#and i know this doesnt apply to EVERY latine body while also applying to other bodies of color

[pyroinfusedtiger]

I think my token complaint when people draw dark-haired latine characters is that theres not a lot of body hair most of the time.

Growing up as a girl, I've always been extremely aware of a mustache and unibrow I couldnt shave off, thicker sideburns that fade into fuzz on my jawline, and arm and leg hair that was more visible than my female classmates that made me self conscious about wearing anything that exposed it.

Iunno, just wanna see more hairy girl representation outside of fanart of dwarven women (i love you hairy dwarven women)

#by this point in my life ive unpacked it and like it after 20 years of dealing with being shamed for it #and this is knowing im not even near the thicker end of the spectrum #but if people still cant be normal about body hair as any natural trait a person has then whats the point #this applies to any designs really because at the end of the day its still seen with a western european eye as an undesirable trait of mascu #linity #and i know this doesnt apply to EVERY latine body while also applying to other bodies of color #im just speaking from personal experience after thinking about how I still feel like I have to shave the hairs on my upper lip to be seen as #pleasant and attractive #(im pleasant and attractive without doing so but i still do it because im still unlearning this behavior within myself) #(so what does it say for those of us who dont deal with this subconsciously reacting to others with body hair that arent cisgender men)

[fipindustries]

my trip to the left

(warning, a lot of this is very cringy, as anyone talking about their past politics is)

those who have been following this blog for long enough (and by long enough i mean since 2012) mayhaps know this. i was much more to the right back then than i am today. to the point im seriously wondering how come i didnt turn into a full alt-righter. 

i talked about this in the past but really it doesnt quite paint a picture of how close i got to becoming the kind of person that worships ben shapiro, or sargon of akkad. how i almost took “the red pill” as it were.

i was strongly anti-sjw, i sympathized with gamer gate, i browsed 4chan and 8chan almost daily, i watched youtubers like the amazing atheist and the internet aristocrat, i was skeptical of feminism, i thought gender queer people were being ridiculous. i thought the humanities such as sociology and psychatry were not real sciences. more to the point i identified as a white man, i was a virgin well into my 20′s. i was basically an antisocial NEET who had gone through a lot of bullying as a teenager and i depised anita sarkeesian.

look, none of these thing are necessarily bad on their own, of course. but in the aggregate they do check all the stereotypical boxes do they not? the only thing i had going for me was that i was that i more or less fit into the standards of beauty.

so, how come i am where i am today?

well the more direct answer is that primarily i did have a sense of self worth and self esteem, product of a loving and supportive family and of my hobbies as an artist and a writer. i didn’t grew with this strong sense of resentment towards the world, perhaps by virtue of the media i consumed, perhaps by virute of being raised in very leftists enviroments (my mom was studying as a language and comunication teacher when i was a kid and she would take me to her college in lieu of hiring a nanny) and being exposed to more conservative enviroments just enough to see how lame and unplesant they can be (my dad’s family was very strongly catholic and i never got along very well with them).

also the fact that i live in latin america instead of USA, and thus being exposed to a different culture did help a lot. on top of that the fact that (and i am probably blowing smoke out of my ass at this point, you guys let me know). most of what i know about american culture is based on movies really, but they always paint highschool and college as a very atomized “every man for himself” enviroment. in latin america there is a different attitude towards peers. my classmates in highschool and my roomates in college were all very prosocial and loved to include me in their activities. i wouldnt always participate, but every now and then i would join and go out with them, and hag out with other people, people who thoguht differently than me. people with different perspectives. people who would get me out of my own head every now and then.

so those were the conditions that shaped the kind of person i am, but what was the road that led me to the beliefs i hold? this is all nice and good to make me pause whenever i would hear something about “the jewish question”, but the internet is very good at channeling dissafected youths through dark pathways. i was on the daily two clicks away from ending up in stormfront, or breitbart, or listening to milo yannopolous, and very skeptical of the left in general back in 2014.

well, gamer gate happened. get ready because this is a really silly ride.

as i said, i was very supportive of gamer gate. sure, ethics in videogame journalism, i was all for it. gone home was a terrible game, zoey quinn was a monster, and sarkessian was telling me i was bad because i liked videogames. that was the full extent of my thoguht process back then.

one thing i still more or less agree with from back then is that i think the left did a poor job by drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and immeditly giving up in reaching towards people who might be in the middle. the undecided and the agnostic. from where i was standing the gamer gate faction had no trouble embracing and bringing forth anyone. i still remember the fiasco with vivian james and the fine young capitalists. i still remember #notyourshield. these things speak of a giant failure in building coalitions. the whole affair was a giant mess.

of course being a supporter of GG meant looking past a LOT of ugly stuff. the harrasment, the toxicity, the misoginy, etc. the excuse i used back then was that these were just a loud minority. crazy people who didnt speak for the movement. i refused to allow the loudest, ugliest aspects of a movement tarnish the lofty ideals that the movement stood for. and that is when the shoe dropped.

well, wasn’t that what i was doing with the left? see, i had no problem ignoring the rabid masses in twitter and actively seek out the smartest, calmest, most coherent advocates i could find when it came to support my side, but if i was to be intellectually consistent, shouldnt i give the same chance to the other side and make the honest effort to hear them out?

this is a heuristic i still apply whenever i can, whenever you have a dissagreement with an ideology, give it a fair shot, dont stop at the rabble and idiots that shout slogans in twitter but actually look for what the best and the brightests in that ideology have to say.

so that is what i did. of course, me being me, and this being 2015 i started with the nostalgia chick. back then it was when she was starting to distance herself from channel awesome and her content was starting to get much more political. she had this series of videos where she would explain feminism through the lens of the transformer movies.

and her videos were actually good.

more or less at the same time i was reading a little story called HPMOR, which led me to less wrong, which led me to slate star codex, which led me to the rat-adjacent side of tumblr. a place famously filled with trans catgirls each with her own manifesto on gender theory. what the rat adjacent community tought me above everything else is that you could defend leftists ideas while still remaining a rational, impassioned, analitical agent.

and then that was it. from lindsey ellis i soon would find contrapoints and from contrapoints i came across vaush and then i got myself into breadtube learning about socialism while taking my hormone supplement to feminize my body. 

that is where i find myself today. who knows where i’ll be a couple of years from now. in retrospect i am a bit disquieted by how much i reduced everything into tribalism and how my politics where primarily influenced by aesthetics and respectability rather than real arguments, but i do find some pride in the fact that i was aware of this and so i went out of my way to find arguments presented in a format i was willing to listen from the outgroup instead of sitting passively and taking in whatever arguments came my way from the ingroup.

#me #politics