Look at his feet.
In case you don’t feel like clicking on the image –
Aww idn’t that precious, that sweet little girl with her shy pigeon-toed feets at the end of her teeny-tiny little legs.
For the avoidance of doubt, since even Fox can’t be bothered to say it: pigeon-toes is a male.
Notice also that even Fox won’t tell the truth. “Trans athlete” is meaningless. He’s a male athlete, competing against female athletes; in short he’s a cheat.
I hate this affectation because I used to do this, needed very uncomfortable orthotics to fix it, and I assure you that NOBODY who actually does it is a prizewinning athlete. The special boy thinks it’s cute and dainty and girly but actually he’s mocking disabled people.
From a Los Angeles Times report on the CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) state track meet is this interesting bit of information:
“Under CIF policy, transgender athletes who place at the state championships receive medals but do not displace cisgender girls in the final standings. The federation announced last year that the policy would apply specifically to the long jump, triple jump and high jump — the three events Hernandez competed in — and the rule remained in effect for her three events this weekend.”
So Hernandez was given a unique exemption to compete with other high school girls in just three events, but basically gets the proverbial asterisk in the final standings. So a compromise that at least does recognize that sex does matter when it comes to elite sport.
Ah, yes, uchimata.
Pigeon toes. It’s a Japanese anime thing. Along with eyes-closed giggling with a hand covering the mouth, or showing gushing excitement by squeezing one’s elbows against the waist while waving her raised fists back and forth, or sitting on the ground, knees pointed forward and inward, legs bent out to the sides, forming a “w” shape when seen from above. It’s vaguely arguable that some of this aesthetic has roots in geisha and kabuki and old Japanese kimono culture, but these days, characters in such poses almost always come dressed in a short-skirted schoolgirl or French maid costume. It’s one of the defining aesthetics of Japanese anime, and it’s deliberately pornographic — far from traditional, ceremonial, or austere.
The “moe” look has been slowly emerging since at least the ’60s (the “cute witch fantasy girlfriend” trope, imported to Japan via American TV — I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched — was an early prototype), but it was formalized into animation style guides around the ’90s. These animators were adult men, and although the comics and cartoons they produced were ostensibly aimed at teen girls, they were often actually consumed by other adult men.
Then fashion magazines aimed at girls took it up. Real life (as opposed to drawn) teen girls in glossy photo shoots were instructed to do those poses. Soon after, pigeon-toed walking became a social contagion which has caused a medical epidemic among Japanese girls and women: they came to believe they’re supposed to walk with pigeon toes in order to be seen as desirable by men. But it causes severe and painful bone and muscle deformities.
The Sailor Moon series is probably the most canonical example of this subgenre of anime: from the 1990s, it was a cartoon about teen girls with superpowers, but it was drenched in sexualized poses and even full-frontal nudity in the original Japanese airings. It was clearly made with horny men in mind just as much as teen girls. And just as the West exported the submissive magical girlfriend to Japan via Jeannie — who called her boyfriend “Master”, you’ll recall — the Japanese kinked and sexed it up a hundredfold and exported it back to us via anime — which has become a cultural juggernaut among Western young men.
That mix, female-character driven stories told through the male gaze is ground zero for the recent trans explosion: a girl or woman is what a horny man imagines a girl or woman to be, rather than a human female. It’s no wonder trans and anime are virtually synonymous online.
And there it is in that male athlete. From the pigeon toes alone, an entire decades- and continents-spanning history unfolds before our eyes…
Ick. And all that is, as I understand it, bolted onto a longstanding tradition of extreme feminization and infantilization of girls and women. Giggling, giggling with a hand in front of the mouth, all that shit. Oh and carrying stuffed animals around.
Yup, it’s fetish and infantilization all the way down. And it’s also got something to do with the “stickiness” of identity I was talking about before. As I often harp on about, identities are deeply emotional concepts that humans become attached to at the deep-seated, limbic-response level. Once an idea about one’s identity is formed, it’s considered almost a matter of life and death to protect it. And I think in a lot of adolescent boys, their budding, strong sexual feelings towards female bodies emerge, and they don’t know how to categorize such strong, powerful feelings, so they slot them into their still-nascent formation of their “identity”: if a sexualized female body is a thing I’m fixated on, maybe that’s because my identity is a sexualized female. And they get stuck on that, and all across the internet, all the isolated boys stuck on that all got together and formed a tribe, which is really more like a rabid, angry, unhinged cult. All of it, built around a misplacement of their sexual feelings about women’s bodies, a lot of this misplacement happening because they consumed content made by men that told them that womanhood is something men get to define according to men’s desires.
Arty, thanks for that. I had noticed that pigeon-toed walking among some of my female students the last few years I was teaching. I can’t imagine trying to walk that way; it’s worse than high heels. I could tell it was some sort of infantilization thing, because some theatres used it to depict college girls are much, much younger girls in their plays.
I have never paid any attention to anime, other than seeing the various avatars, so I was familiar with the wide-eyed thing, but I didn’t know any of this history. That makes me more angry about my female students feeling they needed to walk this way; it was fed to them deliberately.
Funny how none of the males seemed to feel the need to do anything like that…other than squealing out with their cars, leaving rubber stains, and putting guns in their back windows, anyway.
Artymorty: and this has a knock-on effect on the adolescent girls. Many of them don’t identify with any of the sexualised female imagery they’re bombarded with, they don’t like the infantile giggling and girlie consumerism (so much of gender is consumerism), and so they decide OK then, if THAT’S what it means to be a girl, well I must be a boy.
I had pigeon toes as a kid too, pre-puberty though, and I was self conscious about it. I can’t remember if I was teased, but I probably was. I brought the issue to my dad one day and he said that I should practice walking with my toes pointed forward whenever I noticed it. I was skeptical but I tried my best. I actually did this for a couple of years and gradually started walking with my feet in alignment without even thinking about it. By my late teens my foot alignment was mostly solved. I still notice a very slight pigeon toe when I’m very tired or after a particularly long walk.
I do tend to notice that characteristic in people, and I wonder how people can be very duck footed (the opposite (there are so many! )) and dont have balance problems. There must be some kind of ideal conformation for foot alignment in humans. I don’t know, but there seem to be more runners who are duck footed than pigeon toed. I tend to notice this because of my foot alignment problems as a kid.
If you watch Hernandez doing various T&F events, he seems to have good alignment of his feet, so it’s probably something he does for public perception, when he’s not actually pigeon toed at all.
Having lived in Japan for over 50 years now, I enjoyed – no, I shan’t say I “enjoyed”… I found Artymorty’s remarks spot on. I should add, it was moderately recently (i.e. in the last quarter-century ) that I began to notice with disturbing frequency knock-kneed girls walking about. I was puzzled by this, because I certainly hadn’t noticed this when I first came to Japan, and didn’t notice many knock-kneed boys walking around – you can tell by someone’s gait that they’re knock-kneed, so it’s not a matter of skirts versus trousers. I hadn’t realised that this was due to the influence of more-or-less pornographic anime, but this does not, alas, surprise me. Although, in defence of some anime, at least, I would point to Studio Ghibli’s films, which have remarkable and morally complex stories, and are visually extraordinary. I suppose my two favourites are Tonari no Totoro & Monokehime, both of which are directed by Miyazaki Hayao. I cannot bear Disney.
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