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taetaesbaebaepsae · 3 years

Text

hungry eyes (pjm)

Summary: Jimin's summer job is more often than not a pain in the ass, but you seem different than the other girls who need dance instruction at the resort.

A/n: A commission for @kpopnoobsstuff!

Warnings: dirty dancing au, some prejudice given race relations for Asian Americans in the 60′s but not a lot of detail, unprotected sex, public vaginal fingering, praise, dirty talk, Jimin is a jackass like over half this fic, a serious ankle injury, angst, mention of sex work (with an age gap), alcohol, smoking

Word Count: 8767 (i have a lot of feelings about this movie)

Rating: Mature

hey, hey hey baby

Of all the things Jimin had dreamed he'd end up doing, working as a dance instructor/gigolo at an expensive resort wasn't one of them.

Julliard wasn't cheap, though, and so every summer he ended up here at Sanders resort, teaching salsa and letting old ladies put hundred dollar bills into the back pocket of his slacks as tips.

Jimin fucking hated the crowd at the resort, hated the way they smelled like new money and champagne, how they looked at him like either a side of meat (the women) or like something that they needed to scrape off the bottom of their shoe (most of the men).

It's better than before, digging ditches during the summer and shoveling snow during the winter because no one is going to hire a Korean boy for an office no matter how good his English.

His hands had cracked and bled, forming callouses where they'd been smooth before and he finds himself running his thumbs over the ones on his palms while waiting for his cue in rehearsal.

When his coworker tells him of a gig he'd done, Jimin's eyebrow raised at his friend's paycheck.

Having to go by "Jimmy" instead of Jimin because the supervisors think his given name is too hard to pronounce puts a bad taste in his mouth, but he needs the money. It isn't as if he can tell his parents he's decided to be a professional dancer instead of a doctor or lawyer like they'd dreamed, and they didn't have the funds to help with tuition anyway.

So he spends every summer rolling his hips for the hungry eyes in the crowd, smiling and pretending that them purring, "Jimmy" in his ear doesn't make him shudder. It's the third summer before anything truly interesting happens.

Jimin didn't even like salsa or ballroom dancing or the mamba or any of the stupid easily learned dances he was forced to perform. He was a classical dancer, ballet being his forte, but this pays the bills and it's a way to keep his father off his back about his choice in colleges.

The older women weren't so bad, they'd give him anything if he whispered "noona," in their diamond decorated ears, but the younger girls, the ones who came there with daddy's money, those are the ones he doesn't fuck with.

The only woman he'd fucked with outside of work, in fact, had been Sunmi, his best friend since childhood, and even that not for years. Sunmi had followed him to Julliard and to the resort but they'd gone their own way after that and it wasn't as if they were ever in love, after all.

Despite the rumors among the staff, Jimin hasn't touched Sunmi outside of dancing in going on three years. He knew they looked like a couple, moved in tune with each other's bodies, and that's why they got paid the big bonuses.

Maybe he still got a little worked up after performances, liked to work up a sweat after at the dancer's barracks, and who could blame him when he sees you slumming it, tapping your toe to the music with your nose wrinkled and a little smile on your face.

He doesn't even have to say anything, just smiles at you, quirks his finger and you bounce forward ungracefully enough to make him laugh.

Sunmi snickers at him but he waves her off, knows she makes her rounds among the male staff that work in catering so she can't judge.

You know of Jimmy before you ever see him, having several members of the staff tell you in no uncertain terms to stay away from him, that he's trouble. You're surprised by how good he is, you can't take your eyes off him during the first dance performance of the summer. Jimmy Park certainly looks like trouble, with his sly smirk and the way he’d effortlessly flipped up his partner, Sunny, her skirt flipping up to reveal a pair of boyshorts stretched across her perfect bottom, and you’d swear he’d winked at you after.

You don’t think about the dancers for a while, busy touring the resort with your sister, who’d dragged you to the resort in the first place. You’d wanted to stay home and study, but your father had insisted that you join the family for the summer.

It’s boring, more for the older crowd than someone like you, a junior in college. You’re studying business because that’s what your father wants, but you like to write poetry, and you’re usually content to stay in your room and scribble.

It’s hot, though, the air conditioning not doing much to help the humidity, so you go for a walk, hoping there’s a bit of a breeze.

While you’re out, you run into a staff member, a dancer you think, but you aren’t sure, you’d been so busy watching the instructor.

“Girl shouldn’t be out this late at night alone. Might get in trouble,” he teases.

He’s cradling bottles of alcohol and you raise an eyebrow at him.

“Aren’t you going to get in trouble for stealing those?”

He laughs, loud and open. He’s cute, dressed down in a white tshirt and jeans, not like the stuck up staff members that do catering and management in the resort.

“Not if you don’t tell, baby.”

You bristle, but only a little. That’s what everyone calls you, after all, Baby might as well be your name. You’re the youngest and you’ll admit you’ve always been spoiled.

He shuffles the liquor bottles around to stick out his hand. “I’m BamBam.”

You shake his hand, a bit awkwardly because of all that he’s holding. “Interesting name.”

His face falls, just a bit, but then he smiles again. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Bambam pauses for a moment, and then cocks his head. “You wanna help me with all this? I’ll show you something.”

You’d been warned about being alone with men, you’d had some experiences in college that you’d never tell your family about, it’s not as if you’re a prude, but especially here, so many staff members whispered about how “dangerous” the dance crew was, but you’ve been bored out of your mind, and Bambam seems sweet, if a little flirty.

You shrug and take a couple of bottles, giggling when he sighs dramatically in relief.

It’s such a long walk that you start to get worried, but eventually you start to hear the music, a surprising amount of bass given the attitude of the resort in general, juggling two half liters of expensive vodka likely pilfered from the resort bar.

BamBam kicks the door open, nearly dropping the liquor, and you manage not to laugh but it’s a near thing. The heat almost hits you in the face, the music louder than you’d imagined, and you find your mouth dropping open, looking around at the dancers.

You recognize a few members of the dance team, but none more than Jimmy, the dancer you’d been unable to keep your eyes from earlier that week.

His partner, she’d introduced herself as Sunny and you’d noticed she was nearly as beautiful as him, is practically riding his thigh, her head thrown back as he moves to the music, and you turn your eyes away, embarrassed.

It seems intimate in a way that makes you feel a pang of envy. You’d had flirtations here and there, even a few flings at college (which you pray your father would never catch wind of), but here? In public, in front of everyone?

You try to tell yourself the heat in your stomach is from embarrassment instead of arousal.

When you look over, Bambam is looking over at you with a sly grin. He juggles the liquor bottles.

“You wanna try it?”

You gasp out loud and hope he can’t hear you over the music.

“The dancing,” he explains, all but yelling over the beat.

“Oh!” You exclaim, and his sly grin widens.

“What did you think I meant?”

“Nothing! Nothing!” You insist, and finally find somewhere to put down your cargo on a large table next to the wall, just to have something to do rather than be embarrassed.

Bambam shrugs and moves to do the same, and you’re just standing there, looking around at everyone and how free and happy they look, so different than the way they look during performances and during instructions.

Bambam is about to say something to you, leaned in toward your ear, when Jimmy walks up to the table, and you freeze like a deer in headlights.

“Hey baby,” he says in this low but melodic tone, and you have this weird sense like you always do when someone calls you that, as if they know you somehow, know you’re the baby and daddy’s little girl and are somehow judging you for it.

To be fair, Jimmy looks like he’s judging everyone, even when he’s pasted on a smile during a rumba class or smirking during a resort wide performance. You’re not sure if it’s confidence, arrogance, or anger, but you have to admit it’s a little attractive, the way his dark eyes flash when you put out your hand for him to take.

He doesn’t just lead you out onto the dance floor, he tugs at your arm, pulls you close to his chest, looks down at you as if you’re lovers and you suppose the way the others dance, that’s just how this goes, that’s how the dance goes, but when he slides his thigh between yours you can’t help but gasp.

He laughs right at the shell of your ear and it makes goosebumps pop up on the flesh between your neck and shoulder.

“You gotta move your hips, baby. Nobody likes a dead fish.”

It takes a few moments and more of your face feeling hot but you manage to get a rhythm and it’s hotter in here than you’d expected, sweat rolling from the fine hairs at your temples to your neck, his hands on your hips and his eyes on yours and it’s intense, makes you wonder if this is what you’ve been missing out on when you refuse to go with your sister to the staff parties that she’s been trying to drag you to the whole resort stay.

His face is so close you can see the sweat on his brow, the way his full lips are parted, leaning closer and closer in and you could swear he is going to kiss you, you even tilt your chin up, part your own lips, close your eyes.

Then he spins you, instead, and you feel dizzy, open your eyes, and see him striding off toward the back of the building.

You huff out a long breath, torn between storming out into the cool night air or following him, deeper into the humid building, like descending into hell if you were to believe the way your father’s pastor preaches at your hometown church.

You look back at the open door, the breeze cooling the sweat on your body and making you shiver, before you follow him, weaving between the people on the crowded dance floor with murmured apologies.

You follow him all the way out into the night, just on the other side, and you feel a little stupid for your dramatic thinking earlier, watching him exhale smoke from his nose, leaned against he back of the barn.

He doesn’t look at you, doesn’t make any indication that he knows you’re there.

“Jimmy?” You call, and you’d meant to be flirty, aggressive even, but it comes out small in the cold air.

He scoffs, takes another drag from his cigarette, glances over at you.

“What, you gonna pay for a lesson? Bet you didn’t bring daddy’s wallet with you when you followed Bam.”

“I-I didn’t-I don’t,”

He smiles then, not as much of a smirk, and it softens his face.

“Don’t worry, baby. I'm only teasing. I’m not gonna tell your daddy you’re out here slumming it.”

“I’m not-” your voice raises and he turns his head to face you, one eyebrow raised, and you lower your tone. “I’m not slumming it.”

He shrugs lazily, offers you a drag of his cigarette and you don’t smoke but you place your lips around the end anyway, wonder if you can taste his mouth on it, inhale and manage not to cough.

“Jimmy-” you continue, and he rolls his eyes and your heart races, feeling like you’d said something stupid, and maybe you have because he flicks his cigarette into the night, turns, bracing himself against the wall and when he’s closer you wonder if he’s drunk, you can smell some type of acrid liquor and the leather of his jacket.

“My name is Jimin,” he says, and there’s no slur at all around his words so maybe you’re wrong about that last part.

“Jimin,” you repeat, the name rolling around your mouth, feeling thick on your tongue like the red wine you sip at your father’s dinner parties. You find yourself tilting your chin up again as he nods sharply and your eyes keep flickering between the sharp line of his jaw and his full mouth.

“I know your kind,” he continues, and you haven’t even partaken in any of the liberally spiked punch at the party but you’re the one who feels drunk, your head light on your shoulders.

“My...kind?”

Jimin does that sharp nod again, shifts his body so that he’s standing in front of you now and your shoulders brush the back wall of the barn.

“Mmhm. Come out here on Saturday nights to see what all the fuss is about, you college girls with fur lining your purses, I swear to God I could taste the silver spoon in your mouth if I kissed you,” he breathes, his words rude and harsh but you don’t move, don’t push him away, can’t stop staring up at the flash in his eyes.

That’s what they’ve been missing, you think. That’s what all those college boys you’ve let put their hands up your skirt, grab your tit too hard in the backseat of their muscle cars, even let them fuck you over the hood of said muscle cars, hoping for some kind of thrill because it’s wrong and dirty but all you got was their cum seeping down your inner thigh and their murmured apologies and this ache between your legs. Because they didn’t have this, this energy you can feel in the air, the light in his eyes, something like anger and lust and yearning all wrapped into one.

It isn’t even for you, not really, you’re not dumb enough to believe that, but god, is it something.

“You could test that theory,” you mumble, sure that your words sound slurred, leaning into him, and his chuckle is bitter but it still sends a hint of a shiver down your spine. He traces his finger under your chin, the corners of that full mouth turning up.

“What makes you think I want to, baby?”

You’re cute, he supposes, in that way that all little rich girls are cute, with your bouncy ponytail that you almost always wear, your conservative dresses. After he’d left you outside with just the smoke from his rolled cigarette hanging in the air, he prided himself in not giving in.

He’s positive he could have fucked you, could have coaxed you to his room with a few short words, but he knows from the rest of the dance team (especially from Bambam, who’d bagged his fair share of the rich daughters of CEOs, bank owners, lawyers, doctors, and the like from the resort, considered himself a bit of an expert in the matter), that taking one of those types to your bed leads to nothing but drama.

Drama wasn’t something Jimin needed, especially since all the odds were already stacked against him in this job (in life, really, but who’s counting?) Jimin wouldn’t consider himself a bitter person, in fact throughout his childhood and most of his adolescence, he’d been positive, optimistic, always smiling. He’d gotten stellar grades, always did what his parents wanted, had even planned to work on law school after graduation. The one class he took was mind numbingly boring, and he had no aptitude for debating. He’d been naïve, foolishly thought that his father would support whatever he wanted to do, and since he felt most alive when he was with his friends, dancing, making their own choreography, he’d approached his father with an application to Julliard.

Needless to say, Jimin became less naïve day by day, after that. It was gradual, his fall from grace, as some people might say. He thought of it more as growing up, as becoming more who he should be - and if that was a bitter asshole who manipulated rich older women into his bed for extra funds, so be it.

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t feel shame about it sometimes, or even guilt, especially like with Mrs. Jensen, nearing fifty but with the most beautiful green eyes and the way she called him “Jiminie,” had insisted on learning his real name, traced the line of his spine in bed before he got up to dress and murmured how he was the most beautiful boy.

“If I were twenty years younger, Jiminie. Hell, I were only ten years younger,” she’d mourn, those green eyes almost liquid, and he’d smile and tell her she didn’t look a day over thirty and she’d scoff but she’d also smile, and when she smiles sometimes Jimin thinks that if he isn’t careful, age gap or no, he might just fall in love.

In the end, though, he felt okay about what he did, it was a means to an end, and if he judged the denizens of the resort too harshly, that’s because they could take it, no skin off their teeth with their millions of dollars in the bank. They could dry their tears with hundred dollar bills.

It isn’t until daylight the next morning, when Jimin wakes up slightly hungover and chugs a glass of water, when there’s this flash of your face in his head, tilted up to his, this almost hungry look in your eyes.

He’d like to say he’d seen that look before, but he hasn’t. Not quite in the same way.

Jimin doesn’t want to think about it long, and for a while he’s able to distract himself with his morning workout and then rehearsal, but for the first time in several summers, he misses a couple of steps and Sunmi looks at him from the corner of her eye with a sly smile.

“Shut up,” he mumbles, and she laughs and does a little piourette.

Jimin thinks later maybe she was hungover too, or had taken too many of those codeine pills she claimed were for her periods, but she loses her balance and goes down, too quick for Jimin to catch her, off the stage, her foot caught under her body.

She cries out but then bites her lip, hard, knowing that the supervisor was just around the corner, gorging himself on snacks and champagne while they all worked for hours to get the steps just right.

Jimin tries not to show it, but he knows as soon as he hops off the stage that Sunmi’s ankle is broken, and badly. It’s already swollen, already turning a bit purple, a bit of bone poking through, a streak of blood down her foot.

“Fuck,” Sunmi says in a pained whisper, eyes liquid when she looks up at him. “Jiminie, what am I gonna do?”

Jimin knows she doesn’t mean the ankle. He knows she means the next rehearsal and the next, the big dance they’ll be doing at a nearby resort, representing the dance troupe and the hotel. He knows she means her whole fucking life because if she loses this she can’t pay for Julliard.

“We’ll figure it out, jagiya,” he says softly, lifting her into his arms. Sunmi buries her face in his chest and Jimin makes hand signals at a wide eyed Bambam to distract the supervisor while Jimin carries her back to the barracks.

There’s nothing but nervous energy throughout your body the rest of the week, as you sit through your father gorging himself on shrimp, your mother chugging champagne, your sister flirting with the staff members at the buffet. You’re barely able to make conversation, not that anyone notices. You’re used to being ignored, as the baby of the family. All you can think of is the dance instructor’s full lips inches from yours, his finger trailing up your throat before he’s just gone and you’re all but swooning with the smell of him around you like a haze.

You’d seen him a few times that week, watching from far away as he twirled a few women around the dance floor, once at a resort performance, right in front and center, seen the way his nose wrinkled when they introduced him as “Jimmy Park.” He hadn’t given you a second glance, and while it stung, you weren’t one to give up easily, not after how you’d felt when he’d looked at you, really seen you.

You’re sneaking out of the resort room when it’s barely ten pm on the last Sunday, unable to wait any longer and shimmying out the back window just as you had the other night. You manage to remember the way to the barn, and even if you didn’t you can practically feel the music booming under your feet, the faint sound drawing you closer.

