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A Look into Hickman, wherein a Sensitive Young Man discovers the positional utility of money
Link the relevant tweet
I've written about Hickman before because I find him to be a very interesting character. This is a man who was purposefully homeless for years, a self-described constantly drunk anarchist, who then joined the coast guard to clean up his act, become a kind of hardcore catholic that doesn't quite fit neatly into the Online RadTrad mold, got married, had a kid, and now, apparently, self-supports via writing online. He's also something of budding real estate investor.
And although he still "hates money" he just can't deny that it's got some pretty nice features; like being able to live in good neighborhoods where your kids are safe as well as being able to choose the rough outline of your socio-political environment.
Hickman's journey isn't unique overall. It's definitely got a lot of color to it, of course. I see it, however, as a pretty normal process of becoming aware of second order social effects. As kids, we're inherently self-focused. Adolescence brings some awareness of things outside of ourself. Young adulthood continues that up to family formation. For most, however, it takes the actual having of children to ignite thoughts about the beliefs, behaviors, and opinions of larger groups of strangers.
Being 25 and single or dating means I have more or less complete control (or perceived control - memetic influence is for a different thread) over the ideas I let effect me. But a parent realizes that short of keeping their children locked up in the basement, their ability to totally control the kid's ideological intake is far from complete.
It's unremarkable to point out that what happens next is people use a combination of money and social organization to choose and maintain the ideological ecosystems within which their children live. Money can get you access to the right zip codes and/or private schools and clubs / sports. Social organization can get the right (wrong?) books banned from the public libraries, and the right (wrong?) drag queen story hour performers. Enter the ongoing culture war.
The interesting thing, to my mind, that Hickman's post illustrates is the reach of these topics. Hickman, although not living on the street anymore, is certainly on the fringe of "normal" society. He's a very-online yet pseudo Amish dirtbag Catholic who lives in dying upstate NY. Yet is talking in the same direction that leads to HOAs, school boards, zoning, planned communities and all the other things that are top of mind for the most milquetoast suburbanites. Short of a true EXIT mentality, you can't not be in the culture war.
And I think there's something useful here to contemplate in terms of the very Vibes based general feeling of anxiety that generates thousands of thinkpieces across main stream and alternative media and internet outlets. If many of us feel like non-voluntary conscripts in the culture war, it follows that we're fighting the war just to survive and get back home. But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?" There's no 40 acres and a Good Wife (TM) to walk with into the sunset. The HOA has problems with our lifestock and Wifey is at therapy and thinks we need to have a conversation about emotional labor. Or, for my progressive friends, the need to return that 40 acres to the indigenous rightful owners is really getting difficult because of the tax implications of the real estate sale and my polycule keeps breaking up while I'm talking to my lawyer.
Of course I'm having a little fun here, but the point stands; the political dream of the West post World War 2 was that a mix of economic and political liberality could ultimately result in an appreciable degree of autonomy for, at least, an individual if not a family. That no longer seems the case and there's been no real alternative identified. On the left, it's a kind of utopic socialism that can't ever actually work. On the right it's a very vibes based "RETVRN" ethos with some nihilstic streaks.
An FYI re: Hickman’s claim: it doesn’t seem like income is a foolproof way of preventing transgenderism per a 2025 study. $50,000 to <$75,000 household income has about same odds as $200,000 or higher. Probably the best bet is to ban effeminate anime at home and give child a more exciting identity and “quest” to latch onto in adolescence. I looked and there doesn’t appear to be a relationship with religiosity in household either.
FtM or MtF transgenderism? These are meaningfully different things.
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
I suspect it’s that people with autism are drawn to anime for some reason, and that population also transitions at a much higher rate. Any idea if that was corrected for in the study?
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It's almost certainly more porn than anime, but you obviously can't bring up porn when coming out to your parents.
Unless you're Andrea Long Chu maybe.
Judging by the sheer quantity of anime avatars I see among the online trans, I rrally think it's the anime. I've personally witnessed the anime -> furry -> trans pipeline, but have never heard of porn being a major part of anyone's trans origin story.
Not that I necessarily think it's the anime itself that does it (though a genre where nearly all men look like ladyboy twinks and nearly all women look like 13 year old schoolgirls can't be particularly healthy for a developing sexuality). It's that anime as a subculture attracts a lot of mentally ill weirdos.
