My top 10 nonfiction reads of 2023 (the asterisked ones are in French with no translation as of yet) :
Belle Greene, Alexandra Lapierre
The Indomitable Marie-Antoinette, Simone Bertière
Reporter: A Memoir, Seymour Hersh
Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, Erich Schwartzel
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Keefe
Servir les riches, Alizée Delpierre*
La Comtesse Greffulhe : L’ombre des Guermantes, Laure Hillerin*
Le Courage de la nuance, Jean Birnbaum*
The Book Collectors of Daraya, Delphine Minoui
Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement, Hawon Jung
265 notes
·
View notes
like yes i am a woman and i identify as a woman but what even is a woman? is it femininity? not necessarily. is it masculinity? not necessarily. is it both in a way? yeah kinda but really who knows. all i know is that i like a good grilled cheese every now and then and i like fucking yummy sluts. if my vagina became useless to me tomorrow i’d still be identifying as a woman so like. is that what being a woman is to me?? grilled cheese and lesbian activity?? maybe that’s exactly what it is?? gender is so strange because it isn’t actually real and it’s a construct, but i am affected by it societally so it must be thought about. i’m THINKING. i THUNK. i have a headache now
49 notes
·
View notes
The thing about Miw's - idk how to put it - very 2010s brand of girl power is that it is such a front and such an epidermic reaction to being constantly sexualized and having no real recourse against that. Of course she's all "I'm not a bitch I'm THE bitch" and "eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man" and "men will be bewitched and hand over their wallets" ! She can't escape any of this shit so might as well spin things to make it about what she can do with it ! She doesn't want to feel or be perceived as powerless ever again.
And on the other side of that feeling is her constant emphasis on sisterhood, either real - with the other girls at the bar - or desperately wished for. That's what she appeals to in order to connect with the hotel manager, even though for this woman Miw is nothing compared to the freedom she's seeking. It's also what allows her to - however briefly - connect with Mae and sincerely apologize for the pain she caused her. Miw, unapologetic as a matter of principle (because Lean In, girl !) recognizes she hurt another woman even though she was only protecting herself and is truly, genuinely empathetic about it.
And even though 3 will be free is a love story, Miw "girls rules !" front partially being a response to her hard life isn't a transparent excuse to heal her with the love of a Good Man (that's the entire point of Luang's character). This is why her non-romantic relationship with Shin is so important ! It was never about a Bad Girl going Good for the love of an honest man, it's about a woman constantly having to deal with objectification - and being scolded and/or punished no matter how she does so - finally being seen as a full person, and loved both for her sharp edges and her soft ones.
11 notes
·
View notes
my aroace post got way more attention than I thought so I also just wanted to share that you don’t have to have sex. you don’t have to have romance. we have so much social coding around having The Same Major Experiences and Feelings but in truth, EVERYONE’S journey with love, intimacy, sex, romance, and care is different, and you can have deep, meaningful, beautiful connections with people without having sex or being in romantic love. you don’t have to have those experiences if you don’t want them or don’t feel ready for them. you also don’t have to have yourself Figured Out. If you aren’t sure you’re ace/aro/somewhere in between or outside, that’s cool. you’re on a journey. you’re at the right place in your journey, and the right people will support you and respect the boundaries around how you want to be loved and touched!
36 notes
·
View notes
Overall I think we could benefit from learning a distinction between "recognizing that there are genuine patterns of sex negativity and an ignorance of Our History among young people, because we live in an extremely repressive and sex-negative society that does not teach about Our History" and "as an adult, making fun of teenagers for posting online too much about things you think are 'cringey' and not enough about things you think are cool". If I'm being perfectly honest
45 notes
·
View notes
I just want to say that I'm absolutely obsessed with this particular Maxiel dynamic you do so well where Max is such a freak and wants Daniel to do filthy filthy stuff to him, and Daniel is more conflicted about it. It's such a good reversal of the more common thing you see in fic where the more dominant partner is the real driver of how freaky things get. Daniel being the one who needs comfort or aftercare afterward, while Max is just totally chill because he got what he wanted and he's comfortable with his needs, is my absolute favorite thing, and you write it SO well. It's so them. I just wanted to tell you that! <3
thank you so much! i think it's a fun way to write them because max is (to me) a fundamentally straightforward person; he doesn't over-analyze his own actions at all (even when he probably should!). he might feel shame about things but i don't think he'd really interrogate that shame; and once he got to a place where he didn't feel ashamed anymore, he wouldn't interrogate the desire itself, he'd just accept it. shrug. it is what it is, if someone has a problem with it that's on them.
daniel on the other hand does fundamentally overthink things--his career maybe being example number 1--and add the age difference to that and i think (and other scholars have elaborated brilliantly on) he'd have a lot of guilt about what he wanted to do with max or about what he enjoyed with max.
if i ever have the energy to write a long fic again i would want to kind of explore this through the lens of daniel's horrible 2022 and max's great one, where daniel is letting himself play out some of his more fucked-up power dynamic-y desires with max just because it's one thing that makes him feel in control and good and powerful, but then his guilt about it is worse because of the way he feels like he's using max for his own needs. and max, maybe, wouldn't question anything that was happening because he doesn't overthink things like that, and then one time when things didn't go perfectly both of their reactions would really catch them by surprise and everything would come to a head...
58 notes
·
View notes
i still think that viewing stories as this unchangeable format is both like. the end and also this inevitable progression of narrative analysis btw. like let me try to explain.
on one spectrum, you have the whole. disney marvel movies Clickbait youtube videos "ENDING EXPLAINED" and all that shit. where everything is objective and the story is treated as a malevolent entity that just spawned one day with no explanation or anything. like go on twitter and you'll find a couple thousand guys who will laser-focus on like. something being "unrealistic". that mindset of "that would never happen in real life!" = therefore the story loses all merit. in their world, there is no team behind a story, no person making the decisions that led to each event and character, nobody is purposefully writing each line, and there's no significance to most of it. you take it all at face value, "what someone says is exactly what they mean", but apply that to an entire narrative.
and the other "end" (i dont think this is like. the Hightened Perfect way of engaging with anything. i'm just fond of it) is treating the story, both the base fiction itself and the circumstances around its creation, as a full package. parts of a story that may be narratively unsatisfying, or that may be a result of bad writing or lackluster foresight, are a part of that story. it allows it to be both the original, and both a potential examination and sort of..."secondary" (?) narrative of sorts, that focuses more on a reflection of storytelling as a whole, and how we use the medium + what we can get out of it. or just an unintentional but Always-There Story about Storytelling.
for instance, if something you've been enjoying falls off at the end, if the writer struggles to pull all the pieces together, and what was once a Beloved Tale that you deeply adored just kinda....falls apart, that's still a story. it doesn't really lose the significance it had to you, that significance is turned into frustration; an upset at the lack of a satisfying conclusion. i'm not saying this shit doesn't suck, it fucking does, we all like good endings, or at least satisfying ones. but in providing the reader that frustration, i'd argue that still allows significance. there is still something being told, but maybe that story itself is of a more meta variety. in pulling it apart and viewing it from different angle, i think theres more opportunities to take potentially "passable" works, and grant them more significance. because even if that lack of a perfect ending was an unintentional fault on the writer's side, it still made you feel things, and it was a part of the story, in the end.
10 notes
·
View notes
ive been a paper notes taker all my life and i prefer the medium but this semester is tempting me to start taking notes on my ipad so i can doodle in class easier
4 notes
·
View notes