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Advice wantedSafety Concerns
Hi all!
I hope this is the correct circle to post this. I've been wanting to become more active but can no longer afford the gym. I want to start running/walking outside in my neighborhood or parks but I struggle with fear. I was assaulted some years ago and still feel very afraid when I'm alone and I notice men around me. However, I want to enjoy the outdoors and feel it would be good for my mental health.
What safety tips or methods have any of you used to mitigate these feelings?
edit: thank you all for your replies and helpful tips!! you are all amazing
LOL. I love that analogy! Its so apt now that the awful Drag Race show is popular and these dudes are becoming millionaires simply by putting on a dress and some Tammy Faye makeup
Drag was tolerable back when it was a gay male subculture and you had to actively seek it out if you wanted to see it. But I'm growing to hate it more and more now that its literally being shoved in everyone's faces (and woke assholes think its a brave act of resistance to make children interact with these Sex Clowns)
Agree. My local library hosted a drag show for children’s story time and my local coffee shop had one too. I had fun at drag shows in my youth but I would never take a young child to one or consider it to be a worthy act. And I’m not homophobic or remotely conservative.
I've been bisexual since before I knew it was possible and a hippie pinko liberal since I was old enough to have politics, and the most positive I've felt about drag has been politely feigned interest because my friends were into it. Then I realized that women are allowed to have dignity and drag is misogyny, and my opinion has taken a definite nosedive.
was there an epiphany-triggering single event or experience that made you "realize that Women are allowed to have dignity" at whatever point?
Not all at once, but exiting a relationship with a true male degenerate and deprogramming myself from it was the process that led to it.
Thank you for sharing 🥰 and congratulations on "leveling up" in the game of life!
Thanks. The realization is its own reward, but the recognition is nice as well.
SEX CLOWNS!!! Lololol. That is the perfect way to describe them. That's all I'm gonna call them now. Oh god
there was even a drag queen on rupaul's drag race (who was later exposed as a predator to an underage girl, and exposed as a racist, but anyone who had watched their season could realise they were) who had a tattoo of tammy faye! i cringe how much i liked drag as a libfem and how much i know about it now lol
You're absolutely right. I think for many gay men who were always shamed for doing "feminine" things, drag was very subversive and, dare I say, empowering. But only in a specific context that you mentioned. The kind of drag that is "female impersonation" needs to be left behind in 2023.
It does NOT work on national television. RuPaul is first and foremost a capitalist, and he has no qualms saying so. He will do whatever it takes to make more money. The result is branding drag queens as modern superheroes who are changing the world for the better. This branding makes his TV show better and makes him more money. I don't even think he believes it.
Trying to watch Drag Race today is even more insufferable than ever because, atop of the womanface, the contestants are so narcissistic. They speak as though they're the most important people in the world who are single-handedly saving lives by putting on wigs and makeup.
They speak as though they're the most important people in the world who are single-handedly saving lives by putting on wigs and makeup.
I think you hit on why Drag Race bros are so insufferable. They act as if they're modern day MLK Jrs fighting against oppression. Old school drag may have been just as sexist as modern drag. But at least old school drag performers were just having fun and didn't claim that putting on a beehive wig made them civil rights heroes
at least old school drag performers were just having fun and didn't claim that putting on a beehive wig made them civil rights heroes
That's why I do have a soft spot for some of the older queens, like Tyra Sanchez (now changed his name to "King Tyra") who won season 2 of Drag Race. He said this
None of that role model shit, I never signed up to be anyone's fucking role model. None of that opening doors for future generations bullcrap, I don't want my son aspiring to be a drag queen. None of you are changing the world, half of you are just making shit worse. None of that drag queens are heroes crap. You are actors dressed as actresses to get money. THAT'S IT! You aren't fighting wars or saving lives. Stop exaggerating what it is you do. If you're close to me then you know it's been a struggle being called "Tyra" when I'm James or being referred to as "her" when I'm HIM.
I've honestly never understood what the appeal of drag is for gay men either. Like, what gives? I would think that such an exaggerated caricature of "femininity" would be off-putting to a gay men?
(I don't mean any offense btw, I just genuinely don't get it.)
It's always been easy for men to bond with other men over their misogyny, gay men that are into drag are no exception there. They love the pomp and circumstance of exaggerated "femininity" and desirability while mocking women's bodies, roles in society and supposed cattiness and vapidity.
I'm a feminine gay man and I get the appeal of beautiful dresses, wigs, makeup, heels, etc. I do NOT get the appeal of impersonating women while doing so. We should separate the performance of femininity from being a woman, and drag does the exact opposite. It ties them together.
It's fun in the way that any dressing up is fun.
EDIT: Billy Porter wearing this tuxedo-dress is exactly what we need to normalize in men's fashion. It's extravagant, it's flamboyant, it's beautiful. And it does NOT impersonate women.
Of course, I believe Billy Porter is a complete TRA who believes wearing this dress is some non-binary bullshit. When in reality, he should just embrace being a man and wearing a beautiful gown.
TRAs insult women with anime characters. TERFs tell the truth about them using actual historical figures.
