Primaprimaprima
No bio...
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
12hr ago
“Troon” simply is a slur, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there. Has nothing to do with phonetics. It’s just… that’s what it is. I don’t have a complete theory of how a word becomes a slur or what makes a word a slur, but, we can recognize them when we see them.
“Trans person” seems to work perfectly fine to me as a neutral term.
BRUH.
#FreeDase.
And #FreeHlynka too while we're at it.
I will again go on the record and say that I think that permabans simply should not exist (especially for such valuable posters), although I've accepted that the mods don't agree.
Eventually we're going to get to the point where we've banned everyone who doesn't just talk about zoning laws and HOAs and local elections.
Primaprimaprima
13hr ago
One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time
Most people don't know the half of it!
The term "gaze" that would go on to inspire the film/media studies concept of the "male gaze" was originally introduced by Lacan in his Seminar XI. Lacan was interested in exploring the way in which there's always a reciprocal interplay between observer and observed: you distort the image you receive (unconsciously), and the image in turn distorts you. The street goes both ways. There's no "I'm the Subject and I'm looking at you like an Object so haha I win" because that way of thinking is thoroughly un-psychoanalytic.
In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constiuted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it — that is what we call the gaze.
[...]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty points this out, that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi. Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which, following Merleau-Ponty, I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this?
The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seing. This is the phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing. At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.
The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic — it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.
Any originality or nuance that may have once existed in the concept was excised by the Studies crew so that it could be turned into a political cudgel.
Primaprimaprima
17hr ago
No rush! But if you do have a reply to the other thread I would love to read it.
Primaprimaprima
17hr ago
I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since the migration already.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
The disclaimer about trans people was mostly because we just had like 3 other threads about trans people lol.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Well, it’s perhaps not interesting in the way that we expect “literary” characters to be interesting, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon in its own right. (I’m also not surprised to hear that she was like that. I feel that it shows in your own writing/thinking style.)
As I alluded to with my comments about “complexity”, something I often wonder about is how many people are actually “normal” vs “interesting”. Normal in the sense of, no significant mental disturbances, no real hidden corridors in the psyche to speak of, just… livin’ life and doin’ fine. I know such people exist, I’m acquainted with some. Hypercompetent people are strictly speaking not normal because most people are not hypercompetent, but they’re at least normal in the sense that they probably don’t have significant mental baggage weighing them down (otherwise, it would probably show in their behavior and outlook).
I have no concept of what it would be like to live a life that’s not wracked by anxiety and excessive self-reflection, so people who simply take action as their default mode of being are fascinating specimens to me.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
That post expresses my thoughts perfectly, yes.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
Hannah is the best structural engineer at the firm, and the character pays for it. She's lonely, or her marriage failed, or there's a paragraph somewhere in chapter 3 where she wonders what she gave up for her career. Her competence arrives with an invoice billed to her personal life. Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one. Tony is good at what he does and the book lets that be simple and straightforward.
[...]
Once the book has established that her skill costs her something, the skill stops being a pleasure and turns into a wound and readers stop enjoying her being good at things and start worrying for her, which contradicts why anybody wanted a competent FMC leading the book to begin with.
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
Insufferable Hedging: "Sorry, I just, I think maybe we should wait?" "Sorry", "just", "I think", "maybe", and a question mark sitting on a sentence that isn't a question. That's five softeners in nine words. This is a slightly less common issue I see in manuscripts, but it's worth discussing here. This is also nuanced because some real women do speak this way and inspire these characters in our books. That's ok. But make sure it's really an integral part of the character you're writing and that you're not overdoing it.
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It: This one is an audit at the book level. List every named woman in your manuscript. For each one, write a single sentence saying what she wants [you think "what a person wants" can be reduced to a single sentence?? - ed.]. Then look at how many of those sentences have another character's name in them. Here's what it usually looks like. Kate wants Adam to forgive her. Taylor wants to protect her sister. Nicole wants her mother to finally admit something. And then the men. Jake wants the promotion. Tony wants to get out of town. Riley wants to save the world. Every one of those is a real want or goal, and none of them are bad desires, but it's a pattern only visible when the list is sitting in front of you. What this does over the whole book is leave the reader feeling like the men are driving the plot and the women are responding to or serving the cast as a whole.
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Does the FMC want anything when the MMC isn't in the room? If the answer is "nothing at all", then she exists to fall in love, and readers feel that flatness in the character.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
I’m still in the “nothing ever happens” camp unless there’s a literal apocalypse (either ASI scifi world or the literal extinction of humanity). Everything else just washes out in the end and adds up to normal.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Well now I'm kinda curious. Do you think being a woman is that much worse than being a man? (I don't want to draw you into a long obnoxious argument, I just want to make sure I'm properly understanding you.)
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.
I mean, let me just ask: do you really think that there's so little to recommend in the lives of half of all humanity, approximately 4 billion people, that no rational actor, under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, could ever want to be one of them?
If you do believe that to be the case, then the logical corollary is that you should become the most ardent of committed feminist activists. Alleviating their suffering would surely be the most pressing of political issues.
(I'm intentionally being a bit glib, but, what you said could be interpreted in that way.)
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries
Yes.
I'm actually mostly ok with saying that transsexuality is a mental illness. On the one hand, from a certain perspective that's literally what it is: it's an abnormal neurological development that causes adverse health effects, most notably to the reproductive system. On the other hand, I want to stress that it's not merely a mental illness. An individual's reasons for wanting to transition, or wanting to be the opposite gender, can be very complex and multifaceted, and they can go beyond a simple "my body just doesn't feel right". The "wrong body map" theory is a convenient and digestible PR narrative that the trans community can use to explain the phenomenon to normies and make it more medically legitimate, but it only covers a small portion of people's actual experiences.
