Your Life Is Not An Optimization Problem

Man I wish it was easier to be a fan of DIY electronics/electronics repair without being racist to Chinese people

At the end of the day you have to understand some people are mentally ill like really really mentally ill on a level you can’t understand. I see this a lot when someone does something weird or incomprehensible and people are shocked trying to figure out their intentions and why they’d do it and it’s like there’s people who are psychotic or delusional or have rapid mood swings you’ll never be able to comprehend and very often people with other mental illnesses who are able to function more acceptably have a bad lack of understanding of that and compare what they can do and act like as the standard not understanding that’s not the same playing field

I do wish that "oppositional sexism" was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that "men" and "women" are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it's a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It's also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren't performing it to their satisfaction.

It's a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can't understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that "If I'm not a real man/woman, they won't love me anymore."

One common "progressive" form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the "divine feminine", that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It's meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There's a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You'll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn't mean it doesn't apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn't believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It's especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don't overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it's a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.

Mob Psycho 100?? More like Mob 'why are all these characters just different flavors of autistic holy shit'..... 100!!!!!

Click on image for better resolution. Also an ID below, in case the text is too small to read:

[ID: art of Mob, Tsubomi, Tome, Ritsu and Serizawa from Mob Psycho 100, with a list of autistic symptoms below them. The background is beige and behind each character is a square mismatch of colors unique to them as a background.

Mob:

He is wearing his school uniform and smiling lightly. The background colors are saturated blues, cyans, pinks and reds, which are swirling in a liquid like fashion. Below, text reads:

Polite little autistic boy

flat affect

alexithymia

perpetually confused

attempts to mask, just ends up appearing a different type of ‘weird’ as a result

low empathy, high compassion

really strict moral integrity

didn’t have a special interest for the longest time due to repressing himself

disassociating king :(

comorbid inattentive type ADHD

Tsubomi:

She is wearing her school uniform, staring ahead with a bored, uninterested expression. The colors behind her are dark and sharp browns, violets and reds. Below, text reads:

Girlboss

masking queen

low empathy

can’t read social cues but has mastered the art of scripting and being polite and pretty to escape ostracization

hard time connecting to people

often acts unintentionally rude/blunt

stubborn

actually cares a whole lot about people she really considers friends

Tome:

She is also wearing the uniform, leaning her chin on her hand and flapping the other hand excitedly as she rambles about something. The colors behind her are a bright yellow, green and orange, formed as circles and some sharp edges. Below, text reads:

Weird Girl

stimming galore

loud™

special interest in the occult/aliens

finds herself only connecting to people through that interest

emotional dysregulation

comorbid hyperactive ADHD

barely passing grades

probably spends hours on random wikipedia articles

Ritsu:

He is wearing a yellow hoodie, looking to the side and finger raised in confusion. The colors behind him are green, orange and magenta, and they are swirling in a kind of square vortex around him. Below, text reads:

just a little hater

sounds /neg

has a selective wardrobe of comfy clothes cause textures,,,

has no idea what friends are

special interest in psychic powers

spoons are a comfort item

denied he was autistic for a long time because “wdym, i’m completely normal. Look how well adjusted I am.”

comorbid OCD

Serizawa:

He's wearing his usual suit and smiling, eyes closed with the grin, his hands clasped together at his chest. The colors behind him are cyans, blues, greens and magentas, some lines, some circles. Below, text reads:

gamer .....

self isolation as an (unhealthy) coping mechanism

uses comfort items

emotions also be dysregulating but like,, he’s learning to deal with it

high empathy

missed out on a lot of milestones, but it’s okay, he’s catching up :)

special interest in video games

finds comfort in dark, tight spaces

comorbid social anxiety

End ID.]

for the record, if you feel that you cannot control your eating—like, you sit down intending to eat a handful of chips or a couple cookies, and you enter a fugue state and eat the entire package, and you're like, oh my god, why don't I have any self-control when it comes to food, why do I keep doing this—the answer is that it's because you are probably starving. you are probably running on a severe calorie and nutrient deficit and harming yourself by doing so. we should question the idea that exerting "self-control" when it comes to food is even necessary.

Playing The Alternative Age as Reimu taking Concealed the Conclusion in mind it's so funny. Because, like, Keine was so worried that the armament of the Outside World could destroy Gensokyo to the point where she decided to revert time just before its separation from Japan, when the person who actually had the power to erase Gensokyo was right in front of her.

diet talk is so inexpressibly nonsensical the instant you know anything about "the human body" or "nutrition" or if you think about it for three seconds

"t4t" is not simply a cute abbreviation for "transgender for transgender" with no history attached to it. it is a term that was invented by trans women to (often self-)describe a trans woman who only dates other trans women, an orientation that is both political and sexual-romantic in nature, and is born by necessity out of a political reality in which other trans women are frequently the only safe and reliable partners we can have, because everyone else -- that is to say, any TME person -- has the structural power of transmisogyny over us and cannot ever be fully relied upon to never use it.

i recognize that due to linguistic drift there are now trans people of all kinds who use "t4t" as shorthand for any intratrans relationship. if you are not a trans woman and you casually use t4t in this way, that's fine by me, but you must do so with the awareness that in its original meaning this term denotes a politics which you as someone who is not a trans woman lie explicitly outside of. know your history and don't be an asshole. and don't you dare come on a post of mine where trans girls are talking about what t4t means to them to fucking correct a trans woman about what the term really means.

Enami on pixiv

Spoilers for REIGEN spinoff.