Xion Shadow ✦ Pronouns: He/They
Age: 21+
I mostly RB random shit and hyperfixations
and my Art of course. My art blog is @lilmysshadowxion
This blog is mainly SFW, although I do try to tag things such as blood and NSFW themes just in case.
Ever since starting to publish romance novels I’ve been checking out the romance books at the thrift store specifically for the clinch covers, as a reference for what I might want to do with my own books.
As a culture we mocked these to extinction but I think we were just afraid of their power. The modern clinch revival still hasn’t reached the heady heights of what they were doing in the 80s! The vintage covers can be really quite explicit. These ones in particular were steamy enough they had to be hidden on an inner flap.
This episode of the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast where they interview Shirley Green and Sharon Spiak, who were romance novel cover artists in the 80s, is a fascinating look at what a huge industry these covers were. Did you know they had whole photography studios full of props to make these? They’d take photos and turn those over to a painter who’d make something like a couple of these a day. They had it down to a science.
Here is a particular favourite of mine, also by Sharon Spiak!
So many characters should be permanently disabled in multiple ways or AT THE VERY LEAST have severe chronic pain but everyoens a coward so no one writes the effects of the injuries they inflict </3
historical silence of an entire demographic should fill you with horror, fear, and dread, wondering “what happened here?”, and not blanket assumptions that nothing happened at all. there is no mass demographic of human beings who simply sit around and do nothing, have no history, have no stories. if an entire demographic has its history missing, there is a reason for that. and that reason is damn near always violent.
I was just thinking about this.
From many I see the attitude of “Trans men/mascs are hyper-invisible which means nobody knows you exist which means they don’t do anything or very little to you”.
Which creates the false idea that trans men/mascs are intentionally putting themselves into harms way by being vocal.
But vitally it creates the idea that, as stated, we’re being basically ignored by transphobia and oppressive systems in general.
That’s far from the truth. Anyone born or assigned female in a patriarchal society is going to be subjected to misogyny regardless of gender identity (just like how all women are subjected to misogyny regardless of birth/assigned sex).
Those born/assigned female who seek to deviate, even if they’re not trans men/masc, are thoroughly punished.
When that transgression against how ‘women’ should be is the fact that you’re not a woman and intend to live your own truth then society will do anything it can to force you to conform again. Harassment, stigmatisation, physical abuse, sexual abuse, forced pregnancy, conversion therapy are just a few things they do and if none of that gets you to be a woman again? Murder. In fact, many jump straight to the murder. Some even go to torture first then murder us.
Trans women/femmes go through most of that too of course, and a fair number will never be known to have gone through it specifically for being trans.
But the level in which a trans man/mascs true gender will be erased is the result of being hyperinvisible.
You don’t know we’re here, so you don’t notice when we’re gone.
You don’t know we’re here, so you don’t notice us in pain and need.
We’re swept away, either to complete secrecy or down in the statistics as women.
Then people ask us where all the older trans men/mascs are, where are their contributions? Dead. They’re dead.
And those who are trying to speak now are still being heavily silenced by many groups who have chosen to see our plight and very existence as a threat.
The thing about anti-voting arguments that operate on the grounds of efficacy (“voting is useless, do x instead”) is that… even if voting wasn’t particularly useful, it’s still something you do no more than once a year in most jurisdictions. You can’t take one day out of your busy ‘doing x’ schedule? You were planning to use that one specific day to firebomb a walmart/bring about socialist revolution/protest real good? That one day is crucial to your plans? You can’t, like, reschedule?
A couple of weeks ago I was in a pharmacy getting my Covid/flu shot, and there was this old lady there trying to buy a whole bunch of vitamin B12 supplements, because she didn’t want to get sick this winter. 'The flu shot never works", she was saying, “but they said these would work if I take one every day”. And this extremely patient woman waiting in line beside her, as she addressed this talking point to nobody in particular, pointed out the obvious: there’s absolutely nothing preventing you from doing both of those things. They’re not in competition. You want to take a B12 supplement every day? Go nuts. But you can get a vaccine right now, at this pharmacy, for free, and even if you think it does nothing, you haven’t claimed it would do any harm, right? The worst it could do is not work. And if it doesn’t, the only cost is that it took a little time out of one day. Nobody is asking you to dedicate the rest of the winter to getting daily flu shots.
You just can’t trade off the utility of a one-time thing and a continuous thing directly like that. Anyone who has ever managed a schedule knows that. And if you haven’t managed a schedule, I’m not sure how confident I should be in your ability to bring about socialist revolution.
As a trans woman, why the fuck is one of my sisters for coming at me for showing appreciation for the trans men and trans mascs in my life who have helped me discover who I am.
