a groove-billed ani doodle digital / photoshop 2025
Weevil (Pachyrhynchus congestus), family Curculionidae, Philippines
photograph by Frank Deschandol
Erich Dieckmann Bauhaus Development of a Metal Tube Chair.
the thing about this post is that, in my experience, people don't complain about so-called smith college problems (which was always itself an awfully snide coinage) because they don't understand that they're localized problems; they complain about smith college problems because said problems are cropping up like caltrops in a subcultural space to which they belong, and rendering it hostile to them.
and obviously one can come up with examples of this dynamic it's very easy to portray as ridiculous and entitled, like the first two in this reblog: 'support women who shave their legs and wear makeup every day' and 'let's hear it for masculine men.' absurd! but the thing is, it's also very easy to imagine the sort of subcultural toxicity that would produce complaints like that: criticism of compulsory femininity, while hella justified, can very easily tip over into an anti-femininity that's liable to leave a lot of femmes feeling as though they're being sneered at, because, well, they are! similarly, a lot of this website is sufficiently misandrist¹ that it leaves very little room for eg trans men looking to lean into a masculinity that broader society tried to deny them. and then there's this reblog of the smith college problems post, that rolls its eyes at bisexuals who object to other-gender attraction being framed as necessarily straight, and the first reply to the more recent post, that says snidely 'normalize not transitioning,' as if there weren't plenty of queer spaces in which sneering at 'bihets' and 'theyfabs' is a nastily common pastime.
i don't, personally, think it's an accident that all these examples affect groups who exist in a liminal space between hegemonic acceptance and outgroup acceptance, and in practice end up feeling alienated by both types of space. and personally, i think we can and should do better; i think we have to disarm broader societal inequality by working towards actual equality, for everyone, and firmly refusing to indulge this persistent, pernicious urge to revenge that wants, so very badly, to just tilt the social seesaw in the opposite direction…
⸻ ¹ no, misandry does not per se count as oppression. it does, however, combine with other axes of oppression like Blackness, transness, queerness, &c, in complex ways. it's also just tar pit behavior, imo, when indulged in with any serious frequency.
thinking back to the time i realized i'd been practicing such scrupulous politeness abt [bodily feature i actively wasn't attracted to] that my bff had come away with the impression that i was, like, very actively into it, which was like. wow, wild to be so deeply misunderstood—
however it turns out that after putting an enormous amount of energy into Accepting that feature, well, now sometimes i am actively into it, so like. guess i'm the one who was wrong about me after all!
also. as long as i'm telling you guys silly little things. look at my absurd gluttonous beast who shoved her face into my tomato-y lunch leftovers and now has. well.
anime blush only orange.
made it to the transfer station before it closed (task i have been failing at for a week) AND nothing leaked in the car on the way over (despite decomposition of compostables very definitely having commenced) AND there was a hot butch there (presumably my reward from a sometimes-benevolent universe) 👍