And Then People Try To Claim That It’s Because Being Sapphic Is “normalized In Media” —you Mean

have you heard of this spray that makes you see hair on your face that is otherwise invisible so you can shave it with a dull plastic razor that comes in a 20 pack which will be on this planet for hundreds of years??? buy. have you heard of this single use sheet masks that does nothing different than a normal mask and you have to wear it overnight (it will come off) and on flights (you look crazy)??? buy. have you heard of this camera that makes you see your greasy scalp (normal) and dead skin (also normal) up close so you can purchase a treatment for hundreds of dollars and/or exfoliating scrub containing particles that are going down your drain and straight into the sea???? buy. have you heard of this special plastic gadget that

love calling myself a dyke like yes i am the mean and scary lesbian they warned you about on tv

I’m abt to hit the crash out phase I can feel it approaching

20, Butch Lesbian, Feminist/Radical Feminist.

I base my opinions off of facts and my own lived experiences, but I do try and balance with empathy for an individual’s lived experience.

Gender critical= I don’t believe in gendered behavior, either that you must do certain things that correspond with your biological sex, or that doing certain things means that you are a certain gender

Gender critical =/= I think that women are weak, should be forced into childbearing, or that GNC people should go die in a hole after being unloved their entire lives. That’s actually the complete opposite of being GC.

I am heavily critical of a lot of things but I don’t stand for harassing individuals under those groups simply for their existence. That includes religion, political ideology, or how they choose to identify themselves. However if you are, with words or actions, expressing a harmful idea, I will disagree with you, or ignore you if it’s too stupid and I don’t have the energy for it.

I do not misgender, deadname, or otherwise directly disrespect individuals identities to prove a point, I find that stupid and cruel.

Might be surprising but I do spend time outside of the house doing community work and I’d suggest you do the same.

Also I’m always up for a chat if we’re mutuals or if you’ve got any (respectful) questions for me.

"misandrists are just as bad" i don't see men dying at alarming rates because @/i3atm3n4breakfast said she wishes they would shut the fuck up. i don't see men being forced to cover themselves and not being allowed to speak in public. i don't see them being denied education because they're men. but yes, they are totally alike

I love old media warning society of ✨ dangerous butches ✨ bc it’s always

“this woman WILL wear mens shoes and will STEAL YOUR WIFE”

“butch dykes are HANDSOME and GOOD IN BED”

“you WILL be seduced and they have a HIGH SUCCESS RATE”

“they prey on women DISAPPOINTED IN MEN and give them WAY MORE ORGASMS”

“DON’T let your loved ones receive LOVE from AFFECTIONATE LESBIANS”

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.)

1) This is disturbing and I feel so sorry for this poor couple

2) Stealing lingerie, underwear, or even sexual toys is a huge pattern among TIMs. I remember a male ex I had (before I realized I was a Lesbian) telling me this story of a friend of a friend. This man was “experimenting with his sexuality/gender” and would continually steal his mother’s dildos to fuck himself in the ass with, not even using condoms as a barrier, and then putting it back, and eventually she found out and just let him have it. (I have no issue with anal if that’s what you want to do so don’t get me wrong, but it does have a higher risk of bacterial contamination so extra cleaning and/or protection needs to be involved)

And I had a surprised and disgusted reaction to this, obviously, and he accused me of being transphobic and got pretty upset about that. At the time I wasn’t even a radfem but the idea of people stealing intimate items that touch genitals, and especially returning them so they can be re-used unknowingly by the original owner, is just really gross and inappropriate? I don’t really care what it is or what your purpose of doing so is, unless you’re a 10 year old girl who was jokingly putting on her mom’s bra while doing the laundry, it’s incredibly disgusting. And I see stories of that happening over and over again, and I just feel really bad for their poor mothers and sisters because that has to feel like an incredible violation of privacy.

Male secretly abuses his lesbian sister's clothing for god fucking knows how long...... This is so disgusting I don't even know what to say here. (link)

Men really are brain damaged they'll be like women have the PRIVILEGE of not being the sex that rapes people all the time :(. Everybody is scared of me or looks at me like a creep :( it's so hard women are so lucky to just be the rape victim class of people : *((. And expect us to feel bad for them

@halfalive-chaos - Context

Oh BOY do I have some big giant feelings about this!

