#and i could publish feminist and lgbt stuff!!!!!

[shimamitsu]

if you ever feel like talking about ao no flag id love to hear it <3 i read it but hated some parts

mmmmm tbh i can't be very specific about the aspects i didn't like bc i read ao no flag in one sitting like 2 years ago so i don't remember much but i'll try 😭 i think my main problem was that back then everyone talked about it like it was the second coming of shimanami tasogare (i saw it get compared to it so much. seriously) and it wasn't like that..... at all. instead of recommending it for being a good drama or romance or whatever, people were saying (and said to me!!!) read for the lesbian rep! read for the bi rep! and when i finished i was like. is the lesbian and bi rep in the room with us rn.... i think i wouldn't have been so disappointed if my expectations weren't so high and that's on me 👍 when i read stuff i don't like i usually forget about it the next day but imagine seeing a series get compared to one of your favorite manga for months and months and when you read it it doesn't even get close 😭 i liked some aspects of ao no flag! i really liked the characters (which was one of the reasons why the way they got treated made me so mad, touma get behind me), it was a good drama, i just think it didn't really do a great job with the lgbt rep. i feel like if the manga was a few chapters longer and tried to solve all the issues it introduced i would've liked it. but instead it tried to deal with all these issues for so many chapters with no resolution on sight and then out of nowhere it was like time skip! this character's not at a lesbian! the mcs are together for some reason! which i understand, i do, i think it made sense, but taichi's feelings were not explored that much and yes i could see that maybe deep down he had some feelings for touma but. it's not about what i can perceive bc i'm a queer person who's used to finding queer subtext in everything. to be good queer rep it has to be more explicit, at least to me. And. oh my god. they didn't even show up together at the end bc of that whole 1st person pov chapter idk it makes me so mad it's the bare minimum come onnnnnn. at one point the manga even started discussing homophobia in such a weird way like it's just a different opinion guys live laugh love ♥️ HELLO???????? (not even gonna start talking about how dangerous it is to say that stuff when you're publishing a famous manga in a mainstream magazine like shonen jump). anyway i don't think it's the worst manga on earth or that people can't like it or relate to it or anything, the things that bothered me might not be a deal breaker to other lgbt people which it's ok you do you. it's as i said in my post, it tried and failed. anyway this was mostly me complaining, sorry i didn't articulate my thoughts better but as i said i don't remember much hehe. and just in case, i think it's great queer stories are being featured in magazines like jump, don't get me wrong. here's an article i read a few years ago and really liked!!! it discusses these issues i mentioned way better than i do. and in a less bitter way as well lol

#and again. it's ok if you like this manga i don't wanna argue with anyone about it #and kaito i'm coming for you. watch out #and read shimanami tasogare

[junipercalle]

The Green Lodge Cypher, behind-the-scenes

This was originally posted on my Patreon.

Fanzines are a pretty broad topic. They can be a lot of particular things; fanworks collected and printed for charity; indie zines from the punk or generally the music scene; fan magazines that are straight-up like other print magazines, complete with subscriber system. I ran into one older fanzine that mentioned that the number on the issue could be used to determine how the zine was ordered-- a gift, a subscription, or otherwise (I wasn't sure if I might bother some people if I had the Cypher be a for-purchase item; but the sort of zine I'm thinking of did get sold, at least to recoup expenses).

Yahoo Groups, Fanfiction.net, and Ao3 have all come and some still are; but zines are as much a part of fannish history as the things you can find now. It was great to look at zines from times when I was separated from fandom culture, or wasn't around yet, and find things that were immediately relatable and comparable to fandom culture as I have known it.

You can find some of the zines I looked at online. This is not at all comprehensive and I am sure that things I made note of aren't full analyses, and are full of knowledge gaps. These are going to be some disjointed observations. But, in the interest of noting things I thought, and giving credits to those who have come before for adding to my body of knowledge, here you have stuff.

 I read a lot of Aurora, a feminist fanzine. It fascinates me because a lot of what it is, I would call very normal Tumblresque discussion-- up to the way that it's easy for fandom culture to feel like it exists in a vacuum, that the "then" is wholly separate from the "now", especially when it comes to gender concepts or LGBT presence in fandom. I found it here https://archive.org/download/ScifiCultHorrorAndFantasyFilmAndFictionZines but you can also find Aurora and a lot of other things here: http://www.luminist.org/archives/FZ/

That cult film collection had some other interesting works. It shouldn't surprise me: in fandom you'll find the deliberately inclusive, as well as the ones who are perfectly happy to just enjoy themselves and escape the mainstream. They're not there to impress the suits or the 'respectable' types or the normies. ...You're also going to find some frustrating stuff. The writers who insist that there isn't deeper meaning in fandom (certainly not commentary or sociopolitical analysis!), and would rather write limericks about assaulting Dejah Thoris... I didn't borrow from those sorts of things. I did include a certain amount of dealing with the attitude, early on in the Cypher, but while it's valuable to understand the history of sexism/exclusionism in fandom, the Cypher isn't out to be giving platform to that so it doesn't show up much.

https://archive.org/details/fanzines-collection Here are a lot of fanfiction zines, with some discussion/article-based fandom zines mixed in. You see a bit of APA publishing in there (an APA is a group of writers who contribute to issues https://fanlore.org/wiki/APA), but I'm not sure about the publishing methods of the majority. A lot of these are classic Star Trek fandom. The story is that a lot of women wrote a lot of slashfic (you want Fanlore for deep lore on that, I think) (indeed, TOS fic is supposed to be the origin of the word), and it's probably reasonable to wonder if some of the writers were nonbinary or wouldn't, then or now, identify as women. Then, as now, you find hints of discourse about what sort of literature is acceptable, and what reasoning the writers have for presenting it. (The Star Wars fandom seems excessively defensive about even straight sexual content, but I don't know if that was the normal level at the time).

That collection isn't all Star Trek, though. There's some early anime, some Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, convention booklets, filk, and some much more recent works (I see you there, Undertale).

https://archive.org/details/fav-fanzine_collection_archivist includes some Phantom of the Opera works and a bit of Buckaroo Banzai, of all things.

For a much broader range of things called zines: https://archive.org/details/zines

#behind the scenes #the green lodge cypher #green lodge cypher

[rosalesbeausderholle]

Today I woke up with the idea of starting my own publishing company in the head uh... who wants to help? 😂

#liveblogging my life #not only could i publish my own books then #but i could also translate them and hire lit translators or even be one #and i could publish feminist and lgbt stuff!!!!! #AND i could fight censorship!!! #that's like every single one of my dreams in one place

[star-anise]

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like... oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and...” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

#staranise original #lgbt discourse

[sleepingfancies]

We Need to Talk About SJM

I was recently anonymously asked what exactly my issue with Sarah Jane Maas is, and ended up writing what was essentially a thesis paper about it. Unfortunately, Tumblr pulled a Shitty Website move and deleted everything I wrote under the ‘read more’ tab, so I’m compiling my reasons here on a masterpost, for your reading leisure.

EDIT: Read more tab continues to not work for me, so I apologize to all of you who have to suffer through this. I’ll tag is as a long post accordingly.

Let’s get started

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Reason 1: She preaches messages that no young girl needs to (or should) hear.

Granted, I know the a lot of the YA genre are adults who are no strangers to smut and aren’t phased by toxic behavior in characters. But on the same token, a lot of the YA genre is fueled by young girls age 12-20. Now I’m not going to sit here and pretend like girls in that age range aren’t reading/writing smutty fanfiction or dating. I know they do, I did, most of my friends did. But at that age, young girls are still trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be, including in terms of relationships. That’s where my problem with Maas comes in.

