omg so we have 1 seeing dog and 1 blind dog and whenever there’s a toy they both want, the seeing dog takes it and just…stands very still. immobile. she KNOWS he will try to wrestle it from her but she has figured out that if she does not squeak it, then he will not find it. leading to this.
“god….grant me the strength to not squeak the squeaky toy”
in the words of the great Elizabethan wordsmith William Shakespeare, in Hamlet Act IV Scene V, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” or, in the words of the great Twitter wordsmith @Horse_ebooks,
part of being an ally to trans men is not being a dick to cis men for their appearance btw
the short trans men hear you. the trans men with bottom growth—or who are post-phalloplasty—hear your bad jokes about small dicks. the trans men undergoing hrt who are losing their hair hear you talk shit about bald spots.
also, hot take, you should care about not hurting random cis men in addition to not hurting trans men. like just because some guy is being an asshole online doesn’t mean the thousands of young boys reading your comments about someone with their same acne deserved it. i don’t care what your reason is, even if you think someone is bad enough to warrant being bullied, who gave you permission to hurt the innocent bystander?
hey y’all should spread this version bc some people need to hear this context
we had a whole pearl-clutching fest last month debating whether or not we should laugh at billionaires killing themselves in their own deathtraps meanwhile media executives feel comfortable saying shit like “we’re just waiting for the people we’re exploiting to go homeless” with zero personal consequences. we need to stuff more billionaires into shitty submarines and laugh harder
Apparently some people think America Ferrera’s speech in the Barbie movie is “corny” or “obvious” or something like that. But here’s my personal perspective
First thing out of the way: I am nonbinary. I am not a woman. I am AFAB, though, and was therefore socialized like a girl and young woman, even if I felt like those words never really applied to me. Most of the time, though, other people who don’t know me will see me as a woman. It’s whatever.
No, this movie is not saying anything new. It is not a groundbreaking statement to say women face all these exhausting contradictions that cause them to bend over backwards to do the slightest thing.
But I don’t think it’s supposed to be groundbreaking. I don’t think most people at the Barbie movie are going to have a huge revelation because America Ferrera said something that never heard or thought before. In the context of the movie, the character is speaking to a literal doll who has only recently learned that the real world is kinda shitty for a lot of people. Because this doll is literally something little girls project on, and little girls very often grow into women who deal with this shit. Yes, this is feminism 101, because it’s speaking to a character who, until a day ago, lived in a matriarchal society where she never HAD to learn feminism 101. The oppression she faces is literally new to her!
And let’s not forget that this is being said by a Latina woman in a blockbuster film. How often do you see that? She describes herself as a “boring mom with a boring job,” and then she gets to rant about the fact that she’s expected to always be extraordinary, but at the end of it all, she just wants her daughter to love her back and have a good day. And because of that, she’s the hero of Barbieland!
Yes, it’s cheesy. No, it’s not subtle in the slightest. But sometimes, it’s nice to hear someone say the words out loud.
And honestly, if you’re going into the Barbie movie expecting subtlety, that’s on you.
ah spoilers but i genuinely think the majority of the real feminism actually happens in the final scenes of the movie, not in this part of the movie.
the “feminism 101” part of the movie, as you said - is still groundbreaking when a latina gets to say her piece to an actually-receptive crowd. nobody interrupts her. nobody shouts her down. she says her piece, and it’s correct, and it saves the day.
also (like you said!), in the context of the movie: these women never actually needed feminism 101 until then, because the influence of the patriarchy literally hadn’t even been known to the world. ken brings an invasive species into the world, one without any natural defenses. these women need basic feminism because they haven’t had to battle injustice in the same way. this is also notably not framed as the climax of the movie.
because i think the climax might be barbie - stereotypical barbie - turning away from an idyllic world of basic feminism … and accepting something else entirely. she has seen the humanity of the real world (that first moment with the old woman) and she knows it is loud and obnoxious and strange and complicated. and then she turns to her creator (a woman!), and she asks her creator: can i be a person?
feminism 101 is “it is hard to be a lady!” and “i am woman, hear me roar!” …and it is still occasionally exceptionality. it is still assuming we are all powerful and smart and brave and supermom whatever else. but sometimes you are just 30 and bad at math and you’re still a fucking person. feminism isn’t just “women can be presidents” it’s women can be failures. they can be cruel, manipulative, violent. because women are humans.
a woman’s personhood shouldn’t rely on how palatable she is. you shouldn’t have to be white and thin and pretty and pouty with bouncy hair and margot’s face in order to be taken seriously. being a woman is also the “”“"ugly”“”“ parts that men fucking hate thinking about - being a woman is also hair caught in a zipper and eye gunk and sweat stains and and blood chunks and cellulite and ripped earlobes and yes going to the gynecologist.
the final scene of the movie isn’t a woman who accepts her role as president or who is gleefully ready to try to rebuild society: it’s a human person having to deal with her human body. it is her Creator giving her the same choice she was given at the start of the movie - perfection, feminism 101, the ideal! … or mortality, and just having to be a person inside of the patriarchy, every single fucking day.
and this time… barbie chooses the world where it is hard, and ugly, and painful. she chooses the hard way.
and that’s a kind of feminism i think… like. might have gone unnoticed. that’s all i am trying to say.
Idea for a Generic Medieval Fantasy Setting: The characters refer to their nameday as an apparent stand-in for birthdays, celebrating it annually according to their respective preferences and perhaps family customs, as one does. People talk about things that happened before someone’s time as having gone down “before you were named”, someone grievously insults an opponent on the battlefield by going “your mother should never have named you.” So with the way naming is always talked about, as a reader you start to somewhat assume from context clues that these people have some sort of a taboo about the word “birth” or something, and naming is used as some sort of an euphenism to avoid naming the process in which people come into the world.
Then somewhere halfway through the story it turns out that in this setting, people aren’t named immediately after being born. This is a semi-realistic-gritty fantasy setting, after all. Due to the somewhat high infant mortality, to at least somewhat soften the blow of potentially losing a child, babies just aren’t named before the parents are pretty confident that the kid is going to survive. The naming ceremony is where a baby is officially aknowledged as an entire individual, a member of the family and a legally existing person, instead of just a gurgling extension of the mother who may or may not disappear from this world. And that timespan between birth and being named is - depending on the situation and the family - somewhere between 1-4 years.
And suddenly the whole bunch of annoyingly-too-mature teenagers and other weird remarks about age start making sense in hindsight. The heroine protagonist who celebrated her 16th nameday at the start of the story is actually 19 years old. The wild difference in maturity between two characters who were both named the same year wasn’t just a difference in backgrounds, The Rich Idiot isn’t just rosy-cheeked and naive due to being sheltered growing up, but actually literally years younger than a peasant “of the same age”. A character who’s sickly and was frequently remarked to look much older than their years hasn’t just been harrowed by their illness, but was not named before the age of seven because their parents didn’t think they’d survive.
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