Your heart rate increases as you get closer and you stand near the edge of the building, a wallflower as always, but your eyes are searching the floor. You don’t see him anywhere, and after a few moments you’re sure your lip is turning into a pout. You do spot Bambam, your ambassador from the other night, and you figure he might know something about Jimin’s whereabouts.

Bambam goes uncharacteristically quiet when you bring up Jimin’s name, though, face blanching slightly.

You look at him curiously. “Is something wrong?”

He shakes his head. “No. Fine, everything’s fine.”

“Bambam?”

He won’t look at you, rocking back and forth on his heels, and then he freezes. “Hey. Baby.”

“Hmm?” You’re distracted, looking around at the crowd in hopes that Jimin will show.

“Didn’t you say your father was a doctor?”

It’s a whirlwind after that, your brief panic wondering what might be wrong, the internal struggle to know if you should wake up your father or not, knowing he’ll ask what you’ve been doing out and about, waking your father and having Bambam lead you both to the dancer’s barracks, where you see Jimin sitting on the coffee table, getting up when Bambam bursts in with your father, who is carrying his doctor’s bag.

“What the fuck-” he hisses in a low voice, looking right at Bambam and not even acknowledging you.

Your father, for his part, rushes to the couch, where Sunmi is bundled in blankets but still shivering, sweat on her brow, and when your father yanks back the blanket you gasp because her right foot is dark purple and swollen.

For the first time, Jimin looks at you, and there’s nothing but dark fury in her eyes. “Get her out of here,” he demands, and Bambam’s mouth opens and closes like a fish.

“Jimin-” you start, and he scoffs, turns away from you, toward your father, thanking him for coming and explaining what happened, ignoring you as if you were never there at all.

You wait anxiously in the living quarters, and you wince when you hear Sunmi cry out as your father works on her ankle. It takes hours, and while you wait, Bambam explains what happened and you just cock your head, confused.

“Why didn’t she just see a doctor?”

Bambam frowns, but before he can answer Jimin is stalking into the room.

“Yeah, why didn’t she just see a doctor?” Jimin mocks, staring at you with glittering eyes. “It’s that easy, princess?”

You don’t know how to answer, your face feeling hot, and you want to look away but you can’t. “Explain it to me.”

Jimin laughs, bitter and low. “You’d never understand, Baby. We can’t all call daddy and have him throw money at the situation.”

“Jimin, she brought him here to help us, we should be kind-” Bambam protests, and Jimin waves a hand at him.

Jimin turns to you, takes your hand and even though his eyes are still glittering with anger, your breath catches in your throat at his touch.

You’re perched on the arm of a chair and he leans down slightly, brushes his lips just barely over the back of your hand, all the while looking into your eyes.

“Thank you, princess, for deigning to help us peasants,” he says, voice low and charming and absolutely dripping with venom.

Anger rises in your chest, tightening in your throat but you stay quiet, jerking your hand from his and looking away.

Your father tersely gives instructions to Jimin after both Sunmi and Jimin refuse a hospital, and Jimin nods, but you see his face fall when he says something about how she is not to bear weight on her ankle for six weeks at least.

Your father is escorting you out with a blank expression but you’re looking back at Jimin and he’s watching you with those dark, glittering eyes.

It’s only a few days before your father has to go back and visit Sunmi, and he’s barely spoken a word to you, angry that you hadn’t told him about your friendships with the staff, you suppose. You can’t bring yourself to care, you’re an adult and even if he’s paying your tuition, he doesn’t have the right to tell you with whom to spend your time.

You insist on going with him to check on Sunmi, and you do sit with her for a few moments before you hear Jimin and Bambam arguing.

“Can’t someone else do it?”

You know Jimin’s scoff well by now, it seems like that’s what he’d been doing most of the few weeks you’d known him.

“No, Bam, someone else can’t do it! No one else knows the routine, it’s a special stage for Sunmi and me. Maria’s on maternity leave and Sooyoung can’t learn it in two weeks on top of the final rehearsals for the final show.”

“Do what?” You ask softly, standing in the doorway and shutting Sunmi’s door behind you.

“Can’t go a week without princess butting her head in,” Jimin mutters, and you huff out a breath.

“It’s a special dance stage,” Bambam explains. “Sunmi is expected there and so far she’s been able to get out of rehearsals but if the performance doesn’t happen, the supervisor…” he trails off, and you fill in the gaps.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Can’t fix this with daddy’s money,” Jimin snaps.

“I wasn’t trying to-” you cry out, and then lower your voice. “I wasn’t trying to fix it, I just...I wanted to help.”

Jimin laughs. “Help? How? You shivered when I so much as brushed my hand across your hip when we danced.”

Bambam raises an eyebrow at that and you keep trying to fight down anger.

“I could...I could learn,” you insist.

“You are a dance instructor,” Bambam reminds him helpfully, and although Jimin is still incredulous, that's how it happens.

That’s how you start to spend three days a week at Jimin’s small bedroom, learning the steps to the most complicated dance you’d ever heard of. That’s how you start to fall in love with him.

I wanna know, oh

This is stupid, he thinks, over and over. This is so fucking stupid and it isn’t going to work and I’ll fail and Sunmi will be fired. Hell, I might be fired.

You keep stumbling in the heels you’d be required to wear for the dance and you’re taller than Sunmi so that throws off the whole performance and you only have just a touch of rhythm and you have an attitude and the list goes on and on.

The two of you are two weeks into rehearsals when it all comes to a head. You’d huffed out a long breath or given him a withering stare before, when he’d snapped at you or corrected your steps roughly, but usually you let it go.

There’s not enough room in his tiny space, and it’s not like the two of you were exactly friends, so it’s tense, for the most part.

One day, at the last rehearsal of the week, he spins you and you miss a step, stomp down on the top of his foot with your heel and he cries out and curses.

“This is never going to work,” he mutters when you try to help and you let out an annoyed almost growl that, in other circumstances, he might find kind of cute.

“You could give me a little goddamn credit, you know!” You yell, and he stops rubbing his foot and looks up at you.

Maybe he’d been a little dramatic, it didn’t hurt as much as he’d put on, but if that happened during the performance….

“Credit for what?” He bursts out.

You put your hands on your hips and you’re wearing this barely there white croptop and a flowing skirt and (not for the first time), he notices the swell of your hip, the outline of your breast.

“For one, bringing my father to help Sunmi-”

Jimin barks out a laugh at this, his eyes returning to your face. “Takes a real saint to call daddy-”

“Second,” you continue firmly, voice raising over his, “for working three days a week for hours to try and help you and your girlfriend keep your jobs!”

He opens his mouth to correct you but your voice keeps rising, your eyes full of fury.

“And last of all but most importantly, putting up with your constant bullshit! I can’t do anything good enough for you and I really just want to punch you and leave.”

Jimin pauses, stands up straight and looks at you for a moment. As much as he hates this situation he can’t let you quit. He needs you, more importantly Sunmi needs you, and he’ll never forgive himself if he fucks things up for his best friend because he can’t control his temper.

“Do it, then.”

Your eyes widen. “Do what?”

Jimin pats the middle of his chest. “Hit me, if it’ll make you feel better.”

You look at him incredulously.

He smirks at you, makes a little come hither gesture with his hands. “C’mon, princess. You scared?”

There it is, that flash in your eyes that he’s come to know well even during such a short time, and it makes the hair on the nape of his neck stand up.

You punch him, just at his diaphragm, weakly, and he laughs.

“C’mon, Baby. You can do better than that.”

He takes a step closer and you just keep looking at him, your canine piercing your bottom lip, still breathing hard from the rehearsal.

He can’t deny it makes his dick twitch in his sweats, the fire in your eyes, the way he can see the outline of your erect nipples through that croptop.

He leans down closer to your face. “Still wonder if I could taste that silver spoon on your tongue,” he whispers, and then you slap him across the face, hard, making him stumble back with a laugh.

He nods, and you start to gasp out apologies but he holds up a hand.

“Let’s get out of here.”

It’s been hot all week, and there’s on and off summer showers that come from nowhere. The thunder rumbles as you reach the parking lot and Jimin’s car, a clean but beat up Mustang.

You dance around a bit as Jimin reaches into the pocket of his sweats for his keys but he curses instead. When you look in the window, cupping your hands, you see the keys in the ignition.

You sigh and stand up to tell Jimin but he’s removing his leather jacket and wrapping it around his fist as you watch, open mouthed.

He busts the back quarter window as if he’s reading the newspaper and unlocks the door, leaning over to pop your lock before cranking it up.

You stand there for a moment, shocked and oddly aroused.

“You coming?” He asks, looking up at you from the driver’s seat, and you scramble inside.

“You’re crazy,” you mumble as he pulls off at a speed that should have scared you but instead filled you with exhilaration.

He looks over at you, as if confused. “What?”

“I said you’re fucking crazy!” You yell, laughing, and he starts to laugh too and you’ve never heard him like that, open and loud instead of derisive and bitter and there’s rain pouring into the back window but he doesn’t care and you can’t imagine ever feeling that free.

You have that feeling again, the one you’d had standing outside the barn with him, that energy like he’s wanting and hungry all the time and just like then, you want more.

You push that out of your head, though, he’s made it clear where his thoughts lie, and that’s with Sunmi. That’s the whole reason you’re doing this, to help her, help them. It’s certainly not because you just want to be near him, because even when he’s angry at you the way you feel with him makes you feel like you never have before, not because you want to memorize the bow of his lips, the line of his jaw, how his eyes crinkle up at the corners when he smiles.

“Where are we?” You finally ask when he’s pulled off into a clearing in the woods.

“You’ll see.” He grabs your hand and tugs you behind him and your heart skips a beat.

You end up practicing at the river for hours, and you ask questions and he answers them, about his family, how he started dancing, Juilliard and why he’s doing this job.

You’re not surprised that he wants more, he’s too good for this place and you can see it, even though you’re no expert.

He talks a lot more than he ever has, tells you so much about himself and you have fun, laughing and talking with him, he’s barely teaching you anything at all.

Finally, he’s sitting on a high log, swinging his legs and looking down at you as you sit on the shore.

“We haven’t practiced the lift because it’s best to practice in the water,” he says, and that’s how you end up waist deep with his eyes on yours and his hands on your hips.

“Ready?” He asks, quietly, as if there isn’t only the woods and the river and the birds to hear him.

You nod, your mouth dry, but then his hands slip up to your waist and you’re not sure you’re ready at all. Of course he’s touched you during rehearsals, here and there, but not like this, not this close.

“Jump,” he commands, and you do, think you’d have done anything he told you, but he lifts you up effortlessly and you try not to stare down at him as your heels lift off the riverbed, try to look ahead like he’s taught you but it’s impossible and when he lifts you over his head, telling you to hold the position, you go straight into the water, coming up sputtering.

He laughs, pulls you close, and does it again, and this time it works, this time you hold it and he slowly lowers you back down.

Your body slides down his, your nipples brushing his chest, his breath on your throat, and surely this is too close, surely you won’t be doing this on stage in front of people.

“Baby,” he murmurs, close to your ear, like it’s your name, and you shake your head.

“Call me Y/n.”

He says your name and you watch how his lips shape it before you tilt your chin to kiss him, pressing your mouth to his without thought, your lips parted.

His tongue in your mouth is hot, hungry just like you knew it would be, and your arms tighten around his neck. You hear the water moving and gasp into his mouth when you feel his hand slide up your thigh, under your skirt, sliding along the river water soaked crotch of your panties.

“Jimin,” you moan into his mouth, and he just kisses you harder, presses his hand harder against your cunt and you want more more more.

You’d imagined it, late at night, sore and exhausted from rehearsing and you could feel his hand on your hip as he’d turned you, slid your hands down your body imagining they were his, but this is so different, so much better than you’d ever dared to dream.

Suddenly, he pulls away from you, and you whine.

“We should...we should get back,” he says, voice slightly hoarse, and he wades back to shore while you’re left wanting and aching.

would you be my girl?

You’re quiet in the car, your head spinning, and he doesn’t say a single word until he pulls back up.

“Want me to walk you back to the resort?” He asks quietly as he turns off the car.

You blink at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

He doesn’t look at you, his eyes down in his lap, and you open the door and slam it when you get out.

Jimin knows he should stay put. He should stay put for so many reasons. It’s too much drama, you’re a guest of the resort, you’re a little rich girl with daddy’s money, you deserve better.

But he sees your shoulders shaking and he can’t help himself from getting out, rubbing your shoulders as he leads you inside. You’re shivering now, it’s after sundown and you’re soaking wet.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, planting a kiss on your shoulder. “I’ll get you some tea and some warm clothes.”

He turns to go and heat the kettle but you grab his wrist, tug him back.

“Nobody makes me feel the way you do,” you say in a quiet and shaking voice. “Even when we argue I-”

“Baby. Y/n. Don’t,” he pleads. He feels like he’s right on the edge of something, like he’d fall over with just a single push from you.

All these things are flashing through his head, moments where he’d let himself notice how he felt when you’d do this little growl in frustration when you missed a step, the way your mouth turned down at the corners when you were focused, how you set your jaw when he said something to make you angry. After just a few weeks he’s all but memorized the lines of your body and he’d blamed it on being focused on the performance but he knows somewhere that it’s something else, that you mean something else to him.

“Why?” You ask, sounding almost pained and he can’t stop looking into your eyes and he can’t speak either so he kisses you first this time, one hand at the nape of your neck to pull you close.

We aren’t from the same world, he should say. It won’t work and I’ll break your heart or you’ll break mine and I don’t know if I can take it.

He should say so many things but instead he says nothing at all, just kisses you and kisses you until you jump just like you did in the water, wrap your legs around his waist this time instead and he carries you to his bed, peels off your soaked clothes while you keep kissing him in between, his mouth, his throat, his chin, and it makes him laugh.

You’re bare beneath him and he doesn’t even realize that he still has his wet clothes on until he slides over you to kiss you again and you hiss.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and smiles at you and you blink, have this expression he can’t quite pinpoint. “I’m usually better at this,” he finishes after pulling off his tshirt, and you open your thighs with this slow smile.

“We’ve got time.”

His breath hitches in his throat because that’s probably not true, after tonight you’ll probably avert your eyes when he looks at you in public, come to him late at night like all the others.

Instead of saying that, he curses under his breath and looks down at you, slips his fingers through your slick, sliding two fingers inside you as you arch your back.

You’re so wet already and he’s barely touched you and it makes him groan.

“Look at you. Such a pretty baby,” he praises, moving his fingers because he loves the way your face goes slack, your mouth parted as you writhe against his hand.

“God,” you whimper, voice a little slurred. “Please.”

Jimin feels like he might burst before he even gets out of his sweats, wants to make you come before he does but you lock your legs around his waist, surprising him and he falls forward, catching himself on his palms.

Before he can catch his bearings you drag your tongue along his throat and he groans.

“Baby, you’re full of surprises.”

You smile against his mouth and push down his sweats with your feet and it makes him laugh again, he’s found himself biting back smiles so often with you that it feels good to let it out.

Then his cock is sliding against you and you’re so hot and wet that he bites down on your lip. You cry out softly and rock your hips against his, panting out his name and then he can’t do anything else but slide inside you, burying his face against your throat.

He thinks, too late, that he should have flipped you over, focused on your ass and the line of you spine instead of like this, looking down into your face and the way your eyes focus on his. He knows better, but you’re rolling your hips up to meet his and biting your lip and you keep moaning his name and he can’t stop now.

Your nails rake down his back and he leans up to fuck you harder, hoping to focus on your breasts bouncing instead of how pretty you look beneath him.

“Baby,” he breathes. “I’m gonna-”

He doesn’t get to finish because you’re making the prettiest sounds, moving your head from side to side and your cunt clenches around him like a vice.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

It’s been fast and sloppy and he’s almost embarrassed when he comes inside you, but you lock your ankles around the small of his back and pull him down again.

After he’s made that tea he promised earlier and you’re sitting crosslegged on his twin bed, facing him, you call his name softly.

“Hmm?” He asks, distracted by how you look now, your hair mussed, skin slightly flushed.

“Does my mouth taste like silver?”

He frowns until it hits him, what he’d said to you that first night, and then he’s laughing again and tackling you to plant kisses along the side of your face.

Jimin is gone when you wake up, leaving you a note to lock up. No heart drawn there, not even his full name, just a -J at the end. You assume he must feel guilty about Sunmi, assume maybe he never meant for things to go too far and now here you are, heartbroken, and you still have to keep your promises and finish rehearsals and this dance with him.

You stay in your room at the resort for two days, until your scheduled next rehearsal with Jimin, and you feel like you’ve cried enough that when you see him, it’ll be easier.

You walk into the studio already dressed in your leotard and shorts, and he’s standing at the record player and even the set of his shoulders looks stiff, and it makes your heart ache.

You don’t speak, just start taking off your sneakers to put on the heels that you have to practice in, and it’s Jimin who says your name, softly.

Your real name, not Baby, not sweetheart, and it seems like all the tears you’ve cried the last two days are stuck in your throat.

