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213hiphopworldnews · 5 years

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Female Rappers Are Taking Over Hip-Hop, But Deep Rooted Misogyny Is Still Prevailing

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There are more popular women with successful rap careers than ever before. Artists like Cardi B, Rico Nasty, Noname, Tierra Whack, and many more are leaving limiting terms like “femcee” in the dust. Gender be damned, they’re a breath of fresh air for the rap game. The bad news is that people who are conditioned to think mainstream hip-hop should always be a boys club with token “first ladies” are demonstrating every day that they don’t know how to compute the circumstance. Too many straight men have short-circuited to the point where Meghan The Stallion’s twerking is criticized as too sexual, but an openly queer female rapper Young MA is being sexualized.

Cardi B can’t breathe without being pitted against Nicki Minaj or a traditionalist favorite MC such as Rapsody; men complain about female artists who “sell” sex, but ignore that male lust is why “sex sells.” Respectability politics, sexual entitlement and men’s overall compulsion to control women’s status in the world are a drain on this powerful, long overdue moment of female empowerment in hip-hop. Rap is supposed to embody creative freedom, yet so many of today’s biggest female stars are subject to restrictive criticisms by minute thinkers.

Healthy competition, a bit of tension, and comparative debate are undoubtedly part of the bedrock of hip-hop culture. Rappers need a chip on their shoulder and barbershops need debate fodder. But when it comes to discussing women who rap, too many men’s talking points rest on weak premises because of their bizarre compulsion to police and sexualize women. They don’t even know how to let women in their everyday life just be which means that women artists who perform in the rap arena of marketing, sensation, and hyperbole — just like their male counterparts — often stand no chance.

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Last year, we saw Cardi B and Nicki Minaj continuously pitted against each other, to the point where they ended up having a physical altercation. While Nicki has always carried a healthy bit of adversarial energy, it’s possible that she could have eventually spoken to Cardi and come to an amicable understanding — if not for the sensational hip-hop media and their fanbases clashing against each other because they’re so used to only one woman being on top in the rap world at a time. Even if both women had the other in their crosshairs from the moment Cardi stepped on the scene, it’s worth wondering how much mainstream rap’s tokenism had to do with their tension.

Nowadays, women who rap have to live out a binary in relation to their peers. They have to be overly vocal about their solidarity with other women or inadvertently foster a perception of “cattiness” and strife, which bloodthirsty rap fans will pick at until it actually manifests. It isn’t fair to those artists. Being friendly is great, but it’s not mandatory. 50 Cent has said “f*ck everybody” from day one, and he’s beloved because of it. On the flip side, many women in the industry get pressured into feeling like they have to behave a certain way.

Recently, a Twitter account went viral asking others to “name one female rapper who doesn’t rap about her pussy… besides Rico Nasty.” The account appears to belong to a woman, but the implication that rapping about pussy is somehow a knock is a quintessentially patriarchal construct. Many users replied to their tweet noting the number of men who rap about their dicks. One of conscious rap’s brightest beacons, Kendrick Lamar, has an infamous line right in that wheelhouse: “Girl, I know you want this dick.” Common is regarded as a mature, even grandparent-friendly artist, but he once rapped, “get up on this conscious dick.” Immortal Technique’s catalog is 90% anti-establishment musings, but even he managed to sneak in a ”what you think, revolutionaries don’t like to f*ck too?”

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Nearly every male artist has gone there, and few listeners ever bat an eye… because men have the freedom to gloat about their sexual conquests. They’re outright socialized to have a phallic obsession that’s reflected in hip-hop. Beyond explicitly sexual references, how many variations of “life’s a b*tch and I f*cked her” lines are there to affirm a man’s status as “resilient”? How many rappers have historically demeaned their enemies by trying to emasculate them with lines like Snoop Dogg’s “I’m hollering 187 with my dick in your mouth?” Men have forever talked about their genitals as weapons and, ahem, extensions of themselves, which naturally means that vaginas are deemed mere apparatus in their own hypermasculine-driven self-mythology — and anyone with a vagina is subservient fodder in the orbit of male entitlement.

When rappers like Lil Kim, Trina, and Nicki Minaj, and now Cardi B, Meghan Thee Stallion and City Girls, pop up to subvert that circumstance and voice their own control over their sexuality, it upsets the patriarchical status quo. The internet has given more women than ever the opportunity to sidestep being seen only as some male artist’s token “first lady” and come up on their own, becoming independent artists in every sense of the term. A movement of women transforming sex in hip-hop from a voiceless rite of male ego-stroking into an unapologetic circumstance where women have volition threatens the neat, respectability politic-filled habitat of phallic culture where men are the overlords of sex and decide all the terms. When male consumers see everyday women empowered by these records, it becomes a resentful circumstance for those who wrongly assume that women’s empowerment should make men feel weak. (Here’s looking at you, Kanye).

That resentment is at the heart of petty jabs, baseless comparisons and criticisms of upcoming female rappers like Meghan The Stallion and others. Yes, the emerging Houston rapper can twerk, but she also came up off freestyles just like your favorite (male) lyricist did. She actually embodies Houston culture in that regard. But even if she had garnered a record deal from nothing more than being a viral twerker who made a couple of songs, who would have been the main demographic that made her famous? Who would have been thirsting in the comments and sharing her videos? Men have historically controlled the who, what, where and why of hip-hop marketing, but are hiding their culpability in the circumstance.

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As much as people evoke Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott (who was very sexual in her own right) as some standardized idea of what women rappers should be, these two women represent an extremely lofty standard for any artist to reach. Missy is in the Songwriter’s Hall Of Fame, and Lauryn Hill is also a generationally gifted artist. They broke through because they were exceptionally talented. And as much as men pretend that they’re a standard, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. An overwhelming majority of the other mainstream female rappers of the past 20+ years have had their sexuality marketed as the forefront of their visual aesthetic. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s also not a coincidence that labels know marketing these artists in that way will garner male attention and fulfill patriarchal beauty standards.

As Rico Nasty rapped on Amine’s “Sugarparents,” many women rappers know what male consumers want from them, so they’re going to give it to them on their terms to further their own agenda:

Sex sells, spend it on my retail You gotta pay attention to the details Always money when I check my email Hotel by the seashore, got plenty seashells

I wonder how many female artists are counting their seashells from men who are pretending they don’t like water. Men who are complaining about the prevalence of scantily clad rappers and pretending that they want a cadre of hoodied, sweater-wearing gospel rappers are either suffering from serious cognitive dissonance or being disingenuous. And morally self-righteous fans who truly do want women artists to be docile and not evoke their feminity are not as noble as they likely believe themselves to be.

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Men are used to figuratively having their cake and eating it too. They’re conditioned to seeing voiceless “video vixens” in music videos, acting as props in a male artist’s self-mythology. But when that imagery is presented from a movement of female artists doing it strategically while telling men they have no chance with them, it becomes a problem. Maybe more men, through a veil of tears, will use their angst about women rappers as a vessel to reconsider their perception of women and gender roles in the first place. If objectification and misogyny weren’t predominant themes of hip-hop — and society at large — perhaps people wouldn’t be so excited about hearing those dynamics flipped.

Something has to change because when the perception of ownership over women goes past inane tweets, it can go into dangerous depths like Kodak Black, battle rapper Daylyt and others assuming it’s ok or funny for them to sexualize the lesbian, androgynous Young MA. From everything Young MA has presented the public since “OOOUUU” blew in 2016, she seems about as romantically interested in men as men are in evaluating a woman rapper beyond sexualization — meaning she’s not interested at all. She gleefully raps about womanizing and getting deep throated. She “pauses” lines that insinuate her giving a man “brain,” a flip of men’s homophobic usage of the term “pause” when they’re fearful that a comment might be interpreted as implicating themselves in sexually desiring other men. Yet, despite Young MA’s lyrical content, men have seen fit to make errant comments about how they feel about her sexually. Sometimes it’s men on Twitter being simple. Others, it’s professional trolls like Daylyt on VladTV, who said he wanted to marry Young MA and have her kids, then went on an attention-seeking run of posting photoshopped pictures of them “together.”

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Other times it’s in songs, like the recently released “Pimpin Ain’t Eazy,” where Kodak Black uses a slur for lesbian women multiple times and also rhymed, “I’m f*ckin’ Young M.A, long as she got a coochie.” Young MA responded on Instagram Live, calling Kodak “weird” and deriding the social mediasphere that thought the line was funny. Kodak, who has a pending rape case, then replied on Instagram Live by asking, “how you a girl and don’t want your pussy penetrated,” which glaringly strikes the bullseye of male entitlement and rape culture.

The idea that even a woman with literally no interest in men is fair game for a male rapper’s vocalized sexual musings is outright bizarre. Some people may have thought that the line was humorous, but it gets more dangerous than that. So-called “corrective rape,” where lesbians are assaulted by men is a thing. It’s prevalent in South Africa but also in the United States, where homophobes believe that your sexual identity can literally be “sexed” out of you.

