Everybody matters. You matter. It would matter if you died, and it matters that you’re hurting, and it sounds like right now you’re hurting a lot.
I assume, since you’re on tumblr, which has many deficiencies but not a shortage of different perspectives on gender relations, that you’ve already seen analysis to the effect that our society denies women agency and denies men inherent worth – we treat women like they can’t accomplish anything and are fragile and need protecting and can’t really hurt people and will not produce anything of value, and we treat men like they are only as valuable as the things they produce, and matter only if they earn it through hard work, and earn value by providing it to other people. Both of these things suck.
I am assuming that you have seen posts saying that, because there are lots of them, and that they have not made you feel any better, for the same reason that “some people get too much attention, and some get ignored, and it makes sense for many people to focus on the first problem” is not very reassuring to someone who is desperately lonely, and “some people are drowning, but some don’t have enough access to water, and it makes sense for many people to focus on the second problem” is not very reassuring to drowning people. Sometimes you need someone to care about your problem – not to contextualize it, not to explain how it is the offspring of another problem which lots of people care about, not to describe how the opposite of your problem is also a source of suffering, just to care about your problem and go “holy shit how awful”.
So, yeah. Holy shit, that’s awful. Our world did not tell you “you have likes and dislikes, and they matter. You have feelings, and they matter. You deserve to be happy, and you deserve to be valued, not for the things you accomplish but for the person you are.” Our world did not tell you “people ought to treat you well, whether you have “earned” it by being successful or not.” Our world did not tell you that ‘successful’ is a ugly contrived complicated painful thing that many people cannot reach no matter how they try, and that you are just as valuable if you never reach it. Our world did try to convince you that it was heroic to kill people and heroic to die for people; it did try to convince you that if you were successful then you would be loved; it did try to convince you that the people who were hated for being ‘losers’ deserved it. It did present all kinds of variously fucked up ideals of men who were valuable, and promise that if you contorted yourself into them then you’d be valuable too.
Holy shit. That’s awful.
I’m so sorry, man. I’m so sorry. You deserved better. You deserve better. You matter, and have always mattered, and will always matter, and there is an entire universe that did its best to convince you otherwise and that is awful and I hate it and I wish it hadn’t been that way and I wish that it would stop.
I don’t know what it would have helped you to hear. But if you know – maybe tell it to someone. Maybe find a guy – not just a kid, I don’t think this only hurts boys in their formative stage, I think it hurts men every minute of their lives – and tell him whatever you needed to hear while the universe was yelling the exact opposite – and then it’ll be a little bit better.
TUOC continues to be a pretty excellent example of why I think humanity is actually sorta cool.
I didn’t even realize how annoyed I was at the general way women in comedy shows are portrayed until TAZ didn’t do the thing and I realized how amazing it was.
The thing is: when you have a group of funny male characters and one or two women, and the women are always super mature and emotionally together and much too responsible and reasonable to engage in shenanigans. Basically the perpetually annoyed straight man for the jokers to butt up against.
And then TAZ introduced Lup, and immediately she was petty, and smug, and egotistical, and FUCKING HILARIOUS, and it felt like taking a breath of air when I didn’t even realize I’d been underwater. She’s allowed to be every bit as ridiculous and self-obsessed as her brother, and they just trust that we’ll love her the same way we love Taako, faults and all – they never feel like they’re apologizing for putting a girl in with all this silliness, not once! And, like, they joke about a “competent woman” – she is HIGHLY competent! And very moral! And capable of tremendous love and sweetness!
And she ALSO wants her fucking fifteen dollars back, GREG GRIMALDIS.
and she also wants her fucking fifteen dollars back greg grimaldis
^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
So I had the strangest dream this weekend and nobody understands me so I need to share it with you because you might. Press J to skip this post if you can’t deal, I will accept this.
In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic
As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour – I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour – and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back – something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.
Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.
A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.
The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.
They were adult Teletubbies.
