Me When I Fall Down The Stairs Due To My Fainting Disorder

Women do not need to be in fear of harm or harassment to want a space to themselves.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot with the whole women’s only gym nightmare argument the past couple weeks. So much of it is focused on a back and forth of whether or not women are actually in much danger, and I’m going to go even more woke and say I think the danger is actually irrelevant to this question.

We shouldn’t have to prove that we’re terrified of being assaulted, shouldn’t have to cry and break down into an anxiety attack on camera as we relive our trauma to prove we deserve a space for ourselves. If we put our time and effort into building spaces for ourselves in this stupid fucking patriarchal world, we’re allowed to keep it solely for the reasoning of wanting to keep it. That’s enough.

The sense of entitlement towards women’s work genuinely needs to be studied.

Idk if this is going to be an unpopular opinion (probably would be in Insta or TikTok but I feel like ppl are a bit more reasonable here), but while goth/punk/grunge/etc are PRIMARILY music and political based subcultures, there is still a fashion element. Fashion is political in today’s world, due to the nature of capitalism and it’s social effects, and the primary hallmark of the fashion side of these subcultures (in their origins) was the DIY clothes that served multiple purposes: reducing your capitalistic footprint, your environmental footprint, and defying social norms of physical presentation. Same thing with makeup, which is weaponized off of women’s insecurities. I respect your right to do whatever you want with yourself but if it happens to be following the exact trends and beauty standards of your current time, it’s not counter-culture.

You can be goth/punk/grunge and dress “normal” because it is primarily musical and political. BUT, you cannot be goth/punk/grunge and wear Shein, Temu, buy into all the latest trends and participate in fast fashion, etc, because that is against the ethics of the subculture. Similarly, we need to stop watering down the look to the point of incomprehension and normalcy and calling it after an alternative counter-cultural group. And I understand being poor, I’ve been low-income for a while now. I thrift what I can but if I really, actually need (not want!) a new pair of jeans and I can’t find one that fits anywhere else, I will go to Walmart and buy a pair from the clearance section. However I then wear and repair that pair of pants until it’s literally tearing apart, and then repurpose the fabric I can salvage into new projects when I can no longer wear it.

“It’s the most punk thing to not care what anyone thinks!!” No it’s not actually. Punk has been defined by it’s almost obsession with politics, ethics, radical empathy with the oppressed, and fighting for change. Ignoring those calling you out on your privilege and your contributions to the capitalistic machine isn’t Punk. And I say all this as someone who’s parents were part of the original alternative scenes back in the 70s-90s, and who’s talked to a lot of people who were in it at the time of its creation.

Y’all I think that fuckin “spoon bread” person made a new account 😭😭😭 i already blocked them once and they’re back reblogging my posts with complete slop that’s genuinely impossible to read

And then people try to claim that it’s because being sapphic is “normalized in media” —you mean porn?? Being fetishized is not the same as being accepted, and it’s still incredibly dangerous. Sure maybe some men will ask you for a threesome and then get grumpy when you refuse and leave it at that (which is still sexual harassment) but many other times they get violent when you don’t fulfill their fantasies. Or they try corrective rape.

The real reason this happens is because our collective understanding of sexuality is phallocentric and a lot of people cannot fathom a healthy and fulfilling relationship between two women. Somehow a dick needs to be involved in some way.

Additionally, in terms of actual media, it is in general more accepted to be a homosexual man and gay men get more time, better story development, and way more attention from fans, as a general group.

You know how sometimes people act like homophobia toward women barely exists? I feel like that definitely plays into the way people act toward bisexual women vs men. Like men are oh so brave for coming out as bisexual and braving homophobia to be true to themselves and why would they lie about it when he could have saved face and stay closeted until he dated a man, how brave. vs with women it's like why would she even come out if she's not dating a woman, she's probably faking it for the clout (no mention of bravery for risking homophobia)

Literally fixed my mental health by so much 😭😭 I didn’t realize how much forcing attraction to men was weighing me down and causing me to be out of touch with a lot of the rest of my personality because I would be constantly questioning my likes/dislikes. Now I just exist as myself and it’s amazing.

realizing I was a lesbian literally felt like this

It’s because they have this “perfect victim” mentality towards women of color. They’re just so innocent, kind, and helpless, accepting of everyone because they’re just so desperate for help they will accept minor amounts of abuse instead of major— I mean, they’ve always been accepting of these things!!