I do think that the neuroscience underlying transsexuality differs in crucial ways from the neuroscience underlying other types of body dysmorphia, but I don't know the current state of research in this area and I have no way of directly proving it, and at any rate it's a largely academic question.
Regarding the references to amputation, I feel compelled to note, contra Freud, that a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis; it is its own organ, it's just as much of a positive presence as a penis is. The ideal for MTFs is not to engage in a simple act of self-destruction, but to trade one functioning sexual organ for another (current surgical techniques, of course, cannot actually achieve this, but can only provide a facsimile of it).
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Bro I'm gonna be deadass honest with you, there are a lot of freaks who are just gonna hang out in the bathroom and listen to women fart and piss if we don't have separate bathrooms. But if women are cool with that then sure, tear down those walls.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
To be clear, I personally believe that the criteria for membership in a gender category is relatively straightforward, and I believe that most other people believe this too, even if they claim not to. A man is an adult human male with XY chromosomes that produces sperm. A woman is an adult human female with XX chromosomes that produces eggs. A few edge cases don’t impugn the general validity of the definition. Everyone knows this, including trans activists, probably.
I don’t believe that SRS as it currently exists is capable of changing someone from one gender to the other. But, given that these matters are so deeply intertwined with matters of personal identity, I can understand why some people would opt for the “next best thing”, even if it’s not perfect.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:
-
Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.
-
Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.
I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).
I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
The language.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
I’m not a furry at all and have basically never interacted with that community, so you’d have to ask them.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
It's unreasonable to think watching Madoka Magica can induce this in otherwise genetically healthy individuals.
Holy shit lmao. I’m stealing that one.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation.
I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.
If someone could wish for all these things, then why couldn’t they wish to be the opposite gender as well? Is it so much of a stretch?
And if you can accept the comprehensibility of that sort of wish, then I don’t think the comprehensibility of SRS is too much of a stretch, although I absolutely understand why many people would evaluate that the drawbacks are not worth the benefits, and that it might be considered odd or disconcerting for that reason.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation
Sure. But
-
Themes of transformation and metamorphosis are incredibly common throughout fiction (not to mention throughout biological reality), in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. So it’s not particularly surprising that three randomly selected stories touch on those themes.
-
Undoubtedly, fantasies of transformation are very common among both boys and girls. And those fantasies might be inspired by fiction media. But isn’t the average little boy more likely to fantasize about transforming into something, y’know, male? A stronger man? Or maybe at least just self-inserting as the male hero in the show? What could explain the fact that a very small minority of boys go off in a completely random and unexpected direction and fantasize about transforming into women instead? Nothing in the show itself (given the examples we’re talking about). Which is why I hypothesize that some of them simply have a latent disposition to think this way, due to biological factors.
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re getting at with this whole section. Pick any randomly selected battle shounen written for a young male audience (especially one made before 2010) and the female characters will clearly be less important and less capable than the male characters who actually drive the plot forward.
To the extent that you’re picking up on a real pattern, it’s just art imitating life. Yes, an attractive woman is socially desirable and she can convince others to actively work towards soothing her anxieties, by virtue of the fact that she is an attractive woman. That’s not anime propaganda, that’s just reality.
one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life.
You mean… the exact same sorts of sexual fantasies that cis women have?
I don’t know how familiar you are with erotic fiction written by-cis-women-for-cis-women, but the exact same themes of subservience, of being “owned”, of courting favor and protection from those stronger than you, are extraordinarily common. This is just how feminine sexuality works. Usually not presented in such an overtly fetishistic way, of course. Although they sometimes are. I’ve certainly come across puppygirl stories for cis women too.
Some people naturally gravitate towards a supporting role. Many of those people are either women, or would prefer to be women. All of this is wholly unsurprising to me.
To be honest, I think your incredulity at the idea that some people could be born gay or trans (or at least be born with underlying factors that predispose them to that sort of developmental pathway) is just the rightist version of the leftist incredulity at the idea that some people are born stupid and violent. People love biology when it supports their ideology, and then they reach for “social construction” when it doesn’t. I simply consistently remain on the side of biology in all cases.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Well I thought we were in agreement that autistic men were overrepresented among MTFs at least, and therefore it would be pertinent to analyze things from that angle.
There are of course non-autistic transitioners too.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
The Republican midterm strategy has been to repeatedly yell transgender and immigration over and over and over again at voters like the 9/11 family guy skit, hoping to get people to look past the financial disaster/corruption/etc.
If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up? Why not just capitulate and become anti-trans and anti-immigration so there will be nothing more to talk about, and we can get onto important issues like economics and corruption?
The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
I mean, if it is anti-trans, it's not for these reasons. This is a very common emotional beat in AGP erotica (meaning, stories that are very explicitly written by AGPs for AGPs). The psychological discomfort is part of the eroticism, it would be too boring if the guy was just totally ok with it right from the start. "Oh nooo I've been turned into a girl, this is so strange and alien, whatever shall I doooo". But of course the guy (usually) comes to like and accept it by the end.
I know there was a chapter later in the manga where Mahiro was visibly uncomfortable when his dick spontaneously regrew, beyond what would be required by simple practical concerns about being "found out".
Frankly, I think it's structurally analogous to how in erotica for straight women, the female character is often just a little bit reluctant before the action starts. "I mean I'm not reallllly into it, and he's kiiiinda pissing me off, and oh who am I kidding yes I'm totally into it haha". Sometimes, you'd just rather feel like you're being coerced into it (even though the final act is ultimately enthusiastically voluntary); the "detour" is important for the eroticism.
That route was fire I'm so mad that it wasn't longer.
My hopes of her getting DLC have unfortunately dropped to zero at this point.
Well the "sense" is that it was just a pretext so we could see her acting like a dommy mommy to Takumi.
More options
Context Copy link