Maas writes, almost exclusively, toxic relationships - at best. Straight up abusive at worst. At one point in ACOTAR, I had to put the book down because I was so disgusted by what happened. Rhysand assaulted Feyre. I’m not kidding. He kissed and groped her against her will, telepathically asked whether she was wet about it, and wondered aloud what she looked like naked. The entire goal of doing this was to piss Feyre’s then-boyfriend off, and for Rhysand to assert his dominance as a Fae lord or whatever the fuck (y’know, like rapists do). Feyre was left shaking, nauseated, and scared for her life. But the worst part? It was written like this was something sexy and desirable. Literal penetration was all that stopped this from being a horrifying rape scene, and I couldn’t believe Maas wrote about it like some hot erotica. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t cute. It was disgusting, violating, and I was furious when I read it (especially given Feyre actually ends up with Rhysand eventually. What the fuck).

In Throne of Glass - and subsequent sequels - there are couples (namely Rowan and Aelin) who quite literally spit on each other, punch each other, and bite each other. No, not “love nip” bite, I mean “I’m trying to tear your skin off” bite. But we’re meant to believe they’re endgame, meant to be, and a totally healthy relationship. Let’s not even get into emotional abuse and manipulation, because holy fuck does every single character in these books act like a goddamn villain if we were to go over that in detail. All you need to know is that “if you don’t do xyz then I’ll leave and never come back” “what made you think I cared about you? You’re nothing to me. Just kidding, I love you” and similar sentiments are rampant in these series.

While we’re here, what is up with this “mates” nonsense? Every character pairing we see by the end of the ToG series has a “mate,” and swears off everyone they’ve had before, claiming them to be “false mates.” This whole “mates” business sounds a lot like somebody desperately trying to reassure their insanely jealous partner that they don’t still have feelings for their ex. That’s not healthy! That’s not okay! Your exes helped you narrow down your search. They helped you understand yourself more and what you want (or don’t want). And y’know what? It’s okay to have happy memories with an ex. It’s okay to not hate your ex. Telling young girls that all that matters is their future husband (which erases LGBT+ girls, as well as straight women who don’t want to get married) is harmful as hell, and contributes to the idea that a girl is only “complete” when she finds her “soulmate.”

Girls 12-20 really do not need to be given the message that it’s normal - nay, romantic - for their partners to hit them, humiliate them, or assault them. You may be saying, “Clara, come on, girls know fiction isn’t reality and no girl is actually going to stand for that kind of thing in real life.” But I can’t tell you how horribly my own view of relationships was corrupted for several years after all the books I read as a tween where the protagonist had to defend her flirty boyfriend from the advances of other girls. I didn’t trust boys not to cheat on me. I didn’t trust my girl friends not to try and steal a boyfriend. I thought girls who dressed up and wore makeup and dated a lot were sluts. It took me years of conscious effort to unlearn those ideas. Fiction can and does influence the reader. So again I say: teaching girls that it’s “hot and sexy” when men literally abuse you is not a message a 12-20 year old should be hearing. Ever.

                                                     ***************

Reason 2: What exactly does Maas want her readers to be?

Y’know, Maas thinks Caelena/Aelin is a role model for young girls. But here’s a brief list of things Celery/Alien has done throughout the Throne of Glass series:

1. Tried to smash a flower pot over a girl’s head for showing interest in courting Prince Dorian. Despite said girl literally being present at the castle for that purpose and Caelena was not.

2. Very nearly murdered Dorian for absolutely fuckall reason, and then she got mad at Chaol for trying to stop her (keep in mind: Chaol and Dorian are supposed to be best friends. So like... yeah, he’s gonna come to Dorian’s defense).

3. Straight up said, “if I get bored being queen I’ll just go and conquer more lands for my kingdom.” Imperialist there much, Aelin?

This is Maas’ role model material? Half the shit she does from Heir of Fire onward could be described as “war crime” and the other half could be described as “selfish.” Maas seems to think that a shit ton of half-baked “witty” lines and a few “badass” fight scenes completely makes up for having an amoral character as the protagonist you want to flaunt around as an icon for young girls.

It would be one thing if Maas said, “I don’t want anyone to be like Celery/Alien. She’s not a good person and I want my readers to be able to identify how and why she isn’t a good person. The moral is what not to be like.” But she does the opposite and claims time and time again that Celery/Alien is some kind of feminist warrior, when in fact Celery/Alien is the very epitome of white feminism and false feminism. She’ll be all kinds of gung-ho for herself, but as soon as another woman mentions her own unique problems or lifestyles, Celery/Alien thinks she’s a “whiny bitch,” “dumb slut,” or something similar. Celery/Alien ends up looking down her nose at basically every other female character. The lack of female friendships in Maas’ books is frankly astounding.

No girl needs to be Celery/Alien. Celery/Alien is not a role model, she is not a feminist, she is not a figurehead of a well developed female character or even a compelling antihero. She’s sexist, she’s misogynistic, she has serious anger issues, she’s manipulative, she’s abusive. This is not who young girls should be looking up to.

                                                       ************

Reason 3: Maas has no place in the YA genre.

I’m not really sure I need to elaborate much on this. Let me give you a scenario:

Imagine you’re at a book signing for your fans. They’re mostly girls 15-20, so you kind of just sign their copies without thinking much about it. But then a smaller girl comes up to the table, you ask her age, and she says “I’m ten.” A 10 year old girl is standing in front of you, clutching her copy of your book where you wrote and published the scene, “he buried in to the hilt and roared. Over and over he spilled inside of her, the lightning outside flashing soft and lovely long after he stilled.”

Look me in the eye and tell me that shit is appropriate in the YA genre. At all. Ever.

You wanna write romance? Go for it. It can be cute! It can be healthy! It can be intriguing! But this? This? This is just... erotica. If you’re publishing stuff like this in the YA genre, in a book that isn’t even on the ‘tween/teen romance’ shelves, then you better be ready to take full responsibility for teaching 10 year olds what a blowjob is, what an orgasm is, what BDSM is, what a fucking foot fetish is.

I know JK Rowling isn’t the most popular right now, but even she did better than this. The first 3 Harry Potter books you can generally find on the children’s/middle grade shelves. They were cute, fun little adventures about wizards and magic and fantastic creatures. Books 4-7? Those are on the YA shelves. People are dying, magic is dangerous, fascist organizations are on the rise -- it isn’t fun for Harry anymore. It isn’t about the wonders of magic. It’s about life or death, war, and fear. So yeah, of course those book aren’t going to be on the children’s/middle grade shelves! They’re dark! They’re scary! That kind of material shouldn’t be advertised as appropriate for younger kids!

Maas never extended that courtesy. Maas took her books full of badly written erotica and plopped them down right where all the rest of the completely tame YA books went, because she wanted the sales. She didn’t care if she was exposing kids who were too young to explicit sex scenes. She never posted a disclaimer, she never posted any kind of warning on social media when the books came out. Nope. She just silently took advantage of the market knowing she’d get more sales in YA. But it has no place in YA. It’s not YA. And I don’t think I’m ever gonna be okay with that.

                                                          ***********

Reason 4: Diversity? Never heard of it!

Maas’ books are so incredibly white and straight that it’s painful. Rowan and Aelin? White and straight. Feyre? Rhysand? Chaol? Dorian? Manon? Hey, you guessed it! They’re all white and straight (despite Chaol, Dorian, and Manon being heavily LGBT+ coded for like, the entire series till the last book)!

“He looked at his friend, perhaps for the last time, and said what he had always known, from the moment they met, ‘I love you.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Hello? Sarah Jane? I’m all for male friendships, but there’s male friendships and then there’s actual romance. Chaol and Dorian are about as gay-coded as they could fucking get. And this isn’t even the only time this happens! Check this out:

“Dorian surged from his chair and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He grabbed Chaol’s hand, squeezing it as he pressed his brow against his. ‘You were dead,’ the prince said, his voice breaking. ‘I thought you were dead.’” (Queen of Shadows)

But wait, there’s more!

“‘I’m not leaving you. Not again.’

Dorian’s mouth tightened. ‘You didn’t leave, Chaol.’ He shook his head once, sending tears slipping down his cheeks. ‘You never left me.’” (Queen of Shadows)

I mean come on, Sarah!

