#is this because I became a teenager in like 2010 or is this a widespread thing

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

All those guys who are super focused on looking like a “chad” because they want pussy, have absolutely no idea what numbers emo twinks can get

#emma posts #girls. and more. will see a toothpick of a man who looks like he doesn’t see the sun and his hair is part of why he can’t see it #and will go 👀 #I know this from personal experience looking at emo guys #not the only people I find attractive but they have long been my weakness #emo girls can do this too sometimes #I’m not even primarily emo. I’m mostly goth. but the emo boys have something right #is this because I became a teenager in like 2010 or is this a widespread thing #this is a joke post #do not take it too seriously #but I’m not lying about the emo guys thing 👀 #more guys need long dark hair. i don’t care if a bunch of them already do. we need even more #you don’t have to be super pale either. just emo with that long dark hair #they also really underestimate how far being funny and having shared interests can get you

[osmanthusoolong]

I’m not linking directly to the article about how “Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet”, because it’s very very stupid, though it’s easy to find, but my goodness, does it repeatedly touch on some genuine problems while getting the causes absolutely backassward and not realizing that the world in fact exists outside of fandom.

“Though this may sound like a niche fandom issue, this modern puritanism has spread far into the wider culture, intersecting with both a broader media illiteracy and a moral panic that crosses the political spectrum.”

Yeah, it’s almost like we’re living in a period of fascist backlash that’s been building for decades and is more or less mainstream in the overwhelmingly US-dominated spaces being discussed. Glad you noticed once it soaked into the Voltron shipping world.

“The Tumblr culture of the early 2010s rapidly shifted an entire generation of social media users toward the left. That shift started not on Tumblr, but on LiveJournal, thanks to a widespread, year-long conversation about racism in geek culture in 2009 that became known as RaceFail.”

Huh, yeah, I’m sure these cultural shifts came entirely from LJ and early tumblr, I really remember that well. I think there might have been some other stuff with like the stock market around then, maybe a couple of people got really mad about an election, something about wars and some financial street being occupied, but really, that was all LJ.

There’s an absolutely constant incredulity at the idea of fandom ship wars being a thing that people get worked up about, which like. That phenomenon is old enough to have grandkids, Lmao. (I am not a fandom person, but I am a person with a long interest in fandom and culture.) There’s a constant claim that people using leftist language as a means of attacking, bad-jacketing and kicking others out for personal reasons is a zoomer invention, which at least proves that the author hasn’t much knowledge of leftist history.

“It’s not a coincidence that anti-fandom discourse, which has single-handedly reframed decades of sex positivity in fandom, has also coincided with a broader crackdown on sex positivity across the internet.”

I don’t know how to tell you that fandom is actually not that important, and horrid infighting on a dying social media site that has never been profitable, is not actually shaping the world’s sexual politics. It is influenced by them. It’s not “coinciding”, it’s a “direct result of”.

“FOSTA seems to have weakened the natural resistance of fandom and internet culture at large to the US’s broader puritanical, anti-sex culture. The purity movement formally began in the ’90s within evangelical culture as a way of normalizing an abstinence-only approach to sex, especially among teens. In the modern era, the language of this movement has converged with that of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who enact a regressive approach to sex and gender expression.”

You are literally acknowledging that this is a larger cultural thing and not a group of socially reactionary teenagers on tumblr dot com. There is also something about the use of a term referring to religious abuse that starts in early childhood being applied to even very terrible fandom politics? And yes, the terves have been the architects of the sex-negative movement since the 80s, of course their fingerprints are all over it, especially since they’ve been working openly with the Christian Right.

“One positive development is that Tumblr recently brought back, in a limited capacity, the ability to create NSFW content on the site. While this won’t restore the zany porn-for-all days of yesteryear, it might encourage the return of sex-positive communities to drown out the noisy, harassing fringe of haters.”

Yeah, that’s very optimistic of you.

“Then again, if anyone can creatively respond to a culture of increasingly absurd attacks on ingenuity and imagination, it’s an army of passionate deviants who’ve historically been vanguards of the weird, the queer, and the subversive. They’re sexual rebels and literary freedom fighters”

I thought they were silenced by accusations of Homestuck fandom, or have become sinister zoomers single-handedly shaping the culture war for the right?

There’s some good observations about the panopticon of social media, and ways that deeply unserious people weaponize political aesthetics, but it’s absolutely reversing cause and symptoms. Fandom is getting reactionary because everywhere is, if you think fandom is the source of all culture, grass-touching should be considered.

#long post #I have a migraine and am feeling uncharitable #but come on now

[mariska]

heyyy um i got a few new followers from, im assuming, the general population migration from twitter to here in the past few days and i just wanted 2 give the new folks a lil welcome greeting so.....welcome 2 my Home Page if u are one of those people im glad u like whatever i have to offer on here lol ✌️ idk how many people are completely new to tumblr in general or how many are like, tumblr users as well who either used both and decided to stick with this one over the other or are returning because of how batshit horrible it is Over There At The Bird Shit Site rn but just as a general bit of information, this has been my "personal" blog since i was 13 in 2010 so there is definitely not any kind of concrete theme or specific type of stuff i post, i've always used it pretty much as the one online social media site where i feel like i can actually be my authentic self, so sometimes i do unintentionally ramble about random stuff on my mind or a really bad day i've had or frustrations having to do with my disabilities; i did a lot more of that as a teenager and it honestly became Not A Great Coping Method for me at the time so i try not to info dump about negative stuff in my personal life on here like i did years ago, but unfortunately because i do have a lot of overlapping issues with both physical, neurological and mental health sometimes i'm just having a real bad day and this blog ends up being the only place i feel comfortable enough in the moment to rant. i just figured it's worth mentioning in case anyone is bothered or if that is a potential trigger for other peoples' own individual struggles, these days if i just really need to get something off my chest and feel like this is the only place where i can do that it's usually regarding medical health problems/symptoms that i'm not coping well with.

i think a few people may have followed me/found this blog from my 'as seen on my disney princess tv' posts that i like to do on here, so if you are one of those new followers, hello and thank you so much for encouraging that fun hobby of mine!! i mention it every once in a while but if you're new here you wouldn't know obviously; i am always super happy to take suggestions or requests for specific movies/shows/media that people would like to see me play on the pink princess tv and make a fancy photoset of, so i will always be open to requests for that whether its by sending a message in my inbox, leaving a reply on a post or even just like, tagging my username on a post for a specific piece of media and being like 'you should make a tv post for this', feel free to do any of those if u would like to!!

one last thing for this post i promise, this one is more of a request of my own and it's largely out of my control but i wanted to quickly say it at some point; i've never used twitter for any amount of time more than like 5 minutes 10 years ago (and a throwaway account i have for the purpose of making lobby note sketches in Splatoon games since u have to post them to twitter to put them in the game which is very silly to me), so i'm very unfamiliar with the general 'thread' type post format that seems to be the norm on there, but in this past week my blog here keeps getting "mentioned" in posts that have nothing to do with me by people i do not know because its a one word pretty widespread first name, and im not mad or anything about it, but it is really annoying honestly and i know nobody is doing it intentionally so i just wanted to let folks know: if you use the @ symbol in pretty much any text on this site except like, the tags of a post, and someone's blog url/username exists on here, it will tag that user in your post (including instances like replying in the comment reply part of a post that you didn't originally post yourself) even if there's more to the username before or after the part with an active url in it (for example, one instance from this week i got unintentionally tagged in started with 'mariska' and then had an underscore with some other words past that, so my account was automatically tagged and i got a notification that i was mentioned in a post even though it was just that first 'mariska' section of the username). i just wanted to ask everyone who may not be used to the different format style of posts on here vs shorter twitter threads to be aware of that Being A Thing, because it's already happened quite a few times and i do get notified of it every time i would very much appreciate not being brought into random posts via unintentional url mentions and i will most likely just block people if it continues to happen because i'm legitimately concerned that at some point it could end up being a case of my url being mentioned in a post or reply that is actively triggering to my mental health or includes disturbing content or something like that, thankfully that hasn't been the case so far, but just please double check that you aren't tagging a tumblr user in something before you post or reply; a good way to know if you unintentionally have done that is if the word typed after the @ is like, a lighter gray than the regular black default text, and also if you go to post something and you're not sure if someone's blog got tagged in it, an easy way to check is to first save that post as a draft (there should be a click/tap drop menu next to the 'post' button on both mobile and desktop versions of this site, if you bring up that menu it'll show a few different options like 'save as draft', 'add to queue', etc) and then go into your account's drafts and see if the post has that light gray url mention link in it, it should un-link the tagged person if you do something like adding a space between the @ and the username or using a backslash before the username like @/examplename.

sorry for the super long random post about all that LOL, i think i'll probably type up a much shorter and easier to read introduction post to pin at the top of my blog in the very near future, but in the meantime thanks for checking out my lil 2020s geocities homepage lmao 😌✌️

#long post

[sawadeekannyeong]

Thailand: Southeast Asia’s unexpected epicentre of K-pop

How Thailand contributes to South Korea, and how South Korea gives back in return

i. Intro

Video: Clip from Thai entertainment show hosted by Moddam Kachapa. (Source: YouTube)

On September 11, 2021, Thai MC Moddam Kachapa talked about the solo debut success of Blackpink’s Lisa.

“This is what we call world class, truly world class, it’s finally happened to our country.”

Lisa (real name Lalisa Manoban), a K-pop idol who was born and raised in Thailand, got her start under YG Entertainment in 2016, as a member of girl group Blackpink. The group itself has achieved worldwide success, even being credited by South Korean president Moon Jae-In for spreading K-pop content across the globe. Lisa is the only member of the group who is not Korean, and the third to break out into solo endeavours.

Her debut single album Lalisa was considered a huge success. With 736,000 copies sold in South Korea within the first week, it broke the all-time record for most sales in a single week for any release by a female musician — leaving her more than worthy of a celebration.

But in acknowledging Lisa’s success, Kachapa discredited the success of other Thai K-pop idols in the industry: namely, 2PM’s Nichkhun and GOT7’s BamBam.

“We’ve never seen a (Thai) superstar go this far - back then we had Nichkhun, but he wasn’t successful to this degree. We also have BamBam, but he too didn’t manage to get this far.”

Photo: Screenshots of netizens’ tweets regarding Kachapa’s statements. (Source: Twitter)

His statements struck a chord with long-time fans of both artists, who felt there was no need to bring them down in order to praise Lisa. Many even acknowledged that the three are friends, and did not see one another as competition.

Photo: BamBam, Nichkhun and Lisa with one another. (Source: various)

This incident proves one thing – Thai fans of K-pop are proud of all the success their own citizens have achieved, and actively acknowledge that debuting in the K-pop industry is an achievement to laud over. It reflects the level of respect Thai netizens have for K-pop, revealing just how popular K-pop is in Thailand.

ii. The import of Thai idols

A survey conducted with 500 Thai citizens in 2019 revealed that 45.6 percent of respondents considered K-pop to be very popular in the nation, with an additional 27.2 percent considering it to be quite popular. The Korean Wave, specifically the rise of K-pop, has been present in Thailand for more than decade now.

The import of talents like Nichkhun, BamBam and Lisa are both a result of this rise, and also help to maintain this popularity. The respect they are treated with in their home country is nearly unparalleled.

Nichkhun (2PM)

In 2005, when he was just 17, Nichkhun was scouted by JYPE Entertainment representatives while at the Los Angeles Korean Music Festival with some friends. He admitted to having no knowledge of Korean culture, and did not understand why he was scouted. 

“I didn’t know any singers, I didn’t know what JYP was and when I was scouted, I was really skeptical about it because I don’t really speak Korean, I didn’t know anybody there.”

The Los Angeles Korean Music Festival (now known as the Korea Times Music Festival) was launched in 2003 to give Korean-Americans living in Southern California a taste of “home”. The festival grew increasingly popular among non-Koreans, due to the widespread recognition of Korean culture in the United States, and in 2013, 95 per cent of tickets were purchased by non-Koreans.

Video: 2PM performing at the 2014 Los Angeles Korean Music Festival. (Source: YouTube)

The booming presence of the Korean community in Southern California and the rise of Hallyu in the United States were both factors that contributed to Nichkhun’s recruitment into JYPE. His debut as a member of 2PM in 2008 cemented his status as the world’s first K-pop idol from Thailand.

He is incredibly popular in his home country, earning the nickname “Thai Prince” for his good looks, wealth and talent. He also acknowledges that as a foreign K-pop idol, he helps to globalise K-pop, and spread awareness of it beyond just South Korea.

I think I’m the international bridge that connects the group to places outside Korea. If the group were only Korean members, the reach would be very Korean. But because I’m there, I make the group a little more international.

BamBam (GOT7)

BamBam (born Kunpimook Bhuwakul), is a member of GOT7, formerly under JYP Entertainment. Growing up in Thailand, his interest in Korean culture was primarily because his mother was a huge fan of singer Rain. The two of them even attended some Rain concerts together in Thailand, a testament to the singer’s popularity in the region.

BamBam actively took part in K-pop competitions growing up in Thailand, like a Rain cover dance competition, and the Thailand LG Entertainer Competition (which 2PM’s Nichkhun and Blackpink’s Lisa were coincidentally both present at).

Photo: BamBam, Nichkhun and Lisa at the Thailand LG Entertainer Competition. (Source: YouTube)

At 13, BamBam passed the JYP World Tour Audition in Thailand and subsequently moved to South Korea to become a JYPE trainee. Debuting with GOT7 in 2014, his popularity in Thailand soared and BamBam went on to receive the nickname “Thai Prince”, just like his predecessor Nichkhun.

He endorses many brands in Thailand, including mobile network operator AIS, Yamaha, and Vivo.

“Someone had called me “nation’s treasure” before. I felt really good when I heard it. I want Thai people to be proud of me. I am proud of being Thai. I always say it wherever I go. We’re K-pop idols or whatever, we’re still Thai.”

Lisa (Blackpink)

Lisa’s story of how she debuted is similar to that of BamBam’s. In 2010, she attended an open audition held by YG Entertainment in Thailand, and was the only winner out of approximately 3000 contestants. Moving to South Korea at the mere age of 13, she proceeded to become YG’s first non-Korean trainee.

Since Blackpink’s debut in 2016, the group has achieved constant success. Lisa’s fame is nearly unparalleled – she is the most followed K-pop idol on Instagram, boasting 61.9 million followers (as of October 2021).

The star, who like Nichkhun and BamBam is highly respected in Thailand, made sure to boast her Thai roots in her debut single.

"I wanted my album to give a Thai feel as its gem, and YG's producer, Teddy, arranged the lead track in the way I expected. I also sported Thai outfits in its music video and made traditional Thai dance movements.”

The ever growing globalisation of K-pop, like Korean music festivals and idol auditions held in other countries, contribute to the growing pool of non-Korean K-pop idols. K-pop is becoming increasingly accessible, not just for fans, but for those aspiring to join the industry.

Other Thai idols have sprouted in the K-pop industry since, like NCT’s Ten, CLC’s Sorn and G-Idle’s Minnie. All of them contribute to growing cultural relations between Thailand and South Korea, as South Korean President Moon Jae-In said himself.

“ In particular, the peoples of our two countries are curious about each other and share a mutual affection. A number of talented young Thais are making a name for themselves on the world stage as members of K-pop acts, including Nichkhun of 2PM and Lisa of Blackpink.”

iii. Getting what you give

Where K-pop has benefitted from Thailand, Thailand has benefitted from K-pop.

All of the “Big 3” labels – JYP, YG and SM – have expanded their businesses to Thailand: JYP launched JYPE Thailand in 2010, its official Southeast Asian branch. The following year, SM launched a joint venture called SM True with Thailand’s The Visions Group. And just this year, YGMM was launched as a joint venture between YG and Thailand’s GMM Grammy.

Korean music festivals and conventions are also commonplace in Thailand. In 2011, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) held the MBC Korean Music Wave in Bangkok. It featured the biggest groups of the time, like TVXQ, Miss A, Girls’ Generation and SG Wannabe, and was hosted by 2PM’s Nichkhun, alongside Yuri and Tiffany from Girls’ Generation. MBC Korean Music Wave returned to Thailand two more times, and its last iteration received a turnout of 20,000 fans.

Photo: Tiffany, Nichkhun, and Yuri at MBC Korean Music Wave in Bangkok 2011. (Source: Soompi)

More recently, in 2018 and 2019, Thailand became the only Southeast Asian country to host KCON. The convention, held to celebrate all forms of Korean culture, originally began in 2012, in the United States, and has since expanded to eight countries. Thailand’s KCON was hosted both times by 2PM’s Nichkhun, and saw performances from artists like Stray Kids, Iz*One and GOT7.

Photo: GOT7 at KCON 2018, including BamBam (3rd from right). (Source: Tofupop Radio)

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic might have halted K-pop concerts and conventions in Thailand for the time being, but the craze shows no signs of stopping. The K-pop phenomenon has trickled its way down to Thailand’s grassroots, benefitting blue collar workers like tuktuk drivers and roadside hawkers.

Photo: Thailand’s popular tuktuks are now adorned with K-pop idol advertisements. (Source: Reuters)

The drivers of Thailand’s distinctive tuktuks have been hit financially by the pandemic, with most of their income normally coming from excited tourists. According to Reuters, avid K-pop fans have been turning to these tuktuks as a way to advertise their favourite idols. As part of a larger anti-government protest, teenagers stopped paying for their K-pop idols to be advertised on public transport, and instead mobilised tuktuks to celebrate birthdays and album launches.

Samran and many others now drive their empty tuk tuks around Bangkok with a banner of a different K-pop sensation each month, stopping for young Thai fans to take pictures and use their service, often with tips.

Similarly, meatball vendors in Lisa’s hometown of Buriram in Thailand have seen a rise in sales of up to 1000 per cent since an unexpected shoutout from her. In an interview on popular Thai talkshow The Woody Show, Lisa mentioned missing the meatballs sold near the train station in her hometown.

Photo: Meatballs being sold in Lisa’s hometown in Thailand. (Source: Bangkok Post)

“People buy and eat them right there at Buriram train station. They’re really popular. The highlight is the sauce found only in Buriram.”

Business had struggled for these vendors as a result of the pandemic, with many people afraid of eating out. Some vendors even had to shut down stalls.

"Now some shops have about 2,000 orders a day. This is unprecedented and business is even better than pre-Covid 19," said Bordin Ruengsuksriwong, the provincial Tourism Industry Council president.

It is no doubt that when pandemic restrictions ease up, more Thais will find themselves flocking to South Korea to follow in the footsteps of Nichkhun, BamBam and Lisa, while K-pop groups will be marking Thailand down in their tour dates.  

[maeve-of-winter]

Snippet from a WIP: that time Kent’s various visits to Boston spawned a fan meltdown and official meme. Told from Jack’s POV, hence some saltiness.

* * * * *

Back during Kent’s second season with the Aces, fans had started regularly spotting him waltzing around the Boston area. While Aces fans were wondering why Kent was so often in Boston, Boston fans were constantly on the lookout for the Aces captain who might be visiting their city. Forget Jagr Watch—2011-2012 was the year of Parson Watch. And then, as Kent entered his fourth season, his time in Boston only increased, and rumors of him transferring there started to surface and then multiply.

Vegas responded to their star player’s regular trips to northeast by, as Holster once ever so eloquently described it, “promptly losing every iota of their shit and never regaining a single scintilla of it.” Maybe it was because the Aces were Nevada’s only pro sports team, maybe it was because they’d grown attached to Parson, who’d won them a Cup his rookie season and then in 2012 as well, but Kent’s travels had Aces fans in a constant uproar. A tsunami of paranoia swept through them that the reason for Kent visiting Boston was because he was planning on signing with the Bruins. And once that rumor got started, online debates raged more intensely than a nuclear winter could ever hope to, complete with fear-mongering unseen since the Cold War, all focusing on if Kent was staying in Vegas or going to Boston. 

