Defeated

If I’ve seen it once (in a TG caption), I’ve seen it a thousand times (in TG fiction): some thoughtless oaf (of a man) mouths off to a woman (with hidden powers of some sort) and gets his comeuppance. The comeuppance varies: maybe he’s magically transformed into a beautiful woman (which would be a bad thing how?), maybe he’s turned into a woman and forced into some humiliating circumstance (e.g. prostitution, or a bad marriage), or maybe he’s just forced into womanly guise and obliged to walk across town or some equally lame task. But the oddities in this are twofold. First, we (the authors of TG fiction) are always punishing some hapless male (who doesn’t share our particular obsession) by giving him precisely what we want (more or less) for ourselves—doesn’t that strike you as rather perverse? If being a woman is such a wonderful thing (and it is), then why do we so often use it as punishment? (Dat is just weird…) Second, it seems strange to me how negative we are about the male gender, in that we often portray men as jerks who richly deserve punishment of some sort. But besides the obvious Trumps out there, most guys really aren’t that bad. This is a stereotype, and the fact that we often use it reflects badly on us. That said… here’s my latest caption where I do exactly the things I just railed against. But let’s not be too hard on ourselves; everyone’s a hypocrite (now and then), nobody’s perfect (except some women), and I’ll try to be a good girl next time. So go ahead and enjoy this caption, and then go write something better. 🙂

Fans with good memories might recognize that I used this picture once before, in a 2015 caption called “Knight of the Realm“. It had about the same theme, which is kind of mandated by the body language in the pic. Another cap in a similar vein is “Break My Spirit” from the same year.

Amanda