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cavehags · 4 years

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i realize this will probably bring up old drama so you might not want to answer it. but do you ever regret, however on purpose or on accident, bringing all that unnecesary hate towards Katara? i'm really sad and dissapointed tbh. i'm a woman of color and katara was so important to me growing up. my favorite animated woman ever. and then this resurgence comes and theres so, so much unnecesary hatred for her and everyone ignoring everything that makes her a good character.

(2/3) 2- and you know, i expected this from the male side of the fandom. they were misogynistic to her and the others even back then so i would expect it to be even worse with how internet culture is more mysogistic now that ever. and i wasnt wrong. male atla fans had some truly horrible takes and views that just came across as racism and misogyny. but, i expected these circles to be better. to be a safe space for us woc who love this character. but i found the same weird hatred for her.

(3/3) 3-i just, i cant believe i feel less welcome now that i did even back then. and back then i didnt even paricipate really. but at least i could enjoy fandom content without stumbling into misogyny and racism every other post. also sorry for sending this to your personal blog b i just wanted to let you know you controbuted to that too even if it wasnt your intention. at least you realized that and arent contributing to it anymore right? cause honestly the hate has only gotten worse not less.

hey anon. thanks for asking this question, because i hadn’t addressed this topic previously and this gave me an opportunity to do so.

no, i don’t regret publicly interpreting a character whom i love through a nuanced and human lens. and i don’t regret combating the one-dimensional interpretation of this character, which posits that she’s merely an vaguely defined object of attraction for some boy or another, and a singularly gentle, mature, maternal figure whose sole purpose in life is to nurture others. those interpretations suck. they rob her of the humanity and complexity that make her character unique and they stem from misogynistic tropes that reduce women to the services they can provide to men. the thing in the world that matters most to me is fighting misogyny, and this trend to diminish a proud and powerful and angry teenage girl by exaggerating only her most socially acceptable traits is misogyny.

unlike you, i did not grow up watching avatar: the last airbender. the shows i watched growing up did not have a lot of girls who felt real to me. the girls i saw on tv growing up were simple. they were the main characters’ crushes. they were simple, desirable, usually sweet and loving, and not much else. if they had a flaw, it was that they were, at best, “awkward.” whatever that means. or if they were the protagonists, which was rare, they were nice enough and tried to do the right thing, but they never had strong feelings like resentment and anger. they weren’t allowed to be unfeminine which meant they weren’t allowed to be bitter, angry or in any way flawed. they didn’t look like the version of girlhood i knew to be true for me personally, which included a lot of anger and frustration and powerlessness.

that crappy representation left me with internalized misogyny that chased me for longer than i’d like to admit. i did not learn to think of girls as humans who could be as interesting and flawed and messy as the boys were. i did not value myself as a girl, and later a woman, because i thought the best thing a girl could be was... bland. boring. pretty, but empty. passionless.

it would have meant the world to me to see a character like katara.

because katara is angry. she has every right to be: she’s had so much stolen from her, including her mother, her people, and her childhood. katara has a short fuse. she yells. she snaps. she fucks up. sometimes she makes mean jokes! i never saw a single one of those dreamily perfect cartoon love interests make mean jokes when i was a kid. she is extremely idealistic--it’s her defining character trait--but we see the bad side of that as well as the good. we see that her need to help others leads her to act rashly, to get herself into danger, to put others in danger too.

and she has her very own arc. it’s not about her love for another person, either (what a snooze of a storyline); it’s about growing up and learning to break down some of that stubborn black-and-white thinking that we all indulge in as children. it’s a true coming-of-age arc and it belongs to a fourteen-year-old girl.

when i, to use a phrase i find crass, “entered the fandom,” i quickly realized that other fans’ perceptions of katara did not line up with the things i valued most about her. other fans seemed to valorize her most socially acceptable feminine qualities: her generosity, her kindness, her dedication to helping others. and of course i love those parts of her--i love everything about her--but what is really remarkable about avatar: the last airbender is that katara’s many important virtues are also counterbalanced by equally significant flaws. a good character has flaws. katara is a good character, and a deviation from the characters who made up my formative media landscape, because she has flaws. her temper, her idealism, her stubbornness--these are flaws. flaws make her seem real and human and challenge the mainstream sentiment that girls are not real or human.

it simply did not occur to me that celebrating these aspects of katara that make her a realistic and well-written teenage girl would spark ire from other adult fans. it absolutely did not occur to me that i would then be blamed for somehow causing misogynistic interpretations of this character, particularly given that misogynistic interpretations of this character are the very thing i sought to correct when i began to blog about this television show.

i’m told there are “fans” on instagram and tiktok who think katara is whiny, annoying, and overly preoccupied with her trauma. i do not use instagram or tiktok, so i wouldn’t know, but i’ll take your word for it. respectfully, however, they didn’t get that from me. misogynistic takes on katara have existed since before i came along. i have never, ever called katara whiny. and seeing as i have been treating my own PTSD in therapy for nine years, you can safely conclude that i don’t think anyone, katara included, is overly preoccupied with their trauma. that’s not a thing. do i think she’s annoying? of course not! as a character, she’s a delight. does she sometimes find real joy in aggravating her brother and her friends? yes, because she’s 14. i, an adult, am not annoyed by her. sokka and toph often are, because that is katara’s goal and katara always succeeds in her goals. she’s not “annoying.”

if there are “fans” who are indeed following lesbians4sokka and somehow misreading every single post and interpreting them to mean that we hate katara and they should too, i don’t really know what you want me to do about that. l4s has over ten thousand followers and we have already posted so many essays disavowing katara hate. our feminist and antiracist objectives in running the blog are literally pinned with the headline “please read.”

furthermore, you cannot reasonably expect my co-blogger and me to control the way our words will be received. we should not have to, and are not going to, add a disclaimer to every post saying that when we critique or make jokes about a teenage girl we are doing so through a feminist lens. our url is lesbians4sokka, and we are clearly women. if that alone doesn’t make it obvious, then refer back to that pinned post.

it is indescribably frustrating, and really goddamn depressing as well, that people are so comfortable with the misogynistic binary of Perfect Good Women and Flawed Wicked Bitches that they perceive any discussion of a woman’s flaws to be necessarily relegating her to the latter camp. if that is how you (a generic you) perceive women, then i’m sorry, but you’ve internalized sexism that i cannot cure you of. and it’s unjust to expect my friend and me to write for the lowest common denominator of readers who have not yet had their own feminist awakenings. we do not write picture books for babies. we write for ourselves, and with the expectation that our readers can think critically. reading media through a feminist lens is my primary interest; i have no intention of excising that angle from my writing.

as i go through my life, i am going to embrace the flaws of girls and women because not enough people do. as long as the dominant narratives surrounding women are “good and perfect” and “unlovable wh*re,” you’ll find me highlighting flawed, realistic, righteously angry women in the margins. and for what it’s worth, it’s not just katara. i champion depictions of angry girls in all sorts of media. that’s sort of my whole thing. my favorite movies are part of the angry girl cinematic universe: thoroughbreds, jennifer’s body, hard candy, jojo rabbit, et cetera. on tv, in addition to katara, you’ll find me celebrating tuca and bertie, poppy from mythic quest, tulip and lake from infinity train, korra, and more. i adore all these women and see myself in them. i hope you find this suitably persuasive to establish that i have sufficient Feminist Cred, according to your standards, to observe and write about these very flawed and human fictional women.

what i’m saying is this: i decline to take responsibility for the misogynistic discourse orbiting a children’s cartoon. as someone who writes about that series from a perspective that seeks to add humanity and nuance to the reductive, one-dimensional, overwhelmingly sexist writing that already exists, i am pretty taken aback that i am the one being blamed for the very problem i sought to address. except not that taken aback because i am a woman online, haha! and this is always how it goes for us.

finally, i think it sucks that you’ve chosen to blame me for a problem that begins and ends with the patriarchy. i can’t control the way this response will be perceived, just like how i can’t control the way anything will be perceived because i am just one human woman, but i do hope you choose to be reflective, and consider why you’ve chosen this avenue to assign blame.

#anyway! this answer is too long and it's undignified to answer ''fandom drama'' queries on le blog #but here we are in 2020

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cashdiamondsgold · 3 years

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S*x Secrets of An American Geisha - Notes!

A summary from the book, as titled above.

Men are visual and love beauty in a woman. Men are sexual and love sexiness in a woman. Men are masculine and love femininity in a woman. By making yourself beautiful, sexy, and feminine for potential Good Men, you are only “being submissive” or “surrendering” to the realities of men and women and to what can help you attract those Good Men to you.

Geisha Consciousness

Geisha has mastered the art of using all aspects of her femininity to attract, satisfy, and keep her men happy with her so that they will take advantage of her services again in the future. She is, as it were, building a satisfied clientele and a successful long-term business.

The Asian Geisha knows that her man is a simple creature who cannot be legislated into treating her well, but rather must be inspired by her personal ity, kindness, beauty, and sexy femininity to treat her well, both sexually and in all other aspects of relationship, love, and marriage.

Your differences from a man are what attract him to you. Your female characteristics exert a strong pull on his male characteristics as he experiences a gravitational attraction to you and all you represent of the feminine

The Asian Geisha knows that she should do all she can to make her man feel more masculine, more of a man. She knows that she wants to be as feminine to him as she can be.

The secret for both the Asian Geisha and the American Geisha is to display her femininity in a classy manner.

The Asian Geisha’s secret is that she knows that a man’s ego and sense of himself depend in large measure on both his feeling masculine and being seen as such by his woman. The Asian Geisha strokes the man’s ego in many ways, both to sat isfy him at the moment and to encourage him to purchase her business ser vices again in the future.

The Power of Geisha Femininity

Become attractive to a man and to let him pursue you

To attract, sat sfy, and keep your Good Man, be so beautiful, sexy, and feminine that you bring out the best aspects of his masculinity. Make him feel good about himself as a man. Do that, and he’ll never leave you.

The Western or American man is attracted to (or at least notices and appreciates) any fit, well-groomed woman who plays up her uniquely beau tiful characteristics and expresses her inherent femininity.

Geisha never lets her clients or potential clients see her when she is not at her most beautiful and feminine.

The Asian Geisha works consciously at always becoming more beautiful, more sexy, and more feminine, even if only by implementing the tiniest of changes. She makes enhancing her appearance and mannerisms a high prior ity so that she may continue to be thought of as attractive by her male clients and thus remain in demand for her companionship services. Since she is in the business of being a geisha, we can look at her efforts as similar to those of an entrepreneur wanting to make a conscious effort to maintain and to improve the quality of her product, which is herself, so as to main tain her clients’satisfaction and their loyalty to her.

the research of David M. Buss, as reported in his 1994 book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, suggests that men are attracted to youthfulness or the look of youthfulness in women and to healthy-looking women. Specific elements of a woman’s appearance that were found particularly attractive included full lips; clear, smooth skin; clear eyes; shiny, full hair; good muscle tone; a bouncy, youth ful walk; an animated face; and a high energy level. As to body type, men did not tend to prefer very thin women, though men were conscious of wanting to obtain a high-status, attractive wife, because such a wife in creases a man’s standing.

You need to be at your best and most attractive nearly always,

The Asian Geisha sets a perfect example of passively, femininely attracting, rather than aggressively pursuing, men in her business life. She never calls her customers, never initiates getting together, never pays for a meal or buys a gift. These are all masculine actions. The Asian Geisha is the absolute embodiment of the spirit of femininity. She readies herself. Then she waits. She has a confidence that she has prepared herself so well that gentlemen will seek out her company, her mere presence in their lives. The Asian Geisha relaxes, waits, and is receptive to the masculine energy that initiates, pursues, hunts, and makes things happen.

Become more fashion conscious Whatever the label might say, your goal with your clothes is to high light your best physical attributes . Finally, remember this basic: Dress with a sense of class.

remember not to separate beauty, femininity, and sexiness. Instead, let’s mix your three part Geisha Attractiveness with classiness and see how you can set yourself apart from the competition. I’ll use just one example from that last long list of what respondents found sexy and feminine: “Her clothing slightly reveals some of her body.” When you dress this way, you will be perceived as being sexy, feminine, and beautiful; all three aspects of your Geisha Attractiveness will be on display.

Make Your Good Man Feel Like More of a Man

The Asian Geisha is a beautiful actress, speaking lines from a script that she has developed for the very purpose of making her client feel good about himself. She knows that a convincing, ego-building performance with her client will likely result in his future business

You will build your Good Man’s ego and sense of himself as a man through your sincere affection, not through the calculation of customer satisfaction.

Yes, even when he is not there, give him full credit for making you come. His flesh always gets full credit. When he calls somehow the conversation comes around to the fact that you masturbated the night before. I suggest to you, dear Younger Sister, that the following (or something similar) is what happened last night and is how you tell your Good Man about it: “I miss you so much, baby. I miss your cock in me. I got so horny for your fingers on my G-spot. I thought of us making love all day, your tongue on my clitoris. So I took a nice, warm bath and put on one of your favorite silk teddies and used Mister Big to help me. I imagined your tongue all over me and your cock pounding to the back of my vagina, your arms holding me so tightly, our lips crushed against each other’s. And I came so nicely. And then I fell asleep in heaven. Thank you, baby. I love you. Come home soon. You make me feel so good.”

You Love His Cock Like No One Ever Has

Here’s the true test of your love for your Good Man’s cock. At some point after you have responded so excitedly and orgasmically to his cock, after you have so often expressed how much you love and want his cock, after you have created a shrine to his cock, he will say to you these exact words (I promise, with no doubt at all in my mind): “No one has ever loved my cock as much as you do.” It will be true, too; no one ever has

If you do love what his cock does for you, scream with ecstasy when you come on his cock (or fingers or tongue), but also tell him with words that you love his cock (or fingers or tongue), and tell him often.

your first thought upon being asked by your Good Man to make love should be, with full enthusiasm, “Yes.” Go for it. Truly be enthusiastic. In fact, a Good Man only wants to make love with you when you are truly enthusiastic. Again, try to have a sincere enthusiasm when he wants to make love with you. He, his ego, and his cock can all sense when you are not enthusiastic. And they take it badly and personally when you are not really into making love with the three of them. Show real enthusiasm whenever you make love with your Good Man.

You become more and more of an American Geisha when, instead of refusing and rejecting your man, you take the following steps in a positive, loving manner: 1. Say, “I’d love to make love with you, but (give your reason).” 2. Propose a date (not too far in future). 3. Add something special (sometimes). 4. Ask, “Is that okay?”

-- source https://g.co/kgs/CUVsRn #Femininity #levelUp #SB #SW #booksummary

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docholligay · 3 years

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SM rewrite: any of haruka's first times meeting the inners

EPisode 92! 1960 words, I hope you enjoy, I AM HAVING FUN TODAY

“He’s SO HOT, Mina.”

Usagi was off on yet another one of her larks, talking about some guy she’d seen at the arcade. She’d thought, at first, that she was talking about Motoki, who Mina took to be her current obsession who was not Mamoru of the moment, but maybe that had been several moments ago. It was hard to tell with Usagi.

People always took her and Usagi to be alike, and if that gave Mina the benefit of being underestimated, that was fine with her. And it was true, that they both liked attractive people, in a way, but Mina was more of a freelancer, moving from this flower to that like a brilliant butterfly with no particular link to any one person, while Usagi fell in love with every man she ever met.

That too. Usagi was still under the impression that she was straight, and the delusion might yet follow her all the way to the wedding altar. That, in particular, was none of Mina’s business, who had realized since the age of 12 that attractive was attractive in her eyes, which became the fact that a bedroom was a bedroom, as she got older, and what it might say on someone’s driver’s license or facebook held little notice for her when it was time to go home.

Dating, on the other hand--well, she wasn’t bold enough to tell Usagi to never date a man, if she had other options, not while she was still enamored of Mamoru, but she certainly thought it hard enough. Mina had learned that lesson quickly. Men were like riding a roller coaster, exhilarating and fun, for a quick ride, but eventually you just get sick.

Usagi had not yet learned this, and it was in this that Minako allowed her to keep your youthful naivete. She had time yet to learn.

“His name is HARUKA,” she swung her bag around, “I heard the cashier say it. Isn’t that dreamy?”

Mina chuckled, “It’s one of the most popular names in Japan, Usagi. I go to school with like, 4 Harukas.”

“Well, it seems different on him!” She gave a little scowl and a stomp of her foot, but then smiled brightly and whipped around, “Come to the arcade with me and see him!” She narrowed her eyes playfully, “We can compete to see who he’ll fall in love with.”

This was the point at which Rei would have chimed in that Usaig had a boyfriend, if she had denied to leave off from her shrine duties and hang out with them after school, but she hadn’t, and Mina didn’t see why something like a boyfriend should get in the way of a good time.

“Amazing. I hope you like losing.” Mina cackled as she swanned toward The Crown. She hadn’t been in a while, not for any particular reason, other than she was doing a bunch of back work for a hostess club, which she hoped would hire her as a hostess the absolute second she turned 18. Unfortunately, they were too above-board to hire her for anything at the front right now. It was less than a year. She’d live.

Usagi rushed into the Crown, ever with the perfect idea of how to act casual, and gazed immediately over to the racing game in the corner, hand under her chin as she leaned against an old copy of Pacman.

“There he is!!!” she stage whispered, hissing as she grabbed Mina’s hand.

She sighed and turned to tell Usagi that he was going to hear them, but he didn’t look over even at all, and Mina’s brow twitched as she noticed it. His hearing must not be anything to write home about. He was wearing a blazer over the top of a sweater, over the top of a collared shirt, which seemed a bit like overkill to Mina, but hey, maybe he was cold.

MIna walked over to him, Usagi half-tiptoeing behind in a way that Haruka would find either cute or incredibly unsettling, and based on that, Mina would change her strategy. It was all a sort of chess game, flirting and seduction, and with men maybe it wasn’t even chess. Checkers, or something.

“Hi!” Usagi popped up, “Good afternoon! We saw that you were playing alone here, and were wondering, you know!”

Mina looped her arm across the back of the car seat, and leaned against it. “Care for a friendly game?”

Haruka ruffled his hair, and looked up at her, and Mina nearly burst out laughing. She hadn’t noticed, with the bulkiness of the blazer and other entrappings, and she hadn’t looked hard enough when she’d been standing with Usagi, but looking now, there was no mistake. Haruka wasn’t a man at all. Oh, she was tall, and gangly, and even given the sweater probably fairly flat-chested, but there was the unmistakable fullness of her lip, the softness of her brow, the way she looked at Usagi and Mina. Mina was a bit of an expert, in these matters.

She looked over to Usagi. No reason not to let this play out. Why not, she’d earned some fun. Maybe Usagi would have a moment of realization--Mina doubted she’d ever seen a butch lesbian outside of Takarazuka, and those women were made up to the high heavens, more drag than the genuine article.

So she smiled.

“Just a race or two.”

Usagi started to stammer, and step in front of her, but Mina dodged it effortlessly. Why have one bit of fun, when she could have two? Besides, Usagi may have been wrong about Haruka being a boy, but she wasn’t wrong about a certain quality of rough handsomeness that she carried, that sort of young, gentlemanly way, with a touch of insecurity, that Mina sometimes found very winning about the younger butch set. She could have a worse time.

“Sure,” Haruka smiled, and nodded, then added, “I always like to play with a pretty girl.”

Her voice was deep, but not overly so, and Mina found the feminine lilt at the end of her sentences quite charming. She rather liked butches, when it came down to it. They had a habit of picking up the charming parts of masculinity while letting the rest rot where it belonged.

