The gender identification of imaginary creatures

[KatVonSweet]

So mumsnets favourite "women's" officer has been twittering about how t**fs can correctly gender mermaids - given mermaids have no genitals.

One plucky, soon to be blocked respondent amused me greatly with this reply:

"They likely think, that like the mermaids themselves, their gender is make believe. Like yours"

I wonder if mermaids produce any slime ointment that can be used on that burn?

Girl centaurs are called centaurides. I don't think they bother with glitter.

Well surely anything called a “maid” would have to be female?

HoppingGreen did you just ASSUME GENDER????!!!!!! The solicitors will be after you.

With mermaids i worry more about the spine being rotated 90 degrees - the tail should wave side to side not front to back

Cthulu is the original non-binary beast, although Lovecraft uses "he" as its designated pronoun. That probably says more about Lovecraft that Cthulu though!

Lovecraft said that merely looking at it drives someone insane so obviously there will be no time to check if it has genitals.

Plus it's a singular beast and unable to reproduce. Allegedly.

I do not know how to put it in the form of a rule of misogyny but I have noticed that misogynists spend a great deal of their time telling one another what women think so that they can talk about how wrong women are to think whatever it is that the d00dbros claim women think.

I've always thought Homer led the charge on giving imaginary creatures a sex. And guess what?! He plumped for more female baddies than male.

Nasty girl nymph tricking poor Odysseus
Nasty girl witch tricking poor Odysseus
Nasty girl sirens tricking poor Odysseus
I'm sure even the nasty whirlpool and rocks were female. Though I'm not sure rocks have genders really. Whirlpools are a hole so definitely women.

Luckily he got back to the only female that counted. His ever faithful wife. Bless him. Shagged his way round the Mediterranean. He must have been exhausted poor pet!

Kat, you raised the intellectual tone of the whole thread, and sadly, due to the telly in the breakroom at work being tuned to certain channels constantly, I see the word Homer and I just see a bald yellow man who likes Doh!nuts.

Unicorns have transed over the years. They used to be noble looking with manly beards on their chins and rugged fetlocks and have a long spiky horn. Now they are glittered-up My Little Ponies with big fluttery eyelashes, pink manes and cute little stubby nonthreatening horns. Little ladyhorns.

Unicorns used to really like hanging out with virgins though so I guess that's why the TA gang love them so much

lowers the intellectual tone Doh!

I suppose the obvious answer is that mermaids have breasts, while mermen tend to have beards.
Even without the beards, you'd be able to tell by the face, like humans do. That's why facial feminisation surgery is a thing.
I guess even imaginary creatures have biology.

With mermaids i worry more about the spine being rotated 90 degrees - the tail should wave side to side not front to back

That answers the question upthread asking if mermaids are mammals or fish - they're clearly mammals then because that's the way whale/dolphin/porpoise tails go.

Of course the interesting thing about mermaids is the misogyny (and not so veiled sexual violence) in the Little Mermaid. Basically, mermaid swaps beautiful voice (and the ability to talk and communicate, express her own needs, disagree) for legs so she can marry the prince (become fuckable).

In answer to the tumblr-esqu question, I'd assume mermaids do like salmon do - mermaid comes along, digs a little nest in the pebbles, fills it with eggs. Merman comes along, adds semen to the mix. Neither sex actually need meet the other. Resulting babies hatch as fry - high infant mortality rate, but on the plus side, no shitty nappies or broken nights.

Don't think I'd swap that for legs.

Also, Mermaids were actually “sirens”, which is the word for Mermaids in some languages
They lured men to their with their singing and beauty, before revealing their big fangs and fishy faces and drowning them
All very symbolic I’m sure

It used to amuse me greatly as a child that in the Brownies you could be a Kelphie. So a water spirit that existed mainly to drown people.

Strange that women were seen as bad luck to have on boats. Were they at risk from the Mermaid's singing? I think not. They could have given the blokes a helpful hand!

I’d like to know if Lily actually is this dim or if it’s how they think all women act.

And yet ironically it was the head scarf heroes (women) who campaigned to change laws to make it safer for trawlermen.

I also remember reading it took several men to remove Lilian from one protest she was so strong...

I'm still laughing at the notion that someone thinks they've made a zinger of a point by asking how we'd 'gender' imaginary creatures- and then people on here managed immediately to demolish the 'point' logically by pointing out that mermaids are by definition female because mermen are 'imagined' to be the male version.

I once had a long discussion with my then boyfriend about how do mermaids reproduce, and whether they were all mammal, or part mammal, part fish, and how would the actual physical part happen.

It was in this conversation that I learnt about parthenogenesis. (But for the record, I reckon it's like dolphins.)

I also learnt that there are way too many people on the Internet who have not only thought about mermaid sex, but drawn and painted it as well.

It's funny though, isn't it, that the discovery of fishy or scaly tails in mythology often reveal a woman to be a wrong 'un: dangerous and perverted sexuality symbolised by the fact that actually their legs are fused together so completely without genitals. Thinking mainly of Melusine.

Which leads to that other rich seam of spying on women in the bath when the hero sees them as they really are (Duessa in Faerie Queene). When actually he's being a nasty little peeping Tom.

And we're back to men in changing rooms! Artemis had the right idea on that one!

Oh she sure did!

Not my actual tattoo! ‘Reverse mermaids’ are definitely a thing in tattoo culture though, have been around since at the least the 1940s - probably a warning against the siren’s song - these fishes might not be what you think they are...

Re: Slyvanians - surely they are the first an entirely gender-ordered society - take their clothes off and there is no trace of biological sex difference at all?
The mystery as to how they make babies is presumably where we’ll find ourselves when genderism takes over and Sex Ed becomes impossible to teach?

How on earth can you not misgender a mermaid, when gender is nothing to do with sex so it makes no differnce if the mermaid is a male or female

Though yes, clearly mermaids are all female, where mermen are male. Back to the drawing board dear womens officer.