“You’re desperate to change your body, people will go through great lengths. “When people come in and say silicone, they don’t really know what they mean because it could be anything,” says Asa Radix, senior director of research and education for Callen-Lorde in New York City, an LGBTQ-focused health center, adding that some of his patients even had quick cement or peanut butter injected in them. It makes health experts reticent to even call the mixture “silicone,” at all. In one Florida woman’s case, tire sealant and cement were both injected into her face. But over the past five years, there have been a number of news reports exposing “pumping parties,” where groups of trans women pool their money to get injected with silicone, and the practice has now become more underground and more risky.Īnd much of that has to do with what’s being put in the mixture, which many times is unknown by those who receive the injections.
You can read more of his Bad Buddy analyses on tumblr.Meet the Beatle: A Guide to Ringo Starr's Solo Career in 20 SongsĪmong trans women, silicone injections are a well known way to achieve the ultimate body: curvy butt, thick thighs or larger breasts. Tel is a multi-cultural enthusiast of the written word (with a day job in architecture) based in Singapore, where he has an abiding fascination with languages, etymology, science, inter-cultural exchange, international cuisine and people development (when he's not bingeing on Netflix, re-watching Bad Buddy or sweating it out at the gym). And it is this normalisation of LGBTQ+ relationships, in place of yaoi-derived fetishisation, that is its most precious gift to the world. Perhaps the most revolutionary of Bad Buddy's iconoclastic re-workings of the genre is this: set in a world without homophobia, Bad Buddy allows us to see that Pat and Pran's struggles to make their relationship work are really not much different from any other couple's, with similar pressures (parental disapproval, or the strain of long-distance relationships made necessary for career development), aspirations, highs and lows. And like Pat - we just have to let it reveal its subtler truths by getting to know it better, on its own terms, as one little BL revolutionising a whole genre. Like Pran, Bad Buddy doesn't always give up its secrets easily. But not before Pran gets the opportunity to educate him (and the audience), with a little illustrative role-switching, how implied power dynamics can also be read into the terms used, and why it's a stereotype best discarded. For Pat and Pran, the issue is resolved good-naturedly enough when Pat apologises for calling Pran his wife, confessing that he only did it because he thought it reflected their growing closeness. But in a gay relationship where both partners are equal, the gendering of roles is meaningless and the promulgation of unfair power imbalances that plagued (and still plague) heterosexual relationships should have no place there either.
As long as patriarchal stereotypes persist, when a male partner feminises the other's role in the relationship there will be implications of subordination as well. The trope carries the message that the "female" of the pair (the uke) is a "little woman" to his "male" seme. When Pran indignantly confronts Pat in one of the later episodes about calling him a housewife, Bad Buddy is also taking the opportunity to rip into the "wifey" trope (note the diminutive suffix) trotted out in countless other BL dramas.