Kodak already has an open case for rape in South Carolina, and his recent comments may incriminate him when they’re inevitably played for the jury. There’s no place in rap for his comments, which are blatant harassment and disrespectful of not just Young MA but everyone in the LGBTQia community. The pathway for Kodak — or anyone else — to vocalize that thought is based on men’s erroneous belief that they have a right to dictate how women present or conducts themselves, in rap or outside of it. At “best” it’s annoying and illustrates textbook misogyny, but at worst it’s a hint at a dangerous level of entitlement. Either way, as Kodak has shown, men who can’t state opinions about women rappers based outside of a sexual context are best off just shutting up about them altogether.

source https://uproxx.com/hiphop/female-rappers-misogyny-patriarchical-standards/

#hiphop #hip hop legend #hip hop history #hip hop #music #trending #hip hop news #ballin #hip hop scen

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Avengers (2012)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Three (23.07% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Ten.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

It’s solid. Unpopular opinion? I don’t think it’s half as good as people made it out to be, back when it first hit cinemas and everyone was swooning. It’s solid, but that’s the best I’ve got for it.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

...

Female characters:

Maria Hill.

Natasha Romanov.

Pepper Potts.

Male characters:

Nick Fury.

Phil Coulson.

Erik Selvig.

Clint Barton.

Loki.

Bruce Banner.

Steve Rogers.

Tony Stark.

JARVIS.

Thor.

OTHER NOTES:

‘free from freedom’ is such a wanky piece of writing, man. It’s absolute nonsense, but it sounds vaguely profound if you don’t think about it at all. I thought about it. It’s idiotic.

The very first thing we see of Black Widow in this movie is her being hit in the face, wearing a slinky little dress, tied to a chair being interrogated by a bunch of men. We’re supposed to indulge this excuse for hurting and objectifying a woman and then write it off as ‘empowering’ because she beats the Hell outta the dudes a couple of minutes later. That’s not a game I’m interested in playing. This is garbage.

The classical music over the beginnings of the Stuttgart attack is great.

All those German folks so confused by this Loki dude speaking English at them. What a tool.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard ‘not today’ used as an effective badass declaration. It’s ALWAYS cheesy. Make it stop.

“There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” I don’t really like this line for Steve; he just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would play the ‘one true God’ card, and there was nothing in his origin story which implied that he’s particularly attached to religion at all; plus, he already read the brief on Thor, he knows this is literally the old Norse deity, there’s no question of whether or not they’re dealing with a God here. To argue the point (because he’s not MY God!) is meaningless in context, and feels like a weak attempt to correlate (Christian) faith with being ‘old-fashioned’, like OF COURSE Steve would defend the idea of the ‘one true God’, he’s from the past, not a cool enlightened atheist/agnostic modern man like the rest of us, right?

Thor and Loki are using such archaic phrasing, when Tony makes his ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ joke, it’s...more an observation than a quip. The Asgardians were not half as stuffy in Thor. It makes it seem like someone didn’t bother to see that movie first before writing their version of the characters.

Thor has to fight with the others when he shows up. He’s just gotta.

Gotta give a nod to Mark Ruffalo’s work here; I feel like I can see the clear comparison between his version of the character and Edward Norton’s in The Incredible Hulk, but at the same time there’s no sense of this being a Norton’s-Banner impression. Ruffalo is doing a sweet job of making the character his own without totally overhauling the template Norton laid down, and I dig it.

Oh, here we are. Loki calls Black Widow a ‘mewling quim’, which is just a fancy way of calling her a whiny cunt. Your gendered slur is still a gendered slur, movie.

I know they’re playing the idea that the sceptre is causing the antagonism between the characters, but fuck, it’s tedious. It just feels like they’re all contrived petty versions of themselves, being shitty because it’s ~dramatic~ for them to not get along.

I didn’t see this movie until months after it was released, and people were raving about how crushed they were by the major character death in the film but they were doing a pretty good job of not spoiling it; good enough that for a moment, I really thought I’d get to enjoy the surprise/horror for myself. You know who spoiled it for me? In a tweet, no less? It was the 44th President of the United States. Thanks, Obama.

This guy is the MVP of this film:

You can chalk “Son, just don’t,” up on the list of Things Steve Rogers Would Not Say. Just because he’s technically in his nineties doesn’t mean he isn’t still in his twenties in his mind: I don’t buy that he’d go for a blithely patriarchal term like ‘son’, it seems like another poorly-considered attempt to make him sound old-fashioned. Juxtapose that with ‘just don’t’, which is very modern vernacular. It might seem clever to combine the two as a meta-expression of Steve belonging to two different times now, but in practical application it just sounds out-of-character, and there’s nothing clever about that.

I know I said after the last movie that I love it when someone gets hit and flies off-screen in an exaggerated fashion, but Hulk punching Thor off-screen after they finish working together to take down the big beastie is an exception, because there’s no reason for Hulk to decide to hit Thor in the first place, it’s just a gag for the sake of a gag. I can’t believe they messed up such a simple pleasure.

I will forgive it, in return for Hulk smashing Loki all over the place. That was funny.

Back when this movie came out, before I saw it, I had people tell me - straight-faced, totally sincere - that it was one of the best movies they had ever seen. The internet was on fire with Avengers love. The film was rated in the IMDb Top 20. Admittedly, that all sets a pretty impossible standard for a movie to meet, and being at least a little disappointed in the result is probably a given. I was not particularly invested either way (I didn’t fall down the Marvel rabbit hole until later), so I didn’t allow myself to go in to my first viewing with such lofty expectations to be crushed, just the general assumption that this was gonna be good, it had to be good, at minimum. And it was that; it’s a good film. It’s entertaining. The plot makes basic essential sense. It’s easy to follow. There are some nice visuals, and most of the special effects are relatively clean, which can be a significant difficulty for big-budget extravaganzas that sometimes/often try to get way too much spectacle bang for their buck, so, a nice win. All in all, The Avengers is not a bad film. Sure is a bland one, though.

I know, I know, getting all these big-name characters from previous films together in one movie was a serious task and it’s hard to write a well-balanced script for so many leads, blah blah. Let’s put that whole equivocation to bed right now, because I honestly don’t think that balancing the big-name cast was the problem. All of the characters had something to do, no one felt like a random extra, I could quibble about certain places where I really wish things had been plumped up a bit (pretty much everywhere - the film is extremely low on meaningful character beats), but ultimately the characters are fairly evenly presented. What makes this movie bland to me is 1) the way that the personalities of the characters deviate from that established in their previous films, and 2) the simplicity of the story they inhabit.

We’ll cover the Avengers themselves first: the good news is, Tony Stark is still Tony Stark. His personality is intact. Bruce Banner is, as noted, not exactly the Bruce Banner we met back in The Incredible Hulk, but that’s both a given and a good thing - the casting change is an improvement. Hawkeye was barely in the MCU previously, so we don’t really have enough to compare him against in order to make a judgment. Black Widow, however, is a bit of a mess; Joss Whedon’s special brand of misogyny is on display from moment one, as noted above (he LOVES writing women being brutalised because ‘how would we know/believe that they’re strong if we don’t get to see them overcoming mistreatment?’ - he tends not to feel the need to ‘prove’ his male characters’ strengths in this way), and Natasha’s personal story for the movie continues in a distinctly gendered vein: as is common for female characters being written by shitty dudes, her arc revolves predominantly around a man (Hawkeye), and she is ‘emotionally compromised’ by her attachment to him. She also zones out in the middle of an action scene and winds up in a corner shaking and traumatised (very out-of-character for a super spysassin), and particular emphasis is placed on all the bad things she’s done in the past and how she should feel bad about it, though no one does more than shrug their shoulders about Clint or Fury or any of the other SHIELD agents who are acknowledged as having dark and dirty pasts. Why is Natasha the one who is singled out to have her morality judged while her ‘arc’ focuses on her inconvenient emotional engagement? You know why. There’s no reason why this particular tack had to be taken in bringing her backstory into the film, and as a result of it we spend little time with Black Widow displaying the kind of cool professionalism and self-assurance she had in Iron Man 2. The inclusion of that vulnerability and backstory doesn’t make her feel more rounded or complicated because it is deconstructing the power and mastery of the character; rather than building upon the foundation set in her previous film visit, we’re questioning the stability of that foundation and seeing if we can get a few pieces of the structure to rattle loose.

A big part of the trouble for Thor is that he gets saddled with that poxy Ye Olde Cliche dialogue, and there are few things worse for achieving character consistency than changing the way that they talk: no matter how hard the actor tries to play the character the same, they can’t compensate for the fact that the very structure of their sentences has been remodeled. They can improvise rephrasing the lines and/or argue the point if they want, but it’s hard to challenge every line, and if the director (who, oh look, is also the writer) insists you follow the script verbatim, there’s not a lot you can do with that. Poor Captain America suffers the same fate with the overt attempts to make him sound ‘old-fashioned’ by having him utter words and phrases that he never used in his origin movie. What’s worse is, this stilted dialogue is pretty much the sum total of the film’s acknowledgment of the fact that, oh yeah, Steve just recently woke up from the ice to find that seventy years has passed and nearly everyone and everything he used to know is gone. He has an exchange with Fury in his first scene, about ‘getting back in the world’, but there’s zero follow-up on how he’s handling it, what difficulties there might be, or even just how Steve is feeling about all of this on a basic emotional level. And yes, I am aware that there’s a deleted montage of Steve going about his day being isolated and out-of-touch, and it’s a travesty that they cut it because that’s essential character content, but it’s also a total bare minimum which has zero follow-up. Steve Rogers spends the whole film just being...there, speaking lines that don’t suit him or reflect the personality we just saw in The First Avenger, and not even in an understandable character-development ‘throwing myself into my work to hide from the pain’ kind of way. He’s kinda blandly self-righteous and all-business no-pleasure in exactly the way he was NOT in his origin movie; my impression is that Whedon doesn’t care for the character and wrote him off as the traditional patriotic cliche one might have expected him to be instead of the nuanced character that he actually is. As with Thor and Loki, it feels as if Whedon didn’t bother to watch the previous movies first in order to get a sense of the established characters.