There has been a Dirtbag Left meme for more than a decade at this point that dissident right-wing - and, of course, 'transphobic' - online chuds and trolls usually select anime avatars, usually female ones. I think the reason given was that they see anime as counter-cultural or at least not mainstream in present-day liberal America. I don't think there's a deeper reason for any of this other than the intent to signal membership in a counterculture.
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I think you have the causation backwards. Trans are men who want to become women. It makes sense for them to have female avatars online. It makes extra sense that these avatars are not real 3d women. That leaves anime girl avatars. In a cartoon world, maybe they could be a cartoon girl. As for me, I use it for a different reason, which is that it is pleasing to look at, and also somewhat funny. Did watching anime cause me to feel that way, or is it innate and anime is downstream of my instincts?
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If you spend a lot of time home alone on the internet, odds are you get into anime.
A lot of transgender people are introverts and tend to stay inside. Naturally you get an overlap.
I would imagine that there could be a correlation between heavy use of certain social media and transness. The more time you spend online, the greater the odds that you notice a trans subreddit or trans discord or trans-positive streamer. If you become part of such a community, I can only imagine the chance of transitioning goes up.
So spending a lot of time online leads to more time on social media AND more time watching anime and playing vidya. But only one of these lead to transitioning.
They are also usually reluctant to socialize with normies, this feeling also being mutual, I think.
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You may be right. I have no way of knowing which way the causality moves (if any). I just notice that there seems to be a pretty linear relationship between the sexual weirdness of a given online community and the proportion of anime characters in people's avatars/bios. Most of the people I've met in real life who are either trans or some flavor of nonbinary are unusually into anime.
It's possible I'm letting my biases get the best of me and I'm just carelessly lumping trans people and otaku into an overly broad "sex weirdos" bucket. But as someone who is not a fan of anime, I can't help but notice how much overlap there seems to be between the two communities. Then again, you could make the same argument for dungeons and dragons, for example (thanks Dimension 20!), and maybe I just notice it less because I actually like DnD.
Are you perhaps actually noticing that the many trans people are autistic? That would explain those specific hobbies at least.
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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).
Regarding furries I'm guessing the pipeline is not anime -> furry but maybe anime cosplayer -> furry specifically maybe?
I’m not a furry at all and have basically never interacted with that community, so you’d have to ask them.
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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:
Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
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. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, 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. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
This is pareidolia. Any story where a character gets more powerful could be described this way, the only difference being that in animation it's also done visually.
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There is nothing trans here, in fact pokemon is gender-essentialist with its in-game breeding system and sexual dimorphism in many species. Evolution tends to track growing up, for example Charmander is a baby lizard and turns into a powerful masculine dragon lizard. Kind of like how the 8 year old boys the show is aimed at might turn into strong, powerful men. Charmander does not put on a dress and decide he wants to be Misty.
Goku was so ripped and cool that he made me want to lift weights when I was 12, the opposite of a sex change. I am not sure what this has to do with becoming trans.
again, they are not magical but rather innate and predictable based on baby traits. Goku fell out of a space ship and had a tail. He obviously was not a normal human from day 1. He only found out he comes from powerful racial heritage. If anything this will produce fascists or elitists and not transsexuals.
This is western stuff made for LGBTQ folks, not anime.
The only cool female character I can think of is Frieren, which is literally her name ... but she's not the coolest in the series. In male oriented romance series, which have tons of girls on screen, the girls are goofy and the guy is the coolest, usually. In female oriented romances, the guy is super cool because he's supposed to be really attractive to the main girl. In Frieren, Sein and Himmel are far cooler. Women generally are not cool. Maybe if I were naturally trans I would think otherwise, and it's all in the eye of the beholder, though.
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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.
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.
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.
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I think this is brilliant.
What I would add is that your phrase "magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers. It is both the biological reality of puberty and the narrative logic of progressing from child to adult. "Young adult" media inherently concerns the realization of conflict in the world and the boy's need to become a man. (The Pokemon anime is fundamentally for children because the world is basically good and the conflict is all in good fun, with occasional exceptions. The games are closer to puberty media.)