This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of – the captive ones that we have seen on television – are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.
The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.
In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species – if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)
So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the fucking fuck” and went away again.
I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “what the fucking fuck” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.
Anyway I’m sure you guys will join me in this knowledge. And also I’ve googled it and apparently the Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies, so clearly they are getting more from somewhere and the time to question this is NOW
I have a personal theory that how a dream makes you feel is more meaningful than the content.
What I got from your dream was a sense of wonder and privilege (the good kind), followed by the need to bear witness and advocate for the cryptids. Topped off with a disturbingly accurate example of the attitudes you’d face.
(staring nobly into the distance) yes. yes, you understand. you understand.
I’m so sorry but this is what came to mind and so this is what I drew
Holy
Thank you so much for sharing that dream, it was EXACTLY what I needed to stop feeling like shit. Now I, too, am honored by the knowledge of adult teletubbies.
how terrifying, to be aging and girl. at 18 i was told by men that i was “the perfect age,” and i still thought it was a compliment. is it because at 20 i figured out how sharp those words were. i felt old at 21, felt like if grey hairs came and my spine cracked i was done for. how scary. i am reminded constantly by “realistic” ideas in fantasy novels that i should have five kids.
my life feels short. like it is squeezed into my twenties. like at 30 i become ghost, just another mother or hard worker or both, just another background character. like if i am not settled and making a difference by 27 i should just give up already. is this something men feel? like a clock is painted on their back, one hand warning: your beauty is something you are valued for and it is something you cannot get back.
and why was i only beautiful, i wonder, at 18 on a riverbank. i’m told often my childish face is a blessing. that i shouldn’t want to look older. one told me i was a trap falling: “you look young but you’re not” he said to me, “it kind of led me on”. am i not young?
maybe i am wrong. maybe it’s just how we all feel, getting old, like time is slipping from us. maybe men do worry that they will be alone forever if they don’t settle by thirty, maybe it’s even because they think they’ll turn ugly. maybe we all squish our lives into that incredibly young decade. what do i know. i’m still learning.
I’m almost 25 and I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.
As a 48 year old lesbian, I offer my perspective on aging, and you all can take it or leave it.
Our understanding of our own aging is very much conditioned by the priorities of straight men, who in the aggregate understand beauty and femininity, indeed women in general, in literally superficial terms. Most of the ads you see for anti-aging products, for instance, focus on its *visible* symptoms: graying hair, wrinkling skin or discolored skin, sagging breasts, changes in body shape, etc. These are the symptoms of female aging that men perceive, and they are the ones that the cosmetics and the larger anti-aging industry therefore target. (Men do have their own anxieties about visibly aging, mostly related to hair loss and body shape; but they are not, for instance, generally terrified by the appearance of wrinkles, unless they work in the entertainment industry.)
But aging is not just something that happens to everyone else’s perception of you; it is something that happens in your own body, at levels deeper than anyone else (especially anyone male) is ever likely to perceive. From my POV the really important thing about aging is how you feel. Your body is where you live; it is for you. Aging is inevitable, but it can to some extent be intentional, in that you can (to some extent; all this is limited by the amount of time and money available to you and the healthfulness of the environments you have lived in and how you did in the DNA lottery) choose to do things that will help preserve the things about your body that make YOU happy to be living there–things like flexibility, strength, and the smooth functioning of your major organs. Generally, if you’re healthy, you don’t think about any of this stuff at 18 or 25; but when you are 40, you will start to take more of an interest as you come to understand how important all of this is to your own ability to enjoy life.
