there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again

which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo

someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.

you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.

and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.

the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.

oooo yes absolutely!

was just talking to Story about this and he told me about one folktale where a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake and she brings a bountiful dowry of like one million fat cows and such and she is of course a fairy so she's like "my one requirement in our bargain is that if you strike me three times I will leave" and in many versions of the story the husband doesn't ""actually"" strike her -- each time it's something like, one 'strike' involves her forgetting her gloves inside and he walks out and taps her on the shoulder with her gloves, but she tells him that counts as striking her. this sort of thing. which is TRANSPARENTLY like "whoa wouldn't it be fucked up if your wife could enforce consequences for behavior she said was harmful, even if according to your cultural norms it was fine, and you didn't see it as a big deal?" like... lol. what if women could actually be the ones who decided whether or not any given action their husbands took against them was harmful? IMAGINE... PREDEY SCARY....

Someone will say "as a queer person in the heart of empire, my life is in danger every day" and you'll find out they're a developer for Amazon and live in San Francisco or Seattle or some shit, and then you'll meet a trans girl from Alva, OK who's like "Yeah, things are pretty good. AutoZone moved me to full-time."

Someone in a queer group in my current blue city said that they didn't like expressions of solidarity because it "diluted their oppression".

#That's what I mean when I say the foundation of feminism and queer community should not fixate on victimhood #Once you feel that our suffering is our shared experience an not our love then our suffering becomes vital to the culture #I don't want a culture where suffering is vital #I want a culture where love is celebrated #The suffering is an imposition not a prerequisite #And yeah I sure fucking hope our oppression is diluted bitch you WANT us freebasing the uncut shit???

Protip you can do this with writing too

[Image description: a two-panel comic titled “My Art Evolution”. In the first panel, labeled “Past”, a beelike person frowns at a drawing of a happy sun and says “Oh no. It isn’t perfect no one can ever see this”. In the right panel, labeled “Present”, the person holds up the same drawing, and with a sly jokester expression (which includes a nose), says “He he. Who wants to see my new eye crime”. /End description.]

is this anything

I hate ruminating on what could have been. Out here thinking "if only I locked in when I was 13" are we serious

WHAT ABOUT THE FIRE!!

"I want children to suffer" is the ultimate flex by red-pilled conservative anti-feminist dorks who are equally racist when screeching about birth rates dropping.

MAGA boomers SHOCKED by 20y/o commie speaking fluent hog

Hog 201 for anyone interested in trying this:

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.

everybody leaving tags on my letterboxd roundup like "they didn't do the nobody scene??" we're so fucking past that i need you to catch up. i went into the movie knowing they wouldn't do the nobody scene and frankly i had made peace with it like okay if you don't want odysseus calling himself outis because you don't feel like the joke translates well enough WHATEVER you dont need to film every line of the poem. what i was NOT prepared for is that THEY DON'T SPEAK TO POLYPHEMUS AT ALL. they don't steal a giant wheel of cheese, they don't get him drunk, odysseus doesn't taunt him after their escape, AND he doesn't cry out to poseidon or the other cyclopes on the shore. it's "revealed" that he can speak in the cave before their escape as he prays to poseidon. someone asks odysseus "should we try to reason with him?" and ODYSSEUS says "we're past that." resulting in an adaptation where odysseus does not use wit or trickery to escape polyphemus at all-- which is the case with every single obstacle he meets. this guy does not lie and he does not play tricks. his intelligence is restricted to battlefield tactics, the administration and direction of his men as units. You have to poke polyphemus so he opens his eye before you can stab it! I am very smart. the only point at which he could be described as "tricking" polyphemus is when-- because the movie is allergic to making odysseus look stupid or silly in any way-- they tie straw to their backs to be mistaken for sheep instead of riding the undersides of the sheep, and we are presented with an action sequence of trousered and armored soldiers somersaulting and army crawling under polyphemus' gently dangling hand. which i hate because it is a less clever solution that only works if polyphemus is extremely stupid (shepherd who doesn't know how many sheep he has) -- and more importantly because it removes IMO the most emotionally efficient moment in the odyssey, which is polyphemus talking to the one sheep that's walking slow because it has odysseus on its belly like "oh no are you feeling okay today? you're moving so slow, maybe you're upset because i'm in pain? you're the best sheep in the world and i love all of you my sheeps" like that scene is supposed to instantly retroactively humanize polyphemus and make you realize odysseus has been torturing a person with feelings who basically just wants to be left alone with his pet sheep and it's extremely good at that in every translation i've ever read. but not one of odysseus' enemies are allowed an inch of humanity in this entire adaptation which seems to be a veiled metaphor for the vietnam war so what can you expect. and yes because odysseus never does anything wrong or stupid or silly, OF COURSE he would never reveal his name and allow polyphemus to curse him, and his crew only "believes" that he's been cursed by poseidon thereafter, which removes the ENTIRE MAIN ANTAGONIST of the story and changes the central conflict from man vs. god to man vs. ????

your average unconventional cartoon family at the beach 🏖

Yo it's from those pictures of Chris Hemsworth with his son vs. Robert Downey Jr. with his daughter. Very nice solid 12/10

Do you know how far back I had to scroll to find this comment? Nobody else seemed to recognize it?

I'm so glad you did. Definitely a 12/10.

Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you

Free service with no ads: Okay so these guys are stealing my data

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

As lovelyshananigans says, "intersectionality, babes"

@sarumans

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

if you’re wondering why spellcheck and grammar check is worse now, it’s because they replaced it with AI! 🥰

now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.

ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!

people make the same spelling and grammar mistakes so often, AI thinks that’s the way you say it because it is a PATTERN DETECTOR and cannot THINK let alone use language.

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"