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Is it really that high now?
I thought it had more to do with Homestuck's fascination with alternative sexualities. If I remember correctly by the end of the original story there were maybe two main characters left who were not at least ambiguously gay.
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A bit reductive, no? The pharaoh is an entirely different person, that Yugi needs to let go of in order to realize his own growth. And Goku changes to become more masculine. Stronger, faster, angrier yet simultaneously in control of himself. He doesn't become something else. He enchances what he already has. In Pokemon, the main characters do not evolve because that is clearly impossible. That kind of transformation is limited to a different species than us.
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As far as I can tell, most cases of MtF transition happen among young adult males basically driven by the longing to escape the life of a sexually invisible and unwanted organism whereas FtM transition is usually done by children (young girls) due to overall frustration with being biological females, and this decision is usually supported and influenced by their mothers, usually single women who basically grew to hate being women.
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My sense (from the small sample of people I know and the slightly larger sample of people I consider to be tempted by it) is that for both sides, it's the greater relative heaviness of gender-related expectations against a background where all other expectations of young people have been systematically dismantled, coupled with systemic misinformation about the ease and social boons of transitioning and general anomie/lack of avenues for self-actualisation.
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Surely all the LGBT stuff in schools and the internet valorizing trans for being brave, coming out with their real selves is the real cause, plus those groomer discords. US military service is heavily correlated with transgenderism (about 2x general population) and that's presumably because of all the LGBT propaganda in the US military.
Anime doesn't even have a pro-trans message on the whole? Maybe hentai/gooner stuff but anime on the whole seems to cater more for straight men. And if anime were the main cause, wouldn't there be the most trans in Japan or Korea or China where they're way more into anime?
Then again, I don't watch much anime. I watched some of the most normie shows like Edgerunner, Hunter x Hunter, Death Note, Frieren, Kill la Kill. The only thing I could think of is the saga of Tanya the Evil which has a genderbent protagonist but its core idea is 'wouldn't it be cool if there was a dubiously sane evil loli flying ace fighting for not-Germany in not-WW2?' and deliberately desexualizes Tanya. Maybe there are other anime that are what you're thinking of.
For the sake of visitors who have no knowledge of the show I'd add that the protagonist is 'genderbent' only in the sense that a dickhead atheist salaryman dies in a traffic accident in present-day Japan and then God decides to resurrect his spirit in the body of a female infant born in an orphanage at wartime in a monarchy that is basically a stand-in for Imperial Germany but in a parallel universe (I suppose) in the past, the purpose being to teach him a lesson on fate, divinity, morals etc. We see Tanya grow up to be a child who is discovered to have magical powers that are useful in combat and is thus recruited to the imperial armed forces. It's more correct to say that she isn't sexualized in the first place (nor is any other character for that matter) because, well, she's a pre-pubescent girl. So bringing it up as an example of gender-bending is a bit of a stretch.
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For a long time you could join, transition, and the military would pay for your hundred thousand dollars of surgeries.
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Anime is actively anti-trans, but don't tell BreadTube that. (Or maybe do; I'm tired of the shitty takes.)
What they usually miss is the fact that most cross-gender characters aren't trying to make it everyone else's problem, which is the root of the issue that most people have with the subject (including, or complicated by, the excitement derived therefrom, including the sexual aspect thereof).
I found Ranma 1/2 to, interestingly enough, be a relatively good example of that. It is incredibly anti-trans; Ranma sees gender-changing as a disability (except when it's convenient to distract enemies with boobies) to be removed or worked with at best rather than something to heavily embrace. If I recall correctly there's one arc where he does discover a way to undo it, but ultimately chooses to destroy it for Akane.
That's not something you'd ever see in modern "trans-affirming" media. But then again, "anime has gender fuckery therefore it causes transgenderism" is the low-information version and generally outs the speaker as someone who's either not paying attention or is unwilling/unable to understand sexuality beyond the base level. [Which is also why all of the reactionaries are, correctly, dismissed.]