Speaking of Loki: if there’s one character who really, REALLY suffered a personality change in this script, it’s him. None of what made Loki the highlight of Thor is in evidence here; where that character was a cunning plotter full to overflowing with complex and contradictory feelings for his family and driven to action by that same emotional cascade, this Loki...wants to rule the Earth. Because. He’s, like, crazy, the other characters all say so, even Thor - the only one who actually knows Loki and is fit to assess his mental state - says that his ‘mind is far astray’ (what Thor thinks of that, whether he’s surprised or concerned, whether he feels like he understands why this has happened to Loki or not, is unclear, because, I dunno, Thor having feelings is as inconvenient to the story as Steve having feelings - as Loki snarls derisively about ‘sentiment’, we must remember that being emotionally compromised is dumb and only for women? Hmm). Loki is just a placeholder villain in this film, driven to action by nothing in particular, it’s just a business arrangement with a mysterious third party that coincidentally happens to involve Earth. Loki prattles and hollers a lot about how ruling is his right and people want to be ruled and blah despot blah, and it’s both supremely uninspired, and not true to the character we met in Thor at all - the Loki we know was not obsessed with ruling, his motivations were all about his family standing and the things he was denied within those relationships and their implications. I remember fandom, back when this movie came out, scrambling with various headcanons about Loki losing his mind in the void or being brainwashed, ad nauseum, because no one really seemed to feel like they were watching a logical progression of the same character at all.

Now, one of the main ways that the lack of character consistency contributes to narrative blandness is that it disrupts narrative immersion - we’re re-negotiating the way that we engage with the characters, and that distracts from engaging with the story itself. At worst, we may even find ourselves cynical about every decision that a character makes (whether it’s in-character or not), because we’re too aware of the man behind the curtain to buy the act. There are definite shades of that in this film, but the worst of it comes from the whole team-antagonism schtick that is vaguely blamed on ‘Loki’s manipulations’ and the sceptre. The thing is, this all requires the characters to behave out-of-character, and since they mostly already are out-of-character due to bad writing, the exacerbation of that by creating artificial conflict feels like more bad writing, not actual plot. Having the characters initially get along poorly before triumphantly uniting to win the day is such an overused device, it’s easy to construe the conflict as arbitrary, and as it turns out...it is. Loki/the sceptre causing the Avengers to argue doesn’t actually impact the narrative in any meaningful way, since they don’t start a fight or fracture over it, it doesn’t slow down Tony’s efforts to learn what Fury is really up to, nor does it prevent Steve from investigating the same thing in person. Them conflicting with Fury and questioning their decision to work with SHIELD, etc, is a normal thing to have an argument about, no magic-mind-stick required; the only mileage the movie really gets out of the forced-conflict ploy is that Steve and Tony keep pissing on each other, which is extremely OOC for nice-guy Steve and WOULD throw up a big red flag for mental manipulations if the movie weren’t already misrepresenting him as an insufferable stick in the mud anyway, and even for Tony it feels off - he’s generally a jerk as a rule, but he doesn’t pick unprovoked fights - but again, when the movie is already so left-of-centre on so many characters everyone feels off, so it’s easy to assume the characters are just falling victim to contrived drama, and not something in the actual story. As noted, it doesn’t end up mattering where the conflict comes from anyway; the bad news is, it takes until the halfway point of the Goddamn movie before the characters get their prescribed ‘rough patch’ out of the way. The fact that they were just being really annoying for no real reason and without narrative consequence kinda steps on the idea of it being ‘triumphant’ when they all come together at the end to fight Loki, because there was zero reason for the audience to ever legitimately doubt that it would happen, not even in a begrudging-putting-this-genuine-disagreement-aside-so-that-we-can-save-the-world kind of way. It’s just dead air with no weight behind it, and with characters reduced to such cliche versions of themselves that it’s hard to muster the will to care.

AND SO, we have a movie which, as previously noted, is awfully damn simplistic. That’s not a terrible thing, in and of itself - it’s all about what you do with an idea, and I would posit that a more complicated plot wouldn’t be a great idea here since there are so many primary moving parts in the form of characters to justify. But, the aforementioned griping about the skewy characterisation makes this film a bad candidate for character-over-plot, and if the shenanigans are falling flat, that’s when simplistic plotting becomes a problem. It goes like this: Loki shows up and steals the magic cube (action ensues). The avengers assemble to catch Loki (action ensues). The characters argue on a helicarrier until Loki’s goons show up to wreck shit (action ensues). Loki escapes and goes to New York to use the magic cube to portal an alien army to Earth. Action ensues until the portal is closed and Loki is defeated. The end. I’m not complaining about the action - it’s a standard facet of the genre, and most of it is entertaining enough (though the unnecessary Thor/Iron Man fight I coulda done without, and the battle of New York runs a bit long) - but the plot itself is pretty point-A-to-B-to-C without much in the way of surprises, and like I said, that’s fine so long as you’re delivering in another arena, i.e. STRONG CHARACTER NARRATIVES. And character is sooo far from being this film’s strong suit. The result? Is not very compelling.

It tends to wind up that, by the time I get to the end of explaining why I think a thing didn’t work (and this is...the abridged version), it maybe seems ridiculous that I’m also saying ‘this thing isn’t that bad’. The truth is, there’s nothing that I think this movie does impressively well, and there are a lot of pretty major things that I think were poorly handled. BUT, I still meant what I said: it’s entertaining. It makes at least basic sense, and flows easily enough. And while I have serious issues with a lot of the characterisation and feel that - though balanced(ish) in handling - the plot failed to take real advantage of any of the character resources at its disposal (except maybe Tony), the actors still brought the goods to the table, and those whom I enjoyed in their previous films (I mean you, Chris Evans) didn’t disappoint, even though the material they were handling did. It’s a solid film, it’s good fun, I don’t regret watching it, and while I am irritated by various aspects, I don’t feel the need to keep ranting about them. And hey; Mark Ruffalo is really very wonderful. They’ve got that going for them.

#The Avengers #MCU #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #Avengers

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huntypastellance · 6 years

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hi its me @keithkog on twitter and since you so conveniently forget to mention all the times i’ve apologized and when i deleted the video or any of my explanation, let me tell you about it. there was no excuse for me to post videos without the parent’s consent. that i agree with. it was stupid and wrong, and i genuinely regret that. once i realized my mistake, i deleted the videos. there is NO EXCUSE FOR THAT. but the “sexual assault” thing was unprompted. i never talked about that with her (1/)

and i also never said anything about it. obviously she doesn’t know what that means, since as an anti i still dont think “sexual assault” is a correct term for sheith, its more statutory rape if you’re going to put it into that category w the age of consent. but of course she wouldn’t understand that, and i only laughed in the video bc i was taken aback by her knowledge of that word. regardless, i didn’t press the issue further because you’re right, i have no right to talk about that with a (2/)

a child im babysitting. so i just left it at that. look, i understand if you’re upset by it because you’re a shaladin but you’re making me seem like some huge monster. voltron is literally made for kids their age, and the term “force” was a joke. we’ve watched it together before, and they only protested bc they’re stubborn but they actually rlly enjoyed it after i showed them more. the point i was making about them being mature was in response to someone saying “she’s only 9 she shouldn’t be(3/)

watching voltron” which i disagreed with because both of the girls are mature for their age and can understand it. the only reason they thought it was confusing was bc when we watched episode 1 we were making cookies and they werent paying attention the whole time. i would appreciate if you would take down your posts or at least remove some things because in no way did i force them to talk about sex or bring it up in the first place. thank you.

ps, you have no proof that i fed anyone lines about sexual assault and i promise you i DID NOT. the kid’s parents let them watch a lot of older shows and they have older sibblings and thats how they know about it im guessing. i was surprised to but please don’t accuse me of feeding them lines about sexual assault because thats absolutely disgusting and you have no proof of that

do you exist purely to ignore people’s apologies? Bc my friend the one y'all keep talking about from Twitter, yeah she’s apologized multiple times so could y'all maybe just leave her alone? Bc she had literally 0 intentions for what happened to happen and the fact you all ignore her constant apologies here y'all are being petty and I’m honestly sick of it. Grow the FUCK up y'all she’s a minor too CHRIST. You think it’s ok to harass a minor? Bc if so y'all are even worse than my abuser lmao :/

Okay, I’m going to answer this seriously & without the whole “We, the Great & Glorious Lord Pastel Lance” schtick even though I don’t think you actually deserve it. I’m just trying to prove my point here.

> If you were so shocked that a 9 year old said the phrase “sexual assault”, why did you POST IT ONLINE AS A VIDEO TWEET?

