Metal Reviews

LOL! I don't say my posts out loud you loser.

Jesus, getting Japanese sleeve tattoos doesn't make you look strong or like you have balls, unless you have some reason for it to be oriental then it's purely for the looks which seems a bit strange really. Especially as they're very very popular and you look like you're easily swayed by the crowd. Waste of oxygen, haha.

You meant exactly what you said, that there's something wrong with those who, through an accident of birth, ended up with a uterus and working mammary glands, displaying something you consider to be a mark of those who, through an equal accident of birth, ended up with testes. By your logic, women shouldn't wear pants, or button-down shirts, or flat-heeled shoes. You've chosen something completely arbitrary as a marker of gender, too; by and large, if you polled the general public, you wouldn't come up with sleeves as being a marker of anything except a certain roughness of character, regardless of physical characteristics. (I personally don't hold to that opinion, just as I think your assertions of a gender dichotomy relating to tattoos are, as you lot would say, bollocks.) You offer your unsubstantiated opinion as absolute fact, and you, sir, are wrong.

Furthermore, you don't even know what the word "butch" means. A butch is a lesbian (key word: "lesbian") who purposely takes on masculine characteristics in her behavior and mode of dress. Please, trust me on this one. I get that definition straight from the horse's mouth, as it were.

nou

does not compute



i took it as his opinion :\

Bastard is a sexist! OMFG!

All my friends who are girls know for a fact I'm a sexist, I can't help it. I'm not really, but on a lot of differant things I do see women as a lower form-mainly when they act manly. Be yourself whorebeast.

Bah, I was hoping to back you into a gibbery, sweaty corner. Noone can defend themselves against charges of being a racist or sexist. You just can't, God knows I've tried.

Call me a racist and I'll tell ya, I have no problem with skin colour, but if they don't speak English (in this country) and they don't respect my culture then I say burn the fuckers, they can leave.

Call me a sexist, who gives a shit? It's only women.

So you want all women to conform to a single standard of behavior, dress and adornment...and for them to be themselves. Pookie-kins, by that logic, you should be dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch, have short, gelled hair, and be gearing up for business school, since that's what's considered "manly," at least in my neck of the woods.

Translation: you're an idiot and a pig and you can kiss my tomboy ass.

Not talking, breathing

Last time I checked, white ink tattoos, lace and gossamer had nothing to do with Japan. I was giving you an idea of the style I wanted, not the subject. The subject is a secret ;)

As for 'being myself', you're making a tragic, absolutely tragic mistake when you say that women acting 'manly' is something they do against their own nature. For a lot of women femininity comes naturally, but that doesn't mean that it's coded into female DNA. Not all women have a nature/nurture combination that makes them want to grow long fingernails and wear somewhat non-functional shoes. I'm perfectly myself with what I do, even if you might consider some of the things I do and wear somewhat manly and unnatural. I don't purposefully strive to look masculine, and when I genderfuck I aim to look gender neutral or gender ambiguous. Why would I strive to be more like a man when I consider both male and female gender stereotypes to be disgusting and oppressing? I strive to remove myself from them.

Gender stereotypes are the things that put undue pressure on people, create undue expectations and make people distribute duties in an inefficient manner. There are some sex-inherent qualities, but there is a lot less of those than most people think. It also just happens that sex doesn't always go with mental gender. There are two main sexes and a miscellany of other, rare ones. Genders - who knows? I think you have to consider the mind, not the crotch when making decisions about what people ought or oughtn't to do, what they should and shouldn't be.

In short - a uterus is not incompatible with tattoos, but some mental characteristics are. I do not display the mental characteristics that are incompatible with tattoos, and as such I can and will get madass tattoos.

I am a free entity because I freely choose to be with my partner and choose to remain loyal. I am also a free entity because I do not bend my will to the will of my partner when it causes me greater misery than happiness. I do not do things for the sake of an abstract concept that is a relationship and seems to be so important to a lot of people that they forget that a relationship involves people. For me a relationship is a means to happiness, not an end in itself.

