogue of the people at the women’s meeting is quoted from Queer Women in Urban China by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen

if you want all of the bibliography and historical notes that go with this comic, then you’re in luck! I will be putting it up with the 8 pages of notes on GumRoad for pay what you want, $1+. If you just want to download the comic, it will be pay what you want $0+

“Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.

A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.

Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.

Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.

“Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.

Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.

Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.

MSG is not bad for you at all.

The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.

Organic food isn’t better for you: [1] [2] [3]

Tracing food industry slave labor: [1]

Healthier food is more expensive: [1] [2]

Saturated fats (i.e. “junk food”) still provide needed energy, aren’t as bad as people thought: [1] [2]

“Processed” isn’t synonymous with less healthy, because it means a lot of different things: [1]

“Chemicals” also means a lot of things and many food components are misunderstood by the general public: [1]

MSG is not harmful: [1] [2] [3]

Several points here are, on their face, correct, including that MSG tastes good and wont hurt you (tho its opposition is historically unconnected to a lot of this other rhetoric, and was more the product of a racist panic), ‘health’ food is more expensive (a serious equity problem, that is at least partly due to an economic inevitability of producing food in ways that differ from the exploitative corners cut and economy of scale in conventional ag, depending on what one means by health food), ‘organic’ isnt inherently superfood (tho this is a misnomer, as that’s literally not the point or the significance of that label; different less environmentally harmful farm production practices are, and if you cannot connect your own health to reduced environmental destruction, which is dumb, can you at least connect it to the well being of all of the other species devastated by full bore conventional ag? Of which ‘organic ag’ is basically just a mitigated part?), saturated fats provide lots of food energy (l o l at this one, did anyone say otherwise??? The point is that saturated fats are comparatively dietarily rare historically, and are unbelieveably concentrated in the intake of meat and dairy products in the diets of the global north, both bougie and working class alike, and in those amounts has had seriously adverse cardiovascular consequences), while long term environmental and physical effects of many GMOs remain to be seen, the most serious objections to and concerns about GMOs are not, again, health related but have to do with the transformation of the life processes and the life itself of living things into legally controllable private property under powerful IP protections, often amounting to the theft of millennia of indigenous labor and craft by extremely powerful corporate entities, as a major driver of GMO research, adoption, and value is the ability to control and limit supplies, induce artificial scarcity, and marshal legal punishments for anyone who uses those things in a way not sanctioned by the spectaularly powerful rights holding megaconglomerates that dominate the seed, agrochemical, and animal husbandry businesses supplying the overwhelming amount of food in the US and globally.

Furthermore, the suggestion seems to be that ‘regular’ food does not also involve slave labor in the supply chain, which is the opposite of reality, and that highly processed foods are just simply the unjust victims of white Connecticuit liberal’s snobbery, when in reality, ‘value added’ foods like doritos, oreos, literally most any packaged prepared foods etc, are designed first and foremost to allay overproduction of highly subsidized crops and other foodstuffs, to move more of them to prevent price crashes, thus making conventional factory faming capitalist ag look ‘right’ and ‘better’ and ‘natural’ despite its pure artifice, and playing an important part in the economic and even military imposition of US geopolitical hegemony over the past 70 years. And honestly, anyone who does not understand the differences between the nutritional profiles or the bioavailability of energy - i.e. how much work your body has to do to get it - between a rapeseed oil soaked piece of pizza crust made with highly refined (ie, low in any of the fibers, proteins etc’) white wheat flour, and a piece of plain whole meal brown bread, and why those differences are metabolically significant, has no business in dramatic and self congratulatory indingantposting, because they dont know what the fuck they are talking about. I could go on, but I hate writing on my phone, have to pee, and shouldnt waste any more time responding to this asinine horseshit I suspect is somewhere down the line the discursive result of Kraft or Nestle’s marketing departments