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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   37639 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Your observations make sense to me.

"We're all bubbly little bimbos who designate specific booty shorts for our retail adventures? Is this what you think puts us in the same category?"

Back in the early days of the Great Awokening, the idea of "womanface" (as analogous to theatrical blackface) made the rounds. One Harlem drag queen wrote a surprisingly reflective response, not only owning the unapologetic misogyny of the drag community but actually calling for drag queens, not to change in any meaningful way, but to at least listen, to validate (how feminine!) the concerns many women have about drag as mockery.

I encountered these ideas again in an interesting book review of Once a Man, Never a Woman--this time, in the context of transsexuality:

What truly drives the relationship to its breaking point is Shannon’s eventual realization that, with his slinky dresses and high-heel boots, Jamie isn’t a wannabe woman so much as an amateurish imposter. What he imagines to be womanhood is in fact a male masturbation fantasy that presents women as endlessly parked in front of boudoir mirrors, staring dreamily at their own decolletage as they mist themselves with bulbed perfume bottles. As Shannon writes, real women are more likely to spend their lives fleeing such male-imposed expectations...

I seem to recall that the Motte (used to?) have a poster who claimed to be trans-aged (i.e., a young person in an older person's body), though for various reasons they didn't like to make a big deal about it. This seems to happen enough that I've read more than one article about an adult male living (at least part time!) as an underaged female (occasionally, even a prepubescent one).

That seems ridiculous to me, but not like, substantially more ridiculous than drag queens generally, and it follows the same basic pattern--I expect you'd be hard pressed to find a non-fictional six-year-old girl with the same actual taste and style as Stefonknee Wolscht. But six-year-old girls aren't generally in a position to complain about being parodied.

I also wonder a fair bit about the fact that outrageously distorted caricaturization seems to be less of a thing with females who live as men (or even as non-binary). Most of the "trans" females I encounter are just not-very-girly lesbians using counterintuitive pronouns. I don't know if this is because it would be difficult-to-impossible for someone with a female body to convincingly parody masculinity (at least without the aid of dangerous quantities of illicit steroids), or if there is something else at work there (one theory I've toyed with is that males tend to style themselves trans in hopes of getting a certain kind of attention, while females tend to style themselves trans in order to avoid that exact same kind of attention, but I would be hard pressed to prove this to anyone's satisfaction, I think). Or maybe it's just because masculinity is often enough a parody of itself.

have a poster who claimed to be trans-aged (i.e., a young person in an older person's body)

This is fascinating! I actually strongly relate to this, and my partner would as well. Although we're the opposite - older people in young(ish) people's bodies. Although this may be hubris on our part.

Yeah, in the conversation I had with this user--a couple years ago I'm thinking, maybe as far back as the SSC sub--I noted that I have on occasion heard an elderly person opine, "in my head, I'm still 23." Or 30. Or 17. I'm unsure if I relate--I don't think I feel any particular age at all, usually. But I'm one of those who got called an "old soul" when I was still a teenager, so maybe I'm just preternaturally ageless on the inside. Too bad I can't cash that in for physical immortality, I guess.

Along with the phenomenon of transracialism, trans-agism strengthens my sense both that human minds are fascinatingly complex, and that building your entire personal identity around "feeling" a certain way is almost never going to work out as well as you'd like.

one theory I've toyed with is that males tend to style themselves trans in hopes of getting a certain kind of attention, while females tend to style themselves trans in order to avoid that exact same kind of attention,

Yeah, I've had much the same thought.

I also wonder a fair bit about the fact that outrageously distorted caricaturization seems to be less of a thing with females who live as men (or even as non-binary). Most of the "trans" females I encounter are just not-very-girly lesbians using counterintuitive pronouns. I don't know if this is because it would be difficult-to-impossible for someone with a female body to convincingly parody masculinity (at least without the aid of dangerous quantities of illicit steroids)

I think this is at least a large factor; visual stereotypes of masculinity tend to be indicative of some level of hard work and accomplishment, such as big muscles or outward confidence that's hard to fake without having competence to back it up. I think there's also the fact that stereotypes of masculinity is less associated with fashion; men's fashion is well known to be conservative, far moreso than women's fashion, and to whatever extent men deviate from the conservative norm, they tend to be considered less masculine. So caricaturizing that conservative-ness in a way that stands out is inherently difficult to pull off. Whereas many of the distorted caricaturizations of femininity by transwomen one sees is reliant on taking the creativity or outright flamboyance of stereotypically feminine fashion up to 11 and beyond.

Re: transmen - I think our culture sees male as the default, and women as a defective male who needs special accommodations because of this defect. Things like birth control, abortion, and protected maternity leave seek to even the playing field between men and women, a necessity because the game we are all playing assumes a male player. Gender by Ivan Illich spells out the argument that this is a necessity in an industrialized society.

Transmen are a manifestation of this expectation that male is the default. They feel like a defective man, therefore they take steps to reduce the defect.

Re: transmen - I think our culture sees male as the default, and women as a defective male who needs special accommodations because of this defect.

I would actually argue the inverse. If anything, our culture to view femininity as the default.

Can we split the difference and say female temperament in a male body?

A more refined version of my post would be: In a liberal democracy, we need the fiction that we are all equal in every way that matters, and so we pretend we are sexless individuals equally able to form contracts and sell our time and talent. This pretense favors the strengths of a male body, but turns the strengths of a female body into a liability.

"Male as Default" is more of a RadFem terminology I think, and often goes beyond the reproduction question to include things like medication not being tested on women before going to market, crash tests not using female and especially pregnant dummies, etc. But I don't think a dearth of medical experimentation is causing the transmen phenomena (a little tongue in cheek here.)

no

The place where the comparison breaks down is that the audience for blackface was white people but the audience for 'woman face' is heavily female. It's not straight men who sit around and enjoy caricatured performances of femininity, it's gay men and straight women. This is partly anecdotal since the people I know who like drag are mostly straight women, but the RuPaul subreddit did a survey and it was 50% women and 38% men, trans men outnumbered transwomen ~2:1. Given that reddit's user base skews male that might understate the prevalence of women in the drag fanbase. A random masters thesis on James Charles I found on Google says his audience was 85% female.

Then there's Chrissy Chlapeka and the TikTok Bimbo movement which seems primarily aimed at women, though I can't find demographic stats.

The kind of 'Bumbly Bimbo' performances that appeal to straight men are well, porn. Belle Delphine is also doing an obvious performance of an excitable girl.

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