During one of his visits, Kent posted a selfie to his Instagram of himself and Chara having drinks together at the upscale bar of the Langham Hotel. Rather than enthusing about Kent’s fashion sense or waxing poetic about how easygoing and friendly he was (as Aces fans typically did in comments on Kent’s social media pages, Jack had often observed in annoyance), their ensuing meltdown was only matched by the Vancouver riots back from when Kent won the gold for Team USA in the 2010 Olympics. The photo’s comments were promptly inundated with demands that he reveal if he was signing with the Bruins or not, often accompanied by insistence that he “owed” fans an explanation for his actions. It got to the point that NHL Network did an actual segment at the next home Aces game, featuring numerous Aces fans (of varying levels of sobriety) tearfully expressing how much Kent Parson meant to them, how deeply they loved him, and how much they hated the Bruins for trying to steal him away from them (despite no evidence that the Bruins had done so).     

Jack knew these details because he’d been in the Haus’s living room with a few teammates when the interviews had first aired. Holster and Ransom had been watching, bursting into laughter each time an Aces fan, from a burly biker dude to a duo of teenage girls in Uggs and leggings, proclaimed their love for Kent and hate for Boston. 

“Well, I’ll say this about Vegas,” Ransom said, cracking up as a father of four, his teenage sons looking on concernedly, practically sobbed onscreen at the thought of Kent leaving the team. “One thing Aces fans and us Bruins fans have in common? They’re both fucking lunatics. Just look at this shit. Parson told everyone he’s not going anywhere! Like, ten times already!”

Holster chortled as well, taking a swig of his beer. “Right? I can’t believe an expansion team has this devoted of a fanbase. Bettman’s dream has come true, I guess. But come on, you’d be lucky to have a marriage these days with a fucking tenth of this much passion!”

After the interviews aired, a twitter war broke out, with Bruins fans responding to Aces fans’ vocal resentment of them with disdain and insults of their own. Aces fans retaliated, and a short-lived rivalry was born that day, a rare one that only existed between hockey fans themselves and not the actual teams or players. 

But that was Kent. Able to tear people apart with just a hypothetical, his actual presence not even required.

In fact, the question of if Kent was going to sign with the Bruins spawned a viral meme, one that became so widespread that even if someone knew nothing else about hockey, they were at least in on this joke. From that point forward, whenever Kent was spotted in another city, be it because he was vacationing or there for an official game, fans would snap a photo and jokingly include a caption wondering if he was going to sign with the local NHL team. If the city had no team, fans would claim that Kent was obviously there to start one. It became the “in” activity to remark on any of Kent’s non-Vegas photos that he would no doubt soon be moving to the city or town in question. He’d once joined Jeff Troy for Christmas, travelling back with him to Troy’s home of Milk River, Alberta. After posting a selfie, his comments section were filled with jokes that the tiny town with a population of just over eight hundred people would be the site of the NHL’s latest expansion team, with Kent as its first member.

But for Vegas, it was no laughing matter. They loved Kent (to an unhealthy degree, in Jack’s opinion) and were possessive of him. It was their worst fear to lose him to another team. He was their hero, their golden boy, the favorite son of their city. 

He was to Vegas, Jack conceded reluctantly, what he had once been to Jack and his family.

#kent parson #check please #jack zimmermann #justin oluransi #adam birkholtz #current wip #kent parson becomes a meme

[la0hu]

the bi/pan debate is so weird. like realistically, if i met someone who id’s as pansexual in real life, i’d be like cool, i’m bi, there are a lot of similarities. i’m too tired and don’t really care enough to pick fights. but the problem is, every time i met a pansexual in real life and told them i’m bi, they immediately sneer at me and let me know that bisexuality is actually transphobic. it’s the worst fucking feeling bc i rarely come out to people, i’m not out to my family, and when i finally do come out to people i thought would understand me, they treat me like i’m some straight faking her sexuality so she can call herself gay, and i see them looking at my long hair and my wardrobe and seeing how i lean femme, they see that i use she/her pronouns, and they just assume i’m just a cishet girl faking attraction to other cis women for brownie points. it’s so callous, i would think they would understand the pressure to present a certain way when you’re not out, but instead they write me off as a transphobic privileged straight girl just because i said i’m bi instead of pan.

like obviously this is just my personal experience and i see a lot of people on here now in the year 2021, saying we need bi/pan solidarity and that they id as pan and they resent the attacks from the bi community and they don’t think bisexuality is inherently transphobic, and like that’s great and all, but that really wasn’t the fucking narrative seven years ago, was it. Seven years ago, we were all impressionable teenagers on tumblr and saw a single post that explained that gay means you’re a man attracted to other men, lesbian means you’re a woman attracted to women, bi means you like both men and women, pan means you are attracted to multiple genders including those outside the binary, and asexual means you don’t have sexual attraction. and immediately we took that as gospel, and then some genius on here was like, oh wait doesn’t that mean bisexuals are transphobic because they don’t include nonbinary people? and everyone was like, YEA that DOES sound transphobic doesn’t it! bisexuals must be transphobic by definition!

but the moment we left the tumblr bubble and tried talking about multiple gender attraction in the real world, it became very obvious that pansexuals don’t have an established history and community the way bisexuals do. and listen, i don’t give a shit about when the word pansexual was technically invented, i’m interested in when it started being used to mean its modern definition on a reasonably widespread scale, and that wasn’t until the 2010s. versus if you look into the history of bisexuality, it’s clear that term built a community with lesbianism back during the wave of LGBT liberation in the 60s and 70s, AND would you look at that, the meaning of bisexual for that community was never trans-exclusive, huh! (that old powerpoint you saw in 2014 about what LGBT means was written by someone who didn’t realize lesbians don’t have to id as women so what were you fucking expecting)

so the question is, what’s the actual difference between being bi versus pan? and now i’m seeing ppl on here popularizing ANOTHER bullshit definition, that bi means attraction based on gender while pan means attraction regardless of gender -- like how long are we gonna play this fucking game? someone actually did their research and history and pointed out how bisexuality has never been transphobic, and yet here’s another fabrication for why pansexuality is different from bisexuality. why are you so reluctant to id as bisexual? why?

because: pansexual is a nice, squeaky clean term that most people haven’t heard of, which means you can make it mean whatever you want it to and have no baggage to carry. but using bisexual is intimidating, because that term has baggage. it has stereotypes and fetishization and so many assumptions attached to it, and hey, you’re also seeing a lot of people who “look straight” coming out as bi nowadays. you see a long-haired femme bisexual woman like me and secretly wonder to yourself if she’s faking it, if she’s just confused, if her attraction is as genuine and valid as yours, and you decide to distance yourself from this perception of the bisexual community, and just call yourself pan. you never stop to remind yourself that bisexuals, like the rest of the lgbt community, face a lot of pressure to stifle the “gay” aspects of their sexuality and appear straight, while they’re simultaneously being fetishized as promiscuous and unfaithful. that bisexuals may actually be confused, not because they “can’t make up their minds”, but because it’s heteronormative society and also people like YOU who tell them their understanding of their own sexuality is wrong. maybe i want to shave my head and never wear makeup again and explore my masculinity, but i’m getting shit from all sides about how i’m not really bi, i’m really just a straight girl looking for attention. you call yourself pan because there’s something that feels off about calling yourself bi (despite the definitions having no meaningful difference) and you never take the time to dig in and realize that feeling is biphobia.

really this whole post is kinda dumb and pointless because it really is kind of a niche debate, but i can’t help getting annoyed. this is obviously just my own individual experience, and these people may be the minority now, but every time i’ve met a pansexual person, they’ve demonstrated so much blatant biphobia, treated me like i’m faking it, i’m really actually straight, repeating everything straight society is already constantly attacking me with -- it’s so fucking infuriating to see that group of ppl acting so innocent now, as if the misconceptions that whole label is founded upon weren’t what fucked me up for the past five years

and anytime this has been pointed out by someone on here, pansexuals have the gall to act like they’re the victims, as if their whole identity doesn’t stigmatize the entire bisexual community. they come up with new special definitions for pansexual and bisexual as if we’re still in the fucking split-attraction model era of tumblr, bring up gold star lesbians to somehow prove that all lesbians and bisexuals have historically been transphobic, and bend over backwards to defend against some perceived attack on their identity, rather than stop and really ask themselves why they are scared of calling themselves bi.

and it should go without saying that i’m not gonna be a freak about this and get mad at every pansexual i meet because unfortunately bisexuality is so stigmatized and i see why people turn to the baggage-free pansexual label, but if you’re faced with entreaties to do your fucking research and do a little soul-searching yet refuse to do so, time and time again, it gets old.

#p #now i just don't tell ppl i'm bi even if they seem chill #bc it's none of their business unless i wanna date #but also bc if one more person treats me like an attention seeking slutty straight girl i'm gonna fucking lose it

[apollos-favourite-bastard]

I’m going to say this once, and honestly probably several more times while defending my stance, but here goes- Gate keepers are bad people, and almost everyone agrees on that. We all hate the people who gatekeep different bits of culture, as is right. They’re selfish people, and arrogant, too, believing that they get to dictate who does and doesn’t get to participate in something. The act of gatekeeping is, in and of itself, hostile and bigoted. It depends on one placing their own self higher than those around them and passing judgement, trying to push someone out of a space because they find that they are more rightfully entitled to that space than someone else.

There are two very bad fronts of this in the LGBTQIA+ community in particular. The first, which is very well known and acknowledged, but not what this post is about, are TERFs and other groups that are transphobic in nature. Fuck TERFs is an extremely common sentiment on tumblr, as it should be, because fuck TERFs. TERFs are bigots, and their stance comes from a place of bigotry. We mostly all agree on this, except for the TERFs who think that they’re rightful and justified in their bigotry, and nothing that I say, think, feel or do is going to change that. Until they recognize their own bigotry and realize that they don’t want to be hate filled sacks of pus shaped like a human, they’re going to continue to be hate filled sacks of pus shaped like a human. However, most of the LGBTQIA+ community agrees that TERFs are bigots and wants nothing to do with them.

So, why do we give aro/ace exclusionists a pass? Why do we, as a community, not band together to fight it the same way that we do with TERFs? Why do we look at this gatekeeping of our community and not feel disgust in the same way that we do with TERFs? Why do some people in our community think that they have the right to exclude others?

Well, I have a theory about that, although I’m going to say up front that it’s just my opinion. Ace/aro people have, for quite a long time, been partially invisible. Up until the advent and popularization of social media, and even to this day in a way, the LGBTQIA+ community has been pretty heavily segregated. At first, this was out of necessity. People opened gay and lesbian bars and clubs decades ago, out of necessity. We built specific spaces for ourselves because that was literally crucial to our survival. While our communities banded together when necessary, there was always a sort of rivalry or distaste for other members of the community if they fell under a different letter. This was heavily present all the way up until the early 2010s. As a teenager in the aughties, I saw so many examples of queer people who didn’t like other letters on principle, because they had nothing in common with one another, and that hasn’t exactly vanished. I knew gay men who hated lesbians, lesbians who hated gay men, both who hated bisexual people- The list goes on.

Then Myspace and Facebook happened, and people began finding solidarity with one another without having to be in a shared space. People began sharing their experiences, and became more comfortable expressing themselves. While pride has existed for decades, it wasn’t nearly as accepted or widespread as it became AFTER social media exposed people to the realization that these communities encompass more people than they realized, and also encompassed people that they knew and cared about. It eased the way for a second wave of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement that helped the community gain several rights, including marriage rights, adoption rights and legal protections. It eased tensions, particularly in the gay and lesbian communities, and paved the way for the more solidarity focused community that we have today.

HOWEVER

After gaining these things, many members of the community decided that that was enough. Discrimination against gays and lesbians had lessened, and acceptance had become more mainstream, so they stopped giving a shit. Trans issues didn’t affect them, so they didn’t care. Ace issues didn’t affect them, so they didn’t care, and they stopped fighting for the other members of the community. That doesn’t apply to everyone, but it applies to more people than anyone should be comfortable with. 

Like I said before, the communities were pretty segregated, and we continue to be. What so many people don’t realize is that our community only has strength together. People under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella represent a sizeable chunk of the population, but each individual group doesn’t represent that much on their own. We don’t have power on our own. Unlike religious or racial minorities, the LGBTQIA+ community is completely random. Anyone could fit into it. The people in our community don’t necessarily have the same experiences. And while shared experience was a founding principle of our community out of necessity, it cannot continue to be so.

Let me explain that point, because I feel like people are not going to realize that it’s the entire point of this post unless I highlight it. Defining our community based on trauma and discrimination was, at the time, necessary. In order to increase our safety, we clumped together, because there’s strength in numbers. There’s also the completely human desire for community because as a species we are not designed to go at it completely alone. Shared experience is a good foundation for that, and if that shared experience is negative, it can make those bonds all the stronger. But that also creates a system wherein the validity of people’s experiences is judged on a sliding scale, which creates the even more unpleasant sliding scale of validity applied to a person’s existence and position in our community.

In particular, this is applied to aro/ace people, bisexual people, and transgender and nonbinary people. There are so many arguments that I could write a book on the subject, but there are more talented and knowledgeable people than I am who have written on the subject, and I implore people to seek out literature and media that can help them understand these things. But I made this post, and I’m going to talk about the main argument that I have seen applied, which is privilege.

Privilege is something I know all too well about having, as a cis white man. It has kept me safe where other people would not have been, and given me more power than I have deserved at times. I do my best to amplify voices that are shouted over, without speaking over them myself, and while I hope I have done a good job of that, I know and openly acknowledge that I am not perfect and have probably messed up too many times to count. I know that when I was younger, I certainly was not as supportive as I could or should have been to people who needed that support, because I saw someone different than I am reaching out for help, and decided it wasn’t my problem. That made me part of the problem. Over time, I have been humbled, sometimes painfully, and forced to recognize that privilege. I am not proud of things that I have done and said. I am embarrassed by who I used to be, and strive every day to be better than I was the day before. I don’t always get it right, but I am trying.

The point of that isn’t to pat myself on the back, or say ‘look how much I’ve grown!’. It’s to tell you that I have been in that place. I have seen someone different than I am and decided to keep quiet and turn a blind eye to their suffering. I have thought to myself ‘they haven’t had to struggle with the things that I have had to struggle with, so it’s not my business’. It’s also to say that privilege is a WILDLY inappropriate way to gauge someone’s position in a community.

Our community cannot and must not continue to use the meter-stick of privilege to judge the validity of someone’s worth and place in our community. It promotes its own kind of bigotry. That’s not to say that cis or white people in the community shouldn’t examine their own experiences and privilege, because we should. What I mean is that it shouldn’t be used to JUDGE someone else. Aro/Ace people and bisexual people have somehow gotten the reputation as having privilege because they are’ more easily able to blend with cishet society’, and are therefore safer and less oppressed, but that’s a bullshit argument. Trauma and oppression cannot continue to be the way we determine someone’s worth. What we should be fighting for is for discrimination to end, not for people who are more oppressed to be the only valid voices in our community. It is tearing our community apart when we need to stand together.

Otherwise we aren’t a community, we’re just a bunch of different people only standing with those who are like us, and nobody else, which is exactly how systems of oppression have been maintained throughout all of human history. People point to the most different group from themselves and say ‘they’re different, and different is bad, so they’re bad’. That’s the insidious nature of bigotry at work, and I refuse to allow myself to fall into that trap. I refuse to be a part of the problem anymore, and that means that I’m not going to keep quiet on subjects like discrimination against people just because their experiences are different than my own.

People who gatekeep communities are coming from a place of bigotry, and it has to stop. People have to speak up about it, and I hope that they do it better and less rambling than I have. TERFs and exclusionists and racists are too prevalent in this community, and we have let their bigotry form the insidious cracks that will tear this community apart if they aren’t spoken out against.

#ace positivity #aro positivity #ace and aro people are ALWAYS welcome #I will always stand with you

[glamrockqueen]

incoherently written music history #1: billie eilish is the gen z taylor swift and here’s why

don’t laugh at me for making my first history rambling start from 2006 okay i promise i’ll be taking these further back eventually

this particular claim was made in a conversation i had with a friend a few weeks ago and i figured what better way to start off my new tumblr experience right

these pictures of almost identical scenes were taken almost exactly ten years apart. how did both of these ladies become mega-stars and redefine their respective genres as teenagers and what do they have in common? let’s discuss.

for starters, female singer-songwriters are not a new phenomenon. alanis morissette, tori amos, annie lennox, kate bush, the list goes on. so why were taylor and billie good representatives of the late 00s and late 10s respectively?

taylor swift released her self-titled debut album in 2006 as a country singer/songwriter at the age of 16 which is pretty impressive! and billie eilish released her debut album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? last year in 2019 at the age of 17.

although there are plenty of young singers/songwriters, not many of them can reach this level of success. and at first glance (just look at the covers of taylor’s lover and billie’s album, for example) they seem like opposites. but they actually have quite a bit in common!

both started their careers with an audience that is primarily composed of young girls

both wrote or cowrote the songs on their albums

both perfectly capture the mood of the time periods in which they became popular

while taylor debuted in 2006, in my opinion, she didn’t become a superstar until the release of fearless in 2008. considering this was now 12-14 years ago, the process of becoming a superstar was different than it was just last year. taylor was originally signed as a songwriter with sony/atv (the youngest EVER to do so at age 14) and literally built the big machine label with her success when she signed with them. with the rise of streaming and widespread usage of the internet for listening to music (which didn’t exist in 2006-2008 when all music was individually purchased), billie entered the public eye when she released ocean eyes on soundcloud and rose to megastardom within a few years, with a pretty astonishing speed. the picture of taylor swift with her grammys was taken in 2010, a full four years after her debut album was released while billie won all those awards for her debut album in the same year it was released. the rise of such platforms can certainly accelerate the path to superstardom, and it certainly did in this case.

the important note here is that for both, the audience heavily relates to the emotions in the music and the authenticity of the songwriting. taylor’s music suits the early 00s and the young millennials/zillennials well. in the mid to late 2000s, music was upbeat. pop punk and emo pop/rock like fall out boy, panic! at the disco, and my chemical romance were at their peak (just remember early tumblr), and a lot of pop and pop adjacent music was generally happy and fast paced. taylor brought country music to the previously untapped market of teenage girls (and eventually other young female country singers like kacey musgraves, kelsea ballerini, maren morris, etc became popular, almost certainly because taylor proved young women could be successful in the genre) even as she transitioned into a pop artist. she succeeded as a teenage girl in an extremely male dominated genre (in fact, to this day, many country stations are not allowed to play two songs by female artists in a row).

taylor’s greatest strength is still considered to be her songwriting, and many of her lyrics are second to none in terms of modern mainstream artists. her fans appreciate the vulnerability and pure emotion of songs like all too well and dear john, even though they’re generally less well known than many of her hits. even through multiple genre shifts, her storytelling still shines through and feels authentic even if occasionally interspersed with more lighthearted moments like me! or we are never ever getting back together. in fact, the recent folklore album appears to be a return to the very thing that brought her to prominence in the first place, with its focus on lyrics and real instrumentation rather than her recent more synth-heavy pop sound.

people related to her music because it felt like they were getting a glimpse into her diary, and that authenticity wasn’t necessarily present in pop music at the time. she appealed to the hopeless romantics (especially during the fearless and speak now eras) and was definitely relatable to the teenage girls of the 00s. taylor captured the hope and heartbreak of teenagers in such an elegant way, and many of her fans still feel closely connected to her and have a sense of “growing up with her”, even if they’ve never met her in person because of the evolution of her persona and storytelling (and also her former use of tumblr). her songwriting talents are what initially drew fans to her and why she has a such a loyal base of fans even fourteen years after the release of her first music.

however, things are different now than they were even ten years ago. young people are sad and angry and billie captures these emotions in her music. today’s teenagers are not interested in sparkles and ball gowns or sundresses and cowboy boots, but would rather wear oversized tshirts/hoodies and march in protests. they were looking for someone who dresses uniquely and who takes pride in being different. it’s clear to see even through gen z humour that happiness is generally a thing of the past. pop music has gotten slower, more melancholy, more indie-oriented, and hip hop/rap and edm-inspired music is currently topping the charts rather than bubbly pop or rock. billie represents and possibly started the trend of “bedroom pop” (as her album was quite literally recorded in a bedroom) and its more relaxed, lofi sound. with this in mind, taylor has been and continues to be a master of trends and versatility, including releasing the 1989 album before retro nostalgia became popular, as well as including elements of every conceivable genre, including hip hop (throughout all of reputation), pop punk (paper rings is essentially a pop punk song, and i will defend this claim), rock, indie, and even folk and funk in her music. 

this shift almost resembles the way punk and grunge were rejections of mainstream rock at the time; people are looking for something new and “fresh”, and for many young gen z girls, that took the form of billie eilish, since she captures the emotions they’re feeling just like taylor did for millennials. in fact, billie can almost be seen as the punk to taylor’s classic rock. the way billie can speak to this audience is remarkably similar to the way taylor spoke to the underserved market of teenage girls who like country music and fairytale romances (and reminiscent of early rock’s roots in genres that were neglected by mainstream pop radio at the time until being succeeded by activist punk music that rejected the theatrics and fancy production of 70s rock in favour of a DIY ethos). both were appropriate for their target audience.

in short, taylor’s brand wouldn’t have worked in 2019 and billie’s brand likely wouldn’t have worked in 2006, but they suit the atmosphere of their actual time periods. we can no more expect a star of the 00s to represent the teenagers of the current era any more than we can expect a star of the 80s to do the same. however, their popularity comes from the same sort of energy - young people wanting something outside of the contemporary mainstream that feels new and expresses the emotions they may not have been able to express themselves. while taylor represents teenage dreams, billie represents teenage rebellion and loneliness.

in addition, both have been politically active, as well as advocating for change in the music industry. taylor has a long history of fighting for artists’ rights, including not releasing her music to apple music until they agreed to pay artists during the three month trial period, the feud with spotify, and now her struggle to gain control of the masters for her first six albums. she has also expressed support for democratic politicians and social movements like black lives matter, despite people close to her expressing concerns that it would cause damage to her image or career. billie has also been vocal in supporting progressive causes, which again shows that she is a perfect representative of gen z stardom as young fans expect the celebrities they support to use their platform to speak about important issues.

the most important thing that links these two artists together is the impression of being genuine and relatable, especially for an audience of young women who feel as if their voices have not been heard or are not valued by the mainstream. another interesting note is that fans of both artists are/were mocked for being fans, which is almost certainly rooted in misogyny and the dismissal/trivialization of things that are enjoyed by teenage girls. neither of them are taken as seriously as they deserve to be.

for years, taylor’s music was generalized as only being about her ex boyfriends, and that opinion is still widespread, despite the fact she has incredible songs that weren’t written about romantic relationships. since the beginning, taylor and her fans have been relentlessly mocked and dismissed. taylor was bullied online to such an extent in 2016 that she disappeared from the public eye and released the reputation album in order to take back the narrative after being accused of lying and being a “snake” even though it was later shown that she had, in fact, been truthful about the situation. billie’s fans have also been mocked in the past, even though both artists have been revolutionizing pop music and will likely continue doing so. they have also expressed their strong support for each other in the past!

it’s truly past time that people recognize the power of young women to change the music industry and society as a whole. taylor and billie are good examples of a constantly changing music scene, and how the “faces” of music can be drastically different depending on generations and the demands of society and the industry. taylor and billie are both trailblazing trendsetters who have successfully tapped into the unique energy of youth in their own ways, and the way they seem almost like night and day shows just how different millennials and gen z are as teenagers.