Also, Manon. My girl Manon hated men, pretty explicitly, for the entire series. In case you don’t believe me:

“There were few sounds Manon enjoyed more than the groans of dying men.” (Heir of Fire)

Oh, and other characters even imply Manon has never had a heterosexual relationship in her fucking life. See:

“‘That golden-haired witch, Asterin...’ Aelin said. ‘She screamed Manon’s name the way I screamed yours. How can I take away somebody who means the world to someone else? Even if she is my enemy.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Tell me that’s not gay as fuck. I dare you.

Manon had a whole lot of love to give women! She was always affectionate towards other women. Particularly Elide. This is a woman who was about as lesbian as you could get. Had no interest in men, every interest in women, rejected typically expected roles for women (getting married and having kids, etc.) but guess what happened? Guess what fucking happened?

This warrior who was friends with and rode on a big fuckoff wyvern completely and totally submits to Dorian as her lover. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They literally do some BDSM shit where he’s her “master” and she “kneels to him” or whatever the fucking fuck. This entire thing pissed me off more than Chaol and Dorian being all “no homo bro,” because Maas used every possible symbol and subtext for Manon being gay, and then said “just kidding!” Her relationship with Dorian came out of nowhere. All of a sudden she was just as thirsty for mediocre dick as Aelin.

At this point I honestly have to wonder if Maas is really this ignorant or if she’s - dare I say it? - taunting her readers who have complained about the lack of LGBT+ representation. Maas has, historically, not reacted well to people criticizing her work. I would not put it beyond her at all to intentionally queer-code characters only to turn around and rip the rug out from under her readers by pairing them up in heterosexual relationships. And not only is that shitty writing, but it’s... really malicious and rude.

Of course then there’s the issues with racial representation. Again, Maas doesn’t even try. She includes 13 characters of color only to immediately kill off all of them in a suicide pact. So there’s that. Not sure I need to say more than that.

Maas knows what diversity is, but as per her famous quote, “I just don’t want to force diversity into my books.” So. Y’know. Writing a black or gay character (or!! God forbid, both black and gay!!) is asking a little too much of her, apparently. She doesn’t want to force anything as unbelievable as someone who isn’t white or straight, don’tcha know? In these books about fae people and dragons and gods fighting mortals and explicit erotica, an LGBT+ character or a character of color is high fantasy, not YA. *Sarcasm*

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Reason 5: The woman can’t write.

This is pretty straightforward. She cannot write. My proof? She plagiarizes the living fuck out of everything she can to avoid actually writing her own original work.

1. “You’re gonna rattle the stars.” - from Disney’s Treasure Planet

2. “The Queen Who Was Promised” - from GRRM’s ASOIAF, where Dany Targaryen is often toted as the exact same thing. Oh, and The Prince Who Was Promised prophecy in ASOIAF also mentions Azor Ahai being “the Heir of Fire” so, uh.... yeah.

3. Aelin basically being Aragorn. Lost royalty spends years as an outcast, denies their claim, teams up with elves (fae in Aelin’s case) to defeat a greater evil, becomes known as the people’s champion, falls in love with an elf (fae) and makes them their consort, crowned by the people, ends their coronation scene with a “you bow to no one” (I’m not kidding).

4. Nehemia dying for Aelin and it later being revealed that Nehemia was “grooming” Aelin to face great evil, and potentially give her life to stop it. How much you wanna bet Maas tried to give Aelin a name as close to “Harry Potter” as she could get?

5. Manon lighting a series of beacons across a mountain range to call for aid during war. I mean seriously? This is one of the most iconic scenes in Peter Jackson’s rendition of Lord of the Rings. It’s moving, it’s powerful, it’s awe-inspiring. And Maas knew it. So she just... took it. I don’t have a lot of respect for writers who can’t write their own moving scenes.

6. Kingsflame blossoms, which only bloom when the rightful monarch is on the throne. So... the White Tree of Gondor. Got it.

7. The Hand of the King being a royal court position. Like... jesus. GRRM, come get ya world-building, SJ stole it again.

8. A paralyzed Chaol has a specialized saddle made for him, because he wants more than anything to ride a horse again. GRRM! Please! She’s taking Bran Stark’s story now!

And besides all of these horribly plagiarized points, there’s nothing even slightly compelling about these books. There’s literally zero substance, and the last few books in both the ACOTAR and ToG series have been nothing but a smut-fest. Plot who? We don’t know her.

Trauma, both physical and mental, is erased at the drop of a dime (Aelin lost physical scars, Chaol’s paralysis was basically cured, series of events that should’ve left characters absolutely fucked just... didn’t phase them). The battles are rushed and sloppily written, and Maas has a particularly nasty habit of focusing on exactly the wrong people in the middle of what should be an action packed scene. Instead of showing alliances forging and plots being made behind people’s backs, instead of showing us people gearing up for battle by saying tearful goodbyes to their infants and spouses, Maas shows us Rowan and Aelin banging on a beach, or a tree, or a ship, or wherever the fuck they happen to be at that moment.

None of these characters lose jack shit. There is no sense of urgency or stakes, because we knew since Heir of Fire that Aelin and her precious uwu fae “mate” would be just fine. Why? Because nobody shipped Rowaelin as hard as Sarah Jane Maas did. Consistently the only people who suffer in these books are background characters (who, coincidentally, are almost always the characters of color and LGBT+ characters). By the end of Kingdom of Ash, literally everyone is fine. And paired off to be married, too! Because a happy ending isn’t a true happy ending if it doesn’t end with Babies Ever After and everyone in a heterosexual relationship, of course, right?

                                                        ***********

Reason 6: World-building doesn’t even go here! Sorry, she just wanted to be a part of something.

Maas’ world-building is... how do you say... shitty. New lore pops up in every book, having never been mentioned before, and is for some reason of utmost importance (but only for this book. It’ll be forgotten again as soon as it isn’t relevant). Religions who? Culture where? History what? None of these things exist in Maas’ world. None.

Now before anyone jumps down my throat with “but The World of Throne of Glass is coming out this year!!!1!1!!” let me gently establish something. Speaking as a fantasy author: if you do not have your most basic world-building - that being religion, culture, language, and history - already established, then you have no business making a “world of” book to cover all the bases your ass never bothered with in the original series.

I said what I said.

Tolkien and GRRM are masters of world-building because they spent decades working to forge their worlds before they ever put a pen to paper and wrote their stories. Not to toot my own horn, but my own fantasy series has been developing for almost 7 years now. What am I doing with it? I’m outlining governments in different societies, why people came to worship what they do, and I’m making a fucking world map on my bedroom floor (that now has cat paw prints on it, so it’s not exactly final product material anyway).

I give not a single hoot for Maas’ “The World of Throne of Glass.” She could be saying anything she wanted to and it would all just have to be canon, because she’s establishing what this world is after already finishing her series. Yes, it does piss me off, because it’s pretty obvious she didn’t have a clue what her world was, or who was who, or why things were the way they were. She made shit up as she went along, nothing more. There was no grand scheme. There was no planning, and it shows.

                                                       ***********

TL;DR: I have a lot of issues with Sarah J Maas’ writing, including her world-building and handling of diversity. But most of all I despise the potential impact she has on the YA genre and on the young girls reading her work. They deserve better than this. They deserve better than Sarah Jane Maas.

#anti sjm #anti aelin #anti rowan #anti throne of glass #anti a court of thorns and roses #anti tog #anti acotar #anti acomaf #anti acofas #anti hof #anti qos #anti kos #anti eos #anti tod #masterpost #anti rowaelin #anti manorian #listen i'm really trynna mind my tags here so it doesn't show up somewhere pro #i know this seems excessive but catch me being respectful even as i drag sarah jane mess through the mud #clara says stuff #longpost #long post #anti celaena

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

I run a feminist website that publishes articles on pro lgbt+ stuff and discussions on race etc blah blah and we got a submission that was very terfy but it tried to hide it behind “we want to protect trans people we just don’t think they belong on our community” and it was so disgustingly insidious. Like thy gave a bunch of statistics of how trans folk are attacked and used it as an excuse to say “drop the t” and it’s scary cause if you’re new to these discussions and real young (part 1)

(Part 2) you could see that be and be like “oh terfs just want trans folk/me to be safe...” when they’re just outright lying and being exclusionary. Terfs are getting so cryptic and subtle it’s terrifying.

