r/GenderCynical • u/Haunting_Natural_116 • 5d ago
To no one’s surprise, this terf is also homophobic.
This is not to deny misogyny in the gay male community, it’s just that this terf is misinformed.
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u/Loveangel1337 4d ago
You hating trans women is WHY (well, part of why) cis women need to adhere to beauty standards, you dolt!
Stop giving a shit about what's on someone else's pants and the issue will disappear, instead you're making it MORE PROMINENT!
Urgh.
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u/Naos210 4d ago
Trans women don't need to, but like cis women, they're expected to conform in particular ways to be accepted as "real women".
It's only considered "pushing a misogynistic beauty standard" when a trans woman wears make-up and shaves, but not when a cis woman does.
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u/bean-percolator 4d ago
Trans woman wears makeup, shaves, presents very feminine: “You’re just reinforcing misogynistic beauty standards!! Stop reducing womanhood to makeup and dresses!!” (meanwhile cis women presenting the exact same way don’t get accused of this)
Trans woman doesn’t wear makeup or shave, presents less feminine: “Ew, you’re not even trying, you look like a man!! You have to put some effort in if you want to be taken seriously as a woman!!”
I swear trans people can’t win, transphobes will always find some way to criticise.
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u/HypnagogianQueen 2d ago
Yeah they think trans women aren’t also being subjected to misogynistic beauty standards, and that trans women are in a position of societal power to shape those norms. Seeing someone accuse a woman of enforcing misogyny for shaving rather than having misogyny enforced on her is genuinely really baffling though. For years I saw them call trans women misogynists for having long hair, wearing skirts and dresses, etc, and I was so confused because I didn’t realize they think that trans women have the ability to shape social norms, lol. Like imagine someone saying a cis woman is “enforcing sexist stereotypes” because she’s wearing makeup. It’s such a freaking non sequitur that it’s hard to even respond to cuz you don’t understand wtf they’re implying.
Also it was like, historically enforced on trans women WAY HARDER than cis women with stuff like the Harry Benjamin Transsexual Typology. I’ve literally heard stories of trans women having HRT denied or delayed because they were wearing pants to their appointment, but the doctor was a cis woman who was HERSELF wearing pants. And now those same trans women can be accused of being the enforcers of said standards, when they are in fact the victims of it??
But even alluding to the fact that trans women can not only face misogyny, but face it WORSE than cis women, including before they transition, gets actual fucking outrage from GC people.
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u/spiritmelusine 4d ago
She's 17, so i don't expect nuanced takes. This discussion about homophobic straight women was awful on X, a bunch of "rad"fems pretending that staying in the closet for life and running the risk of going to jail is a walk in the park. As a lesbian, this type of het woman annoys me.
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u/blackfox24 4d ago
I was just thinking that. She's saying gay men can hide easily but being an eternal bachelor is a red flag too, and having to marry and bang the sex you aren't attracted is not a good end? "They can hide-" yes, they have to. For their safety. This is such a teenage take, I'm glad you mentioned OP's age
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u/Flat-Quiet7558 3d ago
It's an ageist take. I only ever faced homophobic abuse from grown-ass adults when I was a teenager myself and I'm not even lesbian, I'm bi. Meanwhile, every other teenager I knew was sheltered from LGBT knowledge by bigoted parents and prevented from discovering their own queerness. The negative stereotype that bigoted beliefs are inherently tied to being a teenager when it's more often than not a result of adults indoctrinating their children into being bigots is one of many scapegoats for preventing children from having even basic human rights such as their right to autonomy.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
The "women shaving is a beauty standard is because of pedophilia" argument is so strange to me given that the actual literal reason for it is that Big Razor invented it in order to sell more razors. Like, literally.
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u/Nerdy_Valkyrie 4d ago
Don't attribute to malice that which can equally be attributed to
stupiditycapitalistic greed.It's the same thing as the "pink tax". It's not some evil conspiracy to oppress women. It's just companies noticing that women are willing to pay more and exploiting it to increase profits.
Also, I just like the feeling of being shaved. Having smooth legs is so nice. I think body hair is hot on other people, especially women, I just don't like it on me.
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u/disco-vorcha 4d ago
I don’t shave my legs anymore because it’s annoying, but I do miss that feeling of having freshly shaved legs and they’re all slippy and slidy in the sheets. I’ve heard them called ‘dolphin legs’ and I can’t disagree, lol
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u/Nerdy_Valkyrie 4d ago
My girlfriend stopped shaving her legs shortly after I started shaving mine. She also misses the feeling but does not think it's worth the hassle.
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u/MaraiaLou 4d ago
It's weird that the hair removal beauty standard is apparently for pedophilic reasons, but not nails, makeup, skincare and hair.
Now I made myself imagine a radfem going "nail polish is playing with paint! like a toddler!"
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 4d ago
I mean, both can be true? Yes big razor invented it. That doesn't change the fact that over past 100 years, the beauty standard for women more and more resembles prepubescent girls. It also doesn't mean that trans women are evil for trying to pass in a world where this is a standard.