#taylor swift #billie eilish #shut up arty #incoherently written music history

[makistar2018]

All 125 Taylor Swift Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best

By NATE JONES April 30, 2019

In this business, there are two subjects that will boost your page views like nothing else: Game of Thrones and Taylor Swift. One of them is a massive, multi-million-dollar enterprise filled with violence and betrayal, and the other airs on HBO. I find it hard to explain why exactly, and I’m sure Swift would, too: Somehow, this one 27-year-old woman from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, keeps finding herself at the center of our national conversations about race, gender, celebrity, victimhood, even the economics of the tech industry. And, outside the legions of fans who eat up everything she puts out, no take on her ever stays solid for long. She was a precocious teenager, and the ultimate embodiment of white privilege. She’s been feminism’s worst nightmare, and an advocate for victims of sexual assault. Some people say she’s a goddess of the alt-right. Other people say she’s Jewish.

And yet, unlike Madonna or Bowie, Swift got through the first 11 years of her career without any major reinventions. (For 1989, she embraced feminism and threw away the last vestiges of her Nashville sound, but those were basically just aesthetic changes.) If the word on her has shifted since her debut, it’s because we’ve changed, not her. Swift — or at least the version of Swift on her albums — has remained largely the same person since her debut: a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, with a penchant for huge romantic moments. People don’t slowly ease into a relationship in her songs; they show up at each other’s doors late at night and they kiss in the rain. An unworthy suitor won’t just say something thoughtless; he’ll skip a birthday party or leave a teenage girl crying alone in a hotel room. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. What sort of real life can stand up against fantasies like these?

So, uh, I don’t recommend you listen to this list top to bottom.

But I do recommend sampling as many of these songs as you see fit. Even with the widespread critical embrace of poptimism — a development I suspect has as much to do with the economics of online media as it does with the shifting winds of taste — there are still those who see Swift as just another industry widget, a Miley or Katy with the tuner set to “girl with a guitar.” If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the thinkpieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. I count at least ten stone-cold classics in her discography. Others might see more. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down. 

Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it — which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” — excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. Songwriting is an important part of Swift’s spellbook, so covers are treated more harshly than originals. Because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high-schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult millionaire.

125. “Look What You Made Me Do,” Reputation (2017): “There’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting,” Swift told New York back in 2013. “The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do.” To Swift’s credit, it took her six records to get to this point. On a conceptual level, the mission here is clear: After the Kim-Kanye feud made her the thinking person’s least-favorite pop star, this comeback single would be her grand heel turn. But the villain costume sits uneasily on Swift’s shoulders, and even worse, the songwriting just isn’t there. The verses are vacuous, the insults have no teeth, and just when the whole thing seems to be leading up to a gigantic redemptive chorus, suddenly pop! The air goes out of it and we’re left with a taunting Right Said Fred reference — the musical equivalent of pulling a Looney Tunes gag on the listener. Other Swift songs have clunkier rhymes, or worse production values, but none of them have such a gaping hole at the center. (I do dig the gleeful “Cuz she’s dead!” though.)

124. “Umbrella,” iTunes Live From Soho (2008): Swift has recorded plenty of covers in her career, and none are less essential than this 90-second rendition of the Rihanna hit recorded at the peak of the song’s popularity. It’s pure college-campus coffeehouse.

123. “Christmas Must Mean Something More,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): One of two originals on Swift’s early-career Christmas album, “Something More” is a plea to put the Christ back in Christmas. Or as she puts it: “What if happiness came in a cardboard box? / Then I think there is something we all forgot.” In the future, Swift would get better at holding onto some empathy when she was casting a critical eye at the silly things people care about; here, the vibe is judgmental in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever reread their teenage diary.

122. “Better Than Revenge,” Speak Now (2010): A nasty little song that has not aged well. Whether a straightforward imitation of Avril Lavigne’s style or an early attempt at “Blank Space”–style self-satirization, the barbs never go beyond bratty. (As in “Look What You Made Me Do,” the revenge turns out to be the song itself, which feels hollow.) Best known now for the line about “the things she does on the mattress,” which I suspect has been cited in blog posts more times than the song itself has been listened to lately.

121. “American Girl,” Non-album digital single (2009): Why would you cover this song and make it slower?

120. “I Want You Back,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2011): Another 90-second cover of a pop song that does not particularly benefit from a stripped-down arrangement.

119. “Santa Baby,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Before Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” there was only one holiday song about falling in love with Santa, and for some reason, we spent decades making all our young female singers cover it. Swift’s version leans out of the awkwardness by leaning into the materialism; she puts most of her vocal emphasis on the nice presents she hopes Santa will bring her. (The relationship seems to be fairly quid pro quo: She’ll believe in him if he gives her good gifts — even at this early stage, Swift possessed a savvy business sense.) Otherwise, this is a by-the-numbers holiday cover, complete with sleigh bells in the mix.

118. “Sweet Escape,” Speak Now World Tour – Live; Target edition DVD (2011): Swift’s sedate cover of the 2006 Gwen Stefani hit — those “ooh-ooh”s are pitched way down from Akon’s falsetto in the original — invests the song with a bittersweet vibe, though like anyone who’s ever tried the song at karaoke, she stumbles on the rapid-fire triplets in the first verse.

117. “Silent Night,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Swift’s cover of the Christmas classic veers significantly away from Franz Xaver Gruber’s original melody, and even gives it a Big Taylor Swift Finale. Points for ambition, but sometimes you just want to hear the old standards the way you remember them.

116. “The Last Time,” Red (2012): Red is Swift’s strongest album, but it suffers a bit from pacing issues: The back half is full of interminable ballads that you’ve got to slog through to get to the end. Worst of all is this duet with po-faced Ulsterman Gary Lightbody, which feels about ten minutes long.

115. “Invisible,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006): A bonus track from the debut that plays like a proto–”You Belong With Me.” The “show you” / “know you” rhymes mark this as an early effort.

114. “…Ready for It?,” Reputation (2017): The second straight misfire off the Reputation rollout, this one sees Swift try her hand at rapping, with some ill-advised bars about Elizabeth Taylor and a flow she borrowed from Jay-Z. (Try to rap “Younger than my exes” without spilling into “rest in peace, Bob Marley.”) Bumped up a spot or two for the chorus, a big Swift hook that sounds just like her best work — in this case, because it bites heavily from “Wildest Dreams.”

113. “I Heart ?,” Beautiful Eyes EP (2008): Swift code-switches like a champ on this charmingly shallow country song, which comes from the Walmart-exclusive EP she released between her first two albums. Her vocals get pretty rough in the chorus, but at least we’re left with the delightful line, “Wake up and smell the breakup.”

112. “Bad Blood,” 1989 (2014): When Swift teamed up with Max Martin and Shellback, the marriage of their dark eldritch songcraft nearly broke the pop charts. But when they misfire, the results can be brutal. The lyric here indulges the worst habits of late-period Swift — an eagerness to play the victim, a slight lack of resemblance to anything approaching real life — attached to a schoolyard-chant melody that will never leave your head, even when you may want it to. The remix hollows out the production and replaces Swift’s verses with two from Kendrick Lamar; it’s less embarrassing than the original, which does not make it more memorable.

111. “White Christmas,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007):The most bluegrass of Swift’s Christmas tunes, this gentle rendition sees Swift’s vocals cede center stage to the mandolin and fiddle.

110. “Crazier,” Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack (2009): When approached by the filmmakers about contributing a song to the Hannah Montana movie, Swift sent in this track, seemingly a holdover from the Fearless sessions. In an admirable bit of dedication, she also showed up to play it in the film’s climax. It’s kind of a snooze on its own, but compared to the other songs on the soundtrack, even Swift’s leftovers shine.

109. “I’d Lie,” Taylor Swift (2006): A bonus track only available to people who bought Swift’s debut at Best Buy. It’s as cute as a study-hall MASH game, and just as easily disposable.

108. “Highway Don’t Care,” Tim McGraw’s Two Lanes of Freedom(2013): After joining Big Machine, McGraw gave Swift an “and” credit here as a professional courtesy. Though her backing vocals are very pleasant, this is 100 percent a Tim McGraw song.

107. “Superman,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): A bonus track that’s not gonna make anyone forget Five for Fighting any time soon.

106. “Change,” Fearless (2008): A bit of paint-by-numbers inspiration that apparently did its job of spurring the 2008 U.S. Olympic team to greatness. They won 36 gold medals!

105. “End Game,” Reputation (2017): Swift tries out her blaccent alongside Future and Ed Sheeran, on a track that sounds unmistakably like a Rihanna reject. The only silver lining? She’s better at rapping here than on “…Ready for It?”

104. “The Lucky One,” Red (2012): A plight-of-fame ballad from the back half of Red, with details that never rise above cliché and a melody that borrows from the one Swift cooked up for “Untouchable.”

103. “A Place in This World,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift’s version of “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” this one feels like it missed its chance to be the theme tune for an ABC Family show.

102. “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack (2017): In Fifty Shades Darker, this wan duet soundtracks a scene where Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele go for a sunny boat ride while wearing fabulous sweaters. On brand!

101. “Last Christmas,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Swift does George Michael proud with this reverent cover of the Wham! classic.

100. “Breathless,” Hope for Haiti Now (2010): Swift covered this Better Than Ezra deep cut for the Hope for Haiti telethon. With only one take to get it right, she did not let the people of Haiti down.

99. “Bette Davis Eyes,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2012): “There’s some unbelievable music that has come out of artists who are from L.A., did you know that?” Swift asks the audience at the beginning of this live track. The crowd, not being idiots, responds with an enthusiastic yes. This cover loses the two most famous parts of Kim Carnes’s original — the synths and Carnes’s throaty delivery — but the acoustic arrangement and Swift’s intimate vocals bring out the best qualities of the tune.

98. “Eyes Open,” The Hunger Games: Songs From District 12 and Beyond (2012): One of two songs Swift contributed to the first Hunger Games soundtrack. With guitars seemingly ripped straight out of 1998 alt-rock radio, this one’s most interesting now as a preview of Swift’s Red sound.

97. “Beautiful Eyes,” Beautiful Eyes EP (2008): The title track of Swift’s early-career EP finds the young songwriter getting a lot of mileage out of one single vowel sound: Besides the eyes of the title, we’ve got I, why, fly, cry, lullaby, even sometimes. A spirited vocal performance in the outro saves the song from feeling like homework.

96. “The Outside,” Taylor Swift (2006): If you thought you felt weird judging songs by a high-schooler, here’s one by an actual sixth-grader. “The Outside” was the second song Swift ever wrote, and though the lyrics edge into self-pity at times, this is still probably the best song written by a 12-year-old since Mozart’s “Symphony No. 7 in D Major.”

95. “SuperStar,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): This bonus track is a relic of an unfamiliar time when Swift could conceivably be the less-famous person in a relationship.

94. “Starlight,” Red (2012): Never forget that one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2012 contains a piece of Ethel Kennedy fanfiction. The real story of Bobby and Ethel has more rough spots than you’ll find in this resolutely rose-colored track, but that’s what happens when you spend a summer hanging in Hyannis Port.

93. “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” Red (2012): Another glacially paced song from the back half of Red that somehow pulls off rhyming “magic” with “tragic.”

92. “Innocent,” Speak Now (2010): The disparate reactions to Kanye West stage-crashing Swift at the 2009 VMAs speaks to the Rorschachian nature of Swift’s star image. Was Swift a teenage girl whose moment was ruined by an older man who couldn’t control himself? Or was she a white woman playing the victim to demonize an outspoken black man? Both are correct, which is why everyone’s spent so much time arguing about it. Unfortunately, Swift did herself no favors when she premiered “Innocent” at the next year’s VMAs, opening with footage of the incident, which couldn’t help but feel like she was milking it. (Fairly or not, the comparison to West’s own artistic response hardly earns any points in the song’s favor.) Stripped of all this context, “Innocent” is fine: Swift turns in a tender vocal performance, though the lyrics could stand to be less patronizing.

91. “Girl at Home,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): This Red bonus track offers a foreshadowing of Swift’s interest in sparkly ’80s-style production. A singsongy melody accompanies a largely forgettable lyric, except for one hilariously blunt line: “It would be a fine proposition … if I was a stupid girl.”

90. “A Perfectly Good Heart,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006): A pleading breakup song with one killer turn of phrase and not much else.

89. “Mary’s Song (Oh My Oh My),” Taylor Swift (2006): This early track was inspired by Swift’s elderly neighbors. Like “Starlight,” it’s a young person’s vision of lifelong love, skipping straight from proposal to old age.

88. “Come in With the Rain,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): An ode to a long-lost lover that follows the Swift template a tad too slavishly.

87. “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” Reputation (2017): Reputation sags a bit in the middle, never more than on this forgettable ’80s-inspired track.

86. “Welcome to New York,” 1989 (2014): In retrospect, there could not have been a song more perfectly designed to tick off the authenticity police — didn’t Swift know that real New Yorkers stayed up till 3 a.m. doing drugs with Fabrizio Moretti in the bathroom of Mars Bar? I hope you’re sitting down when I tell you this, but it’s possible the initial response to a Taylor Swift song might have been a little reactionary. When it’s not taken as a mission statement, “Welcome to New York” is totally tolerable, a glimmering confetti throwaway with lovely synths.

85. “Tied Together With a Smile,” Taylor Swift (2006): When she was just a teenager with a development deal, Swift hooked up with veteran Nashville songwriter Liz Rose. The two would collaborate on much of Swift’s first two albums. “We wrote and figured out that it really worked. She figured out she could write Taylor Swift songs, and I wouldn’t get in the way,” Rose said later. “She’d say a line and I’d say, ‘What if we say it like this?’ It’s kind of like editing.” This early ballad about a friend with bulimia sees Swift and Rose experimenting with metaphor. Most of them work.

84. “King of My Heart,” Reputation (2017): Swift is fond of saying that “songs are what you think of on the drive home — you know, the Great Afterthought.” (She says it’s a Joni Mitchell quote, but I haven’t been able to find it.) Anyway, I think that’s why some of the love songs on Reputationdon’t quite land: Swift is writing about a relationship from inside of it, instead of with hindsight. It’s a different skill, which could explain why the boyfriend character here is less vividly sketched than some of her other ones.

83. “Come Back … Be Here,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): A vulnerable track about long-distance love, with simple sentiments overwhelmed by extravagant production.

82. “Breathe,” Fearless (2008): A Colbie Caillat collaboration that’s remarkable mostly for being a rare Swift song about a friend breakup. It’s like if “Bad Blood” contained actual human emotions.

81. “Stay Beautiful,” Taylor Swift (2006): Nathan Chapman was a Nashville session guitarist before he started working with Swift. He produced her early demos, and she fought for him to sit behind the controls on her debut; the two would work together on every Swift album until 1989, when his role was largely taken over by Max Martin and Shellback. Here, he brings a sprightly arrangement to Swift’s ode to an achingly good-looking man.

80. “Nashville,” Speak Now World Tour – Live; Target edition DVD (2011): Swift gives some shine to singer-songwriter David Mead with a cover of his 2004 ballad. (Listen to the screams during the chorus and try to guess where this one was recorded.) She treats it with a delicate respect, like she’s handling her grandmother’s china.

79. “So It Goes,” Reputation (2017): Unfortunately not a Nick Lowe cover, this one comes and goes without making much of an impact, but if you don’t love that whispered “1-2-3,” I don’t know what to tell you.

78. “You’re Not Sorry,” Fearless (2008): An unflinching kiss-off song that got a gothic remix for Swift’s appearance as an ill-fated teen on CSI. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

77. “Drops of Jupiter,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2012): The best of the covers on the live album sees Swift commit to the Train hit like she’d written it herself. If you had forgotten that this song came out in 2001, she keeps the line about Tae Bo.

76. “The Other Side of the Door,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): A bonus track saved from mediocrity by a gutsy outro that hints that Swift, like any good millennial, was a big fan of “Semi-Charmed Life.”

75. “Gorgeous,” Reputation (2017): In the misbegotten rollout for Reputation, “Gorgeous” righted the ship by not being completely terrible. Max Martin and Shellback pack the track with all sorts of amusing audio doodads, but the melody is a little too horizontal to stick, and the lyrics have a touch of first draft about them. (You’d be forgiven for preferring the actual first draft, which is slightly more open and real.)

74. “I Wish You Would,” 1989 (2014): Like “You Are in Love,” this one originated as a Jack Antonoff instrumental track, and the finished version retains his fingerprints. Perhaps too much — you get the sense it might work better as a Bleachers song.

73. “Cold As You,” Taylor Swift (2006): A dead-serious breakup song that proved the teenage Swift (with help from Rose, who’s got a co-writing credit) could produce barbs sharper than most adults: “You come away with a great little story / Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.” Jesus.

72. “Haunted,” Speak Now (2010): In which Swift tries her hand at Evanescence-style goth-rock. She almost pulls it off, but at this point in Swift’s career her voice wasn’t quite strong enough to give the unrestrained performance the song calls for.

71. “This Love,” 1989 (2014): Began life as a poem before evolving into an atmospheric 1989 deep cut. Like an imperfectly poached egg, it’s shapeless but still quite appetizing.

70. “Untouchable,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): Technically a Luna Halo cover (don’t worry about it), though Swift discards everything but the bones of the original. Her subsequent renovation job is worthy of HGTV: It’s nearly impossible to believe this was ever not a Taylor Swift song.