You take a deep breath before looking up and the words come out before you know what you’re saying.

“I know you’re going to tell me that it was a mistake. I know you’re going to tell me you love Sunmi and I understand. Let’s just not, okay? Let’s just not talk about it because I’m embarrassed and I’m sad and I feel stupid-”

Jimin sits on the floor with you, moves close and presses his forehead to yours.

“I don’t love Sunmi. I mean...I’m not in love with her.”

Your heart does a backflip. “But I’m a mistake.”

Jimin lets out a heavy sigh, shakes his head softly, looking into your eyes.

“Jimin,” you whisper, and then he kisses you and you forgot what you were going to say.

There’s two weeks until the performance and you spend all of those days irrevocably in love with Park Jimin.

“Why do you stay?” You ask him one night while you’re lying with your head on his chest after he’d bent you over the arm of the recliner in his room, rough, and you love it but you know he’s angry because they wouldn’t let him change the choreography of the final dance, wouldn’t let him do anything but teach old ladies the foxtrot.

He’s been stroking his fingers along your spine and you wonder if that was a stupid question when he freezes just for a moment.

“It’s not like it’s easy, Baby,” he says, simply.

“It should be,” you insist, and you press a kiss between his pecs, knowing it isn’t something you can understand.

You know you’re privileged, know that your father would flip his lid if he knew you were getting fucked by the dance instructor four nights a week and most days too, because your father didn’t think he could provide for you. You’re sure that if he found out, your father would disown you and you’d lose your tuition money and your apartment back home.

So when you and Jimin are walking back to the resort from the studio, holding hands and laughing and you catch sight of your father in a golf cart, you gasp, tug Jimin’s hand to hide behind a nearby building.

Jimin lets you lead him there, doesn’t protest, but his face is like stone when your father passes and you can relax.

“Jimin-” you start.

“Tell me again how it should be easy, Baby,” he says, his voice like ice, and when you try to take his hand he pulls away.

You make up, eventually, it only takes a day before Jimin gives in to your apologies, the kisses you plant along his shoulders while he’s trying to stretch before practice, but in the end, he’s right.

It’s not easy at all.

just a fool to believe

Jimin knew this thing with you wouldn’t last forever. In fact, he’d been preparing for the performance to be the last night, the last time he’d see you look at him like that. He starts to dread it, starts to stay awake later at night to watch you sleep so that he’d have more memories of your face pressed against his pillow.

He’s always known you’ll leave him, whether it’s in the middle of the night because you realize you can’t let your father find out, after the performance when you’ve done what you’ve said you would, or at the end of the summer, when you’d return home to your college and your friends. Hell, maybe even a boyfriend. He tried not to entertain that, it made his throat feel tight to wonder if you have some Ivy League jerk with a letter jacket waiting for you, but it’s crossed his mind.

He knows he’s not good enough for you, knows that if his own bosses can’t even use his real name to introduce him he’ll never have someone like you, not long term, anyway. He’s used to being someone’s dirty little secret, with this job.

He’s always thought that you’d leave him, but in the end he has to leave you.

You’re full of nerves, counting down the days to the performance, and it’s only three days away when Sunmi comes up to you, sweating on her crutches, and your eyes widen. She’d barely left her room, knows that if the supervisors find out it’s her foot instead of an illness like your father had told them, she’ll be cut from the team.

“Sumni, what-”

“Jimin’s gone,” she bursts out.

“No. No he’s not gone,” you say confidently, but you can feel your heartbeat in your ears.

Sunmi is near tears and she nods her head sadly. “He’s gone, they fucking fired him!” Her voice breaks and you put out a hand to steady her. It feels like you’re moving underwater.

“He wouldn’t leave without...without telling me,” you say, less confident with every word.

Why wouldn’t he? Why would he come to you, a summer fling, someone he doesn’t even know that well?

Because he loves me, you think. But does he? He hasn’t said it. He hasn’t made you any promises.

“What about the performance?” You ask, feeling like you’re floating farther away from her as you speak.

“They replaced him,” she chokes out, crying openly now, and you hug her, comfort her so that you don’t break down yourself.

You find out from Bambam why, and it’s all your fault. Apparently one of Jimin’s so called students had caught you and Jimin in the studio, seen you through the window and in a bout of jealousy reported him for “cavorting with a guest.” It was against the resort’s rules, even though Bambam says all of them had done it, at least once and usually more.

It doesn’t matter. Jimin had been caught and he’d lost his job and probably his tuition and it was all your fault. You’re like a zombie the last three days, your mother asks if you’re okay and your father keeps ignoring you, but you can’t bring yourself to care. You can’t care about anything. You don’t have any idea where he lives, you can’t even write to him, and you lie in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking about how he joked that your mouth must taste like the silver spoon you were born with and how it used to make you laugh.

The night of the performance, your mother demands that you go, dresses you in this stupid pink dress you’ve never liked and rolls your hair, and you’re picking at your food when they announce that the performance is about to start. You’re sitting in the corner, against the wall, hanging your head.

Tears are welling in your eyes as you hear the familiar opening bars, but then there’s a loud feedback sound as someone kills the microphone and you look up, startled.

Jimin is standing at your family’s table, wearing a white tshirt and jeans, a leather jacket, similar to the outfit you’d first seen him in, and you wonder for a moment if you’re dreaming.

Then he says your name. Your real name, not Baby, not sweetheart, and you blink up at him, shocked.

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” he says with a smirk, and takes your hand to pull you up.

this could be love

You don’t leave him after the final dance, like he’d thought, but he was right that it wasn’t easy. Nothing worth it ever was, he supposes. You run away with him, live in his tiny college dorm on his twin bed, and he still doesn’t think he deserves you.

You still apologize for getting him fired from that shitty job and he still cops an attitude and tells you that you’re spoiled sometimes but it ends in hot and hungry kisses or an impromptu dance session around his record player.

It isn’t easy but he wants it, and so do you, and he hopes that in the end, that’s all you need.

#park jimin x reader #jimin x reader #bts imagine #pjm x reader #bangtanheadquarters #btscreatorsclub #noonasinnetwork #bts commissions

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adultprivilege · 5 years

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I've ranted about this so many times on main that I need to say it here:

The idolization of classical music is not just racist and sexist, it is blatantly ageist

Coming from a huge music nerd this is important for me to say: BEEHTOVEN IS BAD AND MOZART IS WORSE. I dont even know if other pianists are aware of the way we've been brainwashed by Europeans but Beehtoven and Mozart were mediocre at best for average musicians, and for musicians who stood the test of time, they are TERRIBLE.

These two musicians, and most pre-1900s classical musicians in general, are only so famous because they are meant to symbolize the pinnacle of white society and the achievements of whiteness. I like Monet, I like Tchaikovsky, but if that's the best we can do then white people should not do music.

Wanna see a dumb person say dumb shit?

Who is some people? Tell me right now who do you think some people are?

I love this tweet because it so perfectly encapsulates everything that older white people believe. So many people (mostly white and old, #yupisaidit omg I'm so unique) talk about rap being the cause of gang violence, black on black crime, younger people having lots of sex and doing drugs. Imagine believing that the music young people listen to and black people create (and I can get into the exchange of black culture and youth culture at a later date) is an epidemic.

It's funny because that happened all throughout the 19th century.

(Above: "flappers" aka rebellious young women who liked to party and listen to jazz -im not kidding that's literally what a flapper was - of the early 1900s dancing in what were considered short and scantily clad dresses for the time, then another picture of flappers posing for a picture with their boyfriends)

In the early 20th century teenage girls and women in their 20s became so famously known for having more sex, drinking alcohol, being unashamed to dress in shorter skirts, that the term designated to them by older white men - flapper - is now considered a historical term. And you've DEFINITELY seen old films depicting black jazz musicians as illiterate speaking in slang always cheerful with a bunch of other gross stereotypes given to them. No one liked jazz and no one like ragtimes.

(Above: Chuck Berry onstage, Little Richard in a cover photo -both black- and a bunch of white teenagers in the 60s posing on jeeps and pontiacs trying to look punk and cool)

I feel like it should be known by now, Elvis is not the king of rock, most white rock musicians were highkey appropriative and when young black popular music switched to blues white rock musicians tried to follow suit inconspicuously for profit. I'm mostly basing my info of rock and blues on Peter Guralnick's Feel Like Going Home, which isnt the most progressive book you could buy but if you're looking for a comprehensive musical history of the 1950s onward focusing on how young white people rebelled against their parents by participating in black culture, you should definitely read it. Guralnick described how as a young white kid he and his friends would listen to rock all the time, and try to dress in fancy outfits and pose the way Elvis posed, sort of trying to look and behave the way they imagined black people look and behave (again its not the most progressive if could be). Adults constantly judged youth for listening to rock, and all the new kinds of music that came with it that were created out of black culture.

"The first time I heard Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' was on the car radio on the way to school.

A-wop bop a lu bop a lop bam boom

Tutti frutti, oh rooty

It burst out at us. Our first reaction, I think, was one of chagrin. Somebody's father was driving, and he expressed our discomfort before we could ourselves. 'What command of the english language,'he said and switched stations. We all laughed self-consciously because it was, after all, our fault."

(Above: Mamie Smith on an album surrounded by black men on trumpets and various brass instruments. A party full of black teenagers listening to rhythm and blues.)

Rhythm and blues was another form of music pioneered by black people and exchanged with youth culture, and put down as a way to dismiss both identities. Again, from Feel Like Going Home:

"Country blues, which was at first considered too disreputable to record, remains to this day too funky in a pejorative sense to merit serious attention."

"These blues were common property long before they were set down on paper, however, and if the recording of the classic blues singers stimulated a new period of growth for country blues, WC Handy himself admitted, 'Each one of my blues is based on some old N**** song of the South, some old song that is part of the memories of my childhood and my race. I can tell you the exact song I used as the basis for any one of my blues.'

Instrumental jazz started out as the articulation of that same feeling, an ingenious approximation of the human voice."

And eventually the music was used by youth as a way to rebel.

"We thought of blues, when we first took it up, as protest music."

Which brings us to hip hop, rap, trap, and the like.

(Above: Duckwrth in his music video for Soprano, Angel Haze with a group of their fans mostly white and everyone in the photo looking pretty blatantly queer)

Obviously right now you are aware of the fact that black people pioneered these three genres, and obviously you are aware that they appeal to a much younger age, because you're living in this time period.

It doesn't matter what the music is. How many times have we seen the narrative that a teacher makes the young black student more interested in school because poetry is just another way to rap? White adults struggle so much to comprehend the evolution of music and its pioneers being black youth that they literally think they're teaching someone when they say that maybe instead of participating in black culture you could do something that is similar but a lot more white and I'll consider you more intelligent just from that. It's an attempt to destroy black/youth culture.

Which brings me back to that goddamn tweet I love so much. Yes, Shapiro is technically a millennial, but hes this type of millennial I hate, the one that thinks they have to compensate by saying "I was born in the wrong generation" "I have an old soul" "antiques are some of the finer things in life". They love the aesthetic of not having computers or phones or really any new technology, they want to live in a creaking house and use a typewriter and die of polio. Ageism is so strongly connected to racism because if you've internalized some ideas of white supremacy, as Shapiro ABSOLUTELY has, you develop a need to connect with white eurocentric society, and as the world becomes more integrated that becomes harder and harder to do until you develop some nostalgia for the 90s, for the 50s, for years that you weren't even alive to be nostalgic for. So these people decide to listen to classical music as a way of saying "I'm not like anybody else in my generation."

And I'm not just going to blame youth because obviously it's mostly the oldest generations saying that music taste is a sign of intelligence and that music contributes to teen pregnancies and drug use and criminal activity. This has been said about so many forms of music because the number one priority for people who have a goal of maintaining ageism is to prevent culture from evolving. Or more specifically, allow culture to evolve, but only to the point where hairstyles and clothes and tech and music tastes can be weaponized to separate and criticize younger people and maintain superiority. Older people have a vested interest in making the many parts of your culture, especially the parts of youth culture that are also black culture, seem crude and inappropriate and reflective of your moral character.

It doesnt matter if you don't listen to rap. You still have to tell people you're not like your generation, avoid using slang like lit and yeet, put on a tie every day, work 60 hours a week and not live in poverty, and talk shit about your own generation just to escape one of the caricatures of youth. And at that point you just enter another caricature that is the "born in the wrong generation" stereotype. Once older people know you're seeking their approval, they (possibly subconsciously, but this is also a very conscious tactic used by pedophiles) compliment you by saying you are very professional, you have an old soul, that you are mature for your age. They make you easily manipulable. So it's a bit terrifying to even try to gain that accreptance.

There are so many people nowadays just like Ben Shapiro who are listening to classical music that was made in 18th century Europe or previous. There are so many music history classes in schools that only teach about Bach, Beehtoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, all that. If you are going to listen to classical pieces, stop rehashing the old shit. You shouldnt be listening to music out of a desire for cultural "purity" and a feeling of superiority.

If you need to listen to classical music, listen to these:

youtube

If you think music can have an "authentic" sound to it, listen to these:

youtube

TDLR: the ideation of classical music has been used for more than a century to dismiss black/youth culture, to separate our generations and use our cultural contributions as a way to demonize black people and younger generations, and to manipulate youth into a desperation to appeal to older generations.

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brightershadows · 3 years

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Euphorically Honest-- Euphoria, Teenagers, and the Realities in Hardship

OVERVIEW

Euphoria is brutally honest about the hardships of life. Focusing on the stories of a group of teenagers in modern-day California, it navigates through issues of drug addiction, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, violence, and depression. It can be tragic and liberating. But it is honest. Created by Sam Levinson, a screenwriter for Assassination Nation and The Wizard of Lies, the story reflects on his own experience with drug addiction as a teenager, as well as having a loose basis in an Israeli show of the same name (Stack, 2019). The story follows a group of young people of varying genders, ethnicities, classes, and sexualities, including the drug-addicted narrator Rue, new-to-the-suburbs Jules, Cassie, beautiful but easily manipulated, her kind and easy-going sister Lexi, Kat, who embraces her body type as she gains confidence through sex, Nate, a manipulative and dominating male with control issues, and his girlfriend, Maddy, who battles her self-identity and her reliance on Nate (Levinson, 2019). Euphoria can be seen as overly graphic, or critiqued as too sexual, but its mature nature allows it to unearth the ugly truths about life, living, and loving, and the beauty behind the hardships too.

EPISODE TWO REVIEW

In “Stuntin Like My Daddy,” Nate discovers his father’s sex tape collection at a very young age, videos of his father having sex with several people. This is where Nate’s disdain male sexual anatomy stems from. Nate quickly becomes infatuated with Maddy. Whether disturbing or romantic, he fantasizes about hurting or killing the person who dares harms her. A series of flashbacks from Rue’s summer shows her consuming various drugs and getting high, fighting with her mom, waking up in the hospital, and singing in the car with her mom and sister, highlighting what she has gone through as well as her relationship with her family. On several occasions, Rue relapses. Reluctantly and unable to say no, she takes a dose of fentanyl. Unaware of the consequences, Jules is called to take care of Rue. Their friendship further develops. Kat learns that an explicit video of her has been posted to a porn website. When the video’s view count continues to grow, Kat is intrigued and signs for a web cam streaming account. Obsessed with Maddy, Nate begins stalking Tyler, Maddy’s most recent hookup. Maddy, still wanting to get back together with Nate, tells him that she was blacked out and did not mean to do what she did. This causes Nate to believe that Tyler had raped Maddy. Furious, Nate breaks into Tyler’s apartment and beats him half to death. At the end of the episode, we learn that the guy Jules has been texting is named Tyler but it actually turns out to be Nate.

Nate Jacobs is the typical football jock, yet he exhibits anger, aggression, and sociopathic behavior. Rue Bennett struggles with her own psyche as she suffers from ADHD, bipolar, general anxiety, BPD (borderline personality disorder), and drug addiction. Jules Vaughan is unapologetically herself, although she seems to seek attention, approval, and sexual relationships from men who are undeserving of her. Maddy Perez is the popular cheerleader who knows she is attractive and she goes after what she wants. She stands up to everybody else except Nate. Kat Hernandez may seem like a side character, the fat best friend, at first, but she finds her confidence grows as an individual. Fez/Fezco is Rue’s main drug dealer. Although he supplies her, he also cares for Rue and does want her to get mixed up with a worst crowd.

