will never get over this. the fact I submitted my fucking dissertation that talked about silphium the fucking Week Before They Discovered It After 2000 Years
Wait, would The Handmaiden’s plot still work if everyone were men? I just ran the scenario over in my head, gave the script a once-over for small dialogue adjustment, and I feel like it technically might.
I cannot stress the unbelievable degree to which it would not work as well if gender swapped. Come on now
like yeah I guess the story would still cohere but thematically it would lose p much everything 😭 this is a movie whose central plot hinges on the sexual exploitation of a woman for the pleasure of wealthy men + the men in the film objectifying, projecting onto, and underestimating the film’s female characters on account of them being women like it’s a pretty significant part of the narrative
love when you stop a cat from doing something and instead of understanding that they shouldnt be doing that theyre just like. ah sorry my good sir you seem to have interrupted me. no worries let me just shimmy past you and get a taste of that pan of hot oil. please.
idk man i think that if you can read dozens and dozens of trans men talking about how their support systems abandoned them when they started getting too masculine on T or had top surgery or whatever, and queer spaces started treating them like threats or potential predators, and you find these stories going back to the 90s or even earlier, and you read all of that and come away thinking that there’s nothing wrong with how progressive communities treat men, you are just fundamentally beyond help dude. you don’t see us as people
a lot of people are somehow misinterpreting this post as saying that trans women Don’t experience alienation or ostracization from queer, feminist, and/or progressive communities, to which i say: i am not responsible for your belief that trans men and trans women have to have entirely separate and opposite experiences. if you think that trans men experiencing something implies that trans women can’t experience it, that’s on you! you might want to sit and have a think about how you see the world and whether or not you’re buying into the (deeply patriarchal!) idea that men and women are entirely separate from each other. you might learn something.
