Gamers get hella uncomfortable over male sexuality too. Can you imagine a “good male character who just happens to be wearing sexually exploitative outfits because he’s ok with his masculinity?” Constantly has the camera pan lovingly over his asscrack and firm glutes, and big ole dangly ballsack that is totes sweaty from all this MMA and soldiering. Time to hit the showers, and do you, personally, think it’s ok to have a long slow pan up the dude’s package (indiscreetly hidden in a jock of course), to his chiseled physique and erect nipples (pierced). He’s not even a Bond-esque confident man, he’s basically a weird Bowie caricature that’s constantly having near-dickslips in every single cinematic as the completely nonsexualized female characters do their business of being gruff and shooting dudes and advancing the plot. Finally, at the end he falls in love (out of nowhere) and/or is killed by the big baddie.

A friend of mine asked me recently, was I gonna go see the new Batman movie with him. But I don’t respect the concept of Batman because of what I understand about politics now. I’mma lay it out for you: rich dude owns a corporation with state of the art equipment, and he uses this to beat up on street level crime. He doesn’t mess with the industrialists, or the super capitalists, or the Murdochs, or the Trumps. He really just fucks with the person that’s on the corner. Batman is a conservative’s wet dream. Fuck Batman.

somewhere between a wound and a jewel

Oh, but this is not a matter of “glorifying” obesity. Glorifying obesity would take multiple TV shows depicting fat folks riding unicorns and devouring warm pies whilst counting the bags of money they’ve gained from being fat. Indeed, if simply putting fat people on television was enough to “glorify” obesity, then The Biggest Loser should have done the trick years ago. It hasn’t, because The Biggest Loser is a show built on the humiliation and punishment (self-inflicted or otherwise) of fat people. When we say that putting fat people on television will “glorify” their bodies, what we really mean is that we are uncomfortable giving fat people any attention that is not overtly negative. Because fat people need to be told: don’t be fat. Being fat means you are not entitled to a normal life. Being fat means you are not entitled to love. Being fat means you are not entitled to humanity, much less dignity.

As egos collide, Black Widow—street name, Natasha Romanova—is the only character who does not throw a monstrous hissyfit. The only character to gather actionable intelligence against Loki from Loki. The character who not only literally kicks sense back into the brainwashed Hawkeye, but then absolves him of any sins performed while under the loony god’s spell.

You want fearless? When midtown Manhattan is swarming with thousands of robo-aliens, the dreaded Chitauri, Black Widow commandeers one of their slippery aero-sleds and flies it to steal Loki’s glowing phallic scimitar so as to save the world so Iron Man can blow up the aliens.

Here is the thing, okay? Coming into a feminist conversation with, “Have you considered that sometimes women acquire free drinks at bars?” is like walking into graduate school during Philosophy finals and saying, “Have you considered that the color blue that I see may not be the color blue that you see?”

Imagine you are the guy who just walked into that Philosophy class and laid that shit down. Imagine the class full of students who have worked very hard and committed themselves and sacrificed to be here, students who have spent several years of their lives learning about this subject. Imagine now their feelings when you go to the head of the classroom with a smirk on your face and demand the professor give you an A for effort. Imagine now that they think you are a douchebag asshole, because they do, and because you are. You are a douchebag asshole because you are obviously so self-centered, arrogant, and completely ignorant of the world around you, that you thought you could walk into a high-level course with no background and no work and say something profoundly simplistic and totally unrelated and also everybody should congratulate you for having done this thing, so brave, so provocative.
[….]
You are not asking us a real question. You are simply illustrating, for all to see, your own ignorance. You are saying, “I have not considered the implications of the question I have just asked. I have not taken the time nor effort nor commitment to sit down and ask myself this question. Instead, I have come into your philosophy classroom/office/feminist blog and shat out my question with a smirk, because I believe that my two seconds of thought are worth more than your long-term analysis, because I believe I am worth more.”

I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to note that women, from a young age, are required to consider the reality of the opposite gender’s consciousness in a way that men aren’t. This isn’t to say that women don’t often misunderstand, mistreat, and stereotype men, both in literature and in life. But on a basic level, functioning in society requires that women register that men are fully conscious; it is not really possible for a woman to throw up her hands and write men off as eternally unknowable space aliens — and even if she says she has, she cannot really behave as though she has. Every element of her life — from reading books about boys and men to writing papers about the motivations of male characters to being attentive to her own safety to navigating most any institutional or professional or economic sphere — demands an ironclad familiarity with, and belief in, the idea that men really are fully human entities. And no matter how many men come to the same conclusions about women, the structure of society simply does not demand so strenuously that they do so. If you didn’t really deep down believe that women were, in general, exactly as conscious as you, you could probably still get by in life. You could probably still get a book deal. You could probably still get elected to office.

While all of these nominally liberal sites pay lip service to the dignity of gay and transgender people, they miss one thing that is very clear to me. Aside from the obvious fat shaming in these stories, the fixation on “man boobs” reveals our culture’s obsession with binary gender. As I noted on The Huffington Post’s comment thread, before a moderator whisked my comment away, “the only breasts The Huffington Post approves of are those of thin, white female celebrities.”…

Men are supposed to have flat chests, hairy bodies and big penises. Women are supposed to have large breasts, thin hairless bodies and tidy labias. (If a woman’s labia are too big, it just might remind us that, with a little testosterone, the same tissue would make a penis.)

We have all the evidence we need that biological sex and gender are not as rigid or fixed as we imagine. There are intersexed people. There are transgender people and genderqueer people. There are millions of men and boys like me, who also have large breasts, or gynecomastia, a medically harmless (though socially lethal) condition that your insurance just might pay to correct. The prevalence of gynecomastia in adolescent boys is estimated to be as low as 4% and as high as 69% . As one article notes: “These differences probably result from variations in what is perceived to be normal.” You think?

We’re so entrenched in that snips ‘n snails bullshit, that we can’t accept bodies which don’t fall on either extreme of the gender continuum. Transgender men and women encounter these attitudes in direct, and sometimes life-threatening ways. And, given the misogyny that pervades our society, these pressures are even harder for women and girls, whether they’re cisgender or transgender. Their bodies are hated and desired in equal measure.

Also I don’t understand this universe you appear to live in where wanting a queer adaptation of Holmes and being okay with a hypothetical het!Holmes/Watson relationship are somehow mutually exclusive. If the creators of Elementary were taking a pairing who were actually gay in the text and genderflipping half of said pairing in order to make their existing romance conform to heterosexual norms, then yeah, that would be hugely gross and awful, and I would be calling for heads to roll at CBS right along with the rest of the internet. But guess what? If CBS were to make an explicitly queer m/m adaptation of Holmes, it would not be ‘acknowledging’ anything; it would be no less of a change than making an explicitly het adaptation, because neither of those things exist in the original text.

You are 100% free to want a queer m/m adaptation of Sherlock Holmes more than an adaptation with a WOC Watson and an as-yet-entirely-hypothetical het romance. If I were given the option to make one of the two come magically into being with the power of my mind, I would be hard-pressed to choose! But raging against Elementary for not being that adaptation is about as logical as… well, raging against a genderbent adaptation for not being a gay adaptation.

If anything, said rage would be far more logically directed towards Sherlock and the recent RDJ film series, both of which openly acknowledge the possibility that there might exist a gay relationship between Holmes and Watson, and which capitalise on the popularity and profitability of queer-baiting - only to turn around and thumb their noses at that same idea, and play it for laughs. But FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON, very few people ever seem to mention that when ranting about how omg homophobic of CBS it is to not make Holmes and Watson gay men.