I didn’t have a lot of trans women in my life growing up, but I did have trans men/mascs. The first trans person I ever met was a trans man, he’s my cousin. Trans men/mascs showed me that I don’t have to live with the life that was assigned to me. My highschool sweetheart ended up being a trans man and so did my first husband. Dating a trans man is what first got me to question my gender (Thank you @gnomeskillet for dealing with my dumbass, I miss your face) and it was a trans masc nonbinary person who finally cracked my egg. For as long as I remember, it was trans men who were there for me and helped me discover who I really am. Not that trans women didn’t help, they just weren’t as much as a presence and the men were until recently.
So when I share my experiences and appreciation and another trans woman, a friend no less, responds with “Is this satire?” and tells me I’m throwing trans women under the bus and I “need to talk to more trans women” it pissed me off. We are literally fighting the same fight, why does it matter that men are who taught me what it means to be trans? And I know this isn’t an isolated incident, I see so many trans men/masc talking about how they are treated like they somehow betrayed the community by finding their true selves or how a lot of the anti-men discourse hurts them as much as it does cis men (that’s a whole other rant about how “All men are evil” is bioessentialism and that’s terf talk) and all I can think is why? Those are our brothers and siblings. They deserve all the same care and compassion as we get, so why the fuck are we attacking them?
To my trans sisters who are participating in this hateful discourse, do better.
To all the trans men/mascs reading this, I love you and you are amazing. Thank you for helping me be who I am today.
i think it’s important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency
in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn’t have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don’t have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can’t just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion
How does that barcode system work? I’ve never heard of something like that.
1. you add whatever porn games or movies or books you want to your cart and go to checkout
2. you select cash payment at conbini as your payment method
3. youre emailed a barcode that you take to the conbini
4. you show it to the cashier, they scan it, and you pay what you owe. note that the cashier does not see what youre buying
and the transaction is complete
from the notes im learning that brazil also something similar. based tbh
Mexico too, there are multiple convenience stores you can pay at, sometimes you can also pay directly at the bank if it is offered even if you’re not a client of said bank.
i used to buy into that online leftist black-and-white Glorious Revolution stuff and what i remember about my mindset at that time. stresses me out tbh. i couldn’t see the viability of anything short of full-scale revolution so i constantly felt helpless. i viewed the revolution as necessary to address any and all societal problems, but i was also, privately, terrified of it. i didn’t want to die for the cause, but i told myself that if that was what happened when the revolution came it would be worth it, that my blood could move us that much faster toward perfect socialist utopia.
in this mindset, the only useful thing i could do was die. i didn’t want to. i wasn’t generally suicidal (although i do consider this mindset a form of… abstract suicidal thought). but i believed my life was the only meaningful thing i had to offer.
now i’m a member of a community who values me and values my contributions even if i can’t contribute as much as i’d like – a community that emphasizes that every single good deed matters, every compassionate act changes the world. a community where just showing up is enough.
now i know that i can change so much more while i’m alive than i’d ever be able to as a corpse on a battlefield. i know that if i keep showing up, i will find or someone will show me a way to make a difference. i know that i am valued as more than a hypothetical martyr in some grand final battle. i know that i am missed when i’m gone. i know that the actual work is done by regular people with a goal in mind, and i know that that work is unglamorous. i know the unglamorous work is often the most meaningful and the most fulfilling.
the “revolution or nothing” mindset is rendering my generation hopeless. a very loud portion of gen z now believes the only contribution they have to offer is their life. this belief effectively nullifies a person’s capacity to create meaningful change; any action they could take while alive is not worthwhile because it won’t fix the world’s myriad problems in one fell swoop – better to burn it all down and yourself with it.
if they weren’t actively fucking over the rest of us to feed their own suicidal hopelessness, i’d feel sorry for them.
there’s a phenomenon i’ve observed wherein a person stews in their own misery, hopelessness, anger, fear, to the point that they can no longer fathom that something might exist outside of that, and so they reject any effort to improve their situation because they no longer believe it can be improved.
i am not blaming the people who are in this place. it’s a terrifying, dark place to be in, and when you’re there it really does feel like it’s the only thing that exists. this is the place where people kill themselves.
i think, though, that this phenomenon, scaled up to apply to politics and activism, undergirds so much of what we see from the left now – the world is dark and terrifying, and in the 24-hour news cycle, social media doomscrolling era we live in it’s so so easy to only see the bad, and when you surround yourself with other scared, overwhelmed people, it can form a sort of 2014-tumblr-depression-tag echo chamber where that hopelessness is glorified and lauded and propped up as Correct And Enlightened.
and then they commit hate crimes about it and my sympathy shuts all the way off.