MIna slid in next to her. She smelled good, like sandalwood and maybe a touch of motor oil, which Mina wouldn’t have thought would be charming. Usagi was salivating as they put their coins into the slot, but she stood and watched Mina. She’d played this game plenty of times, and beaten Usagi at it nearly every time, save when Motoki accidentally spilled a drink on her in the middle of a race. This wouldn’t be too hard, but she would be careful not to humiliate Haruka, and maybe even let her win in the last stretch--

She looked over to the map. Haruka was already out in front, her car on full manual and effortlessly gliding through it, swinging the wheel and tapping on the brake and gas at perfect intervals.

Minako, for a moment, became just a little enraged. She hadn’t even wanted to win before this moment, but for her to be beaten so easily, by whatever putz of a nerd was too old to be hanging out in an arcade but clearly WAS hanging out in an arcade, on an afternoon, and didn’t she have a job or college or something to go to?

She slammed down on the gas, trying desperately to catch up, to make a better showin, but Haruka just kept going and going, hitting checkpoints without a second thought, not even the slightest amount of wrinkle to her forehead.

Besides all that, Usagi was laughing and clapping her hands like the damn fool she was.

Mina tried to weave around the fake traffic in her way, but ended up broadsiding a bus full of fake schoolchildren, and she imagined their fake screams echoing her own as the Game Over flashed across the screen. She quite forgot her seduction, in the moment, as she slapped the middle of the steering wheel and laid her head down on it.

“I can’t believe I lost that bad!”

Haruka chuckled, “No, you actually did pretty good.”

Mina straightened up, smoothed her hair, and tried to regain herself.

“Sorry, it’s just,” she giggled, “I get so competitive. The uh….heat of the moment, you know what I mean?”

Haruka looked at her with a slightly confused sideways grin. “Sure.”

“Oh but I am sorry, Haruka, mother was forever at lunch, sometimes I swear she asks for things only to see the human limit of what a waiter will bear before smoke begins to run from his ears. It was never my intention to keep you waiting.”

“Oh, that’s okay.”

Mina saw Game Over flash across the screen a second time as Haruka looked at the woman who had just entered.

She was unquestionably beautiful, with a delicately rounded face that suggested a touch of foreignness at the eyes, eyes in green or blue but also somehow both, shifting a bit as the tides. Her hair was elegantly curled to her shoulders, and her carriage was straight and practiced, a show dog out for the afternoon with all the regular mutts. She wore a finely tailored blouse of silk with a demurely pleated skirt, round toe leather on that fit her perfectly on her feet, a bag at her side that was the sort of designer you wore if you were too polished for garishness of advertising that you wore designer. The whole of her felt wrong in the crown, like placing Italian marble in a kid’s playplace, and she smelled of rose and jasmine.

But none of that was what stopped Mina in her tracks, no, wealth and polish was not enough to frighten her off. It was the look Haruka gave her, that wide-eyed gaze like a tourist standing in front of some great masterwork, and the softness with which she had responded. Mina didn’t know if they were together, or if they weren’t but she knew one thing for sure:

Haruka was desperately smitten. She could have competed with Usagi for stupid in love, at that point. She and Usagi were getting nowhere with this one.

Haruka rose to her feet, taking her bag and tossing it over her shoulder in one motion. MIchiru turned to leave the arcade, and Haruka gave a nod back to Usagi.

“Hey, uh, you with the buns,” She smiled and tossed her hair, “We should play next time.”

Usagi’s eyes damn near became hearts, but Mina just gave a half-hearted wave and a nod. There were fights you could win, and fights you couldn’t win, and Minako Aino didn’t ever throw effort straight into a fire. She had more of a sense of self-preservation than that.

Haruka turned to walk next to her companion, who gave her the smallest closed-mouth smile.

“Well, aren’t we making friends so quickly today?”

Haruka chuckled. “You jealous or something?” She looked at the woman with what Mina noted was a mix of hope and fear.

“Oh, terribly.” she answered. This woman knew exactly what Mina knew.

Haruka shook her head, unable to keep up the ruse. “They’re high school girls,” she shrugged, “ They seem like such little kids. But they’re cute, right?”

“As kittens.” Noted the elegant woman, as they breezed out the door.

There was a pause for a moment as even Motoki stood beside them to watch them leave, the perfume still hanging in the air as if the entire place were surrounded by petals. Usagi put her hands on her hips.

“Is it just me, or were they both ridiculously good-looking?”

#Eight Days 2020 #SM rewrites #Anonymous

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hellomynameisbisexual · 4 years

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After three incredible dates with a straight-identified woman, she ghosted me. I felt blindsided. Everything had been going well… or so I thought. She seemed genuinely interested in me and our last date ended with an hour-long make-out session!

When I asked our mutual friend, who introduced us, what happened, she told me bluntly, “Yeah, she was freaked out by the fact that you were bi.” Apparently, she was also too cowardly to tell me herself (or to at least make up a reason why she didn’t want to speak to me again).

I was shocked. On our multiple dates, she didn’t seem uncomfortable when I openly discussed my bisexuality. She even spoke about her time sexually exploring at Wellesley College, when she hooked up with other women.

In the weeks following the date, I thought to myself: if a woman who studied queer theory at one of the most progressive colleges in the United States couldn’t date me because of my bisexuality, then who the hell would ever date me?

Sadly, the woman I briefly dated is not alone in her beliefs. In a survey of over 1,000 women, conducted by Glamour in 2016, 63% of women said they wouldn’t date a man who’s had sex with another man. (This isn’t just men who identify as bi. This includes all men who’ve experimented with another man, even if it only happened once!) Still, 47% of women said they've been attracted to another woman, and 31% of women have had a sexual experience with another woman.

It seems that many women, even while acknowledging their own sexual fluidity, don’t want to date men who are sexually fluid.

In January of 2019, a new study, published in the Journal of Bisexuality, examined how bi individuals are perceived, both romantically and sexually, by straight women, straight men, and gay men. The study also explored if bi folks are perceived as being more masculine or more feminine than their straight counterparts.

The researchers recruited 224 heterosexual women, 120 heterosexual men, and 96 gay men to participate in the study. The participants were then asked to review fake Tinder-like profiles of men and women, where nothing would change besides the profile’s sexual orientation. (More specifically, profiles would have the same picture, bio, age, etc., only the person in the profile openly identified as either bisexual, heterosexual, or gay at random.)

Participants then received five statements and were asked to rate them on a 7-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree: “I find this person sexually attractive;” “I would like to go on a date with this person;” “I could find this person romantically attractive;” “I would like to have sex with this person;” and finally, participants were asked to rate how masculine/feminine they found the profile ranging from very masculine to very feminine.

First, the results indicated that straight women perceive bi men as being less romantically and sexually attractive than straight men. Second, straight women also reported that they were less likely to date and have sex with a bi guy. Lastly, bi men were perceived as being significantly more feminine than straight men.

While the researchers expected straight women to rate bi men as less romantically attractive, which has been supported by past research, lead author Neil Gleason, MA, found it surprising that the women surveyed rated bi men to be less sexually attractive.

“I'm not sure if this is tapping into stereotypes not addressed by previous research or if it is due to the tendencies of women's sexuality,” Gleason tells bi.org. “More specifically, that women tend to place greater emphasis on social and personal characteristics compared to men, when assessing sexual partners.”

A plethora of research has indicated that straight women prefer men with “traditional masculine qualities.” Thus, sexual attractiveness could also be influenced by the fact that these women rated bi men as being significantly more feminine appearing than straight men.

Gay men, on the other hand, didn’t hold any attraction prejudices against bi men. There were no significant differences in gay men’s rating of attractiveness and masculinity/femininity between gay, straight, and bi men. While this may indicate progress within the gay community, implying that gay men are beginning to believe less negative stereotypes about bi guys, the researchers were cautious with that interpretation of the results.

The gay men in the study were recruited from Facebook interest groups, such as groups for gay men in a certain city, or for gay men with particular sexual or extracurricular interests.

“Therefore, the group isn't necessarily representative of the wider community of gay men, so it's unwise to apply these results to the general population of gay men,” Gleason said.

Further research would have to look at how gay men respond to questions about bi men with a more diverse and representative sample of gay men.

Still, personally, I know that I fair much better dating gay men than I do straight women. In fact, the woman I went on three dates with was the last straight person I dated, and that was over three years ago.

This all begs the question, how can we, as bi men, find someone who wants to date us? The answer, I’ve found, is dating other bi people and/or gender non-conforming folks. With apps, it’s so much easier to date other bi/GNC folks now. In fact, on most apps, you can even filter by bi people.

Gleason summed it all up when he explained:

This and other studies suggest that there are still prevalent negative attitudes and stereotypes toward dating bisexual individuals, which unfortunately might mean more left-swiping or inconsiderate messages when you use these dating applications, especially for bi men. Our study didn't include bi-identified individuals, but other research has suggested that bi folks may have more ‘luck’ dating one another, likely due to shared experiences of stigma and misunderstanding, and less of a need to explain one's sexuality.

So, if you find yourself continuously struggling while dating straight and gay folks, the answer is get out there and find yourself another bi person!

56 notes · View notes

swtorpadawan · 4 years

Text

Breaking Even

“Kriffing Nar Shaddaa.”

Captain Errul Marsh grumbled under his breath as his light freighter, the Devil’s Horn, finally broke orbit from the infamous Smuggler’s Moon. The Zabrak merchant captain – which, sure, made him a smuggler if you wanted to be crude about it – pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long sigh. It was getting harder and harder to make even a (moderately) honest living in his line of work, especially where it concerned the Hutts.

But that was the galaxy for you. With war brewing between the Republic and the Empire everyone was quickly picking sides and carving out their territory. The true independents were getting squeezed out or just dying off.

Errul might have done business with the Republic. He might even have appreciated the Republic when they weren’t trying to arrest him over one of their silly ‘law’ things.

But Errul Marsh was, above all, a true independent. He owned his own freighter outright and incredibly he was debt free, even if he was just keeping his head just above water. He’d die with his ship before he gave any of that up.

It was an existence that had its price. He hadn’t seen or even heard from a family member in decades. Friends (the kind who hadn’t tried to stab him in the back, anyway) had been few and far between. Crew and companions aboard his ship had proved fleeting, signing on with him and staying for a time but each eventually leaving when they finally found something better for themselves. Lovers, likewise, came and went. Usually amicably and with no hard feelings, but sometimes only when they realized that the ace smuggler would never be tied down to anything, not even by love.

He didn’t begrudge any of them – family, friends, lovers, all – anything. Everyone in the galaxy was chasing after something and they were welcome to chase it. Many of his old associates – the ones he’d stayed in touch with, anyway – had done well for themselves. Two of his erstwhile proteges were now captaining their own cargo ships. Others were running cantinas or small shipping companies. One had ultimately made a name for herself as a Mandalorian bounty hunter, of all things. Indeed, there were worse legacies a man could leave behind.

Still, as the Zabrak had inevitably advanced deeper into middle age, he recognized that his had become mostly a solitary existence. And he was comfortable with that, but still, every now and then…

Ah, well. Life was too short for regrets.

Regardless, loner or not, he still had to make a living. Paying off those Cartel ‘customs agents’ at the spaceport had cut deeply into his profits on this trip. In fact, after his projected expenses for docking at Carrick Station, what with refueling and the Republic’s precious ‘docking fees’ for non-Republic personnel, he’d barely break even after delivering his cargo of adrenals.

Errul exhaled again. He wasn’t that old for a Zabrak, but he was for an independent smuggler. This life would be the death of him.

Force help him, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The ship wouldn’t be ready to jump to hyperspace for about half an hour, and it wouldn’t reach Carrick for a couple of days yet. Still, there was no reason to prolong anything that needed doing.

Errul rose from his seat, feeling his back ache in protest. He’d been in hundreds (thousands?) of firefights throughout his life, and he could still beat any young up-and-comers on the draw if it came down to it. But the price being paid by his aging body didn’t make it any easier.

Silently telling his back to stow it, the old smuggler made his way to the cargo hold. The room was stocked with pallets full of stim-packs and combat adrenals, and his ‘arrangement’ with the Republic meant that this shipment was bound for their military. With fighting breaking out in so many theaters, the ‘Pubs couldn’t be too choosy these days about from whom they received their supplies.

Errul surveyed the stacks. It was all in order. The Cartel agents had threatened to delay his departure as they ‘processed’ the outgoing cargo and verified the contents. Errul knew that game, and knew how to haggle them down on the inevitable bribe he offered them. The delay would have cost him with the Republic, and he certainly couldn’t let those agents spend too much time in his cargo hold, anyway.

“Barely breaking even.” The Zabrak sighed again as he stomped his foot three times on the floor panel to the right between the pallets.

“You can come out now.” Errul called out to the empty room. “It’s safe.”

It took several seconds, but finally, tentatively, the floor panel slid open, revealing the secret smuggling compartment he had installed years before.

Huddled within, looking up at him with a frightened expression, was a young Twi’lek woman.

She’s still rattled. He reminded himself. He’d have to play this carefully. Very slowly, making no sudden movements, he reached down, offering her his hand.

“It’s safe.” He repeated softly. “Nar Shaddaa is already behind us.”

The woman – the girl he should say – slowly reached up and took his hand. He helped her out of the hold, and she looked around anxiously.

Errul regarded her with care. Looking at her now in the normal lighting of his ship’s cargo hold, she was clearly even younger than he’d originally thought, having met her in the darkened chambers of Donje the Hutt’s extravagant sanctum. She was still wearing the yellow jumpsuit he had given her earlier – it was at least two sizes too large for her, but it had been all he had lying around that she could wear. It was certainly more appropriate than the skimpy ‘slave girl’ outfit she was still wearing beneath it that left nothing to the imagination. (There was no way he was going to have her running around his ship dressed like that, thank you very much.) Her face and lekku were adorned with elaborate markings which Errul judged to be natural Twi’lek birthmarks and not artificial tattoos. She was quite beautiful, with a painfully feminine figure and lovely blue eyes almost matching the shade of her skin. But then, physical attractiveness tended to be a much sought-after trait of Twi’leks working for Hutts.

Certainly, with the female Twi’leks. Errul reflected somberly. Rescuing her from that disgusting Hutt on Nar Shaddaa, ferreting her to the spaceport undetected and smuggling her off-world had pressed even his considerable talents. He didn’t doubt for one moment that both of their lives would get very complicated if the Hutt ever found out what he’d done.

“Donje cannot reach me?” she swallowed, finally looking up at Errul, hopefully. Her hands had slid from Errul’s hand to his arm.

The Zabrak shook his head for emphasis.

“No, that giant slug can’t reach you here. In a while, we’ll be in hyperspace. After that, you’ll be out of Hutt space entirely, and you’ll be as free as a bird.”

The girl blinked up at him with her blue eyes, still gripping his arm for comfort.

“I…. thank you, master.”

Errul shook his head vigorously again. He had to put the kibosh on that idea right away.

“I’m not your master, kid.” He insisted. “Call me ‘Captain’. Or Errul, if you like. You don’t have a master anymore.” Errul tried to give her a comforting look. “That’s what being ‘free’ means.”

The smuggler let that sit with her for a moment. He figured she’d probably been born into slavery… or maybe she’d been taken so young that she didn’t remember anything else. The Twi’lek looked down at the floor, and for a moment, Errul was worried he’d lost her entirely. But after a long moment, she looked back up at him with a hopeful look in her eyes.

“Free.” She whispered, like it was all a dream to her.

Errul grinned. “Free.” He repeated, for emphasis. The Zabrak tilted his head. “What’s your name, kid?”

The Twi’lek swallowed, nervously. Probably she’d been forbidden to use her real name in public. Forced renaming was a common enough practice among Hutt pleasure slaves.

“Rhi’kih.”

Errul then gave her his most charming smile. It was a look that had melted the hearts of hundreds of women over the years. (And, Errul reflected, a handful of men, as well.)

“Are you hungry, Rhi’kih?”

“I…” the Twi’lek looked up at him, uncertain, as she regarded his expression. Finally, her features softened and she swallowed again.

“Yes, I am.”

**********************************

The galley wasn’t much to look at. To be honest, with the Devil’s Horn having only one permanent resident who wasn’t a droid – that being Errul himself – it didn’t really need to be anything special.

Yet another benefit of bachelorhood. Errul reflected. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he disliked over-decoration, preferring the utilitarian to any ostentatious aesthetic.

Nevertheless, he had always tried to keep it fairly well-stocked and in good order for when he did have company, and with the help of his Seetoo droid, it was kept clean as well. At this moment, there were exactly two frozen bantha steaks left, and Errul decided now was as good a time as any to break them out of the freezer and grill them up.

The girl - Rhi’kih, he had to remember – had sat down at the small table only at Errul’s prodding. She was still very skittish, taking everything in with trepidation. He couldn’t blame her, given where she’d been living.

Finally finished preparing the food, he served the steaks up on a pair of plates, along with glasses of blue milk for each of them.

“Here. Eat up.” Errul smiled, taking his own seat after distributing utensils.

The Zabrak took up his knife and fork and then tasted the succulent meat, closing his eyes in pleasure. Out of all the skills he’d picked up over the years, learning how to cook – properly, and not like the bachelor he was – easily ranked in the top three in having improved his personal quality of life, going along with how to pilot a ship and how to talk your way out of a tight spot.

(Shooting a blaster? Oh, don’t be silly. He was born knowing how to do that.)

Opening his eyes again, he noticed that Rhi’kih was merely poking the steak with her fork, clearly troubled over something.

“Something wrong?” he asked, concerned. “Its not undercooked for you, is it?”

“Uhm. No.” She looked down embarrassed. “My… my master never let me use knives. No one taught me.”

Errul cringed inwardly. There were a hundred plus one evils resulting from slavery. One of the most underrated was the lack of basic life skills many oppressed people suffered from even after finding their freedom. It could keep them on the fringes of society forever, and perhaps, more likely to end up in the desperate circumstances that had seen them become slaves in the first place. Neither the Republic government nor anyone else seemed equipped to help them acclimate.

“Here.” Errul got up and came around the table. Very gently, he took her by the wrist and helped her grasp the knife. She let him, having apparently grown comfortable with him by now.

“Hold it like this. Good. Now the fork like that – yes. Good. Now cut…. Perfect.”

It took about a minute. But Errul was finally satisfied the Twi’lek had learned how to cut her own food adequately.

“It’ll get more natural with time. Trust me.” He reassured her, observing her progress as he took his seat back.

Rhi’khi finally tasted her steak. Her eyes lit up, and he couldn’t help but think of it as a sign of life.

“Good?” he asked with a grin.

“I…. yes!” she gasped.

Errul was rewarded with a lovely smile from the Twi’lek. It was the first time he’d seen her smile genuinely since meeting her. He’d seen the conditions under which slaves were kept on Nar Shaddaa, and what sustenance they were given. Occasionally, pleasure slaves like Rhi’khi would be fed rich food or wine from the plates and goblets of their masters, almost as if they were pets. The rest of the time they tended to be served an unappetizing gruel back in their pens. Neither option was particularly healthy in Errul’s estimation.

A reasonable nutritional diet – including bantha steaks – was another thing she’d have to adjust to.

As it turned out, Rhi’khi was famished. Her table manners needed some work, but she ate her bantha steak and drank her blue milk with gusto. Errul took it as a positive sign; she’d have to learn to pace herself, but that could come later.

Errul was almost done with his steak when he glanced up, realizing that the girl was eyeing him tentatively as if chewing something over.

He put aside his utensils.

“What is it now?” he asked.

The Twi’lek swallowed, then reached out, laying her hand on his.

