https://feministdragon.tumblr.com/post/180535045991/afniel-10oclockdot-saying-that-man-and-woman
Pretty sure there can be mutiple genders and women can be treated like full human beings at the same time. (Also, my gender makes me a woman, not a “sex and birthing slave”. Sexism and misogyny make women into “sex and birthing slaves.”)
and dudes, like…
I wear business attire to work
Hell I wear comfy shoes as an accommodation which look kinda wrong with my dressed up ness
What does my coworker make fun of me for?
Wearing too much black.
If the stigma is gone now I appear to have missed it.
A lil secret that isn’t a secret. I called out my work place recently and a lot of people are still a bit unbalanced by it.
I pointed out if you took the exact same clothes and put them on another staff member we’d NEVER have conversations about appropriate attire. I, however, have full sleeves of tattoos, shaved head, beard and earrings.
I asked, point blank, what the difference in my clothes would be if on another person.
This idea that shit like this doesn’t happen in every direction (too goth, not goth enough, too prep, not prep enough) is bull.
Also can people stop trying to surgically slice atoms of meaning off that damned cartoon? Woman walks down hall, met with “why can’t you be normal” and from here on out we’re figuring out what her damned back story is so we either excuse her response or explain the harshness or..
Jesus wept. If you, like the figure as presented, are walking along not saying anything and you’re met with “why aren’t you X”? As far as I’m concerned the conversation’s over. As presented there’s no excuse for that. None.
ANY response after that short of a verbal nuke is appropriate.
What is blindingly hilarious is that people are dissecting it via what they think she’s wearing as a signaller of who she is.
People. She’s a person walking along minding her own business. It’s not ok if she’s goth, prep, 90s butch lesbian with dockers and a brush cut, business casual or stripper. That THAT is the conversation? Is kinda actually the point.
Thank you.
Yes, exactly.
My Facebook groups are blowing up over this image.
Blue is read as the bully/the not-nice one, and it’s read as “not like other girls” commentary pitting women against each other, despite the fact that Blue is responding to Blonde’s diss.
I really feel like I’m on a different planet from the Gen Zrs reacting to this image. It’s not even divisive because everyone else but me and the author, seems to see Blue as the asshole in this scenario.
My point is that Blue doesnt owe Blonde niceness at all, because Blonde wasn’t nice to begin with. A snarky comment is about what’s deserved and hers was a really Diet Coke one, which didn’t attack Blonde on the basis of any marginalized identity.
I’m seeing Blue as the one being picked on but Gen Zrs see Blonde as the victim, or the author as the jerk who is pitting women against each other.
I wonder if this is a generational thing.
I feel like Gen Z reads this as two equally mainstream mall shoppers trading quips, or even as a “basic”/“normie” being picked on by a sneering hipster, with the implication that the “normie” is the victim and the trendy girl is in the “in group.”
As a Gen Xr who grew up in the 80s in the San Fernando Valley, Blue would have been the member of the out group and Blonde would have been the socialite/“mean girl.” And Blue may have been drawn to her particular look and or crowd on account of othering and bullying by mainstream people to begin with. I feel like a lot of Gen X snark culture arose as a response to bullying and gaslighting by mainstream people and by Boomers/older, it was a psychological coping mechanism. Blue’s snarky comeback preserved her self esteem, and deflected the insult. It’s how I and a lot of my Gen X friends might have responded to a similar insult.
So anyway it’s interesting to me how apparently nobody younger than me reads this image as “appropriate response to some jerk just walking up and insulting you.”
*Epistemic status: completely half-baked, don’t take this as gospel or even as a real pronouncement*
I’m 24, and I’ve noticed similar rhetoric from people my age and younger. I think my generation took the backlash against “not like other girls” a bridge too far and wound up replicating the exact conditions “not like other girls” girls were responding to in the first place. “Don’t sneer at popular things just because they’re popular” (which, btw, I agree with) turned into “not liking popular things means you need to get over yourself”. In the name of celebrating women whose harmless interests get ripped to shreds, we’ve moved past basic reassurance and into a sort of…celebration of mediocrity. It’s harder and harder to find anything genuinely *original* in modern female youth culture, because it’s out of style. The anodyne “relatability” of group identity is what’s in. If you can’t tie your interests, your thoughts, your Self, to a broader schematic in some way, if you are genuinely and fundamentally individual, you need to get over yourself and get woke.
