Over time, due to increasing alienation under capitalism, more men are seeing women as these inaccessible alien beings that they desperately want so they can prove to the world/themselves how manly they are, but can never have for one reason or another.
So to them, femboys are the next best thing because they're feminine like women, but are men, so therefore more "accessible".
It's actually just a push by Big Sock to sell more thigh highs
Big Sock is an enemy of the people and has to be brought down anyway. It's ridiculous how easy socks tear at the heel nowadays, true falling rate of profit hours. I thought i'd save sock money after moving to a place with a floor that doesn't have any sock-killing edges, but nooooh. They just wear thin and flimsy and then you put them on too harshly and riiiiiiiiip my favorite pair of socks.
👀👀
Now you've got me standing at attention, if you know what I mean o7🍆
That's all we needed to hear. You're under arrest for intention to violate volcel law.
This has big chuddy "Gay people are secretly straights who can't get women" energy.
Countertheory: non-binary identities and expressions are increasingly more openly publicly visible and seen as a valid expression, and so their popularity among otherwise cis/het people go up because it's just all a numbers game about who is around you and available.
Yeah I agree the gender line is being blurred and young people are more accepting of that, thus stocks go up for femboy demand.
Edit: But I also agree with OP somewhat. I think the younger generations struggle with anxiety and social interaction and that just makes everything worse.
I don't think the gender line is being blurred at all, people are just more apt to call themselves "non-binary".
If you look at teen culture going back decades, since it began, there's always been an element of "gender bending", or claims to that effect. People mocked The Beetles for being girly! In the 80s, the coolest, most popular and "alpha" rock stars wore makeup, had long hair and dressed feminine. Plenty of goth/punk girls rocked a look that almost certainly would be called "non-binary" today. Really what's happened is that people are quicker to put a label on identities that have always been around.
"Femboys" are also literally an ancient tradition going back to Greece, though they used to mean "boys" more literally.
As a nonbinary person, there's something uncomfortable about your comment that I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe as an inroad I'll quote this sentence:
Plenty of goth/punk girls rocked a look that almost certainly would be called “non-binary” today.
Now the issue I have with the above-quoted sentence is that nonbinary isn't a "look", it's a gender identity (or in my case, since I'm agender, the lack thereof). And I think maybe that's my issue with your comment. You seem to be saying that people are choosing to say they're nonbinary when really they're just gender-nonconforming. And I think that erases the fact that nonbinary people actually exist. Are we getting more recognition recently? Certainly. Are more people realizing that they are nonbinary because we're getting more recognition? Absolutely. But is everyone who is gender-nonconforming just "deciding" to be nonbinary? No, I don't believe they are.
Also, I binge read the book Beyond Pink and Blue (the one !transenby_liberation@hexbear.net is doing a reading group on recently) and it's caused me to think more about gender than I have since I was questioning. The author, Leslie Feinberg, is pretty clearly nonbinary, but for hir it's pretty clear that gender, gender roles, and gender expression are very much tied up together, whereas the modern conception is that they're distinct things that should be pried as widely apart as possible. I used to believe they were distinct things, and I still sort of do, but reading that book has made me rethink whether you really can separate gender, gender roles, and gender expression in any meaningful way in the real world. It's been a little wild.
So this has all been to say gender is a wonky, confusing mess, but nonbinary people do exist, we always have, it's just that now more people have heard of us and so can maybe put words to their feelings, which is a very liberating thing to do, let me tell you.
Why are you pointing at me... unless I was the femboys all along?
Unfortunately people on the internet do not count as accessible :(
Actually I think it's that they're cute, and we've reached a point on the graph where the line tracking "cultural acceptance of male-male love" is bein' outpaced by "dominance of ironic affect."
I think it's almost entirely because it's a meme on the left. I haven't seen any noticeable increase in general society outside of spaces like this one.
Tbh it's kind of weird to me how a lot of leftist memes instrumentalise queer and trans identities without really interrogating what that means, especially when it's just for hornyposting. At this stage "fully automated luxury gay space communism" or "femboy hooters" have real "black women are my spirit animal" energy, and it's pretty gross.
could a lot of leftists actually be queer? Could the cultural primacy of straightness and cisness be waning? :thinky-felix:
I don't think that changes anything though. It's still dangerous and weird to make the assumption that queerness = left. There are plenty of reactionary queer people, and for people who have struggled or faced violence because of their gender/sexual identity, reducing that identity to memes that are totally divorced from lived realities can be tiring af
Probably not significantly more than the general population, when you get down to it.
Even in a perfectly sexually liberated society, most people are going to be hetero, and the vast majority will be a 0 or a 1 on the Kinsey scale. Cis people will always be the vast, vast majority as well.
I think within the context of patriarchy femboys are considered the ultimate submissive sex object because they are men who CHOOSE to be feminine and by extention of patriarchal logic submissive whereas women are born into that role and are understood to, at least to some extent, be forced into that role by their gender, so there submissiveness is not "guaranteed", but, by fruther patriarchal logic of women as temptresses and tricksters (adam and eve etc.) seemingly submisive behaviour is seen as a potential trick of the temptress.
Of course, I think it's entirely possible to be attracted to femboys as such, but I think a lot of attraction among men who insist on heterosexuality and especially those that display traits of toxic masculinity is probably a bit pathological.
its funny when liberals "discover" something normal and natural, who cares