“I owe you everything for freeing me… Captain.” Rhi’khi smiled up at him, coyly. It was the same smile she’d worn while dancing for Donje’s visitors back on Nar Shaddaa. Noting her brief pause, Errul suspected that she had had to stop herself from calling him ‘master’ again. “I am… very grateful.” Her fingers gently entangled themselves with his, her thumb brushing against his palm.

Errul felt a sudden but familiar warmth in his belly and down to his loins. This beautiful young woman – with her lovely figure, pretty blue eyes and coy smile – was offering him comfort. Even at Errul’s age, the urges still came, and he certainly couldn’t deny the Twi’lek’s sex appeal.

It was the Zabrak’s turn to swallow, as he looked up into Rhi’khi’s eyes.

Errul Marsh prided himself on his ability to read people. During negotiations. During games at the Pazzak table. During a tense stand-off with guns drawn. And the fact that he was still alive after all this time was a sign that he was good at it. It had always been a talent, but he’d refined it over the years with invaluable experience.

So it was that he noticed things. In particular, the slight tension around the girl’s otherwise enticing eyes.

No.

This was not a young woman who was genuinely smitten or enchanted by him. (Galaxy knows Errul knew what that looked like, even if it had been awhile.) No. This was a girl who was, even now, still worried that he would sell her off to the next gangster he ran into or that he’d otherwise abandon her to some unknown fate the moment she became inconvenient.

In her mind, this was about taking control of the situation in the only way she knew how. Rhi’khi was desperately trying to offer him something to ensure he would protect and look after her, this was only coin she could possibly offer him. It bothered him that she’d been conditioned to think that her sex appeal was all she could ever offer to the galaxy. Errul added that to the growing list of consequences of her enslavement. The fear of going back to Nar Shaddaa or the fear of the unknown would lead her to continue living the life she had been living, even after she had just risked everything to escape that very life.

After all, it was all she knew.

That wasn’t what bothered him the most, though.

No, what bothered him the most was knowing – knowing – that not so many years ago, Errul would have taken her up on the offer in a heartbeat. By now, his lips would have been on hers, she’d have been propped up on the table and soon the clothes would have gone flying. (And few of Errul’s lovers had ever complained about his skills in the bedchamber.) Oh, he’d have shown her a great time; he’d have taken her on a trade run or two to some exotic planets and shown her sights few beings could even imagine. Beautiful beaches, majestic mountains, cities that were clean and comfortable in stark contrast to the filth and grit she’d seen on Nar Shaddaa.

He’d have let it last a week. Or maybe – maybe – as long as a month. (He’d only gone as long as a month with a woman a couple of times. It was better that way.) Certainly no longer than that. Then he’d have found something for the young Twi’lek, letting her down gently and making sure she had something to get her started on the rest of her life.

After all, he’d have thought to himself, what she was offering him had been offered freely and was therefore his to take.

That was one of the lies people told themselves. But with age had come wisdom, and Errul liked to think he had given up lying to himself a long time ago.

“How old are you, kid?”

The words came from his lips abruptly. Rhi’khi looked confused for a moment, then worried, as if she thought she had done something wrong, and might be punished for it. She withdrew her hand.

“I…. nineteen, I think.” She said with uncertainty.

Nineteen. Shavit. He was more than twenty years her senior. Force. He’d lived too blasted long.

“Hold on a second, okay?” he offered.

Errul rose from his seat and walked to the far corner of the galley, right next to the washer. He opened the small cabinet above, being careful to block Rhi’khi’s vision of what he was doing. (He didn’t have any reason to distrust the Twi’lek, but he hadn’t survived this long by being careless.) He removed the panel at the back of the cabinet, revealing a hidden biometric safe box. The Zabrak pressed his hand to bio-scanner, then entered a code into the keypad. The safe popped open.

There were a number of trinkets located within, some appearing to be mundane while others would have caught the eye of any professional treasure hunter. Errul ignored the rest and took the one object he had sought. Then he closed the safe, putting the fake panel back in place.

Errul turned back to Rhi’khi, setting the item down on the table. It was a small metallic cube, with ornate engravings etched on all six sides.

“Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you. Promise.” He gave her a soft smile. “Go ahead and touch it.”

Rhi’khi tentatively reached out and lightly brushed the foreign object with her fingertips.

After about a second, the cube suddenly lit up with the engravings emanating a blue light. A small holoprojection then materialized above it, revealing a Cathar woman wearing long robes.

“I am Master Juhani of the Jedi Order.” The projection spoke in an accent that was provincial, but the voice was clear and nevertheless confident. “And these are my teachings.”

Rhi’khi cried out in alarm, withdrawing her hand from the cube. All on its own, the object went flying off the table and through the air, ricocheting off the ship’s bulkhead before coming to a rest on the floor. The Twi’lek, plainly rattled, pulled her knees up to her chest, staring down at it in fear.

Errul just chuckled nonchalantly.

“Sorry about that. I had to be sure, and this saved me a lot of time.” The smuggler reached down and picked up the cube, setting it back on the table. It was undamaged from Rhi’khi’s inadvertent outburst, which he took a relief in. Errul knew it was nearly three hundred years old. “Like I said, this won’t harm you.” He regarded her with a satisfied expression, having been proven right. “I figured as much about you, when I saw you talk that Gamorrean out of ‘enjoying’ the company of your Nautolan friend back at Donje’s club.”

“What… what was that?” Rhi’khi asked nervously, still staring at the cube.

“This? This is a Jedi Holocron.” Errul tapped it, nonchalantly. “I’ve been hanging onto it for a while, mostly for occasions like this.”

The Twi’lek swallowed, starting to regain her composure.

“I don’t understand.”

“Hmmm.” Errul regarded her, debating how to continue. “Have you ever heard of the Jedi?”

“I… yes.” Rhi’khi stammered. “My master… Donje, I mean… sometimes ranted about them. He called them ‘meddlesome Republic fools’. And he said that they fought the Sith.” She paused. “I think he was a little frightened of them.”

The Zabrak just nodded.

“Not without cause. Jedi and Hutts don’t really see eye to eye on much.” Errul sat down across from her, stretching his arms. “Jedi are… well, peace-keepers, you might say. When things are going alright for the Republic, they’re like diplomats. They go around resolving conflicts and helping to uphold the law. They’re pretty… noble, I guess. They’ve helped a lot of people when no one else could. Not as many as you’d hope, but a lot.” He chewed that over. “Of course, these days, they’ve been at war with the Sith Empire, even when they’ve had that sham of a peace treaty. So it’s been tough going these last few decades. They’ve got a lot of rules they have to follow, and they can be very pretentious. These days, they have to defend the citizens of the galaxy, uphold their own lofty principles and beat the Sith all at the same time. No one is going to succeed at that. But to their credit, they keep trying.”

“Having said that…” he continued. “I can honestly say that they do the best they can in a crazy galaxy.” Errul paused at a bygone memory, his voice taking a more conciliatory tone, then looked the Twi’lek directly in the eye.

“You’re Force-sensitive, kid.”

Rhi’khi just blinked.

“The… Force?” she asked in confusion.

“Yeah.” The old smuggler settled into his seat. “It’s like this… invisible energy field created by all living things. It binds the galaxy together, or so the Jedi say. And some special people – like the Jedi and the Sith – can manipulate it; it gives them power.”

“You have that power. You’ve been able to talk people out of doing things before, haven’t you? Maybe not Donje or other Hutts, but others, right?”

Rhi’khi nodded nervously.

“Right. Basically, Rhi’khi, it means you have the chance to become a Jedi.” He paused and looked up at the ceiling. “Or a Sith.” He added dourly. “If you like, I can introduce you to someone on Carrick Station, and, if you decide it’s what you want, they’ll test you to confirm what I just told you. The Jedi usually recruit kids young, but they’re less discerning these days. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I’m confident they’ll take you in and teach you how to become a Jedi.”

Errul paused here for effect.

“But I won’t do that if that’s not what you want.”

The Twi’lek stared down at the table.

“I don’t know what I want.” She whispered quietly.

The Zabrak nodded. No surprise, there. Rhi’khi had probably never been given the chance to think about what she wanted.

“Well, I think you’re in shock, kiddo. A lot of stuff is happening to you very quickly. I wish things were different, but here we are.” He gave her what he hoped was a comforting look. “Not everybody can quite get over the things life throws at them. And you’ve had way more thrown at you in the last few hours than a lot of people will experience in a lifetime.”

“But… if you can let go of it – what with growing up a slave, everything that’s happened to you, everything that was done to you – then maybe, just maybe, this is for you. And maybe, maybe, maybe someday you can help some other little girl from having to grow the way you did.”

The Zabrak considered what he had said. She deserved the truth. All of it.

“No promises, though.” He added firmly. “Even at their best, before the Empire came back, the Jedi couldn’t stop the Hutts from trading in slaves entirely. The best they could claim to accomplish was keeping the slugs in check. And like I’ve said, the Jedi aren’t at their strongest right now. It’s a dangerous life, what with the Empire hanging around.”

Rhi’khi seemed to chew that over for a long moment. Despite his reputation for being a fast-talker, Errul was actually quite comfortable with long silences, and gave her all the time she needed.

“What if I can’t do that?” she finally whispered.

He understood. Rhi’khi might seem meek and innocent at the moment, but Errul couldn’t imagine anyone going through her life without building up a sense of indignation, and scars on her soul that ran deep. If she were aware of that, then she was wiser than she let on.

“If the anger and resentment are too much, well, odds are you’ll become a slave again. Except not a slave to another Hutt, but a slave to your own anger. And to your past. I’ve seen it happen with others who’ve been through the kinds of things you have, even the ones who weren’t Force sensitive. They just… can’t be free of it. They can’t be free of what they’ve gone through. Even with otherwise good people, it eats away at them, over time, and it never ends well.”

The Zabrak looked away, not wanting the Twi’lek to see the look on his face just now. He was speaking from experience, but that experience wasn’t something he was ready to share.

“And then a lot of them wind up doing to others what was done to them.” Errul continued, speaking from experience. “They all have justifications, of course. Little lies they tell themselves. ‘Oh, the galaxy owes me this’ or ‘these people deserve what I’m doing to them because their ancestors killed my ancestors’. It’s all a load of druk.”

“People hurt other people because they can’t let go.”

Trusting himself now, Errul took a breath and turned back at Rhi’khi, giving her a hard look in the eye. She was still watching him closely.

“The ones who do that who are Force-sensitive? We call those Sith.”

The girl shivered again, wrapping her arms around herself.

His expression softened at the sight. He’d given her the ice bucket of water to the face. The least he could do was offer her a towel.

“But… if neither of those choices appeal to you, the guy who runs the cantina on Carrick Station owes me a favor. He’s a tough boss, and the pay isn’t that much, but he treats his waitresses right. He doesn’t put up with any flyboys like me messing with them, y’know? I could set you up. You could work for him for a while, just serving drinks and finding your feet, until you found something better.”

“As for this ‘Force’ business… well, maybe it will let you just live your life.“

“I promise I’m not going to make you choose anything. I’m just telling you what I can do to help you, since you look like you need it.”

Rhi’khi was looking up at him again. She probably didn’t completely understand everything he had said, but she seemed comforted by his words nonetheless. Maybe she liked having a third option, or maybe she just liked listening to his voice. That didn’t really matter right now.

“Well. I’ve just dropped a barrel of Hutt manure on you, kid. I’m sorry to do it like this, but I find it’s for the best in the long run.”

Errul polished off the last of his blue milk, then cleared the table. He put everything away in the washer, set the machine to run, then turned to her again.

“I don’t pretend to know what’s best for you. But I’ll give you as much time as I can to think all this over.”

He moved to stand, only for Rhi’khi to reach for his hand again.

“Captain, wait.” She suddenly interrupted.

Errul noted she didn’t need to stop and start again to remember to call him ‘Captain’ and not ‘Master’. He smiled at her progress and stopped, sitting back down.

“How… how do you know all of this?” she asked. “If you are just a ship captain, how do you know about the Force, and me, and… why do you have this?” she looked at the holocron again.

The Zabrak slowly grinned. She was a sharp one. Most people struggled to use their intelligence in tight spots; when you’re threatened and focused on simple survival, it was hard to think things through. He’d seen enough of that in the refugee camps growing up. But if you offer folks just a little security and comfort, a little breathing room, sometimes they could surprise you with what they could come up. Rhi’khi may have been under-educated and naïve, but he was suddenly confidant that whatever path she took, she’d figure things out, in time.

“Well, let’s just say that once upon a time, a Jedi helped me out of a jam.” He answered wistfully. “They took the time to tell me about a couple of things. As for why I have the holocron… well, it just sort of fell into my lap during a little misadventure on Dantooine this one time, years ago. It’s no good to me personally; I’m not Force-sensitive. But it’ll make a useful bargaining chip if I’m ever in a tight spot… or for confirming cases like yours.”

The Twi’lek took that in and released his hand, thinking.

A chime sounded throughout the ship, and Errul cocked his head.

“I’ve gotta get that. We’re ready to jump into hyperspace.”

With that, Errul stood up. Rhi’khi turned and stared down at the holocron, lost in thought. The Zabrak made for the door and then stopped, turning just enough to speak to her over his shoulder.

“Just remember: Whatever you choose, that’s your choice, and yours alone. That’s the hardest lesson of freedom. What’s happened to you up until now was someone else’s doing. What you do after this is yours.”

As Errul stepped out of the galley and prepared to head back to the cockpit, he hung back for a second out of view around the corner, watching the young Twi’lek mull over her future. He certainly didn’t envy her the choice before her, but he needed to make sure she was okay to be alone right now.

Slowly, tentatively, Rhi’kih reached for the holocron. As she touched it, the little holo-image – the ‘Gatekeeper’ – once again materialized.

“I am Master Juhani of the Jedi Order.” The Jedi started again. “And these are my teachings…”

Errul observed as Rhi’khi watched the projection, a look of fascination coming across her features. As she listened to the words of the long-dead Jedi, she seemed to Errul to become more relaxed, a small smile coming to her lips. A natural, organic smile – not the coy put-on she’d shown him earlier.

The Zabrak turned away. He didn’t pretend to know his own destiny any more than he knew Rhi’khi’s, but maybe both of them were about to take the next step on their respective paths.

Errul sighed again as he sat down in the chair of his cockpit, finally pulling the lever and triggering the jump into hyperspace. The stars outside the cockpit canopy shifted as the Horn made it’s jump, as the galaxy seemed to bend around the trusty old freighter. It was a welcome sight. No matter how many times he saw it, it always relaxed him.

This had already been too much philosophy for him in one day. He decided to blame it all on that Reactor Core he’d had at the cantina before he left Nar Shaddaa. That Rodian bartender was a good listener, but he always put too much spice liquor in his concoctions, and no doubt that was making Errul sentimental. It made him reflect back on what he’d thought to himself earlier.

If it wasn’t ‘this life’ that would be the death of him someday, then it would be sentimentality. He didn’t doubt it for one minute.

He thought back to Rhi’kih listening to that holocron in the galley.

“Yeah, barely breaking even.” He whispered with a smile. He shook his head. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Kriffing Nar Shaddaa.” He grumbled.

END

****************************************

Author’s Notes: I’ve never written about Errul before, but he’s my oldest ‘active’ O.C., as I developed him way back when I was on Free-to-Play. I eventually abandoned his game play, as in my mind, I don’t see him as an ‘Outlander’ type figure. But I keep him around. I saw some talk on Tumblr complaining about the player’s tendency to make our O.C.s on the young side. Errul, in my head-canon anyway, is a smuggler on the wrong side of forty.

People do change. They learn and they grow and they don’t stop doing that the moment they turn into an ‘adult’. (Which is totally a made-up word anyway.) True, the changes aren’t always for the better, but they do come. How you feel about things twenty years from now may be very different than how you feel about things now. That doesn’t make your opinions any less valid; it just means that they don’t define who you are.

Juhani is here just because I like Easter Eggs.

The character of Rhi’khi is inspired by a Twi’lek slave in Nar Shaddaa who was planning to escape with a smuggler in a bit of ambient dialogue within the actual game.

I remember reading an article about people who defected from North Korea, and the immense challenges they faced adapting to the modern world. Even given assistance by South Korea and other countries, most of them have no practical job skills and an education that was incomplete to say the least. It was very sobering.

Oh – and spoilers – Rhi’khi ‘grows up’ to be the Barsen'thor of the Jedi Order in this iteration. The first lesson there is you never know what the person you help might go on to do. The second lesson is don’t worry if you feel you’re getting a late start on pursuing your life goals. Honestly, it is not a race. It never was.

Good luck, and may the Force be with you.

#swtor #swtor fanfiction #oc: errul marsh #oc: rhi'khi #zabrak #twi'lek #smuggler #jedi counselor #juhani #kotor callback

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growingingreenwood · 4 years

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So basically the reason I’m feeling so alone is because I’m nonbinary and I’m out to my friends and they’re really supportive and that’s really nice but I’m not out to my parents because they’re transphobic and lately I’ve just been really dysphoric and every time I hear them use my dead name or incorrect pronouns it just feels like a bullet in my side and I want so badly to be out to them so that I can get a binder and wear clothes that are comfortable for me and use my real name -🏳️‍🌈 (1/2)

another thing that’s bothering me is I’m out to my parents as a lesbian and I have lesbian pride stuff but what if nonbinary lesbian isn’t valid and I have to reinvent my identity? And I’m not out to my best friend because he’s super sheltered and only just recently started to learn that lgbtq+ isn’t bad and I know he’ll support me but I’m worried about losing his parents’ support because they’re like my second set of parents and I love them and I don’t want to have them disown me -🏳️‍🌈 (2/2So this is an add on to my 2 part (now three part) ask. I think my dad might actually be the only one of my parents that’s transphobic. I’m worried that I’m going to tear their marriage apart by being who I am (3/2) -🏳️‍🌈

--I tried to put in a read more link. Didnt work--

Hello my love, I want to firstly apologize for the late response to these questions. I was wary of trying to answer them on my own without any personal experience with this particular situation, because I know how important this situation is important to you. I had reached out to a friend with personal experience but have not heard back about their contribution. So I will answer with the info I have gathered in my psyc classes/ research I've done the past few days/ and helping friends through similar situations.

I am obviously, by no means an expert, and anybody is welcome to add their KIND, RESPECTFUL, SUPPORTIVE, and HELPFUL advice or stories as well.

I’ll start with your best friend:

When I came out as Asexual (I’m acutally Demi-sexual but I didn’t know that yet) to my best friend at the time, I started by sort of… expressing that I felt my current identity wasn’t fitting quite right for me. It felt like something was off with the way I was trying to live my life and be me, I just didn’t know what it was yet. I explained my feelings to her the best I could without applying labels (I was SOOOO stressed because she has a super high sexdrive and works at an adult toy store and all that so yeah)

So I explained to her that I just didn’t understand what books/songs/ and movies were referring to when they talked about this “sexual attraction you literally cannot resist) because the concept is literally absurd to me. She asked about all of my favriote celebreities and if I would have sex with them or not, and I told her that the thought for real disgusted me. I explained that I had literally never once at any random human and even thought about kissing them, or having them in my space in any romantic way at all.

A few days later I cam back to her and told her about some research that I had done, and that I had found something that I thought might fit me better. I brought a little quote somebody had written online about how they felt as an Asexual to help those who were questioning themselves help to figure it out. And I pointed out all the places we felt the same. I told her how much better it made me feel to have this label, this one that finally fit because it stopped the thoughts that there was something wrong with me.

