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(TW for mentions of the concept of unaliving, not actual unaliving.)
Full disclosure: I was assigned female at birth, but I identify as Nonbinary. I spent the 2000s identifying as "Genderqueer." I've always seen Gender Identity as a spectrum. I feel like I fall more on the masculine side, but not enough to identify as a Trans Man, if that makes sense. So, "Trans Masc" it is.
Those of you who have been following my blog for a while might be aware that I am a tad obsessed with The Matrix. (Just a tad, ha ha!) I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing The Matrix, and how pivotal it was. Maybe the last real cultural touchstone before 9/11 "changed everything." And though its appeal was near-universal, it has turned out to represent very different things to very different groups of people. 25 years after the fact, a film created by two Trans Women has been nearly entirely co-opted by reactionary men, and taken to mean something that is the opposite of what its creators intended. The fact that the so-called "Redpill Movement" exists at all is a massive thorn in the side of anyone who likes this movie and its sequels that isn't a reactionary weirdo.
There is a three-part blog post from The Last Psychiatrist from back in 2009 that I've been referring back to a lot in regards to the "Redpill movement" in a "tap the sign" kind of way. Because it contains analysis of how, by the late 2000s, the symbolism and themes of The Matrix had already been appropriated by men who were living in a state of quiet desperation, who had turned that anxiety into grievance and resentment. Looking back at this document from 2009, it's easy to see in hindsight how this would eventually metastasize into "the manosphere" in the 2010s and 2020s. However, a new post just dropped on the Liberal Currents site, and I feel like it's the best take on where we are 16 years later.
( Taken together, both essays point to this: )
Full disclosure: I was assigned female at birth, but I identify as Nonbinary. I spent the 2000s identifying as "Genderqueer." I've always seen Gender Identity as a spectrum. I feel like I fall more on the masculine side, but not enough to identify as a Trans Man, if that makes sense. So, "Trans Masc" it is.
Those of you who have been following my blog for a while might be aware that I am a tad obsessed with The Matrix. (Just a tad, ha ha!) I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing The Matrix, and how pivotal it was. Maybe the last real cultural touchstone before 9/11 "changed everything." And though its appeal was near-universal, it has turned out to represent very different things to very different groups of people. 25 years after the fact, a film created by two Trans Women has been nearly entirely co-opted by reactionary men, and taken to mean something that is the opposite of what its creators intended. The fact that the so-called "Redpill Movement" exists at all is a massive thorn in the side of anyone who likes this movie and its sequels that isn't a reactionary weirdo.
There is a three-part blog post from The Last Psychiatrist from back in 2009 that I've been referring back to a lot in regards to the "Redpill movement" in a "tap the sign" kind of way. Because it contains analysis of how, by the late 2000s, the symbolism and themes of The Matrix had already been appropriated by men who were living in a state of quiet desperation, who had turned that anxiety into grievance and resentment. Looking back at this document from 2009, it's easy to see in hindsight how this would eventually metastasize into "the manosphere" in the 2010s and 2020s. However, a new post just dropped on the Liberal Currents site, and I feel like it's the best take on where we are 16 years later.
( Taken together, both essays point to this: )