The short answer is yes, I think people/The Audience has forgotten this - but I also don't think it's entirely their fault.

Part of the reason I was really impressed by how Arcane used and executed the scene, and why I keep going on about it, is that this whole subject is kind of an ongoing concern of mine.

I very sincerely think that the documented decline of, not just sex, but horniness, in media has narrowed the spectrum of contexts we're used to seeing sex and sexuality happen in our storytelling, in ways that are doing us harm.

Because mainstream media has started shying away from engaging with sex to the degree that it has, sex is now almost invariably depicted in extremes - either "Aren't we edgy big boys now?" stuff like The Boys, or miserably sad traumatic drama grist - or else not at all.

And because "regular" tv has been scared off showing sex, it's vanishingly rare to see characters who are in love have sex, or to be sexual as an expression of that, certainly without some negative element to it.

That means we're almost never asked to think of it in terms of sincere, meaningful character communication, or as a storytelling mechanism, or ever presented with it in the context of a positive wider relationship.

I think the hazard of this is obvious - if our media and storytelling doesn't engage with healthy sex in that wider context, or use it purposefully, then we're conceding the whole conversation around it to porn, to novelty edgelordism, and grimdark miseryfests. Those things will define all our language and imagery around it, and the only time we'll ever see it will be upsetting, harmful or ugly. When it is easier to stumble across a scene of rape than it is to see a consenting woman orgasm, it's little wonder people can become reflexively suspicious of any sexuality at all.

But even when it's not so extreme as that, more often than not it's depicted as a casual fling instead, divorced from a bigger picture, or a distraction, an alternative to a grander and truer romantic interest. There's nothing at all wrong with sex for pleasure, don't misunderstand me, but it's odd that our media landscape has engineered a situation where depictions of sex in the context of a bigger love story almost never happen. It would seem then that we can have one or the other - sex or romance - but never at once.

And we're diminishing it with all of this. We're saying this incredibly important, intense, uniquely vulnerable and intimate feature of the human experience doesn't matter enough to talk about. We're saying that sex and love don't have any functional overlap. Even at best, we're pretending that sex isn't important in relationships, or increasingly, that the only good sex is... well... sexless. Sterile. Permissable and virtuous only when it's so "clean" and so perfect in circumstance that it becomes an unattainably impossible kind of ceremony.

The venue must be perfect. The characters must be not only unimpeachable, but historically and permanently so, and exactly as faultless as each other - they must be exactly the same social status, age, background, emotional state and situation. There can be no power imbalance or even a risked perception of one. No chequered history to leave behind, no overcome adversities, nothing that had to be learned. No transgressions to have been worked through, and comprehensively put to rest now.

Indeed, the moment must be so sublimely judged that it's unlikely to ever actually arise in a drama to start with; the characters must be in such a stable situation that there's no actual storytelling to be done here to warrant the scene occurring in the first place.

Which is convenient, because in this framework, the only unproblematic sex is the sex nobody can possibly have anyway. Because nobody can have "perfect" sex. That's not how it works - the fundamental nature of intimacy is taking each other for what you actually are, in all of the reality involved. If it can't be messy, it's not true.

All of this comes with extra points and splinters too when it comes to the matter of lesbian sex in particular, and the complicated history of how we've been either exploited for disposable male titilation, or else rendered chastely invisible by well intended feminists of all persuasions. We were already being presented with a sex or romance dichotomy, and never mind if either one worked.

It's a dysfunctional either/or. Asexuals & friends notwithstanding, physical intimacy is an incredibly important feature of the lives we spend together, and the bodies we live our lives in. And as much as we'd like to think we're all too cool and aloof for it, for most of us lust is impossible to entirely detach from sentiment, when it comes to the real people we form bonds with.

People falling in love want to fuck each other. People who are in love want to fuck each other. People fall in love in the process of fucking each other. It's not some abstract thing that happens in isolation to our feelings for each other.

I don't think it's good for us to perform such weird acrobatics to pretend none of this is true, whatever the reason for doing so; but that is effectively what modern media does.

And I think we're all poorer for it. We're poorer for missing out on the most private, intimately human kinds of moments in our stories that live in the space where love and lust can intersect. Because that's the only place those moments happen.