I have a post in my drafts about how I was super on board with ending girl hate when I still thought it meant “women should stop bullying other women” instead of what it apparently actually means, which is “women should stop resenting the women who bully them.”
This is what I’m talking about.
Wait, Blue is the mean one here?
I would never even have seen that reading. She was minding her own business being quiet with her little skull when Blonde walked up to her and said something judgmental.
Dude, wtf.
No no, she was being weird in public, which clearly displays hostile intent and justifies anything that might be said or done to her in response.
…/s
😤
I think if Blue were saying “why can’t you mind your own business” or “why can’t you be quiet” “why can’t you cultivate your own garden of delights, why must you piss on mine?” we/I wouldn’t be reading her as bad at all. Even if Blue were responding “Why can’t you fuck off?” I don’t think Blue would be seen as the aggressor here.
As it is I can tell you exactly why she’s reading as a bully – the implication is that Blue thinks the only way to be interesting is to be Blue.
Well, that and the relative value of those insults has shifted in the couple of decades since the mall goth/prep wars were staged in the food court between the Hot Topic and Hollister. “Uninteresting” is a much more cutting insult than “abnormal” in the age of social media curation.
Blonde came up and said “You are different,” Blue responded with “You are valueless” (because being interesting nets you friends and an audience and creates a personal brand for heavy social media users – if you’re uninteresting on social media then you’re shouting into the void and deluded for thinking anybody would care). It’s not seen as bullying because Blue responded it all, it’s seen as bullying because Blue responded disproportionately.
It also doesn’t help that Blue is *totally* normal these days. Blonde’s comment is nonsensical – just today I was talking about how difficult it was to buy black lipstick after Halloween in 2002 but now you can go into any drugstore and buy it year round. Jenna Marbles, the blond prep queen of youtube, the GoGo Dancing, College Sports Playing, Clubby Girl queen herself wears demonia and black moon cosmetics. The extremely popular preppy girls in high school are getting mermaid ombre and rose gold dye jobs. Blue is saying that Blonde is boring but nothing about Blue seems all that weird, so her confidence that she’s the interesting one here seems misguided at best. Blue owns a “Normal People Scare Me” shirt and shares bratty Tinkerbelle memes on facebook. Blue took a quiz that told her she was a raven in a past life and when she shared it your data got passed on to Cambridge Analytica. Blue is the basic bitch of goths and so seeing her calling a basic girl boring makes you want to knock her down a peg. A box of Splat and a paperweight from Spencer’s don’t make you interesting, Megan. Yes we’ve all seen your my little pony skeleton tattoo, Emma.
Which is part of why what immediately struck me about this comic is exhaustion.
I’m so tired of hearing goths talk about how preps wear a uniform or
how it’s better to be alone like me than a clone like you (it’s almost as tired as pointing out that goths like to go out and be unique by wearing a lot of black together). It’s a comic
that feels old and predictable to me, a person who used to own a lot of
Emily the Strange merch and collected Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
comics.And I know there are still people out there who are still getting bullied for being goths and for whom this is a fresh, new pain. I know that there are a few kids for whom this kind of thing is still relevant. But it reads like a goth mom wrote a comic and tried to come hang out with the fellow teens.
(Also blue is extremely me in 2003-2006, my prime edgy teen years of being fucking awful to people at the slightest provocation. Yes, I was totally bullied, no my reaction of “fuck your family, fuck your life, you’re useless and stupid and will never amount to anything because you’re boring and small and destined for a life of quiet desperation, full of longing for things too foreign for you to even articulate” was not an appropriate response to being called Morticia.)
So like I’ve got some projection going on here but I think that’s part of where your split is.
Also kids, it’s always cool and totally okay to tell your bullies to fuck off. It’s a time-tested, evergreen way to tell someone they’re being an asshole. You don’t have to be nice to your bullies!
Yeah no, if someone *walks up to me* and says “why aren’t you like me?” I have a god given right to sass them. Not okay.
Also “people don’t do that to people for being goths any more” is generally true and this is great. We’re not coming right off a satanic panic nowadays and this is a vast relief.
But Tumblr has this… weird general opinion that people don’t ostracize people who are not like them, and anyone who says they don’t fit in is lying. It’s really weird and corrosive and gross and one of the reasons I’m beginning to think I need a break.