So that sucks, as does menopause, which is the unacknowledged referent of a lot of cultural anxieties about female aging. But the point I want to make is: one of the worst things that the phenomenon described so evocatively by the OP does to girls and young women is to make them so anxious about their own bodies that they are unable to enjoy and appreciate their youth while they have it. And that is theft. It really is. I miss youth, but even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then. I did not appreciate its many excellent qualities, and it was a long time before I allowed myself to accept and act on its desires. At a time when I was beautiful, I thought I was fat and ugly, and that because no man would ever find me attractive, I was doomed to loneliness and isolation. After I met Mrs. Plaidder, her conviction of my beauty eventually passed into me. As a result, I enjoyed my life in general a lot more in my 30s than I did in my teens. I’ve enjoyed my 40s more too, apart from the cancer and the current catastrophe. Age does actually bring experience and knowledge and, to those able to profit from it, wisdom. You do gain, even as you lose.
Catullus, yelling in Latin verse at his lover Lesbia, asks her venomously, “cui videberis bella?” By whom will you be seen to be beautiful? It’s a question that still poisons our sense of self and our understanding of our own possibilities. By myself, asshole, she should have replied; and so may we all, at any age.
Long post, but – my three cents. At 67 I don’t feel old and/or ugly. In fact, I really enjoy myself. I’m happy with how I look – because I got over the brainwashed way we see ourselves. As plaidadder said: “even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then.” BTW, plaidadder – you are STILL beautiful, trust me. The American cult of youth and they way of evaluating women’s beauty as inevitably liked to age is fucking TOXIC. I now live in South America; was complemented ( in a non-creepy way) by two guys less than half my age last week, grey hair & all. Love it here.
You will never feel as old as you do in your late 20s to late 30s. Seriously. Western culture makes the passing of youth into a tragic death and that’s – so fucking sad. Once it has passed and you can no longer reasonably think of yourself as young, no matter how desperately you try to hang on to it – you find yourself in a whole other country, you realize that you’ve lived on one side of a mountain all your life and told there’s nothing beyond it only to discover that there is, in fact, an entire world on the other side. Don’t believe the lie.
I enjoyed this post. I also lacked the clarity on culturally imposed bullshit to enjoy my youth and beauty, and at 47, I have good days and bad days. I’m looking forward to one day not giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks about my body. I’m embarrassed and a little ashamed to report that I’m not there yet.
What I like about getting older (I’m 46.) is that the less “attractive” I become, the more I get to fill that space with things I choose. The more invisible I become as a person with whom someone may wish to have sex, the more I can just wear clothes that I like and think are pretty, the more I feel free to let my hair have no real “style.” I wear flat shoes that I think are cute. I wear the same earrings I’ve worn for twenty years. I get to choose to present myself as eccentric or artsy or sloppy or outdated without much commentary from the peanut gallery, because nobody is concerned any more with my fuckablity. And without the constant input, I have more room for my own opinion.
Not that I’m there all the time, but I’m sure there a hell of a lot more often than when I was in my twenties.
One of the things I love best about tumblr (and there are many, many things) is that here I have found a circle of middle-aged and older women who are kind and wise and brave, and are willing to share their experiences and to mentor younger women through aspects of aging. I’m 40, and I feel like I am beginning a journey into a new phase of life with a tribe of women beside me. It is so hugely valuable. ❤️
Well, at 67, I can tell you that finally no one is looking at me like a tarted-up slab of meat with a vagina. Of course, I’m easy to mistake for a little old lady now, my hair having come in a disorderly charcoal grey after my chemo. But that’s a fun stereotype to work (some years ago the teens I was working with described my personal style as “granny goth”), and it also lets you comment and converse with other people with impunity: no one really worries if their kid shares a word in the store with “that granny” and when someone is unspeakably rude, you can just fire right back at them and they actually, sometimes, demonstrate at least momentary guilt. I dress for my own comfort—although I believe one can demonstrate respect by dressing nicely for things like meetings or travel, I tend to mean beyond what simply amuses me that I am clean, relatively ordered, and have all body parts covered that would cause arrest in my local jurisdiction.
The rest of it? Fuck that noise; I’m old and I haven’t got time for that shit.
