promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

Anonymous asked: I mean, yes, it is bad to hold up a sexist antiquated standard of masculinity and claim you're somehow being progressive. But at the same time, I feel like... Since masculinity has been predicated on Not Being Femininity for so long, we need a good working definition of masculinity that isn't Not Femininity? And so a lot of the STRONG PROTECTOR RENAISSANCE MAN people are trying to do that and failing.

ilzolende:

ozymandias271:

No, we don’t!

I really can’t conceptualize people who respond to the concept of “masculine man” or “feminine woman” with anything other than ++CATEGORY ERROR++. Why do we put wearing makeup, being kind and nurturing, liking romantic comedies, cooking, and being courted while dating in the same category? A cursory observation of people will show you that these are, at best, barely correlated with each other, and when they are it is usually because the person is deeply invested in being Feminine and therefore must be courted while dating even if they’d be a lot happier doing the courting. 

I understand that some people really like “being feminine” (as opposed to “happening to do a bunch of things which our society conceptualizes as feminine things”). But the amount of harm caused by this system– to women who can’t or don’t want to be feminine, to people who aren’t able to perform femininity or masculinity, to people who go around doing things they aren’t particularly interested in doing because it is the feminine thing to do, to the people who are harassed or insulted or even subjected to violence because they don’t conform– clearly outweighs this small benefit. 

And, like, if your feminism is based on trying to preserve this system… it is not a terribly good feminism? IMO. 

I feel like the ideal option, since some people seem to really value “being a central example of my gender” or “being gender non-conforming”, would probably be to end up with gender roles that were really unconstraining but also still obvious and obviously separate?

And obviously we can’t have that tomorrow, but we can’t have “gender roles don’t exist at all” tomorrow either, and I’m still not sure why working towards the latter is better.

My obvious first instinct to “some people seem to really value “being a central example of my gender” or “being gender non-conforming”” is to ask how much this is an artefact produced by the system which makes such categorizations possible in the first place.

I want to be gender non-conforming when gendered “female”, but find being a central example of “twitchy ambitious ambiguously badbrains silicon valley nerd who’s exactly as trans female as one would expect” quite delightful, but it feels like a reaction to the systems themselves and their meanings, not an ~inherent~ property of me (while things like “wanting to be lean and soft and hairless” are properties that are very independent of their current associations with femaleness).

2 months ago · 48 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

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    I always thought that Plains and Intermontane Western Indians had a decent system that often resembles @ilzolende’s -...
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    My obvious first instinct to “some people seem to really value “being a central example of my gender” or “being gender...
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    Powers of thirteen are feminine, powers of seventeen are masculine, numbers whose prime factors are seventeen and...
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