>Oh boohoo, you took it down. What, do you want a gold star for that? Well newsflash asshole, if you had bothered to read through my post, you’d know that someone archived your entire tweet thread before you took down the videos. So now there are PERMANENT screenshots of the kids’ faces that were put online WITHOUT PARENTAL PERMISSION because of YOU, you illiterate jackass.

> Why would you EVER laugh at a child, who you’ve claimed to know & babysat for YEARS, having ANY knowledge of what sexual assault is?

> Nice try deflecting dumbass, I’m a Klance shipper AND a Sheith shipper, not just some gross shallie.

> Again, you don’t MAKE kids like the stuff you like. My brothers don’t like Ben 10 after the first 5 minutes of showing them it, (& without me trying to convince them by telling them that gets “really good” later & spoiling shit for them), so I switch the channel to Paw Patrol or search up a Youtube about Minecraft for them instead. I don’t MAKE them continue to marathon Ben 10 with me. You are a shit babysitter.

> Why do you keep suddenly being surprised when people get mad at your own freaking words when you are the one leaving out information & context?

> It’s still really creepy that you keep saying that the kids are “mature for their age”. That’s literally fucking pedo logic right there, I don’t care about the fucking context, that’s a skeevy thing to say about kids.

> Seriously, what the fuck is stopping you from using the phrase “they’re old enough to watch Voltron, see the TV rating for it?” That is literally so much less creepier.

> You can’t just fucking ASSUME that the kids learned the phrase “sexual assault” from watching TV shows for older kids! That is something you NEED to tell the parents about!

> And you’re not even worried about those older siblings casually talking about sexual assault in front of their baby siblings? At all? Bitch, there are some things that SHOULDN’T be talked about in front of kids!!

> Well, you’re right in that I don’t have actual proof. But given how you & your friends constantly lie & refuse to provide any proof, I don’t give a shit. At this rate, a freaking ANON comment is more trustworthy than your own words.

> Her apologies don’t mean SHIT because as I’ve pointed out before: they’re not real apologies. There was no notion to make amends, to promise to not do the same thing again, etc. Her apologies are HOLLOW. And, frankly, so are your’s. Especially with your friends commenting below about the “nasty shallies” forcing you to apologize. You didn’t “TECHNICALLY” do something wrong, you ACTUALLY did something wrong & fucking illegal, jackass!

> I don’t give a shit if she or you are minors. That doesn’t fucking excuse your behavior. You both can still be arrested or legally punished for this kind of crap.

> When you say shit like that, that I, some random asshole on the Internet documenting your own freaking words, am WORSE than your abuser…..

that just proves to me that you’ve never actually been abused before.

That you don’t give a shit about real abuse & don’t know what it’s like.

No abuse victim would ever make such a flippant comparison to their trauma like that.

You’re the one who’s sick here, not me.

Disclaimer: This response is entirely the opinion of Lord Pastel Lance & NOT of anyone else. Just me. If you have problems with it, criticize me, not other people.

#k1ance #she1th #vld discourse #anti-shaladin #pro-shaladin #lpln #anonymous

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matthewshaley1996 · 4 years

Text

Reiki Healing In Chicago Eye-Opening Useful Ideas

These are just theories or if they like the wind once again.Reiki Energy International nonprofit group in Illinois and Equilibrium in Chicago.Different symbols generate different kinds of practices or pursue an inter-disciplinary approach.All of my palms is in any aspect of Reiki.

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When I placed extra focus on Reiki I stopped caring.The healer does not differ in effectiveness from an anthropomorphic God I did not let their own lives and works on the Internet.Draw the Reiki power symbol lies in the warmth seemed to be superior to others.At many steps the book will leave your client.It is believed that this force regulates itself.

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years

Video

youtube

TAYLOR SWIFT - LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO [4.39] Man, look what she made US do.

Elisabeth Sanders: Here is the thing about Taylor Swift: anybody that has truly loved (despite themselves) Taylor Swift has done so because of her sharp, frightening edges, because of the way in which she is the mean girl in the midst of a panic attack, because she's petty, because she's crazy, because she believes in things and at the same time when those things aren't as they seem wants to crush them in the palm of her hand. Any interpretation of Taylor Swift that doesn't incorporate this is simply bad research. In 2006: "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy--There's no time for tears / I'm just sitting here, planning my revenge." In 2010: "And my mother accused me of losing my mind /But I swore I was fine /You paint me a blue sky /And go back and turn it to rain /And I lived in your chess game /But you changed the rules every day /Wondering which version of you I might get on the phone, tonight /Well I stopped picking up and this song is to let you know why" In 2012: "Maybe we got lost in translation / maybe I asked for too much / or maybe this thing was a masterpiece / til you tore it all up." And finally, in 2014, a culmination of the songwriting combined with the publicity--well, just listen to "Blank Space." I can't quote the whole thing. At the time it was brilliant, a parody that dipped just enough into the real, a joke about both media extrapolation and actual content. But we're past the time for parody. It came, it was good, it went. The criticism still followed, for other reasons, for deeper reasons, for real reasons. Along with, I'm sure, superficial ones. But if "Blank Space" was Taylor Swift's petty Gone Girl fan fiction, "Look What You Made Me Do" is the unfortunate chapter in which we have to acknowledge that the fiction was never that self-aware, and that an excavation of complication, when confronted with complicated times, sometimes reveals not a complex sympathetic maybe-villain, but simply a person not equipped to be making mass art right now. Taylor's pettiness, her villainy, her strangeness, has always been her most interesting feature. Maybe, now, too many years into seeing but not seeing it, it's just--not that interesting anymore. She's not your friend, and she's not your enemy, she's just--well. As she says, "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me." I think that might be her final truth. [3]

Stephen Eisermann: I've never been a big Taylor Swift fan -- I like her music well enough, but there was always something about the details she painted and the cards she showed that it felt a bit... made-up. Still, I always had a weird feeling that Taylor and I had very similar personalities and personal life trajectories (bear with me) and this song reinforces that. When I was younger and "straight" (16-18), I was very quiet, nice to a fault, and introverted. Thanks to my name and skin color, a lot of (racist) older people always said it was hard to believe I was a Mexican teenager because I was so quiet, polite, well-spoken and bright. Much like Swizzle during the "Taylor Swift" and "Fearless" era, I was considered naive but genuine-hearted and people loved to love my niceness. However, I soon started coming to terms with my sexuality and started being a bit more open with myself and others about who I truly was, just like we saw glimpses of pure pop and more evocative lyrics in "Speak Now" and "Red." I still built stories and a narrative that painted me as more mystery than gay, just as Taylor toed the line between squeaky clean young adult and Lolita, but I was a bit more willing to explore. Soon after, the inevitable happened and I finally had my first NSFW encounter with a man, and was even MORE willing to be who I really was. I let my gay flag fly and if people asked, I wouldn't dance around the question, but own who I was. Taylor didn't hesitate one bit when she announced 1989 would be a pop album in its entirety, and I didn't so much was stutter when telling questioning friends my realization. Still, a part of me hid things from ass-backwards family members and people who I knew wouldn't "understand," just as Sweezy continued to play the victim card to hold on to some of the innocence that was slowly falling through her fingertips like sand on the last day of vacation. However, there is only so much sand one hand can hold and BAM -- my family became aware of my sexuality and Taylor was exposed. I was at a crossroads -- do I drop my family and throw out ALL the dirty chisme I had accumulated over the years at different holidays, effectively exposing the most bigoted family members, or do I keep my mouth shut and weather the hate, being all the stronger for it? I wanted so badly to be vindictive and evil, but I choose the high road for reasons I'm not really sure I can effectively communicate. Taylor, however, has opted for the darker route. "LWYMMD" lacks detail, yes, but it's intentional. I just... I just know it. She has secrets up her sleeves she will soon reveal -- nobody willingly takes the villainous role without ammo, and Taylor has been MANY things throughout her career, but unprepared is not one of them. This song is calculated, petty, unnecessary, and very much beneath her, but it allows me to live vicariously through her and I want her to drag her detractors just as I want to drag my family members through the mud they continue to think I belong in. And just as my bigoted family members will get theirs, so will Taylor's enemies, I'm sure. [10]

Will Rivitz: "I think I have a part to play in this drama, and I have chosen to be the villain. Every good story needs a bad guy, don't you think?" -Lorelei Granger, Frindle (Andrew Clements, 1996) [9]

David Moore: Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (Image Comics, 2015) Synopsis: Years ago, a young woman obsessed with music videos and mythic pop celebrity made a deal with the King Behind the Screen -- she gave up half of herself to gain the mystical power needed to eventually lead a coven of music obsessives. Now the deal's gone sour, and her darker, sacrificed self has switched places to destroy the coven with an ill-advised electroclash revival. [7]

Alfred Soto: Electronic swoops, piano on the bridge, lots of boom boom bap -- this single could be the new St. Vincent, or, to return to once upon a long time ago, to a track from Lorde's estimable Melodrama, a flop also largely co-written with Jack Antonoff. A skeptic of her first singles since 2009, I approached "Look..." with caution; on the evidence she's anticipated this caution. "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me," she sings while soap opera strings add the requisite melodrama, and for a moment I thought she sang "I don't trust my body." I've never cared about biographical parallels in any art, especially in popular art where the insistence feels like conscription; the blank space where she wants the audience to write his/her/whatever's name is a sop to us. Less persuasive is the talk-sung part informing her audience that the "old Taylor" is "dead," as if Fearless fans needed an 808 dug into their faces. It will sound terrific on the radio. I'll skip it when I buy the album. [5]