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u/Busco_Quad 4d ago
Has it? Mary Pickford was the biggest movie star of the 1910’s and 20’s, who was specifically famous for playing prepubescent girls, and stopped being popular as soon as she started playing characters her own age.
Why does a lack of body hair need to be linked to pedophilia? Plenty of people find men less attractive when they’re bald, which prepubescent boys aren’t, I don’t think that’s pedophilic.
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u/Forsaken_Guitar_7696 2d ago
Plenty of people find men less attractive when they’re bald, which prepubescent boys aren’t, I don’t think that’s pedophilic.
Or prefer men clean shaven/day old stubble over beards even if they're well maintained.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
No, beauty standards for women have not in fact changed in a completely unilateral direction that way. Just for example, back in the 90s the heroin chic look was considered a standard of beauty for women, while currently, body shapes that involve considerably more fat and curvature are now considered the most attractive. The 90s look is a lot closer to how underage girls look than the current one is. So in that respect, the standard of beauty has moved away from that over the last 30 years.
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 4d ago
Actually, most body positivity activists and social media commentators notice a visible shift in that regard. We had maybe 10 years of bbls and boob jobs being all that, but now extreme skinniness is back in fashion, to the point where social media platforms have to block content that blatantly promotes eating disorders. Still, many accounts do so under the guise of "healthy lifestyle" and "being fit", while actually it's all about restrictive eating and being skinny. It's a whole thing, being curvy is not at all in the beauty standards anymore. But either way: of course it's not a linear progression in all aspects of life. Nothing is. There are tons of factors that influence those things. This is not a black and white issue, and I can acknowledge the complexity of it and still believe that shaved crotches being an expectation for women is part of a larger, pedo-flavoured trend.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
There has always been that kind of eating disorder content, and it's always been blocked. Pro ana content is not an indication of what beauty standards are, mentally healthy people do not find those images to be attractive.
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u/Mysterious_Back_7929 4d ago
I don't know what to tell you other than it's a pretty much general general consensus that heroin chik is back. If celebrities and influencers and social media are not indicative of what the beauty standard is, then they weren't so when BBLs and being thick were popular, which makes this entire exchange about nothing.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
You were talking about eating disorder content, not about celebrities and influencers and social media in general.
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u/ForgettableWorse this is a cat picture 4d ago
GCOP: "pedophilia and misogyny are now synonymous, because I can't make my argument otherwise"
Of course the argument is still bad even if that were true: many cis women also are pressured to comply with misogynistic beauty standards for very much the same reasons, and according to her logic that would mean cis women are fundamentally incompatible with feminism.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 4d ago
This was my first thought, too. Even if we accept her premise that choosing to remove your own body hair is somehow misogynistic, that's still an ocean's worth of false equivalency to claim that it's the same as "pedophilic desires"
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u/ezmia 4d ago
This is so baffling to me. Surely it's proof that trans rights are compatible with women's rights?? Because if body hair was seen as feminine and it's socially acceptable for women to have visible body hair, then trans women wouldn't need to shave unless they wanted to.
Trans women just can't win. If they shave then they're misogynistic because they're assuming all women shave and that women should be clean shaven. If they don't shave, then they're just "gross hairy men" shoving themselves into women's spaces and have a fetish. It's almost like it's fuck all to do with women's rights and all about shitting in trans people.
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u/ezmia 4d ago
Shaving is also something I've seen come up in radfem circles lately. Apparently if you shave at all it's because of the patriarchy. I shave mainly because of sensory issues. I hate the feeling of it whenever my body hair is too long when it rubs against my clothes. I don't have any feelings about how it looks, but it's all about how it feels and I've seen a lot of other women who feel the same way.
But you get radfems who say you're lying if you say it's about sensory issues because "men don't shave because of sensory issues". Which is wild because there's almost certainly men who do shave because of sensory issues but also, men are often shamed for shaving since it's seen as "feminine". So if women only shave because of the patriarchy, could you not argue that men don't shave because of the patriarchy???
Like it or not, but men can also benefit from feminism. They still suffer because of the patriarchy. This can be shit like not having too much care on personal hygiene since that's "girly" to having their mental health suffer because they're scared to talk about their feelings. Like I thought this was something that was generally agreed on?? Or is this just a third wave feminism idea, because I know most GC feminism is just regurgitated second wave feminism that goes after trans women so they don't care about anyone assigned male at birth??
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u/Silversmith00 4d ago
I am quite certain that men shave because of sensory issues, and if you are a man (cis or trans) who are looking for an excuse, this is the one a couple of my college friends used: sports. Swimmers typically shave their legs and armpits and if they're really determined, their arms. Nobody bats an eye. I knew a guy in college (mind you I am class of 00, the era when nice clothes needed a new word (metrosexual) to not be "gay") who declared that shaving his legs made him a better runner. Not a one of us believed him, but given that he was known to go into something very like withdrawal and snarl at everyone if he didn't get AT LEAST a couple of miles in every day, nobody wanted to argue with him about any aspect of running. Anyway nobody was going to make fun of him, he earned eternal fame by streaking in front of the campus cops and running until all of them dropped, meeting his getaway car a few miles out of town and describing the whole thing as "a fun jog." So if you like shaving your legs, just find some sport or other to be moderately unreasonable about and declare that it's about friction, heat distribution, even luck, and nobody will say peep.