Your best freinds is new to the community, so maybe start by telling him about a really beautiful story about an individual who discovered their Non-binaryr identity and how wonderfully it touched their lives. How it helped to heal their lives. Explain in a greater detail what it means to be Non-binary. Give him a chance to adjust to the idea of the identity, while you continue to talk about it positively.

Then when you do come out to him, just remember how much he loves you. It might be helpful to ask him at the start of the conversation to not interrupt you or ask questions until you’re done talking or explaining the situation. Another tactic that I often use for really difficult news, is to write it all in a letter and go sit in another room while they read it. This way, you have the freedom to write and rewrite the letter however many times that you want until it sounds how you want it to. In this discussion, you could ask him not to tell his paretns until you are ready for more people to know. Remind him that you’re telling him this because he is your best friend, and you need his support and love now more than ever. Perhapes ask him to do some research on his own before he really decides anything.

For your parents:

Coming out to your parents is…… literally so scary. And there is really never a food time in which to do it. Having to live while keeping this secret from them can be so hard, I understand that so much. But your safety is also the #1 priority right now.

If it is not safe for you to do so, now might be the time unless you can set up arrangements to stay somewhere else for an extended period of time. You are a beautiful person, and the world needs you here, safe, and full of love still. So please, be careful.

To start, perhaps ask them to use a nickname instead? Perhaps say that friends at school gave it to you or something, and it makes you really happy to hear it. Or that you’ve recently met somebody with the same name as you that you STRONGLY dislike and don’t want to ‘share’ the name with them. Is there any way to start to slowly transition your clothing?

For example: If your usual style right now is something like yoga pants maybe swap that for a pair of jeans that aren't super form fitting. Instead of getting a binder right away, invest in some really high quality sports bras. It isn’t the exact same effect, but it might help in the meantime and is much safer than using things like tensor bandages.

If they question this change in dress, perhapes tell them that this is the new style at your school. Or a new trend started by your favorite celebrity. Tell them you’re bored of your old look and wanted something new for a change. Perhaps if you make the changes ‘slowly’ per say it won’t be as jarring to them.

If you still decide this is a good and appropriate time for you to come out to your parents, it might be a good idea to have the discussion with your mother first. If you think that only your dad is homophobic/transphobic. That way it will be less likely that you will be interrupted during your heartfelt explanations, and your mom should (theoretically) be more open to the idea. It might help you figure out the best ways to tell your dad, but also you’ll have an ‘ally’ of sorts when it happens too.

More care should be taken into your information and resources, I think, when you tell them. Such as printing out a sheet of websites to help parents to ‘cope’ with their child telling them of their new non-binrary identity. If you want, you can even find the one you connect with most and print it, give that to them on paper with links listed after it.

Statistics might be nice, like having how many non-binaryr or genderfluid people live in the same city/ state / country as you so that it does not seem so uncommon for them.

Here is a sample sentence to get things started for you:

“Even though you may see me as a woman, on the inside, I am not a woman and I am not a man. I’ve been using the word ‘genderqueer’ or ‘non-binary’ to describe my gender, which means that I don’t identify with either. If you placed me on a spectrum, with ‘masculine’ being at one end and ‘feminine’ being at the other, I’m somewhere in-between. Identifying as genderqueer has made me feel so much better because being seen as a woman or a male made me feel so distressed and unhappy. Like I was forced into a box at birth that nobody would let me out of it”

Analogies might also be helpful, as it can help frame this new information to them into a more familiar manner. Like this: “Imagine if someone just assumed that you liked ketchup on your hotdogs without even asking you. For your entire life, they refused to put anything on your hotdogs but ketchup – even though you know, deep down, you like relish.

Finally, you decide to come out and say that you like relish. But every time you ask for relish, people say to you, “If you don’t like ketchup, you must like mustard. There are only two options.There are obviously more than two ways to eat a hotdog, just like there are more than two ways to express and explore gender, but society seems fixated on hotdogs with ketchup or mustard – and nothing else.

Similarly, society seems to think there are only two valid options when it comes to gender – man or woman – when there are actually lots of other ways to embody gender, and even ways of having no gender at all.”

A good strategy for serious conversation is to use a lot of “I felt” or “I feel” statements. That way, you are still expressing yourself and your feelings while also not making them feel like you are attacking them directly or anything. For example, a good sentence might be to say: “

I feel afraid that if you knew who I really was, that I would lose you,” or “I have been feeling very alone lately, and I’m hopeful that now I won’t be.”

Lastly, I would suggest being prepared to tell everybody but especially your parents exactly what you need from them in this situation. You may be familiar with all of this terminology and stuff but they arn’t. This is alien territory to them, help them help you by making the things you require them to do or change as clears as possible. Maybe write down a list.

Stop using my dead name. (Maybe work together on a good nickname with them to use instead? When my friend transitioned from FTM, when he legally changed his name he went with “Emmet” instead of “August” like he wanted, so that his mother could still call him “Em” which had been his nickname since childhood, as he was born with the name ‘Emily.” This might help your parents feel like they still have ‘their’ child still.\

I need to change the way that I am dressing, because it makes me feel very uncomfortable and self consciousness.

And whatever else you might need form them.

My beautiful little bean, if you come out to your parents and one of them wants to support you, and one of them doesn't and it ends up breaking them up, I’m certain that they had differences fundamental enough that its probably for the best. And if they didn’t have fundamental differences, they do now.

One of them took the fundamental concept of parenthood seriously and one didn't: The concept of loving and supporting your child for as long as you’re around on the earth to do so.

I don’t really think the difference could possibly be more fundamental.

Sometimes, it takes people a while to get used to the idea. If they react negatively now, they might still change their minds the more they think it over / see how much it means to you. Some people (like my own mom) H A T E change. Hate it. And their first response is always to go on the defensive without thinking. I think you all will have to remind yourselves and eschither to have patients with this.

Remember: Your worth as a human can never change, no matter how much it may feel like it can. You are starting your journey to find the home and the body that you were made to find, its scary, so so so scary. So take your time, enjoy your path. Take deep breaths. Others will ALWAYS love you for the divine creation that you are. The worlds is always ready for you to meet the next ones to love you.

I hope this has helped a little bit at least. I love you. 💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛

#not tolkien #haleigh speaks #advice with haleigh #love you 🥰🥰🥰🥰#feel better 💛💛💛💛#non binary #coming out #coming out tips #feel free to leave them!!!!!!!#genderqueer #love and support #lbgtqcommunity #lbgtq #lbgtq pride

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jamesginortonblog · 4 years

Text

"More than just being a warm, affable, effusive and generous man, Stephen was also peculiar. He was eccentric. He had a sinister side and a sad side to him, and that makes for an interesting character to play, with all his vulnerability and layers."

James Norton

What was it about Amanda Coe’s scripts that made you want to take on this role?

I was lucky enough to work with Amanda Coe on a previous project called Life In Squares, which was about the Bloomsbury set and had a similar biopic feel about it. I loved that job and had an amazing time playing Duncan Grant, who oddly has certain similarities to Stephen Ward. There’s a certain warmth and lust for life which they both shared.

Working with Amanda on that job was a complete pleasure, and one knows that when you have that much of a good time on a job it’s because of the quality of the writing. So when I heard that Amanda was writing this, and then the scripts landed on my desk, I knew already that I was in for a treat. As far as the project and tone itself, I guess what makes this show unique is that it is from Christine’s point of view. That makes it special and very timely. It’s no secret that she had various incarnations of her story and it became quite confusing and hard to pin down the final truth. So to have Amanda’s thorough intensive research and work, (she is so attentive and so knowledgeable about the period), but also having a personal angle from Christine, it all makes for a very special script.

What was it about Stephen Ward that attracted you to the part, and do you think this drama will show Ward in a different light?

Playing Stephen and having the opportunity to delve into this man’s mind was the key draw for me for this project. There are extraordinary people involved in this story and I think if you were to meet Stephen Ward now you would be entirely seduced by him and want more of his company. Being in Stephen’s presence was a treat, and something his friends really hankered after once they’d had a taste of it. But, more than just being a warm, affable, effusive and generous man, Stephen was also peculiar, and those are the most interesting people to play. Stephen was eccentric but he also had a sinister and sad side to him and that again makes for an interesting character to play, with all his vulnerability and layers.

What sort of man was he?

One can’t escape the fact that he did groom young women, and that is inexcusable. But why did he do that, and what it did for him is also what's interesting. I could talk about Stephen for hours, but in one of the very first rehearsals Andrea the director really piqued my interest by saying, in her opinion, the heart of Stephen Ward is his obsession with female power. His voyeurism and peculiar sexual appetite are the things that make him this fascinating, weird and unique man. His was a fascination with femininity.

Some would argue that Stephen’s actions actually removed the girls’ power, but perhaps he was empowering them? Do you agree?

Often in dramas, people are very quick to categorise their characters as a way of simplifying things. So you have the hero and the villain and the lover and the victim. The thing about Stephen is that he is, like everyone, in that grey messy area in between. There is no doubt that he did manipulate young girls like Christine and Mandy, and part of it was for his own gain: he was a social climber and he was always hankering after acceptance and being allowed into the Gentleman’s Club. His ticket wasn’t his heritage or his money, it was partly his talent as an osteopath and his career.

He was also known as a man about town, and everyone knew that at Stephen’s house there would be parties and young women and a good time. So, on the one hand you have that slightly manipulative and more sinister side to him, but then on the other hand there is this incredible warmth and generosity of spirit - a man that Amanda has really found in the pen. A paternal man, a loving man who wanted the best for people and saw the best in people, and that’s such a key trait that we often don’t see enough of. He gave people the benefit of the doubt. Most of these women would have been rejected by society, but Stephen, for better or for worse, recruited them and found the best in them and empowered them. It’s a complicated dilemma as on the one hand it was exploitation but on the other it was empowerment.

Can you set the scene as the scandal unfolded? It seems like it was the perfect storm.

It’s 1963 and the counterculture revolution was happening, and there was a tremendous clash of temperament and attitude. Stephen, Christine and Mandy were in the middle of that storm. What makes Stephen so admirable and exciting is that he was a trailblazer. He was brave and individual enough to know whom he was and express himself from a very early age. There is this wonderful line where he says to Christine: "You know I’ve always lived the way I want to live, and you can too little baby. You just have to keep to the odd rule, but as long as you know who you are, and have the confidence to express yourself, then go for it.”

That type of motivation is so seductive and empowering. I think a culture like we have today would have allowed Stephen to be himself. He was born in the wrong time and his expression and sense of individuality was deeply frowned upon and ultimately stamped out. When you have that clash and conflict in society it makes such an interesting context for any story and within that conflict and cultural war zone, Stephen is on the front line.

Did you do a lot of your own research for this part? Did you feel a greater sense of responsibility in playing a real life part?

There is always a responsibility when you play a real person. Not only do you have the responsibility to the family and friends who knew Stephen Ward, but you also have, most importantly, responsibility to him. There are many accounts of Stephen’s character in the public domain, but as an actor you have to find whatever shared ground you and the character have in order to make the portrayal real and authentic.

A lot of information about Stephen is still locked up for some reason - the government hasn't come to share it with the public yet and no one knows why, but there are enough books out there on him that helped me formulate a sense of him. Production created this incredible pack that was so informative. It helped me to get a slight sense of the individual and the unique tone and temperament he had.

I always say that as an actor you have a responsibility to love the person you’re playing. You have to find true empathy, otherwise you will always stand slightly outside of their actions and you won't ever be able to fully invest in their choices. That is what has been so exciting for me. With all the accounts, and the letters that he wrote and the transcripts of the conversations he had, there is a version of this man’s soul, but it’s always slightly out of reach.

What is the relationship between Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler?

When Stephen meets Christine she is 17, has just moved to London and is working in Murray’s Jazz & Cabaret Club. When Stephen arrives in her life Christine’s assumption is that he is a sugar daddy, and of course he is not, he is something entirely different and that is what initially draws Christine to him. It’s partly to do with his self-promotion into the society that he aspires to be a part of, but there is a paternal element to him, particularly where Christine is concerned.

Christine always maintained they never had a sexual relationship, yet he found something extraordinarily endearing and majestic about her, and that’s essentially the foundation for this whole story. It’s what he sees in her when she is this young 17 year-old - she has a power and femininity which she exudes, which he wants to be a part of. It’s such an extraordinary and complex relationship to excavate, and that's what actors crave!

Why is now the right time to tell this story from Christine’s point of view?

It makes total sense for this story to be told from Christine’s point of view. We know what it was like to be a man in the 1960s. We know all about the old boys' clubs, but we don’t know what it was like for a young woman. She was part victim, part trailblazer and an icon of the 1960s. She ultimately was a victim of men like Stephen Ward and John Profumo, who exploited a teenage girl into having sex.

This is a story about a young woman who is the catalyst for change, and so it has to be from her point of view and it has to be told by women. We have an almost entirely female crew - our writer, director, producer, executive producer, costume designer and hair and make-up designer are all women and it’s completely intuitive and completely makes sense. This is an iconic story about a young woman told from a female point of view as it should be, led by women and it is a wonderful thing. I’m immensely proud to be part of this and to be telling Christine’s story from her point of view in an uncomplicated and honest way.

This story is about a very British scandal, but how does a story like this travel?

Britain at that time was very much at the centre of a cultural revolution. People care about our cultural heritage, our music, film and storytelling and fashion. I think the reason this story continues to intrigue people is that these types of scandals like Watergate or Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, or the Profumo /Keeler scandal were all events that changed the course of history and they always make for the most interesting viewing.

#james norton #the trial of christine keeler #stephen ward #interview

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homenum-revelio-hq · 4 years

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Welcome (again) to the Order of the Phoenix, Beth!

You have been accepted for the role of non-biography character ARTEM TREBLAY with the faceclaim of Kristen Stewart! We enjoyed how to incorporated the game-canon veela lore into your application, while also keeping Artem within their own person. We’re very interested in having a character on the dash that is a bit controversial in relationship to the Order, especially with the most recently mission failing. We’re looking forward to seeing Artem’s decisions regarding this and appreciated your attention to detail throughout your application.

Please take a look at the new member checklist and send in your account within 24 hours! Thank you for joining the fight against Voldemort!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME: Beth

AGE: 24

TIMEZONE: CST

ACTIVITY LEVEL: You can see my current activity with Sirius. I will dip slightly once the semester kicks back in, but I don’t think I will struggle.

ANYTHING ELSE: Nothing here.

CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Artem Nikita Tremblay – When Artem was ready to rid themself of their family’s influence, they didn’t initially know where to begin on a new name that felt more like them. They threw themselves into researching Slavic names for a piece of family origin to replace the British feminine name they’d been saddled with. Artem felt fitting for a few reasons. It sounded nice, it means “unharmed” which they’d like to pretend they escaped as, and it was a dedication to Artemis. As a child, they’d often heard to be ladylike, and Artemis quickly because their favorite example of a badass lady who didn’t sit still and let things be done to her. She was active, a hunter, and uninterested in becoming a perfect wife. All of that seemed perfect to Artem. Nikita was another neutral name they found and liked for a middle name. When possible, they put “Artem Nikita” as their full name and drop their family name.

AGE: 27 (December 14, 1954)

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY:

Agender; Prefers both he/him and they/them and would accept other pronouns as long as the user avoids she/her; Sexually Fluid, but Artem is apprehensive to follow through with the attraction he feels. He has a complicated relationship with his body and isn’t in a hurry to bring someone else into the mix. He’s had some experiences with kissing and intimacy but never with heavy touching or clothing removal because he’s never trusted anyone enough to take further steps.

Gender is a complex notion for Artem tied up in his veela heritage. I’m going to quote Ky from a conversation we had about the character as someone “in whom you’ve worked together a disconnect with their assigned gender and with their veela heritage/aspects, when both that assigned gender and veela heritage/aspects are valued for qualities, physical, emotional, etc, that Artem doesn’t feel at home in.” Artem’s perception of being female is very tied to the traditionally feminine values of pureblood society, and while he has worked to disconnect them in adulthood, he is still working past the connection society places on that femininity and his veela heritage. Both are expected to be charming, graceful, beautiful, serene, and docile unless pushed to the point of breaking. Artem doesn’t want to be any of that, and in rejecting that narrow feminine mold, he also rejected being veela. The difference is that while Artem is not female and has since learned to see other aspects of womanhood in people who don’t fit his mother’s ideals, he cannot fully split himself from being veela because he is whether he likes it or not.

BLOOD STATUS: Half-Veela

HOUSE ALUMNI: Gryffindor—Not so much the chivalry, but they’re bold and brash and won’t sit idly if there’s something they can do

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

PERSONALITY:

Artem has spent a lot of time figuring out how to be comfortable in his own skin. Artem was sick of being underestimated by people who took one look at him and assumed he couldn’t hold his own. Artem was determined to change that. They started working out religiously, and once they had the opportunity, they began boxing in a muggle club and got good at it. If people commented on their perception of Artem as female, well, Artem hit those people harder to give them the embarrassment of being not only beaten but beaten soundly by someone they saw as a girl. The regulars didn’t care. The regulars saw Artem as a badass who didn’t like to lose, and they could respect that. He liked the way it felt to fight, to be in control of his own body and his situation. He liked being respected, and being able to defend himself the muggle or magical way has been a huge step forward for him.

He’s still not to 100% comfort, but he’s in a much better place than he used to be. Even when they were struggling most, though, Artem met life with strong determination and confidence. They’d like to believe they can talk their way out of any situation without using veela charm, and while they will get out of it without charm, they’re more likely to turn to a punch or a hex as a means of escape. Still, they have a strong sense of self-preservation and are pretty good about reading a room and getting out of a situation before it goes south. Unless they open their mouth.

When Artem has a good line, he’ll usually say it first and then have to deal with the consequences. Because of this, he’s had to work hard to develop to develop better control. Couple with his tendency to keep people at a distance to avoid rejection, he comes off as quite aloof at times. He doesn’t open up easily because even the people he trusts have hurt him so much. Even when he lets people close, it’s usually while he is serving some kind of role. For example, he has close work relationships with a few of the dancers, but that is while he plays protector, not while he strips the layers away. He has a hard time being vulnerable around people and is okay with that. People don’t need to see his vulnerability.

In a fit of anger at someone making veela comments in class seventh year, Artem marched back up to his dorm, borrowed a classmate’s razer and shaved his head. It was incredibly freeing, and they’ve kept it shaved ever since, one less signal to the world of their veela heritage. Their mother cried when she saw them at Christmas. Artem returned the small collection of decorative combs she’d slowly been passing over. While it further damaged their relationship with their mother, that moment and the resulting calm was proof to Artem that they maybe did want to be more masculine. If taking on a “male” haircut made them feel good, why couldn’t they do that in general? In those early days, Artem bought Polyjuice and used it to try out being different people to see how it felt. They only impersonated a woman once, and the lack of muscle definition that they’d work so hard to create made them end up shaking in a corner until it wore off. They’d been trying to figuring out what it would be like to be comfortable with their prettiness. Clearly that didn’t work because Artem got the woman’s body but not her confidence in it. They were still themself. They used the rest of the Polyjuice to try out being different cismen, but even those moments only reinforced to Artem that they didn’t want that for themself. They missed the comfort they had in their own skin, and the change in anatomy felt foreign and wrong. Clearly masculinity and the things associated with it are a cloak Artem likes to wear, but the male body is not.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY:

The Tremblay family was once incredibly offended to be left out of the Sacred 28, but a recent halfblood in one branch of the family was enough to exclude them. They have since continued to married in some halfbloods when they haven’t been considered good enough for pureblood matches, but most family members would argue they should be considered pureblood. They have the money and the influence of a proper pureblood family but not quite the title.