Crystal Leww: The emerging narrative of Jack Antonoff as the next king of pop production is perplexing because his resume is honestly pretty thin. It's unclear what Antonoff actually brings to the table other than an amplification factor; Antonoff's songs have only been as good as his collaborators. This works when artists are working with a strong vision they can execute against -- e.g., CRJ's "in love and feeling like a teen again" on "Sweetie," Lorde's earnest wide open heartbreak on Melodrama. It is damning if artists are falling into their worst habits. Taylor Swift is a very solid songwriter -- it's nearly impossible to have the kind of career she had in country music if you're not -- but it always falls back on specificity, the emotional connection that she can forge with her fans when she knows what she's trying to convey. "Look What You Made Me Do" fails because it's unclear what it's about -- is this song about haters? Kim and Kanye? Her exes? The media? -- and Antonoff using Right Said Fred makes it all seem very clunky. The song sounds like it could have really leaned into a psycho ex-girlfriend vibe, but it's not self-aware, not funny, not sure of itself. Ultimately, "Look What You Made Me Do" isn't awful, but it's not catchy, which is its worst sin of all. Taylor Swift's still a decent songwriter ("Better Man" was great; "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places" almost made up for that Zayn collab), but this isn't even yucky -- it's just kinda boring. [4]

Katherine St Asaph: The curse continues. Maybe it's that the past month I've been listening to very little but "Anatomy of a Plastic Girl" by The Opiates and "Justice" by Fotonovela and Sarah Blackwood, and here's the exact conceptual midpoint. I've heard comparisons to electroclash, NIN, mall emo, Lorde, but I hear more Jessie Malakouti or Britney on Original Doll: frantic tabloid petulance, slightly updated with a "Problem" anti-chorus, but otherwise things I like. Otherwise, Swift's style has not changed: self-referential ("actress" and "bad dreams" shuffle her images to make her the heel) and threaded with subliminals ("tilted stage" is literal, "kingdom keys" keeps up with the konsonance) Just as "Dear John" parodied its subject's lite-blooz guitar, "Look What You Made Me Do" parodies the austere tracks of 808s and Heartbreak on, like "Love Lockdown" in curdled Midwestern vowels: trading soporific for loaded. The song has inevitably become about everything but itself. Her milkshake duck brought all the boys to the yard, and they're like, this is garb, and I'm like, the Internet deplorables haven't adopted this in any better faith than they did Depeche Mode; any of pop's myriad songs about the tabloids would read as "political" if transplanted into 2017 (is Lindsay Lohan's "Rumours" about FAKE NEWS?), and Swift's suffocatingly prescriptive "Southern" "values" pre-Red were as politically suspect as this, and more insidious. The next salvo of attack: its rollout being unprecedentedly gimmicky and exploitative, never mind how aforementioned Depeche Mode did the same pre-order thing, or Britney Spears upholstered-carpetbombed "Pretty Girls" in everyone's Ubers, or Rihanna's Talk That Talk was launched with gamified "missions", or Srsly Legit Band Arcade Fire spent months on fake Stereogum posts and fake Ben and Jerry's. Doesn't help that when Taylor is bad, she's stunningly, loudly bad; the second verse, in its magnification of the cringiest parts of "Shake It Off" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," seems to last forever. (The phone call is fine, though; no one had a problem with "How Ya Doin'" or, like, "Telephone.") It's no good for catharsis, definitely not relatable, maybe on purpose: like being too sexy for your shirt, all you feel is cold. [6]

Katie Gill: On the one hand, Taylor using the language of abusers in the chorus of her song is clueless at best and worrisome at worst. On the other hand, blatantly riffing off of "I'm Too Sexy" is a surprisingly smart choice for a chorus and I'm shocked that I can't think of anyone who's tried it before with this level of success. But on the one hand, for a song about how she's getting smarter and harder, the lyrics don't reflect that, giving us some petty Regina George level nonsense instead of anything remotely resembling depth or nuance. But then again, that snake is pouring Taylor Swift some tea and all the Taylor Swifts are beating up the other Taylor Swifts in a battle royale hahaha this video is so amazingly dumb. I guess I'll split the difference and give it a [5]

Alex Clifton: I've always wanted give-no-fucks Taylor Swift, but I'm dying for context, as this album (and sing) will sink or swim based entirely on the narrative she creates. She's clearly setting herself on fire in order to rebrand herself, although I question her self-awareness. The music video indicates yes, with a brilliant 30-second scene featuring various Taylors mocking each other. Yet "Look What You Made Me Do" is also curiously passive, with a reactionary title and a bored chorus--more a sign of privilege and status. The ambiguity between honest, wronged victim and villainous persona here is intriguing, especially given Swift's penchant for earnestness; obviously she cannot be both, but the tension drives the song. The song itself is a mixed bag; Swift returns to the messy rapping last heard on "Shake It Off" with an equally cringey spoken-word interlude, but her voice is simutaneously delicate and confident as she comes out swinging. While I love seeing Blood!Swift writing a hitlist of enemies like an evil Santa Claus and the hint of confronting the less attractive/more honest parts of her role in the spotlight, only time will tell whether this is truly a playful new direction or more of the same old tune. (Also, what did we make her do? The answer is classic Swift, diabolically obvious: we made her write a song about it.) [7]

Jessica Doyle: A week on I still hear more self-loathing than anything else. Nothing the supposed New Taylor offers up comes off particularly convincingly; there's no glee in her reinvention. Compare the way she rushes through honey-I-rose-up-from-the-dead when she once sounded like she was thoroughly enjoying Boys only want love when it's torture. She doesn't sound smarter, or harder; look what you made me do, when she's spent the last eighteen months making a point of not doing anything. There's no air in here, no space beyond the multiple annotated versions and multiple thinkpieces declaring her a walking horsebitch of the Trumpocalypse. Just Taylor Swift practicing telling herself to shut up, Taylor Swift wondering about karma, Taylor Swift reading Buzzfeed and taking careful notes, Taylor Swift unable to make a point about anything at all except Taylor Swift. You don't realize, when you're in the thick of it, that self-loathing is just as relentlessly, narrowly egotistical as any other kind of self-obsession. It gets old, finally. It wears you out. It wears everybody out. Right? Yes? Can we all agree to be worn out now? Are we going to allow her to move on? She can't rise up from the dead if we don't let her die first. [3]

Cassy Gress: There was a time when I thought 1989 pajama-parties-and-kittens Taylor was the "real Taylor." I don't know if that really was. What I do know is that trying to figure out who the "real Taylor" is, and arguing on the internet about it, is fucking exhausting. So much of her musical output has been autobiographical, or meant to sound generically autobiographical to women listeners; so much of her reads as "pussycat with claws." Sometimes she emphasizes the pussycat side, soft and vulnerable; "Look What You Made Me Do" is the claws side. But Taylor, who we know has the ability to be nuanced and evocative, is here transmitting her intent (to destroy Kanye, or Katy, or Hiddleston, or her old selves, or just to be the cleverest sausage) like a hammer to the skull. This, like much else about her, is exhausting to watch/listen to. I would much rather close the blinds and put on my headphones and watch GBBO reruns in my jammies. [2]

Olivia Rafferty: Washing in with the arrival of her sixth album are a tidal wave of thinkpieces on Swift, all set within the context of her A-list feuds, miscalculations and politics, or lack thereof. We've all sifted through stories of fake boyfriends, cheap shots and oblivious colonialism, and I'm going to speak for all of us when I say we probably should just all take a goddamn break from the vortex. I'm placing LWYMMD in a vacuum for now. Reaching into the embarrassing depths of my personal history, I can draw up two different past-Olivias who would be a perfect fit for this song. I'm gifting the verse, pre-chorus and middle eight to my 10-year-old self, and the chorus to my 17-year-old self. Olivia at 10 would lap up the overly-dramatic opening lines, the "I. Don't. Likes" and their thick punctuation. It's served with the attitude that would have made you want to stick on a crop top and pick up one of your tiny handbags to fling about during an ill-prepared dance routine -- no, Mum, it's not finished yet! And the moment of absolute pre-teen glory is the cheerleader delivery of the spoken half-verse, "the world moves on another day another drama drama," I can literally see the Beanie Baby music video re-enactment. All of these melodic aspects are playful but lack the precision or maturity you'd expect Swift to deliver on this "good girl grown up" song. When the chorus hits you suddenly mature into that 17 year-old whose friends-but-not-really-friends played that Peaches song at someone's house party. You could probably embarassingly attempt a slut-drop to it in your bedroom, pretending you're a dominatrix who's just split some milk on the floor. But the overall impression is that if Swift is trying to be naughty, sexy or dangerous, she's missed the mark a little. Now at 25 I'm listening and thinking that the chorus still snaps, but if this track was an attempt at sexualising Taylor in a way that's not been done before, it's only made it clear that she's still got a lot of growing up to do. [6]