69. “Wonderland,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): A deranged bonus track that sees Swift doing the absolute most. This song has everything: Alice in Wonderland metaphors, Rihanna chants, a zigzag bridge that recalls “I Knew You Were Trouble,” screams. As she puts it, “It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their MIND!”

68. “Sweeter Than Fiction,” One Chance soundtrack (2013): Swift’s first collaboration with Jack Antonoff is appropriately ’80s-inspired, and so sugary that a well-placed key change in the chorus is the only thing that staves off a toothache.

67. “I’m Only Me When I’m With You,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition(2006): A rollicking pop-rock tune that recalls early Kelly Clarkson. As if to reassure nervous country fans, the fiddle goes absolutely nuts.

66. “Tell Me Why,” Fearless (2008): A bog-standard tale of an annoyingly clueless guy, but it’s paired with one of Swift and Rose’s most winning melodies.

65. “If This Was a Movie,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): The mirror image of “White Horse,” which makes it feel oddly superfluous.

64. “How You Get the Girl,” 1989 (2014): The breeziest and least complicated of Swift’s guy-standing-on-a-doorstep songs, which contributed to the feeling that 1989 was something of an emotional regression. You probably shouldn’t take it as an instruction manual unless you’re Harry Styles.

63. “Don’t Blame Me,” Reputation (2017): A woozy if slightly anonymous love song that comes off as a sexier “Take Me to Church.” [A dozen Hozier fans storm out of the room.]

62. “The Way I Loved You,” Fearless (2008): Written in collaboration with Big and Rich’s John Rich, which may explain how stately and mid-tempo this one is. (There’s even a martial drumbeat.) Here, she’s faced with a choice between a too-perfect guy — he’s close to her mother and talks business with her father — and a tempestuous relationship full of “screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain,” and if you don’t know which one she prefers I suggest you listen to more Taylor Swift songs. Swift often plays guessing games about which parts of her songs are autobiographical, but this one is explicitly a fantasy.

61. “New Romantics,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): Like “22,” an attempt at writing a big generational anthem. That it was left off the album proper suggests Swift didn’t think it quite got there, though it did its job of extending the singles cycle of 1989 a few more months. Despite what anyone says about “Welcome to New York,” the line here about waiting for “trains that just aren’t coming” indicates its writer has had at least one authentic New York experience.

60. “Sparks Fly,” Speak Now (2010): This one dates back to Swift’s high-school days, and was destined for obscurity until fans fell in love with the live version. After what seems like a lot of tinkering, it finally got a proper studio release on Swift’s third album. It’s like “True Love Waits,” but with more kissing in the rain.

59. “Me!,” Untitled Seventh Album (2019): Well, what did we expect? The run-up to “Me!” was preceded by a weeks-long guessing game about what precisely would be the nature of Swift’s April 26 announcement. Would she come out? Would she come out and reveal she had once dated Karlie Kloss? Cut to the fateful day, and the news was … Swift, who is a pop singer, was releasing a new pop song. After the Sturm und Drang of the Reputation era, “Me!” is a return to anodyne sweetness, a mission statement that says, “I’m through making mission statements.” The result is blandly inoffensive, emphasis on the bland.

58. “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” 1989 (2014): Just like the melody to “Yesterday” and the “Satisfaction” riff, the high-pitched “Stay!” here came to its writer in a dream. Inspiration works in mysterious ways.

57. “Delicate, Reputation (2017): With multitracked, breathy vocals, this is Swift at her most tentative. Would any other album’s Taylor be asking, “Is it cool that I said all that?”

56. “Stay Stay Stay,” Red (2012): Swift broke out her southern accent one last time for this attempt at homespun folk, which is marred by production that’s so clean it’s practically antiseptic. In an alternate universe where a less-ambitious Swift took a 9-to-5 job writing ad jingles, this one soundtracked a TV spot for the new AT&T family plan.

55. “Call It What You Want,” Reputation (2017): Many of the Reputationsingles aim at sexy; this airy slow jam about losing yourself in love after a scandal is the only one that gets there, though the saltiness in the verses (“all the liars are calling me one”) occasionally betrays the sentiment.

54. “Ours,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): It’s not this song’s fault that the extended version of Speak Now has songs called both “Mine” and “Ours,” and while “Ours” is good … well, it’s no “Mine.” Still, even if this song never rises above cuteness, it is incredibly cute. I think Dad’ll get over the tattoos.

53. “The Best Day,” Fearless (2008): Swift’s parents moved the family to Tennessee so she could follow her musical dreams, and she paid them back with this tender tribute. Mom gets the verses while Dad is relegated to the middle eight — even in song, the Mother’s Day–Father’s Day disparity holds up.

52. “Everything Has Changed,” Red (2012): “We good to go?” For many American listeners, this was the first introduction to a redheaded crooner named Ed Sheeran. It’s a sweet duet and Sheeran’s got a roughness that goes well with Swift’s cleaner vocals, but the harmonies are a bit bland.

51. “Today Was a Fairytale,” Valentine’s Day soundtrack (2010): How much of a roll was Swift on during the Fearless era? This song didn’t make the album, and sat in the vault for a year until Swift signed on for a small role in a Garry Marshall rom-com and offered it up for the soundtrack. Despite the extravagant title, the date described here is charmingly low-key: The dude wears a T-shirt, and his grand gestures are showing up on time and being nice.

50. “Last Kiss,” Speak Now (2010): A good-bye waltz with an understated arrangement that suits the starkness of the lyrics.

49. “You Are in Love,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): The best of Swift’s songs idealizing someone else’s love story (see “Starlight” and “Mary’s Song”), this bonus track sketches Jack Antonoff and Lena Dunham’s relationship in flashes of moments. The production and vocals are appropriately restrained — sometimes, simplicity works.

48. “The Story of Us,” Speak Now (2010): The deluxe edition of Speak Now features both U.S. and international versions of some of the singles, which gives you a sense of how fine-tuned Swift’s operation was by this point. My ears can’t quite hear the difference between the two versions of this exuberant breakup jam, but I suspect the U.S. mix contains some sort of ultrasonic frequencies designed to … sorry, I’ve already said too much.

47. “Clean,” 1989 (2014): Co-written with Imogen Heap, who contributes backup vocals. This is 1989’s big end-of-album-catharsis song, and the water imagery of the lyrics goes well with the drip-drip-drip production. I’d be curious to hear a version where Heap sings lead; the minimalist sound might be better suited for her voice, which has a little more texture.

46. “Getaway Car,” Reputation (2017): Another very Antonoff-y track, but I’m not mad at it. We start with a vocoder she must have stolen from Imogen Heap and end with one of Swift’s most rocking outros, and in between we even get a rare key change.

45. “I Almost Do,” Red (2012): The kind of plaintive breakup song Swift could write in her sleep at this point in her career, with standout guitar work and impressive vulnerability in both lyrics and performance.

44. “Long Live (We Will Be Remembered),” Speak Now (2010):Ostensibly written about Swift’s experiences touring with her band, but universal enough that it’s been taken as a graduation song by pretty much everyone else. Turns out, adolescent self-mythologizing is the same no matter where you are — no surprise that Swift could pull it off despite leaving school after sophomore year.

43. “The Moment I Knew,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): An epic account of being stood up that makes a terrible birthday party seem like something approximating the Fall of Troy. If you’re the type of person who stays up at night remembering every inconsiderate thing you’ve ever done, the level of excruciating detail here is like a needle to the heart.

42. “Jump Then Fall,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2006): An effervescent banjo-driven love song. I get a silly kick out of the gag in the chorus, when Swift’s voice leaps to the top of her register every time she says “jump.”

41. “Never Grow Up,” Speak Now (2010): Swift’s songs where she’s romanticizing childhood come off better than the ones where she’s romanticizing old age. (Possibly because she’s been a child before.) This one is so well-observed and wistful about the idea of children aging that you’d swear she was secretly a 39-year-old mom.

40. “Should’ve Said No,” Taylor Swift (2006): Written in a rush of emotion near the end of recording for the debut, what this early single lacks in nuance it makes up for in backbone. I appreciate the way the end of each verse holds out hope for the cheating ex — “given ooonnne chaaance, it was a moment of weeaaknesssss” — before the chorus slams the door in the dumb lunk’s face.

39. “Back to December,” Speak Now (2010): At the time, this one was billed as a big step for Swift: the first song where she’s the bad guy! Now that the novelty has worn off “Back to December” doesn’t feel so groundbreaking, but it does show her evolving sensitivity. The key to a good apology has always been sincerity, and whatever faults Swift may have, a lack of sincerity has never been one of them.

38. “Holy Ground,” Red (2012): This chugging rocker nails the feeling of reconnecting with an ex and romanticizing the times you shared, and it livens up the back half of Red a bit. Probably ranked too high, but this is my list and I’ll do what I want.

37. “Enchanted,” Speak Now (2010): Originally the title track for Swift’s third album until her label told her, more or less, to cut it with the fairy-tale stuff. It’s a glittery ode to a meet-cute that probably didn’t need to be six minutes long, but at least the extended length gives us extra time to soak up the heavenly coda, with its multi-tracked “Please don’t be in love in with someone else.”

36. “I Know Places,” 1989 (2014): No attempts of universality here — this trip-hop song about trying to find a place to make out when you’re a massive celebrity is only relatable to a couple dozen people. No matter. As a slice of gothic pop-star paranoia, it gives a much-needed bit of edge to 1989. Bumped up a couple of spots for the line about vultures, which I can only assume is a shout-out.

35. “Treacherous,” Red (2012): Swift has rarely been so tactile as on this intimate ballad, seemingly constructed entirely out of sighs.

34. “Dress,” Reputation (2017): An appropriately slinky track that gives us an unexpected payoff for years of lyrics about party dresses: “I only bought this dress so you could take it off,” she says in the chorus. The way the whole song starts and stops is an obvious trick, but I like it.

33. “Speak Now,” Speak Now (2010): The rest of the band plays it so straight that it might take a second listen to realize that this song is, frankly, bonkers. First, Swift sneaks into a wedding to find a bridezilla, “wearing a gown shaped like a pastry,” snarling at the bridesmaids. Then it turns out she’s been uninvited — oops — so she decides to hide in the curtains. Finally, at a pivotal moment she stands up in front of everyone and protests the impending union. Luckily the guy is cool with it, so we get a happy ending! All this nonsense undercuts the admittedly charming chorus, but it’s hard not to smile at the unabashed silliness.

32. “22,” Red (2012): Another collaboration with Martin and Shellback, another absurdly catchy single. Still, there’s enough personality in the machine for this to still feel like a Taylor song, for better (“breakfast at midnight” being the epitome of adult freedom) and for worse (the obsession with “cool kids”). Mostly for better.

31. “Christmases When You Were Mine,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): The clear standout of Swift’s Christmas album, with an endearingly winsome riff and lyrics that paint a poignant picture of yuletide heartbreak. If you’ve ever been alone on Christmas, this is your song.

30. “White Horse,” Fearless (2008): You’d never call Swift a genre deconstructionist, but her best work digs deeper into romantic tropes than she gets credit for. In just her second album, she and Rose gave us this clear-eyed look at the emptiness of symbolic gestures, allegedly finished in a mere 45 minutes. Almost left off the album, but saved thanks to Shonda Rhimes.

29. “I Knew You Were Trouble,” Red (2012): The guiding principle on much of Red seems to have been to throw absolutely every idea a person could think of into a song and see what worked. Here, we go from Kelly Clarkson verses to a roller-coaster chorus to a dubstep breakdown that dates the song as surely as radiocarbon — then back again. It shouldn’t hang together, but the gutsy vocals and vivid lyrics keep the track from going off the rails.

28. “Teardrops on My Guitar,” Taylor Swift (2006): An evocative portrait of high-school heartbreak, equal parts mundane — no adult songwriter would have named the crush “Drew” — and melodramatic. It’s also the best example of Swift and Rose’s early songwriting cheat code, when they switch the words of the chorus around at the end of the song. “It just makes the listener feel like the writer and the artist care about the song,” Rose told Billboard. “That they’re like, “Okay, you’ve heard it, but wait a minute — ’cause I want you know that this really affected me, I’m gonna dig the knife in just a little bit deeper.’” (In a fitting twist, “Teardrops” ended up inspiring a moment that could have come straight out of a Taylor Swift song, when the real Drew showed up outside her house one night. “I hadn’t talked to him in two-and-a-half years,” she told the Washington Post. “He was like: ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And I’m like: ‘Wow, you’re late? Good to see you?’”)

27. “Begin Again,” Red (2012): Swift’s sequencing genius strikes again: After the emotional roller coaster of Red, this gentle ballad plays like a cleansing shower. (It works so well she’d repeat the trick on 1989, slightly more obviously.) Of all Swift’s date songs, this one feels the most true to life; anyone who’s ever been on a good first date can recall the precise moment their nervousness melted into relief.

26. “New Year’s Day,” Reputation (2017): Like a prestige cable drama, Swift likes to use her final track as a kind of quiet summing-up of all that’s come before. Here, she saves the album’s most convincing love song for last: “I want your midnights / but I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day” is a great way to describe a healthy relationship. The lovely back-and-forth vocals in the outro help break the tie with “Begin Again.”

25. “Shake It Off,” 1989 (2014): Swift’s second No. 1 was greeted with widespread critical sighs: After the heights of Red, why was she serving up cotton-candy fluff about dancing your way past the haters? (Never mind that Red had its own sugary singles.) Now that we’ve all gotten some distance, the purpose of “Shake It Off” is clear: This is a wedding song, empty-headed fun designed to get both Grandma and Lil Jayden on the dance floor. Docked ten or so spots for the spoken-word bridge and cheerleader breakdown, which might be the worst 24 seconds of the entire album.

24. “Safe and Sound,” The Hunger Games: Songs From District 12 and Beyond (2012): Swift’s collaboration with folk duo the Civil Wars is her best soundtrack cut by a country mile. Freed from the constraints of her usual mode, her vocals paint in corners you didn’t think she could reach, especially when she tries out a high-pitched vibrato that blends beautifully with Joy Williams and John Paul White’s hushed harmonies. Swift has worked in a variety of emotional palettes in her career, but this is the only time she’s ever been spooky.

23. “Picture to Burn,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift’s breakup songs rarely get more acidic than they do in this country hit. By the time she’s twanging a line about dating all her ex’s friends, things have gotten downright rowdy. The original lyrics — “Go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay” — show how far standards for acceptable speech in nice young people have shifted in the past decade.

22. “Fearless,” Fearless (2008): The title track from Swift’s second album has more of her favorite images — in one memorable twofer, she’s dancing in the rain while wearing her best dress — but she invests them with so much emotion that you’d swear she was using them for the first time. The exuberance of the lyrics is matched in the way she tumbles from line to line into the chorus.

21. “Tim McGraw,” Taylor Swift (2006): If you by chance ever happen to meet Taylor Swift, there is one thing you should know: Do not, under any circumstances, call her “calculating.” “Am I shooting from the hip?” she once asked GQ when confronted with the word. “Would any of this have happened if I was? … You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.” However, since the title of her first single apparently came from label head Scott Borchetta — “I told Taylor, ‘They won’t immediately remember your name, they’ll say who’s this young girl with this song about Tim McGraw?’” — I think we’re allowed to break out the c-word: Calling it “Tim McGraw” was the first genius calculation in a career that would turn out to be full of them. Still, there would have been no getting anywhere with it if the song weren’t good. Even as a teenager, Swift was savvy enough to know that country fans love nothing more than listening to songs about listening to country music. And the very first line marks her as more of a skeptic than you might expect: “He said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia pines to shame that night / I said, ‘That’s a lie.’”

20. “Dear John,” Speak Now (2010): “I’ve never named names,” Swift once told GQ. “The fact that I’ve never confirmed who those songs are about makes me feel like there is still one card I’m holding.” That may technically be true, but she came pretty dang close with this seven-minute epic. (John Mayer said he felt “humiliated” by the song, after which Swift told Glamour it was “presumptuous” of him to think that the song his ex wrote, that used his first name, was about him.) She sings the hell out of it, but when it comes to songs where Swift systematically outlines all the ways in which an older male celebrity is an inadequate partner, I think I prefer “All Too Well,” which is less wallow-y. I’ve seen it speculated that the guitar noodling on this track is meant as a parody of Mayer’s own late-’00s output, which if true would be deliciously petty.

19. “Red,” Red (2012): Re-eh-eh-ed, re-eh-eh-ed. Red’s title track sees the album’s maximalist style in full effect — who in their right mind would put Auto-Tune and banjos on the same track? But somehow, the overstuffing works here; it’s the audio equivalent of the lyrics’ synesthesia.

18. “I Did Something Bad,” Reputation (2017): It’s too bad Rihanna already has an album called Unapologetic, because that would have been a perfect title for Reputation, or maybe just this jubilant “Blank Space” sequel. Why the hell she didn’t release this one instead of “Look What You Made Me Do,” I’ll never know — not only does “Something Bad” sell the lack of remorse much better, it bangs harder than any other song on pop radio this summer except “Bodak Yellow.” Is that a raga chant? Are those fucking gunshots? Docked a spot or two for “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one,” which doth protest too much, but bumped up just as much for Swift’s first on-the-record “shit.”

17. “Forever & Always,” Fearless (2008): This blistering breakup song was the one that solidified Swift’s image as the pop star you dump at your own peril. (The boys in the debut were just Nashville randos; this one was about a Jonas Brother, back when that really meant something.) Obligatory fiddles aside, the original version is just about a perfect piece of pop-rock — dig how the guitars drop out at a pivotal moment — though the extended edition of Fearless also contains a piano version if you feel like having your guts ripped out. I have no idea what the lines about “rain in your bedroom” mean, but like the best lyrics, they make sense on an instinctual level. And to top it off, the track marks the introduction of Swift’s colloquial style — “Where is this GOoO-ING?” — that would serve her so well in the years to come.

16. “Mean,” Speak Now (2010): It takes some chutzpah to put a song complaining about mean people on the same album as “Better Than Revenge,” but lack of chutzpah has never been Swift’s problem. Get past that and you’ll find one of Swift’s most naturally appealing melodies and the joyful catharsis that comes with giving a bully what’s coming to them. (Some listeners have interpreted the “big enough so you can’t hit me” line to mean the song’s about abuse, but I’ve always read it as a figure of speech, as in “hit piece.”)

15. “Wildest Dreams,” 1989 (2014): Swift is in full control of her instrument here, with so much yearning in her voice that you’d swear every breath was about to be her last. For a singer often slammed as being sexless, those sighs in the chorus tell us everything we need to know. Bumped up a few spots for the invigorating double-time bridge, the best on 1989.

14. “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” Reputation (2017): Put aside the title, which can’t help but remind me of the time Hillary Clinton tweeted “delete your account.” The same way “I Did Something Bad” is the best possible version of “Look What You Made Me Do,” this is a much better rewrite of “Bad Blood.” Swift brings back the school-yard voice in the chorus, but also so much more: She does exaggerated politeness in the bridge, she spins the “Runaway” toast, she says the words “Therein lies the issue” like she’s been listening to Hamilton. The high point comes when she contemplates forgiving a hater, then bursts into an incredulous guffaw. Reader, I laughed out loud.

13. “Style,” 1989 (2014): The much-ballyhooed ’80s sound on 1989 often turned out to just mean Swift was using more synths than usual, but she nailed the vibe on this slinky single, which could have soundtracked a particularly romantic episode of Miami Vice. Despite the dress-up games in the chorus, this is one of the rare Swift love songs to feel truly adult: Both she and the guy have been down this road too many times to bullshit anymore. That road imagery is haunted by the prospect of death lurking around every hairpin turn — what’s sex without a little danger?

12. “Hey Stephen,” Fearless (2008): Who knew so many words rhymed with Stephen? They all come so naturally here. Swift is in the zone as a writer, performer, and producer on this winning deep cut, which gives us some wonderful sideways rhymes (“look like an angel” goes with “kiss you in the rain, so”), a trusty Hammond organ in the background, and a bunch of endearing little ad-libs, to say nothing of the kicker: “All those other girls, well they’re beautiful / But would they write a song for you?” For once, the mid-song laugh is entirely appropriate.