Ouran High School Host Club is kind of the same way, but Haruhi's father is basically a walking stereotype who retains most stereotypical male attitudes and Haruhi herself is... more of an accidental pick-me[1] more than anything else (Western women complain about tonal whiplash with respect to Kyoya- but that's caused predominantly by initial confusion about it being a story about a Modern Liberated Woman due to its initial premise, so those who liked it specifically for that are thrown far harder out of the story).
Kodaka's works are a bit different for a reason I really don't want to get into (I suspect this to apply to Tetsuka purely based on how his art looks, and subject matter that has a lot to do with gender-changing, but I haven't seen it so I can't positively draw that conclusion), but Chihiro actively treats femininity as instrumental and Halara Nightmare is the mirror image of that (where she intentionally confuses the issue and uses androgyny as that instrument instead- or basically, how one would imagine a non-uncanny trans person taking advantage of the privilege to use mis-identification as a scalpel rather than the traditional social sledgehammer Western audiences appear to prefer).
[1] I mean this more in the sense that she just happens to find herself in -> get along relatively well in a niche with a bunch of boys, not that she's doing it intentionally.
From how the character looks I believe this assessment is correct (I haven't watched the show).
Topically for transgenderism, though, there's a particular 'you only think it's desexualized because what the sexualization actually is won't be coherent to you' thing that over time people (particularly men) might hopefully be starting to understand. Steven Universe does it with the 'fusion dance', but most people get frame-trapped by seeing the Fusion dances, going 'it's obviously sex, they're teaching kids to have sex', and ending the scan there.
Because yeah, it is, but what you're missing is that the interaction is about as physically sexual as piloting a Basilisk from Cyberpunk 2077 is (I'd say it's more Pacific Rim, but I'm pretty sure Gypsy Danger isn't used for sex); it depends far more on emotional state to function correctly (who's actually leading is, if I recall, a question the show avoids) and a bunch of other stuff that's only coherent if you're willing to observe sex as women do. But we've talked about that before.
...you're not going to mention the Siamese? Thailand is famous for its ladyboys, and they didn't even need anime for that!
I'm pretty sure the better relationship with crossdressers Asians have has more to do with the fact men and women there look a lot more similar than they do in other races (and women look way younger for way longer); the more sexually dimorphic a particular race of people, the worse of a relationship with adopting the trappings of the other gender the cultures they create have.
I'm pretty sure mentions of this are just crypto-feminist (more typically labelled "social conservative") psyops trying to discredit perfectly normal things, like talking to young people, because they might see ur peepee or ur boobies and then u will explode, oooooo spooky.
You have failed your opposite-sex young adult offspring if the only sexual outlet they have is strangers on the internet. The corresponding responsibility to your right of veto over your child's sexuality is to actively search for situations where they can get laid. Because if you don't, they conclude they never will and decide to become the wo/man themselves.
While I mostly agree with the fact that there's a lot of transgender transformation media that manages to be sexual for a person with a particular kink or fetish without registering as sexual to most of the population, I also think there is a risk with this kind of speculation.
To use an ancient example by way of analogy, look at the animal transformations in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In particular I want to focus on the motif of voice throughout the poem (translation A. S. Kline):
Ovid focuses on the voice, and the lack of it in transformed people a lot throughout the poem. But why is he doing it?
I think there's a temptation for a modern person who is aware of the wide variety of kink content online, particularly transformation media, to speculate as to whether this isn't essentially ancient transformation porn. On this reading, Ovid keeps coming back to the lack of voice that results from a bestial transformation because this is the part that is hot to him, the part where a superior human being is made lesser, and thus, in a pattern that mirrors BDSM, hypnosis/mind control content, etc. the part where Ovid places himself in the mindset of a dom looking down on his literary subjects.
But there is obviously another explanation. That Ovid had a normal, non-kinky interest in transformation stories, and he chose to focus on the lack of voice in ex-human animals because that was one of the most salient differences between a human and an animal in his mind.
We will likely never know which of the two explanations is more directionally true.
But this kind of applies to all media that isn't obviously sexual, while appealing to a subset of the population due to their particular kinks. Plenty of mainstream stories feature body swaps (Freaky Friday being the most famous example), but body swaps are also a popular subject in kink. Short of an author or group of authors just coming out and saying, "This is a kink thing, we're writing kinky porn that only looks non-sexual because you're normal and this doesn't turn you on", there are going to be many examples where a cigar is just a cigar, and no intentional kinkiness was actually intended by the author.
