aeolianblues

[aeolianblues]

I was probably 9 when the girls in my class said 'girls don't have hair on their arms, why do you'. I was 12 when the boys in my class teased a (girl) friend about having a 'moustache'. I was 13 when the girls in my class started threading their eyebrows. Unibrow? He. I was 15 when my dad called the taller girls in my class 'horses' (translation from another language, if that sounds strange to you). Too loud? Barking dog (another translation, but you know perfectly well what the insinuation is here). Broad shoulders? Good luck. Fat? 'Bone weight'? Good luck surviving height and weight checkup day.

If you're a brown girl, the whole world will question your gender (and occasionally humanness) unless you are performing a very specific fantasy brown woman who rarely if ever exists. Your skin can't be too dark, the hair on your arms must either be unnoticeably fine, dyed brown/bleached or regularly waxed. Eyebrows must either be Cara Delevine (and even accepting that is such a recent development... and it took a white woman to popularise it. Of course.) or razor thin. Belly fat? Only half-naked men in towels and dhotis are allowed to have those, not girls. (Also, you're never just a woman. Either you're 'girl' or 'a lady') Don't be taller than the boys, don't be too loud, don't have too boyish interests. Don't have a strong face, and if you do, god forbid don't wear your hair too short (idk if white people get this one thrown at them). Wear the appropriate amount and 'professional' type of makeup, nothing too funky, but also nothing too seductive or you're asking for it. Live by the beauty standard, die by the beauty standard.

Listen. I am very cis. Maybe cis+ from a 12-month period of getting extremely dysphoric over hearing people use 'she' for me, it sounded malicious or like they were committing some sort of violence on me. In my case, I ended up 'cis + do not perceive my gender'. I present and identify in many of the usual cis ways. And yet, I'll never be at that standard.

For the folks at home, I'm not a modest woman in a salwaar. But I'm not a jazzy dress-wearer or a leggy envy. For the folks outside, I'm not wondrously straight-haired, I'm not deliciously curly haired. I'm that weird knotty, kinked up south Asian hair that only gets read by non-south Asians (and some SA folks; we have some ingrained shit to work through too) as 'frizz'. To perform 'woman' for them, I'd need product and stylers working through my hair 100% of the time. I don't have those almost fetishised dark-skinned woman curves. If you're not that, then again you begin to slip off the gender spectrum. We don't have voices that are as high or shrill, many of our voices are quite deeper than white cis women's. Again we slip, or our voices get read as sultry.

To a certain extent, it relieves me, that if I don't resonate as strongly as 'woman' to them, then maybe just maybe the expectations of 'woman' also won't be so strongly projected onto me. But that's hardly the case, is it.

Caption: [A stitch with user @/sapphicyuji. The text on screen reads, " "you can't misgender cis people!", you have never had your gender questioned outside of your transness and it shows. sincerely, a trans poc".

I'm actually super glad we're having a conversation about this. The masculinization of black and brown women, because for years I felt like I endured this unique form of trauma until I realized other people went through the same thing too. And if there's one thing that I'd like to add to the conversation, there seems to be this misconception that this is something that starts at puberty. Like boys tell you you look like a man to hurt your feeling when that's so far from the case.

The first time I was purposefully misgendered was in kindergarten. I was constantly referred to by the masculine variant of my name, I was chased out of the women's restroom, and I had grown adults questioning what my biological sex was before I even knew what the difference was. And those behaviors persisted into adulthood because now if I present as anything less than 100% feminine, people will either compare me to men or animals.

And for myself and for many other brown and black women this is a life long act deliberately intended to humiliate, shame, and other us for the features we were naturally born with and I'm glad we're having a discussion on how harmful it actually is.]