11. “Out of the Woods,” 1989 (2014): Like Max Martin, Antonoff’s influence as a collaborator has not been wholly positive: His penchant for big anthemic sounds can drown out the subtlety of Swift, and he’s been at the controls for some of her biggest misfires. But boy, does his Jack Antonoff thing work here, bringing a whole forest of drums to support Swift’s rapid-fire string of memories. The song’s bridge was apparently inspired by a snowmobile accident Swift was in with Harry Styles, an incident that never made the tabloids despite what seemed like round-the-clock coverage of the couple — a subtler reminder of the limits of media narratives than anything on Reputation.

10. “Love Story,” Fearless (2008): Full disclosure: This was the first Taylor Swift song I ever heard. (It was a freezing day in early 2009; I was buying shoes; basically, the situation was the total antithesis of anything that’s ever happened in a Taylor Swift song.) I didn’t like it at first. Who’s this girl singing about Romeo and Juliet, and doesn’t she know they die in the end?What I would soon learn was: not here they don’t, as Swift employs a key change so powerful it literally rewrites Shakespeare. The jury’s still out on the question of if she’s ever read the play, but she definitely hasn’t read The Scarlet Letter.

9. “State of Grace,” Red (2012): Swift’s songs are always full of interesting little nuggets you don’t notice until your 11th listen or so — a lyrical twist, maybe, or an unconventional drum fill — but most of them are fundamentally meant to be heard on the radio, which demands a certain type of songwriting and a certain type of sound. What a surprise it was, then, that Red opened with this big, expansive rock track, which sent dozens of Joshua Tree fans searching for their nearest pair of headphones. Another surprise: that she never tried to sound like this again. Having proven she could nail it on her first try, Swift set out to find other giants to slay.

8. “Ronan,” non-album digital single (2012): A collage of lines pulled from the blog of Maya Thompson, whose 3-year-old son had died of cancer, this charity single sees Swift turn herself into an effective conduit for the other woman’s grief. (Thompson gets a co-writing credit.) One of the most empathetic songs in Swift’s catalogue, as well as her most reliable tearjerker.

7. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Red (2012): Flash back to 2012. Carly Rae Jepsen had a No. 1 hit. Freaking Gotye had a No. 1 hit. LMFAO had two. And yet Swift, arguably the biggest pop star in the country, had never had a No. 1 hit. (“You Belong With Me” and “Today Was a Fairytale” had both peaked at No. 2.) And so she called up Swedish pop cyborg Max Martin, the man who makes hits as regularly as you and I forget our car keys. The first song they wrote together is still their masterpiece, though it feels wrong to say that “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was written; better to say that it was designed, as Swift and Martin turn almost every single second of the song’s 3:12 run time into a hook. Think of that guitar loop, the snippets of millennial-speak in the margins (“cuz like”), those spiraling “ooh”s, the spoken-word bit that could have been overheard at any brunch in America, and towering over it all, that gigantic “we.” Like all hyper-efficient products it feels like a visitor from some cold algorithmic future: The sense of joy here is so perfectly engineered that you get the sense it did not come entirely from human hands.

6. “Our Song,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift wrote this one for her ninth-grade talent show, and I have a lovely time imagining all the other competitors getting the disappointment of their lives once they realized what they were up against. (“But nice job with that Green Day cover, Andy.”) Even at this early stage Swift had a knack for matching her biggest melodic hooks to sentences that would make them soar; that “’cause it’s late and your mama don’t know” is absolutely ecstatic. She’s said she heard the entire production in her head while writing, and on the record Nathan Chapman brings out all the tricks in the Nashville handbook, and even some that aren’t, like the compressed hip-hop drums in the final refrain.

5. “Mine,” Speak Now (2010): As catchy as her Max Martin songs, but with more of a soul, “Mine” wins a narrow victory over “Our Song” on account of having a better bridge. This one’s another fantasy, and you can kind of tell, but who cares — Paul McCartney didn’t really fall in love with a meter maid, either. Swift packs in so many captivating turns of phrase here, and she does it so naturally: It’s hard to believe no one else got to “you are the best thing that’s ever been mine” before her, and the line about “a careless man’s careful daughter” is so perfect that you instantly know everything about the guy. Let’s give a special shout-out to Nathan Chapman again: His backup vocals are the secret weapon of Speak Now, and they’re at their very best here.

4. “Blank Space,” 1989 (2014): You know how almost every other song that’s even a little bit like “Blank Space” ranks very low on this list? Yeah, that’s how hard a trick Swift pulls off on this 1989 single, which manages to satirize her man-eater image while also demonstrating exactly what makes that image so appealing. The gag takes a perfectly tuned barometer for tone: “Look What You Made Me Do” collapsed under the weight of its own self-obsession; “Better Than Revenge” didn’t quite get the right amount of humor in. But Swift’s long history of code-switching works wonders for her here, as she gives each line just the right spin — enough irony for us to get the jokes, enough sincerity that we’ll all sing along anyway. Martin and Shellback bring their usual bells and whistles, but they leave enough empty space in the mix for the words to ring out. Who wouldn’t want to write their name?

3. “Fifteen,” Fearless (2008): For many young people, the real experience of romance is the thinking about it, not the actual doing it. (For an increasing number, the thinking about it is all they’re doing.) Swift gets this almost instinctively, and never more than on this early ballad about her freshman year of high school, which plays like a gentle memoir. Listen to how the emotional high point of the second verse is not something that happens, but her reaction to it: “He’s got a car and you feel like flyyying.” She knows that the real thing is awkward, occasionally unpleasant, and almost guaranteed to disappoint you — the first sentence she wrote for this one was “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind / We both cried,” a line that became exhibit B in the case of Taylor Swift v. Feminism — and she knows how fantasies can sustain you when nothing else will. “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team / but I didn’t know it at 15,” she sings, even though she’s only 18 herself. That there are plenty of people who spent their teenage years making out, smoking cigarettes, and reading Anaïs Nin doesn’t negate the fact that, for a lot of us squares, even the prospect of holding someone else’s hand could get us through an entire semester. Virgins need love songs, too.

2. “All Too Well,” Red (2012): It’s no wonder that music writers love this one: This is Swift at her most literary, with a string of impeccably observed details that could have come out of a New Yorker short story. “All Too Well” was the first song Swift wrote for Red; she hadn’t worked with Liz Rose since Fearless, but she called up her old collaborator to help her make sense of her jumble of memories from a relationship recently exploded. “She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information,” Rose told Rolling Stone later. “I just let her go.” The original version featured something like eight verses; together the two women edited it down to a more manageable three, while still retaining its propulsive momentum. The finished song is a kaleidoscopic swirl of images — baby pictures at his parents’ house, “nights where you made me your own,” a scarf left in a drawer — always coming back to the insistence that these things happened, and they mattered: “I was there, I remember it all too well.” The words are so strong that the band mostly plays support; they don’t need anything flashier than a 4/4 thump and a big crescendo for each chorus. There are few moments on Red better than the one where Swift jumps into her upper register to deliver the knockout blow in the bridge. Just like the scarf, you can’t get rid of this song.

1. “You Belong With Me,” Fearless (2008): Swift was hanging out with a male friend one day when he took a call from his girlfriend. “He was completely on the defensive saying, ‘No, baby … I had to get off the phone really quickly … I tried to call you right back … Of course I love you. More than anything! Baby, I’m so sorry,’” she recalled. “She was just yelling at him! I felt so bad for him at that moment.” Out of that feeling, a classic was born. Swift had written great songs drawn from life before, but here she gave us a story of high school at its most archetypal: A sensitive underdog facing off with some prissy hot chick, in a battle to see which one of them really got a cute boy’s jokes. (Swift would play both women in the video; she had enough self-awareness to know that most outcasts are not tall, willowy blonde girls.) Rose says the song “just flowed out of” Swift, and you can feel that rush of inspiration in the way the lines bleed into each other, but there’s some subtle songcraft at work, too: Besides the lyrical switcheroos about who wears what, we also only get half the chorus the first go-round, just to save one more wallop for later. The line about short skirts and T-shirts will likely be mentioned in Swift’s obituary one day, and I think it’s key to the song’s, and by extension Swift’s, appeal: In my high school, even the most popular kids wore T-shirts.

Vulture

#taylor swift #rankings #reputation #music

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I'm curious for your thoughts on this subject. I dislike the way antis use the term "yaoi" and "fujoshi" since I feel like these terms were created to mean specific things (in Japanese culture) and antis often apply it without considering differences between slash and yaoi. Also, I dislike the way they use yaoi to pretty much mean fetishizing mlm/content, and fujoshi as fetishizing women since both terms are from Japan and I feel weird seeing these terms associated with fetishizing.

I also am really bothered by the way English fandom has adopted genre words from Japan to mean ‘the worst version of [x]/fans of [x]’. it feels like a form of looking down anything coming from Japan/Japanese culture and treating Japanese culture as the source of these ‘worst versions’.

(a lot of what follows is from light research I’ve done over the years and personal experience. It’s my opinion and experiences rather than a closely researched and heavily sourced essay.)

I think the reason for this weird English-speaking take is two-fold:

Americans/western culture interprets the Japanese subgenre ‘yaoi’ and its Japanese creators & fans through the lens of American/western culture and finds them wanting

the reinterpretation of the concept of ‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ in American/western culture and the unfortunate associations created as a result

Without going into historical depth, any western - particularly American - interaction with Japanese culture is an unequal one. Besides the ignominious end of WWII, the American army was the means of forcing Japan to reopen their borders in the 1850′s. And frankly: western culture has been obsessed with Japanese culture (and other East Asian cultures) for literal centuries. and we’ve been taking their cool shit and appropriating and bastardizing it for just as long.[$] 

the way that the words ‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ are being treated now is, in my opinion, an extension of this.

(this post was heavily updated on August 2-3rd, 2018, to add a lot more about the word ‘fujoshi’: it originally focused more on ‘yaoi’. huge thanks to blogs like @rottenboysclub​, @oh-suketora​, and @satans-tiddies​ for all the information they’ve put out on tumblr about these words.[%] )

American understanding of yaoi in Japan & its Japanese fans

Americans don’t understand yaoi or fujoshi in their original Japanese context, but we belittle and denigrate it as if we do.

BL (Boy’s Love) and its subgenre ‘yaoi’ seem to have a similar relationship to Japanese fans as ‘slashfic’ and mlm fiction does to American fans. But that doesn’t mean we understand yaoi/BL in the context of Japanese culture or that we interact with yaoi/BL the same way Japanese fans do.  Same for the word ‘fujoshi’ - a term that seems to have been coined in a derogatory context but was ‘reclaimed’ by the very female-aligned fans that it was meant to denigrate. (but more on ‘fujoshi’ later.)

In Japan, the word ‘yaoi’ is more equivalent to a Japanese acronym for the English ‘pwp’ (plot? what plot?) than a word referring to mlm. Like ‘pwp’ in its original usage, ‘yaoi’ indicates a fanwork or small-time/one-shot original work (doujinshi) that has little to no plot and/or focuses almost exclusively on the sex part of a fictional ship, though ‘yaoi’ is specifically applied to mlm-focused ‘plotless’ fanworks*.

(*it’s worth noting that - as mentioned in the wiki link above - the word ‘yaoi’ does not, on its own, have a meaning attached to BL. it has more to do with who adopted the acronym for common use: specifically, BL doujin writers.)

‘yaoi’ has fallen out of use in Japanese fan circles. ‘BL’ - ‘boy’s love’ - is the word which is more of an umbrella term for mlm in the way ‘slash’ is in English-speaking fandom, covering everything from explicit sex to soft pre-romance hand-holding. however, ‘yaoi’ was the word that became known as the Japanese-equivalent mlm fan genre to ‘slash’ in English-speaking circles, which had the unfortunate effect of leading English-speaking animanga fans to compare only the most tropey, explicit mlm content from Japanese fandom against all varieties of mlm ‘slash’ content from English-speaking fandom.

This was comparing apples to oranges; a more equivalent Western fandom comparison to Japanese ‘yaoi’ would probably be silly oneshot crackfic and kinkmeme fics. But the misapprehension was already in place and only got worse as some of the tropes of the explicit versions of yaoi genre doujinshi became increasingly known - the ‘seme’ (’top’) and ‘uke’ (’bottom’) and their supposedly male/female-like roles, the ‘rapey’ tendency to show the uke as crying and reluctant under an aggressive seme, etc.

These kinds of tropes don’t sit well with a modern American audience. And Japanese bl fans have had their own conversations about whether bl/yaoi is harmful to or supportive of Japanese gay culture (and long before Western / English-speaking fandom circles were having them, at least in a widespread way.)

But Americans are ill-equipped to judge the situation from the sidelines. To provide a few examples of things we generally don’t have cultural context on to truly understand yaoi (BL, tbh) and its Japanese fans:

LGBTQ+ culture in Japan

the Japanese flavor of gender essentialism

social and societal pressures on Japanese people, particularly women (trans, cis, and intersex) & nb ppl who identify as femme-aligned

what it means to be ‘feminine’ in Japan

strongly gendered roles in the bedroom (sex in Japan)

Without knowing all this, how can we understand why yaoi (or BL) is constructed the way it is? how can we understand what draws people to it, or how it sits with Japanese LGBTQ people?

But because many yaoi tropes don’t sit well with Americans in the context of our own culture and increasing openness to LGBT+/queer people, and because we’ve given yaoi a false equivalence with a western genre of fiction that has a much wider range of subject and form, we’re apt to look down on yaoi as ‘bad mlm’ and on its ‘fujoshi’ fans as genuinely ‘rotten women’.

The international reinterpretation of ‘yaoi’ & international yaoi fans

the other way the word ‘yaoi’ is used by many people in fandom-centric tumblr - anti and non-anti alike - is in reference to how Americans/Western fans ‘initially’ interacted with Japanese-sourced mlm (’initially’ being when yaoi became well-known enough for a noticeable interaction to appear in American/western geek subculture).

Manga and anime had a popularity boom in the US around 2003/2004 thanks to improving internet speeds and the 24-hour cartoon channel Cartoon Network looking for fresh animated content to air. Media companies caught on and a glut of manga and anime were officially licensed, translated, and sold overseas.

As the popularity of Japanese media grew, the word ‘yaoi’ became more popular and widely used in fandom circles, usually as a substitute for ‘slash’ or ‘gay’ (fictional mlm) when the source material for the fannish subject was Japanese in origin. I think this hit its peak around 2006-2007; at that time many teenage and young adult anime fans (primarily female/femme) who enjoyed slashfic/mlm fic called themselves ‘yaoi fans’. 

Why was ‘yaoi’ so popular in America/western culture? and why did its fans get such an awful reputation over time?

as for popularity, here’s a few aspects: 

Just another word for ‘slash’ - it wasn’t so much that yaoi as a publishing genre was popular as that there were a lot anime fans in fandom using the word ‘yaoi’ for their mlm fan content instead of the word ‘slash’. (and it still is used this way in some circles.)

male-attracted teen’s first fanservice - because of the size of the boom and the comparative diffidence of American marketers to young (male-attracted) people, a young anime fan’s first published media experience with the sexual ‘female gaze’ directed towards men was more likely to be sourced in Japanese BL content.

American gaze on Japanese male companionship - manga geared towards young men / perceived men in Japan (such as Shonen Jump titles) features a lot of male companionship and tight bonds of friendship. So does American media, but American male culture rarely allows men to touch one another in friendly ways (any gentle touch from a cis man is treated as expressing sexual interest).  Japanese male friendship culture lacks this physical distance. Guess how it was interpreted, and guess what kind of effect it had on American anime/manga fandom.

relatedly, this LGBT/queer read on Japanese-sourced masc-centric content, plus the willingness of works aimed towards femme audiences to present all-but-canon mlm relationships, probably functioned as a poor man’s substitute for the lack of LGBT representation in American media in some cases.

and some reasons for the terrible reputation ‘yaoi fans’ garnered:

American ‘yaoi fans’ in the mid-2000′s were mostly teenage girls/femme-aligned young people, and it is an American pastime to shit on teenage girls for being teenagers and girls at the same time.

10 years on, those teenage girls are young adults in their 20′s looking back on their younger selves with embarrassed disgust. That is: the word ‘yaoi’ started to garner its sour taste in the 2010′s because that’s when most of the teenagers of the 2000′s outgrew that particular flavor of immaturity.

a lack of LGBT/queer culture awareness and education in America. Yaoi or slash fanworks may have been Baby’s First Gay Content. It also might have been the entire extent of their knowledge about non-straight anything because America had by no means the same level of LGBT/queer visibility that it does now and certainly didn’t (doesn’t) educate about it. people said and did some awful stuff out of sheer ignorance and lack of thought.

fandom got better about it because resources improved and visibility increased, which was itself in some measure because of the popularity of mlm fiction in fandom circles leading to people doing more research and queer fans educating those who knew less. BL wasn’t necessarily intended as queer rep, but it did act as a gateway to queer culture for people who discovered things about themselves through BL.

socially inappropriate behavior of many, many kinds - including those who refused to separate fiction and reality and treated real mlm like live fanservice (‘omg real life yaoi!’). But as an icon of ‘yaoi fan in the 2000′s cringe culture’, perhaps nothing is so prominent and well-known as the ‘yaoi paddle’.

why is the yaoi paddle so illustrative and iconic? Well - the paddles were sold at anime conventions as a silly novelty item. Anime convention attendees tended (and still tend) to skew young, particularly compared to other nerdy social gatherings.  And as you would expect of a bunch of (a) overexcited young people (b) relatively lacking in supervision and (c ) surrounded by things liable to raise their excitement levels even more, they did a lot of foolish things when handed wooden oars that were easy to swing around and hit people with.

At about the same time that anime fandom was truly exploding in size and the yaoi paddle craze was hitting its peak, the internet was juuust about bandwidth friendly enough to allow people to take videos and upload them to this awesome new site ‘youtube’.

I’d say ‘you can imagine what kinds of videos people uploaded’ but you don’t have to imagine. you can see for yourself. The human interest news articles practically wrote themselves. And while yaoi paddles were quickly banned from conventions and their popularity dropped almost as fast, it was an impression to linger. particularly, IMO, combined with other invasive social behaviors that were somewhat more tolerated at anime conventions back then: ‘glomping’, ‘free hugs!’ signs, awkwardly following relative strangers around conventions as nominal ‘friends’, cosplayers publicly ‘making out’ as ‘fanservice’, etc.*

so this is the image of the ‘yaoi fan’ today - a young, white American cis girl at an anime convention in 2007, lacking self-restraint, social grace, and the ability to distinguish fiction from reality. and though this image has little to do with the original Japanese concept, we use the Japanese word to conjure it.

*these behaviors weren’t limited to young female / perceived female ‘yaoi fans’ by any means, but partially because of yaoi paddles, ‘cringe culture’ and ‘yaoi fangirls’ were inexorably linked to one another.

International (mis)use of ‘Fujoshi’: a Brief History

In contrast with ‘yaoi’, the word ‘fujoshi’ has a comparatively short history in American culture. It had a brief rise to popularity in the early- to mid- 2010′s, but for the past year or two it has been heavily invoked by the (so to speak) ‘fandom police’ as an invective against (perceived) women who ship fictional mlm and/or create explicit fictional mlm fanworks.

‘fujoshi’ (  腐女子 ) is a compound word composed of the kanji/hanzi for ‘rotten’/’fermented’ (腐) and ‘woman’ (女子 ) and is a homonym with an old Japanese word for ‘respectable woman’ (婦女子 ).  It was coined on 2ch (a Japanese text board popular with men) to insult (perceived) female fans who ‘queered’ media content written for & centered around men: re-imagining (canon straight) male characters as queer/gay/bi, shipping them with one another, and discussing/creating explicit, sexual work around those ships. (sound familiar?)

In its original insulting context, a ‘fujoshi’ was woman who was no longer a desirable marriage partner because of her interest in BL. She had ruined herself by marinating in sexual fantasies - and not even normal sexual fantasies about having sex with a man herself. Instead, she had fantasies about men having sex with men! Not only had a fujoshi woman lost her cute naivete and innocence: she’d also turned into a sexual deviant. She was fermented, overripe, disgusting, undesirable.

