Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social), page 7

Biological essentialism is wrong and gender as a social construct is incomplete and the most aggressive evangelists of both are tedious.

Also, some people are being silly acting like stock photography and public domain art don't also look cheap and shitty and are easily ignored.

I try to use stock when possible but most stock art is freaking terrible, too.

I think 95% of uses for "AI" are stupid, wasteful, unnecessary, and shoehorned into existing products to make them worse.

But some people seem to think that if you don't have a big publisher behind you or you aren't rich enough to pay for professional book design then you just shouldn't bother writing, or that you should put your work up for free somewhere because they don't want to have to pay you for your work either, which is why so many of us are poor in the first place.

Even my more jaded characters, like Emma or Felicia, are more fully human and sympathetic than the superficial tech bro fascists and dead-eyed politicians we have to contend with in real life.

I enjoy writing stories with teenage girl protagonists because their awkward earnestness is a refreshing antidote from the cultural nihilism surrounding me.

Unfortunately, a large part of being female in this society means navigating other people's hypocritical and contradictory expectations.

It always confuses me when people think gender is clothing, like wearing pants is something masculine when women do it all the time. It's so archaic.

And I like high femme!

But I know girls who got sent home from school because their bra strap was showing or their skirt wasn't quite long enough so dressing high femme was actively discouraged. Not to mention the annoyance of dealing with horny male teenagers all the time.

Being a "grunge girl" or whatever was kind of the norm. It didn't make any of us any less women.

Like, whenever TERFs say, "Wearing a dress doesn't make you a woman!" I'm like, yeah? And? What's your point? I thought you were supposed to be feminists.

It's really alien to my experience because I grew up as part of a generational cohort of women who thought glamming up and wearing dresses all the time was kind of tedious and something you did largely to impress an employer or boyfriend.

The people we trusted to fix this cashed out and decided they're on the side of the billionaires.

No one is shocked by how corrupt America is. Most of us just don't know what to do about it -- other than terrorism or mass violence or vote and pray it gets better somehow -- because nobody in this country below the billionaire class seems to have any influence.

@orangelantern @FeralRobots No pockets, sizes are meaningless, the pink tax, "pretend you're a genderqueer robot from the year 4000 who also can't dress itself," the problems are legion.

American politics makes more sense when you realize the "liberals" are conservatives and the "conservatives" are fascists, and the former think they're in solidarity with the latter against the rest of us even though the latter would rather see the former die.

You might as well try to "solve" racism with "color blindness."

"Everything about gender is fake and made-up" also leads fairly inevitably to banning transition because you can just change how you feel about yourself or society's attitudes about gender, right? It's all in your head!

My irritation with "gender" conversations is people insist on talking about different things while treating them like the same thing and it leads some people in unfortunately TERFy directions ("women are defined by oppression and you don't get to participate") and for others it's just a complete waste of time.

I wish people would just say they want to end gender-based oppression instead of ending gender itself because the latter is a nonstarter.

Gender (or gender identity) is an intrinsic thing.

Gender as it is performed and expected to be performed is an individually and socially constructed thing, a political act.

We could save ourselves a lot of trouble if people stopped conflating the two concepts.

@timberwraith Most Democrats in particular have bought into the lie that Israel has good intentions and the Palestinians would have had peace under Clinton if they just tried, so everything that happens is their fault. It's part of the weird Clinton hero worship. Hilary was saying "kill them all" a decade ago. But then she was close friends of Kissinger, apparently.