applejack do you really think we can make it out of here alive
Kaiba Brothers
Seto and Mokuba Kaiba
Battle City
Season 2-5
There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?
There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing. And like, I find men attractive, yes. But I also find women attractive. I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones. I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.
But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO. A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but a lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women. It removes a source of pressure and sexism. Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life. It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.
This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically. I read a recommendation for a het romance. And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended. The tropes at play were fun. Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss. I had a visceral negative reaction.
Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you. How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.
And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men. Now, there’s no logical reason for that. Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man. But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it. Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.
But I can’t when it’s a het relationship. There’s too much baggage there. Too much societal history of abuse. I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.
Now some people can. And that’s fine. And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender. That’s also fine. I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior. It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.
But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters. We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic. We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance. We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it. But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us. And maybe it shouldn’t? In an ideal world? But for many of us, that’s the truth.
So this post blew up in the last 24 hours, for whatever reason, and I was looking through people’s responses, as you do. I’m quite moved that so many found it relatable.
But I wanted to highlight one set of tags (via @reallifepotato )
Because I AM comfortable with my sexuality and fairly comfortable with my body, but still, this resonates so hard as someone who has always been overweight. The amount that our society teaches women to constantly compare ourselves, almost always negatively with every other woman out there, can utterly ruin our enjoyment of this kind of thing. Like how many times have you tried to watch a mainstream romantic comedy where some utterly gorgeous actress is bemoaning that she can’t get a date, or WORSE is made out to be less than attractive. And you look at her and go…but she’s fucking perfect? And you just want to puke.
But with m/m romance you can put yourself in the place of either character and…not compare yourself. You can enjoy a character being attractive without feeling bad about yourself, which is REALLY HARD to do for any woman in our fucked up culture.
Anonymous asked:
Sorry I didn’t mean to bring you down with negativity. I guess I just wish there was an easy way to unbrainwash people from the qanon/maga cults, but alas unbrainwashing isn’t as easy as that one episode of the Simpsons made it seem where all they had to do was give Homer a beer lol. Another great thing about more charges for trump (besides the obvious) is that it’s going to make us lawyer bills go way up…I would absolutely love it if he had to sell every building/business with his name on it just to pay his lawyers.
qqueenofhades answered:
It’s okay, you’re all good. I hope I didn’t come off as too snippy, it’s just that the chorus of “this doesn’t matter at all” doom-and-glooming happens EVERY time, and I just don’t know what to say to it. For one, I don’t think you can say that a twice-impeached one-term loser who only won his first term thanks to the electoral college, who lost his re-election and then 60+ lawsuits challenging that, and is now facing in the neighborhood of 100 serious felony charges in soon-to-be-four state and federal jurisdictions, hasn’t suffered any institutional repudiation at all. Especially when the trials haven’t actually started, and when as noted, they’ve clearly done a lot of work at picking juries and getting indictments, which should logically lead to convictions. At this point, there’s nothing saying that won’t happen as the next step in the process, so… yeah.
As I have said, democracy is slow, messy, imperfect, and cumbersome. It is also the best system for self-governance we have yet invented, and it’s worth working hard to preserve and improve. So while justice has taken far longer than anyone wanted, it is nonetheless proceeding at a decently good clip; we are up to Kaiju, uh, Indictment Events every six weeks/two months, and it will almost surely not be that long until the Georgia indictment lands; it could be as soon as the second half of this week. Then the process will continue, and yeah. We are in fact making progress, even if it’s hard to wait, and I get tired of people automatically discounting it and changing the goalposts and constantly revising what they expect and when they think it should be done, so that’s why I was possibly a bit short with you. I 100% agree I would love Trump to just fucking pick through the Mar-a-Lago couch cushions to pay his legal bills, but alas, he will just grift his cult members some more. To which I say, good luck with that, guys. At this point if you’re still stupid enough to give him money, you deserve to go broke on a “billionaire’s” behalf.
Also, most of the money Trump is spending on his legal bills is being footed by his political campaign and other donors. Which means that all the money that would normally be spent on election ads and campaign rallies and stuff ... is not going to be spent on that. That is a major drain on Republican party finances. Not just for Trump as president, but for every other Republican down the ticket from him.
Which means ... that the Democrats have the advantage. The moral advantage is great, but the fundraising advantage is great too.