I mean it’s gotten to the point where I’ll be talking to my therapist and she’ll be like “it sounds like people rejected you a lot and you felt hurt” and I’ll be “no, not REALLY” “wait, what, why?” “well you’re never REALLY different, you’re not supposed to think that” “…I think you’re very different from the people you grew up around, and I think that wasn’t a bad thing” “oh I… I guess I think that too but…” “dude you’re gay kinky disabled gnc maybe trans and hyperlexic. Why do you think you’re not allowed to say you’re different?”
So yeah I hate this thing.
Yeah, this broad refusal to admit that people get ostracized, sometimes for little to no reason annoys me so much. No, in a lot of places, Blue is not normal. She would be very outside the norm in the town I grew up, for instance.
The other thing about “don’t say you’re not like the other girls” is, I mean, okay tumblr, I’m sure I share some traits in common with the people who ostracized me, but you still haven’t explained why I should focus on those traits and not the ones I don’t share with them…
But you should never express your ostracism/out of stepness because it, IDK, disrupts the sisterhood or something./s
Yeah. That’s what it feels like. “Oh, everyone loves tomboys these days so you were never treated badly for it in 1989.”
😤
Wtf kids
I was also neurodivergent and physically disabled. I wasn’t badass enough for it to give me social points. I was just “weird,” and even a little bit “creepy” because I couldn’t do eye contact right and when I tried, people thought I had an eerie stare that made them nervous.
I’m fine and generally accepted now, but that’s because I’m no longer in Educational Kid Jail, which I still maintain isn’t 100% horrible but *is* stress inducing enough to make quite a lot of people into tiny assholes.
“I’m not like other girls" was the way I found solace for being bullied for not preforming femininity correctly.
The backlash against it just makes me feel like the bullies have found a way to take that away fom other girl like me. Fuck that noise.
That’s how it feels to me too.
Me, too. I feel like sometimes there’s a heavy strain of “why can’t you be normal” in it, which. No. I gave up trying to be “normal” a long time ago, mostly because of people like you.
The other thing about “don’t say you’re not like the other girls” is, I mean, okay tumblr, I’m sure I share some traits in common with the people who ostracized me, but you still haven’t explained why I should focus on those traits and not the ones I don’t share with them…
But you should never express your ostracism/out of stepness because it, IDK, disrupts the sisterhood or something./s
Yeah. That’s what it feels like. “Oh, everyone loves tomboys these days so you were never treated badly for it in 1989.”
😤
Wtf kids
I was also neurodivergent and physically disabled. I wasn’t badass enough for it to give me social points.
I am now, but that’s because I’m no longer in Educational Kid Jail, which I still maintain isn’t 100% horrible but is stress inducing enough to make quite a lot of people into tiny assholes.
Exactly. I was never much of a tomboy, but I was quiet, shy, and bookish.
The other thing about “don’t say you’re not like the other girls” is, I mean, okay tumblr, I’m sure I share some traits in common with the people who ostracized me, but you still haven’t explained why I should focus on those traits and not the ones I don’t share with them…
But you should never express your ostracism/out of stepness because it, IDK, disrupts the sisterhood or something./s
My Facebook groups are blowing up over this image.
Blue is read as the bully/the not-nice one, and it’s read as “not like other girls” commentary pitting women against each other, despite the fact that Blue is responding to Blonde’s diss.
I really feel like I’m on a different planet from the Gen Zrs reacting to this image. It’s not even divisive because everyone else but me and the author, seems to see Blue as the asshole in this scenario.
My point is that Blue doesnt owe Blonde niceness at all, because Blonde wasn’t nice to begin with. A snarky comment is about what’s deserved and hers was a really Diet Coke one, which didn’t attack Blonde on the basis of any marginalized identity.
I’m seeing Blue as the one being picked on but Gen Zrs see Blonde as the victim, or the author as the jerk who is pitting women against each other.
I wonder if this is a generational thing.
I feel like Gen Z reads this as two equally mainstream mall shoppers trading quips, or even as a “basic”/“normie” being picked on by a sneering hipster, with the implication that the “normie” is the victim and the trendy girl is in the “in group.”
As a Gen Xr who grew up in the 80s in the San Fernando Valley, Blue would have been the member of the out group and Blonde would have been the socialite/“mean girl.” And Blue may have been drawn to her particular look and or crowd on account of othering and bullying by mainstream people to begin with. I feel like a lot of Gen X snark culture arose as a response to bullying and gaslighting by mainstream people and by Boomers/older, it was a psychological coping mechanism. Blue’s snarky comeback preserved her self esteem, and deflected the insult. It’s how I and a lot of my Gen X friends might have responded to a similar insult.
