Tag: misogeny

Why ‘female-presenting nipples’ matter

angrylittlesliceofpizza:

lettersbyelise:

aibidil:

When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.

When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.

When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.

When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.

When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”

When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.

When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.

When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.

When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.

When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.

When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”

When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.

When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.

When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”

When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.

When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.

I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore. 

Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over. 

Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.

Stop shaming people for having bodies. 

I’ve been seething in rage thinking of this all day and @aibidil put into words what was reeling in my mind.

Our bodies are not porn.

hey @staff

Author Scott Lynch responds to a critic of the character Zamira Drakasha, a black woman pirate in his fantasy book Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second novel of the Gentleman Bastard series.

rejectedprincesses:

fuckyeahscifiwomenofcolour:

The bolded sections represent quotes from the criticism he received. All the z-snaps are in order.

Your characters are unrealistic stereotpyes of political correctness. Is it really necessary for the sake of popular sensibilities to have in a fantasy what we have in the real world? I read fantasy to get away from politically correct cliches. 

God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms. 

Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world. It is unrealistic wish fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it!

First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time. Second, now you’re pissing me off. 

You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I realized this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it. 

Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain. 

Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes “SBF, 41, nonsmoker, 2 children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder.”

You don’t like it? Don’t buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears. 

As for the “man’s world” thing, religious sentiments and gender prejudices flow differently in this fictional world. Women are regarded as luckier, better sailors than men. It’s regarded as folly for a ship to put to sea without at least one female officer; there are several all-female naval military traditions dating back centuries, and Drakasha comes from one of them. As for claims to “realism,” your complaint is of a kind with those from bigoted hand-wringers who whine that women can’t possibly fly combat aircraft, command naval vessels, serve in infantry actions, work as firefighters, police officers, etc. despite the fact that they do all of those things– and are, for a certainty, doing them all somewhere at this very minute. Tell me that a fit fortyish woman with 25+ years of experience at sea and several decades of live bladefighting practice under her belt isn’t a threat when she runs across the deck toward you, and I’ll tell you something in return– you’re gonna die of stab wounds.

What you’re really complaining about isn’t the fact that my fiction violates some objective “reality,” but rather that it impinges upon your sad, dull little conception of how the world works. I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. I’m not writing history, I’m writing speculative fiction. Nobody’s going to force you to buy it. Conversely, you’re cracked if you think you can persuade me not to write about what amuses and excites me in deference to your vision, because your vision fucking sucks.

I do not expect to change your mind but i hope that you will at least consider that I and others will not be buying your work because of these issues. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for years and i know that I speak for a great many people. I hope you might stop to think about the sales you will lose because you want to bring your political corectness and foul language into fantasy. if we wanted those things we could go to the movies. Think about this! 

Thank you for your sentiments. I offer you in exchange this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill, suitable for framing.

Here follows is a non-comprehensive list of historical female pirates and sailors, women of color first:

In conclusion: read a goddamn book, critic person.

actuallyclintbarton:

guinevak:

skull-bearer:

thainfool-of-a-took:

roachpatrol:

mercurialmalcontent:

I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.

Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!

I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.

i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.  

rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character. 

then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story? 

and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues. 

so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr. 

I’d been trying to put into words my issue with the idea that genderbent versions of characters are somehow automatically, innately transphobic, and I think you pretty well nailed it.

Originally, it was called ‘genderswap’ or ‘genderswitch’, which was rightfully criticized for reinforcing a binary view of gender. Hence why it is now ‘genderbend‘. Things can bend in many directions.

Yeah basically.

Rule 63s can be transphobic and gender essentialist, no question, just as m/m slash can be misogynistic, but it’s not inherent to the genre.

The way I see it, rule 63 and trans/nb headcanons are two subsets of what I call “gender AUs”, and they’re not mutually exclusive.  Girl!Sherlock Holmes is an example of one, trans!Holmes is the other, and trans woman Holmes is both.  All those would be worthwhile explorations.

Yes! And all sorts have their place because all of them are exploring the experience of an under-represented group (or two) in a different way.