I don’t know how long this meaning had any clout, because Japanese BL fans - BL fans from all over Asia, in fact - embraced the ‘fujoshi’ label. to me, the implication of the ‘fujoshi’ reclamation reads like a giant, queer ‘fuck you’ to the kind of dudebros who hated them: ‘you find me undesirable because i like gay/queer content? That’s hilarious, because I never wanted you in the first place.’ 

And to this day (mid-2018), 'fu’/ 腐, ’fujo’/ 腐女, and its varieties (腐男子, 腐人, etc) have positive connotations in kanji/hanzi-using fandom circles.

The word ‘fujoshi’ reached English-speaking Western fandom eventually (I want to say in the late 2000′s/early 2010′s). It came to us already reclaimed and was picked up as a positive self-label. In those earlier days, Western fandom called themselves ‘fujoshi’ in a way much more similar to how Eastern fandom still uses it: 

It’s not my job to please you.

I’m allowed to enjoy taboo things like queer fanworks, headcanoning canon straight male characters as gay, and sexually explicit content.

If you think that makes me gross, then fine: i’m gross. your opinion doesn’t hurt me. in fact, I embrace it.

(now go away and let me ship.)

this connotation of ‘fujoshi’ enjoyed a brief period of popularity. There was a fandom ‘sweet spot’ for slash in 2011-2012: shifts in public opinion meant shipping gay ships wasn’t utterly taboo anymore and AO3 was a safe space for sharing slashfic. ‘Fujoshi’ came to semi-replace ‘yaoi fan’ in the English lexicon, at this time, becoming synonymous with ‘ships gay ships in animanga fandoms’, with the added bonus of partially shedding the connotation of loving old yaoi doujin tropes in one’s slashfic.

But in the last few years - starting in around 2014/2015, I want to say - there was a shift in the attitude towards shipping mlm here on tumblr. 

mlm fans who are seen as women - whether they are or not - are increasingly told that shipping fictional slash ships or creating fictional content about men in love with/having sex with men is terrible. mlm shippers/fanwork creators who aren’t mlm themselves - especially perceived-female mlm shippers/fanwork creators - are apparent no different from the ‘yaoi fangirl’ stereotype above: the 2007 cis white socially awkward fangirl, holding a yaoi paddle and screaming with excitement about real life yaoi!!! whenever two real gay men kiss.

the word ‘fujoshi’ - still tied to the English-speaking concept of ‘yaoi’ by both words being Japanese in origin and related to mlm fan content - was about to get unreclaimed with a vengeance … by American/Western fans with hardly a drop of knowledge about Japanese culture, fandom, or language.

And it’s been every bit as ugly as you can imagine.

‘yaoi’ and ‘fujoshi’ on tumblr today (mid-2018)

fandom on tumblr, deeply into policing everyone’s fannish interests in the name of social awareness, invokes ‘yaoi’ in a two-fold way:

‘yaoi’ as a doujinshi subgenre in Japan: featuring fictional mlm in sexual situations for titillation written by Japanese women (& femme-identifying nb people) for Japanese women (& femme-identifying nb people), and the distasteful feelings American/western culture bears towards its tropes as being unacceptably unrealistic and ‘backwards’ by modern progressive American standards.

‘yaoi’ as ‘cringe culture’: an imperialistic American/western read on Japanese media content + exposure to Japanese BL, blending unfavorably with a lack of education on real LGBT/queer culture, a lack of alternative LGBT/queer media representation, and teenagers being teenagers

Tumblr fandom police, feeling that ‘fujoshi’ was equally bad as ‘yaoi’ by dint of being adopted as a label by animanga slashfic fans & as another Japanese word relating to mlm shipping, proceeded to co-opt, redefine, and ‘un-claim’ the word ‘fujoshi’:

‘fujoshi’, but literally. having gotten wind of the literal meaning of the word ‘fujoshi’, but completely lacking the context under which the word was created, invoked, and reclaimed, fandom policers designated their own negative meaning for ‘rotten girl’. ‘fujoshi’ means ‘straight girl that’s rotten because she fetishizes gay men!’ fandom policers say - even though that has literally nothing to do with ‘fujoshi’ in its proper context.

telling East Asian fujoshi they can’t call themselves fujoshi. having decided the word ‘fujoshi’ is tied to being homophobic (by ‘fetishizing’ gay romance), and that its derogatory of women because they rely on their own re-take on the literal, negative meaning, American fandom policers start attacking East Asian fans that proudly call themselves fujoshi. (I wish I was joking.)

In summary, English-speaking fans are using their own twisted, ill-informed, and imperialistic treatment and understanding of Japanese concepts to turn those words into pejoratives for use in petty ship wars.

(And when you put it like that it kind of starts to look a little … well … racist.)

[%] This post was never intended as an exhaustive resource - as noted at the beginning of the post, it was based on my absorbed knowledge from being in animanga fandom as an American for many years - but thanks to the blogs I listed, who have a much more thorough knowledge of kanji / hanzi-using fan spaces such as Japan/China/Taiwan, Korea (in part), etc, I learned a lot about the current usage of ‘yaoi’ (or lack thereof) in Japan & how fujoshi was adopted as a popular label over the last 9 months.

If you’re ever looking for more information on these topics, I would especially point you to @rottenboysclub, as their blog is focused on educating English-speaking fandom on Japanese queer/LGBT+ and fandom terminology.

[$] regarding western tendency to appropriate Japanese culture - Japan is eager to export the unique aspects of their culture. but how many times have you seen an English article with titles like ‘10 Reasons Why Japan is So Weird’ or ‘25 Weird Things About Japan that will make you say ‘buy why?’’ (the literacy rate in Japan being nearly 100% is #3 on this list). and okay - Japanese culture is remarkably different from American culture. But this ‘Japan is so weird’ talk is often accompanied by a tone of mild superiority.

consider how we treat Japanese cultural products such as movies. The recent Death Note debacle is only the latest in a long string of this kind of nonsense (though thank goodness it’s getting the reputation it deserves.) Remember The Ring? American remake of Ringu. And of course there’s dozens of other examples of Americans buying or taking things from its original Japanese context and trying to make it ‘better’ for a mainstream American audience, even though the American audience liked the original Japanese product just fine. (Dragonball Z comes to mind.)

(On the flip side you have ‘weaboos/weebs’, the contemporary word for ‘Japanophiles’, putting Japanese culture on a pedestal, which is not any better, and disgust with ‘weebs’ tends to be extended to the aspects of Japanese culture they worship.)

#racism in fandom #this is an americentric post #yaoi as a trope #in defense of fujoshi #in defense of freedom to fandom #animanga fandom #fandom history #TEH HOT YAOIZ

[reistellae]

A really really long reflection 1/3

So, the other day, there was some controversy and I’ve been having thoughts about it since literally last night. This’ll be a long post, so don’t feel the need to read through all of it if you are not interested or don’t know what I’m talking about. 

NOTE: I realized this one was getting super long so I made it a multipart. I’ll add links to any subsequent parts as they’re posted.

Part Two

Part Three

I won’t dwell too long on the initial thing, but basically a post from an anonymous opinion blog was shared around Twitter. Those of you who know what happened, know pretty well how quickly that post went to all hell. People were being accused of racism and one blog even reported getting death threats (one that was posted told the user to “get r**** and die of AIDS.”) I won’t give my opinion on the subject in question itself, but I do want to give further context into how this situation happened and what it means about stan culture, conversations about race, and diversity within pop culture as a whole.

America has been historically racist against every non white group, that shouldn’t be a surprise. And since racism is something that is deeply rooted within a society, it is not something that can just easily be erased because of some laws or some money. Reminder that the slavery of Africans had been occurring for 300 years before they were “free.” Just because African-Americans have civil rights and white people love Beyonce, doesn’t mean that racism is dead. 300 years of mistreatment, trauma, stripping people of their humanity cannot go away in the nearly 60 years since the civil rights movement. 

In the entertainment industry and pop culture alone, minorities are still discriminated against (large due to the fact that those in charge of entertainment agencies were/are old white men). Japanese silent film actors in the 1910s-1930s were popular until WWII virtually wiped out all main roles for Asians/Asian Americans. They were relegated to yellow face or straight up racist caricatures of dog eaters, communists, and unable to speak English properly. This role of “the comedic Asian” has prevailed almost unchallenged except for in martial arts films. Asians/Asian-Americans also are ignored within the music industry. Every now and then, there would be a glimmer of change, but the status quo would remain unchanged. Genres like jpop and jrock saw a surge in popularity in the 1990s-late 2000s because of the rise in popularity of anime but these were mostly considered niche interests and the Internet was not quite as widespread or sophisticated as it is now. 

Enter kpop. Kpop used to also be a niche interest, usually only indulged in by Korean-Americans and other Asian-Americans. Around the late 2000s/early 2010s is when kpop had its initial huge surge in Western visibility. Wonder Girls were on tour with the Jonas Brothers, BoA and Girls Generation released albums in the United States and had made appearances on Good Morning America and Late Night with David Letterman, Psy’s Gangnam Style had become a viral sensation, and Super Junior, Bigbang, 2NE1, and Girls Generation were being nominated for and winning various international awards such as Mashable, Youtube, MTV and more. Bi Rain was featured in TIME Magazine in 2006 and 2007, sold out two Madison Square Garden shows in a matter of days, topped TIME polls for 3 consecutive years, and starred in three Hollywood films (Speed Racer, Ninja Assassin, and The Prince). Aside from Gangnam Style, kpop itself had not yet fully entered the mainstream, but 2012 definitely saw a surge in the visibility of kpop.

Around this time, the Internet had become more widespread and was becoming the dominant source of entertainment and information for the average home. Youtubers began making videos reacting to popularly requested kpop videos like EXO’s Growl, 2NE1′s I Am The Best, BIGBANG’s Fantastic Baby, and Super Junior’s Mr. Simple. Some of these channels only did them for the additional views, but some Youtubers and their regular fans became curious and looked more into kpop. Reaction channels were huge in the early 2010s because of this and this trend would continue well into 2015.

2015 was what, I would consider, the first initial surge in popularity for a particular kpop band; BTS. The group had debuted in 2013 and appealed to a lot of western listeners with their early dark hip hop concept and their songs featured lyrics that deeply resonated with their teenaged audience. Themes consisted of following their dreams, wanting to be successful, and young love. 2015 saw the beginning of what some ARMYs would call their greatest era: HYYH/The Most Beautiful Moment In Life. One of the promoted tracks, Dope, would become a viral hit. The song was infectious and high energy and really showcased the group’s crisp choreography. HYYH would have 2 part mini albums before part 3 came out in 2016. Each video they dropped would do consistently well: I Need U, Run, Fire, Spring Day. Their fans, enthusiastically spreading about the Internet, would want to share their favorite songs and communicate with like minded fans, thus creating the phrase “Any ARMYs here? XD” that would often show up in Youtube video comments, regardless of the content of the video. 

I know this history lesson is long winded and most of you guys DON’T want to/need to read it but as I said, I think it’s important to look at things contextually before drawing a final opinion on a topic. Me personally? I got into kpop in 2011 and it was the natural progression from me liking jpop from 2008. So most of what I’m saying, I saw firsthand. Obviously my perception isn’t unbiased, but I am reading articles and pages to make sure I’m stating things correctly and am trying to not come off as biased. 

Part Two

Part Three

#personal #opinion #canvasbyleo long post #thoughts #kpop

[yeskraim]

The families facing generations of statelessness in South Africa

In the final instalment of a four-part series on stateless children in South Africa, one woman explains how statelessness has a knock-on effect which spans generations.

Luthando*, 28: ‘I went to court and I won the case but I am still stateless’

It has taken years for Luthando, 28, to be recognised as a South African citizen, even though she believes she was born here, albeit to undocumented migrant parents. 

The law in South Africa states that if you are born in South Africa and you have no other nationality, then you are South African. In practice, however, it does not always work this way. 

Furthermore, even though Lawyers for Human Rights, which has been fighting cases on behalf of migrants and refugees in South Africa for the past 30 years, won an important victory when the courts recognised Luthando as South African several months ago, she has yet to receive her much-needed documents or those for her one-year-old son, Bandile*.

Luthando cannot be certain where her parents came from. Her mother, whose nationality she does not know, died when she was five years old.

“My dad told me that they came in from Zimbabwe,” she says.

After he died in 2010, when she was still a teenager, she was unable to complete her schooling because she did not have a birth certificate.

“When I later did research about my surname, I found that it actually belongs to Swaziland,” she explains.

Luthando sits on the double bed that fills the small outbuilding in Cape Town’s Phillipi township where she lives. She moves a stuffed animal out of the way with her foot. Since her case was first lodged five years ago, she has had a baby of her own. Her son has inherited his mother’s statelessness; without a nationality, she cannot pass a nationality onto her child.

I want my son to have a better life. He mustn’t suffer like I did

Without any documentation, it was difficult for Luthando to find work, but she found many people who wanted to exploit her.

“When you don’t have documents and you are looking for a job, other people want to make you a sex slave.” She shudders despite the heat and rubs her shoulder.

“I remember the day this white guy here in Cape Town promised he was going to give me R1000 (about $70) and then take me overseas, to Europe.” This, she says, is how many women like her fall victim to human trafficking and drug smuggling.

Behind her, Bandile waddles in the sun and the dust. Phillipi is considered one of the most dangerous townships in the country, with high unemployment adding fuel to the fire of widespread violent crime and gang-related activities. Luthando cannot wait to leave this place. She lived on the streets of Johannesburg after the death of her father, and says she misses the hustle and bustle of the urban metro. “Cape Town is so slow,” she laughs.

She picks her son up and places him on her lap, feeding him formula from a bottle. “He is so big,” she laments, “and he eats so much. This formula is expensive.” When he has had his fill, she reaches into a plastic bag and brings out a small bottle of calamine lotion, applying the pink mixture sparingly to his skin.

His body is covered with raised bumps that are starting to scab over. His skin is pink in places where he has scratched the scabs off. When he became ill just over a week ago, Luthando managed to collect R230 ($16) to pay a private doctor to see him. Despite the letter from the court, public clinics still will not assist them, she says.

The doctor told her that Bandile is suffering from a viral infection, but did not say which one. Because of their lack of documentation, her son has not been immunised against any of the common childhood diseases. She cannot afford the private fees to have him vaccinated.

Luthando and her son were verified as South African citizens by Pretoria High Court order, but despite this, they have still not received the necessary documentation so remain stateless [Yeshiel Panchia/Al Jazeera]

“I’m stateless. I don’t have documents. I went to court and I won the case but I am still stateless,” Luthando says.

The first thing she wants to do when she receives her South African identity document is to enrol in school. “I must start at Grade 11, and do two years to finish. It’s going to make such a big difference because then I can pursue my dreams.” She smiles. “I want to be a pilot.”

She used to watch planes passing overhead when she was younger and knew that one day she wanted to fly. “We would see the people who fly planes, they were educated and I liked that. I used to think that us black people, we’re not involved in many things. Especially women, because it’s rare to see a black woman in that industry.”

She becomes animated as she talks about how she once heard on the news that South Africa had the first black female fighter pilot on the continent. This, she says, gives her hope that she can achieve her dreams too. Achieving her goals is important, not just for herself. “I want my son to have a better life. He mustn’t suffer like I did.”

A broken system

Liesl Miller is the attorney who heads up the statelessness project at Lawyers for Human Rights. She says statelessness is much more common than most people realise. “I would say that we don’t have a lot of people in South Africa who should be stateless in terms of the law, because the law is very good,” she says, sitting in her office in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.

“The law makes provision for most people to get nationality if they are stateless in South Africa. The problem in South Africa is that there is not proper administrative justice.”

The system, she says, is broken. “That’s always the issue with South Africa. We have wonderful laws and our laws are well written and in line with international laws but we don’t implement them.”

Many of her clients are children, and many were even born to South African parents in South Africa. Despite this, it often takes years and costs millions of rand in legal fees for them to be recognised and protected by law.

Lawyers for Human Rights has seen only 10 cases where stateless people have been granted nationality over the past seven years.

It is nearly impossible to estimate how many people in South Africa are stateless, because as Miller says: “By the very nature of it all, undocumented people are invisible.” The numbers are high though, and her three-person team sees over 700 cases a year.

Earlier this year, she assisted the ABBA Children’s Home in Pretoria to get the births of 33 foundling children registered after the Department of Home Affairs refused to register more than two children for the home per month.

“The home receives very young children who have been abandoned, and before the child can be put on the register to be considered for adoption, that child needs a birth certificate.” Many of the babies had been abandoned or placed in “baby bins” – special receiving containers where women can leave babies they are not able to care for, knowing they will be safe.

The children are usually less than a week old, and almost nothing is known about their parents or their circumstances.

Miller lodged an urgent court case to force the department to prioritise vulnerable cases. Once the case was filed, the department offered to settle and registered all 33 children within the space of a month, “which shows you that they can do it, but by that stage, I had also spent a lot of our funds on paying the sheriff, paying the council, printing …,” she says. “So it was completely useless and totally unnecessary.”

On the walls behind her are pictures scribbled by young artists, notes of thanks from former clients, and bookshelves lined with numbered files filled with case after case that she has fought over the past seven years.

“Making sure that your population is documented and has access to nationality and a state is something that is crucial to your developments in your country. It is also crucial for peace,” she adds.

*Name changed to protect identity

This reporting was supported by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) as part of the Isu Elihle Awards. 

Read More

The post The families facing generations of statelessness in South Africa appeared first on Gadgets To Make Life Easier.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2RTDsSB via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

[thesouthendproject]

True crime: the women making art out of murder

t soon became clear to Sejla Kamerić how big her work, Ab Uno Disce Omne (From One, Learn All), would become. Commissioned by the Wellcome Collection for its new exhibition Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, the Bosnian artist – whose previous work has tried to make sense of the war that started when she was a teenager and killed her father – took on something huge. She describes it as a monument, but one made of data, not stone, and just as permanent. “I found out how the information about what happened is becoming lost,” she says. “Because of the political vacuum, even the scientific facts are being erased and the one thing which is very much needed is to have the collective narrative of what actually happened. The lack of, for example, a list of missing persons 20 years after the war is horrific, or the means of how to get the information on the location of mass graves or execution sites or concentration camps.”

More than 30,000 people are thought to have gone missing during the conflict, and around 9,000 are still unaccounted for. Kamerić’s work, a mortuary fridge with a screen that flashes up random images from her search – around 30,000 photographs, documents, records, satellite images and hours of video, provokes a feeling not only of her unfolding mission but the vast scale of the crimes. “I knew that we had to collect as much as possible,” says Kamerić, who worked with a team of researchers and spent months visiting families, mortuaries, sites of mass graves. “When you think about 34,000 missing, it’s just a number, but if you start counting it you understand – each single person had their own lives, families. One big wish for me is to show through this work how we are all connected, how each of us is just one knot in a huge web.”

What was the hardest thing for her? “There were so many situations where I felt I was breaking. Going through the evidence of atrocities and seeing so much pain is very difficult, but somehow you find a way to accept it. What is difficult is to accept is the present in which the truth is constantly hidden, and in which the survivors don’t have the space to share their stories.”

It wasn’t deliberate, but the curator Lucy Shanahan found that many of the most powerful pieces dealing with crime and its aftermath in the exhibition were by female artists, and perhaps the most moving works are all by women. “It struck me in the course of the research that I seemed to be coming across a lot of women on both sides,” she says (not only artists feature, but people involved directly in the field, such as Dr Angela Gallop, one of the UK’s most experienced forensic scientists, also appear in videos talking about their work). Why does she think that is? She remembers reading an article about the forensic botanist Patricia Wiltshire: “She suggests women have a higher tolerance for gore. Maybe it’s oddly to do with the fact that we are thought to be more empathetic. She certainly observed that women tended to cope better in these situations. Whether that’s true, I don’t know. But I think there must be a certain element of empathy.”She had originally thought there would be a coldness, a detachment to their work, but found the opposite. “All of them have a very close relationship with the subject matter. It’s not a voyeuristic interpretation, and for me it was about getting to the real lives and real human stories, and making sure we didn’t lose sight of that.”