There are not enough hardcore Trumpers to get him elected, and there never have been. Not even close. There aren’t even enough Republicans to get him elected. That’s why he lost in 2020! US presidential elections are won by whoever most effectively turns out the people in the middle--the undecideds, the independents, the people who don’t regularly vote but do if they particularly like (or hate) a candidate. And those people by and large do not like Trump. And they don’t believe there’s a grand conspiracy framing him, either.
With all these indictments, it gives Democrats open season on naming and shaming all the shit Trump did (and the Republicans down-ticket who support him). Republicans are going to have to spend a lot of time and money doing damage control to downplay the indictments and all the stuff that comes with them before they can even start with the normal election issues in their campaign ads ... and they’re doing it with a substantially depleted war chest.
This does not mean we should rest on our laurels. If we rest on our laurels and assume Trump can’t possibly win, we give him the only shot at winning he’s got.
What it does mean is that we need to keep our eyes on the prize: if we don’t fumble the ball, if we re-elect Biden, Trump is fucked. Permanently. And he will spend the rest of his life in jail.
And we also need to keep our eyes on Congress, as well, and the down-ticket elections. Every single member of the House of Representatives, and 1/3 of the Senators, are up for re-election this year. And the Republicans are tied to a guy who a) lost the last time, b) has only gone down in public favor since then c) keeps getting indicted for stuff most Americans believe he did, and d) is draining the party coffers to defend himself. They are not in a good spot. There are a lot of them who are going to be vulnerable. Every single one we can oust makes the country safer. Every seat we pick up makes a left-leaning agenda more possible to pass. Congress actually has more influence on what laws get passed than the President does, and every seat the Republicans lose helps protect America from their racist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, fascism.
anthropicmoose asked:
Speaking of Jack Smith and the indictments, follow up questions if you feel like answering! What do you think the chances of a conviction before the 2024 elections are? And (more worryingly to me), how much will convictions matter given they don't actually stop Trump from running or potentially being elected?
I've been following the investigations pretty closely, until I figured out last night that there are no laws against running for president from prison, and nothing stopping an imprisoned president from pardoning themselves. @_@ And while no one running for president from prison has ever gotten much of the vote, I have a terrible feeling that's one of those terrible firsts Orange-kun could pull off.
qqueenofhades answered:
The thing with all this is that it is, for America, completely unprecedented political and legal territory. As such, while we can speculate and infer from what has happened thus far and what would normally be on schedule to happen next, we simply can’t be sure. As I have said and as we all need to prepare ourselves for, Trump WILL be the GOP nominee at the time of the 2024 election, and if you thought he and his deranged cultists were dangerous to American democracy before, that’s nothing compared to what they would be now. Which means we have the obvious task of all working as hard as we fucking can to get Joe Biden re-elected and given back full Democratic control of Congress. That is and remains Job Number One.
Next, Trump’s only play is to delay, delay, delay as long as possible, in hopes of miraculously winning and canceling all the charges against himself like a proper banana-republic Autocrat-for-Life. That is obviously a terrifying idea, so see above: need to make sure it doesn’t happen. The good news is that Biden beat Trump last time and if we do our part, he can do it again. Democrats are over-performing their 2020 margins by an average of 7+ points in the last 20 special or off-cycle elections, and while this isn’t a sign to think we’ve got it in the bag and can just relax, it also means that the electoral trends are overall much better for Team Blue than they are for the Group Of Pfascists over there, especially since state-level Republican parties are basically bankrupt after throwing away so much money on pointless Big Lie challenges. Trump and his entire vindictive fascist apparatus is, again, terrifying. But it is not genuinely popular or in the actual majority, and we need to approach it like something that can and must be defeated, and not some unstoppable demonic force.
As such, we also need to recognize that even if Trump does go on trial and get convicted on any number of things before November 2024, which is still something of a long shot just because Merrick Garland dragged his feet on this for so long, he will try every bullshit delay tactic and appeal that he possibly can, in hopes of elevating it to a Trump-appointed judge and/or SCOTUS (he will try AS HARD AS POSSIBLE to get it to SCOTUS, since like every good mob boss, he thinks he owns them and they’re obliged to bail him out). We don’t know the timeline on that or what the effects will be, but as I noted last night, the benchmark for “progress on holding Trump accountable” constantly shifts and doesn’t seem to be acknowledged, even when we are in the realm of the unprecedented for any former American president. And yet we do continue to make progress, and as I say whenever there’s a development on that front, the LAST thing we should do is pre-emptively throw up our hands, despair about how it still doesn’t mean anything, or just won’t work. I know pessimism is easy and hopelessness feels like our default setting; the last almost-decade has kicked the absolute SHIT out of us and I won’t pretend otherwise. But nonetheless, this is still happening. We just have to hang in there and do our part.