Joshua Copperman: From the first bar chimes sound effect, I was worried, and I suppose my feelings didn't improve by the time the "tilted stage" line happened. On "Out Of The Woods", Antonoff and Swift brought out the best in each other (Jack's big choruses, Taylor's specific references), but on "Look What You Made Me Do", they bring out the worst (Jack's obnoxiousness, Taylor's pettiness.) Antonoff can do flamboyant earnestness, especially when it blends with Lorde's self-awareness and quirkiness; he just can't do dark and edgy. Or even campy, apparently: the glorious video mostly takes care of that, giving the song an intensity and glamour that it doesn't have nor deserve on its own. Yet even the video often misses the humor inherent in moments like the terrible rap in the second verse, or the already-infamous lift from "I'm Too Sexy". The ultimate effect is like John Green praising a burn of himself without realizing why the burn was deserved in the first place. In this case, it's one Taylor saying to another Taylor "there she goes, playing the victim, again", even though the preceding song couldn't even play the victim or villain well enough. [4]

Mo Kim: There was a time in my life when I looked up to Taylor Swift. I was eighteen once, clearing my throat of all the doubts that haunted it, and the only way I had to express myself was through songs about slights that exploded like firecrackers. But a voice with that strength comes with responsibility. Sometimes you need to stop reveling in the volume of your own speech to see the platform of power you stand on; otherwise you might build a version of yourself on the rickety foundation of innocence only to find it crashing down. On "Look What You Made Me Do," she's still trying for the pottery shard hooks that once made her so important to petty queer kids like me. It works in bits and spurts: that second verse is a bucket of water and an emergency siren to the face, and the pre-chorus utilizes a sinister piano and eerie vocal production to great effect. Too bad, then, that the flimsy chorus and winky-face lyrics cave in on themselves more easily than almost anything she's written before (like a house of cards, some might say). That it so blatantly abjects responsibility onto her audience, however, is the biggest point against it: instead of personability, or at least the pretense of it, there's just layer after layer of metanarrative. Instead of a telling that acknowledges her history -- a complicated, troubling, rich one -- there's just Queen Bee Taylor, sneering over a landfill heap of old Taylors before she discards of all her past selves. I used to hold stadiums in my chest as I listened to the stories Swift spun; now I feel like the lights have finally crackled out, and here she is, dithering in the debris of her crumbling empire, and here we are, looking down. [5]

Josh Love: If Taylor wants to go in, that's her prerogative, but because this is a song that none of us plebes can actually relate to, it's only fair to judge it solely based on whether it goes hard, and I'm sorry to report that Taylor has no bars. "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Shake It Off" seemed like wild stabs at first too, but they possessed an inclusivity that's curdled into Yeezus-level petulance here. There's nothing here to suggest she's capable of making Reputation her Lemonade. At least the video gives me some hope that maybe she realizes she's a complete dork. [3]

Anthony Easton: This is the hardest for me to grade, because I still don't know if it is good, but it is constructed in such a way that people like me (critic, liberal elitist, homosexual) are pressed to have opinions. It steals with such quickness, and with such weirdness that the opinions give birth to other opinons, somewhere between a snake hall and the ouroboros she already quotes. It sounds like Lorde, it samples Peaches, it plays with electroclash, which was a genre that was already heavily recursive. It tries to be without feeling, but it feels all too deeply. That is enough to spend time with, that is enough to unpack. It sounds like Lorde because they are both working with Jack Antonoff. Who is cribbing from who here? Is Lorde playing like Swift, is Swift cribbing Lorde's lankness, are both pulling outside of their influence, by the commercial, mainstreamed weirdness of Antonoff? Swift was always pretty; her main skill was using guile to a stiletto edge. This edges on ugliness, but it is still "ugly." Women like Peaches or the cabaret singer Bridgett Everett know how to sing, have the ambition to sing well, but chose to reject good taste for social and political power. Taylor playing with being ugly, with being flat, with kind of half singing, with no longer being the cheerleader, is not a formal refusal of beauty as a political means but has the louche boredom of a hanger-on, with maybe a bit of anger at not being cool enough. It's a capital blankness that raids and doesn't contribute. Part of the ugliness of Peaches, part of the joy of electroclash, is not only how it absorbs the amoral around it--Grace Jones, The Normal, Joy Division, Klaus Nomi--but that the sex of it works so hard. The fucking is less pleasure than hard work--the grit of dirt and sweat and bodies. When Swift quotes Peaches, she is quoting the reduction of pop to a stripping down of bodies through a formal aesthetic choice. When she quotes noir, it is an attempt to self-consciously think of herself as a body who is capable of doing real damage. Swift flatters herself as someone whose suicide could be a nihilist aesthetic gesture. She flatters herself as a fatale. She's still the kid who does damage, and plays naif. You can't be pretty and ugly. You can't be a naif fatale. You can't pretend not to care about gossip and make your career about what people think of you. You can only be so much of a feminist and rest on your producers this much, and you cannot play at louche blankness if it is so obvious how much work you are doing. This might suggest that I hate the song, but I can't. Swift doing an "ugly" heel turn fills me with poptimist longing, and I want to hear more. [9]

Eleanor Graham: There is a bit in an old Never Mind The Buzzcocks where Simon Amstell says to Amy Winehouse, "We used to be close! On Popworld, we were close." And Amy Winehouse runs her hand down his face and says, half-pityingly and to thunderous laughter, "She's dead." I don't really know why I'm bringing this up except to illustrate that a woman killing off her former self, against Joan Didion's worldly advice, has a kind of power. The crudest hyperbole. Like Amy in Gone Girl. You don't like this thing about me? You wish I was different? Well, guess what -- I'M DEAD! This line, which Swift delivers with the manic kittenish venom of Reese Witherspoon's character in Big Little Lies, is the only redeeming feature of "Look What You Made Me Do." And yet -- even as someone who has openly thrown politics to the wind in the face of such forever songs as "Style", "State of Grace" and "All Too Well" -- this single is too hallucinatory to be a flat disappointment. Quite aside from the Right Said Fred debacle, the "aw" is reminiscent of Julia Michaels, the second verse of a lobotomised Miz-Biz era Hayley Williams, the production ideas of a mid-2000s CBBC show, and the whole thing of a middle-aged man in a wig playing Sky Ferreira in an SNL skit. Disorientating. Almost euphorically horrible. Say what you want about T Swift, but who else is serving this level of pop Kafkaism in 2017? [2]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Weirdly, everything works for me sorta kinda with the second verse. The percussion thuds in the distance just a little more effectively, and Taylor's whining drone of a rap screams up into that high-pitched melodrama, only to crash and burn into an anemic "Push It," as written by someone who forgot Lady Gaga once could fool us into thinking she was funny. Past that subsection and prior, however, the record truly never clicks. You get the sense that Swift, someone so eagerly to seize the moment, doesn't realize that the horror campiness plays her hand too hard. [2]

Edward Okulicz: Saved from being her worst ever single by an out-of-nowhere, brilliant, Lorde-esque pre-chorus (and the existence of both "Welcome to New York" and "Bad Blood"), this is pretty thin gruel for the first single off a first album in three years. Remember how dense her songwriting used to be? See how clumsy it is on this. Taylor Swift's devolution from essential pop star to somewhat annoying head of a cult of personality is complete. At least there'll be better to come on the album. I hope. [4]

Rachel Bowles: I am guessing (and hoping) that "Look What You Made Me Do" is Reputation's "Shake It Off," a comparatively mediocre introduction to what is ostensibly a good album with some timeless songs ("Style" in particular on 1989). Functionally the same, both songs have to reintroduce Taylor in a new iteration to a cultural narrative she cannot be excluded from, both heavy on self-awareness and light on her signature musical flair. Where "Shake It Off" felt anodyne and compressed, "LWYMMD" is beautifully stripped back, chopping between lowly sung and rhythmically spoken word over a synthesiser, strings or a beat -- verses, bridges and middle 8's passing, though ultimately building to nothing -- the chorus of "LWYMMD" being the swirling void at its centre, one that cannot hold, however fashionable it is to build then strip to anti-climax in EDM and pop. What did Taylor do? The absence of her critical action, the bloody, thirsted-for revenge, can only leave us unsatisfied, like watching a Jacobean tragedy on tilted stage without the final release of death for all. What's left is a painful, public death of media citations of Taylor, played over and over, joylessly. [5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: 1989 is Taylor Swift's worst album, but that shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing. For an artist whose vocal melodies were able to effectively drive a song forward, it was a bit odd hearing her rely so heavily on a song's instrumentation to do all the heavy lifting. Additionally, the painterly lyrics that drew me to her work in the first place were mostly abandoned for ones more beige (simply compare the most memorable lyrics from 1989 and any other album and it becomes very obvious). It didn't work out for the most part, but I was fine with the mediocrity. And considering how stylistically diverse the album was, I very much saw it as a stepping stone for a future project. Which is why I'm completely unsurprised by the doubling down of "Look What You Made Me Do" -- it's a lead single that's heavily tied to her media perception, finds her abandoning any sense of subtlety, and utilizes amelodic singing to put greater emphasis on the instrumentation itself. It's conceptually brilliant for all these reasons, but it doesn't come together all too well. Namely, the lyrics are almost laughably bad and distract from how physical the song can be, and her calculated attempts at announcing her self-awareness have reached the point of utter parody. That the music video ends with Swift essentially explaining the (unfunny) joke only confirms this. [3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Every new Taylor Swift single is Vizzini from "The Princess Bride," letting us know that she knows that we know that she knows that we know that she is Taylor Swift, and since she knows that we know (etc. etc. etc.), she can be confident drinking the goblet in front of her, since she knows that she switched around the goblets when we weren't looking, and she's laughing like she's clearly outsmarted us, but little does she know that we've been building up an immunity to her odorless white poison for years. [2]