Pearce and Alanna Tremblay both came from highly respected families. Alanna technically married down from her pureblood family because the Burke’s pureblood claim is still substantiated from that golden list the Tremblays didn’t make, but she didn’t consider it a step down. Pearce and Alanna were not a love match by any means, but their partnership has always been one of close fondness, and they quickly grew to love each other.

The couple had power and a lot of inherited money, but they initially had trouble conceiving and carrying a child to term. When Alanna finally gave birth to Douglas, they were elated and initially said they would be done having children, despite both wanting a large family. When she accidentally became pregnant five years later, Alanna refused to put her own health first, and she and Pearce began planning for the perfect little girl to add to their family.

Instead they got Ellwood. On one hand, it was more reassurance of their family line because they now had two male heirs to carry on the family line. On the other, they really wanted their perfect little girl. Pearce suggested perhaps they add to their family through more unconventional means that both wouldn’t be hard on Alanna’s body and would promise them their perfect little girl: they could adopt a halfveela. It was surprisingly simple to adopt internationally from Yugoslavia, and soon they had their beautiful child who Alanna proceeded to groom into all the refinement and expectations of a proper pureblood lady, never letting the child forget how much simpler it all was when blessed with veela gifts like grace, charm, and beauty that most pureblood girls would kill for.

That child wasn’t a girl, though, pureblood or otherwise. It took a long time for Artem to figure out exactly why they felt so uncomfortable with their mother’s expectations, and in some ways, they’re still parsing it out. All Artem knew for sure was that he felt the freest when allowed to run along behind his brothers. He and Ellie got into all kinds of trouble together, trouble than Douglas was quick to tattle about. Although it had taken a couple years for the Tremblay’s paperwork to clear and for all the proper money to be given where it needed to, Artem came to them as a toddler only a few months younger than Ellwood. When they eventually reached Hogwarts, the two were in the same year, although Ellwood went to Hufflepuff; neither of them followed Douglas’ lead into Slytherin.

It was to Ellie that Artem first admitted their confusion about not feeling like a girl but also not feeling like a boy. Ellie was also confused but mostly supportive, and he joined them in the library to find any scrap of information about people like Artem. He was with them as they tried out new names that felt more comfortable, and he stood by their side when in the summer after sixth year, they finally told Douglas. Douglas didn’t take it well and further alienated his sibling by immediately telling their parents and taking away Artem’s ability to do so. That led to shouting from all five family members and crying from everyone except Douglas. Artem had never seen their father cry before, and they pulled him into a tight hug as he bumbled through apologies for anything he’d ever done to hurt them. Alanna never apologized. Artem didn’t expect her to. Douglas never apologized either. Artem pretends not to care.

Contrary to their fears of family rejection, Artem was not thrown out by their family. Their mother hasn’t quite forgiven him for rejecting her teachings and gifted name, but even she is happy to have him stop by for dinner (although she frequently slips on both name and pronouns). The rest of his family still supports him, but Artem really doesn’t want anything to do with them, especially when he knows everyone except Ellie uses his deadname when he isn’t around to argue about it). He’s rejected his family over and over, only crawling back when he’s really scraped for money. The one person he sees somewhat regularly is Ellie, who still meets Artem for coffee once a week like clockwork. The only person he avoids unless absolutely necessarily is Douglas. Artem can’t bring himself to forgive his brother, and Ellie agrees that it’s justified.

OCCUPATION: Artem is a bouncer at Ganymede’s Gentleman’s Club. They got the job because the owners liked the idea of a veela being able to intervene in many situations to handle them discreetly. That said, Artem doesn’t use their charm ever if they can help it. Most of the time at work, they wouldn’t want to anyway. Why charm someone who cheated at cards into leaving when Artem can drag them out by their collar instead? And on the same token, Artem isn’t going to do anything to make more pleasant the throwing out of someone who tried to take advantage of a dancer. That person is going to wake up outside by the street with a splitting headache and a new black eye.

ROLE WITHIN THE ORDER/THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORDER:

Artem had heard whisper of the Order for years, of course, and while Connor thought he was sneaky, using the rooms a sort of halfway house was bound to attract a little attention. Even before they’d really known why, they’d helped cover for his guests. As of a few months ago, Artem began hearing whispers of the Order helping relocate werewolves trying to avoid You-Know-Who. That was the final step for them as Artem decided they couldn’t stand by any longer.

Artem doesn’t necessarily like or even trust the Order, but if they win, the most likely outcome is that nothing changes in the abysmal way halfbreeds are treated. If the Death Eaters win, though, Artem knows the likelihood of being treated like absolute dirt or even chased out of England is high. It was a calculated risk of standing by and waiting for things to get worse or at least trying to keep things steady. They have no illusions about any of these human wix caring about them, as is proven by comments lumping in all halfbreeds with werewolves. Artem doesn’t necessarily have problems with werewolves (although he hates that they are able to pretend most of the time to be normal and to have people not immediately point to their hair or grace or beauty as othering things), but he will not pretend that their needs are the same as his. They aren’t even close.

The botched mission at the Nott Estate confirmed some of Artem’s worst fears: that the Order doesn’t really know what they’re doing and that they’re losing badly. He’s stuck here for now, but he’s already looking for an escape route. He wants to help, but not at his own expense. He’s not sticking his neck out to protect humans who don’t care about him.

SURVIVAL:

Complicated as things are, Artem loved his family, even Douglas. That said, he’s always put himself first since before he graduated from Hogwarts. For those first few years, Artem disappeared into the muggle world and barely checked in with Ellie, much less anyone else. When he realized he missed magic too much to stay away, Artem came crawling back with a little resentment that he ended up back at home for a few months while he figured out a new apartment and wizarding job. His mother was appalled when he started working at Ganymede’s. That only made it better.

Artem isn’t the best with money, but they can be mostly self-sufficient. They’re blessed that even when their family doesn’t approve of Artem’s choices, Artem can still stop by when things get tight and he’s looking for a new place. Currently he lives in an apartment above a shop in Diagon Alley, but it’s a place he doesn’t really spend a ton of time. They don’t really bring people over much, partially because Artem doesn’t like people to feel that familiar with them if they can help it, but it isn’t a complete disaster.

Should things go south with the Order, Artem does believe they could probably disappear again into the muggle world. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve vanished.

RELATIONSHIPS:

AINSLEY ABBOTT: Artem never quite knew how to classify Ainsley, and he appreciated her greatly for it. They’d met for the first time in the Hogwarts Library because she was in the middle of some grand theory that her audience clearly didn’t care about. Artem listened carefully from over by the stacks, and at the end of her theory, went, “But what about…” and completely undermined her idea. She loved it, and the two soon developed of habit of spiraling back and forth. Artem couldn’t begin to keep up on the theories, but he loved to argue and could logic his way through most. Ainsley is one of the few people he lets win.

CONFIDENCE BROWN. Artem figured he would gain some friends through work, but he never expected to get along so well with someone that they’d call him their work spouse. But that’s the case with Connor. Connor is also one of the few people that Artem will fully loosen up around. Connor’s habit of flirting with everyone means that he’s a harmless person to banter with, and Artem is able to keep some of those conversation skills alive through empty flirting with Connor. Plus, Connor’s flair for dramatics means that he keeps people happy. He’s the kind of person Artem likes to be around.

CARADOC DEARBORN. Artem had always been used to trailing after Ellwood, and while they had their own friends at Hogwarts, it was hard to adjust to giving him up to people like Caradoc. Through Ellie, Caradoc and Artem did spend some time together, but they were never really friends. Ellie had asked Artem after they’d settled on “not-girl” pronouns if he could share that information with Caradoc, and while it had made Artem apprehensive, they had agreed. It’s with a certain fondness now that they recall Caradoc never messing up once he knew.

JAMES POTTER and LUCINDA TALKALOT. Artem only barely remembered James or Lucinda at all before joining the Order. They’d been kids together technically, forced to go to the same boring social events by their parents, but Artem had a few years on both that made it hard to relate. They did end up stuck together sometimes by simple nature of being somewhat close in age, although Artem was happy to let Ellwood have James. Ellie was good at accepting tagalongs, even if it did hurt when the mood became boys only. Sometimes they resented the mothers pushing Artem and Lucinda together, but at least Luci wasn’t the simpering little thing she could have been. As an adult, Artem doesn’t know how to feel about James being one of the decisionmakers for the Order when she still remembers him as a little kid with big eyes and unruly hair. His hair is still unruly. Her feelings about Lucinda aren’t quite as strong, but in many ways, it’s like starting over.

ARCHIBALD MACMILLAN. Artem has never liked Archie, and it’s not his fault. As a child, Artem was constantly reminded of their future duties as a perfect pureblood wife, and because they were the same age and would attend Hogwarts together, Archie was a common target for their mother’s musing. He was pureblood and seemed like the kind of person Artem could easily persuade. When the two were thrown together, it was always awkward and stiff, and it came to a great relief to Artem when his attention fixed on Isla. He may have called her a best friend, but Artem saw the writing on the wall long before their engagement was public. If they still resent him a little, well, it’s because Artem still has to hear from their mother how they squandered that opportunity.

OOC EXPLORATION:

SHIPS/ANTI-SHIPS: Artem/Chemistry for sure. I will reiterate that sex is a complicated thing for Artem, and he is likely to avoid any kind of physicality unless he trusts someone completely.

WHAT PRIVILEGES AND BIASES DOES YOUR CHARACTER HAVE?

Artem’s spent the last ten-ish years in the process of trying to untwine their hatred for the being halfveela from the very specific lens of what it means to be female that was shoved down their throat as a child. They will never truly be able to separate them completely, although Artem is at a place where they can acknowledge that female means a lot of things beyond that narrow definition. The halfveela traits are harder to get around because if being female means more than being the perfect pureblood lady, being halfveela seems to immediately point back to that. Veela beauty, charm, grace, elegance… These are all things Artem has worked and worked on to try and overcome. He has these things naturally and doesn’t want them because they point back to that person he has never been.

Other people seem to have a harder time overlooking those Veela traits, though, and Artem has had to put up with a lot of it. He’s watched as halfveela are held up as a positive example but only seen them being pushed down in practice. The worst days at Ganymede’s are when he steps in to escort out some drunk asshole who assumes the pretty veela boy is available. The first time it happened, Artem beat the man bloody and almost got hired. His boss chewed him out to no end, and when Artem explained what had happened to defend himself, he was told that was to be expected for someone like him.

Unsurprisingly Artem doesn’t trust fully human wix in the slightest. Humans always put themselves first, and Artem isn’t about to do differently. They won’t go out of their way to avoid people, but they definitely try not to put themself in potentially harmful situations that they can’t fight their way out of. They’ve heard more than empty promises about making life better for halfbreeds, and it often isn’t anything actually helpful to them personally. In some ways, Artem is sympathetic to muggleborns, but he doesn’t overly care about their situation. Obviously he grew up in a household where pureblood and high halfblood wix were held up as the shining standard, but he didn’t hear a lot of direct hate. He’s ambivalent in a world that says it’s impossible not to have an opinion, but Artem has bigger battles.

Artem wouldn’t consider themself prejudice against werewolves, but they’ve got some resentment. On one hand, Artem isn’t usually called a monster. Veela are vilified sometimes, but it’s not the excessive demonizing rhetoric that werewolves have. They know most werewolves probably consider halfveela lucky. But werewolves only change one night a month. The rest of the time they can hide. Artem has never wanted anything so desperately as the ability to just stop being halfveela, to no longer have people stare at them on the streets. Artem can’t hide being halfveela, and werewolves can hide their affliction just fine most of the time. They may all be considered halfbreeds, but their needs are not the same.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? I have a lot of passionate for this character and can’t wait to see how their personality meshes on the dash, especially when they have a lot of potential to clash and kind of sort of want some closer people in their life.

PLOT DROP IDEAS: I would love to see some kind of anti-veela or anti-halfbreed sentiment stirring up trouble.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Headcanon: Artem’s current wand is their second. When Artem and their mother went shopping for school supplies that first time, their mother insisted that Artem only be given wands with veela hair cores. None were particularly strong, and the wandmaker tried to talk her out of it. She refused, and Artem ended up with a temperamental wand that they never quite understood. That following summer, Artem snapped the wand out of anger during an argument over their grades, declaring that if their mother had let a wand actually choose Artem, they would be able to control their magic just fine. After spending the summer unable to so much as go outside with Ellie, Artem was allowed to go wand shopping with no restrictions. The wand they ended up with was a short unyielding fir wand with a dragon heartstring core. It has never given them the problems that the veela wand did. Just one more reasons Artem is sure being a veela was never mend to be part of who they are.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/01iTQnHaK284S0AUpvlF6d?si=gEbeARfpSjqjlj6JWgJnOA

https://www.pinterest.com/myrpboards/artem-nikita/

EXTRA FOR NON-BIO CHARACTERS:

PAST: After giving birth to two perfectly good heirs but not quite being healthy enough to risk another pregnancy, the halfblood but highly regarded Tremblay family adopted a halfveela as a way to promise themselves a perfect daughter to raise to pureblood standards. Clearly some promises are meant to be broken because they got Artem, who grew up knowing that the expectations thrust on them were not what they wanted but not initially realizing why. Once at Hogwarts, Artem realized fully that they didn’t want to be a girl but that being a boy felt wrong too. Their brother Ellwood was always supportive of them, and even the rest of their traditional wannabe pureblood family reacted better than Artem would have expected. That didn’t stop them from disappearing after graduation. Artem plunged into the muggle world for a few years, and while it was an extreme culture shock, they ended up in the growing gay community of Muggle London. It was a good place to be with people who helped Artem feel like they didn’t belong in their own skin. That’s also where they picked up boxing, something that changed Artem’s life. They felt positively about their magic, but the physical ability to take action and feel capable no matter the situation or if they had a wand felt more freeing than anything. Technically Artem could have used their Veela charm in those situations, but Artem never used it if they could help it. They felt strong, physically and more mentally than they had in years, but it was time to acknowledge that they couldn’t stay away from the magical community where they had their roots. They missed too much.

PRESENT: Now that they are back in the magical world, Artem deals more directly with that Veela heritage they’ve always tried to ignore. Muggles usually couldn’t put into words those halfveela traits, if they noticed them at all. Wix aren’t like that, and as far as Artem in concerned, most are far too bold it pointing them out. Artem doesn’t really believe the magical community can do better, but they definitely believe it can do worse. They joined the Order not because they believed in it, but because they were more concerned by the idea that Voldemort might win. What they’ve seen thus far from the Order hasn’t instilled much confidence in Artem that he won’t win anyway. Artem is starting from the bottom as a newcomer, and they’re not sure how much people trust them. That said, they don’t necessarily want to rise. They want to show up, do what must be done, and get out of there. Occasionally based on things that are said, though, Artem can’t help wanting to interject and have more of a voice. They may not be the most dedicated Order member, but if they’re here, Artem is going to try and do things right.

FC CHOICES: In order of preference: Kristen Stewart, Brie Larson, Jamie Clayton, Asia Kate Dillon

I know Brie Larson and Kristen Stewart are both cisgender, but they are blonde (I’d be using Kristen’s more recent looks of the blonde pixie cut and shaved head), have an athletic look, and the right vibe that I’m going for. Brie has the toughness and easy confidence. Kristen has the general energy level and the perfect haircut. Asia Kate Dillon is nonbinary, and Jamie Clayton is a transgender woman. Between those two, I like Jamie’s energy a little bit better.

The trickiness with fcs is that Artem’s veela genetics means there is always going to be a certain level of what people associate as feminine beauty to them, no matter what they do. So they’re strong, have no hair, and generally dress in masculine clothing, but it does still happen that they are misgendered. The fc balance for that is something I’m toying with as to how to keep feminine features in a way that feels like his has the edges and physical strength needed. Brie seems to epitomize this the most, although Kristen’s hair is why I edged her slightly above in my preferences.

#homenumaccepted #hp rp #hp rpg #marauders rp #hp roleplay

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Louis Menand, Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir, The New Yorker (September 26, 2005)

Jean-Paul Sartre preferred the company of women. As one would expect of the great advocate of transparency, he discussed his reasons frankly. “First of all, there is the physical element. There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty,” he explained in an interview for the documentary “Sartre by Himself.” “Then, there is the fact that they’re oppressed, so they seldom bore you with shop talk. . . . I enjoy being with a woman because I’m bored out of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas.” “Sartre by Himself” was filmed in 1972, when Sartre was sixty-six; his interviewers were loyal associates from the journal he founded after the war, Les Temps Modernes. None of them encouraged him to expand on the topic, since Simone de Beauvoir was present, and everyone in the room understood that the legend of their relationship was in her keeping. But everyone in the room also knew that Sartre liked the company of women because he devoted much of his time to the business of seducing them.

The nature of Sartre and Beauvoir’s partnership was never a secret to their friends, and it was not a secret to the public, either, after they were abruptly launched into celebrity, in 1945. They were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage. Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir’s four volumes of memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France: “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter” (1958), “The Prime of Life” (1960), “Force of Circumstance” (1963), and “All Said and Done” (1972). Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency. Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point.

Sartre and Beauvoir had met in Paris in 1929, when he was twenty-four, she was twenty-one, and both were studying for the agrégation, the competitive examination for a career in the French school system. Beauvoir was a handsome and stylish woman, and she had a boyfriend, René Maheu. (It was Maheu who gave her her permanent nickname, le Castor—the Beaver.) But she fell in love with Sartre, once she got over the physical impression he made. Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene. He had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can be charismatic, and he wisely refrained from disguising it. He simply ignored his body. He was also smart, generous, agreeable, ambitious, ardent, and very funny. He liked to drink and talk all night, and so did she.

Sartre had been engaged, though the engagement was broken off after he failed his first attempt at the agrégation; but he and Beauvoir decided that their love did not require marriage for its consummation. “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves,” Beauvoir explained in “The Prime of Life”:

One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it. At times this meant that we had to follow diverse paths—though without concealing even the least of our discoveries from one another. When we were together we bent our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the moment of parting we still thought as one. That which bound us freed us; and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible.

Sartre proposed a “pact”: they could have affairs, but they were required to tell each other everything. As he put it to Beauvoir: “What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” Beauvoir’s whole life to that point had been an effort to escape from the culture of her family. Her mother had been educated in a convent; her father was a conservative Paris lawyer of diminished means who, though he was proud of his daughter’s mind, discouraged her interest in philosophy, and would probably have discouraged her pursuit of any career if he had been able to provide her with a dowry. So she was excited by the affront to conventional standards of domesticity that Sartre’s arrangement posed. She also had a high opinion of Sartre’s brilliance as a philosopher. An argument based on terms like “essence” and “contingency” worked as well on her as a diamond ring. She saw (before he did, but in some ways she was cannier than he was) that the pact bound to her for life a man whom she knew would never be faithful. It closed the normal exit.

As matters worked out, the pact meant that Beauvoir not only discussed with Sartre his interest in other women; she often formed intimate friendships with the women herself. At first, she was distressed to discover that she sometimes felt jealous. Sartre advised her that jealousy, like all passions, is an enemy of freedom: it controls you, and you should be controlling it. Sartre soon stopped sleeping with her, and she had her own serious affairs, notably with Nelson Algren, a transatlantic relationship that lasted from 1947 to 1951, and Claude Lanzmann, with whom she lived from 1952 to 1959; she wrote openly about her relations with both men in “Force of Circumstance.” But she remained committed to Sartre and to the pact; and the relationship, with its carrousel of changing partners and café tables, lasted fifty-one years.