If we do that, and trust that Jack Smith and co. do theirs (as they have been doing so far), then things will probably, in fact, be okay. We cannot ever make the mistakes of 2016 again, which is why it’s so maddening that a significant minority of leftist-identifying people seem determined to do exactly that, but it’s certainly not as if all hope is already lost and the indictments will be a magic wand to speed Trump back to the White House (again, God forbid). We have to keep that in mind and our eyes on the goal, so yeah. We can do it and we must, and that’s about all there is to it.
If I read something on the asks that feels genuinely threatening or dangerous, or that's actually abusive, I just delete it and block the person.
If I'm answering an ask here you can assume that as far as I'm concerned even if it's apparently threatening or angry, it's meant humorously or with love.
It's never appropriate to dogpile people. Never appropriate to threaten or abuse them, even if you think you are doing it for me and with the best of intentions. Don't.
If you are upset on my behalf, or on behalf of all Tumblr users, just think "this is probably a tone-deaf attempt at humour" and let it go.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no TV writer in the history of the world has made a show bad on purpose so they can do a big reveal later down the line that it was actually secretly good. like i could be wrong here but i don't think that's something that happens.
just learned about the ginkgo trees that survived the nuclear blast in Hiroshima
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALTyou cannot kill me in a way that matters
At Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, you'll also find a Parasol tree that not only survived the bombing, but has since begun to produce more trees :)
But my favourite exhibit has to be from the nearby Honkawa Elementary school museum, commemorating the Canna plant that became a symbol of hope for many when it was discovered sprouting up in the wreckage only two weeks after the blast...after the Americans claimed nothing would grow in Hiroshima for seventy-five years:
All jokes aside, Americans do owe a seismic debt of gratitude to Jack Smith, especially if it is true (as has been reported) that the DOJ initially slow-walked or stonewalled the investigation into Trump himself (at least until the J6 Committee). He was only appointed to the job last year, and he's already secured indictments for two separate sets of federal crimes, in two different (and wildly politically different) jurisdictions, with felony charges numbering in the dozens. These charges include espionage, conspiracy, obstruction, etc -- aka all the things we saw Trump do in real time, but have been relentlessly brainwashed ever since to try to make us forget that he did.
So it's just... Nice that our collective trauma of 2016-2020 has been legally validated, yknow? That grand juries of private citizens in both DC and Florida, when they actually have to look at the (overwhelming) evidence, do really, empirically agree that the son of a bitch is in fact really fucking guilty. These indictments were not easy to get, we should and must thank Jack Smith for working at speed to get them, and now especially with the trial in DC being assigned to an Obama appointee who won't favor Trump endlessly like Cannon in Florida, there is actually a real chance he goes on trial before November 2024. And while we don't know what will happen, there's no reason to think that Smith and his team will fail at the last hurdle and somehow fail to secure a conviction. That, especially considering the magnitude of the threats and MAGA rage he has been faced with, takes considerable courage.
And that, all reflexive Dooming and Glooming and endless (and at this point, profoundly inaccurate) moaning that Trump will never see an actual systemic repercussion quite aside, means something. We will still have to deal with his crazed fascist followers, but it's been a string of three high-profile indictments now and nary a peep, far less the promised rioting in the streets. It's almost like bullies are cowards and fold when you challenge them, and that we might actually get through this terrible, terrible time by the skin of our teeth and still have a democracy, however flawed, in the future. And I don't know about you, but I think that is, and remains, incredibly fucking important.
whispering "fentanyl" under my breath as the cops arrest me, causing them to fly back like a skyrim shout
Exercises for all the homies who want to have a long career drawing.
The true problem with being an artist and drawing all day (as I wanted my whole life) is that human backs are not designed to hold that position, so it is very common for artists and designers to have really stiff shoulder blades, creating a chain of muscle strain towards the arm AND the back… and a lot of pain.
These are some physical exercises for artists and honestly anyone who works at a desk.
(all credit to my physiotherapist)
manywinged
