This is a great (three-part) blog post, and it's kind of fucking with my head right now.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

This one. The blog is "The Last Psychiatrist." The posts themselves is nearly fifteen years old.

I'm archiving this here because I plan to come back and expound more on it later.

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

This is great, holy shit, thank you for linking it.

I have a lot of complicated thoughts about being a trans man and how I didn't internalize a lot of toxic masculinity re: Accepted Male Behavior/Attitudes because I never had a chance to - I'm not even talking about being socialized female [because from a young age, some accepted-female-socialization behaviors were things I didn't perform/didn't make sense] but because I'm hypermobile and my body has been an epic bag of dicks since I was a kid I never got to, like, be active and Do "Guy Shit" and formulate my concept of self as action hero. As a kid I was the geek who read books and didn't play sportsball, as an adult I'm the hobbit who wants to eat elevensies and live my quiet-ass life and Not go on adventures. [I had some "adventures" not by choice in my 20s/early 30s, 0/10 recommend.]

But this three-part article actually explains a lot about, for example, MAGA radicalization and why a lot of guys from my generation went that way, because Fighting Darth Brandon or whatever is their big epic good v. evil battle.

Again, thank you and I'm looking forward to your thoughts.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

As kind of a preview of the larger post later; I think what happened is that a lot of straight guys trying to perform fairy tale action hero toxic masculinity looked at Neo, went "It's literally me!" and then panicked, and are still panicking, when they discovered it was a Trans metaphor.

[ex_flameandsong751]

YES. OMFG

[solarbird]

Yeah, that part's absolutely at least somewhat true.

[sabotabby]

This is fascinating. Thank you!

oh this part pisses me off

[solarbird]

But 9/11 was different... it violated the most important aspect of postmodern narcissism: story... even the characters were a surprise.

We didn't know they even existed. Tali what? Did anyone know the backstory?

FUCKING YES WE DID AND SOME OF US SPENT MONTHS IN 1999 TRYING TO GET LITERALLY ANYONE TO PAY ATTENTION TO THAT LITTLE EXPERIMENT THE PAKISTANI INTELLIGENCE SERVICES WERE RUNNING IN THE NORTH CALLED 'THE TALIBAN' AND FUCKING TOLD EVERYONE WE COULD WHAT...

[grips fists]

Yeah.

Still real mad about that.

Re: oh this part pisses me off

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Yeah, this is one reason why I said this article is fucking with my head. Takes that seem right-on vs takes like this one. Like...Pepperidge Farm remembers when Bill Clinton was trying to call attention to Osama Bin Laden as a threat after the bombing in Yemen in 1997, only to be accused of trying to "Wag the Dog" by republicans who were obsessed with catching him out over having had "relations with that woman."

It's no wonder they fell all over themselves in performative fury over OBL after 9/11: only to forget about him again completely a few months later (funny how that happened, considering the Bin Ladens are Bush family friends and all) until he was caught ten years later.