It could go either way.
Transformation fetishes are probably more common in the general population than you would expect.
I thought R. L. Stine's Goosebumps books were fire when I was a little kid (like pre-pubescent). I didn't even know at the time that the animal and monster transformation scenes were giving me (proto-)sexual feelings. I just knew that I was very fascinated by them, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
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I haven't seen Ranma or the other anime you mention, so point taken I guess.
Good point.
Why can't they just be incels/volcels and chill out? A part of me is constantly reading headlines (like Cornell or some repulsive novel STD) and thinking 'another incel W.' My second vaguely crypto-feminist opinion is that society is oversexualized, obsesses about sex far too much. It's OK to not have sex. There's nothing special or life affirming about penetrating, often through rubber, an orifice. A lot easier to just crank one's hog. Only reproduction is actually special. It's terrible to shred one's entire life and maybe undertake gruesome surgery in pursuit of a sexual identity, to sacrifice so much for so little. The rapist who ends up in prison for a decade, the gay man who gets an STD from his bathhouse orgies and dies young, these people who try to become the wo/man - addicts. The high isn't even that good.
Maybe we need more Greek statues with tiny penises to remind people that the sexual aspect of civilized man should be controlled rather than vulgar.
And there are parts of discord/perverse hentai communities that try to worsen this, at the extreme end. There's definitely a corruption angle going on. I've seen the edges of it in various parts of the internet, something quite distinct from normal talk. Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) people, chaotic evil. There are others not quite so bad but still really bad out there. I don't think that every random discord server needs this intrusive surveillance crap to counter them but there are real issues going on there, the chaotic-evil brigade is on the march.
In plain English I think "to actively search for situations where they can get laid" in this context means that you as a father and husband are supposed to socialize with other couples of your age and social status with children that are of the same age and of the opposite sex as yours. Isn't that just a part of normal family life?
Less than you think. Parents can be introverts as well, or misfits in other ways.
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These are the punching bags of most media. Almost everyone looks down on a man who can't get laid, including other men who can't get laid. Trans-girls get access to an accepting community and an overall more positive identity.
If monkhood was a bigger thing in the west, then that would be a good alternative. "I am depriving myself of carnal pleasures to get closer to the divine" would be a positive identity as well. But alas, that is not an option for most.
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This was maybe the case through the 00s, but there are modern examples now like Onii-chan Wa Oshimai that are decidedly pro-trans, or at least trans-neutral. Onimai is definitely not a kids' show though, and it's not the sort of thing that children would randomly stumble onto by chance, unlike how say, a child in the 90s/00s might randomly have been exposed to other "effeminate" anime like Ranma or Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura (granted, everyone is given open access to the internet and Discord from birth now, so, you never know).
The funny thing about Kodaka's games is that they're just a bit... zesty, in general (and this has only ramped up over time with Hundred Line and Shuten Order), and thus have attracted a very large tumblr/fujo type of fanbase in the west, despite being ostensibly targeted at a mostly male audience.
Yeah I'm really fascinated by this. This is a common phenomenon whenever genderbender media breaks containment and gets some mainstream exposure. There were many confused comments online about Onimai, ranging from "why isn't he more pissed off at his sister for doing nonconsensual medical experiments on him and turning him into a girl? That's assault" (lol) to "it's a serious story about the struggles that young women face in adolescence" (infinite omega lol). The answer to all that of course is that you're not supposed to think that hard about it because it's essentially porn; it's just, porn that's transmitting on a frequency that you're not tuned into.
Tanya I can confirm is totally desexualized though. The genderswap is just a plot device to get the story going and then it's essentially never brought up again. There are quite a few isekai and other stories like that now.
I mostly agree with you. I think a lot of people are just genuinely, sincerely flabbergasted by the idea that anyone could ever desire to be the opposite sex, unless they were coerced into thinking that way by external circumstances, and "it's all discord grooming" is their attempt to proffer some sort of explanation that they can make sense of. I don't think grooming plays nearly as big a role as some other people here do.
