Hi I'm Dana, I mostly just tool around with friends, play RPGs, and listen to podcasts, but I've also been known to make podcasts at SuperIdols! RPG and I've written a couple of short rpgs at my itch page and on twitter.

💕@wordbending

This user is transgenderrific!



bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat

I'm thinking about the various U.S. court cases where Mattel, Inc. tries to sue the pants off someone responding to their art and all I can think of is the degree to which public space is encroached upon in the name of the Mattels of the world. Even beyond billboards or jingles or the various tedious things that I've Ublocked out of my life, how much collective dignity is wasted when a company invades the space of ideas with facade-concepts like "Barbie pink", "Barbie girl", or "just a Ken"? These symbols are fundamentally dishonest--and until for whatever reason it's impossible to profit off a Barbie, they can be nothing but.

And because we've supposedly all signed a social contract where everyone has to profit off a Barbie or face isolation from their greater community's means of getting food and shelter, all our words become tainted with this fundamental dishonesty. Every utterance of the word "girl" becomes tied to Barbie.

And the profane bit is that, supposedly, this relationship is vulgar only when a "consumer" attempts to treat these special, ubiquitous words as something to be used freely, like any other word! We're stuck, eyes glued to their perpetually lit billboard, struggling even to comprehend the effects Mattel has had on mentifacts like "beauty" or "femininity".

But Aqua and Tom Forsythe are the problem for responding to the screams piped directly into their ears? For using the symbols that were made specifically to become ubiquitous?


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