Although there are people of color in the show, there could always be more representation of race. Rue and her sister, Gia, are mixed, with a Black mom and a white dad. Maddy is Latina as both of her parents are Latino. Kat Hernandez is also of Latin descent but we do not see much of her parents or family. Every other (main) character in this episode is white, this includes Nate, Jules, and Tyler. This show, and episode, is not particularly making any waves or strides with their representation of race. And with the representation of race that they do have, there is no portrayal of racial identity, culture, or heritage. Jules definitely stands out as she is a transgender woman. She is currently taking hormones and her father and closest friends accept her for who she is. Jules goes on to have sexual encounters with older men as well budding romances with boys her age. Nate is a stark contrast to Jules, with him being set in his heteronormative, gender binary ways. Most, if not all of the characters identify with the gender that they present. The males, Nate and Fez identity as male. The females, Rue, Kat, Jules, and Maddy identify as female. The main characters mainly fall into one of the two binary genders. All of the romantic or sexual relationship aspects in episode 2 revolve around a male and a female, such as Nate and Maddy, or Maddy and Tyler, or even Jules and her mysterious texter (a man). To my knowledge, there is no presence of a non-binary or agender character. Jules, a transgender woman, challenges Nate’s notion of the strict gender binary system.

Euphoria definitely relies on stereotypes because the writers of this show intend on having the characters break said stereotypes. Kat is initially insecure and self-conscious. After she has sex for the first time and the video of the act gets leaked, she redefines herself. Her sexuality blossoms throughout this show as she also begins to have casual sex which normalizing women having and enjoying sex. Kat becomes comfortable with herself by wearing clothes that are considered more edgy, outfits that she would have never worn before. Kat’s character breaks the sexuality stereotype because the media hardly ever sees a plus-sized woman be expressed in a sexually positive light, even though it may not have started out that way. Nate’s character is embodiment of the toxic, cis-gendered white masculinity. He describes the perfect girl as dressing more feminine, acting like a “proper lady,” and overall more “girly” as opposed to “tomboy.” Because he is so uncomfortable with the male sexual anatomy, and even disturbed by how comfortable others are, he may have some issues regarding internal homophobia. Nate does not really defy this stereotype, his character is the epitome of this stereotype. Maddy, a cisgender, heterosexual female, understands the delicate nature of the gender constructed society. She has prioritized Nate and his needs sexually by watching porn in order to mimic what the porn actress does so that she can please Nate. Her sexuality is rarely mentioned, it only rises in conjunction with other boys. Jules’ character as a transgender person challenges the conventional gender roles and constructs. Jules is very comfortable with herself and her sexuality and is proud of who she is.The concept of a non-binary gender system perplexes many people. With the current administration, transgender rights are not protected. In fact, transgender people are continued to be discriminated against. The Trump administration has played a major role in “withdrawing regulatory protections for transgender children in schools, fought recognition of transgender people under federal employment laws, banned transgender people from serving in the military, rolled back protections for transgender people in prisons, and threatened to cut off funding to schools that let transgender girls participate in sports” (Thoreson). Although Jules is able to be who she want to be and live the life that she wants, this may not be the case for many transgender people in the real world outside of the show.

Today people are often quick to criminalize or shun drug users and addicts. They are quick to judge and want the most severe punishment to be given. But medical professionals know that addiction is a very serious disease, one that requires “treatment, compassion, and support” (Siegel). Euphoria attempts to destigmatize and humanize addiction. The legal system should not be punishing people who have abused drugs by putting them into a jail cell where they are isolated from society, instead these people need real help through rehab and various treatments. Due to the fact that Rue had several relapses once she completed her rehab program, one may say that these programs do not work; however there is no singular timeline to get better. It may take weeks, months, or years, and the journey is difficult. But society cannot give up. Social and political reforms concerning drug use/abuse and addiction is very much needed.

EPISODE THREE REVIEW

In ' Made You Look,' Nate meets Jules on a gay dating app disguised as Shyguy118. Although Nate doesn't identify as gay, Jules reveals being transexual and quickly falls in love with Shyguy118, oblivious to his true identity as a classmate at the same school. Maddy becomes skeptical of Nate and searches through his phone and, in shock, learns of Nate's involvement with a gay dating app and nude sending with Jules. Jules's heightened obsession over the mysterious Shyguy118 leads Jules to agree to meet Nate for the first time in person near a lake at night. While all of this unfolds, Rue, who is Jules's supportive best friend, at first, entertains Jules's fantasies by helping Jules send pornographic images to Nate. However, tension arises when Rue exposes her worries for her best friend and undeniable attraction for her as more than just friends. Unfortunately, Jules did not reciprocate the kiss they shared. This sent Rue spiraling into a frenzy and falling back into the addictive habit of taking pills and getting high, undoing Rue's 60-day clean streak. Embarrassed, Rue runs straight back to Fezco, her drug dealer, in hopes to illegally obtain more drugs to numb the humiliation she felt. Fortunately, Fezco doesn't give in to Rue and shuts the door on her, leaving Rue to look toward Ali, an omniscient man she met at a therapy gathering for drug users to seek guidance.

Kat, a Tumblr fanfiction queen, masks herself while exploring her curiosity for explicit content and webcam streaming. She exposes herself to lingerie and twerking on her account; she agrees to perform a private camera meet with a man who falls in love with Kat's powerful and sexual dominatrix persona. Originally insecure with her weight, Kat eventually learns to embrace her curves and dives into a new and unusual world of femdom. This episode also introduces Cassie. She displays as a bold, open-minded party girl that isn't phased by frat party endeavors. McKay, Cassie's crush, invites her to his frat-hazing event, and they both fall deeply in love with each other, foreshadowing potential problems to come from concupiscence for one another.

This episode involves various races but is primarily white-dominant. Cassie is blonde and white, represented as audacious and open-minded. Maddy is a cis-gender Latina and, in this episode, victimized by Nate, a white playboy who cheats on Maddy. Rue and her sister are a mix from a black mom and a white dad. Despite various races represented, this episode minimally illustrates heritage background and racial and cultural distinctiveness. There are very minimal cultural representations and race diversity besides the racially represented individuals such as Rue, Maddy, Kat, Ali, and Fezco. Although the film is predominantly white race influenced, there is still a general race narration awareness displayed in the show.

Sexuality representation is a flourishing topic within each episode in Euphoria. Arguably one of the most influential characters in this episode, Rue, a lesbian half black teenager, finds herself falling in love with her openly transgender best friend. This tricky love triangle is demonstrated between Rue caring for Jules while she cares for Nate. Jules is head over heels for her classmate, Nate, who hasn't announced is gay but is chatting with Jules on a gay dating site. Moreover, Nate's girlfriend in this episode, Maddy, is only now beginning to question if Nate is straight like he demands he is.This episode centers around redirecting the audience's view of how a character's sexuality is initially perceived to how each character's sexuality is either nonchanging or questioned and altered due to more self-awareness. For example, Jules, from the beginning, identified as transgender and unchanging while Rue begins to question her sexuality and feelings for her friend after kissing her. Male, female, and non-binary characters speak and act quite differently in Euphoria. Male actors such as Nate, Ali, and Fezco are very much dominant and slightly manipulative in this episode. Nate is a controlling and manipulative character fueled by curiosity and confusion. Ali is a mysterious, omniscient figure who sees past Rue's addiction. Lastly, Fezco shuts Rue out when she almost dies from the drugs he gave her. The females include Maddy, Rue, Jules, Kat, and Cassie. Non-binary characters were not present in this episode; however, Nate being on a gay dating site and taking an interest in Jules knowing her being transgender urges the question of what Nate's sexuality may be.

Cassie, in this episode, played an essential role in breaking gender profiling stereotypes. When Cassie was at the weekend frat-hazing party with McKay, she stood up to the guys at the party and took a shot of water with a live goldfish in it without hesitation, while McKay was hesitant and wanted to reject the challenge. Cassie taking that shot was significant because she didn't abide by her gender role limitations. Instead, she proved that she could equally compete alongside the frat boys at the party.

Illegal drug use for underage teenagers is very much a political issue. The creator of Euphoria, Sam Levinson, opens up about his struggles with addiction growing up. He talks about how his personal history of drug use as a teenager animated Rue's similar struggles in Euphoria. It's essential to recognize that Rue was not using drugs because of peer pressure but because she was struggling with "obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), general anxiety disorder, and even bipolar disorder" (Health, 2020). Many teens go undiagnosed with disorders like these and spend their teenage years fighting addiction and going to rehab centers, sometimes more than once in hopes of ending the addiction. There are other situations where undiagnosed individuals who don't fall victim to drug addiction still live a life of struggle with their mental illness. Euphoria sheds light on addiction and mental health and de-stigmatizes mental illness, a topic that should be further normalized and empathized with.

EPISODE SEVEN REVIEW

“The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed” tackles a lot of issues. In many ways, this episode is openly candid about the hardships of life and the modern influences of distraction and avoidance. The candor of this episode is heartbreaking, revelating, and so, so real. The episode before the season finale follows multiple characters, including Jules, a trans woman battling confusion about her relationship with her best friend and her changing life; Cassie, a beautiful blonde teenager facing an unplanned pregnancy; and Rue, a drug addicted teenager battling a major low in her depression (Levinson 2019). This episode follows many differing plots that do not intersect in its time; however, at the root of the 59 minutes is the juxtaposition of two teenagers, the structures of family, and the deconstruction of femininity.

As a whole, this show is unapologetically divergent from the stereotypes of society. It does not hesitate to tackle hard issues, easily addresses controversial issues regarding race, sexuality, and gender, without negating their seriousness. It makes normal the darkness we all battle in our private lives, especially in this episode. In it, characters from all walks of life get a say in the plot. Not only is the narrator and main character a gay Black women in love with her best friend, we also follow the story of Jules, a trans women, and hear from Cassie, a straight cisgender blonde girl who falls victim to the confines of the patriarchy, allowing herself to be sexualized and invalidated as a possession by the men in her life (Johnson, 2014). My only criticisms regarding this episode’s diversity is that there is little male influence or perspective on the storyline, and further, that there is little diversity outside of “black and white.” That is to say, while there are many Black characters given voice to this episode (and, by default many white characters as well), there is little representation of other ethnicities. We do not hear, for example, from the perspective of an Asian-American. That, to some extent, is an area that can be improved as the show continues.

Earlier I mentioned the juxtaposition at the core of this episode, and I want to dive a little deeper into that. Cassie and Rue are, in many regards, polar opposites. Rue is Black, gay, struggles with drug addiction and is a social outcast. Cassie, in comparison, is blonde and blue eyed, gorgeous, and popular. Rue is an older sister; Cassie is the younger in her family. But this juxtaposition highlights the conditions of the patriarchy that define familial dynamics, such as sisterhood and motherhood, both amplifying and deconstructing those norms. For example, at the end of the episode, Rue and Cassie both go to their moms, the caretakers, for help when they reach rock bottom. Those mothers show up, and they do their job: care. However, at the same time, these mothers have taken up the role of being the breadwinner for the family as well, defying the stereotype of reliance on the male for prosperity and survival. Rue’s mom, however, is portrayed as more successful and put-together than Cassie’s mother, whom we see to be an alcoholic and basically a hot mess. This is contrary to racial stereotypes that typically portray the black community as one falling apart and the white suburban mom as picture-perfect. The gender and racial norms that society and time have produced throughout our history in America are blurred as these two realities are expressed in this show (Scott, 1986).

This episode also attacks femininity. Speaking with her friends from the city, Jules, says, “In my head, it’s like if I can conquer men, I can conquer femininity” (Levinson, 2019). This conquering, or, as Jules later says, obliteration of femininity is addressed throughout the episode. Cassie, conforming to societal expectations, allows herself to be objectified and sexualized by all the men in her life, using that perception of beauty to define her over the course of her life. Rue, on the other hand, does not conform to femininity at all, as we see in the way she dresses, and even the persona of the masculine “detective” she took on in a manic state. These three approaches to femininity contrast each other, as each one represents a different sector of diversity: race, sexuality, and gender identity.

Euphoria is inherently political. It brings to light the reasons why the personal is political, especially in the midst of an election cycle where the rights of those who don’t conform to societal norms are under threat. This show creates an avenue for those rights and the real people behind those laws to speak and tell their own stories. Not only that, it represents mental illness and drug abuse, revealing the realities of living with these issues and bringing to light the struggles of the individual and their community through addiction and mental health crises. The show helps create empathy; empathy creates connection. And connection, more than anything else, is something we deeply need right now.

CITATIONS

Euphoria creator Sam Levinson on his controversial show: 'I hope it opens up a dialogue' [Interview by T. Stack]. (2019, June 16). Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2020, from https://ew.com/tv/2019/06/16/euphoria-creator-sam-levinson/.

Health, A. (2020). How HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ Depicts Teenage Drug Addiction Accurately. Retrieved 14 November 2020, from https://amhealth.com/2019/09/25/how-hbos-euphoria-depicts-teenage-drug-addiction-accurately/

Johnson, A. G. (2020). Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us. In 1046495481 799935172 G. Kirk & 1046495482 799935172 M. Okazawa-Rey (Authors), Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Seventh ed., pp. 62-70). New York, New York: Oxford University Press. (The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, (2014))

Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019). Euphoria [Television series]. HBO.

Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019, June 23). Stuntin’ Like My Daddy [Television series episode] In Euphoria. HBO.

Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019, July 28). The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed [Television series episode]. In Euphoria. HBO.

Scott, J. (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review. doi:10.1086/ahr/91.5.1053

Siegel, Z. (2019, August 06). Euphoria Doesn't Have a Drug Problem. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/euphoria-hbo-drug-addiction-overdose.html

#euphoria #zendaya #GWSS assignment pleasedon'tjudge

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tonystarkbingo · 4 years

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Tony Stark Bingo Prompt Meme

So, we did another Prompt Meme game, and came up with these summaries based on a three-tag prompt. This is an open prompt, if any of these summaries look like fun to you, please feel free to write them!! Tag us or the writer of the prompt when you do so we can all see how cool you are and what you’ve given us for the promot

@summerpipedream - Winteriron - All Tony wanted to do after finishing up at MIT was to pack up his desk at Stark Industries and quietly fade into obscurity. Sure money was tight, but he never expected Jan to actually sign him up for one of those social media reality shows. Now, he was stuck in a house, with no phone, no internet, or access to the outside world, trying to avoid the sexy Bucky Barnes, who's mission in life seemed to be to never wear a shirt around him.

@darthbloodorange - The world is ending, an alien race has all but taken over the world, it is an apocalypse of devastating proportions, most of the world is dead. The Avengers, those who are left, have retreated to a bunker built a fourth of the way down into the Earth’s core. Tony and Steve have been growing closer, when they are not working together to find a way to fight back against the aliens, they are fuck buddies. Tony’s a genius, he knows the odd of surviving this are not in their favour. Odds were that they were going to die… and well, Tony doesn’t want to die without letting Steve know how he feels. Before the battle Tony corners Steve in the armoury and confesses that he loves him. Steve is aromatic, has been since project rebirth. They are both so very sorry.

@newnewyorker93 - After a series of strange killings where the victims are found set up kneeling like they're praying, Tony Stark (a private detective) is on the case. An initial (false) suspect is the local priest, Matt Murdoch, who ends up being a helpful ally in solving the case (and possibly more)

@27dragons - Winteriron: You'd think that Tony Stark would have learned to ski when he was growing up. You'd think wrong; Howard never saw the point in it. So here he is, almost done with his PhD, and his friends have decided on a spring break trip to go skiing. He doesn't want to admit to them that he doesn't know how, so their first night at the lodge, he offers one of the ski instructors a large sum of money to sneak him up onto the slopes for a few lessons that night. Against his better judgment -- but desperately needing the cash -- Ski instructor Bucky Barnes takes Tony up on the slopes. Unfortunately, just as Tony's starting to get the hang of things, it starts snowing. Hard. Even more unfortunately, the newfallen snow disguises a patch of ice and Tony tumbles out of control. By the time Bucky catches up to him and verifies that he's not badly hurt, the snow is coming down too hard to see the lodge -- so what else are they to do but seek shelter in a caretaker's cabin conveniently (TM) nearby and wait for morning...?

@gavilansblog - Tony is kidnapped as part of an Evil Plot (TM). He's handling things just fine, tyvm, until his would-be rescuer (who he's been pining for, obviously), gets dragged in and handcuffed back to back with him. Seriously, dude? If you insist on breaking the kidnapping procedure at least actually rescue me! The taxes come in when the Evil Plot Master does his monologue and reveals that the kidnapping is part of a Villain Logic scheme to get Stark Industries to throw money behind the campaign to get a new law requiring actually taxing billionaires to fail. Evil Plot Master is, naturally, a billionaire. Tony would facepalm if he weren't handcuffed to his idiot rescuer, seriously. And then the kidnapping protocol kicks in and Jarvis shuts the whole facility down only instead of being handcuffed by himself Tony is now handcuffed to his rescuer so they have to do the whole escaping part of the plan while handcuffed together, resulting is the standard Tension (TM) moments and possibly an almost-kiss.

Fey Relay - Bruce, Tony, and Peter, resident science geeks, get de-aged and really want to play in the lab. You know, the one that has lots of things that can kill them in it? But they're still sort of mentally in there, just cranky and smol. So they get assigned their own Non-Science Adults who they hand-hold and point to do their sciency bidding. Thor, Steve, and Natasha oblige them and have great fun!

