humanist + humorist

So there’s this Disney series of shorts about Baymax (the healthbot from Big Hero 6), and this clip is going around, where Baymax goes through the “clueless non-period-having adult is dispatched to get emergency products for a teen/tween girl who’s trapped in a bathroom, oh no” gag.

Good: child-friendly media is acknowledging that periods exist!

Also good: one of the people who advises Baymax on period products is a guy in a giant unambiguous trans-flag shirt!

Still good: the stock joke in this scene is no longer “women treat the hapless shopper as some kind of suspicious pervert, because the idea that he might have a tween girl to shop for is totally unimaginable”!

All that is positive and I’m here for it.

But.

I’m still annoyed that the stock joke in this kind of scene is now “hapless shopper can’t figure out all these mysterious products, ends up buying one pack of each just to be safe.”

Why would you do that. Why??

If you were making an emergency run on somebody else’s behalf for tissues, you wouldn’t stand in the tissue aisle and go “oh my god, should I get 2-ply or 3-ply? Do they want the ones with lotion or aloe? Fragrance-free, chlorine-free? How much recycled content is acceptable?? I better bring back 20 boxes of tissues, that’s the only way to make sure my friend gets the correct nose-blowing experience.”

No, you would get one (1) box of tissues — probably the one that was cheapest! — and be done.

Just get one box of pads. That’s all.

If you want more details, I recommend looking for the words “basic”/”regular” and “unscented”/”plain”, but honestly? In the “helping a tween girl stuck in a bathroom” situation, you don’t need to track any of that. Just remember “pads” and you’re covered.

Your job here is not to get her the Perfect Menstrual Product Experience. All she needs is to get from the bathroom to a place where she can restock — maybe she has more supplies at home, maybe she’s going shopping too — without bleeding through her clothes along the way.

Literally any pads in the Feminine Hygiene aisle will handle that.

And, look, maybe the writers are trying to counteract humanity’s chronic “cis men making all kinds of stupid and dangerous laws based on wild misconceptions about how uteruses work, while being convinced that they know everything and are totally qualified” problem.

But I feel like “periods are an exotic and overwhelming mystery, anything period-related is automatically super-complicated and can’t possibly have a simple solution” is…just another strand of that same problem.

Some things have simple answers! It would not be impossible or overwhelming for a well-meaning cis man, and/or balloon robot who goes by “he” but has no biological organs of any kind, to learn a few basic pointers.

Granted, it’s harder than it should be, because a lot of the resources are made by people who think “this is impossible or overwhelming to learn, so we won’t even try to teach it.”

Resources like, ooh, let’s say…an educational cartoon where each episode is about a friendly robot nurse helping one of his neighbors with a health problem?

Crazy idea, I know, but it just might work.

Bonus: while writing this post, my browser spellcheck flagged “uteruses” as a word it doesn’t recognize. For comparison, it doesn’t flag “follicles” or “aortas” or “penises” or “kidneys” or “ventricles” or “testicles.” The mystique of “this topic is sooooo exotic and complicated that you shouldn’t even bother trying” is so widespread, it even affects which plural nouns someone thought were worth putting in a dictionary.

1800-year-old Roman carvings in Hadrian's Wall: "The phallus was a symbol of good luck to Ancient Romans." Suuuure, that's definitely the reason someone drew a dick on a wall.

Via Wikimedia Commons: "Otto von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria (1912-2011)" taking a selfie in the mirror as a teenager. In the 1920's. But hey, kids these days, right?

...and now, without further ado, queer & trans links from across multiple centuries. The language and the terms change, but the people have always been here.

"Born in Maryland around 1858, Swann endured slavery, the Civil War, racism, police surveillance, torture behind bars, and many other injustices. But beginning in the 1880s, he not only became the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group; he also became, in the same decade, the first known person to dub himself a “queen of drag”—or, more familiarly, a drag queen."

"I originally identified as a cross-dresser. It was in an online support group for other cross-dressers that somebody used the word bi-gendered. And it was like the lightbulbs went on, the choir of angels was singing, and the light was shining down on me. " Profiles of 5 older nonbinary adults, talking about their journeys.

"Trans people are often mocked for being confused and emotional in regards to the choices we make with our bodies. For the sake of the trans community, I feel like I’m supposed to know what I want and who I am. But there are no roadmaps for me to follow."

"PSA for yanquis, the -e suffixes for gender neutrality were brought up by Latin American native Spanish and Portuguese speakers to make our heavily gendered languages truly gender neutral and inclusive!!! It wasn’t created by some random gringue on the internet, but by ACTUAL LATIN AMERICAN NATIVE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SPEAKERS SO OUR LANGUAGES ANSWER TO OUR NEEDS AND REALITIES!!!"

"I think that we can—we must—hold both of our experiences at the same time, OG: Your pain and also mine. The hurt of older generations of queers who feel disrespected by younger movement builders, and the hurt of younger generations who feel that older activists weren’t there for us. We can accept the truth of both of these, as well as the truth that younger and older queers have always benefited from each others’ fight for survival and freedom."

Gotta finish this Baum reread, because it's Yuletide season and I may need the canon refreshment for my assignment and/or treats.