--

Yeah they’re learning to mask their shit or at least secret away their terf shit. I was looking at a mutuals blog and I have shinigami eyes on so I see a red name and I click through just to double check and sure enough its a terf. So i sent ‘em a message to let them know and scroll through their blog some more and there’s a couple of them from various blatant terf blogs and they still ain’t responded so im like :/

#shinigami eyes good finding out someone you've been mutuals with for like 4 years is a terf bad #Anonymous

[butchspace]

Butch-Fem History / Butch Identity Reccs

[Image description: an anonymous ask to butchspace that reads “If you have personal essays or blog recs or books about b-f history or individual butch experience, especially about the b-f dynamic, that would be perfect. A mix of long and short would be great, and links of PDFs would be ideal. I actually meant OFOS, as in old-fashioned old-school butch/fem (@persistentlyfem is a fem example), and by “traditional” I mean the original incarnation of butch as the opposite and lover of the fem. I hope this helps you and thank you very much for your help!” End ID.]

Okay so! I’ve got sucked into making this post and I’m just gonna go ahead and publish before I add even more on and forget to sleep again. Putting it under a cut because of length, if anyone wants a non-readmore version of the post just let me know.

Caveats:

I focused mainly on works I could provide links to; this means that what I’ve provided isn’t necessarily my first pick, but it’s still some good stuff so whatever. (See the Offline/Extended section for more reccs.)

A lot of the pdfs were transcribed in the course of a sleepless night so there’s bound to be typos; if  you wanna tell me about them just message/ask @holzes to avoid clogging this inbox up.

Sadly, most of these works are dominated by white, cis, and able-bodied perspectives. This is especially something I want to remedy in the future in my additions.

It should go without saying, but: I don’t endorse every single opinion in these works or their authors (who for the most part I know little about), they don’t necessarily align with my own views and/or preferences, and I recognize that some of them have issues such as cissexist language and framing (see Content Warnings for more detail). Unfortunately when it comes to LGBT history, a lot of the most prominent texts are outdated or otherwise flawed in some areas and you just have to kind of trudge through it and read critically.

I included dates next to the works for a reason! Some (basically everything written in the early to mid 90s) emerged from a specific time in the lesbian community and obviously some of their statements only make sense in that context (mostly the lesbian feminist movement and its aftermath tbh). Just keep this in mind, it shouldn’t matter too much because those texts are history but just in case…

Just because I couldn’t find a work online doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist out there somewhere.

This is a deeply incomplete list. If you have suggested resources like these (preferably ones available online) including books, essays, articles, blogs, films, youtube videos, etc…. Let me know @holzes.

Content Warnings:

The Q slur (in just about every context), D slur, anecdotal homophobia, mentions of homophobic violence, outdated trans terminology, cissexism / cissexist language, discussion of sex (both academic and semi-explicit), cussing, frequent discussion of bars / probably a mention of alcohol once or twice. Sorry for not providing individual content warnings, this post is already bulky enough. If there’s something you’re rlly concerned about just mssg me @holzes and I’ll do my best to help you out.

And with all that out of the way…….. the actual post begins.

History

“Butch-Fem” by Teresa Theopano (2004)

An extremely succinct, balanced overview of butch-fem best suited for absolute beginners (aka, “what the hell is butch/fem” level). Also a good jumping-off point for anyone lacking historical context for butch-fem. Covers origin, application, and controversies. [Link]

“Lesbian Identities and the Politics of Butch-Femme” by Amy Goodloe (1993)

A rigorous essay that in many ways is a more detailed version of the above; packs a wide range of butch-fem history, controversy, and popular interpretation into a relatively short essay. A nice crash course with a killer annotated bibliography to build off of. [Link]

excerpt from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline Davis (1993)

This excerpt from the introduction explicates the existence of working-class lesbian bar cultures in North America from the 1930s to the 1950s as well as the butch-fem dynamic that accompanied and shaped these cultures. The second section of this excerpt is perhaps best read as a companion piece to The Return of Butch and Femme (see below), especially as relates to Kennedy and Davis’s criticism of Faderman’s attitudes toward butch-fem. The entire book is well worth the read, but if you’re pressed for time, Chapters 5, 6, and 9 will be most relevant for your purposes. [Link to excerpt] [Link to full book]

“The Return of Butch and Femme: A Phenomenon in Lesbian Sexuality of the 1980s and 1990s” by Lillian Faderman (1992)

A thorough examination of how butch-fem became deeply “politically incorrect” through the lens of 1970s lesbian feminism, as well as its persistence throughout that decade and its restoration (and transformation) in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps Faderman’s most balanced examination of butch-fem (but don’t worry, she still throws around every anti-butch-fem critique and stereotype that she can justify including) and an informative history of how modern butches and femmes arose and if/how we differ from our predecessors. Read with section two of the above for best results. [Link]

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman (1991)

Might as well, yeah? The book is a very interesting/enlightening semi-comprehensive history and a groundbreaking work in lesbian history literature. If you wanna cheat, Chapter 7 is the one that focuses primarily on butch-fem. [Link]

Personal Narratives

“Double Trouble” by Lesléa Newman (1995)

A brief personal reflection by a femme on her traditional femme-butch relationship. [Link]

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme eds. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman (2011)

An interesting collection of a broad variety of fem and butch perspectives. Essays range from emotional personal narratives to a mix of historical and personal analysis. I’ve provided links to a few that seem most relevant to your interest.

“Femme Butch Feminist” by Jewelle Gomez [Link]

“No Butches, No Femmes: The Mainstreaming of Queer Sexuality” by Victoria A. Brownworth [Link]

“What We Know to Be True” by Sasha T. Goldberg [Link]

“Spotlight” by Debra Anderson [Link]

Gender Troubles: The Butches (2016, dir. Lisa Plourde)

You might have seen this going around back when it was free to watch for a few months. It’s basically a long string of interviews with a few butches and it’s a nice watch, although I’m not sure how/where you can watch it now. [Link]

Extended (aka Stuff I Haven’t Read Yet and Am Thus Nervous to Recc)

In no particular order,

A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987)

The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader ed. Joan Nestle (1992)

I haven’t read either of Nestle’s groundbreaking works because I’m Fake but she’s probably the most influential writer on butch/fem by far so she can not be recommended highly enough.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)

A biomythography that focuses partially on lesbian bar culture in NYC, Connecticut, and Mexico. The plain text is online if you can work with that. [Link]

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993) 

This one’s only not in the main section because I figured you already knew about it, since it’s legally free online. It’s a novel, which I learned only recently. [Link]

Final Notes

For further reading and essays/books, I highly recommend digging through the notes/sources of the works I’ve linked above and jotting down anything that looks interesting or that gets mentioned a lot.

In terms of access–if you’re a college student or live in a college town, go to the college library (or public library, although these have been far less helpful for me) and find their LGBT section. Some places might surprise you. If you’re a college or high school student, go to your school library’s webpage and look for any access to databases you might have as a student, and exploit the hell out of whatever you find. If you’re not a student and/or don’t have access to a good library (or cannot use whatever resources you do have due to risk of outing yourself), stick to whatever you can find online.

Finally, I remembered @closet-keys‘s butch/femme research guide shortly after finishing this post. So, here’s that. [Link]

Thank you so much if you made it this far and I hope this answer helps out you, anon, at least a little, as well as anyone else who makes use of it!

-Mod P

#asks #anonymous #butch/femme #butch tag #resources #srry for focusing on written stuff that's just my area of expertise lol #reading #mod p #bluespace / #pebble posts

[pibsboots]

Hi I’m Super Pissed Right Now

Ex. Okay so because I hate myself, I was watching the hour-long video of “There Are Only 2 Genders - Change My Mind,” (I don’t wanna give this guy a promo, but you all know who he is, and the link is necessary so) and goddamn I am ready to pick a fight with a goddamn conservative white cishet male. Like any of them that come into my line of sight might get strangled. Anyway, that wasn’t why I showed up.