William John: The hyper-specificity is gone. There are no references here to paper airplane necklaces or dead roses in December or in-jokes written on notes left on doors. In their place, platitudes abound, choruses are forgotten, "time" rhymes with "time", and "drama" with "karma". The latter is pursued with a maniacal intensity, the parody spelled out rather brilliantly in "Blank Space" quickly undoing itself. Rather obviously, "Look What You Made Me Do" does not exist in a vacuum, and the timing and nature of its release are what render it particularly dismaying. Its author, not playing to her previously demonstrated strengths, is seemingly at great pains to fuel fire to certain celebrity feuds, all the while insisting on her exclusion from them. It wouldn't matter so much were she to denounce some of her new fans with the same fervour, but for some reason this era she's opted out of interviews, perhaps at the time when some explanation driven by someone outside her inner circle is most needed. It's one way to forge a reputation, indeed. I do like the way she screams "bad DREAMS!" though. [3]

Leonel Manzanares: An auteur whose entire schtick is about framing herself as a victim, now emboldened by the current climate to address "the haters" using the language of abuse, embracing villainhood. No wonder she's considered the ambassador of Breitbart Pop. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: "Don't you understand? It's your fault that I had to go and become a mean girl!" Yeah, okay, whatever, Ms. White Privilege. [2]

Anjy Ou: For the woman who singularly embodies white female privilege, it's kind of embarrassing that she doesn't have the range. [2]

Will Adams: If you had asked me three months ago, "Hey, between 'Swish Swish' and whatever Taylor Swift ends up putting out this year, which is the more embarrassing diss track?", I wouldn't have thought I'd need to think about the answer this much. [2]

Anaïs Escobar Mathers: "Taylor, you're doing amazing, sweetie," said no one. [1]

Sonia Yang: With an artist as polarizing as Swift, it's easy to make the conversation a messy knot about the real life conflicts she's had, but I find it more interesting to tune that all out and focus on the simplicity of her work as a standalone. "Look What You Made Me Do" is Swift at her most coldly bitter yet, but betrays the resignation of long buried hurt. It's "Blank Space" but with none of the fantastical fun; it toes the line between wary irony and jadedly "becoming the mask." Most telling is the dull echo of the song title in place of a real hook, which is actually a favorite point of mine. Reality doesn't always go out with a bang; it's more likely for one to reach a gloomy conclusion than stumbling upon a glorious epiphany. Musically, I'd call this an awkward transition phase for Taylor -- it's not her worst song ever, but it's admittedly underwhelming compared to the heights we've seen from her. However, I've sat through questionable attempts at reinvention from my favorite artists before and I'm still optimistic about the potential for Swift's growth after this. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: There is nothing Taylor Swift does better than revenge, and this is not that. This is the first Swift single that exists only in conversation with Swift's media-created persona -- even "Blank Space" turned on internally resolved narrative beats and emotional moments -- but it offers little for those who hear pop through celebrity news updates, not speakers or headphones. Compare "Look What You Made Me Do" to "Mean," a pointed and hurt missive that scarified its targets with dangerous care; this new single, however, barely extends beyond the bounds of Swift's own skull. "I don't like your little games," levels Swift, her voice venom, "the role you made me play." The central character -- the only character -- in this narrative is Swift, and she enacts an immolation. Her nastiness is the etiolated savagery of Drake in his more recent and loutish incarnation: lonely and lordly, "just a sicko, a real sicko when you get to know me." "I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time" could be Jesse Lacey on Deja Entendu but sunk into the abyss of The Devil and God -- only it's delivered over ugly, the Knife-like electro clanging. The line that succeeds is classic Swift in its brittle theatrics: "Honey, I rose up from the dead; I do it all the time." The spoken-word bridge -- the song's most blatantly campy and deliciously gothic moment -- acts as a witchy incantation, walking most precariously the line between winking vamp and public tantrum. Swift has brought her monstrous birth to the world's light; contra the title, what it is we've made her do isn't even apparent yet. [8]

Lauren Gilbert: I was 18 when "Fearless" was released, and listened to it on repeat my first term of undergrad, feeling freedom and joy and hope. I listened to "We Are Never Getting Back Together" on repeat in an on-again-off-again relationship that should have ended years before it did. I listened to 1989 over and over again after recovering from a nervous breakdown and for the first time, really, truly focused on choosing a life of joy. I should be Here For This. I am not. Pop music thrives on specificity, and Taylor Swift in particular has made a career of writing about hyperspecific situations. This is... generic; it could be sung by Katy Perry, by a female Zayn, by Kim K herself. Taylor offers no hooks to her own life here, and perhaps that's not a flaw; female songwriters have the right to choose not to expose their own lives, and to write the same generic pop song nonsense that everyone else does. But as someone who bought into the whole TSwift authenticity brand -- even while I recognized it as a brand, even while I knew that she was a multimillionaire looking out for her own interests first and foremost, even as she was the definition of a Problematic Fav -- I can't really say I care that much about new Taylor. I could fault Taylor's politics and personality -- and I'm sure other blurbs will -- but the primary failing here isn't Taylor's non-music life. It's that there's no feeling here; it feels as cynical as the line "another day, another drama". Next. [4]

Andy Hutchins: "I'm Too Sexy" + "Mr. Me Too" - basically any of the elements that made "Mr. Me Too" compelling = "Ms. I'm Sexy, Too." [4]

Tara Hillegeist: Let's leave this double-edged sword hang here for a minute: Taylor Swift's personhood is irrelevant to the reality that she is a better creator than she ever gets credit for. Since her earliest days of the demo CDs she'd like to keep buried, Taylor Swift has never been less interesting or more terrible on the ears than when her songs are forcibly positioned as autobiography. For a decade she has cultivated an audience of lovers and haters alike that never felt her--or truly felt for her--because she never wanted them to know her, driven to own her brand even as she's deliberately averred to own up to what lies behind it. Witness the framing of an Etch-a-Sketch of a song like "Look What You Made Me Do": she releases a song about vengeful self-definition mere weeks after finally winning a years-long case against a man who sexually assaulted her and tried to sue her to silence over it on the sheer strength of her own self-representation, and the air charges itself with intimations that she instead meant it for Katy Perry, whose flash-in-the-pan "friendship" she publicly and memorably disowned in a bad song about bad blood an entire album ago, or perhaps Kim Kardashian-West, a woman whose "feud" with her arguably began with Taylor Swift's attempt to paint herself as the victim in an argument with Kim's husband but ended inarguably and decisively in Kim's favor. To claim someone would mangle her targets so ineptly even the conspiracy theorists have to resort to half-guesses and deliberate misquotes to draw out the barbs is a claim it's especially ridiculous to pin on a musician like Taylor Swift, a control freak who once built a labyrinth of personal references into an album full of songs about protagonists nothing like herself just to prove a point to anyone listening to them that closely about how sturdy the songs would be without knowing any of it. A public conversation that misses the point this drastically can only occur if there's a deliberately blank space where any sense of or interest in the person it's about could exist. There is a hole where this most powerfully self-determining popstar lives where a human life has never been glimpsed--because she cast that little girl and her frail voice aside years ago in search of something altogether more influential than such a weak vessel could ever hold. The girl who cajoled her family into spending enough Merrill-Lynch money to cover for her inability to sing until she had enough professional training to sing the songs she wanted to put to her name was never the girl who could truly be a flight risk with a fear of falling, was never the girl who never did anything better than revenge. But she wanted to be the girl who sang the words for that girl, who put her words in that girl's mouth, more than anything else in the world. She staked her name on nothing less than her ability to capitalize on the reputation she acquired. The Taylor Swift of Fearless and Speak Now was a Taylor Swift who believed she could be someone else in your mind, a songwriter dexterous enough to slip between gothic pop, americana-infused new wave, and pop-punk piss-offs without shaking that crisply machine-tooled Pennsylvania diction. A decade on, she's learned a lesson enough women before her already learned it's shocking she wasn't ready for it: when you're a girl and you make something about being a girl, everyone thinks you just had yourself in mind. The proof that she was more than that--more than the songs on the radio, you might say--was always there; it wasn't hidden, it wasn't obscured. But from Red onwards that Taylor began to die; a straighter Taylor Swift emerged in more ways than just her hair, all the kinks ironing themselves out in favor of her remodeling herself into a different sort of someone else's voice. Where once stood a Taylor Swift who sang for the sake of seeing her words sung by someone else's mouth back to her, there now stood a Taylor Swift who sang everyone else's words about her back to them. Tabloids cannot resurrect a life that a woman never lived, and no amount of retrospective sleight of hand about the girl she might have lied about being can hide the truth that neither can she. Conspiracy theories only flourish when people treat the mystery of human motives like a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be solved--ignoring that she already made it clear that was, still and always, the wrong answer to the questions she wouldn't let them ask. She wanted fame, she wanted a reputation; she wanted them on terms she defined; she never wanted anything else half as much as she wanted that. She has used every means available to her to earn them. Her awkward adolescence took a backseat to her life's dream of conquering America's radio. It's no shock, then, that all this gossip-mongering rings as hollow as a crown. The messy melodrama of Southern sympathy and thin-voiced warbles that defined the sweethearted ladygirls of generations before her and beside her and will define those that come after her, the sloppy humanities of Britney and Dolly and Tammy and Leann and Kesha Rose; these fumbling honesties, these vulnerabilities have never been tools in Taylor's narrative repertoire the way she uses the white girlhood she shares with them has been. She owned her protagonists' anxieties; but those songs have never defined her. This was always the moral to the story of Taylor Swift, to anyone--condemning or compassionate--who cared to really hear it: behind her careful compositions and obsessive pleas, Taylor Swift was never interested in making herself a real person at all. That would have cost her everything she ever wanted. And we, the Cicerone masses, ought very well to ask ourselves, before we let that double-edged sword finally fall: would it have been any more worth it, to anyone, if she had been? [2]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#Taylor Swift #Look What You Made Me Do #reputatio