Whereas in reality women of color are just as able to form opinions based on logic as anybody else. In my opinion they don’t deserve to be treated like some child that needs saving, by people who liken them to men but in a progressive way this time. They’re allowed to have the focus solely on them, to demand more solely on their own merit and not that of nebulous “black trans women” (half of which were self-admittedly just transvestite, looking at you, people who screech about Marsha P Johnson)

Also women of color are the most effected by the sex trade, but nobody wants to talk about that because then they’d have to stop jacking off to their favorite victim and telling themselves it’s moral because it’s inclusive. So instead they twist our words and ignore us. There’s plenty of radfem women of color and I’d even argue it’s more normalized within every other group except white women, in my experience and research. Especially when you look outside of America (like the so-called transphobic 4B movement from South Korea). People are just willfully short sighted to serve their own choices and preconceived notions of the world.

The idea that radical feminism is just for white women and that all radical feminists talk about is white women is so laughable to me. I hate to break it to these people but equating the idea of a fight for gender equality with white western culture and labelling the misogynistic elements of non western cultures as progressive and based is actually so harmful. I care about all women, I’m not going to turn a blind eye to women of colour being oppressed by their own cultures out of fear of being labelled a racist sorry.

Ugh literally. Like as a writer and aspiring author myself (it’s my hope to get a novella self published within the next year, even if that’s just uploading it to Wattpad bc idk how I feel about self publishing through Amazon like many ppl do) I’m going to go out on a limb and say that reductionism isn’t even necessarily bad. It can be a literary tool, and the problem is overusing it, like any other literary tool. The reductionism of the one girl being different was supposed to make a sense of isolation easily understood by the reader, and oftentimes it wasn’t meant to be a direct mirror to real life. It depends on your audience and what you’re trying to do but I don’t even think it’s always bad.

And just as you said, nobody cares about reductionism unless it’s to point out a problem, reductionism that benefits the status quo is completely fine.

I know there are a lot of complaints about the “Not Like other girls” era of books aimed at women, some I disagree with, some I don’t. But I’m rereading one of those types of books right now (technically re-listening bc I’m using an audiobook but same idea) which I absolutely adored the first time I read, and honestly I kind of miss that time period.

Like sure it was reductionist at times, but at least the women were unabashedly themselves and pushed back against gender stereotypes. This book is set in a fantasy past based off of Medieval Germany (from what I can tell) and with that obviously comes the sexism of the period, and she had actually realistic feelings on the matter. She thinks about how she wishes she’s a boy because she wants to have a career, specifically a farrier or a hunter, and criticizes the fact that she’s living in a society in which her value is through marriage. She’s practical minded, she looks up to her father and male relatives because she wants the freedom they have, but also feels a sense of displacement and disgust from them because of their sexism, and in general just has so much more energy as a character than I often see in more mainstream books now. And she’s STILL a woman and eventually finds her power as a woman.

Idk this is just a personal pet peeve of mine but I don’t like our current idea of rejecting surface level femininity = rejecting womanhood, either positively or negatively. On the one side you get shamed for it because you’re a pick me, on the other side you get told you’re just a man. And it’s made characters really really bland.

(Also maybe I just am the problem, idk, but I have had the experience of feeling left out and not like my female peers growing up because they were content to uphold patriarchal ideals and I wasn’t. I still put up a good effort when it came to talking about crushes and doing all the fun sorts of “girly” things they liked, but I had trouble finding anyone who reciprocated that energy towards me when I wanted to talk about my interests that didn’t necessarily fall into that category. So imo there is a kernel of truth in the “not like other girls” stereotype, not because other girls are INHERENTLY bad, but because of how our current societal pressures work on young girls.)

I fucking love being a lesbian.

And I know that’s pretty much all I’ve posted about so far but it’s so true. I love women and my love for women bleeds into my love for myself and it’s almost a spiritual feeling. It’s like the water cycle, I pour out love and yet it is given back to me and I never run dry.

I also find so much comfort in lesbian titles. I’ve finally found people who can understand what confused me for so long. My desire to partake in “masculine” things and yet not leave my womanhood and connection to women behind in that process. I used to think I was crazy and I was told I was contradictory, and now I know I’m just a butch and I have thousands of sisters who understand me. I used to think I was strange and broken until I learned about Stones and now I know yet again that I’m not alone, and I can not only be begrudgingly accepted for my preferences, but desired and fulfilled in a relationship that makes sense for me. There are people out there who want someone like me exactly as I am and I don’t have to change, or hide things about myself, or put up with things I don’t like in order to keep a man around and I find it so beautiful. Lesbianism is beautiful.

It would be quite silly indeed to get too hung up on potential power imbalance between Caitlyn & Vi when the show has a solid 7-10 minute supercut's worth of Caitlyn spluttering her little token protests before immediately doing exactly whatever Vi just told her to do.