Also like taking obsessive care of a lawn is masculine but gardening is feminine? So like grass is the plant it’s manly to take care of? WHY? WHY IS GRASS MANLY?

Also IDK it’s interesting to me

that an interest in murder/crime (real and fictional) is a heavily feminine gendered thing.

Women Are Human, Capable Of As Much Good and As Much Evil As Men

The idea that women are better than men (less violent, kinder, more nurturing etc) is misogynist because it excuses men’s bad behavior and holds women to a more rigid behavioral standard than men.

The idea that you can give women power over men and trust them not to abuse it the way men do power over women is bullshit and implies women are as passive and gentle as the patriarchy wants them to be and creates opportunities for abusers to abuse with impunity.

Also like I identify myself as a woman politically

Because that is the gender people generally tidy me into, not because it is one I feel comfortable in. If I could edit my physical self so that I could always feel comfortable I would, but I can’t.

I’m trapped and it sucks.

I pass through the world perceived as a woman, and so materially I am one, I guess. It sucks though, beyond just the suckiness of dealing with misogyny.

I Find It Annoying That We Default To “Sire” for The Vampire Who Made Someone A Vampire

Regardless of gender. Like we tend to default to the masculine and use that as the gender neutral and that sucks, like calling everybody “sir” in 90s Star Trek.

Why can’t we ever use the feminine as the gender neutral default.

Fuckit, I say from now on we call them dams instead.

What’s Good Stuff About Gender, Class and Race specifically in the US

Cause like there are a lot of heavily classed and gendered forms of anti-black racism I see and I’m having trouble finding stuff that includes class explicitly in its analysis and like classism in the US is heavily gendered and racialized

Like working class femininity scares the fuck out of the bourgeois for some reason

Otherwise they wouldn’t expend so much time regulating and mocking prole women’s expressions of femininity, and so much time on policing prole men’s masculinity, like gnc dudes are only ever depicted at all if they’re bougie or villainous.

and like think about it, the effete aristocrat dude doesn’t scare them, doesn’t shock the system really, but street queens and the new york dolls are some rumbling revolutionary undercurrent that terrify people

I Feel Like Gender Abolitionists (who aren’t shitty trans misogynists, and they exist, and some are trans women) and People Who Want Recognition For The Infinite Number Of Possible Genders

Want basically the same thing, cause like zero or infinity the material result should be basically the same, like non-gendered bathrooms (because you can’t have infinite bathrooms, and if gender doesn’t exist you can’t gender a bathroom) and the abolition of gender roles (too many to keep track of, or gender doesn’t exist) and yeah?

Like ultimately whether you believe that gender should be a space of infinite possibility, or that gender should be abolished to make room for infinite possibility in terms of ways of being, like it’s basically the same thing.

Infinite genders or no gender results in the same material conditions of a lack of gendering of anything because either it’s too hard to keep track of and not seen as a way of sorting people into a group or it doesn’t exist.

Or maybe I’m wrong and bad.

Masculinity as absence also makes the fact that masculinity feels constantly threatened make sense

Because it’s a blank space, and feels sort of “nature abhors a vacuum” but filling it with anything would be feminine? That sounded wrong. Heh male anxieties about penetration

Masculinity As Absence

Also I don’t have a really good terminology for talking about the thing I’m about to talk about, but I think it’s kind of important, which is that like I think femininity and masculinity are defined kind of like this in this culture.

I don’t have good words for this, so bear with me, so there are things that aren’t exactly culturally defined masculinity or femininity, sets of stuff that are associated with masculinity and femininity but work in a slightly weird way. So like masculinity is associated with force, toughness, violence, humor, logic, and so on. Femininity is associated with aesthetics, nurture, diplomacy and so on.

I’m going to refer to these as Set A (force, toughness, etc) and Set B (aesthetics, nurture, diplomacy)

Anyway, I think and I think set A and set B exist independently, as in it’s not a sliding scale from one to the other.

Like you can have high set A and high set B, high set A and low set B, low set A and low set B, or none of either or medium amounts or any number of variations, the point is that they don’t correlate to each other.

BUT I think that masculinity in our society as it stands means having medium to high set A, and ideally no set B at all.

Whereas femininity is still considered femininity as long as you have high set B, and as long as that’s true you can actually have a fuck ton of set A.

I don’t think femininity is the absence of “masculine” set A characteristics, I think masculinity is the absence of femininity.

Femininity socially exists as a presence, you put a pink bow on anything and it becomes “girly” but you can add as many spikes to a lipstick tube as you want and it’s still feminine. Masculinity is an absence.

Am I making sense?

Androgyny seems to be “low to medium set A, little to no set B” because the presence of more than trace amounts of femininity makes something immediately get seen as feminine.