So anyway it’s interesting to me how apparently nobody younger than me reads this image as “appropriate response to some jerk just walking up and insulting you.”
*Epistemic status: completely half-baked, don’t take this as gospel or even as a real pronouncement*
I’m 24, and I’ve noticed similar rhetoric from people my age and younger. I think my generation took the backlash against “not like other girls” a bridge too far and wound up replicating the exact conditions “not like other girls” girls were responding to in the first place. “Don’t sneer at popular things just because they’re popular” (which, btw, I agree with) turned into “not liking popular things means you need to get over yourself”. In the name of celebrating women whose harmless interests get ripped to shreds, we’ve moved past basic reassurance and into a sort of…celebration of mediocrity. It’s harder and harder to find anything genuinely *original* in modern female youth culture, because it’s out of style. The anodyne “relatability” of group identity is what’s in. If you can’t tie your interests, your thoughts, your Self, to a broader schematic in some way, if you are genuinely and fundamentally individual, you need to get over yourself and get woke.
I have a post in my drafts about how I was super on board with ending girl hate when I still thought it meant “women should stop bullying other women” instead of what it apparently actually means, which is “women should stop resenting the women who bully them.”
This is what I’m talking about.
Wait, Blue is the mean one here?
I would never even have seen that reading. She was minding her own business being quiet with her little skull when Blonde walked up to her and said something judgmental.
Dude, wtf.
This is what I was talking about last night. Blue should not be seen as the “bad” one just because she’s out of step with the norm and expressing it.
And to continue the gender thing, I really don’t like how “not like other girls” has become this huge insult from the person saying it, who must be educated about how she, apparently, is too like other girls! Even though most people who say that do seem to be different from, at least, the stereotypical norm, and they feel like outsiders because of that. In middle and high school, I certainly felt like an outsider because I,well, wasn’t like most of the other girls at my school. It wasn’t some weird slam on them, it was an expression of feeling out of step.
http://wolffyluna.tumblr.com/post/177041231257/mikkeneko-ineffectualdemon
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, I feel like some people go too far in the other direction and champion traditional femininity to a point that even I, a fairly feminine person, doesn’t like it. No, not liking pink or makeup or any of that stuff is not a sign of internalized misogyny or anything that necessarily needs to be fixed. There’s a happy medium.
Sometimes I forget straight people exist? And honestly, every time I get a reminder I’m disappointed
I hate that this is the new “trendy” way to act. To talk about ourselves as so different and special, and better, than straight people.
Bitch we are.
….
This one of the many reasons why much of the older half of the “LGBT community” doesn’t fuck with the community anymore.
yep.
If you’re gonna be snotty to half my friends, we’re not gonna get along very well.
That, precisely.
Something I will never understand about this site is the way people react with surprise and disdain at the idea that straight people, who are most likely the majority of people in the world, exist. Like, it’s fine to live in a majority queer community, but that’s not gonna be the whole world and you’re just going to have to deal with that.
“Wait, most people are cis though!” is the thing that soured me on the version of this angry trans kids on Tumblr like.
I remember one person I was friends with who came out as nonbinary and suddenly every third post on their tumblr was “lol I’m so glad I’m not cis 🤣” and jokes about how boring and stupid cis people are and I just…
…I don’t like “you guys are just trenders” rhetoric and I don’t know this person’s gender journey, but I pretty strongly wondered if this was “I realized I’m not cis so now I can share memes a lot” or if it might actually have been “cis is lame so I’m not cis.”
I have wondered if the “queer/trans people are cool, straight/cis people are lame and horrible” rhetoric makes some people do that. Not enough to ask individuals, because that’s rude, but I do wonder about the trend.
The one thing I think terfs got right in the middle of being unhelpful screaming asshole meanies is that I actually think there IS pressure for faab people to identify as transmasc rather than as gnc women, especially if you’re someone who thinks either could apply to you and isn’t really sure.
I don’t think anyone meant to do this or that it’s a side effect of “trans cult ideology” and I actually think terf rhetoric makes it HARDER to figure shit out, not easier. But I do think the issue is real.
This will piss tumblr off but I often actually think it would be better, not worse, if trans and gnc people accepted each other more readily. It would be easier for questioning people to figure themselves out that way, I think.
I’m gender conforming enough that I don’t see a lot of that stuff, but I do think some people see gender as more sectioned off than others, if that makes sense, and it does make it hard for people.
lookashiny 