Just to chirp in (45). One of the many gifts of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was the intergenerational community of dykes. So first, as a dyke, I wasn’t around men a lot who were telling me how unfuckable I was. So aside from the general socialization, inside stepped a ton of bullshit. But also, at 21 I was hanging with wyms who were 40, 50, 60. I was seeing all of these older women in their fullness and glory and sexiness and intelligence and BEAUTY and like everything that happened there, I realized the head trips about aging were a lie.
These women, who embraced being crones, were EVERYTHING. I wanted to be them. And as I age, I remember their power, their gorgeousness. I aim for it with all my might.
Unlearning lies is such hard work, but patriarchy spends a lot of energy reviling things that are powerful.
I can’t believe all the wisdom in these posts above. you GO. I am so in love with all y’all.
There is so much women are not only not taught, but flat-out LIED TO about aging. Even within fandom, a space that is very much women-driven, occasionally you come across someone trying to pressure older women to bow out because our mere presence makes some people uncomfy (and sometimes by “older” they mean over 30, never mind the 40+, 50+, 60+ women speaking up here).
Because we are not taught to respect older women as sexual beings, as beings with our own interests, our own passions, our own weaknesses, and our own right to take up space and be fully present even though we are no longer sexually desirable (to SOME) and might not be willing or interested in taking up a “mom/grandmom” role.
When I was in my 20s I was doing a lot of music writing and one of my biggest role models who I sort of knew personally was Deena Weinstein, who was doing exceptional work on metal culture – very little studied in academia at that time – and she was doing it as a (at the time) very rare visibly middle-aged woman at metal shows banging her head off to Cannibal Corpse. (She is not “detached.” She’s in the mosh pit. She loves the fuck out of it, and it shows.) Lots of people were lining up to tell her in one way or another she ought to be “acting her age,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. I looked up to her as the giant badass she is.
A few things they don’t tell you about aging, that I know at 48 (and I know to some people here, I’m still a baby, and that’s OK)
1. Menopause is real and for some people perimenopause takes years. Holy shit. It’s as big an upheaval as puberty – but, like puberty, it’s not a disaster it’s just a shift. Respect it but don’t fear it. Most of all, don’t fear talking about it honestly.
2. Being sexually invisible to strange men is a fucking blessing, especially if you take public transit every day. What a gift to actually be able to read in peace most of the time. Don’t dread this!
3. Judgmental opinions of trivial people become a lot more obvious for what they are, over time.
4. Your interest in sex might decrease. OR IT MIGHT NOT. IT MIGHT EVEN INCREASE. In a culture that is horrified by the sexuality of older women, consider who is served by the assumption that loss of libido is a thing that always happens. (Or that it should.)
5. You ARE still the same person you were at 17, at 24, at 39, etc. You’re just a little bit MORE that same person.
6. You have the right to discuss and write about any age you’ve passed through. You own your experiences and you can do with them as you will, creatively. You have been a child, a teenager, a young adult, a middle-aged person – you have memories that you are always entitled to draw upon, for any reason at any time.
it amuses me to see people being surprised/impressed/amused by this setup, because it’s extremely common on the plains. if you don’t plant a windbreak, your heating and cooling bills are huge, and storms do things like throw the lawnmower through the living room window, take the roof off, or cake the entire north side of the house with six inches of solid ice.
evergreens remain bendy even in the coldest weather, so – wait, no, not the coldest. i remember when i was a kid it got down to like -45 and the norway pines around my house were cracking like gunshots as the sap froze.
maples, incidentally, make that noise around -20f, and i hear it at least once every winter here in southern minnesota. but i only ever heard norway pines make it that one time.
so anyway that’s why we plant pine trees around our houses. because otherwise the wind would freaking kill us.
This is informative and perfectly sensible under the circumstances but I also cannot resist the temptation to compare it to planting stuff all around the boundary of your lot in The Sims
Ya know, I wanna get mad at forced memes by corporations in an attempt to act “hip”, but I feel Olive Garden is the one place that is perfectly allowed to use this one
can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept
Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”
just moving along like everyone else 