I showed up to talk about the tactics this man is using to win these arguments. So first, a white cis boy sits down to talk with him, and bless his heart, he tried so hard. He tried so damn hard to change this bigot’s mind, and it was honestly kind of cute. But, there were a few problems. Unlike many queers, this dude, doesn’t spend his time trying to justify other people’s existence. He couldn’t deny it when Stev*n Crowd*r (I’m literally going to bleep his name bc I reFUSE to have this end up in a conservative search. I’m sure it will anyway, but I will do my damnedest to piss them all off) said shit like “the idea of more than 2 genders is modern,” or “someone’s biological gender (a/n: UGH) can never be changed. Never.” Now, I don’t want to hate on this poor dude, Thomas. I don’t expect him to know the ins and outs of the queer movement and its history. What pisses me off, however, is the argumentative traps Stev*n led him into. These included: 

“If I say I identify as a bobcat, would you respect that?” Thomas inevitably said yes, because he didn’t have a good reason to say no. He backed him into a corner by asking questions that are FUCKING ABSURD, and you genuinely have to spend Time thinking about, because they flabbergast you so much.

Interrupting Thomas at 7:40 to notify him that, and I quote, “I got a nice, big penis there,” to stroke his own ego, and as some sort of shitty intimidation tactic.

He throws out names and dates to sound like he knows what he’s talking about. Ex. 4:51 “The deal was until 1948 with, you know, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler, gender and sex were interchangeable.” It’d be foolish of me to deny that his main point was true, but I would like to take this moment to point out the fact that Judith Butler wasn’t even BORN until 1956. I get that you want to sound like you researched this, but just because you throw out a year that’s close to the publishing of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and add a couple feminist names, it doesn’t make you educated on the topic. You’re still using others’ lack of knowledge as an opportunity to exploit, instead of teach. Honestly, please fucking stop.

Onto Victim #2: This lovely person’s name was Madison. They were a cool non-binary babe, and the co-president of the campus LGBT organization (this took place on a college campus, I’m not sure which, though, because ya boy Stev*n is too much of a pussy to say)

Instead of the general prey-on-the-ignorant approach he used with Thomas, here he used poke-the-bear tactics. His general goal was to piss Madison off until they couldn’t form coherent, intellectual thought.

Specifically:

He cut them off constantly. I can’t even begin to put specific examples, it’ll triple the length of this seemingly infinite posts.

My favorite time though, was in their opening argument. They began by explaining the difference between sex and gender, and went on to further define gender. Before they could finish, though, here comes Stev*n barging in and mansplaining. He tells Madison that they’re going too fast; “this is a lot to unpack, so let’s break it down.” Then Madison further speaks about intersex people. Crowd*r cuts them off. “These “intersex” people often have very recognizable features, such as an enlarged clitoris, or a micropenis. Still, they make up like, 0.08% of the population.” Crowd*r makes some stupid-ass argument, in the most condescending manner I think I’ve ever heard, about how anatomy teaches people humans have 10 fingers, even though they sometimes have 11. Then he says, “So I think what we need to do, is write off this extreme case, like we would with extra fingers and toes.” exCUSE ME, WHAT??? That’s saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, there are only about 4 million of you, so you don’t really count. Bye-bye!!”

Like he did with the last guy, he repeats himself over and over, until he can get in a rebuttal that he feels is adequate. He likes to do this about Madison’s pronouns a lot, in specifics. 

He’s also super worried about the number of genders?? Like I get that you like your two checkboxes on the Census, but buddy, go look at the race section. There’s this lovely little part that says “Other: Write in Here.” It’s really great for genders too!!

He likes saying stuff without evidence: aka - society needs parameters to function within, and without a defined number of genders, we can’t do that!!

He also likes tearing others to pieces when they do that - even when they have evidence. Ex. “There are more than 2 sexes.” “Yeah but only 4 million people go in that category, so they don’t count.”

I can’t physically make myself watch the 3rd I’m so mad I might come back to this later but holy fuck I’m pissed

#lgbt #cursing tw #transphobia tw #cursing cw #transphobia cw #nonbinaryphobia cw #nbphobia cw #happy pride month guys #gotta love the homophobes #im so fuckin tired of this shit #ew

[butchscientist]

I was tagged by @pvrko-ome in the books i read in 2017 tag! 2017 was apparently the year of being able to read again, because I’ve finished 18 books so far & am halfway through two more (and expect to finish them and maybe an additional book or two before the year is over). Therefore I’m gonna do the 6 books that I’ve read this year that have affected/stayed with me the most (not really in any specfic order).

1. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg - definitely something all butches should try to read at some point (and other lesbian/bi women & LGBT people in general, tbh). Though the rest of the books aren’t in any specific order this is probably at the top of this list, I’m still thinking about it all the time & it really has affected me so much.

2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin - recommended to me by my mother, about a traveller/representative of an alliance of different planets which all have gendered societies, who makes first contact with a planet populated by people who don’t have any concept of gender/anything that could be considered a basis for “”biological sex””. It alternates between the POV of the traveller & a native of the planet he is making contact with, & does a very good job both of showing how the traveller struggles to wrap his head around the idea of a genderless world & how the people of the planet struggle to fathom the concept of gender existing. I definitely recommend it if you like scifi & gender stuff.

3. Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard - about a teen butch that struggles with a family who won’t accept & horrible friends, making new friends and learning to stand up for herself & not take peoples’ shit. Definitely has a happy ending but does depict sexual assault & familial emotional abuse which is good to be aware of going in. I definitely recommend it, though.

4. Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera - about a 19yo NY Puerto Rican lesbian who gets a summer internship with her favorite feminist author in Portland, OR. I don’t really want to spoil anything so I can’t really explain my favorite parts; I will say I was worried about certain issues in the beginning of the book but they were definitely dealt with later on.

5. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - most people have probably heard of this book, but the hype is definitely deserved imo. It really is a wonderfully written book & I highly recommend it.

6. Svo veistu að þú varst ekki hér by Íris Ellenberger, Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir & Hafdís Erla Hafsteinsdóttir - this is one of the books I am currently halfway through but I expect to finish before the year is over. It’s a miscellany of articles about Icelandic LGBT history - the first one ever published. LGBT history in general is something that isn’t easy enough to get information on, but Icelandic LGBT history is near impossible. I don’t necessarily agree with every single view in the book but I definitely think anyone interested in Icelandic LGBT history should read it, it truly is wonderful & I am delighted to have an actual published book on the subject.

Other books I really enjoyed: Skegg Raspútíns by Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir, Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Abyss Surrounds us by Emily Skrutskie, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel.

Idk exactly who’s already done this, who’s interested & who has already been tagged etc, but I think anyone who wants to do it should do it & I would love to see this from any of my mutuals. Idk some ppl I don’t think have done this: @a-ninja-in-training @librarycards @wlwiccan @nazguhl @turmericc @nikolai-kapustin @obozaya @courbet @sweetrevelation @rmwp @clusterwitch @elenas-alverez @carpetmunchies @prouvairy it’s completely fine if you can’t/don’t want to do it - absolutely no pressure! I think you’re all great no matter what you do. ik reading with depression is hard & on tumblr we are all depression (like if i had been tagged in this last year or any year up until now since i was like 12 i wouldn’t have been able to do this) and i think you’re all neat.