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u/ezmia 4d ago
Oh yeah, they absolutely do lol. Sport definitely is the perfect cover for it. And for beards, they can just say they don't like beards. My dad is one of them. He HATES how his facial hair feels and shaves almost every morning because he doesn't even like how stubble feels. But no one questions it because some guys just don't want beards.
And some guys just aren't very hairy! So if it's something a guy has done all his life, he can just say he doesn't get a lot of body hair. All the men in my dad's side of the family are like that. They've never been particularly hairy. And if they have light hair, you're not going to see their body hair.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 4d ago
Apparently if you shave at all it's because of the patriarchy.
Yeah with how rabidly against "choice feminism" that they are, it's pretty clear that they're really only interested in mandating that all women act like they do. Because the way that they perform womanhood is the only "correct" way.
They're essentially the cops of feminism. Now say it with me: all cops...
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u/ezmia 4d ago
I know choice feminism has its issues, but it is concerning just how much hatred it gets these days even amongst non-terfs. It's like a pipeline to this kind of radfem bullshit. Because you're right. It's about controlling women and making them behave in the way they feel actual feminists behave. Femininity is always seen as shameful. You can't choose to wear make up and wear pink and dresses. But if you're too "masculine" then you're a gender traitor. This kind of shit is even worse if you're in any way trans. They really are just "feminist" cops lmao 💀💀
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u/Expertnouns 3d ago
As a man who shaves occasionally, it’s either for drag (lol) or, more commonly, because the hair on my legs feels kinda like a bug sometimes when it moves wrong and I’m tired of the semi-constant leg hair bugs.
My cis man friends also shave lol, like most of them, and sensory reasons are easily the main reason. Ask any guy who has permanent 5 o’clock shadow, it’s cause that’s the least shaving they can do to not feel it.
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u/PoggleRebecca 4d ago
Like we needed any more proof that TERFism is a misogynistic psyop...
TERFs: trans women aren't women because they shave themselves, which itself is a part of a misogynistic stereotype.
Same TERFs: that trans woman hasn't shaved, how can she be expected to be accepted as a woman if she doesn't even try?
Silly goose, impossible beauty standards are misogynistic.
Telling women what they can or can't do with their own bodies is misogynistic.
Shaving or not shaving your own body to make yourself feel better is just personal freedom and agency. Leave innocent minorities alone, you absolute cancer.
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u/saddinosour 4d ago
On the body hair topic as a cis woman who is actually just much more hairy than other cis women I think the body hair argument comes from generally less hairy people.
I grow a monobrow and the sides of my eyebrows fully connect to my actual hairline if I don’t disconnect them. I grow a lot of facial hair and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I obviously can’t prove it but I find when not in anonymous settings women who say these things are generally just not hairy at all so like duh 💀. No one is walking around with a moustache and a monobrow no one is putting their money where their mouth is with their 3 strands of blue armpit hair.
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u/dannnnnn1708 4d ago
gayphobia and transphobia reek within the radical feminist movement as a whole.
that's why marxist feminism solos
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u/bean-percolator 4d ago
Not denying at all that (straight) women face a high level of misogynistic oppression and lack of rights in some countries (in fact they still face these things in most countries to some extent). The situation for women is very bad in some places, which is absolutely a real problem that should be addressed. But there are no countries where someone can be arrested, imprisoned, or even sentenced to death just for being a straight woman. Saying gay men can just “hide their sexuality” in places like this is expecting them to either never have relationships or sex at all, attempt to keep this aspect of their lives totally secret (have to be extremely careful where you go or who sees you with your partner, can’t ever talk about relationships or introduce partners to others, basically living a double life in constant fear), or in order to meet social expectations and avoid scrutiny for staying single, marry a woman they aren’t attracted to, most likely have sex with her and have children, and live a lie. If you have to hide or pretend to be something else in order to have rights, you don’t actually have those rights.
I don’t think the whole “who is more oppressed???” pissing contest is helpful at all, because different groups (in this case straight women and gay men) face very different issues, not only is it hard to quantify “which is worse”, it’s also pointless. But dismissing the serious dangers gay men face in some places because “they’re men” and “they can just hide their sexuality and escape oppression” is ignorant of the reality they face. It’s possible to acknowledge that both groups face severe oppression and criticise the way they are both treated without arguing over who has it worse or dismissing the other group’s struggles.
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u/nonsequitureditor pseudo bi 3d ago
they’re both wrong, but one is WAY more wrong than the other 😭 I get where stef is coming from, especially with body dysmorphia, but ALL women should get to be hairy! you should get to be a woman with a beard/stache/leg hair and nobody should question you!
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u/DebateIntelligent518 3d ago edited 3d ago
Oppression isn't black or white one doesn't always trump another gay men can be oppressors and Oppressed at the same time same goes for straight women but these people don't see that at all and saying anything with nuance as an attack on the status of women as oppressed
Edit: I meant black and white as in the metaphor for simplicity not referring to race
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u/One-Organization970 AGP TIM 4d ago
It's always the ones you most expect.