I’m working on a longer post about you-know-who. In the meantime, enjoy these goats doing their best interpretation of the Men’s Rights movement.
But wait, there’s more!
And while we’re at it, here are some baby alpacas trying to figure out what a puppy is:
Christ, the creepy male family member stories. O_O
Re: wallets, I am so completely unwilling to carry anything in my hands, let alone a handbag. But I totally understand with the lack of real pockets. 🙁
Personally it’s phone right pocket, wallet and keys left. My partner’s the other way around. I figure it’s normal to get quite attached to where you keep such things. 😀
Ahhhhh! So much sympathy.
Vaguely related: it’s very interesting how much people’s perception of me has changed since I shaved my head. It has alleviated my dysphoria quite a lot, but it’s not like I actually feel more masculine with a shaved head – I just am perceived differently. And I have enjoyed the extra attention I’ve got from the ladies, I must say.
Fibi — Haha! My thoughts pretty much exactly!
Re, wallets and bags: Timbuk2s are for females too! I promise.
My “purse” is actually an old-school camera bag I found while on a train/bus trip across America. It is the size of a small backpack, with many interior compartments and a very sturdy shoulder/crossbody strap — so it can fit most books, an iPad if I had one, notebooks, a spare shirt or sweater for in-between climates, and even my netbook in a pinch. Not only that, but it’s tooled leather, like an old-timey Western saddle. I do not ascribe a gender to it, because, why? Then again, I’m the type of woman who wears “mannish” blazers* a lot and sews inner pockets into them if they don’t already come with (a major selling point; I’ve already thrifted blazers simply for their inner pockets), so the bag just kinda goes with the rest of the ensemble.
When it’s hot out, though, or when my back is giving me trouble, I just haul around a big-ass canvas tote with a pillow to sit on, and a small phone/keys/transit card-sized purse that I put on my lap when I’m sitting on the pillow. This has saved me at several recent gigs, when I’ve used the pillow-tote to cushion my back while I lean against the wall. Venue staff sometimes gently makes fun of me until they see how comfortable I look. Try it out if you wanna.
* I am of the opinion that clothes, accessories, and styles of tailoring should not be genderized at all, so that anyone could wear anything they want without any stigma or judgment. But naturally the MRM does not agree, because they’re deeply conservative, reactive homophobes who don’t actually care if men get picked on for carrying purses because they truly think there is something inherently “girly” about purses and we all know girls have cooties eew.. Anyway.
Re, gross male relatives: Yeah. No. Do not want. It sounds like a lot of us here have had them, though (myself included). We could all team up and write a thick-ass book about it, surely. Then throw that book at our gross male relatives.
And I’ve just come home from a seminar at Stockholm Pride held by my personal trainer friend on how to shape your body into looking more masculine/feminine/androgynous with the right kind of body-building! Some assorted advice for people who want to look more masculine:
– if you have wide hip bones there’s nothing you can do about that, since the skeleton is what it is, but you can make them look narrower by comparison by building bigger thighs and pumping up your side abs.
– Bigger shoulders, bigger neck and bigger upper back goes a long way toward making a person look more masculine.
– Boobs will often naturally shrink if you work out a lot.
– Less body fat will make you look more masculine, but since dieting easily turns unhealthy, try to do as much as possible by building muscles rather than eating less calories.
I now imagine some random dude rushing into the seminar room screaming “BUT NOBODY WILL EVERY MAAAAAARRY YOU!”.
Oh mans … please everyone be careful with the exercising/dieting-to-achieve-a-body-type thing …
As someone who had devastating orthorexia with side helpings of deep bodily dysphoria and extremely eating-disordered habits (falling just short of actual anorexia) for a number of years*, I can attest that it’s not worth getting injured or dead just because this society has really fucked up narrow parameters of what “masculine” is or isn’t.
* I’m better now, but still rarely see pictures of anyone who has my body type and looks natural/at ease as opposed to either A. miserable, dead-eyed, ashamed, and extremely uncomfortable, B. hyper-sexualized in classic female-as-object style, or C. both. Which is weird because I only measure like 37″-28″-39″. Society can really do a number on everyone’s brain and warp everyone’s expectations.
Good point Ferrets… My friend has also mentioned that almost nobody who comes to zir for personal training eats too much, but a lot of people eat too little and are way too neurotic about food, and zie must attempt to undo that.
I do think it’s good to teach people that you can change your body quite a lot with mere body-building, even if you don’t take hormones. Everyone doesn’t want to take hormones but may still have a bit of body dysphoria going on, and as zie put it, “we can’t just queer all that away”. Like, you may question society’s notions of masculinity/femininity all you like and still not feel at home in your body. And at least here in Sweden, even if you totally do want to take hormones, even if you want a full transition, there are all these psychiatric hopes you gotta jump through for YEARS before you’re allowed to. But there’s a lot you can do meanwhile. (Argenti wrote that getting testo is relatively easy where zie lives – well, that’s not the case here. My friend said that there’s quite a market now for steroids among trans men who are without excess to testo but who’re desperate for a different body.)
BUUUUUUT obviously the attempt to change one’s body through exercise (and possibly also diet) can and often do lead people down some really fucked-up paths…
And society is always creating new fucked-up paths to change one’s body. Like this, the world’s grossest new weight-loss technique.
What??? The site’s down for maintenance so I can’t check it (or has it got a hole in it and all the stuff’s leaked out?)
That sounds worse than the ol’ tapeworm method, even if that was an urban myth.
Science has made purging safe and convenient! Try it today!
Eugh.
I lived as a man for several years when I was still underdeveloped enough to get away with that. The pressures from outside were almost as terrifying as the pressures from inside, so I do think doing away with social expectations will go a long way towards making *everyone’s* lives better. Presumably everyone would rather live in a world where it’s not okay to make a hole inside someone’s stomach just to starve them until they fit a certain physical ideal.
