I Don't Think Gender Is Something Which Is Joyful, Any More Than I Consider Capitalism To Be Something

a friend is planning to read tlt and I need to resist the urge to say shit like “yeah idk Gideon’s relationship with Harrow is pretty fraught at the beginning and by the end of the first book she’s still kind of on the fence about it”

a lot of behaviors that get attributed to "female socialization" can be so much more easily and accurately understood as a person recognizing the power differential surrounding them and behaving sensibly in response to that.

like. does a woman politely listen to a man monologue at her because of some experience she had when she was twelve that magically cursed her to behave that way forever, or does she do it because the man has the power to hurt her and she knows it?

does a woman do all the dishes in her household because she is less capable of breaking out of a long-ago conditioned response than, like, your average trained dog, or is she doing that because she knows that all the men in the house will blame her if she doesnt and will make life worse for her if she speaks up?

maybe a lot of sexist patterns of behavior that are widely observed in society arent caused by women like, lacking willpower or backbone? maybe it is super fucking weird for supposedly feminist movements to imply this is the case when they talk about female socialization as the end all, be all of predicting human behavior?

isnt it both more useful and more respectful toward women to consider that they are perceiving their present circumstances accurately, and recognize when power is already being wielded against them, and take logical measures to deescalate and protect themselves because it works? is it not fucking clear to everybody that trans women in particular have to do this all the fucking time?

monkey’s sinister smile

poker face (2023) intro cards

Microdosing on court intrigue by being really cagey about what I do in my spare time for no good reason

Imaginal Disk is definitely my top contender for album of the year. I was semi-familiar with Magdalena Bay prior to its release and this really feels like they've elevated their sound into something genuinely unique genre/production wise. it's such a vivid, mesmerizing piece of art, I love it.

i really try to distinguish between being annoyed by semantic shifts in a pointless prescriptive way and being annoyed by semantic shifts because they make language less useful but whatever is happening to the word gentrification it's the latter

a bunch of trans mascs for some reason: "terfs hate all trans people equally! their rhetoric definitely doesn't cast trans fems as uniquely predatory and scary"

actual terfs:

The thing that really gets me is that a very large proportion (the majority?) of currently living, endangered indigenous American languages, at least in the US and Canada America, became endangered as a result of twentieth century policy and twentieth century developments. Residential schools, forced adoptions, and economic sabotage within the last century. And of course this is the case: languages that were already endangered 100 years ago are just dead now. But the point is that these historical wrongs are not wrongs of some distant past. The people fighting for the survival of their language here are not merely daydreaming about an imagined prelapsarian past. The are fighting for something that (depending on age) they or their parents personally experienced being robbed of. Tanadrin pointed out that the more time goes on, the harder historical wrongs are to right. This is the sort of historical wrong which is often in memory close enough that meaningful mitigation is possible.