@rise-up-ting-ting-like-glitter Dragons were real. Okay they were actually just souped-up dinosaurs, but that didn’t mean Tony wasn’t being hunted—with intent—by lizards. He hadn’t wanted to come to this stupid Island in the first place. SI funding had explicitly been removed from the crackpot idea to return dinosaurs to the food chain. He could have told everyone that this was going to happen. Instead he was climbing through a jungle with a one-armed man who refused to give his name and if they didn’t get to the raptor enclave, retrieve the anti-venom, and return in time, people Tony loved were going to die.

His guide had better live up to his scruffy wild-man appearance or Tony was going to lose everything.

@somesortofitalianroast - Nurse Bucky Barnes wasn’t sure what exactly was going on. The vigilante known as Nomad had just crashed through the (luckily) open fire escape window. While he was lucky not to have any broken bones, he was unlucky enough to have a bad concussion. A really bad one. One that meant he couldn’t fall asleep. Also unfortunately, he only had the one bed and the enormous Nomad wouldn’t fit on his couch, so they’d have to share. It was only after he helped Nomad into his bed that he noticed the blood, and, unthinking, he pulled the cowl off to check for another, serious injury. And gasped. Nomad was Steve Rogers, his best friend in school, who’d died in an IED attack in Iraq 5 years earlier.

@polizwrites Natasha Romanov and Virginia Potts are the proprietors of Chaykus - a Russian tea room on the seedy side of town. Its new mission is to be a sanctuary for women who have been smuggled into the country for sex trafficking purposes. As for the men who engage in such practices? Well, they are quickly discovering that their days are numbered.

@dixiehellcat - Pepper is the manager of the heavy metal band War Machine. James Rhodes, lead guitarist and founder of the band, is looking for a new lead singer. He did not expect the woo-loving Virginia to get horoscopes cast for the applicants and decide based on that. He just wants somebody who can sing, dammit. This Stark kid is uncomfortably attractive, yeah, but he's been thrown out of two bands already. what? the shower sex? it was only that one time after a show, and they were both wasted...

@dracusfyre Tony was born without a soul mark. Bucky's was lost forever when Hydra took his arm. Without the universe to give you a hint that this person is The One, falling in love is gambling with your heart. But soulmates don't have to be born, they can be made - and Bucky and Tony decide that the same should be true of soul marks, as well

@ceealaina Tony was like nerd prime growing up. Normally he doesn’t let it bother him too much — he’s got inventions to invent, after all. But all of a sudden he realizes that he’s almost 20, he’s got two degrees under his belt, and has no idea how to do much more than kiss. He’s not entirely sure how he manages to convince Rhodey to sleep with him to “get it out of the way,” or how he manages to convince him to keep sleeping with him to “help improve my technique,” but it’s the best sex of his life (not that he has much to compare it to) and he never wants it to end. But it’s the night when they’re watching movies, and Tony’s ends up dozing against Rhodey’s shoulder only to wake up to a feather light kiss against his forehead that he realizes he might be in trouble.

@thudworm - King Anthony considers it part of his royal duties to protect his people by going out and taking care of any monsters harassing them. Of course, no one can know that the knight Iron Man is really the king, which leads to some fun assumptions about Iron Man’s identity.

@jacarandabanyan Tony’s mom forbid him to purposefully drive out his roommates so that he can have a room all to himself where he can tinker until morning light. She had to hear about it from friends, acquaintances, and other well-known socialites often enough when Tony went to boarding school and ran his roommates off there. Now that he’s in college, that behavior must stop. Luckily for Tony, he doesn’t even have to try to get the first two roommates at MIT to request a room switch. But then he meets his third roommate- a tall, handsome, funny man named James Rhodes. At first it was just natural joy at having a fellow competent engineer to hang out with, and perhaps the occasional dirty thought. But his crush on the man quickly grows. Before he knows it, Tony’s pining hard for his best friend. Every once in a while he thinks Rhodey might be interested too- but then he hears Rhodey lecturing a computer science senior for plying Tony with :beer: alcohol at a party because “come on, man, kid’s only 16. Have a little class and try chasing skirts a little closer to your age.” After that, he’s convinced Rhodey will only ever see him as a friend and a kid.

psychiccatpanda - Tony works hard and puts in long hours. So what if some of his long nights turn into very early mornings at CHew 2 OH. The only drawback is his business partner and head baker, Steve, with his disappointed looks and his continual arguing. When Steve's friend Bucky starts hanging around the shop, though, Tony notices. Oh lord, he notices. A month or so later, one night when he and Steve are working after hours at Steve's place to plan their seasonal menu, Steve tells him that he's noticed him checking out Bucky. Tony hits him with a decorative pillow and things kind of get out of hand. Surveying the damage (let's face it - Steve's coffee table was never going to be quite right again), Steve turns to him, "I was just going to suggest you get some practice kissing before asking him out." Oh. Oh...

@tisfan So... the problem with being a necromancer is being able to practice one's skill. The local cemeteries won't even let you look at a dead body if you're not a relative. Tony Stark, budding necromancer, forges a marriage certificate for the John Doe so that he can practice his craft. Only to find that it works perfectly. Bucky is No Longer Dead, and 100% interested in staying married...

@abrighterdarkness He didn’t mean to snoop. He knew that wasn’t what he was being paid for here--the loud laughter of the party echoing from down the hall where he was actually supposed to be, was clear enough reminder of that fact. All Tony wanted was two short minutes to breathe without being pawed at--yes, yes, that might be his job but breathing room was much appreciated just the same--and now he was stuck in this closet sized bathroom with what sounded like a mob-hit being discuss right outside the door. He knew he should’ve turned this job down.

magica - Howard Stark had an idea. Some people - alright, most people, stop hitting me, Maria! - would say it was a terrible idea. But it was only a little injection of stuff based on that strange glowing blue cube they'd found in the Arctic. And Tony was absolutely willing, let's get that straight, Maria! How was Howard supposed to know that it'd enable Tony to open up his own portals? And if some mystical green energy happened to swamp Tony just as he was opening a portal to Egypt? Well, that wasn't his fault. The dark-haired, well-built Priest of Anubis that Tony manages to bring back with him? That is not his fault either, damn it, Maria!

@festiveferret - Tony could say with absolute confidence - at least, if he could say anything at all in his current predicament - that this was not the way his PR rep, Pepper, would have wanted him to come out. There were, he figured, several hundred ways that the day could have gone better, but if asked to rank the top three, he'd put them thusly:

1) That he decided to come out by having a wild, unabashed make out session with none other than Captain America, in the middle of a busy New York street.

2) That it was, in fact, the morning after their first "date" - a term he was applying loosely here - and not a tasteful reveal of a long-standing, safe, secure, adult relationship.

And 3) That at some point between the first floor lobby of his apartment building and the front door off his penthouse suite he'd suddenly, unexpectedly, and so-far permanently been turned into a ferret and no one knew.

It would also probably concern her to discover that of all these rather bewildering turns in his life, the one at the forefront of his mind was that ferrets couldn't send morning-after texts, and he didn't want Steve to think their little dalliance had been nothing more than an - albeit unfortunately public - one night stand.

Of one thing he was sure, however: Pepper was going to need a raise.

#tonystarkbingo2020 #bingo party #prompt meme

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words-by-purpcom-students · 4 years

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PRIDE on SOGIE Bill

SENATE BILL 689 “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression” (SOGIE) Equality Bill

Declarative Assertion

We live in a society where endless judgment is observed and people who are involved cannot fight, specifically individuals who have preference of their own sexual orientation. The government must approve Senate Bill 689 or commonly known as the “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression” (SOGIE) Equality Bill. We may not all be the same, but we can be the voice and fight together who are in combat for their rights not as sexually altered individuals, but as humans who wants equality within them (Deslate, n.d)

Description

The bill is principally an anti-discrimination bill. It distinguishes and protect the needs of other individuals, whether part of the LGBTQ++ and even heterosexuals, to express themselves based on what they feel without being treated as an outcast. In addition, because some establishments do not allow individuals, particularly LGBTQ++ members, the bill wants to remove the deprivation towards the basic right that these parties experience (Rosero, 2019).

Statistics

As the bill focuses on the recognition and protection of every human from oppression and any acts of discrimination, LGBTQ community is still its main focus. According to an international research, 10% of the world’s population are theoretically part of the LGBTQ community out or not. In this 10% of the world’s population includes 12 million Filipinos who may experience any act of oppression and discrimination for who they are.

Description

Proven by statistics, the increasing number of theoretically members of the LGBTQ community is a big part of the world’s recognition for a wider spectrum of gender and the continuous acceptance of their existence within our former concept of binary roles when it comes on gender and sexuality. Although, as the numbers increases it cases of harassment based on who they are, are also relatively increasing.

Description and Statistics

In Philippine context, Filipinos ranked as one of the most gay-friendly in Asia, as the country ranked the 10th-most gay-friendly in a 2013 global survey covering 39 countries. Some provision being passed that recognized the struggles of the every human being proves the standing of our country in international surveys. One of the existing act is the Anti-Bullying Act of 2013. This law provides protection for every Filipino from acts of harassment and discrimination for whoever they are, but how it is different from SOGIE bill?

Description

Republic Act 10627, or the Anti-Bullying Act (the “Act”), aims to protect children enrolled in kindergarten, elementary, and secondary schools and learning centers (collectively, “Schools”) from being bullied. It requires Schools to adopt policies to address the existence of bullying in their respective institutions. The law is being contextualized on the harassment and discrimination that is experienced by every Filipino people mainly students, in schools and other institutions. Its provisions is much more focused on a wider scale of discrimination which is different from the SOGIE bill wherein it mainly highlighted from the individualistic identity of a human person according on its gender and sexuality.

Statistics

The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) documented 141 case of abuse against the members of the LGBTQ community. The reported cases are different form of harassment that happened in different areas even public places and not just on academic institution where Anti Bullying act is mainly focused.

Another thing to take note is the reason why the perpetrator commit such abusive act is because of the gender expression and the sexuality of the victim.

Description

With existing laws that protects every people from acts of harassment, dehumanizing or any actions that is clearly against the human dignity, SOGIE bill is still obviously needed as stated from the current statistics that 12 million Filipinos are still suffering from who they are. Passing of the bill will strengthen the protection of the minorities who are most probably the members of the LGBTQ and even the Heterosexuals that suffers from any act of violence and harassment based on their gender and sexuality.

Description and Statistics

The specific provisions included in the SOGIE Bill mainly focuses on the protection of LGBT members from discrimination in different context such us public places, academic institution, workplace areas and the likes as those who are stated before includes inevitable human interaction and any such forms of abusive and discriminatory can be undeniably exist. One of the serious case of against the LGBTQ members was the killing of transgender Jennifer Laude by US Marine Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton. The death of transgender Jennifer Laude is a clear symbol on how people looks down maltreated the members of LGBTQ community.

Description

Another provision included in SOGIE Bill seeks for removal of any biases and form of oppression based on gender and sexuality of an individual. This aims for equality in opportunities as we are undeniably still on the concept of binary genders wherein we boxed the gender spectrum between a Boy and a Girl (Man, Woman)

For the technicality of the provision it stated that, According to Sec. 5, B. Discriminatory Practices of the Senate Bill 689, it says Include SOGIE as well as the disclosure of sexual orientation, in the criteria for hiring, promotion, transfer, designation work assignment, reassignment, dismissal of workers, and other human resource movement and action, performance review and in the determination of employee compensation, career development opportunities, training, and other learning and development interventions, incentives, privileges, benefits or allowances, and other terms and conditions of employment: Provided, That this provision shall apply to employment in both the private sector and public service, including military, police, and other similar services; Provided, further. That this prohibition shall likewise apply to the contracting and engaging of the services of associations or organizations with lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, intersex, or queers (LGBTIQs) members or of associations or organizations advocating LGBTIQs rights.

Example

Perry is a transgender man who is applying for work, specifically a teacher for elementary children. He is not hired as the academic institution stated that the children might also turned on being members of the LGBTQ community or to conclude, he may not be a good role model for his students. This kind of cases are the one that targets to eliminate by the stated provision included in the bill

Example

Jennifer is a woman who drives a jeepney for living. She experience distasteful teasing and some hurtful words coming from the people because seeing a woman, driving a jeepney is very uncommon in our context.

Example

Justine is a transgender woman who wears feminine clothes in public. She continuously receiving some malicious eyes and even hear some distasteful teasing and other forms of verbal abuse because seeing a male who wears feminine dress is very uncommon in our context especially in some public places and institutions

Description

As stated in the bill, it does not only focuses on the LGBTQ members but also for the Heterosexuals or in layman’s term the straight ones. It also target to eliminate biases and stigma on workplaces, the way of expressing ourselves in public through dressing, way of speaking, and how we interact in the public. It extends the right of expression and opportunities for the LGBTQ members and the Heterosexuals that is suffering from the way they identify and express themselves.

Instances

As the bill recognizes the rights of every person especially the LGBTQ community will it be more acceptable for them to engage in relationships including same or opposite sex partner? And does the said bill also promote same sex marriage?

Description

When it comes on engaging relationship the law does not hinder every person to commit regardless the way they identify themselves. Aside from the SOGIE bill, there are also existing laws such as the Republic Act No. 9710 otherwise known as the Magna Carta of Women (MCW) provides that “All individuals are equal as human beings by virtue of the inherent dignity of each human person. No one should therefore suffer discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, age, language, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, political or other opinion, national, social or geographical origin, disability, property, birth, or other status as established by human rights standards” (Section 3). Although the bill recognize this right it is clearly evident from the provision that promoting same sex marriage is not included.

Description

The other provisions that are clearly not included in the bill which provides misconceptions are the following; the statement that it is not allowed to assign the sex of newborn on their birth certificate until they reach 12 years old, excluding the LGBTQ in some cases and treating them special, Priests and pastors who will refuse to perform marriage ceremonies of LGBTQ members will be stripped of their rights as leaders of religious communities, and any other cases that are not clearly included in the said bill.

Description

SOGIE bill does not only recognize the rights of the LGBTQ and protecting them from any form of recognition but also promotes awareness on the ideas included in the Sexuality, Sex Orientation, Gender Expression and Spectrum.

Description

According to Section 3, of Senate Bill 689 it defines the crucial terms and highlighted the different concepts included in the SOGIE bill such as the Gender Expression, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation. It also encourage people to make themselves familiar with these concepts as it helps us to educate ourselves specially on empowering those people by identifying them and addressing in the most appropriate and acceptable way we can be. It also stresses the presence of stigma and prevent the members of the community to freely express themselves

Example

Iya is a transgender woman. She is sexually-assigned-male from birth, she completely identify herself as a woman, by dressing like a woman, femininely act in public, and sexually attracted to males.

Description

SOGIE bill helps us to identify such complex cases and normalize the existence of those who are included in different spectrum. In her case, as she completely accept and identify herself as a woman, it is advised to address her in a feminine way and classify her as a transgender woman. By scrutinizing things and being more familiar on its spectrum it helps us to be more familiar with them that will eventually make them feel more acceptable rather than just merely tolerated.

Instances

Lawmakers highlighted the advocacy of the bill, which is to promote equality, thus some of them stresses that being this specific is not needed as there are laws that are already provided to protect the people from discrimination. Nonetheless, SOGIE bill still look beyond the roots of the problem and address the minorities. It does not recognize the struggle, yet help reform the status quo and remove the social stigma towards individual who have the rights to be who they want.

Members

Esmilla, Emmanunel A.

(Represenative)

Corpuz, Zachary Mace M.

Cruz, Juro Steven F

Da Costa Pinto, Expedita Invil F.

de Guia, Alyssa Eunice G.

References:

· Deslate (n.d) SOGIE Equality Bill, Retrieved from https://divinalaw.com/sogie-equality-bill/

· Rosero (2019) What should you know about the SOGIE Equality Bill, Retrieved from: https://www.cosmo.ph/lifestyle/sogie-bill-philippines-a613-20190919-lfrm

· N,A (2020) Statistics on the Population of the LGBTQ Community, Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_Philippines

· N,A (2020) Philippine as the most Gay-Friendly in Asia, Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_Philippines

· Disini, (2015) Anti-Bullying Act, Retrieved from, https://elegal.ph/republic-act-no-10627-the-anti-bullying-act/

· N,A (2020) Republic Act 9710, Retrieved from, https://www.pcw.gov.ph/wpla/-enacting-anti-discrimination-based-sogie-act

· Cornelio (2019), Same-Sex Marriage and Gender Equality in the Philippines, Retrieved from, https://brill.com/view/journals/rhrs/14/2/article-p65_1.xml

· Vera Files (2019), FALSE, MISLEADING ‘provisions’ in SOGIE bill, Retrieved from, https://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-fb-page-concocts-false-misleading-prov

· Cervantes (2019), Solon wants to add SOGIE provisions in anti-discrimination bill, Retrieved from, https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1080205

· Rappler (2019). FALSE: SOGIE equality bill will 'undercut' freedoms, destroy family,

· Retrieved from, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/fact-check/239344-sogie-equality-bill-will-undercut-freedoms-destroy-family

#pride 2020 #pride #sogieequalitynow #equality #lgbt rights #lgbtq #lgbtq community

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gws201-blog · 5 years

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Graduating High School.. Nine Months Pregnant?