Fiction always loses to reality.
prly not an accident that the stock character most often chosen from history to be vilified for silver-spoony excess is a Woman though. •_____•
like hmmMMMMmmmmm🤔 why isn't there nearly as much roasting of Louis XIV—whose materialism, entitlement complex, and lust for power not only dwarf Marie Antoinette's in retrospect, but who made abject cruelty the main flex?
like okay, MA was clearly somewhere between a clueless silver-spooner and a self-righteous showoff with a Calvinist-level belief that she 'deserved it', but unlike our boy louie, I don't think MA spent her time as queen organizing stuff like systematic quartering of soldiers in the homes of people chosen for Other-ing, where they would abuse, rape, and steal what modest possessions may have been owned by those people.
oh yeah and maybe let's not neglect how the supposed worst of MA's wealth-flexing cruel depredations were complete fabrications from whole cloth—not just gross exaggerations, but actually entire made-up sequences of events that never happened at all, for the sole purpose of ginning up hate.
Not a bad hatchet job, considering how many people are STILL swallowing the cartoon-villain depictions of MA in their whole-ass entirety without even the most cursory bit of backchecking.
Ahh, misogyny our old 'friend'. Imagine seeing YOU again.
Trust, but verify^[1]
[1]: If Story and related Lessons Learned are limited to the character assassination and/or scapegoating of one or more Women and/or Girls only, then the Verification Requirement shall be waived.
Why is MA the one who's alws chosen to be peak evil hag? (and wherefore 'hag', out of so many options?)
It's almost like there's a reason, or something... I just can't shake the feeling that we can solve this cold case, nawmean?
But maybe not. It's had history buffs perplexed for ages 🤷🏽♀️((le sigh)) perhapf it'll alws be a myfffffftewy
It's hard to use Louis XIV as a cautionary tale because he got away with it. And I don't know if people view Marie Antoinette as evil- just extraordinarily out of touch. But yes, she has always had it worse than her idiot husband Louis XVI on account of her sex and non-French origin.
imean i sorta get you but... wait wUt, we're using "He wasn't ever held to account" as the sole reason to KEEP not holding him to account?
jeez grandma, what a great big shiny ouroboros you've got...
but what's much more interesting to me is this entire idea of MA as a "cautionary tale"—in the same vein as "the tall poppy gets cut down" sorta thing, i guess?
That's entirely new to me. Have never thought of her story as "Tone it down missie, yer preenin' for a guillotinin' "—nor can I recall seeing her profile pitched that way by any writer or blogger whose stuff I've read
Is this a common line of reasoning? If so, are any individually famous writers/historians/pundits/politicians personally responsible for it?
The vilification of Marie Antoinette, as far as I've seen it, has alws been focused 100% on her conspicuous consumption and her lack of any qualms about showing off around ordinary people who often faced an abyss of abject penury—but absolutely NOT in the sense of "Keep acting like that and, one fine sunday, you'll get yr head cut off".
It's alws been more of an abstract core-values-of-society thing—where those are very very American values, now that I'm thinking it through (I don't know what country you're from).
Basically, I've been exposed to Marie Antoinette hate just in the sense of contemptuous derision at silver-spooners and idle royalty, and at royalty more generally
That it isn't specifically about the guillotine (or other retributive murder) makes all the sense if this is, indeed, a specifically American take—because we declared independence in large part to wash our hands of that whole pestilence that is royalty, and so we've never had any thieving kings or queens to rise up and guillotine over here.
Who knew
Louis XIV presided over an era of glorious art which is probably why people retroactively him. Things were being built.
A better comparison would be her husband who lived in the same Era. Queens at the time held no political power, they were basically pets.
I posted this just now in a chat server full of Friends and some family members, and my brother-in-law hit back about 15 seconds later with
oh hey [lipsy] Remember you were afraid they'll reach back and trans every Woman in history? Worry no more, here's one they won't want
D:
guuuuuuuurl
imean think how many separate sets of observations this draws from. The boy gets it
To be honest I don't care much about drag. I know what they're doing and I don't like a lot of the aspects involved right now. But it's like yeah, take all the heels, the makeup, all for you. I hope the more they associate with drags the less they will be associated with women... As long as they don't claim to be woman, I don't support but I don't fight against it, not an enemy worth my time in my opinion.
All of which items (heels, makeup, etc)—with the singular, very notable exception of lipstick/lip paint, which was already a staple of rich and high-status Women by the heyday of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, and nobody will ever know how long before then (that's the end/beginning of written records!)—were introduced by and long remained the province of male dandys, along with essentially all other varieties of that core male trait, flamboyance.
I'm basically ignorant of cosmetics history, but high heels weren't pawned off completely onto Women in the US until about 1880—when male clothing flair was brutally murdered by a combination of /1/ economic shifts that made finery much harder to afford, and /2/ the advent of the robber barons' Gilded Age, when the ascendant capitalist class drenched American workers in pro-austerity messaging—from Horatio Alger stories, to graham crackers (did you know those were first mass-marketed as a simple austere staple food? Almost like military MREs for civilians smh), to popular sermons—all in the interest of bamboozling the working class into accepting a life of slaving away greater hours for meagre wages.
And even then, Civil War vets looking to start all over took a bit of surviving dandyism West, in the form of the heel on cowboy boots—which until then had been cavalry-issue, flat-heel Wellington boots (of leather ofc, not rubber like modern wellies).
Functionalizations like spurs came later; in 1880 the heel was pure flash.
I would differentiate between the traditional HSTS and hetero fetishists. But yeah.
This might be the ultimate class-conscious roast.