• EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
    ·
    3 years ago

    Feminism is when you look like half the women I dated in college.

    I think the weird male obsession with tomboy "cool girl" characters in media that are coded extremely lesbian but inexplicably are straight because the network would absolutely not allow a gay character has been a major problem. It's almost certainly a major factor in the prevalence of incels and the continuing fetishization of lesbians into the modern era.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Expressing oneself in ways that don't align with what's expected of their gender doesn't necessarily make them gay, though, does it? I was under the impression that that sort of gender-coding was largely arbitrary.

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
        ·
        3 years ago

        Expression certainly doesn't necessarily make someone gay, especially not for real people. Expression is not the cause of gayness, but it does corellate with it.

        However, the significant, overwhelming majority of the "cool girl" tomboy best friend characters in media, especially in animated media, are heavily gay coded. These are the very characters that these dudes are gravitating towards as the platonic ideal of what a tomboy is and should be, resulting in them seeing gay women in real life and going "oooh tomboy!"

        Dudes refuse to accept women as human beings with their own agency and identity so hard that they fetishize an identity that by and large does not exist because it allows them to justify their refusal to go outside of their comfort zone, their refusal to acknowledge that women have different interests from them and that is okay, and that the very reason that they cannot successfully date or have sex is because they refuse to stop being a terminally 4chan-brained incel.

        Women don't want these type of petulant ass piece of shit dudes, so they have turned to media which erroneously told them "hey man, you don't have to get off your sweaty ass or stop saying the n-word, there's women out there who will love you for you! Watch for them dude, they look and act just like lesbians, but they're not! They really really want you to fuck them!"

        And uh, yeah, no, turns out that doesn't exist, and they just end up harassing lesbians.

        • BeamBrain [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Gotcha. Thanks for taking the time to give such an in-depth clarification.