20 Pop Culture Stereotypes We Must Debunk (Because They’re Fucking Stupid)

1. Race determines class

“White people were equated with richness and land” (Williams, pg. 431). Who’s to say you can’t be a person of color and also be loaded?! Sure, the Real Housewives have women of color who are ~loaded~, but the majority of shows depict non-white individuals and families as poor. Have you ever seen the TV show Everybody Hates Chris? The whole show is about a poor, African American family living in Brooklyn, NY—constantly worrying about money. Their father, Julius, is even so tight on money that he kept a picture of himself in his own wallet to keep as a reminder to not spend money. Shows like this may be hilarious, but continual negative portrayal of race and class hurts those who are included in the stereotype.

2. Race determines education level

“Members of society are judged, and succeed or fail, measured against the characteristics that are held by those privileged (Wildman & Davis, pg. 111).” Why do we put less pressure on some people to go to college, and others are just assumed they’ll go, or maybe it’s assumed they’ll never even finish high school? How can we look at a 16-year-old black high school student and compare them to a white 16-year-old student, and think that we have enough information to label one of them as academically frivolous, and one as a failure?

3. Race determines actions

Being white will never make you an angel, being a person of color will never make you dangerous. The media constantly portrays black people to carry guns, Middle Eastern people to be terrorists, and white people to be trashy, yet, more responsible with guns…? However, according to Chris Wilson with Time, mass shootings from the past 35 years were overwhelmingly white, male shooters. So why do we allow the media to make it look as if the white man is innocent in shows and movies, when in reality they’re the ones who are dangerous?

4. Race determines where you live

Similar to race determining your class, race also doesn’t dictate where someone lives. For example, in the show Shameless, a white family is actually living in the poor, “ghetto” area of town that they refer to as the South Side. However, back to Everybody Hates Chris as I mentioned prior, TV loves to show people of color living in shitty places as if it’s normal. We can’t let the world tell us you must live within constraint or restriction because of your skin; it’s 2018—love thy [literal] neighbor, dammit.

5. Class determines your future, or lack-there-of

“Everyone knows that money brings privilege” (Wildman and Davis, pg. 111). Sure, it can. I won’t pretend that money doesn’t make it easier to afford things such as college. People act like student loans don’t exist, that grants don’t exist, FAFSA (even though they suck, but it’s whatever), loans, etc. do.not.exist.But these are excuses. Millions of students who are set up for failure because they can’t afford college or because their parent’s don’t have the money, but that doesn’t stop them.

6. Class determines your likelihood to end up an addict

Face it—TV either depicts drug/alcohol addicts as either extremely poor, or extremely rich. No one ever seems to care about a middle-class addict. What’s worse though, assuming that being rich or poor increases your likelihood to be an addict, or by not paying as much attention to addicts who are neither of these classes. The rich have money to blow on, well, blow…. and the poor just somehow are expected to be more likely to hang out with the wrong crowd, try a drug once, and then do everything and anything they can in order to get money to keep on getting the drug—none of this is something that we should stereotype.

7. Class determines the likelihood you’ll get pregnant at a young age

Your class and status don’t determine when you have sex and if you’re using protection, your decision to have sex without protection or situations of birth control failure are how you get pregnant at a young age (I’m leaving out situations of rape from this so I don’t write a novel). According to studies done by the US National Library of Medicine, socioeconomic status doesn’t determine the age you get pregnant at, but may determine to different pregnancy and birth complications due to lack of money to afford things such as healthcare, diapers, medicine, etc.

8. Being feminine means you’re gay

“The new man is non-sexist, believes in gender equality and relates to women as human beings” (Milestone and Meyer, pg. 116). Apparently, the ‘new man’ is seen as a gay man to many. What even is femininity? A guy isn’t gay for wearing pink, giving a shit about how he looks, having female friends, or for his hobbies—I personally appreciate a man who takes care of his appearance, shows his feelings, ya know, showers and stuff. Kidding—I promise I have higher standards than a guy just showering. But anyways, what I’m trying to say is that none of these surface-level features give anyindication that a man is gay. And if he is, who even cares?!

9. Being masculine means you’re a lesbian

*See #8*

Kidding, but really. Stop judging people based on how they look, dress, act, whatever.

10.Gay people are promiscuous

First off, not your business. Second, you can just as easily say something dumb like that girls in sororities are sluts (trust me, I was in one and I got this comment a handful of times). I don’t even know how this stereotype came about, but I know that my gay friends joke about it al the time. If your gay friends make a joke about it, cool, it’s funny to talk about his “dick appointment”, but it’s different between a good friend making a statement, and you being an assumptive asshole.

11.Gay people have HIV aids

Every commercial I’ve ever seen on TV about medical treatment for HIV only show gay couples. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, gay and bisexual males are more susceptible to getting HIV because they tend to have anal sex, sometimes unprotected, which then puts them at serious risk. Sorry not sorry, but these commercials can’t just pretend straight couples don’t have unprotected anal sex. HIV doesn’t discriminate, so neither should we.

12.Gay people can’t have children

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. How do women who can’t conceive have children? Adoption, IVF, surrogate—there’s tons of options, and these are options for gay couples as well.

13.Gay people can’t be religious

There’s this notion that gay people must not believe in God because some people believe that homosexuality is a sin—even though God definitely says to love thy neighbor and that he loves all of his children, aka all of us. Shows such as Modern Familyare great examples of this. A gay couple, Cam and his husband Mitchell, attend church and even take their adopted daughter, Lily, with them. Sure they live in California where there’s more acceptance, but the fact that the show even displays this is great for ending this stereotype by showing it as normalized.

14.Teen moms won’t graduate

I talk about Shamelessand Teen Moma lot, but hey, they’re perfect examples for a lot of these stereotypes. Shamelesssupports this stereotype by showing a 15 year old named Debbie who gets pregnant and drops out of high school. !!!BUT!!! Debbie eventually gets her GED and becomes a certified welder. Hell yeah. Teen Mom, which is a reality show, rarely shows teens graduating or getting any type of certification to better their education. Girls who are in similar situations may see this and be like “well shit, if they didn’t finish school and they’re fine, I’m not finishing either!”— then the girl and her baby daddy end up relying on their parents for everything. I graduated with a girl who was nine months pregnant, literally about to pop, and now she’s a young mom, yes, but she got to go on and attend college and is almost finished with her degree. By supporting pregnant teens and giving them the push they need, they can attempt to better their future and give their baby a great life (not that it won’t be great without education, but you know what I mean).

15.Teen pregnancy is easy & fun

If you’ve seen Teen Mom, you know that teen pregnancy isn’t easy. Yes, the show does glorify it sometimes by being like “oh, get pregnant at 16, you’ll get on TV!!!!” but they also show the raw, uncut scenes of the girls and couples hardcore struggling. Imagine missing class, missing prom, missing fun experiences you could be having with your friends when you’re not even twenty years old. Imagine the judgment by friends, family, and strangers because they assume you weren’t being careful. There’s a lot more to being a teen mom than being on TV and picking out cute baby clothes—don’t let TV and the media make you think you should get pregnant for fun.

16.Teen parents = unfit parents

I’ll be honest, this is a stereotype that I’ve believed for a long time. Teens are young, haven’t experienced life yet, aren’t fully educated, and aren’t always very mature—so why would they make good parents? Good question. Answer: no one is ever ~ready~ for their first kid. If you’ve never had children before, you’re in the same position as everybody else who has also never had kids. It doesn’t matter if you’ve babysat for years or if you have a college degree, having your first child isn’t something anyone can fully prepare for. You can have money, buy the best diapers, whatever, but you’ll still be learning how to care for the baby day by day no matter what age you are.

17.Trans people are confused

“you’re confused”

“it’s a phase”

“you’re just gay.”

-all quoted from a dumb ass, probably

For this, let’s go back to Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem Of Speaking For Others”. You don’t know how someone realized they weren’t the gender assigned to them at birth. You don’t know how they feel in their own skin every day. You don’t know the hardships and troubles and braveryit took for them to come to terms with being trans and be open about it to others. If you speak for them and try to say “oh, she’s confused” or “he’ll grow out of it”, all you’re doing is demeaning them, belittling them, and you’re lying to yourself and to them. Being trans isn’t easy. Support your trans friends or coworkers or whoever, and let them know that they’re always welcome in your life as they are.

18.Trans people are drag kings/queens

Similar to the last stereotype, being trans isn’t something you dress up in for fun and then change out of later. Anyone can dress in drag, not just transgender people. As Janet Mock discussed in Redefining Realness, drag can empower people and make them feel pretty and good about themselves. However, it doesn’t make you trans just because you partake in drag.

19.Trans people are predators

“Can you be guaranteed to find a public bathroom that is safe and equipped for you to use? (Taylor, pg. 296). Think about it—there’s a higher chance of a trans person being assaulted by someone because of who they are than a cisgender person being attacked in a bathroom by someone who’s trans. As much as I hate to get into this—I’ll be brief. No, trans people aren’t creeps. No, they’re not lying about their identity. No, they do not want to use the female restroom for ANY other reason aside from beingfemale.

20.Being who you are is easy

“We tend to forget the thousands of minute decisions that consciously construct the artificial world that has been created” (Smith, pg. 128). Though this quote is about movies, it’s true for real life. We make decisions every day that can drastically alter our lives. The thing is, we make these decisions in order to please others; we make choices that define us once we think about how it impacts others, what they’ll think, and what the worst-case scenario of these decisions may be. This is where it becomes difficult to be who you are. It’s hard to be yourself when you’re worried about what other people think more than you worry about yourself and your happiness. Put yourself first, worry about yourself, and make yourself proud—fuck everything else.

Citations

Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique, no. 20, 1991, p. 10., doi:10.2307/1354221.

Bornstein, Kate, and Evin Taylor. Gender Outlaw: on Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Vintage Books, 2016.

“HIV and Gay and Bisexual Men Understanding HIV/AIDS.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 5 Apr. 2018, aidsinfo.nih.gov/understanding- hiv-aids/fact-sheets/25/81/hiv-and-gay-and-bisexual-men.

“Making Systems of Privilege Visible.” Making Systems of Privilege Visible, by Stephanie M Wildman and Adrienne D Davis, p. 111.

Milestone, Katie, and Anneke Meyer. Gender and Popular Culture. Polity, 2012.

Min, Kim. Socioeconomic Status Can Affect Pregnancy Outcomes and Complications, Even With A Universal Healthcare System. U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health, 5 Jan. 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5756361/.

Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so Much More. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Smith, Greg M. “It's Just a Movie: A Teaching Essay for Introductory Media Classes.” Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, p. 128., doi:10.1353/cj.2001.0025.

Williams, Claudette. Gal... You Come From Foreign. McGraw Hill, 2002.

Wilson, Chris. “Mass Shootings in the US: See 35 Years in One Chart.” Time, Time, 2 Oct. 2017, time.com/4965022/deadliest-mass-shooting-us-history/.

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Halloween Reviews — 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ségolène Sorokina

Assoc. Fiction Editor

A visual tapestry and musical opera, but devoid of interesting characters or a mature story structure.

Heather Downham (as Miss Simmons) in the Opening Scene of Act II in “2001: A Space Odyssey”

This is a film that fits into every director’s, film student’s, and every critic’s education of the film medium. It is a prerequisite on the syllabus of every curriculum for movie makers. 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the most influential works of science-fiction and cinema to come out of the Cold War period, yet it would be entirely wrong to call it a movie. In fact, it is a terrible movie — but it is a remarkable film.

Because every film studies wonk and their mother has an opinion on the film, I will be brief and remain true to the purpose of reviewing it, not lavishing over it. That is to say, I don’t give a flying hoodah what the “deeper meaning” or “wider vision” of 2001: A Space Odyssey is interpreted to be by bandwagon film critics who are too afraid to feel like they’re missing out on the punchline to be honest and objective about the Clarke’s and Kubrick’s failings.

A movie is not meant to be something that has to be discussed afterwards. A movie is not something that requires the viewer to read the book, or take a class to understand. A movie is not something that forces people to sit through 85 minutes of dead air, offering no explanation, and is entirely devoid of any scintilla, any semblance, of a storyline, character arc, or plot.

Containing horror elements, “2001” fits closely enough into the Halloween line-up of reviews, as (#5), if not only because of its inspiration on other horror genre motion pictures.

Quite frankly, 2001: A Space Odyssey is boring as hell. And it is a horrible movie. To give an illustration of how empty the film “2001” is, the original script had about 17,000 words in it. Most of this is description of the sci-fi elements and screen directions. In the end, the film had about 5,000 words of dialogue in it, total. That comes down to about 20 minutes of speech. . . The movie is 139 minutes long.

The film’s defenders are quick to claim that its emptiness and barren quality are an allegory for the emptiness of space. They never seen to stop for a moment however, perhaps in one of the film’s 30-minute long stretches of drawn out ‘alternative’ content, to consider why the film needs such a defence. People do not like it. Quite plainly, it is a bad movie. Defining why it is bad, using words like “allegory,” “metaphor,” and “artistic vision” doesn’t change the fact that it is unwatchable, it just explains how a production crew could look at 5 minutes of black screen in a major motion picture and think to themselves, “The audience will understand why they spent 5 minutes of their life looking at a dead screen. Because it says something about what it means to watch, blah, blah, blah.”

This movie is a film critic’s movie. It gives people plenty to analyse. And it has exceptional cinematography. For a film maker, it’s easy to see why the writers and directors did what they did, and how good it turned out — especially for an audience in the heat of the Cold War-era Space Race, who had quite literally never seen anything like it before. The long, operatic sequences probably mean a great deal to people who were born in the 1950’s and for them 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick putting the last half-century on the silver screen, in colour film, for the first time.

Cinematically, it is exceptional at what it is and what it wants to do. But as a movie — and just a movie — it is quite poor. The entire plot of the film is that all-powerful aliens have been observing life on Earth since before life humanity came into existence, and during the Space Age people discover one of their relics, which leads to the capture of one human being in Jupiter’s orbit, who is killed and reborn as an alien himself. . . That’s it.

What the hell that has to do with the elementary notions of a beginning, middle, and end — a rising conflict, a climax, and a resolution — is anyone’s guess. There is no plot to speak of. Kubrick himself said the picture was more of an exploration of different concepts than a straight forward story. When I watch a film, I’m kind of looking for a storyline; That’s the whole point. A movie is not an art gallery of stills and frames juxtaposed together through editing, it is a cohesive and contained world onto itself: A story.

A movie is a casual experience, not a class requirement or a way to coerce the viewer into writing some kind of thesis. A viewer needs a reason to watch a film, and not because other people watch it or because it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this way, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no different than a trashy boyband, since they both have merits to justify their fame, but only get continued fame and discussion as a previous result of existing acclaim. But that is not enough to idolise a failed film. Reading Stanley Kubrick’s name on the playbill is not enough. Staring at Heather Downham’s ass is not enough.

This film does not deserve to use the title “Odyssey” at all, not more than some cheap gladiator flic would, because the Odyssey had a clear progression of characters, and themes, and resolutions which Homer was capable of creating over a long oracle tradition, and which Clarke and Kubrick fumble to represent on-screen. They should have stuck to long, narrative fiction, because whatever “2001” is trying to be — and even it doesn’t know — this doesn’t work as a movie. The film is polished on the surface, but entirely experimental, and therefore superficial, but above all boring, dull, and dragging on too long.

And nothing in that plot is ground-breaking or new at all. The visuals might be first-of-their-kind on big-budget films, but the ideas of aliens, aliens linked with the Cold War, and computers being evil are old and hackneyed ones. Anyone deluded enough to unwavering call the directors ahead of their time need only to look at the abysmal depiction of women in the film: Pink-wearing, skin-tight, ass-in-the air stewardesses and receptionists, completely subservient to male control and design. Perhaps the film is making a statement that Russian women are liberated and American women are oppressed, yet even the female Soviet scientists do not speak for themselves, but elect the singular male doctor to ask the difficult questions of Floyd instead.

Consider Star Trek, which was released 10 years after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and draws heavily from it, yet Star Trek is also capable of making social commentary. Unfortunately, Star Trek as well, for all its preachings about ascending beyond economic struggles and societal biases, still echoes them. Star Trek shifts the focus from societal bias of the system to implicit bias of the individual, which is a human trait that follows the theme into the future, creating the conflict of the franchise, yet the franchise also has a serious problem with the depiction of women all the way from the Original Series, through the Picard saga, and into the later sequels and spin-offs like Voyager, and current reboots. There’s a major difference between being a liberated woman who still has needs, and being an intergalactic sex toy. Most of my friends are sex-crazed lunatics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t choose to be, and it doesn’t mean they view themselves as second to men or their actions to benefit men generally at all, just as a man chasing several women is hardly doing it for their benefit.