Angela Strassheim’s beautiful, eerie photograph, Evidence No 1, is from her series revisiting homes where murders had taken place. On walls that had been cleaned and repainted, the application of Luminol still revealed the proteins of blood spatters (anyone who has watched CSI will know it gives off a blue glow). It’s a hidden trace, a memory embedded in the walls of the house of a life violently cut short, and raises questions of how the people living there now must feel. Sally Mann’s photograph of a body looking peaceful in the forest, being reclaimed by nature, brings a strange beauty to the otherwise gruesome idea of the “body farm” as the University of Tennessee’s forensic-anthropology unit is known, where she shot the decomposing corpses.

There are three pieces by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. One is the 313 front pages of a newspaper, collected during 2010, showing graphic photographs of the people murdered in Mexico’s drugs war, underlining its everyday occurrence. Another is a sound recording of a double autopsy of two murder victims. With no visuals to distract you, every sawing sound and fleshy squelch is magnified, contrasting with the mundane noise of a car passing outside, a reminder of life going on in the streets beyond.

In 2006, 18 months after the murder of her friend, the young Mexican artist Luis Miguel Suro, Margolles lifted a section of the tiled floor taken from the studio where he was shot and killed. In this setting it is, notes the exhibition’s curator Lucy Shanahan, a literal transplanting of the crime scene.

“I am from Sinaloa, a very violent part of Mexico,” says Margolles through a translator. Violence and crime has been “part of my life”. She trained in forensics and worked in a morgue for years. “I started to realise the kind of cases that were coming in, and how violence was increasing. I realised the morgue was some kind of social thermometer. The dead body … is telling you what is going on. I work with murder to have a public discussion about the murdered body.”

She wanted to mark the death of her friend because many of her contemporaries had questioned why so much of her work was informed by crime and violence. “But the death of an artist, in their own environment, signified that violence was getting closer and closer to the educated, artistic community. Before that, it was assumed it was something that only happened to the poor, the violent, the ones involved in crime and drug dealing.”

How does the work affect her? “It’s not for me. It’s for the students who are being killed,” she says, referring to the 43 students who went missing last year and who are believed to have been killed, their bodies burned, by a drug cartel. “It’s for the women being killed, the people who have to deal with this. It’s to help us, the audience, understand for a minute what these people are subject to on a daily basis.”

Next to Kamerić’s mortuary fridge are two skulls and two bronze heads showing what these people would have looked like, made by the artist Christine Borland with the help of a forensic anthropologist and facial reconstruction expert. There is great beauty and dignity in them – two individuals who have been given some form of identity back, in contrast to Kamerić’s missing persons whose body parts are still scattered, degraded, in unidentified graves.

In the early 1990s, she had come across an osteological catalogue which offered human bones for sale to medical students and researchers. She was, she says, “completely blown away that you could put a price on a human spine or a human anything”. Later, when the company was winding down its offering of natural bones – plastics were becoming more widespread, and the Human Tissue Act would make it illegal to trade in human remains – Borland asked them to tell her when they were down to their last male and female skulls, and she would buy them. The company said they would probably be “second-class” (that the better specimens would be more sought-after and would go). “They were talking about it in a strictly classification way – if teeth were missing, or there was what they would consider to be abnormalities – but to me that had different connotations. That added another layer of pathos, which made me even more keen to dignify these last two commercial skulls.”

They arrived in the post, in an innocuous cardboard box, “just commodities, being delivered like any other parcel”. Although little is still known about them, she was able to recreate their faces, using modern techniques used in forensic science.

What is it about forensics that interests her? “It’s the crossover between the rigorous scientific methods and the magic of the trace being able to lead you to construct a picture, or a scene,” she says. “I like the idea of something very small, whether it be dust or a mark, something seemingly unspectacular in many situations, and then being able to build a narrative from that. It’s a scientific discipline, but it also speaks of imagination and art.”

• Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime is at the Wellcome Collection, from tomorrow until 21 June. Details: wellcomecollection.org

[spencefast]

Artistry Reborn

  Shit’s just lookin’ different with age

  Inherently, this is the reality of life. Until death, friends come and go, responsibilities weigh heavier, and perspective grows. For Thebe Kgositsile, who crafts his rap under the moniker Earl Sweatshirt, the nature of this lyric is more than an obvious observation — it is a declaration of his ever-changing mindset, his lowest lows, and his flourishing maturation as both an artist and a human being.

  From solace this lyric comes, a disjointed, muffled, overflowing ten-minute project Earl released a month after his sophomore studio album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside in 2015. Made for his mother, it carries the weight of both a dedication and an at-once look into a distraught mind. It is heartbreaking in its contents — “[y]ou could see it in my face, I ain’t been eatin’, I’m just wastin’ away” — confused in its purpose — “[i]t’s me and my nibbling conscience” — yet aware in its existence and emotional holdings — “[i]f ya soul intact, let me know.” To date, it is the least structured and most vividly available Earl has ever been.

  For this there are a number of reasons. Earl was a rap prodigy in his lyrical and technical abilities from his early teenage years, and right before the turn of the decade, he was recruited by fellow artist Tyler, the Creator to join his hip-hop collective Odd Future. In 2010, Earl’s debut mixtape, Earl, was released on the collective’s website to much acclaim and review. It is chaotic, it is sinful, and it reeks of a kid showing off his talents in the most youthful and naive way possible; there is no tangible artistry yet, and there will not be for some time. Much like Earl, Earl’s 2013 major label debut Doris does an excellent job of showcasing his lyrical abilities, his rhyme schemes, his punchlines and his flows, but also much like Earl, Doris feels young and mischievous, new and rowdy, unadulterated and cliché. There is only a hilariously immature, yet openly raw skater boy who can rap really, really, really well. There is no artist, and there is no drowning humanity, yet.

  Came up off of work that my conscience wasn’t in

  When I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside came out in 2015, it was almost as if Earl had dropped homemade napalm upon his career to date. From “Grown Ups,” the fifth track off of the dense, ten-track album, Earl points out that his emotions were not much involved in his craft, but present were motivations to make a paycheck and be showcased to the world. It was not about him, or the person he became in a very short span of time, but about the character he was perceived to be and the “game” in which he so uncomfortably fit. However, his second major project flipped this image, and his persona became more than that of a talented teenager. In an interview with NPR Music’s Microphone Check, Earl says he “...really prostrated [himself] to music” this time around. As he aged out of his teenage years, he couldn’t remain a teenage artist anymore. He was transitioning in life, and like he said, it was time to lay down in process, not to craft for reward but to struggle and bleed for feeling and identity.

  I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is a visceral reaction to Earl’s earlier music, and it is a realization of his earlier life. It is structured, it is grim, and no word is wasted. After the widespread attention Earl received for Earl quite literally launched him to fame, his mother sent him to Samoa because she believed his priorities were out of line and that he was destined for a troubled path. It was about five years later that he could unabridgedly address all of his experiences, from his “term on that island,” to his relationship with his parents, and of all the music of which he was anything but proud.

  But solace is to his second album as are washed paintings to a rainstorm. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is depressing in nature, it is harsh in spirit, and it is unforgiving in delivery. However, it is still a presentation by Earl, and it is still meant to be taken as a whole — this is not how solace operates, and in fact, it is the exact opposite. Earl was deeply committed and serious when he constructed his second album, as he was in a very low place, and the same could be said for solace — except it is far less of a construction and more sacrosanct vomit. It is every last bit of energy remaining in Earl’s body injected into scattered words, otherworldly instrumentals, and desperate emotions. It is not a reaction to his career like I Don’t Like Shit, but it is a beautiful view into his life, his person, his artistry at the very time it was recorded.

   Earl Sweatshirt has not made any major releases since solace. As the world waits, as I wait, we wonder with hope, nervousness, and curiosity about the state of Earl’s humanity. But, at the end of the day, even when shit is changing with age and the mental is dispersed, one of the greatest writers of this modern generation will never be unnatural again.

[kidsviral-blog]

Fostering Profits: Abuse And Neglect At America's Biggest For-Profit Foster Care Company

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/fostering-profits-abuse-and-neglect-at-americas-biggest-for-profit-foster-care-company/

Fostering Profits: Abuse And Neglect At America's Biggest For-Profit Foster Care Company

A BuzzFeed News investigation identified deaths, sex abuse, and blunders in screening, training, and overseeing foster parents at the nation’s largest for-profit foster care company.

In the summer of 2004, a 15-year-old boy, needy and eager for attention, was driven down a road that stretched through the endless flatlands of Maryland’s eastern shore. The boy, known in court records as R.R., arrived at a dirt driveway, where a sign on top of a wooden post announced Last Chance Farm.

Four separate couples lived at Last Chance Farm. All were related to one another and all earned money taking care of troubled children who had been placed in foster care, including R.R.

But R.R.’s new guardians weren’t directly supervised or paid by the government. They had been signed up as foster parents by a giant corporation called National Mentor Holdings, which, over the last three decades, has turned the field of foster care into a cash cow. At any one time the company has an average of 3,800 children and teenagers in its foster homes in 15 states around the country.

View this image ›

Stephen Merritt. Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office

Not long after R.R. arrived, Stephen Merritt, the boy’s new foster father, gave R.R. a beer. Then a cigarette. Soon a joint. When the boy was buzzed, his foster father slipped a hand into his pants to fondle him. Then he performed oral sex on the boy.

R.R. had courage. He told the caseworker overseeing his foster placement what was happening. But R.R.’s caseworker, according to the story R.R. told in court records, took no action. The caseworker worked for Mentor too, and instead of filing charges, or even removing R.R. from danger, the caseworker sent him back to Last Chance Farm. It was only after R.R. complained a second time, according to court documents, that Mentor took him from the home.

And there were more indications of sexual abuse at Last Chance Farm. A separate police investigation involving another child had taken place in 2003. Then another in 2006. A psychotherapist sent a letter to Mentor in 2010, warning of “a huge red flag” about Merritt’s interactions with a child.

Even so, the abuse continued, boy after boy. When the police finally descended in 2011, they found sex toys and lube scattered about and victims who told stories similar to what R.R. had told his Mentor caseworker seven years earlier.

The abuse at Last Chance Farm may have been an extreme event, but Mentor’s blunders in screening, training, and overseeing its foster parents are not. A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that the problems at Mentor are not limited to a few tragic cases but are widespread.

Few states make their evaluations of foster care providers public. But government assessments from three states show that Mentor has had troubling deficiencies in selecting, training, and monitoring its foster parents and foster homes.

At least six healthy children have died in Mentor custody since 2005, including the grisly murder of a 2-year-old in Texas in 2013 whose foster mother swung her body into the ground like an ax, and in nearly all these cases there have been allegations that negligence by Mentor contributed to the deaths. Other children have been sexually or physically abused, sometimes after clear warning signs.

Many former workers say they believe the pressure to squeeze profits out of foster care is part of the problem.

Mentor officials strongly disputed the idea that their company provides substandard care or that the drive for profits hurts children. Dwight Robson, Mentor’s chief public strategy and marketing manager, said the company has done an excellent job of protecting and caring for “literally thousands of vulnerable children whose lives we enhanced.” He pointed to Maryland, where, in their most recent evaluations, state regulators gave the company high marks.

Indeed, many, probably most, of the company’s foster parents offer stable and loving care. Moreover, a comprehensive view of Mentor is virtually impossible, because America’s foster care system is fragmented, administered by states and counties that typically do not share information publicly — or even with each other — often citing child confidentiality.

Still, in many places where statistics were available, Mentor stumbles, a BuzzFeed News analysis shows.

In Texas, Mentor ranks dead last among large foster care providers, based on the number of severe violations found by state inspectors. Over the last two years, Mentor racked up more “high” deficiencies — the worst kind — per home than any other provider with at least 200 homes. Mentor’s rate was 170% above the overall rate among other large providers.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mentor officials contended the high rate could be attributed to the fact that the company has been under greater scrutiny than other providers. So BuzzFeed News calculated the company’s rate of severe problems per inspection, rather than per home, which Mentor agreed was a fairer measure. But that analysis didn’t boost Mentor much at all — it ranked third worst among the 23 providers with at least 100 inspections.

Texas regulators have found more than 100 serious problems over the last two years in Mentor foster homes, including multiple instances of children being slapped, hit with belts, and struck. A baby suffered a broken clavicle after being left unattended on a bed. Another child was taken by his foster parents to an “adult novelty store.” Regulators also found that several children had “inappropriate” sexual contact with members of their foster families. Several others were placed in homes where children were allowed to hit or physically restrain each other.

Mentor also ranks poorly in Georgia, which grades child-placing agencies on a 100-point scale. Mentor has six branches in Georgia. Over the 10 most recent quarters, not one scored an average grade above the median.

In Massachusetts, according to confidential data a children’s rights group garnered in a lawsuit, the company was faulted for 16 cases of abuse and neglect in just one 12-month period between April 2011 and March 2012. That included one fatality in January 2012, the death of a 2-month-old baby, after which a special state investigation found that Mentor foster parents and social workers “were not trained” on safe sleeping practices in caring for infants.

The company said that its scores in Georgia have improved, attaining an average of A- for the most recent quarter. And Mentor’s problems in Massachusetts have been fixed, Robson said. Safety, he said, is “job one.”

He also said that the company performs much better than other foster care operations when it comes to keeping children in stable foster homes where they can thrive, rather than moving them from home to home.

But former Mentor caseworkers and law-enforcement officials said they believe the company sometimes fails children because it is focused on extracting a profit from them.

“You feel the pressure. You have to make those targets,” said a former worker whose name, due to a signed nondisclosure with Mentor, could not be used. “I went there because I care about services for kids. I eventually became a machine that cared about profits. I didn’t care about kids.”

Mentor’s profit margins vary state by state. In Ohio, according to a 2012 spreadsheet obtained by BuzzFeed News, its profit margin, as measured by the common Ebitda method, has been as high as 44%. In Alabama, the document indicates that the margin has hit 31%. That would mean that only 69 cents of every dollar that the state government paid to Mentor was spent on caring for the child and on overhead. Mentor’s overall profit margin, according to its financial disclosures, has been a little over 10%.

Robson denied that the company’s margins ever came close to 31%, let alone 44%, though he declined to say what its margins are, state by state.

Mentor’s foster care business works like this: It receives fees from state and local governments for its services, and it uses some of that money to recruit, screen, and train foster parents, and to pay those parents a daily rate for caring for the children. The money is also used for administrative overhead and to pay the salaries of social workers, therapists, and other staff. But the former workers say that in a bid to increase profits, the company sometimes cuts corners on expensive services that are supposed to ensure the children in its care are safe.

Mentor social workers, for example, may be forced to carry a higher caseload of children than is recommended, sources say. In one affidavit in a court case in Illinois, a Mentor caseworker said she had a caseload of children twice as high as the generally accepted practice.

“Here’s how you cut services: caseloads,” one former Mentor worker told BuzzFeed News. “In therapeutic foster care you are supposed to have 10 kids. So you may have 15 kids. You may have to hire people without licenses because you can get away with it.”

Company officials are quick to dispute any allegations that the quest for profit can cut into the care for children. “We don’t water down services to maintain profits,” insisted the executive chairman, Edward “Ned” Murphy, in an interview. “The idea that we can systematically dilute the quality of services just does not work. We would be out of business.”

View this image ›

In Texas, one of Mentor’s most grisly failings prompted a local prosecutor to call for a federal investigation of the company.

In a one-story rented house in Rockdale, in the cattle country northeast of Austin, a 2-year-old girl, blonde and playful, was murdered by her foster mother, Sherill Small, on a hot evening in July 2013.

Alexandria Hill had been taken from her young parents at the age of 1 by the state child welfare agency. The main reasons, Texas officials wrote at the time, were that her parents smoked marijuana around the child and her mother periodically suffered from grand mal seizures. That convinced the state caseworker she couldn’t care for Alexandria alone.

So the little girl ended up in Mentor’s custody. Texas paid Mentor just $39.52 per day for a child of Alexandria’s age, of which $22 went to the foster family. The company was having trouble finding foster parents.

In November 2012, the company placed Alexandria in her first foster home, where, according to confidential records obtained by BuzzFeed News, she appears to have suffered neglect. When that foster family brought the girl to a supervised visit with her birth parents, the parents were shocked to see that her hair was unwashed and uncombed. She was wearing pants stained with dried feces. Both of her legs were bruised.

Her young father complained to the state of Texas, threatening to call the police, and Texas state workers asked Mentor to place the girl in a different home. That’s when Mentor put her in the residence of 53-year-old Small.

Small spent her own childhood in foster care, and in 2012 she applied to Mentor to become a foster parent. Her maternal instincts were so questionable that even her own sisters were astonished when she was approved by Mentor. “She never even raised her own kids,” said Donna Winkler, one of Small’s sisters. “Her mother-in-law raised her kids, the young ones.”

Bill Torrey, the Milam County district attorney who would end up prosecuting Small for murder, said the company’s vetting process was shoddy. “They didn’t do their homework,” he said. “It was horseshit.”

One example of the gaping flaws in Mentor’s background research on Small: Amber Forester, Small’s daughter, said her mother and stepfather “will make great parents,” and that seemed to carry weight. Forester, after all, said she’d be spending time in the home once Small became a foster mother. But Mentor never requested a background check on Forester herself. If they’d asked for one, they would have learned that she had been convicted in 2002 of aggravated kidnapping and robbery after she and an accomplice kidnapped a pregnant convenience store clerk in 2000.

View this image ›

There were other issues. The Mentor “study” of the family shows that Mentor approved Small’s husband, Clemon, as a foster father even though he had been a longtime crack addict: “Mr. Small shared his past struggle with drug addiction, starting in 1980. He said his drug of choice was crack-cocaine.” He said he had last used the drug in 2000.

Mentor didn’t interview Small’s sisters, who said they would have warned the company.

View this image ›

Sherill Small. Aram Roston / BuzzFeed News

Small was approved and began taking in foster children in September 2012, five in all. By December 2012, prosecutors later found, every one of them had been removed as “failed placements.” Small, according to an internal Mentor document obtained by BuzzFeed News, “reported feeling stressed out, and will express that she is unable to care for the children in the home.” The Mentor document also warns that personnel from the state’s Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) program “felt the children should not be in the home at that time.” It states, “ECI expressed concern about Mrs. Small being very frazzled and not certain what is going on with the children.”

Just a month after that report, in January 2013, little 14-month-old Alexandria Hill, fresh out of her first Mentor foster home, where she had been treated shabbily, was sent to live with the Smalls.

Torrey, the prosecutor, said he was astonished that Mentor would have placed Alexandria there. “How can you justify a report from your people that you apparently don’t read?” he asked. “It’s just a report? What, another piece of paper that goes in the file? No one looks at it? A sixth-grader would have known that you don’t put Alex Hill with these people, in light of Mentor’s own records!”

Mentor’s records, obtained as part of the murder case, indicate that Mentor officials claimed Alexandria was initially flourishing with the Smalls. In June officials wrote that Alexandria was “doing well” and that she is “healthy and playful. She enjoys playing with her toys. She loves to watch cartoons.”

View this image ›

Sherill Small’s sisters Diana Baines and Donna Winkler. Aram Roston / BuzzFeed News

But Sherill Small’s sisters, Donna Winkler and Diana Baines, told BuzzFeed News the little girl was treated poorly. Winkler said Small “hated” the girl, while Baines said that when she visited the home, Small kept Alexandria in a barren room on the second floor where she was allowed to hold her teddy bear, and that was it. “She wasn’t hardly allowed to come outside her room at all,” Baines said.

Baines and Winkler said Mentor did conduct inspection visits, but that they were useless because the visits were always prearranged. Small tidied up the home in preparation, they said, and allowed Alexandria to watch TV so she’d be quiet while the Mentor worker was there. Meanwhile, there was another warning sign documented in Mentor’s own records: Alexandria was pulling at her hair so much she was going bald in spots.

On the afternoon of July 29, Baines visited Small’s home. She waved to little Alexandria, who was standing in a room called the “man cave” that had been formed from a renovated garage. Small told her Alexandria was on a time-out, being punished for waking up too early and taking food for herself. Winkler came by too, and heard the same story: The little girl was being punished.

It was later that day, in the evening, when Small and her husband called 911. When emergency workers arrived, the girl wasn’t breathing.

View this image ›

Once she was hospitalized, a doctor found that the back of her skull had received a crushing trauma. Her real parents, Joshua Hill and Mary Sweeney, were notified. According to her grandmother, Diann Hill, it was while Joshua was sitting anguished in the hospital that an official from the state of Texas arrived. The father asked what he should do.