Beauvoir never pretended that her memoirs told the whole story. “There are many things which I firmly intend to leave in obscurity,” she warned in “The Prime of Life.” Though she strategically employed pseudonyms in the memoirs, enough was revealed, and enough suggested in her romans à clef “She Came to Stay” (1943) and “The Mandarins” (1954), to satisfy most curiosities. Sartre died, after a prolonged debilitation, in 1980. A year later, in a book called “Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre,” Beauvoir published a series of “conversations” with Sartre that she had conducted in 1974, in which she guided him through philosophically tinged musings on his affairs. Even for existentialists, it was painful reading:

de beauvoir: Were you ever attracted by an ugly woman?

sartre: Truly and wholly ugly, no, never.

de beauvoir: It could even be said that all the women you were fond of were either distinctly pretty or at least very attractive and full of charm.

sartre: Yes, in our relations I liked a woman to be pretty because it was a way of developing my sensibility. These were irrational values—beauty, charm, and so on. Or rational, if you like, since you can provide an interpretation, a rational explanation. But when you love a person’s charm you love something that is irrational, even though ideas and concepts do explain charm at a more intense degree.

de beauvoir : Were there not women you found attractive for reasons other than strictly feminine qualities—strength of character, something intellectual and mental, rather than something wholly to do with charm and femininity? There are two I’m thinking about.

And so on. It was hard to say whether the conversation was more humiliating for her or for him, with his boorishness so plainly on display. Still, it was possible to stick to the no-fault view: these were consenting adults. Their erotic lives were no one’s concern but their own.

That view soon lost tenability. Three years after Sartre’s death, Beauvoir published a collection of his letters to her, in which he described in detail his activities in bed, but she edited them to conceal identities. She died in 1986; in 1990, her executrix, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, published Beauvoir’s “Letters to Sartre.” These were unedited—“Is it not, by now, preferable to tell all in order to tell the truth?” Le Bon de Beauvoir wrote in the preface—and they shocked many people. The revelation was not the promiscuity; it was the hypocrisy. In interviews, Beauvoir had flatly denied having had sexual relations with women; in the letters, she regularly described, for Sartre, her nights in bed with women. The most appalling discovery, for many readers, was what “telling each other everything” really meant. The correspondence was filled with catty and disparaging remarks about the people Beauvoir and Sartre were either sleeping with or trying to sleep with, even though, when they were with those people, they radiated interest and affection. Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis. With the publication of “Letters to Sartre,” it was clear that, privately, he and Beauvoir held most of the people in their lives in varying degrees of contempt. They enjoyed, especially, recounting to each other the lies they were telling.

Some of those whose names appeared in “Letters to Sartre” were alive in 1990, and the book opened mouths that, for various reasons, had remained shut while Sartre and Beauvoir were alive. The chatter has not stopped, which means that Hazel Rowley’s new book, “Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre” (HarperCollins; $26.95), is basically an update on a breaking story. Sartre and Beauvoir were prolific letter writers, and most of their correspondence remains under the control of their estates. Le Bon de Beauvoir allowed Rowley to see many of the unpublished letters in her possession; one of Sartre’s longtime mistresses, Michelle Vian, let her leaf through her collection. But Sartre’s executrix, Arlette Elkaïm, did not respond to inquiries. Rowley interviewed Lanzmann, but he did not show her his letters from Beauvoir. She read the letters Sartre wrote to his Russian lover Lena Zonina between 1962 and 1967, though Elkaïm will not permit them to be published. Rowley is able to tell a fuller version of a story that has been written many times, but it is probably still some distance short of complete. (She also includes in the book—it sounds like a Woody Allen joke—a photograph of Beauvoir in the nude.) It seems fair to say that, in a manner consistent with an open-minded lack of prudery, Rowley is horrified by the behavior she describes. Readers looking for a friendlier spin can consult the pages on Sartre’s love life in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s gigantic “Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century” (2000), but even Lévy, a delightfully unabashed heroworshipper and special pleader par excellence, is reduced to complaining that what’s really disgusting is everyone’s obsession with the subject. That may be true, but it is not much of an argument.

Sartre and Beauvoir liked to refer to their entourage as “the Family,” and the recurring feature of their affairs is a kind of play incest. Their customary method was to adopt a very young woman as a protégée—to take her to movies and cafés, travel with her, help her with her education and career, support her financially. (Sartre wrote most of his plays in part to give women he was sleeping with something to do: they could be actresses.) For Sartre and Beauvoir, the feeling that they were, in effect, sleeping with their own children must, as with most taboos, have juiced up the erotic fun.

In 1933, when she was teaching in Rouen, Beauvoir had a seventeen-year-old student named Olga Kosakiewicz, a daughter of a Russian émigré who had been dispossessed by the Revolution. Olga was attractive, dreamy, unhappy; Beauvoir struck up a friendship, and they began to see each other outside of school. In the summer of 1935, Beauvoir proposed that Olga should put herself under the protection of her and Sartre, who would pay her way and be responsible for her education, and a few months later Olga moved into a room in the Hôtel du Petit Mouton, where Beauvoir was living, and they began an affair. Sartre became infatuated with Olga and spent two years attempting to seduce her. He failed, but in 1937 he met her sister, Wanda, also beautiful, and even more at sea, and he managed, after two more years, to sleep with her. The day of his triumph, he left her lying in bed, “all pure and tragic, declaring herself tired and having hated me for a good forty-five minutes,” in order to rush out to a café and write Beauvoir with the news. (“She Came to Stay” is an account of the Sartre-Beauvoir-Olga affair that, from all the evidence, is only lightly fictionalized—except that at the end of the novel the Beauvoir character murders the Olga character. Beauvoir dedicated the book to Olga.)

Bianca Bienenfeld was the daughter of Jewish refugees from Poland. She became Beauvoir’s student in 1938, when she was sixteen. The two went on a hiking trip at the end of the school year and began an affair. Beauvoir introduced Bianca to Sartre, and he began wooing her. “I was very attracted by his charm, spirit, kindness, and intelligence,” Bienenfeld wrote in her memoir, “A Disgraceful Affair,” which was published in France in 1993. (The French title, “Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Dérangée,” is a takeoff on the title of the first volume of Beauvoir’s memoirs, “Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée.”) “Just as a waiter plays the role of a waiter,” she wrote, “Sartre played to perfection the role of a man in love.” (This, too, is an allusion with a sting: it refers to a famous passage in Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” which he began working on around the time he was courting Bienenfeld, about the bad faith of the waiter, who lets himself be defined by the role society has given him.) Sartre eventually persuaded Bienenfeld, who had never slept with a man, to accompany him to a hotel, where, he suavely confided to her, he had taken another girl’s virginity the day before. The first encounter was unpleasant: Sartre had a mildly sadistic attitude toward sex. He took enormous satisfaction in the conquest but little pleasure in the sex (and so he usually terminated the physical part of his affairs coldly and quickly). Still, he and Bianca became lovers, and Sartre and Beauvoir kept up the pretense that they were both in love with her until they had had enough, and then, prompted by Beauvoir, Sartre wrote a letter announcing the end of the affair.

Three months later, the Germans arrived in Paris. Bienenfeld barely escaped capture during the Occupation; her grandfather and an aunt died in the camps. She says that Sartre and Beauvoir never inquired about her or tried to find her during the war. She reunited with Beauvoir in 1945, and saw her once a month until Beauvoir’s death. She had no idea that Beauvoir had connived with Sartre to drop her, or that both of them regarded her as a shallow nuisance, until she read about herself in “Letters to Sartre.” “Their perversity was carefully concealed beneath Sartre’s meek and mild exterior and the Beaver’s serious and austere appearance,” she wrote in “A Disgraceful Affair.” “In fact, they were acting out a commonplace version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’ ”

Nathalie Sorokine, another student of Beauvoir’s, was also the child of Russian émigrés. She and Beauvoir became sexually involved while Beauvoir was still having her affair with Bienenfeld. (“I’ve a very keen taste for her body,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre.) Sorokine, too, slept with Sartre and, with Beauvoir’s encouragement, with another lover of Beauvoir’s, Jacques-Laurent Bost. (This is where you start to need a scorecard: Bost was Olga Kosakiewicz’s boyfriend when Beauvoir seduced him; he later married Olga, but continued, in secret, his affair with Beauvoir, who remained Olga’s intimate friend.)

The ideal form for a Sartre and Beauvoir ménage was the triangle. If they couldn’t fashion one, they contrived a simulation: when Sartre couldn’t get Olga to sleep with him, he seduced her sister. Later on, their affairs followed a copycat pattern. In 1945, Sartre went, alone, to the United States, where he met and began an affair with Dolores Vanetti, a Frenchwoman who had moved to the United States during the war and was married to an American doctor. Sartre proposed marriage (a detail he neglected to share with Beauvoir), and, since Vanetti was emphatically not interested in à-trois arrangements, Beauvoir felt threatened. In 1947, Beauvoir went, alone, to the United States, where she met and began an affair with Nelson Algren. (She never told Algren about Sartre’s affair with Vanetti; he learned about it by reading “Force of Circumstance.”) In 1952, when she was forty-four, Beauvoir began her affair with Lanzmann, who was twenty-seven. In 1953, Sartre began an affair with Lanzmann’s sister, Evelyne. She was twenty-three.

Biographers have trouble getting the complete story because there is contentiousness between the estates, and this, too, is a consequence of the pact. Sartre met Arlette Elkaïm in 1956. She was a French Algerian, nineteen years old, who had fled to Paris after her mother committed suicide. Sartre took her in, and they had a brief affair. In 1965, he adopted her as his daughter. Since Beauvoir had no legal relationship to Sartre, and since Sartre did not make a will, Elkaïm was his sole heir. Beauvoir, though, was not far behind. In 1960, she met Sylvie Le Bon, a seventeen-year-old student. Rowley suspects that they were lovers, though she reports that Le Bon “talks about this subject . . . with vagueness and ambiguity.” (Le Bon says that the relationship was “carnal but not sexual,” which sounds a little Clintonesque.) After Sartre died, Beauvoir adopted Le Bon, who now controls access to Beauvoir’s writings, as Elkaïm controls access to Sartre’s.

What makes the Existentialist Family different from other twentieth-century counter-domesticities—Bloomsbury, for example, which had its own quasi-incestuous, partner-swapping patterns of intimacy—is the asymmetry of most of the pairings. Sartre’s novels and plays earned him a great deal of money after the war, but he spent virtually none of it on himself (a lifelong habit). In 1946, at the peak of his celebrity as the philosopher of freedom and authenticity, he moved in with his mother. He used most of his income to support friends and current and former mistresses. He described the women he was attracted to as “drowning women,” women whose lives were damaged or insecure—which, of course, was why they offered the devotion he demanded. They were all a little desperate, and Sartre was the leading intellectual in a culture that treats its intellectuals like pop stars. He set his women up in apartments within ten minutes of his own and, every week, made what he called his “medical rounds.” Each woman had specified hours allotted to spend with him. The women almost never saw each other; in many cases, they never knew about each other. But they all knew about Beauvoir, and Beauvoir was Sartre’s standing excuse: the Beaver wouldn’t like it; he had to spend more time with the Beaver.

And the Beaver is the great mystery at the center of the whole system. What explains her? One theory is plainly wrong. That is the theory that her relationship with Sartre was a post-patriarchal partnership of equals, combining genuine mutuality with genuine autonomy, and rejecting the superstitious equation of sexual fidelity with commitment—in less pretentious terms, an open marriage. But it is clear now that Sartre and Beauvoir did not simply have a long-term relationship supplemented by independent affairs with other people. The affairs with other people formed the very basis of their relationship. The swapping and the sharing and the mimicking, the memoir- and novel-writing, right down to the interviews and the published letters and the duelling estates, was the stuff and substance of their “marriage.” This was how they slept with each other after they stopped sleeping with each other. The third parties were, in effect, prostheses, marital aids, and, when they discovered how they were being used, they reacted, like Bianca Bienenfeld, with the fury of the betrayed. Algren never forgave Beauvoir for concealing Sartre’s affair with Vanetti from him: when her books appeared in English translation, he reviewed them, and they are reviews from hell.

Two theories are left. One, a respectable but minority view among Beauvoir scholars, is that she was the engineer of the whole pact. It was Beauvoir who rejected marriage, not Sartre, who felt lucky to have her on any terms; and it was Beauvoir who was the dominant partner intellectually, not, as she always publicly insisted, the other way around. The view has some evidentiary support. Beauvoir was far more passionate sexually and complex emotionally than Sartre, and she was also, arguably, the stronger, if less creative, mind. Deirdre Bair, in her 1990 biography of Beauvoir, reported that the jury for the agrégation, in 1929, debated whether to award first place in the competition to Sartre or Beauvoir. They gave it to Sartre—he was, after all, a man, and it was his second try—but they agreed that Beauvoir was the real philosopher. She was the youngest agrégée in French history. A close comparison of their books by no means supports the notion that her thought was parasitic on his. But the theory that Beauvoir tolerated the system because it was the system she created founders on “The Second Sex.”

Beauvoir wrote her great book in two years, a fast pace for her. She started it while Sartre was deeply involved with Vanetti, and it was published in 1949. The edge on its analysis still gleams. (The English translation, made in 1952, is badly misleading, as a number of scholars, notably Margaret Simons and Toril Moi, have pointed out—an abridgment filled with mistakes that distort and sometimes invert Beauvoir’s meaning. According to Moi, proposals to produce a new translation have been ignored by Beauvoir’s American and French publishers.) The book’s final chapter, “The Independent Woman,” arguing that only economic self-sufficiency can release women from subordination, was one of the inspirational texts for the women’s movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. But you can no longer read it without thinking of Olga and Wanda, Arlette and Michelle—the women Sartre supported, who never had independent careers, and who knew that they were allowed access to Sartre only as long as they were “pretty” and never bored him by talking “in the realm of ideas.” A little intellectual pretension, the flattering kind shown by a young admirer, was titillating, of course. It was necessary to get the attention of the great man, who was not disappointed, because he was not surprised, by its limitations. “If a woman has false ideas,” Beauvoir writes in “The Second Sex,”

if she is not very intelligent, clear-sighted, or courageous, a man does not hold her responsible: she is the victim, he thinks—and often with reason—of her situation. He dreams of what she might have been, of what she perhaps will be: she can be credited with any possibilities, because she is nothing in particular. This vacancy is what makes the lover weary of her quickly; but it is the source of the mystery, the charm, that seduces him and makes him inclined to feel an easy affection in the first place.

There is no more remorseless dissection of the situation of the successful man’s mistress than “The Independent Woman,” and, since Beauvoir always wrote out of her own experience, it is possible to imagine that chapter as a coded letter to Sartre, the evisceration that she could never deliver to his face.

If “The Second Sex” can’t be squared with the life, we are reduced to the final, depressing theory that the pact was just the traditional sexist arrangement—in which the man sleeps around and the woman nobly “accepts” the situation—on philosophical stilts. Sartre was the classic womanizer, and Beauvoir was the classic enabler. In the beginning, the bisexuality was her way of showing the proper spirit. “I’ve a very keen taste for her body”: who is speaking that sentence? The woman who wants it to be heard, or the man who wants to hear it? Later on, she had other men, but finding a man willing to enter a sexual intimacy without strings is not the most difficult thing in the world. (Algren turned out not to be one.) Beauvoir was formidable, but she was not made of ice. Though her affairs, for the most part, were love affairs, it is plain from almost every page she wrote that she would have given them all up if she could have had Sartre for herself alone. ♦

#simone de beauvoir #Jean-Paul Sartre #interpersonal relationships #existentialism #sexuality #sexism

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gaycrouton · 5 years

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Femininity

Words of Love 6/27 One of my favorites [Scully gets her period at the office and Mulder tries his best to help her.]

Femininity: (noun) the quality or nature of the female sex

There was not a day that went by in their partnership where Mulder did not recognize Scully wholeheartedly as his equal. Unlike his colleagues at the Bureau, this was not a conscious choice that took effort. She was a woman, and she was by far the best agent he had ever worked with, bar none. Even though it was the nineties, it seemed many men they came in contact with were still a bit archaic in their thinking.

He was aware that every comment aimed at her that pissed him off was only a glimpse at what she must deal with on a daily basis, and it infuriated him. Whether it be a male agent’s appreciative glance that lasted too long or someone on a crime scene refusing to address her, he felt his blood boil. There was no reason that her womanhood made her any less capable as an agent than his manhood did.

He had to be honest, even though he found her outrageously attractive, he was so worried about making sure to conceal his admiration so that she didn’t lump him in with the misogynistic pigs around the office, that he sometimes ignored the importance of regarding her as a woman.

In his mind, she was the definition of femininity. She was stunningly beautiful, ferociously witty, unwaveringly intelligent, and, most importantly, incredibly independent and strong. He loved her with every fiber of his being.

Back in the day he used to hide his appreciation of her behind a guise of humor, “I think it’s remotely possible that someone might think you’re hot.” Only within the past few years, now that he felt comfortable in her trust in him, that he felt okay with openly flirting with her.

Though, it wasn’t until recently that he realized the importance of recognizing her, not only as a partner, but as a female, and that recognition came in the most usual of circumstances.

It was on a normal Thursday that had consisted of nothing but paperwork. They had sat in their respective areas, typing in companionable silence for essentially the entire work day. It was nearing five, and for the past half-hour, Scully had started shifting uncomfortably in her seat, a noticeable grimace on her face. He didn’t fully understand why, but she took off her short jacket and draped it on the seat underneath her. When he had asked her what was wrong, she insisted she was fine and he took her for her word. It was only when he announced their shifts were over, but she made no attempt to move, that he realized something might be wrong.

“Scully, are you sure you’re okay?” he asked from over his desk.

She looked like she was contemplating something before meeting his gaze, he noticed a slight blush had spread on her cheeks. His worry and confusion were increased by what left her mouth. “Mulder, you know I trust you right?”

“Yeah, Scully you’re scaring me. Is something wrong?”

She nodded her head vigorously to assuage his worries. “N-no, I’m fine. I just-,” she paused before muttering quietly under her breath, “This is so embarrassing.”

Now that he knew she was okay, his curiosity was piqued. Embarrassing? “Scully, you can tell me anything. I promise I won’t tease you if it will make you feel better.”

She regarded him for a moment before continuing. “Okay. I might need your help, but I need you to be mature about this.”

He simply nodded, having no idea where this could be going. Scully let out a long sigh before standing up and smoothing out her ivory-white skirt. “I’m pretty sure I got my period, and I need you to tell me if I bled through my skirt,” she mumbled it so fast, he wasn’t sure if he heard her right. When she turned around, he had no doubts that was what she asked.

On most occasions, he definitely would have teased her about asking him to check her out. But right now all he could focus on was the blood-red stain blossoming out around the middle of her skirt. It was significantly large, and now the seat-shifting and grimacing made sense. She must’ve laid her jacket down so she didn’t bleed on the fabric of the chair.

“I’m sorry, Scully. You definitely did. Do you need to sit down? Are you sure you’re okay? That means you bled through your underwear, your tights, and your skirt. That just seems like so much blood, is that normal?” He knew he was rambling, and even though he knew what it was, he would never be comfortable with seeing blood on her. He stood up and made his way to stand closer to her.

He was glad to see, even though she was still embarrassed, she was clearly amused by him. When she answered, she couldn’t keep the coy smile off her face. “Yes, Mulder. I promise this is normal. I was just so engrossed in typing up the reports that I didn’t notice until… it became obvious to me,” she broke off not wanting to get to graphic.

“Were you just sitting in pain? Why didn’t you say anything?” He was worried she had been afraid he would judge her and had been waiting for him to leave before dealing with it.

