Essay Links Pinned Post

For the sake of having everything in one place. This post will be edited as I continue to upload.

Monogatari Series

Fate/Stay Night

i think sometimes people see a story thats hammy or overacted or dramatic or just generally kind of over-the-top, and somehow fail to process this as an intentional effect and instead just go like 'haha this show is so silly' which leads to the most backhanded praise of all time

'oh the plot is such a mess, but it's an enthralling mess', 'im just enjoying the trainwreck', etc.

like you're very straightforwardly just enjoying the thing for the reasons that you're supposed to enjoy it but then act like you've somehow got one over it in your head because the way its presented doesn't read as high art so you have to try and appreciate it from an ironic distance

this is kind of the main takeaway most people seem to have from the book and i do find it pretty reasonable

Softblocking is pretty much strictly worse than blocking for real I feel like

I have to say she is not cooking with a lot of this

Very funny to me that her knock-down argument against social constructivism is basically "if gender is constructed so well why isn't everyone cis?"

Weird line of argument from Serano here I think.

Like I appreciate that trans narratives are often exploited by scholars but that doesn't mean they offer no particular use at all to exploring the theory of gender.

I also simply do not see how 'picking apart' the gender identity of a cis person would be interpreted as offensive or equivalent to misgendering on any level. No doubt some people would get angry at the idea that mens' hobbies and relationships are affected by gendered socialisation but it seems a fairly tame point on the whole.

This isnt rendering their gender identities 'suspect' it is merely trying to explain them, unless you think any theory of gender that doesn't hold some form of naturalism would be somehow invalidating.

Maybe I just don't understand Serano's concept of 'degendering' that well because I feel like 'erasure' or 'exploitation' would have been more useful for this chapter.

There's actually more I could add to that post but I think it's a bit much for something public lol

something v funny about how fetishes/sexual content also vary greatly with the culture of internet spaces

never heard of clicker training before recently

Just saw one of those fucking posts that are like

> "I love evil women" and you can't even handle women who do X

But it was talking about something that women do in real life

That's not the evil women I love! They have to be from an eroge or something!

Slightly controversial take I suppose but I think in real life people typically find evil things to be evil, and don't love them

its wild that theres vast swathes of people who never shut up about how 'fiction affects reality' when 'reality affects fiction' is more true more important and more obviously neglected by every fandombrained dipshit on the internet

I think this is a really interesting distinction to make because for Serano a cis person can very well experience transphobia as a result of expressing their gender differently from others, they still have the "cissexual privilege" of simply saying 'my gender should be respected because it's not trans'

Which is the actual reason btw, it's nothing to do with biology it's simply the belief that if someone's gender differs from what they were assigned at birth it's less valid

Also the inevitable result of the distinction she makes between transsexual (binary trans ppl) and transgender (nonbinary, intersex, other genderqueer ppl etc.) leads to such nonsense as the transgender-identified AFAB person having cissexual privilege over trans women