people who fetishize east-asians are cringe… but could those people involve east-easians themselves? i talk about various topics such as aegyo, asianfishing, orientalism, and the potential positives of self-fetishization. also, i need better lighting.

I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to be that kind of feminist: To give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die.

Cooties Simulator 2009™

Yeah, I really think I don’t get having children.

To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.

As said by a colleague in response to this tweet.

all boys ritually emasculate/are emasculated by other boys as part of showing you are a real man. Trans women do not respond to this phenomenon the way that boys do and, as a result, are treated differently long before anyone realizes they are trans.

In this sharp manifesto, veteran author and activist, Jude Doyle, reunites feminist and trans politics through a common belief: that all people deserve to have the final say about who they are…

An excellent book on transfeminism from the transmasc POV. A terrifyingly easy read: I zoomed through its 200 pages in about a day.

Never so quickly has an article made me transition from confusion laughter to rage so quickly. Conservatives are weird. Everything’s here: pseudoscience, denial of the existence of racism and sexism, bio— and gender essentialism, and so many false dichotomies. The point of this article is to get a conservative white man’s dick wet. Furthermore, it’s one of those frustrating unfalsifiable “theories”: if I disagree with the author on the mertis of what they’re written, then they can just claim I’ve been “feminized.” Utter bull crap.

via: https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/are-women-unsuited-for-the-pursuit

Nina Cosford is a freelance illustrator based in Hastings, UK.

She has illustrated over twenty published books and has worked with numerous brands including Apple, HBO, WaterAid, TATE, Google, UN Refugee Agency, Radio Times, H&M, Lonely Planet and Netflix. Her work became particularly well-known after she collaborated with Lena Dunham and HBO on the award-winning TV show GIRLS, which sparked a huge interest in the girl-centric zeitgeist of today. She has over 325,000 followers on Instagram and was recently named one of the Top 20 Female Illustrators by Stylist Magazine

maybe intersectionality isn’t a game of who can be oppressed in the most ways but rather a framework for understanding our relationship to power.

Every single piece of popular media out there has some variation of “no fats no fems no Asians” as an unspoken default policy. If you’re not white and skinny and cis and male and perisex and straight…

just existing as a fem presenting person sucks so bad 😭 irl or online, my physical body or my fursona, it literally doesnt matter. i want to be more than just a piece of meat to people

Gacha games are famous for their raunchy character designs and objectification. But can you fight fire with fire? Can you teach gamers to respect women, by wrapping a positive message in lewd imagery? Goddess of Victory: Nikke is a game that attempts to find out. We’ll see just how Nikke teaches gamers to respect women, while also taking a look at the limits of Nikke as a teaching tool, in this relatively short video about the objectification of women in the gacha game space.

[…] it’s okay to enjoy your media, even if that media can have problematic aspects to it. This is the world in which we live, and we can either participate it or be alienated from it.

fanservice sucks bc it’s never you that’s being serviced it’s always some other really annoying fan

This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies.

A survey of 8th and 10th graders shows a sharp drop in the percent of boys who believe that women should have the same opportunities as men

The sentiment behind this project is good, but parts of it seem insane:

Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.

Jargon is a crucial part of technical communication. Yes, jargon can cause friction when a person is getting inducted into a field, but our goal should not be to remove all friction from our work. And no idioms whatsoever? That’s just nonsense. But perhaps I’m just over-reacting to “my words being taken away.”

In my view, the effectiveness of what most people understand to be “linguistic engineering”—banning words, redefining them by fiat, trying to force people to use new words invented by engineers—is seriously overrated. If it were held to the same standard as actual engineering (does this work? Can we rely on it to keep working?), it would fail almost every time. Which is not to say we shouldn’t criticize it (though I’d prefer it if we didn’t only criticize the other side’s version while giving our own side a free pass); but I think we should probably focus less on the idea that “they” are messing with our minds, and more on the other, more prosaic tools which are used to crush dissent and enforce compliance.

I think there is much to be done regarding making linguistic engineering a legitimate field.