Zocomi

*checks wiki*

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.

E.g. if you post saying how ridiculous it is that France has never yet paid back the money it demanded of Haiti for its independence 200 years ago, and the post gets popular enough, you will get someone saying "unfortunately the French government can't do this because voters wouldn't like it".

And it's like, yes, thank you, I have heard of "democracy". I am aware that people have incentives for doing things. I am aware that, in a racist society, anti-racist actions are frowned-upon. I am aware that, even if a French government was elected that was theoretically in favour of returning that money, they might still not do it because of fear of criticism from the the media and the far-right.

But the thing is, when I am saying this is ridiculous I don't mean that it is trivially easy to repay the money, I mean that it is such a grave injustice that doing the right thing should outweigh all the reasons for doing nothing. If France ever has a government with some humanity, I would want them to force through this repayment even if it meant being kicked out of office the next day. And if they didn't get kicked out, I would expect them to the repay all the subsequent debts Haiti incurred pay for that first debt, and if they are still there, then they can start paying reparations, not just to Haiti, but to every single former and current colony. The injustice is so large that qualms about practicality don't cut it any more.

People who reply like this seem to have a strange idea about how moral goodness works. If you are the President of France and you technically believe in repaying the Haitian debt but it's not a priority that you will actually incur any personal downsides to achieve, then I'm sorry but I'm not crediting you with being a good person. Good thoughts followed by inaction where action was possible makes you indistinguishable from someone without any good thoughts at all. There is no special medal for people who believe in doing the right thing but still don't do it.

People who reply like this always seem to be men, too. I suppose it's a type of mansplaining since it's a man assuming I wasn't aware of something incredibly obvious, and deciding to publicly correct my supposed ignorance. I generally will block people like this, because there is no point leaving myself open to further interactions from someone who both thinks that I am very stupid and that they are very smart. But sometimes another man will come along and reply to their reply saying "THANK YOU" or similar, and suddenly my post complaining about an injustice has become a bonding opportunity for two men to laugh about how stupid a woman is for never having considered that there are electoral incentives for inaction.

It's an issue complicated by its own history. In Britain at least, modern day drag performers come in a direct line of descent from characters like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, that is, a comic relief female character written for a male actor at a time when it was literally illegal for women to perform on stage. I think it's fair to say that characters like that are straight-up misogynstic appropriation. Banning a whole group from performing, then getting the audience to laugh at a man performing a comic caricature of that group, is just misogyny plain and simple. But cultures evolve over time and it isn't the 16th Century any more.

One of the biggest influences on modern-day drag in Britain comes from the USA. First, the popularity of minstrelsy as a crude racist caricature of Blackness performed by white actors in blackface, which was incredibly popular. Over time, the art form was subverted by increasing numbers of Black performers (often touring Britain from the Reconstruction era US) taking on these roles, although the fact that their managers were still overwhelmingly white was obviously a major issue. And then there was the Cakewalk, a dance that evolved on plantations in the Southern US in which Black people mocked the mannerisms of the white people who had enslaved them, which also really took off in Britain in the early 20th Century. (I am of course only covering this from the perspective of its influence in Britain, the history might be quite different in the US itself).

So you have this explicitly misogynstic artform that is influenced by a different, racist downward-punching artform (minstrelsy), then by the subversion of that artform by the targets of the mockery taking on the role of the performer, and then finally by an upward-punching mockery that turns the oppressive nature of minstrelsy on its head. It was inversion upon inversion, satire upon satire, to the point where these performances became meta-performances about the nature of performance itself.

Modern-day drag in Britain came out of the context of this history that played out in parallel on the Music Hall and Variety stage, and led us to a world where the tension between the identities of performer and character is The Point. It is no longer simply, "haha, this is what women are like 🤣" but rather the insincerity of the performance is the performance. Drag is a joke about costume and mannerism as ephemeral - the played-up sense of "I am still just a man under all this" is why people find it funny.

In a world where barriers to cis women performing on stage have been largely lifted, a joke whose point is "look, I'm a woman!" just isn't interesting, even right-wing comedians have to work a bit harder than that these days. But we still live in a world where huge barriers to trans women performing on stage do exist, so a joke saying "look, I'm a [T-slur]!" does still make audiences laugh, and in fact increasingly so as those barriers seem to get higher over time.

but i have never in my life seen a post saying to support masculine trans girls and trans women or trans girls and trans women who like traditionally masculine things and its really important to understand that showing support for trans women in any form is just as important as showing support for trans men so please, please reblog this.