The Tin Woodman of Oz -- book 12 -- is a nice low-key novel, heavy on the backstory. Useful plot hook: another random Oz civilian, this time a Winkie boy named Woot, wanders to the Tin Woodman's castle, where Nick Chopper and the Scarecrow treat him to food and backstory. When Woot hears that Nick used to be engaged to a fellow Munchkin before he was rebuilt without a heart, he declares that it's Nick's duty to fulfill his promise and marry the woman (thus making her Empress of the Winkies), even if he doesn't love her.

Bonus: from his self-description, the Tin Woodman is what in modern terms we would call canon aromantic:

"She said she still loved me, but I found that I no longer loved her. My tin body contained no heart, and without a heart no one can love. [...] [T]he Wizard's stock of hearts was low, and he gave me a Kind Heart instead of a Loving Heart, so that I could not love Nimmie Amee any more than I did when I was heartless."

The quest is front-loaded with boys...which is thoroughly plot-relevant, because a girl in the party would have stopped them and said "why are you assuming this woman is still pining after you? She hasn't even seen you for decades. She's probably moved on."

***

Plenty of little continuity drops. Woot used to live near Oogaboo. The Scarecrow has learned poetry at the Woggle-Bug's college. Woot gets lost and falls into a cavern full of dragons, which are clearly the same underground dragons we saw in book 4.

And there's the castle of the Yoop, from book 7! In a mirror/foreshadowing of the characters' main bad assumption, they assume that since the Yoop is locked up, his castle will be empty. Turned out that was only Mr. Yoop -- the home is still occupied by Mrs. Yoop. And she's hella powerful. Like "casually mentions she has Polychrome in a birdcage in her room" powerful.

Poly's temporarily a canary, but she still has magic powers, she just has to do things like pick up a twig and wave it around in her beak.

She turns Nick into an owl. But he's still made of tin! And the Scarecrow gets to be a little bear, stuffed with straw. It's hilarious. (Woot: a green monkey.)

So much meditation on identity, and transformation, and what qualities make you yourself! Since Nick got all his original body parts replaced one at a time, is he really still the same person? If he keeps his memories and personality but happens to be shaped like an owl, does that make him unsuitable for marriage? How about if he's shaped like a man, but only a few inches tall? The others get drawn into the theme with their unwilling transformations, and there's a related sequence where the Scarecrow has to give up his stuffing, so Poly carries him in the form of a bundle of clothes for a while.

...also, a one-off scene with a guy named Tommy Quick-Step, who, after an unfortunate wish, has a really long torso and 20 legs. Insert your own human-centipede jokes here.

***

Our heroes continue walking/flying toward Winkie Country, but now they make a deliberate detour to Jinjur's house. I love that she and the Scarecrow are buddies now.

Luckily, Ozma and Dorothy have been spying on the party via Magic Picture this whole time, so they rendezvous at Jinjur's place to reverse the transformations and say hi. (Along with Toto. Still comfortably using human language, though it's mostly to say things like "Leave me out of your magic, please!")

Ozma appears "about 14 or 15," and Dorothy "much younger." (But only half a head shorter?) This is the book where Baum really doubles down on the "nobody ever ages, really, there are babies in this country who have been babies for thousands of years" version of continuity.

Sure enough, Dorothy: "Do you s'pose Nimmie Amee still loves you, after all these years?" Nick is totally convinced. Ozma says that, well, it can't hurt to go visit her and ask.

Anyway, it turns out Nimmie Amee got a new boyfriend (a soldier, unsubtly named Captain Fyter) not long after Nick broke up with her. The witch tried the same limb-lopping-off trick, and Fyter did the same incremental replacement with tin prosthetics, aaaaaaaand that was what convinced Nimmie Amee to accept a marriage proposal. She has a thing for tin!

But Fyter conveniently got rusted in a rainstorm, so after Nick oils him and hears his backstory, they try to figure out which of them has a better claim to their one-time fiancée.

Woot: "If she's into tin, you're basically interchangeable."
Scarecrow: "Why don't you draw lots for her?"
Polychrome, currently the only girl in the party, eyerolling so hard you can probably see it from space: "No, you idiots, it's up to her who she marries."

Seriously, the gender politics of the whole thing feels way ahead of its time.

***

Massive body horror alert:

In trying to track Nimmie Amee down, the party goes to the tinsmith who made Nick's and Fyter's tin bodies...and find out that he still has their leftover meat parts. Still alive. Most of them in a barrel. Nick finds his own old severed head in a cupboard, and they have the most bizarre conversation.

On top of this, it turns out the tinsmith patched together a bunch of those parts to make a whole new Frankenstinian person. All the "what makes you yourself, anyway?" thematic questions are getting slammed, and hard.

The tin men finally find their old sweetheart living in the mountains. They still expect her to be actively crying over her lost love.

Nope. She's married. The body-horror-chimera guy has been her husband for, like, decades now. And she's not interested in either of the tin guys,

Good going, girl.

On the way home they stop in the Emerald City, and the tin men ask, kinda pathetically, what they should do about all this? Ozma sets them straight with an incredibly patient "look, your ex is happy, and it's really none of your business."

Fyter gets hired as a soldier by Ozma, while Nick and the Scarecrow return home, to get back to bro'ing it up for the next few decades. And the Tin Woodman soothes his ego with the idea that, eh, the Winkies probably didn't want an empress anyway.