“I figured I’d just wait until we left for the day, but I don’t know how to leave right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want anyone upstairs to see this Mulder!” she exclaimed. “I’m already made fun of enough for being a ‘bitch.’ If they saw this, it would be five steps back for women in the office. Anytime a woman is assertive, the guys will make ‘on the rag’ jokes.”

Mulder appreciated her honesty, and his heart broke for her. This was a circumstance that he had never even imagined and would never have to go through himself. He was kind of at a loss for what to do. “Scully, I don’t think anyone thinks you’re a bitch.” She shot him an amused, knowing glance and he couldn’t help but smile back. “Okay, well I know you’re not a bitch.”

“Thank you, Mulder,” she laughed, appreciating the fact he was lightning the mood for her.

A light bulb went off and he was pleased with his idea. “Scully, why don’t you wear my jacket? That would probably go low enough to cover your predicament.”

She looked like she was considering his offer before a small frown graced her face. “I appreciate your offer, but I think being seen in your jacket would cause just as many rumors as someone seeing the stain.”

He realized her point immediately. They had just been called into Skinner’s office last month after some rumors upstairs got a little too out of hand. Unbeknownst to them, apparently they were having an illicit affair and had been ‘seen’ at nearly twenty different romantic hot-spots around D.C. by various members of the secretary pool. Skinner had confronted them, much to their embarrassment, and they had to dissuade the rumors and reassure him that their relationship was nothing beyond platonic. Much to Mulder’s despair. He wished the rumors were true, but he would never risk what they had by making a move.

“Do you have your coat or maybe a change of clothes in your car? I could run and go get them for you?” he offered.

“I really appreciate that, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything.” She paused a minute before sighing again. “Do you think you could do me a favor? Could you just walk behind me and hide the stain with your body?” She wasn’t making eye contact anymore and he knew this was taking a lot for her to ask.

“Of course, Scully. Absolutely anything you need. I’ll drape my jacket around my arm to help look inconspicuous.” That earned him a hearty smile of appreciation and she gathered her stuff up, including her lightly bloodstained top she had been sitting on, shoving everything in her purse before they started to the door.

The trek to the parking garage wasn’t too far, but it probably felt like miles to her. When she opened up their office door, she poked her head around to make sure the coast was clear. It was a quarter after five, and most agents liked to leave as soon as possible. She nodded at him that they were good to go, and he followed her after locking the door behind them.

They walked in tandem to the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor. Why they couldn’t have an elevator leading from the basement to the parking garage was lost on him, and was currently the source of a lot of stress for Scully. Those few hallways distancing one elevator from the other was going to be the stretch with the most people.

She sighed as the elevator doors opened and she made swift strides to get out. Mulder didn’t know if it would be better for him to stand directly behind her like she asked, or go the less creepy route and place his hand on the small of her back, allowing his jacket to drape down and hide her. Thinking the latter would be less suspicious, he gently placed a hand on where he knew her tattoo was and walked down the hall with her.

He knew some of the secretaries were turning and staring, but honestly, it’s not like the rumors would be any different than what they already were. He could feel Scully slightly tense under the attention, but they were able to make it to her car without a hitch. She smiled up at him, but he could see her brow was furrowed in pain and she was trying to subtly grab her side.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” He didn’t want to sound condescending, he knew full well she could take care of herself and had dealt with this for god knows how long, but, call him ridiculous, but he could only focus on the fact his petite partner was freely bleeding out right now.

She laughed and he grinned at the sweet sound. “Yes Mulder, I’ll survive. Thank you for making this less humiliating for me than it could have been.” She opened up her car door, re-setting down her stained top on her seat. She turned to him and placed a chaste kiss on his cheek, well really his jaw since that’s about all she could reach, even on her tip-toes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He couldn’t help the grin that made its way to his face at the gesture and waved her off as she drove away. He got into his car and started on his normal route back home.

It wasn’t as if he was oblivious to the intricacies of the female reproductive system, he even knew more details about Scully’s than what could have possibly been anticipated, but he had genuinely never considered the fact she had to deal with this every month. He felt his heart sink when he realized what a period might represent for Scully. Normally blood represented fertility and healthy ovulation. Things that Scully didn’t have. Was this monthly occurrence a source of great pain for for her? Blood of life that would never provide. A slight twinge of guilt started gnawing at him when he started to really think about it. How many times have I pushed her and made her run around chasing monsters and serial killers when she was in pain and bleeding?

He knew she was tough and it’s not like she would ever opt out on a case just because of this, she obviously had never made a big deal out of it, but the fact he had never taken it into consideration bothered him. He tried to remember what they were doing a month ago from today, and let out an exasperated sigh when he realized it was the case that he had snapped at her. She had done two autopsies back to back and had protested when he asked that she do a third.

“Mulder, I’ve been on my feet for eight hours. The lab will probably be so swamped with what I just sent in, that it wouldn’t make a difference if this body’s samples were sent in tonight or tomorrow morning.” He remembered she had been laying on her bed awkwardly and looked truly exhausted.

“Sure. Fine. Whatever.” He had snottily regurgitated those charged words back at her before storming off. Retrospectively, regardless of her predicament, he was still totally out of line and was being a total dick. But with the new knowledge that she had probably been having cramps and soreness all day while on her feet, added to his building guilt.

Running a hand through his hair, he pulled over to the side of the road to the nearest convenience store. He just wanted to do something nice for her. Scanning the aisles, he realized he was a little out of his element. He never really had been close enough with a woman before to hear her talk about her menstrual cycle, so he was at a loss as to what would help. He tried to summon all the knowledge he had accumulated from television shows and readings and found himself frowning at how grossly underrepresented this normal-bodily function was in the media.

Deciding he didn’t need to start a women’s rights rally in the middle of the store, he stuck with what was obvious, and what he knew Scully liked. He left the store with Midol, a heating pad, red and white wine, that weird chili flavored chocolate she raved about, and a bouquet of flowers. He couldn’t help the embarrassed blush that broke out on his face at the older store clerk's praises, “What a wonderful young man you are! Taking care of your woman like this. The world needs more fellows like you!”

He made his way to Scully’s apartment and felt slight worry blossom in the pit of his stomach. Is this too much? Will she be offended? Deciding it was too late to worry, he jogged up to her apartment, lightly knocking on the door with his offerings behind his back.

She opened the door after a moment and met him with surprised eyes, “Mulder, what’s up?” He smiled down at her choice of pyjamas; what he recognized to be an old Yale sweater he thought he had lost with polka dotted silk shorts. Her eyes followed his gaze and an embarrassed grin spread across her face.

He loved it and didn’t want her to think she had to give it back, so he brought the flowers and the bag of goodies from behind his back, earning him a soft gasp. “Mulder, what is all this?” She asked, taking the bouquet and bag from his hands, ushering him inside. He closed the door behind him as she made her way to the kitchen counter, opening the bag.

All the sudden feeling shy, he rubbed the back of his neck while explaining himself. “Well, I still felt bad that you had to deal with that today, and then on my way home, I realized that I never took your well being into consideration while we were on cases. Well, I mean, I cared about your well being, but not in regards to your time of the month. And while I know you would never make a big deal out of it, and I promise I won’t either, but I just felt like a dick for being so hard on you, and I wanted to make you feel better.” During his speech he got a bit more confident at the beaming smile she had while unpacking her gifts.

She looked up at him and surprise him when he saw tears in her eyes. “Mulder, this is so sweet, thank you so much.” She walked around the table and gave him a big hug, which he relished every second of.

After a moment, she looked up at him with an embarrassed chuckle and broke the hug, wiping away the tears she had shed. “Um, I just finished making soup. You can have some if you want to stay and watch a movie with me?” she offered.

“I would love that,” he beamed. She would never cease to amaze him.

#msr fluff #msr #mulder and scully #dana scully #fox mulder #x files fanfiction #xf ff #x files fanfic fluff #cute #gaycrouton #onlytheinevitable #my fanfiction

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go-diane-winchester · 5 years

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How Misha ruined slash fiction

THIS IS AN EDITED REPOST.

I first got into fandom slash fiction because of Lord of the Rings. Before that I had no idea there were others like me. The Ringers, as I prefer to call them, were the nicest slash fans and gave me the erroneous impression that slashers are really lovely girls. How wrong I was. But almost twenty years ago, I [and my generational demographic] had the semblance of mind to differentiate between fact and fantasy. I came across the definition of slash fiction, way back then. Its was generically defined as fanwork done by women for women. Of course one would argue that men like slash fiction too. Correction. Straight and Bi women like slash fiction. Gay or bisexual men like Bara. That is something that they indulge in because it is attractive to them. How trans people fit into this dynamic, would be an interesting study for the future and I have already done a post on that subject.

Straight women are completely different. How straight women show their attraction and what they are attracted to, is completely different to what gay or bi men like. Even bisexual women are still women and still writing from a female perspective. For decades, and I am counting the pre-star trek era, that was how things were. Women, for decades, had no other platform for sexual expression except slash fiction. The phenomenon started in the East, and spread all over the world. But Eastern and Western slash are completely different from one another. Why don't women just write something with a man and a woman? This is where we notice that slashers and other women are completely different. Slashers don't like to watch another woman’s love story. Its not satisfying for us. We can write ourselves as the other half of a pairing, like a Mary Sue scenario, but to be honest, its not the most popular genre because the only woman truly satisfied with the story is the writer herself. Women, very seldom, bond over Mary Sues. But slash stories are discussed as a way of bonding over a common interest.

Classic slash was hidden. It was underground, which was good because the uncultured riff raff stayed away. It was the ultimate girl talk. It surprised us, how similar our desires were and what we found attractive. Remember the faulty character Becky Rosen? Even though she is problematic, the moment Sam licked his thumb and wiped the ink stain off her nose, many of us turned into embarrassing swoony puddles. Why? He was cleaning her nose, for goodness sake. What’s so cute about that? I don’t know. We all just gushed at him. Remember Dean spinning the Impala in the episode “Baby”. I played that bit again and again. It had nothing to with sex. Dean was handling a car but I remember having a flushed face over it.

I read somewhere that foreplay starts in the kitchen. This applies to women anyway. So warming your girl up starts way before you even get her to the bedroom. So you start with a candle lit dinner and soft music and slow dancing. While he may be ready when he walks in through the door, she will need wining, dining, dancing and lovey dovey talk to get interested. Usually. Sometimes, she will appear suddenly turned on, but no, she just saw her husband helping an old man cross the street, and she thought ’‘why is he so stinking cute? Wait till I get my hands on him’’. But that is once in a while. We don’t switch on and off like men. We are, by nature, cautious creatures. Getting us in the mood is as important as the act of lovemaking itself. That is why art that is geared to women, generally, is over-the-top and melodramatic, indulging the foreplay more than the sex.

Ryan Gosling with a boom box [or whatever you call that thing] standing on top a car, confessing his undying love = foreplay. Jack Dawson making Rose stand at the head of the ship [or whatever you call it], making her imagine she’s flying = foreplay. Is it necessary to the story? Nope. Will the Titanic stay buoyant because Jack didn’t make Rose fly? Nah, its will still sink. Do we like it, nonetheless? Oooh, yeah.

For the past 80 or so years, we have kept slash fiction solely to ourselves because:

men wont appreciate it because its not their “thing”

men will misunderstand it [case in point: Misha Collins]

because it was sexual fantasy and some of us would prefer not to share that openly.

Did male actors speak about it when they did find out? Yes, in passing, especially if they were the subject of the story. A reporter or crew member would always tell them. In the case of J2, Kim Manners apparently told them what he had found on the internet. The Lord of the Rings cast found out because of Peter Jackson. What was their reaction? The same as all the other actor’s reactions: They would smirk/laugh about it, make a joke and move on. Then Misha Collins came along. The first time he had spoken about slash fiction, I had winced. Apparently, judging from the audience reaction, so had they. We really didn’t want this spoken about, openly, for two reason.

1] He was speaking to a general audience during his panel. Some of them don’t care for slash fiction and no, homophobia has nothing to do with it. If it doesn’t float your boat, it just doesn’t. Keep throwing the word homophobia around, unnecessarily, and its going to eventually lose its effectiveness because it is frequently being used to bully people into doing what you want, rather than for equality. So no, Jensen Ackles is not a homophobe because he doesn’t want to be up close and personal with Misha Collins. Grow up.

2] The sane slashers of those days, [and it was a decade ago] didn’t want their personal naughty little secrets spoken about so candidly in a public setting. Why? Let me illustrate. If you tell your friends, in a personal setting, how you like when a man runs his hands all over your body, it will illicit some “oohs” and giggles followed by their own contributions to the discussion. If you are sitting with that same gaggle of friends at a crowded restaurant and you say the same thing loudly for the whole room to hear, what will they think of you, especially if they have children with them.

Slash used to be one of those things a lady never spoke about in public, no matter how empowered she thought she was. Personally, I don’t think a lady has to relinquish her femininity and decency in order to feel empowered. That’s why I don’t like women, like Kim and Briana, who call themselves bitches to show how tough they are. Sure, I will break a man's face, if he puts his hands on me, but that doesn’t mean that I have no feminine qualities, and I won't exhibit this aggressive side of myself with a loving and caring man. I guess things have changed since the early days, and women are different now. But this is just my opinion and not relevant to the subject at hand.

If Misha knew how to gauge the audience, he would have understood there and then, that this is not a suitable topic to indulge in, where the audience was mixed and included some younger people, i.e., teens and children. What he did, was to keep running his mouth off about something he didn’t know. And its shows in the way he refers to Destiel as pseudo-porn. His fans were very angry about it, because it lessened their artistic efforts to pornography and nothing else. He said he went on Wikipedia to learn more about slash fiction. For a man who went to university, he is not very smart. If you have ever done any academic research report at university level, you will know that any report that includes citations from Wikipedia are immediately rejected.

Wikipedia is an unreliable source of convoluted, opinionated information that is sometimes not quantifiable and therefore cannot act as an academic resource. Plus anyone can edit those pages, no matter what agenda they have or how stupid they are. This fool didn’t know that. So he started to “educate” the still fixated younger batch [who have now grown into the hellers we loathe with gusto] in the audience and on YouTube as to what slash fiction was and that is why they like him so much. While other actors speak a line about it and move onto another topic, Professor Knowitall esq. will give his rather young audience a lecture on a subject he knows nothing about, thereby conditioning them to think that slash fiction is something that it isn’t. Is he that stupid or that arrogant?

If you look through Wikipedia, it will give you the impression that slash is homosexual in nature, and that it is an expression of gay love. The fact that those stories and artwork originated with straight women and are powered by the artistic efforts of straight women, is ignored. There are topics about queer recognition and LGBT relevance on that page. The page isn’t telling you what slash fiction is. It is telling you what other groups feel about it. I can tell you, almost a century ago, slash fans were not indulging this art form for those reasons. They were doing it for their own satisfaction. If other people like it too, that’s fine and dandy, but it is not about them. And what Misha has done with this fandom, which is bleeding into other fandoms via intrusive destiel fans, is to make slash about the LGBT.

That is why gay men are now getting angry because young impressionable girls are listening to him and turning a straight/bi female art form into an inaccurate gay platform. They are using things like closetedness, gay bashings, bigotry and even AIDS as a gay “trope” or theme for their stories. Gay men fought to change the name ''Gay Cancer'' to AIDS, because it was erroneously being considered a homosexual disease, and yet years later, we have a ''fake'' inclusive generation celebrating a story like ''Twist and Shout". No wonder gay men hate teen slash girls. If you write about a subject you know nothing of, you will write it wrong. These children [because they behave like that] are writing about some very sensitive and serious topics and they are romanticizing them. What person wont get angry?

In the old days, the two people who made up a pairing, were differentiated, by using two words: Seme and Uke. While slash was a straight female art form, gay men didn’t give two hoots about these words. They didn’t read the stuff. They didn’t care. They had bara. When “woke and non-bigoted, inclusive” slash fans started speaking for gay men through their stories despite the fact that these men have a voice of their own, the guys got angry because they don’t have a seme and uke role type in their relationships. Well, of course they don’t. Slash is not about gay men. Its about straight women and their sexual expression. And in their fantasies, there are seme’s and uke’s.

That is another problem with the Wikipedia page. When you look at the history, it starts with Kirk and Spock. The dunderhead who wrote that page, didn’t know that slash started in the east, probably Japan, although Hong Kong might dispute that. When it became animated in the 1970’s, the anime version was called Yaoi. The Japanese were actually making money from slash fiction way back when, by making comic type books, essentially novels with pictures. And it was those translated stories, which were almost always set in another world, that gave birth to Kirk/Spock slash fiction. Star Trek is also set in another world so to speak. The westerners got hold of these books when the Asians immigrated. The first slash stories were actually distributed in conventions, because the internet didn't exist back then.

There is only one other person who over-indulged his slash fan base. Harry Styles. He regretted it, because it ruined his friendship. So he stopped. But he had a good excuse. He was between the ages of 15 and 19 whilst in 1 Direction. He was a baby and didn’t know any better. Harry learned his lesson within five years and stopped. Misha has been on the show for ten years. He was in his mid thirties when he started on Supernatural. He was already a grown man who has no excuse, because he is not stupid. With the amount of damage the militant destiel fans have done, you would think that he would stop. He doesn’t. Because it gives him staying power.

The one thing I have noticed is, overindulging a slash fan [not necessary a heller - any slash fan] is like feeding a Mogwai after midnight. It turns into an uncontrollable gremlin. That is exactly what Misha’s militant fanbase is: a hideous collection of gremlins that he overfed and now they are attacking any mogwai that doesn’t show gremlin traits, even if they are mild-mannered destiel fans who don't like the leads beings threatened. What Misha’s dumb section have now done, is that they have taken slash fiction itself, and turned it into an increasingly hateful and problematic concept. Because, the general public, which includes J2 [because they have nothing to do with slash fiction], now have the impression that slash is a means of bullying and putting your indulgences before other peoples’ opinions and dignity, in the name of representation.

It also give the impression, to unknowing people, that homosexuals are boisterous and demanding people and you have to please them or else. The general public don’t know that predominantly female, heterosexual, entitled princesses are writing this crap. They think that gays are pushing slash fiction because words like gay, queer and LGBT keep popping up in a pro-destiel argument. Any gay man reading this, take heed, because these children are damaging your collective reputations. And if you don’t deal with it now, the PR headache you are going to have to deal with, in the future, as a group, is going to be immense. And it won’t even be your fault, but you will be blamed for it. How do you go about doing that? Speak directly to Misha. Shut up the master Gremlin-Troll himself. Tell him he is doing you a great disservice. After all, the mostly straight heller girls are speaking for you and he is pushing the microphones into their hands.

I always liked slash because not only was it a means of female sexual expression, but it was also a means of female creativity. Sure, we all like Cinderella, but it was lukewarm for some of us because, she was difficult to emulate. And growing up, we didn’t know she was a character to enjoy, not to emulate. Children always emulate what they see on screen. She was thin, pretty, a good singer with nice hair and small feet. I am club footed, bipolar and fat, with a lion’s mane that brushes broke on. I felt sorry for her because she was abused. I felt sorry for her because she was crying at one point. Then I remembered what I look like when I cry. Soft tears don't roll gently down my pink cheeks. Snot rolls down my nose, careening to the inside of my mouth. Not pretty. Not delicate. The story was nice but it left me feeling inadequate. Some women love it. Others, like myself, are “meh” about it.