#books #about me #me #tags #idk if i have a tag for tags? if not i should have one lol #long post

[janiedean]

i think the lord of the flies complaints are not like girls would set up a utopia but rather that a society set up by girls would be messed up in different ways to one set up by boys. Thus a direct adaption probs isn't accurate. They could change the story to acknowledge this but a lot of people think that won't be successful when the movie's writing team is mostly men.

sort of fair, but.... like, can we all do away with this idea that men can’t write a story about women? sorry, but:

idk if y’all have seen kill bill 2, but there was a scene where uma thurman’s character found out she was pregnant while an assassin was trying to shoot her through the door, they told each other that info while the other woman was shooting and she went and left because it changed things, and I remember cracking up and thinking ‘okay that did make sense in between two women’ and guess what, a man directed and wrote both kill bill movies which btw have better female characters than most movies and is full of a+ women, same as all of tarantino’s movies, and he’s a man

the only female character I ever saw myself in is brienne (BOOK VERSION but never mind) and she was written by a man who nonetheless got how it feels to be that kind of woman when sure as hell my best friend of ten years who is in retrospective half of the reasons why I had issues with my appearance certainly couldn’t even begin to imagine it, and that’s valid for a bunch of literature/movies written by women

the best female character I’ve ran into in a newly publishes book in the last five years was also written by a man (ian tregillis *cough*)

for some reason while I do like more female writers now than I did ten years ago I prefer their male characters to their female ones (instance 1: margaret atwood, even if she’s great at both) 

mad max fury road which tumblr hails as the epitome of feminist action movie was written by three men

alien kickstarted the modern concept of badass scifi heroine and did it splendidly because ripley is a+ and it was written by two men and directed by a man

my three favorite tv shows ever have kickass female (also nonwhite and lgbt+) characters and they were all developed by men (deadwood, the wire and six feet under) - obv people on the writing teams weren’t all men but still

I watch a lot of old hollywood which has a++++ female characters that people dream of these days and guess what a good 75% of those movies was written and directed by men

the best short story I ever read about a rape recovery scenario where the female protagonist decides to keep the baby after getting pregnant by the unknown guy who raped her was written by a man and is2g it was really well done, definitely better than 90% of the revenge trope I’ve seen around written by both men and women

I could go on for ages, but like: there’s bad writers in every gender and sex, and a lot of people of either gender/sex can’t get the other (and maybe get theirs, but in most cases if they’re bad writers they don’t get their own very well either), and there is absolutely no bloody reason to assume that just because the team is made up of men then they won’t understand how that story would work if it was young girls. if it was a woman writing a lord of the flies movie where it’s always all boys ending up on the island would we be concerned? probably not. so of course it can’t go exactly the way it did in the book because men and women have different way of socializing and so on, but what I mean with ‘going the same way’ is ‘it starts well and then it degenerates until most of the children are completely out of control and regressed to an animal-like state’, which imo would happen with girls too. not in the same way as the book but i’m 100% sure that a bunch of girls on an island would end up killing each other if left alone without supervision for that long. because it’s human nature and children are not pure and innocent because of their inner nature, either.

and it’s absolutely not a given that even if it’s all men on the writing team, they won’t be able to get it right, and given that I’ve seen comments saying that doing it is already wrong because lord of the flies is according to them ‘A CRITIC OF TOXIC MASCULINITY’ (lol it’s not) I’m trusting the scriptwriters more than anyone saying that kinda stuff on principle.

also sorry if I’m coming off sounding like an ass I don’t have a beef with you, I’m just really tired of tumblr going like MEN CANNOT WRITE WOMEN EVER at every turn, because it’s not true and again, the best-written female character I ever ran into in my life was written by a man (cishet, too!!) so... like... no.

(extra PS: kill bill was a formative movie for a lot of reasons including realizing what I liked in a female character and not, and it still was all written and directed by a man who btw never writes the same female character once and he always does it amazingly, but then again tumblr doesn’t watch movies so what do I know *shrug*)

#janie rants #lfdkgjdlskgjs #the lord of the flies discourse #sigh #Anonymous #ask post

[sadasdfsdf-blog1]

(just copy pasting and adding more stuffs for ppl who insist in defending Kagami or japanese sexist society)

Here some points about Kagami’s ons novel:

https://qafi.tumblr.com/post/158403134006/lalody-amearu-honestly-the-entirety-of-owari

https://sadasdfsdf.tumblr.com/post/159297172431/i-just-saw-an-interesting-post

Also, in the manga, chapter 56, the implication that women (Shinoa and Mahiru) need sexual power and romantic feelings for a man to unlock their potential while we see the protagonists (Yuu and Guren) just needing to care about family to unlock their power says a lot. (I’m not even gonna start about some of the heteronormative discourse that Mahiru spilt there too)

The fanservice scene of Mitsuba being sexually harassed by Shinoa when her clothes are ripped against her will are diminished as comedic relief.

Shinoa and Guren sexist remarks that men being cherry boys/virgins is no good. Have a lot with toxic masculinity, that is a sexist discourse that need to end.

All the important women in story are reduced to orbiting love interests that have no independence but be a number in the male protagonist harem.

And the excuse of “Shounen SQ have worse” don’t glue here. Even if it’s content for men, there’s a lot of toxic masculinity there, and this is bad for men themselves that are the main target there.

And just because the magazine have something more sexist than ons, it doesn’t erase that ons is sexist too in many other aspects. Others being more sexist don’t erase sexism in ons.

The excuse that japanese society is sexist and this is cultural so those things are ok, also don’t glue, because in Japan many japanese feminists are silenced when criticizing with similar discourse. It’s nothing new that many japanese have a disdain for feminism. You reinforcing it will only silence more the japanese feminists.

A link good for read for ppl who conflate objectification and agency of your own body:

http://fandomsandfeminism.tumblr.com/post/99190623519/real-women-have-agency-over-their-own

Following this, even if Kagami isn’t the worst in reducing women to sexual objects, the fact that for men uniform it’s prioritized function while for women it’s prioritized appearance is also sexist.

And just because you are woman, it doesn’t mean you can’t be sexist. 

We criticize because we want changes. You can be sure that conforming and not speaking will only be taken as a signal that there is no problem.

Kagami surely aimed to attract fujoshis with his writing, but he also attracted a lot of lgbt ppl.

He being more often target of critics by being sexist or queerbaiting (denyuuden) is because of the public he wrote for.

Even if the place it’s published is JUMP SQ king of sexist content or whatever

If you want to know, Astra Lost in Space is published on Weekly shounen Jump, and have an open intersex male bisexual character.

So stop defending that Jump/shounen have this impenetrable shield against feminist and lgbt+ critics!

I’m lazy to write more, I’m pretty sure there could be much more to be added here, but these are some points that many ignore to protect and idolize their authors.

We make critics in the hope that someday the critics reach the authors and make the authors change their attitude. Just because it’s Japan and people there seems to care less about feminism, lgbt or have less issues with racism, these issues won’t disappear! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5sHglFbO8

We make critics for people to be conscious of those issues. Trying to excuse the author being sexist will do no good! You are just defending society to act as those issues don’t exist!

Yeah, we can enjoy a serie even with the problematic things, but acting as they are irrelevant? Like those issues don’t matter? That’s the same as supporting that those problems shouldn’t be addressed. At the very least we should recognize that it’s a problem. This doesn’t mean to stop liking something, this just mean to recognize that we want things to change, that we still have ways to go.

edit: I really quoted by accident namanari in “There is worse than ons in Jump SQ like ToLoveRu”. I wrote without checking, maybe because I had read her text previously I ended repeating the same thing as her text. This quote was meant to be people in general who dismiss sexism in ons. Not her, where she used the quote in different context.

#owari no seraph #seraph of the end #ons #sote

[kidsviral-blog]

The 1970s Feminist Who Warned Against Leaning In

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-1970s-feminist-who-warned-against-leaning-in/

The 1970s Feminist Who Warned Against Leaning In

There is more to gender equality than making money. Four writers talk feminism, race, capitalism, and the appeal of some good, sexy class analysis.

View this image ›

Getty Images / BuzzFeed News

Forty years before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, there was Sheila Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World.

Hailed by Simone de Beauvoir as one of the most interesting feminist thinkers of her era, Rowbotham didn’t always think of herself as a feminist. Growing up in 1950s England, she associated the word with “frightening people in tweed suits with stern buns,” but she was always countercultural, drawn first to the bohemia of the Beat movement, and later to the moral certainty of Marxism.

Within these movements, Rowbotham began to think critically about her experience as a woman. She reeled at the socialist men who “solemnly told everyone that drugs and drink and women were a capitalist plot to seduce the workers from Marxism,” and the passivity of the ideal Beatnik “chick,” who was “serene and spiritual … with a baby on her breast and her tarot cards on her knee.” But she also felt a sense of solidarity with the women she encountered, from girls “with no academic protections” who earned their financial independence by dancing in clubs, to Beat women who organized “co-operative sewing schemes” for artists. “They weren’t like me,” she writes in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. “But they were enough like me in a different way for me to respect what they were doing.”