That being said. I was deadass talking to someone just the other day who told me "this guy in a Rust discord convinced me to start taking estrogen". I'm 99% sure they weren't memeing. They were a couple years into their transition. So my reaction was 1) of course it was Rust lol, and 2) sometimes the conspiracy theories and most damning accusations about your political opponents simply turn out to be true.
This part I don’t really agree with though. I’m a consistent anti-egalitarian to the end. Broadly speaking, if a male can’t get laid on his own, then he shouldn’t be having sex; social engineering efforts to the contrary would be dysgenic. (Although I still support monogamous marriage as a preferable social order over polygamy, and I don’t feel particularly inconsistent in doing so.)
Rust, the game, or Rust, the programming language?
The latter makes more intuitive sense, but I could believe either.
The language.
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You know what being MtF and a Rust enthusiast have in common?
It’s the goddamn autists at it again.
Yeah, I was thinking about the link between autism and transsexuality recently. (I almost prefer to use terms like "spergy" or "spergy personality traits" over "autistic", because I'm somewhat skeptical about the existence of autism as a legitimate diagnostic entity, and at any rate most of the people who call themselves "autistic" don't seem to me to have any serious diagnosable disorder; they just have personality traits that are outside of the norm, that's all. But I'll continue to use "autistic" to mean "people who generally have spergy personality traits, at any degree of severity".)
One thing I noticed from my admittedly limited sample of talking to autistic women is that their speech patterns and thought processes are very close to those of autistic men in many ways; they experience many of the same struggles as well (personal, social, etc). The gap between autistic men and autistic women is noticeably smaller than the gap between normal men and normal women. This got me to thinking that, if an intrinsic part of autism is a decreased desire/ability to express highly differentiated sexual behavior that would be typical of one's birth sex, then both autistic men and autistic women might be more likely to experience a less defined and more fluid sense of gender identity (almost like they got thrown into a "third gender" bucket together) and thus might be more likely to be drawn to transsexualism.
I don't think this is a complete explanation or anything; at the very least there's still something uniquely malebrained about the whole phenomenon of MTFism; but I still felt that it was worth noting.
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There's always Louise Perry's theory that it's caused by the degeneration of gender roles in ways that specifically make the experience of being a young woman high stress(in the mind of an adolescent girl). I think her data did show some correlations with family attitude towards gender roles.
It’s high stress because unlike males, there’s no real role to slot into. You have to sort of make one, somewhere on the spectrum between pseudo Amish trad wife and ball busting girl boss dyke. And because Theres such a wide range of potential womanhood, there’s no target to aim for, nor can anyone help you understand the role or how to achieve it. You had thousands of years where this wasn’t true and had few or no girls deciding that they were men. Women knew how to help their girls as men knew how to help their boys because the end goal was known
'unlike males'? What real roles do adolescent males have today to slot into?
I think @MaiqTheTrue is quite correct about this. There are so many male archetypes to choose from both throughout history and throughout fiction media. Almost any type of path you can imagine has already been charted. Even if you're a loser failure incel, that's still a known archetype; you still have an identity, you still have a community of people like you and a place in that community. And who knows, maybe you'll turn it around and eventually become successful and make something of yourself. That too is a known quantity, a story that has been written many times: the tortured soul, the misunderstood genius who is only appreciated by posterity, etc.
Regardless of what you think about the female archetypes and role models on offer, it's pretty undeniable that there are simply fewer of them. You can be a wife and mother, and frankly I think many (most?) women would still be quite happy enough with that, although the cultural (not to mention economic) status of motherhood is more tenuous than it has ever been. You can also be a woke feminist political agitator, although that will understandably be unappealing to women who are not already fully committed to that ideology.
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Female to Male has been described as "ten years ago, these girls would have just gotten into wicca" by a guidance counselor.
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Probably the best bet is to beat the shit out of anyone shaming boys for being boys. Anime and similar media are just escapism for boys who never develop a healthy self-esteem because the culture around them views them as broken girls.
That would be beatdowns for public school teachers and administrators. I'm fine with non-ass-kicking methods of limiting the harm they do.
Sure, interpret "beat the shit out of" as "imposing serious fines on" or "giving multi-year prison sentences to" if that floats your boat. It's all pie in the sky anyway given our collective reluctance to actually protect boys and men from harm.
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