Compute now?

In short, all I want is to be happy. If being happy means bending some 'rules' and disregarding some worthless abstract concepts it's okay. Abstract concepts are not solid things and should not be worshiped as such. Sex is a solid thing, but gender is an abstract concept.

Sasheron - Gender, like sexuality, is a continuum; I don't know if you're familiar with the Kinsey scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale) but a comparable scale is used for gender identity as well, with feminine at one end and masculine at the other, and everything else in between. Personally, I don't think there are any inborn gender qualities at all; my mom managed to give me a completely gender neutral upbringing (by accident, no less), and I ended up with no gender identity at all. While it's impossible for me to look like anything other than a bio female (my chest laughs at your puny bindings) my default mode of dress is stereotypically masculine - with no motives behind it except the fact that I like loose-fitting death metal t-shirts and steel-toed boots.

This is the sort of result that truly liberal parents nowadays (at least in the U.S.) are actively striving for; removing all gender role cues from a developing child's life so they end up off the scale entirely.

wat

still pretty shaky on this "partner's equal" concept. human interaction revolves around one person pwning the other.



for some reason this reminds me of my English class where when we were going to talk about a story we'd be all like "gender stereotypes are noob" but then analyse them in the story then eventually we just stopped prefacing the analysing with saying "gender stereotypes are noob".

Carnifex Umbris: I don't believe it's a scale, and I don't believe that everything is between two extremes. I don't think it's two-dimensional. The kinsey scale fails to fit in the differences between bisexuality and pansexuality for example. Also, there are enormous difficulties defining inherently masculine and inherently feminine gender stereotypes, unlike the ease with which heterosexuality and homosexuality are defined.

noodles - in any interaction there must be some pwning, but equality can be defined as a balance of pwning rather than a lack of it. Often both parties make huge compromises for the sake of a relationship. Women are the ones openly encouraged to do it, men do it grudgingly. Basically me and Chris try to minimise the need for any kind of pwning by making decisions together and letting each other do whatever we want as long as some basic previously agreed-on conditions are met.

Oh, no. The point of the scales is to be able to do away with the sexuality/gender dichotomy entirely. The extremes are the ends of the scale, with every possible gradient in between. A perfectly androgenous individual would fall in the middle of the gender scale, say a 3 if we're using Kinsey's as a model, while a soft butch (for example), would be farther toward the masculine end (and, just to continue the example, a stone butch would fall all the way at the end). Kinsey's original scale is obviously out of date, but that's the general model sociologists and anthropologists use (with literal libraries full of updates and expansions).

Gender stereotypes aren't as difficult to quantify as you might think; the degree just escalates the wider out you're looking. A small, traditional middle American town (which I mention just because that's what I'm familiar with) has an incredibly rigid and clear-cut set of gender identities; men and women are expected to act in a very specific way with very little room for variation. If you look at America as a whole, though, you get a much wider set of expectations, and once you're working on a global scale it becomes ridiculously difficult, especially if you're trying to compare American vs. Northern European vs. Southeast Asian, etc.

What I'm saying is, I don't think it's a linear scale, I think it's a circle. I'm being vague but it's hard to elaborate.

No, I get what you're saying. Like a single-circle Venn diagram, yes? The scales are generally what sociologists/anthropologists use to study gender/sex/sexuality, really just to have an academic standard.

And, just because I'm badly feverish again and can't sleep (I'm actually going to call the doctor tomorrow because this is not mono, this is bubonic ebola or something and my organs are liquifying as I type this), here is a mouse-drawn illustration of my conception of the gender circle:


Ha, now I'm shivering instead of sweating. I'm going to attempt to sleep.

It's a start, but I don't like the way you grouped and distributed those traits. Some of those are not contrary or contradictory to each other, especially the defender/nurturer. It does break up the groupings and shows that one person can have many different levels of 'gender-defining' traits, but it's still lacking. I'm not very fond of most sociological gender scales because they make so many unwarranted assumptions.

I like girls.

'cuz boobz are fun.