By the end of the 1960s, both the U.S. and British Left were in a state of fractious expansion, as the burgeoning black power and women’s liberation movements demanded a new politics that took into account identity and difference. Rowbotham was at the forefront, co-organizing the landmark National Women’s Liberation Conference, held at Oxford in 1970.

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Courtesy Verso Books.

In Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, first published in 1973 and re-released by Verso books last month, Rowbotham brings her feminism and socialism together, arguing that capitalism shapes and upholds the gender divide: Men’s earning power depends on having someone, typically a woman, do a whole lot of unpaid work in the home. (In recent decades, that housework and child care is increasingly done by immigrant women and women of color for low wages.)

Rowbotham’s critique of capitalism is scathing, but she also acknowledges that capitalism provided the conditions for second wave feminism to emerge. Liberating technologies like the Pill — and the capitalist philosophy of the self-actualized individual — enabled women and children to be seen as people with their own rights and desires beyond the family unit.

In an age of #GirlBosses chasing a vision of success defined by men who relied on the support of stay-at-home wives, Rowbotham’s arguments feel both provocative and immediate, calling into question some of the sacred cows of 21st-century pop feminism. So I called three of my favorite young feminist writers, Laurie Penny, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Jacob Tobia, to talk about what we might learn from Rowbotham’s work today — from the new wave of feminist consciousness raised (sometimes painfully) over social media, to the problem with measuring gender equality in the bank account balances of America’s richest women.

–Rachel Hills

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Frederic Lewis / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Reni Eddo-Lodge (London journalist on race, gender, and social justice): One thing that Rowbotham talks about in the book is the development of a new feminist consciousness that was happening in the early 1970s. She says, “Now we are like babes thrashing around in darkness and unexplored space. The creation of an alternative world and an alternative culture cannot be the work of a day … theoretical consistency is difficult, often it comes out as dogmatism.” It reminded me of some of the battles going on in feminism as the moment. It feels like a lot of kinks and creases and sticking points are being painfully ironed out and tugged at, in a massive community of people who have different ideas about what it means to imagine a better future, even though they are all broadly left of center. Currently, some U.K. feminists are trying to have a debate on trans people’s right to exist, which is very disturbing.

Jacob Tobia (genderqueer media maker and LGBT business consultant): There are times when I think that the internet has made the sticking points of feminism (i.e., trans issues, racial justice, pro-sex vs. anti-sex, etc.) much stickier, as the controversy around Patricia Arquette’s comments at the Oscars demonstrates. Arquette used her Oscars speech to advocate on behalf of wage equality for women, later adding that “it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.” The feminist blogosphere erupted with voices telling Arquette where she got it wrong — that women of color and LGBT people have been fighting for women’s equality for generations.

Rachel Hills (feminist journalist, author of The Sex Myth): Yes. I’m still on the fence on whether fourth-wave feminism is a “thing,” but if it is, I think it is characterized mainly by a diversification of the types of stories and experiences we hear about when we talk about what it means to be a “woman.” White, middle-class cis women (like me) don’t get to hog the microphone anymore. That’s tremendously exciting in terms of the conversations we’re having with each other, but it also means that there are a lot of arguments happening about what it means to be a “good feminist.” If there are competing versions of reality, it is because we are all living different realities. Take the recent dust-up over Jessica Williams’ disinterest in taking Jon Stewart’s hosting job at The Daily Show. It is true that many women experience a lack of confidence that makes them less likely to put themselves forward for jobs they are perfectly qualified for. But while that might be true in the general, it was not true in the case of Jessica Williams, and the assumption that she didn’t know her own ambitions was misplaced.

Reni: We live with a lot of contradictions. Sometimes I think life would be easier if I were a status quo-loving Tory.

Laurie Penny (author, journalist, Nieman fellow at Harvard University): I think within feminism, as within nerd culture, a lot of the pain comes from the feeling that you are already part of a special circle of people who feel marginalized, and feel like they’re creating an alternative community. To have someone then come into that group and tell you that that you yourself are engaged in marginalization and exclusion, that creates existential crisis. It’s profoundly upsetting.

Reni: So, what does this mean for the “new consciousness,” as Sheila calls it? I would like to see the better future we’re all imagining to be open minded rather than falling into dogmatism.

Jacob: I think that in order to get there, we have to change the ways that we engage with one another online. We have to find ways to be more considerate and constructive in our feedback if we are to really build a new feminist consciousness of any sort. When feminists yell at each other IRL, sometimes that can be productive. But when we yell at each other online, I rarely find that it’s working toward a new collective consciousness.

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FPG / Getty Images

Rachel: Laurie, I want to go back to a point that you made at the beginning of our conversation. You said, “I feel like the discussion of labor, what does and does not constitute labor and how it should be divided, are the great taboo in modern feminist thought.”

Laurie: So, right from the start Rowbotham challenges the notion that liberation means shoehorning more women into male modes of production.

Jacob: Yes! And that is so important!

Laurie: The idea that “equal pay” is where it starts and ends is kinda where mainstream feminism ended up in the 1990s. You’ve got the right to be equally exploited, now shut up and get to work. It’s no accident that this idea is just starting to be challenged again right now as a new generation is discovering that work does not equal liberation.

Jacob: I think that feminism has lost that sense, at least in a mainstream cultural capacity. Mainstream cultural feminism is epitomized in demands for equal pay, for the ability to “play like the boys.”

Laurie: I think the challenge to “work” itself is the most radical thing in this book.

Rachel: Yes, as a non-Marxist I found it very eye-opening. In particular, how she talks about labor under capitalism in terms of exchanging your LIFE for money. At one point she writes, “The money represents the measure of the time and possibility which has been subtracted from his life. Time is the measure of what he has lost, money represents the measure of what he is allowed.” It’s powerful stuff.

Jacob: I think what we’ve seen in recent years is a real constriction of the imagination of mainstream feminism. Mainstream feminism means becoming Oprah, Beyoncé, or Sheryl Sandberg — the accumulation of wealth is how you demonstrate your equality.

Reni: Don’t get me wrong. It costs money just to stand still these days. I can understand why those of us who don’t have much money dream of it setting us free.

Jacob: I love Beyoncé and Oprah as much as anyone else, but they only represent one vein of feminist thought and analysis, and that type of feminism has definitely been elevated in pop culture over other, more politically challenging forms of feminism.

Rachel: How do you think feminism could incorporate a better class analysis? And what is stopping us from doing that? Is it just that class isn’t sexy? Or perhaps more pertinently, not profitable?

Jacob: It doesn’t work with the “keeping up with the men” mentality of modern pop feminism.

Laurie: It’s partly about who gets to speak and define the conversation. Mainstream feminist discussion has been dominated by wealthy white Western women, mainly straight and cis, who are financially secure and who are able to employ less privileged women to do menial work on their behalf, talking about those parts of gender oppression which affect them. (And those issues are important too.) But class is actually part of the root gender oppression, so it affects everyone, including the 1%.

Reni: I wrote an article a few months back about the domestic labor gender divide. Women are still doing twice as much housework as men, shouldering the majority of a shared burden. The response I got reminded me that housework as a feminist issue doesn’t get much airtime.

Jacob: I think what is really interesting is that we are in some ways replacing what used to be a gendered divide between workers and homemakers with a class-race divide between business people and domestic workers. Like, modern women who are “equal” to men and are able to maintain families and such often do so at the expense of other low-wage workers of color raising their children and cleaning their homes.

Laurie: Yes. That’s the entire message of “having it all” feminism. Lean In is predicated on the notion that you’ll also be leaning ON immigrant women, women of color, and poor women.

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H. Armstrong Roberts / Retrofile / Getty Images

Rachel: Does domestic work HAVE to be a shitty job, or is the problem just that it’s not valued in our society?