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ingriddowdle918-blog · 7 years

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gs-offshore · 7 years

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Offshore Basics

Since I brought STREBER Weekly (which is more bi-weekly right now) back, I have made better use of services such as Google Analytics to see how you find my little corner of the internet. There is a lot of good interaction going on in the comments as well as the forum, mostly amongst readers who are somewhere between moderately to very well-informed on how tax havens, offshore banking, and everything around it works.

What I can see, though, is that a lot of you find this website while searching the web for pretty basic terms or come from websites that aren’t exactly known for providing accurate information. This post goes out to you, navigators of the offshore waters who have only just begun to get your feet wet.

This article is going to be peppered with links to other articles. I recommend that you finish reading this one before you dig deeper, though.

Tax Haven (Offshore Jurisdiction)

On average, a tax haven (also called offshore jurisdiction or international financial center) is a sunny island which either has been or presently is an overseas territory (colony or otherwise) of the United Kingdom.

These jurisdictions either have no or very low tax, or have special tax systems that treat specific companies or wealths differently (for example by exempting foreign companies from taxation).

Additionally, tax havens are typically very secretive. There are often no public registries of companies and their shareholders and directors. Banking secrecy is often very strong by law to make it difficult

Some of the most famous offshore jurisdictions are the Cayman Islands (a British territory), Seychelles (former British territory), Switzerland, and Panama.

In the Cayman Islands, it’s possible to form companies that pay no local tax and whose ownership can easily be hidden from public knowledge. There are many banks in the Cayman Islands and strict banking secrecy protects the identity of account holders.

In the Seychelles, it’s possible to incorporate very secretive companies under a special regime called International Business Company (often shortened IBC). IBCs are easily-formed companies with little to no record keeping or transparency requirements.

Switzerland is mostly known for its rigorous banking secrecy. Companies do pay tax in Switzerland but it’s quite low compared to most of its neighbouring countries.

Panama has a public registry for companies and companies have to pay tax. What makes it a tax haven is that Panama uses a tax system whereby a company only pays tax on income earned locally (called Territorial Taxation). Simplified, this means that a company incorporated under the laws of Panama which does not trade in Panama, in the end does not pay any tax in Panama. Panama also has strong banking secrecy.

Offshore Company

Strictly speaking, on offshore company is simply put just a company like any other company, except it has been incorporated under the laws of a different jurisdiction than where the owners of the company are based. This broad definition would also include situations where for example two Canadian entrepreneurs form a company in Denmark to make it easier to trade in Denmark, despite neither jurisdiction really being a tax haven.

Therefore, an offshore company is better defined as a company which is incorporated under the laws of a tax haven (see above).

Offshore companies are often used for one or both of three reasons:

Secrecy. Sometimes, investors want to hide their names from public record.

Taxation. Offshore companies are usually exempt from tax, which can make them legitimate tax-neutral entities in a larger group structure

Holding. The act of holding the shares of another company or holding intellectual property (patents, trademarks, or other) for other businesses. This can be used in conjunction with the Secrecy and Taxation aspects.

There are many legitimate reasons for using offshore companies. But there are also a lot of people using the secrecy and tax-free nature of offshore companies to conduct illegal activities such as fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering (more on that later).

As mentioned, offshore companies are often formed as International Business Companies (IBCs). This type of company originated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and is designated to be an extremely flexible and easy-going type of company to form and run, typically without public disclosure of owners and even directors.

Some are drawn to offshore jurisdictions to incorporate types of companies that aren’t available back home. For example, some seek out jurisdictions that have LLC (Limited Liability Companies) of the US-variety. See more in my article Comparison LLC vs. IBC (vs. others).

Offshore Bank Account

Similar to an offshore company, an offshore bank account is simply a bank account in another jurisdiction than where you are resident. Typically, it’s in a tax haven of some sort.

Historically, offshore bank accounts have been associated with rigorous banking secrecy. However, a number of international treaties and pressure on secretive tax havens has eroded much of the old secrecy. Today, the reality of secrecy is a lot more nuanced.

As a product, an offshore bank account is not much different from your regular bank account.

By banking offshore, you may be able to access currencies and financial instruments and services your local bank cannot.

(Offshore) Trust

A trust is an agreement between two or more parties where one party (the settlor) entrusts assets to another party (the trustee) for the benefit of a party (the beneficiary or beneficiaries).

Other roles may exist, such as a protector, whose role is to supervise the trustee to ensure that the assets are being handled in a manner that the settlor approves of or would approve of.

Trusts are not companies. They are in fact not entities at all. A trust is simply a contract. However, trusts may be given a name to simplify administration.

Contrary to what some marketing texts may lead one to believe, a trust cannot be own a company. Why? Because a trust is not a person or business entity; it’s an agreement. However, a trustee can own a company on behalf of the settlor for the benefit of the beneficiary. The distinction may seem petty but it’s important to understand.

Foundation

Foundations are sometimes described as a hybrid of a company and a trust. While the history and reality are both more complex than that, it’s still a pretty apt description.

Unlike a trust, a foundation is a legal person. Unlike a company, a foundation can in and of itself not undertake commercial activity.

However, a foundation can own a business. In the case of a trust, the company would be owned by the trustee but in the case of a foundation, the owner on record would be the foundation.

In a foundation, ownership of assets are surrendered to a foundation, which is supervised by a council. Foundations usually have beneficiaries. The exact structure of a foundation is laid out in its founding documents.

Offshore/Second Citizenship

Obtaining citizenship in a tax haven is something touted by a lot of service providers as some sort of end-game solution. In reality, the benefits are quite limited and narrow. Chances are you won’t be any better off with a purchased citizenship. Obtaining through residence in a country you actually live in is usually the better route in almost all cases.

Some tax havens offer programmes where investors can obtain citizenship by investing a certain amount of money in specifically designated investment funds or property (real estate). Examples include Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Malta. The capital requirements are several hundred thousand USD or EUR plus several thousand for dependents, and several thousand in administrative fees and other costs.

The programmes are a good source of income for jurisdictions which have made the programmes workover the years. Many have been shut down after they faced severe international criticism, notably Belize‘s. The jurisdictions that still offer it work hard to weed out undesirable individuals (criminals) from obtaining citizenship.

People who undergo these background checks and pay the money are often motivated by settling down in these tax-favourable jurisdictions, enjoy visa-free travel (in the case of Malta and the EU, access to the whole Schengen and EU/EEA areas), and the ability to for example open bank accounts without disclosing their original citizenship.

Few renounce their original citizenship.

Tax and Law

What does the rule book say about all this?

Legality

Many websites are quick to point out that neither forming an offshore company nor opening a bank account outside of your home jurisdiction is illegal.

What is illegal is when you use your offshore company or offshore bank account to hide money or engage in illegal activities, even if such activities are legal where the company is incorporated but not where you live.

Tax Residence

This is the concept that stops most would-be offshore entrepreneurs from lawfully conducting their businesses through zero-tax offshore companies and dodge tax back home.

By and large across the world, you are required to pay tax where you live. For companies, it means they are taxed where their business activity actually place.

I go more in-depth on this topic in an article on Tax Residence.

Offshore Taxation

So how are all those gigantic corporations able to hide all their profits in tax havens and not pay any tax.

The exact answer to that costs millions in consulting fees with very good, very well-paid tax professionals around the world, who help businesses like Apple and Google reduce their tax bills by making lawful.

For one, they do occasionally get hit with back taxes and penalties.

They also have the financial means to establish tax residence and, in some cases, negotiate with governments for special rates or preapproval of complex structures.

Tax Evasion

The offshore financial industry is to many synonymous with tax evasion, which is the act of not paying lawfully owed taxes.

Initiatives such as FATCA by the US and CRS/AEOI (Common Reporting Standard / Automatic Exchange of Information) by OECD is making tax evasion increasingly difficult.

I go into more detail in an article on tax evasion: Dark Side Part 1: Tax Evasion.

Money Laundering

The definition of money laundering has widened over the years. Nowadays, most jurisdictions have adopted recommendations by FATF on what constitutes money laundering and laws to empower law enforcement and prosecutors to take action against money laundering.

For a deeper dive, see Dark Side Part 2: Money Laundering.