There's a one minute video with the joke in the tweet.
Aside from from the obvious shit on whether you should wokescold stand-up comedians (of course you should), it made me think about the weird position straight cis dude gender nonconformity has in today's progressive spaces. Like there are people with trans flags in qrts explaining that a straight guy having his nails painted is a bad sign.
Here in Russia when I was growing up you could get beat up for being a guy with painted nails. One time I almost did.
Yeah it's just toxic masculinity, transphobia etc. passed off as OK.
People think as long as the person right in front of you is a cis guy, it's fine to basically just say painted nails make you a sick perverted f-word. Liberal identity politics sees oppressed classes as just types of individual people you shouldn't be mean to, instead of seeing any kind of system. There's a certain water-off-a-duck's back quality to being in a culturally dominant group, but at some point it's really easy to just demand toxic masculinity out of men.
There's really very little pressure to filter out reactionary ideas whenever the proximate target is a representative of some dominant group. Like yeah let's all spend our Saturday accusing straight guys of being secretly gay or something, in a way that makes it clear we think being gay is incredibly wrong and embarrassing -- maybe they'll do some wild and freaky shit to compensate
Aren't painted nails incredibly common for goth/rock style individuals 🤔
Penn Jillette used to have a single red fingernail :libertarian-approaching:
Isn't that a kabbala thing or something to do with his mom and like, apparently explicitly not a coke nail
Oh- I wouldn't have a clue about any of that, it's just something I remember noticing from watching Penn & Teller's Bullshit in the Neolithic period
"It's just an esoteric mysticism thing dont worry about it" says the man with the coke nail yeah sure thing bud :libertarian-approaching:
a coke nail is a single nail that's longer than the others, to scoop powder up with. don't know if a single painted nail is a kabbala thing, if so i was accidentally a kabbalist last week lol
It's not uncommon. Goths and punks were playing with gender presentation a long, long time ago. Like contemporary with Stonewall.
i think it's good when gendernonconformity among cishets gets normalized more, and ofc attacking it from a reactionary standpoint should be met with pushback. it's good to stand up for cishets who are faced with queerphobic sentiments directed at them for their nonconforming appearance. but i don't see somebody being part of the queer community for facing that, at least not as more than any other straight ally. after all, putting on nail polish as a cishet dude is a lifestyle choice. still a bold one and one that has political implications, but these people's ability to live a life worth living isn't dependent on whether they can go out with nail polish in public without being harassed. mine is. i need to violate the gender expectations i'm faced with to survive. cissies don't.
so no, i'd definitely not see GNC cishets as part of the queer community. and a part of me regrets that i, as a trans woman waiting to medically transition, am seen as one of them now when i go out with painted nails and a skirt while still being stuck in a visibly masculine body. to a degree, they are taking something away from me when they paint their nails. they are undermining my ability to already be read as trans. there's transmedicalists out there who don't fully accept me as a woman because i'm gatekept from a medical transition for what may very well still be months (maybe longer than that, but at some point i'll take transitioning into my own hands if this doesn't proceed). it's sadly a thing that some people in the community look down on those of us who aren't as far ahead as them. and when you're in that phase, were even your own people sometimes work to undermine your validity, it's as if these straight dudes are making it harder for me to break out of the gender role forced on me. simply for a fashion statement. simply because machine gun kelly does it, too.
so i'm torn on the subject. i want to live in a society that overcomes rigid gender roles, i also want to be able to express myself in a way that reaffirms who i am. for me, that's not a matter of vanity, it's a matter of maintaining my mental health. i need to experience myself as a woman to not spiral into depression and as that's tricky right now, this trend is making me feel uncomfortable even though i'd normally appreciate it.
don't get me wrong, i don't want to wokescold these dudes. i wouldn't be in their replies to tell them they're ... appropriating trans culture or w/e, i'm not that kinda girl. just venting what pops into my head when i think about this stuff so there's a different POV in the thread as well. i still appreciate the other replies, just wanted to share.
a lot of them are closeted trans people who need the opportunity to experiment with their presentation to realize
yeah, that's a big reason why i don't oppose cis people crossdressing (outside of really specific cases like when it's a minstrelsy-esque transphobic joke). eggs need spaces where they can experiment before they've begun to figure themselves out and that necessairly means that these spaces need to be open to cis people. simply because trans people at that stage think of themselves as cis.