#sorry; wrote at 2 am so I might delete tomorrow #but like. Sorry for hijacking a post about all woc and making it specifically about SA women #I know; I know. Black bodies are so heavily policed. Asian and SEA women are held to such impossibly high standards. Indigenous women. #Polynesian women. Roma women my god. There's so much to talk about but from experience I can only talk about what I grew up with #I wish I knew more. But also I literally never see stuff specifically about south asian beauty standards so I have to chip in. It's so #fucking exhausting. People in your life will call you smart and list of 3 ways to better perform womanhood in the same sentence #and at the same time I have been afraid to perform girlhood. Womanhood. I do not want strangers in the street to perceive me as a woman #it's a dangerous world out there too... #desiblr

[aeolianblues]

The greasy indie-rock boy to 70's-fashion-conscious-dad pipeline is real

#thinking that the OG indie boy was maybe an exception to this #Johnny Marr was always so smartly dressed <3 #Mr. Beehive we love you. Sir. Icon. #the reverse can be said of Damon Albarn actually #started greasy indie boy; for a while became sharp indie pretty boy and then hobo

[aeolianblues]

I'm curious. what job would you do if money was no object (you just automatically had an income you could live comfortably on)? including work like volunteering, studying etc. please share in the tags :)

#prob stick around campus radio still #but also maybe have more guts to launch a band #I just think if I ever started one I'd get too sad to go back to normal life again #and in ordinary (money-bound) life I would continue regular work but i'd be So So Sad about that fact #I'd probably be insufferable #maybe it's for the best that I'm not in one

[aeolianblues]

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

#yes! #in most cases I've had it the other way #we've interacted on posts and then moved onto DMs when the reblog frequency got #so large it was clogging up dashboards lol #someone make a joke about how it's like growing fond of someone and then slowly moving things into the 'bedroom' lol #anyway yeah feel free to follow me; feel free to reblog whatever's not tagged 'don't reblog' #feel free to reply to posts or message; whatever you want #if you think we'd vibe go for it #I don't come to tumblr to 'not be disturbed' #no one does

[aeolianblues]

early to bed and early to rise leaves a man so fucked up that he dies

[aeolianblues]

I think there is a bit of nuance between 'Marvel-style kill off characters for shock value because they can never guess our next moves not even the actors' and 'you're allowed to be made uncomfortable by a story'

im starting to think you guys dont like it when stories make you feel things

[aeolianblues]

jesus fucking christ, the combination of redditor + business school kid is the mustard gas of human beings. I can smell it from 300 km away

All i'm trying to do is google some tips to prep for an interview I have tomorrow, what the fuck

also lowkey schulich get fucked, you're always going to get passed over for a smith/ivey kid

#and it's hurting their ego; my fucking god #I can promise you: no one spends a *second* of the day thinking about York University that's for sure #most people don't believe you're a real uni and from having been there for a hackathon once? Yeah I agree

[aeolianblues]

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

[aeolianblues]

#Manson Guitars #YEAH #Muse band #Matt Bellamy

[aeolianblues]

what am i being advertised here exactly

[aeolianblues]

me: chat what do we think

the angel and devil on my shoulders: can you not call us that please

[aeolianblues]

🔥 Everything is fine 🔥

[aeolianblues]

#Joe Lycett

[aeolianblues]

Btw Israel let Palestinians celebrate not one (1) holiday in peace. They didn’t grant Christian Palestinians access to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, they actively attacked families who were already starving at Iftar during Ramadan, and now there are several reports of families being killed on Eid al-Fitr—a sacred multi-day holiday practiced by lots of Arabs. It breaks my heart imagining the Palestinian families in Gaza right now, most of whom are spending Eid mourning loved ones who were taken by Israeli strikes. Most of us will never understand the sheer magnitude of that pain.

#it's also just spiteful #like 'we recognise thsese are holy days for you; we're going to make them misesrable' like fuck off already

[aeolianblues]

can't stop thinking about that one tweet that says "there's starbucks in egypt?" in response to the news of egypt's success in boycotting starbucks

[aeolianblues]

#I am going to jump on the head of anyone who talks about (English) fluency and literacy in the east #like I will fucking eat you.

[aeolianblues]

do people even know the extent of sanctions on the iranian people? my mom's family can't afford fruit anymore. it's a state of psychological warfare; literally nobody living there has any sort of hope for the future. added sanctions from the EU are going to destroy the lives of 87 million innocent people