turns out there is such a thing as 'phase knives' in star war, which seem to be like lightsaber knives but without kyber?? and anyway Obi-Wan definitely dug a pair out of the temple vault personally for his commander as a Totally Platonic Life Day Gift™️
I like to think Benny got that gun from House when they all came to the strip and that House tried to make a big deal of it and what it meant with all its engravings and symbolism. But Benny being a wasteland we just saw if as another weapon.
He never really mentions it in canon, no attachments or acknowledgements to how good it is as a weapon. He just uses it because it’s the brand, a part of his image. Maria, despite carrying the visage of the women who carried/birthed the prophet, is merely used by a man to kill what can be considered the Mojave’s messiah.
This might be a very specific experience, but I think a huge reason I didn't even realize or even want to be bisexual was specifically because of this intersection of my manhood and the way it's viewed
There's this toxic merry-go-round I find myself riding where I am so desperate to not be one of those guys to a woman that it winds up being an inability to connect to women* because of this hyperpolicing I end up doing. For the longest time, I repressed myself because of this impulse, and I find it interesting. It's interesting seeing how this aspect of patriarchy impact me in such a way that I was too afraid of myself and the people around me.
As a trans man, I felt the pressure to prove both that I'm not one of those men, but also, that I wasn't this predatory trans man, that anything I did was in service to proving why I should (or should not) continue to exist. Simultaneously, I am both not a man, but also a predatory man because of my transness, a threat to be contained. I felt this before as somebody who is multisexual, but it somehow affects me more in the aspect of how I interact with women* and womanhood* from the outside.
There isn't an overarching theme to this post, a message about what you can do. It's mostly reflecting on my experiences and thinking about where my impulse to think myself as guilty until proven innocent plays into how I've started viewing myself. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I've seen this expressed by many a trans man*.