When I read a bemusing slash version with actors in place of the fictional cast, I read the whole story smirking. I didn’t begrudge the beautiful lead [I think it might have been Jensen] because I was as besotted with him as Prince Charming was [presumably Jared]. I didn’t want to be him. I wanted him. I wanted the prince too, just FYI. I could be a fly on the wall in the story, without actually picturing how my insignificant self would fit into the story. That is what slash fiction meant to me. It was an escapist art form into a fantasy 'verse, that is custom made to put a smile on my face.

Now, Prince Charming is fighting for gay rights against his bigoted father, the king, and Cinderella is beaten by his ugly step siblings because he is a homo. And I look at it and blink. I am not the audience for this story. Empathy is one thing, but replacing your sexuality with someone else’s, is something else all together. Especially since every slash story now, seems to be about gay characters and gay rights and homophobia. Slash has turned into a one trick pony. How much could you write about gay rights? Slash’s creativity is running on autopilot. Take your ship, make them gay, make one closeted and unhappy, make the other out and happy, throw in a gay oriented trope, even AIDS [no decency threshold] and boom! You've got a story.

They’ve been writing in this way for the last ten years and they’ve ruined the whole genre. So much so, that destiel and cockles stories aren’t enjoyed by anyone except destiel fans, because Misha and Cas are in those stories. And he is always written as a precious smol bean. At this juncture, I have to point out that, to be fair, other ships on Supernatural and other fandoms are doing the same thing, because destiel fans bend the will of others to their own. I heard they are actually tagging destiel into posts about other shows. Other bloggers noticed that destiel and Misha are in Mother Nature tag. They don't even leave Mother Nature alone. Why? Because Misha has turned a harmless indulgence into an addiction. He is their only dealer and pursuing canon gives them their fix. They are gremlins on crack with stunted creativity.

Of course, the children argue that they can't read an unrealistic story which is why slash characters have to instead be gay. Oh yeah, then how come in Cockles stories, Misha is something pregnant. Sometimes, he is a pregnant wolf. So you can take your “realism” and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. When you write a totes realistic story, with gay characters rather than slash characters, you are disrespecting three groups of people:

the actors, who are your, sometimes, unwilling muses

the homosexual community, that you have absolutely no right to speak for

the earlier slash fans who nurtured this art form, before you ''woke'' idiots came barreling in, with your inclusiveness, and flushed their efforts down the toilet, all at the behest on one selfish man.

Decent slashers say: This is a work of fiction and has no bearings on reality. Then they go out of their way to not include themes that are synonymous with the gay community. The characters in a properly written story are never explicitly gay. They just like some guy, even though last week they were with a girl. And no, that doesn’t make them bisexual either. Remember, slash is a platform with a large percentage of straight females and bisexuals don’t want you speaking for them, either. Otherwise, nobody will dispute the hellers for saying that Dean is bi because he wore a purple shirt, once. The fed up bisexuals reading insulting meta on how Dean is bisexual, because of his food and clothing choices, are a case in point. So the character are fantasy slash characters. If I were to coin a word, then they are slashsexual.

They are just muses for the woman’s sexual expression. We don’t need to tell them what we are doing, thereby putting them in an uncomfortable position to amend or dispute our opinion about the subject. That is plain rude and borderline sexual harassment. Even if we are women and they are men. Treat them with the same dignity that you demand for yourself. Its got nothing to do with them. Don’t ask them. Misha, on the other hand, has no shame and will therefore never turn down a question. He will answer the question in a way that his gullible fangirls like, inflating his ego and giving him permanence in the show. Has Misha caused irreparable damage? I am afraid so. Older women, in the SPN fandoms, get caught up in life so they don’t indulge in slash as much. And so the brats are running this art form to the ground, teaching nonsense to those that are younger than them, parroting whatever crap Misha spews about slash fiction, in the name of sexual equality, representation and the LGBT. I am not even counting their online behaviour, just pointing out their horrible handling of slash fiction at the behest of Misha Collins. They still listen to him and its going to get worse and worse, until slash fiction becomes THE most hateful thing about fan culture.

Please note:

The analysis of slash fiction does not include tinhatting. Tinhats do not believe that the people they are writing about are mere muses. Cockles fans and J2 Tinhats believe that they people they are writing about, really are gay, but closeted due to public shame and ostracization. Tinhats, at least the ones that I came across, do not like to be seen as shippers. They are a separate entity altogether. That would be a fascinating topic for the future. Thank you to the tinhat who reminded me of this, because I completely forgot.

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coldtomyflash · 6 years

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I've been thinking about this for a while Mick seems to have easier and stronger friendships with women on LoT. Sara, Leonard & Mick all found kinship in s1A together. In s2 Amaya pushed past Mick 'dumb muscle/wild animal' masks & they are good friends. He talks sincerely & openly with her or openly hugs her. Zari trusted Mick with info on Helen. Ray loves him & wants closer relationship always. Nate & Jax are friendly. Martin & Rip are assholes to him. part one

2/2 On the Flash, Lisa was one to calm Mick down when he took things too far with Cisco. I just feel like Mick puts up less resistance with relationships with women then men. He has a thing for strong women. He’s attracted to them, he respects a certain type of women, usually strong-willed, take no BS or criminal type, or has something views as worthy. Ray & Nate try hard to break down his walls and connect and only sometimes get let in. What you think Mick’s relationships with men vs women?

I think he definitely does form easier relationships with women, and I think a lot of what you said hits the nail on the head. If we delve a bit into Mick’s background, that also makes sense.

To start, with men, we know he has a very tense relationship with his father, who was abusive. If we think about the fact that he went to juvie and was probably around a lot of other authoritarian men, not to mention violent men his own age and older for most of his life after that… I can see why he doesn’t get close to men easily.

Is Dick even older than Mick is in this scene? Honestly though…

And stemming from that, I think it actually makes sense that he’s let pretty much only Len and Ray, and eventually a bit Nate, close over time. Len because Len was a childhood friend, smaller and younger than him when they met and in need of protection. Though Len grew up into someone formidable and dangerous and cold, he and Mick were always even, and Mick was always capable of taking him (i.e, of kicking his ass) though Len never truly gave him a reason to for most of their lives. There was a unique level of lifelong trust there.

Pictured above: my heart fucking shattering. Every time.

With Ray, it was more… Ray is not like most of the men that Mick has interacted with in his life. Ray is soft and emotive. He’s confident and capable and certainly doesn’t lack strength, but he’s unshy about having feelings and caring deeply and wanting to hug, wanting to befriend, wanting to be kind. His earnestness in all those ways is part of what allows him and Mick to get along in the way that they do. Where Ray eschews toxic masculinity and embraces healthier masculinity (and indeed, many aspects of femininity) is often where they actually mesh.

Pictured above: Mick reconsidering every life choice he’s ever made.

(Eventually, Nate starts to fit into this pattern a bit as well, as we saw in Lot 3x07, though Mick doesn’t let him in emotionally in the same way).

But women. I love the way Mick relates to women.

And we can do the same time of analysis here. It’s clear he loved his mother. The way he looks at her photo in 3x07 is very telling. He doesn’t regret killing his father, but nothing is said about his mother. And when we saw Mick’s younger self in season 1, he’s very clearly shaken by the fact that he burned down his house with his family inside, so we can surmise he has a lot of regret over her death. He also mentions the music she used to listen to in the Legends pilot, so I gather that he still thinks about her now.

Mick’s favorite thing: bar fights to the tune of Captain and Tennille.

I imagine she was a bold woman in a lot of ways, and that the emotional strength and fire in her is part of why he appreciates those qualities so much in other woman.

It is kind of hilarious to stack up Mick’s interactions with women too. I’m sure I’ve talked about it before, but all the times he makes a comment about being into a woman, it’s often after she’s done something aggressive or if she’s particularly powerful and confident in herself.

There’s so many examples. From his “nice” when Lisa busts him and Len out of the prison transport, to seeing Kendra punching Rip in the Legends premiere, to him respecting the daylights out of Sara and loving watching her kick people’s asses in that bar. It even dates all the way back to his interaction with Caitlin in The Flash 1x10, really. The way she rebuffs his whole “the fire reveals what’s inside you” and she’s having none of it? I feel like that intrigued him a bit, the way it made him want to push and see how much mettle she really had.

He’s secretly nice, Caitlin. Honestly. Somewhere… deep, deep inside.

And then we see it time and again in Legends S2 and S3 as well, from commenting on the president being hot, from going from thinking Supergirl is ridiculous to being her new number one fan after seeing her kick some ass, and onward. Him calling Agent Sharpe of the Time Bureau hot is just… the cherry on top of that pie.

Number one fan. Or fanboy?

But the friendships he makes with women are different than all that too. There’s an attraction he has to power and grit, to be sure, but his friendship with Amaya goes so far beyond that, and his friendship with Lisa I imagine did as well.

Hug number one for Amaya. It was a bold sneak-attack.

With Amaya, he was at odds with her because he saw her as a rule-follower and she saw him as a man without a code. And yeah, he might be a little into her after she knocks out half (all?) the people on the Waverider and threatens to kill him with that knife and stows away on board, but their friendship doesn’t really start until she sees beneath the surface with him. The way it clicks for her, that he’s in pain, that he’s struggling, and that he has so much fire and rage burning inside him, whipped up like an inferno he can’t control right then.

When she tells him that she sees him, gets him, and is there for him, a lot changes. He starts to trust her, and in turn she ends up trusting him. It’s not wholly dissimilar from his friendship with Ray, and how Ray and him got closer once Ray displayed insight into who Mick is and what’s going on beneath the surface, proving that he sees him as a unique individual and not just as a ‘dumb violent criminal’ more or less.

Aka another episode where the whole fandom wanted to hug Mick.

And Amaya continues to believe in him and that’s just so important. He considers her a real friend and she’s never betrayed him even though he’s betrayed her (not that that Mick exists anymore, thanks Doomworld) and that’s honestly something special?

So… I can see why he lets women in easier (he has a much better history with them in general) and in his experience and line of work, I can see why bold, powerful women who take no shit are women he respects and admires and indicates an attraction toward. Mick likes mettle, and he likes people who can hold their own.

I think for a friendship though, for a real one, regardless of gender what it really takes is someone proving that they understand him and his depths (Ray in the Russian prison, Amaya in the old west after seeing his semi-suicidal state of being). It also goes a long when when they’re willing to do things his way sometimes (Ray playing getaway driver, Amaya stealing that booze for him in 1920′s Chicago).

Aka the moment Mick fell in love with this smol.

And yes, those friendships definitely look different across gender, Mick is much softer with women, hugging them, less abrupt and angry unless his back is up, but he does express vulnerability with men too sometimes, even if he’s not quite as “touchy-feely” (as I imagine he would put it :)).

Amaya vs. Ray hug score: 2 and 0. Poor Ray.

He does express his care for men too, in the ways he knows how (”no one’s allowed too kill Ray but me”). But on the whole I’d say his relationships with women take less work and those friendships come more naturally to him.

#mick rory #characterization #legends of tomorrow #lot commentary #child abuse mention #also truffles if you end up seeing this #i 100% copied your format for meta #because picture captions are hilarious and underused in meta #long post #long post for ts #angelfireeast #replies #gif-sourced analysis #edit: i'm mad because one of my gifs was the wrong one :(((#anyway i fixed it but whoops #ah well

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itswomanswork · 6 years

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How To Build Confidence And Attract The Woman Of Your Dreams

Do you want to learn how to build confidence so that you can attract the woman of your dreams?

I believe that confidence is one of the most attractive qualities that someone can have. Research has confirmed that men and women rate confidence as a very attractive trait in a potential partner. Confident men are comfortable in their masculinity. They know who they are and they own it.

They don’t have to be loud in order to be noticed by women because their presence takes over the room, just by being themselves. In short, confidence is sexy. If confidence is such an attractive trait to a woman, then why do so many men struggle with it?

I’m here to tell you why and how you can build the confidence that women desire. A wise person once said, “Self-confidence is the most attractive quality a person can have. How can anyone see how great you are if you can’t see it yourself?”

In the video below I talk about how to find the right person to spend your life with:

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(Click here to watch on YouTube)

Do you want to learn how you can master confidence in every area of your life? CLICK HERE to join my Life Mastery Accelerator program!

This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase a product through one of them, I will receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). I only ever endorse products that I have personally used and benefitted from personally. Thank you for your support!

If you are reading this, I’m assuming that you want to learn how to build confidence with women.

As men, we all want to be confident with women, but not all of us are. What a lot of people fail to realize is that confidence is a trait that is developed. No one is born with confidence.

The dating world is really complex and it puts a lot of pressure on men to show up and be the prince charming that every woman is looking for. Men are fed a lot of strategies on how to pick up women, but oftentimes these strategies turn out to be tricks and gimmicks that are far from authentic.

They may work in the short-term and get you a few dates, here and there. However, this is not the way that you will attract a partner into your life and create a long-lasting relationship. A lot of men are only left feeling burnt out and tired of the dating game. They may get rejected so many times that they think, “What is the point? I’ll never find anyone.” This mindset only serves to lower their self-esteem even further.

R. Don Steele, the author of the book, Body Language Secrets: A Guide during Courtship and Dating says that the desire is evolutionary and that females want someone who’s not going to run from a fight, a man who is confident in his ability to provide and protect.”

Some men think that they need to fork out a cheesy pick-up line or interrupt a woman’s conversation so that they will be ‘noticed’ for their efforts. These advances only make women feel uncomfortable, annoyed, and at times, insulted.

Lacking confidence is a horrible feeling.

When you are around an attractive woman, do you feel nervous, anxious or intimidated? So much so that you stumble over your words and end up running the other way for fear that a woman is going to see through your insecurities?

I can relate to this because I used to struggle with low self-confidence for many years. When I was younger I was extremely shy and introverted. Let’s just say that meeting women was not my forte. I tried everything and anything to get a girlfriend, but women just wouldn’t give me the time of day.

If I did manage to meet an attractive woman, I would be too nervous to even talk to her, which would turn her off altogether. I was a sensitive and caring guy. I didn’t understand. Isn’t that what women love in a man?

But I was missing that golden trait known as, confidence.

I started to realize that this wasn’t just a problem that I was dealing with. Other men that I knew were struggling to meet and attract women as well. At 21 years old, I decided to build Lifestyle Transformations, a dating coaching business for men. I hosted dozens of seminars and events and coached thousands of men on how to build confidence and attract women into their life.

From personal experience and my work with other men, I’ve found that the #1 reason why men lack confidence when it comes to women is fear of failure. Fear stops men from being the man that a woman needs and desires.

So, where does this fear come from?

We live in a culture where masculinity is associated with toughness and aggressiveness. As a result, being a sensitive and caring man can be frowned upon or seen as “weak.” What do you think this does to a man’s self-esteem? It can definitely lead them to believe that they aren’t manly enough.

According to research, there are 11 masculine norms that embody what it means to be a man: winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, power over women, dominance, playboy lifestyle, self-reliance, the primacy of work, disdain for homosexuals, and the pursuit of status. However, what about the men that are quiet, sensitive and introverted? They matter too.

Just because they don’t fit into one of the above personality types, doesn’t mean that they aren’t a real man.

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time with my Mom and sister. As a result, I took on more feminine traits, like sensitivity, empathy, and vulnerability. Unfortunately, this meant that I was missing the masculine energy that so many women are drawn to. My Dad and I didn’t have a strong relationship when I was growing up. In a lot of ways, I feared him, so I tended to veer away from stereotypical masculine activities.

After a lot of rejection from women, I started to notice that something needed to change. I began engaging in activities like martial arts, which allowed me to embrace my inner masculine. When I did, my physical appearance started to change, my confidence boosted and not surprisingly, I became more attractive to women.

The fact of the matter is that a woman likes a man that can take charge and that isn’t afraid to say how they feel.

David Klow, a Chicago based Psychotherapist states that “women like direct men the same way a salsa dancer likes a good lead. When there are clarity and direction, she feels relaxed. If she can’t trust his movements, they step on one another’s toes. If he is direct and clear in his leadership, however, everyone wins.”

Confidence doesn’t magically happen overnight. You’ve got to do the work to be attractive to women, every single day. Confidence is a mindset.

Let’s explore 4 things that you can do in order to build your confidence and attract the woman of your dreams.

1. Take Care Of Your Body

Let’s face it… women love a man that takes care of his body. This is one of the most effective ways to build self-confidence. When you look great, you feel great, and that package can be extremely attractive to the opposite sex. More importantly, exercise supports mental well-being.

In this study, men with the highest levels of physical activity, cardio fitness, and muscular strength experienced less stress than those who notched lower levels. They also scored higher on tests of “mental resources”—how energetic, capable, and confident they felt about their daily tasks.

I’m not saying that you need to look like Hercules, but physical attraction does matter when it comes to first impressions. Pay attention to your appearance, in a way that builds your self-esteem. Hit the gym, lift some weights and watch your confidence skyrocket when you start getting the attention from women that you have been seeking.

2. Dress For Success

You only have one opportunity to make a great first impression. Have you ever thought about the message that your clothes give off to other women? What you wear says a lot about who you are and what matters or doesn’t matter to you. Women pick up on this kind of stuff.

In her book, You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You, clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner talks about a phenomenon she calls the “psychology of dress.” She explains not only how psychology determines our clothing choices, but how to overcome key psychological issues your wardrobe might be bringing to light in your everyday life.

If you want to attract a woman at a bar, would you wear ratty jeans and a wrinkled shirt? No. You would dress for success! You don’t have to go all out in order to look good. Find a style that represents who you are and pick clothes that convey the message that you want to send to women.

This is a great way to start building your confidence and feeling comfortable in your own skin.

3. Work On Your Verbal & Non-Verbal Communication

When it comes to dating and attracting a woman, communication is key. This is where a lot of men get stuck. If you lack self-confidence, your body language is going to show it.

Men that are shy and nervous tend to make themselves appear smaller by looking down, crossing their arms, and curling their shoulders inwards. Not only is this behavior not attractive to women, but it also sends the message, “I’m closed off and don’t want to talk to you.”

Your posture affects the way that you feel. Work on standing tall, with your shoulders back and your head, held high. You will immediately feel more confident by doing something as simple as changing your posture.

When it comes to communicating with a woman, keep steady eye contact with her and actively listen to what she has to say. Ask her questions about herself and don’t try to overtake the conversation. Compliment her on her sense of humor or intelligence. The focus is on being genuine and authentic.

A woman can smell cheese from a mile away. However, if she feels that you are being sincere, you will be acknowledged for it.

4. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

When a man steps outside of his comfort zone and gets rejected by a woman, it can destroy his self-confidence. As a result, he may continue to shy away from new situations or environments that make him feel uncomfortable around women.

However, staying inside your comfort zone is a surefire way of never attracting the woman of your dreams. You need to put yourself out there, strike up conversations with beautiful women, and be OK with being rejected. It’s all about taking baby steps, every day. In the words of Brian Tracy, “You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.”

You don’t need to do something over the top and so far outside your zone of comfort that you have a panic attack. Start simple. Smile at a girl at the store, hold a door open for her or compliment her on her outfit. If she doesn’t acknowledge you, who cares! You are one step closer to meeting a woman that will.

This is how to build confidence and attract the woman of your dreams.

The woman of your dream is out there, waiting for you. However, she’s not going to magically show up at your doorstep. You need to do the work in order to be attractive to her, so do it. In the words of Larry Winget, “Be confident. There is no one who is not attracted to confidence. Women dig it. Men love it. Confidence adds hair, drops ten pounds, and takes off ten years.” If that doesn’t motivate you, I don’t know what will!

Do you want to learn how you can master confidence in every area of your life? CLICK HERE to join my Life Mastery Accelerator program!

The post How To Build Confidence And Attract The Woman Of Your Dreams appeared first on Project Life Mastery.

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