secretfanspace | First Post

You're viewing

secretfanspace
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

hoisinsauce posting in

secretfanspace

A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt I mean, I am certainly not the person to say what is and what isn't transmisogynistic! I only call it that because I know that if I were some sort of trans, I would be fucking horrified if all the nice folx reading this for their bookclubs assumed this book was in any way representative of my experience. The characters (so far!) are uniformly privileged and unpleasant, with no experience of poverty or real discrimination. They care about fucking and affirming their gender. That's it.

Reese, the MC, fucks an HIV-positive man because bug-chasing gives him the same thrill he imagines women get with pregnancy scares. He pretends his estrogen is birth control. He gets in an abusive sugar baby relationship because being beaten and called a whore makes him feel like a woman. And this is not just Reese! One of his TIM friends fantasizes about being pimped out and murdered by a man.

Do spoiler cuts work?

But in ways that both of them felt but neither could fully admit, the entire saga of the boots that led to the slap was a form of pageantry. Beneath it lay Reese’s own sense of womanhood. The reason Stanley hit Reese reversed everything both of them wanted to be true: Stanley hit Reese because she wanted him to hit her.
....
In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart. And yeah, liberal feminists—especially the trans-hating variety—would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She’d be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady.

From: (Anonymous)

sa I guess the cut DID NOT work, sorry to everyone who had to scroll past this. D:

From: (Anonymous)

I guess there's rot13. I'm sure I've seen cuts on ffa before, but idk how people do them outside of journal entries; would have to look around...

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

> The characters (so far!) are uniformly privileged and unpleasant, with no experience of poverty or real discrimination. They care about fucking and affirming their gender. That's it.

Idk man, I've met some noisy transactivists who call themselves trans and who seem to absolutely love that kind of rep, because they're super narcissistic people who can't see that something's wrong.

That hitting quote is so longwinded omg. hit hit hit hit hit.
heart with ~dark crevices~
lol trying to pre-empt reviewers, u so smart. 'if i say they'll call me sexist, then im not sexist hahahahaha'
haha I wrote that line before even reading the next line, called it, you unimaginative man.

Yeah... I think you were too generous about the narration, if that's representative! xD

From: (Anonymous)

Also I fucking love that he decided he would try to shoehorn in some cliffsnotes in an attempt to persuade us all of his knowledge of feminist history, in the hopes that he could then not be criticised on feminist grounds. "Look, he's using jargon like '2nd wave'! He's saying 'liberal feminists'! Gee whiz, he sure knows his stuff! It's not that he doesn't know shit about feminism, he's fully *aware* of what he's doing, it's *subversive*!" Like nearly all books written by men, it looks like a man droning on about his feelings about life, the universe and everything, and then doing a halfassed job of putting it in the mouths of fictional characters.

god i hate narcissistlit

From: (Anonymous)

The funny thing is, he gets the liberal feminist label wrong, LOL. It's radfems who don't consider you a real woman! And how many op-eds in the NYT do radfems get, anyway??

From: (Anonymous)

Yeah, I noticed that too. It was a weird error; why use the qualifier if you have no idea what you're talking about? Why not just say 'feminists'? But I suppose it does make sense with my 'he used it to try to sound knowledgeable' theory.

Since his character is such a self-insert, it might be quite fun to write a glowing review praising the author's depiction of an ignoramus. "The arrogance and sexism is meticulously observed.", etc.

but hey, maybe it'll surprise you yet!

From: (Anonymous)

> Reese, the MC, fucks an HIV-positive man because bug-chasing gives him the same thrill he imagines women get with pregnancy scares.

You know, when I first heard about this, I wondered if this was a result of a man reading fic written by women and mistaking it for real life; assuming that what women liked on the page translated to what they wanted irl. Because loads of women are into reading about accidental pregnancy; it's a common romance trope and I'd guess a pretty common kink. But irl, pregnancy scares are just annoying and stressful. So I kinda saw this as evidence, not just that he had a fantasy idea of what a woman was, but that it was a fantasy built out of tropes he'd encountered in fiction.

From: (Anonymous)

I strongly suspect this book will be improved by switching out 'feminist' for 'furby' and 'trans' for 'shelby'. Still considering potential replacements for 'gender'; the word needs to work as both a noun and a verb...

From: (Anonymous)

I read it out loud to my bf and he just sat there blinking, then whispered, "... My God."

(Then was like "So we've got tumblr stuff inventing offensive stuff in everything, and meanwhile THIS walks in...?!!" ... And I may have broken him by telling him it was up for a women's prize)

From: (Anonymous)

That's what I'm saying! TBH, the more normies who read this, the better. I'm an evil TERF and I would have written this book with more compassion for the trans characters than the fucking author.

From: (Anonymous)

Yeah, he's aware of a lot of it (partly because I rant to him) but he doesn't realize how fucking brazen some of it is, since he would never read something like this by default. Mais I'm familiar enough with the style by now that I don't even blink at it; he's just, "what in the fuck, that is so sexist, that's such a slap in the face, wtf!" and gets stuck like a computer that has hit an error and doesn't know what to do. The bit with the nursery gave us both pedo vibes. Can't wait to read him that maternity section, he's gonna be creeped tf out lol.