Reni: It’s just not valued. Cis men still aren’t taught that keeping the home they live in clean and livable is their responsibility.

Jacob: And not only are they taught that it’s not their responsibility. They’re also taught that it’s not VALUABLE. They’re taught that it is silly, unimportant work.

Reni: YES, Jacob. One good thing that Sheila says in the book is how husbands return home and see all the housework that hasn’t been done.

Rachel: What is the solution here? Is it to pay domestic workers more money? To get men to do more domestic work so that it doesn’t need to be bought and sold?

Laurie: I’d say universal basic income, socialized medicine and child care, and a complete re-evaluation of what constitutes labor. As a list of preliminary demands. I think it’s also going to involve talking about misery. About depression and exhaustion and how shitty it is to have to earn money. Talking about anger and depression is not sexy feminism, but it is important.

Reni: I often imagine what a world without compulsory work would look like. I still can’t conceptualise it.

Rachel: True, but non-sexy feminism has been put on the agenda before. Domestic violence is not at all sexy, but it is a big media issue in Australia at the moment, where I grew up, and that’s mostly down to one writer, Clementine Ford, writing about it again and again and again. Rape culture involves sex, technically, but it’s not sexy either — and it’s a massive part of the feminist agenda now.

Laurie: Hey, I happen to think total reorganization of the wage labor system is sexy as hell.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelhills/the-1970s-feminist-who-warned-against-leaning-in

[goron-king-darunia]

So I watched this video out of curiosity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVM2CABL0Q

I like McIntosh and I want to be aware if he’s doing problematic things. But the entire video was just an attack on him, so as a feminist, I needed to speak out. Here’s what I commented on the video:

First of all, everyone has the right to block anyone for any reason. If I try to argue with you that the sky is green instead of blue, you have the right to block me for the simple reason that I happen do disagree with you. "But the sky IS blue, you're debating a fact and being a troll." Firstly, no, the sky is a lot of different colors depending on what time of day it is. Just like there are many different ways of looking at the same problem. And guess what? A lot of what he talks about IS fact, and the debatable aspects are probably not the things that are being talked about when he decides to block people. Also, not everyone is polite when they try to "debate". And you're not entitled to his attention. No one has to listen to you. As for bias, EVERYONE is biased, even scientists. That's why we try to design experiments to control for bias because everyone makes decisions that are consciously or subconsciously informed by past events, not even a baby can be truly unbiased. But McIntosh is a lot more qualified to talk about this stuff than you are because he actually knows a lot about the issues. Also, what would even be the other side of the argument that he should talk about to be "unbiased?" "Okay, so I talked about how being unable to express emotions is harmful to men and boys because it limits our methods of coping with difficulty, makes it hard for others to understand us and help us, and further enforces an arbitrary divide between men and women. Now let's talk about how being emotionally constipated is good for you and how being able to be open about your feelings is bad." Like, what? What even is the counterargument? He has science on his side. Also, a lot of people don't identify as feminists because they don't understand what feminism is and a few bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Even I didn't used to identify as a feminist because I thought it was all about hating men. Because misandrists have been calling themselves feminists, the two things have been conflated so that people aren't able to tell what is what and therefore don't associate with the feminist movement. But there are a lot of "non-feminists" or "anti-feminists" that are actually by definition feminists because they believe in equality. They call themselves egalitatians mostly. But they're still feminists. Feminism is all about elevating women and other oppressed groups to equal status of the privileged group (in America, this group is straight white men), so if you think men and women should be treated equally, congrats! You're a feminist! Propaganda is a huge buzzword and just because something has a certain spin doesn't mean it's propaganda. Just because something promotes a certain way of thinking doesn't mean it's propaganda. If that were the case then all news would be propaganda, all ads would be propaganda, even your video would be propaganda for the small-minded "ideals" you espouse. Don't conflate opinion with propaganda and don't conflate sharing facts with propaganda. Also, male feminists are some of the best feminists and allies that women have because they are seen as more informed and more credible than women. And it's sad that we live in a world where men are seen as having more knowledge about women than women do, but guess what? That's also the American government. And unlike McIntosh, the government wants to use that notion to take away women's rights. McIntosh is using that platform to instead speak about how we can help women and men be better. He's not attacking boys and men and so many people ARE benefiting from all this new stuff. So many boys and men ARE benefiting from being told that it's okay to cry. Also the "create your own characters" is BS for several reasons. First of all WE DO. But the powers that be don't think it's something "the masses" want to see. We're constantly shot down because "no one wants to see a gay male character, no one wants to see sensitive men, no one wants to see strong women, no one wants to see people of color". Wonder Woman almost didn't get made. And the Wonder Woman we did get is so so important because the alternative was just such a garbage fire of antifeminist "propaganda" as you might say, that it would have just reinforced the mountain of terrible tropes we already have, but you conveniently act like they don't exist. It takes time and energy and a position of power to "make your own character or story" which is why looking at existing characters through a different lens is so important because they already have the platform and the audience needed to get the ball rolling. "Create your own" is easy if your character happens to be a straight white hypermasculine man because there's already a market for that. I can create a dozen characters like that and make them successful because publishers and producers know that those stories will make money and will be willing to invest. But if my character is a lesbian and she doesn't exist only to be eyecandy for men, she's going to be very hard to market. Also, people take the few diverse and nuanced characters that do exist and turn them into the same old shit we already have, so say that to both sides. Stop taking people of color and whitewashing them. Stop taking gay or LGBT characters and making them straight. Stop taking strong nuanced women and making them objects. Two sides buddy. If you're going to say that to one side. Say it to both sides. Also, why would seeing new versions of old characters be "confusing" or a "slap in the face" to new and old fans? Why is Little Orphan Annie being black "confusing". Yeah the original character was white. But her race wasn't essential to the character so why is it so "confusing" to see it change? Yeah, Captain America is straight, but why is it a slap in the face to old fans if someone wants to explore what it would be like if he was gay? He's still straight in the canon. It doesn't change who he is. In essence gay Captain America IS a new character because it explores things that can't be explored in the original. I get that having the status quo being challenged can be distressing, but don't blame others for your own discomfort and think about why new things bothers you so much. Also, he's been very clear on how masculinity itself isn't a problem. It's specific behaviors that are problematic. I don't know why it's controversial to say "Hey, maybe beating up on people isn't the best solution and it's concerning how many shows try to teach kids that violence is the answer." Or why it's controversial to say "men are generally not allowed to be emotive at all, whether it's crying or being affectionate or even being happy and this can be problematic because generally boys and men aren't able to express a full range of emotions which isn't really fair to them." Why is it controversial? Why is this something that you think needs to be argued over? Why is saying "maybe we should teach boys to be gentle and emotive" something that needs to be argued about? What's the alternative? "All men and boys should be aggressive to a fault and should beat everything up and never cry?" Or is the argument simply "sexism doesn't exist and all boys already know it's okay to cry now, you're not teaching anyone anything?" Because let me tell you even as a girl I had to unlearn some toxic masculinity. I had several behaviors that were harmful and traditionally masculine and it took me years to unlearn them. Clearly this is still an issue and it needs to be talked about so that people like me can stop being harmful and learn how to be helpful. I'm still trying to unlearn toxic ideas like "crying is shameful" and "being aggressive means you'll get what you want so fight everyone all the time" and I'm a damn girl. These are good lessons he's teaching and I'm glad McIntosh exists. Also of course he's going to highlight people with large audiences. Those are the people we're most likely to know about. And also a lot of the "pushback" really is just blaming women spreading more toxic masculinity. A lot of this is really just people playing ostrich and trying to act like real problems don't exist. Also, I really don't see how he's playing the victim card. He's genuinely feminist and I have no idea what kind of problems you think you're discussing that he isn't. He talks about real problems men face and he doesn't blame those problems on women, but rather, he blames those problems on a society that treats women and anything feminine badly. Also, I haven't seen anyone having a polite disagreement. This whole video you being bitter and attacking McIntosh. You were really vague and didn't even point out alternatives. You just said what he did was bad but didn't actually say how he could improve.

#original #feminism #long post #rant