I heard the magic word purging, and would recommend to all of you that, if you have trouble dropping some exces pounds, you purge your skeleton.
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/08/13
Hollow bones! Light as a bird!
(Note: Please. for the love of everything, don’t actually do this. Please. )
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It is pretty amazing what can be done with a bit of repetition and planning, though, in relation to body structure (And heavens, architecture and economics and knitting too, but, eh…).
I still recommend the 4 hour body, Timothy Ferriss, for various neat short cuts.
Just sort out the… everything else.
Falconer —
http://www.aspirebariatrics.com/faqs.html
I can’t even…*notopuses away*
@Guffaw: I couldn’t check the link but hole-in-a-stomach sounds completely fucked up, and I’m sorry for all the shit you’ve been going through with eating disorders.
For my own part though, I’m happier in my body when I have bigger arms, bigger shoulders, flatter chest, bigger side abs etc and overall looks a bit more masculine than the very Barbie-like shape I’m born with. And let me point out that building bigger muscles (especially as a cis woman, with little natural testosteron and therefore naturally handicapped in the muscle-building department) requires EATING and eating A LOT. Maybe one day, when I feel big enough, I’ll do a little bit of “deffing” (i e dieting), but getting BIGGER is the absolute number one priority for me.
And MAYBE I’m just brainwashed by society to think male=better than female and male=big muscles. MAYBE in a feminist utopia I’d be perfectly happy with looking like Barbie, with having C cups and an hourglass figure and the teeniest tiniest little arms ever. I honestly don’t know. I’ve been trying for years to read body acceptance blogs and stuff and tell myself that looking like Barbie is perfectly fine etc. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t feel like me. So at the end of the day, no, I don’t think it works to just tell everyone that they ought to accept their bodies exactly like they are. Although I do recognize how much harm dieting does and how horrible eating disorders are.
Hope this makes sense to anyone reading this post, because my own thoughts on this topic are messier than my thoughts on most topics.
@Katz:
Well that was a fresh and interesting batch of hell.
Curse you for making me aware of this thing. Curse you with happiness and joy and generally good things, but curse you nonetheless.
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@Dvärghundspossen:
I’m on a diet right now, which has so far helped me gain 1½ kilogram of weight.
Hurrah for my massive body and all of its 137 pounds.
ONE DAY I WILL BE BIG ENOUGH TO WEAR THE MEDIUM SIZED SHIRT. This I vow. Ahem.
Sorry if that sounds snide, or glip, but if you eat a specific plan with a specific purpose in mind, you are on a diet. And it sounds like you have that? Lots of protein in various forms and some muscle tension excercises?
I hope that gets you the results you want!
I’m not a personal trainer, and so I’m not as awesome as your friend, who will know more than me, but if you want, I can upload a copy of the plan / diet I’m doing right now and you can try that for bit, see if it gets you anywhere. (Bike shed discussions, hm)
But the reason I jump in is that… There’s an important difference between a desire for a of lessening societal and general pressure to be a way and accepting the way you are.
If the body you have don’t feel like you, then… yeah, do your best to change it (which will generally work out fairly well)
If the body you have is one you’re told you’re not supposed to have, then…
People ought to accept that others bodies aren’t their business to shape, unless it is, literally, their business to shape. But what you want to look like is, at the end of the day, what you’d like to look like.
(Is and ought. Hm)
So no, you’re probably not brainwashed. And no, in a feminist utopia, you probably wouldn’t be happy with your body. You have an idea and a desire.
And, uh, that’s okay. You’re allowed to. Good luck with it!.
But I think (AND I’M A MIND READER NOW) Guffaw-Ferrets major point was merely and simply that, if someone gets so set on a certain path to bodily reconstruction that they follow it despite their own actual desire or interest or inclinations, because someone else from the glossy cover of a magazine leers: “This is the way thou shalt look!” or someone snipes you from a side street with some witticisism… that’s not positive. And is, in fact, dangerous.
So body acceptance blogs and ideas and stuff isn’t, at the end of the day, irrelevant or useless or “wishy washy stuff that doesn’t really apply”.
Tapeworms were indeed a thing.
Thanks Fibinachi. 🙂
I think that in praxis, the line is very hard to draw between changing your body for your own sake and for society’s sake… Like, everyone who diets in order to lose weight, even if they do it after reading dieting tips in Cosmo or whatever, say (and probably also think) that they do it for their own sake. Maybe the only line one can draw is between self-destructive and non-destructive changes…? Although that’s also a really difficult line to draw in praxis.
@Fibinachi again: I didn’t respond to everything in your post first, but yeah, I messed up on the English word “diet”, I thought of it as a translation of the Swedish “banta”, which only means trying to lose weight by eating in a certain manner and not the opposite. 🙂 Thanks for correcting me.
And thanks for the offer. Right now though I’m mostly eating what I want to (I had fairly sensible eating habits already and was used to eating quite a lot), the only thing I consciously think about is eating a big meal which contains both lots of protein and some sugar (my PT said it’s received body builder wisdom that you build muscles better by combining protein with sugar, like fruits or fruit juice, rather than mere protein or protein+slower carbs right after exercise). I do find it a bit exhausting to think about what I eat all the time, so the plan is to see how things are going for a while and then maybe compiling a more careful diet later on if we don’t see as much progress as we’d like.
Also related to this… The reason I identify as a cis woman is really just that I’m okay with being called “she” and referred to as a woman. It bugged me when I was a child, but I’ve gotten used to it over the years, and it doesn’t exactly bother me any longer. But that’s it. (Just in case anyone thought it weird that I, as a cis woman, feel more at home in a more masculine-looking body.)