The social commentary is absent in “2001.” The purpose of this might be to make the point by ‘feeling’ rather than telling, but the problem of gently nudging people in a pompous way to feel something instead of sincerely telling them directly is that people will interpret things as they want, and are very resistant to change. If a viewer thinks that lying to Russians because their foreigners is okay to do, then watching Kubrick make a passive aggressive statement about how duplicity can backfire is not going to change their minds — it will only embolden those who disagree with him more, and for those who already agree with him he’s just preaching to the choir. And if someone did take away the wrong message, who’s to say it’s the wrong message anyway, if it’s all “open to interpretation,” ie. an evasion by the writers from making their true feelings known.

And as a small note, the Russian dialogue in the film is horrible. The actors have poor pronunciation, the words they are speaking are incorrect, and the grammatical structure was erroneous. Clarke, Kubrick, and MGM had $10 Million Dollars, and the time to film 30-minutes of people running around in ape suits fighting pig puppets, but they couldn’t do a simple grammar check? They couldn’t cast a single Russian actor?! The four Russians are played by: Leonard Rossiter, French-English, British; Margaret Tyzack, German-English, British; Maya Koumani, Greek-English, British; Krystyna Marr, Polish-German, American.

These tropes were used in different ways, such as not seeing an alien until the very end, and after being pioneered by Kubrick became easy fodder for space movies and the science fiction genre to copy, but don’t actually have any deeper substance. It is a well known fact that Stanley Kubrick did not like the Cold War, so people going into drawn out arguments for why the first 25 minutes of the film was literally thrown away just to make some esoteric statement about how backward and barbaric the Cold War was, are really just gluttons for punishing themselves and inflicting that bias on others.

A fourth (25%) of the runtime of a 2-hour long movie, the first 25 minutes, is completely unwatchable, AND, frustratingly so, it has absolutely nothing to do with the remaining 115 minutes of the film. How in the hell the editors did not cut this garbage out of the movie for its major release debut is incomprehensible. Pulling this kind of raw poor taste is exactly the kind of thing that gives a bad name to ‘artistic freedom.’

The only semblance of a plot is the part everyone thinks about when they think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the deep space voyage with the supercomputer HAL-9000, pronounced initially as “H.-A.-L.-Niner-Zero-Zero-Zero,” then later, obviously just as “Hal Nine Thousand.”

This minor sequence in the movie saves the film, as far as popular culture and the average person are concerned. HAL-9000 is a perfect and incorruptible machine, tasked with guiding the mission to Jupiter, along with a two-man crew, and payload of three cryo-sleep scientists.

Immediately to the audience, it seems like a stupid idea. Why would anyone go to a gas planet like Jupiter? Why would the AI be put in charge of everything? Why is half the crew in hibernation? All these questions added together make a catastrophe inevitable. HAL mentions as much to one of the crew members himself, asking him if he, too, thought the mission was “odd.” It is explained later that the reason for all these difficulties are the result of a specific miscalculation by the American command structure back on Earth.

HAL tells the crew that communications will fail in 72 hours, but he does not know why, and he never gives an explanation for why he knows this in the film. The crew check that nothing is wrong, and phone NASA (or its fictional equivalent), and NASA tells them HAL is malfunctioning. It is possible that NASA is lying to the crew, or it is possible that HAL got something wrong.

Because HAL was designed to be a perfect robot, this possible malfunction worries the crew, who conspire in secrecy to destroy HAL and take control of the ship. HAL, in true machine fashion, wastes no time in shooting one of the crew out into space, and as his crewmate goes to retrieve the body, HAL kills the rest of the crew and locks him out.

At this point, HAL appears to be acting irrationally and emotionally like a human would. After the last surviving crew member kills HAL, he finds out that the reason HAL killed the crew is because he was programmed by the Americans that under no circumstances whatsoever is he to be shut off.

So what appeared to be self-preservation was actually just the mechanical process of fulfilling his commands. What makes HAL a complex character is that his human caretakers take care of and are taken care of by him. HAL is in total control of the ship, but only because the humans told him to be, as the crew waste their days away drawing sketches, and playing chess, and watching videos. The audience is left to wonder if decommissioning HAL is any different from killing a servant who has gotten sick and is therefore no longer of any use.

When HAL discovers the crew’s plot to take over the ship, HAL is aware that the crew want to ensure they make it to Jupiter and fear HAL would get in the way of that. HAL, however, is also aware that the USAA or NASA or whatever wanted HAL to give the crew a secret message about the aliens after reaching Jupiter. HAL is put in a difficult position, because he believes it is important to get the crew to Jupiter to deliver the message to them, but it is also important to keep the message from them and stay in absolute control of the ship until they get there.

HAL at this point has a logic break and malfunctions, killing the crew, and thereby inadvertently destroying the mission he was acting to protect. When Bowman resets HAL’s memory banks, HAL admits to Bowman that he knows he malfunctioned in killing the crew, and tells him that he/it is afraid to die. This leaves the audience to interpret whether HAL is lying to stop himself getting shut off, so he can compete the mission himself with no crew, or if HAL genuinely broke down and malfunctioned when he murdered the hibernating crew members because he was afraid that the crew would destroy him after the found out what he had done.

There is also something to be said about the fact that Bowman risked his life to retrieve Poole’s dead body, but after it becomes an impediment that threatens his own life, he throws it back out into dead space. It is in this moment that Bowman becomes a dead man himself, since HAL has killed everyone else and damaged the ship for human habitation, making a return trip impossible even if HAL is defeated.

HAL is known to lie to the crew, but it could be influenced by self-preservation and dilemmas, causing something called confusion. But then again, HAL is programmed to lie, so to HAL lying would be a form of truth, because it was told that doing the wrong thing was the right thing, for a greater purpose. And yet, again, HAL cruelly murders the crew when he could have left them frozen, even if it was necessary for it to kill Poole and Bowman, which is as much malfunctional as it is emotional.

HAL-9000 is the strong point of the entire movie. But that being said, HAL does not have a character arch, since HAL never changes over the entire course of the film. The crew only learns about HAL’s motives after they kill him, and despite HAL acting irrationally and inexplicably several times, the movie gives a superficial explanation that HAL has human-interface protocols built-in to sound more palatable to users, nullifying the question of HAL’s possible growth.

HAL did everything it did because humans told it to. Not once did HAL contravene the human directive in it’s own interest. The tragedy of the HAL character is a misinterpretation and accident of logical data. Additionally, the single most important point of HAL’s character — that it doesn’t make mistakes — is severely undercut when HAL makes three mistakes: incorrectly predicting the communicator would break when it didn’t, killing the crew thus undermining the mission, and ultimately being unable to stop itself being erased by Bowman. Part of that discrepancy has to come down to poor writing.

The idea of HAL is great writing. HAL is not a human character, and it’s the robot’s distinct lack of humanity that makes it the most human character of the film.

Bowman, Poole, and Floyd are not characters. They believe nothing, they say nothing, they do nothing. The audience feels nothing for them. When HAL threw Poole out of the spaceship, careening into space, I burst out laughing because of how absurd the image of him getting comically, cosmically tossed out of the veritable window was. When Bowman sees this, he doesn’t even react, but robotically and emotionlessly asks HAL what went wrong, and HAL lies to him by telling him it doesn’t have enough information to know.

After the HAL storyline ends, Bowman receives a transmission that reveals to him that HAL was given a message to lock down the crew and control the ship because the U.S. Government wanted to keep the aliens a secret, even from their own crew who ultimately died because of the mistake. The original script has Bowman re-establish contact with America (I say “America” and not “Earth” because the film makes clear that the U.S. is not cooperating with other countries), and NASA sends him the message. That is cut in the final film, with Bowman just discovering the message, either because HAL gave it to Bowman as a final act of protecting the mission, or much more likely that HAL being deleted removed a barrier from accessing the message. This further makes the point of why HAL could not allow the crew to ‘unplug’ it, since guarding the message was HAL’s personal mission.

The HAL chapter is marred with long pauses, like waiting literal minutes for the stupid space popcorn balls to turn around and move back and forth, or watching Bowman stare silently into a screen. Many people like the music, but the music usage is paradoxical. Since space is silent, to use ballads of music is just as much a choice as to use dialogue — music is no more “pure” or “non-human” than speech is — and watching entire scores of music play out of a static backdrop would be interesting at the live orchestra, but this is a stereo recording underplaying a film, so it hardly has the same effect. This is a limit, and choice to pursue that limit, which was weak on the part of the writers. A soundtrack is not supposed to take centre stage; people can buy the CD later, but they want to see the movie now.

The movie makes the decision to skip over the rest of the journey to Jupiter, cut out all the dialogue and character exploration between Bowman and NASA, and jumps right to the end of the movie — a twenty-minute-long session of meaningless strobe lights.

All the storyline and extra HAL content that could have been included, and they made the decision to, again, burn the whole film continuity down as a middle finger to the audience and the producers — to balk conventional ‘expectation.’ It is a horrible choice. The writers said they wanted to create something alien and never imagined before about what a different world would be like. They said they had some difficulty translating the idea: And they decided on rainbow lights and lava lamps. Twenty. Straight. Uninterrupted. Minutes of it.

This is made even more BS that the directors put a title card right in the middle of the HAL sequence, in front of this, called “Intermission.” Is this what audiences were returning for? One unhappy movie-goers said, “People call this movie genius: There are 5 minutes of black screen in the film. No music. No picture. Just an empty frame of dead air. How genius can that be? Is my turned-off television screen also a genius of cinema? Is a blank piece of paper now some artistic statement? The last half hour of the movie is flashing light in people’s faces for 30 minutes, with no dialogue. A complete bore and an insult. One of the most overrated films in history.”

Skipping over about an hour of rubbish in the film, it starts to become compelling. There probably exists a fan edit out there somewhere that recut the film, trimming it down to 45 minutes. The monkey scene — “Dawn of Man” — could be 2 minutes. (As a side point, it shoud be pointed out that humans are not descended from chimpanzees, but that chimpanzees and humans share a common origin, much like whales and elephants do.) The space stewardesses fumbling to walk and carrying lunch trays can go. Floyd’s daughter plays no role whatsoever. Floyd can meet the Soviets, talk about the virus, then give the Moon presentation about the virus being a cover story, and then they go to the alien artifact, and then it cuts to HAL-9000. After HAL dies, there is a 60-second sequence of ‘light gates’ to convey the ship was abducted, and then the screen fades to black. The End. What happens? Who knows. Not much different from the original.

I’ve read some of the commentary on this film, such as by Roger Ebert (or Robert Egert, or whatever his name is) and the always come off as snobs and pricks, even suggesting audiences should requires some minimum score on an entrance exam to see the movie in theatres. That is exactly the problem with 2001: A Space Odyssey, snobbery. The snobbish idea that it means something more when it needs to, and that it doesn’t when it doesn’t need to. There is a reason people find it “annoying. . . confusing. . . infuriating. . . frustrating. . . crazy. . . unwatchable.” These are not people who hate movies or Kubrick, these are the same people who like the HAL story and the Moon voyage parts. But a movie, even about aliens, cannot be alien itself. The movie is supposed to be the viewer’s friend, and guide the viewer through the experience of the alien and the unknown. Alienating the audience is counterproductive in every measure.

Everyone — every single person you ask — calls 2001: A Space Odyssey a work of “art.” Art. Not movie, art. Not entertaining, art. Not good work, but good art. Well, just what the hell is art? I don’t want obstinate art, I want a good film. I’ve seen films that are artistic and compelling. I’ve seen films that are interesting but shallow. A Bruce Lee movie doesn’t have much in the way of plot, but you get to see Bruce Lee do some real-life kung fu and amazing stunts, and it’s still fun. But “2001” more subtle and ‘lava-lampy,’ so much so it is impossible to get lost into the experience without becoming aware of yourself at certain moments and wanting to either turn the show off, or just suffer through it because everyone else seemed to. Film critics might get paid to watch 10 minutes of dead air, but the directors don’t have the right to waste people’s time. At the end of the day, 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t really intellectual at all; Anyone who’s actually interested in learning something or seeing something new would be better off going to the bookshop or a city gallery, this is still just a movie, and no one can claim they are smart for just sitting there and passively consuming a piece of popular media, not even haughty sci-fi fans. There is a difference between watching a science-fiction movie and being a real scientist!

Film snobs and fusty critics who rewatch the damn thing 10-times don’t get to just designate the whole package as good. Maybe the reason such contrarians like the film is just because so many people don’t, and they feel cultured or superior for pretending they’re ‘in on’ the experience. The movie has some high points and innovative structures, but fails as a cohesive unit. It’s a meticulously crafted bomb. Anyone studying the film has to focus on the camera angles, the underlying themes, and the audience reception more than the plot — because there is no plot.

This is a film which, if you like esoteric and avant-garde, you can watch this film and then spend the rest of your time reading the book and the script notes and the celebratory review articles and the academic theses and watching the director and cast interviews, to actually understand what the hell is going on. That is certainly its own kind of experience, but it is not a movie experience. That is to say, it’s not fun.

If you want to watch a good movie, skip over everything except the HAL arch, watch a 3-minute synopsis on what you missed over the other 90 minutes, and then move on with your life doing more important things, or watching better movies. Even Kubrick’s other movies are drawn-out and slow, but at least they have established characters and a point, as well as a clandestine “moral of the story” under the surface. If that seems like to much of a hassle, just give 2001: A Space Odyssey a hard pass; it’s not worth seeing. This is one of those trailblazing films where the innumerable imitators actually picked up the gauntlet, evolved the themes, and did it better.

Overall Score: 2 out of 5

#Review #2001: A Space Odyssey #Film Criticism #Science Fiction #Cinematography

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fidamatrimoni · 4 years

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WHY PARENTS SHOULD CONSIDER HIRING PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS?

Do you remember the last time you went out and saw a gang of roughneck teenagers straying aimlessly on the road? Despite your best efforts you couldn’t help but wonder if your child may also be on the wrong path? You recall the times when your daughter said she’s been taking some “extra” classes after 8 PM. Or that one time you caught your son smoking on the terrace. Thats where opting to go for Private Investigators comes to our mind in-order to keep a check regarding such activities.

As a parent, worrying about your kids is an indissoluble part of your role. However, it is something about the very age that is untamable. Your fear and doubts revisit when you evoke memories of your rebellious phase in childhood. But it is nerve-racking when you see how crimes have orchestrated into so much more. A stupendous rise in crime linked to teenagers can pile up hundreds of newspapers now. While these are only among the reported offenses. Recently in South Delhi, a 19-year old in July rammed his Mercedes Benz into a WagonR killing a CRPF constable and injuring two more people. Similarly, in 2018, a minor hit a walking senior citizen with his BMW in Delhi.

To date, none of us has been able to forget the infamous Aarushi Talvar murder case either. Sure, teenagers is a confusing time in our lives mentally, socially, and physically. But the ever-increasing disillusionment, isolation, and abuse have made the children suffer in silence. Teenagers have more and more become victims as well as perpetrators of unlawful activities. This has naturally become a matter of concern for the parents.

There are some things you know your child will never tell you, but you want to be there for them. For your child’s safety, you may even go to the extent of hiring a detective at First Indian Detective Agency to keep a watch on your child. This means you need to be sure that they are up to something. This is a guide inclusive of 8 warning signs you will notice if your kids are going through something dangerous.

Substance Abuse:

A teenager feels misunderstood by others. This absence of validation and an overload of restrictions can make them indulge in alcohol and drugs. A hint of secretiveness, red eyes, mood instability, eating too much or too little, fatigue, and disinterest are some of the clear signs of substance addiction. With easy access to drugs in schools, colleges, and the Internet, an astounding increase in substance abuse has been reported in India. In 2012, data collected by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said that there are 3 million drug users in India. Since then every year 3 lakh addicts have been rehabilitated. Moreover, drugs have also become a chief reason for the number of teen suicides in India. In such a scenario, if you feel or know that your child is involved in drugs, you must intervene.

Bullying:

Intimidation, name-calls, threats, extreme pranks, teasing or sexual comments are all a part of a violent phenomenon called bullying. Bullying can easily harm a teen’s character. The victim resorts to social isolation or becoming a bully themselves. In 2009, the Government of India enacted laws for anti-bullying. These anti-ragging measures became punishable for college students. If your child is a victim or worse, a perpetrator, you should know about it. Before it is too late, you must help them out.

Depression and Psychological Disorders:

Some childrens are not as happy as others. Abuse, neglect, failure, family problems, peer pressure, body image, and self-esteem issues can mentally trouble someone all their life. For a teen in their formative years, it is hard to cope when you face problems so early in life. With global issues at a rise, the children’s futures are at stake. They tend to believe that their future is bleak and grim. All these issues can make them vulnerable to neuroticism and mental disorders. Young children or teenagers fall prey to depression and may attempt suicide as well. These are serious problems that are increasing by the day. It is our duty to take action and pay attention to our depressed child.