The official answered, according to the girl’s grandmother: “She’s in your custody now. That’s up to you.” The parents agreed to take the little girl off life support, and Alexandria was declared dead on July 31.

Soon, Small admitted to police that she’d been frustrated with the girl, and described how she’d swung her until her head crashed into the floor in what she said was a tragic accident.

“Obviously we made a poor judgment in that case,” said Mentor’s Robson. “And if we could turn back the clock we would.” But he was emphatic that the disasters in the way the company screened Small, and placed Alexandria with her, had nothing to do with an effort to cut costs to increase profits. And he said the company has learned from its mistake and made improvements in its background checks and other procedures.

Torrey, who has a picture of Alexandria Hill in his office, said he is not convinced. Sherill Small was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but in his interview with BuzzFeed News, Torrey said that based on what he learned in his investigation, Mentor itself needs to be the subject of a larger probe. “We don’t have a lot of resources in this county, so what I would like to see is someone, an attorney general somewhere, the Department of Justice or a U.S. attorney, someone like that, look at it.”

View this image ›

When Torrey first started investigating the Alexandria Hill case, he was shocked to learn that foster care is a for-profit business. “Money for kids — it’s like a crop, that’s what it is,” he said. “It should not be a business.”

And for most of the last century, it wasn’t. State and local governments, which are largely responsible for children whose parents cannot care for them, often subcontracted the work of placing children in foster homes to nonprofit organizations, including religious groups.

But over the last three decades, for-profit operations have moved into the sphere, with scant public scrutiny. It is a transformation that Mentor has helped drive — and benefited from handsomely — first under the leadership of the company’s founder, Marine Corps veteran E. Byron Hensley, and then under one of its first government partners, Edward “Ned” Murphy, who would later come to run the company.

Hensley, who founded Mentor in 1980 in Boston, said in an interview that he hadn’t started his career intending to work with youth. He was a graduate student in philosophy, but after a rough divorce, he moved to Boston and landed a job running a group home for troubled kids.

Hensley said he quickly became convinced that the teens would do better in private homes than in the dilapidated group home where he was working, and he also figured he could earn a living helping to place them there. He named his organization Mentor, after the wise and nurturing figure in Homer’s The Odyssey who cared for Telemachus, the son of Odysseus.

His chief customer, he says, was the Massachusetts Division of Youth Service, then under the command of Murphy. But within three years, Hensley said, he became convinced a for-profit model would better serve all involved, because it wouldn’t be burdened by the yoke around the neck of so many charities: constantly raising funds from donors.

National Mentor, Inc., a for-profit company, was born.

Within four years, Mentor was also doing business in Ohio and in South Carolina. In 1987, Hensley recalled, he convinced two venture capital firms to invest $700,000. He said he warned them that profits on foster care would be small, just 3–5%, but that was more than made up for by the potential for growth.

The growth was phenomenal. Soon Mentor expanded to Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, and Indiana. By 1997, after some takeovers and corporate restructuring, Hensley said, he left. He said the company he’d founded with $10,000 from the sale of his house in Waltham Mass was then worth $50 million.

In 2001, Mentor was bought by Madison Dearborn, a Chicago-based equity firm with billions under management that specialized in leveraged buyouts. Mentor, Hensley says, began spreading into other ventures in “human services,” including group homes and home care for adults. But its bedrock business remained foster care.

In 2006, the hedge fund Vestar Capital Partners bought out the company, investing $242 million in cash, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Vestar is well-connected in both Republican and Democratic circles. Frederico Pena, a former Clinton Cabinet official, and later a co-chair of the Obama campaign, is a managing director there.

Coming out of the deal, Mentor was burdened with a debt of $520 million. According to SEC filings, 5 cents of every dollar that Mentor made had to go to cover just debt. According to people who worked at Mentor, Vestar has squeezed the company to turn more of a profit. A statement from Vestar said, “We are proud to be associated with an organization that has enhanced the lives of tens of thousands of children and adolescents and adults with disabilities.”

Vestar brought Mentor public last year, and the firm began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the name Civitas Solutions, Inc. It reported $1.2 billion in revenue last year.

In some jurisdictions, such as Illinois and some counties in Pennsylvania, for-profit companies can’t get contracts to run foster care operations directly. Mentor found a way around that, by partnering with nonprofit sister organizations Alliance Human Services and Alliance Children’s Services, both founded by Murphy.

Indeed, the corporate paper trail shows that Alliance group subsumed the original nonprofit Mentor Inc. that Hensley founded in 1980.

Those nonprofits have received contracts in states that bar for-profit foster care operations. And then those nonprofits turn around and hire Mentor’s for-profit arm as a subcontractor to run virtually the whole operation.

In Illinois, for example, Alliance gets paid over $200 per day per child to provide therapeutic foster care to children. But, according to contracts obtained by BuzzFeed News, it has hired Mentor to recruit the foster parents, check their backgrounds, train them, monitor them, and act as social workers for the children.

Mentor’s Robson said that when Alliance was layered into Mentor foster care contracts, it wasn’t a ruse but an effort to make sure federal dollars kept flowing during periods of confusion about whether for-profit operations could get reimbursed. He said state and federal officials knew of the arrangement between Alliance and Mentor. Reached briefly by phone, the president and CEO of Alliance, Mary McCarthy, also defended the contracting, and said, “The reason that we started any of these things were to help states that needed help in getting federal reimbursement.”

Robson said that Mentor does not control Alliance. Still, the two organizations are intertwined at many levels. In addition to Murphy, who founded Alliance and now heads Mentor, another former senior official at Mentor, Doris Davila, is now a vice president at Alliance. In Illinois, Mentor is headquartered in a large office building at 600 Holiday Plaza Drive in Matteson. It’s in Suite 400. Alliance is in Suite 410.

Alliance Children’s Services, which was the charity that subcontracted to Mentor in Texas for 16 years, even reported to the IRS in its nonprofit filings that its books and records were in the custody of the for-profit National Mentor.

View this image ›

Aram Roston / BuzzFeed News

If the murder of Alexandria Hill illustrates Mentor’s failures to select appropriate foster parents, the sexual abuse visited on R.R. and other boys over a period of a decade at Last Chance Farm shows the company’s problems training and monitoring foster parents — in this case, even in the face of multiple warning signs.

The first couple on the farm to get certified by Mentor were Stephen Merritt’s father, also called Stephen, and his wife, Carol, in October 1997.

County health inspectors had warned that the place was too run-down for small children, with peeling paint and hazards. Still, Mentor approved the couple.

The younger Stephen Merritt, then 28, and his wife, Trudy, signed up with Mentor in 1999 at another house in the same compound. Merritt passed a background check easily. He denied any history of drug use despite clear evidence in his file that he had been arrested for marijuana possession.

View this image ›

He even told the Mentor recruiter that he had been kicked out of high school for throwing a desk at a teacher.

View this image ›

And he specified that they wanted boys, not girls, a fact whose significance only became clear years later. “Male, white, any age” was his answer on the questionnaire.

View this image ›

Other Merritt relatives soon joined the foster business as well, with four separate households taking in children on the sprawling farm.

The state of Maryland required Merritt to complete 20 hours of training a year, a heightened requirement because the boys in his care were considered high-need and were in so-called therapeutic foster care.

But in practice, that training was hardly rigorous. In 2008, Mentor awarded Merritt two hours’ credit — and a fancy certificate — for watching the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. In 2007, Merritt didn’t even have to watch a movie: He got two hours’ training, and another certificate, for attending Mentor’s Christmas lunch.

View this image ›

Sarah Magazine, Mentor’s spokesperson, defended the training. “One of the tools we sometimes use are movies to facilitate a discussion,” she said, adding that the portrayal of a troubled family struggling with disabilities make it a popular training film for Mentor and other other foster care organizations.

Meanwhile, in 2003, the police launched an investigation of Merritt at Last Chance Farm, after a 15-year-old foster child said Merritt had unbuckled his own belt while joking about the boy being good with his hands. But the boy recanted later, telling the police Merritt was just joking, and the police said the charge was “unfounded.”

Then, in 2004, R.R. arrived and began getting harassed. As the story, culled from court records, indicates, R.R. told a Mentor caseworker that he was being abused. But since he wasn’t believed, he was put back in Merritt’s custody. After he complained again, he was finally sent to another home. BuzzFeed News could not reach R.R. for comment.

Magazine, the Mentor spokesperson, said she believes R.R. was taken out of the home as soon as he first made abuse allegations.

Still, even after learning of R.R.’s allegations, Mentor kept sending foster children to Last Chance Farm. In retrospect, the company now says, that was a mistake. “Kids should not have been at that home,” said Robson. “We acknowledge that and we accept that.”

In 2006, two years after R.R.’s time at the farm, allegations of wrongdoing bubbled up again. The police learned of a foster child who said he’d been offered marijuana and alcohol at the Merritt farm and had had sex with Merritt. But the police assumed the boy was talking about Merritt’s wife. The boy angrily denied it, and told investigators, “You need to get your shit together before you talk to me.” Police ruled the allegations, again, “unfounded.”

And then in 2010, a psychotherapist named Laurie Rockelli warned Mentor about Merritt. One of her patients was a former foster child of Merritt’s, and Merritt was texting the boy on topics of a sexual nature. Worried, Rockelli sent a letter in February to Mentor’s operation in Maryland. “I’m writing this letter out of extreme concern,” she wrote.

There’s no evidence that Mentor took any action after Rockelli’s letter. In fact, in March, the month after that letter from the psychotherapist, Mentor gave Trudy and Stephen Merritt an updated foster care license.

Magazine said the company did react to the Rockelli letter: Merritt was told, she said, that texting with former foster children “wasn’t appropriate.”

A year after sending Mentor her warning letter, Rockelli learned the truth about what was happening at Last Chance Farms: Her patient, still troubled, finally admitted he’d been sexually molested by Merritt, his former foster parent. Now Rockelli went to the police.

When they brought Merritt in, he folded under questioning, and fast. In the interrogation, he did say one thing that surprised them: They should go look at what his uncle, Tracy Bayne, who lived at Last Chance Farm as well, was doing with his foster son. Bayne was also abusing a boy. And, police would learn, many years earlier the uncle had molested Stephen Merritt.

The prosecutor in the case, Jamie Dykes, now in private practice as a lawyer, said she doesn’t believe Mentor knew what was going on at the farm. But she said the company should have known — and could easily have found out. Mentor, she said, never made surprise visits to Last Chance Farm. She said that when Mentor caseworkers came, “the children knew when they were going to visit, because they were made to clean the house. Clean the house from top to bottom.”

Unannounced visits might have provided a different picture, she said. Dykes recalled that when she served a search warrant there, the scene was “disgusting,” “dirty,” and disturbing.

“In the master bedroom, there are sex toys everywhere,” she said. “Oh god, it was nasty. And KY Jelly and Vaseline. And in the woodshop there was Vaseline. Why do you need Vaseline in the woodshop?”

Stephen Merritt pleaded guilty. Merritt’s defense lawyer argued at his sentencing that although Merritt was guilty, Mentor deserved blame too. “The child welfare system sought out the Merritt home methodically and consistently to place these children in their care,” she said. “Unlike Mr. Merritt, the Mentor program does have the cognitive ability to make sound decisions, but because nobody else wanted these children and the Merritt home was a easy scapegoat, they continued to place the children year after year after year, ignoring disclosures of the victims, ignoring all of the warning signs that were there.”

View this image ›

With additional reporting by Talal Ansari.

correction

Alexandria Hill was murdered in July 2013, after she was taken from her parents in November 2012. A previous version of this story said she was murdered “last July,” and that she was removed from her parents in 2013. BF_STATIC.timequeue.push(function () document.getElementById(“update_article_correction_time_5052128”).innerHTML = UI.dateFormat.get_formatted_date(‘2015-02-22 09:06:52 -0500’, ‘update’); );

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/fostering-profits

#Civitas Solutions #foster care

[melindarowens]

Final stretch in Alabama – POLITICO

With Scott Bland and Daniel Strauss

The following newsletter is an abridged version of Campaign Pro’s Morning Score. For an earlier morning read on exponentially more races — and for a more comprehensive aggregation of the day’s most important campaign news — sign up for Campaign Pro today. (http://www.politicopro.com/proinfo)

Story Continued Below

TWO MOORE DAYS — “How Trump came around to an accused child molester,” by POLITICO’s Eliana Johnson and Alex Isenstadt: “Mitch McConnell had publicly disavowed Roy Moore when the Senate majority leader received one of several phone calls from President Donald Trump. McConnell wanted Trump’s help to push Moore out of the Alabama Senate race after he’d been accused of harassing or molesting teenage girls. Instead, the president’s response left the straight-laced McConnell aghast. Trump, according to three sources briefed on the discussions, cast doubt on the claims leveled by Moore’s accusers. … Trump’s sentiment — he has also complained privately that the avalanche of charges taking down prominent men is spinning out of control — helps explain the president’s evolving attitude toward Moore over the past three weeks, when he has gone from uncharacteristic silence to a full-throated endorsement of the controversial candidate. The shift has benefited both men, helping the scandal-tarred Moore bounce back from what looked like a probable defeat to become a slight favorite in Tuesday’s special election — and offering the president a chance to claim credit if Moore ekes out a win.” Full story.

HUH — “Did Roy Moore spend the final weekend of the campaign in Philly?” by POLITICO’s Isenstadt and Gabriel Debenedetti: “In the last weekend of Alabama’s wild special Senate election, Doug Jones barnstormed the state with A-list Democrats in a bid to turn out black voters he desperately needs to win in the deep-red state. Republican Roy Moore disappeared. … Two Republicans briefed on Moore’s schedule before this weekend said he intended to spend Saturday in Philadelphia at the Army-Navy football game — a long-planned trip that the West Point grad had insisted he would still take this year despite the election.” Full story.

ICYMI — “Republicans for Jones wage lonely fight against Moore,” by POLITICO’s Daniel Strauss and Luis Sanchez: “A small group of Alabama Republicans have joined forces with Democrat Doug Jones’ campaign ahead of Tuesday’s special Senate election. But they are having trouble swaying many friends and family members to cross the aisle, too. …The Republicans for Jones include Gina Dearborn, an Alabama lobbyist and former Shelby staffer who has backed Jones on social media and is married to White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. … Jones needs votes from at least 1 in 10 Republicans if he is to win, according to Alabama-based Democratic pollster Zac McCrary.” Full story.

— “Shelby: My state of Alabama ‘deserves better’ than Moore,” by POLITICO’s Louis Nelson. Full story.

— “Trump to cut robocall for Moore,” by POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt: “Donald Trump has agreed to record a robocall for Alabama Republican Roy Moore ahead of next week’s special election, the president’s most direct involvement in Alabama on behalf of the embattled candidate to date.” Full story.

MINNESOTA SCRAMBLE — “Minnesota governor’s top choice mulling ’18 run,” via The Associated Press: “Gov. Mark Dayton’s top pick to fill Sen. Al Franken’s Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, is considering also running for the seat next year, as Dayton faces pressure from top Democrats in Washington to appoint more than a mere caretaker, according to two Democrats familiar with the discussions.” Full story.

— “Senate vacancy creates opportunity, complications galore,” via Capitol View’s Brian Bakst. Full story.

— Pawlenty says he’s considering run for Franken seat, via the Associated Press: “Franken’s resignation has forced him and others to think about how to improve the state and nation, he said. He spoke after addressing a local Chamber of Commerce event.” Full story.

… IN TEXAS — “Growing list of Republicans aiming to oust Farenthold in 2018,” by the Houston Chronicle’s Jeremy Wallace: “The latest candidate to jump in the race is Bech Bruun, the former chairman of the Texas Water Development Board who is from Corpus Christ but lives in Austin. Bruun officially [qualified] for the 27th Congressional District primary on Friday morning. Earlier this week Republicans Jerry Hall, Eddie Gassman and Christopher K. Mapp all qualified for the primary as well. And a week earlier, former Victoria County Republican Party chairman Michael Cloud qualified for the March 6 primary.” Full story.

— ICYMI from NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers: “’I think the filing deadline hasn’t happened in Texas and Blake Farenthold has some thinking to do about whether he wants to run for reelection or not,’ Stivers told Business Insider, adding that the GOP needs to ‘push folks where there’s serious allegations or proven allegations aside.’ ‘We have zero tolerance for that kind of behavior and we’ve made that clear,’ Stivers said.” Full story.

Days until the 2018 election: 330.

Thanks for joining us! You can email tips to the Campaign Pro team at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

You can also follow us on Twitter: @politicoscott, @ec_schneider, @politicokevin, @danielstrauss4 and @maggieseverns.

BETWEEN THE LINES — Supreme Court adds another redistricting case for this term: Maryland’s Benisek v. Lamone, which challenges Maryland’s Democrat-drawn 7-1 congressional map as unconstitutional because it infringes on Republican voters’ First Amendment rights to political speech and association. See the SCOTUS order here.

— “Inside the gerrymandering data top Pa. Republicans fought to keep private,” by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jonathan Lai: “Lawyers for House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati had fought to keep private a trove of documents as they prepared for the trial, which began Monday in Philadelphia. They also sought to block the documents in a separate, state gerrymandering trial that begins next week in Harrisburg. Among them are maps that contain detailed data on partisanship across the state, which experts said appear to confirm widespread suspicion that Republicans had intentionally drawn the map to favor their party. One map’s database contains details for each of the more than 9,000 voting districts in the state, including the races and ethnicities of voters and results from state and national elections from 2004 through 2010. Also included are metrics that appear to rate each voting district’s level of partisanship.” Full story.

2020 WATCH — “DNC ‘unity’ panel recommends huge cut in superdelegates,” by POLITICO’s Kevin Robillard: “A commission set up to help reform the Democratic presidential nominating process has voted to restrict the number of superdelegates as part of a slew of changes. The Democratic Party’s Unity Reform Commission is recommending cutting the number of superdelegates by about 400, equal to a 60 percent reduction. Many of the remaining superdelegates would see their vote tied to the results in their state. The commission is also suggesting that absentee voting be required as an option for presidential caucus participants. It is calling for automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration. And it wants to mandate public reporting of raw vote totals from caucus states.” Full story.

HOUSE INTERNAL — “Democrat commissions poll pointing to tough reelection for Ryan,” by POLITICO’s Edward-Isaac Dovere: “Paul Ryan might be facing a tough reelection race back home next year — provided anyone finds out who his biggest Democratic challenger is. A new internal poll from Randy Bryce, the ironworker who blasted onto the national political scene in June with a viral video, claims he trails by just 6 points in Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district, 46 to 40. But the same poll from the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group shows that 79 percent of likely voters surveyed in late November don’t even know enough about Bryce to say they view him favorably or unfavorably.” Full story.

— “Most approve of job Reynolds is doing, but nearly half want another governor,” via The Des Moines Register: “Just more than half of Iowans approve of the job Gov. Kim Reynolds is doing, but nearly as many are ready for someone new to hold the governor’s office, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows. … Yet just 35 percent say they would vote for Reynolds if the election were held today, and 49 percent say it’s time for someone new. Sixteen percent aren’t sure.” Full story.

POST-MORTEM — “After bruising losses, Virginia Republicans gather to find path out of wilderness ahead of 2018,” by The Washington Post’s Jenna Portnoy and Laura Vozzella: “Virginia Republicans tried to make the best of a grim electoral landscape this weekend at their annual retreat, which marked Ed Gillespie’s first public appearance since his loss in the governor’s race seemed to drive the party further into the political wilderness. Gillespie’s contest became a symbol of a party struggling to bridge the gap between President Trump’s populism and the need to appeal to minorities and independent voters in a purple state. The same forces will be in play in the coming year, when the GOP will try to unseat Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and has to defend seven congressional seats in the state.” Full story.

GETTING THE NOD — DFA endorses four California House challengers: Democracy for America announced it’s endorsing four Democratic House challengers in California: Bryan Caforio (CA-25), Laura Oatman (CA-48), Sam Jammal (CA-39), and Mike Levin (CA-49).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I don’t think — President Trump has a fear of the Lord, the fear of the wrath of God, which leads one to more humility,” — California Gov. Jerry Brown on Trump, POLITICO reported.

Source link

source https://capitalisthq.com/final-stretch-in-alabama-politico/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/12/final-stretch-in-alabama-politico.html