Wonderful news! I’ve finally list enough weight to fit into my work trousers!

I’m new here and not sure how to word things well but I’m a trans woman and I’ve been feeling a lot of dysphoria and anxiety with everything that’s been going on.

I’m trying to find some ways to stay positive though but it’s been rough.

I swore I wasn’t going to go all girly-girl in this group, but … I think I’ve found my new personal look:

I’m a sucker for brocade, I’m a sucker for the so-called “Hanyuansu” (Han Elements) style, and I love wide waistbands on long skirts. (It’s great for sticking in a fan. Or a dagger.) And this looks mature, more suited to my age than a lot of Han revival styles do.

Like this other one I might have carried off 15+ years ago, but not today. Today I can just stare at the picture and wistfully lust after that outfit:

Haiiii gorgeous person reading this, how has your day been?

Hello! I’ve been away from Lemmy for quite a while. My phone screen is kinda broken and I’m not in reach of affording a new one just yet. So that’s killed a lot of my social media usage for now. Also been pretty low I guess and don’t want to infect this place with it.

But I find myself thinking of here and this community in particular often. So I dunno, I just wanted to stop in and say that I hope that all of you awesome people are doing ok. Glad to see this community is still standing strong here. I hope the trolls have been managable. 💜

So I was talking with a friend about the Madonna-Whore Complex that underlies most sexual scripts in the west and started to wonder about whether or not there was a masculine equivalent. (Hint: Freud was an intense misogynist.)

So in the absence of one I decided to borrow something from Chinese culture. There’s the concept, in Chinese language, of the 成语 (chéngyǔ), which is a form of idiom that is basically formed from the title of a story and has little meaning outside of that. (You can find the equivalent in English when talking about “sour grapes”, which is literally a reference to a story and means nothing standing on its own.)

One famous such chengyu is “叶公好龙” which translates to “Duke Ye Loves Dragons”. By itself it means nothing, but it refers to a story in which the titular duke loved representations of dragons: dragon statues, paintings, poems about dragons, etc. One day a dragon heard about Duke Ye’s love of dragons and paid him a visit. The Duke ran away in fear and hid from it. The epigram means “admiring the representation of something while living in fear of it” or “professing admiration for something one secretly fears”.

I thought for a while and came up with the modern twist on it. It’s based on the observation that specifically hentai anime fiends and porn addicts profess to love women (and very obviously love representations of women, given the sheer volume of these they collect and render sticky) but fear the actuality.

So I give to you the new chengyu: 色狼好屄 (“The Lech Loves Pussy”). In the vein of the classic epigram, this refers to the stories that anybody who knows a hentai fan or a porn fiend will have aplenty: people who love the visual (and tactile) representation of vaginas but fear the real deal. (Note: I’ve used a very rude word for “pussy” in my chengyu. This is partially for shock value and partially because to fit the four-character format I had to find a single character that represented the vagina and, sadly, that’s the only one I know. The rest are two-character expressions.)

Wasn’t really worth putting up a full thread, but I’m kinda absurdly proud of my effort so …

This is not really chit chat, but is it intentional that almost all the past weekly chat threads are showing up as pinned for me or is that some kind of bug?

There are six pinned threads visible for me right now – four chat threads (except the one from last week for some reason) and two other ones. So I have to do some scrolling to get to new posts.

I’m just wondering because I vaguely remember that there was a similar situation in another community a while back and it was due to a bug.