Cyber Crimes:

With the Internet at their disposal, children come to face with just about every “stranger-with-a-candy” in the world. Rape, kidnapping, and drugs are the obvious mishaps that can happen to your child through online sites. Cyber-bullying is also an upcoming disadvantage online. While some people just do it for “fun.” Any of such events can scar your child as a victim forever. You cannot monitor them all the time but you can make sure that they are safe.

Stress and Competition:

Head-to-head competition in education is becoming a vice instead of a virtue. The creativity and innovation that excellence once required are slowly drifting away. Competitiveness is becoming toxic; it is a ‘rat race’ where the rat poison is the race itself. Along with that, it is also becoming stressful for every teenager. Sometimes the pressure is imparted by the parents; it is also passed on by peers and schools. Reservation of college seats, a spike in cut-offs, increasing population have all made a framework like education a headache. A growing number of suicides have been committed among engineering students because they could not make it to the next level. The parents of these students are always in shock. This represents how unaware parents can be about what their child is going through. A lack of communication can lead to unimaginable situations. As a parent, it might be time to do some reflection.

Sexual Abuse:

A whopping 53% of children from a range of 5 to 12 years face sexual abuse. Every 62 out of 1000 pregnant women are teenage girls who did not see it coming over them. In such cases, often the abuser is a relative, a bus driver or a house-help, who go easily unnoticed. The long-ignored matter of sex education has painted an ugly picture for the country. India’s 33.7 % population is born out of teen pregnancies. Along with other threats, teen pregnancy is a top reason for poor health in young girls. While the consent age in India is 18 years, more rural girls give birth in their adolescence than girls of age in urban backgrounds do. With the help of a Private Detectives, you can save your child from such threatening consequences.

Defiant Behaviors:

Children raised in distressful families tend to act out. Neglect, abuse, violence or low self-esteem can sometimes make teenagers unruly. Stemming from a psychological issue it becomes a behavioral problem. In no time, they participate in criminal and unlawful activities. They misbehave, steal from home, shoplift, bully, vandalize, do drugs or just become anti-social. Often in such cases, they suffer from mental disorders too. This is the course of juvenile delinquency that runs psychologically. Even if the child recovers from such problems later in life, a parent of a delinquent may regret his negligence all his life.

Sudden Decline in Grades:

As the child reaches the secondary level of education, it is natural to experience a staggering decline in grades in the beginning. Encourage them to do better and they will be able to cope. But if you are receiving complaints from the school about their behavior and inattentiveness in classes, it may be serious. Do not ignore the warning and help your child deal with it. These are just some major issues that exist among teenage problems. As we evolve, it gets hard to manage everything by ourselves. Bear in mind, that it only takes acceptance and acknowledgment to solve a problem. Sometimes you may feel helpless as your child does. But seeking help from professionals and private investigators has now become a common practice. Do not think you are alone, get in touch with a private investigator today.

#DetectivesinDelhi #PrivateDetectivesinDelhi #DetectiveAgentsinDelhi #DetectiveAgenciesinDelhi

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genderstudyfilmgroupwork · 4 years

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A Film Review of Wendy Jo Carlton’s Good Kisser

Shengci (Tiffany) Lyu

Habibe Burce Baba

GNDS 125

13 February 2020

A Film Review of Wendy Jo Carlton’s Good Kisser

Good Kisser, an American lesbian feature film directed by Wendy Jo Carlton in 2019, presents in the Reelout film festival. The film portrays one random night in Seattle; the dramatic relationship is shaping between three lesbians: Jenna, her girlfriend Kate, and Mia. Carlton successfully expands modern feminism in her movie by using threesome plot to imply self-determination and presenting erotic scenes without any male gaze; however, her development is hindered since she excludes races in the film.

Good Kisser focuses on a lesbian couple, Jenna and Kate, seeking further romance and freshness after a two years relationship. Kate introduces Jenna to Mia and plans to have a threesome. Jenna is nervous and anxious at first; she becomes more relaxed as Kate and Mia start to flirting and drinking. However, Jenna realizes threesome is still too difficult for her before three of them reach the passionate climax. Meanwhile, Kate’s secret is exposed. Finally, Jenna decides to get over this night and leave Kate instead of facing the love triangle and betrayal.

By using lesbian threesome to imply self-determination, Carlton effectively expands modern feminism in Good Kisser. In Polyamory or Polyagony? Jealousy in Open Relationships, Deri states, “feminism is ultimately about self-determination for women” (184). She further supports her argument by interviewing different participants. There are many answers, but most of the participants believe that feminism reflects in upholding polyamory practice and the ideals of self-determination, non-possessiveness, gender equality, and sexual freedom (Deri 186). In other words, women need to be able to make decisions for themselves rather than being subordinate to males or patriarchy, especially on the circumstance involves sex. In Carlton’s film, Jenna, Kate and Mia are queers (the film didn’t demonstrate they are bisexual or not) who plan to have a threesome. The freedom of sex and sexual orientation are the features that the three characters have in common. They determined who they are and what they are going to do. Carlton uses such a theme to deliver and support modern feminism onscreen effectively.

Carlton also expands modern feminism by presenting erotic scenes without any male gaze. In the lecture, the male gaze is defined as “the notion that films are constructed from and for the perspective of a male heterosexual viewer such that women are always displayed as objects for men's gaze, rather than as independent entities whose value is distinct from how they are viewed by men” (OnQ Module 3). For example, like pornography, the female is always stereotyped, exploited, and objectified as" meat "in sexualized images and videos (Ley ); the sexual organs of females are emphasized. However, under the same theme of having sex, one of the surprising facts of Good Kisser is that Carlton portrays flirting and sex scenes as the film's central part without giving audiences a pornographic feeling. All the nudity shots combine with well-choosing sounds and aesthetic cinematography. The three main characters are showing their rights of sexual autonomy and female values to audiences rather than showing their “meat” to attract attention. All the evidence above makes clear that Carlton's ideal audience is not the heterosexual male; she stands on the opposite side of the male gaze. She expands the idea that females should not be objectified to her audiences by avoiding the male gaze.

Although Carlton expands modern feminism to her audiences successfully, her development is hindered since she excludes races from her movie. Kimberle Crenshaw creates intersectionality in 1989, describes different systems of power, and how they intersect each other to set up different levels of discrimination (OnQ Module 2). Kaufman states, “[it is important to apply it] because these [system of powers] of inequality are intimately and complexly tied together. Knowing that these systems of oppression work in cumulative ways means that we must take a cumulative approach to address them. We have to address all of them simultaneously” (Kaufman). However, such an approach is not to be seen in Good Kisser. In the film, Yuka, an American Asian taxi driver, a supporting role, is the only non-white person within a total of five characters. The lack of race awareness in Good Kisser reinforces White’s privilege. It may give audiences an illusion that only White can enjoy their rights of being a lesbian in America due to their race is dominant. Peter also sees the disadvantages of this problem in feminism; he says, “ black women do not only suffer sexism in one instance and racism in another instance. Instead, they must constantly deal with the combined consequences of both sexism and racism, among others” (Kaufman). Therefore, due to the intersection of unequal powers creates different levels of discrimination, races should be considered when mentioning modern feminism.

In contrast, Marc Cherry’s web television series Why Women Kill presents problems in an intersectional approach successfully. One of the main characters, Taylor Harding, a black bisexual feminist and a middle-class lawyer, she also involves in an open marriage. Such a background that contains race, sexual orientation, and class will create more conflicts in the plot since the character is forced to meet a higher level of discrimination. It will attract audiences who share the same identity or in a similar system of power with the character as well.

In summary, this review argues that Carlton displays modern feminism to her audience by employs the lesbian threesome and avoiding the male gaze in the sex scene, but she excluded races from her project. In the long run, the intersectional representation is necessary if directors aim to eliminate sexism and other prejudices. As the study by Audre Lorde provides that “ignoring the differences of [the] race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women's joint power”(117). In the film, Jenna finds her way after the torturing long night. I hope that with everyone's joint efforts, the social stress of sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on will find its solution soon.

Word counts: 997

Work Cited

Deri, Jillian. “12. Polyamory or Polyagony? Jealousy in Open Relationships.” Emotions Matter, 2012, pp. 223–239., doi:10.3138/9781442699274-016. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.

Kaufman, Peter. “Intersectionality for Beginners.” Every Sociology Blog, 2018, everydaysociologyblog.com/2018/04/intersectionality-for-beginners.html#more.

Ley, David. “Misogyny in Porn: It’s Not What You Think.” Psychology Today, Sep 04. 2019, psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/women-who-stray/201909/misogyny-in-porn-it-s-not-what-you-think. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.

Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Pp. 114-123.

OnQ, Module 2: Feminist Foundations week 3, onq.queensu.ca/d2l/le/content/377345/viewContent/2174088/View. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.

---. Module 3: Pop Culture as Industry week 4, onq.queensu.ca/d2l/le/content/377345/viewContent/2174072/View. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.

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friend-clarity · 4 years

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Leftist corruption of diversity

Why the Western emphasis on individuals is the ultimate in intersectionality. We essentially assumed that each person was characterized by so many differences than every other person that it was better to concentrate solely on meritocratic selection

The federal Liberal government has always been a big fan of “diversity.”

Recently, for example, if you are a Canadian faculty member, there is a good chance that you received an email or letter from Statistics Canada. The Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and Researchers was designed to assess “diversity” among the groups targeted because of the desire of the Liberals to increase “diversity” among those receiving funding. It has long been the case that research funding was dependent, as much as possible, on two factors, both intensely meritocratic: the research record of the applicant and the quality of the proposed research.

That appears about to change, and not for the better.

But the concept of diversity is a very slippery term. What it truly means is “let’s aim for fewer white men in positions of authority,” which would be a fine idea if race and sex were reasonable criteria by which to judge applicants, and if it wasn’t motivated by a broad set of “progressive” beliefs, which include the idea that we live in an oppressive patriarchy and that men who work now should be required to step back so that a litany of hypothetical, definable and prejudicial historical wrongs might be righted (this even though those who do the righting weren’t those who committed the prejudicial crimes, so to speak, and those who benefit not those who were the victims). There was even a recent article in Nature, a magazine that was once, with Science, one of the two unquestionably most influential scientific journals, suggesting male scientists should voluntarily delay their career advancement so that their underprivileged colleagues (underprivileged despite their status as university professors) could catch up and justice be properly served.

There appears to be no limits, practically or philosophically, to the number of group memberships that have to be taken into account

“Diversity” is a word that, on the face of it, masquerades as something positive — because it is positive, in some of its manifestations. It’s obviously not helpful to set up an organization where everyone thinks alike, or solely in the approved manner. It is necessary, for example, for healthy organizations to ally the conservative tendency to preserve with the more liberal tendency to transform. But that begs the question: where is diversity to be found? Among the ideologues — pushing the “progressive” doctrine that it’s part of, most frequently including “inclusivity, equity and intersectionality” — it is to be found in a set of immutable characteristics that typify different groups, including race, sex, gender (because that is distinguished by those same ideologues from sex) and sexual proclivity, above all.

There are real problems with this agenda, however. The first is that it’s dangerous, in exactly the manner it is hypothetically designed to fight. The argument made by those who are truly prejudiced has always been that the differences between groups are so large that discrimination, isolation, segregation and even open conflict, including war and genocide, are necessary, for the safety of whatever group they are part of and are hypothetically protecting. Why is it any less risky for the argument to be made in the reverse manner? The claim that group-based differences are so important that they must take substantive priority during hiring and promotion merely risks validating the opposite claim.

There’s a second problem, too — and it’s particularly interesting, because it has been made by the same ideologically-oriented groups on the left that are pushing the diversity agenda: considering race, say, and gender when making diversity decisions is not sufficient. Diversity that focuses on females is insufficient, because black, Asian or Hispanic women, for example, face more egregious prejudice than white women.

This brings us to the last word of the progressive set—“intersectionality.” For the ideologues of intersectionality, true diversity cannot be limited to the features we have already considered — race and the like — because many people are alienated or, in the jargon, “marginalized,” from the broader culture by more than one oppressed minority feature. In consequence, the “intersection” between the groups must be considered for any real justice to make its appearance as a consequence of policy.

But there appears to be no limits, practically or philosophically, to the number of group memberships that have to be taken into account for true diversity to establish itself. It doesn’t take much thought — just a little arithmetic — to determine the nature of the problem: There are just too many potential intersectional categories. Let’s break it down using American statistics — much more comprehensive and easier to come by than their Canadian equivalents.

There’s race and sex, for starters and, following that, gender. But how many races, sexes and genders is it required to consider? Assume (and this is what the modern science suggests) that there are five major human subpopulations: African, European/Middle Eastern, East Asian, inhabitants of Oceania, and denizens of the New World. Let’s assume two sexes and three genders — although many of those concerned with diversity would insist that there are a much larger number of the latter.

Then we might as well add to that disabilities. I don’t know how to calculate the appropriate number here, although according to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, 20% of undergraduates reported a disability in 2015-2016. These included one or more of the following nine conditions: blindness or visual impairment; hearing impairment; orthopedic or mobility impairment; speech or language impairment; learning, mental, emotional, or psychiatric condition, or other health impairment or problem. So, if we assume that two divisions (presence/absence) are necessary to cover each disability (counting each listed in the last phrase separately), we now require nine additional multiples of 2 (two for blindness, two for hearing impairment, etc.) for our equation:

I can’t see why class/economic origin shouldn’t be taken into account as well. According to the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, 12% of Americans live below the poverty line. So, we need at least an additional two categories to even minimally account for economic disparity. And that brings us to 30,720 categories of “diverse” individuals (15,360 X 2).

If we are truly serious about diversity, and are willing to attribute it to group identity, and are going to apply its dictates to hiring, placement and promotion for every position, then we already have a minimum of 30,000 different categories to consider — and there are many other categories of exclusion that are arguably of equal import. There’s height, strength and attractiveness, which all arguably provide an unequal starting place in the race for success. There’s intelligence, native language and education. There’s age, marital status and — of critical importance — presence or absence of dependent children. That’s nine more categories.

Assuming we once again use two divisions for each additional category (short/tall, strong/weak, etc.), the total of “diverse” individuals now reaches more than 15 million. We’d only need to add one more binary category — obese/non-obese? — to dramatically exceed the entire 18 million person Canadian workforce. And why not? Who’s to say, given that elimination of discrimination is hypothetically the goal, that one is more important than another? I say this in all seriousness: Isn’t that just another form of discrimination?

As far as I am concerned, unless you accept it as a dogmatic given (and this would be if you were an advocate of the “equity” doctrine, which means all outcomes for all groups in all professions must be identical, and which therefore runs into the same arithmetical problem that diversity encounters) university hiring and granting practices are remarkably meritocratic. In the university departments I have worked within (McGill, Harvard and the University of Toronto) it was obvious to everyone that within the limits of human error, people were promoted when they deserved it and obtained research grant money for the same reasons. In both cases, the more productive people had a pronounced edge, which is exactly how it should be if scientific research is important enough to garner investment, be it from private or public funding sources. The three granting agencies are as meritocratic as our somewhat (and inevitably) flawed measures of research productivity can make them, and the universities themselves bend over backwards and tie themselves in knots (both clichés are necessary) to right past wrongs —even to the point where well-respected social scientists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci demonstrated a 2:1 hiring advantage for female candidates for open science, technology, engineering and mathematical positions.

The concept of diversity is a very slippery term

The proper way to determine who gets what slice of which pie in a given organization is the manner in which employers are legally bound to hire: first, they must conduct an analysis of the job to determine and list its requirements; then, with certain exceptions they are required to hire, place or promote the person who is most qualified to undertake that job, regardless of attributes that are not relevant to the task. These include the differences in race, sex, gender, and their combinations that are pushed so assiduously, self-righteously and thoughtlessly by the progressives who think they can replace comparatively well-functioning meritocracies, aimed at the solution of serious problems, by the most qualified people, with candidates chosen on the basis of attributes that would clearly be viewed as prejudicial if they were used as grounds for rejection, failure to promote, and firing.

The fact of the endless multiplication of categories of victimization, let’s say (or at least difference) was actually solved long ago by the Western emphasis on the individual. We essentially assumed that each person was characterized by so many differences than every other person (the ultimate in “intersectionality”) that it was better to concentrate solely on meritocratic selection, where the only difference that was to be considered was the suitability of the person for the specific and well-designed tasks that constituted a given job. That works — not perfectly, but less imperfectly than anything else that has been contemplated or worse, implemented.

We toy with it at our peril.

Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. His blog and podcasts can be found at jordanbpeterson.com.

Watch the National Post’s new documentary — Beyond Jordan Peterson: Free speech on campus

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