like i said, i don't find this to be a bad thing in itself. after a lifetime of being confronted with gender-policing toxic masculinity in a gender role i could never possibly fulfill, i got a fairly good understanding of what gnc cis dudes have to go through. i know what it's like when people constantly call you the f slur when you're not even a gay dude, simply for acting and feeling more feminine than you're supposed to. story of my life. and i know there's cis dudes who are a lot girlier than me and get heckled nonstop for that. that has to end. it's a vicious, hurtful system that on top of all the damage it does to men (and to pre-transition AMAB people) constantly breeds even more harm by nudging men towards more sexist, more queerphobic, more violent and destructive behavior.
so i'd say that solidarity with gnc cishets is in order. they are our siblings in the struggle against the patriarchal-cishetnormative superstructure. i just wonder if it's appropriate to group them under the LGBT+ umbrella or if that should be a different community where they can organize for themselves and then cooperate with the LGBT community, in the same way there's, say, feminist communities outside of the queer community. what i'm asking is: if they define themselves as cishet, do they even see themselves as a queer group? or is being cishet something of an antithesis to being queer and therefore to being part of the LGBT+ community?
Early on in primary school we had Friday afternoons as free time. On one of these days, some girls from the next room over were going around saying "Does any boy want his nails polished?" The most macho and contrarian boy in the grade above me volunteered, and they painted his nails some mix of pink and purple. He didn't usually smile much, but he smiled a lot that day.
Me in 2001: That's so gaaaaay! 😠 Me in 2002: Wait... I'm so gay! 😮 Me today: That's so gaaaaay! 🥳
Are Emo boys much of a thing anymore? I remember this stuff being huge in mid aughts. Seems like the last huge music-based youth culture wave before internet fragmented everything.
I think it's morphed into Emo Trap. Doomer lyrics are still in but the aesthetic is a little more gritty now.
It’s in a bit of a renaissance but thereve been holdouts the whole time
You know those guys in the early 2000s who would judge your music for not being like the 80s? You're that now
Back in my day we applied the dark eyeliner both ways and had to walk uphill to get to hot topic
Haven't listened to emo trap/rap in a minute. Just gave some a listen and the zoomers have got some real :agony-mescaline: energy now
Being a zoomer is great because you didn't even get to have the false-hope millennials did. I went to high school with an actual nazi at one point, had repeated active shooter drills, and climate catastrophe has been mounting the whole time. But hey! It's not like a plague happened when the oldest zoomers were entering adulthood and our social lives have been irreversibly screwed for forever! Also the internet is destroying our brains just as fast as the microplastics. So the music can get a bit :agony-acid:
there are definitely some cishet dudes painting their nails who suck, but not at a higher rate than there are shitty cishet dudes who don't paint their nails. complaints specifically about how that's a bad sign seem like bog standard gnc-phobia (for lack of a better term, since it isn't quite homophobia or transphobia, but it's right there with a lot of overlap.)
It seems like there's a stereotype that straight dudes do gender nonconforming stuff to manipulate progressive girls into sleeping with them. A whole bunch of women in qrts are going "they do be like that."
Eerily similar to the whole "predatory male feminists" thing.
Yeah, it's a thing. And it's ugh. No, GNC/feminist guys aren't assholes at a higher rate than normal guys. People be horny, people in progressive spaces doubly so.
There's also this "my bad relationship was because the guy was ontologically evil and not because we just wound each other up and were shitheads to each other" thing going around that's trivialising abuse and I'm not a fan.
Literally doubling down on gender stereotypes when people are non-conforming.
Sounds like he's just bashing a guy for a very minor act of gender defiance.
"Lol this guy paints his nails he's a rapist!"
Very funny. A tier humor.
I feel like he was making fun of people who think stuff like that...but I could be misreading the whole thing.
He should try harder because it sounded to me like he was just mocking someone, in a very vicious way, for being gender nonconforming.
That's definitely the angle, and the way he goes straight into the bit is supposed to emphasize that. Just feels like a setup that deserves more than just a minute of material, I guess.
uh get freakin nannette on the phone over here whats their take
e: okay i looked it up and nannette actually uses she/her idk why i thought she was nonbinary
